When Family Is Bad

[Received]

Hey, I love the Godfather, and one of the themes of the film is valuing family above everything else. Like in The Godfather 2 when Michael is ostracized for joining the military, going against his brother Sonny's comments (which sound like "pop talkin'" to Michael) that you're supposed to value family over fighting for people you don't know. This excessive value of family is, to me, a very overlooked ill in our society. Family here can refer to biological similarity, but more broadly refers to whatever group you call home, including your tribe, village, or even nation.

When we value our families too much we by definition exclude or devalue other people. One of the apparently bad Bible verses I really like is when Jesus says if you don't hate your mother, brothers, sisters, father -- basically your whole family -- then you aren't worthy of being a disciple. Hate in these earlier times could be interpreted as "to love less," but I think Slavoj Zizek nails it when he says it's not necessarily the concrete family members Jesus is referring to hate, but the abstract idea of family; in Christianity you're supposed to love all people equally, even if you love them in different ways. Because I have affection for my wife, I'll love her with this added layer of affection, but my goal is to love her (to will her good, benevolence) as much as I do a stranger. This doesn't subtract love from my wife; it subtracts my partiality in idealizing her over other people in the deepest sense.

After all, biologically the family, when valued too much, is really a covert form of self-love, seeing how the family is an expression of genetic similarity and interest. I love you because you're to some degree biologically like me. This isn't just human, all too human; this is primal nature at its purest. Insofar as we value family in this way, we're no different than chickens.

Family should be a stepping stone that helps a person transcend his ego toward other people related to him with the goal of moving beyond this to the world at large in a cosmopolitan spirit. But for so many people it stops at family and so becomes again a form of self-love, the rest of the world strangers left excluded from our benevolence.

 

[Tree of Life]

Family can certainly become an idol when we have more allegiance to our earthly families than we do to God. Our allegiance to Jesus ought to be greater than our allegiance to family. Most of the time allegiance to Jesus means love for our families but there are times when the two move in opposite directions.

Your mention of the Godfather reminds me that family is powerful. And this power can be used for good or for ill. If a family loves Jesus and pushes its members toward Jesus it can be an overwhelming force for good. But a family that sets itself against Jesus can be a great force for evil and can be a great hindrance to members of the family that want to follow Jesus.

In Scripture we have examples of people being called out of unbelieving families to start new families (like Abraham). We also have examples of people born into believing families who are introduced to Yahweh through these families.

 

[bhsmte]

Hey, I love the Godfather, and one of the themes of the film is valuing family above everything else. Like in The Godfather 2 when Michael is ostracized for joining the military, going against his brother Sonny's comments (which sound like "pop talkin'" to Michael) that you're supposed to value family over fighting for people you don't know. This excessive value of family is, to me, a very overlooked ill in our society. Family here can refer to biological similarity, but more broadly refers to whatever group you call home, including your tribe, village, or even nation.

When we value our families too much we by definition exclude or devalue other people. One of the apparently bad Bible verses I really like is when Jesus says if you don't hate your mother, brothers, sisters, father -- basically your whole family -- then you aren't worthy of being a disciple. Hate in these earlier times could be interpreted as "to love less," but I think Slavoj Zizek nails it when he says it's not necessarily the concrete family members Jesus is referring to hate, but the abstract idea of family; in Christianity you're supposed to love all people equally, even if you love them in different ways. Because I have affection for my wife, I'll love her with this added layer of affection, but my goal is to love her (to will her good, benevolence) as much as I do a stranger. This doesn't subtract love from my wife; it subtracts my partiality in idealizing her over other people in the deepest sense.

After all, biologically the family, when valued too much, is really a covert form of self-love, seeing how the family is an expression of genetic similarity and interest. I love you because you're to some degree biologically like me. This isn't just human, all too human; this is primal nature at its purest. Insofar as we value family in this way, we're no different than chickens.

Family should be a stepping stone that helps a person transcend his ego toward other people related to him with the goal of moving beyond this to the world at large in a cosmopolitan spirit. But for so many people it stops at family and so becomes again a form of self-love, the rest of the world strangers left excluded from our benevolence.

Loyalty is good.

Blind loyalty, tends to hurt people outside the inner circle. We see this in politics, families, business, etc. etc...

 

[Uber Genius]

Great intro to a complex problem, bad families!

My wife was raised in Sicilian family that was "Old School." Her grandfather, uncles, and father all spoke in Sicilian. And they were all abusers. Demanding closeness and manipulating all around them for self-aggrandizement just like the movie.

Unbeknown to me at the time, when we married I married for love, and she married to be rescued from a culture of physical and emotional abuse. The family lied and covered it up, but it came out over time. My point however is that the Evangelical church was completely unable to engage my wife with meaningful interventions to bring healing and wholeness.

