Defending Family Values: Using the Family for Social, Political Control (Book Notes: Southern Cross)

It's been remarked by more than one person that the conservative evangelical claims to be 'defending' family values stands in stark contrast to policies and agendas that make matters difficult for many families. In truth, they are better than they used to be - the original evangelicals denigrated the value of families in many ways. In both cases, though, the point was social control.

In Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt, Christine Leigh Heyrman writes:

[A]ny southerner first glimpsing a Baptist or Methodist gathering would have been struck by the physical separation of men and women. Whether worship services were held within church buildings or at outdoor meetings, male and female members sat on opposite sides of a center aisle. Even on the frontier, where preaching often took place in small, crude cabins, groups of women and men clustered in discrete spaces. [...]

[T]he segregation of men and women at worship had the effect of blurring family connections, especially conjugal ties. It would have been impossible for any stranger entering a Baptist, Methodist, or Quaker religious meeting to pair spouses or match parents and children simply by scanning seating — something that could have been easily detected in any Anglican or Congregationalist meetinghouse. It was a division that signaled to many, as Tillson’s disdain implies, a subtle devaluing of the natural family.

Although some may find it surprising that Christians would devalue the natural family, this is quite consistent with the messages of the original Christian communities. The earliest Christians were anxiously anticipating the Kingdom of God, a spiritual state of existence where all earthly ties, bonds, and relationships would be dissolved in the presence of God’s glory. Natural families had little to no value when compared to this.

The separation of families also had important social significance: it hid the fact that so many evangelicals were there without their families.

Separating the sexes at public worship obscured the painful absence of converts’ believing family members. Condemning their upbringings eased converts out of past lives embedded in kinship networks. Identifying the church as a family endowed converts with a new circle of spiritual kin, often one more sympathetic to their religious strivings than were relatives by blood or marriage.

This kind of situation is difficult to understand in modern America, but we have to realize that denominational equality hadn’t quite been achieved yet at this time. In modern America, it’s no big deal if a person moves from one Christian denomination to another. Evangelicals, though, weren’t just another Christian denomination — they were considered more like a cult. In some ways, they were the Hare Krishnas of their era, and conversion to an evangelical church was cause for outrage and scandal in many families.

Today the evangelical churches are established and it’s not a scandal to join them. Evangelical churches stopped separating the sexes decades ago, even before they stopped separating the races. This doesn’t mean that they have stopped devaluing the natural family, though. Evangelicals churches do many things which pull families apart rather than helping them spend time together.

For all the vigor with which conservative Protestant congregations assert their aim of defending “the family,” many encourage their members to participate in a consuming regimen of activities that draw them away from the domestic circle and into the church, where they cultivate intimacies mainly with fellow believers of the same age, and sometimes the same gender and marital status.

For example, the suburban Baptist church’s Sunday bulletins boast schedules packed with church-sponsored doings on every weeknight and throughout the weekend: a battery of choir rehearsals, prayer meetings, Bible study groups, home and foreign missionary endeavors, and social events for single adults and adolescents. ... [F]amily members members caught up in the swirl of activities see a good deal less of one another as a result.

Beyond that, it restores to the church an extraordinary influence over the upbringing of children, as well as over the friendships, romantic partnerships, and spousal relationships of adults. And it does so far more subtly and effectively than the earlier evangelical expedients of an intrusive church discipline and strict prohibitions against marrying outside of the faith. [emphasis added]

As always, a major purpose behind all of this is social control. Separating the sexes helped new members who were there alone feel like they fit in better — and it also helped ensure that they relied more on the church for social support than on natural family members. Modern evangelical churches are accomplishing the thing without separating the sexes during church services; instead, they separate the sexes after church services.

When the church becomes the focus of all a person’s social activities, matters quickly progress to the point where that the church’s doctrines control and the church monitors all of a person’s life. This also has the effect of constricting a person’s social experiences because they expend all their social effort in the company of like-minded religious people — they don’t spend much if any time with members of other denominations, religions, or religious beliefs. Their intellectual world, like their social world, becomes a closed circle where beliefs, assumptions, and attitudes are constantly reinforced and growth is difficult if not impossible.

 

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