R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 399

Transcript: A Culture increasingly Hostile to Men? A Conversation with Psychologist Helen Smith

Thinking in Public – Dr. Helen Smith

September 16, 2013

Dr. R. Albert Mohler

 

Mohler:            This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

 

Dr. Helen Smith is a forensic psychologist, a well-known writer who has written for a variety of publications including the Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee and Master’s Degrees from the New School for Social Research and The City University of New York. She’s a widely quoted commentator, a frequent spokesperson in the media, and she’s also a very active blogger. She’s also the author of a very important new book entitled Men on Strike: Why Men are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matters. Dr. Helen Smith, welcome to Thinking in Public.

 

Smith:              Thank you so much for having me on.

 

Mohler:            You know, this is a topic that you announce so clearly in the title of your book, and there’s an elegant simplicity and directness to that. But I’m going to ask you the same question I ask almost every author on this program: Why did you write this book?

 

Smith:              Well, I wrote this book because there are a lot of books out there, and they are all about how men are not getting married or going to college or whatever. And there are books like The End of Men or Man Enough or Save the Males, they have a slightly negative tone because the basic message of these books are that men are acting immaturely. My point for writing the book was that men are acting rationally. That the rewards for men in the fields of marriage, education, career, and fatherhood are a lot less than they used to be, and the cost and dangers are higher. And so men are opting out. But I think it’s important because so many men around the country, and you’ve probably experienced this yourself, I think so many men are talking about marriage or relationships and they talk to each other sometimes, or they talk to themselves. And people can’t quite figure out why men don’t want to be engaged in these types of relationships as much anymore. And so I think the book is a good starting place to sort of understand what’s happening; what are the cultural and the societal reasons that men aren’t wanting to commit the way they used to.

 

Mohler:            We’re going to talk about the three strikes that you say men have declared: a strike on marriage, a strike on education, especially higher education, and a strike on work in the larger engagement with society. But I find the most revolutionary part of your argument, the part that you just mentioned, moral ethicists, philosophers, sociologists, looking at why people behave the way they do deploys several theories. One of them is called as you would well know Rational Choice Theory. You’re the first person I know to apply Rational Choice Theory to this equation, and I think it’s very important. In other words you’re arguing that men in showing these different and new patterns of behavior are actually making what is in their own minds a rational choice.

 

Smith:              Well, that’s just human behavior. But I think as a society we have to realize that the more of the behavior we reward – you get more of the behavior you reward and less of the behaviors that you punish. And we’re rewarding men being marriage material or providers or anything we’re rewarding that less and less and punishing it more. When you think about even marriage like fifty years ago man was sort of the head of the household or looked up to and treated with respect. And now married men are seen as less of a man by society, by the media, and in event even if he has kids instead of being Ward Cleaver he’s seen more as kind of an idiot, especially in the media and that sort of thing. I agree that I don’t know why we don’t think that men have rational choice and that somehow even other men tell men just to “man up” and go ahead and keep doing the things that society expects of them. But this question becomes: why should they? Why should they be involved in a system that’s so stacked against them? It doesn’t make any sense. We wouldn’t say that if it was about women. If women were getting a raw deal somehow we’d say, “Oh, well of course they’re not going to do that.” But with men we’re just like, “Well, you better man up and do whatever society expects of you even if you are getting as much out of the deal.”

 

Mohler:            Well, to show how this works let’s go to that first issue you address which is the marriage strike. You quote Glenn Sacks and Diana Thompson who have written that American men are now subconsciously launching what they call a marriage strike.

 

Smith:              Yes, and they say that it is mainly for reasons of family ___ because of the divorce issues. But actually I think it’s even more than that. I wrote a blog post over at the Huffington Post and it’s called “8 Reasons Straight Men Don’t Want To Get Married” and some of the things I looked at is that men, basically the summary of what I found just from talking to men and from getting men on my blog and from just the thousands of men I’ve talked to over the years in therapy that some of the things they say about getting married is: Number one reason they don’t’ want to get married is they’ll lose respect. They just feel like they don’t have the kind of respect, and I think going back to the culture I think we treat men in a way that says that they’re not important and that trickles down to the greater community. One of the things that James Macnamara, he is a communications professor in Sydney, Australia, and he did research and he found that 69% of mass media reporting and commentary on men was unfavorable. And that’s compared with 12% favorable and 19% neutral. And I think when you think about that, when you’re looking at it and saying almost 70% of the time when men are portrayed in the media they’re portrayed as a predator, a goofball, a deadbeat, and that just sends a very negative message about how men are to be treated. So I think this loss of respect is a big aspect of why men feel that they don’t want to be involved in marriage as often.

 

Mohler:            You know, you correctly draw the attention to the fact that for most of human history, not just most of our recent American history, but from Adam and Eve we might say onward the mark of adulthood for most men has been marriage. And that’s just not happening. We’ll talk about some of those statistics in a moment. But in one particular set of sentences in your book I think you distill something that no one else has really gotten to in this way. You ask the question: What is it about our society that has made growing up seem so attractive to men? You answer: “Maybe there is no incentive to grow up anymore. It used to be that being a grown up, responsible man was rewarded with respect, power, and deference. Now you get much less of that if any at all.” I think that’s a very profound insight.

 

Smith:              Yea, I just don’t think that there isn’t any incentive to grow up, and to grow up and to have a bad situation where you don’t have respect. In fact, men even say things like you know you lose out on sex. They’ve done studies that show that people who live together actually have more sex than married men. That doesn’t even make sense. And there’s really not much men can do about it in our culture because they’re told you need to do what your wife wants, you’re sort of on the out-skirts, or you’re not supposed to expect anything because we tell women today they’re so empowered and that whatever they want goes. So I think that really for a lot of men it makes them feel that a relationship just isn’t the best way to show that you’re grown up.

 

The other thing is that being a grown up today it’s not just men it’s women too, but I think our society there isn’t a reward. And even in the greater society when we look at what kinds of rewards we have, we don’t reward people for working. I mean look at what’s coming out today we find out that more and more people are leaving the work force. Now some of that is voluntary. But one of the fascinating things is that they found that fewer and fewer men are in the work force. And even before the recession started fewer men were in the work force. And one of the reasons Charles Murray in Coming Apart, the book he wrote, he found that more and more men are pursuing leisure activities. So men today people see them as not being grown up, and in a certain since because of rational choice and because they’re life is somewhat better if they spend their time doing leisure pursuits instead of being seen as the butt of jokes, being married to…And I know you wrote a book about this; I actually saw a post you did on your website a few years ago, talking about how young people don’t want to be married anymore. And one of the things a young man in your post said was he was seventeen years old and he said I’m always told that a wife will call you twenty times a day and she’ll bother you. And a lot of men it goes back to losing your freedom and also losing space. And I talk about that in the book, about losing male space, that when men get married now they’re sort of relegated down to the basement in what we call now this “man cave” and there’s a lot of decline of male space in our society. You know organizations even to some degree somewhat religion, but I think it’s more the Elks club or the old clubs that men used to belong to are seen as suspect. And men are not really allowed to get together and if they do get together everybody sort of says, well, they try to break that apart. So if men want to sort of get together with each other and talk in either the Boy Scouts, they’re always intruded upon in some way, whether that be women wanted to break into no all-men’s clubs, they don’t want men to have gyms of their own, and there are many laws in states that say that men can’t have these types of all-men or all-male situations where as women can. And I think that we’ve lost a lot. I think that men do need other men to talk to. In the past they used to talk to other men and they help themselves solve problems; if they had a problem in the relationship or they had a problem at home there was a men’s group they could go talk to.

 

Mohler:            And even where it wasn’t perhaps as upfront as that I can give personal testimony to the fact that watching my father and uncles and the community of men alongside me as I grew up, and grandfathers and all the rest. And I had all of them I’m thankful to say. When it came to raising kids and all the rest they kind of held each other accountable without having to say that’s what they were doing.

 

Smith:              Exactly, they did hold each other accountable. And at the same time there was some camaraderie there, and there was a place where a guy could go and he felt like there was somebody else that he could turn to. And now men are so isolated. And I think for men, I looked at a study lately they did, and they found that men are just as depressed as women; that men tend to have different ways of showing depression. They tend to become more angry or sullen or turn away. And I think in old times men used to have other men to talk to, and now men, especially if they’re married, are sort of isolated and all they have is the family who generally doesn’t see them as, they’re almost like an accessory in a certain way. And maybe they go down to their man cave. But I think having that whole group of guys who they could talk to and who they could be around, and like you said, hold accountable in some ways. Now what happens is the society holds them accountable but they don’t give them any privileges at the same time. When you look at it in a certain sense women have privileges but they aren’t held accountable. And that would be in a lot of different realms, like in the domestic realm especially if men get divorced, women basically get custody of the kids the majority of the time, around 80% of the time. Men tend to pay the majority of alimony, around 93%, actually I think it’s even higher than that, but men pay the alimony. And a lot of times they don’t even get the time with their kids. So men in relationships are held to a very high standard. So I think men today feel that if I make a mistake I’m going to pay for it the rest of my life. So a lot of men are just deciding I’m not going to do that.

 

Mohler:            Very interesting. The suggestion that men have gone on a strike perhaps subconsciously or unconsciously so, a strike related to marriage and the workplace and education, the big question is not only the “what” has happened, but “why?” And that’s why a conversation like this gets us right where we need to think. You actually distill some things down into almost quintessential sentences, and, for instance, you write this: “The real reason many rational men do not marry is that the incentives have changed and growing up is no longer a reward but a punishment for men. So why do it?” I haven’t seen anyone actually encapsulate the issue quite so clearly.  I do think it’s right. I think in the view of many, especially younger men, growing up is not so much a reward but a punishment; they lose something rather than gain something in their own minds.

 

Smith:              Right, I think they do. And at the same time we see young men who are lost. A lot of young guys are lost. We have so many of these books about boys who fail or how the decline of men or whatever. And I think that what it is that men are opting out and they’re not really seeing the reason to so called grow up because grow up really means do what we want you to do and don’t ask any questions. And if you’re not being rewarded for something there is nothing there for you. People say well you can have a relationship and you’re getting companionship of a woman, but you can have that without marriage. And the marriage actually now today is a legal contract not through necessarily the church or anything but it’s through our government and our state laws that really put a bootstrap against men. And, for example, men pay the majority of child support in this country. And if they don’t pay child support which often can be very, very high, between that and sometimes alimony, men, if they don’t pay it, they can be put in jail. I recently had a post up on my blog talking about this very issue. There was an article where a man in New Jersey was making a million dollars a year. And he’s now lost his job. And because he can’t pay his wife and the kids $100,000 alimony he’s been in and out of jail now for over three years. So people think, oh this is just something that happens to some deadbeat dad, but it’s not. And at the same time this man said that when he talked about his case people would just say, “well you’re a wife beater.” But that’s what you get. Nobody cares about men. They don’t care about their struggles. They don’t care about their problems. And the one statistic that I point out in the book is that 38,000 people a year kill themselves in this country. And over 30,000 of those are men. And the thing is men, a lot of times, do get depressed in middle age and that’s when they’re going through some of these divorces and these situations that nobody really cares about. And men are much more final. They have a lot of anger and frustration and what they do they take their own life because they don’t want to turn to others, or usually it’s because nobody else will help them. And I think this is a really sad situation. And what’s sadder to me is that most people don’t care because they either don’t think about it, or they think because it’s men it doesn’t matter. It only matters if women and children hurt, not if a man does.

