The Natural Family: Bulwark of Liberty

In March 2005, Allan Carlson and Paul T. Mero issued “The Natural Family: A Manifesto” — a bold statement of a pro-family worldview, with the concept of the natural family at its core. Reactions were strong — and, from some opponents, vicious. Now, Carlson and Mero have turned the sparse prose of their manifesto into a book. Insisting, without apology, on the reality of the “natural family,” the book issues a personal call to men and women to rediscover this fundamental source of life, joy, and freedom.

In “The Natural Family”, Carlson and Mero examine why the family is in crisis, the ways in which the natural family is the source of culture and freedom, and what families can do to preserve the most fundamental and wholesome relationship on earth. Some highlights and key themes:

• How the family consisting of a married man and woman and their biological children has been under ideological and practical attack since the eighteenth century, more powerfully than ever before from the 1960s on
• The five qualities of the “natural family,” explained: as part of the created order; as imprinted on our natures; as the source of bountiful joy; as the fountain of new life; and as the bulwark of ordered liberty
• What does science say? The medical, biological, psychological and sociological evidence that supports the natural family as fundamental to human happiness and social order
• Possible alternatives to the natural family as organizing principles — the individual, the church, the state, the corporation — and why they do not work
• What went wrong — and why? Sources of contemporary disorder in family systems throughout the world Restoring the natural family: the case for family-friendly tax policies, legal protections for marriage, the family wage, homeschooling, controls on abortion and contraception, and other measures
• How many people who should have defended marriage were asleep when the full-scale assault on the family began in the 1960s
• How, even more seriously, most of them joined the assault by eventually adopting the very assumptions — philosophical, social, and economic — which almost extinguished the family’s traditional legal and social privileges
• “Family values”: now an empty slogan for those with some nostalgic attachment to the family, but who have no idea what the family really is
• The reasons for the ineffectiveness of the pro-family witness in recent decades
• Specifics of a pro-family action agenda for today

Assured that human nature is on their side, Carlson and Mero can be both realistic about the family’s plight and relentlessly optimistic about the future. “The Natural Family” is a road map, especially for the young, for rebuilding a culture of freedom, joy, and love.

“Nothing short of a blueprint for Western survival.” –Rabbi Daniel Lapin, president, Toward Tradition

“Beautifully written, cogently argued.” — Gary Bauer, president, American Values

“Societies that learn how to restore the natural fertility of the natural family will inherit the earth.” — Phillip Longman, author, The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It

Tags: Allan Carlson, Paul Mero, The Natural Family: Bulwark of Liberty