“The Biblical family is by nature future oriented. Because it requires that there be a continuity of faith and honor, it maintains its roots in the past. ‘Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee’ (Exodus 20:12). This ‘honor’ means continuity and love. At the same time, there must be a departure: leaving father and mother to cleave unto one’s wife. Past, present, and future, are from God and under God.

“A statist world is different. The goal of the state is control and the restriction of change to the state. Instead of the individual or family as the source of innovation, change, and entrepreneurship, we then have the state in control of all these things. The state, however, when it becomes this powerful, becomes a vast bureaucracy, and it gives us a frozen, pre-arranged world, not a future.

“The family is the true wellspring of the future, not the state, and the woman is the key to it. The statist school is a citizen-producing factory designed to manufacture people whose every loyalty is eroded. No family ties bind the well-taught statist school product. Thus, all competing institutions or loyalties of family, faith, and heritage are eliminated. The result is a mass man; such a man is easily a rebel, a malcontent, or a drone, but he is not capable of anything but a statist answer to problems, because for him no other agency has any stature or viability. He is a factory product with standardized reactions and responses.

“The Biblical family, however, is future oriented. It begins under God as an act of faith, not a trial experiment in living. It is governed by a faith and by a way of life that ties the past to the present and to the future. The grandparents and the parents alike share a concern for the children’s future, and for a continuity of faith and life. At the same time, they have a concern that there be progress for the children.”

—R.J. Rushdoony