As the Family Goes, So Goes Civilization

Teach it to your children…

Family and marriage are institutions designed by God–they are not man-made.  Perhaps then, we shouldn’t be surprised that the family is becoming an enemy. Who would have ever believed there would come a time when society would be hostile to what has always been considered the basic unit of its existence?  It is why I think feminism has had the most damaging impact on our culture…because at the core, it seeks to separate family…with destruction as a result.

We have slid down a slippery slope and arrived at the belief that the basic unit of society is the INDIVIDUAL.  (Think about it for a minute…look at all the ways families are divided and the expectations that is should be so…even within the church.)  And when that is believed, the individual is very quickly lost in the state.

“Dr. Carle C. Zimmerman, Harvard University spent his life studying the history of the family.  He has pointed out the family’s significance:  that whenever the atomistic (separate, unrelated members) family develops, in which the authority of the father is no longer paramount, then there is a very quick disintegration of society, the total state takes over, and there is a radical collapse of civilization…..

With the development of the atomistic family–which is really no family at all–the home is simply a place to room and board while the state takes over the role as father–to take care of the family in its every need, providing for the children and the parents; the family no longer cares for itself; civilization collapses. ” -R.J. Rushdoony

(By the way, this paradigm does not exclude the rare single men and women not called to marriage;  all still belong to a family and have a major importance in that role.)

Listen to  Zimmerman’s conclusions:

He believed…

“..that a fundamental purpose of civilization is the empowerment and enabling of the family — and is absolutely key to the health of any civilization. … Nobody undertakes to have a large family because it’s fun, or, in advanced societies, because it’s economically beneficial. They do it because they believe that’s what people do. In other words, they believe that children are a blessing from God, and that we humans are participating in the divine will by begetting children and raising them up to carry on our civilization….

Mankind has consumed not only the crop, but the seed for the next planting as well. Whatever may be our Pollyanna inclination, this fact cannot be avoided. Under any assumptions, the implications will be far-reaching for the future not only of the family but of our civilization as well. The question is no longer a moral one; it is social.”

Building the family is the only option for surviving–slice it any way you like, our ideals and personal opinions won’t erase factual reality.

A New Kind of Church

“Do you see that the church is completely dependent on what is taught in the homes of its people? Likewise the civil society is also dependent on it. What has happened over the last 50 years is that self-discipline is no longer being taught in the home, either because parents are not present or because they have chosen not to take the difficult task of parenting seriously enough.”

“A New Kind of Church” by Eric Rauch points out the error in Brian McClaren’s book, A New Kind of Christianity and poignantly describes the proper way we must think about the church if we desire to see its effectual power around us:

It starts in the home!

“Remember that God ordained three separate and distinct realms of government…The most basic of all of these realms is, of course, the family, and basic to the proper operation of the family is the practice of self-government. No family, church, or society will exist long with members that are not self-governed (self-disciplined).”

Easter, as Described by Screwtape (C.S. Lewis)

“For all practical purposes, death has died. There has never been a more disastrous day in the history of the universe.”

(Satan’s servant, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood)

From my favorite book, The Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis:

My Dear Wormwood,

Now I am obliged to write to you about the most uncomfortable subject. At all costs I would wish to avoid even the mention of this matter but it must be broached. I am referring to the Christian holiday known as Easter. As you know it is the celebration of the day when our Enemy above slew death. Oh, what a shock it was to us all that day. I can remember so vividly my reaction the moment it happened! What screams of rage and anger were heard everywhere in our Kingdom Below. How totally helpless we felt at that moment. We were outmaneuvered. Never in a million years could we have imagined that the Enemy would really love those pitiful humans enough to go through with it. He actually died a terrible death to keep them out of our clutches. Why should they be of such worth to Him? We could not understand. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back to the beginning.

Before the Enemy created these human beings, our Father below was well on his way to becoming Ruler of the Universe. The Christian’s Bible says somewhere that our father was thrown out of heaven by the Enemy, but don’t you believe it. Heaven had gotten too small for him. He decided to go on to bigger and better things. And he wasn’t about to let the Enemy tell him what to do anymore. Our father below knew much better how things should be.

About a third of us went with him. We wanted to better ourselves. We were going with a winner.

Then the Enemy brought into being these human creatures. That was a blow, I’ll tell you. They walked in perfect harmony with him. They did whatever He said. They were completely on His side. All they wanted was to please Him. They lived in this beautiful garden and were perfectly happy. Ugh!!! We could see the handwriting on the wall. Pretty soon the whole earth would be full of them.

