Schism is Wrong

The normal state of the church is a competition of the left and right for the loyalist center. Sometimes that competition breaks down, and one side or the other talks about splitting the church. When the Presbyterian Church recovered from one of these schisms, the Old Side/New Side split of the early 18th century, it wisely adopted the standard for dissent that we have to this day. The standard of 1758 reads:

That when any matter is determined by a major vote, every member shall either actively concur with, or passively submit to, such determination; or if his conscience permit him to do neither, he shall, after sufficient liberty modestly to reason and remonstrate, peaceably withdraw from our communion without attempting to make any schism. Provided always, that this shall be understood to extend only to such determinations as the body shall judge indispensable in doctrine and Presbyterian government.

In the months ahead, there will be calls for schism, some in anger, some under the name of "gracious separation." Our polity does not allow for either, and our officers have vowed to uphold the standard of modest remonstration and, if necessary, peaceable withdrawal.

I do firmly believe that the church can return to civil competition under the PUP standard, which is our good old Adopting Act standard. But if some of our brothers and sisters, of the left and the right, feel it necessary to leave, let them do so in the decent and orderly way that our church has wisely upheld for a quarter millennium.

Loyalists, Step Up: Volunteer for Examination Committees

Now that the Peace, Unity, and Purity report has passed, the burden shifts to sessions and presbyteries to really examine – and re-examine – officers of the church. Too often we let these examinations become perfunctory. We get to know someone as a decent person and an active member of the congregation, and let that substitute for a serious judgment of whether they are really suited to be a Ruling Elder of the church. When it comes to potential ministers in our presbytery, we are more likely to rely on their seminary credential to assure us that a candidate would be a sound minister.

Now that the application of national standards has been returned to the local ordaining and examining bodies, those of us who live and pray in those local congregations and presbyteries must do our part to make those national standards real. PUP can help promote the peace and unity of the church at the national level. But this will only work if we have the will to promote purity at the local level.

Seriously examining someone else's vocation face to face is a very hard thing to do. It is much easier for the perennial critics in the church to attack other people from a distance. Loyalists, though, are loyal to their actual local church.

Therefore, loyalists need to take up the burden of judgment and discrimination, in the highest sense of those terms, in order for there to be purity, unity, and, in the long run, peace in the church.

PUP Passes – Let the Local Application Begin

The Report of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church was debated by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) last night. After a serious, civil debate, the report passed, 57% to 43%.

The debate was all about conservative attempts to prevent the Authoritative Interpretation from taking effect. There were no liberal efforts to stop the two-year moratorium on amending the constitution. Indeed, an overture to delete the chastity and fidelity provision of the constitution was rejected later in the evening by 81% of the Assembly.

By my reading, the PUP report marks a return to the great centrist principle of the Adopting Act of 1729. This is the standard the church has returned to again and again after major conflicts. The Adopting Act requires all officers to subscribe to the church's standards, explaining any "scruples" they might have about particular parts of the constitution. If the ordaining body judges that those scruples do not touch essential matters, then the officer is ok. This judgment by the locals is subject to review by the higher bodies. But everyone is better off if, in the words of the PUP report, all parts of the church "outdo one another in honoring" the judgments of the other parts of the church. The Authoritative Interpretation says that the church does not have to change its constitution to adopt this standard of judgment, because it has been there in the constitution all along.

The PUP report says that it will promote "local application" of national standards. Opponents say that the AI will lead to "local option" or, in more heated moments, "local license," in which the locals will simply make up their own standards.

I believe that the PUP report is a centrist measure. Restoring the Adopting Act rule will take a little doing – we don’t have one confession any more, and we don't have the same track record about how scrupling applies to the rules of order as it does to the confession of faith. Nonetheless, I am hopeful that the effect of the PUP report will be to promote the peace of the church.

To do that, though, we need to have the locals apply the national standards justly. Nearly all presbyteries and sessions will be just and honorable. A few, though, have already demonstrated their determination to simply defy the constitution and the rest of the church. Most of this open defiance has been on the left, especially about gay ordination. A few conservative congregations, though, have long resisted ordaining women, in defiance of the very clear standards of the church. And one or two conservative presbyteries have come close to threatening defiance if the PUP report were adopted.

To make local application work, the national church will have to clearly discipline defiance on the right and the left. It will only take a few judicial cases, or a few public rebukes, and maybe a few firings. The church as a whole can only trust that the standards are really standards if they are enforced in egregious cases. They have the rules – all the church leaders need is the will.

Misstep on the Minority Report

The opponents of the PUP report have made a mistake, I think, in the minority report from the Ecclesiology Committee. In the committee, there was a long debate over deleting recommendation 5, the Authoritative Interpretation.

That failed, 23-37.

They then tried to have 5 and 6 (the moratorium on changing the existing constitution) sent to the presbyteries for comment before final action by the General Assembly.

That failed 26-38.

The conclusion I would draw from this vote, and the debate that preceded it, was that there was more support for getting systematic input from the presbyteries on the two core ideas of the Peace, Unity, and Purity report than there is for killing the Authoritative Interpretation outright.

Instead, the report's opponents went for the whole victory the first time. The minority report reads, in its entirety:

In place of Item 06-01, Recommendations 5, 6, and 7, we move the following recommendations:

1. That Item 06-01, Recommendation 5, be disapproved.

2. That Item 06-01, Recommendations 6 and 7 be approved.

The minority report was filed by 17 commissioners and youth advisory delegates.

I have no doubt that the minority report will fail in this morning's debate. The minority may then try to send 5 and 6 to the presbyteries for comment. If this is proposed after they tried to kill 5 altogether, I think the Assembly is less likely to consider the proposal on its merits, and more likely to see it merely a delaying tactic.

I believe PUP will pass this morning.

The Center is Holding

On the first day of committee work at the Presbyterian General Assembly, they rejected an attempt to make the definition of marriage more restrictive or to oppose government recognition of gay unions. That set a limit on the right side.

On the second day of committee work, they rejected an attempt to undo the rule that officers of the church must be chaste in singleness or faithful in marriage (of one man and one woman, in case anyone were confused). That set a limit on the left side.

Last night the Ecclesiology Committee finally approved the Peace, Unity, and Purity report, 41 to 22. They had made a couple of minor changes, but basically passed it as the Task Force wrote it. The one real addition that the committee made to the report strengthens its centrist character. Listening to the hours of debate, what struck me as the weakest point of the report was the language about judicial review. The relevant section of recommendation 5 reads:

Ordaining and installing bodies, acting as corporate expressions of the church, have the responsibility to determine their membership by applying these standards to those elected to office. These determinations include:

d. Whether the ordaining/installing body has conducted its examination reasonably, responsibly, prayerfully, and deliberately in deciding to ordain a candidate for church office is subject to review by higher governing bodies.

This last point has disturbed some people, who read section d as limiting judicial review of local decisions to the process that the locals used, but not the substance of the decision. If, for example, a presbytery ordained an atheist, the General Assembly's Permanent Judicial Commission (the "supreme court") could only look at whether the presbytery used proper process, but not stop the ordination because the candidate was an atheist.

The Task Force, and the representative of the church's Advisory Committee on the Constitution, were repeatedly questioned on this point. In their reading, "reasonably" and "responsibly" covers the substance, as well as the process, of an examination. The ACC representative said that this language was taken from judicial decisions of the church courts, which have already interpreted this standard to include substantive judicial review.

Nonetheless, the plain words do invite misunderstanding, at least. So the Ecclesiology Committee amended section d. It now reads:

d. Whether the examination complies with the Constitution of the PCUSA, and whether the ordaining/installing body has conducted its examination reasonably, responsibly, prayerfully, and deliberately in deciding to ordain a candidate for church office is subject to review by higher governing bodies.

Three committee actions, all strengthening the loyalist understanding of how the church should work.

Let the plenary begin.

You Heard it Here: PUP Will Pass

At 5:10 p.m. yesterday, Birmingham time, the Ecclesiology Committee of the Presbyterian General Assembly took its first vote on the most disputed section of the Peace, Unity, and Purity report, and the report survived.

The most contested recommendation of the PUP report is #5, the Authoritative Interpretation of the Constitution. The AI proposes to revive the church's custom, dating from the Adopting Act of 1729, of trusting the local governing bodies to make sure that church officers stay within the essential tenets and practices of the Reformed faith. The higher governing bodies can still review the decisions of the lower ones. Unless the locals screw up royally or utterly defy the constitution, the higher bodies will defer to the locals. The locals, after all, know the candidate best, and have to live with him or her.

Conservatives have opposed 5 from the outset. They think it would mean that national standards will not be binding, but will only be suggestions. They disagree with the Task Force that the AI would allow judicial review on the substance, as well as the process, of decisions made by lower governing bodies. Several overtures to the Assembly called for deleting 5, and the overture advocates spoke to the committee in support of this position.

When the committee got to the consideration of recommendation 5 on Saturday afternoon, a member proposed deleting the AI altogether. And the competition was on. The committee spoke, civilly, for hours. Nearly every member of the group spoke, some of them several times. Finally, the vote came.

