Bradley has his own Substack where he posted this great essay with his reflections on why evangelical men don’t become elites. He graciously gave me permission to republish it. You should definitely subscribe to his newsletter, as part two of this series is coming out today - Aaron.

A few years ago, I was at dinner with a group of Christian college men and asked them what they planned to do after graduation. As they went around the table, each one described some version of the same goal: find a job that pays “good money” and allows them to support a family. That aim is not wrong in itself, despite what some argue.

What was striking was not what they said, but what was missing. There was no sense that a career might be pursued because it could shape an institution, serve a community, or leave a meaningful mark on the world. No one talked about building anything. No one talked about leading. No one talked about risk. Their imagination stopped at stability and safety.

They were not describing vocations. They were describing outcomes: a paycheck, benefits, and predictability. In other words, they were not aspiring to become builders or leaders. They were aspiring to become well-positioned employees. What they wanted was not a mission or purpose-driven life. It was a safe and respectable life, secured in advance.

Aaron Renn has spent considerable energy documenting the absence of evangelical elites from the commanding heights of American culture. His diagnosis is serious and worth engaging. His Washington Post piece and his longer First Things essay point to weak institutions, thin intellectual networks, and cultural retreat from public life. These observations are accurate as far as they go. But Renn’s framing stops one level too shallow, because it focuses on what evangelical culture lacks rather than on what it systematically and reliably produces. The problem is not an absence. It is an output. Evangelical culture has spent generations overproducing risk-averse men, and risk-averse men do not build, disrupt, or lead at the levels Renn is describing. They fill cubicles.

The pattern is visible in almost every earnest Christian household. Boys are formed around a coherent set of virtues: responsibility, deference to authority, moral seriousness, and reputation management. Pastors and parents, motivated by genuine love, channel young men toward careers that signal stability and respectability. Law, medicine, ministry, corporate management. These are honorable vocations, but they share a defining feature. They are low-variance paths inside existing systems, not launching pads for building new ones. A young man who lands a comfortable, well-paying job with good benefits and a respected title is celebrated in these communities as a success. What rarely gets asked is whether he is a builder, a founder, or a leader in any substantive sense, or simply a well-compensated follower operating inside an institution someone else had the courage to create. Getting a safe, respectable job is not leadership. It is the appearance of it, and evangelical culture has spent generations treating the appearance as the substance.

The specific failure is not simply that these men avoid risk in the abstract. It is that they are trained to avoid failure, which is a different and more crippling problem. Failure tolerance is not a personality quirk. It is a developed capacity, built through repeated exposure to real stakes, real uncertainty, and real loss. The men who found companies, reshape industries, and accumulate lasting institutional power were not simply born with thicker skin. They were formed in environments where failure was treated as information rather than indictment, where a collapsed venture or a bad bet was processed and learned from rather than moralized over. Evangelical formation runs in the opposite direction. Failure in these communities frequently becomes a spiritual category. Poor discernment. Lack of prayer. Insufficient accountability. When failure gets theologized, young men learn to avoid it at all costs rather than absorb it and move forward. That single dynamic, more than any institutional weakness Renn can identify, explains the scarcity he is documenting.

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Karen Horney, the mid-century psychoanalyst, described a personality pattern she called “self-effacing,” characterized by a deep need to avoid conflict, subordinate personal ambition, and seek safety through compliance and approval. She also identified what she termed “self-resignation,” a settled acceptance of limits driven by anxiety about failure and rejection. Evangelical formation does not set out to produce these profiles, but it frequently does, because it prioritizes moral safety over institutional ambition and mission.1 The working goal of much evangelical parenting is to produce a young man who does not do anything wrong, who keeps his reputation clean, who stays inside the lines of acceptable behavior. This is understandable. It is also, functionally, a training program for followers rather than leaders. The man preoccupied with not doing anything wrong is not free to take the kind of action that building something significant actually requires.

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff traced this impulse at the cultural level in The Coddling of the American Mind, arguing that American culture has broadly embraced safetyism, the belief that young people must be shielded from risk, failure, and discomfort. Evangelical households do not invent this pattern, but they intensify it by adding theological justification. Caution becomes prudence. Risk avoidance becomes faithfulness. The result is a formation environment that does not simply fail to produce bold men. It actively trains boldness out of them.

The research makes this concrete. A working paper on religion and risk attitudes found a consistent positive correlation between religious participation and risk aversion in economic behavior, with church membership linked to more cautious financial and career decisions. A meta-analysis on religion and entrepreneurship found that higher religiosity correlates with lower rates of new venture creation. Research published in the Journal of Comparative Economics found that religious entrepreneurs who do emerge tend to self-select toward lower-risk business activities to manage uncertainty. And a global behavioral study on entrepreneurial risk-taking and culture found that cultures with high uncertainty avoidance produce significantly less entrepreneurial activity than those that reward initiative and normalize failure. Evangelicalism, at its cultural center of gravity, looks far more like the former than the latter.

This is the formation pipeline Renn’s institutional analysis cannot see. Family environments and church cultures shape psychological dispositions. Those dispositions drive career selection. Career selection, aggregated across tens of thousands of men over decades, produces the social outcomes we observe. Evangelical men are not absent from elite spaces because institutions failed them. They are absent because they were formed to prefer the spaces where they are present: stable, predictable, bounded environments that reward rule-following and competence over the willingness to build something that does not yet exist. Getting a safe, respectable job is not leadership. It is the appearance of it, and evangelical culture has spent generations celebrating the appearance while the substance slips away.

Some voices inside the church have begun to say this plainly. Writers working in the Christian leadership space have argued that congregational cultures have become risk-averse organizations where bold action is treated with suspicion and failure is something to be avoided rather than processed and learned from. This is not a management problem. It is a spiritual formation problem with structural consequences.

The biblical tradition is full of figures who act under radical uncertainty, leave behind security without any guarantee of return, and pursue callings at enormous personal cost. Abraham leaves without a destination. Joseph endures catastrophic failure before any vindication arrives. Paul builds something new in every city he enters, usually at the cost of his physical safety and social standing. That tradition is not a template for cubicle life. The gap between what the faith actually commends and how evangelical formation actually operates is large, and closing it will require far more honesty than most communities are currently prepared to offer.

Bradley is planning to post a second installment with his proposed solutions today. Be sure to check out and subscribe to his newsletter.

Anthony B. Bradley

Anthony B. Bradley, PhD helps institutions reverse the boy-to-man collapse by fixing fatherhood and fraternity culture with data, theology, and field-tested programs and the pursuit of justice through personalism.

What this means is that if there are multiple forms of currency with the same nominal value but different actual values, people will hoard the valuable form and spend the less valuable form.

We have actually seen this phenomenon in the United States. Up until 1965, our silver dimes and quarters used to contain actual silver. Since then, they contain no silver. Hence, you almost never see a pre-1965 quarter or dime in circulation. (If you ever get one - save it!)

The same general idea applies to other social concepts as well. We often see situations in which bad social practices starting driving out good.

My wife came across a great example of this recently. She’s still a member of Upper West Side moms social media groups. Recently someone in one of those groups posted asking for help for a problem. She and her husband wanted to hire a nanny, and they wanted to do it right by paying the person on the books, pay taxes, etc. They were willing to pay more to do this right, but even when offering the same net pay as with a cash under the table deal, no prospective nannies were willing to actually work on the books.

Essentially, even for the rare people who want to do the right thing and follow all the rules, it’s difficult to do so because other participants in the market do not want to.

Labor practices are a good example here. Once a critical mass of firms in an industry start hiring illegals at scale, others are almost forced to do so in order to remain competitive. Then legal workers rightly decide to avoid that line of work because the compensation is being set by the marginal illegal worker, which entrenches illegal labor even more.

Another example people like to use is premarital sex. There used to be at least some barriers for men to obtain it. Now that premarital sex is completely legitimized, and out-of-wedlock births fully preventable, it’s more or less expected that people who are dating will have sex relatively soon within the relationship - as early as the first date in many cases.

In this environment, it’s more difficult for women who may not want to have pre-marital sex, or even just to wait a while to ensure they have an actual relationship with the man before having sex with him, to decline to do so. Most men today are simply not willing to date a woman on that basis, so women who refuse to provide sex find their potential dating pool shrinks significantly.

In practice, this might not affect the average woman all that much. That minority of women who do want to avoid pre-marital sex are likely doing so for religious reasons, and thus only want to date men from that smaller pool of other similarly religious people anyway.

But some reports suggest similar things are happing to sexual practices under the influence of pornography. There’s perhaps a greater expectation that younger women will engage in degrading sexual acts that men see in porn. If a large enough pool of women do start performing them, then those who decline to do so will see their dating prospects shrink significantly, putting pressure on them to get into the game.

And of course, given the widespread consumption of pornography today, women don’t have a lot of dating market leverage to insist that men who want to date them don’t watch it.

Another one we see in progress is soaring rates of disability accommodation claims. Substantial percentages - 30% or more in some cases - of students at elite universities are receiving accommodations for a claimed disability. They are getting things like extra time to take tests. You can easily see how this would benefit their competitive standing academically. So people who don’t claim to suffer from anxiety or some such in order to level the playing field are putting themselves at a disadvantage.

It strikes me that in cases of this nature, it’s unlikely there will be that many people who simply refuse to play the game on principle.

Politics and our institutions also suffer from these dynamics. Look at how dysfunctional our political system is, and how shamelessly you have to behave in order to succeed within it. No surprise, most of the high-minded, public-spirited people of good character that we might want in politics take a look at this and decide to stay out of it. This, of course, only makes politics even more of a circus. (Frankly, it’s amazing how many decent people still decide to get involved in politics these days, given the current conditions).

Similarly, we all know that our society would be better if we had functional, trusted institutions. But we are far from that point. Hence the rational move from an individual perspective in many cases is to adopt a strategy of insulation. You exit from institutions and structure your life to buffer yourself against institutional failure. This causes institutional trust and performance to decline further.

We have been seeing this with public schools in many cases. In some places, the primary public school district is in a slow motion collapse, as everyone who can gets out.

Or think about geographic political segregation. Everybody knows we are better off with competitive elections, but people are moving to jurisdictions where others share their politics. This “big sort” phenomenon has led to a number of one party cities, counties, and states, with the bad governance outcomes you’d expect.

It seems to me that there are quite a number of areas in our society where we’ve been caught in this sort of spiral where bad practices are driving out good.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Sometimes, good practices drive out bad.

The most famous case here is probably Henry Ford’s $5 a day wage. By paying more than other car makers, he secured a quality labor force and reduced turnover. This also led to workers being able to afford the cars they were producing. Competitors had to level up their labor practices.

Very often, a competitive market will produce this dynamic from a customer perspective, as improvements from one provider pressure others to adopt them in order to stay competitive. That’s why many of our consumer products have gotten better.

We obviously want to have more of this dynamic.

Gresham’s Law is an important concept to keep in mind when assessing the world. We have to recognize when we are dealing with a situation where bad practices are driving out good. If we don’t understand that dynamic at work, and take actions that will fundamentally disrupt it, then our solutions to various negative things we see are likely to fall short of what’s needed because they don’t address the underlying incentive structures at play.

As a cultural analyst, I rarely find myself praising contemporary film or television. That is not because good storytelling is impossible today, but because it is increasingly rare. Which is why Taylor Sheridan’s new series The Madison deserves attention.

Hollywood is often criticized—and not without reason. Alongside the academy, media, and advertising, the entertainment industry helps shape what sociologists call the social imaginary: the stories through which we understand reality itself. Stories do not merely entertain. They form moral imagination.

And some cultural influences matter more than others.

When pollutants enter the Mississippi River, it matters greatly whether they enter at Lake Itasca in Minnesota—the river’s headwaters—or near New Orleans after the damage is already done. Cultural problems work the same way. Addressing issues at the headwaters is always more effective than dealing with their downstream consequences.

Two such headwaters’ issues today are masculinity and marriage.

America has one of the highest rates of father absence in the world. Marriage, historically the basic building block of stable societies, is increasingly delayed, devalued, or dismissed altogether. Many now see it as a constraint on personal freedom, a legal liability, or a relic of religious tradition. If marriage were a stock, we would have to say it is trading in a long-term bear market.

It is into this cultural moment that Sheridan’s storytelling speaks.

The Madison offers a surprisingly moving meditation on masculinity, marriage, and the search for meaning after loss. It is, in many ways, a countercultural story—not because it is political, but because it is deeply human. Attempts to interpret it primarily through the lenses of culture-war categories like feminism or “toxic masculinity” miss the point entirely. This is not a story about ideology. It is a story about love, grief, and the possibility of restoration.

The series contrasts two cultural worlds: the status-driven corridors of New York’s Madison Avenue and the wide, restorative spaces of Montana’s Madison River Valley. Unlike Sheridan’s more overtly masculine narratives, this story is largely told through the emotional experience of women navigating grief after the sudden death of Preston Clyburn, a devoted husband and family patriarch.

His unexpected death serves as more than a plot device. It becomes a symbol of the disruptions that come to every life—the moments when comfort collapses and we are forced into what might be called a liminal journey through grief toward renewed meaning.

What makes Sheridan’s storytelling compelling is its emotional honesty. The themes of love, loss, and land do not feel ideological or sentimental. They feel earned. This is storytelling shaped by experience, where pain has been transformed into wisdom rather than bitterness. That combination is increasingly rare.

At the center of the story is the deeply loving but imperfect marriage between Preston and his wife Stacy, played with quiet strength by Michelle Pfeiffer. Through her loss, Stacy comes to recognize both the beauty of what she had and the small ways she had taken it for granted. Her grief is accompanied by regret, making the story both cautionary and invitational. It quietly asks viewers not only to desire a great marriage but to nurture one while they still can.

Perhaps most striking, however, is the series’ portrayal of men.

At a time when male characters are often depicted as either incompetent or dangerous, The Madison presents men whose strength is inseparable from their emotional intelligence. Law enforcement officers in both New York and Montana are portrayed not as caricatures but as men marked by experience, compassion, and quiet steadiness. Even a New York therapist—a character easily written with cynicism—embodies attentiveness and care.

These are not perfect men. They are believable men. Men shaped by hardship who nevertheless display kindness, restraint, and presence. Understanding, gentleness, and loving initiative are treated not as weaknesses but as marks of maturity. It has been a long time since television has portrayed masculinity with this kind of moral seriousness.

The spiritual center of the story, however, may be neither the marriage nor the characters, but the land itself.

Like filmmaker Terrence Malick, Sheridan treats the landscape not merely as scenery but as a character. The Madison River Valley becomes a place of healing, its dawns and sunsets visually capturing the in-between spaces where transformation happens. These women, shaped by the pace and ambitions of New York, find themselves emotionally and spiritually unprepared for tragedy. Their burial for the man they loved is marked by an absence that is striking: no minister, no liturgy, no language of transcendence.

Into that silence steps the land.

The natural world becomes a kind of spiritual presence, offering a form of healing where institutional religion is absent. When grief presses in, it is not to ideology or self-assertion that they turn, but to place. The land becomes what might be called a form of cultural therapy—a reminder that meaning is often recovered not through argument but through encounter.

Their journey through grief is unfinished. Like life itself, it remains messy and unresolved. Fortunately, the story will continue in a second season.

