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The state, in its warfare against society, strikes most emphatically against the family, and then the church. If the integrity and the power of the Christian family are destroyed, the church cannot long maintain any strength. The family is the basic community, and thus the primary target of attack, together with Christian faith as such.

It is thus not surprising that a statist educator, in Escape from Childhood, proposes “A Children’s Bill of Rights” which strikes at the freedom of the family to govern itself. Holt writes,

I have come to feel that the fact of being a “child,” of being wholly subservient and dependent, of being seen by older people as a mixture of expensive nuisance, slave, and super-pet, does most young people more harm than good.

I propose instead that the rights, privileges, duties, responsibilities of adult citizens be made available to any young person, of whatever age, who wants to make use of them.

Holt has a different idea of children than do Christians, who do not see children “as a mixture of expensive nuisance, slave, and super-pet.” To reduce the family relationship to this caricature and to pathology is indicative not of scholarship, but of the most intense hatred. His catalogue of “rights” for children is in line with this hatred of the family:

The right to financial independence and responsibility—i.e. the right to own, buy, and sell property, to borrow money, establish credit, sign contracts, etc.

The right to direct and manage one’s own education.

The right to travel, to live away from home, to choose or make one’s own home. The right to receive from the state whatever minimum income it may guarantee to adult citizens.

The right to make and enter into, on a basis of mutual consent, familial relationships outside one’s immediate family—i.e., the right to seek and choose guardians other than one’s own parents and to be legally dependent on them. The right to do, in general, what any adult may legally do.117

These “rights” are for children “of whatever age, who want to make use of them.” Implicit in them is the plan to turn all people, adults included, into children and wards of the state, who will, as “Right 9” indicates, all receive some minimum income from the state.

Such ideas are increasingly the goals of more and more statist educators, whose vision of the future would have been familiar to George Orwell, with his vision of 1984.

This demand for autonomy and independence such as Holt requires for children is also present in women today. Men, of course, first took it upon themselves to be irresponsible and to walk away from responsibilities as they saw fit. Now, women demand the same right. Symptomatic of this is the fact that detective agencies now not only have missing husbands but missing wives to track down. A growing number of wives abandon the home to disappear into a life of irresponsibility. The opinion of Matt Basile of the Brooklyn-based Mutual Investigation Service is that such women have been domineering wives with weak, indulgent husbands:

Basile counsels that the time to prevent a wife from becoming an eventual dropout is right on the honeymoon. “The most dangerous thing a new husband can say then is ‘Whatever you say, dear.’ The first few months are critical. Learn early to say, ‘This is what I want. This is what I’m giving you,’ and your marriage has a better chance of lasting because she’ll continue to respect you.”

In fact, this is Basile’s main advice to men who want to lessen the chances of having a dropout wife: “Learn to say ‘no.’ It’s as important a word in establishing a solid marriage as in raising a child. Love and respect her. Be gentle with her. Ask her advice. But you, the man, should make the decisions. In other words, if you want your marriage to last and be happy, take charge.”118

This cannot be done by men who cannot discipline themselves or say no to themselves.

Still another factor works against the family, the sexual revolution. Because of the basic nature of the family to true community, revolutionaries have often directed their activities against sexual regulations. This was true of the ancient communistic revolution of the Mazdakites in Persia, true of the French and Russian Revolutions, and especially true of current revolutionary movements. In the Patricia Hearst “kidnapping” of 1974, a revolutionary group used the “kidnapping” not only to propagate its ideas but to reduce a family to impotence and to use Patricia Hearst to attack her father.

