Anthony Bradley “Heroic Fraternities”- Socrates in the Studio Transcript
Anthony Bradley: Heroic Fraternities
Introduction
[Metaxas]
Welcome to Socrates in the Studio. Today, my guest is Anthony Bradley. He is a distinguished senior fellow at the Acton Institute. He currently teaches at Kuyper College in Michigan, before that, for fourteen years he was a distinguished professor at the King’s College here in New York City. He is also a theologian in residence at Redeemer Presbyterian Church Lincoln Square Campus here in New York City. Today, we’re going to discuss with him his brand new book Heroic Fraternities. Here is my conversation with Dr. Anthony Bradley.
Interview
[Metaxas]
Welcome to Socrates in the Studio. I am particularly excited, as I think you will see. I honestly get so excited about this subject. I was thrilled you wrote about it. So before I tell the audience what it’s about, why don’t you do that? And how you came to write the book.
[Bradley]
That’s a great question again. Thanks for having me on the show. You know, we have about 350,000 men currently in fraternities in this country.
[Metaxas]
Wait, now?
[Bradley]
Today.
[Metaxas]
350,000 men in fraternities right. Okay, Wow.
[Bradley]
Yeah, in about 4,000 chapters, and I see this as an opportunity to do two things. One is to make university life better, but also to produce the next generation of America’s leaders. Because if you look statistically and historically at the history of fraternities and the types of men they produce, there’s something like in the 70 to 80 percentile of all CEOs, all members of Congress, all presidents and vice presidents, if you look at the Supreme Court, etc. Where do those men come from? They come from fraternities. So when we sort of talk about the crisis of men and masculinity in America, I’m thinking that one of the best places to resurrect the sense of producing America’s leaders is fraternities. Now, I came to write the book because I was concerned that a number of fraternities were getting suspended. In fact, what I noticed in the news cycle is that, before COVID, once a week, somewhere in America, a fraternity was being suspended. Every single week. I thought, “What is happening with fraternities?” and I began to look at the data, and as you look at those stories, you begin to see these patterns, right?
I mean, they were being suspended for hazing violations. They were being suspended for alcohol abuse and things like that. At the King’s College, I taught a class on the history of masculinity in America. We did a unit on the history of fraternities, and when I looked at the history of fraternities and the current expression of fraternities, I was confused at the disparity. What’s fascinating about the disparity is that in the beginning, fraternities were organizations that were primarily literary societies.
[Metaxas]
In the 19th century?
[Bradley]
In the 19th century. So many of the fraternities in the early to mid-19th century were places where men would come and read Socrates. They would read Aristotle. They would read the classics, and they would debate them together. This is what they would do for fun. In fact, the libraries in a lot of fraternity houses were better than the libraries at their university. So it was a sort of finishing opportunity for men of arts and letters to prepare them for leadership. What I noticed when I looked at the narrative in the story is that fraternities began this way, and then we found ourselves currently with all these suspensions. What I noticed is that in 1978, and you will remember this, there was a film called Animal House.
[Metaxas]
The only reason I remember it was because it was required viewing by people in my high school, you know, like everyone had to go to see it. I guess I thought it was 1979, but maybe it was made in 1978. But it had such a powerful impact that when I entered college in 1980, where I went to school, everywhere they were doing toga parties. This was one of those films, Animal House, and I’m glad you brought it up because obviously I was going to at some point, it really was a cultural landmark. It’s like a film like The Godfather in that it’s more than just a film; it basically affects thinking about college life, about fraternity life obviously, and was very influential. Probably mostly for the ill, but it had a huge cultural impact.
[Bradley]
It had a massive cultural impact. In fact, I’m willing to say that the reason that we see some of the challenges with some chapters in some schools is actually because of that film. We can trace it back to that.
[Metaxas]
Oh, no question.
[Bradley]
Because what happened, right? As you said, a bunch of middle school and high school boys watched that film in 1978, and they said, “When I go to college, I’m going to do that right,” and then they went and they did that. Every fraternity film after Animal House is a variation on the theme of that film. It’s probably, I would say, one of the most impactful cultural films or projects in modern American history.
[Metaxas]
Yes, and for people who don’t know what it’s about, there are tons of younger people watching right now who, you know, they were not around or it’s so far back now that they don’t know. They think it’s like a classic film from the 1930s. That film glorified drunkenness. I mean, in a lot of ways, this gets into a larger conversation about media and the glorification of bad behavior. But you had one of the biggest stars of the time, John Belushi, who was one of the main figures on Saturday Night Live, starring in this film, as what? A kind of model of debauchery. That was his thing, and it was cool. It was, you know, cool and funny. That whole idea was pushed very, very strongly in the culture by a principal figure. Then you fast-forward, you know, 20 years later or so, and you get Will Ferrell, another huge figure in films and on SNL, appearing in a similar film called Old School, or whatever. But it definitely started with Animal House.
[Bradley]
Absolutely, and what’s really fascinating to me and quite sad is that what we see in Animal House is not what fraternities are about. In fact, I was in a fraternity when I was in college. We weren’t about that; most of the fraternities at Clemson were not about that. But that genre, that media project, is really sort of stereotyped in a negative way of what fraternity culture is like.
So here’s a problem. There are lots of parents who are dissuading their sons from joining fraternities because of that film, and they’re missing out on all the good things that fraternities could possibly produce and provide. So I wanted to get back to this crazy project. I wanted to try to sort of infuse virtue back into Greek life. It’s a crazy project, but I just believe that we have a generation of men who want to use their presence, their power, and their creativity for the benefit of other people. They want to do that, but they don’t know how, and so I say, well, I’ll at least give them a framework for what that can look like.
