The Roles of Men and Women
Readings
July 2010
Men-Women Differences in Recent Research
The following is a short bibliography of recent research (or summaries of research)
that treats the differences between men and women.
Until about 1990 (and to some degree still) the prevailing ideology was that there
were no significant differences between men and women, other than physical. To say
there were was politically incorrect (and could lose you your academic position). This has
changed under the pressure of the facts, so it is increasingly acknowledged that there are
differences and these are innate and developmental, not just a matter of training or formative environmental influences, although the latter affect the final result.
It is one thing to observe the differences, another thing to understand them correctly,
still another to say what we should do about them. The following bibliography contains
books that treat useful research, for the most part sound. It does not, however, indicate
that the book’s understanding of that research is sound, much less the proposed applications to human life. In fact, one of the recent developments is the number of “Feminists”
who write such books. They seem to have decided that they cannot deny the facts but
have a chance of giving them the proper (ideological) interpretation.
If you were to read these books, you would end up with greater confidence in our
teaching (it even seems “cutting edge” rather than “outdated” or “traditionalist”).
A Select Bibliography
The author of this bibliography recommends his own work for a treatment of how to approach men-women differences. It is not yet finished, much less published, but it can be
found on the SOS Leaders Resource CD. In the 2008 CD it is “4.4 Being Men and Women”. [In the 2005 CD, it is “1.424 Being Men and Women”; and in the 2004 CD, it is:
“F04 Being Men and Women”.] It is often referred to as “The Men-Women Identity Paper”.
There is also:
Stephen B. Clark, Man and Woman in Christ: An Examination of the Roles of Men
and Women in Light of Scripture and the Social Sciences (Ann Arbor: Servant,
1980), chapters 16 and 17.
2
Now that you know there are no hidden biases, the following are the books I would recommend in order of usefulness, plus some comments on each. They are in rough order of
usefulness, so, having finished “the identity paper”, start at the top of the below list. This
is simply a select bibliography, mainly influenced by the fact that these are the books that,
with one exception, I have read that I can recommend for the topic of the actual differences. They are not books that I can recommend as presenting a good approach to roles
(though some are OK). The literature is vast and increasing year by year.
Anne Moir and David Jessel, BrainSex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women
(London: Mandarin, 1989).
• This is still the best summary of the differences and the biological reasons for
them that I know. It is clear and competent, although a bit old now.
Leonard Sax, Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the
Emerging Science of Sex Differences (New York: Doubleday, 2005).
• This is a rival with the Moir book for being the best summary. It is intended to
make a very useful case, namely, that men and women need to be educated separately. See the blurb at the end of this bibliography (below).
Steven E. Rhoads, Taking Sex Differences Seriously (San Francisco CA: Encounter
Books, 2004).
• This is a recent book on the subject and quite useful. It treats more thoroughly social science (sociology, psychology) and so it is more focused on how differences
work in our society and much shorter on the biological data. Chapter 2 “Masculinity/Femininity” provides an overview of recent research. It also contains a helpful
presentation on “Two Kinds of Females, One Kind of Male” (pp. 29-34”.
Michael Gurian, Boys and Girls Learn Differently!: A Guide for Teachers and Parents
(San Francisco CA: Jossey-Bass, 2001).
• A helpful book on the learning differences between men and women. It has many
pastoral applications.
Patricia Cayo Sexton, The Feminized Male: Classrooms, White collars and the Decline of
Manliness (New York: Random House, 1969). (Vintage, 1970).
• This is now considered ancient (and the research is 35 years out of date). Nonetheless, it is one of the most helpful for what to do about the “boy problem”.
Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2000).
• A useful book on what is going on and why boys are having an increasingly hard
time in modern American society.
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Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (New
York: Ballantine, 1991).
• A book on the way men and women talk. Her conceptual framework is problematic, but her observations are mostly accurate.
W. Bradford Wilcox, “Reconcilable Differences: What Social Sciences Show About the
Complementarity of the Sexes & Parenting”, First Things, November 2005.
• An article summarizing research on why it is valuable for mothers and fathers to
take complementary roles in childrearing. It is appended. It can also be downloaded from the First Things website.
