My students report an alarming fact. They live in an environment, they say, in which there is casual sex, but no casual dating. Why would that be?
One reason there might be so little casual dating is because of the widespread presumption that a date is supposed to lead to casual sex. Thus, if you’re the type of person who isn’t interested in casual sex—and studies suggest that, more and more, young people aren’t—then you probably shy away from “dates” with all the baggage that might come along with it.
In one sense, there is something good about this. If more young people are avoiding situations where casual sex is expected, so much the better. It’s not that they don’t want sex; it’s usually the case that they’ve been hurt badly, or they know others who have been hurt badly, and they would prefer not to get burned again. This is sensible, but also a little tragic. It’s a shame that the errors of the “sexual revolution” of the Boomer generation continue to infect the culture so that we can’t have nice things anymore, like civilized public spaces and innocent dating.
That’s one way of looking at it. But the problems may lie even deeper. It’s easy to blame the Boomers and the sexual revolution. (I just did.) It’s harder to accept that the problems may have infected some of our most basic cultural presuppositions, even those we consider pure and virtuous.
Considerations from the perspective of biological adulthood
Let’s consider the problem from a different perspective. What if (as I think a study of history would show) wise cultures recognize that young women become biologically adult—that is to say, they can reproduce the species—at roughly 13 or 14, and that young men, who are usually a few years behind, become biologically adult at 15 or 16. Having recognized this biological fact, wise cultures take serious steps to ensure that these young adults who are now biologically capable of reproducing the species will soon be socially capable of doing so.
In such cultures, children are allowed to be children until 12 or 13. They are allowed to play; they are encouraged to explore the world in wonder; and they are never made the subject of sexual interest, as it would be inappropriate for their stage of development. But at 12 or 13, they are usually taken from among their playmates and thereafter will spend most of their time with adults, getting ready to enter the adult world. At 13, young men were apprenticed. On farms, most young men and women at that age were already involved in working the family farm. But at 13 or 14, the responsibilities and obligations would increase. The goal was to make these young people ready for adulthood and adult responsibilities, to family and society. Wise cultures understood that those biological desires for sexual union would likely soon be in force, so they had better make these young people ready to discipline those energies and turn them into something fruitful.
What do we do? When our young people get to be 13 or 14, we have them spend all their time with other teens, where they will certainly never get good advice on sex, marriage, work, or most of the other things they need to know to have a happy, flourishing adulthood. Thus, most of our time is spent disabusing teens of the utterly disastrous things they were told by their fellow teens or those who specialize in marketing things to teens by appealing to their insecurities or their ill-formed desires.
Because we have lived with it so long, we fail to realize that we created something we call “adolescence.” The word adolescens goes back to ancient Latin. But if you were an “adolescent” in the Roman world, you were a “young adult” being prepared to be a full-fledged adult, so you had to shut up and learn. In our culture, adolescence often means a period of development when young people have all or most of the freedoms of adulthood, but with few or none of the responsibilities.
The culture of expressive, autonomous individualism and “unencumbered selves”
During this time, they are supposed to “find themselves.” It should not be surprising, given our modern creation of adolescence, if what they find is that they are basically what sociologists Robert Bellah described as “expressive individualists.” What they find is that they are a “self-creating, autonomous self”— or what political philosopher Michael Sandel calls an “unencumbered self.”
According to this conception of the individual, persons are not obligated to fulfill ends or purposes they have not chosen — ends given by nature or God, or by their identities as members of “families, peoples, cultures, or traditions.” An “encumbered identity,” entailed by membership in such groups, is assumed to be antagonistic to the conception of the person as “free and independent, unencumbered by aims and attachments it does not choose for itself….”
The problem with this view, as Prof. Sandel argues, is that this view of the self “cannot account for certain moral and political obligations that we commonly recognize, even prize.” These include “obligations of solidarity with the poor and disadvantaged, religious duties such as the obligation to treat the dead with respect, and other moral ties such as those to family and/or extended family which may lay claim on us prior to our choosing them.”
