Blue America's Family Values

Blue families in big cities, evangelicals selling out singles, and more in this week's digest.

Washington, DC resident Joshua Sohn penned an interesting piece for the Institute for Family Studies about the largely progressive families that surround his. It’s observational journalism, not a quantitative or statistical report, but very interesting as a sort of ethnographic piece.

Blue families certainly do exist. I live among them. Specifically, my family lives in the District of Columbia, where Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump 90% to 6% in the last election. Essentially all the families in my kids’ elementary school are Democrats, and most are liberal Democrats. These families also have some remarkable features: marriage is virtually universal, while divorce is virtually nonexistent. Almost every kid is growing up in a two-parent married family. And if we’re going to highlight the general retreat from marriage and parenthood in Blue America, we should also look at the circumstances where Blue Americans buck the trend.

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Given that Blue Americans tend to favor egalitarian gender roles over traditional gender roles, you might assume that deep-Blue families in a deep-Blue city like DC fall squarely on the egalitarian side. But that’s not what you see among the families in our social circle. Instead, you see a more surprising mix of egalitarian and trad lifestyle markers.

On the egalitarian side, virtually every family has two working parents. Stay-at-home mothers are unheard of, for the most part. Educational attainment is equal between spouses. And some of the more symbolic lifestyle markers also fall on the egalitarian side. For example, based on the parent lists for my kids’ classrooms, only 9 kids out of 50 (18%) have parents with the same last name. If the traditional American default is for wives to take their husbands’ last name, these families cheerfully go the other way.

But on the trad side, income hypergamy is alive and well among these families. Most fathers out-earn mothers, and it’s rarely the other way around. To generalize slightly, there are three main career buckets among these well-educated DC parents. At the top of the income scale are the private-sector for-profit workers. In the middle are the government bureaucrats. And at the bottom are the non-profit NGO workers. Most fathers are in the top or middle bucket, while most mothers are in the middle or bottom one. For example, among my kids’ close friends and classmates, there’s one family where the husband is a private-sector lawyer and the mother runs a literacy nonprofit. There is another family where the father is an engineer for a large tech company and the mother is a government lawyer. And another family where the father is a real estate executive and the mother is another government lawyer. Even in the one military family, the father out-earns the mother. And, yes, my wife and I practice some income hypergamy, too.

These families have other traditional markers as well. For example, they’re surprisingly religious. I’d estimate that almost a third of my kids’ friends go to church on a weekly basis.

Click over to read the whole thing.

It’s another example of how if you want to see conservative values in practice, you’ll often find them among people who vote Democrat and align on the cultural left. They are quite often the ones renovating historic architecture, reviving small towns or neighborhoods, patronizing the fine arts, conserving natural beauty, etc. As I once wrote, Vermont is the state that most embodies a certain conservative ideal that you see championed online. This can also extend to some family practices as well.

This might be one reason that conservative elites like Sohn very frequently choose to live in deep blue areas rather than ones where they’d be surrounded by Republican voters.

This piece also gets at something I’ve noted over the years, namely the inability of evangelicals to articulate a compelling role for women other than wife and mother. This is unappealing to those who have talents and inclinations beyond that, or who are single. This story about families on the cultural left - presumably most of whom are not evangelical - shows traditionalism (including religion for many) combined with a broader vision. I’m not saying its perfect, but it is showing in the real world marketplace that it has an appeal.

Evangelicalism and the Single Woman

Speaking of evangelicalism and single women, a video clip posted on X from a book interview with Rebecca VanDoodewaard stirred quite a bit of controversy online. (You can also watch the entire interview). It’s about women and singleness.

VanDoodewaard articulates common positions here, so this is representative of a sizable strand of evangelical thinking. Ligonier, the outfit that posted this video, is a very large evangelical ministry. The latest 990 I could find for them showed a budget of around $25 million. This is not a fringe or niche organization.

I only want to note two things about it. First is the use of “idolatry of the family” language. I highlight this to show that I’m not inventing or exaggerating this language. In the face of declining family formation and fertility, evangelicals heavily stress that a strong desire by single people for marriage and children is often bad and sinful.

Second is the lack of any practical advice for single women who desire marriage to help them find it. Waiting for marriage is treated as an entirely passive endeavor. The only recommended actions are to not waste the time she is single, and instead deploy it for things like getting a graduate degree or working on her career or serving the church.

The contrast with the messages men receive is jarring. The foundational principle of the manosphere is self-improvement. It dispenses a vast array of practical insight and advice to help men get what they want and navigate life. This is also true of more mainstream figures. Scott Galloway’s book is full of it. Even evangelicals like VanDoodewaard’s husband dispense self-improvement advice to single men.

For women, the secular world likewise has a wide array of tactical advice and self-improvement tips to help women get what they want.

But the evangelical world doesn’t seem to offer its single women who desire marriage much beyond admonitions not to be too unhappy about their condition. Their hoped-for futures are being sold out, and by a class of leaders who are overwhelmingly married with children themselves - people who wouldn’t trade their own families for all the gold in Ft. Knox. We have to do better than this.

Related in NY Mag: Yes, Straight Women Are In Trouble

Best of the Web

The film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was released 40 years ago. A decade ago I wrote an essay called “Gentrification on the Big Screen” contrasting it with The Blues Brothers, a film released just six years previously. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off contained many of the elements of gentrification and the Creative Class in embryonic form.

NYT: Behind Every Dad Bod Is a Healthy Dad Brain (gift link) - “When it comes to brain health and mental fitness, becoming a father is one of the best things you can do.”

WSJ: Making Sense of America’s Low Fertility Rate (gift link)

Ezra Klein: Your Kids Are Not Doomed (gift link)

Over the past few years, I’ve been asked one question more than any other. It comes up at speeches, at dinners, in conversation. It’s the most popular query when I open my podcast to suggestions, time and again. It comes in two forms. The first: Should I have kids, given the climate crisis they will face? The second: Should I have kids, knowing they will contribute to the climate crisis the world faces?…But one thing I’ve noticed, after years of reporting on climate change: The people who have devoted their lives to combating climate change keep having children.

New Content and Media Mentions

I promised to specifically highlight the Youtube version of my conversation with Jacob Siegel about his book The Information State. I solved my upload problems and here it is:

I was mentioned this week in Real Clear Books and Culture, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and by Tim Challies.

New this week:

• From Titans to Technocrats - Today’s urban leaders are more polished, more inclusive, and more powerless than the Titans they replaced — which is why the hardest problems go unsolved

• My podcast this week is with Jacob Siegel on the 100-year rise of the information control state.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Cover image by Alexander Dummer on Unsplash.