Commentary, Polemics

The importance of fathers for teaching children about Christian worldview

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One thing I wish that Christian parents and pastors emphasized more with young, unmarried Christian women is the need to choose a man who keeps his commitments. It turns out that passing on Christian values and worldview works a lot better when there is a man around to teach the children himself.

Here is some statistical evidence showing the difference that Christian fathers make, from Touchstone magazine.

Excerpt:

In 1994 the Swiss carried out an extra survey that the researchers for our masters in Europe (I write from England) were happy to record. The question was asked to determine whether a person’s religion carried through to the next generation, and if so, why, or if not, why not. The result is dynamite. There is one critical factor. It is overwhelming, and it is this: It is the religious practice of the father of the family that, above all, determines the future attendance at or absence from church of the children.

If both father and mother attend regularly, 33 percent of their children will end up as regular churchgoers, and 41 percent will end up attending irregularly. Only a quarter of their children will end up not practicing at all. If the father is irregular and mother regular, only 3 percent of the children will subsequently become regulars themselves, while a further 59 percent will become irregulars. Thirty-eight percent will be lost.

If the father is non-practicing and mother regular, only 2 percent of children will become regular worshippers, and 37 percent will attend irregularly. Over 60 percent of their children will be lost completely to the church.

Let us look at the figures the other way round. What happens if the father is regular but the mother irregular or non-practicing? Extraordinarily, the percentage of children becoming regular goesupfrom 33 percent to 38 percent with the irregular mother and to 44 percent with the non-practicing, as if loyalty to father’s commitment grows in proportion to mother’s laxity, indifference, or hostility.

[…]In short, 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.

Basically, a child who doesn’t have a benevolent, involved father is going to have an more difficult time believing that moral boundaries set by an authority are for the benefit of the person who is being bounded. The best way to make moral boundaries stick is to see that they apply to the person making the boundaries as well – and that these moral boundaries are rational, evidentially-grounded and not arbitrary. It is therefore very important to children to be shepherded by a man who studied moral issues (including evidence from outside the Bible) in order to know how to be persuasive to others.

If a woman wants her child to be religious and moral, then she has to pick a man who is religious and moral. And it can’t just be a faith commitment that he claims with words, because he can just lie about that. Women ought to check whether men are bound to what they believe by checking what they’ve read. A man usually acts consistently with what he believes, and beliefs only get formed when a man informs himself through things like reading. It would be good to see how he puts those beliefs into practice, too.

My advice to Christian women is this. When you are picking a man, be sure and choose one who is already invested in Christian things and producing results. It’s very unlikely that he’s going to be interested in developing that capacity from scratch if he’s not already doing it. If you want your kids to be taught Christianity by their father, then make spiritual leadership a priority when you’re choosing a husband.

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Correcting four myths about the history of the Crusades

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Here is an interesting article from Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Intro:

The verdict seems unanimous. From presidential speeches to role-playing games, the crusades are depicted as a deplorably violent episode in which thuggish Westerners trundled off, unprovoked, to murder and pillage peace-loving, sophisticated Muslims, laying down patterns of outrageous oppression that would be repeated throughout subsequent history. In many corners of the Western world today, this view is too commonplace and apparently obvious even to be challenged.

But unanimity is not a guarantee of accuracy. What everyone “knows” about the crusades may not, in fact, be true. From the many popular notions about the crusades, let us pick four and see if they bear close examination.

The four myths:

  • Myth #1: The crusades represented an unprovoked attack by Western Christians on the Muslim world.
  • Myth #2: Western Christians went on crusade because their greed led them to plunder Muslims in order to get rich.
  • Myth #3: Crusaders were a cynical lot who did not really believe their own religious propaganda; rather, they had ulterior, materialistic motives.
  • Myth #4: The crusades taught Muslims to hate and attack Christians.

Here’s the most obvious thing you should know. The Crusades were defensive actions:

In a.d. 632, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, North Africa, Spain, France, Italy, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica were all Christian territories. Inside the boundaries of the Roman Empire, which was still fully functional in the eastern Mediterranean, orthodox Christianity was the official, and overwhelmingly majority, religion. Outside those boundaries were other large Christian communities—not necessarily orthodox and Catholic, but still Christian. Most of the Christian population of Persia, for example, was Nestorian. Certainly there were many Christian communities in Arabia.

By a.d. 732, a century later, Christians had lost Egypt, Palestine, Syria, North Africa, Spain, most of Asia Minor, and southern France. Italy and her associated islands were under threat, and the islands would come under Muslim rule in the next century. The Christian communities of Arabia were entirely destroyed in or shortly after 633, when Jews and Christians alike were expelled from the peninsula.6 Those in Persia were under severe pressure. Two-thirds of the formerly Roman Christian world was now ruled by Muslims.

