Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Conservative Christians Shouldn't Defend The Nuclear Family

Transcript

Conservative Christians Shouldn't Defend The Nuclear Family · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  If you can't spend a year of your life in Jerusalem, then please understand and study this article with us because this experiment absolutely has failed. This idea that we can somehow go from multi-generational family, traditional family to nuclear family, and that this is going to work. We know it doesn't work. Talking about the functional family in a modern context is sort of a punchline.
• 0:23
  Hi, welcome to the Family Teams podcast. Our goal here is to help your family become a multi-generational team on mission by providing you with biblically rooted concepts, tools, and rhythms. Your hosts are Jeremy Pryor and Jefferson Bethke, and we can't wait to chat about all things family.
• 0:40
  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Family Teams podcast, fatherhood edition. I've got in the house two of my good friends, Tyler Graham and Chris Cirillo. Thank you guys for joining me today. Yeah, thanks for having me. Hey, good to be here, Jamie. Yeah, so some of you guys know Chris and Tyler. If you're not following them on LinkedIn, please give them a follow. Tyler's got an awesome project he's working on, three mile per hour fatherhood. This is all about coaching dads how to steward their voice, which is amazing.
• 1:07
  Man, that is awesome. I love that you're doing that, Tyler. So yeah, really recommend you guys check that out. 3MPHfatherhood.com. And then Chris is over there at Mission Fit Dads. I don't know if you guys have seen his stuff, but Chris helps dads get into shape, especially dads who are really interested in being multi-generational fathers. So yeah.
• 1:25
  If you want to join a bunch of patriarchs figuring out how to steward their bodies so they can steward their families, definitely check that out. So you can look at what Chris is doing or missionfit.co. But yeah, excited to talk to you guys. There's an interesting article that somebody shared with me, and I'm like, yes, this is...
• 1:42
  This needs some conversation. Um, and I'm really excited to dive into this one with you guys. So, um, unheard, which is a great little magazine podcast. Um, they, they really oftentimes surface voices, um, in a lot of these cultural conversations that I find interesting. Um, they did a, uh, Jerome. Hazoni did an article for them, um, called the nuclear family has failed. There is nothing conservative about atomization.
• 2:12
  And I'm like, man, I love that title. And this is a very counterintuitive perspective. A lot of people just say nuclear family equals anybody who's conservative, who's a Christian, who cares about family. We're all here to draw our defenses around this thing called the nuclear family. And Jerome is like, no, let's think about this. And actually, the Family Teams podcast, one of the first podcasts we did was on David Brooks' article on has the nuclear family failed?
• 2:39
  Um, and this is a conversation Jeff and I love to dive into, um, Jeff's book, Jeff Bethke's book, um, take back your family goes into this in a lot of detail. Um, trying to tease out like, is this nuclear family thing really what the Bible is talking about? Um, you know, your Rome is so interesting to me. He's a, um, he's a philosopher. He's an Israeli American. He's just returned to Israel with his family and nine children, um, and he's, he's, he's,
• 3:04
  to live in Jerusalem. And he's a political theorist. He's the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation. And he's the president of the Herzl Institute. He's a really interesting guy. And so if you ever get a chance to listen to Yerom on a podcast, it'll kind of blow your mind. He's thinking about...
• 3:23
  You know, what, what these things at a different level. But, um, so I was really, really interested to interact with his ideas around, uh, the family and, um, how to think about family. How do you get past this idea that the nuclear family is sort of the, the biblically, um, based family. And so big part of family teams is say, Hey guys, we gotta take a big step back.
• 3:43
  we have to really understand that the Bible doesn't actually present the idea of a nuclear family being the ideal. It really presents this multi-generational family team as the ideal. And this is super confusing for Christians because there basically are Christians who are going along with sort of secular culture and diminishing the importance of family. And those who try to defend the family are oftentimes defending the Western ideal, the modern Western family, as opposed to the
• 4:11
  I always find a lot of comfort from listening to Jewish voices on this topic because we actually have the same scriptures when it comes to the foundation of our understanding of family, the Hebrew scriptures.
• 4:27
  or the Christian Old Testament, we share these things in common. And so living in Israel and really seeing how Jewish families have preserved the multigenerational family team as being kind of the biblical ideal from Abraham
• 4:44
  has been helpful. So I want to read this article to you guys and interact. I'll read kind of the beginning section and make some comments. And then I'd love to get Tyler and Chris to weigh in on on on this topic. So I'll start. This is a year home's article. It says when people talk about the structure of the family, they often find themselves arguing for or against the quote, nuclear family.
• 5:06
  which consists on most telling of a father, a mother, perhaps two or three children in their care for the first 18 years of their lives. That's the definition of a nuclear family. These children are then supposed to leave the house, move somewhere far away, and make nuclear families of their own. Sounds familiar? That's pretty much almost 100% what the kind of conservative culture teaches, and you'll find almost no distinction in Christian church culture.
• 5:36
  Contemporary conservatives are especially inclined to embrace this image of the family, although it is not entirely clear why. The nuclear family is not the same as the traditional Christian or Jewish family that existed before the two world wars. And this is where so many Christians are shocked. They don't know this. They don't know they're defending a version of family that's that recent.
