Single Motherhood in America: How We Got Here

This post is part of a series entitled, “A Comprehensive Church-Based Ministry to Single Moms.”

The rise of single mom households didn’t happen by accident

People act the way they think. So when tens of millions of people radically change the way they marry, have sex, and raise their children, as happened in twentieth century America, we need to ask what changed in their thinking about marriage, sex and child rearing and why.

For example, in 1890, the first year for which these U. S. census figures are available, the number of divorced white women for every 1,000 married white women was 6.

That’s right, just six divorced white women for every one thousand married white women.

For every 1,000 married black women, there were just 9 divorced black women. While that figure is 45% higher than for white women, it is still very low.

Before 1900, both white and black American marriages were stable

In other words, prior to the beginning of the twentieth century, both white and black marriages were extremely stable.¹

Fast forward one hundred years and compare the number of divorced women per 1000 married women to 1890.

In 1998, for every 1,000 married white women there were 190 divorced white women, a thirty fold increase.

Unfortunately, the statistics for black women in 1998 are even worse. For every 1,000 married black women, there were 422 divorced black women, a forty-six fold increase and more than twice the rate of divorced white women.²

By 2000, the exploding divorce rate in America became a leading indicator of single motherhood

As one would expect, the divorce rate in America became a leading indicator of single motherhood in America.

“In 1965, 24 percent of black infants and 3.1 percent of white infants were born to single mothers. By 1990 the rates had risen to 64 percent for black infants, 18 percent for whites.”³

Today almost one quarter of all children in America live with a single mother

By 2019, 23% of all children in America, or almost one out of every four, lived with a single mother.⁴

What happened? What were the forces that caused this seismic shift in how Americans thought about marriage, sex, and child rearing? What I am going to show is that this sad American tragedy is based on what we believe about — and and how we relate to — God.

1750’s – 1890’s – Enlightenment thinking and Darwinian evolution permeate seminaries

Yale, Princeton, and Harvard have divinity schools which were, in the early years of our country, very conservative. But with the rise of the Enlightenment in the mid 1700’s and the acceptance of Evolution in the late 1890’s, these and many other mainline divinity schools in the U.S. capitulated to liberalism.

By “liberal,” I mean they rejected a literal and historical interpretation of the Bible, the possibility of miracles – including the resurrection of Jesus, as well as many basic orthodox Christian doctrines. This apostacy resulted in a secularized, faith-challenged clergy that eventually impacted the church in general.

Early 1900’s – Modernism infiltrates America’s churches

The first half of the twentieth century saw a rapid and radical transformation of the majority of America’s Christian denominations. Churches in these denominations preached what was called the social gospel.

Liberal churches, which had rejected the classic gospel of personal salvation from sin, replaced that historic gospel with a new “social gospel.” This social gospel was a gospel of salvation from social evils, like poverty, inequality, oppression and racism. Calls for social justice now became the rallying cry of the “mainline” church.

1930’s – Evolutionary theory impacts social welfare thought

If, as evolution teaches, the environment, plus time, plus chance are responsible for all of life as we know it, then the same must apply to human poverty. If evolution is true, then poverty, the thinking went, is not the result of individual human character flaws and poor choices, but the result of the environment poor people live in.

Therefore, sociologists concluded, if we change the environment that poor people live in, then we can change the individual and eradicate poverty.

The result? Welfare and public housing projects such as the infamous Cabrini-Green⁵ in Chicago were built as paragons of what an ideal environment for poor people should look like. But instead of raising the poor out of poverty, these experimental ideal environments became dilapidated magnets for poverty, crime, drug dealers and gang members.

So much for changing the environment.

1936 – 1996 AFDC decimates the black family

We have seen that increasing divorce rates in the twentieth century, with the subsequent rise in single parenthood, has impacted black families much more than white families.

