Thinking in Public

The plateauing of the "Nones," Complementarian erosion, and more in this week's roundup

My newsletter happy hour here in Indiana is on Tuesday, May 28th from 6p-8p in Carmel. The event is sold out, but if you are interested in going please email me and I can probably add you to the list.

Becoming Illegible Online

One of the benefits of being a paid subscriber is access to my Subscriber Knowledge Base. The core of this is a categorized and searchable database of the most interesting articles I have collected over the past years.

But I also on occasion host webinars for subscribers and add them to the knowledge base. Earlier this month, Andy Higginbotham graciously conducted a webinar on web privacy and security. The recording of this has been uploaded the knowledge base for you to watch whenever you want.

Click the screen shot image below to watch. Instructions for logging in are here. Be sure to click the “password” option on the logic screen.

You can also download a document with Andy’s list of privacy enhancing tools.

Become a paid subscriber today for just $10/month or $100/year.

Comments on this post are open to all so you can give it a try.

Life in the Negative World Roundup

I’m gratified that four months after my book’s release, Life in the Negative World continues to attract attention.

This week I was a guest on Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler’s Thinking in Public podcast discussing the book.

I was also a guest on the Family Policy Matters podcast. And I got another mention from Carl Trueman.

New This Week

I had a couple of new pieces this week. I opened comments to everybody during the my 20% off week, so there’s a lot of great discussion on them.

My piece on how the lifestyle ratchet is hard to avoid really struck a nerve with a lot of people.

Reader Brian DM’d me to observe:

I’ve been reading various writers and thinkers in the “dissident right/Christian” sphere, or whatever you want to call it, for the last seven or so years. Whether its Dreher’s BenOp or the “new institutions” crowd or the “Don’t send your kids to college” people or the “homestead and have 10 kids” people or whatever, more and more I’ve come to the conclusion that they are dramatically underestimating the costs (and feasibility) of those sorts of ideas. BenOp might work for niche, historically marginalized communities like Mormons or Amish, but it’s not going to work for mainstream American Christians - thats why nine years after Dreher published that book, there’s no real BenOp community anywhere that I’m aware of. Most of this stuff seems like escapist fantasy to me, not realistic responses or feasible lifestyles for most Christians, at least partially because of the lifestyle ratchet, among other factors.

Commenter “slumlord” said:

It's a really good and insightful article. I spend way more than I like because the circle of friends I move in have very high incomes and high expenditure lifestyles. But if you want to move in those circles--or keep good friends who have high consumption lifestyles--it's the price you have to pay. Friendships are formed--and kept--by common activities and interests and that means being able to have the funds to partake in those interests as well.

I grew up in a working class family and my parents to this day berate me about my expenditure, not realizing that its a consequence of my professional status and the friends formed by moving in that circle. Somehow they felt that I could live on a work classing expenditure while moving in professional class circles. It isn't going to happen.

Commenter “Gordzilla” said:

My family was lower middle class growing up and my parents chose to live in ways that were deliberately different, which, in combination with the restrictions of the conservative Christian culture of the eighties made me feel like an outcast among my peers. I was at the bottom of the social pecking order and felt like I literally had nothing going for me (I was terrible at sports and was always one of the ones picked last, I had hand me down clothes from a friend who attended a very conservative Christian school, I wasn't allowed to listen to the radio, had no facility with the opposite sex, etc.) and I very much resented it….I don't know what the best way forward is in light of the above that Aaron shared about lifestyle markers, but I wanted to share my own experience as an example of how difficult it can be to go against the grain of expectation, especially when it's unchosen, as it was for me as a kid.

And commenter “Feral Finster” says:

One of the reasons that human birthrates have plummeted in recent years is that it has gotten astronomically more expensive to raise a human kitten to what you call a "normative ideal", that is, a basic middle-class standard.

