A (0:00)

Foreign It's Friday, January 9, 2026. I'm Albert Mohler and this is the Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. William Galston went to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to declare that America is facing something of an emergency. But here's the headline, America needs more husband material. The subhead in the article, marriage, disdained by many elites, has collapsed among the working class. Now the statistics are beyond undeniable at this point. We're simply looking at the fact that what is is and what is represents a vast emergency. And Christians have to see this in deeper and more urgent terms even than others. William Galston is very well known for his social commentary, his study of American society. He's served in many roles. He's been influential, particularly in some Democratic administrations. I think it'd be fair to say that his politics basically center left. But these days he can look downright conservative compared to people who are committed to more leftist and progressivist agendas. And I think it's very interesting that William A. Galston here is calling for more young men to be ready to be husbands. He's even writing about a crisis of sorts of when he says America needs more husband material, he does this over against the background of a picture he sees in pretty stark terms. This is how he begins the article. He says at any given time between 1950 to 1980, about 6% of 40 year olds had never married. Then the never married rate began an inexorable rise, quadrupling to 25% by 2020. So this is 40 year olds who have never married. Now one out of four. Now, William Galston looks at this and recognizes that there are some reasons that you can document just in terms of statistics. One of the most important is that you have a declining proportion of young men who are successfully entering higher education and then successfully entering the professional workforce. You have a rising percentage of young women who are doing the same. And so you go to many college campuses and you'll find that 70% of the freshman class is made up of young women, only about 30% of young men. You have institutions that are bragging about the fact that it's just 60% young women. You have 40% young men, very few of the institutions that have anything like a 50, 50 split in their freshman class. And you're really looking at a social revolution working its way out. This is one of the ways that kind of revolution shows up. It's not so much what people say, but it's how they live. It's where they go and where they don't go. It's what they do and what they don't do, as in getting married or not getting married, even by age 40. It's the next paragraph of Galston's piece that really demands our closer attention. He wrote this quote. When I was in College in the 1960s, the conventional wisdom was that the rise of feminism and anti marriage attitudes would undermine family values in the college educated elite, but marriage would remain strong among working class Americans. He then says the reverse happened. Marriage rates declined slightly among those with college degrees and plunged for those without them. End quote. Okay, now this is a phenomenon I pointed to often, and that is you have people of very liberal values who live quite conservative lives in terms of their own marriages and families. And then you have people who are committed to, they will say a conservative understanding of worldview, but they live lives that are very much at odds with that. You have liberal theories and conservative lives, and you also have, well, you might say conservative theories and liberal lives. And that's because you really do have a disruption of the entire social order. That's the big point here. What the left, the radicals, were pressing for in the 1960s and the 1970s, it didn't affect those who have the most options, not in the sense of, say, destroying marriage. No, indeed, you have wealthy elites. They can basically hide behind their leftist ideologies while living lives in which they're quite careful about getting marriage right and having children. After all, they want heirs for their fortunes. You're looking at the fact that they preached something. They never lived, but they preached and they really did have an audience, which is to say vast numbers, millions of Americans listen to what the ideologies of the left were communicating and they bought into it. But they don't have the options. They did not have the financial cushion. They're not from the landed gentry, they're not a part of the cultural elite. And in many cases you have young men in particular whose lives reflect the devastation of broken marriage, of divorce, of fatherless homes, and of a breakdown in the entire man making business in society. The elites will find a way to take care of themselves. It's those who are not among the elites who pay the damage. And that's exactly what this is about. William Alston's not right when he points to the, the dichotomy to the problem. There just aren't enough young men ready to be married. There aren't enough young men ready to hold the jobs that are really key to being married and being a father and having children. They're not ready for many of these milestones in life. Women, by and large, are ahead of men, particularly at these ages. You start to see a real dichotomy in the high school years where you see young men and young women not as individuals but as groups trending in very different directions. Now, there are some ways in which Christians, of course, represent a counterculture to all of this. And that's one of the reasons why you go to the most conservative college