 

Mohler:            And of course that’s kind of the back side of the equation here.  And as many younger men, especially in a secular frame of mind, are looking at what you describe as a cost/benefit analysis I can see as your book makes very clear that for many of them the cost seem higher than the benefits in their analysis of not only marriage but of growing up. But of course marriage as important as that is, and we’ll get back to that in a moment, is only one of the issues you address in your book. And now to others we want to turn as well including the strike on education. You’re talking about the fact that men are striking from college.

 

Smith:              Well, it’s almost like they just never make it there. I have a chapter in the book called “The College Strike.” And maybe that’s almost beyond what’s happening. Because what’s happening is men are just not making it into college. Right now it’s about 57% women, 43% men, and that’s growing where they think in the next ten  years it could be as many as 60% women going to college. One of the reasons for that is younger men in the elementary school grades often having failing grades, they often don’t do well, a lot of boys can’t read or don’t do well in those areas. And they’re disconnected from schools because schools in some sense over the last forty to fifty years have become places that are much more suitable for girls than they are for boys. And we worry so much about what girls need and how we make that happen. Like if we see that girls are lagging behind in science we immediately say okay we have to do something; we have to find books that girls like to read; we have to find a way to teach girls that will make them want to go into science or make them want to understand math better. But we don’t look at boys and we don’t say okay these boys can’t read; what can we do? And a lot of boys are sitting in schools and they’re told to stay quite. We’ve taken away recess, and Christina Hoff Sommers talks about this in her book The War on Boys, she talks a lot about what young men are facing in this country and how we don’t have any competition in schools. We have done away with dodge ball, we’ve done away with recess, and boys are sort of left sitting there and being handed books written by Tony Morrison or other female writers that sometimes they really can’t connect to. The saddest thing to me is that I’ve talked to boys around the country and one of the things a 14 year old boy said to me was that he wanted to start a boy’s group in his school. And he said that not one male teacher or female teacher in his school in New York City was brave enough to help him start that club. But they just said you know we can’t do that because they didn’t want to have an all-boys club in the school, whereas there are a million all-girls clubs, a Latino club, there’s an African-American club, but they can’t have a boys’ club. And I talk about that some in the book about there was one southern school that did start a men’s law group in a law school. And they were able to successfully do that. So I talk to men in the book about how do you go about reclaiming some of that space. And some of that can be worked out, but some of it is some of the schools they just will not allow that type of thing.

 

Mohler;            You quote Christina Hoff Sommers actually from an interview that you did with her in which she says this, “Young men are not going to whine about their predicament. They’re not going to organize workshops or support groups, thank goodness. Teenage boys are the one group of Americans who do not like to gather in circles and talk about grievances and misgivings. So what will they do? My guess is,” she says, “that vast numbers will just stop trying and withdraw. It would not be an organized strike. It would just happen. It is happening.” I think it is happening undeniably.

 

Smith:              It absolutely is happening, and the thing is that nobody really does anything about it; nobody really mentions it because we’re only supposed to talk about women. And what is amazing to me is this book is so rare. To me it seems like there should be a million books about this. And one of the reasons, in the beginning of our interview you ask authors why did you write this book. And one of the reasons I did is I sat for years waiting for someone to write it. And I thought maybe a guy will write it. But unfortunately men really can’t even speak up on these issues because….

 

Mohler:            It looks like special pleading.

 

Smith:              Yea. It’s like men if they do speak up are called sexist, misogynists, they won’t be given a microphone, and so it seems unfortunate to me that a small book like mine even commands any media attention. What it should be, there should be tons of books like this, and we should be working towards making things equal for boys and girls in our schools and for men and women. It’s not a zero sum game. It isn’t that if women do better men do worse, if men do better women do worse. It’s how can we make a community and how can we have a culture where both are doing well, and that we do recognize, and I think one of the things especially in the secular world people want to believe there are no differences in men and women or boys and girls; everybody’s exactly the same, we learn the same way, we do the same things, we want the same things. But that’s not the case, and yet in the extremes there are outliers, there are girls who certainly are just as active as boys, and there are boys who are just as sensitive and everything as girls. If you just sort of look at it in general we have to understand that boys sometimes do learn differently than girls, men do need different things then women. And that that’s okay.

 

Mohler:            Well, indeed. That’s one of the things that we note not only in school but in the larger society. But getting back to schools for a moment, you quote Sommers and also other authorities and offer your own thoughts. And basically if I could kind of paraphrase a section of your book here, you’re arguing that one of the agendas of education in terms of those who are running the schools, and not only say middle schools and high schools, but for that matter the colleges is to make males less masculine as what they think is a way of serving society.

 

Smith:              Yes, and we even see that in the social sciences. And it really is disturbing. But all the social sciences most of the research that comes out we see that we’re always told that masculinity somehow is negative, that’s it’s bad, that you’ll get depressed, it’s sick, the testosterone needs to be stopped, it creates problems. We never see the wonderful things that it creates. I think we really need to stop and think about what we’re doing; we’re trying to decry masculinity; we’re trying to say that it’s something negative. And when you do that a lot of guys they pick up on that and they’re like, you know, if it’s that negative, if you think my masculinity is that negative, what we see is that a lot of especially young boys don’t, they’re told that what they are is such a bad thing that I think they just sort of turn inwards and they go to playing video games or they do other things that will give them this sort of sense of mastery and control. And I think that’s one thing that guys love about video games is you can get when the world is telling you that you’re no good or that being male is somehow wrong or negative or creates war and problems, then I think you sort of turn away and you look for other things that tell you that being masculine is good and that mastery is real and the ability to defend yourself and your country is positive. And I think that’s one of the reasons I think that young men and middle aged men like video games so much. But I agree that the schools do see masculinity as negative. And even in the colleges now, I talk in the book about the problem on campus with men being told they’re perverts, rapists; we see this due process where colleges were sent out a Dear Colleague letter by the Obama Administration telling them that they had to lower the preponderance of evidence against young men. And now everything has turned into sexual assault if a young man is found, if a woman accuses him of sexual assault all they have to do is a campus tribunal, a group of administrators, says, oh okay we think it’s 50% sure that you did it; not 90%, not 99% like we would have in a criminal trial. But we just think you did it and that young man can be thrown out of school, they can be disciplined, they might not be able to get a job. And people think that that’s rare, but it’s not that rare. There are many reports of false allegations against young men. And in my opinion, to take away young men’s due process in college is such a destructive thing to do. That is so un-American. The fact that there is no requirement that they be held to a higher standard is unbelievable. And I think young men are a lot of times afraid. They’re told from day one on campus that you are some type of pervert, you might rape a woman, young women are told “watch out”, carry this whistle with you. Watch out who you’re with, there’s date rape. Of course it’s good to warn young men and warn young women and let people know. But to accuse people without evidence is a terrible thing.

 

Mohler:            Well, as an institutional president I got one of those letters from the Department of Education. And I was amazed by it because of the completely amoral context. It’s not as if anyone was really concerned about people here, but about protecting the ability to claim that everyone is concerned about all the right, politically-correct issues here. That’s not to deny that there are genuine problems that need to be addressed. But as you said denying due process is hardly a legitimate way of dealing with the problem.

 

Smith:              No, but that’s the way because it’s men no one really cares. And that due process extends not only from colleges but it also extends to child support and other places where they call something a civil violation if you don’t pay your child support. But yet they can put a man in jail. And there have been reports, there was an MSNBC article talking about there are thousands of men in this country in jail every year for not paying child support. And a lot of those men are poor men who they are not appointed a lawyer because they don’t give you a lawyer even though you’re going to jail. If you cannot afford a lawyer they simply or they tell you don’t even require a lawyer even though they send you to jail for not paying child support payments. And a lot of those are poor men who have lost a job. I mean it’s pitiful. Or even there are types of men like high functioning men such as the one that I talked about in New Jersey where he was making a million dollars a year in some type of financial position and lost that job. That can happen. And then I talk in the book about there are usually two types of men. And some of them are what I call White Knights, and those are men who tend to want to protect women and they’re very chivalrous. And they might be lawmakers, for example Rick Scott who’s the governor in Florida, recently vetoed. There was a bill to reduce permanent alimony in Florida. But he wouldn’t go along with it because he said well there are women counting on this money. Well, somebody’s supposed to pay permanent alimony the rest of their lives even when they’re retired to somebody, money that might be beyond what they can even pay. And somehow this woman who was married for ten years is supposed to be supported in some standard of living that’s way beyond what anybody should even expect. It’s ludicrous. But that’s sort of an example of a White Knight type.

 

And then there is what I call the Uncle Tim’s who are sort of more liberal types who sort of go along with the agenda of feminism because if they want to get more women or they want women to like them, or they want to be liked themselves. It’s sort of a Bill Clinton type where it’s almost like a politician type who gets a lot of kudos for getting laws that he himself wouldn’t fall under, but you know sexual harassment laws and all types of unfair laws to men where they can easily be charged with any type of sexual harassment whether true, false, or nobody cares. And the thing is that I guess what bothers me is a lot of men do care about these issues. But I think that it will take many men caring about these issues and starting a grassroots organization to fight. And men are taught not to fight because men are so afraid. And I talk a lot about that in the book and in the last chapter talking about what can you do. I think that men, it’s a psychological barrier that men don’t know how to proceed with this because, yes, they can fight in wars and they can fight against each other, but they can’t fight against women. It’s too hard. It’s psychologically very hard on them.

 

Mohler:            If you take whether it’s the educational context or the larger cultural context, not to  mention where political correctness factors in in the larger society to try to advocate even for the fact that we have a problem with boys in school, that we have a problem with  young men not being in college, that we have a problem with young men getting into adulthood, and all the rest. Everyone appears to be talking about this except where it matters in terms of the policy circles because they get no reward for taking on these issues.

 

Smith:              Not it there no reward but there’s a back lash against you. You will be pretty much dishonored, disliked. So, you’re right, the reward is greater than that. And you have to say that the reward is the fairness. Where would any fairness be? I mean if we all felt this way then we would never change anything. We would never have gotten rid of slavery. We never would have gotten women’s rights. We never would have gotten many rights that we as American’s have. So I think you have to go beyond that and you have to say that the reward is the justice and doing the right thing; and the fact that we will be helping our brothers, or our fathers, or uncles, our children. I mean to leave boys; I mean the justice is we can’t leave young boys in schools to suffer for this type of injustice, that they can be put in jail, that they could be kicked out of college. There were young, poor boys around there and middle income who can’t read in this country because groups of politically correct people think there’s no use to paying any attention to boys, and that if we help boys we would somehow be short changing girls. I mean the unfairness of it is, I mean, the reward would be to help those young men. And to me maybe because my practice and my life-long work has been with boys and men, to me that’s the reward would be to…I think that anyone who believes in justice…I mean what is the reward of anybody doing anything if we use that analogy to say well there’s…I mean you have to fight back because the reward is worth more than just being seen as a…if you go around and you think well everyone will like me, I mean that doesn’t really mean anything. People will only like you because you’re following a herd mentality.

 

Mohler:            Let me ask you to look to the future here because when we talk about Rational Choice Theory or rational choice on the part of men making these decisions we need to expand that to the society. We also at least collectively are making decisions as a society, as a culture, as a nation. Is it a rational choice for us to determine that this really isn’t a problem? In other words, is it a rational choice for America to let these trajectories continue?

 

Smith:              No, because actually I talk about in the book it will actually end up destroying the society because what we have now is more and more women will simply be raising children alone. More and more men will opt out. What is the use of having a bunch of young guys who are disengaged from the society? More men will drop out; they don’t want to be engaged as often. We touched on this some, but the workforce will be lessened. We will have less taxpayers. We will have fewer children being born. And the fertility rates, I just saw something today on CNN about the fertility rates reaching an all-time low in 2012. In fact I think there are only 63 births per 1,000 women now, and that’s as low as it has been in all the time that they’ve been keeping track of those trends. I know when one of your guests, Jonathan Last, who wrote an excellent book recently about What to Expect When No One’s Expecting talking about what that will mean. What does it mean when fewer and fewer people have children, or the majority of those children are being born to single mothers. We know that 40% of all children, 40% of children born to mother’s under 30 are mothers who are unmarried. And those mothers tend not to make a whole lot of money. They’re making an average of something like $23,000 per year. And what is that going to do to the future of this country. Now for the democrats maybe that’s a good thing; maybe they have a lot more welfare people who are collecting benefits who maybe vote democratic, don’t really care about politics, and that type of thing. But it doesn’t bode well for the country and eventually that type of a system will just it will stagnate at best and explode at worst.

 

Mohler:            Well, and we can see a living picture of that in that nation formerly known as the Soviet Union now known as Russia that’s in a demographic implosion and a social implosion where you’re left with a few oligarchs and with nothing like a functioning society of men who are actually about the task of building a culture, building a nation, building a future, getting married, having children. I mean, you do have a very stark picture in some places of the world, I would think of Russia first of all, of what it looks like if you just let these things continue.

 

Smith:              We do and I think people are very short sighted because they just look at what’s happening immediately. Or they just say – a lot of people tell me with the book, “well, that’s not true; you just interviewed a bunch of disenfranchised men,” but as somebody pointed out once that group is growing. And, yeah, maybe they are disenfranchised; what’s wrong with that? The women’s movement was full of disenfranchised, you know frustrated and upset, women and they changed the culture. Men are the same as women. I mean they don’t go out, they’re not going to burn their bra or whatever; they’re going to have to fight maybe in a different way. But at the same time they can learn something from women, and that is to speak up because these issues are important, that we can’t succeed this conversation to women and their politically correct supporters; that those of us who care, those of us who see what’s happening and who care about young men and boys and potentially the women and the girls who are involved with them, that we need to stand up and say, you know, we need to do something about this and go through and look at the policies that are in place and see how to make those policies more fair on a nationally level. And at a grassroots level we all need to look at a lot of the state laws that we see need to be changed. And you can see some of those grassroots organizations. There’s a group called National Organization of Parents that used to be called Fathers and Families. But they go through and they’ll fight different laws in different states trying to help fathers in particular. And that group is very successful in a lot of ways. There are other groups and people who do make a lot of changes, but I think that we need more people who are out there who are willing to put the time and the work into helping men. Not in a way, like women get upset when they hear this, they think, “Well, they’re trying to send me back to the kitchen.” Well, no, we’re just trying to have an equal society where people of both sexes are treated fairly and where they both want to participate in a society to make it a richer and a more productive society where children and people benefit and do well instead of one that stagnates and becomes more like Russia or other countries where the men just sort of opt out because men opting out is not successful.

 

Mohler:            Oh, clearly. It’s a timely book and a very timely issue. And I want to thank Helen Smith for joining me today for Thinking in Public.

 

Smith:              Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate your time.

 

Mohler:            In her new book Men on Strike Helen Smith gives us a lot of information and some very pointed and, I think, important arguments. This book is also a reminder to us that at times Christians need to read a secular analysis in order to come to terms with the problem even as the secular world sees it. And Helen Smith has certainly helped us in this regard.

 

Her concerns reflect the kind of secular concerns that you would find in someone who is looking at the world around them and saying, “Something is wrong; something’s broken; we need to know what it is, and we need to figure out how to fix it.” And of course Helen Smith really helps us with her candor, demonstrating that the challenge of fixing this problem is made all the more difficult by a society that doesn’t want to admit that the problem exists, or that if it exists, it’s the problem of those who are indeed the victims of the problem.

 

That is another issue itself. Helen Smith engages so many of the books already written in the burgeoning library of books about the boy problem or the man problem. And she suggests that many of them are what she calls a-matronizing; it’s an alternative to patronizing. In other words, they deal with men from a feminine point of view, something that I think she basically escapes in terms of her own book writing nonetheless as a woman. She writes in a way I think men can understand the problem. And she writes with enormous sympathy in terms of the patterns and the pathologies that she observes. But I think she lets men off way too easy in many of her chapters, where, for instance, she tries to suggest that men are just following rational choice. They’re simply doing what appears to be reasonable to them. Rational Choice Theory is a form of moral argument, or sometimes moral explanation that suggests that human beings – this is a secular theory by and large – that human beings make moral and personal decisions based upon what probably is best described as a cost/benefit analysis. In other words what will I get out of this? For instance, in a Rational Choice Theory of the relationship between a child and a parent the Rational Choice theorist would say that they child obeys the parent simply because it’s easier that way; there are more benefits to obedience than disobedience. There are severe limitations from a Christian worldview perspective to Rational Choice Theory. And one of the clearest of those limitations is the fact that we are not according to Scripture merely rational creatures. There is more to us than that. There is a moral capacity that is built into us by our creator; a conscience, indeed, as Paul makes very clear in Romans 2, that goes far beyond what the calculus of a Rational Choice theorist could understand. But we do need to be informed by this kind of thinking. And we do need to understand that Helen Smith is on to something profoundly real when she says that many young men are not growing up because they do a cost/benefit analysis and it appears that they’re giving up more than they’re gaining by growing up.

 

You know she points towards some issues that we should hear related to that and not only in terms of the larger culture but also in the church. What are the privileges of being a man? Why should a boy aspire to grow up? What does it tell us when we have reversed the entire universe such that boys are no longer trying to dress like their fathers, but the fathers are trying to dress like their sons? How is it that we have all of a sudden institutionalized adolescence as where men should aim whether they are younger or older and where, surprisingly enough, many are deciding to stay long after they leave the teenage years?

 

There can be no doubt that men are on strike – from marriage, from education, and from the workforce. And this is going to come with huge costs to the society. Even by a secular analysis it should be rather easy to calculate the disaster that now looms before us when you have all these young men who are simply not going to be functioning agents in the new economy; when so many women who are never going to have husbands, and children who are never going to have fathers, and the pathology there is so very abundantly clear. When you have a society that is beginning to weaken itself by the fact that it is denying young men the privileges of entering into adulthood as an incentive for growing up, getting married, getting a job, keeping a job, and before that getting an education. What you’re doing is sowing the seeds of a societal disaster. But this is where Christians have to come alongside and say that’s a horrifying problem but it’s not the worst of the problem. The worst of the problem is in the souls of these young men, souls that are never encouraged to grow into true adulthood – souls that never develop in terms of the moral and character issues that should define a man as much or more so than what is true of his job and his family and his marriage. Not that those things can be so easily separated. The Christian worldview reminds us that all these moral goods are indeed held together in their goodness by the divine creation of God in such a way that to sever them, any one of them individually or their parts and trying to take them apart, what you end up with is weakening the whole. And of course that’s why a secular analysis of this problem can certainly point to a lot of the pathologies, can even point to some very important political and legal and other societal improvements. But it can’t point to the heart of the problem because the heart of the problem is the human heart.

 

One of the things that becomes abundantly clear looking at this evidence, and Helen Smith has pointed to it very candidly, is that if you give young men the access to the things they demand as teenagers and as young men without the responsibilities for growing up into marriage they’re then not going to take marriage seriously on the other side. And when you then remove all the privileges of adult marriage, you end up with a situation like what you see in many parts of America today where you have young men becoming fathers without marriage and you have young marriage increasingly leading into a hook-up culture that seems to be emulating male promiscuity. And we wonder how did this happen when we as a society sowed the very seeds for this ourselves.

 

There are huge policy implications for this kind of research. For instance, most immediately many people will think of what takes place in the schools where an undeniable feminization of the entire curriculum and the structure has made schools virtually at every level hostile environments for boys and young men. And they get the message. They get the message loudly and clearly and their disengagement from the world of education prior to their disengagement from the world of work is ample evidence of the fact that that message is getting through.

 

Helen Smith has offered us a wealth of argumentation and research in this book, and it’s important because she clearly is on an issue that is not only timely but urgent. Christians looking at this kind of research are prompted by a secular analysis to understand that we share all these concerns and even more. And so we as thinking Christians need to look at this kind of research coming from whatever the source and put it in the context of the Christian worldview and say we see not less here but more. And that should set thinking Christians to thinking. And today we’ve been thinking in public; many thanks to my guest, Dr. Helen Smith, for thinking with me today.

 

Before I close I want to invite you to join us here on the campus of The Southern Seminary on the 26th of September for one extraordinary day to commemorate the life and legacy of Dr. Carl F.H. Henry. Convenient partnership with the Beeson Divinity School, Fuller Theological Seminary, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Union University, this one day event will feature addresses from some of evangelicalism’s most prominent theologians and heirs of Henry’s legacy. 100 years after his birth, Henry’s vision for a confessional and global evangelicalism remains as timely as ever. For more information, go to www.sbts.edu/events.

 

Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public. Until next time, keep thinking. I’m Albert Mohler.

