Education and the Myth of Neutrality

Education and the Myth of Neutrality

Oct 5, 2023 | Parents and Family, Uncategorized

I use the phrase, “the myth of neutrality” here from time to time when addressing issues related to culture and politics. It also very much has to do with how we educate our children in America. This myth is the fruit of the secularism bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment, and which completely smothered the Christian West in the latter half of the 20th century. This mythical idea is as simple as it is deceptive: public life in a pluralistic society where there are many different religions and beliefs must be neutral with regard to ultimate questions, e.g., the meaning of life and death, sin and salvation, God, heaven and hell, the basis of morality, etc. The problem is that we can’t, not a single one of us, be neutral regarding these questions, ever. This applies both to our personal lives and our lives lived in society with other people, including government. Yet this myth has been accepted for a hundred years or more by most Americans, and sadly most Christians as well.

The opportunity to discuss this comes from the approval for a Catholic charter school in Oklahoma in June. Immediately we saw headlines like this: “Oklahoma’s Religious Charter School Aims to Break Church-State Separation.” Oh the horror! It isn’t just liberals, leftists, and libertarians who oppose such a thing, but many conservatives as well. This piece at Current addresses the intrepid David French who thinks the Oklahoma ruling is a threat to religious freedom. It’s shocking that someone who claims to be a conservative (although a Trump-MAGA hating one) and a Christian could be so historically ignorant, but French fits the bill. Everyone knows Thomas Jefferson came up with the phrase “a wall of separation between church and state” in a letter to Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut, which has come to mean the separation of religion or Christianity from the state.

Regardless of what the secular Jefferson thought it meant, life in America never reflected an impenetrable wall of separation until the mid-20th century. As examples, for most of American history there were sabbath laws, and sodomy was a felony in all 50 states as recently as 1962. The foundation of law in America had always been the Bible and the Christian worldview, but after World War II cultural elites were intent on replacing Christianity with secularism. A significant part of that mission was the Supreme Court  Emerson v. Board of Education decision in 1947 which effectively made secularism the established religion of the United State of America. Christianity and the Bible would no longer be allowed in American “public” schools. In 1962 it was made “official” when the Supreme Court struck down the right for children to pray in schools. Now all would be made to worship at the altar of secularism, and religion’s influence would be confined to the home and church.

In spite of Jefferson’s predilections, America’s founders believed deeply in the importance of religion and education, and to that end the Continental Congress in July 1787 passed The Northwest Ordinance in which they stated:

Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

Religion to the Founders meant Christianity, and its morality and knowledge was necessary to good government and a happy populace. In other words, civilization and the success of American government depended on education and the influence of Christianity. It didn’t follow, however, that encouragement meant government control of education given the Founders’ deep suspicion of human nature and government power. Yet, over time “public” education came to mean government education subsidized by taxpayers controlled by the government. From a Christian perspective there should be no such thing as “public” education let alone government education. J. Gresham Machen put this presciently in his 1934 Education, Christianity and the State:

Every lover of human freedom ought to oppose with all his might the giving of federal aid to the schools of this country; for federal aid in the long run inevitably means federal control, and federal control means control by a centralized and irresponsible bureaucracy, and control by such a bureaucracy means the death of everything that might make this country great.

Who can argue with this after 89 years of hindsight. And it looks like Machen might be encouraged by a political and cultural movement to Make America Great Again.

R.J. Rushdoony in his 1961 book, Intellectual Schizophrenia: Culture, Crisis and Education further makes the point:

The public school is now unmistakably a state school, and its concept of education is inevitably statist. This is apparent in various ways. First of all, education has ceased to be a responsibility of the home and has become a responsibility of the state. . . . the state still claims sole right to determine the nature, extent, and time of education. Thus, a basic family right has been destroyed and the state’s control over the child asserted.

It cannot be both state and family, only either/or. And this is not just an argument for liberty over against government tyranny, but a fundamentally religious question. American public schools are the establishment of a secular religion in the guise of religious neutrality. Joe Boot in The Mission of God explains:

We can clearly see . . . that neither the structure within which we educate, nor the purpose for which we educate, nor the content by which we educate, can be neutral.