campuses, the most conservative churches, you're going to find young couples, and you're going to find lots of babies. And that's because they find a way to get these things done just as they should be done and pretty much right on time. But, you know, you look at those situations, and I get to see them all over our own campus. What you see is there's not an accident here. The pattern's pretty clear. They come from Christian homes. They're produced by Christian churches that have not only preached the scripture, but lived it out. And in most cases, these young men had fathers in the home, and that shows up. And they are emulating what they have seen at home. They see this within the congregation. They aspire to it. Young men understand that a part of what it means to transition from boy to man is indeed to seize these things and to want to the glory of God, all of them, as soon as possible and to grow up as soon as possible. And you know what? The glory of that is just visible. You go to a liberal church or you go to a liberal sector of society, you just don't see much of that. You come to a conservative church that preaches the gospel and preaches the whole counsel of God and shows the warmth and the glory of that Christian testimony. And you're going to find young men and young women sitting together. They're going to have wedding bands on their hands, and you know they're going to be. They're going to be attentive to the children sitting beside them or those who are even in their arms. That's just the way it works. But you notice that picture is increasingly absent from vast sectors of American society. When someone like William Galston really notes this, and in particular goes into some detail, that tells you something. When the Wall Street Journal publishes an article like this, that tells you something. It's also interesting that Galston points to the phenomenon that you have women. If you have a much higher percentage of young women going into college and graduating from college than young men, then here's the deal. In the marriage market. And that may sound strange to people, but even just in the terms used by economists, there is a marriage market. You have young men and young women. And the market right now is dominated by college educated young women who are marrying the very highest qualified non college educated young men. Okay, so that's a little complicated, but it is fascinating. Just think about it. So you have young men, many of whom did not go to college, but some of them, the ones who go to college, they can take care of themselves. They're very much a part of the marriage market, or at least if not, it's because they don't want to be. When it comes, however, to the non college educated young men, it is college educated young women who did not find a husband or were not matched with a husband during those college years, they are now picking off, this is what Gallson's talking about. They're picking off the most qualified of the non college educated young men. And so this means people who are in the professions, they may be quite able to earn a living. And there's real honor in the professions or in the guilds and the trades. And by the trades I mean they may be a mechanic or something like that. The front page of the same newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, pointed to the fact that there is a real shortage of very highly trained automobile mechanics. And so you have major automotive firms that are looking for young men who have that kind of training and that kind of experience. And some of them can bring in six figure salaries. The point is, college educated young women who are looking at a decreasing percentage of college educated young men are then going to look in the so called marriage market or the marriage economy. They're going to look for the very most promising of the non college educated young men. The point William Gallston is making is who is left behind? And the who is left behind are young women and young men. And you have to kind of redefine young here because in some of these studies it goes all the way up into the early 30s. You're talking about many of them who just are never going to find. This is at least statistically speaking, are never going to find the kind of marriage, marriage stability or marriage satisfaction that we all know as Christians is exactly what God had intended. Gallston's point when he reaches the end of his article is this. If we care about marriage rates among working class Americans, we need to focus on increasing the number of men without college degrees who can offer young women what they're looking for in a husband. End quote. I'll just say, I think that's absolutely right, but I don't think there is any secular context in which that's likely to take place. You destroy the family. You marginalize community life. This is one of the inevitable results. And this is one of the reasons why Christians understand the necessity of the structures of creation, order, of marriage and family and community. And we understand that the subversion of those very institutions that make human life possible and profitable and flourishing, the very absence of those things comes with a great cost. And that is not going to be a cost that can be paid just in sociological terms. It's a deeply personal issue. The tragedies here are personal, not just sociological. By the way, I had a conversation with University of Virginia professor Brad Wilcox on this issue and on the fact that so many people on the left are preaching what they don't live in their own lives when it comes to marriage and family. You'll find a link to that thinking in public