Home Truths on Family

From Bill Muehlenberg:

We know that as the family goes, so goes the nation. No society can survive without strong families. That is why the enemies of society in the West have always worked so hard, targeting families. Once the family is weakened or destroyed, so will be the nation.

All the radicals have known this. Vladimir Lenin said, “Destroy the family, destroy the nation.” The family is an “obscene bourgeois institution” said Simone de Beauvoir. All these radicals worked overtime to see the family undermined and decimated.

Thus the defence of the family is always a fundamental task of the rest of us. A recent speech by Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, offers just such a stirring defence, and is worth quoting from at length:

What made the traditional family remarkable, a work of high religious art, is what it brought together: sexual drive, physical desire, friendship, companionship, emotional kinship and love, the begetting of children and their protection and care, their early education and induction into an identity and a history. Seldom has any institution woven together so many different drives and desires, roles and responsibilities. It made sense of the world and gave it a human face, the face of love.

For a whole variety of reasons, some to do with medical developments like birth control, in vitro fertilisation and other genetic interventions, some to do with moral change like the idea that we are free to do whatever we like so long as it does not harm others, some to do with a transfer of responsibilities from the individual to the state, and other and more profound changes in the culture of the West, almost everything that marriage once brought together has now been split apart. Sex has been divorced from love, love from commitment, marriage from having children, and having children from responsibility for their care.

Read more: Bill Muehlenberg.com