[Metaxas]
Talk a little bit about your own biography with regard to fraternities. You said you were at Clemson, because obviously that’s what gives you the principal credential to weigh in on the subject. So talk about that; you were at Clemson, and how was your experience in what’s called Greek life, since I’m Greek? I always have to like to pause. It’s like, no. It’s not about that. It’s about frat houses, and maybe you can actually, before that, tell us why it is. Tell us about the word fraternity, but then tell us about why they adopted Greek letters so that we now know of fraternity life as Greek life. Why was that? Is that a classical influence on 19th-century education?
[Bradley]
That’s exactly right. So fraternities started at Union College in Schenectady, New York. There were three men who were veterans, and they missed the camaraderie of serving together in the military. And so they got together at Union College and decided to form a fraternity. They met with a professor in his office and said, “Hey, we want to do something,” and because at the time being grounded in the classics was so normal, unlike it is today, that of course they wanted to sort of resurrect the Greek influence of camaraderie and brotherhood. They got a deep connection and community. It was out of that, a longing for camaraderie and this strong sense of brotherhood, that they chose the word fraternity.
[Metaxas]
Okay, so I mean this is 1824 in Schenectady, a bunch of veterans. Now, I don’t know what war they were in, the War of 1812, or, I guess, maybe they were just serving in the military together, and then they decided to go to university. We don’t need to talk about this now, because I want to talk about your Clemson experience, but it is fascinating that men seem to long for brotherhood, for camaraderie. There’s something in men that longs for that, and that can be for good or for ill, obviously, as you write about in the book. So I want to touch on that, because that’s so fascinating that that’s how it all started. But what was it that pushed you, you know, as a very young man at Clemson, to say, “I want to be in a fraternity?”
[Bradley]
Well, I mean, I was like a lot of my students in that I was sort of seeking a deep connection with a group of brothers, sort of to have a pact, sort of to have a tribe, right? You sort of want to be a part of a group. Guys want to be a part of a group. This idea that, you know, sort of Americans are individualists and kind of Lone Rangers is absolutely false. Right, guys want to be a part of a group. In fact, from way, way back, they’re like the Little Rascals, if you can remember that.
[Metaxas]
That program is the greatest thing ever, Hal Roach. Our Gang comedies—that’s like the greatest.
[Bradley]
Yeah.
[Metaxas]
Right. I think we were going to go there.
[Bradley]
Thank you. Well, you can go from there to the Three Stooges. I mean all the way to Happy Days. I mean sort of all these media projects, right?
[Metaxas]
Yeah, yeah.
[Bradley]
All these media projects sort of explain, and you can see the deep longing that guys have in the community. It can be for good or ill, like a gang, for example,
[Metaxas]
Yeah, but Hal Roach’s Our Gang was innocent. So, it’s kind of funny, the word gang has taken on this thing. But this is my gang. This is my group. There’s something really beautiful about that, and that is particularly masculine—that there’s something about guys that long for having something like that.
[Bradley]
Well, and I’ve seen some great psychological data on this. What essentially happens is that when men are deeply embedded in a community of support with brothers and sort of comrades, if you will, they’re much more willing to take risks. They’re much more willing to be brave. They’re actually much more willing to be compassionate and empathetic. They’re much more willing to put their lives on the line for others and are actually much more likely to live out the cardinal virtues when they have a community around them to encourage and push them, right? To encourage them and to put courage in them to be great men.
Great men cannot be great without other men. It’s absolutely impossible. We’ve never seen it in America, and not just in American history but in the history of human culture. We’ve never seen a culture where men have been great outside of a community of men to put courage into them to do amazing and outstanding things, and guys want to be heroes. They really do. I mean, we are in a season of Halloween and costumes, and what do you see kids do? Boys put on costumes often of heroes. And they have this intuitive sense—a sort of intuition—that I cannot be a hero alone. I can only be a hero when I have a squad with me, right?
And so, what do they do? They want to join a community of men to make them great. They have that intuition. When I was in college, I was someone who wanted to be a leader. I knew because of the history of fraternities, particularly in the black community. So I pledged Alpha Phi Alpha Incorporated, which is a historically black fraternity. Some of our most famous members are Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr. You may have heard-
[Metaxas]
What? What? “Some of our most famous members,” that’s pretty famous.
[Bradley]
You may have heard of WEB Du Bois and people like that, right? Yeah, our fraternity.
[Metaxas]
What? Also WEB Du Bois?
[Bradley]
Yeah, our fraternity.
[Metaxas]
Is there any fraternity in the world with like three names like that? That’s kind of impressive.
[Bradley]
It is impressive. We have more.
[Metaxas]
Are you kidding?
[Bradley]
That’s a long, long history.
[Metaxas]
At Clemson?
[Bradley]
There’s a long, long list of men in Alpha Phi Alpha who’ve essentially changed America, but that’s it. That would be a different conversation. But, my fraternity was founded at Cornell in 1906, and it served as one of the Divine Nine. So, the Divine Nine is a collection of historically black fraternities and sororities that really saw themselves as one, forming leaders out of college to be placed in the community to be leaders later, secondly. When I was growing up, I mean, part of what it meant to be African American in part of the community was to be a part of Greek life.
I mean, my mom’s in the 80s. She pledged Delta Sigma Theta, and she still goes to sorority meetings once a month. So in the black community, Greek life is not simply about the first few years of college and then sort of ends afterwards. It’s sort of like college, which is the preparatory phase for pressing into being a community leader. And so during the civil rights movement, for example, the fraternity and sororities in the black community were heavily involved in organizing and fighting for freedom, justice, and things like that. So, when I was in college, sort of growing up in a community in Atlanta where postgraduate Greek participation is really, really high, I thought, “Well, it’s a natural thing for me to want to be a part of, as an African-American, one of the Divine Nine Greek organizations in order to be a leader in this country.”
[Metaxas]
I know Thurgood Marshall was at Howard University in 1930 because Dietrich Bonhoeffer, when he came to America, visited the South and visited Howard. So that’s another thing to mention. Is that when you join a fraternity, you’re joining a fraternity that connects you not just to that chapter of that fraternity in that college, but that connects you to all the fraternity brothers across colleges. That’s magnificent networking if you did it only for networking possibilities. That’s an extraordinary thing that Alpha Phi Alpha is doing. Is that what you said? That would be a connection to all of these people, you know, throughout the country and all the alumni, so that’s very interesting.
