“Single?” Lawn Signs Conquer the American Landscape

“Single?” Lawn Signs Conquer the American Landscape

Over the past two years, I have developed a growing fascination with lawn signs.  Not the ones advertising politicians or plumbers, but the ones advertising websites.  Dating websites.
These signs are so prevalent in my area that I decided to launch a private investigation into who was behind them and just how far they stretched.  What I found started in my small home town and led me all the way to the secret guerilla marketing infrastructure of a multimillion-dollar company…

Background: 

In the fall of 2007, I was about a year into an Analyst gig at a large web-focused private equity firm.  My job description was simple: do whatever it takes to find interesting companies who are making lots of money on the internet.
During this time, every radio commercial, billboard, and t-shirt bearing a domain name held a special meaning: it represented an opportunity to find the next big deal.  As you can imagine, the same names kept popping up again and again.  I was looking for new deals everywhere.
One weekend, I trekked down to South Jersey to visit my parents in my hometown of Glassboro.  The town sits about 30 minutes southeast of Philadelphia and has a population of less than 20,000.  As I drove past my old high school, my deal-hunting subconscious noticed something bizarre.  Stuck in the grass by the curb was a white lawn sign about a foot tall with a very simple message in black Times New Roman: “Single? www.GlassboroSingles.ORG”
It looked like something the local contractor would ask to stick in your front yard while he replaced your roof.  Except… well, it was plugging a dating website.  I had about a million questions, but two immediately simmered to the top:

• Glassboro is a tiny market of nominal interest to even local advertisers.  Who would register a domain, let alone build a website, to target our tiny population?
• Who in their right mind advertises websites with lawn signs?

By the time I pulled into my parents’ driveway, I had convinced myself that the site was the product of some overzealous local entrepreneur.  I wrote off the lawn sign as an amateurish stab at guerilla marketing.  When I drove out of town the next day, the sign was gone.
Fast forward a few weeks.  I was back in New York, rushing up 5^th Avenue on my way to work in Midtown.  As I wedged myself through the usual crowd, something stopped me in my tracks.  Eight feet in the air, tied to a lamp post, was a white sign with black Times New Roman: “Single? www.FifthAvenueSingles.COM”
I promptly morphed into one of those sidewalk-obstructing idiots who stares up into the sky and infuriates the people who actually have to be somewhere.  Aside from the URL, this sign was identical to the one I had seen in Glassboro.  By the time I got to my work, I decided that there were four possibilities:

• This was a complete coincidence and these were the efforts of two completely separate businesses with identically unorthodox advertising methods (unlikely).
• The overzealous Glassboro entrepreneur had loaded up his car with lawn signs and decided to extend his guerilla marketing scheme to the Big Apple (less likely).
• Some NY-based business had done some marketing in the tri-state area and decided Glassboro was a ripe market (even less likely).
• There was something bigger going on.  This struck me as the most likely case, but raised a question that made my head hurt: if whoever is doing this has the ability to target New York City but somehow made their way down to Glassboro, how many of the towns in between have also been hit?

Not long after, I stumbled onto another clue.  I was in Central New Jersey on my way to give a guest lecture at Princeton University, which is about the geographical midpoint between New York and Glassboro.  As my cab rolled through neighboring West Windsor Township, I saw a familiar-looking lawn sign wedged in the grass alongside the road: “Single? www.WindsorSingles.ORG”.
That one did it for me.  At the absolute least, I was now convinced that this lawn sign business had its tentacles stretched into almost every town in the state of New Jersey. It was worth spending some time to learn more.

Industry Research:

In talking to a few colleagues about this fascinating business, I learned that most private equity shops shy away from dating sites for a number of reasons:

• Dating sites are known for tremendously high churn rates (if your product works, your customers never have to come back; if it doesn’t they see no reason to come back).  This means dating sites have to keep a steady flow of new customers coming into the top of the funnel in order to survive, let alone grow revenue and profit.
• High churn rates mean new customers have low, volatile expected lifetime values.  This has a negative impact on the equity value of each customer, making it difficult to justify the valuation multiples seen by membership-driven websites in other verticals.
• The need to keep more and more new customers coming in creates a necessity for massive marketing budgets that often involve aggressive affiliate marketing (i.e. paying third parties to bring you new customers).  This further damages the perceived value of the user base to a potential investor or acquirer.
• Like social networking, “online dating” is a natural monopoly (or, at best, a natural oligopoly).  A dating site’s quality is determined by the number and quality of matches it can provide a new user, which is directly tied to the size of its membership base.  This makes it extremely difficult to enter the market. 

However, just because something isn’t a great investment prospect doesn’t mean it’s a bad business.  Many, many people have become obscenely wealthy in this industry (both online and offline).  The technology required to connect two people is trivial, meaning your only real expense is the cost of customer acquisition.  If you are part of the natural oligopoly, your product quality will be high and people will seek you out.  This cycle lowers your costs and sends your margins skyrocketing.
Furthermore, the online dating industry has made a lot of secondary players wealthy thanks to affiliate marketing.  At times, online dating sites have paid as much as $100 per head for new paying customers, and routinely pay out at least a few dollars for new “free trial” users or other prospects.  This means anyone with the power to herd single internet users can potentially tap into a strong monetization engine.
With this information in-hand, I started to see some beauty in the lawn sign model.  Since virtually all dating sites are national, even ones with millions of members can under-serve certain geographic regions.  The “YourTownSingles.com” approach leads potential members to believe their area will be extremely well represented in the site’s population.  This creates the perception of high-quality matches, even if the total user base is small.
I had visited each of the URLs I saw on the lawn signs, and each contained a multi-step form asking for a bunch of personal contact information.  This led me to suspect that the business wasn’t running its own site, but was acting as an affiliate marketer.  Often times, an affiliate’s commission is tiered based on the level of pre-qualification of their referrals.  This means that an affiliate can make a lot more money selling my information to a third-party dating site if they have my name, e-mail, phone number, age and gender than if they simply have my e-mail address.
Given the large amount of information these pages required, I became fairly confident that I had figured out what was going on (for the most part).  The business makes a small investment ($50-100) in buying a domain name and a few dozen lawn signs for a given town.  Then they put up a form landing page at the URL, plant the signs, and see what kind of return they generate by luring the townsfolk to their site and then passing their information on to user-hungry dating websites.  If the ROI is positive, they keep at it.  If not, they try another town.
After reaching these unverified conclusions, the lawn sign business slipped out of my mind for quite some time.  When I quit my private equity job to found RJMetrics this past July, however, my interest was reignited.  The reason: I still see these signs everywhere.

Relapse

I seriously can’t take a ten minute drive without passing one of these signs.  What fascinates me more, however, is that they never seem to last more than a few days in one spot.  In most cases, I’ll see a “Single?” sign somewhere and the next time I drive by it will be gone.  I can only assume that these signs are being taken down by whomever maintains the property where they are placed (they are almost always stuck in the lawn of a public park or building).
The fact that these signs are still so prevalent today, more than a year after I saw the first, means two amazing things:

• Despite their short shelf-life (or, lawn-life), sticking these plastic signs into the ground in small towns has proven financially viable (I can’t imagine that a year’s worth of data to the contrary would result in the business continuing to print and plant these signs).
• Someone must be monitoring and replacing these signs as they are taken down.  When you consider the number of towns likely involved in this system, it’s clear that this is far from a one-man show.

Then, just this past Friday, I saw the most amazing sign yet.  A town not far from my house is called Haddon Heights, NJ.  It is a miniscule town that occupies just 1.6 square miles of land and has a population of barely 7,000 people.  Furthermore, 56% of the population is married and 25% is under the age of 18 (thanks Wikipedia!). Not exactly a ripe market for a dating business.  Nonetheless, as I drove through the town, I saw (no exaggeration) twenty signs that read “Single? www.HaddonHeightsDating.COM”
Since the town seemed to have such a surplus, I decided to pull over and pick up a souvenir:

My new souvenir on the RJMetrics couch

Stealing a lawn sign brought me to a realization: these signs are driving me insane and I have figure out who is behind them, how big this system is, and whether they are actually making any money by doing this.  It was time to do some real digging.

How Big Is It? 

First stop: Google.  Dozens and dozens of crafted queries designed to find the slightest mention of one of these yard signs anywhere on the internet turned up dry.  Absolutely no one out there seemed to be aware of these things (and those that were didn’t seem to care).
Maybe this was a smaller operation than I thought.  To answer that question, I set out to discover just how many of these websites were actually out there.  Since these sites are all just basic lead-gen landing pages, I speculated that the infrastructure of this system was a lot like a domain parking business, where a single web application feeds different content to a large number of domains based on which domain is accessed.  If this was the case, all of the domains would likely correspond to the same IP address.
I pinged each of the four websites I could recall to see what IP addresses were serving them.  Here are the results:

• GlassboroSingles.com: 200.46.241.132
• HaddonHeightsDating.com: 66.252.239.220
• FifthAvenueSingles.com: 69.41.228.6
• WindsorSingles.org: 66.252.239.220 

Four domains and three different IPs.  It appeared I might be wrong about the parking servers, but the fact that one of them showed up twice gave me some hope.  It was still possible that these domains were parked in massive batches on various servers.  However, they weren’t all in the exact same place.  To get a sense of where the servers are actually sitting, I used an IP lookup and traceroute tool.  As it turns out, here is where these servers reside:

• 69.41.228.6 is in Dallas, Texas
• 66.252.239.220 is in Miami, Florida
• 200.46.241.132 is in Panama 

Why the scattered infrastructure?  Is it possible these identical road signs that all appeared within 100 miles of each other are actually operated by different companies?
Regardless, I had the data I needed to size up the operation.  With the IPs in hand, I turned to the “Reverse IP” tool at domaintools.com.  The tool is simple: you provide an IP address and they tell you how many websites reside there.  If you want, you can buy a complete list for a few bucks.
The results:

