A Compelling Vision of Family, Almost
A Review of
Households of Faith: Practicing Family in the Kingdom of God
Emily Hunter McGowin
Paperback: IVP, 2025
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Reviewed by Lindsey Cornett
As I write this review, Doug Wilson is back in the news, spewing misogynistic dribble while claiming to speak for God and the church. He has the ear of the media, of politicians, and of many American Christians. I grew up in the 90s and early-2000s, steeped in all the trappings of American, evangelical life of which Wilson is one of the most extreme spokespeople. I remember well Focus on the Family, purity culture, and sermons including instructions for spanking children in a God-honoring way.
Like many of my generation, I left behind much of the Dobson and Wilson-esque theology and practice in the 2010s, but parenting and family life is where I have most acutely felt this challenge. We need sound theologians to more often and more clearly articulate a better way forward than the fundamentalist and patriarchal narratives that dominate media and popular understandings of Christian life.
Enter the book Households of Faith: Practicing Family in the Kingdom of God by Emily Hunter McGowin. McGowin is a theologian and priest, and in this book she does the essential work of articulating an alternative but entirely orthodox theology of family life, rooted in our apprenticeship to Jesus and strongly opposed to the “powers and principalities” that make family life challenging. “Learning how to be disciples as a family in this moment,” she says, “has been the most challenging task of our lives.”
McGowin goes on to explore how what many uphold as a Christian or biblical family blueprint is merely traditional; that is, “the form of family practiced for most of history,” but without much basis in Scripture. She writes, “…many of us have come to consider as natural and God-given what was really created in the nineteenth century: one male wage-earner, one female homemaker, a consumerist household, gender-role specification, and small family units that largely fend for themselves.”
In unpacking these ideas, she looks at the life and teachings of Jesus, as well as Paul’s epistles, to articulate clearly how neither offers anything that might be construed as a “family blueprint.” She draws out how little Jesus said about family and how his own life did not mirror our American, western tendency to elevate biological relationships above all else. She says, “…Jesus shows us a full human life does not require marriage, children, a private home, or a regular source of income. The one who reveals what it means to be human did not possess any of the often-assumed markers of a successful, mature adulthood.”
She goes on: “Let’s note that Jesus says nothing about what women and men ought to be and do. In fact, it is striking that through all four gospels, in all the teaching recorded from Jesus’s time with his disciples, Jesus never talks about gender roles or gives instructions based on notions of masculinity and femininity. None of his preaching, parables, or warnings require or endorse sex-based tasks or gender-based norms of behavior…What’s more, Jesus repeatedly subverts the whole notion of human hierarchies on which the idea of gender roles is built.”
When it comes to Paul, she writes, “Paul was not answering the question: What is the proper structure for a Christian family or household? Rather, Paul was answering the question: How should Christians live in their current social situations in light of Christ’s current lordship and soon return?” And so, McGowin encourages the reader to consider their own “current social situations” and use that to determine how best to live as a family, encouraging us to both discern and improvise as life and faith require.
Households of Faith is also an important read because of how it addresses abuse and dysfunction in family systems and in churches. McGowin is vulnerable and honest about the dysfunctional families in which she and her husband grew up and discusses the prevalence of abuse in society, including in Christian families. She articulates well just how truly challenging it is to be a healthy family in a culture and economy built to support and promote isolation, consumerism, addiction, and violence. For many decades, the overarching narrative in American evangelicalism (coming from Dobson, Wilson, et al) has been that church attendance and traditional gender roles are sufficient to ensure American, middle-class conceptions of safety and prosperity for our families. McGowin elucidates how those should not necessarily be our goals in the first place, but also that something different is required for health and wholeness to be cultivated.
She writes, “Christians have a responsibility to face, name, and seek to remedy the social diseases that produce such devastating symptoms. But it’s important to be clear about what can and can’t be done at the family level. Liberation and healing from society’s sins won’t happen as a solo effort, not least because imperialism, sexism, racism, and consumer capitalism are part of the world’s powers and principalities.” She argues that American families often reinforce social hierarchies but must instead learn to practice a mutuality that extends beyond our biological kin, to the entirety of our church and the neighborhood beyond. Our families must become communities within which we embody and enact shalom, or in McGowin’s words, “…our families become more fully themselves as they join with others in mutual love, healing, and liberation.”
This is, perhaps, the most compelling vision of family I’ve seen written and articulated in Christian nonfiction.
