Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Why the Market Needs the Family
Why the Market Needs the Family
Dec 13, 2025 5:00 PM

The Family & the Market, an Acton University lecture by Jennifer Roback Morse, uses Christian theology and logic to illustrate unique connections between seemingly unrelated aspects of society, at least to the secular world. Morse is the founder and president of the Ruth Institute, where she discovered that the economy depends on the intact family raising children. This Institute has a dream: that every child is ed into a loving home with a married mother and father. Their goal is to create a lasting and Christ-like social movement, and to clean up the consequences of the Sexual Revolution.

Students in this course learn the importance of both parents raising their own children together, as opposed to divorcing, sharing custody, or placing children in foster care. This is vital in order to “respect, honor, and preserve” the genetic identity and cultural heritage of every adult, without exception. Morse emphasizes that when this practice is violated, it gives way to structural injustice and the political correctness of “Alternative Family Forms.” These terms, such as multi-partner fertility, are indicators of our broken reality, and of life problems for children in these environments, mainly, stirring up feelings of resentment in an unloved child.

Morse goes on to further define the Sexual Revolution, or the secular belief that a good and decent society should: separate sex from babies, separate both sex and babies from marriage, and eliminate all differences from men and women except those explicitly chosen by the individual. We can now create babies without sex, and our society propagates hook-up, divorce, and affair culture. Morse believes the agenda of the Sexual Revolution has, all along, been largely based upon the third point, to “re-construct” identities that were merely “social constructs” in the first place. If gender distinctions are eliminated, then any form of parenting, no matter how broken, can function according to this model.

However, we know this to be impossible, false, and untrue. It is irrational, irresponsible, and ultimately would require force and propaganda to stand on its own. Children really do require both a mother and father. Morse drew attention to a popular argument in the divorce culture: “Children are resilient and tougher than we give them credit for.” She responded in kind with a ment exposing the selfish nature of such a claim: “Parents are precious little snowflakes that will fade and die if they don’t get what they want, and children are supposed to be resilient? No.”

With so many children feeling unwanted and unloved, and with donor conceived people feeling like purchased objects and property, we need to focus on all issues the Sexual Revolution passes. When others do not hear our arguments, Christians need to practice healing friendship, be shining examples to those who are struggling, and above all, show deep and passion. Morse left her audience with forting message of hope: “Heal yourself, heal others, and heal the culture, because the Church will last, justice will last, and friendship and love will last.”

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Lord Acton and America’s Moral Absolutes Concerning Liberty
Lord Acton once said of the American revolution: “No people was so free as the insurgents, no government less oppressive than the government which they overthrew.” It was America’s high view of liberty and its ideas that cultivated this unprecedented freedom ripe for flourishing. Colonists railed over 1 and 2 percent tax rates and were willing to take up arms in a protracted and bloody conflict to secure independence and self-government. In a chapter on Lord Acton in The Moral...
The Rise of Free-Market Alternatives to Obamacare
Referring to the Affordable Care Act, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus (D-Mont.) stated earlier this year, “Unless we implement this properly, it’s going to be a train wreck.” And indeed, from looking at the Obamacare implementation timeline alone, the law seems to have gotten off to a shaky start. The implementation of the so-called employer mandate, which would require businesses with more than 50 workers to offer insurance to all full-time employees, or else pay a fine...
Do the Poor Vote for More Welfare?
A popular saying (often misattributed to Alexis de Tocqueville) states that a democracy can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. If this is always the case then we should expect the poor to vote themselves even more welfare payments. However, as Dwight R. Lee explains, the desire for transfers that others will pay for has almost no effect on people’s voting behavior: This argument that a significant financial gain from...
Dispersing Poor People And Crime
Emily Badger at The Atlantic Wire posts mon sense story regarding the debate about whether or not the dispersing of poor people out of inner-city housing projects into suburban neighborhoods, through government housing voucher programs, increases crime rates. The article reflects recent research by Michael Lens, an assistant professor of urban planning at UCLA. A growing stack of research now supports [the] hypothesis that housing vouchers do not in fact lead to crime. Lens has just added another study to...
Was Gordon Gekko Catholic?
Is greed really good? Does self-interest equal sin? Samuel Gregg takes on these questions at Aleteia.org, in an excerpt from his new book, Tea Party Catholic: the Catholic Case for Limited Government, a Free Economy and Human Flourishing. In many ways, the free economy does rely upon people pursuing their self-interest rather than being immediately focused upon promoting the wellbeing of others. One response to this challenge is to recognize that fallen humanity cannot realize perfect justice in this world....
Spirit-and-Body Economics
Over at the Kern Pastors Network, Greg Forster points to Rev. Robert Sirico’s speech from this year’s Acton University, drawing particularly on Sirico’s emphasis on Christian anthropology.“One may not say that we are spirits inside of flesh,” Sirico said, “but that we are spirits and flesh.” Forster summarizes: Christianity teaches that the human person is, in Sirico’s words, both corporeal and transcendent. We cannot make sense of ourselves if we are only bodies. How could a strictly material body think...
Bradley Cited in News Roundup on Millenials Leaving Church
Last week, Rachel Held Evans wrote an article discussing millennials leaving the church. This piece quickly went viral prompting responses from mentators, debating “why those belonging to the millennial generation are leaving the church and what should be done about it.” Research fellow at Acton, Anthony Bradley, discusses Evans’ piece in “United Methodists Wearing A Millennial Evangelical Face.” Jeff Schapiro, at the Christian Post, discusses this debate and summarizes mentators’ opinions, including Bradley’s: Anthony Bradley, associate professor of Theology and...
What Distributists Get Wrong
Last week, we took a look at what distributists get right in terms of economics, through the eyes of David Deavel at Intercollegiate Review. Now, Deavel discusses where distributism goes off the rails in that same series. It is a rather long list, but here are the highlights. First, Deavel says that simple economics escapes distributists. Despite the fact that economics teaches that actions in the real world have real world consequences, distributists tend to ignore this fact. They scoff...
For America’s Elites, Religious Freedom is a Non-Issue
America’s Founding Fathers considered religious liberty to be our “first freedom.” But as Ken Blackwell notes, that view is no longer shared by our media and foreign policy elites: All such understandings of the religious freedom foundation of American civil liberty and foreign policy seem long forgotten by the elites of today. The media cares little about religious freedom. The famous Rothman-Lichter study of 1981 surveyed 240 journalists from the prestige press. Of course, 80 percent of them voted one...
Disability and Discipleship: God Don’t Make No Junk
In this week’s Acton Commentary, “Disability, Service, and Stewardship,” I write, “Our service of others may or may not be recognized by the marketplace as something valuable or worth paying for. But each one of us has something to offer someone else. All of us have ministries of one kind or another. Our very existence itself must be seen as a blessing from God.” During a sermon a couple weeks ago at my church, the preacher made an important point...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved