Last year, retiring United States Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was asked to identify the biggest change he had seen in his forty-year political career. Moynihan, a public intellectual who has served presidents of both parties with distinction, responded: "The biggest change, in my judgment, is that the family structure has come apart all over the North Atlantic world." This momentous transformation, Moynihan added, had occurred in "an historical instant. Something that was not imaginable forty years ago has happened."

Indeed it has, and we are all very much the worse for it. Virtually every opinion poll shows that the American people are deeply worried about the state of the family. They have good reason to be worried -- even, I would say, frightened. Compared to a generation ago, American families today are much less stable; marriage is far less central; divorce, out-of-wedlock births, and cohabitation are vastly more common; and children are more vulnerable and neglected, less well-off, and less valued. Public attitudes toward marriage, sexual ethics, and child-rearing have radically altered for the worse.

In sum, the family has suffered a blow that has no historical precedent -- and one that has enormous ramifications for American society. To be sure, there are some among us who, for reasons of their own, have welcomed the family's dissolution; a number of them -- and their arguments -- will be duly making their appearance in the course of this book. On the other side, there are some who, having taken the full measure of social loss entailed in the "coming-apart" Senator Moynihan referred to, have succumbed to a near-fatalistic despair, concluding that we are so far sunk in decadence that nothing will pull us out of it.

One of my major purposes in the pages that follow is to refute and repudiate the "liberationists" among us. But in some ways that task, arduous as it is, is easier than dealing with the apathy and surrender of those who see no way out. And so another of my major purposes will be to show why such feelings of surrender are misplaced and even morally unworthy of us. Bad as is the situation of the American family, we still have within us the power to change our ways and reclaim our legacy.

But my first task is to place the dissolution of the American family in its proper context. What is the state of marriage and the family in the first decade of the twenty-first century? How extensive is the damage? What might account for it? Is it irreversible? These are the sorts of questions I explore and try to answer in Chapter One.

Understanding social change of such magnitude concerning matters that touch on the most delicate and intimate areas of human life is a very large challenge -- the more so since the change has taken place in so compressed a period of time and is not yet over. There are things we simply do not now comprehend. But our inability to explain everything does not mean we cannot make sense of some things. For there are, in fact, many things we do know and many other things we can reasonably surmise through the exercise of common sense and with the aid of history and human experience.

Hence my second task, which is to place our current situation in a broader historical perspective. How have marriage and family evolved over the ages? This is the story narrated in Chapter Two. It has many twists and turns, and it will, I think, surprise and intrigue many readers. In looking at five distinct periods in the history of the Western world, we will find that the institution of marriage has been anything but static; to the contrary, it has frequently adapted to new circumstances and has often become stronger and better as a result. At the same time, there are certain essentials that have remained relatively constant -- core purposes that we need to fight mightily to preserve and protect.

Next, I take up what I consider to be the most important contemporary challenges to marriage and the modern family: cohabitation, illegitimacy, fatherlessness, homosexual unions, and divorce. In the three chapters that deal with these topics, I explore the principal arguments made by those who either favor contemporary developments, or accept them as inevitable, or believe they represent viable alternatives to "traditional" arrangements. My attempt to respond to these arguments is, I hope, candid, civil, and intellectually serious.

But my point in these chapters, as throughout this book, is not to engage in debate merely for debate's sake. Rather, it is actively to counter the growing acceptance of certain ideas -- the idea, for example, that all arrangements (single mother, single father, gay partners, two-parent families) are essentially equivalent when it comes to raising children. To put it another way, the point is to give public expression to the private concerns of many Americans, to reinforce moral sentiments they may still hold but are now hesitant to act on or even articulate, and to attempt to persuade those who do not share such concerns.

Ideas have consequences, Richard Weaver famously wrote, and bad ideas can have baleful consequences. It is fashionable these days to say and to believe that matters like divorce, illegitimacy, cohabitation, and single-parenting are "private" matters that are not the business of the wider community. To which I would respond: There are few matters of more profound public consequence than the condition of marriage and families. Most of our social pathologies -- crime, imprisonment rates, welfare, educational underachievement, alcohol and drug abuse, suicide, depression, sexually transmitted diseases -- are manifestations, direct and indirect, of the crack-up of the modern American family.