The Briefing 09-16-13

1. 50th anniversary of 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing

Birmingham Sunday, New York Times (Editorial Board)

2. Epic floods in Colorado reminder humans not in control

More than 1,000 unaccounted for in deadly Colo. floods, USA Today (Gary Stoller)

Rain slows rescue efforts amid deadly Colorado floods, CNN (David Simpson. Nick Valencia and Emma Lacey-Bordeaux)

3. 5th anniversary of Wall Street collapse: Have we learned anything?

The Myth of Financial Reform, Time (Rana Foroohar)

4. Sexual Misconduct Guide at Yale University

Yale Tries to Clarify What Sexual Misconduct Is in a New Guide, New York Times (Ariel Kaminer)

The Briefing 09-13-13

1. Pope Francis responses to Eugenio Scalfari, founder of La Repubblica 

Pope Francis tells atheists to ‘obey their conscience’, The Washington Post (Alessandro Speciale)

Pope Francis reaches out to atheists and agnostics, Telegraph (Nick Squires)

2.  Celebrating abortion in a wedding announcement 

Taking Their Very Sweet Time, The New York Times (Linda Marx)

3. Arsenio Hall talks fatherhood

Arsenio Hall Returns to Late Night, NPR (Rachel Martin)

 

 

 

The Briefing 09-12-13

1. Russian President speaks to the American people about the Syrian conflict 

A Plea for Caution from Russia, New York Times (Vladimir Putin)

Syria, chemical weapons, and the worst day in Western diplomatic history, The Telegraph (Charles Crawford)

2. Britain’s shift toward approval of same-sex marriage and away from marriage

Revolution in attitudes to homosexuality is biggest change in generation, Telegraph (John Bingham)

Marriage ‘no longer the foundation stone of family life’, Telegraph (John Bingham)

How Does Secularization Really Happen? A Conversation with Mary Eberstadt, Thinking in Public

3. Transgender student seeks to participate in homecoming

Controversy over Homecoming, Associated Press

4. Millennials bringing Mom and Dad to work

Should You Bring Mom and Dad to the Office?, Wall Street Journal (Anit Hofschneider)

 

The Man from Issachar—An Address at the Inauguration of Russell D. Moore

THE MAN FROM ISSACHAR

An Address Delivered in the City of Washington, D.C. upon the Inauguration of Russell D. Moore as President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention on Tuesday, September 10, 2013 at Capitol Hill Baptist Church by R. Albert Mohler, Jr., President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

            Without a providential understanding of time and history, one is left with the affirmation that human affairs are often guided by a series of very happy coincidences. At just the right time, the right leader emerges to fill a crucial need. The intersection of an individual life and a demonstrable need meet in a moment and in a person. We celebrate just such an intersection today, but I am not able to describe it as a coincidence. I believe that the providence of God is today demonstrated in the intersection of a man and a moment—in the inauguration of Russell D. Moore as President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

First, I point to the character and giftedness of this man. I can remember the very first conversation I had with Russell Moore. In that first meeting, I caught a glimpse of his intelligence, his conviction, and his ambitions. I knew then that he was out to change the world, but that his first loyalty and constant horizon is not this world, but the world that is already but not yet—in other words, not the kingdoms of this world but the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ.

His intellect is first rate, as is his scholarship. He came as a Doctor of Philosophy student and transformed his doctoral dissertation into a manifesto for kingdom ministry and cultural engagement. His intelligence is energetic and his wit always on hand. To talk with Russ is to enter into a world of ideas undergirded by conviction and footnoted with readings.

He is not merely fascinated by ideas, he is a true public intellectual. He belongs to that class of thinkers who are not merely collectors of ideas but movers of minds. He is a master of communicating those ideas and he knows how to make truth come alive as a living force.

He is one of the most natural conversationalists I have ever encountered. He is like the Victorians who could enter any room and join the conversation and immediately add to it. He is a voracious reader who is a walking bibliography and a library on legs. He comes alive when a book or an idea or a problem or a personality comes to attention.

Amitai Etzioni has distinguished between two classes of public intellectuals: those who are generalists (who can speak about anything intelligently) and those who are disciplinary (who can speak with unique authority within a specific field). Russ combines the best of both. He can talk about almost anything; but he talks with the authority of one who knows of what he speaks.

Above all, Russell Moore is a Christian thinker. In this construction, “Christian” operates as a noun, not as an adjective. He does not merely think like a Christian, he thinks as a Christian. His personal commitment to Christ, to the total truthfulness and trustworthiness of the Word of God, and to the faith once for all delivered to the saints is clear and tested. He is a defender of the faith and a Christian intellectual who dearly and deeply loves the Christian faith.

Russell Moore is a Baptist by conviction and a Southern Baptist by passion. He is a member of the tribe who transcends tribalism. He is not a Baptist by accident. His commitment to the free church in a free state and to the elegant simplicity of Baptist ecclesiology is clear. He is a conversionist and a churchman. He is deeply committed to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to the Great Commission. He knows the Southern Baptist Convention and he loves Southern Baptists with an eyes-open love. Thus, he can lead Southern Baptists. The late Carlyle Marney once said of Southern Baptists, “We may not be much but we are many.” Russ Moore is representative of a generation of leaders needed to make much of many.

He is, as no less than Augustine described the Christian teacher, one who is passionately committed to truth because he stakes his life on this truth and is himself transformed by this truth. He is, as our common mentor Carl F. H. Henry would define, a Christian thinker who is unreservedly committed to the totality of the comprehensive truth claim of the Christian world and life view.

All that, and he has a sense of humor. Russ Moore has an ear for irony and a readiness to be found joyful. Like G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, he knows that the deepest truths reveal the deepest joys, even as the reality of our human foibles reveals humor, whether we like it or not. Like Flannery O’Connor, he has an eye for the bare reality of truth, knowing, as Flannery would remind us, “Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

He is a leader who knows how to run a great enterprise. At a very early age he became Dean of the School of Theology at the mother seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention, serving also as its Senior Vice President for Academic Administration. His reputation as a leader is well attested. He is a leader, an administrator, and an energetic catalyst for good. At the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission he comes to a work well established and much respected. He will build it and take it into the future.

He is also a faithful husband and a compassionate father. To know Russ is to know that he is the husband of Maria, and the father of Benjamin, Timothy, Samuel, Jonah, and Taylor. He finds joy in his home, and he has a joyful home in which to establish his life, both public and private. His dependence upon Maria is transparent, as is his joy in his sons.

He is a theologian of conviction, a leader of great ability, a teacher of righteousness, a preacher of rare ability and power, and a thinker who knows how and when and where to think out loud. He is an ethicist by reflex, by training, and by experience. He is a colleague with whom I have spent countless hours in joyful conversation and gone through times of trial and great challenge. I know what he is made of.  I know where he comes from. I know who he is. I know his ambitions. He is not a self-made man, but a man well made for these times.

So we know the man, but what of the times? Twenty-five years ago, Carl Henry warned:

Our generation is lost to the truth of God, to the reality of divine revelation, to the content of God’s will, to the power of his redemption, and to the authority of His Word. For this loss it is paying dearly in a swift relapse to paganism. The savages are stirring again; you can hear them rumbling and rustling in the tempo of our times.[1]

The last quarter century since Henry’s statement of our crisis has brought no reversal of the trends he observed. To the contrary, the formerly Christian West is, in many sectors, so thoroughly secularized that it now has no consciousness of even being so. The Christian truth claim was reduced to a Christian memory, and now even that memory is gone. Our confidence in American exceptionalism is now fully shaken. If anything, America now seems to be secularizing in a delayed pattern, as compared to Europe, but perhaps even faster on its present course. As the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor reminds us, for millions of people in our civilization, and especially among the elites, belief in God is now, according to their own thinking, virtually impossible.

Many decades ago, the Quaker philosopher Elton Trueblood identified America as a “cut-flower civilization”—its flower cut off from the only source of its sustenance. Those roots have further receded from the cultural horizon.

We are now in the midst of a moral revolution marked by a comprehensive scope and velocity that are perhaps without precedent in human experience. We find ourselves looking at a moral world that is changing right before our eyes, and many Christians seem both bewildered and fearful—precisely because they are.

But the real crisis is not in the world, but in the church. More than sixty years ago, Carl Henry (whose 100th birthday we would mark this year), reminded the evangelicals of that day that the failure was ours before it was a failure in the world.

It was the failure of Fundamentalism to work out a positive message within its own framework, and its tendency instead to take further refuge in a despairing view of world history, that cut off the pertinence of evangelicalism to the modern global crisis. The really creative thought, even if done in a non-redemptive context, was now being done by non-evangelical spokesmen.[2]

Through this analysis of the problem, what Henry called The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, he called evangelicals to a new mode of cultural and intellectual engagement.

“There is a rising tide of reaction in Fundamentalism today—a reaction born of uneasy conscience and determined no longer to becloud the challenge of the Gospel in modern times,” Henry wrote. “It is a reaction to which the best minds of evangelicalism are bending their effort these days, convinced that no synthesis is more relevant than modern frustration and biblical redemptionism.”[3]

In other words, he saw a generation coming, and he saw the likes of Russell Moore on the horizon. We dare not underestimate the challenges before us. We are living in a cut-flower civilization. There is a new paganism growing rapidly around us. There are threats to human life and human flourishing at every hand. We do see the ramparts of the family and the faith being both scaled and taken down. Religious liberty is under direct threat and we find ourselves in a moment of great civilizational peril. The culture of death is now institutionalized and made more ominous yet by technology. America has grown more polarized within and seems to be without a clear sense of itself within the international order. The most fundamental, essential, and pre-political institutions of human life and culture are now up for radical revision to the point of destruction. The scale of the crisis defies exaggeration.

And yet, these are precisely the conditions for optimal Christian witness. Under these conditions, the keenest edge of Christian thinking is soon evident and the operation of a genuinely Christian mind is transformative. The church is revealed to be what we know it to be, the kingdom community of the blood-bought, deployed in this world even as we belong truly to the world to come. This is no time for the weak-kneed or for weak thinking. These times call forth the deepest level and highest quality of Christian thinking, cultural engagement, Gospel-mindedness, strategic ambition, and churchly demonstration.

We do not choose our times, but this is a time for choosing. In the last era of the Roman Empire, Bishop Augustine chose to find his bearings for the City of Man within the greater love of the City of God. A time of crisis can bring us to surrender and lose heart, or it can produce The City of God or the Letter from Birmingham Jail.

I think Russ Moore’s legendary love of country music will serve him well. He knows how to speak of brokenness answered with hope and mercy. And he knows, as Johnny Cash would remind us, “there’s a man goin’ round, taking names.”

In 1 Chronicles 12:32, we read of the men of the tribe of Issachar, “who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do.” We know Russell Moore as a man from Mississippi. I think he is really a man from Issachar. I think he has an understanding of the times, and he knows what God’s people ought to do.

