#401 AWAKE, NOT WOKE with author Noelle Mering; a Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

Get ready for a thought-provoking dialog with Noelle Mering, the author of "Awake, Not Woke – a Christian response to the cult of progressive ideology". Your perspective on the world around you will take on more light that will help you navigate the illusions and falsehoods presented  by the woke movement. 

Our discourse includes insightful conversation on the troubling distortion of language by this progressive ideology that has far-reaching impact on our young ones. From  public education and the Library system to social emotional learning and the latest sex education standards, it's evident that the woke movement isn't just a passing fad. In addition to the long march to control our institutions it is strategically recruiting children to be the foot soldiers in a revolution that goes beyond cultural implications, reaching into spiritual battle for control of the human soul. 

While we cast light on these dark corners, we also reiterate the critical role parents play in nurturing and safeguarding their children.

Follow Noelle and visit her website! 

NoelleMering.com

TheologyofHome.com

Here is one of her recent articles that is relevant to the discussion: https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-long-march-through-the-soul/

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Transcript

Jack: 0:08

Welcome to the Become who you Are podcast, the production of the John Paul Tour Renewal Center. I'm Jack Rigert, your host, and I am so glad you're with me. Hope you had a great weekend. You know you've heard me describe these many multifarious evils that we're seeing around us today. We all have a sense of this, don't we? And I've described that as a hydra. I think that's a good way to do it. You know, a hydra, if you remember, is a mini-headed serpent. You know, in Greek mythology that was slain by Hercules, and every time the head was cut off it would be replaced by two others. And so this multifarious evil of today is not going to be overcome by a single effort. And so what happens is we almost get over, inundated with all of these currents of evil coming at us, and we almost want to put our head down in the sand. I know there's mornings I wake up like that and say, oh my gosh. Well, how do you get a handle on it? How do you understand it all and how do you come up with a solution for all this? You know how do you stand in the breach and look for everything that's true, everything that's good, everything's beautiful, so that you can bring joy and peace in your life in the midst of chaos, right. Well, Awake, Not Woke is a book that will help you do just that a Christian response to the cult of progressive ideology. Noelle Merring is the author and she's on the show today. She's done, in an economy of words, a book that that you can read, you know, you know fairly quickly. That gives you a really nice overview and also can get granular and digs into this multifarious evil that we see around us today. I really highly recommend it. So buckle up and get ready for today's episode. I'm excited and grateful they have Noelle Merring with me today.

Jack: 1:59

Noelle is a fellow at the Washington DC based think tank, the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She's the author of a book we're going to talk about today, along with other things Awake, Not Woke a Christian response to the cult of progressive ideology, published by Tan Books. She is the editor of a website. She founded Theology of Home. She can talk a little bit about that. The co author of Theology of Home one, two and three, she writes on culture, politics and religion and is published in the national review, the Federalist, the American mind, Catholic World Report, National Catholic Register, EWTN and many other places to. Noelle has an MA in philosophy and I just found out she did graduate work and maybe finished her graduate work. I guess I should have been listening a little bit more. Noelle, I apologize for that, but here's an impressive point she's the wife and mother of six children living in Southern California. Noelle, welcome to the Become who you Are podcast. Great to be with you.

Noelle Mering: 2:59

Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jack: 3:01

Yeah, and just to finish up there, I left off on a little bit of a tangent there. You said you went to Franciscan right, I did.

Noelle Mering: 3:11

Yeah For a long time my resume was I did graduate work in philosophy that was at Franciscan and then, as of the last few years, I can say I got my masters in philosophy, because I got pregnant while I was writing my master's thesis, and so I never finished it. And then, through the facilitation of Pat Lee, who's a wonderful philosophy professor here, he helped me get pretty late in life relative to when I graduated master's degree. So I did.

Jack: 3:40

I did. So what was your thesis on?

Noelle Mering: 3:45

Well, I just he. I was able to use my book and develop a thesis paper and then I defended it before some of the grad students and professors and stuff.

