Going Behind Closed Doors in Christian Right Households

By Jeremy Adam Smith, Public Eye. Posted April 11, 2008.

"Models of idealized family structure lie metaphorically at the heart of our politics," writes linguist George Lakoff in his 2002 book Moral Politics. "Our beliefs about the family exert a powerful influence over our beliefs about what kind of society we should build."

Certainly, many Christian Right leaders would agree with him.

People who make it their business to track and fight the Right tend, with good reason, to focus on public, political activity, but the Christian Right sees the private home as a major arena of political struggle and a showcase for the world they want to live in. "These homes are the source of ordered liberty, the fountain of real democracy, the seedbed of virtue," write long-time activists Allan C. Carlson and Paul T. Mero in their new book, The Natural Family: A Manifesto.

The Natural Family attempts to distill a quarter century of "family values" organizing into a unified vision of social and political change in a bid to rejuvenate their flagging movement. It reflects a decade of international collaborations of Religious Right organizations through the World Congress of Families, organized by Carlson's Illinois-based think tank The Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society. First held in Prague in 1997, the congresses convene right-wing organizations from around the globe "to affirm that the natural human family is established by the Creator and essential to good society" -- and also to fight United Nations family planning initiatives.

As Carlson and Mero frame it, the single-family home -- awash with enough sentiment to drown an entire city -- might be the closest thing the Christian Right has to an actually existing utopian experiment. Examining these ideas can reveal a great deal about the psychology of the Christian Right as well as the visionary goals its adherents pursue.

But recent research into the daily lives of evangelicals also reveals the degree to which their ideal is vulnerable to social and economic forces that all American parents must confront. I believe Lakoff is correct to argue that the Strict Father conception of parenting -- which stresses authoritarian discipline and patriarchal control -- is key to understanding Christian Right politics, but his rubric might obscure[JAS1] the ways in which movement ideals are evolving in response to changing social conditions. Even as Christian Right leaders are "talking Right," as University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox puts it, some of the evangelicals who form the base of their movement are "walking Left" and embracing a more moderate way of political and family life. This creates a fissure in the Christian Right that no manifesto can close.

Villages are for Liberals

The Christian Right and evangelical Christians are not one in the same -- "Survey research shows that 70 percent of evangelicals don't identify with the Religious Right," reports Rice University sociologist Michael Lindsay -- but conservative evangelicals have been largely responsible for developing and promoting the anti-gay, anti-feminist "family values" agenda that has powerfully shaped the culture and platform of the Republican Party. The larger conservative evangelical movement is the cultural sea in which the Christian Right swims.

Thus if we want to understand what the ideal Christian Right home looks like, we must turn to the truly staggering amount of childrearing advice conservative evangelical preachers and pundits dispense to followers.

An evangelical home takes the Bible as the basis for all its rules and relations -- as opposed to the empirical evidence that shapes mainstream childrearing advice. "I don't believe the scientific community is the best source of information on proper parenting techniques," writes Focus on the Family founder James Dobson in The New Dare to Discipline, which has sold millions of copies since the first edition was published in 1971. "The best source of guidance for parents can be found in the wisdom of the Judeo-Christian ethic, which originated with the Creator and has been handed down generation by generation from the time of Christ."

As a result of this adherence to a holy text that cannot be changed and must be obeyed, the ideal Christian Right home is a place of authoritarian hierarchy. When University of Texas sociologists John P. Bartkowski and Christopher G. Ellison compared dozens of secular parenting books with conservative Protestant parenting manuals, they found that a literal interpretation of the Bible's childrearing advice contributed directly to a worship of authority in all spheres of life, including the political.

They also found that conservative evangelical parenting gurus disagreed with mainstream counterparts on virtually every issue. According to their study, secular, science-based parenting advice emphasizes personality adjustment, empathy, cooperation, creativity, curiosity, egalitarian relations between parents, nonviolent discipline, and self-direction.

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Jeremy Adam Smith is senior editor of Greater Good magazine and author of Twenty-First-Century Dad: How Stay-at-Home Fathers (and Breadwinning Moms) Are Transforming the American Family, forthcoming from Beacon Press. He is a frequent past contributor to AlterNet, as well as publications like The Nation, Mothering, Utne, and Wired.

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