Public Discourse

Earlier this year, I (Clara) had the opportunity to interview Catherine Ruth Pakaluk about her new book, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, released in March 2024. Dr. Pakaluk is an Associate Professor at the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. An economist and mother, she is uniquely poised to investigate the global phenomenon of falling birth rates. In 2019, she interviewed more than fifty women around the country with five or more children to find out who they are, and why they are, in her words, “strangely immune” from the fertility collapse. Her book, published by Regnery Gateway, organizes the stories of these mothers to develop a narrative revealing why they value children so much, what their children cost them, and how they think our current child scarcity affects the nation. 

Clara: Perhaps the best place to start is the title—who is Hannah, and who are her children?

Catherine: First, Hannah is the fictitious name I gave to one of the mothers: a character you meet right away because her interview captured so many of the themes that I heard across the sample. This Hannah is a Jewish woman who was raised in a secular family. After college, she went on a spiritual journey that eventually took her to Israel. There, she met her husband, who was on a similar journey. When we interviewed her, she was holding her seventh child: she believed it might be her last baby but she also told us that she is “not the planner of all plans.” Her marriage, family, and whole life are entrusted to God’s Providence. So this Hannah and her seven children stand for all the women I met, because she embodies so many of the attitudes and virtues of the women in my sample.

Second, Hannah of the book title is also the biblical Hannah. I did not go into this project thinking about her, but at some point analyzing my data—we should call the narratives “data” or use the sociological term “hearing data”—various aspects of the story of the biblical Hannah jumped out at me. I saw that her basic attitudes about childbearing and the meaning of life looked like the women in my sample. The biblical Hannah became, for me, an archetype to help describe what I discovered in the stories. Though barren, Hannah prayed to be blessed with a child. We all know what came next: she received her son, Samuel. What we all don’t know these days, however, is that God sent her five more children after she brought her firstborn, Samuel, to live in the service of God. The women I met generally didn’t set about to have large families—rather, they valued children greatly, like the biblical Hannah, and saw children as blessings.

So the title of the book refers to the character Hannah that a reader will meet at the beginning of the book, as well as to the biblical Hannah, and to the children who are in both cases the result of their faith.

Clara: In the first chapter, you write that this book is a “search of reasons, perhaps to know my own for the first time”—can you expand on this? Did your own background influence the types of questions you asked and the rapport you were able to establish with the women you interviewed?

Catherine: In the first chapter of the book, I describe a personal experience that is the true genesis of this book—the “stranger on a train” story. I won’t retell it here and spoil the fun, but the baby that I had with me in that story is almost fourteen years old now. I have been blessed with eight children in my marriage, and together my husband and I have raised six children from his first marriage. Before that, I grew up as the oldest in a family of nine. Altogether, my life has been marked by the gift of children in a profound way. As academics, I think it’s very natural for us to be interested in things that touch us personally.

Today, people are hyper-trained to see bias everywhere, and they undertake a fruitless search for neutrality in research. This is misguided. I think our research is improved by having personal experiences we bring to the table. We may have insights into questions and problems that other people may not be looking for—it doesn’t mean we have to have the last word on a topic. But yes—I was raised in a big family, I’ve had a large family, and I’ve been interested in questions of demographics and economics for a long time.

You asked about rapport. Absolutely! It’s one thing to walk into someone’s house and point out how unusual their choices have been, but it’s another thing when you can say, “I have also made these unusual choices. Let’s talk about why and what it means.” That kind of rapport was an excellent aid to interviewing a group of women who often feel misunderstood, misjudged, and marginalized.

With regard to the interview questions, I started off with a wish list of things I wanted to ask. Knowing the academic literature on family economics and demography, I knew that my project—trying to understand why some women still have many children—had great significance. But after a few pilot interviews, I learned that if you want to know why people are doing something, don’t ask them about it directly. Ask them about the years in which these choices were at hand and how they made those decisions. Pretty quickly, I scrapped my wish list and came up with a streamlined approach: I asked about when they had their first child, how they came to that decision, and what they remembered about it; then I asked them to tell me about having a second, and so on, up to the present. In that process, I heard lots of things that I don’t think I would have heard if I had started with “Why did you have ten kids?” The “why” was so often different along the way—and that was exactly what I wanted to understand. Nobody sets out to have ten—almost none of the women in my sample reported that—but some people got there. I wanted to understand that, because whatever it is that can get someone from one to more than average is the hidden immunity from low birth rates.

The other part of my interview guide contained prompts to open a conversation about self-identity, marriage quality, large families, and religious faith. Lastly, I asked them about the character of the nation, and why they thought other people didn’t make the same choices they had made. We had a variety of types of moms—stay-at-home, working full-time, working part-time, and even in our small sample one working mother with a stay-at-home dad.

Clara: Now I want to get to the heart of your project, which is to tell a story through interviews about why some women choose to have many children. You put this in economic terms—how are these women “quietly defying the birth dearth” making perfectly rational decisions?

Catherine: One of the things that has become clearer to me over time, especially since this group of women is such a hidden group, is that people misunderstand the basic motives for childbearing today. There is an implicit suggestion that religious motive is outside the relevant conversation, certainly the policy conversation, and hard to understand—something of a black box. 

Why do people make the choices that they make? That’s something that economists think about a lot. We begin with the supposition that people choose to do something when it has more value to them than their perception of the costs. Such language is often caricatured and misunderstood. But a rationale of cost–benefit applies to human behavior very generally, not only in markets—especially when we see that the notions of “benefit” and “cost” are basic human phenomena of valuation and apply readily to non-economic decisions.

As I started to make sense of the data in front of me, I realized that the story was the extraordinary value they placed on children—not a story about lower costs. And I thought, that’s something worth talking about! Then the question becomes—can this inform the policy conversation? I think it can. How so? Instead of looking at larger families as an anomaly, we can pay attention to their values and where they come from: more often than not, they come from biblical faith. It’s a hopeful message. Policymakers who want to encourage births might work to make greater space for institutions that foster the type of faith that incentivizes people to have children.

Clara: You shared some comments from the women in your sample about how raising children impacted their marriages. Could you elaborate on this—are babies bad for your marriage?

Catherine: Although it wasn’t the focus of my interviews, I wanted to ask about their marriages because there is a lot of stuff out there about how children can ruin a marriage—or at least the romantic part. And I heard a lot of great stories, and tried to include as many as I could. Some women really leaned into this set of questions and ended up giving me basically marriage advice, which was really charming. I kept it in the book.

Across the interviews I heard two major ideas about marriage. First was the idea that the children of a marriage can become a shared mission, something that you and your husband are partners and collaborators in undertaking. Women talked about how the shared mission of raising a large family brought them closer together as spouses, like teammates going through a championship match or something. The second thing was that the hard work of managing and responding to the admittedly large demands that come from organizing your household around three, four, five, or more children really pushes you to become better. In just the same way that we think about athletics or other great achievements that people are committed to, these women used language like “your capacity grows,” “you have more to offer,” and “you become a better version of yourself.” If you become better, and your husband becomes better, “your love grows.” For instance, one of our women referred to her husband as a hero, a rockstar, providing for her and serving her so she can take care of her babies.

It’s not a message we hear very often, and of course, while it’s true that small kids can be difficult for your marriage, it’s a phase that passes. You never hear how kids can make your marriage better.

Clara: There’s so much I’m tempted to discuss with you, but I wanted to pick up on another thread in your book that I think is really unique. The general idea comes from this quote of a mother that babies “provide their own therapy.” This came up also in the context of husbands and siblings, that is, the healing effect of the new baby on the family and even the community more broadly. Do these experiences help us understand the ongoing mental health crisis, which seems to mainly impact women and teenagers?

Catherine: Yes, I want to be a little bit modest, since this is definitely something that surprised me. It wasn’t until the third or fourth time we heard this in an interview that it seemed like something we had to mention. We interviewed fifty-five women, which is not a large sample, but it was enough of a signal that it raised an interesting future question for research.

The theme was this: in multiple instances, women talked about a time when a baby that they had welcomed into their family brought some relief from a tough spot that someone was going through, in some cases anxiety or depression. We heard this so many times in dramatic ways that it would have been irresponsible not to include it. And of course, people are really worried today about the epidemic of loneliness, highly correlated with clinical manifestations of mental suffering. The women we talked to often seemed to believe that they themselves, or their spouses, or their children, had been assisted in times of distress by babies. They said, you know, a baby just loves you and doesn’t judge you. A baby is “like a sunlamp,” one woman said.

Again, that was a really surprising and fascinating thing. I tried to be honest and just really put it out there. This is where qualitative work shines—you get these new things that maybe you didn’t ask the data before.

Clara: A natural question that arises when discussing fertility these days is, what can policy do? Your book offers quite a substantial discussion of the implications of your research for family policy—can you walk us through some of these?

Catherine: Based on my research, it looks to me that the problem of falling birth rates is not a cost problem, at least not in the way we normally think about a cost problem. The direct outlays are probably going down over time, so the real cost of children is the opportunity cost for women. When women’s opportunities expanded with education (enabled by more effective birth control), they raised the opportunity cost of having children dramatically. Of course, we’ve known this for a long time, and I’d point to the pathbreaking Goldin and Katz (2002) paper on this. So, certainly, the opportunity cost of having children has gone up, and if the benefits or values don’t change, then we would expect to see fewer children. That’s exactly what we’ve gotten. But who still has children anyway?—Those people for whom the value of having children is so incredibly large it still outweighs the high opportunity cost. These are people who, for instance, even though they went to medical school and still practice medicine, want children even more. They will work different shifts to still do their job—but they prioritize having kids.  

This matters for policy. One policy response to falling birthrates might be to reduce the financial costs to parents, for instance, with cash payments to make children more affordable. But that isn’t the big margin! You can have one child, maybe two, and still hang on to your professional identity, but if you have a third or fourth, you’d really have to step away from something that you’ve been preparing for your whole life. We can’t reduce that cost unless we want to reduce women’s education, and I don’t think we want to do that. Then the question is: what gives people enough love for having children that they want to do it anyway? What I heard is that it is strong religious communities that take the biblical values seriously, and God’s grace, that tip the scale against the big challenges.

Let me be clear—I’m not against trying to make things easier for families. But most countries are so bankrupt they are mathematically committed to inflating their currencies when they spend more, which hurts families far more than small cash payments can help. I just don’t think broke modern states have any good levers left to incentivize births in ways that won’t do more harm than good.

My research made me wonder more about value formation. What is the number one way that you can affect people’s values?—Through education. Right now we’re in a rapidly evolving policy landscape on the education front, focusing especially on expanded educational savings accounts (ESAs) and forms of educational freedom generally. People think about that as a path to better educational outcomes, but not as a path to raising birth rates. But it might be a path to raising birth rates! If more people are enabled to choose educational institutions where biblical values are modeled and taught, in fifteen years, we ought to see more marriages and more babies being born. Stronger  churches and more church-based schools are  an “implicit” family policy. 

Clara: Finally, is there a lesson from your project that you’d like to pass on to young women currently thinking about their future careers and families?

Catherine: Yes. But I don’t want to be naive. I understand that we have real challenges in the marriage markets and labor markets right now, so giving young people advice isn’t as easy as saying, “Get married.”

I think what I would focus on from this project is what women said about their children: a lot of them spoke about how experiential it is. There is something about children, as a good to be chosen, that requires experiencing to know what it is. A lot of women in my study wish they had started earlier, since they didn’t realize how great it could be. I would definitely count myself as one of those people—I was excited to have my first child, but I didn’t know until he was born how great it would be. I thought, gosh, this has been undersold! It was hard. I was expecting the hardship to be more neck and neck with the joy, but the joy was so much greater.

I think that’s the message. I like to use the language of a train—you’re on a train as a young woman in America: grade school, high school, college, then maybe more. There isn’t much room to really come up for air—that professional train keeps chugging along but there is more to experience and try. Many people experience their first child quite late in life and, when they do, wish they had experienced it younger, because our fertility does decrease as we age.

One of the most surprising things that I heard in my interviews was that nearly all the women who were past their childbearing years would have loved to have just one more. These are women with five, six, and seven children, who told me about being really bummed out about the end of their childbearing years! 

What is it about mothering that changes us so dramatically, that changes our assessment of how valuable this is over time? I think it’s surprising, worth mentioning, and I don’t know what to make of all that. It was a really neat thing to hear. In spite of all the difficulties they told me—“my body is shot,” “I’ve taken second best in my career, ” but “gosh, I would have one more.” What is this thing, that you could drag yourself through all this hardship and still want one more?

Image by Olesya Shelomova and licensed via Adobe Stock.

“Mental health is a complex issue and the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes.” This is the statement that Mark Zuckerberg recently gave under oath to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Zuckerberg’s statement is just the most recent example of how Big Tech CEOs have publicly denied for years that their products are harmful to children.

But the tide is finally turning. 

In his new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Jonathan Haidt has done the difficult work of proving what Big Tech has been denying: that their products, smartphones and social media, are killing our children. Haidt proves both that there is a problem––there is, in fact, a teen mental health crisis—and that the cause of the crisis is the phone-based childhood ushered in by smartphones and their social media apps. The question for us now, Haidt suggests, is, where we go from here. Haidt is no pessimist. Though the train has left the station, he argues, it is not too late to turn it around. 

The Kids Are Not All Right

It’s a shame that we live in such pervasive denial that Haidt had to go to such great lengths to prove what ought to be self-evident: Teens are constantly hunched over their phones. It is obvious that these devices and apps are not good for kids. Many parents are frustrated by these technologies and how they have taken over childhood. Every teacher laments how their students have changed, in both their learning abilities and social skills, as a result of these phones. It’s no wonder, then, that Haidt’s book has been so enthusiastically received, on both sides of the political aisle and by people across all walks of life. 

Haidt is certainly not without his critics. Other academics have tried to point, unconvincingly, to other factors, like school shootings, the global financial crisis in 2008, or climate change, to explain the teen mental health crisis. (See Candice Odgers’s critical review in Nature and Jean Twenge’s response to it, for example).

The criticism of Haidt’s work, which has been personal at times, is not irrelevant. He has touched a nerve that cuts across our everyday lives and lucrative business interests. There are powerful incentives against the kind of work Haidt has done in this book, and so, at the cost of immense scrutiny, he has done us a favor by giving us the clarity that smartphones and social media are bad for our kids. 

Haidt opens the first chapter of the book by laying out the evidence that the rates of teen anxiety, depression, self-harm, and loneliness exploded right after the advent of the smartphone and social media. Haidt calls the period from 2010 to 2015 the “Great Rewiring,” the time when smartphones and social media became widely adopted among teens and when we saw massive spikes in teen mental health problems. Haidt provides compelling evidence for his theory that the Great Rewiring is the main cause of the teen mental health crisis, after debunking other possible explanations because of the timing of the spikes and the international nature of the crisis across the Anglosphere. 

Haidt identifies four foundational harms of the phone-based childhood: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. He notes that while girls are more susceptible to harm from social media and boys suffer more from unrelenting exposure to pornography and video games, both stories end up in the same place: Boys and girls today believe that their lives are meaningless. Haidt explains that social media, online pornography, and video games have all pulled children out of real-world communities and into rapidly shifting virtual networks that result in anomie, or normlessness, and anomie breeds despair. 

But Haidt goes farther than just giving an overview of the evidence of how smartphones and social media are harming and rewiring our children. He situates this new, phone-based childhood in the broader landscape of what normal child development is supposed to look like. He also shares a backstory of the decline of play-based childhood well before the existence of smartphones and social media. This clear picture of normal childhood development and the vital need for risky, independent play illuminates, with disturbing clarity, the developmentally impoverished childhood that smartphones have created. Haidt rightly calls smartphones “experience blockers” because they deprive children of those experiences they must have in order to progress to adulthood.

Throughout the book, Haidt refers to the stark and unsettling contrasts between the play-based childhood of the past and the phone-based childhood of today. The contrasting characteristics Haidt identifies between the real world versus the virtual world—embodied versus disembodied, synchronous interactions versus asynchronous interactions, one-to-one or one-to-several communications versus one-to-many communications (broadcasting), and communities with a high bar for entry versus a low bar for entry—make clear that the phone-based childhood is something “inhuman.”

Haidt’s work draws out the great paradox of these digital technologies: They thrust children into a very adult online world that is not safe or appropriate for their developing bodies and minds. At the same time, the technologies stunt their development and infantilize them in the real world. 

Haidt explains that we got into this whole mess because parents made two bad choices about children’s safety. “We decided that the real world was so full of dangers that children should not be allowed to explore it without adult supervision,” and “We left children free to wander through the Wild West of the virtual world, where threats to children abounded.”

Another contributing factor to this crisis that Haidt doesn’t explore is parents’ own technology use. Many parents are addicted to these technologies, and so they fail to recognize the harms to both themselves and their children. One study found that children of parents who were heavy social media users were more likely to be depressed. Not only have parents lost their children to the virtual world of smartphones, but many parents have become lost there, too. And this loss is also hurting their kids. 

If the phone-based childhood really is, as Haidt argues, so harmful to our children, what can be done to recover the possibility of a phone-free childhood?

Haidt’s Solutions

Haidt suggests that we need a parenting reversal, one that allows for risky, independent play in the real world while erecting guardrails to protect children from the various harms presented by the virtual world. In the last part of the book, Haidt raises the question of how government, schools, and parents can aid this reversal, with solutions both to restrict phones and social media from childhood and to encourage more risks and independent play during childhood.

As a policy analyst on technology in childhood, I am encouraged by, and wholeheartedly agree with, Haidt’s prescriptions for policymakers, schools, and parents. If anything, however, I would take them several steps further.  

Policymakers

Haidt observes correctly that “social media is not like sugar.” He explains that it doesn’t just affect the person who consumes it, but that it changes the social environment for everyone. Social media and smartphones have group-level effects. This concept has had a significant impact on my policy work on this topic. It underscores the need for policy-level solutions to help parents, because countering vast group-level social dynamics is nearly impossible for individual parents on their own.

If social media is not like sugar, what is it like? I have a few suggestions. It is like tobacco, which is extremely addictive and harmful, even in small amounts, to children’s bodies. (It is harmful for adults too, but we trust adults to make wise choices about tobacco for themselves). It is also like alcohol in that it affects developing brains more than adult brains, and children lack the self-control and impulse control to consume it safely. Some argue that it is even like cocaine or fentanyl, a highly addictive drug, in the way it elicits a very similar dopamine response in the brain.

As a society, we don’t allow any of these substances to be sold to or consumed by children. We restrict and regulate them or, in the case of harder drugs, completely prohibit them.

Age-restriction laws mean that cigarettes and alcohol are not an inevitable part of American childhood. Laws help set norms. To make it so that smartphones and social media are no longer an inevitable part of childhood today, policymakers should treat them like tobacco and alcohol and regulate them out of childhood.

Haidt argues for such age restrictions. He recommends that federal legislation raise the age of internet adulthood to sixteen instead of the current age of thirteen, which experts agree is far too low and which was set in 1998—long before the existence of social media. I agree with Haidt that the age should be raised; but I would prefer eighteen as the goal. Recognizing it may take a while to raise the national standard, I would add to Haidt’s recommendation that there are actions states can take to restrict children’s access to social media, like requiring parental consent for minors to open social media accounts with robust age verification to ensure compliance, or, as Florida has done, completely banning social media for minors aged fourteen and under. These are steps in the right direction. In addition, state and federal legislation should help block children’s access to pornography by requiring age verification for pornography websites, which children can easily access through social media. Louisiana, Utah, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Kentucky, Idaho, Kansas, Indiana, and Florida have all recently passed such laws.

Teachers and Principals

Policymakers are critical to keeping phones out of childhood. But schools can also play an important role and help encourage cultural norms to resist these technologies. Haidt states that schools should be a phone-free zone for children and adolescents. I concur. I would also highlight the clear distinction that Haidt is making: It’s not enough to have policies to keep phones out of classrooms. They need to be kept out of the entire school day. Classroom policies are very difficult to enforce effectively and they are entirely dependent on how relentless and energetic individual teachers are when it comes to enforcing them. Furthermore, keeping phones out of the entire school day also helps counter negative effects on teens’ social dynamics. Phone-free schools means the hallways, lunchrooms, and time between class periods can be filled with boisterous noises and laughter of in-person interactions rather than silence as students hunch over phones, as we’ve recently seen in schools in Orlando County, Florida.

Parents 

I appreciate the maximalist position that Haidt has taken on schools and only wish he had extended that maximalist approach to families as well. All of childhood, not just the school day, can and should be phone-free as well.

Haidt offers a variety of age range suggestions—high school for smartphones, sixteen for social media—as well as a number of suggested time limits and qualifications for screen use during childhood and adolescence. I agree with this direction, but suggest that children need us to go even further. 

If these technologies are as bad as Haidt shows us they are, then parents should take a maximalist approach to them and keep both smartphones and social media out of childhood entirely. Opponents may argue there are some benefits to social media and smartphones, like providing community and connection with others who share interests, access to information, a space for self-expression, and social support from peers to buffer against stress, that would be lost as a result of a total opt-out. Haidt challenges these benefit claims by explaining that social media offers very little evidence of benefits to adolescent mental health. Haidt writes: “Social media is not synonymous with the internet, smartphones are not equivalent to desktop computers or laptops.” Opting out of smartphones and social media does not mean children can never access the internet for certain beneficial purposes.

Others may believe it is simply not possible to opt out. The pressures are too great to say “no.” The truth is it can be done. We need more resources showing parents how they can make all of childhood and adolescence free of social media and smartphones, and largely free of screens. An ever-growing number of parents are already doing this successfully.

While Haidt suggests screen time limits, I would caution parents that to be successful in resisting smartphones until high school (as Haidt urges) or after high school (as I and others on Haidt’s Substack argue), then parents ought to make childhood as screen-free as possible. Even allowing daily screen time can habituate children to screens more than is desirable. This can make saying “no” to a child’s eventual requests for a smartphone all the more difficult. Screens should be a rare treat, not a daily practice.

Finally, while I agree with Haidt that there is an inherent collective element to the challenges these technologies pose to our children, and that they have completely changed social dynamics for all children today (even those not using them), I fear that framing it entirely as a collective action problem is demoralizing to individual parents and suggests there is not much that parents can do on their own. But that is not the case. Parents are, and always will be, on the frontlines of helping their children navigate cultural challenges. We don’t need to let these technologies subsume our kids’ childhoods.

