Several months ago, after listening to a Glenn Loury podcast, I ordered and read the book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class by Rob Henderson.1 What drew me in was that Henderson's story and childhood experiences mirrored many of my UTM students who grew up in an unstable, single-parent family environment. It's tempting to characterize Henderson's life as an inspirational autobiography: A traumatized bi-racial foster kid who was adopted but then abandoned by his adoptive father and raised by an unstable mother in a white lower-class community in Northern California. As a young man, he overcomes the odds by finding stability in the Air Force, conquers his alcohol addiction, confronts his Adverse Childhood Experiences through therapy, enrolls, and eventually graduates from Yale and, to top it off, completes a PhD from Cambridge.
But Henderson wants to tell a different story. He recollects broken lives coping with poverty, crime, absent fatherhood, poor decision-making, failed government social systems, failed family structures, and an elite, privileged class at Yale who were ignorant and isolated from the poor and disadvantaged.
What baffles Henderson is the hypocrisy of his classmates.
Many of them accepted and promoted alternative and non-traditional family structures and systems even though most came from the wealthy class with a stable two-parent family environment with a Mom and Dad, which they planned to continue for their own lives.
What was the cause of their group-think worldview about the family and other progressive ideas? Eventually, Henderson concluded that it resulted from "Luxury Beliefs," which he defines as "an idea or opinion that confers status on members of the upper class at little cost while inflicting costs on persons in lower classes."2 In other words, those who are socially privileged due to their wealth, high education, and success have moved on from the exuberant jewelry, fur coats, vacations around the world, and golf playing as the primary status symbols that separate them from the rest of society since most of these things can eventually be attained by the working class.
What's even more pertinent is the fact that studies have shown that among the more educated class, "overall happiness in life is more related to how much you are respected and admired by those around you" rather than money or things that money can buy.3 In an Ivy League environment, where no one wants to be labeled with any number of "isms" and "phobias," there is pressure to conform to the prevailing progressive ideologies on campus and forgo critical thinking that critically evaluates all belief systems, including the ones that the vast majority of students, faculty, and administration embrace.
With Henderson's Yale colleagues going on to shape culture in education, the social sciences, business, media, politics, and law, the downstream impact of their luxury beliefs about family systems will continue to negatively impact the poor, non-college-educated, working class as long as these culture-shapers see the father's role as optional, and fatherlessness isn't considered harmful to children.
Besides the pressure to conform, let me give two additional reasons why these Luxury Beliefs about fatherhood and family have flourished in American society.
(1) The majority of Americans embrace some form of utilitarian ethics fused with expressive individualism. In utilitarianism, in simplest terms, people seek to make moral choices based on what makes them and those around them happy while doing the least amount of harm for everyone. The morality of their decision is determined solely by the consequences it yields rather than the action itself.
One example of this is the inflammatory issue of abortion. Whenever I debate abortion in various contexts, especially among the college-educated class, if they haven’t broad-brushed me with a list of logical fallacies by calling me a misogynist (ad hominem) that wants control over women’s bodies (assuming motive), and isn’t actually pro-life but pro-birth (hasty generalization), what typically happens is that the pro-choicer will diminish the inherent value of unborn babies. Instead they argue that keeping the baby will have adverse effects on the mother, the child, and society as a whole. Some have even implied that the silver-bullet solution to poverty, fatherlessness, single-parenthood, crime, etc... is terminating more and more pre-born babies among the disadvantaged for the greater good of everyone involved, especially when they are at risk of eventually landing within America’s broken foster-care system.
I often will ask many questions including, "How are you so sure it will be the inevitable outcome?"4 And then I follow up with real-life examples of former students from UTM, such as Deangelo, Lydia, and Rodella. These individuals were on the brink of being terminated in their mother’s womb because their single moms faced the daunting challenge of raising them in an impoverished, disadvantaged environment without their fathers. Despite these circumstances, each overcame the adversities and disadvantages they experienced throughout their childhood. They emerged as Christian community leaders and are making an indelible mark on the next generation of youth in their contexts.5
For instance, Deangelo was within minutes of being aborted by his teenage mother until his grandmother stormed into the abortion clinic and pulled Deanglo's mother off the operating table. As a pre-schooler, his mother became a drug addict, which led to Deanglo being exposed to just about every Adverse Childhood Experience imaginable. As a teen, he joined a gang, sold drugs, and lived a promiscuous lifestyle, having several kids out of wedlock. But then Deangelo encountered Jesus, who turned his life around. Through UTM's life-on-life mentoring in the ManUP program, he secured living-wage employment, obtained custody of two of his sons who were previously living in a dangerous environment, and made his life mission to be consistently present in the lives of his children and raise them with the love, care, and support that he never had as a child. Deangelo has also become a leader and role model in his extended family and community. He uses his influence to mentor and fill the gap as a father figure to his nephews, nieces, and his son's friends when no father is present. These are not isolated stories. I could share similar stories and outcomes about Lydia, Rodella, and others within UTM.
