The Family as Sub-Contractor for the State

One point I keep on trying to pound home is that political debate in the USA is often fundamentally distorted by an ignorance of what the our history actually was. I would like to extend this argument to family policy.

Today we have two points of view on the family and the state. Both assume that the family and the state as autonomous organizations are opposed: a strong, purposeful state means a weak, passive family and vice versa. Liberals think the state should exercise stronger, more purposeful collective powers over citizens for their own good, but that the family should have less strong, purposeful collective powers over its members for their own good. Conservatives (especially paleo-conservatives and religious libertarians) think the state should exercise weaker, less purposeful collective power over citizens for their own good, but that the family should have stronger, more purposeful collective powers over its members for their own good. Strong state, weak family or strong family, weak state. Either/or.

Going along with this assumption of antagonism is a false view of history. Liberal historians look for evidence that the state has traditionally had more powers to regulate families than we think, thinking that this would prove that the autonomous family has weak historical roots. Likewise, conservative historians like to emphasize how even state powers over the family we now take for granted didn’t used to exist in the part, thinking that this would emphasize how families resisting interference from the state is an old, old tradition.

For Eurasian societies as widely distributed as Puritan New England, Württemberg peasants from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, and Mongolian and Tibetan nomadic societies*, however, either way of understanding state-family relations was alien. Rather than real family-state praxis, the conventional opposition of family and state reflects only crude and unreflective 19th century post-French Revolution social theories, the phlogistons of social theory. And even today, I think this old praxis survives, despite having no articulation, since the liberal and conservative intellectuals are still divided into "let's have more/less phlogiston!" parties.

In this different praxis the traditional family is itself a sub-contractor of the state (or if you prefer, the community as a whole). As a sub-contracting organization of the state-community, the family is represented by its head. It has a responsibility for producing a number of things for the state: as a rule taxes, in some states trained and equipped soldiers, for some families responsible officials, and in every case, children who will be able to play the contractor role in the next generation. In the Greek city states, performance of such public functions by private families were called "liturgies." Depending on the type of society, this might also involve making sure the children are equipped by literacy to respond to community admonitions (texts, government decrees, scriptures, etc.) It will in any case require that children be trained in the appropriate moral code to be hard-working, responsible contractors themselves. Since the family as a contracting unit for the state/community has a duty to produce both specific persons (soldiers, officials, corvee laborers, as the case may be), and future contractors, unwillingness to procreate is a selfish betrayal of the community/state.

In order to make sure that the sub-contractor can do its job, the state also parcels out to the family a significant chunk of its own authority, entrusting certain police and juridical functions to the heads of the households over the members (and to elders over juniors generally). The head of the family that acts to some degree as an agent of the state’s authority, even as he (or sometimes she, as a widow) resides on his ancestral patrimony. This patrimony is itself a fund for the performance of contracted obligations to the state.

The state/community’s interest in the family is therefore in keeping the sub-contractors functioning. One essential precondition of this is that the family has to have its own resources. The family has to have a sufficient fund of resources, tangible and intangible, to work with to produce the outputs it needs. A family with no land and no skills cannot fulfill its tax obligations. For that reason bad management, such as drinking one’s patrimony away, breaking it up with an irresponsible divorce, and so on, should not be tolerated. And if a family falls into that situation, it needs to have property restored and disciplined so this doesn’t happen again. Moreover, since only a family can produce the necessary outputs demanded by the community, individuals who are without family need to be put into a family.

Social policy in this "family as sub-contractor for the state" assumes a peculiar cast which the liberal-conservative point of view today is almost guaranteed to misunderstand. In it, what looks like charity is simultaneously fiscality: the state gives aid not just to help the individuals involved, but also to get the family receiving the aid back on its feet as a tax-paying/soldier-supplying/official-providing contracting unit. Equality is thus not just, or even primarily, a goal of such assistance, but rather a means to an end: the maximum possible effective provision of necessary persons/goods for the state and community. This is so even when the primary way of supplying such aid is not directly state to family, but lateral: neighbor to neighbor, or even structured by kinship (redemption right of land that might be sold to strangers). For example in the Secret History of the Mongols, we read that the emperor Ögedei ordered one sheep out of a hundred taken from each person and given to the poor in his own unit. This was in part to "let them put their feet on the soil and their hands on the land" but was just as much connected with the periodic renumbering of militiamen in the Mongol army to make sure that each unit had enough prosperous families to supply its share of taxes and soldiers. Among Tibetan pastoralists, Rinzin Thargyal describes how one ambitious lord encouraged the formation of functioning households. When a girl got "knocked up," he would pressure the man responsible into marrying her, loan the new family animals to herd, and hold off on demanding labor service from them until they were a going concern. He did the same with poor immigrants arriving in his estate: find them a wife or husband as needed, loan them animals, and get them going. As a result his estate was unusually prosperous, and his population -- and influence -- grew rapidly. In these cases, charity merges with the aim to preserve family units as sub-contractors of the state. Note also that almost all such societies also had distinctions of families: some produced taxes, others produced soldiers, others produced officials, and these status distinctions are maintained as part of the same system imperatives that forces one family of tax payers to give aid to another family of tax payers facing the danger of break-up and dispersal. In the Tibetan case, for example, the aristocratic household so actively building up its followings' families itself had to supply officials to the Dege principality.

A very common way to maintain households facing crisis is through redemption laws, specifying that households sell their property it may be redeemed from the buyer by a relative or neighbor of the seller. Redemption within the collateral family line, as found in the Mosaic laws in the Bible, is quite common comparatively, and can be found in eighteenth century Germany, as well as Qing dynasty China. Usually interpreted solely as part of compassion for the “poor” (although structurally at least the real poor in ancient Israelite society were not the full-blooded Israelites who had fields subject to such redemption, but the strangers and aliens who did not), this collateral redemption was actually an important part of fiscality (state tax policy) as were the limitations on mobility (in a weak state apparatus, staying in one place so the state can find you is important). Theologically as Christopher H. Wright in God's People in God's Land has pointed out, this works as an analogy: just as earthly kings demand a regimes of sub-contractor families, so the divine King demands a regime of sub-contractor families. Traditional sociological interpretation of this practice/ideal in the context Israelite history has usually read this as a survival of primitive tribalism, resisting the imposition of royal tyranny. In this comparative context, however, I think a better argument could be made that the importance of redemption indicates not "tribalism" but a strong state/community interest in preserving a network of effective sub-contracting and tax-paying militia families.**

Inversely, the elimination of the redemption regime (which took place in Würtemburg for example in the early nineteenth century or in China under the Republic) is not the state going from “respecting intermediate institutions” to “rejecting intermediate institutions” as the libertarian reading of state-family relations would have it, but rather sub-contracting with different units and different calculations. Similarly the family receiving moral guidance and tutelage from the state is not necessarily toxic to family authority—if the state is actually interested in buttressing that authority.

