Timothy Goeglein of Focus on the Family joins the RCP podcast on Friday to discuss his new book, “What Really Matters: Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family,” and why more young Americans appear to be turning back toward faith. “People of goodwill on both sides of the political aisle are particularly concerned about the lowest marriage and fertility rates in recorded American history,” he said. “But there are various factors in this very distracted digital age contributing to the things we’re talking about today.” “I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but really it’s different since COVID,” he said. “It’s easy to forget how much brokenness this rising generation of young Americans have really lived through.” Goeglein also argues that the resurgence of faith is “absolutely real,” particularly among young men. “Counterintuitively, even in urban and blue areas, which before COVID seemed to be at a plateau or declining in faith, all of a sudden there is a resurgence,” Goeglein said. “I think it is rooted in this plague of loneliness. I write at length about the huge percentage of American men who say they have no friends. “This combination of spiritual resurgence and seeking a community, seeking fellowship, connection, continuity, I think it all goes together for this kind of restoration that we are witnessing. “Reliable, empirical data confirms that there are large percentages of young American men who want to be married. They want to have children. They want to be in a faith community. And they view life, broadly speaking, in a way that is far more traditional than we have seen in this demographic in the last decade. It’s different.” He also argued that cultural and political polarization is partly driven by the displacement of religion. “I think history bears it out. In the Revolution, in the Civil War, and the moral and social revolution of the ’60s, we were quite deeply polarized,” he said. “I think man is inherently spiritual, but when you are constantly told not to express this in public, you’re not going to express it in private life.” “This passion does find an outlet, not in religion, faith, or things of the spirit, as Calvin Coolidge called them, but in a very raw politics.”
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