• 5:59
  On the contrary, the nuclear family is closer to being an invention of industrialization in the 20th century. And this is, again, what Jeff spends a lot of time teasing out in his book, Take Back Your Family. And there are good reasons to think that this form of family is, in fact, a failed experiment.
• 6:16
  one that has done immeasurable harm to almost everyone, to women and men, children and grandparents. The time has come for us to consider retiring the idea of the nuclear family and replacing it with something that looks more like the family of Christian and Jewish tradition.
• 6:33
  What is the traditional family? I'd like to propose five principles by which the traditions descended from the Bible channeled the natural tendencies of men and women to establish what I'm calling the traditional family. So what we talk about family teams is the family team or the multi-generational team on mission. Jerome is talking about the traditional family. That's his language in this article. So he's got five principles. Number one, the lifelong bond of a man and a woman.
• 7:01
  The traditional family is built upon the lifelong bond of a man and a woman. Contrary to what is often said, such a bond is not the dictate of untamed cult nature. Indeed, this is nothing more than that that is more contrary to human nature and in particular to male nature than a man marrying a woman with the intention of foregoing all other sexual interests for the rest of his life.
• 7:22
  But by this artifice, biblical religion sums up the forces of loyalty, honor, and the urge towards purity and holiness, turning these against the urge to seek sexual gratification outside of marriage and harnessing them to the project of establishing a strong household and giving it permanence in life. In this way, marriage brings peace.
• 7:41
  to the broader society, which no longer tolerates barbaric scenes of men shedding blood over women and of loose children who know nothing of their father. Instead, these competitive energies are turned to the building up of the household and all its members. This institution of lifelong marriage is indeed the first pillar of what we consider a civilized life. Now, this is not that different than the nuclear family idea. There's one big difference that he's pointing out here, I think, and that is...
• 8:08
  The lifelong marriage bond that a man and a woman, and that he's really highlighting the challenge that this creates for men in particular, to say no to their sexual urges for their entire life and focus all of that energy on one woman. The thing that really is different about the biblical family is this is in the service of building what Jerome calls a household.
• 8:29
  And most nuclear families are not building households. They're not building this thing that in the first century we understood was this place where you had so much like the center of the buzzing that not economic engine often at the center of a household. You have so much activity when it comes to the multigenerational family. What is often sacrificed in a nuclear family ideal is that once your children turn 18 and they leave,
• 8:54
  So much of the incentive for men to stay faithful to their wife, if they've really struggled with those temptations really erodes. And so that incentive is gone. I'm not doing this for my kids. I'm not really connected with my wife. And so this becomes a major problem and trend for a lot of people, but not a huge difference from the Nicular family, but I think important to point out. I'm going to read a second principle and then to get your guys' thoughts, and then I'll read the last three, and then we'll hit that. So number two, he says, the lifelong bond
• 9:22
  between a father and mother and their children. Similarly, the traditional family is built upon the lifelong bond between a father and mother and their children. Many suppose that this bond is natural as well, but this is not the case either.
• 9:37
  Children are by nature in awe of their parents in early childhood, but as their body and spirit grow to adult proportions, they are often filled with self-regard and treat their parents with defiance and contempt. In this way, nature prepares children to leave their parents and lead an independent life. Yet in the traditional family, the principle of honoring one's father and mother establishes a lifelong relationship between parents and children that is much like marriage.
• 10:04
  By this artifice, the forces of honor and loyalty are turned against the natural tendency of adolescents to grow contemptuous and abandon their parents. This permits children to continue learning from their parents throughout life, forming a permanent community of interlocking generations. And barbaric scenes of the elderly cast aside with none to care for them and of children preying on their parents to advance themselves are banished. Okay.
• 10:30
  So he's saying here that in the same way that the traditional family forces men, in particular women as well, but he's highlighting men to resist their more natural urges to have lots of sexual partners.
• 10:46
  The traditional family also challenges nature when it comes to the way children treat parents. And it commands children to honor their parents. In so doing, create a lifelong bond between their parents and the children, even though there's sort of a natural tendency to create that distance. That distance is honored in terms of there being a separate family branch that's emerging
• 11:14
  But it is also critical that those children not treat their parents with contempt. That's kind of what he's describing. And that this actually creates a different kind of family, this traditional family or what we call a multigenerational family. It's really somewhat dependent on...
• 11:30
  the decision of children to honor their parents. So there's a lot there in your Rome's thesis. And I'm excited to kind of hit the last three principles and see what you guys think. But I want to pause there. Tyler, we'll start with you. And then I'd love to talk to you, Chris, about this as well. Like Tyler, what does that start for you?
• 11:47
  Need a blueprint to revise your family to be a multi-generational team on mission? The book Family Revision by Jeremy Pryor is the book that summarizes all the big picture ideas you hear on this podcast. Available on Amazon or familyteams.com.
• 12:08
  Yeah, this has been a fun concept to learn more about over the past several years. And you were so kind to plug some of the things that we're doing. I'm going to plug yours here in your family revision book. This is where I was first introduced to this type of concept, a multi-generational team on mission.
• 12:28
  Um, it'll go as far as to say, uh, first two people that reach out to me after listening to this, I want to buy you a copy of the book if you haven't read it yet, because it's worth checking out, um, and, and reading because I think this concept is so, uh, it's, it's a paradigm shift, right? Like that's how I felt when I first read it. It makes me think of, I do work in healthcare technology, implementing new electronic medical record systems. And.
