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He's editor in chief of Breitbart News and a New York Times best selling author, and on this podcast he brings deep research, prescient analysis at.
World class guests.
He's Alex Marlow and this is the Alex Marlow Show.
All right.
We are talking faith and family today on The Marlow Show. We've got none other than Mike sever himself, Kirk Cameron, followed by Tim Gaglin, who has been a veteran in the conservative movement for a long time now with focus on the family, and we were talking about what makes a good life.
What could be better than that? Check it out.
That's today's show, all right. New guests the Alex Marlow Show. Someone who probably should have reached out to a long time ago, because we're big admirers of his at Bright Part News. And that's Kirk Cameron, who left Hollywood famously because Hollywood was offering things I think went deeply against his Christian faith. He'll be commenting on that and a little bit. He's also got a huge new initiative with doctor Ben Carson and Riley Gaines celebrating America to fifty.
That's also top.
Of mind as well. But Kirk, I'm gonna will surprise you a little bit. You were such a fixture of my home growing up. We were a huge.
Growing Pains family, and it's the you've done so much since.
But how many people of the people, like, let's say, ten people stop you in the street, how many are still?
Man, that was such a good show.
Yeah, I think we all belong to have a show.
All right, So we lost Kirk for a second.
He's back, but now he's listed as Mike sever in the window, which is hilarious.
So very good sense of humor is with you.
I like, see we get a good time as Christian Americans like we don't. We're having a great time too. I asked you about Growing Pains. What was your what was your thoughts?
Face?
Yeah, let's see, I loved being on Growing Pains, by the way, and of course I got my sever in the corner as my id and who nobody else gets to do that except for me?
I got to take full at the end. It's true, it's only you.
I don't know ten people stop me in the grocery store. You know, some of them might give me dirty looks because I love God and I'm pro life and I'm pro America. But I would say that probably eight of them would say, hey, man, I love that show back in the day, and you know, do you think it's too late to turn the country around? Do you think it's all it's all going down here from downhill from here? Or do you think that there could be another great awakening?
And of course I know history and I know my scriptures, and so I think the best has only yet begun.
It's amazing.
I feel the same way, but I have to admit that it is a bit feel though it's a I don't know if I can argue it as well as for me, I feel very optimistic about this country. I still feel like God to shine in America. But tell me, if what is your intellectual argument that the best is yet good?
We're going to go deep. I love it.
So I would say that if we look through life with this narrow lens, and I'm not saying that you're doing that, but it's easy to go off of how we feel and what we see right in front of us, because that's most arresting. But if we step back and we look at the wide angle view of all of history, we begin to see that we've got it so much
better than they did back during the Roman Empire. Go back to the gladiatorial games, where Christians and people of moral virtue were being thrown to lions and lit on fire to illuminate gladiatorial games.
Slavery wasn't just appalling.
It was good business for every nation in the world if you wanted to build a wall or a pyramid, or run a country. And so the whole idea that things are so bad and only getting worse today is just, in my opinion, objectively historically not true. And we are only appalled at the moral nasties that we see today because we have been so civilized by the Gospel and
by the Bible that we consider that stuff outrageous. Today, however, we're slowly sliding back into the swamp of paganism and idolatry and all sorts of perversions, because we're getting away from the very values that lifted us out of these things and toppled tyrannies and gave us representative government and moral ethics, and that ultimately comes from our faith. But if we get back to those things, I believe we're teed up for revival.
And the scriptures and history are replete with that. Great awakenings come.
During times of moral decline, spiritual apathy, economic collapse, and corruption. So we're teed up for one right now. The only thing lacking is people download face and living it out in love with courage, and then it changes everything.
One of the themes of the Marlow Show, on this show and just about every show is life.
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Lord's work making sure more babies are born. What better use of your charitable dollars than to support a cause that will guarantee more human life. Preborn dot com slash morlow They got a phone number eight three three eight five zero baby eight three three eight five zero two two two nine. You go to alexmarlow dot com hit the preborn banner. You can't miss them. I back Preborn, and you should do so. There's been a lot of discussion of whether or not there's sort of a spiritual
revival taking place in the country. A lot of people, particularly since Charlie Kirk's assassination. I think I've been talking more openly about their faith, that they have faith, and others who don't, maybe considering that there are a lot of answers to questions that faith can provide that nothing else can. I feel like to be someone encouraging. I could not believe crowd at my church on this past Easter.
It was certainly the biggest I've ever seen. It's just one of these things where do you feel like this is happening? But again, is this just am I rooting for this? Or do you think it's real? It is real and we're rooting for it. I know that I am again when when you and I are living in a world where things are not working, Promises are made but they're not kept, and we realize we've been sold a bag of horse manure from people politically, people economically, whatever,
we say enough, this is happening on our watch. And those of us who are parents now we got a lot of skin in the game, and our children's futures are at stake.
I don't want them to look back at me and go, what were you doing?
