In what follows, I will give an overview of the American family debate, outline some practical theological responses to this debate, show how these responses relate to political culture, and sketch a brief description of family trends. I will conclude by offering some hints as to how our theological sources should be reconstructed to become more faithful, convincing to the church, and articulate in public discourse. Since this paper is an overview, none of these topics will receive the full attention that they deserve.
The current family debate in the United States should be understood in relation to the optimism about family change in the social sciences during the 1960s and 1970s. For over two decades, social scientists from Talcott Parsons to Jessie Bernard had argued that these changes--more divorce, out-of-wedlock births, stepfamilies, single parents, both parents in the work force--did not mean that families were in crisis.(1)
Many social science texts argued that these changes meant increased freedom from the oppressive weight of traditional families.(2) Jessie Bernard concluded in her book The Future of Marriage (1972) that marriage as an institution was good for men but produced bad mental and physical health for women. Her solution was more radical than her diagnosis seemed to imply. She did not propose a reform of marriage to make it equal and mutually fulfilling for both husband and wife. Rather her solution envisioned a "future of options"--a social situation in which the institution of marriage was one of many options ranging from celibacy, trial marriage, open marriage, group marriage, nonsexual marriage, cohabitation, and singleness with an active sexual life.(3) Some social scientists held that family changes were harmful only when they ended in poverty. A wider welfare net and a healthy economy, they argued, could prevent these negative consequences. Even the prestigious Carnegie Council's All Our Children (1977) played down the importance of the intact, two-parent family for child well-being.(4)
Three practical theological responses to these trends from American churches can be identified--a liberal Protestant, a Catholic, and a conservative Protestant response. Liberal religious communities tended to agree with the dominant social science analysis. Theological liberals, fresh from battles of the 1960s over civil rights for African-Americans, analogized a relation between equality for minorities and equality for a variety of family forms. Single parent families, stepfamilies, nonmarried cohabiting families, gay and lesbian families were seen as equally good for both children and adults if only the onus of prejudice could be removed.
The close approximation of liberal theological views of marriage and family to the growing contractualism of legal theories of marriage should not be overlooked. With the advent of "no fault" divorce in the 1960s and 1970s, marriage agreements increasingly were seen as analogous to business contracts.(5) Unilateral divorce--divorce based on the will of one partner even if the other resisted--made marriage contracts among the weakest in American society.
Liberal churches never accepted the secular contractual view as exhaustive of the religious significance of marriage. Their theology of marriage, however, had analogies to the contractual concept. Rather than contract as such, the liberal view talked of marital-type "relationships." These were spoken of as "committed relationships." Their religious meaning was found in the affective quality, justice, and nonexploitative character of these relationships. Although seldom spoken of as "contracts," these ideal relations nonetheless possessed features of contracts because of the voluntary way they were thought to be established and dissolved. Gradually, the classic religious models of marriage--marriage as both legal contract and covenant or legal contract and sacrament--gave way to the idea of a marital-type relationship that was essentially privately contracted and only incidentally legally witnessed or religiously sanctioned.
The concept of "justice love" between consenting adults--a concept found in the Presbyterian Keeping Body and Soul Together (1991)--is an example of this style of practical theological thinking. A kind of "Kantian relationalism" (to coin a term) became widespread in liberal circles, both religious and secular. This view blurred distinctions between nonsexual friendships, sexual friendships, cohabiting couples, legally contracted marital couples, and couples both legally contracted and covenantally or sacramentally sanctioned. A new democracy of loving and just intimate relationships began replacing older understandings of covenant, sacrament, and contract applied to the sphere of marriage and family.
This view of marriage and family was not alarmed by the family trends of the 1970s and 80s. It saw little reason to either halt or alter these trends. The task of theology and the church was rather to create a new situation of acceptance, justice, and normalization of these emerging family arrangements.
This view tended to believe that lobbying for state support of new family forms, especially single-parent households with small children, was a fundamental obligation of the Christian community.
A second response came from American Catholicism. This view was grounded on the shadows of Catholic natural law thinking about families and its associated principle of subsidiarity. In spite of the personalism of some Catholic theologians (even Pope John Paul II),(6) the Catholic view assumed as foundational to families the natural bonding of one man and one woman for the purposes of procreation and education of children, the payment of the marital debt, mutual assistance between spouses, and supernatural grace.(7) The principle of subsidiarity--a view of the family-state relation inspired by Aristotle but explicitly stated by Pope Leo XIII and Pius XI--has its own natural law backing. This view believed that the family, because of the energies of kin preference, have a prima facie competence and right to care for its members, especially young children. Government should not intrude on this capacity. Nonetheless, government has a crucial role in protecting families from the avarice of the market and assuring families of the social conditions needed for a family wage.(8)
The Catholic response was conservative on family ethics and relatively progressive on social policy. It resisted the trends toward divorce, out-of-wedlock births, cohabitation, the deinstitutionalization of marriage, and abortion. It continued to champion marriage as grounded in natural law and empowered by supernatural grace. The principle of subsidiarity, however, led Catholic social theory to support state-financed welfare for needy families and children, whatever the cause of their vulnerability. Although Catholics believed government should not intrude on families--especially the family's right to be instructed by the Church on family ethics--they believed that the state should protect the family's resources, be this through the guarantee of fair wages, the right through labor unions to bargain with companies, or the right to an adequate education for children.(9)
Conservative religious and political forces did not share the social scientific optimism about family change. Religious conservatives resisted these family changes. They affirmed the traditional family roles of wage earning father and domestic mother. Furthermore, they resisted government intrusion into family life through welfare, progressive values in public schools, and sex education in the schools. Some Christian conservatives justified this thinking by fundamentalist uses of scriptures which appear to sanction male headship (Eph. 5:23, Col. 3:18, and I Pet. 3:1), forbid divorce (Mt. 19:6-9), or command women to silence in the church (I Cor. 14:34-36). This group tended to believe that the nineteenth-century family with its working husband and stay-at-home wife was derived directly from the biblical plan for families. They seemed unaware that the family of the 1950s reflected the contingent character of a specific economic organization of domestic life which had its roots in the industrial revolution rather than the New Testament.
Although conservatives of this type were skeptical of government intrusion on family life, they seemed less troubled by the intrusions of the market. There were exceptions to this rule. The conservative mind was often skeptical of market influences which promoted the subversive values of popular culture, hence the interest in developing an alternative popular religious music.
