(The following is the first half of the introduction to my book, The Triple Path; you can download a current PDF draft of the whole book at TriplePath.org/download, part two of this post is here)

The West is increasingly giving up on religion. This is a problem.

The United States remains the most religious of the developed countries1, and even here the percentage of the adult population claiming no religious affiliation has increased significantly—from 3 percent in 1957, to 8.2 percent in 1990, to 26 percent in 2019. The percentage of Americans self-identifying as Christian declined from 77 to 65 percent between 2009 and 2019. “No affiliation” is now the largest single religious group in America. Only 25 percent of Americans attend church regularly.2 Even those who claim affiliation with a particular religion are giving up on many of their religion’s teachings. A survey of self-identified Catholics found that only 31 percent believed in the core Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation (that the bread and wine at Mass actually become the body and blood of Christ).3

The percentage of Americans who report having grown up with a father who was religiously active decreased from 70 percent for those born before 1900 to 45 percent for those born after 1970. According to one scholar, “every indicator of traditional religiosity is either stable or declining, and there isn’t enough new nontraditional religious practice to balance the decline”.4 Secularization is happening even faster in Europe.5

Religion is part of human nature—it is found in all cultures worldwide6, and appears to have been a constant part of human behavior going back at least many tens of thousands of years. There are different explanations for how religion and our tendency for religious behavior developed: it may have directly evolved through natural selection; it may have come about as a cultural byproduct of mental modules (such as agency detection) that developed for other reasons. It most likely developed through a combination of both factors, with religion initially developing as a cultural byproduct of non-religious mental modules, but with innate, biological religious tendencies then developing and strengthening through gene-culture co-evolution. Regardless of how it developed, religiosity is a part of being human, and it is precious.

Over tens of thousands of years, human cultures have accumulated and passed on to future generations much knowledge about morality and right living—about how to create and maintain good relationships and build successful communities, and about what a good life is and how to live it. The principles of morality and traditions that we have developed within the context of religion have enabled us to live in ever more complex and prosperous societies.7 Over the last 10,000 years, humans moved from living in simple hunter-gatherer tribes to agricultural societies of increasing complexity and size. The large and complex societies of the last few thousand years could not function without moral principles that were developed, honed, and promoted over the generations by religions—principles such as charity, empathy, honesty, industriousness, sexual restraint, and respect for life and personal property. As more people have more fully lived these moral principles, their lives have significantly improved.

Beyond just giving us moral principles, religion guides us on the path to meaning and illumination, supporting our search for answers to deep life questions and encouraging our individual personal development. It helps us to make parts of our lives sacred and to feel like we are part of something bigger than ourselves in a way that is psychologically nourishing and revitalizing. It helps us draw closer to a higher power and feel serenity, peace, transcendence, elevation, awe, and gratitude.

Religion also gives us outlets for exercising moral goodness towards others, and thus encourages stable, thriving communities. It gives us rites and ceremonies to provide meaning and mark major life events. It provides us with a sense of fellowship and unity with others. It encourages group cohesiveness and provides a social outlet for people to interact, become acquainted, learn from each other, and support one another in their lives and beliefs. And, it provides a public signaling mechanism about our (and others’) devotion and trustworthiness.

Most importantly, religion demands that we live better and become greater than we were, calling to us in unique ways that are often more compelling than anything else to lead us to lasting change and improvement.

Almost every adaptive human trait—from altruism to anger—can become unbalanced, turn maladaptive, and lead to negative outcomes. Religion is no different. At least in Western society, however, there is hard evidence that religion is a net benefit. Scholars have found, over and over, that religiosity and belief in God are positively related to better physical and mental health, greater life satisfaction, longer lifespan, and prosocial behavior. The research strongly indicates that religiosity actually causes these effects. The weight of the evidence is astounding. If you have any doubt, please turn right now to the next chapter, on page 29, for a longer discussion (including many references to academic journals).

For psychologically healthy and normal human beings, it is difficult for us to escape religiosity, no matter what church we do or do not go to. Whenever a group of people coalesces around strongly held beliefs or ideas, their religious natures usually emerge, whether it be around Christianity, atheism, environmentalism, or politics.