Just sort of hanging out on the porch, Watch been throwing your hands up saying well, Jesus is coming soon. No, why don't you act like Saint Patrick of Ireland and do something about the Pagans. Why don't you act like King Alfred of Wessex in England and do something about
the Vikings. We've got our own purple hair platoon. We've got our Marxist mafia who is after the hearts and minds of our kids and will torch their future and the future of our country and its liberties if we don't reattach the spiritual route and take back the education of our family, which is why guys like doctor Ben Carson, women like Riley Gaines and I are leaning in to play the long game by investing in the hearts and minds of children through the books that we're writing.
Yeah, my natural follow up would be, so what are you doing?
What should we be doing? And you've got a major new initiative.
What you're doing with doctor Carson, who is familiar to my audience, and Riley Gaines is familiar to everyone at this point.
Tell me about what the plan is.
Well, the plan is we got to stop whining and start winning. We've got to stop complaining about about a bent and crooked culture and replace it with something else. Because I believe that we, as people who love God, love America, love our family, we have been tasked with culture creation, not to just demonize the culture and try to escape it.
Look, this happened on our watch.
And so what we're trying to do is put tools weapons in the hands of parents and grandparents to sit down with your kids and win the war, one family at a time by reading them great stories.
Mine is all about. It's called Built by the Brave, and it's.
All yeah, and I just want to kirk, I want to be really clear with people.
So this is an initiative with Brave Books.
You guys got going the America Winds series that you guys are doing.
Yeah, tell me about this is what it's called the America Winds Bundle.
It's three books, one written by Ben Carson, Riley Gaines and Me about the faith of America, the bravery of early Americans, and the accomplishments of Americans. To help children to understand our country is something you should be proud of. I'm not ashamed of. Billie Eilish says, you know you should be ashamed. We're all living on stolen land. Time Magazine says, you start forth of July celebrations with Juneteenth,
and remember what awful centers you are. And we need to take back to the narrative and say we're not perfect. But America's victories and accomplishments and faith and courage is unique in the world. That's why everybody wants to come here for the opportunity and the liberty. And so don't believe the Marxists who want to indoctrinate your kids. You take charge of what they're learning and teach them why they should be grateful, humbled and proud to be an American.
And you guys, you know to brave books. I US is right on the front, so you can't miss it. So it's Kirkstaff with Riley and doctor Carson. It's all great, and this is so important that it's we can't be feeding our children garbage and is not enough just to complain about it. You do have to ultimately create new art with people in mind who are people of faith, people conservative pople who don't generally just hate this country.
But it's a long road. So tell me some of the stuff.
That you feel like people should be doing to get activated here in terms of culture, not just opining them upon it, but also creating in ourselves.
What do we do?
That's that's the great question you mentioned. Just so many people who hate our country. It's interesting. They don't actually hate our country. They just want to control it because it's the awesomest country in the whole world. That's what they want, right, They want They just want to come inside, infiltrate, take over the power structures and the institutions so that
they can drive. They can drive the ship because we're the biggest, we're the best, We're the greatest, and it ought to be used for good.
With regard to what do we do?
I think that a little Middle Earth wisdom is appropriate here. And I'm going to quote Gandolf the Gray from Lord of the Rings, and he said to Frodo during difficult times, other evils there are fro do that shall come. For even sar On himself is but an emissary or a servant. Yet it is not our task to master all the
tides of the earth. But rather to do what is in us for the help of those years wherein we are set uprooting the evil in the fields we know, so that those who live after us will have clean earth to till.
What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.
So brother, what our task is, what we do is not try to extinguish all the evils politically, economically, morally and spiritually we can't, but to do what we can while we've got breath in our lungs now, for the help of these years, this decade, this generation, uprooting evil where we can planting seeds of truth and goodness and beauty so that our children and grandchildren, those who live
after us will have clean earth to till. And then they'll be able to handle the political storms and the more whirlwinds that come at them, because what they watched you and me and Carson and Riley Gaines and remembered the stories of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and the Pilgrims and others who did it in their generation, and they'll know what to do. I think that's how we get on the right road, and we keep going and we don't quit.
Very well done. And I enjoyed the Gandalff performance. You should try acting. You can probably get at it. Right now. I'm just waiting for a few more grades to come in. Yeah, it's one day, so talk to me a little bit.
Let's go back a step and everyone should go to Great Books dot Us and support what they're doing.
I really admire what they're doing there.
And three great people to support with Riley and doctor Carson, both of them I think will be in the show coming up. So we'll do we'll do a three parter on this one. But you had so much going for you in Hollywood and you did something that I think a lot of us would believe in but is very
hard to do. And just to extract yourself from that when you had already were at the top of top of the industry and your whole future ahead of you, and you thought, you know what, this is costing me more spiritually that it's gaining me in terms of a career. Look back on your decision to kind of leave Hollywood and take your own approach.