Other Christian conservatives grounded their thinking on more sophisticated theological models. Those working out of Reformed theological traditions were likely to invoke the idea of "orders" or "spheres" of creation to justify both their religious sanction for intact married families as well as their theory of the limited rights of government in family life. Genesis 2:24 ("Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh") was used to argue that God's intentions for covenanted and permanent marriage was an "order of creation." More complicated covenant theologies stemming from Luther, Calvin, Barth, Brunner, and the Dutch educator-statesman Abraham Kuyper developed an idea that the spheres of family, government, and market are differentiated orders under the will of God.(10) Kuyper, whose influence is growing on the American scene, taught that each order or sphere should be governed by the sovereign rule of God. This view theoretically does not end in theocracy, since no specific manifestation of government is concretely sanctioned, just the general idea that Christians operating in the spheres of life, including government, must be attentive to their covenant responsibilities.
This more sophisticated view--argued by such thinkers as Mary Stewart van Leeuwen, Max Stackhouse, and legal theorist John Witte--affirms the intact, mother-father partnership, but it does not condone male headship or the public-private split of the nineteenth century family.(11) Although it is cautious about the role of government in family life, this view is likely to see a role for the state in protecting families from destructive market intrusions. This view generally sees a place for state welfare as long as it does not undermine the prerogatives of families and their covenants with their religious communities. The Christian Coalition is a powerful but unsophisticated version of elements of both Catholic subsidiarity and the Reformed doctrine of the spheres. A careful reading of leader Ralph Reed's Politically Incorrect (1994) shows that he is struggling to articulate the autonomy of family from state in ways which reflect aspects of each of these classic formulations.(12)
These three practical theological responses to family trends have interacted with political culture in interesting ways. Theological liberals have tended to be liberal democrats, even to the place where mainline denominational hierarchies are referred to in some circles as "the Democratic party at prayer." Since most social scientists are known to be political liberals,(13) they have joined with Democratic liberals and the liberal churches in both accepting and supporting the new private contractualism. It would be unfair to suggest that liberal political culture does not value permanent marriage, but it is correct to say that it increasingly sees marriage as one among many options for the organization of human intimacy, sexuality, and reproduction.(14) Liberal thinkers tend to believe that neither private institutions nor public policy can do much to bring marriage back as the socially sanctioned institution for the organization of sexuality and reproduction. They argue, therefore, that government increasingly must function as a surrogate family or substitute "father" for mothers and children who have either lost husbands and fathers or never had them in the first place.(15)
Many Christian fundamentalists or conservatives have, on the other hand, gravitated to the Republican party. The Christian Coalition, and the Moral Majority before it, has functioned to organize a large percentage of conservative and evangelical Christians to support the "pro-family" political and cultural agenda of the Republican party. Conservative Christians working out of the Reformed "spheres" or Catholic "subsidiarity" models are more unpredictable in their orientations to political culture. If they are conservative on abortion, they may go Republican. If they see positive but limited roles for government (as both spheres theory and subsidiarity can sometimes hold), they are likely to go Democratic, or at least "new Democrat" of the kind espoused by Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Conference.
In the late 1970s, the Republican party, sensing the fears about family fragmentation among conservative Christians, exploited these anxieties for political purposes. Eventually, this strategy resulted in the stunning 1994 Republican congressional victories. Since the 1992 pesidential election of William Clinton, however, concern over the condition of families has become a liberal (or at least a neoliberal) as well as a conservative political issue. The welfare debate in the United States has come to symbolize a wider cultural conflict over the condition and future of American families. Political liberals such as David Ellwood, Mary Jo Bane, William Galston, and President Clinton himself began to express concern about the negative effects of divorce, teenage pregnancy, and the emerging culture of nonmarriage.(16)
In effect, these political liberals became "neoliberals." Before the November 1994 elections, a new consensus was emerging between neoliberals such as Ellwood, Galston, and Moynihan and a new brand of neoconservatives such as William Bennett, Henry Hyde, and the conservative Family Research Council. Neoliberals and neoconservatives shared the conviction that government should take an explicit moral stand and encourage family formation, discourage out-of-wedlock births, and reduce the divorce rate.
Neoliberals on the American scene can be defined as pro-family liberals who repudiate the older liberal optimism about family trends. They want to reverse these trends but also retain an active role for government in supporting needy families. The leadership of the mainline religious denominations, with few exceptions, have continued their alliance with the older political liberalism and have appeared confused by the steps toward a somewhat more conservative stance by neoliberals.
Neoconservatives at the level of political culture can be defined as conservatives who believe family problems are a result of declining cultural values rather than worsening economic conditions. Yet they are neoconservative precisely because they, in contrast to hard conservatives, believe that there is a place for government supports for needy and disrupted families. Neoliberals and neoconservatives could dialogue and cooperate before the 1994 conservative landslide. Although they varied on the details, both saw family problems as simultaneously matters of changing cultural values and unfortunate economic downturns. They tended to agree that solutions to family problems needed to involve both cultural and economic proposals.
As we move toward the 1996 Presidential elections, this old alliance is once again visible. Now, however, neoliberals and neoconservatives are fighting over a viable middle ground--one that emphasizes cultural values and economic solutions. Since the elections are near, they are fighting to take credit for a new government "familism" that encourages family commitment (by discouraging out-of-wedlock births and enforcing child-care payments) yet supports families economically (through tax reductions, tax credits for children, and tax reductions for college tuition). What is striking is how similar the political parties look on family issues even though they struggle to look different.
Christian voices have been in conflict over the family debate. The three voices--the liberal, Protestant conservative, and Catholic--have been unable to develop a dialogue analogous to the neoliberal-neoconservative alliance at the level of political culture.(17) This cannot happen unless more fundamental theological dialogue occurs between these groups. Here are some issues they must face.
Liberalism's ethic of relationality and equality has difficulty distinguishing marriages and families from other types of friendship. On the other hand, Reformation and Catholic perspectives are often charged with patriarchy and injustice in their family theologies. However, Reformation and Catholic perspectives have recently moved toward formulations of Christian love which deemphasize paternalism, emphasize Christian love as mutuality,(18) found biblical support for this,(19) and placed self-sacrificial love in service to mutuality. Hence, these traditions are now aborbing some of the liberal sensibility. But in order for Catholicism and Reformed thinking to speak effectively on the centrality of marriage for sexual intimacy, procreation, and the educaiton of children, the naturalism in Catholic family theory and the "naturalistic moment" in some forms of Reformation thinking needs to be strengthened. This is what should happen if a neoliberal-neoconservative alliance is to develop at the level of religious culture.
Family disruption has now become a concern of political liberals in the United States as it was formally only for political conservatives. How did this happen? The answer is twofold: 1) the changing interpretation of research on the family in the social sciences, and 2) the growing public costs of family difficulties.
