Transcripts For CSPAN2 In 20240703

Revisited. Host author Mary Eberstadt, where why are there two versions of your book . Mary there are actually two books. The first was written about 10 years ago called adam and eve after the pill. It is about about a decade later, i published adam and eve after the pill, revisited which looks at society and christianity itself. We are taking in the biggest possible terrain. Host what are some of those macro trends that you have noticed . Mary it is a big story, but lets try to do the short version. I have been interested in tracing the faultlines that are beneath society as we know it. I am not a reporter. I tried to get underneath at the big things that are transforming our world. One of these things is the sexual revolution and the collapse of christianity, which begins in the early 1960s. Now, what is the effect of these trends . One thing that has happened is that emilys have gotten smaller. Families are more broken than they used to be. Many people live alone, who did not used to. This has been a transformative effect on our world, i think. The collapse of the family has meant that we are sending more people into the world that do not have asked. With the primal community, the community of the family. This is what we talked about on the surface, when we talk about the divisiveness of our politics, for example. When we talk about the fact that people seem polarized and at each others throat, i believe that this are they cumulated back that have resulted in children who are less socialized. They have resulted in people who know less about each other as human being. Host we are going to show a headline on the Boston Herald in the 1960s. This is about the fda proven contraceptives pill. You can see it on the screen. You can see it there. In your view, that event changed the world. Is that fair to say . Mary i think it was the most transformative thing since eve took the apple from the garden of eden. A transformed relations men and women, first of all. We have to go back to the early 19 to realize that people thought this would be a positive thing. They thought it would strengthen marriage by giving people more power over their fertility. They thought it would strengthen society because women would be able to join the work force in droves in longer tied to a large family. But something strange happened during the next few years. Instead of strengthening marriage, contraception had a distrust is effect. Suddenly, divorce is skyrocketed and cohabitation also skyrocketed. Abortions became legal and there were millions of those. So what happens here . Why is the thing that was supposed to liberate humanity having such a negative effect . Economists have looked at this and they believe that what happened was that the Birth Control pill meant that men were no longer responsible. There was no such thing as a shotgun wedding, which is a phrase that some listeners may not have heard. But if a woman. Pregnant, the man was held responsible. Birth control was a game changer in this way because it meant that women were how were held accountable, usually exclusively , whether or not they became, it was a womans problem, a womans issue. Simultaneously, that makes the man less relevant. There is a wonderful sociologist who wrote a book called the decline of males over 20 years ago, and he argued that the pill had essentially sidelined men. They were not needed anymore. Only when are in control of their fertility. These are seismic changes in relationships between men and women. Today, then we talk about men, i think that we are is the latest in this trend that i am describing that began in the early 1960s. Host you write a in adam and eve after the pill, revisited, that since the pill has been introduced, there has been a rise in abortions and unwanted pregnancy is. Mary that is why my first book talked about the paradoxes of the sexual revolution because a lot of the fallout was unexpected. I once me clear that i am not being mono causal. That is a bad word. Im not saying there is one cause or the deterioration that layers around us that is the one cause that has not been addressed sufficiently in sociology or by church leaders, or by others in authority. It is something that has become hard to talk about. I think we need to talk about it. What we did in the 1960s and beyond it began some of the worst problems of our time, i believe. Host just to give you is an idea of the themes that you are talking about in your book, you can expand on any of them that you want. A short quote, the sexual revolution endures, second to none. Second quote, six decades of social science establish that the most fish and play to decrease dysfunction is to increase fatherlessness. Third quote, christian believers are in open, Uncharted Waters and finally, post 1960s disorder was indeed generating casualties of all kinds. Anything that you would like to expand on . Mary all of it. I went to start with the idea of casualties. Everybody knows that these subjects are difficult. Everyone is in a family that is affected by all of the train under discussion. When i raise the issue of fatherlessness, i am not trying to point and make people do bad, i am trying to connect. So that the generations to come after may suffer a little less from the trends that we are describing. After the first adam and eve looked came out 10 years ago, there was one thing that surprised, the emotional resident of the book. This was not a selfhelp book. It was an undertaking to discuss the effects of the sexual revolution, anthropology it had nothing to do with theology. None of my books depend on the elegy at all. But i was very surprised by leaders who got in touch by email to say that this chapter on pornography really resonated with me. Let me tell you this story about how it destroyed my marriage. And they were even harder stories that i heard from all over. The sexual revolution is having negative consequence is that were not well understood. It seems to be vindicated by these personal stories, these raw testimonials people who wanted to talk about how they were worried about raising their child without a father, for example. There was a lot of emotional resonance and intensity that i did not expect. That is part of why i continue to look at that subject, resulting in the second book. Host one of the adam and eve books, you talk about a High School Girl in 1972, who was, and it was quite a scandal. Today, that does not raise an eyeblink. Mary that is a snapshot that tells us how the world changed after the 19. The story goes like this. I grew up in upstate new york. Down the street, at one point was a young teenager who got pregnant. It was the talk of the neighborhood because the father, who was a young soldier, did not intend to marry her. Needless to say, the scandal was not about her. What was thought scandalous was that she would be a single mother. She went away and had the baby, and returned to school. There was no social program, to my knowledge, that was directed at her. 20 years later, i lent back and was talking to a former teacher. She said a third of the girls graduating high school that year were pregnant. None of them were married. In this 20 year gap, i see what was repeated in america by the millions, where no longer was it thought that pregnancy is something that two people are responsible for. Suddenly, only one person, a frightened young woman, was responsible for it. That was a civilizational backwards. Host how to did you go from rural new york to washington . Mary i was fortunate. I went to Cornell University on eighth ownership. After that, i thought i might want to be last professor. I double majored, but i decided to take a year off. I started writing and i became involved in the work of you are journalism, especially the smaller, intellectual magazine. Back then, in the 1980s, they were very exciting place is to write for and to hang out in. I ended up as the assistant editor. And from there, i ended up doing some loose writing for some major officials in the reagan administration. One was Jeanne Kirkpatrick and from there, and it up each writing secretary of the george shultz. Host what is your fulltime job, currently . Mary we have four children and there is that. I did very little writing for about the, as they were growing up. Once they were in school, i came back to this. I am a Senior Research scholar and also, i hold a chair in washington dc. Host is it fair to say that you are a practicing catholic . Mary i try. Host your book adam and eve after the pill, revisited was written after Cardinal George fell. Who is that . Mary he was a very inspirational spiritual leader. I would not pretend that i knew him well, but he was kind enough to take an interest in of my writing. We had corresponded about some of the scenes in my book. For example, one thing that caught his eye was a meditation that i will about the theme of chaos. In 1930, when the great novelist converted to catholicism, he was asked by a newspaper why he did that. He just said, because in our civilization the chaos of his time was very different in the 1930s, the interwar. There was the carnage of the century. The chaos in our time is very different, yet you are seeing a in more detail than ever specified. I wrote an essay about that, answering chaos within christianity self. Cardinal george powell, because of the essay offered to write a forward for the book. Host he went on to write that the Church