Explore why God’s intentional family design matters for strong, stable, and flourishing societies.

One of the strangest things about modern America is watching people exhaust themselves trying to out-argue reality.

Men are women. Women are men. Mothers are optional. Fathers are interchangeable. Biology is negotiable. Family structure is oppressive. Commitment is confining. Children are somehow both impossibly fragile and fully capable of deciding life-altering truths before they can drive a car.

And then, after all of that, we stare at the wreckage.

Loneliness through the roof. Anxiety everywhere. Birthrates collapsing. Children confused. Families unstable.

And our cultural elites keep responding like a guy pouring gasoline on a kitchen fire, screaming, “Why isn’t this helping?”

At some point, honesty has to enter the conversation.

God’s design wasn’t accidental. And humanity keeps injuring itself trying to prove otherwise.

This week we’ve talked about the importance of mothers—not sentimentally, but structurally. We’ve talked about the science behind early childhood development, attachment, emotional security, language formation, and how the first years of life shape virtually everything that follows.

What’s fascinating is how often modern research arrives breathlessly at conclusions Scripture quietly established thousands of years ago.

Children need stability. Families matter. Nurture shapes identity. Love and discipline are not enemies.

None of this is new. It’s ancient. And maybe that’s what frustrates modern culture so much. We desperately want human flourishing without honoring the design that most consistently produces it. Because whether people like hearing it or not, healthy societies are almost always built on the same basic foundation: strong families, committed parents, mothers and fathers embracing responsibility, children raised with truth, consistency, and love.

When that foundation weakens, everything built on top of it eventually starts to shake.

That’s not religion talking. That’s history.

My own life is proof enough for me. My mother didn’t have a platform. She wasn’t famous. She didn’t spend her days trying to “find herself.” She spent them pouring herself into her children.

When the school system wasn’t working for me, she stepped in and educated me at home before homeschooling was remotely normal. She did it quietly, faithfully, without demanding applause from the culture for making sacrifices on behalf of her son.

And looking back now, decades later, I understand something I couldn’t have understood then: She wasn’t just teaching me math or reading. She was building me. My confidence. My discipline. My understanding of right and wrong. My faith. My resilience. The way I would eventually speak to people, lead people, love people.

All of that was being formed long before I realized it was happening.

And when I lost her at 17 after her battle with cancer, I didn’t suddenly lose those things. Because by then they were already rooted inside me.

That’s what mothers do.

The world talks endlessly about influence, but real influence usually looks a lot less glamorous than social media makes it seem. Real influence is repetitive. Quiet. Unseen.

It’s a thousand invisible moments that slowly become someone’s character.

And from a Christian worldview, that isn’t accidental labor. It’s sacred work.

Scripture never treats family as some side issue. It treats it as civilization’s training ground. Long before governments, corporations, universities, or political parties ever shape a person, a family does.

That’s where values begin. That’s where identity is first reinforced. That’s where children first learn whether love is stable or conditional, whether truth matters, whether sacrifice means anything. Which is why the modern attempt to erase distinctions between mothers and fathers feels so deeply disorienting to so many people—even people who aren’t religious. Because deep down, most human beings instinctively know design when they see it.

A mother nurtures differently from a father. A father protects differently from a mother. Neither role is inferior. Neither role is unnecessary. They are complementary. And children flourish most consistently when both are engaged and present.

That doesn’t mean life is always ideal. It isn’t.

Some mothers carry impossible burdens heroically. Some fathers disappear. Some grandparents step in and save entire generations. Some adoptive families display extraordinary love and sacrifice.

You cannot spend decades undermining family, minimizing motherhood, treating children like lifestyle accessories, severing sex from commitment and commitment from responsibility—and then act stunned when social trust collapses.

You can’t mock God’s design for generations and then wonder why people increasingly feel untethered, anxious, angry, and alone.

Reality eventually collects its debt. And we are living through that collection process right now.

But here’s the hopeful part. Truth has a way of surviving even when cultures try to bury it.

Young families are rediscovering the importance of home. More parents are questioning systems that promised fulfillment and delivered emptiness. More people are realizing that success without family feels strangely hollow. Because it is.

At the end of your life, no one is going to wish they had spent more time impressing strangers online while neglecting the people God entrusted to them at home.

The things that matter most have always been remarkably ordinary.

A mother kneeling beside a child’s bed at night praying over them may not trend on social media. But I suspect Heaven sees it differently.

God’s design wasn’t accidental. It was protective.

And every generation eventually has to decide whether it’s wise enough to live within it—or arrogant enough to keep trying to replace it.

Kevin McCullough | May 06, 2026

Source: God’s Design Wasn’t Accidental

Following the U.S. government’s long-delayed decision on designating the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliated networks as terrorist organizations, the Lebanese branch is now a Foreign Terrorist Organization, while the Egyptian and Jordanian branches are Specially Designated Global Terrorists, and the relevant sanctions have been implemented. Just recently, the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood was also added as a Special Designated Global Terrorist, with the “intent to designate” it as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

Yet in two of these three countries, the Muslim Brotherhood is in any case banned – in Egypt since 2013 and in Jordan since April 2025 – as it is across the Arab and Muslim world: the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Syria, and, to some extent, Libya.

