The Making of Men: Character, Connection, and Human Flourishing with Richard Reeves & Christine Emba

Good evening to all of you. Boy, that quieted down so well. That was so impressive. Welcome to all of you joining us for tonight’s evening conversation on the Making of Men, Character, Connection and Flourishing with Richard Reeves and Christine Emba, and the awarding of our second annual Michael Gerson Memorial Prize tonight. So yes, this is a double header this evening. We are thrilled that each and every one of you is here. And I want to give a special welcome to our first time guest. We know there’s several of you out here who came in from out of town. This might be your very first exposure to the Trinity Forum. And if you are one of those folks and wondering who is the Trinity Forum and why am I here, our mission at the forum is to cultivate, curate and communicate the best of Christian thought for the common good and to provide leaders a space to wrestle with the big questions of life in the context of faith, and ultimately to come to better know the author of the answers. And we hope tonight’s conversation will be a small taste of that for you today. So our topic tonight is one of growing urgency and importance. As more boys and young men struggle to make sense of a changing workforce, find role models and a sense of purpose, or make and sustain a healthy relationship. Today, a young man is less likely than his sister to finish college, more likely to be living at home, and nearly four times as likely to take his own life. And all too often, their plight is either ignored or dismissed as evidence of toxic masculinity or, on the other hand, used as justification for blaming women and turning back the clock on their empowerment. So I am so excited to get to introduce our guest tonight who have not only offered wise and penetrating analysis on the topic, but also concrete steps forward.

Richard Reeves is the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, which he launched in 2023 after serving for many years as a senior fellow at Brookings. His work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The New York Times, and you may recognize him as well from Real Time with Bill Maher and The Daily Show. He’s also the author of several books, including Dream Hoarders and perhaps most saliently of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Man Is Struggling, Why It Matters and What to do About It. Joining him is Christine Emba, who is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a contributing writer at the New York Times and a senior fellow at the Georgetown University Initiative on Catholic Thought and Public Life. She’s also the author of Rethinking Sex: A Provocation, a recent winner of the Nell Minow Award for Cultural Criticism, and I’ll mention, because she is pulling kind of double duty tonight, a member of the Michael Gerson Memorial Prize selection Committee. Richard and Christine, welcome. So looking forward to this conversation. So in starting out, let’s just get a sense from you both of kind of the scope and the nature of the problem, because on one hand, it is still indisputably the case that men hold most of the wealth, most of the power, the vast majority of top notch jobs and the like. But, Richard, one of the things that you have pointed out is that underneath that top tier, there’s a very different story going on. So what is it that society has misunderstood about the plight of men and why and how are they struggling?

Thank you. Well, first of all, thank you so much for the invitation and to Christine for joining this conversation. Just in case anybody doesn’t know, this accent is going to reveal the fact that I am not originally from the US. So let’s get that out of the way. In case you’re wondering, I do run the American Institute for Boys and Men, and I’m just coming up to the ninth anniversary of becoming a proud U.S. citizen. So I want to thank you for having me, because this is a great country. I think sometimes it takes an immigrant to really kind of recognize that. And I think every American high schooler should go to a citizenship ceremony. That’s a separate policy debate. I’m also a father. It’s worth saying that. So I have three sons. I’m a boy dad. And my sons are now 30, 26 and 24. It changes all the time, but I’m pretty sure that’s right. And so I’ve been kind of talking about this stuff with them. So the facts and I won’t take too long on this, but you’ve already alluded to some of these. It’s not only that the suicide rate is four times higher among men. Most troublingly, it’s rising most rapidly among young men. Until relatively recently, it was kind of middle aged men who were losing in the biggest numbers. But actually it’s now been overtaken by young men. The loss of life to suicide among young men has risen by almost a third just since 2010 which is one of the charts that keeps me awake at night.

Obviously, the education story is pretty well told. There’s actually a bigger gap on college campuses today than there was in the early 70s when we passed Title IX, but it’s the other way around. So men are further behind women in college today than women were behind men when we passed Title IX. And then the last kind of data point probably is on the class one you’ve mentioned, which is that men without a college degree are only earning about the same today as men without a college degree were in 1979. So that’s kind of just economic stagnation for that whole group of men. And I think behind that caused by that, and I’m sure we’ll get into this, is something deeper than just the data. And I, you know, I’m a data guy, right? I can, I can do data all night. As Christine, who’s also a board member of the American Institute for Boys and Men, so doing triple duty knows only too well. In fact, one of the mottos of our institute is keep it boring. And as my son said, well, you are the man for that job, dad. What I mean by that is try to be empirical, try to be authoritative with what we say. But I think it is true that the old script that men and women could follow have been very significantly torn up.

So the old script my parents followed for sure, was that the primary role of a woman was to become a housewife, mother, etc. and for a man it was to be the breadwinner. That was certainly the script my parents followed. They had a very equal marriage, actually may not have looked like that to the labor economists examining their household, but they really did. But they never doubted for a moment what their roles were. I think we’ve torn those scripts up and we’ve said to women instead, no, you be who you want to be quite rightly, be an AI senior fellow be a president, be an astronaut. All of which is great. So we’ve given women a new script now, having torn up the old one. I fear that we haven’t done the same for men. I fear that we’ve torn up the old script, which, for all of its problems, which are probably obvious, did at least mean that my dad knew what he was supposed to do. I think for a lot of men today, it’s not clear what they’re supposed to do. And at worse, sometimes it’s clear what they’re not supposed to do than what they’re supposed to do. And so I think that sort of scriptlessness, has led to a lot of men feeling quite lost, having to improvise their way through the world. And improvisation is a really difficult thing to do.

I’ll also thank you Cherie, for for having me on this panel, in this conversation. I like facts too, I have to say, but I’m a journalist. And so in addition to being interested in the empirical facts, I’m interested in what the story looks like as I was telling Richard earlier tonight. He has facts. I want to have facts, but also the vibes. And I think actually the reason why I ended up on AIBM’s board was that I wrote a piece in the Washington Post, my longest essay to date, actually four years ago, entitled Men Are Lost. I will say that this is something of a problem with my journalism. I seem to like get onto a trend just a few years before it’s really mainstream. And so it’s like a lot less profitable than it could be. But anyway, I had been just sort of looking around as a young, single woman who was interested in men. Still all of those things. So any matchmakers in the audience, please reach out. But as I put it in that piece, I noticed that men seem to be getting a little bit weird. They were taking up sort of esoteric hobbies or extremely masculinity coded hobbies. They were chugging milk, getting into weightlifting, and obsessed with Bronze Age pervert. They seemed confused about what it meant to be a man, what a man was supposed to look like, what a man was supposed to do. And so it appeared to me that they were just grasping around for images, tales, really anyone who could give them a path so that they didn’t have to improvise.

And naturally I went and did some reporting on this and yes, I mean, we’ve gone over the fact you’re entirely right. I think that the sense of dislocation is caused by economic change, technological change, which is also going to increase even further with the advent of AI and social change in the form of the feminist movement and women’s, frankly long overdue liberation into the educational sphere and the career world. All of this change happened, and we have not had a lot of time to metabolize it, first of all. And yes, we have not really had a conversation around what it means for men. There is a phenomenon in sociology, social identity theory. The idea is that if your identity is threatened, your identity as a person of color, or as a Democrat or a Republican or as a male, you don’t let go of it easily. In fact, you double down and try to defend it even harder you try and play into that trait even more. And that’s what I saw young men doing. And unfortunately, the traits of masculinity, the social identity of masculinity that was most popular in our popular culture at the time, and frankly, still is today, was not the best vision of masculinity. It was one that, first of all, defined being a man as being better than and not at all like a woman.

