Is the Modern Family Making Us Lonely? (And Is It Even Biblical?)

You're listening to the Provoke and Inspire podcast. What's up guys? This is Ben from Provoke and Inspire. And today you have just me, David, Chad and Luke are out and about doing various things around the globe, and I thought I would take advantage of this opportunity to talk about something that a recent clip from the comedian Trevor Noah brought to my mind. And it's something that I've been wrestling with for a long time, which is the nature of our family, our society, loneliness, and whether this whole modern script that we have been following is actually working. So check out this clip and then let's dive into this conversation. The one thing that nobody seems to tell you is that as a country becomes more and more developed, the one thing that gets eroded is community. Yeah, the village disappears. And what you have to do is you have to buy the village back. Yeah. You know. Yeah. So you buy the house, you literally you have to buy somebody to look after your kid. You have to buy somebody to help you clean your house. You have to buy somebody to help you fix your you have to buy somebody to cook. You have to buy. You're buying the same the same village that they tricked you into not having. Like I always, I always, I'm always amazed at the con of it all. This machine, this larger thing. Told everyone you should get your own house and you should live by yourselves. How can you still live with your parents in the same house? This is ridiculous. And so everyone goes off. They get their own house to live by themselves. They have a kid and now you need somebody to come and look after the kid. But they can't just come a few. If you you know what, you should get a bigger house. They could live with you. You could have a live in nanny. Yeah. Where I'm from, they call that an aunt or a sister, a grandmother, they call it a sister. Look, he's right. We used to have a village, but we gave that up. And now we are paying for what used to be right next door. And we're getting cheap substitutes. A nanny instead of a grandmother, a therapist instead of a friend, and daycare instead of a family. And here's what haunts me. What if this entire system, this thing that we just have accepted as normal and part of daily life? What if this was never part of God's design at all? Here's one thing I know for sure. We were built for community. There is something profound about the way God set things up, and ultimately it comes from his very nature. Do you ever consider the fact that God, in and of himself is community? Father, son, Holy Spirit, and because that is who he is, when he made us in his image, he gave us that same desire and design. So because of that, having each other is not optional. That's why even pre-fall. God looked at Adam and said, it is not good for man to be alone. That is a mind blowing thought that God created it like that and then for emphasis said, oh, by the way, you're not going to be able to cut it without somebody help. And so he brings Eve into the picture. And this is powerful because unlike the materialist or the secularist who has to just view relationships as a pragmatic means to an end or part of survival. Right. I need you to stay warm and reproduce. Instead of that, we can say, no, it's not some pragmatic, self-focused means to an end. It's part of the way I was designed to be in community with one another, and I think we see so many illustrations that emphasize and point to the fact that community, above all else, is what we desperately need. All right, now, I got to admit something, and I don't care who knows. One of my favorite shows of all time is survivor. I think it's the best. I think it's the most brilliant game show that has ever been conceived. Now, some of you are probably thinking that show is still going. Yes, it is, thankfully, and I hope it goes for decades into the future. But let me just break it down for you. In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, survivor is a show where twenty people or so are dropped in an island. They're deprived of food, they're deprived of shelter, and they're forced to play the social game where they vote each other off. And ultimately one person is the winner. Now, one of the very interesting parts of the show is towards the end where they will bring their loved ones to the island. So these people are deprived of all of these physical material needs, but then their family shows up and it is this just tear filled moment of people weeping and breaking down as they see their loved ones come onto the beach. And I cry too, by the way. But here's what's most striking about this moment in the show. Invariably, at some point, they'll interview the contestants and they will say something like this look, I was hungry. I'm tired. I'm sick of sleeping outside. I'm sick of this game in many ways. But what this moment has made me realize is that none of that matters more than love. That more than food, more than sleep, more than comfort. I need love, and this invigorates them in a way that no food could ever do. And this powerful illustration just proves something about the way human beings are built. We need each other more than anything else in this life. This is why the effects of solitary confinement are so devastating. They They've studied this, and it shows empirically that more than beatings, more than depriving people of food or comfort, that being alone is one of the most cruel things that you can do to another human being. I think that more than any of these examples, what proves our need for one another more than anything is when life gets hard. I think about a time in my own life, not that long ago, where my grandmother passed away and when her health was declining, my saint of an aunt brought her home to her place, and the weeks leading up to her death were just this beautiful coming and going of family and friends. People that loved her and surrounded her, met practical needs, sat with her and talked with her, and basically were just a family around her as she transitioned from life to death. And as brutal as this was at the same time, it was a profound picture