Jack: 3:57

So yeah, Is that how you hone this book? Because I made this comment to you and this is why I'm so impressed with this book. You know, Noel, as I go along, you know Christians but even non-Christians have the sense that something is something's up right, Something's unusual about all these. I'm going to call them just currents of evil, but there's something up and people have a sense of that. So as I go around, people ask me for references all the time. I do a lot of public speaking, of course, and with what I do, and when I came across your book, I thought what a gem.

Jack: 4:32

Awake, not woke a Christian response again to the cult of progressive ideology. What you were able to do, Noel, is write a book that that's condensed without being condensed, and it's done in a very clear way. I'm just very excited about this book. And so tell us two things I'm going to ask you to do. How do you raise six kids and do all this? Because you're doing a lot of writing. You've got six kids. We hear in the culture that you can't do that, Noel. You can't raise six kids and do other things that you want to do in life, but it looks like you just might be able to do that. And then, how did this idea for awake, not woke, not just the idea of how it came about, but how did you decide to write in such a beautiful, concise way and make it accessible to all of us so easily?

Noelle Mering: 5:26

Oh well, thank you. I'm so glad that the book has been feeling helpful to people. That's wonderfully here, and so thank you so much for those nice words. Regarding your first question, well, I would say a couple of things. One is that different women have different capacities.

Noelle Mering: 5:39

I certainly could not have done any of this writing when my children were very little. I could not have done it, probably even pregnant. You know, as I indicated earlier, as soon as I got pregnant with my first child, I couldn't even think and stay awake long enough to do my master's thesis, much less anything else, so I had to have a more limited capacity than other women. In that way, I started writing, probably about 2018, for national publications, and so at that time, my youngest was six, so I was sort of out of the really intense baby years, toddler years, pregnancy years, and we've also been blessed with a wonderful Catholic school locally, so I homeschooled for a long time once the kids got into school. You know, then, that freed up my schedule, and it just reminded me that there are different seasons and mothering. You know that it might be here in the thick of things forever.

Noelle Mering: 6:32

But you know, eventually seasons shift and you find that, you know, there are new demands on your time, certainly with older children, but it's less that intensity of the younger.

Noelle Mering: 6:45

So that's my answer to that question Regarding how I came about writing this book. You know I started writing articles, I would say, on the woke movement probably a couple years before I signed contracts for the book, and then it just was a really intriguing subject matter to me, the way that it psychologically affects individuals but also whole culture, people, the way that it kind of sort of appeals to very Christian principles like compassion and walking alongside the suffering and the marginalized, but then sort of manipulates them and manipulates our desire to be responding in the right way because of that good Christian instinct, but then, you know, sort of manipulates and demands a very particular action, response, a very particular justice, manner of responding that it seemed pretty clear was causing more harm than help and also was becoming something that could not, was untenable with Christian morality and Christian theology, and so it seemed really dangerous in that way that it would be. It was, you know, parasitical, I think, on the faith in some ways.

Noelle Mering: 7:54

It's yield to it and through the language of the faith oftentimes, but really ended up Leaving people in a place where they could no longer hold both beliefs together. They either had to be kind of politically progressive or Christian. They couldn't really do both any longer, and I think we've seen the you know the rotting fruits of that so much with so many churches I mean the Protestant world, but also so many you know parishes in the Catholic world where Once they really start embracing all kind of social justice stuff, they wind up, you know, really start of dying on the vine. There's not a vibrancy of orthodoxy any longer. So all of that seemed like the stakes are really high and trying to understand and and and then communicate what was happening, and it was something that, for whatever reason, I just was always really passionate about that type of subject. So I, after writing about it in an article form for a couple years, I proposed I came up with a title. I've been thinking about doing a book and I came up with a title.

Noelle Mering: 8:51

One evening, a wake, not woke, and I reached out to my editor at Tan and the next day I had a contract, and so oh, nice yeah it was only few weeks before the quarantine ahead in 2020, and then the summer of rioting, and so it was really bizarre to be writing about, as all of that was unfolding in this in the world.

