A new paradigm for family policy is needed to bridge the partisan gap.
The American family debate will continue to heat up and take new forms now that Republican majorities have taken over the Senate and House of Representatives. The postelection conservative majorities have two options in the family debate: They, too, could drive toward the center, push Democrats out of the way, and claim the middle for themselves. Or they could move to the extreme Right in hopes that the conservative momentum would pull the rest of the nation along. We urge the first strategy, not only for what it means politically, but for what it might contribute to the health of our religious life.
Before the heat of the recent elections, new lines of communication were developing between liberals and conservatives… These held some values in common. The neoliberals were willing to admit that there is a values dimension to the family crisis. They acknowledged, as conservatives had been arguing, that increased individualism, changes in sexual mores, and declining parental responsibility explained some of the mounting problems families face. These factors, they agreed, helped account for such trends as the growing out-of-wedlock birth rate, the growing poverty of divorced and never-married mothers, and the declining mental and physical health of the children of single parents and stepfamilies. On the other hand, neoconservatives were more willing to admit the partial truth of the standard liberal diagnosis: that the declining economy, fewer jobs, the ravages of market forces, and poorly functioning welfare programs also contribute to family woes. Neoconservatives were more willing than their old-style counterparts to acknowledge a role for government in helping poor families.
Neoconservatives were still conservative, placing their primary emphasis on changing cultural values. Neoliberals were still liberals, seeing a role for government programs that support poor families. The meeting ground between neoconservatives and neoliberals on the role of government was the increasing tendency of both groups to turn to tax inducements rather than direct welfare payments.
Is it possible for something similar to happen in the churches? Can new breeds of religious neoconservatives and neoliberals emerge and cooperate in addressing the family issues that divide the churches? What would such a new alliance look like? What would be its substance and strategy? What central themes would inform a more productive middle ground in the churches?
A program for cooperation for saving the family in America.
Here are some substantive and strategic approaches we think are important. If cooperation could develop on the following points, good things might happen for American churches, families, and public life.
1. Religious liberals and conservatives should reconsider, at least for the moment, the narrowly defined sexual issues that have preoccupied them for the last two decades: abortion and homosexuality. We do not mean that these issues should be dropped, but that they be set within a broad-scale analysis of what is happening to families and children and what the church can do to help. The family viewed as a major social issue — some think the major issue of our time — has had difficulty gaining the attention of churches because of their preoccupation with abortion and homosexuality.
Few church people are well informed about the plunge into poverty of large numbers of mothers and their children following divorce or out-of-wedlock births. Forty-seven percent of all families headed by single mothers live in poverty. Few church people take seriously how these conditions correlate with the declining well-being of children.
Princeton University sociologist Sarah McLanahan, who has done definitive research on single parenthood, wrote, “Half of all children born in the 1980s will live with a single mother before reaching the age of 18. Half of these children will be poor. As compared with children from the same social class who live with both parents, children of single mothers are twice as likely to drop out of high school and become single parents themselves, and half again as likely to have trouble finding and keeping a steady job.”
Why aren’t churches paying more attention to these trends? Mainline churches for over two decades have viewed family problems as privatistic issues and allowed their ministries to families and youth to languish, especially at the national level. Conservatives have been far more interested in families but have often failed to understand the complexity of family problems. Both have been so preoccupied with abortion and homosexuality that they have glossed over the less sensational stresses of people trying to raise children to healthy adulthood. It is now time to reconfigure these two divisive issues in a larger context. If this were to happen, new light might shine forth on both issues.
2. On family matters, both religious conservatives and liberals need to use the Bible with a greater sense of context.
Christian liberals get their family theory more from egalitarian contractual theory than they do from biblical texts. They neglect such texts as Matthew 5:32 on divorce, 1 Corinthians 7 on the burdens of marriage, or Ephesians 5:20-33 on the analogy between a husband’s love and Christ’s sacrificial love. Liberals are attuned to passages suggesting the equality of the sexes, such as the principle of neighbor love (Matt. 22:39), and Galatians 3:28, which says that in Christ there is “neither male nor female.” To liberals, these passages suggest equality in marital and family relations. This is as far as they are inclined to go with the Bible. They avoid Ephesians 5 for fear it can be used to justify “patriarchal” teachings.
Christian conservatives gravitate toward the Ephesians passage and others like it (e.g., Col. 3:18 and 1 Peter 3:1). Many conservatives, though not all, see in these passages a divinely sanctioned family plan – a benevolent-love paternalism – that husbands and fathers should exercise with faithful responsibility, and wives and children should accept in loving obedience. But this understanding of God’s plan for families often gets mixed with the separate-spheres doctrine of the nineteenth-century industrial family with its bread-winner father and domestic mother. When this happens, such passages are used to give divine justification to this form of family that existed in the United States from roughly 1830 to 1960. Whatever virtues this family form had, it cannot be called “the Christian form of the family” as such.
Both conservative and liberal church people miss the various contexts of these so-called headship passages. Many conservatives miss the egalitarianism of the early church. Some also miss the way male leadership passages are qualified by the obligations of sacrificial love — a self-giving love that follows the love of Christ for the church. Although these passages — as liberals and feminists charge — reflect a modified patriarchy, all parties miss how these passages challenge the models of male authority typical of the Greco-Roman world, which was the social and cultural context of early Christianity. In that world, male agency, freedom, and domination were celebrated virtues. Wives were confined primarily to the home with servants and with family. Men enjoyed a range of sexual freedom that was denied to women. To call fathers and husbands to a life of sacrificial love in which wives are treated “as their own bodies” (Eph. 5:28) was revolutionary and seditious in this novel situation.
Religious conservatives should make less out of the male spiritual authority that these passages seem to grant and more out of their direction toward male servanthood and mutuality — “submitting yourselves one to another” (Eph. 5:21). Many Christian conservatives have already taken this step. Religious liberals, on the other hand, need to acknowledge the revolutionary character of these Scriptures and how they set the stage for the subversion of patriarchy.
3. Christian liberals need to pay less attention to the social sciences on family matters; Christian conservatives need to pay more. Actually, both religious conservatives and liberals have been deeply influenced by psychology. How can we explain the colossal popularity of James Dobson without pointing to his particular way of synthesizing interpretations of modern psychology with interpretations of Christianity? But conservatives and liberals put their use of psychology into different value contexts. Conservatives place psychological insights into the framework of a community that has a place for biblical and ecclesial authority. Liberals use psychological insights in the framework of a community that supports individualism and personal liberation. Both groups use the language of community, but their concept of community is very different.
Liberals tend to use psychology and the social sciences to adapt to changing family trends. They are likely to believe that these changes cannot be stopped and that the right combination of governmental and therapeutic interventions can at least cut their losses. Religious liberals, under the influence of the social sciences, see family ministries as helping individuals adapt to family disruption rather than finding ways to prevent it. They emphasize a supportive and nonjudgmental ministry to the divorced, to single parents, to lonely children, and to tension-filled stepfamilies so that they can all do a little better. Their instincts are more than half right. They have little to say, however, to young people, premarital couples, and young married couples about how to prepare concretely for enduring marriage and parenthood in our challenging world.
Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to be heroic in their goals to reverse family decline. They seem to believe that if young Christians have the right values, the right commitments, and understand the true meaning of marriage and the family, they can successfully withstand the pressures of work, declining economy, divided spheres, seditious cultural values, mounting tax burdens, and the growing intrusions into families of both market values and bureaucratic control. Conservatives need to use the social sciences to be more realistic, but they need to do this in ways that will not undermine their faith that they can reverse the more damaging features of present family trends.
[see #3477 for part B]