Get off the sofa and go to church



Let’s get real about something far too many professing Christians have wrongly decided is OK. We’re talking about people who think obedience to Christ doesn’t require participation in the local church.

In a few Christian women’s groups I’m in online, I’ve seen so many casually mentioning how they don’t have a church, or aren’t particularly interested in looking for one, or blatantly reject the idea that it’s needed at all. Comments like:

To remove yourself from the reach of elders, correction, and communal responsibility is, bluntly put, to refuse Christ’s ordained means of grace.

I don’t have to be part of a church. I can watch a service online from my sofa, I can worship or read the Bible whenever I want, and I can gather with other Christians anywhere, anytime. I don’t need to be “pastored.”

This woman is way off base, because a lone Christian is much more easily misled than someone who’s following Christ’s command to connect with a local body of believers.

To clarify, we’re not talking about the capital C “Church” — the global body of believers throughout history. Every authentic Christian joins THAT Church the moment they turn to Christ. No, we’re talking about the LOCAL church — designed by God to offer what the global Church cannot.

Question: What is a local church?

Answer: A group of Christians who live near each other who voluntarily band together to worship God, study His Word, love and serve each other, and submit to the group’s chosen leaders, which should include biblically qualified elders who are able to teach and disciple the flock, as well as qualified deacons to help in practical ways.

All of this is scriptural, as we’ll point out below, but first a quick word about what constitutes a “local group.”

Americans, especially in larger cities, are used to driving a distance to get to a preferred church. I’m not going to argue with that, but I am going to make a plea that the closer you are to your church, the more you can invest your time and energy in it — and the more it can invest in you.

If you are now searching for a church home, I strongly encourage you to start with the congregations closest to you and work your way out from there till you find a biblically sound body you and your family can join.

Not a building

Of course, the local church is not a building. You can have church in a school auditorium, at the local park — anywhere your group is allowed to assemble.

What makes such a group a “local church” is not location, but congregation — a group of Christians in the area who choose to commit to each other, whether they own a meeting space or not.

In fact, a pretty robust argument could be made that owning a facility is an impediment, or at least a distraction, to the church’s mission to shepherd the flock and serve the community.

I love stained glass windows, whether they’re in pretty little country churches or enormous European cathedrals. But those facilities require upkeep, costing money and time that could be directed to other endeavors and needs, especially if the church building sits unused most of the week!

What the local church is for

The Bible provides an excellent roadmap for the local church’s marching orders, because Christ did not establish a disembodied, leaderless, commitment-free Christianity. When believers detach themselves from the local church, in fact, they are not protecting their faith; they are redefining it on their own terms.

So what exactly are we to do?

We are to act more like the early church! Familiarize yourself with what our first brothers and sisters in Christ were doing. You can’t go far wrong using that as a template.

But here’s a helpful checklist of how we are to interact with our local church:

1. Meet regularly

First Corinthians 14 details how to conduct an orderly worship service, including phrases like “when you assemble.” Paul’s assumption is that believers are regularly meeting together, and such meetings are referenced often throughout the New Testament.

"And let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day drawing near" (Hebrews 10:24-25).

2. Worship together, pray together, learn the Word together

Just like the early church:

"And they were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to the prayers" (Acts 2:42).

3. Submit to church leaders (elders/pastors, deacons)

The New Testament knows nothing of a Christian who answers to no one. Christ commands believers to submit to church leadership (Hebrews 13:17) and establishes church discipline, not to shame or punish but to restore (Matthew 18:15-20).

This is one the sofa-churchers miss every time.

Elders/pastors are biblically charged with shepherding the flock (Acts 14:23) — the flock being whatever local church they are leading. But how can they shepherd someone they don’t know, who’s not there?

In Acts 6, the apostles told the believers to select men “from among you” to serve as leaders (leaders often referred to as deacons). This was only possible because the local congregation knew its men and was therefore qualified to help choose leadership.

These commands are not optional, situational, or suspended when church life becomes difficult. To remove yourself from the reach of elders, correction, and communal responsibility is, bluntly put, to refuse Christ’s ordained means of grace. You cannot claim Christ as Savior while functionally rejecting Him as Lord, and the moment a believer declares, “I don’t need the church,” she has placed herself as the final authority over her own discipleship and rejected membership in the Bride of Christ.

Further, if you’re not committed to a congregation, you don’t have a Christian leader (shepherd) keeping watch over you (sheep). That is dangerous territory for any of us and surely a big part of the reason God created us to be in churches.