It is not surprising that the series has drawn criticism. Countercultural stories often do. Some critics have dismissed it as simplistic or ideologically suspect. But such reactions may say more about our cultural assumptions than about the story itself.

The Madison dares to suggest something unfashionable: that men can be good, that marriage can be noble, and that place can heal fractured lives. In a cultural moment marked by cynicism about all three, that alone makes it noteworthy.

If our cultural crises begin at the headwaters, then perhaps our renewal must begin there as well.

And that is what The Madison ultimately offers: not escapism, but what might be called headwaters cultural therapy—a reminder that love still matters, that loss can still teach, and that the places that form us may yet help restore us to our better angels.

Every year people complain that Google doesn’t create a “doodle” for Easter. This year, they put up a pretty good one in my opinion. More evidence perhaps of a vibe shift.

In case you’ve been wondering about the podcast, I’ve been traveling so extensively that I haven’t had time in my studio to record episodes. This is my last intense week of travel for a while, so hopefully I’ll be able to resume recording soon.

There’s so much doom and gloom in the world that this week I want to feature a couple of positive articles.

First I want to reflect on some of what’s going right in the world.

So much of the vibe in today’s online discourse is basically doomerism. Things are bad, and getting worse. The idea of “ensh—ification” is one that encapsulates the mood. The basic concept is that many of our experiences, such as with technology, are being degraded, often intentionally, by someone looking to make an extra buck.

Let’s be honest, there’s plenty of this kind of negativity that’s spot on.

But there’s also a lot that’s getting better in the world.

Let’s start with airports. America has long been a byword for terrible airports. And while ours still perhaps don’t measure up to the gleaming palaces in some foreign countries, the general airport experience has gotten much, much better.

There are a lot terminals that have been designed and built in the post-9/11 era, and they are generally pretty great. Indianapolis kicked off the trend with a 2008 terminal that’s still regularly rated the best in the country for its size class. Other smaller cities have built or are building brand new terminals. Kansas City just replaced a terminal that might have had the worst design in the country. New Orleans and Pittsburgh have new ones. Columbus is building a new one. Portland’s new terminal building is spectacular.

Big cities are getting better too. Start with New York. LaGuardia’s old Central Terminal was in a class by itself for being terrible. This is the one that caused people to say New York had “third world” airports. It’s been replaced with a very nice new terminal. Terminal C has also been redone to be very nice. JFK’s terminals are getting upgraded, and Newark’s Terminal A is not bad at all. San Francisco’s new Terminal 1 is sparkling.

People like to complain about air travel. And yes, airlines now charge à la carte for basically everything. But as someone who has been flying for a long time, almost always does so in economy, and who doesn’t have access to any lounges, I can tell you that much of the airport experience has gotten a lot better. Not only are many - if certainly not all! - terminals better, but things like Touchless TSA are improving the security experience.

Cars are another one. We visited my mother for Easter. This involves climbing several hundred feet of elevation into the knobs above the Ohio River. I remember growing up that we’d need to gun it as hard has possible after turning onto the road that goes up the hill, because you needed to get a head of steam to help the underpowered cars of that era make the climb at a decent speed. Our cars could rarely get above 45 MPH when floored. Even my dad’s V8 struggled to climb it at speed.

Today’s four cylinder engines like the one in our car are so peppy that they could probably hit 70 climbing that hill. I top it out at 55 MPH because of the curves, but the idea of not having enough power is a thing of the past in new cars.

I bought a new car after graduating from college, but otherwise always drove beaters to save cash. Our old Prius had its hybrid battery go bad during the pandemic, so we were forced to buy a car. Because used cars were so ridiculous, we ended up buying a new one. It’s like driving a different kind of technology: backup cameras, blind spot indicators, remote start etc from my phone, satellite radio, and more. I had no idea cars had improved so much.

Last week I was also in San Francisco and used driverless Waymos as a ride hail service. It was like getting to experience a science fiction future. People are also blown away by Tesla’s Full Self Driving experience, which appears at most a few years away from being able to operate in a true autonomous mode.

Then there are breakthrough medical advances. We have managed to find a cure for about 90% of cystic fibrosis cases, a condition that was previously debilitating and fatal. We now have gene therapy treatments that are enabling some children born deaf to hear. In a slew of other areas from premature births to cancer, we’ve made real progress even if long promised fundamental breakthroughs remain elusive. GLP-1 treatments promise to basically cure obesity. Life expectancy, which was falling, has now risen back to an all-time high.

There have also been incredible communications advances. Elon Musk revolutionized rockets, which enabled the creation of new low earth orbit satellite internet and cell phone service. You can now have real, low-latency, high-speed internet on an airplane. I’ve used it and it’s incredible. Starlink’s direct to cell technology also promises to all but eliminate dead spots, enable emergency communications during natural disasters, etc. Newer iPhones already can automatically detect when you’ve been in a crash and summon help. They can even do so via satellite.

The reality is that in many domains of life, things have been getting better, even in recent years.

I don’t want to make light of the things that are going wrong. We have real problems we have to deal with, and I plan to keep talking about them. But we have to keep a sense of perspective and recognize where things are going well - and being thankful for them.

While there’s no guarantee we are on a track to a fantastic future, we are far from guaranteed to be doomed either. There are actually many things to feel good about.

Cover image: Portland Airport by SounderBruce/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

There’s a good reason we never stop talking about toxic masculinity. Men are powerful, so when they go bad, they’re dangerous. Recently, the Netflix documentary Into the Manosphere and The Young Women Leaving the New Right reignited conversations around how many men have modeled their views off of misogynist and racist figures like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.

But as many have noted, it’s not enough to criticize. You have to offer an alternative. Author and CEO of the American Institute for Boys and Men, Dr. Richard Reeves, notes that much of the reason men turn to bad men for masculine models is that we often use “toxic masculinity” to refer to simply “masculinity”. “What does non-toxic masculinity look like?’ And people will often say things like ‘well, that’s where you’re more emotionally vulnerable, you’re much more caring, you’re nurturing.’ And then you say, ‘Well, how is that different from stereotypical femininity? Say, positive femininity?’ And then they’ll say, ‘Well, it isn’t really.”

This is one reason I think people found Project Hail Mary to be a breath of fresh air. The film has been a monster success among critics and audiences, achieving a 94% critics and 96% audience Rotten Tomatoes score and the second-highest box-office opening for a non-franchise in the past decade (only behind Oppenheimer) with $140.9 million global and $80.5 million domestic. The film is also a textbook case in positive masculinity. While many Hollywood films make it seem like you have to choose between Barbie’s toxic “Dictator Ken” or “Doormat Ken”, Project Hail Mary’s male heroes are distinctly positive while distinctly masculine. Understanding why can help us give men a viable vision for their manhood today.

Scientific Problem Solving

Ryland Grace–the hero of Project Hail Mary, portrayed by Ryan Gosling–is a problem solver. He’s a scientist who loves picking things apart, experimenting with them, and understanding how things work. And when he does–whether he’s figuring out how the bacteria work, how to translate his alien friend Rocky’s language, or how to save the world–he jumps for joy.

This ethos is at the heart of the film. Ryan Gosling describes it this way: “We’re so saturated with apocalyptic narratives and sort of just bleak outcomes, rarely given solutions. I think what he’s done is he’s giving us this opportunity to say maybe the future isn’t something to fear, rather just something to figure out, and that we’re capable of incredible things as human beings. It’s kind of our thing — that’s what we do.”

What’s fascinating is that this attitude is a well-established hallmark of masculinity. Sociologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt noted in The Anxious Generation that easily the biggest and most replicable cross-cultural male-female sex differences are that (on average) women like people more than things and men like things more than people. As kids, boys overwhelmingly play with trucks and girls with dolls. As teens, boys get addicted to video games and girls to social media. As adults, men choose STEM and women choose HEAL occupations. (Something even more true in more gender-equal societies.) Men choose religion, and women choose spirituality. Men find much more joy in looking at life like a machine to understand, problems to solve, and obstacles to overcome. Women look at life far more as relationships to love and reconcile with. Hence, men’s preference for stories about overcoming obstacles, such as action or sports movies (even when the protagonist is a woman). And why most stories made by women or for women (even when the lead is a man) have their conflicts resolved by people opening up and expressing their feelings (Heated Rivalry, Pride and Prejudice), self-acceptance and acceptance from others (K-Pop Demon Hunters), reconciling with and apologizing for wrongdoing (Frozen, Wicked).

When Moana addressed an environmental disaster like Project Hail Mary, the heroine apologized to the environment and made restitution. When Arrival addressed interstellar relationships, communication is solved through imaginative empathy rather than Project Hail Mary’s analytical problem-solving. This difference between “fixing” a situation and “empathizing” with it is often a source of mutual–often humorous–frustration between the sexes. (The “It’s not about the nail” sketch is one of my favorite examples from the guy’s point of view.)

The trend in Hollywood has been to treat the way men overwhelmingly operate in the world as a flaw. Reed Richards in Fantastic Four: First Steps describes his deeply analytical and scientific self as “broken” compared to his more empathetic wife. (A statement the film validates.) Films like Barbie, Iron Claw, Sketch, Ad Astra, and Deliver Me from Nowhere portray men’s relational style as a weakness to overcome. The main stories where men’s differences are welcome are stories about violence. Superhero movies or action heroes like John Wick, Reacher, or any Jason Statham film celebrate men, but primarily for their capacity to smash someone’s face in. These trends tell men the only acceptable way to be a man is to embrace stereotypical femininity or embrace violent masculinity. It doesn’t take an astrophage scientist to figure out where that leads.

Project Hail Mary portrays men’s orientation not as a barrier to thriving relationships, but as their source. Problem-solving is what brings Ryland Grace and Rocky together and how they solve the communication barrier. Problem-solving orientation is portrayed as a source of co-operation–where people work together to accomplish a goal–rather than something that requires a villain to destroy. (Unless you count the bacteria.)

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Friendship and Purpose

When people talk about the crisis of men, whether it’s male loneliness or men falling behind economically, there is a tendency to blame men and male culture. Movies about male friendship, (like Friendship), male arrested development, like Palm Springs and The King of Staten Island, blame men for maladjusted relational skills and lack of ambition.

But the data shows the opposite. Men still deeply desire to have a life of purpose and responsibility, and “define manhood in traditional terms: responsibility, sacrifice, and the capacity to provide for others.” But they simply don’t see the path available to them to achieve them. As Samuel James writes for the American Enterprise Institute: “For much of the 20th century, the transition to adulthood was guided by clear institutional pathways. Stable employment, often accessible without a degree, provided the foundation for marriage and family formation. Community institutions—religious congregations, civic associations, fraternal organizations—offered mentorship and a sense of belonging.”

The problem is these pathways are increasingly closed to men. Schools largely teach according to girls’ learning styles and grade girls higher than boys for the same work. During the height of the “Woke” era, multiple organizations made it a stated goal to diversify their workplace (without firing any of the guys at the top) by simply not hiring a generation of men. Churchgoing has also collapsed, and with it, a sense of purpose and a built-in community.

Church collapse and workplace instability have hurt both men’s and women’s relationships. But they’ve hit men harder because men tend to build relationships differently. Women build connection through emotional intimacy first. Men do so through shared work, purpose, and goals (as I detailed in my review of F1). Without a central goal–through faith, shared cultural identity, or work–it’s much harder for men to get to emotional intimacy.

We find Ryland Grace in the same place many men today are. He’s shut out of places of cultural respect and influence. He is then called upon to help save the world, and it is through that shared mission that he builds his deep bonds with others–Officer Carl, Eva Stratt, Rocky, and more. This “purpose-focused” relationship building is assumed and celebrated rather than deconstructed. But unlike more “man’s man” movies like F1, which portray relationships of mutual respect that never get to emotional intimacy, Project Hail Mary has its heroes cry and express their love for each other.

Then there’s the demoralization. Even when paths are not totally closed, it can be difficult to go where you know you’re not wanted. A common theme in Hollywood and culture over the past few decades is that a) humans are a cancer in the world that’s destroying it (Princess Mononoke, WALLl-E, Noah, Avatar), b) that things are better once men abandon their positions of power and give them over to women (Avengers: Endgame, Poor Things, The Last Jedi, One Battle After Another, The Bride) and c) institutions are evil/compromised and you can only be heroic and/or free by abandoning those institutions (almost every Marvel movie, Reacher, F1). It also permeates the culture that normalizes women bashing men in songs and on social media.

One of the reasons Dr. Jordan Peterson became so popular with men is he directly condemned that story and told them a different story. One where they were a hero, and investing in themselves and institutions made the world better–not worse. “You have a woman to find, a garden to walk in, a family to nurture, an ark to build, a land to conquer, a ladder to heaven to build, and the utter catastrophe of life to face, in truth, devoted to love and without fear.”

Project Hail Mary follows Peterson in flipping the script on how men see themselves. Ryland Grace is likewise called up by the government agent Eva Stratt and told that he is important and that he has a purpose. He constantly insists that he’s just a teacher, but she points to the value that he brings to the world, and that by partnering with the government he can save it. As I wrote in my review for World Magazine: “The world is ending, but in this movie, it’s not because humans are a disease, destroying the planet with climate change. On the contrary, they’re the world’s only hope of survival. Grace is a flawed hero without being a deconstruction of a hero. Human institutions are imperfect, but they aren’t shadowy conspiracies run by corporations endangering the planet to make a profit.”

Men’s power means that justified fears of toxic masculinity will never go away. But the more we have pictures of positive masculinity like Project Hail Mary, the more likely we are to see it in real life too.

I won’t reproduce everything, but here are some highlights.

There’s been an interesting change in the milestones young men perceive as important to becoming an adult.

The study hones in on the drop in formal education, but what I find more interesting is the shift from “working full time” to “being financially independent.” My impression is that Gen Z people, both male and female, do not like the idea of a traditional 9-5 job. There’s an entire genre of Tik Tok videos of 20-something women crying about how they hate their 9-5 job. I hear plenty of stories about businesses struggling to recruit younger workers, who’d rather drive for Uber or Door Dash so that they can control their own schedule (and work on their aspirations to be a social media star). You can also see the popularity of hustle culture as feeding into this.

At the same time, most young men actually do have full time jobs.

There’s also an interesting look at education by various demographic characteristics. Keep in mind, many of the men surveyed are pretty young, and can’t be expected to have completed college yet.

You’ve seen me write and tweet before about how there’s been a big leftward shift in the educated classes in America. Today’s GOP is alienating to educated, high functioning people in many respects, so I expect this trend to continue.

What we see here is that among Gen Z men, liberals are twice as likely to have a college degree than conservative ones. So the idea of young people being more conservative isn’t going to bail Republicans out there.

No surprise, we also see that religious people are more likely to have a degree (religious practice is positively correlated with education), and people from intact families are three time more likely to have a degree.

The survey has questions about dating and marriage. We see here that the majority of young men are afraid to ask women out.

Most men have long been hesitant to ask women on dates. One of the biggest planks in the manosphere was about men forcing themselves to approach women in order to overcome “approach anxiety.” Their mantra was “always be approaching.” Helping men overcome nervousness here - and frame rejection as nothing shameful but something that happens to basically all men the majority of the time if they are actually asking people out - was one of the successful self-improvement items on their list. Today’s manosphere is more about validating men in not asking women out.

