Open letters, as far as I can tell, are designed as much to galvanize popular reactions as to influence official ones. A recent letter to the synod fathers entitled "Commitment to Marriage" is no exception. The letter was written by two DC-area scholars, Thomas Farr and Hilary Towers, and includes 48 signatures attesting to the importance of conjugal marriage.

Interesting to me is the wide-ranging list of signatories, which includes usual suspects in the Public Discourse crowd as well as a good number of international voices and even a few "everymen." The claims made in the letter, however, on the importance of marriage are of universal importance, and so such broad representation is entirely appropriate and logical.

What is perhaps less obvious is the particular popular reaction that the letter, by its "open" character, tends to suggest. Lately we've seen plenty of similar attempts, given political circumstances in the US, to influence a cultural conversation on the nature and importance of conjugal marriage. On the other hand, we have seen comparatively little in the way of connecting a suggested conversation to our own conjugal marriages in particular.

"Commitment to Marriage" is rather unique in that the recommended course of action is almost surely not expected to be implemented by the addressees (i.e., the Holy Father and the synod fathers), but instead by folks much more akin to the signatories, broad ranging and disparate as they are. In fact, the "practical ways to create and sustain" marriage commitments at the heart of the letter are, for the most part, things that a synod could simply never effect: for example, "Create small, vibrant networks of strong married couples as mentors at the parish level," and "Educate parishioners on the extraordinary influence they can have on the marriages of friends and family."

Another telling emphasis lies on the preservation of "what is right and just in existing marriage laws, to resist any changes to those laws that would further weaken the institution." This is linked to a more aggressive goal of defending "religious freedom" in divorce courts.

Open letters are useful things, and the ideas put forth here as well as the venerable list of names command serious attention. Yet they might also suggest a waning prognosis for the fate of conjugal marriage in the West. It's hard to deny—especially now—that the fight for marriage has been or will likely soon become anything other than a shellacking by the revisionists. Language of "commitment" befits a scene more like Thermopylae than the Battle of the Bulge. Open letters designed as therapeutic instruments rather than as official ones show a different, unfamiliar face to many who have for quite a while been able to avoid certain harsh realities by propping up conversations and "commitments" of a more propositional nature.

Marriage will, I suspect, never be "lost." But it may for a time be occupied, and it will invariably require us who are committed to it to become more modest in our expectations and more attentive to our individual vocations, lest even these therapeutic exercises lose their potency.

Andrew M. Haines is the editor and founder of Ethika Politika, and co-founder and chief operating officer at Fiat Insight.