The Right Has Forgotten Feeling

I ’m not sure how I got here, into these pages. Lately I’ve found myself in a lot of unfamiliar places: in conversation with Orthodox Christians, buying old Chesterton and Scruton books, wandering ­into chapels and churches, stumbling into a world I have never known. There is something hopeful, comforting, and strangely familiar about it, like coming home to a place I had forgotten, a place for which I always felt homesick but could never find. Growing up I never prayed, never went to church, never had political or theological discussions around the dinner table. I grew up in a place where Christianity—and conservatism—were seen as not only backward and archaic, but cringeworthy, embarrassing, belonging to another world.

But I also lived with a feeling of something missing, a gaping hole. A hunger; a hollowness. I was sensitive and sentimental, as many young girls are, and had this idea of love, of life, that kept getting broken and beaten out of me. My family fell apart and so did I. Dating was disorienting and inhumane; I felt things far too deeply to handle it. I was disheartened by the commodification of everything, and felt that some things—my face, my body, friendships, falling in love—had to mean more, somehow. I wanted vows and commitments. I wanted guidance and guardrails. I wasn’t cut out for a world that offered no refuge, no haven or hiding place, and I thought the problem was me. I’m not sure anymore.

Girls and young women are hurting. They are suffering from record rates of anxiety and depression. Some are starving themselves; others are self-harming until they end up in the hospital. Many feel alone, with few friends, little face-to-face interaction, often without a father or mother in the picture. They feel hopeless, powerless. Across the Anglosphere, ­suicide rates for young women have reached record highs.

Those feelings I had, which many girls and young women live with today, have no answer in the modern world. Only in the past year have I found myself drawn to Christianity and more sure of my conservative instincts—not through reason or intellect, but through feeling. And by feeling I mean not just emotion but intuition, a nagging sense that something was wrong, that my needs weren’t being met. I’m becoming convinced that the answers I was looking for—for community and belonging, certainty and stability, love and attachment, dignity and worth, purpose and ­fulfilment—can be found in the Christian faith and a more conservative way of life.

But that message is not reaching those who really need it.

Most young women I know think of ­Christianity as controlling and patriarchal, if they think of it at all. They see conservatism as outdated and oppressive. For the first time in history, young women are now less religious than young men, and less likely to attend church. Many are moving far to the political left, much more so than previous generations of women. I think I know why. The right has forgotten feeling.

When I listen to conservative commentators today—columnists, podcasters, media personalities, some older than I am but many my own age—I notice an overreliance on intellect and argument, on numbers and logic. Charts on pornography use; statistics on loneliness; facts about birth rates. But the young women I’m talking about don’t care about your statistics on divorce. I know I wouldn’t have. They don’t feel anything from your graphs on fertility rates. What they care about is the pain of their own families falling apart. They know how they feel, and they are hurting. I knew nothing about Burkean philosophy or social conservatism, but I knew that feeling of loss, knew it intimately. Dry lectures about social decline do not cut through. Describing feelings of hurt and homesickness might.

When I listen to Christian thinkers and commentators, I see the same thing. Endless abstract arguments for marriage, but very little talking to young women who ache for vows that last. Commentators quote obscure theological texts to prove their intellect, rarely to persuade.

When I go to religious and conservative conferences, I find little effort to reach girls and young women or attract anyone on the outside. Speaker after speaker recites ontological arguments and academic jargon, losing anyone without a philosophy Ph.D., caring only about impressing an audience who are already convinced. Often it feels like an attempt to close religion off from outsiders, to seal it off, not to open up hearts. I sat at a conference recently listening to an older man lecture about my generation’s neglect of our “moral duty” to have children. Rows of suited men nodded along. I kept thinking about the many young women I know who just don’t believe anyone will stick around, who are terrified to start families because theirs fell apart. Who is this meant to persuade? The people the message is supposedly for aren’t even in the room. Those who actually need help will not be reached by theological lectures on marriage or family. What they need right now is someone to give expression to the wound of growing up between two homes, someone who dares to talk about the pain.

At the same time, I see some on the right blaming girls and young women for their struggles—­blaming them for the mess of modern dating, blaming them for porn addiction, regarding women’s pain as in competition with men’s. Maybe this hostility to women is a response to the failings of liberal feminism, but those failings are not the fault of young women today. We can’t have it both ways. Conservatives can’t complain about the power of progressivism—its institutions, its messaging, its billions in backing—and then blame girls for actually buying into it. I see too little consideration given to the possibility that young women might make certain choices because this is the only world they have ever known—that they might sleep around to fit in, might objectify themselves to feel loved, might feel confused about their identity because the world gives them nowhere to belong to. Maybe young girls behave as they do because they are desperate, wired, to be seen, to be accepted, to belong. They need refuge, not ridicule.

Otherwise they look to the left, which speaks their language. The left hears their pain, acknowledges their anxiety. While I think it often has the wrong answers, at least it listens. Meanwhile the right stays silent, despite the fact that the issues Christians and conservatives care deeply about—moral decline, divorce, pornography, the loss of family, the loss of home—are painful, emotional things. Things to do with the soul.

