Read Time: 15 minutes
To say Protestant churches in America have lost their way is almost trite. Anyone with eyes to see or ears to hear knows that while not all is lost — it never is — American Evangelicalism is experiencing something of a crisis. A moment of cultural upheaval is upon the Church, and we must recognize the nature of that upheaval and respond to it with great urgency. Other than the preaching of the Gospel, there is no facet of human existence more significant for the Church to reclaim her authority over than that of the natural family.
Non-action or passivity in times like these serve only to expedite yet greater evils. While it may be true that revitalized action aimed at the good may not alter God’s permission of cultural rot and ruin, still, such calculations about divine Providence do not recuse the Christian of good faith from participating in God’s perfect will for the world. The Church of Christ is always called to engagement and action, never to passivity or resignation (Matt 28:19-20). As the family dies in the West, the Church cannot be passive.
A Crisis Among Crises
Today’s most difficult crisis is not necessarily a creedal one. This is not to say that within a religiously pluralistic society, the crisis of competing theological claims doesn’t exist or is not significant. Obviously it does and is. However, many Evangelical churches still affirm, often with great conviction, the fundamental dogmas of the faith, most of which are found in the early creeds. Even many progressive Christians are, once again, willing to affirm the truth claims of the ancient creeds (why wouldn’t they, since this is no longer where the cultural battle lies).
Metaphysical points of contention are, as such, not nearly as great an issue in 2023 as in 1923. Today’s crises, surprisingly perhaps, are less about the facts of Jesus’ bodily Resurrection or the possibility of miracles, as about whether or not Christian faith is itself a good thing. And this is regardless of God being real or whether miracles actual occur (which, by the way, the clearly do). As such, the more prominent crises of our times are about social realities, not supernatural ones. They are more psychological than philosophical, moral than metaphysical.
Concurrent with this fundamental challenge to the social goodness of Christianity is a heightened criticism of the embodiment of Christ in the world, namely, of His Church. The criticism of the Roman Catholic version of that embodiment which started with the Protestant Reformation, has now reached a pinnacle in the West. One result of this is that as criticism of the Protestant churches, especially their Evangelical variations, has intensified in recent decades, Evangelical churches have increasingly relinquished authority over their members to the state.
Outsourcing Authority: Ecclesial Power and the Abdication to the State
Ecclesial power, power over ecclesial issues, has been consistently handed over to government and its agencies over the last several decades. This social fact became transparent during COVID, when churches were clueless about how to handle a pandemic in the modern era. The result was churches having to outsource any authority on the issue of disease, death and dying to the power of the state. The state and its “experts” would now tell us what to do in times of widespread turmoil, while the Church would sit back and simply provide support where, or if, needed.
But this punting on a particular crisis of health and human services was merely a flash in the pan when compared to more central, civilizational issues where the Church has abdicated her authority. After all, it is reasonable to think the Church has not necessarily been called to be an expert on every particular area of human existence (albeit, there is nothing precluding robust biblical thinking on every area of human existence either). However, on fundamental issues of human culture, the Church must be the expert. If the Church is the curator of special revelation from God, how could she not be the expert on at least some issues relating to the health and vitality of an entire culture?
One of the most prominent of these issues is the Church’s understanding of the nature of marriage and the family as well as its role as an authority in and over marriages and families. If the Church, with her special revelation from God, cannot speak to civilizational issues such as these then who will, or can? If the Church cannot speak with any sense of authority about what a family is or how it should function in society, then one might rightly wonder if the Church can say anything at all significant about human existence this side of eternity?
The Christianized Secular State
Authors like Tom Holland and Douglas Murray have repeatedly made accurate claims about one of the main problems with the role of the Church in contemporary Western society. The problem they have addressed is the fact that secular states have themselves become ever more Christian in their moral assumptions and social responsibilities. This was something both authors acutely pointed out during the COVID pandemic. What the Church’s role was in the 21st-century Western world in a time of viral pandemic was quite different than in 5th- or 15th-century times of plague. The Church’s success in the West has institutionalized Christian ethics across the political spectrum and in all our social institutions, albeit in impure, adulterated form.
Where does this leave the actual Church then when it comes to managing a social crisis like COVID? Murray laments that in 2020-2021 the Church in England became little more than a messenger service for the National Health Services. The Church, like every other social institution, has become little more than an extension of the state. In another interview, Holland bemoans the fact that the Church seemingly could not point to something transcendent, something stable and fixed, in a time of global crisis.
