Apartments Don’t Have Moats

On home, history, and the role of safety

This is part of a series on what I call “evangelical safety culture.” To catch up you can read part 1,  part 2, and part 3.

Photo by Evelyn Paris on Unsplash (edited)

He introduced himself with a twinkle in his eye and a thick Irish accent as Pat O’Toole and got right to work replacing the light bulb in our entryway. From the top of the teetering ladder he smelled of bar soap and cigarette smoke. His task complete, he hollered goodbye and carried the ladder down the stairs as I returned to prepping dinner for my new husband. We only lived in that drafty first apartment in Northwest Chicago for 10 months while we played house in earnest, trying to figure out both adult life and married life at the same time.

During the week I criss-crossed Chicago on its many groaning buses to care for other people’s children. When I got home I would sink into the ancient clawfoot tub, giving my stiff joints a chance to thaw, like the chicken I had transferred from the freezer to the kitchen sink for dinner. Shawn was finishing his bachelor’s degree and working security for the city’s most prestigious private school. In the evenings we would swap dinners and board game nights with the married couple downstairs who had been living there one year longer (our husbands had previously been college roommates). On the nights I was too sore and exhausted to cook they would double their recipe, and on my days off I would return the favor. After dinner we would discuss theology or play Settlers of Catan before returning to our own apartments.

John Locke is remembered for a lot of things. One of them is his idea that private property ownership is a “natural right” bestowed by God.¹ While he acknowledged that God had provided the natural goods of creation for humanity’s common use and benefit he posited that “there must of necessity be a means to appropriate them some way or other before they can be of any use.” For Locke, that means was labor. By combining one’s labor with the commonly bestowed gifts of creation those gifts became connected to the laborer, and the rights of control, use, and exclusion that apply to one’s body, now also apply to that property.

Almost 100 years before Locke Sir Edward Coke, an English judge and jurist ruled that there should be limits on how a sheriff might enter a person’s home to issue a writ. His words have since entered our idiomatic vocabulary. “The house of every one is to him as his Castle and Fortress as well for defence against injury and violence, as for his repose…” 

America’s founders would build on these ideas with both the U.S. Constitution and the constitutions of every state including clauses protecting private property rights. Indeed, the right to private property has been considered the cornerstone of liberty and a free society, with other rights like freedom of the press and freedom of religion hinging on it. So pervasive was this understanding of property ownership in America that by the Victorian era home ownership had become closely associated with one’s religious virtue and moral character. Without his own castle or fortress a man had no foundation from which to exercise his God-given rights or to disciple his family.

The elderly woman who lived below our second floor garden apartment must have lived there for decades based on the way the plants cascaded across her front porch. We weren’t expecting to live in the Midwest after Shawn graduated, but the first job he was offered was too good to turn down, so I settled our gray wedding dishes into their suburban cupboards and we invested in our first brand new piece of furniture--a greige mid-century sofa. That first summer I planted impatiens in hanging baskets around the perimeter of our balcony. It was screened in by oak trees and I would roll out my yoga mat to stretch and listen to birdsong.

Just a year later, after pushing past my limits in a full-time job the thread of my life would snap and the birds go silent. In that apartment our marriage was tested. We grew in honesty with each other, slowly and suddenly becoming familiar with our most intimate wounds, learning how to support and accommodate each other’s weaknesses. In the spring, after hundreds of hours of therapy and adjustments to new medications I would walk the streets behind our apartment. Behind picket fences and peony bushes, as if they were plucked from a Thomas Kinkade painting, the expensive homes both taunted me and filled me with hope.

In most English translations Titus 2:5 admonishes women to be “workers at home” or “keepers at home.” Those phrases are translated from one word in Greek--oikourgos, a mashup of house (oikos) and worker (ergos). Many have interpreted this verse to mean that women are prohibited from working outside the domestic sphere, that their gifts and duties are limited to cooking, cleaning, and childrearing.

But in some early manuscripts one letter has been altered, changing oikourgos (workers at home) to oikouros (keepers at home). In these manuscripts house (oikos) is combined with the word meaning watcher or guardian (ouros). Some women, while still believing in the domestic limitations of their sex, have latched onto the absence of this single letter to infuse deeper meaning into their domiciliary labors. One ministry blog I read compared Christian homemakers with the gatekeepers of the Old Testament temple. “We, as women, are commissioned to be watchers at the gate. We must stand guard and not allow the infiltration of this age to seep into our homes… We are guardians of the houses of God — ourselves, our husbands, and our children — for we are the temples of the Lord.”

And I thought keeping my house clean with two toddlers was hard.

A 1962 book called The Art of Homemaking extends the woman’s responsibility beyond her own family to the entire country. “As long as we, our country’s women, continue to be good homemakers and fulfill every aspect of our responsibility, America will continue to be good. This is where God intended us to be. This is the task for which we were created. This task is second in importance to none.”

