But I see a lot of generalizations that don't seem to be grounded in data.
For example: yes, Orthodox churches are attracting a lot of young men. But is that because they specially affirm traditional gender roles? I've attended quite a few Orthodox churches of different jurisdictions over my 20 years as an Orthodox Christian, and I've heard little of any advocacy from the pulpit, and not much even in casual conversation with other believers, for women staying in traditional gender roles and avoiding careers. I don't see a lot of vocal or prescriptive anti-feminism. If there's a causal mechanism at work where Orthodox Christianity advocates traditional gender roles and that attracts young men but not young women, I would expect that causal mechanism to operate through what priests say from the ambon. Without that, I don't really believe the explanation. I don't have an alternative, exactly. I don't really understand why Orthodoxy has become a male thing.
You also have some general language about how women are doing well with education and careers, but that's only true of a somewhat elitish subclass. "Go to college and then get a professional career" is a minority life trajectory for both genders. You run a risk care of giving advice that is aimed only at relatively successful people and has nothing to offer that the majority. Suppose it turned out to be the case, as I think some survey evidence that I've seen suggests, the most non-college educated women would rather stay home with their kids if they could, but their households can't make ends meet that way. Would you craft a different set of advice for that class of people? You assume that the breadwinner/homemaker specialization model is more appealing to men than women. It's not at all obvious to me that that should be true, and I don't think the data particularly support it. But it's a dated question, anyway, and just quoting random opinions from your sons really doesn't rise to the level that's needed for the question.
Someone might get the impression from this post that marriage is a particular problem for traditionalist young men, because they're hunting for a tradwife deal that's not available. But the reality is that marriage is falling through the floor for everybody. Huge numbers of people are lonely and sexless, and men and women just don't seem to like each other very much anymore. There's less dating, less romance, less fertility... Just a kind of all-around fail. I guess grappling with that mystery isn't really the purpose of this post... But I think it's needed. And I don't think cheerily complacent moderate feminism that trusts there is some satisfactorily feminism friendly but also marriage friendly equilibrium on the other end of a period of transition is the answer.
Just two things for right now since I’ve got work to do.
1) Despite the little quip about money and pies I don’t really mean to suggest that men are returning to tradition *mainly just for the gender roles*. They’re coming for lots of reasons and in general it’s a beautiful thing; even the parts that are shallow might ultimately be lead-ins to something deeper exactly as you say. No one comes to the faith for fully adequate reasons. But, there are aspects of that vision, the one the influencers are promoting, that *is* fairly appealing to men and actively repels a large share of women. And this post is mainly about women. (Worth noting though that online at least I see a fair bit of angst and anger directed at women in general for *not* coming to or staying in traditional faiths and making tradlife more of a possibility for the men there. People may have recognized the problem but they aren’t necessarily philosophical about it.)
2) The Gallup poll you linked isn’t very good. It flattened the options into a single, binary choice: Work outside the home or care for family at home? Even then it was close. But what more detailed data show is that most women want part time or from-home work, some flexibility for family, with the possibility of leaning back in later. They’re willing to make sacrifices for family, and do want more time for and with kids, but only a smallish minority (about a quarter of moms with young kids in data I’ve seen) just want to be full-time domestic, for life.
Yes to some division of responsibilities within the family, no to what Scott Yenor loves to call the “public men and private women” idea. That’s what I see. I see a rejection of the notion that the domestic sphere is the woman’s proper province, the professional one the man’s. I think it’s pretty revealing also that we’re seeing this rejection on a large scale from women raised in subcultures favorable to it. For them it’s presumably not an issue of inadequate exposure; they have a pretty good idea what this looks like on the ground. And they’re not choosing it, or at least *a great many* are rejecting it. It seems to be an alienating thing more than a selling point even (or especially) for women raised in subcultures inclined to embrace it.
Yeah, I seem to remember now us talking about that. Well, he seems to have branded himself with that idea now to a great extent. "Sexual Counter-Revolution." "Public men and private women." His 2021 Nat Con speech was one airing that got a lot of attention, but he's discussed in various First Things articles, in his essay in this book (among other places):
"The Sexual Constitution" is another phrase he loves. Referring to what he understands to be a kind of gendered social contract; the men will run the public square and while the women run the home.
So I think the key distinction is “career first” versus “family first,” not in ultimate values or objectives, but in daily scheduling.
A breadwinning husband pretty much has to be career first. That's what it takes. Most employers need to be first priority for the best hours of the day, If they're going to pay enough to support a family.
So will the wife be career first or family first? That's the question.
If she's family first, it may be feasible for her to also do some public-facing work. Or it may not. Part-time jobs can be a luxury. Can the homefront needs, food prep and cleaning and child care and Bill paying and all that, still be served? Does external help need to be hired to fill in the gap that part-time work leaves? If so, do the part-time work earnings cover it? All things considered, is it a contribution or a cost? If it's a cost, maybe it's worth it. A good husband will be willing to make some affordable sacrifices for his wife to be more satisfied with how she spends her days. But a whole lot of families are scrambling like crazy just to make ends meet at all, and of a wife feels strongly entitled to what's essentially a hobby, that could be a problem. But of course, there are a lot of cases where a wife's public-facing work is either net helpful to the household or can be easily accommodated. So that's fine.
Going into a marriage, though, you can't foresee how the household’s situation will evolve. The key question is whether (a) a woman wants to be a mom first and foremost, and has a family first orientation, some sort of labor force participation being a secondary preference, or (b) she feels entitled to as much professional participation as her husband will have.
What the Gallup poll indicates to me is that most women (a slight majority) are actually in category (a). Their preferences are roughly aligned with the “public men, private women” balance of work, even if they'd prefer that it be moderated somewhat. Not complete seclusion, but a family first focus. The 2025 survey is more aggressively framed and gets less buy-in for traditional gender roles, but it's still 4 in 10 women wanting a tradlife, which is a lot more than get it, at a time when there's only a small gap between male and female labor force participation rates.
It makes sense that modern women would feel they have more to give than home making and child rearing alone. Families are smaller, most kids spend a lot of their time in public school, and home production is inefficient. So family first, but yes, there's room for paid labor force participation, too.
Obviously, there are a lot of other women who have a career first orientation, and don't particularly seek marriage or motherhood, or at least, don't intend to sacrifice their careers for it. I'm not here to condemn that. But they're not the whole female population, or even close. And if you're waiting for marriage to somehow evolve so that it's as prevalent, stable and fertile as it used to be even though the historic sexual division of Labor has broken down or been suppressed, there was never much reason to think that made a lot of sense, and empirically, it's not working out that way.
Widespread homemaker preferences among women shouldn't be trivialized, marginalized, stigmatized, or swept under the rug. Not only is it good to give these women the lives that they say they want, but these women make a very disproportionate contribution to the grounds for hope in the future of the human race.
I understand why you like that framing. I do not. I mean, right up-front you have to ask, "Why should any parent, or indeed any person, feel justified in adopting a career-first ethic? Our careers should come before our loved ones?" Presumably the response goes back to this "ultimate values vs daily scheduling." Of course the father also puts his family before his job in the final analysis. But he fulfills his obligations to family primarily *through* his work while for the mother the work is secondary. So he gets to prioritize work in a more day-to-day sense while she shouldn't.