Teaching over the years had been coherent and inconsistent. What did he mean by that . Mary he meant that the Catholic Church stood as a sign of contradiction in the world, that whatever was going on around it, it would continue the same teaching. Teachings go all the way back. When jesus tells the disciples that unlike the jews, his people are not allowed to divorce, for example. The disciples become the first christians complained that these are hard teachings, but there is a consistent there that has drawn people in. All things available to the romans, you name it. Divorce etc. They were off limit to christians. This teaching has not changed. Of course, we talk about mercy and redemption because those are also teaching, but the idea that human beings, if they were christians, were held to a higher standard has been consistent. It has repelled many people end up with the century. It has also drawn many others in. Host i want to go back to a quote that we read earlier. I want to talk about this. Christian believers are in open, Uncharted Waters. Mary under the pressure since the sexual revolution, Chris Kennedy has buckled. What i mean by that is, there is only the desire to accommodate these radical changes in the way that people live. Lets not be judging. Lets just soft peddled the teaching of christianity that people do not like and talk about the teaching they do like. Some churches, mainly protestant churches have completely abandoned these kinds of teachings that go all the way back to jesus. He lightened up on divorce and homosexuality. They lightened up on pretty much anything that the sexual revolution would claim was a prerogative. The interesting thing is the result has been institutional decline for the churches that ran this experiment. The anglican communion, for example, comes to mind. It is collapsing. I read a story recently with a headline that led, will the person to leave english schism please turn out the light . It is not only the anglican communion, every church that went in the nice direction has not flourished as a result. Here we have a paradoxical. Because he would think that being nice would make it more likely that people would show up in your church, but in the opposite is true. What has been learned is that strong churches or strict churches are strong, as the saying goes. The more the churches stick to their original foundations, the more likely they are to pull people in. This does not mean that that cap charge is thriving these days. But the collapse seems to have been worse with the churches that decided to get his the most unwanted teachings, the teachings that make our contemporaries the most uncomfortable. Host tie that into the 19 sees approval of the contraceptive live contraceptive pill. Mary the pill is the biggest temptation of all time. I think sex without consequence would be up there on what people want the most. It was widely embraced by catholics. And yet, what lease always that the churches, including the Catholic Church, shied away from traditional teachings because they did not want to make people uncomfortable in the post revolutionary era. So we have this dynamic where the decline of the family brought on by the pill fuels client and the practice of institutional religion and organize legion. We can talk a lot more about that. Host lets look at your book it is dangerous to believe. For more than two centuries, americans have prided themselves on their commitment to freedom of religion. Leaders who lead in a more secular direction maybe surprised to hear, but in recent years, that historic commitment has come under siege. Mary this is because the sexual revolution is on a collision worse with traditional christianity. There is no getting around it. Traditional christianity had a bedrock of that were unpopular in roman times and when unpopular ever sent. Along comes sexual revolution and its devoted partisans obviously, the opinions i am describing our minority opinions, but the question is, how destructive is that fight . I think it is very destructive of the u. S. Lets talk about how christian adoption agent has been shut down in some. Clearly, the pressure coming at them is from people who want to replace the teachings of christianity with the anything goes sexual revolution. I really believe this has become a rivals to christianity. We have to ask ourselves, is it good for those adoptees to miss out on a loving home just because the parents and it our christian . Is it good for the poor among whom the Little Sisters work with lawsuits about contraception, of all things . Well, who does that help . It does not help the Little Sisters or the poor, so my point is, when we see this collision will receive a 10 to cap good works done by christian, we are seeing something that is bad for the worst off among us, and i do not think this is well understood, but people who are ideological about the sexual revolution go after christian good work, routinely. This is not called out the people who it is hurting called out. Host i want to ask you about the Supreme Court decision on roe v. Wade last year. It affected years of eagle abortion. Should abortion be legal, in your view . Mary i am a constitutionalist and turning the question back to the state was an overdue constitutionalist correction. Dobbs was a very important decision and represent the first time the 1960s that there has been serious, institutional rollback on a question involving the sexual revolution. The Supreme Court says that it is wrong. We need to turn it back to the state. I think it may be a game changer, not only in the u. S. , but elsewhere in the world. What happened after roe v. Wade is that country after country came to adopt similar laws, came to legalize abortion red had always been criminalized. Both countries, i think, both leaders are having second. As well. This decision will reverberate, and i would predict that it would have it affect u. S. Because if there are more babies among us, that would be a humanizing thing, not a bad thing. This is another issue that we should talk about. What humanizes people . It seems like a question. Taking care of those smaller and weaker or older and sicker is one of the ways we are humanized. Additional families, up until the interruption of the 19, this was done routinely. Old people are taking care of and everybody knew what to do with a baby, etc. Im not saying we should go back to the 1950s, which is a decade i live in, but what im saying is babies have good effects, not the thanks, just as having to take care of other people has a good effect on people. With the collapse of the family, i think we have seen a generalized it has increased in our society, as people are out of the pack this of taking care of others. Simultaneously, as christianity is in decline, they are not being told that one of their jobs on earth is to take care of others. These two things have impacted us negatively. Host when you look at the election result, it favored those who are prochoice or favored abortion rate. Realistically, did this decision hurt your view, and a sense . Mary no. I am not a politics first kind of person. I want to know what is really going on out there and i would rather be right than to see my party. Host Mary Eberstadt is our guest and is the author of many books. We want to include you in this as well. Here is how you can participate. The numbers are on your screen. If you cannot get through on the phone line and still want to make a comment, try texting. This is texting number. If you do send a text, please include your first name and your city, if you would. Social media, several ways to contact us as well. Just remember at facebook and twitter. We will begin taking those calls in a few minutes. Mary eberstadts first book came out 2004 called home alone america. She wrote the loser letters in 2010. It is dangerous to believe just freedom and enemies in 2016. And adam and eve after the pill, revisited came out in 2023. The first book came out in 2013, and. We will begin taking questions. Mary eberstadt, the subtitle, how the sexual revolution needed identity politics. Put that together for as. Mary not only the u. S. Many countries in the modern world are in the of an identity crisis. Identity is all around us. Where is this coming from . Getting back to the world before the 1950s there were two answers that russian. One was horizontal and could be answered by my relationship with other men being in a family. If you were to say, who are you . A common response would be, i am a mother, and aunts, a sister, a cousin, and we could find our valves relationship wise that way. Most people have had them believe in the cosmos, and a deity, and a vertical relationship. So what happens when the family scatters and the churches go mute . What happens is that mention a wave of answering that russian of who mis off the table for many people. We see this migration into politics, into identity politics. And there is an important point here that i think is not well understood, especially among conservatives. Conservatives like to poke fun at the idea and call them snowflakes and say that jim he and lemuels are impossible to understand and they are so since it is. But when i look at those generation, i see suffering. I see real suffering, on account of not having what most human beings before us had. Robust families to give them connections, protection and love. A connection to organize legend that provides unity and good