Family Values and the New Multi-Racial Alliance
by Rev. John Kenyon
December 2004/January 2005
When it comes to family values, a new multi-racial, multi-cultural majority flourishes in the United State that has rendered silly the rhetorical distinctions between ‘family values’ found on left and right, and the politics that underwrite them. This majority lacks national spokespersons to unite them, so has no real political clout, and it faces off against those who will never voluntarily relinquish the debate on their own terms.
Changes are coming. I am convinced that the current political debate of this election season signals these changes, or to put it more another way, the debate should be seen as the death rattle of the generation of the fifties and sixties. To frame the issue, I offer up the questions: why was the race for President so close? Why did neither candidate represent most Americans? Are we the people of the United States truly as divided as this suggests?
Since the 2000 national political conventions, ‘family values’ has plunged sharply down on the national agenda. Terrorism, the war in Iraq, and the economy stupid occupy the prime time coverage of this 2004 political election season. Pundits and critics, however, I think quite correctly, see family values squeezing in through the back door with the debate over gay-lesbian marriage–a mere so-called ‘wedge issue’ that some predict will bring out thousands of closet conservatives this November in favor of the Republicans.
I predict it will, too. However much we Americans grow horrified over wars and rumors of war, we remain a people concerned with our immediate domestic affairs, meaning our family and our local economy stupid. Note well that after our fascination with the grotesque images of the war in Iraq, it was not the long line of starving people in Sudan waiting for food, or the long line of poor here in the USA waiting for their welfare checks, or the long line of US corporations leaving for foreign soil, or the long line of US corporations considering John Kerry’s proposed tax penalties for foreign investors that caught our national attention. It was the long line of gay and lesbian couples waiting outside San Francisco’s city hall for a marriage license that so fascinated us.
The avante guard of the traditional family values movement, the religious right-wingers, became hysterical. James Dobson, from Focus on the Family, wrote frantically to his constituency, hundreds of thousands in number, claiming that the prospect of legalizing gay and lesbian marriage has America teetering on the edge of destruction. White Evangelical and fundamentalist preachers began to organize in an effort to fight back or else watch their beloved country collapse before their eyes. Some began a campaign to convince the still silent majority of conservative white Christians who do not vote that God requires their voting stewardship (meaning vote for George Bush), to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ that politics and religion do mix and should mix, and that Christian faith does not mix with liberalism and gays and lesbians and same-sex marriage. Left-wingers, the liberal press, and the courts gone bezerk, they proclaim, have succeeded in their assault on God, country and family. Only white religious conservatives can save America through traditional family values.
Ironically, a vast majority of ‘Hispanics’, ‘African Americans’, ‘Asians’ and ‘people of color’—clumsy but necessary terms—did not turn out to support the gays and lesbians, either. Many states rushed to pass constitutional amendments defining marriage as between a man and a woman without the minorities playing the race card against them. The debate over the marriage amendment to the federal constitution broke along party lines for political reasons, not racial-ethnic lines. Yet while studies agree that a vast majority of Americans support heterosexual monogamy, the minority communities still want little to do with the white religious conservatives who have been leading the traditional family cause. What’s wrong with this picture?
Foremost, the religious right has been on the wrong side of so many moral arguments for so long that they have no credibility outside their own circle. Beneath the panic they point to coherent, long-standing arguments for heterosexual monogamy with children, yet the ultimate authority for their position comes not so much from applying human reason to sociological data; rather, they herald heterosexual monogamy as a mandate from God, according to Holy Scripture. They point to the first family, Adam and Eve, which God created as the perfect, ideal family for humanity and America, conveniently ignoring other biblical and historical data. But ask them, as I have done for years, to explain why God chose Jacob to be Israel’s namesake and patriarch, a man who married two sisters, both his first cousins, and with them and each of their handmaidens bore twelve sons, who would soon be the heads the twelve tribes of Israel, God’s chosen people, and they dissolve into chattering chipmunks. One might also probe into their perspective on another biblical champion, King David, composer of many Psalms in sacred scriptures, a king called a man after God’s own heart, the forerunner and prefigure of the son of David, also known as the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of God. King David had many wives, and a harem of concubines. His son, King Solomon, who also composed verse and wisdom for the canon of God’s Word, had 700 wives and 300 concubines. And the mere number was not counted against him. One could go on to cite more instances of polygamy among the Patriarchs, and while doing so one should never omit the mention of Moses, who married an Ethiopian, the first inter-racial marriage on biblical record. But ask Dobson, Falwell, Robertson, and their kith and kin, about these men of God, these promise keepers, and watch the exegetical tap dance begin. The argument quickly shifts from “Thus says the Lord…” back to the sociological reasons for supporting only heterosexual monogamy. One suspects an agenda far more important to them than “Thus says the Lord…”
My point is not to join the reemerging debate over polygamy v. monogamy here in the USA or anywhere in the world. I seek to expose the ‘traditional family values’ agenda, to explain why its leading proponents do not speak for most Americans on the one subject upon which most Americans agree. The answer requires a look at why the religious right has politicized only certain issues that affect the white American family, and why they have politicized them at this particular point in our history.
