“Seek Social Justice” (Part Two)

[Part 2 of 6 in my review of the Seek Social Justice study from the Heritage Foundation and WORLD Magazine]

The second section of the study is called Cultivating Justice from the Ground Up: Marriage, Family, and Friendship. To set the stage for making a strong case for the importance of solid, loving, nuclear family structures, a couple of heart-breaking statistics are presented:

"Roughly 80 percent of all long-term poverty occurs in single-parent homes."

"Nearly four in 10 children are born to single mothers. Seven out of 10 black children are born to an unwed mother. These children are seven times more likely to experience poverty than those born and raised in a home with their married parents."

From the perspective of the study, these statistics seem to indicate a relatively straightforward cause-and-effect relationship: broken families cause poverty. It's impossible to deny the correlation, I'd say, but I'm hesitant to read into those statistics a simple, one-way causal relationship. Isn't it also likely that poverty breaks down relationships? And couldn't there be some deeper, more systemic reasons why certain demographics tend to be poorer than others? Are broken families really the underlying determining factor? Again, I don't deny a correlation; I just hesitate to arrive too quickly at causality.

Nonetheless, the study hits the nail on the head in emphasizing that in order to address the breakdown of families, we as Christians and neighbors will need to "roll up our sleeves" and get personally involved. Family issues, after all, are best addressed at family and relational levels. I think of Donald Miller's organization, The Mentoring Project, and the excellent work they are doing in response to the needs of a fatherless generation.

Rudy Carrasco, former executive director of Harambee Christian Family Center in Pasadena, says in the video, "The family is an integral part of social justice because it is the starting point of social justice." And I have to admit, the authors of this study make a very compelling case. When you consider that there are parts of the United States where kids grow up without witnessing any healthy marriages, and then think about the way marriage is cheapened on TV and in Hollywood, it strikes you as both tragic and inevitable that the cycle of family brokenness would continue unabated.

A year and a half ago, we had a guest join our family for Thanksgiving. He was living at the local rescue mission, part of a rehabilitation program there, and my uncle had begun mentoring him. After spending several hours with our family, he told my uncle with tears in his eyes that he had never, in fifty years, been around a family that really loved each other.

Families and communities really do shape who we become as men and women, husbands and wives, parents and neighbors. The "horizons of the possible" are either broad or quite contracted depending on what we have seen and experienced. It seems to me that a truly Christian understanding of abundant life can't minimize the role of the family in helping people to thrive, to help create an environment where human flourishing can happen.

I think the study does an excellent job at highlighting the family as an all-too-often ignored factor in social justice. In the book of James we learn that real religion has to do with caring for orphans and widows. Personally, I have tended to focus on the sociopolitical side of this - orphans and widows represent those who are particularly vulnerable to abuse by the powerful, which I still absolutely believe to be true - but I admittedly haven't paid enough attention to the significant family implications in their situation.

Not too long ago I read an excellent compilation of essays called The Justice Project. Ruth Padilla DeBorst contributed a chapter called "Parenting for Justice: How Can Parents Instill the Value of Justice in Their Children" and I found it quite inspiring. By watching justice-focused documentaries, doing community projects together, cultivating a more simple lifestyle, eating dinner together and having substantial conversations, and displaying a poster of family hero Oscar Romero in the house, Ruth and her husband James provide a great, accessible example of what it looks like to seek social justice as a family.

Though I am not married and do not yet have kids, these considerations give me a compelling vision of what I would like my own home and family to be like someday. So much so that when I consider the sort of woman I'd like to marry, a commitment to social justice is without a doubt one of the most attractive qualities there is. You know, that other part of Proverbs 31.

So, I'll conclude with this: while addressing broken family structures alone is not enough in terms of social justice, it's definitely an essential building block, and I think the study does an excellent job of making that case.