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Speaker 1: On this episode of news World, I was fascinated by

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Speaker 1: the results of a new nationwide study on faith in

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Speaker 1: relationships by Communio, a national nonprofit organization that works with

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Speaker 1: churches to strengthen families and develop stronger faith lives. The

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Speaker 1: study reveals a strong correlation between people who grew up

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Speaker 1: in homes with married parents and their continuation their practice

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Speaker 1: of faith in adulthood. It also shows that loneliness is

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Speaker 1: a crisis that is negatively affecting relationships and religious life.

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Speaker 1: The conclusions of the study are drawn from a nationwide

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Speaker 1: survey of nineteen thousand Sunday church attendees conducted during worship

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Speaker 1: in one hundred and twelve Evangelical, Protestant and Catholic congregations.

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Speaker 1: That's an amazing amount of work. Here to discuss the

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Speaker 1: new study, I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, JP Degance.

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Speaker 1: He is the founder and president of Communio and the

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Speaker 1: co author of the book Endngate, the church's strategic move

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Speaker 1: to say faith and Family in America. JP, welcome and

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Speaker 1: thank you for joining me on newts World.

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Speaker 2: It's exciting to be here. Thanks so much for having men.

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Speaker 1: How did you go from working in politics to looking

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Speaker 1: into the relationship between marriage and faith.

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Speaker 2: You know, it became like a lot of people who

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Speaker 2: come to DC, you do this to try to save

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Speaker 2: the country, and you start to recognize that a lot

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Speaker 2: of what's going on in our politics is downstream of

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Speaker 2: what's happening culturally in our homes. Actually, and God redirected

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Speaker 2: my life About fifteen years ago, my sister's family failed.

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Speaker 2: She was an abusive marriage and she ended up becoming

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Speaker 2: temporarily homeless. And my wife and I, she asked us

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Speaker 2: to tea in her four kids, and we experienced what

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Speaker 2: happens when families fail in a real powerful way. And

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Speaker 2: God used that to redirect my life in some pretty

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Speaker 2: significant ways. And I started asking the question, what would

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Speaker 2: it look like to use the types of tools and

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Speaker 2: technologies that exist in the political and business world and

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Speaker 2: bring it, baptize it, sanctify it, bring it into the

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Speaker 2: service of the church to renew marriage and our culture

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Speaker 2: which is so badly broken right now.

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Speaker 1: Before you got into looking at faith, you had quite

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Speaker 1: a background in politics. Walk us through sort of your education,

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Speaker 1: if you will. On the political side.

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Speaker 2: I'm a disciple of Morton Blackwell. I went to a

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Speaker 2: youth leadership schools, and he actually showed up to that

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Speaker 2: particular one in the state of Florida that year and

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Speaker 2: ended up being the executive director of his pack for

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Speaker 2: a cycle and working at the Leadership Institute separately that

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Speaker 2: he ran, and then later on got connected with Charles

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Speaker 2: Cooke and worked on his special projects team the Coke

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Speaker 2: Industries in the free market side of the movement and

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Speaker 2: becoming a vice president leader at Americans for Prosperity, and

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Speaker 2: in that work ended up being exposed to all sorts

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Speaker 2: of neat and amazing different types of strategies on polling, messaging,

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Speaker 2: gotv micro targeting, and started to ask the question of

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Speaker 2: so much of this stuff that exists in the policy

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Speaker 2: world can be used and is used in business, it

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Speaker 2: can also be used in ministry effectively in morally illicit way, right,

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Speaker 2: And I ended up getting a phone call from Adam Myerson,

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Speaker 2: who was the president of the Filanpy Roundtable, and Adam

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Speaker 2: was looking for a chief operating officer. I told him

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Speaker 2: he didn't know what it would look like yet, but

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Speaker 2: it was very interested in working with philanthropists around building

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Speaker 2: strategies that could produce movement, not on public policy, but

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Speaker 2: in terms of increasing the stability of families, increasing the

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Speaker 2: number of people getting to church. Fundamentally, what's going on

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Speaker 2: in our country. There's a crisis in the American soul, okay,

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Speaker 2: and it spills out and politics. An old friend, Texas

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Speaker 2: oil guy, shared with me. I thought it was a

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Speaker 2: useful analogy that if you want to try to change

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Speaker 2: the country by focusing on politics alone, then that's a

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Speaker 2: little bit like trying to change the weather by playing

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Speaker 2: with a thermometer. Obviously, there's bilateral causality. Politics changes culture.

