A pastor reflects on his church closing, fertility inequality, declining economic prospects for lower income white America and more in this week's roundup.
Most everything from my childhood is gone now, half a century later. I guess that's the price you pay for growing up in a fast-changing city like Houston, but it's still a peculiar feeling to drive by the site where the lovely church I grew up in, Houston's Central Presbyterian, used to stand, or the site of the church my wife grew up in, and where we were married, Bellaire Church of the Nazarene.
My church was growing increasingly liberal, especially after our senior pastor retired. I left it first, and then other family members within a few years. It would be easy to say "good riddance", the church got what it deserved, but I still felt a stinging sense of loss when the building was demolished 13 years ago. It's a sad day when a church, what used to be an important part of a community, closes up shop.
A really quality novel came out a few months ago that deals with the church closures issue. It's The Saints of Whistle Grove, by Katie Schuermann: https://kloria.com/products/the-saints-of-whistle-grove. The author shared with me (I reviewed the book for The Federalist) that she wrote it precisely to help people grapple with the declining attendance issue especially affecting rural churches. The cover is bright but be prepared for a serious work of literature.
The sovereignty of God rules with the decline of the American church, the loss of fertility, the diminishment of marriage. We’re trying to look at what the church is “doing wrong”. And while the church has never been perfect the world, the flesh and the devil conspire against us. Just as God warned the Israelites that after they entered the promised land taking houses they hadn’t built and vineyards they hadn’t planted, they would forget Him. So is it now in America. We can come up with all kinds of brilliant ideas to “fix things” and develop an intellectual elite that will guide us, but that will fail.
We in the church are not called to be effective, only faithful. Faithful pastors will preach the gospel. Faithful elders will disciple their families and those who are called. Faithful deacons will provide for those in need. The Holy Spirit will do the rest. Everything else is vanity.
I have different view of wealth than Darel Paul at Compact who wrote, "Musk’s personal hoarding of the wealth generated by his investments undermines a more democratic distribution of male status."
Like many people, the author seems to think that wealth accumulation is a zero-sum game, namely that if one person has more, other people must have less. Certainly to some extent this is true, but such statements fail to take into account the wealth-creating effect of bold entrepreneurship. If a business is innovative and efficiently run, it grows and contributes to the overall size of the economy, with the Federal Reserve incrementing the money supply to maintain a balance between more productive capacity (GDP) and the asset class known as dollars. More dollars are created that can be shared in salaries and new jobs. Additionally, foreign sales bring money into the country.
If these points seem unconvincing, consider the effect of clumsy, flat-footed business executives who can't do anything right and whose businesses are subsequently overrun by either domestic or foreign competition. Who is making money then? Some boards might still have wrongly awarded such executives big salaries, but the companies will eventually fail, taking with them the salaries of all employees. So it's OK to reward good management. But there is a caveat.
I said to some extent it is true that the accumulation of wealth is a zero-sum game. It all depends on the intrinsic need for someone to accumulate wealth. If wealth, which may be immense, is needed for effective control of a productive organization, as is the case for Elon Musk, then it is legitimate. What would you ask him to do? Sell most of his shares, give the money away, and lose control of the company, which would then very likely take a bad turn? It wouldn't make sense. On the other hand, someone acquiring great wealth and just sitting on it would do well to share it with society in some way. It isn't needed by such a person, and there are many worthy causes that would directly or indirectly help the common man.
So, whether it is good for someone to retain wealth depends on the what the person is doing with it. There isn't any government function, nor should there be, to make an informed decision about that, so there will always be some abuse, but overall we shouldn't disparage wealth creation. Entrepreneurs need to be given the slack to retain control of their businesses.
Darel Paul is a conservative, not a socialist (who I think are generally the ones prone to zero-sum thinking on wealth). I generally recommend his stuff. I think he understands the valid point you're making on an economic level -- in a more unequal but richer society, it's quite possible that all boats have been lifted, even the poorest have more stuff.