But really that doesn't even capture the reality even of the breadwinning father's situation. There are all sorts of times when something that might be overall good for his career advancement might be bad for his family, and he might decide to forego professional achievement, or just do his job less well than he might, because the family is (perhaps rightly!) a higher priority for him. "Yes, I realize I would be of value to you at that conference or negotiation, boss, but it's my kid's graduation and I'm going to be there." He would of course need a very extreme reason, as breadwinner, to justify quitting his job or dropping out of professional activity completely. But not only does he not necessarily maximize career potential, he *also* doesn't relate to his job purely instrumentally. He very possibly treats his career as an independent good and source of obligation; there might be times when his family could really benefit from his presence at some particular time, and he's in no danger of being professionally penalized for prioritizing them, but he doesn't because he has some task that feels obligatory to him and (again perhaps rightly!) prioritizes professional obligation over family. So "career first" doesn't capture *any* responsible person's professional orientation; we're always balancing obligations and goods.
Yenor has a thing somewhat reminiscent of your position here, in which he humorously praises the "side hustle" as a possibility for women who have time for it. OK, so you've got some extra time and energy, or need money, or are bored, so you do a little work "when you have time." Fine. But let's make clear it's a "side hustle"; you're not all-in the way a man is or the way you are for your family.
Heavy sigh. Look, OK. If there are women who think about themselves that way, whatever. I'm not saying they can't. I think there are people who want a "a side-hustle" for fun and a little extra pocket change. But I am saying, you can't do anything at all *serious* professionally if your starting point is, "I will only continue doing this insofar as I feel like I have free time for it." What mom with growing kids has free time? How can you possibly commit to anything if you can't promise to make it a priority in your "daily scheduling"? And what employer with any serious needs would want to hire a person who approaches her job like that? No. Maybe you can sell handcrafts in an Etsy shop or something, but you can't do anything on that basis that involves any real responsibility or trust. You're basically starting from the premise, "Mothers can't shoulder real professional obligation."
But women *can* shoulder real professional responsibility. Like men, they can balance various obligations, using prudence and circumstance to judge the best thing to do in a given circumstance. Working moms, let me tell you, get very frustrated by the conflation of 1) negotiating arrangements that make it easier to balance work and family obligations (whether that's working from home, family leave, flexible hours etc), and 2) seeing mothers as "family first," unlike the "career first" fathers. That just becomes an invitation not to take women seriously in a professional context. Even when they're working, they're not *really* working, right? Not the way a man works! It's kind of a fancy hobby for them!
As a lean-back-in mom you tend to work extremely hard just to prove to your boss that you *aren't* like that, that you don't see your work as a lark, that you can be trusted with professional obligations just like a man can. (And that's not irrational, there are studies indicating that employers tend to view, say, knocking off early for a kid's school event, benevolently for fathers, as a sign of general good character, and more critically for mothers, as a sign of lack of professionalism.) Meanwhile on the flip side, you're trying to teach people in your personal life that "flexible and part-time" doesn't mean "perpetually available for all things"; you have for-reals work obligations sometimes. (People sometimes get annoyed about that, which, again, can be somewhat frustrating... because if it were a *man* who couldn't do X or Y because work obligations, they would hardly blink. Who blames a man for working?)
I know so very many cases of women who've been primary earners, or desperately needed secondary earners, part time, full time, lean-back-in, all sorts of things, because the family needed money. I appreciate you can say, "Sure, I wrote in a contingency for that; if the family *needs* it then she can work." But that's missing something. By treating this as a backup contingency situation you make it sound as though she isn't really responsible for family finances the way he is. But the very fact that women do this so frequently shows how unhelpful the whole framework is; she can only step in and do those things because *she also considers herself responsible* for the family's finances, and accepts professional obligation in that role. And the only reason she can find that employment is because there are employers out there who don't take the Henry Ford view of life, and assume that women are mostly backup contingency workers.
Life involves balancing commitments and juggling obligations. That's just the day-to-day "scheduling" reality for families with multiple earners. That doesn't have to be your personal preference, but I don't think your survey tracks the paradigm you set out. Given a choice between full-time outside-home employment and being at home, I as a young mom would have picked the latter, but I don't have a "tradwife" and never preferred that. And I know lots and lots of women who similarly have made accommodations for family but still definitely don't think of what they do as a "side hustle."
I think, by the way, that even though there is of course a certain simplicity to a "you take point with the finances and me with domestic stuff," which works well for some people, there are also real goods to both parents feeling real responsibility for both making ends meet and caring for their family and home. I'm not saying either approach is clearly better; clearly there's more negotiation and complex logistics when both parents work, and various problems can follow from that. But I do think the starker division makes it harder for spouses to appreciate at a more granular level when the other does. Sure, maybe you're grateful in a broad sense, but lots of at-home moms who don't really understand the anxieties of professional responsibility, the soul-destroying daily grind. And dads who kind of feel like meals and clean sheets appear magically and don't actually know what it's like to handle small children for fifteen hours at a stretch. More cooperation has its own benefits. You have a stronger sense perhaps of truly having done it together. Again, not saying either set-up is absolutely superior.
By the way, your grievances around the difficulty of making people take your career ambitions and urgency of work tasks seriously, if you're a woman, reminds me of the complaints that you can't get a taxi cab if you're black.
I sympathize! It's annoying when you have to fight continually against other people's assumptions about you that result from unchosen membership in a particular group.
And yet, people are rational. They interpret their world using probabilistic patterns. Doing so usually contributes to their own success and/or societal efficiency.
The taxi driver knows the stats and wants to stay online. The vast majority of black potential fares are suffering for wrongs of which they are completely innocent. But is it really just to ask taxi drivers to get themselves killed by ignoring relevant information about job risks? And would it benefit the black potential fares anyway? Or would it just cause taxis to avoid certain parts of town all together?
Similarly: suppose an employee in a particular role Will probably have a net negative contribution in the first year, zero in the second, positive thereafter, with value peaking around the 10-year mark, then declining through obsolescence of skills and job match, but staying positive because of the value of institutional memory. A hiring manager's decision will depend heavily on a probabilistic judgment about likely employee tenure.
There's a widespread assumption that discrimination is unfair and irrational. It can be irrational, of course, but there's no reason to think it is irrational in general. Selection on observable characteristics that statistically proxy for unobservable characteristics is very much a part of rationality. We couldn't possibly suppress it in general. We can suppress particular forms of it, but that's costly, and I think it's probably more costly, albeit in hard-to-quantify ways, than direct cash compensation of the discriminated-against groups.
How many jobs are not created at all because hiring managers can't sufficiently mitigate the risk of hiring women who will waste the training investment though maternity leave or quitting to look after a baby?
Probably quite a few, but it’s in their interests then to be able to discern which women will actually be good workers, and this whole thing is complicated (as in the black case!) by what you might call historical prejudice, which isn’t necessarily rational. There is a whole extended history in labor of refusing to hire married women, or to hire them for a wide range of jobs. See Henry Ford, Phillips v Martin Marietta Corp, etc. Married women have had to fight for the right to be employed. Our own grandmother was a bit of a trailblazer in this regard! (Not an activist but pushing the boundaries of what had previously been allowed in terms of women working.) So there’s a lot of cultural and historical history there that might be shaping employer perceptions, which is not rooted in rational calculation and very much works to women’s disadvantage.