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Speaker 2: Culture changes politics. It became clear to me that we

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Speaker 2: need to be deeply serious about the health of our culture,

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Speaker 2: and the health of the culture is formed fundamentally by

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Speaker 2: our families and our houses of worshiper churches, and when

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Speaker 2: those are ill, we're in a really bad way. And

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Speaker 2: that's what we're seeing and play out in so many ways.

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Speaker 1: So you move from that political awareness thinking about it

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Speaker 1: in the culture, and then in twenty fifteen you create

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Speaker 1: the Culture of Freedom initiative, which is really a breakthrough

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Speaker 1: and sort of doing with Martin described, you're now using

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Speaker 1: the knowledge and the techniques and the practical things, but

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Speaker 1: applying it to faith and culture. A little bit about

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Speaker 1: the culture of freedom in Issiue was a fascinating breakthrough moment.

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Speaker 2: It was a big idea, the idea of taking a

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Speaker 2: lot of the tools that exist in the areas of

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Speaker 2: business and politics, right so effective message testing, micro targeting. Okay,

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Speaker 2: we're at the cutting edge of bringing micro targeting into ministry.

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Speaker 2: In a campaign, you have a zero sum game, as

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Speaker 2: you well know, November is always coming, and then you

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Speaker 2: have to husband your resources, move back and someone at

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Speaker 2: the end of the day is going to know whether

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Speaker 2: you want or lost. In ministry, we created a goal,

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Speaker 2: a deadline, a number that we wanted to reach in

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Speaker 2: terms of reducing the number of people getting divorced, increasing

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Speaker 2: the number of people getting to church. Okay, And then

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Speaker 2: we looked out over several years and worked back from

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Speaker 2: that like you might in a political campaign, and then

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Speaker 2: thought to husband resources and we called each of our

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Speaker 2: pilot areas a cultural enterprise zone. And we raised about

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Speaker 2: twenty million dollars and spent it over three and a

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Speaker 2: half years and found a lot of things that didn't work.

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Speaker 2: We tried things. It was an R and D project.

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Speaker 2: Thanks be to Guy, we found some things that worked

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Speaker 2: well and in Jacksonville, Florida. Duval County was one of

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Speaker 2: our big pilot areas an NFL market. We were able

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Speaker 2: churches there that we worked with. We moved fifty twelve

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Speaker 2: people through four hours or more relationships skills ministry in

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Speaker 2: the county. We saturated the county with digital messaging, really

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Speaker 2: trying to target folks who were at risk for divorce.

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Speaker 2: And then the net over that three year span was

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Speaker 2: the divorce rate tumbled twenty four percent. And we had

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Speaker 2: some business guys, you know, are not just going to

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Speaker 2: take your word for it. So we had some folks

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Speaker 2: pay for an outside evaluation of our work, which of

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Speaker 2: course is always a little scary. And Brad Wilcox, who

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Speaker 2: is a scholar at University of Virginia, and then some

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Speaker 2: scholars at Florida State and a separate evaluation, and then

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Speaker 2: some guys from BYU ended up doing evaluations, said there's

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Speaker 2: there's no explanation for this decline in the county other

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Speaker 2: than this intervention that you did, right. And so this

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Speaker 2: was really the largest privately funded citywide effort to affect

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Speaker 2: change on family stability. It succeeded, and afterwards my board

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Speaker 2: and donors pushed us to think about how we scale,

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Speaker 2: and we distilled from our work that really we didn't

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Speaker 2: start this way automatically we included the church, but we

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Speaker 2: recognize that the church was the most scalable unit of

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Speaker 2: social change in the country. There's a lot of gospel

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Speaker 2: reasons that are clear and obvious. Right the church is

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Speaker 2: the body of Christ, and the Church in her members

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Speaker 2: or Christ's hands and feet in the world. But in

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Speaker 2: thinking and appealing that you've got churches in every town,

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Speaker 2: in every community, on every street corner, and there's hundreds

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Speaker 2: of billions of dollars of brick and mortar assets and

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Speaker 2: human resource capital sitting on the sidelines right now, not

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Speaker 2: leveraged in this great cultural struggle around renewal of marriage.

