This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about front-line

theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Mola, your host and president to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville,

Kentucky.

Mart Regneris is professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin.

He earned both his MA and PhD in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at

Chapel Hill.

Professor Brigneris has devoted his research to the areas of family, marriage, religion, and sexual behavior.

He's published dozens of academic articles, as well as four books with Oxford University Press.

In addition to his academic and teaching responsibilities,

Professor Rigneris is a senior fellow at the Austin Institute for the study of

family and culture. His most recent book is The Future of Christian Marriage, and this book is the topic of our conversation today.

Professor Mark Rignaris, welcome to Thinking in Public.

Thanks, Al, good to be with you.

Yeah, you know, your book follows a trajectory of the research and writing you've been doing for a long time,

but there's one aspect of it that surprise me, so I just want to start out by asking,

why is this not about marriage or Christian marriage in the United States?

You're really taking on something more ambitious than that.

Yeah, that's a good question. The thing is it grew out of the last book, Cheap Sex, and I had, which was entirely United States and its focus.

And so after that, it kind of went through this, you know, intellectual depression didn't last too long, but they're like, what am I going to do next? And I really wanted something positive. So I wanted to focus on marriage, but you know I had a chapter on marriage

mentalities I think in that book and I kind of thought I got my head around how this was connected to marriage among young adults in the United States and I thought, well, okay, I haven't really done a deep dive on Christians.

But like, well, maybe there, it's time to take this international a little bit

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