Today is Tuesday, December 17, 2024, and this is William Michael of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. Today, I’d like to take some time to talk about the natural order of the family. This concept of the family or the household is not a Christian idea. Often, when we talk about these things, modern people roll their eyes at us and scoff, as if this is some crazy Christian fundamentalist idea that Christians are trying to impose on society, when in fact, the order of the family is something that is actually established in nature. One of the goals of a wise man is to know and live according to order.
The purpose of natural philosophy is to discern the order that exists by God’s own design in the natural world, to observe and know that order, and then to subject one’s own will to live in harmony with that natural order, to live according to God’s will—not just in strictly religious areas of life, but also in natural areas of life. In urban and suburban society, this is very difficult to understand because the entire society is artificial. It’s man-made, designed by civil engineers who’ve been at work for centuries, especially in modern culture, to create an artificial society that doesn’t necessarily follow God’s will for human life at all.
Christians are born into this, and they grow up in this, and they take it all for granted and assume it to be normal because they don’t study history. Cicero, the famous Roman philosopher, said that if a man does not learn what happened before he was born, he remains forever a child. This is the problem that many modern Christians have. They grow up in a culture that is entirely unnatural and destructive, really detrimental to human life, contrary to human happiness. But it’s all that they know, and they struggle to even imagine anything other than what they know from experience.
I learned about this earlier when I was in college. I read an article once which explained that children growing up in New York City were interviewed. I forget the details, but there was someone investigating this, and they asked children growing up in New York City about the stars. As they talked with these city children, they realized that many of the children growing up in New York City had never even seen stars in the sky because they’ve just grown up among skyscrapers their entire lives and lived in the subway.
I was amazed once when I took a seventh-grade class—this was when I lived in New Jersey and was teaching—on a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I remember being nervous about bringing the kids into the subway system, and then, as we got into the subway, realizing how many children in New York make use of the subway every day. There were kids all over the place, kids who live there just using the subway as their normal transportation. It was amazing to me to see those kids growing up in the city treating the subway system as something that was just normal.
But the report, as I said, revealed that many of the children growing up in a major city are not even conscious of natural objects, which for children growing up out in the country are just part of normal everyday life and, for all of human history, have been a part of normal everyday life. When we’re born into an urban society or even a suburban society, if we don’t study history and learn where and how the things that we consider normal came from, what their sources were, what their intentions were, what their effects are, and so on, we can find it very difficult to figure out how to live a Christian life.
We’re stuck, as it were, inside of an anti-Catholic system, an anti-Christian order of life that we think is just normal. What we can’t comprehend without study is that the culture we take for granted is actually artificial and unnecessary, and it’s very difficult to learn that without studying history and philosophy and the Scriptures and so on.
Now, what was interesting for me, in God’s gracious Providence, was that I was studying classical studies in college before I got married. I grew up in a suburban environment. I grew up in central New Jersey, lived on a quarter acre with a two-story house in a tightly packed suburban neighborhood. I loved the place that I lived. I had friends all over my street. I was the paperboy in town. I knew all the neighbors. I could still, to this day, picture every house and tell you the name of the people who lived there.
I grew up in a very child-friendly, tight-knit hometown where I was able to move about freely. Even as a seven- or eight-year-old kid, I could hop on my bike and ride six or seven blocks away to the 7-Eleven or go to the pizza place or the drug store. At five years old, I could go play around the block from my house. It was a very safe, child-friendly environment, but it was a suburban, secular society. I grew up in that culture, and when I went to college—again, in just the next town over in New Brunswick, where Rutgers University is—I started studying classics and ancient history.
As I converted to Christianity, I really had to learn that my suburban worldview was really just a little fish tank. It wasn’t reality. It wasn’t necessarily good. As I said, it was safe and relatively friendly, but there was also a lot of sin and immorality in the community. We had the moral code where, as long as you’re not hurting anyone else, it’s okay. But as I became a Christian, I became sensitive to a lot of the problems in my life. As I began studying history and philosophy, I really began to become sensitive to how many things I considered normal were really novelties in human history.
One of the works that I studied, which I talk about quite a bit, was a work on household economics by a fourth-century BC philosopher named Xenophon. His name is spelled with an X and pronounced “ZEH-no-fon.” He lived during the time of Socrates and was supposedly a friend of Socrates, but he wrote a book on household management, or on household economics, where he explains from the perspective of natural philosophy—and remember, this is 300 or so years before the Christian era. So this is not a Christian idea. This is an idea drawn from human philosophy, from reason, simply observing the natural world.
