The Toxic War on Masculinity, with Nancy Pearcey

foreign [Music] podcast where we equip Christians to identify the core beliefs of historic Christianity discern its counterfeits and proclaim the gospel with Clarity kindness and truth and this discussion that I just had with Professor Nancy Piercy was so enlightening and I'm so excited for you to get to listen to it if you've listened to the podcast for any amount of time you know I'm a huge fan of Professor Piercy I love some of her books like love thy body her book saving Leonardo is one of my favorites that I've ever read but she's just come out with a new book well actually it is coming out on the 27th I believe of June and it's called The Toxic war on masculinity now this is such an important book for our time and place in our culture because there's such a war not just on masculinity but on gender roles in general right about the distinctions between the Sexes and this book deals with so much of that and some highlights for me in the conversation and one of the biggest highlights and something I actually didn't know is that contrary to the popular cultural narrative conservative Evangelical men the data proves out that they actually have the lowest levels of abuse and divorce right we've all heard oh don't we all hear all the time that Christians have the same divorce rates as the rest of society it's actually not true Nancy's going to parse that out for us in this conversation also loved learning about how the darwinian theory of evolution normalized many traits in men that are labeled today as toxic we talked about that we talked about how men are actually falling behind in areas of education employment health and even life expectancy even though in culture it seems like if you act like there's any kind of a war on men or boys oh you know they'll just make fun of you and say well that's just silly because men have been at the top of the food chain and they're the oppressors and everybody else is the victim so we talked through all of these things can't wait for you to listen to this but before we get to that I did want to address a question that came up in last week's live stream so if you listened to the episode from last week we talked through letters from A deconstructed son and I took a question at the end Live on YouTube and I wanted to read from Jay Scar's commentary about it was just such a great answer to the question and I couldn't pull it up in time so I promised I would do that at the beginning of this podcast so let me just quickly read to you the question that this viewer had and then I'll give a few thoughts and then we'll get right into our conversation with Nancy Piercy this question was from Robert and it said when Jesus taught forgiveness will end our sins why need sacrifice and then he quotes Jesus from Matthew 9 saying if you had known what these words mean I desire Mercy not sacrifice you would not have condemned the innocent and so there is a little bit of confusion about this because if we think about what the Old Testament sacrificial system actually accomplished or what we think about in the relationship between sacrifice and forgiveness The Book of Leviticus actually has a lot to say about that and so this Old Testament scholar Jay scler wrote a wonderful commentary on Leviticus I really encourage you to pick it up and so he points out that Leviticus really makes it clear that the sacrificial atonement leads to the sinner being forgiven but then you have in Hebrews Hebrews says it's impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins so how do we reconcile that so really what is Jesus talking about when he says I desire Mercy not sacrifice well if we go to what the sacrificial system actually accomplished in the Old Testament I'm just gonna I'm gonna read you this from Jay scler's commentary because it is so good he says this atoning sacrifice in the Old Testament may be compared to writing a check the purpose of the check was to cover the debt of sin the form of the check was an animal sacrifice whose lifeblood was given in place of the Sinners the Lord in his grace received the check and declared the debt paid graciously assuring forgiveness to the offer but he did not cash it in the grand scheme of things it's not possible for the lifeblood of an animal to fully Ransom the lifeblood of a human to return to the analogy the check would have to be would have bounced right so continuous sklar why did the Lord receive it as a payment at the time because he knew that there would one day be money in the account to cover the debt namely when Jesus gave his lifeblood as the perfect and final ransom for the lifeblood of Sinners and we read about this in Hebrews 10 10 and 12-14 and then sklar goes on stated differently the atoning sacrifices of the Old Testament were pointers to a much greater atoning suffice to come one that would be enough to cover the debt fully and finally so when Jesus is saying if you if you had known what these words mean I desire Mercy not sacrifice you would have not condemned the innocent so what Jesus is talking about here and I'm going to go to a commentary here from RT France where he he says when when Jesus is quoting actually from Hosea I desire Mercy not sacrifice uh France points out that hosea's underlining concern was the danger of a religion which is all external where ritual demands have taken the place of love in other words Israel was offering sacrifices they were doing quote unquote the right things on paper but their hearts were far from God so God wanted their hearts he wanted their devotion he wanted their commitment and and just finally when this question is framed from Robert on YouTube when Jesus taught forgiveness will end our sins why need sacrifice well Jesus didn't just teach that you know we're just going to forgive you and there's no sacrifice sacrifice necessary in fact as we talked about in last week's podcast it was very clear from the words of Jesus in the upper room the night before he was betrayed that he did view his death as a sacrifice to God as the Fulfillment of Isaiah 53 which talks about the suffering servant that would come along and take the sins of the world upon himself in the upper room Jesus identified himself as that suffering servant and then of course instituted the New Covenant where Jesus said this is the New Covenant in my blood and that is a reference back to that Old Testament sacrificial system so I think that the grand themes that might answer this question from Robert is that Jesus God wants our hearts he doesn't just want us to do X Y and Z although those sacrifices were necessary and as Jay scler points out it's kind of like Israel writing a track God accepts the check forgives the sin but he doesn't cash it yet and that wouldn't happen fully until Jesus came and offered himself as that final sacrifice and instituting that new covenant in his blood so I hope that's helpful as an answer to that question from Robert and without any further Ado very excited to get into the toxic war on masculinity and here's Nancy Piercy well Nancy it's great to have you back on the podcast as our listeners and viewers know one of my favorite books is your book love thy body which we just walked uh through with our our study group on Facebook and you got to come on and we got to interview you which was so fun but you have a new book coming out that I'm very very excited about it's called The Toxic war on masculinity and the subtitle is how Christianity reconciles the Sexes and I have been so excited for this