Fathers are the Key to all Government
This article was delivered as a speech at the 2023 ACCS Regional Conference at Bloomfield Christian School, Bloomfield, MI, October 7th, 2023
There is a crisis of fatherhood in this country. The U.S. has more children being raised by just one parent—23 percent—than any other country. The U.S. also has far-and-away the highest incarceration rate – 614 per 100,000. The United Kingdom has 147 and Canada only 109. Child Trends 2016 found that, for the country, between 1990 and 2016 out-of-wedlock births went from 28 to 40 percent of all births. There are communities where kids do not know what a father is. For them, “fathers” are the stuff of literature, and they do not read literature. However, in 2022, Pew Research reported 47 percent of U.S. adults say single women raising children on their own is generally bad for society, up seven points from 2018. Forty-three percent say it makes no difference. But ten percent of adults say it is good for society!
These trends are not just bad for “society” – violent crime, economic drag, etc.; they are bad for the kingdom of God and for the democratic self-government of this free people. God made us for love and for community. How do we know this? We are made in the image of God. Not just any God, not some unitary monad, but the one Trinitarian God, Yahweh – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God – who is One God, not three – exists in three persons. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit love one another. The Father loves the Son and the Holy Spirit; the Son loves the Father and the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit loves the Father and the Son. Because of this, the Bible tells us not only that God loves, but that he “is love.” For this reason, we who are made in the image of this God are made for love. We are made for community with each other.
Some try to encourage young people by telling them, “You’re an individual,” as though this was the most important moral truth about them. Not so! Maybe the most important moral truth about you is not what is unique to you, but what you share in common with others! Of course, you’re a separate person. But it is noteworthy that each one of us came into this world through another person, out of another person, physically attached to that person, into and wholly dependent on a family of people. Properly speaking, we are creatures of love and community, born into love and community, for a life of love and community. That love and community is seen most perfectly in the church, the kingdom of God, the city not made with hands, whose ruler and builder is Christ.
But in this world, that spiritual community requires civil government. The Apostle Paul exhorts Timothy to pray for his government “that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (I Tim. 2:3). This governing can be done well or done badly. The best form of it—the form best designed to support people in a good life: their material, moral, and spiritual flourishing—is a democratic republic, a modern constitutional system of popular self-government.
Fathers are key to this. There is a line that runs from faithful fathers to this great blessing, and underscores their pivotal role in it, a role profoundly and tragically neglected in our day, even actively undermined, across the political spectrum—from populists on the bottom to globalists at the top. The necessity for fathers—faithful, wise, and active fathers—centers on four words: fathers, family, formation, and freedom. Fathers are necessary for family. Family is necessary for character formation. Proper formation into a certain kind of person is necessary for involvement in free civic life. Family is fundamental to everything. God populates his kingdom partly (though importantly) through covenant families.
Fathers: Fathers are necessary for families, not only for generating a family, but also for governing it, especially the children. Fatherless families will tend to produce wild young men and needy young women – the boys unproductive, ungovernable, and dangerous; the girls promiscuous and self-destructive, thus perpetuating the tragic cycle.
Family: Family is necessary for forming good character in people as they grow from little peanuts into men and women. A healthy, father-led family trains us to be human. It models love for us, and it capacitates and trains us in love how to subordinate oneself, how to serve others by sacrificing oneself. In a properly ordered and properly functioning family, children grow up to be good and productive; they learn how to be self-governing and industrious human beings, and to love God and love neighbor. In the beginning, when God created Adam and gave him Eve, he issued the creation mandate to “have dominion” over all the creation, unlocking and unfolding its potential for wealth and glory. Fathers in particular (and family in general) are key to this task. It is an intergenerational undertaking of training in self-discipline, motivation to work and accomplish, discovering and developing one’s skills.
Formation: This formation is not only for the economic dimension of life—our material and cultural thriving—but also for civic life: formation in the character and capacity to take part in a society of equals under free government. The personal self-government is necessary for political self-government. Thus, President John Adams, addressing officers of the Massachusetts militia in 1798, said, “We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by…morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition… Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral & religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Even free, constitutional government requires religion to contend with human passion. (Of course, he had in mind specifically Christian religion.) Despite all the checks and balances in our brilliantly crafted constitution, in order for government to be good—i.e. to do its job in serving the people – there must be true religion in the people.
