Douglas Wilson, senior minister of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, critiques therapeutic sentimentalism—modern parenting prioritizing feelings over reality—as a cultural inversion enabling chaos. His book Keep Your Kids contrasts this with biblical discipline (Proverbs 13:24), arguing secular therapy often lacks moral accountability, while atheistic societies historically collapse into tyranny (Stalin, Pol Pot). Wilson insists Christians must confidently assert unchanging biblical truth, even in secular spaces, to equip kids for life’s objective demands. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Douglas Wilson.
We've been talking to a bunch of people about personal things because I think we are going to rebuild this culture and rebuild this world.
We're going to do it one person at a time.
And even if we are going to fail to do it, the people who rebuild their lives are going to be survivors, the remnant of the truth.
And Douglas Wilson has written a new book called Keep Your Kids, How to Raise Strong Kids in an Age of Therapeutic Sentimentalism.
He sent me his own introduction that says Douglas Wilson is the senior minister of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho.
He's an award-winning novelist, but has written a number of other books that didn't win nothing.
I think this book, as far as I know, hasn't won anything, but I read it and I enjoyed it very, very much.
And one of the reasons I'm so interested in this, I've told you the story before, but I visited Douglas and his group in Moscow, Idaho, and was so impressed with how happy the young people were.
And I remember just coming home and telling my wife about how just startlingly well-adjusted and content they all looked and how well educated and thoughtful they were.
And so I think Douglas has a lot of cred with me as long as, as well as the fact that I actually personally like him and he's a man of culture and intelligence.
This book has a really interesting subtitle.
It's called Keep Your Kids, How to Raise Strong Kids in an Age of Therapeutic Sentimentalism.
I was really captured by that because I'm really interested.
I really believe that's a thing, but I'm wondering if you could define therapeutic sentimentalism.
Sure thing.
I've written a number of family books, marriage books, raising kids, but I realized I was listening to a book called Bad Therapy by Abigail Schreier, which is a really great book.
And I realized that a lot of the stuff that I'd done, most of the stuff I'd done on family, was written back in normal times before everything went nuts.
It is a challenge to raise kids in a fallen world at any time.
The world's never been a perfect place.
But at least the world used to be right side up.
And I recognized that a lot of the parents, young parents with little kids, were bringing up children in clown world, which my wife and I did not have to do.
There were godly people and ungodly people and there were worldly people and there were saintly people.
And that was pretty straightforward being able to navigate.
But we have arrived in a time where a lot of the normal standards have just simply been inverted.
And Isaiah says, woe to those who call good evil and evil good, who substitute light for darkness and darkness for light, sweet for bitter and bitter for sweet.
So woe to those who make a photo negative out of the world.
And child rearing used to be the task of equipping your child to navigate an objective world, getting your child equipped so that they knew how to accommodate themselves and challenge and appropriately make their way in the world.
Today, parents have bought into the assumption that they need to get the world to accommodate itself to the child.
Okay.
And what they do there, and accommodating the world to the child, reduces to getting the world to accommodate itself to the child's feelings in the moment.
Okay.
So what is Billy's truth?
What does Billy want to be?
Well, Billy can be anything he wants to be.
And it used to be 50 years ago, you can be anything you want to be meant you could be an airline pilot or a CEO or go into politics.
Now, you can be anything you want to be is you can be a raccoon.
You can be a girl if you want.
You can be anything you want.
And in order to get to that nonsensical state, you have to pretend that the world is malleable play-doh and that the world can be shaped and fitted to whatever feelings are going on in the child right now.
And so consequently, it used to be that your child would have a collision with reality and parents would say, well, things are tough all over and you've got to learn to suck it up.
And yeah, I know you had a bad time with your teacher in junior high there.
But actually, the world is a lot like this.
You're going to be employed by people just like that in about 15 years.
And we're going to help you figure out how to do this.
Well, now children are flattered and just endlessly flattered.
And they're told that everybody must bow and scrape to their feelings.
And that, of course, this is a recipe for chaos because feelings change.
Other people who are being catered to have a completely different set of feelings.
And so another subtitle for this book would be how to raise children in a world that would have been the way it is had you never been born.
You know, I would like to know, I have these mixed feelings about therapy.