4. Love each other, become a family to each other, hold each other accountable

Commitment to a sound biblical church offers much more than a healthy leader-congregant relationship. It also offers by far the best way to fulfill the numerous biblical instructions regarding one another. (And they are numerous, as I explained here.) Tim Challies says:

Many of these commands can either only be carried out or can best be carried out in local contexts. You may be able to bear my burdens from a thousand miles away, but those who are closer are much more able. And so membership answers this question: Who are the people I am especially called to love? Or who am I primarily meant to serve with the gifts God has given me? It narrows the answer from the entire global church to one specific congregation. To become a member of a church is to say that these are the people God has most explicitly called me to love, serve, and pray for. These people are my “one another.”

Yes! Your local church is where you find your “one another” and where they find you. It’s also where you find “one anothers” who are not like you. Local church gives you an opportunity to love and serve singles if you’re not single, older saints if you’re younger, families if you don’t have kids, and vice versa.

This is ground zero for one of those “greatest commands” of Jesus, to love one another.

5. Observe the Lord’s Supper together; witness baptisms of new believers

The ordinances are generally undertaken in church, and they are to be part of a believer’s life. Baptism can take place anywhere there is water and a believer willing to conduct the baptism, but bringing this under the authority of the church protects the meaning and purpose of baptism through clear teaching on the subject. Likewise with the Lord’s Supper — good teaching in the church clarifies who should and should not be participating.

6. Serve the community near the church, meeting physical and spiritual needs

There is power in numbers, when you’re trying to make an impact for Christ in your community. This doesn’t mean you don’t individually love your neighbor, share the gospel, etc., but it does mean that when you uncover a need that you as an individual can’t fill — well, that’s a need you take back to your church.

Similarly, churches are often notified or aware of needs before individuals are. Serving the community as part of your local church is a powerful witness.

Give me that old time (marketplace of) religion

Another comment to consider from one of my ladies’ online groups:

Sometimes it is hard to find a modern church that fits one’s personal beliefs and convictions. In those cases, I’d say try to find a friend group made of Christians and have a Bible study or just meet up to talk and encourage one another in Christ.

“Try to find a friend group made of Christians.” Hmmm ... if only we had institutions DESIGNED to bring Christians together in fellowship.

And assuming you find something like that (outside of church), “just meet up to talk and encourage one another” is a big bowl of weak sauce compared to the robust spiritual experience the local church offers and demands.

But I want to address her opening comment, because that’s a huge part of the problem with the sofa-churchers: they’re looking for a church that “fits their personal beliefs and convictions.”

America’s consumer mentality — and our relative abundance of churches — play a role in this mindset. Many have left a church, or not found another one, not because they can’t find something doctrinally sound, but because they’re focused entirely on their own tastes, preferences, and comforts.

Thanks in part to our robust freedom of religion, America is home to more than 300,000 Protestant congregations alone. That’s more than 6,000 churches per state, although the Bible Belt areas tend to have more than, say, godless Seattle (I was born there; I can say that).

So we Americans are quick to jump from church to church because it’s pretty easy to find a new one. And we can pick and choose features most appealing to us.

That, however, is where a lot of us go wrong. We choose a church with a consumer mindset, ticking off the features that “fit” our family. The music’s great! They have lots of middle schoolers! There’s a Saturday night service!

Beloved, that stuff is not the focus when looking for a church. We all need a church that prioritizes:

  • doctrinally sound biblical teaching (not just on Sunday mornings);
  • small groups for Bible study, prayer, community, and accountability; and
  • outreach to the lost (locally and on the mission field, ideally).

You found a church? Here’s what’s next:

  1. Commit for the long haul. Approach your church with a “lifetime” rather than a “trial period” mindset.
  2. Prioritize presence. Make regular attendance the baseline — not an optional extra for when the schedule is clear.
  3. Listen with a soft heart. Treat the Sunday sermon as a direct message from God; read the passage before you arrive.
  4. Go deeper than Sunday. Seek out a small home group (sometimes called a community group or life group) that studies, prays, serves, and eats together — that’s the best way to build community.
  5. Get busy. Identify specific ways to serve this body you’ve joined.
  6. Make your church better. Look for ways your church is serving the community, and come alongside. Or bring ideas for outreach back to your church!

Because — ultimately — you DO need a church. And there’s a church out there that needs you. So get off the sofa and go find your part of the Body.

