The NXR Podcast - American Glory - Baby Boomers Had It All… And They Burned It Down

00:00:00.000 Today on American Glory, we're examining the rise and fall of the baby boomer generation,

00:00:04.720 how they became the most privileged, economically powerful, and culturally influential generation in 0.90

00:00:08.840 American history, and how they turned into the most self-centered and culturally destructive

00:00:13.700 generation the world has ever seen. Now, my weekly audit, I'm going to be discussing the 0.96

00:00:18.240 unequal economies between boomers and past generations, and why we need more older people

00:00:23.900 in young, bold churches. All that and more coming up right now.

00:00:30.000 welcome to american glory this is season one on american identity i'm your host dale partridge

00:00:47.040 this is episode number seven titled baby boomers had it all and they burned it all down each season

00:00:54.080 i'm going to be covering an american theme with eight episodes now if you didn't know american

00:00:58.740 Glory is both a podcast and a video show. And if you want to listen, you can listen on the NXR

00:01:03.460 podcast feed or on my personal podcast feed. Just search Dale Partridge's podcast anywhere,

00:01:08.040 and you're going to find me on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you want to listen to your

00:01:11.260 podcast. Now, if you want to watch the video, which I suggest that you do because it comes with

00:01:15.420 helpful slides, graphics, video clips, it can really feel like a documentary. You can watch

00:01:21.320 it on my YouTube channel at Dale Partridge TV. Now, next season, I'm going to be covering

00:01:25.760 American Christianity. I'm going to be covering everything from colonial Christian nationalism

00:01:30.120 to the Puritan view of slavery. I'm going to talk about dispensationalism, the effeminacy 0.63

00:01:34.760 of the modern church, and of course, the debate between Roman Catholics and Protestants. Now,

00:01:40.540 if you have been following along our last episode, I examined the 1964 Civil Rights Act 0.56

00:01:46.740 and how it birthed white guilt, minority entitlement, and destroyed natural social

00:01:52.980 pressures that once encouraged assimilation. Now, if you've been following along, I've taken you on

00:01:59.420 a pretty long journey here, right? We've gone through America's political history over the past

00:02:04.740 probably about 150 years, from the pre-war consensus to the post-war consensus. We've

00:02:09.460 seen how the trauma of two world wars basically led America's elites to engage in a kind of

00:02:15.740 national self-repudiation, traumatized by nationalism. They repented through this kind

00:02:21.320 of suicidal policies, opening the borders to the third world with the Hart-Celler Act, enforcing 0.95

00:02:27.260 racial integration through the Civil Rights Act, and then dismantling patriarchy with feminism,

00:02:33.220 embracing tolerance and privatizing Christianity. All of this in a desperate attempt to prevent 0.90

00:02:39.480 anything from resembling the nationalism that fueled the great wars. So we've covered the

00:02:47.000 policies, today we turn to the people. Not those who initiated these changes, but the generation

00:02:53.560 that eagerly embraced them. These people, as we will see, they magnified them, they worshipped

00:02:59.220 them, and ultimately drove America into the current death spiral that it is going to now.

00:03:05.700 And so, get ready to see how the generation with the greatest privileges

00:03:10.140 became the greediest generation in American history. Let's begin.

00:03:17.880 to truly understand the baby boomer generation we have to first understand their parents their

00:03:24.760 parents were called greatest generation and they're born between the years 1901 and 1927.

00:03:33.800 they were born into a world of extreme contrast because of the industrial revolution there was a

00:03:39.880 boom of millionaires but roughly one percent of americans controlled as much wealth as the bottom

00:03:46.280 99 percent combined now at the same time this was an age of incredible technological progress we saw

00:03:54.600 electricity and automobiles and railways and the phonograph and photography and the national

00:04:01.640 newspapers were transforming daily life we also saw the schofield reference bible was born and

00:04:08.920 it seeded dispensationalism and zionism across america the industrial revolution pulled millions

00:04:15.400 out of the rural life and into those rapidly growing cities. So the rhythm of existence was

00:04:21.400 shifting from local to national, from slow to fast, from personal to public. And this generation's 0.79

00:04:29.540 childhood and their young adulthood were defined by scarcity, uncertainty, change, hardship. Now

00:04:36.720 many of them came of age during World War I only to face the Great Depression in the 1930s. And

00:04:43.740 And when charities and churches could no longer cope with this scale of suffering after the 0.96

00:04:47.980 Depression, the federal government stepped in under Franklin Roosevelt's Jewish-backed 0.76

00:04:53.620 New Deal. 0.74

00:04:54.620 Now, the New Deal laid the groundwork for the modern welfare state and shifted financial

00:04:59.860 support from the family and the church to the federal government.

00:05:04.400 Then just as recovery just began to seem possible, America was thrust into World War II.

00:05:11.760 We know that men fought and bled and sacrificed on a scale that few generations have ever known.

00:05:17.580 And when they finally returned home victorious, they inherited an incredibly fortunate nation.

00:05:24.660 You see, Europe laid in ruins and all of its cities were bombed.