What are some of the implications of this history?

First of all, it helps understand what people are talking about. It is, I think, exactly this sense which is still meant when people, trying to explain why they find the challenge to the traditional constituted family so wrong-headed, say that the family is "the building block" or "foundation" of the country. Not having got the paleo-conservative/social democratic memo that the family and state are inverses -- one can't be a strong institution without the other being weak -- they insist on appealing to real social praxis, rather than the delusions of the political philosophies.

Second of all it points out again how very un-libertarian our Eurasian traditions are. And as Jim has written here, in common law it was taken for granted until the twentieth century that the US state governments had police powers, that is, the right to interfere more or less at will in the life of its members to defend good morals, tax paying capacity, optimal family structure, and so on. In this view, which was the Puritan New England view as David Hackett Fischer emphasized, the state as a sovereign community was, absent any self-limitation, virtually universal in its competence. However, in practice, specific liberties are carved out from this sovereign power and assigned to subcontracting units, such as the family, guild, township, or trading corporation, or what have you. Liberties are thus in the plural, and each one has to be defended either by a specific historical charter, or at least by specific evidence that it existed in the past. Note that it is for this reason that Puritans could join the US constitution. Strong believers in this police power and families as contractors of the state, they could never have joined a constitution that either eliminated these police powers entirely, or assigned them to a non-Congregational government. Only a government that had special liberties above the state (in both senses) could be accepted as the national government.

Thirdly it highlights how many traditional institutions have been misunderstood by a state vs. society framework. This misunderstanding takes the specific form of a what I call “the great inversion” in which institutions first nurtured by the pre-modern state came under attack in the nineteenth and twentieth century, whether by liberals as blocks to the free circulation of resources in the market or by socialists as buttresses of inequality, but then were rewritten by their defenders. This rewriting of history turned them into pre-state, primitive society institutions that had always served as bulwarks of "the people" against the state. The classic case of this is the obshchina or Russian commune, which began as a tax-guarantee institution: the village owed taxes in common and each family was assigned labor to make sure that each family thus contributed to the tax payments. In the 1840s, an idealistic German, looking for remnants of early communes in Europe's countryside reinterpreted this state-generated institution as such a survival of pre-class society. This interpretation was accepted, written in Russian law in 1861, and became the foundation of the populist idea of the Russian peasants being instinctively socialist and communal.***

In American, as well, this happened very early on with gun rights as shown by Joyce Malcolm’s To Keep and Bear Arms started not as an individual right against the state, but a collective sub-contractual obligation of citizens to the state. The English state required all men to participate in its function of maintaining order, training in long bows so the king of England could have enough soldiers in wartime. With the advent of firearms, this obligation to train as a potential soldier of the king was transferred to from long bows to firearms. In the seventeenth century, this hazardous duty was reinterpreted as a valuable right, and in this form was transported to the American colonies. (Although with the New England Puritans, gun ownership was also requirement of community self-defense, not an aspect of individual defiance of the community. Here, as in so many other aspects the New England Puritans typify the phenomenon of "peripheral preservation" where archaic customs and ideas are preserved in remote, provincial areas.)

Finally, the most important implication is for those adhering to the traditional family as valorized by the laws of the Eurasian religions whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Confucian. Despite their differences, I would argue that virtually every feature of the laws -- indeed the very possibility of having a law of family formation and functioning -- was shaped by the family's role as a sub-contractor of the state’s authority. Adherents of these Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Confucian ethics have to recognize that strong family they love became a social reality only in concurrence with state power and through receiving as a sub-contractor a share in the power of the state. The implication is then that the state, in a fairly strong sense, is a precondition for the traditional religious family life. For those adhering to such traditional religious family ethics, the libertarian argument that the state is thus at best a necessary evil runs directly against the historical facts, since those family ethics themselves were first realized in human society as a result of the existence of the state. The predicating of the family's rights on opposition to the state, as in religious libertarianism or paleo-conservatism, is likely to be as ineffectual politically as it is erroneous historically.

*Some sources on this:
New England Puritans: Albion's Seed, by David Hackett Fischer
Württemberg peasants: David Sabean, Production, Property and Family in Neckerhausen, 1700-1870.
Tibetan pastoralists: Rinzin Thargyal, Nomads of Eastern Tibet.

** Maybe more an ideal than a reality. That redemption laws might exist without having much of an anti-market effect is indicated at least by the Neckerhausen evidence as read by Sabean.

***See T.K. Dennison and A.W. Carus, "The Invention of the Russian Rural Commune: Haxthausen and the Evidence," The Historical Review 46.3 (2003), pp. 561-82.

Actually Existing Complementarianism

Imagine someone who said to you: "I used to believe that premarital sex was just wrong. Then my daughter started dating and got pregnant. Since then our family has been completely overturned, and my Christian life devastated. As a result of all these troubles, I've realized all that stuff about premarital sex being against God's plan for families is just wrong." If you are like me, you'd think the logic was a bit strange. Isn't the trouble that follows from breaking the law you used to believe in normally seen as confirmation of the law's justice? I mean when violating some rule makes for unhappiness all around, we conclude that the rule might make sense. But if the person saying the opposite seems otherwise intelligent, we might assume that there is something else there, some hidden assumption going unexpressed, that makes the logic make sense. And if scores of other people agreed with the person when he said that, we might conclude that these hidden assumptions are actually widely shared. And that would be so even if those assumptions contradict the explicit theology of those persons.

