Is Biblical Masculinity Toxic?

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Nancy Pearcey
Not long ago, I got an email from a former graduate student who now teaches high school. She said, all of my male students are fans of Andrew Tate. So I said, where do you teach at a classical Christian school? Yes, I was surprised, but what it means is, if we’re not giving young men a biblical view of masculinity, they are going to be reaching out and being influenced by these online figures who have a very secular view of masculinity.

Collin Hansen
You see it on TV, you heard it from comedians, you even read it in children’s books, men are bad, dads are dim wits. And there’s a lot I like about children’s books, like the Berenstain Bears and Richard scarry’s busy town, but these classics from my childhood and my children’s childhood sure hit differently when I read them as a father and the dads always come across as so dumb. Well, Nancy Pearcey gave me context for these portrayals in her new book The toxic war on masculinity, how Christianity reconciles the sexes, published by Baker, the best selling author of Love thy body, Professor Pearcey writes less about recent culture wars and more about a long term transformation in Western society. For example, she says, when we think about the traditional family, we’re not being traditional enough. We should be looking further back in the 1950s as we do, we can see the contrast between the biblical definition of a good man versus the secular definition of a real man. Professor Piercy writes this quote, neither sex can fulfill its purpose by denigrating the other. Instead of accusing men of being toxic, a better strategy is to support their innate sense of what it means to be the good man. End quote. Well, Professor Piercy now joins me on gospel bound to discuss these historical shifts as well as what Christians and churches today can do to encourage good godly men. Professor Pearcey, thank you for joining me on Gospelbound.

Nancy Pearcey
Thanks. Thanks so much for having me and thanks for that great introduction.

Collin Hansen
Glad to. How long, Professor Piercey, have you wanted to write this book. Was there a specific moment in time when you realize that this message was something especially urgent you needed to share right now?

Nancy Pearcey
You know, there actually was a turning point. It’s when I saw an article in the Washington Post titled, Why can’t we hate men? This was not some feminist rag, right? It’s mainstream publication. And so I thought, why has it become acceptable to attack men so explicitly? A huffington post editor tweeted hashtag, kill all men, and then said it was a joke. Speaking of jokes, you can buy T shirts that say so many men, so little ammunition. And there are books with very blunt titles, like, I hate men and no good men, and are men necessary? And what I found really tragic was that even some men are jumping on that bandwagon. There’s a male book author who wrote talking about healthy masculinity is like talking about healthy cancer. And then this one you may have seen. It’s not in my book, because it’s even more recent, but the producer of the director, I think of the movie Avatar, James Cameron, who was in the news saying that testosterone is a toxin you have to work out of your system. And so when I saw this kind of attacks on men considered totally normal acceptable. Let me give you a survey, 2020. Survey, half of American men, literally 50% of American men, said, these days, society seems to punish men just for acting like men. And so whether you agree with that or not, that’s a lot of people who now think men are getting a bad deal, that the male bashing has gone too far. And so I wanted to write this book to say, where is this coming from. I mean, you know, I write books, usually on apologetics, and so this a little bit different, but it’s the same thing, right? You’re still looking at what is our secular culture saying, and where is that coming from? And how can we respond with a biblical answer?

Collin Hansen
Let’s just, let’s just dive in a little bit deeper there with a basic question. It’s a very provocative title. Could you describe with a little bit more detail? What is this toxic war on masculinity? Let’s explore, when did it start? Who started? It was there a person or a movement and and also, if it’s a war, I guess the question is, who’s winning?

Nancy Pearcey
Well, most people assume that this negative language directed at men probably started with. Uh, second wave feminism, 1960s that’s what I thought. And so I was very surprised when I started looking into it and finding that you can find this kind of negative attacks on men all the way back to the 19th century. It really begins with the Industrial Revolution. Because before that time, men worked. Most men worked all day with their family, with their wives and children on the family farm, the family industry, the family business, and so the cultural expectation on men focused much more on their caretaking role, the responsibility for the people they love. Even secular historians, here’s a quote from one secular historian. He says, The colonial definition of masculine virtue was duty, duty to God and man. And I thought, Okay, where did we lose that definition of masculine virtue? Well, the Industrial Revolution took work out of the home, and then had to follow their work out of the home into factories and offices, and for the first time in American history, they were not working alongside people they loved, right? Their family members, people they had a moral bond with. Instead, they were working as individuals in competition with other men. That was a very different work environment. And that’s when we see the literature start to change. For the first time, you start to see people complaining that men were changing, that they were becoming egocentrics, self, self, assertive, aggressive, greedy and acquisitive. I’m using language from the 19th century and even turning work into an idol. I that was one of the ones that surprised me, how often they were accused of turning work into an idol. That was a common language back then. In other words, instead of using work as a way to support your family when you’re working alone, it’s much easier to start treating work as a matter of personal success, personal advancement, Career Achievement and so on. And so the language, I was surprised to see that already in the 19th century, some of the language was just as hostile and just as negative as anything we see today.

Collin Hansen
Does that correspond, then, to the temperance movement, in response to the rise of of alcoholism and just alcohol abuse by men? Are those happening at the same time?

