Sex, Marriage and Family in World Religions (3 page)

Luke Timothy Johnson
is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins and senior fellow in the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University.

Mark D. Jordan
is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Religion and senior fellow in the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University.

John Witte Jr.
is Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University.

i n t r o d u c t i o n

Social practices involving sex, marriage, and family are undergoing drastic changes throughout the world. These trends raise many questions. Are they real or superficial? Are these changes good, not so good, or positively bad for individuals, societies, and the world? If they are not so good or completely negative, is there anything that can be done to stop these trends and go in another direction? If what we have inherited from the past on sex, marriage, and family needs to be reformed, will the religions that have carried many of our traditional views on these matters have anything to contribute to this process of reformation and reconstruction?

This book does not try to answer whether alterations in sex, marriage, and family are good or bad. Nor does it address what should be done. But it does have a central premise:
we cannot know how to assess these changes or how to
think about the future if we do not understand the role of the world religions in
shaping attitudes and policies toward sex, marriage, and family in the past.
Can we really go forward if we are totally ignorant of the past? Can we constructively relate to these religious traditions if we are riddled with misunderstandings, false ideas about their teachings, and erroneous views about their complexities and nuances. Furthermore, many of the global conflicts that we face today— conflicts that break out in violent forms of hatred, terrorism, and self-defense— are fueled by misunderstandings that people have about what their own religion and other religions teach about sex, marriage, and family.

xviii introduction

The editors of this volume believe that societies cannot form their future on sex, marriage, and family without at least consulting the traditions of the world religions on these matters. The human sciences of law, economics, medicine, psychology, and sociology cannot by themselves shape the future without know-ing and listening to the heritage of the great world religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Furthermore, the peoples of the world cannot get along with each other, appreciate each other, or constructively critique each other without understanding more accurately how their respective traditions have shaped their faithful on these intimate subjects.

The great public conflicts of our time are partially shaped by differences over who controls sexuality, who defines marriage, who shapes the family, and what actually constitutes a threat to inherited practices.

MODERNIZATION AND FAMILY CHANGE

AND CONFLICT

During the last several decades a momentous debate has swept across the world over the present health and future prospects of marriages and families. This debate has been especially intense in North America and Europe, but analogous debates have erupted in parts of Latin America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Middle East. These debates are about real issues. There are powerful trends affecting both advanced and underdeveloped countries. Some commentators believe these trends are changing marriages and families and undermining their ability to perform customary tasks. These trends are often called the forces of modernization. Theories of modernization are now also being extended by theories of globalization. These processes are having consequences for families in all corners of the earth. Older industrial countries have the wealth to cushion the blows of this disruption, but some experts argue that family decline throws economically fragile countries into even deeper poverty and disarray.1

To be sure, there are other sources of family disruption besides the forces of modernization and globalization. Wars, oppression, forced poverty, and dis-crimination between and among cultures and religions are additional factors.

The recent massive family disruptions in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Rwanda, Iraq, the Asian tsunami, and before that in Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and apartheid South Africa are still fresh on our minds. Sometimes the abstract yet disruptive forces of modernization get confused with the cultures and religions with which they have been associated historically. Does the West threaten the family codes of Islamic Shari’a? Or is it Christianity that is the threat to Islamic family law? Or is the real threat the modernizing process with which the West and Christianity are thought to be identified? Or, further, is modernization really a threat to families anywhere, especially if wisely understood and appro-priately restrained?

Who and what is a threat to a religion’s family practices can be asked from a variety of angles. For instance, are the highly pro-family and pro-marriage i n t r o d u c t i o n

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traditions of not only Islam but also Confucianism and Hinduism a threat to the Western companionate marriage and eventually to Western styles of modernization and democracy? Does a strong pro-family tradition have to be, by definition, patriarchal and oppressive to women or is it possible for a tradition to be both highly pro-marriage and pro-family and still be egalitarian on gender issues? Does marriage in a particular religious tradition have to include sex?

Does it have to include children? What, in the first place, is marriage really for? Why are kin relations often, although not always, seen as so vital in several of the major world religions? Under what conditions, however, are kin attach-ments regarded as an obstacle to spiritual development within a particular religion? And do some religions, in complex and subtle ways, see marriage and family as both a threat to higher levels of spiritual fulfillment while, at the same time, subtly using persons who have attained these higher levels (monks, nuns, gurus) to reinforce and protect the more mundane marriages and families of less accomplished laity?

What are the conditions of divorce in a particular religion, and do women as well as men have the right to divorce? When, and for what reasons, is the practice of annulment used as a substitute for divorce? How were women’s rights protected in the past, even in highly patriarchal religious traditions or in religions that practiced polygamy? Why did some religious traditions that practiced polygamy give it up or at least modify the conditions under which it could be practiced? The questions are large in number and overwhelming in complexity.

Yet this volume gives insight—sometimes very surprising insights—into these and many other such matters.
And most important of all, we get to hear the
answers to the questions straight from the central texts of these religious traditions
themselves.

