4. SO WHAT IS A 'FAMILY'?
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. (Ephesians 3:14-15) Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?' And the king will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.' (Matthew 25:37-40) Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother. (Mark 3:35) And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? (Matthew 5:47) For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God's will, than to suffer for doing evil. (1 Peter 3:17) Ascribe to the Lord, O families of the peoples, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. (Psalm 96:7) All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him. For dominion belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations. (Psalm 22:27-28) So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God (Ephesians 2:19)
The family is currently the focus of intense study. Political conventions, sociologists and churches are trying to define and redefine 'family'. You would think that's easy - 'mum, dad and the kids'. But sometimes there's mum and the kids, dad and the kids, two defactos with or without kids, mum and her kids and boyfriend or new husband and his kids; grandparents and kids, two homosexuals or lesbians, 'blended' families, households including ageing parents, childless parents with adopted children, etc. Many groupings want to be known as 'family'. And what about the Nayar people of south-west India, where women took as many as twelve 'lovers' for sexual relations and bearing children; or the Menangbekau of Sumatra, where brothers and sisters form the residence group and husbands visit for sexual purposes; or the Sambia of Papua New Guinea, where boys leave their mothers from the age of seven and form homosexual relationships until marriage? The variations seem endless... [1] [1] Michael Gilding, The Making and Breaking of the Australian Family, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991, p.2. In all societies some sort of 'family' cares for children, educates them, forms their character, develops their moral commitment and sense of worth. The nuclear family (mum, dad and kids) is the norm in Western cultures but this way of doing family is historically quite recent. It is a product of the industrial age and the need to be mobile, relocate for work, and the growth of cities. Before the Industrial Revolution most families were self-sufficient economic units but today few Western families produce everything they need. It is no longer 'profitable' to have many children, so we limit the size of our families. In Great Britain in 1870, for example, the average number of children per family was six. Now it is only two. Further, until the 18th century in Europe people generally lived and died in the village in which they were born. Now families are more mobile: in some large cities of the U.S., the average family moves to a different house every two years. The idea of a grandparent or single relative sharing the home (fairly common until the 1930s and 40s), is now rarer. So TV talk-shows discuss 'Will marriage last?' 'Will this be the last generation to live in families?' The ideal of the two-parent family where a man and a woman promise life-long fidelity to each other seems to be disappearing if you read yuppie journals or watch Hollywood soapies. An Australian politician recently defined 'family' as any group of people living together with a common purpose. A posse of drug-pushers would qualify under that definition. There were two major attempts to 'abolish' the family in this century. The first, in Leninist Russia, collapsed in less than twenty years. (Marx said the family was 'antiquated' and predicted it would vanish along with capitalism.) By the time of Stalin, all anti-family legislation had been reversed and Marenko, one of Stalin's advisors, was speaking of the family as a 'small collective'. A second less doctrinaire experiment was in the Israeli kibbutzim. But here again there is evidence of the family reasserting itself: mothers demand time off from work to be spent with their own offspring; permanent conjugal relationships between the sexes are observed. Indeed the kibbutz operates as a substitute family. Members regard one another as 'kin' and therefore are reluctant to intermarry with members of the same kibbutz since this would be a kind of psychological incest. Edmund Leach said in his 1967 Reith lectures: 'Psychologists, doctors, schoolmasters, and clergy put over so much soppy propaganda about the virtue of a united family life that most of us have the idea that 'the family' is a universal institution, the very foundation of organized society. This isn't so. Human beings at one time or another have managed to invent all sorts of different styles of domestic living and we shall invent more in the future.' In a book entitled The Death of the Family a British physician suggests doing away with the family because it is a primary conditioning device for a Western, imperialistic world view. And in Sexual Politics, Kate Millett said the family must go because it oppresses and enslaves women. Actually there have been two recent revolutions in family life, one in the 18th and early 19th centuries, the other since the 1960s. In the first, the nuclear family broke free of the restraints of village and kin. In today's revolution, the declining stability in family life and resulting increase in social chaos has been caused by: * The sexual revolution and easily available contraception from the 1960s; * the 'Me decade' in the 1970s with its emphasis on 'self-actualization' and individualism; * the rise of the feminist movement; * women entering the workforce in greater numbers and tasting more and more economic independence (and pressuring governments to pay for day-care