Realists Unite! New Documentary on Gender-Affirming Care Presents “Pro-Reality” Position in Response to Trans Ideology

The new documentary “No Way Back: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care” criticizes transgender ideology from a self-described “liberal, west coast Democrat” perspective. Despite facing significant resistance from trans activists, it has been making an impact.

The film will be showing in select theaters across the country during a one-day AMC Theatres Special Event on Wednesday, June 21st at 4:30 and 7:30 pm. It will be available online and on DVD starting July 2nd.

Below, Joshua Pauling interviews producer Vera Lindner.

Joshua Pauling (JP): Thanks for taking the time to discuss your new documentary. It really is a powerful depiction of what is happening to people when transgender ideology takes over. I especially found the detransitioners’ stories compelling. The story you tell throughout is decidedly reasonable and anchored to reality. Kudos to you all for producing such a thorough and moving documentary on such an important and controversial topic. And much respect for being willing to say hard but true things in the documentary.

How has the response been to the film thus far?

Vera Lindner (VL): We’ve received tons of gratitude, tears, and donations. The most humbling has been the resonance the film created in suffering parents. I wept many times reading grateful, heartbreaking messages from parents. People are hungry, culturally speaking, and are embracing our film as truth and facts, and a “nuanced, compassionate, deeply researched” project.

JP: That is great to hear, and interesting that there has been an overwhelming response from parents. Parents are frequently the forgotten victims of this ideology.

How has the film been doing when it comes to numbers of views and reach?

VL: Since February 18th, the film has been viewed 40,000 times on Vimeo, after it was shut down in its first week and then reinstated due to publicity and pressure from concerned citizens. Many bootlegged copies have proliferated on Odysee, Rumble, and such, so probably 30,000 more views there as well. After we put it on Vimeo on Demand in mid-April, it’s getting purchased about 50 times a day. Our objective is the widest possible reach.

 

JP: Sad to say, I’m not surprised that it was shut down within a few days. Can you explain more about how such a thing happens? In what ways has it been blocked or throttled?

VL: Vimeo blocked it on the third day due to activists’ doing a “blitz” pressure campaign on Vimeo. Then they reinstated it, after news articles and public pressure. Our private screening event in Austin was canceled due to “blitz” pressure on the venue (300 phone calls by activists in two days). These experiences help us refine our marketing strategy.

JP: I guess that shows the power of public pressure, from either side. You know you’ve touched a nerve when the response has been both so positive as to receive countless heartfelt letters from people, and so harsh that activists want it canceled.

What do you see as next steps in turning the tide on this topic as a society? What comes after raising awareness through a documentary like this?

VL: Our objective was to focus on the medical harm and regret of experimental treatments. All studies point to the fact that regret peaks around eight to eleven years later. Yet the message of the activists toward the detransitioners is, “It didn’t work for you, you freak, but other people are happy with their medicalization.”

Our expectation is that conversations about the long-term ramifications of this medical protocol will start. We need to talk not only about how individuals are affected, but the society as a whole. Wrong-sex hormone treatment and puberty blockers lead to serious health complications that could lead to lifelong disability, chronic pain, osteoporosis, cardiac events, worsening mental health. SRSs (sex-reassignment surgeries) cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. These are not just one individual’s personal issues.

The economics of our health insurance will be impacted. The ability of these people to be contributing members of society will be impacted profoundly. The Reuters investigation from November 2022 stated that there are 18,000 U.S. children currently on puberty blockers and 122,000 kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria (and this is only via public insurance data, so likely an undercount). These all are future patients with musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, and mental illnesses for a lifetime. A hysterectomy at twenty-one can lead to early dementia, early menopause, and collapse of the pelvic floor organs.

 

I don’t yet see conversations about the long-term health implications of “gender-affirming care,” particularly in relation to how insurance, the labor force, interpersonal relationships, and future offspring will be affected. Everyone wants to be affirmed now and medicalized now. But there are lifelong implications to experimental medicine: autoimmune illnesses, cancers, etc. Sexual dysfunction and anorgasmia have real implications on dating, romantic life, and partnering up. A few people are talking about this on NSFW posts on Reddit.

JP: It’s interesting how speaking out against trans ideology and gender-affirming care creates some unlikely alliances across the political and religious spectrum. What do you see as the potentials and pitfalls of such alliances?

VL: We align with people who are pro-reality, who respect core community values such as truth and honesty, and who see the human being as a whole: body and soul. There is no metaphysical “gendered soul” separate from the body. Teaching body dissociation to kids (“born in the wrong body”) has led to a tidal wave of self-hatred, body dysmorphia, depression, anxiety, and self-harm. We are our bodies, and we are part of the biosphere. We respect nature and the body’s own intricate biochemical mechanism for self-regulation, the endocrine system. We believe that humans cannot and should not try to “play God.” We are students of history and know that radical attempts to re-engineer human society according to someone’s outrageous vision (read Martine Rothblatt’s The Apartheid of Sex) have led to enormous human cataclysms (communism, Chinese cultural revolution).

 

JP: Well, then count me a realist, too! Funny you use the term pro-reality. I’ve written similarly about the possibility of realist alliances. While this makes for some improbable pairings, there can be agreement on the importance of fact-based objective reality and the givenness of the human body.

Realists can agree that the world is an objective reality with inherent meaning, in which humans are situated as embodied, contingent beings. Such realists, whether conservative, moderate, or progressive, might have more in common with each other on understanding reality and humanity than some on their “own side” whom I call constructivists: those who see the world as a conglomeration of relative meanings, subjectively experienced by autonomous, self-determining beings, who construct their own truth and identity based on internal feelings.

But I do have a related question on this point—a bit of respectful pushback, if I may.

Your pro-reality position seems to have implications beyond just the transgender question. Can one consistently oppose the extremes of gender-affirming care while upholding the rest of the LGB revolution? If our male and female bodies matter, and their inherent design and ordering toward each other mean something, then doesn’t that raise some questions about the sexual revolution more broadly?

As we see the continued deleterious effects on human flourishing unfold as thousands of years of wisdom and common sense regarding sex and sexuality are jettisoned, there are both religious and non-religious thinkers raising this question, though some go farther than others. I think, for example, of Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex, Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress, and Erika Bachiochi’s “Sex-Realist Feminism.” An enlightening panel discussion with many of these thinkers was co-hosted by Public Discourse earlier this year. When the real human body is considered, its holistic structure as male or female is clearly ordered and designed to unite with its complement.

 

How does this reality relate to the rest of the sexual revolution? If one argues that individuals should be able to express themselves sexually and fulfill their desires with no external limits beyond human desire or will, how does one justify saying that transgenderism is off-limits?

VL: I will answer the question, but I need to say that this is my personal opinion. I’m fifty-five and have worked in entertainment for more than thirty years, and in Hollywood for twenty-five years. The entertainment industry attracts LGBT people, so I’ve hired, mentored, befriended, and promoted LGBT and gender-non-conforming people every day of my career. I believe that being gay or lesbian is how these people were born. Some were affected by their circumstances, as well, but in general I believe that homosexuality is innate, inborn, and has existed for millennia. There were a handful of “classic” transsexual women as well. I have three close friends who transitioned in their late forties.

But the explosion we are seeing now is different. A 4,000-percent increase of teenage girls identifying as trans? This is unprecedented. Mostly these are autistic, traumatized, mentally ill teens who seek to belong, who wish to escape their traumatized brains and bodies, who have been bullied relentlessly (“dyke,” “fag,” “freak”) and now seek a “mark of distinction” that will elevate their social status. Instead of being offered therapy, deep understanding, and compassion for their actual traumas, they are being ushered toward testosterone, mastectomies, and hysterectomies. This is not health care. The tidal wave of regret is coming, because these adolescents were never transsexual to begin with. Many of them are lesbians or gay boys who have internalized so much homophobia and bullying that they would rather escape all of it and become someone different than deal with it.

This is what we want to address. Kids explore identities. This is a natural process of discovering who they are. Medicalizing this exploration cements this exploration they were doing when they were teens. Life is long, and one goes through many phases and many “identities.” To be “cemented” for a lifetime in the decision you made as a distressed sixteen-year-old to amputate healthy sex organs does not make sense.

JP: The rise in the rate of transgender identification is indeed stunning, as is the stark increase in the percentage of Gen-Zers who identify as LGBT. What those trends portend is a live question, as are the varied possible causes. And as you say, there is a tidal wave of regret building, from those who have been pushed toward gender transition. We will all need to make special effort to love and care for them.

You’ve been so gracious with your time. As we conclude, are there any other comments you’d like to share with our readers?

VL: Find a theater near you to attend the theatrical one-day premier on June 21st. Then the movie will become available online and via DVD on July 2nd. Watch the documentary and pass it on to all in your circles!

And ask commonsense humanistic questions:

– Can adults make decisions on behalf of kids that will forever change the path of the kids’ lives?
– Is it worth it to ruin one’s health in the name of a belief system?
– Is what you are reading in academic medical research based on evidence, or pseudo-science?
– If humans have been going through puberty for millennia, who are we to mess with that now?
– Is puberty a disease?

JP: Thank you for your work on this vital issue. I hope this documentary continues to make an impact. And realists unite!

America’s Commercial Republic, and Its Detractors: An Interview with Samuel Gregg

In recent years, the market economy has come under attack from both sides of the political aisle. In some cases, both Democratic and Republican policies are even converging to expand the role of the state in the economy. Young people remain disillusioned with capitalism, while CEOs of major corporations adopt “ESG” policies and focus on matters of social justice and equity while de-emphasizing shareholder value. It seems that the success story of the market economy—the dramatic increase in our living standards worldwide over the past two hundred years—has been forgotten.

In late 2022, Samuel Gregg, a long-time contributor to Public Discourse and Distinguished Fellow in Political Economy at the American Institute for Economic Research, addressed these questions and others in his book, The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World, which has received acclaim since its publication. I was recently able to interview Gregg about the themes explored in the book. An edited interview follows.

Kelly Hanlon: In the opening chapter, you make the case that there are threats to the market economy from both the left and the right. On the left, there is what you call “stake-holderism” whereby firms are no longer focused solely on increasing shareholder value. On the right, meanwhile, there are calls for economic nationalism, with an ever-growing list of demands for the use of government action to engineer particular outcomes. What are the broad contours of the debate between the left and the right today? Where do the two sides converge? And why are you so alarmed at calls for intervention in the economy?

Samuel Gregg: Thanks for this conversation, Kelly. The first thing to note is that today’s economic debate is less between the right and the left per se. It’s focused on two things. One is the state’s role in the economy. Many on the right have embraced economic ideas difficult to distinguish from those on the left. If you look at some of the economic statements of two politicians as different as, say, Senator Marco Rubio and Senator Elizabeth Warren, you discover they effectively line up on the same interventionist page on many economic issues. Another division is between those who believe in using state economic intervention to try and realize particular moral–cultural ends like buttressing two-parent families, and those skeptical of the effectiveness of such measures.

But even deeper arguments lurk beneath the surface of these fights. They range from disputes about American economic history to the causes of America’s obvious social dysfunctionalities, the meaning of liberalism, America’s relationship with the rest of the world, and even how much conservative America considers itself bound to the American Founding. I’m convinced that many economic disagreements today function as proxies for other issues.

As for my alarm about creeping interventionism, it’s driven by several concerns. One is the very-hard-to-refute evidence attesting to such policies’ general failure to realize their ends and their propensity to inflict considerable economic, social, and political damage. Take, for instance, industrial policy. Its track record of success is utterly abysmal. It also breeds some of the worst cronyism. The same is true of tariffs. I’m also worried about the way that many conservatives seem content to use regulation and the administrative state to try and engineer particular social and economic goals. Leaving aside the fact that tinkering with, say, the tax code won’t do much to reverse the deep destruction inflicted on the family by, say, the disaster of the Sexual Revolution or LBJ’s Great Society programs, this involves acquiescing in the undermining of limited government constitutionalism in America. That is an odd position for American conservatives to hold, even tentatively.

KH: Part of the so-called stake-holderism of the left centers on the adoption of ESG policies throughout corporate America. Broadly speaking, what is ESG and why are corporate leaders advancing these kinds of policies? In a recent symposium at Law and Liberty, you suggest that one solution is that CEOs should better communicate their firm’s value and purpose. But, if CEOs are buying into the ESG agenda, doesn’t this suggest a deeper problem that goes beyond the value of the market economy—and into the realm of formation, education, and culture? How can we encourage CEOs to resist and reject the ESG ideology?

SG: ESG is about principles that purport to allow investors to invest their capital in ways that promote Environmental, Social, and Governance goals alongside profit and shareholder value. To no one’s surprise, most of these goals reflect progressive priorities.

Why do businesses embrace ESG? In a few cases, they’re led by CEOs and boards of directors who are “woke” true believers. That shouldn’t surprise us. After all, business executives swim in the same messy cultural streams as the rest of us. They’re no better equipped than anyone else to understand the degree to which ESG is an ideologically charged weapon.

In other instances, CEOs have told me that younger investors want more alignment between their investment choices and their political preferences. There’s certainly evidence for that, yet there’s also evidence indicating significant gaps between people’s stated political preferences and how they actually invest their capital. There’s a limit, it turns out, to the willingness of wealthy, uber-woke lefties to pay more for less return! Making matters even worse is that many companies see ESG as a way to charge higher fees. They’ll charge more fees to investors for putting their capital in ESG funds on the basis that the higher fees reflect your willingness, as ESG jargon says, “to invest your values.” When, however, you examine the composition of ESG funds, you discover that they’re not that different from non-ESG funds. When Elon Musk called ESG a “scam,” he had a point.

But maybe most importantly, corporate America’s present romance with ESG owes much more to CEOs’ trying to preempt government efforts to regulate them down such paths or get progressive NGO activists off their backs. Alas, corporate America doesn’t seem to grasp that these groups are unappeasable and that regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission are already way down this path. Whatever businesses do in this area will never be enough for those activists or regulators trying to force companies to embrace progressive priorities.

So, those are some of the factors at work. As for the formation issues you mention, you’re right. Milton Friedman often stressed that most CEOs aren’t especially articulate when it comes to explaining the good that businesses do qua businesses, or what you might call the vocation of business: that it’s through pursuing profit and shareholder value that business makes its particular contribution to society’s general welfare. Wealth creation not only provides for people’s material needs and wants. It also facilitates employment over the long term as well as sustaining and growing the capital that people need to raise families, secure their retirement, be philanthropic, build schools, support religious congregations, educate their children, etc. And if enough CEOs embraced this vocational outlook and had the courage to make this case in a public way, it would go some way to highlighting the incoherences and ideologies underlying the ESG agenda.

 

KH: On the right, there seem to be two camps who are increasingly calling for government intervention in many areas of private life—the industrialists and the integralists. Can you give a high-level overview of these two camps, and their views on economic policy? What are their fundamental assumptions? What problem is each camp trying to solve? What, if anything, do they get right—or wrong—about the policies they promote?

SG: Far, far more wrong than right, I’m afraid. Some people in both camps are pointing to obvious social problems that mark America. Well, few are going to dispute that much of American culture is in very bad shape, as indicated by things like divorce rates, a collapsing birthrate, the prevalence of gender ideology in the academy, the number of young men checking out of the workforce to embrace a life of drugs and video games, etc.

Advocates of industrial policy argue that things like trade liberalization have contributed to these developments and that it’s possible via a range of interventionist and regulatory measures to generate better economic outcomes than markets in particular economic sectors and more optimal social conditions for, say, families or blue-collar workers. Work is important, they say, and providing work is one way of addressing these issues.

Putting aside the dubious and highly economistic cause-and-effect logic underlining such diagnoses of America’s social problems, let me say this: work is a good in itself. Even the humblest types of work allow humans to acquire any number of virtues that make us who we’re supposed to be as humans. But using government to try and provide work, or even to try to rig the labor market toward providing particular types of work, is a counterproductive way of going about that. Protectionism and industrial policy generate massive misallocations of resources, trivialize economic truths like comparative advantage and trade-offs, and create massive disjuncts between production and consumption. In the long term, such policies corrode competition, incentivize entrepreneurs to become cronies, and give even more power to legislators, lobbyists, and bureaucrats in places like Washington, D.C., who are about as insulated from market forces as it is possible to be. The long-term results are economic stagnation, the displacement of market exchange in favor of a hyper-politicized economy, and the endless proliferation of barriers to economic growth—all of which severely cramp the economy’s long-term capacity to generate jobs.

Concerning the other group you mention, the integralists, some of them adhere to economic nationalist policies. So, to the extent they embrace such ideas, they’re subject to the same critiques. Other integralists, however, want to implement the economic policies associated with corporatism. Broadly speaking, corporatism means top-down coordination by state officials of an economy in which the forms of private property and market exchange are maintained but embedded in legal and political structures that prioritize the establishment and enforcement of a consensus focused on achieving specific economic and social goals.

The problems with corporatism are manifold. They include the creation of economic insiders and outsiders based on access to political power, the evisceration of economic freedom and property rights, the cronyism and clientelism it breeds, the marginalization of consumer needs and wants from the economic equation, etc. Then there’s some integralists’ determination to creatively reinterpret the U.S. Constitution, much like progressives have, to legitimate rule by unaccountable bureaucrats overseeing a corporate state via an imperial presidency, and to abuse the lexicon of the common good to rationalize such things.

KH: As I talk to young people, particularly in their late teens through late 20s, there’s an underlying desire for equality. We see this in some of the conversations around wealth inequality, with the assertion that a new tax policy could eliminate inequality. There seems to be a related sense that the accumulation of wealth is itself deeply immoral. Have you encountered these concerns? And, if so, what arguments have you found compelling in persuading others that the creation of wealth is not inherently evil?

SG: Let’s start with equality. Have you noticed the selective character of contemporary equality-angst? I haven’t heard many of the people you describe expressing worries about the visible decline of the rule of law throughout America. And if anything is grounded on the equality in dignity enjoyed by all humans and the principles of natural justice that flow from that, it’s the rule of law. Or the blindingly obvious injustices that are integral to the workings of affirmative action programs? Or how “anti-racism” and DEI programs legitimate discrimination against large numbers of Americans because of their race or sex? I don’t hear such things even being acknowledged, let alone discussed.

Wealth inequalities are inevitable in any economy in which market exchange, economic creativity, and the satisfying of consumer preferences prevail. They’re also a precondition for, and a byproduct of, economic growth. If you want a “no-growth” economy—a sentiment I’ve heard expressed by some traditionalists and, ironically, radical greens who hold basically pagan religious views—then you’d better saddle up for life in an impoverished society in which most people are desperately poor while the wealthy are those skilled at using force to extract large pieces of an ever-shrinking economic pie for themselves. As for trying to eliminate wealth inequalities, that’s a sure-fire way of opening up the path to all the evils—not just the inefficiencies but the evils—of socialism.

Is the accumulation of wealth in itself immoral? Well, if it occurs through, for example, lying, theft or, say, owning a brothel, it’s obviously immoral because such choices are intrinsically evil. I’d even argue that it’s morally dubious to accumulate wealth through rent-seeking insofar as cronies effectively engage in wealth-extraction from the rest of us. But there are so many more ways to increase one’s wealth that are completely legitimate and also provide opportunities for vocational growth by everyone involved in a business enterprise.

The real action concerning the morality of possessing wealth concerns its use: the free choices that we make about how we use the wealth that we have justly acquired. You really can’t go wrong if you follow Aquinas on this topic. He neatly summarizes all the entitlements and obligations associated with property ownership, including wealth that exceeds our vocational needs and responsibilities. A few years ago, my friend Adam J. MacLeod wrote an excellent book that addresses these questions in a manner cognizant of twenty-first century economic life. It’s really worth reading.

 

KH: Another point that I’ve encountered with some frequency is the view that other (non-American, perhaps even non-democratic) political and economic arrangements are better suited for life in the twenty-first century. By all measures, we’re living in the most prosperous time in human history. For those who advocate state capitalism and economic nationalism, are there examples in history where those regimes have worked well? Have they ever outpaced the free market in terms of the general welfare of a country’s population? If state capitalism doesn’t work on the whole, are there areas where state intervention may be helpful? Or, more broadly, what role should the state play in the market economy?

SG: My book highlights several cases where economic nationalist policies have been widely deployed and details the long-term damage they inflicted on otherwise healthy economies. Japan is the classic example. When I was a teenager, numerous policymakers, books, novels, and even films like Black Rain, Rising Sun, and Die Hard suggested that Japan and Japanese-style industrial policy was the future. And just as all that hysteria crescendoed, Japan collapsed into what became a 20-year economic slump.

There are several reasons for that, but in the early 2000s, the Japanese finance ministry published an official paper conceding that Japan’s extensive use of industrial policy had been a major contributor to Japan’s economic stagnation. I’d argue that China is now making similar mistakes because they’ve used more and more industrial policy since 2008 in an economy what was only ever very partially liberalized. No one should be surprised that we’re now seeing the same problems emerge on a mass scale in China—something those American conservatives who are fans of Chinese economic policy studiously avoid mentioning. The more Xi Jinping continues deepening the directive role of the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese state, and the Chinese military in China’s economy, the weaker and less productive that economy will become.

So: what should the state do in the economy? For a start, government has some very basic responsibilities like protecting and adjudicating property rights, providing public works, ensuring law and order, administering the rule of law, and maintaining monetary stability. None of these are small tasks, and the U.S. government is presently doing a lousy job in all these areas. I also think that a very basic safety net should be provided by the state, though I’d want strict limits on this, not least because of the economic and social damage that expansive welfare states inflict on society and the soft despotism that they facilitate. Lastly, governments should ensure that the rules governing international trade are being followed, and act when proxy actors for regimes like Communist China engage in activities like intellectual property theft. Again, it was only in 2018 that the U.S. government finally got around to begin addressing this decades-old problem with Chinese nationals and businesses in any meaningful way.

 

These are the state’s prime responsibilities as far as the common good’s economic dimension is concerned. Everything else, to my mind, is normally better handled by free economic processes and those non-economic associative institutions we call civil society. The latter is where most welfare functions should be located. Of course, there are always emergencies that may necessitate state action beyond the parameters I’ve just mentioned, but such interventions should be limited and never become permanent features of economic life.

KH: In the book, you make the case that Americans face a choice between state capitalism and a free market economy. It seems as though if we do nothing, we’ll continue down the path toward state capitalism. How do we move closer to a free market economy? What gives you hope that we will move closer to a free market?

SG: Let’s be clear. State capitalism is already the norm in America’s economy. The last time the federal government actually shrank was during Calvin Coolidge’s presidency!

Virtually all economic freedom indices show America as being in decline in the realm of economic liberties. Our economy is riddled with interventionism, industrial policies, and cronyism from top to bottom. Our default settings for macroeconomic policy remain strongly neo-Keynesian. The notion that American economic policy had been run since the 1980s by so-called “market fundamentalists” is absurd. The refusal—the refusal!—of many American conservative legislators even to discuss reforming those entitlement programs that are driving us into ever-greater debt and that facilitate so many social problems isn’t just disappointing. It’s plain irresponsible.

That said, those who believe in entrepreneurship, free competition, trade liberalization, and their moral, legal, and political foundations must rethink how they make their case. Yes, we must press for deregulation of our ever more regulated economy, we need to get incentives aligned correctly, we should get the state out of doing things that it does badly, and we must focus the government on those activities I just mentioned. But if the case for markets is reduced to more stuff produced more efficiently for more people, or associated with Davos Man borderless world delusions, or involves trivializing the very real bonds that many Americans have to their nation and communities, millions of Americans won’t listen to them, no matter how compelling the economics.

 

The line I often hear is “America is a country with an economy, not the other way round.” To which I say, “Amen.” But America is also a country in which the idea of being a commercial republic is at the core of our identity. Much of my book involves spelling out how the idea of a commercial republic is inscribed into key texts, speeches, and documents of America’s Founding like the Federalist Papers and George Washington’s “Farewell Address.” As the historian Gordon Wood points out, this is where America finds its identity as a nation.

Put simply, key Founders believed that America’s future was to be a polity in which free and dynamic commerce would play a powerful role in defining society, as opposed to, say, the priorities of aristocratic or feudal societies. The “republic” side of this political economy equation is that this commercial society would operate within the context of institutions and sets of virtues that draw upon classical, religious, and moderate Enlightenment sources.

That, I’d suggest, is the vision that those who regard free markets as the most optimal economic system for America should embrace. Protectionists and industrial policy advocates play the patriotism card all the time. That’s ironic, given that tariffs and industrial policy are always driven by, and always focused on, promoting sectional and special interests rather than the general welfare of 330 million Americans.

Let me sum it up this way: America isn’t meant to be just another European social democracy engaged in managed decline. America isn’t meant to be a corporatist state like the World Economic Forum’s envisaged “stakeholder capitalism,” let alone Mussolini’s Italy. America doesn’t have to relive that miserable economic decade known as the 1970s. If those who believe in free markets can tap into that vision of America’s understanding of itself as a commercial republic and what this means for the United States’ place in the world, we have every reason to be hopeful.

Practicing Pro-Life Medicine: A Conversation with Dr. John Bruchalski and Leah Sargeant

In today’s interview, Leah Libresco Sargeant speaks to Dr. John Bruchalski. He is an OB/GYN based in Virginia, and the author of the recent memoir Two Patients: My Conversion from Abortion to Life-Affirming Medicine. Sargeant is the creator of Other Feminisms, a substack focused on the dignity of mutual dependence. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Leah Sargeant: Dr. John Bruchalski, you’re an OB/GYN who used to practice what people would think of as the full spectrum of obstetrics and gynecology, including abortion. And that’s something you chose to walk away from.

I want to ask you a little bit about that choice and about what your new practice looks like, starting with one of those pivotal moments you described in your book when you went into the operating room for an abortion and were confronted by a baby. Can you tell me about that night?

Dr. John Bruchalski: At that point, I’m working at a pregnancy center at night, but during the day, I am doing the full spectrum of OB/GYN, including aborting healthy children, sick children, just about for any reason at any time. Abortion on demand.

And that dissonance is becoming more and more tense for me.

So there I am in one room saving a 22-weeker because the mother desperately wanted it. She’s praying, she’s begging, she’s imploring. We have her in Trendelenberg [a position to forestall premature labor], kind of tilted backwards. We’re using medication and antibiotics, and she’s getting better.

In the other room, mom didn’t want it. She’s like, “No, just get rid of it.” And what did I do? I broke her water and pitted out the baby [administered Pitocin to induce labor].

Now the baby comes out and I lift it. And usually when a baby’s born alive in an abortion, we suffocate it [by not assisting breathing].

But it felt a little heavy. I threw the baby on the scale and lo and behold, 505 grams [over the legal limit, requiring life-saving treatment], I had to call the intensive care nursery. In walks Dr. Debbie Plum [from the NICU team], she takes one look and says, “Hey John, you’re better than this. Stop treating my patients as tumors.”

This baby weighed about a pound and a quarter. Its skin was translucent. It made noise, it was obviously human, part of our family. But the dissonance is: no, call it a fetus, it’s not wanted.

It’s unwanted. So therefore we need to terminate it. The mother doesn’t want it, society doesn’t want it.

LS: I was really moved reading your story of that night and that delivery. I went and looked up kind of what that critical threshold was for the baby. And it was five grams, you said, over the limit.

And so I looked up, what else is five grams? A sheet of paper. A sheet of paper weighs five grams. And that was the measure of what made someone a person or not in the hospital.

JB: That’s exactly right. Once you remove medicine from truth and justice and equality and equity and ecology, five grams—a sheet of paper or whatever the mom wants. It’s a desire.

I began to see my heart hardening as I was doing more and more abortions. You go from the little ones that have no bones to the ones that have bones, and eventually you realize something’s not right here. You think now it’s human, at one point it wasn’t. But no: I later realized that if mom and dad give us the egg and sperm, it’s a human life. Period.

LS: I want to dive in on that shift in vision. I think of these arbitrary thresholds (five grams, one more week) as the things that mark the change from objects to persons. And these thresholds are particularly painful in the context of abortion, but they’re also problems in a lot of places in medicine.

For example, doctors might say: “Oh, you’re not quite sick enough for a transplant. But once your numbers move by 0.1 on this scale, we’ll be able to treat you differently.” And I know that in some cases those numbers come out of a real place of care, of we have to make these decisions based on aggregate data. But as a doctor, how do you balance “These numbers tend to work overall,” and “I have a single patient in front of me I want to advocate for?”

JB: You always hate the disease, but you always love the patient. That’s the core of medicine.

For instance, the thyroid gland has a normal range, but that normal range is based on an aggregate, it’s not your range. So in my practice, one of the ways I’ve done this just in medicine is if your TSH is above a two, it’s telling me that it’s working too hard.

 

Well, why not try a little bit of supplementation or kelp or iodine? You have to look at the individual person and listen to her story. And that’s what happened that night when I tried to kill that baby. She was further along than I thought. Once you start becoming callous to human lives, it becomes a calculus: put in the numbers. You meet the bar. I’m convinced it’s like the train platform at Auschwitz-Birkenau. You go here, you go there based on some line drawn between human and non-human. Some people are part of the human family and some are not.

And I think medicine, because we’ve been a part of eugenics and a part of destroying the weak forever, there’s a dark side to medicine that you really have to be careful about. There’s a better way to practice.

LS: I appreciate that, especially because I think this is an issue, again, that’s certainly in stark relief in obstetrics and abortion, but it’s not limited there. I got a quote from the book here.

“We were taught to trust our patients above all else. And for whatever reason, this woman felt the abortion would make life better. It wasn’t my place to question her choices. I was there to help women.”

And I can tell that your practice is moved by love in both cases when you were providing abortions, now when you’re eschewing them.

But there’s also this pressure from the medical system that the doctor is a vending machine, that you’re there to provide a service. And that’s not limited to abortion. So how do you resist that vending machine pressure, even in a pro-life practice? Where does that pressure come from?

JB: Modern bioethics is based on patient autonomy. I don’t do abortions anymore because they’re not good for unborn, the most weak. But it’s also not good for families or moms, psychologically, medically, that sort of thing. Or even for me as the abortion provider: I’m still post-traumatic. It was part of my life.

When I became this holistic, integrated, life-affirming doctor, I will try many alternatives to see where the data leads us. And you realize that when you listen to your female patients, they are live books.

LS: I like that metaphor because I’ve been in the position where it feels like I have to advocate for myself against a doctor. And so I’m sympathetic to someone who feels like they’re coming in to try and kick the vending machine to get the treatment to come out.

I think good medicine relies on a trust that isn’t there for many patients with their doctors or for doctors with their hospital system, at every level. That lack of trust is part of why people are so skeptical about the possibility that there’s a way to treat both patients; instead, they expect it to be a zero-sum game.

When you look at the statistics on maternal mortality in America, it’s clear many doctors aren’t treating both patients. They may be shortchanging mother and child, but it’s clear moms are getting shortchanged. The most famous recent example was Serena Williams, a famous woman, an important woman, a rich woman having to drag herself off her hospital bed to beg to be checked for a condition she knew she had that was putting her in danger of death.

And when I see those stories, I understand why people who are pro-choice and who care about women say, “I don’t trust the pro-life movement to write laws that won’t leave women in trouble, even if hypothetically it’s possible to do perfect practice.”

I’m going to give you a specific example: imagine a woman who comes in with premature rupture of membranes at 19 weeks. Is it possible to take care of her and the baby? Certainly. Do they expect the doctor is going to do it? No.

So how do you respond to that lack of trust where it’s possible to practice medicine, in a way that woman and baby are taken care of, but manifestly we don’t? How do we advocate a system of laws that puts the appropriate weight on the baby’s life when we know we don’t put that weight on the mother’s life, even in an uncomplicated delivery?

JB: I have to be honest with you, that’s a very hard question because “the life of the mother” exception is a political reality. It’s not scientific.

The only way that you can regain this trust, I believe is not politically, it’s actually by witnessing. So Tepeyac OB/GYN and Divine Mercy Care, what we do now is just out there trying to respond to this question that you ask me. In our practice at Tepeyac, we probably have eleven women whose water broke at 15 weeks. And they all delivered children over 34 weeks.

LS: How do you have a conversation with a mom in that position about what the risk is like? Because I think that risk really worries people.

JB: You can tell a mom in that position that the world literature that has researched water breaking early says you should be able to wait. It says you have to monitor her very closely, along with following her baby. So I tell these moms that we’re going to be taking her temperature every day, morning and night. And by monitoring them closely, we will deliver you as soon as there’s any sign of infection. Because if there is, we then target the infection, not the baby.

You would never tell her, “Well, I’m going to kill your baby to save your life because you might die of an infection.” That’s bad medicine and bad anthropology. In our practice, sometimes this decision to keep monitoring rather than abort the baby leads to polarization between dads and moms. Many dads are like, “No, don’t do this, let’s end the pregnancy now.” And the mom says, “Well, wait a second. I’m not sick yet. I don’t want to give up yet.”

When I aborted those children right away, I would’ve said to the mother: “I saved your life.” But in our collection of thirteen, fourteen cases at Tepeyac, they all made it. And I’m just interested in accompanying people through really tough illness and disease without pitting the mom against the baby.

When young pregnant women come to the office and are considering abortion I say, “I’ve done that. I used to do abortions in this case, but I don’t anymore.” And I tell them: “You can go elsewhere. I can’t help you do that, but you can always come back to me for any complications. Why? Because I value you. I value your decision even though I don’t do it. You’re always welcome with us.” And you’re trying to meet them in their shame, in their pain which often tells them that they have no choice and that they have to get an abortion: “I have no choice. I have to do this.”

LS: I want to ask you about that open door. Your story isn’t simply as a story about walking away from abortions. You didn’t just give something up, you deliberately took on something new.

You talk about having a particular call from Mary to “always see the poor and see them daily.” That’s very different from just saying “I won’t perform abortions anymore.” It changed where you could practice as much as not doing abortions did. Can you talk about what that changed for you as a doctor beyond just, “I won’t do abortions”? How did that change where you and how you could practice?

 

JB: When I was in undergrad and in medical school, I went and worked in Appalachia. But [students in medical school often] want to go on mission trips. Well, with all due respect, just look in your own community. There are men and women who live right next to you who are living below any level of dignity.

People like Paul Farmer from Harvard working in Haiti show that health is based on relationships. Medicine is an act of mercy. Again, you hate the disease, but love the patient. By collaborating in community, you can build a space where abortion becomes unwanted and children welcomed.

It’s very rewarding to practice excellent women’s health that is collaborative, integrated, holistic, and listens to their bodies. Children are not STDs. Fertility is something to be collaborated with rather than suppressed.

LS: I wanted to ask about the practicalities of living out that commitment. When a woman walks in your door who’s vulnerable, how big is the gap between the care she needs and the money available for it?

JB: Huge.

LS: Just ballparking, what percent is able to be paid for, and what percent has to come from donors?

JB: We were a for-profit medical practice. And all my bean-counter accountants were saying, “You got to stop seeing the poor.” Well, I couldn’t because that’s obedience. I believe in alms-giving because it’s very connected to medicine as mercy.

So practically, we probably raise 40 to 50 percent of the cost of our care. People sometimes ask, “Well, what was your plan, John?” I had no plan.

I have a budget now, but somehow I don’t think of it as seriously as my board does. I’m so grateful to my board for trying to keep us on the straight and narrow.

But I had dinner with Mother Angelica years ago. She was so excited about what we did before she died. She said, “Johnny, just remember, my son, budgets are for people who are fearful.” And I can tell you in my life, I’ve never been outdone in generosity. That weekend that we realized that our malpractice premiums tripled from a total of $80,000 to $240,000, and we had one month to cover it. A bunch of patients created an email list and we raised $242,000 in a weekend. It’s about having so much street credibility that you can go to your patients and beg.

LS: Let me ask you one last question. This is for someone who may be starting medical school who has a strong pro-life commitment, but wants to avoid the coarsening effect of medical school. They want to avoid that sense of becoming a vending machine that does procedures, not a person in relation with the patient.

What should this person take on outside of school as a counter-formation to the conventional formation of medical school?

JB: Two things: keep up your prayer life, that quiet time, however you do that. The second piece is to reach out to places like us at divinemercycare.org who can then connect you with Christian Medical and Dental, Catholic Medical Association, where you realize you’re not alone.

I was at the University of Virginia twelve years ago, a fourth-year resident walks up to me after my talk, during which I had asked: “If abortion is so good, why don’t more of us do it?” He comes up and says, “Do you really believe, Dr. Bruchalski, that life begins at fertilization, human life?” I said: “Oh, yeah. And it deserves our care.” He goes, “You’re the first person in twelve years of my academic training ever to have said that.” He said, “I find it fascinating.”

Transforming hearts through healthcare comes by one-on-one.

LS: Thank you so much for making the time to talk to me today. Dr. John Bruchalski, the author of Two Patients: My Conversion from Abortion to Life-Affirming Medicine. Thank you so much for your time.

Gay Marriage, Civil Rights, and Christian Virtue: An Interview with David French

In today’s interview, David French joins Public Discourse editor-in-chief R. J. Snell to discuss French’s new position as a New York Times columnist, gay marriage, and how Christians should engage in politics. 

R. J. Snell: Thanks so much for being with us for this interview and congratulations on your new position with the New York Times. Are there issues or topics you hope to explore there that would be different than at the Dispatch or elsewhere?

David French: As far as I know, I’m going to be writing about the exact same themes and issues and topics that I’ve written about at the Dispatch and the Atlantic. In fact, that’s why the Times wanted me, so I could continue to write about those themes. So I’m going to write about religion, I’m going to write a lot about law, culture. My military experience will come into play in my writing as it has at the Dispatch and the Atlantic.

If you’ve seen my work over the last many years, law, culture, religion are all three big themes that I have addressed quite a bit. We are in an era at the Supreme Court where we have this conservative majority and we’re likely to have this conservative majority for the foreseeable future. It’s important to have folks who understand conservative jurisprudence writing in mainstream publications. Conservative jurisprudence is the air I breathe. I understand what’s going on at the Supreme Court, and I understand the various nuances of conservative jurisprudence. So that’s going to be an important part of what I write about and what I address.

It’s also really important to step outside of the news cycle often and take a look at the larger cultural and religious trends that are shaping American life. And Dean Baquet said right after Trump was elected, a lot of the media doesn’t “get religion.” You can’t understand America without understanding America’s religious landscape. So I’m going to be writing quite a bit about that as well.

RJS: Some have disputed what they understand as a tension or contradiction in your commitments. Particularly your commitments to both civil libertarianism and religious freedom. How would you articulate your position and the tensions or lack of tensions?

DF: Well, I think religious freedom is an aspect of civil libertarianism. So religious liberty, free speech, all of that, those were encompassed in the First Amendment. And so I would say more people frame the distinction as a tension between my commitment to civil libertarianism, including religious freedom for all people, including people who have dramatically different religious beliefs from me, and my Christian orthodoxy. That’s where people see a lot of the tension. I don’t see that tension at all, really.

I think of two of the great founding documents in American history. Of course the most famous of the founding documents is the Declaration of Independence, where Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that we’re endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and then goes on to talk about how governments are tasked with defending that liberty. And then the lesser known, but very important document is John Adams’s letter to the Massachusetts Militia, where John Adams uttered the famous statement that our constitution was made for a moral and religious people and is wholly inadequate to the governance of any other.

The entire letter is fascinating because what he’s basically saying is that our constitution is not strong enough, the government is not strong enough to dictate public morality. Rather than dictating public morality, it depends on public morality. So he talks about how certain vices are so terrible that left unrestrained, they would cut through the cords of our constitution like a whale goes through a net.

So I think of these two documents as framing an American social compact. It is one of the primary responsibilities, not the exclusive responsibility, of government to protect the liberty of its citizens. It is the responsibility of citizens to exercise that liberty towards virtuous purposes. That’s your social compact. When I’m interacting with the relationship between the state and individuals, I’m going to defend the liberty of individuals. When I’m interacting with individuals, I’m going to urge, especially when talking with fellow Christian believers, Christian virtues, I’m going to urge various civic virtues, defend civic associations, defend those institutions that are advancing civic virtues. So I don’t see those things really in tension at all. In fact, I think that the defense of liberty, in many ways, is necessary to holistically pursue virtue in the private sphere.

 

RJS: For some, that answer makes sense, but others think things have changed. They might have been friendly to that argument some years ago, but when they look at the contemporary United States, they see decadence and decline, even the absence of public morality, which that compact depends upon. What had been obvious no longer seems obvious. What would need to happen in our society for you to rethink your commitment? Is there a breaking point where you would think, “that’s not working out; I need to reconsider”?