Haidt begins and ends his book with the analogy that the phone-based childhood is like our children growing up, alone, on Mars: As a society, we would never let such a thing happen. While our children may not be on Mars, we have been allowing them to grow up in a virtual, disembodied world where they are not fully present here with us. There’s no more living in denial. We cannot stick our heads in the sand any longer. It’s not too late to turn the train around. As Haidt concludes, “It’s time to end the experiment. Let’s bring our children home.”

Image by Studio Romantic and licensed via Adobe Stock.

The name Francis X. Maier may not be well-known outside the inside circles of ecclesiastical life because he has worked diligently but effectively behind the scenes. He served for twenty-three years as senior aide to Archbishop Charles Chaput in the Archdiocese of Denver and then in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Before that, he served for fifteen years as editor-in-chief of the National Catholic Register newsweekly, and earlier as a screenwriter and story analyst based in Los Angeles. He is currently a senior fellow in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Maier has written an excellent book, True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church, just released by Ignatius Press, that should rightfully make his name better known. In this concise and readable book, Maier summarizes the frank and in-depth interviews that he conducted with 103 bishops, clergy, religious, and lay men and women from various backgrounds over a seventeen-month period, from December 2020 through May 2022. While the persons interviewed do not hesitate to point out the shortcomings that they see in the life of the Church as well as her strengths, they do so out of love for the Church and a fervent desire to fix the flaws of the human failings of its leaders and members.

In his introduction to the book, Archbishop Chaput writes: 

At heart, the Church is a “she”, not an “it”: the Bride of Christ; a mother of tenderness and the teacher of truth. And even in an age that derides her and dismisses the need for a God; even in an age when her weakness is often brutally obvious, the Church is younger, stronger, and more beautiful than her enemies have the capacity to understand or see.

Then Archbishop Chaput added a personal note about Maier. He wrote: 

In Denver, in the early days of our collaboration, I sometimes stopped by Fran’s office at the end of the day to think out loud or exchange ideas. I asked him once why he worked for the Church when he could do something else that paid more. He looked at me quizzically, and then said, “Because I love her.” 

In Chapter One of the book, Maier then explains why he loves the Church:

I love the Church because she is my home, my extended family, the mother who takes us back whatever our failures and mistakes. I love her for the grandeur of the art, music, law, architecture, and literature she has inspired. I love her for the brilliance of her intellectual legacy, which has no parallel in human experience. I love her for the good that remains in the civilization she shaped. I love her for her patience and mercy. I love her because she treasures and refuses to abandon the weak. I love her above all because what she teaches is salvific and true. There has never been a Christianity without the Church. She’s essential to the Christian life. The Church preceded the Gospels, not the other way around. And the Christian faith has never been merely a personal relationship with God, as important as that is. It has always been, beginning in the Upper Room, an assembly of believers, an ekklesia—a Church. I love the Church despite the sins of her leaders and her people, including my own.

The various chapters of the book consist of asking different audiences why they love the Church and what they would do to correct any perceived shortcomings in the leadership or life of the Church. While two chapters are interviews of priests, deacons, and bishops (not including me), the vast majority of people interviewed are lay Christian faithful, including a diocesan finance officer, the president of an investment advisory firm, university professors, theologians, legal scholars, business people, social scientists, journalists, immigrants, philanthropists, leaders of lay apostolates, husbands, wives, homeschooling mothers, and non-Catholic Christians. He asks them questions like:

Do you love the Church? If so, why, and what do you love about her?

What are your impressions of the Church, and have they changed over the years?

What are the biggest mistakes a diocese or parish typically makes?

What do you see as the major problems in the Church right now?

What issues, particularly in the United States, need to be addressed for a renewal of the Church to take place?

When you look for practical sources of hope right now, what are they?

Since so many people offer their opinions in this book, it is not surprising that they do not all agree, nor do all share the same advice. But that is one of the attractive qualities of this book, in that the reader will hear a variety of voices, some of whom they may identify with and others with whom they may not. A key indicator of what readers might expect in these answers is the number of times the following words appear in this book: Church–732, God–152, Jesus–70, faith–255, hope–63, and love–116.

The title of the book comes from the 1981 film True Confessions, based on the crime novel of the same name by John Gregory Dunne. As Maier explains in the final chapter, True Confessions is 

not a happy portrait of the Church, her people, or her clergy. . . . The heart of both the novel and the film is the fractious relationship between two Catholic brothers: Des and Tom Spellacy. Des, played in the film by Robert De Niro, is a rising young monsignor, chancellor of the archdiocese, right hand to the cardinal, and on the fast track to be a bishop. Tom (Robert Duvall, in one of his finest roles) is an LAPD detective; the “black sheep” son of their Irish Catholic family. Cynical toward life in general and the Church in particular, Tom Spellacy is the lens through which the story unfolds. Tom is a complicated soul: resentful of his brother’s perceived goodness, calloused by the meanness of the streets, but also protective of his brother’s reputation. Des Spellacy is no less complex: smart, shrewd, ambitious, and (when necessary) ruthless—and also keenly aware of his own sin of pride, masked by a veneer of priestly piety. Onto Tom’s police plate drops the case of the murdered young woman. Where it leads provides the rest of the drama.

His point is that 

alongside the great good that can be achieved through Christian engagement in public leadership, great harm can be done to the Church and her mission when her people and her clergy confuse material success with service to the Gospel. A comfortable Church, a colluding Church, a publicly esteemed Church can very easily become a dead Church. And when faith is merely skin deep, it’s worth remembering that societies sooner or later shed their dead skin.

To prevent this disintegration of the Church’s vitality, Maier proposes nothing less than the call to sainthood: “We moderns tend to think that the era of the saints is over. But we’re wrong. It’s always the era of the saints.” This imperative of personal sanctity is not confined to clergy or consecrated religious, but extends to each and every person: “The task of any ‘new reformation,’ any purifying re-formation of Church and world, begins with each believer.”

In the end, a good book leaves the reader hungry for more, and that is how I felt when I reached its end. We hear directly from Maier only in the preface and chapters one and eleven, while the rest of the chapters are a blend of interview responses with Maier’s brief commentary. Those interviews provide a helpful cross-section of views on the strengths of the Church and suggestions for addressing the weaknesses of ecclesial life. But I found myself wanting to hear more from Maier himself because he obviously has a lot of wisdom to share.

For example, I took solace as a bishop in these words: 

Bishops in the Church tend to get blamed for everything. And sometimes they earn it. But bishops didn’t invent the birth control pill. They didn’t create the sexual anarchy that flowed from it. Bishops didn’t invent the transistor, or the microchip, or the cell phone, or video games, or gay dating apps, or the internet cocoon of pornography that’s destroyed millions of families and vocations. And bishops don’t have a magic wand to cancel out the massively negative influence of popular culture on their people.

Maier also has sound advice for everyone else in the Church when he says that we are 

harvesting the effects of a century of Catholic assimilation and naïve optimism about the compatibility of Catholic teaching and American culture. I’ve always believed in our potential as Catholic Christians to be a leaven in American life. It just hasn’t worked out that way. Of course, that can change. But it requires leaders, and their people, who think in terms of the long haul and commit to missionary witness as their first priority in thought and deed.

Maier’s love for the Church comes through in this book and is why others who love the Church will want to read it. Perhaps we can hope for a sequel in which we will get to hear more of Maier in his own words. 

Image by sidneydealmeida and licensed via Adobe Stock.

You’ve been reading the names of James and Emily LePage of Alabama in the news lately. Their surname heads LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine, the Alabama Supreme Court decision declaring that embryos conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) are children, at least, as far as the state’s wrongful death law is concerned. In typical fashion, most commentators have avoided centering on the people at the heart of the matter. The case was filed by the LePages and other families after they were let down by the caregivers they trusted to protect their irreplaceable frozen embryos. In fact, the “cryogenic nursery” at the Center for Reproductive Medicine (CRM) was left so insecure that a patient wandered in, pulled some embryo containers out of refrigeration, and, upon feeling the unbearable cold of the vessels, dropped them. The embryos, and the hopes and dreams their parents had for them, were destroyed.

What many people don’t know is that the inconceivably bad experience of the LePages and other Alabama families is not rare. Fertility is a big business, with billions in venture capital investments pouring into the industry worldwide in recent years. In the United States, that massive growth in profit-seeking hasn’t been accompanied by meaningful regulation or consumer protection. Instead, there has been a burst of incidents, ranging from the unmasking of doctors who impregnated patients with their own sperm, to horrific lab mix-ups, to an explosion in pricey add-on services that don’t actually help patients get pregnant. In just a single week in March 2018, two fertility clinics in Ohio and California devastated more than a thousand families with the news that their frozen embryos—and some frozen eggs—had accidentally been allowed to thaw and perish. “I still sometimes wake up screaming, enraged that I will forever be childless,” patient Monica Coakley recently wrote in STAT.

Regulating IVF in the United States

The last significant regulation of the fertility industry in the United States was in 1992, with the Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Certification Act (FCSRCA). This law requires IVF clinics to submit information about pregnancy rates to the Centers for Disease Control, for ultimate dissemination to the public. The most recent data have shown that success rates in IVF are abysmally low, and even after multiple tries, at least 30 to 40 percent of patients using their own eggs will end treatment still childless. The FCSRCA data were meant to help would-be parents navigate those odds. But the industry itself admits the results are easily manipulated, most commonly by cherry-picking patients; some doctors simply refuse to treat couples who have poor chances of conceiving.

Since then, instead of meaningful outsider oversight, fertility businesses have been left to police themselves. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine does offer professional guidelines on many hot-button issues, for instance, they urge doctors to resist the temptation to pump up success stats by transferring lots of embryos at once (and to cut down on complicated multiple pregnancies). But the ASRM’s suggestions are entirely voluntary and easy to ignore.

Thus we get awful cases like that of Dr. Donald Cline, who fathered at least ninety-four children with unsuspecting women who thought they were being inseminated with donor sperm or their husband’s sperm. As shown in the Netflix film Our Father, Cline’s offspring were flabbergasted to learn that his behavior was perfectly legal and no federal crime was committed. (He did get hit with a $500 fine and a one-year suspension . . . for lying to investigators). Cline isn’t a lone wolf: dozens of other fertility doctors have now been caught doing the same thing, thanks to revelations from consumer DNA testing companies like 23andMe. 

The ASRM gestures toward the fact that embryos have a unique ethical status. Its guidelines say selling embryos is “ethically unacceptable,” while at the same time they give the stamp of institutional approval to payments for donors who turn over their sperm and eggs.

But that warning only gets lip service at California Conceptions, a fertility business with a factory operating model. The company whips up batches of human embryos using the raw materials of sperm and egg donors and then divides them among different women willing to pay to try to get pregnant with them, scattering siblings across the country. California Conceptions children are the result of a bulk ordering process by a corporation looking to find customers for its inventory—and quickly.

Then there’s controversial pre-implantation genetic testing, or PGT-A. In America, it’s routinely up-sold as a chance to reduce the odds of miscarriage, which for fertility patients is like offering a steak to a starving pilgrim. The only problem? This steak is just sizzle. Research shows expensive PGT-A doesn’t help medically normal couples have a baby, possibly because the testing process itself harms their embryos. 

Practices like these are devastating for the dignity of everyone involved. The bodies of egg and sperm donors are treated as valuable raw material to be harvested for industrial purposes. Embryos themselves are subject to a degrading quality control process, which calls to mind a USDA livestock inspection. And their parents’ desperation to have children has been turned into a lucrative opportunity for investors who realize pain can be profitable. Can we question the angelic purity of licensed medical professionals and venture capitalists? Troubling news from the world of Silicon Valley fertility start-ups says we probably should. Without meaningful regulation, the human family in our country risks becoming just another tech product.

IVF Regulation Worldwide

It doesn’t have to be this way. In the vast majority of first-world countries, doctors and businesses working on the bleeding edge of bioethics don’t police themselves. 

In Germany, for instance, the 1990 Embryo Protection Act limits the number of embryos that can be created in a single cycle to just three. The law centers on issues of consent, raising the possibility of multi-year prison terms for doctors who impregnate women without their knowledge or create embryos without the genetic parents’ authorization. Cloning and elective sex selection via PGT-A are explicitly criminalized. 

It’s not just the Germans. From Canada to Australia, from Italy to France, and even in South Korea, non-medical sex selection—or what American clinics euphemistically sell as “family balancing”—is outlawed. South Korea’s regulations in this area come from bitter experience: a strong cultural preference for sons, and the availability of abortion, caused a massive gender imbalance in the newborn population in the 1980s. 

Third-party reproduction is heavily constrained worldwide: in Spain, lawmakers allow donors to produce only up to six children, and in Hong Kong, just three. Further protection is coming from the burgeoning movement to abolish donor anonymity, led by donor-conceived adults. In the UK, France, and the Netherlands, children with a background in donor conception are entitled to the name of the person who contributed half their DNA. 

Though all of these guardrails limit the profitability of the fertility industry, more importantly, they help safeguard the human dignity of patients and reduce the harms that can arise from reproductive technology—or at the very least they’re a small step in the right direction. Fertility businesses can’t create embryo assembly lines, and instead of being a faceless source of spare parts, sperm and egg donors are identifiable as individuals. Not least, the risk of accidental incest is massively reduced when donor information is available and progeny are limited.

In the United States, there is some forward progress. In 2022, Colorado enacted the “Donor-conceived Persons and Families of Donor-conceived Persons Protection Act,” a landmark bill that forces fertility clinics to identify and maintain contact with donors, and limits matches to twenty-five families. The new law also requires donors to be at least twenty-one years old. These rules protect everyone. Kids have access to up-to-date medical information, instead of a giant question mark hanging over their genetic health histories. Teenagers shouldn’t donate sperm, just as for similar reasons we don’t let them drink hard liquor in a dive bar.

At the federal level, the trend of removing anonymity has received pushback from some in the LGBTQ+ community, who express insecurity around the implication that biology is an important factor in families. But secrets are toxic. And a growing number of donor-conceived adults (and plenty of donor-recipient parents) are raising their voices to affirm that genetic identity does matter, and that recognizing that fact doesn’t somehow invalidate the very real love in donor-affected families. 

It’s painful that in the aftermath of LePage, many pundits jumped to repeat corporate talking points. The case paved the way for the LePages and other CRM families to recover damages, even as the industry on the losing side announced a passive-aggressive pause in performing procedures to evaluate their “new” responsibilities under the law. In fact, LePage revealed that patients and fertility businesses have very different conceptions (pun intended) about what’s at stake in treatment. For families, it’s everything. For companies, it’s the bottom line. It’s way past time for consumer protection in the fertility clinic.

Image by Vladimir and licensed via Adobe Stock.

It’s common to the point of cliché to hear engaged couples or newlyweds speak about how excited they are to marry their best friend. Others balk, citing the need to maintain friendships outside a marriage, lest one burden one’s spouse with expectations he or she cannot bear, or arguing that there’s no such thing as a “soul mate.” Nonetheless, in his discussion of the indissolubility of marriage in the Summa Contra Gentiles, Thomas Aquinas writes that “there seems to be the greatest friendship between husband and wife, for they are united not only in the act of fleshly union, which produces a certain gentle association even among beasts, but also in the partnership of the whole range of domestic activity.” Friends share life together, and the fact that husbands and wives share their entire lives—not the fact that they have strong feelings for each other—would seem to make them best friends. By examining Aquinas’s understanding of friendship, chiefly in his Commentary on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, we can gain insight into the connection he makes between strong friendships and strong marriages.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle begins his treatment of friendship by arguing that friendship is a good that all must pursue if they seek to live a happy life. And friendship—at least in its perfect form—is not an incidental good that we pursue in order to gain other things, such as wealth and power. Rather, we seek friendship because it is a participation or sharing (communicatio) in the life of another. Friendship, as Aquinas captures it, is an exchange of love that takes place in repeated acts of goodness from one friend to another. Because it is a habitual act of free choice, friendship is a kind of virtue. Thus even when friends are not performing acts of friendship—such as when they are apart or when they are sleeping—they can be said to be friends because they habitually “live together pleasantly and do good for one another.”

But this degree of pleasure and good is not equally present in all forms of friendship. Every act of friendship is an act of love that seeks an object. We are only friends with someone for a reason. Hence Aristotle identifies three kinds of friendship based on the three objects of acts of love, or reasons for friendship: friendship for the good as such, friendship for the pleasurable, and friendship for the useful. To translate these into practical terms, we could think of them as being friends because there is something intrinsically good and delightful about a person, being friends because someone is funny or attractive or thrilling, and being friends because a person can provide something helpful. In the second two, a person loves a friend for what is incidental. They are friends by way of resemblance. Those in the first category, friends for the good, are friends essentially—for what a person is. Therefore, only those who seek friendship for the sake of pursuing the good, and with good people, can know true friendship.

In a virtuous friendship, a virtuous person loves his friend because he is similar to himself. He loves him as another self, and he feels for his friend what he feels for himself. Such a friendship begins with feelings of goodwill, a disposition in favor of someone based on their natural attributes. Goodwill continues in friendship, but it is joined by acts of beneficence and by concord in mind and heart. This is possible because the friends are alike in virtue. Their virtue impels them to make repeated acts of love and, because virtue is a permanent habit, these acts of love become a permanent, lasting friendship.

The resonances here between a friendship of virtue and a healthy marriage should be apparent, and this is also the case in terms of friendship’s frequency, its cultivation, and the number of people who can compose a friendship. First, because virtuous people are rare, virtuous friendship is rare. As Flannery O’Connor famously wrote, “a good man is hard to find.” Second, virtuous friendship requires time and discernment: a person needs to find out who is virtuous and wants to be a friend. Third, virtuous friendships can be with only one person, for three reasons. First, Aquinas says, the kind of superabundant love present in virtuous friendship is, by nature, designed for one person, as is evident in sexual love. Second, friends are extremely pleasant to one another, and this is difficult to maintain with more than one person. Third, friends become closer with each other by habitual association, but this is hard and can only happen with one person. Friendship, in short, is difficult. It may be natural, but it requires time and effort, and it is infrequent because of its exclusivity and the rarity of virtue.

If, however, one’s friend remains virtuous, the friendship results in a twofold benefit. First, friends enjoy a friendship because they enjoy each other. Each is another self to the other, and each delights in the other. Just as the good man rejoices at the good he performs, so he rejoices in that of his friend. Because he loves the good and because his friend contains the good, the virtuous man loves his friend’s very existence. He wants to live together with him, to share himself with him, and to receive him in turn.

In addition to the joy of living with and knowing a kindred spirit, the virtuous person takes delight in friendship because it helps him to become more virtuous. Because of our natural affection for ourselves, we cannot judge our own actions well. Since we cannot study our own actions, we need to study those of “another self” whom we love as we love ourselves.

Two friends, therefore, love what is good in each other. Through their friendship, they become goods to each other. Each wishes the other good for the other’s sake, not for his own. This mutual love, Aquinas argues, makes friendship something even above a virtue, because “the act of one is not sufficient but the acts of two mutually loving one another must concur.” Friendship, therefore, is not only a matter of pursuing one’s own virtue but of wanting to help one’s friend become better, too. In finding another self, the friend has found a way to work for virtue in more than himself.

If this is the structure of good friendships, let me suggest four ways in which the sharing of life between a husband and wife can make marriage “the greatest friendship.”

1) A good marriage is founded on the good that the spouses perceive in each other. It allows spouses to delight in each other, to rejoice in each other’s good and in the mutual enjoyment of the good that they share.

2) A good marriage begins with feelings of goodwill and attraction, then is joined to beneficence, doing good to each other, and a concord of mind and heart. Marriage entails doing and willing the good for your spouse constantly—even when you don’t feel like it—and making your spouse’s good your own. And marriage requires and enables enough agreement between spouses so they can live together in peace, even if they do not share the same religion, politics, or other convictions.

3) A good marriage can help you become more virtuous. This is both joyful and very difficult. More so than anything else in life, marriage and children show you just how self-centered you are, and they train you to become centered on the good of another. For Christians, marriage is the path to sanctity that God has prepared for the spouses. And sanctity and virtue, as difficult as they are, allow us to flourish and to more perfectly live a life animated by God’s love.

4) A good marriage entails building and sharing a good life with another person—both the diverse goods that we enjoy together in this life and ultimately our enjoyment of goodness itself, life with God in the next. To put it another way, Christian marriage is a shared pilgrimage to life with God in heaven, and that ultimate goal helps spouses keep in perspective the joys and sorrows they experience.

In the Supplement to the Summa Theologiae, compiled by Aquinas’s students from his lectures and writings after his death, Aquinas shows how grace builds upon and expands the friendship of marriage in making the natural union into a sacrament. Aquinas considers the argument that marriage is not a sacrament because the sacraments derive their efficacy from Christ’s Passion, and since marriage involves pleasure, it does not conform us to Christ’s Passion, which was painful. In response to this argument, Aquinas writes: “Although Matrimony is not conformed to Christ’s Passion as regards pain, it is as regards charity, whereby He suffered for the Church who was to be united to Him as His spouse.”

This is one of those moments when Aquinas’s prose is like a prism that refracts a ray of light into an array of colors, or like a doorway into the vast expanse of a Gothic cathedral. Aquinas is saying that in marriage, the spouses give themselves to each other and lay down their lives for each other totally, just as Christ did for us on the cross. It is that total and faithful self-gift that allows marriage to be an image of Christ’s self-gift for the Church.

Three things follow from this. First, the married couple’s own self-gift becomes the path by which they imitate Christ and become Christ-like. Second, in the sacrament of marriage, God gives us his love so that we can love as he does. Third, marriage is also the place in which we should receive God’s love through the self-gift of our spouse. God shows us what his love looks like by how our spouse loves us.

Conceived in this way, it makes sense for someone to say that he has married his best friend. The friendship of husband and wife is founded on an attraction or thrill, but that thrill has roots in the goodness of the other spouse. It should grow into a series of actions that make both spouses better, that cement their delight in each other’s good in a life of mutual beneficence and sacrifice. Empowered by grace, their marriage becomes an icon of God’s love—however imperfectly—and a means of their growth in that love toward its full flowering in the beatific vision. We could add to Aquinas that not only is marriage conformed to Christ’s Passion as regards to charity, but it is also conformed to the Resurrection: it can be healing and transformative, giving joy now and in the life to come.

