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What led you to start writing about how social science data broadly support traditional understandings of marriage and family?

I had a baby right out of college. This was at the height of the happy talk about how the retreat from marriage represented only change, not decline. I got personally interested in this set of issues because I found, like most single mothers, that well before the time my son could be responding to social stigma, he started asking, "Where is Daddy?"

About the same time, I began to see the beginnings of what has become a mountain of social science data on both the rise of fatherlessness and family fragmentation and the negative consequences of these things. My background is as a journalist. So I have had the pleasure of working with a number of extremely intelligent and prominent scholars who have, over the past two decades, grown increasingly concerned about what our high rate of family fragmentation is doing to our children and our community.

You seem to argue for re-establishing fatherhood in our society through the idea of male headship.

I don't know that I would see male headship as the primary strategy. But I firmly believe that mothers and fathers both matter a great deal to their children, and that marriage is the way that you get that for children. You cannot raise a generation of men to be good family men unless you tell them that husbands and fathers matter a great deal.

One of the things sociologist Brad Wilcox shows is that conservative Protestants, who are the only group of people actively advocating for male headship in our society and for a strong vision of gender difference, oddly enough turn out to produce husbands and fathers who are more like the "new man," that is, a warm, engaged, attentive father. And their wives report that these men are also more appreciative, and the wives are happier than the average wife or the wives of religiously unaffiliated men. This is true only for conservative Protestants who go to church. If you're a nominal conservative Protestant and you just pick up on the headship ideology and you don't have the idea of love and sacrifice for the sake of your family, it turns out badly.

Does Christianity Teach Male Headship? is unusual for its cross-pollination between Protestant and Catholic thinkers on this topic.

Right—and also between conservative Protestants and mainline Protestants. It's a really four-way conversation.

What do you think is the essential difference between the conservative Protestant and the Catholic voices in this discussion?

One difference is that the conservative Protestants argue quite strongly that the Bible teaches male headship. The mainline Protestants contest this, grounding their views in other biblical affirmations of the general equality of all human persons, male and female.

The Catholic thinkers have a hard time wrapping their heads around the whole question of headship because they keep focusing on the issue of indissolubility: What does it mean to become one flesh in a way that can't be broken? When that's your basic framework it becomes hard to think about headship in a deep way, because if you are really one flesh, can you really talk about your shoulders being subordinate to your stomach, or can you talk about treating your liver the way you would like it to be treated? The principal intellectual distinctions come from that framing. 

What do you think each side can learn from the other?

Let me say this about the mainline Protestants: Don Browning at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a number of other theologians have worked hard to revise a mainline Protestant understanding of marriage. The phrase they came up with is "equal regard." I think it is a great advance because it implies that men and women don't have to do exactly the same thing. Nor do you have to describe what each gender should do. What Mother is doing is not subordinate in the sense of being less important than what Father does or vice versa. So a woman doesn't have to understand what she does the way some people did in the '50s. The whole point of being a woman then was to free your husband to go and do the "really important" things of achieving in the workplace. Instead, equal regard points to what I think is the reality of marital love: It has got to involve an equal regard between husband and wife for what each is called to do in family life.

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August 2004, Vol. 48, No. 8