Lastly, I’ll highlight this interesting poll question about masculinity. The study emphasizes men agreeing with the idea that manhood is about sacrifice.

I find it more interesting that an even higher percentage of men said it included “strength” and “leadership.”

Almost everyone agrees that manhood involves sacrifice and service. But our society too often reduced it to that. I think this survey shows men are hungry for a definition in manhood that has more positive elements in it, like strength and leadership.

I could go on since there are so many interesting charts and findings in here. But I’ll let you click over and read the report for yourself.

While immigration levels have waxed and waned, I think it’s fair to say that immigration has been a common dynamic in our society for much of its history.

You don’t have to believe that America is a nation of immigrants or that America is just an idea to recognize that immigration has long been a part of our society.

America has done a far better job of absorbing immigrants than any other country. Even today, apart from perhaps some other Anglosphere nations, no one else has really cracked the code on it. It’s basically one of our superpowers as a nation.

While immigrants do in fact receive copious public benefits and are often the recipients of major financial transfers, immigrants who come to the US have to work. They just can’t sit around collecting welfare indefinitely like in Europe. And overwhelmingly they do want to work and are working.

Immigrants are disproportionately entrepreneurial risk takers. Long distance migration itself is an inherently entrepreneurial act. Ross Perot once talked about a “giant sucking sound” of Mexico luring factories south of the border. But as I previously wrote, the real giant sucking sound has been the United States hoovering up the most high agency, entrepreneurial, risk taking people from Mexico and elsewhere. (This essay is in my collection on cities, The Urban State of Mind).

Places do in fact need new blood. Places with low percentages of newcomers - domestic and foreign - tend to be extremely stagnant places with insular, calcified cultures that make change difficult if not impossible. Many Rust Belt cities are demographic cul-de-sacs. Very few people move in or out.

Whether or not ambitious people from other places want to come to your community, or country, and stake their claim on building a better life is a major indicator of civic health.

Most immigrants are also mostly great people. There are officially about 50 million foreign born people in the United States. Whenever you have a group that big, there are going to be more than a few bad apples. Illegal migrants are less desirable because they’ve already showed contempt for our laws. And the there are some more problem-plagued groups like Somalis.

But on the whole, immigrant individuals and families are great. Some of them have really inspiring stories. I honestly don’t understand the excessive negativity about them. People love to trash Indians these days, for example. But I’ve worked and engaged with a lot of Indians over the years - in India, as work visa holders like H-1Bs, immigrants, and second generation - and my experiences have by and large been positive, both personally and professionally. There are 700,000 Indian illegals in the US - the third highest source of illegal migrants and about 13% of the overall US Indian population. You don’t have engage in the hagiography that some do about Indians or immigrants in general to recognize that most of them are basically good people. There are a number of immigrants in my neighborhood, and they are great.

The extreme low openness exemplified by many people on the right about immigrants and diversity today seems very at odds with the historic right as exemplified by, say, the British imperialist. They were very comfortable embedded in other cultures, often admired them and studied them more deeply than the natives themselves had, but without forgetting who they were.

This idea of wanting to live in a shire-like community of people just like you, who’ve lived there for generations, and where things are still basically the same as they were back in the day is the mentality of a European peasant or villager. You’ve mostly only found this in America in places that have stagnated or which failed to achieve the dreams their boosters set for them.

As a general disposition, I’m a more the more the merrier kind of person on immigration, consistent with our country continuing to be intact and as great or greater as it has been.

Unfortunately, we are well past that point. Mass immigration has become a significant negative for the United States, and immigration needs to be significantly reduced until such time as these problems are resolved.

There are a long list of reasons why immigration has become a negative for our country, but I will highlight four.

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My early forays into trying out AI chatbots were disappointing to say the least. Their training data stopped more than a year into the past and they couldn’t access the web, so they were useless on current events. They regularly made stuff up. They couldn’t supply links to sources that substantiated their claims (at least not real links at any rate).

About a year ago I decided to adopt a policy of “AI first.” Meaning, I wanted to try to use AI as a solution before using more traditional approaches. In practice, this meant using AI (usually Grok) rather than Google for information searches. It’s amazing how instinctive firing up a Google window is. It took me months to just break the almost autonomous habit of just searching Google. And it wasn’t necessarily any easier either. With Google, I’d just use keywords to try to find things, whereas with AI I was typing in questions. Especially on a phone this was more painful.

But in recent months, AI has become much, much better than it used to be. Though while not without errors - it continues to make things up, aka “hallucinating” - it’s already super-useful and is only going to become more so. I have subscriptions to both Claude and Grok, and regularly use both.

I typically use Grok to spell and grammar check my posts before publishing them. It also gives me headline suggestions. For podcasts, Substack’s built in AI transcribes the audio of my podcasts. I can then feed the transcript into Grok, which will create Youtube descriptions with suggested chapterization and timestamps in the correct format. I use an AI product called Eleven Labs to generate the audio versions of my posts. I had Grok generate the cover image for this post.

I also use Claude a lot to help with research or developing ideas. It’s very helpful in finding examples to illustrate points I’m trying to make. I also use it to help refine ideas and frameworks. It will give me feedback and suggestions about things I might be missing. It can also fact check things for me and flag potential problems.

In short, I don’t use AI for any actual writing, but employing it extensively in the tasks that surround writing.

These chat bots are also very good search type engines these days. They can provide links to real time articles. I only really use Google these days when there’s a very specific web page I’m looking for. For example, I still use Google to quickly get links to my own articles I’ve written. I can search by title on this site to get them.

Claude and Grok are also fantastic for getting backgrounders on topics. Think of them as an interactive encyclopedia. I recently read my first book by René Girard, and thought his interpretation of the death of Christ was pretty heterodox, and probably more aligned with Eastern Orthodoxy than Western Christianity, despite Girard being Catholic. Grok gave me all kinds of information about how various people had responded to Girard, as well as a comparison between his views and Eastern Orthodoxy.

AI is great for getting a summary of how various commentators have interpreted passages of scripture. One of my favorites things to do with it is, when I hear something from a pastor that sounds like it might be a modern innovation, to ask whether or not any major figure in Christian history taught this prior to 1900. Out comes an entire history of the idea - if there is one.

If I want to use any of this material in print, I have it spit out links to credible sources.

Musk has integrated Grok right into Twitter/X. You can click the Grok icon on any tweet and get an explanation of it, and the context of the post. (I think it’s actually regressed a bit here, but if it doesn’t explain everything, you can prompt it for exactly what you are looking for). If someone simply posts a screen shot of a paragraph out of an article or book, Grok will often tell you the source and even provide a link to it for you.

AI has also proven useful for tons of personal tasks like home repairs. I can post a picture of something and have it diagnose what’s wrong and provide instructions for how to fix. In some cases this can be way better than the old search methods, because it’s interactive. You can tell it what you’ve tried and what you are doing, and it will guide you along or make suggestions. It will also tell you if an option you plan to try is a bad idea or not. Even if it misses some, it will at least catch a few.

I’ve also been using Claude Code, which is a command line “vibe coding” tool. Claude Code is like having superpowers. I read in Neiman Lab that the New York Times had built a tool they called the “Manosphere Report,” that produces transcripts of manosphere podcasts. I had Claude Code whip one up for me. It downloads any podcasts I tell it to (from Youtube, Rumble, or Apple Podcasts), transcribes them, then produces a summary report with guests, topics discussed, and any controversies. The whole thing is automated. It took me two hours to create with Claude Code, 75% of which was me trying to figure out how to install all the dependencies.

I’m using it for other things as well. This is so powerful that I haven’t even figured out all the things I can do with it. I think I’m suffering from a lack of imagination of all the ways that AI will allow me to do things that aren’t even in my mental toolbox right now.

My next goal is to get to the point where I’m using AI so much that I’m fully using a Claude Max subscription. I figure if I’m not using it well beyond the basic account limits, I’m not using it nearly enough.

In short, AI is real, useful, and ready for primetime in some applications right now. You do need to validate the output and other things. It’s not fire and forget. But there’s a ton it’s already doing.

Just the improvements that AI has experienced in the last year are incredible. There’s every reason to believe it’s only going to keep getting better. That’s not saying there won’t be a big AI financial crash, lots of failed companies, etc. But this technology is very much for real.

If you aren’t using AI yet, I really suggest leaning in hard to trying it and figuring out what it can do. It’s a technology you don’t want to find yourself behind the curve on.

You might also be interested in this perspective on AI from Ken Corless. He’s a former Accenture colleague of mine, now at Deloitte, who has been leading complex technology implementations for a long time. I believe he just oversaw the technology implementation at the Milan-Cortina Olympics. He wrote an interesting piece “Ten Things I Think I Think About... AI, Agents, Humans and Software Development,” which is an interesting perspective from inside the IT consulting industry.

“Why don’t men approach us anymore?”

I see this question from women all the time now, whether it’s on TikTok or think pieces like the New York Times’ Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back. As a guy who lived through the #MeToo movement, it causes me a certain amount of whiplash. There was a time when all it seemed I heard from women–in person or online–was about how guys approaching girls in public was unwelcome and made life a hardship for women. Now–seemingly overnight–women online are constantly not only bemoaning the fact that men have backed off, but seem bewildered as to why it happened.

And this is not simply anecdotal. According to the Institute for Family Studies, less than half of men have been on a date in the past year. (Even less for women.) And according to a widely-cited report from DatePsych, less than half of men 18-25 had ever approached a woman in person.

Guys have been more than eager to explain why they’re not approaching. Whether that’s not wanting to be seen as creepy or the normalization of tearing down men (even while you’re dating them). Men will also sometimes note that close to half of young women are depressed. And because they’re feminists, they will largely blame their male partner for their unhappiness. So men feel like they have a choice between being rejected and being in a relationship where they’ll be constantly mistreated.

But most men and women don’t seem that impressed with those excuses. After all, isn’t part of being a man doing hard, risky things? And how risky is it, anyway? Most women under 40 want men to approach them. There are plenty of tools out there to help men learn how to not come off as creepy. And most of the “male-bashing” by women is just talk. When women get married to men, they consistently shift toward men’s values and political views.

That’s why culture critics like Rob Henderson often argue that men’s real reasons for not approaching women are simply cowardice. “What’s really happening is that many men are anxious about approaching women and are relieved to find a socially acceptable justification for that anxiety. It’s not that I’m afraid, they tell themselves; it’s that I might get humiliated or posted online.” The same IFS report agrees that self-confidence is one of the main drivers of young people not dating.

But if men are cowards today about dating, I think we overlook one major reason why: Hollywood. As a male culture critic, I can attest to the fact that Hollywood has consistently lied to men about romance. And when those lies fall apart, it leads to disillusionment and confusion. Part of fixing dating is understanding how men got lied to and telling a better story to those men.

Some voices today think it’s the absence of Hollywood romantic comedies that is causing the dearth of romance. Reese Witherspoon argued that we used to learn dating social dynamics and skills by watching rom-coms with the likes of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

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But the truth is, we learned false dating dynamics. One of the best analyses of men’s changing romantic fantasies came from Charlie Houpert of Charisma on Command. He notes that romances in the 2000s were dominated by “average guy gets hot girl” romances. These movies featured awkward, nerdy, klutzy, boring, and guys — typically unsuccessful with girls — who get to win the most desired girl over the traditional hot jock. Comedies like Girl Next Door, She’s Out of Your League, Knocked Up, There’s Something About Mary, adventure movies like Spider-Man, The Lord of the Rings (Samwise Gamgee), Harry Potter (Ron and Hermione) Kim Possible, Scott Pilgrim vs the World. The list goes on and on. But what those guys did have was initiative. Whether Matthew Kidman or Samwise Gamgee, or Ron Stoppable, they took the risk and made the first move and were rewarded for it.

But modern movies are different. The male leads are ridiculously attractive and cool. They are Jack Reacher, Tony Stark, Captain America, Thor, Henry Cavill’s Superman or Witcher, Paul Atreides, or The Mandalorian. Chris Pratt traded out the lovable goofy and paunchy Andy Dwyer–who still pulled the enviable April Ludgate–for the ripped and cocky Star Lord. Even the rom coms–which used to have leads that included Kevin Hart and Jack Black–are now populated entirely by “Chads” like Jonathan Bailey (Bridgerton), Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal (Materialists) or Glen Powell (Anyone But You). They are the cocky jocks that the previous films made the bad guys. It’s no wonder in this environment that we see the trend of “looksmaxxing”, made more famous by figures like Clavicular.

Moreover, these new leads rarely take the initiative. Reacher and Geralt both have love interests, but almost always, the women take the initiative. Jane Foster kisses Thor first. Chani kisses Paul first. But more often than not, even when men do initiate, romance is largely absent –particularly in Marvel films–until the third act when they abruptly kiss.

Why did the male fantasy change? I think it’s pretty obvious: we tried the old one, and it didn’t work. When I started really asking girls out, I mostly got turned down. The guys I knew who I saw as like me–“average guys” like the protagonists in the movies–also got turned down. The guys who had the most success with girls–particularly the girls everyone wanted–were the “cool guys” who were the “bad guys” in the movies we grew up watching.

What we learned from that was that what Hollywood–and often the well-meaning women in our lives–had told us wasn’t true. We don’t get the girl by “being ourselves”. You get the girl by being the kind of attractive guy she wants.

Different guys responded in different ways. Some gave up on girls entirely. Others–like me–decided to work on ourselves to become more attractive. But given that all this was happening during the rise of the internet, it’s no surprise that a lot of this took place online. For the men who gave up, this led to the incel and MGTOW (men going their own way) movements. For those who dedicated themselves to self-improvement, this led to following self-help figures like Jordan Peterson, Chris Williamson and–yes–Charlie Houpert.

I found a lot of good living through this era of men’s “self-improvement” culture online. The old male fantasy that you could be a conventionally unattractive guy and still get a conventionally attractive woman was honestly not fair to women. Why should she have to settle? Men leaning into self-improvement gave men the responsibility to grow and empowered them to do so. But it did so while also teaching them not to blame themselves for everything or despise their masculinity. Finally, it glorified the process of growth, rather than simply the results. And we know that most growth happens when you fall in love with the journey and not just the destination.

But there were also problems I didn’t always see until my guy friends challenged me. When you decide you won’t pursue girls until you become the ideal guy, it’s too easy to just… never seriously pursue girls. There’s always more you can do to improve. This is especially true the more time you spend online. You base your idea of who can get girls–and what girls are worth pursuing–on people the algorithm pushes at you. So you just stay on a hamster wheel that never ends. The consequence of making marriage a “capstone” rather than a “cornerstone” and always moving the goalposts on the “cap” is not usually a better relationship, but no relationship. And ultimately, it’s one reason we’re headed for increased loneliness and population collapse.

The truth is, it’s so easy for self-improvement just to be another way to avoid pain. The fantasy of “becoming the chad” is the fantasy that it’s possible to become the kind of guy that girls won’t reject, who won’t call us the “mediocre men” in every Sabrina Carpenter song. It’s avoiding the pain of feeling worthless because you’re always the person desiring, not the one being desired.