The U.S. move also appears to have prompted recent action across the West: In January 2026, Argentina declared the Lebanese, Egyptian, and Jordanian chapters terrorist. This month, the Dutch parliament approved a motion to ban the organization, and is now exploring how it can ban terrorist organizations more quickly. An Irish MP criticized the fact that the Brotherhood is not “the subject of a suppression order” in the Republic of Ireland. She added that “this is in stark contrast to the action taken by the U.S. Department of State” and called the Muslim Brotherhood “a lethal organization determined to cast the net of its poisonous ideological extremism as far as possible into the heart of Western democracies.” Prior to the U.S. move, Austria had banned the Brotherhood under 2021 anti-terrorism legislation; besides that, one city in Germany banned a single Brotherhood-affiliated organization in 2024 and France closed some mosques that support its ideology.

The Muslim Brotherhood threat was underlined in the 2026 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. intelligence community, released this month. It stated: “The spread of Islamist ideology – in some cases led by individuals and organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood who have provided financial and other forms of material support to terrorist groups such as HAMAS and Hizballah – poses a fundamental threat to freedom and foundational principles that underpin Western Civilization. Violent networks, including supporters of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, often use appeals to Islamist identities and ideology to fuel recruiting and financial support for terrorist groups and individuals around the world. At the extreme end are groups that endorse the violent imposition of Sharia in governance, directly undermining fundamental Western freedoms of speech and religion, with the ultimate aim of establishing an Islamist caliphate. There are growing examples of this in various European countries such as Austria, Germany, and the UK. The designation of Muslim Brotherhood chapters that fund and promote violence as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) is a mechanism to secure Americans against this threat.”

The Brotherhood, whose ideology underpins and inspires terrorist organizations and leaders from Al-Qaeda to ISIS to Hamas, is not banned by the U.S. in Qatar or in Turkey. These are its global centers; its operations are run primarily from Istanbul and Doha via numerous organizations all over the world. Its official website presents its history along with press releases and historical information, but the U.S.-based Cloudflare blocks details about where the website is hosted and who owns it. President Trump’s designation leaves the issue of these two countries unaddressed, and allows the Muslim Brotherhood to continue to function.

In order to understand the threat of the Brotherhood in the U.S., we must understand its modus operandi: In the U.S., the Brotherhood exploits uniquely American vulnerabilities – among them First Amendment protections and an open nonprofit and civil-society infrastructure that allow its aligned organizations to operate legally. It pursues its strategy of Islamizing the West through legal frameworks such as charities, universities and educational bodies, religious organizations, advocacy groups, political activity, and media platforms – and it is continuing to gain ground thanks to massive Qatari funding.

Critics who point this out face lawfare, attacks on their reputations, and pressure. The Brotherhood’s defenders portray it as a moderate religious movement devoted to social reform – but it must be remembered who these defenders actually are and why they are supporting a terrorist organization.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s ultimate goal, expressed by the organization itself in the “Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal of the Group in North America,” a document entered as evidence in federal court, is achieving global Islamic dominance via “grand jihad” for “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” The Memorandum is part of a wealth of documents seized in a 2004 FBI raid in Virginia that has been described as “the archives of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.”

While the organization has long denied that the Memorandum and the plan were real, its existence was recently acknowledged in a lecture at the Islamic Association of Raleigh in North Carolina. Muslim Brotherhood supporters in the West work hard to shield these views from scrutiny and to obscure the movement’s ultimate objectives. But they are backed by equally explicit statements, by Brotherhood leaders.

Further proof of this plan is the PowerPoint presentation by Muslim Brotherhood leader Tareq Al-Suwaidan. Titled “Change Project – Towards the New Islamic Civilization – Ideas for Today and Tomorrow,” the “project,” which was published in 2011, is now in what he calls “Phase 4 (2025-2030)” – five years short of projected completion. It stresses that “today, we are far” from Islam’s previous “position of leadership in almost all aspects of civilization” and that “it is obvious that we need to change and regain our position.”

Defining the need for “military strength” for Muslims, it underlines the “number of nuclear warheads” as a vital part of “the process of transitioning from today’s reality to the desired future vision.” Al-Suwaidan himself has emphasized his focus on radicalizing Muslim youth in the West who, he says, have the dual power of Islamic identity alongside Western citizenship and professional training and can lead “the rise of the East” and the spread of Islam.

Over the past three decades, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has documented and translated hundreds of sermons, speeches, writings, and official texts by Brotherhood leaders and senior figures, constituting a massive archive exposing the organization’s open embrace of jihad and predictions of the destruction of the U.S. It is only through these systematic translations, documentation, and analysis that the Brotherhood’s true goals, methods, and global coordination have been brought into the open.

Muhammad Badie, the Brotherhood’s General Guide who has been imprisoned in Egypt since 2017, has repeatedly declared jihad to be the only path forward, urging the raising of “a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life.” He also sets out the Brotherhood’s long-term objective: establishing a “rightly guided Caliphate” that would achieve global “mastership.” In sermons, Badie calls the U.S. a “Zio-American” enemy of Islam, proclaiming that America is “heading toward its demise” and that it will be destroyed.