Jack: 9:07

Yeah, on the other hand, it you probably had this kind of shelter in place for a while, so gave you some time to write. Of course, you know all the kids were probably with you too, though.

Noelle Mering: 9:16

That's right. All the kids came home.

Jack: 9:18

I was going at the time, yeah well, you start out right away, you shall be like God's. It's amazing how important getting back to our roots is, you know, the more you know I'm. I don't know how familiar you are with theology of the body, but I imagine you know something about that right from your, from your background, with school and Steubenville, and also just the name of theology of home, you know. But John Paul Points out the crisis always taking us back to that beginning of that image and likeness of God, what marriage is, what the family is, what love is. And you know, of course we got away from that in a while, for quite a while.

Jack: 9:55

But you start out your book kind of with that again, not not exactly, but you start to take us back to this, this battle right between the city of man and the city of God. And, and you know, we see the fall come very early on, you know, in Genesis. So we had this, this beauty of being the image and likeness of God. We got the fall and pretty soon we have this, this, the city of man being built, the tower of Babel, and, and there's a split. And that split is telling us a why, a story that that that seems like it could tell us a lot about today's culture and and you kind of dive into that, don't you? How important is that? No, all when, when we're speaking today to culture and just the people in general, kind of to go back to our roots.

Noelle Mering: 10:43

Yeah, absolutely I'm, you know.

Noelle Mering: 10:45

I think it's important for us, even just as Catholics and as Christians, to understand that this is not just a political movement, that this is deeply spiritual battle.

Noelle Mering: 10:55

You know so much, I think, of what's happening is Sort of that same old lie of that you should be, we can be as gods, that we could become sort of another type of God Without God.

Noelle Mering: 11:07

That we become self-creating, that our, our will sort of triumphs over Everything, including our, the reality of our embodied soul. You know that our very body becomes an enemy to our will. You know, it's an old sort of Gnostic heresy, but it's also a Really delt devilish one. And so I think that if we sort of just think that what's happening is just on a sort of Surface political level, we're gonna miss the really more important nature of this story, which is that it is a battle of good and evil and a battle of whether or not we are going to Remember that God is who God is and we are not who he is, or if we're gonna forget that and you know so much of. When you reference some theology of the body, it's interesting because you know famously the famous statement that man has all of our world's troubles can come down to the understanding that man has forgotten God that's the reaction to this.

Jack: 12:11

Man has forgotten. The creature itself grows unintelligible.

Noelle Mering: 12:14

Right, that's right man has also forgotten that he has a body. He has a body, and those are intertwined, that the people who understand the spiritual nature of reality then actually understand reality itself.

Jack: 12:25

Can you imagine that that statement, noel, maybe 10, 15 years ago, right, that man has forgotten God, or again, that when God has forgotten, the creature itself grows unintelligible? I mean, it makes sense 10, 15 years ago, but today it's like, wow, you know, with the trans movement and these young people I speak to a lot of young people and your book is so well done for that, for parents and for people that are trying to figure these things out that you really see that the creature really becomes unintelligible. There's a disconnect. We can really start to tell this story again, I think, in a way that we couldn't have maybe even a decade ago. Let's say, let's just pause for a minute.

Jack: 13:08

You know there's so much anguish with young people especially, and in families, dysfunction in families that when we lose that image, that amalgaday, that idea that we are embodied souls, that there is really a disconnect isn't there. I mean an actual disconnect, you see, in people. You know you talk a lot about the family in here, the sexual revolution and what happened to that. Maybe you can speak about that a little bit when I think about a Catholic social doctrine and it's set on those three necessary societies and the bottom of this triangle. If you think of a pyramid, is marriage in the family and church, or Jesus, god himself, giving us these Ten Commandments and the structure to live by? When that comes down, everything starts to crumble. I think you bring that out in your book very well.

