June 2022

The traditional family is under attack. Unless you only get your news from the mainstream media, you must know of recent and longer running attacks on the traditional family. Or you may know of some of the recent societal trends but haven’t connected them to the attack on the family. And that’s understandable, as those seeking to undermine the family seldom frame their rhetoric as an attack on the family. In fact, some espousing anti-family ideas may not even realize how they are subverting families. (I will tell you how that happens later in this post.)

Here are some recent examples of attacks on the traditional family:

• U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland calls parents protesting public school curriculum “domestic terrorists.” (Note: The protests in question were verbal and peaceful.)
• The sexualization of children from an early age, a part of the LBGTQ agenda, and usurping the role of parents.
  • Grooming toward the LBGTQ lifestyle.
  • Gender education beginning early.
  • Drag Queens at school story times. 
• Schools punishing children for “misgendering.” 
• Increasing attempts to legitimize pedophilia. 

However, the attack on the traditional family is not new. Satan has been trying to destroy the family from the beginning. Even the Serpent’s temptation of Eve was an attempt to divide the first couple.

But for our purposes, we will consider attacks on the family in more modern times. These include:

• Same-sex marriage and including children in this perverse relationship.
• The sexual revolution and all its progeny.
• Why have a family at all if we can have sex without the responsibility of children?
• Marxism now cloaked in the WOKE culture, Critical Race Theory, and Black Lives Matter.

Before we expose how these are attacks on the family, we need to first define what a family is and why it is important.

Then we can see why the traditional family is under attack.

What is a Traditional Family?

First, some food for thought.

“A family is not an association of independent people; it is a human commitment designed to make possible the rearing of moral and responsible children. Governments care—or ought to care—about families for this reason, and scarcely for any other.” James Q. Wilson

“There never was a society throughout all of history . . . without a family as the central unit for launching the education of children, for character formation, and as the moral agent of society.” Amitai Etzioni

“When we survey all known societies, we find everywhere some form of the family, some set of permanent arrangements by which males assist females in caring for children while they are young.” Margaret Mead

“A substantial body of research suggests that family structure is an independent factor influencing the well-being of children. Even after correcting for variables such as family income, parental education, and prior family history, children from single-parent families tend on average to fare less well economically, educationally, and emotionally, and encounter more difficulties on the road to becoming self-sustaining adults.” William Galston

“This timeless truth about the family is as old as the human race, as attested in the opening chapter of Genesis: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” The divine blessing upon the marital union of man and woman extends beyond them, for such a family, says Pope Francis, creates the optimum environment “for the child’s growth and emotional development” and results in “a unique, natural, fundamental and beautiful good for people, families, communities and societies.”

It is notable that each quotation mentions children. Certainly, from the beginning, God created families to include children.

These writers are referring to the nuclear family.

I closely associated the term with the nuclear family, otherwise known as the traditional family unit, which includes a mother figure who acts, first and foremost, as a caretaker of the family; a father figure whose primary role involves provisioning and protecting; and the child (or children). Nuclear families have formed the bedrock of modern society. As scholarly research has shown, a successful nuclear family provides children with the tools needed to thrive in life. Children with two consistent parents, available both physically and emotionally, are more likely to socialize successfully, earn good grades in school, and involve themselves in extracurricular activities. They tend to have better social, emotional, and physical health than children without married parents.

Sometimes a family doesn’t include children, yet they are still a family. Here I am thinking about heterosexual couples who, for whatever reason, cannot have children. They are a family.

God’s ideal for the family is that one man and one woman unite in a one-flesh relationship for life.

However, nowhere in Scripture is a family defined as two homosexual persons with or without children. Despite what Pete Buttigieg and his same-sex spouse think about their adopted children, they are not a traditional family in the biblical sense.

The Importance and Value of a Traditional Family

First, as I have already said, the family is the basic unit of civilization decreed so by God.

Second, as the building block of the culture, maintaining the family structure and supporting it is crucial.

Third, the family plays the most important role in the education of children.

The family is the great bastion of power and freedom against the state. This has been known since ancient times. This is also why those who have sought the complete restructuring of society have targeted families and children as the cornerstones of society that must be broken. Education is the easiest way to do this under the guise of student maturation and self-improvement.

Fourth, there is much evidence that children do better with a male father and a female mother.

According to a report issued by U.S. Congress, researchers “have well established that children raised by married parents do better on a wide array of outcomes.” In addition to having “stronger relationships with their parents, particularly with their fathers,” these children “are also much less likely to experience physical, emotional or sexual abuse.”

Moreover, “they have better health, exhibit less aggression, are less likely to engage in delinquent behavior, have greater educational achievement, and earn more as adults.”

Why Attack the Traditional Family?

First, the family is so basic and important that it is the focus of all attacks seeking to upend or destroy the culture.

Second, family is the most important part of our social structure, especially for Christians. That is why Satan, and his allies are doing everything they can to destroy the family.

Third, as I wrote earlier, some espousing anti-family ideas may not even realize how they are subverting families. Because Satan is the chief enemy of the family, they are doing the devil’s work without even being aware of it.

Finally,

Targeting of the family is intrinsic to the agenda of woke ideology precisely because of the way the family is meant to uphold the dignity of the person and serve as a bulwark against political tribalism. A healthy well-formed family is preventative; it provides the belonging and care that prepares one to walk confidently into adulthood. As the family is weakened, the pull toward tribalism grows, feeds, and repeats itself. (Mering, Noelle. Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology (Kindle Location 707-708. TAN Books. Kindle Edition.)

Clearly, those who oppose God and His plan for humanity want to destroy the traditional family because it stands in the way of their desire to rule in God’s place.

In my next post, we will look more closely at the attacks on the family and show how we can defend the family as God means it to be.

Meanwhile, please join me in praying for strength to oppose those seeking to destroy the traditional family.

¹⁵ The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. ¹⁶ And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, ¹⁷ but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” ¹⁸ Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” ¹⁹ Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. ²⁰ The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. ²¹ So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. ²² And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. ²³ Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” ²⁴ Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. ²⁵ And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. (Genesis 2:15–25 ESV)