works, and redemption, words like that, that we do not use them much anymore. These seem to be the things that people need in perpetuity. The fact that so many young people cannot reach these and go into politics and said i think it is a very plausible way of describing identity politics. Deferred with the word was first used in a document by radical feminist said that they were giving up on men. It did not trust anyone to have their back except for each other. It is where that phrase identity politics first appears. This is the generation that first the first move there is that men and women cannot get along longer any longer. It proceeds to black lives matter. The black lives matter manifesto was also again heteronormativity and the nuclear family. It also declared that there were apparently new problems in relationships men and women. This is all to say that identity politics not arrived at nowhere. It is coming out of a shattered, postrevolutionary world, and we should have a lot of empathy for the people drawn into this way of politics, even though this way of doing politics, i think is very device the u. S. Host to subsidize something is to ensure more of it and this is essentially what the sexual revolution done. It has an inadvertent subsidize by raising the penalties for traditional mass. Mary a lot of people are puzzled by how androgynous society come. I am not because i think what has happened is that there is a sense of this thing of the human adam. The penalties for being traditionally feminine have risen. The traditional housewife is widely marked. The idea of getting married and having a family as your primary purpose in life makes you retrograde and makes people laugh at you. Simultaneously, men who are traditionally minded are also exiled for a different reason, because it is thought that they are patriarch and oppressive. These being the limiting cases, what we see is a lot of pressure to gravity towards a more androgynous mean. Therefore, it should not be surprising to see androgyny in beams, to see the hold that it has over the minds of the younger people. Host and from your book how the west really lost god, in a way that we are just getting to understand, it appears that the natural family as a the gradual but recognizable muscling of that is surely an important, overlooked part of the story about how western men and women came not to hear. Mary to make a long soy short, when sociologists looked at religion, there is a tendon for people to think, sure, such an family has a lot of kids because they are religious, because their religion tells them no. This applies across islam, judaism and christianity. The more religious people are the more children they are they have. That is assumed. In that book, i turned the thesis on its head and argue that maybe some of what we are seeing in the decline of her sanity is the fact that people are no longer living in robust, extended families. In other words, there is something about birth that trends many people into a different frame of mind, a trend and didnt frame of mind. There is something about standing at an open grave, that we do less and thus of, that confirms the notion that there is something about the cosmos. It is not just and a dead person. The less we do these things the lasix variance we have of birth, death and taking care of this pick, the less likely we are to get into something more internal than we are. That is what that book is all about. Host i went to read a couple of your quote, and i apologize if these are not original to you, but they stood out to me. You describe the 20th century as men have forgotten god and the 21st century as common men are at war with us mary in 1984, alexander gave an important address, in which he says that the problem of the 20th could be summarized in four words. Men have forgotten god. What he meant was that the carnage of the wars in the 20th century would not have happened, had systems really believed what they said. So, i took that quote and thought how we would describe our time. I think men are at war with in their way of trying to what i mean is that we are at war with the idea of a created order. From birth to death, where we see we want to be in control. There is the basic fact of male and female, which we also to control and there is an anger about this war on the created order that is new and another outcome of these radical changes began in the 19. Host lets hear from wayne in michigan. You are on with officer Mary Eberstadt. Caller i would like to ask about competitive religion, how we have a market of religion in america versus places where there is an official religion or state, which might be one of the reason organized religion is doing better here than in some other place. Specifically there is a rigid based on judaism and christianity with stories from profit and all. Pope john paul ii the i think the following folks viewed his as not so much a competitor but there has certainly been a lot of cultural stuff. I was wondering, what is your opinion on this . Do you view it as more positive or negative . Do you see it as more of a competitor . Host you have given us a lot to chew on air. Mary thank you for asking that russian. I do want to emphasize that in the how the what and how the west lost god, i limit myself to christianity and, to some extent judaism because islam is not something i have studied intense. You can generalize about all organized religion that they should at least they share this in common. They tell us that we have to work to be good. Our nature does not start out good. We have to work on ourselves. And once more, with the decline of christianity, i think theres being another unintended concept , which is the idea that we do not have to work on ourselves anymore. We are perfect just the way we are. If we want to walk out the door in our pajamas, we can do that. There is this radical autonomy that seems to rule in many places now, that would not be willing, if people took organized religion more seriously. Host edward in new jersey we had a good afternoon. Caller i think it is the opposite that secularism is actually better for the world. Prior to 1950, there were lynchings. The second point i will make is all of the godfearing bureaucracies the world are impoverished and the people pray five times a day and something. I think that secularism is the way of the future. Science, technology and logic is the only positive. Host do you consider yourself an atheist . Caller i would say i am agnostic. I am a freethinking individual. Just because he created us does not mean he controls us. Even if you could prove that there was a god, i would be against him. Mary i would make two points one is that the u. S. Became the most powerful country in the world during the years and which the public was churchgoing or synagogue going, or observant way. That is to say that i do not think there is much evidence for a clash between you and eyes capitalism. On another plane about whether it is good or bad first, there is a of evidence that we should consider here about what Church People go what churchgoing people do. Im not trying to romanticize it but it is a sociological stat statistic that people who go to church or synagogue, people who are religious are far more likely to give to charity, for example. As we see less christianity, we will see less of those kinds of good works. They are more likely to volunteer and even to donate blood. In other words, the constant message that you need to do good things seeps down at the grassroots level. It is anyway a way that is good for society. Host edward talked about science versus religion. Are they compatible or in competition, in your view . Mary i think that is a misunderstanding because of new atheism. Over 10 years ago now, on the bestseller list, there were several voices. Daniel dennett, Richard Dawkins what we saw in that new atheism was about religious people, ready idea was, not only were they stupid, they were bad society. It went Something Like this, religious people committed the atrocity of 9 11, therefore all religious people are terrorists. Even without elementary logic, who see that does not hold up. Host you also write in your books that atheist have a strong argument against organized religion because of child sex scandals, it but are a etc. Mary there is a lot of room to criticize the churches. The sex scandals was something that helped to prepare atheism. We are talking about behavior on the one hand and whether something is true on the other. You will get no argument from this order about the priestly sex scandals that i wrote about in length in level essays. However, the question of whether what teach what the church teaches is true is not separable from personal behavior. If anything, with the scandals proved is that people are born with original, and they had to redeem themselves. Host Mary Eberstadt, with four kids and writing, how did you manage to do the . Mary mostly, i did not. I did not write a lot when they were growing up. Host when you write your books, ready right where do you write them . Mary i write them in my head at 4 00 in the morning, and then when i wake up, i put them on paper. I make the notes in longhand and then i type out the argument. Host you are on the air. Caller thank you for taking my call. One question. When things better when youre young or better now . I find that the depends on you are and where you are in society. Growing up my and privileged, it