But nobody avoids pain. You just get better at handling pain the more you experience it. You don’t grow by avoiding real-life scary stuff, but by doing the scary stuff. You learn to fall in love with really amazing women by getting to know real women. You learn in what ways you need to grow by having real-life friends and mentors who tell you what you need to hear–not what the algorithm knows you want to hear–and testing it out in the real world.

When dads left home for work during the Industrial Revolution, dad-style parenting fell off and became stigmatized. Dad’s rougher, tougher style of parenting that focused on training boys to be men, and going on joyful supervised adventures, was considered harsh and–at worst–abusive. But rejecting dad-style parenting created a generation of men who never gained the competence and confidence they needed, and retreated into video games, porn, and movies where they could have fantasies of what they wanted rather than the real thing. Setting up expectations that were easy to dash and leave them disillusioned.

Hollywood is great at capturing our hearts with fantasies. And some of those fantasies are good. Social media is good for strategies. And some of those strategies are good. But the future belongs to those who dream and do things in real life. Even those who do it mediocre.

As one example, the New York Times’ real estate section highlighted a Boomer couple who decided to “upsize” in their retirement.

“We spent the last 10 years in an apartment — eight years in Chicago and now two years here,” said Mrs. Harlow, 67. “And that whole time, we’ve had what I call a ‘one-butt kitchen,’ where you can’t walk past each other.”

They thought about buying a lot and building their dream home, but doing it from Chicago would have been too difficult. So in 2022, the Harlows returned to Biloxi, found an apartment, and plotted their next steps to a bigger space.

…

Biloxi is regularly hit by tropical storms and hurricanes; Mrs. Harlow’s childhood home in East Biloxi was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. So they looked exclusively in North Biloxi, which is farther inland, nestled in the woods along the Tchoutacabouffa River. But it came with other challenges.

“The homes in North Biloxi don’t come up on the market very often, because it’s a level-five school district and so they go fast,” said Sallie Lawson of Fidelis Realty, who worked with the Harlows. “Most houses do 10 days at max on the market and they’re gone.” [emphasis added]

They ended up buying a four bedroom house, a decision they described as a “no-brainer.”

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To put some more statistical meat on this trend, St. Louis University Demographer Ness Sándoval posted about St. Charles County in his region. St. Charles County is another example of prime suburbia.

The most important county to watch right now is Saint Charles. What looks like growth on the surface is, in reality, a demographic paradox unfolding in slow motion. It is the fastest-growing county in the St. Louis region, yet much of that growth is driven by senior citizens relocating there for retirement.

Population growth alone does not guarantee demographic vitality. When the red line in the month-to-month mortality trend continues to edge upward, it signals something deeper than expansion—it signals aging that is accelerating.

The official 2024 death numbers are now in, and Saint Charles has moved another step closer to crossing the demographic Rubicon. In 2018, the gap between births and deaths stood at 1,159 (4,306 births to 3,147 deaths). By last year, that gap had narrowed to 518. In 2024, it fell again—to just 431 (4,107 births to 3,676 deaths). The margin that once provided demographic momentum is shrinking each year.

At this pace, Saint Charles may even surpass Saint Louis City in entering the first phase of demographic winter, when births approach or fall below deaths.

Four years ago, the county might have bought time by urgently expanding housing options tailored for families with children. Instead, the current trajectory suggests a slow demographic transition that will be increasingly difficult to reverse. Growth without generational renewal is not long-term growth. It is a shift in age structure and age structure ultimately determines destiny. [emphasis added']

He attached this chart of births vs. deaths in St. Charles County.

Births, though falling, are not down that much as of yet, but keep in mind this county is booming in total population. Some of the rise in death rates is also surely from generational cohort factors. We are an aging society in general, and the large Boomer generation is starting to die at higher rates. St. Charles is a growth area, but also long established. So a number of the older people dying are those who raised families there and aged in place.

Still, Sándoval notes the influx of retirees.

What’s going on here?

I don’t have good data on this as of yet, but my impression is that many of these prime suburbia retirees are relocating to be closer to children and grandchildren. We personally know quite a number of people like this where we live in suburban Indianapolis.

When I lived in Chicago in the 1990s, a common story went something like this: kids went to college at Iowa or some other Big Ten school, moved to Chicago, lived there a few years, got married, had a kid, then moved back to the wife’s hometown (or sometimes the husband’s).

In the 2000s, I started noticing a change. Rather than the children relocating to be closer to their parents and extended family, the parents started relocating to be closer to their adult children and grandchildren.

The wife of one couple I knew in Chicago was originally from Pittsburgh. Her siblings had moved south to the Charlotte area, and after retirement, her parents moved there.

As has been well-documented, upper-middle-class people are now more concentrated in upscale communities, not spread throughout the country or its urban regions. There’s also been great divergence between metropolitan areas in terms of growth and economic opportunities.

In this environment, a place like Charlotte is just going to look more attractive than moving back to a place like Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is a great city with opportunity in select high end industries like AI and robotics, but in general the clear trend has been towards boomtown Sunbelt destinations.

In this kind of environment, it often makes more sense for parents to move rather than the children.

I’m sure that there are also cases in which people simply choose to retire to these prime suburban areas. These cities have become much more amenity rich and are now fantastic places to live based on the product they offer. It isn’t just the old “good schools and low taxes” model of eras past.

But while I don’t want to discount straight up retirement moves, I did want to highlight these family ones. Again, while I haven’t been able to find data on this, I did reach out to Sándoval. He confirmed that he’s heard from sources in St. Charles County that a lot of people are retiring there for proximity to children. (I hope he does some quantitative research on this).

I would say in general that proximity to extended family is generally a good thing. So there are lots of reasons it’s a positive development that parents are moving closer to children and grandchildren.

But this also has big implications for these suburbs.

A lot of people have a vision of multigenerational living in a single household. One of the big urbanist ideas right now is legalizing so-called “accessory dwelling units,” sometimes called “granny flats.” Part of the idea is that aging parents can live there, allowing easy caregiving, etc.

I’m sure there’s some of this, but I don’t personally know anyone doing it. But we do know many people where the retired couple owns a house.

These Boomer retirees are often still healthy and active, have plenty of money, and don’t need to economize on space. They want the big space, to live in for themselves, and to host family gatherings.

Rather than the multigenerational household, what we see is the multi-household extended family.

While the couple in North Biloxi moved to their hometown to be near their parents, not their children, they did want to host their children and other family gatherings, hence their desire for a large house.

After seven years up north, the couple felt ready to get back to their roots. They wanted to be closer to Mrs. Harlow’s parents in Biloxi, and they wanted their two adult daughters — one lives in Omaha, the other in Italy — to be able to come and see family….“The whole idea was to have enough room so that if on the off chance everyone came at the same time, they could all have their own bedrooms and baths,” said Mr. Harlow, 65.

If you’ve got the money - and the Boomers do - why not?

Boomer retirees are putting upward pressure on prime suburban home prices - and making it difficult for families to be able to buy into these communities with top schools. In effect, families are starting to get squeezed out of these communities.

A few people posted reactions to this topic when I discussed it on Twitter. Ashley Weber said, “The last two large ranch style homes for sale on my street have been purchased by Boomer retirees. They are ideal family homes with large yards, safe neighborhood in a good school district. Would love to have had playmates for my children.”

Sullivan Nolan wrote, “I’ve been in the market for awhile and see this all the time. At open houses I’m usually one of the youngest people there. It feels incredibly strange to be competing with retirees for 4 bed / 3 bath homes in top tier school districts.”

What this trend means in practice is that in a growing number of cases, in order to provide housing for families, you actually need to provide two houses - one for the actual family and another for at least one set of their parents.

Boomer retirees buying up homes in prime suburban areas has to be a factor in why prices are going up there. When the towns with good school districts become unaffordable to many families, this can’t be a positive for our fertility rates.

Again, while there are good things about parents moving to be closer to children, it does have this downside. Combine the price increases with increasingly militant demands by Boomers that they shouldn’t have to pay property taxes because they are retired, and the general NIMBYism and willingness to show up to public meetings to complain that Boomers/seniors also have. This is a recipe for public policy negatives that undermine schools and the community in the long term as they get fiscally squeezed and become less dynamic.

Public policy in these suburbs has tended towards actually exacerbating these problems. This is because they enormously privilege development for seniors.

My own city of Carmel, Indiana has recently adopted a de facto policy of becoming a retirement community. Any development that’s age restricted to seniors gets waived through the city council almost automatically, while developments for anyone else get subjected to an ordeal. In one particularly egregious case, the city council expressed skepticism of a development because it included apartments. The developer simply converted them to age-restricted apartments and the council approved without further objection.

As one person on Twitter observed about her community, some towns are actually putting age-restricted retirement communities directly next to their public schools, “The top performing school district in our area has an amazing public middle school for kids gifted in the arts and a top rated elementary school. They just built a 55+ gated community the on the property adjacent to the schools. This should be illegal.”

These kinds of decisions, if compounded over the years into the future, pose a long-term risk to these towns’ futures.

It’s good to have people of all ages in your community - including Boomer retirees. We should welcome all. But you don’t want to become a retirement community.

Whether or not that happens, the trend of Boomers retirees buying up big houses in prime suburbs with great school districts seemed primed to continue.

So what leads normally careful and level-headed writers to swing so wildly in criticizing my book? I believe that their reaction is a reflection of a newish intellectual fault line running through today’s embattled liberal center — by which I mean those people on the center-left and center-right who share more common ground with each other than they do with either the populist right or the “woke” left. That fault line consists of disagreement over the severity of the problems confronting contemporary liberal societies and the connection between those problems and the undeniable political crisis that alarms both sides.

Call it the division between the “brokenists” and the “anti-brokenists,” after the Alana Newhouse essay from a few years back, “Everything Is Broken,” that helped to bring the fault line into view. Brokenists, like myself, regard the political upheavals of the past decade as an understandable but misguided reaction to serious underlying maladies. The furious energy on the political extremes is due to legitimate frustration with a deeply flawed status quo; the problem is that the remedies proposed by those on the extremes are considerably worse than the disease. Anti-brokenists, meanwhile, concede that there are plenty of problems these days, but they insist that there are always plenty of problems; what has changed is the emergence of conflicting “derangement syndromes” that render people unable to handle living in a fallen, messy world and itching as a result to burn everything down and start over.

Each branch of liberal centrists sees the other as deeply mistaken in its response to the rise of extremism. Anti-brokenists — and I’m putting the authors of the two book reviews in question in that camp — worry that people like me are lending aid and comfort to the enemy by substantiating their exaggerated complaints about the status quo. Brokenists, meanwhile, believe that extremists have risen to power by filling a vacuum created by centrist complacency and neglect. In this view, which I share, dismissing widespread disaffection from established institutions and governing elites as so much hysteria and entitled whining is doomed to failure. It will only add fuel to the extremist fire. [emphasis added]

I’d like to reframe this within the context of what I call the American Transition. In this framework, America is in a liminal period between an older order that’s in decline, and a newer one that has yet to fully emerge. This makes the future up for grabs in a way it hasn’t been in much of our lives, causing political and social upheaval, and creating a lot of uncertainty and unease.

Old Orderist vs. New Orderists

To me, the fundamental divide is between those who are still committed to the old order, and those who are trying to build a new one. Think of it as the “old orderists” and the “new orderists.”

Those committed to the old order believe it is still the best answer for the realities of today’s world. What’s wrong is primarily that we have strayed from it, and thus we need to course correct to go back. We need to restore our political norms, our commitment to trade, our postwar institutions, our traditional alliances, bourgeois values, etc.

This does not mean a rote adherence to the specific formulas of yesterday. The old orderists agree that there are new challenges, and that continuous updates are needed. But they believe the previous basic institutional, ideological, political, social, and cultural frameworks remain sound guides to the future.

The new orderists think that the old order, particularly in how it evolved in the post-Cold War world, is no longer fit for purpose. New technological, institutional, political, etc. paradigms are required. This doesn’t necessary mean the old order is “broken,” only that new approaches are needed for new times.

They too don’t believe that the entire old order needs to be jettisoned. In many domains it may be sound, or require simply evolutionary change. But their focus is on building the new rather than trying to restore the old.

Few people fall completely into one camp or another. And probably few people conceptualize themselves within this framework. But I think these two groups capture something of the divide.

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Legacy vs. New Institutions

The old orderists tend to be clustered in legacy institutions, while the new orderists are in newer ones. This makes sense in that the legacy institutions are a product of the old order. Those institutions and the people in them thrived in the old order, and thus tend to think more positively of it. (It’s similar in a sense to how successful, high-functioning regions like Utah or upscale suburbia have been less friendly to Trump-style politics or disruption).

New orderists, those focused on key aspects of an American Transition, tend to be clustered in newer or outsider institutions and movements (though not exclusively). Some examples: Foundation for American Innovation, Institute for Progress, Economic Innovation Group, American Affairs Journal, the Abundance Liberals/The Argument, AI Industry, the AI Safety Movement, Effective Altruism/Rationalism, American Compass, Palladium, Works in Progress/Stripe Press, the Democratic Socialists of America, the “Tech Right.” Perhaps Lindsey would add the Niskanen Center to this list. Some older organizations are part of this as well, notably the Claremont Institute and to some extent the Heritage Foundation.

This spans groups ranging from right to left, from the center to the political edges, but they share some commonalities in that they are looking to address today’s challenges through new models.

Not all of these groups would probably think of themselves as new orderist. My impression is that the people at the Economic Innovation Group (EIG) would not, for example. But they are very much working on a core problem of geographic inequality that requires new models to address. And they are doing it via a new, standalone organization, which says something.

It’s interesting that to date the old orderist institutions have by and large not seemed interested in taking on the kinds of initiatives that these newer organizations are working on, or co-opting the people involved in them.

The Abundance Liberal movement is particularly instructive to look at. As the movement germinated, many of its key figures exited major institutions. Matthew Yglesias went independent a bit earlier. Derek Thompson and Jerusalem Demsas left the Atlantic. Ezra Klein is the main figure still at an establishment institution, the New York Times. It will be interesting to watch his future. Perhaps these are all coincidences, but it shows even fairly mainstream figures have tended to end up outside of legacy institutions when taking on topics that are new orderist in nature.

The Problem with Populism

This framework also helps us understand the problems of various populist political movements. Trumpism is very critical of the old order, but is largely not looking to create a new one. There are cases where the administration is doing that, such as with its work on creating policy frameworks for AI, or onshoring critical manufacturing. The great legacy of the first Trump administration was a reset in our view of China, in which the Trump position was adopted by mainstream elites.

However, a lot of the Trump vision is more reactionary than future oriented. We see it in energy policy especially, in which Trump wants to see an America burning lots and lots of coal to generate electricity, and where coal mining is still an aspirational industry. He’s both attacked green energy - not just by ending future subsidies, but by trying to cancel already approved and under construction projects - and rolled back fuel efficiency rules.

Not all of his moves here are necessarily bad. The key is that they are retro oriented. Rather than looking forward to a new model, it’s about going back to an old 1970s style America of coal plants and gas guzzlers. It is deconstructing rather than constructing.

In some respects this is the worst of both worlds. It’s disruptive of the current order but without building a better or more viable future one. This is a problem that has bedeviled that part of the American right. It hasn’t yet been able to articulate a positive view of the future. (One exception is various forms of localism, but these are predicated on either exiting from mainstream society, or the continued future decay of mainstream society).

