In David Brooks’ essay “The Nuclear Family Was A Mistake,” he demonstrates that for most of human history, we have existed in intricate entangled webs of extended family. For a majority of our history, society has been built on the hierarchical social structure of blood ties, marital ties and fictive kinships.
These extended families were a means of survival, providing a matrix of social capital in times of crises. However, in the last two centuries, American society has seen a remarkable shift in which a family no longer includes aunts, uncles, best friends or neighbors and looks more like a husband, wife and 2.5 kids.
Hayoung Park
In recognizing that the nuclear family concept is a relatively new phenomenon, it is important to briefly examine the Western proliferation of this family model. Simply put, smaller families with fewer children allowed society to transition from agrarian to industrial economies.
Predicated on women being the primary caretakers, the nuclear family model allowed for male heads-of-households to pursue career-based economic mobility without the social obligations of a rural, land-based economy. This new domestic framework proved useful throughout the late 1800s as it placed American economies at the center of the world’s affluence.
Shortly after this shift, our cultural values grew around the economic success of the nuclear family. Politics, religion and art codified female domesticity, male-dominated careers and two-parent homes as the social fabric of society.
Then came the social upheavals of the late 1900s when feminist movements empowered female labor forces and access to birth control, and new legislation launched the Sexual Revolution. In general terms, these changes bifurcated our nation into the progressives who promoted autonomy, consent and pleasure in their laissez faire sexual ethics and the conservatives who codified a reactionary Moral Majority culture and politics.
Moreover, the Moral Majority movement permeated the U.S. Christian church, and the politics of nuclear family began to compromise the Christian vision for family. As demonstrated by recent historical scholarship, white Christian conservatives such as Elizabeth Elliot and James Dobson championed the patriarchal nuclear family as not only God’s divine will for creation but also God’s sovereign plan to make the U.S. a Christian nation.
“Many American churches have, since the dawn of the Moral Majority movement, formed their ethics of sex and family on a political ideology, not a biblical one.”
This means many American churches have, since the dawn of the Moral Majority movement, formed their ethics of sex and family on a political ideology, not a biblical one. The failure of this movement to steward a Christian vision of family has come to a head in an outburst of church controversies in the last decade surrounding family, gender and sex, such as #ChurchToo, Exodus International and the fallout of evangelical purity culture.
More tragically, this has meant many people in our pews have been barred from experiencing safety, friendship and belonging in churches if they deviate in any way from the rigid vision of the nuclear family. Single or celibate people, LGBTQ people, people who are divorced, widows and single parents — these are all populations marginalized when our churches are built exclusively on nuclear families. Due to churches’ fixation on nuclear families, these people often are categorized as fundamentally deviant and unclean, unable to access safe accountability or fruitful discipleship to Christ.
When we turn to the Bible, we must first notice there is no “nuclear family” in the entirety of the Scriptural canon, not even the vestiges of it. As David Goa puts it, “Virtually none of the families of the Bible would be fit neighbors for the Christian Right and the so-called Moral Majority.” The majority of the families of the biblical narrative are riddled with exploitation, dishonesty and scandal, but even so, we see God’s vision for kinship emerge in surprising ways in the Scripture.
When Ruth promises to Naomi “wherever you go, I will go … Your people shall be my people and your God my God” in Ruth 1, she represents a kind of love that sets aside practical convenience and social barriers. By binding herself to an aging Naomi, Ruth was letting go of the economic stability of being married in order to step into the grief, faith and culture of another person.
While Ruth had every reason to step away from life with Naomi — social, economic, cultural — she chose not to. Her voluntary choice to cleave to her mother-in-law means a biblical family is one not limited to relationship by blood or marriage. Voluntary commitment and friendship are legitimate ways of being grafted into family with God’s children. We even see that Matthew 1:5 commemorates Ruth as a foremother of Christ, largely as a fruit of her commitment to Naomi as chosen family.
“There is no ‘nuclear family’ in the entirety of the Scriptural canon, not even the vestiges of it.”
Pivoting to the early church in Acts, we recognize the remarkable “shared-ness” of their life as “no one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.” The early church functioned as a family because of their commitment to share all things. Their sense of a common life made it even more possible for them to enfold the vulnerable stranger and orphan into their family. For example, as a response to a Roman culture that normalized infanticide, especially among female or disabled infants, the early church was known for “actually taking in and supporting babies which had been left to die by exposure by their pagan parents.”
These two paradigms portray biblical family as 1) more expansive than just blood relations and marriage and 2) entailing generosity and sharing as the mechanism through which families are expanded beyond blood and marriage.
This is the Christian family, ever affirming the importance of blood relations and marriage covenants and ever expanding to manifest agape love in relationships that our postmodern society dismisses as transient.
When family functions like this, the pressure is off for married people and parents to represent the pinnacle of God’s love while simultaneously carving out space for the lonely in our world to become embedded in committed community. More deeper relationships mean more relational accountability and need for genuine spiritual discipleship. The extent of our committed relationships in our Christian chosen families then can become the mechanism through which the church performs radical acts of care and generosity for our neighbors.
Perhaps it is only when Christians practice radically inclusive chosen family that our world may recognize the winsome invitation into Christ’s life as good news. It was Ruth’s “yes” to chosen family that propagated the genealogy of Christ. It was the early church’s shared life with one another that enabled them to take in orphans as well as the poor and hurting in their cities.
When we let the Holy Spirit broaden and expand our home beyond the confines of what is culturally comfortable, we just may become a foretaste of that reconciled, harmonious New Jerusalem that all of creation yearns for.
Hayoung Park is pursuing a master of divinity degree and a master of social work degree at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Rooted in her own experiences as an Asian immigrant woman in the church, she is passionate about bridging theology and social justice in compassionate ways.