John Gray, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (New York: HarperCollins,
1992).
• This is now the classic statement on the fact that there are differences and that we
cause trouble if we do not deal with them. Though now considered old, it still has
some good common sense.
Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male & Female
Brain (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
• An account of brain research. He is attempting to show that autism is an extreme
form of the “masculine brain”. I do not think he has it quite right, but it has some
useful material as well as accounts of recent research.
Robert Pool, The New Sexual Revolution (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1994).
• This is a book on the differences. It has some use, though he is a bit muddled on
the understanding of the facts.
There is a body of literature I have not included: the kind of research that David Blankenhorn does and disseminates and also the work of David Popenoe and colleagues at
Rutgers. They have amassed much research on men-women differences in family life. A
Google search will find their websites.
There are also a couple of books that show the consequence of failure to give a role to
men. They do not contain much about research, but raise some of the key issues in regard
to feminization of the church.
Leon J. Podles, The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity (Dallas:
Spence, 1999).
David Murrow, Why Men Hate Going to Church (Nashville TN: Nelson, 2005).
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Reconcilable Differences
What Social Sciences Show About the Complementarity of the Sexes & Parenting
by W. Bradford Wilcox
In the last four decades, a feminist revolution has swept the globe. To be sure, this
revolution has brought many beneficial changes to our world. Now, for instance, much of
the world allows and encourages women to bring their talents into the public spheres of
work and public policy. But this revolution has also brought less welcome developments
to the global scene. What might be described as the androgynous impulse—an impulse
that seeks to deny any essential or biologically based differences between men and women—is one of those developments.
Androgynous Impulse
This impulse can be found, among other places, in the public policies and social
agendas of international bodies associated with the United Nations.
The UN committee responsible for monitoring compliance with the Convention on
the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is one example. This committee has called on countries like Armenia and Belarus to end public policies and practices that support distinctive maternal roles for women, such as Mother’s
Day and maternal leave policies. Instead, it and other proponents of this type of feminist
agenda would like to see public policies that promote an androgynous parenting ethic
where fathers and mothers devote equal amounts of time to parenting, and parent with
essentially the same style of parent-child interaction.
The primary problem with this androgynous impulse is that it does not recognize the
unique talents that men and women bring to the most fundamental unit of society: the
family. A growing body of social scientific evidence confirms what common sense and
many of the world’s religions tell us: Men and women do indeed bring different gifts to
the parenting enterprise. Consequently, at all levels of social life—the international, national, and local—public policies, cultural norms, and social roles should be organized to
protect rather than prohibit the complementary parenting styles that fathers and mothers
bring to family life.
But before embarking on an overview of this literature, let me offer two caveats:
First, not every mother or every father will possess all of the distinctive sex-specific
gifts described below. For instance, some fathers are not endowed with a firm temperament suited for discipline, and some mothers are not endowed with a sensitive temperament suited for nurturing. Nevertheless, most fathers and mothers possess sex-specific
talents related to parenting, and societies should organize parenting and work roles to
5
take advantage of the way in which these talents tend to be distributed in sex-specific
ways.
Second, although both sexes possess most of these parenting talents, one sex nevertheless tends to excel in each of them. For instance, mothers are generally better at nurturing small children than are fathers, but fathers can also nurture their children. Thus,
societies should build on these comparative sex-specific advantages by letting each sex
take the lead in the domains where it excels.
Talented Mothers
Among the many distinctive talents that mothers bring to the parenting enterprise,
three stand out: their capacity to breastfeed, their ability to understand infants and children, and their ability to offer nurture and comfort to their children.