How's it going this far? All's going great. I'm looking at this, I'm talking to you here.
I am all these decades later and I'm talking to you on your show about stuff that I'm passionate about.
And some people say, yeah, you walked away from Hollywood. The truth is I never really walked away from Hollywood.
I walked away from a career that I wanted to have to be a doctor. When I was a little kid, I never wanted to be an editor. I couldn't stand while my mom made me brush my hair, tuck in my shirt and do these like McDonald's auditions.
But it worked.
I got the McDonald's commercial and that turned into the growing pains part, and that turned into getting married to my girlfriend. We've now got six children, two grandchildren, and I'm fighting for the culture. I love this country, and I went from an atheist to a Christian, and.
I feel like I hit the jackpot.
So to slide back to a lower position of an Academy Award winning actor in Hollywood promoting the destruction of the hearts and minds of children has never been on my bucket list. I feel like I've got the greatest job and position in the world, and that is I get to be a husband, a father, and somebody who responds to the grace of God.
So a few years ago you moved to Tennessee unless that's changed. I think that was the last time I had reported on it. And what are your thoughts on just the general decline of Hollywood, because I find myself back out in the Hollywood area after leaving. We went back for my wife's work recently, and it's kind of depressing town.
Now.
A lot of Hollywood is not Hollywood. A lot of it's in Winnipeg, a lot of it's in Georgia, a lot of it is now AI. I'm asked about AI.
In a second.
A lot of it's sort of sort of in computer servers somewhere.
But evaluate the move to Tennessee, what's that like?
And just kind of watching Hollywood continue to I think eat itself alive for all sorts of different reasons from Afar.
Well, first of all, I did move from California. But now that I'm in Tennessee and people ask me where I'm from, I'm quick to say I escaped from California two years ago, and I sought asylum in your beautiful Red state because there's so many Californians here and New Yorker's here, and I think they need to go through a decontamination process. We need to have some sort of like a tank that they passed through first. By the way they drive, they've still got some California and New
York on them. But we moved here primarily for our children. We weren't escaping California. We were pursuing relationship with our kids and our grandkids. And we love California. We want to see revival in California. It's a beautiful state. And you know what you see happening in Hollywood is just I think the inevitable end of.
Of cancerous systems.
Cancer can't last forever in a host, right, It eventually is going to eat itself and kill its own host. That's the that's the that's the sickness of cancer. And when you have a moral cancer in something that is as unfortunately, I guess it's it's fortunate when Hollywood does good things, but it's unfortunate when it does bad things and you have something that's so cancerous that promotes every every vice and you know, epic sin from uh, pride, greed, lust, morality.
I'm sorry, pride, reed, lust, envy, anger, wrath, all that stuff.
It eventually just rots from the inside out. And that's why I'm thrilled that it has diversified. And now you've got it coming out of Atlanta, You've got it coming out of Winnipeg.
You've got to come on out of Toronto and other places. Now, anybody with an iPhone can make a movie. You can do good or bad. You're not shut in by the gatekeepers in Hollywood. So what's your take on AI? Because this is a two parter, Because I have some optimism for AI. We've been thinking about this a lot, reported a lot at Breitbart.
And one of the things that's going on is it's going to democratize art creation more. But I don't know if art's gotten better since it's gotten more democratized in recent years. So I really am kind of mixed on that.
But also from a faith perspective, I feel like it's a good opportunity for people to understand the Bible as a AI could be a real good teaching tool, But I'm also seeing it being used in pretty blasphemous ways with AI confessions going on and AI sermons, And I got to be frank with you, sometimes I feel like the Pope is made of AI, Like he just says stuff that I feel like.
Is so generic that I can't believe it. Tell me where you're.
At on this as from a spiritual perspective.
Well, I'm probably not qualified enough to speak with any kind of authority on this. It's brand new for all of us, maybe even newer for me. But one of the things that I do see with my kids and some of my colleagues is the mistrust in what we see. You know, we used to be able to say seeing is believing, show me proof. Well, now you can have a deep fake video generated by AI that you can't tell the difference between that and reality anymore.
Could it be that it forces us back to analog real.
Things and the whole digital miracle has just cannibalized itself and no one trusts it anymore.
I don't know.
I think it's fascinating. I love the tools and the democratization of information and skills like you talked about, but I don't know where it's going. What gives me, what gives me comfort, is to have faith in God, knowing that he's not.
Surprised by AI. He's he's you, I, He's ultimate intelligence.
He will turn even AI out to work for good for those who love him.
I think that's a great, great way to sum it up. Okay, So I want to ask about Christian consumers of art and Christian creators of Okay, how does someone who identifies as a Christian what should they be doing if they feel that they're drawn to storytelling and they don't like you, they don't really want to be a part of the Hollywood system.
What are some recommendations for them?
For Christian creatives, I would say, heck, yeah, man, go for it.
