This morning, I described how the rise of a militant secular, anti-family political ideology transformed the United Nations from an initially friendly venue into a vehicle dangerous to families, to parents, and to children.  This afternoon, I will outline the emergence of one response: the World Congress of Families.

I will begin by offering a few words about its parent organization, The Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society.  This Center traces its origins to The Rockford College Institute created in 1976 by the College’s then-President, John Howard.  Dr. Howard was responding, here, to the disorders of America’s 1960’s: the counter-culture; the sexual revolution; the new feminism; and the opening salvos of the Culture Wars, including the ban on school prayer and the new permissiveness toward mind-altering drugs.  He recognized that a common thread, here, was a joint assault on the family and he organized a major national conference on the theme: The Family: American’s Hope, held in 1978.  Notably, it featured presentations by prominent theologians or religious readers representing the Evangelical Protestant, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, and Mormon traditions.  This work led to the creation of The Center on the Family in America in 1986, the publication of the monthly monograph series, The Family in America, starting in 1987, and a series of specialist conferences looking at issues such as “the retreat from marriage,” “day care,” and the decline and fall of the family wage ideal.

This project was reorganized as The Howard Center in 1997.

Regarding our purpose statement:

The Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society strives to be the leading source of fresh ideas and new strategies for affirmation and defense of the natural family, both nationally and globally.

Our goals are fourfold:

• To articulate and promote a morally sound natural family worldview that can serve as a reliable guide to culture, law, and public policy.

• To encourage primary research on natural family themes.

• To provide open communication between scientific research on the family and grass roots interest and religiously motivated engagement on family issues.

• And to rally an effective global voice in favor of the natural family that will counter the destructive elements within the emerging international “post family” culture.

Perhaps I should say, here, a word or two about my own background.  I grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and was quite active in the First Lutheran Church there, a congregation of the Augustana Synod (the Swedish Lutheran Church in America).  I really loved my old church and felt at times the tug of a call to go to seminary and become a pastor.  I was one of those odd kids who loved the liturgy and the hymns so much that I would bribe my friends to get their acolyte assignments, particularly for candlelight service on Christmas Eve.  By the time I graduated from Augustana College in 1971, though, my Synod had been merged into a much larger body, The Lutheran Church in America, that church was losing its way theologically and culturally, and the military draft beckoned.  So instead, I joined the National Guard and went to graduate school in European History.

It was while in graduate school that I grew interested in family policy questions.  Eventually, I did my doctoral dissertation on Sweden’s so called “population crisis” of the 1930’s.  The issue, then, was plunging fertility.  I focused on how Sweden’s Democratic Socialists responded to this problem, which led me to meet—both historically and in person—Alva Myrdal, the very woman whom I described this morning, the one who did so much damage at the U.N. over family issues during the 1950’s, and whose legacy we still fight today. Working with her husband Gunnar, Alva Myrdal had shaped during the 1930’s a complete post-family worldview, the one against which we now battle.  (The story of that contest in Sweden is told in my book, The Swedish Experiment in Family Politics: The Myrdals and the Interwar Population Crisis.)  When I finished my studies, instead of teaching, I took a job with the Lutheran Council in the USA, in that consortium’s Government Affairs office.  Growing ever more conservative, I became aware of America’s own mounting family crisis and turned my attentions there, as well.  This background in international and American family questions is what led me to Rockford in 1981. 

Where did The World Congress of Families idea come from?  In the back of my mind, I had read about a series of pro-family conferences held during the 1920’s and 1930’s, mainly in the Catholic nations of France and Belgium.  In these places, as in Sweden, falling fertility had raised concerns about national futures.  Yet the immediate idea for The World Congress of Families was hatched in a Moscow apartment, on a cold Russian night in January, 1995.  I was there as the guest of the Sociology Department of Moscow Lomonosov State University, where desperate social scientists were trying to understand the reasons for post-Communist Russia’s mounting family disasters: tumbling marriage and birth rates; ubiquitous abortion; mounting alcoholism and child abandonment; a rising death rate, particularly among men.  These were not supposed to be the fruits of freedom.  Two professors took me to visit a lay Christian leader, the artist Ivan Schevchenko.  Something of a religious mystic, Ivan laid out a vision of a World Congress of Families, where family leaders from around the globe could come together to celebrate the natural family, and to find common strategies to protect and promote family life.

