How Christianity Subverted Ancient Family Values

What is the traditional family? If one thinks its defining features as a nuclear family with heterosexual parents, it may come as a surprise that this is a fairly recent concept that is by no means historic across most cultures, both Western and non-Western. While the ethnographic and historical literature on familial structure is vast, this article focuses specifically on the Indo-European ‘ancient family’, whose concept of ‘family’ is significantly different from the ‘traditional family’ in contemporary sociopolitical discourse.

Drawing principally upon British political philosopher Larry Siedentop’s book Inventing the Individual, I shall trace the inequalities that necessarily arise from the ancient family structure, and how the advent of Christian faith undermined the ancient family for good. Finally, I explore how this illuminates and interrogates our contemporary understanding of the ‘traditional family’, both in Asia and the West.

The Indo-European Ancient Family

Where did the practice of carrying the bride over the threshold originate from? To understand this, we need to journey deep into the past, to the Indo-European precursors of the ancient Greek and Romans.

The basic unit of Indo-European societies was the family. The religion of such societies are essentially domestic: each family has its tradition of ancestor worship, and only blood relatives can worship the same ancestors (Siedentop, 2014, 10-11). The ancient family’s principal authority was the male head-of-the-house or paterfamilias. Since ancestor worship was patrilineal, his duty was to ensure the continued existence of the family through offspring, since the discontinuation of family implied the virtual destruction of his family’s cult (ibid., 12).

There are several implications of this family structure. Firstly, the subordination of women is a feature and not a bug of this societal structure. Since domestic religion is patrilineal, women are necessarily of secondary importance in the continued existence of the family cult.In order to protect his ancestors from oblivion, the paterfamilias has unprecedented power over his wife and children, and has the right to repudiate or even kill them (ibid., 15). Domestic religion is also tied to the soil, since it is the ground that the ancestors of a family are rooted upon. Property, like religion, is patrilineal and hence women are unable to inherit property (ibid., 16).

Secondly, such family structures effectively lacked an understanding of the individual. We now see individual human beings as endowed with basic rights and conscious agency. The Indo-European family, however, defines personhood as an element within the family, the latter being the basic unit of society. The practice of carrying brides over the threshold is thus a vestige of ancient inequality: the bride crossing the door signals her loss from her family and thus becomes a ‘non-person’. She only regains an identity after the threshold, not as an individual, but as part of her grooms family (ibid., 12).

The ancient family thus differs significantly from our modern conception of the traditional family. No doubt that the ancient family’s parenthood were heterosexual too, but this is at best a cosmetic similarity. Most modern social conservatives recognize women as individuals with choice, subject to equality before the law, and have the right to own property. While ancestor-worship persists in some societies, such as Chinese culture, it is far from a defining feature of the nuclear family with heterosexual parenthood.

The Ancient Family’s Influence on Greco-Roman Society

Indo-European ancient familial structures persisted long after the advent of the Greek and Roman civilisations. Siedentop argues that the basis of Greco-Roman society was still the ancient family, albeit transformed within its new context. We can see vestiges of this in the earliest Greco-Roman laws: houses must be separate, not conjoined, as the gods of a family — being rooted in the land — cannot be merged with the gods of another (ibid., 13).

Ancient families were also not nuclear families, but very large. They can form extended families, clans, tribes and even cities. The Greek cities, the polis, were formed in this manner. This is done through the ‘discovery’ of a common ancestor between two family groups, and hence allows the combination of two religions that were once separate familial cults (ibid., 20 – 21). Again, this differs greatly from the modern concept of a traditional family with its emphasis on being a nuclear unit.

Even the vaunted democracy of ancient Athens and Rome had vestiges of the ancient family. In order to participate in public life, one must become a citizen. Citizenship oaths bound young men to the “religion of the city” (ibid., 22). Just like the ancient family’s subordination of women, Greco-Roman women are excluded from citizenry and hence participation in public life (ibid., 29). The radical inequality of the ancient family therefore saturated the foundations of Greco-Roman society.

Christianity’s Subversion of the Ancient Family

While modified and transformed through Greco-Roman society, the ancient family’s fundamental assumptions remained extant. It would only be challenged to a significant extent with the arrival of Christian faith.

If the ancient world’s basic unit was the family, for Christianity, it was the individual. Previously, it was the family that ensured immortality through the continuation of the familial cult. Now, it is through personal acceptance of Christ. It is therefore from the wellspring of Christianity that the Western concept of individual conscience first emerged, for a conscious choice to accept Christ presupposed a person’s agency (ibid., 58-59). In a similar vein, he classicist Peter Garnsey argued that the concept of individual conscience is:

“…a breakthrough that only a Christian could make, because the Christian, notoriously, had abandoned his ancestral tradition and embraced a supranational universal religion” (E. Gregory Wallace, Justifying Religious Freedom: The Western Tradition, 502).

