What Delano Squires Teaches Us About Marriage, Fatherhood, and God’s First Institution
Last week, the New York State Legislature passed a bill replacing the words mother and father in portions of state law with the more clinical terms gestating parent and non-gestating parent.
Many people shrugged.
“It’s only language,” we’re told. “It’s simply an effort to make the law more inclusive.”
But language is never just language.
Words both reflect and shape the way a civilization understands reality. When a society no longer wishes to speak naturally of mothers and fathers, it is revealing something much deeper than a preference for inclusive terminology. It is signaling that the family itself has become negotiable.
That should concern every Christian.
According to Scripture, the first institution God established was neither government nor the marketplace. It was marriage. Before there were kings, legislatures, courts, schools, or welfare bureaucracies, there was husband, wife, and child. The family is not a social invention. It is part of the created order itself.
That is precisely why the family has become one of the primary battlegrounds of our age.
Today’s cultural revolution is not simply asking us to redefine marriage. It is asking us to redefine motherhood, fatherhood, womanhood, manhood, and ultimately what it means to be human. Once those foundations are removed, every other institution built upon them eventually begins to crack.
That is why I found myself deeply encouraged—and deeply sobered—while listening to a recent interview with Delano Squires discussing his outstanding new book, The Vanishing Black Family: How Welfare and Feminism Made Marriage Optional and Children Vulnerable.
Squires is Director of the DeVos Center for Human Flourishing at the Heritage Foundation, but those credentials are not what make his argument compelling. He writes first as a Christian, a Black husband, and the father of four children who loves his own community enough to tell it difficult truths. Before becoming widely known as a public intellectual, he spent years writing for Black and Married with Kids, a website devoted to promoting healthy marriages and intact families. Looking back with characteristic humor, he remarks that he eventually became the entire title himself: “I moved from just being black to eventually being black and married with kids.”
There is, however, nothing humorous about the burden of his book.
Squires argues that the greatest crisis confronting Black America today is not primarily economic. Nor is it fundamentally political. It is the gradual collapse of marriage and family formation. More importantly, he insists that the solutions proposed by our political class have often misunderstood the nature of the problem because they begin with economics rather than anthropology—with government rather than God.
As Christians, that observation should immediately sound familiar.
For decades we have been told that broken families are primarily the result of insufficient income, inadequate government spending, systemic inequities, or unequal opportunity. Certainly those realities matter. Poverty places enormous strain upon families. Economic instability makes marriage more difficult. Squires does not deny any of that.
But he insists those explanations do not reach deeply enough.
The crisis, he argues, is first spiritual and then cultural. Marriage is God’s institution before it is society’s institution. Consequently, when a culture loses its understanding of marriage, no amount of government spending can restore what has been lost.
That is a profoundly biblical insight.
It also places Squires at odds with many of today’s dominant cultural narratives.
Yet readers should resist the temptation to assume this is merely a book about the Black community.
It is certainly that. Squires writes unapologetically as a Black man who longs to see marriage restored among his own people. He offers pointed criticisms—not only of government policy, but also of many Black political leaders, progressive activists, and even segments of the contemporary Black Church that, in his judgment, have abandoned the biblical vision of marriage and family.
Like an Old Testament Hebrew prophet, His critique comes from within.
That is precisely why it deserves to be heard.
At the same time, Squires repeatedly reminds his audience that the collapse of the Black family is no longer uniquely a Black tragedy.
It has become an American tragedy.
The patterns that first appeared in Black America have steadily spread throughout nearly every segment of our society. What was once considered an alarming exception has increasingly become the national norm.
In that sense, the Black family became America’s canary in the coal mine.
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