Commentary Mary Eberstadt, senior research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., wrote several years ago, “The new wealth in America is familial wealth, and the new poverty, familial poverty.” I was reminded of those words as I studied a new report (pdf) by W. Bradford Wilcox and the Institute for Family Studies looking at the state of marriage and family in America as we reach (hopefully) the last stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. In September 2021, Wilcox and his team surveyed men and women between the ages of 18 and 55 about family formation. What they discovered is that the pandemic has widened the marriage/family gap between the rich and the poor, the religious and the non-religious, and conservative and the liberal. The study found that since the pandemic started in March 2020, the desire to marry among higher-income Americans (those making more than $100,000 per …