The first point is the more dramatic. Distinguished family sociologist Norval Glenn, who describes himself as a political liberal, points out that over 87 percent of sociologists are also liberals.(20)
Liberals, he argues, are future-oriented and open to change. For this reason, liberal social scientists were inclined to give a positive interpretation to the family changes of the 1960s and 70s. Beginning in the 1980s, however, social science studies by Wallerstein, Hetherington, Bumpass, Popenoe, Weitzmann, McLanahan and Sandefur began to support the idea that divorce and single parenthood had, on average, negative consequences for both children and women.(21)
Family structure, seen in the 1960s and 1970s as a neutral factor for family well-being, was viewed by the early 1990s as highly relevant to the flourishing of children. During the spring of 1993, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead published a popular essay for The Atlantic Monthly summarizing much of this new research.(22) Charles Murray, in his more balanced pre-Bell Curve days, created a sensation when he predicted in the Wall Street Journal that out-of-wedlock births would spread and establish a new white underclass.(23)
Within months, liberal journalists such as Joan Beck, David Broder, William Raspberry, and Clarence Page began acknowledging the seriousness of the family crisis in their columns.(24)
Reports of government-appointed groups such as The National Commission on Children (1991) and Families First: Report of the National Commission on America's Urban Families (1993) reversed the thinking of the Carnegie Council by re-emphasizing the importance of intact families for child well-being.(25)
The most definitive research was reported by Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur in their Growing up with a Single Parent (1994). Using sophisticated statistical tools to analyze the data of four national surveys, MacLanahan and Sandefur concluded that children growing up outside of biological, two-parent families were twice as likely to do poorly in school, twice as likely to be single parents themselves, and one-and-a-half times more likely to have difficulties becoming permanently attached to the labor market.(26) This was true when the data was controlled for the race, education, age and place of residence of parents. Income reduced these disadvantages, but only by one half. Furthermore, this study showed that stepfamilies had no advantage over single parents; both were less successful in raising children than intact, biologically related families.(27)
This is so even though average incomes of stepfamilies is higher than that of intact families, thereby challenging the idea that income rather than family structure is the chief predictor of child well-being.
With the publication of the McLanahan-Sandefur volume, the casualness of the 1960s and 70s about family structure seems to be coming to an end. McLanahan, herself once a single mother, is surprised with what her own data suggests. She and Sandefur write,
If we were asked to design a system for making sure that children's basic needs were met, we would probably come up with something quite similar to the two-parent family ideal. Such a design, in theory, would not only ensure that children had access to the time and money of two adults, it also would provide a system of checks and balances that promoted quality parenting. The fact that both adults have a biological connection to the child would increase the likelihood that the parents would identify with the child and be willing to sacrifice for that child, and it would reduce the likelihood that either parent would abuse the child.(28)
Some political liberals have begun to hear this changed message of the social sciences. It is precisely this kind of information which has turned some of them into neoliberals. On the other hand, there is little evidence that a similar shift is occurring in the liberal religious culture. Although Protestant evangelicals and Catholics are inclined to believe these reports, they differ considerably in how they make use of such information within their practical theological positions.
Social science research is pointing to a level of analysis that only recently has become clear. It has to do with the new understanding of the importance of fathers. Some interpreters believe that the single most important family trend in the United States--and indeed throughout the world--is the growing absence of fathers from their children.(29)
I call this trend "the male problematic." This trend is a common factor behind most of the data on family change. Nearly 30 percent of children in the U.S. under 18 do not live with their fathers, and nearly 50 percent of children under 18 will spend several years without their father's presence in the home. Furthermore, divorced fathers, on average, do poorly in financially supporting and visiting their children. The fathers of children born out of wedlock are even worse. As Cherlin and Furstenberg say in their Divided Families (1991), American men see marriage and parenting as a package; when the marriage breaks up, parenting deteriorates as well.(30)
Trends toward father absence are not limited to the United States. Aaron Sachs reports that in a recent study of low income couples in Chile, 42 percent of the fathers were providing no child support to their first-born child after its sixth birthday.(31) According to a recent study in Barbados, of 333 fathers with eight-year-old children, only 22 percent were still living with their child. Furthermore, the children of the fathers who continued to live with their children were performing significantly better in school.(32) The Population Council's Families in Focus (1995) reports that the number of female-headed households has risen significantly in almost every country in the world since the mid-1970s. Marital dissolution runs from 40 to 60 percent for women in their forties in poor countries such as the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Indonesia, and Senegal. Divorce rates were 55 per 100 in the United States in 1990 and have doubled since 1970 in Canada, France, Greece, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and former West Germany.(33)
Out-of-wedlock births were 1.O percent in Japan, 33.3 percent in Northern Europe, 70 percent in Botswana, and 27-28 percent in Kenya.(34) The decline of fathers' financial and social support has had disastrous consequences for both mothers and children throughout the world, even in wealthy countries. Its consequences are especially devastating in poor and undeveloped countries. Poverty both contributes to and is further aggravated by fatherlessness.
Yet, as John Snarey, David Blankenhorn, David Popenoe, and McLanahan and Sandefur show, fathers contribute not only financially but also cognitively and emotionally to the well-being of their children.(35) Furthermore, their contribution is not easily replaced. Although biological relatedness does not guarantee good parenting by either mother or father, it seems to be a premoral condition (a premoral good) that on average correlates positively with moral qualities such as commitment, presence, steadfastness, and positive regard--qualities which are directly related to child flourishing. This raises a question which I will address later--how should information about average premoral conditions for good parenting be used in a more properly ethical argument?
The case for the two-parent, biologically related family can be overstated. Not all biological fathers and mothers are competent parents. Not all two-parent families are just and life-enhancing; some are tyrannical to wives and abusive to children. The facts seem to indicate, however, that alternatives are on average worse. Single mothers are more likely to abuse their children physically than intact families, and children are many times more likely to be physically and sexually abused in stepfamilies and co-habiting arrangements than they are in intact families.(36)
There should be, as a matter of ecclesial and public policy, a presumption toward encouraging the formation and maintenance of intact families. This rule has exceptions, but they do not undercut its importance as a cultural and religious guide.