Any traits that could be perceived in some way as womanish were to be downsized, made fun of. This is sort of the origination of your body, my choice. Making women feel lesser. The traits that were, I think, promoted and seen in figures like Andrew Tate, for instance, were those of aggression, of a sort of need to conquer, of violence, some of which could be useful in certain moments, but are not necessarily what you want to build an identity around. And then there are many other traits of masculinity that weren’t being modeled in the public eye, and that were not clearly taught or understood. The other thing that I found in my reporting as I talked to young men really across America, was that many of them didn’t have figures of guidance in their own lives. They didn’t necessarily have father figures in the home to look up to. There has been a dearth of male teachers, male doctors, male nurses, and in many of the professions. So they were making it up as they went along. And I think this sense of confusion not only allows bad ideas to come to the fore, but also leads to inside a sense of anomie, a sense of listlessness, a sense of well, if I can’t really figure out how to be and nobody is valuing who I am, maybe I won’t do anything at all.

There’s so much to unpack there, and we’re going to go into some of it. But one of the things I wanted to pick up on is, Richard, you were talking about cultural scripts, and certainly for a long time there’s been sort of a cultural script around masculinity that sort of valorized the man of stoic isolation, the strong, silent type, riding off into the sunset alone. But we also know that character is formed through relationship, that it is other people who help us figure out not only who we are, but who we should be. And so I wanted to ask both of you, as you think about offering different alternatives to the commonly accepted cultural scripts. What would those be and how would you go about offering them and making them appealing to young men?

I think this is part of the challenge here is that we’ve done very well to move away from having unitary scripts. So having just said that, I think we’ve torn up the old scripts and given new ones to women. I also think the women’s movement, which is, globally, the greatest liberation in human history for sure, has actually done a better job in some ways than the current debate on around masculinity of allowing for more pluralism. I think actually, if I were to say, here’s how to be a woman, especially if I were to do it, but it wouldn’t go down very well. Like, here’s the script for Modern Femininity. I suspect that there would be women in the audience who would say, well, hang on, that’s not what I want to do. Right? And so I think this is a struggle. How do we have enough coherence to these ideas that they’re doing good social work without being traps, without becoming determined deterministic of how we have to think about it. But I will say that this is partly in response to both your question and the vibe issue is that I do think it’s this sense of pinballing around. So Christine’s quite right that one of the most dominant debates is kind of from the more reactionary right around masculinity, but there’s also kind of competing visions too, which is telling young men, the problem is not that you’re not masculine enough, it is that you’re too masculine.

You might even be toxically so. And so if you’ve got boys who’ve actually been through this kind of period, actually, they’re being told on Monday that their problem is they’re not masculine enough and they should eat more meat and be more aggressive and competitive. But they’re being told on Tuesday that the problem is that they need to get rid of all that toxic masculinity and eat soy beans. I’m not very good at the salad. And kind of go to therapy and cry more. Right. And then on Wednesday, they’re back to, so it’s like they’re being pinballed around. And so in the end, I think that they’ll believe what their eyes are telling them, not their ears. And the thing that gives me a lot of hope is that the evidence suggests that when you ask boys and young men who their role models are. They are still people in their lives, their fathers, teachers, coaches, etc. and they’re not these online figures for all but the tiny, tiny minority. And I risk saying that if young men who are, I think, hungry for formation, i think that’s true to say, that’s what they’re looking for online, elsewhere. They’re hungry for that. If we’re not providing enough positive male role models in the sense of being unapologetically masculine in the best sense, a gentleman protection, which I’m sure we’ll get to.

That’s our fault. And if they go online looking for alternatives, that’s our fault. If we don’t think that the fact that the share of K-12 teachers that are male has gone from 33% in the 80s to 23% today, and falling that most boys will get all the way to middle school without encountering a male teacher. If we don’t think that’s a problem, then I don’t take the person saying it that seriously, to be honest, and I was just to be personal for a moment. My own son is now teaching sixth grade in Baltimore City. And when I think about the kids in his class, including the boys, some of whom don’t necessarily have strong father figures in their own household, and I think, okay, they could go online or they could think about my son in front of them every single day. And it gives me a lot of hope to think that he’s there in front of them every day. He’s not telling them how to be male. He’s not giving them a curriculum for healthy masculinity. He is showing them how to do it, and that’s the way we do it. We beat the online influencers, not online, but in real life.

No, I completely concur with that. I think that this idea of being a person in the world, seeing a man, a masculine role model in the world as being much more important than someone you encounter on TV or online it’s just so key. And it’s something that we do actually tend to overlook when we’re talking about like, oh, this politician or this actor, whoever is behaving poorly. Actually, it was one of the interviewees for one of my masculinity pieces who made this point to me. I was asking him like, so who are male role models for you or models of masculinity in the public eye or on TV? And he was telling me actually about how his male role model, because he didn’t have his father at home, his parents divorced when he was very young, was just a priest at the church he went to, who befriended him and first taught him how to cook because he was complaining that he didn’t know how to cook. And then they started talking about clothes and like, sort of how to be in the world and all sorts of other things. And he said, you know, I think that my male role models like the best men aren’t on TV, they aren’t online because they’re like busy being men in real life. Like they’re taking care of their families. They’re going to work. They’re priests. They’re mentoring younger men. They’re not pontificating out of what is often, you know, a sense of loss within themselves. And yeah, I think that’s the ticket. I think having more of those men in communities, in face to face interaction who can go about their day in a way that is moral and exemplary of character. That is what young people are looking for and also what they’ll gravitate towards.

Yeah. Can I pick up on that? I think this point about relationality that you’ve just made is so central, and it was implied in your question that I think we sometimes think, well, women are the relational ones, right? Women do relationships and men are, as you said, like the Lone Ranger, you know, individualistic. And I think that that’s not just wrong, but the opposite of the truth. Masculinity is a little bit more fragile. Always has been. Has to be socially constructed, right? So people talk about fragile masculinity. There’s a kind of anthropological truth to that, which is we do have to kind of we do have to make men out of boys. And so we do actually need to think about what that means. And it’s defined relationally. It’s defined in relationship. It’s not defined by going off and being the kind of, you know, the idea of the kind of, you know, the pioneer, the lone cowboy or whatever. You know, it’s a nice myth to enjoy when you’re on the sofa watching a movie or whatever. But the truth is what makes us a man and turns us from a boy to a man is caring for others, being responsible for others, and above all, maybe being a father.

It’s very interesting. You mentioned kind of Bronze Age pervert. For those who don’t know him, he’s a very popular figure on the kind of young reactionary masculinist right I guess I would say. And he has a book, Bronze Age mindset, and he says, I quote directly from his book, “A family is usually the end of a man”, right? I think that’s a perfect distillation of that view. Right. Which is that somehow having children, raising children, being a father, being a good dad, maybe being a good husband, that that’s what stops you being a man. No, that’s what makes you a man. The guy who’s not doing those things is the one who’s not a man. But it’s very interesting to me how that those sort of fatherly virtues, that sense of care, it’s completely absent from that discourse on the right. It’s also absent for different reasons from a lot of the discourse on the left. But I do think that one way or the other, away from the kind of heat of the culture war, a lot more young men are figuring this out than maybe we fear.

