Interview with Allan Carlson

Family North Carolina Magazine—Jan/Feb 2008

On Air With . . .
Allan Carlson, Ph.D., is president of The Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society, and founder and international secretary of the World Congress of Families. He previously served as a distinguished fellow for Family Policy Studies at the Family Research Council. In addition, Dr. Carlson has been interviewed by CNN, PBS, and ABC, and has testified before numerous congressional committees. He is co-author with Paul Mero of a new book called: The Natural Family: A Manifesto, which outlines a pro-family worldview and a program of action for building a family-centered society.

The following is an edited transcript of an interview with Dr. Carlson conducted by Bill Brooks, president of the NCFPC. The interview aired in December 2007 on the NCFPC’s weekly radio program, “Family Policy Matters.” Dr. Carlson discusses his new book and why the natural family works best as the central unit of society. He also offers policy recommendations for strengthening the family in the United States.

This interview can be heard in its entirety here: Listen (.mp3) — (.wma) — (Real)

Bill Brooks: First, why did you choose to call this book a “manifesto”?

Allan Carlson: Well, a manifesto is a certain style of writing. It’s a political and cultural document. The famous manifestos range from the Communist Manifesto of the 19th century to Francis Schaeffer’s Christian Manifesto of the 20th century. It focuses a clarity of thinking, tying your political agenda to an understanding of history, and an understanding of the probable course of the future. So, I think it requires and enforces a clarity of thinking and a clarity of argument.

BB: You focus on the natural family throughout the book. What do you mean by the term, “natural family?”

AC: Well, by natural family we’re trying to do two things. One, we’re trying to reinvigorate a concept. The normal term has been traditional family, but to be quite frank, that phrase has a lot of baggage associated with it, and it certainly has sort of a backward-looking feel to it, which is not terribly attractive to young people. So the natural family, by that view, it’s a new term for traditional family. But we’re also making a statement that somehow this way of living—a man and a woman together in marriage for the purpose of procreating children—is inherent in human nature, that it’s natural that we live this way.

BB: What happens to a society when something other than the natural family becomes the rule and not the exception?

AC: Well, when the natural family goes into decay, a number of things happen. First of all, the troubles facing children multiply. Young people grow up much more inclined to do poorly in school, to engage in crime, to become pregnant early and outside of marriage, to have a whole host of psychological, physical, educational, and [other] problems. As those young people grow up into adults, the society changes as well. A free society is no longer possible. In fact, you’re going to require big government, an ever-growing size of government both to provide basic human needs because families can’t do it anymore, and also in order to create the police forces and the prisons necessary to deal with increasingly lawless young people and, ultimately, lawless adults.

BB: What are the fundamental purposes of the natural family?

AC: Well its main purpose is procreation. The human species continues into the future as it has from the past by the willingness of men and women to commit themselves to being parents, to rearing children. That’s the whole reason the institution of marriage exists. It has been given special status over time. That’s where children come from naturally without artificial interventions, and it’s also where they grow up the best. So bearing children, but also rearing them, protecting the children. Again, the natural family, based on marriage, gives children the best opportunity and the best prospects for a healthy, happy, and a successful future. And the society builds on this. The family is the fundamental social unit. The natural family is the fundamental unit of the state, precedes the state, and it’s the vehicle by which freedom is possible, where order is balanced with liberty in a way that makes a free society a possibility.

BB: Dr. Carlson, you argue that the natural family is the fundamental unit of society, not the state, not the individual, not even the church. Explain why the family works best as the fundamental unit of society and these other things do not.

AC: Well, part of the narrative in our book is that the family is the first social unit. It’s the most natural. It precedes the state, it precedes organized religion, and it also transcends the individual and in fact makes the individual a true human person. Let’s go through each one of them. The state exists to protect the natural family. And indeed a proper effective and well-functioning government is a government that places protection of the family as its most important task. It can’t be the individual either. A society of simply freestanding individuals will quickly degenerate into a totalitarian society. That’s exactly what all advocates of big government or totalitarian government want. Freestanding individuals have no one to help protect them, no one to cooperate with them. A healthy welfare system would not require a welfare state. Adults care for each other in marriage. Parents care for their children. And then when children grow older, they help support their parents in their old age. So again, the individual needs some institution to support and help them. And the only real alternative to the family in the long run is the state. The individual, again, cannot stand alone. And finally, the church, particularly in a society with multiple denominations like modern American society, there’s no way that one church or hundreds of churches can aspire to be the fundamental unit of that society. Again, the family pre-dates organized religion and even the Biblical narrative tells us that. The original family, the first family of Adam and Eve and their children, again, pre-dated something we would call organized religion.

