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How the Industrial Revolution Corrupted the Christian Family · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:03
  Hi, welcome to the Family Teams Podcast. Our goal here is to help your family become a multi-generational team on mission by providing you with biblically rooted concepts, tools, and rhythms. Your hosts are Jeremy Pryor and Jefferson Bethke, and we can't wait to chat about all things family. All right, guys, welcome back to the Family Teams Podcast. I got a couple of friends of mine, Riley Flynn and Kamra Akrami with me from our integrated group. Hey guys. What's up?
• 0:30
  So yeah, we have these conversations a lot as entrepreneurial fathers about like, hey, how do we get to this crazy place that we're at today? We constantly are having conversations about what does it look like for us to raise families in the West? But a big part of that is recovering from things that have happened. And so I wrote a quick little essay on the industrial revolution and fired it off to
• 0:54
  My fellow father, friends, and Riley and Cameron were willing to jump on here and talk to me about this. So I'm going to read this and then get their reaction. This is called How the Industrial Revolution Corrupted the Christian Family. All right. Culture is always changing. This creates a constant challenge for Christians seeking to reach each generation.
• 1:15
  Do we take steps to become more relevant, or do we root ourselves in timeless principles and represent a prophetic voice pointing to an ancient way? The answer for when to stay rooted or become more relevant has to come from a careful study of Scripture. Christians have an unfair advantage. We have access to divine revelation. That's why there have been glorious times in history when the Church has stood its ground refusing to compromise on the Bible's clear teachings—
• 1:41
  But one area where the church seems unable to lead, but instead follows culture, is in our theology of family. Most Christian teachers seem entirely unaware that the Bible contains a clear family theology. So when economic forces began to redefine how Western people viewed the family, these new ideas about the family were largely adopted by the church. Recent waves like no-fault divorce, ubiquitous family planning, same-sex marriage,
• 2:05
  are merely aftershocks of an earthquake that none of us were alive to remember that opened the door to these changes and a thousand others. And that earthquake was the industrial revolution. This is from Jeff's book, Jeff Bethke's book. He says, quote, we have created such a surreal and weird system.
• 2:22
  Prior to the Industrial Revolution, an average household was about 12 people, parents, kids, grandparents, uncles, etc. Now it's 3.5 and getting smaller every decade. These two kinds of family are entirely different. As Wendell Berry pointed out, quote, the modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there.
• 2:42
  But we know from scripture that God created the family for the purpose of producing. He spoke over the first family, be fruitful and increase the number, fill the earth and subdue it, rule for Genesis 128.
• 2:53
  Creating a productive household was an essential part of family life until the Industrial Revolution. How we made money changed in our understanding of the family along with it. And this is also from Jeff's book, Take Back Your Family. The Industrial Revolution was based on this idea of mass efficiency, mass scalability, while also fracturing, splintering, and disintegrating the family.
• 3:14
  We want dad to leave that house, and we want him now to come to a factory away from his family for 10 hours a day, and we want him to do certain behaviors that lead to the most scale, the most efficiency. In other words, turn this knob 5,000 times every day on the assembly line.
• 3:30
  What few people realize is we no longer live in that same economy. I doubt many of you reading this are working in large scale manufacturing. We've transitioned from an unfriendly factory economy towards more of a family friendly knowledge, service and tech economy. Today is a better time than any time in the past 150 years to transition back to a household centered economic model.
• 3:53
  The problem is not a lack of opportunity. The problem is Christian families continue to carry an industrial revolution mindset. This is also from Jeff's book. Disintegration, splintering, efficiency, scalability, commodification, all these values that the industrial revolution made prominent were not really a super industrial revolution culture anymore.
• 4:14
  We're a little bit more of a tech and information culture now. As Wendell Berry says, the spirit of that is still undergirding everything that ever came after it. So Christians studying scripture to derive their theology of family should never have fallen for the values and practices encouraged by the Industrial Revolution, but we did. That's why a generation has to decide to take back what has been lost.
• 4:38
  All right, a lot of vast claims made in that essay. So I wanted to get your guys' take, any pushback, any feedback? What does that start for you guys? Cameron, why don't you go ahead and start? One thing is I hear that. I think experientially, a lot of that is probably true. I don't disagree necessarily with the premise.
• 4:55
  I guess maybe I disagree with or would question what should we have done instead? Because you think about each of those things, the only way the culture shifted is because each of these individual families decided that this industrial type of work, factory work, was a better bet for their family anymore.
• 5:11
  than working on the farm or to escape maybe some of the squalor or whatever it was. And so I almost wonder what kind of advice would you have given somebody at that time? Because we can look today at what has happened. But when you're in the middle of it, it's maybe looking at some of the areas of the developing world right now. But what would you have them do?
