Illegitimacy and the Imago Dei

This post is a response to an article on the Heritage Foundation website. The article should be read first for the purpose of critiquing my response. I also posted it as a response on the article page itself.


The claims within this article include:
1. Illegitimacy is on the rise
2. Mainstream media ignores the detrimental impact of illegitimacy
3. Liberals need illegitimacy in order to further their anti-marriage agenda
4. Illegitimate children and their mothers suffer greater social deprivations such as poverty, poor health, poor educational achievement, high crime rates, substance abuse, etc.

Ultimately, there need not be a conspiracy per se in order to achieve these kinds of egregious results. Despite its disparate occurrence among Blacks in the U. S., illegitimacy has no intrinsic racial cause. Moreover, it has always been a part of every culture among both rich and poor. Whereas it is seemingly accepted as an inevitability among the poor, its Hollywood style practice has given it an almost exotic appeal among the more well to do. Additionally, statistics reveal its entrenchment in the society as a whole.

All this notwithstanding, both rich and poor, educated and uneducated, black and white possess an irrevocable commonality in our human nature. Despite those things correctly identified in this article, this aspect was not considered; perhaps due to the article’s limited scope. Or perhaps its assumption precludes its exposition. Nevertheless, it has great ability to explain why this phenomenon is occurring so regularly even in a nation which describes itself as Judeo Christian.

Familial disintegration is self-perpetuating among human beings. Why? Because our nature is such, that our children learn parenting skills largely by being parented. Unlike less sentient beings, our basic instincts only provide us with nominal survival skills. Humans have souls, and parenting requires the care of the soul, not just the feeding of the body. To whatever degree the concept of the Imago Dei (Image of God) in man is omitted from our education, knowledge and wisdom are depleted accordingly. To whatever degree the practice of its reality is removed from our relationships, children suffer from the lack thereof. A void is created in which children's beliefs and affections are directed toward the imago publica (image of the state); a state which portends to meet their needs in the absence of paternal provision.

With due respect to Mr. Roy Eappen of Montreal, I wholeheartedly disagree with his assessment that “children are never illegitimate”. ‘Illegitimacy’ bears witness to the fact that there is a higher purpose to child bearing and rearing than the mere continuation of the species. It is more than a legal designation or cultural faux pas. It is an unwitting yet unavoidable homage to divine purpose and intent in regard to our children. Children are illegitimate when born outside of a very specific familial context, aka marriage; marriage being the intentional and direct homage to the Imago Dei. The Imago Dei is the ultimate reason why we can conceptualize illegitimacy. Outside of this framework we have no logical or moral reason to discern that illegitimacy is undesirable by any measure. Without such a framework, we may only consider it to be slightly disadvantageous to the degree that it is outside the social norm. Yet this causes one to speculate what would be the consequences if illegitimacy itself become the norm. Perhaps we can extrapolate from already observable effects. Such results are documented in another article from the Hoover Institution. I will let it speak for itself.

Humbly submitted