Were families happier in the past?

This is a rebuttal of Happy Families? - a document that concludes, amongst other things,

# The 'permissive'1960s were not the decisive break with long-established norms of marital stability and sexual propriety that is often thought.*
# There was a change in the late 1960s from some of the norms of the post-Second World War period, but that was the historically unusual period, with high rates of relatively long-lasting marriages.
# High rates of unmarried cohabitation of men and women bringing up children prevailed over many centuries, mainly due to the difficulty of obtaining a divorce before 1969.

Professor Rebecca Probert and Dr Samantha Callan offer a different view:

Conclusion
In expressing serious concern about the evidential basis for the claims in Happy families?, it is not our intention to suggest that all marriages in the past were happy and long-lasting, nor that there were no examples of successful and stable cohabiting relationships. But the quality of family life should be distinguished from its form: the fact that a number of marriages were brutal and fleeting should not obscure the centrality of marriage to family life in previous decades.Whilemany Victorianmarriages were short-lived because of the untimely death of one of the spouses, this does not mean that the experiences of the survivors were in any way comparable to those undergoing a divorce today. Similarly, while one can of course find examples from all historical periods of couples who lived together outside marriage, it does not follow that cohabitation was remotely as common in the past as it is today. In the preface to Happy families?, it is implied that those who make public policy are ignorant of the historical context, this report being presented as ‘bring[ing] to bear the skills of the humanities on questions of public policy.’67 It is of course vital that those working in the humanities contribute to debates on public policy by providing accurate and unbiased accounts of the past. But a failure to do this, as we have seen in Happy families?, jeopardises the integrity of the field and is likely to lead to ill-informed public policy.

Download as pdf here.

* Speaking as someone alive at the time, I can only say, "Oh yes they were."

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Alcohol and social policy: "But when I'm with you I can't control myself"

Few people in our society are alcoholics, but many drink too much, as is evidenced in our town centres at weekends. And this is taking an undoubted toll on both drinkers and society. Indeed, according to reports in today’s news media, we face something of a crisis: “deaths from all alcohol-related causes — including cancers and road accidents — could claim the lives of 250,000 people in England and Wales over the coming two decades.”

And the costs involved include not only premature deaths and medical treatment of the sick, but clogged A& E units, damage to families, injuries to police and ambulance crews, lost working hours, and so on.

Clearly we have a problem. So what is to be done?

The answer being proposed by those raising the alarm is that the government should intervene. In particular, prices of alcohol should be raised. Thus the BBC reports a Department of Health spokeswoman saying,

The government has wasted no time in taking tough action to tackle problem drinking, including plans to stop supermarkets selling below-cost alcohol and working to introduce a tougher licensing regime.

And she adds that the government was taking “a bold new approach” to public health.

Frankly, in the area of politics nothing fills me with greater alarm than the news that any government is taking ‘bold new approaches’ on anything. The phrase ‘Fools rush in’ is usually the one that springs to mind.

However, it seems to me there is a deeper issue here, which is the assumption that this is basically a problem for the government to tackle through legislation.

Frankly, this is treating people like idiots, or like children.

Now of course people can behave like idiots, especially when they’ve been drinking. There is an old saying attributed to the Irish: “One drink, fine. Two drinks, plenty. Three drinks, nowhere near enough.” But it is perfectly possible for most people — alcoholics excepted — to identify the transition between that second and third drink and decide to stop.

In my student days I was rather fond of a tipple at weekends, which often left me with a hangover on Sunday mornings. One such morning, I remember walking across the student canteen with my lunch on my tray and feeling very queasy, when I thought to myself, “This is stupid. I don’t like feeling like this. I’m going to stop.” So I did. It wasn’t a great moral decision — just a realization that there were better things in life than spending a lot of money to feel ill the next day.

