This week, the National Marriage Project is releasing a study charting the decline of the two-parent family among what it calls the \u201cmoderately educated middle\u201d\u009d \u201d\u201d the 58 percent of Americans with high school diplomas and often some college education, but no four-year degree.<\/p>\n
This decline is depressing, but it isn\u2019t surprising. We\u2019ve known for a while that America has a marriage gap: college graduates divorce infrequently and bear few children out of wedlock, while in the rest of the country unwed parenthood and family breakdown are becoming a new normal. This gap has been one of the paradoxes of the culture war: highly educated Americans live like Ozzie and Harriet despite being cultural liberals, while middle America hews to traditional values but has trouble living up to them.<\/p>\n
But the Marriage Project\u2019s data suggest that this paradox is fading. It\u2019s no longer clear that middle America does hold more conservative views on marriage and family, or that educated Americans are still more likely to be secular and socially liberal.<\/p>\n