By Nathan Bierma

Staff Writer

One of our country's biggest problems is family values. I don't mean the lack of them, I mean the promotion of them. That's not an argument you'll hear a lot around here, where people are religious and proper and are on the mailing list for Focus on the Family.

Indeed, being against family values may seem like hating apple pie and puppies.

But with a crucial midterm election season in full swing, it's worth taking a discerning look at the political and cultural function of the term of ``family values,'' which bears powerful currency despite having no given definition. Everyone just assumes it means liking marriage and kids, but were it actually that vague and agreeable, it wouldn't be so potent. No, ``family values'' is actually calculated political rhetoric connoting Republican nostalgia for 1950s WASPism, complete with strains of sexism, homophobia, and flawed mythology about 20th century cultural history. What's worse for us at Calvin, ``family values'' can mean prioritizing the family over other spheres of life, including church and society. That would have made Abraham Kuyper harrumph; we should harrumph as well.

First, we should note the hypocrisy of the politicians who throw family values talk around so pompously. Tom DeLay, Republican majority whip in the U.S. House, is one of the leading family values preachers in America. DeLay is not on speaking terms with his mother. While in the White House, All-American grandfather-in-chief Ronald Reagan was estranged from his children. Republican Rudy Guiliani, appropriately lauded as an American hero after Sept. 11, happened to be, on Sept. 10, one of the year's most famous people to very publicly dump his wife for a mistress. Earlier in the 90s, one of the striking differences between family values preachers Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich and their disgraced opponent, Bill Clinton, was that they were not married to their first wives, and Clinton was.

But sounding pious has always been good for getting the votes of churchgoers. Beyond that, what continues to feed the fervor of DeLay and self-appointed family guru James Dobson is part faulty theology - there's hardly any mention of family in the Bible, the most bizarre exceptions being Solomon's 700 wives and Paul's plea for people to stay single - and part faulty anthropology. Caught up in American social myths, family values preachers see the 1950s as an Eden to which a Satan-seized society must make a glorious return.

Actually, the social notion that men should be the providers and women the haven-makers is a surprisingly recent prescription, dating back only as far as Victorian America and 20th century industrialization. Before that, women, men and even children basically worked side-by-side in the fields or the shop, with few unique responsibilities and expectations in their contribution to the family. When industrialization came along and created a new arena of work, a set of strange new roles and assumptions developed, with men assigned to the factories and women expected to remain in the home. The model of the stoveside and cribside mother was powerfully glamorized in the 1950s, in giddy magazines and television shows (even though more women held jobs outside the home in the 50s than ever before). Thankfully, the women's liberation movement of the 1970s, despite its flaws, injected some balance into a society that had so suddenly fallen out of alignment.

Now Dobson and mainstream society blames women's lib for today's problems, with little to say to the men who were half the problem in the first place. But all Dobson has done is seize on a brief demographic aberration, freeze it in time, and make it seem biblical and righteous. We would do better to tune him out and instead return to a pre-industrial, pre-Victorian sense of balance among work, community and home life for both women and men. It's the Kuyperian thing to do.

What I find odd is that Dobson is so grumpy at women for godlessly leaving the kitchen, but never mentions the far more dramatic 20th century abandonment of housework by able-bodied youth. Only in the last several decades was it no longer the norm for youth to play an active role in the maintenance of the home - in fact, 100 years ago there was no such thing as an adolescent, only older children and younger adults, both bearing important responsibilities in home and public life. But now American culture includes this odd phase of adolescence, which has become one of passive consumerism, of soaking up the glow of the TV and drooling over N' Sync. But woe, says Dobson, to selfish mothers who deny their home duties!

Even the warm and fuzzy idea of the ``nurturing home'' is surprisingly recent. Up until the 20th century, the primary expectation of parents was to ``model character'' for their children, no matter how coldly or remotely, while siblings or servants worried about one-on-one child care. Only in the 50s were parents - again, mostly the mothers - expected to intimately participate on a full-time basis in their children's lives, as gardeners coaxing their flowers to flourish. That can be a wonderful thing, as it was for me and my full-time mother. But it shouldn't be made mandatory, not by Dobson, not by society. What Dobson won't tell you is that research shows good day care can produce the most socially healthy children (I said good day care, not the sensationally bad day care the media always pick on to scare working mothers).

And then there are the many Christians for whom Dobson's smug, sugary family values talk is downright cruel. It's not fair that we always compare functional two-parent homes to dysfunctional single-parent ones when judging family patterns. Single-parent homes can be enriching Christian environments, and two-parent homes may not be. Churches must stop considering single people in general as inferior or incomplete members. And somebody should say this aloud: for the estimated one million American children who are living with homosexual couples, when the birth or adoptive partner dies, the best thing for the child is not to be transplanted to a foster home of heterosexual strangers, as is the law. The best thing for the child is to stay with the parent he or she knows. That's common sense, which, again, is the opposite of Dobson sense.

We graduating seniors are called to be ambassadors to this American kingdom as citizens of Christ's kingdom, and to notice the stark differences between the two - differences which the civil religion of my West Michigan upbringing was subpar at highlighting. So indeed, we must, if called to marry, form strong bonds of family, within which faith and faithfulness are cultivated. However, we must not fall into the national trap of glorifying family above all else, including community, civic, and church loyalty, and must not marginalize the unmarried. The remedy to rampant American individualism is not a return to the odd ideals of the 50s, however much conservatives lust for them, but rather a recommitment to faithfulness in all spheres of creation. We must be shining servants for Christ who value his radical truth above our comfortable cultural conformity.