Noelle Mering: 14:03

Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right. Carl Marx targeted the family, the faith and private property. Those are the three greatest obstacles to revolution and I think for good reason. There's a rootedness obviously that comes, that's very appropriate to our nature, from being part of a family, gives us a real identity, that introduces us into who we are and then, conversely, also into the nature of God, that he is not an authoritarian means of our repression but rather is a father who wants our freedom. And those are two dramatically different conceptions of who God is.

Noelle Mering: 14:43

And I think one of the tactics and the greatest triumphs of the woke movement is that it is so effectively portrayed fatherhood, both human and divine, as being a means of our oppression. And so that's been a tactic that's really targeted, gotten to the heart of both of those obstacles to revolution the faith and the family. If we don't understand what fatherhood is and conversely, and also consequently, what family life is, the goodness of it, the beauty of it and the importance of it, then we're going to lose all sight of the faith and the family and then that leads people really naturally into kind of a place that is unmoored and looking for some facsimile of an identity. We're seeing that a lot with fulfilled through the tribalism of identity politics, which is really concerning to me.

Noelle Mering: 15:36

And you made an interesting point earlier when you said that we're seeing, 10, 15 years now into after post that statement now how much in the transgender movement we are forgetting our bodies because we've forgotten God. But that was present also in the sexual revolution from the start right. The idea that sex is meaningless is basically the idea that our bodies don't really mean anything. It seems like power and freedom that you can do whatever you want. Your body can be anything, you can do whatever you want with your sexual faculties. But it actually is really a movement of nihilism and it seems appropriate to me that it ends in violence, as all these sorts of lies do, seeing that violence really acutely now on the transgender movement, and the good news is that a lot of people are waking up because of that.

Jack: 16:23

I unpack that just a little bit, that when you say the violence and I agree with you, but for our audience that's thinking we see violence on the street, we see violence here, we see violence here. Unpack that a little bit and know what. When you say violence, what you're thinking.

Noelle Mering: 16:40

Yeah, well, I think foundational lies, particularly about the nature of the human person, inevitably carried out in their logical way, lead to violence. We've seen it certainly with abortion, the idea that we have to sacrifice a child in order to perpetuate a lie, that sex has no meaning, because a baby is many things, but at the very minimum a great, glaring sign that there is something meaningful happening here in that exchange.

Noelle Mering: 17:06

But then certainly with the transgender movement. Well, I think you could see, in the Me Too movement too, sexual abuse is a using of the other persons. It's communicating that your body is something of utility. It has no real meaning. But then the transgender movement, certainly the puberty blockers and then the cross puberty hormones are a type of violence to the body. And then certainly the genital mutilation, the mastectomies, chemical castrations. These are quite violent medical procedures that are being sort of baptized by this new diabolical ideology as being something that is freeing and something that is for the good of the person. So yeah, so they're always accompanied by lies, are always accompanied by violence when there's such foundational, broadly accepted lies.

Jack: 17:56

Yeah, and when we start to think about that. You know, I was just talking to a psychiatrist and they were talking about especially women and how the violence of that lie that you're you're talking about it's not only an external thing that we can see today, you know, in abortion and and and look at it, if there's an attack on humanity, you know, and there is, the focus of that attack is, you know, from the sexual revolution now seems to be really focused on children and and, like you said, you know, if, if the, if the child makes it out of I, almost escapes out of a mother's womb, today we render them sterile and but but even more so this violence is, it is internal. I mean Women especially, I think, have a real sense of this. I was giving a talk no, I'll to high school kids and just talking about the beauty of love and how a young man should treat a woman if he really loved her right, and a young girl start to cry, and Later on I asked the woman that was in charge.

Jack: 18:57

I said ask that young girl why she started to cry, and she said that that's the.

Jack: 19:01

I don't have a father in my home.

Jack: 19:02

That's the first man that ever stood up and told me what love was and how a young man or a man would treat me If he really loved me, and it was so beautiful that I started to cry.

