The Death of Fatherhood

David Popenoe’s stated purpose in Life Without Father: Compelling New Evidence That Fatherhood and Marriage Are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society (Harvard Univ Pr, 1999) is to provide “an analysis of the American experiment of fatherlessness. Drawing from the social sciences, history, and evolutionary psychology, [the book] examines the nature and meaning of fatherhood and reviews the trend, the evidence, and the social consequences of the removal of fathers from families and the lives of their children. Regrettably, as I shall point out, America is the vanguard of social trends and impulses that are affecting fatherhood and children in all modern societies.”

I find it truly amazing that Mr. Popenoe attempts to prove, through research, what we should already know from tradition, revelation and commonsense: Fathers are necessary. But since we have abandoned tradition, revelation and commonsense, Popenoe tries to fill the void with research.

Is he successful? Well, his research seems convincing to me. But I already believe fathers are essential. I don’t think research is going to convince feminists and our feminist society that fathers are necessary, but necessary they are, according to Popenoe. He cites massive statistics that support the view that children (boys and girls) need their biological father to be present in the home and to be an active participant in the child-rearing process. Children who do not have fathers in their daily lives are much more likely (should this be a surprise to anyone?) to become criminals, nymphomaniacs, drug users, and so on.

In Part I (Chapters 1 & 2), Mr. Popenoe discusses the “remarkable decline of fatherhood and marriage” and the devastating effects the decline has had on our society:

The decline of fatherhood is one of the most basic, unexpected, and extraordinary social trends of our time. The trend can be captured in a single telling statistic: in just three decades, from 1960 to 1990, the percentage of children living apart from their biological fathers more than doubled, from 17% to 35%. If this rate continues, by the turn of the century nearly 50% of American children will be going to sleep each night without being able to say good night to their dads.

In Part II (Chapters 3 & 4), Popenoe talks about the father figure in history. He makes many interesting observations in these chapters. For instance, he contends that the father in pre-industrial societies had more moral authority in the home than the industrial age father. From the Victorian age on, fathers began to spend more and more time away from the home. They became breadwinners only. And when their breadwinning capacity was challenged by the feminists in the 1960’s, fathers were seen as superfluous dinosaurs of a bygone era. The seeming strength of the nuclear family in the 1950’s was a mirage. Once fathers were seen as breadwinners and breadwinners only, they were bound to fade out.

In Part III, the author seeks to explain through “evolutionary psychology” why fathers are necessary. In Part IV, he offers his plan for re-inventing fatherhood. In my opinion, these are the weakest parts of the book. Popenoe takes man’s descent from the apes as a given in Part III and seeks to defend fatherhood as an evolutionary necessity. Fatherhood should be defended, but it does not need help from evolutionary clap-trap theories. In Part IV, Popenoe describes his plan for reinventing fatherhood. Part of that plan involves the acceptance of male-female cohabitation as a prelude to marriage. Why? Because in industrial societies, men and women cannot marry till they are thirty when they have had time to acquire technical training for the industrial world, and it is not possible to remain chaste that long. Well, from a Christian standpoint, if certain actions are sinful, they must remain prohibited even if the dictates of industrial society suggest they be sanctioned.

The last example really highlights the weakness of the book: Mr. Popenoe wants more fathers to stay with their families; however, he mentions Christianity only in passing and makes it clear that he doesn’t want a restoration of the Christian, patriarchal family. The question is: Is there any way to restore fatherhood without returning to the Pauline concept of fatherhood? Of course, there isn’t. Popenoe is like the late pope John Paul II in more than name. He, like the Pope, wants the results of a Christian social order without the imposition of a Christian social order. But feminism is a religion, and one religion can only be supplanted by another religion; it can’t be supplanted by research.

A Christian, however, should give the issues Popenoe raises some thought. Why has Christianity in general and Christian fatherhood in particular, done so poorly in industrial society? The answer seems obvious. In industrial society man is seen as a finite object. He is a “steel girder” in the industrial skyscraper. In Christianity, the real Christianity, man is seen as a recipient of God’s grace and a personality of infinite worth.

I was struck by the fact when I was a teacher that so many young men with some masculinity left in them wanted to join the army. They tragically saw no particular virtue in marriage and fatherhood, because they saw only the value our society places on marriage and fatherhood, which is, of course, no value. But it is precisely now, when the barbarians have breached the wall and are among us, that we need Christian men who are willing to fight for the hearth rather than for the neocons. The neocons need mercenaries to fight for their capitalist faith. Christian Europe needs young men who have discovered the moral, counterrevolutionary role of fatherhood.

The Ongoing Revolution

G. M. Trevelyan, in the third volume of his History of England, had this to say about the Industrial Revolution:

The great changes in man’s command over nature and consequent manner of life, which began in England in the reign of George III and have since spread with varying degrees of intensity over almost the whole inhabited globe, make bewildering work for the historian. Up to the Industrial Revolution, economic and social change, though continuous, has the pace of a slowly-moving stream; but in the days of Watt and Stephenson it has acquired the momentum of water over a mill-dam, distracting to the eye of any spectator. Nor, for all its hurry, does it ever reach any pool at the bottom and resume its former leisurely advance. It is a cataract still. The French Revolution occupied a dozen years at most, but the Industrial Revolution may yet continue for as many hundred, creating and obliterating one form of economic and social life after another, so that the historian can never say – ‘This or this is the normal state of modern England.’

G. M. Trevelyan wrote those words in 1926. He went on to say that we can’t approve or condemn the Industrial Revolution; we need to see it develop more before we can judge it. Can we judge it now? I think so. There is no defense for it. Its apologists always cite increased standards of living and the impracticality of agrarian economies, but no one except a few Luddites ever condemned the use of every single machine. The original critics of the Industrial Revolution, who have been proven correct, feared that the machine would become a replacement for God, dispensing graces and benefits to mankind in a way that was more efficient and modern than the old-fashioned guy in the Christian story. “A man that has an automobile don’t need Jesus,” became the unspoken creed of modern man. The machine separates us from God in two ways.

First, it anesthetizes us by taking us out of the natural order of creation. One need only look at the infernal abortion machines to see this process at work. “Childbirth produces pain; a machine will take care of it.”

And secondly, the machine age allows us to worship progress. Instead of looking for the return of our Lord, we look for the coming perfection of mankind when – thanks to the machine -- death, war, and hunger will have ceased.

When machines were set free and allowed to make men dance to what increasingly became Satanic tunes, man was doomed to become the slave of a force he could not control or stop.

Of course modern Christians (isn’t that an oxymoron?) never criticize industrialization because they fear ostracization and the Luddite label. But it is not an either-or proposition. Our choices are not ‘rampant, Godless industrialization’ on the one hand, or ‘we all live in caves and eat cave moss’ on the other. It is the revolutionary nature of industrialization that a Christian should hate. If the machine age had grown up organically from the needs of a Christian civilization, it would not have been the harmful hateful thing that we see before us today. The word ‘organic’ is overused today, but it best describes the way in which the machine age should have begun. If a farmer could improve his own family farm through the use of a machine that sprang from his own ingenuity and his own hands, then its use would be legitimate. Compare this to the illegitimate use of a machine: the cotton gin was produced to compete on the mass market with other mass producers. If a physician made use of a machine to perform beneficial operations which would be impossible without one, then the use of such a machine would be legitimate. The machine age ought to have been wedded to the real lives of Christian people. When machines were set free and allowed to make men dance to what increasingly became Satanic tunes, man was doomed to become the slave of a force he could not control or stop.

Chaplin is not my favorite comedian, but in his film, Modern Times, he does give us one of the most enduring and powerful critiques of the industrial revolution. Those giant gears are grinding up more than modern man’s body; they are grinding up his soul.