Everyone knows
that the Christian Churches cherish family values. We hear about it all the
time - in schools and churches, on radio and television, and read about it in
books and newspapers. All mainstream Churches claim to follow traditional
teaching based on Jesus own life and example as described in the gospels. No
one disputes this. Or at least we almost never hear about anyone disputing it.
This is not because the claim is undisputed. It is because the media fail to
give a voice to those who do dispute it.
Let’s break
the convention and look at the facts. We’ll start with Jesus’ own life as
recorded in the gospels. Theologians have long been embarrassed by the way he
spoke to his mother: “Woman, what have I
to do with thee” (John 2:4). The
usual explanation is that an element of curtness was unwittingly introduced in
the past by translators, but this is simply not true, as the original Greek
text or any modern academic translation will confirm. In any case, Jesus rejected
his mother more than once, just as he rejected the rest of his family. When they asked for him he denied his mother
and brothers, and said that the followers who were listening to him at the time
were his mother and brothers (Mark 3:31-35, c/f Matthew 12:48-49 and Luke
8:20-21). He denied his mother again at
the crucifixion according to one reading of John 19:27. Jesus had no qualms
about taking his disciples away from their families. The brothers James and
John abandoned their father, leaving him to manage as best he could with the
fishing nets they had been preparing together.
Earthly fathers were no more important than mothers. Jesus gave a clear
instruction to his followers “call no man
your father upon the earth” on the grounds that they had only one father
and that was the one in Heaven (Matthew 23:9). On one occasion, a disciple
asked permission to go and bury his dead father: “But Jesus said unto him, Follow me; and let the dead bury the dead”
(Matthew 8:22 c/f Luke 9:60). Jesus then refused another potential follower who
asked permission to say good-bye to his family before abandoning them (Luke
9:61-62). We learn that this attitude
was entirely in line with Jesus’ purpose:
“For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter
against her mother, and the daughter in law against the mother in law”
(Matthew 10:35). Jesus consistently taught that his followers should abandon
and despise their families. Everlasting
life is promised to those who leave their homes and families (Matthew 19:29,
Mark 10:29-30 and Luke 18:29-30). The
Luke author gives Jesus’ summary of his views on family life: “If any man come to me, and hate not his
father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and
his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26, Cf. Matthew
19:29). A similar sentiment is expressed in the non-canonical Gospel of St
Thomas.
This gospel goes further “Whoever recognises his father and mother will be called the son of a
whore.
Relying on biblical
passages, early Christians inferred that family life was worthless and hailed
virginity as the ideal. Virgins were holy. Those who indulged their carnal
lusts were filthy degenerates. For the
Church Fathers, sex was an inexplicable burden, and the creation of children
was a sorrow to all. In view of this,
Christians set about the destruction of family life. Converts were lured away from their parents,
siblings, spouses, and children. The
children of rich converts were often left destitute, their inheritance being
diverted into Church coffers. This was a common complaint against Christians in
Roman times and is not unknown among Christian sects in modern times. Early
Christians discouraged new converts from communicating with non-Christian
relatives, just as some Christian sects do today.
By the fourth
century clergymen were occasionally being expected to abandon their wives in
emulation of St Peter and the other apostles, all twelve of whom were believed
to have abandoned their wives and families.
As Pope Gregory VII put it “The church cannot escape the grip of the
laity unless priests first escape from their wives”.
Wives were often left abandoned. Many were so desperate that they were driven
to suicide. Those who were not
abandoned, if discovered by the Church authorities, were liable to be sold into
slavery.
In the Middle
Ages ordinary men were encouraged to leave their wives and families. When preaching the first Crusade, Pope Urban
II cited the words of Jesus from Matthew 10:37 and 19:29: “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me…every
one that hath forsaken houses or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or
wife, or children, or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold,
and shall inherit everlasting life”.
In other words a place in heaven was being promised to those who
abandoned their families. Preachers lured hundreds of thousands of men away
from their families to take the cross.
When St Bernard preached, women went in fear. Mothers hid their sons from him, wives their
husbands. Bernard proudly informed the
Pope of his success: “I opened my mouth; I spoke; and at once the Crusaders
have multiplied to infinity. Villages and towns are now deserted. You will
scarcely find one man for every seven women. Everywhere you will see widows
whose husbands are still alive.” Most of those women were soon to become real
widows, but no one bothered to record the numbers. We will never know how many
of them died alone of cold, hunger or old age, never knowing the fate of their
husbands and sons.
