Before there was a nation, there was a family. Before there was a government, there was a home. When God put the man and the woman in the garden and told them to be fruitful and multiply, to tend and keep what He had made, He was establishing the first institution in human history: not a kingdom, not a bureaucracy, but a family. Everything else that God has ordained in human society flows from that first order. When the family breaks down, everything downstream pays the price.

God then established two more institutions: the church and government. These three, family, church, government, are not in competition. They are not rivals. They are the three legs of the stool of a healthy society, each with its own God-given role, each dependent on the others, each accountable to the God who created all three. When any one of them fails to fulfill its purpose, or when one of them tries to do the job of the others, the whole arrangement wobbles.

The crisis of American society today is not primarily a governmental crisis. It is a family crisis. When fathers are absent and marriages are broken and children grow up without the foundation of a stable home, no government program can repair the damage. It goes too deep. The government can address symptoms, but it cannot cure the disease. The disease is not economic or political. It is spiritual. And the cure runs through rebuilt families, strengthened churches, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ working its way into the hearts of men and women who then go home and do the hard, daily, unglamorous work of building something that will outlast them.

The founding generation knew what every healthy civilization has known: the defense of marriage and family is not peripheral to the health of a nation. It is central to it. Every human being alive came into existence through the union of a man and a woman. That is not a religious conviction imposed on biology. That is biology describing what God designed. When a society loses the will to protect and honor what God has built into the structure of human life itself, it has not simply changed its family policy. It has rejected the architect’s blueprint.

God is not the author of confusion. He is the author of order, the order of the family, the order of the church, the order of governing authority. Live submitted to that order. Pray for every institution to fulfill the purpose God gave it. And do your part, in your home, in your church, in your community, to hold the three legs of the stool in place.