conversation at the website for today's program. All right, now let's turn to questions. As always, I'm honored by the questions that are sent in, and I always find them interesting, by the way, sometimes individually, sometimes in terms of a pattern in both senses today. First, I want to take a letter from a listener asking about the cross. And this is in light of some contemporary theological arguments that evangelicals make too much of the cross. And so he goes on and asks, is the cross truly the center of the gospel? And he goes on and says, the listener as a believer in Christ, I believe the cross is the center of the Gospel. He says, but nonetheless, how do we best define this? And I just want to say it goes back to the fact that in the New Testament we find all the warrant we need for understanding the centrality of the cross. And I can't go through text by text, but I will simply say, recall again that in 1 Corinthians 15 the apostle Paul says there are two central focuses of first priority at the very heart of the gospel that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that God raised him from the dead according to the Scriptures, and that death is Christ's sacrificial substitutionary death on the cross. But I also want to point the same Apostle Paul wrote in Galatians 6:14 but God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. So God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross. This is one of the reasons why we sing songs such as in the Cross of Christ, I glory. That's the proper way we glory in a way in which we're trained by the New Testament. We're actually instructed by the apostles, in this case, the apostle Paul. Now, again, we're not talking about the crucified Christ without the resurrection. No, the resurrection, as the Apostle Paul said, is with the cross a first priority. But it is to say that it is on the cross that the due penalty for our sin was paid as Christ died in our place. That is the great miracle in the same sense that in Israel the altar was central to the worship. They're the sacrifice of the animal. But that was only for the forgiveness of sins and the delay of punishment for a time. The atonement accomplished by the Lord Jesus Christ is perfect and it is eternal, and it is sufficient, and it leads to the promise of everlasting life, full acquittal from sin. That's the reason why Paul says he glories in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. Evangelicals should never apologize for this. And I want to be blunt. I think a part of what's behind this is a theological inclination on the part of some to want to get away from the substitutionary language of atonement. And they would rather talk about the victory of Christ in the resurrection. And by the way, that can be applied in a far more universalistic sense quite naturally, which I think is also a wrongful theological inclination, but one that we can note. And so I will simply say that I think anyone who complains about the cross centeredness of evangelical Christianity is actually revealing a problem in the question being asked, not in the centrality of the cross and evangelical preaching and devotion and piety. Okay, another very good question sent in by someone who has asked to remain anonymous, and by the way, only signed in is anonymous. So I get that point. But this letter writer is, I guess, criticizing me for what he sees as an inconsistency because of the attention I give to pronoun usage, as in the corruptions of the transgender non binary movement. And then he says, as an American evangelical, you believe that the one God is the Trinity. The Trinity is a group of persons that should use the pronouns them, they, their. However, you never use plural pronouns when referring to your one God. Why? Okay, well, you know, fair question. But the problem is in the statement of the question where he says that evangelicals believe, and he's saying, I believe as an evangelical, that the Trinity is a group of persons that should use the plural pronouns. We don't believe the Trinity is a group of persons. We believe one God in three persons. But we also believe in an undivided will we properly speak of God as one? Now this is something that stretches our human language because of course, when we're talking about Christ and we refer to Christ as He, and we refer to the Father as He, we by the way, also refer to the Holy Spirit as He. We nonetheless believe in one God in three persons. And we have to be very, very careful not to confuse things. This is why we have the confessional heritage of the Church, nicaea, Constantinople, Chalcedon, etc. This is why we have to be very, very careful. But one of the most important things we need to be on guard against is the argument which is in the assertion of this question that we believe in the Trinity as a group of persons. Well, we believe one God in three persons. We would never refer rightly to the Trinity as a group of persons. And so the problems inherent in the question, and here we simply have to say, I know no way around the affirmation of the trinitarian wisdom of the Church and understanding how best to say one God, three persons. One of the things we must never do is describe the Trinity as a group. Listeners to the briefing know how happy I am to know that young listeners are listening to the briefing. And I particularly appreciate when they write in and just here at the beginning of the year in terms of fresh letters coming in, three from 16 year old boys and one from an 18 year old. So let's just say these young men, four of them, writing independently, just with their own questions, they've all encouraged me. I think they'll