I am thinking about the iMonk's recent post on his agony attendant upon his wife, Denise, becoming a Catholic (he's a Southern Baptist pastor). I would link to it, but it seems to have been removed by him from his site. I don't want to talk about the personalities and rights and wrongs of it all, but as I remember the post, it did have something of the shape: "I used to believe in a man's spiritual leadership in the home; my wife has rejected my spiritual leadership; my life and family are now in complete chaos; so I realize how wrong I was ever to believe in a man's spiritual leadership in the home." Now since this makes no sense at all logically and since the iMonk is certainly an intelligent person, it's clear that there are some hidden assumptions going unexpressed. And I am going to tell you what they are, and why they are there. And I'll start off by saying that those hidden assumptions are not his, but his quite accurate understanding of the sub-text of what "complementarianism"* means in churches that practice it.

Now, in theory "complementarianism" means something like this: "God has given to men a duty to exercise leadership (especially religious leadership) in the home and in the church." Corollaries include the idea that violation of this cause trouble, and so on. Let's call this "theoretical complementarianism."

But that is not all that "complementarianism" means, and not even the main part. It is certainly not the proposition that the iMonk saw completely shattered by his last year as his wife prepared to convert to Catholicism. Rather what was shattered is a quite different proposition: "When men exercise spiritual leadership in the home and church, women will inevitably welcome and follow this leadership." This would have the corollary that "If women deny male headship in church or home, it is all the fault of the men over them." You could also phrase it as "When men exercise spiritual leadership in the home and church, God hears their prayers and makes those who should follow, do so." Practically the result is the same: where men lead rightly women do, in fact and practice, follow. Let's call this proposition "actually existing complementarianism."

Now this would certainly be shattered by the iMonk's experience. He thought he was a good husband and good Baptist pastor -- and now his wife is rejecting his spiritual headship by becoming Catholic. So he now has two alternatives: 1) continue to accept actually existing "complementarianism" (as opposed to the theoretical version in the paragraph above) and take the blame as the bad husband and bad pastor whose failures drove his wife into Catholicism, and prevented God from responding to his desperate prayers; or 2) reject actually existing complementarianism. Now if theoretical complementarianism has been firmly enough linked to actually existing complementarianism, then rejecting the second will mean rejecting the first.

Now, what is the relationship between these two propositions? It certainly isn't some kind of logical corollary. Let's take an analogy: "God had ordained civil authorities as enforcers of the law and all citizens should obey" and "If civil authorities properly enforce the law, all citizens will obey" are independent propositions. None thinks the second follows from the first as some kind of automatic corollary. Likewise, the idea that good parents, for example, never get grief from teenage kids is not part of usual Christian teaching. So how did the Southern Baptist Church, and other churches teaching the same, get from one to the other in the case of husbands and wives?

Even stranger is that "actually existing complementarianism," despite being taught in Christian churches, seems to contradict Christian teachings about human nature. For example, original sin. How can we believe that an original sinner pastor/husband could ever exercise leadership well enough that "actually existing complementarianism" could be anything other than a purely theoretical issue? And how can we believe that even if the pastor/husband is perfect, an original sinner wife/congregant would inevitably welcome this leadership? I mean, does the Bible really teach that when prophets and priests lead in God's way that people always and inevitably follow? In fact, "actually existing complementarianism" is simply an assertion that both men and women can and will fulfill the law of theoretical complementarianism.

Actually existing complementarianism looks very much like Mencius; you know, the Confucian philosopher who argued that human nature is inherently good. Mencius was asked how a prince should get the common people to observe proper ritual. The answer? Just lead and the people will inevitably follow:

The prince said again to Ran Yu, 'Hitherto, I have not given myself to the pursuit of learning, but have found my pleasure in horsemanship and sword-exercise, and now I don't come up to the wishes of my aged relatives and the officers. I am afraid I may not be able to discharge my duty in the great business that I have entered on; do you again consult Mencius for me.'

On this, Ran Yu went again to Zou, and consulted Mencius. Mencius said, 'It is so, but he may not seek a remedy in others, but only in himself. Confucius said, "When a prince dies, his successor entrusts the administration to the prime minister. He sips the congee. His face is of a deep black. He approaches the place of mourning, and weeps. Of all the officers and inferior ministers there is not one who will presume not to join in the lamentation, he setting them this example. What the superior loves, his inferiors will be found to love exceedingly. The relation between superiors and inferiors is like that between the wind and grass. The grass must bend when the wind blows upon it." The business depends on the prince.'

Ran Yu returned with this answer to his commission, and the prince said, 'It is so. The matter does indeed depend on me.'

So for five months he dwelt in the shed, without issuing an order or a caution. All the officers and his relatives said, 'He may be said to understand the ceremonies.' When the time of interment arrived, they came from all quarters of the State to witness it. Those who had come from other States to condole with him, were greatly pleased with the deep dejection of his countenance and the mournfulness of his wailing and weeping.

Now Mencius believed firmly in the goodness of human nature and the naturalness of Confucian ethics. And there is something in this that responds to our usual moral intuitions. If the government is good, people will obey -- generally and as a rule. But conservative Presbyterians and Baptists believe just as firmly in original sin and the unattainability of the Christian ethic. So how did this teaching of actually existing complementarianism get established?

Certainly it is not particularly traditional. I have read quite widely in the pre-20th century Christian tradition, and while theoretical complementarianism is virtually universal in it, the actually existing kind seems nowhere to be found. In other words, a model of family life is set out, but there is no real expectation that just because the husband follows it the wife will -- or the other way around. In general if you act well, the other person in the marriage will frequently respond, but there's nothing inevitable about and nothing shocking when he or she doesn't reciprocate. So why is it so important to insist in conservative Christian churches that traditional sex roles is entirely up to the pastor/husband, and that he alone, simply by personal rectification, can inevitably make them welcomed in his household?

Several reasons, I think. One important one is because of the dynamics of the church teaching situation. Most teaching that takes place in Christian churches in a market environment is men teaching women. When a male pastor teaches actually existing complementarianism, he is doing several things: 1) assuring the women in his audience that they will not be, and cannot be, compelled to submit to their husband's leadership; it's purely voluntary. 2) He is building up his own sense of righteousness and manliness. Look at it this way: actually existing complementarianism has as its corollary that any man to whom women submit is exercising leadership properly (OK, it's not exactly a strict logical inference, but it's close enough for real life.) If I as a Southern Baptist pastor tell my mostly female congregation that they should submit to male headship in the family and church -- but only when the man's leadership is godly --, and they prefer my preaching to that of the Methodist church with a woman pastor down the road or to their own good-for-nothing husbands, well then, then my leadership must be godly than theirs. And godly in a specifically male way.

