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By Rob Marus

            The rhetoric is heating up. As November 7 draws near, both political parties are trying to cash in on voter concern for “family values.”  But whose family? And whose values?

            Surveys suggest the family is a major issue for the vast majority of Americans. The mention of "family values" often precedes a rehearsed list of hot-button social issues. And for many Americans, those family values are synonymous with Christian values. But are they really?

            Check out America’s evangelical subculture. Hundreds of Christian-oriented books and magazines contain the word “family” in their titles. Hundreds of ministries and churches incorporate “family” into their names. Church gyms are now called family life centers.

Even professional sports teams get into the act. The St. Louis Cardinals periodically host Christian Family Day at the ballpark, when parents can bring their children to see sanctified sluggers like J.D. Drew play baseball on a day when no beer is sold at (note the irony) Busch Stadium.

            What would Jesus say about all this?

Many people would be surprised to learn that the same Savior who condemned divorce and revered marriage nonetheless valued some things more than family.

  Jesus on family

            Jesus didn’t talk much about preserving traditional families. In fact, he had some rather startling things to say on the subject:

            * In Matthew 10, Jesus said he had not come to earth to bring peace but rather “to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.  A man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.”

            Jesus added: “Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. Anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”

            * In Luke 9:61, Jesus had strong words for a would-be follower who wanted to go back and see his family one more time: “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”

            * In Mark 10:29-31, Jesus says those who must leave their “home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children” to follow him will be rewarded.

            * And, in Luke 14:26, perhaps the family-values coup de grace: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”

            At the very least Jesus seems to be pointing us away from idolizing human concepts of family. But modern-day American Christians may have done just that.

Family and politics

            In every election cycle since 1992, the term “family values” has been bandied about by both political parties, each trying to paint their policies as more “pro-family” than the next guy’s.

Leaders of the Religious Right particularly have adopted the phrase “pro-family” as code language for policies they support. Someone who supports government-sanctioned prayers in public schools and opposes abortion rights probably will be labeled pro-family.

But that’s not always fair or accurate, according to author Cameron Lee. “Each side in a political debate wants to portray itself as the guardian of the best and truest values of society,” he told FaithWorks. “The implication is that if you don’t vote with our ‘pro-family’ platform, then you must be ‘anti-family’ and, by implication, anti-Christian or anti-American.”

             “There are Christians with evangelical commitments who may disagree with the substance of some ‘pro-family’ public-policy proposals but would chafe at the implication that they are not supportive of family life,” says Lee, a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif.

            For instance, can a capital-gains tax cut truly be described as a pro-family measure if most families aren't wealthy enough to benefit from it?

            Some things that are clearly not good values get wrapped in pro-family language. Rodney Clapp, a former Christianity Today editor and author of Families at the Crossroads, says that many family values that appear good on the surface can be abused in a very sub-Christian way.

“There is no doubt that in certain election cycles, particularly that of the elder George Bush, ‘family values’ were implicated as racist code words,” Clapp told FaithWorks. “We were told, for instance, that family values were exemplified by intact nuclear families, in opposition to ‘welfare mothers.’ And you know what color most of them are supposed to be.

            “So, family values are emphatically not consonant with Christian values in all cases.”

Whose family values?

            In his book Beyond Family Values, Lee presents a case for rejecting the family-values language as ill-defined, subjective and relativistic. “Let us say that some aspects of what people mean by the phrase are compatible with biblical belief but are not necessarily directly derived from the Bible,” Lee told FaithWorks.

In Beyond Family Values, Lee cited studies that suggest evangelical Christians both define the concept of family and assign prominence to a hierarchy of family-related values in ways almost identical to the culture at large. Thus Lee concludes that American Christianity -- at least as it relates to the institution of the family -- is a “subculture” rather than an “alternative culture.” In other words, when it comes to how we conceive of family, we really aren’t that different from other Americans.

