Will America's Thirtysomethings Ever Grow Up?

Kidulting, reviving dying churches, modern views of adultery and more in this week's digest.

The Kindle and audio book versions of my book Life in the Negative World are on sale on Amazon. The Kindle version is just $2.99. So this is a great chance to pick it up if you haven’t already.

Someone created a very nice Wikipedia page about my three worlds of evangelicalism model. Thanks so much to whoever made this.

Will Young Adults Ever Actually Grow Up?

The Wall Street Journal published a long piece asking what will happen if a whole generation never grows up. Like all such things, the premise is probably overstated. Most of these people will be fine. But there is a lot of interesting material in here:

Americans in their 30s have never looked less like grown-ups. Amid steep declines in homeownership, marriage and birth rates, economists have long been warning that young people are struggling to meet the milestones of adulthood. Although some 30-somethings are consciously choosing a less traditional path, many say these goals are simply out of reach.

“It feels like the instructions for how to live a good life don’t apply anymore,” says 38-year-old Cody Harding, who is single and lives with three roommates in Brooklyn. “And nobody has updated them.”

…

“We’re moving from later to never,” says Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. He notes that the longer people take to launch into a more conventional adulthood, the less likely they are to do it at all.

A third of today’s young adults will never marry, projects conservative think tank the Institute for Family Studies, compared to less than a fifth of those born in previous decades. The share of childless adults under 50 who say they are unlikely to ever have kids, meanwhile, rose 10 percentage points between 2018 and 2023, from 37% to 47%, according to Pew Research Center. “You can kick the can down the road, but only so far,” says Reeves.

…

Median wages for full-time workers ages 35 to 44 are up 16% between 2000 and 2024, from $58,522 to $67,652 adjusted for inflation, according to the Labor Department. The overall wealth of 30-somethings, too, rose 66% between 1989 and 2022, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, from $62,000 to $103,000. In many ways, this age group is in a better place financially, on average, than their parents were at this age. The problem is that they don’t seem to know it.

…

Younger adults are far less likely than Americans over 50 to say achieving the American Dream of success from hard work is still a possibility, according to a Wall Street Journal/NORC poll in July. But here, too, the reality is more complicated. At least part of what’s stunting the growth of a generation of young people are outsized dreams of what a good life looks like.

“Our expectations are so much higher today,” says Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland whose research focuses on children and family. “Generations before us didn’t expect to have large houses where every kid had a bedroom and there were multiple vacations.”

To be sure, financial averages are just that. A sizable share of this generation is worse-off than their parents were. Young men in particular are struggling in the labor market. And some of the traditional goals of adulthood really have become more difficult to achieve. Student debt has more than doubled over the past two decades, yet a college degree is no guarantee of a well-paying job. Rising interest rates and dwindling supply have also put homeownership out of reach for a growing share of Americans. The median age of first-time homebuyers hit a record high of 38 this year, according to the National Association of Realtors, up from 35 in 2023 and 29 in 1981.

Still, growing up with less pressure to follow the same narrow route to adulthood imposed on their parents and grandparents—a career, spouse, house and kids all by age 35—has raised the bar for what these milestones look like, if they choose to hit them at all.

Click over to read the whole thing.

One thing I’ve clearly noticed is the “kidulting” trend, where what should be mature adults are still engaging in the same hobbies and activities they did as teenager or even children, like watching superhero movies, playing video games, and playing with legos. Adults apparently buy more than half of all lego sets sold for themselves. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this, but it does seem to be a sign of arrested development.

Is Adultery Wrong?

Ryan Burge has another good data post about people’s attitudes with regards to adultery. There still seems to be wide agreement in our society that cheating on your spouse is wrong. But there are big differences by religiosity.

People of no religion, Burge’s “nones” are the outlier here. This group has also shown the biggest shift in attitudes over time.

Click over to read his entire post.

Basically, should religiosity significantly erode in America, this presages a further significant break in sexual mores.

Reviving Dying Churches

The NYT ran an interesting piece about a Lutheran priest who has worked to try to revive dying New York City congregations. Katrina Foster took over St. John’s Lutheran Church in Greenpoint in 2015. Here’s what we are told:

The neo-Gothic church was built in 1891, and the original blue, vaulted ceiling; wooden pews; stained-glass windows; and a Jardine & Son pipe organ all looked relatively new.

….

Indeed, the congregation was dwindling. “We had 15 members,” said Pastor Foster. (The state of disrepair was also stripping them of potential revenue, she said. For example, two television shows wanted to film in the church but backed away once lead was discovered.)

It took Pastor Foster nine years, but she eventually was able to renovate the bathrooms, replace the plumbing and electrical systems, and, most recently, raise the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to restore the church’s interior. The funds came from members — there are now 80 — and from the wider community.

Though a congregation of 80 is in my view still too small to be long term viable, this is an impressive accomplishment.

Because Foster is a female lesbian in a liberal denomination, most evangelicals will simply ignore this story. But it’s worth looking at. A few points.