Jack: 19:14

She knew she said that as she was using her body right in meaningless sex, that she was, she felt used, but she couldn't articulate it and I and I think the point I'm making here and you, you make it throughout your book is that we have to speak back to these meanings again and purpose and human dignity we can get. We can speak to these things again, because I think we're seeing we've gone so far off the rails now that I think it's time you know to to start to really, you know, get down to the basics of this. And the last thing I'll say is the psychiatrist told me that she was working on college campuses and and she said that they would come in with all of these, all of these anxiety, depression, mental health issues and find out that so much of it related back to her sexual they're sexual lives either abuse, violence, all kinds of things, the things that you were bringing up.

Noelle Mering: 20:09

That's an incredible, powerful story and so moving. Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things that you're, when you say that we need to speak into it, one things that is that's. I agree utterly, of course, and I think one of the things that that provides is a moral vocabulary. You know, people are very frustrated and stunted when they don't know how to speak about something that they feel very deeply about. And so that young woman that you're speaking of, you know that she had no moral vocabulary, no context to identify, to articulate the wounds that she was experiencing and why, you know, probably there's something deep inside her that was screaming out against it and not wanting it, but there's.

Noelle Mering: 20:48

No, we're not giving kids and young adults any way to sort of articulate that, because they're not supposed to feel like that. They're supposed to feel like this is all cool, you know, and so and so. That creates a real dissonance, I think, in the soul and leads, I think, to a lot of anxiety, because you're not able to have a unity of life at that point, right, you're not able to identify your emotions, your spiritual nature, with anything that you can Say, articulate, declare, identify, and that language is so important in that way and you know, I think it always tends to start with a manipulation of language and the fact that we've stripped kids I have any sort of way of talking about this pain I think has led to so much of a doubling down on the pain and furthering of the pain.

Jack: 21:35

You're. The introduction to your book starts out with language, and, and how Important it is. What's happening now, as I, you know our culture, and especially with our kids, through education, a public education system, they're actually distorting, like you said, you know, to DEI, and and through SEL, social emotional learning, which our audience is fairly familiar with those terms at least and and at the end, you know it's these children have this cognitive dissonance within them, right? I mean, even little kids have this sense of what's right or what's wrong and they hear these words in this language and Then we're silencing them. No, I'll, even in schools.

Jack: 22:14

And I'll just add this last thing I just gave a talk on what what we call stolen innocence this last week and and really what it's talking about is are they national sex ed standards, comprehensive sex ed standards and schools and different things, and and and really just making people aware of it, right? Well, it was in a public library and on the way out, we were barely out the door, we got an email from a letter from them already, a saying that we we had to cancel the rest of the dates that we were on there Because somebody you know there's there was a plant in there. We found out later on, but in anyways, they complained at the front desk. They said and, and, because we were twisting and distorting language, right. So now our language becomes hate speech, right?

Jack: 23:01

When we're talking about these things that you and I are speaking of right now, the meaning of sex, the, the, the meaning of our Christian values, morals, virtues, you know, speak to that a little bit. We are in, and how can we bring this language back? Because it takes some courage today, doesn't it's? It takes some courage, but we're gonna have to do it, aren't we?

Noelle Mering: 23:26

Yeah, that's right. No, I mean it's striking that I think it's the new president of the American Library Association isn't about Marxist and publicly so, so that tells you a lot, right there. Yeah.

Jack: 23:37

Emily the Benzke, I think her name is, and you're exactly right, I quoted that not too long ago and and yeah, so she she's even talks about how she, you know, you know how you can queer the catalog so that you can actually distort our views of people and language and different things. By the way, we categorize those things.