book to come out I'd love to just have you talk a little bit about what led you to write this book is it sort of a part two to love thy body or how do you see those things being connected yeah it's interesting to me I didn't think of it that way but a lot of people have said that it seems almost like a partner you know two books that are correlating with one another but actually I started I I started writing uh the toxic one masculinity uh in a nutshell I saw a problem and I saw a solution so the problem was I was actually pretty shocked at the level of hostility that has become acceptable to express against men I think the the headline that really caught my attention was the Washington Post had an article titled why can't we hate men I thought really in a mainstream respected uh newspaper like that the Huffington Post that it had an editor who wrote my New Year's resolution is to hate all men wow and I you can buy T-shirts now they say so many men so little ammunition uh book titles have come out I hate men no good men and are men necessary so that was the beginning point and then I saw that even men are jumping on the bandwagon uh male author wrote a book in which he said talking about healthy masculinity is like talking about healthy cancer and this one came out uh just recently you may have seen it so it's not in the book because it's just recent but the director of the movie Avatar uh James Cameron was in the news saying testosterone is a toxin that you have to work out of your system wow so the first reason I wrote the book is I really wanted to understand where is this coming from you cannot effectively stand against a social Trend unless you know where it came from and how it developed so a good bit of the book is just saying where did this come from it goes back much earlier than most people realize and so kind of tracing the steps uh where how we got here and so that was the problem and and then the solution was uh I started reading sociological books on Christianity and finding out the Christian men are actually doing extremely well and this is not something that's well known either in fact uh let me let me read you um yeah let me give you a few quotes it was easy to find quotes on the internet saying that you know any any concept of male Authority or headship in the home leads to chauvinistic insensitive tyrannical Patriarchs wow so here and this listen to this one so I'm a Christian publication it is no secret that abuse is prevalent in conservative churches that Embrace headship Theory or this was by the co-founder of the church 2 movement the Theology of male headship feeds the rape culture that we see permeating American Christianity Today and I read these and I thought wait a minute they're not paying attention to the social sciences there's data coming out from the social sciences today that that shows that these accusations are just false so the the sociologists and psychologists were reading these accusations and saying oh where's your evidence where's your evidence and so they started doing the studies and they're fairly recent and so most Christians don't know about them in fact I had to go digging in the academic journals in order to fund them but here's what they found compared to the average American family man Evangelical men are the most loving husbands and the most engaged fathers uh on in terms of their wives by the way they do interview the wife separately that's that's important because the ones don't always they won't always say what they really think um but so what they're really saying is that there was reports being having the highest levels of happiness with the way their husbands express love and appreciation Evangelical men are the most engaged with their children both in terms of shared activities like church youth group and sports and in terms of discipline like setting limits on screen time or enforcing bedtime Evangelical couples are the least likely to divorce and then the real surprise was they actually have the lowest rates of domestic violence of any any major group in America so this is amazing even Christians don't know this I you know I speak at Christian colleges and seminaries and schools and people who sit back and their jaws drop like Yeah because it goes it really goes against the cultural narrative right now especially as I studied deconstruction in the deconstruction space you would think that Evangelical ISM or just you know however people want to Define that is just a blight on society that leads to all sorts of abuse and of course every instance of abuse is highlighted and magnified as if there's not abuse in other movements as well but that's that's a very interesting statistic that that does really go against everything we're seeing as far as social media and the narrative that seems to be crafted by culture yes and Chuck let me give you a quote sometimes it's easier to have it really uh crystallized so my uh my go-to sociologist the one that I quote the most frequently because he did the largest study on evangelicals and uh and he's considered perhaps the top marriage researcher in the nation so he gets published in places like the New York Times And The Washington Post and so this was in the New York Times and he said it turns out that the happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives by the way the reason they focused on the wives of course is that the assumption is that these marriages are oppressive to the wise right the happiest of all wives in America are religious religious conservatives fully 73 of wives who hold conservative gender values and attend religious Services regularly with their husbands have high quality marriages so that's uh Brad Wilcox is at the University of Virginia and this is this is something he got into the Washington Times of all places and he actually Ends by saying academics need to cash aside their prejudices of course he's speaking to his own colleagues uh at places like the University of Virginia they need academics need to cast aside their Prejudice about religious conservatives and evangelicals in particular conservative Protestant married men with children are consistently the most active and expressive fathers and the most emotionally engaged husbands so this is this is Empirical research you know this isn't just a pastor giving you know sort of trying to encourage you with yay raw servants this is rigorously tested academic research and it it's something that should make us feel confident in bringing this data out into the Public Square bringing it into our churches so that we can encourage Christian men that that in spite of all the accusations coming from the culture uh they actually are doing very well and it shows up in rigorous academic testing wow you know it blows my mind that you brought up that quote from James Cameron because I don't know if you saw the second avatar movie Avatar way of water but of all well I had you know I have some criticisms of course it's very pantheistic and there's this sort of social justice narrative going on but the one thing that I thought that movie really captured beautifully was the dynamic between what would I would call a healthy masculinity and a healthy femininity there was a very strong focus on the family unit the women were strong and capable but they didn't act like men the men were the leaders who had Tender Hearts but yet strength and led with uh you know with um tenderness and strength which is it so blows my mind that he would say that because I felt like he really captured that quite