And one big piece of that might be the thing I said earlier: a woman who wants accommodations of some kind for her family isn’t necessarily a “side hustle” sort of lady. Given a job that she *can* take she might do it very seriously and very well. I think the data show that a sizable share of women want those options to be available, and certainly to be available at some point in life. There’s a period perhaps when a woman is having babies when it’s quite hard to commit to much else, but that time passes. It’s a small portion of her life. The number of women who want to be mainly at home for that period is large but I think the number who want “tradlife forever” is pretty small. I mean, sure, there too the number who are willing would probably climb quite a bit if he’s a really high earner and they get a super cushy life without working… but how many men are super high earners? Given realistic options, most women want to be employable, and a sizable share actively wish to be employed.
But they want family-flexible jobs if possible, and that’s exactly what will be hard to find if the “public man private woman” paradigm (even in softened “side hustle” form) is promoted and seen widely as normative. Changes in labor are making such things more possible, but cultural attitudes factor here too. I think it will be good for families and birth rates if we can use that to our advantage to tap women’s actual talents but also soften the costs of having kids, which clearly deters many women from childbearing (or from having as many kids as they want). It’s hard to do that if you’re locked into a paradigm where everyone has to be either “career first or family first.”
I tell my boys that they should try to have enough earning power to anchor the family while their wife is actually having babies. Some people continue to find ways to work, I was always at least a bit of a secondary earner, but it can be pretty hard in the midst of baby-toddler life. Good if the man is prepared to support the family in that period.
You’ll likely be poor though, and kids also get financially needier as they grow, and moms also move on from that intense baby-care period and want some new goals and broader horizons, so I also tell them to be prepared for changes across the years of family life. It’s pretty normal nowadays for families to transition into a phase where she works (though maybe part-time or from home) and he picks up some slack on the domestic front. And that can have a lot of benefits for everyone but it does break your mold.
Well, I'm not sure I have a "mold" to break; I'm just *anti* the feminist mold of "not allowed to arrange things so that men's life opportunities are different from women's."
I'm all for family-friendly jobs and remote work and women earning again after all their kids are in school, if they want to.
But I don't buy the story that lingering historical bias makes employers underappreciate women as employees. I think employers are overwhelmingly feminism-brainwashed and treat men and women exactly the same, even when it would be in their own interest to how defensively vs. loss-of-key-staff-to-maternity risk.
It's possible that "yes, there are gaps in her resume, but that's because she's a mom; *now* her kids are in school and she'll be a great, reliable asset on a mom schedule" is an underappreciated opportunity. I'd blame feminism for that; it forced the gender-blind society down all our throats, so we can't be nuanced, attentive to realistic differences, alert to patterns anymore. To discriminate in favor of resume-gap, schedule-constrained workers *because they're moms* and therefore can't be held to be lazy or unambitious actually sounds illegal to me.
I didn't say family-first women are better than career-first women in a moral sense. Careers can matter a lot in themselves. Kids and families can benefit from women's careers, via earning power, role model effects, contacts, etc. Sometimes a woman's career, or even just her string-of-jobs that don't amount to much of a career, are indispensable for the family's well-being.
My point is, that's the distinction that matters most. A tradwife with a side hustle is a lot more like a stay-at-home mom than like a career woman with a husband and kids. Does the family's daily scheduling over decades, and/or its place of residence, get determined or heavily shaped by the wife's job? A man will want to know it before marriage. He might decline to court an otherwise appealing woman because the nature of his own career makes accommodating a wife's career too difficult, or because he wants his kids to have more direct maternal input than that allows for... and/or because he doesn't need the extra money and can handle the breadwinning himself. Whether the aspiring tradwife he's courting has a taste for side-hustles is much less of a decision point. He can work around that.
And when you refine the breadwinner vs. homemaker, career-first vs. family-first, public-facing work vs. private-facing work distinction in this way, the striking thing about the Gallup poll, and some other poll data, is that among young mothers, if anything, homemaker/traditional/private-facing priorities may be even a majority and are certainly a large share. That's a lot different from what you learn in school, what you'd glean from the discourse, or what life outcomes really look like.
It's a coordination failure in the sense that (a) a lot of people don't get married at all and matching breadwinner-preference men with homemaker-preference women might help with that, and (b) the sunk cost effect: many couples that do form would be better off if he had been more of an earning power maxxer and she hadn't taken on student debt and had invested more in domestic skills than job skills. Society should be more intentional about approving and coordinating breadwinner/homemaker specialized marriages for the large number/maybe majority who want that.
That doesn't preclude some women being career-first. I'm 110% in favor of welcoming vast hordes of foreign nannies to fill the childcare gaps left by ambitious women's careers.
First, quick note: I mentioned Orthodoxy in my point (1) and complementarianism in my (2) so I didn't actually say that Orthodoxy embraces complementarianism. Online, the Orthobro phenomenon does seem to overlap heavily with the tradwife/antifeminist/masculinist dynamic but I don't make any claims about what Orthodoxy itself teaches.
I'm not volunteering to spend hours on end producing studies here, but I think the data does very much support the theory that the complementarian model is more appealing to men. In the Mormon church the split is rather shocking, a full twenty-point divide in retention. (About 60% of Gen Z men, 40% of women, staying active in the faith.) Of course that doesn't as such prove that the gender role issue is a major driving factor, but I think taking all the evidence together, that is very much the most reasonable conclusion.
In terms of women's working preferences: a majority of women would like to lean out in some way, for a time, when their children are still young. Working from home or part-time work are popular. Full time domesticity is not particularly popular; it's the expressed preference of roughly a quarter of mothers, I believe. I don't think this some fancy, elite-educated-lady obsession. Rigid complementarianism isn't viable. Young women, in particular, are rejecting it.
"Men were more likely than women to want a return to traditional gender roles, however — nearly 6 in 10 of them agreed with that, compared with 4 in 10 women."
... vs. your...
"Rigid complementarianism isn't viable. Young women, in particular, are rejecting it."
The vagueness of the word "rigid" makes your claim verge on non-falsifiable. What seems clear to me in the data is that a lot more people, especially men but of both sexes, *want* a tradlife of breadwinner/homemaker specialization than are able to get it. Coordination problem is the likeliest diagnosis. And the modern-marriage substitutes (including no-fault divorce and no way for women to precommit to fertility in marriage) are sufficiently inferior that when tradlife is out of reach, a lot of people don't bother with marriage and family at all.
Your mention of the "Orthobro" culture is illuminating... Come to think of it, it's actually plausible that online Orthobro culture is a significant factor in the surge of young men into Orthodoxy. Then, as they get inside, the Orthodox Church doesn't particularly confirm whatever-it-is (I don't follow it myself) that Orthobro culture is teaching them vs. family or pro a particular family model... but it also doesn't *contradict* it, partly because the Church might tacitly agree while avoiding explicit culture war, partly because most of the liturgy is highly prescribed and formalized and changes little over the course of centuries.
But here's the thing: these young male Orthodox converts can see the gender ratios and that converting to Orthodoxy isn't a particularly smart move if finding a wife is your goal. They still convert, out of genuine conviction, because they've found The Truth. But the temptation to be more conformist and not convert to The Truth is greatly lessened because mainstream culture has so little to offer. It's not that they're sacrificing marriage-and-family for the sake of an audacious leap into non-conformist truth. They're more like refugees from a mainstream culture where marriage-and-family has broken down anyway, so there was little to lose by questing for ancient truth.