• 66.252.239.220 hosts about 5,100 domains
• 200.46.241.132 hosts about 3,800 domains
• 69.41.228.6 hosts about 500 domains

Wow-is it really possible this lawn sign network includes so many domain names?  I whipped out my credit card and purchased the answer.  I stared in disbelief at an Excel file containing every domain name hosted across these three servers: 8,870 of them.  They all fit the formula: a town name and a dating keyword.
I wrote some Macros in Excel to pull out each domain’s TLD (i.e. .com, .net, .org), name scheme, and the name of the town it represented.  Here are the results:

• Unique Domains: 8,870
• Unique Town Names: 5,902  
• Top Level Domains:
  
  • .COM: 65.7%
  • .ORG: 29.6%
  • .NET: 4.4%
  • .US: 0.3%
  • .INFO: <0.1%
• Sign Text Patterns (____ is the name of a town or city):
  
  • ____SINGLES: 78.0%
  • ____DATING: 12.2%
  • ____MATCH: 3.0%
  • ____DATES: 2.0%
  • ____PERSONALS: 1.8%
  • SINGLEIN____: 1.0%
  • ____SINGLE: 0.5%
  • ____CHRISTIANSINGLES: 0.5%
  • ____GREATEXPECTATIONS: 0.4%
  • DATING____: 0.2%
  • SINGLES____: 0.2%
  • ____PERSONAL: <0.1%
  • ____ASIANS: <0.1%

It’s important to note that this massive list is almost certainly not the list in full.  I remembered four signs I had seen and they turned up three servers full of domains.  It’s extremely likely that more signs might yield more servers.
I remembered originally thinking that this business was something homegrown to South Jersey- clearly I was wrong.  However, now I had the information I needed to determine just how far these yard signs stretched.
I loaded a master list of every city in the country and wrote an algorithm to link each domain to a specific state.  Naturally, there are some town names that appear in multiple states (which are a jackpot to these guys, since one landing page can serve multiple markets), so in those cases I assigned the domain’s state as “multiple.”  Also some domains contained city nicknames or abbreviations, making it tricky to classify them in a quick batch process.  Despite these issues, I was able to classify over 80% of the domains.
As it turns out, there were domains corresponding to all 50 states and Puerto Rico.  Additionally, the names were distributed surprisingly evenly across the states.  No single state represented more than 8.4% of the domain population, and the top 20% of states only represented 54% of the domains (I would have guessed an 80/20 distribution or worse). The top ten most referenced states are listed below:

• Texas: 8.4%
• Wisconsin: 7.8%
• West Virginia: 5.7%
• Pennsylvania: 5.7%
• California: 5.6%
• New Jersey: 5.0%
• Virginia: 4.7%
• New York: 4.7%
• Washington: 3.3%
• Tennessee: 3.2%

Clearly, this effort isn’t isolated to my tri-state area (in fact it appears to be even more prevalent in states like Texas and Wisconsin).
Let’s take a moment to consider the potential scale of this operation.  Given the number of domains registered and the frequency with which signs appear to be replaced, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to speculate that whoever is responsible may have placed literally hundreds of thousands of signs into American soil over the past two years.

Who Is Behind It?

As I mentioned before, I was intrigued by the fact that these domains live on three separate web servers from separate hosting providers in separate geographic locations (Florida, Texas, and Panama).  In order to find out who is behind this operation, I first needed to confirm that these domains and servers were in fact managed by the same company.
I visited several of the landing pages across the separate servers searching for clues that could tie back to an owner.  I found nothing by way of contact information, but I did see enough to conclude that all three servers are related.  While the designs vary slightly from domain to domain, all of the sites end up asking you the same exact questions about yourself and offering the same exact drop-down lists of answer choices.

Every Site Asks the Same Questions

Since I couldn’t find contact information on the webpages themselves, I decided to go find it on my own.
My first stop: WHOIS.  The WHOIS database is designed to serve as a master directory of all domain name owners, although in my experience there are no controls enforcing the submission of valid information.  Moreover, most domain name registrars now allow registrants to register anonymously by serving as a proxy for the registrant.  Despite these shortcomings, it’s always a good place to start.
I looked up a random domain from my list and was disappointed to see it registered to “Domains by Proxy, Inc”-which is basically GoDaddy’s anonymous domain name registration service.  Disappointed, I decided to try a few more just in case.  Most were by Proxy, but eventually found some variations.
Many of the domains on the Panama server turned out to be registered to NuStar Solutions, S.A. of Panama City.  On the other servers, those that weren’t registered by proxy were registered to IMAT Group of Vadodara, India.
The records didn’t provide domain names for these companies (their e-mail addresses were Yahoo or Gmail).  However, Google was able to come to the rescue and turn up their sites: www.imatgroup.com and www.nustarsolutions.com.
The sites revealed that both companies are offshore development shops.  Both are centered around web design services, but offer additional services as well.  NuStar mentions “Sign/Banner Advertising,” while IMAT mentions a more exhaustive list that includes “Guerilla Marketing Services,” “Sign/Banner Marketing,” “Localized Campaigns,” and “Direct Response Lead Generation.”  Sound familiar?
At this point, I came to the realization that every question I answered seemed to introduce two more.  In this case, they were “did someone hire these firms or are they acting on their own?” and, more confusingly, “how did a web design firm in Panama or India get a lawn sign physically planted in the front lawn of my high school in South Jersey?”
To find the answer, I decided that I wasn’t done with my WHOIS search.  Back when I was cracking into companies in New York, I discovered a tried and true trick for getting a CEO’s cell phone number: historical WHOIS records.  Often, the original registrant of a company’s domain name is its founder.  As such, it’s common for the founder’s personal contact information to exist at some point in the WHOIS database.  As the company grows, they change the record, but by that time (often unbeknownst to them) companies like domaintools have already saved the old information in their archive.
I went back to the list of domains and did an exhaustive search of WHOIS records looking for domains with WHOIS record changes.  I quickly noticed that all of the Panama domains were registered in 2006, whereas the India names were registered from about the Summer of 2007 onward.  This might explain the different servers; if a company hired these firms to register the names and administer the websites, perhaps they switched providers in 2007, leaving their infrastructure split in half.
Pretty soon, I hit the jackpot.
CLINTONDATING.ORG, which sits on the Panama server, was not registered to NuStar Solutions or by proxy-instead, it was registered to Terry Fitzpatrick at a company called “The Right One” in Norwell, Massachusetts.   At long last, I had a company name.  A closer look revealed another little present: Terry’s email contained a company website: therightone.com.
I visited the site and began to find some answers.  “The Right One” is a matchmaking service.  You provide them with basic information about yourself and they use it to match you up with a prospective mate.  Clicking the “Get Started” link on their website leads you to a familiar sight: a web form asking you the same exact questions that appear on the domain landing pages.  These were definitely our guys.
With one more click, I learn that The Right One has franchise offices across the country.  Check out this map from the “Locations” page on their website:

The Right One Office/Franchise Locations

Look familiar?  If you need a hint, scroll up and look at the top 10 domains by state that I listed above.  It’s a perfect match.  Even more telling to my personal story are these particular franchise locations:

• Cherry Hill, NJ: Neighbors Haddon Heights, NJ and is a 20 minute drive from Glassboro, NJ
• Lawrenceville, NJ: Neighbors West Windsor Township in Central NJ
• New York, NY (420 Lexington): Midtown Manhattan, two blocks from my subway stop 

Some quick research on the company itself yields a pretty complex business structure. The Right One is owned by a company called PAFCO International, which is itself a subsidiary of Together Management Group, Inc, which goes by the aliases TD Management Group and Together Dating Services.  The combined company employs over 500 people in over 80 offices across the United States.  If you assume the headquarters has at least a few dozen employees, that implies that any given satellite office is just a handful of people.
A January Inc. article mentions Together Dating as a client of Texas-based Instinct Marketing, a response-based marketing company that specializes in “vertically-focused websites.”  Texas, as you may recall, is the home of one of the company’s three web servers.  However, while Instinct Marketing may be Together Dating’s partner on the technology side, I find it hard to believe they’re the ones putting the signs in the ground.  The geographic correlation between sign spottings and franchise offices is simply too strong.

Does Yard Sign Marketing Work?

Remember when I said that certain dating businesses can print money?  This is one of them.  A 2006 press release reveals that the company was then bringing in about $45 Million of revenue a year.  I also found an unverified claim from a disgruntled ex-employee on ripoffreport.com that claims the company charges their customers from $3,000 to over $15,000 for their matchmaking services.
At those prices, the economics of the yard sign strategy start to make sense.  Yard signs like those cost about $1 apiece to print and if franchise office has a slow day they can send out their extra “relationships experts” to plant lawn signs within a 50-mile radius.  One successful new lead can bankroll thousands of new signs.

Some Closure (and a Shameless Plug) 

In the end, I consider this mystery solved.  My years-long fascination with these bizarre signs that seemed to follow me up and down the east coast is over.  As a bonus, I discovered an interesting company with an even more interesting marketing strategy.
Regardless of how you feel about Together Dating’s industry or its methods, you have to appreciate their tremendous, low-profile marketing machine and the data-driven technological infrastructure that supports it.  This company brings in 8 solid figures of revenue every year using nothing but yard signs, some parked domains, and a firm grasp of the data that drives their growth.  CEO Paul Falzone explained the importance of such data in a recent interview.
Even in this offbeat corner of the business world, success is a function of intelligence, strategy, and analytical decision-making. The online business intelligence tools we provide here at RJMetrics are designed to empower all online businesses with these strengths.  Our tools provide new echelons of accessibility to your existing data, allowing your business to measure, manage, and monetize better. If you’re interested in learning more, contact us for a free discussion about how we can drive growth in your online business (no lawn signs required).

