"[Focus on the Family] attempts to 'turn hearts toward home' by
reasonable, biblical and empirical insights so people will be able to
discover the founder of homes and the creator of families - Jesus Christ."
-- Focus on the Family
"If anyone comes to me and can not hate his own father and mother and
wife and children and brother and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he
cannot be my disciple." -- Jesus of Nazareth, according to Luke
14:25-26
Read together, these two statements must cause any reader to wonder, What
is going on here? How can the aims of Focus on the Family, a group
dedicated to strengthening "traditional values" by spreading Christ's
gospel, be so at odds with the vision of the biblical Jesus?
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The historical Jesus in fact appears quite often to have endorsed views that might be characterized as "antifamily."
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The answer is anything but simple. There is a deep conflict in American
society over the proper roles of men and women and over the relationship of
these roles to religious and moral values. This conflict has come to be
known as the "family values" debate. However, "family values" is a
misleading and partisan term, used by groups that champion a particular
model of family -- specifically, one based on male headship and female
subordination. These groups assume that their model of the family is
biblical. But actually there is little relationship between this model and
the Bible: the historical Jesus in fact appears quite often to have
endorsed views that might be characterized as "antifamily."
This book engages in a historical excursus from the New Testament through
Western Christian history and into American social constructions of work,
family, and gender. My goal has been to locate and identify the basis for
the current -- and deeply ahistorical -- ideology of "family values." To
this end, my text focuses on three major themes: the changing form and
definition of family over the last two millennia; the pattern of
Christianity's volatile relationship, throughout its history, to the
family; and the shifting nature of ideologies of family, determined not
only by changing family structures but also by the places where and the
ways in which societies worship.
There has never, of course, been only one form of family. The very term in
fact requires definition because it covers several distinguishable
realities of human social and economic relations, of kin and non-kin,
within households and also beyond them. These relations have been highly
malleable in human societies through the centuries, changing to reflect
different functions performed by kin and household groups in relation to
the larger society.
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There are several types of family in Hebrew scripture, none of which corresponds with the modern nuclear model.
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To complicate things further, Christianity as a religion has varied in its
stance toward the family as defined as a kinship group constituted by
marriage and procreation. For much of its history Christianity took a
negative or at least highly ambivalent view of the union of men and women
in marriage, of sexual relations, and of procreation. The ideal Christian
was seen as being unmarried, celibate, and childless -- a profile that
renders the Christian Right's effort to sanctify its concept of "the
family" as normatively biblical quite simply untenable. There are several
types of family in Hebrew scripture, none of which corresponds with the
modern nuclear model. The New Testament, for its part, offers no single
view of family. It is even, at times, frankly antifamily, though desires
for alternative family structures and for the restoration of the
patriarchal family are also expressed.
The negative view of marriage promoted by earlier Christian tradition was
reformulated in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. At
this time, celibacy was abolished as a higher Christian vocation and as a
requirement for ordained ministry. Modern Christians think Christianity
has always championed "the family," but this belief ignores three fourths
of actual Christian history. It also fails to account for the conflicted
views of sexuality and of women that continue to plague Protestant as well
as Catholic forms of Christianity. (It is with these latter that this book
is primarily concerned; Orthodox and other Eastern forms of Christianity
are considered here only in reference to the Patristic period.)
There is yet another variable that affects ideologies of family: the
changing location and role of religion. As I have noted, Christian family
ideologies have been modified from largely antifamily to largely
pro-family. But these changes conceal a multitude of differences. Earliest
church practice, whereby the worship community was located within
households but was in tension with marital relations, gradually gave way to
liturgies conducted in separate edifices, headed increasingly by celibates
who defined the married of the church as second-class Christians. When
worship moves out of houses and into institutions run by clergy, it is no
longer controlled by household members but is ruled instead from outside,
by individuals who see themselves as members of a superior caste. The
Reformation saw an attempt to make fathers (and then, in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, mothers) the primary inculcators of religious
observance within the home. Today, in the United States, the norm, even
among churchgoing Christians, is a secularized family, with very little
religious practice actually going on in the home, despite the effort on the
part of the Christian Right to turn "the family" into a religious symbol.
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Shifting ideologies involving the family and "family values" are
generally coded messages about women and how they should behave in relation
to men.
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I intend to show that shifting ideologies involving the family and "family
values" are generally coded messages about women and how they should behave
in relation to men. Such messages are inspired by the assumption that
women have departed from their proper role in the family through some
recent corrupting influence, and must be persuaded and/or coerced back into
that role by a combination of insistent propaganda (by religious and
political leaders) and political policy.
Propaganda about women's misbehavior and corruption of society as causing a
"decline" in the family is based on a misperception about the diverse work
roles women actually have played in families in the past and still play
today. This view sees women as either lesser or different, in ways that
demand their confinement to supposedly unchanging and divinely ordained
family duties such as housekeeping, child care, and care for the husband in
his domestic and sexual needs, eschewing (paid) work.
I will try to relativize such perceptions of fixed family roles in Western
Christian history by showing how changing economic configurations have
radically affected what is considered work, where work takes place, and who
does what kind of work. I will also analyze the shifting messages about
family propagated by religious and philosophical ideologues, in order to
discern their purposes. It is my belief that this type of ideological
message is typically prescriptive, rather than truly
descriptive of what is actually happening in families.
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