Biblical Family Values
Reflections on the Lectionary for June 29th
Have you ever heard of “biblical family values?” Have you ever wondered what it meant?
As a scholar of the Bible, I’m really interested in the question of how people assign authority to the Bible—how biblical texts exert influence over our everyday lives. I’m especially interested in the ways people cite the Bible as authoritative even when the text doesn’t seem to want to be authoritative, or the ways people cite it as authoritative when the text itself runs counter to the belief or position they are trying to uphold.
The gospel reading in the lectionary for June 29th offers a really nice example of this in action. One of the things that many people claim about the Bible is that it offers guidelines for marriage, relationships, and most of all family—that the Bible is a kind of handbook for relationality. In the past several decades this has shown up in the wider culture as “biblical family values”—the idea that the Bible has a stable, identifiable, and salutary perspective on how family ought to work. Usually in practice, “biblical family values” has meant something like a “traditional” heterosexual marriage, with a man performing stereotypical masculinity and a woman performing stereotypical femininity. In practice, “biblical family values” has been a code for Euro-derived gender normativity, which is not—spoiler alert—exactly what the Bible itself envisions. I can remember in the 1990s, at the height of the arguments over marriage equality, conservative Christians would often appeal to the idea of “biblical marriage,” and they would talk about marriage as being between one man and one woman. The Bible itself offers a lot less support for that idea than you might think; the Bible is full of marriages between one man and many women, one man and war captives, one man and a pair of sisters, one man and one woman and several concubines, one man and the woman he has sexually assaulted, and so on. The ideal marriage might be a marriage that doesn’t exist, if you take Paul’s word for it and Jesus’ example. “Biblical marriage” is a mirage—a figment of evangelical Christianity’s biblical imagination. As long as I have been alive, if someone was citing “biblical marriage” to you, it has been a reliable way to tell that they have not read the Bible very closely.
But “biblical family values” is a slightly broader category than “biblical marriage,” and the gospel text for this week invites us to think about it a little bit. The lectionary this Sunday collects a few texts around the theme of discipleship—the idea of being dedicated and devoted to following Jesus (or God). The passages from 1 Kings and 2 Kings follow the theme of discipleship and devotion with Elisha and Elijah, tracking Elisha’s devotion to his teacher and both men’s devotion to God. The Galatians text offers reflections on devotion to the law and the Spirit. But the passage from Luke is really interesting, because it offers at least a couple of angles on the question of devotion, and they are connected to the idea of “biblical family values,” though not in a way most people might expect or claim. The passage is operating on at least a couple of levels.
At one level, this is a story about Jesus’ own devotion. It begins with 9:51, which is one of my favorite verses from the Gospel of Luke: When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. Within the Gospel of Luke, this verse functions kind of like a hinge; the whole narrative turns on this bit of stage direction. Before 9:51, the Gospel describes Jesus as engaging in a variety of teaching and healing activities, but after it, the story focuses on Jesus’ collision course with power structures and the ways he eventually became ensnared in the machinery of empire. Narratively, 9:51 marks a shift in perspective and a change of direction, and thematically it marks a new focus for Jesus. You can see this show up in the text, a bit, in the reaction of people around Jesus—the Samaritans notice that something has changed with Jesus and do not welcome him, and Jesus’ own disciples seem to ramp up their energy and anxiety about him.
At another level, though, Jesus’ new focus and direction turns into an opportunity for him to teach the disciples, and by proxy the reader of the Gospel of Luke, about what devotion means. And here is where the idea of “family values” comes into sharp relief. To put it succinctly and bluntly, in this passage from Luke, “biblical family values” looks like:
· A rejection of social obligations, including obligations to family,
· An abandonment of family without so much as a goodbye, and
· Placelessness, homelessness, and rootlessness as hallmarks of true discipleship.
All of this is apparent in a reading of Luke 9:57-62. In these few verses, Jesus responds to comments from three different disciples. One disciple (verse 57) simply promises to follow Jesus wherever he goes, which prompts Jesus to claim that the wherever-ness of that disciple’s pledge—the placelessness and rootlessness and homelessness that it implies—is itself virtuous. A second disciple (verse 59) also offers to follow Jesus, but wants to first return home to bury his father—one of the most sacred family obligations someone could invoke. But Jesus tells that disciple to let the dead bury their own dead. A third disciple (verse 61) asks only to say goodbye to his family at home, but even this is too much attachment and sentimentality for Jesus, who tells him that anyone looking backward is not fit for the kingdom.