There are competing explanations for the family crisis in the United States. Different solutions in the family debate can be distinguished partially by their differing analysis of the problem. As we have seen, conservatives, neoconservatives, and some neoliberals emphasize the importance of cultural values. Values have changed, they claim, and largely for the worse. Less nuanced conservatives such as James Dobson claim modern society is basically immoral and does not honor family, marital, and parental commitments as it once did.(37) Neoconservatives such as Christopher Lasch emphasize a new narcissism or, as does William Bennett, a breakdown in virtue.(38) Neoliberals such as Robert Bellah and David Popenoe, as well as historians such as Edward Shorter and Lawrence Stone, place importance on the rise of Enlightenment individualism.(39) Even demographers such as Larry Bumpass and Ron Lesthaege invoke Enlightenment individualism to explain growing family fragmentation.(40)
On the other hand, liberal, progressive, Marxist and many liberal-feminist analyses blame deteriorating economic conditions and decreased welfare support for the family crises. Frederick Engels held that capitalism itself was the problem.(41) Jürgen Habermas and Alan Wolfe follow Max Weber in emphasizing the spread of technical reason as a causative factor. They show, however, that this can take two forms.(42) Technical reason can express itself in market logics that spread into private life, replacing family loyalties with cost-benefit and ethical-egoist modes of moral thinking. Or technical reason can be expressed through state bureaucracies which take over family functions and reduce them to dependent client populations.
Neither cultural nor social-economic analyses are sufficient in themselves. Some combination of both seems required to orient us to the problems of families in the United States and, for that matter, most Western nations. Progressives and liberals should acknowledge that there has been a significant value shift toward more individualistic values. Many former progressives and liberals have accepted the reality of this shift toward individualism, hence the birth of neoliberal organizations in the United States such as the Democratic Leadership Conference, the Progressive Policy Institute, the Institute for American Values, the Council on Families in America, and the Communitarian Network. These groups are calling for a cultural conversion--a new balance of individual rights and communal responsibilities and a new marital and parental commitment.(43)
The economic view is also important, but it cannot stand alone any more than the cultural analysis. Economists Victor Fuchs and Diane Reglis admit that the U.S. economy has slowed during the 1980s and 90s and that this has hurt families. But they point out that the downturn in the well-being of children began in America in the 1970s when income and government expenditures for families were at their peak. Hence, changes in cultural values--the new individualism and its expressions in divorce, out-of-wedlock births, single parenting, and careerism--must be invoked, they contend, to supplement the economic explanation.(44)
Cultural shifts can sometimes follow economic decline and then become institutionalized. William Julius Wilson's explanation for the colossal increase in out-of-wedlock births in the African-American community (from 22% in the 1960s to 68% today) is that declining job opportunities for men in inner cities makes family formation nearly impossible.(45) But University of Chicago's Mark Testa has shown that even when black men begin earning middle-class incomes they are now less likely to marry than they were a few decades earlier.(46) Their commitments to marriage as an institution have declined.
Psychological factors constitute a third set of factors influencing family disruption. Susan Moller Okin believes the family has not sufficiently socialized children for gender justice, hence producing the interpersonal strains which lead to divorce or, in many cases, no marriage at all.(47) Nancy Chodorow and Jessica Benjamin believe that the different ways boys and girls are raised by mothers in our society work against gender justice in the home.(48) Linda Waite and Frances Goldscheider believe the family crisis follows from the fact that men's commitment to housework and child care has not kept pace with women's entry into the wage economy.(49)
The view that couples' psychological and communicative skills are not equal to the demands of modern marriage has some merit. It is at least part of the reason for marital disruption. There clearly are fewer religious, cultural, economic, and extended family supports for enduring marriages in the U.S. and most post-industrial countries. Interpersonal and communicative skills must be excellent for couples to endure conflict in societies with fewer social and economic reinforcements for family formation and enduring marriage. Along with the cultural and economic causes of the family crisis, there are genuine psychological factors as well.
Evolutionary psychologists have gone deeper and introduced an important new dimension to the psychological level of analysis. They point to the asymmetrical reproductive strategies between males and females in all mammalian species, including homo sapiens. They point out that males of most mammalian species procreate as widely as possible with a variety of females but do not become involved in the care of their offspring.(50)
This raises the question, what were the conditions which led homo sapiens males long ago to become attached to mates and involved in the care and socialization of their children?
Robert Trivers (1972) and other evolutionary theorists have discovered a range of naturalistic conditions which may have brought monogamy and male parental investment into existence for humans.(51) These conditions are worth reviewing. It may be precisely these conditions which modern societies are losing. The growing absence of these conditions may constitute the deep reasons for family disruption.
These evolutionary psychological perspectives have relevance for contemporary practical theological responses to the family crisis. They offer a way of reconstructing Catholic natural-law theory on the family. In turn, this reconstructed Catholic naturalism can offer what Paul Ricoeur calls a "diagnostic" to the naturalistic depth of the classical Protestant orders of creation. By diagnostic, I mean an indication that the orders of creation actually refer to certain realities and regularities of human existence even though the idea of "orders" means precisely that God shapes these regularities toward God's ends. Finally, the theories of evolutionary psychology and current data about the effects of family disruption on children constitute a critique of the naive justice-love perspectives of liberal Protestantism.
To understand these claims, we must review recent theories in evolutionary psychology about how family formation occurred for homo sapiens. The work of W.D. Hamilton (1964) provided the framework for a theory of kin altruism which in turn had important implications for the theory of family formation. Hamilton's theory of kin altruism states that individuals are not concerned only with the survival of their own specific genes; they are also concerned with the survival of those who carry their genes--offspring and siblings first and then cousins, aunts and uncles, and second cousins in descending order. Kin altruism explains why creatures are willing under some circumstances to sacrifice their own well-being or fitness for the well-being or fitness of their children, siblings, or other extended family members.
The idea of kin altruism does not exhaust the idea of love. It certainly should not be used to reduce the meaning of Christian love. The idea of kin altruism should be seen as a dimension of human love--one with powerful implications for family theory. Kin altruism tells us much about why male homo sapiens joined families and began helping their mates raise their children. It also explains why it is difficult as a general rule to find substitutes for natural parents and extended family for the successful raising of children, although highly motivated adoptive parents often do well. There are very specific reasons why natural parents, on average, care more for their children than do other people.
Evolutionary psychologists are now showing how thousands of years ago the emergence of the following conditions helped integrate human males into families. Four conditions appear to have made this possible: 1) "paternal recognition" or a father's certainty that a particular child was his, 2) the long period of human infant dependency which required mothers to look for assistance from male consorts, 3) ongoing sexual exchange between mates, and 4) reciprocal altruism (mutual helpfulness) between father and mother.(52)
When Robert Trivers in 1972 first introduced the idea that paternal certainty and recognition led homo sapiens males to invest in the care of their offspring as a way of extending their own lives, it was thought that this condition alone was sufficient to account for male bonding with mate and child. It is now believed that the other conditions are needed as well.(53)
These conditions together constitute a naturalistic theory of the institution of matrimony--a theory similar, as we will soon see, to the naturalistic components of Thomas Aquinas' theology of marriage and the family. These four conditions should be thought of as important premoral goods that should be integrated into any more fully ethical theory of marriage and family.
