According to a new report, Census data from the American Community Survey data from the Census Bureau indicates that the U.S. marriage rate plunged to an all-time low in 2019.
“For every 1,000 unmarried adults in 2019, only 33 got married. This number was 35 a decade ago in 2010 and 86 in 1970,” noted Wendy Wang, director of research for the Institute for Family Studies.
The Daily Wire reported last April:
The marriage rate in the United States in 2018 dropped to the lowest level ever measured, according to government data released Wednesday. The National Center for Health Statistics reported that the marriage rate fell by 6% to roughly 6.5 marriages per 1,000 people, the lowest rate since the government began measuring the stat in 1867.
The NCHS stated, “Studies have shown that adults in the United States are increasingly postponing marriage, and that a record number of current youth and young adults are projected to forego marriage altogether (1,2). Marriage has been shown to be correlated with positive health outcomes and longevity (3), and a recent report showed that age-adjusted death rates for both males and females are lowest for those who were married at the time of death.”
“Much variation can be seen in marriage rates over the 1900–2018 period, with the most pronounced fluctuations occurring during the 1930s and 1940s, at the time of the Great Depression and World War II,” the NCHS reported, adding, “Marriage rates ranged between 9.3 (per 1,000 population) and 12.0 from 1900 to 1929 and then declined to a relative low of 7.9 in 1932. The marriage rate more than doubled between 1932 and 1946 when it reached an all-time high of 16.4, and then it generally declined to 8.4 in 1958 and stabilized at 8.5 during 1959–1962.”
“Millennials are in peak marriage years, their 20s and 30s, and it’s still dropping,” NCHS statistician Sally Curtin, the lead author of the report, told The Wall Street Journal. “This is historic.”
The Journal added, “Many Americans are opting to form households without tying the knot, and strained finances have been a top reason. In recent years, much of the marriage decline has come for middle earners and those with only a high-school education. Declining religious adherence and growing acceptance of unmarried cohabitation have also played a role.”
One factor that may play a part in the decline of marriage is the concomitant decline in religious activity in young people. The American Enterprise Institute’s November 2019 American Perspectives Survey stated, “Younger Americans have had less robust religious experiences during their childhood than previous generations have. Fewer than one in three (29 percent) young adults say they attended religious services with their family at least weekly when they were growing up. … About one-third (32 percent) of young adults say they never attended religious services during their formative years. Young adults also report lower rates of attending Sunday school or other religious education programs as children. Only 27 percent of young adults say they attended Sunday school at least weekly.”