Doug Wilson states why this an indisputable fact in The Case for Classical Christian Education:

Education is fundamentally religious. Consequently, there is no question about whether a morality will be imposed in that education, but rather which morality will be imposed. Christians and assorted traditionalists who want a secular school system to instill anything other than secular ethics are wanting something that has never happened and can never happen.

He further asserts that public or “common schools were going to be the means by which the entire progressive agenda was ushered in.” Progressive in the twenty-first century is nothing like the early progressives imagined, but in hindsight it’s easy to see how secular progressive education paved the way for the current takeover of education by cultural Marxists.

Does this mean that what we know as “public education” needs to be “abolished,” to borrow from Marx? Yes! School choice may be a good stopgap measure to take away some of the monopoly power of the government, but it is only temporary. It follows from the biblical imperative of the familial responsibility of educating our children, that it must be completely private and divorced from government at any level. Government money always brings with it government influence. Education is a worldview enterprise, and in America parents should be free to decide in what worldview they want their children educated. Parents should pay for their own children’s education and not forced via taxes to pay for others.                                                                 

What that looks like and how we get there I don’t know. I only know this should be the objective of any Christian who understands the incompatibility of Christianity with any other worldview in the educating of children. In the meantime as we work toward this, I believe that charter classical schools are a critical means to challenging the secular progressive monopoly on education. The ideal is classical and Christian, but even charter “public” classical schools are a powerful weapon against secularism. They reject the postmodern relativism of secularism, and teach that there is objective goodness, beauty, and truth rooted in history and the classical and biblical texts of the Western tradition. The ultimate responsibility for the children’s faith and worldview is the parents, but a classical education will at least not indoctrinate them into the dogmatic secularism of the current cultural and government American elite.

 

 

 

Wisdom on Marriage from Luther and Mangalwadi

Wisdom on Marriage from Luther and Mangalwadi

Sep 5, 2023 | Parents and Family

Having officially been married to my wife Sarah for 36 years on August 15, I think I know a thing or two about the institution, and when I read the thoughts on marriage by these two men of God they instantly become fodder for a blog post. It so happens when I went to Seminary at Westminster in Philadelphia, having driven all the way from my home in southern California, the last thing I expected to find, to say the least, was a wife. But there she was! We got engaged, and it so happens that our pre-marital counselor was the late Tim Keller, a professor there at the time before he moved to New York City to found Redeemer Presbyterian Church and become, well, Tim Keller. I’ll never forget two things he said among many, but these two stand out as especially true in our experience. We sat down in his office in chairs in front of his desk and after some initial niceties he got right to the point:

The only sinner worse than the one you’re marrying is you.

Well, ok. That took a while to sink in, but I can report after all these years . . . . it is absolutely true! Sometimes we argue about who the worse sinner is, but I always win. It’s too obvious! The other thing is related, flowing out of the depth of our sin. I guess we did a personality test and he got to know us a bit, then said this:

You guys are so different you can either destroy one another or sanctify one another.

Keller was not the kind of guy to pull his punches; he was a straight shooter, and this truth was sobering. I believe it’s true in any marriage even if the spouses are more similar in personality. Two self-centered sinners living in such close proximity 24/7/365 is a recipe for conflict, but in understanding and accepting that we are self-centered sinners allows the promise of sanctification and reveals the genius of marriage. It’s not only God’s chosen instrument to sanctify His people and build his kingdom on earth, but also the ultimate redemptive biblical metaphor for the salvation of His people. The significance and profundity of marriage is beyond the ability of mere words to convey, but that’s all we have. It is the most important God ordained institution for extending Christ’s reign on earth, advancing His kingdom, and building His Church, and in that I do not exaggerate. I will explain below.

When I read these two quotes in Vishal Mangalwadi’s book, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, I knew I had to share them here. First from the great Reformer, Martin Luther, who is a more pessimistic than I am, but the point is well taken: 

There is no estate the Devil is so opposed to as marriage. The clergy have not wanted to be bothered with work and worry. They have been afraid of a nagging wife, disobedient children, difficult relatives, or the dying pig or a cow. They want to lie abed until the sun shines through the window. Our ancestors knew this and would say, “Dear child, be a priest or a nun and have a good time.” I have heard married people say to monks, “You have it easy, but when we get up we do not know where to find our bread.” Marriage is a heavy cross because so many couples quarrel. It is the grace of God when they agree. The Holy Spirit declares there are three wonders: when brothers agree, when neighbors love each other, and when a man and a wife are at one. When I see a pair like that, I am glad as if I were in a garden of roses. It is rare.