Therapy helped me out very much in a crisis in my youth.
My wife is a marriage counselor, you know, so this kind of therapy.
And yet, and yet, I also believe that there is this kind of emanation from therapy.
There are a lot of bad therapists out there for one thing, but also there's this kind of emanation of therapy that does have this weird effect of making it seem that you're not responsible for anything.
I'm wondering, I guess what I'm wondering is why you call it therapeutic sentimentalism exactly.
Why you think that that comes out of the therapeutic world that we're obviously in?
Yeah, that came out of reading Abigail Schreiber's book, Bad Therapy.
And of course, I've done a boatload of marriage counseling.
I'm a pastor.
I counsel people.
So I'm not against, I'm not against that.
I believe that we are given to one another and someone who has the gift of insight and wisdom can certainly help someone else out, sometimes just by being there, sometimes with a word of wisdom.
But I've for many years, I've distinguished counsel from counseling.
So counseling can be something where a person's, it's like an attorney client privileged.
So the person goes to the therapist and they're paying the therapist and it's the therapist's job to take their side.
Just like if you go to an attorney, it's his job to represent you.
But in biblical counsel or counsel that's at least rooted in the way the world is, I would say it's the counselor's job to represent reality.
So if you go into a counselor and you say, here's my sob story.
Here's what happened to me.
And let me tell you all about how they treated me.
And the counselor is no more than an emotional support dog where they're there.
And okay, whatever you say, whatever you say, as long as you pay the bill, whatever you say, the counselor and the counsellee are going to float off like two helium balloons.
At the same time, God has given us, we're social beings, we live in community.
There are many instances where a wise counselor can do an enormous amount of good, but it has to be rooted in the way things are.
We don't get to daydream.
As I saw a great t-shirt once, gravity.
It's not just a good idea.
It's the law.
You know, I'm reminded, as you're talking, of one of my favorite scenes in the TV show, The Sopranos, where the mobster's wife goes to an old Jewish therapist and she's trying to explain everything in these psychological terms.
And the therapist kind of delivers some Old Testament wisdom and just says, no, your problem is you're evil.
Your problem is you're involved with evil.
It's really a shocking scene.
And so if I could just add on to that, I do pastoral counseling all the time.
And there's a lot of bad secular counseling out there.
But I know one counselor here in town who is a good, reasonable Christian man, gives good counsel.
And one of the things is he believes in sin.
He believes that people do bad things.
And they need to come to grips with that.
You can't just drug up someone to deal with the guilt.
Guilt, fear, and shame need to be addressed with the gospel and not with meds.
Yeah, yeah.
No, it's really, that the meds thing drives me insane.
It's absolutely true.
You have a concept in this book.
I can't remember now if it's a chapter title, but you use the term that I really liked, love and its counterfeits.
Could you expand on that a little bit?
Because we all love our children so much and we all, you know, we want them to love us.
And it is part of parenting to have to say, do hard things.
What did you mean by its counterfeits?
Yeah, that ties in with the word sentimentalism in the subtitle.
So, for example, there's a passage in Proverbs where it says, a man who does not discipline his son hates his son.
Now, so a loving father is going to say to a son who's misbehaving, he's going to say, I love you too much to let you go out into the world like that.
If you go out into the world like that, you're going to get creamed.
And you're going to get creamed by people who don't love you nearly as much as I do.
So there's a difference between the sentimental love, the trickly love that flatters.
Oh, my child can do no wrong.
My child, well, he's very busy.
He's gifted, right?
He's the sullen, angry kid at the birthday party, a little rain cloud raining on everybody.
And the parents say, oh, he's gifted.
What they're doing is they're making excuses for him.
And because they're not providing the discipline that helps him figure out what the world's actually like, they are setting him up for disaster down the road.
And this takes different forms.
But if you stopped the parent who's being sentimentally overly kind and said, do you describe this sentiment you have right now as hatred?
They would say, no, no, I adore my child.
That's why I flatter them.
That's why I give them everything they want.
That's why I cater to their every wish and whim and so forth.
And I would say, yes, your sentiment, your emotion is one of love, but the impact of what you're doing is tantamount to hatred.
You're destroying your kid.
And this, to come at the same thing from another angle, one time many years ago, I was teaching at our private Christian school.