To a certain degree, then, "actually existing complementarianism" is a way of throwing down the gauntlet to other men: if you are a real man, your wife will welcome your leadership, and if she doesn't -- well then, you mustn't be a real man. Now if the iMonk was raised in this kind of environment it's easy to see why his wife becoming Catholic was a shattering humiliation. He could either live with the humiliation or rip up the whole game. No wonder he chose the second.

But this sort of real man one-ups-manship has been going on for a long time, and actually existing complementarianism is a new thing. So there must be something new in the situation to account for it. Here's the new thing: complementarianism has become an "ethnic" marker, a marker that separates the people of God from outsiders. And it is the distinctive feature of such marker-laws that they have to be attainable. Think of it this way, if not eating pork is the mark of a Jew as one of the people of God, then not eating pork has to be a fulfillable command. If somehow it's not possible to not pork, then all kinds of people who want to be Jews will be turned from Jews to gentiles against their will. And if your life is built around your religious community, that's pretty upsetting.

But the use of marital relations as a marker of being part of the people of God is actually pretty new. In 1858, liberal Episcopalians and evangelical Baptists all had pretty much the same view of family ethics. In 1958, differences were there, but with at a fairly high level of abstraction. But today, views on "complementarianism" vs. "egalitarianism" have becoming major denominational distinctives. If "complementarianism" defines the Southern Baptists, then "complementarianism," (like teetotalling, but unlike loving your neighbor, which all denominations try to do and all fail at perfecting) has to be do-able. Otherwise you won't have any credible "witness." If you are a member of, to chose a different example, a conservative PCA church, and want to remain so, having a good "complementarian" marriage, is as important as not eating pork as is to remaining an Orthodox Jew in good standing. (OK, I exaggerate a bit -- but only a bit.)

Now I can't think of anything less well-suited to be a dividing line between the clean and the unclean than marital relations. An insider/outsider marker should be: 1) easily documented, one way or the other; 2) clear-cut at any point whether you are living up to it or not; 3) Not connected to personality. Otherwise you are saying only one personality type is allowed in this denomination, which is going to drive vast numbers of growing children out of your body each generation; 4) individually determined, so that whether you adhere or not is under your own control, not someone else's. Now, you might point out that kosher rules are set by the family; if a wife refuses to keep a kosher kitchen, the Orthodox Jewish husband's stuck. But in this case, Jewish law allows and would even encourage divorce of a spouse who refuses to comply with membership codes. But in Christian churches, divorce is not explicitly recognized as an option (although in reality it plays an important under the table role in border-maintenance). But what you have in "complementarian" churches is a marker of cleanliness that is hard to check, dependent on endless subtle shades of interaction, determined by the interaction of two distinctive individual personalities, and in the end, out of the control of either partner. This can't help but cause anxiety.

(It is also true that explicitly liberal churches who place emphasis on being progressive have the mirror image problem, giving you the widespread figure of the bossy husband and mousy wife in a UU or Episcopalian church desperately denying that their family order is traditional patriarchy. But since liberal churches are in step with the wider society, are in fact the wider society at prayer, ideological consistency lacks the peculiar imperatives of border maintenance. If you admitted you act like a patriarch, despite believing in "a woman's right to chose", you'd just be a jerk, and not a social outcast.)

In this situation you need desperately to avoid the suggestion that justification by this particular Law is out of your hands. You have to believe that "complementarian" marriages are clearly and easily distinguished from "egalitarian" ones. That conscious belief and will, not the myriad shades of in-born personality types built by each person's unique nature and nurture, determines your interaction with your spouse. That husbands as leaders and wives as followers can indeed be close to sinless enough for actually existing complementarianism to apply.

To admit that these beliefs are obviously false, and would sound as strange and contrived in 1858 as they do today, is hard to bear. (Think of it this way -- have you ever read any good literature built on these principles? I thought not. And if it can't make a good novel, it probably can't be lived out in real life.)

But anything else leads to the dreaded condition of ethical fatalism, the believe that whether or not you are a good person and a member in good standing in the church is out of your hands. And that dreaded condition was what giving your life over to Christ was supposed to get you out of.

So my conclusion is, that "actually existing complementarianism" is created not by traditional Christian doctrine ("theoretical complementarianism") itself, but by that doctrine in interaction with a particular sociological situation: gathered congregations in a religious market in a society with serious conflict over marital ideals . Since those sociological features aren't going away, so too actually existing complementarianism isn't going to go away any time soon. But as you could probably tell, I believe it is overall pretty destructive. That is, however, not because traditional Christian teaching on the family is wrong, but rather because this good Law is being misused. I tend to agree with the biologists that people are mammals, and that means that when males are actually in the pack they generally lead it, and that females have a natural connection with child-raising*. People are overall happier and children are overall better raised where our heritage as a particular sort of mammalian creatures is worked with and not fought against. But daily interaction between husband and wife is just not something that can be legislated. If churches want border-markers between "complementarianism" and "egalitarianism" let them use nice and simple devices that are suited for the purpose, such as wives taking their husband's family name, or including "obey" in wedding vows -- do it once, in public, and then you can forget about it and get on with trying to be a good husband and father, wife and mother, without letting -isms get in the way. That's the approach of conservative liturgical churches and while it is less effective at challenging the broader society, it breeds fewer shattered and bitter opponents like the iMonk.

UPDATE: Here it is in black and white, as another comment of Michael Spencer's troubles.

*I must say, the sheer ugliness of this word is something of a tip-off to the absurdity of some of the views associated with it. It reminds me of what Disraeli once said of "conservatism" back when that new word replaced good old "Tory": "It sounds like something made by a pastry chef."
**Spotted hyenas, where females lead the pack, also have pseudo-male genitalia and aggressive temperaments due to an embyonic bath of testosterone. They are the mammalian exception that proves the rule (more here).

I think they missed a crucial point

Did the guy who wrote this post on "Preaching to Smothered Mama's Boys" noticed that actually God blessed Jacob and not Esau? Seems a major oversight. What next? A post on how Saul was really manly, unlike the wimpy David playing the lyre? Or how Lamech exercised headship in his house, unlike the passive boozer Noah?