Mangalwadi adds perspective as to why marriage is so great and essential to life in a fallen world:

Marriage brings out the worst in both husbands and wives. They must choose whether to stay in that school of character, or to drop out. The Bible made divorce difficult because one does not learn much by quitting a challenging school. The only way to make monogamy work is to value love above pleasure, to pursue holiness and humility rather than power and personal fulfillment, to find grace to repent rather than to condemn, to learn sacrifice and patience in place of indulgence and gratification. The modern world was created by countless couples who did just that. In working to preserve their marriages and provide for their children, they invested in the future of civilization itself.

I’ll never forget before we got married telling other young people we were getting married, and watching the disapproval on their faces while disparaging marriage. Phrases like, “Poor guy” were common. Given my nature, I would get right back in their face telling them how great marriage is, how important, how I can’t wait, and that they should get married too! I was basically telling them how wrong they were. I remember several, specifically the young women, get kind of a quizzical look on their face seeming to say, that’s refreshing to hear! I think some even said that.

And the reason these people all felt that way? Marriage is hard! But I must cut them some slack because examples of successful marriages are not bountiful, nor were they in the mid-80s. When California, no surprise, got the no-fault divorce laws-band wagon rolling in 1969, divorce became common in America; when the going got tough, as it will in every marriage, this gave people the idea, and the legal right, to think they could easily get out of a marriage, and that unilaterally. They think, why be miserable if I can just be rid of it, and the problem, as if the problem was the other person. Yes they can be, but as we say, it takes two to tango. In fact, second marriages fail at a higher rate than first marriages because the person who failed at the first one is the same person in the second, and bring all their problems, and sin, with them.

The other reason is the secular culture that bought into the arguments of feminism, among the many other evils of secularism. However, feminism all along its historical development from the 19th century on had a point. Because of the fall, the relationship between men and women was distorted. After telling Eve her pain will increase in childbirth, the Lord tells her, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” (Gen. 3:16, and here is an excellent explanation of this from the ESV study Bible). Men and women were created different, shocking I know, with different roles and responsibilities within a marriage. All of that become complicated by the fall, and thus the thoughts on marriage of Luther and Mangalwadi about how difficult marriage is. I was going to write, “can be,” but that would not be right. The very nature of the unique consequences of the fall for specifically men and women make every marriage, every single one of them, hard by definition.

The fundamental distortion is what this verse describes, and what makes marriage so difficult. Women will seek to usurp the man’s rightful role as the leader and ultimate authority in the family, and the woman is rightfully commanded to submit to her husband in this, but the man will overplay his role as leader and become a domineering authoritarian. This plays out in every marriage over a continuum, but the dynamic in every marriage is the same. How do marriages not only survive but also thrive in the face of such relentless headwinds? Jesus! God has revealed “the secret” in Ephesians 5:21-33. The analogy Paul uses is Christ and the Church, and the good news is it’s not a secret!

 

Three Cheers for Patriarchy! And “Why Sally Can’t Preach”

Three Cheers for Patriarchy! And “Why Sally Can’t Preach”

Aug 29, 2023 | Parents and Family

Since my last post was on the hot topic of Christian nationalism, I figured I’d follow it up with something about another “controversial” topic, patriarchy. I love thinking about the heads exploding at that title! It’s like throwing holy water on a vampire to some lefties, and many who embrace Christianity too. I will let the video do the heavy lifting, but I will say the same God-ordained roll dynamics in marriage apply in some measure in the church, thus the title of a book in the quotes. The author in the video is being interviewed, and I find his thinking helpful in what in our “enlightened” times is considered “controversial,” i.e., patriarchy. That word comes from the Latin for father, and has come to mean male headship and authority in certain contexts like the family and the church. I would love to hear your thoughts.

