First Things RSS Feed - Betsy VanDenBerghe

Generation Z: Desperate for Rules

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 06:00:00 -0400

I recently attended a meeting that many would consider anachronistic: Standards Night, an annual gathering for Mormon youth and their parents encouraging chaste and porn-free living. Some call this ritual and others like it nothing more than a chance to shame and stigmatize normal adolescent behavior. Admittedly, the baby (teaching moral standards) has sometimes been immersed in bathwater (messaging that leaves kids guilt-ridden and hopeless about measuring up). Many a memoir or critically acclaimed novel covers this coming-of-age territory well.

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Suzuki Method Uberparenting

Tue, 11 Oct 2016 06:00:00 -0400

My oldest child started piano lessons back in the nineties, due to somewhat base parental motives. A friend who volunteered in prisons had told me that a common denominator among inmates was a lack of childhood music lessons—which, admittedly, had more to do with financial than with aesthetic poverty. But still. I’d read Yvonne Thornton’s Ditchdigger’s Daughters , and if that dad in a crime-ridden neighborhood could produce highly educated children by forcing them to practice music, then surely music lessons could help my suburban kids stay out of trouble.

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Unsolicited Advice On How To Find A Mate

Mon, 14 Jul 2014 05:17:00 -0400

In one of his lesser known comedies, playwright Neil Simon depicts the irrationality of undiluted physical attraction through the love-struck yearnings of Norman. A ’60s radical, second in his class at Dartmouth, and writer for a subversive magazine called Fallout, he falls hopelessly in love with the Star-Spangled and athletic Southern girl from Hunnicut who’s moved into his San Francisco apartment building. “I’ve become an animal,” he tells his friend Andy. “I’ve developed senses no man has ever used before. I can smell the shampoo in her hair three city blocks away. I can have my radio turned up full blast and still hear her taking off her stockings!”

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“Knot Yet”: Marriage and Other Choices

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

In the final scene of A&E’s Pride and Prejudice the camera pans a double wedding tableau: Elizabeth and Darcy and Jane and Bingley, both couples surrounded by family and community. Misunderstanding, pride, and prejudice complicated these courtships, but honesty, self-evaluation, and chastity accompanied them too. Few viewers doubt they’re watching stable, happy marriages in the making, in contrast to the interspersed scenes of Lydia and Wickham’s London escapade and stark forced wedding”complete with Darcy looming in the background to keep the groom from bolting.

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Evangelicals vs. Mormons: Blessed Are the Peacemakers

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:02:00 -0400

We refer to it in our family as “the clown episode.” Over a dozen years ago our family visited a collection of rare Bibles open to the public as part of a Sunday service sponsored by Salt Lake City’s Evangelical churches, and my kids quit complaining when they saw balloons in the children’s class. Unfortunately, things went south when the hired clown berated my little boy for mentioning the Book of Mormon in a scripture discussion.

I’ll never know definitively what happened because I was with the adults listening to an excellent lecture on biblical translation. However, to my children’s chagrin, I sympathized with the clown’s dilemma: People of other faiths in Utah have long felt dominated by the LDS majority, and here we were bringing our threatening book of scripture into their territory. Still, the event was open to the public. Couldn’t the clown have been sensitive to various faith traditions that had wandered in, including ours?

While this incident is less egregiously hostile than other interactions I’ve observed between Latter-day Saints and Evangelicals over the years, it represents the pointlessness of the acrimony plaguing our two camps for as long as I can remember. But fortunately—some might say miraculously—a series of conversations, meetings, and generous gestures from leaders on both sides have eroded much of the ill will that has divided two good groups of people for too long.

A nascent sign of peacemaking arose in the spring of 2000 when Evangelical and Mormon scholars apprehensively met together on the campus of Brigham Young University. Although wary of each others’ motives, this group fostered a series of discussions that grew, over the years, into a sincere attempt not to merge theology but to understand each others’ beliefs, dispel misrepresentations, and ultimately become what LDS leader Jeffrey R. Holland characterized as “a true form of brotherhood and sisterhood.”

Fence-mending books like How Wide the Divide , by Craig Blomberg and LDS religion professor Stephen Robinson, prefaced this respectful dialogue on an academic level in the 1990s, but an unlikely friendship between BYU religion professor Robert Millet and Evangelical pastor Greg Johnson propelled it forward. Their collaboration laid the groundwork for Evangelical-LDS dialogues, brought Evangelical speakers to general audiences in Utah, and resulted in Standing Together Ministries”a component of which included Millet and Johnson traveling to nationwide audiences and modeling respectful dialogue about religious differences.