Here is Martin Luther making a similar point in a sermon:

God does not forbid you to drink, as do the Turks [Muslims]; he permits you to drink wine and beer: he does not make a law of it. But do not make a pig of yourself; remain a human being. If you are a human being, then keep your human self-control. (LW 51:296)

Luther’s appeal is not to the law (whether of God or Islam) but to human dignity. And to make such an appeal is itself to treat people in a dignified way.

The society that says, “There must be a law” at this (or similar) points, is already treating people as basically incapable — whether they are incapable through sin or through lack of self-control.

It says a lot for us, that in these early years of the twenty-first century, this is what some of our brightest and best assume must be the case when it comes to alcohol.

John Richardson

BTW, for those who may have missed it, the headline is a reference to The Troggs 1960s hit, "I can't control myself" (lyrics here, but watch out for pop-up ad). The wonderful thing about this particular single is that it refers to a time when self-control might have been thought necessary in a boy-girl relationship.

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How we got same-sex marriage without a proper debate

What the Cornwall B & B case, and the judge’s remarks in his decision, seem to show is that the Civil Partnership Bill effectively gave us ‘same-sex’ marriage without a proper debate in the legislature. As Judge Rutherford put it, “There is no material difference (for the purpose of this regulation) between marriage and a civil partnership.”

Yet the words of the Bishop of Chelmsford from the debate on the Civil Partnership Bill in the House of Lord’s, 17^th November 2004 would suggest this was not supposed to happen and that the government was giving the impression that there was no danger of it happening:

The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford: Perhaps I may say to the Minister that it would be good to have on record that the public understanding of marriage held in the law of this country is not affected by this Bill.

The later words of the Bishop of Chester, however, now seem prescient:

The Lord Bishop of Chester: My Lords, perhaps I may briefly make another penultimate speech in your Lordships’ House. I am grateful for the assurances of my right reverend friend the Bishop of Chelmsford that the Bill before us does not introduce same-sex marriage. I am grateful for the assurances of the Government at earlier stages. But the difficulty is that the details of the Bill as it stands so closely parallel the arrangements for marriage that there is a real danger of a de facto introduction of same-sex marriage by that process.

The history of social legislation in this country is often that the consequences are not quite those that are stated as intended. One sees that in all sorts of areas, including divorce and abortion in family law. In some ways, that makes it difficult to accept the amendment before us. The range of relationships that ought to be dealt with under a Bill, as has been stated so eloquently, not least by the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, is very persuasive.

However, if the Bill is left standing alone, without any other measures being introduced at some point, paralleling so closely the provisions for marriage, de facto we will have a perception of same-sex marriage.

How mistaken was the Bishop of Chelmsford, and how far-sighted was the Bishop of Chester?

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The moral dilemma of Wikileaks

Not infrequently a letter arrives at our house which is intended for a neighbour. What should be one’s first instinct when that happens: to deliver it to the right address, or to open it first to see whether it contains anything of interest?

I would hope that your own answer is the former. I would take it as a sign of ‘good neighbourliness’. Indeed, I would go further, and say it is a necessary quality for a strong social order.

Trustworthiness when we are unobserved is, in short, a virtue. It is not one that we all possess, and certainly not one we all possess all the time. But that is because we are not entirely virtuous, not because trustworthiness is optional.

Imagine, though, that your neighbour is a local councillor. Imagine, furthermore, that the letter is marked ‘Confidential’. Add to that, there have been rumours about irregularities in the recent business of the Council and, furthermore, that these have directly affected you and your welfare.

Now are you so keen to take the letter next door?

Or what if another of your neighbours came to you with the same letter having opened it already, and says, “Here, I don’t understand these things myself, but perhaps you’d like to have a look through this to see if it sheds any light on what the Council’s been up to?”

What will you do now?

Philosophers love to construct such dilemmas, not least to show the fragility of our moral absolutes. What if your neighbour were a known drug dealer? What if you thought they were a spy? — and so on, and so on.

The tendency of such arguments (indeed, often the deliberate intention) is to weaken our reliance on traditional ‘rule based’ systems. And if you are a Christian, there is something to be said for that.

