This is a frightening prospect, but the trend of disappearing fathers has been taking shape and gaining momentum for several decades now. When the bearing of children is divorced from the institution of marriage, disaster is immediately on the horizon. The only question is when the disastrous consequences will appear.
My summary:
“The British elites persuaded themselves that their great crime was to impose bourgeois values on everyone. In fact, it is the undermining of those values that is destroying the lives of the poor.â€
We have done so in America as well – beginning with the promotions of the Congregational Church (anyone read the later chapters of “In His Stepsâ€?) It is a combination of false guilt within the Church and then the rise of fatherless-ness (again) that creates our problem.
Poor history teaching results in lessons unlearned.
Also, As I would rather work for a rich man than a poor one, so would I rather get my values from a rich one rather than a poor one. One seldom can know about the values of a poor person but it is very very difficult that a rich person can hide his values.
A very, very insightful article.
Another triumpth of modern liberalism.
#2 – No Br. Michael — It’s another failure of modern Christianity! If more time were spent on poverty instead of puberty, on crime instead of creeds, on gun control instead of gay control……the churches might actually make some headway in influencing the youth of today.
Why is this happening? Because we are sinners. That is easy. My question is why a preacher of the word is implying that sin will decrease if we only hear that sin is sin. Actually, hearing that sin is sin increases our impulse to sin. Romans “7: 8But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire. For apart from law, sin is dead. 9Once I was alive apart from law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. 10I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death.â€
I would say the problem is not that these broken families have not heard the Law; The problem is that they have not heard the Gospel. Evidently they won’t hear it from Albert Mohler if this is any indication.
This article assumes dead people ( Eph 2:1) will suddenly make good choices for society if only someone pointed out the error of their ways. No need for new birth. No need for the atonement for our sins.
I have been taught that St. Paul always grounded the imperative ( what we should do) in the Indicative ( what we are as a result of God’s plan for our redemption as carried out on the Cross.) I trust I have been taught well because that is my only hope.
Wow — it’s like in every thread.
Fred believes in 1) fighting poverty, 2) fighting crime, and 3) gun control, rather than those old fashioned things like “creeds”.
Two gospels. One organization.
Fred, you spout typical liberal utopian nonsence. You and Stalin can go and make a better world.
Fred, What pious liberal blather. You have a creed; poverty, crime and gun control. The church’s historic creeds will make far more headway with the youth of today than yours. You merely offer them condescension and a “Listen to me I’m your better, I know how to engineer your life for you” attitude. LBJ’s “New Society” repackaged but still totally wrong headed and disasterous. Moynihan was absolutely right and we have liberal Democrats and their “moderate” Republican lackeys to blame for the total destruction of the black American family with all of the federal programs they legislated in to existence that made the black father totally dispensable. They have made the 70’s feminist slogan a reality for the black household, remember it? ” A woman needs a man like a duck needs a bike.” The liberal elites sneeze and the poor catch pneumonia. And what these brilliant minds of the left have done to the black community they now wish to do to the rest of us…normalize the abnormal, make right what is wrong, make moral that which is immoral and worst of all replace honest virtue with transient “values.” Gertrude Himmelfarb from Georgetown University wrote an excellent book on the the bankruptcy of your view…read it might help you out of your stupor…its called “Looking into the Abyss: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values.” The liberal creed of the nanny state with incessant and invasive do-gooderism is of absolutely no value unless it is built upon a sound and healthy religious tradition. The failure of the Christianity you reference is the failure of liberal sideline, once mainline, protestantism which once had a strong and healthy religious tradition but has tossed it aside like so much potage and replaced it with works righteousness in social action and justice politics. And that has done nothing but empty the pews.
Go for it, wamark! You rock!
A small correction, however. The phrase, as I’ve always heard it, is, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Credit (or blame) goes to Irina Dunn, author, filmmaker, former Australian Senator, and now Executive Director of the New South Wales Writers Centre. Studying English Literature at Sydney University, she read a 19th century philosophical work about the “new atheism movement” which used the line “a man needs god like a fish needs a bicycle.” Telling.
Alliteration seems to be the extent of Fred’s thinking. A Jesse Jackson wannabe.
Thanks #8 for the correction. I am glad to know its origin. I heard the phrase so long ago my memory must have fooled me but then I grew up in the midwest and by the time it got there (like the old pass the secret game) it might have morphed into a duck.
#4 Jimmy, if you think that Albert Mohler believes that there is no need for the new birth and no need for atonement, you obviously hav not had opportunity to read many of his columns. Mohler is as orthodox as they come, though he may not have stressed explicitly in this column what you find lacking. This is not the same as ++KJS and other reappraisers omitting an explicit affirmation of doctrine that they deny.
It is not so much whether the woman needs a man; but the children do need a father. It is all about children being brought up in a stable family, and the long term effect on our culture, not whether the woman is able to be Marlo Thomas in Minneapolis. The feminist put-down of men and emasculation of our institutions has been going on for decades. I think we are just seeing the beginning of a very ugly time in our big cities. God help us. Come, Lord Jesus.
The core problem is that the liberal position sees all standards as shackles which must be broken if freedom is to be obtained. Yes, to be sure, I have said this before, so I hope you will forgive the repetition. What the liberals want is not freedom but emancipation, a very different matter. And emacipation is the removal of all shackles from our opportunity for “options.” Accordingly, it follows that the wisdom and practices of the past must be destroyed because the past is a shackle.
This would be self-evidently silly if it were not partly true. There is little that is harder to bring under control than a half truth. Tradition, whose grreat virtue is continuity without which it is impossible to maintain an identity, does not deal with truth content, and so is as often false as true.
We need to shake off the false and so we often need to break the hold of the past. In short, the liberal mantra is rooted in a sound observation.
Our job – as middle-of-the-road-conservatives, for whom MOTR is not mere wishywashyness – is to separate the wheat from the chaff that tradition blows in from the past. The job has been made unenviable because the liberal position has become dogma and because so many believe this dogma as revealed truth and the only route to salvation in their true church.
We have to hope – and there may be good cause for this – that there is iin mankind a persistent strain of common sense that wil eventually assert it self. Do we really need exensive studies to prove tht we need a stable husband-wife marriage for the children to receive sound social education? WE shouldn’t, but we do because the liberal dogma has become so unshakable that evidence to the contrary does not produce altered action but confusion. LM
Note also that the article referenced in this story centers on the city of Newark NJ, where fatherlessness is rampant.
It could be merely a coincidence that the Diocese of Newark includes a number of Episcopal clergy who maintain — with a straight face — that fathers aren’t really neccesary at all, that “two moms” will be just fine for little Johnny.
Reaping what they sow…
Well said, Larry Morse.
Kind words, Jennifer which I appreciate. Thankful in Maine.