The right has a chance to speak ­differently. Forget the neuroscience of what online porn does to the brain. Talk about how it makes young women feel, knowing that the men they love watch it. That feeling of worthlessness when they look at their own bodies, the insecurity and betrayal. Forget what falling birth rates mean for the economy. Talk about what they mean for young women, how hard it is to grow old without a family to rely on—the future we might face. Forget what the loss of local community means for the “principle of subsidiarity” or “little platoons.” Tell me first how it feels to have no community left, the sorrow of scrolling for a sense of belonging on Instagram.

Argue from feelings. Sometimes it’s necessary. We mock people who get “emotional” during debates or discussions, urging them to calm down. But these are painful realities, these are matters of the heart. We don’t need sources or studies to know that a mom and dad breaking apart and barely speaking again is a tragedy; that seeking love by swiping through people like products is a travesty; that spending a childhood wrenched from one parent and passed on to the next is a crisis; that young girls crippled with anxiety about how sexual and sellable they are is a catastrophe.

Besides forgetting how to speak about feelings, the right has forgotten how to listen. Christians wonder why young women aren’t going to church, and conservatives ask where all the good women have gone, but I don’t see much listening. Not sincerely. Few try to understand what young women might be searching for in therapy culture, finding in liberal feminism, hearing from the left—what needs are being met that aren’t met elsewhere. Don’t we see that this world offers them no other sanctuary? Don’t we see that many young women haven’t “abandoned” faith, haven’t turned their backs on the sacred, but were born into a world already desecrated? That they haven’t forgotten their worth but were never taught it? And the cruelty is that this caricature of the modern ­woman—this callous, calculated, emotionally detached “girlboss”—seems to me very often a defense mechanism, a heart hardened to cope with how cold the world is.

Listen to young women long enough, you will often hear pain. They might be brave enough to ask you: Do you know how it feels? How it feels to hold on to hopes of love and loyalty in a world of ­Tinder and hook-ups? How it feels to be reserved and conservative in a world that punishes those qualities, makes you feel pathetic and frigid and childlike? To try to feel beautiful, even just enough, in a world of endless edited Instagram influencers, where hypersexuality feels like the only way to be seen, where humility feels like invisibility? Where if you aren’t sexual straight away, you can’t expect him to stay—why would he, with so many other options? The agony of knowing that pretty much every man you fall for has been raised on and is addicted to online porn and watches it behind your back because you can never be enough? The humiliation? How it feels to dream of romance, only to grow up and find it dead? That disappointment? I can’t begin to tell you.

But Christians and conservatives can say something different. In a world that denies and confuses young women’s every instinct, show them another way. In a culture that tells them to detach and harden their hearts, show them that it’s okay to attach, that it’s human to depend; that their desire to put other people first should be treasured, not trained out of them. In a world that gives girls no guidance on love, no rules for relationships, give them examples and expectations. In a world that measures their worth by filters and editing apps and “likes” on a screen, give them deep, divine, unconditional love. In a world where nothing is permanent, where no vows can be expected to last, give them institutions, commandments, a world that takes commitment seriously, a world of the timeless and eternal. In a world that demands compassion without anywhere to direct it, give them community, somewhere to call home. In a world where girls are left to make up their own morality, where all they get are empty platitudes to love themselves, give them right and wrong. Give them a way of life that meets their instinctive needs and doesn’t make them feel anxious or insecure or needy. Give them answers.

Conservatives can also give young women permission to say no. No, you do not need to put up with it. No, you do not need to come to terms with a world so cold and transactional. You should not have to accept “situationships,” silently bear the breakdown of your family, or shove down your feelings. You are not insecure for having strong moral instincts. Many of us have never been told, not once, by anybody, “You know what, you are worth more.” Help young women see that there are things in this life that should be held sacred, and that includes young women themselves. Give them words to resist, permission to reject.

If Christians and conservatives care about reaching young women, really reaching them, their mission must be to heal their troubled hearts, to still their racing minds, to mend their broken trust. Now is the time to rekindle their dimmed and darkened worlds, remind them of forgotten dreams, listen to what they have kept to themselves for so long, comfort and console. Show them that in these old-fashioned things they have only ever heard scorned, only ever seen mocked, only ever thought of as oppressive and, above all, heartless, there is much that’s worth holding on to.

Again, I don’t know how I ended up in these ­pages, among the theology scholars and Ph.D. students and professors, but maybe there is a reason. Maybe the one thing I can offer is being on the outside, being able to say to some of you reading this that you are so within it you can’t see. Those of you who grew up with faith—which is most First Things readers, I suspect—don’t know how it feels to be a young girl so utterly outside of it. Those of you living in academic worlds, please don’t forget the language of feelings, how to talk human to human. Get to the heart of what girls and young women can find in faith and tradition that they cannot find elsewhere.

The eternal difficulty for conservatives, as ­Roger Scruton put it, is how hard it is to discuss instincts. It is harder still to defend them. But that is our battle. Our fight is to put feelings into words. To articulate the pain, the loss, the abandonment. Find the words, because those words might finally reach young women, might finally bring them home.