CURRENTLY IN CULTURE

Hope for the traditional family
John M. Drescher

Remember when the experts were predicting that marriage and the family were finished? In the 1960s and 1970s, this was the common cry from newspapers, magazines, radio, television and lecture platforms.

While the war against the family was waged in the press and on TV, the most critical battleground was the college campus. Editor Carlfred B. Broderick was editor of The Journal of Marriage and the Family during those years. He reviewed many books which were required reading for sociology and psychology courses in hundreds of colleges and universities. He described how publishers were "knocking themselves out to print books that predict marriage is finished and which offer `alternatives to marriage and the family'."

One book, The Family In Search of a Future: Alternative Models For Moderns, cited many alternatives to marriage, such as group marriage, homosexual marriage, sex outside marriage, communal families and polygamy. The book's "expert" on polygamy wrote of a new era when "it is taken for granted that both men and women want variety in their relationships, [and] individuals look with almost a condescending smile upon the earlier periods in which . . . the standard assumption was that one could love only one person at a time".

A book that was required reading on many campuses, The Family in Transition: Rethinking Marriage, had a chapter titled, "Mate Swapping: The Family That Swings Together Clings Together". It spoke of mate swapping as something which "could further consolidate the marriage".

New "Women's Studies" courses got their ammunition largely from Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, an aggressive attack on the family. This book, which took its ideology from Friedrich Engels' Origins of the Family, Private Property of the State, was required reading in these courses. It argued that the family exploits and degrades women, and pictured the family as a patriarchal trap for women. Students were urged to question the values they had taken for granted and to consider the alternatives to marriage, family, children and long-term commitments.

The impact of this was such that by 1971 a survey of US college students showed that 34% believed that marriage was obsolete. This background goes a long way to explain how we got to be where we are today. We are the most divorced society on earth.

But there is also hope. Although the war against the family has not ceased, we are also witnessing a resurgence of emphasis on the family. Consider the following:

  • In the 1960s and 1970s, few books were published that promoted the Christian family. Today such books flood the market.

  • A landmark study of US sexual habits was released in October, 1994 by researchers at the University of Chicago and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The study found that only 2.7% of American men said they were homosexual or bisexual, and only 1.4% of women identified themselves as lesbian or bisexual. That stood in significant contrast to the popularly accepted notion that 10% of people were homosexual. This was the first randomly selected, nationally representative survey on the topic. Previous studies by Kinsey and by Masters and Johnson, which were popularized by Playboy, other magazines and the news media, relied on information from volunteers, a method that seriously skewed the results.

  • Also in the survey, three-fourths of married men and 85% of married women said they are faithful to their spouse, debunking the popular idea that most people are unfaithful.

  • Teaching is reaching many youth today to abstain from sex until marriage.

  • Recent articles in Reader's Digest and other major magazines speak clearly about the awful long-range effects of divorce on families.

    Although the efforts of past decades to undermine the traditional family will continue to have lasting effects, rays of hope continue to shine through.

    JOHN M. DRESCHER, A MENNONITE WRITER, TEACHER AND PASTOR, HAS WRITTEN SEVERAL BOOKS ON FAMILY ISSUES, INCLUDING IF I WERE STARTING MY FAMILY OVER AGAIN. HE LIVES IN QUAKERTOWN, PA. THIS ARTICLE IS REPRINTED, WITH PERMISSION, FROM THE MAY, 1998 ISSUE OF THE CHRISTIAN LEADER.

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