The motion to delete 5 failed, 23 –37.

The committee continued to debate into the night. A substitute motion, which would have gutted 5, was also proposed, and the long process of considering it, instead of the main motion to pass the rest of the Task Force report, dragged on into the night. Votes on various amendments showed the same split, with roughly a third opposed to the core of the report, and the other two thirds ready to pass it.

At 10:25 p.m. approval of the whole PUP report, with only a few changes, was in sight. However, the last busses back to the hotels were about to leave, and they were exhausted. They recessed, to resume this afternoon.

I believe the writing is on the wall. The Ecclesiology Committee will pass the PUP report by a vote of about 2 – 1. It appears that the conservatives will file a minority report. Both reports will go to the whole Assembly tomorrow. Nothing is certain, of course, but if the whole Assembly is like the committee, I think they will also pass the Peace, Unity, and Purity Task Force report by at least a 2 – 1 margin.

Every Presbytery is Purple

On any given vote, each presbytery comes out red or blue. Within each presbytery, though, all shades of opinion are represented. Every presbytery, in each part of the country, has a dissenting minority. The whole presbytery is well served by being civil in their disagreements. Civility is a virtue in itself. And in the good American tradition of understanding that our self-interest is best served by helping society, smart competitors realize that today's victorious majority can become tomorrow's dissenting minority.

The Ecclesiology committee considered the PUP report all day Friday. The most hopeful word came from people in divided presbyteries who reported that their arguments became more civil and less hurtful after they adopted some of the discernment, consensus, and simple listening methods that Task Force members had brought to them.

San Francisco is one the most liberal presbyteries, especially on the homosexual ordination issue, yet that body has a strong conservative minority which threatens to bolt. Cincinnati Presbytery, on the other hand, had a well-known case in the church of a dissident liberal congregation that had to be disciplined by the presbytery for defying the constitution. Both were places where feelings were running high. In both cases, people who were strong partisans on the contested issues nonetheless came to thank the Task Force for helping them stay together and argue more civilly.

There do, of course, need to be serious limits to dissent and opposition on both sides. But a broad middle that is committed to staying together in order to perpetually compete is the only viable future for the denomination.

The whole church is purple, and is going to stay that way.

Who Won the Moderator's Race? Centrism

Last night the General Assembly elected a new Moderator for the Presbyterian Church (USA). This is usually an exciting and well-attended event. The Birmingham convention center was packed through the hours of speeches and Q & A. The event did not disappoint, either – the candidates were evenly matched, and the election really did turn on the answers the candidates gave to questions from ordinary voters. This was a fine moment for democracy.

Moderator candidates are nominated by their presbyteries months before the GA. These days they have low-key campaigns, too – standing in front of booths, naming vice-moderator running mates, handing out sticker, tee-shirts, and, in the case of one candidate this year, cookies. The pattern in recent years has been to have three candidates, one clearly liberal, one clearly conservative, and the third aiming for the middle.

This year, there were four candidates. On paper, one might read Deborah Block as the liberal – a pastor from Milwaukee Presbytery, a board member of the liberal umbrella group the Covenant Network. Likewise, Tim Halverson looked like the main conservative – pastor of a Florida megachurch, father of seven kids. Joan Gray, an Atlanta interim minister and the author of a well-known polity book, would therefore be left with the center. The wild card was Kerry Carson. He is the pastor of a little church in Iowa.

Yet all of them ran as centrists. Block's pitch was as a sensitive bridge builder. Carson, as a pastoral uniter. Gray? A healing leader. Tim Halverson, in his published platform, said "in a left-right world, we have forgotten the center." In his speech he even said that if elected he would "lead from the center" – very gratifying to this author.

Each candidate was given a nominating speech, then had five minutes to make a pitch to the commissioners. Then followed an hour of questions from the commissioners and advisory delegates. These ran mostly in familiar channels. My summary notes of the questions mostly needed only a word or two to identify which particular chestnut we were dealing with -- Youth? Multiculti? Jesus the way? Gay ordination? Church's greatest challenge? Reconciliation after GA? Favorite Scripture for hope? Global South evangelizing us? PUP recommendation 5? Church in 5 years?

The decisive question, in my view, was bluntly put by a youth delegate: do you favor the ordination of practicing homosexuals? Block said yes, Carson said no. Halverson said no, but said he dreamed of a day when the church would judge officers by the content of their characters, not their sexual orientation. Joan Gray gave one of the few unexpected answers of the night: she respects gays and lesbians who want to serve, but that she had "not been able to get my mind around the idea that homosexuality is God's intention." The Moderator, she went on, is an officer of church, and stands on the constitution. As Moderator, she would fully support the constitution, and would only consider changing her position if the Holy Spirit moved the church as a whole to change the constitution.

In my opinion, Joan Gray ultimately won election with that answer.

The voting itself was fascinating. Here are the percentages won by each candidate on the first, second, and third ballots:

Block..........28.....32.....31
Carson........22.....14.......4
Gray...........28.....41.....62
Halverson.22......14.......4

The center of the church has spoken. Centrism won.

The National Church Sets Standards; the Local Governing Body Applies Them to Individuals

The national Presbyterian Church sets standards for the whole denomination. It is local presbyteries, though, which examine and ordain ministers, and even more local sessions (congregational governors) which examine and ordain elders. The locals apply the national standards to individuals. But every individual is a mixture of virtues and vices. No one meets all the national standards perfectly, so every ordination involves judgment about whether a particular person's quirks, even defects, touch any essential tenet of the Reformed faith.

The national standards are not themselves essential tenets. Depending on the locals to rightly sort out how closely the church's officers fit within the essential tenets – without specifying for all times and places what those tenets are – is part of the genius of the American Presbyterian system.

Some people want the national church to define the essential tenets. The church could do this, but it is a long and complicated process. Thus far, in its three centuries in America, the Presbyterian Church has not thought that defining essential tenets was a good idea. It is clear that no one part of the church could define these national standards by itself.

Faced with these obstacles to defining national essential tenets, some people want to do the same thing at the local level. They want presbyteries to draw up lists of essential tenets that they, at least, will use in examining candidates for office.

And this brings us to the interesting point that the first day of discussion of the Peace, Unity, and Purity Task Force report brought out: the locals cannot define local standards of what are the essential tenets. Only the national church can set categorical standards that apply to everyone. The local church must examine each case on its own merit, in relation to those national standards.

"No Torture" is Good Stewardship

I have often written about stewardship of society as one of the central virtues of Presbyterians. A fine example of this is the new ad, being placed in papers all over the country, against torture. The ad has been signed by a wide range of religious leaders, from Jimmy Carter on down. The text was drafted by George Hunsinger, a Presbyterian and a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. The ad reads, in part:

Torture violates the basic dignity of the human person that all religions, in their highest ideals, hold dear. It degrades everyone involved - policy-makers, perpetrators and victims. It contradicts our nation's most cherished ideals. Any policies that permit torture and inhumane treatment are shocking and morally intolerable.

Nothing less is at stake in the torture abuse crisis than the soul of our nation. What does it signify if torture is condemned in word but allowed in deed? Let America abolish torture now - without exceptions.

Good going, George and the other signers. Good stewardship.

Trust the Locals, But Verify

The Presbyterian Church is a middle polity. The main seat of authority is not the local congregation, nor the top of the hierarchy. The presbytery is the main decision making body. It is made up of clergy and elder representatives of the congregations. The presbyteries send clergy and elder representatives to the higher bodies, including to the national General Assembly. The Presbyterian Church is organized like the federal system of the United States (though I think the influence runs more the other way).

Ministers are examined, ordained, and belong to a presbytery. The rest of the church trusts the presbyteries to examine and choose well. BUT, the higher bodies can review the decisions of the presbytery, including ordination decisions.

How much to trust the locals is the core issue in the debate over the Peace, Unity, and Purity Task Force report at the General Assembly. The shorthand is that the debate is over "local option." This is not quite right. Here is a way to think about the alternatives before the church:

1) Local option: local governing bodies are allowed to set their own standards
2) Local application: local governing bodies apply the national standards
3) Local license: local governing bodies may overlook violations of the standards

I believe that what the broad middle of the church wants is the second option, local application. Local application is what the Task Force calls for. The Task Force does call on the church to trust the locals. Indeed, they call on all units of the church to outdo one another in trusting one another. Still, the Task Force, and common sense, clearly tell us that the central church sometimes just has to review that decisions of the locals and, if necessary, reign them in.

Local application of national standards is the traditional Presbyterian way to have peace and unity in a varied national church. And in those rare cases when the locals go off the rails, the national church, reluctantly but firmly, acts to bring them back into line.

The Big Picture of the Presbyterian Church (USA)

For most of the next two weeks I will be an observer at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA). My particular task will be to follow the ups and downs of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church. I have written about this report on a number of Sundays so far. For the next two weeks, the PC (USA) will fill the weekdays of this blog, as well.

Today I want outline what I think are three fundamental starting points in considering the Big Picture of the mainline Presbyterian Church.

