Well, welcome to a special bonus episode of the Breakpoint podcast. I am very happy to invite and welcome my good friend Tim Gagline back on the broadcast. He's been here more than a couple times, and it's because he keeps writing books. He just doesn't stop. Just one book after another after another.
And they're all worthy of being talked about and discussed, especially for those of us who care about a Christian worldview. Tim Gagline, of course, the vice president of external and government relations for Focus on the Family. Tim, good to see you, my friend. John, it is always great to be with you, and I really mean that. I want to get into the depths of the book, which I think the timing of is fantastic with our nation's 250th.
Yes. There's a difference between celebrating something that needs to be celebrated and also celebrating the right parts of it. Why is it. Celebratory? And I think that's the right question for the American experiment.
But before we go there, I'm always curious about writers in general, but writers like you in particular. Because obviously something gets In your heart, something gets in your mind, and you think this needs to be commented on.
Now, this is a collection of essays. This book, What Really Matters, Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family. But the title is so poignant. The way you've put this writing together is so direct and aimed at the right things. Where do these kind of visions of books or kind of plans and projects come from for you?
Well, first, that's very gracious of you to say. You're one of my favorite writers. And so, from you, that means everything to me. I was on an airplane four years ago of all places. I had spoken at the University of Oklahoma.
And at the very end of my remarks, at the very end of the QA, there's always a few undergraduates who kind of, you know, stay around to continue the conversation. And I remember a young man asked me there in light of whatever I had said. He said, you know, where did the 1960s come from? He was actually asking about the Beatles, of all things. And, you know, I thought to myself, I can give a flip answer, but I really don't know the answer.
Where did the moral and social revolution of the 60s and 70s come from? And you may recall, John, the last time I was with you, we spoke about my fourth book called Stumbling Toward Utopia, which was a deep dive into an answer to that gentleman's question. And, you know, so I wanted to find out the origin and the genesis of the moral revolution. And I got to the end of writing that book. And, you know, it was wonderful to do all the things you do with a new book.
But I realized in all candor that I had not done something well. And that is I had really not demonstrated how that moral and social revolution actually impacted the 21st century, the time in which we're in. And I'm a regular contributor to the Federalist and to the Epoch Times, the Washington Times, the Daily Signal, Daily Citizen, et cetera. And I thought to myself, I want to answer over this two-year period of time, I want to answer what the implications have been for marriage, family, parenting, human life, religious liberty, conscience rights, parental rights, even pronouns, you know, that seem to have in some quarters lost their objective meaning. And I was speaking just a couple of years ago, final comment, and a young woman said to me, you know, Mr.
Gagline, I think I agree with most of what you said, but why does the political class where you live, why don't they talk much about what really matters? And I thought to myself, that is the bookend. That's the name of it. That's what we're writing about. That's the golden narrative.
What really matters?
Well, it's the right title. I tell you what I thought of when I saw it is, you know, I think it was maybe three years ago now when Jim Daly, and Jim Daly and I co-wrote the foreword to this volume, but Jim asked me to speak at Focus on the Family for the chapel in January, right? And so we're coming out of the over. Overturning of Roe v. Wade about a year out, and which was all something we celebrated, but it was actually after state after state after state tried to pass either pro-abortion or pro-life legislation, and it all went the pro-abortion direction.
So, after having this big win in the overturning. Of Roe v. Wade, everything seemed like we're on the wrong side of this when it comes to the abortion issue. And this doesn't often happen, but preparing and thinking about that talk. The verse that kept coming back was: If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?
You're talking here about the foundations of a society. I guess at some level, too, I'm curious.
So, you know, six chapters: marriage, family, the American male, well-ordered society, faith. history that you address here in the book. But there's some topics that aren't in here.
Now, I know that's not because you're saying they don't matter. But let's think, for example, about what decides most elections. The economy. The economy is not anywhere, at least not directly. I mean, obviously, there are economic ramifications of a healthy family and so on.
But why do you think these are the topics? That matter? And what are the topics that you think matter, but don't matter quite this much or aren't foundational? I'm really honored by both of those questions. And I think, you know, the plural of anecdote is not data.
But I was in a meeting just this week, just a couple of days ago, with members of the Senate and the House and a lot of senior staff. And it was a discussion, John, of America 250. It was a fabulous meeting. You know, everybody had a lot to say. It's an exciting year, as you say, the 250th year of our birth.
The Spanish don't know when they were born. The Italians don't know when they were born. The king has been here. The English don't know when they were born. We know when we were born.