was a totally different world than africanamerican and his panic who are now doing much better. There are people who are also doing worse. I do not know how you make the judgment as to society is better or worse. You have to look at individuals. There are an awful lot of things. I look back and i honestly think that there were some things that were much better and there were some things that were much worse. That is just a comment. Thank you. Mary thank you. That is a nuanced view. I am starting from the premise that what people need connection with other and using a variety of evidence to support the. For instance, let us talk about Animal Science, which is something that i at some length because we have learned things from animals in science. We have learned there is no such thing as the lone wolf. Do not run around by the elves anymore than people do. They inherit the style of nuclear families. This is true other mammal that have been studied. I is this . Because a gives them protection, of a kind because you are safer in numbers and also because from an evolutionary respect, this is where social learning takes is a animal families. Monkeys learn how to be monkeys watching other monkeys and connecting with them. We see this most clearly in the remnant on animal separation that was done under harlow, where babies separated by mothers are quickly become dysfunctional. Usually so dysfunctional that they can no longer be returned to the Animal Society what does this tell us . That animals are notional when they are created from their own. The funny thing is that we can usually indicate of others. We know that elephant suffer if they are separated from their elephant families. This is why elephants are no longer in circuses. We also suffer when we have these article disconnection around us, we do not have friend do not have families to depend on. The Animal Science is one of the most important that supports what i am. Host are you referring to the Catholic Church or protestant churches as well . Mary if i say christianity i am talking about. Host is there a difference when it comes to some of the topics that you are just seeing active mary in general, protestants have suffered the biggest collapse, the denomination decided to with traditional teaching like like marriage. Some of them have also click. I do not want to say conservative and liberal by tradition minded and less tradition i needed. There is no doubt that the trend is affecting all of the churches. Host have you looked at the growth of megachurches the prosperity god will of the jewelss Joel Holstein mary the church in other words, people still need churches with teaching, but they are churches that they come with us on today because we are nice host a text nice. Host a text message. The question is, my background is retired instructor at kentucky Law Enforcement academy. I have researched societal problems affecting lawenforcement and society. I believe a major contributor is secularism. I can point at november 1963. Furthermore on discussing leadership issues about the lack of humanitys i80, i believe your writing or onpoint. Can you please address secularism and sexual revolution . Mary first, let me say thank you for your service. Secularism and the sexual revolution. My view, in a nutshell the sexual revolution came like a big party that got out of control. Now it is 2 00 in the morning and nobody wants to call the police on the party, but everybody realizes that that has happened needs to be done. How does that connect to secularism . The revolution became a great temptation and people wanted to embrace it. Part of what made it possible raise was to stop taking christianity that is part of the story about the decline in christianity said like a brick wall against that party that was going on, and people decided they did not want. They said they would walk away because the church was not painted or they would walk away because religion was just for superstitious people. But if you look at the historical documents, but is making people walk away is because they do not want to be told to do, things that became harder after the invention of the Birth Control pill. Host how does Climate Change in the mosaic . Mary i am not a scientist, but in a way of the about Climate Change makes me hope. The reason i that is because acm are passionate about something out so example of Climate Change. There were protests about it. They will become more acclaimed because of it because they believe that is the right to do. It seems to me short between concern for nonanimate creation, Climate Change, and discern animate, human beings, families, other people. There is a lot of potential synergy there. Host manuel, joran with you are on tv with Mary Eberstadt. Go ahead. Caller i used to teach at two mainline law school. My last name is ramos. You can look me up. Clinton invited me to the white house as they used to call us spanish top 100 panic spray conference. It was a nice nation, but i grew up as a rich kid in havana, cuba. I was born in cuba and i just had my 70th Birthday Party at my old country club. Host i apologize for interrupting, but why did you call in today . What would you like to respond to . Caller i want to thank the pope. We know that obama had to go behind. I was born under fidel. And i want to thank the pope and on a, the amount change of relationship between my two countries. You can imagine how emotional i was about that but i want to ask you some people say i am sort of like that john lennon song where, the world would be a lot better without religion and without borders. They use that in the olympics and japan and cuba like to put it on tv all the time, but host do you agree with that sentiment . Caller my question to you, my theory is that they are dangerous because of the cuban missile rising. We all know about missile races that was the closest the world ever came to being destroyed. John f. Kennedy, as we all know, was our first catholic president. What people do not know is that fidel cash was also raised by catholic nun and priest, so we have two very rich, essentially white dies with a conflict almost bringing the world host i apologize. We are going to leave it there. If there is anything that Mary Eberstadt wants to respond to, otherwise theyre going to move along. Please go ahead with your question or comment. Caller yes. Are you doing . I enjoy your works very much. Your books are very enlightened. I would like to ask how you feel about the recent events on the border and how you also feel about mr. David berkley, i believe his name is. Host david berkley. Im not sure who he is referring to their. But when it comes to the border is that something about or write about . Mary that is a political question that i am not particularly written about. Having worked in the u. S. Government, i know that i believe in putting the National Interest first. We can have discussions about what exact, but in other words a question about american National Interest and purity. That is as far as i have done. Host the last two callers had mentioned borders. They talked about the fact that as far as cuba is concerned, it is a good thing. Anything there . Mary not really. Host craig. Caller i appreciate been documented Mary Eberstadt and i Mary Eberstadt i wanted to about how people remember pointing at members. Members are not. That said, i look at this statement where christianity or can and i believe that is true. Even the most staunch atheist had to agree that they create a structure i. E. That is not chaos. In the bible, it talks about the family structure. Putting up against theology and sociology and you find out that psychology and sociology share actually does work. It makes people respect authority and the law. That is the next generation that we i think from a functional psychologist or pragmatist, it works. We should use what works. I just wanted to state that and thank you for the work you are doing. Mary thank you very much. That brings up a good point, which is that i have a disagreement with the new atheists about this. The new atheists resented a paradigm in which you can believe in god or not leaving god. Believe in god. I think the true paradigm is that everyone believes in something. It is how we are made. We have to get passionate about something, which is why we need to ask the question you are asking, which is what is true . Is it true that a religion that tells people to love one another actually has effects on people that makes them better members of society . I agree with you, the answer to that is a yes. Host 202 is the area code. An hour left in our conversation with Mary Eberstadt. 202 7488200 if you live in the east and central time zones and want to participate. 