Please jump in. We need you.
I mean, we need storytellers, we need poets, we need artists, we need sculptors, we need people to we need we need people who have been gifted and skilled by their creator to start creating life giving solutions and alternatives to this death machine that others are creating for our children. And I would say, man, we can't survive without you.
And that's why public education, which is really government education, is such a tragedy, is that it forces these kids into these cookie color cutter molds, lining them up in rows, dismissing them by bells, having them all remember the same data and regurgitated on Friday for a test, rather than exploring their creativity and the unique ways that they've been gifted man, This is what people want. We love movies, we love stories, we love music, and that's how we
create culture. And ultimately, I think culture is going to be upstream from politics every time. So you have a unique opportunity to influence hearts and minds. So don't don't waste it.
Yeah, and from my vantage point, I mean.
Some of the greatest art ever created is a lot of the classical music can in which I studied growing up, and it's all the violin inspired. I mean, almost every last composer that is on the sort of Mount Rushmore cloth of composers, almost all the violin inspired. And just a nice reminder of that that that is relatively recent in the scheme of human history, that even people who seem very old to us not as old as you think. And so we can't have a I think a spiritual
revival in the arting is very good. But let me ask you something as a parent, grandparent, this is what I know. A lot of the audience is thinking about what are you watching? What can you put on for your families that you feel like is enriching. And you're an artist, so you're a person who recognizes that it can't just be the values only. It's got to be entertaining, well put together, or else it's not going to sustain people's interests, is not going to last.
What are the type of stuff you're showing in your family?
Yeah, well, ironically, I'm not somebody who watched this television. You know, it comes on when somebody else wants to show me something, or if I'm watching the news to try to educate myself on something.
So you know, we had our kids.
They grew up with a steady diet of I Love Lucy and a lot of these older shows that I watched when I was a little kid. One of the things that I'm trying to do is provide things for parents to show their kids and grandparents, because I'm going
to need stuff to show my little kids. My a plan is I'm going to take them out in the backyard and I'm going to have them go out there and feed the chickens, and we're gonna take nature walks in the mountains and go try to visit the beach when we visit the ocean, because I think nature is the best place to go out there and be with your kids. And then select things that are really going to nourish the values you want in them. So that's why I'm making this little kid's TV show, which is
a new Mister Rogers Neighborhood Meet Sesame Street. Only it's faith friendly, it's Bible forward, and it's pro life in pro America. So it's called Iggy and Mister Kirk. So even though I don't watch a lot of television, I make television.
And yeah, where do you get that one? To make sure people know what that is?
Brave Plus if you subscribe Pure Flex, you can get it there or Angel has Iggy and Great.
Yeah, yeah, I'm an Angel subscriber myself. Okay, So Kirk, I know you got a round, but I want to connect a couple of things here. So you've got your big initiative with Riley and doctor Ben Carson for Brave Books for America two fifty.
But you're best known.
At this point as being a person who evangelizes for the Christian faith in the public eye. Connected to you, how essential is America's Judeo Christian or Christian heritage to America two fifty in our current identity? To you, what can we do to make sure that people understand this is not that we discriminate against people who don't share that faith. But in essence, America is a Christian nation, and that's a good thing.
We should be shamed of this run from it. Check out this quote from Noah Webster. No Webster was a founding father. He gave us the Webster's Dictionary, and he was also the founder of American education.
And he said this.
He said, every government is based on some religion or philosophy of life. He said, in America that foundational religion was Christianity, and it was sewn into their hearts for two hundred years in the schools and in the home. He said, our prosperity and our success is the result of a Biblical way of life. And he said, therefore, the future of our success and our liberties depend on educating the children of America in the principles of Christianity.
The Bible was literally the books that built America. And it was these faith filled freedom fighters, full of courage, men and women, from the pilgrims to the founders and beyond, who have taken the risks and have implemented the values with love for all, to provide more freedom, more opportunity, more education, more prosperity, more generosity than anyone ever. And so with that as the tap root. If if the tree is flourishing, it's going to produce sweet fruit.
But if the.
Fruit is withering and bitter and gnarled, the answer is to look at what's gone on down in the soil of the tree. And we've severed the root of faith. We've used words like separation of church and state, totally misunderstood. That is not to get God and faith out of government. It's to keep the government from shutting down or controlling the church. But faith is the actual life blood. It's the sap that keeps the tree alive and produces the fruit.
And that's what our America Winds Bundle is all about. The faith, the courage, and the accomplishments of the American people.
Very nice toff the America Winds Bundle from Bray Books. Bray Books that you asked to get that, Kirk Cameron. Really nice to do this with you, unless do it against them.
Thank you so much. Great to talk to you.
A lot of people ask me, Alex, can you still trust the institutions that hold your money? We talk about de banking all the time on the show. About people and organizations quietly losing access to financial services simply because of who they are or what they believe. It even happened to Milania and Baron Trump just last year. That's one of the reasons I partner with three sixteen Financial.
