FROM CULTURE WARS TO COMMON GROUND
Christine E, Gudorf

1. I want to begin by stating my appreciation for this book's great as the most vulnerable members of families. My Catholicism inclines me toward its focus on the common good, my feminism makes me appreciate its clear rejection of male headship, and my background in liberation theologies puts me in great sympathy with the book’s insistence on a priority for children as the most vulnerable members of families.  The practical suggestions almost without exception point in valuable directions and are eminently practical. It is tempting to pick out interesting discussions from throughout the book, but I will try to stick to my assigned area, chapter six.

2.  No book can do or say everything on its topic.  This book is remarkably ambitious and even more remarkably successful despite the breadth of its ambition. But I do want to point to two omissions, the first of which think is critical. It seems to me impossible to responsibly study family and family policy without dealing with the issue of overpopulation.  Overpopulation is an issue for the US and would be even if we hermentically sealed our borders and ended our drastic overconsumption of world resources.  Americans continue to destroy animal and plant species, the oceans and the air here and elsewhere in order to plant more food and provide more shelter and consumer products to our ever increasing population.  Well within the next century, and much sooner if we do not greatly lower consumption rates quickly, we will need negative population growth for a substantial period of time if we are to even have the possibility of reversing enough toxicity in our air, water and soil to allow them to sustain the weakened and depleted array of surviving species of life. And then, barring major global destruction of human life, we will still need rigid limits on population levels forever.

Negative growth would require that adults would have an option between producing no children and one child. This will have major implications, for family life; there will be no brothers or sisters, no aunts, uncles or cousins. No one would have more than one grandchild.  The less restrictive policy -‑which by itself will almost certainly not be sufficient to reach sustainability‑‑will be replacement; each couple could have two children or less. Population policy necessary for biospheric sustainability must be integral to any discussion of family policy, whether Christian, other religious, or civic. This dramatic, conscious and probably necessarily coercive ‑continuation of the demographic transition which began in the 19^th century will have drastic implications for how we interpret Christian tradition on family and how we envision family roles in the future.

3. This is a book on family know that family. I know that family is a big can of worms on its own, and sympathize with the authors' desire to avoid opening that second can of worms we call sexuality any further than necessary. But the questions do not go away. There is, it seems to me, a jump in the book's argument. The evidence is clear that children raised in intact two parent families fare better than those raised either by single parents or those raised in other, alternative family forms. So we should discourage people from having children outside of marriage and try to‑make marriages more stable. But the authors point to the high and increasing rate of unwed mothers as a major part of the family problem and make no suggestions as to how to lower or eliminate unwed parenting except for vague but persistent suggestions that the churches be more assertive in their teachings on family. They report on churches and groups who explicitly teach abstinence outside of marriage, without any probing of either the practicality of such teaching or the moral and theological foundations of such teaching.

Obviously afraid that persons from conservative churches will not consider any proposals which do not include sexual abstinence outside marriage, the authors tried to "bracket" the entire issue of sex, without, I think, much success. Neither social policy nor church teaching can target the elimination of unmarried parents without some consensus around the relationship of sex and reproduction.

Contemporary methods of contraception are very effective when used conscientiously, and for the majority who approve abortion as a backup method of contraception, the need for those not securely married to avoid reproduction is not at all compelling. But, it is not impossible to make compelling arguments against many kinds of non-marital sex. At the very least responsible sex requires maturity, even when it is contraceptive and STD safe, and so is not for minors. I think that sexual partners should have mutual respect and some degree of care for each other, which inclines me to disvalue casual sex, even if contraceptive and STD safe and restricted to mature adults not married to other people. But as my students have not hesitated to remind me, since my own sexual experience is limited to my 30 year marriage, I am not in much of a position to evaluate claims of moral value in other types of sex.

While strongly agree with the authors that churches and other social groups need to mobilize against economic pressures--such as long workweeks for both members of dual career families--that often produce both unstable unions and the lack of adequate parenting within many marriages, there will always be people whose occupations or other situation militate against marriage. While marriage would be the ideal, non-marital long term but not necessarily permanent unions in some of these situations, given equal regard and affection, are more humanizing and more enhancing of the common good than most situations of abstinent singleness. 

I explicitly want to challenge the authors' proposition that sex be linked to family understood in terms of reproduction. I am sure the authors do not mean by such a link what the more extreme church Fathers meant--that since sex was for reproduction, it should be avoided by post-menopausal, pregnant, or sterile couples unless abstinence threatened sin. But such a link is still problematic. If we had the luxury of deciding family policy on the basis of theology alone, we might decide that linking sex and the reproduction of family could reinforce each other's social goods. But traditional systems which do this have historically tended to be very resistant to birth limitation and to use the exchange of women as the glue that makes family networks hang together. We need to make human reproduction a relatively rare event in human life compared to its role in Christian theology and world history. But see no compelling reason why sex should be so rare.

The authors pointed approvingly to my description of marital sex as having certain positive overflow effects on children in the family. Our societies have lost many traditional forms of intimacy, beginning with nearby extended family networks, and including the predominance of lifelong sets of neighbors and church congregations. With these losses of non-sexual forms of intimacy--not to mention the physical intimacy that arose among larger groups of siblings and extended family members sharing beds, bedrooms and bathroom the intimacy of sex has come to carry more weight for adults. Marital sexual intimacy can serve to prevent the kind of common non-sexual but extremely inappropriate intimacy demands that single parents often find themselves making of children, especially of only or oldest children. Minor children should never have to be their parent's best friend--they are not ready for fully reciprocity in their central relationships, and should not have such responsibility imposed on them. Children raised with reciprocal--much less principal-emotional responsibility for parents can become prime examples of what Alice Miller describes as adults who never learned to know their own feelings and desires because they learned to respond to parental needs and desires instead, and eventually lost contact with their own.

