There are many different kinds of conservatism—saber-rattling neoconservatives, backward-looking paleoconservatives, free-wheeling libertarians, to name a few. Ronald Reagan fused them into a winning coalition rooted in a common consensus favoring small government, free markets, and anticommunism.
Today that “fusionism” is being challenged by a new kind of conservatism that favors big government, a centrally controlled economy, and nationalistic populism. As Republicans try to sort out what kind of conservatives they are, an important strain of the coalition that Reagan brought together risks being overlooked: the cultural conservatives, particularly the evangelicals and other Christians whose concerns about what was happening in American culture back in the late 1970s and 1980s turned them into political activists and highly motivated voters whose impact at the ballot box swayed elections.
Today both the business-oriented conservatives and the populist conservatives seem to have little use for the old “Moral Majority” conservatives, having made peace with premarital sex, cohabitation, same-sex marriage, legalized marijuana, and whatever-wave feminism. The pro-lifers still make themselves heard, though the Republican Party is taking a “states’ rights” approach to abortion rather than making a principled stand on the right to life. To be sure, evangelical Christians remain politically active, though they have mostly thrown in with the populists, giving up on their earlier “moral” priorities.
Timothy S. Goeglein, a former White House staffer under George W. Bush and currently a vice president of Focus on the Family, brings those priorities back into focus. His book What Really Matters: Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family, a collection of columns and op-ed pieces he published throughout the 2020s, makes the case that those priorities are more important than ever.
Though the left has been saying that evangelical Christianity is really just a façade for right wing politics, Goeglein says hardly anything about politics. President Trump is mentioned only twice, in the context of a reference to “Trump’s tax bill” and a history initiative from “the Trump administration.” Not that he in any way comes out against Trump. It’s just that “what really matters” is not government but family and faith.
At several points, Goeglein cites the late political scientist James Q. Wilson: “The right and best way for a culture to restore itself is for it to be rebuilt, not from the top down by government policies, but by the bottom up by personal decisions.” Though Goeglein critiques bad and ineffective government policies—such as the “marriage penalty” in the tax laws and the left’s proclivity for futilely throwing money at problems—the emphasis is on what individuals can do to build up American culture again.
Nearly all Goeglein’s columns are packed with data, accounts of studies, and objective facts. This book serves as a handy compendium of the abundant research showing the personal and social benefits of traditional families and traditional faith. The evidence is overwhelming that married couples are happier, that two-parent families are best for children, that the lack of a father in the home contributes to children’s unhappiness and sometimes turning to crime, and finally that religion makes for stronger marriages, more successful child-raising, and a more purposeful life.
And yet, despite all these benefits, the marriage rate is plummeting, fewer children are being born, divorce and single parenting are still commonplace, and church attendance—while perhaps up a little recently—is still low.
Consider the rise of cohabitation. According to a study cited by Goeglein, two-thirds of all marriages today are preceded by a period of the couple just living together. The usual reason given is that they want a sort of trial marriage, making sure that they are compatible before tying the knot so as to avoid the trauma of divorce if the relationship doesn’t work out. And yet the evidence shows that cohabitation increases the likelihood of divorce. The reasons should be obvious: The mindset of “trying out” the other person minimizes commitment, assumes that leaving is always an option, and lessens the need to adapt to a spouse’s needs, habits, etc.
Why is the marriage rate down? Goeglein gives lots of reasons. The lack of marriageable men, a result of the “masculinity crisis” in which men slake their sexual desires with pornography, reject their traditional roles as protectors and providers, and avoid commitments of all kinds. Women prioritizing their careers. Young people thinking marriage is “obsolete.” The difficulty of finding someone to marry thanks to the decline of community. Goeglein also notes the shift in seeing marriage as a “capstone” stage—to be entered into only after establishing one’s career, becoming financially successful, and setting the course for one’s life—rather than a “cornerstone,” marrying early so that the couple achieves all this together.
In Goeglein’s reading, many of our other problems—loneliness, bad education, forgetting our history, the lack of community and social ties, the decline in the birthrate, children without discipline and emotional problems, the bad effects of technology—all come down to issues within our families.
And those family problems all come down to the attempts to live without religious faith, which instills values that promote human flourishing, gives guidance through life’s difficulties, offers a formative meaning in life, and makes individuals part of a community in which they can develop personal relationships, learn to care for others, and acquire social skills.