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Speaker 2: And then we recognize that this is a great way

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Speaker 2: to share the gospel, to grow, to draw people to

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Speaker 2: faith in Jesus Christ. The Church is always advanced the

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Speaker 2: gospel through felt need, okay, throughout her history and does

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Speaker 2: so today. And we don't have felt needs of poverty

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Speaker 2: and malnutrition. What we have is worse. Mother Teresa said

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Speaker 2: that lonliness is the leprosy of the West, and we've

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Speaker 2: got that in spades. And folks want healthy relationships, they

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Speaker 2: want healthy marriages, and so we come alongside the local

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Speaker 2: church where basically we operate largely like a campaign manager

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Speaker 2: in terms of supporting the local church helping them design

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Speaker 2: a strategy to do targeted outreach. We call it a

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Speaker 2: data informed full circle relationship ministry, and the idea is

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Speaker 2: informed by my old life and Morton's influence and helping

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Speaker 2: a church basically design a campaign plan to reach out

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Speaker 2: to the community, draw people in and affect change on

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Speaker 2: relationship and merital health.

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Speaker 1: Now, in February of twenty nineteen, the Culture of Freedom

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Speaker 1: Initiative gets rebranded as Communio. That obviously must have meant

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Speaker 1: something big to you because that's a major project to

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Speaker 1: do that, and you'd already had an invested communication around

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Speaker 1: Culture of Freedom initiative. What led you to adopt Communio

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Speaker 1: and what does Communio mean to you?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, So the Culture of Freedom was a project we

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Speaker 2: started as a project in program within the phil Anthony Roundtable.

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Speaker 2: The Flanty round tables constituents or philanthropists. They're members of

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Speaker 2: the donor community, and so the name reflected that. And

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Speaker 2: so the idea was to help philanthropus understand that if

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Speaker 2: you care about a healthy and free American Republic, American society.

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Speaker 2: Then you need to be deeply interested in the health

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Speaker 2: of the culture. Right. That was the origin name. Right,

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Speaker 2: And once we had our proof case, and it evolved

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Speaker 2: in a way that we did not anticipate at the

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Speaker 2: very beginning, which was we recognize that the go forward

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Speaker 2: strategy was churches would be our customers. And so we

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Speaker 2: spun off from the Philanthi Roundtable as a separate legal entity.

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Speaker 2: We incorporated in twenty sixteen and completely spun off in

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Speaker 2: twenty nineteen at the end of twenty eighteen. Really and

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Speaker 2: then we said, okay, well, for churches are customers, what

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Speaker 2: more effectively communicates to the church our mission. Our mission

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Speaker 2: is to equip the church to share the Gospel through

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Speaker 2: the renewal of healthy relationships and marriage. The word communio

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Speaker 2: was selected because obviously it's Latin means community, and the

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Speaker 2: two core pillars of strong community are strong marriages and

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Speaker 2: strong faith communities. Right. The word communio also is obviously

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Speaker 2: a very old word, but the dot io ending is

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Speaker 2: used for tech startups, and we saw the io ending

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Speaker 2: and communio as being a nod to technology companies. And

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Speaker 2: we are one hundred percent of nonprofit and a ministry,

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Speaker 2: but we have developed our own software that supports the

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Speaker 2: local church. And so in a way, we want to

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Speaker 2: come alongside the local church to help them do a

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Speaker 2: very old thing right in marriage, but do it in

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Speaker 2: a very new way, leveraging the best of technologies and

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Speaker 2: strategies to win in the culture for marriage in the family.

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Speaker 1: So, as part of that baseline, you undertook a nationwide

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Speaker 1: study and faith in relationships, which is pretty impressive. I mean,

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Speaker 1: you've got nationwide survey of nineteen thousand Sunday church attendees

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Speaker 1: going to one hundred and twelve Evangelical, Protestant and Catholic

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Speaker 1: congregations in thirteen different states. Did you find that difficulty

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Speaker 1: at the church leadership to allow you to do this

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Speaker 1: survey in the church?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a great question. So what's great newt is

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Speaker 2: we serve right now more than one hundred and fifty

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Speaker 2: churches around the country right now that are our client

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Speaker 2: churches in nineteen different states. And so as part of

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Speaker 2: our entire business model, the first thing we do with

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Speaker 2: the church is we run an academically robut survey. It

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Speaker 2: takes only about seventy seconds for a person to complete it.

