Learning something from the French?

May 6, 2014 by

By Andrew Symes

Comment se traduit “filiation” en Anglais? (How is “filiation” translated in English?) This question came up at a recent meeting between a small group of Christian traditional family activists from England and some leaders from La Manif Pour Tous (Demonstration for all) in Paris. The unpopular Government of French President Francois Hollande introduced same sex marriage last year at the same time as the Coalition government did here in the UK; there was considerable opposition to the proposals and the legislation was forced through. But there the similarity between the two countries ends.

In England, books and articles were written, petitions signed, parliamentarians lobbied and speeches made, but there was almost no public protest – Christians in particular seemed divided and reluctant to create a fuss. By contrast in so-called secular France, those opposed to the revolutionary neo-pagan innovations on family and gender ensured a vigorous debate in various media, at the popular level as well as at a more academic and philosophical level. Most impressively they mobilised a series of major demonstrations, culminating in a day in January 2013 when more than a million people took to the streets of Paris in a totally peaceful event sending a strong and unmistakeable message to the government. The March comprised students, young families, groups from Protestant and evangelical churches, some socialists, Moslems and gay people, totally confounding the stereotype of opposition to gay marriage confined to elderly right wing Catholics. Last week the visiting group from England was privileged to meet the logistical genius (still in his twenties) who organised the protest and the continuing campaign, together with one of the key leaders of the movement, a leader of a local authority who is also an evangelical Christian.

The main issue uniting the protestors was not a Bible based concern about the ethics of homosexual practice (although this was shared by the majority) but the issue of “filiation”. We don’t have an equivalent to this word in English. It means something like ‘genealogical line’ – the passing down of unique characteristics through human reproduction and in the culture of biological families – which is central to our identity as individual human beings. While we all know instinctively that this is hugely important, as the popularity of the TV programme “Who do you think you are?” shows. But in the debate about gay marriage in England, to talk about the need and even the right of people to know their ancestry, and the importance of encouraging stable opposite-gender biological parenting has often been ruled out of the debate as hurtful to single, gay and adopted people. During the last 18 months I have heard many times from English evangelicals about the need to avoid homophobia and being too family-centric, but nothing on the importance of biological family for giving identity and security. Compare this with the situation in France, where adoption by same sex couples was illegal until after the passing of the law allowing gay marriage. Part of the Manif pour Tous campaign in France featured gay people speaking on YouTube about the importance of “filiation” and a mother and father for their own sense of identity even if they did not have children of their own. In the UK, there is a danger that the normalisation of families with parents of the same sex has created a situation where the crucial genetic aspect of determining who we are is suppressed.


Its not just in France or in Africa that people have a strong yearning for knowing their ancestry and that of others. Many adopted people in Britain testify to this as well. As laws are passed making it more difficult for adopted people to find their real parents, and children born via surrogacy can have two “fathers” or two “mothers” on their birth certificates, we enter a similar situation to Aldous Huxley’s 1932 book “Brave New World” where human beings are created in labs by genetic engineering and no-one knows their parentage.

These concepts of family line and adoption are in the Bible and part of our Christian faith. Genealogies, which preachers often skip over, establish the unique identity, special value, and authority of individuals, including of course Jesus himself. A ‘line’ can become cursed, but also redeemed. There has been a lot of emphasis recently on the importance of community, especially in a society like ours where people can become isolated and lonely. The Bible reminds us of three dimensions of community – the horizontal (those around us at the moment), the vertical (our family ancestry and possible future generations with our DNA, explaining and making up much of who we are) and the spiritual, as we are grafted in to God’s family, not just of contemporaries but the historical line of faith. Societies in the global South as well as those influenced by deeply rooted Catholic ‘natural law’ theology appear to appreciate this more than our own, and so are more resistant to new ideologies which encourage us to create our own identity (even our own gender) but which maroon the individual without past or future.

What might be the consequences for psychological and spiritual health if I foreground my identity entirely in my race, my sexual orientation or my lifestyle preferences? Do they really say who I am? Instead, I am myself, not just because am black or white, gay or straight, Gentile or Jew, an opera lover or a ‘dub step’ fan, but because I am part of a family stretching back many generations, with genetic traits and patterns of behaviour learned and passed on, possibly to children and future grandchildren. Each individual in this line has perhaps ignored God or accepted him and his salvation in Jesus, in which case they have been miraculously been grafted into another line, the ‘filiation’ of faith from Abraham.

This is not saying that everyone must have physical descendants, or that those who know their grandparents or who have biological children are somehow ‘better’ than those who do not. But everyone is part of a family line, and the church should be in the business of helping us to appreciate our biological ancestry, and God’s sanctified method of continuing the line for those called to the stewarding task of marriage and family. As the Bishops recently reminded us, it’s there in the BCP marriage service. And though it might pain some of us to say so, we might have something to learn from the French in this instance.

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