Over the next few months we will be hearing lots about income inequality. The president has made that a major theme in 2014. Some trying to score political points will note that income inequality in America has grown significantly when he has been president. But I want to focus on one thing that is effective in dealing with poverty and income inequality. That is marriage.

Ari Fleischer makes the case for marriage in a recent column. He served as press secretary for President George W. Bush and explains that one of the most significant contributing factors for poverty is the breakdown of the family. He even argues that the president who was mostly raised by a single mother and his grandparents is an ideal person to take up the cause.

According the data analyzed by the Beverly LaHaye Institute, poverty is relatively rare in households with two married parents. In 2012, only 7.5 percent of them lived in poverty. Contrast that with a full third (33.9%) of single mother households that live in poverty.

There is every reason to believe the problem will grow worse as we have more and more children raised in female-headed families. A study by the Heritage Foundation found that more than a quarter (28.6%) of children born to a white mother were born out of wedlock. More than half (52.5%) of Hispanic-American children and more than seven out of ten (72.3%) African-American children were also born out of wedlock.

After 50 years of a war on poverty, we have learned that sending checks to families in poverty rarely is able to bring them out of poverty. We have spent over $20 trillion (in current dollars) since 1964, and have not made much of a dent in the poverty figures.

Marriage is a key factor. The Heritage Foundation study discovered that the poverty rate for white married couples was just 3.2 percent and for black married couples was only 7 percent. However, the poverty rate for non-married families was at least five times greater.

If we want to truly address the problem of poverty and income inequality, we need to talk about the importance of marriage.

Predicting the future is always difficult. Just look at the various predictions that educated people have made in the past about what our lives would be like in the 21^st century. Paul Milo has even written a book with the title: Your Flying Car Awaits. His book is full of inaccurate predictions about what our world today would be like.

These prognosticators believed we would live in a world of robot butlers, flying cars, lunar vacations, and predictable weather. Some of these predictions were reinforced by TV shows like The Six Million Dollar Man or cartoons like the Jetsons. We don’t have bionic bodies, though there has been significant progress in producing artificial limbs.

Our homes have computers, hi-tech TV screens, and microwave ovens. But they don’t have any robots making our lives easier. And we don’t have cities underground or under water.

We might also be glad that we don’t have eugenics, baby farms, and Big Brother controlling behavior and even controlling our minds. Many of these dystopic visions have fortunately not come to pass.

Predictions that have been remarkably accurate were the ones Issac Asimov wrote about in 1964. Much of what he wrote fifty years ago has stood the test of time. He predicted that electroluminescent panels would be in common use. We see these everywhere today as retail signs and lighting.

He predicted that “communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone.” Skype, FaceTime, and Google Hangout are all examples of this in our world.

He also predicted that “the screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books.” Our smart phones, tablets, and laptop computers allow us to do this every day.

All of this is to say that it is very difficult to predict the future. For every futurist (like Isaac Asimov) that got it right, there are hundreds that got it wrong. You can literally fill whole books with all the inaccurate predictions.

Yesterday when I talked about the war on poverty, I mentioned that many of the challenges facing the poor are not economic but social, cultural, and spiritual. Today I want to focus on one issue: marriage.

William Galston is a former advisor to President Clinton and has concluded that the primary cause of poverty in America today is the breakdown of marriage. By that he means the impact that out of wedlock births can have on whether a person lives in poverty. For example, U.S. Census Bureau data shows that the rate of poverty for single mothers is about five times as high as the rate of poverty for married households.

More specifically, William Galston has found that in order to avoid being poor you must do three things: (1) graduate from high school, (2) wait until age 20 to have children, and (3) wait until getting married to have children. He has found that only 8 percent of people who do those three things are poor. Put another way, young people who follow these three simple rules have a 92 percent chance of staying above the poverty line. By contrast, a young person who breaks just one of these rules, has a 79 percent chance of ending up below the poverty line.

I think you can see how much marriage and out of wedlock childbirth are such strong predictors of poverty. Obviously, this country has its share of entrenched, generational poverty. But it also shows how much lifestyle choices contribute to poverty.

