Which Family? Whose Values?

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Patrick T. O’Neill Delivered at First Unitarian Congregational Society Brooklyn, New York on January 27, 2008.Psychologist Mary Pipher explains why any discussion centered around the notion of “family” in our society is going to be problematic for most Americans.  We tend to hold, she says, “two parallel versions of the family in our culture – the idealized version and the dysfunctional version.”“The idealized version,” she says, “portrays families as wellsprings of love and happiness, loyal, wholesome and true.  This is the version we saw in Leave It To Beaver or Father Knows Best.  The dysfunctional version depicts families as disturbed and disturbing, and suggests that salvation lies in extricating oneself from all the ties that bind.  Both versions have had their eras.  In the 1950’s the idealized version was at its zenith.  Extolling families,” according to Pipher, “was in response to the Great Depression and the War, which had separated families.  People who had been wrenched away from home missed their families and thought of them with great longing.  They idealized how close and warm they had all been.” (see, Mary Pipher, The Shelter of Each Other: Rebuilding Our Families, Ballantine Books, New York, 1996. p.24)Pipher points out, however, that “by the 1990’s it was the dysfunctional version of family that had become the most influential in American culture.  The dysfunctional belief system goes along with the culture of narcissism, which sells people the idea that families get in the way of individual fulfillment.”Pipher’s study claims that currently, “many Americans are deeply distrustful of their own and other people’s families.”  The stereotype of pop psychology presents families as pathology-producing.“Talk shows on tv and radio make families look like hotbeds of sin and sickness.  Day after day people testify about the diverse forms of emotional abuse suffered in their families; families are often depicted in literature and cinema as useless impediments.” (Pipher, p. 24)Mary Pipher, of course, is best known for her pioneering work with adolescent girls in American family systems.  What she has to say will certainly come as no surprise to any of us who have raised teenage daughters in the last generation.  She points out that in our culture, after a certain age, children no longer have permission to love their parents.“We in American culture define adulthood as breaking away, disagreeing and making up new rules.  Just when teenagers most need their parents, they are encouraged to distance from them.”What veteran parent of adolescents can’t relate to this example Pipher describes hearing from a friend.  She was walking with her son in a shopping mall, and they passed some of his friends, and she noticed that suddenly he was ten feet behind, trying hard to pretend he wasn’t with her.  She said, “I felt like I was drooling and wearing purple plaid polyester.”  Her son later explained that he enjoyed being with her, but that his friends all hated their parents and he would be teased if anyone knew he loved her.  “He said, I’m confused about this, am I supposed to hate you?”In fact this American antipathy toward families is unusual in the world.  Most cultures revere and respect family.  Our current dysfunctional attitude toward family is one reason many other parts of the world resist and resent the pervading American influence in world media today.  When the most profitable syndicated television show worldwide today is Baywatch, is it any wonder why some parts of the world do not see the arrival of American social attitudes as necessarily a welcome blessing?That Leave It To Beaver family of the 1950’s – children with two parents, one of whom was a stay-at-home mother – was of a time and middle-class place that has largely disappeared from American life today.  Nearly one third of American children today will spend at least part of their growing up years in single-parent homes.  Nearly one half of all the heterosexual marriages that will be officiated in America this week will end in divorce or dissolution within the next five years.  Those homes with two parents in residence will be mostly two-working parents homes.  And most of those family units will have fewer than three all-family sitdown meals together in a given week, with two of those three meals taken at fast food restaurants.  Children in those families will spend more time in front of televisions than they do in classrooms every week.  Before the middle-class American child reaches age 11, she will have watched more than 8,000 homicides depicted during her television hours.  She will also be pitched to by immersion advertising that will instill in her pre-adolescent brain that her life will be hardly worth living unless she wears a certain brand of clothing, listens to a certain kind of music, emulates and conforms to the questionable models of those who make millions selling to our children.It’s more than a little scary these days, it’s more than a little frightening to think about what children today are exposed to, the pressures of dangerous times, the feelings that our culture has not done enough somehow, has not succeeded in safeguarding the innate innocence of childhood, in passing along to our children what Antoine d’St.Exupery called “the passwords of civilization,” teaching them the codewords of civility and honorable behavior, grounding them in values that will inform their lives in ethical respect for other beliefs, other cultures, other civilizations with whom our children must learn to share an increasingly crowded planet.I was thinking about Mary Pipher’s notion that family today isn’t just about biology – Family today comes in all sorts of shapes and arrangements: we have biological family units, adoptive family units, single-parent families, blended families, same-sex parent families, multigenerational families, foster families, extended families, formed families of bonded friendship and lifelong mutual care.  Some people see churches as families of a kind.I think about all the manifold forms of families that I meet and work with and minister to in the course of my work, and then we come to our quadrennial election season, and I hear the term bandied about by candidates who love to refer to something they call “family values.”  And I wonder to myself, what does that term really mean in 2004, in the American society that you and I inhabit today, what does that phrase really mean?I mean, since there are so many variations of “Family” units today, and so many possible varieties of “Values” that would support or mitigate against some varieties of families today, exactly which family does that term refer to in 2008?  And whose values are encompassed in that phrase?I don’t think I’m naïve about the fact that “Family Values” in political jargon is code for conservative appeal to “traditional” political power bases (meaning White, middle-class, nuclear family, heterosexual, church-based, god-fearing, old-time religion, Pro-Life, anti-feminist, homophobic orientations).  I am pretty sure that the phrase “Family Values” when used in political party platforms in election years, probably isn’t meant to be inclusive of some of the best families that I have ever known.In New York, as in most states, some of the most loving family people I know are not allowed to be legally married because of their homosexual orientation, and for no other reason.  Apparently, the “Family Values” of some of our elected state legislators do not allow the notion that civil marriage should be a civil right for everyone in our country.Some of the best families I know, some of the most loving, caring, responsible families I’ve ever met, actually believe in a woman’s right to choose, and they fear that those who wave the banner of Family Values would see that right to choose overturned if they could.  Apparently, traditional Family Values are threatened by a woman’s right to control her own body.And then there’s that dangerous clump of you out there who threaten traditional Family Values by your intransigent personal refusal to believe in God or who have the audacity to question the teachings of God in the Sacred Scriptures.  You know what God I mean.  No matter that there are more Muslims in the country today than Episcopalians.  You know who you are, you unrepentant atheists, you covert rational Scientific Humanists out there, all you lurking agnostics looking so innocent in the pews, and all you secret Gaia-loving earth-types just waiting for the next Equinox to come by (you know who you are) – you don’t think Family Values refers to you, I hope!Why ever would you think we mean to include you when we use the term “Family Values”?  Or did you actually think just because you teach your children the ways of faith, hope, and love that that somehow qualifies you?  You think just because you try to be a good neighbor, a faithful partner, a steadfast friend, a lover of your country, a friend of fairness and justice and equity for all in our land, a lover of peace, a law-abiding citizen who believes in tolerance and decency and honesty and has a strong work ethic – you call those Family Values, do you?  I thought you were a Unitarian Universalist?  An anti-family, anti-values bunch if ever there were one!I have only one message from the pulpit today, folks.  Don’t sit this election out. Or as they used to say in New Jersey when I was growing up, vote early and vote often!!But vote.  Vote your family values, whatever they are, whatever your family happens to look like, whoever your family happens to represent.  And don’t let anybody ever tell you they own the franchise on family values.  Not in this free country, not ever.