Forbidden Bible Verses — Titus 2:4-5

The three-year Lectionary that many Catholics and Protestants hear in public worship gives us a great variety of Holy Scripture.

Yet, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

My series Forbidden Bible Verses — ones the Lectionary editors and their clergy omit — examines the passages we do not hear in church. These missing verses are also Essential Bible Verses, ones we should study with care and attention. Often, we find that they carry difficult messages and warnings.

Today’s reading is from the English Standard Version Anglicised (ESVUK) with commentary by Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.

Titus 2:4-5

⁴ and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, ⁵ to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.

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Last week’s post discussed Paul’s instruction to Titus about the behaviour of older men and older women.

Paul gave similar instructions to Timothy on both groups. In each case, not one of the cohorts in Titus 2:2-10 was to make Christianity look bad.

Titus knew these instructions already, as did Timothy. However, Paul’s point was to show the congregations concerned — in Crete (Titus) and in Ephesus (Timothy) — that these were his instructions as an Apostle of Christ: Christianity must not show a bad example, thereby giving Satan’s human agents reason to criticise it.

Matthew Henry’s commentary reminds us (emphases mine):

Observe, Though express scripture do not occur, or be not brought, for every word, or look, or fashion in particular, yet general rules there are according to which all must be ordered; as 1 Cor 10 31, Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. And Phil 4 8, Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. And here, whatsoever things are beseeming or unbeseeming holiness form a measure and rule of conduct to be looked to …

Verse 4, concerning training young women to love their husbands and children is a follow-on from verse 3:

³ Older women likewise are to be reverent in behaviour, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good,

In our day, these appear to be archaic directives. After all, most older women today in 2023 grew up in the Swinging Sixties, an Anglo-American phenomenon that crept into other Western countries, even those where English is not the first language. Women had the Pill, abortion ‘rights’ (1972 in the United States), feminism, divorce and so on. The mantra of university-age students in the late 1960s was, ‘If it feels good, do it’. Whatever was socially unacceptable in the early part of the decade was acceptable by the end of it. I know. I was alive at the time.

John MacArthur traces this back to the earliest days of Gnosticism, which posits that the Creator was a bungler who did not know what He was doing:

The Gnostics taught there’s no such thing as sin, because there’s no such thing as right or wrong in the human realm. Therefore there’s no need for a savior, there’s no need for a death on the cross, there’s no need for an atonement.  What they needed to do to be saved was – listen to this – throw off the God of the Old Testament, this evil God; throw off the God of the New Testament with all of His laws and all of His threats and all of His so-called punishment. Throw off the whole Old and the whole New Testament and free yourself from the encumbering of this sub-god, this bungling Creator who did what He never should have done and created a prison for us in doing it.  So, you can see that the first tenet of their system was a blasphemy against God – calling God evil, bungling, ignorant.

They also had some things in their system that attacked Christ, and I’ll mention those in a moment.  Of course they had to attack Christ, too, because that’s what Satan wants to do, and the system did that.  But before I look at that, the system also included – listen to this – lies that elevated women.  Ancient Gnosticism focused on women.  This is what it said, for example, “Eve was a spirit-endowed woman who saved Adam.”  You say, “Well the Bible doesn’t say that.”  Of course the Bible doesn’t say that, because the Bible isn’t telling you the truth.

They said, “Final salvation for the whole world from the imprisonment of matter will come through female power.”  And the key is, “Female self-actualization, self-realization, self- knowledge in which a woman becomes so fully in tune with herself and so well knows herself and actualizes and realizes and fulfills herself that she becomes fully divine, and as she becomes divine she will rescue the rest of these lame men, just like Eve, fully divine, rescued poor Adam.”