• 12:55
  We always talk about one of the most dangerous things that one of the most dangerous answers somebody can give as to why they do something is to say it's always been done that way. And there's no real, there's no like foundation or roots to actually back up the decision to do what they're doing. It may not be the best way.
• 13:16
  And I think that's how I view like the atomic family now, especially in our culture where I think this is just this is only picture that people have of what family looks like. They don't know that there's something else available, this traditional family or this multi-generational team. And when I first read your book, that was when, like I said, it was paradigm shifting because I'm like, what, there's something else out there. There's another option.
• 13:44
  And I love the way that he describes it in this article of like presenting how these more traditional methods of family have provided such benefit to marriages, to father-son bonds, to father-daughter, mother-son, mother-daughter. Like these, these things are actually strengthened by going back to these ways that family used to operate and, and, and.
• 14:13
  how the atomic family has really like negated those things. It's, it's we're robbed from these relationships in ways that as I view my life with my wife, Bree and my six kids, like, I don't, I don't want that with them. I don't, I don't want things to deteriorate when my kids turn 18. I don't want my marriage to fall apart when my kids move out of the house. Right? Like I want our home to be a hub now for our family to be the place where our family operates together. And I want it to continue to be that way.
• 14:43
  And I hope at some point in our conversation, Jeremy, you'll get to share about how you've done that, because I think you are living out that example right now. Yeah. I think there's so many people that hear the second principle that Yoram is articulating, that children can honor their parents. And that probably sounds impossible or completely ridiculous or something.
• 15:05
  And, you know, I, I have believed, you know, for a long time that there was something really wrong with this thesis that children are designed to fly the coop and live a completely independent life from the previous generation. And that every generation is supposed to hit the reset button and that this is, there's something natural about this.
• 15:27
  Um, and I think this is one thing that I would challenge a little bit about Jerome's characterization of it, of sort of the, the, the collision between what's natural. I agree a hundred percent that there is a natural, we love the word differentiation. So there's a differentiation that your children begin to experience when they enter adolescence. It's very healthy. And one of the things that you can do if you care about having a multi-generational family
• 15:50
  You need to make sure that your family allows your teenage children to differentiate. And if you become overly controlling and treat them like young children, then you become an unsafe realm or arena for them to differentiate. And so one of the things that April and I became really convinced of is we needed to make our house a safe place for our children to differentiate without violating the relationship between the generations.
• 16:16
  And that was a little bit tricky, but we have a lot of ways that we did that and that we continue to do that with our kids as they enter into teenage years or into adulthood. We want to celebrate the uniquenesses that they have. We want to let them fully express who they are. We want to find ways to bend the family culture around who they're becoming.
• 16:38
  Um, and, and, but part of that is an invitation to honor also what has come before. And, and so we have, we really did not experience a lot of, um, breakages relationally with our children in the phase of differentiation. Um, and I would say that, you know, that there was distance, like our two or two of our daughters just got back from South Korea. You know, Sydney spent three months there in an immersive language school and we went out and visited her, um, and we're missing her like crazy and very close to her during that whole time.
• 17:08
  And also just really celebrating, you know, the things that she was exploring and what that would mean, not just for her as an individual, an atomized individual, but also that what you're doing is actually a gift to our entire family. You're expanding our family's ability to understand these other cultures. And we're excited to see if God's going to give our family a calling. That's why we went out there. And also Lisa, her younger sister, went and joined her for a month.
• 17:33
  You know, things like that. So I think that that's, to your point, Tyler, like, yeah, we're trying to explore, is there an inevitability to breakages between a generation? Or is that something that's occurred because of our cultural elements that we have embraced now?
• 17:49
  that create a lot of that breakage. And I really am convinced it's the second. I think we've made a lot of really bad decisions to either be overly controlling and force our children to differentiate in a completely different arena where they feel like they need to be
• 18:04
  out of relationship with the previous generation in order just to become, you know, whatever God's called them to be, or just some, some kind of like smothering where it's like, no, you are underneath this family and you know, whatever, whatever you are going to become must be explored within the, the iron dome of our family's, uh, existing structure. And you cannot, uh, influence that in any way. Like, like there's gotta be that flexibility. Yeah.
• 18:32
  And you've talked about this before, Jeremy, where and you've described it well just now, even that like your family vision and mission needs to be able to expand and be broad enough to account for the unique giftings and callings of your kids. And I think about how so many families right there, their mission is to get their kids to 18 and get out of the house. And if that's the mission.
• 18:58
  Once the kid turns 18, there's nothing left for them there, right? They've reached the end and now it's their time to go and start their own thing. There's nothing for them to come back to and contribute towards. And so I think having that vision and that mission that allows for everybody within your family to contribute beyond that, you know,
• 19:21
  weird 18 year cutoff that we arbitrarily put on so many of these, like that's going to be the thing that so often is bringing the kids back, maybe keeping them from that, you know, natural tendency to go find that elsewhere. They don't need to, if that's present in their family. Right. Totally. Yeah. A hundred percent. So yeah, I think, I think I really want to also say those of you guys who have younger children, you're listening to this and saying, well, exactly how does this apply to somebody who's, you know, fathering and mothering young children? And
• 19:49
  And I think it's so important. Are you holding your breath for when your kids turn 18? There's a parenting style that I think that necessitates. Now, when your kids especially enter into adolescence and some of these, some of these elements of differentiation start to occur in your family, what I feel like culturally we're told is just hold on, you know, like they'll be gone in just a few years.
