The following are my prepared remarks at the 2026 Orthodox Montanika Conference in Butte, MT. The theme of the conference was nature, and I was there to talk about nature—specifically, human nature, and, even more specifically, our male and female natures, which lately we have not respected as much as we might think.
Before beginning my remarks, I should explain that what you are about to read is the result of 40 years of writing about gender issues, plus 40 years of marriage to a wonderful woman I loved very much, plus a year and a half without her since she died of cancer in October 2024. In that year and a half of thinking over our marriage—how it was, how it could have been—I have come to realize that even I have been too feminist in my thinking about women, despite all my years writing against feminism. Men and women are actually much less alike than we have all been made to think.
And now for my prepared remarks:
Did you know that “marriage counseling,” also known as “couples therapy,” was invented a hundred years ago by German eugenicists? It’s true: Racist, feminist eugenicists, pushing birth control. Before the 1920’s, nobody thought it a good idea to sit a husband and wife down together, invite them to complain about each other, and then prod one of them, usually the husband, to change his ways to suit the other. But that’s what we do today, even we Orthodox.
You’ve heard it said that “Orthodoxy is not a religion, it’s a way of life.” But when it comes to a large part of life—marriage and raising children—the Orthodox way hasn’t really differed much from the world’s way, not in the past and not at present.
The problem is that the world’s way of marrying and raising children has changed radically in the past hundred years, and most Orthodox have followed right along.
