American Religions and the Family

How Faith Traditions Cope with Modernization and Democracy

Don S. Browning, David A. Clairmont, Don Browning, David Clairmont

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9780231510820
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

Religions respond to capitalism, democracy, industrialization, feminism, individualism, and the phenomenon of globalization in a variety of ways. Some religions conform to these challenges, if not capitulate to them; some critique or resist them, and some work to transform the modern societies they inhabit.

In this unique collection of critical essays, scholars of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Native American thought explore the tension between modernization and the family, sexuality, and marriage traditions of major religions in America. Contributors examine how various belief systems have confronted changing attitudes regarding the meaning and purpose of sex, the definition of marriage, the responsibility of fathers, and the status of children. They also discuss how family law in America is beginning to acknowledge certain religious traditions and how comparative religious ethics can explain and evaluate diverse family customs.

Studies concerning the impact of religious thought and behavior on American society have never been more timely or important. Recent global events cannot be fully understood without comprehending how belief systems function and the many ways they can be employed to the benefit and detriment of societies. Responding to this critical need, American Religions and the Family presents a comprehensive portrait of religious cultures in America and offers secular society a pathway for appreciating religious tradition.

PART I

American Religions

THE QUESTION OF MODERNIZATION AND FAMILY LIFE

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

DAVID A. CLAIRMONT AND DON S. BROWNING

Over the last several decades Americans have been involved in a momentous debate about the well-being of families. While religion has played a significant part in this debate, most Americans still perceive it as a narrow dispute between the Christian religious right and the secular left. This national conversation is often acrimonious. We are familiar with the contentious topics such as abortion, homosexuality, and out-of-wedlock births, but many other topics also are being discussed and deserve closer attention. What is more important is that other religious voices, not just those of Protestant evangelicals and Roman Catholics, for instance, are entering the conversation, both directly and indirectly.

This debate is particularly complex because of a frequently overlooked variable: the impersonal forces of modernization. Broadly speaking, modernization has often been used to refer to the variety of modern forces unleashed in American society, and throughout the world, that are drastically changing the patterns and rhythms of contemporary social life. Life is faster, and forms of interpersonal dependencies are shifting. We work harder, have less time with our children, have less control over their lives, and worry about new influences on both our young people and ourselves as adults and parents. However, modernization also brings higher levels of education, more affluence, and less hierarchical patterns of interdependence that many people value.

As the editors of this book, we thought that society should begin to listen to a wider range of religious voices on the topic of families. Moreover, we felt that it was important to involve these voices in existing studies dealing with the effects of modernization on families and religions. To advance these goals we formulated the following question: How have the major religions of the United States coped with the pressures of American-style modernization and American-style democracy, particularly with respect to their traditional teachings about marriage and family life? The processes of modernization ripple through the social and cultural systems of most countries of the world, but they do so in different ways in different places. Because modernization and democracy display distinctive patterns as they unfold in the United States, the more long-standing American religions, as well as the more recently recognized traditions, face special challenges in understanding what these processes mean for their family traditions.

This book examines the responses to modernization of several different American religions. We look at Protestant Christianity (in its mainline and evangelical forms), Native American religions, Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Latter-day Saints, various expressions of black religions, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. These religions made their appearance and gained visibility at different times in American history. Protestants interacted with Native Americans in the early centuries of the founding of the Republic. Judaism and Roman Catholicism became more visible in the late nineteenth century. Chinese immigrants brought Confucianism and elements of other native Chinese traditions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam (with the exception of African varieties of Islam among enslaved people) came even later.

All these religions at various times have undertaken self-assessments as new circumstances arose in the form of economic, political, legal, and cultural changes. These changes pushed these religions to consider critically how their teachings were expressed in the past and how they should be offered in new situations and to new audiences. This is not surprising because challenges arise for communities in response to external and internal pressures on their common life. These challenges may take the form of internal disputes about the meaning and scope of teachings, insufficient attention to the material and emotional needs of individual members, or ideological conflicts with neighboring communities.

This book considers a series of cultural and social changes that have begun to gain the attention of religious communities in the United States and have proved increasingly important in academic, legal, and policy debates about family life. These changes include the tenuous financial and political situations of many immigrant communities, the effects of new communication technologies on family behavior and religious identity, the influence of the academic study of religion on the self-interpretations of religious groups, and the consequences of state-imposed family laws for inherited family traditions. Modernization, as we define it, significantly affects the course of these social changes and raises questions about the meaning and propriety of older marriage and family customs. It also raises concerns about what constitutes a faithful response consistent with the identities of these traditions and how these identities are challenged and reconstituted over time.

Locating the family debate within the full range of interactions among family, religion, and modern social processes marks a significant departure from the usual perception of the debate as confined to a conflict between conservative Christian teachings and secular humanism that many people believe exhausts the religion-family issue. To guide the essays in this book we felt it was important to formulate a set of specific questions to prompt critical thinking about how religious traditions use their multiple oral, textual, and ritual resources to meet the new challenges of family life, and we gave those questions to the chapter authors. Their essays address these questions to varying degrees. Please note, however, that the religious traditions and the scholarly specialties of the different authors make some questions easier to answer than others. Thus the reader will learn something about how different religions perceive modernization and how different disciplines—history, theology, sociology, comparative religion, law, and anthropology—think about common questions:

1. Is it possible to identify a tradition’s core ideas and practices about family, marriage, and children?

2. How do these traditions present justifications for their ideas and practices, if any?

3. What are some of the modifications of these ideas and practices that the traditions have developed in coping with modernization and democracy in the American context?

4. Are certain tensions or divisions in regard to family issues evident among different branches of a single tradition?

5. Can generalizations be developed, with appropriate qualifications, about how each tradition is interpreting, coping with, or critiquing the American-style democratic polity or American-style modernization?