In this work, which I would consider to be a work that uniquely combines natural and moral philosophy, Xenophon explains how a household should be rightly ordered so that it actually operates in harmony with the order of the natural world. He talks about married life and family life and the division of responsibilities and the roles of men and women, all based on observation of nature in light of human reason. It’s a very helpful study that I recommend to everyone. Again, it’s Xenophon’s “Household Economics”.
If you’re subscribed as a student or a parent in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy and you can access the Study Center, there’s a link on the right side of the Study Center where I subscribe to the Loeb Classical Library for all students. You can find Xenophon’s work in there. There are over 500 Latin and Greek works in that library, all of which is free to Classical Liberal Arts Academy families.
I had the privilege of reading this when I was 20 or 21 years old, before I was married. Having a good Christian fiancée who wanted to be a good Christian wife and mother, we were able to talk about these things and think through them and bring ourselves into subjection to them before we got married. I was very serious about marriage and family life when I was in my 20s because I grew up in a family where I experienced the consequences of a disordered home.
I’m not complaining because I was blessed in that I was surrounded by married couples. My parents were married, my uncles and aunts were married, my grandparents were married. I was surrounded by strong family relationships, none of which, interestingly, were Christian. None of my family was Christian, and yet marriage was taken seriously. Family life was taken seriously by my parents, uncles, aunts, and grandparents. I had some of the benefits of family life. I didn’t live through any divorces or anything like that.
At the same time, my parents, as individuals, did not live in harmony with nature. My mother worked full time, was always away from the home, and worked 60 to 70 hours a week. She basically paid the bills. My father, even though he was an electrician, by the time I was in ninth or tenth grade, really wasn’t working much anymore and didn’t care much. My mother was making decent money—middle-class income type money—and our bills were paid, but my household was upside down, and I saw the effects of that.
When I was approaching marriage and family life, I realized I had a lot to learn. I had to figure things out because I wanted to hit the ground running. I had a fiancée who I knew also wanted to hit the ground running, and so we had to prepare. In fact, I was so crazy—I can look back and laugh at this—but I was so crazy in preparing for marriage that I actually wrote up a document for my wife, which was sort of a constitution for our family. I wrote it up and shared it with her so that we could have a clear plan for our family life. As we got married and got started with a family, we would have everything figured out and know what needed to be done so we could have order and peace in our marriage.
The reason why I had this advantage was not just because of my Bible study or my Christian learning. As a Protestant, I was blessed to enjoy premarital counseling from a couple—a good married couple with a bunch of children—who took us in, went through a book with us, and helped us talk through preparation for marriage.
So everything about our relationship and preparation for marriage was just blessed and provided for in so many amazing ways. This was as a Protestant, and I can only look back and see how clear it is. The Scripture says that lands and inheritances are from fathers, but a prudent wife is from the Lord. As I look back at my life, there’s no way to explain how I ended up with the wife and the marriage that I did apart from God’s grace. God just abundantly lavished upon me blessings with respect to a partner for life, a spouse, marriage preparation, and knowledge before I got married of what to do as a husband. I was just able to get off to a good start.
One of the most significant influences was Xenophon’s work on household management. As I said, that provided for us something of a blueprint for our family life before we got married. The reason why this is so significant, as I said, is that the goal of the pursuit of wisdom in philosophy is to know order. There are some things where we observe the order that has been established by God. This is true of nature. In the natural world, God has established the order that exists. That’s what we refer to as capital-N Nature, or the laws of nature.
When I say laws of nature, I’m not just talking about gravity and all this modern scientific language. I’m talking about how the world and all of the different living things in the world are designed to operate so that they can fulfill their end, so that they can be perfect, and the happiness that God intended for them can actually be enjoyed. The natural order goes far beyond just science class, but all the way down to family life, health, personal life, personal habits, and disciplines—questions about scheduling and planning. These things are rooted in nature.
When we live an entirely artificial life where we’re just making up our own rules, making up our own schedules, and choosing our own adventure, as it were, if our lives are contrary to nature, it leads to destruction. The whole universe is essentially moving against us every day, and it eventually overwhelms and crushes us. When we look at something like homosexuality, for example, we see it condemned in church history as being contrary to nature. When we look at the lives of homosexual people, we find that they’re often miserable, frustrated, complaining, oppressed. They’re using drugs and alcohol, maybe even suicidal. We ask ourselves: maybe it’s because the lifestyle is not sustainable. It’s contrary to nature.
We’re not free to just choose whatever arrangement we think looks interesting, but we’ve actually got to recognize the order that exists in the natural world and subject our will to it. That’s what it means to live wisely: to live according to nature.