These views are not unique to Badie. His predecessor, Muhammad Mahdi Othman ‘Akef, similarly predicted that Islam would “invade Europe and America,” also expressing confidence that the U.S. was “heading toward its demise.” Such statements reflect the organization’s own stated objectives, articulated repeatedly by its most senior leadership.

The U.S.’s designation and sanctioning of three overseas branches of the Muslim Brotherhood may be a start – but only if it continues to deal with the serious, multifaceted threat and vital security concern it poses not only to the U.S. but to all Western democracies, using all legal means to protect against it. The Trump administration should next examine Brotherhood operations inside the U.S., demand transparency from affiliated U.S.-based Islamist organizations, and apply foreign influence laws. Instead of granting legitimacy to Brotherhood-aligned groups and activists posing as champions of civil rights, policymakers must expose the movement’s ideological goals and deny these networks the access that has allowed them to entrench themselves so deeply in American higher education and other institutions.

Steven Stalinsky Ph.D. is the Executive Director at MEMRI

Originally posted at MEMRI.

Source: The Muslim Brotherhood Threat to the United States | RealClearWorld

It has been 75 years since a young Yale graduate, William F. Buckley, indicted his alma mater in his masterful God and Man at Yale, arguing that Yale showed contempt for the traditional religious values inculcated in most new graduates during their formative youth. In the three generations since, Americans more generally have become far less religious, evidenced by a sharp drop in church attendance. But a few years ago, something happened in this march towards an agnostic, if not an atheistic society: young men started going back to church in impressive numbers.

A new Gallup poll says 42 percent of men in their 20s say religion is “very important” to them, up very sharply from only 28 percent in a poll conducted just three years earlier. By contrast, there is no similar spiritual upsurge among women, so now a far higher proportion of young men say that they are religious than women, a startling result since historically women have shown a stronger affinity for religion, and that still holds for older age groups. Speaking anecdotally from the vantage point of living in a college town, I have seen a marked upsurge in church attendance at my rather typical state university, concentrated among men, to be sure, with some occasionally bringing along their girlfriends. (Read “Catholic Converts and the Limits of the Trend” and “Why Are So Many Protestant Students Converting to Catholicism?“)

Why is this happening? I think it is because college-aged American males feel like they are part of an oppressed minority group, and that American collegiate society shows hostility and contempt for them. The secular world of the present has replaced a historic role of venerating men for their leadership in the evolution of Western civilization with a new one where males are portrayed for having caused most of the evil inflicted in modern society.

In the last decade, the federal government, namely the U.S. Department of Education, declared that male campus sexual molestation was a huge problem, beginning a period of Star Chamber justice directed against collegiate males and their alleged propensity for sexual violence. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives were explicitly anti-male as well. Even TV commercials have sharply reduced the use of male actors, especially white ones. History was refashioned, with figures like Thomas Jefferson portrayed increasingly as wealthy, randy white guys who raped slaves when they were not otherwise mistreating them, as opposed to their earlier veneration for such things as authoring the Declaration of Independence or founding the University of Virginia.

The young U.S. male college student of, say, 1970 or even 2000 felt like they were part of a gender that had done many great things for society, like leading innovations in business that propelled the nation to unprecedented prosperity, as well as a host of positive advances such as ending slavery—the overwhelming majority of the over 600,000 Civil War deaths were among white males—and expanding life expectancy through scientific innovations. College-age guys were proud of their male heritage.

Even as late as 2010, men were generally proud of their important, even dominant, role in the positive evolution of our prosperous and largely peaceful society. But the Woke Revolution that came after 2010 changed all of that. In campus narratives, men were now part of the problem, not the solution. Men started searching for solace and relief from discriminatory oppression, especially notable on many campuses, where they were also now distinctly numerically in the minority.

Religion offered comfort. The dominant Christian religion venerated a male, Jesus Christ, while other religious perspectives, such as Islam, largely did the same thing. Venerated figures such as Jesus, Mohammed, and the Buddha were guys. The Roman Catholic and some Protestant denominations, even now, require priests and ministers to be men. In the religious world, men were not all bad; indeed, they were usually considered a force for good, for solace, prosperity, wisdom, and progress, and while imperfect morally, the Bible and other holy works suggested that their sins could be forgiven.

So, increasingly today, young men are seeking the solace that religion can provide. “The Collegiate War on Men” did not apply to women, who indeed increasingly were achieving new heights both on campuses and in the real world of business and politics. So while women far outnumber men in religious devotion in older age groups, they are very often a minority these days in church attendance among young Americans.

Upsurges in religious devotion are fairly common throughout American history, but this one is unique in its male emphasis. As the Woke Supremacy embodied in DEI programs continues to face mounting pushback on college campuses, it will be worth watching whether gender patterns in religious affiliation begin to return to their earlier historical norms.

Source: The Return of the Religious Male — Minding The Campus