00:05:28.220 Its factories were destroyed.

00:05:29.860 Its economies were shattered.

00:05:31.220 America now stood as the undisputed manufacturing economic superpower on the planet.

00:05:37.300 So having survived economic collapse and two global wars, this greatest generation, this group of people, was marked by a sense of toughness toward the world, but a tenderness toward their children.

00:05:54.360 And it culminated in a cultural vow that I believe would shape the rest of the 20th century.

00:06:02.460 It was, quote, our children will have it better than we did, end quote.

00:06:07.300 Now, between 1946 and 1964, America experienced the largest birth surge in its history.

00:06:16.360 They called it the baby boom.

00:06:18.300 And roughly 76 million children were born during this period, which completely reshaped

00:06:24.360 the nation's demographics, the culture, the economy.

00:06:27.100 These babies increased the United States population by about half.

00:06:32.300 Now, they poured their energy, this greatest generation, they poured their energy, their

00:06:36.120 resources, their hopes, into giving their children the comfort, the stability, the opportunities

00:06:42.160 that they never had themselves. It was a noble desire, but what it did is that it produced

00:06:48.960 something entirely new in American life. The first truly child-centered culture in the nation's

00:06:56.520 history. Now, we often project modern parenting habits onto past families, but historically,

00:07:03.140 children were to be seen and not heard, managed more than coddled. Now, the boomers changed that 0.85

00:07:10.060 dramatically. Some of it was good and some of it was bad. Now, it was influenced by Dr. Benjamin 1.00

00:07:16.300 Spock's bestselling book, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, which sold over 500,000

00:07:23.460 copies in the first six months. And they embraced a new kind of permissive style of parenting.

00:07:30.940 Children were now given choices.

00:07:33.300 Their feelings were centered and protection from hardship became a priority.

00:07:39.160 Then we had the birth of the suburban neighborhood and Little League and piano lessons and summer camps

00:07:46.540 and the emerging field of what they called child psychology.

00:07:50.420 All revolved around making children feel not like the greatest generation,

00:07:55.940 but feel seen and special and important and secure.

00:08:00.260 And so for the first time, children were no longer kind of subordinate participants in family life.

00:08:05.540 In fact, they became the emotional center of it.

00:08:09.680 Now, if you were a capitalist in 1955, what did you see?

00:08:15.160 Well, many of them saw a gold mine.

00:08:18.320 Tonka Trucks was founded in 1955.

00:08:21.160 Play-Doh in 1956.

00:08:23.380 Toys R Us launched its first dedicated toy store in 1957.

00:08:27.060 and Lego started in 1958. So millions of entitled children with millions of overindulgent,

00:08:36.740 newly permissive parents came on the scene. And the men who grew up poor were now, to their

00:08:43.560 standards, rich, and they wanted their kids to not want for anything. And as a result,

00:08:50.360 television exploded into American homes and it was right on time. Okay. RCA introduced its first

00:08:58.240 mass market TV in 1946. And by the 1950s, over 90% of American households owned at least one TV.

00:09:07.640 And this is a faster adoption rate than even the internet decades later. So television quickly

00:09:13.420 became the family nanny, right? Children spent twice as much time in front of the screen as they

00:09:20.900 did socializing with others. This was all new. For the first time in history, a machine, not parents,

00:09:26.580 not the church, not the local community, became the central tool of child formation.

00:09:32.640 The influence shifted dramatically from local and familial to now national and commercial.

00:09:40.040 You were no longer primarily raised by a village, you were being raised by a nation, a country that was carefully programmed to meet your desires or to make you want more.

00:09:53.720 See, but it wasn't the television shows or even the movies that most profoundly shaped the baby boomer generation.

00:10:00.580 It was the commercials.

00:10:02.140 For the first time in history, advertisers began speaking directly to kids, creating desires and insecurities and demands that parents have never had to deal with before. 0.77

00:10:15.760 So toys and cereal and candy and clothes and gadgets and all of these things were marketed to these boomer children with sophisticated psychological techniques that's aimed at the hearts and minds of the young. 0.81

00:10:28.520 And the message was clear. 0.86

00:10:30.280 happiness comes through consumption you are what you own and so the boomer generation didn't just

00:10:38.520 watch television they were the first to be systematically programmed by it now meanwhile

00:10:44.600 they were experiencing what i would call deep cracks that were forming beneath the surface

00:10:51.380 of their generation many fathers were still carrying the invisible wounds uh into uh the

00:10:57.320 invisible wounds of the war into their family life. And as a result, they threw themselves

00:11:01.760 into workaholism and alcoholism. And they're absent at home because kind of this emotional

00:11:10.140 pain, and it created an emotional void in their families. Now, mothers, many of whom had tasted

00:11:16.260 independence working in factories during the war, now found themselves emotionally disconnected

00:11:21.280 from their husbands and increasingly unfulfilled in domestic life. And so these boys start growing

00:11:28.660 up, idolizing the strong TV fathers, but they rarely saw that kind of man at home. And girls

00:11:36.060 watch their mothers grow discontent with the traditional womanhood. And as a result, 1.00

