http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15890837/was-america-ever-christian
ABSTRACT: The idea of a “Christian America” holds both myth and significant meaning. On the one hand, American history offers little evidence of a distinctly Christian founding; many of the Founders, in fact, actively opposed Christianity and sought its disenfranchisement in the new republic. On the other hand, the decades after the Founding saw a surge of Christian faith throughout the country. By the eve of Civil War, America could justifiably be called a “Christian nation,” but its Christianity was cultural, not political, the result of vigorous local and national enterprises rather than governmental action.
John Randolph of Roanoke (1773–1833) had no confidence that America was, or ever had been, a Christian republic.
Six months after the close of the War of 1812 — a war that he had violently opposed — Randolph wrote to Henry Middleton Rutledge that Virginia was “the most ungodly country on the face of the earth, where the Gospel has ever been preached.” And it was, as far as Randolph could see, as much “the case elsewhere in the U.S. . . .” The blame for this could be easily assigned: the influence of the Enlightenment and Enlightenment “infidelity.” His generation had been “a generation of free thinkers, disciples of Hume & Voltaire & Bolingbroke, & there were very few persons, my dear Rutledge, of our years who have not received their first impressions from the same die.”1
Randolph’s unhappiness will come as a surprise to many Christians who have assumed that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation,” or that Judeo-Christian values played a prominent role in its early life, or that — explicitly or implicitly — Christianity deserves to be recognized as having a special status in the foundations of American life and law. The conviction that an American civil religion exists, and is founded on Christianity, has been fed by images of Washington kneeling in the snows at Valley Forge to pray, by the so-called “black-coat regiment” of chaplains exhorting Revolutionary soldiers to battle against the unholy armies of King George, and by the appeal of the Declaration of Independence to “Nature and Nature’s God” and the “Creator” who has fashioned everyone with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But Rutledge was not merely playing the curmudgeon. Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), who entered Yale College in the 1790s, found — in the heart of old Puritan Connecticut — that
the college church was almost extinct. Most of the students were skeptical, and rowdies were plenty. Wine and liquors were kept in many rooms; intemperance, profanity, gambling, and licentiousness were common. . . . Most of the class before me were infidels, and called each other Voltaire, Rousseau, D’Alembert, etc., etc.2
Ashbel Green, who attended Princeton in the 1780s, also found that “open and avowed infidelity” was the order of the day, and “produced incalculable injury to religion and morals throughout our whole country; and its effect on the minds of young men who valued themselves on their genius, and were fond of novel speculations, was the greatest of all.”3
But it was more than just the Enlightenment that dislocated American priorities at the birth of the republic. It was also the idea of a republic itself. To the extent that the Enlightenment banished all notions of hierarchy from the physical universe, it likewise banished all ideas of hierarchical government, and with it all the apparatus associated with such government, including religion. With no need for a monarchy, a republic based itself entirely upon human longings, human morals, and human consent — not divine ones. Fisher Ames, a Massachusetts congressman, was disgusted by the secular optimism of republican ideas, since they encouraged “the dreams of all the philosophers who think the people angels, rulers devils,” and that “man is a perfectible animal, and all governments are obstacles to his apotheosis. This nonsense is inhaled with every breath.”4
Nor is there any reliable evidence that Washington knelt in the snows of Valley Forge to pray. To the contrary, Washington never mentioned the name of Jesus Christ once in all his voluminous correspondence, and referred to God as a more-or-less providential force who more-or-less made events happen from a distance.5 John Adams snarled at the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as an affront to republican reason and caricatured the incarnation as the belief that “that great principle, which has produced this boundless Universe . . . came down to this little ball, to be spit-upon by Jews; and untill this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.”6 And even though Thomas Jefferson appealed to a “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence, the term Creator was as specific as Jefferson cared to get on the subject. More significantly, the federal Constitution banned the imposition of any “religious Test” for holding national office (article 6), and made no reference to a God or a Creator at all. “That very constitution which the singular goodness of God enabled us to establish,” complained John Monck Mason, the Presbyterian pastor and provost of Columbia College, “does not so much as recognize his being! . . . Even the savages whom we despise” set “a better example.” When Alexander Hamilton was asked about this omission years later, his reply was the perfect echo of John Randolph’s estimate of Virginia: “I declare,” said Hamilton to Princeton’s Samuel Miller, “we forgot.” Or maybe worse. When the aged Benjamin Franklin exhorted the Constitutional Convention to open their sessions with prayer, his motion was met with a polite refusal, since the public might conclude that a call to prayer signaled that the Convention was in so much peril that it had no hope apart from divine intervention, and “the alarm” such a suggestion would arouse would “be as likely to do good as ill.”7
Unevangelical America
Perhaps our problem in Christianizing America’s origins lies in too strict a definition of Christianity. Even if the Founders gave no direct sanction to religious belief, surely the fact that so many of the original British colonies that became the United States originally had legal establishments of Christian churches, and that so many of them were designed by their founders as religious societies and refuges, means that there was a deep and latent Christianity of a general sort at the time of the Founding.
