A Return to Another Theology of the Body, Part 2--Families and Idolatry

1.

Let's talk about family.

I am the oldest of four children.  Both of my parents are alive and still married to each other.  In terms of the nuclear, biological family, I have as close to the ideal as can reasonably be imagined.  My parents love us, and us children love them back.  We are, by most standards, very close.  I saw my sister this weekend in New York City, and I will see her, my other sister, and her husband and children in a couple of weeks.

It is customary to describe one's-self as "fortunate" with regard to having a happy family, and there is a way in which that is true.  No individual has control over who the other people are that inhabit your family of origin, and so there is an important sense in which the nature and state of one's original family is outside of your individual control.  But some people describe themselves as "fortunate" to have a happy family in a way which suggests that the state of any family is wholly outside of anyone's control--that it is a matter of fate or the gods.  That understanding of "fortunate" is nonsense.  My family is happy and well-functioning and loving and supportive because the people that make it up have chosen to make it so.  My parents made a series of very conscious and intentional decisions that the created conditions of family life that we had.  They chose to love us, they chose to sacrifice for us.  Likewise, us children, especially now that we are adults, have chosen to love and care for our parents and for each other.

The older I get and the more I see of other people's family situations, the more I am aware of the fact that none of this was fated in the stars.  There are parents and children that chose, every day, not to do the things that we do.  Many, many people have horrible or non-existent families.  The way it is in my biological family doesn't have to be this way, but it is this way, and it is this way because we have made it this way.

Likewise, on the same New York City trip, I spent time with a circle of very close friends that I have known for a long time.  It is, and functions, in most ways like another family.  There are those who would see those sorts of "created" families as lesser than "real," biological families, but that distinction, once again, presupposes that biological families are a thing that just sort of happens.  If, as I believe, the goodness (or lack thereof) of biological families is something that is the product of the efforts of the people in the family, then there is really no essential difference between my biological family and the other sorts of families in my life.  In all cases, they exist in the form they do because of the decision by the people within them to invest time and effort and concern in each other.  The group I spent time with in NYC is the way it is because we have made it that way, just like my biological family.

Friendships, paired relationships, marriages, nuclear families with biological children, nuclear families with adopted children--the origin of these groups is different, and there are some rules and norms proper to each one.  But, at the end of the day, these different sorts of families are the same in that they will succeed or fail wholly as a result of the decisions and efforts of the people involved.  There is no magic, no casting of fate.  They will be whatever you make of them.

2.

The best way to think about sin, at a 50,000 foot level, is through the lens of idolatry.  Idolatry is taking something that is not divine and investing it in divine significance.  The Old Testament, and especially the Book of Exodus, makes the claim that the only thing that is divine is God, and thus all of the natural world and all of human kind and human institutions are not.  Thus, strictly speaking, the divinization of any of God's creation, not to mention any of our creation, is idolatry.

But I think the biggest idolatrous temptation, especially in the Christian sphere, is to deify fundamentally human institutions.  We want to believe that the things we have built are not just ours, but the product of something greater than ourselves.  And so we recast the things we have made and use to organize ourselves as a manifestation of some transcendent order.  Governments are probably the most common example of this, but any form of human endeavor can be idolized in this way.

Idolatry is a multi-dimensional problem.  There is the formal theological problem that worship belongs to God alone.  But there are also a series of practical problems associated with ascribing divinity to something that is not in fact divine.  One problem is that the non-divinity divinity will always let you down.  In engaging in an idolatrous relationships with something, you are ascribing to it powers and capabilities that, by definition, it doesn't have.  We expect our divine things to live up to the name, to be reliable and predictable and rock-solid in a way that nothing in the natural world and nothing made by human hands ever is.  The idol will never be as good, as powerful, as wise, as capable, as it's idolatrous priests will lead you to believe.

The second problem with idolatry is that it removes the thing being idolized from the realm of analysis and criticism.  Things that are divine, or perhaps more importantly things treated as if they are divine, are not supposed to be scrutinized or picked apart and refashioned into some improved form.  A point that has been made by several people but I think best by G.K. Chesterton is that the demystification of nature accomplished in large measure by the great monotheistic faiths was a necessary precursor to modern science.  The scientific approach to nature, in which we analyze it and pick it apart and run experiments to try to rebuild it in a new way, would never have been possible among people who believed that nature represented the personification of the gods, of the divine.  If science itself is blasphemy, then science will never get off the ground; only when nature became stripped of its divine significance by the anti-idolatrous instincts of Judaism and later Christianity is there room for science to develop.

