Popular (Progressive) Myths About Fatherlessness in Our Culture

Part 2: Luxury Beliefs

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 these same individuals, mostly from wealth and influence, promoted alternative and non-traditional family structures despite coming from a stable two-parent family environment with a Mom and Dad, which they planned to replicate in their 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, advanced education, and success have moved on from exuberant jewelry, fur coats, vacations around the world, and golf. These systems no longer set them apart from the rest of society since the working class can eventually attain most of these things.

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 influencing various fields such as education, social sciences, business, media, politics, and law, the downstream impact of their luxury beliefs regarding family systems is likely to negatively impact the poor, and non-college-educated, working class. This negative effect will persist as long as these culture-shapers view the role of the father as optional and fail to recognize the harm that fatherlessness can cause 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. 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 engage in discussions about abortion, especially within educated circles, I often encounter a range of logical fallacies. Many people label me a misogynist (an ad hominem attack), claiming that I want to control women's bodies (assuming my motives), or they argue that I'm not genuinely pro-life but merely pro-birth (a hasty generalization). In these debates, pro-choice advocates frequently downplay 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 to terminate more and more pre-born babies among disadvantaged individuals for the greater good of everyone involved, especially when these children are at risk of ending up in America's broken foster-care system.

I often ask many questions, including, "How are you so sure it will be the inevitable outcome?" I then provide real-life examples of former students from UTM- Deangelo, Lydia, and Rodella. These individuals were on the brink of being terminated in their mother's wombs because their single moms faced the daunting challenge of raising them in impoverished and disadvantaged environments without the support of their fathers. Despite these circumstances, each overcame the adversities and disadvantages they faced during childhood. They emerged as leaders in the Christian community and are making an indelible mark on the next generation of youth in their respective contexts.

For example, Deangelo was just minutes away from being aborted by his teenage mother when his grandmother stormed into the abortion clinic and pulled his mother off the operating table. As a preschooler, his mother became a drug addict, exposing Deanglo to nearly about every Adverse Childhood Experience imaginable.

As a teenager, Deangelo joined a gang, sold drugs, and led a promiscuous lifestyle, resulting in several kids out of wedlock. However, his life changed when he encountered Jesus. Through UTM's life-on-life mentoring in the ManUP program, he secured living wage employment and obtained custody of two of his sons, who had been living in a dangerous environment. Deangelo made his life mission to be consistently present in his children's lives, providing them with the love, care, and support that he never received as a child.

Deangelo has emerged as a leader and role model within 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 because their fathers are absent. These stories are not isolated. I could share similar stories and outcomes about Lydia, Rodella, and others within UTM.

In fact, the long-term outcomes of their mothers 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.

The challenging circumstances they faced and overcame, fueled by their deeply held faith in Jesus and the support of various Christian mentors who walked alongside them, have played a crucial role in their efforts to empower disadvantaged youth! In contrast, the educated elite, often confined in their "Luxury Belief" echo chambers, seldom come across stories like this from the streets—only those narratives that reinforce their personal beliefs and perspectives.   

Today's utilitarianism is even more dangerous when combined with 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.⁴ Catchphrases such as "Live your own truth," "Finding your (authentic) self," or "Follow your heart" become slogans to live by.⁵

Take, for instance, 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 for self-discovery and freedom. "Eat, Pray, Love" dominated the NY Times bestseller list for 200 weeks, capturing readers' hearts. Its influence was further amplified by the endorsement of the cultural icon and billionaire talk show host Oprah Winfrey, solidifying its place in the literary landscape.⁶ It "inspired women to leave both their unfulfilling jobs and their unhappy marriages in the name of self-actualization and unadulterated, unapologetic independence."⁷ 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.⁸ 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.”⁹

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.

Nevertheless, there are ongoing efforts by a vocal number of family scholars who reject the long-standing belief that the two-parent family structure consisting of a husband and wife is the ideal and best family structure for raising children. This challenge leads to a second reason why these Luxury Beliefs, including viewing fathers as optional in child-rearing and the notion that father absence does not directly harm children, are increasingly 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.

1. Henderson, Rob. 2024. Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. Simon and Schuster.

2. Henderson, Rob. n.d. “Luxury Beliefs Are Status Symbols.” Www.robkhenderson.com. https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/status-symbols-and-the-struggle-for.

3. “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.

4. Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 333–334.

5. Wax, Trevin. n.d. “Expressive Individualism: What Is It?” The Gospel Coalition. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/expressive-individualism-what-is-it/.

6. “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.

7. 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.

8. “Great Value Vacations.” 2024. Greatvaluevacations.com. 2024. https://www.greatvaluevacations.com/vacations/eat-pray-love-in-rome-india-and-bali.

9. Travers, Peter. 2010. “Eat Pray Love.” Rolling Stone. August 12, 2010. https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/eat-pray-love-100814/.