Sometimes people just can't help letting the cat out of the bag. In the Talmudic times, the Jews used Esau as their code-word for Romans and then Christians in general: macho outdoorsmen who in their self-confidence and rude health have no need for God. If the shoe fits . . .

The Bible has a different model: a man who loves his mother will love his wife.

And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah's tent, and took Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her: and Isaac was comforted after his mother's death.

But then, maybe Isaac was a wuss too. He must have had a more macho, outdoors type as a brother, too? Maybe he would be a better model in manly faith for the Reformed, and . . . oops, never mind!

HT: Boar's Head Tavern

The Main Reason the Immigration Bill Went Down to Defeat

The main reason is that the facts presented here were never brought to the attention of the American people (HT: Jonah on the Corner).

According to the World Bank's 2007 Annual Development Indicators, in 1990 Mexico had a fertility rate of 3.3 children per female, but by 2005, that number had fallen by 36 percent to 2.1, which is the Zero Population Growth rate. That is an enormous decline in the number of Mexican infants per female. The large number of women currently in their reproductive years means that there are still quite a few babies, but as this group ages, the number of infants will decline sharply. If this trend toward fewer children per female continues, there being no apparent reason for it to cease, the number of young people in the Mexican population will decline significantly just when the number of elderly is rising. As labor markets in Mexico tighten and wage rates rise, far fewer Mexican youngsters will be interested in coming to the United States. Since our baby boomers will be retiring at the same time, we could face a severe labor shortage.

It's not just Mexico -- birth rates have been dropping rapidly all over Latin America. "This means less pressure on the United States from illegal immigrants from the entire area, not just from Mexico" explains Robert Dunn, Jr.

Indeed the drop is world wide: "Fertility rates are declining across the globe, but the change is particular striking to our south. The world fertility rate fell from 3.1 to 2.6 over the 1990-2005 period. The population bomb is becoming a fire cracker."

I've commented on the similarly astoundingly rapid drop in Mongolia's birth rate (4.5 to 2.2 in ten years) before (curiously no one answered the question in that post).

I have often retailed the statistic that the average Mexican woman has 2.7 children -- which has never failed to astound people I know. What will I say now that it is 2.1 (compared to 2.0 in the US)? I guess it will lose its shock value because no will believe me any more!

One of the most peculiar facts is that it now seems that Mexican-Americans have a higher birth rate than Mexicans in Mexico! A study says (pdf alert) that "the findings demonstrate dramatic decreases in the fertility rates in Mexico at the same time that continuous increases have been documented in the fertility rates of native-born Mexican-Americans in the US at younger ages."

The Corner's resident secular skeptic, Andrew Stuttaford, points out that this world wide crash in birthrates punches holes in the usual explanations for Europe's low birth rates (including social democracy?) Of course you could always say the Third World is simply imitating the first -- the more I see these crazy changes, the more I begin to believe that birth rates are more and more about fashion and image. Is the big family presented as attractive in glossy magazines? Or is the small family presented as modern and with it?

Anyway, it is funny that these figures were never presented in the debate on immigration. Because it is my anecdotal experience that judging from how astounded people worried about immigration are that Mexico does not have a high birth rate any more, I'd say that 75-80% of the opposition to immigration is driven by anxiety over the perceived birth rates of Latinas. Had President Bush or Senators Reid or McCain simply gone on prime time TV and stated that Mexico's birth rate is now 2.1, then most people would have said, "Oh, well I guess it turns out there isn't any crisis," forgot the issue, and let the elites make the laws they want.

New Research on the Family

I just put on my sidebar (under magazines and their blogs -- well it didn't seem to fit anywhere else) the Howard Center, whose mission is to explain and defend the "natural family." The masthead has "family, religion, and society" which is of course Luther's three hierarchies of church, family, and city.

This site has some great resources (although it does not have a blog -- as yet.) One of more amazing sources of information is the second set of abstracts summarizing new research on the family prepared by Bryce Christensen and Robert W. Patterson. (Here's the first set.)

Let me just note a few of the more fascinating bits of research:

1) What were we talking about a while ago? Social democracy? Oh yes:

"the labor force participation rate among women, and especially among mothers of preschool children, strongly and positively correlated with well-developed welfare states in each of the three components of the index.

Multivariate regressions that controlled for both individual-level and country-level characteristics not only confirmed these correlations, but also found that, all things being equal, women’s odds of employment are almost three times higher, relative to men, in countries at the high end of the welfare scale than in countries at the bottom. The correlations with women’s employment also remained significant in models that controlled for variables whose effects could be mistakenly attributed to the welfare index: GDP, unemployment, the Gini index of income inequality, and attitudes toward gender egalitarianism."

Ironically, however, the researchers (who aren't anti-social democracy at all) found that Scandinavian social democracy, by socializing the family creates pink collar ghettos that actually hinder the employment of women in positions of higher influence (that's the part the researchers don't like).

"large welfare states create and sustain “sheltered labor markets” for women with convenient working terms (day care, maternity leaves, and flexible hours) and where women continue doing what they have historically done: caring for children and families, although now in institutional settings like schools as well as health care and social services, funded by the state."

(BTW, the first round-up summarized research showing that daycare may be more a cause of women joining the labor force than a response to it.)

2) So what does that have to do with religion in Europe? Well take a look at this:

In European countries women working outside the home are less likely to be religious than those not in the paid labor force:

A sociologist and a theologian at Tilberg University in the Netherlands examined data from the European Values Study, a series of surveys conducted in almost all European countries between 1999 and 2000, to explore how characteristics of individuals and countries influence individual religious beliefs and practices. They found, among factors at the individual level, that women in paid employment were significantly less religious (both in terms of belief and practice) than their peers who stayed at home. In fact, the level of religious belief among employed women was more like those of men, who were found to be less religious than women overall. These consistent patterns were found in almost all countries and were statistically significant (p<.001) in multivariate tests.

OK, correlation isn't causation but this is worth thinking about, right?

3) And by the way, isn't the free market in religion in America a great thing that keeps us religious by protecting us from all those dead state churches? Maybe not. The same researchers found:

Looking at the characteristics of countries, the study found that religious pluralism as measured by the Herfindahl Index—meaning the more religions in a country and the more evenly distributed their market shares—as well as the degree to which people trust the churches in their country, were each significantly related to religious belief and to religious practice: The greater the religious diversity of a country, the lower the levels of individual belief and practice; whereas higher levels of public confidence in the church increased each of the two measures.