This should not surprise us. Marx and Engels made clear their attack on “the Holy Family” as the foundation of their attack on the human family. “Nicolas Calas” (a pen name) set forth the revolutionary credo when he said that “the dominant of the revolutionary complex is to be sadistic. This means that hatred of the father should always be stronger than love of the brother.”119

Implicit in the modern idea of the brotherhood of man, as Kuehnelt-Leddihn shows, is the hatred of the father, i.e., the rejection of all authority in the name of equality. Thus we must

118 _{A. Bemsohn, “Will Your Wife Be a Marriage Dropout?” True, 55, no. 444 (May 1974): 64.}

119 _{Cited by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse (New Rochelle,} NY: Arlington House, 1974), 180. Kuehnelt-Leddihn cites also the French Catholic philosopher, Jean Lacroix, who “sees in democracy first the revolt against God, resulting in the revolt against all fatherhood.” Lacroix wrote, “One could say that to a large extent the present democratic movement is the murder of the father” (454; cf. 517).

say that the motive behind the demand for brotherhood of man is not love but hatred and envy rationalized into a doctrine of equality. In the name of equality, authority is challenged and denied.

The first authority attacked is that of God. Freedom came to be identified, very early in the modern era, with freedom from God and freedom therefore from the church also. It is ironic that the bloody twentieth century can speak of the blood shed by the church of earlier centuries, and the most totalitarian of eras can speak of repression by the church. It is important to make slaves or semislave citizens believe that they are the freest of people.

The world of literature in particular has been a vocal force for the humanistic assault on community and especially the family. The family in literature has usually been shown in a bad light, as the source of prejudice, ignorance, and reaction. With the birth of the motion picture industry and television, this assault was intensified and popularized. The religious presupposition of films and television is rampant humanism. Freedom is seen as independence from the Christian family and biblical law with respect to sex. Freedom and life have been interpreted in terms of sexual experimentation. This sexual experimentation, moreover, has been geared to violence. Television is geared to action, and its action means violence. The hours of daily exposure to the constant round of violence of television has been discussed by more than a few thinkers. Peregrine Worsthorne of England has in particular summarized very ably the consequences of child education in and out of the modern home, combined with television:

A contemporary child is pampered and cosseted in the home from the earliest infancy, where his parents slave around him; indulged in the school, where the teachers are forbidden to lay a hand on him and where bullying, once rampant, has been largely eliminated; pandered to in adolescence by a whole commercial structure designed to react enthusiastically to his slightest whim, so that he reaches maturity accustomed to getting his way…. But alongside this protracted training in indiscipline goes a cultural diet that promotes the belief that violence is the highest form of human expression, the quickest and most direct way of getting things done, irresistible to women, the only civilised response to a stinking society, the sharpest instrument of freedom. For every taste and inclination and every level of intelligence a good justification for violence can be supplied pretty well on every bookstall and in most evenings’ television entertainment.120

Violence has been made respectable by this trend: it is the means to revolution and change; it is a heroic reaction to evil, and is the necessary answer to problems which only cowards shirk. Not surprisingly, in some of the so-called underground press, violence has become so respectable that some have argued that it is only religious and middle-class “hangups” which lead women to deny that rape is highly enjoyable.

120 _{Peregrine Worsthorne, “Why We Bow to Violence,” (London) Sunday Telegraph, August 13, 1972, cited in John} Eppstein, The Cult of Revolution in the Church (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1974), 19-20.

The result of all this exaltation of violence is the cultivation of sadism.121 Once regarded by all as a perversion and clearly evil, it is today held by many to be a legitimate human expression. Thus, the National Star and the LA Star carry full page illustrations “by the world master of sadistic art, Eric Stanton.”122

This exaltation of sexual experimentation and violence has had a brutal effect upon community life and especially upon the family. It has created a rift between generations, in that parental authority is regarded with contempt by the young, and most adults are afraid to exercise it, having a humanistic distaste for it. There is also distrust between man and wife because of the absence of sexual faithfulness.

On a worldwide basis, we are seeing the steady erosion and destruction of natural communities. The family, clan, group, and other ties which once held man to man are being dissolved by the forces of revolutionary humanism. The logical outworkings of man’s original sin are apparent in all this. The forces of tradition and custom are being swept aside by the modern mood, and the ability of the natural community to resist all this is meager. The resistance is there, as witness the bitter struggle of Tibetans against communism, but the resistance is reactionary and cannot reconstruct, only oppose.

