Our Lost Boys
Written by Brenda M. Hafera |
Monday, April 24, 2023
Mimicry is perhaps the best answer we have as human beings. Explaining dutiful love theoretically is not as palpable as seeing the hands of a father made rough and strong through sacrifice. Boys learn much from the example of a good man….Virtuous femininity, masculinity, and marriages based on friendship draw us in with the attractiveness of goodness. Rather than pontificating in ivory towers about men and women, we are better served by going out into the world, finding good men, women, and marriages and imitating them.
Our Lost Boys
Multiple books have been released in recent years and the past few decades—The War Against Boys, The Boy Crisis, Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis, and Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It—that demonstrate with staggering evidence and statistics that our boys are suffering and lost. But we have not yet fully determined how to respond to these troubles, and reasonable voices on the topic can be hard to find.
Despite the presence of polarizing reactions, we cannot overlook the fact that our boys are floundering and bereft of purpose. Young men commit suicide at six times the rate of young women, and as the knowledge economy grows, and boys fall behind academically, even their IQs are dropping. The absence of fathers, technological and economic shifts, and an education system that does not nurture boys, are all contributing factors begging for commensurate solutions. If men and women can work in unique ways—ways that acknowledge our interdependence—to urge our boys to be conscientious and strong, this may help ameliorate the crisis.
Polarizing Reactions
Good-willed individuals agree that our boys are faltering, but we can become reactionary in our discussions and solutions.
Identity politics leftists tend to portray all masculinity as toxic. They do not have a vision of what healthy masculinity looks like, and are likely incapable of providing one, given that they deny there are differences between men and women and reject a conception of virtue grounded in an unchangeable human nature.
On the other hand, male advocacy often devolves into the discordant. Conservatives can sometimes fall into the trap of delivering sweeping generalizations about rigid gender roles that make constructive conversation impossible. Some writers even stoop to bombastic so-called “solutions” like an author in Crisis magazine who wrote: “We should do one really sound and sensible thing: take away women’s right to vote.”
Such folks insinuate that feminism is the cause of all ills, for men and for the family. They suggest that we should promote a strict division of roles as we had in the 1950s, with women leading private lives in the home and men pursuing careers and public life. This is a blunt description that doesn’t match the complicated realities and mysteries of the partnership between men and women. Nor is it what most women desire, as 60 percent of mothers with underage kids prefer part-time work. These arguments tend to alienate women and enflame young men, which does nothing for a crisis that will require the partnership of men and women to abate.
What is the boy crisis? Contributing factors include the absence of fathers, economic and technological churnings, and policies within our education system.
According to The Boy Crisis, written by political scientist Warren Farrell and counselor John Gray, the primary driver of the boy crisis is the absence of strong fathers and male role models in the community (single-sex spaces can help offset the missing example of a parent). Almost every school shooter is a dad-deprived boy, and such boys “are more likely to be addicted to drugs, video games, opioids, and online porn, more likely to be depressed, withdrawn and to commit suicide, they are even more likely to have their life expectancy shortened.”
In Men Without Work, American Enterprise Institute political economist Nicholas Eberstadt details how men of prime working age are willingly unemployed and spending a great deal of time looking at screens. (The elephant in the room is the rampant addiction to online pornography exacerbated by the invention of YouTube and the smartphone, which will require not only policy conversations but religious renewal to subside.)
In The War Against Boys, Christina Hoff Sommers, a senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, raised the alarm over 20 years ago about our education system. She wrote, “Boys today bear the burden of several powerful cultural trends: a therapeutic approach to education that valorizes feelings and denigrates competition and risk, zero-tolerance policies that punish normal antics of young males, and a gender equity movement that views masculinity as predatory.” Identity politics has ascended even more since that time, and men (particularly white, heterosexual ones) are the prime scapegoat. Young men have reason to feel deflated and cheated.
They also have reason to be pessimistic about their futures. As indicated in The Boy Crisis, the median annual earnings of men with high school diplomas have dropped 26 percent in the past 40 years, while men today are simultaneously earning just 38 percent of university diplomas. Alimony laws can be disproportionately punishing, and many custody laws favor moms.
