Enter Email to Receive New Post Alerts:

Part 1–The Family: How to Define It

May 25, 2009


Photo credit: freeparking

What is a family? Father, mother, and children? Single mother and child? Grandfather and grandchildren? Two men committed to sharing their lives? Any group of people living in the same household?

Society’s view of the family likely includes most of these relational arrangements, if not all of them. In the beginning , God ordained marriage as the union of man and woman, leaving their father and mother to become one flesh. Of course, God’s sanctioning of marriage and family is only an affirmation of what is natural.

The first man and woman on earth, whether one believes in the biblical account of Adam and Eve or not, needed to procreate in order to continue their species. Undoubtedly, a man and woman who combine to create another living soul feel a strong desire to care for it. So, they work together to provide for its physical, social, emotional, and spiritual needs. A family is born — naturally.

The parents care for the child until he or she is mature enough to leave them and cleave to his or her spouse. Of course, if the species is to continue to perpetuate itself, then the son or daughter must follow the natural pattern which preceded, created, and prepared him or her, by joining with a person of the opposite gender. And the process repeats itself, generation after generation. This brings us to the definition of the family. In the words of Paul Mero, “The true tests of a functional family structure are both that it lasts through generations and that it doesn’t need the state to create it.”

1. The family lasts through generations. As I’ve described, the natural family reproduces itself and cares for each of its members generation after generation, passing blood, traits, knowledge, and assets down a line of inheritance. The family has “a past and a future tied together intergenerationally.”

2. The family doesn’t need the state to create it. Government does not create families, it only recognizes and affirms what already exists in nature and offers protection for it and encourages it. Any relational arrangement that requires state sanction to be designated a family (e.g. same-sex marriage) is not a natural family. The family is prior to the state.

There may be variations within the structure of the natural family. For example, a parent may die or a couple may be infertile. As the Proclamation says, “disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation.” One specific adaptation is adoption. When a family cannot care for one of its children, for whatever reason, then the child may need to become part of another family that can care for it.

As we celebrate this Memorial Day, we remember those who have gone before us. To a great extent, this holiday is a manifestation of our human desire to recognize and appreciate the intergenerational bonds that connect us with one another. It is one way to honor and encourage the perpetuation of the natural family — man, woman, and children.

What do you think?

*I recognize that there are a lot of issues related to this topic that could be addressed. I’ve chosen to keep these posts simple — addressing one basic question or idea at a time — in order to keep them concise and focused. Please feel free to bring up related questions or ideas in the comments section.

Related posts:
Intro-The Family
Part 2-The Family: The Fundamental Unit

5 Comments »

The URI to TrackBack this entry is: http://justandholy.blogsome.com/2009/05/25/part-1-the-family-how-to-define-it/trackback/

  1. It is an interesting irony that even Darwinism, which is typically lauded by the secular culture, has prefered the union of man and women to that of the same sex.

    Comment by Scott — May 26, 2009 @ 9:21 am

  2. A significant problem is that our society has for some time been moving from valuing perpetuation of the species and culture to valuing the romantic-devotion bond (or even just the romantic bond) between consenting adults.

    I say that this has been ongoing for some time because the idealized romantic tales of a happily-ever-after partner bond have been around for a very long time. Although happily ever after was once understood to include the joint raising of progeny, children have increasingly come to be seen by society as drains on the partner relationship rather than as a primary goal and purpose. This pattern can be seen in prominent literature even three centuries back, but has become increasingly common in both art and life over the past century and a half.

    Research now overwhelmingly proves what our ancestors knew and incorporated into their cultures: that children fare far better when they are born to and raised by a father and a mother that are devoted to each other and to their children and remain so throughout life. However, the culture now values the whims, desires, and ‘rights’ of the individual adults so much that the welfare of children is considered only distantly by comparison.

    Today, your tale of Adam and Eve (or Adam and whoever) stops there. The perpetuation of the species is not a significant goal for many. Indeed, many loathe the species so much that they have developed an alternate morality where perpetuation of such awful creatures is an unmitigated evil.

    Comment by Reach Upward — May 27, 2009 @ 9:33 am

  3. Thanks, Matt, for making me think about what I believe and why.

    In response to the above ‘Reach Upward’ final paragraph, I have a hard time understanding how society can make perpetuating the species an evil thing. I cannot look at a baby without smiling and wanting to hold him/her. I understand the point of view of environmentalists and zero populationists (although I don’t agree with it). I believe it is important to conserve and take care of the resources God has given us and that there is enough and to spare for all.

    I am pregnant/due this fall. No one could ever convince me that the child growing inside me isn’t a gift from God.

    Comment by Diana — June 4, 2009 @ 9:15 am

  4. Matthew -

    I’ve been pondering what you’re saying and I think you’ve missed some points. First, for the vast majority of human history, we lived in extended kinship groups - not the nuclear family. Children were raised within a web of relationships of biological parents, aunts, uncles, cousins and so on. Stephanie Coontz, in her book Marriage: A History, points out that the model that we Americans have been taught is “traditional” is in fact a historical outlier, something not common to history. Family is a far more fluid concept that you seem to assume it is.

    You wrote “the first man and woman on earth” but it was never that simple. We as a species evolved from earlier species, in a millions of years long progression. In some sense, there never was a first man and first woman.

    Also, by arguing that “god ordained marriage” you introduce a whole set of unproven assumption - first that God exists, that if God exists, God is the Christian God, that God communicated to people who wrote the bible, that they understood what God communicated, that through the centuries it has not been distorted, that we understand it correctly and so on. Each of those assumptions, of course, depends on the first being true, which is unproven.

    The Biblical record clearly approves of various forms of polygamy (whether plural marriages or concubinage). To argue from scripture that God ordained marriage is a flawed proposition given the actual scriptural texts. What’s more it raises a host of questions - did Adam and Eve get married? Whose kids did their kids marry? What about Abraham and Sarah? Who conducted the ceremony? If God ordained marriage, why was God okay with Lot’s daughters getting him roaring drunk and having sex with him so they could have children though obviously they never married their own father? If God is so convinced marriage is the best thing, why did Jesus never marry? If God is convinced the nuclear family is the way to go, why do so many biblical heroes come from and form non-nuclear families? To argue God ordained marriage is to make a profoundly irrational argument.

    Mero’s statement - that the family doesn’t need the state to create it - is fine sounding but empty rhetoric. We don’t need to the state to create sex or procreation or love or rape or drug abuse or promiscuity or violence either and those things certainly have lasted through the generations.

    We don’t actually need marriage to perpetuate the species. We need sex and fertility.

    Family is a far more fluid concept that you seem to assume. Family is the result of a series of ongoing choices to stay in relationship, to care for one another, to nurture one another to sustain one another; those actions do not require specific gender or age components. In one of his books, John J. MacNeill, a psychologist and former Jesuit priest, says that a sign of a healthy family is that it self-destructs. Children are raised with the goal of becoming independent and leaving the family; adults raise children expected to pre-decease them. Those adults may go on to form other families of mutually caring adults. In some sense, then, I see the family not as a discrete, bounded unit, but rather as a permeable, ever changing system, one that grows, dies, changes, alters. To my way of thinking, the definition of family you proffer here is too narrow to match the actual lived human experience. Lastly, Mero’s definition of the “natural family” is not consistent with natural law as conceived by centuries of Christian theologians and is in fact contrary to the actual historical record.

    Comment by glendenb — July 9, 2009 @ 12:35 pm

  5. Glenden,

    You made some good points and raised some interesting questions.

    I’ve read Coontz’s book; it’s a very interesting one. The problem I have with some of her theories, and with the evolution of man theory, is that they are just as difficult to prove as one’s beliefs in God and in revelation from God that you mention.

    Yes, many of my beliefs about the family rest on religious doctrine. My faith does answer most of those questions you asked about God, but it doesn’t answer all of them. I understand why people have a hard time trusting religious doctrine, and I also understand how normal, intelligent people question evolution. I feel as comfortable, or more, believing the history and ideas of ancient texts passed down from men who lived at the time of Abraham and Adam as I do believing scientists or anthropologists who try to outline history back hundreds of thousands of years using what little information they have today. Neither are proven, and I choose the former as the basis for my beliefs as well as whatever makes logical sense from science today.

    No, we don’t need marriage to perpetuate the species, but we do need it to perpetuate a healthy species. I agree with you that there are many variations of the family that can produce healthy children who function well in society. I also think that the family, as I, Mero, most world religions, many sociologists, and, yes, God, have defined it is the ideal structure that we should all shoot for. If variations occur out of our own power, then we adapt the best we can.

    Thanks again for your thoughts.

    Comment by Matthew C. Piccolo — July 9, 2009 @ 2:35 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>



Anti-spam measure: please retype the above text into the box provided.

Get free blog up and running in minutes with Blogsome | Theme designs available here