The Eric Metaxas Show - Doug Wilson

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

Doug Wilson shares his new book: Keep Your Kids: How to Raise Strong Kids in an Age of Therapeutic Sentimentalism.

Noble gold investments is the official gold sponsor of the Eric Mataxis show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals. Learn how you can protect your wealth with noble gold investments. That's noble gold investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. It's a nutritious smoothie of creamy, fresh yogurt, vanilla, protein powder, and a mushy banana. For your mind? Drink it all down. It's numby. I wop vanilla. I wopanilla. Here comes Eric Metaxus. Hey, the folks.

Welcome to the program. I hate it when I say, forgive me. I have as my guest, Doug Wilson. Some of you know Doug Wilson. Some of you may not. I get more excited about those

who don't know Doug Wilson. Honestly, he is such an accomplished figure that it's challenging to describe him. on the simplest level he's the pastor of Christchurch in Moscow, Idaho. He is the author of so many books and has done so much good. Today I'm talking to him about his new book. It is called Keep Your Kids, How to Raise Strong Kids in an Age of Therapeutic Sentimentalism. Doug Wilson, welcome back to this program.

Thanks for coming on. Oh, thanks for having me. you've got so much to say it so much so much so we've got to be a little bit focused your book here you know keep your kids and how to raise kids in an era of therapeutic sentimentalism i think i know what you mean by that but tell my audience what do you mean by that all right that's a great question the book came about as a result of me realizing that i i had done a lot of family books that i wrote decades ago, reforming marriage, standing on the promises, her handed marriage, a lot of family material. And I was listening to another book, Bad Therapy by Abigail Schreier. It's a great

book in its own right. But as I was listening to that book, I realized that the advice that I was giving parents decades ago was not as the principles were as relevant as they ever were. but parents today who are bringing up little ones are in a completely different world. When we were bringing up our kids, even though the world was secular and unbelieving, it was still right side up, right? You'd go out into the secular world and girls were girls and boys are boys. Today, the tyranny of the individualism has taken over such that, that the secular world believes it's parents' jobs to get the world to conform to their child's feelings instead of teaching their children how to navigate a world that's not going to budge

for them. The reality of the objective world is what it is. Actually, let me just jump in because literally yesterday, this is so bizarre. Since my dad passed a year, ago. I'm spending a lot of time in my childhood home. My mom is 90. Some up here in Connecticut, often with my wife, in the house where I grew up. So it's a bizarre thing, you know, 40, 50 years on to think, how has the neighborhood changed? How has the world changed? In some ways, it looks the same. In some ways, it's different. This is what I noticed yesterday. And someone told me about this. Somebody in the neighborhood told me about this, but I noticed it yesterday. It's a pretty cold day yesterday and yesterday afternoon, I jump in my car and I drive past what used to be the bus stop.

My brother and I would, you know, get bundled up and walk in the cold pretty far to the bus stop and stand there in the cold waiting for the bus. There were three or four cars parked at the bus stop. The new thing seems to be parents waiting in the car to pick their kids up, Not from school from the bus stop, lest the kids need to walk a bitter eighth of a mile to their house. I got to tell you, I was blown away. I saw this with my own eyes yesterday, and I thought, this is pathetic. I wanted to go to each car and knock on the window and say, hey, lady, excuse me, why can't your kid walk home? Why are you sitting here pampering your kid?

that is to me the most obvious kind of, you know, if you're solving for X, this was as clear as a bell. This is what the world has become. That's exactly the kind of thing that I was targeting. So parents ought to shepherd their young ones with a great t-shirt I saw once, gravity. It's not just a good idea. It's the law. So the world is not going to step aside for, for your delusions.

But we have gotten to the point where individualism has so run amok and the tyranny of sentimental goo has so captured everyone that if your child says, I'm, I feel like a girl. We want to have those feelings in charge of our chromosomes. We want those feelings to be in charge of the way the world objectively is. And it's simply not true. So the job of parents is to teach your children how to conduct themselves with integrity in a very hard world. Some of that hardness is God designed, you know, gravity. Some of the hardness is the result of man's sin.

