Reflections from an Institution

It’s a commonplace today that people have lost faith in institutions. And it’s no wonder. Wherever you look – politics, culture, education, even the Church – the institutions that normally provide us with stable identity and points of reference have become sources of disorder and disorientation.

Hillary Clinton famously wrote a book: It Takes a Village. She was expressing something not so much wrong as deceptive. It does take a village – and a family, and a church, and a school, and a community – to form children into mature and responsible adults. The “village” that progressive politicians talk about, however, is not an assembly of these natural civil society institutions, but an array of government programs designed to replace and, often, hasten the demise of real human connections.

In healthy times, people identify with family, faith, nation. At least among our cultural elites, identity these days revolves around race, class, and gender.

The paradox, of course, is that those elites say that they want to eliminate differences owing to race and class, and the woozy recent notions of gender fluidity. But if they did, what would people identify with other than their own individual choices? That’s a very weak reed on which to build a truly human life, especially given the social chaos that such radical individualism inevitably produces.

Click here to read the rest of Dr. Royal’s column at The Catholic Thing . . .