Peter Leithart on marriage and family. 

In a recent talk at the Wheaton Theology Conference, the Kenyan Anglican Archbishop David Gitari told of a Christian ministry that hired an ambulance to assist employees at a factory where injuries were being reported regularly. Eventually, someone had the bright idea of finding out why so many accidents were happening in the first place. Inside the building, investigators discovered a hall of hazards. What most needed fixing was the factory, not the workers.

For the past half-century, cultural conservatives have been running an ambulance service. Alarmed by the collapse of sexual morals, rising rates of divorce and illegitimacy, and legalized abortion, we’ve devoted energy and resources to shoring up the “traditional family,” conceived of as father-breadwinner, mother-homemaker, and their common children. But the nuclear family is as much problem as solution. An exclusive focus on defending the nuclear family reinforces the social dislocations that created the crisis.