But our father below devised a plan. He disguised himself and snuck into their garden one day. In his clever way he convinced them that there was something better than pleasing the Enemy. They could become their own god. They could be in charge, be the boss of their own life. “Why obey him? There is so much more to life than that. It is so foolish to let the Enemy be your God, he told them. Think what you will miss if you stay with Him. I will give you a higher wisdom”, he promised.

(Have you noticed that our father below is still using this approach very effectively today? Those humans are so impressed with their own wisdom now. You can get them to believe almost anything. They will absolutely destroy themselves now rather than accept the authority of the Enemy above. They are such a stupid bunch of mortals.)

Anyway, as I was saying, our father below convinced them to disobey their Creator. He told them, “go ahead and do it, you will not die.” (a little lie there, he’s an expert at that all right.) He knew that is exactly what would happen. And then those feeble earthlings would be in our clutches.

They disobey their Creator, rebel against him, and then they become ours. Their Creator can’t keep them because He can’t have in His presence anyone that isn’t pure and holy. He is so narrow. He insists on only what is good. That doesn’t leave any room for all the bad out there.

Well, the humans fell for it. They got suckered into our camp. And immediately they started to die.

And ever since, death has been our great ally. Do you know how many millions we bring into Hell every year through death? It is one of our few pleasures. How delicious to see them suffer! They feel such loss and pain when their loved ones die. Death was the great triumph of our father below.

I say “was” because the Enemy changed all that.

The first thing he did was to lower himself and be born as one of “them.” We almost got him killed when he was a baby. But he eluded us then. He grew up to be a man. He taught those poor humans about himself, all the while not really spreading around who he was. Then one day he gave himself up to be killed by a bunch of jealous religious leaders. We figured it was a big bluff. Just an excuse to perform a public miracle and escape at the last minute. But he actually went through with it. He let them nail him to a cross and he died. We all thought, “Aha, you’re beaten now! You’ve just made your big mistake!”

All of us were feeling, for a few hours, a big relief from that constant fear we had always felt toward the Enemy. Maybe all those prophecies about our last judgment would never happen after all. Death had claimed the Creator of life. Finally our Lord Satan would be undisputed ruler of all.

Then Sunday morning came. The Enemy reappeared. Suddenly, he was alive. Death could not hold him. But it was even worse than that. He had become an innocent sacrifice for the sins of all those humans. He had paid their penalty. He had died in their place. Now death could not hold them either. They could be forgiven and reunited with the Enemy. They can now live forever. For all practical purposes, death has died. There has never been a more disastrous day in the history of the universe.

That, my dear Wormwood, is the whole sad truth.

There is only one thing we can do. We must redouble our efforts. We must do everything we can to make sure that these humans do not believe in Jesus. And if they do believe then make them lukewarm and too busy with other things to be of any use to him.

We have some reason to hope. Much of the media help us. And there is such a climate of pleasure-seeking and materialism that often the Christians aren’t any different from anybody else. Many Christians are uncommitted. Some are hypocrites. And we have got many sincere people convinced they are so guilty that they have no hope. Others are bitter and have closed their ears to the message of the Resurrection. Others are just self-satisfied and only care about now.

We have laid some very good groundwork intellectually. Many educated people have been kept from considering both sides and are firmly convinced that there is no intellectual basis for believing in Jesus. They don’t know what we know and we are not about to tell them. Many of these people are even convinced that we don’t exist! That’s very good! In closing, I will just say, Fight on, Wormwood. I fear we will lose in the end, but let us take as many of them with us as we can. Their willful, selfish part of them gives us much fertile ground to cultivate. We may have lost the war, but let’s go out and win some battles for our father below.

Your Uncle,
Screwtape

The Fight’s Not Over: Women of the Faith Called to Action

I missed Kay Arthur’s message at the True Woman Conference.  (That savvy little thing in black boots cannot possibly be 76 years old!) It sounds like I probably missed the most inspiring message (though they all were).  Here is a snapshot from the True Woman Blog of her call to women:

“Kay began the evening by painting a picture of the grave danger our society is in, and telling us that if we’re going to act, it needs to be now, and it would have been better if we’d started yesterday.  She doesn’t point the finger at the world, but at the church. We are to blame for not knowing and proclaiming the Truth of the Word of God.

‘It’s not over, because I’m here. And you’re here. It begins with us—with women who know God. We have to be absolutely convinced that God says what He means and means what He says . . . To know God is to know His Word.’

