Socialism’s Attack on the Family

 

From ThinkstockPhotos-106515449_1456849126_549x405Dr. James Kennedy’s Site:  https://www.djameskennedy.org/article-detail/socialisms-attack-on-the-family

by Karen VanTil Gushta, Ph.D.

“It is no surprise that today’s socialists and progressives support expanding government power and the redistribution of wealth. But it may not be as obvious why they also push sexual libertinism—abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, and pornography. The roots of these efforts go back to the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the progenitors of socialism’s sinister sister, communism.

In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx wrote:

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. . . . The bourgeois family will vanish . . . with the vanishing of capital.

According to one student of Marx, he “appears to view the family as subject to a similar dialectic as that of other areas of society.” So, the thinking goes, just as the structure of the economy must change from capitalism to communism, the structure of the family must also change.

The denial of an abiding, God-ordained structure for marriage and the family is now a hallmark of contemporary progressives and socialists who embrace same-sex marriage, polyamory, homosexual adoption, and most recently transgenderism. They are also eager to hand parents’ rights and responsibilities to oversee their children’s education to the state.

Taking away this Biblical prerogative is one of the hallmarks of the socialist mindset. As Dr. Erwin Lutzer points out in When a Nation Forgets God,

Hitler’s [National Socialist] educational philosophy was patterned after that of the Soviet revolutionaries.

Every socialist crusade since the Bolshevists of the Russian revolution has tried to build an “army of young radicals.”

The latest socialist appeal to the youth is coming from a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist,” Bernie Sanders. Sanders wants to be “democratically elected” so he can govern as a socialist. His most ardent followers are those of the millennial generation, seventy percent of whom say they would vote for a socialist.

The historian William S. Lind explains this unsettling trend,

A whole generation of Americans, especially the university-educated elite, absorbed cultural Marxism as their own, accepting a poisonous ideology that sought to destroy America’s traditional culture and Christian faith. That generation, which runs every elite institution in America, now wages a ceaseless war on all traditional beliefs and institutions.

Chief among the institutions under attack are marriage and the family. As Patrick J. Buchanan writes in The Death of the West, “For cultural Marxists no cause ranked higher than the abolition of the family, which they despised as a dictatorship and the incubator of sexism and social injustice.”

These new Marxists believe that the path to power is not through the violent overthrow of the regime, but rather through the death of Christian belief in society. The way to kill it, they correctly ascertained, is to take control of the education of the youth. By conditioning children at an early age to reject their parents’ social and moral beliefs—labelling them as “racist,” “sexist,” and “homophobic”—and ensnaring them in promiscuity, cultural Marxists (a.k.a. socialists) are breaking the moral backbone of American society.

Their success in achieving these goals can be seen in a survey of high school students taken in 2013 by the Centers for Disease Control. It found that 47 percent of these students had already experienced sexual intercourse, and 34 percent had done so during the previous 3 months. In addition, a study by the American Sociological Association found that more than half of all children in the U.S. either misperceive or reject their parents’ political party affiliations. [1] And although the percentage of young people who are leaving the church seems to vary according to who is doing the research, the trend is evident.

Healthy and stable families are the fountain and wellspring of a thriving culture and society, but socialists, progressives, and liberals have been attacking America’s families for decades. The policies of the so-called Great Society, which contributed to the breakdown of the black family unit, only exacerbated what a group of cultural Marxists, known as the Frankfurt School, had started.

The members of this “school” came to America from Germany during the 1930s, intent on the “revolutionary destruction of society,” as one of them, Georg Lukács, wrote. The student revolutionaries of the 1960s eagerly embraced the writings of Lukács and other cultural Marxists, including Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse. The latter’s book, Eros and Civilization, which advocated universal adoption of the Pleasure Principle over-against Judeo-Christian ethics, was particularly popular. Marcuse’s slogan, “Make love not war,” became the by-word of antiwar protesters and hippies and many students of the 1960 era.

The general decline of the belief in the importance of the nuclear family structure of father and mother and the willingness to accept the notion of same-sex “marriage” and homosexual adoptions is just a further outgrowth of the seeds that were planted decades ago. And it will not stop here. As Milo Yiannopoulos reported in Breitbart.com on September 21, 2015, there is “a disturbing trend of pedophilia activism on the Left, which has gone out on a limb time and time again to normalize child abuse. “

Recent research shows that as a society, most Americans do not even rank the “family” as a primary cultural value. Compared to South Asian societies, which rank “family” at the top of the list, North Americans rank “religion” first, followed by “individualism, risk-taking, self-reliance, and equity.” However, “religion” that fails to follow God’s plan for the family will not bring much-needed revival to America or advance the kingdom of God.

Our concern over the attack on the family and marriage should not prompt us to hunker down in Christian cultural bunkers in order to protect our own children. Christians need to be in the forefront of society, proclaiming God’s Gospel for all of life. We should show how His divine design gives each sphere of society its rightful place and ruling authority. By living out the Gospel in our own lives and raising godly children, we can demonstrate how the Christian family is truly the wellspring of a healthy society.”