Service Men
Robert Hart on Men Who Are Not Savages
When I was a young man, I tried to make money by selling (I was never any good at it). Once, as I was going through paperwork with a customer after having closed a sale—a rare experience for me—the man began to pour forth the strangest piece of boasting I have ever heard. “I told my wife that if she becomes pregnant, she is on her own. I’m leaving.” He said this with no apparent sense of shame.
Having just married my wife and in those days going through the process of adopting her child who had been conceived by rape, I wanted very much to tell him about the duties of being a man, but I remained silent and finished the paperwork. He went home, probably thinking that the average guy approved of his attitude. To this day, I wish I had been strong enough to show my disapproval.
The Common Man
His kind of “man” is not as rare as we would like to think. One of the ministries I have tried, at which I was not very good, is sidewalk counseling. A group of us would stand outside of abortion mills and try to talk the pregnant mothers into seeking the alternatives. Many times I saw very brave and compassionate Christians try to save the lives of unborn children, and to save their mothers from the harm they were bringing on themselves.
The problem was that most of the time we could not talk to the women. (Did I say women? Most of them were girls.) The overwhelming number of them came with either a parent or a boyfriend. A funny thing: I never saw a woman, head held high, proudly walking in and exercising her “right to choose.” I saw young women being bullied by their keepers, strong-armed into making a “choice” to kill, vulnerable women who saw, under pressure, no other way.
When our people were able to talk to someone, it was to those expectant mothers who had, as we would later hear, been praying that God would give them a way out before it was too late. These were also the few who did not have their keepers dragging them in and fighting us off.
One woman who came alone listened to me, but I simply could not keep her from entering the facility and carrying out the execution of her baby. She did not want to go in there, and was clearly in distress. But she said to me that she had no choice; she did not want to kill her child, but her husband insisted that she had to do this thing because they simply could not afford to care for a baby.
She had to know what pure nonsense that argument really was. To this day I cannot help but wonder if I was speaking to the wife of my customer from years before, the one to whom I did not say anything.
I cannot count how many times, in the course of working to aid poor hospital patients, I have been in a home that consisted of a visibly unhappy mother and several children, half-siblings, each with a different last name inherited from a stranger, innocent bastards all (and a bastard is not so much an illegitimate child as a victim of illegitimate parents). These “families” are always in a state of crisis.
The mothers account for the household income by telling me how many of the fathers are paying child support—that is, most of the time—and how many never have. Most of them, in my vast experience, never have, or rarely do. It is very easy to fault the men who neglect their responsibilities; but the women, too, have often confessed to me their unwillingness to have a traditional family. They were not free in their own minds to accept the natural hierarchy of family life.
Robert Hart is rector of St. Benedict's Anglican Catholic Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Anglican Catholic Church Original Province). He also contributes regularly to the blog The Continuum. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
32.6—November/December 2019
Historical Truth, Beguiling Stories & Three Kinds of Hearers by Anthony Esolen
36.4—Jul/Aug 2023
Our Political Void & the Disintegration of Truth by Michael Hanby
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
