Foundation of society?

I believe a key issue in not understanding singleness properly is that we do not understand families properly.

Our culture sees brokenness all around us and traces the root cause back to "broken families" -- so then we try to fix these broken families. It's true that many issues stem from divorce and single parenthood. But just because brokenness stems from those issues we can't assume that if we fix those issues there will be no more brokenness. This seems to be the myth often believed by strong proponents of the nuclear family argument.

The foundation of society should be Jesus -- it should be loving God and our neighbors above all else. That's the foundation. Humanity is marred by sin and always will be in this life. Nothing can change that. Only the Gospel can begin the healing work that needs to occur to improve society -- that is the foundation of society, not the stereotypical current American cultural idea of family.

In Families at the Crossroads by Rodney Clapp he states:

In books, and on radio and television...evangelical family champions worry over a fairly consistent list of concerns. They criticize public schools for suspect curriculum and teaching methods. They note alarming divorce rates. They decry movies, music and television programs that frighten children and expose them to explicit sex and violence. They abhor the spread of the gay rights movement and the rise of feminism. They place in opposition to all these things what they call the “traditional,” biblical” and even “natural” family—the nuclear family consisting of a heterosexual couple and their children, in which the husband and father is the breadwinner and the wife and mother manages home and childrearing.

Then he goes on to state,

What evangelicals call the “traditional family” is in fact the bourgeois or middle-class family, which rose to dominance in the nineteenth century....”

This may be the first time many have heard a statement like this. More to come in the next blog entries.