About a month ago I called attention to the Winter issue of the Scottish Rite Research Society publication, The Plumblineand the feature article by Angel Millar, The Future of Freemasonry and What We Have To Offer. At the time, I said it was important enough that every Masonic leader today needs to get hold of a copy and read it - Worshipful Masters, Wardens, and absolutely every grand lodge officer of any jurisdiction.
It really is that important.
The SRRS normally doesn't post their publications for free online, but they've just done so with this particular issue. It is available in its entirety at the link below:
The nationwide COVID pandemic shutdown makes this the perfect time to read this issue and ponder on the issues it discusses. In six pages, Brother Millar encapsulates a whole raft of topics and articles I've been posting about for three years now concerning the current social, economic and emotional issues facing men in American (and Western) society, and the generational changes over the last decades that are all having a transformative effect on our fraternity.
We don't exist in a vacuum, and what happens in the world around us has good and bad transformational effects on our lodges and the men in them. The longstanding bonds that passed the traditions of Freemasonry from one generation to the next have almost all been shattered in the last 50 years. Diminishing male role models, single mother households, fewer (if any) siblings, the decline of religious worship and its related group activities, and the rise of the nebulous "I'm spiritual, not religious" mindset are all having measurable repercussions for us. Angel covers a lot of ground in this essay, and especially cites recent, vital survey results by Jon Ruark about attitudes of our members.
For two decades I've been weary with Masons who only want to proclaim, "Ya know what's WRONG with this fraternity...?" Those types of articles and speeches have little more value than the average barstool philosopher. That's not what this is. Angel is not trying to do an autopsy on a dead organization. The rest of the article discusses the new wave of bottom-up changes being made in local lodges that are reinvigorating — and redefining — Masonic education, and driving the evolution of the fraternity at the grassroots level. He spends time especially discussing the MasonicCon concept pioneered by Ezekiel Bates Lodge in Attleboro, Massachusetts, and notes its growing numbers of imitators. He also discusses a New York program, 'Brothers For Brothers,' that teaches the basic life skills to new generations who haven't otherwise had the opportunity to learn them before: communication, public speaking, personal grooming and sartorial care, professional development — all are confidence-building skills that used to be passed from father to son, but rarely are anymore.
Freemasonry started out as a fraternity of gentleman with the aim of educating and improving a growing class of rough and rugged middle-class men - making those good men into better ones by example and education. We have that very same mission today, and society needs us just as much as it did in London in 1717, or western Kentucky in 1800, or California in 1849.
Most of us have just been given a long period of time away from our day to day grind at this bizarre moment in time. Don't waste it. Use it to study the past, contemplate the present, and plan for the future. Our fraternity needs all of us going forward, and we can't waste our efforts just doing the same things we've been doing that have been shrinking our membership rolls and our roles within our communities for decades. It's long past time to act for positive and constructive programs and changes. And this issue of the Plumbline is a good starting place.
Thanks to everyone at the SRRS for making this happen.
If you're not a member of theScottish Rite Research Society, the Plumbline is their excellent quarterly publication of papers and articles, edited by Adam Kendall. This is in addition to the annual collection of Heredom, AND their annual bonus book or publication. It's truly the greatest value in the entire Masonic research world.
Additional reading from this site on these topics:
Robert Putnam's seminal study of the decline in social capital since the 1950s that is cited in countless articles, Bowling Alone, was released twenty years ago, yet it seems that frustrated Masonic leaders just keep freshly discovering it year after year.
It is available for pre-order now. Two good starting references for recent examinations of the post-Bowling Alone era breakdown in social capital and the current results on U.S. society are Charles Murray's Coming Apart, and Timothy Carney's Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse. There are many more, but these are good beginnings.
And every Masonic leader needs to be conversant with the General Social Survey, taken since 1972, which is the baseline study for almost anyone with an interest in studying the attitudes and activities of Americans.
“Is it usually pretty quiet here?” I asked the person checking me in, who later turned out to be my tour guide. “It can get pretty busy in the summer,” he replied. In warm months, busloads of Masons visit the memorial, he said. “I must admit, I don’t know much about Freemasons,” I said, which prompted my guide to launch into a short history of the group. “It’s basically a fraternal organization,” he concluded. “They do a lot of service and charity work.” “Oh, so it’s like the Rotary Club, but with costumes and secret handshakes,” I said... [snip] The memorial also houses a museum of Masonic history, and we’d just arrived on a floor devoted to that when a muffled voice emanated from my guide’s walkie-talkie. He rushed off to fetch a late-arriving tourist, leaving me alone in a room full of creepy mannequins attired in the costumes of various Freemason subgroups and affiliated societies, including Shriners’ fezzes, Arabic-looking turbans, militaristic uniforms and one costume with a jeweled breastplate, an imitation of vestments worn by ancient Israelite priests. I found this to be a fascinating glimpse into a less-woke era, but I was disappointed that I couldn’t find any explanatory text about why these groups of (I imagine) white men wore Middle Eastern-ish garb, and whether similar costumes are still used today.
Some of the Freemason costumes on display struck this reviewer as Orientalist, militaristic or just plain strange.
Scattered around the mannequins were displays of random club ephemera — plus a few inexplicable objects, including a jaunty bobblehead doll of the controversial Christian figure Jacques de Molay, a monk who fought in the Crusades and was later sentenced to death. De Molay’s medieval order, the Knights Templar, inspired the modern-day Knights Templar — a Christian-focused subgroup of Freemasons, my guide explained after returning with a mysterious man in a trench coat...
