Criticism of Contemporary Views On Marriage
By the 21st century, the nature of marriage in Western countries—particularly with regard to the significance of procreation and the ease of divorce—had begun to change.
John Witte, Jr., Professor of Law and director of the Law and Religion Program at Emory University, warns that contemporary liberal attitudes toward marriage ultimately will produce a family that is "haphazardly bound together in the common pursuit of selfish ends".
In From Sacrament to Contract, Witte has argued that John Stuart Mill's secular and contractarian conceptualisation of marriage, based on Enlightenment presuppositions, provided the theoretical justification for the present-day transformation of Anglo-American marriage law.
Romano Cessario, a Catholic Professor of Systematic Theology, in a review of Witte’s book (From Sacrament to Contract) in First Things, suggests that an answer to Nietzche's pessimism (as echoed by Witte) and one that might address the current state of marriage in the West would be to revive the sacramental view of marriage among Christians.
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