Noelle Mering: 23:58

That's right. Yeah, no, and it's particularly targeted, as you say, at children, increasingly out in the open, targeting children, and I think, for good reason, one of which I talked about in the book that innocence is really in affront to ideology Because, as you say rightly so, children have and are, you know, they have an innate understanding of what's real right. They understand that boys and poor, boys or girls, they have a sense of justice, they have a sense of fairness, but they also are signposts to us as adults of something of a standard, of a measure, of some apps Good, real goodness they point us to, they sort of can shame us, right, when we're confronted with innocence, either through the Avenue of a child or through someone who is very holy or Virtuous and we're not living rightly, it can either make us feel ashamed and sort of angry because they're pointing to a truth that we don't want to acknowledge, that we're not living up to, or it could inspire us, it could make us want to be better, and so innocence is incredibly powerful and children embody that sort of innocence. And so the movement really targets children, not only practically because they want to create new foot soldiers for a woke revolution, but also for spiritual reasons.

Noelle Mering: 25:05

I think that their innocence is in affront to an ideology of a lie. But as far as language goes, you know, this is the way it's so manipulative is that it doesn't want to just kind of. It's not just a long march to control institutions like libraries, like academia, you know, media, all these institutions. It's really ultimately a long march for your soul, and so it's it can. If it can control the way you speak and the way you understand what words mean, it starts to control the interior life in your mind and your soul as well.

Noelle Mering: 25:37

You don't, you're not no longer even able to think what is true at some point, or that's that what they're the outcome that they want. So it's really there's a lot going on there, I think, in the control of language, and then what replaces that sort of self-censorship that has starts to happen is that we no longer even feel like we can think those things anymore, because we want to correct ourselves. We're not thinking in accord with the ideology, and so we try to sort of correct ourselves on our own, in on our on our own, but nothing that. Then the second thing that happens is that then it's a demand to Participate in a lie, right, and I think we see this a lot with the pronouns. It's not only that we have can, that we can no longer say you know, a man is a man of a big child, you know they're only two sexes, but it's now we have to affirm the lie that is being demanded of us outside of ourselves. Right, that I am these are my pronouns you have to address me in this way, so it creates complicity.

Noelle Mering: 26:27

That I think is sort of akin to like a gang type of complicity, right, sort of an initiation into not only are you afraid to speak the truth? Now, you are complicit in the lie, and so it's going to encourage you to also want to make every other person that complicit as well. So these are really effective manipulative course of tactics, and so I think the answer is, as you say, to to have courage to speak the truth, to do so simply and plainly, to not never participate in a lie. You know, I tell kids all the time in college Don't give your, don't give your pronouns, even if you say ones that align with your sex, that it's still a participation, and so I think that you know that's an obvious place where you have to stand up and resist that.

Jack: 27:07

Yeah, because you know, young people, especially Noel, have this that's just such a great point, you just made it because they have this natural empathy right. We have the especially Young girls right, and that's why they get caught up in these social contagions. They, they have this natural empathy, they, they, they, you know, their heart wants to go out, and it does go out for for people, and so they can fall to these really Easily. I think what happens is, you know, parents, unfortunately, is Abnegated their responsibilities totally to the school systems. And and maybe when I was growing up, before your time, you know, a generation before it might have been okay to do that.

Jack: 27:47

But by the time, you know, my daughter has got four young girls. The youngest one just went to the school. Also, her oldest one's in high school now and and you can't just do that, you just can't abdicate. So so, as we start to, you know, be cognizant of your time, love to get your thoughts on what parents because parents are a lot of parents are going to listen today and and want to know, you know, is there any hope for public education or did they? You know that they need to just get out, or what can we do? And, of course, on the other hand, even if you get your own children out, um, you know, we can't just give up on the, on the kids that are there, so we're still gonna have to, you know, to stand up. Right. What, what's your advice there? No, I'll.

Noelle Mering: 28:34

Yeah, no, I think that's the last point is I totally agree with.