But -- though I'm paywalled -- I gather that here he's talking about women. Competition for women IS zero-sum. Polygyny is, I think, a social evil, and we've been bringing it back, in the form of serial marriage, for a while. And income inequality exacerbates it, especially in a society where women have a lot of earnings power themselves -- in such a world, men with low-to-middling incomes are basically valueless as providers. But billionaires ALWAYS have value as providers.
Musk represents the newer generation that has done this, but Trump is as good as any representation of the old generation -- his three wives only had children with him, which represents two men of his generation that didn't have children.
I don't know that there's an easy solution to this problem, but it's at least worth acknowledging that it's a bad thing. And there's a certain obtuseness when Musk brags about doing his part to solve the fertility crisis, when most of the women he's had children with probably won't have any more children of their own.
I feel like a crazy person even having to type this out, but Davis and Edenfield are in the 94th percentile of US household income. The reporter should have asked them for a number that would be "enough" for them to feel comfortable having kids.
I'm sure that you could push that number well up into the seven figures if you tried. Let's say you are a professional in NYC, and you feel that you need to give each of your kids private school for 12 years, plus a family-sized apartment in Manhattan and a summer place in the Hamptons, and whatever other crazy things those kids "need" these days... How much annual income do you need for that? $2 million? $5 million?
The WSJ reporter is great, but also really should have asked them: how do you envision growing old? What do you think is going to happen when you become frail and easily confused? Do you think the all-benevolent state is going to make sure you're OK? Who do you think will check in on you?
I called the Coldwell Banker realtor on the listing—a blonde, middle-aged battleax—and discovered that this scammer was colluding with the Russian to sell Jan’s house right out from under her and dump her, penniless, onto the street. Russian collusion!
The day before escrow closed, an estate lawyer my mother found managed to scuttle the sale. The furious Russian cursed my mother, hopped into his purloined C-class, and scurried home to the wife and three children he had been supporting by stealing over $50,000 from Jan.
Jan died years later in her own home, surrounded by kindly nurses.
Her estate lawyer informed us that this happens all the time. Nursing homes are full of bewildered old women robbed blind by false suitors and elder-abusing caretakers.
Jan got lucky. You may not have the good fortune to live next door to my mother. There may be no one to intervene when the swarthy new “boyfriend” 50 years your junior makes off with all your apples, all your branches, and saws down your trunk.
The decline of fertility across the industrialized world will likely lead to massive changes on the lives of people over the course of this century. East Asian countries are set to go extinct in a few generations, while Western countries are promoting immigration to boost the population, but rapid demographic change has always resulted in a massive backlash by the native population. And even immigrants from high TFR countries sink to the TFR of the new country, so the whole thing becomes a pyramid scheme to keep social security and pensions paid.
Eric Kaufmann once wrote a book arguing that the religious may inherit the earth: Orthodox Jews, Amish, Mormons, Quiverfull evangelicals, etc. If Amish continue have kids at their current rate, they will be a majority of America by 2300. It’ll definitely be interesting to see how this all plays out.
I've been reading Haidt's "The Anxious Generation". And the related thought: not only do smartphones make kids anxious, but they make parents anxious, because it increases our expectations of our ability to monitor our kids. It tempts us to keep them on a tighter leash than what is best for human flourishing.
Then I also encountered this Twitter thread, which had various spin-off threads:
In short, man doesn't know how to live with the smartphone.
It seems that the smartphone is, in fact, the reason why fertility crashed everywhere in the world, all at once, during the 2010s. I'm not sure if there is going to be any viable survival strategy for human beings aside from "wage a Butlerian Jihad against electronic distractions." It doesn't mean everyone has to be Amish, but it might mean that every society that survives will have strong norms against allowing distracting electronics into their homes. Maybe governments, or warlords, will even go to war to destroy companies that produce devices that are deemed too distracting.
