The following is a version of an article that Don Browning has
published in the Spring, 2007, issue of the Emory Law Journal.
Reprinted by permission.
[1] In this essay, I will review and critique Linda McClain's
important new contribution to family law in her The Place of
Families (2006).[1] In the process, I also will touch on various
trends in contemporary family law. I will review McClain from
the perspective of "critical familism." Critical familism is the
term I use to describe certain constructive implications of the
Religion, Culture, and Family Project. This was a multi-year
and multi-volume research project located at the Divinity School of
the University of Chicago and funded by generous grants from the
Division of Religion of the Lilly Endowment, Inc.[2] I write this review
essay to bring critical familism into conversation with various
trends in family law theory, especially as exemplified by the
recent work of Professor McClain. It should be noticed that
McLain also has engaged critical familism at considerable length.[3]
Therefore, it seems natural to extend our conversation and in the
process address other aspects of contemporary family law as well.[4]
[2] Although the concept of critical familism is significantly informed by past Jewish and Christian contributions to family law theory in Western societies, these traditions when properly interpreted and critically reconstructed are relevant even today to the modern law of families and marriage. Hence, this essay does not only address the field of family law, it also addresses the more general question of the relation of religion to the law in a pluralistic and democratic society.
[3] Critical familism holds that several trends in
contemporary American family law are not productive for the
wellbeing of families, children, parents, and the wider
society. For example, family law exhibits an uncritical
understanding and acceptance of the certain disruptive forces of
modernization as they are played out in the marital, sexual, and
reproductive fields. Present-day family law is weak at the
theoretical level in assessing how modernization, understood as the
synergism between technical rationality and cultural individualism,
has brought about a wide range of separations in the sexual field.
Among these are trends toward the separation of sex from marriage,
marriage from procreation, parenting from marriage, and with the
advent of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART), the separation of
parenting from reproduction. Many of us would affirm some of
these separations under certain conditions. Frequently,
however, contemporary legal theory has dubbed these separations as
largely benign social changes or productive expressions of family
diversity without assessing their full implications for the sexual
field, especially the wellbeing of children and our cultural and
legal understanding of parenthood.[5]
[4] Contemporary family law also has taken the short, in
contrast to long, historical view of the interaction of religion
and law in shaping Western marriage and family patterns.[6]
Related to this is family law's failure to understand that
religious traditions are carriers of practical legal rationalities
that are both informed by religious narratives but can gain
elasticity from them for debate in law and public policy.[7] As a
consequence of the law's limited understanding of both
modernization and inherited religio-philosophical legal traditions,
it has functioned to deepen dislocations in the reproductive field
produced by cultural individualism and technical rationality. These
include sanctioning cohabitation by promoting its legal equivalence
to marriage, dealing with marital strain by either disestablishing
or de-legalizing marriage, addressing social welfare needs by
broadening the definition and privileges of marriage to cover
problems not generally remedied with this institution
(thereby rendering marriage indistinguishable from other living
arrangements), and normalizing the unregulated use of reproductive
technologies that further divides parenthood from procreation and
marriage. All of these trends arguably work to the disadvantage of
children and their human rights. To say it bluntly, in an effort to
be progressive, recent family law theory arguably is in fact
conformist; it both capitulates to and promotes the dislocations of
modernization in the realms of sex, marriage, and family.
[5] Although I will discuss these trends mainly in terms of how
they appear in the careful work of Linda McClain, I also will make
lateral remarks about other leading positions in family law theory
- namely recent reports from the American Law Institute,[8]
the Canadian Law Commission,[9] and the theoretical writings
of distinguished legal scholars such as Margaret Brinig,[10]
June Carbone,[11] Martha Fineman,[12] Lawrence Friedman,[13]
Richard Posner,[14] and Milton Regan.[15] None of these
additional theoretical perspectives will get the full attention
that they deserve, but references to them will clarify the
distinctiveness of McClain and help convey the full force of her
differences with critical familism.
The Meaning of Critical Familism
[6] Critical familism is based on an ecumenical reading of the central ecclesial and legal implications of the Christian tradition on marriage and family. The theory is familistic in that it supports the centrality of marriage for family formation and childrearing. It does this even though it follows the Protestant view that understands marriage as a highly important but relative good not to be confused with Christianity's more ultimate categories of salvation or redemption.[16] Critical familism is not familistic in the early modern sense of viewing marriage and family as organized around the divided spheres of male work in the wage economy and female investment in the domestic sphere, still defended in some quarters as the ideal Christian family arrangement.[17]
[7] Although critical familism grants a decisive role to a variety of Christian themes for framing the meaning of marital and family relations, it is also attentive to the way Christianity interacted with, absorbed, yet reconstructed Hebrew, Greek, Roman, German, and Enlightenment philosophical family influences. For example, critical familism tries to unpack the statement now found in biblical scholarship that the early Christian family is the "Greco-Roman family with a twist." This means that what early Christian marriage and family meant can only be seen in dialectical relationship to the normative ideals of Greco-Roman family mores and law.[18] Critical familism also affirms the statement made by legal historian John Witte that 12th century Roman Catholic canon law provided the cultural "genetic code" of Western family theory at both the cultural and legal levels.[19] Critical familism views Christian marriage and family as thick and multi-dimensional, both historically and logically. It is historically multi-dimensional because it synthesizes in unique ways several historical strands, such as Hebrew scriptures, Greek philosophy, Roman law, and aspects of German law. It is multi-dimensional in the logical sense in that it contains, as I mentioned above, several levels of practical rationality that are both informed by yet identifiable independently of its surrounding religious narratives.[20]
[8] Critical familism is critical in two senses.