Technology peaked with radio — especially when it comes to catching the game



Remember the radio? Of course you do. It’s not hard to remember. It’s still around. You can buy a little one on Amazon and tune into AM or FM. Cars still have them, for now. You can enjoy classical music on public radio, political commentary on talk radio, the game on a Friday night, or whatever else there is floating around on the airwaves at any given moment on any given day.

Before TikTok there was Facebook, and before Facebook there was MySpace, and before MySpace there was television, and before television there was radio, and before radio there was silence.

'Who else is listening to this right now?' That’s what I wonder a little when I’m driving and scanning the radio. There’s no way for me to know.

Imagine what that transition was like — from silence to radio.

Big world

I’ve been reading “Hello, Everybody! The Dawn of American Radio” by Anthony J. Rudel recently, and in it, Rudel writes at length about that time and transition from silence to radio sound.

The world was so big in those days. Rhode Island was so far from Spain, and Ohio was so far from Rhode Island. In that big world of people without Social Security numbers or anything like our panopticon of 2026, there were millions and millions of little worlds. Towns, blocks, clans, families, and people all in their own little worlds, living and breathing in silence.

Radio was, in some way, a beginning of the modern world as we know it. Of course, there have been many symbols of many beginnings in different and disparate domains, and radio was one of them. The ability to transmit a message across the land to anyone else who might want to listen was the beginning of mass communication and mass modern society. In hindsight, it was the first step in a long march toward Instagram, Facebook, and X.

When media was social

But radio was nothing like today's social media. The people who listened to it still lived primarily in embodied communities — families, churches, neighborhoods, and workplaces. Radio expanded that world; it did not replace it.

Social media has done the opposite. Millions of us now inhabit synthetic networks populated by algorithms, bots, AI-generated content, and strangers selected by recommendation engines rather than real proximity. We are connected to more people than ever while becoming increasingly detached from the human beings physically around us.

Radio felt like a kind of modern magic. Voices traveled across the plains, through the night, and into your living room, making a vast country seem smaller. Yet those voices still pointed back toward a shared human world, answering one of humanity's oldest questions: Is anybody out there?

Beautiful uncertainty

There’s something beautiful about how terrestrial radio isn't completely predictable or reliable. Fishing, not knowing what you might catch when throwing your line in the water is like that. Driving and just letting the road go is like that. Tuning into the radio, passing over static as you turn the dial right, hearing faint music or voices covered by the gray sound, and landing on a station you haven’t heard before is like that.

Driving late at night with one hand on the wheel and the other on the dial, scanning from station to station, seeing if there is anything worth listening to is different from looking through Spotify playlists or flipping through CDs like we once did 20 years ago. Spotify playlists somehow feel like shopping at the store, and CDs felt like something private, while radio stations feel like something almost — almost! — communal.

“Who else is listening to this right now?” That’s what I wonder a little when I’m driving and scanning the radio. There’s no way for me to know. There’s no way for the radio station to know. There’s no way for anyone to know who’s listening in their car or in their bedroom or in their kitchen.

The sound is sent out into the world on a certain frequency, and those who are tuned in hear. There is no history of it marked, there is no documentation logged, there is no surveillance state knowing you listened that night. Ah, the sound of freedom.

RELATED: Goodbye, car radio? Big Tech’s plans to control what you listen to behind the wheel.

Ron Schwerin/Getty Images

Batter up

Maybe it’s nostalgia, or maybe it’s aesthetics, but whatever it is, there is something so damn American about listening to a baseball game on the radio. The game sounds better over a little tinny speaker with crackle and static than it looks on a 96-inch flatscreen. The way the announcers sound, the way they describe every detail, the distant cry of the crowd in the background. You imagine sight in your mind behind your eyes as you play out what they tell you.

Maybe the beauty of radio is the fact that we don’t have control once we finally land on a station that’s clear. Someone else chooses the music to play or the words to say, and it’s there in the background, and everyone out there who’s listening listens. Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s bad, maybe it’s all right, but it’s just what there is, and it’s fine. I think we might get sick of making so many choices these days. There’s too many choices. Going on a ride with someone else is nicer than driving ourselves.

If all this is just nostalgia, then it’s a nostalgia for a world that hadn’t quite yet evolved, or rather devolved, into the global cyber panopticon we have today. It was a world teetering on the edge of technological modernity; one still with the magic of the old little worlds; one that was peering over the fence toward the future and everyone else far away. It was a big world out there, and we could only hear just a little of it.