Nancy Pearcey
Yes, and part of that is, you know, you started with examples from fatherhood. Part of it is because, when I talk about the language becoming negative, especially fathers, because for the first time, fathers were out of the home all day, and they were losing touch with their children. They were not as aware of their children’s experiences and feelings, and, you know, the family dynamics. And so already in the 19th century, you see fathers begin to be portrayed as out of touch, irrelevant, superfluous and incompetent. You know exactly what we see today in the Berenstein Bears. That’s, that’s the roots of that. But people also were very concerned that boys because they were growing up without their father’s supervision, were becoming wild and unmanageable and unruly. They were not behaving as well. One the leading psychologist of the day said, never in American history has the boy been so wild as today and and he said it’s because the boy is half orphaned, that was his phrase, half orphaned because he’s not being raised by his father anymore. No. And the same psychologist said, you know, boys are being raised by women now, in home, school and church. Well, these wild, unruly boys grew up. And so that’s why the 19th century was marked by huge increase of what are traditional male vices, like drinking, gambling, gang activity, prostitution and so on. And yes, there was a reason. There was a temperance movement. Sometimes a single fact can crystallize it. In 1830 Americans drank three times as much as they do today. So yes, there was a reason for the Templars movement. Is because these unsupervised boys were growing up and changing the nature of society. And, you know, there was a huge increase of reform movements to try to deal with this. So yeah, there’s, a there’s a strong history of seeing, seeing men as more naturally prone to sin and vice, and that’s not true. It’s because they were growing up without their fathers that they were they were acting in ways that were not, you know, they were contrary to morality and ethics. Wow. Wow.

Collin Hansen
Different. Yeah. I mean, this is exactly why your book is so helpful and so insightful. Because the way we will we remember certain movements or certain history, we often do not go far back enough. We don’t go back to those roots. We don’t see some of the structural conditions that contributed to some of these moral changes. Um. You describe. A lot of the book is built around explaining the difference between a good man and a real man. Could you explain that difference? And maybe a little bit more about the origins of where we got this concept of He’s a real man, or a man’s man?

Nancy Pearcey
Yeah, some people think this was my language, but no, it’s coming out of a sociological study of young men. And this was the words that they used the sociologist, who’s well known enough that he speaks all around the world. And so he came up with this very clever experiment where he would ask young men two questions. First, he would ask, what does it mean to be a good man? And you know, for example, you’re at a funeral, and in the eulogy, they say he was a good man. All around the world, young men had no trouble answering that. They would immediately start listing things like honor, duty, sacrifice, do the right thing, look out for the little guy. I like that one. Be a provider, be a projector, be responsible. And a sociologist would say, We’re doing that. And they would say, I don’t know or if they were in a Christian society. Remember, this was all around the world. If they were in the Christian society, they might say, it’s part of our Judeo Christian heritage. But then he would follow up with a second question. He’d say, Well, what does it mean if I say to you, man up, be a real man. And the young men themselves said, no, no, no, no, that’s completely different. That means be tough, never show weakness, play through pain, suck it up. Be competitive, win at all costs, get rich, get laid. I’m using their language there. And so this sociologist concluded that, on the one hand, that’s good there’s good news, which is they do know what it means to be a good man. This is an inherent universal knowledge that men seem to have, we would say they are made in God’s image. They do know that their unique masculine strength will not give of them just to get whatever they want, but to protect, provide for those that they love. And that’s encouraging because it means, you know, most men don’t respond very well to being called toxic. Nobody would. And so instead, it encourages us to say, how can we look into ways to support and affirm men in this innate knowledge that they do have being made in God’s image? And or, as Romans two says, they do have a conscience. They do know right from wrong. But secondly, the sociologist said they have a very different understanding of the real man. You know, that they feel cultural pressure to live up to, you know, very different traits. Some of them are fine. I mean, we all want people to be tough in a crisis, but most of the other traits, you know, are things that we today might label toxic. You know, just be competitive, get rich, get laid. In other words, the Andrew Tate phenomenon, right? Fast Cars, Fast Money, fast women. And so the challenge to the church, I would say, is how we can deal with both sides of this, this span, on the one hand, the church needs to support men in doing, in their knowledge of what is good. And on the other hand, how can we reach out and help young men, especially think critically about the secular definition of the real man. Let me give you a story. Not long ago, I got an email from a former graduate student who now teaches high school. She said, all my male students are fans of Andrew Tate. They’re even using Andrew Tate quotes in their yearbook. So I said, where do you teach at a classical Christian school. So I was surprised. Yes, I was surprised. But what it means is, if we’re not giving young men a biblical view of masculinity, they are going to be reaching out and being influenced by these online figures who have a very secular view of masculinity.

Collin Hansen
Interestingly, Professor Piercy, between the time you published your book and even between the time when I wrote the questions for this interview, we’ve seen a number of studies coming out, both that young men are more politically conservative than young women, but then also than previous generations, than the millennials, especially ahead of them. But then secondly, that young men are now for the first time in we might be looking at the history of the church, but you know, different cultures, there were some variations within there that younger men are more likely to be religious and perhaps Christian in particular. Than young women. I it’s really just in the last few weeks that I’ve seen this studies. And I just wondered, how does your research connect to what more studies are beginning to find in both of those realms?

