In the new First Things, Gilbert Meilaender takes a bite out of Crunchy Cons. He’s put off, as I admit I was, by Dreher’s apparent disdain for non-crunchies:

A strong sense of impatience runs through the pages of Crunchy Cons. Perhaps it is the impatience of the prophet, and, to the degree that it is, one must attempt to learn from it. Still, over the years I have not found the folks who sit in church with me to be as vapid as Dreher seems to think they are. I admit that, on those occasions when for one reason or another I have been at a Catholic Mass, the liturgy (let us not even mention the hymnody) has largely failed to move me.

Still, even as a Lutheran, I would never say (as Dreher does), that “if the only contact a typical American Catholic has with Catholic teaching and thought is what he hears at Mass, he will remain a self-satisfied ignoramus.” I would not say it, in part, because I have watched ordinary bourgeois folk struggle in the different ways to take seriously what happens in the church’s worship. And I would not say it, in part, because, evidently unlike Dreher, I do not suppose they were self-satisfied ignoramuses before coming to church. Nor do I think that “traditional Christian values [make] so little apparent difference in the lives many conservative believers lead.”

Meilaender also questions the crunchies’ idea of being “mission-minded” about raising kids: shaping their character, insulating them from mass culture, and raising “rebels with a cause” as Dreher puts it:

There must be a way to take seriously the rearing of one’s children without focusing with such intensity on “family as mission” (probably the central concept of Dreher’s chapter on education). Doing the best we can to rear our children is a task that is both obligatory and (sometimes) satisfying, but to clothe it in the language of “mission” begins to lose something essential to the relation between parents and children: namely, the mystery of it all.

Child-rearing is not pottery or sculpture; the materials in our hands turn out to have ideas of their own. Most of what we know about the task we learn only too late, after our mistakes have been made. Rather than a mission of rearing countercultural children, we have the task of doing the best we can, in love, to set our children on the way in life. We teach them how to behave, we try to set them on the right path and shape their character properly, but we don’t own their souls. They must for a time obey us, but they don’t have to share all our likes and dislikes.

He worries that an excessive focus on the family (pardon the expression) can, like anything else, become idolatrous:

The most important issue, however, lies in the way the book’s discussion of the family as mission-minded intersects with religion. I have already recounted how the women with whom Dreher’s wife Julie came to be friends in Brooklyn shared a belief “that there was something supremely important about caring for their children.” In that context Julie also comments: “All of us wanted more than anything to be a real part of our baby’s life. A baby, that’s a human being. That’s a soul. That’s a life. The baby is not an accessory. He’s not part of life. He’s everything.”

But no, as a matter of metaphysical fact, he’s not everything. We understand, of course, how a devoted and caring mother might sometimes feel that he is. We understand how he might absorb so much of her time and energy as to seem to be everything. We understand that caring for him is her vocation in life. We understand that the tie between her and her child is so deep and intimate that nothing could entirely efface it. But her child is not everything.

To love that child more than Jesus is, we have it on good authority, to be unworthy of Jesus. To bring that child to baptism is to hand him over to God, who must be the guarantor of his existence, and to the church, which must accept responsibility for him. There is something stiflingly possessive in this account of the parent-child bond. It is, no doubt, understandable–even admirable–in a world where so many children are left simply to fend for themselves, but it sometimes strikes a disturbing note.

Not being a parent myself, I can’t really offer informed comments on people’s parenting style. But I do think there is a danger in making “family” the center of everything. And, as a Lutheran, I’m inclined to argee with Meilaender that the extent to which parents can shape their children’s characters has limits imposed both by human nature and the stubbornness of original sin.

Meilaender adds that it’s curious to bemoan “alienation and a loss of community” while at the same time praising the virtues of self-sufficiency (growing your own food, living the agrarian lifestyle, etc.). Whatever its flaws, a market economy connects us by making us dependent on others for things we can’t do for ourselves.

He concludes:

There is much that strikes me as on-target in Crunchy Cons, along with a good bit that strikes me as misguided or ill informed, but where the book goes awry has less to do with substance than with tone. As Reinhold Niebuhr noted, if one really wants to be a prophet, one may need to be an itinerant; it is hard to hang around those who have been bludgeoned by our critique. No doubt such prophets are sometimes needed by all of us, but I wonder whether the tone of this book might not have been more successful had its author been less intent on demonstrating that those who live in ways different from his own are flawed souls–and more intent simply on depicting the goods he has found without invidious comparison with goods others enjoy.