encourage you as well. So for example, a 16 year old young man wrote in to say, currently I'm homeschooled, a sophomore in high school and attend a classical co op which recently has given me a desire to read more of the great books of literature. He then says this, I love to read in general, but I've been discovering that a portion of the classics can be heavily tangled with sexual references. He said, I wanted to first ask your opinion on how you approach classic literature and how to maintain a God honoring balance of reading and enjoying classics, but also staying clear of sinful or ill thought provoking stories. Okay, he goes on to something else, but let's just take that at face value. Number one, I tremendously respect a 16 year old young man writing with this kind of question and frankly with this kind of candor. And you know, even when reading Greek and Roman mythology, even just in the most classic form, you can confront some pretty tangled sexual issues. And so I want to speak candidly, to a 16 year old young man about this. And I want to say that you are absolutely right to have this concern. You're absolutely right to guard your own heart. Part of your responsibility as a young man is to guard your eyes, to guard your ears, to guard your heart. That does not mean running from all these issues, and it doesn't mean you have to avoid all classical literature, or for that matter, all literature. But it does mean you have to investigate your heart at all points in this process. And so I'm just going to speak again frankly to a 16 year old young man. You're going to come across things in literature, even in classical literature, which are going to surprise you with their impact and they may be even sexually explicit. So here's my encouragement and this is something that I've been encouraging young men about for a long time. And it's because I had to encourage myself with this when I was a young man. And frankly, you have to continue this kind of self monitor your entire life. And so 16 is a good place to start. I have a couple of concrete suggestions to offer here. Number one, learn how to skip a bit. And that is to say that you can be reading some really important literature. You can be reading a book of any form and you didn't pick it up for any kind of sexual or pornographic intention. And frankly, it may not even be marked by anything most of the world would consider to be sexually exciting in any sense. But you may find yourself reading something and you just know when all of a sudden that appears. And so you just skip a bit. Because you can generally skip a bit and not miss the plot and not miss the substance. The other thing is that you do just immediately recognize what's happening. And you recognize that here's something that is sexually interesting. And you just say, okay, I have to submit this to Christ, I just have to move on. And honestly, I want to speak to a Christian young man. I speak to all Christian men. We have to learn this discipline or we're sunk. Because all you have to do is go to the airport. All you have to do is go to the supermarket. There's no telling. In other words, it's not just movies and books. It's just life is often nearly pornographic and we have to learn how to move on. And that doesn't mean to deny how God made us. It is just to affirm the perfection of God's plan, which comes down to being married to a woman and the lifelong commitment of marriage. And it means not giving ourselves to any kind of temptation, pornography or anything else. But Martin Luther, the great reformer, I think, just in terms of a colloquial expression, helped us out by saying that you can't help as a young man what birds fly over your head, but you can keep the wrong birds from building nests in your hair. Those are two very different things. And you know, that statement from Martin Luther helped me when I was your age. I hope it helps you. You can't always help what's flying over your head, but you really do have responsibility for what makes a nest in your hair. And those are two different things. And I really respect you for asking the question and for asking it exactly as you did ask it. Another 16 year old young man writes, as a Christian and as a teenager, how much should I be engaging with political issues and where should I look to educate myself on current problems and news? And then he very kindly says in parentheses, other than the briefing, of course. Well, God bless you for that and I'm very glad you are a listener. And I want to say to this young man and to others, you know, everything has to be in a biblical proportion. And sometimes that's in a different proportion of life. So let me tell you that on my phone I have a picture of myself at your age. I was 16 and I'm sitting in a political booth working at a political campaign. In that case, it was as an organizer for fellow high school students for the candidacy of Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination in 1976. He didn't get it, but it was a glorious crusade. He eventually did, of course, become president. The point is that I really grew a lot and learned a lot by doing that. And I think the Lord used it in a big way, not only to make me understand these things better, but I think to even turn my heart. I didn't end up in the political world. I ended up as a Christian theologian and churchman and pastor and preacher and seminary president, college president. But as you know, listening to the briefing, I take these issues with great seriousness. I want to help Christians to think through them. So I would simply say it's not wrong to have this interest. I really want to encourage this interest. You