In fact, convoluting the creation account, Gnostic texts tell us that Dame Wisdom was the heavenly Eve.  There was a mystical, heavenly woman named the heavenly Eve who is the same as Dame Wisdom – she’s the source of all wisdom.  She entered the snake in the Garden, and she taught both Adam and Eve the true way of salvation.  The snake, then, is not called the tempter. The snake in Gnostic literature is the instructor.  The snake is ultimate wisdom.  The snake was wiser than anybody else. The snake, it says in Gnostic literature, is the redeemer because the snake is the incarnated woman who comes the heavenly Eve and teaches the truth about self-realization, which is self- fulfillment, which is making yourself divine, which delivers you from being encumbered by matter.  They also say this: “the serpent in the Garden is the true Christ, the true reflection of God.”

So, they take redemptive history and stand it on its head like a satanist cross in a black mass.  God is evil.  The serpent in the Garden is the true Christ.  Christ in the New Testament, the reflection of God, is equally evil.  And He’s not the true Christ because the true Christ, the true Christ’s spirit, is in the snake, is the Dame Wisdom.

Now again I say, it’s hard to pin all this stuff down.  It’s mystical stuff. But you can see, not so much by what it is, the clarity of it, but by what it attacks, right?  It attacks God, Christ, the Bible, creation.  Though caught in matter, they say – the Gnostics – humanity once again can become part of the universal whole by a process of self-realization.  They say in the book of Genesis itself, “The lack of self-realization is really the problem that man has.”  And the Bible says man’s problem is sin, sin. And that the root of his sin is his self-preoccupation.  So they flip that completely around.

MacArthur tells us more about sexual roles in Gnosticism:

But let’s take a look at some other things.  In the Gnostic system, Eve dominates Adam and sexual roles are totally altered.  And you can understand this because, you see, Satan wants to totally tear up God’s created order.  They wrote, the early Gnostics did, that the divine revealer was feminine.  The divine revealer says, let me quote, “I am androgynous.  I am both mother and father since I copulate with myself.  I copulate with myself and with those who love me, and it is through me alone that the all stands firm.  I am the womb that gives shape to the all by giving birth to the light that shines in splendor.  I am the eon to come. I am the fulfillment of the all, that is, the glory of the mother.”

Now all of that double talk is the talk of the androgyny of Gnosticism.  That means the wiping out of all sexual distinction.  There are Gnostic texts where God the Creator is castigated by a higher feminine power, and that’s that heavenly Eve called Sophia, Dame Wisdom.  And God the Creator, the Gnostic said, God that sub-god demiurge who stupidly created everything, finally learned the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.  In other words, He learned to fear the feminine Sophia, so that the God of the Bible is now in fear of the feminine god Sophia.  The feminization then of this higher god, Wisdom, led directly to the ordination of women.  The ordination of women flows out of the feminization of deity.

The early Gnostic, well-known to church history students, named Marcion was excommunicated from the church in A. D. 150.  He then established his own church in which he appointed women as bishops and priests.  In the Valentinian Gnosticism, women functioned as teachers, evangelists, healers, priests, perhaps as bishops.  This movement in the church to put women into roles of spiritual leadership is simply reflective of this same kind of religious attitude.

In sum, Gnosticism then rejects the Creator God of Scripture as blind and envious and malicious, not hesitating to commit the most heinous blasphemy of all.  The Gnostics even called the God of the Bible the true devil.  For the true Gnostic, the real God, whoever this force was, was unknowable, impersonal, untouchable, some kind of unified sum of separated parts, a sort of pantheistic force.  But they said this, “The divine being, because he is all in all impersonal, untouchable, just this big force, is best expressed by androgyny, that is the erasure of male and female distinctions.”  The ideal for the Gnostic was to become sexless, a radical refusal of sexual differentiation and a complete confusion of sexual identity in God’s intended role.

As for the elevation of women that we have known over the past 60 years, MacArthur says:

I’m telling you this is what is behind today’s Feminist Movement.  This is not some whimsical deal that popped up in the twentieth century by a few women who wanted to take off the apron and buy a briefcase.  This is not that.  This is not something that was invented by women who wanted to abort their babies and get into the corporate halls and the executive washrooms.  This New Age thinking, that’s what it’s called today, is nothing but Gnosticism.  New Age is a new way of talking about age-old Gnosticism.  And the heart of it is that female power is the key to salvation.  The goddess cult is back.