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All right, I'm pleased to welcome to the show. Tim Gaglin. He's the vice.
President of government and external relations for Focus on the Family. He is a longtime veteran of the conservative movement, dating back to the Bush years, and he's in a new book out called What Really Matters Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family.
Tim is nice to make your acquaintance.
I think I've interviewed one other time before, but it's you actually spoke at a Young America's Foundation convention that I was at when I was in college, So it was a good twenty years ago, so you've.
Been around the block.
I want to evaluate before we get into the book content. Well, how do you feel like the state of the consers movement is organization activism in DC and beyond.
Do you feel like this is a good movement to be.
In conservative economics, politics activism or do you feel like that maybe we could we could bone up on a few things.
No, I think it's actually a good moment for American conservatism, Alex because I think that the movement kind of reorients and regenerates itself about every ten years. And my sense is that American Conservatism has never been of a piece. I was in a debate last week and my interlocu tour suggested that somehow, whatever her definition of American Conservatism is had been kind of the same since the nineteen twenties, and my strong encouragement to her.
Was to sort of get out more.
And I say that I pray gracefully, but I think that conservatism is grounded in particular first principles, but the way that it expressed is itself politically policy wise. Otherwise there are shifts and turns, and I politics doesn't go on forever, but conservatism has a foundation.
Yeah.
I think that's crucial to have those sort of core philosophical beliefs because there is so many flash bangs now in our hypermedia age, where there's so many of your favorite personalities you might realize all of a sudden are completely nuts or have some value that kind of reveals that they're not necessarily a committed I think ideological conservative and really more of a manipulator or a best case here, an influencer. I think we're witnessing a lot of that
right now. Is that a lot of the ideas that are have currency. I don't think they're going to last very long because they're not really rooted in much. And I feel like maybe you could opine on that comment.
Yeah, I'd love to actually, And I know that the plural of antecdote is not data.
But in the academic here, Alex, in my role as.
One of the vice presidents that focus on the family, I'm on a different college campus.
Almost every week.
That's Harvard, Princeton, Yale, A ZUSA, Pacific, Hillsdale, Liberty, I mean the entire gamut. And about a year and a half ago, I was coming off of the stage and one of the undergraduates at a school in New England that I will not name, said, mystery Agglin, I agree with everything you said. You know something a speaker wants to hear, particularly at a school of that ideological bent. But she said, why is it that the political class And this is just what she said, Alex, why does
the political class not talk about what really matters? And I don't mind saying that really rang in my years, and I've been internalizing that, and I think it applies to what you're talking about. There are eras where the libertarians and economics and small government and the kind of monitorist debate seems to arise, and there are other eras where it's more nationalistic and populistic. And then there are
those moments that are different from those. But I think what really matters, and I know we shared this in common. What really matters is the foundation of conservatism. There are the things that don't change even if politics changes.
Well, my obvious follow up is, so where do we get those principles and foundations? And we can make one recommendation on the show, which is to check out the book What Really Matters Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family, which is out now.
It just came out, So congrats on that. Talk to me about just the overall premise what really Matters.
Yeah, I remember as a young man reading for the first time at some length three books by Russell Kirk, and I remember thinking across that whole thing that I had come through three books and there really was not a single discussion of legislation in Washington, there wasn't a single mention of you know, sort of who was on the radio, who was on television, you know, who was the speaker of the House. In other words, these seem to be timeless principles, and Russell Kirk suggested that culture
was downstream from things of the spirit. I mean, we all hear the mantra that politics is downstream from culture, and I think that's right. I mean, politics is a
branch of ethics. But I think if you really want to understand conservatism at its highest and the way that we in the twenty first century should think about what is really important, I think you have to ultimately say that conservatism is born of things of the spirit, in the American experience, in the Judaic Christian tradition, but more broadly, the things of religion and faith helped to animate what is really important. And that's what I try to get
at in the book. It's marriage, it's family, it's parenting human life, it's religious liberty, it's parental rights.
I mean, these things matter.
Yeah, And I feel like that even though sometimes culturally we can be pushed away from these things, I think a lot of this stuff is in our core certainly in our founding documents. It's in any religious documents if you're in the Judeo Christian realm of religiosity. But I think that there is a push for a lot of elements of American society to drive young people, in particular
away from those core values. One thing you write about in the book is the decline of the American male, and I want you to kind of define this and the pinpoint where it might be coming from.
Well, in each one of the chapters of What Really Matters, I try to posit the sobering news over against the hopeful news, And in preparing this book, I really dove into an ocean of the most important social study and empirical data that we have. And what I found, overwhelmingly on the sobering side is that the so called and I believe very unfair criticism of so called toxic masculinity is really one of the of the very important realities
of this part of the twenty first century. I think this delineation that the nation seems to be having about whether masculinity and femininity are even important anymore. You know, I was in another debate just a couple of weeks ago, and I said, I think I'm going to cease using the term parenting and I'm going to spend more time using the phrases like mothering and fathering, because moms and dads bring something very unique, you know, to the lives of their.