So. That’s so interesting. And Christine, I totally take your point about the fact that there’s there are a lot of wonderful male role models out there. And, you know, they are busy at work and their families coaching, volunteering. They are not posting, boasting and preening online. That said, we are spending more time online all the time. Time is zero sum. When we are spending time online, we are usually not spending it with other people. Every year the amount of the percentage of the communication information we get is from online. Porn is only growing. Online gambling is growing. With those trends, I am curious if both of you are discouraged or do you see a way out?

Well, when you put it like that.

You’d be pessimistic and I’ll be optimistic. How about that?

Fair enough. You know, I am pessimistic in this moment. And that said, I don’t actually think that focusing on doom is helpful or substantive. So I try not to be. But the statistics are grim, and I think all of us have an experience of time spent online that might be even grimmer. One of the things that I have been researching and writing on, along with my colleagues at AEI, is the question of gender divergence. And if you look at polling and statistics, you see that especially for young men and young women, they seem to be, well, diverging. They are increasingly living in almost entirely different worlds. And, you know, you asked about what was contributing to sort of this problem of masculinity in the first question. And this was actually the key point that we didn’t get into. Technology is a huge part of that. We’re spending less time in person with each other and far more time on our screens. And yes, not just watching movies, but on the internet, on social media. Social media algorithms have become increasingly fine tuned to find to, designed rather, to send you posts and information that inflame or irritate you, and that are very closely tied to what it can read of your personal preferences.

And so young men and young women are getting content that’s geared towards either men or women, and often content of the most inflammatory kind. And for young people who tend to be interested in sex and romance, a lot of it actually tends to be, well, around sex and romance and around the opposite sex. But for young men in particular, much of the online content is extremely negative about women, about their dating prospects, about how the opposite sex might be lying to them. For women, it is about how men are dangerous, how men are either narcissists or gaslighters. There’s a fascinating statistic that I came across recently. The rate of women who own bear spray or pepper spray or some sort of like protective tool has gone from 1 in 10 in 2017 to 1 in 4 today. Women express a lot of fear of men and men hear a lot about how women both hate them and will use them, are wildly sexually active and can’t be trusted. And this is radicalizing, I think for a lot of young men, and contributes to them either sort of doubling down into themselves thinking like, well, there’s no way I can be successful in the world.

There’s no way I can be successful with women. All of these facts and figures I’m hearing from dating coaches and influencers online say that I don’t have a chance or, on the flip side, really angry and willing to act out against women. And then, of course, this is turbocharged by pornography, which has become increasingly prevalent and which young people see it incredibly young ages. I think right now, the age of first exposure for pornography is something between 10 and 13 years of age. That also, because it’s so image forward and tied to a real dopamine response, cements these images of what male and female interactions might look like that are increasingly violent, often misogynistic, and totally divorced from real life. And so you have young men who are sort of growing up steeped in this environment of negativity towards the opposite sex and the world. And then post Covid, especially not actually interacting with members of the opposite sex or even older adults who might be able to correct those misapprehensions. And you have boys who live in their own world. And this is not a good thing. I think it’s very clear to say.

Well, I’m looking forward to the sunny prospects here.

Sorry, everyone.

It’s going to be a long climb out of that hole that Christine just dug. You’re welcome. Thank you. Well, I mean, this might be it’s the distinction you made earlier between kind of vibe and facts, I think might be useful to us here. So I agree that there are some troubling things about the vibes and certainly the online world. I speak as someone who is when it comes to the culture war, a proud, conscientious objector. I just will not engage. And I think there’s too many people who are just kind of drawn to the flames of the kind of culture war. And I do think there’s a problem. And actually somebody I can’t remember who said talking about, you know, deliberate disinformation campaigns being run by our foreign adversaries, is that the real secret to destroying a civilization is to get the young men and the young women to hate each other. It’s struck me as a very profound insight. I think that’s right. And you’re quite right that it’s happening on both sides. There’s polling from more in common that I saw presented at steamboat seminars recently run by my good friend Isabel Sawhill on the front row here and showing that among progressive activists, which is roughly the kind of 1 in 10 most left people, I think I’m getting that about right. Two thirds of them agree with the following statement. Men do more harm than good. So that’s a pretty prevailing view on the on the left now.

And of course, you’re drawn to the algorithm, the inflame the outrage machine, etc.. And so I think that is troubling on, on all sides and you’ll just get, you know, whatever the month is, or two months, there’ll be another culture war explosion around gender. Meanwhile, I look at the data and I don’t see a big change in attitudes towards gender equality, including among young people, seems to still be pretty strongly in favor and trending that way. I mentioned earlier some of the trends that a significant increase in the share of women in senior positions not enough, but significant increase. For all the talk of trad wives, female labor force participation just hit its highest rate on record. The gender pay gap is at its narrowest point on record, and the amount of time that fathers are spending doing hands on fathering has quadrupled in the last 2 or 3 decades, and especially since the pandemic, we’ve seen a massive surge in the amount of time that fathers are spending caring for their children, and an increase in the amount of paid work being done by women. And so it sometimes feels to me as if a way, I guess the last thing, given that startling stat about fear, fear of crime is continuing to rise even as crime itself continues to decline. Crime is really down. So if you just look at something like, you know, rape and sexual assault, which I think we could all agree is one of the crimes we want to get to zero is halved in the last 30 years.

So it’s half the rate it was when I was at college. Is it low enough? No, but it’s significantly lower than it was. But yet the share of women who say they’re afraid of it has really gone up. Right? And that’s true not just for that issue, but crime more generally. And I think that is being algorithmically driven as well. And so there’s this increasing mismatch between what I see as quite encouraging trends, like on the ground, if you like, with women to continue to advance economically. Men to do more and more on the home front, broad support for gender equality, more women in positions of power. I think it’s really striking now that when you talk about politics, no one really bats an eyelid if it’s two women battling out to be governor of Tennessee, for example, where where I’m a resident right now even, that’s not even a story anymore. So I worry sometimes that in our desire, correct desire to worry about the things we should worry about, we have a tendency just to skip over the fact that some things are getting better. And so I wonder if actually young men and young women actually aren’t trying to figure this out. And maybe with a bit of help and a bit less blame from both sides, they might just make it.

That’s great. Christine, I want to pick up on something that you were talking about earlier in regards to relations between the sexes and the world of romance. And you recently wrote really a fantastic article for the New York Times on what had happened at Cornell and have expressed not just in that article, but really consistently over years, concern about moving from basically a societal sort of focus on consent, not violating boundaries or laws, and moving to the kind of formation that leads more young men and certainly more people in general, to think about actively willing the good of another, which is really straight from Aquinas. And so I wanted to ask your thoughts on how do we do that in this time and in this context?

Yeah, it does feel like the Cornell investigation, certainly a live wire under this conversation. Yeah, and it’s a difficult one to talk about because in some ways, it brings to the fore many of these questions that we’re discussing about how the sexes relate to each other, what the future might look like, what we have to anticipate, why fear feels like it abounds in many spaces. A term that I’ve written on before, actually, just to take back to our last question, is hetero pessimism, which is primarily attributed to women at this point, but it’s a sort of sense of disappointment in the idea of being attracted to men, by women in particular, the idea that like, well, I wish it weren’t so nothing good can come of this. I don’t see it going anywhere. And it was originally coined as like a kind of joking term, but it seems to be felt increasingly seriously by young women about young men in moments like these. I think the Cornell case raises the question that we’ve also kind of been talking about through this conversation about how we create social norms. We talk about masculinity and the problem that we’re facing, it seems, with masculinity in this moment is that we’ve we’ve lost the script. There’s not really a norm of what it means to be a good man. It could be anything. You might have to sort of invent it as you go along.