Interestingly, during this time, there has been a resurgence in the Western interest in Eastern religion. MacArthur tells us:

By the way, if you look at Hinduism you see where some of this stuff comes from because the savior in Hinduism is a goddess. 

Some Protestant denominations have picked up on this. I have an Episcopalian friend who was at seminary around the time that MacArthur preached this sermon — 1993 — and there were feminist services at this seminary:

So when you hear about the Methodists or the Presbyterians or whoever – the Episcopalians – deciding to change the Bible and put in “she,” you know that this is not some human contrivance to make ladies feel better about themselves. This is a satanic religion, as satanic as a black mass.

And, as with ancient Gnosticism – the New Age Movement today – the goal of liberation is total reversal of all God-ordained values.  That’s why it’s so unthinkable that Christians would get sucked into this.

My friend thought it was great: so liberating!

Catholics were not entirely exempt, either:

“I found God in myself and I loved her fiercely,” said Roman Catholic theologian Carol Crist.  “I found God in myself and I loved her fiercely.”  There you have in one simple statement the whole deal.  Where is God?  In myself.  What is God?  Feminine, and I am one with God.  And she found God in herself with liberation from all biblical constraint.

Publishers of Christian books have jumped on the bandwagon, too:

The path to the New Age involves destroying the biblical male-female differentiation.  That’s New Age feminism.  Take, for example, New Age author Charlene Spretnak’s book The Politics of Women’s Spirituality, published by Doubleday – by the way, the same publisher that published the Anchor Bible Commentary series.  They’re publishing God’s Word and Satan’s at the same time.  This book, The Politics of Women’s Spirituality, is a book that calls for an end to Judeo-Christian religion and the call is that we will end Judeo-Christian religion by a feminist movement nourished on goddess worship, paganism, and witchcraft that succeeds in overthrowing the global rule of men. 

Returning to Titus and looking at verse 4 in which Paul exhorts Titus to instruct older women to tell the younger ones to love their husbands and children, well, what sort of example do we have in 2023?

Already, in 1993, MacArthur said:

You wonder, don’t you, two generations from now whether anybody will know what biblical morality is?  Oh, they might be able to read the ancient Bible and see what it looked like, but they certainly are going to have a hard time looking around town to find it.  And here witless Christians jump on this feminist bandwagon as if it was some harmless thing.  “Well, we have a right to work, and we shouldn’t be confined at home – and I have a right to express fully myself, and” …

… The satanic agenda is to destroy human society, to just rip the family to shreds and destroy marriage so that God has no means to pass righteousness from one generation to the next, right?  Which was always the role of the family.  There’s no moral order maintained in society.  There are no ethical values left.  And the way you do that is sexually.  You just shred all standard norms sexually so nobody knows how anybody is supposed to be related to anybody, but everybody is free to do whatever they want to do and that’s how they become divine.

MacArthur quotes the author George Gilder, a name familiar to 60-something Americans as he was an adviser to Ronald Reagan. He was once empathetic to women’s liberation movements but later changed his mind:

“Sexuality is not simply a matter of games people play, it is one of the few matters truly of life and death to society.”  He warns that if the feminist agenda, even its most moderate version, is carried through, quote: “Our society is doomed to years of demoralization and anarchy, possibly ending in a police state,” end quote.

Well, we have certainly seen that demoralisation and anarchy in two cities where I least expected it: Seattle and Portland, but particularly Portland. Andy Ngo’s Twitter threads have had some alarming content since 2017 — six years ago. Democrats blamed the civil breakdowns on Donald Trump, but has it returned to normal during Joe Biden’s tenure?

Furthermore, what can explain the social decline in Vancouver? They have Justin Trudeau as their Premier. Friends of mine visited Vancouver in the early autumn of 2023. Their tour guide restricted them to the tourist district! What a change from when I was there for the 1986 World’s Fair and everything was pleasant and clean: so much so that one could eat off the streets if one had been so minded.

