The Productive Christian Household
Covenantalism, Productive Property, and the Household
As you may have noticed if you follow the Reading Journal, I’ve been reading a lot of C. R. Wiley lately. I’ve paired this with many podcast episodes in which he’s interviewed and his own podcast. The thing that has intrigued me about Wiley is that he seems as comfortable talking about general contracting as he does theology or ancient Greek philosophy. And he seems competent in both intellectual and practical pursuits, with several achievements to show in both.
One of the things Wiley speaks about often is the productive Christian household. All of this reading and listening to him and others with him talk about it has me thinking about it a lot lately. The productive household is a term that gets thrown around a lot in the circle of people I read and listen to. I’ve talked about it here before and have also mentioned generational thinking when it comes to how my wife and I think about parenting our children and building our household. Even though it took a while to get the idea into my thick head, I finally think I’m beginning to see a big picture of how the productive household fits together and how I need to act in my role as the head of the household.
The Christian Household’s Foundation
Households are, by nature, covenantal. This covenant starts with the marriage covenant, between a man and a woman, sanctioned by God. The household is then established and, as C. R. Wiley has put it in multiple places, it’s a matter of life and death. In the modern West, we have everything so easy that we often forget that the household is a protection for everyone involved. Neither the man nor the woman could make it very long outside of a household, although women were certainly more vulnerable when outside this shelter. This is part of why young women often stayed in their father’s household until they were married, and why young men worked to build a livelihood and a shelter quickly after coming of age. The household was protection for the woman and support for the man.
Another result of the marriage covenant is that husbands are responsible for what happens in their households. This is one of the foundational principles to understanding the Christian home. Notice that, in the Garden of Eden, even though Adam tried to squirm out of his responsibility for his wife, God still held him accountable. As many have said before me, a man is always leading his household. He may be a good leader or a bad one, but the fact that he is leading remains.
These households, built on the foundation of the binding marriage covenant, are sturdy. They not only provide protection and support to the husband and wife, but they provide a safe and healthy place for children to grow into adults. Children can learn there, not just in terms of education, but also how to work. Then, those same children act as a protection for parents in their old age, when they’re no longer able to work and their children have established their own productive households.
I’ve discussed the concept of federal headship and covenant before, so we’ll delve into that subject in a little more depth in a later essay. For now, a little history is necessary to understand the productive household and what we can do to bring it back in the 21st century.
The Productive Household
Households used to be the center of economic production. Some of you may be rolling your eyes, thinking, “He’s about to go all Wendell Berry on us…,” and some of you are probably nodding vigorously, thinking, “He’s about to go all Wendell Berry on us!” Regardless of your reaction, I think there are some valuable lessons to be learned from the history of the household, so stick with me.
The household, established on the foundation of the marriage covenant, was not only fruitful in terms of children but fruitful in terms of economy. A household would offer a service or several services to the community, and other households offered services, too. So, you’d arrange a deal. You valued a certain amount of money more than you valued the time, materials, and effort that went into your service, and another household valued the time, materials, and effort of your service more than they valued that same amount of money. So, you trade: you provide the service and they provide the funds (you could substitute the funds for another service, but you get the idea). Ideally, everyone leaves the transaction pleased.
A family would work together to provide for themselves and provide certain things to their community. The individual members were especially dependent on one another, and the households in a community were dependent on each other to a degree, as well. This binds people together; when you depend on someone for something important for your family, you handle relationships with that household differently than when the relationship is completely voluntary.
That all changed, though, with the industrial revolution, which divided the members of the household into separate units. In some ways, this was simply an outworking of the philosophy of individualism that was already taking root in the West. Instead of a household running an enterprise together, the father began to go work in a factory and the wife stayed home with the children. As the industrial revolution continued to reshape society, older children no longer balanced school with work in the family trade or an apprenticeship with another local household but were sent off to government schools. Women were then at home, doing housework that was made increasingly easier with labor-saving devices produced in the 20th century.
At this point, the household essentially became a place for recreation and relaxation. Education, healthcare for elderly family members, and economic production had all been moved to separate places outside the home; the household had been divided. Wendell Berry describes it this way,
In modern marriage, then, what was once a difference of work, became a division of work. And in this division, the household was destroyed as a practical bond between husband and wife. It was no longer a condition, but only a place. It was no longer a circumstance that required, dignified, and rewarded the enactment of mutual dependence, but the site of mutual estrangement.1
No longer was the household the center of life for people, the foundation on which everything was built and on which you depended. Now, the corporation and the government have stepped in to do those things for you. Society has atomized, and we’re all so many greased BBs in a pouch, as Douglas Wilson puts it, dependant on the services provided by Big Everything (Big Agriculture, Big Tech, Big Government, Big Healthcare, etc.). We centralized everything because it was more efficient and are now dealing with the fallout as we realize that, it turns out, life isn’t all about efficiency.
