In recent years, family has become central to a new religious polemic, this time embodied in a wave of popular fundamentalist movements. Defining FUNDAMENTALISM is a difficult and often contentious task, a scholarly problem that reflects the rapid, complex growth of antimodern movements around the world today. In their public rhetoric, fundamentalist adherents proclaim a deep antipathy toward modern secularism in all its social, political, and intellectual manifestations. Yet in a larger sense, fundamentalism and modernity exist in a symbiotic relationship (see MODERNISM). Hardly a movement of the rural or unlettered, fundamentalism is most compelling where people feel the most powerless to combat its corrosive effects.
The term “fundamentalist” originally referred to a conservative wing within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American Protestantism. Although the movement was not initially successful in halting the spread of liberal theology, by the mid-twentieth century it exercised a broad influence within American Protestant evangelical culture (see EVANGELICALISM), and, by dint of energetic evangelistic work, on the larger world as well.
Family is an important symbolic battleground in the modern “culture wars” (see CULTURE). Although historians have disagreed, oftentimes fiercely, about the extent of a modern-day family crisis, there is no doubt that over the course of the twentieth century, domestic life in the modern West—and, increasingly, the rest of the world as well—has vastly changed. Although fundamentalist adherents often point to ideological movements like feminism as reason for a family “breakdown,” the sources of change are in fact much broader, reflecting some deeper shifts in modern social arrangements. Thus, rising educational and income opportunities for younger women have reduced the demands of “the family claim” on their lives. Increasing access to birth control has shortened the average couple’s child-bearing years and liberated their sexual expression both within and outside of marriage. Longer years of schooling for young children have decreased the family’s educational role and opened up a new range of possibilities for economic and geographic mobility. The transformation has not been as dramatic (nor perhaps as overwhelmingly negative) as some of the more insistent voices have claimed; yet it is clear that modernity has allowed individuals to make life decisions with far greater independence from their families than their grandparents would have ever thought possible.
The conservative emphasis on family has also arisen against a backdrop of reluctance among more liberal Protestant bodies to make binding rules about sexuality. As social scientists have argued, this development reflects broader individualizing trends in North America and Europe and the increasing privatization of marriage and childrearing relationships. Protestant denominations, no less than secular governing bodies, have become averse to regulating the intimate personal relationships of their constituents, perhaps also because they have recognized the futility of even attempting to do so.
The “pro-family” agenda, centered on the conviction that the home is the true bedrock of a moral society, has both a negative and a positive expression. On the one hand is an effort to control sexuality through opposition to ABORTION and HOMOSEXUALITY, and to situate women more emphatically in the home as wives and mothers. On the other hand, pro-family advocates have also sought to address the problem of father absence, a crisis at least as old as the industrial revolution itself. Though the language of groups like Promise Keepers is often unabashedly patriarchal, their purpose is generally much broader. By affirming the father’s spiritual responsibilities to his wife and children, they hope to reinvigorate family life and, by extension, Christianity among some of its historically weakest supporters.
The sense of social and spiritual crisis in the now post-Christian West has often obscured the vitality of the faith in other parts of the world. By the late twentieth century, religious demographers were reporting that Christianity’s center of gravity had shifted to the southern hemisphere, centered in vigorous Pentecostal and indigenous movements in developing African and Latin American nations (see PENTACOSTALISM; LATIN AMERICA, AFRICA). By 1980, the “average” Christian was not a white, middle-class American, but more likely young, poor, and experiencing all of the hardships of life in a third-world country.
The new global face of Protestantism has posed unprecedented challenges to traditional Western beliefs and practices about family. Discussions on the subject have had to take into account the poverty and exploitation brought on by a rapidly globalizing economy, the sexual victimization of women and children in a world-wide market for pornography, and the ravages of the AIDS virus in Africa and Asia. Long a matter of ethical and theological debate among Western Protestants, family has become a key social concern for the faith’s rising generations.
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