38 - Religions and Families in America: Historical Traditions and Present Positions

Summary

As fundamental and even venerable social institutions, religion and the family for centuries have enjoyed a close association. Both families and religions are approached with a special reverence; both offer to their members the possibility of merging selves and souls within a larger group; each harbors settings for important rituals of unity and continuity. Involvement in religions and in families can spawn similarly intense emotions; each can subdue or smother individual feelings and instead deposit the follower squarely in the swirl of ceremony – be it for a bar mitzvah or a betrothal, a baptism or a burial.

More than sixty years ago, Margaret Park Redfield insisted that, historically, families (and, she could have easily added, religions) provide for people

a sense of security derived from status in a group of which they are permanent members, initiate into a consistent mode of procedure so that there may be some standards for action and principles of right and wrong, and create an attachment to certain rituals which not only give color to life but also supply in certain areas of existence sacred rather than secular values.

The reasons for such close relations are as obvious as they are numerous. Religion and the family occupy adjacent and overlapping spaces in the private realm of modern existence. Yet neither is totally isolated in that sphere.