Most social scientists now acknowledge that modernization, independent of factors such as war, poverty, and terrorism, can by itself be disruptive to families in certain ways. But many distinguished social scientists believe that there is little that can be done to allay these ambiguous consequences. Others are more hopeful that positive steps can be taken. Yet those who are optimistic still quarrel as to whether the religions themselves should have a role to play in the normative clarification, and perhaps reconstruction, of sex, marriage, and family for the future. At the minimum,
the three editors of this volume believe that
these religions—all of them to varying degrees—have vital roles to play in the
dialogue about the meaning and norms of sex, marriage, and family for the
societies of tomorrow.
Hence it is our hope that this volume will serve as a vital resource for students and scholars, religious and political leaders, international and domestic officials alike as they engage in this dialogue.

THE PLAN OF THE VOLUME

This volume provides a number of the essential texts needed to start this dialogue about marriage and the family among the world’s main religions and xx introduction

between them and the modern human sciences. We have assembled a group of highly respected and internationally recognized experts on each of these six major world religions. We have asked them to select and introduce the key texts of each tradition. We have invited them to view these axial traditions in their genesis, exodus, and leviticus—describing and documenting the origin, evo-lution, and institutionalization of their sexual, marital, and familial norms and habits. More specifically, we have asked them to assemble the basic texts—the ur texts, so to speak—that reveal the unfolding of these religions. These texts cover a variety of periods from antiquity to modern times.

These texts also represent several different genres through which religious traditions express themselves . These include classic canonical, theological, liturgical, legal, poetic, and prophetic statements on sex, marriage, and family drawn from the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. All of these religions tend to use all of these genres. The reader will notice, however, that some traditions use legal texts more than other genres while still other religions may rely heavily on stories and poetry. Some religions—such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have firm scriptural traditions while other traditions are carried by more loosely associated basic texts of various genres.

The chapter editors were asked to select texts for the various religions that addressed a number of common topics. Religions vary, however, in their directness in speaking to these issues. These topics include a) the purpose of sexuality, b) its relation to pleasure, procreation, and intimacy, c) the nature of family, d) the meaning, purpose, and institutionalization of marriage, e) gender roles in the family, f) the role of fathers, g) the nature of intergenerational obligations, and, when materials exist, h) the place of same-sex relations. At the same time, we hoped that editors would find texts that also would throw light on sex, marriage, and family from the angle of the major stages of the life cycle (birth, childhood, adulthood, aging, and death) and from the perspective of the ritual patterns and meanings governing these transitions.

THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN THE WORLD

DIALOGUE ABOUT MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY

The various religions can sometimes perceive each other as threats to their respective sex, marriage, and family traditions. Increasingly, as we saw above, the religions consider modernization to be a threat as well. Modernization can be defined in a variety of ways. One view defines it as the spread of technical rationality into various spheres of life.2 Technical rationality tends to reduce life to efficient means of attaining short-term and untested individual satisfactions.

The American sociologist Alan Wolfe, building in the insights of the German social theorist Ju¨rgen Habermas, has argued that modernization viewed as the spread of technical rationality can function either in the service of market capi-i n t r o d u c t i o n xxi

talism, as it does in countries such as the United States, or it can serve more bureaucratic state goals as it did in the Soviet Union and, to lesser degrees, even today in countries such as Norway and Sweden.3 In either case, as Wolfe has convincingly argued, older patterns of mutual dependencies in families and marriage get transferred to the marketplace, as in capitalism, or to the state, as in more socialist societies. In both cases there is likely to be more divorce, more births out of wedlock, later marriages, more nonmarriage, more cohabitation, and more general belief that marriage and family life are irrelevant to modern societies.4 Many scholars believe that along with these trends come more poverty for single mothers, more father absence, and for children and youth more crime, emotional difficulties, school problems, obesity, and nonmarital births.5

As a further perspective on modernization, English sociologist Anthony Giddens has argued that complex modern societies tend to differentiate their social systems into specialized and relatively autonomous sectors. This leads to social-system differentiations such as the separation between home and work, home and school, the social life of the young from parental supervision, the work life of spouses from the supervision of each other, and, finally, the separation of religious guidance from various sectors of society—especially the sectors of sexuality and intimacy.6 In addition, modernization in the form of technical rationality leads to more effective contraception and a huge array of reproductive technologies that can, especially in the United States, be used within or outside of marriage, by singles or by couples, and by heterosexuals or by gays.

The processes of modernization are generally thought to lead to many positive values most of us want to retain and enhance, for example, more control over the contingencies of life, better education, more wealth, better health, more equality for both males and females, and more freedom for nearly every-one. However, these same processes also threaten to undermine the power of religious traditions to shape and support family and marital solidarity. In turn, the religious traditions themselves feel threatened, and
in the process of defending
themselves, they often end up attacking each other rather than the elusive processes of modernization and their extension into globalization.
So, the question becomes, how do we learn to live with, appreciate, yet constrain and productively guide modernization in matters pertaining to sex, marriage, and family?

This brings us back to our earlier question. What will be the grounds for guiding sex, marriage, and family in the future? Will we abandon the hope of any coherence in sexual and family norms—any common ideals around which modern societies will organize their goals in the sexual field? Will we turn to the human sciences (law, medicine, economics, sociology, and psychology) and them alone?
Or will the religions of the world be a part of the dialogue
? What will be the sources of the cultural work needed to find the guidelines for sex, marriage, and family?