But in the meantime, South Korean society is going to get very weird and very, very old in the next 25 years, just going off of UN projections -- which, for the record, assume a significant REBOUND in fertility. It will be the first canary in the coal mine, offering us a vision of the post-natal dystopia.
If I was in charge of public policy, I would ban smartphones in public schools, require 18+ age verification for online porn, and perhaps also think about severe limitations on video games and social media. And I’m saying this as someone who used to be an Ayn Rand-loving libertarian as a teen. And to think Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone before the rise of the Internet… we’re much worse now. My generation has totally lost it in terms of social interaction. We now live by algorithms that feed us junk.
Also, yes, South Korea is in serious decline. I saw that they are now asking for mass immigration to boost the workforce, but that will have its own issues. China and Japan are not far behind. Not even Christianity can boost the birthrate: SK is the most Christian out of the 3, but has the lowest fertility.
Yeah, can't disagree with your suggestions for the most part. Except I don't think video games are necessarily bad, in moderation, and especially not when gaming socially with friends and family. The other things are bad even in moderation.
I don't have a great sense of Korean Christianity, other than the fact that it's mostly a post-WW2 phenomenon. I'm casually acquainted with some Korean Christian immigrants, but not well enough (and their English isn't good enough) to really speak to what it's like. But I would suspect there's a mass apostasy among the younger generation. I think, in general, it's difficult to pass down traditions during periods of great disruption and change, and in the case of Korean Christianity, it's not many generations deep, and the country has gone through more change than most.
But of course, because Korea's young are so few in number, a mass apostasy among the young will take much longer to show up in the national statistics.
Of course, video games are fine occasionally. I play Fallout, Hitman, Cyberpunk 2077, etc. But some young men take it overboard and they end up in their 30s, unemployed, with nothing in their lives but eating, sleeping, and playing MMORPGs or FPS games.
Korean Americans seem to retain Christianity far more than other immigrant groups have. I see second-generation Korean Americans have their own churches and services, in contrast to other groups, where they will either join a non-ethnic church or leave the faith.
Most everything from my childhood is gone now, half a century later. I guess that's the price you pay for growing up in a fast-changing city like Houston, but it's still a peculiar feeling to drive by the site where the lovely church I grew up in, Houston's Central Presbyterian, used to stand, or the site of the church my wife grew up in, and where we were married, Bellaire Church of the Nazarene.
My church was growing increasingly liberal, especially after our senior pastor retired. I left it first, and then other family members within a few years. It would be easy to say "good riddance", the church got what it deserved, but I still felt a stinging sense of loss when the building was demolished 13 years ago. It's a sad day when a church, what used to be an important part of a community, closes up shop.
A really quality novel came out a few months ago that deals with the church closures issue. It's The Saints of Whistle Grove, by Katie Schuermann: https://kloria.com/products/the-saints-of-whistle-grove. The author shared with me (I reviewed the book for The Federalist) that she wrote it precisely to help people grapple with the declining attendance issue especially affecting rural churches. The cover is bright but be prepared for a serious work of literature.
The sovereignty of God rules with the decline of the American church, the loss of fertility, the diminishment of marriage. We’re trying to look at what the church is “doing wrong”. And while the church has never been perfect the world, the flesh and the devil conspire against us. Just as God warned the Israelites that after they entered the promised land taking houses they hadn’t built and vineyards they hadn’t planted, they would forget Him. So is it now in America. We can come up with all kinds of brilliant ideas to “fix things” and develop an intellectual elite that will guide us, but that will fail.
We in the church are not called to be effective, only faithful. Faithful pastors will preach the gospel. Faithful elders will disciple their families and those who are called. Faithful deacons will provide for those in need. The Holy Spirit will do the rest. Everything else is vanity.
I have different view of wealth than Darel Paul at Compact who wrote, "Musk’s personal hoarding of the wealth generated by his investments undermines a more democratic distribution of male status."