First, a critical reading of early Christian history has led me to
argue that it was projecting what Paul Riceour called a
"trajectory" of meaning toward an equal-regard view of marital
relations between husband and wife.[21] When the New
Testament materials are read in context, we now see that the Jesus
movement was in tension with the Greco-Roman honor-shame codes and
Aristotelian aristocratic views of the relation of the father to
wife and children that dominated the urban centers of Roman
Hellenism and constituted the social context of early Christian
communities.[22] The Jesus movement and the
apostle Paul brought the ethic of (Eph 5: 28), and instructed
husbands to be servants rather than Aristotelian rulers of their
families (Eph. 5: 25). Second, in taking the equal-regard impulse
of early Christianity seriously and developing its logical
implications, critical familism has important implications for
social theory as well. It brings the equal-regard ethic not
only into the dyadic relations of husband and wife but also to the
criticism and reorganization of social institutions in the public
world. It proposes supporting the mother-father team with equal,
although not necessarily identical, privileges and responsibilities
in both the public worlds of politics and paid employment as well
as the more private realms of home, child rearing, and
intergenerational care.[23] As an example of its many proposals,
critical familism goes so far with its equal-regard ethic as to
propose major reorganizations of the world of paid wages so that
married couples with children would need to be employed no more
than sixty hours each week between them to earn an adequate living
and have time for children and each other.[24] When
the New Testament materials are read in context, we now see that
the Jesus movement was in tension with the Greco-Roman honor-shame
codes and Aristotelian aristocratic views of the relation of the
father to wife and children that dominated the urban centers of
Roman Hellenism and constituted the social context of early
Christian communities.
McClain's The Place of Families
[9] I will develop further dimensions of critical familism
as I review McClain's The Place of Families. Her position should be
interpreted as mediating between the critical feminist theories of
Martha Fineman or June Carbone and the more pro-marriage
perspectives of Margaret Brinig and Milton Regan. Fineman and
Carbone share the belief that marriage should be either
delegalized as Fineman proposes[25] or disestablished
to place more emphasis on parenthood rather than the conjugal
couple, as Carbone advocates.[26] Whereas Fineman would
delegalize what she calls the "sexual family"[27] and Carbone
would shift legal regulations from marital partners to parents
whether married or not,[28] McClain differs from both and retains
marriage.[29] But she would broaden its definition and
protections to include same-sex couples[30] and extend most of its
privileges and protections to cohabiting couples, domestic
partnerships,[31] unmarried singles with children (including
those giving birth by elective Assisted Reproductive Technology),[32] as well as a variety of cohabitors
not sexually involved and who, for various reasons, are dependent
upon one another .[33] In her move to create legal or near legal
equivalence in privileges and responsibilities between married
couples, domestic partnerships, cohabiting partners, and various
additional patterns of adult interdependencies, she is close to the
positions advocated by the recent proposals in the American Law
Institutes' The Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution (2002)
and the Canadian Law Commission's Beyond Conjugality
(2002).[34]
[10] In short, McClain shares a widespread assumption found in contemporary family-law theory. This is the rather uncritically held commitment to the idea that supporting family diversity should be a fundamental moral commitment of present-day family law.[35] This belief - or maybe we should call it a "pre-commitment" - stands out with stunning clarity when viewed along with another widely held belief in contemporary family law, i.e., that it should be morally neutral and avoid value judgments as nearly as possible.[36] Although the view that law should be morally neutral is the majority view in contemporary family-law theory, McClain, along with Margaret Brinig[37] and Milton Regan,[38] is not a champion of the moral neutrality view of law. In fact, she advocates a pro-active morally articulate view of law and government that would foster both equality in all intimate relations as well as the extension of marriage-like privileges, as we already have seen, to a wide range of relationships beyond the conjugal husband-wife couple, as is the case with the relatively recent European pact civile de solidarite.[39] She does not go as far in her moral view of law as does law-and-economics scholar Margaret Brinig who rehabilitates the concept of covenant, in contrast to contract, as the reigning trope governing legal marriage agreements.[40] But she does make use of certain moves made by Milton Regan. Regan rejects current legal views depicting marriage as basically a legal contract and argues for reintroducing a more egalitarian version of the Victorian idea that marriage is a predefined legal and moral status.[41]
[11] McClain, however, goes beyond Regan in wanting to grant features of the marital status to a wide range of living arrangements, whether the people in question are intending to be married or not.[42] In this, she once again is close to views in The Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution.[43] She is also close to the belief put forth by Martha Fineman and Beyond Conjugality; they both argue that government and law must go beyond the traditional conjugal relation of husband, wife, and children and now sanction, support, and protect with marriage-like privileges a wide range of dependent relationships.[44] Hence, McClain is party to a distinct movement in contemporary family law to extend the privileges and protections of marriage to a variety of dependent relationships as a strategy for mediating welfare benefits in a rapidly changing, disrupted, and insecure society.
McClain and Liberal Social Theory
[12] McClain, as I have indicated above, does not believe law can be morally neutral. More specifically, she is part of a small legal movement that recognizes that law needs some kind of social theory or philosophy to get oriented to its task. McClain opts for a form of liberal feminism. John Rawls and Susan Moller Okin are two of her leading lights. Rawls' concept of justice as fairness without regard to different views of the goods of life is, according to McClain, the key to the moral substance of law in a liberal society.[45] Yet McClain also combines a liberal theory of justice with a more Aristotelian-sounding theory of the virtues required for citizenship in a liberal society. These virtues are namely the capacity for equality, responsibility, respect, tolerance, and liberty.[46] McClain makes use of Okin's reconstruction of Rawls to apply justice as fairness to the inner life of families as well as to government and law. The family, for both Okin and McClain, must be an arena of fairness, especially in relation to the situation of women and the socialization of children.[47]
[13] But there are additional twists worth noting in
McClain's use of Rawls and Okin . Although Okin holds that the
family has a powerful influence on shaping future generations to
have the virtues of democratic citizenship, McClain goes further
and argues that government and law have the right and obligation to
directly form families to develop these skills of
citizenship.[48] In McClain's social theory, the order of
influence flows from government to families and families to
children, without much mediation by institutions of civil society.