But a latent Christianity is not always a deep one, and it is not hard to find places in early America where Christianity was exceedingly thin on the ground. Charles Woodmason, a Church of England missionary in South Carolina, was appalled in the 1760s at the “open profanation of the Lords Day in this Province. . . . Among the low Class, it is abus’d by Hunting fishing fowling, and Racing — By the Women in froliking and Wantonness. By others in Drinking Bouts and Card Playing — Even in and about Charlestown, the Taverns have more visitants than the Churches.” Woodmason found that “there are no Clergy in North Carolina,” which (as he discovered) meant that “thro’ want of Ministers to marry and thro’ the licentiousness of the People, many hundreds live in Concubinage — swopping their Wives as Cattel, and living in a State of Nature, more irregularly and unchastely than the Indians.”8 Even in the more demure atmosphere of Pennsylvania, the German Lutheran missionary Henry Melchior Muhlenberg was shocked at how quickly his fellow German emigrants lost any sense of Christian identity in the free air of the New World:
During this past fall [1749] many ships have again arrived with German people who spread out in crowds scattered throughout the country. It is almost impossible to describe how few good and how many exceptionally godless, wicked people have come into this country every year. The whole country is being flooded with ordinary, extraordinary, and unprecedented wickedness and crimes.9
Much of this religious indifference was shaken by the outburst in the 1740s of what became known in America as the Great Awakening, a tremendous revival of religion centered mostly in New England, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. But the Awakening was also comparatively limited in time and space: it lasted only from about 1740 till 1742, and passed almost completely over Maryland, New York, the Carolinas, Georgia, and even parts of New England. It might not, in fact, have created much of permanent effect had it not found an enormously talented and ingenious spokesman in the person of Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758). Then, in 1775, came the American Revolution and another opportunity for Christianity to assert itself. Many of the Presbyterian and Congregational clergy who had supported the Awakening now swung enthusiastically behind the Revolutionaries. John Witherspoon, the Presbyterian president of Princeton College and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, announced that “the separation of this country from Britain has been of God” and called on “the Presbyterian body” to rally to “the cause of justice, of liberty, and of human nature.”10 “Call this war . . . by whatever name you may,” added a Hessian captain in the British army in 1778, “but call it not an American Rebellion, it is nothing more or less than an Irish-Scotch Presbyterian rebellion.”11
But the war took a more severe toll on church life than anyone expected, and what made the cost of the war harder to bear was the meager recognition the new republic gave to the parsons and the churches that had supported it. The political leadership of the Revolution — Washington, Jefferson, Adams — marched to the rhythm of the Enlightenment, leaving its Christian advocates somewhere far behind. “The late contest with Great Britain, glorious as it hath been for their country, hath been peculiarly unfortunate for the clergy,” wrote Peter Thacher, a Massachusetts parson, in 1783. “Perhaps no set of men, whose hearts were so thoroughly engaged in it, or who contributed in so great a degree to its success, have suffered more by it.”12 Everywhere, old forms of traditional Christianity seemed to be on the defensive. New Jersey eliminated all state funding for churches in 1776, and New York followed suit in 1777; in Massachusetts, the new republican constitution of 1780 maintained public taxation for church purposes, but it now allowed taxpayers to choose which church they wished to support.13
Building a Wall
It was Virginia that became the test case for how much — or how little — public recognition Christianity was going to be left with in the new republic, and it was mostly going to be little. At the urging of the great Revolutionary orator Patrick Henry, Virginia led the fight to strip the Church of England of its legal status as the state church of the colony, but it still provided afterward for the levying of church taxes and the distribution of them among the various churches in Virginia.14 This half measure did not satisfy Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. Both of them were relentless in their determination to force Christianity off the public square of Virginia republicanism: in 1779, as governor of revolutionary Virginia, Jefferson withdrew state funding for the two professorships in divinity at the College of William & Mary, and in 1785, Madison persuaded the Virginia legislature to drop all public funding for religion.15
