Does marriage currently exist in society?

To put it more bluntly, traditional marriage as a public and cultural institution has not existed in our society for quite some time. What mainstream America, both conservative and liberal, religious and secular, has been and is now calling "marriage" is not really marriage, but a kind of contractually formalized "couplehood." We have maintained the term "marriage" as an esteemed and protected word, but what that word once signified has lost its public existence within our culture.

...

If we are truly to defend marriage in this country, and not the contractual couplehood that has for some time now been disguising itself as "marriage," then it is imperative for us to recover the full meaning of that beautiful covenant whose embodiment is now clandestine and highly countercultural. This will, I think, have to be done from the ground up, and it will take generations to succeed, if in fact it succeeds at all. It will have to be lived out first in small communities that embrace and support the self-giving, procreative, and indissoluble nature of that union, and who do so not as an unjustifiable exclusion, but as a positive commitment to proect such an important, difficult, and beautiful undertaking.

- Christopher Oleson in the Jan / Feb 2009 issue of Touchstone Magazine, p. 32-33, 37

Given that divorce rates fall for those who regularly attend church (as opposed to those who'd label themselves as Christian in a survey), seems like there's some evidence of a Christian counter-culture in action.