Children that really matter in this debate.
I'll tell you, Alex May I say directly to the first part of your question. Among all of the data points, I learned that about fifteen percent, which is a huge number in a large, complex, continental nation of three hundred and forty million people, I learned that fifteen percent of all American men say they have no friends.
And I thought this, this can't be correct.
So I have spent time at every single campus, you know, over the course of the last year and a half, asking every single audience. Among the men in the audience, you know, how many of you would say you don't really have any you know, close friends. It's often a forest of hands. And this epidemic of loneliness that we hear about is it's it's absolutely real, and it's it's I think it's emblematic of.
What we're talking about.
Yeah, it's really interesting.
So let's talk about the friendship phenomenon because I do feel like that there's a big it feels like it's all or nothing.
It feels like there's a lot of my friends.
I'm about four, and I feel like I have certain friends of my life who their friends are their focus. It's almost like their family and it's the most important thing to them.
And then others are either very.
Isolated because of internet culture and that's where they get most of their identity, or they're just of their own family and they spend one hundred percent of their time either working or with family, and that's it's how do you evaluate this? Is that what you're seeing is that a negative development from your view?
I'm honored to be asked, and I deal with it in an entire chapter in the book, which is what constitutes a good life? I think that's really an important question, and I think it is a particularly important question to Americans who are in their teens and early twenties, because
the sands of time roll forward really fast. And I think that the very good news is that we have a demographic of eighteen to thirty year old men who of a sudden are telling reliable people, I want to be married, I want to have children, I want to be in a meaningful, lifelong relationship. I want to be in a faith based community. I want to have real fellowship.
I think these are very very good signs. Another silver lining, when women in the same demographic are asked, they often don't answer in the largest percentages in this regard alex, but aspirationally they say yes, eventually I want to be married, or yes, eventually I want to have children. And I think that yawning chasm is often because there are large percentages of American men who are not working. They are not looking for a job, they're not in school beyond
high school, they're not seeking to apply to school. And the question is are they marriageable? And I think that many women essentially say yes, I want to be married, but this large percentage of men don't seem to be marriageable. And I think this is this chasm is a very big part of what constitutes a meaningful life and the challenge that we're facing now.
This is really important.
And I want to get into this because I speak offhandedly about how I do want people to get married in families, and I talk about my personal family and how I have been very fortunate to have had a great career and get to meet lots of interesting people, have intersting conversations, go interesting places. But nothing is even a close second to my home life and that I have a spouse who I love and I have wonderful children, and that's the dream I want for everyone.
But just announcing that is very easy.
What is hard to do is to try to pinpoint where the problems have occurred where that's not seemingly the standard anymore for people my age and younger. It seems like some of the problems are societal influences, where young women are told that there's more satisfaction working for Facebook or for a Google than having a family, which was of course as a lie.
I think the data backs it up at this point.
But also men have been coached in having some arrested development, relying on certain addictions, certain comforts, that is opposed to actually creating a persona that will attract young women to marry them. And then it is hard once you are married to make into me because we're all wishing a little more money in our pocket, even people are successful.
So it's just one of those things.
Where there's a lot aligning against I think our natural inclination to form families.
You know, to that very point, if I may.
I was speaking in January of this year to a Christian college that would be known to everybody who.
Is listening and watching us.
And at the very end of my remarks, I said, you know, marriage is a really good way to spend your life. Having babies and children is a really great way to spend your life. It's really good to invest your time, you know, in a church and a fellowship. I mean, you know, this sort of fit and the riff went on for maybe a total of, you know, twelve seconds. And I had several students come down to me after our Q and a time together and they said, Alex,
things like this. You know, I've never heard that. You know, that was really interesting. Tell me more about.
What you need.
And I thought to myself, you know, it's emblematic in part of the narrative of what really matters, because when you you know, George Orwell has that wonderful phrase, it should ring in our ears. He says that the first duty of an intelligent person is to restate the obvious. And I have learned over time that the things that you and I are talking about, you know, these eternal institutions that we that we can take it for granted that most other people with whom we connect kind of
share our own proclivity in that regard. But the reality is, in twenty first century America, they don't.
And I was.
Reading this morning, you know that we have the lowest marriage, the lowest fertility rates in all of recorded American history. We actually have more babies being born to women who are in their thirties than in their twenties.
This is not a coincidence.
It's related to the cultural issues Alex, that you and I are passionate about and are speaking about today.
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to reverse some of this? Because I think we all agree it's happening to one degree or another, and I think in your personal life that I think that my number number one recommendation for young males in particular is to not waste your twenties. I think a lot of young males are told to spend their twenty For me, it was of finding a spouse, getting married, and advancing my career when I didn't have children.