Returning to 1993, MacArthur was already sounding the alarm. Bill Clinton was president at the time, and Al Gore was vice president:

Our society is doing exactly what I told you in Romans 1 – happens to a society when God gives them over.  What does it say God gave them over? ... God lets them go, and they’re going the way of the satanic lies.  Playing right into the hands of satanic lies is our own government.  Working hard, aren’t they?  [On] what are they working hard?  Our government, the government of the United States, the state of California, the city of Los Angeles, are doing everything they can do to eliminate all gender differences.  That is not an issue of constitutional liberty. That is an issue of satanic religion.

And that is Hillary’s agenda, by the way, in case you haven’t noticed … The Roman Empire didn’t survive it.  This entire system is going right into the pit, tearing up God’s order sexually, tearing up families, tearing up marriage, blaspheming God, blaspheming Christ, exalting the serpent.  I read one book this week where a man suggested the Antichrist might be a woman if we keep going the way we’re going.  Satan is very successful with this.  Al Gore has written a book called Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit.  Peter Jones writes about that book, “Gore’s involvement in ecology is an expression of his belief in the connectedness of all things, in the great value of all religious faiths, and in his hope that ancient, pagan, goddess worship will help bring us planetary and personal salvation.”  It’s inconceivable that these people call themselves Baptists.  No, it’s not inconceivable. Undiscerning Christians falling victim to these hellish heresies; the destruction is not restrained by the church – the church has joined it.

You get the idea.

I am amazed at the social decline, which invariably affects our respective economies and our governments, too. Employees call in sick, believing it to be an entitlement. Or they’re working from home doing who knows what. Only yesterday, I heard anecdotally on a current affairs programme that a female employee thinks nothing of cancelling her Zoom calls so that she can take her children to swimming lessons instead. As for governments, has anyone tried getting hold of a public servant lately to discuss problems with tax or National Insurance payments? What about passport or driving licence renewals? And what about our legislators promoting laws that cause the downfall of families as they say the State should take care of them? I could go on and on.

Returning to Titus 2, Paul tells Titus that older women should instruct younger women to ‘be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled‘ (verse 5). There’s the reasoning: so that the word of God will not fall into disrepute through our unholy living.

MacArthur says he was warned not to get heavy in the pulpit when preaching on these verses:

You can get in a lot of trouble by suggesting that kind of stuff.  Try standing up in this culture and saying, “Women, you’re commanded to love your husband and to love your children and to work at home and to be subject to your husband.”  You’ll get screamed down.  I mean, you can be in deep trouble just reading that, let alone commenting on it.

It’s been amazing since people knew I was approaching this text, they’ve been telling me, “What are you going to say about this?  This is going to be very controversial.  Boy, we can’t wait till these tapes come out.  What’s going to happen then?”  Well, just to mitigate that a little bit, I’ve said what I’ve said this morning, so that if you get upset you know whose side you’re on. God has laid out His standards.  They’re not negotiable.  And I’ll tell you this, if the church doesn’t wake up soon and obey the Word of God, all is lost.  We don’t need to fall victim to this stuff.  You don’t need a master’s degree to figure out what it means to love your husband, love your children, and work at home.  How hard is that?  By the way, there are no qualifiers there, no caveats, no footnotes.  It’s just what it says.  Go home, submit to your husband, have children, raise them in godliness, take care of your house.  And that’s what older women are to teach younger women. They’re to teach it not only with their mouth; they’re to teach it with their life.

I’m telling you, what I said a few weeks ago now is becoming so vividly true.  We are living in Romans 1, aren’t we?  What’s wrong with America? … God’s let us go, and we’re plunging down the path, and the evidence of it is this reversal of sexual roles that Paul talked about in Romans chapter 1, verse 26.

