Breaking the West
If you want to find the root of the West’s instability, it lies in the constant failure of the righteous as a whole to defend the family. Chesterton said of the family that it “may fairly be considered… an ultimate human institution” (Heretics, ch. 14). The family precedes the state and the church; it is fundamental to stewardship, prior to economy, and essential to longevity (Ex. 20:12); it can make a man, or it can break him. Yet the Western (the American) response has been to systematically destroy it, by perversion and explosion and shaving away of piece and part. To this, in the finest fashion of humankind, God’s people have too often set that kind of conservatism discussed by R.L. Dabney: “Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation.” He was in that case talking about the feminism of his day, a part of that destruction.1
Let’s put ourselves in the shows of the destroyer; let’s figure out how to destroy a family.
It’s easy to say that I’d start with the men or the women or the children, but that’s a myopic paradigm. The family is a relationship; if I break the function of one part of the family, the dysfunction there is a dysfunction harming the whole. If I want to diminish fathers, I can do it by attacking fatherhood, but motherhood and childhood are also thoroughly valid targets in the endeavor. What I mean by this is: don’t insist that any breakage victimizes one side only. Whether it’s feminism, abortion, government education, fornication, or something else, it will affect each part differently- the father (even just potential)m the mother (perhaps potential), and the child (hypothetical, often). It will affect them all differently, but it will affect them all. Feminism didn’t just mutiliate men; it shattered women and children too.
Nor should I adopt too small of a means. Take feminism. Was its cause sin in the women? In the parents? In the men? In the children (for all were children once)? The answer is simple: all of them bear blame. Feminism and all such societal sins, however much attention they pay to gender, are the fruit of rebellion in all parties- men abdicating or abusing authority; women rebelling against authority, including illegitimate authority; men and women seeing evils where there were none; men and women seeing real evils and giving evil solutions; children, raised to have cracks in their foundations, passing those cracks along to their children.
So if I want to break the family, I don’t start in any place uniquely. Such singular, focused blows may suffice, but that’s not the nature of sin. Sin spreads and mutates and re-emerges; sin hybridizes and expresses differently in different people and different cultures and difference circumstances. So here’s the historical path to destroy the family: a million evil innovations. They build onto each other; they produce problems the others seem to solve; they present evils which the others can be ‘solutions’ to. Welfare incentivizes single-parent households incentivizes abortion diminishes parenthood unleashes masculinity from purpose…. And as many other chains as you can imagine.
False masculinity, materialism, behaviorism, feminism, government education, welfare, fornication, sex ed (meant explicitly to reshape norms), lack of moral standards for soldiers, poor church discipline, abusive church discipline, more, more, more: thousands of evil things, each with thousands of variations.
The end result?
The West, without its foundation. Churches, built from shoddy blocks. Governments, short-sighted and corrupt. Voters, half-blind and desperate. People, without mooring in the world. People, suffering.
The only solution, first, is individual repentance and faith. The fruit of that repentance and faith, however, as per Romans 6 and James 2, is ever more pervasive righteousness. Fundamental to that pervasion is the family. Build a righteous family, as the father, the mother, or the child, and it will bear fruits for eternity (Ps. 127:5; Matt. 6:19-20).
God bless.
