The Decline of the Family

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

September 16, 2025

Louisville, Kentucky

Richard Nelson:

It is my honor to introduce the first speaker, Dr. Al Mohler. He’s the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, which is a flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention. Dr. Mohler hosts two podcasts, the Briefing and also Thinking In Public, which is a series of conversations with the day’s leading thinkers. He also serves as the editor of World Opinions. He writes regular commentary on moral, cultural, and theological issues. Dr. Mohler is an articulate voice for conservative Christians, and his mission is to address contemporary issues from a consistent and explicit Christian worldview. Please welcome with me Dr. Al Mohler.

Albert Mohler:

Thank you. It’s very good to be with you. It’s a bit of an obstacle course, getting up here. Having accomplished that, now’s the easy part. I appreciate Richard Nelson and the work of the Commonwealth Policy Center. I’m glad to be here with him. I’m glad to be here with my colleague Denny Burk, and especially glad to have Dr. Ryan Anderson here. And so I am looking forward to this evening along with you, and we’re going to be talking about important things, and hopefully we will do so in a very helpful way and we do so with a sense of sobriety indeed, just because of recent events. We also do so, we have a sense of seriousness, but we are here in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and he is the one who said, I have overcome the world and he has not called us to anything that we are not capable of doing in his name, in his power for his glory.

And that includes the defense of the family. So we may be tired soldiers tonight, but we’re happy soldiers, and that’s the way it is to be in Christ’s kingdom. I’ve been asked to speak about the inspiring topic of the decline of the family. There is a sequence here tonight in terms of these presentations, and it follows a rather traditional rhetorical pattern. We’re going to move from problem to solution in the course of this program, and I want to be most helpful in the time that is allotted to me, really to paint a picture of what we are up against and to track, at least to some extent, how this has happened. Sociologists, looking at the last, say two to 300 years, would look at certain break points and they would divide history into what is now rather commonly referred to as early modernity, modernity, and late modernity.

Now, if you figure that out, brothers and sisters, we are in late modernity. Now the problem is of course, what in the world comes after late modernity. I don’t think it’s going to be later modernity. And when I was a younger man, and I’ve lived long enough to have seen so many of these movements come and go, what was claimed then was that the modern is being replaced by the postmodern. And especially in French thought and as it came over because the Americans have always been infatuated with anything that comes with a French accent as an intellectual idea.

It is not new, it’s an old infatuation, but as is almost always the case, you do an archeological investigation and the Germans are driving the troops, and the French are given the slogans, and the whole postmodernist thing post structure, well forms of structuralism, post-structuralism, and all of this. That was the fad in the 1980s and in the 1990s. And I want to cite a work about the family from 1983 kind of setting the stage from my comments. And it is by someone who was incredibly well-informed to speak about these issues. But I want us to notice how he spoke about them. His name is Peter Berger, very prominent, perhaps the most prominent American sociologist of the time, and his wife was Brigitte. So, Peter and Brigitte Berger together wrote a book entitled, “The War Over the Family.” It was published in 1983. Now in 1983 in the world of the American Academy, this aversion of the family and of marriage, the results of sexual libertarian movements and all the rest thoroughly, thoroughly, engaged in a long march through the institutions. Berger is writing, at least in part in response to all that.

And so Berger’s argument in the war over the family made with his wife Brigitte, this emerged at a time when what they appeared to be making is the most conservative argument for the family that could be made in an intellectually responsible fashion. I think that’s what they thought they were doing. In the war over the family, they actually had a very conservative ambition in that sense and that conservative ambition was to provide an argument for the superiority of the traditional family over alternative family forms. It was intended to be an argument for the traditional family. They wouldn’t use the term the “nuclear family,” or what I prefer, the “natural family,” but they’re really referring to mother and father and their children in a home context recognized as the family. They were writing in defense of the traditional family, but they didn’t do so with any ought.

