Byzantine Catholic Family Matters

Marriage, Family, and Community III

Community Does Make a Difference

A recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the sexual content on television programs in the United States has nearly doubled between 1998 and 2005. Seventy percent of the twenty most popular shows with teens have sexual content. Nearly eighty percent of the shows in prime time have sexual content. Innocuous, benign entertainment is what the entertainment industry would have us believe. Perhaps more appropriate would be that it is somewhat reflective of what is now passing for normal in our culture.

In the essay Sex, Freedom and Economy Christian writer Wendell Berry notes that the "prostitution of sex in advertisements and public entertainment" ranks together with promiscuity, epidemic divorce, abortion and adolescent sexual activity as one of the many manifestations of our culture’s so-called liberated sexuality. And, then we try to draw a line saying that sexual violence, child molestation, teen pregnancy, and sexual harassment are wrong. In Berry's words, "Trying to draw the line where we are trying to draw it, between carelessness and brutality, is like insisting that falling is flying - until you hit the ground - and then trying to outlaw hitting the ground."

The danger is that we go from being shocked to being surprised; then we are numbed and eventually resigned to all that goes on around us. We come to expect what is going on. Worse, we are at greater risk of living it in our own lives. No wonder that only sixty percent of high school seniors believe that if they marry they will spend their lives with their spouse (see the part in this series).

The larger community does make a difference; and that larger community, that culture in which we live is so excessively individualistic, so self-serving. John Paul II spoke about marriage as being the relationship in which a man and woman can most totally offer themselves as gift to the other. Similarly Johann Christoph Arnold wrote that "true fulfillment comes from giving love to another person. Yet love does not only seek to give; it also longs to unite" (A Plea for Purity). Talk about being countercultural!

In the 1980s sociologist Robert Bellah and associates wrote Habits of the Heart in which a compelling argument was presented that Americans do not have a language for community; rather it speaks a therapeutic language where the focus is how I am feeling, how I am hurt, what is in it for me, and so forth. In such a society, marriage is inevitably at risk, for, for marriage becomes largely a source of self fulfillment and happiness, and as Fr. Alexander Schmemann warned, when this is the case there is the "refusal to accept the cross in [marriage]" (For the Life of the World). There is no well developed language of sacrifice, service, self-denial, or community. Through the gift of John Paul II's Theology of the Body we have the language, the way of life so glaringly lost in so much of western society. The challenge to the Church and the local parish is to help members of the Christian community learn this language, take it to heart, more completely live it, and see the prevailing culture’s norms for what they are.