The Eric Metaxas Show - Anthony Bradley (continued)

Episode Date: January 3, 2024

Socrates in the studio conversation with Anthony Bradley 

Folks, welcome to the Eric Metaxus show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m. Investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. Welcome to the Eric McTaxis show. When Eric was a kid, he won a contest to ride on one of Santa's flying reindeer. Well, the experience was so amazing that Eric decided to change his middle name to that special reindeer. Now, please welcome. The man who loved... love soaring to new heights, Eric Litson, Metaxon. Hey, folks, welcome. Happy holidays.

I always say that sarcastically. Chris Heims, you know I'm saying that sarcastically. I meant to say Merry Christmas. Actually. Merry Christmas. Yeah, that's legal now. We can say that. It's legal for many years.

Because Trump is back in office. Oh, wait, not yet. Not yet. So, so Merry Christmas and a happy new year in advance. to those of you who are planning to be alive in a few days when 2024 dawns, which is really, it's going to be one of the craziest years. Let me say in American history, no exaggeration. Yeah, that's a lot.

That we cannot even talk about, like madness, lunacy. But I want to be clear, I believe God's will will prevail. I believe that it's like being in a war and you fight and you pray and you pray and you You trust God with the outcome, and I believe things are happening. As I've spoken around the country this past year, I have been profoundly encouraged meeting amazing people going to amazing churches. One thing people ask me is, hey, what can I do, Eric? Number one thing you can do, if you're going to a church that is not taking this battle

for liberty seriously, taking this battle against evil seriously, oh yeah, evil exists. like cutting parts off of children and young people, you know, I think if you don't understand that that's evil, if you don't understand that strangers flooding across our border, Chinese nationals of, you know, young men in their 20s, radical Muslims who are potentially sleeper cells for Hamas, people kind of act like, oh, yeah, that's just conservative talking points. Boy, do I wish that were true. But it's not. It's evil. And we have an administration in bed with evil. And so if you're going to a church that is not dealing with this, and there are many churches, otherwise good churches that are not dealing with this, that think politics is out of

the realm of the church, if slavery were on the ballot, would you say that? If Jim Crow laws are on the ballot, would you say that? Do you think the civil rights movement born in the churches? Do you think that that was out of line, that the churches got political and tried to get legislation? against Jim Crow laws. You think that's out of line? Many American pastors, that's what they seem to think. So here's my action point.

If you're going to a church like that, please, for the sake of your own soul, get out. Don't ever give a dime to a church that is not in this battle. I mean that very seriously. In hindsight, I think you'll realize I was right when I said this. I think a couple of years from now, you're going to say, you know what? Yeah, yeah. We were part of a church like going to a German church in the 30s that says, we're not going to get political.

We're not going to be part of those taking a stand against Hitler. No, no, we don't want any trouble. We don't want any trouble. We just want to do church. Folks, that's the devil's church. Pretty harsh, right? Except, unfortunately, if you look at what happened in Germany, it's true. I'm telling you, if you read my book letter to the American church, the parallels are not.

deniable. So you want to pretend that they're deniable. You want to ignore the facts. God is going to judge us for what we do and what we don't do. And if you're going to a church that doesn't take this seriously, I want to tell you that that is scary to me. We all need to link arms in this battle. So that's my message to you. If you're going to one of those churches, the time is over. like, oh, I think we can convince the pastor to be a little bit more bold. No, it's over. Jesus cursed the fig tree. Over, done.

You need to find a church or find a group of people who are willing to pray and willing to take this seriously and to be active. In whatever way you can be active. We're all active in different ways. Everybody can't do the same thing. Everybody's not called to do the same thing. Everybody doesn't have time to do the same thing. But we can all do a little something. And the one thing you can do is not go to a way.

a church that's just playing church. Okay. Chris, I want to say a couple of things. This is, you know, this is Christmas week. So we're airing some reruns, some fantastic, fantastic conversations I have had with a number of people. We're airing them this week. We continue our campaign into January, very important with CSI.

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It's a beautiful thing. Metaxistock.com. And don't forget, Socrates in the city plus.com. And now here's my conversation with the great Anthony Bradley at Socrates in the studio. Here it is. So self-confidence is sort of the birthplace of virtue. If you believe that you are a person of capacity, then you don't care about rejection if you do the right thing. You just don't care. You read the book of Proverbs. You're like, yep, that's me. And guess what?