These evolutionary theorists make a crucial, even though limited, contribution to the contemporary family debate. Kin altruism theory gives a partial account as to why the children of intact biological parents seem, on average, to do better in school, jobs, and their own later marital relations. Biological parents are more inclined to identify with and become invested in their offspring. They sense that in caring for the "other" that is their child they are caring partially for themselves. They sense further that to neglect or abandon one of their own they are disinvesting in part of their own life. This does not explain good parenting in the full sense of that concept. But it does illuminate a significant premoral motivation or condition for why families were formed, why intact families have more success with children, and why passive acceptance of family disruption should be resisted.
Christian family theory in the work of Thomas Aquinas, without the benefit of modern evolutionary theory, recognized most of the naturalistic conditions for family formation summarized above.(54) But Thomas added the theological belief that the "natural" offspring of parents are also gifts of God and made in God's image.(55) In Thomistic theory, which deserves critical reappropriation, the natural and supernatural reinforce each other. Children, as Aristotle said before, were seen by Aquinas as the semblance or partial image of their parents; this, he thought, was part of the reason parents care for their children. Aquinas added, however, that children are also made in the image of God; therefore, we should love in our children the divine good that is in them.
Children in Thomistic family theory have a double valuation; they are made in part in the image of their parents and in this sense naturally belong to and are valued by them. But more fundamentally, children are made in the image of God and even more radically belong to and are valued by God. Since God's image and goodness spills over into all children, adults--especially adult Christians--should cherish all children whether they are directly their own or not. The power of the Thomistic formulation is this: although it emphasizes the obligation to show a general benevolence toward all children based on God's love for them and God's goodness in them, it does not obscure the importance of inclinations in parents to exert special energy on behalf of their own offspring.
Thomism also offers a powerful response to the male problematic--the tendency of mammalian males to procreate but not to care for their offspring. Aquinas used the Ephesians analogy between fathers and the sacrificial love of Christ to address his version of the male problematic. The key texts are Summa Theologica III, Q. 42-50, Summa Theologica, II, 11, Q. 26, and Summa Contra Gentiles, III, ii, Chapters 122-125.(56) Aquinas portrays Christ's self-sacrificial love for the church as an analogy to and reinforcement for the male's commitment to his children and friendship with his wife. Aquinas ties this theological statement about the basis of marital commitment to a naturalistic and ethical analysis of the foundations of matrimony and the family.
I will briefly list a small portion of the total evidence showing that Aquinas had his own version of the naturalistic elements of family formation presently discussed by evolutionary ecologists. He was aware that long-term human infant dependency beckons for the male to assist his consort in child care. He believed that since the human infant "needs the parents' care for a long time, there is a very great tie between male and female..." homo sapiens in contrast to other species.(57) Second, he recognized the role of paternal recognition in binding males to offspring and mate and how this is disrupted in a system of sexual promiscuity. He wrote, "Man naturally desires to be assured of his offspring: and this assurance would be altogether nullified in the case of promiscuous copulation."(58)
Third, he believed that one of the purposes of matrimony "is the mutual services which married persons render one another in household matters."(59) And fourth, he understood in a distinctively medieval way the role of sexual exchange in integrating marital partners. As Paul and Augustine before him, he advised the payment of the "marital debt," acknowledging that although it was a venial sin, it was excused by the marriage blessing.(60)
Hence, the naturalistic grounds for matrimony were well recognized by Aquinas, even though the biology that supported them was crude and at points inaccurate. But Aquinas did not remain at the naturalistic level in his theory of matrimony. His vision of matrimony entailed distinctively ethical and theological levels as well. The ethical level is found in his refutation of polyandry and polygyny. His criticism of polyandry was still at the premoral level; one woman with several husbands would lower male interest in offspring since it would work against paternal certainty and recognition. It would, for this reason, achieve a lower order of good for father and child and should therefore be rejected. His critique of polygyny was more directly ethical. He admitted that polygyny can exist with relatively high degrees of paternal certainty and interest in offspring. He also observed, however, that wherever men "have several wives, the friendship of a wife for her husband would not be freely bestowed, but servile as it were. And this argument is confirmed by experience; since where men have several wives, the wives are treated as servants." (61)
A theological argument, however, is the capstone that completes his naturalistic and ethical arguments. Aquinas is all too aware of the fragility and vulnerability of human natural inclinations and moral capacities. For him, human commitment to marital permanence must be reinforced with the grace of God wich flows from Christ's love for the church. Although this grace is interpreted as supernatural, Aquinas' sacramentum (Eph. 5:32) is more properly translated as a mystery (mysterion).(62) When this is done, the narrative analogy of Christ and church to husband and family comes forth (Eph. 5:21-33). The husband is to model his commitment to wife and children after Christ's sacrificial love for the church. The male's recapitulation of Christ's sacrificial love does not cancel or replace the naturalistic or ethical arguments for matrimony. Instead, it stabilizes and deepens these natural and ethical dimensions. Nature and ethical reason push humans toward matrimony; Christ's love and our participation in it takes us the rest of the way by consolidating these natural and ethical tendencies into stable and permanent marital commitments.
Although I write as a liberal Protestant practical theologian, there are clearly problems with both the liberal and conservative perspectives. Catholic theological naturalism has its difficulties as well even though it has important contributions to make. Catholic naturalism must be cleansed of those aspects of the Aristotelian biology which depicted women as deficient in rationality. It also must be washed of those features of the Thomistic theology which renders women as less completely made in the image of God than men.(63)
Once these corrections are made, Thomism has several advantages. It has the virtue of depicting the sacrificial love of the cross as working to restore the mutual friendship of husband and wife rather than being an end in itself. In the Thomistic view, as various contemporary neo-Thomists have argued, love as mutuality or equal regard (Catholic views of caritas) rather than love as self-sacrifice (Protestant views of agape) has the more central place, even in the relation of husband and wife.(64)
Furthermore, Catholic naturalism exposes the shallowness of Protestant liberalism on marriage and family. The relational contractualism of this perspective has no way of determining why one family form actualizes, on average, more premoral good than another. It cannot absorb recent turns in the social sciences; nor can it appreciate naturalism positioned within a theological context as it was in Aquinas. Since it repudiates as well the classical Protestant orders or spheres of creation, it has no way of discerning the central regularities of life that love should nurture and justice should organize.