Even those who formally reject organized religion or belief in God rarely escape their fundamental religious nature—they are still human beings, after all. Like most human traits, each person’s innate religious tendencies probably vary along a bell curve. Just as some people are naturally angrier or happier than others, some are more religious than others. The distribution of a natural trait can change in a population over time, but a trend happening as swiftly as secularization in the West is most likely due to principally cultural forces. This is because there have not been enough generations for natural selection to have had much effect (and, if anything, is selecting in the long-term for greater innate religiosity, since religiosity is a heritable trait8 and religious people in the West have higher fertility levels than the nonreligious). Most people who claim no religious affiliation are thus likely doing so because of cultural trends and not because of an innate lack of a religious nature.

One might argue that the growing numbers of people claiming no formal religious affiliation are doing so because they have a naturally diminished religious sense and are now giving up on religion because there are fewer cultural constraints against doing so. This is unlikely, however, because most of those who forsake formal religious affiliation continue to manifest an innate religious nature in other ways. Even atheist philosopher John Gray has noted that “secular thought is mostly composed of repressed religion”.9

Indeed, it is easy to see innate human religious tendencies manifest themselves among the ostensibly non-religious. The new secularists often end up, usually unconsciously, dedicating their natural religiosity to things that scratch their religious itch, but which do not bring as many of the benefits of traditional religion. They are like someone trying to fulfill his body’s craving for the wholesome nutrition of fresh, ripe fruit by eating a bag of candy. They devote themselves to things outside the realm of organized religion, but that are still just as strongly religious, albeit distorted and twisted: new kinds of superstitions and strange new modern secular orthodoxies lacking a basis in reality or tradition, and often with unanticipated harmful effects. For example, many modern secularists have transplanted Calvinist notions of original sin and predestination, and superstitious notions of witchcraft and black magic, into their conceptions of race, ethnicity, and gender relations; many have transformed their inclination toward zeal for religious orthodoxy into campaigns to universally impose their ideology by destroying the professional and social life of anyone who does not agree with them.

Even though we have innate behaviors and mental attri­butes that appear to be hardwired into us, these natural, innate tendencies manifest within the context of the culture around us. For example, language is an innate human characteristic, but the specific language each person speaks is determined by the surrounding culture. When our culture fails to provide a viable option through which we can manifest our natural behaviors, we invent something.

For example, in Nicaragua in the 1980s, deaf children were brought together for the first time to attend a vocational school for the deaf. Teachers did not teach any kind of sign language, instead they tried (unsuccessfully) to teach Spanish and lipreading. The children, though, on their own, created their own sign language so they could communicate with each other. This sign language developed over time into a sophisticated and complete language.

Similarly, when families from different cultures migrate to the same place, the adults usually create a pidgin, which is a simplified language that combines elements of the native languages of the people who created it. Pidgins allow for basic communication, but are not full languages. The children in such communities, though, usually take their parents’ pidgin and turn it into a grammatically and lexically complete language. This new language is called a creole, and normally becomes the native language of the children and their descendants.

Left unchecked, the emerging religious orthodoxies and practices of the new secularists would likely develop into a full religion, just like sign language in Nicaragua and creoles developed into new, complete languages. Creoles can develop so quickly because they borrow heavily from the languages of the groups that came together to create it. Similarly, speakers of Nicaraguan Sign Language borrow from outside sources, such as American Sign Language, to fill in gaps.

The secularists, however, seem eager to ignore and forget as much as they can of the rich religious and cultural heritage bequeathed to us by our ancestors. If the new religion they are slowly creating does not collapse, it will survive only at the cost of many years (and likely generations) of painful adjustment as they struggle to come up with new solutions to problems our ancestors already solved long ago.10

After the Roman Empire fell, so much knowledge was lost in fields like science, engineering, and art that it literally took centuries to re-develop or re-discover it all. The secularists’ rejection of religion and tradition runs the risk of plunging us into an equivalent religious dark age that could take centuries to climb out of.

On the other hand, those who have given up on the old, established religions have a point. The major world religions are pre-modern creations with a lot of baggage that is difficult to accept in light of modern scientific understandings of the world (not to mention the textual, historical, and archeological issues that cast great doubt on the traditional religions’ literal truthfulness). This is one of the main reasons why religious affiliation and participation is decreasing so significantly in the West.

This book is addressed to those who have lost their faith in traditional religion. I am one of you. If you are like me, you feel like you have lost something valuable that used to bring value and meaning to your life. But what do we replace it with? The replacement nonbelievers most often seem to turn to is some form of nihilism or social justice grievance fanaticism, or often both. These are a poor substitute for the grandeur and hope and love and meaning and connection we get out of religion.