6. Are there illustrative events, issues, or confrontations with the law and other sectors of society that give insight into a tradition’s style of coping, adaptation, or reconstruction?

7. What are some key commonalities and differences among these traditions when viewed from the perspective of this coping process?

Not all contributors give these questions equal weight, and the reader will find different approaches to thinking about them throughout this book. Connections among family, religion, and the forces of modernization take on patterns specific to the historical experiences of religious communities. The various religious communities described in these chapters hold differing definitions of family, religion, and tradition. Despite the diversity in subject matter and scholarly perspective, the contributors are united in the conviction that far too little attention has been paid to how adherents to these traditions have shaped their reflections on family life, the social structures that support or hinder traditional religious and family practices, and the connection between family life and religious identity.

FAMILIES, RELIGIONS, AND THE PHENOMENON OF MODERNIZATION

Among the more frequently cited developments affecting both families and religions, the phenomenon called modernization may be the least understood. Modernization is often thought to refer to two developments that stem from the higher valuation of rationality that emerged with the Enlightenment. First, the kind of rationality valued was primarily technical rationality, the discernment and use of efficient means to achieve human satisfactions. Second, the main emphasis that developed with respect to this kind of rationality was the use of these efficient means to increase the productivity of modern market systems.

Modernization as the spread of technical rationality can go beyond the cost-benefit logic of the market and subtly affect other areas of life.¹ Not only can it be expressed in the form of national and global capitalism, it can also inform governmental bureaucratic patterns—patterns that sometimes make it more difficult for individuals and groups to initiate and exercise democratic deliberations. Both forms of technical rationality tend to spill over into the world of everyday face-to-face interactions, thereby colonizing, as Jürgen Habermas puts it, the life world of civil society.² Technical rationality, it is generally believed, does not address the moral propriety of the ends selected but rather the most direct and quickest means of bringing about whatever ends the individual or the group desires.

Modernization is related, but not equivalent, to the phenomenon of globalization.³ The spread of market forces, technological innovation, and the increased speed of monetary and information flows are characteristics common to both. However, globalization also includes immigration, electronic communication, and the exchange of cultural artifacts, styles of life, and generation of new meanings. Many essays in this book focus as much on the forms of social change associated with the more abstract processes of modernization or even the wider phenomenon of globalization, but it is useful to view these changes in relation to the more general forces that may stimulate them.

Thus modernization poses new challenges and new opportunities both to long-standing religious institutions and to families. In short, modernization puts pressure on tradition, cultural memory, and connections with the past, be they religious, familial, or both. Modernization challenges certain traditional religious teachings and understandings of familial continuity, often bringing out the traditions’ own capacities for critique, self-assessment, and reform. Religious and family traditions have developed various strategies of response to these challenges; these strategies of coping, adaptation, and response are precisely what the essays in this book investigate.

WHAT ARE THE “AMERICAN RELIGIONS” AND HOW WERE THEY SELECTED?

Multiple options exist for defining the “American religions.” Our principle for selecting traditions to study centers on identifying communities in the United States that have a history of active engagement with visible cultural trends. Three specific concerns commend this strategy.

First, to be considered an “American religion,” a tradition must have a sufficient historical record in the United States to provide scholars with a sizeable body of evidence for making a meaningful analysis. Second, a tradition must have explicitly engaged—through appropriation, adaptation, or rejection (and often a mixture of all these)—American-style modernization and democracy in its political or social forms. For example, a tradition with a sizeable immigrant population in the past or present often faces legal challenges to its establishment and expansion. Such religious or ethnic communities must navigate a path that their members accept as a balance between maintaining inherited values and adapting to new cultural situations. Third, a tradition must exhibit at least some interest in its family forms, practices, and kinship networks and show some concern for what new social contexts mean to existing customs.

Closely related to selecting which religions to compare is the question of why families should function as a central organizing category. At the outset we should recall that many people think that the current debate about the wellbeing of families has been provoked primarily by so-called evangelical Protestant Christians. This perception is not incidental to the role that Protestant Christianity played in forming American ideals about families when modernization was taking shape in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century America. While the public face of the debate about families has retained the facade of a simple liberal-conservative dichotomy, the actual historical interactions of religion, philosophy, and law in shaping our ideas about family reveal a far more subtle set of influences.

Recent studies suggest that the importance of family to Christian thought is neither simple nor consistent.⁴ The centuries-old debates in Christian theology about family issues and the influence of these controversies on family law in Europe and the United States are just now being uncovered. The heritage of these debates continues to affect current thinking about the nature of marital contracts and the terms for their formation and dissolution. Families and kinship networks are often the first and sometimes the only communities upon which immigrants rely as they attempt to establish themselves in new contexts, even if these networks do not map neatly onto current legal definitions of family. For different reasons Native Americans have found in their families both a refuge and a bulwark against the tides of change that threaten their physical, economic, and social health. Furthermore, the changes and growth of American family law continue to create new legal environments for both immigrants and long-standing populations.

Finally, families are worthy of attention because debates about their importance have begun to spread around the world. While this is significantly attributable to the spread of modernization and the development of new communication technologies, the new global concern about families also draws heavily on the associated effects of war, disease, and the economic inequities affecting individual and family survival. The health of women and children in developing nations is often affected by family disruption occasioned by regional conflicts and crises such as the AIDS epidemic. A comparative consideration of families in the United States has potential to contribute to the emerging global, and increasingly interreligious, conversation about...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface
• Part I: American Religions: The Question of Modernization and Family Life
• Part II: Family Traditions in the American Religions
• Part III: Public Frontiers for American Religions and the Family
• List of Contributors
• Index