The Christian, Trad, Homesteader Life
Trad life, Catholic conversions, growing old alone and more in this week's digest.
The Guardian did an interesting piece on trad Christian homesteader types that was not entirely a hit piece.
Today, Jenny and Mike still believe in respecting the environment and buying local. But they are ardently conservative by common definitions, devoutly Catholic and part of a counterculture where describing someone as “reactionary” is high praise.
They are part of a small movement of Americans who believe that the modern world is broken – and that the solution lies not in economic equality or social progressivism, but in an older, stricter family order. For families like these, a house is not just a home, but a castle against a decadent and dysfunctional world. They believe that they have figured out something about modern life that the rest of us have not, or are in denial about.
And they may find some sympathetic ears at high levels of the Trump administration: the “trad” (traditionalist) movement coincides with a time of extraordinary political assault on women’s rights in the US and a cultural backlash against decades of feminist consensus. At its most militant, it is intertwined with far-right political projects.
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A sublime sunset had begun to glow on the horizon. The farm would be photography catnip to a social media influencer. Yet the property, though attractive, was hardly curated. The house was cluttered with semi-contained chaos and half-completed projects. The mud in the fields was very real.
“This isn’t easy,” Mike said. Tradlife also means going against the grain of an economy oriented toward two-income households, he said: “A willful acceptance of poverty or hardship is not something that’s, like, baked into our cultural conditioning right now.” Butchering animals does not leave a lot of time to watch Netflix.
Secular liberals who experiment with agrarian life often wash out, he believes, because they do not have a religious or philosophical anchor: “I read these ridiculously hysterical things of like, ‘my six-month foray into homesteading’. I’m like, six months? You barely parked the car.”
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Each weekday, Edward Phillips wakes at 4am, works out, takes a cold shower and says his daily prayers. On his way to work, where he is a mechanic for trucks and heavy machinery, he also prays a rosary.
His wife, Emily, gets up around 6.30, sometimes earlier, to nurse their one-year-old. She exercises and prays, and spends the day home schooling, doing chores, paying bills, cooking and taking the children to appointments. By the time Edward gets home, she usually has a list of repairs for him to do while she preps school lessons for the next day.
Emily and Edward are 31 and 33. They are raising six children on a small hobby farm in rural Illinois. The couple’s days are so full, so disciplined, that when I first read Emily’s description of her life in an online essay, I found it a bit hard to believe.
Click over to read the whole thing.
Related: Scott Yenor on side-hustle trad wives
Generation Z Walks Into a Bar
The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting profile of Gen Z men’s influencer James Lawley. He was not someone I was personally familiar with.
James Lawley moved to Chicago from London in 2023, knowing “not a soul” in the Second City. To remedy that, he began going to bars by himself, hoping to strike up conversations with strangers and make friends along the way. He set out, he says, to “master the art of solo drinking,” which, “like dressing well and many other skills men once took for granted, is today a lost art.”
After a few such forays, Mr. Lawley, now 27, decided to share what he learned. With “zero expectations” in February 2024, he posted a video instructing young men “how to go to a bar alone.” He was astonished to discover that, within days, his video had more than a million views. He added more videos, tapping a market he never knew existed.
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Offering advice on dress, grooming, etiquette and related subjects—with Cary Grant and Sean Connery as exemplars of what he calls “classic masculinity”—Mr. Lawley has built a community, maybe even a movement. He has become a kind of missionary, and the gospel he shares is based on a revelation. Well-tailored, tasteful clothing and good manners, he says, “can be a gateway to personal transformation.”
It hasn’t always been this way. Back in London, he was the frontman for a heavy-metal band. Over time, however, he realized that the Goth style “was too limiting. I had other sides to myself I wanted to express without being pigeonholed by all-black clothing, eyeliner and long raven hair. When you have such an extreme visual appearance, it can be difficult to explore other sides to life.” Once he cleaned up his act, people treated him differently. Better, in fact.
Click over to read the whole thing.
Catholic Conversions
I noticed this bit in Rod Dreher’s newsletter today.
Recently a Protestant friend who is one of the bravest and smartest public intellectuals I know told me he is considering becoming Catholic. One big reason, he told me: because nearly all the fellow intellectuals and activists on the front lines with him in the most important battles of our time are Catholic. Very few come from his own tradition. There’s something real and important in that for him.
I think this shows that religious conversions are as much a sociological as theological phenomena. Sociologist Rodney Stark used to note how Christianity from its earliest days spread heavily through social networks.
Because there are milieux where Protestants are largely absent, this creates a fertile environment for Catholic conversions.
Best of the Web
Ryan Burge: Is Divorce the Next Front in the Culture War?
Ross Douthat: How progressives lost their story (gift link) - This is a riff off of John Burn-Murdoch’s Financial Times I highlighted last week.
WSJ: More Older Americans Are Aging Alone. Who Will Take Care of Them? - “More than 16 million people aged 65 and older in the U.S. live alone. That represents 28% of that age group, almost triple the share in 1950. Among the reasons: increased longevity, higher divorce rates among older adults and children more scattered than previous generations.”
New Content and Media Mentions
New this week:
Joseph Holmes has a guest piece on why Weapons is the first great post-Covid America film.
Scrupulousness on Facts (paid) - Don't omit or mischaracterize key facts
Cover image: Ballerina Farm
Enjoyed the Gen Z piece, which I somehow missed although I have a WSJ subscription. I think both the trad life piece and this one are united by being a revolt against disorder - after all, most social change brought to us by progressive politics brings heightened disorder with it. Mass illegal immigration, multiculturalism, lax policing/law enforcement directly produce disorder, and stuff like transgenderism literally is a disorder.
Burge's data on divorce are rather sobering. They make the Brad Wilcox types who keep claiming that things aren't so bad with marriage sound rather like the shopkeeper in Monty Python's Dead Parrot skit.