This book offers a new religion that stays as faithful as possible to the wisdom and traditions of the past while still embracing our modern historical and scientific understanding of the world. It offers a better substitute for the empty nihilism and totalitarian grievance activism that seem to be growing as replacements for traditional religion. If you do not have faith in the old religions: please continue on and see if you do find something worth pursuing.

This book is not an attempt to convince adherents of the old religions about the error of their ways. There are no detailed, polemical attacks on specific religious beliefs—you can find that in plenty of other places. To the faithful of other religions, I invite you also to read on and see if you see something better and more valuable than what you have right now.

So why can’t we just rely on the religions we have already? The great teachings of the world religions are intertwined with superstitious pre-modern cosmologies (cosmology means our understanding of the universe and humanity’s place in it). They are also mixed with legendary retellings of history that we now know are, at best, of dubious veracity, and at worst, outright fabrications. These ancient cosmologies and histories have ever-decreasing relevance as they are contradicted more and more by modern scientific, historical, and archeological discoveries.

For example, when the great religions of the world were founded, many of those religions’ adherents believed that the world was flat and that it was at the center of the universe. The most common cosmology found in the Bible presupposes the Earth is a flat disc floating in water or supported by pillars.11 Other biblical writers say that the Earth is immovable or that the Earth sits at the center of the universe and that everything else, including the Sun, revolves around the Earth.12 For biblical writers, hell was a literal place below the ground and heaven was a literal place just above the Earth (in different places in the Bible the reason the sky is blue is either because we are seeing a heavenly ocean suspended above the sky, or because the sky is the sapphire floor of heaven).13

Many of these types of Bible passages are now interpreted metaphorically, but there is little reason to believe their writers intended them to be interpreted that way—they almost certainly believed them to be literally true.

It is not hard to notice as you read the Bible that the farther back in time a story was supposed to happen (and thus the more likely the passage was written long after the alleged events happened), the more the stories read like mythology instead of history. It is hard to take literally stories about talking serpents and donkeys or a man emerging unharmed three days after being swallowed by a giant fish; or tales of holy men calling fire from the sky, summoning a bear to kill youths who had mocked his baldness, parting a sea, or stopping the progression of the sun through the sky.14

The easier it has become to gather evidence about miracles and supernatural events, the more that claims for their occurrence have decreased. As it has become easier to definitively contradict such claims, they are more rarely made, and even more rarely taken seriously. We have a good grasp of many of the basic laws that seem to govern the operation of the physical universe, and there are no confirmed accounts of any miracles that violate them. There could be a variety of explanations for this, but the most parsimonious is that ancient accounts of such events were not factually correct.

Look at it this way: there are a number of legendary and mythological accounts from dead religions of the ancient world that, if true, would seem to confirm the veracity of those extinct religions and beliefs. No one today believes these accounts to be true. Doesn’t it make sense that the legendary and supernatural accounts in the Bible and the holy books of other surviving religions would be similarly inaccurate?

Because the foundations of the world’s great religions are built on legendary and mythological foundations that have become implausibly difficult to accept, these religions are declining as they are forced to confront modernity.

If Western Civilization needs traditional religion to survive, but traditional religion cannot thrive in the modern world and thus cannot fulfill its important historical role, what are we to do? How should we react when we are confronted with modernity-induced religious doubts?

Let us consider four possible responses: 1) the literal approach; 2) the symbolic approach; 3) the rejection approach; and 4) the Triple Path.

The Literal Approach

If history and modern cosmology contradict sacred texts, one approach is to reject history and modern cosmology. This is hard to justify, though, based on a dispassionate weighing of the evidence. Even so, religious believers who take a literal approach sometimes justify this approach by appealing to authority and arguing that their scriptures (or the pronouncements of their religion’s holy men) contain the word of God and are thus the ultimate authority, trumping the pronouncements of fallible humans.

There are several problems with this approach to relying on authority.

Believing in the divine authority of teachers or texts mere­ly because they claim divine authority is circular: we have no reason to believe in their claims to divine authority unless we already accept their teachings—merely claiming authority offers no external reason to believe in that authority.

Believing in a leader’s or a text’s divine authority because of our subjective emotional responses to them is almost equally questionable. Spiritual feelings are subjective. Adherents of wildly different religions—religions with contradictory and mutually exclusive teachings—describe the same sorts of spiritual feelings confirming their belief in these religions. For a much more in-depth discussion of this phenomenon, and a more general discussion on how we can find truth, see the third chapter, on page 45.