More specifically, in contrast to those advocating a mediating role
for civil society such as William Galston, Jean Elshtain, Francis
Fukiyama, and the Institute for American Values,[49] McClain has
little trust in the capacity of churches, schools, community
organizations, and the business world to shape families for
democratic citizenship without the directives, reinforcements, and
persuasion of legally sanctioned governmental interventions.[50]
Although she does not advocate the use of force by government and
law in producing gender equality in families, she does advocate a
place for governmental "persuasion" through education and other
inducements.[51]
[14] McClain, however, carries Rawlsian justice to still
another level. Not only should law insist on justice within
families, she believes it should actively advocate justice between
families, regardless of family form or marital status.[52]
Her Rawlsian skepticism about different views of the good being
amenable to rational mediation leads her to believe that all forms
of family are equally good for adults and children as long as they
exhibit the abstract features of justice in gender relations.
This position ends, I contend, in a possible contradiction in
McClain which I will address more fully later. McClain rejects the
position of legal theorist Carl Schneider who contends that law
traditionally has had, and should have today, a channeling function
that shapes behavior into responsible sexual interaction within
legal marriage.[53] This raises the question: how does McClain
distinguish her theory of legal persuasion from Schneider's view of
legal channeling? Why does McClain hold it is wrong for government
to channel sexual interaction into legal marriage whereas it is
right to persuade all family forms to exhibit gender
equality? And how does she justify doing this while, at the
same time, bracketing from family law what moral philosophers call
questions about the premoral or nonmoral goods of life, especially
as this relates to the goods enacted on average by various forms of
the family in meeting the needs of children?
[15] McClain's distaste for discussing the category of
premoral or nonmoral goods raises questions about her understanding
of tolerance, one of her central virtues (along with the
capacity for respect, equality, responsibility, and liberty)
required for democratic citizenship. McClain believes that
much of our tolerance in the United States today is "empty
tolerance."[54] It may be, however, that she has
replaced empty tolerance with empty yet official approval and
legitimation. What do I mean? Empty tolerance, she claims, is
mere civility that often cloaks deeper moralistic judgments and
harmful rejections.[55] She advocates a more robust toleration
which respects - following, she assumes, the lead of Locke, Mill,
and Rawls - what she calls "reasonable pluralism."[56] This kind
of toleration refrains from imposing any one comprehensive view of
the good on its citizens. Instead of one part of society imposing
rights and ideal goods on another, she insists that citizens engage
in "reason-giving" deliberations about the right and the
good. Only the policies supported by the best reasons should
merit gaining the persuasive power and sanctions of law.[57] I
will contend that without a more sophisticated theory, or way of
handling, the question of the premoral goods of life, including the
premoral goods relevant to the wellbeing of families and children,
she has no rational way of entering into the "reason-giving" that
she calls for. Hence, without this element of moral theory,
her Rawlsian view of justice and her list of democratic virtues
themselves become empty. In addition, her call for toleration
becomes a blanket approval of an indiscriminate variety of life
styles - an approval that also would gain the channeling, sanction,
coercive protections, and rewards of the law. In fact, her
theory of toleration goes beyond respect and persuasion to give the
normalization of law to all kinds of diversities that she has not
actually critically assessed or defended.
[16] McClain, it must be acknowledged, is partially correct
when she calls for the law to go beyond unrealistic neutrality and
enter the moral field to persuasively promote the moral point of
view. But in her position, this means government using
its moral persuasion to promote what McClain calls the power of
"self-governance" by and among citizens.[58] This laudable
viewpoint, however, is marred by her incomplete, if not empty,
theory of both justice and virtue that she develops without
indices of the premoral goods of life that justice should organize
and virtue should serve. In short, McClain has taken law to the
doorstep of moral and political philosophy. Although law
should go beyond moral neutrality, it should do so with caution,
humility, and outside assistance. As the philosopher of law
Brian Blix has so aptly pointed out, law may have no special
competence in moral and political philosophy.[59] I will
argue in the following paragraphs that McClain exhibits some of the
inadequacies Blix is suggesting.
Some Weakness in Law on the Nature of Premoral Goods
[17] When moral philosophy and theology use the concepts
of premoral or nonmoral goods, they are speaking of the countless
ways we refer to the various goods of life that are not directly
moral goods. I follow discussions of the premoral
good found in the neo-Thomistic moral theologian Louis
Janssens and the nearly identical concept of the nonmoral good
developed by the distinguished American moral philosopher William
Frankena.[60] If I say "this water is good," I am
not saying it is morally good. I am making a premoral
judgment. I am saying it is clean, has a nice taste, and is likely
to be healthy to drink. If I say that the mayor and the
commissioner of sanitation should provide clean water for the
citizens of their communities, I am making a moral judgment.
And if I say that these authorities should provide clear water
equally for everyone - not just the elite, the wealthy, or those
who live on the right side of the tracks - I am making a moral
statement about justice or fairness. But notice, although water is
not directly a moral good, it is a premoral good. It is
unclear what my moral statement about justice actually means unless
we all know that these statements are about the distribution of
something premorally good for human beings - something like water -
but which is itself not directly a moral good. Water does not have
a will and cannot itself act, either morally or immorally. The
distinction between premoral and directly moral judgments runs
throughout our everyday moral and legal discourse whether we are
talking about health or wealth, beauty, efficiency, warmth,
housing, or safety. Without attending to the question of
premoral goods, as McClain fails to do, her effort to drag the law
into moral and political theory becomes highly problematic.