Just to set the stage, while growing up among them in northeast USA, during the fifties and sixties, divorce was strictly taboo for us. The rate of divorce in the communities surrounding us did not merit our attention, let alone our participation in the national debate over divorce, that is, until the late 1960s when divorce began to touch some of our Evangelical marriages. Abortion was not an issue among us either. The number of women outside our camp getting abortions, illegally or legally, did not merit our attention, let alone our participation in the national debate until abortion too threatened to become a choice for some of our younger women. Birth control was not an issue among us, and never became one—a most interesting thing. Inter-racial marriage, on the other hand, was unthinkable. Martin King and the Negroes should just stay in their own neighborhoods, attend their own churches, and quit rebelling against the laws of the land. We made no effort to study these matters. Today you can find no record of any organized protest by white Evangelicals against abortion prior to Roe v. Wade. You cannot find a concerted, organized effort against no-fault divorce laws; nor have Evangelicals been famous for advocacy work for civil rights at any time.
The initial alarm came from the influence of radical feminism, secular humanism and liberalism in general upon their fringes during the sixties and seventies. If the ‘godless’ left was for peace in Vietnam, for no-fault divorce, abortion and civil rights, they must be bad. The taboo against birth control came from the Roman Catholic Church. If the Pope was against it, it couldn’t be bad, even for liberals, blacks and hippies. Both of these sources precipitated an emotional reaction to protect their white, culturally conservative, economically enfranchised, legally protected identity long before the cogent pro-traditional family arguments began to find their voice among them. And what about their religious cousins south of the Mason-Dixon line? They began going Republican to redress their grievance against Lyndon Johnson for passing civil rights legislation.
I do not wish to be misunderstood on this point. The question I pose is why and when certain ‘family value’ issues found a place of priority on their agenda and why others did not and do not. Most of the major issues harming the traditional family have still not risen on their horizon. Specifically, I mean that the plight of migrant working families, illegal immigrants and immigrant labor gets no attention among them. This affects countless thousands of traditional families; just not to the detriment of most white conservative church-going Christian families in America. To the contrary, migrant/immigrant labor works to their advantage, for someone must pick the crops, collect the garbage, sweep the streets, buy the used cars, etc.. Third-world debt and the exploitation of child labor around the world are non-issues among them. These matters clearly affect millions of families in these foreign countries, just not the white Evangelical families who buy third world products from Wal-Mart and K-Mart. Wars, unless the USA or Israel fights them, are not an issue, and if they do fight them they remain irrelevant to going to heaven or justified by default, for the US Marines guard the gates of heaven and Israel remains God’s chosen nation. Race relations, particularly integrating the racially segregated body of Christ, do not qualify as ‘family’ concerns, and most certainly no proactive response to interracial marriage and mixed race children can be found on their agenda.
Hunger and poverty throughout the world rank nowhere in their collective value system, though hundreds of thousands of families suffer politically precipitated famines and genocide. As I write this protest the news media reports that ten thousand people die each month from famine and genocide in Sudan alone. At the rate of 4.5 people to make a family, that means 2,222 families dying each month from starvation and murder. The plight of political and economic refugees has no seat at their table, though these issues affect countless families. And the environment? What’s that?
International economic growth and development is not an issue, for it is assumed that capitalism points the only way to the future of all nations, and white Evangelical Christian families already share in the bounty of the system. The determination of political systems also reverts to the assumption of democracy as the only viable future for the world, and their families, again, already benefit from the system. So why should they take their eyes off heaven while here on earth? Worldwide abuses of human rights are not an issue, not even when the US Selective Service System once drafted evangelical white boys to fight and kill in Vietnam without the right to vote.