But the fundamental question, familiar to moral philosophers but often overlooked in debate, is not whether we can come up with a workable ‘rule’ (often we can’t), but what is the kind of thing that would be done by the kind of person we ought to be.

In short, what would a virtuous person do in any given circumstance?

This, however, may itself be the subject of some debate, and I am therefore inclined to turn the question round and ask, ‘What would a wicked person do?’ Suddenly (for some strange reason) the answer is generally clear.

If I were a wicked person, for example, I would certainly open any letter that I thought might contain anything to my advantage or offer an opportunity for causing harm to another. The greater my wickedness, the less compunction I would feel in doing so. And if my other neighbour brought me such a letter I would ask whether there were any more from the same source (all the time making sure that as little harm as possible could come to me as a result).

Of course, this still does not translate into a ‘rule’ system. It is not that the wicked person operates by ‘wicked rules’ (though we may be sure such have been devised). Rather, it is that the virtuous person and the wicked person approach a moral dilemma very differently.

Faced with the so-called ‘trolley problem’ — shall I divert a runaway train to a siding where it will kill one unfortunate individual, or leave it on its current track where it will kill five who have been tied to the rails by a mad philosopher — it is easy to know what a wicked person would do. (Indeed, the whole problem is posited on the somewhat-politically-incorrect presumption that madness produces wicked acts, such as setting out to kill people or to tax the morally virtuous with difficult choices!)

But if we may thus be sure that the wicked person would have scant regard for an accidental breach of confidence, we may equally deduce that the virtuous person will, on the contrary, seek to minimize the consequences of such a circumstance.

This still does not push us into the realm of ‘absolute rules’. What if one’s neighbour were indeed a suspected drug dealer? What if the envelope were already open, the letter fell out and one could not help noticing it described plans for an act of terrorism?

The theoretician can always come up with tantalizing situations. The fundamental answers, however, must be couched in terms of what a virtuous person would do, which can itself often be assessed in terms of what would be done by a person lacking in virtue.

Now this brings me to the subject of Wikileaks — its rationale, but also its social impact. What is the significance of such a website becoming part of our cultural ‘fabric’, and of media outlets participating in the process, particularly when they are favoured recipients of the material Wikileaks has obtained?

The reaction of many (including the editors of certain newspapers) is that such a phenomenon is vitally important, exposing, as it does, that governments are corrupt and that they have acted corruptly.

But that leads me to ask, what do we expect of governments? Or do we rather expect that they should be virtuous, and if that is the case, where will we find the men and women of virtue, and by what process will we produce them?

We seem to have forgotten that society can only work with the individuals who actually make up that society. We cannot therefore expect to produce incorruptible police officers, self-sacrificing captains of industry and honest politicians from a population of morally indifferent individuals. Virtue begins in the individual, not in theoretical ‘values’ a society demands, but fails to apply at the personal level.

Let me pose another dilemma. You find the lap-top belonging to an MP. As a virtuous person, is your first duty to open it and see what you can find? Or is it to return the lost lap-top intact to its owner as soon as possible?

What a wicked person would do is surely self-evident.

But why would a person of virtue presume that there might be damaging material on the lap-top. And why would they want to know? Surely the virtuous person would first presume virtue in the other? And the virtuous person would equally regard the keeping of a confidence and the preservation of trust as their first priority.

The problem with the Wikileaks phenomenon is that the values by which it operates either presume a lack of trustworthiness or rely on such untrustworthiness in others. There is something about it of the ‘wiki-sneak’, and a true danger of it undermining our necessary social fabric.

By all means let whistles be blown. But let them never be blown by those who love ‘whistle-blowing’ for its own sake, and let us never become people who long for the next ‘revelation’ of wrongdoing. The difference between the reader of the Guardian and the reader of the News of the World is not as great, in this regard, as the former might like to imagine.

