Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Part I

---

A Generation of Young Adults That Never Grows Up: The Reaping of the World of Modernity is the Fall of Western Civilization as We Know It

So, what happens when a whole generation never grows up? That question was recently asked by The Wall Street Journal. Now, there are crises and then there are crises, there are challenges and then there are challenges. We see things that concern us, and then we see things that concern us at an even deeper level. You can’t get any deeper than this level. When we’re talking about an entire generation not growing up, we’re looking at a civilizational crisis. Now, The Wall Street Journal is looking in particular at 30-somethings because the data keep rolling in about 30-somethings telling us that that generation is markedly different than the generations before it. And by the way, some of the generations younger than, say, the 30-somethings of life today, they’re following some of the same patterns of the 30-somethings.

They’re not moving into adulthood. They’re not achieving the usual markers of adulthood. They’re not entering into marriage. They are not having children. They’re not buying homes as previous generations had at the same age. Now, when you look at this and you see even a newspaper like The Wall Street Journal raising the alarm, you’re talking about a crisis here. There’s no denial of that. The question is: how did it happen? What does it mean? Is there any way out of it?

So, how did it happen? That’s a great question. There are a lot of people who are arguing that what happened is that the economy changed in such ways that it became more difficult for young people to achieve the same kind of incomes as their parents at the same age, and thus economic disadvantage has made it more difficult to buy a house, more difficult to achieve many of these landmarks of adulthood.

But as The Wall Street Journal, and let’s just point out if anyone in the world understands economics, it’s the people who write and publish The Wall Street Journal, they point to the fact that the economics will not singularly explain this. As a matter of fact, even though the economic explanation is to some degree legitimate, it doesn’t explain this by a long shot because many of these young people are actually making an income, a multiple of what their parents made at the same age, but they’re not doing the same things. They’re not getting married in the same way. They’re not becoming parents in the same way. They’re not buying homes in the same way. As The Journal says, “The conventional explanation for what’s freezing young adults in place is that they can’t afford to grow up given rising inflation and ballooning housing costs.”

Yet The Journal goes on to say, quote, “Yet this doesn’t explain what’s going on.” There is the acknowledgement that there has been kind of a run of bad luck on the part of this generation as well as every other generation, by the way. Every generation has some run of bad economic news at some point, even the Greatest Generation which entered into the post-war prosperity, had to go through the Great Depression and the trauma of the war in order to get there. But as The Wall Street Journal says, many of these young people are actually, again, earning a multiple, significantly more than their parents did at the same age. “In many ways, this age group is at a better place financially on average than their parents were at this age. The problem is that they don’t seem to know it. Only 21% of adults in their 30s rated the overall economy as good or excellent last year per the Federal Reserve. And economists say young adults are significantly more pessimistic about the future than prior generations were.”

Okay, so, economics not irrelevant to the issue, but on the other hand, by no means an explanation of the pattern. These young people are not not getting married and they’re not not becoming parents and they’re not not buying homes because they can’t. It’s because they’re making other choices. It’s because they have other priorities in life. It is because they are rejecting, whether they say it or not, the pattern that led to adulthood in previous generations. You’re also looking at something else. You’re looking at the fact that many of these young adults intend to live with other young adults in some kind of communal setting, and they want to live in metropolitan areas that are extraordinarily expensive, and they also have economic priorities that, just candidly, don’t begin with marriage or having children. And if you don’t begin with having marriage and children, then pretty soon maybe you tell yourself you can’t afford them.

The cultural expectations have also changed. As The Journal tells us, “Growing up with less pressure to follow the same narrow route to adulthood imposed on their parents and grandparents, a career, spouse, house, and kids by age 35 has raised the bar for what these milestones look like, if they choose to hit them at all.” Now, just how badly is this generation, say, missing the mark? I think the information is overwhelming. You’re looking at the fact that many of them aren’t married and now won’t marry. And you’re looking at the fact that many of them don’t have children, and in all likelihood at this point won’t have children. “Just over half of Americans between the ages of 30 and 40 were married as of last year. This is down from more than two-thirds in 1990 when those in the middle of the cohort were born. The share of women in this age range who had never given birth fell seven percentage points between 2012 and 2022 alone, current population survey data show from 78% to 71%. Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland, points to this generation and says, “Our expectations are so much higher today, generations before us didn’t expect to have large houses where every kid had a bedroom and there were multiple vacations.” It turns out that the multiple vacations part is quite central to this generation. But Professor Kearney went on to say, “Part of this is social expectations and part of this is shifting priorities and part of this is economic realities,” “but altogether they seem to be pushing in the same direction, which is increased rates of staying single and staying childless.”