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Speaker 2: We've actually now collected over sixty five thousand surveys from

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Speaker 2: Sunday Church goers since our inception. We grabbed the prior

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Speaker 2: six months before we closed the survey, so we did

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Speaker 2: a nineteen thousand segment of that did the analysis from

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Speaker 2: that group. When we work with the church, the ideas

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Speaker 2: we talk about helping the church analyze what's going on

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Speaker 2: in their own people and in their community. And so

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Speaker 2: those questions that we have are own family structure, loneliness,

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Speaker 2: relationship health. All of those questions come from different academics.

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Speaker 2: We don't invent any of the questions, and so there's

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Speaker 2: a real data behind it that we can provide lead

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Speaker 2: pastor at First Baptist or the pastor at Saint Mary's, Okay,

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Speaker 2: we can provide some deep insights on their own people.

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Speaker 2: Then we roll it up that nineteen thousand completed surveys.

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Speaker 2: What we recognized is when you're sitting on two hundred

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Speaker 2: and twelve completed surveys, you can get certain insights, but

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Speaker 2: when you're sitting on nineteen thousand, you can start cutting

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Speaker 2: the data in ways that you can't at the per

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Speaker 2: congregation level. And it gave us some really useful insights

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Speaker 2: that we're bringing to the church nationally to help influence

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Speaker 2: the church to understand that the crisis of loneliness and

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Speaker 2: the crisis of religious non affiliation is really entirely wrapped

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Speaker 2: up in our flight from marriage. That's really fundamentally what's

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Speaker 2: happening in our culture. And if our churches don't grasp that,

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Speaker 2: I describe this to somebody, you'd appreciate it. Like if

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Speaker 2: you're running an election and you're trying to become president, okay,

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Speaker 2: and you come out of the convention okay for your

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Speaker 2: party losing your base by fifty percent, okay, and your

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Speaker 2: consultant comes to you and says, look, I've got this

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Speaker 2: great plan to win over independence. It doesn't matter. It

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Speaker 2: doesn't matter what you do with independence. If you're losing

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Speaker 2: your base, your toast. And right now, my friends, churches

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Speaker 2: are losing your base. And by that I mean too

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Speaker 2: few Christians are getting married. Too many Christian marriages are

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Speaker 2: struggling right now. One in five Sunday churchgoers report struggling

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Speaker 2: in their marriage at a level that's at risk for divorce.

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Speaker 2: Women are sixty two percent more likely to struggle than

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Speaker 2: their husbands. And when you look out in the surrounding population.

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Speaker 2: Amongst nuns, the church is better off than those who

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Speaker 2: don't attend church on these measures, and so this actually

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Speaker 2: gives a great opportunity to the local church to breathe

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Speaker 2: into a felt need. We all want healthy relationships. There's

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Speaker 2: a deep desire even amongst gen Z and millennials, who

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Speaker 2: are the least likely to be married. They overwhelm. They

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Speaker 2: say they want marriage still in the data, they just

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Speaker 2: don't know how to do it. And if we in

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Speaker 2: the church continues to operate like it's the nineteen fifties

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Speaker 2: and people are just going to show up and present

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Speaker 2: themselves for marriage, that world has gone. We need a metanoia,

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Speaker 2: a transformation within the church to recognize strategically that the

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Speaker 2: path to renewal of the church is through a renewal

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Speaker 2: of marriage in the population.

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Speaker 1: To what extent does the work you're doing require both

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Speaker 1: better technology and better focus on the family and the community,

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Speaker 1: but also require a reaffirmation that the central message is

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Speaker 1: one of salvation and of not being lonely, in part

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Speaker 1: because God is always with you, and therefore with God

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Speaker 1: in your heart, it's a lot harder to.