Obviously, only mothers can breastfeed their children. The medical literature on the
advantages of breastfeeding could not be clearer. Breast milk offers infants a range of
sugars, nutrients, and antibodies unavailable in infant formula. It protects infants against
at least eleven serious maladies, from ear infections to sudden infant death syndrome. Indeed, this research led the American Academy of Pediatrics in 1997 to recommend that
infants be breastfed until at least one year of age. Here mothers clearly have a very sexspecific advantage in parenting.1
Mothers also excel in interpreting their children’s physical and linguistic cues. Mothers are more responsive to the distinctive cries of infants. They are better able than fathers, for instance, to distinguish between a cry of hunger and a cry of pain from their baby, and better than fathers at detecting the emotions of their children by looking at their
faces, postures, and gestures.2 Another study found that adolescents report that their
mothers know them better than their fathers do.3
In sum, mothers are better able than fathers to read their children’s words, deeds, and
appearance to determine their emotional and physical state. This maternal sensitivity to
children helps explain why mothers are superior when it comes to nurturing the young,
especially infants and toddlers. Because they excel in reading their children, they are better able to provide their children with what they need—from a snack to a hug—when
they are in some type of distress.
Perhaps more importantly, there is growing biological evidence that mothers are
primed by their hormones to engage in nurturing behavior such as hugging, praising, or
cuddling.4 The hormone peptide oxytocin, which is released in women during pregnancy
and breastfeeding, makes mothers more interested in bonding with children and engaging
in nurturing behavior than fathers. In other words, not only are women better at nurturing
but they also are more likely to enjoy expending time and energy nurturing children.
Children know this. Numerous studies indicate that infants and toddlers prefer their
mothers to their fathers when they seek solace or relief from hunger, fear, sickness, or
some other distress.5 In other words, when children look for comfort and consolation, no
one compares with mom.
Thus, it should not surprise us to find that, as Stanford psychology professor Eleanor
Maccoby has observed in The Two Sexes: “In all known societies, women, whether they
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are working outside the home or not, assume most of the day-to-day responsibility for
child care.” Taken together, mothers’ comparative advantage in breastfeeding, understanding their children, and nurturing makes it functional for societies to organize the
bulk of childrearing around the mother.
Talented Fathers
Although the distinctive talents that mothers bring to the childrearing enterprise are
invaluable, especially for infants and toddlers, fathers also bring an array of distinctive
talents to the parenting enterprise.
I am not going to focus on the advantages in physical size and competitive instinct
that fathers have when it comes to providing for and protecting their families.6 Instead, I
am going to focus on three advantages that relate specifically to parenting: specifically,
fathers excel when it comes to discipline, play, and challenging their children to embrace
life’s challenges.
Although mothers discipline their children more often than do fathers simply because
they spend more time with them, fathers do have a comparative advantage in this area.
Typically, fathers engender more fear than mothers in their children because their comparatively greater physical strength and size, along with the pitch and inflection of their
voice, telegraph toughness to their children. Fathers also are more assertive than mothers
in their dealings with their children, and are less likely to bend family rules or principles
for their children. In a word, fathers tend to be firmer and more compelling disciplinarians than mothers.7
Consequently, fathers are more likely than mothers to get their boys to respond appropriately to their disciplinary strategy, both because of their uniquely firm approach to
discipline and because boys seem more likely to respond to discipline from someone of
the same sex.8 For all these reasons, dad’s discipline plays a signal role in fostering an
orderly climate in the home.
Fathers also have an advantage when it comes to play. Although mothers, once again,
spend more time playing with their children than do fathers, the type of play that fathers
engage in with their children is distinctive. Fathers are much more likely to engage their
infants, toddlers, and older children in vigorous, physical, and exciting forms of play and
games.9
Fathers are more likely than mothers to be found throwing their toddlers in the air,
wrestling with their school-age boys, or kicking a soccer ball with their teenage daughter.
This vigorous style of play is popular among infants and toddlers, who generally prefer to
be picked up by their father rather than their mother (if they are not in distress).10
As important, paternal play promotes social skills, intellectual development, and a
sense of self-control. The playful side to fathers teaches their children how to regulate
their feelings and behavior as they interact with others. Engaging in rough physical play
with dad teaches children how to deal with aggressive impulses and physical contact
without losing control of their emotions. For instance, one study found that father-child
play taught children to recognize others’ emotions and to regulate their own emotions.11
7
As Emory psychologist John Snarey wrote, “children who roughhouse with their fathers . . . usually quickly learn that biting, kicking, and other forms of physical violence
are not acceptable.”12 In other words, the lessons children learn playing with their fathers
prepare them well for the game of life.