Many of the groups on the left, particularly in the DSA, neo-socialist space, do have a vision for a future order. It’s just a bad one, built around some combination of degrowth, wealth taxes, identity politics as the foundational ordering principle of society, and more in that line.

A Time to Build

Regardless of your feelings about old vs. new orders, the right disposition is to be constructively working on building positive future models to address the major challenges and opportunities we face. That’s why I think some of the most interesting work today is coming out of places like IFP, EIG, American Affairs, and the Abundance Liberals.

America is the protean nation. Its genius has been inventing and reinventing itself for the future over and over again. It’s been America that’s often created the future, as Tanner Greer so brilliantly described in his essay. We are a dynamic nation. And it would be strange indeed we were to be technologically and economically dynamic, while remaining institutionally, politically, and culturally stagnant.

This is why we need to have the courage and spirit of adventure necessary to embrace change and dynamism, and go out and build a positive future once again.

But there’s a different kind of cringe out there, one that is a contributing factor in why cultural engagement evangelicals, the group best positioned to produce elites, have underperformed in creating those high-level people.

The term “cultural cringe” was coined to describe the view of Australians about their own culture. In cultural cringe, people at the imperial periphery see their own culture as inferior to that of the cultural center. So Australian culture is viewed, by Australians themselves, as inferior to English or London culture.

The term cultural cringe was coined in a 1950 essay by A. A. Phillips, who wrote:

Above our writers—and other artists—looms the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon cul­ture. Such a situation almost inevitably produces the charac­teristic Australian Cultural Cringe…The Cringe mainly appears in an inability to escape needless comparisons. The Australian reader, more or less consciously, hedges and hesitates, asking himself ‘Yes, but what would a cul­tivated Englishman think of this?’ No writer can communicate confidently to a reader with the ‘Yes, but’ habit; and this parti­cular demand is curiously crippling to critical judgment.

…

A second effect of the Cringe has been the estrangement of the Australian Intellectual. Australian life, let us agree, has an at­mosphere of often dismaying crudity. I do not know if our cul­tural crust is proportionately any thinner than that of other Anglo-Saxon communities; but to the intellectual it seems thinner because, in a small community, there is not enough of it to pro­vide for the individual a protective insulation. Hence, even more than most intellectuals, he feels a sense of exposure. This is made much worse by the intrusion of that deadly habit of Eng­lish comparisons. There is a certain type of Australian intel­lectual who is forever sidling up to the cultivated Englishman, insinuating: ‘I, of course, am not like these other crude Austra­lians; I understand how you must feel about them; I should be spiritually more at home in Oxford or Bloomsbury.’

It is not the critical attitude of the intellectual that is harm­ful; that could be a healthy, even creative, influence, if the criti­cism were felt to come from within, if the critic had a sense of identification with his subject, if his irritation came from a sense of shared shame rather than a disdainful separation. It is his refusal to participate, the arch of his indifferent eye-brows, which exerts the chilling and stultifying influence.

Cultural cringe theory became a key influence on post-colonial studies.

The general idea is applicable in a lot of domains. Domestically in the US, people in tertiary locations feel culturally inferior to coastal cities like New York. So these places tend to not produce cultural innovations or a lot of original thinking, but rather look to the metropole for their cues.

When I was primarily focused on writing about cities, I was always frustrated that Midwest cities had so few original ideas for urban development, but instead preferred to simply copy what other, cooler places were doing. I saw so much opportunity in this region, but little willingness to seize it. When the occasional place did find a leader who was able to chart its own path - such as Carmel, Indiana, the city where I live - the results could be extraordinary and influential at the national level.

Cultural engagement Christianity also suffers from a kind of cultural cringe. They tend to view evangelical culture as inferior to mainstream elite culture, particularly in its urban variety, and see that as the standard.

Evangelicals are a socially subaltern group with a culture that is often viewed as cringe in the ordinary sense of the word. It’s not surprising that the intellectual and artistic people who emerge from this culture often develop a sense of alienation from it, and want to distance themselves from it socially in favor of fitting in with their new milieu - or the milieu they aspire to join - which they view as superior.

I can directly relate to this. I grew up in rural Southern Indiana. I was raised in a hardcore, apocalyptic (end times focused) pentecostal church. After graduating from college I moved to Chicago to work as a consultant, and have spent much of my adult life living in big cities. I fell in love with cities and urban life and urban culture. As someone once told me, “Aaron, you love cities like only someone from a town of 29 people can.” I share the intellectual, cultural, and lifestyle preferences of urban America.

Combine that with the fact that I didn’t attend church during the first part of my adulthood, and I am someone who feels very alienated from evangelicalism. For the first time in my life, I’ve been attending a non-denominational baptistic megachurch here - probably the median/modal experience for evangelicals in America - and every single week it feels like visiting a foreign country. I doubt that will ever change. After we moved back to the Middle American city of Indianapolis, I have yet to encounter a church in the entire region that’s culturally resonant with me. Similarly, beyond the foreignness of seeker sensitive evangelicalism, I find a lot of culture war evangelicalism off-putting, and some of the behaviors and rhetoric I see mortifying.

I try to take as much of an academic view of this as possible. While I’m not going to argue that all cultures are equally valid or that we can’t say some things are superior to others, there’s a sense in which we should accept that something like megachurch evangelicalism is an authentic and valid cultural expression of the people who attend them. Just because it’s not designed for me doesn’t make it bad or inherently inferior.

Similarly, I try to see the good in all of these different groups. I see the different religious traditions as akin to spiritual gifts - each has things they are good at. The pentecostals, for example, are fantastic at helping people suffering from severe life challenges like criminal behaviors, addiction, homelessness, etc. Just because I’m not a pentecostal doesn’t mean I can’t recognize the great work pentecostals do.

Another thing I’ve tried to do is avoid ceasing to identify as an evangelical, something that seems to be a popular move among some in urban areas. What I’ve observed is that, like the ex-vangelical, people who do this almost always remain captive to evangelicalism in some ways (i.e., in that they are still self-defined by how they are not like evangelicals). Also, it’s important to retain a sense of affiliation with people with whom we have ties, but are nevertheless very different from. It’s like those folk libertarian, get-off-my-lawn conservatives in Indiana. They drive me crazy. But they are fellow-citizens and their preferences and well-being have to be taken into account.

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Where a kind of cultural cringe really comes into play, however, is when people fail to maintain critical detachment from the milieu in which they do feel a sense of aspirational affinity.

A good example is JD Vance. His book Hillbilly Elegy was written only about three years after he graduated from Yale Law. At that point, he’d developed pretty keen insights into the hillbilly world he came from. He saw their good sides, but also the negative aspects that hobbled their ability to build functional, prosperous lives and communities.

However, he still had stars in his eyes about the new world that he’d entered thanks to Yale. He had not yet acquired the critical detachment necessary to see their flaws and foibles, the things they were getting wrong. Some of you might not like the direction he’s taken his more recently developed insights about that class, but he’s certainly developed some.

Similarly, the evangelical cultural engagement world seems not to have developed the ability to look at mainstream elite culture in a critically detached way. This feeds into an inability to create insightful analysis or compelling critiques of that culture, which in my view is related to the persistent inability of evangelicals to form people who end up in the seniormost positions in the key domains of society.

It’s rare in my experience to come across an evangelical saying something that helps me better understand or make sense of our world, much less compelling ideas for change.

I don’t think I’m alone. Which evangelical figures are followed by people who aren’t evangelical or otherwise Christian because they are providing this kind of insight? How many secular people read evangelicals to gain insight about the world? Which articles written by evangelicals have gone viral in wider society because they were so compelling? How many evangelical novels are read or songs are listened to because they are just so good, apart from the religious content?

It strikes me as uncommon (though not non-existent). Outsiders tend to read evangelicals mostly in order to find out what evangelicals are up to. Or because there’s some evangelical who will confirm all of their anti-evangelical biases by agreeing with them about how horrible evangelicals are.

Contrast that with the Catholic columnist Ross Douthat. Religious people read him because he explains the wider world to them. Secular people read him because he explains the religious world to them. But many people of all stripes also read him because he has interesting and compelling political and cultural insight and critique, such as in his book Decadence.

I’ll highlight again the Catholic political scientist Patrick Deneen, who wrote a trenchant critique of liberalism that made waves in the wider discourse. Even Barack Obama recommended the book.

It takes a degree of critical detachment from the culture, and cultural confidence, to be able to do things like this. It’s easy to prophetically criticize racism or even “capitalism.” Start criticizing something like liberalism, though, and you might get in trouble with the kinds of people you don’t want to get in trouble with.

The cultural engagement model has tended to downplay areas where Christianity is in conflict with culture while being very loud where it can be positioned as aligned with the culture (e.g., refugees and racism). There’s been less of an attempt to be genuinely prophetic, or to provide a truly unique perspective on the issues of the day. (I actually think there’s been regression here, as something like the original CCDA vision was such an original contribution, if not a perfect one).

Again, there are exceptions. For example, I’ve learned things about race from Anthony Bradley and Albert Thompson, two black evangelicals who’ve deeply studied the topic (and in fact have PhDs in subjects related to it). I’m not saying we’re at a zero here. But we are underperforming. Almost all compelling insight about the world, compelling cultural commentary, high impact research, new technologies, powerful art, etc. is coming from secular sources.

The solution is not the kind of cocky arrogance sometimes displayed in the culture war world. This is simply the flip side of cultural cringe. Rather, it’s the quiet confidence that you have something to offer the world in the domains of the Creation Mandate, not just the Great Commission. Phillips describes it well:

If I have thought this article worth writing, it is because I believe that progress will quicken when we articulately recognise two facts: that the Cringe is a worse enemy to our cultural develop­ment than our isolation, and that the opposite of the Cringe is not the Strut, but a relaxed erectness of carriage.

That’s what cultural engagement evangelicals should seek to develop. This is preconditional for high-impact participation in the key domains of society.

Today I want to dive into what it takes to successfully navigate a social transition and construct a successful new configuration, by looking back at a previous such transformation. This was the transition from the society of antebellum America, to that of post-Civil War America and the society built by the Second Industrial Revolution.

This transition occurred over the period of roughly 1860 to 1930. The advent of the Great Depression signaled the problems of the new order, inaugurating a new period of transition that created American society as we have personally known it, but I’ll have to cover that transition in a future post.

I’ll again commend Tanner Greer’s excellent essay on the making of a techno-nationalist elite that describes antebellum America as having people who saw themselves primarily as citizens of their state, each of which had its own insular elite. The economy was built around extractive industries like the southern slave economy (in which northern industries like New England textile mills were integrated) and elites who were suspicious of industrialization. Greer writes that their favored politicians, “dismantled America’s system of centralized finance, slashed its tariffs, vetoed internal improvements, shoved industrial policy down to the states, and maligned the rising class of industrialists.”

In my own essay on the managerial revolution, I describe the nature of the economy as basically a collection of small sole proprietorships and partnerships:

Prior to circa 1830, America was a capitalist country, but the economy consisted of a vast number of small-scale businesses or household enterprises. Only a handful of businesses – a couple of armories and textile mills – had as many as 100 employees. Essentially no businesses operated in a multi-site, multi-unit, or vertically integrated manner apart from the short-lived Second Bank of the United States. Production, distribution, and sales happened through market transactions, facilitated by an array of trading companies, jobbers, agents, etc.

In the Civil War and its aftermath, America saw a vast transformation to a new, integrated national identity and economy. This was increasingly shaped by technological advances, large scale corporations of the type we are familiar with, linked together by sophisticated new forms of infrastructure like railroads and telegraph lines.

This didn’t just happen. It had to be created. It required significant policy changes and government actions to facilitate it, the development of new financial institutions, etc. There was innovation across a whole range of domains, from technology to corporate forms.

But this “techno-nationalist” transformation had another side to it, which is figuring out how to help Americans adapt to this new world, and how to make sure that this new world actually benefitted the average citizen. Along with the Second Industrial Revolution, we also had the Progressive Movement, which, broadly understood, undertook the social side of this national transition.

In effect, the American transition proceeded along two tracks, one creating what we can call the Techno-Industrial Stack, the other the Human-Social Stack.

Here’s an example of what went into creating the Techno-Industrial Stack.

The orientation of those involved in this effort was towards technological and industrial acceleration, and about building - companies, infrastructure, etc. Numerous industrial innovations were created, and many new industries formed. The modern corporation with its layers of management and internal processes and controls began to emerge. The legal environment was transformed to be friendly to these types of institutions, which would have been largely illegal or difficult to establish in antebellum America. The finance world also developed in parallel to finance this. And the vast quantities of geographically concentrated labor needed for steel mills, auto factories, etc. were supplied by the stupendous growth of huge urban centers and mass immigration. Chicago, for example, went from 300,000 people in 1870 to 1.7 million people in 1900.

It’s important to note that not everything was positive about this. Perhaps the creation of the cigarette industry wasn’t one of our high points. There was also tremendous pollution, etc. And of course these firms created a lot of misery as well, and were known to abuse customers and employees. Hence the need for the Human-Social Stack.

The creation of that Human-Social Stack was even more involved. Here’s some of what went into it.

The orientation of this stack was towards formation - of our people and institutions - and tending to their wellbeing. It created a new, national identity, a new elite (the WASPs/Eastern Establishment), and a stable governing coalition. There were reforms across a host of dimensions including politics, labor, civil society - even religion. There was a focus on formation of our people through upgraded education (e.g., the high school movement), integration of immigrants, etc. The negative effects of large-scale industrialization and urbanization were ameliorated through labor laws, unionization, sanitation, pure food and drug laws, antitrust etc.

Again, not all of these were positive. The encounter of Christianity with modern science was not resolved well in the form of liberal Christianity in my view. The temperance movement ultimately brought Prohibition, which proved unpopular. Similarly, I could have included something like eugenics on this list, which was fortunately ultimately rejected.

But while we could look back at this and criticize a lot of what happened, undoubtedly our leaders turned America into a great nation, a global powerhouse across multiple dimensions. And by and large they managed to overcome many of the problems and make this new America work for its people, not just for elites.

Today, we face a similar task of future building in America. We need to keep building the 21st century Techo-Industrial Stack - AI, autonomy, robotics, space, energy, biotechnology and surely much more. We also need to be building in parallel a Human-Social Stack that makes that technology work for our people, and helps our people get positioned for success in that world. We need acceleration, but also formation. It’s a time to build technology, but also to build up our people.

This transition takes place against the backdrop of competition with China, which is trying to beat us in this race, with a model that’s proven extremely effective in the techno-industrial sphere but dystopian in the human-social one.

Better American versions of these are not just going to appear. They have to be built. We will need solutions that span all of the different domains I highlighted in the two charts above, and probably more than that. Unfortunately, all too many of our debates today are either irrelevant to the task of actually building that future America, or are actively about trying to keep us from building it. We need to make sure we are focused on the right challenges and tasks.

Before I get into today’s first installment, I want to give a personal preface.

Of the three major evangelical groups that I’ve identified - culture warriors, seeker sensitive, and cultural engagers - the group I have the most natural affinity with is the cultural engagers. I spent most of my adult life in the big cities of Chicago and New York. I share the cultural orientation of people in those environments; I read The New York Times, attend the opera, etc. My work for over a decade has focused on key cultural and public policy trends, including the study of cities themselves.

