Time Immortal

Inability to relate to a real father leads to an inability to acknowledge the Heavenly Father?

The crisis of fatherlessness is partly cultural. We experience it acutely in the United States. Teachers and pastors witness its devastating effects every day. An abnormal ideological feminism at times enters the vacuum created by fatherlessness. Fatherlessness also can generate homoeroticism or a frantic search for some “spirituality of masculinity.”

Indeed, both boys and girls need a wise father who encourages them and strengthens them, and provides what a mother cannot. In society today, the need for true fathers has become desperate, though by the grace of God generous grandfathers have stepped forward to care for the young. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote movingly about this in My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir, published earlier this year.

Vitz takes a broad historical sweep of atheists from the Enlightenment to our own day. In most cases alienation from God was a reaction to an absent or defective father. Similarly, a survey of staunch believers of the last two centuries shows that most of them had a close relationship with their father or instead enjoyed an effective father substitute.

An example is the life of Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), whose father died when Hilaire was two. Henry Edward Cardinal Manning of Westminster was a real father figure to the young Hilaire, and Belloc matured in the way men do whose biological fathers helped them along the way.

As an Anglican clergyman, Manning lost his wife, so he knew the sorrow of widowhood personally. Later as a Catholic, when he became cardinal-archbishop, he maintained his role as father and found time to spend with the teenage Belloc despite the many pressing duties of office.

Vitz gives us an autobiographical section in which he explains his own “superficial” atheism as a young American academic. His atheism was more a social conformity and a career need than a damaged relationship with his father. A positive father relationship probably helped him overcome temporary atheism and made possible his serious adult conversion to the Catholic faith.

But Vitz’s selection of authors to analyze is interesting and adequate. On the atheist side we study 29 intellectuals or world leaders from the 18th century to the present. These include those who suffered from deceased fathers, weak fathers, absent fathers or abusive ones.

I should remember that the next time somebody tells me that my faith is irrational, illogcal, and based on Stone Age delusions of cave-dwelling madmen with no basis in actual fact or history. What do I know? Maybe that’s all true…but at least I’m not the one with daddy issues.