If people don't like it, they can go kick rocks. So I have these conversations with some of the lives at the University of Arkansas in the Kappa Alpha fraternity, a Phi Delta Theta fraternity there, Christian guys in sort of the party atmosphere. And they basically said this to me. They say this, I came in as a Christian, I have these values, and I told the guys, hey, this is what I'm about. I don't do this and this and this and this, and if you don't like it, then you can reject me. And the guy's like, we love that.

And why do they love that? Because these are men of conviction, of principle, and they can trust that. And so what happened inevitably is that these Christian guys who are in these rape fraternities become the leaders really quickly. because the masses believe, well, this is a guy that has those convictions. Somebody who actually believes something. I always say that when people who don't know what they believe or don't know whether anything's worth believing encounter someone who believes something strongly,

they're taken aback and they're attracted to it. They're just thinking, what is that? I want some of that because it's just innate in us and we see it so infrequently, again, in modern culture. Absolutely. And unfortunately, the sorts of institutions that used to provide a ride of passage that used to develop these sorts of virtues in young men

have really fallen away. You could think about, I'm an Eagle Scout, and the Boy Scouts used to be the sort of place where older men could really invest in forming these virtues and young men, pushing them, inviting them to do challenging things, sort of a ride of passage. You do it with these other lads in the company of older men. And they inspire and speak virtue and validation in you.

You see things in yourself that you didn't see. They give you leadership opportunities and you graduate. You do amazing things after you become an Eagle Scout because you have this self-confidence that I'm the kind of person who has these capacities. So let me now use them in a brand new space. And so this idea that we can take a young lad from the comfortability of his home, bring him to university, have him face challenges, and then learn these capacities,

and he's confident about who he is. He's a virtuous leader. And then he goes back for the purpose of service to make his own community a much, much better place because he has a self-confidence to do that. You see some of this that you're talking about in the world of sports. I was not a sports guy,

and I have lamented that for decades. The idea that you're part of a team, you're part of a group, you have a common cause. Often for men, that is something that does some of what we're talking about here. But obviously not everybody's going to be on the sports team in college. This is a similar thing. Whether you play sports or don't, you get that. It's built into it.

A lot of men also get that in military service. I mean, watching sitcoms growing up because of the era, you know, as in the 70s and stuff, people always talk about, you know, my army buddy is in town. My army, because they all served in World War II or in Korea, my army buddy. And there was this, you know, tribal in the best sense of camaraderie that came out of that. And you hear that a lot, that people who are in the military, they have something so special. In fact, it's so special that often when they come home, they're confused because they're longing for that feeling. And again, we live in a culture that really works against that kind of group camaraderie among men, particularly.

And men need it. I mean, men thrive when they have that. I recently returned from my 40th anniversary of my chapter at Clemson. And I wish I had had a camera in the room just to watch what happened when everybody got back together. it's a group of men in their 40s and 50s and 60s and the amount of energy and affection and camaraderie that happens when they return because they, what happened? They had a three or four years experience with a group of people during this formative phase of life

and they developed these brothers with whom they now do life together. They sort of share life together. and it continued after college and sort of be back in the room together. It just the amount of hugs and laughter. And I think if you look at what fraternities provide, you're exactly right. Outside of sports, outside of the military, on the college campus, the only institution that can provide this sort of structured camaraderie and brotherhood

and formation and a right of passage is a fraternity that's done well. And I think this is the tragedy of fraternities when they're not done well, is it actually squanders all of that capacity. Like I said, 350,000 men. I think about what happened in this country. If in four years from this day that we had 350,000 men enter into the marketplace full of virtue and self-confidence to be great men, it would change the whole country. In fact, I would say it would change the world.

That's literally true. I mean, there's no question about that. But again, to me, the genius of your thesis here has to do with the fact that this already exists. It's not like we have to go create something. We already have Greek life in the numbers that you've just quoted to us. That's a staggering thing. And the fact that they are all effectively being attacked, that we're being told, you know, it's toxic masculinity, Fred House's classic example, whatever.

In other words, that I think might goad them to do something about it. And, you know, the crisis is the opportunity. That as you're seeing men in general, but particularly men in Greek life, being told you're unnecessary, this isn't working, whatever, that you think, okay, so we can go away, or we can change our model and we can adopt the model that you're talking about. So now, practically speaking, I know you have a podcast.

Do you talk about this on the podcast? I do. So there are several opportunities for people to engage this. One, there's a website, heroic fraternities. There's a website heroic fraternities. There's a website heroic fraternities that has all this information there. and there are links to the interviews that I have with students across the country. And I'm developing now a YouTube channel where I'm doing more interviews with fraternity guys as well.

