The following is a webinar interview with Connor Wood on the origins of the nuclear family and the need for building communities for singles in a nuclear-family world. Connor is a researcher who writes regularly at https://cultureuncurled.substack.com, making complex ideas in religion and science accessible to a broad audience. Read his latest article in Equip Insights at https://equipyourcommunity.org/working-with-the-nuclear-family/. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Pieter Valk: Before we discuss the nuclear family, tell us a little about the perspective you bring to this subject.
Connor Wood: My research specialty has been cognitive science, ritual, and anthropology, and my work has always been deeply informed by biological and evolutionary frameworks.
One relevant part of my story is that I found my way into faith partly through my research. I started graduate school as a basically secular person. I wouldn’t have called myself a strict nonbeliever. I thought there was probably “something” beyond the physical world, but I didn’t know what that meant.
Through my studies of biological, evolutionary, and cognitive approaches to human nature, I began to see that ritual and faith are deeply embedded in human nature. They aren’t things we’ll naturally evolve beyond, as some nineteenth-century philosophers, and some contemporary thinkers, have expected. That led me to take faith more seriously. Through what I see as a grace-filled series of events, I was baptized as a Christian and eventually became Catholic.
Pieter: Let’s begin with the history. Is the nuclear family a modern secular invention, a historically Christian institution, or something else?
Connor: The nuclear family as we know it in the twenty-first-century West, especially in the United States, is unusual in the extremity of its isolation. Individual households are often separated from extended family and from one another. But the nuclear family isn’t a completely new institution that suddenly appeared in the 1950s.
To understand it, we should begin with the biology of human sexuality and mating. Humans are a pair-bonding animal. We tend to form strong emotional, economic, and sexual relationships with one other person, and those relationships tend to be durable. That isn’t identical to the nuclear family or to Christian monogamy, but it tells us something about the kind of animal we are.
Consider a spectrum. On one end are sea lions, which are extremely sexually dimorphic. Males are much larger than females. That kind of dimorphism is correlated with polygyny. A male sea lion monopolizes a harem of females until he becomes weak enough to be displaced by another male.
On the other end are geese. Males and females are difficult to distinguish by size, and geese form very strong lifelong pair bonds. They return year after year to raise new groups of goslings together.
Humans are somewhere between those extremes, though closer to the pair-bonding end. We’re a flexible species. In more complex societies, high-status men with many resources have sometimes monopolized multiple young women, producing polygynous arrangements. Yet even in societies that permit polygyny, most people end up in essentially monogamous relationships because only a few men have enough status and resources to support multiple wives. If you randomly selected people from across human history, most would have lived in basically monogamous relationships.
Our biological default, however, may be closer to serial monogamy than lifelong monogamy. People bond for a period, separate, and bond with someone else. Institutions, values, norms, and religious beliefs can move us toward different points on that spectrum.
Christianity has consistently pushed toward lifelong monogamy. The New Testament, for example, expects church leaders to be “the husband of one wife.” That sets a standard of monogamy from the beginning. Christianity inherited this partly from Second Temple Judaism, which was generally monogamous by the time of Jesus. Roman culture was also unusual among neighboring cultures in being monogamous.
In Western, or Latin, Christendom, the church developed what anthropologist Joseph Henrich calls a strong “marriage and family program.” The church wouldn’t have used that phrase, but it established rules that strongly discouraged cousin marriage, prohibited divorce, and required the consent of the people being married.
Together, these practices weakened the tightly bound clan structures of tribal societies in Western Europe. A clan maintains its cohesion partly through marriages among cousins and other close relatives, keeping loyalty and resources concentrated within the extended family. At some points, the Western church prohibited marriage even between third or fourth cousins. That meant people might have to travel several villages away, or farther, to find a spouse.
This change had far-reaching consequences. It encouraged people to understand morality and cooperation in less narrowly familial terms. In a society without tightly bound clans, people become more willing to cooperate fairly with strangers, to conduct business honestly with a shopkeeper, for example, rather than always placing the interests of an extended family network first.
There are tradeoffs, of course. But this development went especially far in England, where there’s little evidence of strong multigenerational households even as far back as the 1200s. We may be looking at roughly eight hundred years of essentially nuclear families.
The United States inherited many features of English culture, including its individualism and nuclear-family focus. We can even see that inheritance in our preference for detached, single-family houses. So the nuclear family is neither merely a modern secular invention nor a direct theological program. It’s partly an unintended consequence of Christian commitments to monogamy, lifelong marriage, consent, and limits on marrying close relatives.
That inheritance has produced real goods. But in contemporary Western culture, it may have been pushed farther than is healthy.
Pieter: So Christianity didn’t set out to promote the nuclear family as such, but the nuclear family developed partly from Christian teachings about marriage. How does the historic nuclear family differ from the stereotypical Leave It to Beaver family of the 1950s?
