“…the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named,” (Ephesians 3:15, ESV).”
As the Black Lives Matter movement began its rise to cultural prominence following a wave of policing scandals a few years back, many Americans naively assumed that the protesters were primarily concerned with police reform and so-called “racial justice.”
However, that façade began to crumble when BLM leaders began openly demanding the disruption of the “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure” as one of their primary tenets. It soon became obvious that the BLM advocates were using racial tensions as a Trojan horse for promoting their radical Marxist ideology through surreptitious means.
The ideological fathers of the BLM movement – Karl Marx and Frederic Engels – hated the family. To them, the biblical family stood in the way of realizing a new communist social order.
These early communists recognized that family loyalty often eclipses allegiance to the state and the collective. After all, aren’t parents responsible for conveying retrograde religious and political values to their children, and doesn’t the family use inheritance laws to maintain the wealth it has accumulated through the immoral contrivances of capitalism? And don’t monogamy and gender roles condemn the wife to domestic slavery, from which strict divorce laws make it difficult to escape?
Dismantling the family would be the only solution. “Abolition of the family!” wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. The family must be replaced by the almighty state, with “society [raising] all children alike.” It was their hope that easy divorce and communal childrearing would enable “the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse.” Only then could men and women find freedom from monogamous marriage, gender roles, and
conservative family values.
Regrettably, communist policymakers were all too happy to follow the advice of these social revolutionaries, and the state gained increasing authority over the jurisdictional duties that God had placed in the hands of the family. American theologian RJ Rushdoony observed this phenomenon in the 1970s:
“The family is to all practical intent abolished whenever the state determines the education, vocation, religion, and discipline of the child. The only function remaining then to the parents is procreation, and, by means of birth control regulations [for example, China’s one-child policy], this too is subject now to a diminishing role.”
God created the family in the Garden of Eden, long before he ordained the church or civil government. Marriage is a divine institution, and while those who seek to dismantle it may gain ground temporarily, they will never be successful in abolishing an institution that our Lord uses to bring himself glory as it fulfills his good design.
PRAYER. Father God, protect my family from the attacks that are waged against it. Prosper us as we seek to glorify you in all our endeavors. Strengthen my family so we may be used as a testimony for you and your truth. Empower me, by your Spirit, to raise children who serve and love you. In the name of Jesus, amen.