Instead, they were just trying to bring a sociological review with some kind of sociological consensus that measured in secular terms, the nuclear family, the natural family, the traditional family, turns out to have certain assets that other family forms do not have. And so this is when the modern age is at high velocity. Modernity is coming at full speed. And Peter and Brigitte Berger made the argument that the family is one among other mediating institutions. And so kind of following in the line, the terms set by Marxist in the 20th century, they said that between the individual and massive forces in society, the mediating structure is the family. Now, there are other mediating structures. This is where you end up with the kind of the thesis that Robert Putnam would make famous in “Bowling Alone” and Robert Wena and others would think that we need these mediating structures in society where there’s the honorable order of the Elks or the local church, the PTA, and the family.

Now, what I want us to note is that Peter and Briggite Berger, were writing in secular terms, their defense of the family is entirely secular in this book. So there’s no real ought, there’s simply an “is,” and their “is” argument is that if you look at the situation of how in the world you would, for instance, produce and socialize children, you need something that looks remarkably like the family. So again, they argued that the family is a mediating institution, but there’s a lot of insight in the book. I’m not mentioning it just because it’s an anecdote, I’m mentioning it because I think it’s an important way to get at the issues assigned to me. And it’s because Peter and Briggite Berger made the argument that even by the early 1970s, the family was being professionalized. He described the family and parents particularly as besieged by experts, an entire army of experts, sociologists, educational specialists, law enforcement authorities, medical authorities, Dr. Spock, and you could just go down the whole list, who are speaking into the family. And so they were trying to offer a reassuring word about the family. And again, they were trying in their own way to make an argument for what they called the traditional family. And they were trying to make the argument that among mediating institutions upon which society depends, this is the most primary and the most basic of those mediating institutions, but at the end of the day, what they couldn’t say is any ought. It was entirely an “is” looked at phenomenologically, just looked at in terms of the evidence, if you want to have a baby that grows out to be some kind of productive citizen, it just turns out that what we would call marriage and what we would call family turns out to do pretty well, and as a matter of fact, to do better than anything else.

And here’s the thing, when the Bergers wrote that book, they were attacked as far right extremists. That was 1983. And again, I look at it because I saw the book when it was brand new. I was a doctoral student. I was very interested in Peter Berger’s work in secularization theory. I thought it was very interesting. He was showing up with people like Richard John Newhouse and others in kind of a postliberal, indeed neoconservative context. He was showing up in flagship magazines is what became first things later. I first came to know him in an academic journal called This World that posed an earlier project with Richard John Newhouse and all the rest. I saw Peter Berger as an ally in all of this, and I saw this book and in my naivete I just thought, well, this is going to be a good thing. And with his sociological dominance in the field, this is going to be accepted as an authoritative word.

And instead he’s written off as a religious zealot, and he didn’t make a religious statement in the entire book. What does that tell us? It tells us that by 1983, if you make a serious argument on behalf of the natural family, whether you identify as a Christian or an Orthodox Jew or regardless, you’re going to be dismissed as some kind of religious quack. And I think it’s one of the most amazing developments of the modern age, that all of a sudden you end up in a situation in which when you talk about the most basic molecular unit of society, you’re now an extremist. And again, the thing that I would fault from the Bergers is, there’s no ought here. There’s merely an is, but of course, Christians understand the is implies an ought and the creation points to the creator. I want to say very quickly, I think we’re in a situation now in which someone like Peter Berger writing with his wife Brigitte, and that kind of book can tell us things that are interesting, but it’s more of a snapshot and intellectual history than anything else.

I don’t think that crowd has much interest in the family at all these days. I think downstream from Peter Berger, you don’t even have really dismissive theories about the family. Instead, you have an ideological understanding that the family, whatever it is, has to be a patriarchal oppressive structure we have to overcome. Alright. I am going to make an assumption and that is, here that we are unified in wanting to make an argument for the superiority of the traditional family and not just that the essential centrality of the family. So I am going to pause it where I will end, and that is that it’s an affirmation of the family structure and at the heart of the family structure, marriage as the union of a man and a woman, and the family as first of all, the increase that comes to them through the conjugal bond, sons and daughters to be celebrated and raised in the nurtured admonition of the Lord. And so we understand that we agree with almost everything Peter and Bridget Berger said, we just believe in a whole lot more. And furthermore, at this remove, we can understand that that kind of argument’s going to have no traction whatsoever because the secular world has already moved far beyond that. By the time they wrote the book, they looked like hopeless reactionaries in the minds of the cultural elites. And now we look at it and we say, well, it’s not that they were wrong, it’s just that they weren’t right enough.