The Premoral Good of Fatherhood
[18] In the paragraphs that follow, I will review several ways in which McClain's failure to develop within family law the category of premoral goods weakens her otherwise laudable effort to overcome the alleged neutrality of law, and bring it closer to moral and political theory. This first can be seen in her discussion of the possible link between marriage and fatherhood. McClain rejects the idea that marriage is important to preserve because it channels male sexual activity into commitment to their wives and attachment to their offspring.[61] Unfortunately, McClain does not understand the main thrust of the historic arguments for the link between marriage and stable fatherhood. McClain directs some of her arguments to my own writings, as well as those of David Popenoe,[62] David Blankenhorn,[63] Steven Nock,[64] and George Gilder.[65] Since there are important differences between these various positions, I only will speak to her critique of my position and the way she confuses it with the views of Gilder.
[19] Although McClain captures my strong commitment to gender equality and the idea of the equal-regard marriage in both the public and private aspects of life,[66] she mistakenly thinks I argue that in marriage wives domesticate the erratic and polygamous sexual inclinations of men. She ascribes to this view the idea that in marriage, women should be the gatekeepers to sexual access and morality.[67] This view holds, she argues, that to have sex with a woman the man must first marry her and thereby become the father of any offspring resulting from their union. McClain disparages this position, thinks it puts an unfair socializing burden on women, and insults the moral self-governing capacities of both men and women.[68] In addition to believing this is my position, she suggests that it is the position, implicit or explicit, of other scholars who argue for the link between marriage and responsible fatherhood - especially the work of University of Virginia sociologist Steven Nock in his Marriage in Men's Lives (1998).[69]
[20] Her characterization of the link between marriage and
fatherhood probably only fits the theory of George Gilder. It
certainly does not fit my views. In addition, there is no
reference to Gilder in any of my writings on marriage and family
even though McClain associates my view with those such as Gilder, a
mistake that Gloria Albrecht makes as well in her recent review of
my work.[70] Rather than the gate keeping role of the
woman, my argument puts the weight on the channeling power of
marriage as a public institution. Marriage as an institution
integrates men into the care of their children through the
channeling power of public expectations, legal sanctions,
institutional signaling, and, historically, the religious ideas of
sacrament and covenant.[71] The affections of the wife are certainly a
factor, but it is not this alone that integrates men. Certainly,
the argument does not rest on the narrow idea of girlfriend and
wife as gatekeepers of sexuality. It is the institutional
patterning and reinforcement plus emerging emotional attachments
with spouse and children that helps integrate men into responsible
fatherhood and care. Both McClain and Albrecht miss the
institutional argument.
[21] My argument is not so much about how women domesticate men as about how the institution of marriage helps actualize father's capacity for care. Marriage is more likely to channel males into recognizing their offspring as part of their own being and hence lead them to invest in the care of their child as a continuation of their existence. This paternal care argument for marriage goes back, at least in the West, to the Genesis command to men and women to be "fruitful and multiply" and regard their offspring as children of God, made in the image of God (Gen. 1: 27-28) and hence subjects worthy of parent's stewardship, care, nurture, and cherishing. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, this biblical story of parental responsibility became philosophically reinforced by the Aristotelian-Thomistic view of the relation of parental care and the conjugal relationship. One sees it in Aristotle's Politics where he says both humans and animals have "a natural desire to leave behind them an image of themselves."[72] One sees it again when Aristotle argues, in contrast to Plato who thought state nurses should bring up children, that the parents who beget children should raise them. He argues for the power of natural parental care when he asserts, "Of the two qualities which chiefly inspire regard and affection - that a thing is your own and that it is your only one - neither of these can exist" in Plato's ideal republic where children are raised without knowledge of who their actual parents really are.[73] These two strands from Genesis and Aristotle were picked up by Thomas Aquinas, with the Aristotelian naturalistic story being subordinated to the Hebrew-Christian view of fathers and mothers as God's stewards of their children. [74] From there, these reinforcing biblical and philosophical insights into the link between conception and care entered the family law of early modern European countries, the ecclesial and legal theory of subsidiarity found in modern Roman Catholic social teaching,[75] and finally the family theory implicit in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[76]
[22] The Protestant Reformation disseminated this
synthesis of biblical deontology and Thomistic-Aristotelian
teleology to early modern secular law. In spite of Martin Luther's
rejection of the Roman Catholic sacramental view of marriage,
Brian Gerrish and John Witte remind us that Luther retained much of
the Aristotelian-Thomistic view of the rights and importance of the
fathers, mothers, and the natural family. Luther did this
even though he assigned this level of thinking to the practical
reason and institutional law of the left hand Kingdom of God - the
Kingdom of this world.[77] He especially emphasized the importance of
married fatherhood when he ridiculed the disparagement of paternal
care for their children that came from the monks and priests of the
early 16th century.[78] This entire line of
argument about the importance of marriage as an institution
functioning to enhance paternal care is a classic perspective
carried and advanced by the Christian tradition. It is actually,
however, a mixed argument that blends and balances a Christian
ontology of creation and covenant with a subordinate
biophilosophical, teleological, and Aristotelian argument about the
premoral goods of parental investment in their children through the
integrations of marriage as a sanctioned institution.[79]
[23] McClain, with her more Platonic sensibilities about the
heightened role of the state in directing the care of children,
misses the point of this massive religio-philosophical and legal
tradition. This tradition mainly conveys an argument about
the sources of the premoral investment of paternal care for
offspring. It is the public institution of marriage -
reinforced by law, covenant, or sacrament - that channels the
investments of males in their offspring, not just the enticements
of women, as McClain seems to think. Because of the powerful
premoral good of paternal care and investment, both law and
religion have traditionally emphasized the moral channeling of
legal marriage as a way of organizing and enhancing these
energies. Religion also has sanctioned the institution of
marriage because it helps integrate the premoral good of paternal
investment with a variety of other reinforcing goods such as sexual
exchange and reciprocal care between husband and wife. This
is the argument for matrimony found in Augustine's The Goods of
Marriage[80]and subsequent theological and legal
formulations that it influenced throughout Western history.[81]
Integrating the investment of fathers into the care of their
offspring is not the only good of marriage, but it may be one of
its central goods; the premoral goods of sexual exchange and
reciprocal aid between spouses help reinforce and thus integrate
the premoral good of parental, and especially paternal,
investment.