The following week, MacArthur began his sermon with this:

If the saving grace of Christ is to reach all men, it’s going to depend on the character of the church. If we honor the Word, silence the critics, and demonstrate that God is a saving God by our transformed lives, then the gospel will be powerfully effective. How we live in the church is the issue here, and its evangelistic implications …

There are times and places in human history where this particular section of Scripture would be commonly believed, even in the culture, where there would not be a reaction to any of these things – it would be the accepted norm for society. But ours is not such a time nor is it such a place. In our culture what is being said in these verses to young women is the very opposite of what young women are being taught. Young women today are being taught to love whoever they want, farm their children out to somebody else, don’t worry about being sensible, do whatever pleases you, don’t worry about being pure, fulfill your physical and lustful desires, don’t work at home, work outside the home, don’t worry about being kind – you do whatever you want. You grab your moment in the sun. Take care of you, not somebody else. And by all means, don’t be subject to your own husband.

When this comes into the church it therefore dishonors the Word of God. I mean, even an unbeliever can read those verses. The most unschooled non-believer can read that the Word of God says young women are “to love their husbands, love their children, be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, and subject to their own husbands.” And if he can read the Bible and look at the church, he can make a very simple conclusion – “You Christians say you believe the Bible, why don’t your women live like this?” You see, it brings discredit on the Scripture to say we affirm the Scripture, but we live however we like. Or worse, we live however the culture – being basically controlled by Satan, the prince of the power of the air – dictates us to live.

Paul also has instructions for young men, much of which would also receive scorn and derision today. They will be the topic of next week’s post.

However, to finish on MacArthur’s sermon, he says:

… there’s something in the fallen flesh that wants to dominate and be free and kick over the fences.

How true.

He goes on to say:

And so here the Word of God is at stake – the honor of the Scripture and the glory of God and the silencing of the opponents of the gospel. In other words, this simple set of commands has immense implications, has far-reaching ramifications for the kingdom. If you love Christ, if you seek to honor God, if you want to lift up and exalt the Word, if you want to silence the critics, you will be eager to obey these commands. If you want to do what the society says, if you want to fulfill your own fleshly desire, you will disobey them. Jesus said it simply and concisely in the summary statement, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.” And here are some of His commandments, given to us by the Holy Spirit through the pen of the apostle Paul.

So, a healthy church with healthy Christians is going to have a witness in the world because its young women pattern their lives according to what the Word of God says. So you need to understand the reason for all of this and the implications of it. If we continue as a church to fall victim to the satanic plotting of the Feminist Movement, we are allowing Satan to destroy the priority and the purity and the integrity of the church. We are allowing him to pull down the Word of God from its lofty place. We’re allowing him to give opponents plenty of reason to criticize us, and we’re allowing him to muddy the waters in terms of God as a saving, transforming God. It is imperative, then, for the sake of the kingdom and the advancement of the kingdom and evangelization, we must respond. And as I said, this is just the most dominant issue in our culture, and other cultures reading this might be sufficient because women have built in to the culture some sense about this.

It also needs to be said that we have a new generation of young women being raised who from the very beginning have been taught the opposite of this. They have not been mentored by godly parents. They are now a second generation of people influenced by the Feminist Movement, and thus this runs against the grain of everything they have been taught, everything they have been exposed to in the media and then bears great emphasis. And that’s why we did what we did last week in laying some historical foundation to the text for this morning.

Let us look at what has been happening over the past 60 years beginning in the United States, then moving to the United Kingdom.

In the early 1960s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) served under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson as Assistant Secretary of Labor for Policy, Planning and Research, serving from 1963 to 1965. His job was to formulate national policy for the War on Poverty programme. Incidentally, Ralph Nader was part of his small staff.

In 1965, he produced the well-known and, at the time, well-received, policy paper, The Moynihan Report.

The early 1960s were dominated by civil rights campaigns in the South. Nearly everyone living outside the South had a great deal of empathy for the civil rights movement and to finally end segregation south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Education Next has an informative page on Moynihan and his seminal report, which discussed black family structures at the time:

Most of the early press accounts accurately described the document (or what they had read of it) as a well-intentioned liberal effort to promote intra-administration discussion of a serious social issue.