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Speaker 2: Be lonely fundamentally at the church. I use the term metanoia, right,

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Speaker 2: It's the first word Jesus utters in the Gospel of

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Speaker 2: Mark Okay, and it means conversion. And at the local

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Speaker 2: church level, we have to recognize that the most common path,

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Speaker 2: not everyone is called to marriage. We know that not everyone,

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Speaker 2: but the most common path to grow in holiness as

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Speaker 2: a Christian is through marriage, whether we like it or not,

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Speaker 2: that's what the biblical evidence illustrates, right. And so at

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Speaker 2: the pastor level and at the church level, helping our

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Speaker 2: young people know how to form relationships that are godly

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Speaker 2: and that can lead to marriage is a deep need

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Speaker 2: because when the church does not teach. I'd heard a

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Speaker 2: priest share this insight that we are sex saturated in

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Speaker 2: our culture. Sex is everywhere around us except in our churches,

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Speaker 2: and we don't know how to teach at the local

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Speaker 2: church level about how to form these healthy relationships. So

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Speaker 2: in first, there is a messaging at the individual local

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Speaker 2: church level and preaching, teaching, and vision that needs to change.

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Speaker 2: We work with churches on that. Then there is also

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Speaker 2: the recognition that there's no gospel manda to be unsophisticated,

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Speaker 2: and the church is supposed to be a light to

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Speaker 2: the world, and this form of ministry, relationship and marriage

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Speaker 2: ministry should be a front porch that welcomes and draws

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Speaker 2: people in. So you first encounter that local church, perhaps

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Speaker 2: through a date night, perhaps through a family block party,

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Speaker 2: something that draws folks in, not first to worship because

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Speaker 2: they're not necessarily ready for worship right, but first to

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Speaker 2: an encounter with faithful Christians in the context of a church,

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Speaker 2: and then through there helping those We use this term

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Speaker 2: the ministry engagement ladder, moving people up that ladder so

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Speaker 2: that you can actually help them, first, feed into their relationships,

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Speaker 2: help them on a human level, and then the spiritual

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Speaker 2: level so that they actually know how to relate to

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Speaker 2: one another. Well, then what we're seeing from our churches

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Speaker 2: is they're growing. Churches that have worked with us new

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Speaker 2: for at least twelve months and not longer than twenty

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Speaker 2: four months are growing or reporting that they're growing on

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Speaker 2: average twenty two percent and their Sundaye attendants, and we're

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Speaker 2: helping them everything that a statewide candidate can do to

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Speaker 2: invite people to a rally or an event or to

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Speaker 2: gootv we've brought to first Baptist We've brought to Saint Mary's.

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Speaker 2: When we do that kind of outreach, we're helping them

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Speaker 2: make marriage and relationship ministry not just for their people.

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Speaker 2: We're actually helping the church to be a change agent

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Speaker 2: in the culture for their surrounding community.

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Speaker 1: Your model ortormally is if you can get people to

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Speaker 1: acquire a new set of habits, it dramatically lowers their

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Speaker 1: resistance and increases the likelihood that they will, in the

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Speaker 1: process become more spiritual and become more committed.

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Speaker 2: You're seeing couples who when you get right with your

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Speaker 2: primary horizontal relationship your spouse or the person that you're

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Speaker 2: pursuing as a spouse, or you begin to discern properly

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Speaker 2: that horizontal relationship, it has profound impact on your vertical

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Speaker 2: relationship that's your relationship with God. Okay, and that makes

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Speaker 2: plenty of sense. It's the reason why the most common

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Speaker 2: analogy used in scripture for salvation and God's pursuit of

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Speaker 2: man is the espousal analogy. Right that God over and

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Speaker 2: over is pursuing the Old Testament Church as his bride

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Speaker 2: and the New Testament Church as his bride. The Bible

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Speaker 2: begins in Genesis with a marriage and it ends with

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Speaker 2: the eschatological wedding feast of the Lamb. And so when

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Speaker 2: this gets so disordered, right, when man's ability to relate

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Speaker 2: to woman and vice versa becomes so disordered, it's hard

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Speaker 2: to grasp the divine love story. Okay, it's hard to

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Speaker 2: accept that Christ so loved the church that he laid

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Speaker 2: down his life for his bride. If I've not ever

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Speaker 2: experienced that kind of complete gift of self, and seeing

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Speaker 2: that in my parents, I've never seen that complete gift

