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Christianity Today, October, 2007

The Fatherless Child

It is a unique cultural moment for the church to act like a family.

A Christianity Today editorial. | posted 10/09/2007 08:37AM

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It's not remarkable to say our culture is confused when it comes to family. But the results of the recent Pew Research Center study on marriage and children are remarkable nonetheless.

The survey confirms that Christian notions about marriage and family are still an American ideal. The growth in births to unwed mothers is a "big problem," say 71 percent of Americans. They agree (69 percent) that children need both a mother and a father. Even as rates of births to unwed mothers have skyrocketed, this strong disapproval has held steady.

But the survey also notes that Americans are less able to live up to their ideals: Roughly 37 percent of births are to unwed mothers, and nearly half (47 percent) of adults have lived in cohabitating relationships.

"Marriage exerts less influence over how adults organize their lives and how children are born and raised than at any time in the nation's history," the survey says. Between 1960 and 2005, the rate of unwed childbearing increased sevenfold, from 5.3 percent of all births to 36.8 percent. The survey finds that the average unwed mother "is more likely to be white than black, and more likely to be an adult than a teenager. …" The survey attributes this "sharp increase in non-marital births" to "an ever greater percentage of women in the 20s, 30s, and older … delaying or forgoing marriage but having children."

We can be thankful that the public still disapproves of out-of-wedlock births in general. But more Americans than ever naively think they alone can make single-parenting work.

Day-to-day realities slowly undermine this optimism. Single parents who have been at it awhile know better than anyone how less than ideal their situation is. That's one reason we can expect to see more and more single parents looking for outside support. Single mothers (to take the typical example), often long for a strong, caring male to enter their children's lives. So it nearly goes without saying: The church has a unique opportunity at this cultural moment.

For years, we have been preaching the supremacy of the two-parent family, offering classes and seminars for young couples and families. But the church is also caught up in an individualistic, ambitious culture, and we find it difficult to carve out time to offer ongoing, concrete help to single-parent families. We pray for them. We urge the parent to find a mate. But, to take the case above, it's hard to find a church that intentionally helps men of the church connect regularly with the children of single mothers. Would a "father program," on the order of Big Brothers and Sisters, be something the "family of God" might institute?

A single mother at Christianity Today International adopted two African American boys. Though she's given them extraordinary care and discipline, she has long felt that they desperately needed adult males in their lives. She says plainly that her church let her and her boys down in this regard. Only after one of the boys ended up in prison did the church's men rally around and enter this young man's life.

A dramatic example, but boys without father figures and girls without mother figures have a strike against them. The latest national study shows that more children than ever are entering the world with such strikes. It's an unprecedented cultural moment for Christians, to see if we can act less like individual consumers of spirituality and more like the family of God.

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October 2007, Vol. 51, No. 10

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Bill Bray

October 12, 2007 10:11am

Nice article. Wish it were more urgent and demanding. Also, I wish that it addressed the fact that Christian women need to encourage their fathers, husbands and the men in their lives to join the church's appointed diaconate in taking an interest in the single moms in the community and their orphaned children. Too often we don't have an active diaconate that is officialy appointed and recognized to help welcome and integrate the windows and orphans into our church communities, and therefore the men don't have a convering to do this work. I think that women need to help lead the way in this--and that all too often they consider the single moms a threat rather than an opportunity for Christ.

RBarryYoung

October 11, 2007 3:52pm

While your article is well meaning, it is steeped in implied accusation and shame for single mothers as exemplified by tha claim that they "... naively think they alone can make single-parenting work." Hardly. The vast majority of such women never intended to become single mothers. Even leaving aside the cases of those who are widowed or abandoned, the most frequently stigmatized case: that of a woman who is a single mother because she became pregnant out of wedlock forgets the most important fact about her. In this case she is raising a child without a father because, whatever the preceding mistaken decisions in her life, at that point she *choose* to affirm life and she *choose* to accept her responsibilites to that child. What you, your readers and all pastors should do in turn is to remember that we are called to be God's hands in affirming the correctness of her decision and that despite the difficulties "through God, all things are possible".

dempsey

October 11, 2007 2:27pm

To the Editor, Could that possibly be caused by the fact that white women out number black women in the U.S. 6 to 1? This is still a grave misrepresentation of the facts.

dempsey

October 11, 2007 9:16am

This article states: "The survey finds that the average unwed mother "is more likely to be white than black,..." when in fact, the Pew study found exactly the opposite. Here is the Pew summary statement: "Blacks are much less likely than whites to marry and much more likely to have children outside of marriage." Pew states this fact at least 6 or 7 times in it's findings. Why this discrepancy? Pew never makes the statement that Christianity Today's editor attributes it, in fact even "quotes" it, as having been made. This is dishonest reporting of the facts.

CT Editor

October 11, 2007 12:00am

In response to Dempsey: We are in fact quoting from the Pew study, which makes the statement about the typical woman who gives birth out of wedlock on p. 15 of the report. http://pewresearch.org/assets/social/pdf/Marriage.pdf. What might be confusing is that this statistic deals with pure numbers, not percentages. Despite the fact that a higher percentage of black women have children out of wedlock, there are more white women. Disclaimer: I couldn't post without giving this a star rating.

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