“For evangelicals,” Butler Bass continues, “this is an unusual arrangement that leaves the husband open to charges of ‘feminization’ and the wife of being difficult. The Gosselin's tensions demonstrate how unsuccessfully conservative religious groups have been dealing with gender – and how when a woman like Kate Gosselin breaks with tradition in order to pursue what she loves -- even when her business is family and motherhood -- she gets both blamed and punished for problems in her relationships.”

In a guest opinion column Monday in Christianity Today, Julie Vermeer Elliott has a different criticism of Evangelicals -- writing as one herself.

We evangelicals tend to be easily impressed. We cheered on Jon and Kate's decision to carry all six babies to term but rarely considered the prior question: Was it right for them to undergo risky fertility treatments in the first place? …

Warned by their doctor during an ultrasound examination that the fertility medication had worked a little too well and that four mature follicles were present, Jon and Kate nonetheless went ahead with the insemination. …

Six babies were growing in a space designed for one, posing great risks to the life of each baby as well as to the life of their mother. Faced with this unintended but preventable situation, Jon and Kate were right to carry all of the babies to term. But this decision is not enough to warrant their status as models of Christian faithfulness. That most evangelicals were satisfied to celebrate the end -- six miraculous lives -- rather than assess the morality of the means whereby those lives were created, betrays the thinness of evangelical reflection on reproductive ethics. Too often our ethics have focused so singularly on the question of abortion that we have given comparatively little attention to the morally-significant issues surrounding infertility, reproductive technology, childbirth, and parenting.

Vermeer Elliott, who teaches Christian Ethics at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pa., describes the show’s viewers as co-conspirators in its consumerism:

As fellow Christians, we should have reminded the Gosselins that life is a gift to be received in gratitude, not something to be grasped, purchased, or sold. In many ways, the last four seasons of Jon & Kate Plus Eight is the story of a family that seemed to progressively lose sight of this truth. …

When the first few episodes revealed the earning potential of this 'everyday family,' Jon & Kate Plus Eight became a brand name that was packaged and sold. And many Christians were happy to comply by opening up their wallets and their fellowship halls. When the network and the couple were not satisfied with the money generated through high ratings and book sales, the Gosselin home was filled with product placements and the children were filmed for long hours each week. All the while many (though not all) evangelicals watched with undiscerning eyes. Somewhere along the line we, like Jon and Kate, seemed to forget the warnings of 1 Timothy 6:9-10:

‘But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.’

It was not until the recent allegations of sexual impropriety arose that a significant number of Christians began to question whether Jon and Kate were indeed the examples of faithful living that we had imagined. Somehow most of us missed the long trajectory that was, day by day, moving them farther from a life of Christian virtue. Sexual immorality -- whether actual or merely suspected -- caught our attention, but the materialism, narcissism, and exploitation of children that preceded it was largely overlooked.

She concludes that the breakdown of the Gosselins’ marriage “is but a symptom of the larger weaknesses of ethics in the evangelical community:"

We are easily seduced by wealth and fame. We are easily contented by the shallow rhetoric of hot-button issues. In short, we are easily deceived by cultural values painted in Christian veneers (or clothed in Isaiah 40:31 T-shirts).

Her prescription: “to turn once again to the rich, complex, and difficult ethics of Jesus and to let those ethics form us into a more discerning people in the world.”

It is time that we look for role models who value self-sacrifice over material gain. It is time that we practice forgiveness and the healing of broken relationships and call fellow Christians to do the same. It is time that we take our own marriage vows seriously and hold our brothers and sisters to be true to their commitments as well. Most importantly, it is time that we develop a view of faith and life that is capable of asking deep questions and courageous enough to embody real answers.

Photo by Karen Alquist, TLC