00:11:42.020 the traditional structure of the family began to erode. And so the 1950s were in many ways

00:11:48.860 like a deeply external moral era. It was largely a moralism without true transformation from

00:11:58.100 Christianity. America was still riding on the coattails if it's a historic Christian heritage, 0.68

00:12:04.180 but the morality of the 1950s was detached from the robust Christian doctrine of previous

00:12:11.080 generations. Churches were full, but the gospel was often sentimental, shallow, moralistic,

00:12:18.600 rather than transformative. Now, society in the 1950s was still very Christian, but only passively 0.84

00:12:25.760 so. It wasn't intentionally so. And this created a dangerous spiritual vacuum. When something is 0.98

00:12:34.040 being removed from society, something else will always rush in to take its place.

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00:13:58.380 you can feel good about feeding to your family. So a generation that was raised with Christian 1.00

00:14:04.720 ethics, but without that deep grounding in theology, eventually asks the fatal question,

00:14:12.400 why should we live this way? In other words, the 1950s were largely an era of kind of like

00:14:19.160 plastic Christianity. And when that spiritual emptiness was combined with the emerging post-war

00:14:26.780 consensus that it was creating, it was this perfect fertile ground for the moral civilizational

00:14:33.820 rebellion that would explode in the 1960s. Now, the boomers inherited adulthood with enormous

00:14:44.120 cultural economic power, and they experienced the entire world in a way that no other generation 0.52

00:14:52.160 had before they expected the nation to continue revolving around their wants and their emotions

00:14:58.840 and they rejected the conformity and restraint of their parents and grandparents generation

00:15:03.640 and they ushered in the era of the quote do your own thing now the cultural mood it flipped

00:15:12.180 radically from the 1950s to the 1960s from obedience to you know self-expression from

00:15:19.240 modesty to the sexual revolution, from duty to feelings. You know, we saw rock and roll and

00:15:24.580 television and advertising amplified all of these things, the self-indulgence mentality to a level

00:15:30.960 that was never seen before in American history. Now, one historian said, quote, the 1960s became

00:15:37.220 a perfect storm of unprecedented affluence, boredom, and rebellion, end quote. I think he's

00:15:44.080 right. I mean, it really reshaped everything. Political spheres, art, religion, sex, morality.

00:15:52.240 In fact, most people don't realize how destructive the 1960s were for America. I mean, it took 200

00:16:00.480 years to build a nation, and it was almost completely deconstructed in one decade by one

00:16:07.880 generation of people. And we saw this because in rapid succession, the baby boomers cheered on or 0.99

00:16:13.380 directly supported the sweeping wave of transformative liberal post-war consensus

00:16:19.140 legislation and Supreme Court rulings, right? The Civil Rights Act, we saw the Heart Seller Act,

00:16:24.700 the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, 0.98

00:16:29.620 the removal of prayer and Bible reading from public schools, the legalization of interracial 0.96

00:16:36.060 marriage, the legalization of sodomy, the overturning of contraception laws, the steady 0.85

00:16:41.700 dismantling of pornography restrictions the the legal uh scaling of strip clubs and eventually

00:16:48.620 the legalization of abortion in 1973 and so it was it was a house fire that burned down

00:16:56.820 like the very infrastructure that had made america what it was and so this generation

00:17:03.260 what could only be described as kind of national trust fund kids tore down the fences their

00:17:12.040 forefathers had carefully built without ever pausing to ask why those fences were there in

00:17:19.440 the first place. You see, the baby boomers are the only generation that had a better economy than 0.99

00:17:25.560 their parents and their children, okay? This is a very strange phenomenon in both history and 0.98

00:17:34.160 economics. Now, because of feminism and the sexual revolution, the boomers married later, 0.75

00:17:41.020 and they married less often, and they had more and higher divorce rates. But when they did marry, 0.77

00:17:49.220 they also had fewer children. So for generations, Americans had averaged well over three children

00:17:55.140 per woman. The boomers dropped that number just down to about 1.8, and that's below the

00:18:01.240 replacement level. And so raising children was essentially too inconvenient for a generation

00:18:08.900 of self-absorbed people. Now, this demographic collapse became one of the main justifications

00:18:14.840 for mass immigration, this need for economic replacement. So if you won't have your own

00:18:20.440 children, you must import someone else's foreign children. Now, to the boomer, the mark of a 0.99

00:18:27.560 healthy nation was not moral, religious, racial, or virtue. It was almost purely economic. Nothing 0.91

00:18:35.720 else mattered as long as the economy was growing and they could continue their indulgent lifestyle. 0.94

00:18:41.340 Now, the church was not spared from this spirit of the boomers either. What happened under 0.90

00:18:48.800 the boomer years in the church? Well, a shallow, audience-driven, spectator Christianity was born. 0.85

00:18:56.400 Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago built the megachurch model around pragmatism.

00:19:00.140 I mean, just think about this with me. After thousands of years of historic liturgy, reverence,

00:19:07.800 tradition, not one generation has tried to turn the church into a spectator experience.