I agreed to try to organize such a gathering and soon recruited an ally in the Czech Republic, the Civic Institute, a pro-democracy group formed by Czech Christians after the fall of Communism in that land.  They, too, were searching for ways to strengthen families in a time of social and cultural stress.  And so, we convened the first World Congress of Families in Prague in March, 1997.  Over 700 delegates from 200 organizations in 43 nations took part, with strong representations from the Russian Federation and Eastern Europe.  Themes for this first Congress included the building of a new alliance of conservative religious orthodoxies, all of whom—despite their differences—shared a common understanding of the natural family.  This Congress produced The Prague Declaration, a solid early statement of principles and goals. 

In May, 1998, we convened a special Planning Session for a second Congress in the ancient city of Rome.  Our group of twenty-five represented all six inhabited continents and all the scattered children of Abraham: Evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, Russian Orthodox, Mormons, Muslims—both Sunni and Shite—and Jews: each in their way very orthodox, with no intent of compromising on their beliefs, but each also sharing a common commitment to the natural family.  Indeed, besides issuing a broad international call for a second World Congress, we also crafted a clear and compelling definition of the natural family, one that has stood up very well:

The natural family is the fundamental social unit, inscribed in human nature, and centered around the voluntary union of a man and a woman in a lifelong covenant of marriage for the purposes of:

• Satisfying the longings of the human heart to give and receive love;

• Welcoming and ensuring the full physical and emotional development of children;

• Sharing a home that serves as the center for social, educational, economic, and spiritual life;

• Building strong bonds among the generations to pass on a way of life that has transcendent meaning; and

• Extending a hand of compassion to individuals and households whose circumstances fall short of these ideals.

  Rome, Italy May 1998

The World Congress of Families II convened in Geneva, Switzerland in November, 1999.  Over 1600 delegates from 270 organizations in 65 nations attended, with strengthened numbers from Latin America, Africa, The Middle East, and Africa.  We held our opening session in the General Assembly Hall of the Palace of the Nations, the very room in which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been approved 51 years before.  Our main focus at this Congress was on countering the anti-family forces now dominating the U.N.  Financial support for this meeting came from many sources; the largest single donor was The World Family Policy Center, part of the Law School at Brigham Young University.  Directed by Richard Wilkins, World Family Policy Center was emerging as a key organization in countering the aggressive secularism of the U.N.  The Second Congress crafted The Geneva Declaration, a statement both concrete and universal.  I am pleased to share copies with you.

In preparing for the Geneva session, I was frequently asked to clarify the purposes of the Congress project.  I developed a simple summary of what the Congress IS and IS NOT:

• The WCF is NOT a structure seeking to unify the world's pro-family and pro-life organizations under its guidance and control.

• IT IS a practical effort to build greater understanding and encourage informal networks among family advocates at the national and international levels.

• The WCF is NOT an "ecumenical" campaign seeking to advance its agenda by doctrinal compromise.

• IT IS a coalition of the most orthodox believers within each denomination, church, or faith group, persons who are the least likely to compromise on their core beliefs.

• The WCF is NOT an effort at crafting "one world religion."

• IT IS a venue where religiously-grounded family systems can respond together to the global spread of a militant secularism that threatens the liberties and existence of all vital faiths.

• The WCF is NOT a massive organization with visions of power and permanence. 

• IT IS a project currently coordinated by a small organization; it will continue only so long as it proves helpful to others, and to the defense of the family.

