American liberals often charge that Christians seem unusually preoccupied (even obsessed) with sex and sexuality, and have a bunch of strange hang-ups about marriage and family structure.
Conservatives, meanwhile, argue that the “traditional family” lies at the core of Western Civilization, and that weakening foundational norms around sex, marriage, and child-rearing would likely have destabilizing and adverse effects on affected societies and cultures.
The WEIRDest People in the World, a new book by Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich, suggests that both parties in this debate are onto something, even as it casts the entire conversation in a different light.
Specifically, Part II of the book (Chapters 5–8) demonstrates that what is often referred to as the “traditional” family is, in fact, anything but. Looking worldwide, historically through the present, the family structure that people in the U.S. and Western Europe take for granted is actually highly peculiar — a product of a centuries-long campaign by the Western Church to dismantle kindreds, clans, tribes and other competing structures of allegiance and authority, and to reorient society around the Church instead.
Central to this endeavor was what the author calls the Western Church’s Marriage and Family Program (MFP). Critically, many aspects of this program had a tenuous relationship with scripture or Christianity per se.
Indeed, many of the prescriptions and proscriptions of the West Church’s MFP were extra-Biblical. The Tanakh, for instance, allows for plural marriage, cousin marriage, divorce, and concubinage. Although these practices were all rendered taboo in the Western Church’s MFP, the Eastern Orthodox Church (and many other interpretations of Christianity) did not have as stringent or unusual rules regarding sex, marriage, and family structure — instead continuing to tolerate many of these practices that were explicitly permitted and regulated in the Scriptures.
These differences proved extraordinarily consequential.
Over time, Henrich argues, the Western Church’s MFP ended up reshaping the culture and psychology of the people under its domain, leading to significant differences between denizens of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) countries as compared to virtually everyone else — including other places where Christianity was dominant, but the Western Church’s MFP was not.
If one looks at the areas where the Western Church was able to implement its MFP from the time it was developed through the Protestant Reformation, the places that had longer exposure to the MFP, and where it was more stringently enforced, are more characteristically WEIRD today than places that have shorter or less intense exposure. This is true not just across contemporary countries, but within them as well.
Henrich then illustrates how the Protestant Reformation, and later the Enlightenment, were both products and accelerators of the WEIRD revolution in culture and thought kicked off by the Western Church’s MFP. And even though the influence of the Western Church was greatly diminished over the course of these uprisings, and has been undermined further in the intervening centuries (for instance, due to growing irreligiosity in the United States and Western Europe), the Western Church’s Marriage and Family Program has largely persisted — with nuclear families continuing to serve as the foundational social unit in WEIRD societies.
In fact, many non-Christian societies have ended up adopting aspects of the Western Church’s MFP in a bid to emulate the successes of “the West” (e.g. China, Turkey).
To help illustrate how significant the cultural and societal changes around the Western Church’s MFP were, consider the case of (culturally) enforced monogamy.
Polygyny and (especially) concubinage were fairly common in Europe prior to the ascendance of the Western Church’s MFP.
In societies where polygyny and concubinage are common, but where women have agency in whom they partner with (and they often did/do have some agency, even in contexts where arranged marriage was/is common), the typical outcome was that lower-status men had virtually no prospects for marriage or children.
This is because, while the most favored outcome for most women may have been to secure a high-status spouse dedicated to them alone, if provided a choice between sharing a high-status partner versus having a low-status partner exclusively to oneself, the choice was easy for most women. A life of relative comfort and ease for oneself and one’s children trumped a life of precarity, hard work and struggle every time — even if the low-status partner might be, for instance, a more dedicated husband or a more involved father.
To this day in the United States, just as in other historical and cultural contexts, women overwhelmingly choose men who earn more than they do. Research suggests that when women earn more than their husbands, they often feel embarrassment and resentment towards their spouse, and become significantly more likely to initiate divorce (in the contemporary U.S., divorces are overwhelmingly initiated by women).
This “assortative mating” has strongly contributed to a situation where wealth and opportunity have been “hoarded” in the top quintile of society — leading to stagnating social mobility and rising inequality.
However, the situation may ultimately prove unsustainable because even as women have become increasingly educated, are increasingly employed, and are earning more than they have in the past, the opposite trends are taking root for men. They are growing less likely to graduate college, to be employed, to live independently, etc. This has led to a situation where women are forced to compete ever more intensely with one-another for an ever-diminishing pool of acceptable men.
Faced with a shortage of men who earn as much or more than themselves, women are increasingly opting out of marriage altogether rather than “marrying down.” More women are also exploring non-heterosexual relationship arrangements — especially in communities where the shortage of acceptable men is particularly acute. Collectively, these dynamics have created a growing class of unmarriageable (and often resentful) young men, colloquially referred to as incels.
Yet in polygamous societies, this same strong preference among women to partner with equal or (ideally) higher status men tends to create even more massive imbalances. For instance, in a society where the top 20 percent of men have 2–4 wives, while the next two quintiles involve monogamous pairings, the lower 40 percent of the male population would not be able to find wives at all. In most polygamous societies the situation was (is) far more dire than this, as men in the uppermost decile regularly had (have) several consorts, plus several concubines, leaving the majority of men in a society with almost no prospects for marriage or children. As a consequence, they often had little stake in the current order and even less investment in the future.