[24] Parental investment in and attachment to children,
whether paternal or maternal, is a premoral good. It is
morally relevant but not morally exhaustive of parental obligations
to their children. Parental investment is an index of their
emotional identification with, commitment to, and endurance in
caring for offspring. This investment is not fully moral
unless it is guided by respect for the growing selfhood of the
child, integrated into a wide range of other premoral goods of
life, and balanced with the needs of other children not one's own.
From a Christian perspective, this premoral attachment and
investment in one's offspring is subordinate to an even deeper
reason to care for one's children, i.e. the reason that they are
children of God and reflections of the divine good. Thomas Aquinas
formulated it well; Christians should love their children for two
reasons - 1) because they are continuations of their own existence
and 2) because they are made in the image of God. Aquinas
taught that the latter reason was the more profound.[82] Furthermore, he held that because
all children are made in the image of God, we have the obligation
to love all of them in analogy to our own offspring. This is
the ground for the Christian obligation to adopt and cherish needy
and abandoned children and orphans.[83] It was Aquinas, more than
anyone else, who gave Western Christians a way of reconciling the
demands of the love and justice of the Kingdom of God with the
important yet subordinate good of loving and emotionally investing
in our own children. This legacy is deep and is likely to remain in
the sensibilities of Western societies unless dislodged by
contemporary legal theory and the logics of modernization.
These two forces together may unwittingly be functioning to
undermine how the institution of marriage reinforces the deep
attachments possible between fathers, mothers, and their
children. They may also be functioning to ignore or actively
reject the way religious symbols balance and reinforce these
inclinations.
Kin Altruism, Child Wellbeing, and Domestic Violence
[25] Because McClain does not understand accurately the classic philosophical and theological arguments for the link between marriage and paternal attachment, she does not understand the relation between family diversity and violence. As I have pointed out above, McClain, along with The Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution and Beyond Conjugality, holds an a priori dedication to the goal of family diversity.[84] They all hold a strict analogy, if not identity, between the moral good of ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity, which we would all affirm, and the alleged good of diversity in family form, which is a much more problematic concept.
[26] But there are several defects to this presumption.
First, it overlooks growing evidence on the comparative capacity of
various family forms to enhance the premoral goods of health and
wealth, especially for children. It overlooks growing evidence of
the increased violence against children by cohabiting couples,
domestic partnerships, single-parent homes, and even married
stepfamilies. New empirical evidence supports the intuitions
of the classic tradition that I outlined above. The a priori
presumption in favor of diversity in family form overlooks the fact
that today many liberal social scientists, who on several issues
would otherwise agree with McClain, are now willing to support
marriage promotion as public policy as long as it does not replace
other needed public supports for families and children.
[27] It will be efficient to start with the last point and work backward to the others. Why are previously skeptical liberal social scientists gradually moving toward supporting marriage as public policy? The answer is this: strong emotional investments by parents in children are the presupposition for creating the emotional health required to form democratic virtues in children and youth. McClain actually agrees that strong and warm attachments create a foundation for democratic citizenship, but she denies that the two-parent intact family has an advantage in this. One of the most peculiar features of this otherwise careful book is absolutely no discussion of the emerging consensus in the social sciences that children do better on almost every measure of health and wellbeing if they are raised in the married, two-parent family.[85] To the contrary, she holds that a "close parent-teen relationship does not, in itself, vouchsafe good citizenship."[86] In this, McClain is doubtless partially right; close attachments may not be sufficient, but they may be essential in the sense of foundational to all other socializing measures. Democratic citizenship is not likely to emerge in young people without the healthy attachments of the kind that stable intact married parents on average can provide better than other arrangements. The growing evidence of this accounts for why the liberal social sciences are turning to what some call a policy of "marriage-plus" - the idea of the cultural and public support of marriage but without undercutting a variety of other important governmental family supports, especially for children.
[28] Evidence of this can be found in a recent edition of the journal The Future of Children on "Marriage and Child Wellbeing" jointly sponsored by Princeton University and the Brookings Institution.[87] In a special issue, the most authoritative summaries of the connection between marriage and child wellbeing are reported. Much of this builds on evidence from Paul Amato's and Alan Booth's Children at Risk (1997), research from the Center for Law and Social Policy, and the Washington, D.C. research institute called Child Trends. A recent literature review from Child Trends concludes with the striking statement, "[R]esearch clearly demonstrates that family structure matters for children, and the family structure that helps children the most is a family headed by two biological parents in a low-conflict marriage."[88] Recent reviews of the literature by The Center of Law and Social Policy and the Institute for American Values point in the same direction.[89]
[29] Is there a new, totally unambivalent, consensus
in the social sciences on the importance of marriage for
children? Not quite, but there are strong trends in this
direction. In a recent review of 266 articles that in some
way address the issue of family structure from 1977 to 2002
published in the prestigious Journal of Marriage and Family, Norval
Glenn and Thomas Sylvester rated these articles on a 1-5 scale as
to whether they were either "sanguine" about the role of family
structure for child wellbeing or "concerned," meaning
pro-marriage. They found a major shift from 1977 to 1987
toward scientists who were "concerned" and a discernible but less
dramatic movement in this direction from 1987 until
2002. Even in this later period, 3.64 percent of the
articles believed that married biological parents made a measurably
positive difference to child wellbeing, when all other relevant
factors were controlled.[90] What is intriguing about the
Glenn-Sylvester survey is the logical analysis they make of how
some social scientists have downplayed or denied the
family-structure effect. This was done by using various forms of
the "not in-and-of itself" or the "per se" argument of the kind
McClain used in denying the link between family structure and
democratic virtues. These arguments try to deflect attention from
structure to causal factors such as income or family process. Such
maneuvers are, according to Glenn and Sylvester, illogical because
of existing research demonstrating that family structure and father
absence themselves contribute to loss of income and poor family
process.[91]
[30] Such evidence, largely ignored by McClain, challenges
her a priori commitment to family diversity. In view of this
mounting evidence, one can appreciate the direction of the articles
in the Princeton-Brooking issue of "Marriage and Child Wellbeing"
when the introduction states, "The articles in this volume confirm
that children benefit from growing up with two married biological
parents. The articles also support a more active government
role in encouraging the formation and maintenance of stable,
low-conflict, two-parent families."[92] The authors and
editors of this issue seem not to fear the prospect of government,
churches, and civil society channeling human sexuality and
childrearing towards marriage as long as this does not trump or
neglect other important job, tax, welfare, and justice supports for
families and their children. This is a position entirely
consistent with, and directly advocated by, the perspective of
critical familism and first introduced in the last full chapter of
From Culture Wars to Common Ground and repeated in Reweaving the
Social Tapestry, the background book for the consensus statement
achieved on family public policy sponsored by Columbia University's
The American Assembly. Although we did not use the term, for
all practical purposes it was a marriage-plus policy consistent
with the editorial in the Future of Children.
