The family-wars metaphor framed American culture as enemy-occupied territory requiring men to defend children

Evidence

Farrar then abruptly transitioned to a different scenario. The reader was still a point man, but now he was leading his family: a tearful little girl, brave little boy, and a wife, who was caring for a baby. There was nothing imaginary about this scenario: “If you are a husband/father, then you are in a war. War has been declared upon the family, on your family and mine. Leading a family through the chaos of American culture is like leading a small patrol through enemy-occupied territory. And the casualties in this war are as real as the names etched on the Vietnam Memorial.” Farrar provided a litany of evidence: divorce, single mothers, prostitution, drug addiction, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, abortion, suicide, homosexuality, sexual abuse, and “social awkwardness.” If a man was going to keep his children off the casualty list, he would need to prepare them “to defend themselves against the snipers, ambushes, and booby traps of this silent war.” — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 373

Categorization

• XREF: The war-on-the-family framing directly echoes the conspiratorial siege mentality that later animated Trump-supporting white evangelical politics — a core strand of Du Mez’s continuity thesis. — connects to: American culture signified freedom and defiance during the Occupation. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 536
• SEED: An essay could trace how the ‘silent war on the family’ metaphor migrated from these 1990s devotional books into the political rhetoric of the culture war and ultimately into QAnon-era claims.