Remembering the Million Moms' March

. . . and Christian family values

A ranting radio talk show host, a self-proclaimed proponent of "Christian family values," was bemoaning the Million Moms’ March. Mothers have no business going to Washington, he pontificated. They ought to be staying home with their children where they belong!

In this post I want to look more closely at the phrase made popular by the Christian right, "Christian family values." What are legitimate Christian family values, in light of the liberating gospel of Jesus Christ? Using the lead-off example, do Christian family values dictate that a woman should stay home with her children; or rather, that she should participate on occasion at a political demonstration, lobbying for public policy changes which just might save her children from death or serious injury by gunfire? (If not her own children, then certainly someone else's). Just what are "Christian family values" and what sorts of specific behaviors might they call for? Putting the question another way, how can we tell who is obeying them and who is not? That radio host is certain he knows who the defenders of Christian family values are and who the detractors are. What is his measuring stick, and should we use the same one?

Let me begin this inquiry by 'fessing up. I have a strong bias with regard to these questions. Christian charity demands that I start by being as fair as I can to that radio host, and persons of his persuasion. There are a number of things about which we agree, I suspect because we both observe that life in this country in the last generation or so has taken some turns for the worse.

For instance, many people have become more materialistic. The figures say so. Even allowing for inflation, many people spend more than twice as much now as they used to in 1947. There is a widespread impression--whether it be warranted by statistics or not I don't know--that our homes and our persons are less secure now than they used to be. Complaints of crime abound, and many a citizen reminisces about a time when it was safe to leave one's house unlocked and let older children go about without worrying for their safety. Gone are the days when you could buy roadside produce by taking what you needed and leave the money under the basket, trusting that the next passer-by wouldn't pocket it. Gone are the days when, if your kid did something out of line, your neighbor would scold him first and then let you know about it for sure. Used to be, strangers were regarded with an affable curiosity. Now instead, it is with suspicion and distrust. Despite the lack of labor-saving devices way back when, life used to be more leisurely. Not anymore. Many people are harried, irritable, inconsiderate, and sometimes in heavy traffic, downright nasty! Road rage doesn't happen just in the big cities anymore. Better not honk your horn! Wouldn't want to provoke that stranger in the car in front of you who just might have had a really bad day. Used to be, if you were loyal and a good worker you could serve the same company for a lifetime and retire with a pension and a gold watch. That was my grandfather's world. It’s long gone. Even for highly qualified workers, careers are less certain; and loyalty doesn't seem to count for anything. There have always been incidents of domestic violence and killings, but the frequency of both younger and older people going berserk and gunning down strangers, that's new, appalling, and bewildering. I share a social world with that ranting radio host, and I agree with him that in many respects the quality of life has deteriorated miserably. So, I understand why he's wrought up and wants to change things. I resonate with his feeling when he speaks of culture wars irrevocably altering our society in undesirable directions. I feel much of what he feels. I empathize with his fears and his chagrin.

But we part company in deciding what to do about all this. For he wants to turn the clock back, back to a supposed golden age when men "wore the pants in the family and brought home the bacon"; when women did what wives and mothers were meant to do: stay home, clean house, and mind the children; when "colored people" knew their place and "queers" didn't dare to speak out; when English was, by God, the language of all real Americans; when Sunday was the holy day, of course; when Christian prayer and Bible reading was an order of the day in all public schools; and when everybody knew what comprised a normal family: a white, Protestant, heterosexual husband, a white, Protestant heterosexual wife, and two point five white, Protestant, absolutely cherubic children, like you saw on Gerber's baby food bottles. Why, oh why, can't we have all of that back again, the radio host wants to know. Why? Because the Satanic enemies of Christian family values don't want it that way, he roars.

It becomes immediately clear what he means when he uses the term in this context, for he associates Christian family values with the way things used to be. Any other model for family than the one which prevailed in the gray flannel suit society of the 1950s he lambasts as un-Christian, even Satanic!

