American families and the great divide

It is scarier than we imagine! The breakdown of families is creating a whole new underclass in America — almost a third of our population that doesn’t attend church; doesn’t get married or make real family commitments; doesn’t finish high school or attend college; doesn’t work full time; doesn’t eat right or exercise and thus is seriously overweight; and essentially doesn’t believe in the ideals that this country was founded on.

America is more divided right now than it has been at any time in its history since the Civil War.

And the main divider is not race, gender or sexual preferences, or the tea party or the Occupy movement or even basic economics and income. (Each of these is divisive, but none of them is the main divider.)

The great divider is a complicated malaise that can best be defined as the breakdown of families.

In his new book “Coming Apart,” Charles Murray compares two “tribes” of white Americans, age 30 to 49. (He stays with whites in his comparison, because he wants to focus on factors other than race.) People in the top tribe (about 20 percent of the population) have at least a bachelor’s degree and work in higher-paying professional or white-collar jobs. People in the bottom tribe (roughly 30 percent) have no more than a high school diploma and work in blue-collar or low-skilled jobs.

In the top tribe, about 85 percent are married; in the bottom tribe, 48 percent. In the top tribe, 40 percent don’t go to church or profess any religion; in the bottom tribe, the figure is 60 percent. In the top tribe, 12 percent are either unemployed or work only part time; in the bottom tribe it is more than 20 percent. In the top tribe, 6 percent of kids are born out of wedlock; in the bottom tribe, 44 percent.

The trends over the past 50 years are even more worrisome than the numbers themselves. Crime rate in the top tribe has stayed flat since the 1960s while it has sextupled in the bottom tribe. Unemployment has gone up 3 percent in the upper tribe since the ’60s while it has doubled in the bottom tribe. Secularism (no religion) has gone up twice as much in the bottom tribe than in the top. Non-marital birth has doubled in the top tribe but gone up by 700 percent in the bottom tribe.

The great divide, in other words, is getting wider.