BEYOND FAMILY VALUES

Beyond Family Values: A Call to Christian Virtue by Cameron Lee

Review:
Lee calls for those who clamor for "family values," especially evangelical Christians, to step back and take a look at what they're actually promoting. Lee contends that "values" can change, and can mean one thing for a lesbian couple with children and another thing for a traditional heterosexual couple with children. He also argues that evangelicals and other conservative Christians have made an idol out of the family, placing it even above church. Many of those same Christians also have bought heavily into our therapeutic, materialist, divorce-oriented culture, and "family values" even reflect some of that. That church community, Lee says, is where our priorities ought to lie and from which our direction ought to come.While he acknowledges the key role family plays in Christian faith, he argues that Christian families are simply part of the Christian Family, namely, the Body of Christ. Lee promotes Christian virtues -- in particular, faith, hope and love -- as those things to which Christians should aspire, and it should be the local congregation modeling these virtues, he says. Christians are called to be salt in the world, Lee points out, and this is accomplished not through political victory but through cultural engagement and by giving priority to theKingdom of God. While much of the book gets weighed down in academic language and can be a difficult read at times in its opening chapters, Lee's central message still comes through clearly, especially toward the end -- and it's a challenging message. It's also one that the "family values" crowd needs to hear. Sure, Christians should have certain "values" to which they adhere, but these values have deeper roots, and it's those roots --Christian virtues -- to which Lee is encouraging them to return. Reviewer: A reader

RodneyClapp, a former Christianity Today editor and author of Families at the Crossroads, says that many family values that appear good on the surface can be abused in a very sub-Christian way.

Lee contends that the so-called ideal of the American family -- a two-parent, middle-class household where the father is the sole bread-winner and Mom stays home with the kids -- is in reality more a reflection of the culture and politics of the 1950s than anything biblical. But times and economics changed in the 1970s. Women began to go to work in larger numbers in order to maintain the standard of living that their 1950s parents had taught them was essential to the American dream. Most parents were forced to spend more and more time away from their children in order to make enough money to maintain that mythical living standard.

"We must remember that the 1950s were

a pre-civil rights era of racial and cultural

anxieties that brought us lynchings,

McCarthyism and bomb shelters," Lee writes.

And not all families were healthy or happy -- nor are they today. Christian families today experience physical, emotional and sexual abuse as often as the general population. And recent studies have shown that evangelical Christians in this country have an even higher rate of divorce than the general population.

www.faithworks.com/articles/article%20archive/jcfamilyvalue.htm

Clapp concludes that the post-industrial model of family may serve a lesser god than the God whom Christians are called to serve. "What goods or ultimate aims does the post-industrial family serve?" he asks."Privatized and domesticated as it is by definition, it serves the aims of late or consumer capitalism."

But Jesus is exposing their game. In essence, the games of self-justification, of building reputations, these are all human power games.And the results of such games are that some people rise to power and some don't. Some people become part of the in-group and some are left out. And this is precisely why so many of our so-called traditional family values need to be transformed and taken to another level. This is why Jesus challenges us to go beyond traditional family values: Because we can never truly claim to befamily when some people are left out. Mixed with our power games ofself-elevation, our traditional family values work out to be ones in which somefamilies win and those who are left out lose. Proper 17C Sermon

Regards

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