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Hello, fellow wayfarers … How the Mitch McConnell (and Donald Trump and Joe Biden) spectacles ought to teach us about age, youth, and clinging to power … What Steven Curtis Chapman and Mary Beth Chapman learned about marriage, happiness, and "long-suffering" … A Desert Island Bookshelf came up from Georgia, looking for some life to give … This is this week’s Moore to the Point. |
The Spiritual Reason Our Elderly Leaders Refuse to Give Up Power |
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Mitch McConnell is still alive, but our knowing that was subject to a weekslong filibuster. At least for the moment, the aging Kentucky senator’s "proof of life" photo from his hospital bed is a kind of avatar for an era in which our elderly leaders are clinging to power by any means necessary. Behind that, though, is more than a social or political problem: It’s a spiritual crisis few of us want to acknowledge. |
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After an ambulance took McConnell to the hospital, even some people not normally given to conspiracy theories wondered if he was secretly dead, trying to get past the August deadline to avoid a special election for his seat. Others suggested he was brain-dead or too incapacitated to show himself. One Republican congressman publicly said he did not know whether McConnell was alive. After a long period of silence, his office said he fell, briefly lost consciousness, and developed mild pneumonia but did not have a stroke or heart attack. |
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Behind this situation, there’s an obvious question of public interest, but what’s unnerving is that there seems to be more. Online commentators treated McConnell neither as a statesman nor quite as a patient but as a disputed political asset—like a deed whose owner may or may not still be legally competent to sign it. The controversy revealed something more troubling than one office’s secrecy about one senator’s health. We seem unable to imagine an elderly person except in one of two ways: either still exercising power or already socially dead. |
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In that way, McConnell’s situation was about more than just one ailing old man. |
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The 80-year-old president of the United States says he visited Walter Reed National Military Medical Center last week for yet another physical and still another cognitive exam, which he seems to think is the equivalent of an IQ test. He appeared to fall asleep several times in public and referred to an attack by "the Islamic Republic of Japan." On her book tour for her memoir, former first lady Jill Biden brought back memories of her husband’s disastrous 2024 debate performance (in which he declared that he had "finally beat Medicare") by saying that she wondered at the time if he were having a stroke. |
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Interviewing former senator and 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, journalist McKay Coppins asked Romney, age 79, if he would run for president again in 2028. Romney said he did not think 80-year-olds should be "running the world," pointing to a section of a book on how aging affects the brain. Granted, Romney, at nearly 80, is only 40 or so in Mormon years (the über-healthy Latter-day Saints seem to age at a slower pace than anyone else) but Coppins’s question was clearly tongue-in-cheek. He was getting at the exhaustion many Americans feel at this long-running gerontocracy. |
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If this were a problem relegated to the political sphere, we could imagine passing a constitutional amendment that puts an age cap on public office, but we see a similar phenomenon in almost every arena of American culture. Singer Rod Stewart had to stop a concert to take oxygen. Pop star Lionel Richie had to sit down to sing "Dancing on the Ceiling." Even in pulpits and ministries and denominations, aging leaders seem to view the possibility of cultivating a new generation as a kind of existential threat. |
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Here’s where I agree with Romney but worry his formulation might itself be part of the problem. He is right, of course, that matters of statecraft require stamina and the mental agility to process complex information—especially in this time. And he’s right that there’s nothing ageist about saying so. He’s also correct that Washington—along with other sectors of American life—has accumulated too many people who see their own demise as equivalent to civilizational collapse. But I worry many of us tend to confuse influence with control, all under the hidden assumption that "running the world" is the highest form of human significance. |
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The problem is not that our geriatric leaders prize age over youth. The problem is the reverse: They and all of us prize youth over age—and that’s why it’s so scary for them to admit they are old. |
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Granted, senators and rock stars seem more narcissistic than the average person, but perhaps they are only the funhouse-mirror exaggeration of the assumption held by many who are scared to give up power—whether that’s taking up the offering at church or chairing the homeowner’s association monthly meetings. Many aging people cannot imagine being loved, respected, or needed without it. |
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The McConnell spectacle (along with the Trump one and the Biden one and countless others) carries an unspoken horror: What happens when I am no longer clearly myself to everyone else? What happens when I can no longer do what made people notice me? The 85-year-old grasping the gavel and the 25-year-old sneering "Okay, boomer" are confessing the same creed: Relevance comes with vigor, power, recognition, and control. |