DF: Yeah. The difficulty is that if you look at some of the worst moments in American history, it’s when the government has violated that social compact, when it has said for certain communities of Americans, you have fewer rights. Or when it has put its thumb on the religious scales in some decisive way.

For example, you don’t have to go far back in American history to find the Blaine Amendments, these anti-Catholic state constitutional amendments that were designed to protect public schools, which were deemed and viewed at that time as essentially Protestant schools free from Catholic influence. Here was a world, in many ways, that a lot of the more “New Right” folks want, which is the ability of the government to put its thumb on the religious scales. We had that. It didn’t work very well.

We’ve had many times in American history when the government had the power to reward friends and punish enemies. Again, this is what much of the New Right wants, and it didn’t work. It was inherently unstable. It was unjust.

 

What I see in modern America is something maybe a little bit different than what other folks see. I think the nation vis-à-vis its laws is far more just than it has been at virtually any point in its previous history. Racial discrimination is outlawed de jure. You have an extension of the First Amendment to all American communities. You have greater religious freedoms in a concrete way than we’ve ever enjoyed in the history of the United States. Is this government treating its people justly? We’re far from perfect. We have a lot of problems, but we’re better than we’ve been.

When it comes to public morality, the other side of that social compact that asks us to exercise our liberty for virtuous purposes, things are a lot more mixed. Now, in some ways, we’re better. We should never minimize the advances we’ve made in really eradicating the kinds of brutal personal racism that used to mark American life. There’s a news broadcast from the 1970s in New York where there’s a black family that’s moving into a local community. And the amount of unbelievable, overt racism directed at that family blows our minds here in 2022, and that’s not that long ago. 1970s is my lifetime.

We often take a look at things from the standpoint of sexual morality. We think the changes in sexual mores have fully defined the increasing decadence of the American public. But we are complicated creatures. There are many ways in which we’ve gotten better, and there some ways in which we have gotten worse. We tend to completely overlook the ways in which we’ve gotten better and then say, “Well, this is just not working out. We have to make big changes.”

But in fact, even when it comes to sexuality, I think that we are actually in the middle of a number of really important and meaningful conversations about sex and sexuality, and there are actually some positive signs. Many negative signs for sure, but also some positive signs. I don’t know if you saw Christine Emba’s recent book about how the consent-only culture has harmed women. There’s been a rising groundswell from both religious and secular sources rethinking the way in which we have constructed a sexual morality that is entirely experiential as opposed to a relational. Disconnecting sex from love and relationship has not worked for millions upon millions of people. A free society isn’t immune to negative social movements, but it is able to react to and reform negative social movements in a way that more authoritarian countries often are not.

I’m not going to say that from a moral standpoint, we citizens have upheld our end of the bargain. In many ways, we have not, and that has caused a lot of suffering. But it is also the case that a free society is able to reform itself in ways that totalitarian societies obviously do not and cannot.

RJS: How would you respond to those who suggest that the inner logic of liberty and the anthropology of liberalism have a directionality toward the destruction of the family, fragmentation, and soft tyranny? Sure, it’s not as bad as hard tyranny, but we’re moving to soft tyranny as an inevitable logic.

DF: I’ve always been confused by the phrase soft tyranny. Is it tyranny if it’s soft? I don’t know exactly what that means. When I see the phrase soft tyranny used, this often means there are powerful people who don’t like me. It’s not that they can actually control me. It’s not that they actually are shutting down my church. They’re not destroying my family or my relationships, but I’m a dissenter. I’m on the outside looking in, and there are people who don’t like me. That term, soft tyranny, needs a lot more definition before I’m going to start to question liberal democracy.

RJS: I take them to mean it’s not the state itself, but cultural forces, business forces, those sorts of things.

DF: Yeah. Again, unimpressed by that concept. But some of this, I think, is also due to what your conception is of what it means to live as a Christian in this world. I never for a moment have understood the scriptures to say that there is a system of government that is going to make it easy for me to live as a Christian. In fact, I’ve been guaranteed the opposite.

So if my standard is, well, I find it difficult to live as a Christian in this culture, therefore we need massive governmental reforms and greater governmental authority to make it easier for me to live as a Christian in this culture, number one, the track record for that historically is really bad. Number two, in many ways, what you’re asking for is trying to construct what is biblically, in many ways, an impossible system. I’m not so sure it’s possible to make the systems and the engines of culture hospitable to the gospel message by force of law.

And number three, we have seen time and time again that it is difficult to live authentic Christian lives even in many of America’s Christian institutions. If you look at some of the most powerful Christian institutions in America, part of Christendom, for lack of a better term, some of them have been deeply and profoundly corrupt. The most prominent apologetics ministry in the United States was run by an abuser of women. You have perhaps the largest Christian camp housing one of the worst superpredators in American life for a decade plus, and then covering it up. You could go down the line. And time and time again, I hear Christians say, “We need more Christians in power.” And I’m thinking, “Do we, though?”

 

Think of January 6th. If you had told young me that there will come a time when the chief of staff is an outspoken evangelical, one of the president’s personal lawyers, outspoken evangelical, the House and Senate Republicans are staffed with outspoken evangelicals, the young naive me would have said: “Justice must be rolling down from the heavens.” Instead, what was rolling down from the National Mall was a mob listening to praise music as they stormed the U.S. Capitol building.

I do think you can use the engines of government in ways that are deeply and darkly oppressive to Christianity, but I’m much more skeptical when it comes to arguments that I hear from folks on the New Right about building some sort of Christian nationalism that will preserve what is good in our society and squelch what is bad. I’ve yet to see a government exercise that kind of authority in a just manner.

RJS: Let’s talk about same-sex marriage. You’ve written that you’ve changed your mind on this, and more than once. Is this a fair summary of your position from the Atlantic and Dispatch essays of late 2022?

First, equality and fairness before the law under the conditions of pluralism guides your thinking. Second, there’s an unfairness and inapplicability of using Christian or religious understandings of marriage as normative for civil marriage. Third, civil law is already out of step with the Christian conceptions anyway—think no-fault divorce—and the harms to the biblical understanding of marriage were done by religious hypocrites. And, fourth, you don’t see under the current conditions any grave threat to religious freedom. Is that the arc? What would you add or change in my summary?

DF: I think that’s pretty fair. The way I characterized it in a piece I wrote is that it’s a flip-flop-flip. It’s one position then another, then back to the original. Again, remember, my default position is a more civil libertarian position. So when the initial Massachusetts Supreme Court decision was handed down in the early 2000s, I was not alarmed by it. I’m a traditional, small “o” orthodox Christian, and I have a biblical view of marriage, which I call covenant marriage. And no-fault divorce is utterly alien to that scriptural conception. It is as separate as night and day from the scriptural conception.

So when civil marriage was being changed to include same-sex couples, in my view, that was not the same thing as walking into my church and saying, “Okay. Marriage has changed.” Those were two different things.

Then you began to see what a lot of people presciently warned about, that some people who will attempt to isolate and render as second-class citizens individuals who believe in traditional Christian marriage, or what are called covenant marriage in my writing. This is something I encountered time and time again in my religious liberty work. “Oh, you don’t have the new view of marriage? Well, you can’t operate in this college. You can’t have a student group in this college,” or, “We’re going to threaten your accreditation if you’re a Christian university.”

RJS: Soft tyranny, as it were!

DF: Well, it’s pretty hard when you’re using the operations of the government to kick someone off campus, or take away their tax-exempt status. That’s government action. That’s not somebody making me feel bad. I can handle that.

That’s when you began to see this concern emerging that said, “Look. If same-sex marriage becomes law, then the institutions and ideas of covenant marriage are going to be rendered second-class.” And I said no to that arrangement, absolutely not. If supporting same-sex marriage means treating those people like me who uphold covenant marriage and belong to institutions that uphold covenant marriage and want to foster it around the culture, if that means that people like me have to become second-class citizens, no deal. So then along comes Obergefell, and when Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, he seemed cognizant of this issue. He very clearly wrote that there are people of goodwill on both sides of this issue and the law should respect and protect both. I remember reading it and thinking, “Nice words. We’ll see.”

Since then, in the seven, now coming on eight years since Obergefell, there has not been a single significant religious liberty loss at the Supreme Court. Religious liberty has continued to advance. And many of the wins were by supermajority, seven to two, nine to zero. This was really surprising for folks who thought that Obergefell was the beginning of the end of religious liberty.

When the Respect for Marriage Act came up, it tried to (imperfectly) respect religious liberty. If I was writing the bill, it would be different, but it imperfectly said, “We think that same-sex marriage and religious liberty can coexist in the United States of America, and we’re going to codify that coexistence.” I thought that was absolutely an acceptable compromise.

 

RJS: After the Atlantic piece, you did two Dispatch essays to explain your views in more detail. In one of those, you have a throwaway line—it’s not the core of your argument, but I’m interested in it—where you state that there are both secular and religious arguments against abortion. Are there not secular arguments against same sex marriage? What is the role of reason in how we understand covenantal marriage and civil marriage? Are there secular arguments against same-sex civil marriage? Don’t covenantal understandings of marriage translate to reason?

DF: Let’s say I’m talking to someone who does not share my faith commitments. I have lots of arguments about the value of lifelong marriage and not viewing marriage primarily as an engine for adult happiness.

RJS: Are these mainly sociological arguments, or arguments that can be made about the nature of marriage itself?

DF: I’m not so sure about the nature of marriage itself, but definitely when it comes to arguments based in what we understand about human flourishing. And interestingly, what we see is that there are an awful lot of people who don’t question no-fault divorce at all and would resist a legal regime that repeals no-fault divorce. Yet they don’t live like that in their own marriages: they stick through it, through thick and thin.

One of the hallmarks of the upper-middle-class America is pretty darn stable families. People do not cycle through relationships. They do not cycle through marriages. That stability is the hallmark of upper-middle-class America, even if social conservatism as an ideology is not. There are all kinds of arguments about family stability, the inadvisability of divorce, the destructiveness of divorce, the challenges of loneliness. You can make these arguments to people who don’t share my preexisting faith commitments about marriage.

RJS: Those are sociological arguments, or arguments about human flourishing. As you know, some of our colleagues at Witherspoon wrote the What Is Marriage? book, in which they ask, using secular reason, about the nature of marriage itself. They claim that if you don’t accept the conjugal view of marriage you lose any principled and rational basis for why marriage needs to be permanent or exclusive. If you don’t provide arguments about the nature of marriage itself, what’s your limiting principle to disallow throuples or five-year marriages with options to renew? Such arrangements might have negative effects, but do you have a principled reason against them?

