Defending Faith, Family and Freedom Podcast

Intro/Outro Voiceover: You are listening to Defending Faith, Family and Freedom, featuring Gary Bauer, Senior Vice President of Public Policy at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. And now, here is Gary.

Gary Bauer: Hello, everybody. This is Gary Bauer, Senior Vice President for Public Policy and Culture at the James Dobson Family Institute. Welcome to our podcast, Defending Faith, Family and Freedom. Glad you are with us. Tell your friends about us.

Today, we are going to spend a little bit of time with an old friend of mine. I do not normally just have old friends of mine on because they may or may not be of interest to you, the listener. But this old friend is in the same battle that I have been in for decades and that I know many of you care about deeply.

It is the battle, as the name of our podcast suggests, to save and protect faith, family, and freedom. In addition to that, my guest, Tim Goeglein, has quite a history with Dr. Dobson and a friendship with him. In fact, if Dr. Dobson was not with our Father, he would be on this podcast today, probably interviewing Tim and me about some of these issues.

Tim, welcome to the podcast and congratulations on yet another fantastic book. Can you tell us a little bit about your work in Washington and how you and Dr. Dobson first crossed paths? I know he was an admirer of yours and you were a great admirer of his.

Tim Goeglein: That is really gracious. I met Dr. Dobson and I remember it quite vividly when Dan Coats came to the United States Senate. Dan Coats served in the Senate a little more than two terms because he filled the place of Dan Quayle, who became the vice president. Dan Coats later came back to the Senate.

In all of those years in working for and with Dan Coats, Dr. Dobson would often stop by the Senate. It is through Dan Coats that I got to know Dr. Dobson and we really became quite great friends.

As fate would have it, I worked for you in your quest for the presidency. It came that close, a cat's whisker. I ended up joining the George W. Bush for president campaign. President Bush won, and we came to the White House.

In sum, my role was to be the point person, among other things, for our fellow religious and faith-based leaders. You and I, Gary, worked a lot together in those years, as we did with Dr. Dobson. I miss him. It was an honor to be at the memorial and it was a Christ-centered memorial, which was very important.

Gary Bauer: It really was. I wish everybody that cares about these issues could have all been there. But then we know we will be together again sometime after this particular battle on planet Earth has run its course. Those are a lot of things. We could spend a couple of hours talking about the campaign and about the work you did for George W. Bush.

I informally played the same role for President Reagan. I was head of the Office of Policy Development and Under Secretary of the Department of Education. But over that period of time, informally, I found myself being the guy, just like you were formally the guy under Bush, that conservative groups and Christian groups would come to in order to get the ear of the president.

Tim, I know you recall this. Dr. Dobson wrote a book years ago and I was the co-author, called "Children at Risk: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Our Children." Dr. Dobson said something in that book and he quite frankly said it all the time: that there was this great battle raging in the country.

On one side, there were people, broadly speaking—this is not a perfect analogy—broadly speaking, people that believe that God is. And that the purpose of America was to be one nation under God with ordered liberty. Not just do whatever you want, but ordered liberty, virtuous liberty.

The other side has a lot of people that believe God isn't. And they think that the meaning of America is if it feels good, do it. Different strokes for different folks. That is a quick summary of the clash that is going on.

You have written a number of books that address this theme. I want to confess, because it is a podcast where people expect us to be truthful, I have not started reading this latest book yet. But my understanding is that it is by and large a number of the columns you have written over the years that remain very timely.

That is actually one of the benefits of the book because somebody can sit down and read a column or two and be able to ponder those and then get right back into the book the next time they have time. From the standpoint of the author, how do you think of the book and is that an apt description of it?

Tim Goeglein: The short answer is yes, it is. I travel often. I travel sometimes weekly, every other week. Whether I am in California or Maine, north, south, east, west, there is an ongoing and profound concern. It is rooted in its reason I chose the title of this book, "What Really Matters."

We are having a profound national, ongoing, multi-fronted debate on why marriage, family, parenting, human life, religious liberty, conscience rights, parental rights, even the meaning of pronouns. We are really in this moment that you and Dr. Dobson were writing about. We have arrived at that moment.