Nancy Pearcey
Yeah, I have a lot of studies in the book. You know, most Christian books on masculinity are sort of devotional, and this one is not. It’s based on data. And one of the things that really surprised me is that Christian men test out as the most loving and engaged husbands and fathers, and this is quite contrary to the secular narrative, right? It’s the secular narrative is that, if anything, Christian men are exhibit a of toxic masculinity. I’ll give you just one quote. It was easy to find them, but the co founder of the church two movement, which followed the metoo movement, said that the the theology of male headship feeds the rape culture that we see permeating American Christianity today. So the thing is that sociologists and psychologists were listening to these and saying these accusations, and saying, where’s your evidence. You’re making these charges, but where’s your data. And so they went out and did the studies. And in one sense, that’s the good part that Christian men were targeted, is people went out and studied them then. And to their own surprise, they found that Christian men test out far better than any other group of men in America. They they have they’re more loving to their wives. And by the way, I always get asked, yeah, what did the wives say? I have to, I have to qualify this by saying, yes, they did interview the wives separately. So they’re actually reporting that the wives say they are the happiest with the way their husbands treat them. Evangelical fathers spend more time with their children than any other group, 3.5 hours more per week than secular fathers, evangelicals, evangelical couples, divorce at a lower rate, 35% lower than secular couples. And the biggest surprise is they actually have the lowest rate of domestic abuse and violence of any group in America, and so sometimes, again, a quote can crystallize it. So I’ll give you a quote from The New York Times. This was by Brad Wilcox. He’s at the University of Virginia. He’s a sociologist, and he did the largest study, and he wrote an article in which he said, direct quote, it turns out that the happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives. Fully 73% of women who hold conservative, conservative gender values and attend church regularly with their husbands have high quality marriages. And then he turns to his secular colleagues, and says, I love this part of the quote. He says, academics need to cast aside their prejudices against religious conservatives and evangelicals in particular, because Protestant evangelical men do test out consistently as the most loving and engaged husbands and fathers. So this is great news, and we need to be bringing into the churches. You know, the churches are not publicizing this data yet. I had to go digging in the academic journals to find it. If you read my end notes, you’ll see them mostly academic journals. And so we need to bring this into the churches to encourage men that they are doing well. One of my graduate students was the head of the women’s ministry at a very large Baptist Church here in the Houston area. And she said, on Mother’s Day, we hand out flowers and tell the women they’re wonderful. On Father’s Day, we scold the men and tell them to do better. And so the theme of my book is no no more scolding. You know, we need to encourage Christian men. This isn’t a pep talk from some religious leader. This is solid empirical research. These are evidence based findings that we should be bringing into the church to encourage Christian men.

Collin Hansen
Now we’re talking here about Nancy Pearce’s book, The toxic war on masculinity, how Christianity reconciles the sexes. I wonder, Professor Piercy, if the data that you’re citing there from Brad Wilcox, a previous guest on gospel bound here. Love his work. I’ve loved it for a long time. His description of soft Patriarchs is what you’re getting at there, and the difference between where the difference that church attendance makes in particular, with that dynamic, I wonder if on the ground, as men are increasingly labeled toxic, that the younger men have been looking for that refuge, that example of manhood, and they’re realizing that they can find it in. The Church, and they’re not going to find it anywhere else, because the options outside the church are sort of a kind of androgyny in one direction or in the other direction. Andrew Tate, and they’re looking for a viable third option, which is certainly what you’re describing. Want to go back to the Industrial Revolution question, and just wondering, practically here, I grew up on a farm, so I grew up working with my dad. You can actually see a picture right back here, if you’re watching on video of my dad and me working in the feedlot with cattle. And so I was not only around my dad, I was around my two uncles and my grandfather. So lots of men there and lots of models, and I was around them all the time. Should we be doing more practically and economically, to close the gap between the workplace and the home and even try to unify them when possible? What do you think?

Nancy Pearcey
Oh, absolutely. Um, and the pandemic was a game changer. A lot of people who did not think it was possible discovered that they actually liked working, you know, all the time, or part of the time from home. This is not the book, because this is more recent, but Harvard University did a study, and The finding was, during the pandemic, 68% of fathers said they got closer to their children, and they don’t want to lose that. And I thought that this is great. You know, Father, when fathers do have time to be with their kids, they do like it. In another study, which I do cite in the book, 70% of men said they would rather have more family time, even if it meant a loss in salary. You know, lower salary, most men would prefer to have a better balance of work and family, some kind of a hybrid situation, for example. And ironically, in a totally different study, the same number, 70% of wives said they too, would rather have more time with their husband, even if it meant a lower salary. And so millennials in particular, by the way, when they’re surveyed, they all want a more equal balance. You know, men do want more time with their kids. They realize it’s a real loss not to have close relationship with their children. And, of course, women also want more time, more opportunities to use their skills and gifts in economically productive work. So millennials are saying, hey, we want more of a balance. It’s not quite there yet, but that’s what they really aspire to. And and by the way, you have to get the CEOs on board too, right? So in my book, I do quote several CEOs who said, during the pandemic, we changed. We were very hesitant. You know about remote work before the pandemic. Here’s what one of them said the pandemic, direct quote, the pandemic has completely exploded. Those fears. We were not seeing any discernible drop in productivity. So we have to get the, you know, the heads of industry, the heads of corporations, the heads of businesses, on board as well. So you can take these quotes to your boss that are in my book and say, hey, look, actually, it works better. More and more people are finding that they get more productive workers if you give them time to be better for fathers and husbands, they actually are better workers as well, because, you know, they’re happier. And here’s how one CEO put it. She said, the time they do spend at work, they’re much more productive because they have a reason to get home. And so I think we should be, I don’t. I’m not saying that remote work is best for everybody, but I’m talking specifically about people when their children are young, parents, when their children are young, you know, giving them opportunities to be more engaged with their children for both, for both of their sake, you know, fathers, I have a whole chapter on how fathers benefit. Usually we talk about, you know, fathers, you need to be better husband. You know, husbands and and we do in sort of a scolding tone like I said earlier, but actually we can encourage them more when they realize studies, I cite several studies where men said they had a much deeper sense of masculine fulfillment when they could be deeply involved with their children. So they benefit as well.