But we have to teach our children, equip our children to collaborate. lied with the world and adapt where they need to adapt, conquer where they need to conquer, but don't expect to go out and the world and have the world bow down to your perception of reality. Whatever daydream is going on in your head, the world has no obligation to obey that. Now, we in this last generation, our ruling elites have cowed a number of people in the government school system and elsewhere to pretend as though we can cater to those sentiments. But we really can't. It's not going to, it's not a long-term solution. And so Christian parents who want to bring up their children in a world that is right side up, instead of bringing them up, accommodating themselves to

clown world, they're going to need some help. And that's what this book is intended to do. there's so much here because you know you're striking at something that is it's a key element of the zeitgeist so it goes everywhere and you're talking about particularly with kids but it's you know what we're talking about is reality and you want your kids to understand i have to live in reality it's called bundle up walk home from school part of what's going on here i just want to throw it in is that my guess is if you had eight kids, you wouldn't be able to pick up your kids from the bus stop. But if you only have one or maybe two and you want time with your kids because you don't, you're not sick of your kids.

You know, you, so you see these different trends kind of conspire. You have more time to think about, oh, so and so is at the bus. If you had eight kids, you couldn't keep track. You'd just be like, make it home. I'll see at dinner time. So that's part of it. But the other thing, I want to get into this a little bit, is the idea of the subjective. I mean, this goes back, you know, to the romantic movement, I guess, Rousseau, 200 plus years ago,

where feelings were almost deified. And it kind of trickles down into the culture so that now it affects us in these very, very practical ways. But that's where you get the idea of the artist is not here to represent. reality. I'm going to paint something that's out there and try to conform to it and make a beautiful painting of what's real, but I'm going to express myself. My subjective feelings are the most important thing. So the artist has to have something to say to get. Most people don't know, but that's new. You know, 300 years ago, nobody asked an artist, so what are you saying? It didn't exist. So this is a trend that's taken, you know, centuries and decades to trickle down to what we're now talking about

in your book. That's exactly right. And then one of the main portals or the avenues whereby young people are diluted along the lines of this lie is their Instagram profile, right? Everybody gets to express themselves. Everybody gets to curate their life. Everybody gets to present to the world what it must be like to be as awesome as me. And then teenagers start to live or die by whether or not they got the requisite number of likes. And we're churning out a generation of flatterers and flatterees where it's not geared to accomplishment. It's geared to picking the right filter. Okay.

Forgive me. We got lots more coming up talking to Doug Wilson. The new book is Keep Your Kids. So you're putting money away, saving for the future, for retirement, for your family. You're doing what you're supposed to do, right? Well, what if I told you that your 401k, IRA, and other investments are probably paying for gambling, abortion, and LGBT causes? Inspire Advisors can tell you where your profits are really coming from. Do what I did. Go to inspireadvisors.com and order your free customized impact report and find out. Inspire is a

recognized leader in faith-based investing. They can empower you to put your money where your values are. They stand by their biblical values, donating 50% of their profits to Christian ministries each year, and they know that investing with Christian values has power. Get your free customized impact report now at InspireAdvisors.com slash Eric. And together, let's show Wall Street what investing with biblical principles can do. Inspire Advisors, biblically responsible investing, visit InspireAdvisors.com slash Eric. That's inspireadvisors.com slash Eric. My Pillow is excited to announce that they're having the first ever mega sale on overstock clearance

and brand new products. For example, you can save over 50% on this season's flannel sheets. The queen size is only 59.998 and King is only 69.99. They sell out fast every year, so be sure to order now. You can also save 30% on their brand new My Crosses. They're designed in the likeness of the one Mike has worn every day for over 20 years. They come in men's and women's styles, and they're made right here in the USA. Get the 2025-6-piece My towel sets for only 29-98.