00:19:15.560 But the boomers turned Sunday morning into entertainment in just one generation. 0.65

00:19:22.100 Okay, they replaced the pulpit with a stage, hymns, and the organ with drums and a guitar, 0.96

00:19:27.500 and kicked the children out of the service, inventing this kind of modern youth ministry

00:19:32.300 movement to outsource their responsibility to catechize and disciple their own children.

00:19:38.660 And just as they had done even with the public school system.

00:19:42.240 So everything became about personalization and preference.

00:19:46.440 The customer, whether in the marketplace or in the pew, was always right.

00:19:51.700 And the capitalists and the pastors were happy to deliver this to that generation.

00:19:59.160 See, but then came a young Southern Baptist preacher named Hal Lindsey.

00:20:03.720 and he was an author and wrote a modest book 192 page paperback titled the late great planet earth

00:20:13.980 now few people probably imagine that this book would become one of the most selling books in

00:20:21.040 all time 35 million copies and it was outselling nearly every other non-fiction title of that

00:20:29.280 decade now mr lindsay had been deeply formed at dallas theological seminary which is the epicenter

00:20:36.880 of dispensational theology and dispensational theology essentially divides history into distinct

00:20:43.440 dispensations and it placed modern israel at the center of biblical prophecy and it interpreted

00:20:49.600 essentially current events as signs of this imminent return of christ and this imminent

00:20:54.080 apocalypse. And so the timing was perfect. America in 1970 was already trembling, right? The Cuban

00:21:02.240 Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the race riots, the constant shadow of nuclear annihilation

00:21:08.800 was really leaving the nation with this kind of atomic anxiety and they're exhausted.

00:21:14.020 And into this atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, Hal Lindsey dropped a message that was both

00:21:20.280 terrifying, and I think strangely comforting to the boomers. The end was near, right? And it was 0.58

00:21:26.940 all part of God's plan. And so he declared that Israel's rebirth in 1948 as this kind of super

00:21:34.960 sign of the last days, and the European common marketplace was kind of the revived Roman Empire,

00:21:43.740 the Antichrist was alive and rising somewhere in Europe. You know, most enticing of all,

00:21:49.440 Lindsay taught that the generation that saw Israel restored in 1948 would not pass away

00:21:55.400 before Christ's return, which he calculated put the rapture sometime before 1988.

00:22:02.820 Now, to a generation already steeped in kind of a narcissistic instant gratification mentality,

00:22:10.680 this was an intoxicating Christian message. It gave the baby boomers theological permission 0.90

00:22:17.000 to live for the present moment, as they had already done. 1.00

00:22:21.260 Why sacrifice for the future?

00:22:23.800 Why build an enduring institution? 0.89

00:22:27.720 Why raise large families and reform a broken culture

00:22:31.420 when everything was about to burn anyway? 0.95

00:22:35.680 Now, Lindsay's theology of evacuation

00:22:40.060 replaced the historic vision of dominion

00:22:43.720 and cultural engagement.

00:22:45.480 So not only did churches become modern consumer centers to meet the materialistic and historically rebellious desires, but they also filled this generation with prophecy charts and rapture fever and increasingly empty of this kind of long-term vision that was characterized in the church.

00:23:07.900 The greatest generation was characterized by working, just like many other generations.

00:23:13.520 But the boomer generation was characterized by waiting.

00:23:18.160 And as one preacher famously quipped during this time,

00:23:22.060 why polish brass on a sinking ship? 0.90

00:23:25.060 And I think that phrase captures the spirit of that age.

00:23:29.140 Everything was about living for the moment.

00:23:32.120 Jesus is coming back soon.

00:23:33.640 you know, don't try to stop the evil. In fact, the faster the evil comes and dominates,

00:23:40.680 the sooner Christ returns. And so American Christianity shifted from, you know, thy kingdom

00:23:46.920 come to take us home, you know, and do it soon. And so for an economically focused generation,

00:23:57.060 the boomers kept this prosperity of the moment, the now for themselves. And they left almost 0.50

00:24:07.820 nothing for their children because they're not having a long-term mindset as previous Christians 1.00

00:24:12.900 did. Now, I was born in 1985. My father earned about $75,000 in 1995, which placed us comfortably 0.99

00:24:25.580 in kind of an upper middle class. Now, to have the same standard of living and economic power

00:24:34.420 today, I would have to earn roughly $260,000. The national debt under the boomer generation 0.91

00:24:44.720 tripled, okay? Their uncontrolled spending and consumption habits that really helped 1.00

00:24:51.320 birth the modern credit card industry and explosion of consumer debt. But what began as

00:24:57.140 a convenient buying pattern was quickly turned into a sophisticated system of usury. And we all

00:25:04.580 know who's behind the usury in the United States. But the boomers were basically a gold mine 1.00

00:25:10.040 population for banks looking to exploit easy credit and long-term debt. Now, we've kind of 0.96

00:25:19.860 grown numb to these things, these staggering statistics that we hear about online. But the

00:25:26.100 truth is sobering. Again, no generation in modern history, not even those who lived through world