Now, I never really understood this until my wife and I moved out to the country and started gardening and doing some light farm work—working with animals, plants, fruit trees, shrubs, and all different kinds of plant life. We started to learn very quickly that you can’t just go on the internet, decide what you like, buy it, and live happily ever after. There is an order in nature—not just in nature in general, but also in a specific sense. Where you live determines what you can and can’t do. It determines what’s sustainable and not sustainable.
To be a good gardener, to be a good farmer, doesn’t mean that you successfully produce whatever you want, because that turns out to be unsustainable and really contrary to the point of gardening and farming, which is to live according to nature. A good gardener or farmer studies his location, his environment, his climate, and so on, and orders his gardens and farm so that his property—and all the things on it—are in harmony with nature. That’s what causes prosperity, and that’s what wisdom is.
We became very conscious of this as we started gardening and farming because we saw how many things we thought would be good ideas failed terribly. Even though we would read planting guides that said, “This sort of plant doesn’t do well in this area,” we’d think, “Oh, come on. We can make it work.” We had to learn the hard way that nature is going to determine what we do. Our wisdom is to simply act in harmony with nature. We are not the masters of nature in the sense that we make nature do our will, but we are masters in the sense that we direct things that are inferior to us according to the greater principles of the natural world, which is the end of the study of natural philosophy.
When we talk about family life, we’re talking about living people. We’re talking about human beings, living creatures that God has made. When we look at the causes of human life, it’s not just the material we’re made of or the nature of the human person. It’s also a question of the end for which we were created. God created us not to choose our own adventure or just pursue our own creative end and do whatever we want. God created us for His own purpose, for His own end. He designed us for a purpose.
Just like we can look and say, the milk cow was obviously designed for a purpose, and the tomato plant was designed for a purpose, human beings—male and female—were designed for a purpose. When we bring ourselves into harmony with that purpose, we flourish, we prosper, we thrive. If we set ourselves against that purpose, it’s like running against the current or trying to sail a boat into the wind. When we act contrary to nature, we cause ourselves endless frustration, and ultimately, nature will prevail over us. Our will is not superior to capital-N Nature. We’ve got to learn to understand the order of nature, understand where nature is leading things, and bring ourselves into harmony with nature.
When it comes to family life, if we look at ourselves physically and think about the physical realities of family life, we find that there is an order that God has designed. When He created the world, when He made men and women, we’ve got to be very careful that we order our lives so that we are living in harmony with nature. It doesn’t matter if you can find people who will pat you on the back and encourage you, trying to rouse your spirits to pursue your own plans and goals—”You can do it! Whatever you set your mind to!”—that’s all a bunch of baloney. That’s foolishness.
Wisdom is not telling people they can do whatever they want and anything they set their mind to can be accomplished. That’s not wisdom. That’s the essence of foolishness, doubling down on foolishness rather than learning wisdom. What we should be asking is not, “How can I do what I want to do?” but rather, “What does God want me to do, and what does nature direct me to do?” How can I live in harmony with nature?
If I choose to get married as a man, the question is: how does nature direct my life as a husband and, God willing, as a father? If I’m a woman and I get married, how does nature direct my life as a wife, as a mother? That’s really the question. That’s the question Xenophon and other ancient philosophers set out to answer in their investigation of natural philosophy with its application for the household or the family. In order to have a wisely managed household, the household needs to be set up according to nature, in harmony with nature.
Think about what Jesus says in the Gospels. He says, “Whoever hears my words and does them is like a man who built his house on the rock. The winds and the storms came and beat against the house, and it stood strong because it was built on the rock. But the foolish person who doesn’t listen to Christ’s words, who doesn’t listen to God’s words, is like a man who builds his house on sand. The winds and the storms come and beat upon it, and it collapses and crashes, and there’s a great destruction.” Jesus says, “So it is with everyone who does not obey my words.”
There we see this principle again. The God of nature, the God who created the world, has taught us how to live. Obeying His commandments, ordering our lives according to His commandments, is compared to building a house on the rock. It can actually stand in the presence of natural stresses. Think about it: storms are not some kind of extraterrestrial invasion. Storms are natural events. The God who created the world—the God who created the storm clouds, the tornado, the lightning, the hurricane, and the earthquake—that God tells us how to live. If we live according to His Word, when those storms come, they won’t affect us because we will have our lives ordered according to the wisdom of the Creator.
The foolish person will do things that have no chance of surviving—not some kind of unexpected tragedies, because these things are normal, these things are natural. We see people set their lives up for destruction. These two principles—the principle of living according to natural philosophy and living according to true theology, according to Catholic theology—are both two sides of the same coin. It’s really living according to God’s will, but God’s will expands beyond just moral commandments to the principles of the natural world itself.