The initial quantities are extremely low, so get them now before the... they go. And I can't forget to mention the best-selling standard. MyPillow is just 1498. To take advantage of the first ever mega-sale, go to MyPillow.com and use promo code Eric or call 800-978-3057. But wait, remember that $75 free shipping rule. Well, that ship has sailed because right now for a limited time, every order ship's free. Folks, go to MyPillow.com. Use the promo code Eric. MyPillow.com. Promocode Eric. Welcome back, folks. Talking to Doug Wilson, pastor to Doug Wilson. author Doug Wilson, the new book is Keep Your Kids, How to Raise Strong Kids in an Age of Therapeutic

Sentimentalism. So you were just talking about the dynamic, which is exacerbated by social media, that people are trying to put out this version of themselves, this image of themselves. So keep going with that. Yeah. Basically technology and smart technology is a tool. And I argue that it's a form of wealth. The Bible doesn't say anything negative about technology per se, but it does have a lot to say about wealth. So the phone, the smartphone that I carry around is the equivalent of 100,000 servants. I can have a Latin speaker in there, look something up, I can have an Anglo-Saxon dictionary in there. I can have a cartographer telling me where to turn left. I have all these servants in there. And there are many, many blessings that come with it. But the Bible has,

has a lot to say about the temptations of wealth. And the temptation and technology is a form of wealth. If I have 100,000 servants, then I'm a wealthy man. Nebuchadnezzar didn't have that many servants. And so I've got to learn how to conduct myself appropriately and wisely. And I have to teach my children how to do the same thing. So when Nancy and I were bringing up our kids, we didn't have to deal with smartphones at all.

They weren't here. They weren't around. Parents today have to say, okay, I've got a teenage boy. I've got a 13-year-old boy who wants a smartphone, which is a portal to every porn library in the world, and I'll just give it to them and no instructions, no teaching, no discipleship. That's, you know, that's an obvious problem. And that's, that's a problem that many parents are at least dimly aware of or aware of at some extent. But the problem that I was talking about with social media is a more pernicious problem because a lot of Christian parents don't see it. They don't see it as a problem because they're frequently doing the same thing, curating their lives and presenting themselves to an adoring

public. So I don't have any problem with a kid with a smartphone who can text his folks and say basketball practice ended early. Can you pick me up? That's a great convenience. That's a good thing. But for example, my son, while he allowed his teens to have phones, they couldn't have social media platforms. They were not allowed to do that. Don't go live in that. One of my granddaughters asked about it, and he said, my son replied, just go to school and listen to all your friends talking about being exhilarated or disappointed on the basis of how many. likes they got for different things. And my granddaughter came home after that and said,

never mind. I don't want to go there. That kind of guidance, God gave kids parents for a reason. And this is a challenge because oftentimes with the technological lag, the kids are more adept at managing the technology or understanding it than their parents are. So parents might discover there's a means of communication with all their classmates that they didn't even know existed, right? You know, they know about Facebook, but they don't know about anything else. And it's a parental responsibility to be up on this. And well, how can you be up on this? Well, you have to talk to your kids. One of the things that is never going to go out of style is the family sitting down at dinner every night and talking about the day, working,

you know, talking, having real conversations and no phones at the dinner table, no, you know, we, we have real conversation with real people. And that is going to, that's going to go a long way. Well, part of this, you know, thinking back, what I said earlier, about driving past the bus stop and seeing all these cars parked, I thought if there were one car, okay, that's a problem. But look what's normative. To me, that's part of the problem is that you feel pressure from other parents. You feel pressure from – so part of what needs to happen, it seems to me, is you have to try to find communities where you're going to get backed up on this kind of behavior. Like where everybody knows at dinner time, there's no phones.

Everybody knows, don't try to reach me at dinner time because my parents will not allow me to have a phone at the table. This has to become more widely normative, which is one of the reasons it's good to talk to you, because I want people to understand this. Because if you're all alone and everybody else is doing X or Y or Z, it's just hard to have the bandwidth to take that on with your kids. I mean, if you're a strong personality, maybe that's not so tough. Most people, that's just tough. So if you're living in some kind of community or your kids are going to some kind of a school where this stuff is normative, Now, I am actually hopeful. Jonathan Hate, I think it's pronounced her height, who's not a Christian, kind of like Abigail Schreier. The world out there is dealing with this kind of stuff in some ways better than the Christians. And he is talking about schools where you're not allowed to have a phone and how healthy this is and how the data shows that this is healthy. So to some extent, things have gotten so bad that the trend is to begin to think about this. I knew that it had to happen eventually, but it does seem to be happening.

