Why Young Men Love Reading Nietzsche

Nietzsche's masculine draw, why Gen Z men don't want to start churches, immigrant nannies and more in this week's roundup.

The Point is one of the best little magazines out there. It recently published a piece by Mat Messerschmidt on why Nietzsche appeals to young men, and why attempting to interpret away some of the aspects of his thought that people don’t like won’t work:

The voice of Nietzsche was unmistakably the voice of a man—a man who was asserting himself as a man. Maybe I was especially susceptible to the allure of such a voice at that specific moment in time, as I endured the deeply emasculating experience of undergoing a surgery that would leave me bedridden for a month, enfeebling my body, causing pretty dramatic weight loss and ruling out further participation in high school sports, which had been central to my identity and the basis of many of my male friendships.

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I had grown up, I was repeatedly told, in a culture dominated by men, by male voices, by male interests, by male points of view. Raised in a progressive family in the college town of East Lansing, Michigan, I accepted this description of the world. Yet, paradoxically, it was precisely the assertive maleness of the voice I encountered in the Nietzsche text that felt so profoundly radical. At home, my father would never have talked about being a man, and my mother seemed only ever to tell me about how men were in order to tell me how I should not be: men didn’t listen to women; men were stubborn and vain; men didn’t know how to load a dishwasher. At school, there were plenty of class discussions like the one led by our German teacher on how much better the world would be if women held all political power. But this sort of talk wasn’t simply transmitted by our elders. At our staff meetings for the high school newspaper’s opinion page, the hottest discussion topic was sex and gender, and an especially well-worn theme was generalized male entitlement and selfishness in sex—a stressful conversation topic as a virgin already obsessed with worries about basic performance. Of course, it isn’t as if any one of these reflections on men was emotionally devastating on its own, but they were coming from all sides. The world demanded masculine men, but smart people could not say that men needed to be masculine. Smart books certainly could not say that—or so it appeared to me, until I found Nietzsche.  

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But the gap between the world as seen by Nietzsche and the world as seen by a progressive college town was that Nietzsche openly extolled the masculine characteristics demanded by the real social world, whereas the real social world condemned those characteristics while it demanded them. Despite all the very real social penalties for failing to live up to standards of masculinity, in any and every conversation I ever had in East Lansing about gender, those very standards were explicitly and roundly condemned as poisonous. In such discussions, the words “male,” “man” and “masculinity” were far more often invoked pejoratively than neutrally or positively. “Toxic masculinity” was not yet a catchphrase in the early aughts, but masculinity was already toxic in our town. His challenge to this enforced cultural contradiction was something both new and liberating. 

Click over to read the whole thing.

Why Gen-Z Christians Don’t Want to Start Churches

In a follow-up to my interview with NYC pastor Jon Tyson, who observed that Gen-Z Christians are not interested in starting churches, a Gen-Z pastor wrote to share some thoughts on why that is:

As a Gen Z pastor who like most of my seminary classmates did not go on to plant a church, I wanted to send you some thoughts on why that's happening. 

Three main reasons: 

1. There are fewer Gen Z pastors in all fields. Gen Z is smaller and less religious than Millennials so there are just fewer people going into every kind of Christian ministry. Ask church planters or mainline denominational executives or mega-churches looking for staff and they will all tell you they cannot find enough bodies to fill the jobs out there. 

2. There are better ministry alternatives to church planting available. Church planting was in part a theological movement but it was also a practical response to a bottleneck in lead pastor jobs. To paint with a broad brush, the boomers took all the lead pastor jobs when the church was growing in the 90s and then as church growth stalled in the 2000s there weren't jobs for the younger guys. If you wanted a lead pastor job either you might have to spend a decade getting experience or waiting for a boomer to retire, or you could just plant your own church and be a lead guy from day one. For example, one of the hottest church plants in my home county is led by an older millennial who was youth pastor for 10 years at the local mega-church under a boomer and eventually he got tired of it and planted his own church 30 minutes down the road. 