So too, another problem is that, as Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out, to become these “self-creating, autonomous selves”—or what he terms “independent practical reasoners”—we must be raised and guided by those who have been willing to make our good their own apart from any expectation of recompense. In other words, the creation of “self-creating, autonomous, expressive selves” depends on the help and guidance of those who have devoted themselves to us selflessly and thus have not devoted themselves to being “self-creating, autonomous, expressive selves.” Self-creating, autonomous, expressive selves do not generally take it upon themselves to produce children to whom they must devote themselves selflessly.
The result is this: My students, even the best of them, when asked, “Are you ready for kids?” will reply: “Absolutely not!” Nothing in society has prepared them to make the needs of others their own, and they are aware of this lack, even if implicitly. They aren’t ready to “compromise” on their trajectory of expressive individualism, and that trajectory has rarely been expressed to them as something that involves the self-giving of marriage and family.
They have been trained to think of “rights”, not of “responsibilities” or “obligations.” The most driven and intense of them have often been parented with a kind of selfless seriousness that they would consider stifling. They live in a culture that says, “Well, you might have some casual sex—it happens—but do not get pregnant and don’t get married. These things ‘tie you down.’” And you need to “become yourself” first and create your own expressive identity.
Waiting … how long?
Now, consider the paradox that such autonomous “unencumbered” selves find themselves in when they reach biological adulthood. When these teens reach the age when their sexual yearning is brimming, those who care about their welfare as autonomous, self-creating, expressive selves tell them—to wait.
How long?
In the 1950s, it was hard enough to get young people to wait until they finished high school. Now we tell them to wait until they’re done with college … and graduate school … and have a job. So, maybe until they’re 25 or 30. Really? They can at 16, and we expect them to wait another 10, 15, or 20 years? We are cruel or stupid.
Of course, most people don’t really expect young people to wait. Hence, the acceptance of some “experimental,” “casual” sex. It would be “unhealthy” to wait, wouldn’t it? Or so psychology (since Freud) has insisted. You’ve got to “get out there” and “get some experience.” Too often, this is the experience of some severe heartbreak. (On this, see the chapter on “The Shadow Side of Sexual Liberation” in Christian Smith’s book Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood.)
But these things sounded so good on paper when couched in terms like “liberation” and “psycho-sexual development.”
Why date if there’s no courtship?
Now consider the situation of a young man and woman in high school or college living with these cultural expectations.
The results can be predicted. Why date? Dating is a form of courtship, and the one thing they know is that they’re not ready for kids and not ready for marriage. Thus, “getting serious” is out of the question.
So what would dating be for, then? If not courtship, its sole remaining purpose would be as a precursor to a sexual hookup. This is looked down upon, but permitted, as long as pregnancy is avoided or abortions are available for those “in need” of this form of “liberation.” If you’ve been raised to stay away from such things the way you’ve been raised to avoid smoking and drugs, then just as you, if you’re a “good kid,” generally avoid parties and bars where there is a lot of smoking and drugs, so too, you stay away from dating that might lead to hookups, because the results can be equally disastrous to your future. To the extent that hooking up has become a widespread expectation in the culture—it was what rushed in to fill the void left by “no courtship”—those who aren’t interested in hooking up will date little or not at all.
There never really was any “casual” dating. Dating has always been associated with potential courtship. If you’re not interested in courtship, what do you do? You go out with friend groups in which there might be some of the opposite sex. And you might become good friends with some of them. But “dating” as something serious? Since it comes with all this emotional or biological baggage, absolutely not.
Am I suggesting that 14- or 15-year-olds get married? I am always asked this question, so let me address it directly. Given what I’ve said above, the answer should be an obvious no. No way. Ours is a culture that has studiously avoided, almost entirely, preparing young people for marriage and family. Thus, one should expect that, even if people get married at 25 or 30, many marriages will fail. And that is what we find. A culture that spends years and years trying to get its young people ready for jobs (and can’t even do that especially well) but spends almost no time whatsoever preparing them for the responsibilities of marriage and family—what would you expect?
