by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News
When you see an image, or an actual photo, of an American family such as the one above, what comes into your mind about the 5 people in this image?
For me, being raised in a church-going family and part of the Christian religion, I used to look at images, photos, or actual groups of people resembling this illustration in public, and conclude that this was a “good Christian family” who all go to church together every Sunday.
I would just assume that the adult man and woman in this photo were married and that the children with them were born to them after they were married.
If it was an “ideal” Christian family, they would not have been previously married to anyone else, and would have been married as virgins because they were “good Christians” who saved themselves until God brought them the “perfect” husband or wife.
However, I am older and wiser now, and when I see an image like this, or a group of people in public like this, I no longer imagine the same kind of things about these people in this “family” that I used to think.
It would look more like the image below, with commentary about who each person in this graphic is more likely to be.
And while some may want to say and believe that everything written in this graphic below is likely to be rare when one sees such actual “family units” in public or in photos, I am quite confident to say that the way I now see such “family” units as in the image below with the sample bios, is far more common than the false, storybook “ideal” Christian family that is portrayed by our culture.
In fact the culturally-defined “Christian Family” concept is a myth, and is found nowhere in the Bible.
I have been led by the Spirit for some time to write an article like this, and this week I have felt like God is especially moving in me to write this, so I want to be very clear from the beginning, just why I am writing this, and what the purpose for writing this is.
I am NOT trying to criticize or judge anyone. In fact, it is just the opposite.
My intended audience in writing this are all the “broken” people from “broken families” who have been beaten down by Corporate Christianity and western culture because of this mythical definition of “family” that is considered “good” or “Christian,” and which, as a result, conditions people to feel guilty and inferior because their own family situation does not come close to this mythical one that has been portrayed by western culture pretty much since the advent of TV and movies in mass media just after World War II.
If you want to believe in the mythical concept of the “Christian Family,” and think that believing this myth and striving to achieve it is positive, then there is nothing here for you to read.
Please move along and do NOT be tempted to write me scathing comments and attack me, because I don’t owe you anything, and I am not writing to you anyway.
To everyone else who has been conditioned to believe that they are failures and inferior because they come from “broken” families, I am declaring to you today, that you are NOT broken!
You are “normal,” and you are just like every other family of believers that we get glimpses of in the historical records of the Ancient Scriptures, the Bible.
No Perfect “Good” Families Recorded in the Bible
Jesus and the woman taken in adultery from John 8:1-11. By Guercino, 1621. Source.
When you read the ancient texts that make up the Bible, and read about the “heroes” of the faith, in the cases where there is text written to describe their family life, it is mostly negative, if not always negative, except in cases where there is little to no text on their family life.
Here are some examples:
Adam & Eve – The first human beings recorded in the Bible. One of their sons (Cain) became a murderer and murdered his brother (Abel).
Noah – One of his sons defiled him by looking (or possibly more than “looking”) at his “nakedness” and was cursed.
Abraham – Although a hero in the faith, he initially did NOT trust God to give him a son in his old age, and listened to his wife and slept with her servant, and then later compounded his sin by driving her and his son by her, Ishmael, away where they almost died, just so he could please his wife.
Moses – When God told Moses to go back to Egypt to lead his people out of slavery, his wife and children were originally accompanying him, but Moses apparently listened to his wife who was opposed to the Abrahamic covenant sign of circumcision, and God almost killed them until she circumcised their son. She and the children returned to her father’s place after that incident, while Moses went on ahead with his brother Aaron to deliver the Hebrews from Egypt. Later, both Aaron and Moses’s sister Miriam were punished by God for opposing Moses.
King David – David was God’s chosen man to be King of Israel, and God made a covenant with David which was fulfilled in his descendant, Jesus Christ, who brought salvation to the world.
But David had one messed up family! He had several wives, including one who was the daughter of his predecessor, King Saul, and who opposed him and remained childless.
One of his wives was the result of him committing adultery with another man’s wife, a soldier who served him whom he had killed, and one of his sons tried to take away this throne and had to be executed in battle. Another son committed incest with one of his daughters, and was killed by one of his other sons.
Samuel – Samuel was a Judge and Prophet who ruled Israel, who had replaced Eli the Priest. Eli’s sons slept with prostitutes in the Temple, and Samuel’s sons “turned aside after dishonest gain and accepted bribes and perverted justice” (1 Samuel 8:3) prompting the people to demand a king instead of letting Samuel’s sons rule over them.
There are very many other examples of family life in the Old Testament, but all of them had major issues and did not come anywhere near the modern Christian mythical concept of “family”.
In the New Testament, we have very few glimpses of family life, except for one:
The family of Jesus Christ.
Jesus’s mother was a virgin who was pledged to be married to a man when she got pregnant, which created quite a scandal. The man she was pledged to be married to, Joseph, was in the process of divorcing her until God spoke to him and assured him that she was, in fact, still a virgin.