            Clapp adds that the modern concept of family that most American Christians hold is shaped more by the American part of their identity than by the Christian part. “The family typically sanctioned in recent family-values enthusiasms is a Victorian and post-industrial structure of family,” he says.

“Family is privatized, made a sentimental refuge from the public world of politics and economics. Romantic love is the major motive for marriage and selecting a spouse. The woman is made paramount in the home, her special realm. None of these things were true of European families before industrialization.”

            Lee notes that early Americans had a different conception of family than their modern counterparts. For instance, Puritans in colonial New England had a much more public view of family life. Every aspect of family life was regulated by the government and the church -- which in many cases were one in the same. Though family-values proponents today often look wistfully on the Puritan era as a time of public piety, strong families and obedient children, Lee says they probably would be very uncomfortable with the amount of regulation the church/state imposed on Puritan families.

The price of prosperity

            Bringing it into the 20^th century, Lee contends that the so-called ideal of the American family -- a two-parent, middle-class household where the father is the sole bread-winner and Mom stays home with the kids -- is in reality more a reflection of the culture and politics of the 1950s than anything biblical.

            There are reasons why this model became the norm. Post-World War II prosperity gave Americans a higher standard of living then ever before. Lee argues that the American family came to function as a unit of people designed to consume goods and teach their offspring to be good, study hard and become model citizens in order to pursue even greater prosperity.

But times and economics changed in the 1970s. Women began to go to work in larger numbers in order to maintain the standard of living that their 1950s parents had taught them was essential to the American dream. Most parents were forced to spend more and more time away from their children in order to make enough money to maintain that mythical living standard.

            And don’t forget that the postwar ideal left many families out in the cold. “We must remember that the 1950s were a pre-civil rights era of racial and cultural anxieties that brought us lynchings, McCarthyism and bomb shelters,” Lee writes.

And not all families were healthy or happy -- nor are they today. Christian families today experience physical, emotional and sexual abuse as often as the general population. And recent studies have shown that evangelical Christians in this country have an even higher rate of divorce than the general population.      

            Moreover, the recent focus on the family is unsettling to a growing segment of the population -- single adults -- who make up about half of all U.S. households.

Singles are often made to feel left out by a Christian culture that talks as if they're incomplete without spouses, says Mike McMillan of New Zealand, who started an Internet magazine, Purposeful Singleness, to counter that thinking (www.singleness.org).

“Excuse me, but I am a complete human being!" McMillan says. "Colossians 2:10 tells me -- and I believe it -- that we have been given fullness in Christ. This is more than an abstract theological point. Do marrieds know the insult a single person with a full life and a significant ministry can feel when told that he or she is ‘incomplete?'”

A lesser god

            Clapp concludes that the post-industrial model of family may serve a lesser god than the God whom Christians are called to serve. “What goods or ultimate aims does the post-industrial family serve?” he asks. “Privatized and domesticated as it is by definition, it serves the aims of late or consumer capitalism."

            But that’s not a necessarily Christian goal, Clapp continued. “The ultimate good Christians are called to serve is the kingdom of God, [which is] not, I dare say, synonymous with consumer capitalism."

            Lee and Clapp both emphasize that Christian families should cultivate virtues rather than values, and specifically those virtues that are true to the Gospel.

“Values are attitudes and preferences the individual chooses for him or herself. They are what the person values," Clapp says. But virtues are “those excellences that exist outside any particular individual’s preference."

"Faithful monogamy is not one of my values if I don’t feel like embracing it. [However,] it remains a virtue whether or not I am hot for my neighbor’s wife.” 

The family of God    

            Once while teaching, Jesus was told that his biological mother and brothers were waiting outside for him. “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked in Mark 3:33-35. Looking at the followers seated around him, Jesus said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”

            The bottom line: Any time people are more loyal to a human concept of family than to the virtues embodied in the gospel, then family becomes an idol. That doesn’t mean Jesus is anti-family. It just means he wants us to focus on the family of God at least as much as we do on human families.        

- Rob Marus is a free-lance writer in Jefferson City, Mo.  

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