You should expect exactly what we have. It’s not happy. In fact, it’s mostly tragic. But like many things that are bad for us that we’ve become accustomed to, we’re not likely to give it up anytime soon. I get that.
Please, though, in the meantime, don’t complain about how there’s no dating. Until and unless we deal with these more fundamental issues, encouraging them to “date” would just be leading these young people into some meaningless encounters that simulate something from the past. But the whole reason for that activity has now been lost, so it’s not really dating anyway. It would mostly be a counterfeit of the real thing. Young people aren’t stupid; they know this.
When they’re ready for marriage and family, they’ll date. It won’t be easy because, at that point, they’ll be trying to put their “unencumbered autonomous” lives together with other autonomous “unencumbered” selves. But until marriage and family become a possibility for them — until it is supported culturally as part and parcel of a flourishing human life — “dating” is pointless. Or worse yet, it’s likely to be a rocky road to some serious heartbreak.
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Excellent article.. excellent advice..
About autonomous selves and the disastrous hookup culture, the next iteration is autonomous selves fixated entirely on their own bodies or else totally self-estranged: the abandoned and victimized recent generations of LGBTQ tribalist and even transgenders.
Rather than engaging in the formidable task of reconstructing the culture from the ground up one courtship at a time, as Randall Smith counsels, instead we get the ambiguous chapter 8 and footnote in Laudato Si (2015) about “irregular couples” and then—connecting the dots—the straight line (the only thing “straight”) into sorta blessing the failed culture one “couple” at a time, under the facile Cardinal Fernandez’s Fiducia Supplicans (2023).
When the world’s cardinals are assembled, as announced by Pope Leo XIV in Rome in January 2026, we hope that if Smith’s tattered youth subculture is on the agenda, then that the 17 steadfast and dissenting cardinals from Africa, and many others, are given more of a “listening” moment than, say, Jimmy Martin at the “aggregating, collating, and synthesizing” Synod on Synodality.
Or the dehumanizing of sex altogether and resorting to robotic sexual pleasure.
The solution to the current woeful state of marriage is very simple. No sexual intercourse outside of marriage which can only happen between one male and one female. If you adhere to this rule, you have an infinitely greater chance of having a successful marriage. Now, to all you clerics out there: preach this from your pulpits.
You’re correct Deacon. Although it will take a sea change of moral values, appreciation of the beauty of purity and chastity. Clerics can make a big difference, although the effort must be concerted. Those of us aware and willing are indebted to do our part.
The key is the spiritual intellectual cultivation of the most intimate of human acts, that finds its full realization, and personification of love in the union of one particular man and one singular woman.
Dr. Smith,
Having spent a couple decades with the 13–14-year-old crowd in Catholic Schools, I have come across dozens of females who are socially and spiritually ready for marriage. The number of males would be very few in any.
Here are a few strong solutions that would greatly improve percentage of good, holy young couples seeking marriage before they’re waning years of fertility:
1) State-funded public education, one of the worst injustices in the west, should be abandoned, nearly completely. The only public schools should be for the poorest of the poor and for the handicapped. The high percentage of liberal feminists reigning in education is pretty well established.
2) Parents would have the option of homeschooling or religion based schools.
3) Science and the church have stated unequivocally that Co-Education is harmful, particularly to boys. It must eliminated, especially in Catholic Schools.
4) Any adults responsible for the formation of youth must eliminate the mindset that if a child does not go to college, he is a failure and a waste. So many even Catholic schools care way too much about metrics: scholarships, graduation rates, ACT scores, number of extracurriculars etc..
5) Instead, the metrics that matter are: marriage rates of graduates, vocations, number of former students who are actively practicing their faith. These things matter.
So many kids in both Catholic and public education systems have been robbed. They have been lied to and told that they have the future in the palm of their hands and that they can be whatever they want to be. I have heard a principal say this to students.
