With respect to looksmaxing: part of the problem here is that there's a grain of truth underlying it. For young guys who want dates, looking good helps. A LOT. This has always been true to an extent, and sure the pressure nowadays is even more intense; but being overweight, unhygienic, unkempt has never been a positive in the dating market (obviously). I suspect there's a connection here between the overall decline in dress and self-care in American culture and the rise of this movement. Americans dress much more casually than they used to, and when you're out in public it's hard not to miss that outright sloppy appearance is everywhere. I'm not talking about young men not having model looks, but rather about them clearly not investing in basic hygiene and maintenance. Also, despite the pressure on both young men and women to look fit, the reality is that Americans young and old alike continue to get increasingly overweight as a population. The disparity between reality and desire grows so fast it feels unbridgeable to many. Perhaps this leads to feelings of hopelessness and giving up? Hard to say. But in any event, while looksmaxing as described in your post is outright dangerous (talk about hormones and drugs like that in teenagers: it's insane), I wonder if part of this movement's popularity is a reaction to a culture where so many clearly care so little about how they present themselves in public.
With respect to giving early: parental support for rent in high cost cities is very common in high end professional circles. Or even other, more subtle levels of parental financial support (paying for cell phone bills, paying all education expenses so no loans, keeping kid on health insurance first few years out of college). It is an absolutely massive differentiator. I'm in medicine, and when one combines the cost of med school and associated debt, the extremely low salaries during multi-year training courses after med school, and the concentration of many of the strongest residency programs in high cost cities, the reality of a kid without any form of parental support making a go of it these days in a medical career is bleak. It's not like it's impossible, but America is making it harder and harder for ambitious poor and working class kids to have a shot at a medical career in so many ways. That's a loss to those communities as well, because those are precisely the people we need MORE of in medicine if we're going to stand a chance of increasing healthcare availability in rural and poor areas.
This has a lot to do with the deterioration of common culture. Romance derived from common references to certain kinds of art and participation in certain arts and aesthetic rituals that technology has pushed aside. Now, coupling mostly starts with an exchange of digital photos or short digital videos disconnected from any social context. If you do not make a hit with the first exchange of visual media, you get nothing. The deterioration of the medium of clothing also makes the body more important.
This is also becoming a bigger factor in the increasingly illiterate workforce. As people lose the ability to understand email or to hold a phone conversation, how you look matters a lot more than what you know, and how you look also determines whom you are allowed to get to know. The sin of the looksmaxxer is to make something that was tacitly understood but rude to articulate into something legible.
I'll second the recommend for Douthat's Burge interview. Douthat's podcast is one of the best out there, mainly because he's very good about pressing people and not letting them get away with punting or deflecting.
My $0.02 on the SBC, as someone who has lived a lot of his life in and around it: there are a lot of SBC churches with relatively good demographics. Though one difference relative to the non-denom world: every SBC church has a solid contingent of old people. In many, but not all cases, they still have plenty of families.
Non-denoms are the opposite: they basically always have families or single young people. They may or may not have anyone over the age of 65, but even if they have some, they will never have as many as even a family-oriented SBC church.
I would think the SBC could recover to some degree if it produced incentives for churches to join it. For example, it could invest more resources in church planting, or invest them more wisely. Summit Church -- part of the SBC! -- has its own Summit Network of church plants, which seem to be mostly, if not exclusively, non-denoms. I don't have the exact stats, but I wonder if Summit on its own has had more success at church planting than the SBC itself. My own non-denom received a crucial loan from a Baptist organization to finance the purchase of a new building.
But the problem -- and this is shared to some degree by all denominations -- is the brand has negative value. Some of the most successful SBC churches don't have "Baptist" in their name.
Though there's a particular irony in the case of Baptists: the trajectory of American Christianity is non-denominational, and your standard non-denom would qualify as some form of Baptist (though some are more on the Charismatic side). I would go so far as to say that the Baptist approach has become the dominant religious expression in America, and most of the market share lost by the Mainlines was taken up by churches that are Baptist in essence. Yet fewer and fewer Christians want to call themselves "Baptists". I wonder if to some degree Baptists are victims of their own success.
(Nods) I moved to Houston last year, and you're not wrong about Baptist demographics. While looking for a church, one of the first ones I went to was almost entirely retirees--I dropped the average age of the congregation by ten years. However, most of the ones I've attended have had a decent balance.