4) And of course, large numbers of revivalist evangelicals lowers divorce, right? Well, not exactly. Large numbers of "moderate" or "miscellaneous" Protestants, Catholics, and especially Mormons.

Where “moderate” or “miscellaneous” Protestants,* Mormons, or Catholics were more heavily represented relative to other religious categories, that county had significantly fewer divorced persons. Conversely, higher divorce rates were significantly related to lower concentrations of each of these four categories. Moreover, the independent effects of the concentration of these denominational categories were able to explain 49 percent of the variance in the divorced rate with a confidence level of p<.01.

No statistically significant relationships, however, were found between the rate of divorced persons and a higher concentration of each of the remaining three categories: “conservative” Protestants, “liberal” Protestants,* and Jews.

It's actually a well-known fact in sociological circles that conservative revivalistic denominations are not particularly good for marriage -- in fact the researchers were surprised "conservative" Protestants didn't create an increase in divorce. But I have a hunch that a grouping by intensity of conversion experience expected would actually give a better resolution of Protestant churches that the conservative-liberal continuum. It is unfortunately the case that when adults are born again the new person isn't as happy with the old husband or wife. To put it this way: to promote stable marriages churches need to promote two things: 1) the value of marriage; and 2) the value of stability. Liberal Protestants fail at the first; revivalist sects fail at the second.

So one could make a good argument that the United States is more religious than Europe despite the anarchy of revivalistic sects, not because of it. (More tidbits along the lines of how a society-wide social church is actually better for society than passionate revivalism here. Short version: Southern Baptists are good for society only when they act like the state churches they rebelled against.)

5) But of course deep thinkers know that industrialization is what's really responsible for the breakup of the family. It's simplistic to just think that we can have the agricultural family in a post-industrial era. Right? Again, not exactly.

Looking at the effects of the industrialization on family forms,

[Michael J. Rosenfeld] marvels at how American families “weathered the social changes of the Industrial Revolution together.” In fact, because “the Industrial Revolution in the United States … took place during a period of Victorian social retrenchment,” Rosenfeld believes that in many ways “family government” remained quite strong. As a result, “some aspects of American family life remained surprisingly unchanged” during this tempestuous era.

During America’s Industrial Revolution, Rosenfeld points out, “most single young adults … remained in their parents’ homes until they married.” This pattern of coresidence allowed parents to maintain “a significant degree of supervision over their children’s social lives and made it much more difficult for young adults to form the kinds of unions that their parents would not have approved of.” As a consequence of this family governance, “age at first marriage remained constant” during the Industrial Revolution while “extramarital cohabitation remained rare.” As evidence of the remarkably persistent power of family governance, Rosenfeld cites Census data indicating that between 1880 and 1960 the percentage of American men living in nonmarital cohabitation “remained steady at 0.1 percent, one per thousand.”

So what's caused the rise in extramarital cohabitation? Well, it's not complicated:

Central to this analysis is the erosion of “the long-established norm of intergenerational adult coresidence.” Rosenfeld adduces statistics showing that “between 1950 and 2000 the percentage of single adult young women who lived with their parents dropped from 65 to 36 percent.” Not coincidentally, the percentage of young unmarried adults who headed their own households rose—fully 30 percent of young unmarried women and 27 percent of young unmarried men were heading their own households by 1980.

Young adults living with their parents while dating are less likely to move in with a boy or girlfriend, than young adults already in their own apartments. Simple, huh? No "deep-seated causes" no "deep loss of faith" dating from nominalism or the Reformation or industrialization, is needed to explain the rise in extramarital cohabitation: no, it's just that sometime between 1955 and 1965 parents and children stopped thinking it was appropriate for unmarried twenty-somethings to live at home. (And colleges stopped having parietal rules, by the way.)

Anyway, I love this kind of stuff and there's lots more there. Check it out for yourself.

*Moderate Protestant: e.g. AME Zion, American Lutheran Church, United Methodists (19 denominations)
Miscellaneous: e.g. Evangelical Mennonites, Quakers (12 denominations)
Conservative: e.g. Church of the Nazarene, Brethren, LCMS, Salvation Army, Southern Baptist (59 denominations)
Liberal: e.g. ECUSA, PCUSA, UCC (eight denominations)

Some Observations and Hypotheses on the Social Democracy-Secularism Connection

Here's some other interesting ideas on how and why social democracy strengthens secularism:

Mary Eberstadt here suggests that the correlation of fertility and religion goes the opposite way than what we think: it's not that loss of religion causes lower fertility, but that lower fertility causes loss of religion. The piece seems more suggestive than definitive, ef="http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/religdes.htm">university press release:

Reiss said that each of the 16 basic desires outlined in the book influence the psychological appeal of religious behavior. The desires are power, independence, curiosity, acceptance, order, saving, honor, idealism, social contact, family, status, vengeance, romance, eating, physical exercise, and tranquility.

His research is not the usual reductionist stuff (it's also not that incisive, alas) and emphasizes how all sixteen desires interact in religious experience.

Reiss has already done some initial research that suggests the desire for independence is a key psychological desire that separates religious and non-religious people. In a study published in 2000, Reiss found that religious people (the study included mostly Christians) expressed a strong desire for interdependence with others. Those who were not religious, however, showed a stronger need to be self-reliant and independent.

The study also showed that religious people valued honor more than non-religious people, which Reiss said suggests many people embrace religion to show loyalty to parents and ancestors.

Reiss defines "honor" here in a somewhat special way as the idea of living up to one's family, continuing their legacy, and not shaming them.

If he's right, my sense is that most people in Christian societies have little sense of what is psychological drives are strong in the religious.** If asked, my guess is what people would say is that religion fulfills desires for idealism or tranquility (pro) or order or vengeance (con).

OK, put it all together and here's what my general hypothesis:

Religion (or at least the Christian religion) increases when people live in stable, interdependent families that have thick, multi-generational identity, and where good and bad deeds are sanctioned by highly personal punishment and reward. (The best picture of what I mean is here).

