Fossilized Faith

Religion going obsolete, among the pro-natalists, and why we should reject "toxic masculinity"

I have a review of sociologist Christian Smith’s important new book Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America in the new December issue of First Things magazine.

I find Smith’s obsolensce framework very powerful. His analysis is also complementary to my three worlds framework. An excerpt from my review:

Smith offers a useful new lens: obsolescence. Religion is now obsolete—that is, “most people feel it is no longer useful or needed because something else has superseded it in function, efficiency, value, or interest.” This doesn’t mean that religion is hated or that no one is religious, merely that the world has moved on…As Smith writes, obsolescence doesn’t mean extinction. “Some people still can and do use obsolete items because they are familiar, less expensive, viewed with affection, or as a matter of principle.” Traditional television is becoming obsolete because people have moved to ­on-demand digital streaming and social media. Many people still watch TV, but as a medium it is in decline, with viewers skewing older. Print newspapers are even more obsolete. At age fifty-five, I still take the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times in print. But younger generations have moved on.

In the short term, nothing stops you from using an obsolete product or practice. But it is no longer relevant to most other people’s lives, and eventually, social ­changes will make sustaining obsolete practices difficult. Horse and buggy transportation is obsolete: The Amish continue to use it, but doing so requires them to maintain a lifestyle that is detached from mainstream American life. Print newspapers may be even less sustainable. When they are no longer produced, people like me won’t be able to buy them at all.

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The most impressive thing about Smith’s book is how many social trends and events he adduces—both inside and outside the church—in support of his thesis. By my count, he discusses forty-one different historical developments, ranging from the increasing number of women in the workforce to the rise of televangelism to global neoliberal capitalism to postmodernism. Most of these developments will be familiar to readers already, but together the effect is overwhelming.

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The implications of Smith’s book are challenging for conservative American Christians whose strategies for the future have ­t­ended to involve doubling down on the very elements—the “fossilized forms”—of traditional religion that are now obsolete: rootedness, stability, family-centeredness, thick community, institutions, and historic practices and distinctives. This is the paradigm of Rod Dreher’s ­Benedict Option and, to some extent, of my own work.

But if Smith is right, this strategy will probably only ghettoize the Church by making it even less relevant to mainstream society. It is the “build an ark” approach, which is designed to help the Church survive cultural change but which at some level involves giving up on or disengaging from society.

Click over to read the whole thing.

I highly recommend reading Smith’s book. You may also be interested in the podcast I did with him about it.

Make America Procreate Again

The Economist magazine took notice of the conservative pro-natalist push. Their take was everything you’d expect and focused on the Natal Con conference.

The vice-president, J.D. Vance, is at the nexus of the tech-trad alliance. As a vocal convert to Roman Catholicism whose political career was supercharged by Thiel, his former boss, Vance has been thrilled to help make pro-natalism an explicitly MAGA issue. He has criticised prominent Democrats who don’t have biological children for being “childless cat ladies” (Taylor Swift then pointedly used the phrase in her endorsement of Kamala Harris last year); and he made a point of saying in his first public address as vice-president that “I want more babies in the United States of America.” Trump, in turn, has declared himself the “fertilisation president” and recently unveiled a plan to offer discounted fertility drugs through TrumpRx, the administration’s direct-to-consumer website, due to launch next year.

There was a sense among many at NatalCon that, with Trump and Vance in power, the moment to jump-start American baby-making had come at last. But those gathered outside the museum on the opening night of the conference had a different impression: that pro-natalism was part of a broader and more insidious project to create a whiter America. A group of protesters, their faces mostly covered, gathered in the museum’s courtyard. “Nazis off our campus!” they screamed through a megaphone as conference attendees streamed in. One sign read “Eugenicists” with the word “Natalists” crossed through.

Adkinson didn’t mind being heckled. “I’ve been called a Nazi at least 500 times in my life,” he told me with a shrug. He didn’t see what all the fuss over pro-natalism was about. “The message is simple: go have babies. And the left is going nuts!”

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Many governments have tried to bribe people to have more babies. South Korea—which has a TFR of 0.72, the lowest on Earth—has spent $270bn over the past 20 years on pro-na talist policies: subsidising taxis for pregnant women, providing free IVF and, in some towns, giving new mothers free housing. This year it began granting couples a cash payment of close to 30m won ($20,000) over eight years for each child they have. Viktor Orban’s government spends 6% of Hungary’s GDP on pro-natalist policies—including a lifelong exemption from income tax for mothers of two children or more.

