The Patriarchal Role: Fathers and Community

Having been asked to prepare a Sacrament Talk on "Fathers" for a Father's Day Sacrament Meeting, I found myself in something of a stupor of thought. All that swirled through my mind were the gushy, sentimental observations, and very tired cliche's and supposed Biblical connections that everyone assumes are somewhere in the Bible about family values. Such thoughts just did not resonate for me. The more I meditated on the subject, the more I realized that was not where I was supposed to go with the talk.

So I tried to think about my father's generation -- which Tom Brokaw labeled "the greatest generation," a statement of praise that is probably overstated. They were blessed, or cursed, whatever way you want to view it with America's last morally unambiguous war. In fact, the more I thought about it, the less enthused I became about that generation. But, fortunately for our family, Dad did not behave like a lot of the Dad's of that generation. He showed up for all of our activities even though we sat the bench in all the team sports. My mother, my dad and my dog tended to be the only adults other than the coaches who showed up for cross-country meets and track meets. My generation on the other hand flocked to our kids meets both home and away. Same for music competitions.

My father shared most of the racial prejudices of white males in post WWII Indiana. Indiana was the hotbed for the Twentieth Century KKK. But that did not include my father -- who attempted to shelter the Catholics who drew the harassment of the KKK, because there were no readily available African-Americans to persecute. And, he annonymously decorated the grave of an African-American who had led him, as a small child, around on a pony in the churchyard when services droned on too long. His attitude with the gypsies who periodically travelled through the area was to get to know and befriend their King, rather than close up shop when they came to town. So he was the kind of guy who would bluster one thing, but behave completely inconsistent with his bluster.

While unconsciously I believe he was indeed my role model, I never really thought of him that way, nor do I remember him ever behaving in a manner intentionally to serve as such. Well, I take that back -- Dad drank socially, but he never drank in front of me until I was of legal age. An intentional deception which backfired on him because I located and raided all of his liquor stashes -- its kind of hard to discipline a kid for consuming something that you are trying to pretend does not exist. Less hypocritical was his position on smoking. But what I mean is that he never seemed to be behaving in a "preachy manner" calculated to impress me with the notion that I was to behave as he did. The role modeling must have been too subtle for my older brothers because I cannot see that they ever used him as a role model.

The question, however, which haunts my mind is whether a father plays any other function in society other than a role model for his children and a source of financial support for his family. If he does, then what might such a function be and what might its level of importance be to the family and society. In a society where the social conservatives keep chirping about the importance of "family values" or "traditional value" there needs to be some in depth thought and investigation lavished upon such an inquiry.

I believe a father (and sometimes the mother) play an important role in anchoring or connecting the family to a community. The father is, especially in traditional white anglo-saxon Christian families, the person who establishes the family within the community and in many spheres also establishes the role the entire family plays in the community. Because of Victorian notions regarding gender roles, the exception to the father being the anchor in the community, is in the area of education. The Victorians specifically reserved this role to the mother and hence the mother frequently is the person anchoring the family within the public school system.
If what I have just said has even a modicum of truth, and I believe it has much more truth than that, when we start lamenting the decline in "family values" -- we may be looking at the wrong culprit. What I mean is that "family values" are associated by the vocal right as being under attack by gays, abortionists, pornographers, and the media. Somehow, I have always doubted that -- not that I necessarily condone homosexuality, abortion, pornography -- but because these are not new activities.

What I believe is happening is that the fathers have no community with which to connect. Certain religious groups do supply at least a partial community to which the fathers can connect. For example the Mormons, the Amish, Jehovah Witnesses, and the Islamists all recognize the inherent need for community.

For the Mormons it goes beyond that, and I fear that many Mormons do not understand the full extent of what is happening in society and its impact on Mormon standards and belief. Shortly after Joseph Smith, Jr. established the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Lord directed him to start up colonies of members who would be a part of what is called the United Order or the Order of Enoch. These were something like the Israeli kibbutz -- in other words they were very communitarian in nature. Because of persecution, the Mormons after the assasination of Joseph Smith, Jr., by an anti-Mormon mob in Illinois, migrated to Utah under the leadership of Brigham Young and established successful United Order communities in the west. These communities continued to function until the Federal Government in the guise of clamping down on polygamy caused the communities to dissolve for fear of seizure of their land.
Obviously, United Order villages are what might be considere hyper-communitarian. But, America still had communities in the rural small towns and in the ethnic neighborhoods in the urban area which were still true communities until in the late 1980's. What we are seeing now, however, is the complete destruction of the communities encompassing small towns. During my father's generation, there was still a community to which he could connect his family. Persons born to families in such towns tended to either stay in the community after they graduated from high school, or returned to them after college or graduate school. That is much less likely now.
America during the last forty years put the saying, "home is where the heart is" to the test. It appears to me, that the saying has been found wanting. Home may be where the heart is and certainly no home can long endure if the family's heart is not in it, but home needs to be an actual community and an actual geographical location as well. It requires a father to stake his claim in that community and to connect his family to that stake. The creation of a home involves more than simply a home or an apartment in which blood relations reside, just as a community involves more than a group of housing units with a shopping center.