1) The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) must be a biblical church.
We should read the Bible richly and with some sophistication, but we should never let that sophistication lead us to reject the Bible because it is culturally inconvenient. Some churches rest more on the church's tradition of reasoning about the faith, while other churches depend more on the continuing witness of the Holy Spirit. I think that the whole ecology of the capital-C Church depends on having all of them, in spirited competition with one another. But the Presbyterian Church must aim to act biblically in order to be true to our essence.

2) The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) must be a responsible steward of society.
Responsibility is built into our DNA. We do not have the option of sectarian withdrawal from society. We do not even have the option of being just decent ordinary folks, while someone else takes care of social order. The Presbyterian Church, and even more so individual Presbyterians, can't stand aside from the major cultural issues of society. We have to avoid pride as a deadly sin, and avoid hubris as a ridiculous foible. But the Presbyterian Church must aim to act responsibly in order to be true to our essence.

3) The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) must be a respectful competitor in a free society.
While we are trying to be responsible biblical stewards of society we know that other churches and other citizens who are not churched at all have an equal right and responsibility to try to shape society. We are competing to convince other free citizens, not to coerce even if we could. The Presbyterian Church must be especially careful in its relation to the civil government, to avoid improperly using or being used by government power. But the Presbyterian Church must aim to act competitively in order to be true to our essence.

Trust and Consequences

The Presbyterian Church (USA)'s General Assembly begins later this week, and yours truly will be enjoying every minute of it, no doubt, in lovely Birmingham. My job will be to follow the ins and outs of the debate over the final report of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church. I will keep you posted about the PUP report.

The main proposal of the report is that Presbyterians, at all our many institutional levels and forms, need to outdo one another in honoring each other's decisions. To be sure, there are still checks and balances. But the main thrust of the report is that we should trust one another more to make just decisions for the church. If one presbytery says that someone is good to ordain as a minister, then the other presbyteries should try mightily to believe that they are right.

I fully support this proposal.

However, the church, like any other human institution, needs to enforce its own rules sometimes, or all that trust will erode. Nearly all the time, in nearly every case, presbyteries do make good decisions in who they ordain and how they judge their officers' subsequent actions. But in those rare cases when a potential officer, or even an already ordained one, openly defies the rules of the church in order to defy them, then the church has to try 'em and toss 'em.

The worst instance of this kind of defiance is the case of Jane Spahr, lesbian evangelist, who finally got someone to try her for conducting same-sex marriages. As she well knows, Presbyterian ministers may not perform same-sex marriages. She opposes that rule, and has been breaking it publicly in order to get a trial. But it is not Spahr's defiance that is the real problem. The real problem is that, by a 6 –1 vote, the judicial commission of Redwoods Presbytery ruled that Spahr did nothing wrong in openly violating clear church rules.

Redwoods Presbytery as a whole has responded to this breach of trust by its own judicial commission by appealing the decision to the synod, which in turn will no doubt be appealed to the General Assembly's judicial commission. The worry here is that the church's top court will evade the open defiance of church rules on a technicality. In this case, that would be very bad. The church is a voluntary institution. No one has to belong. If you deeply disagree with a church's confession and rules, go join another one. It is a very free country when it comes to religion.

The best way to build trust in the church nearly all the time is to have real consequences for the untrustworthy – no, the openly destructive – in those exceptional times.

The Great American Brass Band Festival: Americana at its Best

Today is one of my favorite Saturdays of the year: the Great American Brass Band Festival in Danville, KY. Every year on this weekend the town spiffs up, the stage is built on the Centre College quad, and ten thousand plus come to enjoy our Norman Rockwell town and hear the best brass bands in the world. For free.

This weekend the weather is gorgeous – seventies and dry. Last night, at the gallery hop (featuring the work of junior Gruntled #2), the streets were lined with folks just milling and talking, eating strawberries, drinking lemonade, and enjoying some pretty good local art.

As I write, the coffee house is full. Soon there will be a parade down Main Street, led, as always, by the Olympia Brass Band from New Orleans. All day long, bands will fill the stage, and crowds will fill the college lawn. Groups of friends rent picnic tables decorated to a theme. Sunday morning the Salvation Army band will provide the music for an ecumenical church service.

One of the nicest features of the Brass Band Festival is how kid-friendly it is. On the college lawn there is a low spot in the middle where the little kids play, surrounded by ramparts of adults watching them, and watching out for them. The bigger kids just roam the town with their friends, buying funnel cakes and curly fries and other high-tone food. Parents stake out a spot with blankets and chairs, making a base for the kids to return to.

This year, or some year, come on down to Danville.

Gay vs. Ex-Gay Christians 3: What is Success?

More than 3/4ths of gay men and lesbians who wanted to change through sexual reorientation therapies "satisfied the criteria for good heterosexual functioning." That is the conclusion of Robert Spitzer, the Columbia University psychologist who led the movement to delist homosexuality as a psychological disorder, an expert who no one would call a homophobe. Michelle Wolkomir, in Be Not Deceived, does not have a comparable study of the specific ex-gay ministry she studied, but the director estimated that perhaps a third gave up and returned to homosexual activity.

75%-plus seems like a pretty good success rate to me. Yet until reading this study, I had seen the routine summary that sexual reorientation or reparation therapies and ministries work with only a small percentage of people.

I think the gap between these two assessments depends on whether the aim of such programs is to change gays' and lesbians' orientation, or to help them get control of their behavior. Spitzer reports that for gay men, only 11% reported that they had changed their orientation, while 37% of the women changed theirs. However, an additional 66% of the men, and 44% of the women were functioning well as heterosexuals.

So, what is the right measure of success – changed orientation, or changed behavior?

The analogy that occurs to me is Alcoholics Anonymous. They do not aim to help people stop desiring alcohol. No matter how many days or years a member has been sober, they still introduce themselves as, "Hello, my name is Bill, and I am an alcoholic." Success for AA is helping people stop drinking.

Groups like "Expell," the ex-gay ministry that Wolkomir studied, are for people who are trying to resist temptations that they don't want to give in to. If most of them succeed in reaching that goal, that would seem like a successful ministry to me.

Gay vs. Ex-Gay Christians 2: What Wives Do

The most interesting feature to me of Michelle Wolkomir's Be Not Deceived is the role of the ex-gay men's wives. The gay men, many of whom had been married, left their wives and girlfriends when they decided to accept being gay as a defining identity. For most of the ex-gay men, on the other hand, what motivated them to continue to struggle against their homosexual desires was that they loved their wives and wanted to stay married to them.

Wolkomir's initial study worked just with the men in gay and ex-gay support ministries. When she realized how important the wives were to the ex-gay men, she wanted to interview the women, too. To her surprise, though, the leader of the ex-gay group was very reluctant to connect Wolkomir with the wives of the men in that group, and the women themselves, when the leader asked them, did not want to be interviewed. I think I understand this. For all of these women, the fact that their husbands sexually desired other men – and often did not have much sexual desire for their wives – was a shocking discovery and a painful ongoing fact of their lives. Talking to another woman who probably knew their husband's sexual experiences and desires even better than the wives knew it themselves would be, I think, more than most people would want to bear.

Fortunately for us, Wolkomir was resourceful and persistent. Eventually, through an internet query to a national network of ex-gay men's wives, she was able to interview 15 of them.

Here is the crucial thing these wives said: they stayed committed to their husbands because they were first committed to God. They did love their husbands, and did work with them in dealing with the men's struggles and inevitable setbacks. But their marriage was not simply for their own satisfaction, or even for their kids' sake. The ex-gay men and their wives regarded their marriage as part of their commitment to God.

Setting their struggle within their larger, deeper, and prior commitment to God made the struggle seem winnable, and really did strengthen them to succeed.

Gay vs. Ex-Gay Christians 1: Defending Christianity

Gay Christians defend their faith against other Christians, who think the Bible condemns homosexuality as a sin. No surprise. But ex-gay Christians also defend their faith against other Christians who think the Bible condemns homosexuality as a worse sin than other sins. Men in both kinds of ministries support one another as they share the work of making a place for themselves in the church.

This is the interesting finding of Michelle Wolkomir, a sociologist at Centenary College, in Be Not Deceived: The Sacred and Sexual Struggles of Gay and Ex-Gay Christian Men. She spent several years as an observer and, where possible, participant in two parallel ministries for gay men, one with the pro-gay Metropolitan Community Church, the other with the ex-gay Exodus International ministry. Wolkomir describes herself as a married non-religious Jewish woman, so it is a real testimony to her skills as an ethnographer that she was accepted and trusted in both groups.

Wolkomir shows how strongly similar the two groups of men are. Likewise, both ministries are strikingly parallel in helping these men bond by re-interpreting their Christian experience. Both the Metropolitan Community Church and Exodus International are conservative Protestant ministries – a point not always appreciated about the MCC even by its secular allies. The men in both groups are trying to be faithful, Bible-believing Christians, while wrestling with homosexual desires. Many in both groups are or were married, and have children. These are not the gay men who reject the Bible and Christianity as oppressive; instead, they are arguing with their fellow conservative Christians about how their homosexual desires should be understood and dealt with.