Obviously, the cases vary a lot, and a narrative like this is a poor fit for most specific cases. But one young convert I knew was particularly lucid. He was quite marriageable by conventional standards, or could have been; his quest for meaning had taken his work life in some odd directions, and he wasn't obvious breadwinner material although he clearly could have been if he cared. The logic of "why seek a breadwinner paycheck if you can't get a breadwinner role?" seemed to be at work in him... but he more or less courted, tactfully, all the plausible candidates (but they were mostly too young) and eventually moved on (to eastern Europe) when he had exhausted the pool. We had several long talks, one of them about this topic, and he described how *none* of his high school peers had yet (he was in his 30s) gotten married and had kids. Family life had just died out of the whole social circle that he knew. Considering how sad that objectively is, he was pretty resilient about it... and yes, if any young woman took your advice and said "I'll convert to this very traditionalist faith but still live a moderate-feminist lifestyle," her odds with him would have been good.
Not sure what the takeaway of that story is. I guess I just sympathize with young men who seek a tradlife even when the odds of getting it seem low.
My read of the data is that a lot of people probably really do want a tradlife and are being deprived of it by life-cycle coordination failures interacting with marriage markets.
I am a bit late to this but I was wandering what you make of female altar servers. AFAK there is no theological reason to exclude girls from being altar servers. Still, in many traditional communities girls are not accepted in this role due to tradition. Has this ever been an issue for you? Since you only have sons this is probably not front and center on your radar. I have a daughter that is a passionate and dedicated altar server. So that would be a considerable issue for her. But maybe in the US the attitudes are somewhat different?
We don’t use altar girls in my parish, no. That’s somewhat unusual in general but not in more traditional parishes. I prefer it, both because altar serving can help boys consider whether they have a vocation to the priesthood and because I think it makes a healthy kind of boys’ club. All of my sons serve except the youngest (still just 7) and they take it very seriously.
But the question of what spiritually formative experiences should be suggested to girls does trouble me a bit, though I can’t easily weigh in on that, having no daughters and never having been a Catholic girl. I myself am very happy with a situation where the men handle the liturgy while I just get to stay in the pew and pray. I have enough things to manage and organize in life. Quiet prayer time is a welcome thing for me.
Thank you for your response, I certainly can understand where you are coming from! I must admit that the argument "only boys are allowed to be altar servers so that they can discern the priesthood" simply rubs me the wrong way. So that means that having also girls as altar servers would somehow prevent them from doing so? That we need to have an all male altar server community to have a suitably healthy kind of boys'club? Having been a boy myself (a long time ago...) I sort of can understand the gist of the argument. But at the end of the day what this comes down to is that the preferences of boys simply override the rights of girls to serve at the altar. Frankly, I just have a hard time with such a perspective.
Your second remark reminded me of a conversation I had a long time ago with a lady from Russia. We talked about how under Soviet rule Russia was a more egalitarian society in terms of what professions people could aspire to. I point out that it was strange that the major politicians in the Soviet era where all male. She answered that in spite of the political principles and the socialist ideals the household chores were still the responsibility of the women. Females simply lacked the time and the energy to go around networking and pursuing a political career. So talk about similarities between traditionalism and communism... :).
I would never of course tell a father not to delight in his daughter’s devout service! No doubt there are trade-offs to different approaches on the level of parish or Church policy but all parents should take joy in seeing their children learn to love worshipping God. Of course I do understand; my eldest son likewise is now the lead server of the noon Mass in our parish, training my boys and sometimes others that they send along his way for that purpose too. And it’s beautiful. I love watching them.
Also, that being the case, I don’t mean to suggest that serving is absolutely a breeze. But surely it is true that meritocracy (with respect to the formal tasks involved) isn’t, or need not be, a dominant guiding criterion in choosing who may serve? That’s all I was getting at. The fine points of the thing are certainly discussed often at our dinner table!
But this is does actually move into the same space as the argument about women and the priesthood. It seems unhealthy to treat serving the altar, even in that less central role, as an opportunity commensurate with worldly opportunities. Just in general I think that we should try to approach life with an eye to determining what God wants from us, what work he has laid out for us. But in the realm of worldly opportunities it's probably fine/normal to see our own talents and ambitions as fairly robust indicators of what that work at least *might* be. In the realm of liturgy... I mean, it's not like any of the involved tasks are difficult. Quite easy, in general! No one doubts that girls and women can carry things, light candles etc. The great majority of the population could functionally fill the role. But here, a wish to worship God *as he wishes to be worshipped* should be very much at the forefront of our minds. Very much swamping the "I can do it and I want to" consideration.
Note, I am not saying, "And I personally know that God never wants girls to serve at the altar in any respect." No, I don't know that, but the argument, "And the girls want an opportunity to serve too," rubs *me* a bit wrong, because to threatens to sideline the question, "But what does God want?" which here should be very dispositive. Having girls serve the altar doesn't prevent boys from serving or from contemplating a vocation to the priesthood, but it might prevent us from having the sort of boys' club that shapes the boys' sensibilities in the optimal way. One ordered towards both worship and service, with the understanding that it is a privilege to be there, but a *demanding* privilege calling for a proper and generous response on one's own part. Sure, you could form a boys' club around fun, voluntary activities (watch movies or take them camping or whatever) but that wouldn't instill the same ethic of worship and service. You could make them go paint elderly people's porches or whatever, and I'm fine with that too, but doesn't train them to see the worship of God as properly central to their lives and concerns. Which in turn doesn't as readily shape the sensibilities we want in future priests.
For what it's worth, I do very much try to stress to my own sons that they have responsibilities to the parish... altar serving is not about what they want. So they need to be ready to do the nosebleed Masses nobody else wants instead of the fancy high Masses, if that's what the parish asks. To fill unglamorous roles. To help train other boys when asked. Etc.
As I say, the question "but how do we integrate the girls then" does surely interest me. I'm not in a good position to speak to it, but I appreciate that it's a worthwhile question. Their sensibilities also need to be trained, albeit not for the priesthood. Also I don't accept the argument "but the males prefer that this be a boys' club" in most other contexts involving the achievement of consequential things. In nearly all ordinary professional contexts, for instance, I think that argument has to give way to inclusion and meritocracy, which both push the other way. Liturgy is one area of life in which it seems particularly inappropriate to treat either inclusion or meritocracy as significant concerns. It's just not that kind of a thing.
Thank you for taking the time and the energy to answer my remark with such a thoughtful response! Yes, I agree with you that God's will on how to worship Him should be front and center in these discussions. To a certain extent the question of altar girls must be considered within the broader issue on the roles of women in the liturgy. And in order to figure that out principles such as inclusion should not be completely disregarded but subordinated to an attitude of humility. I sometimes forget that, so thanks for reminding me! My own perspective is obviously coloured by my personal experience of a father of a girl that is a dedicated and passionate altar servers. Her two younger brothers are also altar servers and they look up to her in doing their service at the altar. Maybe a possible solution could be to form separate girl and boy groups that take turns in serving the altar? I don't know if this would be reasonable or practical, but it might be a possible option in some parishes.
As a former altar boy myself I do need to set the record straight and point out that serving the altar is not as easy as you make it out to be. There is a LOT that can go wrong! Ask your boys, they will confirm. Where we certainly agree is that all alter servers regardless of gender should do their fair share of nosebleed Masses. In fact the distinction between nosebleed and high Masses is one (but far from the only) key takeways from our exchange!
So I don't really disagree with the advice here.
But I see a lot of generalizations that don't seem to be grounded in data.
