IT Takes a Village to Save a Marriage

Dr. Keith Edwards answers questions that describe his approach to Christian marriage, marital interventions and sociocultural factors in American marriages. Integration issues are presented as well as the current state of research on marriage. He describes his clinical approach to treating distressed couples based on Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy. Specific approaches to improving marriages for communities, churches and therapists are discussed. ********** Can you briefly describe what kind of work you are currently doing in support of Christian marriages? I am a professor in the doctoral program in clinical psychology at Rosemead School of Psychology, Biola University. I teach marriage therapy skills to Christian graduate students who will become counselors in their communities. In my position as an educator, I seek to read and be informed about the latest developments in theory, research, and practice in the field of marriage therapy. I attempt to provide my students and clients a Christian view of marriage and marriage therapy. My students and I participate in regional and national professional organizations, attending meetings and presenting our research on marriage and spirituality. I also conduct marriage enrichment seminars at churches and retreats and do marital and pre-marital counseling at the Biola Counseling Center. My wife and I participate in missionary member care as associates of the Narramore Christian Foundation providing parenting seminars, marriage enrichment, and marriage counseling for missionaries in Europe, Asia, and South America. At a personal level, I believe we support Christian marriages by developing and growing in our own marriage. My wife and I have been married for 36 years, have been active in teaching and leadership in our local church, and have been on short-term missions sponsored by the church. We have three married children and five grandchildren. A number of dangers to the institution of marriage have been proposed including cohabitation, increased religious heterogeneity, dual career issues, modern mobility, increases in the length of life and others. Over the next decade, what do you believe will be the greatest risks to the institution of marriage? I believe the single biggest threat to the institution of marriage is the continuing erosion of a commitment to marriage as a life-long relationship with one's spouse. Anything that undermines commitment to marriage as a Divine institution, designed by God to last for a lifetime, is a threat to the institution of marriage. The increasing practice of cohabitation is a significant symptom of the growing crisis in our culture's commitment to marriage. The directors of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University have identified the increasingly casual attitude toward intimate relationship commitment among young singles today as seeking "relationships without rings, sex without strings." (Popenoe & Whitehead, 2001). While erosion of commitment is multi-determined, I believe the self-centered, pleasure-oriented, individualistic, materialistic values propagated by advertising and programming in our media-saturated society are a major cause. Media influences will only grow in the next decade as powerful, new, wireless technologies extend their reach into all areas of public and private life. At the risk of provoking questions about my patriotism, it appears evident in our time that individualistic, materialistic capitalism without the restraining influence of transcendent values and community accountability has degenerated into exploitation. No where is this exploitation more evident than in the area of human sexuality. The glorification of sexual pleasure and the sexualization of our youth culture have had a profound undermining impact on the institution of marriage. The minimalist value constraint that continues to be the slogan of sexual permissiveness is that a sexual relationship is moral if it occurs between "consenting adults. …