Every man needs a father and friends. Sadly, both seem to be in short supply these days.
My own father is a great man. He’s not perfect, famous, educated, or wealthy. He’s good. He didn’t have to be that way, since his father was a deeply broken member of the so-called Greatest Generation, traumatized by the Great Depression, poverty, displacement, and the Second World War. My paternal grandfather would struggle throughout his life in different ways, never knowing quite how to love his family or himself. He had his virtues, to be sure—especially as regards hard work and patriotism—but he had no idea how to be a father or a husband.
My dad was (and is) very different for the simple reason that he decided to follow Jesus, pray, read Scripture, and be part of a church. He has never given up and has always had enough humility and honesty to improve, but his faith has made all the difference. Over time he was able to find better examples and father figures, making immense sacrifices for his family and never once resenting my brother and me, or believing that fatherhood was a burden. He knew that nothaving a good father was a far greater liability, and so he overcame greater odds to be the good dad he would not otherwise have known how to be.
As I learn more about the crisis of men and boys in the U.S., and the epidemic of fatherlessness, I cannot help but be even more grateful to my dad. Indeed, I commend to you a brilliant talk by Anthony B. Bradley about the importance of fatherhood. The data that he and others share is overwhelming and show that children growing up without a dad are far more likely to live in social and material poverty. According to the National Fatherhood Initiative, children raised in a father-absent home are more likely to have behavioral problems, go to prison, commit a crime, become pregnant as a teenager, be abused and abuse others, drop out of school, abuse drugs and alcohol, and suffer from obesity. Nearly a quarter of American children are presently at risk of all these things due to the absence of a father. The pain is deep and transcends divisions of class, race, gender, religion, and so on.
Thanks to several programs, studies, and recent books, the crisis of fatherlessness is being addressed in many ways and places, but it is frustrating how often our society turns first to laws and policies to fix everything. To be sure, policy and economics are not irrelevant, but the deep pain that fuels fatherlessness cannot be healed through such means. Many of these initiatives fail because they treat human persons primarily in materialistic and mechanistic terms, out of their context, and as little more than complex biological organisms devoid of a soul.
This will not do. Men need fathers and friends. We need other men to encourage and challenge us. We need men to hold us accountable, to cry and think with, and enjoy life with. We need men to pray, worship, and share the holy sacraments with. Like my dad, we need good examples, and we also need to address the deep spiritual and emotional wounds we’ve all suffered. We need to confess, forgive, be reconciled, and experience the great gift of tears and vulnerability. For no matter how fortunate one may be, there are wounds that need to be healed, often due to our unhelpful responses to pain and suffering and to the lies we’ve unwittingly come to believe.
A good marriage can provide many of these things, as can a healthy and theologically sound church. But there is an urgent need also to attend to the need for friendship. Even those of us blessed with great fathers and marriages inevitably find that, in midlife, our social circles begin to shrink if we do nothing to maintain them. Back in 2021, Daniel A. Cox at AEI wrote: “Thirty years ago, a majority of men (55 percent) reported having at least six close friends. Today, that number has been cut in half. Slightly more than one in four (27 percent) men have six or more close friends today. Fifteen percent of men have no close friendships at all, a fivefold increase since 1990.”
It’s unlikely the data have recently improved, so I would echo Cicero, who said: “I can only advise you to prefer friendship to all things else within human attainment, insomuch as nothing beside is so well fitted to nature—so well adapted to our needs whether in prosperous or in adverse circumstances” (De Amicitia, par. 70).
Friendlessness plagues most groups, but men seem especially susceptible. We might blame this on social media’s alienating effects, the viral scourge of pornography, and workaholism, but perhaps fatherlessness is another explanation. It’s hard to know how to relate to other men when the most important man in your life was absent physically or emotionally. And the kinds of social skills and norms that help facilitate friendships as children and college students do not necessarily translate to life as adults.
My dad and mom taught me how to be a friend, but their roles were not primarily to be my friend; nor is a community of coworkers likely to do the trick. I also cannot be for my mom and dad what only other friends could be. I have the great privilege and responsibility of being their son, but friends are necessarily something qualitatively different. Addressing this need for genuine face-to-face friendship will be crucial to resisting America’s social and spiritual impoverishment.
