33 Don Browning Christian Ethics and the Family

DON BROWNING

CHRISTIAN ETHICS

AND THE FAMILY DEBATE*

An Overview

The current family debate should be understood in relation to the optimism about family change during the 1960s and 1970s. For over two decades, social scientists from Talcott Parsons to Jessie Bernard argued that the emerging changes in families-more divorce, out-of-wedlock births, step families, and 1 single parents-did not mean families were declining.'

Indeed, many popular social science texts argued that these changes meant increased freedom from the oppressive weight of traditional families.' Liberal political theorists held that family changes were harmful only when they ended in poverty. A wider welfare net and a healthy economy, they argued, could prevent these negative consequences. Even the prestigious Carnegie Council's s All our Children (1977) played down the importance of the two-parent family for child well-being.'

Conservative religious and political forces did not share this optimism. In the late 1970s, the Republican party, sensing the fears about family fragmentation among conservative Christians, exploited these anxieties for political purposes. This strategy resulted in the stunning 1994 Republican victories. Since the 1992 presidential election of Bill Clinton, concern over the condition of families has become a liberal (or at least a neo-liberal) as well as a conservative issue. The welfare debate has come to symbolize a wider cultural debate about the condition and future of American families. Former political liberals such as David Ellwood, Mary Jo Bane, William Galston, and Clinton himself began to express concern about the negative effects of divorce, teenage pregnancy, and 4 the emerging culture of nonmarriage.4

In effect, these liberals became "neo-liberals". Before the November 1994 elections, a new consensus was emerging between neo-liberals such as Ell- wood, Galston, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and neo-conservatives such as William Bennett, Henry Hyde, and the conservative Family Research Council. They shared the conviction that government should take an explicit moral stand

33 and encourage family formation, discourage out-of-wedlock births, and reduce the divorce rate.

Neo-liberals are pro-family liberals who repudiate the older liberal optimism. They seek to reverse trends in family decline, but they also want to retain an active role for government in supporting needy families. The leadership of the mainline religious denominations, with few exceptions, have continued their alliance with the older political liberalism and maintained their distance from both neo-conservative and neo-liberal formulations of the family problem.

1. The Concern about Families among Neo-Liberals

How did worries about family well-being become a liberal as well as a conservative concern? The answer is twofold: 1) the changing interpretation of research on the family in the social sciences, and 2) the growing public costs of family difficulties. The first point is the more dramatic. Distinguished family sociologist Norval Glenn, who describes himself as a political liberal, points out that over 90 percent of sociologists are also liberals.s Liberals, he argues, are future-oriented and open to change. For this reason, liberal social scientists were inclined to give a positive interpretation to the family changes of the 1960s and 70s. Beginning in the 1980s, however, social science studies by Judith Wallerstein, Mavis Hetherington, Larry Bumpass, David Popenoe, Lenore Weitzmann, Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur began to support the idea that divorce and single parenthood had, on average, negative consequences for both children and women.'

Family structure, seen in the 1960s and 1970s as a neutral factor for family well-being, was viewed by the early 1990s as highly relevant to the flourishing of children. During the spring of 1993, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead published a popular essay for The Atlantic summarizing much of this new research .7 Char- les Murray, in his more balanced pre-Bell Curve days, created a sensation when he predicted in The Wall Street Journal that out-of-wedlock births would spread and establish a new white underclass.' Within months, liberal journalists such as Joan Beck, David Broder, William Raspberry, and Clarence Page began acknowledging the seriousness of the family crisis in their columns.' Reports of government-appointed groups such as The National Commission on Children (1991) and Families First: Report of the National Commission on America's Urban Families (1993) reversed the thinking of the Carnegie Coun- cil by re-emphasizing the importance of intact families for child well-being. 10

The most definitive research was reported by McLanahan and Sandefur in their Growing up with a Single Parent ( 1994). Using sophisticated statistical tools to analyse the data of four national surveys, MacLanahan and Sandefur concluded that children growing up outside of biological, two-parent families were twice