I know you are a great admirer of George Orwell, as am I. He famously wrote that the first duty of an intelligent person is to restate the obvious. I know you are out and about across the country a lot as well. Especially when you are connecting with the rising generation of young Americans, it is always a little astonishing when you have to restate the obvious about the goodness of marriage, the goodness of children, the blessing of babies, and the blessing of marriage, family, and parenting.

Why a faith community makes for a great life, and these sorts of things. I have found over time that it is not uncommon, not just for younger people, but for people in each generation to say something like, "I hadn't thought about that in a while" or "I guess that makes sense."

Part of it is rekindling an interest. What really matters are the first principles. They are the permanent institutions. I also believe that among the rising generation, there are a flock of young people who are in fact recommitting to these institutions. There are many silver linings in the culture that we are witnessing even today.

Gary Bauer: That is a good summary. I find myself between optimism and pessimism. I think you address this in the book, that there are some people who self-describe themselves as liberals that are suddenly having light bulbs going on and saying, "Wait a minute, marriage does matter. Marriage has always been the bringing together of a man and a woman. If you find that special person, having children is an important thing to do."

Then on my pessimistic days, I will see something like what happened recently. I do not know if you saw this. There was a big conservative conference, the annual CPAC conference, down in Texas. They had a panel of young conservative women.

The women were saying exactly what you would think they would say: that if you are looking for happiness in life, one of the ways to do that is to find that person that loves you and that you love, and then get married and bring as many children as you can into the world because bringing children into the world is a good thing.

The next day, this group of malcontents on the show called "The View", these very liberal women that sit around and just moan and groan about all kinds of things, saw this panel of conservative women. The liberal women went absolutely crazy. Whoopi Goldberg, who is one of them, could not even get a sentence out. She was so angry.

The others lapsed into this: "It takes $400,000 a year just for child care." They were making the most pessimistic analysis that you could make. One of them said this idea of getting married and having children reduces women to nothing but their ovaries. What? How do you explain how badly off the rails from common sense people like that are?

Tim Goeglein: I am eager to go back to your initial comment about pessimism and optimism. I know you are a fellow great admirer of Winston Churchill, who famously said that a pessimist is a person who finds a difficulty in every opportunity and an optimist is a person who finds an opportunity in every difficulty.

In the structure of this book, what I decided to do, acknowledging precisely the kind of things you are raising, Gary—I start in Chapter One, "Restoring Marriage." What I do in the book is I parallel sobering news against hopeful news.

The sobering news to your very point—and I think this is really important to say in this great conversation—is that fewer than half of U.S. households in 2025 were married couples. This is a significant shift from just 50 years earlier, when nearly two-thirds of those homes, 66% of American homes, were defined by a home with a married couple. But here is the good news: among middle to lower-income Americans, the desire to get married has actually substantially increased, 5% just over the last five years.

It is interesting that in the middle and lower-income brackets in the American experience, that is where the uptick is among young people who actually express a very hopeful idea about the importance and the desire to be married. In recent years, that has not necessarily been the case.

There's another recent study which I spend some time on in the book, which found that 41% of Gen Z and millennial men and 52% of Gen Z and millennial women perceive marriage as an outdated institution. That is sobering, no doubt about it.

But the same study showed up to 78% of the same group said, however, even with the difficulties in 21st-century America, I want to be married. There is this aspiration over against the kind of cultural and secular aggressivism that young people are trying to deal with.

Navigating through this is part of the reason that the restoration of marriage can be very difficult because young people who express the desire and the aspiration to be married, every day they are bombarded by a culture that says hold off or think otherwise. Popular television and popular culture are real factors when young people are making some of the most important decisions of their lives.

Gary Bauer: When Carol and I first got married, we waited a couple of years before we started our family. One night, when Carol and her mother had both turned in and I was sitting in the den with her father, he turned to me and he said, "Gary, when are you going to give me a couple of grandchildren?"