• 5:28
  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good question. Yeah. I would say one thing that I do wonder about that transition is that there are cultures, Orthodox Jewish cultures, obviously Amish cultures, some that have almost a preexisting value set for integrating the family. And so when they already have that value set, when these economic waves hit the family, they look for the corners of society where they can, they, they can make money and stay integrated. Right. So
• 5:55
  You have, you know, I remember when in New York, I was like, saw this vast textile industry that so many Jewish families went into during that period. You certainly, we certainly could have had an ownership culture within the church and said, look, I know it's difficult because in the industrial revolution, there is, there's required requires a lot of capital, right. To, to start a factory.
• 6:25
  the energy of the shock wave into something that'll bless the family instead of just capitulating to it. So it's hard to play that back and see how hard that would have been for those families. I hear your point, like,
• 6:36
  I don't know what it would have been like. I don't know if it would have been realistic, but that's kind of what I picture is that if we had this pre-existing value set, would we have chosen to more, maybe even group together as a Christian community and said, let's face this challenge in a way that's not going to destroy the family? What would the alternative have been? Maybe I'm just going to follow up on that for one second. Where were they coming from that this represented an opportunity for people?
• 7:03
  the dads would go off to a factory and was that better from the basic, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Was that providing some basic security that maybe wasn't available in the same way? Never mind blessing future generations. How many people were in spots where this represented a marked increase just above the maybe subsistence level for the average person?
• 7:27
  Yeah, there were those opportunities. I mean, clearly, when you look at when Henry Ford was willing to pay people $5 a day at a time when the average wage was probably closer to $1 a day, that was to do soul-crushing factory work. A lot of families said, OK, well, we'll take that exchange, and even if you do take that exchange...
• 7:51
  My point isn't necessarily that we could have avoided some of the opportunities of the Industrial Revolution, but that we would have channeled those into opportunities for our family. So like if you're going to make two or three times what a normal person would make by doing a soul-crushing factory job, then why isn't there a conversation more broadly in the Christian community about how to turn those into assets?
• 8:12
  You know, instead of like, let's just, let's just become a, let's transition to be a consumptive family as opposed to a productive family. But yeah, Riley, what is that? What does this turn up for you? Well, actually the camera's question I thought of there's, there's the stories of.
• 8:27
  entrepreneurs like Hershey that created an entire community surrounding their factory schools. And, you know, I know nothing of the faith of that particular man, but at one point I read a biography and was actually impressed with Jeremy, to your point, the way he was holistically thinking about the lives of his employees. And, you know, we're riding at that time in history
• 8:54
  you know, in the US waves of immigration and, you know, we were coming out of or dealing with different economic shocks. And so I think it's interesting to think about, you know, well, it was difficult for many of these families because they didn't own anything.
• 9:12
  And so they didn't have any productive assets. And so this did present an opportunity, I think. But if we fast forward and get maybe to the other aspects of your essay, I think there absolutely is ways in which it shaped our economy, right? This idea that,
• 9:32
  When you move out of an agrarian, not that that was the pure move, there were some things in between, but if we just bullet point, when you move from kind of an agrarian cyclical product productive economy, where the exact outputs are not determined, the they're not as predictable, you know, and you move into abstracting the various components, putting them into different stages and phases,
• 10:00
  of production and then doing everything you can to make it predictable, that starts to then tell the economy, okay, you can now, instead of we have to, we have to wait and we have to see what the weather's like to see what, start to tell the economy at large, actually, and we're going to produce more next year because we're going to get a better machine or we're going to hire more people. And, you know, I think even in the knowledge economy, maybe where I would,
• 10:27
  push on what you've done here is like, or what, especially with Bethke's quotes that you've got in here. Yeah, we're in a new time. And even maybe COVID was an additional move that helped us kind of be more household centric, but I don't know that we've fully shaken that maximization culture that take that abstraction culture. And if anything, it's just come into our homes.
• 10:53
  And now we have kind of this idea that your time should be maximized, that your life should be maximized, that the moments you have. And I don't think it drives us that productivity that's imprinted, perhaps, you know, all the way back is still persisting here. And we're just abstracting a different kind of work. And so I think we could chat about that for a bit, but that's where I would push. Yeah.
• 11:18
  Yeah. What does that start for you, Cameron? So the idea that there's an industrial revolution mindset that is almost like causing us to think mechanistically about time and how we run our families. Well, as we've engaged with family team stuff, we've definitely seen those patterns true and have unlearned a lot of those things in my own mind. And I wouldn't even call myself the pinnacle of optimization, but there's still something that
• 11:44
  that undergirds, I think, the way that we think about stuff. And as we think, and that's a very Western way, and it is a very orderly way. It has led to prosperity that nobody's ever seen for the average person. So on the one hand, I don't wanna swing the pendulum too hard in the other direction, because I don't wanna necessarily roll back to a thing where, again, I think what we traded out of, I'm glad that that trade was made, because we wouldn't be in the position that we are societally today,
• 12:12
  As far as the positive things, obviously there are real poxes on there. And I do agree that the family has gotten beat up big time and that that's been to the detriment. But so where's the tension then? Where where are we able to maybe do both?