Yeah, it does. And our Christian school here is adopted a similar policy to that. And it's, it's just a good step. It needs to happen. And I wanted to touch on a couple things. You mentioned Rousseau earlier. And I wanted to mention a wonderful essay by C.S. Lewis called the Poison of Subjectivism. Lewis, it's a wonderful essay. It's in Christian Reflections. It's a great essay on the poison of relativism. But it's not just relativism, it's relativism on the basis of my subjective experience and what I want. Lewis was just wonderful on this poison, this rot. And elsewhere, he calls Rousseau, the father of the totalitarians. Now, the radical twist that people don't see is that when we bend in up on ourselves and become sort of postmodern self-centered narcissists,

we have no ability to resist the tyrannical state. Because society has become atomistic. Each person is an individual atom, like a BB. And then things like social media, things like porn use, things like pot smoking, grease the BBs. And so you put all the BBs in a sack, and you can just push in anywhere. It's like a beanbag chair. And there's no rigidity in society because every BB is isolated, and the state always outnumbers you.

Always. But in a biblical society, a biblical society is molecular. There are complex molecules. The BBs are connected in ways that are independent of the state. And this is Edmund Burke's little platoons. You beat me to it. I was just going to say, can we talk about Edmund Burke's little platoons?

Because these are the things, and you've written a lot about this, I have not. But that concept, that's gone out of the culture. The idea that we need to have communities, we need first the family, but then communities and

structures, it's almost like, you know, it's like when you're talking about the sovereignty of the United States. Well, it's not just, you know, 300 plus million people. It's states, each of which has, you know, its own sovereignty, its communities. You have to have these structures, in a sense, as baffling structures, baffle in the classic sense, to pretend everything from just being mob rule. That's why it's not a democracy. And the little platoons of Burke, these structures starting with the family, the church help us to function more effectively.

So exactly. And this is crucial because this is why the immigration debate is as inflamed as it is, because liberals do not understand these molecular structures. They say, what does it matter if we have some extra BBs roll across the line? Bebis are BBs. But molecular structures have to form in a course. with a particular pattern. There's families, there's extended families, there's townships, there's communities, there's counties, there's denominations, there's church congregations.

These are all complex molecular structures, and without them, you don't really have a society. A society has to have these complex molecules. Otherwise, you just have an aggregate, and the aggregate becomes undifferentiated. And then the state can be. whatever it wants, because there's no structure for resistance. And the fact that people are now resisting in ways that are incomprehensible to the progressivists who want everything to be individualized because they want state control. This brings us, of course, to the concept of the electoral college, same. The same.

the founders in their wisdom understood. It's not just, you know, everybody gets a vote and that's that. No, no, no, no, no. We have to have these baffling structures. We have to have states. We have to have an electoral college. That will prevent tyranny in the long run. We have to have these intermediate mediating structures for greater health.

We'll be right back talking to Doug Wilson, the brand new book, Keep Your Kids. Don't go away. I've looked at clouds. that way. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Douglas Wilson, whom you can find at Dougwills.com. That's d-O-U-G-W-I-L-S dot com.

You are, you know, you contain multitudes, Doug Wilson. And so I want to touch on that before we get much farther in this conversation. Where did you grow up? I grew up in Annapolis, Maryland. And that's what I consider my hometown. And I moved here and then spent a few years in Ann Arbor in high school. And then I helped my parents move to Idaho before I went in the Navy.

And I was here a few months, went in the Navy, did my hitch in the submarine service. And I came back here to go to school, got married and started having kids. And the roots went down pretty quick. We started a school for our kids and the roots developed. What is your affiliation with the college there? With the University of Idaho? Yeah. Well, University of Idaho, I've taught there before.