In other words, that would just be a very attractive reason for somebody, you know, to join a fraternity.
[Bradley]
Absolutely, it’s a huge draw. I mean, to know that you will be a brother in a fraternity, which puts you in a legacy of great men. And here’s the thing: High school guys want to be great men. That is just a fact.
The problem is they don’t have a good roadmap for that, and few people are investing in them and encouraging them on exactly how to do that. So, one of the big issues I’ve had is in terms of how we relate to young adult men is that we encourage them by negation. What I mean by that is: “don’t be bad.” Right? “Don’t mistreat women, don’t haze your brothers,” right? “Don’t abuse alcohol and drugs,” but they aren’t telling them what to do, right? They aren’t giving them the virtues of greatness and excellence. They aren’t giving them prudence. They aren’t giving them, you know, some sort of justice. They aren’t giving them the cardinal virtues. It is formation by negation, which is not formation at all. So we have a whole cohort of young men who are trying to figure out what to do, what to be, with this sort of heroic impulse that they have, and what they end up doing, we’re seeing this right now: they’re on YouTube trying to figure it out. So that’s why, when I ask why college men are so driven by these influences on YouTube, it’s because there’s a vacuum. You should do a book on this, maybe. There’s a vacuum of instruction on how to be an outstanding and excellent man. There’s like nothing out there for them. So they’re joining fraternities to try to recapture some of those virtues and to join a legacy of men who’ve proven and demonstrated that they’ve done it.
[Metaxas]
I sort of wrote two books on this subject. I wrote a book called Seven Men and the Secret of Their Greatness and then a sequel called Seven More Men and the Secret of Their Greatness. Which are short biographies, because sometimes you can help people get virtue, get the concept of virtue, as they read stories of greatness, right? You read a story of greatness, and without telling people it’s this value and that value, you kind of pick it up. So that’s, in some ways, for the same reason you wrote this book.
I wrote the book Seven Men, because I thought we lack in our culture a number of the things you’ve already mentioned, but we don’t talk about virtue. We don’t model virtue, we now denigrate virtue. If anything, we’re going to denigrate or mock virtue or these kinds of heroism. It’s mocked, and as you’re saying, men in particular automatically respond to this kind of thing. So that’s why I wrote those books.
But your idea of using the Greek system and the fraternities that already exist as a delivery system for this, I think, is genuinely brilliant. It’s amazing. And that’s why I was just so excited to talk to you about this because, really, it’s simply a great idea.
It’s an amazing idea that these things already exist. And if we could get any number of them to begin thinking along these lines, even with the fact, as you say in the book, that there’s historical precedent, They used to shape men in a good way, and it’s only really in our lifetimes that this has kind of gone sideways.
[Bradley]
Every single campus that I speak to a fraternity and I invite them to a heroic life of virtue, they almost come out of their skins in excitement on almost every campus I go to. This is a sort of response that I get because I say, “Hey again, why don’t you use all that you’re about, right? Use your power, your presence, your creativity, all that you have, right? Use all of that for the benefit of your brothers in your chapter and everyone else on campus.” Whenever I invite them to that, I get a standing ovation. Every single time. And this is what they say to me: “No one talks to us like this. There’s no one inviting us to be great men. No one, no one, no one believes in us.” So what I tell them is, “I believe in you, and I believe that you can actually use the virtues, values, and mission of your fraternity because they’re back.” You know these were developed in them in the early to mid-19th century, so they’re sort of classically Judeo-Christian all of them. All of these fraternities have fantastic values, virtues, and mission statements, and if they plug back into those, it will not only change the campus; it’ll also change the country because out of that cohort will come the next iteration of America’s leaders.
[Metaxas]
Well, I’m so glad to hear you say this now and to read in the book that you are being invited to speak at colleges around the country on this subject. It’s interesting that their response is that “nobody’s talking to us this way” because, I mean, let’s face it. The culture has gotten profoundly confused on these basic issues. Even when you mention masculine traits or whatever, there’s either confusion or derision, and I’m just so grateful to you for turning that narrative because the hunger is there, as you’ve just said.
[Bradley]
Well, I think what happens is that so much of the current cultural discourse is about how bad men are—not just the word toxic, but unnecessary—and that men make things worse.
Think about your average 20-year-old. Your average 18, 19, or 20-year-old has grown up in a society in a culture, yeah, where they’ve only heard how bad men are. Yeah, and they’ve just experienced shame and rejection—not encouragement, right, but rebuke and shame and rejection because “you’re a mistake.” Just get rid of men.
[Metaxas]
There would be no wars, no serial killings—how great that would be. You use a term I wrote down in the book; you talk about disordered masculinity and the purposeless void. That’s the issue. Isn’t it true that you and I, men of faith, know that God’s idea of masculinity, or the traditional Judeo-Christian view, even the Western view of masculinity, is fundamentally heroic? It’s fundamentally meant to be neither self-serving nor selfless. That’s the model, you know. Obviously, we can talk about chivalry. That’s been there for the longest time, and it’s only recently that masculinity has been defined in terms of toxicity. What I mean is, I don’t know if it’s worth getting into, but how that happened because, really, I always say that if you denigrate men, you will be harming women. There’s just no way around it. If men do not embrace this heroic view of masculinity, it means they will embrace something.
That is the opposite of that. They don’t go away. They will simply channel their energies into negative things, so we are seeing some of that. Absolutely. I think you know when you want to start the clock and when it went south.