For example: yes, Orthodox churches are attracting a lot of young men. But is that because they specially affirm traditional gender roles? I've attended quite a few Orthodox churches of different jurisdictions over my 20 years as an Orthodox Christian, and I've heard little of any advocacy from the pulpit, and not much even in casual conversation with other believers, for women staying in traditional gender roles and avoiding careers. I don't see a lot of vocal or prescriptive anti-feminism. If there's a causal mechanism at work where Orthodox Christianity advocates traditional gender roles and that attracts young men but not young women, I would expect that causal mechanism to operate through what priests say from the ambon. Without that, I don't really believe the explanation. I don't have an alternative, exactly. I don't really understand why Orthodoxy has become a male thing.
You also have some general language about how women are doing well with education and careers, but that's only true of a somewhat elitish subclass. "Go to college and then get a professional career" is a minority life trajectory for both genders. You run a risk care of giving advice that is aimed only at relatively successful people and has nothing to offer that the majority. Suppose it turned out to be the case, as I think some survey evidence that I've seen suggests, the most non-college educated women would rather stay home with their kids if they could, but their households can't make ends meet that way. Would you craft a different set of advice for that class of people? You assume that the breadwinner/homemaker specialization model is more appealing to men than women. It's not at all obvious to me that that should be true, and I don't think the data particularly support it. But it's a dated question, anyway, and just quoting random opinions from your sons really doesn't rise to the level that's needed for the question.
Someone might get the impression from this post that marriage is a particular problem for traditionalist young men, because they're hunting for a tradwife deal that's not available. But the reality is that marriage is falling through the floor for everybody. Huge numbers of people are lonely and sexless, and men and women just don't seem to like each other very much anymore. There's less dating, less romance, less fertility... Just a kind of all-around fail. I guess grappling with that mystery isn't really the purpose of this post... But I think it's needed. And I don't think cheerily complacent moderate feminism that trusts there is some satisfactorily feminism friendly but also marriage friendly equilibrium on the other end of a period of transition is the answer.
Just two things for right now since I’ve got work to do.
1) Despite the little quip about money and pies I don’t really mean to suggest that men are returning to tradition *mainly just for the gender roles*. They’re coming for lots of reasons and in general it’s a beautiful thing; even the parts that are shallow might ultimately be lead-ins to something deeper exactly as you say. No one comes to the faith for fully adequate reasons. But, there are aspects of that vision, the one the influencers are promoting, that *is* fairly appealing to men and actively repels a large share of women. And this post is mainly about women. (Worth noting though that online at least I see a fair bit of angst and anger directed at women in general for *not* coming to or staying in traditional faiths and making tradlife more of a possibility for the men there. People may have recognized the problem but they aren’t necessarily philosophical about it.)
2) The Gallup poll you linked isn’t very good. It flattened the options into a single, binary choice: Work outside the home or care for family at home? Even then it was close. But what more detailed data show is that most women want part time or from-home work, some flexibility for family, with the possibility of leaning back in later. They’re willing to make sacrifices for family, and do want more time for and with kids, but only a smallish minority (about a quarter of moms with young kids in data I’ve seen) just want to be full-time domestic, for life.
Yes to some division of responsibilities within the family, no to what Scott Yenor loves to call the “public men and private women” idea. That’s what I see. I see a rejection of the notion that the domestic sphere is the woman’s proper province, the professional one the man’s. I think it’s pretty revealing also that we’re seeing this rejection on a large scale from women raised in subcultures favorable to it. For them it’s presumably not an issue of inadequate exposure; they have a pretty good idea what this looks like on the ground. And they’re not choosing it, or at least *a great many* are rejecting it. It seems to be an alienating thing more than a selling point even (or especially) for women raised in subcultures inclined to embrace it.
Goodness, when did Scott say that and is that in context? He was my political philosophy professor at BSU and he and his wife introduced me to Jon.
Yeah, I seem to remember now us talking about that. Well, he seems to have branded himself with that idea now to a great extent. "Sexual Counter-Revolution." "Public men and private women." His 2021 Nat Con speech was one airing that got a lot of attention, but he's discussed in various First Things articles, in his essay in this book (among other places):
https://www.amazon.com/Up-Conservatism-Revitalizing-Right-Generation/dp/1641772905/
https://firstthings.com/sexual-counter-revolution/
"The Sexual Constitution" is another phrase he loves. Referring to what he understands to be a kind of gendered social contract; the men will run the public square and while the women run the home.
So I think the key distinction is “career first” versus “family first,” not in ultimate values or objectives, but in daily scheduling.
A breadwinning husband pretty much has to be career first. That's what it takes. Most employers need to be first priority for the best hours of the day, If they're going to pay enough to support a family.
So will the wife be career first or family first? That's the question.
If she's family first, it may be feasible for her to also do some public-facing work. Or it may not. Part-time jobs can be a luxury. Can the homefront needs, food prep and cleaning and child care and Bill paying and all that, still be served? Does external help need to be hired to fill in the gap that part-time work leaves? If so, do the part-time work earnings cover it? All things considered, is it a contribution or a cost? If it's a cost, maybe it's worth it. A good husband will be willing to make some affordable sacrifices for his wife to be more satisfied with how she spends her days. But a whole lot of families are scrambling like crazy just to make ends meet at all, and of a wife feels strongly entitled to what's essentially a hobby, that could be a problem. But of course, there are a lot of cases where a wife's public-facing work is either net helpful to the household or can be easily accommodated. So that's fine.
Going into a marriage, though, you can't foresee how the household’s situation will evolve. The key question is whether (a) a woman wants to be a mom first and foremost, and has a family first orientation, some sort of labor force participation being a secondary preference, or (b) she feels entitled to as much professional participation as her husband will have.
What the Gallup poll indicates to me is that most women (a slight majority) are actually in category (a). Their preferences are roughly aligned with the “public men, private women” balance of work, even if they'd prefer that it be moderated somewhat. Not complete seclusion, but a family first focus. The 2025 survey is more aggressively framed and gets less buy-in for traditional gender roles, but it's still 4 in 10 women wanting a tradlife, which is a lot more than get it, at a time when there's only a small gap between male and female labor force participation rates.
It makes sense that modern women would feel they have more to give than home making and child rearing alone. Families are smaller, most kids spend a lot of their time in public school, and home production is inefficient. So family first, but yes, there's room for paid labor force participation, too.
Obviously, there are a lot of other women who have a career first orientation, and don't particularly seek marriage or motherhood, or at least, don't intend to sacrifice their careers for it. I'm not here to condemn that. But they're not the whole female population, or even close. And if you're waiting for marriage to somehow evolve so that it's as prevalent, stable and fertile as it used to be even though the historic sexual division of Labor has broken down or been suppressed, there was never much reason to think that made a lot of sense, and empirically, it's not working out that way.
Widespread homemaker preferences among women shouldn't be trivialized, marginalized, stigmatized, or swept under the rug. Not only is it good to give these women the lives that they say they want, but these women make a very disproportionate contribution to the grounds for hope in the future of the human race.
I understand why you like that framing. I do not. I mean, right up-front you have to ask, "Why should any parent, or indeed any person, feel justified in adopting a career-first ethic? Our careers should come before our loved ones?" Presumably the response goes back to this "ultimate values vs daily scheduling." Of course the father also puts his family before his job in the final analysis. But he fulfills his obligations to family primarily *through* his work while for the mother the work is secondary. So he gets to prioritize work in a more day-to-day sense while she shouldn't.