Wasn't so long ago, if you fed your offspring, put a roof over their heads, and didn't beat them so badly that they never got the chance to be big kids, you were doing a pretty good job. Forget ballet lessons so that young Tyler can get an edge on entrance into a top university, or therapy sessions so that Mackenzie can finally come to terms with her little self. Anyone talking like that would have been a prime candidate for the funny farm.

Of course, with the deterioration of the middle class in the West, it also makes sense to have few children. Fewer children allows concentration of resources, and the competition to stay in the middle class has never been more intense - either you get to the top by any means necessary, or you will be barely getting by, and getting by on less and less.

I also put up a post about one strategy for conservative organizations to avoid getting pulled left. There are 50+ comments on it as of the last writing, so plenty of discussion there as well.

The Complementarian Erosion

In a post a lot of people didn’t like, I predicted that the evangelical complementarian gender theology was in trouble. We’ve seen some more evidence of this recently.

First, Jason Meyer’s new church is ordaining female pastors. Meyer was a protégé and the successor of John Piper at Bethlehem Baptist Church. Piper was one of the two main architects of the complementarian system.

Second, Nashville pastor Scott Sauls left the PCA denomination in order to switch to a denomination that ordains women. Before accepting a call in Nashville, Sauls was the lead pastor at the West Side location of Tim Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. Though not involved in creating complementarianism, Keller was certainly one of its highest profile exponents.

One of Sauls’ new church startups in Nashville also left the PCA in order to move to a denomination that ordains women.

The defection of inner circle younger generation adherents from complementarianism is indicative of the challenge it faces.

The Plateauing of the “Nones”

Academic Ryan Burge does a superb job of data analysis about religion in America on his Substack Graphs About Religion.

A very interesting recent post suggest that the share of people in America who are “nones” - people without any religion affiliation - seems to have plateaued in the last three years.

From Burge’s article:

From a pure statistical standpoint, I don’t know if we can say with any certainty whether there’s a larger share of nones in the United States today than there was in 2019. It’s probably right about 35% (according to this one estimate of the nones). But it definitely hasn’t continued to explode in the last few years. If anything it’s steady as she goes.

…

Okay, the nones are still rising among older Americans. The share of the Silent Generation that are nones rose from 18% in 2020 to 21% in 2023. It also jumped three points among the Boomers (25% to 28%). However, that’s certainly not the case among the next three generations.

Among Gen X, 34% were nones in 2020. It was the same share in 2023.

Among Millennials, it was 43% in 2020. It dropped to 42% in 2023.

Among Gen Z, something completely odd happened. The share who were nones in 2020 was 45%. It rose to 48% in 2022. Then, it dropped to 42% in 2023.

…

Of course, the question is why? I don’t know if I have a bulletproof answer. I think the easiest explanation is that a lot of marginally attached people switched to “no religion” on surveys over the last decade or two. Eventually, there weren’t that many marginally attached folks anymore. All you had left were they very committed religious people who likely won’t become nones for any reason. The loose top soil has been scooped off and hauled away, leaving nothing but hard bedrock underneath.

But generational replacement is an impossible trend to stop.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

Anthony Bradley: The Lost Art of Ambition: How Churches Can Inspire Young Men to Greatness

New York Magazine: The Bridesmaids Going Into Debt for Their Friends’ Weddings

Brookings: The growing gender gap among young people

Michael Toscano/American Affairs: Scrolling Alone - Smartphones and Social Atomization - A fantastic look at Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation.

Matthew Schmitz/First Things: The New Midlife Crisis

Before you can tire of life as a housewife, you need a house and a husband whose income can maintain a family. Before you can embark on an affair, you need to get married. It is hard to buy a sports car at forty if you’re still paying off student loans, or to enjoy a second youth while looking after your first baby. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, only about 6 percent of forty-year-olds had never been married. Today it is true of one in four. A 2021 report found that one in six adults were childless, and that number is likely to increase.

David Brooks/NYT: We Haven’t Hit Peak Populism Yet