It is obvious that American culture has gone through a massive shift in family and sexual values for the last decades. It is also obvious that the church is not dealing with the changes well. She is either following the culture or looking longingly to the 1950’s and hoping to turn back the clock. Being “conservative” is merely foot-dragging. Are there any positive things she can do to strengthen her own view of the sanctity of marriage and family? Here are some thoughts.
Number One: The church can no longer depend on the culture or the status quo to confirm its faith, because cultural values and family are no longer vitally inter-connected.
In The Origins of Speech, Rosenstock took issue with most anthropologists, who believe that primitive tribes were formed by associations of family groups seeking security and protection. Rosenstock reversed this order. He believed that tribes saw the family as a necessary means of creating, first, sexual order. No man could have any woman he wanted at any time, without chaos and fighting among males. Tribes also found that incest and rape produced poor offspring. The result was the rise of family groups with taboos against incest in particular. But, second, and at a deeper level, tribes discovered that the family was the best means for propagating the values of the culture. The best citizen was also a good father, whether it was a Roman patrician passing on the rules of the Republic to his children, or an Amazonian tribesman showing his son how to artfully shrink an enemy’s head; and the culture pressured parents to fulfill this role.
I question if this connection still holds in America. Children are taught cultural values by mass media and by the public school, values which may or may not be those of their parents. I have wondered if there are initial and confirming rites in secularism as there are in most world religions, and I’ve decided that the first day of school and graduation fit the bill. Mommy takes junior to the bus and turns him over to the state to arrange his values to the cultural norm, and the state turns him loose to be a model citizen at the end of the process. I am desperately biting my tongue so as to not make a moral judgment at this point; I just want to point out that the family is not necessary to the culture for the propagation of its values. That means that defining “family” is no longer important to cultural survival. It also means that the accompanying sexual mores are not governed by survival pressures. Now the individual is free to choose family style and sexual preference without a larger societal frame of reference. This is not to say that large numbers of people will not opt for the security and commitment of family life—but it is an option, not a requirement for passing the culture's values to the next generation.
The church, therefore, must determine if the family (even more than clergy, doctrine, and programs) is still her primary means of propagating her values, and if so, how to perpetuate those values in a religious sub-culture that is voluntary. There will be very little outside support.
Number Two: The church needs to define “marriage” for its members.
The definition of marriage will be different than the culture’s, because it will presuppose the existence of God—a God who is in his triune relationship an archetype for the family, and because it presupposes a Christ who looks at his church as his bride.
If the Persons of the Trinity are committed to one another in love, and if Christ calls the church into union with himself, then marriage, as a mirror of the archetypes, is a lifelong covenant, made before God and the church. The members of that covenant will be changed and grow in love within it, until death. All covenants, by the way, have sacramental rituals that seal or validate them—from dinner after signing a business contract, to baptism and the Eucharist as the sacraments of our union with Christ. I believe that sex is the sacramental seal of marriage vows—initially on the wedding night (parallel to baptism), and repeatedly afterwards (parallel to the Supper). That doesn’t mean that sex can’t be fun, or earthy, or even fumbled. It does mean that there is a serious commitment hovering behind it. It’s interesting that the Old Testament penalty for pre-marital sex was marriage (if you’re going to act married, then so be it), while the penalty for adultery (covenant breaking) was death. This understanding of marriage and sex of course has no meaning without a sound faith in the blessed triune nature of God and Christ’s passionate love for his church. Those positive truths need to be taught and lived before young believers early and consistently. They lay a much better foundation than saying, “Don’t have sex before marriage or God will be mad at you.”
3. The church needs to take seriously Paul’s admonition in 1 Corinthians 7:9, “It is better to marry than to burn.”
First, “burning” is not an innately evil thing to be shunned, not should it be confused with lust. “Burning” is Paul’s word for normal sexual desire. Lust is its perversion. Lust is to sex what gluttony is to eating, drunkenness to a glass of wine, and rage to anger. “Burning” is a real force that is not going to be suppressed or treated like some kind of teen-age disease in moralistic sermons.
Second, the church opts for the wrong side in the present conflict between the biological and economic clocks. In Old Testament times, these clocks were synchronized. A young man learned a trade, usually in the context of the family business, and was able to be self-sufficient at the same time his libido was peaking. This is not true today. Middle and upper class young people will be in their upper twenties before they finish their master’s, or their residency, or grad school, etc. The church consistently follows the culture and says “wait.” The church is biased against young marriages—an admission that she has not adequately instructed her children. She offers no solution to “burning.” But she will certainly cluck with disapproval if the young find ways to alleviate the pressure. This is a clear rejection of apostolic counsel. That means that the church will have to support young marriage and weave the economic clock into it, not the other way around.
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Our secular culture has no meaningful rituals. By definition a secular culture can not have any meaningful ritual since rituals are the performance in the seen world of a larger truth that exists in the unseen world. In the scientific, rational worldview there is no unseen world.
ReplyDeleteOur secular culture celebrates no rites of passage between the seasons of life or in the seasons of the earth, but people need such markers both in the year and in their lives. Where they do not exist, they are often created. That, I believe, is one of the key attractions of the New Age generally and Neo-Paganism specifically. Other examples outside religion include football, socially sanctioned ritual combat for young men. Don’t laugh, every culture on earth has some form of moderately dangerous sport organized and sanctified by the culture to keep things from getting out of control. That would include jousting in the middle ages and competition between Kung Fu schools in the East. Just watch young women, who believe in nothing we might call spiritual. Often they been living with their boyfriend for several years but decide to get married because they want to start a family. When that time comes, she will walk around holding her engagement ring out for all to see. In fact during this phase her ring is called “a headlight,” even by other women. Bridezilla is a well know phenomenon, even among unbelievers. The poor things have been dreaming out the one day they will be the center of the universe, since they were little girls and the brides and grooms were dolls and stuffed animals.
The Protestant tradition through its conscious destruction of symbol, from General Monk shelling Catholic Churches in Ireland, to the application of logic to doctrines like transubstantiation is to some degree the unwitting father of our modern secular culture.
As for the nuclear family, the culture and the state can not replace the nuclear family—It is as unnatural as asking young people to remain celibate between 16 and 28. Unnatural, ultimately fails, every time, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the fall of the Soviet Empire in our time.
Great post RIck and great comment Henry. Wow. You two together make a double whammy power punch. I appreciate Rick's looking back to Rosenstock-Huessy's understanding of tribal organization as a way of thinking and talking about family. And Henry's emphasis upon the need for ritual and symbol.
ReplyDeleteTo me, both of you point to a "depth understanding" of family that challenges the reductionist concept of family both in culture and in the church. The culture seems suggests family is any social organization, failing to consider generation or the Hebrew idea of Toledot. The church stumbles by limiting family either to moral regulation or defense of a "nuclear family." None of these approaches come close to the Mediterranean idea of family or Jesus' revealing of family in the Gospels and Paul's letters.
I think you've started a topic that is worth more posts and explorative articulation. Thanks.