As a result of this trend in marital breakdown, by 2015, while 30% of white births were to single moms, a full 77% of black births were to single moms.⁶

I personally witnessed this collapse of black families as a minority white child growing up in a 95% black community in inner city Los Angeles. In the early 1960’s, almost all of the black families in our community were typical nuclear families comprised of a husband, a wife, and their children. The result: a solidly middle class, peaceful black neighborhood.

But by the time I left home for graduate school in 1974, there were a number of single parent black families in the community and crime was on the rise. By the time my father moved out of our home in the early 1990’s, most of the families were single parent black families headed by single moms and the neighborhood was a very dangerous, gang-infested community.

The natural question is, why? What happened to black families in America starting in the 60’s?

The answer? The federal government’s Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) decimated the the black family by making it economically feasible for black mothers to raise children on their own, thus sidelining the role of the black father.

“Of the black children born between 1967 and 1969, 72 percent received Aid to Families with Dependent Children before the age of 18. School dropout rates, delinquency, and crime…were rising in the cities.”⁷

1960’s to 1970 – Post Christian culture repudiates the Christian sex ethic

I remember as a young boy in the late 1950’s riding home in the car from church on Sunday with my mom and dad and my mother saying, “We need to stop at the liquor store. We’re out of milk.”

The reason why Mom and Dad, who never drank an ounce of liquor, sometimes stopped at the liquor store on Sundays to get milk was because in the 1950’s, even in Los Angeles, all grocery stores, along with almost everything else, were closed.

This example illustrates how, even though the intellectual elites of our country had long before jettisoned any serious belief in Christianity, culturally, 1950’s America was still running on Christian autopilot. Prayer was still offered up in public schools. Men were the primary bread winners while women were homemakers. It was taboo to talk about sex. Abortion was illegal. Divorce and single moms were relatively rare.

But with the advent of the 1960’s, especially with the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., along with race riots, the hated Viet Nam War, and the rise of pop culture, a true cultural revolution happened.

The “counter culture” embraced by young baby boomers upended traditional attitudes towards authority, especially political and religious authority. Old cultural beliefs about the role of women in the workforce, and about marriage, divorce and especially sex were quickly thrown out. Within ten years, American culture became almost unrecognizable from that of the1950’s.

The result: the Christian sex ethic — the belief that sex is only for a man and a woman united for life in marriage — was effectively dead in what had become a post-Christian culture.

1960 to Present – Men go AWOL from American families

Missing in this discussion about the demise of the American family has been the role that men have played in it…or lack thereof. Simply put, starting in the 1960’s, men increasingly went AWOL from the family. But for black men and white men, they went AWOL in different ways.

Black men, who had now been replaced in their provider/protector family role by the federal government, proved their manhood by resorting to gangs and violence. As a result, black men who survived early death from gang violence were often met with oppressive police tactics and mass incarceration.

“For black men in their thirties, about 1 in every 12 is in prison or jail on any given day.” The lifetime likelihood of imprisonment of a black man born in 2001 is one out of every three.⁸

White men, on the other hand, have gone AWOL from the family via a different route. Instead of trying to prove their manhood by joining gangs, they simply abandon it by retreating into boorish addictions like drugs, pornography and video gaming. In reality these “man boys” never grow up to assume the mantle of family responsibility that men have previously done for millennia. I describe this male descent into cultural chaos at length in my post, “The Misery of Modern Men.”

“People act the way they think.” True. But more precisely, people act the way they believe. What we have witnessed over the past 130 years is what happens when a culture turns away from belief in the God of the Bible; the living, personal God who has spoken and given us a foundation, not just for our families, but for life itself.

“My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn them out cisterns–broken cisterns that can hold no water.” Jeremiah 2:13

This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.

For the past nineteen years New Commandment Men’s Ministries has helped hundreds of churches throughout North American and around the world recruit teams of men who permanently adopt their widowed and single parents in their congregations for the purpose of donating two hours of service to them one Saturday morning each month. We accomplish this with a free training site called “Meeting to Meet Needs.“

Learn how to mobilize your men’s ministry to meet every pressing need in your church here.

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Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom

and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.