We’ll often hear people ask the question, “Can I do this? Is it okay for me to do this?” What they’re asking is, “If I do this, is this sinful? Will it be sin for me to do this?” That’s really not the question a wise man would ask. Just because something is not sinful doesn’t mean that it’s good. Just because something is not illegal doesn’t mean that you should do it. For example, I can ask, “Is it legal for me to sit in my house tonight and play video games until two o’clock in the morning?” We can say, “Yes, that’s legal. That’s not a crime.”
Is it sinful for me to play video games tonight and just sit around playing video games until midnight? We can say, “Well, no, technically, it’s not sinful.” “Oh, good, then I’m going to do it.” You can just see that’s not the attitude of a wise man. That’s not the attitude of a Christian person. We don’t ask what is sinful and then stand as close to the edge of sinful living as possible.
St. Paul teaches us this in his writings in the New Testament. He says, “”All things may be lawful for me, but just because they’re lawful does not mean that they’re profitable.”” By “profitable”, he’s not talking about money. He’s talking about what is beneficial. Just because something is lawful for me—it’s not illegal, it’s not criminal—that doesn’t mean that it’s good for me. It doesn’t mean that it’s what I should do. The standard of living is much higher for a wise person than just staying out of sin. The standard for a wise person is actually doing what is best.
That’s what I always encourage people to ask: “Don’t ask, “Is it okay for me to do this? Is it sinful for me to do this?”” The question that we should ask is, “”Is this the best thing that I could do? Is this the best thing for me to do?”” That’s the question we should be asking. “What’s best? What is the best thing for me to do?”
That’s really the question that the ancient philosophers were after. Modern Christians don’t ask those questions, which is why Christian culture is what it is. It’s a bare-minimum culture where we’re trying to stay as close to sin as we can, but just beyond it, so we can say that we’re being good and not sinning. If anyone questions us, we can say, “What are you saying? It’s sinful for me to do this? What do you think, it’s sin?” That’s become the new standard of Christian life, and that can’t be the standard of Christian life.
In fact, Jesus teaches us the opposite. He says, “”Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.”” So again, the question we should be asking is not, “Is this sinful?” but, “”Is this the best thing for me to do? Is this being perfect?”” That’s the question we should ask. That’s the question the philosophers asked, which is why I would prefer to study secular philosophers, ancient philosophers, rather than modern Christian writers. The standards in modern society are just so low.
In Xenophon’s work, he looked at man and woman. He looked at their physical constitution, their physical makeup. We look at the bodies of men and women, and we find that these bodies are different. They are both human. They’re both essentially human, but they are different. It’s very clear that they are designed to serve different ends. They’re designed to serve different purposes.
When we think about family life and the organization of a household, we need to look at the bodies of men and women and realize that nature shows us that the man and the woman are designed for different ends. They’re designed to serve different purposes, different functions in life. On the farm, you can look at a dairy cow and a beef cow, and you can see that these two different breeds of cattle are designed for different ends. Dairy cows are bony and lean, and they direct all of their energy to the production of milk. Beef cows are thick and muscular, and they don’t produce much milk—they produce meat, solid muscle. You can look at the cows and see, by their constitution, that these breeds of cattle have different purposes in their design.
Even though male and female are the same species, we can see in their bodies that they have different functions. We can see that they’re not designed to do the same work. I once heard someone explain, which is pretty obvious but still profound to think about: when God created man and woman, He created man first. He created Adam, and Adam was by himself. God said, “”It is not good for man to be alone,”” and so God said, “”I will make a helper suitable for him.””
If the help that man needed was simply more help to do his own work, God would have created a second man. If the work was simply too much for one man, God would have created another man—or maybe ten more men. If all that was needed was more labor, more work, God would have created another man. But God didn’t create another man. He created a woman, and the woman was designed to be different and complementary to the man. When we look at the man and the woman, we see that they differ, and their difference is natural and significant. It reveals the final end or the purpose of the man and the woman.
When we look at the woman, it’s good to start with the woman because her features are significant, and I think we could say that they reveal more fully her end than man’s body does. When we look at the woman’s body, we see that a woman is given a uterus. She is given the organs to actually reproduce the race, to perfect the human race. Aristotle taught that a creature is not perfect until it can reproduce itself. Woman perfects the human race because the woman makes the human race capable of reproducing itself.