It was tinny, scratchy, and it was magical.

Never AI. Always reality. Only film: The 6-word promise that's building a worldwide community.



What is real?

I know that sounds like I'm trying to "blow your mind, man." But I don't mean it in some kind of hippy-dippy, dorm-room philosophizing kind of way.

They want a place where they know they'll be seeing the world as it is, where they can drop their defenses against being fooled.

In 2026, "What is real?" is a very pressing question.

Won't get fooled again

If you've spent any time on X, Instagram, or Facebook, you've probably gotten used to thinking about reality. Namely when coming across the countless AI-generated photos and videos flooding your timeline.

Some, of course, are obviously fake. A penguin shaking hands with a polar bear on a dock while a moose looks on from a sailboat? Most likely AI. But with others it's not so easy.

Take that photo of the beautiful sunrise over those shining snow-covered mountains. Looks real ... but it isn't. Neither is that perfectly convincing woman talking about the scheduling app that helped her organize her life.

Unless you are exceedingly discerning, you've probably been fooled by AI, even if just for a few seconds. You shouldn't feel bad, and you shouldn't feel like a dupe, even though you probably do. We weren't made for this world of images that look 99.99999% real but are 0% so. What in our past would have ever prepared us for this world? Seeing is believing? That may have been true once upon a time, but no more.

Shutter island

There are a lot of implications here for society. How do we live in a half reality, half anti-reality world? How do we organize a society around truth when the truth is constantly muddied by false images and videos? How do we even talk to each other if we can't reach a consensus on what's in front of us? These are big questions without clear answers.

But on a smaller, more granular, human level, I think something interesting is happening: People find themselves aching for more truth, more reality. Not everyone, of course. Some are going full steam into the Kafkaesque world of reality-nihilism. But others see the trap, the chaos, and the shallow ugliness of anti-reality.

Earlier this year, I started a project by the name of Film 20. Essentially, it’s a place of pure reality in the form of film photography. It’s an archive of photos from real people and real places all around the world. No iPhone photos are allowed, no digital photos from DSLRs either. Only film; only reality.

RELATED: The Kids Are Outside

O.W. Root

Reality hunger

At first, our followers were mostly film photographers and film aficionados. But an interesting thing happened in the past few months. The account blew up in a substantial way. There are now nearly 29,000 people following Film 20, an account dedicated to documenting reality through the eyes of film photographers.

Those 29,000 people aren't all photographers, though some are — our DMs are flooded with submissions from wonderful photographers from all over. They aren't just following for the nice photos either. I know because the primary sources of growth have been derived from posts underscoring the purpose of Film 20.

"Never AI. Always reality. Only film."

People — 29,000 people — want a feed of reality and only reality. They want a place where they know they'll be seeing the world as it is, where they can drop their defenses against being fooled.

Cultivating authenticity

I know that everyone doesn't have this same kind of yearning for reality. I understand that these 29,000 are not representative of the general population in 2026. But I don't think this desire is going away, and I don't think the awareness of the shallow falseness of digital AI imagery is a short-term blip. The further we move into the AI world, the stronger this yearning for reality will be.

The bleed of fake video and imagery into every corner of our digital world will continue for the foreseeable future. It will be annoying. Next year you will only see more fake videos than the last.

So whether it is film photography, live music, local food, or real people with real emotions, the future of reality is one that will need to be cultivated and earnestly sought out. Just like we try to eat healthy and read good books, we will need to consciously make the choices that lead us toward reality in every way we can.

Reality is good for the body, mind, and soul.

You need just two things to have fun — and neither of them is money



A recent national survey found something rather alarming. Nearly half of Americans say the fun has faded from their lives. The top excuse is predictable — money. Over half say they simply can’t afford to enjoy themselves any more.

Interestingly, the people who do make time for fun report less stress, stronger relationships, and more motivation. In other words, the payoff is real. And the barrier is not as simple as the price tag.

There’s also something to be said for reviving lost habits: pickup sports, church gatherings, volunteering, even old-fashioned storytelling.

We have trained ourselves to think fun is expensive. That didn’t happen by accident. Social media sells a deadly diet of curated lifestyles — vacations, rooftop bars, luxury dinners, perfectly staged “memories.” Reality TV ups the ante with drama and excess. Fun, in this version of life, is something you buy, document, and broadcast. If it doesn’t look impressive, it doesn’t count.

