Mugged By Reality -- By: Sharon James

Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 03:1 (Spring 2021)
Article: Mugged By Reality
Author: Sharon James


Mugged By Reality1

Sharon James

Sharon James studied history at Cambridge University, has an M.Div from Toronto Baptist Seminary, and a doctorate from the University of Wales. She works for The Christian Institute, UK, and her books include Gender Ideology: What do Christians Need to Know? And God’s Design for Women in an Age of Gender Confusion.

They continually try to escape From the darkness outside and within, By dreaming of systems so perfect that no-one will need to be good.

- T. S. Eliot2

In the Spring of 2020, as fear of COVID-19 gripped whole populations, Sophie Lewis, author of Full Surrogacy Now, argued that the crisis posed an opportunity to get rid of the family:

. . . the private family qua mode of social reproduction still, frankly, sucks. It genders, nationalizes and races us. It norms us for productive work. It makes us believe we are ‘individuals.’ It minimizes costs for capital while maximizing human beings’ life-making labor (across billions of tiny boxes, each kitted out – absurdly – with its own kitchen, micro-crèche and laundry) . . . We deserve better than the family. And the time of corona is an excellent time to practice abolishing it.3

Lewis thinks the world would be a better place when the family is “unthinkable.”4 Babies need to be “universally thought of as anybody and everybody’s responsibility, ‘belonging’ to nobody.’”5 She stands in a long line of thinkers who have set out to attack the natural family. Plato’s Republic recorded the thoughts of Socrates about the collectivisation of childrearing.6 After the revolutions in both France (1789)7 and Russia (1917), there were attempts to abolish the traditional married family. Both social experiments ended in disaster. The “reforms” were hastily reversed.8

Some intellectuals continue to attack God’s design for family. By the second half of the twentieth century, many universities taught psychologists, social workers, health workers, and educationalists to regard the nuclear family as the source of psychiatric dysfunction, the likely location of abuse, the place where children were victims of either over-controlling or o...

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