202 7488201 for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zones. If you cannot get through on the phone lines and want to make a comment, do it via text or social media. Text line, 202 7488903. Please include your first name and city. When it comes to social media, remember booktv for our email address, booktv cspan. Org. March 26, 2023, the wall street journal. You cannot cancel me. I quit. What was this oped . Mary i was invited to give a speech at Vernon University that i was excited about. Never having been there. And, i looked up the local museum which apparently has a great collection of andrew wyatt paintings. I was gender up for this. Before i got there, a typical thing happened and in an exaggerated fashion. Some students decided i was a fascist. I have a photo advertising my talk. Someone wrote fascist and misspelled it. Advertising posts advertising my speech were taken down on campus and in the local student newspaper, i was being called names that i cant think there was any truth to like hater. I was called dangerous. I look very dangerous. Etc. It turned out the speaker before me had a bad experience at this kind of cancellation. He went to give a talk on postoil ski and had treatment saying he was a hater and all of this. He had three armed guards who guarded him during his talk on those staff ski in other words, this is cancel culture on parade. I thought about it and i thought , maybe it was time to make a statement in a different direction. And not to have to play this stupid game. Instead of going and getting my talk with armed guards and subject to people calling me names that i do not deserve, i wrote an oped in the wall street journal saying that i was canceling myself because i think speakers in this toxic newly toxic environment, have the power not to play the game. Instead, i sent 25 of my books to the President Office of the university so students could get them for free. And wrote the piece in the wall street journal and gave a class via zoom. My point speakers out there or to anybody who is worried about cancel culture is that you can reframe that situation. Host Mary Eberstadt, the cancel culture situation you faced is that different than it was 20 years ago as far as allowing a controversial speaker, and i do not mean to call you controversial but, somebody with a point of view. Mary it is much different now. It is much more menacing because there is no rationalism about it an irrationalism about it. Some students show up with their mouths duct taped shut. Some speakers are subjected to threats of violence. Social media inflames all of this. What happens is, instead of reading one of my books and taking exception to it, what the people involved in this cancellation are doing is cherry picking anything. They will find a quote from a radio interview given 20 years ago and take it out of context and make you look bad. This kind of cherry picking is very destructive, because it distracts from what an author is trying to do. It distracts from an argument. Again, this is not something that we have to do. Maybe if more people cancel themselves, we will see less of this. That is my hope. Host from your book, primal screams, you mentioned the allison stanger, Charles Murray incident in milled in middlebury college. Mary yes. We need to talk about the irrationalism out there that we see among the inflamed young and particularly among the followers of identity politics. This has nothing to do with an intellectual disagreement with a speaker. This has everything to do with an unbound derangement, a state some of these students get themselves into. In the case of Charles Murray and allison stanger, if we reduce what happened at middlebury into plain english, what happened is that a bunch of ablebodied College Students attacked a 70 plus year old man and sent his hostess on campus, a middleaged professor, a woman, to the hospital with an injury. Now, how can these things be happening . I think the answer goes back to some of what i write about. People are very disconnected from one another. They are not being socialized, many of them, in their families or by other institutions like religion. So, they are arriving on campus is gravitating into identity politics and really unraveling as a result. This is something we need to understand. This is not is this as usual. This is about being attacked ad hominem. This is about being called a hater, a transphobia, a lgbtqphobe, a racist, etc. , etc. These are not the labels thrown around by the vietnam war back in the day or by the civil rights movement. These are new ad hominem labels that bear no relation, no observable relation, to reality. There is an unreality out there we should be concerned about. Host with the Charles Murray, professor allison thinker incident, this is a case where repressor stanger did not necessarily agree with Charles Murray intellectually but wanted to have this dialogue and this conversation for the students. Mary that was especially striking. She was just the facilitator. She was just in the room and collateral damage. Host from primal screams, he quote. What is happening on campuses and elsewhere today is not nearly a pseudopolitics of self regard. It is all panic, all the time, served up with more than a smidgen of violence. You used the word panic. Mary it is no secret that Mental Illness has been rising among the young. You kindly referred to the first book i published, home alone america, which was about young people, children and adolescents there is a whole chapter in there about what we could see already 20 years ago, which was that the rise in anxiety and stress and panic and oppression, especially depression, especially, was real. Therapists did not inc. They did not think they were better at exhibiting it. That trend described 20 years ago has intensified so much that it is often a front page news story whenever the latest study comes out. So, why are we seeing all of this Mental Illness, the psychiatric trouble . There is no doubt that social media plays a part on this. Social media is throwing gasoline on the fire. The obsession with imagery is gasoline on the fire. What is the fire about . I think it is about this freefloating lack of connection that is having destructive effects on young people. Host craig, fayetteville, north carolina. Please go ahead with your question or comment or Mary Eberstadt for Mary Eberstadt. Caller i am enjoying this conversation very much. I have two quick questions. The secularization, at what point in American History did you think that started to happen . I think it started to happen in the late 1800s. The second question is where is this all going . We are seeing the breakdown of our institutions, the family, of law order. If we do not turn around and recognize that we need god in our country, where is this going to end up . Is it going to result in the total collapse of our society . I would like to get your perspective on that. Host thank you. Mary thank you. To take that last part, which is very important, i want to say that there are reasons for being hopeful here. It is easy to despair about some of these issues. But, i take hope from the fact that in between the publication of that first adam and eve book 10 years ago and now with the new one, it has become possible to talk about these things more broadly than it used to be. Back when the first book came out, to question the sexual revolution in any way was just forbidden. It was not talked about in the mainstream press. People write me off as a religious fanatic, even though there is no theology in the book. The book is not to appeal to all readers ash all of my books are. 10 years later. We have seen a number of books and in different countries, interestingly, all written by women and all questioning what i was questioning 10 years ago, which is is this new world we live in good for romance . Is this new world good for children . We have seen secular writers take on this question. I am encouraged by that, because if you look at bad episodes of human history, if you look at, for example, the problem with g en a lot of english people are having in london, right before the Victorian Era there were terrible things afoot. People were drinking gin, pregnant people were drinking gin. The formers went after this and said, this is not good for you, not good for the baby. The result was a religious awakening and a social awakening. It became one of the reforms of the Victorian Era, to renorm and stop people from hurting themselves quite as badly. That, it seems to me, is the most likely outcome of where we are now, which is why it is important to draw attention to it. Host Mary Eberstadt, i saw an article recently that the survey of english and anglican bishops, the overwhelming majority said, yes, it is true. England is no longer a christian nation. What does that say to you . Mary it says that the thesis is correct. What happened was the collapse of the family in england and in other places became inextricable from the collapse of the church, even though the anglican communion was trying to make nice, trying to play ball, trying to say, ok, we will not push so hard these people find objectionable. Despite that trying, england is now no longer a christian country, or a country in which the majority of people identify as christian. Host 1980s, moral majority, ronald reagan. Was that a religious reawakening . Mary not from the point of view avenue point of view of sociology. It brings up an interesting point. There is a tendency to be a galeon about this stuff and think about, religion is in inevitable decline. Certainly, the atheists talk about it that way. Even religious people often think about it that way, which is why they despair. They think this is some historical process that is going to end with everybody being an atheist. But, history itself refutes that point of view because what we see if we look at examples from history is that religion does not go like this. Religion waxes and wanes in the world. It looks like a wave. For example, in victorian london, there was mark and more religiosity then there had been in previous years. The idea that materialism drives out god, that the richer