The left has recast marriage not as a lifelong contract, but as a civil right, a choice, one of many paths to empowerment. An old-fashioned covenant that binds two people in mutual submission sits uneasily in a secular ideology that holds personal autonomy as the highest good.

WHEN Jennifer Maggio was in her early 20s, she was raising two children by herself on the $750 per month that she earned as a manager at a furniture store in Vidalia, La. She went to college at night and was living in subsidized housing when she felt God urge her to make an unexpected choice. “I started tithing. To tithe while I was living on food stamps — that was a tough decision,” she said. “The conversation I had with God was: ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. This is about the pastor wanting a new truck.’ ”

She dropped a $75 check in the offering bucket. “I kept doing it, and the bills continued to get paid.” Within a year, she got a job offer from a bank in Baton Rouge and “went from food stamps to a six-figure income,” she said. Ms. Maggio credits God, not government assistance, with helping her climb out of poverty. She later married and founded Life of a Single Mom Ministries to help other women. She hates talking politics, but says she has always been an “extremely conservative Republican.”

Politically speaking, Ms. Maggio is unusual: in 2008 and 2012, three-quarters of single mothers voted for President Obama. It’s tempting to dismiss a Republican single mom as a dupe persuaded to vote against her own interests, a victim of what Thomas Frank called “the politics of self-delusion.”

This assessment is misguided. One polling firm called single mothers “the largest progressive voting bloc in the country,” but Democrats should not take single moms for granted, even as Republicans have shown that they would rather sabotage the basic functions of government than extend the social safety net.

The single mothers who reject the politics of their peers tell us something about the limits of the liberal effort to redefine cultural ideals. The left has recast marriage not as a lifelong contract, but as a civil right, a choice, one of many paths to empowerment. An old-fashioned covenant that binds two people in mutual submission sits uneasily in a secular ideology that holds personal autonomy as the highest good.

But that covenant still means something to many Americans — including single moms, who have every reason to be cynical about traditional marriage. Some have been persuaded by evangelicals that they have a stake in defending conservative ideas about gender and family. Others have found their own way to a rejection of the left’s vision of social welfare. Feminism fails to resonate with many of the women who seem most likely to embrace it.

Since the rise of homes for “fallen women” and unwed mothers in the early 19th century, American Christians have worried about their plight with a mixture of compassion and contempt. If some of these women — widows and deserted wives — were the epitome of the “deserving poor,” others were a pox on their community, a sign that God’s law had been broken by divorce or extramarital sex. Maternity homes for unwed mothers concealed residents’ names to protect the honor of their families. The Christians who ran these charities believed that seclusion from the sinful world, combined with tutelage in child care and God’s word, could rescue these women and return them to respectable society.

Today, conservative Christians see that God-fearing communities are not immune to unplanned pregnancy or divorce. The president of Focus on the Family, Jim Daly, candidly tells journalists that his alcoholic father was absent for most of his youth. The anti-abortion ethic has motivated outreach to single mothers, and a new movement is beginning that is distinct from the familiar network of adoption organizations and crisis pregnancy centers.

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