Our Father Issues In Heaven

Robert Hunt takes aim at Mary Eberstadt’s contention in her recent book, How the West Really Lost God, that the breakdown of the conventional family has led to secularization, offering an alternative account of the institution’s ambiguous place in the Christian tradition:

It is hardly surprising that the biological family is a key assumption of both Jewish and Christian scripture. Yet scripture also understands that the family can also be a broken and even oppressive institution. The most memorable families in the Bible are the most dysfunctional. Indeed, with the exception of Ruth and Boaz all the families in the Bible are dysfunctional. Even Jesus was raised by his stepfather.

It is precisely in God’s care of the widow, the orphan, the childless, the outcast, the adulterer, the prostitute, and even the murderer that God’s full nature as lover and redeemer of the world are revealed.

Thus it is these for whom care is demanded by scriptural ethics, and these are among the first gathered into the family of those who call God father and Christ brother. Only God’s love for all these broken and incomplete families rescues the common trinitarian symbolism from itself being exclusive and oppressive. It isn’t the family that brings (or pace Eberstadt fails to bring) these refugees from the family to God, it is God that makes family a possibility even for them.

The root of this failure in Eberstadt’s analysis may be that she does not consider the role of fictive kinship and its importance in the formation of the early Christian community. Her promotion of the specifically biological family as fundamental to healthy Christianity leads her to ignore the ways that Christians have understood what Jesus means by “being born again by water and the Spirit.” And so she also fails to consider alternative families that are so central to Christian history, and particularly Catholic and Orthodox history. Convents and monasteries, and even though she doesn’t see it, brotherhoods like her oft mentioned Opus Dei are surely as critical to the church as the biological family unit, something which even a sociologist can see and any historian should note.

Previous Dish on Eberstadt’s book here.