Building the Good Life

We are surrounded by seekers. What do we have to offer them?

For close to a decade, my writing has focused closely on politics. First, this involved reported pieces and commentary on all sorts of issues: religious liberty, school choice, feminism and gender, abortion law and policy. I traveled across the country covering national elections—a House race in Georgia, Senate races in North Dakota and Wisconsin, Iowa for the 2020 presidential campaign. More recently, my work at a think tank has involved homing in on policy and advocacy specifically related to abortion and the pro-life movement, especially in the wake of the Dobbs decision.

I’ve been writing and speaking about this topic from a number of angles, but the one that I keep returning to is this: What does it mean, and what does it look like, to build a culture of life?

This question has preoccupied me since Dobbs, but it’s preoccupied me, in one form or another, since high school. Not specifically as it pertains to abortion, but to frame the matter a bit more broadly, we might put it like this: What is the good life, and how can I contribute to helping more people pursue it?

I remain passionate about the need to defend human beings in the womb and to show how abortion is harmful to women and our entire society. I continue to believe that this is the human-rights abuse of our moment. But the more time I spend with this issue, the more I believe that we have to grapple with the abortion debate as situated in a particular cultural context, one of confusion, loneliness, and suffering. Abortion is a grievous act, the normalization of which only can be understood as a wounded response to deep cultural rot.

Abortion is the most devastating symptom of a host of cultural ills, most but not all of which are the poisonous fruit of all the ideas, shifts in mores, and technological changes that we call the Sexual Revolution. This has included normalization of divorce, sex and childbearing outside of marriage, the general loosening of familial bonds, less religious belief and practice, and significant declines in community involvement and institutions of civic life.

We are living in a culture of disconnection, dislocation, and disenchantment.

While it’s tempting to spend time and ink staring at and lamenting this sickness, and plowing away at efforts to control or mitigate or reverse it through law and policy, I find myself increasingly drawn to the idea that good crowds out evil. You build a “culture of life” by finding as many ways as possible to contribute good things to the culture — true ideas, beautiful stories, thriving families and schools and churches and communities. Building a culture that rejects abortion means building a society that believes life is beautiful and good, and that knows how to live as if this were true.

​Manet, Édouard. The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil. 1874. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Tim Carney’s recent book Family Unfriendly presents a striking idea: One of the main reasons that Americans are having fewer children is because we have ceased believing that human beings, that we ourselves, are good. From my review:

In his final chapter, Carney quotes a woman he met at a bar, who echoes a sentiment present in many of the book’s interviews and statistics: “In general, do I think people are good? No, I don’t. I think we’re the cancer of the Earth.”

Though the book offers a compelling rebuttal of this perspective, Carney clearly understands it well and realizes that it’s a common and popular explanation for the choice to have only a couple of kids or to have no kids at all. At root, Carney argues, this worldview stems from the fear, increasingly entrenched in our culture, that people aren’t good. “Achievements, success, brilliance, speed, strength, nimbleness, and beauty are all good things, wonderful to behold and worthy of celebration,” he writes in the first chapter. “But in our modern age, we confuse these good things with the Good. We wrongly believe that the good things about other people are the things that make them good.”

In contrast, Family Unfriendly presents a case for the inherent value of human beings, “a value independent of their accomplishments and instead rooted in their very nature.” And, as he puts it at one point, “kids fertilize our world,” opening us up to the fulfillment we can find in a life full of unpredictability, imagination, flexibility, serendipity, and even surrender, so often miscast as a killer of joy.

This underlying false belief about human beings—especially situated within the existing rot produced by the Sexual Revolution’s worldview—has led to all sorts of lamentable things. But we can also see signs that it’s stoking hunger in those around us, and in us, for beauty and truth. Americans are drawn by the millions, for instance, to spiritual resources such as Fr. Mike Schmitz’s “Bible in a Year” podcast, the Hallow app, and Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire.

We are surrounded by seekers. What do we have to offer them?

The title for this Substack originally came from the fact that my writing often focuses on beliefs that are countercultural. But I’ve realized recently that certain ways of approaching our troubled moment are also countercultural. It’s countercultural to believe that we might make a real difference by making and sharing beauty and goodness. It’s far more attention-grabbing to produce clickbait or focus on outrage, stoking negative feelings toward one’s political opponents and building up certainty within one’s own echo chamber.

But I believe there is an important role for presenting beauty, a case for the good life, to a culture desperately in need of that vision. We need to explore what it looks like to help the hungry people around us see these truths more clearly: Human nature is real and fixed. Human beings, embodied as male or female, are a certain sort of creature. We were created out of love for a particular purpose and are headed for a particular end. There are some ways of living that are in accord with being that type of creature and that will lead to flourishing, lead us closer to that telos.

This all starts with the somewhat discouraging reality that we must first cultivate that belief and that goodness in our own life. It isn’t about being “preachy” or telling people how to live but about living well ourselves, demonstrating as best we can, given that we’re fallen human beings, what it looks like to pursue the good life. This response might feel too small for the big challenge we’re facing; does living well, in my own home and my own community, really make a difference? I think we have to think so.

Some forms this takes in my own life right now: Do I look at my phone or at my baby? Do I read a classic that takes some mental energy or do I scroll Instagram or mindlessly check my email? Do I host the gathering, chat with my neighbor, attend the block party when not doing so appears more immediately relaxing? And even: Do I write what’s familiar, what I know has been successful, or do I try to share something new?

Acceptance of abortion stems from the belief that the stuff of life is ours to control and master. In this view, happiness is the fruit of free-flowing self-will, directed by the autonomous adult, unmoored from the constellation of relationships that once made life perhaps more difficult, but also more meaningful. No more do we prize the concept of eudaimonia. Yet I can’t help but notice: Purveyors of the modern notion of happiness rarely seem especially fulfilled. They still appear to be searching for something more, wondering if more license or more pleasure is what they’re missing, wondering where they can find the ingredients that would make all this self-gratification actually enjoyable and fulfilling. It certainly appears as if this path leads to internal emptiness, constant wandering with no satisfying conclusion.

Offering something helpful, something to rebuild culture even in a small way, doesn’t require us to know everything or to live perfectly but to share what we know and show what we see.

That’s where I find myself drawn with this newsletter. I like to think about writing as pointing your reader to the things you wonder at, the things you see. Credit to Austin Kleon for sharing this Robert Gottlieb quote: “Publishing is making public your own enthusiasm.” I also liked the insight Alister McGrath offers in a book review in the Spring 2025 issue of Religion & Liberty: “For [C. S.] Lewis, a writer is primarily someone who has seen something and aims to enable his readers to see this as well.”

This is how I think about my own writing these days. What do I want readers to see a bit more clearly because of what I share? The world has a need for wonder and beauty — these things are doors to the truth, but we shouldn’t view them as means to an end. We have to value them for what they are. It is in the spirit that I aim to share a newsletter a month like this one, sharing my thoughts on the things that have made my daily life more wonder-ful.

How do we stop abortion? There are many ways of approaching this question. The one that appeals most to me at this phase of my life: Show others how to believe that life is good, a gift, a blessing, by first believing it and living it ourselves.

If ours is a culture of disconnection, dislocation, and disenchantment, perhaps our task is to look for ways to create more connection, to build up places and communities, and to present beautiful things that inspire wonder.

If you’re enjoying my newsletter, I’d be so grateful if you’d subscribe and share it with others who might be interested. And feel free to send me a message. I’d love to hear from you: