Looking at Faith-Based Marriage Counseling

Among President Bush’s various faith-based ideas for social problems has been the promotion of religious counseling for those considering marriage. The point is supposed to be that pre-marriage counseling leads to better marriages - but just how likely is that to be the case?

Writing in The Nation, Kate Levin and Kevin McCarthy describe their experiences at a Roman Catholic “Engaged Encounter” workshop, just the sort that heads a list of model programs created by Wade Horn, Assistant Secretary for Children and Families at the Health and Human Services Department:

By the end of the day, our Engaged Encounter had, however briefly and in spite of its structure, done what the HHS website said it would do: created a space for meaningful exchange between premarital couples. Unfortunately, this dialogue was stifled by a curriculum that was divorced, so to speak, from the reality of most participants' lives. Oft-cited impediments to marriage like financial difficulties, sexual incompatibility and racial or cultural divides were all deemed too hot to handle. Simplistic and amateurish, the curriculum failed even to push its purported ideological agenda about the sanctity of faith-based and faithful marriages. If the Bush Administration is serious about marriage-preparation programs, why not adopt a model that puts the participants in the driver's seat, instead of at the back of a high school driver's-ed classroom? Only then, when couples are encouraged to speak from their own experience about issues that matter to them, will these programs truly succeed in engaging.

There’s no question that good pre-marriage counseling could improve marriages by getting people to seriously consider issues and problems that they should consider but might not otherwise. A good workshop would, for example, get people to think about financial issues and ways to deal with likely conflicts (money is what most couples end up arguing about).

Apparently, though, that isn’t really the case with Catholic Engaged Encounter, a model religious program. If the administration goes with something like this, they will be putting a premium on the appearance of doing something substantive without actually accomplishing anything.

Read More:

• Secularism 101
• Separation of Church and State 101
• Roman Catholicism