Collin Hansen
I can see especially that those options of flexibility play really well into information economy type jobs, including mine, and oddly enough, like how I grew up, pre industrial jobs. So much of the challenge will be in service economy and industrial type jobs where that flexibility will be more difficult to come by for a variety of reasons, but it’s a mixed bag, depending on where and what kind of job that you’re in there. But one commonality, no doubt, would be. Be the decrease of commutes that comes with remote work, and that’s a huge boost, just in time spent, but also in stress.

Nancy Pearcey
I’ll address this, because sometimes people say, Oh, well, you know, the solutions you’re giving are just for the laptop class. But I do have a friend who is a car mechanic, and you know, you can’t it’s not easy to bring cars home. You don’t have specialized equipment, but you know what he did? He brought his paperwork home. Instead of sitting at the office and doing it, he brought it home and sat at the dinner table while his kids were sitting around him doing their homework. So he could talk to them about their homework if they had questions, you know, if they didn’t understand something, he was sitting right there with them. So here’s how I put it in the book. Not every job can be done at home, but aspects of most jobs can’t be done at home. We have to be more creative in thinking about which parts could possibly be done away from the workplace so that you can connect with your family better.

Collin Hansen
One of the other things that I’ve often observed talking with other fathers is that in pre industrial times, especially, you could see your dad work, which helped to give you a sense of what work was like, and give you a sense of the dignity and the importance and the significance of work. It also helped you to understand what it meant to be a man, because so much of the work that you did was physical in nature and lent itself more toward a division of labor between men and women. It wasn’t always that way, because there were some domestic things that we think of now that men often did before, but certainly just basic physical demands that men had to shoulder. Now it is much more difficult to portray that, especially if you’re in the information type sector, because the work looks so similar, you can’t really see any different kind of work. And then the work that men and women do is is fairly similar, because you’re looking at a computer. And so my daughter, not long ago, she’s six years old. She said she was going to work, and what she’s looking at is me, her mom, my wife, is home with the kids, and she set up a set up a laptop, and just started pounding at keys. Was like, Well, I mean, I can’t that’s what it looks like. It could. You can’t quite tell that different. So there are different ways. One of the things I’ve tried to adjust with is try to find other things around the house, repairs and yard work and things like that, where I can involve my children and try to get them involved. You may have some other ideas, Nancy.

Nancy Pearcey
I think that’s great. And I think all parents have a tendency to say, well, I’ll just do it myself. It’s easier. It’s faster, instead of training their children to work alongside them, knowing the outcome won’t be as good, knowing it’ll take more time. But I appreciate what you’re saying, that one of the things that we haven’t really touched on is the secularization of the masculine script, because that played a role also in this. Again, it involved the Industrial Revolution, because after that, there grew up a large public sphere of large institutions like factories and businesses and financial institutions, the university trade unions. Yes, there you go. And of course, the state expanded considerably, and many people began to say that this public sphere needs to operate by quote, unquote, scientific principles by which they really meant, value free. In other words, don’t bring your private values into the public realm. There we play by a different set of rules, which is exactly what we hear today still. And so since it was men attending those secular education back then, you know that universities, and since it was men working in that secularized realm, they did become secular earlier than women did, and that also affected the conflict between men and women, because men were not being they were not governing their behavior as much by Christian principles and and it also raised the question of, if values are not cultivated in the public realm, if they’re kicked out, then where will they be cultivated? Well, in the private realm, home and church, and who will cultivate them? Well, women, because women were home. And so the first time ever in human history, women was said to be morally superior to men, and that’s the double standard. Many people think that’s just forever. No, it was brand new in the 19th century, all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. People had thought that the insight into right and wrong is Rational Insight, and they thought men were more rational, and therefore men were more virtuous. In fact, the word virtue, the root is Vir which in Latin means that. Man. So virtue had the word had overtones of manly strength and honor. So this was totally new when it began to be accepted that men were just, you know, more naturally prone to sin advised and that women had to hold them in check, that it was women’s job to be sort of the moral guardians of society. And this created a lot of the tension that we still see today. I mean, the me what this is the ME TOO movement. It’s women have to hold men in check, because men are just naturally raging, lustful beasts. And by the way, it’s even in the church, I was interviewed by a young, young, recently married couple. They have a podcast, and so I’ve turned the questions back on them, what do you think Do we still have, you know, double standard? And they said, absolutely. You know, in the in the dating stage, well, even in marriage, they said, it’s very much thought that just under the surface, men have have all these lusts and temptations, and that it’s up to women to sort of hold them down, you know, dress modestly and draw the line on any physical engagement while they’re you know, before they get married, and even after marriage, if he does porn or gets caught in adultery, who’s blamed? You know, his wife wasn’t meeting his knees adequately. So I think it’s important for us to recognize that a lot of the tension between men and women also came from the 19th century, and came from this assumption that this, which I think is a very secular assumption, you know, that we can’t hold men to the same standards that we can hold women to. You know that they’re not just they’re just never going to be as spiritual, as moral as women. And as you noted, it’s turning around, even as we speak, the polls are coming out showing that today, men are taking the lead and become especially younger. Men are becoming more spiritual, more interested in religion, more committed than young women are. So that was never true. That was always a secular lie, that we should just accept the lower standard for men.

