The theme for this year’s Forum focuses on "social ecology": specifically, the setting of the family within its human and physical environment. Yet I think it important that we also consider the word "ecology" in its more common-contemporary usage: namely, as related to the natural world, to nature, to the environment, and to the new politics of the environment.

In this context, the family does not usually fare well today. Indeed, under the influence of ideas labelled "Deep Ecology," the human family system commonly stands as the chief evil in its propensity to produce new human life. As the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naes and the American George Sessions explain in their Deep Ecology "platform":

The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.1

Other architects of the Deep Ecology hypothesis have labelled humankind "the cancer of the planet," with the source of its spread being the family itself.

It is important to understand that these images of human life as a cancer on the Earth underlie the anti-life, anti-family rhetoric and actions found at many recent international gatherings. The Deep Ecology hypothesis, its treatment of the Earth itself as a living thing, and its condemnation of "human interference with the nonhuman world" have struck deep roots, particularly in Western Europe and North America. Human fertility, and implicitly human life, are cast as problems to be overcome: the solution is "population control."

Historians and analysts agree that a key inspiration for the contemporary Deep Ecology idea was the work of the American ecologist Aldo Leopold. Leopold summarized his famous "land ethic" in one sentence: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community."2 As part of his argument, he also concluded that the world of the 1940’s was already overpopulated: there were too many humans. As he wrote then:

This reasoning points directly toward the mechanisms of "population control," with the "underdeveloped" lands also clearly cast as the chief targets. It is on this ethical ground that the Population Council, the Population Crisis Committee, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities could build their work.

I actually have a personal affinity or fondness for Aldo Leopold: He and I were both born in the American state of Iowa to parents of Lutheran Christian background. He spent his most productive years in southern Wisconsin, a short distance north of my current home in Rockford. His most influential book, Sand County Almanac, builds on his observations of animals and plants along the Wisconsin River, a wide body of water featuring a white sand bottom, constantly shifting sandbars, and a gentle flow. I, too, have canoed, camped along, fished, and observed this beautiful river. And so, I wonder, why did Aldo Leopold reach the terrible conclusion that human life, nurtured in the natural family, was the central problem facing the Earth?

The mystery is compounded by the fact that his early writings actually reveal a remarkably family-centered man. Leopold and his New Mexican-born wife Estella had five children: Starker, Luna, Nina, Carl, and little Estella. Holiday expeditions along the Colorado River, in the New Mexico mountains, and in the Minnesota-Canada canoe country were glorious family events, recorded in Aldo Leopold’s journals. Here is one excerpt about a fishing journey with his sons and brothers to Ontario’s Quetico Provincial Park, through lakes and rivers that I, too, have paddled on with joy. Leopold writes:

"June 12….About 10 a.m. reached the Basswood River and soon got to [the] first falls, portaging around them and finding our outfit good to carry, but not quite to the point where we could make it in one trip. Had some lunch, and Carl and Fritz caught two fine wall-eyed pike….Several red-breasted mergansers passed over. Then we portaged the lower falls, at the foot of which Fritz added another wall-eye and Starker caught a pickerel. About 3 p.m. we camped on the portage of still another very pretty waterfall…. There is considerable style to this camp, which is on a grassy knoll overlooking the falls with an International Boundary Monument for a tent peg.

"Boiled wall-eyed pike with mustard sauce for supper. After supper we fed an Indian who chanced along in a birchbark canoe, and then went fishing. Carl flirted with a huge pike at the foot of the falls but couldn’t hook him. Fritz caught another wall-eye but put him back. After threatening rain it cleared up with a beautiful sunset….

"The number of adventures awaiting us in this blessed country seems without end. Watching the gray twilight settling upon our lake we could truly say that ‘all our ways are pleasantness and all our paths are peace.’"4

As I read these words, I can almost smell the smoke of the campfire, taste the wall-eye, and rejoice in the precious company of one’s brothers and children.

In 1935, the Leopold family purchased an abandoned, worn out farm along the Wisconsin River, soon called "The Shack." For a dozen years, the family worked to restore this land as a natural wildlife habitat. Leopold’s observations of this small acreage would crystallize into his great book, Sand County Almanac.