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The Bible repeatedly affirms the necessity of the wisdom of elders and warns about the folly of youth (Prov. 16:31; 1 Kings 12:6–15). In revealing to Moses the specific duties of the Levitical priests, God allowed no one younger than 25 to serve in the tabernacle (Num. 8:24). This wasn’t because of bodily capability; a man was physically strong long before 25. The rule functioned more like a completed apprenticeship or vocational credentialing—it was about maturity. |
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The same revelation commanded, "And from the age of fifty years they shall withdraw from the duty of the service and serve no more" (v. 25, ESV throughout). Granted, given lifespans and medical advances, 50 was far older then than now. What’s significant, though, is that God sees the categories of "relevance" and "retirement" in ways antithetical to those of our cultural moment. |
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Levites of age didn’t go away. Instead, God said, they should "minister to their brothers in the tent of meeting by keeping guard" (v. 26). That’s what a genuinely intergenerational institution does, free of both the fear of death and the cult of youth. |
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McConnell owed the public candor, and failed. But online commentary on the situation was also grossly dehumanizing. Elderly leaders have a moral obligation to step aside at the right time. At the same time, it’s up to all of us to build a culture in which stepping aside does not mean being discarded—or accepting that one’s meaningful life is over. |
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We should enable the old to relinquish control without surrendering vocation, and the young to receive authority without despising dependence. A healthy society is fueled by neither the envy of the young or the jealousy of the old but by a bigger, broader view of what it means to matter. |
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One day we will all be old enough to see that. |
Wendell Berry on What Getting Old Taught Him About Criticism |
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As I noted in last week’s newsletter, I just read some pre-publication galleys of Wendell Berry’s new collection of essays, which will be out in the fall. I will save my review and commentary for later because there is much to talk about here, including Berry’s views on the Second Amendment, war, and the killing of children—as well as his denunciation of fundamentalism (both religious and secular), his critique of materialists for whom "nothing matters but matter," and, of course, agriculture policy. |
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Several times I laughed out loud, but never as loudly as when he responded to a belittling book review by a writer in The New York Review of Books and how his reaction differed from what it would have been when he was "half as old and twice as illusioned" as he is now: |
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My approximate normality informs me that my prose and I would have been pleased by Mr. Klinkenborg’s approval, had we received it. Aside from that, I don’t much mind his disapproval. Younger readers of that sentence, I know, will disbelieve it. I can only remind them that I am now an old writer. My first book was published sixty years ago. I have had plenty of time to learn that my happiness does not depend on the judgment of book reviewers. |
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Steven Curtis Chapman and Mary Beth Chapman Are Still Here (and Working It Out) |
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If you’ve been to an evangelical Christian wedding in the past four decades, you’ve probably heard Steven Curtis Chapman singing "I Will Be Here." What you might not know is that he wrote it 37 years ago out of the wreckage of his own parents’ divorce—a promise made not from confidence but from fear. Now, almost 42 years into their own marriage, Steven Curtis and Mary Beth Chapman have written a book about what it took to keep it: Still Here: Life Together on the Long Way Home. |
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The Chapmans are longtime friends of mine—we worked together for years on orphan care—and this conversation is one I really want you to hear. They talk about marrying at 19 and 21 and about the premarital counselor who looked at their personality tests and told them, essentially, that Tigger and Eeyore were getting married and there would be "some challenges." They heard more than once that they didn’t belong together on paper—which, they’ve concluded, is exactly what God seemed to be up to. We talk about why one of the most-awarded artists in Christian music still wrestles with insecurity—including a line from Bono that will stay with you about the thin space between insecurity and humility. |
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We talk about the calendar wars they still haven’t resolved, about when to be honest with a struggling spouse and when to be gentle, and about the night the Grand Ole Opry surprised them both. |
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And we talk about the unimaginable: the death of their 5-year-old daughter, Maria, and the statistic their pastor gave them about what that kind of grief does to marriages. They tell me about the decision they made—with their whole family in the room—to fight the Enemy instead of each other, and why the shortest verse in the Bible turned out to be the longest one for them. |
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The Chapmans say the old King James got it right when it translated patience as "longsuffering"—that to bear with one another in love means you’re suffering a longing that won’t be answered this side of heaven. If you’ve ever struggled to hold on to hope when things don’t turn out the way you thought they would, this conversation will resonate with you. |
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You can listen to it here. |
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