(Why super-involved conservative young people may actually be working for the liberals!)

I was once on the board of an alumni association. One of the older members said everyone on the board was either right out of school and new to the area, or retired. He wasn’t upset about it in the least. He said it was simply that everyone else was busy raising their families, which he thought was a good thing.

Nowadays the conservatives really want to get more young people involved. They seem over-excited about getting attendance at events and meetings. You know, it’s just some guy talking too long about something only a little interesting, but the Facebook event page says “come be part of this exciting event!” Uh huh. A local conservative nonpartisan organization just gushes over its 30-year-old single guy who is ready to volunteer for everything. They love how much time he gives to the group. But 30 isn’t actually young. And at that age, he ought to be contributing by raising a family. But it looks like he has invested so much of his energy in political volunteering, sending e-mails, organizing rallies, maintaining a superficial internet presence, that he has missed the boat on major life investments.

If conservatives really intend to try to live like super-involved liberals, they will be abandoning the very worldview they are fighting for. Consider:

Liberals get a lot of young adults involved, but if my friends and associates are any indication, those people are living out a worldview in which individuals interact with civil society directly, without being invested in a family first. At its worst, it’s me and the government. That is, those friends tend not to be married. They tend not to have families. They have huge presence on facebook, and they hold and attend lots of “events,” but if you ask me, the whole thing looks a lot like college. In college, we were all separate individuals participating in student organizations and attending events. Accumulating experiences. Stuffing our schedules with “involvement” for its own sake. Living in organizations rather than families.

And that is the liberal worldview, isn’t it? Everyone unmarried, everyone dependent on society at large, the State, for emotional and economic support. Pure democracy is both radically individualistic and totalitarian. But it has no legacy. It is impermanent.

My married friends don’t live like that. Certainly many of them still care about politics, but their investments look much less like they’re just desperately trying to fill their time and be “involved.”

Conservative young people seem to be more likely to get married and start families. They spend less time on Facebook, and their political volunteering comes after their commitment to their families. In fact, to the extent that they are involved in politics, they are doing it FOR their families, because they have something, someone, important to take care of beyond themselves. They aren’t individuals interacting directly with the State. The first interaction they have is their spouse, and everything they do flows out of that basic relationship. If you ask me, that is a far better way to generate policy.

And I have been convinced that cultural change comes about by example. Getting young adults to give all their time to politics keeps them from focusing on building families. But families are the most important units of society. So if conservatives want to stay unmarried and over-involved in politics, they will actually be working for the liberals. Even if they are fighting for conservative policy! Because they are living out the liberal model of society.

So, I’m not saying young people shouldn’t be involved in politics. I’m saying they should have families first.

Just heard this ad for NPR: “Do you ever feel like you’re drowning in a sea of hyperbole?” Then follows an extended maritime metaphor making the point that NPR give you a balanced, even take on things.

The sermon today was about that potter in Jeremiah. The takeaway: God is deeply involved in our lives. Forming us into something worthwhile is a messy business. God pushes us, smashes us. Molding requires pressure, and gets mud all over God’s hands. If we resist God, we end up useless paperweights. But if we allow ourselves to be changed, we can be shaped into something useful, and then maybe covered in a beautiful glaze. But if we resist, if we turn from what God is trying to make us, eventually, God will give up. Useless paperweights we will be. Forever.

It’s true! Spiritual immaturity is useless. You can tell the people who refuse to become what God is trying to make them into. They aren’t much use. Is God asking you to grow up? Is God asking you to surrender your will in favor of his? Be mindful of the ways God is pushing you. He is trying to make you into something. And your resistance is more dangerous to your soul than you might think. After all, you are either with God or not. There is no in-between. and being with God means doing what God asks. Loving the people in your life. Being a positive contributor to your community. Changing your priorities in response to God’s pushing and molding. If you don’t go along with God, you can say all you like about loving God, but you aren’t doing it.

A status update from my facebook newsfeed:

“37 years ago today I married my best friend. I love you!!!”