So here we see a good father introducing his five children to the delights of and obligations toward the natural world. And he taught them many principles with which I firmly agree:

Aldo Leopold’s children also paid their father a great tribute: each of them followed in his footsteps, becoming naturalists, ecologists, scientists, and writers.

So what led Aldo Leopold, at the end of his life, to indict human population and implicitly the human family as a curse, rather than a blessing?

A share of the answer, I think, lies in the spiritual realm. While Aldo Leopold’s parents had been baptized as Lutheran Christians, they themselves were not churchgoers. As a boy, then, he had no "specific spiritual upbringing." Leopold’s wife, Estella, was a Roman Catholic, but he–in the words of one biographer– "eschewed the Church and disliked taking a vow not to interfer" with his children’s religious training. Regarding his father’s beliefs, son Luna reported: "I think he, like many of the rest of us, was kind of pantheistic. The organization of the universe was enough to take the place of God, if you like. He certainly didn’t believe in a personal God." Estella once directly asked her husband if he believed in God: "He replied that he believed there was a mystical supreme power that guided the Universe, but to him this power was not a personalized God. It was more akin to the laws of nature…his religion came from nature."6

These views led Aldo Leopold, in turn, to rebuke sharply the Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. "We abuse land," he said, "because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us." And he continued: "[The Patriarch] Abraham knew exactly what the land was for: it was to dip milk and honey into Abraham’s mouth."7

Other architects of the Deep Ecology hypothesis have been more blunt. According to a widely quoted passage from Lynn White, Jr., Christians, Jews, and Muslims all insist "that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends"; that these faiths believe that humans "are superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim." Far better, White says, were the pagans of yore.8

My time this evening does not allow for a full answer to these charges. I will say only this: while Christians and other children of Abraham have surely done many foolish things, including the desecration of land, the reckless uprooting of plants, and the mindless slaughter of wild animals, such acts have rarely–if ever–enjoyed religious blessing. Rather, they normally proceed by ignoring Scripture. Relative to land, the real story of the Old and New Testaments is one of stewardship and respect. It is revealing, I think, that the characterizations of Christianity offered by Leopold, White, Naes, and others are not referenced or footnoted; specific examples are not cited; real evidence is ignored.9

If the Deep Ecologists misread religion, they may also misread true science. Leopold’s land ethic–"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community"–is actually not holding up very well as we learn more about the real interaction of species in a biotic community. For example, Leopold’s reverence for "stability" increasingly runs into trouble. Even in largely untouched ecosystems and within the scale of a human life, there seems to be no sublime balance and order. Nature is always in flux, some species spreading, others in retreat. One ecologist labels a true ecosystem "rather sloppy…the members of a biotic community have no shared needs; there is only shoving. Or there is indifference and haphazard juxtaposition."10 Other recent ecologists have emphasized the "principle of plenitude,…a richness, an expansiveness, a tendency to multiply." In this view, nature is the place of robust fecudity: of many offspring, the very opposite of "population control."11

In the end, it appears, Aldo Leopold’s most basic arguments–and the premises of Deep Ecology in turn–are not about a better way to understand and live in nature; rather, his arguments are about a different kind of religious faith: one that finds human life and the human family to be dangers to the Earth.

Still, I wish it were possible to reach out to Aldo Leopold, above all to try to show him that the birth of children is not the real problem. Perhaps if I could have sat with him in the years just prior to his death in 1948, I might also have been able to summon his brothers and all five of his children before him. I would then have asked Aldo Leopold three questions:

Aldo Leopold’s journals show that he was a decent man, a good brother, a loving father. I believe that he would not have labelled any of his children as a negative burden; nor would he have chosen any of his children for a painless elimination; nor would he have wished away his brothers. Instead, with the question posed this way, I think he might have recognized that the real global problem is not excessive human numbers; rather, the actual troubles facing our world are ignorance, poverty, despair, corruption, and–in the 21st century–depopulation, troubles which can only be countered by good children raised in good and fruitful families.

Endnotes

1 "Platform," in Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985): 70.

2 Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966): 262.

3 Aldo Leopold, For the Health of the Land: Previously Unpublished Essays and Other Writings, J. Baird Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle, eds. (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997): 225-26.

