Bible Bulletin Boards

Book excerpt: The nuclear family is under siege as never before. With the dramatic increase in divorce, illegitimacy and single parenthood, we are witnessing the voluntary breakup of the minimal family unit on a massive scale. Meanwhile many people question whether marriage should be defined as a relationship between a man and a woman, and some are trying to sever the idea of marriage and procreation completely. Bestselling author William Bennett believes that we are engaging in a reckless and radical social experiment that, unless it is firmly resisted, will have calamitous consequences. In this strong and vigorous, but sophisticated and informed defense of the traditional nuclear family, Bennett argues that we urgently need to reestablish the idea of marriage as an arrangement between a man and a woman, monogamous and freely chosen, a place of sexual and emotional intimacy, affection and friendship. Marriage should be the institution through which children are conceived and born, loved and disciplined, nurtured and raised. And marital permanence must once again become normative, a high ideal, something to which people commit and strive to maintain. Bennett argues that we are willfully and frivolously casting aside one of our greatest historical achievements under the illusion that we can cheerfully deconstruct the traditional family and then one day decide to pull back from the brink. Having blithely tossed these precious things aside, we will find that we cannot so easily summon them back. Yet Bennett's book is not a jeremiad or a gloom-and-doom scenario but a positive affirmation of family life and an argument for why a certain traditional understanding of the family leads to greater humanflourishing and happiness.