• 12:24
  Get the best parts of the industrialization and the efficiencies that can be there. But maximizing that, I mean, technology has made a huge... You mentioned in your article that there are tons of opportunities today to be able to integrate and do family stuff. And we kind of can have the best of both worlds if we're willing to see it. Yeah.
• 12:45
  Yeah, I think part of what you're saying, Cameron, is one of the things the Industrial Revolution did was it grew the size of the pie. Like, and I think that's one of the things that's sometimes underappreciated. So, you know, if there is this many resources, if you double or triple the amount of resources, even if you're divvying it up in an increasingly unfair way, there's still so much more that everyone is actually net better off than they were before. And that definitely is true. Industrial Revolution created such efficiencies that the actual scale of the economy just ballooned.
• 13:14
  And so the opportunities were huge. And I do think it brought a lot of people out of subsistence. I think that my concern, yeah, is that when you don't have a pre-existing theology of family and a pre-existing vision for what you want family to look like, then the economy starts to dictate how you respond to those shockwaves. And the Industrial Revolution tended to be a little bit more of a winner-take-all situation.
• 13:40
  kind of thing because you had factories that were so expensive to purchase. And so there was just a lot fewer owners and a lot more workers. And then they had so much leverage over their workers that they could force their workers to in those early days with the Carnegie Steel and everything working 12 hours a day, seven days a week.
• 13:58
  You had these horrible situations going on in the cities where people were putting their children into factory labor for 8, 10, 12 hours a day. And so you just had these effects. And it took a long time for the government to step up and say, hey, there's some problems here. Let's regulate some of this. My concern is that the church didn't have that. You know, the church...
• 14:17
  still hasn't stepped up into that. That's kind of my frustration. That's kind of what I'm just kind of signaling or yelling about is that even now, even as we've really exited that industrial sort of scale economy, we're no longer in a winner take all kind of thing. You could, it's so easy to start a business, a tech business, a service business, something that would give you an asset that your family could own and integrate around. And we're still not talking about it. We're still not celebrating it. And we're still not talking
• 14:47
  clearly about the impact that these different decisions have. We're just sending our kids into school systems and educational processes that are designed to prepare them for an industrial economy and not realizing that, wait a minute, this is not only bad for them maybe from a
• 15:09
  for a for like even a you know preparation perspective but this is this is this is bad predictably bad for their future family potentially right so so it's like why don't we have that conversation first and i think the church is the only place to have that you're not going to see the government initiate a conversation like that that's the thing that i'm trying to figure out like what what what could we say what what could we be talking about that would help signal the
• 15:34
  the major problems that come with just capitulating to the economic forces. Well, I would add something. So industrial farming, what have we learned recently about it? Well, it stripped out the nutrients, both from the soil,
• 15:50
  and from our food. And so it reduced the price of food, that was good, right? Brought a lot of, but long-term, the impact's potentially generational health issues, right? And then I think what we have today is if we fast forward, so yeah, I'm working from home, right? But my kids walk by and they have no idea what's happening on my screen. I could be checking fantasy football scores, or I could be actually producing something.
• 16:16
  And which of these digital assets do I own? Which of them are not? You know, I mean, what is a business even? I think we can all, you know, is an influencer, is that a business? Is it not? What's actually, what are the productive assets now and who truly owns them? Have we actually discovered?
• 16:34
  Have we shared that wealth or not? And so I think the first thing we need to do, because those of us who understand that, I think we have to plug into the church because the church, we can't expect the church to understand. It's not the church's world without its parishioners, without its congregants to understand.
• 16:53
  plug in and participate and bring that expertise. And so I think, but you have to do that for your children. And so you've, the very first thing is you have to say, Hey, come here. Like, let me show you what's happening here. What's, what is this business? And I think Jeremy, it's like, how early can you get your kids?
• 17:10
  participating and understanding the work that you do so that your entire family can bring that knowledge into the church. And the ideas and the creativity that naturally occurs when we each contribute our unique understanding, that's the nexus that is possible.
• 17:31
  The Family Plan Calendar is the new way to keep your family team organized. Plan your rhythms, menu, household chores, and notes for the family all in one place. Visit familyteams.com to purchase. Like what you hear? Be sure to leave a rating and review for this podcast wherever you use streaming. I believe. Yeah, yeah. Isn't some of this an issue that...