To be sure, many religious institutions abandoned those goals, choosing instead to emulate the cultural progressives, and so contributed to the problems by, in effect, secularizing faith itself. Consequently, both family and faith collapsed, bringing the rest of the culture down with them. Here is Goeglein’s summary of what happened:
With regard to the family, there were several factors leading our nation down the progressive path and away from conservatism. The social engineering of the liberal Great Society devastated the family, as fathers no longer had to accept fiscal responsibility for the children they bore. Legalized abortion greatly devalued human life and further enabled personal irresponsibility and selfish, rather than selfless, behavior. No-fault divorce made it easy for either spouse to walk away from their commitment of “until death do us part,” leaving a trail of broken children behind.
On the faith front, mainline denominations in particular, swapped out the Gospel for social justice and the abandonment of absolute truth, leaving a spiritual vacuum for progressive thought—which sought governmental rather than faith-based solutions—to fill. Thus, once faith and the family, the two essential pillars of conservatism, were weakened, the rest of the house started to collapse.
How can the house be rebuilt? How can the culture be restored? The foundation, Goeglein says, has to be faith:
The renewal of faith is the essential part of solving the break-down of marriage and the family. If we are to restore marriage and the family and begin to reverse their decline—and the resulting damage it has done to our society—we must start with the restoration of religious faith.
That restoration must begin in our homes. If we are not involved in a church, we miss out on the biblical teaching needed to keep us focused on God and putting others before ourselves, which, in turn, deepens the marital bond through self-sacrifice and respect for our spouse. We also lose the opportunity to develop mutually encouraging relationships with other couples, as well as to provide our children with the spiritual foundation and formation resulting in successful future relationships. . . .
Therefore, I would encourage all couples … to quit spending their Sunday mornings sipping lattes at Starbucks and instead start attending church. Second, when tensions inevitably arise in a marriage, rather than lash out at one’s partner, take a moment and say, “Can we pray?”
I think if we start with these steps, we will have not only stronger marriages but also stronger children and a stronger society as well. It will be faith, not government programs or other secular solutions, that will bring the restoration of the vital institution of marriage—and all its benefits—to fruition.
Restoring religion and the institution of the family may seem unlikely in our highly secularized, sexually revolutionary culture. But Goeglein uncovers some rather surprising research that suggests it can be done.
Today’s progressive base consists of white, affluent, highly educated professionals. They constitute a cultural elite that is the source of today’s ideologies about nontraditional families, sexual tolerance, the suitability of single parenthood, moral relativism, woke politics, and the like. Goeglein cites the work of Brad Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia and senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. Wilcox studied the beliefs of this demographic and compared them with their actual personal practices.
It turns out that advocates of family “diversity” themselves tend to have quite traditional families. Promoters of anything-goes child rearing tend to have fathers in the home, discipline their children, and see that they get a good education. This is, in fact, why these families and their children tend to be so successful. Meanwhile their progressive ideology is wreaking havoc in other people’s families.
Goeglein quotes Wilcox (my emphasis): “On family matters, [elites] ‘talk left’ but ‘walk right’—an unusual form of hypocrisy, that, well intended, contributes to American inequality, increases misery, and borders on the immoral.” For all their cultural progressivism, they themselves still go with marriage, have relatively low divorce rates, and avoid single parenthood:
College-educated elites have outsized power over American culture and politics, and on matters of family, they are abdicating. They typically don’t preach what they practice, despite the megaphones they hold in traditional and social media, and elsewhere. Sometimes they preach the opposite, celebrating the practices they privately shun.
In fact, affluent, college-educated individuals—not all of whom are members of the “cultural elite”—also constitute the demographic with the highest church attendance!
And the reverse is also true, as Goeglein observes: “Meanwhile, the bottom economic half of society are children born out of wedlock or living in a single-parent home.” The gap between the “haves” and the “have nots,” he says, is not primarily a matter of money. Rather, it is a matter of having a stable family.
The fact is, the white, nonaffluent, non-college-educated working class has the lowest marriage rates, the highest divorce rates, the most examples of single parenthood, and the worst church attendance of any demographic. (Goeglein doesn’t dwell on this, but Wilcox documents the phenomenon in his chapter in Religion, Work and Inequality entitled “No Money, No Honey, No Church: The Deinstitutionalization of Religious Life Among the White Working Class.”)
And yet, this is also the base of populist conservativism! These are the Trump-supporting, MAGA Republicans. If you ask them, they will describe themselves as pro-family and pro-Christian. They are not being hypocrites. They are the victims of elite cultural progressivism, so they hate it, though they cannot easily extricate themselves from it. But I suspect that even though they do not practice what Goeglein preaches, they would agree with everything Goeglein is prescribing.
So if the conservatives do not practice what they preach, and the progressives do not preach what they practice, they share an implicit consensus. Despite their hostility to each other, both factions agree, whether theoretically or in practice, on the importance of family and faith. The culture can be restored if the conservatives would do what they believe in and the progressives would believe in what they do.
