Section One

 

When Dr. Richard Marks, a counselor working with Live the Life in Jacksonville, asked new client Tommy Davis to rate his commitment level to his marriage, Marks got the kind of response one might expect to hear from a man on the brink of divorce.

“I’m 1% in and 99% out,” Davis said.

To which Marks replied, “I want you to give 100% of that 1% for two days, and after that, you can do whatever you want.”

So, Tommy and his wife, Sondra, agreed to attend a HOPE weekend retreat for troubled marriages, a faith-based program that Marks regularly led in conjunction with Live the Life in its efforts to strengthen family life in the Jacksonville area.

The retreat proved to be transformative. “That HOPE Weekend didn’t just save our marriage,” Sondra said.“It changed our lives.”

HOPE and other programs like it sponsored by COFI from 2016-2018 may well have changed the lives of many other Jacksonville couples. In this three-year period, Duval County experienced a 24% decline in divorce19, a decline that is considerably larger than that found in other parts of the state during this same time period (see below for more details). 

This significant drop may well be thanks, in large part, to COFI’s innovative community-wide initiative designed to strengthen marital stability in Jacksonville. COFI brought together scores of ministers, marriage counselors, and nonprofit leaders in Duval County, and connected them with some key national leaders who provided start-up funding and programming expertise.

At the center of it all stood Dennis Stoica, the chairman of the Florida-based marriage enrichment non-profit, Live the Life (LTL), which served as the primary “on-the-ground” coordinator of this ambitious endeavor. Stoica had moved to Florida after leading California’s Healthy Marriage Initiative, a federally funded program that offered couples an array of skills-based marriage education classes on effective communication, conflict resolution, and other topics.

During his time with the California project, Stoica saw the limits of an exclusively skills-based approach, especially one cut off from a larger ecosystem of supportive relationships.

“It was easy for us to get permission to hold marriage education classes at a local community center like the YMCA,” Stoica said.“And the couples who came to our classes clearly benefitted from the instruction in relational skills that we offered them.” Nevertheless, after the classes were over, there was no organic network of relationships—no ongoing system of support—available should couples need additional guidance and encouragement.

From his own background as a Catholic layman, Stoica knew that churches typically offer their members an intricate web of enduring cross-generational relationships—and that interactions within this ecosystem often prove highly beneficial to married couples. Yet, Stoica also knew that in order for churches to partner with his taxpayer-funded initiative, they would have to avoid church-state entanglement issues by refraining from any instruction that presented marriage in a larger religious context.

Some California churches agreed to do just that. But this ended up neutering the faith-based programs of much of their spiritual power, according to Stoica and other observers. As J.P. De Gance, the then-executive vice president of The Philanthropy Roundtable who directed COFI, noted, “If you’re going to gut and remove faith from the equation, you’re going to have a hard time changing family behavior.” 

Convinced of the need for a different approach to strengthening marital stability—a privately-funded initiative that relied heavily on church-based leadership—De Gance decided to pull in some philanthropists associated with his national organization to offer Stoica and his LTL team in Florida the kind of financial assistance they would need to jump-start an intensive communitywide effort to reduce divorce in Jacksonville.

Why Jacksonville?

Jacksonville easily qualified as a logical place to launch an initiative of this kind. It had a comparatively high divorce rate. It had a number of religious leaders who were familiar with, and intrigued by, the long-running success of a marriage-strengthening project LTL had initiated in Tallahassee (several hours away) in 1998. And the ringleader of that Tallahassee effort, LTL founder and president Richard Albertson, had been laying the groundwork for a major organizational expansion to Jacksonville for the previous three years.

Jacksonville was also hosting another effort to strengthen marriage and family life around this time. SMART Couples, a federally funded initiative across the state of Florida, started in 2015 and ended up offering relationship education to about 1,000 men and women in Jacksonville alone between its founding and the present day. This initiative, then, was also seeking to improve the family climate in the city about the same time that LTL was looking to expand into Jacksonville.

In addition, Jacksonville boasts a native population that is, in many ways, more Southern (and more culturally Christian) than most other places in Florida. Indeed, Floridians like to joke that in the Sunshine State, “the farther north you go, the more Southern it gets.” And one of the best ways to illustrate this fact is by tracing the northward progression of hometowns for some of Florida’s most iconic music legends: Pitbull (Miami), Jim Morrison (Clearwater), Tom Petty (Gainesville), and Lynyrd Skynyrd (Jacksonville).

