Noted church historian says 'Pollyanna and Pangloss' inspired PCUSA family study By John H. Adams The Layman Online Monday, May 19, 2003 World-renowned church historian Martin E. Marty says the findings of a Presbyterian Church (USA)-sponsored report titled "Living Faithfully with Families in Transition" were inspired by "Pollyanna and Pangloss." "… Pollyanna and Pangloss inspire the report writers to assure the public that the majority of families are getting along fairly well, without addressing or ministering to the needs of huge minority groups whose families are not doing well, and who require solutions that the report fails to give," Marty says his Oct. 19 Sightings. Martin E. Marty Marty, a Lutheran, joins one of his colleagues at the University of Chicago, Dr. Don Browning, in ridiculing "Living Faithfully" as an elitist report that ignores social and legal realities about America's troubled families. "Living Faithfully," a product of the PCUSA's Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP), concludes that families come in all shapes and sizes – including homosexual couples and single mothers with children out of wedlock – and that no single family model is to be preferred. The report calls on the Presbyterian Church (USA) to affirm all configurations of "families." In his criticism, Marty summarized Browning's seven-page assessment of the PCUSA study: "How Inclusiveness becomes Elitist: Reflections on the Presbyterian Report on Families." Browning, who is director of the Religion, Culture and Family Project at the University of Chicago, is considered one of the nation's foremost scholars on American families. He called the Presbyterian report "a marvelous example of how elitism can silently march under the banner of inclusiveness." Marty obviously sought to add his influence to the growing siege by scholars and evangelicals against "Living Faithfully." In a May 19 Sightings column titled "A Good Report?," Marty said, "Next week Presbyterians will meet in Denver to kick off the denominational convention season and, as part of their agenda, vote on the findings of a Presbyterian Church (USA)-sponsored report called 'Living Faithfully with Families in Transition.' My non-Presbyterian colleague Don Browning sees so many public consequences coming from this report that he has critiqued it in various Web and print media outlets." Marty summarizes Browning's conclusions in his own words. Some of the excerpts from "A Good Report?" include: "…while the report claims to rely on social scientific data and biblical witness, it is inaccurate about the former and selective about the themes and interpretations in the latter." "The document depends too much upon the language of "therapeutic acceptance" and support, and is too limited and illiberally mild to do justice to the problems of families in all their forms." "It spends more energy on the form of families than on dealing with the real issues and problems that plague all their forms." "Its drafters tend to slight the word marriage, in favor of 'committed relationships,' and glosses over the data that reveal enormous advantages to the marital form of committed relationships. "The report is elitist in that it takes the pretty good world of Presbyterian (and other mainline Protestant) family life more or less for granted. (Did you know that mainline denomination families are closer to the 'Fifties'-style family than others? They have far lower divorce rates than born-again evangelical, Pentecostal and Southern Baptist types … " "It does not relate well to law and to what likely forthcoming legal definitions will do to the 'cohabiting' forms of commitment in many states. This report is unready for such clearly foreseeable changes." This is not the first time that ASCWP has caught flak for one of its reports. Together with the PCUSA's Office of Theology and Worship, ASCWP sent a report titled "Euthansia Study Materials" to the 210th General Assembly (1998). A General Assembly committee approved the report, which pictured suicide favorably and even suggested that Jesus might have committed suicide. But the full General Assembly rejected the report and told ASCWP to revise it. In 2001, the 213th General Assembly requested that the Office of Theology and Worship organize and host a national dialogue on theological issues related to end-of-life care during the years 2002-2003, including the articulation of a Biblical ethic within the bounds of historic Christian faith that encompasses both pastoral and palliative care. From these dialogues, the Office of Theology and Worship will prepare a compilation of resources consistent with the Reformed faith as expressed in the Confessions of the church, which will be submitted to the 218th assembly. ASCWP also produced a report titled "Building Community Among Strangers" – a document that helped ignite another denominational firestorm. To get along with others, ASCWP proposed, Presbyterians must abandon their rigid commitment to Jesus Christ and recognize there are many paths to God. The study depicted a multicultural banquet in which Christians who assume that Jesus Christ is Lord of all discover a great surprise: "The greatest surprise occurs when the food is blessed, not only in the name of Jesus Christ the Son of God, but also in the name of Allah, the Lord Krishna, Siddhartha Buddha, and the Goddess Gaia!" The 1998 General Assembly also rejected "Building Community."

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