This article is adapted from a talk given for the Thomistic Institute at Clemson University.

Image by glogoski and licensed via Adobe Stock.

The scholar M. D. Aeschliman wrote an essay for First Things last month occasioned by the republication of a little-known 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed. I had not previously heard of this dystopian novel, and Aeschliman’s description drew me to read it: “In the fictional society of The Wanting Seed, abortion, homosexuality, and disdain for the family have become ascendant and are politically privileged.” Because, in the future Burgess imagines, overpopulation has overwhelmed the world’s resources, the state punishes any woman who has more than one child; even if a child dies, a mother is not to have another. This being a work by the author of A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed is unsurprisingly dark, mordantly funny, and written in a richly vivid style that somehow accustoms his readers, without their recoiling, even to scenes of cannibalism as the society appears to collapse. Imagine Evelyn Waugh dropping acid and writing science fiction.

Burgess’s novel got me thinking that a thread running through all dystopias is the totalitarian state’s invasion of every kind of human love (all four loves, as C. S. Lewis might remark). This is true of friendship (philia), familial affection (storgē), and of course charity (agapē), but especially of eros, the love that is fruitful and multiplies. Burgess’s overpopulated state has a Ministry of Infertility—until the cycle of cannibalistic anarchy drives it to drop its prefix and become, at least for the time being, the Ministry of Fertility. To have siblings verges on the scandalous; large families are unheard of; being homosexual is so advantageous to one’s career that one major character pretends to be gay to get ahead.

The all-powerful state’s control of eros is a feature of what is generally considered the first twentieth-century dystopia, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. First published in the 1920s, We depicts a society in which people are known by numbers, not names, and in which every building is made of glass so that there is no privacy. Yet each citizen lives alone. There are no marriages, only couplings prearranged in one’s Sexual Table (during which a shade may be decently lowered over the glass wall of one’s apartment). There are no families: the One State, governing a small remnant of the world’s previous population after a devastating war, takes charge of the rearing of all children. We’s narrator-protagonist, D-503, becomes involved with a mysterious, rebellious woman, I-330, and his yearning for her is a kind of rediscovery of long-suppressed nature. Spoiler alert for those who have not read the book: it does not end well for either of them.

George Orwell is said to have been influenced by Zamyatin’s novel in writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, and inasmuch as Orwell’s Oceania is a totalitarian surveillance state, that influence is evident. Unlike Zamyatin’s One State, there are marriages and families in Oceania, but it quickly becomes apparent that the state rigidly controls all relationships, at least among party members (the “proles” can live as they like). Why else must Winston Smith, who is married but separated and childless, and his lover Julia Worthing, a single woman belonging to the Junior Anti-Sex League, resort to secrecy and deception in order to be together? Does the state care about extramarital sexual relations? Probably not as such; what it wants is complete knowledge and control of every kind of relationship. True, Winston and Julia talk privately about how much they hate Big Brother and would like to join a rebellion against his authority, but it is their meeting in private alone that is their first offense against public order.

In Sandra Newman’s 2023 novel Julia, a retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four from the titular character’s perspective, the Party’s control of eros among its members is an even more prominent feature. In Newman’s tale, Julia Worthing becomes a serial seductress in the employ of the Inner Party mastermind O’Brien, luring not only Winston Smith but two of his co-workers at the Ministry of Truth into affairs in the same dingy upstairs room in a prole district. Julia and Winston are not simply found out by the Thought Police, as in Orwell’s story; she is his knowing betrayer, though she pays a price as heavy as his own.

Newman’s shift of our perspective to Julia rather than Winston enables her to add some features to life in Oceania that are not in Orwell’s book but are consistent with it. The young women in the dormitories of the Anti-Sex League, like Julia, are evidently pledged not to marry, but are eligible to go to a clinic for Artsem—artificial insemination—and thus contribute their offspring to be reared by the state. A select few are even chosen for the Big Future program, to be impregnated by the (purported) seed of Big Brother himself, and given a badge to wear in public announcing the honor that has been bestowed on them. (It is an open secret, however, that single women in the Anti-Sex League sometimes go for Artsem as cover for a pregnancy that has already begun.)

A very different kind of control over eros and reproduction is central to Margaret Atwood’s 1986 novel The Handmaid’s Tale. In Atwood’s dystopian Gilead, a substantial part of North America, a pseudo-Christian, male-dominated tyranny deals with a crisis of infertility by enslaving fertile young women as “handmaids” to the ruling class, to bear the children that cannot be borne by the wives of Gilead’s “commanders.” (To my fellow Christians and conservatives who know Atwood’s book only by reputation, I should say: Never mind the enormous popularity of the book [and of its television adaptation] among progressives for its dark view of a kind of “Christian nationalism,” which is the book’s weakest feature; it is nonetheless a very well told tale.) Each handmaid is a precious broodmare, too important to the society’s future to be given any freedom at all to marry, to raise her own children, to go where she pleases, dress as she likes, live as she likes, even to have her own name. So few and valuable are these handmaids that only a high-status man can have one in his household.

Swinging in quite the opposite direction is This Perfect Day, a 1970 novel by Ira Levin (better known for Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, among other books). Like Burgess, Levin imagines a world in which the problem is controlling population growth; unlike The Wanting Seed, This Perfect Day depicts a one-world government that has pretty much solved the problem. A single great computer, Unicomp, runs everything, and its subjects are told what their job will be, where in the world they will do it, whether they may marry and have children—and how long they will live: at age sixty-two, each person is quietly euthanized. Individuals not permitted to marry have girlfriends or boyfriends, but with no possibility of procreation. Every month each person goes for a “treatment,” an injection cocktail of contraceptives, vaccinations against disease, and psychoactive drugs to control mood, disposition, ambition, and curiosity. Regular meetings with one’s “adviser” help to monitor whether any adjustment is necessary in one’s treatments.

Where Burgess and Levin give us overpopulation as the rationale for tyranny, and Zamyatin and Atwood give us underpopulation as its cause, the totalitarian state in Orwell and Newman’s Oceania seems to be both the effect and the cause of endless war. The state’s external enemies serve as justification for its relentless hunt for its internal enemies. But the upshot for the erotic relations of human beings is the same in principle in every case. No one’s loves are his or her own; even the dearest thing of which we say “mine,” another person whose good is identical to our own, is placed beyond our reach, prevented from being really ours.

Nowhere is this sundering of natural loves more central to a dystopian story than in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In the World State, in the year A.F. (After Ford) 632, promiscuity is an ethical expectation, attachment to one person is suspect, babies are gestated entirely in laboratories, children are raised in state nurseries, and the word “mother” is an obscenity. The benign tyranny of empty pleasures, with its cinema “feelies” and the ubiquitous drug “soma,” is the state’s chosen means of control not in order to reduce population or to increase it. Nor is this an Orwellian state at war, its boot stamping on the faces of its own citizens in a desperate bid for order and loyalty. Huxley’s society seems to have achieved a perfect stasis, a status quo of bred-to-purpose class hierarchy with a stable population, and war has apparently been eliminated. Here there is sex but no love; there are co-workers and castes but no friends or families; there are pleasures but no passions, and soma to chase the blues away.

These dystopias—each of which is challenged by characters who glimpse what has been taken from them—raise a question about utopias as well. Is any political order that strives to straighten the crooked timber of humanity once and for all bound to rob us of love?

The answer seems to be yes. I have written elsewhere of the strong affinity of Huxley’s Brave New World to Plato’s Republic. As I read Plato, the “city in speech” described by Socrates is a fantastically ironic project, each outlandish proposition outdoing the previous one. When one reaches the fifth book of the dialogue, one finds Socrates arguing that, for the sake of their total dedication to the city, the guardian class must be deprived of all “mine and thine”—stripped of all property, all privacy; to have no spouses of their own, no children of their own, nothing that can rival their love of the city they govern and defend. It’s quite mad, and there is every indication that Plato knows it is. The reasons given at each step of the argument seem sound; but human lives and human communities are not amenable to being organized into perfect order by abstract reason. Our need for one another—for particular others—cannot be suppressed without unbearable cost.

This is evident, finally, even in the work that gave the genre its name, Thomas More’s Utopia. A subtle and ingenious work with clear debts to Plato, Utopia gives us milder instances of the same tyrannical meddling in natural human loves. Utopians all wear the same drab clothes; the doors of homes have no locks; meals are taken not at home but in common dining halls; after several years families are compelled to change houses, and meanwhile, those with too many children send their excess offspring to homes with too few. All this is by way of attenuating people’s attachment to things, places, and even persons we will claim as peculiarly our own. True, marital fidelity is very strictly enforced; but before any marriage, each spouse is shown completely naked to the other, just as we would expect the saddle and blanket to be removed when we are “buying a colt.” (A pretty shocking idea in the Christendom of 1516.)

It seems the utopian impulse and the dystopian nightmare are never very distant from one another. If we are to love Big Brother, as Winston Smith does at the end of Orwell’s novel, all our other loves must be intruded upon, damaged, even sacrificed entirely. The case for freedom begins with the case for love.

Image by fantom_rd and licensed via Adobe Stock.

Since certain Republican presidential candidates have recently distanced themselves from, or outright rejected, pro-life state supreme court decisions in Arizona, Florida, and Alabama, while praising counter-legislation such as that examined here, a closer look at that legislation’s content and actual scope seems worthwhile. Political calculations about toning down the conservative party’s pro-life identity to win elections are being touted at the moment. But if sacrifices or concessions are to be made, one must at least know what is being given up and what is being gained.

The new Alabama Act SB159 grants IVF providers civil and criminal immunity for any “death or damage to an embryo.” This partially reverses the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision that recognized extrauterine human embryos as children and granted tort remedies for their destruction. The new law, and the astounding events surrounding its passage, were the product of intense propaganda and political pressure from the political Left and the artificial reproduction industry to exploit election-year politics, attack yet another pro-life court judgment, and successfully divide Republicans.

The act partially reverses the holding in LePage, Fonde & Aysenne v. Center for Reproductive Medicine & Mobile Infirmary Association, in which the Alabama Supreme Court held that Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act allows parents of a deceased child to recover punitive damages for the death of extrauterine human embryos created in vitro. The case concludes that IVF embryos are included in the term “minor child” under the statute. 

In this case, the embryos of three married couples—the LePages, the Fondes, and the Aysennes—were destroyed in a bizarre incident at an IVF clinic. A patient entered the clinic’s frozen embryo bank, without authorization or supervision, to remove some embryos (probably their own) and accidentally destroyed the plaintiffs’ five embryos in the process.

As noted by Justice Jay Mitchell, who wrote the majority opinion, all parties to the litigation, including the Center for Reproductive Medicine and the Mobile Infirmary Medical Center, agreed that “an unborn child is a genetically unique human whose life begins at fertilization,” and that an unborn child qualifies as a “human life,” “human being,” or “person” throughout all stages of development regardless of viability. The clinics disagreed, however, arguing that an extrauterine human embryo, who is not physically located in utero, would not be a “child” or “person” and, therefore, would not be within the class of persons protected by the Wrongful Death Act. In contrast, the Alabama Supreme Court found that the physical location of the human embryo, like any other ancillary characteristics, did not exclude him from the act’s protection.

The LePage judgment recognized some measure of accountability against IVF providers that, by wrongful act, negligence, or omission cause the destruction of human embryos. It allowed a private cause of action to parents for money damages for the loss or destruction of their own human embryos in an IVF clinic. The ruling did not prohibit any artificial reproduction procedures or impose any penalties on IVF providers in Alabama. The plaintiffs themselves stated that they had conceived healthy children through IVF before and “did not intend to hinder or impair” access to IVF treatment.

The seed for the distortion of the holding’s scope, and of the subsequent rejection of the ruling, seems to have been planted by Justice Greg Cook, who wrote the sole opinion that dissented in full, siding with the IVF providers in the lawsuit. Despite affirming his agreement that life begins at conception, Justice Cook rejected the idea that the extrauterine human embryo could be included in the legal definition of the terms “child,” “person,” and “minor” under Alabama law. He also referred to the plaintiffs’ deceased embryos as “frozen embryos,” a term suggesting a non-living status for the cryopreserved embryo. This term was later used as the only designation for the deceased embryos by most of the press.

Judge Cook’s dissent directly addressed the Alabama legislature, repeatedly calling it to adopt legislation that would reverse the judgment. The dissent echoed the defendants’ threat that the recognition of “frozen embryos” as children would “almost certainly end the creation of frozen embryos” in the state of Alabama, “lead to fewer newborn babies,” and end “this medical procedure,” creating a “huge impact on many Alabamians.”

In its amicus brief siding with the defendant clinics in the litigation, the Medical Association of the State of Alabama threatened to raise IVF costs to a prohibitive level and make the procedure less affordable to prospective parents by IVF. Apparently speaking for IVF providers in the state, the Alabama Medical Association argued that providers would be held liable for routine treatment of ectopic pregnancies, a proposition that the LePage majority categorically rejected. The association made blanket assertions that treating extrauterine human embryos as children for the purposes of wrongful death liability would “substantially increase the cost of IVF in Alabama,” would “make cryogenic preservation onerous,” and that “costs and storage issues would be prohibitive;” but it presented no evidence whatsoever to that effect. National Review columnist Ed Whelan called such unproven claims a “massive bluff” on the part of IVF providers.

As soon as the ruling was issued, Alabama IVF providers, including unlikely institutions such as the University of Alabama at Birmingham, voluntarily suspended their IVF services. They blamed the Alabama Supreme Court decision in LePage, which did not remotely suggest such action. Providers and Democratic politicians also blamed the Dobbs decision, which had no relation whatsoever to IVF access, as correctly pointed out by Ed Whelan.

The Associated Press reported that IVF providers “traveled to Montgomery to urge lawmakers to find a solution,” promising to resume their activities as soon as the state legislature passed a law reversing the ruling. In the mainstream press, Alabama providers who admittedly maintained low standards for extrauterine embryo care and preservation, claimed that they would be victimized by the LePage ruling and forced either to close down, or to increase the already high costs of their operations. The judgment would also harm thousands of individuals and couples who would lose access to biological parenthood, especially those identifying as LGBT, the progressive media claimed.

Hit pieces were published against Alabama Chief Justice Thomas Parker in leftist media such as NPR, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the New York Times. Even though he did not write the majority opinion, Justice Parker was targeted and subjected to ad hominem attacks against his person and his faith. Leftist journalists deplored his pro-life concurring opinion; they also took the opportunity to condemn his conservative stance on same-sex marriage and his legacy of pro-life decisions during his tenure as Chief Justice and as Supreme Court judge. That legacy includes Hamilton v. Scott II (2018) and Ex Parte Phillips (2012), which attacked Roe v. Wade and recognized the personhood of unborn children; it also includes Stinnett v. Kennedy (2016), in which he argued that unborn children are entitled to equal protection of the law under the constitutions of the United States and Alabama. Likewise, in Ex Parte Hicks, a 2014 judgment, he pointed out the logical fallacy of treating the unborn child as a distinct person in some respects and yet denying them full personhood in abortion cases, a principle that he applied in protecting the unborn child’s rights in chemical endangerment cases such as Ex Parte Ankrom and Kimbrough.

Justice Parker’s powerful concurrence in LePage made relevant references to multiple Christian theologians of various denominations to explain the meaning of the Sanctity of Unborn Life Amendment to the Alabama Constitution. His references to the Christian origins of the constitutional amendment were ridiculed with special viciousness and characterized as Christian nationalism by the leftist press, an idea that Ryan Anderson refuted in First Things.

Astonishingly, President Joe Biden used his State of the Union Address to specifically condemn the LePage ruling. He and U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer invited as guests to the event two female IVF users whose embryo transfers had been unilaterally canceled by their IVF providers. The women were presented as victims of the Alabama Supreme Court, rather than victims of their own IVF providers who unilaterally halted services and exerted unethical, undue pressure on their patients to protest the ruling on their behalf. As a result, in Alabama, parents who had conceived children by IVF unwittingly protested against parents’ rights to compensation for the wrongful death of their embryonic children and their right to render IVF clinics accountable for their destruction, perhaps without truthful knowledge of the court’s actual holding.

The majority Republican legislature yielded in less than fifteen days after the February 20 judgment. It approved the act and the Republican governor signed it into law on March 6, apparently intimidated by election year considerations, political pressure from the Left and mainstream media, and the Alabama IVF providers’ strike over the recognition of human embryos as children. The new law’s affirmative grant of civil and criminal immunity for IVF providers who fail to properly handle and preserve human embryos, however, does not benefit parents who use IVF or children conceived in it; it solely benefits the IVF industry, as pro-life leaders have pointed out. These leaders include people like Marjorie Dannenfelser of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, along with representatives of the Southern Baptist Convention, March for Life Action, and Family Research Council, who urged the Alabama governor to veto the legislation.

The act gives IVF providers absolute legal immunity from any civil or criminal action against embryo tampering or destruction. It prevents parents from seeking any remedies other than limited reimbursement from some IVF equipment manufacturers and requires no minimum due care for the lives of human embryos. The act’s broad and imprecise language suggests that Alabama IVF providers are now free to damage, manipulate, dispose of, or otherwise destroy any human embryos, whether cryopreserved or in vivo, intentionally or negligently, with or without parental consent, and in complete impunity.

If unchallenged, the law would reverse the portion of the LePage decision that grants parents a right of action against IVF providers for the wrongful death of their own embryos. The act’s retroactivity provision, which applies to any actions or omissions resulting in embryonic death or damage before the passage of the law, would also preempt enforcement of the judgment by the three married couples who were plaintiffs in the lawsuit and foreclose their option of obtaining wrongful death remedies for the death of their embryonic children.

The act did not, however, explicitly overturn the decision in its entirety or adopt any provisions contrary to the finding that extrauterine human embryos created in vitro are children, whether cryopreserved or not. Alabama Supreme Court precedents holding that unborn children are “children” for the purposes of Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor statute (e.g. Mack v. Carmack and Hamilton v. Scott) are not affected by this law, either.

Alabama, a pro-life state with a pro-life constitution that specifically recognizes the sanctity of unborn life and ensures “the protection of the rights of the unborn child in all manners and measures lawful and appropriate” (Art. I, §36.06) will continue to prevail over legislative acts such as SB159. Alabama’s fetal homicide statute, the Brody Act, will continue to outlaw the killing of an unborn child in utero, even in capital murder cases such as Ex parte Phillips. Under Boone v. Mullendore, Alabama will continue to reject “wrongful birth” actions because of its Sanctity of Unborn Life Amendment.

The passage of Act SB159, however, undermined an important pro-life state supreme court judgment, setting a negative precedent for the finality of other pro-life judgments and even pro-life legislation in general. Immediately after Act SB159’s passage, the IVF industry in Alabama, supported by Democrats, seized momentum and tried to destroy Alabama’s recognition of the unborn child’s personhood. Alabama House Democrats proposed legislation declaring that an extrauterine human embryo cannot be considered an unborn child or human being under state law, arguing that it was the most “direct way” to deal with the issue. Republicans reportedly prevented the proposal from being brought up for a vote.

Republican confusion about the actual holding in LePage led to unfortunate consequences for party unity on pro-life issues. Notably, former president Donald Trump released a video statement on abortion and IVF rejecting a hypothetical nationwide ban on abortion and condemning an IVF ban that the Alabama Supreme Court never ordered. In it, President Trump congratulated the Alabama legislature for acting “very quickly” in passing the IVF provider immunity law and doing a “really great and fast job,” stating he “strongly support[s] the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious baby,” apparently under the incorrect assumption that the Alabama judgment had somehow banned it. 

Curiously, such statements seem to heed President Biden’s call to Republicans in his State of the Union to support legislation that would “guarantee the right to IVF nationwide.” In addition to the presidential nominee, other Republicans seem to agree: U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, for instance, proposed a nonbinding federal resolution treating IVF as a reproductive right, and U.S. Rep. Marc Molinaro co-sponsored one of three bills recognizing a legal right to IVF proposed by Democratic congresswomen.

Whether supporting the creation of a right to IVF will help Republicans win votes remains unclear; the next federal and state elections may give an inkling of it. In the meantime, conservatives can nevertheless choose not to react to every provocation that the Left throws their way, or to be sidelined by distracting debates and ideological traps that will force them to make concessions on pro-life or other critical political issues. In particular, as noted by policy analysts like Patrick T. Brown, conservative politicians need not side with the Left on IVF or support liberal agendas.

Conservative lawmakers can certainly agree that the IVF industry needs legal regulation. In LePage, both Chief Justice Parker and Justice Mendheim pointed out that legal scholars consider the United States a Wild West for reproductive technologies, which have gone largely unregulated since their inception in 1978. All justices, including Justice Cook, agreed on “the need for comprehensive regulation” of the IVF industry. In practice, that could mean, for instance, supporting legislation to substitute embryo freezing for gamete (ova or sperm) freezing; this is a more ethical alternative to mass embryonic cryopreservation, according to the Catholic University of Valencia’s Bioethics Observatory.

To expect the IVF industry to regulate itself or to curb its own destruction of embryos in any way seems especially unreasonable as a conservative position. The billion-dollar industry of artificial reproductive technologies creates and destroys more embryos than can possibly be implanted in human wombs, as IVF providers openly admitted in LePage and the publicity campaigns against it. Ordinary IVF processes in the United States today require not only surplus embryo creation but also embryo screening, selection, freezing, eventual disposal, and destruction or donation to embryo-destroying research. Providers’ economic interest in preserving the status quo includes an economic interest in allowing millions of human embryos to be created and destroyed by IVF providers for profit, with no legal consequences.

The new Alabama law can ironically be a good starting point for a consensus that conservatives should not promote broad immunity and impunity for embryo destruction, nor support the abolition of a parental right of action against IVF providers. The law’s passage is a proper illustration of why conservatives need a principled approach to defend rather than attack pro-life judgments, especially not without careful legal study. Conservatives can choose to coalesce around pro-life courts and support their rulings, to give them the benefit of the doubt rather than distance themselves from them. The Left certainly seems to have greater consensus on that strategy.

Image by nevodka.com and licensed via Adobe Stock.

