Mills on the (partly) natural family...

Excerpts from David Mills on biblical and semi-biblical views of family in Touchstone (one of my two most favorite mags-- and one I'd blog about much more if I could get access to more of their articles)...

First, an overview...

When a pastor says something in a sermon that you do not like, goes the old joke, he has “gone from preaching to meddling.” He has stopped telling pleasant and comforting stories (or enjoyably convicting stories about the sins you don’t commit) and started interfering with your life.

Many traditional Christians and cultural conservatives love what the family scholar Allan Carlson has called “the Natural Family” as a theory, because Americans love anything “natural.” It seems more direct, more genuine, more authentic, untainted by commerce and calculation. And it has its political uses: They love to appeal to Nature to argue that homosexuality is unnatural.

But they do not respond so favorably to other appeals to Natural Law, ones that meddle with their own lives. They like things “natural,” but they do not like the Natural Family as a way of life.

You go from preaching to meddling when, for example, you assert that the Natural Family has a “quiverful” of children; that it requires a permanent, unbreakable bond between the husband and wife; or that it is marked by what are called “sex roles.” This is too much nature, it is nature untempered by technology and culture, as if you were asking people to go naked in the winter or hunt and kill their own food and eat it raw....

Even conservative Americans, religious and not, seem to understand marriage as secular Americans do, defining it as a contract based on affection and mutual satisfaction;...and feeling that they must create perfect children, which is a burden when you have one and very hard when you have many, especially when “perfect” is defined in worldly terms....

[They] do not really believe that marriage is governed by external, objective ends, that it has a nature. They do believe that it is governed by certain rules, especially faithfulness to your husband or wife (until you feel you must leave your spouse), and these they call “family values.”

The rules are mainly negative, not positive, telling us what not to do but not telling us what to do, perhaps because that would raise the question of ends and thus of a higher, more demanding definition of marriage. “Do this” implies “to reach this ideal.” “Don’t do this” implies only that the action will hurt you.

They do not see that marriage has a nature, that it is something given to us that we cannot change. Or else, if I am being unfair to them, they do not see very clearly or completely what is the nature of marriage. They understand the family in a conservative sense, as what middle-class religious Americans already do, but no more. In other words, they believe in the Partly Natural Family....

From there, Mills provides three suggestions in trying to "reach" those who have difficulty in understanding...

The first is to begin with the readers’ beliefs and show how the reasons for these beliefs lead to other beliefs they do not find as attractive. Begin with the moral law they know—the nature they know—and show how it leads to the moral law and nature they do not know. Use the parts of the Natural Family they affirm to show them the truth of the parts they do not affirm.

Let me give one example, from an editorial we published a few years ago titled “The roots of Roe v. Wade,” referring to the decision of the Supreme Court that legalized abortion on demand in America. The writer, Patrick Henry Reardon, began with abortion, which traditional Christians oppose almost unanimously, and tied it to the contraceptive mentality, which many of them hold. And hold with no idea at all that there is any problem with it....

My second suggestion is to speak as much as possible about the demonstrated social benefits of the Natural Family. You want to drive into your readers’ minds the idea that this is the way things are. You want them to realize that this is not a matter of personal preference or choice or values, but of recognizing the way the universe works. You want them to see that the Natural Family is real and the Partly Natural Family somewhat unreal....

And worse, because this talk is so abstract and general, it has been adopted and used very effectively by the advocates of the Unnatural Family....

Unfortunately, even the average American Christian will not always listen to his pastor when he speaks of the Natural Family (if he does, and few do), but he may listen to the sociologists. There is a great amount of evidence for the effectiveness of the Natural Family in promoting human happiness...we need to give them secular evidence of the wisdom of divine law.

My third suggestion is to work to protect and purify the language by which people speak of the family....

Replacing old words with new ones is a particularly subtle way of killing the old words.

I'm not sure I agree here. Often, corruption comes through co-opting, twisting, or just a slow, unexpected evolution of a term.

In any case, he provides three examples of the new language: “family values", “sex roles”, and the now almost-universal replacement of the word “sex” with “gender.”

Wrapping up, Mills writes:

Those called to writing, teaching, and preaching must work hard to move the average man from his belief in the Partly Natural Family to belief in the more difficult but infinitely more rewarding Natural Family. The needed creativity in argument and discernment of language requires much work, and the help of those who have the gifts for it.

The Partly Natural Family looks so good—it is, after all, a compromise between the ideal and the world, which claims to offer the best of both without the costs of either—that many people will not easily abandon it and will not thank us for our attempts to move them to something more natural. We take up the difficult task of promoting the Natural Family because we want them to be happy and to enjoy all the joys and pleasures this world provides, and by following their vocation in this world as closely as they can to prepare themselves for the next.