From the sixteenth century onward through the nineteenth, families in the West became smaller and more nuclear, that is, centered around a single married couple and their children. Although historians have vigorously debated the meaning, causes, and extent of this change—which did not, of course, affect all families equally—at least part of the force behind it was practical: declining child mortality rates, increased urbanization, and INDUSTRIALIZATION meant that large, extended households were not necessarily an economic advantage. The emerging bourgeois family depended on a single wage earned by the father, who left his domicile each morning to labor in the public world of business and commerce, while mother and children lived more quietly within the private sphere of the home.
The new model identified family as central to the developing world of private life, characterized by an ordered intimacy between spouses, parents, and children. To be sure, access to a private life was certainly economically determined; few working class or rural families could demarcate their lives into separate spheres of home and work. Yet, as it developed in the nineteenth century, the domestic ideal had widespread currency. As market-driven economies made everincreasing demands on those striving for success, home became the place where morality and religion lodged most deeply.
Although historians have debated the effect of bourgeois domesticity on the status of women, it certainly marked a departure from the traditional patriarchal household of centuries past. In some ways, the bourgeois pattern increased the subordinate status of women, assuming that they would be economically dependent on a male provider and fill a submissive role in the marriage relationship as well. Moreover, in most Western legal systems, women had no independent standing before the law; the legal principle of “femme couvert” meant that a man always took responsibility for his wife’s or daughter’s property and wages and represented her in the political arena. Yet in other ways, the emerging bourgeois family undercut the old assumptions of patriarchal society by emphasizing the necessity of mutual love and intimacy in marriage. By the late nineteenth century, falling birth rates among middle-class women suggest a shift in the balance of power in the bedroom as well. Indeed, in the long run, women’s ownership of the domestic sphere allowed them to assume increasingly direct responsibility for upholding social morality. The social networks that they created on behalf of TEMPERANCE and other moral causes eventually became a platform for voicing a common complaint against their legal and social disadvantages. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the legal barriers against women were beginning to fall, marked by the passage of married women’s property acts and suffrage amendments in most of the Western industrialized nations.
The intimacy of middle-class family life also centered increasingly on children. By the eighteenth century, and especially in the rising democratic ethos of the UNITED STATES, the feudal assumption that all children would simply inherit their parents’ station in life did not reflect reality. To a degree, the “discovery of childhood” in the early modern West drew from the democratic ethos of the ENLIGHTENMENT and the optimism of Romantic thought. Emile, JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU’S archtypical child of nature, was not a stubborn sinner, but rather a young innocent with an innate potential for rational thought and an infinite capacity for good. Falling child mortality rates, paired with declining family size, also contributed to this trend, allowing parents in the urbanized middle classes to devote more specific attention to the moral and intellectual growth of each individual child.
This new ideal of family intimacy did not mesh easily with some forms of Protestant belief. On the most fundamental level, the celebration of childhood innocence came into conflict with the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. In a strictly logical sense, this teaching held that all children came into the world under its stain and were thus liable for eternal punishment, even if death came within minutes of birth. Yet from Augustine’s time on, Christian thinkers had struggled against the apparent injustice; Thomas Aquinas in fact posited a “limbo” for the souls of unbaptized children. Even the Puritan divines recognized the difference between the logical implications of a DOCTRINE and the emotional needs of parents grieving the loss of a child.
The emphasis on adult CONVERSION in the evangelical REVIVALS of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also posed a quandary for parents. To what extent were they responsible for the spiritual fate of a child not yet at the moral “age of accountability”? Moreover, to what degree could parents expect genuine faith in children who were not old enough to experience a full-fledged conversion experience? In some cases, anxiety about the unchecked sins of childhood led to the conviction that parents had a duty to “break the will” of the young rebels in their care, sometimes through sustained physical punishment. By forcefully repressing a child’s sinful tendencies, parents might not save him or her from punishment, but they could limit the pull of temptation to SIN in the years before a full adult conversion was possible.
In many ways, nineteenth-century liberal Protestant thought marked a response to these parental concerns (see LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM AND LIBERALISM). Instead of a transcendent God of judgment, liberals emphasized God’s immanence, that is, God’s embodiedness in the created world. Rejecting the idea of a depraved human nature, they saw great possibilities for progress and development in each individual person. Reflecting the optimistic spirit of their age, liberal theologians proclaimed the KINGDOM OF GOD, not as a future heavenly state, but rather as the promise of their own age, here on earth.
Two leading theologians, the American Congregationalist HORACE BUSHNELL and the German Reformed thinker FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER, played a major role in developing a Protestant understanding of Christian nurture. Both men rejected the traditional evangelical view of children as desperate rebels unable to accept or understand divine love. Instead, they affirmed the authenticity of childhood faith at every stage of its development, for although a very young child might not intellectually understand Christian doctrine, he or she still had the capacity for a true faith in God. Although neither theologian romanticized childhood innocence, both emphasized the naturalness and purity of youth and saw childhood as a time of unique openness to the divine. Parents therefore played a crucial role in the child’s moral outcome. Thoughtless, cruel, or dissolute treatment could harden the child’s spirit toward eventual rebellion against God; in a parallel fashion, firm and gentle childrearing would implant a positive awareness of God’s care for creation, and open the way for genuine faith even in a preliterate infant. To Bushnell, even the atmosphere of a Christian home was subtly salvific. A child reared in a calm, loving, peaceful environment, he believed, would have no difficulty eventually accepting God as heavenly father.
The nineteenth century thus saw the gradual identification of the Western bourgeois family as a fundamentally “Christian” institution. Family was not just a place for catechizing and disciplining the young, but itself a means of grace in the lives of parents and children. Regular household devotions were an important sign of godliness, but hardly the only one. Even more telling was the home’s peaceful, controlled atmosphere—a true sign of its essentially Christian character.
The Christian home also became an important means of evangelistic outreach for European and American Protestants. In foreign missionary efforts, especially those organized and led by women, Western-style domesticity became a key means of introducing Christianity to non-Western people. By the late nineteenth century, most Western missionaries recognized that reaching native women in their homes could be far more effective in proclaiming the Gospel than simply PREACHING sermons in the public square. But the missionary emphasis on family was far more than a pragmatic strategy: for Victorian Protestants, home was so closely identified with the essence of Christianity that it was all but impossible to separate the two.
The use of family as an evangelistic tool meant, in many cases, a headlong confrontation between Western assumptions and indigenous traditions. When, for example, the Anglican LAMBETH CONFERENCE interdicted polygamy (plural marriage) in 1888, African Christians faced some difficult choices. In African society, polygamy was a sign of economic success and a means of cementing political alliances; some observant converts pointed out the multiple wives of the Old Testament patriarchs. In embracing monogamy, converts sacrificed social power and in many cases treasured personal relationships. For some, the cost was simply too high. In 1917, an act of church discipline against the polygamous marriages of several Nigerian laymen led to a mass exodus of members and, in protest, the formation of the United African Methodist Church.
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