BB: One of the excellent points you make in the book is that the natural family makes everything around it better, and you have a whole chapter on what you call the gifts of the natural family. Give us an example of these gifts.

AC: Well, let’s take the gifts that the natural family system provides to women. This is maybe a bit more controversial, but a woman who voluntarily enters into a marriage and who bears children, is going to be healthier over the course of her life. She’ll be wealthier—she’ll enjoy much greater levels of income and savings. She will be happier. The evidence on this is clear that women who are married and have children are the happiest women compared to all other alternatives. Women in marriage are even best protected physically. They are the least likely to be physically abused when they’re married and living with their natural husbands, the father of their children. For children, the same gifts are found that children are going to be healthier, less inclined to suicide, more inclined to do well in school, less inclined to get engaged in illegal drugs and damaging activities. These are gifts that the natural family gives to the individuals that make it up. Again, men come out doing much better in such systems as well, and society gains gifts. Society will have a lower crime rate, less need for government intervention, less need for taxes to take care of people who live outside of the natural family system, who must go on the public dole, for example. These are all gifts of the natural family and they sum up very easily and they form the basis of a free society, where people will be happiest, healthiest, and where the children will in fact grow up to be good citizens.

BB: Dr. Carlson, your book affirms the equality of men and women, while also emphasizing their different functions. How important is this distinction to building a pro-natural family society?

AC: It’s absolutely critical that we recognize that while men and women should have equal legal rights, and should be equal before the law, the law should also recognize that men and women are fundamentally different, and they’re different in a few very key areas, all of which relate to the practice of procreation and of rearing of children. The ability of women to conceive and bear children is a vital thing. In fact, if anything, it makes women more important than men. There’s a very special responsibility there, and public policy and the culture should not only protect that but even reward that with laws that favor bearing children, particularly inside of marriage. Men do something that women don’t do very well. Men are ideally situated to take care of controlling the boys, taking young men who are full of racing hormones and turning them into civilized, future citizens of society. Women on their own do not do this well at all. All one has to do is look at the average American urban ghetto, where 80 to 90 percent of the boys grow up without fathers, and what do you get, you get crime, you get misery, you get a troubled neighborhood. So recognizing these differences, celebrating them, and protecting them in the law, is critically important. A society that fails to do this is setting itself up for great trouble and turmoil..

BB: You dedicate a chapter to key policy goals that you believe will help move us closer to a family-centered society. Give us a top five.

AC: Well, one example would be that right now, many governments, state and federal, in the United States, are giving fairly significant support to daycare. The government either gives direct benefits or tax credit to support that choice. We feel that’s really unfair. We would favor a system that created a level playing field, that for every benefit that’s given to support out of home care an equal benefit should be given to the at-home parent who’s sacrificing career and other opportunities to stay at home with their children. We favor a dramatic increase in the tax breaks that go to families raising children. The large family should be seen as a real treasure, and tax benefits should be dramatically increased in favor of families and parents who are committing themselves to rearing children. We think no-fault divorce has been a disaster, and we need to go back to a system of fault-based divorce, where marriage is once again treated as a public good, and where we recognize that the community has a real interest in protecting children. We need to favor alternative forms of education. We need to favor home schooling, private and religious schooling, and there are ways I think to shape the tax system to favor those options at a much higher level.

BB: Throughout the book, the definition of marriage is clearly and firmly articulated, but in the policy section, you make no mention of a key policy goal for the pro-family movement, which is amending the state and US constitutions to define marriage as only the union of one man and one woman. Why did you leave this out?

AC: Well, to some degree it was a strategic reason. I mean both Paul Mero and I would favor such an amendment to the U.S. Constitution at this point. It’s not the ideal solution to the problem or the challenge of same-sex marriage, but I’m afraid at this point it’s the only practical one. We also left that out because we didn’t want to tie this book to the immediate issue of the time. The Natural Family: A Manifesto is meant to speak not just to our generation but to generations across many decades, into the future, and also to speak to the situation in other nations. So, while we would certainly favor that amendment, we didn’t want to just focus on the immediate public policy issue of 2007. We wanted to have a much broader statement that would, again, transcend time to some degree.