That, in turn, set the stage for Jefferson’s and Madison’s attitudes toward public religion on the federal level. Madison, representing Virginia in the first federal Congress in 1789, was responsible for composing the provision in the first amendment that committed Congress to making “no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” And while this seems on the surface to describe no more than a hands-off attitude toward public religion, one member of the House of Representatives feared that it cloaked “a tendency to abolish religion altogether.”16 And Madison’s subsequent use of the amendment makes it clear that he intended it as a significant disfranchisement of Christianity in the American republic. In 1790, Madison opposed counting ministers as ministers on the federal census, and he opposed the hiring of chaplains for Congress and for the American military as “some sort of alliance or coalition between Government & Religion.”17
Jefferson, acting on the same principles, believed that instead “of putting the Bible and Testament into the hands of the children,” it would be better for Virginia educators to teach so that children’s “memories may be here stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European and American history,” and he was trying as late as 1818 to prevent the new University of Virginia from even allowing a classroom to be used for Sunday worship.18 Jefferson summed up his attitude toward public religion very succinctly in 1802, replying to a letter from the Danbury (Connecticut) Baptist Association: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion’ . . . thus building a wall of separation between church and state.”19 The image of a “wall of separation” was not intended as a compliment: it was meant to convey the shutting-out of religion from public discourse.
Deists, Unitarians, and Masons
If any religion looked to be ascendant in the new republic, it was not Christianity, but Deism — the simplistic belief of a clockmaker God who wound up the universe and then let it tick away on its own, without any personal intervention. The Revolutionary veteran and Vermont republican Ethan Allen pushed Deism into public debate by publishing a crude but highly effective tract, Reason the Only Oracle of Mankind (1785), in which he freely attacked reliance on the Bible and the “superstitions” of prayer and miracles. Allen was followed by an even better-known veteran of the Revolution, Thomas Paine, who had made himself into a republican hero in 1776 with his famous anti-monarchy pamphlet, Common Sense. Paine was in an incessant ferment of revolution, and joined ranks with Deism by publishing The Age of Reason in 1794 (a second part followed in 1796). Paine was even cruder than Allen, and even more effective: “What is it that we have learned from this pretended thing called revealed religion? Nothing that is useful to man and everything that is dishonourable to his Maker,” Paine yelled. “What is it that the Bible teaches us? Rapine, cruelty, and murder.”20
“If any religion looked to be ascendant in the new republic, it was not Christianity, but Deism.”
A more complacent and elitist version of Deism was Unitarianism. Like Deism, Unitarianism was an English development, but it caught on in a big way in America after the Great Awakening as an alternative religion for New Englanders who could not stomach Jonathan Edwards and the Awakeners. William Ellery Channing declared in his famous 1819 Baltimore sermon, “Unitarian Christianity,” that “we believe that Jesus is one mind, one soul, one being, as truly one as we are, and equally distinct from the one God.” Hence, Jesus Christ was not God, and did not share any divine attributes with God. Channing immediately hedged by adding that Unitarians continued to believe that Jesus was nevertheless “the Son of God . . . the brightness of the divine mercy,” whose death provides atonement and salvation. But Channing firmly rejected that idea that Jesus was also divine. God was a “Unity,” and shared nothing of his attributes with Jesus (thus the term Unitarian).21
The purposes that Unitarianism served in New England were just as often served elsewhere in the new republic by Free Masonry. Free Masonry had its origins in the peculiar hunger of the Enlightenment for a religious ritualism that could be squared with the glorification of reason. Although Free Masonry developed out of the fraternities, guilds, and lodges of Scottish and English stonemasons in the 1600s, by the eighteenth century it had become a secretive order for wealthy and aristocratic English-speaking male elites, and it developed rituals and a quasi-theology that allowed it to offer upper-class Anglo-Americans a fashionable and restrictive version of republican religion. The secrecy that shrouded the American Masonic lodges makes it nearly impossible to estimate the number of American Masons; but that secrecy also gave it an alluring sense of esoteric and mysterious ritual and republican brotherhood, and prominent Americans from Washington and Franklin to Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson found themselves drawn to the Masons.
All of them together — Masons, Deists, Unitarians — thought they were the wave of the future. Thomas Jefferson, surveying the scene in 1822, rejoiced “that in this blessed country of free enquiry and belief, which has surrendered [its] creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests . . . there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die an Unitarian.”22 What is amazing about that prophecy is how clearly Jefferson should have seen, even in 1822, that such a likelihood had already disappeared. The United States may not have been a Christian republic at its start, but it soon became one.
Revival and Republican Virtue
Instead of republicanism absorbing religion, religion co-opted and absorbed the energies of republicanism between 1780 and 1860. Instead of traditional Christian denominations fading into a Unitarian future, they embarked on a voyage of aggression, expansion, and empire-building that easily outstripped the overall growth of the entire American population. The Congregationalists jumped off from 750 congregations in New England in 1780 to spread across upstate New York, northern Ohio, and into lower Michigan, and by 1860 had grown to 2,200 congregations; the Presbyterians, who counted about 500 congregations in 1780, counted 6,400 in 1860; the Methodists, who had hardly existed as a denomination in the 1780s, included nearly 20,000 congregations in 1860, while the Baptists, who had only 400 congregations in the United States in 1780, included 12,150 in 1860. Even Roman Catholics, who had organized only about 50 congregations and missions by 1780, had grown to 2,500 congregations in 1860. Between 1780 and 1820, American religious denominations built 10,000 new churches, and by 1860, they had quadrupled that number.23 How, in the name of Thomas Jefferson, had this unlooked-for result occurred?
“Instead of republicanism absorbing religion, religion co-opted and absorbed the energies of republicanism.”
Two major reasons explain the sudden explosion of Christian influence in American life. The first is the resiliency of revivals. The writings of Jonathan Edwards on the Awakening of the 1740s were developed by his pupils into a full-blown blueprint for fresh waves of revival. Edwards’s grandson, Timothy Dwight (1752–1817), upon taking over the presidency of Yale College in 1795, aggressively beat down the “infidelity of the Tom Paine school” that Lyman Beecher had found there as a student. Beecher recalled that the students challenged Dwight by handing him
a list of subjects for class disputation . . . [and] to their surprise he selected this: “Is the Bible the word of God?” and told them to do their best. He heard all they had to say, answered them, and there was an end. He preached incessantly [in the college chapel] for six months on the subject, and all infidelity skulked and hid its head.24
This “Second Great Awakening,” which is variously dated between 1800 and 1825, could not be contained to New England. Edwardsean preachers and converts followed the out-migration of New Englanders to New York and Ohio, and there, influential outposts of Edwardsean revivalism sprang up, to the point where western New York was home to so many revivals that it was referred to as “the burned-over district.” Of course, the revivals spun off a number of unlooked-for variations — Mormonism, the Shakers, the Millerites, Matthias the Prophet — but their energy was palpable, and even the variations were testimony to revivalism’s pervasiveness.
The second force that moved Christianity to the front of American culture’s attention was the need of republics for virtue. Every good republican knew that republics were politically fragile: lacking the old monarchical cement of patronage or hierarchy, republics depended for their existence solely on the virtue — the disinterested benevolence and self-sacrifice — of their people. But where was virtue to come from? The French Revolution had demonstrated that the ethics of the Enlightenment were no protection from the guillotine and the Reign of Terror. What then could guarantee the virtue of republican nations? The answer to that question was promptly offered by John Witherspoon and Samuel Stanhope Smith, as the two successive Presbyterian presidents of Princeton College before and after the Revolution: only religion can guarantee virtue, and therefore the promotion of Christianity is a prerequisite to keeping the American republic virtuous and prosperous. “To promote true religion,” argued Witherspoon, “is the best and most effectual way of making a virtuous and regular people”; by contrast, added Smith, let “infidelity” and atheism prevail, and virtue would “cease to exist, and the bonds of society, which are effectually maintained only by the public morals, would hasten to be dissolved.” The proper conclusion, then, would be that even in a republic, the government should offer sponsorship to Christianity, and “the magistrate . . . enact laws for the punishment of profanity and impiety.”25
Despite Jefferson’s and Madison’s best republican efforts to close the door on Christianity, their efforts were frequently undone by the courts, who had more than a little concern about virtue. The great Supreme Court justice Joseph Story declared that Christianity was in fact a necessary component of the English common-law tradition, and offered the “only solid basis of civil society.”26 And in 1844, writing as an associate justice of the Court, Story upheld the decision of the lower federal courts in the case of Vidal v. Girard’s Executors, which permitted the breaking of the will left by the notorious Philadelphia banker and atheist, Stephen Girard, in order to permit religious teachers onto the grounds of a school that Girard had founded in Philadelphia and into which he had declared, by the terms of in his will, a clergyman should never be permitted to enter. Story declared that this was “derogatory and hostile to the Christian religion, and so is void, as being against the common law and public policy of Pennsylvania.”27 By defining virtue as Christianity, Christianity could be treated as a necessary part of the republic’s life, and allowed the public role that Jefferson and Madison had struggled to prevent.