I was teaching a class, and there was a young boy, a young black boy in the class who was kind of a pill.
He was not liked by the other kids, and he had trouble.
Image God Burning00:16:14
He just had trouble.
And I was having a parent conference with his mom, and she was convinced that the other kids didn't like him and were picking on him because of his color, right?
And she was wanting to circle the wagons, wanting to coddle him because the world was not coddling him.
And I said, I didn't dispute her take.
I didn't think her take was accurate, but I didn't dispute it.
But I did say, look, you're telling me that you believe that your son is growing up in a world where he's going to have to work twice as hard to get the same distance.
That's what you think.
You think the system is rigged against your son, and he's going to have to work twice as hard to get the same, achieve the same goals.
And I said, I'm telling you as his teacher, he's currently working half as hard.
Now, you're telling me that he's going to have to work twice as hard.
I'm telling you that he's working half as hard.
And that means you tell me what's going to happen to him when he goes out into the world.
He is singularly ill-equipped to deal with what he's going to encounter there.
And he's going to be ill-equipped because sentiment prevented parents from telling him to stand up straight and put on his big boy pants.
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No, my wife used to say this all the time.
And if you don't teach your kid manners, adults will dislike them.
And that's not going to go well for them, especially as they move up in the world and want to get hired and all.
Yeah, I love you too much to let that happen.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, obviously, one of the things that is at the core of our dysfunction right now is this absolute chaotic confusion about gender.
And which for people our age, I think is just appalling.
I mean, you sit there and think like, you know, this is the central reality of the human experience or central to the reality of the human experience.
And people are confused about things that everybody has always known.
What do you teach your kids?
I mean, you've got grandkids, you've got great grandkids.
What do you teach your kids about gender specifically?
Is there something that you say to them about the fact that their girls are boys that they can keep with them as they go forward and come into this chaos of this crazed philosophy?
Yeah, it begins by modeling it in the home where dad is dad and mom is mom.
And kids are going to be picking up on a bunch of those signals because we learn by imitation.
Our central learning mechanism, that's how we learn to talk.
And, you know, that's why we have accents.
That's why we have the speech patterns we do is we learn by imitation.
So if mom and dad are secure in their roles and they are clearly defined roles, not watertight roles, because clearly defined roles, just incidentally, that's what makes a gift possible.
So when the husband does the dishes or the wife mows the lawn, the stereotype, the stereotypical roles are there and everybody has a sense of stability from them.
But there are times when everybody has to pitch in and lend a helping hand and that's just normal life.
So one of the things that I would say is model it or live it out.
The second thing is it's astonishing what kids will pick up on that way.
One time when one of my daughters was a little girl, very, you know, I think preschool, they went to the pediatrician and the pediatrician had some sort of, there were some pictures that kids had drawn on the wall, something like that.
And the pediatrician said something like, the boys draw trucks and the girls draw houses with smoke coming out of the chimneys because this is socially social construct that we teach them to do this.
And they were, Nancy and my daughter were leaving, and my preschool daughter said to her mother, she doesn't have any kids, does she?
I heard of one situation where some feminist parents gave their little girl a dump truck, you know, model dump truck and construction gear and stuff.
And so she had the truck in bed and tucked it in, you know?
Fed it with a bottle.
So then that leads to the third thing, is I think that we need to teach our kids to obey their chromosomes.
God didn't just haphazardly throw you together from pieces out of a junk drawer.
In Genesis 1, it says that God made them male and female.
In the image of God created he them.
So male and female is the way God configured the world as a way of manifesting or declaring his image.
That's his signature.
It's his signature on the painting.
And the illustration I use to talk about this, and I think this is a good way to talk with your kids, is let's say there was a king lived in a castle on the hill, and there was a village down below, and the villagers hated the king.
They just didn't like him.
But he was too powerful to do anything about it.
They couldn't assault the castle.
He had a strong army and so forth.
But they hated him anyway.
Well, they can't reach him.
They can't topple him.
They can't overthrow him.
The one thing they can do down in the valley is they can burn him in effigy.
They can make an image of him and burn that image.
And that's what this transgender insanity is.
We bear the image of God, male and female, and the transsexual revolution is trying to burn God's image in effigy.