00:25:30.820 wars, has experienced such a rapid simultaneous collapse in morality, family, religion, national

00:25:38.700 identity, and economic opportunity in a single generation. Okay, millennials and Zoomers, 0.98

00:25:45.280 they're living through something unprecedented. Not just like financial collapse, not just moral 1.00

00:25:52.060 collapse, not just national collapse, not just religious collapse, not just family collapse,

00:25:56.580 but all of it at one time. And I think that millennials and Gen Z, they share a deep intuitive

00:26:06.320 sense of having been screwed. Okay. I think that's what I hear when I have these conversations. I 0.87

00:26:13.420 I mean, if you look honestly at the numbers and the trajectory, you quickly realize that they

00:26:19.980 sold our future. In a very real sense, the baby boomers were generational locusts. I mean, 1.00

00:26:27.960 to this day, economically, it doesn't always look that bad on the surface. The average neighborhood

00:26:33.600 still functions. People are still buying food. They're still going about their life. But that's

00:26:39.180 just because you're looking on the outside. And everybody's burning through their reserves.

00:26:45.400 They're borrowing money from their parents. They're drowning in debt. They're renting their

00:26:50.780 houses because they can't afford to buy their own. And any inheritance that would have been helpful

00:26:58.600 during our 20s and 30s, a lot of boomers are now spending it on a motorhome to travel

00:27:05.540 you know, across the nation or to buy an extra house in Hawaii or whatever it may be.

00:27:10.960 And even on those motorhomes, you know, they got the bumper sticker, right? Spending my children's

00:27:15.700 inheritance. Okay. So the, the, the hard truth is this, the baby boomer generation squandered

00:27:24.300 an enormous inheritance, not just financial, not just moral, not just religious, not just

00:27:32.620 cultural, not just in values and virtue, not just in national identity, but all of it.

00:27:39.020 All of it changed under one generation. Now, and because of their enormous size and voting power,

00:27:48.180 the boomers also dominated American politics for the past 40 years. Like no president or 0.85

00:27:53.980 major politician dared to criticize them because without the boomer vote, you simply couldn't win. 0.79

00:27:59.280 And for us living below them, this is all we've ever known, but it's not how it's always been.

00:28:08.260 Okay. Previous generations thought generationally. The boomers did not. I mean, I often think about

00:28:14.620 just the concept of the cathedrals. I mean, think about how many generations it took.

00:28:20.920 Most cathedrals took between 200 and 500 years to build. Cambridge or Oxford,

00:28:30.940 these institutions took hundreds of years to finish their buildings. You can't build

00:28:37.360 buildings like that without having a long-term multi-generational outlook on society.

00:28:46.300 So you can just look at the facts of society and get the implicit reality that they had no

00:28:52.460 position that Jesus is coming back really soon. No, they were building for generations because

00:28:59.940 they believed that Christ wasn't coming back until the world had been Christianized, which is the

00:29:05.460 historic optimistic eschatology of post-millennialism, which I will be talking about in the next

00:29:11.680 season. But again, boomer dominance, it will eventually end, right? We're seeing that now 0.96

00:29:18.780 as the boomers are dying off as they grow older. Going forward, millennials and Zoomers are going 1.00

00:29:24.760 to become a generation of retrieval and recovery. Okay, we are a generation who has to look back to 1.00

00:29:31.140 the old paths. We're thinking of our descendants and our nation in ways that they did not.

00:29:38.140 And I'm often reminded that, well, I try to remind men that if our fathers were not honorable,

00:29:47.100 that we have to look to our fathers' fathers or to our fathers' fathers' fathers. And that's how

00:29:53.600 you can fulfill the fifth commandment in this generation. Look, I get it. No generation is

00:29:58.700 perfect, but ours has been uniquely corrupted by several factors that are bigger than just the 0.99

00:30:07.560 boomers. I mean, it's more than just the boomers. But the boomers are a significant piece to this 0.92

00:30:13.760 puzzle. Now, the only way to return to a multi-generational, covenantal, patriarchal, 0.99

00:30:20.260 nationalistic, and Christian society is to relearn, no pun intended for those that follow 0.96

00:30:26.400 my ministry, but to relearn the old ways, right? To dig up what was once very common and return 0.95

00:30:34.160 to practices and patterns that served civilization well for many centuries. Now, we're already seeing

00:30:41.820 this on the rise of homeschooling. Classical Christian schools are being started, homesteading

00:30:50.400 this kind of renewed interest in historic Christian traditions like Anglicanism and

00:30:55.440 Presbyterianism and Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. See, ultimately, people are realizing

00:31:01.520 that we had a nation and now we don't. And this entire collapse happened under the watch and

00:31:10.940 leadership of the baby boomer generation. Now, I do want to say, not every boomer is equally 0.85

00:31:18.220 responsible. There are many excellent baby boomers, strong, bold, virtuous men that were,

00:31:25.060 I would even say prophetically, you know, preaching against their generation. There was a lot of good 0.73

00:31:32.180 and godly men and women in that particular generation. So when I say these, I'm speaking

00:31:37.520 in generalizations. I'm not speaking specifically to every single boomer. My own father fought

00:31:44.500 against abortion. You know, he would have me watch anti-abortion documentaries when I was a kid.