It is important to note that, regardless of what people say today and of what I was taught in the 1960s and 1970s, many black men and women married and raised families together. My late father had black friends with whom he played basketball after school in the mid-1930s. They all came from two-parent homes.

By the time I was a child, that had changed in urban areas, and many black women were raising children alone. That is what I also saw living in my parents’ large industrial hometown for a couple of years just after Moynihan’s report appeared. My father couldn’t understand it.

Of The Moynihan Report and Moynihan’s view of it later on, Wikipedia says:

Moynihan and his staff believed that government must go beyond simply ensuring that members of minority groups have the same rights as the majority and must also “act affirmatively” in order to counter the problem of historic discrimination.

Moynihan’s research of Labor Department data demonstrated that even as fewer people were unemployed, more people were joining the welfare rolls. These recipients were families with children but only one parent (almost invariably the mother). The laws at that time permitted such families to receive welfare payments in certain parts of the United States.

Moynihan issued his research in 1965 under the title The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, now commonly known as The Moynihan Report. Moynihan’s report^[11] fueled a debate over the proper course for government to take with regard to the economic underclass, especially blacks. Critics on the left attacked it as “blaming the victim“,^[12] a slogan coined by psychologist William Ryan.^[13] Some suggested that Moynihan was propagating the views of racists^[14] because much of the press coverage of the report focused on the discussion of children being born out of wedlock. Despite Moynihan’s warnings, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program included rules for payments only if no “Man [was] in the house.”^[15][16] Critics of the program’s structure, including Moynihan, said that the nation was paying poor women to throw their husbands out of the house.

After the 1994 Republican sweep of Congress, Moynihan agreed that correction was needed for a welfare system that possibly encouraged women to raise their children without fathers: “The Republicans are saying we have a hell of a problem, and we do.”^[17]

Around the time The Moynihan Report appeared, unrelated riots erupted in some mid-sized to large American cities, the most famous of which was in the Watts district in Los Angeles. As a result, Education Next tells us that some Americans deplored the report’s content:

Moynihan obviously empathized with the black poor. But it was his bad luck that parts of the report became public at such a tempestuous (post-Watts) time in the modern history of American race relations. It was also obvious that he should have thought twice before employing such high-octane phrases as “tangle of pathology.” Black writers like Kenneth Clark, who had detailed black “pathology” in his recently published book, Dark Ghetto, might be extolled for detailing black social problems. But a white man, who was highlighting the rise of black illegitimacy and of “pathologies,” would not be. Moynihan, a white messenger of unpleasant news, was vulnerable, a figure who could be disarmed and shot at.

President Johnson hoped to avoid a break with increasingly militant black leaders and quickly distanced himself from the report …

Moynihan, as it happened, left the Johnson administration in July 1965 to run (unsuccessfully) for the presidency of the New York City Council. He was thus in no position to act as an official spokesman for his report. But he was deeply hurt that LBJ had appeared to abandon it and that he was not even invited to attend the November meeting. The administration, he wrote later, had “promptly dissociated itself from the whole issue.” He added, a “vacuum” then developed, and “no black would go near the subject. And until one did no white man could do so without incurring the wrath of a community grown rather too accustomed to epithet.” He complained privately to a friend in late 1965, “If my head were sticking on a pike at the South-West Gate to the White House grounds, the impression would hardly be greater.”

He was later accused of being ‘patriarchal’:

… criticisms of his report continued to appear from time to time, some of them in the 1970s and thereafter from feminists who assailed what they regarded as his support of patriarchal families. Still hurt, he distanced himself from left-oriented figures. After 1965, when community-action programs within the War on Poverty encountered substantial problems, he toned down his once strong faith in governmental expertise, emphasizing that some Great Society liberals had “lost a sense of limits.” Though he continued to call himself a liberal and a Democrat, he associated closely with neo-conservative writers …

These have been the trends over the past 60 years:

Then and later he also deplored post-1965 trends afflicting American race relations and family life. At most times since the mid-1970s, black male unemployment has been roughly twice as high as among white men, and the black poverty rate has been roughly three times higher. Drug-related arrests have contributed to staggeringly high growth in the numbers of incarcerated black men. Most African American children, especially those in low-income or single-parent families, enter 1st grade with already large cognitive disadvantages, which then grow in the higher grades.