New St. Andrews College is a college we founded in the early 90s. And so I'm on the board there and I teach. So New St. Andrews College is in Moscow. Right. How many students are there at this point? A couple hundred. A couple hundred. 100. Well, just I wanted to mention that because there's so much going on in your life and you've had such great influence. New St. Andrews College, folks would check it out. Somebody was just telling me that their kids are going there. Well, so to get back to the subject of your book, Keep Your Kids, How to Raise Strong Kids in an Age of Therapeutic Sentimentalism, you were referencing C.S. Lewis's essay, The Poison of Subjectivism. Lewis was clearly a prophet because he saw this stuff. I mean,

in his book, the abolition of man, the first few pages, he deals with the issue of subjectivism, the issue of the deification of feelings. I feel this way about that. I feel that, and he's trying to pull us back and say, no, no, no, you're supposed to care about reality. Your feelings are your reaction to reality, but don't confuse reality with your feelings, because if you do that, you wash away reality and you're in a world of fantasy. which is where much of the culture is today. When you're talking about the transgender lunacy, that's basically the logical extreme of subjectivism.

That's correct. And in abolition of man, the thing that sets him off is a children's textbook. Right? So what he's doing is the relativism that we are, that is a torrential hurricane now that we're dealing with was just a cloud the size of a man's fist in Lewis's day. And he saw it and he recognized it at that point. And he raised the alarm.

In a sort of ghastly simplicity, he said, we laugh at honor and are shocked to find traders in our midst. We castrate and bid the gildings to be fruitful. You cannot, you cannot debunk the classic virtues that grow out of the gospel. You can't laugh at them and then be dismayed when they go away. And that's precisely where we are. When a school shooting happens, and this is going to sound, I'm going to sound harsh and mean here, but I'm not being mean at all. When a school shooting happens, when some troubled kid shoots up the cafeteria and kills some of his classmates and then kills himself. He is, people raise a hue and cry. Where is this coming from?

How can we, how are we raising such monsters? No, he's the one kid in the school who understood the ramifications of what you're teaching in there. Right. We are the end product of so many years of blind evolutionary progress out of the primordial goo. We do not bear the image of God. It's illegal to mention God. It's illegal to reference him. We are all in this flux that, you know, it's like 10 tons of confetti dumped into a tornado.

That's what the world is. and he's the one kid who grasped that everything is meaningless. Nothing coheres. Nothing hangs together. And he acted accordingly. Maybe your high school ought to give him a posthumous diploma instead of calling him names. Or you could perhaps repent of the relativism and the sentimental goo and the false doctrine that you are stuffing down our children's three. throats. And so consequently, it is, you can't, you can't avoid arriving at the place where you're

going. If you get on the plane to Chicago, you're going to land in Chicago. If you, if you adopt the relativistic premise that Lewis tags in Abolition of Man, you're going to wind up exactly where we are. Well, I have to say that the, the, The only positive thing that I get out of this is that things have gotten so bad that many people are waking up. There are many people that see finally this is the fruit of, you know, where we've been. And it's, it's, you see it in a number of different ways where people finally wake up. So you reference Abigail Shreier. You know, this is a Jewish woman seems fairly secular.

But she, along with J.K. Rowling and others are saying, wait a minute. this transgender stuff is insane. They finally are standing against, you know, the juggernaut of the zeitgeist and saying, this is wrong. I mentioned Jonathan Haidt, another secular figure, saying that the social media and the phones is pernicious and whatever. It seems to me that the hope in the midst of this is that things have gotten bad enough that a lot of people who have been blithely drifting along with it are waking up and saying,

top. We've got to do something about this. And so we're talking about it. We're going to another break, folks. We'll be right back talking to Doug Wilson. The new book is Keep Your Kids, How to Raise Strong Kids in an Age of Therapeutic Sentimentalism. We'll go back talking to Douglas Wilson in Moscow, Idaho. He's the author of many, many, many, many books, the most recent of which is called Keep Your Kids. So keep going, Doug. Yeah, I write all these books to make the little voices in my head go away, but thus far it's not working. So you were just mentioning people finally seeing through it or people finally becoming aware. Don't leave the Trump recoil out of this because the fact that Trump has come in and is going after DEI stuff and pronouns and all that with a couple of machetes. his attack on it is not subtle. And the fact that he's able to do that to generally broad acclaim, people are finally saying, at last, somebody's talking sense. This is just bizarre.

