Church, State, and Family Reconciling Traditional Teachings and Modern Liberties Law and Christianity Series

This book defends the fundamental place of the marital family in modern liberal societies. While applauding modern sexual freedoms, John Witte, Jr also defends the traditional Western teaching that the marital family is an essential cradle of conscience, chrysalis of care, and cornerstone of ordered liberty. He thus urges churches, states, and other social institutions to protect and promote the marital family. He encourages reticent churches to embrace the rights of women and children, as Christians have long taught, and encourages modern states to promote responsible sexual freedom and family relations, as liberals have long said. He counsels modern churches and states to share in family law governance, and to resist recent efforts to privatize, abolish, or radically expand the marital family sphere. Witte also invites fellow citizens to end their bitter battles over same-sex marriage and tend to the vast family field that urgently needs concerted attention and action.

Introduction; 1. The first integrative Christian theories of family life: John Chrysostom and Augustine of Hippo; 2. Marriage as an office of nature and a sacrament of the church: Thomas Aquinas and Francisco Vitoria; 3. The marital family as social estate and covenant community: Martin Luther and John Calvin; 4. The domestic market: the family as matrix of modern economics; 5. The nature of family in seventeenth-century Christian thought: Hugo Grotius and John Selde; 6. The surprising liberal defense of the traditional marital family by enlightenment liberals; 7. The multidimensional family sphere: reconstructing traditional family teachings for modern liberal societies; 8. Why suffer the children? Overcoming the modern church's opposition to children's rights; 9. Why same-sex marriage should not lead to polygamy; 10. By the power vested in whom? What place for faith-based family laws in a liberal democracy?; 11. The dangers of private ordering; Concluding reflections.

John Witte, Jr is Woodruff Professor of Law, McDonald Distinguished Professor of Religion, and Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, Atlanta. He edits the Cambridge Law and Christianity Series and the Journal of Law and Religion. He has published 260 articles and 32 books, including the following titles: Law and Protestantism (Cambridge, 2002); The Reformation of Rights (Cambridge, 2008); Christianity and Law (Cambridge, 2008); The Sins of the Fathers (Cambridge, 2009); Christianity and Human Rights (Cambridge, 2010); To Have and to Hold (Cambridge, 2007); The Western Case for the Monogamy Over Polygamy (Cambridge, 2015); and Christianity and Family Law (Cambridge, 2017).