Today, Roy Moore stands as Exhibit A in conservative hypocrisy when it comes to family values—saying one thing in public and doing another in private. Yesterday, it was others: Plenty of Republican leaders, from Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump to Joe Barton, have failed to practice the values conservatives preach. But are conservatives outside of the political class failing to live up to the family values associated with the right since the 1980s?

In the wake of the Moore scandal, a spate of articles on evangelicals, fundamentalists and conservatives have made just this case, arguing that conservatives of one stripe or another are family values hypocrites. Writing in The New York Times, for instance, Nicholas Kristof recently wrote, “conservatives thunder about ‘family values’ but don’t practice them.” To add insult to injury, Kristof also argued that it is actually “liberals [who] practice the values that conservatives preach.” His primary evidence: Red states often do worse than blue states when it comes to family-related outcomes such as divorce and teen pregnancy.


Here, Kristof is indebted to a book by family scholars Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, Red Families v. Blue Families, which makes the case that blue states have more successful and stable families than do red states. Arkansas, for instance, has one of the highest divorce rates in the nation, whereas Massachusetts has one of the lowest. Cahn and Carbone go on to contend that blue families, more than red families, “encourage their children to simultaneously combine public tolerance with private discipline, and their children then overwhelmingly choose to raise their own children within two-parent families.” In other words, blue Americans are more successful at forging exactly the sort of stable, two-parent families that red Americans say they support.

But this state-based argument obscures more than it illuminates about the links between partisanship and family life for ordinary families in America. Scholars and journalists who have bought into the idea that red Americans are hypocrites on family values because some red states do poorly when it comes to family stability are committing what is called the “ecological fallacy” of conflating the family behaviors of individual conservatives with the family behaviors of states dominated by conservatives. So, while it is true Republican states in the South have more family instability than Democratic states in the North, that does not mean Republicans as individuals necessarily have more unstable families than Democrats as individuals.

Indeed, when we look not at states but at counties in the United States, we see that counties that lean Republican across the country as a whole have more marriage, less nonmarital childbearing, and more family stability than counties that lean Democratic. In fact, an Institute for Family Studies report I authored found, “teens in red counties are more likely to be living with their biological parents, compared to children living in bluer counties.” So, even at the community level, the story about marriage and family instability looks a lot different depending on whether or not one is looking at state or county trends. At the county level, then, the argument that Red America is doing worse than Blue America isn’t true.

Finally, when we turn to the individual level, the conservatives-are-family-values-hypocrites thesis really falls apart. Republicans are more likely to be married, and happily married, than independents and Democrats, as Nicholas Wolfinger and I recently showed in a research brief for the Institute for Family Studies. They are also less likely to cheat on their spouses and less likely to be divorced, compared with independents and Democrats. So, Donald Trump is the exception, not the norm, for Republicans.

Family patterns for parents are particularly noteworthy, since children are more likely to thrive when they are raised by stably married parents in good relationships. When we look at parents ages 18 to 55 in the United States, as the figures above and below indicate, we find that Republican parents are significantly more likely to be in their first marriage and, if married, to say they are “very happy” in their marriages, according to the General Social Survey, a nationally representative survey conducted by the University of Chicago that tracks a range of American attitudes and behaviors. Specifically, 61 percent of Republican parents are in their first marriage, compared with 50 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of independents. Likewise, Republican married parents are at least 6 percentage points more likely to say they are very happy in their marriages compared with Democrats and independents.

When it comes to family stability, Republican parents are less likely to be divorced. In fact, Republican parents who have ever been married are at least 5 percentage points less likely to have been divorced, compared with their fellow citizens. The 2017 American Family Survey also indicates Republicans are less likely to have their first child outside of marriage, compared with Democrats and independents. So, contra Kristof, it’s actually Republicans, not Democrats, who are more likely to enjoy a stable, happy family life anchored around marriage.

What’s also fascinating about looking at the individual data is that it suggests that the relatively fragile state of families in the Republican South does not apply as much to individual Republicans in the South. Indeed, in both the North and the South, Republican parents are at least 9 percentage points more likely to be in their first marriage, compared with Democrats and independents. The figure also reveals how the ecological fallacy works: Just because the Republican South has more family fragility does not mean that Republican families are fragile. In fact, Republican parents in the South are more likely to be in their first marriage than Democratic and independent parents in the North.

In other words, even though Southerners in general are at greater risk of family instability than Northerners, Republicans in the South enjoy markedly higher levels of family stability than their fellow citizens—a family stability advantage that puts them above Democrats and independents in the North. Another way to put this: It’s blue and purple Americans in the South who are really pulling down family stability in the South, not red Americans.

A similar story plays out for education. When American parents are separated by whether or not they have a college degree, it turns out that Republican parents have about a 10-percentage-point advantage in the likelihood that they are in their first marriage. In both college-educated communities and less-educated communities, then, it looks like Republican parents are more likely to be raising their children in their first marriage.

Some might wonder if these trends are driven by race and ethnicity, given that African-Americans and Hispanics are less likely to be raising their children in stable, married homes. And that is certainly part of the story. But even if we limit our focus to whites, we still see that white Republican parents are more likely to be in their first marriage. Specifically, 62 percent of white Republican parents are in their first marriage, compared with 54 percent of white Democratic and 44 percent of white independent parents.

Finally, given that Republicans are more likely to be religious than are Democrats, isn’t this Republican advantage an artifact of more religiosity among the Republican ranks? Not entirely. When we break out parents by those who attend religious services frequently (several times a month or more) versus parents who attend infrequently or never, Republicans still have an advantage in both the more religious and less religious groups. In fact, in both groups, Republican parents are more likely to be in first marriages than their fellow citizens. Moreover, even after controlling for religiosity, as well as education, race, ethnicity, region and age, the data indicate that Republican parents are still more likely to be in their first marriage, compared with Democrats.

The Republican advantage when it comes to stable, happy marriages across regional, educational and religious lines makes sense for at least three reasons. First, Republicans are more likely to embrace marriage-minded values and live in communities that embrace such values, like the importance of marrying for life and raising children in a two-parent family; and these values do influence behavior. As David Leonhardt of The New York Times observed, the “red model highlights the importance of local cultures that celebrate marriage as an important part of most stable, prosperous families—rather than just another choice that’s no better or worse than any other.”

Second, because married parents are more prosperous and less dependent on government for their financial security, they are less likely to gravitate to the Democratic Party and more likely to gravitate to the party of small government and lower taxes. Indeed, counties with large numbers of lower-income single parents are more likely to lean Democratic, partly because the Democratic Party supports policies designed to provide them with more financial security. The figure below is illustrative of the link between family structure and voting at the county level in 2016.

Third, it may be that Republican personality traits—such as their optimism or aversion to risk or conscientiousness—make them somewhat better or more stable spouses. That is, the kind of people who are more likely to identify as Republican may be more likely to form and maintain stable marriages and families, compared with Democrats and independents who tend to be somewhat more inclined to engage in risky behavior or to look at the world through a critical lens.

Regardless of the reason, though, what is clear from the data is that the charge that ordinary Republicans preach family values but don’t practice family values is unwarranted. At least today, most Republicans don’t live lives like Donald Trump or Newt Gingrich: In fact, they are more likely to be stably married, happily married, and faithful than Democrats and independents in America. The question, of course, is whether this Republican family advantage will persist if Republicans keep anointing leaders who don’t practice the family values the party has preached.