The Odyssey is a poem about a father’s homecoming, but it does not begin with the father. It begins with his son. Telemachus is twenty years old when we meet him, sitting in his father’s hall while the suitors eat through his inheritance, brooding over a man he cannot remember. By every outward measure his household is intact. There is a mother, a home, land, wealth, servants. What there is not is a father. The goddess Athena, when she comes to rouse him, does not come as herself. She borrows the face of an old family friend named Mentor, and it is from that borrowed face that our word for a surrogate father enters the language.
I thought of Telemachus while talking with my colleauge Anthony Bradley on Acton Line about his new book, The Fatherhood Effect: Consequences of a Dad-Deprived Culture and Practical Strategies for Positive Change, out from Baker Books on November 17. Bradley is a distinguished research fellow at the Acton Institute and research professor at Kuyper College, and the book grew out of a lecture he gave at Acton University in 2022 that left attendees asking for the data. He gathered it into a resource for pastors, nonprofits, and families.
The first thing Bradley wants to correct is the picture in our heads. Fatherlessness, he argues, is not only a story of absent fathers and low-income households. A child can live in an intact, prosperous home and still be dad-deprived if the father is emotionally detached, unattached, present in the house but not in the life. Telemachus had a roof. He did not have a father.
The social science on what that costs is consistent across every line Bradley traces. Fathers play a distinctive role in teaching empathy and other-centered behavior, pushing children to act responsibly and to weigh their effect on others. And fathers are the single strongest predictor of whether a child’s religious faith survives into adulthood, a finding Bradley says holds across traditions. Children model their father’s enthusiasm. A father who weaves faith into the texture of ordinary days transmits it; a father who outsources it does not.
That last point leads to the most interesting part of our conversation. Bradley pushes back on a model of fatherhood that is essentially a discipleship program: the father as drill instructor and catechist, dispensing rules and lessons. He is not against teaching. He is against teaching as the foundation. The scriptural image of God the Father, he argues, is one of love, affection, and tenderness first, and the fathers who form their children best are those who attach to them physically and emotionally before they instruct them. Rough-and-tumble play on the living room floor does more formative work than any lecture.
Bradley extends the critique to the church itself. After the Industrial Revolution, congregations built youth programs that quietly removed fathers from their children’s spiritual formation, and the retention numbers from youth-ministry-heavy models are poor. His counsel to churches is not to abolish youth ministry but to stop treating it as a substitute. Resource the fathers. Equip the fathers. Put the fathers back in the hall.
Any fatherly involvement helps, but Bradley is careful to say that the strongest results come when a father is present within a marriage. That is where policy enters. Family courts that default custody toward mothers and welfare rules that penalize low-income couples for marrying build systemic barriers to the very household the data recommends. A culture serious about fathers cannot be indifferent to the incentives it has stacked against them.
What keeps the book from being a lament is its last movement. To fathers who feel they have missed their chance, Bradley says plainly that it is never too late to re-engage and attach, even with adult children. Shared leisure, time, and physical presence build bonds at any age.
And to the rest of us he says what Athena said. Established fathers in a congregation can stand in for children who have none, and the research he cites suggests that positive father figures, whether uncles, grandfathers, or mentors, can cut negative outcomes by as much as half.
The goddess had to borrow a human face to reach the boy in the hall. There are a great many boys in a great many halls, and the faces they need are ours.