Timothy S. Goeglein has just published a book entitled What Really Matters: Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family.
I have reviewed it for Religion & Liberty Online. I take the occasion to discuss what Christian conservatives used to emphasize, as compared to what they emphasize now.
And I discuss a fascinating and completely counter-intuitive phenomenon that Goeglein brings up in the treasure-trove of research that he uncovers: The affluent, well-educated cultural elite that constitutes the progressive base keeps propagandizing against the institution of the traditional family–and yet they themselves tend to have traditional families!
Conversely, the struggling white working class that constitutes the base of today’s populist conservatism has America’s lowest marriage rates, the most single parenthood, and the lowest church attendance! And yet, no doubt out of bitter experience, they would mostly agree with Goeglein’s book on the importance of family and faith!
My review ends with this paragraph, which I’m kind of proud of:
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.
What Matters to Cultural Conservatives:
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.
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