[snip]
If I’m right, he’s an increasingly rare breed. Freemason membership has been in decline since the 1960s, according to a chart on display in the museum’s basement. “Civic life declined as people spent more time alone in front of a television or computer screen,” the accompanying text explains. Fair enough, but I’m betting that the Masons’ fraught racial history and continued exclusion of women have also contributed to their diminishing relevance. I mention this because the Masonic memorial may be on its way to becoming just that: a memorial to a bygone organization, where powerful men once gathered to socialize, plan charitable work and wear Orientalist costumes. Perhaps a lot of this is best left in the past, but it seems to me — a person who spends way too much time alone, in front of a computer — that there’s something here worth bringing into the future.
The benefit of resources like LinkedIn is that you can go and find out about the background of people whom you otherwise don't know at all, and Sadie's profile yields a few items worth noting. She's not a teenager or a college student — she graduated in 2001, so she's in her mid- or even late-30s. Sadie's a graduate of Smith College (a private liberal arts college for women only in their undergrad program), and she's been working as a writer for the Post in the Washington D.C. area in various capacities for ten years. She lives and works in the very city that a lot of Masons (and even non-Masons) regard as one heavily influenced by Freemasons from the past, and (if you believe in such things) filled with Masonic symbolism even in the street map. TV producers of programs about Freemasonry are obsessed with the idea. So it surprised me a bit to see just how little knowledge or awareness of Freemasonry she seemed to have when she walked into the Memorial — and apparently, how little she had actually learned by the time she left. After touring the place, she declared that Freemasonry is little more than a bygone organization. This isn't a hit on Ms. Dingfelder, not at all. It's a comment on how diminished we have become in the collective American psyche. I thought we had reached rock bottom in that regard back before novelist Dan Brown put Freemasonry back on the map in the early 2000s. Since those dark days, cable television has had loads of programs about Masonry. Stacks of factual, intelligent, and truthful books (including mine and Brent Morris') got poured onto the market. Freemasonry worked its way into pop culture references like movies, music and TV shows. I had thought we had even turned a tiny corner and tipped the scales slightly back into our favor, at least as far as a basic awareness of Freemasonry was concerned. Indeed, the Scottish Rite NMJ did a survey two years ago and discovered that a full 81% of respondents had at least heard of Freemasonry, even if they didn't know what it was. But as I think back over the last five or six years now, and reflect on my own contacts with the public about it, I fear more people are even less aware of what Freemasonry actually is than in the 1990s. In that same survey, less than 30% actually knew what the values of Freemasonry were. And the most common question I get asked by non-Masons under 35 these days once I get my basic elevator speech out of the way is, "But just what is it that you guys DO? What's the point?" That shouldn't be a shock, since we are about one generation removed from the 1990s. The adults in 1990 were having children at that moment in time, and we are now encountering those former infants as adults today. Already by 1990, Freemasonry had been waning, along with a raft of other social changes taking place then. By 1990, the fraternity was already down in membership by more than 30% from its 1958 height. It was blatant that the Baby Boomers had steered clear of Freemasonry, just as they had so many other so-called "Establishment" ideals of their parents. Organized religious attendance was decreasing. Divorce rates had skyrocketed. Childbirths were down substantially, and most concerning, single parent households (usually single moms) were taking a major upswing. It was into this period that today's current Millennial adults now in their late-20s and 30s were born.
According to the Pew Research Center, fewer than half (46%) of American kids under 18 years of age are living in a home in 2018 with two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage - what is quaintly called a traditional family household. This is a huge change from 1960, when 73% of children fit this description, and 1980 when 61% did. At less than 50% today, it's certainly a dwindling tradition.
One of the most enormous shifts in family structure is this one: 34% of American children today are living with an unmarried parent—up from just 9% in 1960, and 19% in 1980. In most cases, these unmarried parents are single, without a live-in partner of any kind to help raise and educate the children. And by far, the largest number are single mothers.
When I wroteFreemasons For Dummies in 2004, there was still a reasonable chance that enough grandfathers had been Freemasons in sufficient numbers that their grandchildren had at least encountered the fraternity in their lives. But that percentage has done nothing but drop since then.
Fewer children today have full-time fathers than ever before in recorded history, and even fewer of them have a grandfather to pass along older traditions like Freemasonry and numerous other important values.
(Interestingly, 5% of children are not living with either parent at all. In most of these cases, they are living with a grandparent—a phenomenon that has become much more prevalent since the recent economic recession.)
When you take into consideration all of this stew of statistics, it's clear that Freemasonry as a subject for observation by children has a pretty paltry chance of being passed along to the current and future generations by many fathers, grandfathers, siblings, uncles or other influential men in their lives.
In other words, there's no statistically significant reason why Sadie Dingfelder would have encountered Freemasons in her family. She doesn't mention any sort of family connection to the fraternity, so the only way she knows anything at all about us is from what she picked up by cultural references she has encountered as a teenager and adult. Like going to the Memorial, poking around on the Internet, or catching a rerun on A&E or the History Channel. I suspect she may not have a single family member, friend or acquaintance who is a Mason, or was in recent memory.
Mull that over. And if she has children of her own today, what chance will they have as adults to inherit any sort of collective, cultural knowledge of Masonry in another 20 years?
Note her comments about Masonry being from a "less-woke era" (a colossally imbecilic adjective if ever there was one) and her pronouncement that our "fraught racial history and continued exclusion of women have also contributed to their diminishing relevance." Whether you believe that or not, that is one narrative being circulated about us today in this hyper-heightened period of describing every single subject on the face of the Earth in terms of gender, race, offense, privilege and oppression. Young people are being taught a dramatically different (and arguably damaging) version of Western and American history now than older generations, and the values, traditions and institutions of the Founders and prior important historical figures are being derided or ignored altogether. The images of George Washington and Ben Franklin as Freemasons don't carry the sort of influence and impact they had even 20 years ago – some today would even argue that they are a negative. And let's not even venture into the demographics regarding religious beliefs among Americans in 2018, or how religious Americans are almost uniformly portrayed in a negative light by the pop culture.
None of this is an indictment of anyone, because there's no single villain we can isolate and counter, argue with, or shoot out behind the barn. These are simply the current circumstances we find ourselves struggling in. That's what we're facing going forward as we try to craft messages for the profane world, design our museums, and sit for interviews with the press. Once again, the culture has shifted under our feet, and this time, we find ourselves potentially tap-dancing on a minefield.
As bleak as all of this may seem, at its core, Freemasonry is and will remain important and relevant and needed as time marches on, but it's up to each of us to do our part to ensure its future by not hiding what's left of our light under a bushel and permitting ourselves to be ignored to death. Remember that even Sadie recognizes this, and concluded her essay with this thought: "Perhaps a lot of this is best left in the past, but it seems to me — a person who spends way too much time alone, in front of a computer — that there’s something here worth bringing into the future."
An article about Freemasonry in New South Wales, Australia appeared Tuesday on the ABC website highlighting their recent increases in new members between 18-30. The article says that some local lodges are seeing recent gains among younger men as high as 10-15% over previous years.
Freemason Alec Ayling, in South Australia's Riverland, said it had been daunting attending his first meeting.
"If you were to join, you were blindfolded before you came in and you're conducted around certain areas and had things explained, and then you're sort of brought to light," he said. Since declining membership has led to fraternities closing, rules around membership have evolved from being secret and at times discriminatory to being advertised as welcoming people from all walks of life. Grand lodges in Victoria and New South Wales have pointed to social media campaigns as the success behind recruiting new members. Several have reported a 10–15 per cent increase in young people aged between 18-30 joining their group.
In the Grand Lodge of South Australia and the Northern Territory, 75 per cent of its 115 new members over the past year were in the 20–30-year-old age bracket. Port Adelaide Freemason Cooper Andrew Allan, 22, said young people were finding a sense of purpose with the group. "Inside that lodge room there's no phone, there's no iPad. It's very much like an enlightenment society. It's a time for peace, tranquillity and learning."
(Ah, would that the same were true in every Masonic lodge everywhere. The sight of brethren constantly checking their phones and even texting each other during meetings is not exactly conducive to contemplative solemnity or even good manners.)
Freemason Ryan Mann was 32 when he joined and feels since then he has become a better person and found a sense of brotherhood.
"There was this vibe, a warm feeling in the [lodge] room, a feeling I hadn't felt in long time. There was just a bunch of good men in the room," he said.
"With a tried and tested system, [it was about] making a good man better."
Mr Mann admitted his initial contact with Freemasonry had involved looking at conspiracy videos on the internet.
On Wednesday of last week, United States Marine Corps Commandant General Robert B. Neller told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense: "It's a strategic issue that less than 30 percent of the young men and women of our nation are qualified just to join the military, either because of physical, mental or moral issues."
Think about that for a minute. It means that 7 out of 10 young Americans between roughly 17 and say 30 are NOT qualified to serve in the military for "physical, mental or moral issues."
It's part of a much, much larger matter, particularly involving men in America. I despise people that hang "crisis" around the neck of the topic de jour, but when looked at in the aggregate, the statistics involving American men by almost every measure are alarming, and have been for quite some time. Economics, crime, job losses and wage stagnation, drug use, suicide, illiteracy and education failures, illegitimacy rates, government dependence, homelessness — pick any of them, or pick your own.
Coincidentally to the General's statement Wednesday, last Thursday Tucker Carlson on Fox News began a month-long series of reports on the decline of men in America. The video of his long introduction can be seen above. I recommend a viewing of it.
This blog site is a deliberately myopic one. I focus on Freemasonry and topics and events in the world that affect the fraternity going forward. That's why I feel so strongly that this report from Carlson is an important one that brings up issues that are having profound effects upon American society at this very moment. And because they specifically revolve around men, they are vital to understand for the leaders of the Masonic fraternity, too. Because we have a job to do, and we're failing at it.
Here are a couple of excerpts from the show:
"The signs are everywhere. If you’re a middle aged man, you probably know a peer who has killed himself in recent years. At least one. If you’re a parent, you may have noticed that your daughter’s friends seem a little more on the ball than your son’s. They get better grades. They smoke less weed. They go to more prestigious colleges. If you’re an employer, you may have noticed that your female employees show up on time, whereas the young men often don’t. And of course if you live in this country, you’ve just seen a horrifying series of mass shootings, far more than we’ve ever had. Women didn’t do that. In every case, the shooter was a man...
[snip]
"The average American man will die five years before the average American woman. One of the reasons for this is addiction. Men are more than twice as likely as women to become alcoholics. They’re also twice as likely to die of a drug OD. In New Hampshire, one of the states hit hardest by the opioid crisis, 73 percent of overdose deaths were men. "But the saddest reason for shortened life spans is suicide. Seventy-seven percent of all suicides are committed by men. The overall rate is increasing at a dramatic pace. Between 1997 and 2014, there was a 43 percent rise in suicide deaths among middle aged American men. The rates are highest among American Indian and white men, who kill themselves at about ten times the rate of Hispanic and black women. "You often hear of America’s incarceration crisis. That’s almost exclusively a male problem too. Over 90 percent of inmates are male. "These problems are complex, and they start young. Relative to girls, boys are failing in school. More girls than boys graduate high school. Considerably more go to and graduate from college. Boys account for the overwhelming majority of school discipline cases. One study found that fully one in five high school boys had been diagnosed with hyperactivity disorder, compared with just one in 11 girls. Many were medicated for it. The long term health effects of those medications aren’t fully understood, but they appear to include depression in later life...
[snip]
"For men, the consequences of failing in school are profound. Between 1979-2010, working age men with only high school degrees saw their real hourly wages drop about 20 percent. Over the same period, high school educated women saw their wages rise. The decline of the industrial economy disproportionately hurt men. "There are now seven million working age American men who are no longer in the labor force. They’ve dropped out. Nearly half of them take pain medication on any given day. That’s the highest rate in the world.