4 Alda Leopold, Round River, ed. Luna B. Leopold (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): 35-36, 39.

5 Leopold, Sand County Almanac, pp. 239, 249, 261, 263-64.

6 Gary Suttle, "Aldo Leopold, 1887-1948," http://home.utm.net/pan/leopold.html.

7 Leopold, Sand County Almanac, p. 240.

8 Lynn White, Jr., Machina ex Deo: Essays in the Dynamism of Western Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1968): 75-94.

9 For a more complete response, see Ernest L. Fortin, "The Bible Made Me Do It: Christianity, Science, and the Environment," The Review of Politics 57 (Spring 1995): 197-224.

10 Holmes Rolston III, "Duties to Ecosystems," Companion to A Sand County Almanac, J. Baird Callicott, ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987): 252-53.

11 Lewis P. Hinchman, "Aldo Leopold’s Hermeneutic of Nature," The Review of Politics 57 (Spring 1995): 230.

Our common concern is family reconstruction: how might we halt and reverse trends of family dissolution? As an historian, my instincts and training lead me to peer into the recent past to search for earlier, successful examples of family renewal.

For the United States, we have one remarkable episode available for analysis: the time period 1935 to 1965. In the hundred years before this period, the course of key American family statistics was disturbingly familiar. Fertility fell sharply from an average of seven children born per woman in the 1820’s down to two by the early 1930’s, reflecting a dramatic retreat from children. The average age for first marriage rose steadily during the last half of the 19th Century and the early decades of the 20th; the number of unmarried adults as a proportion of the whole population also rose. Meanwhile divorce, a rarity in 1830, slowly grew as a social reality and surged ahead after 1900.

But then, quite unexpectedly, these numbers all reversed course in favor of the family. The marriage rate began climbing in 1935, and the creation of new family households proceeded at a record pace. By the early 1960’s, the proportion of Americans living in married-couple households reached an historical high. The average age of first marriage for women fell below 21, another unprecedented figure. And these young women embraced domesticity and homemaking with purposeful commitment. The American fertility rate recovered from Depression era lows and climbed to a level unseen since the years before World War I. Most surprisingly, college-educated women were in the vanguard of this recovery, with their fertility more than doubling. While the strains of World War II produced an uptick in the divorce rate, this ended in 1946; between 1947 and 1960, the divorce rate steadily declined. The number of married-couple families with children climbed by 15 million; the family-centered suburbs mushroomed; the schools overflowed with children; and America seemed once again to be a youthful, child-centered, family-oriented land.

Yet the social euphoria and apparent family strength of the 1935-65 era quickly unravelled in the ten years that followed. Viewed another way, the old trendlines returned, this time with a vengeance. The marital birthrate tumbled sharply; the divorce rate climbed 150 percent, while the proportion of births outside of wedlock soared; and the measures of marriage all slumped. A notable and unique American episode in family renewal had come to an ignoble and curious end.

The questions scream out: What happened in this timeframe? Why did this family system succeed? Just as importantly, why did it fail? More specifically, what role did religion play in shaping this familistic period? What role, if any, did the disciplines of sociology and psychology play in undergirding this American episode in family renewal? And were these disciplines implicated in its demise?

One standard explanation for marital and fertility behaviors in the 20th century came from demographer Richard Easterlin. He argued that the material aspirations of young adults were shaped by their experiences in their parents’ households during adolescence. Fertility behavior depended on the degree to which a young man’s earnings exceeded, met, or fell below his aspirations. When male incomes were high relative to aspirations (as during the 1950’s), rates of marriage and childbearing rose. When male incomes failed to meet aspirations, though, wives sought employment and childbearing was deferred or avoided.1

A related, more telling explanation, I believe, is the perfection during the 1935-65 era of a distinctive family-wage regime in the United States. This system presumed that the place for married women with children was in the home and that men as heads-of-households, in turn, deserved a family-sustaining wage. Progressive reformers such as Julia Lathrop, religious social justice advocates such as Father John Ryan, and labor leaders such as John L. Lewis and Mother Jones all saw the "family wage" as the keystone to economic justice in America. This regime rested on cultural assumptions that have an alien ring to modern ears. During the 1930’s, the division of work into so-called "men’s jobs" and "women’s jobs" actually grew more pervasive. The "famed" (or in some circles "infamous") wage gap between men and women working full time also began to widen. Women who did outside work increasingly crowded into a fairly narrow range of lower paid jobs: elementary school teacher, nurse, and clerk-typist. The higher-paying jobs, from skilled labor on the factory floor to the professions of law, medicine, and engineering, became more fully male. As men specialized in outside labor, women focused on homemaking; indeed, in a change from the 1920’s, "home economics" became the most popular college major chosen by young women.2

