FAMILY REVIVAL

THE REVIVAL OF THE TRADITIONAL FAMILY IN CANADA
Calgary Herald - May 27, 2000
JUST AN OLD FASHIONED LOVE SONG:
THE REVIVAL OF THE TRADITIONAL FAMILY IN CANADA

In the week before Father's Day, 1997, Bob Carlisle's album Shades of Grace unexpectedly sold 223,000 albums, because of the explosive popularity of his song, "Butterfly Kisses." A Wall Street Journal editorial called that song "A Miracle in Billboard Magazine," for being the first Christian title to hit No. 1 since the 1963 song "Dominique" by the Singing Nun.

"Butterfly Kisses," written as a father's reminiscences on his daughter's wedding day, unabashedly celebrates the importance of fatherhood, and it does so in an unabashedly Christian context:

        Butterfly kisses after bedtime prayer,
        Sticking little white flowers all up in her hair,
        Walk beside the pony, Daddy, its my first ride,
        I know the cake looks funny, Daddy, but I sure tried,
        Oh, with all that I've done wrong,
        I must have done something right,
        To deserve a hug every morning
        And butterfly kisses at night.

When Carlisle sang the song on the Oprah Winfrey Show, he left the audience weeping. And a Chicago Tribune reporter overheard a bicycle-shop clerk tell a customer, "I can't stand that song, but every time I hear it, I can't stop crying."

What does this mean? Thirty years after the Sexual Revolution, no-fault divorce, and the exile of religion from public life, why should the public look on the traditional Christian family with such emotion? When a quarter of kids grow up in one-parent households, and less than a third of their elders attend divine worship weekly, what does this mean?

What it means is that the traditional Judeo-Christian family (and for that matter, the traditional Muslim, Hindu and Confucianist family) had it right, not simply as a matter of Divine Revelation, but also as a matter of human nature - not human nature in its "fallen" state, perhaps, but human nature as its Creator originally breathed it into mud.

Poll results make the same point within the Canadian context. According to a 1994 Angus Reid survey, 83% of Canadians say that their families are "the greatest joy in their lives, and among youths, 93% predict that their families will be the most important determinant of their future happiness. Fully 93% of Canadian youth describe their families as "happy" and 94% say that they're "full of love." And despite the influence of television, 64% of youth still say that they rely on their families for moral guidance.

Even when the entire weight of the culture, over 30 years, is actively antagonistic to the natural family - antagonistic to the monogamous union of a man and a woman excluding all others, and antagonistic to the self-sacrifices needed by the children of that union - even when the entire weight of the elite culture celebrates promiscuous and diversified sex as the apex of the human experience, even then, young people know in their bones the importance of their families. Even then, a song like "Butterfly Kisses" finds harmonic vibrations within each human soul.

"Butterfly Kisses" contradicts the presumption of what might be called "the activist secular humanism" of the last century. The modern faith in human progress has supposed that elite engineering of our social vocabulary can fundamentally alter our social reality. Supposedly, expunging "sexism" from our language can eliminate the differences between men and women in everyday life. And erasing "repressive chastity" from our public speech can turn us into docile, contented, promiscuous rabbits. Just the sort of citizenry most valued by political elites.

And yet, thirty years after Beatle John Lennon sang, "Why Don't We Do It In The Road" - and much, much worse has followed since - a song like Butterfly Kisses still reverberates through human hearts. What the "activist secular humanists" forget (or wanted to ignore) is that social progress is built only upon the enduring foundation of human nature. And that progress can only be measured by how it serves the deepest, most enduring longings of that nature.

The family is under assault, at the social, literary and political level, by an alliance of sexual libertines and social engineers. In Canada, the plain purpose of a decisive minority of educators, legislators, judges and "celebrities," today, is to make the world safe for sexual promiscuity. They strive for this, on the basis of a crude Freudian faith that all the evils of the past have been the consequence of unhealthy sexual repression. And parental authority has been taken as the primary enemy - the source, not of "original sin," but of "original repression."

As we've already seen, the good news is that the natural yearning for family - the intergenerational family - is chugging along unabated at the individual level, in the souls of young men and women. They want to have a faithful union and they want to raise the children that makes possible. And they want this, even when the behaviour of their own parents makes them doubt their own ability, and even though the mass media tells them such loyalty is unhealthy and impossible.

The bad news is that the family is indeed being destroyed as a social and political institution. And that has one - and possibly another - social consequence.

The next good news, following upon the bad news, is that civilization has no alternative to the family, and the recovery of civilization will come, when it does, through the family.

The bad news comes in two parts: first, what is happening, and second, what might happen even worse.

First, because human beings are naturally political animals, the natural desire for family needs the support of the political order. Where there is not the support of law and custom, people find it hard to live up to their most challenging yearnings.

