The Family: America's Hope

John A. Howard

John A. Howard is a senior fellow at the Howard Center on Family, Religion and Society in Rockford, IL. This speech was presented to a James Madison Center Symposium at Princeton University on October 9, 2002.

But what more oft in nations grown corrupt And by their vices brought to servitude Then to love bondage more than liberty, Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty!

- John Milton
From his drama, Samson Agonistes, 1671

The year was 1939. Nazi Germany had already seized Austria and moved into Czechoslovakia. Europe was under a red alert profoundly fearful about which nation would be Hitler's next victim. In that period of anxiety, T. S. Eliot gave a series of lectures at Cambridge University that were published together under the title, "The Idea of a Christian Society."

In his preface to the book, Eliot wrote,

My point of departure has been the suspicion that the current terms in which we discuss international affairs and political theory tend to conceal from us the real issues of contemporary civilization.

Eliot recognized that the peril confronting Britain was of an order that required the nation to refresh itself on first principles and set its priorities accordingly, rather than improvise responses to enemy initiatives as it had cravenly done in signing the Munich Pact, authorizing the German occupation of Czechoslovakia.

America now exists under its own red alert. The comfortable assumption that life lived in the continental United States is relatively immune to enemy attack was shattered by the September 11 cataclysm. The citizens are now confronted by a nightmare of uncertainties. Not only do we not know the identity and whereabouts of the enemy troops and leadership, nor their primary targets, nor the nature and extent of the weapons they possess, but we are also unsure who our allies are and how reliable their support may be. Moreover, there are disquieting questions about the soundness of our economy and the integrity of corporate leadership, and the extent to which partisan politics will compromise the government's difficult wartime decisions.

We too, would do well to heed Eliot's judgment and ponder the real issues of civilization as they relate to international affairs and political theory. This discourse will consider one such issue, the question of whether the natural family, which has been the great stabilizing force in the life of the American people, shall be phased out, or revitalized with sexual morality and intergenerational responsibility and restored as an essential and respected norm.

It was, I believe, in the dark times of our Civil War that another of America's preeminent poets, James Russell Lowell, was asked by the French historian Francois Guizot how long the American Republic would last. Lowell replied, "As long as the ideas of the men who founded it remain dominant." Let us consider two of those ideas that bear upon the issue we are to examine.

The first one: God reigns supreme and His guidance and support are essential to the success of the new nation. Several generations of Americans have been short-changed in their schooling with regard to the extent and importance of religious influence in the history of our country. Here are illustrations of the piety of the Founders.

When the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention had reached what seemed to be a hopeless impasse, Benjamin Franklin addressed the assembly.

We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings that "except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it," I firmly believe this.

At the end of this speech Franklin moved a resolution that the sessions begin each morning with a prayer asking God's blessings and guidance. It was later reported by Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey that Franklin's resolution was adopted.

It is noteworthy that more than a quarter of George Washington's Inaugural address was an expression of gratitude to God and prayers for His continuing blessings. Washington then said:

In tendering this homage to the Great Author of every public and private good, I assure myself that it expresses your sentiments not less than my own, nor those of my fellow citizens at large.

The Congress clearly was of the same mind about prayerful supplications to God, for five months after the Inauguration, the two Houses of Congress jointly asked the President to proclaim a national Day of Thanksgiving, "to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God."

In 1812, three weeks after the United States declared war on Great Britain, a joint resolution of Congress requested President Madison to set aside "a day of public humiliation and prayer acknowledging the transgressions which might justly provoke the manifestations of God's divine displeasure, of seeking his merciful forgiveness, and His assistance in the duties of repentance."

The historical fact is that from the arrival of the earliest settlers, on through the first century and a half of this country's existence, America was a Western extension of Christendom. Christendom was not a nation or region where everyone was a Christian. Rather, it was a society in which the generally accepted standards of human behavior were derived from the Bible. With few exceptions, those norms were drawn from the Ten Commandments, the Proverbs, the Sermon on the Mount and the Lord's Prayer. Since the source of these standards was religious, most of the people readily accepted them. When the norms were broken, it was simply understood that such actions were wrong.