[Bradley]
Yeah, you could actually go back to the roaring 20s. Yeah, you could go back that far if you like. But I mean, there was this sort of incremental disdain for all things masculine in the name of liberating other communities to experience freedom, justice, and things like that. You might surmise it may have been a little bit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, perhaps. But I think in this season where we were, we really wanted to empower women, and in many cases, there was a place for that because of the ways in which we pursued culture and kept women from doing things. But what happened is that instead of celebrating and empowering the right sort of encouraging women, we did it at the expense of men, and it’s really fascinating and somewhat depressing when you have situations I’ve actually heard people say that we have to keep men down today because of what men did abusively in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and I want to say, Wait a minute. What does this 18-year-old lad at the University of State College, yeah, have to do with what happened in 1940, 1950, 1960, etc.? And so there has been this: we need to sort of celebrate empowering one gender. Yeah, but by doing that, it’s kind of a zero-sum game.
[Metaxas]
We can’t do that. You took the words out of my mouth. This is cultural Marxism. It’s like it’s a zero-sum game. The world is not constructed so that it works along with the zero-sum game thing; right, a rising tide lifts all boats. So this idea that I’m going to have is that in order to lift up women, we have to push down men. If that worked, I would say okay, but when you push down men, you end up pushing down women.
There’s no way around it. You could say the same thing about the race issue: the zero-sum game argument. Doesn’t work. It’s intellectually confused and is leading to further harm to women. So, it’s tremendous irony, so that’s part of how we got here: the zero-sum game cultural Marxist paradigm that has been pushed strongly in our lifetime, and this is why we have the purpose void.
[Bradley]
Because there are so many young men today who have no idea why they’re needed. If the
Culture doesn’t tell them what we need them for it now, in part. That’s been precipitated and altered by just sort of changes in the market, right?
So we don’t necessarily need men’s physical strength as much as we did a hundred years ago. We have machines and technology to do some of that, but men are really lost. They don’t know where they fit in, and the culture isn’t really providing them with a pathway to understand what it means for them to be adults. They just don’t say, What am I supposed to do? So here’s the result of that: About 60% of all college freshmen are women. We have about 9 million prime-age males, ages 24 to 54, who are not working and doing nothing. We have a mental health crisis among young men. 15 to 24 spiking, and depression, anxiety, and suicide Massive amounts of drug overdoses with young men, especially in Appalachia It’s an opioid crisis.
What are we seeing right now in Seattle and San Francisco? We’re seeing fentanyl take out young men. The suicide rate in this country is spiking. Most suicides in this country are by men, something around 80%. So in one sense, it worked negatively, so men are lost. They’re depressed, and what they’ve chosen to do is simply resign.
They’re not protesting. They’re not burning things down. They’re not necessarily wreaking havoc. They’ve just withdrawn, and they say I’m out.
So what are they doing with video games? Endless amounts of time on the internet because the internet says well if you don’t have anything to do out there, then you can create an imaginary world over here and practice some heroism. You can be important, and you can and you can matter online because you don’t matter in society or in culture. So a lot of women like where the men are, and that’s a great question.
They’re off the grid. They’re not working. They’re not in school. By the way, they’re also not in trade. People think the young men are in trade.
No, no, no, they’re not. They’re doing nothing. They’re doing nothing. And so for me, I’m thinking, “What’s the one population of guys who are willing and ready to do something you’re engaged in aspirationally looking for a pathway for that? and then I end up thinking about that small population of men who are actually in college, so that the purpose void is really massive and one of the things that I tell them is to invite men, and this is when I get really excited. I invite college fraternities to develop this reputation because you’re right about the context in which women’s lives are better when men excel and excel in virtue. It’s just a historic fact. I say, Hey, listen, guys.
Why don’t you make your fraternity house? Why don’t you make your house have a good reputation on your campus? Is your house the safest place for women on campus?
It’s the best place for women on campus. In fact, women leave when women leave.
your house, they will be better off than they were when they came. What if the reputation on your campus is that women are with you? You and your brothers feel a sense of dignity, honor, respect, joy, and celebration. They have a great time, and they become better people, and you can see this on campus after campus after campus when I invite men. To treat women with great honor, dignity, and respect, they get elated. They’re like, We want that. What do you have to do to get that? and you seem to take a nose. Their eyes get big, and they get A woman does not want to marry a guy with that attitude. Absolutely extraordinary Absolutely.
And what’s interesting is that no one is inviting them to do that. So what do we say to them instead? Don’t sexually assault women; they don’t treat them badly, but we don’t say they treat them.
Well, treat them great. Here’s how to do it: This is what you should do and what you shouldn’t do, and this is where older alumni have a role to play. Fathers have a role to play, and older men have a role to play. Then helping to give these young men some sort of vision, coaching, or tutorial on how to treat them Well, because they actually want to do it. They want to be great men.
[Metaxas]
They want to be good men. They really do, we would say you and I would, that we’re hardwired by our creator to want that that’s it’s there. It’s not like we have to find it. It’s already there. Part of the issue here is the narrative—the way the narrative has changed over the decades about what I am supposed to do with my life. There was a time in America when the norm was that I’m supposed to man up.
I’m supposed to find a good wife and have a family. Support the family. In other words, if you start there, you already have a reason to say, Well, I’ve got to support my family, and I’ve got to work hard. I’ve got to make a sacrifice.
I got it. Whatever that is, when that norm goes out the window, We encourage this perpetual adolescence in a sense that I don’t. I don’t have any gun in my head to make money or to do anything I can do. I don’t have that, but the burden of having to support kids or something is financial pressure.
I mean, actually, in my own life, I don’t know if I’ve ever said this publicly, but because I was married with a child, that made me able to write my biographies of Wilberforce and Bonhoeffer. I know I can say this. I know I would not have gone through what it took to do that because it was very, very hard unless I knew I had to do it.
I kind of had to do it. It wasn’t just about me, and I think you write about that in the book.
Discovering that you can do more than you thought you could Because you’re a rite of passage. Talk about that a little bit, because that’s for me. You know the rites of passage. For men and women, but we’re talking about men. That’s been a staple in cultures around the world that has gone out of our culture.
