Religion and the decline of marriage: the Soviet case
By Anna Claire Flowers, Mercator.
Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege made waves amongst economists and policymakers in the final months of 2023. In podcast interviews and panel discussions, a question that consistently confronted Kearney was, “What does the decline of religion have to do with the decline of marriage?”
It was a question that Kearney said herself she wasn’t prepared to answer since the book narrowed in on the empirical relationship between unmarried parents and their children’s socioeconomic outcomes. Still, the question is a real and relevant one. What is the role of religion in supporting stable households and even, dare I say, enforcing commitment?
Clara Piano and I chip away at this question in our working paper “Three to Get Married? The Role of Religious Authorities in Marriage.” Throughout history, religious organisations have overseen the regulation and enforcement of marriage contracts, and still today, religious marriage holds meaning and responsibilities distinct from marriage contracts overseen by the state alone.
Isolating the effect of a marital third party is difficult because religious couples are likely to be different on unobservable margins from those who are not. In our paper, we focus on the Soviet era, a period in which religious marriage was banned, to compare marital outcomes in cases where a religious third party is and is not present.
Secularised
Following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, organised religion was immediately replaced with the promotion of scientific atheism. For centuries prior to the Revolution, marriage was a religious affair, but in 1917, the Bolsheviks issued two decrees concerning marriage: first, religious ceremonies were to be replaced with civil registration, and second, unilateral divorce was now permitted. Instead of vowing their loyalty to one another under God, the bride and groom, draped in red, pledged themselves to raising the production of the state.
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