Sermon on the Mount

Mary Whitehouse

The Subversive Family Ferdinand Mount (Jonathan Cape £9.50) Anyone who starts a book with the words 'The family is a subversive organisation' must be aiming at controversy

to cover its inadequacies. At least that was My immediate reaction. My second — that

the author must be solemnly and totally confident of the validity of his assertion. And it was this reaction that turned out to be correct, though in a rather unexpected way.

As this erudite book, with its vast amount of research, progresses, it becomes clear that its writing was as much an in- tellectual pilgrimage for Mr Mount as it is for the reader, who, if he is to make the Most of it, must be prepared to question if not jettison, en route, just about all his and Perhaps especially her preconceived and cherished ideas about the virtues and im- portance, not only of the family as an enti- ty, but of all those fringe but significant elements of the family which we take for granted.

The Subversive Family teaches us a very great deal, provides us with a wealth of

quotable quotes and constantly challenges not only our prejudices but our — and society's — deeply held and cherished beliefs — 'the hostility of Christianity to the family dates back 2,000 years', for a start.

Ferdinand Mount begins by quoting the words of Jesus (Mark 10, 6-9) which we use in the marriage service and says that 'It is hard to read [these words] as a positive assertion of the spiritual importance of

marriage', which, he says, is 'wholly ab- sent' from the Gospels. He claims that Jesus was making only a biological and social statement.

But anyone who has experienced the realities of keeping together what 'God

bath joined' surely realises that the very ef- fort and commitment to do so has real spiritual connotations, especially at moments of crisis.

Is there not a crippling dishonesty — intellectual and moral — running through

the whole business?' Mr Mount asks. The

'whole business' being the integration of Marriage, with sexual intimacy at its heart, into the Christian Gospel. Marriage is one thing and always has been, he says. The other thing, in his view, is how the Church, a its efforts to make respectable the Physical expressions of man's sexuality, has actually denied the essential truth of Jesus's words — 'If any man come to me and hate hot his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sister; yes, and bps own life also, he cannot be my disciple'. BY insisting on a literal interpretation of the

word 'hate' at this point Ferdinand Mount devalues not only the essential challenge of

these words but demonstrates a certain

dishonesty or, dare I suggest, ignorance of the Bible itself. Jesus also said 'If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out' and no one takes that literally. Surely Jesus in using the word 'hate' in relation to the family was under-

lying the possibility of an ultimate choice between even those dearest to us and Himself. A choice which, in one way or another, many of us have had to face and,

in deciding for what we believed Jesus would have us do, have known that however difficult, perhaps even bitter, that choice may be, ultimately it has been for love of our family as well as for Christ.

Mr Mount goes on to look in depth at the history of the influence of both Church and State on the attitude of parents to their children. This makes very salutary reading and does much to expose what, for exam- ple, he rightly claims to be the myth that in earlier days parents had less love and con- cern for their children than we do now.

1 never could believe that mothers who swaddled their infants and put them out to wetnurses somehow loved them less and was delighted to see how effectively, in his chapter 'The Myth of the Independent Mother', he makes mincemeat of Professor Shorter's claim that such mothers did 'not care' and that was why he said 'their children vanished in the ghastly slaughter of the innocents' that was their traditional child-rearing. Mr Mount draws on literature even as far back as the first cen- tury to expose the Professor's inadequacies of logic and research. And, in doing so, quotes Plutarch's letter of condolence to his wife on the death of a little daughter surely one of the most moving things in the book. It could indeed have been written by any sorrowing father to a mourning mother in the centuries between — 'Just as it was the sweetest thing in the world for us to hold her in our arms and look at her and listen to her, so now the thought of her must live with us and bring us more joy than sorrow'.

However, in his efforts to establish that tastes have changed little over the centuries, Mr Mount claims all that has happened is that popular taste is now legally and economically able to satisfy itself. Such a position takes no account whatever of the 'hard sell' or of the power of the electronic media to give or withhold publicity for ideas, for publications and also, upon occa- sion, for fact. In order to reinforce his claim he refers to our complaint about the BBC's Alf Garnett monologue in which he imagines the Queen (Elizabeth II) telling Prince Philip 'You're pissed'. Mount goes on to infer that it is not popular taste which has changed but 'the ability of respectable opinion to enforce its preferences'. Well, if I may say so, it was the disreputable opin- ion of a very few which forced its prejudices on the many millions who were watching that programme! To wipe out, as Mount does, the years between the ballads of the first and second Elizabeth and to claim, as he does, that only 'respectable' opinion in our day — i.e. not that of 'the common people', whatever that may mean — would find offensive the involvement of the Queen and her Consort in such coarse ribaldry, is to stretch belief beyond the limit.

I found my own prejudices — if that's the word — against militant feminists rein- forced in his chapter on 'Woman, Power and Marriage'. It brought me back to my own fundamental belief that however great, however sad, however unfair are the in- justices women have suffered through the centuries and — in spite of the feminists — still often suffer, equality in matters of the emotions is not something which, in the last resort, can be legislated for.

Ferdinand Mount, in assessing and acknowledging the impact of feminist philosophy on marriage today says, 'It is within marriage that the notions of equality and openheartedness have existed long before they became part of a political pro- gramme' and 'it was never suggested that they could be achieved without forebearance and self-sacrifice...The old ideals of marriage were 'not, and are not, opposed to women's rights, indeed it is in them that we first find those rights asserted. What the old ideals were, and are, opposed to is egotism, whether male or female'. Which surely is precisely what Jesus himself taught! It's been a fascinating and rich pilgrimage — clearly as much for Mr Mount as for his readers.