It was about three o'clock in the afternoon on July 4th, 1776. And there was the political class, many of our friends. But it was interesting to me, John, after an hour-long discussion of what you and I would say broadly as a meeting about what really matters, there was no mention of what really matters. If we're going to have this discussion, what kind of a country do we want 50 years? Years from now, I thought at least one person of the political class would say, let's have a discussion in light of 250 about marriage, the lowest marriage rates in American history.
What about fertility? We have the lowest fertility rates in American history. For the first time, as you know, in what really matters, I write about this remarkable phenomenon. Just last year, 2025, the majority of babies in America were born to women in their 30s, not in their 20s. What is a dating recession?
What is the impact of a crisis of loneliness? What does it mean if 50% of the rising generation of young Americans, by the way, not disaffected, dysfunctional members of that generation, but people who you and I would say are otherwise quite remarkable young people, they've not had a date in over a year. They don't know how to ask for a date. I mean, what really matters balances in these six generations. Chapters, the sobering news over against the hopeful news.
And the good news is there's a lot of good news in this book. I think we're actually in the early chapters nationally of what I think is kind of a quiet restoration. I think there's good things happening in culture and demographically. On the other hand, I think we ought to speak more in the public square and in the private sphere about these issues of the first principles, the first foundations that clearly are facing massive headwinds. Yeah, I mean, these are the pre-political realities that Chuck Colson and many others talk about.
And you know, as well as I do. I mean, I was just accused of this again just recently. I get accused of it so much, I lose track of when it was and who it was. But, you know, you guys all just talk about politics and the issue, you know, that he brought up specifically. Oh, this was, yeah, it was a questionnaire from another country.
I won't say where, but it was north of us. And, you know, the question had to do with. You know, you talk about too much about politics. And then his example was capitalism versus socialism. I mean, I wonder why, you know, an economic question, which itself rests on the definition of what it means to be human, right?
Are humans consumers only or are they also producers? You know, that's a fundamental question at the heart of that issue. And politics just reinforces it one way or another. Why is that a political issue? You're even going even further, like marriage.
We get accused, for example, when we say, you know, same-sex marriage hasn't been good for children. Dads can't mom and moms can't dad. That now we're being political, but we're not being political. We're being pre-political. We're being moral.
We're being, if I could, use the big language, we're being ontological. We're asking questions about existence and epistemology, about knowledge, and about morality before we're getting to all of this. And I think it's exactly the right time. When we thank God for 250 years, where a lot of cultures, a lot of nations, a lot of civilizations haven't lasted that long, and ask the question, I think our friend Osgina says this. We talk about making America great or making America great again.
We have to say, well, what made America great? To begin with, what were those things? And in your mind, these are the things. Let me jump to faith because faith is the thing that's not to be. Brought into the public square.
You know, we're not supposed to have those conversations. How's faith one of those? Foundations, or one of those things that matters most? Yeah, I want to answer that in two ways, if I may. The first is a silver lining, one of the things I mentioned earlier.
Because of a sudden, we have a sizable number, percentage of young men in the demographic, 18 to 30. And they tell reliable people that they want to be married, they want to have children, they want to be in a very committed relationship for their lives, and they say that they want to have a foundation of religion and faith.
Now, that's fairly broadly defined, but on the other hand, for about the last 20 years, when similar questions were asked, it was almost predictable you would see kind of a down chart ticking one, two percentage points every couple of years.
So it's not just a plateau. In that demographic, I think we've seen. A reliable upward trajectory. At the same time, young women in the same demographic, when they are asked, you know, aspirationally, someday, someday I might want to be married, someday I may want to have children. The problem, the chasm, John, and I think this is very important to say, you know, in light of our great conversation, is that our friend Nick Eberstadt at the American Enterprise Institute has done path-breaking research on what he thinks of as unmarriageable young men.
And I think we have to say this. At the same time, we're seeing this trajectory of faith, religion, a bent toward marriage, the things that we would say is kind of a traditional institution. You also have millions of young, able-bodied American men. They're not in school. They're not applying to be in school.
They're not working and they're not looking for a job. You know, they may want to go on dates, but one or two dates later, a lot of young women, by the way, the majority of which now are more affluent and more educated than their male counterparts, say, I don't think I want to do this for a, you know, for a long term. And by the way, both progressive and conservative women, as I outline in What Really Matters, when they are asked by our friends at Pew, what is really remarkable, John, is that you can be left and blue from Urban America, or you can be right and red from Ruby Red America. And they all say over 70%, if I'm going to get married, he has to be a good contributor to this marriage economically. He has to support me if and when necessary.
And if we have children, he's got to be a good husband and a good father. If I may say, really quickly, to the first point you raised, I actually use the research. Research in what really matters of very prominent progressives who support a Colson Center focus on the family breakpoint worldview. You know where I'm going. I think she wrote one of the most important books of the last 10 years.