• 18:00
  that all of the people at the levers of culture, of the church, were all of us products of the exact same system that we're trying to change. You know, one thing about family teams is so helpful, because it tells another story. You know, it tells a different paradigm. And when you're swimming in this kind of post-industrial revolution world, you have no idea that you're even swimming in it. You don't ever remember jumping in it. And I know you're not dunking too hard on people back in the day, making decisions individually as families. And so maybe it was that whole frog in the pot of water where it just...
• 18:30
  We found ourselves on the other end of this thing over a period of time. So it's hard when all of the systems are set up. On the education front, I kind of perk up there more than I do on the business front, because that's a little bit more, I don't know, kids kind of get pushed into that. That sets them on a road. That's one thing that's informing our decision in school, is being able to make some decisions around what kind of story, what are we actually equipping our kids for? And that is to think differently.
• 18:56
  That is to be present and available and not necessarily, and yes, they need to do math and all of these things. So maybe it starts with just getting a message out and letting people know that there's another way, telling another story about other possibilities, and to highlight the idea that we've been swimming in this water when we didn't even realize it.
• 19:13
  Yes. Well, I think one of the reasons why I feel like the volume on this conversation needs to be turned up even more now is that I'm curious what you guys think about this, just kind of in closing. I'm a little worried that we're headed back into...
• 19:28
  a winner-take-all economy. So I think with AI, with robotics, the kind of capital, like if you have access to large-scale production, I think that I can't tell what's happening next. I can't tell if those people who are going to control patent, those kinds of super powerful tools are going to be like,
• 19:48
  you know, the industrialists of 150 years ago, 100 years ago, if they're going to wall off access to some of those powerful technologies in order for there to be this winner take all, because you are seeing this sort of phenomenon begin to occur in the economy where you have the distance between various people who own their level of scale that you're able to create things at, the amount of wealth you can create, the gap is growing. And so I think that there's always segments of the economy, like the service space economy is going to be really hard to
• 20:18
  to see technology go in there and do all of those things as well, right? That's going to take some time. But we're seeing this with the creative economy. We're seeing this in certain industries. And so curious what you guys think. Are we, because I think we have been in a golden age of like,
• 20:34
  You could start a business and really make a living and escape the middle class even in just a few years if you hit it right in various sectors of different industries. But I'm worried a little bit that in 5, 10, 15 years from now, that opportunity may not be gone, but it may be less than it is now or was in the last 10 years. What do you guys think?
• 20:56
  Riley handed it off to me. Wow, that's an interesting consideration. So it's not even just let's recapture what we was there. It's okay, foreboding of what might be the case later. I'm not entirely concerned with a disparity in income or some of those things. The gap doesn't concern me as much as is there widespread destruction of so many people's livelihoods as a result of
• 21:22
  It's not just the horse buggy being thrown out in favor of the car. It's kind of a widespread, we just don't need you anymore. What can you do? What could you go into? It's not replaced by another industry. It's being replaced by something that replaces an industry almost, and that doesn't even need people anymore. That's an interesting thing to consider. Yeah. I wonder...
• 21:45
  I wonder, yeah, if it's not as much about, I mean, cause what's the ultimate goal? Is the ultimate goal that like every, every family would escape the middle class? Like, I don't know if that's really, but it's that every family would have agency to, and would have a productive enough asset, have enough kind of agency to invest in the next generations and pass on a legacy of faith.
• 22:12
  and understanding and purpose. And I think that's not necessarily purely a wealth. It's not not a wealth question, but it's not purely a wealth question. It's almost more of a time and an energy question. And I don't know that we're leaving the age where we have less control over our time. I think there's just actually, we have an increasing amount of agency over our time. It's what do we do with our attention?
• 22:40
  And how do we combat, and I don't, I mean, the amount of possible consumptive outlets we have have increased exponentially. And so that would be the, my worry would be more the downstream impacts of the industrial revolution in terms of what we could indulge in versus the.
• 22:58
  whether or not it's controlling how I can spend my time or what I own. Yeah. I think, I think that's great. That's a great place to kind of land Riley. So these two things, agency and time, we're really talking about like, how do we, how do we make sure we, we, we don't lose control of that when we are trying to live more integrated with our family. And there are different pathways into getting the control of those things. And so we're talking about an economic way. And I think that,
• 23:26
  that there are people that sometimes trade asset ownership for a lot more miserable job that gives them less control of their time. So that's not a good exchange. And so it's not asset building for the sake of asset building. It's what kind of family do you wanna build? And are you choosing an economic path that is likely to serve that vision? And let's talk about that. Let's talk about the pros and cons. Let's talk about the ups and downs and every economic shockwave that hits us is going to change and sort of reshuffle
• 23:56
  those considerations to a certain degree. And so I want us to, I want us to be having that conversation, you know, within the church with between fathers, I think it's really, really critical. So awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for joining me on this conversation. That was really helpful. Thanks.
• 24:12
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