The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake

All the data and anecdotes I’ve seen suggest the correlation is in the opposite direction. Especially when it comes to race; in many minority groups grandma is very much part of the stereotypical family home.

To your anecdotes and the article's credit, yes, many minority groups (or approaching majority) do often use larger extended family units.

This is not to say that the the people who need help (from government or church) always have the option -- or that it doesn't have additional costs. (Though to several of the cases mentioned above, extended families are replacing a missing nuclear family member.)

Your argument and examples make logical sense to me, but I'm deeply skeptical of the practical effects.

I grew up in a religious conservative family, so I'm steeped in the conservative tradition that government welfare programs displace the social welfare functions of church and family. It's common for robotic conservatives (obviously not talking about you now) to take this straight into New World Order conspiracy land, where liberals are actively trying to destroy the church and family so they can have more power. Or something. This comes up over and over again in my circles.

On the one hand, I see the logic in the non-conspiratorial flavor of that theory, and I think your examples are plausible. However I've never seen evidence that it actually happens to any significant degree.

It seems like every conservative politician and pundit in America is required to publicly pine for the good old days when families and churches kept poor people fed, clothed, sheltered and healthied-up. But they won't tell us when or where these good old days existed. I'm unaware of any time in modern history when church/family has provided the measure of social welfare and insurance that we now expect from the state. Not even close.

In the present day, I think the scale of the government's welfare and insurance functions is hopelessly beyond the capabilities of religious organizations. A 2004 book published by the Brookings Institute, Sacred Places, Civic Purposes, contains a well-put quote by John DiIulio, who briefly advised the GW Bush admin on this issue:

> But, make no mistake: while faith-based organizations can supplement and strengthen public social service programs, they can by no means substitute for government support. To dramatize the point, just consider that even if all 353,000 religious congregations in America doubled their annual budgets and devoted them entirely to the cause and even if the cost of government social welfare programs was magically cut by one-fifth, the congregations would barely cover a year’s worth of Washington’s spending on those programs and never even come close to covering total program costs.

EDIT:

I neglected your main point:

> liberals are insensitive to the fact that safety net social programs may displace support provided by charities and family.

I think that's true. I'd actually say most partisan liberals are reflexively hostile to the idea.

IMO, this type of communal living strategy is the best remedy to a lot of the problems faced in America and in western cultural in general. Many of the problems were already stated in the article, so I'll just add suburban sprawl, the high cost of individual ownership of everything, including the house, and the increased workload that results from not sharing the labor of common tasks like cooking, cleaning, and caring for children. BF Skinner's Walden Two is a good read that goes more into detail on the advantages of communal living. As a non religious person weary of politics, neither the state nor church are good options.

> > liberals are insensitive to the fact that safety net social programs may displace support provided by charities and family.

> I think that's true. I'd actually say most partisan liberals are reflexively hostile to the idea.

This is a fascinating thread! You and rayiner are having a laudably introspective and low-charge discussion of this stuff, so I’ll try to throw in my (hyper-progressive) take on this:

I’m certainly not insensitive to the fact that government social support tends to be a substitute for faith-based social support (and the presence of substitutes inevitably weakens any marketable good).

From my perspective, religious traditions that have offered social support, but only with strings attached, resorting to shunning when those expectations weren’t met, have caused so much trauma to people I love that I am, at least in unguarded moments, quite happy to acknowledge that I want to break down the economic foundations of those groups.

On the other hand, my wife is an immigrant whose family was sponsored by a church. I am immensely grateful to religious communities offering love and support to the neediest without any strings attached. The Unitarian congregations I’m familiar with have consistently impressed me with their wise, worldly social support without any hint of shunning.

So while I don’t think I’m hostile to people of faith offering support, there’s no doubt I want robust well funded alternatives.

It’s definitely true that there is a culture war at play for progressives, and I agree it’s disingenuous to pretend weakening religious institutions isn’t at least a foreseeable, if not actively pursued, effect of many social policies I support.