John Richardson
30 November 2010

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Labour's ironic worship of Mammon

Yesterday, I was half-listening to the news, as you do, when I thought I heard something Harriet Harman was reported to have said which struck me as astonishingly revealing.

Today I checked out a couple of news reports in the papers and I think this, from the Telegraph, relates to what I thought I heard (the quote is much longer than the ‘snippet’ I originally picked up):

“Equality is important not just for the individual but also it’s an economic argument. Think about the economies that will thrive and prosper in the future. Do you see those that are hierarchical and hide bound – where everyone knows their place – where you get [on?] on the basis of your connections or because your “face fits”? Far from it. Because that is the opposite of a meritocracy.

“The economies that will thrive in the future are those where everyone can achieve their full potential and where the economy can draw on the abilities of all.”

So what is the ultimate point of giving people a better opportunity in life and a better education? Apparently, It is to feed the maw of the economy.

Now I find this not only a horrifying vision of human life and society, but an astonishing thought from the mouth of a Labour politician. I rather naively thought that the Labour Party regarded the worship of the economy as in some sense inimical to human well-being. Indeed, it was originally called the ‘Labour Party’ (I thought) because there were people — labourers — whose lives were weighed down and diminished by the unending demands of ‘capitalism’.

There was —or did I imagine it —an element of Marxist Utopianism about the labour movement. But that Utopia did not consist of a world where the economy got bigger and bigger, and the contribution of the individual towards it became more and more effective. Rather, the point of the movement was to free the labourer from his labour and to allow people time, space and the necessary personal and intellectual equipment to be something other than a cog in the machine.

Thus, when the Workers’ Educational Association was founded in the early years of the twentieth century (by a keen member of the Church of England) its aims were, not that people would thereby gain the ‘skills’ needed to contribute to the economy but,

... to acquire knowledge which would enable them to decide for themselves what to think about the society in which they lived and worked. (A Brief History of the WEA)

Thus the education ‘workers’ were encouraged to receive was as much in the liberal arts as in the practical sciences. It was certainly not about giving people ‘job skills’. Nor, therefore, could the education it offered be evaluated in terms of its economic ‘usefulness’, unlike the present.

Nevertheless, this could not, I think, be characterized as ‘learning for learning’s sake’. Rather, it stemmed from a particular understanding of education which itself reflected an understanding of being human. It is noteworthy that one of the key patrons of the movement was the future Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, who was also an early tutor and who regarded it as one of his most important contributions to society.

Unfortunately, New Labour’s worship of Mammon, and its subservience of our education to our suitability to feed the machine, is all of a piece with the ‘decadence’ of Western society — its declining or falling away from its previous character. Of course, it was never perfect —indeed, far from it. But surely it had a higher view of human life, and therefore a greater potential for human development. By contrast, what Labour’s ‘equality’ policy seems to offer is the equal opportunity for all of us to become Epsilon-minuses of Huxley’s Brave New World —fit for a purpose designated by others, and blissful in our ignorance.

Revd John P Richardson
22 January 2010

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Would Darwin give a monkey’s about global warming?

So the Copenhagen summit has come and gone, “and we have not brought salvation to the earth” (Is 26:18).

Doubtless, the global warming saga will run for some time, as will the question about the extent to which mankind is responsible for causing it and capable of curing it.

As I looked at the televised pictures of delegates to the summit, however, I found myself wondering, “Does it really matter?” Or rather, “What reason, given the presuppositions held by most of these delegates, would they or anyone else with the same viewpoint give for arguing that it mattered?”

Let us take the ‘worst case but one’ scenario. (The worst-case scenario is, I would argue, runaway and irreversible global warming leading the planet to hot up like Venus and become utterly uninhabitable. I’m not sure if this is possible, but I just thought I’d touch base with that one.)