Thus, in both aspects of existence, the immanent and the transcendent, the Church seemed to have little to say in a time of upheaval. Neither was there an authoritative stance taken about how to live rightly in a time of pandemic, nor was there much forthcoming about how we might transcend the current historical moment.
In addition, others have also noted that when it comes to social concerns about justice, the Church again seems irrelevant as an authority on the matter. Instead of pioneering new movements toward greater degrees of social justice and cohesion, Evangelical churches merely glom on to whatever social justice movement of the day has gained political traction and celebrity status. This is a point that N.T. Wright makes powerfully in the same interview with Murray. And that is often regardless of what other theoretical, philosophical or political sources have shaped or funded said movements.
This again is in part due to the fact that Western society still retains a broadly Christian framework of moral thought and action. As many like Holland have reminded us, social justice movements like Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+ or #MeToo would never get off the ground in non-christian nations or cultures. It is unthinkable that such groups would survive, let alone thrive, in Islamic states like Iran or Iraq, or in atheistic regimes like North Korea, or in pre-Christian cultures like ancient Rome or Greece. The historical fact is that without Christianity there would be absolutely no basis for the kind of social justice thinking we have today. Each of these movements desperately presupposes the intrinsic value of the human person, an idea that would not have flown very far in the days of Caesar Augustus, let alone gotten off the ground.
In short, the Church has not only abdicated its authority on multiple social issues: health and human services, social justice, etc., but, in a sense, the Church’s success has also had the unintended consequence of making her voice in the culture seem, at best, repetitive, but, more often than not, aggravating, insulting and superfluous. However, no culture can sustain itself merely upon implied premises. And so the Christian ethic that is taken for granted and that still stabilizes our institutions is itself no longer stable. If there is one thing then that the Church must do, it is be the prophetic voice that calls a nation back to its roots.
The Family and Civilization
After the evangelistic call to Christ, the next most significant call the Church can make on behalf of the culture in which it lives, is to call it back to God’s eternal institutions. This is the Church engaging in her prophetic task, reminding society that it lives in a world created by God, sustained and governed by God, and meant to function in a way determined by God. The most foundational of these eternal institutions to which the Church must call culture is the family.
The family is both a transcendent reality and a particular form. The eternal family is found archetypally in the Trinity, the Father eternally begetting the Son, and the Spirit spirated eternally from Father and Son. However, the family is essentially present in the concrete world of particulars as well. Its form is well known to us, even if often rejected at given times and places in history. That form is “one man-one woman-their children.”
Speaking to the concrete form of the family, Carle Zimmerman writes the following in his classic text on the subject, Family and Civilization:
The family as a social institution is part of the life of everyone. We are here as the result of the family, we are the products of families, most of us create families of our own, and when we die those families bury us and mourn our passing. If we have done good while here, this is remembered and worshipped. If we have not done good, this is excused and forgotten. If one is in trouble, the family is the first to help and the last to condemn. If one does not create a family of his own, he or she lives in a world where family law and family mores sharply define the most important phase of conduct.
Zimmerman, 15
Touching on the transcendent aspect of family, Zimmerman continues:
Most of the sentiment and emotion of the world is centered about the family or is of a family nature. God is the Father, and His chief representative in this world is the Son. The work of the Father and the Son is called ‘divine.’ Father-love and mother-love and ‘Honor thy father and mother’ are three subjects that are always taken seriously.
Writing in the 1940’s from Harvard, Zimmerman already saw the breakdown in the natural family. The natural family was losing its intrinsic power to the state. Recognizing the brute fact that any grouping is inherently a “power organization,” Zimmerman saw that the modern family was abdicating its power to state power:
A family, a community, or a state has social power. This power may be limited, or it may, as in the totalitarian state, be great. The power of the modern family, contrasted with what it has been at other times, is not great. The power of the present family is limited largely to domestic functions and an attempt to keep harmony among the children until they know better and can do this for themselves.
Zimmerman, 16-17
Aside from the unforeseen “baby boom” of the 1950’s and a short-lived reaffirmation to traditional values in the late 1990’s, the rejection of the family as both a God-modeled and ordained institution has come “full swing” (Carlson, xiii) in contemporary American culture. In the introduction to the 2008 release of Family and Civilization, Allan Carlson summarizes the societal course since Zimmerman’s defense of “familism”:
Even as Zimmerman wrote the elegy for rural familism…the peculiar circumstances that had forged the suburban ‘family miracle’ (of the 1950’s and 60’s) were rapidly crumbling. Old foes of the ‘domestic family’ and friends of ‘atomism’ [individualism] came storming back: feminists, sexual libertines, Neo-Malthusians, the ‘new’ Left [e.g., Herbert Marcuse]. By the 1970s, a massive retreat from marriage was in full swing, the marital birthrate was in free fall, illegitimacy was soaring, and non marital cohabitation was spreading among young adults. While some of these trends moderated during the late 1990s, the statistics have all worsened again since 2000. Zimmerman was right: America is taking its first real ‘sickness’ most violently.
