The church has been perhaps the most obvious warrior on behalf of the family in the past century. But there’s been an unfortunate side-effect to how church leaders and theologians have presented the church’s teachings about the family in recent decades: the tendency has been to stress the similarity between the family and the church, even to the point of blurring the boundary between them.

The costs of this have been to distort the church’s understanding of itself, by marginalizing its essentially political nature, and to create confusion by investing the family with a quasi-salvific quality. In other words, there are good reasons we should hesitate to refer to the family as a “domestic church” and to the church as a family.

Comparing the family with the church has watered down the church’s political nature.