Hold on, now, Mr. radio host. I can understand your being upset by a slew of social changes. I've already agreed with you that some of them are indeed deplorable. But I take offense that many of your listeners swallow your idea of a proper family, and use that to judge and impugn other others’ moral sincerity, like the conscientious mothers who decided to leave their children to take a day trip to Washington for protesting so that they could fight the proliferation of handguns; or the gay and lesbian citizens who cherish being joined in marriage and having their faithful partnerships blessed by a community of faith; or the interracial couples whose partnering and parenting was not only forbidden by such as you back in a supposedly golden age, but is still being regarded as unnatural, perverted, and --need it be said?-- un-Christian. It's clear to me that what you regard as a life lived according to Christian family values and what other sincere Christians regard as a life lived by Christian family values is very different.

How can this be? Apparently because we have in mind different values when we think of Christian family values. The radio host can appeal to certain Biblical passages in support of his patriarchal, traditionalist view of a proper Christian family. In Paul's letters and other pastoral letters we find several examples of household rules for Christian families. For instance, the husband should be "the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head of the church,” we read in Ephesians, a letter which tradition attributes to Paul, but which most critical scholars contend was written by someone else. In Galatians, a letter which no one disputes as Paul's, we read that "in Christ there is neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free." Strange, isn't it, that one should find in the same sacred scriptures such an egalitarian statement as this, alongside numerous others admonishing women to stay in their traditional subservient place: Women are to keep their heads covered. They are not to speak up in church; and above all, they must obey their husbands, full stop. How can these very different views about proper Christian family relationships, the one socially revolutionary, the other quite traditional and patriarchal, be reconciled? They cannot. The easiest explanation of this disparity is that the progressive, egalitarian values of Jesus, who frequently broke class and gender taboos himself, were soon compromised by a church which capitulated to patriarchal pressures in the Roman Empire. In other words, even as the Christian scriptures were being written, the church was failing to heed Paul's warning not to be conformed to this world; and some of the scriptures which eventually came to be regarded as God-breathed, reflected these compromised, once-prophetic values. If you read the Bible with this historically critical eye, you may recognize that not all passages in the Christian scriptures, let alone the Hebrew ones, can legitimately carry ethical authority for followers of the radical prophet Jesus. In deciding which of the family values in scripture are most in agreement with the prophetic values of Jesus, the reader must look beneath the patriarchal prejudices of the culture in which the young church was incubated. Just because early Christian families were patriarchal, just because the institution of slavery was not questioned in wealthier Christian households, does not mean that Jesus would have been happy with these early models of Christian family values. Nor should modern Christians, if they are serious about following Jesus. They should not be obligated to emulate these ancient patriarchal and hierarchical models of family. What Jesus wants from us, regarding family values, is in fact likely to be in tension with and at variance with many of the accepted models of family, no matter how proper they may seem in any given period. This is because the ethic of Jesus is prophetic, progressive, pushing toward ever new reformulations of love and justice. (Presbyterians are wont to say that the church they cherish is Reformed, and always being reformed. Why? Because the radically prophetic ethic of Jesus drives their consciences in this progressive direction.)

Jesus himself evidently didn't say much about family, and his few terse remarks on the subject never cease to astonish a people who, down through the centuries have tended to associate Christian life with a wholesome family life. The disciples remember him saying: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even life itself, cannot be my disciple." The disciples also remember one time when Jesus was super focused on teaching and someone called to his attention that his mother and brothers were outside waiting for him, he replied "Who are my mother and my brothers?" Looking around at those in the circle of learning he said: "Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother." These remarks don't give us much to go on, but they do seem to indicate that Jesus was not too concerned with family as kin. He was concerned with the prophetic values of love and justice, Kingdom values, not family ones. And he hinted that these values drive one beyond kin, drive one to regard all God's creatures as belonging to the same family; and that sometimes loyalty to family in any smaller sense conflicts with this prophetic drive, and so, must be resisted.

That's why the mothers who attended the Million Mom March and now are still protesting on behalf of progressive social causes are not spurning family values, but rather supporting them. Each mother thus engaged realizes that the safety of her own family is interwoven with the safety of a nation of families. Family is not confined by kinship. Family can be as big as a million moms, who out of love, march for justice.