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Is the politics of family values a sign that the place of the family is an institution in American society has atrophied? Or perhaps that other institutions, such as state schools or even the entertainment industry, have muscled in on the family territory?

Even though the family is under siege, it does not atrophy as easily as people tend to think it will. The family is anchored in something that is much stronger than a mere human tradition. It's creational. It is part of universal human experience from the beginning of time. The family is culturally variable, but it always reasserts itself.

In The Great Disruption, Francis Fukuyama argued that after the social turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, societies seemed to be reknitting themselves. Despite the impact of sin in human society, societies tend to bounce back. The family bounces back as well. Marriage bounces back.

So you may say that the family has been eroded, that it's under siege, but it is probably more resilient than people who speak about family values tend to assume.

The Bush Administration has recently earmarked funds for encouraging marriage among the poor. Certain critics have cried outrage, that this is privileging one form of family over another form of family. In your theory of "differentiated responsibility," is it legitimate for the federal government to encourage marriage in that way?

I have no difficulty with that. In the fifth stage of liberalism—what I call the "choice enhancement" stage—the state is supposed to be neutral with respect to lifestyle choices. There is an assumption that privileging one lifestyle is somehow a violation of the equality rights of the individuals. But even if this form of liberalism claims a benign neutrality towards different lifestyle choices, those lifestyle choices still have very different consequences. That's something that those people adhering to the choice-enhancement state are unwilling to see.

So when those choices have a deleterious effect on society, for example through higher rates of illegitimacy in the inner cities, the state has to somehow expand itself to compensate for those ill effects. Certain kinds of choices that people make are better than others, and it is within the state's prerogative for doing justice to be able to make those kinds of judgments and to embody them in law.

You talk about Marx's false hope that a brief revolution would bring in the classless society. Of course, that never happened. Is there an analogy to the experience of the Moral Majority, which thought it had a shot at some quick legislative reforms, but which didn't pan out?

I think there is a similarity to the Marxists' conceit, that somehow all it takes is one victory, whether it's the legal entrenchment of the rights of the unborn, for example, that as soon as that legal victory is won, then abortion will be put an end to.

When the 18th Amendment was adopted in the United States, there were many people—including evangelist Billy Sunday—who believed that because of Prohibition, the poverty in the inner cities was going to go away, that wife beating and a host of other social ills were going to evaporate, simply because booze had been outlawed.

There is a tendency on the part of political activism to assume that adopting a particular reform is somehow going to end up making everything much better than it has been. It's a kind of revolutionary conceit that is common among Christians on the left and the right. It's kind of a false eschatology.

This is not to say that Christians shouldn't be actively seeking legislative change?

Oh, absolutely not. But I think they need to be more modest in their expectations of what that will bring about.

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June (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47