Now, the fact that Jacksonville has both high levels of divorce and high levels of religiosity may surprise those familiar with the Biblical passage where God says, “I hate divorce” (Malachi 2:16). But this cultural contradiction is actually quite common in Southern life. In fact, six of the 10 states with the highest rates of divorce are found in the South. And fans of the South’s most popular homegrown music—country—are accustomed to singing along to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” or Carrie Underwood’s “Jesus Take The Wheel,” right after tapping their toes to Hank Williams’ “Your Cheatin’ Heart” or George Strait’s “All My Ex’s Live in Texas.”

In seeking to make sense of the South’s strange confluence of religiosity and divorce, some scholars have found it useful to make a distinction between religious practice and religious identification. For example, research indicates a strong correlation between weekly church attendance and marital stability, but not between conservative Protestant religious identification and marital stability.

In other words, research affirms the old adage that “the family that prays together stays together.” But it also suggests that a city with a sizeable number of nominal Christians and occasional churchgoers can have an unusually high divorce rate, particularly if that city has other characteristics commonly associated with high divorce. For example, sociologist Norval Glenn has shown that one of the most significant factors affecting regional differences in marital stability is “geographic rootedness”—or the lack thereof, with regions marked by high levels of mobility also facing higher divorce rates. This helps to explain why high divorce rates are often found in steadily-growing, transient Sunbelt cities like Jacksonville.

In sum, then, Jacksonville is the closest thing that Florida has to a major city in the cultural Bible Belt. Jacksonville has lots of churches, big and small, and lots of churchgoers. (In fact, 56% of Jacksonville’s residents say they are affiliated with a church.) But local leaders report that Jacksonville has many people who identify as Christian, yet rarely go to church— which, for the purposes of this initiative, is quite significant. That’s because when nominal Christians and occasional churchgoers find themselves in need of some sort of marital counseling or assistance, they often have fewer apprehensions about participating in a church-based marriage program—especially one sponsored by a church with which they are familiar—than non-attenders who have no cultural or historical ties to any local congregation.

These factors, then, combined to make Jacksonville an excellent location for COFI’s innovative campaign.

COFI’s Theory of Change and Strategic Plan

Jacksonville’s Culture of Freedom Initiative can be best thought of as a privately-funded civil society project that relied heavily on church-based leadership to strengthen marital stability in Duval County, Florida. While the project’s programs taught many of the same relationship skills that Stoica had emphasized in the secular California Healthy Marriage Initiative, COFI’s theory of change was largely built around harnessing and developing the unique marriage strengthening capabilities of local congregations.

“Faith and family tend to be mutually reinforcing,” observed J.P. De Gance, COFI’s director. “Married couples are more likely to attend church; and churchgoers are more likely to form and maintain healthy marriages.”

Similarly, churches are uniquely positioned to provide all three components that Stoica believes are needed to promote marital stability:

1) A vision for marriage—which churches often offer through their various teachings about the covenantal or sacramental character of marriage, and norms—like fidelity and the Golden Rule—that foster stronger marriages

2) Support —which churches and other religious institutions typically facilitate through the relationships built in small group ministries, Bible study classes, and various social gatherings;

3) Skills—which are often taught (and modeled) in both formal instruction and informal interactions.

Moreover, Stoica says that some of the benefits to marriage that come from religious participation arise indirectly from general teachings that can be applied to one’s family life. For example, a church sermon on “how to forgive others just as God has forgiven you” may not be targeted primarily to married couples—or even contain a specific reference to family life—yet can still be transformative in the life of a marriage, if the husband and wife apply these teachings to their relationship.

Still, Live the Life’s programming is built around direct instruction at face-to-face gatherings where couples at every life stage and at every point on the marital stability continuum can gain both insight and inspiration to strengthen their relationships. Some of these programs are targeted narrowly to particular types of couples (such as the newly engaged or those on the brink of divorce), but others offer general principles that are broadly applicable to wide swaths of couples.

For example, one of LTL’s signature programs, Adventures in Marriage (AIM), is a weekend retreat for married couples to get away and focus anew on their relationship. Albertson often compares this time to the 30,000-mile check-up that car owners periodically schedule for their automobiles. Yet, AIM weekends sometimes attract couples whose relationships need far more than just routine maintenance.