(See some of my previous thoughts on telling the truth about marriage here and here.)

I was sorting papers today, throwing away things I’d kept for some reason. I’ve kept a lot of written prayer requests from a group I was once part of. I have cards asking for prayers for relatives and friends. One asking for good weather. (“Don’t snow! Don’t rain! Plz.”) Prayers for peace of mind. Prayers for all sorts of things.

One person, at some point, wrote the following:

“Pray for guidance for me, for the direction of my life; and for all the other directionless people suffering from prolonged adolescence in today’s culture?”

I think the question mark at the end is especially poignant. The perfect flourish on a request for direction from someone who is having trouble committing. But the request is really intriguing. For my part, I have spent a lot of time praying for guidance for this person. I was praying long before I got this request, and I kept praying long after. The thing is, I have been constantly amazed at how fully those prayers for guidance have been answered. And equally confounded by how incredibly recalcitrant this directionless person has been in the face of what looks like more guidance than I’ve ever seen anyone get about anything (including my parents who followed a call to become missionaries).

In my more exasperated moments, I’d pray, “God, Whatever you want my friend to hear, please just tell my friend in plain English what to do, as straightforwardly as possible!” And later that week, we’d be walking down the street and some stranger would stop us and tell my friend what to do. Really. Like, “Evening. You should ____.” I mean, that’s only happened a few times. I mention it just for fun. Did you ever see Joan of Arcadia? God would appear as strangers and just start talking to the protagonist about her life. Most guidance isn’t like that, though!

At some point, after years of praying for guidance for this person (and seeing God offer a lot of guidance), it occurred to me that there wasn’t much more anyone could do. Even this person’s friends started seeming tired and saying, “well, I’ve said my piece.” If you aren’t going to take the answer to your prayers when you get it, well, continuing to pray isn’t going to help much. At some point, it is up to us to accept what God has given us.

Someone observed once that the miracles in the Bible don’t convince people. They are miracles for those who already have faith! People who see them who don’t have faith just try to explain them away. They reject the miracle, or ignore it.

I think sometimes we assume that if we insist we believe in God and love God, we can just be limp, wet noodles and assume God will do all the work of making us understand what we are supposed to do. Like God is in the business of just planting opinions in our heads.

But faith is actually trust. Not an assertion of belief, but a relationship with God expressed through action. Think of a trust fall: the recalcitrant seekers of direction will never take the plunge because they are waiting to be pushed. But that isn’t trust, is it? The trusting person folds his arms across his chest and tips back! And if we don’t trust God and trust the path he creates for us, then no guidance will satisfy us. We need to take steps in trust. (I don’t mean moving to a new city just to see what happens. I mean looking at where God has put you and what God has given you and what God actually seems to be asking of you.)

But we can waste years praying for guidance and refusing it when it comes because we don’t want to be active participants in the relationship of trust. Or because we wanted a different sign. Or because we don’t like what we hear.

If you were waiting for a sign, you probably already got it.

It seems like my life has had a theme recently. The sermon this week was another good one. An oldie, but a goodie, if you will. We were reminded that God is always other-oriented in love, and that God’s intention is to bring unity, while the devil works for separation, and that these facts are the basis for all Christian morality: in our marriages, in our friendships, in all our relationships.

Christianity is a very relational religion, isn’t it? I was talking with someone after church about how there are people-oriented people and task-oriented people. But the primary task that Christianity asks of us is to love others the way God loves us, the way Christ loves us. To always privilege love over separation. To always privilege the other over ourselves. And to do it non-abstractly.

It is the opposite of our current cultural training. Look first to your own interests. If you can believe it, I actually know someone who has articulated his relationship theory in terms of the free market: I get something I want out of it, so does she, like in economics where a free, bargained-for exchange leaves both parties thinking they’ve given something of lesser value and gotten something of greater value. Someone out there actually thinks this is a feasible relationship model! Needless to say, he won’t find anyone until he gives that up. Or if he does, they’ll make each other very unhappy and have no access to what is sanctifying about the sacrament of marriage.