Public policy reinforced these trends. The New Deal built the "family-wage-earning-father"/homemaking mother family model into virtually all of its components. For example, emergency work relief projects gave preferences to the enrollment of men and paid them twice the amount given to unemployed women. When the Works Progress Administration did enroll women, it commonly placed them in sewing rooms and home economics classes. The new Social Security system assumed–in one historian’s words–that "men paid for their families while women raised them." The child’s welfare required "a competent domestic mother" and "a living wage for the father."3

The homemaker’s pension granted to the wives of qualifying men and the survivors’ allowances paid out to a deceased laborer’s children were complemented by the assistance given to women in their role as mothers. Meanwhile, new federal housing policies provided special subsidies to young married couples purchasing first homes, while tax policy changes adopted between 1936 and 1948 gave decided preferences to marriage and larger families. Such policies reinforced the family wage regime and the specialization by women in domestic tasks and by men in paid employment. As the Nobel Laureate Gary Becker has shown in his 1981 book, A Treatise on the Family, such specialization by husband and wife increased the rewards of marriage and childbearing and raised the costs of divorce, as well.4 Such measures alone might explain the remarkable period of family renewal during the 1935 to 1965 era.

Yet on closer analysis, we find a more important force at work in family reconstruction: religious faith; indeed, faith of a particular denominational variety. It appears that while the "marriage boom" of the 1935-65 era was found broadly among all white Americans, the celebrated "baby boom" was in some respects a distinctly Roman Catholic thing. For example, the total marital fertility rate for non-Catholics averaged 3.15 children per woman in the early 1950’s and 3.14 in the early 1960’s; for Catholics, however, the respective figures were 3.54 and 4.25. Put another way, the return of large families occurred–on a society-wide basis–exclusively among Catholics. Another survey underscores this point, showing that in 1952, only 10 percent of Catholics under age 40 had four or more children, a figure close to the 9 percent found among Protestants. By 1959, the Protestant figure was unchanged at 9 percent, but the proportion of Catholics with four or more children had more than doubled to 22 percent.

More remarkable was the nature of this surge in Catholic fertility. Violating a supposed law of sociology–namely, the more education a woman has, the fewer children–the Baby Boom flourished among the best educated. Catholic women who had attended college were bearing more children than Catholic women without a high school degree. Attendance by women at a Catholic high school or college was also positively related to fertility. In addition, this increase in fertility was found primarily among younger parents: through 1965, each new cohort of Catholic parents was more pronatalist in its attitudes than the group before. Another survey found that more frequent attendance at Mass was related to more births. Moreover, the rise in fertility seemed part of a broadly renewed commitment to family life, with research showing Catholic extended-family bonds to be more durable and the enjoyment of parenting tasks more intense than among non-Catholics.5

Why did this happen? Simply put, it appears that the whole teaching Church was driving ahead on all eight cylinders with a consistent pro-family message: from Papal declarations to Catholic colleges and universities to parish schools to Sunday sermons to the confessionals. While Protestants began to drift into deep confusion on family and sexual issues starting with an endorsement of birth control at the Lambeth Conference of 1931, the Catholic hierarchy labored to shore up orthodoxy on family-related questions. Pope Pius XI issued Casti connubii in 1933, which boldly reaffirmed in a systematic way historic Catholic teachings: procreation and the rearing of children as the primary purposes of marriage; marriage as an indissoluble sacrament; limitation of family size only for licit reasons; periodic abstinence from sexual activity as the only licit means of birth control; and married women serving in the home as wives and mothers.

Pius XII gave frequent attention to marriage and family renewal and their theological foundations. As he explained near the end of his Papacy in 1958: "Large families are most blessed by God and specially loved and prized by the Church as its most precious treasures....Where you find families of great numbers, they point to: the physical and moral health of a Christian people; a living faith in God and trust in His Providence: the fruitful and joyous holiness of Catholic marriage."6 Encouraged by their faith leaders, and materially supported by new public policies and the "family wage" regime, Catholic Americans responded in an almost dizzying fashion, building new marriages and bearing more children. As late as 1965, there were no signs in the survey data of any crack in this edifice of vital Catholic family life.