Constructive Responses
We have yet to work through comprehensive responses to these issues, especially as some of them, such as the growth of the knowledge economy, are not the result of deliberate discrimination or maliciousness.
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God of Ages Past
Spurgeon kept the baptismal pool filled — even when no baptisms were scheduled (81). His people would always have the mission set before them. May our pools be figuratively filled with importunate prayers, compassionate tears, and joyful proclamations of the excellencies of our glorious Christ. May we be fully awake, fully alive, sowing much. And let us look to the God of our ancestors to answer us from heaven.
Over 38 years of pastoral ministry at New Park Street Chapel (later to become The Metropolitan Tabernacle), Charles Spurgeon and the church added nearly 14,000 people into membership. Of that number, how many would you guess were brought into the church through baptism — as new souls won to the Savior?
I would have guessed up to 3,500. Most, I would have reasoned, transferred from other churches to hear the generation’s greatest preacher. Further, 3,500 people baptized — on average 92 a year, nearly 2 per week for 38 years — seems like a downpour of blessing compared to the trickle of conversions I am accustomed to.
In his wonderful book Spurgeon the Pastor, Geoffrey Chang gives us the answer. “Spurgeon took in 13,797 people into membership. Of that number 10,063 (73%) were taken into membership through baptism,” the rest through transfer (20%) and by profession (7%) (110). Meaning, “most of the membership of the Tabernacle was made up of those who were converted through the ministry of the church” (112).
In one generation, over 10,000 brought into one local church through baptism. Can you imagine?
“Burning Disgrace”
The astonishment deepens when Chang documents how Spurgeon detested lax standards of baptism and membership. Meaning, the church did not baptize on a whim. Those ten thousand did not raise a hand in one moment of passion and wade into the pool a few minutes later. Spurgeon refused to boast of “unhatched chickens” (112). Rather, the church remained serious about regenerate membership, with a process on the front end that towers over many churches today.
Above all, Chang writes of Spurgeon, “he wanted to see people brought into the church from the world” (111). His hunger to see God save souls was contagious. He could not conceive of the church of Jesus Christ not winning her Master’s spoils.
I should reckon it to be a burning disgrace if it could be said, “The large church under that man’s pastoral care is composed of members whom he has stolen away from other Christian churches.” No, but I value beyond all price the godless, the careless, who are brought out from the world into communion with Christ. (111)
How many pastors and churches today think this way? Or, most convicting to me, how many believe this way? How many really believe God can build our churches primarily through baptism? I struggle to. How many really believe we can see a revival of a neighborhood, town, city, or nation with that old rugged gospel? I struggle to. How many really plead for God to move mightily among us as of old? I struggle to.
Great Awakenings
Stories like these stir a restlessness in me.
I read of God’s work in other lands and times, and wonder at such little resemblance to my own experience. They lived in an epic, it seems. I turn the pages of Scripture to read of my forebears “who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight” (Hebrews 11:33–35). What would they read flipping through the pages of my life?
Continuing on, I read of a mighty gospel “turning the world upside down” (Acts 17:6). In special epochs — distant epochs — I read of major cities casting their idols into the fire (Acts 19:18–19), and of conviction for sin shattering hearts by the hundreds and thousands (Acts 2:37–41). I read of Great Awakenings on our own shores, as many looked up from their snake-bitten condition to Christ and were healed.
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The Weapon We Need for Spiritual Battle
There is a battle raging. We have a powerful enemy who seeks to devour, but we have a weapon that is more powerful and allows us to fight back—the truth. Armed with the truth of God, we can withstand Satan’s assaults. As ambassadors for Christ, we can stand firm against the devil’s lies in the culture.
Beneath the surface of the visible world, a battle rages in an unseen realm. Dark, wicked, supernatural powers seek to rule the world by force. The carnage and the casualties lie all around us.
This isn’t a physical battle, though. It’s spiritual. “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood,” Paul says, but “against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12).
In this battle, Satan’s weapons aren’t bombs and bullets. They aren’t his raw power or demon possession, either. His chief weapons are lies and deceptions.
Yes, Satan can harm us physically and often does. We see this in Scripture. Most of the spiritual warfare we encounter, though, is not a power encounter against Satan’s physical attacks. Rather, it’s a truth encounter against his spiritual lies. Therefore, we don’t respond with spiritual chest-pounding but rather with a gracious, sound, and measured proclamation of truth.
Remember who Satan is. Jesus calls him “a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44). He says there’s no truth in him. He warns us that our battle is against a deadly foe who lies, cheats, and steals.
The devil’s deceptions—Paul calls “schemes” in Ephesians 6:11—are sophisticated strategies he uses to gain a foothold to exert his influence over people.
Satan preys on those not ready for combat, and his plan is working. Currently the culture is in the crushing grip of three of Satan’s cons: moral relativism, religious pluralism, and sexual progressivism.
The results of his schemes are everywhere. For example, many of the commercials during the Olympics this year featured gay, lesbian, and transgender people in relationships—quiet lies of Satan coming into our homes on prime-time television. Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Disney all feature movies depicting similar themes.
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What God Is Jordan Peterson Wrestling With?
Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
There are some things that Christians could learn about how Jordan Peterson engages so successfully with his audience. First, lean into reenchantment. This is a big reason why the Eastern Orthodox church has such an appeal today. Hyper-rationalistic Protestant theology or the emotion laden evangelical style don’t speak to this longing to reconnect with an enchanted world. I do believe in our modern, scientific era, we’ve lost parts of the genuine Christian life and experience. People who dismiss reenchantment will miss out on opportunities for evangelism. The symbolism in scripture is a good place to start.Jordan Peterson first became a viral YouTube sensation because of his lecture series on Genesis. The Bible is a subject he’s continued returning to, adding an Exodus series, and next a forthcoming book called We Who Wrestle With God.
Peterson is doing a national tour on the theme of wrestling with God, which I attended last week in Indianapolis. He sold out a 2,500 seat theater with a minimum ticket price of over $100, so he’s still a big draw. I’d say the median audience age was 35-40, with lots of couples attending.
He first used the failures of Google’s Gemini AI to launch into an hour long discussion of the nature of language, ideas, and symbolic structures, positioning the Bible as “the oldest collection of stories by the oldest people that survived.” To him, this makes it a bulwark against the societal equivalent of AI hallucinations (e.g., fascism) and thus worth studying. His take here is similar to Nassim Taleb’s “Lindy Effect.”
He then gave a much shorter presentation of the call of Abraham from the start of Genesis 12. The presentation was clearly unbalanced with too much preamble and not enough actual Bible analysis. This was very different from what Jake Meador saw from Peterson in Omaha.
Peterson views the Bible as myth and symbol (in the good sense), and deploys it therapeutically.
He talked about how he analyzes things like the Bible through multiple lenses: psychology, evolutionary biology, etc. Referring to his first book Maps of Meaning, he said that he only includes what all the perspectives agree on. Notably, orthodoxy theology is not one of his lenses.
The best way to view Jordan Peterson’s religious perspective is as New Age. That is, he believes in a sort of vague spirituality that has implications for how we are supposed to live our lives. It’s about an encounter with spiritual truth and the spiritual voice within. Or perhaps an understanding of the deep structure of reality and the human condition. This spirituality is esoteric, and apprehended indirectly and partially through a symbolic understanding of the world.
Peterson deploys this approach therapeutically. When God calls Abram, it’s the voice within telling him to get out of mom and dad’s house and go out in the world to make something of himself. But it’s not just a call to “Man up!” but also, critically, a call to adventure.
When Abram builds an altar to the Lord, his sacrifices are the giving up of the parts of himself that interfere with his becoming who he is called to be and achieving his destiny. The fire in the burning bush is also interpreted that way, as a sort of refining fire.
Last year I noted the turn towards a reenchanted world. One way to understand the appeal of Peterson is the way that his ideas are aligned with this way of thinking. Unearthing the Jungian collective unconscious and such are not unlike what people are seeking when they go to South America for an ayahuasca trip. Both are about looking for spiritual meaning and a spiritual encounter without an actual God or a real religion. Both are also a quest for therapeutic personal transformation – the quest for self-actualization – without sanctification.
The draw of an enchanted world is part of what is drawing people to Eastern Orthodoxy, as I also noted.
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