It was tiny, but we were so optimistic. We didn’t even have to strain our voices to hold a conversation with each other from anywhere in the apartment’s 520 square feet, but it didn’t matter. After four years of marriage we had finally made it to sunny SoCal. We were happy. My joints were happy. I made cookies for everyone we shared a wall or floor with and deposited them on welcome mats. Exactly 30 days later those welcome mats would be pulled in when the words COVID-19 and pandemic entered our vocabulary.

Our cells and lungs escaped the virus for a while. Our plans and optimism did not. The jobs we had come West for were no longer needed in a virtual world and our savings dwindled with our hope. In that apartment we held our breath. But even underwater, you can still see the sun. One neighbor kept their welcome mat out. We passed carne asada and fresh baked pita bread back and forth across our low patio walls. After months of watching football with my husband he would profess faith in Jesus. And in that tiny haven, us against an angry frightened world, our dreams of parenthood were conceived.

If you grew up in a family that tried, and perhaps failed to establish a practice of  “family devotions” or “family worship”, you’re not alone. While the beginning of the practice is untraceable, the saying “a family that prays together stays together” was coined in 1947 by a young ad executive while volunteering for a faith-based production company. Father Patrick Peyton popularized the saying on his weekly radio program over 22 years, and a Los Angeles area advertising firm splashed the quip on billboards as a public service throughout 1947.

Deuteronomy 6:6-7 is often cited as the biblical foundation for the practice, and more modern studies have bolstered family worship advocates by demonstrating that “If the parents are not themselves involved in religious activities, if their actions are not consistent with what they preach, children are rarely motivated to follow in their parents' religious footsteps.” In the 19th century G.K. Chesterton had lamented this kind of insular focus on the family and home, referring to Victorians as “the first generation that asked its children to worship the hearth without the altar.”²

6 weeks before our son was born we unpacked boxes in the California desert. I folded tiny onesies and muslin blankets and nestled them in the dresser of the nursery in an apartment twice the size of the last. Before leaving our last apartment we had learned that families of five, six, and seven lived in floor plans identical to ours. When our second son was born only 18 months after the first we shuffled babies and playpens from room to room as necessary so that everyone could get some sleep.

I could catch glimpses of barbed wire, a motel, and the local car wash from my kitchen window while I stretched and folded the dough for the next day’s loaf of bread. If the summer sun slipped behind the San Jacinto mountains with just the right smattering of clouds above them my faucet and that barbed wire would glint with gold and rose. After dinner my two-year-old would request a “family walk”, which is what he calls a stroll through our apartment complex to the playground. If we ran into the maintenance manager along the way he would play shy when he was greeted by name, while his little brother got excited to see the golf cart.

The term “nuclear family” first appeared in the 1920’s. Nuclear comes from nucleus, meaning “something essential” and refers to a family consisting of a husband and wife and children under 18 living in a residence together. Historical anthropologists generally assert that the nuclear family developed as the primary form of social organization during the Industrial Revolution.³ The resulting urbanization shifted the meaning of home from a place where men and women worked together to a haven for men from the chaos of the city, a haven that was kept for them by their wives. The home came to represent the peace and rest that could no longer be found outside.⁴

Over time, and as the middle class developed, this idealized vision of the home was reinforced by architectural designs that emphasized privacy, for example lawns and porches that served as buffers between the private and public spheres of life. But more and more people are discovering that these features might actually be bugs.

While modern sociology has continued to treat the nuclear family as the dominant shape of family life, the 2020 U.S. Census showed that only 17.5% of households reflect this reality. A report from AARP and the National Building Museum offered examples of how the housing market might creatively shift to keep up with the needs of elderly Americans who live alone or with just their spouse, or the nearly 20% of Americans who live with non relatives. One of the suggested solutions is called a cohousing neighborhood. The report explains, “These communities, which are typically created by residents rather than by developers, can address roles traditionally played by extended families, such as assistance with childcare or eldercare. Participants commit to actively engaging in the governance of the housing development, most often through a homeowners association.” A community in North Carolina called Pacifica is doing just this. Residents regularly share potluck style meals in The Common House and contribute 4 hours each month to maintaining the neighborhood.

Slowly the boxes are filling up, ready to be transferred to their next home. My eldest is still upset that we packed some of his books. This time, the fifth time, we’re not moving far. We want to be closer to our church. We pray we can find somewhere with better guest parking. We want to be hospitable, not just toward the people we live up close to, with baked goods and board game nights and greetings across language barriers. We want to invite even more people in, to host church small groups and (non-nuclear) family dinners and playdates.

Like the rest, this apartment won’t have a moat (although I can hope for in-unit laundry). I will still be a homemaker without a crown. My husband will still be a man without a throne. But we’ve learned that having no drawbridge also means we have fewer barriers to welcome. We have the opportunity to rely more on the Spirit than our own judgements to decide for us who will cross our path. And it’s just a bit easier to invite some of them across our threshold when we don’t have to call off the alligators first.

1. Locke lays out his views in The Second Treatise of Government, 1690.

2. The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton.

3. Some scholars contest this, like Brigitte Berger, who believes that the nuclear family was dominant going as far back as the 13th century.

4. Thank you to

Karen Swallow Prior

for excellently distilling this shift in her chapter on Domesticity in The Evangelical Imagination.