Solving the Boy Crisis

All male organizations for boys, David Brooks on right-wing nihilism, Christianity in America and more in this week's digest.

Check out this piece where I’m quoted in The Hill, on Republicans and cities.

Men Mentoring Boys

Richard Reeves (Of Boys and Men) and Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone) had a great opinion essay on the cover of the last Sunday Opinion section in the New York Times. They talk about what we can learn about the boy crisis from the Progressive Era of 100-125 years ago.

They specifically highlight the role of single sex institutions, and the double standard that exists where men’s organizations must admit women - and ultimately center their interests - whereas women can keep their own organizations.

More than a century ago, reformers recognized that the most effective solution to the boy problem was to build civic institutions and spaces where men could help boys to navigate their way successfully to a mature, pro-social manhood. That is a lesson that needs to be relearned for our own times. As former President Barack Obama said recently, “As a society, we have to create more structures for boys and men to have guidance, rituals, frameworks, encouragement.” He went further, suggesting that the men in our communities are vital assets who can act as a “sort of elders to boys, so they’re not just looking at one particular role model, but many.”

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First, there are simply fewer organizations with an explicit mission to serve boys and men. Most of the ones formed during the last boy crisis have gone coed, sometimes as a result of a merger. Most now serve more girls than boys. An exception is Boys and Girls Clubs, which renamed itself in 1990 and still serves a slightly higher share of boys (55 percent) than girls.

In other cases, previously male-serving institutions have gone coed while their sister organizations have remained single-sex. Boy Scouts no longer exists, having rebranded as Scouting America after the controversial decision to admit girls. Of the roughly one million scouts in the movement today, around 20 percent are girls. But there are also more than a million girls in Girl Scouts, which remains a single-sex organization. All told, there are 50 percent more girls than boys in scouting.

The Y.M.C.A. banned gender discrimination in 1978 and now has a mission to support the well-being of all children, young people and the wider community, regardless of gender. Most Y.M.C.A. members are female, and more than two-thirds of Y.M.C.A. employees — including, strikingly, all six senior executives — are women. Most volunteers are women, too. On every measure, then, the Y is now a female-oriented institution. (The Y.W.C.A. remains a single-sex organization with an explicit mission to empower women.)

The gradual abolition of organizations devoted to serving boys and men has been a result of a laudable drive for inclusion and perhaps a sense that single-sex environments are archaic or even harmful. But it is naïve to think that a society bereft of male-centered institutions is the ideal one for helping boys to become good men. Indeed, there is some suggestive evidence for positive outcomes for boys attending single-sex public schools, like Eagle Academy in New York, for example.

Click over to read the whole thing. I used a gift link so you should be able to read it.

David Brooks on Right-Wing Nihilism

David Brooks it out with another classic column in which he bemoans the excesses of the left, but then proceeds to tell us that the real problem is the right’s reaction.

Democratic friends, let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine you woke up one morning and all your media sources were produced by Christian nationalists. You sent your kids off to school and the teachers were espousing some version of Christian nationalism. You turned on your sports network and your late-night comedy, and everyone was preaching Christian nationalism.

That’s a bit how it feels to be more conservative in the West today — to feel drenched by a constant downpour of progressive sermonizing. What would you do in such circumstances? Well, at least at first, you’d probably grit your teeth and take it while silently seething.

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Other people, of course, don’t just cope; they rebel. That rebellion comes in two forms. The first is what I’ll call Christopher Rufo-style dismantling. Rufo is the right-wing activist who seeks to dismantle D.E.I. and other culturally progressive programs. I’m 23 years older than Rufo. When I was emerging from college, we conservatives thought we were conserving something — a group of cultural, intellectual and political traditions — from the postmodern assault. But decades later, with the postmodern takeover fully institutionalized, people like Rufo don’t seem to think there’s anything to conserve.

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But there’s another, even more radical reaction to progressive cultural dominance: nihilism. You start with the premise that progressive ideas are false and then conclude that all ideas are false. In the dialogue, Yarvin played the role of nihilist. He ridiculed Rufo for accomplishing very little and for aiming at very little with his efforts to purge this university president or that one.