Cultural, Not Political, Christianity
The results of the Second Great Awakening, and the co-optation of virtue, paved the way, in 1835, for Alexis de Tocqueville to remark, “There is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.” And it was, continued Tocqueville, “a form of Christianity which I cannot better describe than by styling it a democratic and republican religion.”28 Charles Grandison Finney, the most famous revival preacher in America since Edwards, rushed to claim that his own Presbyterianism was but “Church Republicanism,” and even Episcopalians like Calvin Colton declared that “the genius of the American Episcopal Church is republican.”29
But this was not a political achievement. In 1864, proponents of a “Bible amendment,” which would have inserted an explicit recognition of Christianity into the Constitution’s preamble, came close to getting Abraham Lincoln’s presidential endorsement.30 But only close. Christian America would, instead, be culturally Christianized. Still, for those who believe that politics lies downstream of culture, this was no small accomplishment, and all the more significant for the fact that the Constitution provided a comparatively spare and noncommittal framework for governing the republic, thus allowing for a Christian culture to enjoy vast sway in the nineteenth century.
Nor was the achievement of a Christian America the gift of the American Founders, or a part of the design of the American republic. That Christianity in America arrived at a place of commanding influence in American life in the years before the Civil War was the product of ceaseless cultural energy by Christians themselves in the decades after 1800. Never again, wrote the literary critic Alfred Kazin, “would there be so much honest, deeply felt invocation of God’s purpose.”31 If that influence has seemed to wane, then perhaps the solution will lie in the renewal of that energy, that invocation, that culture, rather than in a myth.
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The Joy of John the Baptist
Part 13 Episode 246 What is it that filled John the Baptist with such joy towards the end of his short life? In this episode of Light + Truth, John Piper opens John 3:22–30 for a look at the source of John the Baptist’s surprising happiness.
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The Dangers of Alone: Five Questions for Single Men
As a senior in high school, I played an accountant in The Actor’s Nightmare. He wakes up on stage, in the middle of a play, only he doesn’t remember any of his lines, or how he got on stage, or when he ever read a script or attended a rehearsal, or even what play he’s in. Everyone around him knows who they are and who he is, but he’s lost, clueless, and letting everyone down — all with a big audience watching.
The play was inspired by the awful recurring dream so many actors have, being suddenly thrust on stage to perform a show they do not recognize, in a role they cannot name, with lines they cannot recite. The nightmare, however, might also be an accurate picture of how many young single men (even Christian single men) feel in their actual, wide-awake lives. Who am I supposed to be? What role am I meant to play? Who are the good guys and bad guys? Where am I supposed to stand and work and live? What story am I in? What wars am I trying to win?
Stumbling Through Singleness
When I see that accountant stumbling around the stage, putting his foot in his mouth, sweating profusely, I see something of my own single life — wrestling with where to go to school, shuffling through majors, meeting new friends, losing touch with old ones, then reconnecting with some, starting my first job, and then my second job, and then my third job, moving from apartment to apartment, then house to house and city to city, trying to find a wife and failing, and then trying again and failing, and then mustering the courage to try again. All while everyone seems to be watching me sweat and stumble.