well in that movie I'd love to know your opinion if you ever get a chance to see it if you would agree with that of course you know Avatar was recorded I think it's it took him 12 years to finish the movie so maybe the cultural narrative changed over time which is highly possible but I'm really fascinated by some of the data you just brought out because it seems like all we've heard is the opposite that Christians divorce at the same rate as secular culture and so like why don't we know this stuff why is this not more talked about or more out in the open exactly the first pushback I always get when I talk about these numbers is well haven't we heard that Christian's divorce at the same rate and and by the way in my research I discovered that that's one of the most widely used statistics by Christian leaders apparently they're trying to motivate us but but researchers went back to the data and what they did is they divided out Evangelical men who attend church regularly who have a genuine commitment you know an authentic faith versus nominal Christians so nominal Christians are men who in a survey like this might check the Baptist box for example but who actually attend church rarely if at all you know they have the Evangelical label but they're not living it and it turns out that these men are shockingly different they are they have the worst marriages the wise report the lowest level of Happiness they have at least engaged with their children they have the highest rate of divorce higher than secular men and the the real shocker they have the highest rate of domestic violence higher than even secular men wow so this is it this is why the statistics get skewed if you just look at evangelicals which a lot of researchers have done you'll you'll get you'll get the wrong numbers because you're putting together men who are better than secular men with men who are worse than secular men interesting if you put them together you get the wrong number and that's what's happened in in most of the studies up till now it was it was Brad Wilcox I think who first teased this out and so now we understand why it is that so many people have a negative view of evangelicals they've probably run into phenomenals because nominal Christians uh the the sh by sheer numbers you and I probably hang out mostly with Haley committed Christian men and so my first assumption was that the nominal Christian men would be a fairly small group they're not in America because we've had a kind of cultural Christianity they're at least the same numbers at least one of my studies had them coming out at the same number and so you have a 50 50 chance that if you talk to somebody who claims an Evangelical identity that he is in fact a nominal Christian and what they do is they hang around the fringes of the Christian World enough to pick up the language of headship and submission but they Infuse it with secular meanings so entitlement dominance control um and the and people have asked me like but why would they be worse than secular men well because they have they're using religious language and so in a sense if they feel like they're getting religious permission to do uh to live the way they're living whereas a secular person doesn't doesn't have that stuff they end up actually having the worst of Both Worlds they're they feel in a sense uh religious justification but for living by a secular script um that's that's really fascinating I want to talk about the word masculinity a little bit because you've identified there are two scripts really that that we're operating from because when I think of the word masculinity uh I think of a protection a man who uses his physical strength to protect those in his care or someone who um you know takes initiative to lead his family well but then there's other ideas that people might think of of Dom you know being domineering or oppressive to the people in his care so what are the two scripts that we're working from and what effect have those had yeah I found that this was really helpful it comes out of a study done by a sociologist and I'll give you a little background on this the reason it is helpful is um people uh this has been the most controversial book I've written I I really thought love that body would be more controversial because it deals with issues like abortion homosexuality and transgenderism which are really on The Cutting Edge today um but I have actually found this one to be more controversial I taught some classes on the manuscript and I led reading groups in the manuscript and when they would tell their friends and family uh what the book was about invariably the first question was whose side is she on with that tone whose side is she on and the assumption is that you have to either be you know completely against masculinity you know you're some sort of male bashing feminist or you have to be some angry reactionary you know who's defending man and so I put this study right at the beginning of the book to sort of uh diffused that hostility and uh and and so you know it's not either for a guest and this was a a ingenious experiment that was done by a sociologist he's very well known he's not a Christian um he's well known and so he gets invited to speak all around the world uh and so he decided to ask young men two questions he said what does it mean to be a good man if you're at a funeral and in the eulogy they say he was a good man what does that mean all around the world young men had no problem answering that you know from Australia to Germany to Brazil and I'll redo it so you get the actual words uh honor Duty Integrity sacrifice do the right thing stand up for the little guy be a provider be a protector be responsible and the sociologist would say well where'd you learn that and they would say it's just in the air we breathe or if they were um in the West in a western culture they would say it's a judeo-christian heritage and 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 man would say oh no they'll know that's completely different and again I'll read you their words that means be tough strong never show weakness when at all costs suck it up be competitive get rich get laid so in other words there are two competing scripts out there for masculinity and most men men are made in God's image and they do know what it means to be the good man they do know what but their unique strengths were not given them just to do whatever they want but to provide and protect as you were saying and if it doesn't say even fight for the people that they love but they also are being pressured by a culture to adopt you know the real man you know so the good man versus the real man and and so what I say in the book is the debate is not really so much between men and women but within men's own heads between these two Scripts and it gives us a better way a better strategy I think for dealing with these issues because um because men don't respond well to being called toxic but and none of us would so the strategy is how can we support men encourage them affirm them in what they already know is the good man I think Romans 2 right we all have a conscience we all know what's right and wrong how can we encourage them in being the good men which they innately know all around the world and and then you know instead of trying to denounce them for the real man encourage and support them in being the good man so I think that that gives us a much more positive approach to these issues [Music] well I want to take a moment and let you know about our first sponsor today