Nothing like being asked that question by your father-in-law at 11:30 at night. I thought this would impress him. I said, "Well, we're saving, Dad, and trying to get a little bit of money aside before we make that move." He kind of went, "Hmph." And I said, "Did I say something wrong?" He goes, "Gary, I thought you of all people would know that having a child's got nothing to do with how much money you have in the bank. Having a child is a leap of faith."

Truer words have never been spoken. Do you think that part of the problem we have is that there's such a level, it seems to me, of fear in the culture? We're afraid of global warming. We were afraid of COVID. We're afraid of this, we're afraid of that. People use this as an excuse not to take the risk of loving someone and being loved. They also take the risk of not bringing a new life into the world, which is what God intends for us to do.

Tim Goeglein: I think that's it exactly. It's why in the book I quote very prominently James Q. Wilson. Gary, I think to sum up so beautifully in the point that you've just demonstrated in your own life and in your own family, Jim Wilson said it is not money, but the family that is the foundation of public life. He says as it has become weaker, every structure upon that foundation has become weaker.

I think that's right. Show me a nation of strong marriages, families, and parents; I'll show you a strong nation. Show me a nation with the opposite, and I'll show you a weakened nation.

That's why the structure of the book is rooted in restoring marriage. Another whole chapter is "Restoring the Family." One that I know that you care a lot about is "Restoring the American Male." This involves the very important idea of masculinity versus femininity, which has been under such a remarkable attack.

Fourthly, "Restoring Faith," the undergirding of faith and religion, the Judeo-Christian tradition in the life of the building of our remarkable country. It is the most important ingredient in the idea of our constitutional republic. I include in that idea, because we're in the 250th year, the birth year of America, the idea of restoring the importance of history.

The Italians, they don't know when they were born. The Spanish don't know when they were born. The British don't know when they were born. But we Americans know when we were born. It was about 3:00 in the afternoon on July 4, 1776. Our founding fathers and mothers warned over and over that you have to have an educated, literate citizenry if you want to carry on freedom.

The other side of freedom is virtue. It's the restoration of these first institutions that get us closer to that kind of moral excellence that we need in the leaders and in the citizens to carry on the American project.

Gary Bauer: That's a great historical point, Tim. All the founders believed that only a virtuous people could remain free. One of the reasons for that is that virtue is what restrains us from doing bad things. If we don't have that restraint, government has to get bigger and bigger in order to restrain us. When government gets bigger, that's always at the price of our own liberty.

I was thinking the other day, I remember when a Democrat senator that represented New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, came out with this big report on welfare and the black family. He sounded the alarm because way back in the '60s and '70s, there was significant evidence that the black family unit of mother and father bringing children into the world was breaking down. Moynihan said that if that continued, all the efforts being made to help those families financially or with civil rights laws were likely to fail.

He was a liberal Democrat, and he was excoriated for making judgments about the way people live. Many years forward now, what he pointed out in the black community continued to get worse. The statistics that worried him then about the black family are the figures we have now among Caucasian Americans. This breakdown of the family is almost—I don't even know how to describe it. No other society's done this. This is like an experiment in progress and the early results are not good.

Tim Goeglein: Two things if I may, to pick up on those great points. The first is that Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote that report exactly 62 years ago. When he issued that report, black illegitimacy in the United States was 25%, and Pat Moynihan called it a crisis.

We are now only 62 years from that report. That number today is about 71%. Among Hispanic Americans, that number is about 53%. Among native-born white people, that number is about 33%. This is a very sobering statistic which I write about in "What Really Matters," that the majority of babies who are born to American women ages 30 years of age and under are now born to unmarried women.

What we have in our country is an epidemic of fatherlessness. The political class speaks and writes at length about the border crisis, the tax crisis, and about all the other crises. By the way, that's not to say that those are not incredibly important; of course, they are. But this idea of fatherlessness is a plague on our country.

It's not just you and me as conservative Christians who happen to be Republicans. Three of the most important studies—and I cite them at length in "What Really Matters"—three of the most important studies on these topics have been written by progressive Democrats.