The man and the moment have come together and, like you, I don’t for a moment believe it is a coincidence.

 

 

[1] Carl F. H. Henry, Twilight of a Great Civilization: The Drift Toward Neo-Paganism (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway Books, 1988), 15.

[2] Carl F. H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1947), 32.

[3] Ibid, 34.

 

The Man from Issachar — An Address at the Inauguration of Russell D. Moore

THE MAN FROM ISSACHAR

An Address Delivered in the City of Washington, D.C. upon the inauguration of Russell D. Moore as President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention on Tuesday, September 10, 2013 at Capitol Hill Baptist Church by R. Albert Mohler, Jr., President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

            Without a providential understanding of time and history, one is left with the affirmation that human affairs are often guided by a series of very happy coincidences. At just the right time, the right leader emerges to fill a crucial need. The intersection of an individual life and a demonstrable need meet in a moment and in a person. We celebrate just such an intersection today, but I am not able to describe it as a coincidence. I believe that the providence of God is today demonstrated in the intersection of a man and a moment in the inauguration of Russell D. Moore as President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

First, I point to the character and giftedness of this man. I can remember the very first conversation I had with Russell Moore. In that first meeting I caught glimpse of his intelligence, his conviction, and his ambitions. I knew then that he was out to change the world, but that his first loyalty and constant horizon is not this world, but the world that is already but not yet. In other words, not the kingdoms of this world but the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ.

His intellect is first rate, as is his scholarship. He came as a Doctor of Philosophy student and transformed his doctoral dissertation into a manifesto for kingdom ministry and cultural engagement. His intelligence is energetic and his wit always on hand. To talk with Russ is to enter into a world of ideas undergirded by conviction and footnoted with readings.

He is not merely fascinated by ideas, he is a true public intellectual. He belongs to that class of thinkers who are not merely collectors of ideas but movers of minds. He is a master of communicating those ideas and he knows how to make truth come alive as a living force.

He is one of the most natural conversationalists I have ever encountered. He is like the Victorians who could enter any room and join the conversation and immediately add to it. He is a voracious reader who is a walking bibliography and a library on legs. He comes alive when a book or an idea or a problem or a personality comes to attention.

Amitai Etzioni has distinguished between two classes of public intellectuals – those who are generalists (who can speak about anything intelligently) and those who are disciplinary (who can speak with unique authority within a specific field). Russ combines the best of both. He can talk about almost anything, but he talks with the authority of one who knows of what he speaks.

Above all, Russell Moore is a Christian thinker. In this construction Christian operates as a noun, not as an adjective. He does not merely think like a Christian, he thinks as a Christian. His personal commitment to Christ, to the total truthfulness and trustworthiness of the Word of God, and to the faith once for all delivered to the saints is clear and tested. He is a defender of the faith and a Christian intellectual who dearly and deeply loves the Christian faith.

Russell Moore is a Baptist by conviction and a Southern Baptist by passion. He is a member of the tribe who transcends tribalism. He is not a Baptist by accident. His commitment to the free church in a free state and to the elegant simplicity of Baptist ecclesiology is clear. He is a conversionist and a churchman. He is deeply committed to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to the Great Commission. He knows the Southern Baptist Convention and he loves Southern Baptists with an eyes-open love. Thus, he can lead Southern Baptists. The late Carlyle Marney once said of Southern Baptists, “We many not be much but we are many.” Russ Moore is representative of a generation of leaders needed to make much of many.

He is, as no less than Augustine described the Christian teacher, one who is passionately committed to truth because he stakes his life on this truth and is himself transformed by this truth. He is, as our common mentor Carl F. H. Henry would define, a Christian thinker who is unreservedly committed to the totality of the comprehensive truth claim of the Christian world and life view.

All that, and he has a sense of humor. Russ Moore has an ear for irony and a readiness to be found joyful. Like G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, he knows that the deepest truths reveal the deepest joys, even as the reality of our human foibles reveals humor, whether we like it or not. Like Flannery O’Connor, he has an eye for the bare reality of truth, knowing, as Flannery would remind us – “Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

He is a leader who knows how to run a great enterprise. At a very early age he became Dean of the School of Theology at the mother seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention, serving also as its Senior Vice President for Academic Administration. His reputation as a leader is well attested. He is a leader, an administrator, and an energetic catalyst for good. At the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission he comes to a work well established and much respected. He will build it and take it into the future.

He is also a faithful husband and a compassionate father. To know Russ is to know that he is the husband of Maria, and the father of Benjamin, Timothy, Samuel, Jonah, and Taylor. He finds joy in his home, and he has a joyful home in which to establish his life, both public and private. His dependence upon Maria is transparent, as is his joy in his sons.

He is a theologian of conviction, a leader of great ability, a teacher of righteousness, a preacher of rare ability and power, and a thinker who knows how and when and where to think out loud. He is an ethicist by reflex, by training, and by experience. He is a colleague with whom I have spent countless hours in joyful conversation and gone together through times of trial and great challenge. I know what he is made of.  I know where he comes from. I know who he is. I know his ambitions. He is not a self-made man, but a man well made for these times.

So we know the man, but what of the times? Twenty-five years ago, Carl Henry warned: “Our generation is lost to the truth of God, to the reality of divine revelation, to the content of God’s will, to the power of his redemption, and to the authority of His Word. For this loss it is paying dearly in a swift relapse to paganism. The savages are stirring again; you can hear them rumbling and rusting in the tempo of our times.”[1]

The last quarter century since Henry’s statement of our crisis has brought no reversal of the trends he observed. To the contrary, the formerly Christian West is, in many sectors, so thoroughly secularized that it now has no consciousness of even being so. The Christian truth claim was reduced to a Christian memory and now even that memory is gone. Our confidence in American exceptionalism is now fully shaken. If anything, America now seems to be secularizing in a delayed pattern, as compared to Europe, but perhaps even faster on its present course. As the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor reminds us, for millions of people in our civilization, and especially among the elites, belief in God is now, according to their own thinking, virtually impossible.

Many decades ago, the Quaker philosopher Elton Trueblood identified America as a “cut-flower civilization” – its flower cut off from the only source of its sustenance. Those roots have further receded from the cultural horizon.

We are now in the midst of a moral revolution marked by a comprehensive scope and velocity that are perhaps without precedent in human experience. We find ourselves looking at a moral world that is changing right before our eyes, and many Christians seem both bewildered and fearful, precisely because they are.

But the real crisis is not in the world, but in the church. More than sixty years ago, Carl Henry (whose 100th birthday we would mark this year), reminded the evangelicals of that day that the failure was ours before it was a failure in the world. “It was the failure of Fundamentalism to work out a positive message within its own framework, and its tendency instead to take further refuge in a despairing view of world history, that cut off the pertinence of evangelicalism to the modern global crisis. The really creative thought, even if done in a non-redemptive context, was now being done by non-evangelical spokesmen.”[2] To this analysis of the problem – what Henry called The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism – he called evangelicals to a new mode of cultural and intellectual engagement.

“There is a rising tide of reaction in Fundamentalism today – a reaction born of uneasy conscience and determined no longer to becloud the challenge of the Gospel in modern times,” Henry wrote. “It is a reaction to which the best minds of evangelicalism are bending their effort these days, convinced that no synthesis is more relevant than modern frustration and biblical redemptionism.”[3]

In other words, he saw a generation coming, and he saw the likes of Russell Moore on the horizon. We dare not underestimate the challenges before us. We are living in a cut-flower civilization. There is a new paganism growing rapidly around us. There are threats to human life and human flourishing at every hand. We do see the ramparts of the family and the faith being both scaled and taken down. Religious liberty is under direct threat and we find ourselves in a moment of great civilizational peril. The Culture of Death is now institutionalized and made more ominous yet by technology. America has grown more polarized within and seems to be without a clear sense of itself within the international order. The most fundamental, essential, and pre-political institutions of human life and culture are now up for radical revision to the point of destruction. The scale of the crisis defies exaggeration.

And yet, these are precisely the conditions for optimal Christian witness. Under these conditions the keenest edge of Christian thinking is soon evident and the operation of a genuinely Christian mind is transformative. The church is revealed to be what we know it to be, the kingdom community of the blood-bought, deployed in this world even as we belong truly to the world to come. This is no time for the weak-kneed or for weak thinking. These times call forth the deepest level and highest quality of Christian thinking, cultural engagement, Gospel-mindedness, strategic ambition, and churchly demonstration.

We do not choose our times, but this is a time for choosing. In the last era of the Roman Empire, Bishop Augustine chose to find his bearings for the City of Man within the greater love of the City of God. A time of crisis can bring us to surrender and lose heart, or it can produce The City of God or Letter from Birmingham Jail.

I think Russ Moore’s legendary love of country music will serve him well. He knows how to speak of brokenness answered with hope and mercy. And he knows, as Johnny Cash would remind us, “there’s a man goin’ round, taking names.”

In 1 Chronicles 12:32, we read of the men of tribe of Issachar, “who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do.” We know Russell Moore as a man from Mississippi. I think he is really a man from Issachar. I think he has an understanding of the times, and he knows what God’s people ought to do.

The man and the moment have come together and, like you, I don’t for a moment believe it is a coincidence.

 

[1] Carl F. H. Henry, Twilight of a Great Civilization: The Drift Toward Neo-Paganism (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway Books, 1988), p. 15.

 

[2] Carl F. H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1947), p. 32.

 

[3] Ibid, p. 34.

 

The Briefing 09-11-13

1. President addresses the nation on Syria.

Presidential Address: Full Transcript, Washington Post

2. New York’s Mayoral election trending to the liberal side.

Liberal de Blasio leads New York democratic mayoral primary, Reuters (Edith Honan and Hilary Russ)

De Blasio’s Lead Built Across Wide Swath of City, Wall Street Journal (Michael Howard Saul)

3. Sexting becoming alarmingly more popular

Men expect better things from sexting than women do, Washington Post (Rachel Rettner)

Sex films halted after a string of positive H.I.V. Tests, New York Times (Ian Lovett)

4. LEGO creates a female scientist figurine.

 

 

The Briefing 09-10-13

1. French schools required to display “secularism charter”

France unveils controversial ‘secularism charter’, The Telegraph (Henry Samuel)

2. California appeals court upholds gender conversion therapy ban

Law Banning ‘Gay Cure’ Is Upheld in California, New York Times (Ian Lovett)

Banning a Pseudo Therapy, New York Times (Editorial)

3. Media shocked when SBC bans chaplains from involvement in same-sex weddings

Southern Baptist chaplains face same-sex marriage bar, Associated Press

Transcript: How Does Secularization Really Happen? – A Conversation with Mary Eberstadt

Thinking In Public – Mary Eberstadt

September 9, 2013

Dr. R. Albert Mohler

 

 

Mohler:            This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Mary Eberstadt is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She’s also a research fellow to Hoover Institution, and was executive editor of the National Interest Magazine. She was a member of the policy planning staff, the United States State Department, a speech writer for Secretary of State George P. Shultz, and a special assistant to Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. A four year Telluride Scholar at Cornell University, she graduated Magna Cum Laude. She has written widely for magazines and newspapers among them First Things, Policy Review, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, and Commentary. Her latest book and the catalyst for our conversation today for Thinking in Public is How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization published by Templeton Press.