This entry was written by robertjmoore and posted on November 6, 2008 at 10:26 am and filed under Business Profiles with tags affiliate marketing, dating, dating websites, guerilla marketing, investigation, lawn signs, local advertising, marketing, response marketing, signs, single, street spam, together dating, yard signs. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: 

Immigration: No Correlation With Crime

By Kathleen Kingsbury Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2008

A Los Angeles police officer leads a man suspected of kidnapping to a patrol car.

Robert Nickelserg / Getty

Despite our melting-pot roots, Americans have often been quick to blame the influx of immigrants for rising crime rates. But new research released Monday shows that immigrants in California are, in fact, far less likely than U.S.-born Californians are to commit crime. While people born abroad make up about 35% of California's adult population, they account for only about 17% of the adult prison population, the report by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) showed. Indeed, among men ages 18 to 40 — the demographic most likely to be imprisoned — those born in the U.S. were 10 times more likely than foreign-born men to be incarcerated.
"From a public safety standpoint, there would be little reason to limit immigration," says Kristin Butcher, an economics professor at Wellesley College and one of the report's authors.
The new report even bolsters claims by some academics that increased immigration makes the United States safer. A second study, released earlier this month by Washington-based nonprofit Immigration Policy Center, found that on the national level, U.S.-born men ages 18-39 are five times more likely to be incarcerated than are their foreign-born peers. And, while the number of illegal immigrants in the country doubled between 1994 and 2005, violent crime declined by nearly 35% and property crimes by 26% over the same period. The PPIC even determined that on average, between 2000 and 2005, cities such as Los Angeles that took in a higher share of recent immigrants saw their crime rates fall further than cities with a lower influx of illegals.
Driving these statistics, researchers believe, are the same factors that drive immigration in the first place. "People who make the decision to come here from another country want to get ahead, establish a better life," says Harvard sociology professor Robert Sampson. "That dream is not something they're likely to risk by getting arrested."
Sampson and colleagues recently examined more than 3,000 violent acts committed in Chicago from 1995 to 2003, analyzing police records, census data and a survey of more than 8,000 residents. They discovered what Sampson calls the "Latino Paradox" — first-generation Mexican immigrants were 45% less likely to engage in violence than third-generation Americans. This pattern continued into the second generation, which was 22% less likely to be violent. Similar trends have been seen in New York and Miami, both of which have large immigrant enclaves. "Immigrant communities are often responsible for revitalizing the urban neighborhoods that they live in," Sampson says. The irony of people's popular misconceptions, he adds, is "that the longer one is exposed to American culture, the more likely you are to participate in violence."
Critics note that studies such as those mentioned above rarely distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. Reliable data that separates the two groups is hard to find, but Indiana University economist Eric Rasmusen has culled figures from a 2005 GAO report on foreigners incarcerated in Federal and state prisons to calculate that illegal immigrants commit 21% of all crime in the United States, costing the country more than $84 billion. Rasmusen contends the distinction is important because immigrants with a green card or U.S. citizenship have already jumped through several legal hoops to live and work in the U.S., including a background check into any prior criminal record back home. "Legal immigrants are by definition unusually law-abiding," Rasmusen wrote last June. But Professor Daniel Mears, a Florida State University criminologist, argues that such reasoning can also be turned on its head. "If someone is here illegally," Mears asks, "why would they call attention to themselves by committing a crime?"
Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter immigration controls, warns that even if immigrants are less likely to commit crimes, their children and grandchildren may be more likely to end up on the wrong side of the law. He points out that U.S. Department of Justice statistics show that Hispanics make up 20% of state and Federal prison populations in 2005, a rise of 43% since 1990. At that rate, one in every six Hispanic males born in the U.S. today can expect to be imprisoned during his lifetime — more than double the rate for non-Hispanic whites, but lower than that of African-Americans of the same age. "That means the children and grandchildren of immigrants are committing a lot of crime, making this a long-term problem," Camarota says, before adding, "That's much worse news."
Whatever the findings of the latest PPIC research, it will do little to cool the passions on either side of the issue. When debating immigration, says Mears, "it doesn't matter what the empirical evidence shows; people react with their gut feelings first."
The original version of this article stated that Daniel Mears is a professor of criminology at the University of Florida. In fact, Daniel Mears is a professor of criminology at Florida State University.

After Immigrant Raid, Iowans Ask Why

By Betsy Rubiner/Postville Tuesday, May. 27, 2008

Two women attend a press conference at Saint Bridget Parish in Postville, Iowa.

Jessica Reilly / Telegraph Herald / AP

In this small northeastern Iowan town surrounded by newly planted cornfields, a middle-aged white woman walks into the local Guatemalan restaurant with her arm around a Hispanic child who is sobbing because she can't find her mother. After conferring with a restaurant worker, the woman takes the child nearby to St. Bridget's, a small 1970s-era brick Catholic church on a quiet tree-lined street that has become command central for what people in this community of 2,273 describe as a "disaster relief response."

In the aftermath of the nation's largest single-site immigration raid — a May 12 raid of a Postville-based meatpacking plant, Agriprocessors Inc. that took 389 workers into custody — Hispanic children and adults here remain fearful. And many white residents remain hard at work helping the people left behind — mostly women from Guatemala and Mexico and their children. To date, 270 illegal immigrant workers have pleaded guilty to unusually tough federal criminal charges of working with false documents and have received five-month prison sentences followed by deportation. About 40 female workers have been released temporarily to care for children. Suddenly without income, job prospects or spouses, they await court dates.
Many Hispanics, legal or not, fear that the immigration agents will return. (The original goal had been to arrest 697 of the plant's 968 workers.) On the first chaotic day of the raid, about 400 people fled to the church seeking safety, food, shelter, medical care and the whereabouts of family members. Now, Postville residents led by religious leaders have spontaneously stitched together a safety net. Their argument: if this were a natural disaster, FEMA would be here but instead it's a man-made tragedy and the government is providing little help. "It is my privilege to serve the needs of these people," says Sister Mary McCauley, a petite, white-haired woman with a kind smile who is St. Bridget's pastoral administrator. "[but] I don't know why they have left it to the faith community alone."
Responding with an outpouring of donated goods, money, time and caring, the volunteers are fueled by compassion, duty, and, increasingly, frustration and fury. They know too that immigrants have helped make Agriprocessors the nation's largest kosher meat processor and, in turn, helped Postville prosper while many small Iowa towns struggle. "They're being preyed upon," says John Schlee, 71, a volunteer wearing overalls and a farm implement company cap. "They're doing work that the American workers don't want to do. They're searching for a better life and now their families are being torn apart."
Anti-immigrant sentiment and ethnic tensions are not unknown in this unusually diverse Iowa small town, whose residents include descendants of German and Norwegian Lutherans and Irish Catholics as well as more recent arrivals — Latin Americans, Ukrainians and Hasidic Jews drawn here by the plant. A few angry people have called the church, complaining about its care of "criminals." But volunteers like Ardie Kuhse, 60, shrug this off. "Yes, they were illegal. But they were working. Is that a crime? They're a part of our community," says Kuhse, near tears as she recalls trying to calm children after the raid.
On the weekend before Memorial Day, St. Bridget's social hall bustled with Hispanic families seeking financial and legal advice, including Sylvia Ruiz, 40, and Marta Veronica, 32, Guatemalans who wore electronic ankle bracelets. "We can't work. We can't provide for our kids. God bless the church," says Veronica, speaking through a Spanish interpreter. She is looking after a daughter and two teen-age nephews, who were among several minors detained and later released. Cooking meals, making beds, unloading trucks and running errands, the volunteers include people from Postville, other Iowa communities and beyond — lawyers, religious leaders, staff from a nonprofit Latino aid center in Waterloo and students and faculty from Iowa colleges.
At one card table, a Cornell College student helped people locate family and friends. Above them hung an Iowa map pocked with post-it notes showing the locations of detention centers. Nearby, a Lutheran minister conferred with a Hasidic man who runs the local kosher grocery store. At another card table, two nuns filled out a raid "registration and care" form for two Hispanic men, assisted by two Luther College students acting as interpreters.
Donations are being used to help pay for necessities like rent and utilities. In the church rectory, lawyers met individually with immigrants struggling to understand criminal and immigration law. The unusually rapid court proceedings have raised concerns about violations of due process. There have been allegations that workers have been exploited. Some immigrants fear eviction as replacement workers arrive and need lodging. They have other questions: Where are the men and women serving their sentences? When will the temporarily released mothers face charges? How do they get and pay for passports for children who are U.S. citizens?
Sylvia Ruiz, who is preparing for a likely return to Guatemala, has four children ages 18, 16, 7 and 2. "The little ones don't understand what's happening," she says. "The older ones do." At Postville's K-8 school, where about half of the 387 students are Hispanic and some have been at the school for years, Principal Chad Wahls predicts 70 to 120 children won't return next fall, possibly including the best friends of his third-grade daughter, who "cried and cried for days" after the raid. When school breaks for summer this week, he predicts more tears — from teachers.
Braced for months of waiting and uncertainty, many Postville residents are certain about one thing: "We have to have comprehensive immigration reform so these people who desire to work can. We have to have a way to welcome them," says Sister McCauley. "When people are so hurt, we have to take a look at the law."

Sunday, Jun. 11, 2006

Does Fatherhood Make You Happy?