So how do you think the accountant figured out who he was? He studied the other people on stage. The keys to knowing who he was supposed to be lay with the men and women who had been placed, very intentionally, around him. What if the same is true for living as a more faithful single man? What if some of us stumble, wander, and struggle more than we have to because we spend so much time looking in at ourselves and so little time looking out and around at others? For some of us, it’s like we woke up on stage, in the middle of a play, and yet never mustered the courage to get out of bed, much less play an actual role.
My burden in this article is to give Christian single men better perspective and greater courage in singleness. I want to convince you that you are not as single or alone as you think. Because I wasted some single years. Because I’ve watched other men do the same. Because you don’t have to. I want to help men like you play the man God made you to be.
Fundamental Questions for Men
What questions do you think drive and consume the average twentysomething man? What kinds of questions keep him up at night and spur his decisions?
Where do I work?
What is my role?
How much do I make?
What do I want to watch?
What did so-and-so say about so-and-so on Twitter?
Where do I want to eat?
Did my team win or lose?
How much can I afford to buy?Many men spend most of their best strength and energy, day after day, year after year, on shallow questions like these. I want you to ask better questions, bigger questions that will demand more of you and draw more out of you. In the end, I want you to see yourself, through these questions, as less isolated and alone.
1. Who’s Over Me?
Before we look at the relationships around us on stage, we need to remember who wrote the script for us. Before a man can be the man he was made to be, he needs to know and love the one who made him to be. If we could trace all the dysfunctions and failures that plague men to one root issue, it would be our disregard of God.
Do you believe that about yourself? Do you see that the health of every other relationship in your life grows out of your relationship with Christ? We’ll never faithfully act out the part we have been given if we’re out of touch with the Author of the story.
The apostle Paul writes specifically against sexual sin in 1 Corinthians 6, but what he says helps us make sense of every other dysfunction in a man’s life:
Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. (1 Corinthians 6:19–20)
As much as you may feel otherwise from day to day and week to week, you are not your own. You don’t get to do whatever you want, whenever you want — not if you’re in Christ. You belong to him twice over: he made you and he redeemed you. So glorify God in your body — consecrate your body, your time, your energy, your ambition more fully to him. Strive to cultivate, enjoy, and model an “undivided devotion to the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:35).
2. Who’s Ahead of Me?
As a man, you will inevitably become like the men you admire, spend time with, and imitate. The calculus won’t always be easy, but discerning people will be able to trace aspects of who you are to the men who have had the most influence on you (for better or worse). Many young men fail to mature because they lack mature men to follow and learn from. They grow up and live without good fathers.
As I near forty, and have now discipled younger men for years, I believe no single earthly factor will determine a man’s maturity more than the man (or men) who father him. And yet too few men have good fathers in the faith. Maybe they have men they admire and imitate from afar, but they don’t have an older man who actually knows them well enough to affirm, confront, and encourage them specifically and personally. John Calvin and John Piper can be spiritual fathers for you (they are for me), but they can’t be your only fathers (or even your main ones).
Who can say of you what Paul says of the younger men in Corinth?
I do not write these things to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children. For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel. I urge you, then, be imitators of me. (1 Corinthians 4:14–16)
He can say, I’ve known you well enough to call you beloved children, and you’ve known me well enough to imitate my way of life. What older man knows you well enough to say that? What older man do you know well enough to imitate how he meets with God, how he loves his wife and children, how he serves the church, how he wins the lost? If you don’t yet have a father relationship like that, who could that man be? The best place to begin looking is in your local church, where the family of God — fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers — lives together and loves one another (Matthew 12:49–50).
In my experience, the younger man will often have to initiate relationships like these, so don’t wait for an older man to come put his arm around you. Identify the men worth imitating, and then go and ask them for wisdom, for counsel, for time, for fathering. Look for ways to come alongside them in the ordinary rhythms of their lives. Make it as easy as possible for them to spend time with you.
3. Who’s Beside Me?
After a good father, every man also needs good brothers. He needs friends. And not just any friends, but friends who consistently draw him toward God and draw God out of him. This is why men instinctively love the picture from Proverbs 27:17: “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.” Sharpen iron for what? He’s likely talking about sharpening an axe or a sword. Men sharpen one another for battle, and we’re all at war (Ephesians 6:12). Who helps you fight well?
These aren’t buddies you watch football with or play video games with online. They’re men whose faith makes your heart rise and run after Christ, who kneel down and pick you up when you stumble and fall, who rally you to live worthy of your calling and hold you accountable, who jump into the hard trenches of life and ministry with you. They’re not just men anymore, or even just friends; they’re brothers.
