A new book challenges conventional beliefs about Christianity and the family 

 
Sayin' it don't make it so:
While "family values" may appeal to many people today, early
Christians, including Jesus himself, had little use for them

UNLIKE GEORGE W. BUSH, I’m not exactly what most people would call “a good Christian gentleman.” Even so, I have indeed read much of the Old Testament and nearly all of the New, which is why I’m so frequently mystified to encounter so many bizarre positions and beliefs that get circulated under the heading “Christian.” A case in point: “family values,” a notion touted by such aggressively Christian organizations as “Focus on the Family,” “The Family Research Council,” “The American Family Association,” Harold Camping’s apocalyptic “Family Radio,” and the political pressure group “The Family.” While I’m something of a family man myself, I've long wondered where in the Bible Jesus ever promotes “family values”? 

The answer is an easy one: Jesus doesn’t. Not anywhere. Not ever. Nada. In fact, as Swiss author Hans Conrad Zander demonstrates in his new book The First Single: Jesus, the Enemy of the Family,* the King of Kings not only repeatedly insulted and rejected his own family, but consistently preached a radically anti-family, pro-single doctrine for us all. 

Hate your father and mother!

Author and journalist Hans Conrad Zander is a former Dominican monk who writes extensively on religious issues. He begins his latest work by pointing out that even though Jesus has been used to promote countless agendas (ranging from Nazi racial anti-Semitism to the feminism-light pseudo-religion of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code), no one has ever tried to depict him as a father. And with good reason: the Jesus of the Scriptures not only failed to found a family of his own, but made his own rejection of the family as public and explicit as possible. As the Good Book tells us, “Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.’” (Luke 14:25-26) It is thus all the more surprising that Christians around the world unthinkingly regard the Prince of Peace as a spokesman for a vaguely defined set of notions called “family values.” 

Jesus condemned family values. Repeatedly. Unapologetically. For a man who once said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them,” Jesus had no use for Moses’ injunction to “honor your father and your mother,” which, after all, had once made it to number five in the Ten Commandments of the family-based Jewish faith. Two millennia before George W. Bush referred to his loyalty to a “higher father” in an interview with Bob Woodward, Jesus publicly flipped off his own legal parents in Luke 2:  

Every year Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem for the Festival of the Passover. When he was twelve years old, they went up to the festival, according to the custom. After the festival was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it. Thinking he was in their company, they traveled on for a day. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him. After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.” “Why were you searching for me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he was saying to them.  

The Holy Family of Mantegna (c. 1500).
Despite centuries of pious projection, the scriptural
Jesus despised and abandoned his own family

So much for obedience to parental authority and dignity. Of course, Jesus was only twelve at the time and maybe hadn’t heard about family values yet. Luke is also illustrating a point about the lad’s divine origins. But in Matthew 10 Jesus instructs his Apostles in utterly unmistakable terms on how to deal with their own families: 

Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law— a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household. Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 

When Jesus walks along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, asking the sons and fathers working there to become “fishers of men” and follow him, he demands that they leave their wives, children, and aged parents behind. “When he had gone a little farther,” we learn in Mark 1, “he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. Without delay he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him.” His entourage soon grew to include the estranged wives of his enemies: “After this, Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him, and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; Joanna the wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod’s household; Susanna; and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.” (Luke 8) This group was so busy recruiting new members that it didn’t even grant them time to dispose of their elders, a breathtaking violation of the “family values” promoted by the Old Testament: “Another disciple said to him, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ But Jesus told him, ‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.’”  

Even his own brothers

But even if Jesus chose not to found a family of his own, and ordered his followers to abandon theirs, his relationship with his own family must have been a model for future generations. Or perhaps not? I suspect that few self-styled Christians realize that, immaculately conceived or not, Jesus himself came from a large and seemingly quarrelsome family. “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?” his neighbors ask in Matthew 13. “Isn’t his mother’s name Mary, and aren’t his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas? Aren’t all his sisters with us?” Even fewer are aware that his own family apparently schemed to have him killed at one point. “Jesus went around in Galilee,” we learn in John 7. “He did not want to go about in Judea because the Jewish leaders there were looking for a way to kill him. But when the Jewish Festival of Tabernacles was near, Jesus’ brothers said to him, ‘Leave Galilee and go to Judea, so that your disciples there may see the works you do. No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret. Since you are doing these things, show yourself to the world.’ For even his own brothers did not believe in him.” 