Noelle Mering: 28:37

I think it's interesting and important to think about and it's when I think about a lot that even if you know my kids, even if we have a good school situation for our family, you know these are the, these are their future peers, their potential future spouses, future neighbors, and so we all should be invested and concerned with the education of all of children, even if we have a good solution for our own family, whether or not there's a potential for, you know, the public education system to be redeemed I mean it's certainly possible it seems like a hard, long road and one that I don't think we can leave our kids to be lab rats and waiting for that change to come around.

Noelle Mering: 29:15

So I would say that the children's education is, should be, a preeminent importance to family decisions regarding where we live, having communities, you know, where they can have friends whose families we know and trust, and don't have to feel like they're standing a thwart society. At seven years old, you know, or eight years old, or twelve years old, you know that it's sort of too much to combat, I think, to ask of our kids, and so part of their formation is having them have a whole culture that's living the truth. You know that they are not just reading good books, which is important, having good conversations, going to mass, but also that they have, you know, fun, fun, culture life that reinforces all those things. You know fam, with families gathering together and all of that is so important and crucial. So you know, parents are have a lot of challenges ahead of them. The good news is, I think, that they are realizing it now. You know a lot of us for a long time.

Jack: 30:13

Well, let me stop you there for a second? Do you think so? Because one of the hardest things, and that's that? I hope you're right. No, I really do, because and there are waking up, people are waking up in general, but I feel like more grandparents are waking up than then.

Jack: 30:28

Then the millennials, let's call them right, and I think that's a little my kids age, you know, kids that were born in, say, the 80s. You know, basically, and and and maybe a little beyond right and and so they're, their children are starting to go, they're in school now and a lot of them are sitting in there in with that proverbial frog and that pot and I and it's not all their fault, I don't think the boomers passed much down to them. I think you know the two institutions that that would normally passed on your morality and your virtues, which are the family and which I think we were both compromised, you know, and sexual revolution did a number on on both of them and other factors, of course, sexual abuse and the church, all kinds of things. But at the end of the day, we kind of left the millennials in this vacuum. I don't think I know when my kids were in school, no well, and then even went away the college.

Jack: 31:24

I didn't realize how bad things had gotten, even surprised me. I didn't do as much as I should have with my own children and then they turned around and and I think they they just don't know how to stand up. They don't have the enough of a moral foundation you know to stand up. I mean, we have a we. I don't just want to throw this in your lap, because you need to get everybody to read your book and books like yours, right, and maybe start there and really start with a good, solid foundation. I think I get back to your book because it's able to to get above the trees and they get granular. But getting back to those, those parents, do you? Do you think the millennials are waking up to this and and and? Because they're not, the church numbers aren't showing it right. So hopefully they are.

Noelle Mering: 32:14

Yeah, I mean, I think, like most things, it's probably a big mix. You know, I certainly see what you're pointing to, which is that I know a lot of very good, faithful, fantastic parents who, you know, it was sort of like the I was right before that stage. You know, I'm older than a millennium Gen X, and so I think this public schools were not quite as bad, the culture is not quite as bad, and then somehow the millennials a little bit got lost in the shuffle, because I think things were changing a lot and there was the parents didn't really weren't really aware of it because they were thinking of kind of an older school model. So I think that's a really common experience that you're pointing to in in some ways. You know, I think, well, two things I see the phenomenon you're talking about, and oftentimes is not that they are just afraid to speak up, it said, they don't have the internalized, they haven't internalized the formation of the faith to the depth that they should have already, and so they're kind of so caught there.

Noelle Mering: 33:04

The cultures come into them so much and they're not really aware of their thought processes so deeply that it's hard to, it's hard for them to really see what's happening because they they haven't really embraced the faith to the degree that maybe they could. It should be and and that's, you know, that's something that can I have hope for, certainly, as for changing, because you know, you know God is merciful and people oftentimes, as they get older, they start to see things differently and wind up embracing the truth more deeply, and they might have when they're younger. So that might be a good step. The first step, obviously, is their own spiritual formation as parents.