DF: Well, so five-year marriages with an option to renew would actually be more binding than the current no-fault marriage. It’s mind-blowing to realize literally a refrigerator warranty is more binding than a marriage under the law. That is no exaggeration. So when people have talked to me about the sanctity of marriage prior to same-sex marriage, it’s been an eye-rolling thing for me because I think either they don’t know what no-fault divorce is, or they think that has sanctity? What? No-fault divorce is the codification of a sub-contractual view of marriage.

It’s hard for me to see the argument that there’s something fundamentally sacred about that civil arrangement. I see why government has an interest in delegating the sanctity of a relationship to the citizens. I see why there are defensible governmental reasons for the no-fault divorce construct of marriage, especially given long histories of extraordinary problems with domestic abuse in intimate relationships, and the difficulty people had traditionally in extricating themselves from physically abusive situations in years past. But it is difficult for me to see the moral interest in that construct. So that’s why I’m not persuaded that that particular construct was worth excluding same-sex couples from. That’s where folks lose me.

And this is magnified by the idea that, if you have a same-sex couple and they’re raising children, you’re going to come in and change the law, and suddenly, they’re not married, which has all kinds of down-line ramifications for everything—from financial arrangements, to healthcare relationships, to child custody. My goodness.

While at the same time preserving this sort of no-fault situation that heterosexual couples have, it’s hard for me to see the justice in that because that’s where the reliance interests come into play. You have a million-plus people in this country who have built their relationships around these legal arrangements, and then to yank it all away strikes me as profoundly unjust, even cruel.

RJS: You claim there’s something quite different between a covenantal marriage (I would call this a sacramental marriage) and a civil marriage. The circles don’t overlap, is how I remember you putting it. But on one understanding, and this would be my own, the logic of revelation or grace can’t contradict the logic of nature. Even more, the logic of revelation or grace presupposes the logic of nature. Grace presupposes nature, grace perfects nature, and grace elevates nature. If in the domain of the civil or the natural, we’re creating something out of step with the logic of revelation and grace, we’ve got something deeply wrong with our understanding of the natural; we have something that can’t be true, that doesn’t follow the logic of either nature or grace, or we have double truth. God’s general and specific revelation would contradict one another, and that just cannot be possible. How do you think about that?

DF: What do you mean creating?

RJS: Well, we create laws, positive law. I take civil law to be a construction of the state. But I also take a just civil law to be one in keeping with the logic of grace, and open to it because grace presupposes nature. (That’s Aquinas’s phrasing.) Do you agree? What should we do if the civil law contradicts the logic of covenantal marriage? How do you understand the relationship of nature and grace? I think you’re going in a different direction than I would.

DF: Yeah. I don’t quite see it that way. I don’t think the civil law is creating anything. It’s recognizing relationships in a pretty precise legal way. So the civil law cannot create or destroy my marriage. My marriage—

RJS: Your covenantal marriage?

DF: That’s the only marriage that I know. The civil law cannot create my marriage, nor can it destroy my marriage. It can recognize it and provide particular sets of benefits surrounding it, or it cannot recognize it, but it doesn’t create it, nor does it destroy it. We can’t think of the state as providing that level of meaning. That’s where I dispute some of this, because I don’t see my marriage as a creation of the state at all. I see it as a union of one man and one woman before God himself. I’m glad that the state recognizes it and provides certain kinds of short benefits that allow me to make, by default, some kinds of medical decisions, and by default possess child custody. But it does not create my marriage. It cannot destroy my marriage.

The question when it comes to the state is not what is the state creating. The question is what kind of relationships is the state recognizing and providing certain kinds of default protections for. It’s a much lower order of engagement. That’s why from the beginning of the debate, I’ve been much more torn about this than many of my Christian friends have been. I look at the role of the state as not an entity that creates. It recognizes and provides particular kinds of benefits to relationships. It’s a much lower order engagement.

 

Perhaps some of this is influenced by, for example, my longtime free speech advocacy. If the state is protecting my speech, it is not in any way endorsing that speech. Or if the state is protecting my religious liberty, it is not in any way endorsing that religion. It is not imbuing that religion with truth or meaning or purpose. It’s just protecting it from oppression and restriction. I think of the role of the state in a different way.

You can really dig deep into this, but one of the ways where I really depart from some of my Christian nationalist friends is they put a lot more meaning around what the state can potentially do to provide some sacred purpose or meaning to a nation.

RJS: One might respond to what you just said this way: okay, fine. So the real marriage is neither going to be created nor destroyed by the state, but the state can recognize the relationship. But that’s precisely why the state should recognize some sort of civil union, but not same-sex marriage, because the state can’t create marriage. Marriage is created by the covenantal logic, and that covenantal logic is going to be permanent, exclusive, involving spouses of different sexes, and so on. Why grant same-sex marriage under civil law? That sounds like creating something, and something false. Certainly, there are opponents to that position, who want same-sex marriage recognized as marriage just because marriage has a sacral quality to them. They didn’t want the recognition of civil unions. They wanted marriage.

DF: Right. Yeah. They absolutely wanted their relationships to have the same legal recognition as the recognition granted to opposite-sex couples. If the state recognized civil unions, but not marriage, even if the set of benefits were identical provided to civil unions as to marriage, that they would still view these as second-class arrangements. There was a validating aspect of expanding the definition of civil marriage. There’s no question about that.

Also, there was almost no constituency on the right for creating civil unions that were identical to marriage, but not called marriage. I remember the days. If you were for civil unions, you were seen as a hopeless compromiser. This was compromise that nobody wanted at the time.

 

It’s also the case that there’s a wide divergence of religious belief regarding marriage in the United States of America. An awful lot of same-sex couples say, “David, you’re wrong. I have a covenant marriage just like you do.” And they belong to religious traditions or to churches that would endorse that wholly entirely and completely, and that my definition of covenant marriage is fundamentally wrong. And that brings into play the question that we haven’t really addressed, which is pluralism. How do we live together across this really big difference? Again, that’s why my default position comes down to respecting each other’s liberties and respecting each other’s desires to live our lives according to our deepest values.

RJS: Final question, and thanks again for doing the interview with us. Clearly, there’s a lot of contestation in the conservative world right now about what it means to be a conservative, what we should do, who we should vote for, and so on. What do you want to tell conservatives about how they should think and act and proceed going forward?

DF: On the voting question, which is one of the more basic questions, I have a two-pronged test that I apply, and you have to pass them both. It’s not one or the other. It’s an “and,” not an “or.”

First, you have to possess personal character commensurate with the office you seek. So the higher the office, the higher demand for character there should be. So there should be character commensurate with the office that you seek. Second, a person should broadly support my political policy positions, my political values. There’s no perfect person, and there’s no perfect policy alignment. But broadly speaking, high character and policy alignment. If you’re missing either one, I’m not going to vote for you.

I wrote about this in my last Sunday newsletter. In 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention wrote a resolution on moral character in public officials. It was extremely brief, but eloquent and powerful. And one of the most eloquent passages of it says that the tolerance of serious wrongs by leaders sears the conscience of a culture, spawns unrestrained lawlessness, and surely will result in God’s judgment. There was a lot of mocking of that sentiment by a lot of the mainstream culture in 1998 when it was drafted, because that was Bill Clinton they were aiming at. We had peace and prosperity and all those Christian prudes. I remember even reading op-eds about how we need to have more European views about mistresses.

 

Is there a statement that’s been more thoroughly vindicated than that? What happens when we tolerate serious wrongs by leaders? It does sear our conscience. How many times are we now seeing people just rationalizing the grossest conduct? It does spawn lawlessness. The scandals that are metastasizing through the American body politic are ripping at the seams of our social fabric. God’s judgment is not necessarily hurricanes or tsunamis or fire from the sky. It can be something as simple as giving us over to our own desires and watching us reap the consequences of our own behavior. A part of God’s constant mercy and grace is consistently saving us from ourselves. God’s judgment will not always save us from ourselves, and many times we reap what we’ve sown. Right now, we’re in a reaping phase of having sown an awful lot of lawlessness and corruption.

This really short-term thinking that says, “I don’t like either one, but one’s clearly a lesser evil,” is exactly what’s landing us in the position that we are in with a collapse of trust in institutions, a collapse in trust in politics, a collapse in competence. If your primary qualification is you’re not the other guy, where’s the emphasis on competence even as a baseline? Somebody has to start taking the long view.

Neither party can win an election without their Bible-believing base. The two most church-going segments of American society, in addition to Mormons, are white evangelicals and black Democrats. Black Protestants are overwhelmingly Democrat. If both these movements exercised a veto authority over low-character politicians, American life would change.

That’s what I would urge for people of faith. Use the power that you actually have. Stop sitting around moaning and groaning that you’re persecuted and you don’t have any power. Come on. White evangelicals are the most powerful faction of one of the two most powerful political parties in the most powerful country in the history of the world. You are not powerless. You are not persecuted. Use the immense power that you have to begin to change the character of our institutions in a positive direction. No more fear-based voting. No more compromises with lesser evils. Use your power to reinforce virtue in this country, or you’re not upholding your end of the social compact. Period.

Can Fatherhood Cure the Modern Male Malaise? A Conversation with Richard Reeves

In today’s interview, Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard Reeves joins Public Discourse editor-at-large Serena Sigillito to discuss Reeves’s latest book, Of Boys and Men.

Serena Sigillito: The subtitle of your new book is Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. I think there’s widespread agreement across the political spectrum that there is a problem with the state of men in our society, but those “why” questions are where you start to get into a lot of disagreements.

Could you give me a sense of how you approach those questions? Why are men struggling, and why does it matter?

Richard Reeves: I started by looking at the trends in various areas, like education, employment, and family. So, for example, why are boys and men struggling in education? There are various fairly straightforward ways in which the education system isn’t working very well for boys and men. It’s similar with the labor market. So that’s category one: questions and answers that are quite straightforward and specific, which you can get empirically.

The second category of “why” questions is harder to get at. These are more about motivation, more about incentives, more about the “why” for individual boys and men. Why get a job? Why finish school? What’s driving agency? I think that the combination of lots of cultural and economic changes has left many boys and men without a very good answer to their own “Why.”