My question to the group and especially the OP,mwho I believe has a counseling background, is what things need to be done in the Church healing and wholeness model to work through family-related issues that plague our church attendees? 45 minutes of teaching and 20 minutes of singing per week do nothing to being those damaged by their families to wholeness.

 

[Received]

Great intro to a complex problem, bad families!

My wife was raised in Sicilian family that was "Old School." Her grandfather, uncles, and father all spoke in Sicilian. And they were all abusers. Demanding closeness and manipulating all around them for self-aggrandizement just like the movie.

Unbeknown to me at the time, when we married I married for love, and she married to be rescued from a culture of physical and emotional abuse. The family lied and covered it up, but it came out over time. My point however is that the Evangelical church was completely unable to engage my wife with meaningful interventions to bring healing and wholeness.

My question to the group and especially the OP,mwho I believe has a counseling background, is what things need to be done in the Church healing and wholeness model to work through family-related issues that plague our church attendees? 45 minutes of teaching and 20 minutes of singing per week do nothing to being those damaged by their families to wholeness.

I think pastoral counseling is a good staff requirement, provided the church is big enough.

 

[Uber Genius]

I think pastoral counseling is a good staff requirement, provided the church is big enough.

So let's parse this further. If we are expanding the Kingdom of God in a fashion similar to Jesus and the Apostles (i.e. Disciples), we need instruction, and healing, right practice, etc.

Imagine a football team that never diagnoses and cures muscle tears, or joint dislocations, broken bones. If the analogy holds, we have a bunch of "disciples," who due to incomplete treatment of wounds are unable to fully function as disciples.

How might churches change their structure and priorities if this hypothesis turned out to be the case?

 

[Dave-W]

Imagine a football team that never diagnoses and cures muscle tears, or joint dislocations, broken bones.

Take it back a step. This team never was trained in the proper use of stretching and warming up, never learned how to roll with a tackle, or how to properly dive. IOW, they do not even know how to avoid most injuries in the first place.

 

[Uber Genius]

Take it back a step. This team never was trained in the proper use of stretching and warming up, never learned how to roll with a tackle, or how to properly dive. IOW, they do not even know how to avoid most injuries in the first place.

Yes. Exactly. But that's not all!

The coaching staff don't have a model for anything but classroom lecture!

Now imagine players never getting out on the field for practice. (Coaches just get up once a week and tell their team what it was like in the big game 20 years ago. Players take notes and are inspired, and forget everything they heard by lunch the next day.

This has been my experience of the Evangelical church for the last 40 years across 6 different churches.

Model doesn't produce well-coached healthy players able to handle a wide variety of game day circumstances, here and respond to audibles (called by HS). It is a sad state of affairs and tough to mentor people out of such malpractice.

 

[Dave-W]

Model doesn't produce well-coached healthy players able to handle a wide variety of game day circumstances, here and respond to audibles (called by HS). It is a sad state of affairs and tough to mentor people out of such malpractice.

Agreed. Lack of discipleship. In fact, almost no one in the christian community (evangelical, main line or historic) have a CLUE of what discipleship is or how to do it. (orthodox Jews still understand it)

And yet Matt 28 COMMANDS us to do it.

https://heartofgodisrael.org/messianic-messages/discipleship-is-jewish/

 

[Eudaimonist]

After all, biologically the family, when valued too much, is really a covert form of self-love, seeing how the family is an expression of genetic similarity and interest. I love you because you're to some degree biologically like me. This isn't just human, all too human; this is primal nature at its purest. Insofar as we value family in this way, we're no different than chickens.

I fail to see what is wrong with being no different than chickens in some respect. Self-love isn't wrong in itself, however "primal" it may be. It isn't wrong to have a stronger bond to family as opposed to strangers, or even friends. None of this means that strangers should be excluded from benevolence or that abusive relatives are deserving of love.

I don't think that morality should be "impersonalist", and by that term I mean that we should never have any higher regard for someone than someone else, for instance due to family relations, and view everyone as interchangeable units. I view that as absurd and anti-human. It is natural to care about some people more than others, and that isn't such a bad thing. Call it "primal" all you want, it may something that we should accept and refine, instead of discarding in some religious or spiritual show of disgust for the merely "human".

So, I'm siding with self-love on this one. Self-love allows us to understand and prioritize our values, and to seek our well-being in a way that doesn't tell us that we should simply prioritize others the same as ourselves because they are other than us. Self-love allows us to see how important other people are to us, which creates the possibility for living in moderation with respect to them, such as moderation in generosity or charity, instead of seeing oneself as just one out of several billion individuals.

It's not really fair to throw the baby out with the bath-water here. Yes, self-love, when unrefined, can lead to a lack of concern for strangers, but when refined into something more aware and mature is unlikely to do so. There is no need for getting rid of that baby -- we need that baby. The goal shouldn't be self-ambivalence.


eudaimonia,

Mark