The disciplines of sociology and psychology played a role in this period of family renewal, as well. And while not as important as the religious factor in generating family renewal, I do want to review the role of these disciplines, for they underscore the innate weakness of this family renewal, hidden cracks that would soon bring the whole edifice tumbling down.

Family renewal actually began at a time when prominent sociologists predicted further decay. William F. Ogburn of The University of Chicago compared the old family system–which stood as "the chief economic institution, the factory of the time, the main educational institution"–with the new order where "the factory [has] displaced the family." Modern American families, he emphasized, were reduced to "the personality function" alone, providing "for the mutual adjustments among husbands, wives, parents, and children and for the adaptation of each member of the family to the outside world."7

Giving the same data a more optimistic reading in 1945, Ernest Burgess and Henry J. Locke argued that as the family shed its formal legal and economic functions, it reorganized on the principle of companionship. In the future, they said, the "companionship family" would predominate, resting on "the mutual affection, the sympathetic understanding, and the comradeship of its members." As the home became a place reserved for psychological intimacy and love, governmental, corporate, and charitable institutions would solidify their control over the old family functions of clothing and food production, education, and youth training.8

Harvard’s Talcott Parsons concluded at mid-century that the American family system had successfully reorganized itself around two tasks: the socialization of children and the psychological "tension management" of adults. Even gender roles within the family, Parsons said, had adapted themselves in a positive, mini-bureaucratic way with "managerial" matters increasingly concentrated in the "wife-mother" role, while "the husband-father" tended to hold a "fiduciary–‘chairman of the board’–type of role" and perform extra familial functions.9 In 1958, two of Parsons’ students concluded that the evident American trends toward bureaucratic management and psychological adjustment would further "lower the rate of divorce and separation" and raise still higher "the criteria of competence and the gifts of homemaking to renewed importance in the choice of a marriage partner."10

Psychologists during the 1940’s and 1950’s affirmed this same shedding of productive functions by families and reorientation of the household around the task of personality adjustment. Indeed, this was an era where psychological jargon and analysis pressed deeply into everyday American life. In the schools, for example, the advocates of "life adjustment" emphasized the failure of the traditional humanist curriculum (that is, of literature, mathematics, languages, sciences, and the arts). Instead, schools should help students adjust to a changing world and to develop their psychological skills. Teachers sought out early signs of maladjustment and predelinquency, and schools introduced an array of prevention measures, including the hiring of "adjustment teachers" and school psychologists for the first time. As one historian explains: it was no longer enough that Johnny could read; the schools must also ensure that he felt good about it. One characteristic class introduced in schools under the spell of "Life Adjustment" was: "Basic Urges, Wants and Needs and Making Friends and Keeping Them."11

New sociological and psychological theories regarding the "companionship family" focused on "personality adjustment" had particularly powerful consequences in the fields of urban planner and housing design. In the early 1950’s, urban planner John Dean drew the conclusion that "it becomes possible...to maintain family interaction without recourse to the traditional housekeeping dwelling unit." He held that units "inherited from the family farm" with a focus on household production be replaced by rational, flexible housing designs more in harmony with modern life patterns focused on intimacy and consumption.12 Psychologist Svend Reimer emphasized how new attention to the revolution in family functions must alter home architecture. "The goal of home construction," he wrote, "lies in the social dimension: it is a frictionless family life." Reflecting "long-term trends of social change in the family," functional architecture "has promoted a definite way of life and left unmistakable traces on the contemporary housing scene." This included abandonment of formal rooms such as parlor and single-purpose dining room, the replacement of community-oriented front porches by nuclear-family-centered backyard patios, and the rejection of work rooms and storage rooms by "flexible rooms that serve the everyday life of the family and reduce household chores to the minimum."13

These assumptions about the irretrievable loss of family tasks and the reorganization of the suburban family around the psychological relations of its intimate nuclear core worked themselves into federal housing policy. For example, the official "Fannie Mae" history of housing from 1979 underscored that the family was "no longer the basic economic as well as social unit." Productive activities–from the growing of food to the rearing of children–took place elsewhere. Relative to home design, this meant that there was no longer a need for attics, sheds, storage cellars, work rooms, sewing rooms, and so on. Easy access to processed food supplies meant less need for pantries and large kitchens. The decline of the family’s social role also meant less need for the front porches, drawing rooms, and grand staircases of former years. Instead, the new "companionship family" needed "open plans with flexible spaces that could be adapted to the family’s more informal lifestyle....Space and facilities for nurturing were needed to replace the space for workshops that had been used when economic function was so important."14