that's good ranchers you all know I love good ranchers it's American Meat delivered right to your door but guys this 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could pay today what I paid for my groceries two years ago well two years from now you can be saying that that your price for your meat has not gone up so again go to ranchers.com use the code Elisa for thirty dollars off your first box [Music] I love your title because you've sort of flipped the toxic masculinity idea on its head with the toxic war on masculinity but anywhere in culture that you look and I'm curious to know maybe I'll ask you this toward the end about the pushback you've received on the book but I can already imagine you know people act like if you if you come around saying that men are under attack or that there's a war on masculinity or something like that they will almost just respond with mockery like oh yeah men they just can't get a break you know poor men as if men have been these oppressors who have had all the privilege but as I mean if we're just going with the data men are falling behind in education employment health and even life expectancy as you point out and so why do you think that people sort of Punt to that mocking thing like yeah men are fine they've been fine we need to give somebody else some attention but why are people ignoring these real problems because the way I see it if we don't teach men how to be good men then that's a that that leads to very dangerous Society yes this is something that's really surprised me here's how one of my students put it she said we always hear about the problems women face like sexual harassment and discrimination and so on and so we assumed that men are doing fine and in reading my manuscript she said I actually men are not doing fine yes it's true that the CEOs you know the maybe the top five to ten percent of men are at the at the very top but on average men are actually falling behind and so it in my book I do talk about meant boys falling behind at all levels of Education from kindergarten through college I mean we face this at Houston Christian University the average University now is 60 women and 40 men and some of them are even 70 30. um there was even an article on how some of the top universities are doing sort of reverse reverse affirmative action to try to attract more men um there are books coming out with titles like you know why the trouble with boys and the boy crisis and why boy why boys fail more women than men are going to graduate school more women than men are even going to Professional School like law and medicine and as adults men are falling behind as well in terms of uh more men than women commit suicide more men are likely to be addicted to drugs alcohol more men are victims of violence and perpetrators of violence I used to work for a prison fellowship which is an International Ministry and we knew that 90 of people sitting behind bars are male male um and recently men have been falling out of the workplace as well unemployment among men is that Depression era levels it's not showing up up in the statistics because they're no longer even looking for work so you have this is researchers who dug behind the statistics and they say that male unemployment is that Depression era levels and their life expectancy as you mentioned is even going is even going down now women's have stayed the same so it's not a general Trend it's only men's life expectancy that has gone down in recent years and so I think it is about time that we think about how we can help men and boys how we can support them better Christina Hoff Summers is a philosopher who wrote maybe the first book on the start the subject it was called the war against boys and she says the main reason we cannot get started with programs for boys and men is that feminist groups tend to oppose them you know feminist groups have poured lots and lots of money and effort into helping women succeed and helping girls succeed in school creating girl friendly curriculum and so on which is great you know it's great the girls are moving ahead you you have to realize that women weren't even allowed into universities until about the mid 20th century so it's very recent and that's good so we don't want to denigrate that but we do need to say we we need some programs now for boys we need to have some compassion on the fact that our boys are falling behind and you point out that the critician criticisms of men uh began much earlier than most of us think so walk us through a little bit of that history where did where did we how did we get here and where did this term toxic masculinity even come from yes so I think a lot of people assume that it's a product of a second wave feminism in the 1960s actually it started much earlier than that it started with the Industrial Revolution think about before the Industrial Revolution men work side by side with their wives and children all day on the Family Farm in the family industry the family business and so they ethos the expectation of masculinity was very much a caretaking role you know they're responsible for their family and they need to be gentle and kind because they're dealing with their family members and they were expected not only to be fathers of their family but a common phrase back then was fathers of the community they were supposed to bring that that following ethos that caretaking F off into the community as well and Authority had a very specific meaning back then I think a lot of times we kind of think Authority means you know I have the right to do what I want but back then it was very clearly defined as the person responsible for the common good so you know you naturally look out for what's good for you I look out for what's good for me but who looks up for the common good whether it's the common good of the marriage relationship or the family the church civil society and so on positions of authority were that's supposed to be the word back then was disinterested meaning not pursuing your own interest but pursuing the interest of the whole so there were very stringent expectations on then back then how did this all change it started with the Industrial Revolution it took work out of the home which meant of course men had to follow their work out of the home into factories and offices and for the first time in American history men were not working alongside their wives and children and they were working as individuals in competition with other men and already back then you start to see people complaining that men were changing they would no longer sort of acting out a caretaking ethos they were acting out look out for number one be competitive be aggressive be egocentric be self-interested and and the literature of the time you see protests you know it started out as a protest that men were losing the the caretaking ethos that they had in the colonial era and so uh in in my book The Toxic War masculinity I do take people through several stages it took you know several stages to reach the point where we are today but that was the starting point that's when you first start seeing the language shift and become very critical of the male character what do you think uh culture would say in your research would be a healthy version of masculinity or do they think there even is one what what does culture say is a healthy man well the cool thing about the going back to American history is that the colonial era was very Christian and so in a sense you're not just being speculative you can say well this is what