Kay concluded with seven steps we each need to take, all from the book of Nehemiah:

1. Look at what’s broken, and what needs to be repaired.
2. Go to God and ask if you need to help with that particular repair. The first thing you need to do is sit down. Stop running around being busy. Sit down and weep over the situation. Let your heart be broken over the things that break His heart. Confess your sin. Fast and pray.
3. Ask God how you’re going to do it. Ask for success. Do it even if you’re afraid. Enlist others who see the need. You cannot do it alone.
4. Don’t be distracted or derailed by opposition without or opportunists within. The enemy doesn’t want you to rebuild. Don’t get derailed or discouraged.
5. Fear God and not man. Don’t be afraid. Fight for your brothers, sisters, husbands, houses, and communities.
6. Stay in constant communication with God.
7. Don’t let down your guard. Hold to God’s standard and deal with evil.

‘I believe if you’re not hearing something,” Kay said, “it’s because you’re not listening.’ ”

Contradeception: The Public Nature of Marital Privacies

Just when I thought I had covered every inch of the issue of birth control, Rebekah Curtis proved me wrong with this brilliant piece published in Touchstone Magazine.

Kudos to one of my very favorite friends, Nancy, for knowing how much I would love this article and showing me a copy–Nanc, you’re my muse.  I contacted the author for permission to reprint and she graciously granted.  I hope it provokes your thoughts the way it did mine. 

Unbelievably good.  I read the whole thing in italics out loud to my husband. You want to read this.

“Our four ex utero kids are generally well-behaved, or so we’re told. But occasionally they do something spectacularly disobedient, and even more incredibly, they fail to make any serious effort to conceal it. This infuriates their father. If they’re going to do something that dumb, he growls, they should at least be clever enough to keep us from discovering them at their sin.

However, I salute their stupidity. I take it as a sign that though the children are disobedient, they have at least sinned simply and honestly. Their sin is impulsive, not deceptive; it is primarily of the flesh and not the devil. They sin with desire but without duplicity. They sin as I wish I sinned.

Their sin reminds me of a time when I would say of a couple of friends “in trouble,” “If you’re going to be stupid, at least be smart about it.” Their stupidity led to their exposure, their excruciating confessions to parents, their hurried marriages, the incongruity of birthdays and anniversaries in their family histories. At the time when  had such sophisticated advice to offer, it did not occur to me that this counsel amounted simply to adding decep- tion to their sin.

Signs of Health or Brokenness

Sexual relationships, while enacted privately, are public property. The lover declares, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”  This protects the relationship from internal and external breach. Those within the relation-ship are bound to each other by their promise of troth, held in trust by the neutral third parties who witness the promise. Those outside the relationship know that this new unit of their community is being rightly founded, and also that any attempt to besiege the promise is illicit.  The vow of complete self-giving is sanctioned by those   present, and its publicity makes it safe to carry out. Thus would a bride in former times blush—all those gathered in her honor knew what she would be doing in just a few hours.

And in former times, when the married couple fulf lled their vows to God and each other and their witnesses, they produced, at God’s favor, babies to prove it. The lack of a baby indicated either a broken body or a broken vow. While both called for the community’s prayer, the latter also called for the community’s assistance in healing the marriage for the benefit of everyone, for a broken vow means broken people. When a baby gave evidence of a union where no vow had been made, it was similarly in the interest of the community to correct the situation in the way that would most benefit all the parties involved.

In marriage, a couple gives over supervision of their marital health to those who approved their avowal.  A sexual relationship between people who made no vows would normally not remain a secret for long. But contraception blinds the community by concealing the sexual act outside of marriage, or its absence within marriage, and by leaving goods damaged in various ways unmarked as such.

The heartbroken suffer alone in hijacked bodies. A relationship is known to be serious (since sex is no longer a mark of gravity in a relationship) when both members unload the “baggage” of past relationships. Accountability is lost, and there is little opportunity for prevention.  We are all left to pick up someone’s pieces when it is too late, and without help, since these matters are private.

This is not to advocate public shaming. The Church is not a place of shame, for Christ covered shame with his naked death. But the shame of sexual immorality torments even if it is not widely known.

Every member of the community profits from a protective mechanism against such shame. Two people cannot become one flesh without being personally affected, and the shock waves their union generates change the community. Publicizing the event allows the community to approve, prepare for, and absorb the change. Extra-marital unions infect the community with diseases of body and soul. Atrophied unions weaken the community in body and soul. A community that has been deprived of its primary diagnostic tool for identifying an ill or illicit union is less able to remedy itself.

Unacknowledged Debt

Why must we have physical, public evidence of the faithful fulfillment of even those marital vows most of us can’t imagine neglecting, at least at first? Who would lie about such things? Well, who would talk about them?  Allowing nature to manifest our faithfulness is certainly more graceful than a verbal report.

Contraception, now the status quo, also puts the burden of disclosure on the tragically infertile. They are forced to openly deny contraceptive use to prove their faithfulness. The involuntarily childless must actively solicit the sympathy of friends and the prayers of the Church, giving painful birth only to words that express their sorrow.