• 20:12
  And so instead of fighting for the relationship, instead of really hanging in there and saying, look, we're like, this is a big deal. Like I, I, I care about you. I love you. I want you to differentiate. I want you to explore a lot of things and, and really understand all the things that God has given you and who he's made you to be. But you must honor this family while you go through that. Is it possible for children to learn how to do that? And yes, it is. And a lot of that is, it goes both ways. The parents have to honor the child's family.
• 20:38
  process of differentiation and, and be very careful about how you, and this is really, you know, transitioning from being that, that sort of, um, rule that person is constantly enforcing rules to being a coach, like constantly having hearts, hearts to hearts, whatever you're learning and creating in the culture of your young children.
• 20:56
  It's going to pay massive dividends when they turn 13, 14, 15 and start entering into differentiation. So much of parenting young children is doing it in a way to make sure that when they enter into adolescence, teenage life, that the relationship can handle.
• 21:13
  the, the, the huge impact of differentiation, that process, um, and what the, the relationship does not fracture underneath the stress of that season. Chris, what does this turn out for you? A couple of thoughts on the article, but before I, I mean, that just a response to what you guys are sharing. Um, yeah.
• 21:30
  One of the things this brings to mind, especially with five young boys in the house, is the transition period and how often what people are doing in parenting seems to be flip-flopped from what I believe is probably a more effective process. And that is like...
• 21:47
  When a child is born and they're totally dependent on father and mother, that is like the highest level of control over their entire environment in every aspect of their life. And as they grow, control should stay high but slowly reduce as relationship, I think, slowly increases to the point where most people are doing this flip-flop where they are –
• 22:13
  Their kids are young and, you know, it's like, oh, they're just little kids. And, you know, so their control is not there. The shaping, the training, the controlled environment is not there. And they become adolescent or teenagers and they're...
• 22:29
  that foundation hasn't been built and now they're off the rails and their control, it decreases and the parents clamp down. And that's that differentiation timeframe that you're describing. And it's like, we need to flip flop as parents. So if you're a young parent listening, like now is the season to have the high control and begin to dabble in some of the heart depth relationship type stuff so that you can set yourself up for that transition over time. Yes. Um,
• 22:56
  And then, yeah, the one primary thing that came to mind with this is even if someone doesn't have a framework for a multi-generational classical family, we still have to look at this and ask ourselves the question, is this actually working?
• 23:14
  And every data point that you could come up with is proving that this is a colossal failure. Right. And so I, I know it's cliche. I just often think of for myself and for anybody listening, it's like, if we keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting somehow there to be a breakthrough and some, some progress to be made, um.
• 23:34
  it's just the definition of insanity. We have to turn back. We have to start asking the question. And then I think, family revision or any other, look at the scriptures and asking, are these scriptures actually applicable for me? I'm a follower of Jesus. Do these inform my life? And should I be considering the fact that these have some influence on the way that I should be doing things? And
• 24:02
  I was reading recently with my brother going back through mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. And one of the quotes that, um,
• 24:10
  really stood out to me for not just our era, but I think human history is, he said, we all want progress, but progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you've taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about turn and walking back to the right road. And in that case, the man who turns back the soonest is the most progressive man. There's nothing progressive about being pig headed and refusing to admit a mistake. Yeah.
• 24:40
  And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We're on the wrong road. And if that is, if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on. So that was resounding in my mind as I'm reading this. I'm like, there's a better way. We need to turn back. Just admit it. It's not worth it. Oh, man, that's so good. Chris. Well, yeah, one of the things I would say, too, is I love that quote from C.S. Lewis.
• 25:10
  The compass point, just to give like two quick data points. Number one, the United States has the largest number of, the largest percentage of single parent households in the entire world. So we are living in ground zero of the experiment that failed. And then a second data point is that Israel is the only country in the entire developed world that has an above replacement rate in terms of children right now.
• 25:39
  And so when I think about a compass point, like where do we leave and how do we get back? This is, you guys will hear me talk about this a lot because, I mean, this is what happened. This was my story. And that is that, that I went from, you know, Seattle living in the Northwest, like, like Chris does, you know, in a place where there's, there's a real advanced version, I think of this family collapse idea. And then immediately was in Jerusalem.
• 26:02
  where what shocked me was it was a it was a modern city you know it was but it was but the families were so different and so it was just the contrast for me was so powerful and what your Rome is pointing out here and I'm really hoping if you can't if you can't spend a year of your life in Jerusalem then please understand and study this article with us because you're
• 26:25
  The compass point on the way back is what we're trying to find. We got to find out this experiment absolutely has failed. This idea that we can somehow go from multi-generational family, traditional family to nuclear family, and that this is going to work. We know it doesn't work. And that doesn't mean that there are not rare exceptions. But talking about the functional family in a modern context is sort of a punchline.
• 26:51
  People are like, there is no such thing. And when people start to become cynical about family, you can either think that the idea of family that God originally had was inherently flawed. And I think a lot of people think that. Like, they believe that God had this idea.
