Fathers undermined, families corrupted – from loss of regard for God

Philosopher Ed Feser recently wrote that modern society is Oedipal, seeking to kill the father and defile the mother. It is a tidy summation of the twin targets of the woke movement: authority and innocence.

Authority has long been targeted by undermining trust in fatherhood both human and divine. In speaking with a strong, loving, and politically progressive grandmother about her interactions with her grandchildren, she noted with bemusement that no matter how much she and Grandpa might be similar in their grandparenting styles, he seemed to command an authority over the children that she did not. Maybe it was his deeper voice or his commanding height, she mused. But it seemed as inevitable as it was unintentional. This was not something the children were taught, but something they intuited, and it hints to a reality of fathers as icons of authority.

Men are not called to embody a type of fatherly authority because they are better than women, but because they are designed to express that aspect of God’s love in a particular way. True authority is rooted in, and subordinate to, something beyond itself — ultimately, God Himself. In this way, a person’s authority is both limited and ennobled. In Christ we see that leadership in any capacity, for men or women, is a calling to servant leadership, a rebuke of the old trope that all authority is oppressive.

The revolutionaries from Marx to Marcuse wrote about the need to depose the father by undermining his moral authority through sexual licentiousness. In so doing, the great obstacle to revolution, the family, would be destabilized. They were correct. Most of our societal pathologies can be traced back to either poor fathers or absent ones. Such a society is in want of manliness, not in excess of it.

And here we see the intimate connection between the corruption of authority and the corruption of innocence. A society without true masculinity will not value, much less protect, innocence. As a result, women grow calloused, children rebellious, and abuse and corruption become the norm. The #metoo phenomenon exposed the folly of the modern notion that a society without virtue can be restrained by corporate sermons on consent. Most acutely, this loss of authority finds no defense for the child in the womb. If the sexual revolution taught us that our bodies have no objective meaning, then neither do our lives, nor the lives of the most vulnerable among us, bear any such meaning.

Even the etymology of the word authority implies that integral connection to the Author of all. In the attack on authority, it is He who is reimagined as our ultimate oppressor. In reality, in losing the fear of God, we become oppressed by the fear of everything else. We fear losing human respect, or means, or our health, or our lives. These are natural human fears, but they are subordinate to the prospect of losing our greatest good: communion with our Lord.

Whether or not a day will come when we are dramatically called to choose God over our livelihoods or even our lives, we can choose to privilege Him every day in more hidden ways. Our struggles to follow Him in the small details of life are the very elements that fortify our future and the future of those around us. Only through such perseverance and fidelity to Him, our highest good, can we hope to have the courage to restore true authority and innocence in the world around us. We respect life because we reverence the One who created it.

NOELLE MERING is a fellow at the Washington D.C. based think tank the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She is the author of Awake, Not Woke: A Christian response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology and the co-author of the Theology of Home book series. Noelle and her husband and six children reside in southern California.