The second idea of the Founders applicable to this analysis is a corollary of the first one: Only a virtuous populace can sustain a self-governing republic. A month before the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed, the State of Virginia adopted a Bill of Rights "as the basis and foundation of government." The last two articles specified not rights, but obligations. Number fifteen was:

That no free government or the blessings of liberty can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue, and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.

The final one concluded with this admonition: "It is the duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love and charity towards each other."

George Washington's Inaugural Address was brief. After expressing hope that he would measure up to the responsibilities of the office, and his supplication to God, he turned to what he regarded as the most critical challenge for the new nation, the character of the people. He cautioned against local prejudices and party animosities, which compromise the work of the government. He stated that the foundation of national policy must be laid

. . . in the pure and immutable principles of private morality . . . since there is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness; between duty and advantage; between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity.

Why the acute concern about virtue? Civilization can only exist when individuals learn restraint and subordinate their personal interests and desires to what is required for the common good. It must be remembered that a savage is a person who does his own thing. In all civilizations, each person is subject to a continuing tension between what he might like to do at a given moment and what he is supposed to do as a member of a group. This polarity applies to all of our associations-the family, the workplace, the church, the athletic team and the kindergarten. So, too, with a nation.

The question is: How are the citizens of a free and self-governing nation persuaded to behave in ways that will serve the common good and produce a safe, amicable and productive society? For the Founding Fathers, that question was answered by the French political philosopher, Charles de Montesquieu, whose work, The Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748, was well known to and substantially drawn upon by those who drafted the U.S. Constitution. Montesquieu analyzed and compared the basic types of government. In the section that examined the relationship between the populace and the government, he noted that in a despotism or dictatorship, the people do what they are told because they are fearful of what will happen to them if they don't cooperate. When the people are no longer afraid, that form of government is doomed. For a republic or democracy, Montesquieu observed, the sine qua non is the principle of virtue. The populace must voluntarily abide by informal standards of conduct. In the United States those norms were lawfulness, truthfulness, marital fidelity, respect for one's neighbor and all the other elements of Christian righteousness.

When the informal restraints no longer prevail and the liberated, savage inclinations produce increasing dishonesty, corruption, bribery, vandalism, violence, crime, deceit and maliciousness, there must be more and more new laws regulating specific actions requiring additional compliance officers and police and more metal detectors, surveillance cameras and prisons. The once free society, loving bondage more than liberty, transforms itself into a controlled despotism.

Many cultural commentators of today seem to assume that if America ever had a virtuous populace, enlightened modernity got rid of that tiresome condition long ago. Actually, until the last third of the 20th Century, Americans were predominantly virtuous people-lawful, decent and religious. Consider several American realities that existed within living memory. When I was young, I rode my bicycle down the front walk and out into the street. Mrs. Prindeville jammed on the brakes of her car, but knocked me down and my collarbone was broken. There is no way my parents would have sued Mrs. Prindeville, nor would anyone else in our town. Such a thing was then unthinkable. You don't sue people to get rich. Mrs. Prindeville deserved and got an apology from my parents for the carelessness of their son.

Another illustration of virtuous America. Until the student uprising at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, so far as I know, every coeducational residential college and university, public and private, had what were called parietal rules declaring that men were not to be in women's dormitories, nor women in men's dormitories after a stipulated hour. Furthermore contraceptives and abortions were not provided by the colleges. As a matter of policy, the entire majesty of academia was on record in support of those standards of sexual morality essential to sustain the institutions of marriage and the family.

It is time to consider the natural family. The Geneva Declaration issued by the World Congress of Families in 1999 states,

The natural family is the fundamental social unit, inscribed in human nature, and centered on the voluntary union of a man and a woman in the lifelong covenant of marriage.

At that Geneva Congress, Rabbi Jacob Neusner stated that the family-father, mother, children-is ordained by God and is so totally the centerpiece or human life that it is only by using the family as a metaphor that Jews and Christians even know how to talk about God, God as father and human beings as his children. The family, he said, predates all other associations and institutions, and is more important than all the others, and must take precedence over all the others.

In 1948, the United Nations adopted The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was issued in reaction to the horrors of Nazism, wherein the acts of marriage, human reproduction and child rearing were subordinated to the demands of the racial state, with dire and tragic results. Article I, section 16 of that declaration asserts,

Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have a right to marry and found a family.

Section 3 of that article reads, "The family is the natural and fundamental unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and by the state."