The gay Christians interpret their homosexual desires as something that God made them with, which they should therefore accept. The ex-gay Christians interpret their homosexual desires as the result of bad experiences – molestation, or unloving fathers, or the like – which they should seek God's help in resisting and healing.

The crucial question for Wolkomir is, why do some of these men choose a gay ministry, and others an ex-gay ministry? Her answer is that they join these ministries for the same reasons they joined the church in the first place. The gay Christians tend to be men who were raised conservative Christians. They are trying to find a way to stay in the church they have always known. The ex-gay Christians tend to be men who were isolated from others, by their homosexuality and for other reasons. They are trying to find a community that will accept them and help them wrestle with their particular sins.

I find this pattern to be parallel to what I have found in studying the Presbyterian Church, which I am sure is true for all mainline churches. Most members in the vast middle of the church are converts. They chose to join because they accept the traditional beliefs of the church, as they sometimes hazily understand them, and are looking to find a community that they want to fit into. The Presbyterians who describe themselves as "extremely liberal," on the other hand, are much more likely to have been raised in the church. They assume that they are Presbyterians almost by definition, and are trying to change the church to be more like them.

For all of these folks, their life in the church is more about what group they want to belong to than it is about their theological beliefs.

Washing Out the Jewishness of "The Squid and the Whale"

One advantage of coming to a film late is that the DVD has extras. In a straight fictional film I just skip these parts – I want to see the finished work, not the rough drafts. In documentaries, though, the extras are often interesting, adding further detail to the reality of the subject, not just to the craft of moviemaking. "The Squid and the Whale" is in between fact and fiction. It is clearly based on the writer/director Noah Baumbach's real life, and the mess made by his parents' divorce. The interesting extra on the DVD is an interview of Baumbach by Philip Lopate.

In the film and in real life, the parents are both writers living in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn in the mid-'80s. They think of themselves as intellectuals and live a somewhat bohemian life – bohemian for married people with kids and a house and cars. The father contrasts what he wants his sons to be with "philistines," which he defines as "people who aren't interested in books and interesting movies." In the film, the parents, Bernard and Joan Beckman, are excellentlyl played by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney. As the IMDB review put it, casting Jeff Daniels as the aging, and declining, writer will make many viewers see his character through the lens of Flap Horton, the hapless, adulterous English professor that Daniels played in "Terms of Endearment."

Lopate, though, who knows Noah Baumbach's real father, noted that Jonathan Baumbach said everything in "double inverted commas." He would make the kind of pompous pronouncements that Bernard Beckman says, but at the same time he would have a knowing critical detachment from them. Lopate asks if Noah Baumbach meant to take the "Jewishness" out of the family? In the interview, Baumbach was taken by surprise by this question. It seemed to me that, in the director's mind, the most salient fact about his family was not Jewishness, but intellectuality. He says that all families think of themselves as superior to others. He means that in class terms – as intellectuals and writers, his family is above the normal rules.

I think Lopate reads "Jewishness" as meaning the same thing that Baumbach means by "intellectual." Lopate, a noted writer himself, opens the interview by announcing to the audience that "all writers are bastards." He is certainly not saying that all Jews are bastards. He is suggesting, I think, that secular Jewish intellectuals are really above the rules of normal bourgeois life, but they do so knowing that that superiority is itself a cliché. Played by Daniels and Linney, the parents come off as hapless WASPs, not fully aware of the effect they are having on the children. The movie would feel different if the director had cast toward the ethnic reality behind the movie. I imagine that another layer of meaning would have been added if Baumbach had cast, say, Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, the real parents of Owen Kline, who plays the younger son in the film; or Jennifer Jason Leigh, the director's wife, who played Dorothy Parker [Dorothy Rothschild] so well in "Dorothy Parker and the Vicious Circle"; or any of the literally dozens of well-known Jewish actors from New York.

As "The Squid and the Whale" itself shows, divorced kids want to keep points of connection with their parents, even if they criticize the divorce itself. I read Noah Baumbach as making this film as a "Brooklyn intellectual," just like his parents, without fully seeing that Brooklyn intellectual is a more specific and distinctive ethnic and class location than he knows.

College Reunion for the Married

We spent the weekend at Mrs. Gruntled's college reunion. This is always a happy time – we see old friends, walk the gorgeous campus, hear how much better the student body has become over the years, and eat cheesesteaks (one of the very few important deficiencies of central Kentucky). I also get to engage in the sociologist's favorite pastime: finding patterns in groups.

Two strong patterns stood out. First, no one smoked. In our college days, a fifth of the class smoked some, maybe even a fourth. This weekend, I did not see smoking by anyone in the class, and indeed almost none by alumni in any class. Mostly, I think, we grow up and put away adolescent things. But it is also likely that the smokers are just less likely to come back. The people who seemed most alienated from the college at the time were also very likely to be heavy smokers.

The second strong pattern was how married the returnees were. Now, most college graduates get married, so it is not surprising that a college reunion is mostly a gathering of married people. But this group was almost completely married. In fact, nearly all (approaching 90%) were married parents, and kids' schooling was the default topic of conversation.

I can see a two opposing factor that would make reunions disproportionately married. Reunions draw pro-institutional people; so does marriage. This goes double for people who marry classmates or college-mates like the Gruntleds – their marriage loyalty reinforces their alumni loyalty. The opposite force comes from divorce, especially for those divorced from classmates. There are happy exceptions – we ate with a woman who had served as "best man" at her ex's second marriage. At the same table were her ex and her new husband, all swapping stories.

Next year is my reunion. I do want to see my married classmates. I want to see the others, too. I guess I had better volunteer for the committee, to encourage everyone to come.

Off to Reunion

The Gruntleds are off to alma mater for a 25th reunion, so I will take a couple of days off from the blog. We will return with family tales on Monday.

"The Squid and the Whale" is a Harrowing Divorce Movie

I know I am six months behind on this discussion, but one of the very few drawbacks of living in a small town is that we get to movies a bit late. This one, though, is not a blockbuster that defines a season. It is not a general-audience movie. It is a film for people who need to think about and chew over how divorce works on kids.

When the film came out it coincided with Elizabeth Marquardt's book Between Two Worlds, and much of the discussion on the Family Scholars Blog, which Marquardt is part of, turned on how well the film depicted the very thing she wrote about.

Noah Baumbach has written a nearly autobiographical fiction about his own parents' divorce, through the eyes of a Noah-like teenager and his little brother. As I wrote on the Family Scholars Blog, I thought it was a richly made movie of selfish parents destroying their children. Baumbach's parents are living, as are most of their friends. He was quoted as saying that when they saw the film for the first time, he looked back at them when it ended; they looked as if they had been flattened by G-forces.

Yet Baumbach was actually fairly gentle with the parents. He shows the mother as doting on her sons, and the father still having some tenderness toward his ex. In interviews Baumbach has been careful not to condemn his parents, or divorce in general. The tagline of the movie is "joint custody blows." The strongest critique he offers is of the tug-of-war between the parents that pulls the kids apart. These fictional parents are much better about that than many real parents manage to be.

Still, the older son is already on the road to emulating his father. He dumps his nice girlfriend because, in his father's estimation, the boy can "do better." At the same time, we see the father getting booted by his third wife and taking up with a woman half his age – who, just to make it worse, is his own student. The little brother is even more scarred – especially after both parents forget him and go away with their new paramours for a weekend. He is about ten, and cries when his parents have the "family meeting" to announce their divorce. He hardens, though, turning to drinking, public sex, and an extremely foul mouth. It is hard not to fear much worse in his future.

As a film, "The Squid and the Whale" is a bit rough around the edges. It has some unfinished parts that show a young director. More importantly, there are parts of the parents' relationship which simply can't be brought into focus when the director is working so close to his own life. Still, this is a rich movie for thinking about the effects of divorce and, therefore, of marriage, on kids.

Three is the New Two

A new story in the Boston Globe reports the happy news that among educated marrieds, there has been a slight return to replacement-level families. Married people need to have a bit more than two kids per couple merely to replace the population. In recent years, though, the whole country has not been having enough kids to keep up. Among married people – those in the best position to care for kids on their own – the birth rate has dropped well below replacement level, and among educated marrieds the birth rate has fallen alarmingly. Even among educated married people who do have kids, there has some sense for the past generation that two was the maximum responsible number.

As I have argued for some time, though, it is precisely among educated marrieds - those people most likely to consider the impact of their family size on the world - that we need a few more kids. So it is encouraging that there has been a small but real uptick in the number of third-or-more births, from 26% in 1995 to 28% in 2004, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. This statistic includes unmarried as well as married women, so is not exactly what this doctor ordered. But it is a movement in the right direction.

At a time when Russia and much of the former Second World is trying desperately to keep their population from collapsing, it is encouraging to see that more Americans vote for the future with a third child.

Loose Ends of the British Divorce Ruling

The Law Lords, Britain's highest court, upped the ante in two large divorce cases. They awarded much larger settlements than had been given in the past to two divorcing women. One couple had a childless short marriage; in the other, she had given up a career to raise the couple's children. Both involved significant amounts of money.