"Far fewer young men get married than did just a few decades ago, and fewer stay married. About one in five American children live with only their mothers. That’s double the rate in 1970. Millions more boys are growing up without fathers. Young adult men are now more likely to live with a parent than with a spouse or partner. That is not the case for young women. Single women buy their own homes at more than twice the rate of single men. More women than men now have drivers licenses.
[snip] "One study using census data found that single women in their 20s living in metropolitan areas now earn eight percent more on average than their male counterparts. By the way, the majority of managers are now women. Women on average are scoring higher on IQ tests than men are. "Men are even falling behind physically. A recent study found that almost half of young men failed the Army's entry-level physical fitness test during basic training. Fully seventy percent of American men are overweight or obese, as compared to 59 percent of American women.
"Perhaps most terrifyingly, men seem to be becoming less male. Sperm counts across the west have plummeted, down almost 60 percent since the early 1970s. Scientists don’t know why. Testosterone levels in men have also fallen precipitously. One study found that the average levels of male testosterone dropped by one percent every year after 1987. This is unrelated to age. The average 40-year-old-man in 2017 would have testosterone levels 30 percent lower than the average 40-year-old man in 1987.
"There is no upside to this. Lower testosterone levels in men are associated with depression, lethargy, weight gain and decreased cognitive ability. Nothing like this has ever happened. You’d think we’d want to know what exactly is going on and how to fix it. But the media ignore the story. It’s considered a fringe topic..."
Pick it apart, take issue with this stat or that one, obsess over some point where you think Carlson overstated all you like. If you don't like him or you don't like Fox News, then pretend it's Rachel Maddow or Edward R. Murrow if you like. The point is, something grim is happening to the American man in society today at almost every sociio-economic and racial level, and it bodes ill for all of us. This is far from a whole new controversy or topic, and Carlson is by no means alone in sounding this alarm bell. He's just the latest to highlight it, and he's got a big platform from which to spread the word. After the clip above ended, he interviewed Jordan Peterson, a Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Peterson is hated in many circles for bringing issues like this up at all, but he's one voice among many now. It's been going on for quite some time. Recall the specifically Christian-centric "Promise Keepers" movement in the 1990s, which was partially organized to attempt to halt the decline of masculine character in America. It too was publicly excoriated at the time in some quarters for fighting against the accepted cultural norms, and for celebrating what were seen as old fashioned, pseudo-Neanderthal morals and attitudes about men and women, and the very real, very serious, very honest, biological, physical, and mental differences between the sexes. But Promise Keepers, as large and as successful as they were at the time, was just a drop in the bucket, and they have largely faded from the landscape today.
Freemasonry has been around for at least three centuries, and we long ago adopted the catch phrase that we "make good men better." So, do we? Do we really? Maybe the bigger point is that there seem to be less and less good men out there to start with, however you define "good." That's because the society and the culture aren't even preparing them for the future anymore. While Freemasonry is not, and never has been, a home for wayward boys or a rehabilitation program, it has always been a philosophy and institution to encourage self-improvement through association with other men who are worth emulating. We are needed now more than ever before in a society that has left vast swaths of men unprepared to deal with life, men who are simply giving up. We can and must fill a void that exists by doing our part in helping to fix society at this critical moment in time. But we must also come to grips with the fact that the men who are joining the fraternity today (and who are already members) are NOT the men who joined 50 or 100 years ago, by any measure you may choose: in temperament, stability, knowledge, motivation, competence, competitiveness, faith, morality, education, and personal responsibility. That's just a plain fact. And it's not a pretty one.
Civilization is a long game, not easily analyzed in ten year spurts, much less in five minute news reports. But these stats have been trending this way since as far back as the 1970s, as traditional male roles have been made more and more diminished, and even obsolete, by almost everything, everywhere you look. On the family side of the equation, there was Dr. Pincus' invention of the birth control pill, followed by the legalization of abortion on demand, no-fault divorce, combined with the huge expansion of the social safety net that encouraged the destruction of the extended family. On the morality and virtue side of the equation, there has been the complete dismantling of any and all religious considerations, or even gentle guidance, in the public square, along with the plummeting rates of those who will even acknowledge a belief in a Higher Power, however that power may be conceived. Laws and regulations have completely replaced what people used to do or not do because it just wasn't right before, or the neighbors would talk. Now, the neighbors don't know who you are, don't care, and they don't dare talk about you anyway. Judges and legislators used to discuss crimes that were "an affront to God and Man." Now, neither can even be mentioned, if only as an abstract construct, in a public policy statement or ruling, or much of anywhere else outside of a church, synagogue, temple, or mosque. Meanwhile, consider the huge shift in attitudes about adolescence and adulthood itself. As recently as World War II, it was not an uncommon story to hear about men lying about their age to join the military as young as 16 or 17. In the 1960s, there was an insistent clamor to reduce the age of consent lower, and the drinking and voting ages were dropped from 21 down to 18 to coincide with the draft age (and in time for the 1972 presidential election) — the 26th Amendment giving 18 year olds the vote was passed by the states faster than any other Constitutional amendment in history. But in the last decade, something quite bizarre has happened. Smoking ages and drinking ages have been almost uniformly increased by state laws back UP to 21, and now states are attempting to raise the age of various gun purchases to that higher age, as well. It seems that 18 year olds are deemed less trustworthy or less responsible than they were in 1970 in the public perception. Likewise, when the Obamacare laws were enacted, the age of child dependents permitted to stay on their parents' insurance