Churches, especially, have a great opportunity here. The Great Commission of Christ is for us to make disciples who follow Jesus, but the apostles were not sent out alone. They were sent out as friends to a world in need of a savior. So, too, must the church of any denomination cultivate the authentic relationships and friendships that draw others to their congregation, finding distinctive ways to love and serve one another. This is hard work and there are no reliable shortcuts, but a church distinguished by its friendships and its uncompromising devotion to Christ above all is one that will be more likely to weather adversity, resist heresy, and strengthen fathers, sons, mothers, and daughters alike.
But there is also a need to create the “little platoons” of friendship within and beyond the church. Such groups are rightly credited as pillars of civil society, but they are more than that. Families and churches are beautiful and essential institutions held together by the love of Christ and a deep sacramentality. But there are other loves through which we may connect. They may be of an athletic or a literary nature, focus on hobbies, or subsist in any number of associations that Americans were once distinctively known for. Carefully curated digital “communities” cannot replace the embodied and admittedly messy groups we desire and need. Men and women alike long to be more alive and connected, but we increasingly live what Thoreau famously called “lives of quiet desperation.”
Hannah Arendt, in her epilogue to The Promise of Politics, spoke to this desperation and a growing “worldlessness” and the “withering away of everything between us,” resulting in alienation and an experience of living in a metaphorical desert. Unmoored from truth and reality, and denied the freedom to judge, suffer, or condemn, we acclimate to meaninglessness and nihilism. Modern psychology is often of little help, encouraging us to adjust to a life no human was meant to permanently live. These intellectual wastelands and “deserts” of worldlessness and emptiness are exactly the kinds of places where totalitarian movements thrive—a warning that Arendt spent her career proclaiming. While journeys through deserts or “valleys” are part of human life, we are not meant to set up camp there or abandon the pursuit of what she called “oases.”
Oases, for Arendt, exist separately from politics and often partake of a friendship where “one heart reaches out directly to the other.” And “without the intactness of these oases,” she writes,
we would not know how to breathe.… If they who must spend their lives in the desert, trying to do this or that, constantly worrying about its conditions, do not know how to use the oases, they will become desert inhabitants even without the help of psychology. In other words, the oases, which are not places of “relaxation” but life-giving sources that let us live in the desert without becoming reconciled to it, will dry up.
These oases, in other words, ought not be escapes but instead function as soul-enriching reservoirs of beauty, truth, and friendship. They’re not merely support groups and networking opportunities but the kinds of moments and places where the experience of being together fuels creativity, persistence, courage, and any number of virtues. Fathers, sons, mothers, and daughters alike are thirsty for such encounters.
Families and churches can provide these oases, as can classical schools, homeschool co-ops, nonprofits, and any number of impromptu face-to-face gatherings. Scholars and intellectuals are particularly in need of such oases, as the intellectual life can be excessively isolating. While solitude is undoubtedly helpful and restorative, our minds and imaginations also need sharpening and encouragement. Like those in other lines of work, we need to know that the loves we have for particular Big Questions, books, art, and ultimate truths are shared by others. As C.S. Lewis said,
Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.”
I submit, perhaps controversially, that effective schools and organizations are not those that put up the biggest numbers, produce the most content, garner the largest memberships, or attract the most website clicks. They’re the ones known for the friendships associated with them. After all, particular places and moments are often remembered fondly, not for their own sake, but for the persons we associate with them. Places are often most treasured for the names and faces connected to them, and it is those places we most want to preserve and invest in.
While my late paternal grandfather had his challenges, my dad learned a lot more from his father-in-law, my maternal grandfather. He passed away five years ago, was a devout Christian, and was an immense source of joy to those around him. Like my dad, he was not wealthy, brilliant, or famous (though he pretended to be all three), but he was unquestionably rich. He was rich because he was deeply loved by his heavenly Father and knew it with all his being. He loved his family, sacrificed for them, and ensured that his faith would live on. He was rich because he had a church he loved and was involved in. And he was rich in friendship, as the hundreds of people at his funeral testified to. The friend he was and the friends he had indirectly enriched and strengthened the family that would raise me.
Going forward, it is crucial that we seize every opportunity to pray for and pursue whatever means we need to love and inspire fathers and to cultivate genuine friendships. It’s not an overstatement to say that civilization depends on it.
