Defining the “Good Family” in Local Congregations 169
The Good Family in Rhetoric and Practice
Ideology is a matter of both rhetoric and practice, and the survey gathered data on
both dimensions of familism. Pastors were asked to agree or disagree with a number of
items concerning their own beliefs about gender and family, and additional items were
included to elicit the pastor’s interpretation of the faith tradition’s stand on gender
roles and family forms. Extensive information on congregational ministry practices
and programming was also gathered for each congregation.
Tables 13.1 and 13.2 contain more information about the specific items on the
survey. These tables are organized by religious tradition.^5 For Protestants, this organi-
zation allows for a quick assessment of the degree to which a congregation’s stand on a
liberal/conservative continuum influences the symbolic and pragmatic dimensions of
family ideology. It also allows an assessment of whether a liberal/conservative catego-
rization is a useful one with which to understand the family ministry and rhetoric of
local Catholic parishes in these communities.
Both tables suggest that familism is a central element of congregational life and
rhetoric in these communities. Table 13.1 reveals that virtually all pastors view the
family as “in crisis.” In focus groups, over 95 percent of pastors told us that changes
in work and family were among the most important issues facing their congregation
today.
Focus groups with pastors and participant-observation within congregations re-
vealed that pastors are responding to the perceived crisis in the family in a variety
of ways designed to be more inclusive of those who do not fit the nuclear family
ideal. In the basement of a little church at a crossroads in Seneca County one af-
ternoon, the pastor of an independent Baptist congregation talked at length about
his church’s decision to make the annual Mother-Daughter banquet into a Women’s
banquet that celebrates women’s contributions to the family, the congregation, the
broader community, and the workplace. He said they did this to make working women,
single women, and childless women feel welcome at the most important and well-
attended women’s event on their church calendar. This kind of rhetorical, symbolic
inclusion is common across congregations, as indicated by the second-to-last line of
Table 13.1.
But if congregations are moving to provide a more caring and inclusive atmosphere
for those who do not fit the nuclear family “ideal,” they differ sharply in their willing-
ness to affirm the ideal itself, or to uphold the nuclear family as a normative model
for family life today. And to some extent, this difference is organized according to a
left-right “culture-wars” divide, as shown in Table 13.1. Evangelical Protestant pastors
were by far the most likely, in our telephone survey, to affirm the importance of male
spiritual headship in the home, a traditional division of labor between husband and
wife, and the importance of obedience in children.
In focus groups, evangelical Protestant pastors, along with some Catholic priests,
would employ a language of symbolic inclusion and talk about the need to minister to
all members regardless of their family situation while at the same time affirming the
neo-patriarchal family as the ideal kind of family. Evangelical pastors may be openly
(^5) Categorized according to the Appendix in Smith 1990, which yields a classification very similar
to that proposed by Steensland et al.2000.