Is there a way that we can mar or destroy or erase that signature and instead of the signature of God, put the signature of man on it, and the sky's the limit, we tell ourselves.
You know, 58 genders or whatever Facebook says, and you can toggle from one to the other.
All that matters is your feeling, because remember, the therapeutic sentimentalism demands that the world bow and scrape before your feelings and not the other way around.
You know, when you're a pastor and you're making frequent reference to the Bible, and I, imperfect though I may be, I mean, Christ is, I can certainly honestly say Christ is the center of my life as imperfectly as I may follow.
And I'm sure you're asked this all the time.
I'm asked this all the time.
Can people be good people and not believe in God?
And of course they can.
But it does seem to me that the logic of what you're saying depends upon the bottom line of faith in something that looks very much like the God of the Bible.
And in other words, so that people can, of course, be good people, but they're not being logical in their goodness.
And I think that things that don't make sense ultimately collapse.
This concerns me because the things, when you're saying these things, I'm nodding and they make perfect sense to me.
And I'm saying, yes, that follows logically.
Is there a way that you ever address people who are not believers that makes sense?
Yeah, so here, I think you've put your finger on it.
Let's say, in a thought experiment, let's say I live next door.
My next door neighbor was an atheist and didn't believe in God at all.
I'm perfectly capable of getting along with him and having conversations and perfectly capable of being friends with this person who doesn't believe in God.
And if we were to go on vacation, I wouldn't have any trouble asking him to take in our mail or to put out the trash or do different things.
I wouldn't have to, my Christian faith doesn't obligate me to believe that when we drive around the corner off on vacation, he's going to run over and burn down our house because he's an atheist.
So that kind of civic goodness is something that is obviously the case.
You can have a Buddhist on one side and an atheist on the other and a Christian in the middle.
And it's possible to get along.
Okay.
But this is the thing.
In a conversation with that atheist, he could do all sorts of decent things for me.
What he cannot do is give me any reasonable account why.
That's true.
Right?
He can't answer the most basic questions.
And because of this, because men are individually inconsistent and are capable of being inconsistent, it's worth pointing out that men collectively are always consistent with their presuppositions.
And there has never been an atheistic society or an atheistic nation that wasn't a hellhole.
Okay?
Because the presuppositions will work themselves out collectively.
If there is no God above Stalin, then Stalin is God.
If there is no God above Pol Pot, then Pol Pot is God.
If there is no God above the tyrant, then the tyrant is God.
And so if he wants to starve the Ukrainians or if he wants to do whatever it is he wants to do, a hundred years hence, if he remained in power until he died, he gambled and gambled correctly.
Look at Auschwitz, look at Buchenwald, and then superimpose over that John Lenin's inane song, Imagine.
You look at the Auschwitz gas chamber, above them, only sky, right?
Imagine there's no heaven, that the universe doesn't care, right?
And the atheist has to be more, I think, needs to be more intellectually honest and rigorous with himself.
I traveled with Christopher Hitchens a number of years ago, and we made a documentary together.
And he could get really morally indignant about certain things, but he couldn't explain why he was getting morally indignant.
Because all we are, if there is no God, all we are is meat, bones, and protoplasm.
All we are is time and chance acting on matter.
We are the froth on the waves.
And why get indignant about anything that's going on?
My thoughts are simply what these chemicals in this bone box will do at this temperature and under these conditions.
So where's this indignation coming from?
Yeah, no, I always wondered this one when people on the left talk about racism and on the atheist left talk about racism.
I always think, I know why I believe racism is a grave sin because it's a sin against the image of God.
It's essentially saying you can't see the image of God in a certain colored face or a certain kind of face.
But I don't know why they are.
I don't know what their problem is.
And ultimately.
That's exactly right.
And so, and if someone says, oh, you're saying an atheist is going to be a genocidal murderer.
No, no, I don't believe that.
But I do believe that an atheist confronted with a genocidal murderer would have no answer, would have no explanation, would have nothing that he could say to him.
So this creates a responsibility in us to talk into the secular world at some length.
Now, you have it easy because you're a pastor, so you get to say those things.
But as an artist, I think about this quite a lot because you want to meet people in some sense where they are.