How does this relate to social democracy? Here are my detailed hypotheses:

1) Social democracy weakens the sense of family (and other social groups) as lineage from past to future. First a universal pension system makes having children (hence the survival of the group) optional. This is also encouraged by removing sex from procreation -- but I would guess the effect of this is relatively minor, compared to that of universal pensions. Second, by insulating children from the bad decisions of their parents, they remove that sense that my decisions now have consequences for future generations. In other words, egalitarianism, by seeking to eliminating being born in one family rather than another as a generator of life outcomes, comprehensively diminishes the consequences for future generations of one's actions now. Finally, the tendency to replace marriage with cohabitation denies the child a sense of being born into a fixed and named social group (the Joneses, the Smiths, etc.) that is formed and continued by definite ritual incorporation via marriage.

The decoupling of the present generation from the past or future can be seen in the increase in disposal of the bodies of the dead in ways that leave no site for personal remembrance (grave, shrine, columbaria, etc.) which seems to be a prominent feature of European social democratic societies. (That's what Bottum is talking about.)

2) Social democratic values are hostile to shame and guilt as a sanction for bad behavior. The anti-punitive measures focus on the idea of good behavior as rational and bad behavior as resulting not in punishment from some one who loves you, but rather in the impersonal consequences of one's behavior. To put it very crudely, if you've been spanked as a child the concept of sin as an offense against a loving God, rather than a foolish act that results in impersonal consequences, becomes much more plausible. But again social democracy is comprehensively hostile to the concept of punitive sanctions, as opposed to rehabilitation and/or experiencing the automatic consequences of one's unwise actions. As a result sanctions for good or bad actions are systematically depersonalized, i.e. separated from the anger or joy of someone you love.

3) By removing key functions from the family, the social democratic system removes the effect that forces people to live in intense, long-lasting relationships. In more practical terms, household size declines because people can afford to move out. As an adaption to growing up under these conditions, the desire for independence grows and the desire for interdependence declines. Where school and day care are extended to ever greater percentages of childhood, this effect is intensified.

To summarize, all other things being equal*, religion in Christian countries** makes most sense for people who belong to defined and named social groups (families and larger) with a recognized multi-generational past and future, who can bring on themselves and that family intense feelings of honor or guilt/shame by bad or good actions, and who in order to make a living are pushed into intense, permanent, and deeply interdependent relations with the other members of that family.

It makes least sense for people raised as individuals who have individual parents but no sense of a corporate family past and no sense of an obligation to have children in the future, who experience the results of good and bad actions only as an impersonal outworking of actions in the nature of things, and who are financially able to freely move in and out of family groups and live alone or with new persons.

Social democracy devastates religion in Christian countries because it sets about deliberately and systematically to turn a society made of the first type of persons into a society made of the second type of persons.

*Which they almost never are.
**This indirect phrasing is deliberate. Someone might say "Well, Christianity is a relationship, not a religion!" OK, if that's how you define it. But strangely enough, I bet you'll find getting people into your "relationship" will be easier in a society that stimulates "religious" values of interdependence and family honor, than in one that sees these as bad things.

Where Does the Money Go in a Dual Income Family?

As I mentioned before, Harvard Magazine almost always has an unintentionally enlightening article, one that makes you say, "Well, yes, follow that thought through and you might get somewhere." Typically it concerns some issue where social science is demonstrating a deletrious effect of lifestyle changes which the magazine is compelled by its political stance to treat as beyond question.

So it is in this case.

In an article by Elizabeth Warren, the author talks of the "Middle Class on the Precipice," specifically referring to the dual-income family. Her argument is that the dual-income family model of economic life is far less secure than the former single-income family model that prevailed until 1970 or so.

Scholars, policymakers, and critics of all stripes have debated the social implications of these changes, but few have looked at their economic impact. Today the median income for a fully employed male is $41,670 per year (all numbers are inflation-adjusted to 2004 dollars)—nearly $800 less than his counterpart of a generation ago. The only real increase in wages for a family has come from the second paycheck earned by a working mother. With both adults in the workforce full-time, the family’s combined income is $73,770—a whopping 75 percent higher than the median household income in the early 1970s.

One good point the article makes is a single-income family can respond to a loss of the breadwinner's income (for whatever reason: death, injury, laid-off, fired, etc.) by sending the other parent into the paid labor force. Dual-income families don't have that option. In other word, single-income families work with a kind of discipline of deliberately keeping half of its potential labor force in reserve "for a rainy day," so to speak.

She also points out the tilting of the balance in the credit market from the debtors to the creditors, aided by Congress:

Since the early 1980s, the credit industry has rewritten the rules of lending to families. Congress has turned the industry loose to charge whatever it can get and to bury tricks and traps throughout credit agreements. Credit-card contracts that were less than a page long in the early 1980s now number 30 or more pages of small-print legalese. In the details, credit-card companies lend money at one rate, but retain the right to change the interest rate whenever it suits them. They can even raise the rate after the money has been borrowed—a practice once considered too shady even for a back-alley loan shark. When they think they have been cheated, customers can be forced into arbitration in locations thousands of miles from home. Some companies claim that they can repossess anything a customer buys with a credit card.

Smart people will avoid credit-card debt like dead birds in Turkey, but lots of people aren't smart, and the Bible tells us that God hates, yes HATES those who take advantage of their naivete. Even though they failed, we should be thankful for men like retired congressman Henry Hyde who tried to speak up for the debtors in the new bankruptcy law (and I know about the fraudulent use of bankruptcy; I know of a local millionaire of notoriously lax business ethics who regularly uses it to get out of inconvenient debts. Throw the book at him and people like him, but don't wink at the credit companies' loan sharking practices.)

Professor Warren also makes a good point about retirement risk being shifted on to the backs of families:

During the same period, families have been asked to absorb much more risk in their retirement income. In 1985, there were 112,200 defined-benefit pension plans with employers and employer groups around the country; today their number has shrunk to 29,700 such plans, and those are melting away fast. Steelworkers, airline employees, and now those in the auto industry are joining millions of families who must worry about interest rates, stock market volatility, and the harsh reality that they may outlive their retirement money. For much of the past year, President Bush campaigned to move Social Security to a savings-account model, with retirees trading much or all of their guaranteed payments for payments contingent on investment returns.