[31] The issue at stake, here, is the question of
channeling, something McClain is quite happy to aggressively use
law to accomplish with regard to equality in and between families.
But she is reluctant to do this to enhance the likelihood that
children will be raised by the parents who conceive them.
Increasingly, this particular issue is being seen as a question of
children's rights, well protected in the Universal Declaration of
Human rights.[93] In addition, new evidence from both
sociology and evolutionary psychology shows significantly higher
levels of sexual and physical violence to children in cohabiting
families, domestic partnerships, single-parent homes, and
stepfamilies, making this issue of children's rights all the more
salient.[94] McClain fears that promoting marriage in
law and public policy will trap women in violent homes.[95] Unfortunately, she disregards
evidence collected by University of Chicago sociologist Linda Waite
and others demonstrating that violence to both adults and children
is far less in intact marriages than in cohabiting couples,
domestic partnerships, and other non-legal arrangements.[96]
[32] All of this evidence indicates that an uncritical, if
not a priori, commitment to placing the channeling and sanctioning
power of law and government policy behind family diversity is not
justifiable. Nor is it a wise construal of liberal social
policy. Liberal social policy must not simply concentrate on
the procreative and intimacy rights of adults. A genuinely
liberal social philosophy must express itself in a life-cycle
theory of justice and equal regard. It must include the
interests of children behind the veil of ignorance - the veil that
in principle McClain honors so profoundly. Since small children
cannot fully articulate their own interests, adults must exercise
empathic imagination on their behalf. Increasingly, however,
young adults who were themselves children of divorce or conceived
through the aid of anonymous donors are wondering how it happened
that the public policies of their societies have so carelessly
disregarded their rights to be raised by the parents who conceived
them.[97] Certainly, they want loving parents, and
may in fact have had them in the various adult arrangements that
raised them. They also are saying, however, that they want this
love thickened as nearly as possible by the deep identifications,
attachments, and investments that come from knowing and
having been raised, if possible, by their parents of procreation
and conception.
[33] The dynamics of modernization are such that we can be
certain that there will be family diversity in the form of divorce,
nonmarital births, cohabiting couples, and other so-called
non-traditional family formations. Critical familism has no
systematic animosity toward these families and acknowledges that
public policy in the form of welfare, tax strategies, and medical
supports is required to address their needs, especially those of
their children. Indeed, critical familism has offered a long
list of such supports. Critical familism has proposed something
like the GI Bill of rights, but in this case for parents, married
or not. It would guarantee parents who leave the job market for
several years to care for children the possibility of joining it
again, with job training and other supports, at approximately where
they left.[98] For single parents on welfare, it has
proposed no more than a 30-hour work week; significantly increased
medical insurance; childcare supports; transportation supports; and
huge increases in tax exemptions and earned-income allowances for
all families with children, regardless of form.[99] Whereas
McClain would meet the dislocations of modernization and cultural
individualism by championing them in the name of diversity,
critical familism addresses them with a strong reliance on
reconstructed religious traditions, a social policy guided by an
ethics of equal regard within families, and a differentiated
welfare policy targeted to meet the needs of families with children
without redefining legal and cultural institutions in ways that
would further aggravate, if not channel, social
fragmentation.
[34] Critical familism resists the proposals found in
McClain, the Canadian Beyond Conjugality, The Principles of the Law
of Family Dissolution, and several other leading family law
theorists. These perspectives would institute a broadened
definition of marriage and family and invent a wide range of legal
equivalents to marriage as a way of addressing the dependency and
welfare needs of modern societies. In the name of equal regard to
both adults and children, I propose fashioning both civil society
and the law to promote more equal regard and justice in both the
public and domestic spaces of marriages and families, but without
dismantling the use of law to channel through the institution of
marriage the integration of sexuality, kin altruism, and extended
family solidarity and the value of these integrations for the good
of children.
[35] Critical familism brings together a program for the reconstruction of religious tradition, law, and public policy toward the equal-regard marriage and family and adds to it the emerging concept called "marriage-plus." It does this in ways that maintain continuity between public policy and a critical hermeneutic retrieval of the marriage traditions of the dominant theological and philosophical strands of the Christian tradition. Through a similar task of reconstruction, the methodology of critical familism can doubtless bring the modern law of families into at least a rough congruence with other major religious traditions as well. This is a task and discussion that I have begun in other places but must be carried further at another time and in other contexts.[100]
Linda McClain, The Place of Families: Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). (Hereafter, referred to as TPF.)