By Daniel Gilbert

Sonora Smart Dodd was listening to a sermon on self-sacrifice when she decided that her father, a widower who had raised six children, deserved his very own national holiday. Almost a century later, people all over the world spend the third Sunday in June honoring their fathers with ritual offerings of aftershave and neckties, which leads millions of fathers to have precisely the same thought at precisely the same moment: "My children," they think in unison, "make me happy."
Could all those dads be wrong?
Studies reveal that most married couples start out happy and then become progressively less satisfied over the course of their lives, becoming especially disconsolate when their children are in diapers and in adolescence, and returning to their initial levels of happiness only after their children have had the decency to grow up and go away. When the popular press invented a malady called "empty-nest syndrome," it failed to mention that its primary symptom is a marked increase in smiling.
Psychologists have measured how people feel as they go about their daily activities, and have found that people are less happy when they are interacting with their children than when they are eating, exercising, shopping or watching television. Indeed, an act of parenting makes most people about as happy as an act of housework. Economists have modeled the impact of many variables on people's overall happiness and have consistently found that children have only a small impact. A small negative impact.
Those findings are hard to swallow because they fly in the face of our most compelling intuitions. We love our children! We talk about them to anyone who will listen, show their photographs to anyone who will look and hide our refrigerators behind vast collages of their drawings, notes, pictures and report cards. We feel confident that we are happy with our kids, about our kids, for our kids and because of our kids--so why is our personal experience at odds with the scientific data?
Three reasons.
First, when something makes us happy we are willing to pay a lot for it, which is why the worst Belgian chocolate is more expensive than the best Belgian tofu. But that process can work in reverse: when we pay a lot for something, we assume it makes us happy, which is why we swear to the wonders of bottled water and Armani socks. The compulsion to care for our children was long ago written into our DNA, so we toil and sweat, lose sleep and hair, play nurse, housekeeper, chauffeur and cook, and we do all that because nature just won't have it any other way. Given the high price we pay, it isn't surprising that we rationalize those costs and conclude that our children must be repaying us with happiness.
Second, if the Red Sox and the Yankees were scoreless until Manny Ramirez hit a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth, you can be sure that Boston fans would remember it as the best game of the season. Memories are dominated by their most powerful--and not their most typical--instances. Just as a glorious game-winning homer can erase our memory of 812 dull innings, the sublime moment when our 3-year-old looks up from the mess she is making with her mashed potatoes and says, "I wub you, Daddy," can erase eight hours of no, not yet, not now and stop asking. Children may not make us happy very often, but when they do, that happiness is both transcendent and amnesic.
Third, although most of us think of heroin as a source of human misery, shooting heroin doesn't actually make people feel miserable. It makes them feel really, really good--so good, in fact, that it crowds out every other source of pleasure. Family, friends, work, play, food, sex--none can compete with the narcotic experience; hence all fall by the wayside. The analogy to children is all too clear. Even if their company were an unremitting pleasure, the fact that they require so much company means that other sources of pleasure will all but disappear. Movies, theater, parties, travel--those are just a few of the English nouns that parents of young children quickly forget how to pronounce. We believe our children are our greatest joy, and we're absolutely right. When you have one joy, it's bound to be the greatest.
Our children give us many things, but an increase in our average daily happiness is probably not among them. Rather than deny that fact, we should celebrate it. Our ability to love beyond all measure those who try our patience and weary our bones is at once our most noble and most human quality. The fact that children don't always make us happy--and that we're happy to have them nonetheless--is the fact for which Sonora Smart Dodd was so grateful. She thought we would all do well to remember it, every third Sunday in June.
Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert is the author of Stumbling on Happiness. To read an interview, go to time.com/gilbert

As Marriage and Parenthood Drift Apart, Public Is Concerned about Social Impact

Generation Gap in Values, Behaviors

July 1, 2007

From:     To:

Download the complete report

Executive Summary

• A Generation Gap in Behaviors and Values. Younger adults attach far less moral stigma than do their elders to out-of-wedlock births and cohabitation without marriage. They engage in these behaviors at rates unprecedented in U.S. history. Nearly four-in-ten (36.8%) births in this country are to an unmarried woman. Nearly half (47%) of adults in their 30s and 40s have spent a portion of their lives in a cohabiting relationship.
• Public Concern over the Delinking of Marriage and Parenthood. Adults of all ages consider unwed parenting to be a big problem for society. At the same time, however, just four-in-ten (41%) say that children are very important to a successful marriage, compared with 65% of the public who felt this way as recently as 1990.
• Marriage Remains an Ideal, Albeit a More Elusive One. Even though a decreasing percentage of the adult population is married, most unmarried adults say they want to marry. Married adults are more satisfied with their lives than are unmarried adults.
• Children Still Vital to Adult Happiness. Children may be perceived as less central to marriage, but they are as important as ever to their parents. As a source of adult happiness and fulfillment, children occupy a pedestal matched only by spouses and situated well above that of jobs, career, friends, hobbies and other relatives.
• Cohabitation Becomes More Prevalent. With marriage exerting less influence over how adults organize their lives and bear their children, cohabitation is filling some of the vacuum. Today about a half of all nonmarital births are to a cohabiting couple; 15 years ago, only about a third were. Cohabiters are ambivalent about marriage – just under half (44%) say they to want marry; a nearly equal portion (41%) say they aren't sure.
• Divorce Seen as Preferable to an Unhappy Marriage. Americans by lopsided margins endorse the mom-and-dad home as the best setting in which to raise children. But by equally lopsided margins, they believe that if married parents are very unhappy with one another, divorce is the best option, both for them and for their children.
• Racial Patterns are Complex. Blacks are much less likely than whites to marry and much more likely to have children outside of marriage. However, an equal percentage of both whites and blacks (46% and 44%, respectively) consider it morally wrong to have a child out of wedlock. Hispanics, meantime, place greater importance than either whites or blacks do on children as a key to a successful marriage – even though they have a higher nonmarital birth rate than do whites.
• Survey Sample and Methods. These findings are from a telephone survey conducted from February 16 through March 14, 2007 among a randomly-selected, nationally representative sample of 2,020 adults.

Overview

Americans believe that births to unwed women are a big problem for society, and they take a mixed view at best of cohabitation without marriage. Yet these two nontraditional behaviors have become commonplace among younger adults, who have a different set of moral values from their elders about sex, marriage and parenthood, a new Pew Research Center Survey finds.

This generational values gap helps to explain the decades-long surge in births to unmarried women – which now comprise nearly four-in-ten (37%) births in the United States – as well as the sharp rise in living together without getting married, which, the Pew survey finds, is something that nearly half of all adults in their 30s and 40s have done for at least a portion of their lives.

But this generational divide is only part of a more complex story. Americans of all ages, this survey finds, acknowledge that there has been a distinct weakening of the link between marriage and parenthood. In perhaps the single most striking finding from the survey, just 41% of Americans now say that children are "very important" to a successful marriage, down sharply from the 65% who said this in a 1990 survey.

Indeed, children have fallen to eighth out of nine on a list of items that people associate with successful marriages – well behind "sharing household chores," "good housing," "adequate income," "happy sexual relationship," and "faithfulness." Back in 1990, when the American public was given this same list on a World Values Survey, children ranked third in importance.

The new Pew survey also finds that, by a margin of nearly three-to-one, Americans say that the main purpose of marriage is the "mutual happiness and fulfillment" of adults rather than the "bearing and raising of children."

In downgrading the importance of children to marriage, public opinion both reflects and facilitates the upheavals in marital and parenting patterns that have taken place over the past several decades.

In the United States today, marriage exerts less influence over how adults organize their lives and how children are born and raised than at any time in the nation's history. Only about half of all adults (ages 18 and older) in the U.S. are married; only about seven-in-ten children live with two parents; and nearly four-in-ten births are to unwed mothers, according to U.S. Census figures. As recently as the early 1970s, more than six-in-ten adults in this country were married; some 85% of children were living with two parents; and just one-birth-in-ten was to an unwed mother.

Americans take a dim view of these trends, the Pew survey finds. More than seven-in-ten (71%) say the growth in births to unwed mothers is a "big problem." About the same proportion – 69% – says that a child needs both a mother and a father to grow up happily.

Not surprisingly, however, attitudes are much different among those adults who have themselves engaged in these nontraditional behaviors. For example, respondents in the survey who are never-married parents (about 8% of all parents) are less inclined than ever-married parents to see unmarried childbearing as bad for society or morally wrong. They're also less inclined to say a child needs both a mother and father to grow up happily. Demographically, this group is more likely than ever-married parents to be young, black or Hispanic,¹ less educated, and to have been raised by an unwed parent themselves.

There is another fast-growing group – cohabiters – that has a distinctive set of attitudes and moral codes about these matters. According to the Pew survey, about a third of all adults (and more than four-in-ten adults under age 50) have, at some point in their lives, been in a cohabiting relationship with a person to whom they were not married. This group is less likely that the rest of the adult population to believe that premarital sex is wrong. They're less prone to say that it's bad for society that more people are living together without getting married. Demographically, this group is more likely than the rest of the adult population to be younger, black, and secular rather than religious.

Marriage

But while this survey finds that people in nontraditional marital and parenting situations tend to have attitudes that track with their behaviors, it does not show that they place less value than others on marriage as a pathway to personal happiness.

To the contrary, both the never-married parents as well as the cohabiters in our survey tend to be more skeptical than others in the adult population that a person can lead a complete and fulfilled life if he or she remains single. This may reflect the fact that never-married parents as well as cohabiters tend to be less satisfied with their current lives than is the rest of the population. For many of them, marriage appears to represent an ideal – albeit an elusive, unrealized one.

Along these same lines, the survey finds that low income adults are more likely than middle income or affluent adults to cite the ability to meet basic economic needs (in the form of adequate income and good housing) as a key to a successful marriage. Adults with lower socioeconomic status – reflected by either education or income levels –also are less likely than others to marry, perhaps in part because they can't meet this economic bar.

And it's this decline in marriage that is at the heart of the sharp growth in nonmarital childbearing. This trend has not been primarily driven – as some popular wisdom has it – on an increase in births to teenage mothers. To the contrary, those rates have been falling for several decades. Rather the sharp increase in nonmarital births is being driven by the fact that an ever greater percentage of women in their 20s, 30s and older are delaying or forgoing marriage but having children.