One such couple, Eddie and Stella Villanueva of Jacksonville, found an exercise at the AIM weekend particularly helpful in addressing a number of unsettled issues that had accumulated over their 26 years of marriage. “After we did that night of ‘taking out the trash,’” Stella said, “for the first time, I felt like there was no heavy weight on me.”

While LTL brought to Jacksonville the full array of programs that it had successfully developed in Tallahassee, Albertson made a special point of signaling to prospective partners that LTL viewed its role as that of a catalyst and an aggregator, and not just that of a content provider.

“We wanted to be sure that church leaders in Jacksonville recognized that we weren’t there to simply peddle our own programs, but that we were looking to assemble a local ‘tool kit’ that would offer couples in Jacksonville a full menu of options for improving their marriage,” Albertson said. “I think this helped to build trust among our local partners who had marriage programs of their own, while also easing the fears of those who’ve seen parachurch organizations come in and try to ‘build something on their back.’”

To encourage participation in the various marriage education classes and programs, COFI created a web site (jaxmarriage.org) that provided listings of all the different marriage education program options. It also relied on microtargeted outreach online to steer Jacksonville residents with a potential interest in marriage or marital assistance to its activities. And it provided seed money for Facebook ads, radio spots, and outdoor billboards that directed people to the website. All in all, COFI registered more than 28 million digital impressions (see Table 1) in the Jacksonville area from 2016-2018 in its efforts to get the word out about its local offerings and to promote a family-friendly message in the area.

Interestingly, the messaging for these ads drew heavily from some research COFI commissioned from Right Brain People, a brand strategy firm that works with many Fortune 500 corporations. According to De Gance, this research concluded that messaging around marriage needs to be tailored for three different groups: 1) romantics, who tend to have unrealistic expectations about marriage; 2) pessimists, who want lifelong marriage but tend to question its likelihood; and 3) independents, who tend to invest less in marriage and family because they regard other life pursuits as more important. 

Using data on the different emotional needs of each of these groups, COFI then worked with communication experts to develop ads, videos, and other messaging designed to address the unique concerns and barriers to marital success of each psychographic group. Generally, this meant developing messages that helped romantics develop more realistic expectations for marriage and that helped worrywarts gain greater confidence in their ability to experience marital success. (Not surprisingly, De Gance said, these two marriage hopeful groups were more likely to respond to messaging about marriage than the independents.) 

Whatever the case, De Gance believes COFI’s sizeable investment in this front-end research not only proved useful in Jacksonville, but that it should also prove useful in future cities that may want to replicate, or improve upon, the Jacksonville project.

COFI’s extensive use of big data and cutting edge technology clearly distinguished it from many other faith-based initiatives, which have not operated at this level of sophistication.

“Microtargeted marketing has long existed in the commercial world. It’s existed in the political world. It’s even used in the intelligence world,” De Gance noted. “But in a lot of ways, the family and faith sectors are still living, technologically, in the 1990s. This project is bringing it forward.”

Still, De Gance and other COFI leaders did not want the technological sophistication of their plan to detract from a simple “low-tech” truth central to their strategy. “Lives are influenced by relationships,” DeGance said. “Those authentic personal relationships are the bread and butter of civil society.” Thus, even in its use of technology, COFI sought to direct married couples to programs and events that would allow them to build and deepen relational ties with others in Jacksonville who could guide, encourage, and support them.

In this important regard, then, Jacksonville’s highly relational, high-tech project bore more than just a passing resemblance to the Tallahassee initiative that Albertson and LTL had launched in 1998—and to more than 150 other highly-relational, low-tech community marriage projects adopted around that same time through the leadership of Marriage Savers, a Maryland-based national nonprofit organization founded by Mike and Harriet McManus. 

Flooding the Market

When Live the Life launched the Jacksonville project in 2016, Stoica and Albertson vowed to flood the market by: 1) increasing the supply of marriage education programs, 2) increasing the demand for such programs, and 3) conditioning the landscape for this effort.

“We wanted to ‘normalize’ the idea that people should invest in their marriage at any and every stage of their relationship” Stoica said. “So, we continually told couples that it’s ‘never too early—and never too late’ to take part in a marriage enrichment program.”

