September 08 +James ARE FATHERS NECESSARY?
In 1996 Greg Norman lost the Masters' golf tournament to his friend Nick Faldo. After the game Faldo gave Norman a consoling hug - and Norman burst into tears. During a subsequent interview he explained. "I wasn't crying because I lost" he said. "I've lost a lot of golf tournaments before. I'll lose a lot more. I cried - because I've never had a hug like that in my life."
Fathers are there to provide consoling hugs. They are there to provide a role model for their sons and an example of unconditional love for their daughters. They are there to do the most important thing they can for their children, which as Henry Ward Beecher once famously observed is to ‘love their mother'. It is no accident that nature requires a man as well as a woman to provide a child. Children need a father as well as a mother. That is how it has always been.
But according to our society, that is not how it should be in future. When a woman applies for fertility treatment, she no longer needs to consider the child's need of a father. When two women apply to adopt a child, they have a similar dispensation. No wonder Iain Duncan Smith, who established the Centre for Social Justice, argues that "bit by bit we are airbrushing men and their responsibilities from society".
Of course sometimes women find themselves bringing up children as single parents through no fault of their own, not least through bereavement or divorce. They need and desire all the help, care and support the church can offer, because not even our schools can entirely make up the deficit. As the old proverb puts it, ‘one father is more than a hundred schoolmasters'.
But how perverse that we should now be encouraging the creation of families without fathers when simple research - not to mention Christian teaching - suggests that young men without a father will often find alternative, unsuitable role models; while (to quote the Centre for Social Justice) ‘vulnerable girls who have no father are more likely to be flattered by male attention and to be drawn into early sex, which is often regretted and unprotected'.
I recently came across a pertinent comment made by an American commentator, Daniel Moynihan. "There is one unmistakeable lesson in American history" he observes. "A community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future - that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder - most particularly the unrestrained lashing out at the whole structure - that is not only to be expected, it is very near to inevitable."
Nobody would want to pretend that all fathers are perfect. Not long ago a little girl was asked by her teacher to write a piece on her ‘personal hero'. She chose her father - who was duly flattered and asked why she had chosen him. "Because I couldn't spell Arnold Schwarzenegger" she replied.
But they are necessary, and never more so than today. This is fundamental to Christian understanding of family life. It should also be a basic feature of social policy. James Newcome