it looked like you know when it was when it was actually lived out and so for example I deal with Puritans I literally have students say I have never heard anything positive about the Puritan so they're very surprised when I I have quotes from the Puritans showing that they had very loving families very affectionate marriages in fact the Puritans passed the first law anywhere in the entire world against wife beating 1644. wow they passed the first law yeah isn't that interesting yeah it was they passed the first law against wife beating and it was soon amended to include wives beating husbands and and beating your slaves and children as well but it started out as a first law anywhere against wife beating so it we're not just speculative we can show that what Christianity looked like when it was lived out in the colonial era wow and so this is helpful it kind of sets up a baseline that you can see how what happened at Society became more secular as they lost that Christian vision and and this is actually the the part of the Industrial Revolution as well because as the as work was taken out of home out of the home and there were huge factories and Industry and financial institutions and Banks and universities and the state of course government a huge public sphere developed and people began to say well this public sphere should be run by scientific principles and by which they meant value free by which they met don't bring your private values into the public sphere which is of course what we still hear today but that's what began and so because men were the ones who were out in the public Street at that time you know going through a public education which was secular working in a secular environment the biblical ethic lost its hold on man's hearts earlier than it did you know they became secularized earlier than women did and so again that was attention there as women began to complain that their men were no longer these moral upright characters that they used to be and in fact this is why there were so many reform movements in the 19th century because men's behavior got worse in the 19th century there was a huge increase in crime and drinking gambling prostitution those the number of brothels mushroomed sometimes it's easier if you have a single fact to hang the hang your ideas on in 1830 Americans drink three times as much as they do today wow so alcoholism peaked in the 19th century so there's a reason there was a temperance movement because men were spending all their money on drink and leaving their families destitute and then coming home and beating their wives because they were drunk I mean this is I'm talking about what people were saying at the time yeah um there was there's a reason that there was an abolition movement um there was a there was a reason that there were movements against prostitution and sex trafficking it was a huge growth in reform movements at the time but most of them run by women by the way you know the the history books don't always tell you that but these reform movements were largely driven by women for example the temperance movement was mostly women trying to bring their husbands out of the saloons and taverns and back to the family Hearth where they belonged you know so there was a sexual tension in many of these movements because it was women saying guys you need to come back to your Christian values as we would put it today maybe um and this was also driven by the fact that you know if the public sphere is supposed to be value free where do we cultivate values you know people desperately wanted to keep values like love relationship altruism religious piety and so on well those had to be cultivated in the home presided over by women and so in the 19th century for the first time again first time ever in human history women was said to be morally and spiritually Superior to men the double standard that we still see today all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Romans people have thought that men were morally Superior that the Insight between right and wrong was a rational insight and they thought men were more rational and therefore they said men are more moral they're morally stronger they're more able to keep their you know animal impulses in check so this was a huge reversal in the 19th century people began to say women are morally you know more pure men are more naturally prone to to to sin and vice especially in regard to things like sex and alcohol and so a lot of the tension between the Sexes goes back to that period where women felt like it was their job to hold husbands in check and men will in a sense I have one uh secular historian who puts it this way it said Society was kind of letting men off the hook you know it was no longer expecting moral leadership from Men it was expecting women to in a sense tame men and I don't know about you Alyssa but um I have talked to some young people who say they think it's the same today I was in a podcast with a young couple that it's it's it was a podcast to young people and um the young man the husband said oh yeah in Christian circles it's just thought that you know men are just naturally much more prone to sin and Temptation especially sexual Temptation and that it's women who need to hold the line and women who have to make sure that they they uh imposed you know biblical morality on their husbands and if they don't do their responsibility then it's their fault if their men are doing porn or having Affairs and I've heard from a lot of people that that's still the the narrative in Christian circles anyway so it starts in the 19th century so to really understand it we have to go back and say where did this come from so that we can deal with it more effectively today that that is so fascinating and I'm just thinking about media too because it seems to me that there there are Trends to portray women as almost like toxic masculine men in a way you have women fist fighting men you have women acting like men cussing you know sort of that stereotype in I think in a way they're maybe trying to break the stereotype by saying no women can be just as sinful as men too and so there's that Trend but then you also have this trend that as you've pointed out portraying men as the the villains men are are always the ones that are going to oppress somebody or abuse somebody and yet at the same time you have movies come out that portray men doing really heroic things and those sell tickets too so there's like all these mixed messages but where did where did we get this stereotype of men being the villain and women being the victims even though it seems to contradict some of the narrative that we even see in movies yeah but what movies have to sell and so yeah we can't always betray men as a villain or they won't sell right but in in my book The Toxic one masculinity I go through several stages and the one I I'd like to focus on the one a lot of people jump on is the impact of Darwinism so this would be you know 1859 Darwin publishes uh the Origin of Species and that really contributed to a negative view of masculinity because darwinian writers began to say that in the struggle for survival The Men Who came out on top were rugged ruthless brutal Savage Barbarian and even predatory and so this well and discipline books came out like the Tarzan series right so the idea was that Tarzan was raised by the Apes and therefore you know he still had that animal nature within him and even after he becomes you know civilized and learns European manners in the book he literally says to