Covenant marriage on the rocks.

AFTER GAINING MEDIA attention in the late 1990s with a promise to lower divorce rates across the nation, the covenant marriage movement has hit the skids. The movement seeks to establish a legal category of marriage that makes divorce more difficult. It requires pledges such as a declaration of intent to live together "forever" and allows divorce only for infidelity, physical or sexual abuse, conviction of a felony, abandonment for one year, or living separately for two years. Irreconcilable differences aren't grounds for divorce.

Founded in 1999 in Dallas, Texas, by Phil and Cindy Waugh, a Baptist minister and his church-worker wife, the Covenant Marriage Movement organization grew by 2006 to claim fifty thousand couples and sixty-five cooperating ministries. The Waughs call for Christians to return to biblical values that are "established by God and everlasting" and based on acceptance of "God's intent for marriage and the importance of His presence in the marriage."

The Waughs see marriage as "under attack": divorce rates grew from 2.9 per thousand in 1968 to 4.2 per thousand in 1998 (they declined to 3.8 per thousand in 2002). Presently the National Center for Health Statistics estimates that 40 percent of all current marriages will end in divorce. But only Arizona, Arkansas, and Louisiana passed covenant marriage bills. Legislation was introduced but not passed in California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia.

In 2005 Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister turned conservative Republican, and his wife converted their thirty-year marriage to a covenant marriage in a Valentine's Day ceremony in Little Rock. On February 12, 2006, congregations across the South participated in Covenant Marriage Sunday to reaffirm God's role in their marriages. Otherwise, the covenant marriage campaign failed to convince couples to make marriages more difficult to escape. Some 112,000 couples were married in Arkansas in the first three years of the new law and only 800 of them, fewer than 1 percent, took advantage of the covenant marriage license. Fewer than 3 percent of couples in Louisiana and Arizona agreed to the extra restrictions of a covenant marriage.

"Covenant marriage just didn't take off," said Barbara Risman, co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families. "It was a very hot idea that didn't catch on because not enough people wanted that choice." She views the covenant marriage movement as a way for religious groups to bring God more openly into traditional family values and calls it "a wonderful idea" for individual rituals, although she doesn't think the state should play a role. Risman isn't surprised at the push for covenant marriage in the South's Bible Belt.

Steven Nock, director of the Marriage Matters project and a sociologist at the University of Virginia, describes covenant marriage as a reaction to continued increases in divorce, out-of-wedlock births, and unmarried cohabitation. "At the moment," he said, "covenant marriage appeals to a small, distinct group who differ in important ways from the average person approaching marriage." Nock added that, based on current evidence, he finds little reason to believe the covenant marriage movement will catch on with the larger population.

After the more traditional marriage arrangements of the 1950s and 1960s, when the nuclear family was celebrated as the core of society, religious conservatives became alarmed in the 1970s and 1980s with the rise of legalized abortion, birth control, and cohabitation. Describing what they saw as decline and decadence, groups such as the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation reacted to the trends and began pushing a "pro-family agenda" in politics.

Nock attributes some of the current political support for traditional marriage as an attempt by politicians to lower welfare costs because research indicates that married people are healthier, live longer, and are less likely to be poor. "I doubt that government can predictably alter things like marriage and divorce," he said. "We are midway through a fundamental redefinition of what marriage is and are at the beginning of the reaction to that redefinition. Fifty years ago marriage defined men's and women's lives more than anything else, but it doesn't anymore."

Lowering welfare costs has replaced an emphasis on covenant marriage and become the primary justification for attempts by the Bush administration to promote marriage. His Healthy Marriage Initiative, currently before Congress, would allot money to faith-based groups as part of a wider attempt to shore up marriage.

Instead of bothering to wait for legislation, the Bush administration is already shifting federal funding for marriage initiative programs, such as a $583,475 grant from Health and Human Services to the California Healthy Marriages Coalition for an Internet resource center for California groups that promote marriage. Religion-based groups make up many of the program's participants.

The covenant marriage movement is a failure, but promotion of marriage by fundamentalist conservatives and religious groups continues. Although it is doubtful that the movement will have much influence on overall relationship patterns, it does have influence on the government--and how taxpayer dollars are spent.

Don Monkerud is a writer in Aptos, California, who follows cultural, social, and political issues. See his website at members.cruzio.com/~monkerud.