The phrase critical familism, however, does not represent the views of all the scholarly contributions to that project. It mainly refers to my co-authored contributions found in Don Browning, Bonnie Miller-McLemore, Pamela Couture, Bernie Lyon, and Robert Franklin, From Culture Wars to Common Ground: Religion and the American Family Debate (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1997, 2000); Don Browning and Gloria Rodriguez, Reweaving the Social Tapestry: Toward a Public Philosophy and Policy for Families (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2002); my Marriage and Modernization (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003); and a number of published articles.
Not only does McClain discuss critical familism and the
Religion, Culture, and Family Project in The Place of Families, she
also does this in her "Intimate Affiliation and Democracy: Beyond
Marriage?" Hofstra Law Review 32:1 (Fall 2003), pp. 379-421.
In this article, I also will show how McClain compares and contrasts with other major legal theorists and positions, such as Margaret Brinig, June Carbone, Martha Fineman, Lawrence Friedman, Richard Posner, Milton Regan; the Law Commission of Canada's Beyond Conjugality: Recognizing and Supporting Close Personal Adult Relationships, 2002); and The Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution (The American Law Institute, 2002).
For a fuller discussion of these various separations that have evolved in the sexual and reproductive field, see Brent Waters, Reproductive Technology: Toward a Theology of Procreative Stewardship (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2001).
Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and Family in
Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hll, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 1985).
For how religious traditions carry models of practical rationality, see Don Browning, A Fundamental Practical Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001).
Beyond Conjugality: Recognizing and Supporting Close Personal
Relationships (Law Commission of Canada, 2002).
Margaret Brinig, From Contract to Covenant: Beyond the Law and
Economics of the Family (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2000).
June Carbone, From Partners to Parents: The Second Revolution in
Family Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
Martha Fineman, The Illusion of Equality: The Rhetoric and
Reality of Divorce Reform Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago
Press, 1991); The Neutered Mother: The Sexual Family and Other
Twentieth Century Tragedies (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995): The
Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency (New York, NY: The New Press,
2004).
Lawrence Friedman, Private Lives: Families, Individuals, and the
Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
Milton Regan, Family Law and the Pursuit of Intimacy (New York,
NY: New York University Press, 1993).
For how critical familism follows Luther in seeing marriage as a
highly central religious and secular good even though not as such a
sacrament and not itself equivalent to salvation or justification,
see my discussion in Marriage and Modernization, pp. 22-23.
For a discussion of the Greco-Roman family patterns of the urban
centers of ancient Israel to which early Christian families
put their "spin, " see Carolyn Osiek and David
Balch, Families in the New Testament World: Households and
House Churches (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1997),
pp. 48-87.
[19] John Witte, From Sacrament to Contract (Louisville, KY:
Westminster John Knox, 1997), pp. 23-30.
For an analysis of the levels of practical reason in Christian
marriage, see Browning, et. al., From Culture Wars to Common Ground
(2nd edition, 2004), pp. 335-341; John Witte, From
Sacrament to Contract, pp. 21-30
Andre LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 54; for a
discussion of the meaning of equal regard, see Louis Janssens,
"Norms and Priorities of a Love Ethics," Louvain Studies 6 (1977),
pp. 219-220.
The idea of the 60-hour work week for married couples in the
work force with children was first developed in From Culture
Wars to Common Ground, pp. 316-318. This idea was also
proposed in the consensus statement on families produced by the
"Final Report of the Ninety-Seventh American Assembly," in Browning
and Rodriguez, Reweaving the Social Tapestry, p. 190.
McClain, TPF, pp. 7, 191-193. Regan also retains marriage
and extends it to same-sex couples, but does not extend its
benefits to cohabiting couples and other intimate relations as
would McClain. See his Family Law and the Pursuit of
Intimacy, p. 123.
The Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution, chpt. 6; Beyond
Conjugality, pp. ix, x, 34. 118.
The Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution, p. 912; Posner,
Sex and Reason, pp. 4, 181-199; Friedman, Private Lives, p. 9;
Beyond Conjugality, p. xvi, 1.
Brinig develops a secular covenantal model of marriage and
family law based on a kind of phenomenology of classical Jewish and
Christian models of covenant. See her From Contract to
Covenant, pp. 1, 4, 6, 7.
Regan tries to develop for family law what he calls a
"relational ethic" that enables him to restore a status model of
marriage, in contrast to a narrow contractual one. See his Family
Law and the Pursuit of Intimacy, pp. 90-93, 179-180.
The use of the word "fostering" in the subtitle, i.e.,
Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility, should be taken
to point to an active, although non-coercive, role for law and
government in promoting these virtues. See TPF, pp. 118,
258.
See the following studies which McClain addresses that outline
the role of civil society in shaping democratic citizenship: A Call
to Civil Society: Why Democracy Needs Moral Truths (New York:
Institute for American Values and the University of Chicago
Divinity School, 1998), and A Nation of Spectators: How Civic
Disengagement Weakens America and What We Can Do about It (The
National Commission on Civic Renewal, 1998).
Carl Schneider, "The Channeling Functions of Law," Hofstra Law
Review 20 (1992), p. 495; McClain, TPF, p. 23.
Brian Blix, "Law as an Autonomous Discipline," The Oxford
Hardbook of Legal Studies, ed. by Peter Cane and Mark Tushnet
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, ? ), pp. 981, 981.
Louis Janssens, "Norms and Priorities of a Love Ethics," Louvain
Studies, p. 210; William Frankena, Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1973), p. 14.
Gloria Albrecht, "Ideals and Injuries: The Denial of Difference
in the Construction of Christian Family Ideals," Journal of the
Society of Christian Ethics 25:1 (Spring/Summer 2005), p.
173.
My analysis of how marriage integrates a variety of male and
female human tendencies is based significantly on the views of
Thomas Aquinas. Here the weight is on the institution, and
not simply on the moderating powers of women. In fact, the argument
is precisely that without the institution, sanctioned by covenant
and sacrament, individual human appeal alone will not work in
integrating either men or women. See Browning, et.al., From
Culture Wars to Common Ground, pp. 118-124, and Browning, Marriage
and Modernization, pp. 84-94. See also the institutional
analysis of marriage put forth by Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher,
The Case for Marriage (New York: Doubleday, 2000) and the review of
that book by Don Browning, Kelly Brotzman and David Clairmont,
"Marrying Well," The Christian Century, 118:6 (February, 2001), pp.
