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The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci (Photo by © Ted Spiegel/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)
Religious conservatives are going to hate David Brooks’s assertion that the nuclear family has had its day. Don’t confuse a defence of the nuclear family, he argues in a piece for The Atlantic, with a defence of families in general. Families come in a variety of shapes and sizes. And have looked very different at different times. That conservatives — and religious conservatives in particular, and American religious conservatives above all — came to believe that the only sort of family worth defending is the nuclear option of Mum and Dad and 2.4 children, is part of the reason they have locked themselves into a losing position.
Having little historical imagination, the moral majority movement of the Eighties fetishised this very particular notion of the family — one that only flourished within some very particular economic conditions during the post-war period. But this iteration was only a blip during the long transition from large, extended kinship groups to the ‘chosen’, ‘blended’ family that begun to emerge within the gay community at precisely same the time Jerry Falwell and Ronald Regan were insisting that nuclear was the only proper way for families to be. For these two reactionaries, the nuclear family was the all-American redoubt against the twin threats of communism and homosexuality. The family was nuclear not just in the sense of being a nucleus, but also, as the premier expression of resistance to the nuclear threat of Communism. Family, God and country became “the holy trinity of American traditionalism”.
It is rather awkward for Christian conservatives, then, that among the most difficult to conscript into this cosy celebration of the bounded little family unit is Jesus of Nazareth himself. For again and again, throughout the Gospel accounts of his life and teaching, Jesus is portrayed as a thorough-going enemy of the exclusively narrow biological unit. Let one example stand for many:
“While Jesus was still talking to the crowd, his mother and brothers stood outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.”He replied to him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” (Matthew 12. 46-50)
One way of telling the story of the Biblical narrative about the family is as an arc that begins with the association of family life – and particularly procreation – with patriotic duty, and then gradually subjects this position to ever increasing scepticism. For a fledgling community intent on nation building, the production of children was essential to communal survival. Thus the suspicion of all those who do not contribute to the expansion of the population – eunuchs, homosexuals, unfertile “barren” women. The problem here is not about sex, it’s about children. This is what modern sex-obsessed conservatives miss about the argument that is going on within the pages of the Bible. The charge against homosexuality is not that people shouldn’t have sex this way, the charge is a lack of patriotism.
But even this gets challenged and broken down. Consider the following from Isaiah, 56:
“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me
and hold fast to my covenant—
to them I will give within my temple and its walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters”
This is radical stuff. Keeping Sabbath is “better than sons and daughters”. And Isaiah is Jesus’s favourite book of the Hebrew scriptures — he quotes from it more than any other text. Jesus’s “whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” line is a clear extension of this tradition. He takes it beyond anything even Isaiah could have imagined. Membership of this new family is not premised on biological kinship but on baptism — water is thicker than blood.
It is very peculiar how religious conservatives have sought to construct an apologia for the nuclear family from the Bible. Broadly speaking, the Old Testament is perfectly relaxed about its heroes having multiple wives — Solomon had 700 of them. In contrast, the heroes of the New Testament are mostly single men, with little interest in the domestic duties and pleasures of a settled family life. St Paul even advised that it was “good for a man not to marry” (1 Corinthians, 7). To say the least, it is very hard work indeed to try and find a secure theological model of the nuclear family within the pages of Holy Scripture.
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SubscribeGiles Fraser is right that the nuclear family emerged from very specific economic and social circumstances, and the nuclear family is not the standard mode presented in the Bible. However the idea that the table of the Lord includes people in unrepentant sin (the emphasis being on unrepentant) and without being of one faith is ludicrous and incoherent. Fellowship is predicated on union with Christ.
The Bible goes on constantly about the importance of the tribe, of the extended family, of the holiness of the marital bed. Christianity extends that tribe in a spiritual sense to include all the baptised faithful, it does not mean that gay men who have infected each other with HIV via sodomy are ‘closer’ to what Jesus had in mind for a so-called family. Such blindness, from a spiritual leader no less.
Giles, you’re as guilty as ‘conservatives’ in making the biblical message in your own likeness.
An incomplete argument cherry picking certain verses to suit,
Ignores the injunction at the creation for man and woman to become ‘one’.
Jesus widening of the description of family is not a rejection of marriage between man and woman
Presenting Paul as ‘against’ marriage when he talks about the sanctity of mutual submission of man and wife.
Not sure what you are trying to achieve here