The economic rise of women represents a seismic shift in gender relations. It has broken the chains of dependency that held women down—but also held the nuclear family together. The traditional institution of fatherhood, based on a provider and protector role, has been almost completely deconstructed. Millions of men are being benched as a result. A new model of mature masculinity and fatherhood is desperately needed. 

In the span of just a few decades, an astonishing, epochal revolution in human relations has occurred. Since the widespread adoption of agriculture, patriarchy has been the norm in human societies. No longer. Patriarchy has been effectively demolished in advanced economies.
Women are no longer dependent on men for material resources. By tearing down barriers to education and the labor market, feminism has achieved a central goal of securing for women economic independence and power.
In 1970, when these changes began gaining steam, women were locked out of many educational and professional opportunities. On American campuses males dominated. In undergraduate enrollment they were 58 percent of students to females’ 42 percent. Men got more than 85 percent of PhDs. In law schools, about 90 percent of students were men.
Today, undergraduate enrollment has flipped—female enrollment is at 58 percent. Women are awarded 53 percent of PhDs, and they make up the majority of law students. Whole professions, like psychology and veterinary medicine, are becoming overwhelmingly female. Forty percent of American women now earn more than the average man, up from just 13 percent in 1979.
This rise of women has been accompanied by male decline. The statistics here are equally startling. There is the bad economic news: most American men earn less today (adjusted for inflation) than most men did in 1979. This is not because of the mass entry of women in the workplace, but because of the hollowing out of traditional male jobs—factory worker, steelworker, coal miner—as a result of free trade and automation.
But male troubles are not just economic. Almost one in four school boys are diagnosed as having a “developmental disability.” One in five fathers is not living with his children. Men are at three times greater risk than women from the epidemic of “deaths of despair,” from suicide, alcohol, and drugs.
There are now more young women than men with university degrees in every advanced economy. Male wage growth has been sluggish in these countries; and men’s employment rates have been dropping around the world.
Some hear all of this and come to the conclusion that the women’s movement has been a mistake and the solution is to wind back the clock. I disagree. The movement to liberate women has unleashed the power and talent of half of the global population—to the benefit of us all. But like all revolutions, it has generated real challenges, too. You don’t upend a 12,000-year-old social order without experiencing cultural side effects. In this case, it is the dislocation of many of our boys and men.
It is past time we recognized and started to address these problems. Doing so does not signal a retreat from feminism—or a belief that all misogyny and sexism have been eradicated. It is a recognition of our collective responsibility to deal with the downsides of radical change, as well as celebrate the upsides. For the longest time—pretty much all of history—the cause of gender equality has been synonymous with the cause of girls and women. No longer. It is now necessary to consider gender inequalities in both directions.
Doing this is in women’s economic self-interest. A world of floundering men is unlikely to be a world of flourishing women. If men struggle to find work or decent wages, that puts more pressure on women as breadwinners. Except in the richest U.S. families (i.e., the top fifth), all of the growth in household income since 1979 has resulted from the increased working hours and earnings of women.
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Written by J. Warner Wallace |
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
Steinrucken rejects the claims of “religionists”, even as he enjoys the world they have created. “The fact is, we secularists gain much from living in a world in which excesses are held in check by religion. Religion gives society a secure and orderly environment within which we secularists can safely play out our creativities. Free and creative secularism seems to me to function best when within the stable milieu provided by Christianity.” My dad would certainly agree. But for my dad to live in a world that benefits from the “useful delusion” of religion, he has to live a life of contradiction and denial; a life that is itself an illusion and a lie. 

My father taught me how to attend church as a non-believer. He did it for many years in many different contexts with both his kids and grand kids. He was willing to attend Catholic Mass as a non-believer in the early 1960’s, and he did it again with his second family at the LDS church near his home. He attended Methodist services with my grandparents and Baptist services with my sister-in-law. He also attended the church I pastor several times. He even served once with us on a service project. He sang the songs  and sat quietly during the prayers. If you didn’t know better, you would swear he was a believer. But as a happy atheist, he rejected Christianity (and Mormonism) while he simultaneously embraced these two religions. He rejected their claims related to the existence of God while embracing them as useful delusions. He liked the impact these religions had on his children, and for that he continues to be grateful.
Several years ago, John Steinrucken wrote an article at The American Thinker entitled “Secularism’s Ongoing Debt to Christianity“. Many Christians have commented on this article because Steinrucken, as a committed atheist, acknowledged the debt that secularists have to the Judeo-Christian culture in America.
“Rational thought may provide better answers to many of life’s riddles than does faith alone. However, it is rational to conclude that religious faith has made possible the advancement of Western civilization. That is, the glue that has held Western civilization together over the centuries is the Judeo-Christian tradition. To the extent that the West loses its religious faith in favor of non-judgmental secularism, then to the same extent, it loses that which holds all else together.
Succinctly put: Western civilization’s survival, including the survival of open secular thought, depends on the continuance within our society of the Judeo-Christian tradition.”
Steinrucken acknowledged what my father has always believed. As an atheist, my father embraces my Christian values wholeheartedly, even while he rejects the God from whom these values come.
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Christians also face intense persecution in African nations like Nigeria, making the witness of athletes like Rasheedat Ajibade especially powerful. In one Instagram post, the young soccer star shows off a T-shirt with the words “Jesus Revealed, Jesus Glorified, Haleluya.” Another shirt reads simply “Thank You Jesus,” with a reference to the prophet Isaiah. She writes, “Beyond my desires, beyond everything in and around my life, I JUST WANT TO SEE JESUS REVEALED AND GLORIFIED” (caps original).

The International Olympic Committee charter bars athletes from displaying religious symbols of any kind, but that didn’t stop Rayssa Leal from coming up with a bold and ingenious workaround. Just before earning a bronze medal, the Brazilian skateboard prodigy smiled at the camera and sent a message in sign language: “Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.”
Leal went viral at age 7 when she executed a perfect heelflip in a blue princess dress, catching the attention of legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk. She grew up attending a Baptist church, and at age 16, her faith remains strong. Her Instagram is full of Scripture verses. After her win, she told the media that she signs Scripture at every competition. For this medal, her second at the Paris Games, she says, “Once again, thank God.”
It’s been 100 years since Eric Liddell won Olympic gold without compromising his deep Christian convictions—particularly his Sabbatarian convictions about competing on the Lord’s Day. Today, young Christian Olympians like Leal are willing to be similarly bold in an even more hostile and secularized West. And many, perhaps even most of the open believers competing at the Olympics, are non-Western. Many are African and Asian—the fruit of faithful gospel preaching by missionaries like Liddel.
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