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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
June 20, 2004
Father's Day
Surprise surprise: surveys show that religious men and especially evangelical Protestants make more affectionate and reliable fathers. The surveys are themselves surveyed in a new book by a sociologist at the University of Virginia named W. Bradford Wilcox (who is incidentally Catholic). He shows an unmistakable correlation between things like regular church attendance and things like not beating children to within an inch of their lives. More subtly he shows that while evangelical family men are stricter than the "mainstream" and "secular" types and less inclined to do housework they devote more time and emotional energy to their wives and children; are downright well-disposed towards them and less likely to abandon or hurt them. They are in the title of his book Soft Patriarchs -- "devoted" as opposed to "authoritarian" -- the opposite of the ogres depicted in the official feminist demonology. By contrast it would appear to have been demonstrated the farther one gets away from hard-line Judeo-Christian religious belief and practice the worse it gets for women and kids. My reader may be aware of what I think of surveys. They fall broadly into two classes: those which were commissioned for the very purpose of giving an illusion of scientific authority to someone's batty inverted view of reality in order to help some positively evil pressure group extract large sums of tax money from a government cravenly eager to capture a constituency with dubious special interests. And those which were not. The latter with less axe to grind usually wind up affirming the obvious and thus have little news value. There is a third class but it is rare. Yet it sometimes happens that a researcher finds the exact opposite of what he expected and is honest enough to admit that his assumptions were all wrong. An example was the environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg who after an exhaustive survey of relevant international statistics concluded that on balance environmental conditions on the planet were actually improving. This is very bad news for the researcher. It means he will be ostracized by all his friends. Mr. Wilcox's survey of surveys -- shadowing ideological developments in American society over the last half-century -- appears to fall somewhere between my second and third categories. There had been a number of studies designed expressly to put evangelical Christian parents in a bad light. Starting with the assumption that such people like to spank their children and that spanking is wrong they moved by unerring steps to the conclusion that they like to spank their children and that spanking is wrong. Certainly my own impression is that "surveys have shown" sociologists to be extremely unsympathetic to persons with religious beliefs and commitments especially Christian ones. They tend not to like "patriarchy" either. Indeed someone should do a sociological survey of what sociologists do believe: I dare say it would curl your ears. But in the meantime Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands performs the useful function of giving a veneer of scientific credibility to a thesis so glaringly obvious that only intellectuals could miss it. If you want men to behave you don't try to turn them into whimpering sycophants of women's liberation. You make them fear and love God and understand their manly place in the grand scheme of the Creation. You let them play their family role as husband and father; you defer to it; you find it neither necessary nor wise to subvert it. You do not whine about who does the housework. But what am I saying? That fathers should be paternal; that mothers should be maternal; that children should be obedient. Which is about as reactionary as saying that women who don't kill their babies make more affectionate and reliable mothers. It is the sort of thing that may have seemed self-evident to another generation but has been made almost counter-intuitive by decades of feminist nihilist and abortionist propaganda. Father's Day is a silly commercial spectacle like all the others. It was an excuse to sell ties that evolved into an excuse to sell power tools. (Ties are more useful in affirming manhood.) If we wanted to put it to good use however we might consider giving it an ideological twist. Father's Day should be the day when we remind ourselves of the value of patriarchy. It should be a day to defy political correction and recall that every advanced human civilization including the one that made everything around us that is any good has been essentially patriarchal. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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