we get, the less we need religion, is also falsified by the example of a tour in london. The religious revival was led from the top. It was the people who were at the top of the socioeconomic ladder who were more likely to be going to church and professing beliefs. We see this pattern in the United States, including today. Similarly, after world war ii, there was a religious boom in all the countries of the west, including places that are secular today, like new zealand, for example. And across europe. People came back from the war and they filled the charges. You can see this reflected in what hollywood was offering all of those sword and sandals movies about christian stories, the 10 commandments, the singing nun, whatever. The point is, people work going back to church. This revival, this religious boom, which is not nearly as wellknown as the baby boom that accompanied it, continued until 1963. In other words, this lazy head galeon is a that tells us whatever is going on will go on inevitably until the end is refuted by historical example. Host text message from nicole in fort lauderdale. Ms. Eberstadt, you are overgeneralizing. I have two friends who are stayathome mothers, housewives and no one mocks them. I also have other friends who are working moms, wives. The working moms would love to be stayathome, but their families need two incomes to make inns meet. The cost of living is too high. Mary yes, point taken. It is impossible to have a conversation about such large subjects without overgeneralizing. Im sure everybody can think about counterfactuals to any given point being made. In saying that the stayathome mom has become the socially less acceptable option in the dominant conversation, i think, is imminently defensible. Because, the social pressure is on the side of moving into the paid workplace and the economic Pressure Point taken. Host call from a city you may be familiar with. David in utica, new york. Caller hi, good morning. I think we need to understand that this woman is a science denier. And, science deniers, if they were to get their way, would have high bound christianity which would start exposing jews, then muslims, or the other way around. Then, they would start working on christianity, like catholics are always at the top of the list. Before you know it, they are encouraging you to read the bible let the inner table. There will be men and women in white capes running up and down in the middle of the night. We have seen that before. This breeds it. Men in brown shirts in bunches running up and down streets, breaking glass that is what happens. She is going to deny it, of course. That is what happens when science deniers she wants the big bang, eve and adam. My god. The big bang, it was a tiny piece of platinum fluff. Host david, thank you for calling in. Mary eberstadt, science denier, men in brownshirts. Men in capes. Mary that was a good example of the kind of pushback that one can get on bringing up these kinds of issues. In fact it is largely ad hominem the point i was making earlier. I do want to make one comment about the brownshirts, the suggestion seemed to be that religious people end up as nazis. Just to make a factual, historical correction, that was not the case. That was part of the point of alexanders life, to demonstrate the ideologies responsible for mass murder in the 20th centuries were ideologies devoid of religious faith. The nazis were antichristian. The communists were antichristian. To try and connect the dots so that christians are nazis is not historically plausible. Host are you a science denier . When somebody has said that, maybe they have not to you, what you think that means . Mary i think it is a label. I think it is an effort an epithet. An epithet is not an argument. I feel the same way about transphobe. That is an epithet. What in the world is that supposed to mean . Nobody explains. They hurl these things around to discredit people. I cannot respect that. Host glenn, tacoma, washington. Good afternoon. Caller good morning on this end of the world. How are you doing today . Host we are good. Go ahead and make your comment, sir. Caller my ears perked up when ms. Eberstadt talked about labels. I have come to the conclusion that the word woke is being used by the right and from the left without knowing what they are really talking about. As a 60yearold man, it sounds like code for the most vile form of lover it could get. They are using it as a weapon and nobody seems to do anything about it. When a man from florida calls everybody woke, when woke goes to die, what they are really saying is that vile form. It seems plain to me. No one has called it out. Host we are going to leave it there. I will ask Mary Eberstadt about your thoughts on the word woke and wokeism. Mary the word is dispensable because it gets that kind of truth, which is that the United States was founded largely as a protestant nation. There were all kinds of revivals through the years, including upstate new york, which was a hotbed of these things. There was not one, but two great awakenings as they were known. The word woke does seem to capture that there is something about identity politics that has a religious impulse, it has a religious flavor that is somehow connected to the kind of revival protestantism that was dominant in the country. I think it is spent civil to use that word for that dispensable to use that word for that reason. Host Mary Eberstadt is the author of several books. Her first book, home alone america, came out in 20024. The hidden toll of they te the loser letters, comic tale of life, death and atheism. Came out in 2010. How the west really lost god, 2013. Adam and eve, after the pill, that same year. It is danger to believe. Religious freedom and its enemies, 2016. Final screams how the sexual revolution created identity politics, came out in 2019. Adam and eve after the pill revisited just came out this year. One of the things we like to do is ask our guests what they are reading and what some of their favorite books are. We got the favorite books from Mary Eberstadt. Then, we got a thesis on currently reading, which im going to read part of it you. It is more interesting when you add, instead of just the title. Favorite books, the master margarita, did i say that correctly . Vile bodies and klein and fall the klein and fall. Anything by shakespeare. Philip kerr and edie james a masters of the genre what is the master in margarita . Mary the master and margarita was written in stalinist russia by a playwright and author who somehow managed to survive. It is impossible to describe briefly, but it is a fantastic novel about the intersection of truth and writing and falsehood and oppression. It is so vividly told that the author could not publish it in his lifetime, because it would have meant his death. It was a critique of communism. But, there is a famous line in the book that is my favorite line from all of literature. This author is sitting there, his manuscript has been thrown into the fire. He thinks all his lifes work is in vain. Another character, who is a supernatural character, declares manuscripts do not burn. It magically comes back to him. In other words, all of the labor is not for nothing because once something is written, it is hard to get rid of it. That does not mean you see its effects in that lifetime. The author of that novel never lived to see the effects it would have. One of the effects it did have when it was published, it caught fire around the world figuratively speaking. The phrase manuscripts do not burn became a slogan for freedom seeking people. I thought that was a beautiful story. That is why it is one of my favorite books. Host what is the best way in your view to read shakespeare and understand . Mary to see it live and uncorrupted. To see it on stage is my favorite way of reading shakespeare. Host currently reading, here we go. Over the summer, mary wrote to us, i wrote an outstanding book by gail valley called the apocalypse of the sovereign self. Recovering the christian mystery of personhood. It is a gripping, indepth analysis of how the collapse of christian anthropology is leading to social and psychological dissolution. Mostly, i am working through a big stack of historical and other books about upstate new york, one of the most fascinating and largely unknown petri dishes of the american experiment. From the year of the pharisee to the years of the socalled burned over district with its unprecedented religious ferment, to the Game Changing erie canal and subsequent rust belt on up to the opioid and heroin crisis that has devastated parts of the state. All of it taking place against a background of forbidding natural beauty. This is a place you have to understand to understand our country and its pioneer history. I grew up in villages scattered across the state. In the next few years, i am hoping to break ground on telling Amazing Stories in different genres and medias. What is that story you want to tell about your home territory . Mary i want to credit a great, late friend of mine, tj or rourke, who had dinner with me 10 years ago almost exactly and asked me what was on my mind. I started talking like that and said what is on my mind is upstate new york in telling some of these stories and historical intersections and trying to get the hang of the place, because i do not think most americans are aware of its richness. We talked more and more. Tj got on fire with the idea i should