The Future of Humanity Passes by Way of the Family (Part 1 of 2)
In many sophisticated corners of the West, the phrase “the family” would be met with a shrug, at best.
Some ask: “Haven’t we moved beyond that rigid old institution?” Other critics might respond more harshly: “Isn’t the traditional family a nest of neuroses? A zero-sum game in which children contest for scarce resources? A place where women are subjugated, prevented from reaching their full potential, including in the paid marketplace?”
Still others these days, at least in the United States, would urge that we approach the question of “the family” with the same kind of hyper-consumerism taken to evaluating material products. After all, they say, we have alternatives now to that ancient, primal form of community.
Thus, some urge individuals to decamp and disown their given families, and to embrace what are called “chosen” families instead. Some point children and adolescents towards so-called “glitter” LGBTQ “families”. Others devise so-called “families” of friends rather than relatives, and so on. In much the same way, so-called “street families” are common substitutes for the real thing among fatherless boys and feral runaways in many American cities.
All of which is to say that the institution of the family as Christians understand it is now profoundly countercultural. For that reason, it continues to be assailed in our time by disparate forces within our secularising cultures to whose worldview it poses a threat. In fact, for reasons to be discussed, it is fair to say that this institution is under attack in the societies of the modern West as never before.
In a sense, that should not surprise us. As the first and most primal human institution, the one in which most people learn their most profound lessons of love and loyalty, loss and sacrifice, the family has been the object of attack by utopians and totalitarians throughout history. Socrates said that the ideal society would take children away from their parents. Marx and Engels demanded the family’s abolition. Communist Russia and like-minded dictatorships tried, and succeeded, in disrupting the family’s primacy, especially in the critical realm of education.
This list could go on. But we can cut straight to the point.
Today, I am here to share some perhaps surprising but essential news. Even as critics continue to assail both family and faith, Church teaching on the family is being vindicated. That vindication is not issuing from theology or philosophy. It is instead comprised of empirical evidence assembled by perfectly secular sources — evidence showing what happens when societies do not place a sacred value on family, as our societies increasingly do not.
In a time when many religious believers feel anxious and on the defensive, when other losses for the Church seem to be mounting, the idea that the Church is scoring a major win these days might seem dubious. But it is real — as real as the fact that this same vindication is ignored by those who don’t want to see it. Let us consider four broad areas of such evidence, the better to see this vindication clearly.
Evidence in Favour
First, many decades of social science have vindicated the idea that the Sexual Revolution beginning in the 1960s has had terrible consequences. This apprehension was most clearly voiced by the Church in the encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968), which reiterated longstanding teaching against artificial contraception. Yet even the authors of that encyclical, prophetic though they were, could not have foreseen just how much social and personal chaos would become compounded during the decades following the widespread adoption of artificial contraception.
Hopeful sexual revolutionaries believed that the birth-control pill would strengthen marriage. Instead, both divorce and cohabitation skyrocketed as never before. Some also argued that contraception would help people by preventing abortion. Sixty-three million-plus abortions in the United States since Roe v Wade put quite the dent in that case. All over the West, marriage and family have imploded such that today, having no father at home has become an unremarkable norm.
Meanwhile, the children who are at home, fatherless or not, are far less likely to know the consolations of siblings than before. And an entire library of social science now six decades in the making continues to testify to the behavioural, emotional, educational, and other fallout brought on by broken homes — a library as resolutely ignored as it is robust.
This tragic litany could continue, but the point is already plain. Today we can see in retrospect what no one in 1968 saw coming — the atomisation and fragmentation of society that would follow the Sexual Revolution as day follows night.
This isolation is a tragedy no one saw coming. This kind of misery has not been seen before. And it is one more indication that, whatever people may think of the Catholic Church, there is mounting empirical evidence that Pope Saint Paul VI and others were right in predicting that the Sexual Revolution would wreak havoc on human beings.
Second, we also possess abundant evidence of another kind that no one could have foreseen before the Revolution took hold. Jettisoning Christian teachings about the family, as our societies largely have done, has made many millions of people miserable not only on account of broken homes, but for another reason. The decision to live as if family were a consumer choice rather than the most important human institution on earth has exacted steep costs not only on children, but at the other end of life: that is, old age.
These costs are the deeper meaning of one of the most telling academic phenomena of our times: the explosion of what are called “loneliness studies” in every Western nation on earth.
So, for example, “Loneliness is becoming a common phenomenon in France”, to take an example from Le Figaro. Citing a study on the “new solitudes” by the Fondation de France, that article also named what it called the prime driver of this loneliness: “family rupture”, especially divorce.
In a similar vein, a study, “Predictors of Loneliness Across the Adult Life Span in Portugal”, also cited divorce as increasing the likelihood of loneliness — though it did not ask whether having children in the picture might ameliorate the problem.
Oddly, one can read through many “loneliness studies” without seeing any reference to children — a striking omission. But that is what happens in a world where children have come to be seen as a burden rather than as a blessing: their absence in turn becomes a terrible burden all of its own.
Outside the Church, in the secularising societies that do not enshrine the family, the problem of loneliness is nevertheless so pressing that those same societies cannot help but notice it. In Sweden, a 2015 documentary on The Swedish Theory of Love questioned the dominance of “independence” in that country as an ideal. It seems more a curse than a blessing when one-half of Swedes now live in households of one.