You know a serious rapprochement is underway when, recently, the official magazine of the LDS Church,the Ensign, published Elder Holland’s address to a group of national Christian ministers entitled “Standing Together for the Cause of Christ.” In it, he calls the peacemaking initiated in the past decade “a labor of love in which the participants have felt motivated by and moved upon with a quiet force deeper and more profound than a typical interfaith exchange.”

Lay members of the LDS Church like me knew nothing of these conferences, but we have witnessed other compelling developments. In a groundbreaking “Evening of Friendship” in 2004, Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints sat together in the Salt Lake Tabernacle to hear Christian philosopher Ravi Zacharias. In introducing him, Fuller Theological Seminary President Richard Mouw offered this dramatic apology to the Mormon community: “Let me state it clearly. We Evangelicals have sinned against you.” He went on to explain that “It’s a terrible thing to bear false witness . . . We’ve told you what you believe without first asking you.” While Mouw remained firm about theological differences “that are of eternal consequence,” he made the crucial point that “now we can discuss them as friends.”

Both he and Zacharias faced criticism in Evangelical circles. Yet Zacharias responded with gratitude: “The courtesy and graciousness extended to me by every Mormon leader or professor that I came into contact with cannot be gainsaid,” he wrote in a public statement. “My earnest prayer is that the Lord was honored in what happened and that opportunities that come from this event will multiply.”

The opportunities have indeed multiplied. LDS Humanitarian Services has long collaborated with Catholic and other Christian ministries in disaster relief and worldwide alleviation of poverty and disease, and Mormon leaders increasingly call on the Church’s general membership to join in community service and moral causes with those of other faiths. They also continue encouraging Utah Mormons—that benighted fraction of total international membership whom I count myself among—to repent from our sins of insularity, exclusion, and obliviousness to the good that people of other faiths do in our community.

Here in Salt Lake City, we’re listening. Along with adapting to the glare the presidential election relentlessly shines on us, Latter-day Saints are, individually and collectively, tentatively reaching out to others—not just in serving food to the homeless together, but also in lowering our defenses and discovering genuine friendship. I attended one of Millet and Johnson’s traveling presentations a few years ago to an overflow audience at a local Methodist church gym, co-sponsored by a neighboring LDS congregation. Millet, the Mormon academic, dispelled various unfair and naive LDS stereotypes of born-again Christians, and Johnson, the pastor, to my amazement, described LDS beliefs in a respectful way I’d rarely experienced. Past encounters with Evangelical literature and acquaintances had contributed to a subconscious sense that they understood my faith in a way completely unrecognizable to me. But that night, as Mormons, Methodists, and others ate refreshments and cleaned up amid palpable goodwill, I realized that, along with having friends who are Catholic, Protestant, secular, and Hindu, I could be friends with devout Evangelicals, and wanted to be.

It’s taken a while, but I’ve recently become friends with a wonderful Evangelical, ironically a children’s minister for Assemblies of God—our “rivals” when I served as an LDS missionary in Brazil. She and I got to know each other through a neighborhood group of women—LDS, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Catholic, Evangelical—who came together for dialogue, understanding, and to create a better sense of community here in our Salt Lake City neighborhood. We put on a women’s night that included information booths, humanitarian service, and that old peacemaking standby, food.

Since then, the interaction has taken an unexpected trajectory, with my Evangelical friend and me speaking together in an LDS meeting on “loving my neighbor, despite our doctrinal differences.” The Presbyterian minister in our group, Amy Kim Kyremes-Parks, ended up giving a sermon at her own church describing her journey growing up non-Mormon and alienated in Utah, only to feel God compelling her, Jonah-like, to return as a youth minister for Wasatch Presbyterian Church. At some point, she decided that “love thy neighbor” included loving her LDS neighbors, and she began serving, receiving service from, and genuinely engaging with the Mormon community she now jokingly refers to as “my ward.” LDS leaders in Salt Lake and Provo invited Kyremes-Parks to share the sermon in their meetings, and she invited a few Latter-day Saints, including me, to speak at Christian congregations on loving our neighbor even when our theology differs.