That idea is both wrong and exhausting.

Simple, local, shared

For most of human history, fun was simple, local, and shared. It was built around people, not purchases. Somewhere along the way, we replaced connection with consumption and then acted surprised when both our wallets and our spirits ran dry.

The truth is, some of the best forms of fun cost next to nothing, and they tend to be the ones that actually work.

Start with the obvious: time with other people. The survey itself admits what many already know but ignore — shared fun strengthens relationships. Not curated, expensive outings. Just shared time.

A backyard cookout beats a $200 night out more often than people admit. A few burgers, a cheap speaker, maybe someone brings a folding chair that’s seen better days. It’s not glamorous. That’s the point. People relax. They talk. They laugh hard, let their hair down, and leave feeling re-energized.

Playing, not paying

Game nights are another example. Not the staged, Instagram-ready kind, but the slightly chaotic version. A deck of cards, an ancient board game, or even something improvised. Half the fun is in the arguing over rules and the inevitable cheating accusations.

Then there's the outdoors, still one of the best bargains left in America. A walk through the neighborhood, a hike up a nearby trail, a pickup game at the local court, an afternoon fishing at a quiet pond. None of it costs much more than the time you put in.

Even something as simple as a long drive can reset a person. No destination needed. Just music, conversation, and maybe a wrong turn that ends at a gas station selling fireworks, ammunition, and wedding dresses. Gas costs money, sure. But compared to most “entertainment,” it’s pocket change

Some ideas lean practical. Others lean a bit ridiculous, and that’s part of their charm.

RELATED: My new hack for a long, healthy life? Getting married

Universal/Getty Images

Thrift tour

Try a “no-spend day” with friends or family. The rule is simple: No one spends a dime, but everyone has to contribute an idea. You end up with a strange mix. Maybe a park visit, followed by a kitchen experiment, followed by someone insisting on teaching a skill they barely understand.

Or host a “bad movie night.” Everyone brings/suggests the worst film they can find. The goal isn’t to be entertained, but to acknowledge how terrible it is. You’ll get more genuine enjoyment out of that than sitting silently through a $250 million film whose plot you couldn't summarize at gunpoint.

There’s also something to be said for reviving lost habits: pickup sports, church gatherings, volunteering, even old-fashioned storytelling. These used to be normal parts of life. Now they feel almost novel, which says more about our culture than it should.

Other people's fun

The issue goes beyond money. It comes down to isolation.

The same survey points out that social circles have shrunk. People have fewer friends, fewer regular meetups, and fewer shared routines. That is not solved by a bigger paycheck. You can have more money and still sit alone on a couch, scrolling through other people’s “fun.”

In fact, that’s exactly what many people do.

There’s an idiotic assumption that if finances improved, life would suddenly feel fuller. But look at the data again. What people actually benefit from is participation rather than spending. It’s being with others. It’s stepping out of the passive role and into something shared.

Money can help, no doubt. It can remove certain barriers. But it cannot replace effort, initiative, or community. Those are choices.

If anything, the “money excuse” has become a convenient shield. It lets people avoid the obvious truth. Building a life with real enjoyment requires intention. It requires calling people, making plans, and actually showing up at the agreed-upon venue at the agreed-upon time.

Fun still exists. It just got crowded out — by work, by screens, by the idea that everything worthwhile must come with the swipe of a credit card.

Once we drop that idea, something refreshing happens. Fun becomes accessible again. So make the call, organize a game night, watch a so-bad-it's-good movie with more than one sad soul in the room. And prove that fun doesn't require a reservation, a dress code, or a payment plan.

‘The Vanishing Black Family’: Delano Squires discusses the main problem facing the black community



When Delano Squires was growing up, he was surrounded by young black men who were not only getting into trouble, but getting into gangs and going to jail — while he kept his hands clean.

“At a certain point in my teenage years, I said, ‘Well, it’s because of the families we were raised in. All our parents were married, ... we were going to the same church, same values across households, a community of men who were raising us and keeping us in line. And I realized that family structure was the key,” Squires tells BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock on “Jason Whitlock Harmony.”

“So from there, just one of those things that I’ve always thought about, the importance of family, the importance of marriage, importance of my dad in my day-to-day life, his everyday presence. And at a certain point, I wanted to write about it,” he explains.