• 27:14
  about the family, and it just doesn't work well at all. And maybe they think sin is so terribly corrupted that that's the reason. But for whatever reason, family is just a bad design. Or you can think, maybe we're not actually living out family in the way God designed it.
• 27:29
  And that doesn't mean that, again, sin can't come into any family structure and destroy it, including multigenerational traditional families. You're not going to find a family blueprint that can withstand somebody's complete selfishness, for example. But the actual design of the family is really, really good. So I want to read the last parts of this and get your guys' reaction to this. So he has three more principles that I think are really important to consider. Number three.
• 27:54
  The traditional family is a business enterprise. Because liberal society considers one's, quote, career to be the defining characteristic of the individual, we have largely forgotten that the traditional family was usually a business enterprise.
• 28:10
  The average family was engaged in farming, commerce, light manufacture, or a profession, and the family business was usually conducted close to the home, if not within the home itself. Often, both parents were deeply involved with the family business, a custom that is vividly described in the Bible. Parents taught their children their business, and children gained self-esteem as well as practical skills by contributing actively to the family livelihood.
• 28:37
  Where children went to school, this was balanced against responsibilities to the family business, and the family itself was often extended by the informal adoption of unmarried relations or of young men and women who were hired to help with the business and had no other home.
• 28:52
  So this is another observation, and this is the whole reason he's describing here why we started Family Inc. And the whole reason we started that, a lot of people have said that. Someone just posted today a snarky comment that, why did you guys, why would you ever do such a thing? Why would you start a family, like obviously just as a money grab? I'm like, no, you don't know what we think about family. This is a natural extension of our vision for what family is.
• 29:22
  share these things in common. And that is that they require a business asset building engine somewhere in the family. It doesn't mean you can't have a career or a job. There are ways to have a job as one of the income streams of the family, but you got to think about your family as an economic entity.
• 29:40
  And this was completely normal for in every other form in history today. The modern Western family is strictly a consuming entity and the individuals are the only ones with any economic activity. That is incredibly unusual historically. And so he's pointing this out. And it's very difficult to build a household without beginning to create economic engines through the family that actually create cohesion.
• 30:06
  We experienced this dramatically. I had no idea this was true, by the way. This was something we discovered completely by accident, really. I was in ministry, and when we started our first business, we moved to the Northern Kentucky area, and I experienced something I wasn't expecting. I didn't see it coming. But as soon as we started a business...
• 30:22
  All the family members started to move towards our area. And for some, it happened immediately. Like when we opened our first business, April's sister moved from Manhattan to Genoa, Kentucky to help us. April's dad would come down. Like he lived in Columbus two hours away. He'd come down for hours, like for days every week just to help us. April's brother moved here. Then my dad moved here. Then my sister. I mean, it was like...
• 30:47
  I was like, what is happening? Like we created a business and it created this vortex of all of a sudden reasons to come together. The opposite is what oftentimes happens with so many of the economic ways that we think about providing in our culture, which is that oftentimes when there is no economic engine, your children often are forced
• 31:07
  to find employment elsewhere. Like unless you live in a pretty diverse city where there's lots and lots of economic opportunity, even then, if you join a corporation, they could move you, right? Now with remote work and there's career paths, I think that are much more friendly. And I think we need to be careful about pursuing some of those if we care about keeping our family together. But by and large,
• 31:28
  an economic engine has all kinds of impacts on the kind of family you can develop. And we have to just be really honest about that and look at it carefully. All right, number four, it says, the traditional family consists of multiple generations in daily contact.
• 31:45
  The traditional family often consisted of three generations or even four in daily contact with one another. The bond between parents and children was not yet imagined as something that undergoes a rupture when a child turns 18 or 21, and so the relationship of parents to children continued throughout life. And where there is no rupture between adult children and their parents, grandchildren grow up with grandparents and perhaps great-grandparents. Thus, young children were able to learn the skill of honoring their father and mother by watching their parents do it.
• 32:13
  It also means that in raising children, grandparents often were crucial presence, providing stores of wisdom and attention to children who learned to honor earlier generations as an integral part of growing up. Oh my gosh, this is like a daily experience for us. I remember yesterday, my wife April was watching our grandson because our daughter was on an all-day discipleship journey.
• 32:40
  Uh, event. And so while she was doing that, so we're a family team and our, the essence of our family team is to, is to multiply disciples. And so we, we worked together on that. And so it was so much fun, like getting to be with Elijah, my grandson, and then, then my dad.
• 32:56
  was walking around the property. You know, we live in a four-generation house. And so, you know, Elijah's like reaching out for my dad. And, you know, my dad just is a normal part of daily life, just gets to be with his grandson and play with him and talk to him while I'm playing and talking to him. It's just like, just normal. That was just a scene that happens every day around here. And I think, again...
• 33:15
  Totally natural, totally normal, nothing unusual historically about that at all. It's what you could expect. Incredibly weird today. Like, you don't see that. And so all of these things really, there's a sequence too, I think, to what he's describing here that kind of builds towards that kind of a family. The last thing he says is traditional family is part of a broader congregation.
• 33:38
  The traditional family was part of a broader loyalty group, the clan, which in later versions became the community or congregation with which it was concerned on a daily basis. Such communities or congregations often include adult siblings and cousins who had chosen to live in proximity to one another, assisting one another.
