Julio Torres, Intern
Red Families v. Blue Families by Naomi Cahn and June Carbone examines the differences between the value systems of conservative and liberal families. The book compares, contrasts and connects the differences to explain how these shape contemporary American culture,
economy and law.
The following excerpt explores how red (conservative) families struggle to successfully impart traditional norms of sexual behavior to a generation that no longer lives in the world of unanimous values of the nineteenth century. Today, conservative teenagers subscribe to the irreconcilable values of purity imparted in the home and the individualistic, liberal way of thinking they find outside. The wide gap between “belief and behavior” stems from the disconnect between competing value systems, a challenge that Sociologist Mark Regnerus words as “serving two masters.” Cahn and Carbone lay out the consequences of this dichotomy in red families.
Moral Backlash
This new middle-class ethic, unlike its nineteenth century counterpart, is a direct affront to those who do not accept its premises. The nineteenth-century emphasis on purity, with its condemnation of those who could not live up to its principles, may have been hypocritical (and often racist), but it reaffirmed consensus-based standards of morality. The new version, in contrast, is disdainful of traditional moral restraints, insistent on the rights of women and same-sex couples, and skeptical of once-venerated institutions such as marriage.
Traditionalists have responded to the changes in family form, the negative consequences for children, and the class-based nature of the transformation with a sense of crisis. If advocates of the new order are right that a promising future is the best contraceptive, this disturbing news for poorer men and women who face less-hopeful prospects. Moreover, if investment in women opens new opportunities to prosper in a post-industrial world, it does little for the poorly educated men who have less to offer in a society in which the factories that once employed them have moved overseas and the farms of their youth have given way to mechanized agribusiness conglomerates. The advice to defer childbearing until financial independence just does not resonate for those who may never achieve it.
At the same time, the growing gap between the beginning of sexual activity and marriage creates much more dissonance for evangelicals and their parents than it does for those with more tolerant attitudes towards sexuality. In today’s society, Protestant evangelical teens experience the biggest gap between belief and behavior. Both the teens and their parents hold more-conservative sexual attitudes than many others, but evangelically affiliated adolescents, for a variety of reasons that include class differences, lose their virginity at younger ages than the average for many other religious groups, and they are almost likely to do so with someone other than the partner they will mary. Sociologist Mark Regnerus reports:
“[Evangelical adolescents]…are urged to drink deeply from the waters of American individualism and its self-focused pleasure ethic, yet they are asked to value time-honored religious traditions like family and chastity. They attempt to do both (while other religious groups don’t attempt this), and serving two masters is difficult. What results is a unique dialectic of sexual-conservatism-with-sexual –activity; a combination that breeds in