December 11 The Spectacular Uplifting of Family Happiness by Christianity

 Reason #11 The Spectacular Uplifting of Family Happiness by Christianity

The facts of history strongly indicate that the evangelical faith possesses an unrivaled record for lifting the level of family love and happiness in society.

People everywhere seem to appreciate the immense importance of family in their lives. Even those who have known very few happy family interactions in life sense that they’re missing out on something of great personal significance.   The prospect of holiday gatherings with family evoke deep feelings and are featured in our songs and movie scripts. Parent-child social bonds tend to dominate the child-raising years for both the parents and their children. Young adult children tend to rely on their parents for a sense of financial security, or for support in caring for their own small children while they establish their career paths. Grandparents and grandchildren are often bonded in powerful ways. And at the end of their lives, elderly people tend to rely on their families for sympathy and assistance. For all of human history, at a very core level, both emotionally and practically, family has functioned as a kind of psycho-spiritual “money in the bank”—the basic social unit of humanity.

That’s why the statistical data available to us on this topic from the field of social science is so crucial. It turns out that Christian faith is the most statistically sturdy predictor of family happiness in our society. Besides the data which indicates that devoted Christian people are more charitable, kind, and emotionally stable than the other populations around us (see reason #s 7-10), there is also an enormous block of data to indicate that devoted Christians are better at fostering family happiness than the other populations of our society. The hard data is actually quite clear.

•  Evangelical men spend more time with their children and spouses, and are more affectionate towards them than the average American man, or even men in other faith traditions.

•  Evangelical mothers praise and hug their children more often than other mothers do.

•  Evangelical parents are significantly less inclined than other parents to yell at their children.

•  Evangelical women tend to be happier in their marriages than other women, and report the highest levels of satisfaction with their sexual lives.

•  Regular church-going children and teens have lower risks of mental illness, higher rates of volunteering, lower probabilities of drug use and early sexual initiation compared to other children.

•  Religious Americans adopt more than twice as many children as other Americans.

•  Regular church attendance—for all demographic backgrounds—is correlated with less poverty, fewer divorces, fewer births out of wedlock.

Like those who criticize the medical community for its flaws, critics of the Christian faith will provide long lists of self-indentifying Christians who have failed to live up to the New Testament family ethic. But as surely as medical science is impacting the health of its adherents for good every day, so Christianity is impacting the family happiness of its adherents for good every day. And as all our songs, poetry, and movie scripts indicate, that’s no small matter!

The facts of history strongly indicate that the evangelical faith possesses an unrivaled record for lifting the level of family love and happiness in society.