My friend Brandon, who is the proprietor of the YouTube Channel I’m part of, Eschatology Matters, wrote a Facebook post on the centrality of the family for the maintenance of civilization. As soon as I read it I knew I had to write about it. Here is a portion of what he said:
Everyone sees how bad everything is. The chaos in Washington, the madness of the Left. There are a million books and podcasts on what’s wrong and how to fix it. What our society desperately needs is strong families. Strong homes. And that starts with strong men and women.
Twentieth century feminism taught women that their highest aim was to be like a man. It taught men to submit and be like women. It’s nearly destroyed us. Our daughters need to know change starts by valuing the home and family. It’s not getting in their way of self-fulfillment; it’s the very thing that humanity itself hinges upon.
The future belongs to those who know what’s truly valuable. By God’s grace, and His alone, the great 20th Century Lie ends now, in my home.
I responded to Brandon: “Amen! The cradle of civilization is the home; all the answers start there.” Most importantly, it starts in my home.
The spiritual war that rages on a cultural and societal level is not primarily “out there,” but in the home. If we build civilized homes that honor God and his law, we’ll build civilizations that do as well. The family is foundational to everything God has done, is doing, and will do in the advancing of his kingdom on earth. The foundational nature of the family was accepted for the entirety of Western history until the modern era when the individual became the focal point of existence. Along with that came the rise of feminism over the last two hundred years, among other societal and cultural forces, and the family became just another “lifestyle choice.” It is not.
The Family as Foundation for Civilization
The well-functioning family is required for a well-functioning society and civilization. If the family isn’t flourishing, neither will the society. Any place where familial breakdown is rampant, be it the inner city black ghetto, or white hillbilly Appalachia, societal breakdown follows as night follows day. In the 1960s and 70s, liberals basking in the faux freedom of the sexual revolution like the teenagers many of them were, thought the family was optional, and that divorce and familial breakdown wouldn’t have any negative societal consequences. Nobody believes that anymore because the evidence is overwhelming. Dysfunctional families create dysfunctional children who bring their dysfunction into their communities and the culture. Suffering follows.
In fact, healthy families are the fundamental requirement in a republican form of government like America for the exercise of liberty and self-government. A self-governing republic needs people who can actually self-govern! Which means it is the primary bulwark against all tyrannical forms of government. Our current societal collapse is what happens when this civilizational bulwark breaks down. This was a commonly accepted fact through most of American history, until the sexual revolution. I came across some quotes about the family from President Theodore Roosevelt that in our day would be considered “controversial,” but in the early 20th century were common, this being a good example:
It is in the life of the family upon which in the last analysis the whole welfare of the Nation rests . . . . The nation is nothing but the aggregate of the families within its borders—Everything in the American civilization and nation rests upon the home—The family relation is the most fundamental, the most important of all relations.
His traditional conception of the family including the roles of men and women as husbands and wives would be positively shocking to our secular cultural elites, woke or not. R.J. Rushdoony states what Roosevelt observed as axiomatic for Christian Western civilization:
The family is, sociologically and religiously, the basic institution, man’s first and truest government, school, state, and church. Man’s basic emotional and psychic needs are met in terms of the family.
This was an inarguable statement of fact until the 20th century and the rise of secularism, and with that rise, for example, the state slowly began to usurp the prerogatives of the family in education. J. Gresham Machen writing in 1925 argued it had already happened:
The most important Christian educational institution is not the pulpit or the school, as important as these institutions are; it is the Christian family. And that institution has to a very large extent ceased to do its work. . . . . The lamentable fact is that the Christian home, as an educational institution, has largely ceased to function.
Even the great pagan philosopher, Aristotle, understood the primary importance of the family for the possibility of civilizational flourishing. In a book called, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything, Robert R. Reilly writes of Aristotle:
For Aristotle, the irreducible core of a polity is the family. Thus, Aristotle begins his Politics not with a single individual, but with a description of a man and woman together in the family, without which the rest of society cannot exist. He says: “First of all, there must necessarily be a union or pairing of those who cannot exist without one another.” Later, he states that “husband and wife are alike essential parts of the family.” The family is the nursery of virtue, which reaches its perfection in the polity.
