“Church Family”
What does it mean when a church or spiritual community refers to itself as a “family”? If this is intended as a statement of support and affirmation, why does it make some people feel uncomfortable? And how does it relate to common workplace ideas like being part of the “team” or “community”? Dan tackles all these questions in this episode.
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Hello and welcome to It's In The Code, a series on our podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
And as always, I want to thank everybody who's taken the time to tune in and give us a listen.
I want to thank all of you who have been emailing me, Daniel Miller Swaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com with ideas for this series.
And again, invite everybody to please do that.
Keep the ideas coming.
As always, I'm behind on responding, but I am doing my best and I am reading the emails and continue to be so grateful to everybody.
The great ideas you send in.
Also grateful to everybody who supports us financially and otherwise.
And thank everybody for that.
And also, before we dive in, I want to mention, if you go to the Straight White American Jesus website, you can see information for the upcoming seminar offered by Sarah Mosliner.
I really encourage you to take a look at that.
She has appeared on the podcast numerous times, and we talk about her a lot, and she ran the seminar a few months back, and it's just outstanding.
So, just to let people know about that.
And finally, as always, we are offered in partnership with the CAP Center at UCSB, and we thank them as well.
So, I want to dive into a topic today that a lot of people have reached out about, and it's sort of interesting because it's one of these topics that I think it's complicated.
I'm probably going to use the word complicated a bunch of times today.
But it's the best word I can think of for this.
And the language that I want to get at is the language of the church family.
And I realize there may be other spiritual organizations that use this kind of family language.
I'm not really sure.
But it's really common in churches.
And I don't know that it's necessarily more common in one Brand of church than another.
Maybe more common among Protestants than it is Catholics.
I'm not positive about that.
But other than that, I don't know.
And part of the reason I say it's complicated is even folks who have reached out to me, a number of people, some people have had really specific reasons, but some people have said, you know that the language It just makes me feel kind of uncomfortable, or I feel like there's something going on there, and I don't know what it is.
Or, again, to an outsider, it might just sound weird, right?
This language of church family or whatever.
So I want to sort of tackle this.
And if you grew up in church, if that was something that you grew up with, the language of having a church family The idea that the congregation of the church is referred to as a family, right?
So for those who didn't grow up in church, that's what we're talking about when we talk about your church family, meaning that everybody in the church is a family.
But if you grew up in that context, that language may be so sort of normalized to you that you don't even think about it as a kind of metaphor or something like that.
And that's one of the things that we want to talk about.
And I think it also highlights not just what does this language do when churches use it, but it ties in with some other cultural things, things about our American culture that I find really problematic.
I think there are resonances there, and I want to sort of talk about that a little bit.
And what we're going to get at ultimately is that the language of families is complicated, right?
If you have a family, and all of us It's the same way with the language of church family, and that's what makes it hard to sort of talk about or to sort of pin down.
I think it's also what can create for some people a vague sense of dis-ease about the language of the church family.
I think it's also why for some people, They would hear that language of a church family and say, what's wrong with that?
I love my church family.
I've always felt supported by my church family.
What coded language do you think is really going on, Dan?
Nothing's going on there.
So I want to talk about all of this, and I want to start with the kind of broader cultural discourse that I think it's related to.
And I don't know if I can draw a straight line between these things.
Maybe this is an association that only I have, but when people talk about being kind of uncomfortable with the phrase, that resonates with me.
And I think part of the reason I'm uncomfortable with the language of church family is because of the resonances that I think are there with some kinds of other social domains, right?
So I'm going to try to tie this together.
Bear with me a minute.
I think we'll get there.
But I want you to think about as you walk around wherever you live and you go and you run your errands and you do your things, if you go into almost any, say, fast food place, Or any store right now, you'll see signs that say that they are hiring members of their team, right?
Be a part of the team at Target or Walmart or Taco Bell or wherever, right?
Or maybe you work someplace with a culture that refers to everybody as being part of the team or even a community, right?
The community here at, you know, insert name of business or organization, is this or this or this, right?
The language of team, the language of community, right?
In extreme cases, you will actually hear of some of these kind of organizations referred to as a family.
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