facilities for their toddlers - or even babies); * young people staying longer to gain an education; * easier divorce; * a higher profile by homosexuals; * maternity and paternity leave; * increase in the post-war standard of living (with the temptation to bestow material goods on children as a way of showing love and affection); * pluralism - parents hesitating to offer any clear guidance on behaviour or belief; * the right to 'do your own thing' - fulfilling personal goals outside the long-term stability of marriage and family. In his chapter 'The Fractured Family' in Future Shock Alvin Toffler wrote: 'The family has been called the "giant shock absorber" of society - the place to which the bruised and battered individual returns after doing battle with the world, the one stable point in an increasingly flux-filled environment. As the super-industrial revolution unfolds, this 'shock absorber' will come in for some shocks of its own.' [London; Pan Books, 1970, p.219][55]. Ten years later, in The Third Wave in his chapter 'Families of the Future' he predicted 'a high variety of family structures... From now on the nuclear family will be only one of the many socially accepted and approved forms.' [London: Pan Books, 1981, p.225]. [24] As I write, the Australian Young Liberals at their national convention acknowledged gay families as legitimate: delegates declared that government policy should not discriminate in favour of any particular family unit [The Age, Melbourne, 8/1/1994, p.5]. According to Charles Murray (The Coming White Underclass) illegimitacy is the single most important problem of our time - more serious than drugs, poverty or illiteracy. Actually it drives all of those other social ills, setting in motion a chain reaction in which family breakdown is perpetuated from one generation to the next. When families fall apart, he believes, societies will disintegrate. His case rests on parallels between the explosion of crime in the black community in the US in the 1960s with the explosion of crime in the white community now: both trends correlated with illegitimate births. Governments are being urged to initiate a 'national family policy' - which will depend on whose philosophy of the family they agree to. So the question 'What is a family?' is not simply academic. 'Family' is defined differently by various cultural and sub-cultural groups, and by pressure groups with competing agendas. The Australian Festival of Light offers this (conservative) definition: 'The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society comprising mother (female), father (male) and children, which begins with marriage - the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others, undertaken voluntarily as a life-long partnership, and solemnized and registered according to law' [Australian Festival of Light PO Box A 87 Sydney South, NSW, media release 30/1/1981].[50] Here's another, from the Australian Family Association [Aims and Objects brochure 1993-1994]: 'The family... is composed essentially of a father, mother and children; in a wider but still necessary relationship, of grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles; a kinship group of human beings linked by ties of blood, marriage and adoption, structured to bear and rear children, to care for the young, the sick and the old and other human needs... The family is the basic unit on which human societies are built and is the prime agency for the total development of children, ie. the transmission of moral, ethical and cultural values, and for the ongoing social and emotional support for all its members. Its natural purpose is to serve as the chief functioning mechanism for the primary delivery of social services in the fields of nurture, education, health and welfare... [We] respect the sanctity of life from conception to natural death... [and] recognize the need for care and compassion for the broken family and for the support of all people in need. However, [our] activities are directed towards the consolidation of the family unit: seeking the support of public policy so as to forestall the causes which today lead to the disintegration of the family and its fundamental role as the basic unit of our society.'[204] A more liberal definition would include most primary intimate groups of people: one or more individuals who have responsibility and or care of one or more children or dependents. The Australian Anglican Church's social responsibilities commission [Manifesto for the Family 1985] suggested a middle course: 'Family' is 'one or two adults and one or more children. The church is not primarily concerned with maintaining a particular form of family as the only right form'.[27] Allan Bloom maintains in The Closing of the American Mind, that 'it is fashionable these days to reject absolutes except for the absolute belief that everything is relative.' [17] Conservatives preach that the relationship between religion, morality and the family is a very close one: contempt for the family goes hand in hand with contempt for religion and traditional morality. But it could be argued that the family as the basic unit of society is not simply a product of a particular set of religious and moral values. It is the basic social unit in all cultures regardless of religious beliefs. Indeed family seems to be more carefully protected in certain non-Christian societies in Asia and Africa than in the (so-called) Christian societies of the West. Conservatives like to call themselves 'pro-family', are suspicious of government competence to 'interfere' with the family; governments tend to aggravate problems rather than solve them. Governments are urged to return to 'family values' and provide tax relief for families. The political left, on the other hand, identify more readily with 'battlers': the unemployed, single mums, street kids, homosexuals, feminists, etc. As a Christian I am both sympathetic with and suspicious of some aspects of these extreme views. Since Cain and Abel we have bemoaned the decline in family life. I believe there were no 'good old days' when people were more Christian than today: at times when the family was a 'stable' institution we discriminated more against minority groups. 