00:31:51.420 I remember my dad wearing a shirt that on the back in big letters, it would say something like

00:31:56.500 white, Christian, American, heterosexual man, or something like that. And he was standing

00:32:04.840 against those things in that generation. We went to church in the 90s. He stood up against

00:32:11.180 mass immigration, homosexuality. But again, as a generation, as a whole, the facts are just 1.00

00:32:19.120 undeniable. Okay. If we're just looking at objective metrics, their legacy is one of

00:32:25.320 squandered inheritance. They inherited something quite excellent. And again, I know there's many

00:32:29.860 factors involved and there are a lot of other people, including their parents that transitioned

00:32:35.280 them into this. But there really is, if you just look at the objective reality, a squandering of

00:32:42.340 inheritance. So the journey ahead must be both bottom-up and top-down, okay? Planting faithful

00:32:52.940 churches, strong Christian schools, covenantal communities, which again, is its bottom-up,

00:32:59.840 and at the same time, also raising up theologically robust Christian men to take leadership

00:33:05.300 in political office, you know, the executive, the legislative, the judicial branches,

00:33:10.820 top down. I'm going to be talking more about that in our final episode for the season.

00:33:17.400 But that's very important. We can recover. It's just going to be an incredible amount of work.

00:33:26.100 Here at The New Christian Right, we produce daily content, and now there's an app for it.

00:33:32.860 Introducing NXR Plus, available now on both Apple and Android.

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00:34:21.260 This isn't just a streaming app. 0.71

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00:34:27.680 So go and download NXR Plus, content that conquers. 0.71

00:34:35.360 Let's go ahead and get into the weekly audit.

00:34:43.980 All right, so we're going to be talking about a few things this week in the audit.

00:34:50.000 I'm going to offer just some short commentary on two videos.

00:34:53.220 And I want to start with a young man's analysis of the baby boomer generation and why life

00:34:59.060 was so dramatically different for them.

00:35:02.600 Take a look. 0.72

00:35:03.420 Forrest Gump is the perfect analogy for the life of boomers. 1.00

00:35:06.200 It's a movie about a retard who just stumbles through life successfully. 0.99

00:35:09.380 The boomer generation was born into a post-war America where jobs were just as easy as going 0.98

00:35:13.900 down to a local factory and applying, or most likely your dad knew a guy. 0.65

00:35:17.880 I mean, picture it.

00:35:18.520 You're 20 years old.

00:35:19.360 It's 1965.

00:35:20.120 You have no college education and you get a manual labor job with a starting salary you can afford a home.

00:35:26.200 And the woman that you marry was your classmate growing up and a member of your church.

00:35:30.160 And you're capable of supporting an entire family off this job with full benefits and can retire at 62 years old,

00:35:35.700 collect Social Security, and live off your pension.

00:35:38.020 And not only that, but now your house is worth a million dollars.

00:35:41.260 And just like Forrest Gump, this is an accidental success through luck and timing rather than exceptional talent or hard planning.

00:35:47.520 And the movie mythologizes the second half of the 20th century into this feel-good nostalgia,

00:35:51.560 which for most boomers, it really was.

00:35:53.460 The problem is, is that today they're the largest voting bloc in America and hold about

00:35:57.100 40% of our nation's total wealth and 35% of all federal spending directly serves boomers. 0.91

00:36:02.800 And they're an out-of-touch generation of infants raised on television that dictates 0.98

00:36:06.080 their reality, who destroyed the inheritance of your nation.

00:36:09.200 Yeah, so he's right. 1.00

00:36:10.980 The baby boomers are the only generation in modern American history, again, who had it 0.80

00:36:15.200 significantly better than both their parents and their children. They inherited, you know, a 0.99

00:36:21.800 functional, predictable system, right? You went to school, you went to college, often at very little

00:36:30.180 debt, and then you stepped into an economy with a clear career path that, you know, were frequently

00:36:37.040 supported by parents or community connections. Today, young people graduate, well, they go to

00:36:46.480 public school. Then they take on like $100,000 in debt to get a degree that doesn't matter to their

00:36:53.500 career. And then they are like kind of thrown out into the wild, searching for jobs, and are

00:36:59.540 increasingly being replaced by AI and by foreigners. And nothing feels predictable or reliable anymore. 1.00

00:37:07.040 I was just watching The Dead Poets Society, and you should check this movie out. It's just an

00:37:15.140 incredible movie that you can watch. It's Robin Williams, and it shows the late 1950s, and they're

00:37:22.260 in kind of a Hogwarts-style school where you had dorm rooms in high school, and it's kind of like

00:37:28.060 aristocracy, higher-level networking and students. But they had this classical Christian education

00:37:35.600 and this robust experience, and I thought, man, they inherited that. They inherited that

00:37:41.740 beautiful old buildings that have been around for 100 years and just this incredible experience