Also consider that the 8 percent who do these three things and are still poor includes people who will be there temporarily. For example, it includes families where the father has lost a job. And it includes unskilled immigrants, who start out at the lowest rung of the income ladder but are able to improve their economic situation over time. Some of the people in that 8 percent won’t stay there forever.

The next time you hear the rhetoric about helping the poor, remember what William Galston discovered when he worked in the Clinton administration.

Fifty years ago President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty.” Many critics have argued that if this was indeed a war, then poverty was the victor. That may be a crass response, but it is easy to see why critics would say such a thing.

The number of Americans living in poverty is higher today than it was in 1964. It isn’t that we haven’t tried to make a difference. It isn’t we haven’t spent lots of money in the war on poverty. Trillions of dollars have been spent to alleviate poverty, yet we seem to be losing ground not gaining ground.

Many of the programs were no doubt launched with a great deal of idealism. But when they weren’t working, few wanted to dismantle them for fear of being labeled as insensitive to the needs of the poor. Some welfare programs became quite partisan in their orientation. The editors of National Review point out that the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents “the welfare bureaucrats at the Administration for Children and Families, is a large political donor that gives about 94 percent of its largesse to Democrats.”

There have been attempts to restructure our welfare society. Newt Gingrich reminds us in a recent interview that welfare reform was an important achievement by the Republican Congress that Democratic President Clinton ended up signing. He believes it is important for Congress and citizens to be “actively involved in trying to find ways that work to help Americans.” He believes the first step is to have the “courage to stand up to the left and insist that we look at why, after 50 years and $16 trillion, did big government fail?”

I also believe that churches and Christian ministries can have an important role in dealing with poverty. The poor not only have economic challenges but social, cultural, and spiritual challenges. An excellent book on what Christians have done in the past and what they can do in the future is Marvin Olasky’s book, The Tragedy of American Compassion. We as Christians need to consider what we can do to help the poor.

The HHS mandate when into effect this month. It requires that all employer-sponsored insurance plans must provide free contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization. Numerous religious organizations and businesses with religious perspectives have been forced to do something that violates their religious convictions.

This issue that many Christians have been following was pushed back into the news when Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor granted a stay to the Little Sisters of the Poor. This is an order of the Catholic Church that operates a nursing home. Although it provided a reprieve for the nuns, the Justice Department called for a removal of the injunction.

This action by the justice only helps them and a few other associated groups. Most of the religious groups are still under the governmental mandate. In March, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on behalf of two groups. The owners of Hobby Lobby and Mardel brought one of the suits. The arts-and-craft chain and bookstore run their business on biblical principles. The other suit involves Conestoga Wood Specialties, which is a cabinet-making company owned by a Mennonite family.

James Capretta, at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, argues that this confrontation between government and religious groups was manufactured by the administration. Providing “free” contraception and sterilization procedures was not a burning national crisis that demanded immediate attention. Contraceptives have long been readily available and are relatively inexpensive.

When the issue surfaced during the 2012 election, the administration and its political allies saw an opportunity to make it a divisive social issue. Anyone who opposed the mandate was charged with engaging in a “war on women.” The conflict today owes its origins to the 2012 election geared to attract women voters.

It is possible that the Supreme Court will remedy the situation, but that solution is still months off. Meanwhile, religious non-profit organizations and businesses find themselves under the oppression of the HHS mandate.

John Stossel found that there was one topic his audience wanted to know more about. His TV producers asked their Facebook audience to vote on a topic they would most like to hear discussed on his year-end show. The overwhelming winner was the educational standards program known as Common Core.

If you don’t know anything about Common Core, you are not alone. A Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll on American attitudes toward education revealed that nearly two-thirds (63%) of Americans are clueless about the Common Core Standards. They better get informed since 45 states have adopted those standards.

Common Core is but another top-down approach to educational reform that is now being adopted in many states because of funding. In the past, many governors and former governors endorsed the program. Many have changed their minds once they have seen what Common Core really means.