I also have a list of fraternities that are sort of signing on to the heroic fraternity mission. They want to be one of these virtue-forming institutions on their campuses. So you can see a list of chapters on college campuses that are there as well. So there are lots of opportunities I'm sort of building out to invite more and more and more chapters to this. I also have an Instagram account called Her Work Fraternies where I celebrate and highlight the good things that chapters are doing. I'm following about 2,500 fraternities across the country right now. And like I said, I mean, you know, fraternities are now contacting me and wanting me to come out and speak. And I've just had such great opportunities.

I'll just say for the record, there are a number of CEOs that I'm now having conversations with the CEO of Lambda Chi Alpha, the CEO of Fight Alpha Theta, where they're now thinking about sort of changing the whole model of fraternities to make them values-driven institutions that form good men into great men. They're really committed to sort of swapping out the playbook and restarting. something new. And there's just a lot of momentum right now, so I'm really, really, really excited about where things are going, because there's a lot of challenges that we have in this country with our young men. And if we don't engage them, we're in a world of trouble. Just one quick stat. I saw this a couple weeks ago. Forty-five percent of men 18 to 24 years old have never asked a woman out. They've never even approached a woman. So what we're finding is that a lot of these sorts of communities, fraternities, are actually

ways that some of these older guys are helping younger guys to do something like that, to sort of start a relationship. Yeah. Because what's happening? Marriage rates are declining. The fertility rate is also plummeting precipitously. And it's all, it all has a lot to do with the fact that we lack a generation of confident man. He want to be great fathers and great statesmen and great employees and bosses and things like that. For more than 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America's only Christian conservative wireless providers standing behind their values and their exceptional service.

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Feel the difference. Well, I taught for 14 years at the King's College. We have a house system at the college, right? Sort of off that O'Oxford model of houses, these lads and young ladies live together. They'd be in a community together for four years. And I watched what happened. I watch what happened when a freshman comes in, joins a community of like-minded men, they challenge and develop him, and then on the other side, he graduates and then becomes an outstanding person.

I saw it happen for 14 years. You saw it happen? Yeah. And I'm thinking, well, this is, in some ways, pretty normative on a lot of Christian college campuses to have these sorts of communities. and I'm looking at these big state schools, and I'm thinking, well, what is it? Where on the university campus can we capture what I'm seeing at the King's College? Where can I somehow replicate a framework, an institution, a model,

where you're just turning out great men who also make their communities better and become great dads and great little league coaches and great mayors and great business owners and great, men in the military and things like that. I mean, where else got to do that? I'm looking around. There's sports, as you mentioned. There may be ROTC, things like that. But other than that, this just didn't exist except for fraternities.

And as I looked at the data in terms of where fraternity men end up, wouldn't it be great if Congress was full of virtuous men? Wouldn't it be great if the business. sector, our business leadership was full of virtuous men. Wouldn't it be great? If the Supreme Court was full of virtuous men, I mean, that would be fantastic.

And so where do we go to get those men? So my own interests is always how far upstream can I go to get the results that we want in 10, 15, 20 years? And I'm thinking, well, one way to go upstream

is to really focus on on this population and cohort of men who were actually going to college. When you mentioned the King's College, the house system that they had at Kings, which is very similar, as you're saying to, people would, people, young men would come up to me and say, I'm a member of the House of Bonhofer, Kings College. They would be excited about it, you know, not because, just because I'd written a book on Bonhofer,

but you could see that they had this sense of like, I'm part of this thing. And people long to be part of something. to be proud of something. And I was just always impressed by that, but then I was impressed by how Kings had created houses with the names of heroic figures, which is fascinating to me,

not all of whom were Christians by any means. You know, Churchill, I don't know what his theology was, but heroic figures, somehow people that stood for something or whatever. and that is, again, part of what has fallen to the side in our culture, to lift up what does it mean to be great? What is greatness? Let's even talk about greatness. In a funny way, you know, when you're dealing with cultural Marxism, they don't believe in greatness.

They don't believe in the idea of the great individual. They believe in the gray sludge of, you know, we're all somehow. we're not meant to distinguish ourselves in great ways, which is really sick, frankly. But that's been, that's trickled into the culture, you know, from, you know, critical theory used to be just in universities, but it's trickled into the culture. And that that's another part of what we're talking about. Yeah, when I was at King's, I was the faculty advisor for the House of Churchill for about 10 years. And so what did I see?