Striking the Balance
So what do we do from here? Do we eschew all technology and, like the Amish, retreat to our own carefully gatekept communities? I don’t think so (although, I think the Amish could teach us a thing or two about how to think about technology). I’m not calling for a cultural retreat, nor am I calling us back to purely all-natural living in a commune somewhere, the smell of patchouli rising from our camp like incense. I am asking, though, that we all take a minute to review the game film from the last 200 years. Are we better off now than we were then, or are we lying in the hospital bed on life support?
Some might object, “Things are better now than they ever have been in terms of people going hungry and the opportunity to make more money.” In some ways that’s true. Most of that is teetering on the edge of collapse, though. As we’ve seen the fragility of the supply chain over the last few years, I’m much more inclined to think that Americans created a highly centralized (and highly fragile) system and, up until the last twenty years or so, benefitted from our capital as the wealthiest and strongest nation on earth. We shot ourselves in the foot, though; the thing that made us the strongest and wealthiest nation was the personal industry of our people. By that, I mean the grit of men and women who saw work that needed doing, established businesses, and went to it, regardless of the difficulty of the work. Centralizing everything and giving away household responsibility (and, thereby, some of the challenges that make people stronger) to the government and corporations for things like subsidized college education, social security, employer-run retirement plans, and the “security” of an office job only served to make us fragile, just like the system we surrendered to. The additional hit for families, though, is that this made us weak because we didn’t have to face many significant, high-stakes challenges unless we chose to. We’ve surrendered our personal agency and become weak, while the government and corporations have become more involved in our lives than ever.
There’s a balance that we’ve got to try and strike. I appreciate the fact that I can refrigerate and freeze food, and I’m a huge fan of indoor plumbing; I think both are a blessing from God. But I don’t appreciate that most of the food we’re handed as “normal” is something that, a few generations ago, would have been unrecognizable. I don’t appreciate the chronological snobbery with which we look back at people from even just 100 years ago. If you step back and take a broad look at history, we’re the odd ones out. I think there’s a way to accept most of the industrial and technological advances that have come and discipline ourselves in our use of them. But it has to be balanced with a respect for tradition and generational wisdom.
Practical Parting Principles
A few things to review and then some principles to help us understand how we should be thinking about these productive households we’re trying to build.
First, the Christian household, whether you buy into the necessity of it being productive or not, is established on the foundation of covenantalism. A man and a woman make a covenant, established and sanctioned by God, and a household is born. The two are now one, and their lives are bound together. God’s design is that they would then be fruitful, both in terms of having children and in taking dominion of the earth. The husband, as the federal head, represents his family and is responsible for everything that goes on in his household; he must guard and keep it. Without an understanding of this covenantal foundation, it will be difficult to build a Christian household.
Second, the modern home is more of a recreation center than it is a household. It’s a place where various individuals, loosely bonded, come to unwind, recreate, and sleep. This is historically unusual. Biblically, the home should be the center of education for children, whether they’re private or homeschooled. A child’s education should be rooted in the home as the responsibility of the parents.
Third, we need to regain an appreciation and see the value of productive property, recognizing that one of the greatest assets for acquiring and tending to productive property is our household. Productive property can be anything from a business, a dividend-paying stock, real estate, or livestock; essentially, any property that generates income not directly associated with how much time you spend working with it. Some call this passive income but it’s a little misleading as you do still have to work to maintain and tend to that property. The divisions that have resulted from the modern mindset regarding work have been, largely, unhelpful. We need to remember that part of our responsibility as parents is to teach our children to work. What better way to do this than to have them help you grow and develop your “portfolio” of productive property that can then help provide for them as they grow into their own households?
Lastly, remember the chief end. We should have a mission that is unique to our household but can also encompass the various talents and abilities of the household’s members. I feel like I’ve only just started to nail this down. Of course, if you’re only just starting to have kids or are still a pretty young family, a level of flexibility needs to be built in because you don’t know how many kids you’ll have or what their talents will be. This might mean that, early on, your mission is a little broader than it will be later. As long as it’s specific enough for you to be moving in a definite direction that is glorifying to God, then you’re on the right track. Remember that that is the chief end of every household: to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
God’s glory is the goal of all of this. I realize that, to some, this all sounds pretty foreign. To sum it all up, our goal should be the glory of God by submitting to Him and, thereby, blessing our families, churches, and communities. We shouldn’t want to be productive just to spend any wealth we accumulate on ourselves for our own pleasure. Rather, we should seek excellence and productivity for the blessing of those around us and to bless our descendants with generational wealth, both material and cultural.
Lord willing, a couple of generations from now, our great-grandchildren will remember our work to bless them with productive property and to give them a spiritual inheritance of life in covenant with the one, true God. May God, in His mercy, let it be so.
Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, read by Nick Offerman (Landover, MD: Recorded Books, Inc., 2020), Libby Audiobook, 12 hr., 54 min.
Glad I get to be the one to come along-side you in living this out!