"The New York Times" wrote a shocking article calling attention to the income inequality caused by single parenthood. That's right, the liberal "New York Times" found that inequality is caused more by marital status than by finance, Wall Street, or tax policy. Are liberals encouraging the decline of marriage? Find out on this Trifecta.

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Michael Brown - Young Americans, Faithless and Fatherless

According to a recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, almost one in three Americans under the age of 30 doubt that God exists, while, in contrast, the figure for Americans over the age of 65 is less than one in ten. Could there be a connection between the fatherlessness of this younger generation and their struggles with faith? According to a theory called “the psychology of atheism,” the answer might well be yes.

But first, some caveats.

There are many reasons why people struggle with the issue of faith, so it would be wrong to think that “one size fits all.”

The highest percentage of fatherlessness is found in the African American community, and yet African Americans tend to be more religiously oriented than other population sectors.

It cannot be denied that a large portion of contemporary American Christianity is often superficial, hypocritical, and powerless (in terms of radical life transformation), and these serious defects certainly account for some of the faith struggles experienced by American young people. That being said, it is important to probe the connection between fatherlessness and faithlessness.

In 1999, New York University professor Paul C. Vitz, a former atheist himself, wrote a book entitled Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism. In it, he argued that the absence of a father or the presence of a defective father (say, a weak, cowardly father or an abusive father) often played a major role in the development of the atheism of the child (or grownup). A similar argument was made by journalist John P. Koster, Jr., in his 1989 book The Atheist Syndrome.

To be clear, these authors are not denying that atheists claim to have strong, rational reasons for their atheism. Instead, Vitz and Koster argue that what lies at the root of atheism is often the lack of a solid father figure, thereby allowing unbelief to become dominant later in life (or even in childhood).

According to Vitz, “an atheist’s disappointment in and resentment of his own father unconsciously justifies his rejection of God,” a theory Vitz developed while reading the biographies of well-known atheists. He calls it the “defective father” hypothesis.

Under the category of “Dead Fathers,” Vitz lists famous atheists like Nietzsche, Hume, Russell, Sartre, and Camus; under “Abusive and Weak Fathers” he lists Hobbes, Voltaire, Freud, and Wells, among others. He then compares their stories with the stories of theists like Pascal, Wilberforce, Kierkegaard, Chesterton, Buber, Barth, Bonhoeffer, and others, before reviewing apparent exceptions to his theory.

Speaking of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Vitz notes that her son, William, “claims that he did not know why his mother hated her father so much – but hate him she did. In the opening chapter of the book, he reports a very ugly fight in which O’Hair attempted to kill her father with a ten-inch butcher knife. She failed but screamed, ‘I’ll see you dead. I’ll get you yet. I’ll walk on your grave.’” Does this remind you of her desire to eliminate God from American life?

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “I have absolutely no knowledge of atheism as an outcome of reasoning, still less an event; with me it is obvious by instinct.” As a young boy, Nietzsche was very close to his father, who was a pastor, but he died shortly before Nietzsche’s fifth birthday, having suffered the previous year from a brain disease.

In his early teens, Nietzsche wrote about the agony he experienced when his father died, noting that, “In everything God has led me safely as a father leads his weak child. . . . Like a child I trust in his grace.” So, for the teenage Nietzsche, God was just like a loving father. Unfortunately, Nietzsche also remembered his father as weak and sickly, and it was this image, Vitz claims, that Nietzsche “also associated, naturally enough, with his father’s Christianity. . . . It is therefore not hard to view Nietzsche’s rejection of God and Christianity as a rejection of the weakness of his father,” a father who abandoned him by death when he was but a little boy.

As for H. G. Wells, he was raised by an irresponsible and often absentee father (named Joe) and by a mother whose faith collapsed when her 9-year-old daughter died suddenly from appendicitis two years before Wells was born. Vitz notes, “Whether it was Joe the father or God the Father who gave no answer seems to make no difference to Wells, because for him both were equally absent.”

Describing his mother’s faith struggle in his autobiography, Wells wrote, “My father was away at cricket, and I think she realized more and more acutely as the years dragged on without material alleviation, that Our Father and Our Lord . . . were also away, playing perhaps at their own sort of cricket in some remote quarter of the starry universe.”

Returning to our day, the U. S. Census Bureau reports that as of 2011, one third of American children are growing up without their biological father, and over the last 50 years, the number of babies born to unwed mothers has jumped from 5 percent to 40 percent.