After the age of 12 when Jesus appears with his parents in a trip to Jerusalem, we never hear from Joseph again, who either died or left Mary. Jesus had brothers and sisters, although we don’t know for certain who the actual parents were of these siblings, who were at the most “half siblings” of Jesus if Mary was their mother. Some of them could have been children of Joseph from previous relationships Joseph had before he met Mary.
We do know that Jesus’s brothers thought he was crazy, and mocked him.
So if your own family does not meet the standard of our culture and the concept of the “American Christian Family,” you are in good company, because neither did the family of Jesus, nor any of the Old Testament heroes of the faith.
The “Christian Family” is a $Multi-Billion Dollar Industry
In spite of the fact that the western concept of the American “Christian Family” is a myth, it is a $multi-billion industry that continues to grow today. It has been around for many decades, and instead of this teaching strengthening American families, I seriously doubt that anyone would argue with me that the American family has rapidly declined in moral values during this time until today.
One of the men who has shaped American culture and the concept of the “America Christian Family,” is Dr. James Dobson who is the founder of “Focus on the Family.”
Dobson was not trained in the Bible or theology when he founded his Focus on the Family organization, which today takes in about $100 million a year.
No, he was trained in psychology and medical pediatrics. He was an Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Southern California School of Medicine for 14 years, starting in 1967.
He became a national leader in the Conservative Right Wing movement of the U.S., and much of his teaching became “mainstream” teaching in Corporate Christianity, with his pro-pharma and pro-psychology views that were “Christianized” to distinguish them from Liberal Left Wing teaching.
While Dobson is retired today, his Focus on the Family remains a leader in this Conservative Christian movement, which is also a leader in child trafficking in the Evangelical “Orphan Care” movement. See:
Christian Churches Redefine the Meaning of “Orphan” to Justify Participating in Child Trafficking
We can easily see that Christian Corporations such as Focus of the Family have culturally defined what is a “good Christian family” and what is not, which are primarily White, middle class families, and which then become the standard of “good parents,” and who should be able to keep their children, and who should have their children taken away, through the foster care and adoption Government-funded programs that destroy families today, and are the #1 pipeline to child sex trafficking.
The New Testament Model: The “Household of God” is More Important than Biological Families
This mythological idea of a “Christian family” has created a $billion industry that includes films, books, Christian schools, churches, and many other corporations that have left behind, in my opinion, billions of people traumatized and feeling guilty and worthless because this Christian culture constantly communicates to them that they are “broken” and failures.
I reject this demonic spirit in the power and name of Jesus Christ!!
Jesus Christ himself was rejected by his own biological family, and he warned his followers that if they followed him, they could expect the same treatment from their families.
Here are some previous articles I have written on this topic:
Does Your Family Believe You are “Out of Your Mind”? You’re in Good Company Because Jesus Faced the Same Thing with His Family
Loyalty to Christ Must Surpass Loyalty to Family: “I Did not Come to Bring Peace, but a Sword” – Jesus
What is to replace our biological families, is the household or family of God, which hopefully will also include some of our biological family members.
Therefore, holy brothers, you who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession, who was faithful to him who appointed him, just as Moses also was faithful in all God’s house.
For Jesus has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses—as much more glory as the builder of a house has more honor than the house itself. (For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.)
Now Moses was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, but Christ is faithful over God’s house as a son. And we are his house, if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope. (Hebrews 3:1-6)
The entire New Testament documents teach us a lifestyle of warfare, as we battle against the Satanic world system.
What is missing in the New Testament is any kind of training manual on how to find a spouse and raise a family. It is also missing any of the common labels that are used in Corporate Christianity today, especially titles of authority such as “Pastor”, “Bishop”, “Priest”, etc.
The most common way believers referred to each other in the New Testament was by the use of a family term, most commonly “brother” and “sister.”
Even the label “Christian” is never recorded as being used by the actual believers of Jesus Christ of each other in the New Testament.
In I Corinthians chapter 5, for example, Paul is dealing with sexual immorality among the congregation, and he writes:
But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. (1 Corinthians 5:11 – emphasis mine.)
The teaching of the New Testament is the exact opposite of the “American Family” teaching of corporate Christianity, which is basically mythology that serves Satan’s purposes much more than it serves the purposes of Jesus Christ.
We are called to live the life of a persecuted believer who is committed to the Truth, and stands strong on GRACE, undeserved merit and blessings, regardless of our family lives, or its failures, according to these false Christian standards.
The world outside of the Church and Corporate Christianity knows that this teaching is hypocritical and false. They have been rejecting it for years now, while those inside Corporate Christianity deceive themselves and think that the world is rejecting Jesus Christ, when in fact they are mainly rejecting Corporate Christianity, and not Jesus himself.
So now it is time for those inside Corporate Christianity to come clean with the Truth, and see this false religion for what it really is, just as the rest of the world does.
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