They have never been asked: what does God want from you in this life? They have never been told that every person has an inherent call to maternity or paternity. Boys scarcely have been given an example of a hard day of physical labor and that their oodles of energy has purpose. Girls have been told they can have it all on their time and that marriage, motherhood, family life are subservient to one’s career. The educational czars fail to mention waning fertility if one does not prioritize family life in one’s twenties.
As Dr. Smith suggested, the present trajectory does not look good. However, souls are changed one at a time. Let us all work on the ones nearest to us, especially exuding the joy and peace of the domestic church.
Ave Maria!
Joseph: You offer some very sage ideas.
“I have come across dozens of females who are socially and spiritually ready for marriage.”
“The number of males would be very few in any.”
I’m sorry, but that’s indefensible. Males are spectacularly immature, but females are just unspectacularly immature at that age.
They are still girls, rather than women then and we don’t allow them to drive, vote, consume alcohol, execute contracts, enlist in the military or own firearms for a reason.
Not only do they not have the “life experience” that would afford them the ability to function in the world as independent adults-responsible for marriage and children- especially in ambiguous or hostile situations-but the brain doesn’t fully develop physically until the mid-to-late 20s, specifically the prefrontal cortex. This area is responsible for skills like planning, prioritizing, discerning higher order effects-the attributes of good decisions.
They may be appear compliant and cooperative, rather than showing the rebelliousness and competitiveness typical of males of the same age, but they aren’t ready for marriage. Since we agree that males of that age are unready, that would mean they would have to marry older males.
I know of no responsible father who would let think of letting his 13 year old daughter go on a date with a 16 year old, forget somebody old enough to be a responsible sole provider-since a 13 year old has no legal capacity or marketable skills for employment.
School is a constrained environment with adults establishing agendas, expectations and schedules. Adults need to do that on their own, with their own wherewithal.
PR,
I appreciate your response and I agree with much of it.
What I did say was spiritually and socially. I did not say anything about realistically, truly, and economically.
My point in mentioning it is that there is a grotesque divide that is perpetuated by public and co-education that further distances the sexes. They are not ready for marriage at a particular age because they have been together with opposite sex age mates for more than a decade. Thus, they cannot “find” themselves until much later if ever.
I would suggest looking into the work of Dr. Leonard Sax who discusses the gender differences in brain development of adolescents. There is a reason why the church has permitted 14 year-old girl to get married. Her ( the church’s) wisdom is always a few steps ahead of science.
Two questions that parents, pastors, catechists, and teachers need to consider: when a young lady is ready to get married in the 14 to 19 range and she is told to wait many years beyond this, is this to her spiritual advantage?
Second: what can we do to help the 16 to 20 year-old male demographic become prepared for family life? Teaching them the value of good hard physical labor would be a start.
Sending both sexes of the same age off to college arbitrarily has proven to be a disaster.
Ave Maria!
St. Maria Goretti was obviously spiritually developed at age 11, so I suppose it’s not impossible for somebody to attain that dimension of maturity at that age.
However to exclude the possibility of such a thing in boys is ridiculous. A couple of months ago a 13 year old boy named Guage Bryant rescued another child by placing his own life at risk. Had he perished in the effort, he would have exhibited “no greater love”. Others have. St. Carlo Acutis was apparently quite developed from an early age, but was not martyred.
Now as for being “socially” developed, that’s absurd. Part of social development is discretion-something that one gains with experience and maturity. At that age, children and I repeat children are incapable of picking and maintaining friends let alone picking and maintaining spouses. There’s a reason vigilant parents monitor their children’s associations and why youthful marriages require parental consent.
There were a lot of reasons to allow fourteen year old females to get married in the past-but the vast majority of women waited until longer. Part of that was physical maturity- a 14 year old boy simply incapable of competing with even 16 year olds and in the past, a strong back was necessity for fathers as protectors and providers. What is allowable in extremis, isn’t what’s desirable.
