Would you move for friends? For church?
Plus: A new book on the Bible in U.S. politics, wool running pants, and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.
1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere
Would you move for friends? For church?
There’s a concept in economics called “revealed preference” which at its most basic is about inferring what people want from what they actually choose, which sometimes is not the same as what they say they want (their “stated preference”). I’ve been thinking about it this week in connection to two goods: friendship and church.
The former is on my mind mostly because Justin Whitmel Earley—whose first book, The Common Rule, I loved and have mentioned here before—has a new book coming out this month which is focused on adult friendship. I haven’t read it yet, nor do I have a copy, but it looks very practical, like his previous works, and the chapter on geography, which you can spot in this image of the contents page, caught my eye:
Geography is huge for friendship—you may be able to preserve a friendship long distance, but it’s very difficult to build a new one without repeated physical proximity—and we all say we want friends. But our revealed preference, often, is to stay put, even if it leaves us lonely. It’s to not move ourselves into the proximity friendship requires, whether that’s across the city to hang out for the evening or across the country to be in our friends’ lives day in and day out.
When we moved to Pittsburgh, it took a whole miserable year to find friends locally, and part of that was coming to terms with the fact that accidents of local geography mean we have to drive much more than we’d like if we want to have friends here. But we do, so we have finally accepted it and started driving. I don’t like it. But I do infinitely prefer it to sad American mid-30s friendlessness.
Proximity is also pretty important for church. It’s commonplace to drive 20 minutes or more to get to church in America, and that’s definitely worse than driving (or walking!) just five or 10 minutes—those 10 or 15 minutes each way can make a strikingly big difference for how much non-Sunday morning involvement feels doable—but it’s also much better than not going at all.
I wrote a piece about dechurching and rechurching for CT last week, and in the replies on social media, there was a fair bit of pushback to my contention that (extenuating circumstances aside) Christians do, in fact, need to go to church. Some of it was I can be a Christian without institutional religion stuff, which is outside the scope of this Substack post, but some of it was, I suspect, more mundane revealed preference stuff about how church is far and we’re tired and overcommitted already.
Anyway, in talking about the piece with a reader on Twitter, I was reminded of a question I considered while writing A Flexible Faith and which I still think is worth asking ourselves: Would we move for church?
We move for jobs, certainly. We move for school. Some of us move for family. But would we move for church? And would we move for friends?
If the answer is “no,” what preference does that reveal?
2. What I'm reading this week
The Ballot and the Bible: How Scripture Has Been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go From Here, by Kaitlyn Schiess (forthcoming August 22, 2023)
Scheiss’s publisher is my publisher for Untrustworthy, and I was sent a complimentary copy of her book pre-release. I’m not far enough along to offer anything like a review—currently half-way through the first chapter—but so far she’s provided some new-to-me history on America as the “city on a hill,” and the table of contents is promising.
3. A recommendation
Wool running pants from Tracksmith. Everything at Tracksmith is super expensive, and they don’t routinely have a sale section, so you have to keep an eye out for the occasional sale event, which generally comes with discounts of 30 to 40 percent. But the wool pants are so good, so much better (and more flattering) than the leggings which have become standard winter running attire over the last 15 years.
4. Recent work
Writing less than usual while I get up to speed in my new role at CT, so this list will be a bit sparse for a few weeks at least.
The surprising staying power of dispensationalism | Christianity Today
What if churches ask for more and no one says yes? | Christianity Today
Quasi-allies, real risk | Defense Priorities (newsletter)
5. Miscellaneous
Regular readers will know I really like
’s work, despite some pretty significant political and theological differences, and this recent piece is no exception. He argues that at present, “an inescapable American cultural mode, particularly among the educated, is one of mandatory therapeutic maximalism and an attendant tyranny of affirmation,” and outlines tenets of an “anti-affirmation movement,” including:• Given that pain and suffering are literally and permanently unavoidable in human life, teaching others to be resilient rather than teaching them to be victims is an act of mercy, and cultivating resilience in yourself is an act of essential personal growth and adult development
• Unhappy emotions, even chronic unhappy emotions, are inherent and ineradicable elements of the human condition, with boredom and disappointment something like the default state of adult life for those of us lucky enough to be financially secure in the developed world
• Your pain is important and we should all want to help you heal, but everyone else is hurting too and the fact that you are hurting does not give you any special privileges
• Human beings are self-deceiving creatures, and what we often need from others is to be told that we are wrong—that what we believe is wrong, that what we want is unrealistic, that the way we’ve behaved is unjustifiable
Read the whole thing here.