Yet, the evangelical cultural engagement world has not been a backer of my work, having provided little to no material support or promotion. While often quite personally friendly to me, it’s very obvious that the people in this movement by and large do not view my work as aligned with what they are doing, and in fact often see me as some type of threat. As a result, I’ve ended up getting much more support and engagement from Catholics, Jews, and even elite mainstream publications than from this group of evangelicals and their institutions.

However, this group is, realistically, by far the most likely demographic base to produce any future evangelical elites, should they ever emerge. Achieving this will require them to make some changes in order to expand their impact in that direction. Hence, much of my writing on a future evangelical elite will of necessity focus on the cultural engagement group.

Not having much in the way of personal or institutional ties to these people, I’m free to say whatever I want about them. So I’m going to use that freedom to offer my best perspectives on how they can become larger producers of the leaders our society needs. Perhaps they won’t appreciate it. But I’m going to offer what I hope is constructive engagement that they will incorporate it at some level, even if they never say anything about me in the process.

Now, onward.

John Ehrett wrote an interesting essay on how the dispute between the various evangelical factions is actually a class war. To me, it illustrates something important, namely the dominance of the evangelistic impulse, even in the cultural engagement world. And how strategies for evangelism end up displacing other forms of cultural engagement.

Ehrett highlights three different people doing evangelical ministry on the campus of what I believe is Yale in 2017.

1. A thirtysomething man in a dingy polo shirt stands at the corner of one of the busiest campus intersections, holding a bullhorn and displaying a ten-foot banner proclaiming EVOLUTION IS A LIE. Over and over, he declares the realities of sin and judgment, so loudly that his proclamations can be heard even from several blocks away.

2. A well-dressed, sixtyish pastor, hailing from a prominent New York City church, sits on a university-provided stage across from a former dean of the university’s law school. They are there to discuss the academic’s recent book, a theological-philosophical argument for Spinozistic pantheism over against traditional Christianity and secular materialism alike. Before an audience of several hundred students and faculty, the pastor delivers a distinctively Christological critique of the volume.

3. A middle-aged man in a business suit stands along the edge of a busy roadway. He says little, but at his feet is a box of Gideon New Testaments, and he’s handing them out to anyone, student or townie, walking past who will accept them. (He even gives one to a runner sprinting by.)

These are roughly representatives of my three evangelical groups. Person #2 discussing Spinoza, we learn, is pastor Tim Keller.

What’s interesting about Ehrett’s choice of examples is that they are all at some level evangelistic in intent. Ehrett certainly treats them that way.

While certainly not limited to this, my impression is that Tim Keller’s cultural engagement was heavily shaped by an evangelistic impulse. Much of what he did was oriented around showing educated urbanites that Christianity was something they should take seriously.

This is important work.

Consider JD Vance’s experience at Yale. Vance was from an evangelical background, but became an atheist as a young adult because it seemed like that’s what successful people did. At Law Yale, however, Vance encountered people that made faith seem credible to someone in his socio-economic position:

Mormons and Catholics at Yale Law School, who were really smart and successful, were engaged with their faith. There was a moment when I was like, “Maybe it is possible to have Christian faith in an upwardly mobile world.” You can be a member of your faith and still be a reasonably successful person. That’s not the world I grew up in, but maybe that’s true.

Vance ended up converting to Catholicism. While it’s wonderful he became a Christian, as a Protestant, I can’t help but be disappointed that there did not appear to be any Protestant presence at Yale Law that made the same impression on him as the Catholics and Mormons did.

What Keller was doing at this Veritas Forum event at Yale was trying to provide that impression. Not that the substance of the discussion at the event was irrelevant, but its most important impacts were not about Spinoza. Rather, Keller was demonstrating that it’s possible for an evangelical Christian to belong on the stage at Yale, to discuss intellectual topics in a serious way, and be taken seriously by a secular Ivy League professor that was willing to share the stage with him. The winsome style helps with his, and also shows that Christianity doesn’t have a come in a culture war stylistic package.

When I first watched Keller’s 2010 address on why cities matter and how to reach them at the Lausanne conference in Cape Town, it was perhaps the most impactful evangelical talk I’d ever heard.

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Much has been in the news of late regarding fake daycares, fake autism therapy centers, and fake hospices. The scale of the fraud is almost unbelievable, on the order of tens of billions. Since none of these businesses produces legitimate goods in a voluntary transaction with a customer, the money they collect serves to bid up the cost of goods and services for everyone, while contributing nothing to total economic output.

The idea of building actual things people value, like a Ford or Toyota, seems almost quaint, and it’s hard to say if those who do so are heroic or pitiable. Serving actual customers and making a profit is freaking hard, and there’s certainly the temptation, in a general decline, to, if I can’t beat them, join them, and get what’s mine.

Hard vs. Soft Scams

Recent news has focused on hard scams, actual fraud, not the broader areas of vice and cheating. A few examples will serve to illustrate.

A few years ago, we had some significant investments in the “tobacco” space. We were encouraged by the coming transition to reduced-harm or zero-harm nicotine products and had a thesis that nicotine, as the ultimate nootropic and thus marijuana’s virtuous opposite chemical in its effects, would make a comeback as the stimulant of choice for high achievers, eventually seen as safe and harmless as caffeine (which is consistent with the data in Sweden, where reduced-harm products have zero net effect on mortality relative to non-users). It’s no exaggeration to say that caffeine and nicotine may have catalyzed Western man’s latent Promethean drive from the Reformation to the Scientific Revolution to the moon landing in just a few centuries.

We assumed, given the uneasy but durable alliance between states dependent on tax revenue and regulatory capture of the industry, that reduced-harm products would be owned by industry incumbents and responsibly regulated to wall off these products from minors. The FDA did this, notably, when they forced pouch and vape manufacturers to file applications demonstrating the safety of their formulations, while, in the case of vapes, requiring manufacturers like Juul and NJOY to add bitterants to their products to make them taste like cigarettes, not candy, and thus less appealing to kids and targeted to adult smokers seeking a healthier alternative. The regulated American manufacturers complied, and thus, kids would be protected, and our investments would enjoy a nice little oligopoly with pricing power.

We ended up exiting those investments for a smaller profit than expected a couple of years ago, when the thesis proved false, in that the heretofore effective regulatory regime of nicotine products failed against the swarm of Chinese-manufactured vapes and Indian-owned convenience stores and smoke shops. These immigrants do not quietly comply with laws, but rather demand a level of enforcement resources our country lacks. Here’s a typical display from a recent road trip:

Above this display, but unpictured, were several offerings of THC-related compounds that are similar in psychoactive effects but chemically modified to evade state law, laws our Republican legislature was too cowardly to fix, given the power of the pot lobby. Why do we never hear of convenience store and vape shop owners being perp-walked for selling these illegal products? Why do taxpayers subsidize the proliferation of these trashy little stores with SBA loans for non-citizens?1 And how are responsibly manufactured, safe, properly regulated American products supposed to compete when the Chinese flood our country with illegal ones?

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Big Time Soft Fraud

But this is small-time as the hollowing of norms and voluntary compliance reaches its full apogee in international trade. The most valuable intellectual property in the world is arguably Eli Lilly’s patent on tirzepatide, the most effective weight loss drug. Yet, despite the FDA’s closing of loopholes, a simple Google search will reveal dozens of sources for compounded, pirated tirzepatide sourced from Chinese labs.

Given that the stuff is sold as a powder and doses are measured in milligrams, it would seem almost impossible to cut this off from international trade, at least on the black market. Nevertheless, scammers operate openly and domestically to undercut Lilly’s intellectual property investment, and nothing happens. In cities like Houston, it’s trivial to receive a prescription from an immigrant doctor and fill it from an immigrant-run compound pharmacy, since Americans playing by the rules largely no longer operate the compounding pharmacy industry, which used to be a niche service for patients needing strange or alternative dosing of common medicines not otherwise commercially available.

How is this possible? Drug manufacturers in China can “register” with the FDA, pass one inspection, and sell any drug into compound pharmacies. And in this case, one part of the government doesn’t talk to the other. Such firms can rip off US intellectual property, and this does nothing to affect their FDA approval. Many of these inspections, due to FDA backlogs, are only subject to “remote inspections,” i.e., the FDA looks at paperwork submitted electronically, trusting Chinese firms to self-report their compliance! And, as long as they register with the FDA and apply for inspection, they can begin selling into the US market before they’re ever inspected. And if they get inspected and fail, they can close up shop, register again under a new entity, and be good for another few years. Trump was right, they really must be “laughing at us” for being such easy, dumb marks.

Regulations surrounding such pharmacies, like those of the IRS, depend on Anglo-Saxon norms of voluntary self-regulation, not police inspection. They simply no longer work when those norms are not shared by many of our residents and trade partners.

Many Americans are likewise unaware that most of their generic medications are made in India or China. These manufacturers, who are outside of US criminal jurisdiction attaching to impure drugs, are allowed by our government to have FDA approval. My first job, some readers may recall, was at an FDA-regulated facility. It was drilled into all of us to never slack on quality or record-keeping because of the dreaded “surprise inspection.” The FDA can show up at any time and start digging, and while rare, veterans at the company shared war stories of previous inspections. The company maintained its own internal “red team” of surprise inspectors, many former FDA, who often showed up at manufacturing plants unannounced to simulate government inspections. QA and manufacturing people could and would be fired if internal inspectors found serious problems likely to surface in an official one. We also knew about the criminal penalties for major negligence discovered in such an inspection. Almost no one actually went to jail for this, of course, but the thought of being arrested and having a “criminal record” scared our domestic employees terribly. It was understood to be a high privilege to make products people trusted to put into their bodies.

That system is imperfect enough in the US as Christian norms recede2, but imagine we had a competitor in China or India. Technically, they are FDA-approved and subject to surprise inspections. But the manpower to do so, and the criminal penalties, are absent. And in any of these countries, the odds that the FDA can actually execute a surprise inspection are extremely low, simply because their movements can be easily tracked or shared with the manufacturer by locals. And absent criminal penalties enforced by US courts, records can be falsified, and lies told without consequence. How could a US manufacturer possibly compete with such regulatory asymmetry? The expense in making a medicine is all in quality control and compliance, not raw materials. And the price we pay is impure drugs and the hollowing out of our ability to make the world’s most useful medicines domestically (the most valuable medicines, i.e., the low-hanging fruit, tend to be older proven generics).

At a similar scale but with a more dispersed impact has been Amazon’s effect on small American manufacturers, famously chronicled by Austin-based entrepreneur Molson Hart’s futile attempts to have the online platform play fair and respect his intellectual property. On a recent episode of Shark Tank, Kevin O’Leary pronounced the futility of preventing knock-offs on Amazon, even with a patent, and recommended that brands knock themselves off with white labels selling just above cost to at least gain some small return on sales that would otherwise go to Amazon scammers.3

Again, the incentives of our laws make it almost impossible to compete on a legitimate basis. Section 230, an early Internet law designed to indemnify online forum operators from liability for their users’ speech, has been interpreted to protect Amazon from the acts of its resellers. By contrast, Target, with a conventional vendor reselling relationship, is often jointly and severally liable with the source of goods for any tort. Honest retailers can be sued, but if you turn your website into a bazaar for foreign scammers to lie, cheat, and steal on your behalf, it’s “user-generated content” and statutorily excluded from any liability, even if, like Amazon, the platform makes most of the profit in the transaction and controls the entire customer relationship from billing to fulfillment to communications to returns.

At the other end of the value chain, the fundamental currency of American meritocracy itself, the SAT, finds itself dealing with Chinese websites that publish the contents of every test online within hours of administration. The dumb WASPs who run the SAT were gullible enough to allow Chinese students to use their own devices, in China (well, Hong Kong and Macau, same culture), to take the tests. And thanks to Obama abandoning US sovereignty over ICANN domain name registrations, there’s nothing SAT can do about it.

And that’s East Asia, maybe the most functional non-Western culture. Things get much darker elsewhere. Nigerians and other third-world financial scammers torment our vulnerable elderly, often with the help of domestic mules. Why are they allowed on Facebook, and why is Facebook immune from liability for allowing this on their platform?4 Has anyone asked the question of why Nigerians are generally allowed to use the US banking system and receive international wire transfers? Why is this culture allowed any access to our monetary system at all?

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The Lethargy of Voluntary Compliance

Bottom line: the slow-moving, minimally invasive Anglo-Saxon schemes of regulation and litigation assume fair play, that people mean well, deserve due process, and are entirely unsuited for the vast majority of the world’s population, who do not share these cultural values. Such systems require a “guilt culture” like ours, where individuals, as part of their self-image, desire to behave according to abstract notions of right and wrong and align their behavior, however imperfectly and often tempted, to those notions, and feel bad when they fall short. In much of the world, the only effective regulation to make scammers behave is swift, violent, and unilateral punishment, no trials, no judges, no juries.

Our system is only well-suited to a free people with at least a residue of cultural Christianity, where outliers are uncommon enough that enforcement’s necessity is rare. It will fail against the human default of “shame cultures” where public reputation is all that matters, and besides which, cultures where cheating foreigners, especially, from their perspective, gullible, foolish ones like us who believe in people following the law voluntarily as a matter of personal morality, is seen as smart, not wrong.

These are not insignificant concerns. The sort of middle-class jobs Americans desire demand that business owners have defensible margins to insulate their innovations and intellectual property, however trivial, from a race to the bottom with sweatshop and scammer cultures, foreign and domestic. Only defensible margins allow business owners to provide good salaries and benefits to American employees, and to allow foreign businesses practically exempt from the jurisdiction of US courts to sell into our markets directly is to commit long-term economic suicide. No serious person suggests that businesses be immune from all liability, but this is exactly what libertarians and free-trade zealots propose functionally in their globalist schemes.

It seems a mystery why any company would move operations to China, given the pervasive theft of intellectual property, as such is often the only reliable defense of profits. My best guesses are:

1. Most businesses are neither owner controlled or managed. Managers of large public corporations have severe principal-agent problems and are usually incentivized for profit growth over at most a 5-year time horizon. Access to overseas manufacturing and markets (including IP sharing, which China often demands to sell to her internal markets) will indeed lift profits for a time. I can’t imagine replacing my domestic employees to save 50% on payroll to educate future foreign competitors. But if I were a hireling manager with a 4-year stock options package and likely to bounce to my next job within the decade, why not? And once one hireling defects for short-term gains, the others, whatever their motivations, are tempted to follow if they cannot compete with higher COGS for a time that will ruin their stock options.

2. As the incentives of #1 came to dominate, many options for domestic manufacturing disappeared. Molson Hart has documented this, how it’s more or less impossible to manufacture injection-molded toys or stuffed animals domestically, regardless of an entrepreneur’s theoretical preference. You will manufacture in China, and you will be ripped off and scammed by them if they sniff a percent of margin above bare costs.

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Hope for a New Coalition

Shame cultures only respect enforcement, not appeals to abstract moral standards. Fortunately, our legal system offers a system of private enforcement in the plaintiff’s bar, which many have described as our “private attorneys general.” As I’ve been involved in legal matters over the years, and had a thoroughly good time helping coach teenagers in mock trial competitions, I’ve developed an affection for lawyers as fun, entrepreneurial rascals. Hating attorneys is as non-sensical as hating guns. Attorneys don’t sue people, laws and incentives do.

