Fathers undermined, families corrupted – from loss of regard for God

Philosopher Ed Feser recently wrote that modern society is Oedipal, seeking to kill the father and defile the mother. It is a tidy summation of the twin targets of the woke movement: authority and innocence.

Authority has long been targeted by undermining trust in fatherhood both human and divine. In speaking with a strong, loving, and politically progressive grandmother about her interactions with her grandchildren, she noted with bemusement that no matter how much she and Grandpa might be similar in their grandparenting styles, he seemed to command an authority over the children that she did not. Maybe it was his deeper voice or his commanding height, she mused. But it seemed as inevitable as it was unintentional. This was not something the children were taught, but something they intuited, and it hints to a reality of fathers as icons of authority.

Men are not called to embody a type of fatherly authority because they are better than women, but because they are designed to express that aspect of God’s love in a particular way.

The revolutionaries from Marx to Marcuse wrote about the need to depose the father by undermining his moral authority through sexual licentiousness. In so doing, the great obstacle to revolution, the family, would be destabilized. They were correct. Most of our societal pathologies can be traced back to either poor fathers or absent ones. Such a society is in want of manliness, not in excess of it.

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