“The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families. … In vain are schools, academies, and universities instituted, if loose principles and licentious habits are impressed upon children in their earliest years.” —John Adams (1778)

Recently, I wrote about this year’s commencement speeches, noting, “For larger colleges and universities, it is difficult to find speeches that inspire, as most tend to cater to the prevailing winds in academia.” But one in particular, delivered by Eric Church at the University of North Carolina, became the most widely viewed speech this year.

Why?

Because at its core, Church’s remarks were about family and faith. Imagine that!

Despite all the cultural degradation reported by the mainstream media, there is an abiding commitment to family and faith in America, and it’s making a comeback, a trend reversal, particularly among young people.

Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, Bill Bennett, notes, “I believe today’s young people might not merely match the faithfulness of my generation, but exceed it.” He says of current trends: “History shows that the hunger for God never fully disappears. It can only be suppressed for a season. When it reawakens, the political and cultural consequences can be profound — and, with God’s help, profoundly hopeful.”

Even CNN and The New York Times are begrudgingly taking note, though they would rather be focused on the defamation of “Christian Nationalists.”

Moreover, there is also a resurgence of faith among thought leaders, a revelation we find in a recent book by noted researcher and former agnostic Charles Murray, Taking Religion Seriously. Murray is best known for his prior groundbreaking research in Losing Ground (1984), The Bell Curve (1994), and Coming Apart (2012), mostly gloomy assessments of our future. But he joins others who are seeing the Light.

And what about family?

There are two days annually that we devote to a combined recognition of family and faith. Those are Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, on which we honor the societally pivotal roles that have been bound together in the sanctity of marriage across generations.

This Sunday, we observe Father’s Day, and, by way of encouragement, I want to revisit a great speech on fatherhood.

But first, some personal perspective.

This is a day that reminds me of what I know to be true every day, that I’m called by God the Father to be a faithful father to our children, now adults with their own children. When I think about “fatherhood,” the word invokes my relationship with the person who indelibly imprinted my own life as a father — my “Old Man,” as I affectionately called him (and as my sons call me today). My father was a devoted husband to my mom, and he was always there for my siblings and me. He was a real man, a man’s man in every sense of the word, and I thank God for his influence in my life.

He was the “founding father” in our home.

Growing up in suburbia in the 1960s, I was in my teens before I had friendships with two peers who did not have fathers at home. Those fathers had divorced their wives and largely abandoned their families.

A colleague recently asserted in conversation that the most insidious assault on the family today is the Left’s gender confusion cult and the resulting gender disorientation pathology now inflicting about 3% of Americans, though if you throw in the rest of the alphabet variations, that rises to almost 9%.

While that agenda is insidious, I responded that the most significant assault on the family is divorce. And ironically, broken fatherhood and motherhood exemplarities in marriage account for a lot of gender confusion.

Unfortunately, divorce is far more common today, and our urban centers are teeming with generations of men and women who may never have known their fathers.

But there is good news… Divorce rates are dropping, and though the probability of generational divorce — children from broken families also breaking up their families — is twice as high as it is for those from intact homes, divorce rates have declined dramatically over the last decade. Those numbers for younger generations (Millennials) are also dropping, in part because they are marrying later in life.

Maybe this dovetails with the resurgence of faith among young Americans, as noted by Bill Bennett.

When I write about fatherhood, in addition to praising fathers who have taken responsibility for their marriages and families, it is necessary to consider the consequences of those who have not.

I have covered in depth the consequences of fatherless homes on children, particularly that the most consistent common denominator for violence in our society is fatherlessness.

I have also made the case that fatherhood and freedom are irrevocably linked, and that healthy families are essential to sustaining American Liberty.

To be clear, I am not asserting that the burden of divorce falls just on fathers because, increasingly, it is mothers who are breaking up families.

But it is long past time to Make Fatherhood Great Again!

And that leads me to the advocacy for fatherhood by Dr. Rick Rigsby.

Rick has frequently spoken on fatherhood and hope for the fatherless, and he is clear about his faith and the current cultural problems across our nation.

He is a former journalist who also spent two decades teaching at the college level, most of those years at Texas A&M University, where he served as Chaplain and Life Skills Coach for the Aggies football team.

But he suffered a great loss when he was 41 — his wife Trina died after a six-year battle with cancer, and he was left with two young sons, overwhelmed with grief.

“Trina was the only woman in college who gave me her real phone number,” he joked. “We get married. We have a few children. Our lives are great.” But as he stood at her casket, he thought: “Our lives as we knew them were over. There was no way to hide the harsh and sudden reality that she would never be with us again. It’s hard to breathe within the space created by never.”

