Continuation of article on how to improve family values in America.
4. Liberals tend to look too much to government for solving family problems; conservatives too rapidly dismiss the government as a useful resource. Liberals should look to government less; conservatives should look to government more.
Since their 1960s successes in using government to make racial discrimination illegal, religious liberals have too often thought they were fulfilling the church’s mission if they could persuade the government to do what they believed was just and good. In the process, liberal churches, especially at the leadership level, have often been more concerned about what the state should do than what churches should do. As evidence, note that during the 1970s and ’80s the national family programs of most mainline Protestant denominations were severely cut, while lobbying efforts for various federal programs received continued support.
Christian conservatives have a reputation — not always justified — for being against family-support programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, and Medicaid. Many religious conservatives believe that these programs undermine family values, function as welfare traps, support out-of-wedlock births, and encourage dependency; and they believe that if everyone followed Christian family ideals, welfare programs would not be needed.
On this point — the attitude of the church toward government — religious conservatives and liberals have the most to learn from each other. This is also the point on which conservatives and liberals in the church can learn something from the pre-election dialogue between political neoconservatives and neoliberals. Although tensions continued, both groups agreed that some forms of short-term welfare are needed, that welfare recipients have responsibilities as well as rights, that welfare should not become a trap, and that it should not encourage teenage pregnancy and out-of-wedlock births. Furthermore, the consensus held that government assistance should not contradict generally held moral standards. Hence, government should resist merely expedient remedies and communicate moral expectations consistent with settled moral traditions. It is important for that emerging consensus to hold in the new Republican order.
This new consensus is important, not just for what it implies for government family programs, but for what it suggests for a wider cultural synthesis on family matters. Since Charles Murray’s October 1993 editorial in the “Wall Street Journal” in which he predicted the rise of a new “white underclass,” there has been a deeper concern among liberal elites about the health of American families. Murray, in his less inflammatory pre-Bell Curve days, wrote that the out-of-wedlock birthrate in the white population, now at 22 percent, is the same as it was for the black community in the early 1960s. The out-of-wedlock birthrate in the black community has now risen to 68 percent. Murray argued that whites are now undergoing the same consequences blacks experienced — deepening poverty for mothers and declining well-being for children. Murray held that the family issue is the biggest public issue of our time, and he succeeded in convincing leading liberals and conservatives he was right.
But Murray would enlist the help of conservatives, in politics and in the church, to support the withdrawal of all government supports for single mothers, with the exception of medical insurance for their children. If this
happens, he believes, couples will take marriage more seriously, confine procreation to marriage, divorce less frequently, or turn to extended family, church, or community organizations if divorce or out-of-wedlock birth throw them into poverty.
If an unfeeling conservativism replaces the fragile consensus that existed before the election, Murray’s radical approach is much more likely to be tried. And we think this goes too far. Families need government supports for a wide variety of reasons. The neoliberal/neoconservative proposal to preserve family assistance, make it temporary, and connect it with basic moral expectations, is worth refining and trying.
Even if this consensus were to endure and mature, neither Christian conservatives nor liberals should invest all of their attention in government programs and public policy initiatives. This message is especially important for liberals. Religious liberals need to attend once again to their theology of marriage and the family. They need to do historical work of the kind they have neglected. They need new programs with youth that start very young and help them to replace current individualistic cultural scripts about sexuality and the family with the classic perspectives of the Christian synthesis. Religious conservatives, on the other hand, need to continue their present energy on family issues, but with a more accurate sense of context in
handling ancient texts.
5. Religious conservatives and liberals should be alert to the subversive effects of market forces. Both groups should be more sophisticated in relating family issues to market dynamics.
Religious liberals often pride themselves on being critical of capitalism and its excesses. Some mainline religious leaders have been socialist or even somewhat Marxist in their antimarket attitudes. Conservatives are often seen as promarket, occasionally as ideological defenders of its injustices.
But the family issue shows the positions of both sides to be more complex. Religious conservatives have had less relish for women joining the labor market. From one angle, they look patriarchal and appear to confine women to domestic life. Liberals, on the other hand, have appeared to encourage wives and mothers to work outside the home, seeming to be progressivist, profeminist, and egalitarian.
There is, however, another angle of vision. Religious conservatives may be inadvertently the true resisters of competitive market values and the spread into private life of cost-benefit modes of thinking. By preferring that mothers stay at home and by granting dignity to full-time homemaking, they block the spread of market values into the inner life of families. On the other hand, religious liberals may have unwittingly sold out to the growing dominance of cost-benefit and rational-choice ways of thinking, even in the home. Religious liberals are far more likely to celebrate the dual-income, 90-hour-a-week working family. Yet, when both parents work full-time, both are fully absorbed in the world of market values, demands, efficiencies, and logics. The small children of dual-income families do not easily conform to the pressures of market forces.
We believe both Christian conservatives and liberals should affirm the market as an effective method for generating wealth while, at the same time, they should be vigilant against the ways it can undermine families. The market hurts families by taking too much of their time, by engendering individualistic and cost-benefit mentalities even in intimate affairs, and by promoting consumerism and hedonism in both children and their parents.
Christian men and women alike should resist the spread of market forces by spending less time at paid work. We will not solve this problem by preserving the two-sphere ideology of the industrial family that religious conservatives baptized for decades. We join with Harvard social scientist Jacqueline Olds and her team in their 1992 paper titled “Part-Time Employment and Marital Well-Being.” Their research shows that the families with the most marital, parental, and child satisfaction are those that work one-and-a-half jobs or approximately 60 hours a week between them. Although this may not be financially possible for many couples, we believe it is an ideal toward which society should aim. (This does not mean necessarily that mothers and wives should be the ones with the half-time employment, although that may be best in many cases.)
There are several ways the market can be attuned to the needs of families. Employers might experiment with some 30-hour-a-week positions. Job sharing could be used more frequently. More half-time employment with partial benefit packages might be offered. These positions could become full-time after children grow older.
There are many other ways Christian conservatives and liberals can cooperate to create healthier families. Religious liberals should study the men’s programs of conservative churches. Conservative churches are clearer than most liberal churches in teaching that male responsibility is crucial in the current cultural climate. Religious liberals will want to soften the notes of male headship that sometimes pervade these programs, but liberals should acknowledge that male responsibility, not authority, is often the deeper theme of these programs. Both liberals and conservatives should work to restore the viability of the two-parent family. Today, however, it should be the equal mother-father team with flexible role definitions and permeable boundaries between domestic and public life.
Conservative and liberal churches should start their sons and daughters at a young age to prepare for equal-regard marital partnerships. They should work together to chasten the excesses of the market and force it to adapt to family needs. They should work together to fine-tune government programs. They should, as did the early church, develop leadership patterns in the churches that model egalitarian relations between the sexes. They should work together to protect their children from the demonic values of a materialistic age. They should eliminate all of their inflammatory rhetoric on family issues and search for commonalities before accentuating differences. Finally, they should go beyond the labels of conservative and liberal to find common ground in a faithful interpretation of the Christian tradition that informs them both.
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Don Browning is Alexander Campbell Professor of Religious Ethics and the Social Sciences at the Divinity School, University of Chicago, and director of the Religion, Culture, and Family Project sponsored by the Lilly Endowment. Carol Browning is a musician and researcher of the family. This article was written while they were in residence at the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton, New Jersey.
Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./CHRISTIANITY TODAY Magazine
[see #3476 for part A]