Check out this article from 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.
One of the many paradoxes of American life is that, as individualistic as we are, our society isn’t always particularly well-suited for singles. As David Brooks argued in 2020 in The Atlantic, our culture famously idolizes the nuclear family: two parents living with their own kids in a single-family home. Brooks sees our obsession with the nuclear family as a problem. The nuclear-family model is hyper-individualistic and mobile, with family units often moving in pursuit of new opportunities, so it only works for the most privileged. By contrast, Brooks argues that less-advantaged families benefit from strong webs of support from extended family.
And singles, of course, often don’t fit into this landscape of autonomous nuclear families. For gay Christians who are trying to live by historic Christian sexual ethics, it can be especially brutal.
The critics of nuclear family idolatry often suggest that we reverse time and rediscover a not-so-distant American past of communal living. The norm could be big, multigenerational houses, homes where single people, cousins, widows, grandparents, and parents could dwell together with a gang of children (and maybe some occasional long-term houseguests). In this kind of living situation, singles could more easily find a place, a role, wherever they put down roots. Being unmarried wouldn’t have to exclude deep connection and belonging.
But what if the nuclear family ideal has deeper roots than we’re often told? If that were true, we might then have to find ways to work with, not against, the culture we’ve been given.
The new American family
Tell me if this sounds familiar: before World War II, Americans mostly lived in large, messy, multigenerational families. Whether in big immigrant tenement blocks in Manhattan or in rambling farmhouses on windswept hillsides, we did what people everywhere have always done: lived together with extended family for generations, caring for children and elders in common. It was only after the postwar suburban expansion, with its mass-produced tract homes, interstate highways, and mobility afforded by cheap automobiles, that the nuclear family popped into existence.
Or maybe, as Rodney Clapp argues in his book Families at the Crossroads, the shift actually took place a bit earlier, during the Industrial Revolution. With the new wealth and mobility industrialism unleashed, families broke down into smaller, more transportable units, the better to chase factory jobs across a vast country.
Either way, this new American family was individualistic, atomized, and harshly conventional. Cousins, aunts, even siblings drifted apart as each new generation moved away to form new nuclear nests of their own. The pressure was on to get married early. Gay people, immigrants with extended families, and, crucially, singles of all kinds were all looked on as deviant.
It’s a compelling story. But the truth is more complicated. The nuclear-family ideal clearly predates the 1940s. Alexis de Tocqueville noted the marked individualism of American society in his classic Democracy in America, published in 1833. Tocqueville was particularly struck by Americans’ extraordinary geographic mobility and, importantly, their relative lack of extended, dynastic families.
We can see Tocqueville’s mobile individualism in later documents such as Laura Ingalls Wilders’s Little House memoirs. Wilders’s 19th-century upbringing centered on her nuclear family—Ma, Pa, and her siblings—as they moved from one frontier state to another. Extended family and relatives make few appearances in these works.
So Americans have been individualistic and have often had small, nuclear families going back to at least the early decades of the 1800s.
But this tradition turns out to go even deeper than that. Our country descends in many ways from England…and by the Middle Ages, England was already among the most individualistic societies on earth.
Longstanding dominance of the nuclear family
Historians once assumed that, like most cultures, preindustrial England was a “peasant society.” Such societies are communitarian, not individualistic. Families own land collectively. Most households consist of extended relatives, with networked families staying rooted in one region, or even on one farm, for generations or even centuries. Peasant agriculture is the ultimate prototype of multigenerational living.
But in his 1978 book The Origins of English Individualism, the historian Alan Macfarlane showed that England never actually fit this pattern. In communitarian peasant societies, properties remain in the same hands for generations. The same family names dominate a given village for centuries. Yet English records already show a brisk trade in farmland and property in the 1500s and before. Surnames rapidly popped up and disappeared in particular parish records, with sons and daughters moving away to be apprenticed in faraway towns. Families constantly uprooted and settled in new townships.
In other words, England was already a remarkably mobile society before Shakespeare ever set pen to paper.
More importantly, though, the English simply didn’t go in for collective land ownership or multigenerational living. Examining one collection of villages in 17th-century north-central England, Macfarlane found that the registry “does not show a single instance of a married child living with his or her parents, not even with a widowed partner…the nine townships with very few exceptions indeed show only nuclear families, parents and unmarried children” (emphasis added).
In fact, Macfarlane found evidence of the same patterns extending back all the way to the mid-thirteenth century, the high Middle Ages! By then, English kin systems were already focused on the self rather than a common ancestor, with the nuclear family anchoring one’s map of the family. Even first cousins were relegated to a relatively distant tier.
Macfarlane’s findings are striking. A century before the Black Death, other European nations were largely inhabited by peasant families who farmed land in common and dwelled in large, extended households, just as David Brooks imagines earlier generations of Americans did. But although telescopes and calculus were not yet invented and the Renaissance was still more than a century away, the English were already living in nuclear family units.
This longstanding dominance of the nuclear family in England has important implications. It means that some of the most unusual features of American life—our individualism, our mobility, our preference for single-family dwellings and nuclear families—turn out to be deep inheritances from our historic “mother country,” not recent accidents of policy. As such, they might be harder to rework or replace than we think.
It’s telling that other English-speaking societies show similar patterns. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are all notably individualistic and emphasize private property owned by people, not families. Nuclear families predominate, primarily dwelling in single-family houses. Cities in these countries are mostly low-density, with big suburban tracts surrounding contained, central downtowns.
If the American suburban nuclear family were just an accidental byproduct of post-1940s zoning laws and highway systems, then countries with different postwar laws would show different patterns. If it were merely a byproduct of industrialization, then all industrialized countries would show the same tendencies. Instead, most of the world continues to build high-density cities and often lives in larger families. By contrast, all the countries that were started by England look remarkably like…England.