We’re looking for something deeper and stronger than biological brotherhood. Proverbs says of this rare kind of friend, “A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother” (Proverbs 18:24). Do you have male friends like that? If not, who might become your company of iron? Again, start with your church. At first, it may not seem that you have a lot in common with those men, but if you share Christ, you have far more in common than you realize. Every friendship that’s risen to this level in my life started with meeting to open God’s word together. Most of them grew and matured through serving the church in some tangible way together.
4. Who’s Behind Me?
Few men have good fathers in the faith. I’m tempted to say even fewer have found and made sons in the faith. But every man of God should be a spiritual father to someone. This is what faithful Christianity is: “Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19–20). Who are those disciples for you? If nothing in our lives looks or sounds like Jesus’s Commission, then are we really living a Christian life? Can we really say we’re following Christ?
The apostle Paul had many sons in the faith, including a young man named Timothy. He says to Timothy, “What you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also” (2 Timothy 2:2). In other words, Timothy, as I have been a father to you in Christ, go and be a father to others. Take a younger, less mature man under your wing for a season, and patiently and diligently teach him the ropes of following Jesus. Draw him into your life and marriage and family and work, and then live so that you can say, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). As you do, you’ll be surprised how much you grow and benefit from pouring your life into him (Philippians 4:1).
It really doesn’t matter how old you are or how long you have been a Christian. If you’re old enough to read this article, some younger man — in your church, in your neighborhood, at your job — looks up to you. How are you stewarding his eyes? How are you engaging his questions, desires, and failures? Again, don’t wait for him to ask you for help or counsel. Go and be a father.
5. Who’s Against Me?
Satan knows that the most solid single men are the men most loved by spiritual fathers, brothers, and sons. He’ll do whatever he can to make you feel alone, and then to make that loneliness feel like freedom. He’ll make danger feel safe. He’ll slowly lead you away from the kinds of relationships you need, and then distract you with meaningless anxieties and pleasures. Do you even know you live at war?
Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith. (1 Peter 5:8–9)
In your apartment, at your desk, beside your bed, on your computer, even over your Bible, you have an enemy. A fierce and intimidating enemy. If the Christian life feels hard — if relationships like the ones I’m describing above feel unrealistic or even impossible at times — it’s partly because someone is relentlessly attacking and undermining you. He’s not a metaphor. He’s a real spiritual being, and he hates you. He wants to devour you.
But if you are Christ’s man, the one who lives in you is stronger than the one who wars against you. And he’s not a metaphor or a fairytale, either. He’s the King of the universe, the Warrior who will judge the earth, and you are fighting on his side. So don’t ignore your enemy or underestimate him, but don’t back down either. Lean on the men you need — fathers, brothers, and sons — and follow Christ into battle.
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The Humble Young Leader: Four Qualities of Godly Men
God created men to be strong and faithful leaders, especially in their families and churches. Becoming that kind of man does not simply happen, however; we need to train ourselves for godliness and Christlike leadership (1 Timothy 4:7–8).
To grow as men, we follow Jesus — the only sinless man, the God-man, who alone provides us righteousness and the perfect example of how to live. But we also follow the footsteps of those who followed or foreshadowed his (1 Corinthians 11:1). Joshua, though predating the incarnate Christ, can serve as one such example, especially for younger men.
Joshua teaches us that leading well starts with realizing that all you are, have, and accomplish depends on God’s gracious provision. Joshua knew this deeply, even in his younger years, as he served God and led the people into the promised land. I would like to highlight four traits from Joshua that men young and old need today: humble confidence, humble dependence, humble submission, and humble patience.
1. Humble Confidence
At key times in Israel’s history, even as a young man, Joshua stepped forward as a great example of humble confidence. One of the first times we meet Joshua, we see his faith in action, trusting God against the tide of popular opinion.
Joshua took part in a search party sent into Canaan to spy out the land God had promised. The spies returned with a dismal prediction about Israel’s ability to take on the “giants” in the land (Numbers 13–14). Joshua and Caleb were the only two (of twelve) who urged the people to take the land, because they believed God’s word (Numbers 14:7–10). They knew God’s track record and his power to keep his promises. Their confidence was not in themselves but in the God they served.