Over the years I saw that when I spoke work. words of validation and affirmation, when I invited them to be great, they responded. I didn't have to shame them. I didn't have to tell, rebuke them in terms of say, don't be a bad person. When we had a list of virtues and values and I said, hey, you should, you should aspire to be more courageous. You should aspire to be sort of more encouraged and you should you should expire to be more excellent. They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I want that, I want that, I want that, I want that.

And I just, like I said, I saw over the years, guys come in at 18, and when they graduated at 21 or 22, right, when they, by the time they left college, they were completely different people. And they were the kind of men that any father would want their daughter to marry. And I just watched it happen over a four-year period. And I think the culture, our country, our country, needs more of that. We don't need less bad men. We need more great men. And I'm committed to going around college campuses to invite these young guys to be absolutely astoundingly excellent. When I do that, they sign up. They're excited about it. and expenses. Most of you've heard about some of these companies. You've decided to stop shopping or

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Call 800-978-3057 or go to MyPillow.com now and use promo code Eric. Also about the model and the way you're talking about it is that you don't have to confront, you know, wokeery or cultural Marxism head on, you can almost do an end run around it. All you do is talk about greatness. People respond. They don't, you know, they know intuitively that this is something they want. And that's interesting to me. In other words, that this, we're not talking about conservative virtues or Christian virtues. We're talking about things that are inherent. And that almost everyone responds to when you talk about it. They want that.

But again, in the culture, we don't have a lot of discussion of this. And again, it's why I wrote my book Seven Men and Seven More Men, because I thought nobody is saying what does it look like to be great? What are some models? And the King's College House model of naming these names. and, you know, putting these things out there. Because part of what we're talking about also has to do with the death of heroism itself as a concept,

you know, tearing down statues, not just statues of people with whom we disagree, but the very idea of putting up statues and saying, this person achieved something, even that idea has fallen on hard times. You don't see a lot of representational statues being put up. I mean, when Central Park was created, you know, 150 years ago, they put up all these statues of poets and this and that and whatever. And

that was a thing in the 19th century, when Greek life emerged, the idea that I want to be, I want to be somebody. Somehow that idea itself has been denigrated. The idea of heroism itself has been denigrated. It has, except for one institution, fraternities. And so guys are seeking these out because it's one of the last bastions in our culture that does exactly what you just said. When you're in a fraternity, they put up a list of all the great alumni in the past who've done amazing things, who are amazing people, not perfect people, imperfect people who've done great things. And they say, hey, if you embrace the values and virtues of this fraternity, one day you can be like

that. And the guy's like, yep, I want to be like that. So you're right, all of these things have fallen away, and there are just a few institutions left that still embody what you've mentioned. And I think that's one of the advantages that Greek life has, both on the sorority side, but also on the fraternity side, to do what we've lost. That still, it's sort of an opportunity to maintain those systems and structures that in the past produced. great people. And instead of giving up on them, instead of saying, we should just toss them because they're flawed, I'm thinking, well, let's make them great. Let's re-infuse what was lost because it's already there. The systems there, the structures here, the values are there. What we've not done

since Animal House is invite them to embrace those things. And when we do that, I think we're going to see massive, massive change. One thing we haven't talked to, about, and I'm amazed, neither of us brought it up, but the very idea that fraternities are all men and sororities are all women, that alone at this point is a dramatically countercultural thing. That's a fascinating concept right there, because part of what has gotten into the current, gotten us into the current cultural mess is, you know, the deconstruction. of the concept of man and woman. And you don't even need to get into the transgender madness,

just the very idea in our lifetimes of, you know, what is a man really or what is a woman really? There were, in every society in history, places for men to hang out with men and women to hang out with women. It was always a thing, and it was always understood as healthy. healthy for women, healthy for men. That, in a way, has gone out of the culture. You know, the secret societies at Yale, none of which I was involved with,

but they at some point became co-ed. The idea that fraternities are groups of men is itself extraordinary. I mean, it really is an opportunity. to my mind, I don't know if there are any fraternities or sororities around America that have gone co-ed, I imagine probably there are, but by and large not. And that's, that is astonishing. And I would also say it's probably why they have been attacked, because they're outliers in a sense, on that, simply on that. They are. And what's true is that the, the data shows that when they're in these sort of single-sacs cohorts,