The long-term outcomes of their moms choosing life over abortion did not lead to more chronic poverty, cycles of fatherlessness, and crime in their lives. Instead, it had the opposite effect.
Moreover, the difficult circumstances they experienced and triumphed over due to their deep-held faith in Jesus and the multiple Christian mentors who came alongside them have been vital in their work to empower disadvantaged youth! However, the educated elite isolated in their "Luxury Belief" echo chambers rarely encounter stories like this from the street. Only the stories that fit their personal beliefs and own narrative.
What makes today's utilitarianism even more dangerous is its ethically lethal combination with an emerging expressive individualism, which "holds that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized."6 Catchphrases such as "Live your own truth," "Finding your (authentic) self," or "Follow your heart" become slogans to live by.7
Take, for example, Elizabeth Gilbert's provocative memoir "Eat, Pray, and Love," which delves into her adulterous affair and her tumultuous divorce—travels to exotic locations in Italy, India, and Indonesia on a quest of self-discovery and freedom. "Eat, Pray, Love" soared to the top of the NY Times bestseller list for 200 weeks, capturing readers' hearts and was even promoted by the cultural icon billionaire talk show host Oprah Winfrey.8 It "inspired women to leave both their unfulfilling jobs and their unhappy marriages in the name of self-actualization and unadulterated, unapologetic independence."9 The book's influence is such that travel agencies continue to offer "Eat, Pray, Love journey of self-discovery tours”, following the same route Elizabeth Gilbert took in her quest for self-actualization and individual freedom.10 It even prompted an autobiographical drama/romance "Eat, Pray, Love" movie starring Julia Roberts in 2010. However, the expressive individualism of Eat, Pray, Love is nothing more than a luxury belief that even Rolling Stone movie critic Roger Travers recognized, observing that “the movie left me with the feeling of being trapped with a person of privilege who won’t stop with the whine whine whine.”11
There is an irony about the expressive individualism crowd who end up navel-gazing to find their personal happiness. Happy, successful marriages and stable, intact families aren't the result of self-discovery, individual freedom, and actualization. Instead, it involves the continual rhythm of selflessly giving to others. In a marriage, when both partners prioritize the desires and needs of their spouses above their own, it fosters a deep and mutual love that cultivates joy and happiness. Parenting is about putting the needs and well-being of their children above their own as well. On the most basic level, that means ensuring their kids are raised by a stable, loving Mom and Dad, recognizing that both are indispensable for the child's flourishing.
However, there are efforts by a vocal number of family scholars who reject the long-standing belief that the best or ideal societal norm for raising children is the two-parent family structure consisting of a husband and wife. This leads to the second reason why these Luxury Beliefs, including viewing fathers as optional in child-rearing and that absent fatherhood does not directly harm children, are steadily becoming the norm among the culture-shapers of society:
That is, The uncritical acceptance of current feminist and queer intersectional scholarship. I will further explain what I mean in Part 3.
Click Here for “Popular (Progressive) Myths About Fatherlessness in Our Culture, Part 1.
Henderson, Rob. 2024. Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. Simon and Schuster.
Henderson, Rob. n.d. “Luxury Beliefs Are Status Symbols.” Www.robkhenderson.com. https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/status-symbols-and-the-struggle-for.
“Respect Matters More than Money for Happiness in Life.” n.d. Association for Psychological Science - APS. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/respect-from-friends-matters-more-than-money-for-happiness-in-life.html.
Even though I embrace virtue ethics rooted in Scripture and Natural Law as my ethical belief system, its not my starting point in my discussions about the morality of abortion. Rather it is empathetically listening and also questioning the assumptions of the outcome-based (utilitarianism) ethical system of pro-choicers.
Because UTM believes that all human-beings (from the moment of conception) are made in the image of God, we advocate for a whole-life, pro-life perspective that goes way beyond child-birth, all the way through the entire life of a person. For more information, see Watson, Benjamin. 2023. The New Fight for Life: Roe, Race, and a Pro-Life Commitment to Justice. Tyndale Momentum.
Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 333–334.
Wax, Trevin. n.d. “Expressive Individualism: What Is It?” The Gospel Coalition. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/expressive-individualism-what-is-it/.
“Eat, Pray, Love and Oprah’s Book Club Announcement!” 2006. Oprah.com. Oprah.com. 2006. https://www.oprah.com/spirit/eat-pray-love-and-oprahs-book-club-announcement_1/all.
Farrell, Gwen. 2023. “Why Women Should Never Have Fallen for Elizabeth Gilbert and ‘Eat Pray Love.’” Evie Magazine. September 25, 2023. https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/why-women-should-never-have-fallen-for-elizabeth-gilbert-eat-pray-love.
“Great Value Vacations.” 2024. Greatvaluevacations.com. 2024. https://www.greatvaluevacations.com/vacations/eat-pray-love-in-rome-india-and-bali.
Travers, Peter. 2010. “Eat Pray Love.” Rolling Stone. August 12, 2010. https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/eat-pray-love-100814/.