Finally, a reconstructed Catholic naturalism can supplement classic Protestant perspectives on the orders of creation. The classical Protestant perspective, with few exceptions, understand these orders as attested to by scripture. They are generally presented as "ordinances" or "commands" of God and accepted by faith.(65) In a day when hermeneutic perspectives on knowledge have firmly established the importance of tradition for all knowing, neither the eyes of faith nor the counsels of philosophy can object to beginning with the witness of a community of faith. On this score, the traditions of orders or spheres of creation are on solid ground. But beginning with the witness of scripture, tradition, or faith need not mean that naturalistic perspectives have nothing to contribute to heightening the plausibility of the attestations of faith. Especially is that true when they pertain to faith's perspectives on such human arrangements as marriage and the family. So far I have found two examples of Reformed thinkers who contain a naturalistic moment within their broader use of order of creation thinking--principally the work of Emil Brunner and the feminist evangelical Mary Stewart van Leeuwen.(66) These views should be studied and refined.
The naturalism recommended here is not a scientistic one that wipes tradition away and builds an ethic on the basis of the accumulation of discrete natural facts. The naturalism advocated here uses insights gained from the relatively distanciated epistemological stances of the social and evolutionary sciences to add a dimension of realism to the attestations of faith. In the parlance of contemporary hermeneutical debates, this is a "critical hermeneutics" of the kind advocated by Ricoeur or a "hermeneutical realism" as promoted by my colleague William Schweiker.(67)
Liberal Protestantism was, for the most part, blind to the world-wide trends and consequences of father absence. Conservative Protestantism has resisted family change but has seldom framed the issue in this way and has, for the most part, been unconvincing in public debate. Some of Catholicism's conservative stand on population issues actually has the male problematic in mind. The Vatican's resistance to some liberal and feminist solutions to the population explosion is based on the fear that widespread abortion and birth control can lead to the worldwide collapse of the institution of marriage and further impoverishment of poor women and children.
I will not debate the merits of this fear. My point, rather, is this: neither its older, scholastic natural-law arguments nor its more recent personalism has placed the Catholic church in a favorable position to make its arguments clear in public debate. I believe that the reconstruction of Catholic naturalism along the lines advanced above has much to offer for a more robust participation of the church in the American and emerging international debate over family issues.
I have argued that the causes of the contemporary family crisis are multiple. To isolate the cultural, social-economic, and psychological factors behind the crisis is not to overlook the pervasive reality of human sin. It is, rather, to suggest that human sin also feeds and cooperates with other causal factors. For this reason, solutions and strategies also must be multiple even if always and everywhere the church primarily addresses the reality of human sin.
Cultural factors--for instance, the rise of modern individualism--are central causes. Excessive individualism may be the modern expression of human sin. If a cultural expression of this kind is central to the family crisis, then a cultural--indeed, religio-cultural--answer must be at the forefront. Antidotes to modern individualism, however, must be advanced without undermining the rights of women, as well as men, to participate in vocations outside the home. Furthermore, religio-cultural resources for halting the male drift from families and parenthood must also be found.
Christianity, when properly interpreted, addresses these issues. First, as I have suggested, recent reinterpretations of Christian love are relevant to rebuilding norms governing family life and the relation of families to work and public. As we have seen, neo-Thomistic ethicists such as Janssens and feminists such as Gudorf and Andolsen advance interpretations of Christian love which more nearly balance self-fulfillment and self-sacrifice. I find Louis Janssens' formulation of neighbor love a particularly useful reinterpretation of much that can be found in Aquinas. Janssens joins Gene Outka in interpreting "you shall love your neighbor as yourself" to mean that valuing "the self as well as others remains a manifest obligation."(68) This is the meaning of Christian love as equal regard. The "other" must be loved equally to the self, but the self should be regarded equally to the other. This formulation of the meaning of Christian love is both faithful to the tradition, sensitive to the self-affirmations of women and minorities, and more adequate to the needs in postmodern families for more flexibility between public and private realms.
This understanding of love is especially important for women and wives who have carried disproportionately the burden of enacting self-sacrificial models of Christian love. In love as equal regard, wives are to love their husbands as themselves. They are also obligated, however, to love themselves equally to their husbands. There is a role for self-sacrifice in Janssens' understanding of Christian love, but it is not its end or goal. He writes, "Self-sacrifice is not the quintessence of love. . . . Self-sacrifice is justified derivatively from other regard."(69) Love as equal regard and mutuality, not self-sacrifice, is the goal of Christian love. Self-sacrifice is designed to reinstitute equal regard and mutuality when they are threatened. Self-sacrifice is not the goal or purpose of love.
This view of love preserves a strong sense of communal obligation, thereby inhibiting the excesses of modern individualism. On the other hand, love as equal regard finds a place for self-regard, thereby sanctioning the ordinate individual concern for self needed for women and minorities to assert their rightful place in the public world. Love as equal regard mediates between modern individualism and older ethics of extreme duty and self-sacrifice. Love as equal regard honors yet recontextualizes modern values of individual self-fulfillment.
Second, Janssens' view of love as equal regard, in contrast to Outka's more Kantian view, builds a strong place for teleological judgments about the premoral good. Equal regard for him entails both the ordo caritatis (the order of equal concern for other and self) and the ordo bonorum (the order of the premoral good).(70) Love as equal regard means equal respect for dignity of self and other but also equal concern to actualize the good for the parties involved. The premoral conditions for flourishing become very important in this view of love. Hence, the premoral conditions for child well-being and parental commitment (including paternal commitment) are important goods that love as equal regard attempts to promote. It follows that the premoral goods entailed in the four conditions of family formation should be seen as central values to be promoted by a love ethic of equal regard.
But love as equal regard applies to the wider society as well as the conjugal unit. Families should be objects of equal regard as well as individuals. Here is where the economic analysis comes back to supplement the cultural view calling for a rebirth of marital and family commitment. Jobs needed to support families, tax relief for parents with small children, flex time for working parents, parental leave provisions, adequate health care--all of these proposals may help provide premoral social conditions necessary to support family formation, just relations between families, the care of children, and a more equitable place for women in modern societies.
Although addressing the religio-cultural and economic strategies listed above is central to any viable practical theological strategy, the psychological dimensions of the contemporry family crisis should not be neglected. Couples and families need to acquire the skills to implement intersubjectively a love ethic of equal regard. It is one thing to subscribe intellectually to an ethic of equal regard; it is another thing to live through the intricacies of equal regard in intersubjective communication.
By the intersubjective communication of equal regard or the love command, I mean the capacity of both partners to affirm the selfhood of the other, treat that selfhood as always an end in itself, communicate one's needs to the other, listen deeply to the other's perceived needs, communicate to the other one's understanding of the other's communications, listen to the other communicate the other's understanding of one's own needs, and do all this in such a way as to continue to affirm and positively regard the selfhood of the other and self. A distinctively Christian perspective on such intersubjective equal regard entails the capacity to sacrifice and endure in listening to and affirming the other even when the other does not fully reciprocate. This endurance must be active and transformative as one continutes to love so that the other will someday love, not for your sake but for his or for hers.