The fruits that proceed from the union of lovers bear witness to the lovers’ faithfulness to their public vow. This is the pain of infertility: a union unconfirmed, a love lacking its plainest proof.

This is also why the Church perceives discord in the decision of a newly married couple to take a few years to “enjoy being married” before ending marital enjoyment with children. Apparently, we are expected to take them at their word that they are fulfilling the vows made before us, although they refuse to tender the token. In those storied former times, we’d have worried that perhaps the sweet things weren’t quite sure how things worked.  For now, charity ordains that we fill in the child-shaped marital deficiency with the sad assumption of trouble conceiving, except in the great majority of cases, where bride and groom make no secret of being confirmed window shoppers at the baby mall. If you’re going to be married, be smart, after all. Be ever copulating but never conceiving. Their debt to their witnesses (to say nothing of each other) goes quite unacknowledged.

So also is the public treated disrespectfully by the couple who, 2.1 children later, give no sign of continued faithfulness to their vow. Is he so disgusted by the sight of his wife’s birth-changed body that he will no longer suffer its embrace? Is she using her maternal exhaustion as an excuse to withhold herself from him? Can this marriage survive? The only way we know a marriage to be sexless is when it comes out in therapy, on the golf course, at play dates, on the pages of The Atlantic.

On the other hand, those inclined to give evidence of ongoing sexual success can simply mention recent adventures to friends. We no longer provide pregnancies to testify to our faithfulness, for faithfulness is no longer a positive act or a community act. It is simply the failure to pursue gratification elsewhere. Furthermore, to whom could we possibly owe testimony? Sex is private.

“Safety” in Secrecy

Outside of marriage, contraception permits sexual sin without public consequence. The public, for the most part, no longer cares, but the Church certainly must. Those who accept contraception as legitimate within marriage set up their children to succumb not only to lust, but also to guile. Fornication super-enabled by contraception leads the young away from marriage and into a life of secret sin behind closed doors on which no one has a right to knock.

The Christian couple “in trouble” faces more shame now from the Christian community than in ages past. With so many opportunities to conceal an illicit relationship or even an illicit pregnancy, those couples who must admit publicly to a sin considered private assume a largely avoidable humiliation. They’re concupiscent and stupid.

Christian parents are tempted to hope that if their kids mess up, they will at least be “safe” about it. The young have to be taught, with subtlety of course, that for everyone to remain happy, they must plan their sins and take measures to prevent these sins from coming to light. Veniality is far too risky.

The people we seek to keep safe are ourselves. There is nothing safe about “safe sex” besides an external reputation. As long as no one knows, we can still participate in society’s grotesque nuptial parodies. Our daughters flounce down the aisle in ironic white gowns, naked from the cleavage up; our sons save for honeymoons on which the couple, drained by months of preparing for the exhibition of extravagance, can finally get some sleep. We smile about how our darlings waited—or if they didn’t, about how they at least were smart enough not to let it become a problem.

Empty Glasses

But as go the banns, so go babies. Our churches must grow, but our families must be reasonably sized; our sex must be fantastic but never dutiful; our food is organic but our love is not. We sip from empty glasses and sing the expressiveness of the wine. True love waits, or if that’s too hard, it can be made to appear to wait. And after the official waiting is over, love need show nothing for itself but a naughty grin.”

This article first appeared in the January/February 2010 issue of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity (www.touchstonemag.com)

Are You “One of Those People”?

Sometimes the smallest Word lodges itself and looms large in my heart…

“…having the form of godliness but denying its power…”

I tend to skip over this verse because, well you know, it’s about “those other people”.

“For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,  unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good,  traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power.”  2 Timothy 3:2-6

(tap tap…)  “unthankful, headstrong, lovers of pleasure”

How could those things be lumped in with “brutal and blasphemers”?

And He speaks so clearly–“Anyone who loves (fill in the blank) more than Me is not worthy of Me.”

I am unthankful when I complain about MY needs not being met.  I am headstrong when I want MY way.  I am a lover of pleasure when I choose ME over Him.  Ick.

Oh yes, I can “look” godly.  But do I live godly?

I am a “lover of self” each day that I don’t crucify my flesh.  I am “one of those people” when I don’t deny myself, take up my cross and follow Him.

And it comes again–the beautiful irony of God’s Word:

If loving myself “denies the power of godliness” in my life, then dying to self brings it to life!  POWER.  The very thing I think I can achieve when I live in the flesh is the thing I lose.

What if we really died to live?

“If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”

Daily.  Thank you, Lord, for knowing I’m so forgetful that I need to start again every morning,  and thank You that Your mercies are new!