become better for each other. Right. And so it seems to me that we would want more of this rather than less of this, because it makes everybody better. It makes everybody better. The campus is better off when women have opportunities to invest in each other, to mentor and to coach and to even use that Christian's phrase disciple one another, you know, the virtues of being an outstanding adult and that that boys benefit from the exact same thing and I think in part one of the reasons that there's so much interest now in fraternities with a lot of young lads is that they've never had this they've never had sort of a men's only space where they can you sort of relax

not have to posture not have to be a certain type of person and just be a guy and be silly and have fun. And these guys will tell me stories about how they will stay up to two or three o'clock, four o'clock in the morning, just talking, sharing their stories, asking for advice, getting help, processing their parents' divorce, talking about their breakup issues, right? There's space where they actually need to do that, and women need it the same. We often are okay with women having spaces where women can invest in each other, but for some reason we're suspicious, when guys get together. But when you look at the psych data right now for young men,

it seems to me that you would want your son in fraternity because he's much more likely to be less anxious, less depressed, right? Less stressed, et cetera, by being in a community of guys who were doing a couple of things. One, having a lot of fun, but also investing in him as a person and caring about him as a person. Again, when I talk to guys about why they, joined fraternities, the number one reason, the overwhelmingly number one reason they give me is

brotherhood. They want deep brotherhood. They've never had it before. And here's what they know. If I don't get it in college, I'm done. And Santa Claus is coming round. The Christmas snow is white on the ground when old Santa When you get on in life and you have trouble, whether it's in your marriage or your job, who do you talk to, how do you process it? And if you don't have a healthy way to process it, you're very likely to process it in an unhealthy way by checking out, by stepping away, but whatever it is. And so this, in a way, has a lot to do with, you know, emotional health for society.

And a lot of the statistics you quote in the book and have talked about here, show that we are in a crisis. Absolutely. And when you talk to young men in fraternities, they tell me that they have, for the first time in their life, people outside of their family, with whom they can share secrets in the context of trust. And that trust is built, by the way,

on the back end of doing something fun and challenging together. So men build trust and relationships. after they've done something together. After they've done something together, we have to do something together first, and then we open up and provide a context for trust and vulnerability. It's not that men aren't vulnerable. It's that men are only vulnerable with people that they trust aren't going to use their vulnerability against them later.

Right. That's the trust part. If I tell you this, I'm not going to hear it back, come back to me later. Right. And in a fraternity, what they're doing is they're testing that out. They're being vulnerable a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, see what happened, just the reciprocity there. And after three or four years of that, you graduate with a group of guys, you know, five, six guys with whom.

You have these rust relationships. And I talk about that in the book. These are relationships where, we're over time you ladle in and out of people's lives. but you could you could not talk for five years and then called each other and it's almost like the five years didn't happen. You could not talk

for 10 years and then you get together and it just restarts right where you left off. And fraternities provide guys these relationships so that when life gets hard in middle age you can get on the phone or get on a plane and go visit your fraternity brother and they know

this because this is what the this is what they hear from the older alums when they come back and tell them how important those relationships have been. And I just don't see outside of fraternities where this is, where this becomes normative and is regularized, both within the context of college culture, or even within the context of culture in general for men who are in this age cohort of 18 to 24. I think one of the reasons that people should go to college is, yeah, the education is, yeah, the education's great. Yeah, you can get prepared for a job, absolutely. But the social aspect to me is also worth investing in because you have a network of people with whom you'll do the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years with.

This is a huge idea. I just want to say it makes me want to go back to college and join a frat. I can't do that, but I can encourage people to do that. So is there a list? Have you thought about putting out a list of fraternities that have signed up to be heroic fraternities? Because it seems to me that, you know, not all fraternities are espousing these values or familiar with you or the book or the concept. Is this the thing that you're thinking about putting out there that fraternities that have signed on as yes, we're on board with this concept? Yeah, we are developing a certification program.

So if a fraternity wants to sign up for this model, they can be certified as a heroic fraternity on their campus. So we are rolling this out this year, and we've got about a dozen or so fraternities across the country who are saying, yes, we're about this. We want to be great men. We want to be heroic. We want to make fraternities the kind of places that actually are the primary draw for the university, not the sports program, not the education. We're having a list of just to tell parents where the best fraternities are. are at what universities and the ones who are at least moving in this direction. This gives me a lot of hope, which isn't so easy to do. So I want to say Dr. Anthony Bradley,

thank you for all you've done, but particularly for this, I think it's extraordinary. And thank you for your time today. God bless you. Thanks for having me.