In an incident that will surprise no one, a man sitting near me on a Manhattan subway began shouting incoherently at passersby. He spent much of the brief ride rambling about immigration, Bidenflation and the like. He also repeatedly displayed a large wooden cross on a necklace while declaring, “May Auschwitz be with you!” I exited the train after one stop to the sound of him shouting “Welcome to Auschwitz!” to new arrivals. 

In New York City in 2024, subway lunatics are expected. This episode, though, stood out; it was almost as if a Twitter “groyper” had assumed human form. 

I recognized this peculiar form of madness from our fevered online culture; there is little doubt that China, Russia, and Iran plant extreme conspiracy theories on social media, psychological weapons meant to destabilize the West. Social media influencer and talk show host Jackson Hinkle, who features an American flag emoji in his X (formerly Twitter) profile, boasts more than 2.4 million followers and may well be a foreign plant: he is pro-China, pro-Russia, and pro-Palestinian. Among countless wild claims, Hinkle insists that the U.S. or Israel secretly arranged the recent ISIS-led terrorist attack in Moscow. His posts are vague, erratic, and image-driven—he employs countless emojis and memes to make his points. In short, he offers up a kind of agitated delirium to a large, apparently eager audience. 

The madness fostered by Hinkle and others has taken hold of an untold number of real people; we ignore it at our peril. It is worth examining how online conspiracists draw people en masse, and what they really offer. 

Before her March 2024 departure from the Daily Wire, political commentator Candace Owens had established herself as a leading conspiracist of this sort. She appears to glory in epiphanies that entail realizing you have been lied to all along. A former leftist turned right-wing media star, Owens confessed to Dave Rubin, in a 2017 appearance on his talk show, that her political conversion occurred following a failed attempt to launch a nonprofit (the story of this organization, “Social Autopsy,” is about as odd and nefarious as the name suggests). She realized then, she explained, “that my friends were my enemies and my enemies were my friends.” There was a “conspiracy element,” she said, to the negative media coverage that contributed to Social Autopsy’s downfall.

This led her to support Donald Trump for president in 2016, as she felt he had been treated unfairly too. It also led her to reconsider her positions on a wide range of issues—including a host of conspiracy theories. She has repeatedly argued that the moon landing was fake, for example. After news broke of the recent death of Putin opponent and political prisoner Alexei Navalny, apparently at the hands of Kremlin operatives, Owens proclaimed on X that “the entire story makes no sense and the people I distrust trying to turn him into some kind of martyr makes it even more suspicious.” 

On almost any given day, a quick scroll through Owens’s social media reveals similar ambient distrust: the notion that enemies within media, government, tech, and Big Pharma are always lurking, surveilling, calculating, deceiving. The Daily Wire scrubbed recent episodes of Owens’s podcast in which she insisted that Brigitte Macron, France’s first lady, is a biological man in disguise. Owens announced on X that she would stake her “entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man. Any journalist or publication that is trying to dismiss this plausibility is immediately identifiable as establishment. I have never seen anything like this in my life. The implications here are terrifying.”

Among the most revealing texts from Owens’s oeuvre is an X post from March 4, 2024. It includes a photo of African American rapper Kid Cudi in heavy makeup, wearing a white lace bridal ensemble and holding hands with Eli Russell Linnetz, the Jewish designer of Cudi’s curious outfit. Owens offered this caption: 

When I see demonic rituals like this done to black artists and then I research who is behind it (a perverted “designer” that used to work for Woody Allen)—I truly cannot fathom how the media has brainwashed some black Americans to believe I’m the enemy. 

Open your eyes.

The specific noxious connotations of this post—that Jews are corrupting the fashion industry or black men—are almost beside the point. (It is worth noting, though, that Christian Siriano has for years crafted famously elaborate evening gowns for Billy Porter—who, like Cudi, is a black male celebrity. Siriano is not Jewish.) It’s more useful to consider what Owens’s conspiratorial messaging offers people. 

In this post, Owens posed a typical challenge to her nearly five million X followers: Open your eyes. See what I see. Connect the dots as I do. This is a form of flattery, belligerent though the tone may be. You are intelligent enough to see past the surface—and you can do so without much effort. Owens also suggests that she is divulging secrets that powerful forces wish to keep hidden. I am letting you in on something. This, too, can be flattering. Note that Owens does not criticize Cudi for his get-up—his clothing choices were apparently imposed upon him by his designer. This is also an insidious form of flattery; conspiracy theories often neatly absolve people of responsibility for their own behavior. Finally, such theories can charm the imagination; they appeal on the level of storytelling. 

Owens may or may not be a thoroughgoing anti-Semite; her winking approach to Jew hatred has been well documented. In just one example, she “liked” a twelve-word tweet joking about Jews drinking Christian blood. She later insisted she hadn’t read past the first four words. Owens never publicly apologized for this or similar incidents; she has defended herself at length without expressing regret. (Former UFC fighter Jake Shields, who boasts nearly 650,000 followers on X, is less coy; he has spread multiple blood libels with impunity.) But to focus on the Right’s growing antisemitism, and to protest it as antisemitism qua antisemitism, is to miss the bigger picture. 

Jew hatred is revealing; it arrives in different iterations at different times and can be used as a mirror reflecting particular fears. In Chapter 1 of the Book of Exodus, the new Egyptian king, “who did not know Joseph,” suspects the Hebrews of a potential military uprising on the basis of their population growth alone; Pharaoh’s suspicions reveal his insecurity about maintaining power. Sometimes, Jews are cast as despicably weak and feckless; in the ongoing Israel–Hamas war, they are cast as vainglorious oppressors. Antisemitism, perhaps the world’s oldest conspiracy theory, is an adaptable sickness of the soul.

And conspiracy theories are attractive, maybe especially in the age of AI image manipulation and other mind-warping technologies. As noted, these theories flatter—they can help people feel insightful or powerful or as if they are a part of something. They provide easy, lightly researched answers to deep anxieties. They can also give people “permission” to deflect responsibility for challenges in their own lives—and this can be especially appealing for people who lack authority or control or trust in institutions.

Much of the wariness and resentment reflected by figures like Hinkle or Owens is justified; that’s partly why this moment of paranoia is so alarming. The transgender movement, for example, was embraced by leading medical establishments despite being predicated on a profound and supremely obvious falsehood—the consequences of which have damaged people in permanent and immediately apparent ways. The COVID-19 pandemic, too, was marked by countless petty tyrannies: restaurants were forced to close while political leaders secretly dined out; houses of worship were subject to severe attendance limits while retail stores were not; hospital nurses held masks over the faces of women in labor. There is serious evidence that the federal government censored political speech to subvert an election. All this has served to radicalize people, perhaps in underappreciated ways. Rather than rely on perfidious elites who disdain them, many turn to figures like Owens or Hinkle, who encourage disdain for institutional authority.

They are not all wrong. And paranoia is certainly not new in American life. Almost exactly sixty years ago, in November 1964, Harper’s published “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” by historian Richard Hofstadter. Hofstadter sought to examine our “political psychology through our political rhetoric,” and argued that American “politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” He used the term “paranoid” not in a clinical sense, but rather to evoke a particular kind of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” Just over twenty years later, in 1985, then–U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan reflected on Hofstadter’s argument in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics Revisited,” published in The Public Interest. As Moynihan writes (in part quoting Hofstadter):

The distinguishing feature of the paranoid style is the sense of persecution, which expresses itself in elaborate theories. 

While the clinical paranoid lives in a world he is convinced is out to get him, the paranoid in politics, wrote Hofstadter, sees the conspiracy “directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life. His sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic, in fact, goes far to intensify his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation.”

These people “tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, over-aggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression” and yet socialized, functioning individuals. 

It is important to recognize that Hinkle, Shields, Owens, and others are appealing to the American imagination at a time when we are starved for meaningful stories or symbols of national health. Their approach is dark, even nihilistic, but they are offering Americans something important. It is no accident that their key slogans include “America First” and “Christ is King.” It is telling that these resonate with so many. 

Most Americans are not dispositionally anti-Semitic. But it is vital to recognize that American pride has been wounded by a “thousand natural shocks,” which include seemingly minor events like West Point dropping the words “duty, honor, country” from its mission statement. It is in this environment that conspiracists like Owens step into the breach, appealing to wounded pride through puffery and the manipulative misuse of innocuous catchphrases.

The response cannot be simply to insist that people like Owens are antisemitic and to attack them on those grounds. We must strive to understand what they are getting right about the American psyche. Owens and Hinkle tap into a legitimate feeling that decent, normal Americans have been misused by the elite, that their way of life is being subverted. Some of Owens’s criticisms, including of the ADL, are apt.

The “redpill” movement does something similar—it acknowledges genuine misery among men, perhaps largely a result of feminism. It responds poorly by pitting men against women and casting the latter as uniformly devious gold-diggers. There is no redeeming vision for relations between the sexes, no sense that they each offer something vital. Owens also gestures toward enemies of America but offers no serious road to redemption.

As Yuval Levin notes in his 2013 book The Great Debate, Edmund Burke “refused to cede the language of nature in politics to Paine and the French and English radicals, because he grounded his case for resisting radical political disruption in a notion of nature quite different.” There is no reason to cede language invoking American civic or religious pride to the worst actors on the Right, and no reason not to cultivate comparable slogans toward more hopeful and noble ends. We cannot abandon the art of storytelling to the nihilists, in other words. This of course must be done alongside the serious, perhaps generations-long work of reforming elite institutions—the project of doing away with DEI at the academy, for example, is underway. But even the most cynical redpillers warm to phrases that reflect a positive vision; “America First” might easily be taken to invoke West Point’s abandoned “duty, honor, country.”

In short, we must restore or replace corrupted institutions. We should also recall Lincoln’s appeal to the “better angels of our nature” and “mystic chords of memory.” Heeding Lincoln’s advice need not be a lofty or arduous task; as Moses insists in Deuteronomy, “It is not baffling or out of reach; it is not in the Heavens.” No: “It is close to you, on your lips and in your heart.” This moment, among other things, may call for something as banal as looking around, embracing and underscoring the figures and images that capture what is enduringly good about normal American life.

Image: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Image resized.

“Neighbor love,” “loving one’s neighbor,” and “love for one’s neighbor” are everywhere in Christian discourse about social ethics. How could they not be? The principle comes from our Lord Jesus Christ in such places as Matthew 19:19 and 22:37–39, Mark 12:30–31, and Luke 6:31. 

Last year, I wrote a long-form essay explaining the moral logic of loving one’s neighbor and what such a principle entails. The general thrust of my argument then was that loving one’s neighbor is a principle that calls us to will the good of others. In our interactions with others and in society, we are to cultivate flourishing and not privation. It might as well be the equivalent of Aquinas’s first principle of practical reason applied to social ethics. We should seek to do no harm to others. It is both a scriptural principle and a natural law principle. 

But crucially, it is just that—a principle. On its face, it is not a policy prescription. If you survey its use in contemporary Christian ethics, however, it is used to justify virtually whatever policy preference one wants justified. If not carefully weighed and considered, it easily becomes a wax nose that can be shaped in whatever way one wants to get the outcomes one prefers. 

Consider the ways that loving one’s neighbor can be invoked: in defense of COVID-19 quarantines, same-sex marriage, LGBT rights, paying taxes, public healthcare, wearing masks, thriftiness, gun control, environmentalism, and, yes, eating vegetables. A simple Google search shows how far this logic goes. 

You get the point: “Love of neighbor” is an ad-lib or choose-your-own-adventure approach to Christian ethics. Take one’s desired outcome and reason backward from it under the supposition that loving one’s neighbor requires unfettered support for the cause at hand and, voilà, all ethical deliberation is complete. 

Confusion over this matter stems from confusion over the Bible’s moral language. 

In the Bible, there are moral “genres.” There are clear moral rules, like “do not murder.” A rule has a fairly clear application that offers specificity. There are also moral paradigms, like the Good Samaritan. A paradigm offers an exemplary template one should replicate or embody. Then there are moral principles. A principle is like the glow of a candle. The burning wick is the clearly stated principle while the glow emanating from the wick illuminates in all directions. A principle does not dictate an outcome, but rather informs the moral deliberation around it. 

Here’s the problem with the sort of moral analysis that comes with ceaseless invocations of “love of neighbor”: it confuses a general moral principle for a specific applied outcome. Its temptation is seen most frequently in confusing a moral principle for a moral rule. 

Love for one’s neighbor should, of course, undergird all Christian ethical decision-making. But love for one’s neighbor is a principle. It should motivate us to care for our neighbors but does not specify, by itself, what the care looks like. It does not give us guidance on precise applications of what actions are required to love one’s neighbor (even if some actions are clearly incompatible with loving one’s neighbor). It offers a framework by which to evaluate the rationale for one’s actions. As I said, some actions are clearly prohibited by this principle. For example, I see no way to reconcile loving one’s neighbor with allowing for their termination through abortion. 

Let’s take another example we saw on repeat in recent history: loving one’s neighbor means taking, and encouraging others to take, the COVID-19 vaccine.  

Allow me to lay the critique I’m making on others to myself.  

In December 2020, I co-wrote an essay in these pages about why love for one’s neighbor should lead one to take the COVID-19 vaccine.  

Upon reflection, I now regret making the argument in the manner that I did, for all the reasons I have cited above—I went farther in applying the principle than what the Bible specifically calls for. I now think I was wrong, though well-motivated in my wrongness. 

Consider alternative perspectives: others could refuse to take the vaccine and invoke loving one’s neighbor. For example, it is reasonable to conclude that one could love one’s neighbor by not participating or encouraging others’ participation in a vaccine regime they believe was unsafe, rushed to market, or was complicit in some evil. That’s not my position, but it is a reasonable concern. However, my argument could be read that an individual was unloving if one did not take the vaccine. I genuinely regret that and apologize for my error. 

The article made allowances for conscience freedom for those who did want to take the vaccine, but it saddled the consciences of those refusing to take the vaccine with the burden of justifying their refusal. This was unfair and done under a “love of one’s neighbor” principle. 

I want to be clear about what I am, and am not, apologizing for: I do not regret recommending the vaccine. I remain convinced that taking the vaccine lessened the severity of COVID in affected patients. I do not regret the essay’s analysis concerning the vaccine’s safety, efficacy, complicity, and compliance. I regret only the “love of neighbor” element to our argument.  

I also want to be clear that I am not condemning my co-authors, both of whom I esteem and respect immensely. They are free to make the argument they believe they should make. They are free to disagree with the argument I am making right now. My conscience, however, has brought me to the conclusion for which I write. 

I regret invoking the love for one’s neighbor as one of the motives for taking the COVID-19 vaccine. I prioritize intellectual honesty and intellectual consistency. My views on this have changed upon reflection. When I err publicly, I need to correct my error publicly. 

My error in this situation has led me to broadly rethink how evangelicals invoke this principle for public ethics. Here is my conclusion: we need more restraint when appealing to the love of one’s neighbor when supporting our causes. I am not calling for us to have less concern for loving one’s neighbor. I am calling for us to have greater restraint in exercising certainty that love for neighbor necessarily entails support for one’s particular cause. 

Without more restraint, more abuse is possible. We also need to consider in any moral event how someone’s understanding of love for neighbor could lead them to a different conclusion than your own. 

For example, I could justify supply-side economics and consumption taxes in the name of loving one’s neighbor if I really wanted to do so. After all, is it not more loving to have a lower unemployment rate, which I think supply-side economics better achieves? Is not a lower tax rate more loving to one’s family budget than regimes with income taxes that are typically much higher? Is it not more loving to insist one own the fruits of his own labor instead of surrendering a portion to the government by the threat of force? A person who supports wealth redistribution could also argue that material relief for the poor is evidence of loving one’s neighbor. Who, then, is right? Who is wrong? Who has loved their neighbor the best or least? 

This logic, when extended, can reach morally ambiguous and disturbing ends. If you wanted me to, I could justify dropping the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki under the “love your neighbor” rubric. One could argue that it’s more loving to my neighbor by preventing millions from dying in a land invasion of Japan.

And herein is the problem. To justify supply-side economics and consumption taxes is biblically attenuated. It stretches biblical principles beyond recognition. I could make arguments for both from the Bible, but my stridency in making such arguments is less clear than the Bible’s opposition to abortion. To be clear: I prefer supply-side economics and consumption taxes. I may think the Christian who disagrees with me is wrong, but they are not sinning or unloving.  

Now, I can imagine the critic reading this piece and saying, “Well, how expected and callous it is that some conservative Christian is seeking to diminish the command to love one’s neighbor or to narrow its application.” 

But no such thing is in view whatsoever. The Christian should wake up every day with the full intention to order his whole life to love others in both a general and particular sense. 

Loving one’s neighbor is a moral imperative. How best to do so, however, is more complex than just recklessly citing this principle as immediate justification. All my point amounts to is a plea for caution. 

Image by  ImagineStock and licensed via Adobe Stock.

One of the unwelcome gifts of the “modern project” is our shrinking attention spans. So I’ll start where I plan to end: Mary Ann Glendon has written one of the best books I’ve read in the last five years. There’s nothing quite like it. And for good reason: a distinguished scholar and Harvard professor emerita of law, Glendon is a veteran consultant to the Vatican in multiple sensitive roles and a former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. The result, In the Courts of Three Popes, is a vivid, faithful, blessedly frank, and completely absorbing insider’s memoir of her years of service to the Holy See in three very different pontificates.

In discharging that service, Glendon lived and worked as “a stranger in a rather strange land—a layperson in a culture dominated by clergy, an American woman in an environment that was largely male and Italian, and a citizen of a constitutional republic in one of the world’s last absolute monarchies.” The work, as the reader learns, was rewarding, exasperating, and, at times, ironically funny. Vatican protocol could be complex. There was, for example, the moment “when I was introduced to the elderly French Cardinal Paul Poupard and extended my hand” in friendship, rather than kissing his ring, . . . with the effect that “he looked as if he had bitten into a bad escargot.”

More on such things in a moment. But first, some needed context for the Church and the “gifts” of our peculiarly modern moment. 

In his great study of the modern project, The Kingdom of Man, the French Catholic philosopher Rémi Brague outlined the roots and course of the Enlightenment and its failure. By seeking to dethrone God and exalt man, the modern project deprives the human experience of any higher meaning or purpose. This leads, inevitably, to self-destructive ends. In seeing man as a god and nature as mere raw material to be manipulated, the pattern is set to use other men—man himself—as raw material to be dominated and remade. Technology now makes this possible in ways unimaginable in the past.  This is sobering news, because, in Brague’s words, “the Enlightenment passes for having been humanistic. [But in] fact, the authors who represent it often express a disdain that borders on misanthropy toward man.” In practice, an “emphasis on the dignity of man is only one of the themes of modern thought.” Another, and less noble, is “a certain delight in [man’s] humiliation.”

How does any of this relate to Glendon’s book and its importance? Just in this way: by replacing the sovereignty of God with the sovereignty of man, today’s secularism dispenses with the supernatural, but then needs a stand-in for the devil, a this-worldly scapegoat for the persistence of evil. And an ideal candidate for that role is biblical religion, especially the Catholic Church. No matter how compliant or fellow-traveling a “progressive” Christianity tries to be, it will always be the necessary enemy. As a result, pursuing the Gospel mandate—to make disciples of all nations—now demands a higher degree of realism, evangelical zeal, and common sense than at any time in the recent past, not just from Church leaders but from every committed believer. It also needs a confident and persuasive Christian anthropology as an alternative to the modern narrative—a compelling case for man’s sacred identity as a child of God. 

Glendon is well aware of this need. And exactly this need makes the lessons from what she actually found in her long Vatican experience so concerning and valuable. It also invites some very sober reflections on the priorities of the Church in any coming papal conclave.

Glendon’s memory of leading the Holy See’s delegation to the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995) is particularly revealing:

From the end of the first week, it was clear that a coalition led by the European Union had taken up leadership on the sexual and abortion rights front. . . . [T]wo aspects of the European negotiators struck me as very odd. First, many of their positions contradicted well-established principles in their own national laws and constitutions. Second, they were opposing references to key international human rights principles to which their own governments had subscribed. . . . They contested every effort to include the word motherhood in the conference documents except where it appeared in a negative light, even though the Universal Declaration [of Human Rights] and many European laws provided that “motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance” (Art. 25).

The same European attendees “objected to a paragraph providing for freedom of conscience and religion in the context of education.” They also “sought to eliminate all recognition of parental rights and duties from the conference draft” document. Note that all this happened nearly thirty years ago. The prospects for shaping today’s culture with an authentic Christian humanism have only grown less likely and more challenging. That’s the toxic terrain that the Church now navigates.

Glendon’s book is informed throughout by a genuine respect for all three popes she served. But it’s easy to sense her special regard for John Paul II and Benedict XVI, their life stories and exceptional intellects, and the holistic Catholic integrity of their teaching. Her memory of the warm rapport between Pope Benedict and President George Bush in her years as ambassador is especially engaging. She also notes that while Benedict had a friendly view of the United States and appreciated the “healthy secularism” in the American founding, he was also “keenly aware that the American model was in trouble, weakened by changes in the culture and under assault on many fronts.”

Glendon is a faithful Catholic but very far from a naive one. The same love that motivated her service to the Holy See drives her candor about flaws and abscesses in a sclerotic Vatican bureaucracy. Her comment early on about the Holy See being “a court with many lords and few ladies” highlights a serious underrepresentation of women in positions of curial influence. Her service as president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences was, as she suggests diplomatically, “less peaceful than I would have liked.” It was crippled by inadequate staffing and funding, and disrupted by the “aberrant,” “eccentric” behavior of Argentine Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, the academy’s chancellor. Sánchez managed to insult and alienate the academy’s only sub-Saharan African member; was “overbearing toward those . . . he thought had nothing to offer him, and obsequious toward superiors”; and proved himself quite capable of staging an unauthorized press conference behind her back. His Vatican curial “type,” though, is not unique. And it hasn’t disappeared in the years since. 

When she was appointed to a commission for investigating mismanagement and corruption in the Vatican bank—the Institute of Religious Works (IOR)—a friend in the curia warned her that “the devil lives in the IOR.” And apparently so. In hindsight, she writes that “if I could have foreseen how much of the next four and a half years would be spent in often fruitless labor on the reform of the IOR, I would certainly have declined to step into that quagmire.”