The sense of being at home cannot be franchised whether by a Church or a business. After WWII, servicemen who had suffered homesickness abroad came back with the notion if you had a business set up to look exactly like the same business elsewhere then it would make people feel at home. The concept being if you went into a franchised restaurant or store that was just like the one in your hometown then you would immediately feel comfortable and at home. In other words, businessmen went out with the conscious intent of creating a homogenized hometown so that wherever you went it was home. Religions such as Mormonism and the Jehovah Witnesses understood the concept as well and so every chapel and every Kingdom Hall tends to resemble every other chapel and every other Kingdom Hall. If you attend a Sunday service in one Mormon ward, you can expect that a similar service with the exact same Sunday School lesson is occurring in similar chapels all over the United States. Mormons often point out that no matter where you go you are at home at Church.

The problem with this economic concept is that if home tends to be everywhere, then instead of home being everywhere -- it is nowhere. Families moving in and out of LDS Wards every couple years or so, can only develop a superficial connection to the community at large and a somewhat tenuous connection to the Ward family. In other words, the father has no community to connect his family with, (not to mention the mother being unable to connect with the educational community) and as a result he is denied the opportunity to connect his family to any community.

The phrase "army brats" meaning children of military personnel who bounce around the country and the planet following their parents' postings has come to potentially include a huge segment of American society. As a consequence, father's are failing to fulfill their complete role and families are falling apart at a prodigious rate. But what the social conservatives are complaining about are merely symptoms of a much more systemic problem. That problem is that fathers no longer play the role they have to play in the community because there is no community in which he can play the role.

My father connected his family to his community. We knew we had certain standards which we were charged to uphold in order to protect or improve our family's reputation in the community. Our father provided the family leadership in this respect, and if his family upheld the reputation then it reflected well not only upon the father, but the whole family -- deservingly or not. This had a tremendously positive impact on the entire community and tended to keep families together. If the community is only a homogenized replication of some other community -- or a tract of hundreds of houses looking more or less the same as all of their neighbors, this community never comes into being. With the loss of the community, the obligation to protect the family reputation or even to keep the family together tends to erode -- you can just move on to another community which is exactly like the community where the family fell apart, or a different Ward which looks exactly like the Ward your family crashed and burned in.

The demise of this patriarchal role is of very significant religious importance and nowhere of such importance than Mormonism. Although one may search somewhat in vain for praise of family connections in the Bible, one finds such praise much more evident in the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants which along with the Bible and the Pearl of Great Price constitute the canonized Latter-Day Saint scriptures. In Mormon theology there are three Priesthoods: the Aaronic Priesthood which is an appendent to the Melchizdek Priesthood, the Melchizedek Priesthood, and the Patriarchal Priesthood. Currently the only ordinances of the Patriarchal Priesthood currently restored are the sealing ordinances conducted in the Sealing Rooms of the Temple. This Patriarchal Priesthood is bestowed as part of the marriage ceremony and cannot be held by persons who have not wed. While the Melchizedek Priesthood is the authorization to act in God's name with respect to mortals, the Patriarchal Priesthood is the authority by which the Celestial Kingdoms are governed. In other words, the Patriarchal Priesthood governs the community of the gods.

If we believe that everything on Earth resembles that of the Heavenly Realms. Earthly Fatherhood then involves training to connect families to the community of the gods. For that reason, it is more than merely the assumption of duties of support and maintenance, and it is more than the duty to be a role model. It is to prepare for the enternities in God's Creation. As a result, it is not just a building block of society, it is that which when accompanied by God's grace secures and binds the eternal relationships of the Kingdom of God.

I suspect as a result, that if we want families to continue to be the bedrock unit of our country, we should spend less time battling pornography, abortion and bad media, and more time rethinking our economy and society so that families make a difference. Our goal should be the literal creation of Heaven on Earth, or rather the Kingdom of God. That goal involves much more than the preaching of sexual morality, it requires the creation and nurturing of a society to which a father can connect -- in other words a community in which every family has a place and every father a role. Not only a place and a role, but a cherished place and a dignified role.