A Thing That Marriage is For: Fatherhood and Why the Battle for Marriage is So Important

Stephen Baskerville in "Why We're Losing the Battle for Marriage":

Marriage exists to attach the father to the family. It is not a gender-neutral institution. Marriage breakdown produces widespread fatherlessness, not motherlessness. (Motherlessness often follows, but fatherlessness begins the process.) The father is the weakest link in the family chain, and without enforceable marriage bonds, he is easily discarded. This is glaringly obvious: American inner cities, native American reservations, northern England, Parisian banlieues, Africa – all are impoverished, crime-ridden and drug-infested matriarchies. Fatherlessness – not poverty or race – predicts social pathology among the young. Without paternal authority, adolescents run wild, and society descends into chaos.

It is only very rarely the prospective husband is the one who comes to me to arrange a wedding or the father comes to me to arrange a child's baptism. A milder symptom of whatever the malaise is described above?

Read the whole article over at The Ruth Institute here.

Fatherhood, Healthy Masculinity and Churchgoing

In "The Truth About Men & Church," an article in the June 2003 edition of Touchstone magazine, C of E Vicar, Robbie Low, provides a fascinating and disturbing piece on how much a churchgoing father influences the likelihood of his children growing up to be churchgoers:

if a father does not go to church, no matter how faithful his wife’s devotions, only one child in 50 will become a regular worshipper. If a father does go regularly, regardless of the practice of the mother, between two-thirds and three-quarters of their children will become churchgoers (regular and irregular). If a father goes but irregularly to church, regardless of his wife’s devotion, between a half and two-thirds of their offspring will find themselves coming to church regularly or occasionally.

A non-practicing mother with a regular father will see a minimum of two-thirds of her children ending up at church. In contrast, a non-practicing father with a regular mother will see two-thirds of his children never darken the church door. If his wife is similarly negligent that figure rises to 80 percent!

The results are shocking, but they should not be surprising. They are about as politically incorrect as it is possible to be; but they simply confirm what psychologists, criminologists, educationalists, and traditional Christians know. You cannot buck the biology of the created order. Father’s influence, from the determination of a child’s sex by the implantation of his seed to the funerary rites surrounding his passing, is out of all proportion to his allotted, and severely diminished role, in Western liberal society.

Low also has some challenging things to say about how we do church these days:

Emasculated Liturgy, gender-free Bibles, and a fatherless flock are increasingly on offer. 

What results, he argues, is worship and communities in which healthy masculinity, masculine leadership and fatherhood and are being devalued.

This is not to say that women and mothers are somehow inferior or deficient in their witness to their children. Their feminine influence is just as important as that of the fathers. The motherly and fatherly influences are different and were designed to complement one another.

Read it all here (H/T VirtueOnline).

David Warren on Forgiveness and Manliness

David Warren is a columnist with The Ottawa Citizen.

His website is worth some exploration.

Some excellent pieces, for example:

On Forgiveness:

To accept an apology is not forgiveness. It is just good manners. Good manners can be taught. They are within the reach of almost any human will. The ability to forgive is a little beyond this. It is like genius, in the sense that it cannot be taught.

On Manliness:

One week I write about the feminine virtue of modesty, then last week, I say in passing that women “understand orders differently from men”, and that they don’t belong on the front lines in combat. This last remark, especially, turned out to be a great way to meet women. A lot of them wrote to me -- about half in agreement, and the other half striving to illustrate my point.

...the rest.