But really that doesn't even capture the reality even of the breadwinning father's situation. There are all sorts of times when something that might be overall good for his career advancement might be bad for his family, and he might decide to forego professional achievement, or just do his job less well than he might, because the family is (perhaps rightly!) a higher priority for him. "Yes, I realize I would be of value to you at that conference or negotiation, boss, but it's my kid's graduation and I'm going to be there." He would of course need a very extreme reason, as breadwinner, to justify quitting his job or dropping out of professional activity completely. But not only does he not necessarily maximize career potential, he *also* doesn't relate to his job purely instrumentally. He very possibly treats his career as an independent good and source of obligation; there might be times when his family could really benefit from his presence at some particular time, and he's in no danger of being professionally penalized for prioritizing them, but he doesn't because he has some task that feels obligatory to him and (again perhaps rightly!) prioritizes professional obligation over family. So "career first" doesn't capture *any* responsible person's professional orientation; we're always balancing obligations and goods.
Yenor has a thing somewhat reminiscent of your position here, in which he humorously praises the "side hustle" as a possibility for women who have time for it. OK, so you've got some extra time and energy, or need money, or are bored, so you do a little work "when you have time." Fine. But let's make clear it's a "side hustle"; you're not all-in the way a man is or the way you are for your family.
Heavy sigh. Look, OK. If there are women who think about themselves that way, whatever. I'm not saying they can't. I think there are people who want a "a side-hustle" for fun and a little extra pocket change. But I am saying, you can't do anything at all *serious* professionally if your starting point is, "I will only continue doing this insofar as I feel like I have free time for it." What mom with growing kids has free time? How can you possibly commit to anything if you can't promise to make it a priority in your "daily scheduling"? And what employer with any serious needs would want to hire a person who approaches her job like that? No. Maybe you can sell handcrafts in an Etsy shop or something, but you can't do anything on that basis that involves any real responsibility or trust. You're basically starting from the premise, "Mothers can't shoulder real professional obligation."
But women *can* shoulder real professional responsibility. Like men, they can balance various obligations, using prudence and circumstance to judge the best thing to do in a given circumstance. Working moms, let me tell you, get very frustrated by the conflation of 1) negotiating arrangements that make it easier to balance work and family obligations (whether that's working from home, family leave, flexible hours etc), and 2) seeing mothers as "family first," unlike the "career first" fathers. That just becomes an invitation not to take women seriously in a professional context. Even when they're working, they're not *really* working, right? Not the way a man works! It's kind of a fancy hobby for them!
As a lean-back-in mom you tend to work extremely hard just to prove to your boss that you *aren't* like that, that you don't see your work as a lark, that you can be trusted with professional obligations just like a man can. (And that's not irrational, there are studies indicating that employers tend to view, say, knocking off early for a kid's school event, benevolently for fathers, as a sign of general good character, and more critically for mothers, as a sign of lack of professionalism.) Meanwhile on the flip side, you're trying to teach people in your personal life that "flexible and part-time" doesn't mean "perpetually available for all things"; you have for-reals work obligations sometimes. (People sometimes get annoyed about that, which, again, can be somewhat frustrating... because if it were a *man* who couldn't do X or Y because work obligations, they would hardly blink. Who blames a man for working?)
I know so very many cases of women who've been primary earners, or desperately needed secondary earners, part time, full time, lean-back-in, all sorts of things, because the family needed money. I appreciate you can say, "Sure, I wrote in a contingency for that; if the family *needs* it then she can work." But that's missing something. By treating this as a backup contingency situation you make it sound as though she isn't really responsible for family finances the way he is. But the very fact that women do this so frequently shows how unhelpful the whole framework is; she can only step in and do those things because *she also considers herself responsible* for the family's finances, and accepts professional obligation in that role. And the only reason she can find that employment is because there are employers out there who don't take the Henry Ford view of life, and assume that women are mostly backup contingency workers.
Life involves balancing commitments and juggling obligations. That's just the day-to-day "scheduling" reality for families with multiple earners. That doesn't have to be your personal preference, but I don't think your survey tracks the paradigm you set out. Given a choice between full-time outside-home employment and being at home, I as a young mom would have picked the latter, but I don't have a "tradwife" and never preferred that. And I know lots and lots of women who similarly have made accommodations for family but still definitely don't think of what they do as a "side hustle."
I think, by the way, that even though there is of course a certain simplicity to a "you take point with the finances and me with domestic stuff," which works well for some people, there are also real goods to both parents feeling real responsibility for both making ends meet and caring for their family and home. I'm not saying either approach is clearly better; clearly there's more negotiation and complex logistics when both parents work, and various problems can follow from that. But I do think the starker division makes it harder for spouses to appreciate at a more granular level when the other does. Sure, maybe you're grateful in a broad sense, but lots of at-home moms who don't really understand the anxieties of professional responsibility, the soul-destroying daily grind. And dads who kind of feel like meals and clean sheets appear magically and don't actually know what it's like to handle small children for fifteen hours at a stretch. More cooperation has its own benefits. You have a stronger sense perhaps of truly having done it together. Again, not saying either set-up is absolutely superior.
By the way, your grievances around the difficulty of making people take your career ambitions and urgency of work tasks seriously, if you're a woman, reminds me of the complaints that you can't get a taxi cab if you're black.
I sympathize! It's annoying when you have to fight continually against other people's assumptions about you that result from unchosen membership in a particular group.
And yet, people are rational. They interpret their world using probabilistic patterns. Doing so usually contributes to their own success and/or societal efficiency.
The taxi driver knows the stats and wants to stay online. The vast majority of black potential fares are suffering for wrongs of which they are completely innocent. But is it really just to ask taxi drivers to get themselves killed by ignoring relevant information about job risks? And would it benefit the black potential fares anyway? Or would it just cause taxis to avoid certain parts of town all together?
Similarly: suppose an employee in a particular role Will probably have a net negative contribution in the first year, zero in the second, positive thereafter, with value peaking around the 10-year mark, then declining through obsolescence of skills and job match, but staying positive because of the value of institutional memory. A hiring manager's decision will depend heavily on a probabilistic judgment about likely employee tenure.
There's a widespread assumption that discrimination is unfair and irrational. It can be irrational, of course, but there's no reason to think it is irrational in general. Selection on observable characteristics that statistically proxy for unobservable characteristics is very much a part of rationality. We couldn't possibly suppress it in general. We can suppress particular forms of it, but that's costly, and I think it's probably more costly, albeit in hard-to-quantify ways, than direct cash compensation of the discriminated-against groups.
How many jobs are not created at all because hiring managers can't sufficiently mitigate the risk of hiring women who will waste the training investment though maternity leave or quitting to look after a baby?
Probably quite a few, but it’s in their interests then to be able to discern which women will actually be good workers, and this whole thing is complicated (as in the black case!) by what you might call historical prejudice, which isn’t necessarily rational. There is a whole extended history in labor of refusing to hire married women, or to hire them for a wide range of jobs. See Henry Ford, Phillips v Martin Marietta Corp, etc. Married women have had to fight for the right to be employed. Our own grandmother was a bit of a trailblazer in this regard! (Not an activist but pushing the boundaries of what had previously been allowed in terms of women working.) So there’s a lot of cultural and historical history there that might be shaping employer perceptions, which is not rooted in rational calculation and very much works to women’s disadvantage.
And one big piece of that might be the thing I said earlier: a woman who wants accommodations of some kind for her family isn’t necessarily a “side hustle” sort of lady. Given a job that she *can* take she might do it very seriously and very well. I think the data show that a sizable share of women want those options to be available, and certainly to be available at some point in life. There’s a period perhaps when a woman is having babies when it’s quite hard to commit to much else, but that time passes. It’s a small portion of her life. The number of women who want to be mainly at home for that period is large but I think the number who want “tradlife forever” is pretty small. I mean, sure, there too the number who are willing would probably climb quite a bit if he’s a really high earner and they get a super cushy life without working… but how many men are super high earners? Given realistic options, most women want to be employable, and a sizable share actively wish to be employed.
