I don’t claim to be a political scientist or a historian, but I know enough to spot a pattern. Across the radical regimes and utopian philosophers I’ve read (people who promise to re-engineer society and create “heaven” on earth) one thing never changes: they are intensely interested in other people’s families.
In almost all cases, they move to either redefine the household or to recruit it. Failing that, they often seek to dissolve or destroy it. Why? Because the home is where transformation, transmission, and reproduction actually happen–all the building blocks of society. Without its support, tyrants and demagogues are powerless to change anything.
Government’s lane is not “ultimate meaning”
Good government does a few indispensable things: it renders justice, provides security, and (prudently) maintains a limited safety net so opportunity is broadly accessible. They keep us safe and help create the conditions for prosperity.
On the other hand, it should not independently adjudicate a nation’s deepest theological questions. Yet, over the last century our politics have continually drifted toward theology or the ultimate. The modern state has moved from roads, bridges, and defense toward dictating when life begins, establishing what marriage is, and deciding what makes you a man or a woman. The problem isn’t citizens debating moral questions through their representatives; the problem is the state’s expansion into defining meaning for the people—outside its natural jurisdiction—and then enforcing that meaning from above. More and more, it feels as if the government has outlawed our answers in favor of theirs.
Our republic was never meant to be a state-run meaning project. The founders assumed a moral people and their free institutions would be capable of answering the “why” of life for themselves. This makes the Government’s task humbler: create the conditions for freedom; let citizens, churches, and communities supply purpose—for better or for worse.
But what if the people want a government that supplies meaning—or a ruler declares that’s the state’s highest role?
Once the state claims to answer life’s “why,” it must build a utopian project to embody that answer, sell it as a national purpose, and enforce it through law, school, media, and bureaucracy. Meaning becomes policy; dissent becomes deviance. And because meaning is first learned at home, the family becomes the primary obstacle or the primary tool. To “make the project real,” the state will move to standardize what homes teach, redirect children’s loyalties, and regulate reproduction and kinship. That is the moment the household gets targeted—for redefinition, co-option, or dissolution.
Put simply: When the state claims to answer life’s “why,” your kids become the plan and your home becomes the battleground.
Why the family is always the target
Families control the three levers every utopian project requires: they transform persons (forming character, loves, loyalties), they transmit truth, history, tradition, morality, and culture, and they reproduce—deciding who and how many exist tomorrow. That alone makes the household non-negotiable. But there’s more.
Healthy homes also generate self-sufficiency: joyful, purposeful, responsible people who feel the natural duty to provide and to care for their own. Contented, rooted, self-reliant citizens are terrible raw material for revolutions, which flourish on grievance. Families also command kinship loyalty. Children and spouses are a parent’s greatest asset and highest earthly allegiance; that allegiance competes with the state’s nefarious ambitions, which makes coercion and co-opting harder. Finally, families supply meaning, legacy, and significance—even for the non-religious. A loved child, a faithful marriage, and aging parents: these offer sturdy answers to life’s “why” and shows us exactly why the state (who wants to manufacture meaning) must displace the home first.
The family is central and indispensable. It is the last line of defense and the hardest group to radicalize. If you dissolve or conscript the household, nearly everything else in a society will follow.
The Historical Record:
Totalitarian regimes: (bad people doing bad things)
Nazi Germany (Fascist): this regime implemented forced sterilization and the killings of the disabled or unwanted on one side; medals and social rewards for “desirable” mothers on the other. Control fertility, reshape kinship, manufacture a “master race”.
China (Communist): this regime created “Up to the Mountains, Down to the Countryside” as a campaign to uproot youth from parents for re-education, with children spending multiple years cut off from parents redirecting loyalty from family to Party. The One-Child Policy (1980–2015) was infamous around the world for coercive contraception, sterilization, and abortion. Economic and cultural factors saw a preference for sons lead to a societal epidemic of “missing girls.”
Khmer Rouge (Cambodia, 1975–79): “Year Zero” sought to wipe the slate clean—erasing history, tradition, and familial ties—by emptying cities, collectivizing life, separating children for indoctrination, arranging forced marriages, and demanding loyalty to Angkar over parents, faith, and kin.
USSR (1929–33): The Dekulakization & Collectivization, known as “liquidate the kulaks as a class,” seized land, livestock, and tools, deported entire households, and replaced household farming with the kolkhoz (collective farming). Family self-sufficiency was systematically ruined and the effect was to shatter kin networks and reroute survival, loyalty, and meaning upward to officials and the Party.
Utopian theorists: (bad people with bad ideas)
Marx & Engels (Communist): explicitly called for the “abolition of the family,” treating the bourgeois home as a property-and-power machine to be dismantled and replaced by public (state-directed) child-rearing on the road to a classless order.
BLM Global Network (Progressive): in 2020 published (then removed) language about “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family.”
Plato’s Republic (Philosopher): envisioned guardians who hold wives and children “in common,” with prestaged pairings for breeding and communal state based child rearing.
As you can see, different banners, same logic: either destroy/dissolve the home so the movement can re-form it and keep it dependent, or co-opt the home so the state rules through it.
What Christianity clarifies
Christianity gives us an antidote to state-constructed meaning and to ideology’s
designs on the household. We do not look to parties or bureaucrats for purpose. We know what family is for: to be fruitful and multiply; to disciple; to carry the Great Commission into ordinary life; and (uniquely in marriage) to mirror Christ and His Church. That calling helps us reject both moves: the dissolution of the family and its conscription into a state project.
This does not make the family a savior, nor does it erase the family by portraying Christians as part of a non-biological collectivist mega-families. It means we receive the household as a God-given vocation and refuse its politicization.
It also means Christianity binds us into communities of care that bring in from the margins those who don’t fit state plans—the single, the widowed, the orphan, the elderly, the disabled, mother and unborn child. Our allegiance is to Christ; we honor parents, love spouses, disciple our kids, and serve our neighbors—not as a retreat from public life but as the foundation for any flourishing public to exist.
The risk worth taking
It may frighten officials to leave meaning to free people, because a purposeless, lonely society is easy prey for demagogues. But the remedy is not a “managed paradise”; it is a moral people. If we refuse the eternal, generous, sacrificial values that have sustained our civilization, no bureaucrat can paternalistically steer us back. We will have to taste the fruit of our choices—and repent. Better the consequences of freedom than a state-constructed hell imposed on our children in the name of utopia.
A republic will always be what its people make of it. Let’s make ours in the homes that extremists fear most and in the communities of care that welcome the very people their plans would cast aside.
Such an important article! Thank you for consolidating history to help us refocus on what is true and meaningful.