These “excess men” were/are prone to risky and myopic behaviors in order to shake up their status or improve their prospects, including gambling, crime, insurrection at home, or raiding others abroad (often targeting women in “other” populations for rape, sexual or domestic slavery, and/or forced marriage).
However, through ingenious maneuvering and some lucky breaks, the Western Church gradually managed to convince and cajole elite and relatively well-off men to more-or-less comply with monogamous marriage and other aspects of their Marriage and Family Program — thereby compelling women who could have been additional wives or concubines for these men to instead settle for lower-status partners than they would otherwise have been inclined to accept.
This allowed a much wider swath of the male population to find mates and form families, giving them an incentive to work hard, follow rules, be forward-looking, patient, responsible, etc.
In addition to plural marriage, taboos were enforced against adoption (the church would provide for orphans rather than kin), extra-marital sex (concubinage, prostitution, adultery, homosexual acts), familial marriages (at its height, the MFP forbid unions to 3rd cousins or closer; it was also unacceptable to marry in-laws, step-siblings/children, or those assigned as god-parents to oneself or one’s children), “illegitimate” children (the Western Church MFP created new notions of “legitimate” marriages, which were the basis for “legitimate” children; inheritance and succession rules were ingeniously tied to these new standards of legitimacy), divorce, and eventually arranged marriage (on the grounds that marriage should instead be a volitional union of two souls, based in love).
Collectively, these revolutions to the family structure dramatically weakened kinship networks, over time leading to a greater sense of individuality and autonomy.
The Western Church MFP enhanced mobility (the extensive taboos forced people to look outside their own communities to find acceptable partners), and led to couples marrying later and having fewer children. This, in turn, led to norms facilitating trust and collaboration with strangers — for instance, to sustain crops in a world with fewer children, delivered later in life, and with families increasingly forged among people from different communities. These cross-cutting and instrumental relationships eventually led to WEIRD notions about rules being impartial and universal (rather than being interpreted and enforced based on context, often with one standard applied to one’s in-group and a different standard applied to “others”). This, in turn, predisposed denizens of WEIRD culture towards analytical over holistic thinking about the world writ large. In conjunction with the aforementioned ethos of hard-work, rule-abidance, and planning for the future that developed among formerly-excess males, these changes facilitated the emergence of capitalism, private property, and the meritocratic ideal.
Through a fairly exhaustive walkthrough of macro data, archival records, fine-grained anthropological fieldwork, and contemporary social science experiments comparing WEIRD cultures to others around the world, historically through the present, Henrich persuasively demonstrates that what we in WEIRD societies describe as the “traditional family” was in fact a revolutionary form of social arrangement — one that spurred the development of many other aspects of our psychology and culture that “we” take for granted but are outliers as compared to the rest of the world.
In short, conservatives are right to assert that what we call the “traditional family” serves as the foundation of Western Civilization. This is true in a very deep historical and sociological sense. Indeed, many values that liberals tend to hold dear (even sacred)— autonomy, egalitarianism, individuality — flowed from establishing the nuclear family as the core social unit (over clans, kindreds, tribes, etc.), via the very norms around sex, marriage, and family that contemporary liberals often decry as irrational and stifling.
However, from within Henrich’s framework, many other social phenomena that conservatives often describe as a threat to the “traditional family” (and, by proxy, Western Civilization) seem to be products and reinforcers of WEIRD culture instead.
For instance, gay marriage is straightforwardly an evolution of WEIRD notions around marrying whom one loves, respecting others’ autonomy and choices, etc. Indeed, the notion of organizing one’s identity around sexuality (with “homosexual” denoting a type of person rather than a type of behavior) is a relatively new and highly novel artifact of WEIRD culture — a product of “our” unique fixation on sex.
In fact, rather than being a threat to the “traditional family,” gay marriage neutralizes a form of “deviance,” rendering it more compatible with the Western Church’s MFP.
Many queer activists, historically through the present, have sought to dissolve the nuclear family, abolish gender, etc. Instead of realizing these objectives, the apotheosis of what is today known as the gay rights’ struggle seems to be acceptance of men and women settling into monogamous, indefinite, legally-recognized pairings with others who happen to share their same gender identity.
Most lesbian and gay couples seem quite content with these victories and are uninterested in dissolving the family. Instead, they are increasingly striving to establish nuclear families of their own (be it through adoption or surrogacy) — and the available research suggests children raised in these unions emerge well adjusted (despite occasional stigmatization by peers).
Gay marriage seems to have largely subverted the aspects of queer activism that posed a genuine threat to the Western Church’s MFP. It has reinforced, rather than menaced, the “traditional family” model. This is probably one of the reasons Pope Francis, for instance, although insisting that marriage is a religious sacrament confined to one man and one woman, nonetheless urges governments to recognize same-sex civil unions: it gives otherwise excluded people a stake in the “traditional family.”
In principle, transgenderism could be absorbed in much the same way.
