Hello my friends,

There is a lot happening in our world right now and so I wanted to invite us to reflect on rhetoric that seems to have its tentacles connected to so many of the issues we are seeing today. The rhetoric of "family values." I heard this phrase all the time in the church growing up and still hear it today. It shapes conversations and policies, especially in states like mine (Idaho). It is really important that we as followers of Jesus both understand the reality it is creating and respond with integrity.

Recommended Resources

​-5 Calls I just wanted to remind you of this helpful resource. It allows you to simply select an issue that matters to you and populates your local representative's phone numbers. It even provides a script for the issue, which is helpful for those who may feel intimidated to call. I use this resources all the time in my busy life. It makes raising my voice to my elected officials accessible. I know it can feel like raising your voice doesn't make a difference, but added to our collective voices, it does. 5 Calls really helps with that.

​-Sign the Christians Against Christian Nationalism statement I wanted to invite you to sign this statement written by my friends over at Christians Against Christian Nationalism. They are doing really important work and they provide a lot of news and resources on ways to oppose the ongoing threat of Christian nationalism in our nation. After you sign this statement, take some time to explore their website.

​-"The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born." It feels like I hear an injustice perpetrated against our immigrant brothers and sisters almost daily now. It can feel so overwhelming and hopeless looking for ways to help love them as our neighbors. In my newsletter linked above, I included a list of resources and ways to partner with organizations that are doing some really important things right now. It is a tangible way to take action and help those in need right now.

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Family Values That Don't Value Family.

Did you see that the White House is assessing ways to persuade women to have more children?

This push comes from a growing movement on the right that claims to want to reverse the declining birthrate, prevent a demographic collapse, and wants to push conservative "family values.”

It is being championed by those like the vice president and others in high positions of power.

Let’s talk about this particular movement as it is deeply personal for me as I am sure it is for many of us.

A "pro family" state.

Both my wife and I were born and raised here in Idaho, which has always presented itself as a “pro family” state for as long as I can remember.

Idaho is often a testing ground for a lot of policies like the one the White House is assessing currently.

As our family grows, it's become clear to me that there is a very specific kind of “family” that our state is “pro.” It is the traditional, conservative, Christian, and privileged definition of “family.” One where the man is the only one who works and the wife stays at home to care for their many children.

When you look at my family from the outside, we seem to fit this model. I am a pastor, we are Christians, we are heterosexual, we have two kids and one on the way. Judging by the optics, we should be the ones that benefit the most from “pro family” policies, right?Except, there are things that don’t allow us to fit in such a narrow view of “family.” I’ll just give you two examples.

First, both my wife and I work full time to provide for our family. This right here is not encouraged at all in this narrow definition of “family” and the policies that come with it. For example, due to childcare resources being extremely underfunded here in Idaho, childcare costs are outrageous. In many cases childcare costs as much as an average mortgage payment per month. This is just for one child.

Many families like mine literally have to choose to either have both spouses working or have one of us stay home with the kids, which is the ideological goal to have women be the ones staying at home with the kids. A family would have to be at a much higher level of income to afford both working full time and childcare at the same time.

So, families like mine often have to face the reality that we can’t get ahead financially because we either have to spend the money we are making on childcare so both parents can work or just focus on one income and save on childcare and still not get ahead.

This brings me to the second thing that sets us apart: we are egalitarian. We strive to share all the household, parenting, and work related tasks as much as possible. This value of ours becomes a necessary practice if we both want to continue working full time, which we do. To sustain this balance, my wife and I do not have a day off together in this season of life. As my wife is works 3 days a week, I am home with the kids. Then we trade and I work four days a week while she stays home with this kids. This allows us to be both home with our kids when they are very young and also maintain our careers. Our three year old son also attends Montessori school three days a week, hence the childcare costs.

Now put these expectations on steroids for families with single parents, blended families, or families with a disabled parent, or a “non traditional” family structure. Not to mention the shame this ideological framework puts on those who do not have or simply can’t have children for a plethora reasons.

Yet this movement on the Religious Right claims to care about “families” and declining birth rates. However, when you take a close look at the policies carried out by the political party it supports, like not adequately funding childcare, you quickly find out that this is a lie.

Here are a few more examples of what I mean:

This movement opposes even common sense measures to prevent kids from dying from the number one cause of death among children in our country: gun violence.

This movement opposes hungry kids getting free or reduced cost meals at public schools.

This movement has historically opposed raising the minimum wage and efforts to reduce student loan debt, both of which create heavy burdens for working families, all while advocating policies that benefit the super wealthy.

This movement opposes universal healthcare and has just advanced a spending bill that will most likely bring significant cuts to medicaid, harming millions of Americans in the process, including their families and their children.

This movement discourages vaccinations, which will only cause children to die at higher rates from preventable diseases like Measles.

This movement works feverishly to strip away women’s rights, not only medically, but architects of Project 2025 are advocating stripping women’s rights to vote, claiming that men as “head of the house hold” should be the only voting member to represent their family unit at the booth. This ideology has been around a long time and seeks only to silence and subjugate women.

This movement has rolled back environmental protections in a time when it has never been more critical to confront climate change and put the future of our planet and future generations ahead of making a profit.

This movement has rolled back critical food safety regulations, which will only cause food born illness to spread more rapidly and stay around longer. Adding yet another health risk for people and families.