Challenging Fathers
Finally, fathers play a central role in pushing their children to face the challenges and
opportunities that confront them outside the home. Compared to mothers, fathers are
more likely to encourage their children to take up difficult tasks, to seek out novel experiences, and to endure pain and hardship without yielding. Fathers are more likely than
mothers to encourage toddlers to engage in novel activities, to interact with strangers, and
to be independent; and as children enter adolescence, fathers are more likely to introduce
children to the worlds of work, sport, and civil society.13
The bottom line is that fathers excel in teaching their children the virtues of fortitude,
temperance, and prudence as they prepare for life outside their family. Not surprisingly,
there is considerable evidence that paternal involvement is associated with higher rates of
educational and occupational attainment, self-confidence, and more pro-social behavior
for boys and girls.14
Fathers’ strengths in discipline, play, and challenging behavior are related to their distinctive position in the family. Because of the smaller role they play in procreation and
because they do not have the same hormonal priming to engage in nurturing behavior as
mothers do, fathers are—to some degree—more distant from their children and, more
generally, from the daily emotional dynamics of family life than are mothers. Although
this distance can be a liability if fathers are neglectful of their parenting responsibilities, it
can be an asset if fathers take advantage of this distance to engage their children in a distinctly fatherly way.
By this I mean that fathers, because of their distance from their children, feel freer to
be firm and challenging with their children than do mothers. In general, this distance also
makes fathers more likely to focus on their children’s future and to take the difficult
steps—e.g., telling a son to stop fooling around in school and shape up—that ensure that
their children reach their potential and internalize a sense of self-control.
Rutgers sociologist David Popenoe summarizes the complementary strengths of
mothers and fathers well in his Life Without Father:
The complementarity of male and female parenting styles is striking and of enormous
importance to a child’s overall development. . . . [F]athers express more concern for the
child’s long-term development, while mothers focus on the child’s immediate well-being
(which, of course, in its own way has everything to do with a child’s long-term wellbeing.) . . . [T]he disciplinary approach of fathers tends to be “firm” while that of mothers
tends to be “responsive.” While mothers provide an important flexibility and sympathy in
their discipline, fathers provide ultimate predictability and consistency. Both dimensions
are critical for an efficient, balanced, and humane childrearing regime.15
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Necessary Differences
Research on parenting styles and family structure indicates that sex-differentiated
parenting helps children in important ways. A review of research on parenting in Child
Development found that children of parents who engaged in sex-typical behavior where
the mother was more responsive/nurturing and the father was more challenging/firm were
more “competent” than children whose parents did not engage in sex-typical behavior.
Another study of adolescents found that the best parenting approach was one in which
parents were highly responsive and highly demanding of their children.16
The research on family structure is also very suggestive. In general, children who
grow up in an intact, married family are about 50 percent less likely to experience serious
psychological, academic, or social problems as children or young adults, compared to
children who grow up in single or stepfamilies.17 The general tenor of this research can
be illustrated by briefly considering what we know about how fatherlessness affects boys
and girls.
For boys, the link between crime and fatherlessness is very clear. As former US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed in The Moynihan Report: “A community that allows a large number of young men (and women) to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, . . . that community asks for, and gets, chaos.”
Boys learn self-control, as we have heard, from playing with and being disciplined by
a loving father. As importantly, boys also learn to control their own aggressive instincts
when they see a man they respect and love—their father—handling frustration, conflict,
and difficulty without resorting to violence. By contrast, boys who do not regularly experience the love, discipline, and modeling of a good father are more likely to engage in
what is called “compensatory masculinity,” where they reject and denigrate all that is
feminine and instead seek to prove their masculinity by engaging in domineering and violent behavior.18
Studies of crime indicate that one of the strongest predictors of crime is fatherless
families. Princeton University sociologist Sara McLanahan found in one study that boys
raised outside of an intact nuclear family were more than twice as likely as other boys to
end up in prison, even controlling for a range of social and economic factors.19 Another
review of the literature on delinquency and crime found that criminals come from broken
homes at a disproportionate rate: 70 percent of juveniles in state reform schools, 72 percent of adolescent murderers, and 60 percent of rapists grew up in fatherless homes.20
Studies of crime and family patterns at the neighborhood level come to similar conclusions. As Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson observes, “Family structure is one of
the strongest, if not the strongest, predictor of variations of urban violence across cities in
the United States.”21
Civilized Daughters
Clearly, fathers play a central role in civilizing boys. They also play an important role
in civilizing girls, as the research on sexual promiscuity and teenage childbearing makes
readily apparent.