The principle at issue, though, is that both members of the marriage are entitled to part of the wealth and the future earnings that the marriage helped make possible. This seems to me eminently fair and long overdue. The buzz has been that now rich men will be less likely to marry at all, or to marry only with pre-nups. That would be sad. But what that really means is that up until now men, especially rich or high-earning men, have been more willing to marry because they knew they could dump their wives and still keep most of the marital assets. That is at least as sad.

There were two loose ends of this story, though, that have had me pondering. One is fault. The other is kids.

One of the divorces in the British case involved a couple who had been married for three years and had no kids. During the marriage, the husband had made a fortune as a fund manager, and would likely make even more in the future. The report of the decision cast the whole question as one of her share of his past and future earnings. As an aside, the reports mention that the marriage broke up because he had an affair. Now, the basic justice of the case is that she did contribute to his fortune by letting him invest in his career while she did everything else. But it seems to me that she is also entitled to something additional – Hazardous S.O.B. Pay, perhaps – for being cheated on, too.

The other issue is the role of custody in who initiates divorce. I have been convinced by Margaret Brinig's studies, which I have written about before, that women are more likely to file for divorce in jurisdictions in which they are almost automatically awarded custody of the children. It seems to me that justice would lead one to make custody awards on a case-by-case basis, so neither party would assume that they would get the kids.

SO, if kids are awarded based on what is good for kids, and money is awarded based on just contributions. This may make for more just divorces. Now if only we could find a way to make fewer divorces.

The Harvard-Yale Study at 20: Still Missing the Point

Twenty years ago this week Newsweek's cover story, "The Marriage Crunch," reported the dire prospects for educated women who had not married by their mid-thirties. The most notorious line in the article – which did not come from the original report – was that a 40-year-old unmarried woman with a B.A. was "more likely to be killed by a terrorist" than ever to marry. This report was unlikely at the time, but the "Harvard-Yale Study" became notorious, attacked by marriage-ambivalent feminists and striking fear into the hearts of unmarried educated women everywhere. This story was particularly important to the Gruntleds because we were graduate students at Yale when that report was written, and one of the co-authors, Trisha Craig, was a college as well as a graduate school classmate of ours.

This week the magazine is running a follow-up story to show how silly the fears they fomented before were. Most of the single and worried women they interviewed in the story subsequently got married and stayed that way. The old rules, Newsweek intones, don't apply any more. Educated men want to marry educated women, and artificial reproductive technology means that women can have babies indefinitely.

The new story is a silly as the old one was. Yes, educated women are marrying later, and their marriages are more likely to last than those of less educated women. Yes, there are all kinds of expensive miracle treatments that extend fertility for a few years for some women. But biology has not been repealed, nor sociobiology. And Newsweek did not report that, ironically, Craig herself is unmarried (though she does not report that as a tragedy).

The main point, though, is that the "Harvard-Yale" demographers did not set out to study the marital chances of educated women, but of uneducated welfare mothers. Those were, and still are, slim. For comparison, they included numbers on the marital chances of educated women of different ages. But Newsweek isn't aimed at welfare mothers, and neither are the thousand and one women's magazines that picked up the story. For their readers, the footnote was the story. And Newsweek, like most news organizations, usually finds a way to turn every story into something readers can fear.

The good news is that educated women do have a good chance of marrying.
The bad news is that uneducated welfare mothers don't. And that is something that we as a society should be concerned about.

A Standard is a Standard Even If Exceptions Are Allowed

The debate over the Task Force on Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Presbyterian Church is heating up, as we get closer to the General Assembly a few weeks from now.

The Task Force proposes two crucial ideas:
1) that the church leave in place its existing ordination standards; and
2) that the ordaining body decide if any particular candidate's scruples about those standards touch on essential tenets of the Reformed faith.

Some conservative groups in the church say the Task Force's two recommendations contradict one another. Either a standard is a standard, or it isn't. In their reading, a standard is an absolute requirement, set from the center, that every individual must meet.

In the Presbyterian Church, the central body is not where candidates are examined and, if they pass, ordained. There is no bishop, and certainly no Vatican, in the Presbyterian Church. The body that examines and ordains ministers is the regional presbytery. The presbytery, not surprisingly, is the central unit of the Presbyterian Church, the level where church leaders live with one another the most, and the unit that any unspecified powers are reserved for in the church. The General Assembly, with the agreement of most presbyteries, can set the standards for the church, but the presbyteries are where they are applied. In nearly all cases, that is where it ends: the church as a whole accepts the presbytery's judgment.

Still, since the first two presbyteries were brought together in this country, the church has faced the problem of presbyteries interpreting and applying the standards differently. In those cases, the church has had two mechanisms to smooth out the conflict or, if smoothing out is not possible, for deciding the contested issue. The main mechanism is to trust each presbytery to ordain well. That ordination is for the whole church. However, if a minister wants to "labor within the bounds" of another presbytery, he or she must be examined and approved by that new presbytery. The second presbytery can't change an ordination granted by the first one, but it can say, "you may be ordained for the whole church, but you can't work in this corner of the church." This is a long-established tradition of the Presbyterian Church in this country, going back to the first synod in 1729.

The second way the church deals with a conflict of standards between two ordaining bodies is to hold a trial in the higher governing bodies (the synod, and then the General Assembly). This trial is not about the particular minister's beliefs, but rather is about whether the presbytery applied the church's standards correctly. The presbyteries are given a great deal of leeway in applying the standards, but ultimately there are limits.

Existing church standards would, among many other things, forbid the ordination of practicing, unrepentant homosexuals. Some presbyteries think this prohibition is clearly required by the Bible, and therefore is essential. Other presbyteries have made it clear that they do not think such a prohibition is essential, or even just, regardless of what the Bible appears to say.

The Task Force says this standard is still the standard for the church. They also call on the whole church to trust the local presbytery to apply that standard properly. However, if the presbytery does not apply that standard (or any other standard) correctly – or worse, denies the standard altogether – then the presbytery can be tried by a higher governing body. If necessary, the presbytery's ordination decision can be overturned. That is the way things are now. That is what the Task Force is proposing to keep and strengthen.

A standard is a standard, but every organization needs some way to judge whether a particular case comes under the standard or not.

Hail the Graduate!

The eldest junior Gruntled graduated from high school with great ceremony and a fine speech. She called upon Captain Planet to remind her fellow graduates that "the power is theirs." And they danced all night.

The best joke from the senior speeches: "Yo mama is so fat, she went swimming in the Atlantic Ocean and Spain claimed her for as part of the New World."

The Dad Revolution, Part Two

By guest bloggers Kim Hall and Anne Guagliardo from the family life class.
(Part two of two)
This concludes the series of guest blogs from the family life class - my thanks to all.

In Austin Murphy’s How Tough Could it Be?, the author exposes his negative view of stay-at-home dads by assuming that the only way for a man to achieve domestic success is to follow the path set by stay-at-home moms. Obviously, this is problematic in itself as men must define their role in their own terms. For instance, most men who provide primary childcare find that obsessive cleanliness is not a necessary feature of the staying in the home. It was even seriously suggested at a convention for at-home dads that “household toy cleanup be conducted with a rake." These fathers also found that they were able to hold onto a lot of their traditional roles and were not set in their ‘fathering’ ways all the time. On the weekend or after work, most dads have no problem letting their wives take over as the primary caregiver. The imitation of stay-at-home moms could never produce fulfilling, long-term results for these men.

The advantages of fathers taking the stay-at-home role are incomparable for both the men themselves and their entire family. Stay-at-home dads often comment that this job changes their character in a very positive way. Men become more caring and understanding, as they are more attached and committed to their role, but the fathers are not the only beneficiaries of their new job. Their wives, who are usually spending most of their time at work, feel less guilt and worry knowing their husband is caring for the children. These women are able to focus more on their career, which, in turn, creates a larger income for the entire family. The equalitarianism of the marriage also benefits both parents. For example, in ‘traditional roles’, if a child wakes in the night the mother is 80% more likely to go tend to the problem. With reversed roles, the likelihood of each parent taking care of the child at this point is completely even. Not only does this demonstrate a more involved father, but it also confirms that the mother is not being replaced in the home. Increased contact with their fathers benefits the child as well. Children who have a close relationship with both parents are less likely to use drugs and become pregnant as teenagers. Children with stay-at-homes dads also perform better at school that those with less attachment to their fathers.

Although there are many advantages of stay-at-home dads, this role reversal has its downside. Isolation seems to be the “biggest hurdle for at-home dads." Even though there has been a recent increase of stay-at-home dads, the number is still relatively small. These fathers, who are often ashamed of their job, are reluctant to reach out to other men in the community who are in the same position. Instead, these men usually isolate themselves from the community of stay-at-homes, father or mothers. The children are often affected by a lack of stimulation and connection with others. Another problem of stay-at-dads is the difficulty faced when trying to return back to the workforce. Employers often question the man’s previous job by either assuming that it is simply a cover-up for unemployment or an alternative to his inability to handle a workload. Mother’s guilt can also be problematic with stay-at-home dads. With the cultural norms as they are, women sometimes feel that being the primary breadwinner, while their husbands are doing ‘her’ job, is unacceptable. These women often envy their husbands, wishing to reverse these roles once again.