That’s the underlying cause of these other trends we see in things like education, employment, health, and family life, which is this harder-to-identify cultural phenomenon. I refer to it as a male malaise. As I say in the book, for centuries women have had to fight against misogyny without. Now, men are struggling for motivation within.

 

SS: Your book could be characterized as left-leaning in the way that it praises feminism, focuses on structural problems, and integrates the lenses of race and class as well as gender. But you could also say it’s right-leaning in its straightforward acceptance of the claim that there are real biological differences between men and women and that they ought to be accepted and accommodated by society. You actually spend a whole chapter critiquing the left and another whole chapter critiquing the right.

Could you give a brief overview of the pitfalls you see on both sides of the political spectrum?

RR: Look, I’m John Stuart Mill’s biographer. Whatever else you might think that means about me, what it means is that I strongly believe that when two people disagree about something, it’s never the case that one of them’s right and the other one’s wrong. They always, to quote Mill, “share the truth between them.” I’m a conscientious objector in the culture wars.

In terms of issues with the left, the first is what I call progressive blindness, which is this ideological refusal to accept the fact that there can be gender inequalities that run against boys and men. The second is a tendency to pathologize masculinity, the toxic masculinity problem. A third is a sort of a blank slate-ism on issues around sex and biology, particularly when it comes to boys and men. There’s a pretty stubborn refusal to say that there are any biologically based differences in preferences in psychology between men and women.

SS: And the right?

RR: Well, one part of the right is the flip side on the biology point. There’s an overemphasis on biology.

On most traits, there are overlapping distributions when it comes to differences between men and women. But the left sees two distributions that don’t differ at all, or shouldn’t. Any deviation is suggestive of injustice. The right tends to see distributions that barely overlap, and that leads them to be too deterministic in, say, gender roles.

Let’s take the people–things dimension: women on average are more into people, and men are more into things. That has implications for occupational choice. Unless you did extraordinary social engineering, you won’t have 50 percent of engineers as women and 50 percent of nurses being men. You just won’t. But it’s reasonable to say that 25 percent might be.

My son is an early-years educator, and my sister-in-law is an engineer. I don’t like it when I hear people say, “Well, of course there aren’t men in early-years education. Men’s and women’s brains are different. Women are much more nurturing.” There are twice as many women flying military planes as men teaching kindergarten. And I’m like, “Are you sure that’s explained by biology?” You hear people like Jordan Peterson saying, “Well, only 5 percent of engineers are women, but their brains are different.” I’d say, “Are you sure? Are you sure that they’re that different, Jordan?”

I don’t want people out there thinking women can’t be engineers and men can’t be early-years educators. Sure, there are differences on average, but there’s huge overlap. All I care about is whether he’s got the skills for this job or she’s got the skills for that job.

One thing the right’s done well is to see these problems facing men more clearly than the left has and for longer. But then rather than offer up forward-looking solutions that are compatible with the reality of gender equality, instead there’s been a tendency to send messages about going back. Conservatives invoke a world where men had factory jobs and you could raise a family on one wage. They’re careful not to say whose wage it is, but it’s pretty hard not to read into that a valorization of a certain period of economic history.

I think that’s just crazy. It’s not what most men and women want, and it’s unhelpful in the current situation. But it can make for good politics, because there is such real anguish out there that, channeled skillfully, can produce short-term political gain, especially if mainstream liberal institutions are ignoring the problem.

 

SS: In general, you’re very, very careful to consider the interplay of nurture and nature. You argue that we have innate biological differences, but those are shaped by culture in profound ways. But on two specific issues, prostitution and transgender identification, you seem to forget about culture and just accept biological differences as determinative of behavior.

Regarding prostitution, you say that we’ve had this with us throughout human history, that men’s sex drives are stronger than women’s, and that therefore we should just give up, decriminalize sex work, and focus on harm reduction. Whereas I would say, okay, the poor will always be with us, too, but that doesn’t mean we stop fighting poverty. This is a deeply harmful practice, and the law is a teacher. We shouldn’t be sending the message that prostitution is acceptable.

On the trans question, you say we shouldn’t worry about transgender ideology because 99 percent of people are cisgender. But the reality seems more complicated, and it seems to be changing. Those numbers aren’t fixed. Sexual desires and gender identity are quite plastic, especially during adolescence and especially for women, and they’re affected by the surrounding culture.

Gallup came out with a poll in February 2022 analyzing sexual orientation and gender identity by generational cohort. They found that 20.8 percent of Gen Z identifies as LGBT. That’s compared with 10.5 percent of Millennials, 4.2 percent of Gen X, and 2.6 percent of Baby Boomers. Over 2 percent of Gen Z identifies as trans, and another 1.5 percent say they’re queer, non-binary, or something else. Compare that to the 0.1 percent of Baby Boomers who identify as trans.

You could say that some of that is due to increasing social acceptance, but I have a hard time believing that there’s no social contagion going on here.

RR: No, you’re right. There is. You just have to look at the evidence to see. When it happens to one kid in one school and then it happens to ten other people in the same school . . . that’s culture. That’s a micro-culture at work, isn’t it?

Regarding the Gallup poll, the increases can sound really big, but they’re still very small numbers. And it’s important to note that a huge proportion in the rise of LGBTQ identification is young women identifying as bisexual. As you say, sexual attraction among young women is more plastic. It changes. Fine. That’s a very different thing to being trans or being non-binary. And just identifying as trans is very different to doing something about it. The real concern is when you get into things like hormone therapy, gender reassignment surgery, or gender-affirming care, whatever you want to call it.

When it comes to that, we get into really small numbers. It’s not to say that there aren’t real issues at stake. I’m just saying, I think it’s important to keep it in perspective. And I do think that it is seen as good politics by some people to really exaggerate how many people this is affecting.

So I guess what I’m not willing to do is share in the moral panic. I do feel quite strongly about making sure that our policies are correct around it. The UK is having a better debate about this than the U.S., honestly, partly because there’s more feminists in the UK that have been willing to have a proper argument about it.

SS: And what about the prostitution question?

RR: There are just really big differences between men and women on sex drive. That’s not a distribution that overlaps anything like as much as other characteristics do. So what do we do about that?

This is where culture comes in. I agree with you that one of the roles of culture is to say, “Okay, well, here’s how you are. What are you going to do about that? When and how is it appropriate and healthy for you to express that drive?” It’s not going to go away. There isn’t a rite of exorcism that will take this stuff out of you. So the question is, where does that energy go? I completely agree that there are healthy and better ways for it to be encouraged, and we should do that. But I think I’m a bit more realistic about it.

A lot of sex workers have made the argument that legalization would just be much safer. And I take those concerns about safety very seriously. I would say it’s a kind of cultural version of realpolitik. If you assume that sex work is going to be with us, like the poor, then the conditions of sex work and the conditions of sex workers themselves become an important policy question. The worst of all worlds, I think, is to continue to just say, “Oh, well, it’ll go away soon,” and not have safe and proper regulations around it.

You referenced the idea of the law as a teacher, and I’m not sure that’s right. Where I come from, in the UK, abortion’s legal, but there’s no sense in that culture that abortion’s a good thing. So I disagree that just by having something be legal means that culturally what you’re doing is embedding a message that it’s good. It might be a necessary evil in some cases.

SS: That relationship between what is legal and what is good leads to my most significant point of contention with your book, which is the role of marriage.

When talking about fatherhood, you cite data to demonstrate that the quality of a child’s relationship with the father is more important than the physical presence of the father in the home. You then argue that one way to cure this modern male malaise is to restore and elevate fatherhood. That all sounds good, as far as it goes. But you then turn around and do the exact opposite thing with women.

In the past, we had this vision of the role of the husband and father that centered on financial provision and physical protection. With children, you said, “Okay, maybe they don’t need that anymore, but they still need something else.” But with women you say, “Okay, they don’t need that anymore. Women can provide for themselves, and therefore, women just don’t need men at all anymore.” So it sort of seems like the gist of your argument is, “We can just move on from marriage, accepting that feminism and the sexual revolution are here to stay in their totality. It’s not like we can say there are good parts and bad parts. We have to just accept them wholesale and then do what we can about the consequences.”

I contrast that with the vision that Erika Bachiochi sets out in her book on Mary Wollstonecraft: a feminism that rejects this ideal of unbridled autonomy and sees rights as being linked to duties. She’s totally on board with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom you both cite, in terms of looking at individuals’ unique capacities, nondiscrimination law, encouraging men to be caregivers, and all of these things. But her book elevates a vision of marriage and domestic life as something that should be bringing both men and women to greater virtue. They need each other, and their children need them, and that’s a good thing. It’s an interdependence model.

Whereas your book says, “Okay, well, we’ve accepted this idea of autonomy. Women are autonomous now. Don’t even try to get men and women back together. Instead, we should create a workaround so that men can just have a relationship straight with their children, and cut out the mother as middleman.” And I think that’s a mistake.

RR: I’m having versions of this argument with quite a few people right now, but you just put it better than most. Very sharply, actually. I’ve been having a debate with Ian Rowe that Brad Wilcox is putting together on precisely this issue. I would describe my approach as kind of fatherhood first and I would describe their approach as marriage first, leading to more fatherhood. Right?

SS: Right.

RR: So there’s a couple of things going on here. One is to, I think, confuse two different roles which can go together, but in my view no longer necessarily do: the role of the spouse and the role of the parent.

There was a real simplicity and strength to what we would call a traditional family. People knew roughly what the roles were going to be. There was some specialization. Those marriages tended to be quite stable, which was good for kids. Both parents were in the home, which meant kids could reasonably have good relationships with both parents. Great. Slight problem, though: they were massively economically unequal and to some extent predicated on a division of economic power, which in my view was to the detriment of women. This is where probably we agree it is a good thing for women to have more economic power.

 

Now, there are some people who would say, “No, actually it’s not a good thing,” because this is what happens if women get economic power. They start becoming journalists and Harvard professors and think tankers and stuff. If they start doing that, economically, they don’t need to be married, which was the point of the women’s movement. So if they don’t need economically to be married, well, maybe they won’t be.

As a social scientist, my basic view is the future of marriage, if it has one, is as a co-parenting contract. I think that’s what’s driving most upper-middle-class marriages. I’ll put it really unromantically just to provoke you. Marriage has become, for many people, a joint venture for the purposes of human capital formation in their children.

