Below is an excerpt from an article I wrote for ERLC.
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David Brooks has a new article out this week on the “haphazard self.” In the piece, he highlights a number of economic and cultural trends related to working-class men in the United States that are both important and disconcerting. Brooks cites research from an academic study conducted from 2000-2013 in which 107 working-class men sat down for detailed interviews about their occupations, families, and spiritual lives. The common denominator among these findings is detachment.
In the article, Brooks engages the alarming trends revealed within the study, namely that working-class men today are intentionally seeking to limit their obligations as parents, romantic partners, employees, and religious adherents. More and more, men today are seeking to live, what the study characterizes as, unattached and autonomous lives. But this is more than an interesting data point. The fact that men in the United States are self-consciously opting to remain unattached to the basic institutions of our society is a perilous trend. And the implications of this behavior are vast and dire.
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Read the entire article here.
Joshua Wester 