"The Family is the Backbone of Society"

A Rosetta Stone unlocking much of modern politics

The ideas informing this post have been banging around in my head for years. I’m still not sure that they fully cohere into something intellegble and I’m certain that others who study family have thought these thoughts before and much more eloquently. Still, I’ll plow ahead.

One of the first references I found to highlight this unique role of the family in society was in Pope Paul IV’s 1963 Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope).

Thus the family, in which the various generations come together and help one another grow wiser and harmonize personal rights with the other requirements of social life, is the foundation of society. All those, therefore, who exercise influence over communities and social groups should work efficiently for the welfare of marriage and the family. Public authority should regard it as a sacred duty to recognize, protect and promote their authentic nature, to shield public morality and to favor the prosperity of home life. The right of parents to beget and educate their children in the bosom of the family must be safeguarded. Children too who unhappily lack the blessing of a family should be protected by prudent legislation and various undertakings and assisted by the help they need. (emphasis mine)

It’s no surprise that further Google searches turn up a number of Catholic or LDS sites making similar claims. I was nine in 1963, so Pope Paul’s statement didn’t mean a lot to me.

I really became aware of this “foundation of society” argument as it was deployed early this century as a tool in the fight over “traditional marriage”. The argument underlying all of the 2004 traditional marriage state constitutional amendments was that the family as it was known had been unchallenged for 3,000 years.

Obviously, there is a connection between couples and reproduction of the species. But this was only about biology in the most elemental sense. It was really about privileging a certain style of family life. There may be others, one supposes, but they don’t really contribute to the social good.

Never mind the rising social acceptance of divorce (see Reagan, Ronald) and the resulting blended families shuttling kids over weekends.

One also has to ignore the scads of research on how the image from Dick and Jane shown above reflects a mid-twentieth century, middle class, conception of family (see Stephanie Coontz’s work). The working dad and stay at home mom served up the menu of television families I grew up with.

When the Obergefell decision’s critics said that the Court had “redefined marriage”. Somehow this would be a threat to all of the Leave it to Beaver families that were out there (even though they outnumbered same-sex couples).

I don’t hear today’s social critics making the “backbone of society” claim in the same way. But it’s the idea that ties their policies preferences together.

J.D. Vance argues that “childless cat ladies” aren’t contributing to society and that postmenopausal grandmothers need to fulfill their duty to support the nuclear family of the next generation. Moms for Liberty wants to ban books from public school libraries for all to keep their kids from confronting material they don’t approve of . Conservatives block the child tax credit or policies for cheaper day care because they don’t want to incentivize women to work. I just got Jessica Calarco’s new book which argues that America doesn’t have a social safety net because we have women to do that essential work.

This particular image of idealized family feeeds a patriarchal view putting men in the privileged position. You don’t have to go as far as Goddard’s umbrella theology to see how our inability to deal with sexual abuse in politics or the workplace or the church or the school reflects a bias toward the male as the head of the ideal household.

Back in the day when I taught sociological theory, I would spend some time in the Robert Merton chapter exploring this notion of family. Merton was still in the functionalist school of thought that dominated American sociology from the late 1930s to the late 1960s. He argued for what he called “functional equivalents”. Where early scholars (like Parsons) argued that a given piece of social structure was the essential contribution to the social order, Merton suggested that there were alternatives that might work in a similar fashion.

The Old Testament tells us that Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. I imagine that if someone had told him that the right model was one man and one woman, he would have argued that society couldn’t survive such a transition in a key part of the social structure.

Whatever is going on in conservative talking points, in Project 2025, in evangelical sermons, in speeches in the well of the Congress, just remember that this is all about Dick and Jane and their parents.

Regardless of what the reality of modern families looks like.