Some followers may instead place their trust in stories about a teacher’s or a leader’s miraculous or supernatural abilities. These stories, if true, possibly could provide some indication of divine authority, but they invariably end up failing objective verification; they are nearly always told second- or third-hand, or the “miraculous” occurrence ends up being explained by charlatanism; they do not stand up to rigorous scrutiny.

Things like feelings, stories of dubious veracity, or a religious text’s or leader’s own claim to authority are not enough to validate the claims about religious texts’ or teachers’ authority, especially when some of their claims are directly contradicted by historical or archeological evidence, or by our modern scientific observations of the world.

Furthermore, it is a logical fallacy to believe in a statement’s truth merely because it was uttered by an “authority”. The statements of authorities should be able to stand up to criticism and independent verification. We discuss this fallacy more on pages 53 to 55.

If an authority’s statements are true, they should be consistent with our knowledge of reality. The problem is that questions involving religion and the supernatural are hard to verify. We have no independent means of determining which claims about God are correct, absent a personal direct visitation from God Himself. And even then, without physical evidence or some other corroboration of the visitation, there would be a host of alternative explanations (such as hallucinations or mental illness) for any such visitation that would have to be ruled out first. And as I said, most such claims that can be evaluated fail to stand up to scrutiny.

The Rejection Approach

The rejection approach is to conclude that if verifiable religious claims are often contradicted by scientific discoveries, then perhaps there is not much reason to believe in any religious teaching or ideal—if the verifiable claims are untrue, then the unverifiable claims and teachings probably are not true or worth following either. A rejectionist might conclude that, if the ancients were wrong about their cosmological claims, we should therefore reject (or be skeptical of) all traditional religious morals and injunctions, unless we can immediately find a good reason to keep them. The general presumption of rejectionists is “guilty until proven innocent”—all aspects of religion are valueless until proven otherwise.

This is the approach most atheists seem to take.

The problem with this approach is that it ignores our own shortsightedness. Often, it is hard to understand the reason for a traditional rule or taboo until long after the fact. For example, during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, it was assumed there was little justification for traditional sexual norms and that they should be abandoned. It turns out, though, that those traditional sexual norms encourage behaviors that are associated with stable family structures, and thus better outcomes for children in our society (and eventually for the future of society itself).

For example, research shows that couples who don’t live together before marriage and in which the woman was a virgin on her wedding night have much lower risk of divorce.15 And divorce is associated with a host of poor outcomes for children.16 Some comparative anthropological research suggests that widespread cultural acceptance of norms of strict chastity before marriage and absolute monogamy afterwards leads to positive societal outcomes as well.17

One lifetime is too short a time to figure everything out. That is why we have culture and tradition. Wisdom about how to live slowly accumulates over huge spans of time, and get passed down as tradition. Rejecting all of it, or large parts of it, is an unwise course. It is far safer only to reject the hard-earned wisdom of the past when it has been clearly and indisputably proved wrong.18

Moreover, religion provides important structure and discipline on which to build your life and character. It is difficult to get this structure and discipline in any other way. As Professor Jordan Peterson wrote:

Religion is . . . about proper behaviour. It’s about what Plato called “the Good.” A genuine religious acolyte isn’t trying to formulate accurate ideas about the objective nature of the world (although he may be trying to do that too). He’s striving, instead, to be a “good person.” It may be the case that to him “good” means nothing but “obedient”—even blindly obedient. Hence the classic liberal Western enlightenment objection to religious belief: obedience is not enough. But it’s at least a start (and we have forgotten this): You cannot aim yourself at anything if you are completely undisciplined and untutored. You will not know what to target, and you won’t fly straight, even if you somehow get your aim right. And then you will conclude, “There is nothing to aim for.” And then you will be lost.

It is therefore necessary and desirable for religions to have a dogmatic element. What good is a value system that does not provide a stable structure? What good is a value system that does not point the way to a higher order? And what good can you possibly be if you cannot or do not internalize that structure, or accept that order—not as a final destination, necessarily, but at least as a starting point? Without that, you’re nothing but an adult two-year-old, without the charm or the potential. That is not to say (to say it again) that obedience is sufficient. But a person capable of obedience—let’s say, instead, a properly disciplined person—is at least a well-forged tool. At least that (and that is not nothing). Of course, there must be vision, beyond discipline; beyond dogma. A tool still needs a purpose. It is for such reasons that Christ said, in the Gospel of Thomas, “The Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, but men do not see it.”19

The Symbolic Approach

The symbolic approach is to look at cosmological religious teachings as being symbolic. It focuses on myth, symbolism, and allegory as powerful tools for teaching and helping us to feel moral truths.