• 33:55
  But many members of the Klan community or congregation were not kin relations in this sense. Rather, they were members of an alliance of families who together formed a kind of adopted and extended family, which came together to celebrate Sabbaths and festivals, to teach and train the community's children, to provide relief to those in distress, to improve their communal economic assets, and were needed to establish security and justice as well. Man, this is so important.
• 34:20
  You know, we, we live life with a specific community of six or seven other families. We celebrate various festivals together. It's hard to pull off those things and we, we train each other's kids and we are a part of even a larger circle of a clan. We have a thing where dads are, our youth ministry is, is exclusively fathers training kids. And so, um, there's a, what we call young adults midrash. And so all the dads take turns and it's on our house every other week and another, another dad's, you know, their family's house. And so.
• 34:48
  this we need each other we need to be a part of a larger clan um and there's a lot of economic activity at that level like all the things he's describing um happens at that level festivals education um so i'll read his conclusion and then get your guys thoughts like what you hear be sure to leave a rating and review for this podcast wherever you use streaming
• 35:12
  Of course, not every family was successful along all five of these dimensions. Nevertheless, once these principles are examined together, it becomes clear that the traditional Jewish or Christian family was far more active, extensive, and powerful organization than the family as it exists today. Yes, far more active, extensive, and powerful.
• 35:30
  As anyone who has lived among such families can immediately see, the nuclear family is a weakened and much diminished version of the traditional family, one that is lacking most of the resources needed effectively to pursue the purposes of the traditional family. Yes, you see nuclear families is almost like a fragment of a family. And so it's not it's not surprising that it falls apart and becomes even more fragmented into a single parent household or and it continues to degrade in that way.
• 35:56
  When this conception of the family became normative in America and elsewhere after the Second World War, it gave birth to a world of detached suburban homes connected to distant places of employment and schools by trains and automobiles and buses. In other words, the physical design of large portions of the country reflected a newly rationalized conception of the family. By the way, this is why we decided to move into a community that was planned before World War II. So our community was planned in the late 1800s. Our house was built in the 1890s. I completely agree with what he's saying. There's actually a community design problem.
• 36:26
  We actually have designed communities that make what we're describing in these five principles virtually impossible or much more difficult. In this new reality, there are no longer any business enterprises in the home for the family to pursue together. Instead, fathers would, quote, go to work, succeeding from their families during their productive hours each day. Children were required to go to school, succeeding from the family during their own productive hours. Young adults would then go away to college, cutting themselves off from family influence during the critical years in which they were supposed to reach maturity. By the way, yeah.
• 36:55
  We hand our kids over to an educational system, oftentimes, that we know is opposed to our values. We then pay those people to systematically train the young people of our family in values opposed to our family during the most vulnerable years of their lives.
• 37:14
  That's our design right now. We think that's a good idea. That's almost universal within the Christian world. It blows my mind. Similarly, grandparents were excised from the vision of the home being retired to retirement communities or nursing homes. Under this new division of labor, mothers were assigned the task of remaining by themselves in the house each day, attempting to make a home using the minimalist ingredients that the structure of the nuclear family had left for them. Much of this involved increasingly desperate efforts to keep adolescents somehow attached to the
• 37:40
  now shared virtually no productive purpose with their parents, grandparents, and broader community or congregation, and instead spent their days seeking honor among their adolescents. There's a whole rabbit hole there. Read, hold on to your kids if you want to understand the nightmare that that's creating and how to fix it. The resulting rupture between parents and their children was poignant, described in numerous books and films beginning in the 50s. But these works rarely touched upon the reconstruction of the family. This is what has always shocked me, is that we...
• 38:09
  There are a hundred times more examples in art and literature and movies of why this is breaking down and almost none about how to fix it. These work rarely touched on the reconstruction of the family, which had done so much to inflame the natural tendencies of adolescents toward agonized rebellion while depriving parents of the tools necessary to emerge from these years with the family hierarchy strengthened. But mothers had the worst of this new family life.
• 38:33
  Some did succeed in maintaining the cohesion of their families in a world in which grandparents and other family relations had grown impossibly distant. The family businesses had disappeared from the home, and their congregation or community with its Sabbaths and festivals had likewise been reduced to something accessed by automobiles once each week, like a drive-in movie. Yes, absolutely.
• 38:55
  Yeah. I don't even know if I want to talk about that rabbit hole, but yes, it's unbelievable how we have taken, and we don't have the tools to take what was the center of the faith in these times in history. You say like Roman religion or first century Jewish religion, all of it was centered in the home. It's today almost all centered in the outside of the home and these other spaces. However, many...
• 39:20
  Other, quote, housewives despaired and turned to the feminist movement, which not without reason declare the nuclear family to be a tomb for women. 100% agree with what he's saying here. Feminist writers were mistaken in supposing the reconstructed household of the post-war era was itself the traditional family. Yes, that was the mistake. Feminists turned their guns on that, and they didn't realize that what they're—we have common cause—
• 39:43
  Like, I agree with so much. I study. There's a lot of feminists I follow because they're saying exactly the same thing that we're saying of family teams all the time. They're talking about how this is terrible for women, that there's a whole nother pathway for women. But they often don't see this sort of pre-war family as being what really what created a place of thriving for women.
• 40:06
  But they were right that the life of a woman spending most of her productive hours in an empty house, which has been stripped of most of the human relationships, activities, and purpose that had filled the life of the traditional family was one that many women found too painful and difficult to bear. Many of these mothers quickly joined their husbands and children in leaving the home during the day, thus completing the final transformation of the post-mobody.