With a goal of equality of the genders, the social stigma of stay-at-home dads must be replaced with open-mindedness. What is best for the family is most important. One should not be limited to traditional views and a fear of social change. As humans change and grow, society is forced to adapt by throwing out the idea of a ‘social norm’ in hopes of finding a reasonable resolution in a case-by-case process.

What Men Really Want, Part Two

By guest bloggers Angie Bohnen and Laura Walters from the family life class.
[I got a little ahead of myself yesterday - this is part two of Tuesday's post.]

Overall, what men seek in women is the indication that they are fertile. However, what men seek in women and what women think men seek can often differ. A study done in 1993, found that men tend to have a preference for women with a waist- to- hip ratio centering near 0.70. Psychologist Devendra Singh argues that the waist-to-hip ratio can be viewed as a reliable marker of age. Before puberty, boys and girls show a similar fat distribution. After puberty, boys lose fat from their buttocks and thighs. Androgens (especially testosterone) cause them to gain fat in their abdominal region. Estrogen is released in girls and this causes them to gain fat in their hips and thighs, which may be an independent criterion of fertility. A study performed on Dutch women found that a 0.1 unit increase in waist-to-hip ratio led to a 30 % decrease in probability of conception per cycle after adjustment for age, fatness, reasons for artificial insemination, cycle length and regularity, smoking, and parity (Zaadstra et al, 1993). This means that a woman with a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.80 instead of Singh’s advised 0.70 would have a 30% lower chance of becoming pregnant. Singh conducted a study on the waist-to-hip ratio of Miss America pageant winners and Playboy centerfold winners over the past thirty years. Although both models and beauty contest winners got thinner over the time span, their waist-to-hip ratio remained exactly in the 0.70 range. This information serves as evidence that although the idealized female body types may have changed over the past decades, the waist-to-hip ratio has remained the same.

Knowing that men prefer a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.70, women should come to the realization that men actually prefer a more average sized body frame. Although women are often led to believe, by such influences as the media, that men prefer super skinny women; this is not the case. Waist-to-hip ratios that are below 0.70 could serve as evidence that a woman is not fertile. On the other hand, when women are pregnant, their waist-to-hip ratio becomes much greater that 0.70. If a woman has a ratio that is much greater than 0.70, it mimics pregnancy and therefore may render her less attractive as a mate or sexual partner.4

Overall, women should be thankful that men prefer a waist-to-hip ratio of around 0.70. The waist-to-hip ratio is one that indicates not only physical attractiveness, but also is an indicator of long-term health status. In trying to attain or maintain a waist-to-hip ratio of around 0.70, women make themselves attractive to men, but more importantly will be maintaining a healthy size. Diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, heart problems, stroke, and gallbladder disorders have been shown to be linked with the distribution of fat, as reflected by this ratio. Women who are much larger or much smaller, are indicative of poor health.

Men have consistently found a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio as attractive in women over many decades. This ratio is not only an idealized number, but also, as Zaadstra et al demonstrated, it is an indicator of health and fertility; therefore, women should not resent it. In actuality, women should embrace it as nature’s way of helping them attract mates and be healthy and fertile.

[Works cited:
Zaadstra, B. et al. 1993. Fat and female fecundity: Prospective study of effect of body fat distribution on conception rates. British Medical Journal, 306: 484-487.

Buss, David M. The Evolution of Desire. Pp.55-57. Basic Books. New York, 1994.]

The Dad Revolution

By guest bloggers Kim Hall and Anne Guagliardo from the family life class.
(Part one of two)

Over the past few decades, women have begun placing more emphasis on the advancement and progression of their career. These women often assume the husband and having children will eventually follow suit. Since the feminist movement, the number of these high achieving women has increased drastically, which has caused a simultaneous increase in the number of childless high achieving career women. According to David Buss in The Evolution of Desire, women most often seek male mates who are more achieving than themselves. Thus, the selection pool for the high achieving career women is limited as there are fewer men available. Even the businesswomen who end up finding a mate often are childless due to their overwhelming schedules. Sylvia Ann Hewlett in Creating a Life found high achieving women are continuously increasing, which, in turn, increases the number of childless couples.

A possible solution may be a role reversal of the men and women. High achieving women must begin looking for men who are not as high achieving and would be more likely to consider a majority of the childcare duties. If more men would be willing to take on the nurturer role and let the woman become the primarily breadwinner, the number of high-achieving women with children would likely rise. Ideally, if this role swap of husband and wife occurred at the same rate as the increase of the high achieving women, most women in the workplace would be able to ‘have it all’, the job and the children. Some fathers have already started to take on this role of nurturer. The career sacrifices of these men in order to raise their children have created a movement in a positive direction.

Although stay-at-home is naturally followed by the word mom, a slow, steady stream of acceptance towards fathers who choose to raise their children in the home has brought the alternate possibility of child-raising to light. By March 2002, there were 189,000 children with stay-at-home dads, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Although this amount seems completely over-shadowed by the whopping 11 million stay-at-home moms, there has been an apparent increase in this recent role reversal over the past decade. There has been an 18% rise of stay-at-home dads within eight years, from 1994 to 2002. With this sudden revolution of societal norms, these men are faced with a constant battle for “acceptance and understanding in a stay-at-home mom world.”

The traditional roles of women and men are thrown out the window with this rise of nurturing fathers and ruthless businesswomen, but one must wonder what has caused this reversal of societal norms. One possibility is the repercussions of feminist movement. As women attempted to gain a foothold in the ‘man’s world’ and quest for equality, men were forced to react to this increase in competition and initial role reversal. The slow movement of gender equality in the business world pushed towards egalitarianism in all areas of societal life, such as in the home. With more commonality of women in the workplace, a prioritization of the male career seemed highly illogical. Instead, the family must carefully choose the best option for the entire family, which is increasingly the stay-at-home dad as in the United States where two out of five women out earn their male counterparts.

Another spark for stay-at-home dads may have been the alteration of the public view of these men. Before 1980s, stay-at-home dads or at least the acknowledgement of them were a rarity in pop cultural. At least until 1983, when “Mr. Mom” starring Michael Keaton made stay-at-home fathers more well-known. Although it featured a “bumbling dad with virtually no clue about how to raise children” and put an almost negative spin on these men, the movie created an admission to stay-at-home dads as a career choice. Ten years later, “Mrs. Doubtfire” shed a softer light on the issue of men raising their children. Even more recently, television shows such as “Daddio” and “My Wife and Kids” show an even more acceptable version of the stay-at-home dad. Whether this alteration in the public view helped create the cultural movement or the media reflected the change at the time may never be known, but either way the increased acceptance is notable in all areas of today’s society.

What Men Really Want

By guest bloggers Angie Bohnen and Laura Walters from the family life class.
(Part one of two)

Sociology of Family Life began with probably the most interesting topic to present day college students, sex. David Buss, in The Evolution of Desire, introduced us all to sex. A more intricate form of sex than what was learned in elementary school, Buss informs us of the development of sex, starting with our ancestors. One sub-theme explored in the book is what men want. Buss makes it clear that men want beauty and that all men have standards of what beautiful is. Beauty encompasses many characteristics such as full lips, lustrous hair, clear and smooth skin, and body shape. The idea of body shape is of utmost importance in today's society due to the alarming rate of females who partake in eating disorders in response to the sociocultural pressures that emphasize small equals beautiful.

Body shape and size are the most variable characteristics of beauty and vary from culture to culture. For example, some cultures view beauty in the form of a plump body rather than a slim body. In the United States, the rich distinguish themselves through a thin body. Men have evolved to prefer women with features of status, and thus have developed the mentality to seek thinness. There are huge discrepancies, however, as to what women think men want and what men actually look for in women. In chapter three, Buss cites a study performed by Paul Rozin who investigated women’s and men's perceptions of the desirability of plump versus thin body types. Women were asked to indicate their ideal body image and the ideal body image that men want. Women consistently chose images that were thinner than average. These results indicate that women believe that men desire thin women. Another study that investigated these differences was that of Drs. Wendy Stuhldreher and William Ryan (1999). The researchers analyzed the actual and ideal body images of undergraduate college women. The conclusions of their study showed the same female gender pattern. This pattern was that women not only perceived themselves as being heavier than they wanted to be, but also thought of themselves as heavier than what men found attractive. What the women did not know was that the undergraduate men in the study were actually attracted to a heavier figure than what the women chose to be ideal.

Distortion in women's body image is an extremely important health concern. Mossavar-Rahmani, Pelto, Ferris and Allen (1996) found a positive correlation between inaccuracy of body size and dieting. Women who think they are bigger than what they are tend to diet more frequently. Further conclusions of the Stuhldreher and Ryan study include patterns of women wanting to lose weight, recent dieting to lose weight, avoiding fast food, and avoidance of high fat foods. Also common to those who wanted to lose weight was the use of diet pills, laxatives, and purging after meals.