The Pew survey was conducted by telephone from February 16 through March 14, 2007 among a randomly selected, nationally-representative sample of 2,020 adults. It has a margin of sampling error of 3 percentage points.

Children

The survey finds that while children may have become less central to marriage, they are as important as ever to their parents. Asked to weigh how important various aspects of their lives are to their personal happiness and fulfillment, parents in this survey place their relationships with their children on a pedestal rivaled only by their relationships with their spouses – and far above their relationships with their parents, friends, or their jobs or career. This is true both for married and unmarried parents. In fact, relatively speaking, children are most pre-eminent in the lives of unwed parents.

The survey also finds that Americans retain traditional views about the best family structure in which to raise children. More than two-thirds (69%) say that a child needs both a mother and father to grow up happily. This question has been posed periodically over the past quarter century,² and – even as the percentage of children who live with both a mother and father has dropped steadily during this time period – public opinion has remained steadfastly in favor of a home with a mom and a dad.

In keeping with these traditional views, the public strongly disapproves of single women having children. Among the various demographic changes that have affected marriage and parenting patterns in recent decades – including more women working outside the home; more people living together without getting married; more first marriages at a later age; and more unmarried women having children – it's the latter trend that draws the most negative assessments by far.

Two-thirds (66%) of all respondents say that single women having children is bad for society, and nearly as many (59%) say the same about unmarried couples having children. No other social change we asked about in this particular battery drew a thumbs-down from more than half of respondents.

Divorce

While the public strongly prefers the traditional mother-and-father home, this endorsement has some clear limits. By a margin of 67% to 19%, Americans say that when there is a marriage in which the parents are very unhappy with one another, their children are better off if the parents get divorced. Similarly, by a margin of 58% to 38%, more Americans agree with the statement that "divorce is painful, but preferable to maintaining an unhappy marriage" than agree with the statement that "divorce should be avoided except in an extreme situation."

Thus, public attitudes toward divorce and single parenting have taken different paths over the past generation. When it comes to divorce, public opinion has become more accepting.³ When it comes to single parenting, public opinion has remained quite negative.

The oddity is that rates of divorce, after more than doubling from 1960 to 1980, have declined by about a third in recent decades, despite this greater public acceptance. On the other hand, the rates of births to unwed mothers have continued to rise, despite the steadfast public disapproval. Some 37% of all births in the U.S. in 2005 were to an unwed mother, up from just 5% in 1960. This rapid growth is not confined to the U.S. Rates of births to unwed mothers also have risen sharply in the United Kingdom and Canada, where they are at about the same levels as they are in the U.S. And they've reached even higher levels in Western and Northern European countries such as France, Denmark and Sweden.

Public Opinion by Demographic Groups

The group differences in public opinion on these matters tend to be correlated with age, religion, race and ethnicity, as well as with the choices that people have made in their own marital and parenting lives. There are some, but not many, differences by gender. Here is a rundown of the key differences by group.

Age, Religiosity and Political Conservatism

As noted above, the Pew survey finds that older adults – who came of age prior to the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s – are more conservative than younger and middle-aged adults in their views on virtually all of these matters of marriage and parenting. Thus, some of the overall change in public opinion is the result of what scholars call "generational replacement." That is, as older generations die off and are replaced by younger generations, public opinion shifts to reflect the attitudes of the age cohorts that now make up the bulk of the adult population.

Even among the younger generations (ages 18 to 64), however, our survey finds substantial differences in attitudes that fall along the fault lines of religion and ideology rather than age.

White evangelical Protestants and people of all faiths who attend religious services at least weekly hold more conservative viewpoints on pretty much the whole gamut of questions asked on the Pew survey. This is true across all age groups. For example, white evangelical Protestants are more likely than other religious groups to consider premarital sex morally wrong.

They are more likely to consider the rise in unmarried childbearing and cohabitation bad for society and more likely to agree that a child needs both a mother and father to be happy. They also are more likely to say legal marriage is very important when a couple plans to have children together or plans to spend the rest of their lives together. Further, white evangelical Protestants are more likely than white mainline Protestants to say that divorce should be avoided except in extreme circumstances and to consider it better for the children when parents remain married, though very unhappy with each other. In sum, white evangelical Protestants have a strong belief in the importance of marriage and strong moral prescriptions against premarital sex and childbearing outside of marriage.

The pattern is the same among those of any faith who attend religious services more frequently, compared with less frequent attendees. And it is the same for political conservatives compared with their more moderate or liberal counterparts.

Race and Ethnicity

The racial and ethnic patterns in public opinion on these matters are more complex. Blacks and Hispanic are more likely than whites to bear children out of wedlock. And yet these minority groups, our survey finds, also are more inclined than whites to place a high value on the importance of children to a successful marriage. Indeed, they place higher value than whites do on the importance of most of the ingredients of a successful marriage that this survey asked about – especially the economic components. But blacks and Hispanics are less likely than whites to be married. One possible explanation to emerge from this survey is that many members of these minority groups may be setting a high bar for marriage that they themselves cannot reach, whether for economic or other reasons.

As noted above, there are sharp generational differences in views about the morality of unwed parenting. However, there is no significant difference on this front by race or ethnicity; blacks, Hispanics and whites are about equally likely to say it is wrong for unmarried women to have children. There are small differences along racial and ethnic lines when it comes to evaluating the impact on society of the growing numbers of children born out of wedlock. Hispanics are somewhat less negative about this phenomenon than are whites and blacks, between whom there is no statistically significant difference.

When it comes to the relationship between marriage and children, Hispanics again stand out. They are more inclined than either whites or blacks to consider having and raising children to be the main purpose of marriage (even so, however, a majority of Hispanics say that adult happiness and fulfillment is the main purpose of a marriage). Also, Hispanics – more so than either blacks or whites – consider children "very important" for a successful marriage.

But when considering a broader range of characteristics of a successful marriage, it is whites who stand apart. They are much less likely than either blacks or Hispanics to consider adequate income, good housing and children to be "very important" to a successful marriage. And they are somewhat less likely to rate various measures of compatibility (see chart) as being important as well. To some degree all these racial and ethnic differences reflect the differing socioeconomic circumstances of whites, blacks and Hispanics. People with higher incomes and education levels – regardless of their race and ethnicity – tend to rate these various characteristics as less important to marriage than do people with a lower socio-economic status.

When it comes to views about divorce, whites and, especially, Hispanics are more likely than blacks to say that divorce is preferable to maintaining an unhappy marriage. However, about two-thirds of all three groups say that it is better for the children if their very unhappy parents divorce rather than stay together.

Views about cohabitation are similar for blacks and whites, while Hispanics are a bit less negative about the impact of cohabitation on society. But the similarities between blacks and whites masks divisions of opinion within each group. Among whites, the difference of opinion between generations is particularly sharp – with 55% of whites ages 50 and older saying that living together is bad for society, compared with 38% among younger whites, a difference of 17 percentage points. The comparable difference between older and younger blacks is just 9 percentage points. Among older blacks and whites, the balance of opinion is tilted in the negative direction. For younger whites (ages 18 to 49), a plurality hold a neutral assessment of the impact on society of couples living together without marrying. Among younger blacks, opinion about cohabitation is more divided; 48% of this group considers living together bad for society while 45% take a neutral position and 5% say it is good for society.

To some degree, views about cohabitation reflect differing moral assessments of premarital sex. Blacks are more likely than whites and Hispanics to say that premarital sex is always or almost always morally wrong – and this is true even after group differences in age are taken into account. Those who consider premarital sex wrong also tend to consider cohabitation bad for society, while those who say premarital sex is not wrong or is only wrong in some circumstances are more likely to say the cohabitation trend makes no difference for society.

When it comes to marital and parenting behaviors (as opposed to attitudes), a number of racial and ethnic patterns stand out.

More than eight-in-ten white adults in this country have been married, compared with just seven-in-ten Hispanic adults and slightly more than half (54%) of all black adults. Among blacks, there is a strong correlation between frequent church attendance, moral disapproval of premarital sex and the tendency to marry. Among whites (who marry at much higher rates) this relationship is not as strong.

Among those who have ever been married, blacks (38%) and whites (34%) are more likely than Hispanics (23%) to have been divorced. Blacks also are somewhat more likely than whites or Hispanics to have cohabited without marriage. But all three groups, this survey finds, are equally likely to have had children.

Blacks and Hispanics are more likely than whites to have children out of wedlock. For all groups, this behavior also is strongly correlated with lower educational attainment. For blacks and Hispanics (more so than for whites), frequent church attendance correlates negatively with the likelihood of being an unwed parent.

Gender

The Pew survey finds a great deal of common ground between men and women on issues surrounding marriage and parenting. There are some small differences, however. While men and women are about equally likely to see unmarried parenting as a problem for society, men are a bit more negative than women about unmarried parenting when no male partner is involved in raising the children. Similarly, men are a little more likely than women to believe that children need both a mother and father to be happy. Women, on the other hand, are a bit more likely than men to consider divorce preferable to maintaining an unhappy marriage; they also believe more strongly than men that divorce is the better option for children when the marriage is very unhappy. On other matters – such as the main purpose of marriage or the characteristics of a successful marriage – there are few differences.

Education and Income

College-educated adults and high-income adults marry at higher rates and divorce at lower rates than do those with less education and income. They are also less likely to have children outside of marriage.⁴

However, despite the sharp differences by socio-economic status in marital and parenting behaviors, there are only minor differences by socio-economic status in values and attitudes about marriage and parenting. Adults with higher incomes and more education tend to be slightly less inclined than others to say that premarital sex and nonmarital births are always morally wrong. The college educated also are slightly less inclined than the less educated to say it is very important for couples to legally marry if they plan to spend their lives together. Similarly, those with a college education are a little more likely to say that a man or woman can lead a complete and happy life if he or she remains single.