These policies have had little effect. South Korea’s low birth rate has barely budged; Hungary’s is 1.56, lower than its neighbours Romania and Bulgaria, which have spent far less on promoting births. “Look, having a child is more like joining the military than going out to dinner,” Catherine Pakaluk, a speaker at NatalCon, told me. “That’s why cash incentives don’t work.” Pakaluk is a professor of political economy at the Catholic University of America, where her research touches on the economics of family and demography. “Women now have all of these wonderful options. Which is to be celebrated. But that renders childbearing a choice.”

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Lyman Stone, a demographer and the head of the Pro-Natalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative think-tank, knew the optics of the conference were unpromising. When we met up at NatalCon, he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt that made him stand out from the crowd. “We’re getting together and all talking to each other about babies, which is kind of a weird thing to do, especially for a group that’s like, I don’t know, 70%, 80% men,” he chuckled.

He understood why women would balk at hanging out with pro-natalists. “A lot of people associate worries about low fertility with the end of women’s rights”—with a regressive vision of the future, or even the dystopia created by Margaret Atwood in her novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”, in which women are seen simply as baby-making machines. “That obviously turns a lot of women off to the whole conversation.”

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I had wondered whether pro-natalism was more attractive to people in the tech industry, than to, say, other educated groups in America, because they are some of the few people who feel they can comfortably afford to have massive families. But it was clear that, even for a couple as affluent as the Collinses, some sacrifice was necessary to raise their brood. Rather than living in an urban tech hub, for instance, they had moved to rural Pennsylvania, where it was cheaper to buy a house large enough for a host of kids.

As Malcolm and I spoke, I noticed that the Collins children were wearing the same black polo shirt as their father. “Mostly we just have one outfit for the kids that can change with age,” he explained. I noted that that seemed like a pragmatic way to raise children. “We’re breeding at scale,” he responded matter-of-factly, “so we need to find ways to be frugal.”

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Still, some issues between them are tricky to reconcile, including IVF. The technology accounts for only 2% of American births, because it is expensive and often not covered by insurance. But some religious conservatives oppose it, as the process produces excess embryos—“unborn children”, in their eyes—that are often destroyed. The Heritage Foundation supported last year’s decision by the Alabama Supreme Court which ruled that frozen embryos have the same rights as living children; the decree has created confusion over appropriate storage methods and the legal liabilities those seeking IVF treatment might face.

Many of the religious conservatives at NatalCon took a more pragmatic approach to IVF, however, acknowledging that it attracts broad public support. As Peachy Keenan, one of America’s most famous trad wives, said in her NatalCon speech, “My best friend used IVF to build her family. I have IVF nieces.” In spite of her “serious moral qualms about the byproducts of the process”, she did not think it was something to block: “Neither I nor J.D. Vance nor the pope is going to outlaw IVF. That toothpaste is out of the fallopian tube.” Kevin Dolan—the conference’s organiser and a Mormon father of six, with a seventh on the way—concurred. “Religious conservatives know they’re in the wilderness. They know they won’t get to decide if people use IVF or other fertility technologies,” he told me.

Click over to read the whole thing. I was able to access it by creating a free account.

Against “Toxic Masculinity”

The internet personality Cartoons Hate Her has a new piece in GQ arguing that it’s time to retire the term “toxic masculinity.”

If you were alive in 2017—or better yet, like me, in your twenties and living in San Francisco—you probably heard a lot about “toxic masculinity.” I did, all the time, and it bugged me a little. Not because I felt personally attacked by the term (I am a woman, after all), but because nobody seemed entirely sure what the alternative was. How does one replace toxic masculinity without abandoning the concept of masculinity itself? To make matters worse, there was seemingly no way for men to escape the label. In a sort of nonsensical “if the witch drowns, she wasn’t actually a witch” train of logic, the only way to avoid the label was to “do the work” and own up to being toxic. The worst sin you could commit was to deny your toxic masculinity—which was apparently a symptom of toxic masculinity.

Most reasonable people agreed that it was bad to be boorish, arrogant, overly confrontational, and aggressive. Most people agreed it was bad to objectify or disrespect women. But if those things were toxic, what would a non-toxic masculinity look like? Assuming a man “did the work,” did his future involve endless groveling and the disavowal of his masculinity entirely, or was he able to remain masculine in some way that wasn’t a problem? And how would we square this with the long history of heterosexual women sexually desiring masculine men, whatever that meant? (I distinctly recall some women denying that women were attracted to masculine traits, but as one of the many studies I conducted for my Substack on relationships and culture later suggested, women desire dominance in men more than men desire submission in women!)

Click over to read the whole thing.

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New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention in First Things magazine as well, and also from Rod Dreher, and Rod Dreher again.

New this week:

• The Evaporation of the Sacred (by John Seel) - We traded worship for branding, mystery for metrics, and now the soul is colonized by code

• My podcast this week is with this newsletter’s resident film critic Joseph Holmes on his film Jim vs. the Future.

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