Jane I am still a wild beast at heart and and there were more serious literature too is called literary naturalism the best known is Jack London so Jack London uh read darwinian books when he was young and had what one historian calls a conversion experience to radical materialism naturalism and so he wrote about dogs but his you know they were metaphors for people and his point was that we were all products of evolution and environment and genes in the struggle for existence and so how did this affect the prevailing views of masculinity well Christianity had urged men to live up to the image of God in them whereas darwinian thinkers began to reverse that and say no no our true self is the animal nature and the you know the Beast Within stars and put it um and there's only a thin veneer of civilization that was one of their favorite phrases there's a thin new civilization but you know men are always about to break through and so uh one of the um the most the most uh popular the most the most effective popularizer of Darwinism here in America was Herbert Spencer and he literally said the men who gave rise to our Modern Men you know were these harsh brutal men and you say well how did women get along with them then and he says well they had to learn the ability to please and it would also help if they learned to hide their resentment at poor treatment still that apparently was a message of evolution you know medical beats and women need to put up with it and Darwin himself by the way also argue that women are inferior they're intellectually inferior um he acknowledged that women are more sensitive and intuitive but then he said but those are characteristics of the lowest species okay so even women's strengths were signs of the inferiority right so it was Darwinism contribute a great deal to the secular script for masculinity that uh portrayed men as crude lewd rude and crude governed by the biological instincts of lust and power so I I traced several stages of you know how the masculine script became so negative and acquired what we now call toxic traits and darwinian evolution was a big part of it wow that's really fascinating and you know with the time we have left I'd love to swing more into the Practical realm because it seems like the best long-term solution for this is for men to disciple their sons to be good examples and involve them in teaching them what masculinity is really all about um but at the same time when you watch sitcoms you watch some of the media that's out there it's as if almost every time you have a fun thinking of what's that old sitcom everybody was it called everybody loves Ray was Ray Romano or he's just this bumbling idiot the whole time and oh especially in kids programming well I would even argue it's both parents that are really portrayed as bumbling idiots but especially the fathers and so kids are kind of being conditioned by the media that they're taking in to see their parents as like they're just kind of idiots they don't know anything especially dad he's just always getting everything wrong and he can't make anybody happy or do anything right um so where did that negative image come from and when did do you think that started in culture yeah first of all I agree with you that the most important long-term strategy is to reconnect father's with their sons because everyone knows on both sides of the political aisle you know left and right this used to be a right issue by the way and now it's left and right uh that that fatherless boys do have greater problems in school more likely to drop out of school more likely to have behavioral problems more likely to do um get addicted to sex and out get addicted to drugs and alcohol have sex outside of marriage Etc and we end up Behind Bars by the way is it some 75 8 of violent criminals are fatherless you know we're fatherless boys so it's really a serious thing that fathers are mocked and ridiculed in the media one psychiatrist put it this way we're not going to have a better class of Ben until we have a better class of fathers I thought that was a good summary so where did this ridicule of fathers begin again you have to go back to the Industrial Revolution because its fathers were taken out of the home they began to be out of touch with what was happening in the home they began to be out of touch with the family Dynamics they no longer knew their children as well they no longer knew their kids day-to-day activities and their their feelings their experiences their needs and so already in the 19th century you see people protesting that our fathers are out of touch with our families they're becoming irrelevant and incompetent you know because if you don't know your kids you're going to be incompetent you won't really know what they need and already that negative image starts in the 19th century and people began to say well you know uh I'll actually give you a quote the the leading psychologist of the day said never in American history has the American Boy been so wild because he's been unsupervised by his father been so wild and so half orphaned I love that phrase half orphaned because his father's not there in the way he used to be and and this psychologist said you know boys boys are being raised by females you know in the home in the school in the church and because fathers weren't there boys did have a lot of unsupervised time and that's why the psychologist said they're becoming wild you know boys will be boys that phrase was not used before that before that it was it was expected that boys would be as good as girls there was no expectation that boys were particularly wild and unruly and rebellious and rambunctious that came about because the fathers were out of the home and boys were no longer being adequately parented I mean mothers tried to step in but boys could see that the mother's life was quite different from the father's life and so to follow the mother's rules seemed to be seemed to mean be effeminate and so of course no boy is going to do that even in the in the literature of the time you can see it up until now literature for children was very didactic you know teaching teaching children how to be good with positive role models and now a new genre emerged that was actually called Bad Boy books because it was the first time that the bad boy was the protagonist in fact the first the first one the first book of its kind was called the story of a bad boy and the best known though you probably you can probably guess Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn oh yeah and Samuel Clemens Mark Twain was deliberately parroting the earlier books because the earlier books were didactic and moralistic and he was deliberately parroting them so what happened when these boys grew up they brought that concept you know if they thought the real boy now is the boy who's rambunctious and Rule breaking and Rowdy they brought that with him into adulthood and especially boys who are coming in from the countryside to find work in the city they were leaving behind structures of accountability like family and church and the village and so they were falling prey to the vices that when were coming in the city and again we're back to the you know great increase in crime and prostitution and so on that was another reason for that because boys were not being adequately parented by their fathers anymore so all of that to say this the problem with men being disconnected from their children and therefore being portrayed as incompetent parents incompetent fathers um it goes back to the