The intersubjectivity required in distortion free public communication of the kind discussed by Habermas and the intersubjectivity required for enduring marriages are now being seen as highly analogous.(71) Both patterns of intersubjectivity are simultaneously ethical, psychological, and communicative processes. The conditions for such communication can be learned. But the commitment to learn these skills is a religio-cultural preunderstanding--a gift of the effective history of a specific tradition, especially the Christian tradition, that has shaped our cultural resources.
Marital therapy and education have learned much about this intersubjective communicative process. Rather than being expressions of the individualism of a "therapeutic" culture, recent work in these disciplines is increasingly guided by an intersubjective understanding of the ethic of neighbor love--the ethic of equal regard as we have stated it.
For marriage and the family to be renewed, these institutions must receive a new religio-cultural commitment. They must be understood to meet real and very deep human needs. They must be supported by powerful social and economic programs. And couples must acquire new communicative skills intentionally imparted and conscientiously learned. This is true even though, in Christianity, families must be seen as very important relative goods which themselves are always subordinate to the more inclusive claims of the Kingdom of God.(72)
1. Talcott Parsons and Robert Bales, Family, Socialization and Interaction (Glencoe, IL.: The Free Press, 1955) and Jessie Bernard, The Future of Marriage (New York: World Publishing, 1972).
2. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, "The Experts' Story of Marriage," An Institute for American Values Working Paper for the Marriage in America Symposium (New York: Institute for American Values, 1992).
3. Bernard, The Future of Marriage, pp. 270-272.
4. Kenneth Keniston and The Carnegie Council on Children, All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977).
5. John Witte, "From Sacrament to Contract: The Legal Transformations of the Western Family," Criterion, 34:3, pp. 3-11.
6. For evidence of the personalism of Pope John Paul II that still conforms to the classic Catholic natural law position on the family, see his early book, Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Geroux, 1994).
7. Augustine, "The Good of Marriage," The Fathers of the Church, ed. by Roy J. Deferrari (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1995); Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, III, Q. 41.
8. For key documents on the Catholic concept of subsidiarity, see the following: Pope Leo XIII, "Rerum Novarum," Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, and Pope John Paul II, Centisimus Annus all in Proclaiming Justice and Peace: Papal Documents from Rerum Novarum Through Centesimus Annus, ed. by Michael Walsh and Brian Davies (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications).
9. Pope John Paul II reiterated both sides of Catholic teachings on the family--conservative personal family ethics and liberal social philosophy on the active but limited role of government--when he visited the U.S. during the autumn of 1995. See Gustav Niebuhr, "Homily at Aqueduct Race Track," New York Times (October 7, 1995), p. 12.
10. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III, 4 (Edinburgh: T.& T. Clark, 1961), pp. 116-129; Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1957), pp. 330-339; Abraham Kuyper, The Problem of Poverty, ed. by James Skillen (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1991), pp. 29-30.
11. Max Stackhouse, For Richer, For Poorer; For Better, for Worse: Social Teachings of the Churches on Family and Economic Life (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997); Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, Gender and Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1990); John Witte, From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage and Law in the Western Tradition (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1997).
12. Ralph Reed, Politically Incorrect (Dallas, TX: Ward Publishing Co., 1994), p. 256.
13. Norval Glenn, "A Plea for Objective Assessment of the Notion of Family Decline," The Journal of Marriage and the Family, 55:2 (August 1993), p. 543. Glenn writes that in a recent sample of members of the American Sociological Association, "only 6% identified themselves as conservatives or reactionaries while 87% said that they were liberals or radicals."
14. An example of the kind of social science thinking that sees marriage as a declining institution that cannot be brought back can be found in a recent statement by James Levine and Edward Pitt in New Expectations: Community Strategies for Responsible Fatherhood (New York: Work and Familly Institute, 1995), p. 35. These authors hope to produce more responsible care for children by nonresident fathers. Encouraging marriage, discouraging out-of-wedlock births, discouraging divorce is not a part of their strategy for producing responsible fatherhood. They write, "But we do not know how to produce more marriages. Nor do any of the experts we cite who argue so passionately for marriage as the only way to socialize men into continuing relationships with their children."
15. Jan Dizard and Howard Gadlin, The Minimal Family (Amherst, MA:The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990).
16. For an example of this trend, see Mary Jo Bane and David Ellwood, Welfare Realities: From Rhetoric to Reform (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
17. An example of this can be seen in reviewing the responses of Interfaith Impact, the Washington, D.C. voice of the liberal denominations, to the Contract with the American Family issued by the Christian Coalition during May of 1995. The response was one of total rejection rather than a couching of criticisms within efforts to find points of common ground. See "They Don't Speak for Us: The Religious Community Responds to the Christian Coalition,"(Press Conference, May 17, 1995).
18. For a statement about the centrality of mutuality in families, see John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio (Chicago, IL: Archdiocese of Chicago, 1981); For a Reformation emphasis on mutuality see Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, Gender and Grace,p. 243.
19. Elizabeth Schlüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her (New York: Crossroad, 1990); Warren Carter, Households and Discipleship: A Study of Matthew (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994); Stephen Barton, "Paul's Sense of Place: An Anthropological Approach to Community Formation in Corinth," New Testament Studies 32 (1986), p. 74.
20. Norval Glenn, "A Plea for Objective Assessment of the Notion of Family Decline," Journal of Marriage and the Family 55:3 (August 1993), pp. 542-545.
21. Judith S. Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee, Second Chances: Men, Women, and Children a Decade after Divorce (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989); E. Mavis Hetherington, Martha Cox, and Roger Cox, "The Aftermath of Divorce," in Joseph H. Stevens and Marilyn Matthews, eds., Mother-Child, Father-Child Relations (Washington, D.C.: National Association for the Education of Young Children Press, 1978); Larry Bumpass, "What's Happening to the Family? Interaction between Demographics and Institutional Change," Demography, 27:4 (November 1990), pp. 483-498; David Popenoe, "American Family Decline, 1960-1990: A Review and Appraisal," Journal of Marriage and the Family, 55:3 (August 1993), pp. 527-541; Lenore J. Weitzman, The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America (New York: The Free Press, 1985); Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing up with a Single Parent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
22. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, "Dan Quayle Was Right," The Atlantic Monthly (April 1993), pp. 47-84.
23. Charles Murray, "The Coming White Underclass," The Wall Street Journal, (October 29, 1993), p. 16A.
24. Joan Beck, "Teenage Pregnancy is an Issue that Crosses Party Lines," Chicago Tribune (March 27, 1994), Sec. 4, p. 3; David Broder, "Family Values: Stop Arguing about Them and Start Changing Them," Chicago Tribune (February 16, 1993), Sec. 1, p. 17; William Raspberry, "That Disturbing Charles Murray," The Washington Post National Weekly Edition (December 6-12, 1993); Clarence Page, "Wrong Target for Welfare Reform," Chicago Tribune (May 11, 1994).