So what happened? I’ve been asked to do an autopsy on what happened. So a very quick autopsy, how did we arrive at that much less where we are today? I’m going to say a part of it has to be traced to modernity. In other words, the modern age. And so, when you’re looking at a process through history and there’s a break point, you need to take that break point very seriously. And so, the breakpoint can be identified in several different ways. One of them is, and to use another phrase from Peter Berger’s plausibility structures, at what point does something become plausible? Something was not plausible before. It’s plausible now. Something that could be assumed, that then has to be articulated and then once articulated, it’s rejected. So in other words, modernity comes with a massive shift in thinking, but a massive shift in ways of living as well.

And the modern age basically makes everything provisional. And so the family is not immediately dismissed, but it is destabilized in the modern age by the fact that it now becomes a sociological development in terms of the modern view. And so the ought is removed from the family, although not entirely. So, one of the most interesting things you see is that even in the 19th century and the early 20th century, a lot of the literature about the family implies an ought. But at that point, it’s merely a cultural ought. Parents ought to take care of their children, parents ought to provide for the education of their children. So it is very interesting that what you have here is a second part of this in thinking about modernity is at the heart of the issue, which is secularization. So modernity comes with many different facets- and I am going to be faithful to the time tonight- it comes with many different dimensions, but I just want to get cut to the quicker things with you and say that at the heart of it is secularization. So what you can’t say on the other side of the modern divide is that God says that it must be so. Or if you say that, you can say that in a pulpit or you can say that in a Sunday school class. You might say that in some kind of private conversation, but you can’t say that in such a way that is supposed to have any cultural traction or normativity whatsoever. And so the destabilization in all of this comes down to a fact. I just want to assert plainly, as Martin Luther would say, without horns and without teeth, understand exactly what I’m telling you. I do not believe that any secular society can create a stable environment for the family and marriage. Period.

I think what we see looking backwards in terms of the development of the modern age, pre-modern, modern, late modernity, whatever, early modernity, you look at the entire period, it is the progressive destabilization of everything, and then that is essentially due to all kinds of factors. We’re going to talk about ’em, it’s going to kind of rattle them off here. But at the heart of it is that if you can no longer say, “God says,” if you can no longer have confidence that this is God’s design and that it’s a matter of faithfulness or unfaithfulness, obedience or disobedience, you can’t say that anymore. Then all you’re really left with is sociology. And sociology assumes the modern prejudice, and this is built right into the discipline of sociology: that the major dynamic is going to be oppression and the task is to undo oppression. Well, if you’re going to undo oppression, where do you start? You start in the family. You start with parents, and particularly you start with dad. And the next thing you know, you are severing the relationship between parents and children. Eventually you’re severing the relationship between husband and wife, and eventually you’re atomizing the entire picture.

Modernity, is to use a prominent French metaphor, we’ll borrow from the French tonight and throw their tools back at ’em, one of the French expressions about modernity is that it is liquid. Modernity is liquid. Before modernity, we were stuck with concrete material forms. The family’s one of them, but in modernity, everything’s now liquid. You can pour it into whatever vessel you want, and that’s what’s been attempted with the family is what’s been attempted with morality, sexual morality in particular. It’s what’s been attempted with law. We can’t understand the demise of the family and the decline of the family, and by demise, I do not mean that it’s disappeared. I mean it’s a lethal attack. We can’t understand this version of the family without understanding that all around us are people who don’t have the vocabulary. Nonetheless, they’re thinking in these terms. They think of everything in society as liquid. They think of the US Constitution as liquid. They think of tax entirety as liquid. That includes of course the Bible. This is liberal theology we’ll get to in just a minute. They see all social structures as liquid, and not only that comes with the presumption that what is oppressive to be succeeded by something presumably less oppressive.