People were
expected to put Christian duties before their duties to their family, and
inform on any deviation from orthodoxy.
It was a grave offence for a child not to inform on its sinful parents,
or for a parent not to inform on their sinful children. Children had no right to family life, and the
Church encouraged people to give their sons to the service of the Church. These
children, oblates as they were
called, were brought up away from their families, by monks, for the service of
the Church. We have no reason to suppose that the scale of abuse of these
children was any less than that perpetrated by Churchmen in modern times. Yet
in some ways the oblates were lucky. The Church was responsible for worse
things done to other boys. After girls had been excluded from church choirs,
the Eastern Churches hit upon the idea of using castrated boys to replace
falsetto soprano voices. The idea was
copied in Italy and Spain in the sixteenth century. Popes and Church synods declined to prohibit
castration on the pragmatic grounds that without castrati churches would remain
empty. Castrati were entertaining Popes
in the Sistine chapel into the twentieth century. It was apparently of no
consequence to the Church that these boys, when they reached adulthood, were
denied the possibility of an ordinary family life or even married life. The Church
would not let them marry, on the grounds that they were unable to father
children.
Under
Christian hegemony the position of slaves and their families was equally
questionable. Slaves required permission
from their Christian owners to marry. Men and women were owned and bred like
animals. Slave children did not belong to their parents but to their masters.
In nineteenth century America, children of slaves were still being taken from
their parents before reaching their first birthday. Far from condemning this,
priests and ministers (often slave owners themselves) condoned it. As they so
often pointed out, slavery was not merely permitted by God, it was enjoined by
God. It would be sinful not to
practice slavery. Once again, Christianity did not accord any value to family
life per se.
In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries priests assured Catholic women that they
owed a greater duty to the Church than to their husbands. One consequence of
this was that they had a responsibility to help priests wanted for treason,
even if their husbands did not approve, and even if by so doing they put their
innocent husbands at risk of death. Father Henry Garnet wrote a Treatise of Christian Renunciation
which contained many examples of families broken asunder by religious
differences. Once again the point was clear: families were dispensable. Bonds
between husband and wife were not important. One reason for this was that love
played no part in the traditional Christian idea of marriage. Arranged
marriages were the norm when the Church controlled this area of the law, as it
did for many centuries. Under Church Law, children could be betrothed at the
age of 7. In practice marriages were often arranged at much lower ages–
sometimes months rather than years for the nobility. The traditional Anglican
marriage service reflecting Christian ideas identifies three reasons for
marriage: procreation, the avoidance of fornication, and mutual society. Love does not come into it. The Roman
Catechism is even more direct: the section on the sacrament of matrimony states
that really it would be desirable for all Christians to remain unmarried. As canon
277 of the 1983 Roman Catholic Code of Canon Law affirms: Celibacy is a special gift of God. Following the Church Fathers,
the pinnacle of achievement is to remain a virgin, and so not have a family at
all. St Alexis won his sainthood by abandoning his new bride on her wedding
day.
The poor were
not entitled to a family life either. In Victorian times Anglican parochial
charities found it perfectly consistent with Christian teachings to split up
the families who claimed poor relief. Husbands would be sent to one poor house,
women to another. Untold numbers of married couples were split up in this way,
never to see each other or their children again. The hereditary sick were also
undeserving of family life. When Hitler
discussed them with Cardinal Faulhaber in 1936 the two men agreed that they
were a problem, but had different approaches to it. Hitler wanted to sterilise them, but the
Cardinal had another solution. The Catholic theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann cites
him as saying “The state, Herr Reich-chancellor, is not debarred from removing
these vermin from the national community in the interests of legitimate
self-defence and in conformity with moral law, but preventives other than
physical mutilation must be sought, and such a preventive does exist: the
internment of the hereditary sick”. He
was talking about what we now call concentration camps. The cardinal’s problem
with sterilisation was that it would allow people to enjoy sex without the risk
of procreation, contrary to the teaching of his Church. To this extent the
sterilisation option was morally unacceptable, but there was nothing wrong with
splitting up families in order to put individual members into concentration
camps.
Non-Christians
were not entitled to a family life either. When Christian missionaries failed
to make an impact on the locals they could always kidnap children so that the
next generation could be indoctrinated into the Christian faith by force. A
missionary called Symeon pioneered this method around the Euphrates in the sixth
century, scorning the objections of local villagers. Parents who objected
started to die in mysterious circumstances, and the rest gave way. The
abduction and indoctrination of children became a standard technique when
missionaries could make no impact on adults, and this technique would be used
with effect for many centuries. Children of members of any faith might be
seized by Christian authorities.