What had happened? Most people actually know the answer, if pressed—though for some reason they do not usually connect the answer with the crusades. The answer is the rise of Islam. Every one of the listed regions was taken, within the space of a hundred years, from Christian control by violence, in the course of military campaigns deliberately designed to expand Muslim territory at the expense of Islam’s neighbors. Nor did this conclude Islam’s program of conquest. The attacks continued, punctuated from time to time by Christian attempts to push back. Charlemagne blocked the Muslim advance in far western Europe in about a.d. 800, but Islamic forces simply shifted their focus and began to island-hop across from North Africa toward Italy and the French coast, attacking the Italian mainland by 837. A confused struggle for control of southern and central Italy continued for the rest of the ninth century and into the tenth. In the hundred years between 850 and 950, Benedictine monks were driven out of ancient monasteries, the Papal States were overrun, and Muslim pirate bases were established along the coast of northern Italy and southern France, from which attacks on the deep inland were launched. Desperate to protect victimized Christians, popes became involved in the tenth and early eleventh centuries in directing the defense of the territory around them.

If you asked me what are the two best books on the Crusades, I would answer God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades by Baylor professor Rodney Stark and The Concise History of the Crusades by Professor Thomas F. Madden. If you get this question a lot from atheists, then I recommend you pick these up. Anything by Rodney Stark is useful for Christians, in fact.

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How do “conservative” women like Tomi Lahren explain the decline of marriage?

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Recently, “conservative” Tomi Lahren has appeared on shows like Piers Morgan and Laura Ingraham, arguing that men are defective, weak, and lazy. She thinks that the deficiencies of men are the reason for the decline of marriage. Women want to get married, but the men are just so inferior that women cannot find any “real men”. And that’s why marriage is declining.

But are her views accurate? Is the decline of marriage really due to a shortage of high quality men?

First of all, it’s important to point out that women’s views of what a good man is have been changing. For one thing, a “good man” is now a man who embraces leftist policies like abortion, same-sex marriage, student loan bailouts, green new deal socialism, government-run healthcare, defund the police, open borders, transing the kids, etc.

The far-left UK Independent explains:

An analysis of survey data from across the developing world had found that “a new global gender divide” is emerging. The analysis, conducted by the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch, showed that the developed world’s young women have rapidly become more liberal. Young men, however, have either become more conservative (as in the US) or been much slower to become more progressive (as in the UK). Gen Z, Burn-Murdoch concluded, is “two generations, not one.”

Today, young, unmarried women are more likely to support abortion and same-sex marriage than young, unmarried men. And it’s not just moral issues, it’s fiscal issues as well. Young unmarried women generally vote against the policies that make a country prosperous, such as low taxes and small government.

This study from the Journal of Political Economy explains:

This paper examines the growth of government during this century as a result of giving women the right to vote. Using cross‐sectional time‐series data for 1870–1940, we examine state government expenditures and revenue as well as voting by U.S. House and Senate state delegations and the passage of a wide range of different state laws. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise. Contrary to many recent suggestions, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s, and it helps explain why American government started growing when it did.

Now, if you think that Christian leaders are opposed to this slide to the left among young women, then you are wrong. Christian leaders have embraced a view called “servant leadership”. And that view is simply that men are not supposed to lead on moral and spiritual issues, like telling the truth, making decisions, making plans, and achieving results. If men say anything that upsets non-Christians, then this is BAD, and the man has to be punished.

The new view of male leadership which is shared by Christian and non-Christian feminists is that men’s primary purpose is not to serve God, but women. Men are not there to confront lies and immorality in the culture, because “don’t judge”. Men are only there to “provide” (dispense money) and “protect” (be tall, and make muscles). Men should not expect their wives to stay home with their young children. Men must not expect their wives to homeschool the children. Men must drop off the kids at day care and public school, and pick them up. This allows men’s wives to be free to pursue their feminist goals – like buying expensive clothes, putting on make-up and going on TV, just like Tomi Lahren does.

So, how do traditional men respond to this assessment of the decline of marriage?

Here is a clip from Matt Walsh, where he explains what he thinks is wrong with Tomi Lahren’s view:

And then here’s another clip from Steven Crowder, where he explains why feminists (non-Christian and Christian) have failed to be convincing to young men:

Finally, a note. Tomi Lahren is not a conservative. Like most childless, career-oriented feminists, she’s pro-abortion. In fact, if she is like most Christian leaders, she doesn’t think that women sin by choosing abortion. It is somehow always a man’s fault when women sin, because women were not affected by The Fall.

Where are all the good men?

What about Tomi’s definition of “good men”? When modern women talk about “where are all the good men?”, they don’t mean men who are good at defeating lies and opposing moral evil. They don’t mean Matt Walsh. Conservative, Christian men “give them the ick”.

By “good men”, they mean men who:

  • are tall and have muscles
  • display wealth, rather than save it
  • dispense lots of cash to women on demand
  • put their kids in daycare and public schools
  • vote for Democrat policies, e.g. – abortion, green new deal socialism, defunding police, open borders, transing kids, etc.
  • don’t judge, especially don’t judge the woman’s past

Those are the “good men” that modern feminists are having so much trouble finding in their 30s and 40s, once they get tired of having “fun”, and want to settle down with a stable, boring ATM who agrees with them on secular leftism, and NEVER imposes any responsibilities or obligations on them. “Servant leadership”!

So, should traditional men wife up non-traditional women like Tomi Lahren? No. Traditional men should only get married to traditional women. Non-traditional women have to get married to non-traditional men.