Some of this took the form of explicit ideology. I’m writing a book project about this right now, and so I’m reentering territory I’ve been in for a long time, partly just to make sure I get my arguments in exactly the right order. I want to get ’em in. So I mean, I’ll admit that at like four o’clock in the morning recently I found myself reading Betty Friedan. Okay. I will just tell you that if you suffer from insomnia, Betty Friedan is not a form of therapy to get over it. How many in this room know who Betty Friedan was? Okay, good grief. Very early feminist, ardent secularist. We won’t go there, but she called the family marriage, nuclear family in the home, a domestic concentration camp. Okay, how’s that for starting an argument? But I was looking at her, and so it is the ideology that the family is inherently repressive in its form.

And what’s really interesting is that Betty Friedan basically was displaced in leadership in the feminist movement because of her opposition, for instance, at one point to abortion. But eventually, the logic of the feminist movement came down to the fact you got to buy it all. And lesbianism- she really wanted to keep what she called the lavender menace out of feminist leadership. Well, lavender has now become a multicolored flag. I often think if you go back to Betty Friedana and say, Betty Friedan, you’re really sure you know what a girl was. I just got to tell you, one day those are going to be the good old days.

But it was an ideological subversion, and if you read this literature, you begin to catch on exactly what’s going on. It’s the attempt to argue that any structure that inhibits human personal autonomy, self-expression, all the rest, or ties one down to any bonds, and you see this right now in public argument. I’ll make reference to that very quickly in just a moment. This basic libertarian impulse in society is something that was first celebrated even by a lot of conservatives, and it’s because conservatives were mostly afraid of the oppressive power of the state. And so certain forms of libertarian philosophy appeared to be a healthy good pushback to the oppressive power of the state. The problem is that left on its own a libertarianism leads to just pure individualism and a complete moral relativism in which nothing’s left but will. Economics also plays a part. I have to be quick here, but if you just look at economics, here’s one of the most sinister things.

I will argue that one of the greatest enemies of the family is the chamber of commerce. One of the greatest enemies of the family is the Fortune 500. You need to understand that in the period between 1935 and 1965, American corporations, big industry, big corporate structures, came to understand that there was, what they then called quite quaintly, a manpower shortage. So to overcome the manpower shortage, what did they do? They redefined it as human power resources. So, for instance, there was a complete economic model based upon the single wage earner, just in terms of the family unit, the idea of a family wage. All of that was discarded between 1935 and 1965, in which by the time you get to 1975, 1985, 1995, the family unit is now in terms of the optimal picture presented by economic theorists, it’s of two wage earners- the mother and the father both fully deployed in the workforce. And of course, it turns out that that is overwhelmingly successful because it turns out that material pressures, incentives- you can just put down whatever you want here, depends on whether you’re a Marxist or not- in any event, let’s just put it this way: it worked. By the time you get to the current time, the default position is that women are in the workforce first and then might eventually be married and might eventually have children. Now, if you’re looking at another thing, just very quickly for time, the precipitous fall on the birth rate is due to many factors, and a lot of it has to do with the late stage of the sexual revolution and all the rest, and quite frankly, decisions made about career and all kinds of other things. But increasingly, even in the literature among say, OBGYNs, the increasing thing is that the expectation of a first baby for a woman in America is shifting from just under 20 years of age for a first baby to over 30 years of age for a first baby. Now, in terms of obstetrics, that’s defined as a geriatric pregnancy.

So the geriatric pregnancy, our daughter, Katie, is expecting her fourth child. We are just deliriously happy and awaiting this baby. But Katie’s now a geriatric patient, which creates levity on both sides of the equation. And she’s not 40 yet. She’s not 40 yet, but she’s the one with geriatric on her name. I’m about to turn 66, and I don’t have geriatric in my name, or at least if so, you guys aren’t telling me. But anyway, in other words, God did not intend for a woman’s reproductive life to begin in her early to mid thirties. So what you create here is this entire corruption of the entire system in which assisted reproduction of some sort is going to become the norm in order for a woman to have on average like 1.21 children. I can just tell you, society will die. I mean, you’re talking about about a death culture. I mean, you would think at least that feminists could do math. I mean, you don’t have to do morality in the first level. Just do math. There’s not going to be anyone to take care of you. Japan, South Korea, just look at this. In Japan, they’re looking at developing robots to work in nursing homes.