This movement has rolled back bans on toxic forever chemicals, which will expose the public and the very soil we grow our food in to higher levels of PFAS and other pollutants. Some of these chemicals cause adverse effects for reproductive health, making it difficult to conceive. Yet this movement is also opposed to IVF and surrogacy. Quite the paradox for a movement that claims to care about "declining birthrates."

This movement champions figures in power who mock childless people and call those like single parents, disabled, or wounded vets who rely on social services to make life happen the “parasite class.” These same figures reveal their privileged status by proposing a $5,000 "baby bonus" for every mother after delivery, which wouldn't even cover the average cost associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and post-partum care, which is $18,865 in our current healthcare system, with the average out of pocket cost for those who have health insurance being between $2,854 and $3,214.

All this and more from a movement that claims to “care about families” and wants to encourage people to get married and have children. This movement claims to be “pro life,” yet is opposed to meaningful measures that actually help people to flourish, especially women and children, all while relentlessly legislating against abortion, which resulting bans have only caused infant and maternal mortality rates to rise. This isn’t “pro life.” That’s just anti abortion.

Hope Over Ideology

Let me tell you what actually encourages people to get married and have children: Hope for the future. These political efforts do the opposite of creating hope for the future.

As a pastor, I can’t tell you how often I hear from people how much the state of the world causes them to rethink their desire to have children at all. I myself wrestled with that for years as well.

When we look at all the possibilities of our children being exposed to harm in our world today, our daughters growing up with less human rights and being shamed for wanting to pursue careers as well, our boys growing up with the expectation of working themselves to death as the sole provider while being shamed for being “absent fathers,” the fate of our planet not being taken seriously, ideology being prioritized over human diversity and needs, all while not being able to afford to get by, telling people that they should not only settle down and have kids, but to do so in a narrow definition of “family” is as ignorant as it is harmful.

It is also incredibly ignorant to assume that every child raised in conservative Christian families will remain a conservative Christian. Obviously no one in that movement is listening to those of us who grew up in that culture or our parents who raised us in that culture and how we are reflecting on it today.

This movement doesn’t actually care about children or families. It only cares about wealth and control. To suggest it does care about children or families is a lie. It wants to oppose any meaningful efforts to create a society that actually cares for one another, no matter how different we may be, all while stripping hope for the future, then placing the demand that we all need to do something about the “declining birth rate” ourselves.

My best guess is that this is simply a pursuit to grow the white conservative Christian population out of fear of them "being replaced" as well as grow the labor force as cheaply as possible, all while cloaking such efforts in “family values.” This is connected to the virulent anti-immigrant mentality of this movement as well. If it was purely a concern about declining population, immigrants and a growing citizenry would be seen as an asset. Yet here again, as we see with the majority of those being targeted for deportation, they don't fit this narrow definition of "family." So immigrants are seen as a threat.

I couldn't help but notice a frightening historical parallel of this mentality when an activist couple on the forefront of this movement drafted several executive orders for the current administration, along with one that would bestow a “National Medal of Motherhood” to mothers who give birth to six or more children. When I read about this, my mind immediately rushed to the Cross of Honor for the German mother, which was exclusively reserved for German-citizen mothers who displayed "exceptional merit" for the German nation in the eyes of the Third Reich. This cross came in three classes, with the gold first class being reserved for women who had eight or more children and silver second class reserved for women who had six or seven children.

All this to say, we need to be clear about this movement. It uses "family values" to draw ideological boundaries while advancing policies that don't actually value families. This movement may use the name of Jesus, but ignores his teachings, because he prioritized the needs of the poor, the hungry, the sick, the oppressed, and the stranger. This movement simply prioritizes its own ideology and control. It is demanding that we all just fit a narrow definition of family, through religion and policies, then shames us when we don’t fit that model while actively working against a society that would actually help all people and families to flourish and thrive.

People should be free to shape their families according to their values, including traditional conservative Christian values. A society based on freedom should allow all the diverse kinds of families to prosper. People like myself have experienced the fruit of the false narrative that is being presented as “traditional Christian family values” from those in power all our lives and we are done with it being presented as “God’s will.” It's not. It harms the very people it claims to care about and must be confronted as such.

I wrote at length about the context of Mathew 10 here, where Jesus says "I have come not to bring peace, but a sword." Yet Jesus says something profound in verse 37 of that chapter that connects to what we are reflecting on today. Jesus said, “Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me."

Jesus was sending his disciples to his own people of Israel, in a time where biological and ethnic bonds were prioritized as the essential markers of "God's chosen family." In that context, Jesus was emphasizing that he was going to bring a sword, not peace to that kind of thinking. Because Jesus believed that what should bond people together even deeper than our biological or ethnic ties should be love. Jesus came to preach a gospel where the greatest commandment is to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves. All our neighbors. Thus, Jesus is essentially saying here that anyone who loves their biological, ethnic, and national hierarchy more than the way Jesus came to embody is not worthy of Jesus.

The same is true for our time as well. Anyone who loves this narrow definition of "family" more than the gospel of Jesus, more than their neighbors who don't fit that definition, is not walking in a way that is worthy of Jesus.

In this kind of world, may we who follow Jesus love all our neighbors all the more boldly and embody the truth that every human being is a child of God and therefore part of our human family. May we continue to strive for a world where everyone is valued as part of the family.