• 40:24
  traditional nuclear family into a hollowed out shell, a failed invitation of the traditional institution of the family. Yes. So fathers left the home and then the mother left the home. And so what's really confusing for a lot of people when we talk about how important motherhood is and coming back to the home, again, they think that we're talking about returning to the 1950s. No, we want fathers and mothers to be working together as teams. That's a completely different vision. And that's what we left. Much has been said about the dissolution of the family and
• 40:51
  And polemic treatments tend to focus on a number of important symptoms of this disillusion. Marriage now happens later in life, if at all. The birth rate has declined. Divorce, childbirth, outside of marriage, and fatherless households are now all common. So you can see all of those various metrics that are just demonstrating how broken this idea is. These and many other indicators reflect a widespread failure to hand down the traditional institution of the family to future generations, but very little is said about the disease itself.
• 41:19
  which is a removal from the physical household of much of what the family was a little more than a century ago. Now that the household is no longer the location of a common business enterprise, of devotion to God, the study of scriptures, of a direct responsibility for the education of the young, of a direct responsibility for honoring and caring for the old, of a significant responsibility for the establishment and growth of the community and congregation, why should anyone be surprised?
• 41:40
  that what remains is neither terribly sturdy nor especially attractive to the young. If I had been writing this a few years ago, I would have assumed that most of my readers would have few experiences that confirm my argument. But the COVID-19 pandemic had changed this. The extended closings of businesses and schools, churches and synagogues have offered many people some insight into the potential power of the traditional family.
• 42:03
  Suddenly, they have found themselves conducting their business at home, their schooling at home, their religious life at home. Suddenly, many young adults have found themselves returning over great distances to live with older and younger family members or to be in close proximity to them. Suddenly, many families have discovered the healing joy of preparing and eating meals together according to a regular routine and the unparalleled riches that conversations in such context can bring into our lives. Yes.
• 42:27
  I agree. I mean, a lot of people didn't have that experience, but some people who did because of COVID, they can see what we're talking about. They got a little taste of it. I know that in many cases, these experiences were not always pleasant. Not everyone lives in a physical home that was built for such an experiment. And having to make a living and educate one's children under such conditions has often been a genuine hardship. Yet in spite of these challenges, or rather because of them...
• 42:49
  Many have had their first glimpse of what a family thrown together and having to rely on its own resources is capable of achieving when it takes on a more extensive array of common purposes. In particular, many have experienced the kind of heightened cohesion that can come of it. In other words, many have had their first glimpse of what a family was like when it was a strong political institution in which generations worked together to create a permanent community very much resembling a little tribe or nation.
• 43:17
  Perhaps this difficult event has paved the way for us to think more carefully about what has been lost, about what each of us can do to make restoration a reality. And that restoration is why family teams came into existence. So I appreciate what Yerome has to say here. Chris, we'll start with you and then love to get your reaction. Tyler, we've got a few more minutes. So yeah, Chris, what stirred up for you in that part of the essay?
• 43:42
  Yeah, kind of going back to the last three bullet points that he talked about, I think helped wrap up the full picture. I think I would ask this question for myself if I'm hearing this for the first time is, do I believe that family is a vehicle?
• 44:00
  And so we see in Genesis 128, family is the primary vehicle for taking God's ways and principles into all the world. That was God's unadulterated design before the fall.
• 44:13
  And if there are so many components to the way that the world functions and the family is the vehicle, then like if it's the vehicle, then it must and it has to impact the economy, the marketplace, the community, the church. Like all of those elements have to be wrapped into the family. Otherwise, it's not an effective expression of what it was intended to be. Yeah.
• 44:38
  And then if that's true, then we should be pursuing the ideal. Now, I think where when you've talked a lot about how we stop talking about standards because people can't reach them and it's like offensive and all those things. And I think that plays into this here. And I think he did a good job at the end highlighting, yeah, this isn't going to be perfect and pretty and not going to be easy. In fact, it's probably going to be incredibly hard at times, but
• 45:04
  Our pursuit should be on the ideal with realistic expectations and thinking if we shift this way, our expectation should be that the ideal is realized many generations from now, not in our own. And so to have a healthy expectation of that. Yeah.
• 45:26
  We know there's strength in numbers. That's why we're supposed to be fruitful and multiply. And as we seek to influence and realize a particular end, it makes so much sense that we would be this network of multi-generational households that have economic influence and are centered around a particular set of ideals and in our case, Christianity. And I would say last piece of,
• 45:52
  This was family, depending on what you believe in the age of the earth, this was the family design for 6,000 years at least, if not 10,000. Right. And what we're experiencing is 100, 200 years in the making, right? And like 1% of human history is what we are currently grasping onto and like holding to for dear life rather than saying,
• 46:21
  Maybe we should be looking at the other 6,000 years. Right. Yes. Yeah. When it was actually functional, not that it was perfect. Sin corrupts everything for sure. Yes. But the design of the family did make sense. It was, it was cohesive. And to your point, so you have in Genesis one, and this is what, yeah, really shocked me when I really began to realize it.