Now, that's not, it's not the same thing as revival, but it is common sense reasserting itself. And Christians ought not to be embarrassed in this moment. we ought to be able to point to things that we've been saying all along. Unfortunately, in many churches, they can't point to things they've been saying all along, but at least perhaps they can come to repentance and say, you know, I was wrong. I was swept up in the culture smog. I was swept up by the zeitgeist.

And perhaps we ought to turn and listen to those Christian teachers who have been warning us all along. And we've not had a shortage of them. I could, you know, Francis Schaefer would be a good example of someone who warned us decades beforehand of what was coming. And a lot of people, Jesus talks about this problem where you build memorials to the prophets, thus proving that you're the descendants of the people who mistreated the prophets. there are a lot of people who like to build on the legacy of teachers in the 70s who were, you know, people like Schaefer,

but they're just completely at odds with the center of what that ministry was about. Schaefer was an unapologetic absolutist. There is an objective reality that doesn't change with the times. and that's the thing that we need is a clarion call from Christians saying the word of God grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of God stands forever. The Word of God is never going to go out of fashion. We ought to teach the Bible and be unashamed. Well, and if you're not ready for the Bible, how about reality?

You know, like God is the author of reality, and if you play against the house, you lose. And I think that's what's happening. A lot of people have been playing against the house, playing against reality, and eventually, you know, it's the snake swallowing its own tail. It cannot be sustained any more than socialism can be sustained. You know, the Soviet Union could have a pretty good run of seven decades, but eventually it falls apart. You see this over and over. The truth will out, as Shakespeare put it. You cannot sustain madness.

Eventually, it's over. And we're really seeing that right now. And I do think that God often uses folks outside the church to humiliate the church and to say this, you know, this thrice married New York real estate developer. I'll use him to show the church what courage looks like if the church is not willing to courage. And you see this over and over again, whether you're talking about, you know, Abigail Shrier or Naomi Wolf or lots of people that we could mention right now who are, you know, saying the emperor has no clothes. the church ought to have been at the forefront saying the emperor has no clothes. And there are many, I'd like to think that there are many in the church that are waking up, but there's still many that, you know, they kind of stumble along in churches that are open to the wokeism or soft on the wokeism.

I would argue that those churches are dying, that Jesus has cursed them like he cursed the fig tree, and they're just trying to cling to relevance. And you ultimately cannot. This is our bottom line. The bottom line message is not optional. right reality is not optional and you just mentioned the sovi soviet union being able to carry on for seven decades but the only reason they were able to do that is because they were propped up economically by the west you know going back to lennon's comment about the capitalist will sell us the rope that we're

going to hang them with and that we're discovering the same thing about these NGOs that were spreading socialistic dogma and globalist stuff. Well, what happens with someone walks in and turns off the tap like Trump has just done? Spending freeze. All of a sudden, these propaganda machines all over the world have to lay everybody off. In other words, the American taxpayer was paying for his own destruction. And basically, okay. You know, if we don't, if we stop funding it, maybe a bunch of this goes away.

Well, it's USAID. This is just astonishing, really. It's kind of like somebody spotted the say that, look, I see like a stopper and they pull the stopper and the swamp starts to drain. That to me, USAID thing is that the swamp is draining and the swamp creatures are freaking out, praise the Lord. They're freaking out. And I think most Americans are rejoicing because we didn't even dream that there could be an end of the madness. And it looks like the madness is ending or we're at least seeing the beginning of the end of it. Want to just get specific with the book, Keep Your Kids, How to Raise Strong Kids in an Age of Therapeutic Semmentalism, 60 seconds, and then we've got another short segment.