of family and not just nuclear family, but three generations and also friends that would come around her and help guide her through this very difficult process. I think about my own life, where my dad recently has gone through a cancer journey, and in order to remove the cancer, he had to get surgery. And the recovery is very, very brutal. And once again, my saint of an aunt brought him to her house and a whole host of friends and family gathered around to help him through this process of healing. Again, a beautiful picture of how we are not meant to do these things alone. Now, as beautiful and redemptive as those pictures are, it does beg the question, how do people do hard life? In the absence of this kind of support? So many people go through the hardest things of life without a friend, let alone three generations of family surrounding them. And the fact is, this is the outworkings of the modern script, of the modern narrative. And it's this what we're all supposed to do, right? We've all heard this. You got to grow up. You got to move out of your parents house. You got to find a partner, you got to buy your own house, and then you raise your own little nuclear family alone. This is the modern script that we've all believed. In fact, it's kind of seen as the sign of maturity, right? Everyone mocks the twenty five year old, who's still living at home and won't get a job and plays video games all day and is covered in Cheeto dust. And yeah, I mean, okay, that person probably does need to move on, but built in that exaggeration, that hyperbole, is this idea that the ultimate sign of maturity is to move away from your family and to create your own little isolated nuclear reality. But the question is, is that what God designed? Clearly this is not working for us. And so we do need to ask, how did we get here? Because this is not the historical norm. And frankly, it's not even the norm of most countries and cultures around the world. This is really a Western modern paradigm and we don't even question it. When I think we really should. There's a scholar named Leo Purdue who studies ancient Israelite culture. He says family households did not consist of nuclear families in the modern understanding of a married couple and their children, but were rather multigenerational and included the social arrangement of several families. This sounds really familiar, right? Kind of like the description of the early believers in acts two forty two through forty six. It says they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and prayer. All of the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had a need. Every day they continued to meet together. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts. This is a wildly different vision of family and community, and I think it's really important we understand what were the factors and forces that led us to the modern paradigm we're at, because I think when we realize the roots of it, it'll help us to be more honest in our assessment of it. And I think it'll help us challenge whether things should stay like that. There's a scholar named Nancy Pearcey, and she's written many amazing books, but one that speaks on this towards the end is her book, Love Thy Body, and she explains how we got to the place that we are now. She begins by describing what she calls the pre-industrial family, which, as I said, was the norm for the majority of history. And this vision of family was a very unified economic unit. Now the big shift occurs during the period of industrialization, when you have the Industrial Revolution and where work went from the home to outside of the home. We are now in this reality where this is the unquestioned structure of family and society. But again, to ask the most pressing question here, does this work? Because if you were to look at Trevor Noah's point, the answer is, of course, no. Like he says, we used to have a village and we gave it up and now we're just paying to get it back. This was years ago, but I remember when I was in college, I was hired as a sports nanny. Now, what that meant was that this family primarily had boys very active. And now that I have active kids, I understand better, but they had a lot of energy and my job as a young college kid was to come in, play sports with him, and I enjoyed this part of the job for sure. But what was really telling was that really more than playing sports, what I did was drive. I would pick these kids up and from the time I picked them up till the time they went to bed, I drove them around. I had to drive to dance, I had to drive to sports. And really, the youngest kid just kind of sat in the back and was tagging along for all of it. But from a young age it made me realize, man, the mom and dad alone cannot make this family work. If I wasn't here, if I wasn't a taxi driver, this whole thing would fall apart. And it was very revealing in terms of our modern setup and how challenging it is to maintain. We live in a time where absolutely everything is outsourced. You know, where we used to have a village to fix things and to help us and to even socialize with. Now everything is a challenge, right? If we break something, we got to hire someone. We need groceries. We get them delivered. If we want to have friends, we got to somehow align our schedules and hopefully see them every few months if we're lucky. I think about when I was in college and how amazing it was to live on a floor with just a bunch of peers. And if you wanted to hang out, if you wanted to do something, all you had to do was just walk down the hallway and boom, you were having a social interaction. And yet I think about my modern context, the life I live now, and how challenging it is for modern people to even be there for one another, to even have genuine relationships and community. Honestly, it's tragic and I think it may just be the real cause of our loneliness epidemic. Not only are we overworked and stretched too thin financially, but we are lonely. That is probably the greatest indictment on this modern family structure, and whether or not it's working for us in twenty twenty three. The Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, he