[Bradley]
Yeah, one way the psychologists talk about this is a failure to launch. [Metaxas]
Yes, right
[Bradley]
Just they’re just stuck in delayed adolescence or arrested development if you want to use that phrase, and that’s partly Partly precipitated by a generation of their parents who have so much money that they don’t have to launch because their parents are paying their rent for them. The right parents are saying you can just stay here and figure it out, even though you’re 33, and there’s just no pressure to move out because their parents have so much money.
Just sort of talk about Gen Xers and younger boomers being loaded, and so one of the greatest wealth transfers in American history will be from the parents of Millennials to them. It’s going to be massive, and they don’t have to do anything. All right, and you’re right. There was this natural progression of, Okay, go do it. You got to get out of here and go do something.” And in the West, this is a part of our affluence there.
It just hasn’t been that much pressure. And so what we’ve done is we’ve let adolescents, and we’ve let children and young adults create their own rites of passage. Because we didn’t, we didn’t provide one for them. They just made up their own. So what did that include? Alcohol consumption didn’t include the ability to pick up girls. It included the ability to jump off something really dangerous and not sweat your head open, right? So they should have created their own rites of passage. And this is one of the benefits of fraternities: they are designed structurally to provide a rite of passage from boyhood into adulthood to be challenged with things. You have to overcome obstacles together, and you learn that you have these gifts and capabilities that you didn’t know you had, and you have a group of people saying we believe in you. So what happens when you face these obstacles together with a bunch of your brothers? You discover gifts, interests, passions, opportunities, and all sorts of capabilities that you did not know you had. You’re now excited about those, and then you go back into the community when you graduate college to use them. I was interviewing someone this week, from the uniform to the University of Michigan. He’s in a fraternity, and he was explaining this specifically: that when he was in high school, he was
a bit of a loner.
He didn’t know that he didn’t have any social skills. He wasn’t really a leader, but he’s only been in the fraternity for a year, and he says I’ve come out of my shell and I know how to talk to people. I know how to do conflict resolution now, and so now he wants to be a leader in his fraternity, and now he has these aspirations to be a different kind of person, and that’s only because the fraternity gave him the opportunities to sort of transition from being this really timid, isolated 130- and 30-pound high school graduate to sort of this developing man who now has the self-confidence to take risks to be leaders. And this is what the rite of passage does: it gives these lads self-confidence, and that’s one of the things I’ve seen over the years in terms of exercising the need to exercise wisdom. Is it true that a young man does not have self-confidence? He will not make wise decisions because he’s too afraid of being rejected and being kicked out of the tribe. So self-confidence is sort of the birthplace of virtue if you believe that you are a person of capacity. Then you don’t care about rejection if you do the right thing. You just don’t care if you read the book of Proverbs. You’re like, yep, that’s me.
And guess what? If people don’t like it, they can go kick rocks. So I’ve had these conversations with some of the lads at the University of Arkansas in the Kappa Alpha fraternity, Phi Delta Theta fraternity; they’re Christian guys and sort of the party atmosphere, and they basically said this to me. They said this because I came in as a Christian. I have these values. I told the guy, This is what this is.” What I’m about is that I don’t do this and this and this and this, and if you don’t like it, then you can reject me and the guys like we love that, and why do they love that? Because these are men of conviction of principle, and they can trust that, and so what happened inevitably is that these Christian guys here in these right fraternities Become leaders really quickly.
[Metaxas]
Because the masses believe that, well, this is a guy who has those convictions, somebody who actually believes something. I always say that when you encounter people who don’t know what they believe or don’t know whether anything’s worth believing, you’re taken aback and they’re attracted to it.
They’re just thinking, “What is that? I want some of that,” because it’s just that it’s innate in us, and we see it so infrequently again in modern culture.
[Bradley]
absolutely, and unfortunately, the sorts of institutions that used to provide a rod of passage that used to develop these sorts of virtues have really fallen away. You could think about the fact that I’m an Eagle Scout, and the Boy Scouts used to be the sort of place where older men could really invest in forming Yeah, these virtues and young men
pushing them and inviting them to do challenging things, sort of a rite of passage. You do it with these other lads in the company of older men. They inspire and speak virtue and validation in you; you see things in yourself that you didn’t see; they give you leadership opportunities; and when you graduate, you do amazing things after you become an Eagle Scout. You have this self-confidence that I’m the kind of person who has these capacities, so let me now use them in a brand new space. And so this idea that we can take a young lad from his comfort to the comfortability of his home Bring him to the university, have him face challenges, and then Learn these capacities, and he’s confident about who he is. He’s a virtuous leader, and then he goes back for the purpose of service. To make his own community a much better place because he has the self-confidence to do that.
[Metaxas]
You see some of this that you’re talking about in the world of sports. I was not a sports guy, and I have lamented for decades the idea that you’re part of a team. You’re part of a group. You have a common cause, often for men, that is something that does some of what we’re talking about here, but obviously not everybody’s going to be, you know. On the sports team in college, this is similar.
This is a similar thing, whether you play sports or not. Don’t you get that it’s built into it? A lot of men also get that in military service. I mean, you watched sitcoms growing up. Because of the era, you know, as in the 70s and stuff people always talk about, you know My army buddy is in town, but because they all served in World War II or in Korea, there was this, you know, tribal in the best sense of camaraderie that came out of that, and you hear a lot about people who are in the military because they have something so special.
In fact, it’s so special that often when they come home, they’re confused because they’re longing for that feeling, and again, we live in a culture that really works against that kind of group camaraderie among men, particularly men who need it.