Collin Hansen
And perhaps based on the analysis you’re offering here, not a coincidence, because women are excelling more than men in the public sphere. So it could just be a continuation, but reversal of the historic trend that you’re talking about there.

Nancy Pearcey
Good point, good point. Because a good part of you know, your first question was, why did I take up this topic? And one reason was, I was so concerned that men are falling behind. Boys are falling behind at all levels of education. It starts in kindergarten because they they don’t have as good fine motor control, so they can’t use the scissors as well, right? So already in kindergarten, they feel like they’re falling behind. They’re behind all the way through high school. In college, I teach at a Christian college, Houston Christian University, and so I was surprised. He learned that college is now average 60% female students, 40% male. And by the way, smaller Christian colleges. When I started it at Houston Christian, it was 7030 so we’ve been working to increase our males. You know how we started a football team and we started an engineering school, and now we’re almost 45% male, so we’re ahead of the curve. Finally, right? But and graduate school too more more women than men.

Collin Hansen
Law schools across the board, now.

Nancy Pearcey
Exactly. And then, once they get out of school, men are falling behind in the sense that men are much more likely than women to be prone to drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness, mental illness, crime, right? More than 90% of prison inmates are male. And unemployment. Unemployment is at Great Depression era levels, and people are not aware of that because it’s not showing up in the unemployment statistics. So instead, what researchers looked at is what they call labor force participation, and that’s when it came out that it’s great depression era levels and life expectancy even has gone down, not for women, only for men. A magazine called New Scientist had an article, and their conclusion was, the largest demographic factor today in early death is being male. So I do think it’s time for us to show some compassion and and look at programs that might help boys and men succeed. What can we do in school? Even like in school, there was been a plethora of books with titles like the war against boys, the boy crisis. Why boys fail? There’s been books calling attention to this problem, and yet, well, the author of the war against boys was Christina Hoff Sommers and. And even though she identifies as a feminist, she says every time I’ve tried to get some kind of program for boys, it’s been squashed by feminist groups who say, Oh, if we, you know, give resources to boys, we won’t, you know, we’ll take it away from girls. And I just don’t think that’s true. I think we can have good programs for for girls and good programs for boys.

Collin Hansen
Well, I’ll give you two examples. Professor Piercey one, I was working with a Policy Institute here in Alabama, and we went through a wonderful exercise over the course of a couple different days looking at different social challenges. This is a conservative policy institute, and we were trying to narrow down, if we had one thing that we could change in society, what would be the what would have the biggest ripple effects if you can’t do everything? So if you could focus on one thing, what would you do? And the thing that we concluded over the course of those two days was labor participation from young men like our workplace participation rates for young men were about the lowest in the nation, or something like maybe 40% non participation, and all these other problems were downstream from that. Because typically work is going to precede marriage, which is going to proceed, you know, involved fatherhood and I mean, all sorts of bad things happen when a lot of young men do not have work occupying them.

Nancy Pearcey
Go ahead, but even that is downstream, usually from fatherless homes, it is.

Collin Hansen
But the problem was, we were trying to figure out we can’t go back and fix what’s happened in those homes, so we’ve got to start somewhere. And was like, Let’s get them into work, and then from work, we’ll get them. It basically the success sequence right from from Wilcox again. Let’s try to get him to work, from work, we’ll get him into family, from family, we’ll get into fatherhood, and then we can kind of break the cycle. But you’re right where it broke down was clearly in the fatherhood, along the lines of what we’ve been talking about here. And then the other example is same context. Presbyterian pastor here, who does a lot of great work in an inner city context where he had come from previously, had said, the major problem we have right now, especially in the inner city, is with young men. We’ve got to intervene specifically with young in this case, African American men, but in a more liberal church context, the response was That’s not fair. It needs to be equitable. We need to focus on girls, he said, but you don’t understand what’s happening with the boys. That’s got to be a priority here because of how much worse off they are, and they could not bring themselves ideologically to reconcile with that. That’s how he ended up in Alabama, and it’s how he ended up in a program that focuses on young men in particular. So it’s couple illustrations to your point. Go ahead.

Nancy Pearcey
Yeah. Well, for some reason, caring about boys and men has been coded conservative, right. And so the liberals, liberal people, you people who identify on that side of the political spectrum, you know, have not wanted to touch it or like you, like you just said, you know, if we do anything for boys, it’s, you know, it’s not fair. The irony is, the reason girls rushed ahead of boys is because they were given special programs. 1972 title 919, 94 Gender Equity Act. Millions of dollars were poured into gender equity workshops, curricula, training to help girls. And basically the idea was, we’ll pull girls up to where boys are, right because girls were falling behind back then. Nobody anticipated girls would charge right past them, and that’s what happened. But it does show you that special programs can help. They they’re out. They are the reason that girls are now out doing boys on all kinds of academic performance and other jobs. And, you know, in major cities now, women earn more than men. But I’ll have to tell you, there is a new book. You’ve probably seen it already, but Richard Reeves, at the Brookings Institution, has a book called of boys and men. And you know that he’s from a more bona fide liberal background.

Collin Hansen
Brookings, yeah, for the Brookings, yeah.

