Letters To Young Men: The State of Masculinity

Young men, you face challenges. That is nothing new. From the beginning of time, men have had battles to fight. Some have cowered in sloth. Some have fought valiantly. Though there are common themes in the war, each generational battle has had its unique variation on the themes. As with previous generations, you are being called to act like men, steeling yourselves for the battles in which God in his providence has placed you.

I have been a young man. Now I am older. I have raised four sons. I was not perfect. I made many mistakes. But I always did what I believed was right with the wisdom I had at the time. I hope you can say the same when you are older. I have been around the block a few times, you might say, and I have learned some wisdom along the way. I’m still learning. This series of letters aims to pass this wisdom on to you so that you will be better men than I am. The focus of these letters is masculinity, what it means to be a man in God’s world.

I begin with the present state of masculinity in our present culture both broadly in the USA and, even more specifically, in the Christian church. It is difficult to be a masculine man nowadays. (There is a difference in being a biological male and being a masculine man, you see.) Truths about the created order that were once assumed in Western culture are now questioned and even suspect. Any form of traditional masculinity is labeled “toxic.” Feminism has conquered the culture of our day.

Feminism has been around since the beginning. In the fall of mankind, the first female sought to displace the man from his God-given role, but God restored the husband to rule over his wife (cf. Genesis 3:16). Man was created to lead, not only in marriage, but in the dominion project. As humanity grew, men’s original garden responsibilities expanded. Men were created to lead societies, what some call “patriarchy.”

Patriarchy has gotten a bad name in our day; some because of men’s sinful abuses of power and some because women are also sinful and want to rebel against God’s order. But the fact that Jesus is King of the universe is God’s imprimatur on his patriarchal intentions for the creation. Jesus’ bride, the church, rules with him, but there is only one ultimate Lord: the Man, Jesus Christ. Jesus is Lord in the way that the church is not. The universe is patriarchal (or, maybe better, an androcracy).

Feminism demurs. In our modern times, feminism has again formally raised its ugly head in the late eighteenth century and has continued to come in waves ever since. The first wave of feminism seemed docile and reasonable enough: women wanted equality with men in, for example, the right to vote. This wave ended with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. While seemingly benign one hundred years later, the philosophical underpinnings and all that drove this push for suffrage sought to create an independence from men that was poisonous for the culture.

The second wave of feminism rolled in not long after World War II and was given its manifesto in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. In that second wave, women wanted to move away from homemaking and into the man’s world of the workplace created by the Industrial Revolution. This second wave fought for women’s reproductive rights. With the introduction of the birth control pill and eventually abortion, women could be as free as men to be promiscuous. Friedan and her ilk hit upon some real problems in the world, but she attributed the problems to the wrong source and had the wrong solutions. A woman may choose to be a wife and mother, but a woman does not need a man. The movement, by Friedan’s own testimony, was overwhelmed with misanthropy that she herself never intended.

The third wave of feminism rolled in around the late 1980s and early 1990s. In this wave, the sociological concept of intersectionality came into play. The effect of this theory encouraged people to define themselves as having particular characteristics that put them in some sort of oppressed minority status. The stage was set in the second wave to have feminists join with the civil rights movement. The third wave brought that union to full expression. There were to be no distinctions. Women now wanted to be men. Traditional masculinity and femininity were seen as social constructs that needed to be destroyed. Men and women were completely the same except for some ancillary differences in a few organs.

The fourth wave of feminism is recent, beginning somewhere around 2010. All of the seeds that were planted in the first three waves have come almost full flower. There is no such thing as a man or woman in any real sense. You are what you feel. Transgenderism is an archetypal expression of the fourth wave of feminism.

As each wave rolls in on our culture, many men accept the redefinitions of masculine and feminine that have evolved from the first through the fourth waves of the Feminist Movement, watching as the woman converses with the serpent. Men are deceived and disoriented. The culture is now defined by this perverted feminine. Feminism controls the conversation about what is and is not a good man (if there is such a thing as a man at all!). Feminism is controlling the frame of cultural conversation. “Frame,” as some call it, is basically, who sets the agenda, whose mission and imperative are primary, who defines the context and meaning. In the feminine frame prevalent in our culture, the feminine believes that men and women ought to be equal in function, but, in the words of Orwell, some are more equal than others; namely the women. Feminism was never truly about equality. It was about ruling men; taking over the masculine position, destroying the patriarchy or androcracy set up by God from the beginning. I will discuss the concept of frame more in a future letter because there is quite a bit to it and how we operate as men in relation to women. For now, you need to understand that we live in a society, both outside and inside the church, in which Feminism has taken over the frame and redefined masculine and feminine, male and female, relationships.