[Bradley]
I mean, men thrive when they have that. I recently returned from the 40th anniversary of my chapter at Clemson, and I wish I had had a camera in the room just to watch what happened. When everybody got back together, it’s a group of men in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, and the amount of energy, affection, and camaraderie that happens when they return because they would have had a three- or four-year experience with a group of people during this formative phase of life, and they developed these brothers with whom they now do life together. They sort of shared life together, and it continued after college, just sort of being back in the room.
together just so the amount of hugs and laughter, and I think if you look at
What fraternities provide, you’re exactly right. Outside of sports and outside of the military, on the college campus, the only institution that can provide this sort of structured camaraderie, brotherhood, formation, and rite of passage is a fraternity that’s done Well, and I think this is the tragedy of fraternities when they’re not done Well, is it actually squandering all of that capacity? Like I said, 350,000 men. Think about what would happen in this country if, in four years from today, we had 350,000 men enter the marketplace full of virtue and self-confidence to be great men.
It would change the whole country. In fact, I would say it would change the world. [Metaxas]
That’s literally true. I mean, there’s no question about that. But again, to me, the genius of your thesis here has to do with the fact that this already exists. It’s not like we have to go create something. We already have Greek life in the numbers that you’ve just quoted to us. That’s a staggering thing, and the fact that they are all effectively being attacked means that, you know, we’re being told, You know, it’s toxic masculinity, Fred House’s classic example. Whatever it is, that, I think, might get them to do something about it. And you know that another crisis is the opportunity, as you’re seeing men in general, but particularly men in Greek life, being told you’re unnecessary. This isn’t working. Whatever you think is okay, we can go away, or we can change our model, and we can adopt the model that you’re talking about, so now practically speaking.
[Bradley]
So there’s sort of several opportunities for people to engage in this one. There’s a website, Heroic Fraternities, that has all this information. There are links to the interviews that I have with students across the country, and I’m now developing a YouTube channel where I’m doing more interviews with fraternity guys as well. I also have a list of fraternities that are sort of signing on to the heroic fraternity mission. They want to be one of these virtue-forming institutions on their campuses, so you can see a list of chapters on college campuses that are there as well. So there are lots of opportunities.
I’m building out to invite more and more and more chapters to this. She also has an Instagram account called her work fraternities, where I celebrate and highlight the good things that chapters are doing. I’m following about 2,500 fraternities across the country right now. And like I said, I mean, you know, fraternities are now contacting me and wanting me to come out and speak, and I’ve just had such great opportunities. I’ll
Just say so for the record.
There are a number of CEOs that I’m now having conversations with, including the CEO of Lambda.
Chi Alpha, the CEO of Phi Delta Theta, is now thinking about sort of changing the whole model of fraternities to make them values-driven institutions that form good men into great men. They’re really committed to sort of swapping out the playbook and restarting something new, and there’s just a lot of momentum right now, so I’m really, really excited about where things are going because there’s a lot of challenges that we have in this country with our young men, and if we don’t engage them, we’re in a world of trouble. I saw this a couple weeks ago. 45% of men 18 to 24 years old have never asked a woman out.
They’ve never even approached a woman, so what we’re finding is that there are a lot of these sorts of communities. Fraternities are actually ways that some of these older guys are helping younger guys to do something like that. So sort of start a relationship. Yeah, because of what’s happening, marriage rates are declining. The fertility rate is also plummeting. Precipitously and it all has a lot to do with the fact that we lack a generation of confident men. Who wants to be great fathers, great statesmen, great employees, bosses, and things like that?
[Metaxas]
It’s obviously all related again. You know, we’re talking about the norm of our culture, particularly in America, but I mean, the idea was that, you know, I’m going to get married. I’m going to have a family.
I’m going to be somebody. I’m going to do something that was normative, and you know, some people did it this way, some people did it that way, but that was basically the norm. We’re now clearly a very confused culture, and we know that you know once birth rates decline, all these things feed on themselves, and so there are a hundred ways you can approach this or hundred things that need to be done. But as I’ve said a couple times, this is a particularly ingenious delivery system for some of this stuff that you do, so I don’t know if you mentioned it and I missed it. But I want to make sure, where did this idea come to you? Because this is, to me, just an amazing idea, and how did it come to you because you know a lot of people? You know, you have been members of fraternities in college or whatever, but to come up with this concept now Was it something that happened fairly recently?
[Bradley]
You’ve been thinking about it for years. Well, I taught for 14 years at King’s College. We have a house system at the college that is sort of an Oxford model of houses where these lads and young ladies live together. They’d be in a community together for four years, and I watched what happened. I watched what happened when a freshman joined a community of like-minded men. They challenge and develop him, and then, on the other side, he graduates and then becomes an outstanding person. I saw it happen for 14 years. I saw it happen.
Yeah, and I’m thinking Well, this is, in some ways, pretty normative on a lot of Christian college campuses that have these sorts of communities. And I’m looking at these big state schools, and I’m thinking, well, what is it? Where on the university campus can we capture what I’m seeing at King’s College? Where can I somehow replicate a framework, an institutional model where you just turn out great men who also make their communities better and become great dads, great little league coaches, great mayors, great business owners, great men in the military, and things like that? I mean, where else can I do that?
I’m looking around. There’s sports, as you mentioned; right now, there may be ROTC things like that, but other than that, this just doesn’t exist except for fraternities and As I looked at the data in terms of where fraternity men end up Wouldn’t it be great if Congress was full of virtuous men? Wouldn’t it be great if the business sector Our business leadership was full of virtuous men; wouldn’t it be great if the Supreme Court was full of virtuous men? I mean, that’d be fantastic.
And so, where do we go to get those men? So my own interest is always: how far upstream can I go? To get the results that we want in 10 15 20 years, and I’m thinking Well, one way to go upstream is to really focus on this population cohort of men who were actually going to college when you
[Metaxas]
Mentioned at King’s College the house system that they had at King’s, which is very similar to what you’re saying to people. Young men would come up to me and say I’m a member of the House of Bonhoeffer Kings God; they’d be excited about it, you know. Not just because I’d written a book on Bonhoeffer. But you could see that they had this sense of, like, I’m part of this thing, and people long to be part of something to be proud of something, and I was just always impressed by that. But then I
I was impressed by how the kings had created houses with the names of heroic figures, which is fascinating to me, not all of whom were Christians by any means. You know, you know, Churchill.
