Feature
From Meddling to Preaching
Three Ways to Expose the Partly Natural Family by David Mills
When a pastor says something in a sermon that you do not like, goes the old joke, he has “gone from preaching to meddling.” He has stopped telling pleasant and comforting stories (or enjoyably convicting stories about the sins you don’t commit) and started interfering with your life.
Many traditional Christians and cultural conservatives love what the family scholar Allan Carlson has called “the Natural Family” as a theory, because Americans love anything “natural.” It seems more direct, more genuine, more authentic, untainted by commerce and calculation. And it has its political uses: They love to appeal to Nature to argue that homosexuality is unnatural.
Designing Marriages
But they do not respond so favorably to other appeals to Natural Law, ones that meddle with their own lives. They like things “natural,” but they do not like the Natural Family as a way of life.
You go from preaching to meddling when, for example, you assert that the Natural Family has a “quiverful” of children; that it requires a permanent, unbreakable bond between the husband and wife; or that it is marked by what are called “sex roles.” This is too much nature, it is nature untempered by technology and culture, as if you were asking people to go naked in the winter or hunt and kill their own food and eat it raw.
You will, for example, see some very conservative people stiffen and scowl when you say, as Allan Carlson (a contributing editor of Touchstone) and Paul Mero do in their book The Natural Family: A Manifesto, that “the calling of each girl is to become wife and mother,” and that “everything that a woman does is mediated by her aptness for motherhood.” That seems to some of us built into the nature of things (and to have a parallel for men, as the writers note), but to many conservatives it meddles in their lifestyle choices.
Even conservative Americans, religious and not, seem to understand marriage as secular Americans do, defining it as a contract based on affection and mutual satisfaction; believing that you may design your marriage in almost any way you like; assuming that sexual activity without consequences (that is, children) is a human right; thinking that they must as a matter of duty pursue an ideal of the good life that requires spending too much money to have more than one or two children; and feeling that they must create perfect children, which is a burden when you have one and very hard when you have many, especially when “perfect” is defined in worldly terms.
I remember, many years ago, sitting with an older friend, a serious and wise Christian, on the back porch of her family’s enormous Victorian house, looking across their large beautiful green lawn (I think one of the gardeners was planting bulbs as we sat there) to their small private forest. I had parked our little Honda in the driveway next to their big BMW, and we were having tea on a very fine silver and china tea set. We started talking about children and she said, “I wish we could have afforded to have more than two children.” I didn’t know what to say.
These people, who represent the great mass of American Christians, and Americans in general, and I suspect Canadians and Europeans in general, do not really believe that marriage is governed by external, objective ends, that it has a nature. They do believe that it is governed by certain rules, especially faithfulness to your husband or wife (until you feel you must leave your spouse), and these they call “family values.”
The rules are mainly negative, not positive, telling us what not to do but not telling us what to do, perhaps because that would raise the question of ends and thus of a higher, more demanding definition of marriage. “Do this” implies “to reach this ideal.” “Don’t do this” implies only that the action will hurt you.
David Mills has been editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things. He edits the opinion page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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more on family from the online archives
31.1—January/February 2018
The Wisdom of the Victorian Quest for Innocence by David Sandifer
34.1—January/February 2021
Jesus' Astonishing Other Teaching on Marriage by James Ware
28.2—March/April 2015
Neo-Pagan Family Policies Doom Any Recovery by Allan C. Carlson
more from the online archives
16.5—June 2003
on the Importance of Fathers to Churchgoing by Robbie Low
28.5—Sept/Oct 2015
on Our Sacred Duty to Teach the Devil to Death by Marcus Johnson
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