But what specifics do you talk about in the book? Specifics like getting your kids out of the government school. Basically, you can't send your kids to the pagans to be educated and then be surprised when they come back pagans. It used to be that they would come back secular, but now they come back wanting to transition to another gender. Right. And that's what it's gotten to such a demented point that the rank and file Christians who are keeping the public school system afloat are starting to walk away. And, of course, lockdown and the COVID madness accelerated this. The number of homeschooling and private school kids exploded by the millions.

Great opportunity for me to plug the Herzog Foundation, folks. You know I go on and on like a lunatic, a sane lunatic about homeschooling. Folks, this is what Pastor Doug Wilson is talking about. If you want help, you're not sure. Could we do homeschooling? Could we do Christian school? Go to HerzogFoundation.com. Trust me on this.

This is very important. We've just been scratching the surface in this conversation, but you need to think about this. This is at the heart of everything. HerzogFoundation.com. Just please go there, visit them, HerzogFoundation.com. They're there to help you do what we are talking about

HerzogFoundation.com. We'll be right back talking to Pastor Doug Wilson. The new book is Keep Your Kids, how to raise strong kids in an age of therapeutic sentiment. Welcome back talking to Doug Wilson, the writer. Right now he's the writer. People often say to me, Eric, you're so prolific. I think, no, no, no, no.

Doug Wilson is prolific. He's writing at least two books for everyone that I can get out. So the new one is called Keep Your Kids, How to Raise Strong Kids in an Age of Therapeutic Sentimentalism. And you were just giving us a few specifics. And the first thing you said is get them out of the public schools. That is always my recommendation. if you can possibly do that, folks. What else?

We touched on earlier the whole issue of social media and the surrounding culture. It used to be that if 50 years ago, if you got your kids out of the government school and you sent them to the Christian school, you have basically turned off the tap of the secular influence and you've brought them under Christian influence. But Christian kids who go to a Christian school still have. have Spotify playlists. They still have Instagram. They still have devices that can stream movies and shows and that sort of thing to them. And so consequently, I would say very practically, parents need to be actively engaged with their child's use of smart technology, computers, phones, you know, all of that, that whole realm. What a lot of, a lot of

of parents would be astonished if they looked if they just and they can just go look at their child spotify playlist and if a third of the songs have that explicit label next to them then maybe we're talking about rotify instead of Spotify and so you have to you have to be engaged you have to be talking to your kids about what's going on and that doesn't mean that you just are censorious and say no that's the world you have to talk it through when my kids were teenagers. MTV was just coming out. And back then, they used to play music videos, believe it or not. But you can't be that old. Wait a minute. I'm that old. But what I would do is I would sit down with them and I'd turn on MTV. We'd watch a music video, one music video,

then I would turn it off. And then I'd say to the kids, okay, what were they saying? What was that song about? What was the worldview being advanced by that band? Some bands might be nihilistic, Nirvana. Some bands might be hedonistic, you know, some party, party music. You know, there's different worldviews. And I would, I would want the kids to be able to look at something and identify where it came from, right? You can identify the quote, or you can identify the worldview, or you can identify the smell. And so, for example, earlier when you said that I contained multitudes, that was a reference to Whitman, Walt Whitman. And you want children who are educated in a rigorous way so that they can say, oh, I think Thoreau said something like that.

Or I think, you know, like the transcendentalists, or that sounds like it sounds like deism. the issue is not that the secular culture out there has cooties and we just have to run away stopping our ears and covering our eyes. What we want is active, intelligent engagement with the world so we can see what they're saying and see where the lie is and know how to answer. Well, that's so wonderfully put. We're living in exciting times. Let's be clear that the re-election of Donald Trump gives us a fighting chance.

And it's very exciting to me to think there are folks like you out there. I want people once again to know that you can be found online at Dougwills.com. That's W-I-L-S-D-O-U-G-W-I-L-S.com. We've been talking to Doug Wilson. The new book is Keep Your Kids. Doug Wilson, really a joy to speak with you. Thanks for being my guest. Great privilege. Appreciate it.