I’m not sure what criteria you could apply to make the statements:
“I have come across dozens of females who are socially and spiritually ready for marriage.”
“The number of males would be very few in any.”
but I think there’s some sort of bias or myopia at play here, sorry.
I’ve seen young women that age as well, a younger sister and her friends, now her daughter and her friends. My friends had sisters, and now daughters.
No, they wont butt helmets on the sideline. They paint each others’ faces with school mascots.
We live in an increasingly complicated and hostile world.
I think the real test would be to identify the girls you thought “spiritually and socially ready for marriage” at 13-14, and then ask the people who know them the best and are responsible for their upbringing and see if they agree with your assessment of their readiness. I suspect that the best reaction you would receive is amusement.
Now of course that’s impossible and if you happened to make such an inquiry of me-I’d be so suspicious of any stranger who made that assessment I can almost guarantee we would have an interaction that the other individual would find unpleasant.
PR,
I stand by what I said, having taught hundreds to a thousand or two children over the last twenty-five years, in addition to my own…
Teaching both in a coed and single gender eighth- grade classroom, the difference in the spiritual, cognitive, psychological and moral development between the sexes at that age is extremely convincing to me. They are just not at the same point, especially verbally and socially. FWIW, boys are slightly ahead in math…
My bottom line point is this: the egalitarian (one size fits all) formation of youth of the same age and of a different sex is retardant to their true development. Any school, especially a Catholic one, that refuses to acknowledge these differences in the sexes especially by perpetuating Co-Education, is contributing to the demise of Christian Marriage, the very erosion the author laments in his essay.
A strong challenge to anyone who cares about the formation of youth and the dilapidation of the institution of Catholic marriage: read DIvini Illius Magistri by Blessed Pius XI. Profound and prophetic.
Ave Maria!
Joey, you are literally building an argument for adult males to engage in sexual activity with pre-pubescent and pubescent girls. Is it to a girl’s (aged 14-19) “spiritual advantage” to have creepy adult males preying on them sexually?
There is no justification for your argument whatsoever. You not-so subconsciously believe it is ok and for grown adult males to have sexual relations with GIRLS. This is not ok. At all. Ever.
I worry for all of the girls in your immediate and extended family.
Nicole,
I appreciate your persecution. I am also not sure of your apparent tone. My posts have no other purpose than the love of God and the salvation of souls.
Further, I am not at all sure where you came up with any of your conclusions. Not one iota of it accurately summarizes what I believe or propose.
Dr. Randall Smith, who wrote the article, asks nearly the same question in multiple paragraphs and admits to being regularly asked if 14 year olds should consider marrying today.
I responded to his article that while a young lady may have some virtuous attributes and maturity that might have made her marriageable in an earlier era(or different culture), her male counterparts today are ill-prepared on nearly all levels for such an indissoluble sacramental commitment.
During this time of waiting for the boys to mature, young Catholic ladies of God can find any number of preoccupations that very well could be harmful to their desire for marriage and family, causing the dearth of marriage that the author so laments. This cycle of loneliness is aided and abetted by any educational institution in the USA and the West that emphasizes the superiority of career and financial gain over vocational discernment and/or marriage and family life.
May the blessed Virgin wrap you in her magnificent mantle. Know, too, that you have been recommended to her Most Immaculate Heart.
Ave Maria!
I agree Nicole. It’s just…gross.
I’m beginning to wonder if he’s trolling. My guess is that like many teachers, he values compliance-perhaps submissiveness is the better word- and amiability. Those are the two attributes, when present in a significant number of students reduces the need for “classroom management” and allows for ease and effectiveness of instruction.
Translating that as “socially” and “spiritually” ready for marriage is a quantum leap at odds with human experience. At best, it’s idealistic, at worst it’s crypto-Sharia.
I used to volunteer in a function that had a lot of school groups field tripping for programs that lasted about an hour. One the tasks my role had was obtaining a “customer” count. Inevitably, boys in that age would yell out random numbers if not nipped at the bud, and there was always a ringleader.
