Family breakdown as victory for human rights

I wonder if we lived in a matriarchal society he would think so highly of it.

I actually get the guy’s point–people are more free now. But that is not always the point. What you do with your freedom matters. If we spend it in selfish pursuits that lead to terrible outcomes for future generations, that’s not good. There needs to be a balance.

I tend to land on the side that yes we are more free, but that means that we are more free to serve others.

Good point, EconJeff. Freedom isn’t an end unto itself. As Chesterton put it: “Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called ‘The Loves pf the Triangles’; I never read it but I’m sure that if triangles were ever loved, they were loved for being triangular.”

The good news is that if a society can’t coexist with the family, it’s more likely that the society will cease than the family will. The latter is written onto human design; no matter how hard we try, we can’t really escape it.

On top of it all, the guy is against single income households? “The economic base” that previously kept family members home more?

Since when were UN officials known for their wisdom?

A lone UN representative is hardly the harbinger of a new world order, but have Chrisitian communities acknowledged the sordid effects of unchecked patriarchialism? A conservative Christian blogger I admire recently made this point –

“I’m going to be in trouble now: I believe the blindness towards the general bias against women and the actual mistreatment of women is a failure in evangelicalism that far outweighs the issue of racism. Evangelicalism has a lot of men who respect and love women as Christ did, but it also has a massive amount of men who don’t like women, disrespect and mistreat them.”

Let’s clean our own house first.

Sam @9: An official spokesman for a world institution is openly promoting the sins of divorce and out-of-wedlock sexual relations as being good things, because they are breaking down traditional family structure. Your response to this is that all of us, collectively, should be silent until every single evangelical Christian is sinless with regard to the Biblical command to love our wives.

It would seem that such a standard would preclude us from every speaking out against any societal evil.

We may have more “freedom” but we definitely have less liberty.

Bryan, the fact is that many evangelical and orthodox Christians have been greatly influenced by the liberal and romantic ideas of modernity.

That is why in my view Western Civilization is most probably on its last legs. In college two of my best teachers shared Toynbee’s view that the essentially Christian West showed signs of serious decline. At the time, being young, somewhat irreverent, and optimistic, I was skeptical of this view. Now, I understand what they were talking about.

Bryan (@14), I’m sorry, but you’ve inadvertently made reference to the Spanish word for “drawers” twice now. Just so you know.

And Peter (@12), si no tienes los cojones para decirlo en inglés, ¿porqué piensas que está bien decirlo en español?

I am encouraged that this discussion has moved to the heart of the matter. Missing Christian men. I have counseled Christian youth for over 20 years. I have found this to be the number one problem within Christian households. No ‘real’ Christian headship. These men faithfully attend church each Sunday, but in general, Christ does not rule their hearts. If they desire to lead, they have little or no mentor available. This tragedy is now being passed to the next generation. I see many young Christian women who tell me that they see no difference between the Christian young men in their lives and the non-Christian young men. WHY IS THE CHURCH SO AFRAID TO REALLY ADDRESS THIS ISSUE?????

I can’t read minds, to be sure, but it seems to me that some of these comments, while agreeing that the church should first take the beam out of its own eye, still come uncomfortably close to identifying the problem as, of course, women. “It’s because women work, women don’t stay at home; a passive man is worse than a man who beats his wife.”
Incredible.
Fellas, women are the not the problem.

Don S @11.

You got it. Let’s keep our mouths shut a little more often about others and look at ourselves. Given that Christians largely ignore the mistreatment and disrespect of women within our own ranks, we reek of hypocrisy when we condemn the things unbelievers say about “family values.”

Bryan @24. Or perhaps I read them too well.

Peter (@22), there is no more “elegance” or “manners” involved in saying an inelegant word in a different language. That you, like the Norman elite before you, happen to find Germanic languages unsavory, preferring the would-be “subtlety” and “elegance” of Latinate languages, doesn’t change the meaning. I hope you won’t mind if I continue this comment in my guttural English.

But never mind the bollocks, here’s the point: I already made my “objection” back in comment #10. Of course, you continue to blame “liberals” (one wonders if you can do anything else), while completely missing the point that “conservative” men have also failed to “stand up for the vocation of fatherhood”, even if they are testicularly laden — and they do this by failing to love their wives fully. Indeed, in the less-than-glorious history of the patriarchy, wives were often treated as little more than property or baby-making machines.

Now, you may call me a smitten love-struck lefty for thinking so (indeed, I’m fairly certain you will, though if you need to resort to French to do so, I’ll understand), but I stand by my point, secure in the knowledge that loving one’s wife fully — not abusing her, not disrespecting her, not even thinking less of her, but taking care of her and putting her needs before one’s own — is quite literally what husbands are called to do. By Jesus.

tODD, re: #10, while some men attempt to cruelly dominate women, that is far from the true meaning of patriiarchy or the role of the male head of the family. You might reflect on the following post from Beth on the Touchstone blog:

If marriage is to reflect the relationship between Christ and the church, it is quite clear that Christ leads and the church submits — but look at how that happens. Christ sacrifices Himself, yes, but He also most definitely leads and we are constrained to obey. But His leading is out of love for us and for our good and we respond to that love in joyful submission to bring glory to Him; only in that submisson can He make us fully the selves He intended us to be when He created us.

Nothing on this earth delights me more than when I see this worked out in a marriage, like that of my parents, which has lasted 63 years now. There is nothing of “you submit, you slave!” about my father, nor the cowering doormat about my mother. My father leads lovingly and my mother submits joyfully, and they are beautifully the unique beings God made them to be, working in unity with Him and each other to reflect the love of their God.

I have come to see that this equation of sinful terms of dominance/superiority and cowering/inferiority with biblical leadership and submission is the worst deceit of our time

tODD, fallen men and women will be capable of poor behavior in any social order. The issue is whether the contemporary liberal order that dominates with men like Hoestra who praise the virtue of divorce and children born out of wedlock is better than the traditional Christian order where men have a serious obligation as husbands and fathers to lead from Christian love and women and children have an obligation to submit to this lead joyfully, as Beth remarks above.

Serious Christians from St. Paul to C. S. Lewis have seen the wisdom of men heading families in a firm, loving way. Some liberal friends of mine effectively do the same, though they would never admit it.

Sam, I’m not sure if you understood me or not. My contention is that the domineering, abusive, dictator of a husband, while inexcusable, is a much smaller issue when compared to the passivity of men.

Are women to blame? In a sense yes, in so far as feminism is concerned. Feminists have been standing with a clenched fist demanding men abdicate their leadership for 200 years, which men have been in large part willing to do. So there is plenty of blame to go around.

But my bigger point is this, partriarchy is not the problem! It’s a lack of it. Passive men are doing more harm to families than abusive men have ever done. Furthermore, passivity will breed much more abuse than a society that upholds a proper patriarchy.

As a outsider to this discussion, might I suggest that y’all get on the same page. You guys have wildly differing concepts of what “patriarchy” means or implies. Ditto with the “conservative men” that are mentioned back and forth.

It’s really hard to have a discussion when using the same words to mean different things. I don’t know that a common set of meanings would bring agreement, but it might help the discussion to be a bit more precise.

Peter (#31), Another good resource for Bible study is John Temple Bristow’s “What Paul Really Said About Women”.