As a young friend was about to go to college his father sat him down and said, “I saved myself for your mother. I hope you will do the same for your future bride.” He was very grateful to his father for telling him that. It was a great ideal and his father’s achievement and encouragement carried him through many temptations. He is looking forward to the day when he can tell the same to his son.
The purpose of chastity is to protect the child. Today, where children are concerned, we are a ‘throwaway society’; we throw our children away and leave others to pick up the pieces. In 2018, of all U.S. children conceived, every fifth child was aborted, while among 17-year olds only 46% were living with both their biological parents. More than half these teens had heard at least one of their parents say: “My happiness comes before yours. Goodbye!” Some even heard both parents say: “Our happiness comes before yours. We are breaking up.” These massive violations of the rights of children cry out for the adult offenders to seek mercy and forgiveness from their children, else they cannot talk reasonably about chastity, the virtue that will protect the rights of their children’s’ children.
Even good single parents intensely dedicated to their children will present a hypocritically conflicted picture of chastity if they don’t acknowledge the bad decisions that led to their single parenting. Without a deliberate conversation there will be a major obstacle to talking about chastity.
There are many ways of addressing this, but parents essentially say, “You are precious and are the most wonderful thing that has happened to me, but I brought you into the world the wrong way. I hope you will not make that big mistake. I hope you will have a good spouse, who with you, will raise your children and give them even more love than I have been able to give you.” With a statement like this a new vista is opened up to the child, and one major obstacle to chastity has been removed. A difficult but great good has been achieved.
Fathers and mothers who do this benefit immensely. Their inner psyche will be stronger, more integrated and more at peace with itself. With this conversation they will have given themselves and their child the freedom to talk about chastity and its benefits in every dimension of their children’s lives: their health and happiness, greater productivity, and especially the greater happiness of future grandchildren. The most foundational lesson in human relationships — chastity is the foundation of marriage which is the foundational relationship in society — will have been taught.
When single fathers seek forgiveness and mercy from their children, they change everything. Their apology for not giving them the marriage they deserved changes the conversation, permitting them to discuss why chastity totally protects and empowers the life of everyone involved. With this conversation fathers empowers their children to think clearly and decide rationally.
The beginning of maturity is when parents put the child first and themselves second. When we return to that norm, America will be great again, not before. If that day never comes, America will disappear.
The single mothers and fathers who have these conversations with their children, ironically, are those who can most save America. In our day of materialist self-centeredness, to seek forgiveness and mercy is totally countercultural, particularly for these sexual transgressions. These parents are the ones who will have confronted our biggest stumbling block, are the ones who can break the contagion of unchastity.
Many of them are themselves victims of their own parents. In our day, victims are most powerful if their cause is just. Chastity is the greatest justice children need — even before they are conceived. In this epoch in Western Civilization mercy, forgiveness and chastity are now intertwined as never before.
But it has been so from the beginning. Other religions tend to be much less forgiving on family and sexual violations. Some are downright brutal. But for Christians Christ set the standard on chastity-intertwined-with-mercy: the woman at the well with her “five husbands”; Mary Magdalen; the woman caught in adultery and His challenge “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”
To forgive is divine. Single parents who seek forgiveness and mercy gift their children and society with large doses of the divine.
Western Civilization can be rebuilt fastest by such single parents, and none more powerfully than the most dispossessed: single Black and Hispanic mothers and fathers of the inner city. They could bring so much strength to the rest of us. In this way they can be like Christ and His Father, the founders of Western Civilization, founded on a crime much worse than unchastity – the murder on the Cross, a murder committed by all those who would later be part of His civilization. Single parents who ask forgiveness and mercy can lay His foundation anew, by bringing chastity afresh to their children.
Those who oppose them really favor murder.
For the good of the child, the future of mankind,
Pat Fagan, Ph.D.