The trick was to surveil the group upon entry, identity and assess the ringleader, provide an opening and when they attempted to disrupt the count, crush the informal peer authority in front of the others by holding up a shiny mechanical tally counter and smiling smugly. Just because the girls tended to assemble in their little cliques and typically didn’t challenge authority doesn’t support his claim.
It’s a different world and culture today but most people I know have grandparents who married as teenagers. I have 4 great grandmothers who married between the ages of 12-15.
As recently as the early 1980’s- late 1970s we knew a young mother who had married at 13 with the parents’ and judge’s permission. She and the teenage father had found themselves in a family way and that was considered the best thing to do in the interest of their little boy. It worked out ok because the grandparents supported them and helped out.
My great grandmother was a teenager, but she was 17, not 13 or 14. My great grandfather was three of four years older, but they actually faced a test in that he emigrated first, working on a freighter, then as a miner after Ellis Island. When he sent money back for his wife’s passage, she left a mother pregnant with her youngest sibling, one she would never meet or know. No 13 or 14 year old could do what they did.
The situation you note actually proves the point. The marriage was a “shotgun wedding” of extraordinary circumstances, it required two levels of adult consent and special intergenerational support.
For sure. US Girls of 13 weren’t married in the last 40-50 years unless they were expecting a child & then only with parental & a judicial permission as an humane exception to the rules so the child could be born within wedlock.
But earlier, 13-15 year old marriages weren’t that uncommon. My son in law’s great grandma passed away several years ago. She’d been married at 15.I’ve met other older ladies like that.
I have a more distant great grandmother who was married at 12 to a young man in his 20’s. Pretty similar to the age difference between E.A. Poe & his wife. She also left her family back in Europe never to see them again. After being widowed at the age of 31 with 9 children she found herself on the losing side in a war & became a refugee living in a tent with her children in Nova Scotia.
I told my grandchildren whenever things seem trying & difficult I think of their ancestors in that refugee camp in the Canadian winter.
I’m sure your ancestors were made of tough stuff, too.
🙂
PR,
I am responding to this as it would not let me respond to post where you accused me of trolling.
I have been accused of multiple offenses ad hominem in these comments.
We all know the final battle will be over the family. Instead of attacking and accusing, why don’t we simply stick to refuting purported falsehood and defending positions?
The last thing I will say: the best marriages I know are the ones where mom and dad have made a conscious effort to pray the family Rosary together every day. If we want to help youth prepare for the sacrifice necessary for true commitment to vocation and move them to God’s will in their lives, convincing them of the true efficacy of this central Marian devotion in their formative years is a giant first step.
Thanks again for the dialogue. I pray that our blessed Lady will keep you ever in her magnificent mantle.
Ave Maria!
The canonical age for marriage until recent times was 12 for girls and 14 for boys. Royalty and elites were often betrothed in childhood and consummated their marriage when they came of age. The rules now say 14 for girls and 16 for boys.
The ancient Roman and Patristic practice was marrying 12 year old girls to men in their 30s. The pious widows clustered around St. Jerome came from such unions. This pattern of wedding girls early persisted in southeastern Europe into modern times, along with extended family structures but the northwest European pattern was delayed marriage and nuclear families. Medieval English commoners married in their early 20s. Early Modern French commoners on average married in their late 20s while the nobility simply forbade a third of their children to marry at all. The French system was enforced by strict supervision of the young and cruel sanctions on illegitimacy. People in the US and Canada usually married earlier and had more children than their relatives back in England and Europe. From doing genealogical research on German, French, and English ancestors I don’t find 18th and 19th C ancestors marrying in their early teens. Over here, my German immigrant great-great grandmother was 18 but my grandmother was 26 at marriage.
Long on insights, short on solutions.
Br. Jaques: feel free to inform the rest of us.
Br. Jacques doesn’t understand there are no “solutions” in culture change.