plans rose all the way up to age 26 — further reinforcing the social acceptance that the age of childhood could now be prolonged beyond a quarter of a century — nearly a full third of the average lifespan today. Indeed, more 25 year olds today are still living with — and off the labors of — their parents (or even grandparents) than at any time in recorded history. And a substantially higher percentage of these 25 year old, at-home children are men than women. Substantially. Then there is the matter of men in the workforce. Automation has rendered the natural physical strength advantage of men over women unimportant now. Jobs once reserved exclusively for men that were considered too strenuous or too dangerous for women are overwhelmingly being replaced by machinery or technologically advanced tools. Wage stagnation has driven far more women out of domestic life and into the workplace than any sense of 'liberation' or 'empowerment' has. Until the 1980s, it was absolutely possible and probable that a mature, responsible man could support a wife and two or more children on his salary alone. Two-income households have become a basic necessity now, regardless of family size, and not just a decision based on some sense of personal fulfillment. But automation is not just robbing men of jobs anymore. Women are being supplanted too, putting even further downward strain on households and on earnings. Tens of thousands of formerly middle class Americans are now living in second hand trailers and motor homes, traveling the countryside like nomads, chasing low-paying, seasonal jobs just to survive. Amazon even has a program for these people, calling them their CamperForce. We seem to be living through a modern-day Grapes Of Wrath period. But these aren't just Okies fleeing the Dustbowl anymore. They used to be our neighbors, and they're from everywhere. Stir all of that soup together, and the result has been an almost complete transformation in five decades of men from the supporters and protectors of their families and society into what is today obsolescence. In a world where all gender roles (and even genders themselves) are interchangeable, men have been rendered, as the British so chillingly refer to it, "redundant." This hasn't been a gradual evolution over centuries or epochs, but of just a few recent decades or less. What was most admirable and successful about men vs. women for tens of thousands of years that enabled the human species to endure and flourish has been pushed overboard in less than half a century by America and much of Western civilization. To quote Ned Beatty in the movie Network, we have "meddled with the primal forces of Nature." Good, bad, or something in between, it doesn't matter. This is where we are right at this moment in time.
We're fifty years away from the pivotal year of 1968 (the "Summer of Love") that became 1969 (the "Summer of Regret"), and that gives enough distance to compare what we were before with what we are now. In the world of Freemasonry, grand masters everywhere are currently obsessing single-mindedly on how to appeal to "the Millenials," and starting to sniff around about the generation coming after them, too. The reason young men are coming to us is because they are searching for something. They want to fill an emptiness at the center of their lives.
Often, these young men have been raised without moral or religious instruction, or any sort of fraternal bonding at all. In that regard, an increasing number of them equate Bible passages that make up the very foundation of Masonic rituals as being no more or less significant than both ancient and new age mystical manifestations or charlatanism; who learn their own moral code because nobody from their mom to their schoolteachers to the cop on the corner wants to impose upon their own sense of self-discovery and self-esteem. They are seeking something that the culture used to provide but lost the keys to the car for a couple of decades ago. Often, they don't know WHY they want to join the fraternity themselves, they just know that SOMETHING IS MISSING FROM THEIR LIVES. And distracted parents, shrinking families, unstable jobs, nonexistent friendships, and churches they've never been in haven't provided that 'something' to them. This is not mere evolution going on today. Evolution takes time. But we are experiencing a terrible rending of society itself right now, a society that no longer trains the very people who will soon inherit it, run our governments and our corporations, and decide whether to shut off your life support machine on some not too distant morning. A society that DEPENDS on the passing of knowledge and culture and ideas and history and moral and spiritual values, or it will implode when its own people who have the control panel in their hands don’t know how or why the damn thing doesn’t work anymore. Wikipedia has become our national memory and replaced the need for anyone to have one of their own anymore, and the collective consciousness of internet groupthink, of Facebook likes or Reddit upvotes, has replaced our own conscience and moral compass. As Masons, self-improvement has always been a cornerstone of improving the society around us. That’s supposed to be our mission. But we can’t improve the world if we can’t even improve our own members, or keep them long enough to even try. Or just simply attract those men "who can best work and best agree" that we are all supposed to be emulating in the first place. Society isn't like a faulty iPhone that can be fixed by just tossing it out and getting a new one. We once either attracted men who were the pillars of the communities, or we taught the ones who would become those leaders. Masons didn’t need to beg those men to join, or provide one day classes or reduced proficiency, or form study groups to “peer into their mindset.” They were attracted to us because of our reputation — a reputation we’ve been living off of for well over half a century now, that we don’t earn or even deserve any more. Where are our Masonic mayors and councilmen and school principals, and sheriffs and judges and business leaders and shop owners and congressmen and presidents today? Much less, our philosophers who debated the issues of the Enlightenment that we were living out within the walls of our lodge meetings before any nation put them into practice? Not many of them can be found in our lodges now. The Lodge of the Nine Muses that Benjamin Franklin shared with Rousseau in Paris was studied by an academic historian in the 1960s, and he called it the United Nations of its era. Do we have any lodges like it anywhere the U.S. today? The truth is that when we circulate lists of famous Freemasons now, we’re lying. Those lists are like a phantom limb that our brain remembers from before it got blown off in our more recent past.
We once demanded the very best in our membership, but we also CREATED the very best, too. The most admired men in any society don't often start out that way. But they became the best over time, in their family, their little towns, their states, their fraternity. Masons didn’t hunt for them, they hunted out Masonry.