declared this epidemic that is so often spoken of this loneliness epidemic. He wrote this. This is an epidemic of loneliness and isolation that has been building for years. During that time, there has been a declining participation in communal life. Fewer people belong to churches or other religious institutions or are engaged with civic organizations. We move around a lot more, we change jobs more frequently, and we don't put down roots in the same way as our parents and grandparents. Really, what he's describing here are the consequences of the nuclear family, that it is so much harder to participate in life. It's so much harder to have a community. It's so much harder to interact and both offer and have the help that we need when we become these detached, isolated units. And perhaps the most devastating consequence is our loneliness. Again, back to the Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy. He says we've moved away from having confidants to contacts, from having friends to having followers, a shift from quality of friends to quantity. We are not together. We have become disconnected. The way we have set up our societies and structures is not working and as a result, we are stressed, we are overworked, and we are lonely. I think the first thing that just needs to be said unequivocally is that the nuclear family is a modern invention. It's an industrial Western capitalist invention. It's simply not biblical. You cannot find evidence that that is the ultimate design in Genesis two twenty four where it says, therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. This is often used to justify this idea that the family unit should break off and become their own isolated thing, and yet nothing in the history of ancient Israel would back this up. In fact, married sons were expected to stay near parents to work together in a symbiotic way. They inherited land. In fact, to leave was a signal of shifting loyalties. It wasn't something to be sought after. Looking at the New Testament, if you go to one first Timothy five eight, it says, but if anyone does not provide for his relatives, especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. Now, the word that is used for household here was not meant to describe you, your wife and your one and a half kids. It's the Greek word oikos and it means multiple generations. The idea of household in the Bible encompassed more than just the nuclear family. It was multigenerational and even included people that were not blood relatives. Scripture just assumes proximity. In Galatians six two it says, carry each other's burdens, and in this way you fulfill the law of Christ. Hebrews ten twenty four and twenty five says, let us consider how we may spur one another on towards love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another. But in order to do any of this, it just assumes proximity. It assumes that we're getting together more than, I don't know, maybe once every few months, but that our lives are intertwined in a meaningful way where we actually can carry each other's burdens and meet together and encourage one another. Ecclesiastes warns against isolation. It says in Ecclesiastes four nine and ten, two are better than one because they have a good return for their labor. If either of them falls down, one can help the other. But pity the one who falls and who has no one to help him. Look, I think that perfectly describes the sad state of our culture and our families today. People who are fallen, people who have fallen into ditches and into pits and into trouble and hardship and have nobody to pull them out. And let me just be very clear. I have not figured this out. I am a part of this paradigm. I live in this Western modern context and I feel busy. I can feel overworked. I can feel lonely. I can feel as though I don't have the people in my life that I need. And frankly, I'm not being the kind of person for others in a way that they need. But here's what I do know. I want to live intentionally. I don't want to just do what everyone else is doing. I want to stop and ask God, are there patterns of this world that I have inadvertently adopted that I have not questioned, that I've just followed? This is the kind of life that God has called us to live, one that is submitted to the will and ways of Jesus as demonstrated through His Word in Scripture. So would you join me in prayerfully reflecting on these questions? Is a nuclear family living alone God's ideal, or is it something that we've just adopted from our individualistic, modern Western life? How have we capitulated to world's patterns for family structure? Is it something that we've questioned? Is it something that we've actually gone to God into Scripture and asked the Holy Spirit to reveal his pattern and his design for us? What would expanding our family definition look like practically? What would we need to change to make that happen? And have we allowed busyness, selfishness, and technology to rob us of the built in community that God has designed for us to have. Here's my challenge to us. What if the exhaustion and loneliness we feel is not just a personal failure, but actually a systemic one, a structural one? What if the loneliness isn't just because we're doing something wrong, but we're trying to do something impossible? Raising a family. Building a life. Carrying our burdens completely alone. What if we've been sold a vision of success that looks like independence? But God's vision has always looked like interdependence. The early church didn't gather once a week and call it community. They shared meals, resources, and the struggles of daily life. They didn't hire out what a family used to provide for free. They didn't move away just to prove that they had matured. So maybe it's time we stop asking how do we survive this system and start asking, what if the system was never meant to work in the first place? Because until we're willing to reimagine family the way God designed it, messy and multi-generational and deeply connected, we're going to keep paying the price for a village we were never meant to lose.

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