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During the 2020 worldwide lockdowns, marriage rates dropped significantly in every European country except one. One country managed to sail against the winds, experiencing a slight increase in marriage rates that year, while some Mediterranean countries saw a decrease of 42 percent. That country was Hungary.
The story of marriage in Hungary contains important lessons for us in the United States, where we continue to struggle to build stable marriages and, through them, strong families.
The rise in marriages wasn’t solely because of Hungary’s strong Christian identity. Andrew Breitbart famously argued that politics are downstream from culture. While others contend that culture is downstream from politics, if I had to wager on which side of human society drives more change, I would choose culture, which deals with the most fundamental aspects of human life and everyday existence (food, family, fine arts, faith), and thus the basic determiners of human behavior and belief. But the reality of political and cultural change defies any overly simplistic formula, and each of these spheres of human activity exerts a gravitational pull on the other.
In the case of Hungary, we see an example of the influence that policy can have over culture—and it’s something that could be easily replicated here in the United States. Hungary’s laws appear to have substantially altered cultural norms surrounding marriage and family, making marriage more popular and upending the idea of the “capstone marriage” in favor of the “cornerstone marriage.”
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban introduced several programs that promote marriage and family life. For instance, couples who marry prior to the bride’s 41st birthday receive a loan of up to 10 million Hungarian forint, which is about $33,000. One-third of the loan is forgiven if the couple has two children, and the remainder is erased if they have three or more. Having kids reduces a family’s taxes as well, up to a complete income tax exemption for life for women with four or more children. Other benefits include housing support for married couples and stipends of 5,000 forint per month for the first two years of marriage.
The results speak for themselves. The marriage rate in Hungary doubled from 2010 to 2021. Hungary now leads the EU in marriage rates. Women in Hungary also get married at a younger age than other women in the EU. At the same time, divorce rates have been cut in half since 2010 and abortion rates have halved since 2003. Teen abortions and teen births have dropped since 2016.
Compare this with the United States, where, in 2022, the percentage of households headed by a married couple was the lowest ever recorded—just 46.8 percent, versus the peak of 78.8 percent in 1949. Although the U.S. divorce rate has come down some in recent years, it remains true that about one-third of marriages end in divorce, as of 2022. In other words, the United States, like many other countries, faces a marriage crisis.
Alongside the marriage crisis, the United States—like virtually the entire globe—also faces a fertility crisis, a looming population collapse the impact of which will shake the world. Demographers generally agree that we will reach peak population this century, after which our numbers will drop off significantly. In virtually all Western nations, the fertility rate is significantly below the 2.1 children-per-woman rate needed to maintain population levels. As the BBC reports, “The world is ill-prepared for the global crash in children being born which is set to have ‘jaw-dropping’ impact on societies.”
Hungary hopes to fight off this fertility collapse through its pro-family policies, which have begun to see some success. By some accounts, the pro-family policy has led to the births of 120,000 additional children over the course of 10 years. While Hungary still hasn’t reached replacement fertility rates, it has rebounded from “lowest low fertility”—below 1.3 children per woman—to about 1.6 children per woman.
Hungary reportedly spends 5 percent of its gross domestic product on these pro-family policies, which isn’t cheap. But the destruction of families and the collapse of fertility rates isn’t cheap, either. We need people for a flourishing economy. Moreover, children and families are the soul of every nation and the guarantors of its future. The promotion of the family—the “first society” that forms the building block of all other societies—ought to top the list of priorities for any government. And strong families depend on strong marriages.
So far, Hungary’s efforts in that direction appear to be working. As Laurie DeRose writes for the Institute of Family Studies, “By making marriage economically beneficial, the Hungarian government may have helped alter the cultural image of marriage from a means of showcasing security to a means of building it.” Indeed, nations throughout the West need to return to a conception of lifelong marriage as something normal, natural, and productive of security, fulfillment, and happiness.
The United States would do well to take note of the Hungarian successes and replicate them on our shores. Our future depends on it.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Before becoming a freelance journalist and culture writer, Walker Larson taught literature and history at a private academy in Wisconsin, where he resides with his wife and daughter. He holds a master’s in English literature and language, and his writing has appeared in The Hemingway Review, Intellectual Takeout, and his Substack, The Hazelnut. He is also the author of two novels, “Hologram” and “Song of Spheres.”