It is a powerful thing, we discovered in each other’s churches, to be embraced by people with tears in their eyes who have connected with you as a fellow child of God after years of suspicion and presumption. Through experiences like these and friendships with people of other faiths, I have come to understand better the appellation Jesus gave to peacemakers: “children of God.” In his address to national Christian leaders, Elder Holland powerfully encapsulates the purpose of sincere interfaith efforts:

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The Unacceptable Alternative Lifestyle

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 00:01:00 -0400

They occasionally populate New Yorker stories—characters on the peripheries of the narrator’s life, somehow only half human, almost surreal, because they’re single, celibate, and plan to stay that way until, someday, they marry. But the someday hasn’t arrived, and in the context of postmodern fictional settings, the chaste represent objects of repression, pity, and derision. Of the multitudinous lifestyles deemed acceptable and worth defending today, celibacy for singles stays off the list, almost as if its very existence threatens the well-being of the world as we know it.

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Cohabitation, Marriage, and Brangelina

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:01:00 -0400

While single and working in the Boston area during the 1980s, I observed the cohabitation phenomenon up close. My friends moved in with guys anticipating stability along with the fun and, after a year or so, sought therapy for anxiety and depression. Whatever twinge of jealousy I felt at living my chaste Mormon life turned into gratitude for my congregation and its single young men willing to date and eventually commit to long-term relationships with an engagement ring rather than a U-Haul. I also felt a sense of je ne sais quoi when a friend in New York married via a circle of Catholic singles and a colleague at work found a husband through a Boston Jewish young adult group. Thank you, God, for organized religion! And for rabbis, priests, and other faith leaders who convince young men of marriage’s moral, spiritual, and emotional gifts.

But what of my secular friends? For many, no singles group will provide an alternative to their trajectory toward premarital sex, cohabitation, fatherless children, multiple partners, and uncommitted relationships—particularly among the poor where married role models are almost non-existent. The likelihood that young adults today will find the wherewithal to buck cohabitation is minute, the consequences gargantuan: adults who reap none of the proven physical, economic, and psychological benefits of marriage; children far less likely to succeed academically, psychologically, and economically; and communities upended by the crime and dissolution a dearth of marriage yields.

How then, as R.R. Reno recently called for in these pages, does society “restore a culture of marriage”? Those eager to make the case for marriage can take heart from public health campaigners who took on a cigarette culture that permeated movies, magazines, and television. Research is on our side as much as it was on theirs. The fact that it all seemed overwhelmingly futile didn’t dissuade those crusaders, or for that matter civil rights workers and suffragettes whose initial prospects of success seemed bleak indeed. Can it be that hard in this internet age to somehow get across the fairly unremarkable steps—finish high school, have children only after getting married—that will greatly increase the chances for achievement among all socioeconomic classes?

I had read few criticisms of cohabitation in publications other than First Things , Family Foundations , Christianity Today , and the magazines of my own community, the Latter-day Saints. But the New York Times recently ran an editorial by Meg Jay, a University of Virginia clinical psychologist, the title of which—“The Downside of Cohabiting Before Marriage”—says it all. Her therapy client example mirrors the experience my friends underwent in the 1980s: even if you do eventually get married, the chances for divorce skyrocket, and not just for the current relationship, but for those in your future as well.

A two-thirds majority in a University of Virginia poll agreed that “moving in together before marriage [is] a good way to avoid divorce.” Are all of these social scientists indefatigably collecting their longitudinal, cross-national, rigorous research working in a complete vacuum? But I digress. The good news is that an essay refuting the “cohabitation prophylaxis” theory appeared in the Gray Lady and, one way or another, the facts will inevitably emerge.

I also find hope in another fact: middle and upper classes still get it that marriage is far better for their children than any substitution. Academics are finding more and better ways to bring the crucial message to the poor that married parents are not only good for children, but will almost assuredly lead them into the middle class.

Another hopeful sign has emerged in a highly unlikely place: the engagement of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. I’m not at all calling the Brangelina engagement ring a sign of progress after seven years of living together. But I admit to taking heart and finding fascinating the reason Pitt and Jolie decided to wed after all these years:

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Why Bigger Might Be Easier

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 00:01:00 -0400

In the National Marriage Project’s exhaustive 2011 “State of Our Unions” report, a sidebar among the analyses and graphs draws attention to a subset social scientists tend to ignore in their ubiquitous research on marriage and parenting: big families. Noted researcher Alan Hawkins explains the dearth in blunt terms: “There’s not a lot of research on large families these days because they are few in number, assumed to be highly religious, and thus, well, weird.” But W. Bradford Wilcox and Elizabeth Marquardt tease out of the report some curious counterintuitive data, especially when considered against studies that suggest that having children lowers happiness. Their analysis of the data finds that parents of big families with four or more children tend to be happier and more fulfilled than those with fewer.