Sometimes whole families were seized.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Jewish families were
taken, often by force, by Christian authorities and subjected to what we would
now call brainwashing. If half of the
family converted and half did not, they were split up never to see each other
again. Sometimes wives never saw their
husbands again, sometimes parents never saw their children again. As late as 1858, acting under clerical
instructions, the Bolognia police seized a young boy, Edgardo Mortara, from his
Jewish family. Despite an international outcry the kidnapped child was kept in
Rome by the Catholic Church, and “re-educated”.
His re-education was so successful that he eventually became a
missionary priest. From the age of seven
until his death he was never to know a real family, either as son or father.
His life was regarded by the Roman Church as a great success, and presumably
still is.
Jews were not
the only victims. With the complicity of the state, Christians were kidnapping
non-Christian children well into the twentieth century. This practice is generally justified by
claiming that non-Christian parents are somehow unsuitable. North American Indian children were being
taken from their families by the Canadian authorities until at least the
1950’s. Aboriginal children were being
taken from their families by the Australian authorities until the 1960’s and
put into Christian orphanages. A Roman
Catholic organisation in Switzerland was kidnapping Romany children and sending
them to be adopted by Catholic families into the 1970’s. The children were routinely told that their
parents were dead, and that they had no living relatives. The same thing was common among the
children of unmarried mothers around the world – from New Zealand to Ireland
and Brazil. Children were taken by
force, generally with the complicity of the authorities, and given up for
adoption as “orphans” to the mainstream western Churches.
In Britain
children were not taken by force, but by deception. Stigmatised single mothers
were encouraged to leave their children with Christian organisations, either to
be adopted or to be cared for until the mother could take the child back. Many
of these organisations sent children to the colonies without their parents’
consent or knowledge – even when the mothers had stated explicitly that they
would return to take their children back. The children were told, falsely, that
their parents were dead. They were described as orphans and they grew up believing themselves to be orphans. They
were not given their birth certificates or other identification documentation.
Sometimes they were provided with new names and even new birthdays. Sometimes
their files were burned. In some cases when parents came back to reclaim their
children they were told, again falsely, that the children were dead. In other
cases mothers were told the truth, but no effort was made to bring their
children back. Sometimes two or more brothers and sisters were sent out at the
same time. Usually they were split up – destroying the last vestige of a family
relationship. These children were to remain in institutions throughout their
childhood. When Australian families came forward to foster them, traditionalist
Churches preferred to keep the children in institutions. An official report in
Western Australia in 1959 indicated that “practically all children could be adequately
fostered if the institutions were not loath to part with them…”. The last child
migrations to Australia took place in 1967. By then between 100,000 and 150,000
children had been shipped around the world, away from their roots and their
families. As middle-aged adults, many of these “orphans” discovered in the
1980s that they were not orphans at all, and some that their parents were still
alive. Parents discovered that their children were not dead, as they had been
told. The emotional turmoil caused by this deliberate “deceit and deception”
was documented by Margaret Humphreys in her book Empty Cradles.
So there it
is. Over the centuries, Christianity has been responsible for untold millions
of abandoned wives, divided families, and stolen and disinherited children. The
current attachment to family values is an innovation, and runs contrary to both
Jesus’ teachings and the historical stance of all mainstream Churches. It is
only since the 1960’s that the Churches have found it expedient to adopt this position. As Don Cupitt, a leading liberal churchman,
noted: “The idealisation of the family is a modern cultural creation, which the
Churches have validated, and now no modern bishop would dream of publicly
endorsing Jesus’ views about the family.” Among Catholic, Anglican, Protestant,
Methodist and Baptist theologians much creative imagination goes into the
pretence that the gospels do not mean what they plainly say: that followers of
Jesus must hate their families. Except
for a few men and women who abandon their families to become hermits or
anchorites, or monks or nuns in closed orders, there are now virtually no
Christians who follow Jesus’ teaching about family life. The only significant
group keeping up the old traditions are Christian missionaries, still quietly
breaking up families around the world, telling new converts to leave their
non-Christian spouses, siblings, parents and children – just as Christian
missionaries have done since Roman times. As they will proudly tell you, they
are doing exactly what Jesus wanted them to do.