It is understandable why many jumped on board. We are spending more money on public education that ever before. Per-student spending has tripled, but test results are stagnant. Central planning and standards aren’t the answer. Imposing a single teaching plan on 15,000 school districts isn’t the answer.

Michelle Malkin has written a series of columns about the standards in various disciplines. A Stanford University math professor on the Common Core validation panel concluded that it would place American students two years behind their peers in other high-achieving countries. The literature standards de-emphasize literary works for “informational texts.” A world geography lesson on Islam banned words like “terrorist” in favor of the term “freedom fighter.”

John Whitehead is concerned with the methodology of Common Core. He believes it will “create a generation of test-takers capable of little else, molded and shaped by the federal government and its corporate allies into what it consider to be ideal citizens.”

It is not surprising that many concerned parents, teachers, and school boards are pushing back against the Common Core curriculum. They reject the standards and feel that Common Core is rotten to the core.

In our modern world we take for granted that people should have compassion for one another. But that was not always the case. Compassion from the Christians in the Roman Empire demonstrated the love of Christ and also set the standard for our modern view of compassion.

James 2 encourages us to meet the physical needs of a brother or sister who is “ill-clad and in lack of daily food.” We are not to say to them to “go in peace, be warmed and filled.” We are admonished to show compassion. This was radically different from the moral climate of the ancient world.

Rodney Stark in his book, The Triumph of Christianity, explains that “in the pagan world, and especially among the philosophers, mercy was regarded as a character defect and pity as a pathological emotion: because mercy involves providing unearned help or relief, it is contrary to justice.”

When plagues broke out in the Roman Empire, the mortality rate among Christians was much lower than among the pagans. The pagans fled from the sick and tried to avoid any contact with the afflicted. When “their first symptoms appeared, victims often were thrown into the streets, where the dead and dying lay in piles.” Christians instead ministered to the sick by giving them two things they needed: food and water.

Why did Christians respond differently? First, they were following the example set by Jesus who taught mercy towards the sick. Second, the early Christians “believed that death was not the end and that life was a time of testing.” They were willing to sacrifice themselves in ways the pagans never would.

Rodney Stark concludes “that Christian nursing would have reduced mortality by as much as two-thirds!” He also added that the “fact that most stricken Christians survived did not go unnoticed lending immense credibility to Christian miracle working.” This most likely led to additional conversions.

We may take for granted the idea of compassion, but the concept came from the sacrifice of the early Christians who ministered to others.

Should a Christian always say yes when someone tells him to “bake me a cake?” Two homosexual men visited the Masterpiece Cake Shop and ordered a cake for their upcoming wedding reception. Jack Phillips (the owner) politely told them he could not bake their cake because of his religious beliefs opposing same-sex marriage. He offered to make them any other baked item.

The two men stormed out of the bakery determined to make an example out of Christian business owners like Jack Phillips. Within hours, he began to receive threatening phone calls, and some death threats along with boycotts and protests outside his store. Then came the lawsuit against him.

The irony in all of this is the fact that Colorado doesn’t even permit same-sex marriages (though it does allow civil unions). Nevertheless, Jack Phillips was charged under the state’s anti-discrimination law. He may feel that he has the First Amendment right to exercise his religion and act on his religious beliefs. The Colorado Civil Rights Division and a Colorado judge believe he must subordinate his religious beliefs to the ideological conformity of the homosexual community.

It is worth mentioning that Jack Phillips wasn’t just singling out homosexuals. As a devoted Christian, he has also refused to bake Halloween-themed items. The judge’s ruling in this case has put him in what some have called a “make or bake moment.” Either he bakes whatever someone desires, or he faces a stiff fine from the state of Colorado.

Lawyers and commentators say that a person’s religious freedom is important and even remind us that Jack Phillips doesn’t have to change his religious views. But, they add, society cannot let someone use their religious views to deny service to someone. I am waiting to see if they really believe this. Should a Jewish delicatessen be forced to serve food that is not Kosher? Should a Muslim be forced to serve food that is not halal?

The message this sends to Christian businesses is that you are free to have your religious beliefs, but you cannot apply them to your business if the state thinks your actions are discriminatory.