Noelle Mering: 33:39

But secondly, I do think that the more we can, you know, let people see, and maybe even through asking questions, you know, this is what's happening, for you know 13 year old girl, or 14 year old girl, 11 year old girl, puberty blockers, or you know trans, these shocking things that are really happening. Because I think part of the problem is, I think they oftentimes just don't really want to wrap their minds around what's happening. You know, then, once you're kind of buffering yourself from what the reality of the situation, then of course you're not going to really have an accurate understanding of, you know, the stakes of public schools and raising their kids there. So I think that helping them in a way that is not too pedantic or polemical, but still pointing them to the truth, and then asking them questions and then letting them sit with that question and try to mull it over themselves, you know, as a good tactic, as a start.

Jack: 34:34

Yes, yes, yes, yes. And so why did you decide to stay in Southern Cal? Now? I mean, that seems like a tough environment. Look, I'm in the belly of the beast here in Illinois, so I'm just west of. I was born in Chicago, just west of Chicago and on the suburbs, but you made a decision to stay there. Did you find an area there in Southern Cal that you can kind of fence that culture in just a little bit for a while?

Noelle Mering: 35:02

Yeah, that's right, exactly, we have. You know, we've been here for 20 some years and here at Thomas Coinas College, so there's just a big Catholic, robust community of Orthodox families all around us within multiple towns around us. So, ranging around a 20 mile radius or so, there's a ton of Catholicism. That's very vibrant Orthodox here and also, you know, I found north of LA.

Jack: 35:27

Right, yeah, that's right, and you can find these pockets of Catholic families there, so there's some hope there, that's right.

Noelle Mering: 35:36

Yeah, I mean, we certainly have had our fair share of good friends. Flee California, and I understand why. You know, and that is maybe the right choice for some people You're an embattled state too. Oh, that's right, yeah.

Noelle Mering: 35:47

We can relate to each other in that way. But it is hard to leave to pick up, you know, especially in our state of life. We're homeowners. My mom is elderly, she lives nearby. It'd be hard to move her so many old friends. Our kids are spanning from college years down to grade school still, so it's just a tricky time. They're not so young and mobile anymore. So, yeah, so we're hanging on.

Jack: 36:09

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, god bless you. Before I let you go, just a quick thing when do we buy the book? And if people want to reach out to you, is there a way for them to contact you, noel, and then tell us just a little bit before you go about. Theology of Home.

Noelle Mering: 36:26

Sure Love to. So I easily found NoelMarryingcom, I've got all my articles on there and I have a way to do a submission form to email me. The book is available through my publisher, Tan Books, wherever books are sold, but also in our shop, TheologyofHomecom. So Theology of Home is a project that I run with Keri Gress, who's a prolific Catholic author of her own right amazing woman and it is multiple things. It's a free subscription website where we can help, you know, really curate and shape women's limited time, where they want to learn things about the news and the faith and maybe how to organize their home and get a new recipe.

Noelle Mering: 37:08

But you don't want to scroll a million websites to do that and also be polluted with all the junk that's out there that is contrary to your faith. So we give them, you know, sort of a curated news feed that addresses, I think, the interests of most women. We also have priests and men who follow us there too, so all of our original work goes on there too. Plus, we oftentimes create original work just for that website, TheologyofHomecom, and we've also curated a beautiful shop there as well Home Goods, Nothing made in China, usually from artisans, and beautiful things that we think are quality and not cheap kind of junky stuff, With the idea being that Catholics are, you know, the supporters of beautiful culture historically. You know that we should be at the forefront of creating not only important works in our writing and philosophy and through theology, but also informing the popular culture with beautiful content, as well, well, god bless you.

Jack: 38:01

Thank you so much. Thank you for that information. I'm going to end the podcast here, but hang on for a second because I want to make sure I have your contact information and for everybody, thank you for joining us today. Looking to show notes, and I'll make sure that I get Noelle's contact information in there. Check out TheologyofHome. Make sure you get the book Awake, not Woke. You won't be disappointed with that. God bless you. Thanks for joining us today. Bye-bye, everyone.