Pope John Paul II once cautioned the world about what would happen if we lost the family. As the family goes, so goes the nation — and so goes the whole world in which we live.

“The family is the domestic church,” the pope told the crowd of thousands in Perth, Australia, that day in 1986. “The meaning of this traditional Christian idea is that the home is the Church in miniature. The Church is the sacrament of God’s love.”

At the time, the pontiff’s words were taken as a staunch warning to Western nations. But today they seem more like an eerie premonition. Indeed, since the time of this warning, our society has been eroding as the traditional family has been replaced by “alternative families” — gay marriages, empty-nesters by choice, co-habitating couples, and more.

As an overly permissive and civil-rights-driven culture keeps chipping away at the notion of the traditional family, the excuses for this are ridiculous:

  • “It doesn’t harm you or infringe upon your rights — so it’s allowable.”
  • “We don’t need marriage — it’s really just an archaic institution that takes away women’s rights.”
  • “It takes a village to raise a child — not two responsible parents.”
  • And my personal favorite: “As long as the parents are loving and take care of their child, it doesn’t matter if the parents are two moms or two dads — or if the two parents aren’t married at all.”

Related: Is Anything ‘Sacrilegious’ Anymore?

As we’ve seen over the past decade, our civilization has been hammered by constant attacks against the family; contraception, abortion, gay marriage, and co-habitation all work against the family. We’ve been told the only way to remake our civilization is through a greater economy; by beating radical Islamic terror, the Communists, the Chinese, the Russians, or any other enemy; or by becoming the greatest country on earth once again. While these things are important in growing and protecting our civilization, we need a rebirth — and it must start with the family.

Six years before his message about the family in Perth, St. John Paul the Great spoke about the definition of freedom: “[T]rue freedom is not advanced in the permissive society, which confuses freedom with license to do anything whatever and which in the name of freedom proclaims a kind of general amorality. It is a caricature of freedom to claim that people are free to organize their lives with no reference to moral values, and to say that society does not have to ensure the protection and advancement of ethical values. Such an attitude is destructive of freedom and peace.”

Indeed, our nation has accepted with open arms this idea that freedom means doing anything anyone wants — as long as it doesn’t infringe on another’s rights (except the unborn) or offends anyone (except Christians). The more you can offend the values of Christianity, in fact, the “better off” we will be as a society, the more advanced and progressed we’ll be as a country, and the freer we will be as a people.

This idea has done a good job of “progressing” us so far that we’ve actually turned back to a day when our feelings are the law, instead of reason; where hedonism instead of self-control rules; where entitlement is more important than charity. We have actually “advanced” so far we’ve come full circle and are nearly at the point of darkness, when the values of Western civilization were just a faint gleam of light in the far-off distance.

Related: The ‘Religious Left’ Is on the Move

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And as our society continues to move down the rabbit hole of relativism and hedonism, we become more unhappy, life becomes harder to bare, confusion and sadness reign, and depression and ennui are rampant. Is there a way out of this self-destructive cycle? Yes. The answer lies with the family.

According to the plan of God, a family is a man and woman, united in marriage, whose outpouring of love manifests itself through procreation. It is within the family that we learn to give of ourselves; we learn the meaning of authority and how to act accordingly. We learn moral values and how to be truly free, making good use of the freedom bestowed upon us.

Unfortunately, our society has corrupted the idea of freedom. The truth of God’s plan for marriage and the family has no place in today’s definition, which is the idea of full autonomy and selfishness (Familiaris Consortio no. 6). This subjectivist and relativist view has infected our society, destroying us from the inside out.

It began with taking children away from parents for education and telling parents they did not have the education, certifications, or degrees necessary to teach their children correctly. So children, for decades, have been separated from the guidance of their parents for most of the day to be taught by, essentially, complete strangers. Furthermore, because of the nature of the school system, the education of the moral conscience was pushed to the side to make room for the study of injustices committed by one group of people or another against other groups.

Related: How Bibles Differ — and How to Choose the Right One for You

Then, once the majority of children were educated in the ways of the world (i.e. relativism and injustice), it was time to send them out into the world to spread the chaos. We fell further down the rabbit hole. Since parents didn’t matter anymore, marriage didn’t matter. If marriage was inconsequential to raising a child — then anyone should be able to get married (or not).

The family was turned inside out. Teachers replaced parents, civil unions and co-habitation replaced marriages, and children were left without the foundation of freedom and security formed by a well-educated moral conscience. And so every value learned within the family was pushed aside to make room for this brave new world, where family merely meant one or two people providing sustenance for kids.

The return to the traditional family is the only way Western civilization can be reborn. Within a family, we learn filial respect. In a family, we experience the true giving of oneself through the relationship between husband and wife. We learn charity and understanding. A child learns how to deal with conflict and experience relationships.

Good parents can teach their children the difference between right and wrong. More importantly, they can teach children how to make good judgments. And as we become good members of our family, we become good members of society.

Steffani Jacobs is a freelance writer based in the Twin Cities area. She has written about everything from military history and weaponry to theology and church doctrine.