Industrial Revolution as well and what would be some practical steps fathers could take to disciple their sons well to connect with their sons and I would assume daughters too because it kind of the whole family together is what's going to lead to a really healthy expression of both genders so what would be some just practical things for any fathers who might be listening to this today that they can take to reconnect with their sons and maybe just start instituting some practical steps to disciple them better in these areas well you can't write a you can't write a book like this without giving some practical tips um even today in surveys men say that the main barrier to having close relationship with their children is work just like it has been ever since the Industrial Revolution and so I do have a whole chapter on ways in which we could Flex the work structure to some degree for both parents so that parents can be more involved with their kids and at this point it's mostly anecdotal but I have lots of anecdotes of people who found ways to work from home two days a week for example or I mean some of them actually start home businesses or you know start Consulting businesses um some of them uh just leave work early I have I have one student who would just leave work early two days a week to coach his son's basketball and soccer team and his Co his boss accused him of coasting but he said it never actually hurt my career and when my sons got older they said we want to be a dad like you which is a lot better than any workplace success yeah I have a I have a story of one another student um sometimes it's easier to have concrete anecdotes so during the pandemic the pandemic has a very slight silver lining in that parents are saying hey I actually did get closer to my kids um one study found that 65 of fathers said they don't want to go back to work full time because they their family benefited so much from having at least working some of the time from home and that that statistic is in the book then there was another one that's come out more recently so it's not in the book but I love it the New York Times had a headline that said during the pandemic fathers got closer to their children and they don't want to lose that that the New York Times says is wonderful one of my students uh her her husband is a I.T worker and he came home during the pandemic and because he was home he was able to be more involved in the homeschooling he was he decided he would be the one to make lunch every day he was able to drive the kids to their soccer practice and he took on so much of the family responsibilities that his wife was freed up to start a part-time business she's she's an opera singer I had a student who was an opera singer wow but I know pretty cool she um started a voice studio and so the whole family is benefiting from the added income and I interviewed her husband and he said our family life is so much more balanced now I am never going back to a cubicle and the final kicker was he said the time I used to spend commuting to work I now spend praying every morning with my wife wow wow so I I just give Anarchist like that to try to encourage men to see if there's ways that they can Flex their work schedule and and really the pandemic helped I quote some CEOs who said we never wanted to experiment with home-based work before because we were we were afraid people would just Slough off you know they would they would be slouches and he said the pandemic completely exploded that we did not lose any productivity and in fact if anything they work more when they're home because they're no longer wasting time with the commute but they're no longer having to waste time you know with special work clothes and so on he said if anything we have to tell him to stop they tend to I don't know if you've ever worked from home but yes you you tend to keep going yeah um people I interviewed who worked from home said my biggest problem was knowing when to stop so they did not lose any productivity and so it actually is better even for the workplace you know we have to sell it to the workplace that it's not only good for the family which it is but it's also good for the workplace that people who have good work with people who have good family relationships are better employers and have better employees yeah well you know you mentioned that that was one of the Silver Linings of the pandemic I think also a silver lining was opening up people's minds to the possibility of homeschool because that certainly was the case in our family which has led us to being closer as a family and I didn't see this coming but my husband almost all by himself homeschooled our son whereas my daughter worked a little bit more independently and I I would work with her on a few things here and there he he just kind of took the reins of my son's home school and that has brought them closer together and it's just been so great for our families so I think there were some Silver Linings there with people and also there's Silver Linings to all of the social media and the internet that we have although there's a lot of bad stuff on there it also has opened up people's minds I think to alternative ways of working and even business opportunities that wouldn't exist without an online space or something like that so I love that that's so practical because that's something all of us can be thinking through as far as how to get more of that family time I've personally just in the the last year have probably thought more about and invested more in homemaking than I ever have before just just enjoying that you know at any time that I have to cook meals and to make the home more inviting and warm for the family and um so I think that there's just little things we can all do to really invest in the family and in in that time and and just nurturing those times together that Fathers and Sons can have and fathers and daughters and all of that working together for society and for a better Society but I do want to address one thing because at the beginning you mentioned how a lot of more Progressive leaning types have connected headship and male lead families with abuse or you know patriarchy and they connect that with abuse and and certainly some of those charges I think are probably unfair because it would be perceived that even having a male-led home is abusive in nature but at the same time there are there there is a problem of abuse in homes there's a problem there's problems of abuse in churches and I I do want to address that because you address the problem in your book of abuse in Christian homes so how do you think churches can respond more effectively than maybe they have in the past I think we've seen instances where maybe churches didn't know what to do or they didn't realize what was actually required of them what advice would you give to churches to respond to that type of abuse more effectively right as I mentioned earlier phenomenal Christian men actually have higher levels of domestic violence than even secular couples and so I had to address that in the book otherwise it would look like I was you know sweeping it on the under the carpet yeah so I do have two chapters at the end on domestic abuse and um and I I have to tell you the literature on the subject has really changed just in recent years because until very recently uh the emphasis was all put on the wash the emphasis was all on well if you would just love more if you would just forgive more if you would just make his favorite foods if you have had sex more