The National Marriage Project attributes this unexpected conclusion to that weird faith orientation of mothers and fathers with many children. Their stronger religiosity means they’re more prone to possess a deep sense of meaning and purpose in life, and more likely to benefit from a large church-oriented network of family and friends than parents of smaller families. As the church-going mother of eight children, I do not take issue with these claims. But twenty-one years of large family parenting have offered reasons of my own why lots of kids is, in some strange way, easier than one or two—and few of my reasons relate to sainthood.

This realization began dawning on me quite a few years ago when I was editing biographies of young violinists for my daughter’s performing group program, several of which were overdue. After sending out a gentle reminder to the late moms, one emailed back with a sense of outrage I still tremble at on reminiscence, something like: “How dare you group my daughter in a list of irresponsible girls when I’m certain her biography must have been one of the first ones in! That we would be publicly listed as undependable and un-conscientious truly shames me!” “Whoa,” I thought, with genuine relief, “I’m glad it takes a lot more than an email reminder to publicly humiliate me .”

That very week, I’d been to a parent-teacher conference in which an entire term’s assignments in several classes were missing, attended a regional wrestling championship in which my son suddenly found himself pinned in an ill-seeded run-off match to the final, heard from neighbors whose delicate plants had been crushed by our basketballs landing over the fence, and witnessed my youngest child play a faux piano on another child’s head during a church children’s program.

So an enforced humility should not be underestimated as a benefit of multiple children. You find yourself eminently able to cope with public humiliation without losing sleep. In fact, you view the embarrassment as a normal component of child-rearing since you gave up on raising trophy children after the first two kids and, over the years, gradually accepted the fact that your children aren’t here to make you look good.

But other benefits to having lots of kids exist as well, prime among them the effects of “sibling abundance.” There is always someone to build Legos with and always a ready partner to fight with in the back seat when road trips get long, not to mention tutor for math tests and offer consolation in social rejection. This takes a lot of pressure off Mom and Dad, who by virtue of being outnumbered, cannot play with everyone, helicopter everyone, or afford multiple teams and activities per child. We also have to eat dinner together because even frozen burritos are expensive when multiplied by x amount of kids, and agree with economist Bryan Caplan’s assertion in Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids that “parents overcharge themselves” with obsessive oversight, expenditures, and anxiety.

In that book, Caplan contends that instead of creating fewer kids and more work, today’s parents should consider having more children and doing less work, since all the obsessive oversight, his analysis of the research finds, doesn’t make any difference. But I can’t pretend big families don’t equate hefty amounts of manual, mental, emotional, and spiritual labor—it’s just that in multi-children economies of scale, all that work creates a loaves-and-fishes effect. You’ve already accumulated the multiplication flash cards, Suzuki cello CDs, and American Girl doll paraphernalia. Let the stuff benefit a few others. You’ve also amassed a diversity of knowledge that includes which science projects don’t require a week of fomenting in the kitchen sink and how to calm an adolescent whose entire life has seemingly imploded. After going through infancy, childhood, puberty, and even young adulthood with a few kids, you’re capable of rapidly assessing even complex situations and finding solutions from the hindsight of experience.

Not that small families can’t share in some of these experiences, just that big families get it in spades. Along with the spades of laundry, infighting, and clutter come the spades of varied interests of the sports-crazed kids or the politically, musically, or socially obsessed ones—and with those interests come the mentors, coaches, music teachers, and church-oriented network of youth leaders to which the National Marriage Project attributes high happiness levels in big families. My purpose differs from Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids in that I’m not trying to talk people content with small into going bigger, but I do hope that the big will count their chaotic and numerous blessings. I also hope that the small will chill out a little, and realize that God is the ultimate parent in charge. Even when we mess up, his grace more than compensates by bringing in the people, experiences, and opportunities a struggling child needs. All families, of course, can tap into that grace. But maybe big families need, and ask for, more of it.

Betsy VanDenBerghe is a writer specializing in family and religious issues and lives in Salt Lake City. She can be reached at betsyvandenberghe@gmail.com.

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