Over the course of the three-year initiative, Jacksonville program participants completed approximately 50,000 COFI-sponsored courses involving at least four hours of education-related to marriage or family life. (A larger number of Jacksonville residents had some kind of contact with events and programs offered through COFI.) Most of this COFI-sponsored programming focused directly on marriage enrichment and/or helping couples in crisis, but some of this programming addressed other topics that significantly affect marital quality such as parenting, faith formation, financial management, and work-related issues.

Nearly 45% of these participants took part in a program developed by Live the Life, while the rest participated in a program developed by a local church or some other local organization. For example, one of the most popular programs for couples facing money management issues was a faith-based course developed by Dave Ramsey called “Financial Peace University.”

Table 2 indicates that more than 11,000 people per year were touched by the efforts of COFI from 2016 to 2018—for a total of more than 58,000 people in this three-year period. Note, however, that some of the people counted here may not be unique participants. In other words, the number of unique members of the Jacksonville community who were reached by COFI-related activities is undoubtedly less than 58,000.

Multi-week courses like Ramsey’s were often held in church facilities, but some of COFI’s weekend or one-day programs were held in meeting rooms and conference centers not affiliated with a local church. For example, COFI partnered with Family Life. a national parachurch ministry based in Little Rock, Arkansas, to bring its highly-acclaimed “Weekend to Remember” marriage enrichment program to a Jacksonville-area conference hotel.

Four out of five COFI program participants had at least some connection to a Jacksonville church. One in 10 attended at the encouragement of a church member who invited them. And one in 10 took part even though they had no prior connection to the church or any of its members. 

Almost all of those in the “no prior connection” category (and some in the other categories) learned of the marriage education classes via COFI’s digital marketing campaign, which generated more than 28 million media impressions over the course of the project. This media messaging started with a bang, with eight million impressions, to get people’s attention.

But program participation numbers in 2016 (almost 12,000) were comparatively lower than any other year. Some of this no doubt stemmed from the nature of any start-up enterprise, where one must first build awareness before expecting action. But COFI organizers determined that another factor was hindering program participation.

In year one, the campaign relied heavily on high intensity/high-commitment offerings (multi-week classes, multi-day weekend retreats, etc.). While this represented an ideal level of instruction (at least from the organizers’ perspective), COFI officials perceived that some prospective participants—perhaps especially those not in the habit of going to church regularly—found it difficult to commit to a series of weekly meetings or to “give up an entire weekend” to participate in a marriage education program.

So, the campaign decided to offer more low intensity/low-commitment introductory events designed to “whet the appetite” of couples who might want or need more substantial marriage education. These introductory events were often billed as “date night” programs for couples and featured everything from popular national speakers on marriage to a clean comedy act that poked fun at the everyday challenges of married life.

Interestingly, these special community-wide LTL programs fostered greater-than-usual cooperation from different denominational groups. Indeed, when the local Catholic diocese and the Jacksonville Baptist Association co-sponsored one of these special events, it represented the first time in the city’s history that these two groups had ever joined together to host such a program.

That these two groups came together to promote marital stability was no accident. From the outset, Stoica and Albertson had targeted Baptist and Catholic congregations in particular, since more religiously affiliated Jacksonville residents identify as Baptist (35%) or Catholic (25%) than anything else. (Almost all of the rest are divided between various Protestant groups; Jews, Muslims, and Hindus collectively comprise only 2% of the Jacksonville population.)

Live the Life organizers found that they had to employ very different strategies to enlist the participation of Catholic and Baptist leaders. Some of this had to do with differences in governance. Since Catholics have a hierarchal governing structure, LTL’s Catholic outreach coordinator Lori Gramer found it easy to get cooperation from parish priests and lay leaders once she had the endorsement of the diocese. Conversely, since each Baptist church is governed at the congregation level, getting buy-in from Baptists was “a lot like herding cats,” as one associational leader put it.

Moreover, Baptists and Catholics often view ministry quite differently. For example, when it comes to church growth, Catholics tend to think in terms of growing from within. So, they put considerable emphasis on encouraging large families and on welcoming back those who were baptized in the Catholic church as children but no longer practice the faith as adults. Conversely, when it comes to church growth, Baptists tend to give considerable emphasis to growing from outside—to winning new converts to the faith from among the unchurched.

