Families have always been the cornerstone of America. Families played a significant, if not vital role in the development of the United States. Alexis De Tocqueville in his Democracy in America, written in the 19th century, observed that what set America apart was its independent spirit and that families traveled together across the great sea to reach America. In other settlements in the New World, this was not the case.
“The other colonies had been founded by adventurers without family; the emigrants of New England brought with them the best elements of order and morality—they landed in the desert accompanied by their wives and children,” explained De Tocqueville.
The settlement of the New England area was unique. Further south in Virginia, the settlement on the James River that became Jamestown first consisted of adventurous, gold-seeking, young, troubled, single men, who usually were shipped off by their own family. Later came the agriculturists, who were more moral than the ones who sailed previously, but who were still a part of the inferior class in their mother country, and who were largely uneducated and had no “lofty conceptions” of an intellectual system as De Tocqueville describes.
This theme played out elsewhere around the world too. “Some settlements cannot even boast so honorable an origin; St. Domingo was founded by buccaneers; and the criminal courts of England originally supplied the population of Australia,” De Tocqueville added.
With families in tack and a strong religious fervor guiding them, New England went on to become one of the most prosperous and stable settlements in the New World, and their politics progressed across the Atlantic coast, eventually uniting thousands of settlers to fight Britain for independence.
Skipping ahead in time, the American family is at a crossroads. The past 60 years have shown an increase in divorce rates (although in the last 10 years the rate has stayed relatively stable), the amount of people getting married is at an all-time low, and the latest census shows that Americans are having fewer kids. Simply put, families, and quality families, are becoming harder to find. As Americans become more secularized, the key institution that it affects is families. Research compiled by Pew indicates that people who take religion more seriously have more kids on average and that atheists and agnostics have fewer kids than Christians, no matter their denomination.
The causes of the breakdown of the American family are more plentiful than one could put in a single article, but it's essential that we put an emphasis on stable and healthy families. Secularization is a key element in the breakdown of the traditional family, but economic and other factors have played their role as well.
The main takeaway is this: When families are healthy, the community is healthy, and when communities are healthy, our country is healthy. We must remember the observations of De Tocqueville and must remember the role that families play. Some progressive groups on the American left are attacking the traditional nuclear family, but its structure has brought humans more prosperity than any other structure tried by mankind. We’d be fools to abandon it now.
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