I just think this is a horrible picture of where we are headed, and it’s not headed eventually, but actually quite soon. The economic factors, I just want to point out, we’re presented often by Republican administrations as much as from democratic administrations. During the Nixon administration, the economic powers that be, including the Bureau of Employment Statistics and all the rest, they began to redefine the expectation that women and men, husbands and wives, indeed mothers and fathers, if you even want to get to that, will be equally deployed in the workplace. Right now, we are at the point that in generation Z, the average young woman no longer has even having children within the top five priorities. Let me share this with you. I talked about it on The Briefing this morning. It’s an NBC poll that was just recently taken, and it indicates and tells you something of the strange times we are in. So I’m reading to you directly. This is undertaken by Harris with NBC. I believe it’s Harris.

When you ask young males and Generation Z for their list of life priorities, young men who voted for Donald Trump put having children as their highest priority. I just have to stop for a moment. I’m shocked by that. I’m very pleased by that. I’m not shocked by that on this campus. I’m not shocked by that in our churches. I’m shocked, honestly, that that would be a development of such seismic significance that it shows up in an NBC poll with young men saying, number one, I want to be a dad. Where is it on the list of priorities for women who voted for Kamala Harris? It is at the bottom of the list.

There’s one below that, but it’s at number 12. Number one, for young men who voted for Donald Trump, number 12 out of 13 for young women who voted for Kamala Harris. So even secular authorities are looking at that and going, okay, this is not just a little change. This is an inversion of the pattern. During the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, the psychotherapeutic community, the sociological community, was making the argument that young men are transitioning out of courtship and marriage, and largely because of the sexual revolution, they can get sex without marriage and without children so it’s a deal young men will take. Okay, fast forward 30 or 40 years, it’s the young men who want to be fathers. It’s the young women- now, again, I won’t say right away, I don’t mean the young women in this room, I don’t mean the young women in this campus, I don’t think by and large, certainly the young women in our churches- I mean the generation as a whole. So something has happened, and so the economic determinants kind of claim that they predicted this long ago.

I want to mention very quickly and ask how this happened. I mentioned secularization. Again, Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard address, 1974, it still rings the bell. You ask, all this has happened. Men have forgotten God. That’s how all this happened. And that has to be the bottom line because if you just look at the first two chapters of the Bible, brothers and sisters, you are getting married and you’re getting to work. Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, okay? That is part of, that’s one of the easiest texts in all the scripture to understand. But if there is no God, then eat, drink and be happy for tomorrow you die. Liberal theology plays a part in this. I don’t have time to track that out, but it is part and parcel of the rest of it. Liberal theology bought into the idea that marriage, family, certainly the natural family, childbearing, this is all a cycle of oppression.

I was in a doctoral seminar at one point where a feminist theologian referred to the creation mandate as seen in Genesis chapter one as a fatal trap for women. There you go. I thought at the time it’s kind of fatal to get out of that trap because then there are no more women, which evidently hasn’t struck them as a matter of irony. The bottom line, I’ve got to end. Tracing the decline of the family defies the time assigned here, but I think you actually know the story. I just wanted to point to some of the ways of understanding, at least how we got here. We couldn’t get here without secularization, couldn’t get here without modernity, couldn’t get here without a revolution in the law, couldn’t get here without a revolution in morality. We can’t get here without a basic redefinition of the goods of human life, etc., but we’re not going to get out of here with a better sociological argument.

That’s it. I’ve got to end, but we’re not going to get out of this with a better sociological argument. Marriage and family, the understanding of man as male and female as determined by God and revealed in anatomy. You think that would influence sociology, but we’re not going to get out of this by sociology. The only way we’re going to get out of this is with a return to understanding that marriage is an ontological reality. That the family is an ontological good, given to us by the creator and assigned to us by that very creator. He made us male and female in his image, and it is to the man and the woman in the conjugal union that the command was given to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and the command was given to raise our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. And this is our task. I think we understand that. I think this is good that we remember a little bit about how we got here. What I didn’t want to do in this time was just say that they did it. Oh, they did it. But to a remarkable degree, we and our people were complicit in it. Undoing it is going to be no small thing, and it’s going to step on some of our own toes, but it’s time we get to it because the time is short. God bless you. Thank you.