The “Traditional Family” is WEIRD (and Revolutionary)
On the origins of liberal democratic values in the Western Church’s social engineering
American liberals often charge that Christians seem unusually preoccupied (even obsessed) with sex and sexuality, and have a bunch of strange hang-ups about marriage and family structure.
Conservatives, meanwhile, argue that the “traditional family” lies at the core of Western Civilization, and that weakening foundational norms around sex, marriage, and child-rearing would likely have destabilizing and adverse effects on affected societies and cultures.
The WEIRDest People in the World, a new book by Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich, suggests that both parties in this debate are onto something, even as it casts the entire conversation in a different light.
Specifically, Part II of the book (Chapters 5–8) demonstrates that what is often referred to as the “traditional” family is, in fact, anything but. Looking worldwide, historically through the present, the family structure that people in the U.S. and Western Europe take for granted is actually highly peculiar — a product of a centuries-long campaign by the Western Church to dismantle kindreds, clans, tribes and other competing structures of allegiance and authority, and to…
