It seems to me that trying to restore marriage among the lower classes through simply pulling some policy levers is only going to end in disappointment. It's going to take more than increasing education levels among men to reverse the all out assault leftism has wrought on the traditional family. And I don't think they really want to accomplish this goal if they refuse to advocate traditional marriage. They are for the imposition of their values in every case that they do mean it.
It's also hard to take them seriously at all when they say their goal is to get less of something (one-parent households) but they want the subsidies to that thing to go way up. "Though broadly supportive of redistributive measures that would expand mothers’ monthly budgets and increase quality family time—and a critic of the stringent and penurious standards effected by the bipartisan welfare reforms of 1996—Kearney argues the data is unambiguous: benefits flow to children in a two-parent home that cannot be duplicated easily through welfare programs."
And I hate the title "The Two-Parent Privilege." Leftists have inverted the meaning of privilege (coming from Latin privilegium "law applying to one person, bill of law in favor of or against an individual"). If anything, the law gives greater benefits to single-parent households.
You made a really interesting comment on the American reformer pod , I think I understood you correctly, about how there is no benefit to belonging to most evangelical churches , so if someone gets church discipline , it’s no big deal they just go to the next church down the road . I’ve seen this recently in effect
Trying to think of what benefits a church could possibly ad , I like what refuge church in Utah is doing where they have a school attached and it’s free for those that tithe . Curious if anyone has any other thoughts
Maybe the point is that a church should be a supportive community to such an extreme that it is truly a spiritual family, such that you don't want to leave your family and lose that support.
It is not merely a matter of church discipline, but of voluntary leaving. "How can we make the threat of discipline more terrifying?" is a strange way to approach this problem.
Recent research has shown that many people who are unattached to any congregation were formerly members of a congregation but moved to another city and just never got involved in a new congregation at their new location. Some of these are described in the parable of the sower and the soils as being choked out by the thistles of worldly cares. But it occurs to me that if they had a deep communal attachment at their previous congregation, it would be very high on their list of priorities to find something similar at the new location.
Sharing an hour of worship together each week is not the idea here.
Another place to start is better collaboration and information-sharing among churches within a town. I think my town is actually pretty good about that, there are a number of projects that Baptists, Presbyterians, and Anglicans cooperate closely on. But church discipline is such a rare thing these days that I have no personal experience with it.
If Christian culture started to shift towards tighter discipline, then I would suggest churches in a community agree to inform each other of cases of church discipline. And while it would be a bridge too far to demand they all make it binding, they should at least agree on some process for reviewing it if a disciplined member of another church is seeking membership at a new church.
It seems to me that trying to restore marriage among the lower classes through simply pulling some policy levers is only going to end in disappointment. It's going to take more than increasing education levels among men to reverse the all out assault leftism has wrought on the traditional family. And I don't think they really want to accomplish this goal if they refuse to advocate traditional marriage. They are for the imposition of their values in every case that they do mean it.
It's also hard to take them seriously at all when they say their goal is to get less of something (one-parent households) but they want the subsidies to that thing to go way up. "Though broadly supportive of redistributive measures that would expand mothers’ monthly budgets and increase quality family time—and a critic of the stringent and penurious standards effected by the bipartisan welfare reforms of 1996—Kearney argues the data is unambiguous: benefits flow to children in a two-parent home that cannot be duplicated easily through welfare programs."
And I hate the title "The Two-Parent Privilege." Leftists have inverted the meaning of privilege (coming from Latin privilegium "law applying to one person, bill of law in favor of or against an individual"). If anything, the law gives greater benefits to single-parent households.
You made a really interesting comment on the American reformer pod , I think I understood you correctly, about how there is no benefit to belonging to most evangelical churches , so if someone gets church discipline , it’s no big deal they just go to the next church down the road . I’ve seen this recently in effect
Trying to think of what benefits a church could possibly ad , I like what refuge church in Utah is doing where they have a school attached and it’s free for those that tithe . Curious if anyone has any other thoughts
Maybe the point is that a church should be a supportive community to such an extreme that it is truly a spiritual family, such that you don't want to leave your family and lose that support.
It is not merely a matter of church discipline, but of voluntary leaving. "How can we make the threat of discipline more terrifying?" is a strange way to approach this problem.
Recent research has shown that many people who are unattached to any congregation were formerly members of a congregation but moved to another city and just never got involved in a new congregation at their new location. Some of these are described in the parable of the sower and the soils as being choked out by the thistles of worldly cares. But it occurs to me that if they had a deep communal attachment at their previous congregation, it would be very high on their list of priorities to find something similar at the new location.
Sharing an hour of worship together each week is not the idea here.
Another place to start is better collaboration and information-sharing among churches within a town. I think my town is actually pretty good about that, there are a number of projects that Baptists, Presbyterians, and Anglicans cooperate closely on. But church discipline is such a rare thing these days that I have no personal experience with it.
If Christian culture started to shift towards tighter discipline, then I would suggest churches in a community agree to inform each other of cases of church discipline. And while it would be a bridge too far to demand they all make it binding, they should at least agree on some process for reviewing it if a disciplined member of another church is seeking membership at a new church.