The Canary in the Coal Mine
Squires begins his historical analysis with one of the most controversial government reports ever written: the 1965 Moynihan Report.
Written by Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan during the Johnson Administration, the report sounded an alarm that many political leaders preferred not to hear.
At the time, approximately twenty-five percent of Black children were being born outside of marriage.
Today, that figure hardly sounds remarkable.
In 1965, however, it was regarded as a national crisis.
As Squires observes, one in four Black children were born to unmarried parents, which also meant that three out of every four were still being born into married homes. Moynihan believed that trend, if left unchecked, threatened the long-term stability of the Black family and urged the federal government to make strengthening marriage a national priority.
History, unfortunately, proved his fears well founded.
By the mid-1980s, roughly sixty percent of Black children were being born outside marriage.
Today, the figure stands at approximately seventy percent.
Equally sobering is what has happened outside the Black community.
Nationally, roughly forty percent of all American children are now born to unmarried parents. Even among white Americans, the percentage approaches thirty percent—numbers that would have been almost unimaginable when Moynihan wrote his report sixty years ago.
That observation is one of the most important insights in Squires’ book.
Too often, discussions of family breakdown are framed almost exclusively in racial terms. Squires refuses to make that mistake. He acknowledges the unique historical experience of Black Americans without reducing today’s crisis to race alone.
Instead, he argues that Black America experienced first what much of America would eventually experience later.
The Black family was not unique because it alone suffered family breakdown.
It was unique because it suffered it first.
This is not, therefore, an article about one community’s failures.
It is about one community’s warning.
The canary entered the coal mine decades ago.
Today, the warning belongs to us all.
The obvious question, then, is this:
How did we get here?
Squires’ answer is as provocative as it is challenging.
He believes that two revolutions, arriving at almost exactly the same historical moment, fundamentally reshaped American family life: the dramatic expansion of the modern welfare state and the rise of second-wave feminism.
Together, he argues, they unintentionally helped make marriage increasingly optional while leaving children increasingly vulnerable.
When Government Replaces Fathers
One of the reasons Delano Squires’ book has generated so much discussion is that he refuses to accept the conventional explanation for the collapse of the Black family.
His argument is not that economics are irrelevant. They matter. Stable employment matters. Housing matters. Transportation matters. He readily acknowledges that a man should have a dependable income, a place to live, and a reliable means of getting to work before he seriously considers marriage. Those realities are important.
But they are not ultimate.
The modern tendency is to begin every discussion about family with economics. Squires begins somewhere entirely different.
He begins with culture.
And behind culture, he begins with theology.
“I would argue that this is first and foremost a spiritual issue because marriage is an institution created by God and it’s the first institution created. But downstream from that is also a cultural issue.”
That is a remarkable statement because it reverses the assumptions that dominate so much of our public discourse.
Modern politics almost always asks, “How can government solve this problem?”
Scripture first asks, “What has God designed?”
Those are profoundly different starting points.
If marriage is fundamentally a human invention, then legislatures may redesign it whenever social preferences change. But if marriage is God’s institution—woven into creation itself before the Fall—then neither governments nor courts possess the authority to redefine what they did not create.
That conviction runs through the entire biblical story.
Marriage was established before there was Israel.
Before there was civil government.
Before there was a king.
Before there was even sin.
The family is not a policy preference. It is part of creation itself.
That is why attacks upon the family are never merely political. They are ultimately theological.
When Good Intentions Produce Bad Outcomes
Squires believes one of the greatest mistakes made by policymakers after the publication of the Moynihan Report was confusing the symptom with the disease.
Moynihan looked at the growing number of children being born outside marriage and concluded that government should strengthen the Black family.
Instead, according to Squires, the Johnson Administration dramatically expanded welfare programs in ways that unintentionally accelerated family breakdown. What Moynihan viewed largely as the consequence of weakened families eventually became, in Squires’ estimation, one of the causes of further family disintegration.
His explanation is straightforward.
“If you condition receiving welfare on a woman not being married and not having a man in the home,” Squires observes, “then you create financial incentives for that not to happen.”
He continues:
“You end up moving the men out, displacing men and replacing men with the government…who now become the substitute father in millions of low-income homes.”
Public policy always creates incentives.
Sometimes those incentives encourage virtue.
Sometimes they unintentionally reward behaviors that weaken the very institutions policymakers hope to strengthen.
Christians have long understood that government can perform many important functions. It can punish evil. It can preserve order. It can protect the innocent.
But government cannot become a husband.
Nor can it become a father.
A monthly benefit check may relieve financial hardship, and sometimes it is desperately needed. But no government program can teach a son what faithful manhood looks like. No bureaucratic agency can model sacrificial love between husband and wife. No state institution can replace the quiet, daily presence of a father who loves his children and keeps his covenant with their mother.
Government has important responsibilities.
The family has irreplaceable ones.
Confusing the two ultimately harms both.
Marriage Is the Institution That Binds Fathers to Their Children
Perhaps the single most important sentence in the entire interview is one that should become part of every discussion about fatherhood.
Squires says:
“Marriage is the most effective structural enabler of father involvement.”
That sentence deserves to be read twice.
Notice what he does not say.
He does not claim that unmarried fathers never love their children.
He specifically cautions against exaggeration, noting that many unmarried fathers remain actively involved in their children’s lives. He criticizes conservatives who casually repeat the inaccurate claim that seventy percent of Black children are “fatherless.” That is simply not true. Many have fathers who remain involved, even if the parents never married.
His point is subtler—and stronger.
Marriage creates the social structure that most naturally binds fathers to mothers and children over the long term.
It transforms fatherhood from an occasional responsibility into a daily vocation.
Nearly every married father awakens under the same roof as his children.
He sees them before school.
He eats meals with them.
He disciplines them.
He comforts them.
He laughs with them.
He grows old with them.
Marriage is not merely a romantic arrangement between two adults.
It is civilization’s most effective institution for connecting fathers to the children they helped bring into the world.
That is why every successful culture has prized it.
And that is why every revolutionary movement seeking to reconstruct society eventually finds itself reconstructing marriage.
The Family Before the State
One of the most moving sections of Squires’ interview concerns the history of slavery.
Both the political Left and the political Right often tell oversimplified stories.
Some progressives draw a nearly unbroken line from slavery to every contemporary problem in the Black community, suggesting that today’s family crisis is simply the inevitable consequence of America’s racial past.
Some conservatives, reacting against that narrative, speak as though slavery had little lasting effect on Black families.
Squires rejects both accounts.
Slavery, he argues, undeniably distorted the Black family.
How could it not?
A husband who could be sold away from his wife at any moment could never fully fulfill the covenantal responsibilities of marriage. Parents who could lose their children through sale lived under a cruelty almost impossible to imagine.
Yet slavery did not destroy the Black family’s love for the family itself.
Following emancipation, formerly enslaved husbands searched desperately for wives.
Parents searched for children.
Children searched for parents.
Families placed advertisements in newspapers across the South hoping to reunite with those from whom they had been torn apart.
Why?
Because family mattered.
Indeed, it mattered so much that men and women who had endured one of history’s greatest injustices spent years trying to rebuild what slavery had attempted to tear apart.
Squires therefore rejects the fashionable claim that slavery is the direct cause of today’s family collapse.
It distorted the family.
It did not erase its value.
The greater tragedy is that many of today’s cultural elites seem determined to accomplish voluntarily what slavery itself could not: persuading a generation that mothers and fathers are optional, marriage is obsolete, and children can flourish equally well apart from the stable union of the man and woman who brought them into existence.
That may be the most radical social experiment in American history.
And it is unfolding before our eyes.
(continue on next page)