By Rev. Brian Schwertley
[Brian has authored a number of scholarly books and monographs and has been published in The Christian Statesman, The Homeschool Digest, Semper Reformanda, Chalcedon Report, The Puritan Journal of Brazil, The New Southern Presbyterian Review and The Counsel of Chalcedon. Pastor Schwertley's works have been translated into several languages including Portuguese, German, Italian, Danish and Swedish, and are being used by churches around the world. Brian and his wife Andrea, have been married for 22 years and have five children, all of whom are homeschooled]
We live in a time of great marital discord and family disintegration. At the beginning of the twentieth century the divorce rate in America was under ten percent. By 1983 the divorce rate was just under fifty percent (the divorce rate has stood near fifty percent ever since the early 1980s). One would expect that with the great rise in the standard of living in the United States, families would be in a better state in the 1990s then they were in the 1890s. There is no question that, materially speaking, Americans are much better off than they were 100 years ago. The problems in the family in the late twentieth century are not economic but ethical and spiritual. The twentieth century in America is the century of unbelief and apostacy, the century in which secular humanism replaced Christianity as the predominant worldview. It is the children of those who rejected biblical Christianity in the 1930s and 40s who cast off all restraint. Thus, since the 1960s America experienced the youth rebellion, the so-called generation gap, the drug culture, the romanticization of socialism (the loony left), and the sexual revolution. While the political and cultural establishment of the 1950s was a hypocritical farce and justly needed to be questioned, the youth rebellion went beyond the questioning of political and cultural norms. Young people rejected Christianity and rejected God’s ordained lawful means of preserving the family. The sexual revolution, with its premarital sex, pornography, adultery, homosexuality and easy, no-fault divorce has left in its wake broken families, untold heartaches, suicide, poverty and abortion (the American holocaust). “We have watched in horror and disbelief as the number of illegitimate births has climbed 400 percent, as divorce rates have quadrupled, as the incidence of domestic violence has increased 320 percent, as the percentage of children either abandoned or left to their own resources has quintupled, and as teen suicides have skyrocketed 200 percent.” [1]