But standing by his side was his own father, Roger Rigsby: “Dad was there during the worst times of my life and the best. I was so blessed to have the wisest man I ever met to be my father.”

He recalls: “You know what sustained me? The wisdom of a third-grade dropout. The wisdom of a simple cook. We’re at the casket. I’d never seen my dad cry … [but] my father shared three words with me that changed my life right there at the casket. It would be the last lesson he would ever teach me. He said, ‘Son, just stand.’ You keep standing. No matter how rough the sea, you keep standing. And I’m not talking about just water. … No matter what, you don’t give up.”

Rick has four degrees and is now an internationally acclaimed speaker. He says: “My brother is a presidential-appointed judge in Washington, DC, and we’re not the smartest ones in our family. [That was] my dad, a third-grade dropout, challenging us to go beyond just appearance to make an impact.”

And it is a commencement speech he delivered about his father in 2017, at the Maritime Academy of California Polytechnic State University, that is again making the rounds. That speech, “Lessons From a Third Grade Dropout,” has been viewed by more than 300 million people, and for much the same reason Eric Church’s UNC speech was the most-viewed among commencements this year — Rick’s remarks were all about faith and family.

You can view his speech here or read about it in his teacher resource book by the same title.

But here are a few notable excerpts:

“The wisest person I ever met in my life, a third-grade dropout. Wisest and dropout in the same sentence is rather oxymoronic, like jumbo shrimp. … It’s not oxymoronic for me to say the wisest man I ever met was a third-grade drop out. … That third-grade dropout, the wisest person I ever met in my life, who taught me to combine knowledge and wisdom to make an impact, was my father, a simple cook, wisest man I ever met in my life, just a simple cook, left school in the third grade to help out on the family farm, but just because he left school doesn’t mean his education stopped. Mark Twain once said, ‘I’ve never allowed my schooling to get in the way of my education.’ My father taught himself how to read, taught himself how to write, decided in the midst of Jim Crowism … my father decided he was going to stand and be a man, not a black man, not a brown man, not a white man, but a man. He literally challenged himself to be the best that he could all the days of his life.”

Rick’s dad taught his boys, “Excellence is a habit, not an act. … Aristotle said, ‘You are what you repeatedly do.’ Therefore, excellence ought to be a habit, not an act. Don’t ever forget that.”

And he recounts his father’s wisdom: “You want to make an impact. Every day of your life, find your broom. You grow your influence that way. … If you’re going to do a job, do it right. … Good enough isn’t good enough if it can be better, and better isn’t good enough if it can be best. … I’m not worried that you won’t be successful. I’m worried that you won’t fail from time to time. Wisdom will come to you through the unlikeliest of sources, a lot of times through failure. When you hit rock bottom remember this: While you’re struggling, rock bottom can also be a good foundation on which to build and on which to grow.”

Rick passed on this advice to the graduates: “I ask you all one question: How you living? How you living? Every day, ask yourself that question. How you living? … Look in those unlikeliest places for wisdom. Enhance your life every day by seeking that wisdom and asking yourself every night, ‘How am I living?’”

And a sampling from his father’s wisdom book:

“Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity. Pride is the burden of a foolish person.”

“Son, make sure your servant’s towel is bigger than your ego.”

“Hearing tells you the music is playing. Listening tells you what the song is saying!”

“Life boils down to choices. You cannot choose what happens to you. You can choose how you will respond.”

“Just Keep Standing: three words to guard your life. Keep going. God will bring you through.”

In closing, as I put the final edits on this column today, I paused to read again a 2014 letter from Billy Graham about fatherhood, framed at my desk. Among his advice was this: “Getting where we are going is important. Equally important are those who are following us because they are on the same journey. … The lessons we have learned from our failures and successes can help those following behind. The impact we have on them can mean the difference between leaving good memories in our place or simply being out of sight, out of mind. Continue to fight the good fight, Mark.”

With these collected words of wisdom, I send blessings to all of you fathers this Sunday, and every day of the year. Continue to fight the good fight!

(For additional resources on fathering, visit the National Fatherhood Initiative, the National Center for Fathering, and Focus on the Family. Tony Dungy, the Super Bowl-winning coach, has devoted much of his post-football years to coaching fathers. His All Pro Dad fatherhood mentoring organization provides great resources. There are also many great local mentoring organizations, like the one founded by my friends John Smithbaker and Scott MacNaughton, Fathers in the Field.)

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Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

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