The second-worst case, I guess, is something like this: the planet warms up by several degrees celsius. The seas rise by a number of metres, inundating much of the existing land. There is a major refugee crisis, and at the same time a catastrophic decline in our ability to produced food. Wars, riots and starvation become rampant. Billions die. At the same time, tens of thousands of species of plant and animal become extinct. The global ecosystem wobbles on the point of collapse. More and more life forms are threatened with extinction including, possibly, the entire human race.

My question to the Copenhagen delegates is, “So what?”

As far as I am aware, our planet has suffered several what are called ‘extinction events’ —including the Cretaceous–Tertiary, the Triassic–Jurassic, the Permian–Triassic, the Late Devonian and the Ordovician–Silurian. And that’s just the big ones. Apparently there are a number of other, lesser, extinction events which can be added to the mix.

According to Wikipedia (and why should I doubt it?), 97% of all species that have ever existed are extinct. Yet, every time, the ecosystem got over it. From a purely evolutionary perspective —and I am sure that is the perspective not only of most Copenhagen delegates but of their scientific advisers —an extinction event is a mere ‘blip’. Indeed, it is arguably an opportunity rather than a catastrophe. After all, the death of the dinosaurs led to the rise of the mammals, including ourselves. Who knows to what the AGW extinction event, should it happen, might give rise?

Of course, one of the worries is that a lot of people will die. But whilst accepting this with equanimity is not a vote-winner, it is surely an acceptable attitude in the biological long-term. Let us not forget, everyone alive now will probably be dead in a hundred and fifty years. What does it matter if some of them die sooner, rather than later?

Some might appeal to the suffering that global warming would cause as a reason for concern. But the more people global warming kills, the less actual human suffering there will be in the long-term. For it is not just that existing people will die, and therefore not suffer any longer, there will be fewer people born to suffer in future, because there will be a smaller human population.

Moreover, if the people who blame global warming on human influence are right, the fewer people there are, the more rapidly the problem of global warming will be corrected. Some years ago, when I was more interested such things, I had a book called The Optimum Population for Britain, which reckoned the figure was 35 million. Given that we are currently at 70 million and rising, a population collapse would be beneficial, and especially so if there is widespread loss of low-lying land to the rising sea.

Certainly the human race cannot go on increasing at its present prodigious rate. The effects of global warming on the human population are thus, from a planetary point of view, likely to be nothing but beneficial, especially if, as some are arguing, we are the chief cause of the phenomenon in the first place.

Others will point to the loss of bio-diversity, but as already been observed, we know that this is not a real problem following previous extinctions. Bio-diversity is not a constant, but goes in cycles. Nor is a dramatic loss of such diversity a problem. It seems likely that at least some extinction events occurred virtually overnight in terms of planetary history. Yet the ecosystem recovered every time.

Equally, the time taken for such a recovery is not an issue. No-one is actually waiting for this recovery! No one is inconvenienced if it should take a few million extra years. All we need to know is that, willy-nilly, it does seem to occur.

So yes, global warming is a threat to our survival. But then we are a threat to the survival of other species, from the late Dodo to the soon-to-be late polio virus. It is only a form of speciesism which laments the demise of the former over the latter, or ourselves over either or both.

Would Darwin, or should Darwinists (which is most of our political and scientific establishment), give a monkey’s* about global warming? If they are right, then at worst, it would reset the evolutionary clock. But we have every reason to believe the planet would recover. And it might even get rid of the chief planetary trouble makers, namely ourselves.

And if that should happen, would anyone care?

Revd John Richardson
21 December 2009

* To give a monkey’s is an English phrase meaning ‘to care’.

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Homosexuality and the Law: Uganda might look to Britain

The news that Lillian Ladele, a Christian registrar who refused to register civil partnerships as a matter of religious conscience, has lost her appeal against dismissal suggests to me that the Ugandans, who are currently considering draconian (see here) legislation regarding homosexuality, might actually have a point.

