Adult desire vs. God's design: The true battle over defining what is a family

The current debate over marriage, surrogacy and even the commodification of children has exposed a deeper problem that many churches have been reluctant to confront directly: we no longer agree on what a family actually is.

For too long, Christians have argued individual issues in isolation. We debate same-sex “marriage.” We debate surrogacy. We debate donor conception, IVF ethics, adoption policy, and the rights of biological parents versus intended parents. But underneath every one of these controversies lies the same foundational question: What is the family?

Until the Church recovers a coherent, biblical, natural definition of family, we will continue losing these debates because we are arguing downstream consequences without addressing the upstream premise.

The modern world defines family primarily through adult desire and emotional attachment. If adults love each other, desire companionship or wish to raise a child together, society calls that a family. Your “fam” is whomever you choose, not whom you’re actually related to. Biology becomes secondary. Marriage becomes flexible. Parenthood becomes transferable. Children become products of intention rather than the natural fruit of a covenantal marriage.

But Scripture and God’s creation (natural law) present something radically different.

Biblically, family is not a lifestyle arrangement built around adult fulfillment. It is the foundational covenantal institution created by God through the union of husband and wife, ordered toward permanence, fidelity and the bearing and raising of children across generations.

That definition matters because once the family is detached from its created purpose, every other institution destabilizes with it.

This is why the Church’s opposition to same-sex marriage cannot merely sound like opposition to homosexuality. The issue is larger than sexual ethics alone. The question is whether marriage itself has any intrinsic meaning beyond emotional affirmation.

If marriage is simply about adult companionship, then there is no principled reason it must be male and female. There is no reason it must be permanent. There is no reason it must be connected to children at all.

But if marriage is fundamentally the covenantal union through which God forms families — joining husband and wife, then mother, father and child into one kinship structure — then sex difference is not incidental. It is essential. It is natural.

The complementarity of male and female is not arbitrary religious symbolism. It is the very means by which humanity creates life and establishes the natural bonds of parentage that societies have recognized exist through the laws of nature (rather than the laws of man) for millennia.

Once society (the laws of man) severed marriage from family formation (and the laws of nature), the next developments became inevitable.

Surrogacy is the clearest example.

Notice how the entire modern surrogacy industry speaks almost exclusively in the language of adult rights and adult desires. Adults want children. Adults feel called to parenthood. Adults deserve the experience of family. Marriage should come with the “right” to be a parent.

But virtually absent from the conversation is the child’s inherent right to his or her own mother and father.

Instead, parenthood becomes contractual and the product of adult desire instead of the natural effect of the marital union.

A child can now be intentionally conceived to be separated from his biological mother at birth. Egg donors, sperm donors, gestational carriers and intended parents become interchangeable market categories. Human reproduction becomes fragmented into purchasable parts.

And yes, this becomes particularly obvious in situations where two men or three men or a single individual seek to acquire a child despite lacking the natural capacity to create one within the covenantal structure of marriage. By necessity, someone else’s motherhood or fatherhood must be severed, outsourced or purchased.

The problem here is not merely that technology exists. The deeper issue is philosophical and ethical: we have shifted from viewing children as gifts received within the family to products obtained through adult intention.

That inversion changes everything.

Children are no longer understood as persons with claims upon us. They become objects toward which adults possess claims. This inversion of rights is an infringement of the rights of the child to his or her family.

The Church has often hesitated to say this clearly because modern culture immediately frames every objection as cruelty or discrimination. “These kids are loved, too!” say the LGBT advocates. But again, family is not defined by emotional attachment; rather, by biological and natural bonds.

Christians must recover the courage to speak truthfully and compassionately at the same time.

A child does not exist to fulfill an adult’s emotional longings.

A child has his or her own identity, dignity, lineage and natural bonds.

Every child comes from a mother and a father. That is not bigotry. That is biology, reality and ultimately natural law.

This is why so many modern legal battles now seem impossibly tangled. Courts struggle over parental rights because we have disconnected parenthood from biology. Legislatures struggle over marriage definitions because marriage has been detached from procreation and family formation. Activists argue over birth certificates because society no longer knows whether parenthood is biological, contractual, emotional or ideological.

But nearly all of these contradictions resolve themselves once we restore the proper definition of family.

Family is not whatever configuration adults choose to call one.

Family is the God-ordained covenantal structure arising from marriage between husband and wife, binding together parents and children in mutual obligation and generational continuity.

That definition protects children because it recognizes they are not commodities.

It protects women because motherhood is not reduced to a service for hire.

It protects fathers because fatherhood is not interchangeable or optional.

And it protects marriage because marriage is understood not merely as romance, but as the institution through which civilization itself is sustained.

The real battle is not over isolated questions like same-sex marriage or surrogacy contracts. The real battle is whether society will acknowledge that God already defined the family long before modern politics attempted to reinvent it.

And until we recover that truth, the confusion surrounding marriage, parenthood and children will only deepen.