Connor: One of the most important differences is isolation. The suburban ideal, mother, father, two children, perhaps a dog, living behind a picket fence, is an example of pushing the nuclear family to its logical extreme. At that point its weaknesses become obvious, because families can’t sustain that level of isolation without serious tradeoffs.
Children are wonderful, but they’re difficult to raise. Marriage is also difficult and deeply worthwhile. Both are much more sustainable when other people are nearby to help. People who can assist with children, offer friendship, provide counsel, and ensure that a husband and wife aren’t each other’s only confidant or social outlet.
Long-term monogamy also needs communal support. If you want to remain faithful to your spouse as both of you age, as the intensity of new love matures into long-term commitment, it helps enormously to belong to a community of people who share that commitment and can reinforce it.
As nuclear-family households have become more geographically separated from extended family, friends, churches, and other communities, they’ve become harder to sustain. We may be seeing the result in the way stable marriage increasingly functions as a luxury good. The people most likely to marry and remain married often have graduate degrees, strong networks, and enough money to purchase help with household work and childcare.
Working-class people are less likely to have those resources or that social capital. Increasingly, they struggle to marry and form stable families, not because they care less about family, but because the entry barrier has become so high.
A certain degree of individualism has been good for society. It frees people from constant oversight by extended family and creates space for eccentricity, experimentation, and scientific or economic innovation. There are reasons England and the United States have been highly productive societies.
But we’ve gone over what we might call the “individualism cliff.” We’ve pushed family isolation so far that only people with substantial resources can reliably sustain the expected pattern. We can’t keep doing that.
Pieter: The problem with the Leave It to Beaver ideal, then, isn’t necessarily that it idolizes marriage. It’s that a private suburban household, with physical distance from friends and relatives, ample consumer comforts, and little outside support, is unattainable for many people. Yet Christians may still feel that they’re supposed to live that way. They become isolated and under-resourced, then feel ashamed when they can’t achieve the ideal.
Connor: Exactly. And because the barrier to that form of family life is so high, many people simply give up on marriage altogether. That’s a rational response when an institution seems inaccessible.
They don’t necessarily respond by joining an intentional Christian community that makes marriage more sustainable. They may avoid marriage, divorce, cohabit for many years, or have children with multiple partners. I don’t say that to denigrate single mothers, blended families, or people who grew up in those situations. I grew up in a blended family myself. But we know that instability is generally not associated with the best outcomes for children. Children tend to do best with a married mother and father who remain together.
Without institutions pulling us toward lifelong monogamy, people often return to the more basic human pattern of serial monogamy. Living with one person for a decade, separating, and then living with someone else. That creates a great deal of pain and instability. We’ve lost a vision of monogamous Christian marriage that’s genuinely accessible to everyone called to it.
Pieter: Some Christians propose an alternative. Recover the larger, kinship-based understanding of family found in the ancient Near East. Joseph Hellerman, in When the Church Was a Family, points out that when Jesus and his contemporaries spoke of family, they meant a broader group that included parents, grandparents, children, siblings, and close associates. Jesus also relativized the claims of biological family when they conflicted with allegiance to God’s family.
Should the church replace its focus on the nuclear family with a more clan-like understanding of family and community?
Connor: God can bless people through many forms of community life. Jesus clearly teaches that God must stand at the top of our hierarchy of loyalties. Christian history also contains recurring attempts to imitate the apostles by sharing possessions and life in common.
That vision is beautiful, but it would work perfectly only if people were perfect, if the kingdom already lived fully within every person. It doesn’t. We remain imperfect.
By “clan life, ” I mean a social arrangement in which people live within large extended families and invest most of their daily energy in that family. People outside the clan remain relatively distant. Such communities can provide a great deal of belonging and reduce loneliness, but they also produce serious tradeoffs.
In a strongly clan-based society, it’s extremely difficult to build effective, impartial, large-scale government and commerce. People naturally prioritize their relatives. Westerners call it corruption when a public official funnels a government contract to his brother-in-law. In a clan-based society, however, doing so may be considered the moral choice. What’s the point of gaining access to resources if you don’t use them to feed your family?
The weakening of clans helped make broad, impersonal cooperation possible. It enabled people to conduct business, administer institutions, and extend moral concern beyond dense networks of relatives.
In that sense, monogamy and the nuclear family may be something like the best available solution for imperfect human beings. We naturally care more for our own children than for children in the abstract. Rather than pretending that tendency doesn’t exist, a society can channel it by asking mothers and fathers to care well for the children they bring into the world.
There’s evidence that this has worked. Rates of children born outside marriage remained relatively low in Christian societies for long periods. Encouraging spouses to remain committed and raise their children together is a realistic way of working with human nature.
There’s still something beautiful in the New Testament vision of a faith-based family that transcends blood. But, speaking as a Catholic, I think of an image associated with J.R.R. Tolkien. The acorn isn’t necessarily better than the oak tree. The early church was a beautiful seed. Over centuries, its teachings were developed through the wisdom of the church fathers and later teachers into something larger and more complex.