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Speaker 2: of self in my life. And we all do it

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Speaker 2: as humans, we do it poorly. I always say that

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Speaker 2: as a dad, I mean bad imitation of the real thing,

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Speaker 2: the heavenly Father. Right, But to the extent that I

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Speaker 2: reflect the bridegroom, to the extent that I reflect the

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Speaker 2: love of the Father in the home, I am creating

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Speaker 2: the narrative that God has woven into our hearts, that

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Speaker 2: the Gospel can live on top that God intended to

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Speaker 2: be grafted on top of all of our churches. When

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Speaker 2: we work with them. It's both the spiritual formation and

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Speaker 2: the human formation. And at first what people are willing

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Speaker 2: to receive is the human formation because this helps me. Okay,

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Speaker 2: and then along the journey, you start to help form

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Speaker 2: the spiritual habits in the couples, right, being able to

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Speaker 2: pray together, worship together, okay, and deepen in your faith together.

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Speaker 2: And so our churches then start to see folks who

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Speaker 2: don't attend their church starts showing up for ministry long

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Speaker 2: before they're showing up for membership. And then there is

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Speaker 2: a conversion and the reality is, well, I am very

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Speaker 2: much a fan of the scholastics and the intellectual approach.

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Speaker 2: The reality is is Jesus when he first performed Signs

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Speaker 2: and wonders, and then he told Peter and Andrew to

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Speaker 2: come follow him and go on a camping trip for

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Speaker 2: several years with the guys, and it was entering into

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Speaker 2: deep relationship with them that that form of personal encounter

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Speaker 2: allowed the didactic and the catechisis to actually stick, the

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Speaker 2: faith formation to stick.

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Speaker 1: It seems to me that sometime around nineteen sixty the

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Speaker 1: role of males began to change radically, and we went

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Speaker 1: through both the process of demasculization and of total irresponsibility.

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Speaker 1: And so you have a you number of males who

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Speaker 1: are fathers without being fathers biologically. Fathers is not socially involved,

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Speaker 1: and you have a profound breakdown because in families with

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Speaker 1: no fathers, there's no one for young males to learn from.

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Speaker 1: You've had this growing acceleration, which is also a part

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Speaker 1: of our crime problem. What do you think happened and

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Speaker 1: why did the society suddenly take this very dramatic detour

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Speaker 1: from what had been a relatively healthy model.

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Speaker 2: The sexual revolution hit its tipping point. Nineteen sixty is

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Speaker 2: oftentimes identified as the beginning point of the sexual revolution. Fundamentally,

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Speaker 2: in my book Endgame, the Church's strategic move on Saving

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Speaker 2: Faith and Family in America, we go into this specific question.

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Speaker 2: The reality is is the sexual revolution and really, with

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Speaker 2: the proliferation of artificial contraception, you end up have a

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Speaker 2: decoupling of marriage from sex, and then that springs about

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Speaker 2: a variety of other couplings. Right, So then you decouple

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Speaker 2: marriage from parenting, and you decouple now sex from even partnering. Okay,

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Speaker 2: you start to have post nineteen sixty rapid growth. You

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Speaker 2: have growth before it, but it hits an accelerator because

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Speaker 2: now with this triumph of technology, you end up having

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Speaker 2: no dissolving the cultural conventions around sexual chastity. Right, And

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Speaker 2: what ends up happening is alienation. Right, It's what we're

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Speaker 2: living through. We have been alienated. We're deeply wired for monogamy.

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Speaker 2: Men and women were just hardwired for it. Okay. The

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Speaker 2: sexual I like to just note, you know, when you

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Speaker 2: look at the sexual revolutionist triumph, you know, the question

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Speaker 2: to society is how's it working for you? Right? And

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Speaker 2: the reality is is shorter lifespans, epidemic levels of loneliness.

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Speaker 2: Women with multiple sexual partners. Okay, they were told, hey,

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Speaker 2: behave like the worst stereotypes of a frat guy. You

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Speaker 2: should be able to do that. That's great. Sex is

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Speaker 2: nothing more than a bodily function. The reality is is

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Speaker 2: that's not true. Okay, the science says that's not true.

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Speaker 2: That was an ideological claim that was fact free and

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Speaker 2: data free. We now have the data and it leads

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Speaker 2: women disproportionately to high levels of depression, suicidal ideation. Okay.