A young man to whom we are introduced early in the article, his name is Cody, he’s identified as a 38-year-old who is single and lives with three roommates in Brooklyn, he said, “It feels like the instructions for how to live a good life don’t apply anymore, and nobody has updated them.” But when it comes to this young man, it also points to a part of the problem here, and that is that many of them have chosen to live single childless lives in very expensive places rather than to get married and have children and live in less expensive places. For example, Cody lives in metropolitan New York City, and “Although he now makes around double what his parents did at the height of their careers combined, he’s disappointed by what it affords him in New York City.”

So, this is a choice, it’s a lifestyle choice. He has chosen to live in New York City. He’s making twice as much as his parents at the same age combined, but he’s disappointed in the, say, real estate options that are available to him in Manhattan. He’s living with other 30-something young men in a communal apartment. By the way, we’re also told that in a period of a sluggish labor market, he decided he would go and get a law degree. He is now, because of that degree, $180,000 in student loan debt that now has ballooned to more than $200,000 because he’s been making only the minimal payments.

You also have a young woman cited in the article who lives in the Los Angeles area. “She knows her salary would go farther in her hometown of Philadelphia, but she prefers to stay in LA. Inflation has raised the price of small luxuries such as her Spotify subscription, but she doesn’t want to give them up. ‘There isn’t any part of my life that doesn’t feel more expensive than it did two years ago,’ she says, but she likes her life.” She, “says she enjoys meeting friends and waking up when she wants, which makes the upheaval of children unappealing. Motherhood, she says, is a non-starter.” And in an incredibly telling statement, she said this, and this is the concluding statement in the article, “Kids become the first priority. I’m still figuring out myself as a priority.”

Well, sometimes your words in a quote like that, just say it all. What we’re looking at here is the reaping of the whirlwind of modernity. The modern age that says we can separate ourselves from creation, we can separate ourselves from creation order, we can separate ourselves from biblical commands, we can separate ourselves from the Christian worldview, we can separate ourselves from the institution of marriage, we can separate ourselves from children. If we can make all those separations, here’s a key principle of life in a fallen world: if we can make those separations, we will. If we can have sex without marriage and sex without babies, then a sizable number of human beings will choose that option. But this is also, just looking at this kind of data, it for Christians, comes at us at two levels.

Number one, let’s just say the civilizational level. Civilizations can’t survive this. Civilizations can’t survive about half of a generation deciding it’s never going to marry and never going to have children. That’s not survivable. It’s a matter of demographics. You can do the math. The math tells the story. Eventually you end up a civilization like Japan right now or some other nations right now that are looking at such low birth rates that they’re having to look at creating robots to take care of people in nursing homes. That’s where society is headed if we stop having babies.

Part II

---

The Church is A Counter Culture: The Hope for the Restoration of Society is Only Found Through the Obedience to the Gospel by Local Church

But here’s the point, the Christian worldview addresses this at an even deeper level, which is the fact that it’s not just for the good of civilization that we are to do these things, it is for our own good. It is the crucible of making human beings as adults, and that’s how we understand marriage and having children.

Christians don’t understand marriage and children as achievements of adulthood, we see them as part of the process of adulthood. We see, for instance, entering into marriage as a part of making us men and women as adults. We see entering, as married couples, a man and a woman into parenthood as a part of becoming adults by becoming parents. We grow ourselves up by getting married, and we grow ourselves up by having children and parenting them. And if you have a generation that says, “You know, I’m just not sure I know enough about myself to know who I’d want to marry or how I’d enter into marriage, or I don’t know enough about myself to acknowledge children as a priority, so I’m just going to do without them,” what you end up with is a generation that, by the way, is never going to find itself until it finds itself single and without children, at a point in which it’s very difficult to reverse either.

Here’s something else the Christian worldview validates, and that is that God has made us chronological creatures, and that means that we are born, let’s just say, with the promise of reproductive capacity, but we’re not born with reproductive capacity. Reproductive capacity comes in adolescence, that period between childhood and adulthood. And the point of adolescence is not to get stuck there, but rather to move into adulthood. And that means that physiologically, all of a sudden, you have not only the promise of being a parent, but you have the ability to be a parent. And then that indicates the fact that you should be moving into more serious responsibility, eventually entering into marriage. And the order here is very important in biblical terms, you enter into marriage, and then entering into marriage you become fruitful and multiply, which is to say you have children and thus you grow up.

I think all of us who are married any length of time would say that we have grown up by being married. And I think all of us who are parents would say we have grown up by being parents. If you wait until you’re grown up enough to get married, you’re never going to get married, and if you wait until you’re grown up enough to become a parent, you’re never going to become a parent. And that’s because, in times past, before birth control and before the sexual revolution that said you don’t have to get married to have sexual relations, at that period, guess what, you grew up because you had to. You grew up because, guess what, you get married, and what comes with that? Children. You’re going to have to grow up fast. And that’s one of the reasons why, I’ll just put it this way, as the president of an academic institution, of a seminary and of a college, I am surrounded, I am thrilled to say, by young adults who are actually adulting.