Everybody knows, today, that divorced men most often die young, and divorced women most often grow old alone. Yet when the going gets tough or boring, without the support of law and moral custom, people bail out of their marriages. This is leaving 14% of the children of married couples without one of their parents - and 63% of the children of common-law parents.

Now, if societal health was a democracy, we could rest assured that the healthy children of intact families would prevail over the unhealthy children of broken families. After all, we can expect that something over 70% of children will continue to be raised through their lives. And a majority like that could win any election.

Unfortunately, society is more fragile than that. Normally speaking, all the violent crime in a society is committed by 1-2% of its usually young, usually male citizens. And if that figure doubles, so 3% of its males are committing violent crimes, civilization starts to teeter on the edge. A small minority of the violent can veto the policies of the law-abiding.

Fatherless girls are 150% more likely to bear a fatherless child (half of whom will be boys), and fatherless boys are over 100% more likely to end up in jail. Certainly not all fatherless boys become violent felons; but as the rate of fatherlessness pushes into the 20-30% range, the proportion of violent felons begins to push up into the 3% range.

In the American inner cities, illegitimacy is hitting 60%, and even in the affluent Canadian and American suburbs, fatherlessness now afflicts 20-30% of young boys. For this reason, law enforcement agencies are preparing for a new wave of "super-predators," violent and without consciences, when the wild boys of the single mothers of the 1980s and 1990s come of age, around the year 2010. And that brings us to the second, potential problem.

Second, civilization itself needs the family as a social institution. As the Roman Catholic pope John Paul II has said repeatedly, "the future of civilization passes through the family." And if civilization turns its back on the family, it is civilization itself that begins to collapse.

Back in the 1950s, American political scientist Edward Banfield published his book, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. He went to southern Italy, asking the question, why are the towns there so poor and backward, when towns in southern Utah, in almost exactly the same terrain, are flourishing?

What Banfield discovered was that the southern Italian towns suffered from what he called "amoral [or immoral] familialism." This is to say, they did not trust anyone outside the immediate circle of their blood loyalties. So the families of southern Italy could not cooperate with each other, while the families of flourishing southern Utah constantly cooperated with each other, building libraries, schools and churches - "moral familialism."

Why the difference? The families of southern Italy lived in merely natural families, while the families of southern Utah lived up to the family as a social and moral ideal. While Italian family loyalty marked the boundaries between allies and enemies, the loyalty of the Utah family was the symbol of the social loyalty they were prepared to offer to other families, and it provided the means by which they recognized other families, equally prepared to cooperate.

Now, it should be plain to the unbiased observer, that we are now on the slippery slope, sliding down from Utah to Italy, from "moral familialism" to "amoral familialism." Ironically, the educational, bureaucratic, cultural and political elites have all tried to weaken the primary loyalty of the family, on the assumption that this would strengthen the loyalty to the society as a whole and the central authority. Instead, it has simply weakened the trust, binding society as a whole.

Front-line teachers report that a small but troublesome minority of parents are adopting a "my child right or wrong" attitude, when confronted with their children's disciplinary problems. Front-line police officers report that a small but dangerous minority of parents are adopting the same attitude, when confronted by their children's legal violations. And third, an increasing number of "survivalists," Christian and non-Christian, are talking in terms of retreating to the "family stockade," rather than renewing society.

Just as Aristotle warned the students of Plato's Republic, 2,400 years ago, the attempt to strengthen the state, by weakening the family, merely diminishes society's sum total of moral capital.

Now, of course, the corruption from "Utah" to "Italy" doesn't take place in the blink of an eye; it is a process that stretches over three or more generations. And it is curious to note that, while ancient societies would "rise and fall," since the Middle Ages, Christian societies have tended to "fall and renew and fall and renew." Most recently, for example, the gin troughs and bawdy houses of early 18th century London - where alcoholism and venereal disease were becoming the norm - gave way to the much-preferable "Victorianism" of the 19th century, thanks to Wesleys and their great Evangelical Revival.

How does it happen? In any Christian or once-Christian society, there always remains a core of families who do not rely on the prevailing cultural climate to inform them about the nature of family. In obedience to scripture, they cling to their "moral familialism," while all about them are losing theirs.

And while all about them are sinking into sterile, self-destructive isolation, they alone become more easily recognizable to each other. And energized by the threat to their children, they increasingly cooperate with each other in the rebuilding of schools, clubs, charities and all the other grass-roots associations of a living and genuinely progressive culture.

It is to be prayed that society as a whole does not sink too far into self-destruction, yet the farther it sinks, the smaller is the remnant needed to initiate its revival.

Joe Woodard is a writer with the Calgary Herald. This article first appeared in the quarterly newspaper of the Canada Family Action Coalition.