Optimist Sees Change Coming to Massachusetts

Churches Must Become Involved

Mass News Photo: Robert H. Bradley

March 2001
By Susan Greenleaf

After commanding a boat on the rivers and coastline of Vietnam as an officer in the U.S. Navy and working 14 years overseas with Citibank, Robert H. Bradley, Wellesley, came back home in 1985 to find that the social and political environment here had changed dramatically.

“I felt that Massachusetts desperately needed an organization which would try to strengthen families and uphold the values which the country was built upon, which are Judeo-Christian in origin,” he says.

Bradley believes now that the churches must get involved. “I’ve come to the conclusion that unless the churches are willing to stand up in the public square and take a stand on the moral issues, whether it be marriage, divorce or sexuality, we will not make progress. They must say, ‘Enough is enough. We’re going to be involved and we understand our place is to be fighting for these great modern issues.’ If they don’t, I think we’ll ultimately lose. But our job is to try and help fulfill and encourage that to happen, for the churches to get involved.”

He says that when you start an organization, especially in a liberal state like Massachusetts, it’s difficult because if you pursue it in certain ways, you’re almost immediately marginalized as being irrelevant or bigoted or the religious right. So from the very beginning, he always insisted that the Massachusetts Family Institute be of the highest quality and always be backed up by solid research.

“The idea is to make a difference over time. We always need more people to be involved who are willing to stand up and be counted with their principles and their financial resources. I’m not a pessimist. I think that any great idea or any great movement takes thirty- to fifty-years to happen. Whether you look at the abolition of slavery in this country or in England or at the Women’s Suffrage Movement, it takes a long time. So I’m an optimist.”

A graduate of Williams College, Bradley and his wife, Nancy, are the parents of three grown children. He works full-time for his investment management firm in Connecticut called Bradley, Foster & Sargent, Inc. which he started in 1993. Besides volunteering as treasurer for missions for the large Park Street Church in Boston, he has been Chairman of the Board of the Massachusetts Family Institute since 1992.

He says they held their first fund-raiser in the fall of 1989, raised only $3000 and had nobody to hire.

But things have changed markedly since then. There’s been a solid core of directors who have stayed on the Board of Directors for seven or eight years. “It’s been a team effort,” Bradley commented.

“We try to be the organization in the public policy arena that stands up for the family and defends it and makes people aware of trends and research and tries to advocate for it in the public square. We advocate for the family on Beacon Hill, to the legislators and the media. We’re often called to be on TV and radio to speak on the issues and debates.”

The MFI began in the early years with a number of outstanding seminars and had four or five thousand people attend them. Then it began publishing twenty- and thirty-page studies on different family related issues such as gambling, welfare reform and its relationship to out-of-wedlock births in the state.

“Each year we would do one of these and then have a press conference. The final one was on sex-ed and abstinence in the public school system. So they were very well researched, well-written, well-documented articles that were disseminated on talk TV and talk radio,” Bradley said.

Then the MFI began to develop a very impressive thirty-page report on “Fatherlessness in Massachusetts.

“We think that somewhere around 30% of all Massachusetts children have no father at home. If you look at prisons you see that most of the men did not have a father at home. And if you look at the women, often they have turned to early promiscuity for the same reason. So that’s a major heart breaker and something we wanted to document,” said Bradley.

One of the more recent efforts, Bradley said, has been working on the Defense of Marriage Act. They sponsored a bill two years ago to pass a law, which would define marriage as only between one man and one woman. “When that was sponsored, there were press conferences and hearings and there’s another effort on right now where a coalition of groups is trying to get that passed. That we feel is a major effort because ultimately, if the institution of marriage is the very heart of the family and you begin to change the definition of the family, where do you stop?” said Bradley.

To contact the Massachusetts Family Institute you can log onto their website at www.mafamily.org or call 617-928-0800.

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