Who sits down and does hard things that may not be popular? That would be fathers. Men who are willing to mature and conquer life’s challenges, not just live for endless entertainment. While entertainment makes us first think of TV and film, even bigger influences shape our present and future. Film’s worldwide box office receipts are in tens of billions annually. The global porn industry makes an estimated 100 billion annually. Video games raked in more than 200 billion in revenue in 2025. But all of them are dwarfed by gambling which is more than 300 billion and growth by 2033 is expected to exceed 500 billion.

Young men are lured to spend time and money on cheap substitutes for real achievement, intimacy and healthy competition. What they earn is increasingly squandered for dopamine hits in the pleasure center of the brain for counterfeit accomplishment. Legalizing more drugs, sports betting and other vices won’t make us a happier or more functional society. We need to put first things first, then enjoy diversions and recreation in moderation.

What’s disturbing is literally and figuratively, our culture increasingly eats desert and fits meat and vegetables on the side at best. Hobbies and leisure are not what make life worth living, they allow for rest and contemplation in a life already lived well. Part of what grows our destruction are political regulators primarily motivated by tax revenue they can manage and campaign contributions to remain in office.

Occasionally a figure like Jordan Peterson or Charlie Kirk becomes popular with young men for calling out masculinity but these voices are routinely demonized canceled or silenced by force. The millions of leftists who celebrated Kirk’s assassination were glad he was killed for daring to use reason, research and debate to change hearts and minds rather than glitz, glamor or parading a self-destructive lifestyle.

The work ahead is difficult and we may hit rock bottom as a nation before we look up to eternal values again as “one nation, under God.” Fracturing into tribalism may not end us as a nation but it will end us as a force largely for good. No nation ever attained more power, misused it less for evil and used it more for good than the United States. I pray for spiritual revival as our history has shown that God’s grace repeatedly arrives at the right time. Two Great Awakenings in the 1700s transformed our nation and gave our founders the boldness to separate from Great Britian and write a constitution that has lasted longer than any other human experiment in self-governance. During the 1860s both Union and Confederate armies felt the effects of a Third Great Awakening which sowed seeds for healing as our states reunited post war and the nation expanded west.

The 1960’s decent into “free love” and popular drug culture was met with the most recent Christian revival known as the Jesus movement. This evangelical Protestant phenomenon spread from North America to Europe, Central America, and Australia. While promoting fatherhood and male maturity, I must acknowledge that God will make the most important contributions in his own supernatural timing. Our history has and will depend on heaven’s mercy as much as it is blessed by good people of every type that promote the good, true and beautiful wherever we can.