Men are spiritually passive. That’s nothing new: while Eve was being tempted by the serpent in Genesis 3, Adam was standing right next to her. Saying nothing. Probably thinking something like, “OK… who was it again who was in the first Super Bowl? I know it was Green Bay for sure. And Oakland? No… Kansas City? Yeah, Kansas City. Wait… it wasn’t called the Super Bowl for the first game. So what was it? I need to Google that when the snake’s done talking to my wife.”
Men have always been spiritually lethargic, but it seems to have reached unusual proportions these days, and lots of people are noticing it.
Some people believe this is due to the feminization of the church. They say that the overly emotional worship songs and sermons about meek-and-mild-turn-the-other-cheek Jesus are big turnoffs to real guys. In response, they inject their ministries with video clips of sports bloopers, songs about testosterone, and guys on stage who can bend wrenches with their bare hands. I’m not making that up.
But in this thought-provoking article, Anthony Esolen says that the current crisis of manhood isn’t limited to Christian men. He sees a growing stagnancy among all men in our culture, and he traces it to the sexual revolution that started forty years ago. First, the process of “becoming a man” has been redefined:
All boys need to prove that they are not failures. They need to prove that they are on the way to becoming men—that they are not going to relapse into the need to be protected by, and therefore identified with, their mothers.
Societies used to provide them with clear and public ways to do this. The Plains Indians would insert hooks into the flesh of their thirteen-year-old braves and hang them in the sun by those hooks, for hours—a test of endurance and courage. At his bar-mitzvah the Jewish boy reads from the Holy Torah and announces, publicly, that on this day he has become a man.
In our carelessness we have taken such signs away from boys and left them to fend for themselves. Two choices remain: The boys must live without public recognition of their manhood and without their own certainty of it, or they must invent their own rituals and signs.
And here the sexual revolution comes to peddle its poison. The single incontrovertible sign that the boy can now seize on is that he has “done it” with a girl, and the earlier and more regularly and publicly he does it, the safer and surer he will feel. If sex is easy to find, and if (as mothers of good-looking teenage boys will testify) the girls themselves seek it out, then you must have a pressing and publicly recognized excuse for not having sex. To avoid scandal—think of it!—you must be protected by your being a linebacker on the football team, or by being too homely for any girl to be interested in you.
A boy who does not agree to a girl’s demand for sex will be tagged with homosexuality. She will slander him herself. Ask teenagers; they will tell you.
The time that guys now spend proving their manhood in terms of sexuality would have been spent very differently in previous generations, says Esolen:
The boys might get together to build a car from scratch. They might set up a series of telegraph connections. They might pitch themselves into learning everything they could about aircraft carriers and bombers. They might form a club to read Nietzsche, or to read the Scriptures, or to read both—audacity at this age can be wildly inconsistent. They might attach themselves to an acknowledged teacher, as did the young men of Athens who followed the chaste Socrates, or, dare I say, the young men of Palestine who followed Jesus. They might form guilds to ensure that the men they paid to teach them actually followed through on their end of the bargain—and thus would they create the medieval university. They might invent jazz music. They might rob banks.
They might do a thousand things fascinatingly creative and dangerously destructive, but one thing they would not do. They would not, as our boys do now, stagnate. They would be alive.
And in the process, they would be learning to develop the kind of intimate (wait – that’s not a masculine word, is it?), soul-stirring, life-sharpening friendships that men have enjoyed throughout history. At least until recently, when a close relationship between two men became a reason to question their sexual orientation.
What two men today could ever admit to the kind of friendship forged by David and Jonathan in 1 Samuel 18? It says, “The soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” Sounds pretty suspicious to me.
But according to Esolen, these are exactly the kind of friendships men need, to be truly alive.