In tracing the etiology of these pathologies, The Broken Hearth is, as I already intimated above, critical of contemporary liberalism and various "liberation" movements. But it also assesses the temptations of modernity and probes why so many Americans of nonideological persuasions do not hold the institution of marriage in high repute. To say it simply: We could not have experienced the scale of marital breakdown we have witnessed since 1960 unless huge numbers of our fellow citizens -- conservative and liberal, believers and nonbelievers alike -- had willingly detached themselves from once-solemn commitments made to spouses and children.

Finally, this book attempts to articulate some of the forgotten purposes of marriage and family. Too often in this debate, it strikes me, even the advocates of the family speak of it the way a mother might speak of spinach to an unwilling child: You might not enjoy it, but it's good for you. This needs to be redressed. Commitment, hard work, and perseverance are indeed essential elements in making a modern family succeed, but, today no less than yesterday or the day before, the rewards are matchless, taking the form of love, deep friendship, tenderness, mutuality, the refinement of the soul -- and much laughter to boot.

I am no Pollyanna, and I do not believe that every marriage that is entered into in good faith can, or must, last forever, no matter what. My own mother divorced when I was five, remarried several times, and held two jobs outside the home; I saw my father only on weekends, and the various stepfathers in my life ran the usual gamut from good to bad. I am, therefore, the last person to idealize or sentimentalize family life. Still, we need to reclaim the ideal itself, so that it may serve as a guidepost, something high and estimable that we strive to attain. One reason so many American families are dissolving, or never forming, is that many of us have forgotten why we believe -- and why we should believe -- in the family. In the pages that follow, I try to answer those questions as well.

Let me offer a few additional observations. Divorce, out-of-wedlock births, fatherlessness, cohabitation, and the gay rights agenda are phenomena that affect virtually the entire Western world -- which means, among other things, that what is happening in the United States is not unique. The engine driving the crack-up of the American family is cross-cultural and entangled in modernity itself. For a variety of reasons, however, I confine myself largely to America. It is the nation I know best and love most and feel best equipped to comment on. That is not to say that what applies to America does not apply to other Western nations as well; it does.

This book rests on moral precepts most people agree about. It also reflects an understanding of marriage and family life rooted in traditional Christian and Jewish teachings, and, more specifically, in my Catholic faith. One certainly does not have to hold to these faiths to agree with the arguments I propound; there are a raft of nonreligious reasons to support marriage and the family. But the effort to pry discussions of these matters away from the religious context altogether is, I believe, both wrong and counterproductive. The Christian and Jewish understanding of family is no myth. Not only does it reflect deep human truths, it contributes a vital perspective that mere social science is powerless to provide.

I fully recognize that in arguing for many of the positions I do, I will be accused of wanting to "turn back the clock." That happens not to be true. While I believe that we desperately need to recover much of what has been lost, I explicitly say that certain trends are irreversible, and, at least in some cases, thankfully so, for there are things in the past that are worth leaving behind -- including the unequal status accorded to women for much of Western history. The notion that "conservatives" believe otherwise is a disingenuous fiction.

In fact, the whole turning-back-the-clock argument is itself often disingenuous, meant more as a conversation stopper than as a serious point, and designed to make those who hold traditional views appear antediluvian. C. S. Lewis had a wonderful rejoinder to this ploy:

I would rather get away from that whole idea of clocks. We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive... [and] going back is the quickest way on.

If we are to get nearer to the place we want to be, we will have to correct some big mistakes and revisit some disastrously wrong turns. This will require much of us, both personally and as citizens. Although there is simply no substitute for the daily love and devotion of individual husbands and wives and parents, there is also a vital need to affirm publicly, and to defend publicly, the institution that is the keystone in the arch of civilization -- a keystone in desperate need of repair.

This is my third decade in public life. I have served two presidents and written on subjects ranging from crime, education, and welfare to race, immigration, popular culture, and much else. But the enervation of both marriage and family life is, to me, the most perilous development of modern times. To help fortify them is the reason I wrote this book.