'Protect me and mine and my mortgage' can be the ultimate middle-class cop-out from wider social responsibilities. Right-wing reactionary conservatism is often selfish: many who call for a return to 'family values' are loudest in calling a halt to the immigration of refugees, for example. These same people are not as clamant about more support for unmarried parents, the elderly, singles, or the homeless. And we can't turn the clock back to a pre-industrial simple agrarian communalism. On balance, however, I am more nervous when left-wing radicals attack traditional values. God has given us some instructions about home and family life, and we ignore them at our peril. It is no accident that social dislocation, homelessness and crime on the streets increase when home life is fragmented. There's an old joke: 'What's a conservative? Someone who wants to protect human life (until it's born). What's a liberal? Someone who wants to mother every member of our society (except children).' Try this: find one (just one) compassionate article about 'How to cope as a single parent' in a right-wing family association's newletters. Or, in a radical feminist publication, find a well-researched chapter extolling the idea that full-time home-making can be, for women (as well as for some men), a very fulfilling and rewarding vocation... Every family is affected by actions of government: we probably need a 'family impact report' for every piece of government legislation. One study at the George Washington University in the late 1970s identified 268 programs administered by seventeen Federal departments and agencies that had potential impact on families! [Newsweek, May 15, 1978, p.37]. So definitions are important. They affect our laws and our lives.
The word 'family' entered the English language in the fourteenth century from the Latin words familia, 'household' and famulus, 'servant'. Until the mid-seventeenth century, its usage was divided between notions of co-residence (members of a household not necessarily related by ties of blood or marriage), and kinship (persons related by blood or marriage but not necessarily living together). Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries these usages were amalgamated and the dominant meaning of family came to be a small kin group living in the same house... In the 1980s the growth of informal cohabitation and ex-nuptial births led the Australian Bureau of Statistics to incorporate unmarried couples and ex-nuptial children in their definition of family. At the same time new reproductive technology forced legal refinements of the definition, with unprecedented evaluation of the relative significance of egg, sperm, womb and post-natal care. Michael Gilding, The Making and Breaking of the Australian Family, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991, p.3. [147] The family... is not an individual living by himself or herself. It is not a group of individual single people, unrelated to each other, sharing an apartment. The family, for the purposes of this book, is one or two adults living together with one or more children and committed to their care and protection. The children may be connected by blood, adoption, or other arrangement, but the adults are committed to them. Alan Nichols, Families - Top Priority for Government, Canberra: Acorn Press, 1986, p.7. [72] The only function of the family that continues to survive all change is the provision of affection and emotional support by and to all its members, particularly infants and young children. Specialized institutions now perform many of the other functions that were once performed by the agrarian family: economic production, education, religion, and recreation. Jobs are usually separate from the family group; family members often work in different occupations and in locations away from the home. Education is provided by the state or by private groups. Religious training and recreational activities are available outside the home, although both still have a place in family life. The family is still responsible for the socialization of children. Even in this capacity, however, the influence of peers and of the mass media has assumed a large role. Family composition in industrial societies has changed dramatically. The average number of children born to a woman in the U.S., for example, fell from 7.00 in 1800 to 2.00 by the early 1990s. Consequently, the number of years separating the births of the youngest and oldest children has declined. This has occurred in conjunction with increased longevity. In earlier times, marriages normally dissolved through the death of a spouse before the youngest child left home. Today husbands and wives generally have about as many years together after the children leave home as before... Ida Harper Simpson 'Family (sociology)', Microsoft (R) Encarta Encyclopedia, Copyright(c) 1993 Microsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1993 Funk & Wagnall's Corporation. [225] A few years ago political figures and social scientists across the world were predicting the doom of the family, without expressing any regret. The mood has changed. Individualism has produced unwanted and deserted children, and people want to reassert the value of the family unit for a stable society. There has been a huge mood swing since 1985 across the world. Left-leaning political