Good Christian men: how faith shapes fathers

Christian Century, Jan 11, 2005 by Don Browning

Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands.

By W. Bradford Wilcox. University of Chicago Press, 337 pp., $62.00; paperback, $20.00.

BY EXPLORING the contradictions between official theologies and the actual behavior of religions communities, sociologists of religion help religious people to view themselves more honestly--a sometimes deflating and even painful process. Such may be our experience in reading W. Bradford Wilcox's Soft Patriarchs, New Men, perhaps one of the most important studies of American religion to come along in recent decades.

Wilcox explores how American Protestantism shapes the behavior of husbands and fathers. He asks, "Does religion in general and Protestantism in particular oppose or support the emergence of the new father--the father committed to egalitarianism in the home on issues of paid employment for both wife and husband, child care and domestic chores?" He defines the "new man" as the father and husband who supports his wife's work outside of the home, spends time with the children, washes the dishes, attends Johnny's soccer games, helps with the school work and brings home his share of the cash.

Who does a better job of being this new husband and father--unaffiliated secular men, evangelicals who listen to the Promise Keepers or Focus on the Family, or liberal mainliners who attend older and well-established churches? Ask college students from elite schools that question, and they will probably say that most of the new fathers belong to the secular and unaffiliated group. Ask mainliners and they will say that liberal Protestant men are certainly better husbands and fathers than are the conservatives who follow the blatant patriarchy of a James Dobson or Jerry, Falwell. Ask conservative Protestants and they may tell you that they are not sure that being a new father is a good thing. According to Wilcox, none of these answers is accurate.

A rising star in the sociology of religion, Wilcox thinks there is much to admire in the new fatherhood. But it is a complex phenomenon. And the sociological evidence shows that evangelical men are not the obstacles to the new manhood that many feminists, liberals and academics have thought.

Wilcox sets the entire discussion about religion and family within the context of the impact of modernization. Participants in the present conflict over families within American churches and denominations would do well to take the modernization factor more seriously than they have in recent debates.

Wilcox uses a widely accepted explanatory principle in sociology called the "family modernization perspective." This is a theoretical view of modern societies that attempts to explain why families become weaker and less important in advanced industrial societies. The increased differentiation of institutions and their autonomy from religion, the expansion of the power of the state, the higher rates of participation by both men and women in the wage economy, the increased delegation of family functions like education, leisure and food preparation to the market and the state--all these trends weaken family functions. These developments "diminish the strength and authority of the family as an institution, thereby reducing the incentives and dependencies that once fostered high levels of commitment to and investment in the family."

THE DIFFERENCES between conservative and mainline Protestants in family ideology and practices can be seen in how the two groups cope with the modernization process. This process is attuned to the needs of a technological society, in which gender differences increasingly are less important, functional equality for technical roles is more useful, cooperation and tolerance make the workplace more efficient, and sexual behavior and family life are less relevant to work life. Conservatives tend to resist the family modernization process; mainliners tend to accommodate it.

From 1970 to the present, mainline churches have officially been more tolerant than conservative churches of divorce, abortion, gender equality, family pluralism and homosexuality--all changes in keeping with the family modernization process. Conservatives--in spite of the fact that they are now better educated and wealthier than in the past, and have witnessed a significant increase in the number of religiously conservative women working outside the home--still resist most of these changes on the ideological level.

So who are the heroes and heroines of this drama--the liberals supporting family modernization or the conservative resisting it? Is the mainline really serving justice and equality, or is it serving the functional demands and leveling universalism of a technologically driven market economy? Are conservative Protestants a bunch of patriarchal Neanderthal men and kitchen-bound, barefoot and pregnant women, or are they people courageously building a wall against the depersonalizing and family-destructive trends of modern societies addicted to efficiency and profit? One's answer to these questions is influenced by one's theological and philosophical critique of modernity.