There are no more than minimal differences by education or income when it comes to views about the impact on society of unmarried childbirths and of cohabitation.

Family Background

The Pew survey finds some strong correlations between the kinds of family arrangements that respondents experienced growing up and their own behaviors in adulthood. For example, among respondents who are themselves products of parents who never married, about a third (32%) are themselves never-married parents. By comparison, just 5% of the general adult population are products of never-married parents.

Family background in childhood plays a smaller role, however, in predicting adult attitudes (as opposed to behaviors) about whether unmarried parenting is bad for society and morally wrong. Once age differences are taken into account, those whose parents never married are just a bit less negative than those whose parents married and never divorced about the impact of unmarried childbearing on society.

Respondents with parents who divorced are just as likely as other respondents to take the position that divorce is painful but preferable to maintaining an unhappy marriage. Similarly, among people ages 18 to 49, the now grown children of divorce hold about the same views as those who grew up in a traditional-married-parent arrangement on whether divorce is better for children than parents staying in an unhappy marriage. On the other hand, those respondents whose parents divorced are less likely than other respondents to believe that a child needs a home with both a mother and a father to grow up happily.

Moral Beliefs, Attitudes and Behaviors

There are close relationships between behaviors, attitudes and moral beliefs when it comes to the subjects of unwed parenting and cohabitation, the Pew survey finds. For example, those who have fewer moral reservations about premarital sex and are positive or neutral about the impact of living together on society also are more likely to have lived with a partner themselves. Similarly, those who are positive or neutral about the social impact of unmarried parenting and less likely to consider it morally wrong are also more likely to be in this situation themselves. It is not possible from this survey to disentangle which came first--the moral beliefs, the attitudes, or the behaviors--but it is clear they tend to go hand-in-hand.

Statistical analysis of these survey findings shows that having less education and being black or Hispanic are traits associated with being a never-married parent. Attending religious services less often also is associated with being an unmarried parent, particularly among blacks and Hispanics.

On the other side of the coin, those who believe that having children without being married is wrong are less likely to be a never-married parent. Also, those who consider the rise in unmarried parents bad for society are less likely to be unmarried parents.

A statistical analysis of factors correlated with ever having lived with a partner outside of marriage shows that cohabiters are younger, more likely to be black, and, after controlling for other demographic factors, less likely to be Hispanic. They are also less likely to attend religious services frequently. There is a strong relationship between moral beliefs about premarital sex and cohabitation history; those who consider premarital sex always wrong are less likely to have cohabited than others. They are also less likely to have cohabited than those who say living together is bad for society – suggesting that the more powerful stigma against cohabitation comes from concerns about morality rather than from concerns about social consequences.

A different pattern emerges when looking at differences between married people who have – and haven't – been divorced. Here, the demographic and attitudinal factors do little to predict the probability of experience with divorce.

There are a few exceptions, however. Catholics are bit less likely than members of other religious groups to have been divorced. And there is a modest correlation between having been divorced and believing that divorce is better for the children than maintaining a very unhappy marriage.

But in the main, experience with divorce cuts across all demographic subgroups more evenly than does experience either with unmarried parenting or with cohabitation. The belief that divorce is preferable to maintaining an unhappy marriage is widely shared by both those who have and have not been divorced.

The body of this report provides a deeper analysis of attitudes and behaviors on all these matters. It is presented in five sections:

I. Nonmarital Childbearing
II. Modern Marriage
III. Cohabitation
IV. Divorce
V. Gay Marriage, Civil Unions and Same-Sex Couples Raising Children

Notes

¹Throughout this report, the term blacks or whites refers to non-Hispanic blacks or whites, respectively. Hispanics are of any race. The survey included an oversample of blacks and Hispanics. Interviews were conducted in both English and Spanish.
²See the World Values Surveys conducted in the U.S. in 1982, 1990, 1995 and 1999.
³See for example, Thornton, Arland and Linda Young-DeMarco. 2001. "Four Decades of Trends in Attitudes Toward Family Issues in the United States: The 1960s Through the 1990s." Journal of Marriage and Family, 63: 1009-1037.
⁴Bianchi, Suzanne M. and Lynne M. Casper. 2000. "American Families." Population Bulletin 55(4). Population Reference Bureau.

Download the complete report

Why are People Having Fewer Kids?

Perhaps it's because they don't like them very much.

Ronald Bailey | February 26, 2008
The "demographic winter" is coming. So warns a new documentary of the same name. What is the demographic winter? The phrase, according to the film's promotional materials, "denotes the worldwide decline in birthrates, also referred to as the 'birth dearth,' and what that portends." The first half of Demographic Winter was previewed at the conservative Heritage Foundation a couple of weeks ago. According the film, the demographic winter augurs little good, e.g., economic collapse and social deterioration. If current trends continue world population should begin a steep decline sometime around the middle of the 21st century. Why?

Because total fertility rates (TFRs) are plummeting around the world. Population stability is achieved when each woman bears an average of 2.1 kids over the course of her lifetime—one for her, one for her male partner, and a little overage to make up to childhood deaths. Today, there are sixty countries in which TFRs are below 2.1. For example, the European Union's TFR is 1.5 and no EU member state has a TFR at replacement or above. Even high population developing countries have seen steep declines in fertility. Since 1970, China's TFR fell from 5.8 to 1.6; India's from 5.8 to 2.9; Indonesia from 5.6 to 2.4; Japan's from 2.0 to 1.3; Mexico's from 6.8 to 2.4; Brazil's from 5.4 to 2.3; and South Africa's from 5.9 to 2.7. The U.S. TFR dropped from 2.55 in 1970 to around 2.1 today, largely because of the influx of higher fertility immigrants. However, the fertility of second generation Americans drops to the level of longer established Americans.

I doubt that the "demographic winter" portends economic collapse or social deterioration, but let us set that aside for this column, and instead ask why people are choosing to have fewer children? After all, voluntary childlessness seems to violate the Darwinian premise that our genes dispose us, like all other creatures, to try to reproduce.

However, demographic data are undercutting the notion that there is some kind of sociobiological nurturing imperative, economist and demographer Nicholas Eberstadt noted during the question period following the documentary. As evidence, he pointed to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, where 30 percent of women are childless and that Hong Kong's TFR has been below 1 birth per woman for at least a decade.

Demographic Winter asserts that "every aspect of modernity works against family life and in favor of singleness and small families or voluntary childlessness." And surely they are right. Modern societies offer people many other satisfactions and choices outside of the family. In particular women find that their time becomes more highly valued in occupations outside the home. There are no iron laws of demography, but one that comes pretty close is that the more educated women are, the fewer children they tend to have. Eberstadt also noted the best predictor of fertility levels is the desired family size as reported by women. And finally, the most profound event of the 20th century may have been the sexual revolution's drive toward gender equality, enabled by modern contraception. Unlike other creatures, people can have the fun of sex without the side effect of parenthood.

So, modernity essentially transforms children from capital goods that produce family income into consumption items to be enjoyed for their own sakes, more akin to sculptures, paintings, or theatre. But that's just the problem—according to happiness researchers, people don't really enjoy rearing children.

"Economists have modeled the impact of many variables on people's overall happiness and have consistently found that children have only a small impact. A small negative impact," reports Harvard psychologist and happiness researcher Daniel Gilbert. In addition, the more children a person has the less happy they are. According to Gilbert, researchers have found that people derive more satisfaction from eating, exercising, shopping, napping, or watching television than taking care of their kids. "Indeed, looking after the kids appears to be only slightly more pleasant than doing housework," asserts Gilbert in his bestselling, Stumbling on Happiness (2006).

Of course, that's not what most parents say when asked. For instance, in a 2007 Pew Research Center survey people insisted that their relationships with their little darlings are of the greatest importance to their personal happiness and fulfillment. However, the same survey also found "by a margin of nearly three-to-one, Americans say that the main purpose of marriage is the 'mutual happiness and fulfillment' of adults rather than the 'bearing and raising of children.'"

Gilbert suggests that people claim their kids are their chief source of happiness largely because it's what they are expected to say. In addition, Gilbert observes that the more people pay for an item, the more highly they tend to value it and children are expensive, even if you don't throw in piano lessons, soccer camps, orthodonture, and college tuitions. Gilbert further notes that the more children people have, the less happy they tend to be. Since that is the case, it is not surprising that people are choosing to have fewer children. And if people with fewer children are happier, then people with no children must be happiest, right? Not exactly, but the data do suggest that voluntarily childless women and men are not less happy than parents. And they sure do have more money to squander as they try to pursue what happiness they can and strive to somehow fill up their allegedly empty lives.

Disclosure: My wife and I try not to flaunt our voluntarily childless lifestyle too much.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Freemasonry is not compatible with Christianity or Southern Baptist doctrine.