Of course we are all on the level. But there’s a flip side to that, of our responsibility to lead and improve society around us every day, in ways large and small, regardless of how we start out. That’s what George Washington meant when as a teenager he wrote down the aphorism in his copybook, “Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company.” Children in single-parent families now make up 40% of the kids born in the U.S. today, and in the African American community, that percentage soars to 67%. They have been raised by daycare centers, drugged to be calmer and more manageable, staring into TV sets and smartphones, isolated behind backyard privacy fences or closed up in apartment cubicles, and never even knowing their who next door neighbors are (even the ones who don't move away after a year's lease expires). A growing handful are now home schooled, and never physically interact with other students until they reach high school, or even college. They have more virtual friends online than real, flesh and blood ones. Teenagers have lost the desire to learn to drive a car or be independent of their parents. They're even giving up the most basic concept of the mating ritual: dating. And yet, young men today are looking for a mystic tie to other men. They are looking for enlightenment. And undeniably, they are looking for a connection to the past that maybe their parents, friends or other institutions were never able to give them. Most of all, they are seeking a connection to something larger than themselves. They come looking for the Masonic lodges of Washington and Franklin and Hancock, of Mozart and Goethe, of Thurgood Marshall and Rudyard Kipling. Of festive boards and philosophical discussions and toasting to the King, the Queen, or the President. Lodges of the world's oldest, largest and most legendary gentleman's fraternity the world has ever known. They’ve read all about it. But if what they find instead is peeling plaster, foul smelling furniture from the Coolidge Administration that should be cleaned and then burned, suspicious meat sandwiches, generic pop, and three hour business meetings about when to hold the fish fry or bitching about who's going to fix the toilet, followed by a bunch of guys stabbing each other in the back out in the parking lot, they won’t be back. Like it or not, we’ve suddenly had a big fat awesome responsibility shoved onto our shoulders as Masons, and especially as Masonic leaders, that have never existed before. That’s now on your head and mine, because we’re still here and we keep coming back every week as these men cycle through our lodges. You can bitch about “kids these days” like your own parents used to, but like it or not, they are ours to raise now. We’re stuck with the job because society won’t do it anymore. Countless of them are moral and spiritual ciphers, hunting something they can sink their teeth into that reaches into their heads and hearts, without understanding why they need it. They just know that they do. But they won’t find what they need and we won’t have the opportunity to help them find it if they flee the building before anybody has the chance to help them discover that ‘I’m spiritual but not religious’ vacuum they recognize they lack. The current wave in sociology, in education, and even in government is to attempt to completely deny basic human nature, and basic biological wants and desires that are baked into our cakes since childhood, and to instead alter them by fiat and by passing laws and constantly repeating theoretical utopianism that is just not true. The current state of the American Man and society at large shows that these attempts have taken a horrible toll. When human beings no longer have anything to strive for, no greater purpose to live up to, no horizon to conquer, no common belief or shared sense of mission, no sense of duty for even the children they give birth to, nothing to defend or protect or provide for, and no worth of any kind because they have no responsibility to succeed at anything anymore, they are capable of doing tragic and even horrible things, if only for revenge or out of despair. Or that most horrible of all dragons: sheer boredom. History is something that happens when you aren’t paying attention. But we ignore this growing crisis of the decline of men in society at our peril, and at the peril of our communities and nation as well. As Masons, as citizens, as fellow creatures, it's long past time that we rolled up our sleeves and start fixing each other before there's nothing left to fix.
Last June, I had the rare treat of locking a large group of America's various grand lodge officers in a room for the Northeast Conference of Grand Masters and browbeating them for 25 minutes or so. They actually took it pretty well, and the North Carolina contingent got so excited that they stood on their chairs cheering at the end, so it must not have been entirely idle air-bending. The subject that was much on the minds of everyone in that room that day was an almost obsessive concern over What To Do About Millennials. All last spring and summer, articles, editorials, marketing programs, and more came pouring out of Masonic offices everywhere that fretted and and concentrated on how to reach, recruit, and maintain the interest of men born between 1981 and about 2000. It was a curious preoccupation. If you read much of it dispassionately, you'd get the impression that what was being discussed was some odd, alien species, or perhaps some lost tribe of Amazonian rainforest dwellers who wandered out of the jungle and encountered their first flush toilet. Well, just in time for the Conference of Grand Masters this weekend (and I mean JUST in time), Macoy Publishing has released a new book that needs to be on the bedside table of every grand lodge officer in the country, and probably the top three officers in any current Masonic lodge, too: 41 Million Men: The Importance of the Millennial Generation To Freemasonry, edited by Steve McCall, with an introduction by Michael Halleran. The book features essays by McCall, Halleran, Matt Nelson, Matthew Stuart, and Samuel Friedman, and it is due to go on sale on Saturday. Buy it and read it. You can literally finish it in one night, or on one plane trip.
Unlike the usual treatment of topics like this, their collection of essays is NOT written by a group of 70 year olds telling another group of 80 year olds "what young men want." These are actually active, enthusiastic, and very level-headed Millennial Masons in the trenches. Like most of us, they have encountered more than their share of failing, 'hospice lodges' providing nothing more nourishing to the heart, soul, mind, and stomach of the the rank and file Freemason besides prison coffee and gray bologna sandwiches in the basement. This diminutive volume presents the statistics in black and blue about who this generation of men are, how many of them are out there in the world, why they do and do not become Freemasons, and why so many of them who actually join the fraternity wind up leaving within two years or less. And they actually provide some solutions, because the world doesn't need yet another book with the premise, "I'll tell ya what's wrong with this fraternity..." I despise generalizations, as a rule. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., reportedly said of generalizations: "No generalization is worth a damn, including this one." Nevertheless, what's important to understand is that the general attitudes, beliefs, values, behavior, and habits of Millennial men really ARE a perfect fit for what Freemasonry has to offer. 41 Million Men should be at the top of your reading list if you are in any sort of leadership position in this fraternity, and you ignore it and its information at your peril. Steve McCall presents a generational overview of the current American demographic and their various broad characteristics and patterns of behavior. Samuel Friedman writes about the Millennials' generational attitudes about race, diversity, and gender, and how that may affect the fraternity going forward. Matt Nelson writes about the all important (and almost never practiced) topic of Masonic education, what forms it can take, what it should be providing, and how to introduce it into any lodge. Moreover, he stresses why it's so very, very important that we all need to be doing this right this very moment. And it's not like this is quantum physics, either. Matthew Stuart writes about the Millennials and concepts of spirituality, and why Freemasonry is the ideal fit for them, if we're doing this right. And the book is filled with practical advice on how to attract and retain these men who are so vital to keeping this fraternity alive in the coming years. Half-baked plans, with no long-range planning, and zero enthusiasm will no longer do, and we are watching the results of that past behavior all around us. The truth is that we’ve got a cataclysmic problem with leadership and vision in this fraternity. Merely flacking and plumping for new members year after year and not knowing how to keep them is like your mechanic saying "I couldn't repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder." Here's a clue: I hate to break it to all of us, but younger men will have their revenge by simply outliving us. They already outnumber us in society. And try as we might, we can't rule anybody from the grave. Why make everybody's life miserable by ceaselessly insisting that the programming and practices in our lodges will only change when they rip the keys to the Temple out of our cold dead hands, and not before?