With respect to looksmaxing: part of the problem here is that there's a grain of truth underlying it. For young guys who want dates, looking good helps. A LOT. This has always been true to an extent, and sure the pressure nowadays is even more intense; but being overweight, unhygienic, unkempt has never been a positive in the dating market (obviously). I suspect there's a connection here between the overall decline in dress and self-care in American culture and the rise of this movement. Americans dress much more casually than they used to, and when you're out in public it's hard not to miss that outright sloppy appearance is everywhere. I'm not talking about young men not having model looks, but rather about them clearly not investing in basic hygiene and maintenance. Also, despite the pressure on both young men and women to look fit, the reality is that Americans young and old alike continue to get increasingly overweight as a population. The disparity between reality and desire grows so fast it feels unbridgeable to many. Perhaps this leads to feelings of hopelessness and giving up? Hard to say. But in any event, while looksmaxing as described in your post is outright dangerous (talk about hormones and drugs like that in teenagers: it's insane), I wonder if part of this movement's popularity is a reaction to a culture where so many clearly care so little about how they present themselves in public.
With respect to giving early: parental support for rent in high cost cities is very common in high end professional circles. Or even other, more subtle levels of parental financial support (paying for cell phone bills, paying all education expenses so no loans, keeping kid on health insurance first few years out of college). It is an absolutely massive differentiator. I'm in medicine, and when one combines the cost of med school and associated debt, the extremely low salaries during multi-year training courses after med school, and the concentration of many of the strongest residency programs in high cost cities, the reality of a kid without any form of parental support making a go of it these days in a medical career is bleak. It's not like it's impossible, but America is making it harder and harder for ambitious poor and working class kids to have a shot at a medical career in so many ways. That's a loss to those communities as well, because those are precisely the people we need MORE of in medicine if we're going to stand a chance of increasing healthcare availability in rural and poor areas.
re Looksmaxxing:
This has a lot to do with the deterioration of common culture. Romance derived from common references to certain kinds of art and participation in certain arts and aesthetic rituals that technology has pushed aside. Now, coupling mostly starts with an exchange of digital photos or short digital videos disconnected from any social context. If you do not make a hit with the first exchange of visual media, you get nothing. The deterioration of the medium of clothing also makes the body more important.
This is also becoming a bigger factor in the increasingly illiterate workforce. As people lose the ability to understand email or to hold a phone conversation, how you look matters a lot more than what you know, and how you look also determines whom you are allowed to get to know. The sin of the looksmaxxer is to make something that was tacitly understood but rude to articulate into something legible.
I'll second the recommend for Douthat's Burge interview. Douthat's podcast is one of the best out there, mainly because he's very good about pressing people and not letting them get away with punting or deflecting.
My $0.02 on the SBC, as someone who has lived a lot of his life in and around it: there are a lot of SBC churches with relatively good demographics. Though one difference relative to the non-denom world: every SBC church has a solid contingent of old people. In many, but not all cases, they still have plenty of families.
Non-denoms are the opposite: they basically always have families or single young people. They may or may not have anyone over the age of 65, but even if they have some, they will never have as many as even a family-oriented SBC church.
I would think the SBC could recover to some degree if it produced incentives for churches to join it. For example, it could invest more resources in church planting, or invest them more wisely. Summit Church -- part of the SBC! -- has its own Summit Network of church plants, which seem to be mostly, if not exclusively, non-denoms. I don't have the exact stats, but I wonder if Summit on its own has had more success at church planting than the SBC itself. My own non-denom received a crucial loan from a Baptist organization to finance the purchase of a new building.
But the problem -- and this is shared to some degree by all denominations -- is the brand has negative value. Some of the most successful SBC churches don't have "Baptist" in their name.
Though there's a particular irony in the case of Baptists: the trajectory of American Christianity is non-denominational, and your standard non-denom would qualify as some form of Baptist (though some are more on the Charismatic side). I would go so far as to say that the Baptist approach has become the dominant religious expression in America, and most of the market share lost by the Mainlines was taken up by churches that are Baptist in essence. Yet fewer and fewer Christians want to call themselves "Baptists". I wonder if to some degree Baptists are victims of their own success.
(Nods) I moved to Houston last year, and you're not wrong about Baptist demographics. While looking for a church, one of the first ones I went to was almost entirely retirees--I dropped the average age of the congregation by ten years. However, most of the ones I've attended have had a decent balance.