25. Beyond Rhetoric: A New American Agenda for Children and Families (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1991); Families First: Report of the National Commission on America's Urban Families (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1993).
26. MacLanahan and Sandefur, Growing up with a Single Parent, pp. 1-12.
27. Ibid., pp. 70-71.
28. Ibid., p. 38.
29. For a summary of this point of view, see David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
30. Frank Furstenberg and Andrew Cherlin, Divided Families: What Happens to Children When Parents Part (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 34-39.
31. Aaron Sachs, "Men, Sex, and Parenthood," World Watch 7:2 (March-April 1994), p. 13.
32. Ibid., p. 14.
33. J. Bruce, C.B. Lloyd, A. Leonard, Families in Focus: New Perspectives on Mothers, Fathers, and Children (New York: The Population Council, 1995), pp. 14-20.
34. Ibid., p. 73.
35. John Snarey, How Fathers Care for the Next Generation: A Four Decade Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); David Popenoe, "The Evolution of Marriage and the Problem of Stepfamilies: A Biosocial Perspective," in Stepfamilies: Who Benefits? Who Does Not? (Hillsdale, NJ.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994), pp. 3-27; McLanahan and Sandefur, Growing up with a Single Parent, pp. 37, 56, 72.
36. One of the most definitive analyses of the risk of abuse in non-biologically related family structures can be found in Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1988), pp. 86-90.
37. James Dobson, Dr. Dobson Answers your Questions about Marriage and Sexuality (Wheaton,IL.: Tyndale House, 1979) and Dr. Dobson Answers Your Questions about Confident Healthy Families (Wheaton, IL.: Tyndale House, 1979).
38. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1975); William Bennett, The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), pp. 5-12.
39. Robert Bellah, et. al., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press, 1985); David Popenoe, "The Family Transformed," Family Affairs 2:2-3 (Summer 1989), p. 3; Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Lawrence Stone, The Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
40. Larry Bumpass, "What's Happening to the Family?", pp. 492-493; Ron Lesthaeghe, "A Century of Demographic and Cultural Change in Western Europe: An Exploration of Underlying Dimensions," Population and Development Review, 9:3 (September 1983), pp. 411-432.
41. Frederick Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New York: International Publications, 1972).
42. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, II (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), pp. 153-178; Alan Wolfe, Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation (Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 54-73.
43. For an example of the kind of thinking that runs through these organizations, see Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda (New York: Crown Publishers, 1993).
44. Victor Fuchs and Diane Reklis, "America's Children: Economic Perspectives and Policy Options," Science, 255 (January 3, 1992), pp. 41-46.
45. William J. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
46. Mark Testa, "Male Joblessness, Nonmarital Parenthood, and Marriage," (Chicago: Paper prepared for the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, 1991).
47. Susan Muller Okin, Gender, Justice, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989).
48. Nancy Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989; Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).
49. Linda Waite and F. Goldscheider, New Families, No Families?: The Transformation of the American Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
50. Summaries of evolutionary theory on family formation, kin altruism, and inclusive fitness can be found in the following: Pierre van der Berghe, Human Family Systems: An Evolutionary View (New York: Elsevier, 1979); Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Sex, Evolution, and Behavior (Belmont, CA.: Wadsworth, 1983); Don Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
51. Robert Trivers, "Parental Investment and Sexual Selection," in B. Campbell (ed.), Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man 1871-1971 (Chicago: Aldine, 1972); Barry S. Hewlett, Father-Child Relations: Cultural and Biosocial Contexts (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992).
52. W.D. Hamilton, "The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior, II," Journal of Theoretical Biology 7 (1964), pp. 17-52.
53. Barry Hewlett (ed.), Father-Child Relations: Cultural and Biosocial Context (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1992), pp. xi-xix.
54. For Aquinas' analogs to the four conditions listed in the text, see his Summa Theologica, III, Q 41-46 (New York: Benziger Brothers, Inc., 1948), to be referred to as ST; and Summa Contra Gentiles, III, ii (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1928), pp. 112-123, to be referred to as SCG. See Don Browning, "Biology, Ethics, and Narrative in Christian Family Theory," in David Popenoe, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and David Blankenhorn (eds.), Promises to Keep: Decline and Renewal of Marriage in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996). See also Stephen Pope, The Evolution of Altruism and the Ordering of Love (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1994). Pope's work on the relation of evolutionary biology and Thomistic theories of love and the family has been ground breaking.
55. ST, II, ii, Q 26.
56. ST, II, ii, Q. 26 (London: R. & T. Washbourne, 1917).
57. ST III, Q 41, 1.
58. SCG, III, ii, p. 118.
59. ST, III, Q.41, i.
60. Ibid., Q. 41, iv.
61. SCG, III, ii, p. 118.
62. ST, III, Q.42, A 2.
63. ST, I, i, Q. 92.
64. Louis Janssens, "Norms and Priorities of a Love Ethics," Louvain Studies 6, pp. 207-238; Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, "Agape in Feminist Ethics," Journal of Religious Ethics, 9:1 (Spring 1981), pp. 68-83; Christian Gudorf, "Parenting, Mutual Love, and Sacrifice," in Woman's Consciousness, Woman's Conscience (New York: Winston Press, 1985), pp. 175-191.
65. Luther uses the language of "ordinance" in "The Estate of Marriage," in Luther's Works, 45 (Philadelphia, PA: Muhlenberg Press, 1962), pp. 13-48. Barth and Brunner use the metaphor "command."
66. Brunner has an interesting and somewhat complicated way of combining naturalistic observations and "orders" thinking. He believes that reason through an analysis of human action reveals the spheres of work, family, and government. Within the order of the family, he makes a wide range of natural observations very similar to those of Aquinas. But revelation reveals the proper purpose and direction of the orders, including the order of the family. See The Divine Imperative, pp. 330-338. Van Leeuwen uses psychology, specifically object relations theory, within her broader "orders" and "spheres" theology.
67. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 60; William Schweiker, Responsibility and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 4, 113-117.
68. Ibid., p. 220.
69. Janssens, "Norms and Priorities of a Love Ethics," p. 228.
70. Ibid., p. 213.
71. References to Habermas' theory of intersubjectivity can now be found in the therapeutic literature. See Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), pp. 19-20.
72. For the best statement of how early Christianity both valued families yet subordinated them to the Kingdom, see Stephen Barton, Discipleship and Family Ties in Mark and Matthew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).