Freedom: God has provided us with civil government, not only for broadly orchestrating our common life, but also (since the fall) to restrain evil. This allows us freedom, i.e., peaceful and quiet lives of godliness and dignity, both as individuals and as families, and as the church. But the power to secure us is also the power to enslave us. The power to protect our property is also the power to pillage it. Thus, fathers have responsibility not only for forming their children into godly, productive adults (grace permitting), but also for resisting government encroachment. Left unchecked, filled as it is with sinners like us, it will absorb all government into itself, assuming to itself government of the home, of the church, and even of each one of us over ourselves!
Fathers have their job in the home. But they must also do their part as free citizens of a free republic, and keep your government limited to its proper sphere, limited to the good for which God gave it. What is that good? It is protecting the conditions for moral thriving, family thriving, wealth creation, as well as the happy life of Christ’s church and its advance. That is to say, it is protecting the moral environment (for each and for families), the opportunity economy, a church-positive society. Faithful government will protect the life of liberty, the life of a free people. In doing so, it must protect the health and integrity of the family, the seedbed of civilization and of every free people. There’s a lot more to making America great again than a don’t-mess-with-us foreign policy, fair trade deals, and a low-tax, deregulated economy—although those are important! But you can have all these while the moral and civic foundations of the nation collapse.
America needs strong fathers. She needs fathers to be strong and wise and faithful – to form families, to be faithful to their wives, to train their children in godliness and model it, to have them regularly in a Bible-teaching, Bible-obedient church, to provide them with Christian schooling, to train them in industrious habits – not idle or lazy – through home and school, to hold their government within its boundaries. That is, this country, like any country, needs fathers who will build God’s kingdom and restrain God’s government.
Image Credit: Unsplash
So you favor men being able to beat their wives and children.
Patriarchy REQUIRES wife-beating. If a man has ‘authority’ and ‘leadership’ over his family, he must have a way of enforcing that authority through inflicting physical pain on anyone who disobeys him. That means he can beat his wife and children. You’re too cowardly to formally endorse wife-beating, but GK Chesterton in “Democracy vs Divorce” openly advocated for ‘wife hitting’ which for no good reason he distinguished from wife-beating. At least he was honest about how patriarchy really works.
So, when are you going to endorse wife-beating?
Respectfully, you have reading comprehension problems (like Curt Day) if this is your takeaway from this article.
How does a husband enforce his authority over his wife if he can’t beat her?
To start, you don’t choose a … KAREN… for a wife.
How do you enforce authority over kids without beating them?
How does anyone enforce authority over anything without beating them/it?
What a stupid fallacy. Tell us Karen, when did you stop beating your wife?
You refuse to answer my question. How does a husband enforce his authority on a disobedient wife? Either male authority is meaningless, like Prince William being Duke of Cornwall, or it means a man can beat his wife. God sends most people to hell for all eternity. Governments imprison and kill people for breaking their laws. Parents can beat their kids for disobedience.
What makes husband’s authority different from all those others?
In all seriousness, it breaks my heart, Karen, to imagine the tragic family experience that must be behind these comments. You mention children. Wise parents know that as the children transition into greater maturity and rationality, even regeneracy and faith, the means of government changes to suit their condition. When they are fully adults, you govern fully out of relationship, with appeal to conscience, all the while feeding the relationship in love. Thus, you cannot argue from spanking children to beating wife. Any man who would beat his wife, for which there is zero support in Scripture–indeed the opposite, is a monster and a tyrant.
For reference, Ephesians 5:22-33.
“Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.”
That verse never defines what exactly ‘love’ means. Jesus loves all people but is going to send most of them to Hell for all eternity. Loving parents beat their kids, at least in your world.
Is it loving for a man to scold his wife for, say, charging too much on the credit card? Can he punish her for leaving the dishes unwashed?
Submission is easy: follow whatever orders he gives you. “Love” is open to interpretation.
Can we all pray for this person? Let’s pray.
Interesting trajectory: as education declines moral depravity escalates and one of many casualties is the (rather basic) ability to engage in cogent dialogue devoid of pejoratives and ‘straw men.’ Eh, Frau Karen?
The clearest indicator of failed argumentation is immediate recourse to ad hominem. Very sad.
So, can a man beat his wife or not? Can he scream at her? Scold her? Punish her? What can he do to her when she disobeys or displeases him?
Spanking is not or certainly should not be “beating.”
And Christ does not head his people by beating them(us). I am a very old man & grew up thinking of my father as the head of our family, as I am sure our own children thought of me. Yet never did I see my father so much as threaten to hit my mother. And never, in 61 years of marriage, did I imagine such a thing. When we were growing up, boys knew they could not hit girls even when the girls hit them first.