I believe a major project for populist conservatives must be a selective increase in our system’s litigation surface area to better regulate abuse in private markets. Notably, common immunities, most notably Section 230, given to platforms or resellers must be stripped when the tortfeasor is outside the jurisdiction of US courts.

Perhaps a safe harbor could be offered if foreign sellers or speakers post a hefty domestically-attackable bond ($10MM would get the job done) and provide a US agent to receive service. And many of our laws need to allow more private enforcement. If “Elf Bar” or whatever Chinese trash vape brand were required to post such a bond as a condition for their distributors and retailers to not be sued, and competing domestic businesses affected by their behavior could sue all actors involved in the supply chain absent such a bond being provided, including landlords5 who were given adequate notice of a problem, I suspect many if not all of these products would disappear from the shelves.

Litigation and the threat of litigation work well together to produce effective private regulation. For example, commercial insurance often requires building owners to submit to inspections and fix safety issues without any cost to the taxpayer. Likewise, any insurance company issuing a $10MM bond to a foreign actor would regulate those actors’ behavior and exclude many of them to reduce its own exposure. The insurance policy itself provides for the reliable collection of damages and makes more plaintiff’s attorneys willing to take cases for small businesses on contingency, and the latter arrangements further incentivize attorneys to be efficient and operate at scale to deliver justice more comprehensively throughout the economy.

These are just the beginning of some ideas, and I’m sure they’re flawed in various ways that only a skilled attorney crafting legislation could fix. My vision is a grand alliance between the plaintiff’s bar and populists to provide proper private regulation of globalism’s externalities and correct the asymmetry posed for domestic players in the US market, who, after all, can be sued and sanctioned, and regulated by every jot and tittle of the US Code and Federal Register, whereas their foreign competitors cannot and are not.

There’s already some hopeful evidence that this is happening. In the most recent legislative session in Texas, an effort by the tort reform crowd to exclude disfigurement6 as a category of compensation for plaintiffs was defeated by a cohort of populist Republicans in the House, some of whom are beginning to realize that big business is not a reliable friend of the conservative cause. Outlets friendly to populists ran cover for their opposition by (rightly) framing the legislation as undermining the litigation rights of disfigured children victimized by transgender medicine clinics.

Democratic politics requires money and votes. Conservative populists have more votes than money, and a durable political coalition must ensure its clients get paid, and efforts are self-funding. It’s fortunate that trial lawyers, by nature, have money and are functionally non-ideological. Conservative populists likewise reject pretextual laissez-faire economic arguments that are, they have noticed, selectively applied by special interests, and further understand that the rot in our society is deep, almost in the bones, and largely beyond the government alone to correct. Trial lawyers, as private actors, can more efficiently and effectively help achieve conservative policy goals if given the right incentives.

Expose the enemies of civilization to torts proportionate to the harm they cause, attach liability to every externality with private profits and public harm, and let a thousand lawsuits bloom.

This February, our fledgling Christian study center in Princeton, the Coverdale House, will begin reading through Luther’s Large Catechism with around 15 students. It’s a sort of Beta launch for our study center—Beta because we are doing it primarily so we can listen carefully for that “click” that happens when you get the perfect product-market fit. Each Monday evening, we’ll get together for dinner, a short prayer service of Psalms, other Scripture, and appointed collects, and then we get to dive into the primary text. It’ll be facilitated by two graduate students from the Religion Department, Onsi Kamel and John Walker, and we’re delighted that the renowned Phil Cary from Eastern University will stop by and give us his expertise in April. So I fully expect to hear the “click” aforementioned.

We’re choosing Luther to start off for a number of reasons. For one thing, it is a beautiful summation of the gospel, written in simple and immediate language. It will be familiar and affirmative and accessible. But, for another thing, it will also likely shock us. Many of us Protestants in the room will be surprised to find Luther urging us to cross ourselves, Luther telling us to look to our baptisms for assurance of salvation, Luther, like a Desert Father, denouncing one of the “mortal” sins, acedia. We are, as it turns out, reading a historical document. It’s not modern, decidedly not modern evangelical. It will force everyone to engage with the text historically and carefully, and not merely as a mirror held up to one’s nodding self.

The Coverdale House has chosen to make part of its vision the furtherance of specifically Protestant scholarship. Of course, we want the furtherance of all Christian scholarship generally, but we see a special need to support historic, orthodox Protestant traditions in the academy. That may seem like an odd choice, so I’d like to explain why we have chosen to make it.

There has been some disagreement recently about Protestant evangelicals in the academy. It’s over the degree to which Protestant evangelicals lag behind their Catholic counterparts, as Aaron Renn’s recent First Things article argued. On the one hand, it seems pretty clear that Catholic intellectuals dominate the scene of Christian scholarship—not just in the area of theology, but in every area. My friend Onsi Kamel gave a good example of this: back in 2021, Ross Douthat interviewed Sohrab Ahmari on New York Times’s Ezra Klein Show. Though both relatively conservative Catholics, they talked about the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin and her rejection of the idea that sex is purely private. Ahmari and Douthat noted that Dworkin’s ideas in an odd way supported St. Augustine’s notion of libido dominandi. Kamel’s point is not that Douthat or Ahmari are particularly great scholars. In fact, that’s just it—they aren’t scholars at all, but journalists, and yet they are beneficiaries of an incredible intellectual ecosystem that can cultivate this kind of rich and capacious approach to traditional Catholic theology. They are the fruit of a strong Catholic intellectual ecosystem. Why is it so difficult to imagine this sort of thing happening outside of Catholic intellectual circles?

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Kamel takes a few stabs at this question:

First: not only have Protestants lost the institutions that were formerly home for us, but we also lack robust representation at elite levels in the secular academy. This, in turn, means there is less distinctly Protestant work to popularize. Because there is less Protestant work to popularize, public intellectuals are not reading Protestants on a regular basis; the void is filled by Catholics.

Now, this is a good answer, but there are other answers. One is that this is all a trick of the data: “Protestants” of the sort Kamel is talking about are an exceedingly rare phenomenon as it is, compared with Catholics. If you mean by “Protestant” the mainline denominations, that is a dwindling crowd (one which is, in fact, facing demographic collapse). If you mean more confessional Protestant denominations (Presbyterian Church in America, Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, the Anglican Church in North America, etc.), this, although growing, is an even tinier crowd.

Still others would say that the evidence cited for the dominance of the “Catholic elites” over the “evangelical elites” in the academy is anecdotal, and that the broader trends are, in fact, in the other direction: Catholics in large numbers are converting to evangelicalism, not vice versa. The conversions that tend to get talked about in the circles of higher education are only a cloistered countercurrent with outsized influence. So maybe all this doomsday talk about the dearth of evangelical Protestant scholars is overblown.

Yet another position might be this: why should any of this matter? Evangelicals, Protestants, Catholics should all be working together. Vying for the most elite or ambitious intellectual ecosystem is surely a bad look. We all can benefit from each other’s scholarship, so let’s build institutions together. Let’s major in the majors and minor in the minors; academia is already a tough place for Christian scholars as it is.

What is left out of this discussion is an important asymmetry: Catholic intellectual institutions are allowed to be Catholic, to act Catholic, to assume Catholic theology is true, and to admit to assuming it is true. Take Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago, for instance. No one is unclear as to what it believes and where its theological convictions will lie. And that is its strength. The fact that it is an institution that owns its beliefs is what gives it energy and confidence.

On the other hand, evangelical and historic Protestant intellectual institutions generally aren’t encouraged to call themselves evangelical or Protestant. They don’t so much emphasize their theological distinctives as blunt them. They don’t attempt to argue that such distinctives are particularly important for the scholarly life. Institutions responsible for the formation of Christian scholars tend to emphasize only three quasi-theological topics: apologetics, vocation, and moral formation. But they tend, on the whole, to demur to go too much further. “Mere Christianity” is an oft-repeated slogan.

And why not, one might well ask? What do arcane and granular theological issues afford us? What does the view of the Eucharist, for instance, or what sort of liturgy one ought to have, or different views of atonement, really have to do with mainstream scholarly inquiry?

Yet here, again, is an asymmetry. I suspect that if you asked major Catholic scholars in a variety of disciplines, they would be shocked by the question. Ask the late Josef Ratzinger, or Eugene McCarraher, or Margarita Mooney Clayton, “Does the doctrine of the Eucharist affect how you do theology? history? sociology?” I am sure of what their response would be. Of course their view of the Eucharist affects their work. Of course the shape of the liturgy matters (after all, isn’t the law of faith the law of prayer?). This might be incomprehensible to many evangelicals Protestants, but that in itself tells you something.

The bottom line is that Catholic intellectuals tend to assume that all theology is relevant to all areas of intellectual endeavor. If it’s not obvious how, it’s still worth assuming it nevertheless until it becomes apparent. On the other hand, theology for the evangelical scholar tends to be a sort of God-of-the-gaps, an occasional mortar to stick in crumbling joinery.

The situation is not helped by the reduction of “theology” to the three issues mentioned above, at least in institutions responsible for forming Christian scholars—apologetics, vocation, and moral formation. After all, what is the point of apologetics when the actual content of the faith in question is underdetermined on all its most crucial points? What is “moral formation” if we don’t have a clear sense of how to arrive at agreement on moral issues, because we have avoided discussing the nature of the Church and her polity?

It won’t work, either, to say in answer, “But mere Christianity!” There is, in fact, a very good author who discusses why this is not an adequate response, by the name of C. S. Lewis, and he wrote a book on the subject which I can recommend, whose title I will leave you to guess. In it, he says that mere Christianity in relation to different theological traditions

is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. …But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, not a place to live in.

Lewis is right, not only about people, but also about institutions in higher education. The hall is a place to wait in, not a place to live in. To be genuinely useful to scholars, institutions that equip Christian scholarship and form Christian scholars ought to do so with convictions.

But won’t this lead to more division in the body of Christ, rather than less? I suspect not. If I look at my bookshelf, it has the names of many great Catholic thinkers, like Rémi Brague, Josef Pieper, Josef Ratziner, Henri du Lubac, and so forth. I am convinced that these people, by being serious about their Catholicism, have made me a better Protestant, not least because they have helped me to conform my mind to the pattern of Christ. Many Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican, and Baptist Christians I know have deeply benefited from Catholics being good at being Catholics. The whole academy has benefited, secular and Christian.

Yet there are riches within the magisterial Protestant tradition that desperately need recovering too. They are criminally underrated, although there are exciting projects attempting their recovery. Catholics need these riches. The secular academy needs them. It is for the good of the whole church that Protestants be good at being Protestant. Or, to borrow the words of John Henry Newman about his own Catholic faith, Protestants in the academy ought to become the cordial and deliberate maintainers and witnesses of the doctrines they are to support.

For that reason, the Coverdale House has a two-fold mission. First, the furtherance of all Christian scholarship, through formation of every Christian scholar. Second, the more specific furtherance of historic, orthodox Protestant scholarship (Reformed, Anglican, Lutheran, Baptist), especially that scholarship which seeks to recover and further a Protestant vision of the Bible, theology, worship, human experience, humane letters, and society as a whole.

The Coverdale House is entering a time when we’re ready to begin operation. That takes support, and, if you feel called to support financially, there are ways to do so. We are particularly looking for partners who can be anchors for our first 3 years of operation. Please get in touch through our website, or by replying to this email, if you would like to learn more.

Be in touch.

A better way to make sense of what we are seeing and feeling is that America is in transition. An old order, one that shaped many people’s lives, is passing away, but a stable new order has not taken its place.

We are living in a liminal period, where we can’t go back, but we aren’t sure where we are moving forward to.

A change of orders is painful. Tanner Greer documented one such transition, from the antebellum American order to America as a nationalized, industrialized colossus. But we could also think of the shift from pre- to post-World War II America.

Many mourn the passing of the old. And certainly things of value are lost in a change of order. But throughout our history, the new orders have proven on the whole to be better than what came before. Certainly few people today would actually choose to live in the previous orders if offered the chance to go back in time.

There’s no guarantee America makes it safely out on the other side into a newer and better configuration. But the was no guarantee in the past either. Previous generations of American helped build those new futures. And that’s the call on us as well.

To show the scope of what’s changing, I’ve created a framework showing the American transition in progress - the old postwar/pre-60s order we came from, where we are today in what I believe to be a transition phase, and where we might be tomorrow.

I trace this transition across three major categories: culture and formation, institutions and governance, and political economy and material conditions.

Culture and Formation

We see here the religious transition I’ve charted in my work. In the postwar order, American’s previous softly institutionalized generic Protestantism gave way to a generic Judeo-Christianity as Ellis Island era immigrants were brought into the American mainstream. Today, we are in a post-Christian culture - see my recent Wall Street Journal essay on vice as an example. We appear to be trending towards a reenchanted spirituality as a religious base.

Similarly, I’ve written a lot about the shift towards postfamilialism, with falling marriage and fertility rates. If this trend does not change, it will have profound consequences for the country - and the world. Many people are studying this topic, but few viable solutions have yet emerged.

While we read more about this in the past than we do today, the postwar order was characteristics by a national common culture (with local cultures beside it) created by mass media, starting with radio and Hollywood. This began shattering the 1990s and has continued fragmenting. Today’s social media driven landscape has a very different media ecology than mass culture America.

We’ve also seen big demographic shifts, from a largely biracial to a diverse society with high and uncontrolled immigration flows. Today’s era remains very Boomer dominated, as we have been for 35 years or so. But this will soon pass.

Unsurprisingly, we’ve seen along with this a decline in social trust and cohesion, and the kinds of dysfunctional politics that characterize our present day.

There’s a lot of white space on this chart. I don’t think the future is set in stone on any of these points.

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Institutions and Governance

The characteristic trend we see here is a steep decline in institutional trust, something very few people seem interested stopping, much less able to stop.

Related to this is the decline of norms. Today, people only feel bound by the letter of the law (if that). Previous norms like “fair play” are despised. Hence we see large percentages of students at elite colleges claiming to be disabled to get extra time and accommodations on tests and such. The new rule is that anything that can be done should be done - if it’s personally advantageous. This ethos has come to permeate our politics, but it is much more pervasive than that.

As those of you who have read my work know, this collapse in norms is related to the collapse of the old WASP establishment, whose values defined those norms. Today’s ruling class is certainly more open, but also less effective. While it contains many good individuals, collectively it is a bankrupt enterprise. The whole is less than the sum of its parts.

In this environment, the commitments of the old order around the ruling class outlook and American engagement in the world are up for grabs. A traditional American isolationism is reasserting itself. While there’s no going back to the insular America of old - at least without some type of great national catastrophe - the idea of a purely cosmopolitan and globalist worldview, detached from the national interest, also seems to lack future viability.

Political Economy and Material Conditions

We see here the shift to a post-industrial economy. People of a variety of persuasions believe we’ve gone too far towards services, believing some measure of production capacity is necessary for defense if nothing else. We’ve seen moves towards a reindustrialization agenda, such as with the CHIPS Act, but the future is very uncertain here. AI also promises to upend our economy, and will have big implications for the future of work.