The outcome of this case, as it stands, means that traditionalist Christians could soon be excluded from all public office and employment. All that is needed is for applicants for any post to be asked their views on homosexuality —whether or not they accept it on an equal footing with heterosexuality. If the answer is ‘No’ (as it must be for the traditionalist Christian), then that may be deemed sufficient grounds for them to be unsuitable for such employment or to hold such an office.

Alarmist? Let us consider a little bit of history.

In 1967, the Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalized homosexual acts in England and Wales by allowing such acts between ‘consenting adults (defined as those over 21) in private’. In our present context, it is important to be aware both of the motivation and the scope of this act. The motivation was compassion and consideration for those who were subject to legal sanction and social opprobrium for what was seen as a ‘victimless’ action.

The scope of the act was simply to take a specific area of human sexual behaviour out of the realm of criminal law. Thus, the Wikipedia site [mis]quotes a passage from the Wolfenden Report of 1957, whose conclusions provided much of the framework for subsequent debate and legislation:

... unless a deliberate attempt be made by society through the agency of the law to equate the sphere of crime with that of sin, there must remain a realm of private [morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms], not the law’s business ... (Wolfenden Report, 1957)

Significantly, however, the Wolfenden Report went on,

To say this is not to condone or encourage private immorality ...

In other words, the Wolfenden Report was produced, and the subsequent debate was conducted, on the assumption that there was such a thing as private immorality, into which category homosexual acts might well fall. Nevertheless, given the social acceptance of other private acts of immorality (which in those days would, for most people, have included sex before marriage or adultery within it) it was appropriate to rule that this ought no longer, in certain circumstances, to be ‘the law’s business’.

This itself was to recognize a long-standing trend to distinguish, in a society which generally regarded itself as ‘Christian’, between the ‘unlawful’ and the ‘sinful’, and was arguably itself an outcome of a Christian doctrine of sin. (Notably, a number of Christian theologians contributed to the Wolfenden Report and —something which would be unimaginable today —the Committee included the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford and the Minister of St Columba’s Church, London.)

The Christian doctrine of sin sets a standard which no law could possibly address. When Jesus said that anyone who looks lustfully at a woman has committed adultery in his heart, he made it thereby impossible for the law to regulate any and every sin. Though English law had, in some ways, reflected an ‘Old Testament’ background (for example in defining the ‘prohibited degrees’ of marriage), it had never seriously tried to use the Sermon on the Mount as a model for what should be ruled illegal. Indeed, a major point of that Sermon is that this could never be done.

At the same time, however, there were clearly other pressures at work, challenging traditional, ‘Christian’, morality. The austere fifties gave way to the ‘swinging’ sixties, and quite rightly there was talk of a ‘sexual revolution’, helped on its way by the advent of the contraceptive pill.

Even so, there was clearly no outwardly declared intention in the passing of the Sexual Offences Act to effect a radical transformation of society, such that what was formerly regarded by most as ‘sinful’ would become to be regarded as one amongst many and various ‘norms’.

More than that, had anyone sought to argue, in the debate surrounding the Act, that less than half a century later it would possible for a Christian registrar to be sacked for refusing to ‘marry’ homosexuals, the person making such an allegation would surely have been dismissed as not merely alarmist but as slightly insane.

Yet here we are, experiencing yet another instance of the principle of ‘unintended consequences’, for the legalisation of homosexual acts has been followed by the normalization of homosexuality, which has now been followed by the criminalization of opposition to homosexuality. (Interestingly, the legalization of contraception was itself another example. In debates at the Lambeth Conference over a number of decades, bishops warned that the widespread availability of contraception would lead to a breakdown in social morality. Eventually, however, the ‘compassionate’ argument for ‘family planning’ won the day —and the doubters were also proved right.)

The question which must now be asked, frankly, is whether social normalization of homosexuality can co-exist with Christian morality. Currently, the answer would appear to be that it cannot, for despite all the talk of religious ‘rights’, it is quite clear that they are trumped (in Spades) by the acceptance of society’s sexual norms. At very least, this suggests that the Ugandans might look to our experience before making any decisions regarding their own situation, for the exercise of godly compassion in our case has clearly not resulted in a more godly society.