 

Mary Eberstadt, welcome to Thinking in Public.

 

Eberstadt:        Thank you very much, Dr. Mohler. Thank you for having me.

 

Mohler:            I’ll just tell you at the onset I think your book is really important and extremely timely. And we’ve talked about some of these things and patterns and ideas before. But I want to tell you how much I appreciate the fact that now at book length you’re making an argument that on the one hand should have been made some time ago. But, on the other hand, could only be written now with the experience of the last twenty or thirty years in terms of both demography and well the experience of the family. Can you tell the story of how you came to write this book?

 

Eberstadt:        Well, yes, I think the question of how the West lost God, that is how religion came to occupy a diminished place in many Western lives, is a very interesting question. To me it appears as a giant jigsaw puzzle. And it was especially the experience of going to Europe and seeing how empty many European churches are, seeing the fall off in attendance that is so sharp as you know in many places. There’s no one in the pews under the age of 60. Just to shoot a couple more numbers, something like 1 in 10 people in Great Britain go to church monthly at this point. That’s monthly, not even weekly. So, there’s been a fall-off in attendance, and we know from survey data that are all in the book there’s been a fall-off in religious belief. It is sharper in Western Europe than it is in the United States. But you see the same trends here with the rise of people professing no religious affiliation at all, especially people in their twenties. And of course some of these culture war issues that we’ve been immersed in are also by extension religious issues.

 

So the question is: what’s going on? And I got interested enough in this question to start doing research. And what I found, Dr. Mohler, was that the prevailing explanations for secularization really don’t hold up upon inspection. There’s several reasons that have been put forth by conventional sociologists for why Christianity is in decline. Some, for example, are following Karl Marx, say that religion was always the opiate of the people; it was something that the poor classes did; it was something whose need would expire if people became better educated and more prosperous.

 

Now the problem with this explanation which is very widely accepted both in popular form and in academic form is that it is completely refuted by the facts. So, for example, in the United States today quite the opposite of what Marx said holds. In other words, it is not the lower classes that are populating the churches. In fact the upper third of the socioeconomic ladder is more likely to be found in church than the bottom third, and is more likely to profess religious belief. And you see this across the country. You see this also with the Mormons and you see it in other parts of history as well. And that’s what I get into in the book. You see, for example, in Victorian England this same pattern of painting of the better off and better educated as being more likely to be practicing Christianity. So, just for starters, the whole idea that Christianity is something for those who are, what was the saying Dr. Mohler, you’ll know, easy to command, easily led.

 

Mohler:            The Washington Post, infamous about twenty years ago. Yes, easily led for sure.

 

Eberstadt:        Yes, uneducated and easy to command. This stereotype which is very prevalent in our society does not conform to the empirical facts. So that was one thing that got me interested in this question. If the stereotype doesn’t hold, and if what we think about the decline of Christianity across the West is actually coming from some other place, what is that place? And that’s what I get into in the book. Because I think there’s a piece of this puzzle that has been overlooked all along, and that is the family and the relationship between the strength of the family and the strength of the churches.

 

Mohler:            Absolutely. I think it’s important for our listener’s to know that we were citing a rather infamous statement made by a reporter for the Washington Post about twenty years ago in which he made a very dismissive comment about American evangelicals which could have been generalized to American Christians; just suggesting that somehow that Marx had made the point that religion is the opiate of the masses. But as you have pointed out, not only in the United States but even more so in Europe, it is the persons who are most highly educated who are more likely to be in church than the people who are least educated and also least economically advantaged often are not.

 

Eberstadt:        Yes. And so that’s one stereotype that I think goes straight out the window. And there are other ones that I get into in the book. For example, some people say, “Well, Christianity evolved because people needed it. It comforted them to believe in this whole idea of the Christian God. And if they become more rational they won’t need that superstitious comfort anymore.” So here we have another very familiar stereotype that does not hold up when you look at it a little more closely. If this theory were true, then what you would expect to see is that Christianity declines over time in accordance with education and rising material standards of living and so on. But this is not what you see. You do not see Christianity throughout history going on a straight downward trajectory. You do not see what conventional sociology predicts, in other words. What you see is that there are times when Christianity is strong, and times where it is weak. In Victorian England, again, there was a period of great religious revival. In the United States since it began there have been several periods of religious revival, including in the 1950’s, even in the memory of some people listening to this, there was a tremendous revival in the United States. So you see Christianity come and go in the world in a way that is not predicted, again, by conventional sociology. So what I try to do in the book is zero in on those places where Christianity is strong and ask what else is going on at the same time. Because, again, I think what you get back to is the relationship between the churches and the family.

 

Mohler:            Well, that is a particular relationship you would think many people would have seen before. And they have to some extent. In your book as you marshal so much research, you point out that every one of the theorists of secularization has brought something to the conversation. And everyone’s looking at the same, rather indisputable facts or set of facts now. But the received tradition in terms of secularization theory had been that secularization leads to the breakdown of the family. You’re actually arguing that that is reversing the actual way that secularization happens.

 

Eberstadt:        Yes, and that’s a critical point to zero in on, Dr. Mohler. Because in the conventional way of understanding these things, exactly as you say, the idea is that first you have some kind of religious change. Say, like, the fall off of attendance in mainline Protestantism, to take an example. Then you have family changes attendant on that, as people are left Christian, as fewer of them are observing Christians, you have changes in family structure. You have more divorce, you have more out of wedlock births, etc. That’s the way this relationship has conventionally been read. In other words, religion is in the driver’s seat, and religious change creates family change. And what I’m saying in the book is that there is another way of looking at this altogether, and that is the kind of family changes we see around us – more broken homes, more divorce, more out of wedlock birth, etc., more families not forming in the first place – these changes I argue are driving religious change. So when you look at those empty churches and you wonder about what’s going on in them, you don’t have to believe like the New Atheists are insisting that what’s going on is that people have come to their senses and abandoned God. No, what you can believe and what I think the evidence shows is that once people stop living in families, or stop living in effective families or competent families, they have fewer things driving them to church. They have transmission belt of belief and tradition that has been interrupted in such a way that many of them are no longer Christians. But this is a very different explanation for secularization than the prevailing one.

 

Mohler:            So let’s talk about that for a moment. And I want to go back to an argument you make in your book, just to set the stage for this. You write, “Like the collapse of Christianity in many of the same places, the collapse of the natural family has reshaped the known world of just about every man, woman and child alive in the Western world today.” I think that’s an indisputable statement, and, yet, let’s go back to the fact that there are some people who question whether secularization is even taking place. And you address that very clearly in your book. And how is that anyone just to set the stage for this, how can anyone look at the world as it is today in the West and especially amongst the more highly educated; the closer you get to a college or university; the closer you to either Europe or for that matter to Canada, how can anyone now doubt that something like secularization is taking place?

 

Eberstadt:        Well, I appreciate those who doubt it. Because what they want to say is that Christianity is more vibrant than it appears to be on the surface. And I think there is some truth to that. We’ve seen very dark periods of history since the beginning of Christianity that have been followed by great periods of revival. So, I appreciate that contrarians don’t want to write an end to the Christian story. That’s what’s good about what they do. Also, I believe they are right to point out, you know, when we look back in time, you and I, Dr. Mohler, and lots of other people, we think maybe that people were more religious and more observant than they were. I mean when we visit the great medieval cathedrals of Europe, for example, even if we just do it in our armchair, we have a tendency, “Oh, people were so religious;” that was some kind of golden age of Christianity.

 

There’s really no reason to believe that. But, I think what the evidence does show indisputably is that people are far less religious now and far less governed by Christian precepts than most people were in the past, including the immediate past. And that’s where I part company with the people who deny that secularization exists because I think if you look at attendance numbers, if you look at what people profess to believe, if you look at the way they live their lives, many more people now live in open defiance of Christian teaching, especially about the family. Then you see that there’s been a clear fall off in both belief and in the idea that not going to church will have consequences. Indisputably there’s evidence of secularization.

 

Mohler:            Well, I agree with you, of course. And by the way, many of the people that you cite in your book and with whom you’re in conversation in your writings have also been guests on this program. So listeners to Thinking in Public have heard conversations with Peter Berger and Grace Davie and any number of others. But you know when it comes to your crediting them with believing that Christianity is more vibrant, I want to come back and say I think there are two issues there as well. I think one of them is that many of these sociologists operate out of an understanding of Christianity, specifically religion in general, that merely is about social function. And so they’re arguing that that social function hasn’t disappeared, that many people are still involved in explicitly, self-consciously religious belief and activities. And that isn’t going to go away. So you even have evolutionists who are completely secular in their outlook who say there’s a social function there. The other thing I want to point out. And you sight Charles Taylor who, I agree, is the most important theorist in terms of secularization and secularism in terms of the world today. And I think he makes the point that many don’t get. And your exactly right, as are the critics of secularization theory; there wasn’t ever a golden age. But what they’re looking at is piety and personal belief. But what Charles Taylor really helps us to see is that even where there were low levels of piety and perhaps not even any discernible markers of personal belief, the worldview was explicitly Christian because there was no other available worldview. And that is shockingly different now.

 

Eberstadt:        Well, yes, it is. And so is just personal conscience in these matters. In other words, I think it makes a big difference why there’s somebody commits a big sin and then says, “Uh oh, I’m going to hell for that.” Or commits a big sin and says, “Uh oh, I hope I don’t get caught at that.” And in that kind of distinction I think we see the difference between our age where people seem more afraid of being caught then previous ages where they actually believed enough to think that there would be eternal consequences for certain things.

 

Mohler:            But you also make the point in your book that there are many people that don’t even have a memory of the Christian moral code that had any binding authority on their conscience at all. So, they’re not even afraid of getting caught.

 

Eberstadt:        Yes. And it’s important to figure out why they have no such memory. Again, to go back to the Middle Ages, in those times you could be illiterate, you could be a peasant, and you could understand things about Christianity because you have what I call familial literacy. In other words, the family is so central to Christianity in so many ways, and I would love to talk about just some of those way, that if you don’t understand the family you’re going to have more trouble understanding Christianity itself. And that I think is where we are right now, Dr. Mohler, is with this situation that a lot of people may be perfectly literate about book learning, but they are illiterate about family. Let me give you just some examples. If you grow up in a home as many of millions of kids do in the Western world today without a father figure, and we all know homes like this, we all are related to people with homes like this, then how are you supposed to understand the idea of God that has been handed down since Judaism and Christianity began, of God as an eternally loving Father. In other words, if you haven’t seen a father up close don’t you have a little more of a conceptual leap at understanding what’s mean by that idea? I think a lot of people do. And that’s just one example, but I think a very telling example of how the interruption of the natural family and rhythms of family in the Western world have also interrupted people’s understanding of Christianity itself. And that’s what a lot of the book is about.