She's an MIT trained economist, a full professor at the University of Maryland. Melissa Kearney, and she found in conclusion, and she is a remarkable demographer and sociologist. She found that two-parent families provide significant benefits for children. While single parents work incredibly hard on, on average, she says, children from two parent households have greater access to resources and opportunities. By the way, that's absolutely correct.
There's not a single empirical data set that negates that. And I could go on and on.
So it seems to me that the natural law is affirmed in the best empirical data. And if we resolve and address the marriage issue, and I believe we can do it, I think we will thereby soon after address the fertility issue. But our political class and our cultural shapers and formers, they need to pay attention to this. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. I mean, we've talked about that a lot, and some of us who have been involved in.
You know, early days trying to push back against same-sex marriage before the Obergefeld decision. And even now, kind of thinking, okay, how do we recover? Is that even if we rid the world of some of these inherent wrongs, we still have a big problem with marriage in America, and that is that it's actually not happening. I mean, the demographic winter, you know, you mentioned the fertility rate. I mean, this is the greatest existential threat.
To the civilized world. I mean, way more than climate change. When you look at this upside-down birth rate, it has economic implications. One of the things you write here a number of times about pointing to our friend Brad Wilcox at the Institute for Family Studies, who I think has done just incredible, incredible service in doing kind of the same thing, basically looking at the data and saying, you know, where does it go, is this happiness issue.
Now, I've got problems sometimes with. measuring happiness and what we mean by happiness. I appreciate Arthur Brooks's work and so on. But when he just comes out and says, look, you still hear on blogs, you still see in the kind of the 20-something female blogosphere, this assumption that marriage is a source of misery, marriage is the joke of a ball and chain for a man and oppression for women. The happiest people on the planet are, so we're also dealing with a happiness quotient problem where when you don't have young people that are married, you're removing a source of happiness and meaning from them.
I think you pointed out work for young men. That's certainly true as well.
So you have to rebuild these things, even to have kind of a mentally healthy citizenry at some level. Yes. And I'd like to pick up on what you've said and address it in two ways very quickly. First, our friend Brad Wilcox at the University of Virginia. What a remarkable resource.
You know, if I had to slim his entire professional achievement into one sentence, I use it in the book. To me, it is the North Star of the work of a incredible sociologist and researcher who has really dove into all of the data. And his conclusion indisputably is that marital quality is, he says, far and away, the top predictor, not one of the predictors. It is the top predictor that he has run across of life satisfaction in America. And that is why I devote an entire chapter to this question of how do you construct a good life?
How do you construct a life that is ultimately rooted in contentment and joy and broadly defined, as you say, in happiness? And it goes back to another progressive, now deceased, but I quote him at length in the book, a man I got to know at the very end of his life. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He a man of the left, me a man of the right. But Pat Moynihan, though he often voted wrong in the U.S.
Senate, he often got the analysis pretty close to right. And he said very famously that marriage orients men and women toward the future. It asks them not just to commit to each other, but to do what? To plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing what he called their children's prospects. And I think that's what we're talking about here.
We're talking about the principal job of the generation like us, which is the preparation for the moral ecology of the rising generation and the way that we are to serve and prepare them to be great citizens, to have a great life, and to lead a great nation. Our founders cared about this very deeply. Tim, I also want to ask you about the chapter on history because I thought that was an interesting ad. You know, we're both fans of. History.
We enjoy history. We like history. And I think a lot of people think about history. Kind of at that level of value, right? Do I like it?
Then it's good. If I don't like it, then it's not. You're saying that it's a foundational thing, and you're saying that the loss of a historical and cultural memory, particularly for young people, is a problem. Could you just kind of speak to that, too? Why is this something in your mind that really matters?
Is this knowledge and understanding of the past? I'd be pleased to do so. At the very end of his life, I got to know the great American historian David McCaula quite well. We had hosted him a number of times in the Bush years at the White House, and he was a remarkable writer and a remarkable historian, as you know, John. And I commend his 1776 single-volume book to everybody because if you had to pick one book in this year to read, it's McCullough's 1776.
Of course, after they read what really matters. But all to say, David said he was haunted by the following. He said he was haunted by the fact that the rising generation of young Americans, by and large, were historically and culturally illiterate. And in fact, he told me on two occasions he had recurring nightmares about what the ramifications for a constitutional republic were if the future leaders and citizens didn't even know kind of the basic American story. And what I do, and what really matters is I actually share those sobering statistics.
It's important to know this: that Only 13% of American eighth graders are deemed proficient in history. That's a composite number. Under 15% of our eighth graders could essentially say to you, it's something like the following: it's the revolution, it's the Civil War, it's, you know, two American world wars and our involvement in them, the moral and social revolution, you know, Watergate, Vietnam, et cetera.