Federal Housing Administration guidelines turned this theory of family life into reality. FHA-insured mortgages were systematically denied to any residence that contained space for use as a productive shop, office, separate apartment for extended family member, or preschool. FHA rules discouraged regional architecture, favoring "companionship family" designs such as the "split level" and the "basic ranch."15 In sum, housing design for the American suburbs would follow theories about "the psychological intimacy of the companionship family." The productive home economy would be rejected as even a possibility; love and "psychological adjustment" would be enough to sustain the new American family system.

So why did this family system–seemingly strong and buoyant–fail in the late 1960’s? Many explanations might be offered: the rise of ideological challenges such as the new feminism (which objected to the system’s prescribed gender roles) and neo-Malthusianism (which looked upon the baby-booming suburbs with horror); or the quick decay of the family wage regime and its sustaining assumptions; or the off-cited sexual revolution linked to introduction of the birth control pill. But the explanation that I want to stress is somewhat different: this episode in family reconstruction ended because of a failure of community.

At the religious level, the extraordinary family behavior of American Roman Catholics came to a rapid halt, a change that can be traced to the specific years 1967-71. In a detailed study of Catholic fertility in Rhode Island, researchers found that average expected family size among Catholics fell from 3.3 children in 1967 to 2.8 four years later, a substantially greater decline than seen among Protestants. Among Catholic women with some college education, the decline was even greater: from 3.7 expected children to 2.7. Moreover, frequency of attendance at Mass no longer proved to be related to fertility. Even the large family ideal vanished: in 1967, 28 percent of "devout" Catholics planned to have five or more children; by 1971, less than 7 percent did.16

How do we explain this? There is little doubt that ideas affecting Catholicism during the mid-1960’s–including challenges to traditional practices and hierarchical authority in the wake of the Vatican II conclave–played a role. Dissent became open, and doctrinal uncertainty grew among the laity, at least. Given open public divisions among theologians and church leaders on issues such as contraception, it appears that the laity may simply have followed the easiest of several disputed paths of obedience. We can conclude, I think, that the Catholic community suffered a crisis of authority and obedience here, with Catholic, familism as a major casualty.

There was failure, as well, at another level of community: the "companionship family" model was unable to sustain its ethos much beyond one generation. This near-functionless family form, centered on the intense cultivation of personalities and nuclear family bonds, proved to be a frail structure. It was susceptible to disorders such as "the problem that has no name," Betty Friedan’s diagnosis of the isolated woman’s frustration in her inward-looking suburban home. Housing design and tract design discouraged neighboring. Subdivision design rarely provided for "central places": parks, shops, community halls. The application of sociological and psychological theory to suburban planning and housing design failed to produce successful community.

We are left with another question: are there models of the successful rebuilding of autonomous families in good communities? I believe the answer is yes. I note, in particular, the great, ongoing, incompletely understood experiment in family renewal now advancing under the label "home schooling." As many as two million American children are now educated at home with their parents as teachers, an increase from 25,000 in 1975. Viewed from the perspective of family structure, home schooling represents the return of a key family function–education–to the home. From both personal experience and extensive observation, I can testify that the decision to home school children deeply alters the social psychology of a family. Priorities and relationships shift in family-strengthening, but little studied ways. The refunctionalized family is different in kind than the "companionship family" it supplants. Such families do grow institutionally stronger, evidenced in higher fertility (home schooling families are nearly twice as large, on average, as their public school counterparts) and in a reduced propensity toward divorce.17 These families also become avid community builders, creating support associations and even building new intentional villages such as the successful Heritage Homesteads of central Texas.18

There may be promise, as well, in the sometimes stunning architecture flowing from the so-called "new urbanism." As Mark Henrie recently explained, where the old leftist critics of suburbia condemned the suburbs for not being bohemia, the "new urbanists" criticize suburbia for failing to be a polis. They favor housing design focused on sidewalks, smaller lots, front porches, parlors, and work rooms and development layouts featuring integrated shopping areas and other central places. Perhaps family, productive work, and community can be better reconciled in places such as this.19

More broadly, though, any episode of nationwide renewal will probably require the confident reassertion of religious faith. As found among Roman Catholics in the middle decades of the 20th century, this family renewal would rest on confident theological affirmation, spiritual discipline, and lay obedience. Can this happen in the circumstances of the early 21st century? Could this occur again among American Catholics? Or are there other, better denominational candidates this time around?