 

Mohler:            Your treatment of that specific issue set my mind to thinking and in a way that was chastening and humbling. I’m even more concerned than I was before reading your passage on that particular issue. Because it strikes me that something else is actually in effect there. Everything you say, but also, something that is perhaps even more sinister, and that is that if you do not have a father in the home, if you have no access to a positive understanding of a father, then actually it’s not that you have nothing, it’s that what you have is probably more negative than positive. And I think pastorally as well as theologically looking at the church today and its challenges that is a huge challenge. We’re speaking of God as Father, even the ability to speak about prayer in a biblical context leaves us in the position where many people not only have the absence but a very haunting absence of any ability to tie into that because, as you argue so clearly, their family context did not prepare them for understanding fatherhood, much less the fatherhood of God.

 

Eberstadt:        Yes, and let’s consider a few other ways in which those same family changes have an impact on people’s ability to grasp the faith. If you look at the most secular region of the world right now it looks to be Scandinavia. In Scandinavia something like only 1 in 10 people even believes in hell anymore, just to give one snap shot. But what else is going on in Scandinavia? It is also one could argue the least familial and the most atomized of Western societies. In Scandinavia today almost half of all households are households of one person. That is to say people aren’t even living in families.

 

Mohler:            They’re no longer even cohabitating.

 

Eberstadt:        No. This is an enormous change on the world scene. And once again, if you have a religion as irreducibly familial as Christianity is, I think, you’re going to have more trouble understanding what’s meant by all of this if you are living of, by, and for yourself. In a world where very few women have babies, for example, also the case in Scandinavia, if you’ve never had a baby, if you’ve never held a baby, you might have a little more trouble understanding what is so all-fired important about a religion that starts with the birth of a baby that has the idea of a sacred infant right at its very core. And how the Holy family protects that baby at all costs, and flies to Egypt, etc. This whole story just might not make very much since to you if you are living in an apartment by yourself without sacrificing for other people. The whole sacrificial message of Christianity too, I think, makes more sense to people who live in families because to live in a family is to know you sacrifice day and night, or at least you’re supposed to sacrifice your time and your leisure and your money and other things for other people. The idea of a religion based on sacrifice, the ultimate sacrifice, the sacrifice of one life for others, makes more sense to you if you live in a family. If you’re a rugged individualist and you’re on your own out there and you don’t have people to take care of who see why you should, then that part of the Christian message, again, falls on grounds that is a lot less fertile. So, in all of these ways, I think what we see is that a world in which families are weaker and more fractured and more atomized is necessarily going to be a world where Christianity is also weaker. But this is a very different reading of the weakness of today’s Christianity from the reading that you get from secular and conventional sociologists.

 

Mohler:            This conversation with Mary Eberstadt raises so many issues. But it brings together so many concerns that thinking Christians ought to have at the forefront of our observation as we see the world around us. We’re seeing these two things indisputably to be true: the breakdown of the family, its radical definition in our times, and the decline of faith in terms of its cultural status, its binding authority. And for that matter, the beliefs and practices of the people who live around us. As Mary Eberstadt explains the fact that these two things are happening together is hardly a coincidence.

 

Mary Eberstadt’s new book How the West Really Lost God is really important for that central word in the title. In other words, how did this really happen. And, Mary, when I look at your book I want to say I think many of us had a sense that what you’re writing here is true. But I really want to credit you for writing the book that makes the thesis clear, and I think almost undeniable.  Let me ask you: what has been the response to your book and to your presentation of this material in the world of social science?

 

Eberstadt:        Well, in the world of social science there’s been some gratifying push back; that is the world of secular social science. Thank you for asking. The most gratifying response I get comes from pastors like you who say, “Yes, in my day to day life when I’m dealing with actual people, not with the theology books, this is what I find. I find what you say. I find that it’s family changes that make it harder for me to get the Christian message across in the first place.” And, so, I feel for those people. I hope that the book ratifies their efforts because as I argue in all kinds of ways the fracturing of the family has also fractured Christianity including because people in a time when millions are living in open defiance of the Christian code, people don’t like to be told that they’re wrong. And now days there are a lot more people who have resentment about the Christian moral code that can’t help saying, “No, this is wrong and this is wrong and this is wrong.” Christianity has said certain things are wrong since its very inception. But it’s only now that so many people, a certain critical mass of people, are living outside those rules that it becomes the social conflagration even to point to that code in the public square.

 

Mohler:            A good bit of your argument is about what might be reduced to a chicken and egg question – which came first, secularization or the breakdown and redefinition of the family. In either case what we’re looking at is the indisputable fact that we’re living in a more secular age, and in an age in which the family itself is being radically redefined. I do believe that your argument about the family change coming first is really important. And those who are Christians operating out of a Christian worldview are basically those who should have the intuitions to know that already; in other words to know that the family is more basic to the society than the society is to the family. And you know Catholics would lean back on subsidiarity and evangelicals would lean into a similar notion that what is most properly basic is that which is most intimate beginning with marriage and the unit of the family. Somehow, however, we really didn’t see this. In a recent conversation on this program with David Hollinger of the University of California at Berkeley, historian that is reconsidering liberal Protestantism, he comes back and rightly says that before the theological issues emerged in full bloom, a demographic disaster happened to mainline Protestantism that is the birth rate fell precipitously long before the major theological revolutions took place. And that’s very consistent with your argument.

 

Eberstadt:        Well, yes, if you look at the reasons why people say they don’t go to church today people don’t say, and again, I think it’s important to harp on this because the new atheists put this idea out there, “Well, the reason people don’t go to church is that people realize it’s all this superstitious ball of wax and has no meaning for their lives, and people have gotten smart enough to live without God, and they realize there are all these logical problems with the problem of evil,” or this or that. No, I submit that the reason people don’t go to church today looks a lot less like I have a problem with theodicy than, “Well, my mom’s just married her lesbian girlfriend, and I think that’s great and I don’t want to be part of an institution that says that’s wrong.”

 

Mohler:            You know, people don’t even have to say that. You just observe it. And, again, you put it in the context of the church, rarely do people come up to you and say what you just articulated. But they’re patterns of life say it without having to articulate it.

 

Eberstadt:        Yes, and it gives them a whole new barrier to religious belief. I’m not saying that’s an insurmountable barrier. You know, Christianity has dealt with a lot of problems in its 2,000 year history. And to study them is to have a humbling sense that the current problem which is sexual revolution isn’t really going do it in either. In other words, it’s not going to be the ultimate problem. There were a lot of other things that looked pretty bad in the past that Christianity managed to make the best of or even thrive in. But that is what we’re up against today, I think. And I don’t think that the case for pessimism is the stronger case. I think there’s a lot of room for optimism about this, but optimism has to start with being very clear about what we’re seeing out there. And what we’re seeing is not that people got smarter and better off and decided to jettison the idea of God; that’s what Nietzsche thought would happen, but that’s not how it’s gone down. What’s happened is that family changes have rocked the churches to their foundation.

 

Mohler:            Well, they’ve also rocked the society which makes evangelism and reaching out to the culture all the more difficult. One of the observations that came to me in reading your book is the very chastening knowledge that the church is in a very uncomfortable position. Now we understand this immediately with the sexual revolution. We understand just as you said the church has to say that’s wrong, that’s wrong, that’s wrong. It has no choice on biblical authority to do anything otherwise. But it struck me that the problem is even more diffuse than that in that there are so many people that look at the church and hear the church saying what the church must say, and that is hold up the natural family as one of God’s greatest gifts. And hold it up in a way that honors it, shows God’s glory in it, demonstrates human flourishing through it, and normalizes the natural family. And we want to say at the same time everyone’s welcome. That is a very difficult balance. I guess balance isn’t even the right word. It’s a very difficult challenge to take on, but inescapable as your book makes very clear, given the scale and scope of the breakdown of the family all around us.

 

Eberstadt:        Yes, here’s another place where I think we have to look back somewhere in history to see our way out of this. It is very reminiscent of the end of the Roman Empire. And Christianity, as other scholars have pointed out, has a much stricter understanding of sexual morality than the Romans and others of the time. Christianity said, “No, the pagans can do this, the pagans can have infanticide, the pagans can have abortion, the pagans can have this, that, and the other thing, and the Christians can’t have that.” Now, on the one hand that put a lot of people in society off, it always has. But on the other hand, in a way that we need to keep sight of, it brought a lot of people in because that dignified of what human beings at their best can be about is something that has resonated with people across the world in all different places and times. So I think in order to see to get back to your question about how do we do this, how do we put out the you are all included message alongside this code that looks very strict by the standards of the day, one way of doing that is to look back in history and see how they did it then. And see what they had to work with because they were surely up against it even worse than we. They had the coliseum to contend with, and that’s not our problem.

 

Mohler:            That’s a very important word, and we need to recognize that in the challenge of the fall of the Roman Empire or in what Peter Brown would have called “late antiquity.” Many of the theological resources that the Christian tradition draws most richly upon now such as the word of Augustine in the City of God was occasioned just by Christians at that critical turning point trying to figure out how do we maintain the faith when everything around us seems to be shaking. But I want to turn for just a moment in thinking about these things to just ask you where these trends appear to be headed. Because what we’re talking about here is not something that emerged out of a vacuum in terms of all these patterns, nor is there likely to be any immediate reversal. So, you offer two scenarios: one more pessimistic and one more hopeful. But both of them raise the question: what would precipitate anything changing the trajectories that you trace so well in your book?

 

Eberstadt:        Yes, well there’s another elephant sitting in on this discussion that I’m able to get into the book a little more, and that is the modern welfare state, the gigantic state that has promised cradle to grave substitutes for the family in effect. In other words, The family used to do lots of things that a lot of families don’t do anymore, from taking care of the young to taking care of the old, to taking care of the sick and lots of things in between. And on the one hand the welfare state has grown bigger across the West because it had to do these things or people wanted it to do these things. More fatherless homes mean more people who have to be family substitutes, and that means the welfare state, etc. So, the welfare state has both bankrolled the factoring of the family, and also served as a family substitute. So, the biggest question hanging over the countries of the Western world I think is this: what is going to happen if and when the welfare state as we know it proves unsustainable?

 

Mohler:            As it is right now, we might point out, in Scandinavia which by no coincidence is where you point out we find the greatest family dislocation and the greatest, highest levels of secularization.

