"Sin is knocking at your door. It wants to rule over you. You must resist it"
-Genesis
In this first part of this series of essays on the connection between rejecting God and rejecting fatherhood, we’ll look at the culture’s war on fatherhood and manhood in general. The next two parts will cover the rejection of God in Western history and how these two rejections connect.
I recently came across an interview in the Catholic Herald with His Eminence, Cardinal Robert Sarah. I was struck by the Eminence’s warning that People in the West “are guilty of rejecting God.” While this may not be a novel observation, what was novel was his correlating it with a concurrent rejection of fatherhood. I found this point to be particularly prescient and I hope to explore this connection in the following work.
After thinking it over, I can’t help but agree that the two rejections are connected and come from deep roots in Western history. Casting our gaze back through the history of Western civilization, we see the pattern of rejecting God and consequent suffering emerge again and again. We’ve seen rejection of God in Biblical history, European History, and in recent American History, but the inescapable and pervasive rejection of fatherhood is a novel to the Western world.
“Western people are convinced that receiving is contrary to the dignity of human persons. But civilized man is fundamentally an heir, he receives a history, a culture, a language, a name, a family. This is what distinguishes him from the barbarian.” -Cardinal Sarah
While the rejection of God doesn’t necessarily manifest as a rejection of fatherhood, it seems probable if not necessary that the rejection of fatherhood requires of a rejection of God. If we are not connected spiritually to our Father, then the earthly analogue of this connection (that of human fatherhood), is degraded in office.
You see, as His Eminence so astutely observes, it is a problem of identity. Are we sons and daughters, as members of a family, heirs of a heritage, children of God? If not, then what are we?