And Squires did write about it in his new book, “The Vanishing Black Family,” where he argues that the breakdown of the black family is to blame for lack of education and high crime rates.


“Men and women are continuing to have children, particularly in our community, where 70% of kids are born out of wedlock,” Squires tells Whitlock.

“The other thing that we’ve seen over the course of the last 60 years is that as poverty has decreased in the black community, the non-marital birth rate has increased,” he continues, using NBA players as an example.

“In a league that was 70-plus percent black, you had guys who were fathering four, five, six, seven kids out of wedlock, even though they were making millions of dollars a year,” he explains, noting that economics appear to have very little to do with children being born out of wedlock.

“I think economics is a part of it, but the real reason is because marriage is no longer seen as valuable, desirable, accessible, or indispensable for the purpose of forming a family. And the reason for that goes back much further than current economic trends,” he tells Whitlock.

Whitlock has his own theory as to why the black family has broken down.

“If we had more God, we could have a successful marriage, and we could raise up better kids. That’s the missing ingredient,” Whitlock says.

“The cause of the vanishing black family is because we’re not looking for God to be our provider. We’re looking for money to be our provider. And so, whatever makes us the most money is going to fix the most problems,” he continues.

“And to me it’s, you know, we’ve just lost focus on who our real provider is. It’s not man-made money. It’s God,” he adds.

Want more from Jason Whitlock?

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My new hack for a long, healthy life? Getting married



Admittedly, planning a wedding is a strange time to start reading cancer research. The seating chart had 17 unresolved feuds in it; the oncology journals felt like lighter reading.

Until they didn't.

Public health researchers call this 'social monitoring.' In practice, it means someone loving you enough to be annoying about your symptoms.

A recent American study, drawing on more than 4 million cancer cases, found that adults who never married face considerably higher cancer rates than those who did. Never-married women saw rates dramatically elevated. Never-married men weren't far behind.

The gap widens after age 55, which is when a lifetime of accumulated habits, poor decisions, and missed appointments begins sending invoices.

Settling for less?

Marriage rates in America have fallen steadily for decades. What was once expected is now optional — and sometimes viewed with suspicion. The language around "settling down" carries a faint odor of defeat, as though building a life with someone else were a concession rather than a choice.

The cultural conversation, meanwhile, circles endlessly around diet, exercise, and whatever superfood is currently being flown in from a distant rainforest. Billions flow into wellness industries. Podcasts dedicate entire seasons to optimizing sleep. And yet the data keeps returning to something far less marketable: whether you have someone in the next room who gives a damn.

The researchers are careful to avoid claiming that a wedding ring makes tumors vanish. But the pattern holds and appears across most major cancer types. Cancers linked to smoking, alcohol, and infections showed the biggest gaps between married and never-married adults. That concentration is telling. It points at behavior, environment, and the kind of low-level interference that only someone who genuinely cares about you will bother to sustain.

Buddy system

A man living alone can ignore a cough for months. A wife will drag him to a doctor. A woman juggling everything on her own might postpone a checkup indefinitely. A husband will plead, push, insist, and escalate if necessary. Public health researchers call this "social monitoring." In practice, it means someone loving you enough to be annoying about your symptoms.

Then there's the physiological cost of chronic loneliness. Without someone else setting the rhythm, sleep suffers, meals become erratic, and the basic architecture of self-maintenance gradually gives way. A person alone sets his own standards, and standards, without a witness, tend to decline. Freedom looks like a luxury until it tips into neglect.

The research on loneliness as a health risk has been mounting for years. Chronic isolation produces measurable changes in stress hormones, inflammatory markers, and immune function. The body registers abandonment, and it responds accordingly.

Previous generations were hardly models of healthy living. They smoked heavily, drank liberally, and regarded dietary advice as a personal affront. The average mid-century American male was not tracking his resting heart rate. Yet many of them were embedded in something we have spent decades dismantling: long marriages, tight families, a reliable social unit that caught problems early and addressed them without being asked. The neighbor who checked in. The sibling who showed up uninvited. The spouse who had the kettle on before the door had closed behind you.

Noticing matters enormously.

RELATED: Aging is inevitable — catastrophic decline is not

The author with his mother and grandmother. Photo courtesy of John Mac Ghlionn

The cure of community

Cancer rates in younger Americans have been climbing. The old assumption — that serious disease waits its turn at the end of a long life — has expired. It is arriving earlier, frequently without warning, and the reflexive response has been to scrutinize diet, sleep, and screen time. All valid. All insufficient on their own.

