When did the family issues go global?  What is the resulting challenge to Christian churches?  These are the questions that I have been asked to address this morning.

Of course, at one level, the “family issues” have always been global.  God’s creation of Adam and Eve, his intent that they become “one flesh,” that they be “fruitful and multiply,” underscores the universal nature of marriage.  Procreative marriage is an expression of human nature; marriage and the family, as such, have been found in every known human culture.  Humankind’s fall into sin also made divorce, fornication, adultery, and promiscuity aspects of every known human culture, challenges for those who would build moral order in any place. 

And, from their very origin, the far flung Christian churches have struggled with marriage and family questions.  The earliest churches, let us remember, emerged in a time of great moral and sexual disorder.  The Roman Empire of the First Century, A.D., was awash in concubinage, prostitution, adultery, divorce, homosexuality, and infanticide.  Even within the early churches, the heresy known as Gnosticism worked to subvert the family: a struggle waged by the Church Fathers to which we pay too little attention.  One group of Gnostics demanded total sexual abstinence by all believers, a sort of collective death wish.  Another group took the other extreme, demanding complete sexual freedom, endless sexual experimentation.  All Gnostics, though, rejected procreative marriage.  The Epistles are full of warnings against Gnostic infiltration of the early churches in Ephesus, Rome, Galatia, Corinth, and Alexandria.  As Paul warns in 1 Timothy 4: “some will depart from the faith by giving heed to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons…who forbid marriage.”  In short, the early international Christian movement was deeply engaged in defending family standards within its own ranks, while also fighting—and eventually winning—a culture war in the broader world. 

Moreover, to choose another example, the original Protestant movement of the 16th Century might also be seen—from a social perspective—as another pro-family campaign, a movement in favor of the natural family.  Martin Luther despaired over the decline of moral standards within the Western church, the violation of vows of celibacy by many priests, monks, and bishops, and rising sexual license in the broader culture.  Luther called for a new affirmation of marriage as the highest “office, estate, condition, [and] work” on earth; and he deemed God’s command in Genesis 1: 28--“be fruitful and multiply”—to be a “divine ordinance which it is not our prerogative to hinder or ignore.”  Procreation, he wrote, was “a most outstanding gift”…. “the greatest work of God.”  As he affirmed in his tract, The Estate of Marriage: “For it is not a matter of free choice, but a natural and necessary thing, that whatever is a man must have a woman and whatever is a woman must have a man.”

I mention all this in order to put recent books like this one in perspective.  Globalizing Family Values: The Christian Right in International Politics from the University of Minnesota Press is a breathless account of The World Congress of Families project by two law professors, who write with open feminist and lesbian sympathies.  They are shocked and surprised as Christians over the last decade have engaged family questions at the international level; something new and disturbing, they say.  My point so far is that, at one level, this kind of engagement has been something that Christians—since the time of Paul—have been doing; indeed, something that we are supposed to do, as Christians.  Nothing really new, at all.

On the other hand, there is one new development that has changed fundamentally the nature of this engagement, a change which raises new challenges for Christian witness and work. 

This new development is the emergence of international structures such as The United Nations, the rudiments of global governance.  The curious, albeit good, news is that during the early years of the United Nations, the social policy work being done there was largely “pro family.”  Consider, for example, key phrases to be found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the Young UN in December 1948:

Article 3:  “Everyone has the right to life…,” including by implication the child in the womb.

Article 16(1):  “Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality, or religion, have the right to marry and found a family.”

Article 16(3):  “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the state.”

Article 25: “Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity,” which is simply the “family wage” ideal. 

Article 25(2):  Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance,” implying the right of mothers to be home with their children and the right of children to a full-time mother.

And, Article 26: “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children,” marking a strong affirmation of parental rights.

Where did this language come from?  As the old saying in Washington goes, personnel is policy.  This was never more true than in the drafting of The Universal Declaration.  Two men were largely responsible for its content.  The first was Rene Cassin of France, a specialist in international law.  While himself Jewish, Cassin was highly sympathetic to the Christian Democracy movement that gained strength after the Second World War in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere.  Christian Democrats held beliefs in a God-created order that included “natural social structures,” most especially “the family.”  Cassin also believed that the human rights idea derived from Holy Scripture: not only from the Old Testament, but also from Jesus and Paul, who taught “there is no more distinction between Jew and Gentile, between free men and slaves.  All form one large family, one human family.”  Cassin served as the chief staff member of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, and so controlled the drafting process for the Declaration.

The second key actor here was Charles Habib Malik, an Arab from Lebanon and also a devout, “intensely prayerful” Greek Orthodox Christian.  He held several key posts at the UN in 1948, including Secretary of the Commission on Human Rights and President of the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council.  He, too, was heavily influenced by Christian Democratic thought and crafted the key phrase, “the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society,” which—in his original version of the phrase—was directly tied to a reference to “the Creator.”  In defending this appeal to the natural family, Malik stated:  “The family is the cradle of all human rights and liberties.  It is in the family that everyone learns to know his rights and duties and it would be inexplicable if everything is mentioned except the family’s right to existence.”  I would go so far as to say that the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a product of Christian and Jewish witness.

This “Judeo-Christian” influence at the UN survived into the 1950’s, but was in full retreat by the 1960’s.  Replacing this foundation of faith was a different idea system: secular democratic socialism.  This ideology took root through the influence of the Norwegian socialist Trygve Lie and the Swedish civil servant, Dag Hammarskjöld, who served as the first two Secretary Generals of the United Nations.  Both were men of the political and intellectual left, and they peopled the UN Secretariat with staff sympathetic to their worldview.