Could it be, then, that there really is a connection between the lack of fathers and the lack of faith among young Americans?

Dr. Michael Brown

Michael Brown holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University and is the author of 20 books. He has served as a professor at a number of seminaries and hosts the nationally syndicated, daily talk radio show, the Line of Fire.

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Doug Giles - Hey, Man-Hating, Nerve-Grating Feminists: Good Fathers Are Irreplaceable

I have two twentysomething daughters who’re currently taking over the planet. When these female charges popped out of their mommy’s womb, this thing called “responsibility for their upbringing” hit me like a Jackie Chan punch.

I didn’t slough off my role in their lives onto my wife, my church, public school, day care, relatives, TV, or “the village.” I didn’t expect any of the aforementioned to fill my boots chiefly because … they can’t.

Living in Miami, I knew I would have to pony up and become a major player in my little ones’ lives if I wanted them to escape being part of the local teen chum slick. In other words, I was going to have to be a dad in the traditional sense of the word.

Here’s a little FYI for slack-jawed sperm donor baby daddies out there: A lack of mental, physical, and spiritual input from you, dad, will exponentially boost the odds that your youngster will grow up to be more lost than an AK-47 under Holder’s oversight.But you probably don’t give a crap because you’re the type who wears sunglasses indoors. It’s always sunny in Doucheville, eh?

Now, the man-hating feminists would love for us all to believe that a dad’s role in his daughter’s life really isn’t that important and that a father can be easily replaced by extra mothers, or public school, or some government program; however, the facts speak to the contrary.

For instance, when a little girl has a loving dad in her life who is a provider, protector, hunter, and hero, research shows that said lucky lady is going to turn into one amazing woman. Yep, when a great pappy is in the house, these are the kinds of reports you hear:

• Toddlers securely attached to fathers are better at solving problems.
• Six-month-olds scored higher on tests of mental development when their dads were involved in their lives.
• With dads in the home, kids managed school stress better.
• Girls whose dads provide warmth and control achieve higher academic success.
• Girls who are close to their fathers exhibit less anxiety and withdrawn behaviors.

The good news doesn’t stop there. As little darlings mature and plow into puberty and beyond with dads who’re worth their salt at their sides, these young women show these not-too-shabby traits:

• The likelihood that daughters engage in premarital sex, drug use, and alcohol plummets when their dads are involved in their lives.
• Girls with doting fathers are more assertive.
• Daughters who feel that their dads care about them and feel connected with their dads have significantly fewer suicide attempts and fewer instances of body dissatisfaction, depression, low self-esteem, substance abuse, and unhealthy weight.
• Girls involved with dad are twice as likely to stay in school.
• A girl’s self esteem is best predicted by her dad’s loving affection.
• Girls with fathers involved in their lives have higher quantitative and verbal skills and higher intellectual functioning.
• Girls whose parents divorce or separate before they turn 21 tend to have shorter life spans by four years.
• Girls with decent dads are less likely to flaunt themselves to seek male attention.
• Fathers help daughters to be more competent, more achievement oriented, and more successful.
• Girls with involved fathers wait longer to initiate sex and have lower rates of teen pregnancy. Teen girls who live with both parents are three times less likely to lose their virginity before their sixteenth birthday.
• 76 percent of teen girls said their fathers influenced their decisions on whether they should become sexually active.
• 97 percent of girls who said they could talk to their parents had lower teen pregnancy rates.
• A daughter from a middle-class family has a fivefold lower risk of out-of-wedlock pregnancy if her father lives at home.
• Girls who live with their mothers only have significantly less ability to control their impulses, delay gratification, and have a weaker sense of right and wrong.
• Kids do better academically when their fathers establish rules and exhibit affection.

(The above bullet points were taken from Meg Meeker’s book, Your Kids at Risk: How Teen Sex Threatens Our Sons and Daughters .)

Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers out there who are living their lives in the grand masculine sense of the word. No matter what the man-hating, nerve-grating feminists yammer, you are irreplaceable in the grand family scheme of things. Therefore, stay your traditional course and watch life pay you back in spades. Salute!

Doug Giles

Doug Giles’ new book “If You're Going Through Hell, Keep Going!" is now available. Ann Coulter says "Doug Giles is a substantive and funny tour de force for traditional values.” Doug’s talk show and video blog can be seen and heard at www.ClashRadio.com.

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