In February, 2001, we convened another planning session, this time at a 200-year-old hacienda near Caracas, Venezuela.  We agreed on the need to move outside the Euro-American world and to hold a two-city Congress in November, 2002, with our first choices being Mexico City (the largest city in the world) and Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.  We focused on a Muslim nation because, sadly, the only reliable pro-family and pro-life voting bloc at the U.N. has been the Islamic Conference.  ‘Abortion’ to ‘same-sex marriage’ would be internationally guaranteed ‘human rights,’ except for the votes of the Muslim nation.  Hence, our desire for a venue in the Middle East.  Alas, the events of 9/11 forced us to shelve these plans.  And yet, miraculously it seems, in April 2003 I was approached by a group from Mexico City.  Six of them had attended the Geneva Congress; inspired by the event, they had returned to Mexico to form Family Network, a coalition of over 100 pro-life and pro-family organizations in Mexico; and the first to show a working alliance between Mexican Evangelicals and Mexican Catholics.  Almost at the same time, the small Middle Eastern State of Qatar approached Professor Wilkins of the World Family Policy Center.  The royal family of Qatar asked him to help organize a pro-family Congress in their capital, in Doha; not far from Dubai.  And so, our plan was reborn in ways we couldn’t have imagined.

The World Congress of Families III convened in Mexico City, March 29-31, 2004.  We had hoped for 2,500 delegates.  3,300 came.  Allow me to show you a short DVD summarizing the event.

The Congress also produced The Mexico City Declaration, another fine pro-family and pro-life statement.

Meanwhile, the Doha International Conference convened in late November, 2004.  1,500 persons participated, leading to the Doha Declaration, a solid document essentially based on reaffirmation of the pro-family principles of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which I reviewed this morning.  Despite the predictably strident objections of the European Union and Canada, the Doha Declaration received formal blessing by the U.N. General Assembly in early December, built on an alliance between the USA and The Third World.

Our goals, in all this, are to shift the terms of key international debates:

• From “the family as an obstacle to development” to the “family as the source of social renewal and progress.”

• From “overpopulation” to “underpopulation” as the demographic problem facing the 21st Century.

• From “the small family and voluntary childlessness as good” to “the celebration of the large family as a special social gift.”

• From religious orthodoxy as a “threat to progress” to “religious orthodoxy as the source of humane values and cultural progress.”

How are we doing?  Well, our opponents are worried.  Jennifer Butler,

representing the liberal Protestant Global Policy Forum, writes:

“The World Congress of Families…represents a radical realignment of religious and political interests.”  (2003)

Ms. Magazine, America’s premier feminist journal, reports that:

“The World Congress of Families [has] brought together the leadership of an increasingly trenchant and powerful wing of the international conservative movement….The Centro Banamex [in Mexico City] was teemng with crowds that reflected the organization’s growing luster.” (Fall 2004)

The left-wing British paper, The Guardian, states:

“The [WCF] Congress is the most important manifestation to date of this new form of interdoctrinal collaboration based on the deeply conservative values which unite the most reactionary believers of different faiths.”  (1999)

In the Guardian, being called a reactionary is a sign of honor and integrity.

And the book, Globalizing Family Values, by two feminist law professors, concludes:

“The WCF II [in Geneva] represented a new sophistication on the part of American activists: the recognition that conservative social change, at the global level, requires a networked alliance of orthodoxies.”  (2003)

Our Congress project has also supported over a dozen regional Congresses, where our job has mainly been to provide quality control.  These events have occurred in Washington, DC; Manilla, The Philippines; Melbourne, Australia; Mesa, Arizona; Calgary, Alberta; and other locations.

So we now look to convening a Fourth World Congress of Families, perhaps in late 2006 or 2007.  [Our two websites]  New York City is one possible venue, given its tight connection to the U.N.  But another site is possible: Poland; Brazil; Brussels have all been proposed.  We are working now to raise the money to pay for another planning session and to hire a Congress organizer.

I invite you, as leaders of the charismatic churches, to become involved.  You are also an international movement, with—I am told—over half a billion adherents.  You have a vital interest in shaping a family-friendly and faith-friendly world order.  John Vining has been a real blessing to us, and he played an important role in developing plans for the Mexico City Congress and for the event’s implementation.

And yet, I have this bigger dream.  Our Prague conference was mainly the result of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox organizational support.  Our Geneva Congress in 1999, as noted before, enjoyed substantial financial support from the LDS Church.  Our Mexico City session in 2004 had primary financial backing from Roman Catholic groups and individuals.  And the Doha conference was financed by a Muslim royal family.  My dream this time is to hold a Congress resting a greater diversity of resources, especially this time from Protestant sources.