Nancy Pearcey
And he was born, do not take up this issue, you know, because, like you said, it’s just it’s been coded conservative, and it would ruin his reputation, and he would face way too much opposition. But he did anyway, and this is good, because now it means that it’s slowly becoming an issue that liberals, you know, sort of have permission so to speak, to care about, to talk about, you know, he even left Brookings and started his own organization. I did not know that. Yeah, yeah, to continue research specifically on boys and men. So this is good. Knows it does mean that it’s becoming more an accepted, an accepted issue to care about across the political spectrum, “Of Boys and Men,” by Richard Reeves.

Collin Hansen
But odd how those things are are thought of, because so many of the problems are especially with working class communities, and especially also then with minority communities with the boys. And you would think that historically, those are communities that liberals care a lot about helping, but then it gets mixed up with men, and then that gets mixed up with feminism. And that’s, you know, that influence on the left and and you forget that, Aren’t we trying to do good here for all people, and when these young men are are helped, that’s the whole point of our study. Was to help see all the effects, not only for them, but the ripple effects throughout our whole society would be enormous, financial I mean, with crime, with taxes, with with family formation, with problems with I mean, whether you were on the right or the left. It was really something that everybody should be able to agree on. I’ve got just a couple questions here with Professor Nancy pearcey talking about her book titled The talks of war on masculinity, how Christianity reconciles the sexes from Baker we mentioned earlier in the discussion on the Industrial Revolution, how it changed with the workplace, but there was another change from kinship networks to nuclear families. Seen a number of people write on this topic. David Brooks wrote about it provocatively a couple years ago, but you write this in the book. Quote, for better or worse, emotional intimacy is now the main glue holding families together. We are asking marriage to give us the sense of emotional belonging that earlier generations used to get from an entire kinship network. In this sense, we are asking far more from marriage than at any other period in history. I’m going to go back to my experience and a lot of things have made more sense in my life, realizing that structurally, I grew up in the 19th century, not the 20th because of a kinship network that was built around a family farm. So not only did I work alongside my dad and my uncles and my grandfather, but then I also lived around my great grand two great grandmothers, my grandparents, not far from another set of grandparents, aunts and uncles next door to cousins, all of that. So this is something that I’ve just kind of taken for granted. And in fact, my wife and I moved so that our children could grow up in a kinship network, not mine, but hers, because we valued this, but it’s because we were convicted by what you’re arguing here. But help people to understand why this is a big deal and why they should care about this change and how it affects what you’re describing here, about this toxic war on masculinity.

Nancy Pearcey
Yes, well, that’s a good question, because certainly without that larger kinship group, marriages are much more fragile, because there’s so much more of more pressure put upon marriage than ever before. And actually, that quote that you read is from some chapters. I include two chapters on on domestic abuse and violence in Christian homes, and that’s because the research, again by Brad Wilcox, who we’ve mentioned here, showed that this really two very different subgroups of Christian men, and we already talked about how Christian men who attend church regularly test out as the best, most loving husbands and fathers. But what he found was that, well, let me start by saying the first pushback I always get is, but haven’t we heard that Christians divorce at the same rate as the rest of the culture? And so that question sent the researchers back to the data, and they made that very crucial distinction between men who attend church regularly versus men who are merely nominal. By the way, my students don’t know what nominal even means. I tell them the Latin N, O M means name, so it means in name only. And so these are men who, on a in a survey, might check the Baptist box, for example, but who actually attend church rarely, if at all. It’s more of a cultural background, and they test out dramatically different. They fit all, sadly, they fit all of the toxic stereotypes, stereotypes their wives report the lowest level of happiness. They spend the least amount of time with their kids. They actually have the highest rate of divorce, 20% higher than secular men. And they have, shockingly, the highest rate of domestic abuse and violence of any group in America. Brad Wilcox wrote an article for Christianity today, and he summarized it in one sentence. He said, The most violent husbands in America. Are nominal evangelical Protestant men who attend church rarely or not at all, and so I obviously had to deal with that issue. You know, I couldn’t, I couldn’t sweep that under the carpet. So I do have two chapters on domestic violence and abuse because, and you just mentioned one reason, one reason that the Christian view of marriage is more important today than ever before is that marriages, you know, married couples are so isolated they don’t have a wider support network, and so that emotional connection between husband and wife is more important than ever and when it when, like in the case of nominal Christians, when it’s a destructive or dysfunctional relationship the church needs. Churches need to recognize that number one, it’s these nominals who are ruining our reputation. When people think, oh, Christians, you know, there are, there are these abusive tyrants. They’re thinking of the nominals that they’ve met. But and so the churches need to think, how do we reach out to these men who are at the fringes of the Christian world, who are claiming an evangelical identity, but who are actually treating words like headship, not with their biblical meaning, but they’re infusing meaning from the secular world. And so that’s another reason I had to spend a lot of time in the book on, well, what is the secular view of masculinity? Because so many Christian men are picking it up and and, you know, just putting sort of a Christian veneer over it. So it’s it’s crucial that we learn how to disciple these nominal Christian men for the sake, for the sake of themselves and and the sake of their families.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, and one of the best ways to do it is when they have a broader network of people who set examples for them, especially cousins, siblings, uncles. One of Wilcox is he’s, he’s gonna, he’s gonna hear his name called out so many different times on this but I was working at Christianity today when he was started publishing for us back at that time, and I learned a lot from him, via Andy Crouch and others who were reading their work. But one of the things he talks about is how divorce is contagious. If you come up in a family where there are lots of divorces, you are far more likely to get divorced. When your friends get divorced, you are far more likely to get divorced. So one of the things that happens within a kinship network is that if the other marriages are together, you are far less likely to get divorced just because of the norms that are set, but also the resources that are available to you in doing that.