Revd John P Richardson
15 December 2009

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You're not the boss of me now —or are you?

Teaching on the Wisdom literature yesterday, I was struck by how in Proverbs the foundation of the good life is the godly family. The book opens with several chapters addressing the young man (person) in need of wisdom who is urged to listen to his father’s instruction and not forsake his mother’s teaching.

We may note that this itself builds on another ‘foundational’ principle, enshrined in the Ten Commandments: “Honour your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” As St Paul observed (Eph 6:2-3), this commandment has a special quality in that there is a promise attached to it. It has consequences, not just for the individual but for society, and these are spelled out: “you will live long, and it will go well with you in the land.”

Similarly, the Proverbs have social consequences. They are, according to 1:3, “for ... doing what is right and just and fair.” And this is also the basis for God’s blessing of the world through Abraham’s descendants: “I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him” (Gen 18:19).

All this depends, in the first instance, on the parent-to-child communication of God’s ways. Abraham is to direct “his children and his household”. The subject of Proverbs is to “listen to a father’s instruction” (4:1).

The Christian reader of Proverbs, moreover, is in the privileged position of knowing that the human relationship between parent and child is a mirror of the divine relationship between two of the three members of the godhead. The Son is constituted as ‘son’ because, as Jesus is recorded as saying in John 5:19, he does “only what he sees his Father doing.” Obedience is inherent in the son-to-father relationship. What is often overlooked, however, is that the converse to this is trust: “the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, that all may honour the Son just as they honour the Father” (5:22-23). Here is not just a lesson about the Trinity but about parenthood: parents may expect children to obey them, but ultimately they must honour this by their absolute trust of their children.

Yet it is part of the lesson of the Wisdom literature (and its fulfilment in Christ as the Wisdom of God, cf 1 Cor 1:24), that this is not universally understood or accepted. That parents may expect obedience from their children, and have the right to direct them as to how they should live, is itself a theological proposition, based on the principle that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom” (Prov 1:7).

Where there is no such ‘fear of the Lord’, however, we may expect Wisdom to be in increasingly short supply. We must thus be ready to question much of the agenda of our society with regard to children and their upbringing.

At the same time, however, we may challenge the assumptions of our society, both collectively and individually, about not merely education but procreation. A question worth asking, it seems to me, is what people think gives them the right to have children in the first place.

Having a child involves bringing another person into existence — yet we do not (indeed, of course, we cannot) ask that person whether or not they want to exist. Most of the people thus caused to exist will experience life as, to a greater or lesser extent, a struggle. They may, of course, have happy times as well as bad, but they will have to come to terms with their own existence, and, perhaps most difficult of all, they will eventually have to face the inevitability of the termination of their life which, in the view of many, means their consequent non-existence. (The book of Ecclesiastes is replete with material which reflects that particular struggle!)

Yet parents —even atheist parents —assume they have the right to do this to someone else: to cause them to exist and therefore to face the angst of existence itself. They do this without question and, moreover, they unquestioningly impose their authority on them, beginning with naming the child. Yet what gives anyone the right to say to another person something as dramatic as, “Everyone will call you ‘Joel’ or ‘Ziggy’,” or whatever takes their parents’ fancy?

I have no doubt that somewhere in the dark recesses of some department of sociology or social policy unit exactly these questions are being asked. And I suspect that the answer is precisely what we would expect in a society where there is no ‘fear of the Lord’: that there is no right to do this —or rather that any rights there may be are to be defined in law and regulated by the State. Once it was thought to be a privilege that schools, colleges and so on could act in loco parentis. Today, one suspects, we are moving to the position where the parents will be allowed only those privileges that the State grants to them.

But that, of course, begs another question: what gives them the right ...?

If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom, it is also true that the lack of such fear is the beginning of the unravelling of reason.

Revd John P Richardson
27 September 2009

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