Chris Carter

A nation, for the good of its people, must secure itself both in space and in time. One of the most important ways a nation secures its existence in time is by securing the coherence of its families. The family, being the fruitful union of man and wife, is the fundamental political unit of civil society. It is the most efficient cause of the resources, actions, values, and loves belonging to a nation; the way in which a nation is most closely linked with what it has, and what it is. Ultimately, families are one of the principal material causes of a nation.

This is evident in the way in which families steward the physical resources of a nation. The land which belongs to a nation is owned and stewarded principally by its families. Wars are fought by fathers and brothers. Homes, churches, and businesses are built by men with families to shelter, feed, and disciple. A nation’s human capital is the fruit of the natural union of man and wife in marriage. But families are also responsible for more abstract resources and actions, such as the stewardship of the intellectual, vocational, and spiritual development of their children. It is only rational to leverage the natural bond between parents and children to achieve the ends of education, vocational training, religious discipleship, and the engrainment of civic values. As children are raised, they are immersed in the daily activities and rhythms of the household. Fathers naturally train their sons in domestic and vocational skills, such as the maintenance of family property, involvment in the family business, and the virtues of masculinity. Mothers likewise are the best and most natural tutors in the arts of homemaking and child rearing, exemplifying feminine character to their daughters. These family patterns are a framework for the cultivation of virtue, practical skills, and religious and civic piety in all the members of the family. In this way, the household is a little church, a little nation, and a little world; a small corner of the fractal of all Being, mimicking the household reign of Christ over the whole cosmos.

Families are therefore the center of human life, producing, stewarding, and dispensing a wide range of both earthly and heavenly goods. For this reason, they are irreducible units of humanity, containing all the elements which are essential to human life but which cannot be actualized in any individual human being. A man cannot provide all the goods he needs on his own; in a very real way, he needs others to fully be what he is. Man is gregarious, paradoxically relying on other men with the same deficiences as him. Hierarchy and community are not emergent properties of humanity, but fundamental ones. A brief consideration of man’s gregarious nature will prove this. At the largest scale, man needs God as the ultimate source of all subsequent hierarchy and community, with the most fundamental expression of this being God’s father-rule of all creation. A bit lower down, civil magistrates are direct mediators of God’s reign over the nations, acting as “nursing fathers” to their people, a term which denotes a tender and yet masculine devotion to the good of their people, able to punish, protect, and reward. The edicts of the magestrate are milk to an infant, providing the civil order, stability, and justice that an individual man needs. Lower still are man’s dependencies on other individual men. Men need a good church, good neighbors, and good friends; men with differing skills, strengths, temperments, and ideas to mutually meet each others needs. The man who is talented working with stone is not likely to have the time, energy, or knowledge to know how to work with wood, but to build a house (a need of both men), you need both skill sets. But most intimately, men need a good family the most. When our first father experienced a need in himself that he could not fulfill, God fulfilled it in him by giving him a wife. It is not good for man to be alone, but from togetherness with his wife flow many other human goods, such as community, hierarchy, productivity, and legacy. In Eve, Adam recieved what he needed as a man: a companion to love, a household to rule, a helper to share the load, and a mother for his children. When the human good is considered, families are irreducible. In my opinion, this applies to Christian baptism as well.

The intimacy of families makes them the best vessels of the unique loves, particularities, and values of a community, since family life is where these aspects are most frequently enjoyed and lived out. The best way to instill something in a person is to expose them to it over a period of time, and families have a lot of time together. Of course the state and the church can do their part in shaping the loves and particularities of a community, and they ought to by the various means that God has given them to minister to the people. But by and large, these particularities are going to be most materially felt in the context of family life. Many of us point to our families for the reason we learned to work hard, or be well-mannered, or be Christian. Marcus Aurelius first thanked his father and mother for the character and piety they exemplified, and later instilled in him. Our fathers taught us to give firm handshakes, and our mothers reminded us to say “please” and “thank you”. We wrestled with our brothers and learned to be gentle with our sisters. We learned to pray, to study the scriptures, and to be faithful Christians from our parents diligent leading of family worship. We experienced nationally recognized holidays like Independence Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas alongside our loved ones. When families are strong, we want to “be like mom and dad” when we grow up. These are the experiences that shape our own values and piety, and serve as a means of instilling national particularities in us.