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Speaker 2: In our survey, we found the loneliest people knew were

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Speaker 2: not the elderly, and they were not the widows. Although

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Speaker 2: that's what you would think. The most lonely were actually

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Speaker 2: the never married between the age of thirty and thirty nine. Okay.

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Speaker 2: The reason for that is it's historically not natural. Okay.

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Speaker 2: Men and women are not meant to be alone. We're

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Speaker 2: social creatures. Okay. And this idea of prolonged adolescence into

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Speaker 2: your thirties and then getting married at the average age

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Speaker 2: of thirty, okay, that's been around for about thirty five

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Speaker 2: seconds of human history. Okay. And the Surgeon General's advisory

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Speaker 2: in May of this year, eighty two page dis cument okay,

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Speaker 2: he buries the lead. The word marriage used twice first

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Speaker 2: time on page fifteen. Okay. The reality is the loneliness

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Speaker 2: epidemic would not exist today if we weren't fleeing marriage

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Speaker 2: as a culture. It wouldn't be a thing, and you

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Speaker 2: wouldn't have plummeting life expectancies at the levels that we are.

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Speaker 2: Because single people guess what, they live less, They live

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Speaker 2: shorter lives. My wife is more likely than not to

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Speaker 2: say things like, hey, do you need that extra piece

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Speaker 2: of cake? Or maybe you should go to the doctor

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Speaker 2: for that, okay, And I'm likely to encourage her to

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Speaker 2: go to the doctor if there's something going on. There's

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Speaker 2: all sorts of reasons why that happens. But the reality is,

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Speaker 2: as we should I think, And this is one of

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Speaker 2: the points that we make to pastors and equip them

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Speaker 2: to do, is the evidence is now piled up and

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Speaker 2: it's in Okay. The sexual revolution leads in the triumph

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Speaker 2: of It has led to untold amounts of human suffering,

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Speaker 2: of fatherless children, of crime, of poverty. You don't have

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Speaker 2: in America ever, multigenerational poverty until after the sexual revolution

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Speaker 2: is trump and then you've decoupled parenting from marriage, and

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Speaker 2: now you have multiple generations of folks who don't have

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Speaker 2: any working memory that there was a marriage in their family.

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Speaker 2: I was speaking with Alicia Lajas, who I think the

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Speaker 2: world of She has done family strengthening work in tough

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Speaker 2: neighborhoods in Chicago, and she told me the story or

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00:26:23,160 --> 00:26:26,640
Speaker 2: her and her husband were speaking to school children and

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00:26:26,720 --> 00:26:31,000
Speaker 2: she just introduced her husband and said, this is my husband,

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00:26:31,040 --> 00:26:32,840
Speaker 2: and then she goes on to keep talking. In a

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00:26:32,840 --> 00:26:36,560
Speaker 2: few minutes into the presentation, a little child raises her

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00:26:36,560 --> 00:26:40,400
Speaker 2: hand and says, what's a husband? And you have entire

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00:26:40,800 --> 00:26:44,880
Speaker 2: communities where there isn't this evidence of a marriage. And

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00:26:44,960 --> 00:26:49,080
Speaker 2: it's funny because to reverse Marxism on our friends, it's

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00:26:49,119 --> 00:26:54,200
Speaker 2: a very bourgeois virtue. To pretend that people don't need

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00:26:54,240 --> 00:26:57,359
Speaker 2: marriage when it's usually espoused by people who are married.

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00:26:57,800 --> 00:27:01,880
Speaker 2: On the left, free love is a cheap virtue when

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00:27:01,880 --> 00:27:05,960
Speaker 2: you don't suffer the economic carnage because of your already

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00:27:06,200 --> 00:27:10,360
Speaker 2: upper class existence. It's called comfort to those who are

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00:27:10,400 --> 00:27:14,479
Speaker 2: in middle class and lower existences. And the reality is,

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00:27:14,680 --> 00:27:19,440
Speaker 2: if you're born into the bottom quintile of way journers,

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00:27:19,920 --> 00:27:22,400
Speaker 2: if you're in the bottom twenty percent and you're born

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00:27:22,440 --> 00:27:25,920
Speaker 2: into that group and your mom never gets married, okay,

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00:27:26,000 --> 00:27:30,880
Speaker 2: seventy four percent of you will never never escape poverty. Okay.