Nancy Pearcey
I do think that’s why the Christian church is said to be a family. Absolutely no, it’s supposed to be a family for those who don’t have it. You know, it’s I would like to see us construct relationships within the church that are strong enough to take the place of those missing kinship networks for those who no longer have them.

Collin Hansen
Right. Well, and I think that just goes back to that question, or the point you just made, that this religion, I mean just talking to sociological terms here, not in spiritual terms, but in sociological terms, your religion has no value to you unless it is practiced. You can claim whatever you want. You can check whatever box. You can go back to whatever experience you want to identify, but if you’re not actively participating in that. So how does your church become that missing kinship network that you may not have for a million reasons, because you participate heavily in it, it’s not going to have any magic powers for you if you don’t bother to worship, if you’re not doing a Sunday school or a home group or whatever. And I often would tell people, as an elder in my church that whatever they wanted out of that church would be available to them if they just showed up. You’re gonna get what you want. You’re gonna get that kinship network. You’re gonna get that family if you show up. And if it doesn’t exist right now, by you showing up, you’ll help to create it.

Nancy Pearcey
And to quote Wilcox yet again, so I had a friend who was who was skeptical. She’s not a Christian. I have a friend who is skeptical about that church connection. You know when, by the way, the reason Wilcox focuses on church attendance, there have been other psychologists, sociologists who’ve looked at other factors. Because people say, Well, wait a minute. Just attending church doesn’t mean that you’re sincere. You know, don’t you need to test something more about how sincere are they? How often do they pray? You know, how important is related to them? And they have been studies that ask all of those questions. But you know what they found? The social scientists found that they get all of it pretty much in just one factor. Do they attend church? Right? It’s easy to quantify, it’s easy to test, and it tends to include all of those others. So because people sometimes think, isn’t that a bit superficial? Do they go to church? Well, actually, it tends to capture all the other elements as well. And what he says is, for those who are skeptical, because I thought it was kind of funny, because many of his fellow sociologists are skeptical, like my friend was, you know what? Church? Why is that so important? And he so he has to sort of patiently explain to them, well, actually, church is the one place that affirms men in their masculine moral responsibilities. He says, You don’t get it at the workplace, you don’t get it at the tavern, you don’t get it at the sports arena. But at church, you do get other men who care about their families, who talk about their family responsibilities, who support one another in being good family members, and that in addition, of course, church gives a family opportunities to do things together, from the Sunday service to, you know, youth groups and so on. And so it was kind of funny watching him have to unpack this for a secular age that no longer even understands how much church helps men, in particular, understand, you know, a strong, healthy and loving role for husbands and fathers well.

Collin Hansen
And with the decline of nominal Protestantism and the decline of nominal Roman Catholicism, it means that church attendance is more likely an indicator of serious faith than it would have been to say, two generations ago there and had a friend of mine, a young man, married, Young had kids, you know, started having kids in his 20s, and he said to me, one day, Colin, you wouldn’t believe how sad and pathetic. I think in some ways he was getting at the 30 something men are at my Country Club in the locker room, the way they talk about their wives, the way they talk about their kids, the way they carry themselves in the locker room, the amount of alcohol they consume, things like that. He said, It’s really depressing. But the point was, he was contrasting it with the church, where there were positive reinforcements, positive encouragements and ultimately, spiritual resources for them to be able to carry out these responsibilities where these other men were just lost, because the country club is not a supplement, where you’re going to be formed in those positive ways.

Nancy Pearcey
You know, one of the things I often say when people say, what can we do about this? I would like to see churches consciously, intentionally, have more ministries to boys and young men. There are a very, very few I met, I met a guy who goes around the country trying to persuade churches to start Ministries for boys and young men. I mean, take, crime for example. We all know that fatherless families, most most young men who commit crimes, are from fatherless families. It has a greater impact than race, poverty or education, and 40% of children in America today are growing up without their fathers. Did you know it’s the highest rate in the world, highest rate of single parenthood in the world, right right here in America. But researchers have also found that father substitutes can have a huge impact. And that’s that’s encouraging. In other words, grandparents and uncles like you, like you had that, teachers, coaches, youth group leaders and so on, they can actually have a big influence. And so I would love to see churches take the lead and just say, Okay, let’s have specialized ministries to boys and young men. And you know, just make that a priority for the next generation. Like you, like your Think Tank found for the next generation, nurturing boys and young men is probably the one most significant thing that churches could do.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, well, to wrap up here, I want to make sure everybody knows you pick up and read this and a lot more. You can find it on Amazon, just going to find Nancy Pearce’s book, The toxic war on masculinity, how Christianity reconciles the sexes, published by Baker, but Professor Piercey, before you go, I do want you to tell us briefly about your story becoming a Christian at Labrie, the Gospel Coalition and the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics, where I serve as the executive director, heavily influenced by Labrie, especially via Tim Keller. So we’re always interested in a good Labrie story, especially as it relates to somebody who’s so professionally capable as you are as an apologist.