Thanks in considerable part to powerful cultural trends, which have featured ever more insistent popular demands for personal freedom, marriage rates since the 1960s have tumbled, and percentages of births that are out of wedlock have escalated throughout much of the economically developed Western world. Among non-Hispanic African Americans, this percentage jumped from the 23.6 percent that Moynihan had identified for 1963 to more than 70 percent, where it has stayed since the mid-1990s. The rate among whites, 3 percent in 1963, has reached 30 percent. Overall, 41 percent of births today in the United States are out-of-wedlock.

Moynihan clearly saw the need for welfare, but more as a hand up rather than a handout:

… pointing out (as he had done in his report) that welfare spending was a necessary response to need, not a source of dependency, and rejecting any notion that he had blamed the victim. Moreover, he did as much as anyone in public life after 1965 to develop policies aimed at strengthening families, white as well as black. During the Nixon years, he championed a Family Assistance Plan (FAP), which if enacted (it wasn’t) would have provided a guaranteed annual income to many poor people. As a senator, he promoted liberal social ideas, including family allowances. What poor families needed most of all from government, he often argued, was more income, not more services. He also emerged as a leading proponent of a federal tax credit for low-income families who send their children to private schools.

Today, commentators can better appreciate what Moynihan was communicating nearly 60 years ago:

… most commentators today appear to believe that Moynihan was right in 1965 and that his attackers had been unfair. Some people have hailed him as a prophet. But not even Moynihan had imagined in 1965 that growth in the percentages of out-of-wedlock births would become so enormous. Then and later he emphasized that problems affecting families were extraordinarily complex and that there were no easy answers (which is a reason why he had not enumerated cures in his report). In 1992, he wrote Hillary Clinton that serious study of the family was “the most important issue of social policy,” but added, “I picked up the early tremors, and have followed the subject for thirty years now. But haven’t the faintest notion as to what, realistically, can be done.”

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a good man. His heart and mind were in the right place. Unfortunately, the welfare state was becoming too large and, as such, intractable.

After leaving the Johnson administration, he was a Harvard professor, a social policy advisor to Richard Nixon, US Ambassador to the United Nations and a US senator for the state of New York. He was also a columnist and wrote 19 books before his death in 2003 from a ruptured appendix. He was a one-man woman, having married in 1955. His widow Elizabeth (née Brennan) survived him. They had three children.

Moynihan’s mother was a homemaker and his father a newspaper reporter.

As stated above, the 2007 rate of out of wedlock births in the United States was 40 per cent. In 2009, a law professor, Helen Alvaré, who is Catholic, wrote:

The recent news of the nearly 40% out of wedlock birth rate in the United States should pretty much rock our world as citizens and as Catholics. According to the Centers for Disease Control report, this means 1.7 million children were born to unmarried mothers in 2007, a figure 250% greater than the number reported in 1980. The implications for our society loom large. According to empirical data published over the last several decades in leading sociological journals, these children, on average, will suffer significant educational and emotional disadvantages compared to children reared by their married parents. They will be less able to shoulder the burdens that “next generations” traditionally assume for the benefit of their families, communities and their country. They are likely to repeat their parents’ behaviors. The boys are more likely to engage in criminal behavior and the girls to have nonmarital children.

I am old enough to still consider out of wedlock births as unplanned in most cases, but Alvaré said researchers have found that this is no longer a given:

First, the researchers concluded that the majority of children born to lone mothers could not correctly be deemed “unplanned.” Rather, many were planned or actively sought. And the majority were somewhere in the middle between planned and unplanned. In other words, many of these very young couples (it was not uncommon for the mothers to be 14 or 15 years old) explicitly or implicitly wanted a baby in their lives. Their reasons by and large would be familiar to anyone who has ever hoped for a child. They wanted someone who was an extension of their beloved, a piece of him or her. They wanted to love another person deeply.