The conservative variety of this approach is to reject only the parts of a religion’s teachings that are indefensible, but to retain everything else and hold fast to the old religion. You reinterpret as symbolic teachings about cosmology that have been contradicted by modern science, but you continue believing in the teachings that have not yet been challenged by science. You create space for belief out of the gaps that science has not, or cannot, address. For example, you might discount the idea of a creation in six days, but continue believing that God created the Earth using natural processes over millions of years. If heaven is not directly above the Earth, it is somewhere else, or on another plane of existence.

This conservative approach of discarding the bare minimum is far preferable to the rejection approach. The problem with it, though, is that as scientific and historical knowledge continues to contradict more and more of traditional religion, its foundations continue to weaken, because those foundations were built on an ever-growing corpus of disproved cosmologies and historical claims.

The liberal variety of this approach is to reject or ignore any teaching that seems out-of-date or out-of-harmony with the spirit of the times. You reinterpret as symbolic anything you want. The problem with being this liberal is that religious belief becomes volatile and ever-changing. Groups made up of individuals who apply a liberal approach often lack internal consistency and have little to unite them.

Some people adopt a symbolic approach privately, while maintaining membership in a religion that asserts cosmologically suspect teachings as true. There are cultural and social reasons to do this. For example, if you live in a society or within a group dominated by a certain religion, you may have no practical choice but to remain affiliated and try to make the best of what you have. This is not a wise or sustainable solution, however. It is morally degrading to live such a double spiritual life, and is difficult to do so without being dishonest. Furthermore, continuing participation in such religions provides institutional strength to them, which helps them perpetuate false beliefs.

The liberal variety of this approach often means joining a liberal religion that endorses the symbolic approach—whether officially or de facto—by rejecting the literal truth of the cosmologically suspect teachings of its foundational spiritual beliefs and texts. In theory, this might sound like a promising way forward, but in practice it has proved to be a dead end. Churches generally adopt this approach while still relying on their previous forms of worship and holy texts. Doing this requires a great deal of organizational dishonesty—maintaining an overt devotion to many aspects of the religion that are based on things the religion has also already partially or completely rejected. Such dishonesty is poison to the moral character of an organization or person.

Applying a “by their fruits you will know them” test shows that the churches that have adopted the liberal symbolic approach are generally failures. Such churches usually do not stop only at rejecting old, false cosmologies, but continue on to also jettison many valuable, foundational moral teachings. They give up not only on the discredited parts of their beliefs, but on tried and true traditions too—often to the point of almost becoming outright rejectionist. This illustrates the greatest problem with the liberal variety of the symbolic approach: it rejects too much. Ever-declining attendance at such churches is a concrete manifestation of the morally bankrupt, dead husk most of them have become.

By itself, a middle-of-the-road symbolic approach is an important tool for getting the most out of religion. The accumulated mythological and legendary stories that have been passed down to us over generations and through the centuries have survived so long for a reason. They are powerful stories illustrating profound moral and psychological truths, and the symbolic approach is the best way to approach them. Psychology professor Jordan Peterson has been producing a marvelous lecture series discussing the psychological significance and symbolic meaning of major bible stories.20 These lectures are well worth studying, and are a great example of how the symbolic approach can point us toward wisdom and add rich meaning to our lives.

But the way things are now, applying the symbolic approach to traditional religion is like treating skin cancer with sun block.

Most cosmologically suspect religious teachings were originally put forth as being literally true, even if they also were originally intended to have, or were later re-written to have, multiple, symbolic meanings. (Of course, there are some exceptions: Jesus’s parables are profound and full of meaning, but were not taught as being literally true.)

The legendary and mythological stories of the Bible, and the pre-modern assumption that they were true, formed the traditional foundation of religion in the West. Symbolically reinterpreting them—whether in a conservative or liberal way—cannot avoid the irreparable damage the foundations have already suffered from scientific and historical discoveries indicating that most of them are not factually true.

If churches that accept as true the false cosmologies and history inherent in these stories are facing long-term decline, and if the churches that have rejected the false cosmologies and history have fared even worse, then maybe we need another solution.

We need new, strong religious foundations that do not rely on those stories’ truthfulness. Then, we can continue to draw meaning and learn important lessons from them (and all the other parts of traditional religion) without them undermining the foundations of our civilization.