I'm really stunned particularly by the extraordinary work of Melissa Kearney of the University of Maryland. I commend her book to everybody who's listening to us. She wrote that two-parent families provide significant benefits for children, while single parents work incredibly hard; on average, children from two-parent households have a greater access to resource and opportunities.

You dive into the empirical research, and the empirical research overwhelmingly says that if you want to do the best thing for young people, it's growing up in a married family by any objective measure. You can go down a long grocery list of items; it is the two-parent connected family that is the best incubator for the next generation of Americans.

Gary Bauer: You have the same sensitivity that I have had about this. I don't want to discourage single-parent families. I know single-parent women that have done incredible jobs. We all know families with a mother and father that really messed up and did a whole lot of things badly. Maybe their kids just used their free will and made their own decisions, and those ended up being bad decisions.

When you're making public policy or when you're trying to figure out what to encourage and what to hold up to be emulated, you have to look at the broad research and what it tells you. What it tells you is that a mother brings certain things to both a daughter and to a son that only a mother can bring, and that a father brings things to a son and a daughter that only a father can bring.

When you have that mother and father in the home working together, those two children, that little girl and that little boy, are more likely by the empirical evidence to have better outcomes across the board on virtually every measurement that social scientists can come up with.

Tim Goeglein: I agree strongly and firmly. By the way, I love the word parenting, but I think we ought to think often about using phrases like mothering and fathering because mothering and fathering bring very unique skills and differences to the life of children.

Then I'd like to pick up on that point that you made to the last question. I was in a debate at the turn of the year at a very large public university. It was quite a debate on the topics that we're talking about. I said near the end of the debate that we do not have any examples yet of a government that will save a marriage, or a government that will tuck a child into bed at night.

My interlocutor paused for a moment and she said, "I've never thought of it that way." That to me is interesting because we have lived through a blizzard, a tsunami of federal spending, the "Great Society," which incentivized in many ways the breakup of the family.

We actually at the federal level worked overtime to disincentivize the biological fathers of being deeply invested and involved in the lives of their daughters and sons. We can look empirically and say that's what we should not do.

But the really good news is that among the rising generation of young Americans, particularly among young men who are 18 to 30 years old, they want something different. They want to be married. They want to have children. They know the importance of tradition. They know the importance of being part of a faith community.

Even though those aspirational numbers are higher among that demographic of young American men, among young American women, aspirationally they also want that. But they find that there is a large percentage of American men who are not marriageable. They're not looking for a job. They're not working. They're not in school. This is a large number. Nick Eberstadt has done a deep-dive study on this huge percentage of American men who are not marriageable simply because they're really not doing anything in a common day, week, month, or year. It's a very sobering reality.

Gary Bauer: It is fair to say from what I've been able to tell, Tim, that while you certainly address these trends—the idea that there are not enough marriageable men in America is so depressing to me that I don't really know how to completely react to it. Carol and I have three adult children, two girls and a boy. But we have four grandsons.

Both of the families that those grandsons are in really overtly talk about it. It's really a reference to what Erica Kirk said that Charlie Kirk was interested in: save the men of the West. These two families with our grandsons intentionally set out every day to save our boys and make them into the kind of men that can be marriageable men but also save our country.

Tim Goeglein: I'll say again, this is why I wanted to devote a chapter in "What Really Matters" exclusively to restoring the American male. Men account for three out of every four suicides or drug overdoses; approximately 15% say they have no friends. We should be sobered in the United States among a large percentage of young men who simply are having a crisis of loneliness. And it's a real thing.

On the other hand, when you look, about 48% of conservatives and 41% of liberals say they are worried about the state of American boys, and they say they want to do something better to affect a change. So I find a bit of a silver lining there that even if we ultimately may disagree on the biggest policies, I really do think that people of goodwill have come together to see that this is not nothing.

The things that we've been writing about, speaking about, and advocating in this space of the necessity to understand the unique God-given roles of masculinity and femininity are not rooted in some ideological equation; they are real.