We see that in her body, she is given the organs of reproduction. She is able to conceive, produce, and bear a human person. Not only is she given the organs of reproduction, but she’s also given organs for the nourishment of the infant child. She is not only the source of life for the preborn child, she is also designed to be the source of life for the child after it’s been born.
Xenophon, in the ancient world, looked at this, and he said the woman is designed to be with the child, with the infant child, with the young child. The woman is designed to be with the child because the woman is designed to bear the child through pregnancy, which is a fragile time of life for a woman. She’s got to be protected. She’s got to be kept safe. She’s got to be richly nourished, as her body requires so much nutriment and energy for the production of a child. It’s obvious that she is not designed to work. She is not designed to labor and toil for the gaining of wealth. She is designed to require protection and provision.
Her work is that work of reproduction. It’s going to take all that she has. It’s going to exhaust all her resources. She needs to be in a safe place, and she needs to be richly provided for in order for her to fulfill that end of reproduction. After she goes through that whole process, she’s not then freed as soon as the child is delivered because she is designed to be the source of nutriment to that newly born child. Where that child is, she needs to be.
Xenophon argued from nature itself, from simply observing nature, observing the order that exists in the natural world, and reasoning from nature. He could see the order of a wisely managed household. While the woman goes through all of this physical trouble, all of this physical change, the man—his physical body goes without any change whatsoever. He has no menstrual cycle to worry about. He doesn’t have pregnancy to bear. He’s not responsible for the nourishment of the newly born child. The man is standing over there absolutely free to work and work and work.
He’s responsible for the provision and protection for the woman throughout her vulnerable time of childbearing and for the children that are defenseless. The man is responsible to provide, not only for the wife and the child, but for the life of that child until that child becomes an adult and becomes responsible for his or her own provision.
A simple observation of the nature of the bodies of a man and a woman shows how the household needs to be ordered. When we look at modern society, we often find this turned all upside down. We find women saying, “No, I’m going to work. I’m going to pursue a career.” When they pursue that—and I’m not saying they can’t do so successfully to a degree—their success comes with all kinds of negative consequences, which we need to think about.
They justify these negative consequences by talking about earning money, making a career for themselves, providing for themselves, and so on. Yet, that approach brings all kinds of negative consequences upon other people—upon their children. I experienced this as a child. My family was heavenly until I was about 12 or 13 years old, when my mother went to work, and then my family fell apart. Yes, Mom got a job and helped pay the bills because Dad neglected that responsibility. Mom took things into her own hands, went out, and checked the box of earning income, but she unchecked ten other boxes in our family life by doing so.
My sisters and I no longer had any supervision from a parent. When I was younger, in elementary school and into middle school, my mother was one of the most actively involved parents in my school. Everywhere I went, my mother was there. My mother was involved. All my teachers knew my mother. My mother was the team mom for my baseball teams and sports teams. My mother was involved in everything. Everything I did was a family activity because my mother was involved in everything we did. She was home. She had nothing to do but take care of my sisters and me, and that’s what she did.
When she went to work, when I was 12 or 13 years old, all of that stopped. All of a sudden, in my life, school was like foreign territory. My parents didn’t know my teachers. My teachers didn’t know my parents. My teachers no longer respected me because they didn’t know my parents, whereas when I was younger, my teachers loved me, especially because they had relationships with my mother, who was the most active PTA mom in the school. All of these benefits disappeared when my mother went to work. We no longer went to church. My faith formation stopped. I no longer went to catechism. I didn’t receive confirmation.
So when we talk about mom paying the bills and helping to provide for the family, at what cost is that going to come? What are the negative consequences of this “positive” of mom going to work? I will argue that the benefits of mom going to work will never equal the negative consequences that are created when she does so. Her role in the lives of not just the children, but in the household itself, is so important for the household, for the family, for the children, that when she leaves for work, the money she makes is a fraction of the value of what’s lost. The quality of life, the culture, the unity, the order of the family life, the lives of the children, the safety of the children—all of that is sacrificed for money.
Meanwhile, the man is standing there allowing that to happen. We often find the man willing to punch in and punch out of a nine-to-five job, and if his nine-to-five job isn’t covering the costs of the family, he turns around and looks at his wife as if she’s responsible to go earn the rest. We can just see that expectation is contrary to nature. It’s contrary to nature. He has nothing to do but work. He has nothing to do but work.
The children don’t need him. I know we try to glamorize this Little House on the Prairie idea, where dad is always in the kitchen and in the living room, hanging out with the children and spending all his time with his nine-year-old daughter. But his children do not need him at home. What they need is a parent—that’s true. They need the influence of parents, but they do not need dad to be that parent because they have a mother who is present and perfectly capable—I would even argue, more capable—of serving that role. The father is free to go and work to provide for the needs of his family, not just the bare essential physical needs, like putting a roof over their heads and food on the table.
