Three ideas represent, three waves of the anti-family movement of the past 150 years: 1) the Marxist contribution; 2) the eugenicist; 3) the gender theorists

In the renewal of Catholic culture, 
the battle begins at home, on bended knee. ...

This article is adapted from Dr. Topping’s new book 

Rebuilding Catholic Culture: How the Catechism Can Shape our Common Life (Sophia Institute Press)

The Long War Against the Family (Part I)

by Ryan N. S. Topping

The progressive cultural elite has long perpetuated prejudices against the familythat, unchallenged, lead to its ruin. Among several I cite three: (1) the assertion that marriage makes men and women less free; (2) the assumption that children are a burden; and (3) the insistence that sexual differentiation is a fiction. These three ideas represent, as it were, three waves of the anti-family movement of the past 150 years. The first is the Marxist contribution; the second is the eugenicist; the third is the fruit of recent gender theorists.

Social conservatives too often play a battle of catch-up with the progressive left. We marvel at abortion; we worry over divorce; we wonder at the rise of the homosexual lobby. It is right that alarm is sounded. But even before lobbying, if the family is ever to regain its natural position of prominence, conservatives need to recover the memory of how the “traditional family” lost its way. In this and the next two articles I would like uncover the three stages of the long war against the family, and then note briefly some helpful lines of response to them. We’ll begin first with the Marxist contribution.

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The Long War Against the Family (Part II)

by Ryan N. S. Topping

The second wave also accepted the Marxist premise that justice demands strict material equality. Next, the wagging finger turned from men to children. If women wish to have sex with men (so the thinking went), they should not be punished with unwanted offspring.

For the most part, artificial contraception was seen as the first ring of defense, but from the beginning, abortion was always the backup. The connection between contraception, economic equality, and access to abortion was made public in 1992 by the United States Supreme Court ruling on Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld the prior 1973 decision in favor of abortion in Roe v.Wade in these memorable words:

The Roe rule’s limitation on state power could not be repudiated without serious inequity to people who, for two decades of economic and social developments, have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.

Tolerance of legalized abortion is the gravest consequence that follows once you accept contraception, but it is not the only one. In 1930 the Anglican Communion became the first Christian group to approve of the use of artificial contraception. 

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The Long War Against the Family (Part III)

by Ryan N. S. Topping

If you’ve been with us for the first two parts here and here, you’ll recall the three waves of attack against the family—(1) the assertion that marriage enslaves, (2) that children are a burden, and (3) that sexual difference is a fiction. How to respond? I’d like to conclude our short history by reflecting not so much on a course of action but upon how we might renew our thinking.

First, what does the contemporary attack on the family presuppose? Frequently, at the root of these attacks on family lies a corruption of what John Paul II has called “the idea and the experience of freedom.” In the late pope’s analysis, underlying these ideas and the social and economic institutions supporting them is a notion of freedom conceived not as a capacity for realizing truth, “but as an autonomous power of self-affirmation” (Familiaris Consortio 6). In place of such a notion, and enacted through the disciplines and habits suitable for family, man and woman united in matrimony are called to embody the self-giving love of Christ. There can hardly be a more attractive witness of self-giving love than a family at prayer.

Next, Christians will have to re-evaluate the concept of equality, beginning with its unit of measurement.

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In the renewal of Catholic culture, the battle begins at home, on bended knee.

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