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| More Lasting Unions: Christianity, the Family, and Society By Stephen G. Post Marriage, Family, and Society: A Social-Scientific Perspective When men and women marry and bring children into the world, they migrate into new spheres of mature love that will both challenge and change them. Conjugal love and subsequent parental love form the basis of the "family" as I consider it here, however extended it might be beyond this essential biological core. The high moral expectations connoted by the term "family" are often best fulfilled in the context of the surrounding extended family, of which the nucleus is frequently our last remnant. If this domestic window to the sacred is to succeed, it must inevitably be shaped by patience, kindness, forgiveness, trust, hope, perseverance, and other features that Christians associate with agape, after the words of Saint Paul (1 Cor. 13:4-7). Marriage and Family at a Crossroads What is a family? In the modern Western world, the term "family" most commonly refers to a group of kinship-related persons who share a home. In this context, the family consists of a kinship system whose members belong to it by marriage, birth, or adoption. Some persons consider themselves to be a family because they live communally and have caring relationships, and this metaphorical notion of the family is certainly to be respected and appreciated. My focus, however, is on the family as a biological community within nature that is defined by sexual differentiation, procreation, and kinship descent; it is the social unit in which children are born, protected, supported both economically and emotionally, and socialized. This entity is termed "nuclear" when parents and children live in an independent household, and "extended" if the household includes grandparents and/or other relatives. Parental, filial, conjugal, and sibling responsibilities define the biological family. As Lisa Sowle Cahill writes, the family "has a basic and constitutive relation to biological relationship (including reproductive partnership to produce the next generation), for which other relations, however valid, are analogues, not replacements." Marriage is widely understood in the Western world and, for the most part, cross-culturally as the stabilizing foundation for responsible procreation. Certainly the monotheistic religions of the Western world have clothed marriage with the garb of sacred vows. It is only very recently that the concept of marriage as being merely optional prior to procreation has become thinkable. From a Christian perspective, however, the emerging advocacy groups for optional marriage in the United States and Great Britain must be viewed critically. Optional marriage is a very different phenomenon than either justified divorce or single-mother parenthood due to the death of a husband because it creates fatherlessness by choice rather than by undesired contingencies. (A child who has lost his or her father due to untimely death will not feel abandoned by choice or neglect.) Recent studies show that more than half of American children and growing numbers of European children now spend significant periods of their childhoods without fathers. An unmarried woman who chooses to have a child without a social father does form a biological family in the sense of a mother-child bond; this arrangement does not, however, provide the child with the usually enhancing dyadic husband-wife foundation. There is much sensible wisdom in the old rhyme "First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes junior in the baby carriage."
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