That’s not Golden Rule provision for a family. The man is free to go and work honestly, justly, righteously, and diligently to generate wealth for his wife and children, and that’s a charitable work. To go and work and work and work, to exhaust all of a man’s mental abilities, shrewdness, and physical skill to generate wealth and then hand that wealth over to his wife and children—what can be more Christ-like than the simple provision for the family? All of the works of mercy are fulfilled in a man providing for his family.
I can see in Christian society that we’ve ruined this principle with a silly kind of false religion and morality. A woman who doesn’t want to be a wife and mother decides that she’s going to “test” her husband by seeing whether or not he does the tasks that belong to a wife and mother. I just talked about this recently. There’s stuff on social media where women say, “Oh, you know, if you’ve got a husband who does the dishes…” That’s modern culture. So now the men are expected to be stay-at-home dads who wash the dishes, and the mothers—it’s just an intentional turning upside down of the natural order, and there are reasons why it does not and cannot work. It’s not sustainable.
The man is free to work, and if the man would pursue virtuous work and see himself as a problem solver—that’s really what work is—it’s going into the world and solving problems and then being remunerated for providing the solution to problems for society at large. Then, taking what’s gained by that honest good work and giving it to one’s wife and children—you can’t get a much more virtuous life than for a man to simply be a man.
And then, if we think about the implications of a man being a man, the life of his family is radically changed. He creates an environment where his wife can just be a wife. He creates the opportunity for his wife to be a mother. He gives his children a full-time mother to be with them all day, every day—to prepare their meals, to watch over them, to teach them, to keep them safe. There’s nothing that he can do that his wife can’t do. If there are things that need to be done, they can be procured with money by the mother.
He doesn’t need to be the source of those things. For example, if the children need piano lessons, dad doesn’t need to teach the piano lessons. If dad would simply earn the money and give it to mom, mom can hire a piano teacher. If services are needed, mom can procure those services from men who do those things for a living. Dad does not have to be this sort of jack-of-all-trades who does everything, because the jack-of-all-trades is the master of none.
That actually brings culture down, not up. When we look at human beings and say that we’re social animals, we’re designed to live in society. We earn our living as men by specialization. We specialize in things, and our specialization is derived from God’s providence in our lives. I work full-time, 24 hours a day, as a classicist. It’s a highly, highly specialized life, but it’s valuable. I work to solve problems that other families have. Other families pay me for my services. I take all of the money I earn and just hand it to my wife. I give her a monthly salary that she then manages as the manager of the household, and I just stay focused on my work.
I’m a classicist. I focus on my specialty. I work around the clock at it to be as useful and influential as possible. The money that I generate, I give to my wife, and she takes care of the house and the children while I work. What the woman needs, what the children need, can be provided for with money by simply hiring services from others—hiring services from others who are actually specialists in those things, which is much wiser and better for culture than having dad pretend that he does every job, or having mom pretend that she does every job.
If we just trust the natural order, stick to it, and allow all of its fruits to be borne—and I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying, “Oh, dad goes to work; that means he punches in and punches out nine to five, Monday to Friday.” No one has ever taught that. There’s nothing natural about this nine-to-five idea. That’s part of the artificial society—this idea that you should be able to go someplace, punch in at 9 a.m., punch out at 5 p.m., Monday to Friday, and have your entire life provided for. Where does that idea come from?
That is an artificial modern idea. It’s not coming from Christianity. That’s not how real life works. Nature doesn’t teach us that. That’s part of the problem. That’s an example of one of these modern artificial ideas in society that is actually causing the trouble. Men have grown up in societies where they imagine that the nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday workweek is something real. If they can’t earn the money their families need at their nine-to-five job, well, then they’re just victims, and either the government or their wife needs to provide the rest.
You can see that whole idea of restricting work to eight hours a day—so a man can have eight hours for sleep and eight hours for play—is just an artificial modern idea that no one has ever practiced. You think farmers throughout history punched in on the field at nine o’clock and punched out at five? No. They worked sunrise to sunset. In fact, the old farmers—because I live among some old farmers—they tell me that the time for quitting work used to be called Dark 30. Dark 30 meant about a half-hour after sunset. That’s when the work stopped.
So they would work through sunset until Dark 30, which, in the middle of summer, is almost nine o’clock at night. But this whole idea that we have this right to work eight hours a day, and that’s going to provide for a family—no one teaches that from nature anywhere. That’s an unnatural idea that itself has to be destroyed.