• 46:39
  You had God make a decision. He gave us a theology of family, a purpose for family. He gives a mission statement for family to fill the earth, to be fruitful, multiply, fill, subdue, and rule. And everything, and this is what I began to realize, that business, that education, education,
• 46:56
  in that community life or church life are all nested really underneath that, that, that realm, that, that original design of the family. And if you, if you, if your family theology is wrong, you will have a corrupted family,
• 47:11
  theology of business, you'll have a corrupted theology of education, and you'll have a corrupted theology of the church, ecclesiology. You cannot arrive at a biblical ecclesiology, a biblical theology of education, or a biblical understanding of business if you have a complete misunderstanding of the theology of family.
• 47:27
  And so these things are, are inextricably linked to a kind of family, a kind of family that is being fruitful, multiply feelings of doing a ruling the household, the, the oikos, right? That's why you had so many household salvations in the book of Acts. That's why you had so much going on. The, the, the household was the infrastructure of the church in the first century, but it wasn't, it wasn't house church in that, like it was a place for a church that, that we understand meeting in the house. The household was the infrastructure. It was what Jerome is talking about here.
• 47:56
  It was these tribes. It was these clans. It was all of their resources were being leveraged and were being brought into the kingdom of God. And it provided the infrastructure for the kingdom. So, Tyler, why don't you wrap us up? Any last thoughts before we go here today?
• 48:12
  Yeah, so many things. I mean, we could go for a few more hours on this one, I think. So I'll try to keep it to sitting. There's three points that come to mind that I'll be brief on. The first is to continue Chris's analogy of the family as a vehicle.
• 48:29
  As you were reading the article, Jeremy, it almost sounds it's like the we've replaced the household is like a vehicle is replace it with a gas station. Right. So the place where you come to sleep and eat and refuel and then kind of go on about your day. And I think that's one of the main things that that needs to shift that we've seen shift in our own family, where like the family does become the foundational part of how we operate is like our home. Working from home, homeschooling here.
• 48:58
  Uh, it, it doesn't become just the place to, to refuel and go out, but becomes the place from which we like operate, which is huge. I think another thing that Chris said, uh, where you talked about how this is like a recent development, it made me think of how we are so prone in our culture now to assume that anything that is less or that is slow or that is old is bad. Right. Right.
• 49:23
  New, fast, more, those are good. And so if we're not able to take a step back and acknowledge the success of the traditional family and not assume that it's bad because it's old, because it's ancient, we lose so much when we simply assume that surely things by nature of being newer must be better. And that's just simply not the case. We see it with nuclear families.
• 49:51
  here. And then the third thing I think it is almost like a reframing of how we perceive family. Uh, and you touched on this a little bit earlier, Jeremy, um, where I think the, the general picture of family has become so broken. And if you read through the comments of this article, they're very illuminating.
• 50:12
  and how people perceive family. And there's almost just this natural expectation that kids should want to move out and leave their family, that parents should want their kids to leave. That you're almost sick of each other by that point. You mentioned that earlier, Jeremy Ian.
• 50:28
  My in-laws live right across the street. They moved in a few years ago. And it was like even the way that people perceive that, right, when they're asking me, like, oh, how do you feel about that? Your in-laws being so close to you, that seems like a recipe for disaster. And that's just the way people perceive family is that it's bad, it's negative, that surely there's something there that's not good. And when in reality, having my in-laws across the street has been
• 50:57
  nothing but good right there's been no negatives to having them right there it's been such a tremendous blessing to my wife and i to our kids my parents are 10 minutes down the road having everybody here has been such a tremendous blessing when you see what family really can enable when you view it rightly and not through this lens that a family is something that actually holds you back that you need to break free from
• 51:20
  And it's sadly like the reality that so many people are either experiencing or think they're experiencing because that's just the general way that I think family is talked about. So, again, a lot more we could probably share, but those are kind of the three thoughts closing that I've got.
• 51:36
  Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that. I, I, yeah, we want to give you guys hope. We know that there's a lot of toxic stuff that I'm sure a lot of you guys listen to this or think it's not a good idea for me to integrate with upstream generations. We, we get it. Um, and so we have to, like Chris had said earlier, we have to be honest about the ideal. We have to be honest about the design so that our children and our grandchildren can experience something closer to this biblical idea of family.
• 52:01
  So that's why we need to just be honest and talk about it. Yes, it's very broken in our culture. And people are going to listen to this and have their own intuitive reactions. But some of those reactions are coming from Western ideas of family that have broken down. And so we're looking for something else. And so we encourage you guys, this should be the very beginning of a conversation. Like both Tyler and Chris are saying, like, you have to make a decision what kind of family you want to build.
• 52:23
  And so if you decide to shift to this kind of a family, it's a huge transition. It's going to require a lot of thinking, a lot of like re-thinking the way you spend time, energy, money, everything. It's going to be a huge, long, multi-multi-year transition, decades transition.
• 52:39
  And that's why we started Family Teams to have like a little bit of a community that you can, you can go on this journey with. So, yeah, I'm so encouraged to hear this from Jerome, from, I'm so glad that UnHerd published this article. It just really well describes what we've been trumpeting here for a long time. So thank you guys so much for joining me today on this podcast.
• 53:00
  Thank you for listening to the Family Teams podcast. If you're enjoying this content or have learned something new, please make sure to leave a rating and review and share with a friend. To stay up to date with our events, new content, and products, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Family Teams.