The “insider” nature of Professor Glendon’s book, elegantly written and judiciously presented, is part of its great appeal. But I’d argue that the real point of the book emerges only in her epilogue. She notes there that:

Compared to his predecessors, Pope Francis has given relatively little attention to setting conditions for the preparation of a laity that is equipped and inspired to be protagonists of evangelization. . . . [His] statements on matters of faith and morals have often been ambiguous or contradictory. His decision to abolish the Council for the Laity and to fold its responsibilities into a new Dicastery for the Laity, the Family, and Life was understandable as an economic measure, but it inevitably gave the impression of downgrading the importance of the bodies it replaced. It was not as though the reasons the fathers of Vatican II had urged the creation of a “special secretariat” were no longer urgent.

I choose to read those words less as a criticism of the current pontificate than as a wake-up call to all of us as Catholic Christians. The world described in Rémi Brague’s Kingdom of Man has little interest in, and even less patience for, the moral guidance of ordained Church leaders. But it depends for its life and its agenda on the cooperation, or at least the apathy, of the everyday men and women who inhabit its public square, who drive its economy, educational institutions, media, and political structures. Thus the bitterness of our leadership class toward any hint of “retrograde” thought. Today’s media hysteria over ongoing resistance to abortion is only the most obvious example.

But we’re not powerless. Faithfully living what we claim to believe as Catholic Christians shapes the future. And the fact is, we can no longer afford a sclerotic Church, a comfortable Church, a get-along Church. We need to be a confessing Church, not just in our diocesan structures, but in the pews and family homes of every parish. We now really do live, as Glendon says, in “the hour of the laity.” And the Church and her mission really do depend on zealously committed laypeople to turn words like “the new evangelization” from a pious slogan into the active witness of their lives. 

That, more than anything else, is the lesson of Professor Glendon’s life. And it’s the cornerstone of her marvelous book.

Image by Antoine and licensed via Adobe Stock.

In today’s interview, author Brad Wilcox joins contributing editor Patrick Brown to discuss how marrying young can renew culture and form the foundation of a healthier culture. His book Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization was released last month.

Patrick T. Brown: Brad, thanks for joining Public Discourse—where you’ve published before—to talk about your new book. Let’s start with the bad news: we all know marriage is in decline, with many potential causes at play, from general economic forces to Hollywood-induced cultural changes to public policy decisions. If someone asked for an elevator-pitch-length ranking of the most important forces behind the diminution of marriage in American life, what would you tell them?

Brad Wilcox: I would focus on five dynamics, many of which have been championed by the elites who control the commanding heights of our culture, economy, and government: 

(1) Expressive individualism—the cultural orientation that tells us life is about living for the desires and projects of the self, rather than for family and community.

(2) Secularization—the decline of religious authority and practice in modern life, which has diminished the normative power of marriage and the social supports that sustain marriage.

(3) The rise of a post-industrial economy—especially the economic shifts that have disadvantaged non-college-educated men, making them less “marriageable,” that is, less likely to marry and more likely to divorce.

(4) Statism—the modern state’s tendency to supplant many of the functions and much of the authority once held by the family to the detriment of marriage (including “marriage penalties” that make marrying a bad financial deal for lower-income families). 

(5) Electronic opiates—Big Tech’s products have left too many young women anxious and depressed and too many young men bereft of drive and ambition, dynamics that undercut their capacity to forge good relationships. They also distract us from IRL (in real life) dating and investing in the relationships that matter most, including marriage and family.

To sum up, as I note in my book: 

Dominant elites have advanced ideas that devalue and demean marriage, cast aside the normative guardrails that forge strong families, passed laws that penalize marriage for the poor and working class, and superintended the rise of a new economy that benefits them but has put marriage and family life out of reach for millions of their fellow Americans. [But the] irony . . . is that the very group—our ruling class—that has sabotaged our most fundamental social institution has figured out ways to protect their own families even as marriage flounders in the nation at large. 

This, in part, is why a majority of educated and affluent Americans (ages eighteen to fifty-five) are married, whereas only a minority of poor and working-class Americans are married.

PTB: The title of your book is admirably blunt—Get Married. But the group for whom marriage has declined the most—namely, blue-collar Americans—are perhaps least likely to pick up a book by a sociologist from the University of Virginia. What’s the conversation you hope to kickstart with this work?

BW: It’s a great point. The erosion of a strong marriage culture starting in the 1960s initially had a disparate effect on the most vulnerable Americans. But the ongoing erosion of a strong marriage culture has been climbing up the class ladder into working- and middle-class communities since the 1980s. And now, as my book suggests, America’s retreat from marriage is beginning to affect even well-educated and affluent Americans, especially those who embrace a progressive orientation to life. What I mean is that it is not only working-class and poor Americans who are markedly less likely to marry but also more progressive-minded Americans.

So, my aim is to help revive the cachet of marriage among the elites who command the heights of the culture, along with other scholars like Brookings economist Melissa Kearney. To persuade politicians, Hollywood and Big Tech titans, educators, and social media influencers to shift their treatment of marriage not just in a more family-friendly direction, but in a more honest direction. And if mainstream elites prove unpersuadable, then I will work with insurgent elites in media, politics, education, and social media to find new ways to advance a family-friendly message to the American public.

Because the truth is that marriage is a path to financial security and happiness for most Americans. If this truth catches on in the hearts and minds of the general public, especially young adults, and marriage begins to gain greater cultural respect, everyone will benefit—including the least advantaged Americans.

PTB: There’s definitely a conversation happening now that feels different. In response, some left-leaning provocateurs have rolled their eyes at the idea that getting married is “defying the elites.” They point out, I think fairly, that college-educated Americans who skew left and make up a large share of what we might consider “the elite” do get married, and often more stably, than Americans without a college degree. What are they missing?

BW: I laughed when I saw this point making its rounds on Twitter. I’ve written a ton about elite marriages, so I know that elites, in their private lives, tend to get and stay married.

The problem is what they do in their public capacities as cultural, business, and political leaders. Our elites often “Talk Left, Walk Right” when it comes to marriage and family, privately embracing a marriage-minded way of life even as they deny the importance of marriage and the two-parent family in public. And there are now good polling data showing that no group of Americans is less marriage-friendly than college-educated liberals when it comes to their public attitudes.

The pushback was especially funny because the very people who objected to this phrase from the book’s title, like the journalist Matt Yglesias, were exactly the elites I was thinking about in writing the book. Yglesias famously wrote an article in Vox entitled “The ‘Decline’ of Marriage Isn’t a Problem.” Efforts by elites to deny, discount, or devalue the importance of marriage in the media, education, Hollywood, Capitol Hill, and even now, the C-Suite, are a big reason we have a marriage problem.

If our elites used their power to tell the truth about marriage—in schools, universities, media, pop culture, and on social media—we’d have a much healthier family culture. For anyone looking for recent evidence in support of my point that our elites often get behind ideas that are unfriendly to marriage, you only need to look at the recent push for polyamory, coming from seemingly everywhere, from the pages of the New York Times to the Peacock streaming service with its new show, “Couple to Throuple.” It’s like none of these cultural elites know anything about how open marriages fared in the ’70s.

To be fair, there are still glimmers of hope. Influenced by scholars like Kearney, no doubt, even Matt Yglesias has been more positive about marriage and the two-parent family of late. Let’s hope many more elites follow in Matt’s footsteps.

PTB: Part of this shift has to happen in academia as well. I think it’s safe to say you are one of, if not the, most prominent academic voice making an explicit case for marriage and family in the social sciences. As someone with conservative principles at an elite, left-leaning university, how have you seen the conversation around marriage change during your time doing academic work? Do you think the academy—and America—are more open to this message than they would have been in 2014 or 2004?

BW: Given its leftward tilt, the academy is generally not very favorable to a marriage-friendly argument. But because of the work and witness of Bill Galston at Maryland, Sara McLanahan at Princeton, and Isabel Sawhill at Brookings, in part, we saw a brief uptick in appreciation for marriage in the academy in the 1990s and early 2000s. Less so in recent years, as the academy has turned pretty hard to the left.

But Kearney’s new book, my book, and Rob Henderson’s new book, Troubled, are all helping to revive an appreciation for marriage in other precincts of the culture besides the academy. We’ve seen good pieces in mainstream media platforms—like The Atlantic and The Washington Post, for instance—on marriage, that suggest some new movement in a better direction in the media regarding our most important social institution. Let’s hope these books—and the work of civic and educational leaders like J. P. De Gance (president of Communio, a religious initiative to strengthen families) and Ian Rowe (founder of Vertex Partnership Academies)—will help paint an updated, more positive picture of marriage in the culture at large.

Moreover, think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the Institute for Family Studies are now producing original empirical research on family-related topics. This research allows us to discover and publicize marriage findings that would otherwise be overlooked in the academy. So we’re less dependent on what is happening in the academy when it comes to conducting and publicizing marriage-related research.

PTB: There is, of course, a long tradition of conservative pundits and intellectuals arguing for a revivified culture of marriage, from Pat Moynihan to Dan Quayle to Rick Santorum and on down the list. But for the most part, they’ve failed to convince the primary vehicle for conservative policymaking, the Republican Party, to prioritize marriage and the family with something more than mere lip service. Are you optimistic or pessimistic that today’s conservative movement is willing to explore policy options other than the bully pulpit that could shore up marriage?

BW: This is a legitimate concern. We’re heading into a very uncertain political climate, both regarding the White House and the makeup of the House. It’s quite possible that the 2024 election will lead to a divided government again. Given all this, I’m not overly optimistic that we will make much headway on policies that would strengthen families in the near term. But, in principle, I’m supportive of policies that (a) financially reward, or at least stop penalizing, marriages, (b) make family life more affordable, (c) let families choose how to best raise their young children, (d) make it easier for parents to spend time with their kids, and (e) underline the value of marriage and parenthood to the general public, especially adolescents and young adults.

Accordingly, I would love for Congress and the states to minimize marriage penalties in means-tested programs like Medicaid, expand the child tax credit for working- and middle-class families, tackle housing costs, give families generous educational savings accounts, and underline the cultural value of marriage in schools and on social media by teaching the success sequence.

To be clear, government can only do so much to renew marriage and family life. It’s worth noting that family formation is falling in countries with very generous family policies, like Finland. So family policy is no panacea. But policy should at least aim to make marriage and childbearing more appealing and attainable to ordinary Americans.

PTB: Certainly policy can’t do it alone; culture plays a huge role as well. When you study the landscape, is there a particular state, region, city, or community that gives you hope that we can turn this thing around?

BW: There are new family policy pushes to strengthen marriage and family emerging in states like Florida, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah: marriage initiatives, new policies on teens and tech, and fatherhood programs—some civic, some public. I am encouraged, for instance, by the work that Communio is doing to strengthen marriage and family ministries in Catholic and Protestant churches across America and the work that Governor Spencer Cox and the Utah legislature are doing to advance the Success Sequence and a range of other family-friendly laws. I am also impressed by what J. P. De Gance and Live the Life seem to have done in their marriage initiative in Jacksonville, Florida to bring down divorce rates there.

Finally, churches that have put a premium on encouraging dating and stressing the value of marriage to their teens and young adults seem to be doing better on the marriage front. St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, for instance, has seen weddings increase 50 percent in the last four years. I would attribute its success, in part, to how its Catholic Hoos ministry, which serves UVA students, has emphasized the vocation of marriage and the practical importance of dating to its students. And given the dramatic decline in dating across the culture that has affected even Latter-Day Saints, the BYU University system is also stepping up efforts to encourage dating among its Mormon students.

Let’s hope evaluations indicate that many of these policies and initiatives work. Otherwise, this nation is facing what I call the “Closing of the American Heart,” where record shares of young adults will never marry and/or never have children. Demographer Lyman Stone projects that, on the current course, as many as one in three young adults in the United States might never marry and as many as one in four will never have kids. That’s a lot of kinless Americans. Given the importance of marriage and family for what Jefferson called “the pursuit of happiness,” this would be a tragedy. So let’s find new ways to make it easier and more appealing for young adults to get married.

America is a hostile environment for young men. Feminists have long denounced the “patriarchy” and erroneously cited disparate outcomes between men and women as proof that men enjoy vast social, legal, and institutional privileges that enable their success. The long women’s march through the institutions has sought to counterbalance disproportionate representation in various realms, whether on corporate boards or academic faculties. 

With the rise of second-wave feminism, scholarships, grants, mentorship programs, and strategic hiring practices have sought to elevate women and entailed denying opportunities to men—even those who were better qualified. The era of “girl boss” feminism convinced young women that they could dismantle the patriarchy by conquering it, and as men were subjugated, they became irrelevant. “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle,” feminists cheered, boasting that “the future is female.” 

But feminists have never been satisfied with merely reforming the statistics of professional success. From their perspective, the problem has never really been that men dominated in certain spheres. The problem was men themselves, so feminists have attempted to repair the broken system by breaking men. As women championed adopting stereotypically masculine roles, they simultaneously branded everything associated with males as “toxic.” A man was demonized for the slightest social errors: should he dare occupy more than one seat on a subway, he committed the grand moral crime of “manspreading” and deserved to be photographed, then publicly shamed. In all its excess, the “#MeToo” campaign endorsed believing—not merely listening to—any female with a grievance, eroding the social presumption of innocence and deeming men guilty in the court of public opinion. Accordingly, contemporary feminists have taken to unabashedly asserting the lazy generalization that “all men are trash.”

And many men––especially young men––were disillusioned upon realizing they confront a culture that effectively punishes their masculinity, ambitions, and achievements. They asked, why work hard when major institutions actively work against you? Accordingly, young men reasoned that the only way to win the game is not to play at all; then they submitted to unfulfilled lives and opted out of society, by preoccupying themselves with porn, drugs, and video games. 

Unsurprisingly, this led to a loneliness epidemic. Recent data confirm that men are dejected, depressed, and desolate in comparison to women. National statistics show nearly 40,000 suicides among American men annually, roughly four times that of women. In 2021,15 percent of men said they have “no close friends,” compared with 10 percent of women. In 1990, only 3 percent of men said that. Roughly 63 percent of men under age 30 consider themselves single, nearly double that of their female counterparts. Men are outperforming women in the worst possible metrics.

So feminists concluded that they didn’t need men. But men have always needed men, so lost boys found an online refuge: the “manosphere,” a right-wing sliver of the internet where (mostly) nameless and faceless accounts defend masculinity—or, a specific brand of masculinity. It promotes what feminists seek to destroy, namely “alpha males.” Indeed, some accounts brand themselves as “pro-patriarchy.” Although they offer insightful cultural analysis accompanied by valid instructions for personal growth, the manosphere’s remedy is an over-correction. Ironically, it suffers from the same flaws as feminism by demonizing the opposite sex as categorically bad. More devastatingly, the alphas betray the struggling men they claim to help by prescribing rigid conduct that prevents genuine interpersonal bonding, thereby exacerbating loneliness.   

The self-described alphas accurately identified a nationwide problem: “Most of the anxiety and depression in men stems from a lack of purpose” that then leads them to “seek fulfillment by chasing pleasure.” According to the manosphere, the two available paths are to “sink into a swamp of wimpiness” or become a man through achievement. This oversimplifies the options available, but I applaud the commentators who, in a Jordan Petersonian fashion, act as shepherds guiding a flock of sheepish men toward self-improvement with unobjectionable directions. For example, the user “Manliness Norms” states that rules for men include “don’t throw your friend under the bus to impress someone,” “don’t take out your phone during a conversation,” and “never insult the cooking when you are the guest.” It isn’t obvious to me why this is branded as guidance for manliness as opposed to politeness, since these standards are equally applicable to women; regardless, I have no substantive complaints about promoting etiquette, and perhaps young men are most in need of hearing it. 

Parts of the online manosphere offer valuable constructive criticism and practical solutions. As the account “Modern Man” advises, “There will always be people who are objectively more attractive than you but that doesn’t mean you yourself cannot become more attractive over time. Better to put some effort in and look like a 6 than completely let yourself go and look like a 3.” Put crudely: stop bemoaning your loss in the genetic lottery and make yourself presentable. Some accounts prompt introspection and encourage personal development, questioning what obstacles are preventing a man from “hitting the gym.” There are threads telling guys how to gain confidence, particularly around “hot girls”; improve your mindset with a “positive attitude” and “learn from failures” that “provide valuable opportunities for learning and growth.”

The responses to men’s grievances within this niche internet community can be summarized neatly: you’re a man, so toughen up and do something. At a time when young men are noticeably unambitious, the motivational tweets are particularly healthy. 

But the manosphere has noticeable faults: the support for men is premised on degrading women, the self-improvement (like “get some exercise”) is wrongly directed toward securing women in the sheets, and rigid instruction manuals suppress the personal expression that cultivates relationships. By some evaluations, a man who adopts the alpha mindset might no longer be considered “wimpy.” But there’s no reason to believe he isn’t still lonely. 

At a time when young people have fewer sexual partners and less casual sex, managing to “score” is a mini countercultural rebellion that represents a man’s enviable “game.” The alphas are correct that the HR-ification of society sterilized romance, insofar as the over-regularization of mixed-sex spaces (such as the workplace) entailed the decline of risk-taking due to possible consequences for a misinterpreted gesture. For many men, especially those outside of blue-collar jobs, initiating one unwanted romantic advance in the office can have devastating effects. Accordingly, they largely stopped pursuing innocent crushes, and they pretended their skimpily dressed female coworkers were unnoticeable while entertaining devilish fantasies. The sad attempts to build a workplace community, like decorating Easter eggs, are severely limited in their ability to cultivate interpersonal connections because romantic interest is effectively prohibited. The standard is untenable: you should like your co-worker, but don’t you dare experience attraction.

The alphas rebel against the social castration in corporate culture by insisting that a real man does not cater to women’s hypersensitivities. To compensate for the widespread feeling of subordination in a society committed to accommodating women, the manosphere persuades powerless men to obtain dominance through seduction and subjugation. 

The same account that provided a strategy for developing confidence around women has also written a book titled The Art of Fishing, with instructions that will allow men to effortlessly sleep with beautiful women. Stirling Cooper, a self-described “award-winning professional pornstar,” advertises that “my goal is to help men everywhere embrace unapologetic masculinity and achieve mastery in the bedroom.” He doesn’t offer many suggestions for embracing masculinity, but he claims sexual prowess can be accomplished with his $97 e-book on “porn industry secrets” and his $399 “Dirty Talk 101” course, even the descriptions of which are too vulgar to repeat. 

The manosphere’s philosophy—if it even deserves to be called that—is contradictory. The alphas claim in the same breath that “there is no good or evil,” but “men are drawn to goodness and repulsed by evil,” whereas “women are amoral.” Supposedly, men should “stop expecting loyalty & honesty from women” because “women don’t care about your struggles, they hang out at the finish line and **** the winner.” But these men want to be the winners; they author manuals on “winning with women,” and a gold medal is awarded to the “top 20% of men that women swipe right for on online dating.” The alphas want to spotlight a woman and proclaim “She chose me over men,” but they denounce the framework through which she made that choice. 

There is another disastrous error. By insisting that detailed manuals be followed for casual erotic encounters, the alphas exacerbate male loneliness by suppressing individual expression and discouraging investment in relationships. Loneliness cannot be corrected by following a particular conversational script because the lack of genuineness precludes interpersonal connections, both platonic and romantic. Will a man feel confident or nervous as he anxiously flips through a mental Rolodex of “sexy” pick-up lines? Can an erotic encounter be fun if the man is preoccupied trying to remember the “tricks” he learned from an online course? The absence of authenticity aggravates the passionless culture among young people by doing precisely what feminized corporate culture has done: prescribing rules to obey.

Ultimately, the alphas are responding to a pressing need: young men crave self-worth in a culture that condemns their mere presence. We can appropriately attribute some blame to feminists for relentlessly bashing men, as well as the policies that unfairly rewarded women, prioritized their emotions, and censored attraction in mixed-sex spaces.

Still, the manosphere’s decent guidance about personal development is defeated by ordering precise conduct for the sake of casual sex because the crisis of male loneliness is a crisis of intimacy. Both the speech codes and the aim of one-night stands obscure emotional, intellectual, and romantic compatibility. At best, brief erotic pleasure can be achieved, but nothing more. In the end, this will only facilitate men’s withdrawal from society, for they will feel unsatisfied in other respects. 

I won’t resort to the “be yourself!” platitude or argue that anyone should unleash the waterworks on a first date. However, I will suggest that the relationships (particularly romantic ones) that alleviate despondency cannot be cultivated while adhering to manifestos and maintaining derogatory views of the opposite sex. And that applies to both women and men. 

Image by Jacob Lund and licensed via Adobe Stock.

In an interview recorded last month by Swiss television and partially released on Saturday, March 9, Pope Francis urged Ukraine to “have the courage to raise the white flag and negotiate.” Francis’s advice comes in the third year of war following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with Russia gaining momentum on the battlefield and Ukraine both running low on ammunition and needing strategic weapons for her survival. 

“When you see that you are defeated, that things are not going well, you have to have the courage to negotiate,” the pope concluded. In his words, “negotiations are never a surrender.”   

Francis would have been two years old when Czechoslovakia and Poland were invaded (in March and September of 1939 respectively) by Nazi Germany, following the annexation in 1938 of Austria. Negotiation and appeasement was the air that the Allies breathed in the 1930s. This allowed Hitler, unchecked, to extend German territory through imperial policy. In September 1938, with Germany and Italy, Great Britain and France signed the Munich Agreement, by which Germany was permitted to occupy German-populated border regions of Czechoslovakia. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned home from Munich, extolling a “peace for our time” that supposedly had been assured. Hitler, of course, was undeterred. By March 1939 Germany occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia, thus making null and void the Munich Agreement. By September, Germany had invaded Poland and the British were at war. 

Only a year later the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg would be invaded, with occupation in literally a few weeks. And by June 1940, Paris was occupied. 

The tragic nature of appeasement is such that negotiations are typically a surrender. There is such a thing as unjust peace. 

War and coercive force, classically speaking, have been justified for four principal reasons. According to just war moral reasoning, they are: (1) to defend against unjust aggression, (2) to recover what was wrongfully taken, (3) to protect the innocent, and (4) to punish evildoers. Peace, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “is not merely the absence of war, and it is not limited to maintaining a balance of powers between adversaries”; peace is “the work of justice” and entails safeguarding “the dignity of persons and peoples” (CCC 2304). 

As Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has reiterated, any “peace negotiations” must be determined by the nation that has been invaded. Zelensky’s own peace plan, supported by virtually all Ukrainians, calls for the withdrawal of Russian troops from all of Ukraine and the restoration of its internationally-recognized territory. Just as the Second World War was justified in the Allies’ defense of sovereignty and territorial integrity against tyranny, Ukraine is deserving of support against the outrageous sociopolitical evil of a terrorist regime that is committed to her elimination. In this case, appeasement and “negotiation” are not the principled response to Russian tyranny and aggression. 

Equally telling during the interview with Pope Francis was the pontiff’s answer when asked about the war between Israel and Hamas. His response, remarkably, was that of moral equivalence:  “War is made by two, not one. The irresponsible ones are these two who wage war.” The pope did not distinguish between Hamas’s brutalities and Israel’s right to respond to and punish these genocidal violations of international law and human decency. Nor did he acknowledge that, since its inception, Hamas has been intent on destroying the state of Israel.  

European leaders’ reactions to Francis’s comments were unequivocal. Latvian president Edgars Rinkēvičs placed the issue in proper perspective: “One must not capitulate in the face of evil, one must fight it and defeat it, so that the evil raises the white flag and capitulates.” German ambassador to the Holy See Bernhard Kotsche, responding that Russia is the aggressor in the ongoing war, called on Moscow, not Ukraine, to end the war. Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski similarly observed: “How about, for balance, encouraging Putin to have the courage to withdraw his army from Ukraine?” In that case, he said, “Peace would immediately ensue without the need for negotiations.” 

For his part, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba declared, “Our flag is a yellow and blue one. This is the flag by which we live, die, and prevail. We shall never raise any other flags.” “The strongest,” Kuleba emphasized, “is the one who, in the battle between good and evil, stands on the side of good rather than attempting to put them on the same footing and call it ‘negotiations.’” Kuleba expressed hope that the pope would visit Ukraine to show support for “over a million Ukrainian Catholics, over five million Greek-Catholics, all Christians, and all Ukrainians.” 

But perhaps the strongest criticism came from Sviatoslav Shevchuk, Head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Shevchuk lamented that the pope’s recent statements were “deeply hurtful” and that Ukrainians perceived them “not only on a political and diplomatic level, but also on a spiritual level.” “One thing we know for sure is that if Ukraine is even partially conquered, God forbid, the frontier of death will expand.” And to any who are skeptical about the need to defend Ukraine, he declared: “Come to Ukraine and see! If any of you do not believe in the victory of Ukraine, perhaps it’s time to go to confession! It means that we have little trust in the living God present in the body of the Ukrainian people.” 

In light of these prudent responses, let us be realistic: what would any sort of “negotiated” settlement between Ukraine and her invader look like? At bottom, it would be no “peace” treaty. Russia would not withdraw from any part of annexed territory, and it is doubtful that Russia would comply with any sort of “non-aggression pact” or agreement. After all, this is a war that has been going on since 2014, though in various phases. What’s more, the West would probably be forced to keep sanctions in place. 

The result, then, would be a frozen conflict, with Ukrainians still wishing to be liberated and Moscow still pursuing conquest. The chances of any reconstruction and “normalization” of Ukrainian society would be next to nil. The only way to end the war is to defeat Putin, the one who caused it and who has obliterated all conventions of international law. At this point, any talk of a “negotiated peace” is fruitless. Such negotiation can only result in an unjust peace, because to ignore Ukraine’s plight is to be inhumane and complicit in evil. By such isolationist logic, as former undersecretary at the Ministry of EU Affairs Selim Yenel has well noted, neither the Baltic states, nor Poland, nor any of the Eastern European NATO members that were part of the former Soviet bloc, deserved independence or protection against totalitarian aggression. 

As we enter the third year of the war, Western nations—with the U.S. in the lead—seem unwilling to get to the heart of the matter. Yes, Ukraine has miraculously survived, but this cannot be for long. We have deluded ourselves into thinking that a compromise with Russia is possible, but it is not. Vladimir Putin will not rest until Ukraine is either subjugated or eliminated. 

One can detect among some U.S. politicians and policymakers a renewal of pre-World War II isolationist thinking. In our day, those who hold this mindset are reluctant to work closely with our partners and allies, for example, NATO members. Such thinking downplays—or ignores—major global threats that are thought not to bear directly on U.S. security interests. Or it focuses only on China, failing to discern the policy priorities that link Ukraine, the Middle East, and Taiwan. As former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst argues, even those who properly view China as our most dangerous long-term adversary fail to understand that “stopping overt Russian aggression now is the best way to deter China’s aggression in the future.” 

The imperative of the U.S.’s immediate support of Ukraine—that is, providing her with the needed ammunition, equipment, and strategic weaponry to win the war and defend her own borders—is not merely a practical security matter (which it is). Nor is it mere charity. Rather, it is the moral thing to do. Few Americans are mindful of the security guarantees we gave Ukraine through the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Four nations—Ukraine, the UK, the U.S., and the Russian Federation—signed this agreement, promising to respect Ukraine’s “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity” and, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, pledging to “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.” And should Ukraine “become a victim of an act of aggression,” they also promised “to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action” for assistance. 

In this instance, war is made by one, not two parties. And “negotiations” that are intended to appease evil are always unjust and wrong. 

Image by Nikolay N. Antonov and licensed via Adobe Stock.

Excerpted from Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World like the Early Church by Stephen O. Presley ©2024 (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

It is not uncommon to hear people compare our current cultural shift toward secularism with the pagan world of the early Church. In my recent book, Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World like the Early Church, I consider this thesis and explain how the early church engaged their pagan neighbors. In this excerpt, I describe what I call a “culturally discerning spiritual life,” which explains how ancient Christians thought through every facet of their public lives. This kind of cultural discernment requires awareness of the contingences of changing cultural circumstances and the desire to seek sanctification through them, always performing and improvising in ways that were consistent their theological and moral convictions. This was no easy task, and they quickly recognized that it required them to form deep roots through catechesis and discipleship. Like the early church, I hope that we can see the need for cultural discernment to help us navigate the complex and ever-changing social world in which we find ourselves.

By the end of the second century, Christians were thoroughly entrenched within Roman culture and social life. To begin with, their numbers were growing at a rate quite unsettling to many of their neighbors. At least in North Africa, said Tertullian, Christians had spread out rapidly: “Though we are but of yesterday, we have filled all that is yours, cities, islands, fortified towns, classes of public attendants, the palace, the senate, the forum . . . nearly all the citizens you have in nearly all the cities are Christian.” Many Romans agreed, in dismay; they whined, “the State is filled with Christians—they are in the fields, in the citadels, in the islands: they make lamentation, as for some calamity, that both sexes, every age and condition, even high rank, are passing over to the profession of the Christian faith.”

Given this growth, Christians and non-Christians carried on regular everyday interactions, in the marketplace and conversations at social gatherings in public places. Pagans “came in contact with the movement in a number of casual ways,” as Nock says in his classic work on conversion, because “there was little, if any, direct preaching to the masses.” The church was not distinguished from the culture by anything in their outward appearance, especially since they were not typically found among the upper crust of society and thus blended in even more with those around them. What did distinguish them was their distinctive doctrine and practice. Christianity came on the scene with “very distinctive roots” and, though fully embedded, was never fully enmeshed in the culture.

Public skepticism toward Christianity also produced gossip and rumors as might be expected among people living in close quarters with each other. Not everyone was attracted to Christianity; there was widespread suspicion, misunderstanding, and ridicule. This led to constant tensions between the pagan and the Christian communities that played out in daily interactions. Refusing to worship pagan gods, Christians were subjected to various forms of interrogation. They were excluded from public places; ultimately, some were tortured and killed for their convictions. This hostility escalated in the times of Decius, Valerian, and Diocletian, as these emperors tried to bring unity to the fractured empire. Christian theologians often discussed how pagans charged them with all kinds of outlandish arguments. They “regard us as a human herd cut off from other people,” Tertullian said, and Minucius Felix’s pagan interlocutor suggested that Christians were a “shadowy and cunning race, silent in public, but chattering in lonely corners.”

Obviously, Christians were making a name for themselves, and the church had to live with the negative consequences. But how did they do so? How did early Christians think through the challenges of living in a world marked by temples to idols on every street and an economic system fueled by idol worship? They had to undertake a process of resocialization, cultivating a cultural discernment in every aspect of their own spiritual lives.

The post-conversion challenges facing Christians arose when they reentered society as baptized people and navigated the conflicts raised by their new convictions. This process demanded a culturally discerning spiritual life. In their post-conversion resocialization, those who came up out of the waters of baptism had to navigate the pagan world by a new set of convictions. They encountered their neighbors in a new perspective and had to weave new patterns of social engagement so as to live faithfully in light of their theological and moral convictions. And they had to do so in ways that made the Christian life a living testimony to the moral beauty of the gospel . . .

The church is never reserved to one people or one political system. The early Christian apologist Aristides, for example, argued that the Christian community formed a new ethnos, a new people, distinct from Greeks, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Jews. While these groups might in varying degrees approach the truth, only Christians “have come nearer to truth and genuine knowledge than the rest of the nations.” New Testament scholar Wayne Meeks compares Aristides’s discussion of conversion to the ethnos of Christianity with the experience of immigrants who leave their native land and need to adapt to a new place and a new way of life. He defines the “resocialization” of the reenactment in a new setting of “the primary socialization that occurs normally in the interactions between child and family, the process in which the self receives those components of its structure and those basic values that are contributed by its environment.” Just as a child is reared and guided with the morals and the values of its family and then grows to maturity and enters society, so also is the Christian discipled and guided in the distinctive theological and moral assumptions of the church and matures to live Christianly in the world. This resocialization, however, is built upon different theological assumptions and maintains distinctive moral convictions so that those who convert begin following new cultural and moral patterns of the Christian life.

In social sciences, the concept of resocialization is related to the notion of acculturation, “the changes that arise following ‘contact’ between individuals and groups of different cultural backgrounds.” For ancient Christians, this became a dynamic process in which the elements of their Roman identity were filtered through their Christian morality, like separating the wheat from the chaff. Meeks says that “for the vast majority, the Christian life was an amphibian life, life at the same time in the old world that was passing away and in the new world that was coming.” Christians were “moving back and forth between the two sets of social practices” in accordance with their moral sensibilities. A key passage that helped shape this kind of movement was Matthew 6:24: “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” This text addressed much more than taxes; it called for a holistic framework by which the church could undertake the life of cultural discernment. The service of two masters had to be carefully regulated and deciphered, particularly in terms of forming habits, mores, and customs. The early church assumed that devotion to Christ necessitated that their process of cultural absorption be governed by their choice to follow Christ within the culture in a way that was faithful to Christian morality.

The process of Christian acculturation happened at both the personal and institutional levels. On the personal level… Christians were challenged to live moral lives among their neighbors so as to display their good works to others through social interactions. For many, this kind of witness manifested Christian virtue in all aspects of life, not least by the kinds of social interactions that Christians refused. Alongside personal interactions, acculturation also happened at the institutional level where the church viewed itself as a family, an organic body manifesting the work of God within creation. That community would be, for example, devoid of any association with paganism. As such, their gatherings, rituals, morals, and culture would be quite distinct from those of any other social or political organization. For this reason, the clergy had to remain committed to the task of organizing and leading the church, because if the “deacons, and presbyters, and bishops” turned their backs and ran, Tertullian writes, “who of the plebs will hope to persuade people.”…

How were they to seek holiness in their world? In the early second-century text called the Didache, we can see the process of cultural discernment in action. The text describes how to welcome newcomers into the community:

Everyone “who comes in the name of the Lord” is to be welcomed. But then examine him, and you will find out—for you will have insight—what is true and what is false. If the one who comes is merely passing through, assist him as much as you can. But he must not stay with you for more than two or, if necessary, three days. However, if he wishes to settle among you and is a craftsman, let him work for his living. But if he is not a craftsman, decide according or your own judgement how he shall live among you as a Christian, yet without being idle. But if he does not wish to cooperate in this way, then he is trading on Christ. Beware of such people.

Sojourners among the Christian community were welcomed and supported, but that support was limited; those who wished to join the community had to take up an occupation. If not, the community had to discern how to maintain them without fostering idleness.

We find a more detailed account of cultural discernment in Hippolytus’s tract On the Apostolic Tradition. This text tells us that anyone interested in joining the church had to go through an initial interview to ferret out potential problems in their lives or backgrounds. Newcomers were “questioned concerning the reason that they have come forward to the faith” and “questioned concerning their life and occupation, marriage status, and whether they are slave or free.” While many vocations were acceptable, any involving sexual immorality, pagan religious offices, or gladiatorial games had to be abandoned before the candidate could proceed further. Some others, such as teachers or military personnel, might continue their work with some cautioning and qualification. The same kind of sifting is also evident in Tertullian, who tied everything back to the problem of idolatry: “no profession, no trade, which administers either to equipping or forming idols, can be free from the title of idolatry.” Christians had to think carefully through every aspect of their lives, examining their vocation to see how it might influence their spirituality; as Greer argues, “theology in the early church was always directly or indirectly concerned with the common life of Christians.” The intersections of the common life were precisely where the tensions between the Christian and pagan ethical concerns became manifest.

For contemporary Christians raised in the seeker-sensitive movement, this kind of personal interrogation of potential new members may seem a bit shocking. Early Christians did not immediately welcome just anyone into the church; the church’s identity and purity needed to be safeguarded and preserved through a slow, steady, and deliberate process. The early church played the long game and grew slowly. There were no dramatic mass conversions, only a work of church planting that attracted locals through casual contacts and everyday interactions. This was a revolution marked by “gradualism” and proved to be the “ultimate factor” that led to the rise of Christianity, says sociologist Rodney Stark. The “central doctrines of Christianity prompted and sustained attractive, liberating, and effective social relations and organizations,” steadily undermining the Roman patterns of culture. It grew naturally out of the Christians’ dual citizenship. The moral of the story is that the “Christian can be neither fully involved in his society nor fully withdrawn from it. Instead, he must keep his sights on the pilgrim’s path.”

Image by WavebreakmediaMicro and licensed via Adobe Stock.

The first time I walked into a Chinese orphanage, I picked up a little girl and held her close. At the time, I was working for a Chinese adoption agency, and while I was not yet a mother, I instinctively started rocking and swaying. Within a few minutes of making eye contact, the baby’s previously vacant expression blossomed into smiles and coos as I talked to her and mimicked her responses. Oddly, in a room of about 100 children arranged head-to-toe, two or three per crib, the baby I was holding was the only one making noise. After about five minutes, I put her down, ready to give attention to another abandoned soul.

The baby lost it.

The second her back touched the crib, her piercing cry tore through the quiet room, and I quickly scooped her up again. It slowly dawned on me that the children were quiet not because of an orderly schedule. They were crying because their cries had never been answered. So they stopped crying.

Without Mothers, Babies Suffer

These abandoned children had given up hope that anyone would respond. They had no experience of a mother talking to them, soothing them with a song, or rocking them to sleep. The absence of human touch—maternal touch—had short-circuited their emotional wiring.

My orphanage story should sadden and horrify us all. We instinctively mourn when children are starved of their fundamental needs, especially when it comes to human contact. That’s certainly the case with the babies in the orphanage and others like them who may experience “delayed physical growth and brain development, dysregulation of the neuroendocrine systems, delayed cognitive development, and deviant attachment and/or attachment disorder” as a result. But it’s evident in lesser forms of human deprivation as well.  The world is now being forced to acknowledge how even moderate human disconnection during COVID lockdowns damaged children’s long-term emotional, social, and developmental health, as well as academic success. Yet many eagerly anticipate an even more relationally barren existence during the most primal stage of development: the still-developing technology of artificial wombs.

Artificial Wombs, Mother Deprivation, and Commodification: A Deadly Combination

Artificial wombs are coming. You may remember the Matrix-esque “Ecto Life” video that made the rounds late last year. While factories for custom-ordered children are still in the realm of science fiction, they may not be for long. The technology has already had preliminary success with premature lambs. China is developing robot nannies who can “adjust the carbon dioxide, nutrition, and other environmental inputs” for children in artificial wombs once the technology becomes available. Conveniently, those AI “nannies” can also “rank” embryos and encourage or terminate their development according to an algorithm. Between now and then, we continue to fiddle with how children come to be through the trifurcation of motherhood via surrogacy and by dabbling in womb transplants for women (and possibly men as well).

Idealists out there think artificial wombs will cure a host of childbearing ills. Some, such as transhumanist Zoltan Istvan, see the advent of artificial wombs as the solution to the abortion debate. The woman doesn’t have to carry the unwanted baby, and the baby doesn’t have to die: a win-win, many think. Some hope the technology will help preemies achieve full-term development by transferring the underdeveloped fetus to a Biobag—problem solved. Others, as the Cato Institute recently suggested, envision artificial wombs as an option for “women to have biological children without the health risks, pain, or other physical and psychological inconveniences often attendant to pregnancy and childbirth.” Writers at Wired see the mechanizing of pregnancy as the great equalizer for sexual minorities, creating an “equal starting point for people of all sexes and genders.”

The advent of artificial gestation will result in some or all of those “solutions.” But a more realistic application of artificial wombs will be as a replacement for the most elusive component of the three-part—sperm, egg, womb—baby assembly process. #BigFertility is ever searching for available wombs, whether they are found in war-torn communities, among economically vulnerable women, or in countries where brown bodies are giving birth to white babies. It would be much easier, and much cheaper, if we could just cut women out of the gestating process completely.

Doubtless, the advent of artificial wombs will thrill all manner of adults: those who want their baby to gestate beyond the onset of preeclampsia, celebrities who prefer not to ruin their figures, career women who won’t step away from the office. Gone will be the days when gay couples must solicit a surrogate in their Buy Nothing Facebook group. And of course, traffickers, who will no longer need to extricate children from their parents through capital or capture, will love it.

Technologically Tinkering with Tots

How will children fare when coming into being totally starved of human touch? I would argue, far worse than the babies in the orphanage. The orphanage babies were, at least, as they were made to be, totally enveloped by their mothers’ warmth, voice, smell, song, language, sleep patterns, dietary preferences, and movement for the first 9 1/2 months of their existence. Only after the first stage of human development did they suffer what many adoptees refer to as a “primal wound,” the loss of the only relationship they had the moment they were born. 

But babies grown in artificial wombs? Because humankind has never tinkered at this level with human development, outcomes for children gestated in a bag or by a bot are purely speculative at this point. What we do know, though, is that we have been technologically tinkering with children for decades now, and thus far, disrupting the natural processes of how children come to be has only diminished their physical, emotional, and relational health. 

It began with creating babies in a petri dish, known as IVF or in vitro (in glass) fertilization in 1978. Now, around 2 percent of births in America and the UK are products of IVF. While there’s still much study to be done, we know that children made in a laboratory rather than begotten in the sexual embrace are at higher risk of premature birth, birth defects, cardiovascular issues, cancer, brain damage, and intellectual disabilities. 

In addition to curating children in glass, the reproductive tech world has also introduced “third parties” into the baby-making equation. While the first “artificial impregnation” with foreign sperm took place within the womb in the late 1800s, the advent of IVF enabled baby-making using the gametes of strangers to be widespread. Children made from third-party eggs, which are extracted laparoscopically and only after weeks of hormone injections, arrived in 1983. The first child born to a “gestational surrogate,” who is not genetically related to the baby, was born in 1985. 

Because there are few requirements for recordkeeping and sharing in the fertility industry, we don’t know how many children are born to sperm and egg “donation” each year. But the best estimate is 30,000–60,000 children born via a third-party sperm, and around 3,000 via a third-party egg annually. 

What should be at the forefront of everyone’s mind is the question, “How does all this technological tinkering affect the kids?” We are only beginning to be able to answer that question. My work involves gathering stories of children who grew up in “modern” families, that is, children who had to lose a full or partial relationship with their mother or father to be in that family. Given the relatively early incorporation of sperm “donors” in the baby-making process, we have some information on children created via another man’s gametes, less from egg “donors,” and hardly any surrogate-born children both old enough and bold enough to speak out and/or participate in studies.

What Say the Kids?

So what do we know about “donor” kids? The largest study conducted (among very few) on outcomes for children of only sperm “donation” found that 

young adults conceived through sperm donation are hurting more, are more confused, and feel more isolated from their families. They fare worse than their peers raised by biological parents on important outcomes such as depression, delinquency, and substance abuse. Nearly two-thirds agree, “My sperm donor is half of who I am.” Close to half are disturbed that money was involved in their conception.

The kids in this study had the benefit of being comforted and cradled by their mothers’ presence during gestation and a continuing bond and connection with her after birth. But listen to how the intentional loss of this child’s genetic father affected her sense of identity and starved her of the paternal love she craved:

I am the daughter (not biological) of two moms. I love them both sooo sooo much but there is not a day that goes by that i didn’t wish i had a dad. it is very hard for kids like me that are different. no matter how accepting society is. i have men in my life my moms’ friends but it is not the same. I love my parents but I don’t agree with the fact that I will never know half of my biology or my siblings. I will never do that to a child.

The data on children created via egg donation are even slimmer. The few studies we have focus only on early childhood and only reflect parents’ interview responses. But unsurprisingly, their stories reflect a similar craving for a relationship with their biological mother: 

Every day I wonder about my biological mom. Does she wonder about me? Do we look similar? Do we have similar personalities, likes, and dislikes? Do I have half siblings? Do I have grandparents that know about me? That barely scratches the surface. I cannot put into words the pain of not knowing who my biological mother is and not being able to have/have had a relationship with her. I really do think about this at least once a day, and it is deeply mentally, emotionally, and psychologically troubling.

Even if a surrogate baby is genetically related to his two “intended parents,” on the day he’s born they are just two strangers among eight billion. For all he knows, the surrogate is his mother. Separation from one’s birth mother, even briefly, inflicts trauma on a child, imposes lasting psychological distress, and leads to that primal wound adoptees have been wrestling with for decades. Such wounds can manifest as depression, abandonment and loss issues, and emotional problems throughout an adoptee’s life. 

While it may be decades before we can accurately measure outcomes for children created via surrogacy, we already know that the bond we form with our mothers in utero is not inconsequential. The handful of surrogate-born children who have been willing to speak up testify to that reality:

Children of surrogacy, just like children of a traditional adoption, deal with all the traumas that go along with adoption. We want to know where we come from. We want to know who our biological mothers are. We want to know who gave birth to us and what they are like. . . . When we have children in this world who already need homes, why are we intentionally creating children [via surrogacy] to go through adoption traumas?

