Peter Range, senior fellow for strategic initiatives at the Ohio-based Center for Christian Virtue (CCV), says the organization's new Family Structure Index is calculated for each state by the percentage of married adults aged 25 to 54, the average number of lifetime births per woman, and the percentage of children aged 15 to 17 who are living with their married parents,
"It focuses on each state's share of adults – residents who are married, have children, and raise those children together through their high school years," he summarizes.
Utah, Idaho, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming all ranked near the top. Down near the bottom are Massachusetts, Nevada, New York, New Mexico, and Rhode Island.
Ohio is 29th.
"42% of Ohio children were born to unmarried parents," Range relays. "What that means is we have kind of a rise in child poverty, violence in our communities, drug use, and even the crashing of educational outcomes."
He encourages people to do more in the way of promoting the family structure. That includes churches refocusing their preaching and teaching on the dignity, value, and beauty of marriage between a man and a woman.
"We're working with a group called Communio," the CCV spokesman reports. "They work with both evangelical and Catholic churches to market to their local communities, to increase marriage."
His organization wants to employ Communio's model used by 100 different churches in Jacksonville, Florida that decreased the divorce rate by 24%.