In the Christian faith, it is within the family that God made Himself physically known to human beings in the earthly presence of His son, a revelation which dwarfs all other events of human history. As poet Mary Glew Penn wrote, "Time split in two that starry night and history fell apart." God made the family the core of human experience, and He made that primacy known beyond any doubt. In the instructions about how to live that God gave Moses on Mt. Sinai, the family was given the highest human priority. Immediately following the stipulations about one's obligations to God, came the Commandment to honor one's father and one's mother. Another Commandment forbids adultery.

The Christmas story itself reaffirms the priority of the family in human relationships. God could just as easily have presented His son as a full-grown teacher and shepherd. He did not. God chose instead to give us the divine presence in the bosom of the family, a baby with parents who were later blessed with other children.

At the christening of one of four children, in 1963, the clergyman having taken the baby from my wife, said to the people in attendance,

What I hold in my arms, good friends, is God's greatest gift-a new life. This child at this time is a wonder of potential. How that potential may develop, for better or for worse, will largely be determined by those assembled here. I charge you to remember that the shaping of this new life is in your hands, and I pray that with God's help, you may cultivate that which is good and kind and wholesome, and discourage that which is self-centered, petty, and destructive in this young life which has been entrusted to your care and nurture.

That was a particularly moving articulation of the message often delivered at baptisms in those days. What the clergyman was enjoining the family to do was to raise a virtuous child. It is tempting to embrace the message of the sentimental ballad from "South Pacific," "You've got to be taught to hate and fear," but the librettist has the thing exactly backward. There is nothing in human nature that inclines the individual to live as a self-restrained, cooperative member of society. Good behavior is learned behavior.

It is altogether natural for the child within a family to come to understand the wholesome necessity of accommodating his desires to the inherent requirements of the family group, and to comprehend and embrace as desirable and useful the concepts of duty, commitment, humility, authority, magnanimity, integrity and all the other elements of emotional maturity. The natural conflicts among the family members provide a microcosm of the contention in the larger society, but one in which the child may learn in a wholesome and loving environment how to achieve the duality of the self-directed individual and the willingly cooperative member of a group.

The many important benefits to the child raised in a natural family have been established in innumerable research studies. The child living in a home with both father and mother is far more likely than children living in other circumstances to succeed in school, in a job, and in a marriage, and far less likely to use illegal drugs, commit a crime, run away from home, have emotional problems, become an alcoholic or commit suicide. In short, the family with its daily affirmative influence on the child is the most reliable nursery of responsible, emotionally mature and socially compatible individuals. The family is also far more effective than any other agency in training new generations in the virtuous conduct required to sustain a republic. The family is the breeding ground for both the good life and the good society.

Let us consider now one of the primary causes of the dwindling popular acceptance of the natural family as the norm for living in this country. It is the casual attitude regarding sexual habits and preferences of other people. The sexual impulse is so powerful that most civilizations have found that the family must be protected by formalized restraints on sexual activity.

Any established standard of conduct acknowledges that people are inclined to act otherwise, but this one, like loving one's enemies, rates the highest degree of difficulty. With all voluntary informal codes of conduct, there is a need for general public support to encourage people to abide by the rules. As with the Mrs. Prindeville incident, public opinion solidly in favor of doing the right thing, and a readiness to ostracize and stigmatize anyone who did the wrong thing, were strong reinforcements of the norm. In the realm of sexual morality where such reinforcement is critically needed the loss of the reinforcement of public opinion has been devastating.

The cancellation of parietal rules on most campuses was a landmark in the transition to today's shoulder shrug attitudes about sexual relationships. For the college student, suddenly the new formal campus policy not intentionally, but very powerfully, says that as far as the college is concerned it makes no difference whether you do or don't shack up with your boyfriend or girlfriend or a sequence of friends or strangers. The college doesn't care one way or another. You decide for yourself. The college-age student was immediately plunged into a situation wherein regardless of the ideals that had been instilled by family and clergy, the professors and administrators were saying that it really doesn't make any difference. After the colleges and universities jumped over that hurdle, it wasn't long before many clergy, journalists, authors, artists, screen-writers and others in the value-forming professions joined them.

