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Hello, fellow wayfarers … Why the impending bankruptcy of the so-called "breastaurants" could be a sign for the church … How I was shocked by a book chosen for me by artificial intelligence … What a fun-loving author learned about suffering and grief from kids … A Desert Island Bookshelf from Winnipeg … This is this week’s Moore to the Point. |
The Death of Hooters Holds a Message for the Church |
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Those of us who are traditionalist Christians have long said that the Hooters restaurant chain is morally bankrupt, but the time has come for it to be financially bankrupt too. Before we "family values" types take a victory lap, though, we should recognize that the chain—known for its scantily clad female servers and their wink and nod to male sexual appetites—is in trouble not because it’s too edgy but because it is not edgy enough. And that ought to tell us something about the future of American culture and the future of the church. |
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On one hand, a chain restaurant filing for bankruptcy shouldn’t be all that surprising. The post-COVID-19 years have transformed entire industries, and lots of them have suffered. The restaurant industry, in particular, has seen many chains—Red Lobster, for instance—facing uncertain futures. And, beyond that, no business lasts forever. Each has a life cycle, a rise and fall, just as people do. Yet, as a recent analysis by journalist Annie Joy Williams of The Atlantic shows, Hooters is losing ground for being too tame for an American culture acclimated to online pornography and OnlyFans. |
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Williams points to the Hooters restaurant in her hometown of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, as an example of the chain’s typical business model "to sell just enough sex to be palatable to people like my Southern Baptist neighbors." |
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"There weren’t any strip clubs in my town," Williams writes. "There was just Hooters, and men could always say they only went there for the wings." |
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This psychological dynamic reminds me of a preacher I knew many years ago who would rail with all the fervor of Carrie Nation against the use of "intoxicating beverages" and the kind of people who went to bars. He would make an exception, though, for medical purposes of rye whiskey as a cough suppressant. |
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Now, the preacher himself seemed to be wrestling with a persistent cough for decades. But he could tell himself he wasn’t like those he saw as degenerates who would outright ask for a beer on a barstool. His psyche could sleep easily—really easily, it turns out—knowing that he could get buzzed purely as a patient, not as a sinner. |
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In the half century from the sexual revolution to the digital revolution, a man who wished to sexually objectify women beyond what he could see in "respectable" society had to go to a strip club or a roadside sex shop or at least go out to purchase pornographic material from behind the counter in a convenience store. Any of those choices required crossing a psychological threshold—it required a man to admit, at least to himself, that he was intentionally going looking for something his conscience knew was wrong. |
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Hugh Hefner counted on a certain kind of "respectable" man telling himself and his friends that he read Playboy for the magazine’s cultured profiles of John Updike and Andy Warhol. And the guy at Hooters could claim that the club sandwiches were the real draw—what could he do about how the servers were dressed? Maybe this same man would be the one complaining at the deacon’s meeting at his church about how "immodestly" women were dressing these days. |
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The internet gave that man a way to pursue his illicit sexual fantasies privately, easily, without ever leaving the house. And it did so in an algorithmic way that allowed him to feel like he wasn’t making an intentional choice at all—that this was merely something that happened to him, that he never went looking to violate his conscience. |
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More recently, the sexual revolution changed sides with hardly anyone even noticing. The cultural left is still more likely to argue for government-funded contraception or legal abortion or the malleability of gender, but in many newer sexual battles—on #MeToo and sexual trafficking and the ethics of consent—those on the left are often viewed by America’s sexually hedonistic culture not as hippies but as puritans. The new right, on the other hand, invites porn stars to speak at political conventions and celebrates the pornographer (and alleged sex trafficker) Andrew Tate. |
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The Amherst faculty lounge is still more likely to talk about "ethical polyamory" than a conservative-coded place would—but for many ordinary Americans today, that seems less transgressive than preachy and moralistic. Elon Musk, meanwhile, openly says he doesn’t know whether he is the father of the child yet another woman to whom he is not married claims to be his, and this is met with yawns. |
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In this kind of environment, Hooters can hardly stay in business by being just "naughty enough." Indeed, for many people, any moral objections to Hooters have become as quaint as television audiences’ shock at Elvis Presley’s gyrations or The Beatles’ long hair. As one "adult performer" told Williams at The Atlantic, Hooters is "just too tame for today’s customer." |
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If Hooters is indeed not long for this world, we should be glad. These restaurants were always about exploiting economically vulnerable women. (Williams also quotes the manager of a strip club asking, "What’s the difference between a Hooters waitress and a stripper?" His chilling answer, which reflects the effects of desperation for food and shelter: "about six weeks.") Indeed, Hooters was built on the willingness of an abundance of men to ignore the fact that the women working there are human beings made in the image of God, not meat for inspection and consumption. |
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But we should take no solace in how these places are dying. The chain is not closing because a superior view of marriage and family and sexuality won the argument. In a real sense, Hooters is gone because the argument was so decisively lost. |
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The nightclub down the road from you might be empty—but it’s because the people who once went there now prefer to get drunk at home, bingeing Netflix alone. The teenager next door to you might not be having premarital sex—but it’s more likely because he’s never around people in real life than because he’s crucified his lust with the gospel. |
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That ought to remind us of what Jesus and his apostles already taught us: Fallen, broken human nature might manifest itself in different ways, but, between Eden and Armageddon, it’s the same old fallenness and brokenness. And we must give the same old answer to it all. Culture-war coding can occasionally remix who takes what side in debating sexual restraint versus sexual license, but it can’t produce chastity and fidelity. The gospel can—and that’s much harder than choosing a tribe. |
