The Mythical, Imaginary "They"
As I've written in my "Daily News & Views," seven percent of American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, twenty percent of American high school graduates don't know how to make toast, and one-third of British high school graduates don't know how to boil an egg. This is the new "virtual reality."
People today have been raised in an environment so removed from basic physical reality that they think the mythical "Others" or "They" can and should magically provide all their needs, wants and wishes. Certainly, we don't need to know every detail of how an economy functions, but we ought to have a grasp on basic facts such as all cows give white milk and water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius) with or without eggs.
As the article Religion and Politics at the Dinner Table: Challenging the Old Maxim explains, "family members bear natural affection toward each other" - or at least they should - and thus they bear responsibility to care for the young, the infirm and the elderly in the family circle.
As the Apostle Paul wrote to Timothy - "But if anyone doesn’t provide for his own, and especially his own household, he has denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever. ...If any man or woman who believes has widows, let them relieve them, and don’t let the church be burdened; that it might relieve those who are widows indeed" (1 Tim. 5:8 & 16). The context is about how the church should care for widows in their midst, but the primary responsibility lies with the immediate family.
The Church Fathers Chrysostom, Theodore, and Theodoret wrote that "Special care is to be given to the supervision of the work of widows in the church. It is important to distinguish those widows who deserve appropriate support from those who do not and to monitor the widows who are being supported, lest their time turn to idleness and mischief. The true widow is chaste and patient, and if she is without children, she deserves the church’s support" (Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture).
Note how St. Paul and these Church Fathers emphasize the need for the local church to monitor the behavior of widows. St. Paul wrote that younger widows should get married and bear children: "So I would have younger widows marry, bear children, manage their households, and give the adversary no occasion for slander" (verse 14).
Instead, what we have is "They," the modern secular welfare state, even giving young women financial incentives to not get married, to bear children out of wedlock. The article Why Are So Many Millennials Having Children Out of Wedlock? states - "57 percent of parents ages 26 to 31 were having kids outside of marriage."
Why has this happened? It's not simply due to income inequality, as the article implies. That's a result, not the cause of the problem. Rather, it's because Christians have not taken a firm stand in the public square on social matters; instead, we've allowed the state to pay unwed mothers to have babies. Children born out of wedlock have a very difficult life ahead of them. Morality in sexual conduct isn't a "private matter," it has a direct effect on society at large, on the economy, and on our taxes.
Not only are babies increasingly being born out of wedlock, fewer and fewer babies are being born. The post-war "baby boomers" born from 1945 to 1960 - seventy million Americans - are now reaching retirement age, and there are not enough young adults paying into the Social Security fund to support them. These 70,000,000 retirees also are no longer investing money in private retirement plans but instead taking their money out, while those same fewer young adults are putting less money into private retirement plans. This means less money for investment in the economy... thus a shrinking economy.
When the socialist notion takes root in our thinking that the mythical, imaginary "They," the state, will take care of us from the cradle to the grave, this begins to weaken the above Christian teaching about the immediate family's responsibility to take care of each other. Adult children begin to think that if they live far away from their parents or if they simply don't want to, they don't need to look after their elderly parents. We've witnessed first-hand in Russia how a divorced adult son beat up and forced his widowed and disabled mother out of her apartment so that he could live there with his girlfriend. Similar things are happening here too.
The answer to these problems isn't to simply continue singing our hymns and listening to warm-fuzzy pablum-sermons in church while we stick our heads in the sand and ignore society as it crumbles around us. The answer is to preach and practice the Scriptural texts on social responsibilities and sexual conduct, as well as to boldly express these teachings in the public square. We not only have the right to freely express our religious beliefs, as the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly states, but also a civic duty to do so.
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