Like many people, the author seems to think that wealth accumulation is a zero-sum game, namely that if one person has more, other people must have less. Certainly to some extent this is true, but such statements fail to take into account the wealth-creating effect of bold entrepreneurship. If a business is innovative and efficiently run, it grows and contributes to the overall size of the economy, with the Federal Reserve incrementing the money supply to maintain a balance between more productive capacity (GDP) and the asset class known as dollars. More dollars are created that can be shared in salaries and new jobs. Additionally, foreign sales bring money into the country.
If these points seem unconvincing, consider the effect of clumsy, flat-footed business executives who can't do anything right and whose businesses are subsequently overrun by either domestic or foreign competition. Who is making money then? Some boards might still have wrongly awarded such executives big salaries, but the companies will eventually fail, taking with them the salaries of all employees. So it's OK to reward good management. But there is a caveat.
I said to some extent it is true that the accumulation of wealth is a zero-sum game. It all depends on the intrinsic need for someone to accumulate wealth. If wealth, which may be immense, is needed for effective control of a productive organization, as is the case for Elon Musk, then it is legitimate. What would you ask him to do? Sell most of his shares, give the money away, and lose control of the company, which would then very likely take a bad turn? It wouldn't make sense. On the other hand, someone acquiring great wealth and just sitting on it would do well to share it with society in some way. It isn't needed by such a person, and there are many worthy causes that would directly or indirectly help the common man.
So, whether it is good for someone to retain wealth depends on the what the person is doing with it. There isn't any government function, nor should there be, to make an informed decision about that, so there will always be some abuse, but overall we shouldn't disparage wealth creation. Entrepreneurs need to be given the slack to retain control of their businesses.
Darel Paul is a conservative, not a socialist (who I think are generally the ones prone to zero-sum thinking on wealth). I generally recommend his stuff. I think he understands the valid point you're making on an economic level -- in a more unequal but richer society, it's quite possible that all boats have been lifted, even the poorest have more stuff.
But -- though I'm paywalled -- I gather that here he's talking about women. Competition for women IS zero-sum. Polygyny is, I think, a social evil, and we've been bringing it back, in the form of serial marriage, for a while. And income inequality exacerbates it, especially in a society where women have a lot of earnings power themselves -- in such a world, men with low-to-middling incomes are basically valueless as providers. But billionaires ALWAYS have value as providers.
Musk represents the newer generation that has done this, but Trump is as good as any representation of the old generation -- his three wives only had children with him, which represents two men of his generation that didn't have children.
I don't know that there's an easy solution to this problem, but it's at least worth acknowledging that it's a bad thing. And there's a certain obtuseness when Musk brags about doing his part to solve the fertility crisis, when most of the women he's had children with probably won't have any more children of their own.
I feel like a crazy person even having to type this out, but Davis and Edenfield are in the 94th percentile of US household income. The reporter should have asked them for a number that would be "enough" for them to feel comfortable having kids.
I'm sure that you could push that number well up into the seven figures if you tried. Let's say you are a professional in NYC, and you feel that you need to give each of your kids private school for 12 years, plus a family-sized apartment in Manhattan and a summer place in the Hamptons, and whatever other crazy things those kids "need" these days... How much annual income do you need for that? $2 million? $5 million?
The WSJ reporter is great, but also really should have asked them: how do you envision growing old? What do you think is going to happen when you become frail and easily confused? Do you think the all-benevolent state is going to make sure you're OK? Who do you think will check in on you?
Illustrative anecdote from Peachy Keenan below:
https://americanmind.org/salvo/childfree-doesnt-mean-pain-free/
I called the Coldwell Banker realtor on the listing—a blonde, middle-aged battleax—and discovered that this scammer was colluding with the Russian to sell Jan’s house right out from under her and dump her, penniless, onto the street. Russian collusion!
The day before escrow closed, an estate lawyer my mother found managed to scuttle the sale. The furious Russian cursed my mother, hopped into his purloined C-class, and scurried home to the wife and three children he had been supporting by stealing over $50,000 from Jan.
Jan died years later in her own home, surrounded by kindly nurses.