That thought process is so out of my league as to be incomprehensible, but the Centers for Disease Control researchers found the reasons why:

Relationally, the authors described these young mothers as existing in an environment without close, trusted ties. In particular, the men in their lives were considered to be highly untrustworthy and worse. Infidelity seemed almost a universal problem among the fathers. Drug and alcohol problems, criminal behavior, and domestic violence were extremely common. Motherhood provided a chance for these women to “establish the primordial bonds of love and connection.”

Now we move to the UK, where a 2007 report showed that the percentage of single-parent families had trebled since 1972. On April 10 that year, Metro reported:

Almost half the black children in Britain are being raised by single parents, new Government figures reveal.

A quarter of all youngsters live in one-parent families – treble the proportion in 1972, according to the Office for National Statistics.

The biggest percentage of lone-parent households is among black ethnic groups. Forty-eight per cent of black Caribbean families have one parent, as do 36 per cent of black African households.

Single-parent families are less common among Indians (ten per cent), Bangladeshis (12 per cent), Pakistanis (13 per cent), Chinese (15 per cent) and whites (22 per cent).

Nine out of ten single-parent families are headed by mothers.

Children who grow up without their biological father are more likely to be unemployed, commit crime and leave education early, according to research by think tank Civitas.

They are also twice as likely to be homeless.

Lone-parent families are three times more likely to live in rented accommodation than couples with children and are also more likely to live in homes that fall below minimum standards.

There is a small bit of good news in Statista’s 1996-2022 report on single-parent families, published on May 30, 2023, but as you can see from their graph, the numbers fluctuate year on year:

There are over 2.94 million single parent families in the United Kingdom as of 2022, compared with over three million five years earlier in 2015. Between 1996 and 2012 the number of single parent families in the UK increased by almost 600,000, with that number falling to the amount seen in the most recent year.

The best thing that single parents can do is to encourage their children to get an education and have aspirations. I do not think we will be moving away from single-parent households anytime soon, however, where I live, marriages are on the up, including those in church.

Returning to today’s verses, I will close with Matthew Henry’s observations:

Christ is the head of the church, to protect and save it, to supply it with all good, and secure or deliver it from evil; and so the husband over the wife, to keep her from injuries, and to provide comfortably for her, according to his ability. Therefore, as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be unto their own husbands, as is fit in the Lord (Col 3 18), as comports with the law of Christ, and is for his and the Father’s glory. It is not then an absolute, or unlimited, nor a slavish subjection that is required; but a loving subordination, to prevent disorder or confusion, and to further all the ends of the relation. Thus, in reference to the husbands, wives must be instructed in their duties of love and subjection to them. And to love their children, not with a natural affection only, but a spiritual, a love springing from a holy sanctified heart and regulated by the word; not a fond foolish love, indulging them in evil, neglecting due reproof and correction where necessary, but a regular Christian love, showing itself in their pious education, forming their life and manners aright, taking care of their souls as well as of their bodies, of their spiritual welfare as well as of their temporal, of the former chiefly and in the first place. The reason is added: That the word of God may not be blasphemed. Failures in such relative duties would be greatly to the reproach of Christianity. “What are these the better for this their new religion?” would the infidels be ready to say. The word of God and the gospel of Christ are pure, excellent, and glorious, in themselves; and their excellency should be expressed and shown in the lives and conduct of their professors, especially in relative duties; failures here being disgrace. Rom 2 24, The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles through you. “Judge what a God he is,” would they be ready to say, “by these his servants; and what his word, and doctrine, and religion, are by these his followers.” Thus would Christ be wounded in the house of his friends. Thus of the duties of the younger women.

Next week, I will look at Paul’s advice to Titus on young men. That is also designed so that no one can criticise Christianity.

Next time — Titus 2:6-8