Talk about dysfunctional families. As Mark tells us in chapter 3 of his gospel, and as Zander reminds us, the presumed creator of America’s present day “family values” despised his own backward family (who, in Mark 3:21, thought he was “out of his mind”). He particularly had it in for his “virgin” mother, Mary, and did not hesitate to deny her at the first possible moment: “Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, ‘Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.’ ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.’”  

Dishonor thy mother 

Jesus disses Mary again in John 2, where he performs his first miracle: 

On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, “They have no more wine.” “Woman, why do you involve me?” Jesus replied. “My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”  

While the online Bible I used for this essay provides a helpful footnote claiming that “The Greek for Woman does not denote any disrespect,” Zander quotes the Israeli religious scholar Shalom Ben-Chorin as stating that there is no other case of “a Jewish son daring to address his mother with ‘woman’… For Jewish sensitivities, then even more than today, this was ‘an outrageous insult.’”

In fact, Jesus goes out of his way to distance himself from his four brothers, and particularly his distraught mother. He appears to have missed the memo on the Catholic Church’s cult surrounding the “Mother of God.” For example, Luke tells us that “as Jesus was saying these things, a woman in the crowd called out, ‘Blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you.’ He replied, ‘Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it.’” Ouch.

And brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death. (Mark 13:12)

Yes, I know: Jesus is issuing a warning here and not making a prescription. But he clearly does not tell his followers to put up a fight for their families. Instead, the message seems to be: “Leave your family the first chance you get, and don't even think about starting one.” This was surely a wise precaution for him to take on the eve of the End Times of the first century, but to me it sounds like a pretty brittle scriptural foundation upon which to erect a twenty-first century “family values” platform.

Saint Paul, prophet of a “singles religion”

 
A religion of love:
Paul of Tarsus preached freedom for all

So if Jesus really did despise family values so much, what is Christianity really about? Zander explores this question by looking at the lives of the apostle Paul and several other key Christian figures over the intervening centuries. That Paul of Tarsus disliked families is a complete no-brainer. He actually spells out his contempt for marriage in 1 Corinthians: “To the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do.” 

Where did this contempt come from? As Zander tells us, Paul was “a Jewish intellectual who wrote like a Greek, thought like a Greek, and felt like a Greek. But there was one thing that distinguished the Greeks from all the other peoples of the ancient world, from the Romans and the Persians, and particularly from the Jews and the Arabs: the Greeks, they alone, did not make a cult out of the sacred family. On the contrary: they delighted in mocking it.” 

Without Paul’s mockery, Zander suggests, Christianity might easily have become an intrinsically authoritarian, family-based religion like Islam. Zander describes in detail how Jesus’ younger brother James the Just jockeyed for power following the Resurrection, becoming the first bishop of Jerusalem in the place of the Apostle Peter, only to be eclipsed in short order by Peter and Paul, who cleverly left Jerusalem behind and spread the new religion throughout the Empire. James became dependent upon them for fundraising and faded into obscurity. According to tradition, the two itinerant apostles ultimately relocated the church’s center to Rome, where its Catholic version continues to thrive. Its Jerusalem counterpart - not so much. 

We don't need Zander to tell us that early, post-Jesus Christianity had an aggressively countercultural, anti-family slant. The second century pagan critic Celsus (as quoten by the Church Father Origen) reviled it as a religion of simpletons that spat in the face of traditional family values:

 [Whenever Christians] get hold of children in private and some stupid women with them, they let out some astonishing statements, as, for example, that they must not pay attention to their father and school teachers...; But, if they like, they should leave father and their schoolmasters, and go along with the women and the little children who are their playfellows to the wooldresser's shop, or to the cobbler's or the washerwoman's shop, that they may learn perfection.