write not in one genre, not write a history or memoir he said in any genre you can manage, if you can do fiction, tell it as fiction. He said, no one has your stories. That is another great line. It is not just about me. No one has any individuals story except the individual. I am hoping to do exactly what tj wanted me to do, which is to write about the history and characters and perhaps return to fiction. The loser letters was fiction, it was one of the best adventures of my literary life. One of those may be in order for new york. Host he sat in this chair a wild back. Mary he and his wife and my husband and i and a couple other friends sort of grew up together the last 35 years, or tried to. Host you talked about the loser letters and it is fiction and i dont want to say in sarcasm mary satire. Host here is a quote from Mary Eberstadt. Clearing for pornography and only never rust sex and broken homes and abused and screwed up kids and the rest of the sexual revolution fallout may not be everyones thing but most of you knew atheist guys have made it yours. I respect that. Mary it is a little hard to explain as satire can be but it goes back to the new atheism most were taking it at face value. Many wrote serious books saying no the climb claim science and christianity is income pat believe is false. I wanted to take a different tack because i suspect that when it comes to these questions of are you religious, are you not religious, theres more going on under the surface than just philosophy 101 arguments about whether god exists. These often have to do with deep personal issues, or reasons for not wanting to believe. I tried to invent a female character a. F. Christian and fan girl of the new atheism and saying you have to do there to make it better so we will all be atheists. You can see the connection between her rejection of god and what is happened in her broken life that made her reject this way. So, it was a great adventure in 2017 this novel was adapted for stage and premiered at Catholic University of america for two weeks in the fall and was exciting and i would like to do more work like that. Host next call is jack in san diego. You are on book tv. Caller good to speak to you. Mary, i have been in the advertising business many years and im 79. I did textbook advertising and one issue that came to my mind in teaching people in the jail how to do graphic work and make communications i come up with the need to explain how to communicate. And it goes back a ways, just on the advertising i have done like an ad the power of being connected and how i can help someone check. In my studies it interprets the sensory of our eyes and other senses read about, measure our territory, what is around us and what is going on in our environment. It decides that those are negative signs that means we are leaving territory and it has been shown this is back to mckeown once we feel like we are losing our territory we will have anxiety because the pituitary gland we feed adrenaline so he can avoid a host i apologize, but can you bring this to your point . Caller yes, im there. This sense of conflict of what you are talking about, if communications and things distorts territory and makes them think it is shrink r shrinking and we have more people around we heading to a huge sharing or breaking apart of territory . Host anything you want to responds to there . Mary in the book prial scream i invent two fictional characters one who came of age in the 1950s and his grandson coming of age now and it is the difference of social life between the boomers and millennials and zoomers. And what we see is what i call acts of human subtraction that brandons life is not like his grand fathers because so many people have been subtracted by fatherlessness, abortion, shrinkage of his family and other things i talk about there. Taste an example of trying to capture that feeling of losing, the word you used is territory but i had say losing human connection. Host greg from sacramento. Are i familiar with Jordan Peterson . What do you think of his ideas of instruction at instructional truth . Mary i cant say im well enough read to recognize those words but i have seen the kinds of crowds he brings in of young men. I saw him bring traffic in a major American City to a standstill because he filled a stadium and from what i have read and seen of him, he is giving young men what they need, which is practical talk about had you to be a man. And where his work i think connects with mine is that im trying to describe why he has this audience. He is a wonderful speaker so this is not about him. Im trying to describe the supply side of this, where are all of these young men coming from. Text message from jim in university place, washington, subject, god. What definitive proof did you have or know that god exists . Proof, not belief. Mary well, if i had that we wouldnt be having this conversation. But i think that i would direct you toward how the west really lost god because that is where i try to get at the idea that there is a deep connection between lived experience and religionousity. The more we live apart from other people the less we understand why everybody before us practically has been raining toward god. There is true across cultures. People want a connection with the comos and beyond themselves. Generally speaking. This is the human story for the most part. Host Mary Eberstadt, in your view has christianity from time to time been cooped by politician coopted by politicians in a negative way . Mary yes. One thing that might make people believe in original sin is how corrupt the relationship between the church and the state can be and how confounding it can be we, for example, we have kings with divine rights. So no argument from there quarter about how the church has often screwed up itself or had corrupt leaders or had leaders with earthly motivation rather than super natural. Host back to the kings and queens with divine right to rule it was said elizabeth ii truly believed she was chosen and that whole viewpoint has kind of faded off, hasnt it . That these families have the divine right to rule . Mary if you are talking about the royal families, they are subject to the same secularizing trends were talking about. So it would be surprising to hear any of them claim the divine right at this point. Host mike, detroit. Good afternoon to you. Caller yeah, yeah. I was raised by the world war ii generation and when i look at this Democratic Party and its constituency, you have marxist, socialists, globalists appear gestapo tactics. You look at hitler or stalin or mussolini they targeted the same people with religious and family values and democratic principles. Parents just wanted to maintain their parental rights. They didnt want to see their children mutilated by the state. It seems like this is a party that worships the state above all else. I wonder if you see the parallels. Mary what i see and what i write about a little the relationship between the crackup of the family and welfare state. The welfare state as we know it has arisen largely in response to the trends im describing because it comes in to bank roll broken homes and to be a kind of political super daddy in homes without a daddy. So, in this way we see the decline of the family and rise of the welfare state perpetuating each other. That again is not the way we are used to thinking about the welfare state, but it is the bedrock underneath when we talk about why we need these social programs. Not being a libertarian here, im not a libertarian but that to me is the deepest level at which those connect. Host has the state in a sense become our new religion . Mary it is not the state, then things that people use to get to power have religious overtones. This is what identity politics is all about. Host Mary Eberstadt, back to the pill 1960 and economics today. How has, in your view, the pill and sexual revolution changed economics . Mary i rely on the work of the sociologist w. Bradford which cox at university of virginia who has done great work of establishing that if we had the same rate of marriage, intact marriage as we say 1984 most households would be significantly better off. This is a reason we need to talk about family policy in america. Because it is directly related to the economic troubles that many people experience. Divorce is expensive. The system merchant mother households is very difficult not pointing fingers my mother was a single mother so im on sturdy ground knowing how hard it is. Part of the economic problem today is a people problem, a problem of subtraction and not having as many hands as we need to do the work of running a household. Host mary is calling from florida. Please go ahead. Caller hi, thank you for taking my call. I want to start by saying that i i knew a legal scholar Harold Berman and he was primary speaking of kristen come so my question is the destruction of the rule of law through second lue similarization. What are the main groups and organizations that take these legal actions an and lobbies to destroy the rule of law and how do we destroy it to return and heal a lot of these ills that shes been speaking on . Thank you. Host thank you, maam. Mary thank you. The attacks on christian calculators are usually charities are usually launched by groups like the american r civil liberals and those aligned with particularly the lgbtq versions. How do we get back to a better place . This is why i think we