Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 06:1 (Spring 2024)
Article: Keep To The Old Roads: A Review Of Brad Wilcox’s "Get Married"
Author: G. Shane Morris

Eikon 6.1 (Spring 2024) p. 145

Keep To The Old Roads:
A Review Of Brad Wilcox’s Get Married

G. Shane Morris

G. Shane Morris is a senior writer at the Colson Center and host of the Upstream podcast.

William Bradford Wilcox. Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. New York: HarperCollins B and Blackstone Publishing, 2023.

In his 2012 song, You’ll Find Your Way, Andrew Peterson urges his son to “keep to the old roads.” It’s profound advice for faith and life in a time when so many in our culture are attempting to blaze new trails. From sexuality and gender to spirituality and family, modern people seem intent on rejecting the “life scripts” that guided previous generations, and are instead opting for new identities, values, beliefs, and approaches to love.

Marriage, in particular, has fallen on hard times. Many are convinced it no longer works, is outdated, or won’t serve their interests. In Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox argues from the data that this widespread rejection

Eikon 6.1 (Spring 2024) p. 146

of marriage has been a mistake. He thinks the “old road” of matrimony is not only still viable, but is the most dependable route to happiness, prosperity, lasting love, and a meaningful life. He also suggests the reason millions have given up on marriage is that our elites, influencers, and pop culture tastemakers have lied to us about it for fifty years.

The Closing Of The American Heart

It started with what Wilcox calls “the Me Decade,” a time when Americans shifted their priorities from family and community to chasing their own gratification: “The promise held out in the 1970s was that casting aside the values and virtues of an older era and focusing on your own needs, your own desires, and your own projects would bring you happiness.”1 This was when divorce began to skyrocket,2 abortion became legal nationwide, the Pill was introduced, and out-of-wedlock births began the process of more than doubling.3 Today, the heedless hedonism of the Baby Boomers, taken up by their adult children, has soured into record loneliness, singleness, childlessness, and depression. You’d think we’d finally question the anti-marriage philosophy that got us here. But a new generation of opinion-makers is doubling down on anti-marriage rhetoric. Wilcox...