Both of these factors sometimes made it more challenging for LTL to enlist the involvement of Baptist (and other evangelical) church leaders, who often wanted to know how this marriage initiative would complement and enhance their existing outreach efforts. Indeed, of the 20 most-active congregations involved in the project, more than half were Catholic.

Nevertheless, LTL succeeded in getting enthusiastic support from some of Jacksonville’s most prominent evangelical congregations, including Chets Creek, a multi-site Baptist church with four Duval County locations, and Celebration Church, the largest evangelical “megachurch” in the greater Jacksonville area. Celebration’s involvement in the COFI project proved particularly notable for several reasons. Celebration is far more racially diverse than most Jacksonville congregations. Accordingly, it represented one of the Jacksonville project’s greatest success reaching African-American couples. (Even though about 20% of the married population in Jacksonville is African American, COFI was only able to establish relationships with two historically black churches, Potter’s House and Hopewell Baptist Church; however, LTL relied on a number of African American mentors in its programmatic activity.)

In addition, Celebration experienced considerable growth during the three-year span of the COFI project—going from just under 7,000 attendees on a typical Sunday in 2016 to more than 10,000 attendees on a typical Sunday two years later. One of Celebration’s executive pastors, Wayne Lanier, believes this church growth is directly related to a strategic shift that took place at Celebration thanks in large part to the COFI project. Prior to the Jacksonville initiative, Celebration largely viewed itself as an “attractional” (or seeker-sensitive) congregation; but over the course of the COFI campaign, the church restructured its ministerial focus around serving marriages and families at every stage of the life cycle.

This is precisely the kind of transformation De Gance hoped would take place in Jacksonville, as the project sought to (re)build a culture around faith and family—and the meaning and purpose that these institutions foster in everyday life.

In all, approximately 50 Protestant and Catholic churches, as well as more than 40 nonprofits, took part in the initiative in some way. Several of these congregations had Spanish language programs to serve Hispanic churchgoers interested in content delivered in their native tongue, but it should be noted that the size of Jacksonville’s Hispanic population is considerably smaller than in most other major Florida cities.

LTL fostered these collaborations through initial oneon-one meetings with senior ministers, subsequent training sessions with lay leaders and mentor couples, regular participation in every-other-month associational meetings, and an annual presentation of “Marriage Champion” awards to churches and individuals that showed exemplary leadership in working to strengthen marital stability in Jacksonville.

Moreover, the Jacksonville project sought to address the most-pressing needs within each congregation— even if the pro-marriage aspects of this work might be seen more in the long run than in the near term. For example, one of COFI’s non-profit collaborators— Flourish Now—partnered with several African American congregations to hold job fairs at urban churches as a way of addressing the underemployment of black men (since stable employment is a key factor affecting the “marriageability” of men).

Cultivating close ties with these churches reflected LTL’s emphasis on helping to “establish, develop, and grow sustainable marriage ministries in local churches,” according to Meiko Paige (who, along with her husband Christopher, helped train marriage coaches in various congregations). Moreover, cultivating close ties with church leaders facilitated the project’s shift, over time, from a heavy reliance on advertising and digital marketing to a less-costly reliance on in-house church platforms (notices in church bulletins and e-newsletters, announcements during church services, and the like) as well as word of mouth advertising from lay couples recommending marital enrichment programs to others.

Year-to-Year Changes and Possible Factors Affecting Change

While Duval County saw a 24% decline in divorce over the duration of the three-year project (measured from 2015-2018), it’s important to note that this decline did not occur in equal increments each year. Indeed, the official county statistics show substantial drops in divorce in 2016 (down 20%) and 2017 (down 9%) followed by a slight rise in 2018. But these numbers are somewhat misleading because they fail to account for the effects of Hurricane Irma, which apparently pushed some late 2017 divorces into 2018.

Hurricanes not only cause lots of closings, disruptions, and displacements, but they also frequently complicate divorce proceedings—particularly when property damage is involved (and the valuation of various possessions is affected). While the process for getting a divorce in Florida typically takes around six months (from filing to completion), major hurricanes often lengthen this process considerably—as Floridians saw with Hurricane Irma in 2017 and again with Hurricane Michael in 2018 (which hit areas several hours west of Jacksonville). So, one reason that divorce ticked up slightly in 2018 could be that there was a “Hurricane Irma effect” that led couples to postpone divorce in 2017 and then turn to it again in 2018.