My Post-Mill Conference Experience and the Children

My Post-Mill Conference Experience and the Children

May 15, 2023 | Parents and Family

If you had told me a year ago that I would be attending a conference on Theonomy & Postmillennialism I would have told you to say no to drugs. But there I was in Georgetown, Texas last weekend with about 500 other people who seem to also have drunk the post-mill Kool Aid as if it was a real, biblical eschatological option. Prior to my “conversion” I didn’t think there were 500 post-mill people in the world let alone that many of them would find their way to a conference in Texas, but there they were. And the vibe was electric. I’m going to do two posts on the conference. While this first one will be primarily about children, and you’ll see why, the next one will be more meat and potatoes eschatology. The two are connected as I hope to convey.

I thought like a death metal concert, most of the audience would be dudes, and especially dudes with beards. Strange how beards have made a come back in America, and we’re talking long, nineteenth century type beards. There were definitely those, but what I didn’t expect was all the children and families. When the speakers were talking there was always the sounds of babies. I was sitting toward the front initially, and had no idea just how many children parents brought to this conference. After initially being annoyed by the disruption, I started to appreciate it, the young, new life, the indication of the blessing of God a la Psalm 127. As Solomon says, “Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.” It’s unfortunate how man Christians in our day want fewer blessings rather than more, that’s how infected we’ve become with secularism.

Before I address that, on Saturday morning I was sitting in the midst of these families amazed at how well behaved all the children were. I thought, don’t all families bring their children to a conference on post millennialism on a beautiful spring Saturday? Of course they do! After the session, I asked the gentlemen sitting in front of me with all these kids how many children they have, and he said . . . . ten! Be honest, your first reaction to reading or hearing that is a kind of revulsion, right? Don’t lie to me. In the modern secular post-Christian West having ten children is looked at as at least strange. It almost seems wrong. You think of the poor woman who bore all those children. That’s a lot of work! And raising them is ten full-time jobs. I would contend our initial reaction, while understandable given how programmed we’ve become by secularism, is sin. God tells us children are a blessing, full stop. I found out the man with these ten blessings is Phil George, the pastor of Grace Life Church in Dallas. May he and his wife, and their tribe, increase, and that tribe doesn’t have to have that many children.

Which brings me to an article I providentially read after my profound children post-mill conference experience: Western culture is at fault for dwindling birth rates: We are witnessing the process of demographic crisis in its early stages. The author, Louise perry, starts the piece with a wonderful analogy of the Cassava plant that was made safe to eat by South Americans hundreds of years ago. Without that process, unbeknownst to them, the people eating it would be slowly poisoned to death by cyanide. Though the people didn’t realize the traditions of cleaning and processing the plant was saving lives, they did it anyway. She compares that to the tradition around a fertility culture where extended families and societies made it easier for women to bear the burden of having and raising children. The analogy is powerful. People in the Western world, which is most of the world today, don’t realize we are as a civilization slowly being poisoned to death by what she calls “the sterility meme.”

The word crisis in her title is more appropriate than anyone knows or will admit. Like being slowly poisoned by eating unprocessed Casava plants, civilization is slowly being poisoned by not enough children being born:

The effects of fertility decline will not become evident until the last above-replacement generation dies. In Britain, that tipping point is likely to come in the 2040s, when most of the baby boomers have passed away. Right now, we are witnessing the process of demographic crisis in its early stages, and most people do not recognize it as such. If modernity is cassava, then this is the cyanide.

She states the problem with modernity such:

But what we are now discovering is that, at the population level, modernity selects systematically against itself. The key features of modernity — urbanism, affluence, secularism, the blurring of gender distinctions, more time spent with strangers than with kin — all of these factors in combination shred fertility. Which means that progressivism, the political ideology that urges on the acceleration of modernization, can best be understood as a sterility meme. When people first become modern, they have fewer children; when they adopt progressive ideology, they accelerate the process of modernization and so have even fewer.

These are all complex sociological and psychological phenomena, but Christians are not immune. If you go to many churches today you’ll see that most families have two children. We must ask ourselves as Christians, is having only two children on purpose biblical? Is it living in obedience to God? Or is it succumbing to the “spirit of the age”? I would argue it is the latter.

