#442: Retrieving the Christian Household

An Essay

MLA: This is a draft of a recent talk I gave at Houston Christian University. I am reserving it for full members, only because it is a line of thought that is fairly inchoate for me still. Comments are welcome—as are memberships!

The family is “where most of the rape happens on this earth, and most of the murder. No one is likelier to rob, bully, blackmail, manipulate, or hit you, or inflict unwanted touch, than family.” So writes Sophie Lewis in her manifesto Abolish the Family. Don’t ask Lewis what she would replace it with: her aim is to establish the world where the family is simply unnecessary, and that what comes after it is a “glorious and abundant nothing.” Lewis is by no means the first to propose such a radical venture: as she notes, Plato’s Republic develops a scheme to redistribute babies in his idealized city. While I would protest that Socrates’ proposal is an ironic reductio against those who fail to give the body and nature their due, rather than the political programme that Lewis seems to take it for, various figures in the modern era have taken the idea both seriously and literally: Lewis’s ambition to ‘abolish the family’ self-consciously takes its place within the string of attempts people have made to escape marriage as the organizing principle for our private lives. Never mind whether such efforts worked: they failed only because they were half-measures, utopian attempts to do away with the family in the midst of social structures that were not yet ready to accommodate them. Though they both would blanch at the comparison, Lewis might co-opt Chesterton’s maxim about Christianity as her own: it is not that family abolition has not been tried and found wanting, so much as it has been left hitherto untried.

The radical left’s growing interest in family abolition has been fueled in part by the return of anti-bourgeois forms of reasoning within the so-called LGBT community after Obergefell vs. Hodges was issued. While social conservatives thought the opinion was the final sign of marriage’s dissolution, many on the left saw it as domesticating and commidifying previously renegade forms of sexuality. Gay marriage did not liberate gay life so much as inscribe ‘heteronormative’ patterns of conduct on gay couples, while reinforcing the perception that childrearing should happen within stable, intimate, affective household bonds. The emergence of the fight for trans-rights after Obergefell is an attempt to pay off an old debt, which the lesbian and gay factions incurred by pushing more socially transgressive, less bourgeois forms of queer life into the background as they sought social respectability. The gambit is risky, though, as the interest in advancing trans rights has no purchase or claim on traditional family forms the way gay marriage putatively did. Whether ‘woke capital’s’ embrace of a unified LGBT movement as a single class can survive the destabilization of bourgeois forms of sexuality the trans ideology represents is one of the  great questions of the next decade. It sits alongside the question of whether such transgressive lifestyles will survive capital’s embrace, or whether the ever expanding list of ‘queer identities’ will be submerged within the neutralizing logic of the markets. In one way, abolishing the family is the only radical political position left.

While family abolition is the outer edge of contemporary efforts to rethink relationships, the political center has shown a similar interest in renewing the American household—as typified by David Brooks’ 9000 word Atlantic article from 2020 on why the nuclear family was a mistake. While Brooks’ positive proposal is more modest than Lewis’s, they both have the same fundamental interest, namely, establishing forms of social support and care that are voluntary. Brooks proposes that we need  “extended and forged families,” which enact a kinship that is chosen rather than given by biology or blood. This invocation of fictive kinship is too conservative for Lewis, who worries that it “functions as a linguistic appeal to something non-contingent that can ground a relation. And I am asking,” she goes on, “can we suspend that fantasy of something non-contingent? Can we let go of it?” Instead of kinship, Lewis argues we should prioritize relationships of kith, which are grounded on “knowledge, practice, and place, rather than race, descent, and identity.” Though where Lewis is ideologically committed to such relationships, Brooks seems to see them as a prudential path forward in the face of an aging and fragmenting society.

The timing of Brooks’ article could not have been more ironic: the Covid pandemic arrived on America’s shores the same month it was published, beginning a strange season in America’s life that reminded people either of the nuclear family’s critical importance or our urgent need to create alternatives to it. Many lockdown policies only allowed contact with one’s immediate family in the home, reinforcing the state’s prioritization of nuclear household bonds. The economy’s rapid contraction drove many younger millennials to move back in with their parents, while others created ‘pods’ which functioned in familial ways. As the pandemic has receded, Americans have reverted to our pre-pandemic norms: a demonic cocktail of acidic individualism, sexual liberation, elite careerism, and working-class economic stagnation have combined to make marriage and family formation a secondary concern for many young people. The broader currents that have undermined the nuclear family’s hold on our moral imaginations are unlikely to be reversed any time soon, and reinvigorating the nuclear family tomorrow would offer little help to the millions of Americans who currently live on its fringes.  

How should Christians think about the household in such a world?