The New Cultural Christianity

Utilitarian religion, critiquing the trad wives, and more in this week's roundup.

Head’s up. This Sunday only, Amazon is going to be running a sale on my book Life in the Negative World. The Kindle edition will be only $2.99. So if you haven’t bought it yet, this is a great opportunity.

The New “Cultural Christians”

This podcast with Alex O’Connor and Chris Williamson on the growth in “cultural Christianity” is interesting. They have a different view of cultural Christianity from what we would normally discuss here. These cultural Christians are people who see Christianity as a utilitarian device for resisting wokeness or something else, even though they don’t really believe in it. The first five minutes of this at least is definitely worth watching.

Paul Vander Klay posted an interesting video following on from my piece about how JD Vance rejected evangelicalism and became Catholic.

The Washington Post also wrote about how JD Vance’s Catholic conversion is part of young conservative movement.

Catholic writer Michael Warren Davis wrote a piece on why he became Orthodox. I don’t know anything about him, but this section caught my eye:

Thirdly, as we said, folks just aren’t terribly interested in other people’s conversion stories—not unless they’re extremely dramatic, which mine wasn’t. It destroyed my career. It ruined many of my friendships with Roman Catholics and caused a terrible strain on many others. [emphasis added]

There’s a lot of value in the Catholic intellectual ecosystem. And that ecosystem is not afraid of imposing a big cost of defection on anyone who converts away from Catholicism, even if to another Christian denomination. They might even ditch you as a friend. I don’t hear nearly as many stories of evangelicals cutting people off if they convert to Catholicism.

Against the Trad Wives

The huge trad wife influencer Hannah Neeleman aka Ballerina Farm, was the subject of a lengthy profile in the Sunday Times (UK). This quickly became controversial as the paper took a skeptical view of her life, trying to suggest she’s being coerced by her husband to live this lifestyle.

Trad wives are an internet phenomenon; women who have rejected modern gender roles for the more traditional existence of wife, mother and homemaker — and who then promote that life online, some to millions of followers. Their lifestyle is often, though not always, bound to Christianity. They film themselves cooking mad things from scratch (chewing gum from corn syrup, waffles from a sourdough starter), their faces glowing in beams of sunlight, their voices soft and breathy, their children free range.

In order to explain trad wives — and their popularity — we need to look back 15 years or so, when the fourth wave of feminism was breaking. This was the “girl boss” era, when women were told to be bolder in the workplace, to lean in further, to break glass ceilings. The poster woman for the movement at the time was the Facebook boss Sheryl Sandberg. But as the years went on women realised they’d been sold a lie: this individualistic feminism didn’t resolve anything unless you were a millionaire. For normal working mothers the girl-boss era achieved virtually nothing.

…

I look out at the vastness and don’t totally agree. Daniel wanted to live in the great western wilds, so they did; he wanted to farm, so they do; he likes date nights once a week, so they go (they have a babysitter on those evenings); he didn’t want nannies in the house, so there aren’t any. The only space earmarked to be Neeleman’s own — a small barn she wanted to convert into a ballet studio — ended up becoming the kids’ schoolroom.

…

I can’t, it seems, get an answer out of Neeleman without her being corrected, interrupted or answered for by either her husband or a child. Usually I am doing battle with steely Hollywood publicists; today I am up against an army of toddlers who all want their mum and a husband who thinks he knows better.

Hannah pushed back strongly against it. Lyman stone observed, “I guess my take on the Ballerina Farm thing is that conservatives will absolutely never come out looking good when they let hostile reporters wanderer around their house for a few hours and judge their family, because the reporters are liberals who hate them.”

And this episode prompted Matt Hennessey at the Wall Street Journal to argue that social conservatism is alive and well.

Best of the Web

The Financial Times Lunch with the FT feature had some interesting advice from a top lawyer at the NYC firm Cravath.

She also tries to keep her clients out of trouble in other ways, reminding them to use email rather than texts to communicate about contentious business issues because so much ends up in litigation. Not only is it less invasive to have email collected from a server than to have to turn over a phone for screenshots, but emoji-laden texts can look unprofessional to a judge or jury. 

WSJ: America’s New Political War Pits Young Men Against Young Women

The Atlantic: What Is America’s Gender War Actually About?

Oren Cass: JD Vance Is Right About Prioritizing Parents

Ryan Burge: There Is Almost No 'Liberalizing Religion' in the United States

Jack Wilkie: Why I Won’t Be Encouraging My Sons Toward Ministry

A professor at UCLA and his co-authors put together a study on the financial effects of legalizing sports betting. They find:

Several measures of excessive debt increase substantially. We find a roughly 28% increase in bankruptcies and an 8% increase in debt transferred to debt collectors. Similarly, auto loan delinquencies increase substantially as does use of debt consolidation loans. Interestingly, we find that banks restrict access to credit on average in affected states. Credit card limits decrease and the ratio of secured to unsecured loans increases.

Jacob Siegel: Learn This Term: ‘Whole of Society’ - You cannot understand what’s going on with American politics today without it

New Content and Media Mentions

New this week:

• My podcast this week was a conversation with Miami Mayor Francis Suarez about his city’s transformation.

• How to Live in a Lower Trust Nation - You can't even trust your friends anymore, plus thoughts on the Olympics opening ceremony controversy

Post-Script

The Financial Times did a story about the controversy around naming Thomas Jolly to create the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. This was published before those ceremonies took place. This paragraph caught my eye:

Yet the prominent leftwing newspaper Libération immediately decried the Olympic choice. In an article scoffing at the 42-year-old’s “pompous aesthetic”, culture writer Ève Beauvallet painted a dystopian picture of a Jolly-made opening ceremony, with performers “dressed as goth gremlins vaguely out of a Cure music video”, cast in “embarrassing scenes that hearken back to the most spluttering displays of inept 20th-century drama lessons”.