FOLLOW US
A.J. Guerra: The Role of Religion in Strengthening the Family
Written by Anthony J. Guerra
Saturday, May 26, 2001
Paper delivered to An International Symposium Commemorating the International Day of Families and the International Year of Volunteers, “Serving Nation, Serving World,” May 26-28, 2001
“For more than a century, the notion of romantic love has held sway in the land. The popular culture has debunked traditional notions of marriage and family; the birth rate is falling precipitously; marriage is on the decline; and the traditional two-parent family is an endangered species. The situation has now attracted the attention of the political elite. The holder of the top office in the land promotes legislation supportive of traditional family values. Unfortunately, the problem seems intractable to state manipulation.”
Now listen carefully. You may be thinking I am speaking of a modern European nation or more probably the United States. But in fact, I’m referring to the Roman republic, and the political adept I have in mind is Augustus Caesar. His efforts on behalf of strengthening marriage and family some 2,000 years ago were also similar to that of today’s political elites: virtually without effect. After four years of former President Jimmy Carter’s focus on the family, an individual reviewed the progress and wrote a book entitled The Futility of Family Policy, published by the liberal Brookings Institute. He concludes: “Government has no mechanism to enforce love, affection and concern between husband and wife, between parent and child or between one sibling and another.” In other words, the state is inherently incapable of affecting the stuff of strong families.
From a social science perspective, social psychologists have noted that associational patterns and the nature of commitment in religious and family institutions have much in common. They are very similar kinds of organizations. On the other hand, political, economic, and educational institutions are quite a different breed. This could be one of the reasons why the state has been so unsuccessful in remedying family problems.
Take the problem of out-of-wedlock births. In a recent study, Donny Critchow demonstrates that despite enormous costs in the 1970s and 1980s, federal family planning failed to reduce the number of out-of-wedlock births. Fortunately, some correcting trends emerged in the 1990s and are persisting. For instance, after having risen to its highest point in 1988, the percentage of unmarried black women giving birth did begin to decline and by 1996 had reached its lowest level in 40 years. After 1994, the birth rate among unwed white women also began to drop. Now, given the fact that sexually active teenagers in 1995 got pregnant at higher rates than in 1988, one can conclude that the only reason for such decline had to be abstinence. Where did this come from? Well, enter the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest Protestant denomination in the United States of America.
The SBC has gained some media recognition for challenging the anti-family slant of much of the mainstream entertainment industry. Less well known is the fact that the SBC has invested enormously in television, radio, and the internet to provide alternative media friendly and supportive to families. The SBC initiated Family Net in 1988, offering 24-hour programming services for more than 70 million people. Programming is distributed by satellite to broadcast stations which carry them either part of the day or for the entire day. In the late 1980s, the SBC Sunday School board prepared a curriculum for Christian sex education which elicited a great response from parents and teenagers seeking further guidance. Believe it or not, teenagers want to be told that there are limits. They want to hear it.
In April 1993, the SBC unveiled the True Love Waits campaign to promote biblical sexuality and premarital abstinence for teens. At the 1994 SBC annual convention in Orlando, Florida, more than 100,000 signed chastity cards were displayed on the lawn outside of the meeting site. In Washington, DC, 211,000 signed abstinence pledges were placed at the Capitol Mall on July 29, 1994. And on Valentine’s Day 1996 over 340,000 teenagers expressed publicly their commitment to remain abstinent until marriage.
Their stacked pledge cards reached from the ground up to the roof of the 27-story Georgia Capital Dome. The SBC has succeeded in turning peer pressure towards affirming a teenage abstinence campaign and in doing so, demonstrated that biblical or traditional sexual values can be sustained in contemporary America. I might add that these programs and a few other programs that I’ll be talking about from other denominations quickly became ecumenical. They were emulated by other denominations in the United States and also by other religions, Jewish, Muslim, etc.
I want to speak now briefly about the Roman Catholic efforts in this country to strengthen families that are truly impressive. The Roman Catholic Church is, of course, the largest denomination of Christians in America, almost four times the size of the SBC. Incidentally, when you combine the SBC and the Roman Catholic Church, you’re talking about one out of every three of Americans in the United States.
In 1964, Pope John XXIII affirmed the family in the: ecclesia domestica, that is, the domestic church. This was repeated by his two successors, Pope Paul VI and also by Pope John Paul II. Pope John Paul II has written voluminously on the topic of the family, emphasizing the sacrament of matrimony that grants to family members “the dignity invocation of being really and truly a ministry of the church, a ministry of the church at the service of building up of her members. ” John Paul II draws the parallel between the ministry of parents to their children and that of the priest to his congregation. He also sees similarities in the challenges of keeping fidelity to one spouse and in being celibate as a cleric, a priest, or a nun pursing the vow of chastity.