There are complications worth acknowledging. Marriage has its limits as a medical intervention. As Tina Turner and Johnny Depp demonstrated at considerable personal cost, not all marriages are protective. Some are so destructive that they make solitude look like sensible doctor's orders.

Nevertheless, the directional evidence holds.

Knee-deep in wedding planning, I keep returning to what this whole undertaking actually represents. Families reactivate. Old friendships resurface. Obligations form. The ceremony is a public declaration that someone will be watching, intervening, and on occasion refusing to let you get away with things.

The vows carry legal and emotional weight. They're also a mutual surveillance agreement, entered into willingly, which turns out to be rather good for your health.

We've built an entire cultural vocabulary around independence. Self-optimization. Personal growth. The solo journey. These are not entirely worthless ideas, but they have crowded out an older and more durable understanding. Humans aren’t built for sustained isolation. The people around us, intrusive and imperfect as they are, perform functions that no app, no routine, and no amount of cold-plunge evangelism can replicate.

A culture that treats relationships as provisional and commitment as one lifestyle choice among many is making a collective wager. The evidence suggests the odds aren't favorable. In ways we're only beginning to quantify, permanence appears to be protective.

American Youth Are Returning To Church, But They Need Encouragement To Keep Them There

Older Christians must commit to providing new converts with the support, discipleship, and community they need to thrive in life-long faith.

After Years Of Big-City Rootlessness, Gen Z and Millennials Can Find Happiness Moving Home

When people are rooted in their communities, they are happier -- and they develop the habits of self-government.

The socialist spell: Why modern minds keep falling for an old lie



What draws people to socialism?

Even after nearly two centuries of ruin brought to those societies that have adopted this governing system, the appeal still remains. Most Western countries have a thriving socialist party occupying portions of the government, including the United States with the Democratic Socialists of America.

The promises of socialists made in today’s media landscape are closely analogous to the serpent’s promises in the Garden of Eden.

Worse still, the DSA experienced a huge win in New York City with the election of outspoken socialist Zohran Mamdani and came close to beating the Republican candidate with another socialist in a special election in Tennessee in December.

Then, of course, there are the legions of leftist online content creators indoctrinating millions of users with socialist messaging.

Is it historical ignorance with the Cold War increasingly far behind us? Is it the leftist teachers simply passing over the horrific genocides of communist leaders like Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, or Pol Pot and ignoring the ongoing calamities of Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and other socialist backwaters? Is it simply the promise of free stuff? Is it the envy of billionaire elites who seem to wield omnipotent power?

The socialist paradox

No doubt, ignorance, greed, envy, and boredom all play a significant role in the elevation of socialists.

This is why most opponents of socialism generally push back by attempting to teach people about the endless failures of socialism, the basic laws of economics, and the immorality and destructiveness of confiscating property and denying citizens their constitutional freedoms.

Clearly, this approach has not been successful with this latest crop of socialists who now make up a large portion of the Millennial and Gen Z cohorts.

It could just be that human nature is such that it is always vulnerable to toxic ideas like socialism, and digital technology has made this problem even more challenging. After all, the promises of socialists made in today’s media landscape are closely analogous to the serpent’s promises in the Garden of Eden: Do this one thing — i.e., eat this fruit, vote and campaign for this socialist — and you will have everything you want.

Or, more likely, it could be that conservatives are misunderstanding the issue altogether.

Rather than view socialism as an ideology, a movement, or a moral failing inherent in human nature, it would be better to see socialism as a reaction to all these things.

At its core, socialism is what happens when a person consciously rejects political reasoning, morality, and complex abstractions, all in favor of a strictly materialist and existentialist approach to life.

Orwell and the socialist mind

An illustration of this phenomenon comes from the great 20th century writer George Orwell, who unintentionally captures the socialist mind in his personal account of the Spanish Civil War, “Homage to Catalonia.”

Despite being known as a fierce critic of totalitarian surveillance states like the Soviet Union, Orwell himself was an ardent socialist throughout his life. In fact, he was so committed to socialism that he went to Catalonia to fight a war on behalf of the Trotskyist Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification.

His stated goal was not necessarily to write a full account of the Spanish Civil War (though he did), but first and foremost to kill fascists.

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What is most surprising about “Homage to Catalonia” is just how little Orwell actually writes about socialism itself. He spends many pages describing the size of rats, the scarcity of tobacco, and the convoluted squabbling between various anarchist, communist, and socialist factions, yet almost nothing about why he is actually fighting in a foreign civil war.