Relative to the family, their most notable appointment was the Swedish activist Alva Myrdal.  Raised and trained in an aggressively socialist, feminist, and atheist home, she became Deputy Assistant Secretary-General for the U.N.’s Social Commission in December 1948 (the same week, ironically, that the U.N. General Assembly approved the decidedly “pro-family” Universal Declaration of Human Rights).  As the highest ranking woman at the UN, she was given responsibility for women’s issues, population questions, welfare, and human rights.  To these matters, she brought a distinctive worldview:

(1) There are no moral absolutes.  Indeed, morality evolves to meet new circumstances.

(2) The traditional family “is almost pathological,” “rootless,” “isolated” and doomed.  So, too, with the institution of marriage.

(3) The state is ready and able to assume most family functions.  And

(4) Gender equality demands the leveling of all institutions, traditions, and cultural structures that get in its way.

By the mid-1960’s, Christian Democracy was in massive retreat at the United Nations; Democratic Socialism on the rise.  A great shift in policy occurred:

(1)  On women’s issues, a shift from the original U.N. focus on gaining the vote for women and suppressing prostitution, to the new concentration on equal employment, the suppression of gender roles, the promotion of day-care, “sexual rights,” and family change;

(2)  On population issues, a shift from the encouragement and protection of large families to strict attention to overpopulation as the problem, to be combated through the sex education of children and abortion;

(3)  On family issues, a shift from support of the family as “the fundamental and natural group unit of society” to a portrayal of the family as antiquated and oppressive; and

(4)  On human rights, a change from a “Christian” focus on the innate dignity of each human person and the necessary place of humans in natural communities to a radical feminist individualism.

And there were real results.  For example, the U.N.’s Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women” [CEDAW], approved in 1979, is closely aligned with these new views.  Taken as a whole, CEDAW strips the family of all autonomy and authority.  It gives moral legitimacy solely to the isolated, radical individual.  And it grants sweeping power to the state to regulate, restructure, and even abolish the natural family.  This is the meaning, for example, of Article 5 which declares:

State parties shall take all appropriate measures to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices or customary and all other practices which are based…on stereotyped roles for men and women.

Nations which have signed the CEDAW treaty have been pressured by U.N. authorities to actions such as abolishing the practice of Mothers Day and promoting androgyny—the denial of male and female—in the schools. 

In related fashion, the U.N.’s “Convention on the Rights of the Child” of 1989 contains measures that subvert the authority of parents over their children; strip away the authority of religious faith and tradition in favor of a politicized and radical social science; and prevent nations and peoples from sheltering their own unique cultures.  In Article 13, for example, we read:

[T]he child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other medium of the child’s choice.

To protect this “right,” the state imposes itself between parent and child.  To put it simply, this understanding of “rights” is the polar opposite of that found in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration (which states “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”); and it is evidence of the victory of one worldview over another.

A new round of this international campaign to subvert, to deconstruct the natural family began in 1994.  Ironically, the occasion was celebration of The International Year of the Family.  The Bill Clinton administration teamed up with the European Union to promote a series of international conferences that would implement a post-family agenda: the first, on “population,” convened in Cairo; the second, on “women’s rights,” convened in Beijing; the third, on “housing,” gathered in Istanbul; and the fourth, on “youth,” convened in Copenhagen.  At each session, the organizing voices called for population control through so-called “reproductive rights,” especially abortion; the deconstruction of marriage; the full recognition of all so-called “sexual preferences”; and campaigns for androgyny.

This militant secular alliance held religious faith in particular scorn: only a very private and inward faith would be allowed; no public expression of one’s faith should occur; no actual attempt actually to apply moral principles derived from faith would be permitted.  Vital, active faith and the natural family must die together.  Cynically, but cleverly, this militant secular alliance relied on religious divisions to secure their victory: distrust between Evangelicals and Roman Catholics; divisions between Trinitarian Christians and Mormons; hostility between Christians, Jews, and Muslims.  With the children of Abraham so divided, the militant, secular, the anti-family coalition would surely win.

Now some would respond that Americans need not worry about all this: our sovereignty will protect us.  They would note that despite the best efforts of the Clintons, the USA has not ratified either CEDAW or the Children’s Rights conventions (indeed, the U.S. remains to this day the only nation on earth which has not ratified the latter).  So long as we hold to that position, the argument goes, the radical secularists at the U.N. can have no effect.

Well, simply put, this has not proved to be true.  Over the last decade, U.N. declarations and actions on “family issues,” along with laws and regulations promulgated by the European Union, have evolved into what legal scholars now call “international customary law.”  And American judges, at both the state and federal levels, have begun to appeal to this “international customary law” to justify anti-family and anti-life decisions.  Notably, the U.S. Supreme Court’s sweeping 2003 decision in the case Lawrence v. Texas—a decision which created a right of sodomy and which opened the door to same-sex marriage—rested on appeals to precedents set by U.N.-made and European Union-made law.

Now, it is true that since early 2001, the George W. Bush administration has done a good job of slowing down, even stalling, the radical, anti-family social agenda at the United Nations.  Excellent people such as Ellen Sauerbrey, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Committee on the Status of Women, and Wade Horn, Assistant Secretary for Children, Youth, and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, have played important roles here.  All the same, the other side is biding its time, waiting for the Bush team to lose interest or to go away.  Moreover, little has been done to reverse the losses of the 1990’s.  All religious faiths which affirm the natural family and a moral code based on revelation, and which have international missionary aspirations and alliances, remain at grave risk.

After lunch, I will describe to you one broad reaction to this rise of a militant anti-family, anti-faith ideology at the global level: namely, the World Congress of Families.  For now, though, I am pleased to take your questions.