Who needs family anymore?

Family is the core foundation stone of civilization. Always has been. Man marries woman, they have children, they raise children to adulthood and then those children get married, etc. The survival of the species depends on humans reproducing themselves and the family has provided the primary means by which that happens.

It is also true that the family has always been under assault. This attack is not something that has happened since the beginning of the Obama administration or even back to the Clinton administration. It should be obvious that for a very long time, the family unit has been the target of those who see any sort of boundaries on behavior to be akin to repression. All the way back to the first few chapters of Genesis we see this, from the Fall involving the first married couple to the murder of Abel. Having said all of that, we are seeing the pace of deterioration accelerating. The new administration gives a nudge and a wink to homosexuals. The mass media portrays family life as repressive and celebrates all manner of sin and perversity. The family is crumbling all around us and there is plenty of blame to go around. Here are a few of the culprits…

Marriage

The first and the most obvious form of assault on the family is the redefinition of marriage. Make no mistake, homosexuals dressing up and having a “wedding” is not about expanding the joys of marriage to everyone, it is about making marriage irrelevant for anyone. If a couple of guys can marry one another, if marriage is redefined to be primarily about health insurance and seeing people in the hospital rather than being about a covenantal relationship between a man and woman for life and the having and raising of children, then marriage stops having any meaning whatsoever and might as well be chucked as a quaint historical anachronism. Even setting aside the issue of homosexual marriage, marriage is under duress from all corners. Marriage has become just one possible outcome from dating, instead of being an expected state. More and more people are perfectly content to cohabitate and never get married, and no one seems to see this as a problem.

Day Care and Public Schools

The public school system has taken on the task of not merely “educating” kids, but warehousing them. Many parents dread summer because they have to figure out what to do with their children after 9 months of shipping them off all week. Not to be cruel, but many parents spend an obscenely small amount of time with their kids. The baby is born and mom is back to work in six weeks or less. Off goes the infant to daycare to be stored until mom or dad can pick them up, being cared for by a stranger. It is heartbreaking to see women at daycares carrying tiny babies in to a storage facility in their car seats or half awake toddlers stumbling in the wee hours of the morning to a daycare. Public school is daycare writ large with hordes of barely controlled kids overseen by a handful of disenchanted teachers.

Institutionalized Churches

How can the church be blamed for this collapse of the family? Isn’t the local church the only bulwark against the storm? It has tried but it also has failed and in fact may have made it worse. Not out of malice but out of a misplaced sense of duty. More and more the local church has taken on a life of its own and become the place where we “do church”. By providing a neat and compact package that only takes a few hours a week, where a paid professional and a small group of dedicated volunteers has done all the prep work, “doing church” has become easy, painless and mindless. You just show up at the predetermined time, we will whisk away your kids, give you a lesson that you don’t need to prepare for or think about ahead of time, provide you with songs to sing, prayers to listen to and a sermon performance. After an hour or two of your time, you are free to go and not worry about your faith for another week. If you think your kids need something more than that, you are free to drop them off at a number of preplanned activities but don’t worry, we don’t expect you to participate or even stay at church for them. Just drop them off and away you go, we will do the rest! Many local churches divide up families as soon as they hit the door. You don’t worship together as a family, you worship with other demographically similar people.

Social “Security” and Medicare

When family units are the foundation stones of a society, families care for one another. You can hardly argue that to be the case today. Little wonder. Why would a child shipped off to daycare out of convenience feel compelled to care for their elderly parents? Good for the goose is good for the gander. Children do not feel obligated and society does not encourage children to care for parents as they age. Better instead to warehouse them in nursing homes until they die, to be visited as often as guilt requires but certainly not so often as to cause inconvenience.

Family requires some sacrifice and setting aside personal desires for the good of others. Families are inconvenient and the response to that inconvenience is to pay someone else to do the work for us: daycare, schools, clergy, nursing homes, the government. As a society we value individual convenience over shared sacrifice. Whether intentional or not, we see many forces that are working to make families obsolete by replacing them with government/schools/churches/social contracts. What was once focused on the home is now focused on the external. Where we had families, now we have networks.

This toxic environment will not be overturned by legislation or by sermons. The only way this will be changed is one family at a time saying enough is enough. I am terrible about setting aside what I want to do for the good of the family, but I am trying to get better so that my kids will not grow up seeing family as an onerous burden but as a joy to be cherished and shared. We need to spend time with our kids, and you can’t make up for that with a nice vacation once a year. We need to make marriage and family the expectation for the future for our kids, more so than college and career. We need to care for one another and especially the most vulnerable among us: children and the elderly. If we don’t make a change and make it soon we are going to end up like Europe where family means very little, where getting married is something to be ashamed of. We don’t have many generations left before it will be too late.