A man is responsible to provide for his family. There’s no limit on his work hours. I always say, my grandfather—when I was growing up, I knew my grandfather had three jobs. He was an electric motor repairman. He worked at a toy factory as a warehouse supervisor, and he did side jobs repairing motors for people outside of his full-time motor repair job. He had three jobs that he was working at all times. At all times.
He provided for his wife, even though they weren’t Christians. My grandmother was a stay-at-home wife and mother—not only for her own children but for us as grandkids. We could go to grandma’s house, and grandma was home all the time. We slept over there. My parents could drop us off there. You see how a man, by working and by providing for a woman, provides for his whole family.
The benefits of the work of that woman at home—now, she’s got moral responsibilities, too. She can’t sit at home and play with the ladies and decide that she’s home to pursue her social life. You can see how that can also be abused with all kinds of unnatural foolishness. “Oh, well, all the ladies in our suburban community—” No, that’s artificial. You’ve got work to do as a stay-at-home woman. You’ve got work to do. You’ve got to run your household. You’ve got to manage your husband’s income, because if he hands that over to you, you’re now the steward of that money. You’ve got to make the best possible use of that money for the sake of your whole family. You’re now over your children. You’re their Christian influence.
You have been provided for, to provide your children with a full-time stay-at-home Christian influence in their life, one of the greatest benefits that children can have. You’ve got to exhaust yourself in that work, just as your husband is responsible to exhaust himself in his work. When we think about the family working like that—the husband specialized in his own line of work, or multiple lines of work if need be, working to provide generously for his family—he is providing his children with the greatest gift of all, which is a full-time mother, a Christian mother, a wise Christian mother.
Read Proverbs 31 and get an idea of the life of a wise woman who manages her husband’s income as a steward, to make the best possible use of the money he brings into the home so the family thrives, rather than just wastes everything on nonsense. She sees her role as being the primary teacher of her children, first of all, and the protector of her children. She can serve as a homeschooling mother and as a source of endless social and cultural benefits for her children. But most of all, the role she plays is that she is the manager of the household.
She’s not the head of the household. She manages the household, and that’s why it can be said that she is subject to her husband, because she is not the head of the household. At the same time, she is given authority over the children, and they are told to obey their mother because she is the manager of the household. She is then free to fill the household with Christian culture. She can order the culture. She can help her husband. She can say to her husband: “You focus on your work, you focus on your craft, you become the best at what you do, and I’ll do everything that I can to help you.”
This is what my wife does. “You will always have clothes clean and ready. You’ll never have to worry about what you’re going to eat. You’ll never have to worry about what you’re going to wear. You’ll always come home to a happy, warm, welcoming, orderly home. You can safely trust that while you’re out working and doing good, I’m at home fulfilling my Christian duty by providing for this Christian home.”
That’s what my wife does for me. I’m free to work without distraction because my wife is at home managing the household, managing our household expenses, providing for our children’s daily activities, and overseeing our children. She leads all the children through all of their faith formation, all of their sacramental preparation. She takes care of all of that for me so that I can just devote myself to my life’s work, and that causes our whole household to prosper.
We were able to create that household because we learned these things even before we were married. I have a wife who, as a Christian woman, wants nothing but to live according to God’s will. She, fortunately, knows history. She knows the Scriptures because of me. She knows about this sort of philosophical teaching about family life, and she is docile and open to it. She wants to live a wise life. She doesn’t care what the other women are doing. She doesn’t care what society is doing. She doesn’t care what people tell her she can do because she knows that if she does this or that, it’s going to bring all kinds of negative consequences into the lives of other people, and that’s the opposite of how Christians live. Christians don’t pursue their own good at other people’s expense.
The way our family operates is what allows the Classical Liberal Arts Academy to work. It allows me to devote myself to work that most people would say, “There’s no way to make that work sustainable.” You’re wrong. The Christian family, ordered according to God’s will, ordered according to nature, actually allows for the promotion of Christian culture.
If I were to say, “Well, you know what? Back in 2005, when I was a school teacher making $37,000–$38,000 a year, why don’t we stick the kids in school, and you can go get a teaching job too? Then we’ll make $80,000 a year, and we’ll be comfortable.” No, we didn’t do that. It was never my wife’s responsibility to provide for our family.
When I was making $37,000–$38,000 a year, I was working in the evenings, studying, researching, and working to develop what would become the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. In 2008, as my family continued to grow, I knew we couldn’t live on $37,000 a year. It was sufficient for us when we were young, and teaching was the perfect opportunity for me to provide for the basic needs of my family while devoting all my extra time to my future work. So that in 2008, when I started the CLAA, I had a means of providing for that startup period.