There are a number of other possible explanations for this curious three-year pattern in Duval County divorce rates. To the extent that the COFI project played a role, three possible explanations would appear to merit particular consideration:

• A Better Mix of ‘Thick and Thin’ Programming in 2016? In any kind of endeavor like the COFI Jacksonville project, there is an inherent tension between breadth and depth in content. Should one seek to reach the widest possible audience, even if that means offering a less-than-ideal amount of instruction? Or should one seek to offer the ideal level of instruction, even if that means reaching a less sizeable audience? Obviously, there is a sweet spot where the optimal mix of “thick and thin” programming is found. And it’s possible that the COFI organizers came closer to hitting that sweet spot in 2016 than in subsequent years (and that the corresponding year-by-year divorce rates reflect this).
• The Positive Effects of Digital Messaging Apart from Boosting Program Participation? COFI viewed digital marketing and advertising as a key to driving traffic to its “jaxmarriage” web site where couples could learn about, and sign up for, various marriage education classes. But the web site also contained a wealth of other resources for interested couples, including articles, books, and links to numerous marriage ministries, counselors, and programs. So, it could be that some Jacksonville couples who never took part in a faceto-face marriage education class were still positively affected by COFI’s digital messages and by the other resources available at the web site—and took steps accordingly to improve their marriage. It may be the digital messaging in the initial stages of the initiative was perceived as more novel by Jacksonville couples in its first year, 2016, which might help to explain why divorce rates dropped more in 2016 than in subsequent years.
• Did the divorce decline reverse? In the nation as a whole, divorce declined during the Great Recession and then went up a bit in 2010 until falling again in 2012. The recession may have prevented some divorces, while only delaying other divorces that were finalized from 2010-2011 as the economy improved. Likewise, one possibility in Jacksonville is that COFI prevented some divorces while only delaying other divorces. That is, the COFI initiative may have initially encouraged many couples to reconsider divorce as the best option for them; but some of these couples may have decided to go ahead with a divorce in 2018 because they were not able to resolve the problems in their marriage. This kind of pattern would also help explain the reverse J-Curve in the divorce rate in Duval County from 2015-2018.

Of course, COFI-related factors were not the only variables affecting Jacksonville divorce rates.

A 2017 study by researchers at Florida State University identified a number of longer-term trends contributing to an improved climate for marital stability in Duval County, including a stronger economy (since the Great Recession) and a reduction in the number of long-term military deployments out of Jacksonville’s Naval Station Mayport (since the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). We take up these explanations in greater detail below.

To be sure, changes in military life significantly affect the Jacksonville area. Duval County is home to four major military installations that collectively employ roughly 10,000 active duty personnel and another 12,000 civilian personnel. When family members—and the 50,000 military veterans living in or near Jacksonville—are added to the equation, the total number of people with some tie to one of Jacksonville’s four bases swells to at least 100,000 of Duval County’s nearly 1 million residents.

According to Bill Dougherty of the Navy’s southeast regional public affairs office, there have been some modest year-to-year shifts in the base population of different Jacksonville-area military installations since 2010. For example, Naval Station Mayport’s active-duty population grew by around 2,000 personnel in 2016 when the base became the home port for three new ships. 

Overall, however, the size of the Jacksonville military population has remained quite stable in recent years, Dougherty said, with slight upticks in one installation offset by slight decreases in others. Similarly, the length and frequency of deployments from Jacksonville bases have not changed dramatically during the 2010s.

“The operations tempo has been very steady in recent years,” Dougherty says. “We haven’t seen any major changes since the time when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were much more intense.”

In the wider Jacksonville community, family law experts also report no major changes in the legal climate surrounding divorce in recent years. In early 2017, the Chief Judge of Florida’s Fourth Judicial Circuit (which includes Duval County) tightened a longstanding requirement that parents going through a divorce must attend a family stabilization class in person rather than online. But family law experts and marital stability advocates do not believe this modest change had any significant effect on divorce numbers, since family stabilization classes like “Two Parents, Two Homes” (offered by Jacksonville’s Hope Haven Children’s Clinic and Family Center) are designed to help couples minimize the adverse effects of divorce on children and rarely lead to reconciled marriages.