Thus, the only kind of community which is able to survive and grow is the supernatural community. The Christian family, for example, has grown stronger in the twentieth century because it has recognized the necessity of battle and has fought intelligently. The Christian school movement has resulted, with far-reaching consequences for the future. The years to come will see a renewal of the church, of vocations, of arts and sciences, and much more. The supernatural community is a product of Christ’s work and an aspect of His new creation. It is both truly natural and of this world and yet an outpost at the same time of the new creation. The natural community is dying because, apart from Christ, it cannot define itself. It becomes only a phase of evolution and in essence a part of the past rather than the key to the future. For modern evolutionary humanism, the future means change, and thus all present forms of human society, as well as man himself, face possible obsolescence or extinction.

The Christian, on the other hand, together with St. Paul, bows his “knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named” (Eph. 3:14-15). All things, according to St. Paul, are named or called by God. The word name in Scripture means to define. When the unfallen Adam was asked by God to name “every living creature” (Gen. 2:19), this was a scientific task guided by God, the classification of the animal creation. God, in naming Abraham, defined Abraham in terms of a divinely ordained calling and future.

Some have sought to limit “the whole family” of Eph. 3:15 to the redeemed, but in verse 9, St. Paul emphasizes the creation of “all things by Jesus Christ” and then declares, in verses 11-12, as Westcott made clear,

121

Eppstein, The Cult of Revolution in the Church, 23. 122 _{Los Angeles Star, May 10, 1974, 38-39.}

This marvellous harmony of all parts of creation and life, as tending to one end, now at last made manifest by the coming of the Son of God, answered to an eternal purpose which was thus fulfilled. The same LORD Who is the stay of our faith and hope is also the crown of the whole development of the world.123

The whole of creation is defined or named by God, and that “eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Eph. 3:11) now becomes apparent in the coming and triumph of Jesus Christ.

In the supernatural community, the definition or naming of all things is in terms of the triune God and His infallible word. In terms of this, St. Paul then defines marriage in terms of God. In Eph. 5:22-33, he makes it clear that the relationship of husband and wife is to be understood in terms of the authority structure and unity of life between Christ and His church. The life of the church is defined by Christ: so, too, marriage is defined by Christ and His word. The unity of marriage is to be as that of Christ and the church; the same preeminence must be given in marriage to the authority of the word and its government over man, and by man over his family. The authority of the husband is named or defined in terms of Christ, and the husband’s faithfulness to Christ and His word.

All things are either named or defined by God, because they are His creation, or else they are meaningless brute facts. The authority of the husband and father disintegrates apart from biblical faith. As the erosive logic of humanism works to its logical end, it destroys all authority and meaning and leaves every man his own god in an empty world and a meaningless void.

Thus, the humanist begins by defining true sexuality as total sexual experimentation without any restraint of law and ends by “defining” all things as meaningless: he becomes a nihilist. Having denied God, he has denied all meaning.

For those, however, who bow before Him of whom and by whom all things are named, nothing is meaningless, and true community begins with communion with God through Christ. Because nothing is meaningless, we can be confident that, whatever our calling, it is not a disaster nor a tragedy. Whether we are married or single, whether we have children or are childless, we know that God makes all things work together for good for those who love Him, for those who are the called according to His purpose (Rom. 8:28).

The ungodly see life only as something farther out on the road of rebellion against God. “You haven’t really lived,” it is regularly said, unless you have tried one new form of degeneracy or another. The end of this road is the cry of a young man of nineteen, who, with the wealth to do it, tried everything sexual, narcotic, and everything else money and imagination could offer. At nineteen, he thought of suicide, stating, “I’ve tried everything, and nothing makes sense or is worth living for.”

123 _{Brooke Foss Westcott, Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans} Publishing Co., [1906] 1952), 49.

In Christ, however, “we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him” (Eph. 3:12). We are then a member of His supernatural community, the new creation, the Kingdom of God, and we have a responsibility to reconstruct every area in terms of His word, His naming.

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