The Sacred Family — Our Bible App

Day 1 of 3: What Is Family?

“Chosen families are also often born out of necessity. Many queer individuals do not rely on their biological families in ways that other individuals might be able to. Anywhere from being completely rejected by family, to experiencing extreme homophobia at home, to simply not feeling affirmed by a biological family are some realities that many queers face. This type of disconnect from the family one grew up in, stresses the importance of building a new, intentional, healthy family.”
From Complicating Queer Theory — an online resource about queer inclusion and representation

A man. A woman. Wedding rings. A couple of kids. A house with a picket fence. A pet dog named Fargo. Suburbia. Neighbors who look the same. Everyone is healthy. Everyone is happy.

“The nuclear family,” they called it. It was the image of the perfect little family, and it was something we should pursue at all costs if we want to be happy and fulfilled. It was what God wanted for us.

Or at least that’s what they told us.

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But how often do our biological families look like this? How many of our biological parents still live together? How many of us have mixed families — the meshing of two previous marriages into a new and sometimes awkward blend of values and traditions? How many of us live with a single parent who struggles each month to make ends meet? How many of us are one of a dozen siblings and had to become a parent to their older siblings because their parents couldn’t be there? How many of us carry the weight of losing a parent or a sibling too soon? How many of us have lost what previously felt like a safe and stable home?

If I had to guess, I’d say that many of us have probably never really seen a “nuclear family.”

You see, the model of the “nuclear family” is a myth. It is not real. Even cisgendered, heterosexual couples so often fail at achieving this model. So, if even the cis/het people in our lives cannot achieve the “nuclear family” ideal, why do we feel so much shame around not being able to do so? And why do so many of the Christians use this model to invalidate our pursuits of finding, creating, and molding our own families?

Like the cis/het people around us, the queer community has been sold a counterfeit image of what it means to be a family. The “nuclear family” is an idol, a golden calf championed by those who hold “traditional Christian values.” It is based upon a reality that is rarely, if ever, realized. Yet, if even these “traditional Christians” often cannot achieve their own familial ideals, why do we feel the need to aspire for it?

From a young age, we have been taught to internalize the belief that the only way to have a healthy and happy family is to always keep our ties with our relatives. “Blood is thicker than water,” right? But what if that’s not true? Few people realize that the previously mentioned quote is quite ironically misquoted. The ancient proverb correctly goes “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb,” which really implies that it is our chosen bonds and relationships that matter most, not the “water of the womb” or in other words, the people we choose to be in relationship with are more important than the biological relationships we share.

This week, we begin to explore a much healthier view of family. It is time for us to be brave and let go of aspiring to society’s models of family and reclaim a new model for family — a queered model of family.

Think about some of the narratives of family you have internalized. What are they? When you imagine your ideal family, what does it look like? Who is part of it, and who is not? Would you consider your family to be a group of relatives or a community that is chosen and formed by you?

Jimmy Tidmore

Day 1 of 3: What Is Family?

Start reading this 3-day devotional in the app. Find it on the Featured shelf.