The difficult reality is that the natural family and sexual liberation are mutually exclusive. The more there is of the one, the less there will be of the other. This is not a conflict for which the sages of a society can piece together a mutual accommodation, enabling both to thrive. The dominant forces in the idea industries are unwilling to acknowledge this cultural predicament, even when it is brought to their attention.

That is not the case in other countries. There is a growing massive and intensifying concern worldwide about the diminishing respect for, and reliance upon the family as the central and essential institution of daily life. In 1995, some Russian scholars and Dr. Allan Carlson of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society in Illinois decided to create a World Congress of Families which could mobilize support for the family and provide persuasive, factual, well-reasoned arguments to counteract anti-family policies and initiatives in the various nations and in the world marketplace of ideas. The first World Congress of Families was held in Prague in 1997.

The second Congress took place two years later in Geneva. One thousand, five hundred delegates from 65 nations attended and heard 103 speakers including Mrs. Anwar Sadat, Cardinal Lopez Trujillo from the Vatican, the Majority Leader of the Philippine Senate, and other eminent scholars and statesmen from the six inhabited continents. A speaker at the opening plenary session was Dr. Margaret Ogola, a physician who founded and heads a hospice for AIDS orphans in Kenya. The following quotations are from her address.

. . . by the late sixties, this ideal of sex only between men and women committed to each other in the bond of marriage began to come apart.

(She had mentioned earlier that tribal taboos had effectively sustained that ideal.)

Once it began, the collapse of the ideal of the sacred nature of sex rapidly resulted in children being born out of wedlock, marital breakdown, abandonment of children and of the elderly who used to be held in great esteem, and of course the explosive increase in sexually transmitted diseases of every imaginable kind. What led to the massive collapse of an almost universal ideal? I put forward some suggestions:

• Thanks to contraceptives and their worldwide marketing-most people could get away with infidelity and premarital sex, but deception, of course quietly destroys relationships.

• Demystification of sex: sex was no longer seen as a wonderful and sacred gift, nor the power to beget children as anything very special.

• Value-free education based entirely or how pregnancy and disease could be avoided.

• Planet Hollywood-worldwide dissemination of a culture of pleasure as the ultimate desirable good.

This is but a segment of the causes she listed. Her whole speech is available on the World Congress of Families website. Remember that she serves in a hospice for AIDS orphans. She did not say it, but the message clearly is that the causes she listed of the family breakdown and the AIDS pestilence all come from the cultural output of our country and other Western nations. The bitterness, anger and fear stirred up in Latin America, southeast Asia, black Africa and Muslim nations by our amoral culture is mounting and has grievously damaged the moral authority of the United States in international councils. A most unfortunate black mark at this time when we need solid allies!

The Geneva Declaration that issued from the Second World Congress still has a growing impact. The Emirate of Dubai asked to host and sponsor the third Congress and plans were well along to meet there, and concurrently in Mexico City to accommodate the much larger anticipated attendance, when September 11 harpooned those plans. That meeting has been postponed until 2004, probably in another location. Meanwhile a number of regional Congresses have taken place. The one held in New York in May of this year was especially noteworthy.

A speech from that session also merits attention. The address was given by Mrs. Janet K. Museveni, the First Lady of the Republic of Uganda. The title of her remarks was: The AIDS Pandemic: Saving the Next Generation. She reported on the dire condition of war-ravaged Uganda when her husband became President in 1986. He realized that prompt action was needed to try to check the rapid spread of the AIDS pestilence and mobilized all the elements of the government, private organizations, faith-based groups, artists, the media, even tribal healers, to spread the word that AIDS kills, that there is no known cure, that it is transmitted through sexual conduct, and can therefore be avoided. The multi-pronged educational program led to a reduction in the rate of new infections among the youth ages 14 to 24, from 18.5 percent in 1995 to 6.1 percent in 2000.

Mrs. Museveni herself led the campaign to educate the young. She organized and heads the Uganda Youth Forum, which reaches young people throughout the century.

In this forum we introduce the concept of Abstinence as the only viable and preferred method of staying clear of the ugly head of AIDS. The concept of abstinence is undergirded by Christian principles. But abstinence is also a traditional value in our cultures. There was a time in our society when virginity at marriage was a valued commodity. Therefore the Christian concepts of sexual purity and faithful relationships were not alien values we were trying to impose. It was what had always worked until the system of values broke down through chaos and through the introduction of foreign modern cultures . . .