Freemasonry

By NAMB Staff
During the annual session of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), June 15-17, 1993, the messengers overwhelmingly approved a report on Freemasonry. This action recognized the many charitable endeavors of Freemasonry. It also acknowledged that "many outstanding Christians and Southern Baptists now are, and in the past have been Masons."¹ For the first time in the history of the SBC, however, the Convention concluded, "many tenets and teachings of Freemasonry are not compatible with Christianity or Southern Baptist doctrine."² The report accepted by the Convention identified eight tenets and teachings of Freemasonry that it concluded were not compatible with Christianity.³
First Incompatibility: The prevalent use of offensive concepts, titles, and terms such as "Worshipful Master" for the leader of a lodge; references to their buildings as "mosques," "shrines," or "temples"; and the use of words such as "Abaddon" and "Jah- Bul-On,"⁴ the so-called secret name of God. To many, these terms are not only offensive but sacrilegious.
Biblical Response: The so-called secret name of God illustrates the offensive nature of the above terms for Christians. Albert Pike, one of the most influential Masonic writers, explained the first two syllables of the secret name in his discussion of the old French rituals of Freemasonry:
This is probably Jabulum, incorrectly copied; which, as I have shown, meant 'the product of, that which proceeded, issued or emanated from Om.'
If correctly written, it is compounded of … Yu or Yah-u,… Baal or Bal or Bel, and Om, thus combining the names of the Hebrew, Phoenician and Hindu Deities, to indicate that they are in reality the same. In some old rituals it is Jabulum.⁵
Many leaders of Freemasonry confuse pagan deities with the true God of the Bible. The Christian Scriptures never represent pagan deities as simply different representations of the one true God. The Bible rejects all pagan deities as false gods and goddesses. Exodus 20:4-5 states: "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me." The Bible also rejects the idea that idolaters worship the true God but know Him by a different name. Israel used the correct personal name for God, yet God rejected their worship because of their use of an idol.
He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt." When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, "Tomorrow there will be a festival to the LORD." So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry. Then the LORD said to Moses, "Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt. They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, 'These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.'"
"I have seen these people," the LORD said to Moses, "and they are a stiff-necked people. Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation" (Ex. 32:4- 10).⁶
Non-Christian religions recognize many different gods and goddesses, but none of these are a representation of the true God of the Bible. All pagan deities are false gods and must be rejected by Christians. The gods and goddesses of the non-Christian religions are different in nature and character from the biblical God. The differences are far greater and more significant than the terminology or name used to refer to God. No Christian should have any part in a ritual that honors or glorifies a pagan deity.
The 31st degree of the Scottish Rite Southern Jurisdiction is especially troubling for Christians because of the honor and glory it attributes to Egyptian deities. The following quotes are from the official Masonic commentary on the Scottish Rite degrees:
The second section takes place in a re-creation of the Court of the Dead in Egyptian mythology, a place where judgment is rendered on the worthiness of a recently deceased man to enter into the kingdom of the gods. This section of the ritual relies heavily on The Book of the Dead.
The candidate is brought into the Court of the Dead to be judged for actions while living and to determine if he deserves to dwell among the gods. His escort is Horus. Isis, Horus' mother, speaks first, inquiring whose ka has come to be judged.
Through Horus, the candidate claims to have led the most virtuous of lives. The gods express their hope that he speaks the truth. They ask him to approach the balance and stand near the body that was his in life.
Isis now directs the candidate to the altar of the great god Khem, the source of life. Here she inquires about the honesty of the deceased through six questions. Thoth again records the answers.
The answers to all of the specific questions before the altars of various deities are now thrown upon the balance, making the pans nearly equal.
Osiris, having once been a man and subject to the passions and weaknesses of human existence, knows that the other gods cannot appreciate human fallibility. He renders the final judgment-this man is worthy of admittance into the realm of everlasting light and rest and peace.⁷
The above reference to the Egyptian god Osiris goes so far as to attribute to him the same qualities and preeminence that the Bible assigns to Christ Jesus.⁸ Any participation by Christians in such rituals (even by proxy) is inexcusable. Joshua 23:7 states: "Do not associate with these nations that remain among you; do not invoke the names of their gods or swear by them."
Second Incompatibility: The use of archaic, offensive rituals and so-called "bloody oaths" or "obligations," among these being that promised by the Entered Apprentice:
"All this I most solemnly and sincerely promise and swear, . . . binding myself under no less penalty than that of having my throat cut from ear to ear, my tongue torn out by its roots, and buried in the sands of the sea, at low water mark, where the tide ebbs and flows twice in twenty-five hours, should I, in the least, knowingly or wittingly violate or transgress this my Entered Apprentice obligation."
Or that of the Fellow Craft degree:
"All this I most solemnly and sincerely promise and swear, . . . binding myself under no less penalty than that of having my left breast torn open, my heart plucked from thence, and given to the beast of the field and the birds of the air as prey, should I, in the least, knowingly or wittingly, violate or transgress this my Fellow Craft obligation."
Or that of the Master Mason:
"All this I most solemnly and sincerely promise and swear, . . . binding myself under no less penalty than that of having my body severed in two, my bowels torn from thence and burned to ashes, and these scattered before the four winds of heaven, that no more remembrance might be had among men or Masons of so vile a wretch as I should be, should I, in the least, knowingly or wittingly violate or transgress this my Master Mason obligation. So help me God and keep me steadfast."
Or that of other advanced degrees with required rituals considered by many to be pagan and incompatible with Christian faith and practice.
Even though these oaths, obligations, and rituals may or may not be taken seriously by the initiate, it is inappropriate for a Christian to "sincerely promise and swear," with a hand on the Holy Bible, any such promises or oaths, or to participate in any such pagan rituals.⁹
Biblical Response: Both Jesus and the apostle James taught that Christians should avoid the kind of extravagant oaths found in the rituals of Freemasonry. Christians should simply let their "yes"be "yes," and their "no" mean "no." In Matthew 5:34-37, Jesus taught the following:
But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.
Likewise, in his epistle, James wrote: "Above all, my brothers, do not swear-not by heaven or by earth or by anything else. Let your "Yes" be yes, and your "No," no, or you will be condemned" (Jas. 5:12).
The oaths required by Freemasonry are far worse than the examples the New Testament warns its readers against making. The Entered Apprentice swears under no fewer penalties than that of having his "throat cut from ear to ear," and his "tongue torn out by its roots, and buried in the sands of the sea." In the Fellow Craft degree, he swears under no less penalty than that of having his "left breast torn open," his "heart plucked from thence" and "given to the beast of the field and the birds of the air as prey." The candidate for the Mason degree swears under no fewer penalties than that of having his "bowels torn from thence and burned to ashes, and these scattered before the four winds of heaven."
Some Masons claim that the candidates for the degrees do not take these oaths seriously and, therefore, the oaths are compatible with Christian teaching. However, the Bible warns that oaths should be taken seriously and not given rashly. Leviticus 5:4 says, "Or if a person thoughtlessly takes an oath to do anything, whether good or evil-in any matter one might carelessly swear about-even though he is unaware of it, in any case when he learns of it he will be guilty."
Third Incompatibility: The recommended readings, in pursuance of advanced degrees, of religions and philosophies, which are undeniably pagan and/or occultic, such as much of the writings of Albert Pike, Albert Mackey, Manly Hall, Rex Hutchens, W. L .Wilmshurst, and other such authors; along with their works, such as Morals and Dogma, A Bridge to Light, An Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry, and The Meaning of Masonry.
Biblical Response: Several of these Masonic writers deny the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. For example, Rex Hutchens wrote:
The purpose of teaching the concept of a Messiah in Freemasonry is to point out its near universality in the well-developed religions of the ancient world. We see references to Dionysius of the Greeks, Sosiosch of the Persians, Krishna of the Hindus, Osiris of the Egyptians, Jesus of the Christians. The purpose of these varying cultures' messiahs was to find in human form a source of intercession with Deity; in particular one who, as a human, had been tempted and suffered the daily pangs of life and so could be expected to possess a particular sympathy and understanding; in a word, the messiahs expressed hope.¹⁰
In addition, some of these writers confuse false pagan beliefs with the teaching of Christianity. Albert Pike, in the following quote, confused the Christian Trinity with the Hindu Universal Soul: "Behold the True Masonic Trinity; the Universal Soul, the Thought in the Soul, the Word, or Thought expressed; the Three In One, of a Trinitarian Ecossais."¹¹
According to Hutchens, the following pagan deities are mentioned in the ritual of the 31st degree of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, Southern Jurisdiction. (31st degree) "The Egyptian deities present in the hall are: (1) Osiris: the Lord and Judge of the dead; (2) Atum: called the 'Father of Souls'; (3) Ma: goddess of Truth and Justice whose image weighs upon one side of the balance; (4) Thoth: Scribe of the gods; (5) Anubis: Conductor of Souls; son of Osiris by his sister Nephthys; (6) Horus: son of Osiris, who presents the deceased to his father; (7) Isis: wife and sister of Osiris, mother of Horus; (8) Nephthys: sister of Isis and Osiris, mother of Anubis by Osiris; (9) Four sons of Horus: Kebhsenuf,Tua-mutef, Hapi and Amset.¹²
Pike even compared the Bible with the occultic Kabalah, which he apparently considered superior to the Bible.
All truly dogmatic religions have issued from the Kabalah and return to it: everything scientific and grand in the religious dreams of all the illuminati, Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg, Saint-Martin, and others, is borrowed from the Kabalah; all the Masonic associations owe to it their Secrets and their Symbols.
The Kabalah alone consecrates the alliance of the Universal Reason and the Divine Word; it establishes, by the counterpoises of two forces apparently opposite, the eternal balance of being; it alone reconciles Reason with Faith, Power with Liberty, Science with Mystery; it has the keys of the Present, the Past, and the Future.
The Bible, with all the allegories it contains, expresses, in an incomplete and veiled manner only, the religious science of the Hebrews.¹³
The SBC Report on Freemasonry correctly identifies these "recommended readings" as "undeniably pagan and/or occultic."¹⁴
Fourth Incompatibility: The reference to the Bible placed on the altar of the lodge as the "furniture of the lodge," comparing it to the square and compass rather than giving it the supreme place in the lodge.
