Values are products of our ideologies

Pope Francis has a reputation for speaking softly on issues, but when he has a mind to it, he can be very tough and direct as well. As an example of this, when he speaks about the family, he speaks as he always does, about the need for mercy and to meet families where they are and accompany them along the road.

But he has also spoken about the “global war” on the family, as he did in Georgia last year, and about the “ideological colonisation” of the family as he did on an earlier visit to the Philippines.

In Rome last week, the Pope issued a letter to the Dicastery of Family, Laity and Life, headed by Irish-born Cardinal Kevin Farrell. It was sent ahead of the ninth World Meeting of Families (WMF), to take place in Dublin in August next year.

At a press conference organised to coincide with the issuing of the letter, Cardinal Farrell and Archbishop Diarmuid Martin discussed ‘ideological attacks’ on the family.

Attacks

Archbishop Martin said it would be “foolish” to ignore such attacks. He then observed that this is something families rarely bring up with him when he meets them.

Instead they bring up “work, leisure, homelessness, how to make ends meet, how they’re facing new challenges, how they have sleepless nights because of their teenage children … These are the challenges parents have to be supported in, so they can carry out this essential role within society.”

All of this is true, of course. Few parents think about, much less discuss in explicit terms, ‘ideological attacks’ on the family. But that does not mean they aren’t happening.

For example, why are so many parents having “sleepless nights because of their teenage children”?

One reason might be because a daughter is suffering from an eating disorder. Or she might be self-harming. Or a son might be addicted to porn. Or the parents might worry that a son or a daughter is developing a drug problem.

Parents have always worried about their children, and always will, but there was a time when eating disorders were almost unheard of, self-harm – much less suicide – was far less common, porn was almost impossible to access and so were drugs.

Changing values mean changing behaviour. Today, people have far more freedom than they once did. But this also means fewer boundaries for children and teenagers and more ways to get into trouble. Parental authority over children is hugely diminished. This is a good thing when authority became authoritarianism, but a bad thing when it becomes much harder for parents to keep their children out of trouble.

It becomes harder still when one set of parents is trying to (say) delay the day their children get a smartphone while other parents are giving their children’s friends smartphones at younger and younger ages.

Values are a product of ideology, of ideas. The current backlash against the authoritarianism of the past isn’t just affecting children, it’s affecting their parents as well. The hyper-individualism that is the driving value of Western society at present is affecting every aspect of family life.

Hyper-individualism means we are placing too much emphasis on personal freedom and autonomy as the be-all and end-all of life.

This is at its most obvious in the abortion debate. Those who back legalised abortion are not called the ‘pro-choice’ side for nothing. Being free to choose, up to and including the death of your own unborn child, is considered the ultimate good before which all other goods, even the right to life itself, must bow. The irony is that many women feel pressured into having abortions, sometimes by their own parents. So much for ‘choice’.

But the hyper-individualism also means that many parents don’t even bother to marry. Society once insisted that couples had to marry before they had children. When they didn’t, the consequences could be dire, especially for unmarried mothers.

Equal

Marriage is good for children. Married parents are far more likely to stay together than unmarried parents and that kind of stability benefits children, all other things being equal.

Hyper-individualism also means couples are much more likely to divorce or separate than was once the case. Divorce and separation rates in Ireland are still low by Western standards. All the same, the number of Irish people who are divorced or separated has increased from 40,000 in 1986 to 250,000 by 2011. That is without counting all the children affected.

When Pope Francis referred to the “global war” on the family last October, he was referring to gender ideology, which is the theory that the ‘gender’ we are (male or female or something in between) has nothing to do with our biological sex. Therefore, someone who is biologically male might really be a female and vice versa.

This ideology is now in our schools. A couple with a son in the local primary school told me recently that he had come home from school and asked his mother: “Mammy, have you always been a mammy or were you once a daddy?”

This is because a girl in the school has declared she is really a boy with the full backing of the school and her parents. All the children in the school have now been told that girls might really be boys or boys might really be girls regardless of their anatomies. That is a lot for young children to have to absorb.

This, by the way, is another manifestation of extreme individualism, in this case that you can even choose your own gender and that it is not something given to you by nature.

Without doubt, therefore, one big source of pressure on families today is ideological in nature because values stem from ideology and values help shape what we do and what we don’t do.

The World Meeting of Families next year must imitate Pope Francis by showing both a soft side, and a tougher, more analytical side as well.

On that score, let’s finish with the Pope’s words from Georgia last year: “Today, there is a global war out to destroy marriage. Not with weapons but with ideas… we have to defend ourselves from ideological colonisation.” Exactly right. The World Meeting of Families should be part of that process. Anything else would be a terrible failure of duty.