Religion, Feminism, and the Family

Christian Century, August 26, 1998 by R. Marie Griffith

Religion, Feminism, and the Family. Edited by Anne Carr and Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Westminster John Knox, 398 pp., $33.00.

People seeking fresh perspectives for guiding family policy, particularly those convinced that religion has much to contribute to the support of family life, will be delighted by the nine volumes that have emerged from the Family, Religion and Culture Project based at the University of Chicago Divinity School. (A tenth volume is scheduled to appear this fall.) The project director, Don S. Browning, and his series coeditor, Ian S. Evison, have brought together a diverse array of authors who seek to clarify issues heretofore obscured or ignored in the public controversies over religion and the family.

These early volumes focus on some of the major questions facing church people today: What impact have changing notions of the family had on parish life and the needs of particular congregations? How have churches resisted or accommodated to the changing gender roles and sexual ethics that have so powerfully re-shaped contemporary American family life? And how might religious people think critically about the prospects for family stability?

The 11 essays in Faith Traditions and the Family examine specific denominational perspectives on issues relating to the family, ranging from divorce and remarriage to homosexuality to changing practices of motherhood. They also outline shifts in church policy regarding such issues and suggest possible future trends. The denominations analyzed range from conservative to liberal; they include Southern Baptists, Latter-day Saints, Mennonites, Catholics, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the United Church of Canada. And they include Jewish perspectives. A final essay compares changing family policy in the National Association of Evangelicals and the National Council of Churches. The essays vary in scope--some analyzing contemporary family problems with considerable breadth, others zeroing in on particular concerns--but the volume as a whole provides a much needed window onto the attempts by religious groups to deal both with family breakdowns and with new, nontraditional reconfigurations of family life. The brief introduction by Phyllis Airhart and Margaret Bendroth cuts to the heart of these issues with admirable precision.

Among the topics neglected are infertility and the staggering increase in couples seeking treatments such as in vitro fertilization. Yet these practices not only alter American views of adoption (comparable in that sense to abortion), but also deeply affect the couples who undergo such expensive, time-consuming and often emotionally wrenching procedures.

Missing, too, in all but one of the chapters (Eileen Lindner's on the NAE and the NCC) is any thoughtful discussion of childcare, plainly one of the foremost issues in contemporary family life. The book would have been helped by a concluding chapter that more broadly compared denominational practices and analyzed the mixed record of Christianity and Judaism regarding the family.

Jean Miller Schmidt and Gail Murphy-Geiss's essay on the American Methodist tradition is especially thorough, tracing changes in Methodist views on the family through, among other sources, denominational magazines, the Book of Worship and the Book of Resolutions. Their conclusion that because United Methodists no longer agree on how to define the family the denomination no longer knows how to speak out on family issues applies more broadly to many other mainline groups. Southern Baptists, as Bill Leonard shows, have been slower to confront changing family patterns and, particularly since the denomination's fundamentalist resurgence, have been more willing to promote authoritarian and patriarchal models of the family and clear rules regarding sexuality.

In sharp contrast, Daphne Anderson and Terence Anderson charge the United Church of Canada with adoptting a "radical [ethical] subjectivism" that leaves people to choose their own moral and behavioral standards. Lamenting the "preoccupation with self-fulfillment" that has recently colored the church's reports on sex, marriage and family life, the authors indict church leaders for ignoring the church's historical struggles with sexual and familial issues and so becoming vulnerable to the "spirit of the age."

Such denunciations may sting, and they will surely irritate those convinced that the mainline churches' liberal stance on sexual issues has been crucial to beginning the church's redemption from centuries of homophobia. But it is hard to quarrel with the volume's conclusion that when faith traditions refuse to face familial and sexual realities, they fail their members. Religious leaders and laypeople must bring historical and ethical resources to bear in order to shape a coherent, compassionate response to the conundrums of our time. The book does not offer easy answers to the perplexing familial situations in which we find ourselves, but it will encourage readers to do some hard thinking about their own family ties and about the impact of their faith on those commitments.