Click over to read the whole thing. I used a gift link so you should be able to read it.

In my opinion, this piece misleads people about sociologist James Davison Hunter’s views. While Brooks doesn’t explicitly say it, most readers are going to come away from this column thinking that Hunter writes only about right wing nihilism. In fact, he stresses that we live in a nihilism saturated culture that affects the left as well as the right.

He should also have put Chris Rufoism in context. Rufo’s approach, and that of today’s New Right generally, is actually a recurring phenomenon in American conservatism. There are big parallels to early 1990s populism, and also to the movement that was previously known as the New Right, the one from the 1970s and 80s. (There’s nothing older than the idea of a New Right). For example, one of that New Right’s founders, Richard Viguerie, said in 1982, “We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals working to overthrow the power structure of this country.”

Brooks seems to genuinely want to interact with people from all walks of life and try to bring them together. His forays into these spaces, as well as his non-profit work, attests to this. But his sensibilities are those of a DC elite, so this often comes off awkwardly.

Someone once described David Brooks to me as “the pastor to the Aspen Institute.” I think that’s actually what he does best, serving as a kind of de facto mainline Protestant pastor and moral conscience to the American center-left elite. Maybe speaking “prophetically” against conservatives is the price he has to pay to be able to do that, but I don’t think his work in that area comes off nearly as well.

On the Use and Abuse of Christianity for Life

This interview with Julius Krein, editor of American Affairs journal, is really interesting. Krein was raised in a Lutheran environment in North Dakota and is now Anglo-Catholic. He has some interesting perspectives that you don’t hear every day.

Because it would seem so easy for Anglo-Catholics to go all the way to Roman Catholicism, and yet they don’t, they must in some ways be highly committed Protestants. At some level, Anglo-Catholics must actively interrogate what binds them to Protestantism and what is important about this tradition, especially now that the political and narrowly theological issues surrounding the Reformation are no longer relevant.

My answer to this question is more philosophical and intellectual. Summarizing briefly, with all the crudeness that entails, I find that the Catholic intellectual tradition tends to emphasize the affinities between reason and revelation, the rational and irrational, the city of man and the Kingdom of God, whereas Protestantism is more attuned to the conflicts between them. In terms of intellectual history, one could schematize it as Aristotle and Aquinas versus Plato and Augustine. In my view, the latter approach, the Protestant approach, is the truer one. And although I just said that there is more to Christian observance than theological and intellectual matters, I nevertheless think that this Protestant orientation is vital and worth maintaining.

As for the decline of mainline Protestantism, the French writer Emmanuel Todd recently offered a more bracing account than anything I have read by an American author. Todd sees it as nothing less than a civilizational collapse, and argues that it’s not coincidental that the decline of the mainline coincides with the rise of neoliberal atomization across society. For both elite and people, it becomes impossible to imagine a collective future. Likewise, the shared norms that once put bounds on worldly political and economic competition seem to disappear, which is something E. Digby Baltzell discussed as well.

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The term “adversary culture” is typically employed by conservatives to describe the progressive currents of the 1960s, and I think it accurately describes the left-wing movements within the church at this time. Yet, as you have suggested in your writing, the rise of right-wing evangelicalism could also be seen as a form of “antinomian opposition.” The result is that we are still stuck with two competing adversary cultures rebelling against what is now a vacuum left by the decline of the mainline. One attraction of adversary cultures is that they don’t feel the need to take responsibility for anything, or undertake an autonomous, constructive project, since they define their task solely in terms of opposition. This problem only seems to worsen with time, even as the initial objects of rebellion fade further into the past, both within and beyond Christian institutions.