• My impression is that in denominations like the Lutheran ELCA church that ordain women, female clergy tend to get the less prestigious jobs. I would guess this is the subtext of how she ended up in these struggling congregations.

• Evangelicals focus almost entirely on starting new churches and rarely on reviving or renewing old ones. Hence they are frozen out of high value historic buildings in strategic locations. Greenpoint is a trendy, gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn. These liberal groups understood the strategic value of working to revive that church. Evangelicals don’t understand the value of the cultural center.

• Foster was willing to take a leap of faith into what seemed like a hopeless situation - a leap most evangelicals pastors would not take. As I’ve long said, there’s something off about an evangelical church that says the gospel changes everything, Christ is making all things new, etc. but which defaults to writing off older, struggling churches as hopeless.

To be clear, this sort of thing isn’t common in the liberal church space either. Cases like this should be studied to find out if there are any lessons that can be drawn from them. Reviving older congregations and buildings is a muscle that needs to be better developed in more denominations.

Speaking of Christian revival, the New York Times also had an interesting piece about the growth in people converting to Christianity in Kosovo. The largely Catholic movement argues that the Albanians there were originally Christians. Of course, the secular scholars claim that there was an even earlier pre-Christian history. You’ll note that the media always works to undermine the historical rootedness of Western traditions and peoples in ways it never does for other cultures. For example, no European peoples other than the Sami are ever given the title of “indigenous.”

Best of the Web

X user Anise wrote:

Hung out with a group of women aged 35-45 tonight & all had 0-2 children. We talked about why the childless ones had no kids & why the ones with 2 stopped at 2. Three fourths of them had concerns over having a severely autistic child. “I’ve got 2 perfect kids, don’t want to take my chances,” was the most common reason. Or the ones with severely autistic family members had decided to have no children & cited their fear of being saddled for life with the responsibility of caring for a high needs handicapped person. Interesting. I suspect this is more common than just my friends.

This is actually not an irrational fear. Rates of autism have gone up a lot. I’m not saying that this should cause people from being afraid of having children, but I can see why it might have that effect.

Related are the very high expectations placed on parents today. Katherine Martinko writes of this that it is ok for parents to do less.

And Angie Schmitt wrote about the negative case for having kids - that is, about the problems that come from a life without children.

Parenthood has a PR problem. I think this is partly because a lot of the famous writers and influencers have very young kids? And very young kids are pretty hard. Though even in those years, writers and influencers might have weird incentives to RAGE about this or that. We obviously don’t have a very supportive culture for parents in the U.S. and that contributes to the public angst. And that is real.

…

I mentioned part of the motivation for me, with having kids, was intrinsic and instinctual, but I also had an opportunity to sort of grow bored with what seemed like the most available alternatives to child rearing. And I think these things are arguably over rated. My sort of ambivalence about all that was motivating for me in wanting to have kids as well.

Jonathan Haidt: TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale

Celeste Davis: The real reason male college enrollment is dropping. This person argues, correctly in my view, that as fields become female dominated, men exit. Since colleges are increasingly female skewed, men are staying away. I think there’s something to this. It’s interesting that while men have little interest in female coded things, women seem to have great envy of male coded ones, and agitate to enter every male domain.

John Psmith reviews Eric Berger’s Reentry, his second book about Elon Musk’s SpaceX. It’s a fascinating read, with insights into what it takes to pursue greatness. It also reveals how Elon Musk basically treats his employees like crap, expecting them to be, in essence, members of his cult. Ironically for the guy who professes to worry about the birth dearth, especially among high IQ people, working for Musk makes it extremely difficult for a high IQ person to have a family.

Kasey Klimes: What if everything you touched was made to last?

NYT: This Tiny Fish’s Mistaken Identity Halted a Dam’s Construction - This piece is actually something of a blockbuster. It effectively admits that scientists classify animals as separate species for the explicit purpose of getting them classified as endangered so that they can be used to stop projects. The “snail darter,” for example, is not really a separate species at all.

“I feel it was the first and probably the most famous example of what I would call the ‘conservation species concept,’ where people are going to decide a species should be distinct because it will have a downstream conservation implication,” Dr. Near said.

The T.V.A. began building the Tellico Dam in 1967. Environmentalists, lawyers, farmers and the Cherokee, whose archaeological sites faced flooding, were eager to halt the project. In August 1973, they stumbled upon a solution.

We’re constantly told to “trust the science” and such, but too many of these people across a wide range of domains are simply dishonest and corrupt.

New Content and Media Mentions

New this week:

• My Members only podcast was about the toxic overlap of mass immigration and DEI.

• My regular podcast was with Tim Chapman on traditional conservatism in a populist age.

• The Hidden Costs of Defending Others Online - Defending the weak against attacks by the strong is noble, but needs to be done wisely

• The Game Is Hearts, Not Spades - Christian intellectuals must confront an uncomfortable truth in the age of Trump: we've been fighting the wrong battle all along - A guest post by John Seel

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Cover image: St. John’s Lutheran Church, Greenpoint.