In one of the middle chapters, almost in passing, he devotes a precious few paragraphs on the matter, citing his sympathy with the laborers in their hope of realizing true equality: “The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the ‘mystique’ of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all.”

Sadly, Orwell quickly follows this reflection with the immediate reality of his situation, “I was hardly conscious of the changes that were occurring in my own mind. Like everyone about me I was chiefly conscious of boredom, heat, cold, dirt, lice, privation, and occasional danger.”

Naturally, these concerns are what make up the bulk of his book.

At no point in Orwell’s narrative does his joy rise above the creature comforts of cigarettes, wine, food, sleep, and personal cleanliness, nor does his sorrow go much beyond beyond the deprivation thereof. Any hope he might have that transcends this narrow worldview — i.e., virtue, ethics, greater truth, life after death (Orwell survives a shot through the neck), or even winning the war — is completely absent.

Orwell is just there, living his life and fighting an enemy. Even though he is aware of the atrocities of the socialist militias — like destroying churches and killing innocent priests and nuns — he hardly thinks about it. Even though he throws a bomb into enemy lines and inflicts a slow and painful death on a fascist soldier, he is more annoyed at the man’s screaming than he is perturbed at the fact that he just killed a man in cold blood for a dubious cause.

Obviously, Orwell was not too dim-witted to think of these matters, nor is it because he was some kind of true believer blinded by misleading propaganda, nor was he a sociopath.

Instead, he has committed to a mode of behavior and thought that negates all moral rationality. His socialism simply does not touch on anything beyond the next meal, the next bus to work, the next cup of coffee, the next nice-sounding idea.

Acting as a socialist only means doing what the other socialists seem to be doing, whether that means joining a protest, fighting in a civil war, or voting for a DSA candidate.

Although some of this mode of behavior betrays a deep streak of nihilism, the socialists themselves never reflect on anything long enough to realize it. For all the observations Orwell makes, with his characteristic wryness, none of it ever leads to a deeper conclusion about his situation.

Much of his general attitude could be summed up with the empty platitude, “It is what it is.” Readers can also find this kind of hopeless shrug in the endings of Orwell’s novels “Animal Farm” and “1984,” where the antagonists triumph and all the efforts of the protagonists prove to be futile as well as pointless.

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Based on the account given in “Homage to Catalonia,” the biggest precondition that leads to this mindlessness is modernity’s systemic atomization and subsequent loneliness.

Throughout his narrative, Orwell has no real friends about which to speak — yet he does somehow drag his wife to Barcelona while he fights with the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification. True, he notes with fondness how everyone addresses each other as “comrade,” as well as substituting the formal “usted” (Spanish for “you”) for the informal “tu.”

Yet, this belies the indifference he ultimately has for these men suffering and dying senselessly. This community of soldiers in the trenches — the one example that Orwell can point to as true socialism in practice — is almost entirely superficial. Years later, he still cannot see this and even feels glad for the experience of stinking and starving in trenches with his socialist “comrades” for so many months.

Humanize before you catechize

In light of all this, it should be clear that mere apologetics for free-market capitalism, liberal democratic republicanism, and Christian communitarianism will fall on deaf ears, for the socialists both then and now.

A catchy slogan, a photogenic demagogue, an attractive vibe will win over otherwise intelligent people and lead them down a dark path that allows no light to come in.

In order to bring them back from this path, conservatives and other anti-socialists need to appreciate the content of their worldview (or lack thereof) along with the modern context of today’s postmodern consumerist culture that have made friendship, depth, and moments of quiet reflection next to impossible.

Once they recognize this, they will finally understand that more education and fewer affordability crises will not fix the problem of socialism’s growing popularity. Instead, they will have to meaningfully connect with these people, pull them away from the sources of malaise, and patiently fill up what has been hollowed out.

People must be humanized before they are catechized.

Even though this is a much bigger project, it is a more effective and fulfilling one. One can speculate what would have happened if Orwell found religion and joined a church instead of finding socialism and joining the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification. Perhaps his eventual novels criticizing Russian communism would have lacked the same insights.

Or, perhaps his cynicism and recklessness would have turned to hope and wisdom, and he could have offered a better way forward to those who fall under the spell of socialism instead of dreaming up horrific depictions of socialism’s excesses.

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