Paul, the author of the great hymn of love in 1 Corinthians 13 (“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud”), crisscrossed the Mediterranean world preaching tolerance and personal freedom. Anti-family values lay at the heart of his message, and rightfully so. In the Roman Empire, marriage and the family were instruments of repression. Singles were vilified and literally taxed to death. Paul’s theology of love offered a way out of this trap. As he laid out in 1 Corinthians 7:

I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord.  But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife— and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord’s affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world—how she can please her husband. I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you may live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord.

Good news for women 

But wait, you may be wondering. Wasn’t Paul a notorious woman-hater? A reactionary chauvinist pig who went around saying that women should keep their mouths shut in church? Maybe, but maybe not. Zander sides with the Dominican priest and theologian Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, who has demonstrated that Paul’s misogynistic sayings were almost certainly added in by later scribes. And if you read the rest of Paul’s epistles, you will find that these attributed statements hardly fit his message. For example, are these the words of a patriarch and anti-feminist?:

A woman is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to marry anyone she wishes, but he must belong to the Lord. In my judgment, she is happier if she stays as she is—and I think that I too have the Spirit of God. (1 Corinthians 7)

 
Portrait of a Roman woman in Pompeii (c. 70 AD):
For single and married women in the Roman Empire,
the Gospels were particularly good news

In fact, in its beginnings, and in the times of its renewal, Christianity was a religion of women for women – and independent women at that. Zander explains why:

According to Roman law, when a Roman woman married, she abandoned control over her entire fortune to her husband. Nevertheless, they all wanted to marry. At all costs. They would give all their money in order to avoid the shame of remaining a “coelebs,” a “spinster.” Now, with Jesus Christ, this had all changed. Even more so with Paul. … Christian Roman women received this message as a sensation. As a revaluation of all values. Now one no longer needed to have a man. One did not need to give birth. An unmarried woman was now a human being, perhaps a better one too. And Paul himself didn’t think of the best part of all: According to Roman law, a single woman retained control of her entire fortune.

That was the “good news” as far as Roman women were concerned. Legion was the number of women who abandoned their parents and husbands to live the single life in freedom. Widows (whose numbers grew sharply in this period, interestingly enough) particularly embraced the new religion. If organized Christianity has continually reverted to a sexist old boys’ club, this has more to do with the persistence of patriarchal structures in society than with the explicitly stated intentions of Jesus, Paul, and their inspired successors. No, family values have no place in the Church. “Just imagine if family men had prevailed in Rome back then,” Zander muses. “We would be a religion of ayatollahs. A Christian mullah would be seated on the throne of Peter. God forbid.” 

Mohammed, you may recall, had thirteen wives. Today, a Muslim man may have up to four wives at once. Parental authority is absolute. So if you are looking for a religion that truly “focuses on the family,” Islam might just be the one for you.

Getting away from them all: St. Anthony and the Desert Fathers

Zander provides a more drastic example of abandoning one’s family to follow Jesus in the story of the Desert Fathers of Egypt, who founded Christian monasticism. Saint Anthony (251-356) came from a village in Lower Egypt. In the realm of the pharaohs, we learn, and particularly during the Roman era, family values were another word for repression. “A village,” Zander tells us, “is nothing other than the oldest agglutination of several extended families. But you, Qeman in the district of Beni Suef, are not the least among the villages of Egypt. You are the total village. You are the total closed society, which Anthony broke out of at the age of twenty-four. What did the young Egyptian have in mind? The imitation of Jesus Christ!” 

 
The Temptation of Saint Anthony (Martin Schongauer).
The original Desert Father may have had his troubles, but
at least he didn't have any annoying in-laws to worry about.