 

Eberstadt:        As it is across western Europe it is an unsustainable welfare state because, of course, it doesn’t have the demographic wherewithal to keep itself going. Not enough taxpayers have been born, and unemployment is too high. There are riots in places like Barcelona in the streets, in Athens, and other places. This is not picture postcard Europe anymore. This is a place with serious problems. And with dark crowds hanging over them that are headed our way. So, what’s going to happen to the dynamic between the family and the churches once the welfare state is radically revised? Well, that I think, Dr. Mohler, is the case for optimism in an odd and somewhat ironic way. Because we know that in times of adversity people pull back and they look to their more immediate, organic connections, connections of family. They look to their churches. We saw this after 9-11 when all of a sudden, and I’m sure you remember this as well, for many Sundays on end people were found in church following 9-11, who had never darkened the doorstep in the previous decade, say. There were people going to church who didn’t usually go to the church. And the reason is that adversity has a way of making people look to what’s nearer and dearer to them, and then in times of prosperity less so. If the welfare state proves unsustainable people are going to be forced back to their more organic, competent family connections because that’s the only institution that be imagined stepping into the vacuum left by the implosion of the welfare state. So that’s one way of looking at what’s going to be here 50-100 years from now that argues for religious renewal and not for religious decline.

 

Mohler:            You know those same patterns are also discernible in terms of other research indicating not just with reference to the welfare state but of government in general, that where government is strongest religious belief tends to be weaker. And you can draw this parallel very clearly. Christopher Lasch and Peter Berger demonstrated that back in the 70’s speaking about the family as well. And that’s interesting now in retrospect after your book and very compelling thesis where Peter Berger and Christopher Lasch both said look, the family is now being surrounded by an army of experts, externally adjudicating it, and evaluating, and entering in from everything to Dr. Spock, the pediatrician, and on to educators and child welfare experts, and all the rest. And the point that they saw back in the 70’s was that what we call secularization is greatly accelerated by the encroachment of government into the life of the family. And I think we really, in some ways, had to wake for your book for the explanation of exactly why that is so.

 

Eberstadt:        I thought of both Peter Berger and Christopher Lasch often in writing this book because, of course, everybody’s been after a different piece of the puzzle in all of this. I think it is fair to say looking at history that you see government on one side and family/church, I think they’re so indistinguishable sometimes that you can just say it that way, on the other side. And you do see that there’s a competition. There’s a competition for resources. There’s a competition for people’s loyalties. And that’s part of what’s been happening in secularization is the supplanting of those more elemental and organic loyalties with wider loyalties toward government.

 

Mohler:            Well, I think expertise is a crucial issue here. And Christopher Lasch makes that so clear in one of his books where you know it depends, where you really demonstrate what it is that you believe, and where you think authority lies by whom you ask for advice. For instance, in raising children, it used to be that people turned to Christian authorities, Christian parents in particular, for that advice. And in some ways they still do. But it’s interesting that the authorities they ask are the ones that often come with a secular credential. They’re perhaps even more informed by and have instincts of which they’re not even aware that they’re more inclined to trust someone who appears on television as a pediatrician than an elder in their church.

 

Eberstadt:        Or to get even more elemental about it, it used to be that a young mother with her first baby would have her own mother and any other number of aunts and cousins and other women, again the shrinking of the family has shrunk the authority of the family in this way too. And it has shrunk the ability of the family to serve as a transmission belt whether it’s for secular, sort of “homey” wisdom about how to raise a baby, or much more profound wisdom that’s been passed down for 2,000 years and now just ends with some people in the here and now because they don’t have anyone to pass it to, or because they never understood it in the first place because it was so badly communicated to them. Again, I think these sort of much more down to earth terms capture more of the empiricism of secularization than abstractions that don’t hold up under inspection

 

Mohler:            You describe your thesis in terms of a very compelling metaphor and that is of the double helix. And as we have to come to a conclusion of this conversation I think it might be very helpful for you to describe that double helix of faith and family and how it works.

 

Eberstadt:        Well, I don’t pretend to be a scientist here. But the double helix model is DNA, which I’m borrowing strictly for literary purpose, means that there are two spirals that go around and they’re connected by rods. And they need each other to reproduce. That’s the main meaning of the double helix. They’re even hard to disentangle. And they need each other to effectively reproduce. This is the situation I argue with the two institutions a family and church. They’re more closely tied than maybe has been understood in a lot of times and places. They need each other to reproduce, and one side is only as strong as the other. And so, for example, in times of decline like ours, we see family decline and religious decline going hand in hand. Conversely though to end on a note of optimism, when we see times of religious decline, these are also times of family decline. And to get back to one example that happened that was completely unforeseen, at the end of World War II, not only in the United States but across the western world, there was a religious boom that was much documented by sociologists of the time. Church attendance was up and Christianity was flourishing. At the same time what else was going on during those years? There was a baby boom, of course, also across the western world. So, the point once again is that the stronger and more vibrant the family is, the stronger and more vibrant the church is and vice versa. There’s nothing inevitable about the decline of Christianity contrary to what we’ve been told since Friedrich Nietzsche, but we do have to understand what’s going on in the places where we do see decline.

 

Mohler:            Mary, I have to ask you as we come to an end here, what’s next, what’s your next topic or theme or field of research?

 

Eberstadt:        Oh, thank you for asking. I’m fascinated and hoping to do some good by exploring these themes in other forms. That is the themes of what the shattering of the family and the shattering of the church has done to society. So, as soon as I have something that I can bother you with, Dr. Mohler, I will be in touch. Thank you for asking.

 

Mohler:            Well, as always, I’ll look forward to seeing that as I commend right now to the listeners of this program Mary Eberstadt’s latest book How the West Really Lost God. Mary Eberstadt, thank you so much for joining me for Thinking in Public.

 

Eberstadt:        Thank you for having me. It’s always such a pleasure.

 

Mohler:            Mary Eberstadt use of that metaphor, the double helix, makes a great deal of sense because it gets right down to the molecular, indeed the genetic, level of the human being. If you come to understand that you cannot unravel that double helix without destroying the very organism. And when she makes the argument using that metaphor of the relationship between family structure and belief, that is in particular religious belief, specifically Christian belief, she makes an argument that should immediately make sense to us.

 

Now for thinking Christians we need to recognize that the Christian worldview underlines the fact that God has made us in such a way, both individually and in terms of our community, that all of the goods he has given us are to be received together. In fact, there’s the basic Christian moral principle that reminds us that the division of these goods leads to a weakening of the entire structure. So, if God has given us the good of family, the good of marriage, the good of parents and children, has given us the goods of community and the goods of, of course, church and the fellowship of the redeemed, and all of these things together, when you break them apart you don’t just weaken the thing that you’ve taken away from the whole. You weaken the whole. And so this metaphor of the double helix makes a great deal of sense, especially when we look at these two devastating trajectories taking place around us in terms of secularization on the one hand and the radical redefinition of the family on the other, we’ll recognize that there is no coincidence taking place here.

 

Furthermore, the importance of Mary Eberstadt’s work is to suggest not only that it’s an intellectual mistake, but that it’s a mistake of consequence if we get wrong the relationship between the two parts of this picture. The received tradition, the received wisdom in terms of secularization coming especially from the world of secular social science, but also from some Christians observing the same trajectories, their explanation is that secularization produced the breakdown of the family. But Mary Eberstadt comes back to say, no, it’s exactly the opposite. It’s not that there’s no truth in that previous theory. It’s just that a closer look at the evidence demonstrates not only that the family breakdown comes first but why the family breakdown will come first. This is where Christians looking at this pattern need to recognize once again that we should not be surprised by this. That indeed even following our theology that is laid out in the Scripture, the meta-narrative of the Bible, we come to understand that it is the most intimate that is at the beginning and the most social that comes after the family. You just look at Geneses 2, “It is not good, God declares, for man to be alone.” And so he creates the help mate for the man, and you have the man and the woman and then you have in the very same chapter that therefore a many shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh; that comes before the rest of human society. In other words, the family is not only pre-political, in some ways, it’s pre-sociological. It comes before the rest of society. So the trends we see in the larger society had to begin somewhere, and that is at the most basic level of society – marriage and the family.

 

Mary Eberstadt’s book is not merely a book that lays out the theory that she has so well discussed on this program. It is filled with data. It is filled with research. And an ongoing conversation with an entire community of people who have been looking at these same patterns and have been trying to understand what is taking place. I tremendously respect Mary Eberstadt’s respect for the researchers who come before us. She is engaged in a very respectful and positive, even constructive conversation, with those who have been looking at secularization and the breakdown of the family, and trying to figure out how these things are related. But in this book she does what no previous book has yet done. What no previous theorist has yet tied together in this way. The use of word “really” in her title, How the West Really Lost God, is the explanation that the losing of God, that is the secularization in the culture around us, really happened because something happened before that. And the something that happened was the breakdown of the family.

 

Readers of this book will be confronted with a very daunting set of statistics. And, furthermore, with a picture that can only be described as rather dark in considering the future. That’s what makes Mary Eberstadt’s hopefulness in this rather remarkable and very significant. She points rightly to the fact that sometimes when nothing else works people turn to what they really do intuitively know will work, in other words the family. So the breakdown of the welfare state, the exhaustion of government in terms of trying to meet the needs that it has supplanted in terms of family function, the running out of steam, not just in terms of budget but in terms of governmental will, well that might also lead to a recovery if fueled by nothing else than necessity of the reality of the family and the gift that God has given us in marriage and family prior to community.

 

We’re indebted to Mary Eberstadt for this research. I also want to point out as we think about this kind of book and a conversation of this quality we need to be thankful for certain institutions that exist in this country that often do not get much attention, especially from those who are very busy in life and thinking about other things. And that is the existence of what in America is called the Think Tank. Mary Eberstadt’s work is associated with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington D.C. and the Hoover Institution in California. Both of these are representative of what Think Tanks can do, setting aside time and priority and resourcing for someone like Mary Eberstadt to do this work. And as thankful as we are for this work, we need to be thankful for the institutions that have also helped to make this possible.

 

Thanks again to Mary Eberstadt for thinking with me today. Before I close I want to invite you to join us on the campus of Southern Seminary on September 26 for one extraordinary day to commemorate the life and legacy of that evangelical titan of the 20th century, Dr. Carl F.H. Henry. Convened in partnership with the Beeson Divinity School, Fuller Theological Seminary, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Union University, this one day event will feature addresses from some of evangelicalism’s most prominent theologians and the heirs of Carl Henry’s legacy. 100 years after his birth Henry’s vision for a confessional and global evangelicalism remains as timely as ever. For more information go to www.sbts.edu/events.

 

Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public. Until next time, keep thinking. I’m Albert Mohler.

How Does Secularization Really Happen? – A Conversation with Mary Eberstadt

Podcast Transcript