I’ll briefly note an emerging techno-pessimism in a segment of the American right, one that is skeptical of the viability of technical progress, skeptical of the implications of technical progress, and even neo-Luddite in some respects. I’ll be writing more about this in a forthcoming essay.

We also see the kinds of distributional questions that have produced a lot of discussion and political upheaval. A “K-shaped” society in which the top 10% of households by income control half of all spending is reshaping the fabric of the economy. We still experience significant geographic divergence, with many left behind cities and an entire “Old North” region that is largely moribund.

Housing and energy have gotten much more expensive. Again, there’s a lot of centrist consensus that we need more of both, and the bring down the cost of both. But the center-left “abundance agenda” is easier to talk about than to make reality. And a significant and well-funded segment of the left remains committed to de-growth.

I’ll lastly note that there’s a mixed bag on health. We are now seeing breakthrough miracle cures of diseases like cystic fibrosis. Life expectancy is now back up again. Yet our health care costs are the highest in the world, the public health establishment discredited itself during Covid, progress on many medical fronts remains stubbornly low, and techno-pessimism is very much affecting this area as well (e.g, vaccine skepticism).

These are a lot of areas that have seen major change. One could certainly add other categories as well. Not all of these changes are necessarily bad, or at least not all bad. But the net result is an uncertain environment, one subject to increasing social and political contest as the future is up for grabs.

The future is a product of many complex and interrelated forces and events, superintended by Providence. None of us as individuals can design or conjure a new order.

What we can do is feel a sense of responsibility and opportunity in getting to participate in the creation of that future. America isn’t doomed to disintegrate.

There’s not much many of us can individually do to address many of these problems. In some respects, the logical path to take is to take actions that accelerate the disintegration of the old order. Following the old norms in a country where nobody is doing so is a formula fit only for a chump, for example. And maybe the future order actually is built around a fundamentally lower trust society. (If so, this would be a return to the status quo ante in America, which was not always as high trust as it became in the postwar era). We have to protect our families from the fallout of what’s been happening.

But I do believe we can take a more realistically optimistic stance, and see that there are going to be times that some of us do have opportunities to start building something new and better, being a part of creating that new America order.

Part of my contribution will be to work hard to give you the tools and insights need to understand what is happening and help navigate this period of change, to build lives, institutions, and a society that flourish in the era ahead.

Note: I have opened comments on this post to everyone.

Cover image: Ponce City Market in Atlanta by Keizers/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0

You hear a lot less about the mafia than you used to. One reason is that federal law enforcement has done a great job of breaking up their criminal networks. But that’s not the only reason. Society has legalized much of what the mafia used to do—gambling, drugs and pornography. America is now a post-vice society.

Once largely confined to Las Vegas and Atlantic City, N.J., gambling is now legal in all but a handful of states. Advertisements for sports-betting apps are ubiquitous, and professional sports leagues have partnered with gambling companies. About half of 18-49 year-old men have online betting accounts. Almost all are destined to be losers. Sports betting is reducing savings and increasing bankruptcy and domestic-abuse rates.

…

Finally, there’s porn, now delivered at industrial scale in high-definition video for free online. Adult models can now set up their own personal porn delivery accounts, where desperate men pay for parasocial relationships with their favorites. The Trump administration likes this business model so much it’s handing out coveted O-1B visas, designed for individuals with “extraordinary” creative talent, to OnlyFans models. Sex trafficking and child sexual abuse are common in the online pornography world.

…

The strong Protestant influence created an emphasis on moral reform and vice suppression. Examples include the Comstock Act of 1873, which banned the sending of obscene material in the mail; the Mann Act of 1910, which banned interstate prostitution; and most famously, the temperance movement, which culminated in Prohibition. While some of these efforts may have gone too far at times, they served to keep a lid on the private harms and public blight associated with vice.

Click over to read the whole thing.

You may also be interested in my piece on why men (and women) today should reject vice.

Thanks to all of you for your support, which enables me to devote time to writing on some of today’s most important matters for publications like the Journal. If you aren’t already, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today.

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Cover image: A man smoking pot in Las Vegas by Vapor Vanity/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Hirsch leads off by saying:

The golden age of American Jewry is indeed ending—and the Jewish community can’t see past its fading reflection. The institutions upon which American Jewish flourishing once relied are crumbling. It’s time for American Jewry to build new foundations for its next phase of achievement, and to build them stronger than before.

He says that Jews, a small diaspora minority, adopted a strategy for community survival called shtadlan (intercessor). This model involves currying favor with incumbent power structures, and having a key interlocutor figure who represents the Jewish community in the king’s court. He highlights the Biblical example of Joseph in Egypt as a prototype.

On its face, shtadlanut was a way of securing de facto Jewish rights in lands where Jews were denied such rights de jure. At its core, it was the art of indispensability, to both the Jewish community and its non-Jewish overlords. The shtadlan was part courtier, part financier, and part counselor to non-Jewish rulers, who, in turn, guaranteed Jewish rights.

He argues that this model continued into the modern American era, albeit in an updated form:

In their attempts to become Americans par excellence, Jews not only amassed unprecedented economic, political, and cultural capital via the prestige institutions of American life—universities, newsrooms, civic clubs—but modeled their own institutions on them. The American Jewish Committee, for example, began in 1906 as essentially a shtadlan cooperative of influential and well-respected American Jews and ultimately fashioned itself into the “State Department of the Jewish people.” Rather than end the era of shtadlanut, these organizations institutionalized it, employing what Breger called “a form of postemancipation Jewish politics” concerned “with the protection of the civil and political rights of individual Jews.” The strategy of intercession, far from extinct, adapted to the political structure of American democratic liberalism, much as it had adapted to the particular circumstances in different parts of Europe.

The problem with this strategy is that, as Hirsch points out, when there’s a change in the regime of power, this leaves Jews exposed. They are seen as part of or collaborators with the old regime.

This experience is hardly limited to Jews. Think of the Christian community in Syria, for example. It more or less sided with the Assad regime in return for protection. With the fall of Assad, they are now exposed to reprisals.

By aligning so closely with incumbent power structures, Hirsch notes that Jews also sacrificed community autonomy in the process.

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Hirsch argues that this is the very process that is playing out in America, writing:

Yet perhaps because of a historically conditioned impulse for security, Jews eventually tend to prioritize institutionalization above autonomy—and when they do so, enmeshment risks exposure. During anti-institutional epochs, Jews do not merely face concomitant collapse—the very accomplishment that once secured them serves as grist for persecution. American Jews face such a moment today.

Much as in 1640s Poland, American Jews have become identified with the United States’ institutional authority and its core characteristics—among them, meritocracy, expertise, and prosperity—at precisely the moment when that authority is fading. Where our ancestors courted dukes, we endowed universities; where they befriended bishops, we cultivated editorial boards; where they built self-governing institutions that interfaced with royal authority, we founded nonprofits and advocacy groups engineered to mirror American power structures. Other minorities press their concerns, to be sure—such is the beauty of American democracy—but no other community has fused its fate so completely with establishment institutions. If anything set American shtadlanut apart, it was America itself: Jews believed that, thanks to its republican creed, the United States would treat its embrace of the Jews not as barter but as principle. We placed our faith in a kind of civic loyalty.

Yet the institutions we invested in are crumbling.

Trust in government and media is at a historic low. Confidence in higher education has similarly plummeted. Almost no institution in American public life remains broadly admired. As top-tier talent fled these bodies, their husks have been occupied in many cases by second-rate, navel-gazing functionaries, cosplaying radicals, and clenched-fisted commissars. In turn, Americans are rejecting the collective order that governed the country for decades.

…

We’re not just losing influence; by communally clinging to institutions, we confirm every anti-establishment suspicion that we are paragons of a discredited order. [emphasis added]

Hirsch makes the case that in today’s ongoing catabolic collapse of institutions, Jews need a new strategy.

To survive in this new world, we must rid ourselves of the enmeshment currency and trade autonomy for something better: sovereignty.

What does sovereignty mean in this context? In a sense, it is rather similar to what the anti-institutional forces are calling for. Many of them, especially on the political Right, call for a cold reassessment of inherited entanglements with allies and nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations.

In this landscape, he believes one vehicle for the pursuit of Jewish communal sovereignty is the creation of a Jewish sovereign wealth fund.

The anti-institutional world is less wood-paneled boardroom than open-air bazaar. Institutional America was relational, running on shared values and social mores that fostered trust. Anti-institutional America, by contrast, is transactional, with everyone haggling at arm’s length—ad hoc, opportunistic, often devil-may-care. To prosper in the coming transactional disorder of anti-institutionalism, the Jewish community must disentangle itself from the institutions. Instead of investing so much financial and political capital in lobbying efforts to preserve our establishment station, we should invest that money in something we directly control: a Jewish sovereign wealth fund.

A Jewish sovereign wealth fund would represent a new form of Diaspora power, suited to the transactional age. Much like the wealth funds of other nations, it would wield capital as statecraft on behalf of Jewish interests, without apology or pretense. [emphasis added]

He sees the sovereign wealth funds of the Middle Eastern states as a model.

Consider the recent success of the Gulf states in transactional America. Rather than build grassroots advocacy organizations, they invest in U.S. infrastructure, from AI data centers to critical minerals. Rather than lobby for favorable coverage, they buy sports teams and entertainment properties that shape cultural narratives. Rather than appeal to shared values, they generate mutual profit. They build political alliances not through pleading but by creating dependencies.

Hirsch makes the key point that rather than just another tool to be deployed, the logic of the sovereign wealth fund represents a fundamental shift in mindset, away from reliance on institutions toward self-reliance.

Reorienting around the concept of sovereignty autonomy would signify a shift toward self-reliance. Institutionalized shtadlanut in America depended on building up others’ resources—namely, those of lawmakers and taxpayers—to secure Jewish protection. A transactional approach, by contrast, would require insourcing rather than outsourcing Jewish security. Instead of building political patronage and pushing for resources through mediating institutions, the Jewish community would ask no one to spend on its behalf and would openly invest its own capital in pursuit of its own interests—indeed, its own happiness. [emphasis added]

Also key: this is designed to build up Jewish sovereignty but not to become antagonistic towards other people. It’s intended to be a clear-eyed, realistic response to a changed world, but one that continues to allow the Jewish community to work with and invest with others where there’s an overlap of interests and opportunity. It would just do so on a different basis than today.

A wealth fund would allow the Jewish community to invite allies and skeptics alike into mutually beneficial investments. It could help key players solve their problems and achieve their goals, thereby securing support for ours. Skeptics who distrust our institutionalism might respect our show of independence. Anti-establishment forces might welcome Jewish capital that strengthens their projects. Most important, a wealth fund could transform both our psychology and our posture—from supplicants seeking protection into partners offering opportunity. Despite its corporate veneer, a wealth fund would not merely reproduce institutionalism. If shtadlanut sought seats at the institutional table, a wealth fund would build its own table and invite others in.

He sees his proposal as revolutionary.

The implications of this proposal are monumental. Metaphorically speaking, it is a call to change the currency of Jewish politics, exchanging intercession for sovereignty as the currency of power. It is a call for the Jewish community to exercise its economic and political power openly, in pursuit of its own interests, as any sovereign people would—measured in real-world security rather than cocktail-party applause. [emphasis added]

I am not Jewish and neither endorse or reject Hirsch’s proposal. I find his engagement with our cultural trends interesting. First, he sees the same institutional decay that’s widely observed by many. He judges it to be a serious problem that requires a serious response, namely resetting how Jews in America secure their future.

A lot of people today bemoan the decline of institutions and social cohesion, but appear not to consider that a particularly big problem. I say that because if they did think it was a big problem, they would be talking about major changes that need to be made to adjust to this new institutional landscape.

Hirsch is not one of those people. He sees the problem, believes it is a problem, and lays out the case for major changes to deal with it. He may be wrong in both his diagnosis and prescription, but he is proposing a solution that measures up to the scale of the problem he sees.

His focus on sovereignty and a more transactional approach to society is similar to what I’ve argued for evangelicals. A pursuit of more ownership is a form of working towards sovereignty. So it’s interesting to see someone independently develop similar ideas (though of course I’ve never mentioned his core idea of a sovereign wealth fund).

This sort of serious engagement with what it would really mean to live in a world where the current trends continue forward is something I expect to see much more of in the future.

Cover image: Le triomphe de Joseph by Hilaire Pader, photographed by Archaeodontosaurus/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

A couple of weeks ago I highlighted part of a response by Albert Thompson to my evangelical elite article in First Things.

Many evangelicals understand ownership, but they do not understand governance. Evangelical business success is concentrated in sectors like retail, restaurants, and distribution—niche fiefs, where the power of ownership is absolute. This is effective for building a company with a relatively predictable business model, but it is a poor preparation for the commanding heights of society. Institutional power in places like high finance, the Supreme Court, or elite universities requires a different social capital: the ability to marshal a consensus among the governed and to navigate complex, high-trust systems that you do not personally own. When evangelicals bring a fief mindset to politics or public institutions, they may win a few elections, but often fail to create durable institutions that flourish and survive in a messy and fallen world. Instead, they become lords of gated enclaves and public square paupers. [emphasis added]

I said it reminded me of a Law & Liberty essay I’ve referenced before that talks about the difference between “car dealers” and “New Dealers.” Evangelicals are car dealers (sometimes literally) whereas elites are New Dealers.

One of the themes of my writing has been that evangelicals need to become more focused on ownership. Ownership provides sovereignty in a world where institutions can’t be trusted or relied on, and where many people may not like you. Ownership allows you to sustain your way of life in the face of unfriendly social currents (to a point).

Just as an example, evangelicals have been building their own educational institutions such as classical Christian schools or homeschooling. They are building these things for the same reasons that the Catholic Church built out its parochial school network, to educate their children in values-aligned institutions, not the mainstream institutions that were not. (In the case of the Catholics, this was because they perceived public schools as too Protestant).

The problem is that going through an evangelical education pipeline through to college channels young people away from elite pathways and networks. It’s not a hard and fast ban. Lots of people who go to religious schools get into elite colleges. Plenty of people who go to Christian colleges get into elite graduate programs. And people who never went to an elite school nevertheless join the American elite.

Still, we have to be honest that there’s a tension between these things. The more we focus on building and participating in private ecosystems, the less we can focus on participating in and benefitting from public, mainstream ecosystems.

It’s all too easy to construct a ghetto and spend your days operating inside of it.

Everything in life involves tradeoffs. Everyone out there is allocating their time between various ecosystems, public and private, deciding which ones to participate in, etc. You can’t get everything you want with just one choice, and every unique mix has its own upsides and downsides.

I continue to think it makes sense for most evangelicals to focus on building up more owned space and institutions. For most people, considerations like elite pathways don’t even apply.

But for those people who have the talent and inclination towards pursuing positions and accomplishments at the highest levels of society, it makes sense to allocation much more time and effort towards participation in the institutions and networks that lead that direction.

For example, in contrast to the “college doesn’t matter” people, I’ve always argued that where you go to school is crucial in determining what opportunities and networks you will get access to. So absolutely you should think about going to the most prestigious school you can get into (assuming you are able to get into a highly prestigious one. If you can’t, that’s probably telling you something right there).

I’m definitely not someone who promotes a one-size-fits-all approach. However, I did want to highlight some tensions between various themes I’ve written about in my work.

Cover image: The Ambrose School, Boise, ID