Part 2 of this post tomorrow will explain my solution to the problem: a new religion called The Triple Path, come back tomorrow to read it here, or go to TriplePath.org/download to download a PDF of the latest draft of the book to read the rest right now.

Footnotes

1. Pew Research Center, “Among Wealthy Nations . . . U.S. Stands Alone In Its Embrace of Religion”, December 19, 2002.

2. Pew Research Center, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape”, May 12, 2015; Pew Research Center, “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace”, October 17, 2019; Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS 2008) Summary Report, March 2009, p. 5; Mark Chaves, “The Decline of American Religion?”, The Association of Religion Data Archives Guiding Paper Series, pp. 1-2; Daniel Cox Robert P. Jones, “America’s Changing Religious Identity”, Public Religion Research Institute, September 6, 2017.

3. Gregory A. Smith, “Just one-third of U.S. Catholics agree with their church that Eucharist is body, blood of Christ”, Pew Research Center, August 5, 2019.

4. Mark Chaves (see footnote 2), pp. 1, 3.

5. Stephen Bullivant, Europe’s Young Adults and Religion, Institut Catholique de Paris and The Benedict XVI Centre, Saint Mary’s University, Twickenham, London.

6. Donald Brown, Human Universals, 1991.

7. Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety, 2016, pp. 208-10.

8. Laura B. Koenig, et. al., “Genetic and Environmental Influences on Religiousness: Findings for Retrospective and Current Religiousness Ratings”, Journal of Personality, Feb. 16, 2005.

9. John Gray, Seven Types of Atheism, 2018.

10. For example, it has been nearly three generations since the start of the so-called sexual revolution. Secularists are still struggling to come up with rules and norms to govern the most basic aspects of sexual encounters, such as consent, whereas centuries of tradition had already come up with a solution that worked very well: sexual restraint outside of marriage, and fidelity within it. And the secularists have done almost nothing to solve the bigger problems caused by the sexual revolution, such as the unstable home environments it forces upon many children (a problem that has so far been getting worse over time).

11. Adele Berlin, “Cosmology and creation”, in Adele Berlin and Maxine Grossman (eds.), The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, 2011, pp. 188-89; Othmar Keel, The Symbolism of the Biblical World, 1997, pp. 20-21; 1 Samuel 2:8; Job 9:6.

12. Joshua 10:12-13; Psalm 93:1, 96:10; Psalm 104:5.

13. J. Edward Wright, The Early History of Heaven, 2002, pp. 54-57; The Hebrew word for hell was also used to figuratively refer to death, but was also used in the Old Testament to refer to a physical place, Alan E. Bernstein, The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds, 1993, pp. 140-42; Exodus 24:9-10 speaks of the sapphire floor of heaven—God’s throne was also described as being made of sapphire in Ezekiel 1:26.

14. See Genesis 2; Numbers 22; Jonah 1-4; 1 Kings 18; 2 Kings 2; Exodus 14; and Joshua 10.

15. Anthony Paik, “Adolescent Sexuality and the Risk of Marital Dissolution”, Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 73, No. 2, April 2011, pp. 472-485; Casey E. Copen, et. al., “First Marriages in the United States: Data From the 2006-2010 National Survey of Family Growth”, National Health Statistics Reports, No. 49, March 22, 2012; Scott M. Stanley and Galena K. Rhoades, “The Timing of Cohabitation and Engagement: Impact on First and Second Marriages”, Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 72, No. 4, August 2010, pp. 906-918; Galena K. Rhoades, et. al., “The pre-engagement cohabitation effect: a replication and extension of previous findings”, Journal of Family Psychology. Vol. 23, No. 1, February 2009, pp. 107-11; see also David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Togeth­er? What Young Adults Need to Know about Cohabitation before Marriage, A Comprehensive Review of Recent Research”, The National Marriage Project: The Next Generation Series.

16. Thomas G. O’Connor, et. al., “Are Associations Between Parental Divorce and Children’s Adjustment Genetically Mediated? An Adoption Study”, Developmental Psychology, Vol. 36, No. 4, July 2000, pp. 429-37; Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, 2012, Chapters 8 and 15; Brian M. D’Onofrio, et. al., “A children of twins study of parental divorce and offspring psycho­pathology”, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Vol. 48, No. 7, 2007, pp. 667-675.

17. Joseph Daniel Unwin, Sex and Culture, 1936, Oxford University Press.

18. For more about the value and importance of tradition, see pages 59-65, 77-86, and 95-102.

19. Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, 2018, pp. 133-35.

20. See https://jordanbpeterson.com/bible-series/.