Now nations, as groups of people with shared loves and particularities, thus propagate themselves into the future by passing those loves and paricularities onto the next generation of its citizens. Since robust family life is the best means to do this, then there is a serious political motivation to be involved in the affairs of the family. If you seek to preserve a nation, then you must preserve its families by promoting their natural function; chiefly, the earthly and heavenly good of children. Likewise, if you seek to destroy a nation, the natural family is a strong bulwark to overcome. You must disconnect fathers from sons, and mothers from daughters. You must strip away the natural functions of the household, like work, education, and worship.

In past generations, the view of the family that I have presented here was uncontroversial. But industrialism and the rise of the 20th century tricked us into believing we are more clever than our fathers. We have delegated the traditional roles of the household to the great abstractions of the Open Society, like government schools, multinational corporations, and children’s ministries at our local megachurches. We have successfully commoditized piety. We have socialized knowledge. We monetized vocational training, and bureaucratized work. We have outsourced virtue to the third world, and import knowledge from “The Experts”. Our properties, which were once businesses, farms, and economic enterprises, are now mini recreational restorts. Our homes, which once were the places where wealth and goods were dispensed to people, functioning in some capacity as miniature schools, churches, charities, and hospitals, are now mere dormitories. Our children, the ones who benefit the most from the economy of the traditional household, now fulfill the bulk of their needs via people who are not their parents. We send our children to be catechized with the godless ideologies of globalism, atheism, and humanism in the spiritual death camps of John Dewey. Private family worship is a bygone artifact, an anachronism of the Puritans. What little spiritual discipleship our children do get is not even from the congregational meeting of the church on Sunday, but from the seperate, outsourced teaching of the utterly unqualified volunteers (many of whom are women) in our churches’ “children’s churches”.

Vocational training, once built upon the interpersonal relationship of master and apprentice, is outsourced very often to the objectively useless, blind, and stupid university system, a shill for government debt and the doctrines of the postwar consensus. It is utterly demonic to uproot our marrying-aged sons and daughters, send them into an environment filled with rampant sexual and drunken debauchery, and allow them to rack up tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars of student loans gaining a “degree” they’ll likely never use. There is no more disenchanting and family-disintegrating force on the planet than “The University Experience”. Even if your children walk the straight and narrow through college, four years of seperation from family rhythms will take a toll. They will learn customs, habits, and patterns of speech that are foreign to you. Bedazzled by modernity, they will despise where they came from. They will abandon their hometowns and move to the cities, interning in the Priesthoods of the Pseudo-Transcendent, searching for a prestigious job in a multinational corporation. In their youth, they will mistake their seperation for independence, and knowledge for wisdom. They will meet a spouse whose family lives hours away from yours, and all three families will forever feel the sting of the resulting geographical rift. At a time when they are in the most need of guidance concerning their values and their life trajectory, they will be whisked away from the only people who truly love them, and will find themselves alone amongst strangers to be discipled by “The Experts”.

The household, once the central institution of all spheres of human life, has been successfully obsoleted, abolished, and effectively destroyed. Indeed, there is a political interest in the family. In the postwar world, the strong affections of our glorious sons and daughters must be stunted. Someone has to work the cube farms, after all.

The disintegration of the American household and family is the reason why father hunger runs rampant among young men. We have been deracinated. We were raised from age 5 to age 18 by the disciples of the humanists. We brainwashed that makes an American is the embrace of constant progress, we were innoculated against reading, we were catechized by strangers with strange heresies, and we were likely sent off to a college many hours away, many years too young. Billions of dollars, countless man hours, and several philosophical “innovations” were invested into our assimilation as citizens of nowhere. We are not human, but only humanoid; spaceless, timeless lumps of carbon resembling men and women, with no home, no place, no connection, no past, no future, and no chests. We are astronauts in the postmodern void, with strong appetites and weak affections, bureaucratically and programmatically desensitized to our natural loves of family, nation, truth, and God.

