It’s not uncommon to hear people warning that the United States is on the brink of a dangerous abyss. It’s less common, though, to hear people back up their statements with both hard data and the authority of God’s Word.

Ben Carson, famed neurosurgeon and the 17th secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, has done just that in his book The Perilous Fight, coauthored with his wife, Candy.

“The reason I wrote this book, The Perilous Fight—and you’ll recognize those words from our national anthem—is because we are in a fight right now for the soul of our nation,” Carson said during a July 25 book signing at the Billy Graham Library. More than 650 people came to hear Carson and have him sign copies of the book.

So what is this perilous fight? Carson explains in the book’s introduction: “We are facing an enemy who wishes to destroy us, not with rockets, bombs or ballistics of any kind, but from within.” Specifically, Carson sees this enemy attacking two essential pillars of American society: faith and the nuclear family.

From the opening pages of the book, Carson backs up his arguments with facts gleaned from the Brookings Institution, Princeton University, U.S. Census data, the Pew Research Center and others. 

One study concluded that strong families have an impact that can be measured far beyond the family itself. Researchers found that higher levels of married-parent families were “strongly associated” with economic growth and stability at the state level.

Various experts have suggested reasons why such families tend to produce children who become successful adults, such as two-parent households being more economically efficient than other kinds of families. Carson sees a deeper reason:

“Children thrive in nuclear families for the same reason birds thrive in nests,” he writes. “They were created to do so. We know that because the Creator of human beings—who is also the Creator of the family—laid out the guidelines for families in the Bible, which is His manual for life.”

Carson quotes Genesis 1:27-28, which teaches that God created man in His own image, male and female, and told them to be fruitful and to have dominion over every living thing.

“Here is the principle,” Carson writes: “God designed the family to be the foundation for human life in our world.”

People who know the story of Carson’s childhood may wonder why someone who came from a broken family and nevertheless became extraordinarily successful and productive would argue so strongly for married, two-parent families.

After all, his mother married at age 13, only to find out years later, when Ben was 8, that her husband was a bigamist who had another family she knew nothing about. After that discovery, Ben and his brother, Curtis, rarely saw their father again. Still, Carson excelled in school, attended Yale University and became the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, before serving as a Cabinet member during Donald Trump’s presidency.

Carson says he could easily have been sucked into a destructive lifestyle in his youth, as others did whom he knew. But he points to his mother’s hard work—holding down three jobs to support herself and the boys, her compassion for others and her deep Christian faith as key elements that helped to steer him in the right direction. In a 2004 interview with Decision, he described how he put his faith in Jesus Christ at age 8. In his book, he writes that, following his mother’s footsteps, he developed the discipline of “praying about virtually everything.”

But, today, families are suffering, and Carson believes that America is in serious decline as a result. The Perilous Fight sheds light on many of the forces attacking faith and family: socialism, wokeness, government control of personal lives, government-sponsored censorship, activists who push children into harmful and irreversible transgender procedures, schools that usurp parental authority, and organizations such as Black Lives Matter, which holds as one of its founding principles that it seeks to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”

But as bleak as the situation may seem, Carson sees reason for hope. He lays out a number of practical ways that individuals can fight—for their own family and for families in general.

“The easiest and most effective step you can take,” he writes, “is to pour yourself into loving, serving and enjoying your own family—and to make that same decision every day. Make your family a foundational priority in your life, and then don’t allow anything to push your family out of that coveted spot.”

Citing examples from people in his own life, he also challenges his readers to invest in the lives of others in their communities: “When you see needs to be met, meet them. When you see people who need help, help them. And especially when you see families in danger of succumbing to the relentless assault seeking to destroy them, step in and offer support.”

And in his remarks prior to his book signing at the Billy Graham Library, Carson identified the key to victory in this perilous fight: “We have to return to our faith in God, and that’s what will stop our downward spiral.” ©2024 BGEA

Photo: Courtesy of Ben Carson