And I think that that is sort of a branch off of the same tree where our kind of discussions about sex have gone off the rails. So I write in Rethinking Sex: A Provocation, my book, about the difference between consent and actually being a good person. The idea that I posit is that consent is a legal criterion. It’s the bright line that we put in place to make it possible to adjudicate cases in a court of law. You get permission to do a thing. That’s the floor. That is the floor of good behavior. A good person should be aiming to do more than, well, I got permission. By law, I didn’t actually sexually assault this person. No, a good person should be trying to be good to the other person, to see their human dignity, to see them as an individual and to will their good, to make choices with their good in mind. So in a case like this one, whether a person consented or not, whatever else was happening in a room at the time, it’s not enough to say, well, legally I haven’t been caught out, so this is fine. You can still say, no, there’s something wrong here. Something was wrong in this situation. Even if it’s not yet decided in a court of law. By my moral understanding, by our shared social understanding, we have higher expectations for ourselves.

I think the question that I’ve been asking and the question that we’re asking on the stage is, yeah, how do we create social norms that may not be legal? They may not be written in a book, but they are broadly understandable about how we’re supposed to behave, what we want our sexual culture to look like, our romantic culture, what we want our men to look like, and also our women to look like. And I think that, again, depends less on sort of legal rulings, although, as Learned Hand once said, the law is a teacher. But on our exemplars, on those father figures who are in the community, who would talk to the young men around them about what they would expect from them in a certain situation, about having a society that is able to cheer on good men and men who do the right thing and actually find something to celebrate in an honorable masculinity, while also being clear to disdain and, frankly, shame a masculinity that is taking advantage of people, that allows evil to happen.

I guess I can do this here. I wasn’t sure where I could do this, but for some reason, when I’ve been reading about this case and just listening to you now, the Anglican confession of sin came to my mind. I know there’s an Anglican priest in the audience, but, I’ll get it somewhat wrong, but, it is Almighty and most merciful father, we have erred and strayed from your ways like lost sheep. We have followed too closely the devices and desires of our own heart. We have left undone those things that we should have done. And we have done those things which we should not have done. So this is one of the oldest prayers in the Anglican lexicon, and it’s a reminder of a number of things. One is that the line between sin and not sin runs within us, not between us, but also that there can be sins of omission as well as commission. We’ve left undone those things that we should have done. And I think that’s really underlying a lot of this debate too, which is not enough to say, well, I didn’t do anything wrong. The question is, but did you do the right thing? Not just did you not do the wrong thing? And obviously, we’re thinking about it as a father too, and thinking, how would have wanted my own sons to respond? And like, I should be clear that I never had conversations with my son about masculinity, maybe until, you know, some of these online figures came came on and I started writing about it. But I’ve said publicly that I tried to raise them to have the courage to-they’re straight, I should say that first, the courage to ask a girl out grace to always accept no for an answer and the responsibility that either way, she gets home safely that night. In fact, they had a bye from their curfews, if that’s what they were doing. What I was trying and I realized I was trying to do. I never quite articulated that way until quite recently. So actually, I think it’s okay to have agency. It’s okay to kind of trust in the good of the other and, you know, just ask somebody out as long as you do it well and nicely and like, you’re okay. Like these myths that somehow if you ask a girl out, she’s going to drag you to court. They are just a myth, right? There’s one example of it that gets blown up on the internet. All of one of the huge problems with the online world is that it takes exceptions and convinces you that they are the rules and they are not. So ask them out. And if she says no, of course, of course.

But then also the last bit is make sure she gets home safely. Now, I’m aware that that’s quite a sexist idea. And I think one of the problems with the way we’re talking about this case and others is that we’re reluctant to admit a couple of things maybe. Number one, which Christine has written a book length about, is that sex might, on average, be somewhat different for men and women, right? We cannot just assume androgyny here. And if it had been a John Doe rather than a Jane Doe, it would have made no difference. But that’s something people are really reluctant to talk about, especially on the left, is that there are differences here, which we should, and that we have elaborately constructed ways to kind of manage a positive culture around this stuff, which is based on an acknowledgment of those differences which cannot be airbrushed away ideologically. And the second thing is the idea of being a protector. And what I like to think is if one of my sons had been on that group chat or had been the guy that walked in and walked out again, that is not what they would have done, that they would have protected that young woman and made absolutely certain that she was safe and that she was where she wanted to be, would have interposed themselves in an inconvenient and difficult way, physically if necessary, to protect her.

But to do that, we have to invoke the idea that men have a protective role. And again, I’ve just transgressed against one of the truisms now, which is that, Oh, well, there aren’t any differences. Women shouldn’t need protection. You’re asking men to protect? And I’m saying yes. And I think we have to decide. We can’t have it both ways. And I think that it’s better to raise our young men to think that they do have a specific and honorable protective duty, not despite being men, but at least in part because they’re men. And that is one of the things that makes them a good man. And so I can tell you, I would have been ashamed of my sons if they hadn’t intervened or had been one of the participants in that. And I think shame is one of the most undervalued forces in a good society. We say, shame on you. And that should mean something long before we get to law. It can be awful, even if it’s lawful. But we’ve got to be clear then what that means. We can say that we need norms and morality, but then we’re sometimes reluctant to spell out what we actually mean by that, because we know if we do that, we’re going to lose half our listeners.

You know, Richard, you’re an invocation of the Anglican Prayer actually anticipated a question I really wanted to ask. So thank you for that.

I saw that coming.

But we have been taught, of course, there’s an economic aspect to the plight of men and boys. And you’ve written about that quite persuasively in your book. We’ve been talking mostly about character formation and a lot of what we have been talking about really gets to ideas of sin and transgression, virtue, love of neighbor, love of the other, willing the good of the other. And you both have been writing about formation in this way. And so I wanted to ask you both how your faith influences your own views of formation, of character, of flourishing, and then whether you believe there is something that faith or a faith community can offer to young men that really can’t be replicated elsewhere.

That is a much more pleasant question, I have to say. So my faith background, I was brought up a sort of non-denominational Christian by very devout parents and actually converted to Catholicism in college, which is often not the path that many college students are taking going to church more often. But I think throughout my life, and it’s something I’m appreciating more as I grow older and frankly, as I’m called to write more and express my thoughts aloud, is how much growing up within the Christian faith tradition has first forced me to actually think about questions of good and bad, good and evil, what it means to be a good person, what virtue actually is, just being asked to ask that question is actually fairly novel I found. We live in a moment, especially young people, where we’re increasingly taught by the world around us, and often in many case parents, that the important thing to do is to excel, to make sure that you go to school so that you can get a good job so that you should, you know, you can follow your professional dreams, etcetera, etcetera, believe in yourself, but not that much about just how to be a person. Actually, in research I’ve done with AEI, we do focus groups with young people frequently.

And one question stood out to me when asking about relationships in particular. We’ll ask a focus group to raise your hands if your parents taught you the importance of getting a good education. Everyone raises their hand. Raise your hands if your parents talk to you about debt. Some people raise their hands. Raise your hands if your parents talk to you about the importance of finding a good partner and a future marriage. No one. Actually, that’s not a thing that’s talked about anymore. And I think about how much time was spent in my youth, and especially in my church communities. First, just talking about what it means to be a good person and then instructions for even parents train up a child in the way he should go, frequently deployed by my mom. Or, for young people, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest. These were sort of trainings and virtue that were just running in the background of my mind from when I was like a small child to now. And those actually set the norms for me, set the expectation that I would think about these things, literally, think on these things, and that this was something that it was normal to expect of another person, and that this was information that I needed to seek out and live by.

