We have demolished the family – but there is Hope
by Andrea Williams, Christian Concern:
Chief Executive Andrea Williams tells the story of how we’ve demolished the family, tragically imitating the dystopian visions in Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. But there is hope, because this is God’s universe and he is in charge.
Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four – arguably the two great dystopian novels of the twentieth century – both point to a future where the family is undermined.
In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, family is relentlessly undermined by the ruling Party. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the family is fully abolished, children are grown in artificial wombs and carefully conditioned into a class system to make them useful to society.
Nearly a century later, and we are perilously close to realising the futures Orwell and Huxley warned about.
The 1960s saw the Sexual Revolution gain steam. Sex was decoupled from marriage, or from the possibility that babies might be the result. The contraceptive pill became available. Coupled with the availability of abortion from 1967, the perceived ‘risk’ of sex outside committed marriage became much less.
‘Free love’ threw away the safeguards of marriage and said that we could all experience sex however we wanted it.
As the decades went on, same-sex relationships became increasingly normalised and new forms of family proposed – why shouldn’t children have two mums or two dads? We’ve since seen same-sex adoption, surrogacy and attempts to engineer embryos with two male, or two female parents
Meanwhile, divorce rates skyrocketed. We kept relaxing the law, weakening our understanding of what the covenant of marriage was for. We made men and women interchangeable, recognising fictitious gender identities and then said you could have two men or two women ‘marry’.
Finally, we said that marriage wasn’t even a lifelong commitment – allowing unilateral divorce where a husband or wife could end the marriage for ‘no reason’.
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