This is why I think that on the trans debate as it relates to sports and a number of other issues, I believe that American conservatives are seeing victory after victory because real people with real families understand that the implications for this are real.

Gary Bauer: That's a great point. The trans ideology phenomena—the fact that it sprung on the scene and yet we found out later it had sunk roots deep into multiple professional organizations in the field of medicine and so-called science and the universities. In the very beginning of the debate, there was a lot of confusion. I don't even think people even knew what the term like "trans woman" meant.

The polling showed the public was kind of divided. Once people realized that these were psychologically ill men, or worse, who were asserting they were women and then demanding access, not only to women's sports but to your daughter's or granddaughter's locker room, then I think good old common-sense Americans said, "Whoa, wait a minute. That's insane." This has been one of the first big cultural issues where we actually appear to have won the debate.

Tim Goeglein: I think that's right. As we all know, these cases have been coming to the United States Supreme Court, the circuit and appellate court level, and the district court level. Of the ones that you and I would say on a scale of one to ten are the most important ones, I'm pretty sure that almost without exception we are winning in that regard.

It goes into the cultural question. It is hard to think about this in real time, but over there was Pat Moynihan, over there were you and Dr. Dobson, over there was Ronald Reagan, over there was Scoop Jackson. Yet, here we are just a few years later, and so much of what was being debated there, and what people were really concerned about, I think is now coming to fruition.

Moynihan was correct when he said that the central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. He said that the central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself. I think we're learning very quickly that on these very important issues, politics can make it a whole lot worse; it mostly cannot resolve it. Moynihan was correct that conservatism at its highest sees cultural reformation, restoration, and renewal as the thing.

Gary Bauer: Culture is upstream of politics. There's no question about it.

Tim Goeglein: I think politics is downstream from culture, but I think culture is downstream from things of the spirit. Religion is determinative on so many of these questions. Very recently, in a restaurant, they had the little gift shop and they had a little sign. The sign said, "The best things in life aren't things."

That is an important summation of the kind of cultural debate we're having. It's not material things or money. Those are very important, but it is the first principles, it's the first institutions. We should celebrate in this 250th year, really celebrate marriage, family, parenting, and the goodness and power of faith. These things have never been more important in the American experience. We need to go tell a new generation about the goodness of these things. It's a wonderful way to form a great life.

Gary Bauer: Probably the most important thing we can do on the 250th this year. Obviously, we're all celebrating and thank God that we have a president and an administration that's not ashamed of America's history and wants our children to know that true history, including its flaws.

But the other thing we ought to do is make sure that in our churches, the halls of government, and the popular culture, we're promoting things and encouraging things that will help ensure that there's a 300th birthday of the American Republic. If we don't, the 250th will not sustain it just by itself.

Tim Goeglein: In summary, Gary, it's funny we would say that because I was in another debate. In a closing argument, I said I'd like to propose a question for everybody who's here: what kind of a country do we want in 50 years? That question should be one that we should be prepared as a great nation to answer. What kind of a nation do we want 50 years from now?

Gary Bauer: Tim, the book sounds fantastic. As I said, because it's based on a variety of essays, it really fits the busy lifestyles that people have. You don't have to sit down and read a 45-page chapter; you can sit down and read a couple of these columns and essays and then consume a couple more the next day. Give us the title again and where people can find the book.

Tim Goeglein: That's so great of you, and I hope everybody buys and enjoys it and shares it with their 50,000 best friends. The title is "What Really Matters." The subtitle, "Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family." Published by Fidelis Books, and it is widely available wherever people buy books. Barnes & Noble, Target, Amazon—it's widely available and it's "What Really Matters."

Gary Bauer: Fantastic. Tim, it's great to spend some time with you as always. Sometime we have to get together and critique what went wrong with my campaign. I know it couldn't have been the media, which you were handling for me. But it was a very much of a learning experience.

As I know you recall, many of the issues we just discussed were things central to the campaign that I ran in 2000. God bless you for all the work you do for family, faith, and freedom. Folks, be sure to come back and take a listen to us at Defending Faith, Family and Freedom here at the James Dobson Family Institute.

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