The ascetic desert community that Saint Anthony (“the patriarch of the modern single”) and his followers created was briefly the model of a free, post-family society. It attracted thousands of imitators who in turn sought to break free from their stifling family and village life. Alas, this ideal of the single life could not last. As Zander points out, no Christian reform movement survived in its essence for longer than two generations, and if the monastic ideal later gave way to the Catholic Church’s modern-day “sterile, consumptive celibacy,” and if monasteries and convents later began resembling prisons, this was hardly the fault of Anthony and his independent-minded followers.**

Brother Sun, Sister Moon

Giovanni Francesco Bernardone (1181-1226), later known as St. Francis of Assisi, likewise defied and abandoned his own family to pursue his vocation in freedom. He never looked back. His sisters soon followed his example, fleeing their parental prison in the dead of night. Christianity was renewed and monasticism enjoyed a new boom. Like Jesus, Paul, Anthony, and a host of other seers and saints, Francis rejected the conventional family and sought a new set of parents and siblings – not only within the wider Christian community, but also in the fields and in the skies. In one of the most beautiful Christian poems, his “Canticle of the Sun,” Francis celebrated his new, divine family in these words:

Most high, all powerful, all good Lord!
All praise is yours, all glory, all honor, and all blessing.

To you, alone, Most High, do they belong.

No mortal lips are worthy to pronounce your name. 

Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures,
especially through my lord Brother Sun,
who brings the day; and you give light through him.
And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor!

Be praised, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air,
and clouds and storms, and all the weather,
through which you give your creatures sustenance. 

Be praised, My Lord, through Sister Water;
she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure. […] 

The tyranny of a husband 

Later chapters examine Thomas Aquinas and also Teresa of Avila, who once wrote: “I am appalled by the damage one suffers when one associates with one’s own relations. I would not have thought it possible if I had not experienced it myself.” Nor did Teresa see much “sanctity” in marriage. In words understandable to any twenty-first century feminist, she said: “What a mercy, when God spares a woman the tyranny of a husband. He often ruins her body. And sometimes her soul too.”

 
Saint Catherine of Siena:
What did she have to look forward to as a married woman
in fourteenth century Italy?

Indeed - in those days, marriage and family life meant the ruin of independent-minded women. Zander devotes several pages to the Dominican reformer Saint Catherine of Siena. She, we learn, escaped from the grip of her mother, who had already given birth to twenty-five children! Mamma Monna had just arranged Catherine’s marriage to a fitting suitor at the gentle age of twelve. But what could a girl expect from marriage in fourteenth century Italy?

There you are, flat on your back, on top of you a fat, revolting, idiotic male. He stinks of horse manure, of sweat, of beer and his own piss. But when it comes to what he’s doing to you, he thinks he’s the greatest hero in the world. That’s why he wants you to joyfully bear him as many children as possible. Children in his own glorious image. How many? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven – twenty-five children.

Seen that way, even a Dominican convent looked like a wise career move. Of course, Catherine went on to become one of the great Scholastic philosophers of her time. Single – in imitation of Christ.

“Left Behind”: the family

Of course, “family values” can mean a whole laundry list of issues. As understood in contemporary America, the term includes such divergent items as divorce rights and the treatment of gay people. As a matter of fact, despite his commandment to break up families, Jesus did indeed come down against divorce (conceivably in order to protect women from being thrown out of their households without any financial means or civil rights on their husbands' whims), but he never saw fit to denounce abortion or homosexuality even once. I wonder what makes us think we are entitled to do so 2,000 years later?

 
In defiance of Scripture, the Protestant Churches
practically made family life mandatory for all believers.
Scene from Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1982)

As Zander takes his history of Christianity through the family-obsessed Protestant Reformation up to the present day, only one conclusion is possible: Jesus Christ preached anti-family values, and so did his sainted successors. Regardless of our own personal views on the family, the Bible tells us that the Son of God himself stepped down from heaven to inform us that the first step towards becoming a true Christian consists of leaving your family behind and not looking back. All claims to the contrary are nothing but opportunism – an effort to maintain Roman-era patriarchal structures into the present day, rather than to allow people to decide for themselves how they want to conduct their lives and interact with others. That’s why the buzzword “family values” remains a central tenet of Christianity as most Christians understand it. Why let the printed and supposedly inspired Word of God get in the way of a politically convenient story? And yet, the Pat Robertsons and Harold Campings of this world will soon repent the error of their ways – certainly at the next “Rapture,” if not sooner. For as the Master himself proclaimed to his disciples in Matthew 19:

Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.

In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. 

Amen.