Reflecting on the conditions for the maintenance of republican government (what we would today call “democracy”), James Madison observed that “a well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.” In the same vein, John Adams famously remarked that “our Constitution is made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

The founders of the American republic understood that even the best constitutional structures and formal constraints on political power aren’t worth the paper they are printed on if people do not understand them, value them, and have the will to resist the blandishments of those offering something tempting in return for giving them up or allowing them to be violated without swift and certain political retribution.

People lacking in virtue can be counted on to trade liberty for protection, financial or personal security, comfort, being taken care of, or having their problems solved quickly. And there will always be those occupying or standing for public office who are happy to offer that deal—in return for an expansion of their power.

The question then arises: To whom, or to what institution or institutions, do we who wish to preserve republican democracy look to form the hearts and minds of our people, to help make them worthy of freedom and capable of preserving a republican civic order against temptations to trade it away? It is certainly not to the state itself; nor is it to economic institutions or courts. It is first and foremost the family.

Russell Kirk once observed that “the family is held together by the strongest of human bonds—by love, and by the demands of self-preservation.” Those of us who seek to preserve and defend our republican civic order must recognize that the pre-political institution of the family—whose preeminent status among our loyalties, obligations, and attachments makes it, to co-opt Edmund Burke’s language, the “germ of public affections”—is the most important inculcator and transmitter of the virtues necessary for the exercise of responsible citizenship in any system of self-government.

Thus, everyone should be concerned about ideologies, practices, and policies that undermine the family, including those that today massively contribute to or abet widespread family dissolution and failures of family formation. Law and policy pertaining to the family must embrace a sound understanding of marriage—which, in my view, is marriage understood precisely and only as the conjugal union of husband and wife—and support a healthy culture of marriage. Family integrity and family structure crucially matter, as the sociologist Mark Regnerus showed in his reviled and slandered but now fully vindicated family structures study. And whatever ideologies, practices, and policies weaken the marriage culture and thus harm the institution of the family—including pornography, promiscuity, the mainstreaming of non-marital sexual cohabitation, widespread out-of-wedlock child-bearing, and various other elements or artifacts of the sexual revolution—are matters of legitimate and serious public concern.

To be sure, the family is but one of the nongovernmental institutions of civil society (what Burke famously referred to as the “little platoons”) that sustain a culture in which self-government can flourish and endure—where people are fitted out to exercise political and personal freedom responsibly, and institutions of government perform their essential roles and stay within their constitutional bounds. Religious communities, educational institutions, and a panoply of private associations are all, in their own ways, in the business of transmitting essential virtues. Such associations, which Tocqueville recognized as crucial to American democracy’s success, function as mediating institutions that provide a buffer between the individual and the power of the central state. But it is the marriage-based family that stands out as the most significant because it does the heavy lifting when it comes to instilling in people in their most formative years honesty, self-restraint, self-discipline, fairness, concern for others, public-spiritedness, and all the other virtues necessary for people to live well, be good citizens, and participate constructively in the enterprise of self-government.

As provocative as it may be to say it today in academic and other elite circles, it is true that anyone—progressive or conservative—who wants to be a defender of democracy must also defend the family.