Biblical Response: Albert Pike identified the Bible as part of the furniture of the lodge in his book Morals And Dogma Of The Ancient And Accepted Scottish Rite Of Freemasonry. He wrote:
The Holy Bible, Square, and Compasses, are not only styled the Great Lights in Masonry, but they are also technically called the Furniture of the Lodge; and, as you have seen, it is held that there is no Lodge without them. This has sometimes been made a pretext for excluding Jews from our Lodges, because they cannot regard the New Testament as a holy book. The Bible is an indispensable part of the furniture of a Christian Lodge, only because it is the sacred book of the Christian religion. The Hebrew Pentateuch in a Hebrew Lodge, and the Koran in a Mohammedan one, belong on the Altar; and one of these, and the Square and Compass, properly understood, are the Great Lights by which a Mason must walk and work.¹⁵
Freemasonry has no commitment to the Bible as the unique Word of God. It happily substitutes non-Christian scriptures when Christians are not the majority of a lodge.
Fifth Incompatibility: The prevalent use of the term "light," which some may understand as a reference to salvation rather than knowledge or truth.
Biblical Response: In commenting on the Christian interpretation of the Blue degrees in Freemasonry, Pike wrote:
Notwithstanding the death of the Redeemer, man can be saved only by faith, repentance, and reformation.
Having repented and reformed, and bound himself to the service of God by a firm promise and obligation, the light of Christian hope shines down into the darkness of the heart of the humble penitent, and blazes upon his pathway to Heaven. And this is symbolized by the candidate's being brought to light, after he is obligated, by the Worshipful Master, who in that is a symbol of the Redeemer, and so brings him the light, with the help of the brethren, as He taught the Word with the aid of the Apostles.¹⁶
In the above quote, the concepts of light and salvation are closely related. This quote also reveals that many Masonic writers include reformation (good works) as one of the requirements for salvation. However, the Bible clearly states that good works are not a requirement for salvation. ¹⁷
Sixth Incompatibility: The implication that salvation may be attained by one's good works, implicit in the statement found in some Masonic writings that "Masonry is continually reminded of that purity of life and conduct which is necessary to obtain admittance into the Celestial Lodge above where the Supreme Architect of the Universe presides." Even though many Masons understand that the "purity of life and conduct" can only be achieved through faith in Jesus Christ, others may be led to believe they can earn salvation by living a pure life with good conduct.
Biblical Response: According to Pike, the 25th degree ". . . teaches the necessity of reformation as well as repentance, as a means of obtaining mercy and forgiveness, . . ."18 In his commentary on the 27th degree, Hutchens wrote: "Constans refuses the monk's arguments, trusting in a God of love who will recognize his honor and service to others as a noble path of salvation."19 Likewise, in concerning the 31st degree, Hutchens stated: "The candidate is brought into the Court of the Dead to be judged for actions while living and to determine if he deserves to dwell among the gods. His escort is Horus. Isis, Horus' mother, speaks first, inquiring whose ka has come to be judged."²⁰
The teaching that meritorious deeds can make one acceptable to God is common in many false religions. The Bible, however, warns that there is no deed that can make a sinner acceptable to God. Only the grace of God that comes through faith in Jesus Christ can save those under the judgment of sin. The addition of works to faith as a requirement of salvation is contrary to the teaching of the Bible. The following Scriptures illustrate this: Romans 3:28:"For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law." Romans 4:4-5:"Now when a man works, his wages are not credited to him as a gift, but as an obligation. However, to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness." Romans 11:6:"And if by grace, then it is no longer by works; if it were, grace would no longer be grace." Ephesians 2:8-9:"For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith-and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God-not by works, so that no one can boast." Titus 3:5:"He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit."
Seventh Incompatibility: The heresy of universalism (the belief all people will eventually be saved), which permeates the writings of many Masonic authors, which is a doctrine inconsistent with New Testament teaching.
Biblical Response: Many Masonic writings can be interpreted as endorsing universalism. Pike wrote, "It is the fine dream of the greatest of the Poets, that Hell, become useless, is to be closed at length, by the aggrandizement of Heaven; that the problem of Evil is to receive its final solution, and Good alone, necessary and triumphant, is to reign in Eternity."²¹
Even more prominent in Freemasonry is the false teaching of inclusivism, the belief that followers of non-Christian religions will also be saved. Freemasonry holds out the promise of salvation to all worthy Masons regardless of the deity they worship. The Muslim or Hindu member of the lodge is on the same spiritual level as the believer in Jesus Christ. According to Hutchens, "Masonry is tolerant, even supportive, of the most diverse religious beliefs."²²
Pike likewise argued that no religion can claim to have exclusivity to the truth, nor can any religion claim to be superior to another.
Toleration, holding that every other man has the same right to his opinion and faith that we have to ours; liberality, holding that as no human being can with certainty say, in the clash and conflict of hostile faiths and creeds, what is truth, or that he is surely in possession of it, so every one should feel that it is quite possible that another equally honest and sincere with himself, and yet holding the contrary opinion, may himself be in possession of the truth, and that whatever one firmly and conscientiously believes, is truth, to him."²³
Inclusivism denies the teaching of the New Testament that only those who place their faith in Jesus Christ will be saved. The following passages teach this biblical truth: John 3:36:"Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God's wrath remains on him." John 14:6: "Jesus answered, 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.'" Acts 4:12:"Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved." First Corinthians 3:11:"For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ." First Timothy 2:5:"For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." First John 5:12:"He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life."
Eighth Incompatibility: The refusal of most lodges (although not all) to admit for membership African-Americans.
Biblical Response: The Bible teaches that all men and women are created in the image of God. Genesis 1:27 says, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." According to Genesis 9-11, all the races of humanity scattered throughout the world are made in the image of God. For example, Genesis 9:6 states, "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man." The context (Genesis 10- 11) reveals that this prohibition applies to all of the races of humanity scattered throughout the world.
The New Testament reveals that Jesus rejected the racism of His day. John 4:9 indicates that Jesus discarded the racial prejudices of the Jews towards the Samaritans. "The Samaritan woman said to him, 'You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?' (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)"The apostle Peter, who struggled with the sin of racism throughout his life, stated in Acts 10:28,"You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him. But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean." Racism should be rejected wherever it is found, whether it is discovered in the lodge or in the church.
Summary Statement on Freemasonry
There are eight major concerns that the Southern Baptist Convention has expressed about the teachings and practices of Freemasonry. These are:
(1) Freemasonry uses offensive, non-biblical, and blasphemous terms relating to God.
(2) Freemasonry insists on the use of "bloody oaths" or obligations, which are strictly forbidden by the Bible (cf. Matt. 5:34-37).
(3) Freemasonry urges that occultic and/or pagan readings be used, and that their teachings be appropriated in interpreting such concepts as the Trinity.
(4) Freemasonry includes the Bible as part of the "furniture of the lodge," but only as an equal with non-Christian symbols and writings.
(5) Freemasonry misuses the term "light" to refer to moral "reformation" as a means to salvation.
(6) Freemasonry teaches that salvation may be attained by "good works" and not through faith in Christ alone.
(7) Freemasonry advocates in many of its writings the non-biblical teachings of universalism.
(8) In some of its lodges, Freemasonry discriminates against nonwhites.
While it is clear that some Christians, moral persons, and outstanding government leaders have been and are members of the Freemasonic movement, several points of the lodge's teachings are non-biblical and non-Christian. And, while Freemasonry encourages and supports charitable activities, it contains both multireligious and inclusivistic teachings that are not Christian in its religious instruction.
Taking the above into consideration, and being consistent with our denomination's historic deep conviction regarding both the priesthood of the believer and the autonomy of the local church, we recommend that each individual Baptist, as well as each congregation, carefully review the issues of the teachings and practices of Freemasonry. Since, in the final analysis, the Bible alone is the only guide for faith and practice, issues related to Freemasonry and any other fraternal organization, especially secret societies, must be evaluated only in light of the plumb line of Scripture. The divinity and lordship of Christ, the substitutionary atonement of Christ, and salvation by grace through faith are foundational and nonnegotiable doctrines and the teachings of any organization or society in contradiction to such biblical tenets must be evaluated accordingly. It is, therefore, the duty of every Christian to resist and avoid false teachings to speak the truth in love and to embrace only those doctrines which are revealed in the inerrant Scripture, the Bible (see Matt. 7:24-27; John 7-10; 1 Cor. 10:14; Jude 3).
All Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission.
Notes
¹ Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1993 (Nashville: Executive Committee, Southern Baptist Convention, 1993), p. 224.
² Ibid., p. 225.
³ Ibid., pp. 225-227 lists the following eight tenets of incompatibility.
⁴ This word has several alternative spellings.
⁵ Albert Pike, The Book of the Words (Kila, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing Co., n. d.), p. 151.While some Masons may disagree with Pike's explanation of the secret name for God they cannot deny the tremendous influence of Pike upon Freemasonry in the United States. A reading of A Bridge To Light (an official publication of the Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction) reveals that many modern Masonic leaders also confuse the God of the Bible with pagan deities. See A Bridge To Light, pp. 31, 120, 139.
⁶ The use of the word LORD with all capital letters indicates that the personal name of the God of Israel is used in the Hebrew text..0
⁷ Rex R. Hutchens, A Bridge To Light (Washington, D.C.: The Supreme Council, 1988), p. 299-302.
⁸ See Hebrews 4:15.
⁹ Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1993, p. 226.
¹⁰ Hutchens, A Bridge To Light, pp. 112-113.
¹¹ Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: L.H. Jenkins, Inc., 1942), p. 575.
¹² Hutchens, A Bridge To Light, p. 300.
¹³ Pike, Morals and Dogma, p. 744.
¹⁴ Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1993, p. 226.
¹⁵ Pike, Morals and Dogma, p. 11.
¹⁶ Ibid., p. 639, emphasis added.
¹⁷ See Romans 3:28; 4:4-5; 11:6; Ephesians 2:8-9;Titus 3:5.Also see the discussion in the biblical response concerning the sixth incompatibility.
¹⁸ Pike, Morals and Dogma, p. 435.
¹⁹ Hutchens, A Bridge To Light, p. 243.
²⁰ Ibid., pp. 300-01.
²¹ Pike, Morals and Dogma, p. 847.
²² Hutchens, A Bridge To Light, p. 67.
²³ Pike, Morals and Dogma, p. 160.