To these questions, I have no clear answers. Only Christian optimism … and Hope.

Endnotes

1 Richard A. Easterlin, The American Baby Boom in Historical Perspective (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1962).

2 On the family wage regime, see: A.C. Carlson, "Gender, Children, and Social Labor: Transcending the ‘Family Wage’ Dilemma," Journal of Social Issues 52 (1996): 137-61.

3 Gwendolyn Mink, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917-42 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995): 125, 151, 155.

4 Gary Becker, A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

5 See: William D. Mosher, David P. Johnson, and Majorie C. Horn, "Religion and Fertility in the United States: The Importance of Marriage Patterns and Hispanic Origin," Demography 23 (Aug. 1986): 367-69; Judith Blake, "Catholicism and Fertility: On Attitudes of Young Americans," Population and Development Review 10 (June 1984): 39-40; Gerhard Lenski, The Religious Factor: A Sociologist’s Inquiry (New York: Doubleday, 1961): 219-22, 226; and Lincoln H. Day, "Natality and Ethnocentrism: Some Relationships Suggested by an Analysis of Catholic-Protestant Differentials," Population Studies 22 (1968): 27-30.

6 Pius XII, "The Large Family Address to the Associations of Large Families of Rome and Italy, Jan. 19, 1958," The Pope Speaks 4 (Spring 1958): 363-64.

7 Ogburn’s analysis is found in: Recent Social Trends in the United States: Report of the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933): xlii-xlvi, 667-78, 708.

8 E.W. Burgess and H.J. Locke, The Family (New York: American Book Company, 1945): 651, 654-72.

9 Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: The Free Press, 1951): 188; and Talcott Parsons, "An Outline of The Social System," in Parsons, et.al., eds., Theories of Society: Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory, Volume I (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961): 39, 73.

10 Daniel P. Miller and Guy E. Swanson, The Changing American Parent: A Study in the Detroit Area (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1958): 201.

11 John Hood, "The Failure of American Public Education," The Freeman 43 (Feb. 1993).

12 Jean Dean, "Housing Design and Family Values," Land Economics 29 (May 1953): 128-41.

13 Svend Reimer, "Architecture for Family Living," Journal of Social Issues 7 (1951): 140-51.

14 Gertrude Sipperly Fish, ed., The Story of Housing, sponsored by the Federal National Mortgage Association (New York: Macmillan, 1979): 476-78.

15 Federal Housing Administration, Underwriting Training Handbook, Vol. 1, pamphlet HH 2.6/6:un 2/2v.1 (1961): 30.

16 Leon Bouvier and S.L.N. Rao, Socio-religious Factors in Fertility Decline (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1975): 1-4, 84-91, 156-58; Charles Westoff and Larry Bumpass, "The Revolution in Birth Control Practices of U.S. Roman Catholics," Science 179 (Jan. 12, 1973): 41-44; and Charles F. Westoff and Elise T. Jones, "The Secularization of U.S. Catholic Birth Control Practices," Family Planning Perspectives 9 (Sept.-Oct. 1977): 203-07.

17 From: J. Gary Knowles, Maralee Mayberry, and Brian D. Ray, "An Assessment of Home Schools in Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington: Implications for Public Education and a Vehicle for Informed Policy Decisions; Summary Report," U.S. Department of Education Field Initiated Research Project (Grant #R117E90220), submitted to the U.S. Department of Education, December 24, 1991; and Brian D. Ray, A Nationwide Study of Home Education in Canada: Family Characteristics, Student Achievement, and Other Topics (Salem, OR: National Home Education Research Institute, 1994).

18 A Glimpse of Brazos de Dios (Elm Mott, TX: Heritage Homesteads, n.d.).

19 Mark C. Henrie, "From Green Fields to the Grey Town," The University Bookman 42 (No. 1, 2002): 6-12; and Peter Katz and Vincent Scully, Jr., The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993).