“In all my years of working with troubled marriages, I’ve only had one couple ever referred to me by someone in the legal system,” reports Marks, the Jacksonville marriage counselor who heads the HOPE Weekend program for couples in crisis.

Given the absence of legal changes surrounding mediation and divorce, county court officials in Duval were reluctant to speculate about other possible causes for the reduction in divorce cases. For example, a spokeswoman for Family Law Judge Lance Day said, “I couldn’t even begin to guess what is responsible for the [decline in] divorce numbers.” This reluctance to speculate probably isn’t all that surprising given the premium placed on proof in the court system; but it does serve to underscore the fact that those in the legal system do not perceive Jacksonville’s divorce decline to be due to court-related reasons.

While Jacksonville saw no major changes in the legal proceedings surrounding divorce during the threeyear span of the COFI project, it did see an important demographic change beginning in 2013 that may have had an effect on divorce rates in 2016-2018. Indeed, one of the reasons why divorce rate reductions may have slowed in 2017 and disappeared entirely in 2018 is because of a significant uptick in the number of Duval County marriages beginning in 2013. Some of this increase in the mid-2010s marriage rate is no doubt due to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision (legalizing same-sex marriage) in 2015. But it should be noted that Duval’s increase in marriage actually began two years prior to this decision and appears to be primarily attributable to the unusually large millennial generation reaching full-fledged adulthood (and prime marital age) in the mid-2010s.

As with everything else, one must be careful not to overstate the significance of this increase in marriage. And while the shift that occurred in 2013 was no doubt seen as a welcome development by LTL and other Jacksonville-area marriage advocates, it nevertheless may have had the ironic effect of making their work (of driving down divorce) harder since a number of research studies show that the marriages most at risk of breaking up are those that are still in their first seven to 10 years.

Proof of Concept

The year-to-year shifts in Jacksonville’s divorce rates are certainly interesting, but the larger story of what happened to divorce rates over the three-year duration of the Culture of Freedom Initiative is far more interesting and far more important.

The essence of the Jacksonville initiative closely resembles the Community Marriage Policy (CMP) strategy that Richard Albertson and his Tallahassee team successfully implemented in the late 1990s. In 2004, a research team led by Stan Weed found statistically-significant but modest declines in divorce rates among the more than 150 CMP initiatives that it studied. Writing in the academic journal, Family Relations, Weed and his team observed:

Our findings indicate that divorce rates appear to decline more rapidly following the signing of a [Community Marriage Policy] than would be predicted by the passage of time alone... The results reported here are important not because of their magnitude (which was modest), but because they are present. In reality, finding a significant program effect is surprising when the context of the program implementation is considered: volunteers implement the program, there is high turnover among those doing so, there is wide variation in the intensity of the program implementation, there is often a low proportion of signed congregations in the context of the larger county population, and this largely city level intervention is only testable using the county statistics in which their results are embedded. 

 

To be sure, COFI’s Jacksonville project represented an attempt to improve upon the CMP model. It was savvier, more sophisticated, and made better use of technology. Yet, the leaders of the Jacksonville initiative also had the wisdom to understand that the power of local religious communities lies in the vertical and horizontal relationships that are built around them. It is in and through these relationships that lives—and marriages—are transformed.

Christopher and Lacresha Hannah of Jacksonville know first-hand about marital transformation. Several years ago, their marriage faced enormous problems: infidelity; a spouse preoccupied with working and providing; a lot of hurt and bitterness and feelings of betrayal—a colossal mess in nearly every respect. But the Hannahs learned of the marital resources newly available in their city through Live the Life. And they began attending classes at their church, where they found healing and forgiveness, restoration and renewal. 

When Christopher looks back now at how far he and Lacresha have come, he marvels. “Without the church support, these classes, and a great group of friends and relatives, the success of our marriage wouldn’t be possible,” he says.

Thanks to COFI initiative, the Hannahs’ story is a familiar one in Jacksonville. And as COFI is now taking its work to other communities under a new name (Communio), many marriage and family advocates are hoping that more and more couples around the country will see their marriages transformed—just like the Hannahs, the Villanuevas, the Davises, and the many other Jacksonville couples whose lives were changed as part of this initiative.