This papal theologizing, in my view, not only helps empower the thousands of Catholic married people who are involved in ministry to families but also, I must say, is a reflection on the already achieved accomplishments of Catholic married people who have been involved in the family movement over the last several decades. In the 1940s, the Cana Conference movement emerged to address the specific spiritual concern and needs of modern American families. This movement stimulated thousands of clergy and lay persons to become engaged in marriage and family ministry. It also provided the infrastructure and content for the marriage preparation ministry of the institutional Catholic Church.
Prominent Protestant figures have remarked that the Catholic Church does a better job than any other denomination in preparing couples for marriage. Couples desiring to be married in the Catholic Church are required to participate in a marriage preparation course. Such courses are often multi-session these days, conducted by a team composed of clergy, lay married couples, and parish staff. A minimum preparation period of usually four to six months is mandated of couples. Prenuptial inventories assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the couple and zeroing in on the problematic aspects of the relationship are sometimes employed. An increasing trend is to pair the engaged couple with an older mentor couple. More than 93 percent of Catholic couples surveyed in their first year of marriage viewed their participation in marriage preparation as valuable.
There’s been some noted lack in the preparation or in the support given to families after marriage. Into that gap, several lay Catholic movements have come. As the Cana Movement was waning in the late 1960s, a powerful new movement arose from the Catholic laity called Marriage Encounter. Some two million American families have participated in Marriage Encounter weekend retreats. Eighty to 90 percent of those attending experience a sense of renewal of their nuptial bonds. The intent of the weekend is to learn “a technique of loving communication that couples can use for the rest of their lives.” The emphasis is on communication between husbands and wives. Couples hear talks from lead couples and write answers to questions. Then the couple read each other’s answers and engage in discussion.
Marriage Encounter now involves more than a dozen denominations. There are many other movements—I don’t have time to refer to them all, but I’m trying to give you some taste of the truly enormous pro-family efforts that Christians are making.
By the mid- to late-1980s there was a spiritual revival among Catholics in this country. And they opted for a decidedly more spiritual approach to marital and family matters. In 1989, the 850-acre Catholic Family Land campus set in a remote region of the Allegheny foothills of Ohio. Since its opening, thousands of Catholic parents and children have enrolled in three- to five-day spiritual boot camps called Spiritual Detox Centers by its founder, David Coniker. He says, “Here they can obtain the tools of evangelization. There are no walkmans here, no TV, no radio, no liquor, just time to let God, nature and the family work together.” Graduated families of the center are encouraged to make six novenas or a 54-day prayer condition to solidify their spiritual gains.
Finally, I would like to speak about the roles of the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS), or the Mormons, and the Family Federation for World Peace or Reverend Moon’s Unification Church. The Mormons, or LDS, is a nineteenth century American religion which is currently the fastest growing denomination in the world. In fact, some historians now believe that the rate of growth of Mormonism is greater than the rate of early Christianity in the first two centuries. The Unification Church may also be the most stable of the new religions born in the twentieth century.
For both these religions, the family is not only an important social unit in a matrix for individual spiritual life and growth, but is for both of them the center for God’s providential work of eternal salvation. Unlike traditional understandings of marriage as ending at death, for both Mormons and Unificationists the married life is believed to continue into the spiritual world, and indeed, the ultimate disposition of spiritual status is in large part determined by the marital status as a seal or a blessed union. The Mormons refer to their religious ceremony as the sealing of marriage done in the temple and in the Unification Church it’s the blessing ceremony.
In these religions, the final barrier to marriage, i.e., death, is removed and ancestors and descendants have an immediate and continuing eternal significance since marital and family union is not dissolved with the passing from this world. In both, a sense of biblical and restorational purpose is given to each family. Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, and his first followers understood themselves to be restoring or regaining the ideal of the biblical patriarchal family.
Hence the temporary flirtation with plural marriage at the beginning. The Unificationists understand themselves as restoring the original Adamic family, the family of Adam of Eve from whose fall all human and world disorder was initiated. Thus, for the Unificationists, marriage has purpose, not only for the spiritual elevation of its individual members but in the social context in which world unity can be attainted. Reverend Moon’s encouragement of international marriages from his first blessings of unions between Koreans and Japanese more than 30 years ago, peoples with great enmity between them, and his encouragement of interracial marriages, all in large, joint ceremonies, signifies the reconstitution of the root world family of God by the acts of love between once enemy peoples and unified, blessed, matrimonial love.
These new religions thus give to families a sense of global, historical, and cosmic meaning, and in so doing, help strengthen the institution of the family in contemporary times. Most important, I think however, for the purpose of our discussion is that they are obviously rendering a service along with these other religious movements to the sustenance and the revival of the family in this very difficult time.