Fathers, Families, and the Republic
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.
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