But they want family-flexible jobs if possible, and that’s exactly what will be hard to find if the “public man private woman” paradigm (even in softened “side hustle” form) is promoted and seen widely as normative. Changes in labor are making such things more possible, but cultural attitudes factor here too. I think it will be good for families and birth rates if we can use that to our advantage to tap women’s actual talents but also soften the costs of having kids, which clearly deters many women from childbearing (or from having as many kids as they want). It’s hard to do that if you’re locked into a paradigm where everyone has to be either “career first or family first.”
I tell my boys that they should try to have enough earning power to anchor the family while their wife is actually having babies. Some people continue to find ways to work, I was always at least a bit of a secondary earner, but it can be pretty hard in the midst of baby-toddler life. Good if the man is prepared to support the family in that period.
You’ll likely be poor though, and kids also get financially needier as they grow, and moms also move on from that intense baby-care period and want some new goals and broader horizons, so I also tell them to be prepared for changes across the years of family life. It’s pretty normal nowadays for families to transition into a phase where she works (though maybe part-time or from home) and he picks up some slack on the domestic front. And that can have a lot of benefits for everyone but it does break your mold.
Well, I'm not sure I have a "mold" to break; I'm just *anti* the feminist mold of "not allowed to arrange things so that men's life opportunities are different from women's."
I'm all for family-friendly jobs and remote work and women earning again after all their kids are in school, if they want to.
But I don't buy the story that lingering historical bias makes employers underappreciate women as employees. I think employers are overwhelmingly feminism-brainwashed and treat men and women exactly the same, even when it would be in their own interest to how defensively vs. loss-of-key-staff-to-maternity risk.
It's possible that "yes, there are gaps in her resume, but that's because she's a mom; *now* her kids are in school and she'll be a great, reliable asset on a mom schedule" is an underappreciated opportunity. I'd blame feminism for that; it forced the gender-blind society down all our throats, so we can't be nuanced, attentive to realistic differences, alert to patterns anymore. To discriminate in favor of resume-gap, schedule-constrained workers *because they're moms* and therefore can't be held to be lazy or unambitious actually sounds illegal to me.
I didn't say family-first women are better than career-first women in a moral sense. Careers can matter a lot in themselves. Kids and families can benefit from women's careers, via earning power, role model effects, contacts, etc. Sometimes a woman's career, or even just her string-of-jobs that don't amount to much of a career, are indispensable for the family's well-being.
My point is, that's the distinction that matters most. A tradwife with a side hustle is a lot more like a stay-at-home mom than like a career woman with a husband and kids. Does the family's daily scheduling over decades, and/or its place of residence, get determined or heavily shaped by the wife's job? A man will want to know it before marriage. He might decline to court an otherwise appealing woman because the nature of his own career makes accommodating a wife's career too difficult, or because he wants his kids to have more direct maternal input than that allows for... and/or because he doesn't need the extra money and can handle the breadwinning himself. Whether the aspiring tradwife he's courting has a taste for side-hustles is much less of a decision point. He can work around that.
And when you refine the breadwinner vs. homemaker, career-first vs. family-first, public-facing work vs. private-facing work distinction in this way, the striking thing about the Gallup poll, and some other poll data, is that among young mothers, if anything, homemaker/traditional/private-facing priorities may be even a majority and are certainly a large share. That's a lot different from what you learn in school, what you'd glean from the discourse, or what life outcomes really look like.
It's a coordination failure in the sense that (a) a lot of people don't get married at all and matching breadwinner-preference men with homemaker-preference women might help with that, and (b) the sunk cost effect: many couples that do form would be better off if he had been more of an earning power maxxer and she hadn't taken on student debt and had invested more in domestic skills than job skills. Society should be more intentional about approving and coordinating breadwinner/homemaker specialized marriages for the large number/maybe majority who want that.
That doesn't preclude some women being career-first. I'm 110% in favor of welcoming vast hordes of foreign nannies to fill the childcare gaps left by ambitious women's careers.
First, quick note: I mentioned Orthodoxy in my point (1) and complementarianism in my (2) so I didn't actually say that Orthodoxy embraces complementarianism. Online, the Orthobro phenomenon does seem to overlap heavily with the tradwife/antifeminist/masculinist dynamic but I don't make any claims about what Orthodoxy itself teaches.
I'm not volunteering to spend hours on end producing studies here, but I think the data does very much support the theory that the complementarian model is more appealing to men. In the Mormon church the split is rather shocking, a full twenty-point divide in retention. (About 60% of Gen Z men, 40% of women, staying active in the faith.) Of course that doesn't as such prove that the gender role issue is a major driving factor, but I think taking all the evidence together, that is very much the most reasonable conclusion.
In terms of women's working preferences: a majority of women would like to lean out in some way, for a time, when their children are still young. Working from home or part-time work are popular. Full time domesticity is not particularly popular; it's the expressed preference of roughly a quarter of mothers, I believe. I don't think this some fancy, elite-educated-lady obsession. Rigid complementarianism isn't viable. Young women, in particular, are rejecting it.
This poll is interesting too: https://19thnews.org/2025/09/poll-traditional-family-gender-roles/
"Men were more likely than women to want a return to traditional gender roles, however — nearly 6 in 10 of them agreed with that, compared with 4 in 10 women."
... vs. your...
"Rigid complementarianism isn't viable. Young women, in particular, are rejecting it."
The vagueness of the word "rigid" makes your claim verge on non-falsifiable. What seems clear to me in the data is that a lot more people, especially men but of both sexes, *want* a tradlife of breadwinner/homemaker specialization than are able to get it. Coordination problem is the likeliest diagnosis. And the modern-marriage substitutes (including no-fault divorce and no way for women to precommit to fertility in marriage) are sufficiently inferior that when tradlife is out of reach, a lot of people don't bother with marriage and family at all.
Your mention of the "Orthobro" culture is illuminating... Come to think of it, it's actually plausible that online Orthobro culture is a significant factor in the surge of young men into Orthodoxy. Then, as they get inside, the Orthodox Church doesn't particularly confirm whatever-it-is (I don't follow it myself) that Orthobro culture is teaching them vs. family or pro a particular family model... but it also doesn't *contradict* it, partly because the Church might tacitly agree while avoiding explicit culture war, partly because most of the liturgy is highly prescribed and formalized and changes little over the course of centuries.
But here's the thing: these young male Orthodox converts can see the gender ratios and that converting to Orthodoxy isn't a particularly smart move if finding a wife is your goal. They still convert, out of genuine conviction, because they've found The Truth. But the temptation to be more conformist and not convert to The Truth is greatly lessened because mainstream culture has so little to offer. It's not that they're sacrificing marriage-and-family for the sake of an audacious leap into non-conformist truth. They're more like refugees from a mainstream culture where marriage-and-family has broken down anyway, so there was little to lose by questing for ancient truth.
