Christian family values

There is a particular tone in which the phrase “Christian family values” is most often uttered here in the 51st state and the 48 contiguous ones to the south. But it is not the tone of the Sermon on the Mount.

It is a tone of laminated certainty. It comes pre-installed with a stock photo: smiling nuclear unit, 2.3 children, father upright and payroll-bearing, mother serene and casserole-adjacent, the whole scene lit with the soft-focus glow of a cable news chyron. The phrase functions less as description than as perimeter fence. Inside: order, obedience, tradition, clear roles, respectability. Outside: chaos, moral entropy, the collapse of civilization as foretold by people who have written at least one book about it.

There are plenty of inspiring movies on Netflix about this if you don’t believe me. Check out Jennifer Garner in Miracles from Heaven or Dennis Quaid in The Hill or Kevin Spacey in American Beauty. (Just kidding about that last one, but have faith: there are a ton of uplifting moral tales to be had at the touch of a button.)

The interesting thing — interesting in the way that a loose stair on a dark staircase is interesting — is that when you turn from this laminated slogan to the actual recorded words of Jesus of Nazareth, you do not find much laminate. You find something sharper. Stranger. Less Disney. And certainly less marketable.

This is awkward, because the Gospels are not especially coy on the subject of family. Jesus does not say, “Honour your suburban zoning regulations.” He does not offer a three-point plan for raising compliant teenagers. What he does say, in various formulations, is the sort of thing that would get him uninvited from a certain genre of conference, including this month’s U.S. National Prayer Breakfast, where President Donald Trump told the forum for the political, social and business elite that immigrants are a threat to churchgoers. Let us prey.

But back to that Jesus guy, breakout star of the New Testament. Take, for example, his utimate family-values question: “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” (Mark 3:33). When mother Mary (no Perpetual Virgin by this time, accompanied by as many as six other kids if you put together Matthew 13:55, Mark 6:3 and versions of Mark 3:32) brings his brothers and sisters to a public event to see him, Jesus points instead to his disciples as his authentic mother and siblings (Mark 3:31-35; Matthew 12:46-50; Luke 8:19-21). In Luke, when a female follower says to Jesus, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked!”, Jesus retorts: “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it.” For lo, as the Christian messiah sees it, whoever does the will of God is his family. This is not an affirmation of the nuclear family as the foundational building block of civilization. It is a relativizing move. It quietly detonates the assumption that blood is the ultimate loyalty. It redraws the circle. By and by, Lord. By and by.

Or consider this line in Luke: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters … he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).

Theologians will rush in (rightly) to explain that “hate” here means something more like “love less by comparison,” which is fine and philologically responsible. But even softened, the claim remains volcanic. The claim is that your primary allegiance is not to family-as-institution; it is to the kingdom of God. Family, in other words, is not ultimate. It is penultimate. And penultimate things, when treated as ultimate, tend to curdle.

The modern rhetoric of “Christian family values” tends to invert this. Family becomes sacred in itself, almost sacramental, a kind of moral greenhouse where the right political opinions and gender norms can be cultivated. Jesus, by contrast, speaks as though family is both gift and obstacle — beautiful and dangerous. Mike Johnson dangerous.

Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law without offering commentary on the proper chain of domestic authority. He blesses children and simultaneously warns that allegiance to him may set “a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” (Matthew 10:35).

This is starkly spelled out in more detail in Luke 12:52-53:

Henceforth in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three; … father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against her mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law, and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. This is not a Hallmark card. This sounds more like a rerun of The Jerry Springer Show for anyone who believes, as the Jesus of the Gospels clearly does, that the end of the world is nigh.

It’s worth noticing what Jesus does not do. He does not condemn sexual preference. He does not issue detailed instructions about preserving first-century Mediterranean household structures. When confronted with a woman caught in adultery — a situation ripe for a lecture on sexual morality and family breakdown — he stoops, writes in the dust and disperses the mob. His energy seems directed less toward shoring up social architecture than toward exposing hypocrisy and extending mercy.

This is deeply inconvenient if your preferred narrative is that Christianity is primarily about maintaining a stable domestic order. Because Jesus appears oddly indifferent to stability for its own sake. He praises those who leave houses and brothers and sisters for his sake (Mark 10:29). He commends celibacy “for the sake of the kingdom” (Matthew 19:12), which is hardly a pro-natalist rallying cry. The early Christian movement that follows him includes unmarried apostles, itinerant missionaries, households reconfigured around shared faith rather than shared DNA. It looks less like a 1950s sitcom and more like a travelling, slightly chaotic extended family held together by a story about resurrection.