An awakening, revival?
Br. Jacques, Consider taking up the task of lecturing your liberal wing to not treat chastity as a dirty word.
“My students, even the best of them, when asked, “Are you ready for kids?” will reply: “Absolutely not!””
This is not strictly a matter of school-taught selfishness. It is also a practical problem. Most families have only one or two children. Schools, and most after-school activities, are rigidly age-separated. Home Ec and shop classes are things of the past, and the percentage of children raised in a one-parent household is hovering near half (which means *neither* parent can pass on as many life skills, since each is trying to manage a job and a household and therefore will be lacking the time and mental bandwidth to slow down and teach everything they do).
I’ve met too many teenage boys who can’t pound in a nail. “Improving self-esteem” cannot provide competence, nor can it indefinitely trick young adults into thinking that they are competent. They need someone to bother with teaching them.
I will also add: young ladies on hormonal contraception become physiologically less interested in marriage and children, and young men on porn likewise. The beginnings of those problems are on those that raised and taught and doctored them. The solution is on the young people themselves, with the grace of God.
Amanda: Excellent! I’d like everyone to imagine that Amanda’s ideas expressed above are inserted into a homily and preached from every Catholic pulpit. One could only guess at what power such Truth would unleash onto the world.
My 18 year old grandson is shipping out to the Marines boot camp on Tuesday. God bless him. 🙏
I think that some kind of mandatory military or community service such as Israel has for young people would be a great idea to adopt.
God bless him. It will be tough but worthwhile. Speaking from experience, tell him to get in good physical shape and maintain a sense of humor. My years in the Corps were a great experience. Travel the world and meet many interesting people. Your grandson has many great adventures ahead of him. Semper Fidelis.
Thank you very much William. 🙂
Mrscracker: agreed…my prayers for your grandson.
A belated thank you also, Deacon Edward.
🙂
Not that I have a problem with military folks, but absolutely not. The military is not something everyone is cut out for, and we are certainly not in the same situation as Israel, security-wise. There is a common good argument for conscription in times of national self-defense, there is no argument for forcing young people to give up several years of their lives (or life itself) to do the bidding of politicians who already have far too much power. Not to mention, if you object to the brainwashing the public schools impose and which we see in colleges, forced military service, particularly for the purpose of social improvement, would guarantee that the military would be turned into an extension of that, under even more controlling conditions.
I think the solution *might* be for parents to actually bother to parent, and for others in the local community to step up when they don’t. Maybe even when the kids are still kids and are hungry for adult guidance.
Prayers for your grandson.
Thank you so much Amanda. I appreciate that very much.
I just read that France is looking at a national service program.
It doesn’t have to be military service or more than 18 months but I really believe young people would benefit in serving their nation and their communities. And getting off their phones. My grandson had to leave his at home and his father is expecting his first letter to arrive today.
We’ve spent the last 60-years praying for vocations under the presumption that we did not need to pray for holy marriages. We were wrong. We’ve been red-pilled. We had better find a way to pray for marriage now, too. In every parish I have attended both my wife and I are alarmed at the number of late-20’s, 30’s, even 40’s aged parishioners that are not marriage and no dating. It’s alarming to say the least.
Excellent piece. Lots of common-sense wisdom. As a high school administrator for a number of years, I discouraged any dances that required dates (including proms). In the current culture, dating generally has no good results. Kids need to socialize in groups and learn to enjoy each other’s company without the pressure to pair off on their way into Noah’s ark.
An “awakening” would be an endogenous emergent phenomena.
A “solution” is typically an exogenous planned effort. In cultural, social or political matters, there are no “solutions” there are only tradeoffs.
A couple of hundred years ago, it wasn’t uncommon to castrate young male vocalists to preserve their soprano? voice. The world seems to have rid itself of barbaric mutilations to appeal to a peculiar aesthetic desire-now we’re removing not only reproductive organs but breasts in order to appeal to a deviant desire.
Wonderful article.
Past time to wake up.