So I think the sobering news is that we have got to find a way to restore the importance of history. Here's the good news: there is a way forward, and I think it's the best single tool. Our friends at Hillsdale have created something called the 1776 Project. And I promise to everybody who's listening and watching, if you had to pick one antidote, K through 12, to fixing or addressing this sobering news, the Hillsdale Project is the one. It's usable.
Easily gettable. And at a time when we have historic records of homeschoolers, school choice, charter schools, Christian schools, non-sectarian schools, I mean, it's a fabulous tool. And in the 250th year, I think this is the time to have a national recommitment to the importance of understanding American history.
Well, listen, although I personally have reason to sponsor Hillsdale, and by sponsor, I mean paid tuition. This was not a paid advertisement, but I agree completely with that. Wonderful resource and McCullough's book as well. And there are a lot of really great resources on the 250th, and it is important. I want to kind of close our conversation out here, Tim, with this question, because it's one thing to think about this.
As an American, it's another thing specifically to think about this as Christians. And you might say, to paraphrase an author, you know, Christian Americans need to be Christian, they need to be Americans, and they need to be Christian Americans. And we need to figure out how to put that together. It's obvious that we're struggling to put that together on kind of both sides of the equation here. We talk at the Colson Center a lot about being called not just to particular jobs or particular ministries, but to a time and place in history.
This is the 250th anniversary. We're at a moment in which really the greatest civilization in the history of the world, the most dominant, the most prominent, and the source of the most good, is faltering. It's vulnerable. Our nation, which is at the center of that civilization, it's not clear that we can go forward so divided as we are on fundamental definitions of right and wrong, of good and evil, of all kinds of things. What do you think the Christian calling is?
Or if Christians are to read your book, which I hope they will. and wrestle with that. What do you want them to take away in terms of their calling? In this cultural moment, particularly in the American context, I think the moment of calling for American Christians is a categorical national recommitment to the reclamation and regeneration of the natural nuclear family. That to me is the crown jewel of America 250 to address head-on the restoration of marriage, family, and parenting.
The late, great James Q. Wilson, Jim Wilson, and I know you were deeply influenced by him as well, John. He famously said that it is not money, but the family that is the foundation of public life in America. And Jim said, as it has become weaker, every structure upon that foundation has become weaker. And I think he was precisely correct in sharing that analysis with us.
So it seems to me that what really matters is the restoration of family. Faith and ultimately the restoration of those things lead directly to the continuation of a robust constitutional republic. That's what we're aiming for. If you want to have liberty and freedom over time, you've got to have virtue, you've got to have moral excellence in the citizens and in the leaders. And in the American experience, we have to ask ourselves, John, where does moral excellence come from?
It wells up from Holy Scripture, from the foundation of the Bible, and from the spread of Christianity. Christianity is a social good. And I think that if what really matters achieves anything, it's just a tool in the toolbox to help this national effort. And I'm confident that an American restoration is, in fact, possible. I pray for it regularly.
I know you do. And I know millions of Americans want the same thing. Yeah.
Well, listen, I appreciate the careful ordering of those things, too, right? Freedom comes from virtue, not before virtue. And freedom without virtue ceases to be freedom. Faith and family are the foundations of a nation. You don't restore faith and family by power, through authoritarianism.
You do it from the ground up. And I also think about the question there about calling and think: if you look at the state of the family, you look at the importance of the family, and then you say, well, where is hope to be found? In terms of this restoration, you know, the state can't fix the family, but the church can. Christians have that message. The state can certainly not get in the way.
The state can certainly help, but it really is going to be Christians being Christians, the church being the church, to paraphrase Chuck Colson. My guest, Tim Gagline from Focus on the Family, authored yet another very helpful and illuminating book, What Really Matters: Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family. Co-authored the book with Craig Osten, published by Fidelis Publishing. And it is just a really, really instructive book. It's also one that you can read in chunks.
So a great one to pick up and work your way through. It is an appropriate, timed, appropriately timed here, just released last year, at the end of last year, just before here, the 2026, as we celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States. Tim, I'm grateful for you. I'm grateful for this work. I'm grateful for the clarity and the poignancy.
Really struck too. I don't want to ramble on here, but the number of footnotes in this book is remarkable.
So it is well attested and points to, even as you've done in this interview, some other people that we should know about and think about and read and listen to.
So, grateful for your time with us on this special episode of the Breakpoint Podcast. Thank you so much, John. Be of good cheer. Many blessings to you and the great folks at the Colson Center. I'm so appreciative.
God bless.