What’s going on here? Isn’t all this anti-family, anti-home rhetoric a bad fit for the “biblical family values” worldview that so many Christians proclaim? Isn’t abandonment and rejection at odds with the idea of valuing family?
It sure seems to be.
This was an inherent tension in early Christianity, I think, and it has become pronounced (again) in 20th and 21st century forms of Protestant Christianity (especially evangelicalism) that seek to leverage the Bible in culture-war arguments. The tension in early Christianity was this: Jesus’ own life and ministry were itinerant, and that itinerancy seems to have come at the cost of family attachments and social norms and structures. Jesus himself was unmarried (though he remained in touch with his family, as his mother and brother are sometimes seen as part of his entourage in gospel texts), and Jesus’ disciples appear to have been made up at least partly (but not completely) of unattached young men. Perhaps this was because of Jesus’ apocalyptic message; if you are expecting a radical revision of society in the form of coming kingdom of God, it doesn’t make much sense to invest in the social structures of the world that’s about to be swept away. Why get married if the world’s about to end? There might also be a sociological explanation; unattached young men might have been more easily recruited into a movement like Jesus’. (Something similar is happening right now with the alt-right, which is catering to disaffected and unattached young men).
This tension can be found all the way through Christianity’s formative centuries, up through at least the period of late antiquity and into the early medieval period. Christianity was full of movements and people who renounced sexuality and family attachments and the very ideas of home and kinship, and went to live in desert hermitages or monasteries as recluses, to devote themselves fully to God. Sexual renunciation has been a theme of Christianity from as early as Paul and as late as right now.
But on the other hand, as Christianity became more mainstream and as it became clear that Jesus’ (and Paul’s) apocalypticism would have to be revised to fit a longer timeline in which the world was not ending right away, marriage and family became more important. It might have been easy for Jesus to renounce family in the year 29, when this scene Luke is relating might have happened. If Jesus was an unmarried and placeless preacher, leading a band of similarly (mostly) unmarried and placeless disciples, it was easy to teach that discipleship meant severing family obligations and bonds. But by the year 500—for example—it was a much tougher thing to teach someone to renounce marriage and abandon parents and ignore the normal obligations of society. You can’t stay urgently apocalyptic forever. So over the centuries, Christianity tempered Jesus’ more radical language about renouncing family, like this passage from Luke, and it made such teachings into something metaphorical and aspirational rather than practical and real-world.
That all makes sense to me. What makes less sense to me is the way people in the year 2025 think that Jesus taught some kind of unproblematic family-values agenda. Much of what passes for Christian theology these days is really a kind of latent cultural bias, projected backward onto Jesus, and this is a prime example. The dominant cultures in which Protestant Christianity were formed (Europe, broadly) valued a certain kind of marriage and certain expressions of sexuality within that marriage. These were not the same values of marriage and sexuality that the Bible itself valued and expressed, but that hardly mattered. Christians claimed that their own cultural values were the Bible’s cultural values, and therefore God’s cultural values, despite ample evidence that their idealized forms of marriage and sexuality—the way they envisioned them—did not really show up in the Bible at all, and certainly not as an unchallenged norm. The Bible must agree with me and my specific forms of piety, people seem to have assumed, and from that false assumption has flowed a great deal of cultural, political, and ideological struggle and even violence.
As I was writing today’s Substack, I got an email notifying me that someone had left a comment on a recent post. The person called me a false prophet, accused me of hiding behind fancy language (guilty), and reminded me that God’s plan for human sexuality is traditional marriage. I’ve learned, over the years, that there are people who spend their time roaming the internet finding people to call false prophets, and offering their condemnations; I call them Orthodoxy Trolls. It’s nothing new. But it was also a reminder of the power of an old illusion: that the Bible offers clarity about “biblical marriage” and “biblical family values.” It does not. The Bible offers a multitude of views on marriage and family values, some abhorrent, some antiquated, and some perhaps worth lifting up as worthwhile. But if we are focusing only on what Jesus said, and especially what he said in the Luke text from this Sunday’s lectionary reading, then we will see that sometimes the Bible doesn’t value family very much at all.
👏👏👏