World trade and finance, how it affects the global economy and individual nations within the community of nations, and consequently the well being of every family these policies reach, get no attention. Energy resources and their allocation on a global scale cannot be found on their agenda because their homes and churches already have central heating and air conditioning for their families; their Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles and SUVs have gas in their tanks when they take their families out.
Religion and religious institutions get little attention from the religious right, other than the assertion that the United States is, was, or again should be a Christian nation, JUST NOT A ROMAN CATHOLIC ONE OR A BLACK BAPTIST ONE, or Christian according to one of those denominations belonging to the liberal National Council of Churches, but yet once again a Christian nation whose core strength is the white Evangelical Christian family.
Terrorism, however, became an issue on September 11th, with a proclamation by Pat Robertson that God had delivered a wake-up call to our nation because the godless left had gone too far in America. God would never be trying to wake up Evangelicals.
So legalizing same sex marriage became a crisis among them first because it is anathema to their heterosexual monogamous, cultural/spiritual, and economic place of privilege. They trot out their apologists to thrash the opposition with arguments both historical and cogent, but as though homosexuality just popped up out of nowhere to spite them. While a serious issue in its own right, gay-lesbian marriage is not a near cause of the breakdown of the traditional family in the United States, nor is it among the most serious threats facing the traditional family here or around the world. Yet, it is a ‘wedge-issue’ in the political debate of this election season. The Andersons from Father Knows Best and the Cleavers from Leave It To Beaver wish to reclaim the national agenda.
To put their debacle in a nutshell, poor and minority families have been oppressed, enslaved, plundered, split, exploited and abused in our own nation for most of our history, while white Evangelicals did nothing about it except look to their eternal life in heaven…and help pass prohibition. And knowing the origin and history of the term ‘Evangelical’ I am not fooled by how some of today’s Evangelicals misidentify themselves with others in American history who once called themselves ‘Evangelicals’ and had a social conscience. Since the 1960s, only their ethnocentrism caused the meteoric rise of the pro-traditional family issue to our national attention, not their compassion for their neighbor’s family. Cause for alarm is their attempt to stage a comeback.
In the meantime, Dobson, Falwell, Robertson and their kith and kin advocate vociferously for Jesus Christ’s greatest unfunded mandate—getting married heterosexually and monogamously. While programs abound to address lack of capital investment in business, a major cause of business failure, where is the capital investment needed for success in traditional marriage? They do nothing I can see that might alleviate what makes waiting for heterosexual monogamy for so many years so much less likely for young people, or managing new marriages economically credible. They rake in mega-bucks for their para-church organizations by hyping traditional family values, by demanding in God’s name that young people take premarital vows of chastity, and then they support an economic system that keeps increasing the age at which marriage becomes viable. Today the gateway to marriage and family (having a good paying job, or a two parent income) generally means at least a college education for both parents, and more than likely a graduate degree up to a PhD. That age, in general, used to be graduation from high school, and with a one-parent income.
What could the pro-family Evangelical para-church organizations and churches that support them do for a start? They could redistribute their tax-exempt millions to financially support their own Christian young men and women who want to marry after high school. What’sthatyousaid? They could give them grants to start businesses. They could pay for married housing and tuition during college; perhaps just lower the rent and tuition for married couple. They could assume part of the burden or the whole burden of their government funded student loans as long as their couples remained married. Opportunities for incentives abound. One tradition in ancient Israel gave newlyweds a year off just to enjoy one another. That’sleftistsocialism. Evangelicals preach chastity and fidelity, hoard their wealth, cast their children upon the waters, and then look to government, business and industry to solve the economic future so that their children can find good enough jobs to support a family…one of these years. But their children have some hope.
Young people in poor, minority communities fight despair over their future every day. Poor and minority community leaders know it, particularly the clergy. They know that the high rate of unwed mothers and absentee fathers in their communities has multiple causes, foremost among them lack of good paying jobs to support those who want to marry heterosexually and monogamously. Consequently, the best intentioned young people from every ethnicity understand that marriage and good paying jobs do not go together like a horse and carriage, that they do not compete on a level playing field for that scarce resource called a good job to support marriage and family. Morality and money do not mix. Money subordinates morality.