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00:27:31,080 --> 00:27:33,600
Speaker 2: But if you're born in that same group of wayjourners,

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00:27:33,800 --> 00:27:35,920
Speaker 2: and I just know one another thing about you, mom

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00:27:35,960 --> 00:27:39,960
Speaker 2: stays continuously married, okay, You're more likely to die in

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00:27:40,000 --> 00:27:42,160
Speaker 2: the highest group of wag journers than in the bottom.

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00:27:42,560 --> 00:27:46,639
Speaker 2: You're the Horatio Alger story of our time that needs

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00:27:46,640 --> 00:27:49,720
Speaker 2: to be certainly trumpeted. There's all sorts of biblical reasons,

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00:27:49,760 --> 00:27:51,879
Speaker 2: and there's all sorts of good science reasons why this

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00:27:51,960 --> 00:27:53,000
Speaker 2: makes a ton of sense.

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00:27:53,240 --> 00:27:56,480
Speaker 1: You're doing such amazing work and it's ongoing. Where can

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00:27:56,560 --> 00:27:58,760
Speaker 1: people go to visit your website?

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00:27:59,080 --> 00:28:02,359
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd encourage anybody to download our study. It's for free.

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00:28:02,400 --> 00:28:05,720
Speaker 2: What newt has been talking and sharing about Communio dot

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00:28:05,840 --> 00:28:09,480
Speaker 2: org backslash study. Okay, you can get that. I'd encourage

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00:28:09,480 --> 00:28:13,840
Speaker 2: you to download the Studycommunio dot org backslash Study. You

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00:28:13,880 --> 00:28:17,320
Speaker 2: can download it, read it, discuss it with your small group,

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00:28:17,400 --> 00:28:19,960
Speaker 2: share it with your pastor. Okay, we need to help

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00:28:20,040 --> 00:28:23,240
Speaker 2: in producing this metanoia in the leadership of churches around

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00:28:23,280 --> 00:28:23,720
Speaker 2: the country.

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00:28:23,920 --> 00:28:28,080
Speaker 1: You're doing amazing work, groundbreaking work that may end up

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00:28:28,280 --> 00:28:31,960
Speaker 1: historically helping save America. Jp. I want to thank you

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00:28:32,000 --> 00:28:34,480
Speaker 1: for joining me today and I encourage our listeners to

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00:28:34,560 --> 00:28:39,040
Speaker 1: visit your website communio dot org slash study and check

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00:28:39,080 --> 00:28:43,680
Speaker 1: out the findings from your nationwide study on faith and relationships.

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00:28:44,040 --> 00:28:44,760
Speaker 2: Thank you so much.

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00:28:44,800 --> 00:28:50,600
Speaker 1: New I want to thank my guest, JP Dugains. You

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00:28:50,640 --> 00:28:54,120
Speaker 1: can get a link to read the new Communio nationwide

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00:28:54,160 --> 00:28:57,719
Speaker 1: study on faith in Relationships on our show page at

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00:28:57,800 --> 00:29:02,560
Speaker 1: newsworld dot com. Produced by a Ginglishtree sixty and iHeartMedia.

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00:29:03,120 --> 00:29:07,800
Speaker 1: Our executive producer is Guernsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson.

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00:29:08,240 --> 00:29:11,320
Speaker 1: The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley.

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00:29:11,880 --> 00:29:15,360
Speaker 1: Special thanks to the team at ginglishly sixty If you've

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00:29:15,400 --> 00:29:18,440
Speaker 1: been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast

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00:29:18,840 --> 00:29:21,479
Speaker 1: and both rate us with five stars and give us

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00:29:21,480 --> 00:29:24,400
Speaker 1: a review so others can learn what it's all about.

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00:29:25,080 --> 00:29:27,640
Speaker 1: Right now, listeners of news World can sign up for

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00:29:27,760 --> 00:29:32,320
Speaker 1: my three free weekly columns at ginglishree sixty dot com

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00:29:32,360 --> 00:29:34,600
Speaker 1: slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich.

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Speaker 2: This is newts World.