That does take a lot of time.
It takes tons of time to raise for children as I do, and so I am it was a very useful that I spent my twenties not wasting them. And for young women, I would say that sure, if you feel like you need to have a career, have a career. I'm not anti career. I'm married to a woman with a great career. It's a nurturing career.
She's a doctor. She provides medical care for people.
She's not someone who I think would be I would love to be in the home all day. But she'll be the first one to tell you that her identity or satisfaction her life comes from the family. And so try to find something like that and not think that I'm just going to go up the corporate ladder on Wall Street and feel like that's going to be satisfying to me. Because you're not going to be You're not gonna be satisfied the vast majority of people.
I'm not going to feel that way. That's kind of where I would start.
But that's really sort of superficially, what can we do bigger to get people on the right track of the.
Late great Daniel Patrick Moynihan's observation Alex he said that the principal difference between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives believe that if you want to change and impact the country, you have to change and impact culture, and that people on the left, their view is just the opposite, that if you want to impact the course of the nation,
you have to ultimately and first impact politics. So I really believe very strongly that the way forward toward restoration, renewal, regeneration, and the way that we envision it is that we have to impact culture by telling a brand. We have to go tell a new generation about the things that are not things, family, marriage, parenting. We have to defend innocent, preborn life and say why every single person matters, and
then we have to live it. I was in a conversation yesterday and a woman said to me, how would we actually think about growing our community of faith, And I said, it begins with the most elemental thing of having someone actually ask someone else, Hey, come to church with me, Come to this dinner, come to this fellowship gathering. We're doing an event, you know, in our neighborhood next weekend.
Come and join us. And I think that.
The magic, as it were, is it turns out not to be magic at all, That it's a matrix of human relationships being asked. And what happens is that people kind of join into this circle of a community and of a sudden they realize, I want more of this. This is the kind of life that gives me great satisfaction, and I think it's the way forward.
Okay, So where do you think the trajectory of marriage is on right now? Because it feels like it's going on not a not a good trajectory, but is there seems to be more discussion laying out what I've been saying. I think I been hearing more discussion. But just because I feel like some online chatter is more pro marriage, more pro natalist, it doesn't necessarily mean we're seeing results yet.
But what are you seeing?
Yeah, I'm glad you asked.
I do believe that there is a remnant, and there is a remnant largely center right. But I think it's much broader than that of young Americans who, like you and your great wife, are committed to being married, having children, and you know, creating the natural nuclear family that is the way forward. And I think that number of people
is very large. But I think at the exact same time, there are a very substantial number of Americans, for all the reasons we have discussed in this great dialogue, who have been raised only amid brokenness. I was speaking in Los Angeles to a very large group of people from East Los Angeles, and this young man said, I, you know, he appreciated my remarks, but he said, I just need to let you know that there are very few of us. And it was a cavernous auditorium. He said, there's very
few of us who know anybody who's married. So I think it's not just people who organically resist marriage or resist kind of growing a family or children. I think, alex we would be dazzled and maybe even shocked by the large percentage and sheer number of Americans who have never been raised in a home with a mother and a father. We have a plague of fatherlessness in our country. You know, fathers who are present physically but not really there.
And then another percentage that have been sentivized, often by the government, not to.
Even be a part of the children's growing up.
So I think we have to deal systematically with these issues, and I think we have to do it not by government imposing it. I mean, government's never going to save a marriage or tuck a child into bed at night. It has to be from the bottom of and I think it comes, if I may back to moynihan, from the cultural elements of where we live. It's our parish,
it's our neighborhood, it's our church, it's our community. That is where I believe overwhelmingly that a reintroduction to marriage and family begins.
All right, So again the book what really matters The author, Tim Gaglin is my guest. Tim, I want to ask you about the spiritual revival that I feel like I'm
seeing in this country. There is certainly, again another one where there's huge amounts of I think over online references to faith and trying to actually have a realistic I believe the marriage of politics and religion in this country where we've gone so far out of our way my entire life to try to misinterpret our founding principles that we want a secular society where in fact we don't want to state sponsored religion.
That's pretty simple. We're not going to have one. We don't have one.
But you can't have in America without God's presence, I don't think, And I think that's kind of coming back as a viewpoint. Easter Sunday mass was totally overflowed where I went, which was a nice sight.
But is it real or is it just good vibes.
It's absolutely real and it's actually measurable, and I share your analysis categorically. I said earlier that I'm an inveterate optimist, because I am, but it's not confetti to the wind optimism. I think empirical data shows that whether you are in the center of urban blue America or if you are in suburban or rural ruby red America, there is definitively something that is happening. I think the kind of seeds that we have talked about today have been planted, and
I think we're seeing a germination. It is absolutely the case that if you want restoration and renewal in a country, a culture, and a civilization like ours.
It's not going to be overnight.
You know.