For instance, the Islamic Republic of Iran recognizes gender dysphoria, and supports gender reassignment surgeries — along with changes in legal documents — to facilitate people transitioning from one gender into another.
Ayatollah Khomeini first made a juridical argument in favor of interventions to help dysphoric people change their sex back in 1965 (i.e. shortly after the concepts of transsexuality and transgenderism were established by Western academics and practitioners). After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Khomeini issued an official fatwa as Supreme Leader of Iran in 1986, formally recognizing dysphoric individuals and calling upon the state to financially support and legally validate their transition from one sex to another.
Here again, the intent was to regulate “deviance” into acceptable channels. The objective was precisely to preserve a strict male/female binary and to reinforce heterosexuality.
It is not acceptable in Iran, for instance, for people to identify as non-binary or gender-fluid. Nor is it acceptable for people to merely “present” as another gender. Instead, transgendered individuals are expected to surgically (and therefore, permanently) commit to their transition.
Moreover, whether cis or trans, one can only enter into relationships with members of the opposite gender (for instance, a transgender male could not have a relationship with a cisgender male; they could only partner with someone who identifies as a woman). Homosexuality is strictly forbidden. Many people who might otherwise identify as gay or gender nonconforming are therefore pushed to think of themselves as transgender and commit to reassignment.
Finally, although embraced in principle (both legally and theologically), in practice many Iranians who commit to transition often face a tough road to acceptance in their own families and communities.
In short, the Iranian approach is far from perfect in many respects. Yet it does provide a model other states are building upon.
For instance, in 2018, neighboring Pakistan (another Muslim-majority country), working from the Iranian theological and legal precedents, passed legislation recognizing transsexuality, granting people a right to both legally and medically change their sex, and providing still more robust protections against discrimination for trans individuals than Iran — or arguably even the United States. Here again, however, part of the aspiration was to encourage people to stick to the gender binary, thereby reducing the number who identify as “khwaja sira” (third sex) — and to possibly reduce homosexual pairings as well.
In both Iran and Pakistan, recognition of transgenderism has been used to reinforce gender binaries and ostensibly heterosexual pairings, much as gay marriage in the West has reinforced commitment to the nuclear family among the very populations that had previously been among the most committed to its destruction.
Granted, there are complex, often fraught, theological and juridical issues around transgenderism, homosexuality and their (in)compatibility with various faith traditions. Many religious people can (and do) reasonably interpret these identities as being in tension with God’s Law, as revealed in the scriptures.
However, from a strictly sociological perspective, neither transgenderism nor homosexuality is intrinsically a threat to the “traditional” family structure per se (which, again, was largely extra-Biblical) — nor to the WEIRD cultures and societies that are premised thereupon. Indeed, LGBTQ identities and activism are themselves largely products and accelerators of WEIRD culture.
That said, other norms that set WEIRD societies apart from most others seem to be eroding — and these should perhaps be of greater concern for conservatives, as they are likely more central to the unique social trajectory of “the West.”
For instance, as noted at the outset, the abolishment of a plural marriage was a game-changer. Polyamory has the potential to be far more disruptive to the “traditional” family structure than homosexuality or transgenderism. Yet consensual non-monogamy is currently on the rise in the United States (driven heavily by women). Indeed, it has been argued that plural marriage is the next major frontier in family law post- Obergefell.
The erosion of taboos on out-of-wedlock births, adultery, and divorce also seem to be far more destabilizing to the basic family structure, and far more consequential for society overall, than the gender or sexual identities of the people at the helm of nuclear families. “Broken homes” are tied to all sorts of negative mental, physical, emotional, and socio-economic outcomes; their prevalence is correlated with regional rates of crime and poverty.
Therefore progressives who are concerned about things like uplifting people from disadvantaged backgrounds, reducing incarceration and inequality, enhancing social mobility, etc., should probably be more concerned about family structure than they typically seem to be. To say, “people should live in whatever arrangements work for them,” is to willfully ignore that the non- “traditional” family structures that a growing share of Americans end up in are clearly are not working for them — nor are they situations that many of the people involved aspired towards or willfully created, for that matter — and indeed contribute strongly to many of the social problems progressives ostensibly wish to address.
Strikingly, the people most likely to be laissez-faire about others’ family structure (relatively affluent and highly-educated whites) are much more likely than virtually anyone else to hail from traditional families themselves, and to eventually establish traditional families of their own. And not for nothing: family structure and sequencing makes a huge socioeconomic difference. These relatively well-off social liberals should therefore preach what they practice.
Meanwhile, insofar as they are concerned with protecting the foundations of Western Civilization, conservatives would perhaps be better served by focusing on phenomena like polygamy, divorce, adultery, out-of-wedlock births, and the growing numbers of unmarriageable men. These are likely much more destabilizing for (and less compatible with) the “traditional family”— i.e., the foundation of WEIRD culture — than homosexuality or transgenderism.
In so doing, each side could be rendered more effective, both at advancing their own purported agendas and at building common ground with those on the “other” side of the political spectrum.
In many respects, then, Henrich’s arguments and findings validate core intuitions across the U.S. political spectrum, even as they reframe the entire debate around many culture war issues.