00:37:47.280 that would shape and put out some of the best people. And they kind of just rebelled against

00:37:54.820 all of that. And so the boomers just didn't sustain the pattern because they failed to see

00:38:00.600 the value in maintaining the system that their forefathers built and that their children would

00:38:07.220 benefit from. And so it's going to be our job to rebuild a reliable pattern. And so one where,

00:38:15.700 again, if you follow certain steps that you can generally have a predictable and fruitful life,

00:38:22.340 that means we have to stop moving so much, right? We have to build strong churches,

00:38:27.660 build strong towns, build strong businesses, build strong training programs and education

00:38:33.400 systems, own businesses so that you can hire your own sons and daughters, actively help faithful

00:38:38.740 Christian singles get married so that they can start families. And so we need all of that. We

00:38:45.920 need to rebuild the systems of predictability so we can build a national culture that we can go,

00:38:54.860 hey, look, if you're faithful, you can follow this pattern. And I know that AI is harder now

00:38:59.420 because we don't know what the heck's going to happen in the next 10 to 15 years as a result.

00:39:03.780 But what we want to do is we want to create strong thinkers, people who can navigate

00:39:09.960 through any circumstance. One argument that we have for enrolling people at our classical

00:39:17.180 Christian school here at our church is, yeah, you want to teach your kids how to start a business.

00:39:25.380 So sure, you want them to read business books. But the people who invented the printing press

00:39:31.340 or the people who invented the automobile, they didn't read business books. They read the classics.

00:39:38.240 They read biographies. They read Shakespeare. And what the reality was is these were people

00:39:44.780 who were able to think. They were able to learn. They were high IQ, intelligent men and women.

00:39:52.700 And so our job is not so much to just give them how to, how to, how to, but to raise a generation

00:39:59.800 of people who know what wisdom is, who have a moral compass, who can think clearly. And so we

00:40:06.460 have to rebuild that system. So yeah, check out the Dead Poets Society. Look at the themes.

00:40:13.080 like their rebellion was going at night to read poetry and smoke cigarettes in this cave.

00:40:23.700 But it's just, it gives you a, it'll make your soul hurt because it'll make you realize how much

00:40:29.500 we lost and how much we lost in one generation, in one generation. So, all right, our next video

00:40:36.820 comes from Pastor Mark Driscoll speaking to the differences in giving between the boomers

00:40:44.660 and young generation. Let's take a look. You boomers, let me just rebuke you all. You are

00:40:49.420 retiring and moving away from your children and abandoning them and not being generous toward

00:40:54.180 them and not helping them. And when you die, you're not even including them in your estate.

00:40:58.720 You despise your God and your children. You're an entirely greedy generation that loves money 0.98

00:41:04.680 in power. How shameful is it that children are out giving parents? Let me say, when you get to

00:41:09.700 be my age, you're making usually more than your 20 something kid who's just getting started and

00:41:15.440 they're out giving you. It's just disgusting. Yeah. So, um, now I know there are many faithful 0.92

00:41:22.820 boomers. I said it already who give generously to their churches and we praise God for you.

00:41:27.140 Praise the Lord for that. But the hard reality is that most boomers are attending, 0.60

00:41:34.300 you know, woke, feminist-leaning, cowardly megachurch churches that practice spectator 0.97

00:41:44.960 Christianity. And they're massively expensive. And the only reason that they're affording to 0.99

00:41:50.260 do that is because they have so many boomers. In fact, there was a church in our own city.

00:41:55.920 we at one point shared a parking lot. And everybody, it was fascinating because we would

00:42:03.860 watch all the people that would show up at our church were men wearing suits, women wearing

00:42:09.140 dresses, women wearing head coverings, vans filled with kids. And they were walking up to our church

00:42:16.700 that sings hymns, that focuses on a liturgical structure of church, having a more historic

00:42:27.000 example of church. Me as the pastor, I'm wearing a clerical collar. We're doing kneeling. We're a

00:42:36.500 very conservative church, but we're all under the age of 40. Okay, I'm 41 now, but they're like 95%

00:42:44.960 of our church is under the age of 40. And then we look over to this other church that's got this

00:42:51.600 massive parking lot filled with cars. And we live in a retirement city. So Prescott, Arizona very

00:42:59.660 much has lots of, we are essentially the Florida of the West, okay? And we look over at this other

00:43:07.440 parking lot and you see Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops and shorts, and they're doing night

00:43:15.380 at the movies or at the movies series on Sunday morning and trying to explain how Shrek preaches

00:43:23.560 the gospel or whatever. And they have this building that their rent is like $15,000 a month.

00:43:31.340 And sure, they've been around a lot longer than us, but it was this really incredible contrast.

00:43:36.720 and i'm thinking oh my gosh like if we just had one uh faithful boomer that was you know giving

00:43:43.280 you know a thousand bucks a month i mean it would like change our entire church we were

00:43:47.520 barely making rent and and so i mean i always think about like if we just had one boomer who

00:43:54.720 owned their home you know today's homes especially the homes here there's hardly any homes that are

00:43:59.280 less than a million dollars um and if they were to leave their estate to the church like it would

00:44:06.560 change our entire church forever. But again, these boomers are not in these kind of reformed, strong, 0.81

00:44:16.840 historic, bold, conservative, patriarchal churches. They're just not. And my hope is that we would 0.57

00:44:26.800 have more of those boomers turn and be at these. We need you. We need your wisdom.