To whom then shall we turn to save America from the sins of the religious right? To the feminists? To the gay/lesbian caucuses? To the pro-alternative family advocates? To the churches on the left who support this agenda? Do they speak for the majority of Americans? The radical left believes that neither Congress nor any state shall pass a law establishing a family or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
I recently came upon the well written article by Ellen Willis entitled, Why I am Not Pro-Family, in response to the famous article, Dan Quayle Was Right, by Margaret Whitehead. Willis spoke with a clarity that from my experience resonates with the clarion call of the various alternative family movements that collectively characterize themselves as ‘Progressives’. She argued that the traditional family was formed for economic and emotional reasons, but is no longer viable in the post-modern technological era. Willis just wants personal, economic and social fulfillment. Unable to find them in her traditional marriage, she sought them elsewhere. And she wants social, political and economic support as she pursues happiness elsewhere, as well as the same rights for everyone who pursues happiness anywhere. Willis concludes her article modestly, saying that she sees no easy answers in the debate over family values, yet that our nation’s creative resources should be invested in seeking alternatives for those unhappy with the traditional family.
Where Willis fears to go, others do not. Add up the collective agenda of the progressive left and it reads like this: the individual should have the constitutional right to enter into any kind of ‘family’ they can devise. American culture eventually can be brought around to accepting every kind of family model, and as the traditional-family advocates resist, legal standing can be won for alternative families through the courts. First, legal rights can be won for single parent families, then for gay and lesbian families. Such incremental victories will one day win the same legal privileges enjoyed exclusively by heterosexual monogamists for all family models, and thus open up to them the coffers of government, business and industry. Furthermore, marriage vows notwithstanding, if the individual fails to find economic and personal fulfillment in one family model, each will be free to switch to another. All family models will have equal standing in tradition and at law, with only one proviso. Heads of families must be made up of consenting adults. So when the North American Man-Boy Love Associations finally gets the legal age of consent lowered to ten years old, America will at last be a just, egalitarian society. Then we can criminalize hate speech and toss Dobson, Falwell and Robertson in prison where they belong.
Now I am no anthropologist, but I will put a month’s salary against any research that uncovers a ‘family’ model that Homo-sapiens have not already tried since they first appeared on planet Earth. If Freud is right, and the evidence supports him, the first failed experiment resulted in the incest taboo. Mother and son, father and daughter, did not find the emotionally happiness, social approbation and economic prosperity they anticipated in their loving, adult, consensual relationship. The others flopped, too, excepting polygamy up to a point, which still enjoys some stature in some nations, including the USA. So as Willis seeks to recover from unhappy monogamy, others seek to recover from unhappy polygamy, from unhappy polyandry, from unhappy single parent families, from unhappy same-sex families, from unhappy communal families, from unhappy incestuous families, from unhappy promiscuity, from unhappy vows of celibacy, et al; all the unhappiness rooted jointly or separately in economic and personal causes. Support groups and recovery groups flourish for all these injured, unhappy people and their injured, unhappy children. Yet we should all have the constitutional right to try and fail at whatever kind of family we want. In truth, what the progressives consider progressive is regressive. What might be progressive is the unprecedented notion that Americans can be united in the cause of all consensual family models, and that our legal, ecclesiastical, social and economic system can, should and will one day accommodate them all.
So here you have it–toothless religious idealism on the right and hopeless secular idealism on the left. The public debate takes place between the racists and the lunatics, who do not represent the majority of Americans. The majority of Americans–red and yellow, black and white–prefer heterosexual monogamous marriage, some more than once, and want to the see family law, tradition, education of our children and economic policy vigorously supporting them. How one does this at law while protecting the rights of the minority seems to me to be a legitimate debate.
How one does this practically for the majority is the better debate. Why does current traditional family social policy now tell young people that heterosexual, monogamous marriage is legal, moral, but economically unfeasible until…how old? What is the minimum income needed for the heterosexual, monogamous family unit with 2.5 children? At what age could a young man and woman earn this income? At what age should marriage be legal? Why should social policy not directly fund newlyweds at the age of consent, all other factors being genial, if they cannot support themselves, or support themselves and get an education at same time, or support themselves without farming their children out to day care because both parents must work just to survive? If that minimum income were defined, we would have a meaningful economic goal for all those interested in preserving the traditional family, and then by investing in its success instead of its failure. Then the vast majority of Americans who want heterosexual monogamous families would have a realistic option. These people are the future. They lack formal organization, national spokespersons and political clout. And the current ‘family values’ advocates, left and right, never want them to get the clout, for that would mean a social revolution, and thank God, an end to their hegemony.
Copyright © 2003 Rev. John Kenyon. All rights reserved.