What emerged might be called a “soft nuclear family” vision. Most men and women marry and raise their children together, they maintain strong ties to extended family and community, but those ties don’t become overweening clan structures. The secular West may have pushed this model too far toward isolation, but the basic pattern deserves at least the benefit of the doubt.
Pieter: What role has contraception played in enabling the highly comfortable but externally unsupported two-child household, or at least the illusion that such a household is sustainable?
Connor: This isn’t my primary area of expertise, but there’s a good case that the technologicalization of marriage is part of the story. French theologian Jacques Ellul used the term “technique” to describe the effort to manipulate circumstances through reason and technology in order to secure a desired result.
That mentality has, in a sense, conquered marriage and family. We use technology to control sexuality and the number of children we have, and we begin to imagine marriage itself as an arrangement that should produce outputs we can optimize.
This distinction helps clarify the problem. A nucleus is the core of something larger. An atom is individual, indivisible, and isolated. The problem isn’t necessarily the nuclear family, it’s the atomized family.
The use of technique has moved us away from a nucleated vision, in which a mother, father, and children form the center of a larger, extended, nurturing community, and toward an atomized vision. In the atomized model, marriage becomes an agreement based primarily on the desires of two individuals. If we want the same things, we remain together for as long as that continues.
It’s not coincidental that no-fault divorce followed relatively quickly after reliable chemical contraception in the United States. Both reflect an internal logic in which marriage changes from a lifelong struggle of grace, helping one another become saints and raising children in the family of God, into a convenient economic, emotional, and social arrangement that can be manipulated for optimal results. That’s one direction in which the sexual revolution has taken us.
Pieter: Some qualities of American culture helped produce this atomization. Individualism, geographic mobility, and economic independence. But American culture also values voluntary association, entrepreneurship, and local problem-solving. How can we use those strengths to repair the gaps around nuclear families?
If we aren’t going to undo a thousand years of history and return to clan-based society, how can we work with the nuclear family to build thicker community?
Connor: We should look for the seeds of wisdom within our own culture and cultivate them toward a Christian vision of the good.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed this quality in Democracy in America nearly two hundred years ago. Democracy isn’t merely voting for public officials. It’s active participation in solving the problems around us through voluntary groups, cooperation among neighbors, and local creativity.
That’s one of American culture’s most powerful resources. It has weakened considerably over the past several decades, but it still exists.
Some solutions may sound mundane. Zoning, for example, matters. Many suburbs require large lots that are neither truly rural nor urban. This physically enforces an atomized vision of family. Communities could change zoning rules to allow multifamily housing with a variety of unit sizes.
New apartment buildings in places like Boston typically offer units ranging from studios to three bedrooms, with the largest units often prohibitively expensive and still not well designed for raising children. What if a building included studios and one- or two-bedroom units alongside genuine five-bedroom apartments? A household could retain a meaningful boundary around parents and children while living near friends, single adults, older people, and other families. They might share a courtyard or other common spaces.
Creating such housing is complicated. It requires people with money, knowledge of planning and legal regulations, construction experience, and commitment to the vision. But that complexity can itself build community. People from different parts of society must cooperate to solve an interesting and difficult problem.
The church can serve as a broker for that kind of cooperation, a place where people with different skills, backgrounds, and resources come together. Working alongside someone on a shared problem creates bonds even when the two people differ in race, social class, or religious background. That’s how bonding and bridging social capital develop, and both are essential to a vibrant civic society.
The aim is to reintegrate nuclear families into thicker community without pretending that we can, or should, return to clan-based society.
Pieter: So the solution isn’t for churches to condemn the nuclear family and invite everyone into a commune. Nor is it for churches to serve only people who can afford the isolated Leave It to Beaver lifestyle.
A church can include families who live that way while recognizing the gaps, pain, and practical problems the model creates. It doesn’t need to offer a naïve, one-size-fits-all answer. Instead, Christians can work creatively and locally to address particular needs. We can’t solve everything, but we can make things better.
Connor: That’s a deeply realistic and loving vision of human nature. Sometimes we assume that realism about human nature must be pessimistic or Hobbesian, that we’re all merely selfish. But Christian realism acknowledges our shortcomings while affirming that Jesus loves human beings as God made us.
A healthy community meets the kinds of creatures we actually are, where we actually are.
Pieter: What would you recommend for readers who want to explore this subject more deeply?
Connor: Alan Macfarlane’s The Origins of English Individualism is somewhat academic, but it clearly explains the history of individualism and the nuclear family in English-speaking countries.
I’d also recommend Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success and The WEIRDest People in the World. Henrich uses anthropology to show how institutions have shaped the values and norms of Western civilization and led it to its distinctive, and unusual, position, for good and for ill. His work has been enormously helpful in explaining where Western societies came from.