In short, I think sex can no longer primarily represent for us power to create, but rather energy for sustaining life, for maintaining and recreating the world. The predatory hypermasculine understanding of sex as pioneering male power penetrating virgin territory and then creating from its raw resources whatever is desired is not only sexist, but ultimately life-destructive.  

4. More work needs to be done on the theology of family. This text is almost entirely an ethical, historical and social science treatment of family. It is not enough for the churches to implement programs that teach that Christian marriage should be based in mutual respect and children should take priority within the family. Christian theology on the family is much broader than such programs. What we teach about the Father and the Son and the absence of women in their divine family, about the holy family at Nazareth, about the virginity of Mary, about the role of the Father and the Son in the death of the Son are all critical aspects of Christian theology on family, as are all the biblical stories involving family. What does it say to children when they are taught that God demanded--even if only teasing--that Abraham sacrifice Isaac? or that God requires that human salvation require suffering? If we are to take seriously the welfare of the most vulnerable members of the human family, then we need to look at the complicity of Christian theology in both the social marginalization and the domestic abuse of children and women. In Brown and Bohn's anthology Christianity, Patriarchy and Abuse, Shelia Redmond points out that pastoral teaching on suffering as desirable, on the importance of forgiving, on sexual purity, on the human need for redemption and on obedience to authority all constitute obstacles to children's recovery from abuse, especially sexual abuse. Perhaps the most powerful general argument with regard to the welfare of children in the family is that if we teach that God the Father required the Son to suffer and die in order to forgive human sin, then ideal parenthood is forever tainted with potential for sadism.

 5. When first read the book, the most surprising aspect was that a group of Protestants who thoroughly grounded their approach in American Protestant history of family reached for almost exclusively Roman Catholic theological resources on society and family. On one level, understand American Protestant thought on family has been almost entirely polarized between liberals intent on individualist egalitarianism and reactionaries intent on denying late modem structural change altogether, Catholic battles and divisions have lain elsewhere. But at another level was reminded of a section from Peter Berger's Sacred Canopy on Catholic/ Protestant differences regarding secularization hope this is not simply Catholic parochialism on, my part:  

If compared to the "fullness" of the Catholic universe,
Protestantism appears as a radical truncation, a reduction
to "essentials" at the expense of a vast wealth of religious
contents. This is especially true of the Calvinist version of
Protestantism, but to a considerable degree the same may
be said of the Lutheran and even the Anglican
Reformations .... Protestantism may be described in terms
of an immense shrinkage in the scope of the sacred in
reality, as compared with its Catholic adversary.…At the
risk of some oversimplification, it can be said that
Protestantism divested itself as much as possible from the
three most ancient and most sacred concomitants of the
sacred--mystery, miracle and magic.'[i]

Berger goes on to say that for Protestants, " the radical transcendence of God confronts a universe of radical immanence, of 'closedness' to the sacred. Religiously speaking, the world becomes lonely indeed.”[ii] I am not sure that can make this argument clear. There is, think, a sense in which the Catholic openness, to mystery and miracle even magic in some senses, to the presence of God in nature and in natural institutions such as the family--to the sacramentality in human life--grounds particular concepts like subsidiarity and common good. It grounds as well my own insights on mutuality and not self-sacrifice as the foundation of parenting. And wonder how well these principles, concepts and insights can function outside the context which gave them life.  I am not making a proprietary claim.  I only mean to suggest that these ideas function in their original context not as moral ideals to be rationally accepted because they offer something promising in practical terms, but as descriptions of created reality which can be recognized and experienced and which calls for responsible participation. In the Catholic context, such concepts are practically useful precisely because they reflect the way the world is put together. They are not procedural rules based on reason, but reflections of a unified and ultimately sacred creation which continues to be connected to our Creator.

6. One thing that could not help noticing about the treatment of children in the book is that moving the needs of children to the center of the discussion of family did not have the result would have expected, of initiating some discussion of parent/child relationships. Instead the emphasis is on putting together marital structures that can meet the needs of children. This leads to an odd lack of parallelism, in that there is tremendous emphasis on the need for equal regard and mutuality in the spousal relationship, with the clear expectation that parental modeling, of these will have the effect of preparing children for similar relationships. But the book is curiously silent about how parents should relate to children, and how churches are to deal with biblical models of parenting which reflect concepts of ownership.

 7. I would also like to see some examination of grandparent roles. If family size drastically decreases, as it must, grandparents become virtually the only relatives outside the nuclear family. In many churches, and families the most debated issue around grandparents is what responsibility they have to raise grandchildren when parents are unable or unwilling. This is a serious issue. It is not only in Africa that grandparents are raising the children of the AIDS dead. In Miami review foster care placements for the juvenile court, and the numbers of grandparents raising the children of their dead, dying, or drug-addicted children are legion, especially among African-American, Haitian and Hispanic families.

But the larger issue is the more ordinary role of grandparents.  What are the responsibilities of grandparents; do they impinge on the recent image of recreational retirement as the right of seniors, or on south-bound relocation decisions? Though we certainly have poor elderly throughout the nation, of all the age-groups in the nation, the elderly are as a whole the most comfortably off. Does that bring with it any responsibilities to descendants, or have the elderly put in their time and earned their freedom?