Editor’s Note: Law professor Helen Alvaré delivered remarks during a panel presented by Organization of American States (OAS) on Oct. 21, 2024, ahead of International Religious Freedom Day. Her remarks on the impact of Christian culture on our society especially as it pertains to marriage and family follow below.

Increasingly today, states are pressuring religion’s ability to witness and to transmit religious wisdom particularly about sex, marriage and parenting. This happens often via laws regulating educational content, and laws affecting religious employment or housing or business practices.

Ironically, this pressure is increasing precisely at the same time that empirical scholarship — in sociology, psychology and economics, for example — is clearly and strongly revealing how religious wisdom about the family is measurably associated with issues: family stability, happiness, greater equality between men and women, stable care for vulnerable children, social stability, and even with the potential to narrow the income, wealth, educational, and employment gaps persisting between majority and minority populations, earlier and more recent immigrants, and the more and less privileged.

In short, showing respect for romantic partners and family members in the ways that religious teachings recommend turns out to be the beginning of — and an indispensable component of — social justice.

Thus, this proliferating scholarship strongly indicates that in order to promote the common good, beginning with the family — then spreading into the larger society — religious witness on family matters requires protection. Please note that I am not speaking of an imposition of religious values or suggesting that they are the only helpful values in the family arena. In fact, research shows that secular families that model values similar to religious values, fare almost as well as the religious. I am urging only that the religious voice should be carefully preserved as one of the voices in society communicating about sex, marriage and parenting.

Allow me to unpack this theme in 2 points:

First, to summarize the robust and nonpartisan scientific literature about the relationship between individual and social flourishing and particular family practices.

And second, to note especially the good of preserving religious freedom in the leading places where particular family practices and values are preserved and transmitted — that is, within families and schools.

Turning to the relationship between religious teachings concerning sex, marriage and parenting, and individual and social flourishing, it has never been more clear in empirical literature that these teachings conduce to human well-being, and are needed especially in the lives of the more socially vulnerable who, today, experience less marriage, more divorce, more nonmarital parenting, more father-absence and more abortion.

Interestingly, Christianity, since its origin has understood its teachings about the family to be the beginning of and coincident with social justice. Eminent Church historians and sociologists write that — deriving from Christian beliefs that each person is image of God, and must model God’s way of loving, and that the body is sacred — Christians were equally insistent upon demonstrations of radical and unselfish love, Good-Samaritan style, both for romantic and marital partners and for society’s most vulnerable. Thus, in the early Church, as today, this “Good News” is especially good news for the socially weaker. Women and slaves were attracted to Christian insistence that the same obligations of sexual fidelity and care for children that applied to them also applied to men and masters. They were relieved that Christianity stood with women’s interests against polygamy, automatic divorce or demands to abort their children or to kill after birth their sick or female child. In the words of Classics scholar Sarah Ruden in her book Paul Among the People, Christianity offered a “a hope for something beyond exploitation, materialism and violence.” Instead, it offered a chance — especially for the vulnerable—not to be treated as a thing.

Interestingly, for at least a century, and particularly in countries with a Christian tradition, including its family traditions, women have revealed themselves to be more religious than men, whether the measure is religious affiliation, frequency of worship service attendance or prayer, and or regarding reports that religion plays an important role in one’s life. 

Fast forward to today and we discover in a vast and growing scientific literature the reasons why religious family teachings—and I will focus here on Christianity as the tradition I know best, although this applies to several traditions—why these teachings support family strength and are particularly important to the vulnerable. The leading reason is likely the nearly undisputed social science finding that children fare best within the stable, long-term presence of the two parents who brought them into the world. In fact, family structure deficits experienced by poorer and some minority children are regularly the single weightiest reason for the gap between these groups and more privileged children respecting their educational, emotional, economic and employment outcomes.

Obviously, these findings map easily onto Christian teachings about the good of preserving the links between sex, marriage and procreation, which linking conduces to preserving exactly this type of marital stability and marital parenting.

Furthermore, according to another body of scholarship, Christian teachings about the unity of sex, marriage and procreation are closely associated with couples’ happiness and well-being. Married, practicing, jointly religious couples regularly express the highest levels of happiness and well-being as compared with other relationship types and with those sharing less or no religious commitment in their lives. This is at least partly accounted for by their higher levels of fidelity and their sharing of domestic and childcare responsibilities.

Before turning to my final point, let me also note one other positive aspect of the Christian posture towards families. Motivated by the same beliefs undergirding Christian teachings concerning chastity, marital fidelity, and respect for life at every stage — that is, the beliefs that we are all imago Dei, that our bodies are sacred, that relational fidelity is justice— motivated by these principles, many Christian ministries reach out to those who have been wounded in the sexual arena, and offer healing, counseling, practical assistance and community. They assist single mothers and their children, offer post-abortion healing, and offer the Courage ministry to persons experiencing same-sex attraction. In a world that offers too few resources of these kinds to the many who earnestly seek them, this contribution should enjoy robust religious liberty.

I turn now briefly to my final point: the good of preserving religious freedom where religious family matters are most often and effectively transmitted: i.e., in families, and in schools. Parents’ rights in this regard are well recognized, as in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

The thinking is that parents, who are charged with the most significant and primary duties to children, must have rights allowing them to fulfill these duties. But it should also be observed, in justice — even as we know every family has its challenges—that as compared to those with relatively brief contact with their children — e.g., teachers, counselors, administrators — it is parents who both know their children best and are the only persons who have invested their very lives and fortunes into their children’s long-term happiness and well-being.