It has been discovered that distortions in body size and shape begin to develop in childhood. It has been documented that young girls favor more thin bodies and adjust their eating towards that form. Gustafson-Larson and Terry (1992) found that 60% of fourth grade girls wanted to be thinner and participated in weight-related behaviors. As a result, some of these girls will inevitably develop anorexia or bulimia later in their lives. Why does this happen though? Certainly, it must not come from the male population as reported studies have shown that men prefer a heavier body type than the actual ideal form that women choose. Men actually tend to like what women most dislike.

[The cited articles are:
Stuhldreher, W and Ryan, W. Factors Associated with Distortion in Body Image Perception in College Women. American Journal of Health Studies. 1999; 15:8-13.
Mossavar-Rahmani, Y, Pelto, G. H., Ferris, A. M. & Allen, L. H. (1996). Determinants of
body size perceptions and dieting behavior in a multiethnic group of hospital staff
women. Journal of The American Dietetic Association, 96(3), 252-256.
Gustafson-Larson, A.M., & Terry, R.D. (1992). Weight-related behaviors and concerns of fourth-grade children. Journal of American Dietetic Association, 818-822.]

Does "Medium" Show the Best Marriage on Television?

The Washington Post had a story this week on the upcoming television season, which is almost devoid of functional families. I have noticed that there have been almost no competent fathers on television in the past decade, and one of them, Steven Camden on "Seventh Heaven," wrapped up the series last week (though another network may bring them back one more time).

The Gruntleds watch quite a range of shows, driven in part by the disparate interests of the kids as well as the parents. Still, I may have missed a few good family portrayals. But a look at the list of most popular shows reveals just about zero strong marriages.

My nominee for the best marriage on television: the DuBoises of "Medium." The main gimmick of the show is that Alison DuBois can communicate with the dead. The best part of the show, from my perspective, is the portrayal of their marriage and the ordinary travails of a two-career couple raising three kids. Even if one of the careers involves ghosts.

I would welcome other nominees for strong marriages on television today. And let me say that I don't think the Sopranos are anyone's role models.

"The Da Vinci Code" is a Competent B Movie. Period.

Dan Brown ingeniously combined the "buried treasure" plot with the "secret conspiracy" plot. As a buried treasure movie, it is better than, say, "National Treasure" or "King Solomon's Mines." On the other hand, when they eventually film "The Rule of Four," that has the potential to be a richer thriller.

Conspiracy theories have the advantage of providing an enemy worth fighting, which every good thriller needs, while at the same time explaining why you have never heard of them before. Their fatal flaw, though, is that the more the audience knows about how human history is actually shaped, the less likely they are to believe that there is one organizing intelligence behind it.

Still, some people like conspiracy theories because they bring history down to a scale they can grasp. The Priory of Sion has been exposed as a hoax as thoroughly as the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" were, but some people still believe in both.

I was surprised at the politically correct twist in this particular conspiracy plot. According to "The Da Vinci Code," the church's conspiracy to suppress the sacred feminine also, somehow, is behind the oppression of people of the "wrong color," or who are just "different." I think the casting of a well-known anti-religious gay activist to articulate this point was not accidental.

So, to give the film its due, the lead actors did a decent job, the plot moved right along, and the settings were glorious. A fine popcorn movie. It is not in any way a serious critique of Christianity or the church.

[SPOILER WARNING: Don't read further if you don't want to know an important bit at the end of the movie.

I thought that Dan Brown missed an opportunity in his choice for the final codeword. "Apple" is cute, in context, but pedestrian. He made a lame effort to tie it back to Eve, but he had not set up the Magdelene/Eve connection sufficiently. I thought the codeword was going to be "Sofia." This would have tied the central woman of the movie together with a sacred feminine image that really does have some currency in the church.

And while we are talking about missed opportunities in holy grail movies, I thought "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" would have been much better if Dr. Jones, Sr. (Sean Connery) had remained in the cave as the knight guarding the grail.]

Nevaeh

This is the fastest rising girl's name in the century that the Social Security Administration has been keeping track of these things. From zero to 70th in six years.

It's "heaven" spelled backwards.

So what comes next?

Anavrin? Sounds like a painkiller.

Ayla, for Muslim girls (and her friends the 72 siruoh)?

Hallahlav? Maybe, though it sounds like a Cockney greeting ("'ello, luv")

Supmylo? Maybe, though it sounds like a ghetto greeting ("'S up, Mylo")

And why stop with heavens? Obmil, anyone? Yrotagrup?

Y, indeed?

Centre as a Level 3 Family, Part Two

By guest bloggers Amanda Nall and Teather Sanders from the Family Life class
(Part two of two)

One would think that because upperclass men live near the freshmen women and upperclass women live near the freshman men that interaction may occur between these groups. However, both male and female upperclassmen have already been socialized through their Greek affiliation and Centre’s other level 3 roles they must conform to, so interaction seldom occurs between these groups, although we must admit it is more probable for interaction to occur between these groups than between men and women from the same class. Upperclassmen, both male and female, tend to stick to their own gender, groups they have been socialized with since day one. After a year or more in the system, upperclassmen know their roles and hesitate to deviate from them, never knowing what might occur if they did.

The divided gender interactions may also occur because of Greek affiliations. Although becoming Greek is a valuable experience that many students enjoy, it may create tension and boundaries between the sexes. Members of Greek affiliations are encouraged to sit together and socialize together. Drinking and other social events, whether official parties or unofficial “get-togethers,” are held within each Greek organization, but never with several organizations combined.

As a level 3 rule-bound family, Centre has established rules regarding intimacy between members of the opposite sex as well. The rule is that there is to be no intimacy unless you can blame it on alcohol, which therefore creates an escape and banishes the rules for the night. Once the next morning arrives, however, the rules are immediately snapped back into place and everyone acts as though intimacy never existed. This creates a sense of awkwardness when the couple passes each other soberly the next week or so and must act as though they do not know each other. The only exception to this is when, miraculously, a relationship does blossom, usually from such an encounter that eventually leads to something more. In this situation, the relationship must be hidden from everyone, including friends, until it is officially serious, usually marked by the changing of “facebook relationship status.” If this rule is not followed, many unwanted questions and rumors will abound.

After interviews with current freshmen, we concluded that the rules are learned and imposed from the very beginning, starting with orientation. Boys and girls are segregated from the very beginning: boys live in Nevin and girls live on North side (with two blocks separating them). Although hall events during orientation may include a co-ed “mixer” or two, these events always take place at night. This teaches the new students that appropriate interaction with the opposite sex occurs at night during parties, never during the day. Intentional interactions taking place in Cowan or elsewhere on campus during orientation may lessen the tension that occurs between the sexes in the dining hall or at Centre in general. If we started sitting together and speaking with each other from day one, we may be more likely to continue this habit.

On the other hand, the absence of such a structure, just as the absence of rules in the level 3 rule-bound family, would inevitably lead to a state of chaos and despair unless a more mature, optimal level of functioning can somehow develop. According to www.family-rules.com, “the absence of structure itself invariably will lead the family further down the spiral of despair, dysfunction, disease, and delinquency.” This would undoubtedly only serve to bring more problems to Centre. As the parents in a traditional family must set the rules and the standards by which others follow, the upperclassmen at Centre must set the standards for its incoming classes. Unless these roles can somehow be changed and a higher functioning social structure can be created, Centre College must continue having such unwritten rules for each of its students to follow.

Centre College: the Typical Level 3 Family

By guest bloggers Amanda Nall and Teather Sanders from the Family Life class
(Part one of two)

Maggie Scarf writes about level 3 families as a stable, nontyrannical form of governance with an unresolved problem of intimacy. With the range of families on the Beavers scale stretching from “severely disturbed” (level 5) to “optimal” (level 1), it seems that level 3 might not be the best, but it is definitely a step up from the confusion and control that are found in the lower levels. Rules for a family are the glue that holds the family out of chaos. According to www.parentleadership.com, “every healthy family lives by a set of rules in the home, some high standards for attitudes and conduct directed toward the welfare of others.” Rules also let each member of the family live in the environment with a set role that comes with a set of specific rules about how to perform that role. In a level 3 family where rules are abundant, there is no confusion about where each member fits or what their responsibilities are for the family. Everyone’s behavior is effectively regulated and there is predictability, order, and control built into the family system. With letting rules dominate the family, an important sacrifice is made: intimacy.

We would like to suggest that Scarf’s Beavers scale can be used as a model for more than families. All interactions within a community can be fit into these five levels with the dominating characteristics seen as the norm within that community. Centre College, the wonderful institution that we attend, is just like a level 3 family. Not purposely, but the relations among the students are defined by rules, or as we like to call them, social commandments, leaving little room for intimacy.