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Hooters can also remind us that appealing to what the Bible calls "the flesh" is always, in the long run, a losing strategy, even on its own terms. The human appetites that can call the shots in our lives are not always sexual. Sometimes we are enthralled to other carnal appetites: lust for wrath and revenge or cruelty or envy. |
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Some would-be Christian influencers argue that, to keep up with young men, the church should "edgy," embracing anything and everything up to the line of explicit white ethno-nationalism. This is immoral, full stop. But it’s also self-defeating, as self-defeating as a parenting strategy of giving children a little bit of cocaine every night to keep them from trying heroin. And it never stops there. There is always someone edgier, someone who’s gone a bit further out of the Overton window. Cultural engagement built on winking, aren’t-we-naughty transgression always requires escalation. If you live by carnality, you will die by carnality. |
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The Hooters parking lot down the road might be emptier than it used to be. But will your church’s lot be fuller? What if your church were a place that offered something strange to an era of rule by appetite? What if it were a place where men and women learned to serve and love each other, not to use each other? What if instead of asking our young men to choose which appetites will govern them—sex or rage or ambition—we modeled what it would look like to put to death any and all of the passions that seek to enslave us? What if we offered a new picture to young women who’ve been told that their worth is measured in their sexual attractiveness and sexual availability? What if we showed them a vision of being joint heirs in Christ, loved and valued for who they are instead of how they can be used? |
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Exchanging one form of exploitation for another does not a counterrevolution make. But a church that offers the quiet power of the ordinary means of grace, of the ancient call to fidelity, is revolutionary still. |
An AI Tool Chose a Book for Me, and I Was Shocked |
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As Beth Moore can tell you, it sometimes takes me a while to get around to reading a book recommended to me by someone else. (Every time I do read one she recommends, I love it, but I feel bad telling her because it’s been something like a year and a half since she made the recommendation.) I think that has to do with whatever part of me didn’t like to do the required reading for class back in middle school, even though I was reading A Tale of Two Cities or The Fellowship of the Ring on my own. |
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A few weeks ago, though, I did an experiment: I asked the generative artificial intelligence platform Claude to recommend a book for me. I prompted the question by listing out example after example from my own Desert Island Bookshelf, then asked the AI model to also look at the books I’ve recommended elsewhere in the public record. Claude came back with Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, a Norwegian novel that flashes back and forth in the life of one man, jumping between his childhood in 1948 and his elderhood in 1999. |
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The book didn’t seem to be something I would like—until I started reading it, and then I was simultaneously captivated and creeped out that an AI tool could figure me out so well. |
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Out Stealing Horses deals, among other things, with the protagonist’s desire to make narrative sense out of his life. Talking about coincidences, he says, |
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It may be all very well in Dickens, but when you read Dickens you’re reading a long ballad from a vanished world, where everything has to come together in the end like an equation, where the balance of what was once disturbed must be restored so that the gods can smile again. A consolation, maybe, or a protest against a world gone off the rails, but it is not like that any more, my world is not like that, and I have never gone along with those who believe our lives are governed by fate. |
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He seems to sense, though, that maybe his rejection of a story line in his life might be even more simplistic. "I believe we shape our lives ourselves," he muses, "at any rate I have shaped mine, for what it’s worth, and I take complete responsibility. But of all the places I might have moved to, I had to land up precisely here." |
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The book also is about how fatherhood and disillusionment and memory fit in that sense of mystery and story line. |
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"As I sit here now, in the kitchen of the old house I have planned to make into a livable place in the years left to me, and my daughter has gone after a surprising visit and taken with her her voice and her cigarettes and the orange lights from her car down the road, and I look back to that time, I see how each movement through the landscape took color from what came afterwards and cannot be separated from it," the narrator says. |
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And when someone says the past is a foreign country, that they do things differently there, then I have probably felt that way for most of my life because I have been obliged to, but I am not anymore. If I just concentrate I can walk into memory’s story and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it and still feel in my body that ride through the forest with my father; high above the river along the ridge and then down the other side, across the border into Sweden and far into what was a foreign country, at least for me. |
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I could feel it too. It reminded me of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life in some places and Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It in others. It also includes at least a little bit of fighting and defeating Nazis, so I am even more on board. |
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That a disembodied large language model could predict I would react that way is a little exciting and a lot unsettling. And it’s just the beginning of this new world. |
A Fun Person Grapples with Suffering (and Finds Answers on the Playground) |
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Many of you are familiar with Annie Downs from her many books or from her popular podcast That Sounds Fun. Her newest project, though, was not one that she ever would have expected from a self-described fun-loving person. |
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It’s a children’s book, Where Did TJ Go?, which explores suffering and grief. The project was prompted by the death of her nephew TJ and her conversations with TJ’s surviving brother about how to make sense of it all. |
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Annie was on my podcast this week, talking about what surprised her about how kids respond to death, why she refuses to use "passed away" euphemisms about those who have died, and how to help suffering people with what we can learn from children on the playground. She is, as always, insightful, and I learned a lot from her about what it means to genuinely grieve while still recognizing a world of joy, hope, and even fun. |
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Every other week, I share a list of books that one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a deserted island. This week’s submission comes from reader Karin Christoph, who says, "I’m writing from the beautiful Canadian prairies, from the city of Winnipeg in the province of Manitoba." Here’s her list: |
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