Everything from the #MeToo movement in the broader culture, “servant leadership” (a perfectly good phrase hijacked by feminism) in the evangelical church, and the functional androgyny of Reformed women such as Aimee Byrd and Rachel Green Miller are reshaping masculinity into the feminine image. Masculinity is redefined by and for the perceived advantage of what women think they want; empowerment, leadership, independence from men, equality with men in terms of “sameness.” Men have been emasculated, not just by the broader culture, but also by the church.

If, for example, men seek to be assertive with a mission that is not wife-centered, the man is not a “servant leader.” If the man doesn’t count her as an equal partner, which functionally means that he does whatever his wife or girlfriend desires, then he is not a servant leader. This has crept into the church in many ways. Men in the church, before they can do anything, will say things such as, “I need to ask the boss,” meaning their wives. That is not a joke. It has become reality. And it is bad juju for relationships between men and women, no matter how much we laugh about it.

Boys are expected to behave like girls in classrooms because girls’ behavior is the standard for what good behavior is supposed to be. Piety in the church is acting like a woman; all the “feelies,” music, the way we express devotion, the way we conduct our friendships, and many other things are defined by the way the woman understands them. That is true piety. Rough-and-tumble manhood, lifting heavy weights, trash-talking one another as men, competition, and such the like are all attributed to a barbaric, sinful male ego trip that has to be stroked or tamed by a strong mother, wife, or the feminine culture at large. Our feminine culture emasculates men until they need particular desired aspects of masculinity. You are told to “Man up!” for a little while until the feminine need is satisfied–protected and provided for–and then you are to go back to being the complicit, female-dominated male.

In the broader culture, Feminism is showing itself in various ways. Women are empowered but responsible for nothing. Women have control over their bodies, they say. But if they consent to have sex with a man (empowerment) and then afterward decide that they regret it, they will accuse the man of rape (victimhood, which, it turns out, is very powerful in our society). The man is always presumed guilty and must be proven innocent in the courts of public opinion. Legal courts heavily favor women in divorce cases, child custody, and financial support. The man is guilty if the woman says he is guilty until, first like Clarence Thomas decades ago to Brett Kavanaugh recently, he is acquitted after going through arduous trials based on little to no evidence. Women have complete control over whether or not a man’s child is aborted. He has no say. Abortion is “the woman’s right to choose” (quite the loaded phrase considering the history). Everything in our culture is serving this feminist imperative; that is, what they decide is best for them. The man was created for the woman, a proposition in direct opposition to God’s revelation (1Corinthians 11:7-9). Feminists have flipped the script.

This is the culture in which we live. You will spend the next generation or two in this culture. You need to be aware of what is going on and how much you have been affected by it. Not every individual woman is like this nor is every male. But because this is the cultural air we breathe, we have all been influenced by this anti-creational ether more than we realize. Some have compared it to living in the Matrix, referring to that 1999 movie with Keanu Reeves. (“Matrix” means “womb,” a feminine image, not so incidentally.) That is an appropriate comparison because feminism is not God’s reality for the created order. Because of this, feminism will ultimately fail. Fighting God’s reality is always a losing proposition. Nevertheless, many people would rather stay connected–take the blue pill–rather than take the red pill to see how far the rabbit hole of reality goes. These letters are meant to unplug you from the Matrix, work in harmony with God’s created order, and encourage you to fulfill your mission as a man.

Some in our culture have seen the Matrix for what is and want to “red pill” people; unplug them. Many of these people have wrong philosophical and theological foundations, relying upon evolutionary principles. What is commonly called “the manosphere” promotes this red-pilling. The manosphere started with several pick-up artists (PUA’s) and morphed into something different. No one even really knows what the manosphere is anymore or who is part of it, but there are many men, non-Christian and Christian alike, who are responding to the war on masculinity. Like the sons of Cain who led the way in metallurgy, musical instruments, and domesticating animals before the sons of God, many non-Christians have led the way in recovering masculinity and understanding God’s design for intersexual dynamics. They do not have much of a moral compass, believing, for instance, that sex outside of marriage can be a positive good for men. But they recognize, oddly enough, some of the deleterious effects of sins such as pornography, masturbation, abortion, and even women being promiscuous. While they don’t have the proper foundations for their knowledge, they do see, in many instances, God’s reality of the created order. As I’ve mentioned to some friends, they may not attribute rain or gravity to God, but they carry umbrellas and do not jump off of buildings. Many Christians, however, are standing in the rain while denying they are wet, and they are jumping off of buildings wondering why they are suddenly stopping. This pesky reality continues to hit us in the face with effeminate churches and less-than-desirable marriages.

While you could go searching through blogs–and there are many to search, Christian and non-Christian alike–I want to try to help you see some of the realities discovered by these sons of Cain through biblical eyes so that they can be shaped properly for glory of God in the fulfillment of our masculine mission. My prayer is that you will learn of and then courageously take up your masculinity as the gift of God that is and be a man.

For Christ’s Kingdom,

Pastor Smith