Christianity and the Making of the Modern Family

Christian Century, Nov 1, 2000 by Adrian Thatcher

Christianity and the Making of the Modern Family. By Rosemary Radford Ruether. Beacon, 284 pp., $28.50.

THESE TWO BOOKS should nudge Christians toward a more compassionate, gender-conscious and tradition-aware understanding of marriage and the family. On the basis of empirical evidence, Stephen Post critiques the "divorce culture" in the U.S. and shows, for example, that stepfamilies are much less safe environments for children than are intact families. A Christian "prophetic family" is characterized by the principles of care for all children, faithful monogamy and equal regard between husband and wife.

Post includes excellent chapters on adoption and on the demands, limitations and anguish of intensive caregiving. He considers an issue that has attracted increasing theological interest recently--how to balance the demands of "loyalties to biological family members, the church community, and all of humanity." Post has devoted much of the past nine years to the care of people with Alzheimer's disease and their caretakers, and the sensitivity of his reflections will generate much encouragement and gratitude.

Rosemary Radford Ruether's book invites comparison with her recent Women and Redemption, since it too ranges from the birth of Christianity to the present. The book achieves its aim of showing "that shifting ideologies involving the family and `family values' are generally coded messages about women and how they should behave in relation to men." The idealized, modern, nuclear family, in which male headship and the separate spheres of husband and wife are taken for granted, is shown to lack both biblical and historical warrant. But Ruether is less successful at achieving her second aim of "rethinking the theology of marriage and family."

Ideology can best be unmasked by the prolonged exposure of its falsehoods, and this is what Ruether's historical chapters do. The sections on the family in biblical times and on asceticism and marriage in patristic and medieval Christianity successfully relativize assumptions about fixed family forms. Different theologies of marriage and attitudes toward divorce are traced through the time of the Reformation. A chapter on the making of the Victorian family examines "key aspects of the reorganization of economic and social roles that laid the basis for ... dramatic shifts in the ideological identity of the family, women and children in relation to adult men." Four chapters cover the 20th century.

Ruether describes the many faces of the family at the turn of the millennium and claims that a "postmodern perspective calls for an acceptance of this reality of diversity of family models." Paradoxically, Ruether premises the availability of divorce on social realities--on changing patterns of work, and on women becoming "autonomous legal persons" with legal and growing financial independence from men. She calls for more sex education and warns that "no American woman can safely be socialized as a teenager or young adult into a future based on the expectation of being supported by a husband for the rest of her life." The welfare-to-work program doesn't work, she contends, since the available jobs won't lift people out of poverty. Ruether makes political proposals for a sustainable family policy, and urges "a new vision of family, of home and work" based on "the mutuality of whole human beings."

Both authors are positive about lesbian and gay people. Typical of Post's inclusive vision of Christian faith is his declaration that "nothing I write on behalf of permanence in marriage as a basis for optimal child rearing should obscure my respectful attitude toward human differences in sexual and gender orientation." Ruether urges the creation of covenant celebrations that are equal in value and equally available to gays and straights. Both disown "the plague of patriarchy," but in different tones. Post (following Don Browning and others) sees the Promise Keepers men's movement as both "a step forward and a step backward." Ruether thinks there is little point in dialogue with most religious conservatives because "irreconcilably different presuppositions" make reconciliation impossible, and "progressives are being stalemated in every church as they try to concede to the fundamentalists in order to keep their international church or congregation together."

Both authors wrestle with the apparently antifamily sayings of Jesus. These "crisis-sayings," Post states, "emphatically do not suggest a diminishment of the centrality of marriage and family in Jesus' teachings and hopes; they do, however, convey Jesus' strong reaction to the absolute patriarchal grip on the family in antiquity." Perhaps.

Ruether, with disappointing brevity, sees "the antifamily tradition of the New Testament [as] rooted in a critique of the family systems of the day," which were "an expression of the demonic powers and principalities of a fallen world." The new family of the church broke down these disfiguring separations, and a recovery of this subversive character of the early church would enable Christian families to become, once more, "redemptive communities."