Defining the “Good Family” in Local Congregations 171
critical of their own tradition’s history of dealing with family change, saying things
like:
A lot of times, a family-oriented church means mom and dad, three kids and the
dog, and this can turn away those who don’t have this type of family.”^6But they would also say that “God describes a humanity that is broken and lost,”^7 and
they would refer to those in single-parent families, the divorced, or gays and lesbians
as being broken or lost.
Catholics and mainline Protestants, by contrast, affirm that “God approves of many
kinds of families” (see Table 13.1). They score higher on all of the measures of “progres-
sive” family ideology, in our survey, than do evangelical Protestants. And these views
were echoed in the focus groups, as well, where pastors from these traditions spoke
positively about gay and lesbian lifestyles, and outlined their ideal of a nurturing fam-
ily that fosters self-expression and mutual care over any rigid division of labor or strict
within-family roles. As one Presbyterian pastor explained to us in the Tompkins county
focus group,
I think it’s fair to say that we have changed our thinking as to what constitutes
family, in our churches, to get up to speed with society. I shudder to think what was
considered a family when I was growing up in the church. (6/6/00)Mainline Protestant congregations, and many Catholic parishes, see a consistency
between the local rhetoric of symbolic inclusion as it is applied to actual persons and
the official rhetoric about the ideal family. There is not the decoupling of ideal from
practice found in evangelical churches.
Nevertheless, pastors in many mainline Protestant and Catholic congregations do
use other rhetorics about contemporary family life and the source of the “crisis” in the
family that undercut the progressive message behind their official views about what
constitutes a good family. In particular, comments about the large numbers of dual-
earner couples in these communities were couched in a time-bind rhetoric pervaded by
nostalgic references to the male-breadwinner family of the past – and the corresponding
availability of women’s volunteer labor in the church.
During fieldwork in one otherwise progressive Catholic parish, I asked the director
of family ministry to tell me how recent changes in work and family had affected her
church. She responded immediately, with a time-bind rhetoric, as shown in the excerpt
from my fieldnotes, below:
The biggest change over the last fifteen years or so is the lack of time that families have
now. She said that’s much bigger, more important, than any other change, “more
than single parents, more than divorce. It’s time. The women,allthe women, went
to work. And they have no time for parish activities, to bring the kids to activities.”
(11/16/98)She went on to blame the loss of traditional priorities – a life centered on home and
church, women being the mainstay of both arenas – on the rise of the dual-earner
couple and on the time-bind that such families face on a daily basis.
(^6) Pastor of an independent Baptist church, Tompkins County focus group, 11/20/1997.
(^7) Pastor of a Missouri Synod Lutheran church, Northside focus group, 6/14/2000.