Obviously, the cases vary a lot, and a narrative like this is a poor fit for most specific cases. But one young convert I knew was particularly lucid. He was quite marriageable by conventional standards, or could have been; his quest for meaning had taken his work life in some odd directions, and he wasn't obvious breadwinner material although he clearly could have been if he cared. The logic of "why seek a breadwinner paycheck if you can't get a breadwinner role?" seemed to be at work in him... but he more or less courted, tactfully, all the plausible candidates (but they were mostly too young) and eventually moved on (to eastern Europe) when he had exhausted the pool. We had several long talks, one of them about this topic, and he described how *none* of his high school peers had yet (he was in his 30s) gotten married and had kids. Family life had just died out of the whole social circle that he knew. Considering how sad that objectively is, he was pretty resilient about it... and yes, if any young woman took your advice and said "I'll convert to this very traditionalist faith but still live a moderate-feminist lifestyle," her odds with him would have been good.
Not sure what the takeaway of that story is. I guess I just sympathize with young men who seek a tradlife even when the odds of getting it seem low.
If you have a moment, take a look at my post about why “‘can't afford a tradlife’ is totally a thing.” https://lancelotfinn.substack.com/p/no-matt-yglesias-cant-afford-a-tradlife
My read of the data is that a lot of people probably really do want a tradlife and are being deprived of it by life-cycle coordination failures interacting with marriage markets.
This 2015 Gallup poll indicates that the majority of women with young children prefer homemaking role. https://news.gallup.com/poll/186050/children-key-factor-women-desire-work-outside-home.aspx
I am a bit late to this but I was wandering what you make of female altar servers. AFAK there is no theological reason to exclude girls from being altar servers. Still, in many traditional communities girls are not accepted in this role due to tradition. Has this ever been an issue for you? Since you only have sons this is probably not front and center on your radar. I have a daughter that is a passionate and dedicated altar server. So that would be a considerable issue for her. But maybe in the US the attitudes are somewhat different?
We don’t use altar girls in my parish, no. That’s somewhat unusual in general but not in more traditional parishes. I prefer it, both because altar serving can help boys consider whether they have a vocation to the priesthood and because I think it makes a healthy kind of boys’ club. All of my sons serve except the youngest (still just 7) and they take it very seriously.
But the question of what spiritually formative experiences should be suggested to girls does trouble me a bit, though I can’t easily weigh in on that, having no daughters and never having been a Catholic girl. I myself am very happy with a situation where the men handle the liturgy while I just get to stay in the pew and pray. I have enough things to manage and organize in life. Quiet prayer time is a welcome thing for me.
Thank you for your response, I certainly can understand where you are coming from! I must admit that the argument "only boys are allowed to be altar servers so that they can discern the priesthood" simply rubs me the wrong way. So that means that having also girls as altar servers would somehow prevent them from doing so? That we need to have an all male altar server community to have a suitably healthy kind of boys'club? Having been a boy myself (a long time ago...) I sort of can understand the gist of the argument. But at the end of the day what this comes down to is that the preferences of boys simply override the rights of girls to serve at the altar. Frankly, I just have a hard time with such a perspective.
Your second remark reminded me of a conversation I had a long time ago with a lady from Russia. We talked about how under Soviet rule Russia was a more egalitarian society in terms of what professions people could aspire to. I point out that it was strange that the major politicians in the Soviet era where all male. She answered that in spite of the political principles and the socialist ideals the household chores were still the responsibility of the women. Females simply lacked the time and the energy to go around networking and pursuing a political career. So talk about similarities between traditionalism and communism... :).
I would never of course tell a father not to delight in his daughter’s devout service! No doubt there are trade-offs to different approaches on the level of parish or Church policy but all parents should take joy in seeing their children learn to love worshipping God. Of course I do understand; my eldest son likewise is now the lead server of the noon Mass in our parish, training my boys and sometimes others that they send along his way for that purpose too. And it’s beautiful. I love watching them.
Also, that being the case, I don’t mean to suggest that serving is absolutely a breeze. But surely it is true that meritocracy (with respect to the formal tasks involved) isn’t, or need not be, a dominant guiding criterion in choosing who may serve? That’s all I was getting at. The fine points of the thing are certainly discussed often at our dinner table!
But this is does actually move into the same space as the argument about women and the priesthood. It seems unhealthy to treat serving the altar, even in that less central role, as an opportunity commensurate with worldly opportunities. Just in general I think that we should try to approach life with an eye to determining what God wants from us, what work he has laid out for us. But in the realm of worldly opportunities it's probably fine/normal to see our own talents and ambitions as fairly robust indicators of what that work at least *might* be. In the realm of liturgy... I mean, it's not like any of the involved tasks are difficult. Quite easy, in general! No one doubts that girls and women can carry things, light candles etc. The great majority of the population could functionally fill the role. But here, a wish to worship God *as he wishes to be worshipped* should be very much at the forefront of our minds. Very much swamping the "I can do it and I want to" consideration.
Note, I am not saying, "And I personally know that God never wants girls to serve at the altar in any respect." No, I don't know that, but the argument, "And the girls want an opportunity to serve too," rubs *me* a bit wrong, because to threatens to sideline the question, "But what does God want?" which here should be very dispositive. Having girls serve the altar doesn't prevent boys from serving or from contemplating a vocation to the priesthood, but it might prevent us from having the sort of boys' club that shapes the boys' sensibilities in the optimal way. One ordered towards both worship and service, with the understanding that it is a privilege to be there, but a *demanding* privilege calling for a proper and generous response on one's own part. Sure, you could form a boys' club around fun, voluntary activities (watch movies or take them camping or whatever) but that wouldn't instill the same ethic of worship and service. You could make them go paint elderly people's porches or whatever, and I'm fine with that too, but doesn't train them to see the worship of God as properly central to their lives and concerns. Which in turn doesn't as readily shape the sensibilities we want in future priests.
For what it's worth, I do very much try to stress to my own sons that they have responsibilities to the parish... altar serving is not about what they want. So they need to be ready to do the nosebleed Masses nobody else wants instead of the fancy high Masses, if that's what the parish asks. To fill unglamorous roles. To help train other boys when asked. Etc.
As I say, the question "but how do we integrate the girls then" does surely interest me. I'm not in a good position to speak to it, but I appreciate that it's a worthwhile question. Their sensibilities also need to be trained, albeit not for the priesthood. Also I don't accept the argument "but the males prefer that this be a boys' club" in most other contexts involving the achievement of consequential things. In nearly all ordinary professional contexts, for instance, I think that argument has to give way to inclusion and meritocracy, which both push the other way. Liturgy is one area of life in which it seems particularly inappropriate to treat either inclusion or meritocracy as significant concerns. It's just not that kind of a thing.
Thank you for taking the time and the energy to answer my remark with such a thoughtful response! Yes, I agree with you that God's will on how to worship Him should be front and center in these discussions. To a certain extent the question of altar girls must be considered within the broader issue on the roles of women in the liturgy. And in order to figure that out principles such as inclusion should not be completely disregarded but subordinated to an attitude of humility. I sometimes forget that, so thanks for reminding me! My own perspective is obviously coloured by my personal experience of a father of a girl that is a dedicated and passionate altar servers. Her two younger brothers are also altar servers and they look up to her in doing their service at the altar. Maybe a possible solution could be to form separate girl and boy groups that take turns in serving the altar? I don't know if this would be reasonable or practical, but it might be a possible option in some parishes.
As a former altar boy myself I do need to set the record straight and point out that serving the altar is not as easy as you make it out to be. There is a LOT that can go wrong! Ask your boys, they will confirm. Where we certainly agree is that all alter servers regardless of gender should do their fair share of nosebleed Masses. In fact the distinction between nosebleed and high Masses is one (but far from the only) key takeways from our exchange!