The mother-child bond established in utero serves as the foundation for trust, attachment, and long-term relational health. So it’s hard for me to believe that the advent of artificial wombs, where babies will not just be separate from their birth mother—because there will be no birth mother—but starved of a mother altogether, will be anything but disastrous for children’s emotional well-being.

Never-Before-Seen Dangers to Children

Even in surrogacy, the “intended” parents often do not have the same level of connectedness and protectiveness as the unrelated woman carrying the child. There have already been cases in which the surrogate chooses to raise a disabled child abandoned by the intended parents: more specifically, these are cases of women who defied the requirement in their surrogacy contract by refusing to abort perfectly healthy babies when the intended parents demanded it. 

In some cases, the only relationship preborn children have—their relationship with the surrogate mother—may be the only thing standing between life and death should the commissioning parents be dissatisfied with the child product.  

And sometimes, even her pleading isn’t enough. Last year one surrogate begged the child’s two dads for an early delivery so she could start her cancer treatment. The men refused, unwilling to deal with the medical complexities of a preterm baby. And though the surrogate mother had lined up several couples willing to adopt the baby, the men didn’t want their DNA “out there.” The baby is now dead. 

Mothers, even if they aren’t genetically related, form a protective bond with the children they carry. I don’t expect robot nannies to be so sentimental. 

In addition to threats to their life and emotional health, cutting women out of the gestation process will spell a new kind of danger for children: a level of exploitation and abuse not yet imagined. Even with real women signing real surrogacy contracts, it can be difficult to distinguish surrogate pregnancies from child trafficking. Whereas adoption prohibits payment to the birth family—the bright red line distinguishing adoption from baby-buying—third-party reproduction and surrogacy are predicated on it. My Google “surrogacy” alert is filled with headlines of ring after ring after ring of traffickers busted for selling children under the guise of “family building.” Often, the only distinction between the two is the timing of the contract. Signed before conception? “Surrogacy.” Signed after conception? “Baby selling.” As if the timing of the contract will ameliorate a child’s identity struggles, primal wound, and mother hunger in any way.

Even without totally automated gestation, the commercial separation of children from their mothers via surrogacy has already allowed men to mass-produce surrogate babies, handed several children over to pedophile “intended parents” who never would have passed an adoption screening, and placed children with unstable men against the objections of the surrogate. Celebration and normalization of surrogacy among Kardashians, Kidmans, and Cohens of the world open the door for wider acceptance of manufactured babies that the predatory Adam Kings of the world are eager to walk through. 

From the child’s perspective, separating gestation from parenting is risky. Separating gestation from humanity will be downright dangerous.

Children Hanging in the Balance

What will be the fate of children raised without any human contact in their first nine months of existence? Perhaps, like the thirteenth-century children of King Frederick’s experiment to discern what language they would speak if they were never touched or spoken to, children of artificial wombs will die. 

If they don’t, and if these children voice their struggles, they, like many donor-conceived children today, may be asked if they’d rather not exist. But, just as in cases of rape, we can welcome and care for any new life created while simultaneously denouncing the circumstances of the child’s conception. A just response demands both. The children who result from reproductive technologies, including future artificial wombs, have dignity and worth and rights. That is the exact reason why we are critical of the way they came into being.

That first day at the orphanage, I didn’t hold any other baby. And when it was finally time to leave, I laid her down and nearly ran out of the room and down the hall so I wouldn’t have to hear her abandoned cry. It’s reasonable that children of artificial wombs will experience even greater suffering. Will they live? Will they be able to laugh or cry? Will they disappear into a trafficking underworld? A society concerned with protecting the rights and well-being of the most vulnerable will insist that not even one child will have to find out.

Image by Alexander and licensed via Adobe Stock.

In 2016, Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild released her study of Louisiana bayou Republicans, Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, to great fanfare. In “What’s the matter with Kansas?” fashion, the explicit aim of the study was to understand why rural conservatives voted against environmental regulations that would improve their quality of life by curbing the pollution that wreaked havoc in their communities. This question, however, served a more open-ended and ambitious goal: to figure out what makes red-state Republicans tick.

Hochschild took a novel and rigorous approach to the question. Recognizing the problem of a vast cultural gulf between rural conservatives and the social scientists seeking to understand them, she endeavored to explain her research subjects on their own terms. Setting out to “climb over the empathy wall,” she spent five years living part-time in the Louisiana bayou, attending community events, befriending Tea Party activists, and watching Fox News day in and day out, embedding herself in the red-state Republican world as thoroughly as possible. Far from providing armchair analysis, she sought to present her readers with the view from within.

To summarize her conclusions, Hochschild introduced the concept of the “deep story.” The deep story, she argued, is a cultural narrative people hold about the world and their place in it. It is a “feels-as-if” story through which they interpret events and channel emotions. Everyone has a deep story, but the particular story she uncovered among her research subjects went something like this:

All their lives they had been working hard, waiting in line for their turn at an American dream that felt forever out of reach. Yet all of a sudden, with the aid of liberal government and media, “line cutters”—women, racial minorities, immigrants—were being waved ahead, gaining access to jobs or social status before it was their turn. To add insult to injury, the line cutters and their liberal allies then turned around to heap scorn on the rural conservatives they had left behind, ridiculing their folkways, beliefs, and values. This left them feeling like “strangers in their own land.”

Hochschild proudly reported that when she presented her Tea Party friends with this deep story, they enthusiastically affirmed it, seemingly validating her answer to the question of what makes red-state Republicans tick. Critics on both the Left and Right may find some fault with Hochschild’s conclusions, but her project nonetheless comes far closer to providing real, empathic understanding than most scholarship on the topic.

There is one question Hochschild never addresses head-on: is the deep story of her Tea Party friends true? Some may argue that this is the wrong question, even a category error. What matters about the deep story is that people believe in and act on it, since what people regard as real is real in its effects. As a matter of sociological theory, this may be correct, yet the response isn’t quite satisfying. The story does not seem so abstract as to be impervious to empirical investigation. 

Hochschild apparently doesn’t think so, as she devotes an entire appendix to debunking many of the factual claims she heard from her research subjects that seem to support their narrative. 

Furthermore, Hochschild’s initial research question was effectively why people vote against (what she takes to be) their own interests. She answers that they are acting based on their deep story—and so not, presumably, the reality of their situation. It seems to follow that a deep story in greater accord with reality—that is, one that was truer—would produce more beneficial political outcomes. The question of the deep story’s validity is thus not only intelligible but socially consequential.

Though Hochschild does not affirm the truth of her subjects’ deep story, she grants some of the circumstances that make it seem plausible. Stagnant wages have, indeed, put the American dream further out of reach. White American Christians are in real demographic decline. Popular culture does not cater to their sensibilities. These social and cultural changes give rise to emotional reactions that require some narrative to help process them. Social, political, and media ecosystems further contribute to the development, embedding, and maintenance of shared narratives, which, in turn, shape partisan attachments. The paradox of her Tea Party friends’ ostensibly self-defeating political commitments may be lamentable, but it is not inexplicable.

Hochschild was wrapping up her research just as Trump emerged on the political scene. The book was released just a few short months before the 2016 election. The timing was perfect in one sense, ill-fated in another. On one hand, the Trump election put the academy on alert that their understanding of American culture and politics, and of the Right in particular, had been woefully off base. This lent a sense of urgency to precisely the sorts of questions Hochschild was asking. 

The book seemed tailor-made for the moment. On the other hand, that same academy was in no mood for the scaling of the “empathy wall” that had been a central element of Hochschild’s project. They had their own anger and mourning to work through, and building bridges of understanding with their political opponents was not part of that process. The result was that in subsequent scholarship, the concept of the “deep story” gained some traction, but that of “climbing over the empathy wall” did not. This was unfortunate since a sincere attempt at empathy was not only a normative consideration but a methodological prerequisite for the appropriate use of the deep story.

Six years later, sociologists Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry were to make a very different use of the deep story in their work The Flag and the Cross. This book begins by reviewing the events of the January 6 Capitol Hill riot, which they attribute to the book’s central subject—white Christian nationalism. White Christian nationalism, they inform us in the introduction, is a deep story that runs as follows:

America was founded as a Christian nation by (white) men who were “traditional” Christians, who based the nation’s founding documents on “Christian principles.” The United States is blessed by God, which is why it has been so successful; and the nation has a special role to play in God’s plan for humanity. But these blessings are threatened by cultural degradation from “un-American” influences both inside and outside our borders.

Despite explicitly drawing on Hochschild’s theory of the deep story, Gorski’s and Perry’s usage differs from hers in important ways. First, as described above, Hochschild was rigorous and transparent in the process by which she developed and validated her account. How Gorski and Perry arrive at the deep story of white Christian nationalism, in contrast, is left wholly mysterious.

Second, it is doubtful that a single living soul adheres to the deep story as they have written it. Most of those to whom it is being attributed would angrily object to the inclusion of the parenthetical “white” and its implications. (A few might keep it but protest its demotion to parentheses.) Furthermore, anyone who adheres to this general story is unlikely to include scare quotes around what they sincerely believe to be Christian principles or un-American influences.

These choices of wording and punctuation are not trivial. The power of the deep story as a sociological concept lies in its potential to describe people on their own terms and provide a view from within. It works precisely because it treats self-understandings, rather than supposed hidden or subconscious motives, as its starting place. In their telling, Gorski and Perry betray a fundamental unwillingness to attempt the empathic leap required to make the idea work. They can only offer another condemnatory view from without (though with the added insult of purporting to be from within). The result is a haphazard and perverse application of the deep story concept as articulated by Hochschild.

Third, as an explanation of what motivated the January 6 rioters, this particular deep story is a strange place to land. Of all the ways we might diagnose the pathologies clearly on display in that day’s events, it is not obvious that an excessive, David Barton–esque sacralization of the American founding mythology, and a slanted understanding of the founders’ religious beliefs, are where things went wrong, nor does the book offer any empirical support for such a claim. Indeed, what little research is available contradicts it. To make the connection, Gorski and Perry rely on the sheer shock value of the (admittedly shocking) religious imagery on prominent display in photos of January 6, but this falls far short of the standard for social scientific evidence.

Even if we put these concerns aside and take the deep story they offer at face value, it does little to elucidate the improbable range of phenomena they attribute in whole or in part to white Christian nationalism. These include, non-exhaustively: King Philip’s War, the Ku Klux Klan, vaccine skepticism, the Electoral College, gun culture, American imperialism, American isolationism, libertarianism, judicial originalism, pocket Constitutions, the Tea Party, the Southern “Lost Cause” narrative, the national anthem, premillennial eschatology, Fox News, QAnon, conservative Christian preoccupation with sexual morality, religious freedom advocacy, Catholic integralism, post-apocalyptic fiction, Marvel comics, and John Wayne fandom. As a list of things that make progressives uncomfortable, one could do worse. But the prospect that these disparate phenomena can be subsumed under some enduring social entity called “white Christian nationalism” stretching from colonial times into the present, and that this entity is embodied by the deep story recounted above, should strain any grounded sociological imagination well past its breaking point.

In the end, this is all beside the point, because the purpose of The Flag and the Cross is not to provide a sober-minded, coherent scholarly account of the cause-and-effect processes linking American religion and right-wing politics. Such a project would be poorly suited to the mood of the Trump-era academy. The aim is not to enlighten the ignorant or convert the skeptic so much as to stir the heart of the believer. As Jemar Tisby urges in the foreword, this is work that must not simply be read, but “absorbed and applied.” The book acts as a denunciation of evil and a call to arms, the expression of an angry yet erudite id. It was written for a moment that calls not for analyses but declarations, a time to rise out of the armchair and into the pulpit. This is clearest in the concluding chapter, entitled “Avoiding ‘The Big One,’” in which we are assured we won’t be so lucky with the next insurrection and are warned of an impending American “Jim Crow 2.0” and a descent from Trump’s America to Putin’s Russia. The choice laid before us is stark and Manichean: “To the left lies a path toward multiracial democracy; to the right lies a path toward continued white dominance.”

Precisely because Gorski and Perry opt to suspend the scholarly virtues of objectivity and circumspection and lay their cards on the table, however, their work is quite effective in revealing a deep story, albeit not the one they intended. It is the deep story of the Trump-era progressive public intellectual, one that draws on critical theory and the Frankfurt school, certainly, but no less from more popular figures like Howard Zinn and Margaret Atwood (whose trade, after all, is in stories). One can detect it in other works of the same genre as The Flag and the Cross, in progressive think pieces, and in Q-&-As at academic conferences. It goes something like this:

The forces of capital and reaction are ever in league, bent on rolling back progress and imposing a social vision that would make the Nazi and the Klansman feel at home. Behind a façade of internal division and moderated rhetoric, they coordinate their efforts via dark money and dog whistles. It was once thought that these forces were fading, but Trump’s election proved they had only been quietly gathering strength before launching a fresh assault. The barbarians are at the very gates. It is incumbent upon public intellectuals imbued with the ability to recognize these sinister designs to use the weapons at their disposal—the publishing house, the op-ed, the academic conference, the interview, the speaking engagement—to educate and mobilize the right-thinking public against these dangers. The survival of American democracy itself hangs in the balance.

Just as the deep story of Hochschild’s Tea Party friends shaped their politics, that of the Trump-era academy has shaped its scholarship. Certainly, there is plenty of fodder to lend it plausibility, not least the photos and footage from January 6 used as the jumping-off point in The Flag and the Cross. We must once again ask, however, not merely whether the story is plausible but whether it is true. If the assessment of the threat to democracy is broadly accurate, these scholars are indeed morally obligated to throw themselves fully into the fray and take the rhetorical dial to an eleven. Any less would be complacency in the face of rising fascism.

If the story is substantially false, however, then scholarship structured around it is misguided and irresponsible. At best, it serves to obfuscate the reality that social science is intended to elucidate and undermine the public credibility of the academic enterprise. At worst, its influence will be to throw further fuel on the fires of polarization, make radicals of moderates on both sides of the political spectrum, and hasten the very social collapse it aims to prevent. Thus, much hinges on the truth or falsehood of this deep story.

The question here is not whether the modern political Right is sick—that almost 70 percent of Republicans still reject the results of the 2020 election serves as an irrefutable testament to this fact. The issue, instead, is one of diagnosis. Put simply: is the Right’s chief problem that it is composed primarily of power-mad, racist authoritarians? Here the evidence is thin. Research consistently confirms that most Americans, Left or Right, are not particularly radical or even ideologically coherent. When it comes to social attitudes, Democrats and Republicans alike tend to move in the liberal direction, albeit not at the same rate. Most Americans across the political spectrum affirm the value of democracy (while doubting that opposing partisans do the same). And the idea that the Right is united around any social vision at present is little more than the stuff of wishful thinking among conservative intellectuals and strategists. In assessing the political Right of recent years, we would do well to recall that adage that in our fractured age may pass for charity: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

If there is anything uniting the Right’s disparate factions, it is fear and loathing of the Left. We may summarize this feeling in one final deep story, as told by media scholars Anthony Nadler and Doron Taussig based on interviews with conservatives of all stripes. It bears some resemblance to Hochschild’s account, but with a broader application:

On the right, there is a powerful story—let’s call it “The Shunning”—about conservatism as an identity under threat of humiliation, social stigma, and formal exclusion. . . . Privileged liberals [in this story] are rarely depicted casting their scorn at   one issue position. Rather, they are shown holding in contempt broad social groups supposedly associated with conservatism—blue-collar workers, Christians, white people, older people, people who live in rural areas. Disrespected and under attack, members of these groups are invited to find solidarity in their conservative identity, and moral support from the right-wing media that defends it.

Despite containing no social vision of its own other than a persecution narrative, this deep story has been sufficiently powerful to bring out voters and win elections repeatedly, if not consistently. Progressive academic commentators are aware of the power of such narratives on the Right and seek to understand them, predictably landing on such explanations as right-wing media manipulation, misinformation, and demagogue worship. There can be little doubt all these factors play a role.

But here, the commentators might try stretching their sociological imaginations just a bit further, and in an inward direction. If they want to know what sustains the conservative sense of grievance, a good place to start would be to reread their own work and consider how it sounds from the other side of the empathy wall. 

The Flag and the Cross is only one entry in a flourishing subgenre of bombastic polemics from both academic and popular presses purporting to lay bare the evil lurking in the hearts of their authors’ opposing partisans. (One can find many of these works conveniently listed in the “Pluralist Resistance Syllabus,” alongside some very worthwhile studies of American religio-political conflict.) Several of these works, despite advancing arguments that often reduce to tendentious and nakedly partisan interpretive assertions, have met warm critical receptions, with their claims regularly repeated in high-profile publications and even congressional testimony.

We are thus left with the curious spectacle of prominent academics with substantial cultural platforms gathering at conferences to ask one another: What could have possibly given all these power-mad, racist authoritarians the idea that America’s elites have contempt for them? This is only a puzzle if these authors assume their work is somehow hermetically sealed off from a larger political discourse in which the targets of their polemics are also participants. This would be a strange supposition, however, given the evangelical zeal and undeniable success with which many of these scholars have disseminated their condemnations into that discourse. It may be time to consider the possibility that Fox News has had some assistance in rendering the conservative deep story of “The Shunning” plausible to its viewers.

Ultimately, the deep stories of the conservative voter and the progressive public intellectual feed one another. As long as academics continue to use their platforms to publicly heap scorn on the Right and obtain tremendous professional rewards for doing so, the conservative narrative of being under political and cultural siege will remain plausible and provide ongoing justification for engagement in aggressive populist politics. As long as right-wing voters continue to endorse or even tolerate absurd conspiracy theories or policies and rhetoric antithetical to liberal democracy, progressive intellectuals will have fodder for narratives of the threat of a new fascism.

There is no obvious way out of this impasse, but any path toward a healthier cultural politics will depend on the crafting of better, truer stories. It may be objected that deep stories are not crafted at all but arise organically, operating outside of conscious awareness and doing their work behind the scenes. There is something to this. But once recognized, they can be scrutinized and thereby reshaped. Unfolding events—elections, wars, political scandals—provide fresh inputs into the stories we tell, thus creating opportunities for cultural elites to tell them more responsibly. In Hochschild’s story about her Tea Party friends, the Obamas featured prominently and Trump not at all. It is fair to assume that if she conducted the same study today, the story she landed on would sound somewhat different. The same will be true in a few years. The tragedy of October 7 and the ensuing Israel–Gaza war seems to have sparked some soul-searching within the academy that shows signs of producing a real shift in self-understanding. 

If the stories can change, it stands to reason that they can improve—or deteriorate. Responsible cultural elites of the Left and Right alike would do well to consider not only what claims they make explicitly, but what kinds of stories underlie those claims, and whether these are the right stories to tell.

Image by zimmytws and licensed via Adobe Stock.

These have not been happy times for democracy. It is not merely that the weeds of authoritarianism have sprung up all over again in place after place where we thought they had been killed. It’s that the places that had been, and continued to be, authoritarian drew renewed strength and profit from their crimes, while the great democracies themselves are consumed with self-doubt. This has generated a substantial woe-is-us literature, while at the same time generating an equal-but-opposite reaction in the form of reassurances that things are not actually quite so bad for democracy. Both, however, only serve to underscore how much worry, guilt, and anxiety have become the cloud of gloom that enshrouds the democratic prospect. 

The newest entry in the happier-faced category is from Brook Manville and Josiah Ober in The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives. Ober is a political theorist and a specialist in classical politics at Stanford; Manville, by contrast, is a political consultant. Together, they present a beguilingly hopeful picture of democracy’s past and present—conditioned, however, on the willingness of democratic polities to confront two basic challenges, and to promote a specific program for civic education and action.  

Ober and Manville are not illusionists. “Securing democracy’s future,” they warn, can only “be achieved if today’s citizens recommit to a civic bargain” that is composed of “good faith compromise,” made for the purpose of “sustaining the common goods of security and welfare” by “a defined citizen body who regard one another as friends rather than enemies,” and sustained “by civic education.” Yet they certainly have no brief for “democratic pessimism” either, and they believe that the best evidence for optimism lies in four extended historical examples—classical Athens, republican Rome, parliamentary Britain, and constitutional America—which they believe offer the best proof of “democracy’s emergence, evolution, and strategies for persistence.” Despite the wide differences in time and place, they believe that these four democratic moments “are consistent enough across the cases to allow for meaningful comparisons.” 

This historical consistency lies mainly in seven common characteristics of democracy, which Manville and Ober lay out in the opening chapter. The most fundamental of these marks of democracy is, simply, “no boss.” In other words, citizens in a democracy govern themselves, without needing to be guided to the political trough by kings, emperors, or dictators. Flowing from that, democracies “ensure common safety, freedom from harm, and basic means of living . . . for all.” Democracies also define who the citizen is who shares in these benefits, since there is no way to be sure that civic responsibilities will be carried out without some designation, and enforcement, of who is (or is not) a citizen. These citizens, in turn, create and “maintain institutions of decision-making and conflict resolution,” and in the process of decisions and resolutions, they prefer “good faith compromise . . . over unilateral demands for perfection.” Citizens also act as “civic friends”—not that they go clubbing together en masse, but rather that they treat each other as political beings of equal dignity with whom they are willing to negotiate civic bargains. Finally, democracies look after their own, by providing for civic education and training in the habits that promote “bossless self-governance.” 

On the whole, this is a cautious description of democracy, especially since Manville and Ober believe democracies “prefer a common good compromise in political decisions over unilateral demands for perfection.” It is, the authors warn, the “value absolutists” who “regard democracy as a sham.” It is the “value absolutists”—whether Left or Right—who actually prefer boss-ism because bosses do not need to broker compromises. And they are especially uncomfortable, in the American democracy, with how “the Supreme Court has reasserted itself as a highly consequential branch of American government,” since that assertiveness is redolent of an admission that “more bossiness now seems to many the only way to resolve conflicts in the current political climate.” 