Here we see one quality that set Joshua and Caleb apart from the rest of the Israelites — they believed the promises of God. They were not intimidated by the size of the warriors or the strength of the cities. Rather, they knew their God and remembered how he had dealt with Egypt, then the most powerful nation on the earth. If God could take care of the mighty Egyptian army, he could certainly take care of the Canaanite tribes. God rewarded Joshua’s and Caleb’s faith by exempting them from the entire generation of Israelites who would perish in the wilderness (Numbers 14:29–30).
Humility and confidence might seem like opposites, but in Joshua and Caleb, we see they are two sides of the same heart. When we find our identity and security in God, we can rest in knowing that our frailty and sin no longer define us. We can walk in the strength that God supplies, even when we are rightly aware of how weak and sinful we are. In fact, God only chooses and empowers those who know how little we can do on our own.
2. Humble Dependence
Joshua could be considered one of the greatest military leaders in history. He led the armies of Israel to victory against far more powerful enemies. Without minimizing Joshua’s gifts and abilities, he knew that God is the one who ultimately vanquishes his people’s foes. He learned this early in his military career, as he led the people in battle against the Amalekites. Exodus 17 tells the story of God’s provision:
Whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed, and whenever he lowered his hand, Amalek prevailed. But Moses’ hands grew weary, so they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it, while Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side. So his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. And Joshua overwhelmed Amalek and his people with the sword. (Exodus 17:11–13)
The outcome of the battle depended on something entirely outside of Joshua’s control. Yes, he fought with great courage, but all the while, he realized that the battle belongs to the Lord. The same was true even when the victories were not as supernaturally obvious. God had promised to give the land of Canaan to his people, and Joshua’s trust in God’s power and faithfulness gave him the faith he needed to be the leader God called him to be.
Even when the challenges before us are not nearly as dramatic as Joshua’s, the basis of our confidence is still the same faith — faith not in ourselves or even in the gifts and talents God has given us, but faith in the God who is the Creator, sustainer, and provider for every breath, heartbeat, and victory in life. Joshua’s example reminds us that any skills, opportunities, accomplishments, or victories come as gifts from our gracious Creator. He deserves all the credit for any good in our lives.
We can regularly remind ourselves of this by asking the apostle Paul’s rhetorical question in 1 Corinthians 4:7: “What do you have that you did not receive?” Realizing that God is the source and end of all he gives us leads to humble confidence, and that confidence frees us to follow his will and be used as he sees fit.
3. Humble Submission
As a young man, Joshua learned to trust God’s word, and it guided his life. He knew God’s promises are trustworthy, so he followed his plan even when the challenges were great. God’s word became the core of his confidence, as we see in God’s exhortation to him before the people entered the land of Canaan:
This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. (Joshua 1:8–9)
God calls Joshua to be strong and courageous based on his trust in God’s word. A godly man’s confidence, likewise, does not depend on his own abilities or the opinions of others to predict the outcome of circumstances; rather, it depends on what God says is true. When we submit to the authority of the word of God, we are trusting in the character of God. In our day, one’s desires in the moment have become the primary guide for many, but men of God buck that trend and live rooted in the unchanging teaching of the Bible.
4. Humble Patience
The best leaders are men who have learned to follow well. They faithfully contribute to the objectives of a team, even if they do not have a title or position. Joshua’s submission to God translated into his submission to the leader God placed over him.
Joshua served as Moses’s assistant when he was a young man (Exodus 17:8–16). After being chosen, he filled that role with patience for forty years. We are told that when Moses would go into the camp, Joshua “would not depart from the tent” (Exodus 33:11). It must have been deeply challenging at times to serve the people in Moses’s shadow, but we get no indication that Joshua was anything but a dutiful encouragement to Moses and an energetic partner in the mission. His commitment to patiently serve shaped him into the man who could lead God’s people into the promised land.
The lessons Joshua learned as a young man shaped him into an old man who could be trusted as a godly leader. And because of his leadership, “Israel served the Lord all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua and had known all the work that the Lord did for Israel” (Joshua 24:31).
Joshua’s trust in God and his word formed him into a man of humble character. His confidence, dependence, submission, and patience offer powerful glimpses of Jesus, who perfectly lived out these qualities as our substitute and example. May God give many young men in the coming generation the ability to trust their God and lead with Christlike character.