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Going forward, however—my coauthor and I planned to argue—the locus of any substantive religious dialogue would shift toward non-liberal themes. For a vanguard of elite Catholics, there has been a rediscovery of older teachings on, inter alia, the relationship between church and state and the economics of Rerum Novarum. Protestants, meanwhile, might reemphasize faith and vocation over individualism. It should not be forgotten that Protestantism did not arise as a project of “religious liberty” but initially had the effect of reuniting church and state, a sort of integralism from the other direction. Within Calvinism, Calvin’s Geneva, Cromwell’s England, and Puritan Massachusetts could be described as integralist societies par excellence.

The point is not that Christian theocracy is possible or desirable today—though contemporary progressivism arguably displays certain theocratic tendencies—but rather that fundamental questions seemingly settled by modern liberalism have now become unsettled. Liberalism itself has been reduced to its own moralism, rather than a structure that allows for people with competing moral commitments to constructively interact through political institutions. In this context, Anglo-Catholicism’s “royalist” trappings might generate some unexpected insights.

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To me, this is the real story of the end of the end of history. It’s not that liberal democracy was too effective or “too good” and provoked a thumotic rebellion of the great. On the contrary, the seeming triumph, the seeming appearance of an “end of history,” provoked an internal crisis among American elites, just as the Hegelian master winning the initial battle to become master is the root of his frustration. And so, almost immediately, the apparent triumph of “liberal democracy” is accompanied by confusion about what this means and paranoia about its future—Fukuyama’s book itself representing a prime example—which only deepens as time goes on. From the beginning, American elites could not simply content themselves with a geopolitical victory. It was not enough to have power and maintain it. This victory had to be a moral victory, a spiritual victory, and American elites were desperate to believe that not only must/would the entire world adopt these values, but former enemies will do so voluntarily—and they would like it! Hence China would have to liberalize and democratize. Hence 9/11 was such a shock and provoked such a self-defeating response. Hence Russia’s evolution away from democracy continues to loom so large. America’s leadership class needed to believe that they would achieve not just coercive power but recognition. But the efforts of American elites to achieve recognition became increasingly deranged and counterproductive.

And although it’s impossible to make a causal claim, I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that this process occurred among generations increasingly disconnected from Christianity, especially “mainline” or “establishment” Christianity. In explicitly separating earthly and spiritual kingdoms, Christianity uniquely allows for a realm of recognition among spiritual equals without requiring the complete denial or rejection of worldly political realities. It is very difficult for a purely secularized conception of “democracy” or even “citizenship” to provide this. That is not to say that Christianity automatically ensures competent government, obviously, or that non-Christian societies cannot have capable rulers. But I do think Christianity provides a special intellectual context that allows for the formulation of basic concepts like “statesmanship.”

Click over to read the whole thing. It’s a perspective you won’t get every day.

If you didn’t already read my essay on Emmanuel Todd’s book, you’ll find his takes very interesting.

Best of the Web

Saagar Enjeti posted on X about how Disney theme parks are being taken over by childless adults.

“Kidulting” is one of the most important concepts to keep in mind to make sense out of the world we live in. Maybe so many people aren’t having kids because they still are kids.

If you didn’t seem my podcast with Saagar on sports betting, be sure to check it out.

Jeff Giesea: The boomer reckoning no one's ready for - The boomer era is ending. How we manage the transition will shape the future of America and other Western democracies

Expat Prep: Choosing Your Place, If You're Staying In America - This is a very interesting article by a person who is making contingency plans to leave the country if Trump becomes a dictator. Only here he’s writing about where to move to if you are planning to stay in the States. The author is an example of the political horseshoe theory in action. He provides a lot of really practical information of the type you’d expect from a similar site on the right.

Ryan Burge: The Four Types of Nones - A new understanding of 30% of Americans who are non-religious

Mere Orthodoxy: The American Church in the Fourth Republic

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention from Glenn Moots at Law & Liberty.

New this week:

• "Excarnated" Christianity - Doctrine is important, but Christianity is also an embodied faith.

• In my podcast this week, Ted Esler of Missio Nexus joined me to talk about the state of Christian missions.

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

Cover image: Learning boxing at the YMCA in the 1930s.