often if you would lose weight if you would work on your appearance then he will blossom into the man you want him to be that's actually a direct quote from a woman who is being abused the church kept telling her you know if you would just die to yourself more and love more unconditionally well he never did and the reason is bullies you know two bullies truly abusive people do not respond well when you're kind to them they interpret kindness as weakness they interpret forgiveness as permission to keep abusing I'm like okay yo I guess you're okay with this you know um it's kind of like the bully on the playground you know if you acquiesce he gets worse or even International Affairs if there's a belligerent Nation as we have know if you acquiesce if you appease they get worse so you just recently you are starting to see a change in the books that are being written on a domestic abuse which is very good um because they're they're dressing much more the the need to confront Matthew 18. Matthew 18. I just keep coming back to that Matthew 18 is the verse on what you do if somebody's sinning against you and for a long time for some reason this verse was not applied to marriage but if a husband is truly sinning of course a wife as well but some 80 or whatever I don't remember the exact numbers but some 80 of abuse is from the the male the husband um Matthew 18 is the verse on how to deal with someone who's sinning against you and I do with a lot of data again this is the most fact fact-driven book that I have written the the facts from the sociology and the facts of history and here the facts on people who've done uh studies psychologists mostly who've done studies of abusive marriages and my my the best known is John gottman so he's not a Christian but he's um he's a former mathematician and so he brought that very empirical quantifiable approach to marriage which nobody had done before and he became what he does is he has a love lab he calls it this love lab it's it's like a bed and breakfast and a couple comes in and stays up to maybe 72 hours and they're wired up to find out you know the heart rate how fast is that beating and there's the the how much are they sweating and the their breathing rate and so on uh you know how much and even the urine is tested for stress home bones and they have an elaborate system of coding Behavior you know everything from smiling to rolling your eyes and disgust and and for also coding language everything from put Downs to placating and they feed all of this into a computer and he became famous because he was able to predict with 93.6 accuracy whether a couple would divorce or not wow and even how soon you know and this was like with 15 minutes of observation on a very short time scale he could see this and you know okay this couple's going to last seven years this couple is going to last 12 years and so a lot of obviously a lot of Christians are working you know tuning into his data the most surprising thing he found was the health of a marriage depends primarily on the husband that 65 percent of men in America do not respect their wives do not or his languages they do not accept influence from their wives by which she means they they don't listen to their wives concerns their wife's opinions their their wives they don't involve wise in the decision-making and of course women then feel very disrespected and he said in those cases where a husband does not listen to his wife's voice they have an 81 percent chance of breaking up you know either divorce or settling into long-term unhappiness um and his point is that it is mostly women who work on the relationship it's mostly women who read books on marriage who go to marriage counselors who go to pastoral counseling about their about their marriage and so he said the main uh thing that matters is whether the husband responds and he says unfortunately in most cases they don't they don't return the favor as he puts it and in one of his books he actually turns directly to the men and he says you know his point is not to shame or blame men he says my point is to give men the sense of how much power they have that they actually can fix their marriage you know the data shows this very clearly that if a man decides to share decision making with his wife it's gonna work in the majority of cases so he turns to Ben and he says what I want you to realize is how much power you really have if you want a good marriage it's up to you by a wide margin that's his actual words that the man by a wide margin is the one who determines whether you have a good marriage or not wow so most of us don't realize that that's more data that the Christian world needs to know about because the data is putting the emphasis right where the scripture does who is supposed to take the initiative all the way back to Genesis 1 who's supposed to leave his mother and father and cleave to his wife you know who's supposed to take the initiative to leave his childhood and create a new life with his wife it's the husband so I think the data is supporting what is essentially a Biblical view of marriage yeah that's good well the book comes out looks like June 27th right so that's coming soon tell everyone how they can connect with you where they can pre-order the book and any information you wanted to know definitely want to recommend everybody picks up this book because there's just such great information in here and so Nancy where can they connect with you and pre-order the book well of course you can pre-order anywhere uh Amazon is more strategic because Amazon sets the tone unfortunately um but and pre-orders do help they do help with algorithms if you pre-order then ultimately Amazon gives it more more coverage so that's a good thing but if that my my publisher has helped me re redo my whole website so go look at it nancypherocity.com it's it's colorful and fun now and it didn't used to be so go look at Nancy piercy.com and of course you can order from from there as well and you can take a look at my other books if you're not familiar with them as well awesome well I want to thank my guest uh Professor Nancy Piercy for joining us for this great conversation today guys I just want to add to when when you order this book especially on Amazon when it comes out on July uh sorry June 27th go back to Amazon and leave a review I can't tell you how much that helps authors when you go back to Amazon and you leave a review get a bunch of good reviews going and that helps with algorithms as Professor Nancy mentioned it helps give it more coverage get it into the news feeds of more people it puts it in a suggested category so that really helps others if you pre-order then when you go back when the book comes out and leave a review I also want to mention our sponsor Southern Evangelical Seminary where I am currently a student if you are looking for higher level education I recommend SES go to scs.edu Elisa and you can download a free ebook and take a look around the website and what they have to offer I'll be taking classes again in the fall very very excited about that and for now as we pursue Christ let's remember to keep a sharp mind a soft heart and a thick skin [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Alisa Childers

Views: 31,648

Keywords: apologetics, progressive christianity, deconstruction, live your truth, another gospel, historic christianity, alisa childers, podcast, philosophy, christianity, truth, gospel

Id: jGMXks4-w3w

Length: 67min 25sec (4045 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 11 2023