I don’t know what his theology was, but you know heroic figures, somehow people that stood for something or whatever, and that is again part of what has fallen to the side in our culture to lift up. What does it mean to be great? What is greatness?
Let’s even talk about greatness in a funny way. You know, when you’re dealing with cultural Marxism, They don’t believe in greatness. They don’t believe in the idea of the great individual. They believe in the gray sludge of, you know, we’re all somehow We’re not meant to distinguish ourselves in great ways, which is really sick, frankly, but that’s been That’s trickled into the culture; you know, critical theory used to be just in universities. But it’s trickled into the culture, and that’s another part of what we’re talking about.
[Bradley]
We know that when I was at King’s, I was the faculty advisor for the House of Churchill for about ten years. And so what did I see over the years? I saw that when I spoke words of validation and affirmation, when I invited them to be great, they responded.
I didn’t have to shame them. I didn’t have to rebuke them in turn in terms of saying, Don’t be a bad person. When we had a list of virtues and values, I said, Hey, you should. You should aspire to be more courageous. You should aspire to be somewhat more encouraging. You should aspire to be more excellent.
They’re like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I want that.
I want that. I want that, and I just like I said, I saw over the years guys come in at 18, and when they graduated at 21 or 22, right when they left college, they were completely different people, and they were the kind of men that any father would want their daughter to marry. I just watched it happen over a four-year period, and I think the culture of our country needs more of that. We don’t need fewer bad men. We need more great men, and I’m committed to going around college campuses to invite these young guys to be absolutely astoundingly excellent. When I do that, they sign up, and they’re excited about it.
[Metaxas]
What’s interesting to me also about the model and the way you’re talking about it is that you don’t have to confront, you know, Wokery or cultural Marxism head-on; you can almost do an end run around it. All you do is talk about greatness. People respond that they don’t know; they know intuitively that this is something they want. And that’s interesting to me, in other words, that we’re not talking about conservative virtues or Christian virtues. We’re talking about things that are inherent and that almost everyone responds to when you talk about them. They want that, but again, in the culture we don’t, we don’t have a lot of discussion of this, and again, it’s why I wrote my book Seven Men and Seven More Men because I thought nobody was saying, What does it look like? To be great. What are some models and the King’s College house model of naming these names and, you know, putting these things out there because part of what we’re talking about It also has to do with the death of heroism itself as a concept. You know, tearing down statues—not just statues of people with whom we disagree, but the very idea of putting up statues and saying this person achieved something—even that idea has fallen on hard times. You don’t see a lot of representational statues being put up.
I mean, when Central Park was created, you know, 150 years ago, they put up all these statues of poets, and this and that and whatever, and that was a thing in the 19th century when Greek life emerged. The idea that I want to be somebody, somehow that idea itself has been denigrated, and the idea of heroism itself has been denigrated; it has except for one institution.
[Bradley]
Fraternities. And so guys are seeking these out because it’s one of the last bastions in our culture that does exactly what you just said. When you’re in a fraternity, they put up a list of all the great alumni in the past who’ve done amazing things and who are amazing people, not perfect people. Imperfect people who’ve done great things say, Hey, if you embrace the values and virtues of this fraternity, one day you can be like that, and the guy’s like, , “Yep.” I want to be like that. So, you’re right.
All of these things have fallen away, and there are just a few institutions left that still embody what you mentioned, and I think that’s one of the advantages that Greek life has, both on the sorority side and also on the fraternity side, to do what we’ve lost. That’s still sort of an opportunity to maintain those systems and structures that in the past produced great people, and instead of giving up on them, we should just toss them because they’re flawed. I’m thinking well; let’s make them great. Let’s re-infuse What was lost because it’s already there—the systems, the structures, or the values What we’ve not done since Animal House is invite them to embrace those things. And when we do that, I think we’re going to see massive, massive change.
[Metaxas]
We haven’t talked about it, and I’m amazed neither of us brought it up, but the very idea that fraternities are all men and sororities are all women alone at this point is a dramatically countercultural thing. That’s a fascinating concept right there because part of what has gotten us into the current cultural mess is that you know the deconstruction of the concept of man and woman, and you don’t even need to get into the transgender madness. Just the very idea in our lifetimes of, you know, what is a man? Really, or what is a woman really there for?
in every society in history. Places for men to hang out with men and women to hang out with women It was always a thing, and it was always understood as healthy. Healthy for women, healthy for men, that in a way has gone out of the culture You know the secret societies at Yale, none of which I was involved with, but they at some point became co-ed. The idea that fraternities are groups of men is itself extraordinary. I mean, it really is. It’s an opportunity to my mind. I don’t know if there are any fraternities or sororities around America that have gone co-ed. I imagine probably there are, but by and large not, and that’s astonishing, and I would also say it’s probably why they’ve been attacked because they’re outliers in a sense, and simply on that.
[Bradley]
They are, and what’s true is that the data shows that when they’re in these single-sex cohorts, they become better for each other, and so it seems to me that we would want more of this rather than less of this because it makes everybody better. It makes everybody better.
The campus is better off when women have opportunities to invest in each other as mentors and coaches, and you even use that Christian phrase, disciple one another. You know the virtues of being an outstanding adult, and that boys benefit from the exact same thing, and I think in part one of the reasons that there’s so much interest now in fraternities with a lot of young lads is that they’ve never had this; they’ve never had sort of a men’s only space where they can sort of relax, not have to posture, not have to be a certain type of person, and just be a guy and Be silly and have fun, and these guys will tell me stories about how they will stay up to two or three o’clock or four o’clock in the morning just talking. Sharing their stories, asking for advice, and getting help Processing their parents divorce talking about their risk of issues, right?