The ancient family also created a hierarchy where individuals were defined by their role within the family. The paterfamilias and his sons would be the head, or eventual head of the family, while women, children and slaves were necessarily subordinate. Christianity undermined this notion of a ‘natural’ inequality. For St. Paul, Christ’s love is universally available to all, and all humans possess the appropriate faculties for accepting Christ (Siedentop, 60). In Galatians, Paul wrote:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28-29)

Here, personal identity was being transformed. For the ancient family, primary identity is fixed and predetermined by their roles in the household, while Paul in Galatians preached the radical vision of making this familial identity secondary to their identity in Christ (ibid., 62).

The idea of Christian faith creating a community of morally equal agents freely associating with each other also birthed hints of what modern liberals would term as freedom of association and religious freedom. The latter presupposes the former, for the freedom to practice a religion assumes a free choice to associate oneself with any religion of his or her choosing. This was virtually impossible in the ancient family. The ancient family cult was not a choice, but a belief system one was born with and was obliged to preserve. One could only leave their family cult by virtue of being the gentler sex — by marrying into the groom’s family and hence exchanging one domestic faith for another.

A version of religious freedom could be found as early as the 2nd century CE, in the writings of the Church Father Tertullian:

We worship the one God… there are others whom you regard as gods; we know them to be demons. Nevertheless, it is a basic human right that everyone should be free to worship according to his own convictions… religion must be practised freely, not by coercion; even animals for sacrifice must be offered with a willing heart. (Wiles and Santer, Documents in Early Christian Thought, 227)

Another fundamental challenge Christianity posed to the ancient family was the freedom Christianity granted to women. By the 3rd century CE, Christian monasticism offered a new form of community based on individual conscience and choice, rather than the socially-predestined hierarchical order of the ancient family. Women who choose to enter a monastic life of sexual celibacy may appear to modern ears a form of religious oppression, when in fact, it is an act of freedom. Firstly, sexual renunciation was a free choice where the social restrictions were self-imposed. Secondly, this choice emancipated women from permanent subordination to a paterfamilias, be it her husband or her father. Upper-class Christian women in Roman society led the way in this regard (Siedentop, 95), demonstrating the truth that human beings value freedom more than wealthy indignity.

The Germanic Family

The Greeks and Romans were not the only culture which served as a tradent of Indo-European ancient ‘family values’. So were the Germanic tribes and kingdoms that dominated Europe following the decline and collapse of the Roman empire. The Germanic tribal family had similar traits: paterfamilias, subordination of women, and inflexible inheritance laws.

The 510 CE Salic Law for example, excluded women from inheriting property, a vestige of the ancient family’s emphasis on property being the family cult’s, and the cult solely being survived via male heirs. Yet, by the 7th century, the Lex Ripuaria collection of Germanic law relaxed such inheritance laws (Siedentop, 142-143). Most striking was the statement by the king of Soissons, Chilperic I (561-584 CE) on rejecting ancestral Germanic customs as a consequence of his Christian faith:

“A long-standing and wicked custom of our people denies sisters a share with their brothers in their father’s land; but I consider this wrong, since my children came equally from God… Therefore, my dearest daughter, I hereby make you an equal and legitimate heir with your brothers, my sons.” (Siedentop, 143).

By the 7th century, Germanic mass was no longer offered to dead ancestors. It became a sacrifice only a priest could perform for God (ibid., 144 – 145). The foundations of the ancient family was at this point threatened existentially. Christianity’s concern for the fate of the individual soul was supplanting the continuity of the familial cult, the essence of the ancient family.

The Chinese Traditional Family

I now turn beyond Siedentop’s scholarship, which focused solely on developments in European familial structure. Chinese traditional families are remarkably similar, if not identical, to the Indo-European ancient family. While the ancient family was largely subverted in Europe due to Christianity, this structure survived in Chinese culture for far longer. The 20th-century saw the tectonic transformation of the Chinese traditional family due to major shifts in social, cultural and political developments within China and beyond in the Chinese diaspora. Due to the brevity of this article, I shall not address this evolution, but focus succinctly on two things: (1) the Chinese traditional family before modernization (2) contemporary vestiges of the Chinese traditional family structure.

Like pre-Christian Europe, Confucian Chinese society’s basic unit was the family, and not the individual. Consequently, individual identity was determined by their role within the family (Cho, Eunae; Choi, Ye Eun, 2018, 2). While Chinese culture had suprafamilial faiths such as Buddhism, the oldest religious traditions are likely domestic and rooted in ancestor veneration, focused on male ancestors, and was patrilineal.