I’ve always said that in order to understand American marriage, we have to answer the following question. Why is it that the women with the most economic power of any group of women in the history of the world, i.e. college-educated American women, are getting and staying married? What’s going on there? Because that is not what Gloria Steinem said was going to happen. It’s the opposite of what Gloria Steinem said was going to happen. So the fact that it’s gone completely against the expectations of the women’s movement—that all these college-educated women, including very liberal women, are getting and staying married—that’s really important. We know they’re not doing it because they economically have to. So why are they doing it? My answer is because they want to raise their kids together.

 

SS: To me, this is a social justice issue. We have all of this nice-sounding rhetoric coming from the highly educated upper classes based on the tenets of sexual revolution—that we can uncouple sex and childbearing, that women should be totally independent, all these sorts of things. But the people who are hurt the most by the breakdown of the family over the past half century have been those at the bottom of the economic spectrum. I think devaluing marriage further is just doubling down on that inequality instead of solving that problem.

RR: I don’t think it’s devaluing marriage to say you can be a good parent even if you’re not married. I do agree that it’s much easier to be a good parent if you are married or at least co-resident, and if you planned to have the kids together.

I think what’s happening is I think I’m largely describing the world and you think I’m prescribing it. The main reason why I think we have to accept a decoupling of parenting from marriage is because it’s already happened. I see no reasonable prospect of those trends being reversed. We are where we are. Given where we are, to say that you have to be married to be a good parent just sends a hugely negative message to so many people.

SS: I think this gets back to some of our earlier disagreement about the nature and purpose of law, and connects to a lot of contemporary debates on the American right about procedural liberalism and whether there is such a thing as neutrality in law. You get a lot of the post-liberals critiquing this façade of John-Stuart-Mill-style—

RR: Don’t get me started, but yes.

SS: I’m not going full post-liberal on you, but I do think of Robby George or Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, who said that you can’t have a naked public square. We are instantiating certain moral commitments within our laws, whether we admit it or not.

It’s crystal clear in the social science that the intact biological family is the best place for kids. So it seems problematic to be just throwing up our hands and saying this decoupling of marriage and parenthood is inevitable. You’re saying that your work is purely descriptive. I think it’s impossible to be purely descriptive in law, and that you’re bound to be nudging people one way or another.

This conversation also reminds me of the book Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage. You were talking earlier about the stronger sexual urges in men versus women. I think that, as a culture, we haven’t fully understood and unpacked the consequences of the stronger nurturing urges in women. I think the physical bodies of women put the lie to the myths of radical autonomy. As humans, we want people to be dependent on us, and we want to depend on others. You see that playing out with the young women profiled in that book: low-income single women who purposely get pregnant even though they know the dad isn’t going to stick around. They still want to be mothers. They see motherhood as such an important source of identity and love and purpose for their life. They have that inscribed in their bodies in a way that, as you say, men don’t.

If we want men to be good fathers, we as a culture have to give them a script and a role, something productive and positive for them to be doing instead of engaging in those harmful behaviors. So sure, maybe it’s an unrealistic ideal for a large portion of the population. But I still think we need to hold up a vision of men as good, faithful husbands and good parents. And we can have that even in the absence of the 1950s economic model, which was a relic of a very particular point in time. In many other eras, when we had more home-based industries, there wasn’t this strict hierarchical economic dependence of women on their husbands.

 

RR: That’s right. It was the industrial revolution and then everything that happened after that. So I certainly agree with that.

I think the disagreement between us is both bigger and smaller than it seems.

A mistake conservatives make is to say, “You see? These upper-class liberals have got traditional marriages, they should preach what they’re practicing.” I say to that two things. Number one is no, they’re not traditional marriages. You’re looking at it from the outside. You need to look at them from the inside. From the inside, I think it’s mostly about parenting. The upper middle class are modeling a new form of marriage, which I call the high investment parenting model. Parenting is the glue of marriage in a way that it was less so in the past. If that’s true, the way to have more marriage is to strengthen parenting and, in particular, to strengthen fathering, because mothering does kind of come with the territory. So what I’m trying to do is elevate, promote, and celebrate fatherhood so that dads feel like they matter, period. They always matter.

Let’s say we could freeze marriage rates where they currently are. Given that 40 percent of kids are born outside marriage, what message do I want to send to the dads of those kids? I want to send the message, “You really matter, even though you’re not married to the mom. You have a responsibility to raise that kid, even though you’re not married to the mom.” I’m afraid that all conservatives want to say is, “Sorry, mate, you screwed that one up. You’re supposed to be married to her.” I don’t think that’s a very empowering message. I don’t think that will help them to become a better father.

Last thing: there are no interventions that I know of that are successfully promoting marriage. More conservative social scientists than I have said that. From a public policy point of view—and I agree that there’s no such thing as a naked public square—the moral message I want to send is the importance of responsible and engaged fatherhood. I want to underpin it in policy. I think I’ve got more actionable stuff I can do around that: around paid leave, around child support, around fatherhood intervention programs, etc. I think I’ve got stuff I can do on that. “Get married”: well, there ain’t much you can do about. The only successful marriage promotion policy I’ve ever seen was career academies, which was a high school intervention that significantly increased both earnings and marriage rates among men. So the only pro-marriage programs I’ve seen ever work are the ones that weren’t aiming to increase marriage. They were aiming to increase the economic prospects of men.

 

SS: I’m wary about taking intensive parenting as a model for marriage. I think this raises deeper questions about contraception and the way that technology changed the sexual marketplace and altered family formation.

Upper-middle-class couples now wait to enter into marriage until they want to embark on this intensive project of having their 2.1 or 1.9 kids—this ever-shrinking number of children. That feeds more into a highly individualized contractual model of what it means to be a family and what it means to have fulfillment and purpose in your life. Encouraging that model seems like it will continue to feed the problem of men being so utterly adrift.

Contrast that to a more organic yet transcendent vision of love and marriage, one that demands that you pledge yourself to one another for life. Children arise naturally from your love for each other. They might not all be perfectly planned, and there might be more of them than you expected. There’s a sense of richness and fullness in that vision, versus this intensively cultivated, parenting-centered vision of marriage, where you carefully plan to conceive only as many kids as you can afford to enroll in the best piano lessons and travel soccer leagues.

RR: My unromantic idea about a joint venture for the human capital formation in a pre-agreed number of children is the antithesis of what you’re talking about.

SS: This is where you’re saying: we’re both disagreeing less and more than it might initially seem.

RR: Right. And I think that yours is the right model of marriage. Obviously, I’m not saying I agree with everything you’ve just said, but this idea that it’s not just a contract . . . it’s just, I don’t know what that means for other people. This is the liberal in me coming out. I’m wary about presuming to know what it means for other people.

You see the rise of so-called gray divorce now. That’s evidence of this model of marriage that I’ve been talking about, which is exactly the opposite of the one that you were just advocating. They say, “Okay, job done now.” It’s literally a dissolvable contract. The joint venture starts, then it dissolves. I agree that that’s just a horrifically gradgrind, unappealing view of the institution, and in fact, of life and love. But it might also be true that that’s what’s driving a lot of what’s going on.

Look, here’s the difference. I don’t think it’s our job to be prescriptive at all. A proper libertarian would say, “We set the rules of the game, and then whatever you want.” Mill is mischaracterized by post-liberals as being in this camp, because they haven’t actually read Mill. “Yeah, anything goes. As long as you don’t hurt anybody else, be yourself, be radically autonomous. Ignore traditions.” It’s just a whole bunch of made-up bulls**t about Mill, frankly.

That would be a self-respecting liberal position. Then a very strongly prescriptive or paternalistic vision would be to say, “No, no, here’s how you’re going to live. This is how to live.” The middle ground, where most of us probably are, is that we are careful what we’re prescriptive about, and we’re careful about how universal we assume these lessons are. We do not presume that what works even for the majority works for everybody. That’s, in the end, what makes us liberal pluralists. It isn’t that we don’t strongly believe in traditions and covenants and all of that, in our own lives and faith traditions. We celebrate all of that. But we’re just very, very, very cautious about prescribing a formula.

The question is, what’s the role of the state in particular? Should it wield coercive power in promoting a particular formula for the good?

SS: To give the postliberals some credit, I do think that there is a difference in the philosophical anthropology of the default liberalism of our public sphere today, and a richer, teleological vision. That second vision sees human beings as having an intrinsic sense of purpose not only physically, in terms of bearing children and so on, but also spiritually; we are called to a vision of self-sacrifice and binding ourselves to one another. It’s that sort of heroism that I think could be the antidote to the malaise of the modern male.

With the liberal pluralists, I would say that we shouldn’t be imposing that life script on everyone via state coercive power. But, as we’ve talked about, nothing is really neutral. So, if the law is going to be tilted in one way or another, it should be tilted in favor of marriage. There’s also a really deep need for churches, schools, and organizations in the civil sphere to provide a vision that’s more ennobling for men.

 

RR: I agree with that. I think promoting an other-centered life of service and sacrifice is absolutely central to any good moral tradition. I have this long quote in the book from Margaret Mead, who said, “Every known human society has rested on the learned nurturing behavior of men. This behavior, being learned, is rather fragile and can disappear quite quickly under circumstances that no longer teach effectively.” The reason I know that by heart is because I’m like, “Wow, I think every single word of that is true.” The learned nurturing behavior of men: why is it important? Because it’s learned.

Men have to learn how to do this. They have to be taught. Masculinity is more socially constructed than femininity. The script is more important. It has to be nurturing, and not in the same way as mothers, but by being similarly other-centered. Creating a surplus, caring for others, sacrificing for others, giving for others. A friend of mine growing up went to a Christian summer camp. Their motto was “For the other fellow.” And they still quote that to each other. And I know him and his friends quite well, and they still say, “For the other fellow.” And that seems beautiful.

So the question then is, what are we going to build that script around? That sense of being needed, giving, other-centered?

My answer to that is fatherhood.

The moral norm around engaged, responsible parenting is incredibly strong. So I’m taking that and elevating it, but not insisting that it takes place within marriage. If I get more dads more actively involved in their kids’ lives, it might lead to more marriage. But even if it doesn’t, I think it’s a good thing, independent of marriage. That’s why I land so heavily on fatherhood. You can only put one thumb on the scale, and that’s where I’m putting it.