Without strong families that teach their children the principles of Judeo-Christian morality and how to exercise freedom without turning it into mere license, all the schools and money and laws in the world will be useless in protecting a society from corruption and collapse. That was the message of John Adams two centuries ago, and it is still true today.
The family is the building block of society. It is no surprise that our society is in moral, political, and cultural crisis now considering how fractured and unstable the American family is. As Adams observed, “The foundations of national Morality must be laid in private Families.” That is the national reform that only we can accomplish and that does not require or depend on elected officials.
Adams, the second U.S. president who was born on this day in 1735, made the above observation while journaling about his time as an American diplomat to our Revolutionary War ally France. He was disturbed (as any sane person would be) by the immoral excesses of the French Versailles court — particularly as he was told they had been under Louis XV, whose extravagant indulgences emulated his predecessor the Sun King’s. They could not be atoned for by all the reforms of Louis XVI, setting the stage for the French Revolution.
Reflecting on the adulterous and lascivious lives of King Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour, Adams noted that when even the women in a society become very corrupt, the society itself is doomed to moral catastrophe. In a sense, he was saying what Archbishop Fulton Sheen stated 150+ years later, “To a great extent the level of any civilization is the level of its womanhood.” Adams’ musings led him to the following conclusions, which are very applicable to America just as much as to France or any other nation:
The foundations of national Morality must be laid in private Families. In vain are Schools, Accademies and universities instituted, if loose Principles and licentious habits are impressed upon Children in their earliest years. The Mothers are the earliest and most important Instructors of youth...
The Vices and Examples of the Parents cannot be concealed from the Children. How is it possible that Children can have any just Sense of the sacred Obligations of Morality or Religion if, from their earliest Infancy, they learn that their Mothers live in habitual Infidelity to their fathers, and their fathers in as constant Infidelity to their Mothers.
What is unsettling is that the second part of that quote very accurately describes a significant portion of the American adult population now. As of 2019, America had the highest rate of children living in single parent households in the world, per Pew Research, and as of 2023, almost one in four American children were growing up in a fatherless household. As of this year, around 40% of American children (including 70% of black children) were born out of wedlock.
And that’s hugely significant because, as the Institute for Family Studies highlighted in 2021: “Less Poverty, Less Prison, More College: What Two Parents Mean For Black And White Children.” It is worth noting that the risk of poverty and prison is lowest with an intact family with the two biological parents and that step-parents trigger problems in the children just as single parenthood does.
America First Policy Institute published the following sobering statistics last year:
70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions come from single-parent homes…In a study of 75 juvenile delinquents, 66% experienced fatherlessness…71% of teachers and 90% of law enforcement officials state that the lack of parental supervision at home is a major factor that contributes to violence in schools.
In a study of 56 school shootings, only 10 of the shooters (18%) were raised in a stable home with both biological parents…Children who feel closeness to their father are 80% less likely to spend time in jail.
The iconic Jason Bourne novels and movies are based off the proposition that to be an amnesiac, to know nothing about your family or your past, is the most excruciating state in which to live. And yet a horrifying percentage of Americans come from broken families and know nothing of their fathers, let alone their grandfathers. Women and men alike are encouraged to be irresponsible, selfish, lustful, and unfaithful. Pornography, abortion, contraception, no fault divorce, explicit sex ed, heavily sexualized entertainment, LGBTQ ideology, and more encourage Americans to indulge all of their sexual impulses and never accept the consequences of their actions.
Until and unless we can correct that poisonous mentality and restore the family, America will continue to fall apart from within.