I wrote an entire book book, Stumbling Towards Utopia, my last book, about the moral and social and cultural devastation in our country in the nineteen sixties and seventies. I mean, it absolutely was a planned dismantlement of the United States of America, and it destroyed marriages, It destroyed millions of people. I mean, it takes a long time to combat the social engineers, and the social engineering that we're talking about
has had a leveling effect. But now, in my view, Alex, it's time to level up.
So how do we do that?
Because first of all, I think it's identifying where the root causes are. I'd like for you to help me do that, and then how do you repel from that?
Yeah, the nineteen sixties, the seed.
Bed of the radical revolution of a late sixties and seventies, is a combination of the destruction of what was year too four of quite excellent public school system. John Dewey and the radicals decided, as moral relativists that we should not teach good and bad, that we should not, in any manner seek to instill in the rising generation of young Americans objective truth, and John Dewey, as the leader of the radicalization of American education, unfortunately achieved his goal.
Howard Zinn, who was ultimately responsible for changing the objective understanding of the American story. I mean, here we are in the two hundred and fiftieth year birthday year of our nation. The Spanish don't know when they were born, the British don't know when they were born, the French don't know when they were born.
But we know.
When we were born, about three o'clock in the afternoon on July fourth, seventeen seventy six. But the shocking thing, Alex is that young Americans they don't know the story. You know, basic Civics, basic math, basic English. I mean, these numbers are really shocking. But I wouldn't to internalize this.
Yeah, And what bothers me about this is that and I live in Los Angeles now, and I lived in Washington, d C. Before, so I spent a lot of time in areas that are run by people who don't share my particular politics. And what is the most alarming is these people are very comfortable with failing school systems, rising crime rate, rising, homelessness, all wild. Tax payer expenditures go up.
And this is where I get a little pessimistic. I'm like you, I'm naturally very optimistic about things, but sometimes I look at this stuff, like, how are some of our peers on the left, How are they so tolerant? They've seen how the big government secular experiment has gone is not gone well, and yet they cling to it.
I am thrilled that you asked me that question, because in what really matters, I actually deal with the kind of home sociology of the so called progressive elite left. Now, when they are in public, they seem to be, you know, in air quotation marks, tolerant of every possible thing that they all that they know automatically is very bad for
children and very bad for a civic life. And yet every empirical data point shows Alex that in their own life they believe in a marriage that is functional, They believe in having children inside of marriage. They believe in what you and I have called the success sequence, which by the way, is now mandated in three of the fifty states.
I think that's all to the good.
So I think what we have to conclude is that the success sequence is real, and it's real for a reason.
But we have a lot of people on the left.
Who are really concerned that unless they be judged by saying this is a really good way to raise children, it's a really good way to create the moral ecology of the next generation.
So here's the big question, the tough one.
So how do we return to the American values of the past that at least people in this audience almost universally gonna agree we're superior to the way we're kind of walking around these days.
So how do we do it?
You know, as conservatives, one of the things that I think is that we ought to be prudent about and you not that you would disagree, but sometimes in the rhetoric of conservatism, people would say we need to go back, you know, as I say, I'm an inveterate optimist, but I don't think we're going back in the way.
That they often refer to it.
I think what we want is we want to if we want to return, we want to return to a time between the forty yard lines of sharing world, shared moral views.
About big things.
I'll say, between the forty yard lines the guardrails, and I do believe it is possible to to go to that moment. There are areas where we are never going to agree, and polarization has been baked into the American DNA from the beginning.
I absolutely believe that.
But I believe that people of goodwill understand the importance of things of the spirit in the public square. And I think that we have seen this in the United States Supreme Court here in Washington, that increasingly religious liberty, conscience rights, the things that we're speaking about here, they're
being given a wider birth. And I think that's important because this aggressive secutarism has essentially sent a signal to young people, don't discuss your faith, don't discuss your political views in the public square, because you will eventually be punished and ostracized.
That's not America.
And I think we are now, I think aggressively and successfully addressing the danger of Wokstan, that the danger of DEI and I think it's all to the good. And as these roadblocks are legally, theologically politically, as they are removed, it gives us a much better way forward.
Very wise to also say that rhetoric's important, and I actually don't talk about it as we're going back. I don't think that works for people. I think people hate that idea. I think everyone wants to feel like we're
looking forward. We're looking ahead, but we do need to draw upon some of those founding principles and I think some of those Judeo Christian principles that really made the country great initially, and framing that up for people, it's a battle for all of us, and maybe the battle starts with all of you at home by reading What Really Matters by Tim Gaglin. He's dedicated his whole life to deep thought on these topics, as you can tell, and I'm positive you'll enjoy.
It if you pick it up. Tim, I really appreciate this talk, and let's do it again.
It's been a great fun. Alex be of good cheer and thanks so much.
And congrats and all the longevity in the movement.
It takes a lot to be that's very gracious of you.
Thank you, thank you, sir.