And I personally don't believe because I think it makes the world a better place.
I believe because I think it's true.
I mean, I'm absolutely convinced that this is when I'm reading the Bible, I'm reading an account of people telling me things that happen.
What do you think is the key for speaking into, if you had a, you know, wanted to give people advice on how to speak into the secular world without being just annoying and turning people off, which I guess is counterproductive, where would you begin?
Yeah, if I were speaking to Christians, to preachers or street preachers or evangelists or whatever, I would turn to the Christians and I would say, please make a distinction between confidence on the one hand, which is attractive, and bombast, which is not.
Okay.
So security, confidence, security, a secure belief that these are, in fact, the words of God is powerfully attractive to people living in a rootless generation.
We are living in times where everything is just upended and people are not designed to live that way.
And so if a rootless person comes across a rooted person and they are confident that Jesus is the way and the Bible is his word and they speak with confidence, that's going to be mighty attractive.
At the same time, the counterfeit of that is thumping your chest and standing on the chair and preaching in rotund vowels.
No, brethren, ladies and gentlemen.
That kind of thing.
You don't want to do that.
You want to simply say, these are the words of God.
I found this as this.
Cliche goes, evangelism is one beggar telling another beggar where he found some bread.
This is wonderful.
It's answered things for me.
Let me share it with you.
So that's the general approach that I would encourage believers to take as they're sharing the gospel, as they're living it out.
Confidence is not the same thing as bombast.
That said, you want to say, look, here's another illustration, one that I learned from my dad.
Let's say, and I'm not recommending, it's just a thought experiment.
Believers' Approach to Evangelism00:02:35
I'm not recommending this, but let's say you're going to mug somebody and you came up behind them and stuck your gun in their back and said, give me your wallet.
And the person laughed gayly and said, you can't do this to me.
I don't believe in guns.
Now, the thing that would make the illustration hilarious would be if the mugger said, oh, I'm sorry, and put the gun away.
Right?
Well, now the problem is not that the muggy doesn't believe in guns.
The mugger doesn't believe in guns.
So if I refer to the Bible, if I say, well, God's word says this, and the person I'm talking to laughs gaily and says, well, you can't do that.
I don't believe in your Bible.
That's to be expected.
But if I get embarrassed and go red in the face and put my Bible away, the problem is not that he doesn't believe in the Bible.
The problem is that I don't believe I don't believe in the Bible.
So if he said, I don't believe in your God, I can say, well, that's funny you should say that because in Psalm 14, 1, it says, the fool has said in his heart, there is no God.
So you speak to the person's condition from the word with the absolute rock-solid certainty that God's word stands sure.
God's word doesn't change.
Man's word changes all the time.
I'm out of time, but I want to ask you one question out of pure curiosity.
I recently saw a film by Clinice, which is probably his last film called Jur Number Two, which I thought was a wonderfully religious film, which has nothing to do with God at any point except at one moment, one crucial moment when a lawyer looks at the state seal and it says, in God we trust, and focuses on those words.
So you know that that's what she's thinking in that moment.
And I just thought, that's wonderful.
What a wonderful way to pull this off.
And I don't even know what Clinice would believe.
But is there a movie or a book that comes to mind that you just think speaks into the secular world with great expertise and power?
You just have to name it because I'm, like I said, I'm out of the way.
I would say Peace Like a River by Leif Wenger.
Yeah.
I would say that is a book that will move you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very much.
Doug Wilson, the book is Keep Your Kids, How to Raise Strong Kids in an Age of Therapeutic Sentimentalism, but it's only one of many books he has written.
It is always great to talk to you, Doug.
Hopeful Conversations00:00:35
I hope you have a wonderful Christmas and I hope to see you again soon.
God bless.
Always good to talk to Doug Wilson.
He has a lot of common sense, very culturally minded, very much paying attention to the world as it actually is instead of the world as we would all prefer it to be.
I hope he has a Merry Christmas and I hope you have a Merry Christmas.
There will be no Andrew Clavin Show Christmas week, but I'll be back on January 3rd in the new year.
I hope you will be there because I'll be there.
And if you're not there, I'll just be talking to myself, which would be absurd.
So I'll see you then.
Have a merry, merry Christmas and a happy new year.