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Fathers who are affectionate and firm with their daughters, who love and respect their
wives, and who simply stick around can play a crucial role in minimizing the likelihood
that their daughters will be sexually active prior to marriage. The affection that fathers
bestow on their daughters makes those daughters less likely to seek attention from young
men and to get involved sexually with members of the opposite sex. Fathers also protect
their daughters from premarital sexual activity by setting clear disciplinary limits for their
daughters, monitoring their whereabouts, and by signaling to young men that sexual activity will not be tolerated.22
Finally, when they are in the home, research by University of Arizona psychology
professor Bruce Ellis suggests that fathers send a biological signal through their pheromones—special aromatic chemical compounds released from men’s and women’s bodies—that slows the sexual development of their daughters; this, in turn, makes daughters
less interested in sexual activity and less likely to be seen as sexual objects.23
Consequently, girls who grow up in intact families are much less likely to experience
puberty at an early age, to be sexually active before marriage, and to get pregnant before
marriage.24 Indeed, the longer fathers stick around, the less likely girls are to be sexually
active prior to marriage. One study found that about 35 percent of girls in the United
States whose fathers left before age 6 became pregnant as teenagers, that 10 percent of
girls in the United States whose fathers left them between the ages of 6 and 18 became
pregnant as teenagers, and that only 5 percent of girls whose fathers stayed with them
throughout childhood became pregnant.25
Sexed Gifts
I could also present studies indicating that mothers play a unique role in fostering the
welfare of children. But because fatherlessness is the bigger problem confronting the
world today, I think these studies on fathers are sufficient to indicate the importance of
promoting a parenting ethic that embraces rather than rejects the distinct gifts that the
sexes bring to the parenting enterprise. Vive la difference.
Let me now conclude our review of the social scientific literature on sex and parenting by spelling out what should be obvious to all. The best psychological, sociological,
and biological research to date now suggests that—on average—men and women bring
different gifts to the parenting enterprise, that children benefit from having parents with
distinct parenting styles, and that family breakdown poses a serious threat to children and
to the societies in which they live.
Consequently, governments and international organizations such as the United Nations need to come to terms with the accumulating social scientific evidence that indicates that distinctly gendered approaches to parenting are best for children and families.
They have to recognize that most societies will and should organize their approach to
parenting along gender-complementarian lines, both because this is what comes naturally
to most men and women and because this is what is generally best for children. This
recognition should be matched by public policies and social norms at the international
and national levels that support mothers and fathers who seek to parent in sex-typical
ways, without penalizing mothers and fathers who depart from the typical patterns.
10
Of course, many influential feminist organizations and other groups will resist such a
strategy. They will point to academic work that claims sex differences are just a consequence of socialization patterns in societies that are organized along sexist lines. But such
resistance will look increasingly futile in the face of growing scientific evidence that men
and women are generally different, especially when it comes to the parenting enterprise.
Even Eleanor Maccoby, a distinguished feminist psychologist who once championed
the idea that sex differences were caused only by socialization, is now acknowledging the
importance of biology in explaining sex differences in parenting. In her latest book, The
Two Sexes, she concludes her study of men and women by admitting that
it is probably not realistic to set a fifty-fifty division of labor between fathers and mothers
in the day-to-day care of children as the most desirable pattern toward which we should
strive as a social goal. We should consider the alternative view: that equity between the
sexes does not have to mean exact equality in the sense of the two sexes having exactly
the same life-styles and exactly the same allocation of time.26
It is my sincere hope that this alternative view—that gender equity does not require
an androgynous parenting ethic—will come to guide the public policies and social norms
that shape family life around the globe, for the sake of the children.
Notes:
1. Steven E. