Short Stories and Essays
THE TRADITIONAL FAMILY, AN ENDANGERED SPECIES
We are at a tipping point in America in multiple ways, but none is more crucial than determining the appropriate role of the family in our society. That issue will transcend any election and outlive any office holder. Our dire situation with respect to the family unit has not developed overnight. Attacks against the family have been stealthily growing like a cancer for decades. We do not find ourselves in our present condition because we lost some giant battle relating to families. We are where we are today because we have lost skirmish after skirmish, here a little and there a little, over a substantial period of time.
I refer to the trend which, at first, was a neglectful weakening of the traditional family, and which has now progressed into a concerted effort by some, through redefinition, to actually destroy the traditional family—the most basic and indispensable organization or institution in a civilized society. The family is currently undermined by everything from revolving door relationships to ill-conceived laws which subsidize immorality, surtax those who live together in marriage, and replace the role of spouses and parents with governmental dependency. High school teenage pregnancies are rampant. More and more single women look upon Uncle Sam as a providing “husband” and “father” to their children.
Now threatened with extinction, it is the healthy, traditional family that should be at the very top of our nation’s endangered species list. Why?
Positive values are properly taught, lived, experienced, and perpetuated in the home. The family is the only efficient means for producing human happiness and human goodness. In the absence of nurturing families that teach correct principles, instill a work ethic, and reinforce honorable motivations, there arise malcontents, militants, gangbangers, and demagogues whose deeply flawed childhoods lead them to seek attention on a world stage where they can act out their warped ideologies that in time bring nothing but suffering and misery to humanity.
It is a self-evident truth that unless we can fix families, we will not be able to fix anything else. The most vexing problems cannot be fixed by the government. Government programs merely entrench the problems by throwing money at them in an effort to avoid the natural consequences of people’s bad choices. Government programs merely whittle away at the branches without striking at the root. Until we re-enthrone the sanctity of marriage and the honorable rearing of children at the center of our social fabric, we will witness even more corruption, more decadence, and more violence.
We cannot overstate the importance of the obscure work—and it is work, that it takes to produce a stable loving home where we learn first and best the Christian virtues of love, patience, mercy, forgiveness, respect, charity, honesty, chastity, and self-restraint. Parents face constant challenges in their work, but their efforts are worth it. No other success of any nature will ever compensate for failure in the home, and the greatest work that any man or woman will ever do is within the walls of his or her own home.
May we muster a concerted determination to elevate the position of the traditional family in our society. Each of us has an important role to play. May we set good examples as faithful husbands and wives, and as diligent and attentive parents and grandparents. We will not fail unless we lose faith.
I close with this insightful quote from a now departed friend. I have confidence in its truthfulness. “When the surf of the centuries has made the great pyramids so much sand, the everlasting family will still be standing, because it is a celestial institution, formed outside of telestial time.” (Neal A. Maxwell, Ensign, May 1978, pp. 10-11)
With appreciation for your listening ear,
John E. Enslen