Cultural support of vocational singles
Alleviating loneliness and enabling co-living for vocational singles is a vitally important goal for today’s Church. But challenging 800 years of cultural inertia won’t be an effective starting point to accomplish this mission. Instead, we should pursue something akin to what Chinese philosophers call wu-wei: the art of effortless action. Practically (and counterintuitively), this means embracing the quirks of our deeply individualistic society, with its age-old expectations of mobility and nuclear family living, then finding ways to create rooted communities where singles can thrive within that fabric.
What would this wu-wei approach actually entail, though? How could we flow with the facts of American culture rather than fighting against it?
Our friend Tocqueville might offer some help. An outside observer with a keen eye for culture and mores, he depicted early American society as rich in voluntary associations, clubs, and organizations. For him, the genius of American democracy was that unrelated people took pains to group together for solving problems, knitting together a robust social fabric in the process. Our society, Tocqueville believed, worked best under spontaneous order.
In many ways, that’s still true today. Christians are often on the leading edge of this American talent. The Nurturing Communities Network, for example, brings together intentional Christian communities from different traditions throughout North America, showing that organic Christian community-building is alive and well. Beyond this network, one Nashville-based intentional Christian community is another living example of this ground-up problem-solving in action. Dwelling in a large metropolitan city and inhabiting a church culture that frequently makes an idol of heterosexual romance and marriage, the Kept Branch Community (formerly the Nashville Family of Brothers) realized that vocational singleness needed more scaffolding, more institutional support. So they built it themselves. (Equip founder Pieter Valk is a member of this community.)
But the Kept Branch Community weren’t on their own. They had a template to work from. Throughout Christian history, monasteries and religious orders have offered clear, meaningful roles and thick community to people not called to marriage. And along the way, they’ve formed the backbone for much of the Church’s living culture. Christians in America today don’t need to reinvent the wheel. They just need to organize to address an age-old problem.
Of course, all vocational singles need loving communities, not just those called to take religious vows. Building out a cultural infrastructure to support singles (indeed, to support anyone who doesn’t live in a nuclear family) means being creative, taking initiative, and forging networks. It also means being persistent in courageously calling the Church to support singles, many of whom make great sacrifices for kingdom work.
In fine Anglo-American tradition, Christian singles and their advocates could use law and the courts to seek targeted legal changes that would make community living easier and more natural. Residents of cities large and small could advocate for more courtyard apartment buildings, where different households could own their separate units yet share a garden and other semi-private spaces. Importantly, such buildings might offer a mix of unit sizes. Studios and one-bedrooms could accommodate singles, while much larger units with four or five bedrooms, more than is currently typical in multifamily housing, would anchor established nuclear families. Then vocational singles could live literally next door to their friends with children, drop in and help with dinnertime, and receive regular support in turn.
Large churches and dioceses could, and should, use their resources to provide funding and oversight for such ventures. The Church would be taking the lead in seeding the ground with new possibilities for single and community living. But it would be doing so by honoring the long precedents established in the surrounding culture, not by trying to tear them up.
In this scenario, a cultural support system for vocational singles would emerge within and as part of the mobile, individualistic society we’ve inherited. As such, it would provide a counterbalance for the excesses of our culture’s individualism. This in turn would be living proof that the Christian counterculture is always loving, always pro-life at all levels, including the cultural. Long-established traditions and habits within an existing culture should be seen as parts of the society’s living garden. We frequently need to trellis, train, or prune such things. We baptize them with our care and love. But we rarely tear them out by the roots.
Advantages of American individualism
Finally, we shouldn’t overlook that Anglo-American individualism has some real advantages. Economic dynamism is one of them. Individualists often make good entrepreneurs, explorers, and inventors, and they’re frequently willing to move to pursue good work. These traits help make workers in English-speaking societies highly productive, which encourages owners to invest more in businesses: a virtuous cycle. Wealth easily becomes an idol Christians must guard against, but we also shouldn’t forget that it’s a blessing to live in a society where the means of living are widely available. Individualism is part of the reason why ours is such a society.
Maybe more germanely, Anglo-American individualism actually allows for singleness in a way that most cultures just don’t. Tight, multigenerational families tend to push almost everyone toward early marriage, typically in the early twenties for men and teens or younger for girls. Voluntary singleness is unheard of in most traditional peasant societies with multigenerational families. Marriages are usually arranged, not chosen. And being gay or gender nonconforming is unthinkable.
By contrast, in medieval England a large proportion of women never married, helping to kickstart a culture of normative singleness and devotion to volunteering. This cultural inheritance has carried over into modern times. During the Second World War, George Orwell rhapsodized that a quintessentially rural 20th-century English scene was “old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning.” Far from using the term “old maid” insultingly, Orwell was pointing out that the acceptance of lifelong singleness was a cherished part of what made England, and English Christianity, unique.
It’s tempting to yearn for a more tight-knit, less atomized society. And in many ways, that’s what we should want. But American culture didn’t come from nowhere, and our individualism— including the independent, nuclear family—is close to the core of what we’ve inherited from our forebears. It can be annoying and oppressive as well as life-giving and surprising. In any case, it’s our job as Christian inhabitants of American society to identify what St. Justin Martyr called the logos spermatikos, the seeds of wisdom, in its values and traditions.
American individualism offers unique space for singles and for what J.S. Mill named “experiments in living.” More place-bound societies with large extended families really can’t match these opportunities. In the struggle to forge lasting community for single and gay Christians who are living according to historic sexual morality, our legacy of individualism and mobility may prove an unexpected gift.