may want to look at a wide variety of media and some trusted authorities. You need to learn some discernment in the worldview analysis of knowing, where's this newspaper coming from? Where's this podcaster coming from? How does this work? But the last thing I want to do is to pour any cold water at all on your interest. I'm thrilled that a Christian young man has that kind of interest at your age. But I also want to say, and here I want to go back to the 16 year old before you. I want to say that this is one of the reasons why God gives a 16 year old young man parents, and sometimes in particular here the role of a father and also fellow believers in the local church. So talk about these things. Consider these things in the context first of all of a conversation with your own parents and then also in conversation in the local church. That'll help us all. That's one of the means of grace that keeps us from driving ourselves into a ditch. Okay, another 16 year old young man, this one writes in saying that he's also homeschooled and he says by God's grace, a future politician. Anyway, he says, my question is, do you think it would be wise for the United States to pull a similar operation to the operation in Venezuela, in Cuba? He says, as someone who's part Cuban and have a family with family support there, I do have a bit more bias personally. He says, I think that an operation there would be good and is very possible. What are your thoughts? Okay, so I think most Americans have no idea that even going back as far as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Americans have had a great, great interest in Cuba, understanding at one point that that both Franklin and Jefferson thought that Cuba would inevitably at some point become part of the United States of America. That hasn't happened. But because of its location and its strategic importance, Cuba has loomed large. And America has learned how to mess that up at various times in our history. And we need to get it right. I have stated that I believe that the American intervention in Venezuela is legitimate. That doesn't mean that it works out like we want it to work out. And I desperately want a similar kind of liberation or perhaps even a more comprehensive liberation for the people there in Cuba. And they are victimized by a horrible regime that has just preyed on its own people for too many decades. And if you want Exhibit A of how communism fails, then simply look to Cuba. But I write knowing that this young man even has family who are involved here. And I want to say I hope and pray for the liberation of Cuba. It may be that at some point a military action by the United States or the United States and others will become feasible or necessary. At this point, I think the most important thing we can say is that we pray for the relief and liberation of the people of Cuba. When it comes to aiding that liberation, I think the United States faces not only an opportunity, but I think in historical terms, in moral terms, something of an obligation. I mentioned also a letter from an 18 year old young man. This is a high school senior, also homeschooled. And he writes, I was reading about the Tower of Babel and noticed something interesting. God said that when all people were of one language, they could do anything they set their minds to. He's citing here Genesis 11:6. He says, what does this mean for people attempting to create text such as AI glasses that can translate any language and remove the barrier? Also, is it biblical backing to show why globalization has failed? Okay, so let me answer the last part first. Yes, globalization is going to fail, period. And that's because of sin. And it's also because of God's judgment on sin. And you point to Genesis 11 and the tower of Babel. And indeed God said that the human conspiracy of pride, a conspiracy against him was facilitated by the fact that human beings spoke one language. And a part of God's judgment on humanity was. Then he separated us by ethnicity and by language such that a full global human conspiracy against the Creator was made much more difficult. Now is AI and current digital translation means are those going to reverse the curse? No, they're not going to reverse the curse. And, and I think it is still very evident that as much as you may have through AI, some, some real translation gain, the fact is that we still are deeply embedded in different language groups. And you come to know by Genesis 11 that's a part of God's plan, indeed it's a part of God's judgment. Now, on the other hand, I think it's also true to understand that the ambition to overcome that in political terms is indeed something that is destined to fail. I don't believe that God's going to allow the situation in 2026 or in some future date that he did not allow in Genesis 11. But you know, the way you ask the question, it also very insightfully points to the fact that some of those committed to the worldview of global want explicitly just that in their own way, in our own times, they're trying to build their own Towers of Babel. Those who have eyes to see should at least notice what they're doing and why it matters. Some of them are openly calling for a transhuman, post human secular utopia. And they've told us so in their own words. Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website@albertmohler.com you can follow me on X or Twitter by going to x.comalbertmohler for information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to spts.edu. for information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com I'm speaking to you from Davenport, Florida, and I'll meet you again on Monday for the briefing.