Carlson, xii-xiii
Or, to paraphrase Pope John Paul II, “as the family goes, so goes the nation.” While we must amend Zimmerman’s claim to include slavery as America’s “first real sickness,” (a sickness that nearly destroyed it), it is no doubt that America is reacting “most violently” to its second real illness: the rejection of the family. If things continue in this vein, this second illness may be terminal.
Yet, given the diagnosis, what has the Church, especially Evangelical churches, been doing all this time? Can the so-called representatives of Christ on earth really be dropping the ball so badly on something so foundational to the health and wellbeing of culture itself?
The Church’s Great Failure: Marriage, Family and Divorce
Zimmerman highlights in chapter 1 of the book the ideological forces at war with what he calls “familism.” These theoretical forces dominant the sociology departments of his day, and still in our own day, even unto our “Christian” seminaries. The main culprit of this way of theorizing is a form of “evolutionary, or continuous-movement-in-one-direction, school of thought” (18). The goal of this school of thought is to negate “familistic bonds.”
Some held that we must find the perfect happiness or ultimate good in easy divorce; a second group, that we must free the family from patriarchism; a third, in eliminating the burdens of childrearing; a fourth, in securing the proper sex adaptation between partners; a fifth, in increasing individual happiness by the proper mating selection and practices; and many others in various eliminations and reforms. All of these ideas have as their fountainhead the evolutionary school of thought.”
Zimmerman, 18
In contrast to these iconoclastic movements against familism, or what Philip Rieff would have called ‘death works,’ Zimmerman reaffirmed the historic Christian understanding of the family. Its central functions being “fides, proles, and sacramentum; or ‘fidelity, childbearing, and indissoluble unity’” (Carlson, x).
Unfortunately, for both individual families and for society at large, it is exactly these three necessary functions of the family that the Church in America has neglected to defend. There has been a weak, effete resistance to the cultural forces of neo-Marxism, critical theory and postmodernism that promote their antithesis: libertine freedom, personal happiness and bodily autonomy. In systematically relinquishing its authority over marriages and families to the cultural mood, the Church in America, especially Evangelical churches, have only hastened the downfall of America as a free, healthy and prosperous nation.
The Church Must Reestablish Its Authority over Marriage and Family
As marriages continue to break apart, untethered from the Church’s traditional teachings and exercising of ecclesial power regarding marital fidelity, procreation and the sacredness of the eternal institution, the state cannot help but step into an authoritative role over families. We see this being advanced explicitly in policies that now give the government more control over children than that of parents. This is especially the case in areas related to sexuality, where not only is the Church no longer an authority, but neither are families. Now authority lies almost exclusively within the realm of the government and its proclaimed “experts.”
Evangelicals abject failure to be the final, biblical authority in and over marriages, is a massive ecclesiological shortcoming. Churches, elder boards and pastors who take the now prevalent “hands-off” approach to marriages and divorces are not only failing in their authoritative role to govern the body of Christ, but they are literally handing the welfare of their people over to the state. In doing so, the Church is conferring the state with ever more authority, power and control.
This is the Marxist dystopia, and it flips Zimmerman’s, and the biblical, idea of family squarely on its head: it is not the family into which we will be born, but the state. It is not our family that will bury and mourn us, it is the state that will bury us, albeit probably not mourn us. It is the state that will worship and praise us, if we adhered to its totalitarian system in our lifetime. If we did not, however, it is doubtful we will find forgiveness or forgetfulness of our erroneous and unsanctioned ways. In a recent debate at Oxford Union, anglican priest and bible scholar, Ian Paul, forcefully made this very point. If the Church capitulates to the culture regarding its teachings on marriage and family, then it is the state that will step into the role of governor and guarantor of both.
In conclusion, the Church in America must reestablish itself as the definer, custodian and guarantor of marriages, instead of being the biggest cheerleader for all things anti-marriage, like easy divorce, gay marriage or anti-natalism among otherwise healthy married couples, not only will she be failing to properly shepherd her own flock, she will be actively expediting the demise of of the culture in which that flock resides.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In