Fall 2026 Issue: In The War on the Family, the Family Must Win

It won’t surprise you to learn that at The Believe! Journal, we believe in the family.

After faith in Jesus Christ, family is the most important thing in my life. I’ve been blessed with a beautiful wife, four incredible kids, and six grandkids and counting who bring me a level of joy I didn’t know was possible.

When I was updating Dad’s book last year, his chapter on the family inspired me all over again. It’s the last chapter, but as Dad makes clear, family is society’s first institution.

All the other good things in life, he wrote, “have their basis in the strength of the home and the family.” Families are “the incubators of the American Dream.” He didn’t just mean that economically. Family helps you discover your gifts, your worth, your purpose in life. If you don’t have a strong foundation, it’s so much harder to rise.

Dad wrote these words because, in his time, the family “no longer occupies the place of sanctity that it once had in the minds of so many people.” So, he said, “it is time in America for the family concept to be reaffirmed.”

Fifty years later, that’s an understatement. Today, we’re living through a war on the family.

This war is real. It’s also worse than you think.

I’ve found that when people talk about the “war on the family,” they usually mean that family values are under attack. From whom, you ask? Hollywood. Popular musicians. Cultural trendsetters. The usual suspects, who are indeed guilty as charged.

But this war has many fronts, and not all (or even most) are cultural.

The war on the family is political. At the highest levels of government, we have politicians and policies driving the family toward a cliff. From housing to healthcare to welfare, they’re making family harder to choose and afford.

The war on the family is spiritual. As atheism and agnosticism have risen, the moral imperative for the family has been forgotten. At the same time, not enough religious leaders are preaching the Biblical mandate to marry and multiply.

And yes, the war on the family is individual. It’s easy to blame others for the decline of marriages and childbearing. But at the end of the day, people make their own decisions. A lot of people are deciding that marriage is off the table—that having kids would make their lives too hard or less fun. Everyone’s situation is different. But what if most people decide against family?

And what happens if the family loses this war?

Common sense tells us that no society can survive without strong families, traditional or non-traditional. We need people to get married and stay married. We need couples to have kids and teach them values and virtues. We need families where love rules, where wisdom grows, where society finds the strength to endure. Our economy, our communities, our own happiness—everything depends on the family.

In the 1970s, soon-to-be President Ronald Reagan said his strategy for the Cold War was simple: “We win, and they lose.”

In the war on the family, our goal must be equally clear and simple: The family wins.

This issue explores how we can move toward victory. Naturally, we’re going to spend a lot of time looking at the forces and factors we’re up against:

• Tim Tebow—yes, that Tim Tebow—has a public service announcement for parents. He shows how traffickers are targeting your kids, and how you can protect your sons and daughters.

• Arthur Brooks has a Q&A with me. My biggest question: Does having children make you less happy? Arthur knocks the answer out of the park!

• The incomparable Olivia DeVos asks: What do women want? Spoiler alert: She says it’s not what the loudest cultural voices claim.

• Les Ford, who worked in the White House, says the safety net is tearing families apart. She shows the problem—and an achievable solution.

• Abby Roth, founder of The First Generation Stay at Home Mom, makes a strong case for more stay-at-home moms. Talk about counter cultural.

• Matt Lucas, from Our Daily Bread Ministries, calls on families to bring back the tradition of reading the Bible together. Why? Because it makes families stronger.

• Anthony B. Bradley, at the Acton Institute, asks a tough question: What happens to daughters of absent fathers? His answer is heartbreaking and demands action.

• Aaron Renn, one of our most frequent contributors, writes about the decline of the family—and what it means for the state and the church.

• Ryan Anderson, head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, tells the story of buying a farm—and how it has changed his family for the better.

• Jonathan Eckert, from the Baylor Center for School Leadership, says that happiness isn’t the highest good for your kids. You’ll want to know what he says is the highest good!

• Lyman Stone, from the Institute for Family Studies, argues that government should do more to financially support families. He has a truly novel policy proposal.

• Catherine Pakaluk, a great academic and author of Hannah’s Children, has a bracing message: The state can’t save the American family—only religion can do that.

• Kevin Dolan, who runs the Natal Conference and writes the Bennett’s Phylactery Substack, says technocrats can’t save the family–only a “covenantal understanding” of the family will work.

• Annie Holmquist, a writer for the Epoch Times and Imaginative Conservative, wants more parents to raise marriageable children—hear, hear!

• Stephen Barrows, from the Acton Institute, gets to the root cause of the fertility crisis—he says it’s a “failure of imagination.”

We also have a few pieces from our own team—the editors. They argue for bringing back home economics—for men and women alike. They also show how the humble playground is actually an important battleground in the war on the family.

I’ll leave you with a thought from Dad—specifically, the last lines of his book, Believe!.

“Strong families are not made without strong people who believe enough in the value of their parenthood that they are willing to arrange their entire lives, if necessary, around home and family.”

Are you that strong person? You can be. May this issue deepen your own belief in the beauty, the power, and the utter necessity of the family—especially your own.