The basic point is that whatever you idolize you also remove from criticism, and indeed that is to some degree the (perhaps unconscious) motivation underlying idolization.  If you want to shut off a debate over the proper working of some thing or how it can be improved or changed, the most efficient way to do that is to describe the thing as divine.  Calling something divine removes it from the normal human realm of the finite and changeable and into the realm of the impassible and that which is beyond criticism.

3.

The family finds in the plan of God the Creator and Redeemer not only its identity, what it is, but also its mission, what it can and should do. The role that God calls the family to perform in history derives from what the family is; its role represents the dynamic and existential development of what it is. Each family finds within itself a summons that cannot be ignored, and that specifies both its dignity and its responsibility: family, become what you are.  (Familiaris Consortio, Pope John Paul II, 1983, paragraph 17).

The title to the section in which the above quoted paragraph of this encyclical is found is "Family, Become What You Are."  While it is not in a technical sense part of the official corpus of the Theology of the Body, this encyclical comes out in the same time period as the Theology of the Body lectures, at the direction of the same Pope who developed the Theology of the Body.  I would be shocked to discover any TOB advocate who would not point to Familiaris Consortio as the proper TOB understanding of family.  And, outside of the Catholic sphere, at least this paragraph (but perhaps not the other stuff about celibacy) reflects the general Christian conservative understanding of family.

The slogan "Family, Become Who You Are" is predicated on the idea that "family" is a singular, ontological reality, created and ordered directly by God according to a fixed schema.  The job of the actual human beings in the family is not to build itself or to define its boundaries and scope, because that has already been done for it by God.  All families are, at the end of the day, fundamentally the same, as "[e]ach family finds within itself a summons that cannot be ignored. . . ."  The work is "to become more and more what it is"; to simply lean into the pre-designed reality and manifest the fixed Ideal of its own nature.

Under the TOB theory, my biological family is not in fact the product of the efforts of the members as such, but simply a reflection of the ways in which we have allowed the essential nature of the thing to manifest itself.  To put it crudely, under this model, we have collectively found a way not to fuck it up; nothing more, nothing less.  As for the other relationships in my life, well, there is nothing really to be said, I suppose.  Whatever merit they have, they are not part of this singular model, and so (presumably) have no theological or other significance.  Who cares, right?

When I first started looking at the Theology of the Body, there were a set of what you might consider "surface" things that seemed off--originally its insistence on opposition to artificial birth control, later its rigid gender essentialism.  But, as I look at these sorts of things more and more, I find that those surface questions are being driven by more fundamental commitments, commitments that are pitched in a way that causes you to just pass over them without much reflection.  Talking about Family is literally like talking about Mom and Apple Pie--we assume that everyone's job is to praise family and say how important and great it is, so much so that we are comfortable with it enough to never bother to actually read what is actually being said about Family.  It's easy and tempting to just gloss over this presentation of what family is and how it works without giving it too much serious consideration.  I think that's a mistake.

The presentation of family set forth in Familiaris Consortio and the TOB is, in my view, (1) wrong as an empirical matter; and more importantly (2) fundamentally idolatrous.  Familiaris Consortio and the TOB take the family, and in particular the biological nuclear family, and make it into a divine institution, ordained by God with a fixed scheme and a fixed set of rules for its governance.  By contrast, I think families are human institutions.  Like all human institutions, they are capable of wonders, including all of the wonders described in the rest of Familiaris Consortio.  And equally like all human institutions, God is present in the midst of the work of families.  But there is no single way to be a family, no divinely ordained schema of how it is to be done.  Moreover, it is absolutely not the case that a passive relaxation into this divine schema is going to guarantee any of the benefits of family life.  If you want a great family, biological or otherwise, you are going to have to go out and build one, doing the work of relationships and voluntarily taking on the joys and pains of walking with other people.  You cannot simply wait around for your family "to become more like what it is"; you have to go out and make it.

Just as no idol will ever talk back, no family will be worth a damn unless its members commit to building it.  By investing family in this divine mandate, TOB shies away from telling people the truth about families.

4.

But, maybe worse, it also shields the concept of family from analysis and criticism.  As I said, my biological family actually was as close as you are going to find to the ideal presented by TOB.  But many, many people did not and will not have that experience.  There are many, many people in this world for whom the biological family they experienced was a horror show, making the elevated presentations set forth in things like Familiaris Consortio a cruel joke.  Many of the people who have experienced horrors in their biological families have found at least a measure of the promise of family in other, non-biological family structures, structures that have no place in the all-consuming idolatry of the nuclear family in the conservative Christian discourse.  By setting forth a fixed schema of how family is arranged and structured, loving and committed LGBT families are deemed illusory--indeed, that's a big part of the point.

On the flip side, idolizing the nuclear family shields bad, dysfunctional manifestations of that structure from criticism.  Sure, there will always be a pro forma declaration that some parents in a household are Doing It Wrong, but the default assumption in the divinized model of family is that such families are on the side of the angels.  After all, per Familiaris Consortio, "[e]ach family finds within itself a summons that cannot be ignored."  If the summons to Doing It Right can't be ignored, then we can comfortably expect that it, well, won't be ignored.  Families (well, the right kind of families at least--"real families") can be safely counted on to get it right, do the right thing.  No need to have checks on their decisions and actions, no sir.

Such is the thesis offered by Ross Douthat with regard to Alfie Evans.  How dare anyone question the decision making of families with regard to the care of those in vulnerable positions as a result of sickness?  Certain not, well, medical experts and neutral parties who are able to separate out the complex entanglement of emotions and self-interest that often comes along with family relationships.  Those evil experts must give way to the judgment of families, regardless of the content of the individual judgment being proffered.  

Now, I am of the view that the parents of Alfie Evans were wrong and the medical establishment in the UK was right with regard to the tragedy of Evans, for basically all the same reasons I though the UK establishment was right with Charlie Gard.  But let's suppose they got it wrong.  No one can or should suggest that courts and doctors and other "experts" get everything right.  But the advocates for Evans are asserting that parents always get it right, because they are asserting that parents should be able to make unfettered decisions with regard to their children's care and status.  And the track record of parents as a whole provides no basis whatsoever to draw that conclusion--spend a day in Family Court and hear the horror stories of parental abuse if you don't believe me.  UK law holds, quite rightly, that the relevant standard is not "what the parents think is right," but what is in the best interests of the child, recognizing that those two things are not necessarily the same.  The fact that courts can screw that up doesn't mean that the solution is to unthinkingly turn everything over to the parents.

The Alfie Evans and Charlie Gard cases, and the way that the Roman Catholic and other conservative Christian establishments have reacted to those cases, have proven to me two things.  One, Roman Catholic theology instrumentalizes children and sacrifices their personal autonomy and dignity at the altar of family and the abstract idea of "life."  But it also shows the effects of the idolization of family.  If family is a divine institution, then it is inappropriate to criticize the decisions made by families.  You put up a shield around the family to deflect away any sort of criticism.  It's not acceptable to ask whether Evans's parents were duped by agenda-driven "professional Catholics."  Or whether they were taking out their (understandable) grief regarding their son on a medical establishment which was telling them truths that they didn't want to hear.  Or, even, whether once they got into the spotlight, they decided that they liked being the center of attention.  No, none of that can be said when the family is a divine institution that can be assumed to be Doing It Right.  Who are we to question something that God has made?

5.

If I did find myself in a situation where I was not able to express myself and difficult medical decisions needed to be made, I would have full confidence in my biological family to make those decisions.  But that confidence is not a product of the fact that they genetically related to me, but a product of what I know about who they are, what they think, and what they know about me.  We have together built that confidence.  And if for some reason my family was not available, there are other people, from another sort of family, for whom I have same confidence as a result of exactly the same process.

That's how family works.  It is a web of bonds that are built through time and effort and emotional investment.  It is a beautiful thing, or at least it can be.  It has been beautiful in my life.  But it is something that we make, and that we chose to make.  It is not guaranteed to any of us, and it is not a product of some essential divine mandate.  Those that love it, and I am one of those people, should be careful to remember that it is a work of our hands, and thus remember not to idolize it.