In fact, Christian ethics teaches us that the opposite is actually the way to be successful. Give everything! Expect to take a loss! Older couples who are interviewed about what made their marriages successful talked about the importance of remaining friends, and about how bad it is to think of marriage as an exchange, to think of what you deserve. Every day, you have to give 100%. Christian morality is other-oriented. Unity-oriented. For my money, marriage is the best training we can have in Christian ethics. (Not if you’re a free-market spouse, of course. But if you are trying to do it God’s way.)

The whole Christian outlook on life rests on this truth about God’s personality. When we don’t live accordingly, we are denying our God.

I have had a lot of time alone recently, as my companion is absent for a while. It’s Labor Day weekend. But I am blessed to be surrounded by people who are married and have families of their own, which means I am by myself; the only person whose job it is to be with me is temporarily elsewhere.

This is what I’m thinking about today:

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” … And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.” Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.

Women are made to be companions. Men need companions whether they know it or not. God knows it. This is saying that when you find a fitting partner, you get married. And leave your father and mother and siblings. And lead one life together with your spouse. To the extent that men these days can get away with not committing, they are harming women by denying them what they most need: the chance to be what they were made to be. Companions. Feminism, ironically, has just enabled men to harm us in this new way. They still hold the power. They can dawdle, and refuse to grow up, and act like they don’t owe anybody anything, and pretend they have years before they need to settle down. And while they refuse to marry, they keep women from being women.

We weren’t made to be alone. And meeting friends for coffee once a week doesn’t cut it. We were made to live one life together with one other person, one God made to suit us primarily as a committed friend. COMPANIONSHIP IS THE PURPOSE OF MARRIAGE, as far as the Bible is concerned. A partnership! That is very important. Children, notice, are NOT the reason for marriage. They are one thing marriage can give you, among many things. But the reason God gives is that is it NOT GOOD FOR THE MAN TO BE ALONE.

It is apparent that God’s observation is true. Joseph Smith [Correction: Brigham Young] is credited with saying every unmarried man over the age of 26 is a menace to society, and it is true. Thankfully, in my circle of friends, there is only one single guy left. But he is an incredibly destabilizing force in our lives! My sister, the other day, was talking about how hard it is for her circle of friends to deal with single people (she and her circle are also mostly married). She says they change they dynamic of parties. They are increasingly hard to interact with. And the older they get, the more their immaturity shows. Marriage is the only way I know of to civilize men and get them to be positive forces in the lives of those around them. It forces them to live cooperatively. It forces them to live for something other than themselves and their own hobbies.

It is a little different for girls. I think we are less destabilizing than men. But we actually notice the lack. Companionless on a holiday, a lot of people would be quick to say, “I’m sure there must be someplace you could go be a third wheel!” And that’s probably true. But it isn’t what we’re made for, which means it is likely to hurt even more than being alone for the holiday. All for the selfishness of childish men who won’t leave their mother and father and cling to the wife God has given them.

I once got this fortune in a cookie: “It was when you found out you could make mistakes that you knew you were onto something.” It’s not the most eloquent fortune ever, but it is a lesson worth remembering.

There is a planet in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books that couldn’t see the stars, and their understanding of the world didn’t include the rest of the universe. When they finally flew out of their dust cloud and saw the stars, they were confronted with something that didn’t fit in their worldview, and they responded simply, “It’ll have to go.” The whole rest of the universe had to go, so their flawed worldview could persist.

I suppose you could understand this as some commentary on simple-minded religion. But I think it touches my own life more nearly as I observe one of my most logical and beloved friends confront the possibility that the theories he has had about some of the most important aspects of life are just plain wrong. Will he decide to favor real-world experiences, flexibility, and tangible application of his principles in the actual situation of his life? Or will he walk away from mountains of information and things of great value for the sake of preserving a theory that will probably never line up with real life? (He doesn’t read my blog, but I guess this is sortof dedicated to him. I hope it helps others like me and my friend.) Becoming an adult looks a little different for each of us. We must learn who we are, and how our greatest strengths can also be our greatest weaknesses.