As a report put it of one particular “lonely death”:
“As the Swedish authorities scrutinise the case, they discover that the man has no close relatives or friends. It is highly likely that he lived lonely and alone for years, sitting solitary in front of his TV or computer. After a while, they discover that he has a daughter, but she proves impossible to locate … It becomes apparent that he actually had quite a lot of money tucked away in the bank. But what does that help when he had no one to share with?”
One last snapshot, this from Germany. An article in Der Spiegel entitled, “Alone by the Millions: Isolation Crisis Threatens German Seniors”.
It reports:
“Over 20 per cent of Germans over the age of 70 are in regular contact with only one person — or nobody. One in four receives a visit less than once a month from friends and acquaintances, and nearly one in 10 is not visited by anyone anymore. Many old people have no one who still addresses them by their first name or asks them how they are doing.”
Such human poverty, which Pope Francis himself has decried, abounds in societies awash in material wealth. This contradiction, too, could not possibly have been foreseen in full by those who argued for and against Humanae Vitae in 1968. Yet, without doubt, what unites these sad portraits is the Sexual Revolution, which by the 1970s was operating at full throttle in Western nations, driving up divorce rates, driving down marriage rates, and emptying cradles. It does not take a demographer to connect the dots; the evidence of our senses will do.
Third, Church teaching about the family is vindicated in our time in one more way, this one outside the bounds of social science. The more the surrounding decadence darkens the horizon of today’s Western men and women, the more the ennobled vision put forth by the Magisterium shines in contrast.
After all, look at our societies. Are they better off, post-Sexual Revolution, having largely tossed out the Good Book? Are these liberated fellow human beings of ours markedly happier, now that they are free of rules and children and church?
To the contrary: evidence abounds that there is something unnatural and inhuman about the way many now pass their days. Social dysfunctions like addictions are rising across the better-off countries of the world. In the United States, we’ve lost millions of lives over the past two decades to an opioid epidemic that turned into a heroin epidemic and now a synthetic fentanyl epidemic.
A rapacious search for corporate profit started this ruination. But one has to wonder about the extraordinary demand for self-medicating that has kept it going for so long. Once more: might dispensing with marriage and babies, thus emptying Western lives of other people, account for some of this cost?
And drugs are only part of what any impartial observer can see across the Western landscape today. Psychiatric problems like anxiety and depression have been increasing for years, especially among the young, including well before the pandemic. (In fact, the rise in psychiatric trouble across the modern West was one of the first puzzles that drew me to some of the writing I’ve done, trying to get to the root of why.)
In sum, a lot of men, women, and children are suffering in our time. Their trials go largely ignored in a wider world that seeks to keep the Sexual Revolution as status quo. But these same people are suffering in ways that can be helped by the Church, which offers a guide to life and an elevated view of humanity and its worth that many of those suffering may never have heard before.
The dominant secular culture sees human beings as sexual animals to be used and thrown away. It sees euthanasia, death, as an answer to the supposed problem of life.
Christianity opposes these pagan encroachments with its every breath. It teaches that life is good, period; and that human beings are infinitely precious and made in the image of God. These are diametrically opposed versions of the human person — and when people have to choose, at least some will reject the idea that they are mere animals, if the choice is only put to them.
Solicitude Towards Women
Fourth, let us look briefly at two ways in which Church teaching about the family offers solicitude towards women, in particular, as the indifferent secularist culture does not.
First, is the elephant in the room — and on laptops and smartphones everywhere: pornography. The Catholic Church, and practically the Catholic Church alone among all global institutions, condemns it. Once upon a time, prominent feminists like Andrea Dworkin stood shoulder-to-shoulder with moral traditionalists like law professor Edwin Meese, united in finding pornography inimical to humankind.
Today’s secular mainstream is instead “anti-anti-pornography”. At best, it views those who object to pornography as the problem. At worst, it defends pornography as one more fast track to liberation.
Even so, the fact remains that many girls and women are not nearly as unconcerned about pornography as secular materialism demands. That is one more fault line running between women and the secular movements that claim to protect them, but do not. It is the Church that actually stands on the side of women here. That fact is nothing to hide. It should be shouted from Christian schools, pulpits, and faithful universities far and wide.
Then there is the grotesque project that subverts the secularist claim to put women first: gender-cide. Around the world, in a pattern unfolding since the invention of the sonogram, millions more female fetuses are destroyed than males — destroyed because they are female.
If one were devising an actual “war on women”, it would be hard to improve on a strategy that pre-emptively keeps millions of us from seeing daylight in the first place. Yet the same activists who are adversaries of the Church take the same view of gender-cide that they do of pornography: they are more opposed to the people who resist that phenomenon than they are to the thing itself.
I often wonder if the Church could join in forging a new consensus among many women — and many men — just by getting all parties to agree to three simple points: that humanity has taken a mechanised, industrial turn about sex; that this wrong turn is making plenty of people miserable; and that both men and women deserve better — including by entertaining what the Church has to say about all that. Today’s often-blind search for authenticity among the secularised young, especially, may be an underused asset on the side of truth.
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Originally published at News Weekly. Photo by Victoria Akvarel.
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It’s kinda straightforward really. The reason the activists inside and outside the Church want to destroy the family and faith is because it leaves children utterly vulnerable to predators. This is the satanic way of reproducing and creating – in its own image.
PS. When children are exposed to adult sexuality from birth , they not only view this aberration as normal they live it out = they reproduce themselves.