parties were promoting individualism and describing the family as oppressive and patriarchal. Researchers also joined this game. A survey of children from divorced parents in a provincial town in Australia in 1988 concluded that children are 'better off' without their parents because they became more 'self-reliant'. A few years later from the same survey, the Australian Institute of Family Studies made a totally contrary conclusion: that childen of divorce shielded themselves from trust and intimacy as a result of the failure of their parents' marriage. The same survey; totally different conclusions. It illustrates how much some feminist and anti-family ideology eroded the objectivity of family research. >From 1985 to 1988 the Anglican Consultative Council, the international coordinating office for the Anglican Church, ran an international project on family and community. Consulting with the World Council of Churches, this project updated both a Christian view of family and the current social research... The essential recommendations were: * There must be recognition within the Church of how much the family unit has changed, and how many women head up families and have the sole resonsibility of child-rearing. * Pastoral ministry to families should be based on the political and economic realities which affect family functioning, and must particularly take account of racism in public policy and practice. * Families must be seen in the community context. In many parts of the world, they will be uplifted only when appropriate aid and development projects are available. This will include family planning, and realistic attitudes to abortion, pornography, violence and sexism. * The Church's theology of family should emerge from its practical ministry, and must be able to handle brokenness in human relationships, and the possibilities of a new start in Christ. * Pastoral care for families must address the injustices women face in most societies and therefore must also address structural injustice for women within the Church... Many dioceses have changed their rules: divorced people can remarry in church; in some desperate situations post-war polygamy is allowed (though not encouraged) to rebuild a tribe or nation; family planning and child health are major activities of church outreach workers; much more work is done now on analysing the social situations putting pressures on families. What used to be seen as a 'right-wing' pro-family stance of the Churches is now seen as socially healthy and community developing. The worst anti-family phase is now over. Alan Nichols, 14 September 1993 (reprinted with the author's permission). [461] We are living under threat in this country. The threat defines itself more clearly every day: the foundations of our traditional social order are breaking up because we are losing faith in each other and in our traditional systems. Life in any society has to be built on trust: trust in each other, trust in... the law, trust in the value of our money, the security of our savings and the honesty of those we pay to administer them. These are the currencies of our lives, the symbols of our mutual dependence. Without them we become like beasts in a jungle preying upon each other for simple survival. Morris West, 'The Sunburnt Country: broke, bewildered, beseiged', The Bulletin, January 25/ February 1, 1994 p.26. [108] As religion is driven from our public lives, it creates what Richard John Neuhaus has called the 'Naked Public Square.' But as Neuhaus has pointed out, no public square remains 'naked.' Neither politics, law, nor government, will tolerate a vacuum. Someone's values, based on some philosophy or world-view, will fill the empty space. That is precisely what is happening in America today. Militant secularism is filling the void with an empty philosophy... Freedom of religion has in many important ways come to mean freedom from the influence of religion, or from even its presence in our public life. This trend is not accidental. It is one more example of the clash of forces in American society. Freedom of religion, like family and tradition, stand in the way of those who would remake the world and expand the power of government into every aspect of our lives. Dr. James Dobson and Gary L. Bauer, Children at Risk: Winning the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of your Children, Dallas: Word Publishing, 1990, p.245. [147]
Dear Lord and Father of all humankind, in this International Year of the Family we acknowledge that you are both our master and our friend. You are our primary nurturer in a heartless world; our guide for responsible living; and our security in times of danger. We are glad to belong to an earthly family and to your eternal family. We are nourished by the bonds of love shared by those in our families. Help us to honour every member of our families - the young and the old, the secure and the insecure, the strong and the weak, the clever and the not-so-clever, those who are easy to get along with, and the difficult ones. May we keep growing into spiritual and emotional maturity. May we delight in both our own specialness as unique individuals, and honour the uniqueness of others. Remind us that every person is very important to you, and therefore should be important to us. May we nourish relationships with both 'like' and 'unlike' people in our home and church families. And as we love our families - your families - may you grow in us. For this and all your loving and good gifts we give you thanks. Amen. A Benediction And now may God the Father of us all, Jesus the Saviour who was a special friend of children, and the Holy Spirit our guide and counselor, strengthen you and encourage you in this exciting and dangerous quest of exploring your life with others. Amen.