Today’s entry is for the abstract thinkers:

At some point in our lives we must all realize that real life is not abstract. The real people around us are not abstract. Our real job, our real homes, our real opportunities and obligations are not abstract. The person we marry is not a generic “wife.” She is a unique individual. Models may help us conceptualize the world, but if we live as though the model is actually reality, we will look insane and hurt people and be quite bad at life. (“First, assume a spherical cow.”)

Unfortunately, contemporary society has separated people from the realness of their lives. I have a friend who sometimes says that social norms are very important because it is unfair to ask everyone to think through how to react to every situation from scratch. Not everyone is inclined to think seriously about the consequences of their actions. So if the elite class say to everyone, “Just do what seems best to you,” some people are better equipped than others to figure out what’s best. But social norms provide everyone with a set of expectations that they don’t have to think through from scratch. In previous decades, for example, folks found it easier to get married. It was like getting a job. You had to do it, and the process was much less mysterious: that girl you’re such good friends with? Marry her! Done. Happy for seventy years. Move on to actually constructing an adult life together. These days, everyone is left trying to figure out that process from scratch, without the help of being surrounded by a particular culture with expectations.

Expectations benefit those of us who are more impulsive, those who don’t like to think, those who aren’t so bright. But there’s another group who really can’t cope without social norms and expectations. And moreover, when they finally find themselves confronted by those helpful cultural expectations, they basically implode, because they’ve been stuck in their own heads too long:

The abstract thinkers.

The trouble with being an abstract thinker is that, in the absence of social norms to follow, when they are left to fill in the gaps and start from scratch, they go overboard. They run the risk of doing all the work in their own heads, at the level of theory, so that they can end up with something totally inappropriate for the real world.

They may be more inclined to trust their own reasoning and their own mash-up of ideas pulled from other theoretical sources than they are inclined to trust anyone’s actual experiences. Not their own, not those around them. They’ve used theory to form a set of rules, but those rules are necessarily simplistic. The real world requires a lot of flexibility that theory cannot account for. Go read Antigone and ask yourself if you are the character Creon.

Abstract thinkers are at risk of jettisoning massive amounts of data for the sake of preserving their theory and rationalizing their erroneous worldview. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve done it.

Well, so far, this has all been quite abstract. I can’t make it less abstract right now without telling long stories. But learning this lesson has changed my life, and I hope it can change yours.

The sermon at my church today was about how the Christian is called to love, especially because we should know that we are loved by God without deserving it. In turn, we are called to love the people in our lives although they don’t deserve it. Nobody deserves it! Irrelevant. The Christian message is one of unity, commitment, and caring for others. We don’t really get to choose which people God asks us to love. Our only choice is whether to love them or abandon them.

It’s easy to talk the talk. But what does this mean in your life? Whom has God asked you to love?

I was at an engagement party last night. Two friends of mine are getting married. They started out as just friends, and persisted that way for a long time. He knew in some sense that God had given this girl to him, but he wasn’t particularly pleased with the gift. He had other plans. He dated other girls. But eventually, he made the decision to put his own will second to God’s. And after he made that decision, he knew it was the right one. They’re really just right for each other.

I talked to her mother at the party. She said one of her other daughters has a boyfriend who remarks about her daughter that he never expected to find someone else who saw things the way he did. I said that chapter in C. S. Lewis’s Four Loves about friendship is actually the chapter that best describes the sorts of relationships that become marriages. She agreed. She and her husband, she says, were just good friends.

Do you think you are the exception to the rule? If you have a good friend, get married. Nobody who has done that regrets it. If you think God is nudging you in one direction, but your own plans pull you in another, surrender your own plans. Nobody who has done that regrets it. But you may not know that until you try it. The proof is in the pudding.

But in the mean time, look at how happy all these other people are—people who did the right thing—and take heart.