Response to Stephen Baskerville on Family Crisis

     Freedom and the Family: The Family Crisis and the Future of Western Civilization  by Stephen Baskerville (in the Commentary section) raises fundamental issues about how we can address the impasse which blocks Americans (and Westerners generally) from making progress with just about any cultural or political issue we face from the Judao-Christian perspective.

Family is the smithy of the soul.  When family disintegrates, the culture will necessarily follow suit.  I do not think the onslaught is accidental.  As FDR (I think) said, “If it happen in politics, someone planned it.”   The someones are, I believe, the globalist financial crowd.  They are not evil because they are financial, rather they have chosen the financial route because they know that control of the money system virtually guarantees them control of politics and culture.  And we let them get away with it.

But I am concerned not with the evil ones so much as the solution.  The problem is fundamentally spiritual.  The only way a people can keep a government such as we were given 1775-1789 on a constitutional tether is to have among themselves a deep moral consensus, a firm agreement on what is right and what is wrong.  The destruction of our Western Biblical worldview, Gospel, and moral consensus, mostly intact at the time of the Revolution left us unprotected from the slings and arrows of globalism and government centralization.

But the Biblical worldview was severely undermined mostly by ourselves, our failure to defend our faith against the pseudo-Enlightenment onslaught.  We lost our intellectual credibility, soon followed by our moral and spiritual integrity.  We split to a fare-thee-well among ourselves, over 2000 denominations.  And we were driven from the public arena over the 20th century, leaving government to precisely those family-negative forces to which Stephen points.

We will not get our spiritual unity back until we reverse our own self-caused Christian disintegration by splitting into warring camps.  I would refer the reader to my article on A New Reformation (in the Commentary section) in which I assert that we must become truth-seekers before we can be honest position-defenders.

There is, I believe, a “family” in God, just as we are made in the Image of God — male and female.  See again, A New Reformation.  Family will not die — because that is the image in which we are made.  But there can be only more dislocation and pain if we do not reverse the trend soon.  That means a return to God as sovereign over all things, including especially over civil government.

Blessings, Earle