And you see that with all the young couples getting married, you see that with all the young couples pushing strollers out on the lawn on a beautiful afternoon, and you see it in all the children playing out on the lawn, along with the college students and others. It’s just a picture of the way it ought to be. And that just points to the fact that the Church is an alternative culture. In the midst of a secular age, the Church is the place that better get these things right when no one else gets them right.

And I also think this means to Christian leaders, to pastors, to parents of young people, it means we have to understand that the social script is being rewritten by the secular world in such a way, that if there is not clear biblical teaching, if there is not clear affirmation and encouragement, if there is not a clear set of expectations, we shouldn’t be surprised that any generation of young adults will decide to go off in any number of different directions in a project of themselves rather than the project of getting married and having children and helping to build a civilization.

But here’s something else, and this I don’t think has really been apparent until very recent times, and that is that I don’t think that’s enough. I don’t think that’s enough. I don’t think that’s enough. I think it points to the necessity of the local church as a body of believers where there is mutual encouragement into faithfulness in all of these dimensions. And that’s one of the reasons why I think if you go to a liberal church, you don’t need a nursery. You go to a conservative church, you better be ready to expand it. And it is why when you see these young people get married, other young people say, “I want that.” And when you see these young couples have babies, other young couples say, “We want that.” And pretty soon you’re going to have to add space in the nursery.

And by the way, we also are looking at the reality that among Christians, there is a resurgent natalism, which is to say an understanding that having babies is not only something which comes as something of an adult hobby, it is an adult responsibility, and thus it is central to our accountability. This is really important. And when you look at the collision between the secular and the Christian worldview, even when it comes down to something ideological, like the distinction between liberal and conservative, conservatives are far more likely to get married, stay married, and have babies. It doesn’t mean that they’re morally superior in every way.

It does mean that, if you’re trying to conserve, guess what, you’re trying to conserve patterns of life. Even if you’re not a Christian, you understand that certain patterns of life have to be conserved. As a Christian, you understand that those patterns of life are not incidental, they’re not accidental, they’re a part of creation order and a part of the Creator’s plan. But when you look at the birth patternsm, and you look at the falling of the birth rate, it’s true that it affects across the board, but it is not evenly distributed, and it shows that worldview matters.

On Monday night of this week–I’m just going to talk inside baseball here for a moment–on Monday night this week, I got to speak to the assembled young men of Boyce College, just the young men, and I had the opportunity to exhort them, not only to grow up as young men in Christ, but to grow up right on time. And that means all these hallmarks of adulthood, they’re not just sociological realities, they point to underlying creation order realities. And we understand our accountability is far greater than a secular generation trying to figure these things out on its own. I also told them what I want to tell you, and that is that these students make me very, very happy because they’re drawn to this kind of vision and they believe these kinds of convictions and they do intend to be faithful and to make a difference.

And you know what? They’re doing it with joy. That’s the happy thing. I find so many of the people cited in this kind of article talking about how they’re not following the familiar script and this is just not for them, they also don’t appear to be very happy, in the way that I think, for instance, my parents who didn’t have all that much, but what they had was devoted to their family. I think they were very happy, and I think that joy is itself a testimony to God’s glory. I can’t think of issues more important than this, frankly, when you think about the future of our civilization, so we’ll be returning to these issues because they’re central to the Christian worldview and to Christian concern.

Part III

---

Secretary of State Rubio’s Trip to Panama: Trump and Rubio Send Strong Message to Panama About Adversarial Control of the Panama Canal

But for The Briefing today, I’m going to shift now to a very different issue, and this is driven by the news, and it has to do with Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to Central and South America. And the background to this is really important. When you talk about a clash of worldviews and you talk about a clash of world powers, a lot of this is driven by domestic concerns here in the United States, but the other part of what is driving this is concern about the influence of a nation like China, an adversary nation by specific US declaration, an adversary nation that is seeking, and in some cases achieving, significant interest right here close to the United States of America. The encirclement of the United States by Chinese interests under the direction of the Chinese Government and indeed the Chinese Communist Party, that is a part of the Belt and Road Initiative that China has undertaken, it’s a part of the development of relationships.

So, where did that explode under the news? It exploded, I think, most interestingly when it comes to Panama and the Panama Canal. Now, President Trump, even as President-elect Trump, shocked a lot of people by his talk about the Panama Canal, and by his statement that it’s vital to US interests, and that Chinese control or the threat of Chinese control over the Panama Canal is unacceptable. Now, here’s the thing. Many of the mainstream media have run off on this as if it’s a crazy idea, but we need to point to the fact that many Democrats as well as many Republicans share the same concern, and actually share the same conviction or the same judgment. They’re just not saying so so publicly. And of course, a part of what President Trump does as compared to other politicians is he offers leadership by thinking out loud. He enjoys thinking out loud. He enjoys the effect of thinking out loud.

