The Long Work of Restoration

What Really Matters:
Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family
by timothy goeglein
with craig osten
fidelis publishing, 264 pages, $28

A well-ordered culture is like an orchid in these two respects: Each takes painstaking attention to detail over a long period of time to mature, to flourish; and it takes a fraction of that time to ruin a culture, or an orchid. In most instances the damage is not a one-off thing. It is rather the effect of countless small cuts. Or, as we read in the foreword to Tim Goeglein’s timely and invaluable new book, What Really Matters: Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family: “Small compromises over the years and decades have resulted in the grim reality now confronting us. Marriage has been redefined, the biological reality of male and female has been abandoned, and the institution of the family as it has been understood for millennia has been cast aside as outdated at best and oppressive at worst. It’s not just Judeo-Christian values being reimagined; it is science and the very nature of reality.”

Just so.  

Only a similar multitude of small corrections will get our culture back on track.  

How we got here and where to make those corrections is exactly what Goeglein (with Craig Osten) delivers in What Really Matters. The book is comprised of fifty or so standalone columns published since 2020, mainly in the Washington Times. They are separated into six chapters: one each on restoring marriage, the family, the “American male,” “well-ordered society,” faith, and “the importance of history.” The author introduces most columns by summarizing and contextualizing the intervention. Each essay is a deft compound of acute diagnosis and savvy prescription, all for the sake of making America a “shining city on a hill”—Goeglein’s leading image. He writes: “This book seeks to . . . be a source leading us out of our present darkness and back into the light.” The volume is extensively footnoted, facilitating deeper dives into the subject matter for the intrepid.

Tim Goeglein has long labored in the heat of the day. He served as special assistant to President George W. Bush and as deputy director of the White House Office of Public Liaison from 2001 to 2008. During that time, I was in frequent touch with him as he coordinated national efforts to (among other good causes) preserve religious liberty and to ward off same-sex marriage. In January 2009, Goeglein became vice president of external and government relations for the Christian organization Focus on the Family, where he remains.  

Given the roster of topics in What Really Matters, it is no surprise that Goeglein relies extensively on the good work of Brad Wilcox and his Institute for Family Studies, as well as Peter Schuck, Mary Eberstadt, and the late James Q. Wilson. One essay is a moving tribute to Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan and her “prophetic work.” Goeglein writes that McLanahan “knew the difficulties of being a single mom firsthand and the toll it took on her and her children. While single parents try their hardest, you still cannot fix the hole in a child’s heart yearning for a traditional two-parent family. Upon her passing, I wrote this column to salute her, her work, and to carry on her message, [namely that] our continued path of single parent/non-married homes is not sustainable for women, children, and our nation.”

What Really Matters covers the devastating effects of smartphones, especially for boys and young men. Goeglein writes persuasively about the perils of fatherlessness, for sons of course, but also for daughters. He laments in almost poetical language the loss of courtship, and even of a dating culture: “As I spend more time around young people, I have learned that many are looking for the absolute perfect person—aka ‘soulmate’—to spend the rest of their lives with. The result is that they wait too long or never find that person at all and lose out on the joy and happiness that comes within the marital relationship. This is tragic, not just for them but for our society as well.”The essays collected in What Really Matters are both sublime and prosaic. I do not mean that some are one and that some are the other. They are characteristically “both, and”: marinated in the everyday detritus of culture war, yet always looking at the field from the heights of wisdom, prudence, and faith. The best example of this compelling combination is one devoted to the fading family dinner: “In his January 1989 Farewell Address to the nation, then-President Ronald Reagan said, ‘All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen, I hope the talking begins.’”