And then I think the other part about a faith community that is incredibly valuable is just this last part, right? Community. We’ve talked extensively just on the stage about how you learn from others. You learn from examples. Even if you don’t have a particular figure in your own home. Maybe there is someone at your church. And in my case, there often were many people at my church, even if I didn’t want to go to my mom to talk about a certain question, I could talk to someone else, a sort of aunt or religious leader, someone who led my like stars troop, you know, even when my brother was not really interested in talking to my dad about his sort of romantic issues, there were male youth leaders, there was a men’s group, there were places that you could go both to receive instruction and be held while you were figuring that out. And I think having a place that sets these norms, sets these expectations, and also holds you up as you try to live up to them is crucial.

I love all of that. And I agree with it. And I think that if we agree that to some extent, at least many young men are hungry for searching for structure, community, meaning and formation, it turns out there are some institutions in our society that have had quite a lot of experience of doing all of those things, which is religious institutions. I think it’s no surprise that there’s more interest in religion among some of these young men. I don’t immediately kind of panic. I mean, you can imagine some people are like, oh my God, these men are all now going back to church because they all become, you know, reactionary or whatever. And I think there’s something much deeper and more interesting going on, which is this search for formation. I’ll also say it is very interesting to me, having been in various denominational spaces, that church is one of the very few places left where having a men’s group is completely unproblematic, right? I mean, like, you can go to the most liberal Episcopal church in D.C. and it has a men’s group or the most conservative.

What are they doing in there…

Exactly. Right. Well, in that case, they’re probably learning about toxic masculinity. I’m sorry. That was very that was very unfair, very unfair. I retract that comment. But I do think, and women’s groups and so on. And I think that’s just some some real deep wisdom there that it is useful maybe to have some of those spaces. I think deeper still, at least when I think about this, I think the way I raise my son’s, not that they are especially religious, I should add. And it gets back to Christine’s point and her reporting recently, which is if we want people to kind of fundamentally believe in the dignity of that particular person, of every single individual person, rather than as someone you can instrumentally use with their consent, perhaps. But to see them instrumentally is very difficult. If you see them as a child of God, if you think every single person has divinity within them, they think that’s a good basis upon which to then build this respect for other people. I don’t think you necessarily have to have the explicit faith around it, but I do think that a lot of our most standard moral norms are based on an idea of the dignity of each and every person in every single situation that is hard to get to without some invocation of the divine. I’ll just finish on a personal story. One of my sons, who’s probably the least religious, although increasingly curious, when when my sons are growing up, one of the things I do is if there’s someone, if there’s young men sitting down in a bus or on a metro stop and there’s someone else that needs the seat more than them, I say, who’s going to get up? And I say, come on, guys, who’s going to give up this seat for this elderly person? Who’s going to do it? Like who’s going? I just do that.

And my sons would die of embarrassment every time. Oh my God. Like, dad, stop doing that. Stop doing it. Every time I would do it, every time I’m just like, I’m sorry, get up. Right. And it always worked. And usually without almost always, if you actually said, look, I think they need the seat more than you wouldn’t mind getting up. My sons would die. Not that long ago. I’m on the metro with my middle son, the one who’s probably most embarrassed by it. There’s a bunch of people sitting down, someone else who needs a seat. He goes over to them and say, hey, guys, is what are you going to give up the seat for this lady? I’m like, my work here is done. But I didn’t tell him he had to do that. He just saw me doing it for 25 years. And it comes back to your point, which is, in the end, people believe their eyes and their ears. We learn by example and by exemplar. And so the best thing to do is as a father, as a coach, as a teacher or whatever, it’s not, again, not to preach masculinity positively, but practice it.

We’re going to turn in just a second to questions from the audience, but I’m going to try to squeeze in one more quick question with quick answers, which is, let’s suppose in the audience tonight, there is a discouraged young, 20 something guy who, he may not have a father figure, may not have a clear sense of his purpose or what he has to contribute. What would you most want him to see, experience, or encounter in the next five years? And why?

Can I go first and just, I don’t know if it directly answers the question, but I have encountered a few young men just when I’m out speaking about these issues. First of all, know that we need you, that we see you, and that we love you. And I think some of the kind of more positive “menfluences”, to use a lovely term of Christine’s, have actually tapped into that desire among a lot of young men, just to feel seen and heard and known and loved. So we need you, right? We cannot build a good society without our young men. And we need you at your best. Please don’t retreat. Please don’t give up on us. We need you. And then what I’d want him to see is other men doing that in his lives. I’m obsessed with this issue about more male teachers and more male coaches and more male youth leaders, because the massive decline we’ve seen, like most historically male serving organizations like the YMCA, Boys and Girls Clubs now serve more girls than boys. And to be clear, I love the fact they’re serving girls. This is not a zero sum game. But they’re not, in many cases, serving boys. So I want them to see men in their lives who are kind of living this out. And I want them to experience a society that really does believe that they are as important to our future as anybody else. I really think that probably upsets me more than anything else, is the way in which, in different ways, various people have set out to persuade men, young men especially, that they are struggling and they face some real challenges, which is true.

And that’s the fault of women. Blame women for that. And then other actors who’ve gone to young women and say, you still face a lot of challenges in this society, etc., and that’s the fault of young men. And so it seems to have been amazingly good for business to set young men and young women up against each other. Whereas it feels to me as if what we need them to do is to be linking arms not only for their own sake, but also because we’re just letting down our young generation on a profound range of issues economically and socially. And so, it really wasn’t me being pessimistic now, one of the things that upsets me most is to see young men and young women blaming each other for their problems. Whereas really, let’s be honest, it’s the baby boomers that screwed them over. And yet there they are blaming each other. I think it’s a brilliant strategy. Like if it was the same, you know, intelligence that’s doing it, it would be brilliant. It would be to say, I tell you what, can we get all these young men to get really mad at all the young women and blame them for all their troubles? And then somebody and then the young women to blame all of their problems on the young men. Then we’ll actually prevent the kind of political energy that could otherwise be unleashed for a better future. And so if we could find a way to stop young men and young women pointing their fingers at each other and instead linking arms with each other, then I think we’d see something quite formidable.

So that’s a really hard one to follow up on. I have to say, but honestly, I think that Richard expressed what I had hoped. I mean, I took that question fairly literally, and my answer really would have been something along the lines of, you know, see and experience a moment in which they actually feel needed and affect positive change by coming to someone’s aid and then hear thanks for it and some encouragement that they’re useful and wanted and celebrated as they are. And then also, I think, experience that in the company of other people who love them.

So we’re going to turn to questions from the audience. And those of you who have been to a Trinity Forum gathering before, know that we have three guidelines for questions. We just ask that all questions be brief, all questions be civil, and all questions be in the form of a question. So there are roving mics. And I understand the first question comes from Malcolm Guite, our senior fellow right there.

Malcolm Guite: Thank you. So first of all, you spoke of confession and Anglican priests. I have to confess, I’m the Anglican priest. And it’s such a clarifying thing. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. What a prophetic choice of word device from Kremlin. Now, my question is this. I want to think about trying and failing and being able to start again. So I want a word that hasn’t actually been spoken, but I think is obviously a very key word in Christian discourse, which is forgiveness. Now, my I experience as a chaplain among young people is the terror of being canceled is really pervasive, and that in the world of the doctrinal purity of both the right and the left, you put one foot wrong, you get adjacent to the wrong person, and you’re done. Do you know of, have you found practical examples of bringing forgiveness into online discourse and into all of these culture wars, allowing it the possibility of a person making a mistake and then being restored? My own experience, both as a when I was a boy growing into a man, and when I was a man trying to help boys to grow into men, is that the key breakthroughs were literally confession of sin, renewal, and genuine restoration on a new path. I don’t see that modeled anywhere online. Give me some hope.

Well, no, I think that’s a really important observation. And I think that is actually one thing that I thought about after I completed my answer on what has a faith community brought to my life. The idea that you can set a foot wrong, that you can make mistakes and yet be forgiven and restored to community, that is an understanding that I have had both from my faith and kind of a metaphysical sense and also in community. And I do think that that is really rare. I talked a little bit about women’s increased level of fear around men. But in talking to men, I hear actually what feels like almost an insane amount of fear that in some senses feels justified. You know, a young man told me at one point, like, well, you know, like asking out a woman at work, that would be like handing someone a loaded shotgun. They could destroy me. And I was like, okay, it’s not that serious. But there is this sense that, yeah, if you say the wrong thing, if you ask out someone and they’re like vaguely creeped out, if you like did a bad tweet one time, you are likely to be banished to the utter darkness never to return. That is something that keeps a lot of young men, I think, kind of pinned to their seats and afraid in certain ways of transgressing. I don’t know that there are really great examples of restoration online or in our media right now because speaking about, you know, algorithms and the media environment right now.

That’s not what sells a happy ending is not going to raise ire enough to pull in eyeballs. But I will say that many of my most gratifying and interesting conversations and conversations that, you know, I don’t know, but I have some inkling of hope might have sparked a change in some of my conversions is actually in approaching the masculinity question, being given reason to talk about it asked onto a podcast or writing an article, and then trying to respond with empathy, not blame, to actually be interested in men’s experiences or even actually like be willing to talk to X, Y, or Z man that people disapprove of. And then later on, I see in the comment sections of a YouTube video or an article like, Christine actually seems to like men. Like I wrote an article on incels actually, where one of the AB tested headlines was sympathy for the incel, which was a bold choice for the Washington Post I will say. But I actually got a flood of emails from self-identified incels, like people who frequented the involuntary celibate forum famous for producing misogynistic mass shooters who these emails all said something along the lines of, I didn’t think anyone was listening. No one’s ever written anything that seemed not shamey about us. You weren’t mean. Thanks. And the fact that even just trying to empathize the slightest bit, approaching someone as a person could have that effect, does seem promising and shows that there’s a hunger out there for it.

I agree that there’s a hunger. And I’ll quote Ezra Klein here saying that we need to learn to react with curiosity rather than contempt. I think that applies even more in this space than some of the other spaces. Actually, I feel more optimistic on this too. I actually think that the desire for, you know, good faith disagreement is much greater than most people think it is. And this is another version of the fear is greater than the reality. I actually think that the fear of being canceled or putting a foot wrong or saying something wrong and being called out for it is really high and it’s way disproportionate to the actual risk. And certainly today that it is, and it seems to be casting the whole era of “cancel culture” seems to be casting a much longer shadow than I think is true in the real world. And, you know, my experience and the experience of my sons and I think others, which is as long as the disagreement or the points are made in good faith, the chance is that someone’s going to jump on you for it or you make a good faith mistake are very, very low. And if that’s the case and you have done it in good faith and you’ve done it appropriately, they’re the jerk, not you. And so I think we’re in better shape on this than we sometimes allow ourselves to think. And as a result, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If everyone’s kind of afraid to say anything because they’re afraid that if they say something they’ll get jumped on, no one says anything. And so it creates this weirdly kind of hollow, fragile kind of world, which I actually don’t think that’s where most of us live.

Other questions right here on the second row.

Thank you so much. You’re really, you’re a good man, Richard. You’re a really kind and good man. As I keep hearing over and over again, what comes to me is years ago, we got rid of the Ten Commandments, but it wasn’t replaced with anything. How about 21 or 13 universal principles where we can all agree on, and that be a standard for all of us as Americans, as people. You know, women, men are leaders. We’re in a crisis of leadership and a crisis, you mentioned identity. We’re in a crisis of identity, is what I find everybody’s trying to fit in. What are your thoughts on something like that, and what would it take for us to unite on? Can all can we all agree on what decency is, on what a good human being is? And that’s our North. And then we can hold ourselves accountable instead of looking around, is it going to be okay with them? Okay with them? We all know have a moral compass.

So I don’t know what the list would be. And again, I worry a little bit about prescription, but I actually don’t think that the sorts of things that will be on it would be that hard. I think we’ve talked about a lot of them already, and they are. I mean, when I sometimes talk to people about who’ve got kids and say like, what’s the, what’s the thing that you most want? What’s the one word you most want people to use to describe your children? Right? And just leave it as an open question. What’s the one word? And sure, you’ll get some, you know, who’ll be like, I don’t know, valedictorian. Um, and so you just know, okay, we’re not going to be, we’re not going to be friends. Um, but overwhelmingly the modal answer is kind. Kind. If there was one thing that you really want your kids to be. It’s kind, isn’t it? I mean, all the other things nice. But like, you certainly don’t want them to be not kind, right? I mean, you want them to show kindness in the world.

You want them to be looking out for people who can benefit from them, like kindness. So it is kindness, respect, etc. some of the stuff we already talked about I don’t think would be that hard to do to be honest, but I’m not sure we need to kind of reinvent exact lists. But I think the spirit of your question is exactly right. And I also think that 99.9% of the population would agree with roughly what we’ve just been saying. I don’t think these are controversial ideas, but it’s almost like sometimes people feel the need. We need permission to be good and there isn’t enough permission space to just be good, to intervene, to be kind, to be protective, to assert our goodness in the world. It’s almost as if we feel like we can’t even assert goodness now for fear that that will offend somebody, or they’ll take it the wrong way, they’ll get angry at us for our attempt to be kind. But I sense a hunger to get past all that stuff and get back to the basics.

We’ll squeeze in one more question. Way in the back there.

Hi. I’d like to present a point of hetero pessimism and beg you to press back. Richard, I loved your book. So many of the concrete cures seem geared toward little boys, or perhaps adolescent boys. Rather, it’s redshirting kindergartners, encouraging high school boys to babysit, considering nursing or other similar professions. One of your colleagues, Jonathan Heit, would say, wait till eight. Another concrete cure geared toward adolescents. Scott Galloway would say many things, but all likely geared toward boys, maybe 20 somethings. Has the ship just sailed for millennial men? Or are there cures for that subgroup that can be addressed as well?

Well, first of all, you mentioned Scott Galloway, and I’m connecting it to one of the previous questions, which is that, and he’s on the advisory council of AIBM and I’ve been on his podcast a bit, so I’m probably a bit biased, but he very, not that long ago made some comments about men shouldn’t be in the delivery room and men are kind of useless after kids are born. They should just men should just smoke a cigar and get back to work basically in a conversation with Derek Thompson and he got largely justifiably pilloried for that position. And then he just publicly apologized and he just came on the podcast and said, yeah, I really, really messed that up. It was a terrible thing to say. I mean, rethinking it. Thank you. There are examples of people that that will do it. And then he got a lot of kudos, I think, for that. Not many people stamped on him and said, yes, you see, you were wrong. And now you’ve admitted it, you evil person. It was more like he was wrong. He admitted it. Good for him. Right? Was kind of the the response. Yes, most of it is focused on, most of my proposals are focused earlier, but I think some of these issues around some of the changes in jobs that we’re seeing, for example, like in the last 18 months, the share of male jobs in the US economy has increased by zero.