Nancy Pearcey
Oh, thank you. I just love to talk about it. And actually it’s kind of relevant to this book as well, because. Yeah, I start this book with my personal story. I did grow up in a very abusive home, you know, very the opposite of what you grew up with. You know, my father, he would, he wouldn’t say, Do this all. Spank you. He’d say, do this. I’ll beat you. And then he would, his favorite was the knuckle fist, you know, the middle finger extended to cause a sharper stab of pain. And I was even on tranquilizers because I was so troubled as a child. And it was, I know it was because of my father. I was, I was terrified. So you can imagine, when I became a young adult. I ricocheted off into extreme feminism. I read every foundational feminist book, Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett, Susan Brown Miller, you know, I just loved them. I thought they were wonderful. I always had some feminist book on my bedside table. How did I end up at Labrie. So we had lived in Europe when I was a child, so I’d gone back. I’d saved my money all through high school because I wanted to go back to Germany. And since I was in Germany, I won’t go into details, I sort of stumbled across Labrie, which was in Switzerland, and that was the first place. Oh, I didn’t even tell you this part. So I my I was raised Lutheran. I forgot to say that part. I was raised Lutheran, but in high school, I very intentionally walked away from my faith. I asked my father once, why are you a Christian? He said, works for me. That’s it. That’s all you’ve got. My father was a university professor, and that’s all he had. And I had a chance to talk to a seminary Dean, and all he said was, don’t worry, we all have doubts sometimes, like it was a psychological phase. And so about halfway through high school, I had decided, I guess Christianity doesn’t have any answers, and if you don’t have good reasons for something, you shouldn’t say you believe it. And I clearly was not getting good reasons. And so, yeah, I spent several years then as an agnostic and but a serious search for truth. I should say this, you know, I realized pretty quickly that if there was no God, there’s no foundation for ethics. It’s just true for me, true for you. There’s this. There’s no foundation for truth. There’s no foundation for even moral freedom, if we’re just complex biochemical machines as materialist, for materialist forms of evolutionists tell us, so I had, I had absorbed all of these isms, you know, secularisms, and so I was perfect candidate for going to Labrie. And I had never heard, I had never heard any Christian apologetics. I had no idea that Christianity could be defended with good reasons and arguments, that it could stand on its own against these secular isms that I had absorbed by that time. And so I was blown away. In fact, I was I was so blown away that I left. I was so impressed. I stayed a month, and I was I was afraid I might be drawn in emotionally, because it was so appealing. Labrie was very appealing. You know, these intelligent, thoughtful Christians who could answer my questions, and also because of Francis schaeffer’s emphasis on cultural apologetics, right? The arts. I went there from Germany, where I was studying violin at the Heidelberg conservatory. So the art part was very appealing as well. But because of Labrie, I had, I had found out there with apologetics. I’d learned about Lewis and Chesterton, and just through my own reading, I eventually decided I was intellectually, intellectually convinced it was true. And then I said, Well, where do I find other Christians? Because I wasn’t in a church or anything. I was really just doing this reading on my own. I said, Well, I knew so at Labrie. So it was a year and a half later, I went back to Labrie, and that’s where I really got grounded. I spent four months then and got grounded in Christian worldview and apologetics and so on, and so it was. And you know what? There’s a side of it that I don’t usually tell but it’s relevant for this, for this interview, because I started out talking about my dad and his abuse on the staff at Labrie was also psychiatric social worker. Have you heard of her?

Collin Hansen
I haven’t, no.

Nancy Pearcey
Okay, so that’s a very important part of Labrie. She agreed to be on staff because she realized that for many people, their objections to Christianity are not just intellectual, but emotional, especially back pastor kids and missionary kids. She was a missionary kid, and her name was Sheila bird, and we called her birdie, and she couldn’t see everyone, of course, who came to Labrie. So she would pray that God would tell her who was going to come. So when I showed up at her door, somebody said, Ah, you should talk to birdie. Well, I was, I was willing to talk to any staff. Sure. Why not? I. She met me at the door. She said, God told me you were coming.

Nancy Pearcey
But to make the story short, at Labrie, I not only got it, you know, a good start with a full blown understanding of Christian Wolvie apologetics, I also got started on psychological and spiritual and emotional healing because of my dad’s abuse, and so I had a really rich understanding of the Christian life right from the beginning because of that, you know, I had, I’ve had to go, as you can imagine. I had to go through years and years of healing from my abusive childhood, and Labrie gave me a start on that as well. So I’m that that may be more of a story than you’ve heard from other people about Labrie. But everyone who’s everyone who knew birdie, said birdie was like a highlight of their time at Labrie. She She helped people have, you know that comprehensive understanding of faith, the whole person, you know, head and heart, right? That it is sometimes people are missing, especially people who love apologetics like I do. I do. I mean, all my writing, all my teaching now is on apologetics, but it’s never been dry or intellectual, because Labrie gave me both sides of my Christian walk.

Collin Hansen
And we are all the beneficiary of birdies, Ministry of the shars, Ministry of Labrie. And what God did through that, through you, and through this work and others as well, but especially through this work, there’s actually someone that I’m helping to kind of coach and to talk through and cultural apologetics, who she’s a PhD student right now, and I’ll probably send her this because I had recommended this book for us to read together and to talk through, to work through some of these questions. So continuing just years later, what in effect, continuing on the church. So my guest on gospel bound has been Professor Nancy pearcey, her latest book to toxic one on masculinity, how Christianity reconciles the sexes. Thank you, Professor Pearcey.

Nancy Pearcey
Thank you for having me.