First up, a call for questions! Later this week, I’ll be interviewing Matthew Loftus, the author of the new book Resisting Therapy Culture: The Dangers of Pop Psychology and How the Church Can Respond. Matthew and his wife are missionary doctors in Kenya. He drew on his experience serving to co-write the Save PEPFAR op-ed with me last year.
I got to read and blurb his new book before publication, and he’s very thoughtful about balancing the real ways medicine and therapy can help mental illness, as well as the iatrogenic harms from taking therapy as the primary lens on human behavior.
When I speak on The Dignity of Dependence, I get thoughtful, good-faith questions about whether my project poses some of the same risks: We may all be dependent by nature, but if we think of that as core to our identity, will it become an excuse to stop using our particular strengths? To free-ride on others? To desire powerlessness/victimhood?
I think Matthew is a great person to have this conversation with. I’d love any questions or requests in the comments. You can read a thoughtful review of his book here.
Last week, I had a guest post in American Compass’s Commonplace, in response to, well, the responses to AOC freezing her eggs and liveblogging the process.
As I wrote in the piece:
A winning message on this issue begins by acknowledging that, insofar as women like AOC are pursuing egg freezing because they want to have children, they are motivated by a positive desire. Podcaster and MAGA world advisor Katie Miller took this tack, arguing that “if [Ocasio-Cortez] inspires other women to have babies, we should celebrate that.” However, while the desire for motherhood is indeed natural and admirable, it’s still important to ensure that this desire is directed to its proper ends.
Unfortunately, blue-state America does not trust social conservatives when it comes to matching up and settling down. The political divide is hard to bridge already, and we make it harder for ourselves when adopting what I call anti-anti-family rhetoric. Vice President JD Vance was right to apologize for his “childless cat ladies” crack, and pro-family advocates should avoid the temptation to take potshots at liberals for their supposed hypocrisy in having children. It’s one thing to say “Get Married,” but another to convince people who have been trying that they can better their chances. Our job on the Right is to credibly present ourselves as rooting for others to find happiness.
In the full article, I spend some time exploring the actual stats of egg freezing (an expensive insurance policy for young women; deferred disappointment for the majority of older women), but I think this isn’t a fight that will be won by scolding people about the stats.
Winning a culture war in a pluralistic democracy is rarely done by squashing your opposition. You have to build durable majority, which means genuinely winning over people who are currently skeptical. (And, again, that requires credibly caring about their welfare, not just protecting your family from theirs).
I think the expansion of classical schools offers some lessons in what engaging the culture and your immediate community can look like:
Let’s consider a different domain, one where conservatives have had more success winning converts. The growing classical schools movement offers a positive alternative to traditional public schools, not just a critique. There are over 1,000 classical schools operating now in America, a quarter of which have opened since the COVID-19 pandemic. These schools take the liberal arts seriously and seek to form students’ character, not just their intellect. An anti-anti-public schools movement would primarily highlight overreach and error (and there are certainly big mistakes in this space that deserve it). But it’s hard for people to choose against something if there’s no viable alternative on offer.
The growing networks of classical schools are a witness to our neighbors, an invitation they can accept. They showcase that conservatives are saying no to the cultural default not out of reflexive contradiction but for the sake of saying yes to something better. I was surprised, when chatting with a non-religious friend in the Bay Area recently, to hear her say she was considering a Catholic school for her kids. After researching the issue, she believed that the parochial school in her area was focused on forming students as independent thinkers, while the public school was devolving into woke, Maoist self-criticism sessions. That’s what a win looks like.
Schools regularly host open house events and actively recruit new families. In order to promote alternatives to mainstream dating, marriage, and parenting, conservatives need to offer open houses of our own. My husband and I make a deliberate effort to invite single friends and young couples over for dinner with us and our three kids. When bedtime starts, we don’t send our guests home but instead invite them upstairs to read picture books to our children. (I love to hand someone I Want My Hat Back and watch them discover the violent volta as they’re reading). My kids tend to make bedtime a full-contact sport. It’s impossible to be a passive spectator.
If our guests are a couple that has been dating for a while, I sometimes hope that seeing each other play with my kids will help them start thinking about marriage. If it’s a single guy, I sometimes hope the experience will spur him to start dating seriously. But often I just want the joy that I’ve been given to spill over into other people’s lives. I remember how much it meant to me to be invited into my friends’ homes during my single days, and also later, during a season of loss after loss as my husband and I endured six miscarriages. Whether or not someone has kids of their own, no one should have a life totally devoid of children.
You can cover the details of egg freezing and AOC specifically in the comments, but what I’m most interested is, in your own life and communities…
The most "different-from-my-norms" place where I was invited, was to a birthday party for my 4-year-old great-grand-daughter. At the party were her older teenage sisters, one of whom had a new baby and lives with her father and stepmother, her two brothers, an unmarried friend with a one-year-old baby, and other friends. I went with the hope of telling these family members of my own regrets, in the hope of convincing them that marrying a Christian and raising kids in a full-out praying things through family would be better than the choices I had made at their ages. I wisely abandoned this approach at once, and just listened to what they wanted to tell me. So at least, the bonds between us were strengthened.
My chief question for Dr. Loftus is how, in an effort to avoid Category 1 errors (overtreatment/overdiagnosis), we can avoid swinging into a Category 2 error (withholding treatment from those who most benefit from psychiatric treatment).