OPINION:
Is America experiencing a values revival — or is the culture war just getting started?
Tim Goeglein, Vice President of External and Government Relations for Focus on the Family, joins Washington Times Commentary Editor Kelly Sadler on Politically Unstable to discuss declining marriage rates, the return to faith among young Americans, navigating the digital age, and his new book, “What Really Matters: Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family.”
[SADLER] So Tim, could you — what do you discuss in the book? What is it about? Why should readers pick it up?
[GOEGLEIN] I’m one of the vice presidents at Focus on the Family, and I shepherd our Washington office. And in my professional life of the last 18 years at Focus on the Family, I travel a lot, almost every week — California to Maine, Minnesota to Florida. And I think it’s fair to say that everywhere I go, whether the audience, as it were, is left, right, or center, people are deeply and profoundly concerned about the things that I wanted to write about. And so I decided to pen a book called “What Really Matters,” which is, as you say, primarily focused on marriage, family, parenting, human life, religious liberty, conscience rights, parental rights, and the objective meaning of pronouns.
And I think we’ve all learned — and some of us have learned in more difficult ways than others — that when you step in front of many audiences in our beloved country and you speak about the goodness of marriage, the goodness of children, the goodness of being part of a faith community, unfortunately, sometimes those are seen as fighting words.
I’m an inveterate optimist, and I decided to write a book that would look at how we might think about restoring some of the most important institutions that we have. So that’s the derivation of the book, “What Really Matters.”
[SADLER] I find it troubling. There was a new study that came out — Heritage has been actually working on it — looking at marriage rates, and marriage rates are declining. And younger people are not wanting to enter into the institution. Recently, there was a kerfuffle on The View responding to a CPAC panelist saying that women should get married and have kids as soon as possible, and those women being very, very upset at that comment, saying, “You can’t control my ovaries and my bank account,” and that this is a financial decision that feminists should be making, and it was a very anti-feminist message.
What do you make of all of this, of this cultural debate that we’re having right now?
[GOEGLEIN] I am familiar, actually, with that panel discussion and with the debate. And I encourage — I know you do, too — I encourage this kind of national discussion, because it points up this most troubling time that we find ourselves in. That when you look at the empirical data, as I have done and written about at length in “What Really Matters” and in the Washington Times, when you look at all the empirical data — and “all” can be a very dangerous word — but when you look at all the most important empirical data about what is best for the rising generation of young Americans, what you find overwhelmingly is that the best way to guarantee the success of the next generation of Americans is in intact, functioning families, and ideally with a father and a mother.
And by the way, I’m eager to know of one important study that does not confirm that — that young people do best when they grow up in a home with their mother and father. They do best educationally. They do best on a host of measurables.
And yet when you make a statement like the one that was made by our friends at CPAC, these immediately become, in this aggressive secular culture that we find ourselves in sometimes, we find them to be most unfortunately attacked for reasons that are very often mostly irrational or without a basis in fact.
Watch the video for the full conversation.
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