Now boomers are retiring and lead jobs are opening up. Or if you take an associate job, there's a good chance the lead guy will be retiring soon. It's much easier to get a lead pastor job than it used to be. At the same time, church planting has gotten harder with the culture being more anti-Christian and cities more expensive, so why risk it with a church plant when you could just get a normal pastor job? 

3. The economics of church planting have broken. Cities cost way more than they did when the movement started and church giving is in decline across the board. It was one thing to plant a church when you could get a low rent apartment in a bad neighborhood and meet in a church building nobody wanted. It is quite another when all the old churches have already been turned into boutique shops and your apartment costs most of your salary. With plenty of other opportunities out there, why take the risk? 

The key takeaway is that the realities of the pastoral job market and cities are driving this change more than any dispositional shift in Gen Z. From a practical, individual perspective planting a church is now much less appealing than its alternatives. A lot of what makes Gen Z distinct from Millenials are just rational responses to how the world has changed in the past 20 years, as opposed to direct reactions against Millennials. It's like the meme from Mad Men, "I don't think about you at all." 

If you didn’t give it a listen yet, you should check out my full interview with Tyson. He gives a lot of cultural insights about post-Covid NYC and Generation Z that I had not heard elsewhere.

How Elites Rely on Cheap Immigrant Labor to Get By

The cover of this week’s New Yorker is an extremely accurate portrayal of the city. When we lived on the Upper West Side, I’d estimate at least 85% of nannies were immigrants.

The people hiring these nannies are high income professional, but given the high costs of living in the city, they can only afford to hire help at the low rates this labor affords them. It’s the same for many other such services. Their ability to live in the big city is underwritten by having these immigrant women earning below par wages, and, as this image implies, frequently having to not be present for their own children in order to do so.

The desire for high immigration by these urbanites is deeply personal and self-interested. Michael Lind made this observation as far back as the mid-1990s:

Why is a high immigration policy opposed by most middle-class Americans but favored by almost all members of the overclass of all persuasions—left, right, and center? I discovered the answer after publishing a book in which I argued for reducing immigration levels in order to raise wages among unskilled workers in the United States. Friends and acquaintances of mine of various political viewpoints, all of them highly educated and affluent members of the overclass by my definition, found elements of my argument convincing. From both liberals and conservatives, however, I heard a similar complaint: “I don’t agree with your idea about restricting immigration, though. We need our nanny!” In every case, it turned out that the objecting individual and his or her spouse paid a maid or nanny from Latin America or the Caribbean to look after their children while both parents worked at professional jobs. Take away the elaborate moral arguments of the overclass left for immigration, and the equally elaborate economic rationales of the overclass right, and what remains is the naked economic interest in maintaining a supply of poorly paid, nonunionized foreign women whose labor permits overclass parents of all political persuasions to enjoy a lifestyle like that of the aristocrats of the past with their nannies and governesses.

They talk a good game of “justice” but many of them want to perpetrate a state of affairs in which they personally benefit from labor exploitation.

Best of the Web

Education Next: What If Boys Like the “Wrong” Kind of History?

Fox News: Growing number of Gen Z men supporting Trump represents ‘ongoing culture shock' in US politics

James Richardson: How The Rise of Small Families Set Many of Us Up for Gender Miscommunication - A piece from 2023 someone sent me that argues one reason for growing intersexual conflict is that smaller families mean people are less likely to have grown up with siblings of the opposite sex, which helps train us in cross-gender understanding and relations.

Kyla Scanlon: How Dating Apps Contribute to the Demographic Crisis

WSJ: I Am Childless, But Not By Choice

WSJ: Having a Child With Down Syndrome Changed the Way I Think About IQ

WSJ: Americans Are Having Fewer Babies—So Fewer People Get to Be Grandparents

Joshua Mitchell: The Age of Incomplete Religions - If you like this piece, then check out my podcast with Mitchell on the topic.

New from me this week:

• My podcast is with Joshua Klein about his Mortise and Tenon magazine - and the intersection of theology and craftsmanship

• Joseph Holmes reviewed the new Reagan movie.

• I look at a new study on the state of working class men.