00:44:33.160 them. We need your financial support, but don't come here if you're a coward, right? Don't come 0.99

00:44:40.480 here if you're a coward. And I can't tell you. I mean, literally this has happened several times. 1.00

00:44:46.260 I remember I actually had an entire row of boomers visiting our church, all gray hair,

00:44:54.160 and they were in the back row. And I started preaching a section in my sermon about homosexuality

00:45:00.020 and they all got up. Just this last weekend, I was preaching on Genesis chapter nine on the curse 1.00

00:45:09.440 of Ham or the curse of Canaan and talking about Noah's three sons and how that interacts with

00:45:15.880 race and nationalism. And we had a boomer couple that right when the sermon was done, they got up 0.75

00:45:21.820 and they didn't even do communion. It has been a consistent pattern. We cannot keep the boomer

00:45:27.920 generation. I don't know if it's just they don't have the hermeneutical ability to interpret the 1.00

00:45:33.260 times digitally with the internet world, if they're just not aware of what's happening,

00:45:39.020 or if they're just still stuck so heavily in the fog of the post-war consensus. 0.53

00:45:49.700 But yeah, we need the boomers. Our young people are barely getting by. And so 0.72

00:45:56.860 So we need, and that's the problem, having a church that we have is that we have a whole 0.97

00:46:01.320 bunch of young people.

00:46:03.940 And so whenever we speak against the post-war consensus on feminism, on multiculturalism, 0.77

00:46:10.360 homosexuality, immigration, Israel, the boomers just leave. 0.94

00:46:14.960 And so as a result, the strong, faithful churches remain poor. 0.89

00:46:20.360 And again, I'm saying this, by the way, as a man who has only taken four or five paychecks

00:46:27.880 over the last three and a half, four years, I don't basically take a salary at our church.

00:46:35.900 We'll sometimes take a stipend every six months or every 10 months or something like that.

00:46:42.520 And so, yeah, I'm not saying this because I need people to come to our church to give

00:46:48.700 money so that I can get paid.

00:46:49.680 No, we've been bivocational this whole time. 0.99

00:46:54.020 And so we just want boomers so that we can have a building, 0.99

00:46:58.160 so we can build a school, 1.00

00:46:59.180 so that we can build a Christianized city,

00:47:01.900 so that we can be faithful,

00:47:03.460 so that we can do these things and start working. 0.99

00:47:05.600 But we do, we do need the older generation

00:47:07.560 to come and support because our young people,

00:47:10.260 they're struggling.

00:47:10.920 A lot of young people, if you're 40 and below,

00:47:13.040 I think the average home buying,

00:47:14.860 the average age to buy a house,

00:47:16.640 a first-time house is now 40 years old. And this is insane because there was a stat that was

00:47:24.160 showing that the number of people who would own a home and be married, I think in 1950s,

00:47:34.240 was somewhere around 50%. And now it's around 12%. So 12% of people by the age of 30 are married

00:47:43.240 own home. I mean, that's how much things have changed. We have such a crazy shift in every

00:47:52.140 dimension of life. And again, we know the policies that have done that. And now we have talked

00:47:58.280 about the people. So that is a wrap for this episode. You can follow me on X, Instagram,

00:48:07.660 and YouTube. My featured book for this episode is The Israel Delusion. You can pick up a copy

00:48:15.840 on Amazon or at relearn.org. The book is a very easy introduction to an argument, a biblical

00:48:23.640 argument against Zionism. If you haven't picked up a copy, I'd love for you to grab a copy.

00:48:28.200 Now, next week, I'm going to be discussing an introduction to Christian nationalism

00:48:34.880 and how I believe it is the only solution to save America.

00:48:41.320 So my name is Dale Partridge.

00:48:42.800 Thank you for watching or listening to American Glory.

00:48:45.820 I'll see you next week.

00:48:46.580 America will either have Christ, or it will have chaos.

00:49:06.820 For years, conservatives believed that Trump could reverse America's decline.

00:49:11.520 But after Trump, the right is now fractured, exhausted, and losing ground.

00:49:17.600 Endless infighting and electoral losses have exposed a deeper problem that politics alone cannot solve.

00:49:26.220 A nation that rejects Christ cannot be restored by mere personalities, grandstanding, or Christless conservatism.

00:49:35.520 So NXR Studios' first annual conference, America After Trump, brings together pastors, politicians, commentators, and Christians that are committed to strength, cooperation, and a durable future for the American right.

00:49:53.160 Complaining is not a strategy, and despair cannot be an option.

00:49:58.520 Christ is King. Let's live like it.

00:50:05.520 Thank you.

The NXR Podcast - June 16, 2026

American Glory - Baby Boomers Had It All… And They Burned It Down

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