As it grew, I was free to devote myself to it completely because I had a wife who required nothing of me other than to work. She helped me. As many of you know, she’s helped me through the years, working from home and doing whatever she can to help. When she has free time, you’ll see her very active. Other times, like now during the holiday season, she disappears. Kids are coming home, Anna has her “Nutcracker” rehearsals, and my wife is busy. She’s not going to be involved in CLAA work at this time because she’s totally devoted to organizing and managing our family Christmas celebration and all of the family culture around Christmas.
She focuses on the children’s homeschooling. She helps our adult children manage their activities and works with them. That’s her role. I am totally undistracted to pursue my work. When things come up in the family and there are problems, my wife can turn to me and say, “Hey, Bill, we need some more money because this kid needs this, or we need to do this, or that needs to be done.” I’m able to say, “No problem,” because I devote all of my time to work for this purpose: to provide for my family’s needs.
We can see how the family works together when it orders itself according to nature. It doesn’t matter what the world does. It doesn’t matter what’s popular. It doesn’t matter what other women or other men are doing. It doesn’t matter what the labor union people say we should do or what politicians say. Politicians might say you should only work three days a week and get paid $5 million an hour. That’s all wonderful for people trying to bribe voters, but it’s not real.
As Solomon said, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” The world works a certain way. It works as it was designed to work, and it will always work in the same way. If we live contrary to that, no matter how popular it may be, no matter what priests say—”Oh, modern society…”—no, the priests don’t have authority over nature, and they’re not going to pay your bills when your family is in trouble. We’re responsible to study philosophy. We’re responsible to study theology—not just to look for an individual to tell us it’s okay to do this or that.
If we go to wise men, if we look at the teachings of Sacred Scripture and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, we find this natural order of family life taught very clearly, not only by Christians but also by pre-Christian philosophers. The goal of our family life is to order our family according to nature, to live in harmony with nature.
Ideas become popular, like today’s idea that Christian men need to be with their children all the time—that they need to teach their children to read, catechize their children, and lead their children in prayer every day. That is artificial. A Christian man, working diligently, intelligently, and sacrificially to earn a living honestly in the world, and then taking that living that he’s earned and handing it over to his wife and children, is providing a crystal-clear example of Christian living to his family. If his wife fails to explain and teach that to the children, that is not the husband’s fault. That’s her fault, probably because, instead of teaching her children to admire the virtuous, sacrificial work of the husband, she’s competing against him and trying to criticize him for things she is home to do.
So we have to learn to resist these fads in society. It doesn’t matter what other neighborhood people do. It doesn’t matter what social and civil engineers tell us or what politicians say. Nature shows us how things are intended to be ordered, and a wise man orders his life according to that order in nature. That’s the challenge we face.
So, you can disagree. You can say, “Bah humbug, Fauci,” and all that, but I ask you to examine yourself and ask whether the choices you’re making for your own benefit will come with negative consequences that others have to bear. That’s not how Christian community works.
Let me give one more warning before I wrap up. Many young men with young children like this idea of spending lots of time with their little children. They love talking about being good fathers by spending time at home and hanging out with their children. Our children’s toddler years are very short. When our children get to their teenage years, they’re going to be heavily dependent on the experience, wisdom, and resources of their fathers.
What’s happening in Christian society is men are becoming “experts” in parenting toddlers while completely neglecting the parenting of teenagers and young adults. That’s what’s wrong with this modern view of the “toddler dad” or the “girl dad”. When these children reach their teenage years, when our sons take on the characteristics of men, they have needs to prepare for adult life. They need a father successfully engaged in the real world—competitive, free-market life—who can offer practical wisdom, help, connections, and financial support.
If fathers spend their years playing with toddlers, that may look cute in the family photo album, but it’s going to be a problem when those teenage and young adult children are left to seek help outside the family because their fathers are functionally useless to them as adults. This is common in the modern Christian family: dads who claim to be great fathers of toddlers but are completely useless to their 16-, 18-, or 21-year-old sons trying to transition into independent adult life.
So one warning I would give is not to be deceived by the so-called “good dad” who’s playing with toddlers. Fathers are responsible to raise men, not toddlers. There’s nothing fathers are doing with little children that the mother can’t do. The mother cannot do what the father needs to do for older children in the years to come.
Anyway, I hope that’s helpful. I’m happy to discuss these things in more detail, and I strongly recommend the study of Xenophon’s “Household Economics”, which you can access on the Academy website if you have access to the Study Center. I hope that’s helpful. God bless you.