CAPSULE 2: HOW GOVERNMENTS AFFECT FAMILIES
As the twentieth century marches to a close, it will be remembered for many things by future generations. Perhaps the most loathesome historical fact will be that our century witnessed the creation of the most bloodthirsty totalitarian governments in world history. These all-powerful governments, from Communism to Nazism, and from Idi Amin in Uganda to Pol Pot in Cambodia, tolerated no private area of life. As Mussolini put it, 'Everything for the state. Nothing against the state. Nothing outside the state.' History is replete with despots, but few can rival the totalitarian leaders, from Stalin to Hitler, who sought to fold every aspect of life into the government sphere, and who treated men and women as mere pieces of dust to be crushed and reformed in their own images. It is not surprising that every totalitarian movement of the twentieth century has not only tried to destroy the individual, but also to destroy the family - to make it a mere bureau of government. All modern totalitarian movements have tried to substitute the power of the state for the rights, responsibilities, and authority of the family. Strong families can stand against the aggression of government and protect the individual, but not without a struggle. When all power flows to a government, with no mediating institutions between government and the individual, the result has been disaster and tragedy. In fact, in this century of bloody wars, totalitarian governments have killed more of their own people for political reasons than all the soldiers killed in all the wars of this century combined. Often the first area of conflict between the family and gargantuan government has been over the control of children. In the United States we have seen the tendency to let government assume more responsibility for, and power over, children, even while parental rights and authority have eroded. If this trend continues, I am convinced it will be our greatest mistake as a nation! Adolph Hitler understood instinctively how important it would be for the 'Thousand Year Reich' to control the children. He said, 'When an opponent declares, "I will not come over to your side", I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to me already... what are you? You will pass on, Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.' Dr James Dobson and Gary L. Bauer, Children at Risk: Winning the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Your Children, Dallas: Word Publishing, 1990, pp.97-98. [393] By reading the press and monitoring the media, it has been possible, I think, to identify a host of objectives that might be called 'the family agenda of the left.' Listed below are their goals as I perceive them. * Convince the public that the training and development of children are far too important to be left to the whims and errors of parents. Only child-development authorities and professionals, commissioned by the government, can do the job properly. Mothers and fathers must yield control to those who are better equipped for the task of raising children. * Propagandize heavily against the use of corporal punishment as a disciplinary measure with children. Equate it with child abuse, even when administered judiciously by loving parents. Ultimately, secure legislation to outlaw the practice. * Continually emphasize an exhaustive list of 'children's rights,' which will provide wedges to separate kids from their parents. * Provide mandatory schooling for every four-year-old, so that young minds can be controlled. This will be accomplished first through government- sponsored childcare centres. Once established with federal funds, they should eventually drive unassisted church-based facilities out of competition. * Teach students that gay and lesbian lifestyles are no less moral than heterosexual relationships, and that they typically involve long-term monogamous commitments. Teach girls that it is just as appropriate to fall in love and have intimate relationships with another girl as with a boy (and do the same for boys). Design counseling programs for gay and lesbian students that will permit subtle recruitment services... * Require churches, businesses, and schools to hire gays, lesbians, and others who contradict their faith. * Promote Gay-Pride celebrations in every American city, and seek equivalent legal status of families for homosexual and lesbian partners. * Expand the power of government and its bureaucracies to control every vestige of private life. * Increase the tax burden on families, forcing more women into the work force and their children into childcare facilities. * Make homemakers feel exploited, stupid and useless. Especially at the college and university level, ridicule female students who wish to marry, to have a family, or to postpone or avoid a career. Dr James Dobson and Gary L. Bauer, Children at Risk: Winning the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Your Children, Dallas: Word Publishing, 1990, pp.59-60. [355] In Sweden, according to some economists and sociologists, it is the government itself that is contributing to the declin </body
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