One thing is certain: if we continue to present to the world outside nothing better than an image of senior citizens in crumbling, once-magnificent temples, who gather only to play cards, swill Folger's Decaf, and exchange nothing but stories about how mean our doctors who all look too young are to us these days, we will achieve the oblivion we so richly earn. Everyone over 65 in this fraternity was 30 once, too, and we do well to remember how we were all treated by the WWII veterans who refused to change anything, either. Let's not do to those who follow what was done to us, or become the very sort of men we were always frustrated by.
The poet George Meredith once wrote, "Keep the young generations in hail, and bequeath to them no tumbled house!" There are just as many Millennial men in America right now as there are of us Baby Boomers. It's long past time to hand them the keys, sit back, and say "Do greater things, and make us all proud."
Those of us with even a passing interest in the next cohort of potential Freemasons knocking on our doors should take a look at the results of the most recent U.S. Census, and especially one particular summary report issued this month about it by the Census Bureau:
The report specifically examines changes in social, economic and demographic trends among young American adults between 18 and 34 (commonly branded as 'Millennials') over the last 40 years. It tracked four "common milestones of adulthood:" getting married, having children, getting a job, and living on one's own. The percentage of Americans achieving all four of those "adult milestones" by age 34 went from 45% in 1975 down to just 24% in 2016.
Here are a few takeaways:
Most of today’s Americans believe that educational and economic accomplishments are extremely important milestones of adulthood. In contrast, marriage and parenthood rank low: over half of Americans believe that marrying and having children are not very important in order to become an adult.
Young people are delaying marriage, but most still eventually tie the knot. In the 1970s, 8 in 10 people married by the time they turned 30. Today, not until the age of 45 have 8 in 10 people married.
More young people today live in their parents’ home than in any other arrangement: 1 in 3 young people, or about 24 million 18- to 34-year-olds, lived in their parents’ home in 2015.
In 2005, the majority of young adults lived independently in their own household, which was the predominant living arrange- ment in 35 states. A decade later, by 2015, the number of states where the majority of young people lived indepen- dently fell to just six.
More young men are falling to the bottom of the income ladder. In 1975, only 25 percent of men, aged 25 to 34, had incomes of less than $30,000 per year. By 2016, that share rose to 41 per- cent of young men. (Incomes for both years are in 2015 dollars.)
Between 1975 and 2016, the share of young women who were homemakers fell from 43 percent to 14 percent of all women aged 25 to 34.
Of young people living in their parents’ home, 1 in 4 are idle, that is they neither go to school nor work. This figure represents about 2.2 million 25- to 34-year-olds.
Of course, generalizations are always imprecise measurements, especially with something as nebulous as a generation's perceived "attitude." But when we as a fraternity have our tin can of institutional destiny tied to the tail of the next generation or two immediately following us, we need to at least keep an eye on these kinds of major shifts that affect our own present and future membership. Despite all of our solemn cant about making no innovations, Freemasonry has always adapted to suit and serve the society in which it resides. It is a constant evolutionary process, and those who fail to evolve will find themselves reaping the whirlwind. The current U.S. population today is 324,911,917. The latest available figures on regular, recognized U.S. Masonic membership from the Masonic Service Association are for 2015: 1,161,253. That is just 0.36% of Americans who are currently Freemasons – which makes us either very elite or very precarious, depending on your point of view. (Just by way of comparison, the worldwide estimate of Freemasons currently being floated by the press in its coverage of the United Grand Lodge of England's 300th anniversary is 6 million. Since everybody's best guess in 2005 was around 3 million, one wonders who's doing the counting, and just how they calculated that.)