The consequences of this social structure has striking similarities to that of the Indo-European ancient family: identity being determined by family roles than by individual agency (ibid.), women usually lacking the right to inherit property, and could often grow beyond the nuclear family unit to form clans. A remarkable example of clan structures can be found in Fujian, where massive houses called Tulou are built to house up to 800 people each from the same clan.

Female subordination was also a key element of traditional Chinese culture. Although much equality has been achieved with the rise of modern China, vestiges of inequality remained in Chinese language as clues to this unequal past. Terms such as “valuing men, trivializing women” (重男轻女), and “married daughters are like waters spilled outside the house” (嫁出去的女兒，潑出去的水) all demonstrate the inequality that necessarily arises, at least in part, from the Chinese traditional family structure. Given that patrilineal familial continuity is the priority, women are — in the Confucian social structure — of secondary importance to the family. In fact, the Chinese characters for marrying off a daughter (嫁), combined two words: female (女) and home/household (家). Like the Indo-European ancient family, the woman loses her prior identity in her birth family’s home, and gains a new one in the groom’s. She does not define herself apart from family.

In the mid-9th century, Emperor Wuzong of Tang launched the Huichang Persecution of Buddhism (会昌毁佛). While the reasons were varied, of particular relevance was the belief that Buddhism endangered the traditional Chinese family (Shi, Longdu, 2016, 153). Like Christianity, Buddhism has a rich tradition of monasticism which caused people to leave their families to become monks and nuns. Unlike Christianity, the state suppression of Buddhism was effective, hence the ancient family and its inequalities persisted in China long after Europe has lost them.

Family Frenemies: Asian conservativism and Christian conservativism

In contemporary politics, liberalism is, broadly speaking, no friend of both Asian and Christian conservatives. For Asian conservatives, the “collectivistic”, family-based societies of Asia are often contrasted with the “individualistic” West. For Christian conservatives, liberalism’s emphasis on non-heteronormative relations undermine the sanctity of marriage between one man and one woman. Yet the two conservativisms do not share much commonality on the concept of family beyond this superficial opposition to liberal thought.

Firstly, Christian conservatives are heir to Christianity’s destabilization of the ancient family and its familial cult. This is not necessarily true of Asian conservatives, especially those who abide Chinese ancestral veneration customs. It is no accident that Chinese families can be hostile to Christianity, for it upset familial traditions of continuity and preservation. The ongoing efforts for reconciliation and compromise between Chinese familial traditions and Christian faith only further demonstrates an ideological tension to begin with.

Secondly, although Christian conservatives may lament the excesses of liberal individualism, they themselves already assumed that the basic unit of society is the individual, not the family. If one speaks to an American conservative, chances are that individual liberties such as economic freedom, religious freedom and freedom of association are taken to be ‘conservative’ values. Again, this contrasts with Asian conservativism of the Confucian variety, which assumes the family as fundamental. This is not to say Asian conservatives do not have a concept of the individual. Rather, the individualism extant in contemporary Asian societies is ultimately the adoption of Western ideals, and in a filtered sense, Christian ideals.

Illuminating and Interrogating Modern Concepts of the ‘Traditional Family’

The ‘traditional’ in the traditional family is historically complex. If the term ‘traditional’ implies a stable historical past, then this article seeks to dispel such ahistorical sentiments. I shall summarize this in point:

• Firstly the nuclear family before the modern period was historically rare. From the examples, of the Indo-European, Greek, Roman, Germanic and Chinese societies, we see that the nuclear family often conjoins to form larger entities, such as extended families, clans, tribes, and even cities (the Greek polis).
• Secondly, while modern ‘traditional families’ and the ancient family had heterosexual parenthood, this was a mere cosmetic similarity. The substance of the ancient family was the familial cult, which is an uncommon feature in most modern ‘traditional families’ with the possible exception of East Asia.
• Thirdly, many modern conservatives who promote ‘family values’ also assume individual freedoms such as freedom of association, freedom of conscience and religious freedom. These were unthinkable in the ancient family. The modern concept of the ‘traditional family’ is therefore very new, and unconsciously assumed the very liberal (and arguably Christian) ideals that conservatives disparage.
• Fourth, Christianity destroyed ancient family values that held sway over Europe. A patrilineal familial cult necessarily results in female subordination, lack of individual agency, and loss of individual identity. Its destruction would pave the way for gender equality and individual freedom. It is therefore unsurprising that these ideals developed in the Christian West.
• Lastly, contemporary political discourse may unite ‘Asian values’ with Christian notions of a ‘traditional family’. This unity is not historic fact, but political rhetoric.