But not all hope is lost. Thanks in large part to the work of historically grounded Christian men, we are seeing a retrieval of the traditional and natural roles of the household. The great ancient householders, such as Xenophon, are being studied. Masculinity and patriarchy are seen as worthy goods again. Education, work, vocational training, and piety are returning to the home. Families are working together again. Households are becoming more productive. Parents are taking more active responsibility for their children’s development, and are increasingly skeptical of delegating it to others. Classical Christian education is reenchanting the modern mind with transcendent realities. This is all very good and necessary; rekindling the lost loves of the West will require nurturing those loves domestically first. The family must once again become the strong unit that it naturally is, becoming a bulwark against the Regime which has overtaken every other institution of the West. In the interest of preserving strong family ties, a man must structure his family life to that end. I am not going to enumerate all the ways in which this should be implemented (much ink has been spilled by far more seasoned men), but broadly, families should adopt traditional gender roles for husband and wife and orient their daily activities to the earthly and heavenly good of their children. Men and women should seek to marry young. Husbands should work outside the home, as they are better equipped for the agonistic struggles of the public realm, and wives should work inside the home, as they are better eqipped to handle the domestic functions of childrearing. Seek fertility, and don’t use birth control, unless necessary for something like a medical condition. Baptize your babies, and teach them to grow into their baptism, trusting totally in Christ for their salvation. Acquire productive property, mitigate debt, and minimize liabilities. Avoid the public schools (which teach nothing but humanist filth) and pursue options that educate your to be bright medeivalists, ready for the modern world. Involve the whole family in your daily work, as much as you are able; garden, raise animals, work on house projects, and worship before or after mealtime. Attend church regularly. Seek vocational training for your boys outside the university system, either at your own business or via apprenticeship under an experienced man you know. Teach your girls to be Godly wives and mothers. Seeks spouses for your children locally, and be active in helping them to find one. Endow them with Strong Loves. Pray for them. Be a shining light of Christian maturity to them.

If we want any hope of reversing the decline of America, we must promote strong, intergenerational family ties. If we want our children to be genuinely happy, pious, and purposeful people, we must teach them to love the right things. Unfortunately, this is a necessary but not sufficient condition; we must also hope for the providence and favor of God, and appeal the civil magistrate for their help. If the government of this nation wishes to combat the existential threats the West faces, it must make its highest priority the security and prosperity of the American family against threats from within and without. From without, this means first and foremost securing the American border from invaders, who bring loyalties to foreign nations, violent dispositions to Americans, and foreign religions, values, language, and customs that are contrary to American particularities. The basic safety and security of citizens from foreign and domestic evils is a fundamental responsibility of civil government, and the millions of invaders flooding our borders every year are the greatest existential threat to the safety and well-being of the American people in our time. From within, the American family must also be unburdened from the economic conditions which currently assail it. Foreign invaders, private equity firms, and many large-scale real estate investors are driving home prices too high for most American families to afford. Continual debasement of the American Dollar has made most assets, goods, and services unreachable for the typical American family budget. Automobile manufacturers are intentionally restricting supply and building bigger, more expensive vehicles to fatten their profit margins, rendering affordable American family vehicles nonexistent. This is especially true of single income households. Debt in all forms is crippling young people. Property taxes are an annual burden on the land families do own, and income and sales taxes (originally temporary New Deal measures) siphon away critical household assets. Economic incentives, controls, and tax breaks should be implemented to ease the impact of these burdens. And sending billions of dollars of American tax money in “foreign aid” to meddle in countries like Israel and Ukraine must be categorically rejected and opposed.

Further still, it is in a nation’s best interest to promote family participation in the Christian religion, education, civic duty, political engagement, and other endeavors critical to public morality. American family life must be reenchanted with public reason, duty to God, and strong national loyalty. American public education should return to its original commitment to these things. Neighborhoods should be safe and walkable. Architecture should be beautiful. The traditional American Christian family should be the subject of advertising and entertainment. Public blasphemy, immorality, and debauchery should be both socially and civilly opposed. And so on, and so forth; the earthly and heavenly good of the family must be the highest priority of the American government. Only in this way can the existential threats which face the West be combatted.