An accusatory jab at marriage
The Christian Century
| 25 Sep 2008
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The Future of Marriage
by David Blankenhorn (Encounter, 260pp; US$25.95).
Marriage: The Dream that Refuses to Die
by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (Intercollegiate Studies Institute (225pp; US$25).
It would be hard to find more divisive, jabbing rhetoric on marriage than in these publications by self-described "marriage nut" David Blankenhorn, founder and director of the Institute for American Values, and the late historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, well known for her testy rebuff of feminism. Those familiar with Blankenhorn's Fatherless America and Fox-Genovese's "Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life " will find few surprises.
Fighting what he sees as the vacuous definition of marriage as a purely private relationship of love, Blankenhorn urges readers to work toward resurrecting marriage as a public institution designed to uphold what he believes is the birthright of every child – to have a mother and a father.
Fox-Genovese's book, published posthumously by a former doctoral student who is effusive in her praise for her teacher, combines three lectures delivered at Princeton in 2003 with five previously published essays and concludes with a praise-filled eulogy by Princeton professor Robert George. Sparse footnotes for the initial chapters reveal how little Fox-Genovese kept up with literature on families. She drew heavily on her complaint, launched in the 1990s, that the women's movement undermined families, and she argued for reclaiming marriage as an institution that resolves the inherent antagonism between women and men, an institution based on what she claimed are naturally complementary roles of female nurture and male authority.
I found the accusatory tone of these books troublesome and tiresome. Can Christians and Christian theologians do better than this? I think so. Scholars who study religion and the family such as Lisa Cahill, Mark Jordan and Adrian Thatcher tend to search for common ground or at least for greater understanding of the complexities. Heated conflicts still arise, of course.
In 2003 Don Browning of the University of Chicago Divinity School, one of the major scholars on the family, termed a Presbyterian report on families as elitist, and Presbyterian ethicist Gloria Albrecht retorted by calling Browning oblivious of economic realities. But by and large those who study religion tend to acknowledge the ambiguity of human action, the complexity of ideals in practice, and the inescapable difficulties in interpreting scripture, history and religious traditions. I also believe there are Christian approaches to the family that would contest the win-lose, either-or rhetoric of Blankenhorn and Fox-Genovese.
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