Having said this, I understand why so many Christian families succumb to it. It’s been pounded into our heads almost as long as I’ve been alive, that there are “too many people” on earth, it’s unsustainable. The word “overpopulation” is an axiom, unquestioned as if it were obviously true. Then there is the little issue of children being expensive, and putting a real crimp in your lifestyle. I laughed out loud, literally, when I read this in the piece:

As one of my friends observed soon after having her first baby, “the only thing that limits your freedom more than having a newborn is going to prison.” She’s right.

Raising children is hard! All consuming. If freedom is a priority in our lives, we will have fewer children, and sadly these impediments to having more children keep too many Christian families from having more children.

I once told an Italian couple at a church we attended some years ago that we need to out breed the enemy, speaking of the secularists. Their look told me they weren’t quite sure what to make of that statement. They now have two children, and it looks like they’re stopping there, unfortunately. If I knew thirty years ago what I know now, as the saying goes, I would have tried for more than three children. Three has been an incredible blessing, so I can only imagine the blessings of more. Christians, and religious people in general, do have more children than secular people, but I pray in due course it would become many more.

 

 

Our Granddaughter Eleanor Geline Lewis Was Baptized Today!

Our Granddaughter Eleanor Geline Lewis Was Baptized Today!

Oct 30, 2022 | Parents and Family

When I was born-again a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, by default I became a baptist. I was born and raised a Catholic and so baptized as an infant, but born-agains don’t do infant baptism, so I got re-baptized. It made sense to me at the time because in this new form of Christianity I had embraced, the way you became a Christian was by making a personal decision for Jesus. Only then could you be baptized. Infants can’t make such a decision, so I reasoned they should not be baptized. I remained a baptist until I was introduced to Reformed theology when I was 24.

There are Reformed baptists, and that’s what I guess I was initially, until I went to a Reformed baptist church service. The gentlemen who introduced me to this strange new theology was a paedobaptist, so he had his children baptized. This new theology seemed upside down enough without me having to change that too, so I resisted it initially. Then I went to that service.

It so happens that Sunday morning they had an infant dedication. I had seen plenty of those in my five and a half years of being a Christian, so didn’t think anything of it. Then when they called up the parents with their children, a phrase snuck its way into my brain, I know not how, but it was disturbing to me. I thought, these children are strangers to the covenant! That didn’t sit well with me. I had been learning how important the covenant was in this new theology, and this dedication process was telling me the children had nothing to do with it. I became a paedobaptist on the spot!

The reason why is as simple as it is difficult for most Evangelical Christians to accept. Most don’t embrace it not because they’ve grappled with the texts and the theology, but because it’s so common to be a baptist that it just seems right. It could be right because my being wrong about something wouldn’t surprise me in the least, but for now I’m convinced baptizing our infant children is what we should do. I’ll give a very brief and probably not very persuasive case for why I believe this.

When I was praying this morning before we left for church, I was marveling that little Eleanor was part of God’s covenant promises to Abraham. She, literally this beautiful energetic little 9 month-old baby was in God’s mind when he said that Abraham’s offspring would be like the sand on the seashore and the stars in the sky. She is one of those! Then I thought, well, she’s really part of God’s covenant promise to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 when he said to the serpent:

15 And I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
    and you will strike his heel.

Then I realized, she was actually part of God’s covenant promise to himself, which is known in Reformed theology as the covenant of redemption. In the words of RC Sproul:

The covenant of redemption is intimately concerned with God’s eternal plan. It is called a “covenant” inasmuch as the plan involves two or more parties. This is not a covenant between God and humans. It is a covenant among the persons of the Godhead, specifically between the Father and the Son.

That this eternal covenant is revealed and fulfilled in redemptive history is strongly implied by Jesus in John 6:37:

All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away.

We believe as Peter preached in the first Christian sermon in Acts 2, that the promise is for us and our children. Not just when they grow older and put their trust in Christ as their Lord and Savior, but now when they pretty much can’t do anything at all. I love the way Moses puts it in Deuteronomy 29:

29 The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.

. . . . and to our children forever . . . . Our children are part of the covenant! And praise our Almighty God and Savior for it.

The Beginning of Christian Nationalism: The Family

The Beginning of Christian Nationalism: The Family

Jun 30, 2022 | Parents and Family

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.