Reverend Peter Marshall's Commentary Archive

                               Marriage, the Family, and the Nanny State

 ". . .Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" (Luke 12:56)   

     Nothing could be more deleterious to the future of the American republic than the removal of the Christian faith from the public square. We are in moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of our nation, fighting against a militant secularism which is dedicated to the purging of all Christian influence on the formation of public policy, and public education, and public anything else. 

Just this week I received a scurrilous email (which I did not dignify with a reply) referring to a statement of mine quoted in last weekend's article in the New York Times Sunday magazine concerning the process of revising the Texas Board of Education social studies guidelines. I had told the reporter that in the formation of our Constitution the Founding Fathers' awareness of the Biblical principle of the sinfulness of man caused the separation of powers in our Federal government. The email writer called that "total poppycock," and quoted one secular historian, ignoring the overwhelming evidence of Biblical thinking on the part of the Founding Fathers (James Madison, chief architect of the Constitution, called its successful completion "nothing less than a miracle," and only God creates miracles). Governed as the email writer is by a willful ignorance of the massive influence of Biblical principles on the founding period of our history, it is not worth the effort to try and penetrate his darkness with the light of truth, but unfortunately his opinion is held by many. 

I want to raise the alarm for you on the ramifications of stripping the Christian faith from the public square, with a particular emphasis on the danger to the family. 

During last year's Presidential campaign, Obama suggested to a South Carolina audience that they might want to see him as "an instrument of God" and help him "create a Kingdom right here on earth."  How's that for a messiah complex?!!  Yet in the face of these statements he has the silly audacity to say publicly "I am not an ideologue." It is patently obvious that in his agenda to increasingly assert government control over the everyday affairs of the American people, he is indeed driven by an ideological agenda. You may be sure that the President knows that the name for government control of the private sector is socialism. 

What makes the present time acutely dangerous is this: for centuries what governed Americans' understanding of the good society was that we were commanded by God to first govern ourselves and then care for our neighbors in obedience to Him. Church and State were kept functionally separate, and because of that the Church's influence was only persuasive, never controlling. We understood that our first allegiance was to God, and only after that to society -- in concentric circles radiating out from our spouses and families to our neighbors and others. The state was never viewed as primarily responsible for our daily welfare -- rather God, our families, our neighbors, the Church, and thousands of volunteer organizations were. Contra Obama, we knew better than to expect the state to be able to create the Kingdom of God on earth, or even to allow it to try. The state was to be subservient to God (the portrait of Moses as the giver of God's law to mankind hangs in House of Representatives chamber) and answerable to Him as His servant, as were all human institutions. 

But, if you remove from human consciousness the idea that we are to worship God and Him alone, that He is our provider, and that our daily lives are to be lived in the awareness that all human society is under His authority, then you create a vacuum ripe for another provider figure. And, given the fact that human nature is hopelessly religious (made as we are for a personal relationship with our Creator), we will look to a human institution to fulfill that "saving" or providing function. Martin Luther said: "Your God is the one you depend on." If we begin to depend on the state to provide, then the state becomes God. The history of mankind is full of examples of societies falling into this idolatry, from the Caesars of Rome deifying themselves, to the utopian insanity of the French Revolution, to Hitler's Thousand Year Reich, Josef Stalin's Russia, and Kim Jong Il's current North Korean dictatorship. 

In America, this emerging savior state, or Nanny State, as I prefer to call it, is not a military dictatorship -- it is much too benevolent and benign for that. But, it nonetheless seeks to be just as controlling, for all its mild manners. Mind you, I am not claiming that somewhere in the dim corridors of Washington power-broking evil men are meeting to hatch plans for taking control of America. No, no. What you need to understand is that it is simply the nature of government to grow and grow until it takes over everything -- it's worse than kudzu. 

In order for a government to become tyrannous it must rise above and destroy the influence of the most important two safeguards to the freedom of the individual citizen: the family and the Church. In my commentary for February 4 I delved into the secularists' ongoing attacks on our religious freedoms, so I'm not going to write anything further on that today. Here I want to talk about the government's growing threat to the sanctity of the family. 

Consider this: although welfare programs are a helpful temporary safety net for the poor and needy in our society, they also have an insidious and destructive element - they tend to pull people away from dependence on their families and churches into an unhealthy dependency on the state. Every politician knows perfectly well that one of the best ways to grow the Nanny State is to increase the number of people on welfare. After a rollback of welfare programs under the 1994 Republican Congress, which reduced state expenses and increased the work force in many states, welfare is now once again on the increase under an Obama Administration committed to building up its welfare constituency. The government supplants God as the provider. 

It is when we look at marriage that we see one of the worst threats of the Nanny State to a healthy America. Every culture, ancient or modern, has always considered marriage as the basic institution of society. And in our nation, the state has always historically regulated marriage. The relationship between the Church and the State in regard to marriage was that a man and woman could get married in any church, synagogue, mosque, or temple they wanted to, but if that couple didn't get a marriage license from the county courthouse, they were not legally married in the eyes of the state. 

Someone might respond: "Well, so what? The state doesn't have any business regulating marriage anyhow. Marriage belongs to God and His Church. Yeah, well, try telling that to the IRS if you got married without a license from your state of residence and filed a joint tax return! If the state doesn't have your marriage license on file you've got a big problem. Whether we like it or not, the traditional regulation of marriage by the state in America has resulted in tying married people into a knot of various relationships to the state that would be impossible to unravel. 

But this regulation of marriage by the state was never a serious problem in America until the twin problems of divorce, and more recently, same-sex marriage reared their ugly heads. Leaving aside the horrendous problems created by the prevalence of divorce in our time, let's consider the relationship between same-sex marriage and the state. 

The problem of same-sex marriage goes far beyond the violation of God's order for creation. Marriage is a human institution that pre-dates government and the state. Not only is it the basic building block of society -- it actually produces society through the procreation of children. But, when the government, through the court system, abrogates to itself the "right" to regulate marriage by allowing same-sex couples to be married, it has made marriage a legal construct that is at the mercy of the state. The state is now defining marriage; marriage is becoming a department of the state, instead of an institution that pre-exists the state. 

And, as the state no longer defines marriage on a procreative basis - that is, that marriage exists for the purpose of procreating children -- then marriage comes to be defined on an inclusive basis. That means a marriage can legally be any combination of individuals, or even include animals. Children and parents are left without an institution that protects their natural rights and relationships with each other. No longer then, does the purpose of child-bearing, and thus the parent-child relationship, control and define the concept of marriage. Now, the state has wrested away from the millennia-old traditions of God's order of creation and God's revealed Word the right to enact new definitions of marriage and family relationships, and taken upon itself the right to determine these through the courts. (Anybody who has ever been through a custody battle understands the horrors of this!) And, what the state has the right to define once, it has the right to define again and again, and even to remove, if it so chooses. 

Notice also that in situations where courts are taking children away from say, a Christian parent, and giving custody to a non-Christian parent because that parent objects to the child being taught the Christian faith, the court is taking unto itself the right to determine what that child will be taught. In other words, the state has taken over the education of that child. A hideous conclusion is arrived at increasingly these days in the courts, which is that the state has the responsibility to protect the right of children to a state-directed education -- even when the child does not want that right. The state is claiming the obligation to "protect" the child against the parent's desires for his or her child. In this view, education becomes the method by which the child is removed from the control of the parents, and the home is broken into by the state. 

Please don't misunderstand me -- of course the state has the responsibility to step in to protect the child against physical abuse, or the refusal of a parent to get proper medical help for a sick child. I'm not talking about that kind of thing. What I'm referring to is the idea that the state's views of a "proper" education have the right to trump a parent's view. 

Can anyone doubt that if the state control of marriage and parent-child relationships is not rolled back, that before long they will turn their sights on the Church itself. Since the chief roadblock to the state redefining family  relationships has been the Church, it seems obvious that the complete removal of Christian influence in the public square will necessitate attacking the Christian Church -- and I daresay attacking the Catholic Church in particular. The reason why the Catholic Church will likely be singled out is that the Protestant churches provide a more nebulous target. The Catholic Church is a much more visible institution, which through its orders and priesthood has exerted a more traditional, conservative, and change-resistant posture in society -- inviting the attack of those wanting to do away with traditional values. An illustration of the truth of what I just wrote is the fact that when Hollywood script writers want to attack the Church and things Christian they invariably choose to portray Catholic priests or the Catholic hierarchy. 

What is to be done by thoughtful Christians? 

We must become aware of the encroachments the state is making upon us as believers, and the institutions of marriage and family. And we must understand that we are in a struggle to retain the traditional values of our society against people that are determined to destroy them with the connivance of the court system. We must be super-vigilant to guard against the chipping away of our natural human rights, and fight back to regain the rights we are losing. 

It will not happen just through individual and isolated lawsuits and court actions; it will take a major upheaval and reversing of the current trends. That, in turn, can only happen by a nation-wide rising up on the part of Christian believers and conservatives. We must be determined to restore to Washington and to our state capitals a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people," that will reflect our traditional values. 

Prayer is absolutely essential. Nothing happens in the way of major changes without prayer. But prayer by itself is never enough. 

The election of Scott Brown has shown us what is possible. The time has come for Christians to act.

Copyright, 2010, Peter J. Marshall. All rights reserved.     

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