Martha Beck: Dad Almighty

The God-Father

Sociobiologists hypothesize that the intense link between fathers and children makes evolutionary sense: Fathers who claim, protect, and provide for their offspring are more likely to have surviving heirs, so nature "selects for" paternal attachment. If you don't like cold evolutionary logic, you might prefer a religious approach. Christianity, the world's most widespread religious tradition, calls God the father; other religions and cultural traditions, from Judaism to Islam to Confucianism, support social systems that are heavily patriarchal.

This is true not only in the macrocosm of culture but in the microcosm of the mind. Children of good men often start out with an almost naive sense of a just universe. Those fathered by bad men may live in a world ruled by evil, where they can never feel safe. Absent, deceased, or unknown dads become huge question marks, bequeathing to their children a lifetime of wondering and imagining.

Our fathers give us half our DNA but more than half of many identifying characteristics—things as basic as a surname or as complex as social status. Despite a half-century of skyrocketing single parenthood (a trend that has only just started to reverse) and increasing gender equality, many of us lived in homes where fathers—or at least father figures—made the rules. Fathers usually have supreme power to permit and forbid, meaning they not only dominate but create our reality. They establish the way things are, or in other words father rules.