20-25. Here is our summary of the Waite-Gallagher argument about
the role of marriage as an institution in promoting the integrating
benefits of marriage as an institution. "Marriage as an institution
entails public commitments not only between the husband and wife
but also between them and their friends, extended families, the
state and the church. Make this public commitment as a
promise - possibly even as a covenant or sacrament - and these
benefits are likely to follow from it. This may be true even
if the benefits themselves were not what motivated these public
promises and commitments in the first place."(p. 22)
Aristotle, "Politics," in The Basic Works of Aristotle,
ed. by Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), bk. 1, chap.
2.
Thomas Aquinas, "Supplement," Summa Theologica, III (New York:
Benziger Brothers, 1948), q. 41-42.
See especially, Pope Leo XIII, "Rerum Novarum," Proclaiming
Justice and Peace: Papal Documents from Rerum Novarum through
Centesimus Annus (Mystic, Conn: Twenty-Third Publications), pp. 20,
30, 34; Pius XI, "Casti Connubii" (New York: The Barry Vail
Corporation, 1931) and "Quardragesimo Anno," in The Papal
Encyclicals (McGrath, 1981).
Don Browning, "The Meaning of the Family in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights," A. Scott Loveless and Thomas Holman
(eds.), The Family in the New Millenium, Vol. I (Westport,
CT: Praeger, 2007), pp. 38-53; Don Browning, "The U.N.
Convention on the Rights of the Child: Should it be Ratified?,"
Emory International Law Review 20:1 (Spring, 2006), pp.
158-184.
Brian Gerrish, Grace and Reason (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1962), pp. 8-9; John Witte, Law and Protestantism: The Legal
Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), p. 92.
Martin Luther, "The Estate of Marriage," Luther's Works, 45
(Philadelphia, PA: Muhlenberg Press, 1959), p. 18.
For a detailed historical summary of how Christian marriage
combines Christian deontological and covenantal symbols of marriage
with Greek teleological justifications of the institution, see John
Witte, "The Goods and Goals of Marriage: The Health Paradigm in
Historical Perspective," in John Wall, Don Browning, William
Doherty, and Stephen Post, (eds.) Marriage, Health, and the
Professions (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002), pp.
49-89.
St. Augustine, "The Goods of Marriage," The Fathers of the
Church, 9 (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1955), pp. 13,
16.
Charles Ried, "The Augustinian Goods of Marriage: The
Disappearing Cornerstone of the American Law of Marriage," BYU
Journal of Public Law, 18 (May 2004), pp. 339-478.
Don Browning, "Adoption and the Moral Significance of Kin
Altruism" in Timothy Jackson (ed.), The Morality of Adoption (Grand
Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 52-77.
There is no mention, discussion, or attempt to refute in The
Place of Families the landmark social-science studies on the
correlation between married, intact families and child wellbeing
such as Sarah McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single
Parent (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994) or Paul
Amato and Alan Booth, A Generation at Risk: Growing up in an Era of
Family Upheaval (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,
1997).
Kristin Anderson Moore, Susan M. Jekielek, and Carol
Emig, "Marriage from a Child's Perspective: How Does Family
Structure Affect Children, and What Can be Done about It?" Research
Brief, June 2002. (Washington, DC: Child Trends), p. 6.
Mary Parke, Are Married Parents Really Better for Children?
(Washington, DC: Center for Law and Social Policy, 2003).
Norval Glenn and Thomas Sylvester, "Trends in Scholarly Writing
on Family Structure Since 1977 in the Journal of Marriage and
Family," Journal of Marriage and Family, I and II, 2007, in
press.
Sara McLanahan, Eisabeth Donahue, and Ron Haskins, "Introducing
the Issue," The Future of Children 15: 2 (Fall 2005), pp.
8-9.
See Article 16, 3 in Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
published in Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New (New York:
Random House 2001).
Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, The Truth about Cinderella: A
Darwinian View of Parental Love (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1998). One of the most intriguing reviews of
this literature can be found in the writings of legal scholar Robin
Wilson demonstrating the startling higher incidence of daughter
sexual abuse by fathers in stepfamilies, information which should
not be used to denigrate blended families but be used to alert us
that family form does count and that government and civil society
should not adopt policies that promote it under the banner of a
romantic view of "self-governance." See Robin Fretwell
Wilson, "Children at Risk: The Sexual Exploitation of Female
Children after Divorce," Cornell Law Review 86:2 (January
2001), pp. 251-327.
See the provocative writings on this issue by Canadian medical
ethicist Margaret Somerville, "What about the Children," Divorcing
Marriage, edited by Daniel Cere and Douglas Farrow (Montreal:
McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004), pp. 63-78 and The
Ethical Canary (Toronto: Viking, 2000).
Ibid., pp. 325-326, 330-331. Many of the ideas proposed in
From Culture Wars to Common Ground were discussed in Reweaving the
Social Tapestry written as the background book for the year 2000
American Assembly on family policy; see pp. 114-117. Several of
these proposals were adopted by the consensus statement approved by
the 53 participants of the Assembly. See the "Final Report of
the Ninety-Seventh American Assembly" in Reweaving the Social
Tapestry, pp. 193-194.
Beginning efforts toward this dialogue between the major world religions and law can be found in Browning, Marriage and Modernization, chpts. 5 and 9, and also in the introduction to Don Browning, Christian Green, and John Witte (eds.), Sex, Marriage, and the Family in the World Religions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) and Don Browning and David Clairmont (eds.), American Religions and the Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
© February 2007
Journal of Lutheran Ethics
Volume 7, Issue 2