With only revelation in creation, Aristotle innately understood what God reveals in Genesis, that a man and woman would become one flesh, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, having dominion over every living thing. The family is the first institution upon which every other institution is built.
The biblical basis for the family is assumed from Genesis on with the family as the central unit of Hebrew and then Jewish life and civilization. Three of the Ten Commandments address families directly.
#5: Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.
# 7: You shall not commit adultery.
#10: You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.
I used the fifth commandment a lot with our kids as they were growing up. It’s helpful leverage appealing to their self-interest. You want a good life? You want the blessing of God on your life? Then do as I say! When God lays down the fundamentals of existence, of how we’re supposed to live in this world he created, the family is central. Get family life right, and everything else flows. Of course, the devil figured out if the family is so important, then that’s what he’d have to destroy.
The Rise of Feminism and the Modern Era
His attack starts with the fall. Man was created to be the leader, provider, and protector of his home (the garden), while the woman was there to help him. The Lord tells us why he created man, male and female:18 The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
A man or woman alone is “not good,” meaning it’s not the ideal state for which we were created. For whatever reason, some people end up single, and they are not second class citizens, but in God’s economy the ideal is marriage. This tells us as Christian parents we are to raise our children to aspire to marriage, that it is a good, noble, and wonderful calling, but it’s not an easy one. It is as important to teach them the latter as it is the former, which I’ll address below. We also learn something about the roles in a marriage. The woman is to the be the helper for the man, not man the helper for the woman. This drives feminists and egalitarians nuts, but it wasn’t my idea. Their beef is with God.
As for the difficulties of marriage, God also tells us why that is in Genesis 3. Among the consequences of man’s rebellion was a tension in the marriage relationship. Because of the curse of sin, the Lord says to Eve:
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.
What makes these sinful inclinations so difficult is Satan’s fundamental temptation to Eve: “You will be like God knowing good and evil.” You now get to call the shots! What you think and feel is the most important thing, not what God reveals. That is a recipe for marital disaster.
When the marriage relationship works well, as God intended it to work if we live in obedience to Him, it is glorious, when it doesn’t, we’re all familiar with the consequences. Because of sin exacerbated by sinful culture, our fallen tendencies have gotten us to the point in marriage history where divorce and broken families are common. For the first 1800 years of Christian history patriarchy, or male rule, was the normal state of affairs, and too many men abused that. One of the understandable results was feminism. As horrible as feminism has been, one of the benefits has been to remind us of the dignity and strength of women, and how men are to treat them with respect as “the weaker vessel” (I Peter 1:7). These dynamics didn’t happen in a vacuum, and understanding the history of their development is important if we’re to address the marital challenges in our day.
Making this even more difficult than it already is, is one of the downsides of living in the “information age,” historical ignorance. Add to that the rise of “progressive education” over the last hundred years that devalued history as it fetishized progress. Average Americans have no clue that what they think and believe, how they see the world, is largely determined by all the people and events that happened before they were even born. This ignorance can be blamed on the family because, as Machen implied, parents are responsible for the education of their children, not schools. If children do go to schools (i.e., are not home schooled), then the parents ought to determine which schools and what they are allowed to learn. I know, easier said than done, but the responsibility is still ours as parents.
Part of this historical ignorance is that most Christians have no idea that the modern world became modern largely as the result of rise of Christianity. Much bad, however, came out of the good. In the 17th and 18th centuries Western intellectuals decided that human reason without divine revelation in Scripture, called rationalism, was how we would find all the answers to the mysteries of life, and the long slide downhill into the disaster of modern secularism was on its way. The rise of feminism began not too long after this in the early 1800s as the industrial revolution was beginning to expand throughout the West. The historical dynamics in which feminism developed are complicated and complex, but in addition to the fall and the rise of secularism, another one worth addressing is economics.
The material reason for feminism’s rise was the industrial revolution. British journalist Mary Harrington in her book Feminism Against Progress, explains how the economic changes that transformed an agrarian society created the forces in which feminism rose. She grew up completely accepting every lie feminism told, and as she grew older slowly began to realize they were in fact lies. What ultimately opened her eyes was finally getting married and pregnant later in her 30s or into her 40s. She writes:
I concluded that what’s usually narrated as a story of progress towards feminist freedom and equality can be better understood as a story of economic transition: in particular, of the transition into industrial society, and the transformative effect that shifts had on every aspect of how men and women live—whether apart or together—including how we organize family life.