In May I wrote a review of Brother Samuel Friedman's important book Millennial Apprentices, about societal trends in the U.S. found among those born between the mid-1980s through about 2000, and how they are affecting Masonry here. Well, our brethren across the Atlantic are confronting this same situation in England, and the similarities and differences between our two societies are interesting to compare. Like in the U.S., these younger members are quickly moving into leadership positions within their lodges and districts (which has always been the natural course of events throughout our history), and as their numbers increase, they will make large and small changes to their lodges, and eventually to the grand lodge and the fraternity as a whole. The latest issue of UGLE's official magazine, Freemasonry Today, is out, and one of the longer articles is Millennial Masonry: How Those in Their Twenties and Thirties Are Changing the Craftby Padraig Belton. In it, Brother Belton interviews several younger members and asks for their opinions and suggestions regarding Masonry. They seem to want to dispense with or modify a couple of the things their U.S. counterparts want to encourage. For instance: English lodges' have strict dress codes (black suit, white shirt, black or approved GL tie), while U.S. lodges largely eschew such things. There seems to be a desire in England to start relaxing this a bit, while there is a small but growing movement in the U.S to become more formal. English lodges often have more expensive and higher quality dinners, while U.S. lodges generally dine on the cheap. The article mentions a desire to concentrate less on the "dining club" experience, and to make it less expensive. Curiously, English lodges don't appear to encourage Masonic education outside of learning the ritual or joining Quatuor Coronati Lodge No. 2076, while U.S. grand lodges make valiant attempts every few years to try to develop and encourage Masonic education programs of some sort. Younger U.S. Masons seem to be eager to study our symbolism and philosophy (not so much history and "famous Masons"), yet it was not even mentioned in the UGLE article, outside of ritual perfection. Several references were made to a desire to have multiple degree conferrals at one time on several candidates, as opposed to the U.S.'s phasing out of those types of events after trying them en masse during the previous 20 years. In their University scheme lodges particularly, speed of degree conferral is seen as attractive, and getting new Masons into the officers line seems to be an important achievement. Interestingly, when one day classes and rapid degree conferrals were started and publicized in the U.S., English Masons were among the first and loudest to proclaim such practices to be appalling. And they seem to want to continue with the UGLE's very publicly promoted charities as a centerpiece to the fraternity, as opposed to the U.S. millennials' more restrained attitudes towards our industrial-sized charities. Yet, while the younger English Masons seem to want to continue to stress the charity side of the fraternity, they appear to want less emphasis on their massive programs and support more "individual charitable entrepreneurship." They also deal with lodge customs that we don't have at all in the U.S., such as starting meetings at 4:00 PM. I'm not sure that such a thing has EVER been the case in the U.S., outside of a small handful of individual "daylight" lodges across the country.
From the article:
They do not especially like to join institutions, but they are joining this one. Why? Doubtless, the deeply personal engagement with moral development encouraged by the Craft – that the ritual is there, supremely evocative, but how you interpret and engage with it is utterly up to you – appeals to Millennials with a disillusion towards authoritative institutions. As does the exclusion from the masonic space of religion and politics, both discredited discourses for Millennials.
[snip]
Another convenient point of reference might be the Future of Freemasonry report, which UGLE commissioned in 2012. The document was largely a stock-taking exercise with the tercentenary of the UGLE – and modern masonry – beginning to lumber into view next year, in 2017. On page 29, the report – by the independent Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford – concludes 'even at the cutting edge of twenty-first century communication technologies, our need for symbolic exchanges that reinforce social bonds remain as evident as ever.'
It goes on to observe, similarly to the Millennials above, 'perhaps surprisingly, it was the younger masons who put the greatest emphasis on the rituals, seeing them as a distinct pull of Freemasonry from the beginning', all 'as the more formal rituals of British life decay'. This appeals strongly to younger members, in the way it combines enjoyable, entertaining aspects with more serious ones involving the 'transmission of moral codes' by reflection on the dramaturgical experiences and antique phrases.
A comparison in non-Masonic attitudes between U.S. vs. U.K. millennials is interesting, as well, and the article spends a lot of ink on studies that have been done specific to attitudes among English millennials. Like in the U.S., they are mostly not specifically "religious," but "spiritual." They are "fiercely individualistic," and extremely relaxed about social issues like same-sex marriage, smoking, alcohol, and pot use. Some 41% said they would rather communicate electronically than by phone or in person. And while 2/3 of them said they are very interested in social issues, only 1/3 said they have any interest whatsoever in political issues. English millennials are extremely entrepreneurial, and are more likely to have set up their own business than their European counterparts across the Channel. Interestingly, they see social problems as a responsibility for individuals to solve, rather than government. While we fret in the U.S. when lodges shrink in size, and in some cases turn in their charters or merge, we are mere pikers compared with UGLE lodges. The article points to some lodges that have as few as 7 or 8 total members there. According to the latest List of Lodges Masonic, UGLE currently has a little over 200,000 total members, yet they have 7,476 lodges. The leadership seems to be aware that more lodges need to consolidate, simply out of practicality. Freemasonry has always adapted over the centuries and generations to reflect the attitudes and desires of its active members, and anyone who thinks we have remained the same since "time immemorial" is deluding himself. It is perhaps just a little more startling to those who have been Masons for a long time, simply because of the increasing speed with which changes have occurred in society over the last two decades. That has been driven in large part by technology. But on a societal level, it is in greater part due to the massive changes in attitudes and customs brought by us baby boomers in the first place. As a group, we boomers tore apart an awful lot of the long established "glue" that held together the previous society. I'll leave the evaluation as to the ultimate success or failure of that to future sociologists. But now that we are the aging farts on the sidelines, a lot of us are making a last redoubt and, to use the old Bill Buckley line, "standing athwart history, yelling Stop!" That is a perhaps noble, but ultimately useless, gesture. While I often heard throughout my Masonic life from my fellow baby boomers in reference to the WWII-era guys, "What we need are a few more Masonic funerals," the realization must come that the selfsame observation is now being made about us. The millennials will remake Freemasonry in their own image just as we did, and they can and will accomplish great things. As the Fellowcraft degree says, "Freemasonry, notwithstanding, has still survived." Brother Belton sums up:
The Craft is acquiring, quickly and in some numbers, a generation who show no signs of caring especially for rank, whose predilection to see masonry as a dining club (though admittedly, the best dining club) is weak, guided by a sense of moral seriousness and dissatisfaction with the answers, for the grand questions, on offer either from organised religion or political parties – questions to which their strong disposition is to answer themselves, educated, and charitably entrepreneurial.
More speculatively, others have raised the question whether Millennial masonry may produce a different and closer working relationship between UGLE and the two women's grand lodges.
[snip]
In any case, and in nearly all respects, the inclination of Millennials will be to nudge us back to where we began – a less top-heavy institution, a haven of tolerance in a partisan and angry world. And a Craft whose charitable efforts share a bit more in common with the entrepreneurial start-up culture of the tech sector, and show a bit less of what Mike Baker calls 'masonic porn', what one Millennial quoted above called 'grip'n grin' – old men, holding a very large cheque.
