When I was growing up in the late 1950s and ’60s (when gas was selling for around 30 cents/gallon), I don’t remember any of my friends and classmates who had “working moms.” Their mothers were housewives and homemakers in their one-family owned homes taking care of a brood of kids (typically 3 or 4 or more). In addition, all us children in our large Lutheran church-owned school (over 30 kids were in my class alone–never with an assistant teacher) went tuition free. The offerings and donations of our congregation supported all the teachers, which were all male from grades 3 to 8, whose salaries also managed to support their own stay-at-home wives and mothers.
Fatherless Families Became a New Normal
In the late ’60s and early ’70s several movements combined to cause a seismic cultural shift. The Civil Rights movement, which effectively ended legalized, institutionalized (systemic) racism, was long overdue. But on the heels of this were other movements that were destabilizing and demoralizing. Marxism became fashionable in academia and spawned a variety of radical revolutionary movements. Among these were Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and welfare expansion, sexual “liberation,” followed by legalized abortion and no-fault divorce, and feminism (women must be sexually and economically liberated from marriage, home and family to pursue money-making careers equal to men) and drugs. Fatherless families became a new normal, leading to depressed, dysfunctional and hostile kids.
Further Away From God
Burgeoning government programs and spending led to the abandonment of the gold-backed dollar under Nixon, which led to massive inflation in the late ’70s under Carter (dependence on energy from unfriendly foreign nations and long lines at gas stations for rationed gas, the establishment of the counter-productive and perversion-pushing Department of Education, the rise of Moslem terrorism from the Middle East, etc.)
“Fatherless families became a new normal, leading to depressed, dysfunctional and hostile kids.“
Now we’re into round two of radical revolution on steroids: Race-baiting has reversed past accomplishments, sexual perversion and confusion replaces the nuclear family and child-bearing, big government woke and waste has led to inflation ($1 now buys 80 cents worth of what it could 3 years ago. Has your income increased by 20% in the past three years? How’s the American dream of home ownership doing for young families?) It’s called “progressive” and “liberation.” Progressive to what and liberation from what?!
Show Yourself
The Bible says: “Train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the Word of God may not be reviled. Likewise urge the younger men to be self-controlled. Show yourself in all things to be a model of good works . . . so that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.” (Titus 2:4 ff.) (Talk about revolutionary!)
