The Human Family is Weird.
The deep roots and beautiful mess of our family tree
This essay is based on a sermon from a series about family relationships at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, CA.
A few weeks ago, I heard a sermon that began by calling all of us in the congregation “WEIRD.”
I obviously felt seen.
We quickly learned that WEIRD was actually an acronym for:
Western
Educated
Industrialized
Rich
Democratic
(Still feel seen, I guess?)
Historians, evolutionary biologists, psychologists, and more have begun to use this term to describe the particular type of human being that has emerged out of the habits, culture, and systems of what we typically call the Western World. The hallmark of that type of person is their sense of individualism.
Those humans (probably most of you reading this) are WEIRD—both in the words in the acronym, but also because we are actually the exception in this world. The vast, vast, vast majority of cultures are not WEIRD. Rather than individualistic, they are kin-based societies where people identify themselves as part of an extend family or tribe. Their hallmark is a deep communal identity.
As this sermon continued, the preacher praised the aspects of the non-WEIRD world: the interconnectedness, the bonds of belonging that comes from feeling like you’re a part of something larger. All good stuff.
And that’s when I started to have some gut reactions.
“No, I’m a unique individual. And that’s the most important thing.”
Some core parts of me were pushing back hard, and I wanted to understand why. So I got the book The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich and discovered some pretty fascinating stuff.
Henrich’s central idea is that Westerners became WEIRD because of a change in marriage that happened around the year 600. Around that time, Pope Gregory the Great outlawed cousin marriage, which was very common at the time. That system had its benefits. Marrying cousins helped the family grow while keeping its people, property, and inheritance together. This served as a wide support structure for that family unit, and in fact, it was this relational structure that helped humans survive and migrate all over the world.
But the Pope severed that structure (perhaps for alleged health concerns, but the reasoning isn’t too clear), forcing people to leave their family unit to marry and often traveling far and wide to find people they weren’t related to. Over time, this cultural and geographical change gave rise to a new way of thinking. Because the ties had been broken, people stopped thinking of themselves as part of a wider kin group, and instead their sense of identity shrunk into nuclear families (parents and children) and finally to the self. That change has magnified the uniqueness and peculiarities of the individual, but has also had dramatic effects on our social bonds, sense of belonging, isolation, and loneliness.
One simple shift transformed the world, and we’re living with the repercussions of it today—for better or worse—both in the culture around us, but also in the ways we think about ourselves and one another.
The Bible has a lot to say about families, and there certainly isn’t one-size-fits-all model. In scripture, we find your typical nuclear family, but also polygamous families, adoptive families, and chosen families. We find singleness idealized and marriage seen as less-than. We find relationships built on adultery and betrayal. We find children born from servants and children born of the elderly and children born of God.
In short, it’s messy.
Why? Because life was messy then, and life is messy now.
Jesus—who has his own messy genealogy—offers some strong words about family. And to a society that was woven together tightly in kinship bonds, in some ways, he does a little Pope-like severing of his own.
In Luke 14:25–27, he says:
“Whoever comes to me and doesn’t hate father and mother, spouse and children, and brothers and sisters — yes, even one’s own life — cannot be my disciple. Whoever doesn’t carry their own cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”
He says that discipleship — following God — requires us to hate our brother, sister, spouse, and parents. Over in the Gospel of Matthew, that word “hate”is softened a bit.
In Matthew 10:37, he says:
“Those who love father or mother more than me aren’t worthy of me. Those who love son or daughter more than me aren’t worthy of me.”
Discipleship requires us to love our family less than God. These are startling words intended to grab our attention.
But Jesus never asks us not to love and care for our families. Not at all. But as we do that, he reminds us of a deeper truth: our container of family (or tribe or clan or community) is expansive and our love, our energy, our care, and our compassion do not stop at our family boundaries.
Instead, God’s family — the human family — is wider than that.
Over and over again throughout his ministry, Jesus tunes his attention and tends to those that have tumbled out of the boundaries of the community or family.
People who are ill or hurting and are deemed “unclean.”
People who have made mistakes, even committed crimes.
Even people who will betray him.
Jesus tells stories of the “lost.”
Lost sheep.
Lost coins.
Lost sons.
Jesus offers his care and attention to those peculiar individuals who don’t fit in, who are different, who don’t do it “right,” who have been isolated. He truly sees and understands them, and his message to them is simple: “You might not feel like it, but you still matter, and you’re still part of this family.”
Jesus reminds us that we must constantly stretch our communities of belonging and attend to our tendency to push people out of the family—something we struggle with in our world.
Our family/tribal struggle might be our preeminent challenge right now. That struggle has sown seeds of war and violence, political division, battles in our organizations & communities, and even contempt in our friendships and family relationships.
This is an age-old thing.
But just as age-old is Jesus’s proclamation of the inherent value and worth of every single individual, which comes from knowing that all people are part of God’s family.
Luckily, we’ve already begun journeying to that realization.
As WEIRD people, it turns out that our shift to individualism — for all of its downsides — has come with some beautiful things as well. WEIRD people may be self-focused, but one of our other markers is that we have more innate trust of people outside of normal families and communities.
That transformation came after centuries of “Good Samaritan”-like moments where we had to mix and mingle and eventually marry people who were different from us, including people we were afraid of. Our fear of the other diminished because we had to live with the other, build families with the other, and in some ways we became the other.
A decree from the Pope not to marry our cousins forced us out of our comfort zones and into proximity with diversity. Out of that, we got some even more incredible things. Universities, professional guilds, and artistic communities all emerged out of this shift because people now saw themselves and others as individuals with unique talents and interests, and they could now voluntarily choose new ways to connect and be together.
In our current world of tribalism, we could wait for another decree to forcibly burst our tribal bubbles. Maybe that will happen.
Or we can choose to hear that age-old decree of Jesus: that the human family tree is wide with deep roots that extend across this earth and into every single person that walks and has walked this life.
When I think about deep roots, I can’t help but think about this 1940s photo of my grandmother my family recently dug up. I posted it on Instagram because I loved it so much, and dozens and dozens of people messaged me to say, “Wow, you look just like her!”
In my almost 40 years, I have never, ever been told that before.
But they all said, “Yeah, it’s right there in the smile.”
As I took a look at the photo again, for the first time it really occurred to me that my smile isn’t just my own. It also belongs to her. And she got her smile from someone else — her mother and her father. And they got it from their parents. And they got it from their parents… And on and on.
All of them are still smiling because of me.
You. Me. We have ages of humanity swimming through us. Scientifically speaking, it’s in your genes. But it’s also simply in the story of who you are.
You are the product of all sorts of relationships.
Ancestors whose lives became intertwined intentionally and by chance.
People who had messy pasts.
People who faced great challenges and great successes.
People who were held high esteem and people of meager means.
People who travelled far across land and sea.
People who farmed the land and went to market.
People who studied the stars and wrote stories.
People who invented language and discovered fire.
You are “you”: a wonderfully weird and good individual.
But you are also “us,” a sibling in the human family with precious relatives all across this Earth.
Day by day, you are writing one new little chapter in the book of humanity — adding new life, new love, and new meaning to our collective story.
Jesus calls us to realize that each and every person is doing that, too.
And that is the beautiful mess of our human family.
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Find more words and creative worship from me at samlundquist.com