have to shed light on these things. Because we can have hope, but it is like any situation where there is a patient who is ill. The first thing the doctor has it figure out is what the problem is because no treatment will be effective without the problem being understood. What im trying to describe is the problem. One of the things that points to is the need for trying out pro family policies at the state level, federal level, anywhere we can try to devise incentives that would keep, say, a couple in the same home doing the hard work of raising children, making their Financial Lives easier. I know there are politicians who talk about these kinds of options. Im into the a politician myself so i tend not to go there but there is a role for government to do experimentation. Host i found this trilogy in your writing. Father with a small f, father with a capital f, and patria. What is that referencing . Mary one thing we havent talked about yet is another kind of decline which is the decline of patriotism. This we see very clearly among the young. To me it is one of the most surprising findings because i always regarded myself as a patriot. I think most people who ever work in government get an enhanced sense of patriotism. So, what does this mean . In one of the chapters in the new book adam and eve after the pill revisited, i suggest that perhaps theres a relationship between these three declines, decline in religion or belief in a super natural father, decline of the family often meaning the absence of the natural father and decline of attachment to country. Because what is ailing so many people today is not just that they cant find a church or dont want a church or live in small families or no families at all, there is that connection to community that Robert Putnam road is beautifully about in bowling land. This has increased over time. Not being connected to a community is another way of being lonely for people. That is why i speculate that maybe this kind of attachment or nurture is like a muscle and the less it is exercised in one sphere the less it is exercised in others because it is striking we see these simultaneous disattachments. Host cornelius from alexander, louisiana. Good afternoon. Caller good afternoon, peter and mary. I want to western everybody a happy labor day tomorrow. This is constitutional month and patriot day on september 11. So, we need to celebrate all of that. Im for patriotism. I want to talk to you first, peter, then ms. Mary. I found out what year that book feels 2008 Abraham Bolden echo of dealey plazament just got his card from President Biden so he would be a great guest. He tried to prevent president kennedys assassination. Host he is referencing an Older Program when he called in. Go ahead. Caller my question for you, i happy to be africanamerican, 62 years old. I 62 years old. Warp we were in segregated schools and negro anthem and white schools prayer, pledge, national anthem. Then we only had the prayer, the pledge and national anthem. I believe as you that the democrats have pretty much taken all of this stuff out. If you look at the communist manifesto they completed everything. I have an idea for you. With a. I. Technology coming out and military kind of revealing that these aliens which i believe are fallen angels and stuff would be a good book for you to look into because at the want to a. I. Jesus, a. I. God and a. I. To rewrite the bible. God bless you, peter and mary, have a blessed day. Host you have a blessed day as well. I want to go back to the technology. We have had cars and alfonso and phones and everybody lam lamented they will lead to the ends of society but they seem to be exponential of what we do and how we isolate ourselves. Is that a fair statement . Mary absolutely. And the social science is proving it. How do we control it . To me it is a little like the example of tobacco. It was ubiquitous when i grew up. Every adult i knew practically mostly cloudied and you could smoke in hospitals back then as long as were not near the oxygen tank. It is unbelievable now. What makes it unbelievable now . There was a Reform Movement that arose that people really didnt want to listen to but over time with the 600 studies showing that tobacco can cause harm people started changing their minds. And this is why we can no longer smoke in restaurants, say. This is why people smoke because there was a change in public consensus so fewer smoke. Im not saying that to tuttut smokers but to reforming society we faced with suffer sufficient proof of harm and i think that day is coming for the smartphone. I think the hammers it can do will harms that it can do will be evidence. Host he also brought up artificial intelligence. Have you thought along throws lines . Mary no, im still looking for the regular intelligence. Host dan is in bridgewater, new jersey. Caller in your discussion of christianity you left out one of its branches which is the eastern orthodox church. It believes in the most particular calendar mystical relationship with god and the church is only there to serve that relationship. I think in that sense it distinguishes from the catholic system which insists on a relationship with the church as the means to get to god. So when you had priests or any of the other problems the church seems to be having an indecisive way. In the orthodox church, whatever the church does its only function is to serve the relationship between the individual and godment i think that you god. I think you kind of deemphasized that and it is to the detriment of christianity which was originally an individual and god that he can never escape no matter how fallen he might be he is still part of it at all times in his life. Host thank you, sir. Any comments . Mary i dont have a comment. My only comment is i was not trying to sideline orthodoxy but thank you for that thought. Host when you hear people say im spiritual but not religious what does that mean to you . What do you hear . Mary i hear the idea of d. I. Y. Religion. Im going to do my own religion. And it is understandable that people would think this. But people had believe that dont understand their capacity for selfdelusion. What i mean is that say im devising my own religion and i like to play texas hold em, which i did. Im not going to devise a religion that says gambling is a sin. That is not in my interest it come up with a religion that stops me from doing something that i like. And you could continue the metaphor. If i design a dinner party and im a vegan i wont put steak on the table. It is just it say we have a very strong tendency to do things that are in our immediate interests that gratify us. So, i dont think anybody who is designing his own religion is going to make demands on himself. Now, there are Big Questions whether the demands made by judaism and christianity are reasonable demands. Do they point to truth . What are they there for . We can spend or lifetimes examining toes kinds of questions those kinds of questions but the question of spiritual not religious is the same as organized religion absolutely not. Host bill from billings, montana, you might have the last word. Host h caller hi, mary. I too am sharing my search for regular intelligence with you. I dont think it is going to be found on this program. But i do have a question. The religious right, the evangelicals, believe that trump is the chosen one. Is donald trump really the chosen one . Host before we get her it answer that question or to talk about that, what is your experience with religion if any . Caller i was born and raised a catholic. And to that end im recovering. Host thank you, sir. Evangelical. Christianity, donald trump. Anything you want to address or all of it . Mary the specific question is, is donald trump the chosen one and this is just not something that has been given to me to know. Host what about the evangelical right and their support of former President Trump . Mary i dont understand why the evangelical right is singled out in it way in this way. There are obviously a lot of people in it who like what he stands for or says he stands for or likes his policies during the four years of his administration and they have as much right to vote for president as anybody else but for some reason they are the ones put in the petri dish of home people ask why are they supporting donald trump and just saying we shall have even scrutiny crass other groups across other groups. Do you consider yourself evangelical right . Mary no. Host what does that mean actually . Mary it is usually a protestant thing and it has been very wedded to politics to desiring certain political outcomes like the ends of roe rememberss is wade for example. Roe v. Wade but not where imcoming from. Why if somebody. S to reads one of your books which is the one you would recommend and why . Mary you said it wouldnt be hardball. Thank you. For people interested in the relationship between the sexual revolution and the decline of religion and the family, how the west really lost god. But please know that all the books are addressed to the general reader. Some have lots of footnotes but i didnt want to distract. Im writing for regular people and have know theological or other suppositions in the arguments of the book. I hope to change the minds of some of those represented by callers today who take exception and i thank them for their relative civility. Mary eberstadt, thank you for being on indepth in book tvs 25th year on the