The social commandments of Centre College:
1. Men and women are not to consume food at the same table in Cowan
2. Do not show affection for the opposite sex in public. This includes:
a. Holding hands
b. Kissing
c. Talking
d. Eating together
3. If you’re in an actual relationship, hide it from the general public until it is considered serious
4. “Hooking up” is okay while intoxicated, but this does not change the rules of sober interaction

There are a few circumstances where the above rules may be set aside temporarily:
1. Athletic teams may eat together and communicate with any gender as long as it is in direct conjunction with a practice or sports event
2. “Wingnuts,” who sit in the outer wings of the hall, do not follow the Cowan seating rules
3. The Cowan seating rules may be set aside during Saturday/Sunday brunch or during breakfast
4. Drunken interactions may or may not follow the rules

The Cowan seating chart is the most obvious place to view Centre’s display of the level 3 rule-bound family. Freshmen first enter Cowan thinking they can sit wherever they want and with whomever they want. They soon learn that this is not the way Centre works; there are certain rules that must be followed. Men and women are supposed to sit at separate tables, with the women sitting on the inside of the circular main room, and the men sticking to the outside tables. Looking around the outside of the room there are tables for each of the fraternities, with the inside tables designated for the sororities, freshmen women, and sports teams. Sports teams are the only ones that are allowed to sit with the opposite sex, but only if the interaction is in conjunction with a sporting event or practice. The rules are sometimes set aside during weekend brunch, when topics of conversation concern only the events of the past night, or during breakfasts, when everyone present is studying for the same upcoming test. The only way the rules can be broken during weekday lunch or dinner is if you allow yourself to be considered a “wingnut,” which is basically defined as those who prefer to sit in the wings, rather than the large main room of Cowan.

Divorce Effects, Part Two

By guest bloggers Will Adams and Ellie Guy from the Family Life class.
(Part two of two)

A recent study conducted by Norval Glenn at the University of Texas at Austin has some surprising things to say about the effects of divorce on children relative to the quality of divorce. Glenn says that children of good divorces are caught off guard by the divorce and have long-term damage to their views of marriage as an institution. Children of a bad divorce see the conflict leading up to the divorce and can justify the divorce in their minds and, while they may blame one or both parents for their actions, their faith in the institution of marriage is maintained. The children of bad divorce, however, experience a much greater psychological trauma as they are often “torn between two worlds” worse than children of good divorce are.

What Glenn’s research shows is that both good and bad divorces have detrimental effects on the children involved. He, like most researchers in the field, concedes that there are examples of abusive marriages where the parents and children are better off with a divorce, but that this population is a small minority. Save those few situations, most divorces have an overwhelmingly negative effect on children. What we see is that divorced children, having either been disillusioned by marriage or made to fear divorce in their own relationships, will have a greater likelihood of themselves either never getting married or ending a marriage in divorce.

This trend seems to indicate that we may begin to see a cyclical pattern in families that have experienced divorce. Because of this, we believe it would be interesting to conduct a study that looks at marital happiness and success based on the family history of the two people in the marriage: whether both come from intact or divorced families or if one comes from each. Our belief is that the findings would show that both spouses from intact families would be the happiest and successful, both from divorced families second, and mixed spouses the least happy. Our reasoning for listing two children-of-divorce spouses as the next happiest behind the dual-intact spouses is that we believe a percentage of dual-divorced marriages would be both so turned off by their parents’ experiences that they would be willing to do anything to make their own marriages work. Furthermore, if they both came from this background they would understand each other’s mentalities. Our reasoning for placing a mixed family history marriage as the least likely to be happy/successful is that we feel the intact-family spouse would not fully understand where the divorced-family spouse had grown up with. Furthermore, one spouse would have experienced his or her parents dealing with situations while the other one would not have that knowledge. The result would be that the two come to the marriage with unequal marital skills and knowledge.

This is all obviously theoretical. We would like to see the results of such a study and believe that it will be conducted someday and anticipate its results.

Divorce Effects, Part One

By guest bloggers Will Adams and Ellie Guy from the Family Life class.
(Part one of two)

In life, statistics do not lie, and divorce has become a large part of our life in today’s culture. Since the 1960’s and 70’s divorce rates have been on the rise in society. It has, in a sense, become more acceptable to enter into marriage knowing that there is a future possibility of divorce. But this of course does not come without consequences. Researchers have been studying the effects of divorce on families, especially those on children, and have found some overwhelming evidence that divorce is harmful for children. Many believe that by ending a conflict laden marriage they are freeing their children of the chaotic and unhealthy family structure. In reality, they are freeing their children from family structure. Parents think that children can sense the unhappiness and tension in the household, while in reality children think that their family situation (barring excessive violence or abuse) is the norm and that mommy and daddy are merely having disagreements. Furthermore, studies have shown that parental conflict does not end with divorce, but only increases the harmful effects on children as they are caught between the two parents and the two households.

While much research has been done on the harmful effects of divorce on children, led by such researchers as Judith Wallerstein, little has been done on the effects of divorce on the children after they grow up. The effects of divorce don’t cease when the child becomes an adult. The reason that little research has been done in this area is that the effects may not be apparent until decades after the initial divorce, and since divorce did not become widely accepted until the late 80s-early 90s, we have only recently been able to see the long-term effects. Only recently has data started to emerge showing that the marriages of children of divorce are traumatized by the divorce of their parents. And while the negative effects on children of divorce’s future marriages has been recognized, little has been done to attempt to explain the psychology of these effects let alone how to properly prevent them. Furthermore, recent research has begun to show surprising effects on children’s marriages based on the type of divorce experienced, which will be discussed in tomorrow’s post.

In a 1995 study reported in the American Journal of Sociology, Webster, Orbuch, and House showed that among unhappy marriages, those who had grown up in divorced families and those who had never known their fathers were much more likely to end up divorced than were those in unhappy marriages who had grown up in a two-married-parent household. This study does report several different theories put forth by other scholars pertaining to the relationship between family history and marital stability, but determines that empirical evidence does not conclusively support any of these theories.

In addition, in the 1987 Journal of Marriage and Family, Glenn and Kramer found evidence in US national surveys conducted from 1973 to 1985 that children of divorced families are more likely to divorce in the future. They supported these findings with a plethora of reasons for why this correlation might occur. Some of their theories include that children with divorced parents have inappropriate modeling for spouse roles, less social support from parents, a lower level of education, the greater likelihood of resorting to divorce, and a lower average age of getting married which ultimately leads to higher rates of divorce. Glenn and Kramer used these statistical findings to formulate a variety of conclusions that demonstrated the detrimental effects of children of divorce on their marital future.

Elizabeth Marquardt covers in depth the effects of divorce on children in their early childhood, psychologically and emotionally. She asserts that though some believe divorce is the best plan of action to avoid future disaster, in reality there is no such thing as a ‘good’ divorce that leads to a positive outcome. Moreover, as we are beginning to see with new and upcoming research, the effects do not end in childhood; they are carried throughout life and are evident in the children’s married lives and families. Which begs the question, what can be to avoid this detrimental outcome in our families and our society as a whole?

"Close Relations" Theory Pours Acid on Family Roles

Dan Cere wrote a fine essay on how the "close relations" theory is quickly displacing the conjugal theory of marriage in the laws of this country and Canada. I have written about it before. For their final examination, my family life students had to consider all we had studied in light of this conflict of paradigms. I learned something, as I always do, from these examinations.

One of the ideas we spent some time with is the Beavers Scale of Family Functioning, a family systems account that divides families into five large categories of functioning from chaotic to optimal. One of the points that Robert Beavers emphasizes (as does the author who popularized his view, Maggie Scarf) is that well-functioning families have clear boundaries around their various roles. The boundaries should not been too rigid, but neither should they be too permeable. But in order to have boundaries around family roles, you need to have some dependable roles to begin with. Beavers builds on the boundaries around the marriage, around the parent-child groups, and around the family as a whole, in addition to subsidiary roles.

The conjugal theory is, obviously, built around the roles of husband and wife. In the more amorphous world in which any close relationship is as good as any other, and none are assumed to be permanent, "family roles" melt away. In fact, under a close relations model, I don't see how we could talk about functional and dysfunctional families at all. This may be part of the appeal of the close relations paradigm to postmodernist intellectuals. The freedom from defined roles is likely to be cold comfort, though, to children caught in the chaos of a formless family.

Mom and the Prom

My mother went to Swarthmore at 17. I have seen pictures of her then – a very pretty brown-eyed girl who, well, had a figure pleasing to men. I learned what the word "chic" meant when I read the description of her in the college yearbook. She met my father at a freshmen mixer dance, and they went on to a long and successful marriage. I talked to my mother yesterday, as I do every Saturday, and we went over the news of family, friends, and the big world. My mother is part of my wisdom circle, and I am proud to be part of hers.

My daughter just turned 18, and will go to Swarthmore in the fall. She is a very pretty brown-eyed girl who, well, has a Marilyn figure. Last night my wife and I had the pleasure of enacting a classic scene with her as she got ready for the prom. She had been to the hairdresser, and came back with what she has taught me is an "up-do." Her mother had latched that hard-to-reach hook in the back, and our eldest was before us in a halter dress like the one that Marilyn Monroe wore in "The Seven Year Itch" in the famous updraft scene, except our girl's dress was black. We watched her put the last touches of her makeup on, a skill she certainly did not learn from her nerdy parents.

As I watched my daughter get ready, I thought of my mother, whom she resembles.

Thank you delightful daughter.

Happy Mothers' Day, Mom.