Her estate lawyer informed us that this happens all the time. Nursing homes are full of bewildered old women robbed blind by false suitors and elder-abusing caretakers.
Jan got lucky. You may not have the good fortune to live next door to my mother. There may be no one to intervene when the swarthy new “boyfriend” 50 years your junior makes off with all your apples, all your branches, and saws down your trunk.
The decline of fertility across the industrialized world will likely lead to massive changes on the lives of people over the course of this century. East Asian countries are set to go extinct in a few generations, while Western countries are promoting immigration to boost the population, but rapid demographic change has always resulted in a massive backlash by the native population. And even immigrants from high TFR countries sink to the TFR of the new country, so the whole thing becomes a pyramid scheme to keep social security and pensions paid.
Eric Kaufmann once wrote a book arguing that the religious may inherit the earth: Orthodox Jews, Amish, Mormons, Quiverfull evangelicals, etc. If Amish continue have kids at their current rate, they will be a majority of America by 2300. It’ll definitely be interesting to see how this all plays out.
We're maladapted to the environment, for sure.
I've been reading Haidt's "The Anxious Generation". And the related thought: not only do smartphones make kids anxious, but they make parents anxious, because it increases our expectations of our ability to monitor our kids. It tempts us to keep them on a tighter leash than what is best for human flourishing.
Then I also encountered this Twitter thread, which had various spin-off threads:
https://x.com/robertlasagna1/status/1816088362786144518
In short, man doesn't know how to live with the smartphone.
It seems that the smartphone is, in fact, the reason why fertility crashed everywhere in the world, all at once, during the 2010s. I'm not sure if there is going to be any viable survival strategy for human beings aside from "wage a Butlerian Jihad against electronic distractions." It doesn't mean everyone has to be Amish, but it might mean that every society that survives will have strong norms against allowing distracting electronics into their homes. Maybe governments, or warlords, will even go to war to destroy companies that produce devices that are deemed too distracting.
But in the meantime, South Korean society is going to get very weird and very, very old in the next 25 years, just going off of UN projections -- which, for the record, assume a significant REBOUND in fertility. It will be the first canary in the coal mine, offering us a vision of the post-natal dystopia.
If I was in charge of public policy, I would ban smartphones in public schools, require 18+ age verification for online porn, and perhaps also think about severe limitations on video games and social media. And I’m saying this as someone who used to be an Ayn Rand-loving libertarian as a teen. And to think Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone before the rise of the Internet… we’re much worse now. My generation has totally lost it in terms of social interaction. We now live by algorithms that feed us junk.
Also, yes, South Korea is in serious decline. I saw that they are now asking for mass immigration to boost the workforce, but that will have its own issues. China and Japan are not far behind. Not even Christianity can boost the birthrate: SK is the most Christian out of the 3, but has the lowest fertility.
Yeah, can't disagree with your suggestions for the most part. Except I don't think video games are necessarily bad, in moderation, and especially not when gaming socially with friends and family. The other things are bad even in moderation.
I don't have a great sense of Korean Christianity, other than the fact that it's mostly a post-WW2 phenomenon. I'm casually acquainted with some Korean Christian immigrants, but not well enough (and their English isn't good enough) to really speak to what it's like. But I would suspect there's a mass apostasy among the younger generation. I think, in general, it's difficult to pass down traditions during periods of great disruption and change, and in the case of Korean Christianity, it's not many generations deep, and the country has gone through more change than most.
But of course, because Korea's young are so few in number, a mass apostasy among the young will take much longer to show up in the national statistics.
Of course, video games are fine occasionally. I play Fallout, Hitman, Cyberpunk 2077, etc. But some young men take it overboard and they end up in their 30s, unemployed, with nothing in their lives but eating, sleeping, and playing MMORPGs or FPS games.
Korean Americans seem to retain Christianity far more than other immigrant groups have. I see second-generation Korean Americans have their own churches and services, in contrast to other groups, where they will either join a non-ethnic church or leave the faith.