What faces in a different direction, however, is the stress Manville and Ober place on democracy as an instrument of a “common good.” To arrive at genuinely stable civic bargains, and not just temporary truces between absolutist factions, “all must subordinate certain of their personal or subgroup interests to the good of the whole.” This requires a certain “willingness” to “self-regulate the impulse to act selfishly” in public life, and “moderate the natural urge to act to satisfy their private desires in full.” But this also has the faint aroma of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s demand that a democracy must require the submission of all its citizens, once a decision has been reached, to a General Will, without room for dissent. (And, in effect, this produces the mentality of political fanaticism so manifest from Goebbels to Alinsky, which insists that everything is political, and that no aspect of life can be treated as neutral or exempt from a political construction.)  

Manville and Ober are not unaware of the threat of Rousseau and majoritarian tyranny. But they are more worried about the destabilizing danger that emerges from the fury with which people cling to their own interests rather than embracing compromise. In so doing, they miss something very important, which is that self-interest in a democracy is not necessarily an evil. It only becomes an evil when democratic government grows so intrusive in ordinary life that self-interest can only be interpreted as a kind of dissent from a general—but now all-pervasive—good. When any regime becomes that pervasive, are we still talking about democracy? 

The same uncertainty surrounds Manville and Ober’s identification of the two principal challenges that the four democracies they examine have faced, which are the problem of scale and the problem of civic bargains that require the sacrifice of power, time, or resources. Scale, for Manville and Ober, means the size of the citizen population: democracies need to achieve sufficient numerical size to fend off the assaults of hostile aggressors and to achieve internal harmony. Athenian democracy, for instance, failed after nearly two centuries because it refused to incorporate women and slaves into its citizenry, and thus lacked sufficient numbers to protect itself from the numerically greater Macedonians. Rome was more successful in scaling up its citizenry by opening citizenship throughout the Italian peninsula and elsewhere. But it then failed to give these citizens any meaningful access to political decision-making. Civic bargains increasingly became back-room deals between elites, and that led people to turn away from bargaining and participation and toward fighting, rioting, and civil war. 

To which one is tempted to ask, is that all that challenges a democracy? As much as Manville and Ober acknowledge that “every civic bargain depends on unwritten norms and social practices,” the importance of what Tocqueville aptly identified as mores for democracy is mostly missing from The Civic Bargain. In fact, despite his place as the author of the most prescient book ever written on American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville occupies only two worthwhile paragraphs in The Civic Bargain. Which is better, however, than the space allotted to Abraham Lincoln, who is only fleetingly described as the president who “made it clear that he would not countenance the breakup of the union.” Losing Lincoln from the picture means that an example of a principled refusal to bargain away democratic principles is lost to the reader. 

Ironically, the civic bargainers who occupy the principal places of action in The Civic Bargain often resemble precisely the atomized individuals, shaking hands and agreeing to give a little here and give a little there, whom both the woke and the integralists alike deplore, and whose bargains (as Paul Berman wrote in Terror and Liberalism) seem “mediocre, corrupt, tired, and aimless, a middling compromise, pale and unappealing—something to settle for, in a spirit of resignation.” Why these bargainers should even bother to bargain instead of simply coshing each other on the head never gets explained.  

It is, for that reason, curious that Manville and Ober have so little to say about leadership and statecraft in democracies until nearly the end of the book. True, The Civic Bargain is addressed to a broad audience of citizens, and it would not be unusual, if the authors want to avoid any recourse to the idea that a single democratic savior should be waited for by a passive democratic people, to keep such an easy-solution expectation out of view. The question has been raised in many other places whether democracies actually disdain the emergence of leadership and statecraft. But it is worth noting that some of the hinge moments in the development and renovation of democracy actually do depend on the far-sighted initiative of some particular individual, such as a Solon, a Lincoln, an Adenauer.  

Some of the same questions emerge from the four central chapters (out of seven) of the book, on Athens, Rome, Britain, and the United States. These are intended to be the historical evidences of the seven democratic characteristics and the two ways these democracies either failed the democratic challenges or surmounted them. But to compress a survey of the leading aspects of the Athenian demokratia into twenty-five pages, or Rome from the founding of the republic to its overthrow by Caesar into thirty, arouses the suspicion that a vast spread of centuries is being squeezed to get exactly the seven strands required by book’s introduction. 

The Civic Bargain, in its closing two chapters, lays down a number of useful prescriptions for sustaining a democratic experiment. In a world without bosses, democratic citizens have to display a certain “acumen and courage,” and that “acumen” should require them to eschew four of the most toxic characteristics of modern political life: a cult-like party mentality, a media environment that promotes “fear, anger and resentment,” a weary sense of disengagement among the citizenry, and an appalling ignorance of the most basic civic facts. It is one more evidence of a basic conservatism in The Civic Bargain that it also identifies a lack of “clarity about borders” as a problem, since the borders of a nation-state are indispensable to identifying who its citizens are. 

However, the specific solutions Manville and Ober recommend at the close of The Civic Bargain may not be enough to patch the threadbare places in the American democratic fabric. They urge, principally, military service, civic activities (which include “public parades, sacred rituals, and collective oath-taking), “directly voting” on policy issues, and “public service as officials and jurors.” All of these are laudable. But there have been long stretches in the American experience when these solutions have been neither prominent nor compulsory and without their absence seriously endangering our democracy. And would some form of compulsory service, or even mandatory voting, really be compatible with the individualism inherent in liberal democracy? (It’s worth noting at this juncture that the authors make no attempt to distinguish between democracy and liberal democracy, which raises again the specter of democracy assuming the shape of a Rousseauean General Will.) Nor may the commendable weight the authors place on civic education gain quite the kind of ground they hope for democracy, since there are some species of what passes for civic education in modern life that are literally anti-democratic.  

Perhaps the most serious oversight in Manville’s and Ober’s call for a renewed democratic civics is the absence of any real reason to love democracy, much less to sacrifice for it. Lincoln, at Gettysburg, understood how much the American experiment was founded on a proposition; but it was a proposition that so closely embodied the natural rights captured in the Declaration of Independence that he could ask Americans, not just to dedicate a cemetery, but to dedicate themselves, even to the height of experiencing a quasi-religious “new birth of freedom.” Love is the great mover of the human soul, and the love of this thing we call democracy must, at the bottom line, be the real mover of our civic bargains. 

Image by Daniel Thornberg and licensed via Adobe Stock.

This essay was adapted from an edition of the popular Substack letter Civic Renaissance. 

Our current divisions stem in many ways from our failure to appreciate the gift of our humanness, both in ourselves and in others. Our insufficient appreciation of personhood manifests in ways large and small.

The large ways are obvious. Growing political violence, extremism, high-stakes rhetoric, and the emboldening of hate groups and hateful rhetoric.

But I’ve noticed it in small ways, too.

Take, for example, a news item from a few weeks ago. Sofia Richie Grainge—daughter of musician Lionel Richie, and Gen Z’s “It girl” in her own right—announced that she was pregnant . . . and due in three months. Her waiting until she was two-thirds through her pregnancy reflects a growing cultural norm among celebrities and non-celebrities alike to delay a pregnancy or birth announcement. In an extreme case, Paris Hilton didn’t announce her child’s birth (through surrogacy) until after he was born.

Of course, there are many reasons one might want to delay sharing publicly about one’s pregnancy. Whether to avoid public scrutiny, gossip, speculation, or simply to celebrate privately for as long as possible, pregnancy is deeply personal, and all are valid reasons to keep the news to oneself. An announcement of pregnancy delayed to the second trimester also helps one to ensure a pregnancy’s viability before sharing the news widely: after twelve weeks, the chances of miscarriage drop dramatically.

My first pregnancy ended in miscarriage, so I understand the fear that many women share of making a public announcement only to have to follow it with a public recantation—adding insult to injury in an already devastating loss.

“The Miracle That Saves the World”

For my current pregnancy—twelve weeks along—I have chosen to tell people early and often. I chose to break the cultural norm of delaying discussing pregnancy before twelve weeks and did so as a defiant, definitively pro-human act, a small rebellion against these deeply dehumanizing times we find ourselves in.

War, a divisive election, a media and political ecosystem that wants us to essentialize others based on one aspect of who they are: these are but a few symptoms of a society that insufficiently appreciates the gift of being human and the value of human life.

Hannah Arendt, the Jewish German philosopher and refugee from Hitler’s Third Reich, chose never to have children herself, but she still had strong thoughts about why birth mattered to everyone, and how it supported a free and flourishing society. She was passionate about birth, which she beautifully called “the miracle that saves the world.”

She unpacks her philosophy of “natality”—a word derived from the Latin “natus,” meaning “born,” which is also the root for our words natal, nature, native, nation and nativity—in her book called The Human Condition. Birth, she claimed, wasn’t just something for pregnant women or couples to care about. It was something that everyone—at all levels of society, and of all sexes, all ages, childless or not—had an interest in. Even though she was childless, she knew that natality matters to everyone because we were all once born, and had an interest in seeing our species perpetuated. Our views on birth were a proxy for our views on life itself—and any living person should not be indifferent to life, or birth, she thought. 

She also believed that as we’ve been born once, we have the power of being born again, beginning something anew in ourselves and in the lives we live. We also all have an interest in the propagation of our species, which birth alone enables.

Arendt argued that a society that diminished and marginalized the value of birth—as I think radically delaying pregnancy announcements can—fundamentally lacked an appreciation of human life. A society that insufficiently appreciates human life, she thought, was a sign of a society in decline. Indifference to life, or fatalism, was both a breeding ground for, and result of, totalitarian rule.

Celebrating birth, by contrast, is an antidote to the fatalism, the indifference to life or death, that pervades a society—in Arendt’s day and now. This is because celebrating birth’s critical role in human life affirms democracy and human freedom.

Arendt wrote that totalitarian leaders and strongmen “do not care whether they themselves are alive or dead, if they ever lived or never were born,” and are primed to take power when their subjects stop caring about life or death, too.

We owe it to our species, past, present, and future, to celebrate birth—to reinvigorate our celebration in what Arendt dubbed “the miracle of being”—in ways great and small.

I see my early sharing of my pregnancy as a declarative rebellion against the fatalism and dehumanization of our day.

Because loss defined my first experience of pregnancy, I have a constant subliminal fear of loss once again rearing its ugly head in our lives. Seven years ago, we grieved our child whom we lost at nine weeks. A few family members and friends knew of our pregnancy and loss, but we were largely alone.

Duality in the Human Condition

That early experience with miscarriage gave me a profound sense of the precariousness and fragility of life. And yet, having borne two beautiful healthy children after my loss, I now better appreciate the resilience and tenacity of life, too.

Today, we often think of things and people through a lens of cheapened simplicity: good or bad; right or wrong. But much of human life is both/and.

My experience with miscarriage taught me life is fragile. My experience bearing two children showed me life is resilient. As human beings, we are both/and.

Fragile.

Resilient.

One of the many dualities of the human condition.

It reminds me of Blaise Pascal’s insight from his Pensées:

Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapor, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this.

In birth, we must be prepared for the dual possibilities of “irreparable loss and rapturous gain,” as Yale University Press editor Jennifer Banks writes in her wonderful work, Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth, which is informed heavily by Arendt’s thought.

This duality of gain and loss, joy and suffering, is ever present in human life.

Birth is no exception.

Being a mother, a parent, a human being in this world demands that we be prepared for both possibilities, and that to enjoy the peaks we must endure the valleys. Callousing our hearts to shelter us from pain is a recipe for numbness, indifference to life and suffering, and can breed the fatalism that Arendt feared.

I chose to tell people as early as three weeks of my pregnancy, knowing full well it would be painful to share with them once again should he or she be lost.

Inviting people into my joy, both then and now, means also inviting others into my possible pain. We must embrace the joys with the sorrows to lead full, rich lives as human beings.

Image by Gary and licensed via Adobe Stock.

My longtime and dear friend Robert George sounded the note of liberal confidence when he declared that the regime in the universities must encompass “the right to examine and defend or criticize any idea, including ideas we judge to be extreme and even evil.” And so indeed it must. But we must be clear at the same time that nothing in that search for the truth entails that we recede in any way from the surety that we have with us, now as ever, the standards for judging evil ends to be truly evil.   

There is no need to slip into a kind of soft relativism in which we are willing to pretend to ourselves that the case for Nazism and Auschwitz has a claim to be regarded as legitimate as any other ends that are on offer in our politics and civic life. But that distinction was far clearer in the classic teaching on the moral framework of free speech that came out of the classic Chaplinsky case in 1942. It was a teaching that was quite in line with what we have understood about linguistics: about the way that words are used in our ordinary language. But it offered the “commonsense” understanding of the moral boundaries that we ever see at work about “speech,” as in every other dimension of our personal freedom. The drift away from that teaching has brought us to the moral emptiness of those clichés uttered by the presidents of three universities when they were called in by Congress to give an account of themselves. If we connect again seriously with that commonsense teaching, we see that there is something awry in the conventional formulas we have been offered now in the hope of securing at least some enclaves of free speech on the campus.   

The upshot now is that the clichés offered in defense of free speech on the campus, detached from those old moral grounds, have left the universities morally mute, utterly bereft of judgment, in confronting the scariest assault on our civic life that I have seen in my own lifetime. When I was born in July of 1940, France had fallen and a murderous Nazi regime was moving with a growing dynamism. When the war had ended, as Victor Davis Hanson said, every notable Nazi was fleeing for his life or under arrest. The anti-Semitism after the war would be acted out in those forms of discreetly barring Jews from hotels and private clubs, from prestigious law firms and boards. But there were no more sights of public demonstrations calling for the killing of Jews. Those kinds of displays were regarded now widely in our culture as disreputable. The Supreme Court sustained in 1952, in Beauharnais v. Illinois, a statute that barred racial defamation, or the inciting of hatred on the basis of race or religion; and the statute was framed with language far more careful and precise than the language we’ve seen in statutes so casually struck down in our own day. The statute in Illinois was directed at those who presented to the public any lithograph, plays, publication, or movie that: 

portrays depravity, criminality, unchastity, or lack of virtue of a class of citizens, of any race, color, creed or religion which said publication or exhibition exposes the citizens of any race, color, creed or religion to contempt, derision, or obloquy or which is productive of breach of the peace or riots.  

That statute was adopted after the famous race riots in Chicago in 1919. But in the aftermath of the Holocaust, those statutes were taken ever more seriously again and strengthened all over Europe. As the late Philip Kurland observed, the decision on that statute in Beuharnais has never been overruled. But now we have seen a dramatic moral inversion, with the irruptions on the campuses and the cities. It is no longer disreputable now to come out in public places to justify and celebrate the killing of Jews as a tenable way of making a territory in the Middle East Judenfrei. 

Let me put it then in this way: there is no campus in this country that would permit the burning of crosses, even when black people are not present. The expression of the N-word is now wholly forbidden, even for professors who would quote from Mark Twain in deriding racists. In my own Amherst College, some gestures of racial hostility were enough to have classes suspended, the campus drawn into days of self-examination, along with the conviction that those who had done such things had no place in this community. If that is the case, it is hard to see how it can be plausible for students to go unchastened or unpunished for coming out en masse, in a planned and choreographed movement, to call for the mass killing of Jews without restraint if that is necessary to remove Jews from Palestine. 

It was the deep virtue of Justice Frank Murphy’s opinion in the classic case of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, to show us that we can indeed have a serious framework of moral judgment to sustain a robust defense of speech. Among other things, that understanding had the cardinal attribute of reminding us that “assault,” in the law, has never strictly required a laying on of hands and material harm. One can hold an unloaded gun near someone’s head and click the trigger; one can make sadistic and threatening phone calls in the night; and yes, one can burn crosses outside the home of a black family. Human beings, as “moral agents,” are naturally given to arguments and complaints about the things that are right or wrong, just or unjust; and they will bring forth, in the language, the words and gestures, that bear the moral functions of commending or condemning, praising or blaming. And at the very edge of things will be those words with the function of insulting and attacking. Hence those lines from Justice Murphy’s opinion in Chaplinsky: 

There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting” words—those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality. 

There were two critical components here. First, the words and gestures established as assaults are known in everyday usage in ordinary language. You don’t need an academic degree for this; truck drivers and construction workers can be as savvy as lawyers in noticing when they are being “dissed” or treated with disrespect. The clearest test comes with any jury: we tell the jury to hold back and not convict if there is any hint of uncertainty about the offensiveness of the words. Most people have no trouble picking out the terms that would be commonly understood as terms of attack—just as most people would have no trouble in telling the difference between a burning shoe box and a burning cross. 

But then the second, decisive point: that the sharp, practical distinction would be drawn between the words that assault and the words that make a substantive argument. The most telling examples that make Murphy’s point have been given to us in the cases of David Rosenfeld and Seth Waxman. 

Rosenfeld, speaking at a meeting of the school board, had one adjective threading through his harangue, “motherf—ing.” And he was asked to stop. As Justice Murphy would explain, this language had nothing to do with the “exposition of ideas.” To bar Rosenfeld from destroying the climate of discussion in that way did not deprive him of making the most searing substantive attack on the performance of the school board. 

Seth Waxman was a distinguished Washington lawyer and former Solicitor General. I was in the courtroom hearing him defend the Fox network against the FCC, defending the freedom of performers on television to use such expressions as “sh–” and “f—ing.” And yet in the course of that finely spun argument, he never used those very words he was seeking to defend as words legitimate for public broadcasting. He offered then one of the most elegant confirmations of Justice Murphy’s key point in the Chaplinsky case: forgoing those words did nothing to impair his substantive argument—and he won his case. 

This remains the clearest distinction accessible to the common sense of ordinary people: the distinction between words and gestures of assault, set against the words that make a substantive argument. That is why, as Professor George says, we can fully protect the freedom of Professor Peter Singer to make his arguments in speeches and writings—the arguments, as Professor George recalls, that “[defend] the moral permissibility not only of elective abortion . . . but even the intentional killing of infants for some period of time after they are born.”  That is also why we can discuss in class Hitler’s Mein Kampf, even as we restrain a bunch of self-styled Nazis from parading in communities containing survivors of the Holocaust and their families. And by the same reasoning, it doesn’t count as assault if students affect to feel unsafe or threatened by substantive arguments in the classroom over abortion or transgenderism, or by a professor using the N-word as he tries to explain terms settled in the language as terms of denigration. And yet still, as Professor George notes, “the academic project entails norms that restrict some instances of speech . . . threats and harassment are prohibited, as are slander and libel . . . [and] incitement to imminent lawlessness.”   

But what about a demonstration on campus, accusing Israel of conducting genocide in Gaza? Isn’t that about a substantive argument? Perhaps. And yet it also brings us back to an old, uncomfortable truth that people seem afraid to speak these days. Justice Hugo Black was as much of an “absolutist” on free speech as one could find, and yet he insisted that there may not be demonstrations in front of the courthouse: there should be no suspicion that any judgment reached in a court will be affected by the massing of people on the street. A moral conviction may sweep people into the street, but a massing of people on the campus is not a “discussion,” nor is it the making of a substantive argument. It took Thomas Hobbes to express the unlovely truth here: that the point of massing people in the street is to convey a sense of how powerful and rightful their position must be, which is to say it is simply another form of the “rule of the strong” or “might makes right.” 

But if we are dealing with a university that takes itself seriously as a university and not an academic theme park, the administration and faculty can insist now that we can be far more demanding: massing people on the campus is not a “discussion,” but a real university lives through the challenge and testing of arguments. We might, out of prudence or tolerance, accommodate this occasional flare-up of a demonstration, but the people who choreograph these protests should be alert that, in staging the demonstration, they are now called upon to defend their position and open themselves to a searching critique. The students defending Hamas should come before us and tell us why these attacks of Hamas are things they call “morally justified.” What “wrong,” say, has been done to the Palestinian people that finds it an apt and proportionate response to kill parents in front of their children and behead babies? And there could be professors on both sides ready to step in to engage in the debate. Have we forgotten that this is exactly what took place at Harvard and other universities in “teach-ins” over the war in Vietnam? In fact, something like this has just been played out at Dartmouth, and so we know that it can be done. What is missing simply is an administration—and perhaps a faculty—with the imagination and nerve to insist that it should be done. 

If the demonstrators take themselves seriously, they should realize that it will take some rather refined reasoning to make their argument. For if we take them at their word, they would seek to show that what the Israelis are doing, penetrating into the tunnels of Gaza to find and have it out with the Hamas fighters, is essentially equivalent to shipping Jews to the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau. It was a deliberate plan, after all, to carry out a savage assault on civilians and take hostages, knowing that the Israelis would have to respond to repel Hamas and get their own people back. And when they did, they would encounter an enemy without uniforms, embedded with ordinary people, with their weapons hidden in hospitals and schools. That the Israelis were bound to kill and wound civilians in Gaza was taken from the beginning as the political asset for Hamas with the media. To make the argument that this is indeed “genocide,” comparable to the Holocaust, will require high skill; but the demonstrators should be challenged to step up and make that argument, and take the risk of embarrassment in their failure to make it.  

We need to be clear that when the demonstrators argue against the Israeli “occupation,” their complaint is not that Palestinians are governed without their consent in a regime of free elections, for they have been governed for years now without free elections in Gaza and the West Bank. Their complaint is that the land is “occupied” by Jews living there. And the demonstrators have given us to understand now that the brutal attack by Hamas is an altogether “justified” way of effecting that removal, which is to say, a willingness to kill Jews without restraint because they are living there. If that doesn’t count as “genocide,” it would be hard to say what would. And this is the hard truth that must put the odium—and the burden of justification—on any of these demonstrations whenever they flare. In fact, the planting of that very point may foreclose any need for controls and punishments on the part of the university: to have it known that a demonstration in favor of killing all Jews to remove them from Palestine will be as objectionable—and as disreputable—in this community as the burning of crosses.  

But all of this shows as well—if it needed showing—that nothing in this framework of moral judgment falls apart because people frenzied with hyperbole will make up their own definitions of “genocide.” The quick invocation of “genocide,” whenever arms are taken up and people are killed, cannot be an “argument stopper.” It becomes the ground, rather, of a burden of proof, to explain and justify a grave charge of that kind. We are often cautioned, in prudence, to hold back from making these moral judgments on the uses and abuses of speech, because people will twist words to mean anything. But as the late M. Stanton Evans warned, “the problem with pragmatism is that it doesn’t work.” What serious scheme of practical judgment or jurisprudence can plausibly begin with the axiom that we must rule out claims to truth, or just stop taking them seriously? What serious vocation, what serious life, could be lived in that way?  

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