And that’s because all the job growth recently has been in areas like healthcare and services, which is where women are. And it’s great that the women actually have, we’ve seen some of the most historic increases in female employment under both Trump terms actually, than we’ve seen for a very long time. Trump on that measure, Trump has been one of the most successful presidents in recent history in terms of increasing female employment rates. But the largest because of this separation. So can we get more men into teaching more men into healthcare, social services, retraining, especially with some of the AI shocks that are coming? I think those relational and in-person roles are going to be where a lot of the jobs are going to be. But right now, a lot of men don’t feel like they’re for them. Frankly, some of the people in those positions don’t think they are for men either. They do face some stigma and discrimination. So that would be something the millennial men can do. But I will say that millennial men are the ones leading the way in terms of increasing the amount of fathering they’re doing. Millennial dads are quite something in terms of the amount of fathering they’re doing compared to previous generations.

Yeah. Has ship sailed for millennial men? I certainly hope not.

Because you need at least one, right?

At least one must be out there somewhere. I think it’s common knowledge that people tend to be harder to shape or rather more fully form the older that they get. But the human person is plastic and people never stop growing, learning and changing. I think that one area in which I can see some hope and where more progress could possibly be made. A sort of shovel ready issue actually is in the area of community. I see men of all ages talking about the lack of third spaces, the difficulty in finding a group to be part of, the wishing that they could go out and meet people and not necessarily being able to. The fact that this concern is being expressed in public that there is actually a yearning for community, I think is actually a really positive sign. And I do see interest from a lot of different and individualistic corners in creating spaces, whether it’s, you know, I think the group is called like four f or something like F3. I don’t even know who founded it, but it’s a group founded by men who just, like, meet up to work out with each other in the park, in their locales.

And then often just kind of like hang out afterwards and talk. And many of them actually end up being friends and forming community with each other. I complain a lot about the internet, but I also know friends who have joined a discord with their mutuals and like met up with their friends in real life and have formed community that way. I think that there are like public projects happening now to greater and lesser extent to encourage this sort of thing in New York. The new mayor has instituted various policies of like keeping playing fields open past midnight for pickup soccer, such that especially men who work during the daytime or who have sort of like gig service jobs can still like find a way to play sports with other people and like form teams and form community in that way. A reinvigoration of just like our park space in public life could actually do a great deal, I think, to just help people connect. And if there is an eagerness for that and it’s being expressed and there are people rising to meet that need, I’d like to think that’s a sign of hope. I’m taking it as one anyway.

We’ll take it as a sign of hope. Richard. Christine, thank you so much. We’re going to turn our attention now from the making of men to the legacy and impact made by an extraordinary man, Michael Gerson. In awarding the second annual Michael J. Gerson Memorial Prize for Excellence in Writing on Faith and Public Life, I’d like to express our profound gratitude on behalf of all of us at the Trinity Forum to the many generous sponsors who have made both the prize and this evening possible, including the College Board, the Bill and Crissy Haslam Foundation, Frank and Deborah Jimenez, Josh and Ann Bolton, Ed and Karen Moy and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. And I also want to offer a special welcome to Don and Bucky Gerson, Mike’s wife and son, who are with us tonight, along with Mike’s brother, Chris Gerson, and his wife, Tara. We’re so honored that you’re here. Many of you in this audience knew and worked with Mike. Others may have known him only through his words. It’s fair to say that Mike was a singular talent. He wrote widely on politics and faith, as well as his own spiritual journey on the injustice he witnessed, on the potential for solidarity that he discerned. He was also an extraordinary thinker, and he marshaled words to illuminate what was true and inspire a love for what is good. I think it’s fair to say that his example is all the more needed now, just four years, under four years after his death, when faith is so often used as a tool or a weapon for ends having nothing to do with the ways of Jesus.

And while there will never be another Michael Gerson, we need more writers who embody the heart and spirit of Mike. And so we are so excited to bestow tonight the second annual Michael Gerson Memorial Prize. This award recognizes and honors an emerging talent who is writing on faith and public life in a way that exemplifies Mike’s conscience, courage, and mastery of craft. Our hope is that the prize will not only inspire and encourage emerging writers, but benefit the practice of journalism and the country at large by cultivating fresh voices of similar moral clarity and vision. Now, selecting this year’s winner was not an easy task, but we had an absolutely stellar selection committee leading the effort. Chaired by Atlantic writer and Trinity Forum senior Fellow, who was also a very close friend and colleague of Mike’s, Pete Wehner. The committee also included Christianity Today editor and senior fellow of the Trinity Forum Russell Moore, author and AEI senior fellow, doing double or triple duty, Christine Emba, and writer, educator and senior fellow Karen Swallow Prior, who is also with us here tonight. The selection committee solicited and evaluated nominations from a broad swath of journalists, writers, public intellectuals and faith leaders before making their final determination. We are so grateful for their generosity with their time and their expertise, and we know it was a labor of love. And so it is my pleasure to now introduce Selection Committee Chairman Pete Wehner to announce the winner of the second annual Michael Gerson Award.

Thank you, Cherie, for your kind words and for leading that excellent discussion. And to Christine and Richard for your wise and and relevant words. It’s an honor to have once again chaired the selection committee for the Michael J. Gerson Memorial Prize and to serve alongside of Russell and Christine and Karen. Mike was one of my closest friends and for a season he was a colleague and so let me say a few personal words about him. First, Mike was a man of deep integrity. He was honest and morally upright, but his integrity went further. His life had a wholeness to it. The pieces fit together. What he wrote was consistent with who he was. Second, Mike was a deeply gifted writer. Cherie spoke about the range of what he wrote. What always struck me was how he wrote. He could be honest and vulnerable, as he was at the National Press Club when he spoke openly about his struggles with depression, a speech that touched so many lives. He could write with moral force and passion. He could write on movies and poetry and family. And his prose was always beautiful and elegant. He wrote like an angel. Third, Mike lived deeply consequential life. He was an influential columnist at The Washington Post and one of the finest presidential speechwriters ever. And he played a key role in creating President George W. Bush’s initiative to combat global AIDs, which has saved more than 25 million lives.

Finally, Mike lived a deeply faithful life. Faith was at the core of who he was. I’ve seen faith like this in a few people I’ve known, and I’ve described it as a drop of food coloring in water. It changes everything. Mike believed every person is made in the image of God and that no insignificant person was ever born. That conviction shaped all he wrote and all he did. This year, the committee is delighted to honor Brad East, associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. Brad joins our first honoree, Matthew Loftus, in carrying forward Mike’s legacy. Brad is a graduate of ACU. He went on to earn his M.Div. at Emory University and his PhD at Yale University, and then returned to teach at his alma mater. He and his wife, Caitlin, live in West Texas with their four children. In 2022, Brad was named ACU’s teacher of the year. And that tells you a great deal about him, not only about his love of learning, but about his love of students. One student said Doctor East was always available to ask questions and pushed us to ask more questions, and he didn’t shut us down no matter what. It’s a great tribute that a student can pay to a teacher. Another said he has inspired me both in my studies and in my walk with Christ.