But President Trump in this case has not just thought out loud, he also sent his Secretary of State, a Secretary of State who is the first Hispanic or Latino Secretary of State in US history. And he went to Panama and he met with Panama’s President, and he made very clear that it is unacceptable to the United States that a company controlled by the Chinese Communist Party could have control over the ports on, in the case of what’s now true, both ends of the Panama Canal. That’s just not acceptable. It is not consistent with the security needs of the United States of America. It’s not consistent with the Monroe Doctrine, I would point out, handed down by President James Monroe in 1823, that said it is in the national interest of the United States that we exercise the determination that foreign interests, in particular in his day, European interests, could not seek to control significant territory in Central or South America, in North or South America as continental realities.

Now we’re looking at an updating of this plan, but we also need to understand that this is a struggle that’s gone back a long time. And so even though it kind of exploded into the headlines, we need to understand, there is a story here. That story is really interesting. That story takes us back to the 19th century, and even further back in one sense, when the European powers, having mapped out Central America for the first time, noticed this isthmus where the Pacific and the Atlantic are so close together, separated by less than 100 miles. And the idea was if we could just build some kind of canal there, we could have a shortcut which could make all the difference in the world in economic or in military terms between the two great oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Okay, so the United States, and the Monroe Doctrine is behind this, the United States understood that it would build this canal. And frankly, it went through all kinds of political and military interventions to make that possible. Basically sequestering some land in Northern Columbia, declaring it to be a part of Panama, and then bringing influence on Panama to offer legal cover for the United States to move into building the canal. And then it administered the canal in what was declared to be a canal zone, virtually transforming traffic between the two oceans and transforming world trade in that matter, and also American military influence by the building and the maintenance of this canal.

But there were pressures, especially in the last half of the 20th century, given the backlash to imperialism and so many other things, that the canal needed to be under Panamanian control and even under Panamanian ownership. And thus, there was a treaty that was devised under President Carter, and thus, eventually the Panama Canal was repatriated to Panama. President Jimmy Carter was very clear about this. When he was running for the 1976 Presidential Nomination, then former Governor Ronald Reagan, former Governor of California, ran on a platform of opposing the transfer of the Panama Canal, but nonetheless, it was transferred, and by 1999, it was under the full control of Panamanians. Now, the largest number of registered ships going through the Panama Canal continues to be American traffic. It continues to be largely that American transport, but you are looking at the deliberate intentional strategy of China to gain control over many of these choke points. And that’s exactly what President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have said is not acceptable.

Now, what exactly will go on in, let’s just say the negotiations or the posturings between the United States and Panama? My guess is that the bottom line is that there will be some kind of acceptable ownership and administration of the canal and of those ports, or the United States will perhaps even take military action. And I know there are people saying, “The United States doesn’t do that,” but let me remind you that the United States has done that before, military action in Panama, indeed, as recently as 1989, 1990, in which the United States invaded Panama in order to help bring about the fall of the regime of a military strongman, Manuel Noriega, and he was removed and replaced with a Democratic government. But it’s still true that Panama is kind of defining its own political reality.

I landed in Panama City as a newspaper editor just after the military toppling of the Noriega Government. The Commandancia downtown was still in Panama City smoldering when I arrived in the city. And as an American journalist, had the very first interview with the new Panamanian President, Guillermo Endara, there in the cathedral, by the way, in Panama City. He wanted to sit in the cathedral in front of the Pieta in order to make certain that there will be less likelihood he’d be assassinated because the assassins, being presumably coming from a Catholic background, would not dare to shoot him in the cathedral in front of that statue. Interesting footnote in history.

But all this just reminds us that China is a malign influence seeking to have control over choke points, strategic assets all over the world. It is doing this in Africa, it’s doing this in South America, it’s doing this in Asia, even doing this in the Middle East. It is seeking influence by building infrastructure and controlling that infrastructure often through shadow companies, some of them now, by the way, headquartered in Hong Kong, which you’ll recall was returned to Mainland China just in recent decades. There’s more to this story of course.

There are commercial relations, there are fees charged in terms of the traffic through the canal, but in worldview analysis, what I want to point out is that if you have a nation like the United States, and if you have the declaration, the understanding very early in our national history that what happens in a place like, say, Panama is in the national interest of the United States and has a good deal to do with the eventual survival of the United States, then you can look at the kinds of statements made by President Trump, the kind of message taken by Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and you understand that if you’re in Panama, you better hear these words as very, very serious.

That’s not to say they can’t be delivered in a respectful way, but it is to say that, at the end of the day, the United States cannot allow an adversary power to have control over a choke point like this. And you can argue about how that should be communicated, but the bottom line is, evidently, it has been communicated.