Last Wednesday ABC’s television series Modern Family received the International Television Audience Award for Comedy at the 54th Monte-Carlo TV Festival, indicating that it has among the highest ratings worldwide. Anyone who has seen the show knows its story line centers upon three couples—one traditionally married, one divorced and remarried, and one homosexual. With likeable, yet quirky characters and sharp-witted humor, it is understandable that viewers could be lured into believing there just isn’t a one-size-fits-all when it comes to family. Because each of the families finagle their Lucy-and-Ethel routines in an upbeat and ultimately successful way, who wouldn’t want to tune in for a big bear hug with the Dunphy-Pritchett-Tucker amalgamation and simply see where life leads? It’s fun. It’s freeing. It’s fresh.
And unfortunately, it’s a fraud.
ABC’s show is based on the premise that the mother-father-child family dynamic is an archaic and dispensable one, easily replaceable by whatever alternative life circumstances concoct. A family is nothing more than a fluid machine with endless possibilities or a Rubik’s cube that can be manipulated backward, frontward, in and out, until the withheld pattern finally emerges. They would have viewers believe that such changes are evidence of a social progress, deserving of celebration.
They would be wrong.
Obviously, “modern” families come in all shapes and sizes. Life happens. People get hurt. People fight. People divorce. People choose to live alternative lifestyles. People sin. The reflections of such choices in the family dynamic isn’t evidence that society is moving towards a new and improved version of family but rather society is still part of a fallen world in need of the saving grace of Jesus Christ.
The truth is that God’s model for the human family has been straightforward and consistent from the beginning of time. He “created man in His own image…male and female” (Genesis 1:27). Because it was “not good that man should be alone,” He created a “helper comparable to him” (Gen. 2:17). He determined that “a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). God blessed them and gave them the directive to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). In other words, God predetermined that a man and a woman have something inherently necessary and unique to the fulfillment of the family dynamic.
Tellingly, years later at the birth of Jesus Christ, God upheld this same model for the raising of His own son. Matthew 1:18-21 recounts the following:
When the mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found with child through the Holy Spirit. Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly. Such was his intention when, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins” . . .
If anyone had reason to break from the traditional model of family, it would have been Mary and Joseph. Joseph, by all ethical measures, had no real duty to marry Mary, and Mary’s gifts of grace would surely have allowed her to raise Jesus without a human father. Rather than allowing them to dismiss the importance of the human family dynamic, however, the heavens (for reasons only God knows for sure) directed them to stay together in the traditional model—and in doing so, they reflect the standard for the ideal holy family.
ABC may consider the traditional family dynamic an unimportant or evolving one, but such conclusions are really just a myth they are spoon feeding the public. And frankly, Christian viewers should think twice before continuing to swallow it.
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