What I want to testify to you categorically is that behavior change may be slow and difficult, but it is possible . . .

The full text is also available on the World Congress of Families website.

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We began with T. S. Eliot's concern that in an era of grave crisis Britain's national priorities were not being determined by ultimate principles. At the end of his last lecture, Eliot said:

The term "democracy," as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces you dislike-it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God . . . you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin. . . . The feeling which was new and unexpected was a feeling of humiliation . . . not a criticism of government, but a doubt of the validity of a civilization.

James Russell Lowell believed that the ideas of the Founding Fathers were what gave validity to the civilization in America. Lowell was much more than a poet. He was a professor at Harvard for thirty years. He was editor of the Atlantic Monthly and later of the North American Review. He was also the U.S. Ambassador to Spain and then to Great Britain. He was respected here and abroad as a man of high intellect and wisdom. The Founding Fathers, in whose ideas he saw the hope for America's future, have been repeatedly held up as the best informed, most intelligent and wisest group of statesmen ever to provide leadership for a nation.

The question that arises is: Does the United States have leaders of sufficient wisdom to comprehend all that is at stake in the dwindling status of the natural family, and leaders of sufficient courage to take the needed remedial action in the face of powerful elements opposed to such action?

Tolerance and diversity have been elevated to the highest position of honor by academia and the press but we have already recognized that in order to maintain standards of virtue there must be public approval of the standards and public disapproval of whatever undermines those standards. Any effort to reestablish them, will meet fierce resistance. Consider, for instance, the massive cultural juggernaut that has been aggressively advancing the cause of sexual liberation. You probably are aware that in 1993, Princeton's President Shapiro declared the Boy Scouts ineligible for funds from the University's United Way because of the ban on homosexual scout leaders. On October 4, of that same year, the New York Times published an editorial objecting to court decisions that had removed children from the custody of lesbian mothers. The Times declared,

Some children grow up in homes where they witness or suffer physical or emotional abuse. That's immoral. A loving relationship between two adults of the same gender is not.

Whereas everyone can sympathize with the agony of mothers who have been separated by judicial action from their children, that sympathy cannot be permitted to suppress the profoundly important question of who or what is to determine the ideals for the society and the standards of behavior judged to best serve the larger community. Is the New York Times a wiser and more reliable authority in these matters than Solomon or God speaking for Himself in the Ten Commandments? The fact is that for some years, the secular forces have been redefining what is moral, eliminating most of the biblical norms. Has that rejection of the Bible produced a nation of wise stable, confident and friendly people?

The reported level of stability and confidence of the American people today is disquieting. In August, the New York Times, reported that the American Red Cross together with the September 11 Fund, beginning immediately, "will make psychiatric help available to hundreds of thousands of people" traumatized by the World Trade Center catastrophe. The cover article in the October 7 Newsweek declares that three million kids suffer from depression.

Is the American populace that has been cradled in the laid-back rock music culture capable of withstanding emotionally the cumulative fear and tensions caused by America's escalating involvement in fighting terrorism? In World War II, the troops raised in an era when religion was commonplace in American life, were made of sterner stuff. In our First Infantry Division battalion, during eleven months of combat from D-Day to V-E Day only a couple of soldiers were relieved from duty because of combat fatigue. Family life and church involvement had given them the moral and emotional stamina to stand up to whatever came their way.

Another of the most highly regarded wise men of Western Civilization, Alexis de Tocqueville, in his work, Democracy in America, evaluated the status of the American nation and the American society in the middle of the 19th century. Scholars still marvel at the depth and accuracy of his perceptions. The concluding paragraph of that work is worthy of our most earnest consideration today.

The nations of our day cannot prevent conditions of equality from spreading in their midst. But it depends upon themselves whether equality is to lead to servitude or freedom, knowledge or barbarism, prosperity or wretchedness.

I believe it is plain that the passion for equality among America's dominant leaders in the idea industries has been the primary force in negating and neutralizing the ideas of the Founders regarding the necessity for God to be preeminent in American life and for virtue to be held in the highest respect. Their triumph in rendering America an amoral society has led to the grievous deterioration of the natural family.

We began this homily with a lesson from John Milton. Let us conclude it with a benediction from James Russell Lowell's Poem, "Once to Every Man and Nation."

And beyond the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above His own.