There is a space where they actually need to do that, and women need it the same. We are often okay with women having spaces where women can invest in each other, but for a certain reason we’re suspicious when guys get together, but when you look at the psych data right now for young men It seems to me that you would want your son in fraternity because he’s much more likely to be less anxious, less depressed, less stressed, etc. by being in a community of guys who were doing a couple things, one having a lot of fun, but also investing in him as a person and caring about him as a person again. When I talk to guys about why they join fraternities, the number one reason the overwhelming number one reason that they give me is brotherhood. They want deep brotherhood; they’ve never had it before, and here’s what they know. If I don’t get it in college, I’m done. Because they look at their fathers and they see I don’t want to, you know, what my dad because my dad has no friends. He’s a great guy. He has a great job. He’s a great father, but he has no friends, and I don’t want to end up 45 or 50 years old with no friends. And so a lot of them are desperate to join fraternities in college because they know that this is probably my last chance. To get really, really close friends.
I’ve seen some statistics that most men don’t make a new friend over the age of 30, so for men, it’s really important that they sort of solidify these friendships really, really early because the date is against them once they get a job, a career, and a family.
[Metaxas]
Church responsibilities talk to you about your problems because you don’t have a friend. I mean, you may be familiar with me. I was involved for many, many years. There’s something called the New Canaan Society, which really came into existence and thrived exactly as a result of what we’re talking about. But other than the New Canaan Society, I can’t think of anything, and you’re right. And I know you write about it in the book that men, when they are around other men, where they build some level of trust, feel the freedom to open up to being vulnerable. Usually, men and women both don’t feel that level of comfort to be vulnerable when they’re members of the opposite sex. And so this is a key thing in terms of emotional health in society, and as you’re describing this, you know, when you get on in life and you have trouble, whether it’s in your marriage or your job, who do you talk to and how do you process it? And if you don’t have a healthy way to process it, you’re very likely to process it in an unhealthy way by checking out by stepping away, but whatever it is, this in a way has a lot to do with, you know. Emotional health for society and a lot of the statistics you quote in the book and have talked about here Show that we are in a crisis.
[Bradley]
Absolutely, and when you talk to young men and fraternities, this is what they tell me. They tell me that they have for the first time in their lives people outside of their family with whom they can share secrets in the context of trust, and that trust is built by the way on the back end of doing something fun and challenging together. So men build trust and relationships. Yeah, after they’ve done something to get a bit after they’ve done something together, we have to do something together first, and then we open up and provide a context for trust and vulnerability. It’s not that men aren’t vulnerable; it’s that men are only vulnerable when people they trust aren’t going to use their vulnerability against them late, right? I’m right.
That’s the trust part. If I tell you this, you’re not going to hear it back. Come back to me later, right? And in a fraternity, what they’re doing is testing that out. They’re being vulnerable a little bit. After three or four years of that, you graduate with a group of guys—you know, five or six guys with him. You have these rusty relationships, and I talked about that in the book. These are relationships where, over time, you ladle in and out of people’s lives, but you could not talk for five years and then call each other, and it’s almost like the five years didn’t happen. You could not talk for ten years, and then you get together, and it just restarts like that. Right where you left off, fraternities provide guys with these relationships so that when life gets hard in middle age, you can get on the phone or get on a plane and go visit your fraternity brother, and they know this because this is what they hear from the older alums when they come back and tell them how important those relationships have been, and I just don’t see outside of fraternities. Where this becomes normative and is regularized both within the context of college culture or even within the context of culture in general for men who are in this age cohort of 18 to 24, I think one of the reasons that people should go to college is that, yeah, the education is great.
[Metaxas]
Yeah, you can get prepared for a job. Absolutely, but the social aspect is also worth investing in because you have a network of people with whom you’ll spend the next 10-20, 30-40 years. This is a huge idea. I just want to say it makes me want to go back to college and join a fraternity. I can’t do that, but I can encourage people to do that. So is there a list you have thought about? Putting out a list of fraternities that have signed up to be heroic fraternities because it seems to me that, as you know, not all fraternities espouse these values or are familiar with you, the book, or the concept. Is this the thing that you’re thinking about putting out there that fraternities that have signed on as yes, we’re on board with this concept?
[Bradley]
Yeah, we are developing a certification program. So if a fraternity wants to sign up for this model, they can be certified as a heroic fraternity on their campus. So we are rolling this out this year, and we’ve got about a dozen or so fraternities across the country that are saying “yes—we’re about this. We want to be great men. We want to be heroic.” We want to make fraternities the kind of places that actually are the primary draw for the university, not the sports program, not the education, but hey parents, if you come to the University of Virginia and you and your son are looking for a great fraternity, we have on our list right the Sigma Phi fraternity, for example, and you come to UVA like you, you should join that fraternity.” So we’re making a list just to tell parents where the best fraternities are. At what universities and who were at least moving in this direction? Because what I’ve seen is that when I travel to a campus and I speak to a chapter in less than about 45 minutes, They will completely reimagine.
I’ve seen it happen in less than 45 minutes after my talk. They’ve completely reimagined their whole chapter and what it means for them to be not just Greek but men. It’s a low-hanging fruit because there’s just such a void, and it simply takes the invitation to be greatness, and the guys sign up for it with great enthusiasm. So we’re having some great success, and I’m encouraged there, so on the website, if you click on a certified fraternity, you’ll see a list of some of the chapters that we’re signing up for again.
[Metaxas]
The website is Heroic Fraternities.com. Look, I’m in. I don’t know what I can do to help, but this seems to me like a providential idea that you have come up with, and obviously I’m just so excited about it. So people can find you, Dr. Anthony Bradley, online at Heroic Fraternities.com. This gives me a lot of hope, which isn’t so easy to do. So I want to say, thank you for all you’ve done, but particularly for this. I think it’s extraordinary, and thank you for your time today. God bless you.
[Bradley]
Thanks for having me.