And this is where the contrast sharpens.“Christian family values,” as commonly deployed, often emphasize hierarchy: father as head, mother as helpmeet, children as obedient arrows in a cultural quiver. Jesus, meanwhile, says things like, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them. … It shall not be so among you” (Matthew 20:25–26). The greatest must become servant. Authority is inverted, not reinforced. The last are first. The child — socially marginal, economically useless in the ancient world — is placed in the centre as the model of the kingdom.

It should be difficult to weaponize that. Yet if the last 2,000 years have proven anything, it can certainly be done. A little hypocrisy goes a long way. An inexhaustible supply goes further.

Oh. And there is also the small matter of wealth. Many contemporary invocations of family values are entangled with aspirations toward comfort, security and upward mobility. Provide for your family. Protect them. Build something to pass on. All understandable. Yet Jesus tells a man to sell all he has and give to the poor. He warns that one cannot serve both God and money. He speaks of storing up treasure in heaven rather than on earth. If the family is imagined as a project of accumulation — assets, reputation, insulation from risk — then Jesus’s economic teaching functions rather like a solvent.

None of this is congenial for those who portray Christianity as the religion of the settled nuclear family. But neither does it mean that Jesus despises families. He quotes the commandment to honour father and mother. He condemns those who evade caring for their parents through religious loopholes (Mark 7:9–13). He offers a blanket prohibition of divorce (Mark 10:11-12; Luke 16:18), though this is modified by Paul of Tarsus in I Corinthians (7:10-11; 7:15) and the Evangelist Matthew (Matthew 19:9). From the cross, Jesus entrusts his mother to the beloved disciple (commonly understood to be John).

There is tenderness here, responsibility, attention. But it is framed within a larger loyalty. The family is not abolished; it is re-situated inside the kingdom of God, where mercy outruns propriety and obedience to God may fracture even the most cherished bonds.

The trouble is that “Christian family values” sometimes operate as a way of domesticating Jesus — trimming his harder sayings into something that fits neatly above the mantel.

The radical reordering of allegiance becomes a program for social conservation. The call to lose one’s life becomes a strategy for preserving a lifestyle. And the expansive redefinition of family — whoever does the will of God — shrinks back down to those who look and vote like us.

Next thing you know, you’re stuck watching Kid Rock at the Turning Point USA All-American Halftime Show telling Americans to dust off their Bibles and find Jesus, rather than taking a boo at that vibrant but godless Bad Bunny performance at the Super Bowl. (Sadly, the president’s second hippest musical supporter (after Lee Greenwood) neither sang nor lip-synched his song “Cool, Daddy Cool,” the one with the righteous lyrics: “Young ladies, young ladies, I like ’em underage, see. Some say that’s statutory, but I say it’s mandatory.” God bless America.)

But OK. Let’s dust off that Bible and find Jesus.

His vision of family is simultaneously more demanding and more generous than the divisive contemporary “Christian family values” model that either attracts or repels, depending on your point of view.

More demanding, because it refuses to let blood ties or cultural norms outrank obedience to God. More generous, because it explodes the boundaries of kinship. Tax collectors, zealots, fishermen, women of ill repute, Roman centurions, children — these become siblings in a new household. It is less tidy. It is less controllable. It is, in a sense, less safe.

Which might just be the point. A family built as a fortress can become a bunker. A family built around the kingdom becomes a doorway. The former is preoccupied with defending itself from contamination; the latter is sent outward, even at cost. Jesus seems less concerned with protecting a pristine domestic sphere than with forming a community whose love is conspicuous enough to unsettle the surrounding world.

If that sounds less like a slogan and more like a cross to bear, that too might be the point. The cross is not a symbol of cultural stability. It is an instrument of execution that becomes, paradoxically, the sign of a new kind of life. In that light, the question is not whether families matter — they plainly do — but whether they are ends in themselves or signs pointing beyond themselves.

So look. You can believe Jesus was a man or a myth. You can believe that the Gospels about his life, which biblical scholars have concluded were written in the 70s-90s CE — a generation or two after the crucifixion — accurately reflect the oral history passed down by the first Christians. You can believe that oral history was 100% accurate, though keep in mind that the well-attested Roman imperial census and tax levy associated with Jesus’s birth in Nazareth did not take place until until 6 CE. But if you actually dust off that Bible and find Jesus, you won’t find any glorification, veneration or deification of modern “Christian family values.” And certainly no excuse for using those values as a cudgel to demonize anyone — least of all the immigrants who, in the pious words of the Very Rev. Donald J. Trump, are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

“Christian family values,” as a phrase, promises reassurance. Jesus, as a person or a myth, offers transformation. One is easier to print on a button. The other asks you to reorder your life.