Familyolatry in the Church?
Queer Brit over at Queermergent has a nice piece on a topic I’ve been wondering about a lot the past few years: the idolization of the family by the church. We hear it from several corners: marriage and the family are the foundation of Western civilization and without them, our culture will crumble. This sounds nice, but in effect, it makes the family into a kind of god — an idol.
Queer Brit writes:
From the beginning Christianity was radically about a new form of extended community, as a visible expression of the invisible kingdom of God. This is the reason why the early church was persecuted, because in so doing, these little Ecclesia’s challenged the power of the Empire which sought to disempower minority groups, which the church, counter-culturally, sort to include. If you look at the book of the Acts, where people shared a common purse and lived together in extended friendship groups – it is all completely different from the ideal of conservatives with their 2.2 children, man at work and woman at home….
I’ve been reading the same thing in Kierkegaard: the family is not a Christian value, and there is no Biblical way to claim that it is.
I see this idea from the perspective of the Gospels and Paul, but it is hard to reconcile it with the Hebrew scriptures, which value family fairly highly — think of how many of the miracles have to do with having children. So, how do we find a biblical understanding of family that values them properly without making them the idol on which civilization is built?