So, these three factors, the fall, the Enlightenment, and economic reality, make marriage and relationships between men and women, and family life, complicated. And statistics prove that as secularism came to dominant American culture, and the further away America moved from Christ and Christianity, the worse the results for marriage and family life. Since the sexual revolution and no fault divorce exploded in the 60s and 70s, the American home has suffered, and with it multitudes of people living lives of struggle and pain. The statistics of suicide, widespread depression and anxiety, and broken families are sobering, be we have the answer! No, it’s not an easy answer because none of these forces cease to exist just because we embrace Christ and commit to his word as the guide for our lives, but he makes flourishing families possible.
Familial Flourishing in Christ
Having been married for thirty-eight years and four months, I marvel that marriages can survive without Christ at their center. It so happened that my wife and I met at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, and that our premarital counselor was Tim Keller. I’ll never forget the first thing he told us in our first session: “The only sinner bigger than the one you’re marrying is you.” I was nonplussed (surprised). I thought that was kind of blunt! But oh how true it is. Unless you are completely blind, deaf, and dumb, it becomes obvious not too long into a marriage what a horrible human being you are. None of us are mass murder horrible, but you begin to see what a self-centered often petty and juvenile creature you can be. You realize your three favorite pronouns are I, me, and mine. George Harrison wrote a song called exactly that!
These realizations of our natural sinful tendencies lead to another benefit of marriage, sanctification. Keller also told us after we’d done a personality test that we are so different we will either destroy one another or sanctify each other. Wow, Tim, you really know how to make a couple feel good about themselves. But knowing marriage is hard because it’s two sinners living intimately together is foundational for a successful marriage. And because we are sinful sinners who sin, having at the center of our marriage a Savior who died for us on a Roman cross for our sins is crucial. It’s so much easier to apologize and say I’m a jerk or a moron because, well, I am! And here’s the golden key. Because Jesus died for us, and forgave us, when we were his enemies (Rom. 5:8-10), we are obligated for forgive others, not least our spouse. Jesus made is possible for us to truly love others because we daily take up our cross and follow him. I grew up in a home of constant bickering and tension, and I despised it. I swore that would never be my house, and because of Jesus it isn’t.
All of this has a profound spillover effect on our children. When mom and dad truly love one another, even as imperfect as they are, the children see what real life is about from a Jesus perspective. They see how two sinners can offend and hurt one another, and still love and respect each other. The reason early Christianity grew among women the quickest is because Jesus and Christianity transformed the male and female relationship. Women instead of property with no rights and little respect, were now co-equal heirs of eternal life in Christ. It was literally world-transforming. When Paul wrote this in Galatians, pagans and Jews would have thought him certifiably insane:
There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Because of Christ and the full testimony of Scripture, we know men as patriarchs are the leaders, providers, and protectors of their families, having their wives alongside to enable them to fulfill their roles successfully. Men won’t be tempted to “pull rank” because there is no need. Biblically, men lead, women submit. Men are the ultimate authority in the home, but with ultimate authority comes ultimate responsibility. Women have the responsibility of the home, and men to “bring home the bacon.” However, there are no ideal versions of a home; it’s messy, and has to be negotiated given modern realities. As Brandon said,
Twentieth century feminism taught women that their highest aim was to be like a man. It taught men to submit and be like women.
The thing I’ve seen destroy most marriages, and children if the marriages survive, is weak husbands and strong wives. This largely has to do with personalities, but the real problem is when men won’t lead, and women think they can. Or women who want their men to lead, but since the men won’t they have to. Again, this is messy and every relationship is different. No ideal exists. What does, is being obedient to God’s design for marriage and family. Biblically it is clear what that is. Though we fail and struggle, we go to the cross as men and women and daily repent. Then we get back up the next day and pray that God will use us to build a home to His glory for the good of our families, and the advance of his kingdom on earth.
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