All that being said, I found a significant gap in Households of Faith and grew increasingly frustrated by it as the book continued, and that is the absence of any reference to the LGBTQ+ community. Given her employment in both ACNA and at Wheaton College, it would have been foolish to expect McGowin to articulate a fully affirming and inclusive theology. I imagine it would be vocationally prohibitive for her to put those views in print even if she did hold them. But she goes beyond being nonaffirming, instead writing as though LGBTQ+ individuals and their families are not worth even mentioning or considering in the conversation. As best as I can identify (having read the book carefully, cross-referenced the index, and used keyword searches), the words gay, LGBTQ, homosexual, heterosexual, and same-sex never once appear in this book. How can one write a book about families in 2025 and not even mention these realities?
In the introduction, in a section titled “Real Families in the Real World,” she writes, “Many kinds of Christian households exist, including single adults, single-parent families, couples with no children, divorced and remarried families with stepchildren, families headed by grandparents, and more.” We might give credit for the “…and more” and the reader might fill in the blanks, but should that be their responsibility? In most other ways, McGowin’s book is inclusive. She is careful to mention the ethnic or racial background of the theologians she quotes (even to the detriment of the writing’s flow and ease of sentence structure); she candidly discusses racism, sexism, and ableism; she seems to make every effort to be thorough in this regard. And because of that, the absolute erasure of our LGBTQ+ siblings and neighbors feels more jarring and confusing.
Besides the aforementioned “and more,” the closest McGowin came to acknowledging the presence of LGBTQ+ people within the church and within families is more than halfway through the book, in Chapter 7, “Singleness and Marriage.” She writes, “Early church leaders fought about whether marriage was inherently sinful because of sex. Contemporary churches, by contrast, largely assume sex is good (not sinful) and fight instead about gender roles. Early church leaders fought about whether divorced and widowed spouses could remarry. Contemporary churches largely ignore that question and fight instead about who can get married to begin with.” Like the example from the introduction, she fails to go beyond vague implication.
Perhaps McGowin hoped to follow a “third way,” seeking not to alienate either side of the affirming/nonaffirming church debate. But I was reminded of conversations about children’s picture books, in which critics have pointed out that it’s more likely for picture books to feature animal or dinosaur characters than children of color, and not including humans doesn’t make BIPOC children feel more seen and included. In the case of Households of Faith, being vague is not enough to make all people feel included.
Many of McGowin’s arguments seem to favor LGBTQ+ affirmation and the absolute support of households with same-sex couples or queer children. For example, in exploring what the Old Testament has to teach about family, she writes, “…the emphasis of the Hebrew Bible is decidedly on the family’s function rather than on its form.” Later, in discussing the various challenges faced by families in twenty-first century America and reminding the reader of the Holy Spirit’s active presence, she says, “…the horizon of what’s possible is not limited to what we’ve always done. It never has been and never will be.” When it comes to gender roles, she articulates a theology of ever-increasing freedom, moving away from strict binaries.
The cognitive move from these ideas into full affirmation and inclusion of all LGBTQ+ people is not a difficult one to make; and yet because McGowin does not make the point herself, I struggled to make sense of her work in this book. How are these arguments to hold together in our “current social situation”? Early in the book, she says, “So much Christian talk about families deals in abstract ideals rather than embodied realities.” Indeed.
As a heterosexual, cisgendered woman in a “traditional” marriage, it would be easy for me to recommend this book unreservedly, because of the very, very good work it is doing on patriarchy, family structures, discipleship, and kingdom ethics. And yet, I want to do better to consider the perspectives of my LGBTQ+ siblings, and as I do so, it gives me significant pause. If you identify as LGBTQ+ or parent LGBTQ+ children, I would read this book with care. Perhaps you can work through McGowin’s ambiguity with no issues and imagine your own place within her exposition. On the other hand, it would be perfectly reasonable for you to skip this book entirely.
McGowin’s clear linking of the family to the kingdom and to Christ is powerful, sorely needed in a Christian culture trying to forge a path away from the high-control, fundamentalist, and conscriptive blueprints that defined Evangelical family practices for decades. I am a parent of three young children, and I wanted to love this book because I need this book. After so many years of church hurt, and as I try to raise my kids in a world hell-bent on malformation, I am desperate for a vision of “practicing family in the kingdom of God” that feels realistic, faithful, and hopeful.
Households of Faith was almost that book.
Lindsey Cornett
Lindsey Cornett is a loud talker, obsessive coffee drinker, and lover of the written word who lives in downtown Indianapolis with her scientist husband, 3 kids, and crazy Bernedoodle. Most days, you’ll find her wrangling the dog, managing snacks, reheating her coffee, and trying to savor as much joy and gratitude as she can in the middle of these very full days. Lindsey writes a monthly-ish email newsletter about the intersections of faith, community, and curiosity at lindseycornett.substack.com.
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