It’s rare to find a theologian with Brad’s range and extensive curiosity. He’s written rigorous technical books on Scripture and the church, such as the Doctrine of Scripture and The Church’s Book, both of which I’m reading and can highly recommend. He’s also written Letters to a Future Saint, a warm and accessible guide for young believers and seekers, and his next book is coming out early next year, The Screen Free Church examines how digital technology is quietly reshaping our souls. His essays have been published in a range of journals, First Things, Commonweal, Christianity Today, The New Atlantis, and many others. And he writes on Substack as well. As Russell Moore observed to me, Brad has the breadth of a generalist without the shallowness that often comes with it. Mike was the same way, whether he wrote about the death of his dog or about nuclear energy, it felt as though he had given his life to that topic. Brad writes with the same focused attention, and his work, for all its range, holds together. He sees the whole world through the lens of faith. What sets Brad apart is not only how much he writes, but the seriousness with which he writes. He doesn’t offer cheap apologetics or comfortable, superficial answers. He writes as if the stakes are high because he believes that they are. The gospel is the most important truth there is and discipleship is costly.

Like Mike, Brad understands that words are a stewardship. They can change lives. He trusts readers with depth of thought and depth of feeling. And he does it beautifully. Theology can be dense and sometimes it can be a bit dry. Brad’s prose is clear and lively. Christianity today recognized Letters to a Future Saint with its Award of Merit, runner up for the book of the year. In Brad’s hands, reading theology feels like an act of praise. Finally, there’s something hard, harder to define. As Russell put it to me when Mike wrote about the rule of law, “one could tell he loved the Constitution, not just constitutionalism. When he wrote about Jesus, it was clear that he loved Christ, not just Christology.” The same is true of Brad. It isn’t something you can argue someone into or chart in an outline. It’s the difference between knowing about something and loving something. Cherie described this prize as honoring a writer who exemplifies Mike’s conscience, courage, and mastery of craft. Brad East embodies all three in a distracted and angry age. He shows us what is worth pursuing. He’s a gifted teacher, a rigorous mind, and a writer of unusual grace. In the spirit of this evening, he’s a good man, and it’s my great pleasure to present the Michael J. Gerson Memorial Prize to Brad East.

Thank you, Pete, for those kind words. I loved movies growing up, and so I practiced a lot of Oscar speeches in the shower. Never knew I’d get to use those muscles. Thank you to the committee. Thank you to my wife, Caitlin, and to my university president, Doctor Phil Schubert and his wife Brooke for coming. Thank you to everyone here. I must say it came as quite a shock last month when I got the email from Cherie. I had to read it over multiple times before I understood what she was saying. I knew of this award because I was delighted when Matthew Loftus received it last year. Matthew, if you don’t know him, is a doctor and medical missionary in Kenya. By contrast, I am a theologian teaching undergraduates in West Texas. One of these is not like the other. In his poem, In Memory of W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden writes the following: “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still. For poetry makes nothing happen.” Just as poetry makes nothing happen. I try to remind myself and fellow writers that most of the time words themselves make nothing happen either. Books make nothing happen, magazines make nothing happen. Essays and reviews make nothing happen. Even teaching all too often seems to make nothing whatsoever happen. Now, I know that words matter. Christians know that at the rock bottom foundation of the universe, there lies a single word. This word brought everything into being and upholds everything in being at this very moment. The power of this word isn’t comparable with anything else, because its power is divine, and the power of human words flows from this truth, namely, that language, verbiage, speech, grounds and surrounds and saturates all of reality.

We communicate ourselves because God first communicated Himself to us. Our words follow his, both ontologically and morally, and therefore socially and politically. I’m going to set that down right there. Yet every writer knows the feeling that his or her words seem not to make a whit of difference in the world, or even to a single reader. When I say that words make nothing happen, this is what I mean, that it can appear as if one’s own words lack meaning, because all the evidence one can see points in that direction. What makes the news or goes viral tends to be nasty, vicious, ugly, and mean spirited, or merely shallow, superficial and empty. Why write then? Why spend one’s time on words if words make nothing happen? Two answers. First, because words matter in themselves. Words are not only a means, they are an end. Words are something humans do because humans are made in the image of the word, and our words share in Him because they share in the word He is. This, incidentally, is why Christians at least don’t have to think very long about the nature, appeal or quality of AI generated words. If words are both divine and human, if they flow from God’s nature and constitute us as creatures, then what we say and how we say it matters, so does the who, when, where and why. Not just the what, not just the product.

As if it were immaterial whether a piece of text had a living soul or a machine as its source . Language, it turns out, is Christological all the way down. In short, Christians who speak and write in public about anything at all are somehow, in one way or another, talking about Jesus. And because they are talking about Jesus, the criteria by which their words are measured are not, thankfully, the same criteria used by politicians, journalists, celebrities, or influencers. That’s the second answer. We continue to write in the age of TikTok and fake news and AI slop, not because we can see that our words make anything happen, manifestly they do not, but because both the framework and the timeline of their assessment is not this world’s. The church thinks in centuries not the hyper speed of sound bites and short form content. And the same goes for Christian writing. What fruit are words might bear in God’s good time? God only knows. And this is liberating. Relieved of the burden of ensuring everything will work out just right. We can do our humble best to speak the truth in love to those who will listen about what matters most. That describes the writers I most admire, from Wendell Berry and Simon Leys to Stanley Hauerwas and Alan Jacobs. I ventured that it also describes many of the people in this room, as well as the late Michael Gerson himself. I am therefore honored to receive an award in his name, because I hope that one day it might describe me too. Thank you.

Thank you, Brad, and hearty congratulations. All of us are so excited to see your future work. We’ll be reading you for a long time. We’re also just so glad that your wife, Caitlin, was able to join you and we’re so glad too that Phil and Brooke Schubert that fills the president of Abilene Christian University, there they are, were able to fly in for this event as well. You’re very welcome here. As we close out and, we’re just, we’re so glad that each and every one of you are here this evening. We’ve talked about both what it takes to make good men. And then as we have honored some, I’d like to thank again as we close out our wonderful sponsors for the evening, particularly the College Board and the Bill and Crissy Haslam Foundation, whose seed funding has helped us create and establish this prize. And if you by chance are interested in contributing to help make this prize a reality for many years to come or to support the Trinity Forum in any way, there is a QR code on the back of your program that gives you an opportunity to do that. I also just want to have some of my colleagues raise their hand. You can talk with them about the prize and the like, if that’s of interest.

So please stand up, raise your hand, let people see where you are. Great. Thank you for that. In addition, but relatedly, but in addition, we invite all of you to join the Trinity Forum Society, which is the community of people who help advance Trinity Forum’s mission of cultivating, curating and communicating the best of Christian thought. There’s many advantages to being a member of the Trinity Forum Society, including subscriptions to our quarterly reading and as a special incentive for joining the society, we will give you a signed copy by Richard Reeves of his book, On Boys and Men, which is also available for sale just outside the doors as we wrap up. It’s always appropriate to end with thanks. And there are many people whose presence and participation tonight helped make this evening possible. I want to thank the Gerson family, Don, Bucky, Chris and Tara for their presence this evening. Thank our selection committee members Pete, Karen, Russell and Christine. Our volunteers, Brenda Dixon, Olivia Seal, Alyssa Olley, our crackerjack interns, Anna Forrest, Luke Chang, Adrianna Bean and Abena Afriyie, photographer Susan DiBiase and of course, the Trinity Forum team Tom Walsh, Campbell Vogel, Marie-Anne Morris, Robin Dixon, Jack Alexander, and Heidi Little. Finally, thank you to each and every one of you for coming. Have a great evening.