Family Values and Christian Values

Among the many idolatries circulating these days, one is actually circulated by people who think themselves religious: “family values.”

According to the relevant Wikipedia entry, “family values,” the idolization of the nuclear family as the basic, essential unit of society, “is sometimes used by the media to refer to Christian values.”

Have they read the Bible? The two are not the same at all. Name one single significant religious personage in the Old Testament who came from a model nuclear family. 

Cain and Abel - Titian

Adam and Eve—one of their sons killed the other.
Noah—cursed one of his three sons and all of his descendants.
Lot—had incestuous relations with his two daughters.
Abraham—saved by an angel from sacrificing his only son.
Jacob—feared being killed by his brother, having cheated him.
Joseph—his brothers tried to kill him, sell him into slavery.
Moses—raised in a foster home.
David—killed for his wife, killed his son who rebelled against him.
Solomon—killed his brother. Took 700 wives and 300 concubines, who subverted his faith. 

Abraham and Isaac - Rembrandt

Indeed, all the patriarchs were polygamous.

Isn't there a certain consistency here? Absolutely no trace of the nuclear family as a good thing or a bastion of proper Judeo-Christian values.

In the New Testament, the rejection of the family is emphatic. Jesus took no family; and the apostles who were married apparently abandoned theirs. Jesus rejects his family when he stays behind, age twelve, in the temple. He rejects his family again when they come to call him during his early ministry, and he responds, “What have I to do with you, woman?” When he calls James and John, they actually abandon their father Zebedee in the boat. When a young man seeks to join him, but after burying his father, Jesus will not allow him: “let the dead bury their own dead.” He says, “call no one father but your father who is in heaven.” And he says, “anyone who does not despise his father and mother on my account is not worthy of me.”

Absalom

 

This is harsh; no harsher, but of a piece, with the Gospel's rejection of the kingdoms of this world. Families, like governments, are a practical necessity, but ought to be viewed with the same suspicion. They are a situation in which some individuals hold power over others; given human nature, that rarely turns out well. No doubt there are good, nurturing families somewhere; but when I survey the experiences of my close friends and relatives, I don't see many. In most families, it seems, someone is abusing someone.

This does not justify government intervening against the family; bad as most families are, government is not likely to be any better. And it is in principle easier for the abused individual to escape from a bad family situation than from a bad government. Government interventions against the family seem always to make the situation worse.

The solution, instead, is presumably “voluntary families,” groups of like-minded people, as in a church congregation or a monastery. This is what we need more of.

Young Jesus in the Temple - Hole.