The Republican Party at Prayer
Mainline voting patterns, the good men shortage, and more in this week's digest.
There will be no podcast on Monday in honor of the US Memorial Day holiday.
I’m curious what your interest would be in more men’s lifestyle content. Please leave a comment on hit Reply to let me know your thoughts.
Where Have All the Good Men Gone?
Erika Bachiochi wrote a piece for the Institute for Family Studies that concludes:
If men are leaders of families—which I think they have the responsibility to be—then men are going to have to lead here as well. Because women will continue to think it’s in their best interest—and, frankly, I think they are right—to decline becoming mothers with the profound vulnerability and dependency that entails—with men in whom they cannot put their trust.
If a new and growing women’s movement can inspire young women to stop giving away their bodies to unworthy men, then men have got to become worthy of receiving them again. As mothers, women must do their part with their sons, teaching them how to govern their appetites and avoid the poison of porn. But as a cultural matter, it’s good men who must step up—to inspire young men to put down the porn and aspire to become gentlemen.
This is typical tradconnery. The problem is a lack of good men.
If only the same scrutiny were applied to the women men are expected to desire. When I hear the manosphere arguments about divorce risk, family court, the way culture (and the church) almost always sides with women who make accusations against their husbands or boyfriends, etc. I can only echo Bachiochi by noting that in a certain sense they are right. It is a high risk move for young men to get involved with women today.
Reading her piece, it’s interesting that her calls for change in women are for the purposes of pursuing self-actualization properly understood (versus the false paths offered by the culture). Whereas men are additionally called to change in order to better align themselves with women’s interests and desires. Suffice it to say women are not asked to do the same in return.
Related from Freya India in First Things: The Right Has Forgotten Feeling
Mainline Protestants Are Republicans
The great Ryan Burge was out with a post-mortem analysis of the 2024 election for mainline denominations.
Here’s how mainliners have voted in the last few presidential elections.
You can see a slight and increasing edge for Republicans.
There are also charts by denomination in the post. The Episcopal Church is majority Democrat, but the Presbyterian Church (USA) is majority Republican, and so are the Lutherans (ELCA).
The Episcopal Church used to be known as “the Republican Party at prayer.” Obviously that’s not true anymore, but the Republican Party is still alive and well when it comes to the attendees of mainline denominations.
There’s an assumption in the evangelical world that mainliners are all theological and political liberals. That’s just not true. I think this voting shows that evangelicals don’t have nearly as a good a handle on the reality of mainline Protestantism as they think they do.
Click over to read the whole thing.
Live Players vs. Dead Systems
Samo Burja of Bismarck Analysis is a very interesting and provocative thinker. His thoughts on America in this podcast are worth checking out. Don’t let the reference to Curtis Yarvin fool you. This podcast has very little to do with Yarvin.
Best of the Web
Christine Emba/NYT: The Delusion of Porn’s Harmlessness
NYT: Divorce Is a Gift - “We could have had a nice life together, but I wanted more for him.”
When you know your marriage is over, it can be a time of great tenderness. I knew it would be our last year together before he did. It’s not something I can easily explain except to say every time I looked around, I felt I wasn’t supposed to be there. The place I held seemed to belong to someone else.
…
I didn’t have a real reason. Just a calling, a signal only I could hear. And I knew I had to listen to that. I didn’t want to do it, but I knew it was the right thing. I knew he would never, and between the two of us, I knew I had to be the one to do it.
WSJ: Freezing, Storing and Thawing My Eggs Cost Me $33,179. I Still Didn’t End Up With a Baby.
NBER: Divorce, Family Arrangements, and Children's Adult Outcomes - “We find that parental divorce reduces children's adult earnings and college residence while increasing incarceration, mortality, and teen births.”
Katherine Dee: An Efilist Just Bombed a Fertility Clinic. Was This Bound To Happen? - Read on to find out what exactly 'efilism' is.
Mary Harrington: Fertility clinic bombing heralds weird new era of terrorism - mentions me.
Michael Perrone: The Collective Sovereignty Framework
David Brooks: ‘We Are the Most Rejected Generation’
New Content and Media Mentions
Christianity Today had an interesting piece that referenced my middle class vs. striver class framework. “Oh, I thought when I read Renn’s post, that’s me. I’m a striver.”
I also got a mention in CBS Eye on the World, from Mary Harrington, and Johann Kurtz.
New this week:
John Seel writes about the great higher education reset.
My podcast is with Elizabeth Landis on why Christians must rediscover civics.
Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.
Aaron, please keep writing about mens' issues. You are one of very few influencers who have good takes on this topic, and it's the main reason why I'm a subscriber.
Burge's arguments are talking past the diagnosis of the Mainliners. Yes, there are lots of people, many of them seniors, who are theologically and politically conservative within the Mainline churches. I have close family members who are those people. The point, however, is that these people are inert within these churches.
I have Episcopal family members, attended Episcopal churches for over ten years, and even was an employee of Bishop Jenkins of Louisiana for a while. I know these people, lived with them, and heard it all. When New Hampshire elected Gene Robinson, do you know what several people told me? "It's just those Yankee Episcopals. We Southerners have common sense. They're troublemakers and enjoy causing controversy. Ignore it or you're giving them what they want." They did nothing, and the disease spread.
There are two countervailing motions in the liberal Mainline. When people become too liberal, they drop out of the Mainline Churches to become Nones. This causes the laity to begin trending right. However, the remainder happens to also be rather old as younger people have less attachment to the Mainline denominations and convert out to Catholicism and Evangelicism. We've seen a balancing point over the last couple of decades where the theological conservatives are dying as fast as the theological liberals are apostatizing. This is a recipe for inertia. Old folks aren't going to fight a battle to reclaim their denomination, young folks exit left and right, and the remainders are those who have institutional interests and salaries.
What about that young fellow and his reconquista? We've seen what happens when the laity revolt. They get their church sold out from under them. The Mainline Churches are utterly dominated by their ecclesiastical bureaucracy to the point that they don't even own their places of worship like most Evangelical churches do. Look at the disaster of the UMC breakup. As much as I complain about the SBC, at least we own our church. At least I can talk to the people in charge and have a chance at convincing them to change without running into lawsuits from some real estate portfolio run by a coven of lesbian deacons. That's what deceptive about Burge's numbers. It doesn't matter if it becomes 66% or 75% Republican. Episcopal laity are locked out, plain and simple. I've seen it with my own eyes. Bishop Jenkins tried to sell off my great-grandfather's church and give the money to one of the precursors to BLM. Luckily, he was diagnosed before he went through with it and stepped down before putting ink to paper. Not everybody is so lucky to have their bishop diagnosed as mentally ill, despite the fact that most of them are.