Christians throughout history have had different ways of contending with this fallen world. On one end of the spectrum, you might have monks who completely isolate themselves from the world, while on the other millenarian apocalyptic fanatics who mean to usher in the kingdom now by any means. For the rest of us, trying to find out where we fit along that spectrum is the challenge. Fortunately, we have almost 2,000 years of Christian history to guide us, and many examples of Christians in that time who have grappled with these issues. When in God’s providence America came along almost 18 centuries into the story, something very different in the history of the world happened. The antecedents had been brewing for centuries in England, and then the Reformation blew up everything. God saw to it that the printing press was invented, and that made the dissemination of these world-changing ideas possible. We are shortly coming upon the completion of 246 years of this incredible experience in liberty and self-government, and we as Christians, and American citizens, have a unique opportunity to keep this republic, in Franklin’s challenging words at the Continental Congress. I believe we have in front of us the greatest opportunity in modern times to do just that.

As I said in a previous post, it’s so much easier to complain, and most of us just want to be left alone to live our lives in peace. Those are no longer options because our enemies on the Democrat-left want to destroy us. Some might think that is hyperbole, but it isn’t. This is an existential threat, meaning our very existence as a Christian and American people (including those who are not Christian) conceived in liberty is on the line. It is time to fight, and thankfully, God directed America’s founders to put together a system of government for a self-governing people that can really allow us to be self-governed. That means we are responsible at every level for governing ourselves.

Of course, that starts with each one of us in our homes, which the enemy (here I speak of the enemy behind all our enemies, Satan) has sought to destroy from the beginning. Almost immediately after the fall in Genesis 3, we read in the very next chapter how Cain kills his brother Able in cold blood. Yet, the family is the most important civilizational bond available to human beings (because believe it or not, men and women are different!), and it has endured to this day. However, one of Satan’s most influential and destructive disciples, Karl Marx, understood that if his communist revolution was to ultimately prevail, it must see the destruction of two primary enemies of the revolution: religion and the family.

I’m a big fan of Steve Bannon’s War Room (which I catch on Rumble), and Bannon had a special recently on the Juneteenth celebration. All his black guests made a similar point, that the progressives-leftists-Democrats use victimology turn to turn the black community into wards of the state, destroying their dignity. However, their pernicious policies harm people of every color and nationality, especially lower-class working Americans, but families from all socioeconomic strata are harmed. Destroying the family is job one in the process. Ken Blackwell put it well:

The family is the incubator of liberty, and if you want to create dependency on the state, you destroy the family. Mission accomplished! You create an administrative state, and folks move away from being free self-governing citizens to being dependent subjects. This attack on the black family has grown to an attack on the American family. There is a cancer eating away at the American family.

This process of this cancer ostensibly started in the 1960s with the so-called “sexual revolution,” but goes back much further as I said above to the fall. But the family always endured because it is the bedrock of civilization without which is chaos. The modern weakening of the family took a great leap backward with French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (d. 1778), and Western intellectual elites have been rebelling against traditional Christian moral norms ever since. That, along with the growth of the welfare state and globalism have created a tsunami of deleterious effects for the American family. I could delineate examples for days, but I think it’s unnecessary. These statistics will not surprise us:

The share of births to unwed mothers stands at 40 percent—up from 5 percent in 1960. We estimate that nearly half of births start as an unwed pregnancy, including two-thirds of first births to women under 30.

That statistic is 77% for black births.  Sadly, this includes many Christians because secular cultural influence is difficult to escape, but it must be challenged at every point, including in its expression of self-centered sexuality. We’ve taught our children that sex outside of marriage is wrong, evil, out of bounds, and we continually critique for them the lies of sexual immorality pushed by the culture. I’ve often told them something that might surprise you. I would rather them sneak around and have sex knowing it’s wrong and not wanting anyone to find out, then to live with their boyfriend or girlfriend and proclaim to the world that it is morally good. It is not! We used to call that “living in sin.” Don’t do that!

In I Thessalonians 4, Paul is addressing just this issue, that we should avoid sexual immorality, and it is worth reading because Paul is positively intolerant! He should be because as he says, “The Lord will punish all those who commit such sins,” and “anyone who rejects this instruction does not reject a human being but God.” He then sums up his exhortation with this:

¹¹ and to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, ¹² so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.

In I Timothy Paul says something, which I believe is primarily directed to men, but certainly includes their wives in some measure:

If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

The family is central to the health and sustanance of Christian Western civilization, and we must fight for its integrity continually. Next we’ll explore how we can expand our influence out from there.