Now with these issues of retirement we have to remember that a defined benefit plan isn't a human right or a gift from heaven. Like many of the institutions that buttressed the security of the single-income families in the 1950s and 1960s they were created by unions, reformers (mostly women), and Democratic administrations who were animated by the ideal of the secure, home-centered, single-income family. (You can read more about this lost legacy of pro-family activism here.) Sadly their efforts were not accompanied by a similar focus on creating a pro-family culture, and so the result of the security and stability of the fifties was to create a generation that took it all for granted (Jeshurun grew fat and kicked . . .)

But unfortunately a good part of her article also aims to make the case that the dual-income model is irreversible (of course!), and driven by "rising prices for essentials as men’s wages remained flat." Actually though, the statistics she presents tell quite a different story. The only essential item that people are spending more on (and boy, are they spending more on it!) is housing. The only other major increases in the average budget are taxes, child care, and cars.

First she argues that families today are not living more luxuriously than in 1970; they are actually spending less on clothing, food, and household applicances:

. . . the average family of four today spends 33 percent less on clothing than a similar family did in the early 1970s. Overseas manufacturing and discount shopping mean that today’s family is spending almost $1,200 a year less than their parents spent to dress themselves. . . . Today’s family of four actually spends 23 percent less on food (at-home and restaurant eating combined) than its counterpart of a generation ago. The slimmed-down profit margins in discount supermarkets have combined with new efficiencies in farming to cut more costs for the American family. Appliances tell the same picture. . . . manufacturing costs are down, and durability is up. Today’s families are spending 51 percent less on major appliances than their predecessors a generation ago.

Even when we factor in the "23 percent more—a whopping extra $180 annually" spend on entertainment and the $300 more spent on computers, the total spent on all the above mentioned items combined is less for today's dual-income family that it is for 1970's single income family.

It's worth interjecting here that the savings in food and clothing are something which we can attribute to the Wal-Marts and Sam's Clubs of the world. Greater efficiency in the retail market has made a real difference to peoples' incomes.

So why are families today spending so much more? In a word, bigger houses and higher taxes, although the author struggles mightily to obscure the fact:

The data can be summarized in a financial snapshot of two families, a typical one-earner family from the early 1970s compared with a typical two-earner family from the early 2000s. With an income of $42,450, the average family from the early 1970s covered their basic mortgage expenses of $5,820, health-insurance costs of $1,130 and car payments, maintenance, gas, and repairs of $5,640. Taxes claimed about 24 percent of their income, leaving them with $19,560 in discretionary funds. That means they had about $1,500 a month to cover food, clothing, utilities, and anything else they might need—just about half of their income.

By 2004, the family budget looks very different. As noted earlier, although a man is making nearly $800 less than his counterpart a generation ago, his wife’s paycheck brings the family to a combined income that is $73,770—a 75 percent increase. But higher expenses have more than eroded that apparent financial advantage. Their annual mortgage payments are more than $10,500. If they have a child in elementary school who goes to daycare after school and in the summers, the family will spend $5,660. If their second child is a pre-schooler, the cost is even higher—$6,920 a year. With both people in the workforce, the family spends more than $8,000 a year on its two vehicles. Health insurance costs the family $1,970, and taxes now take 30 percent of its money. The bottom line: today’s median-earning, median-spending middle-class family sends two people into the workforce, but at the end of the day they have about $1,500 less for discretionary spending than their one-income counterparts of a generation ago.

Let's put this in tabular form in order of decreasing magnitude:

Mortgage then: $5,820; now: over $10,500 > + over $4,680
Taxes then: $10,188 (24% of income); now: $22,131 (30%) > +11,943 [since we generally agree taxes should be proportional to income this is misleading; had the tax rate stayed 24% per average family, today's tax bill would have been $4,426 lower].
Health insurance then: $1,130; now: $1,970 > +840

Even I was rather astounded by how really insignificant health insurances increases are compared to tax increases.

The other increasing expenditures -- for child care and for a second car -- are (at least in part) entailed by the decision to be a dual-income family:

Child care expenses then: $170*; child care expenses now: $5,660 (school age) -$6,920 (pre-school) > +$5,490 to $6,750
Car expenses then: $5,640 (for one car); now: over $8,000 (for two) > + over $2,360 [note the apparent implication that in real terms cars have gotten cheaper]

So while Professor Warren concludes that the dual-income family is a victim of forces beyond its control, and will eventually demand political action to reduce risk, what I conclude is that:

1) As long as you are willing to live in a small house and own one car, the single-income family makes as much sense as it ever did.

2) The desire for bigger houses is the main driving force behind the dual-income family.

And I can't avoid another query: is the flood of relatively unskilled female workers into the labor market keeping wages soft?

Tim Bayly has put up a very interesting post on big houses here. He questions why families with fewer children need more space. And if they don't need it, is it not squandering to buy it? What he doesn't mention is Isaiah 5:8-9:

Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth! In mine ears said the LORD of hosts, Of a truth many houses shall be desolate, even great and fair, without inhabitant.

Why woe to them? Because they have done injustice to seize other men's fields? Certainly. But is there not something antisocial in the very desire to "be placed alone in the midst of the earth"? And does not the desire for bigger houses drive the desire to move to the outskirts of town, which makes a second car necessary, thus creating the other big drain on the family income?

My conclusion is hopeful, though: economize on your house, and don't buy a second car, and a single-income family has a realistic chance of achieving the financial security and stability that so many dual-income families seek in vain. The government may not be helping, but most of our financial future is in our own hands, and following the traditional rules of life are the key to that future. (Gee, sounds like Proverbs!)

* Derived by subtracting all the other figures

Where Have All the Children Gone?

Read the article linked here and tell me, what missing from this picture? What might it be about the urban centers selected that makes them particularly hostile to children? What demographic force influential in the local politics of the cities mentioned might have created this interesting, fascinating, and quietly inhuman situation?

One of the things I love about being in Mongolia is the vast number of children. Sadly with the transition from Communism and the legalization of abortion, the birthrate in ten years (1990 to 2000) dropped from 4.5 per woman to 2.2.

The aim of marriage is first and foremost procreation. To reject God's blessing of being fruitful and multiplying is a sin, unless one has dedicated oneself to make spiritual children. Christ can forgive this sin, but how can those that reject the duty of procreation (through marriage and/or ministry) ever repent of what they don't know is a sin?

Communities, societies, and nations that drive out children deserve to wither. Communities, societies, and nations that feed parasite-like on the children bred elsewhere should be ashamed of themselves.

Originally posted at Here We Stand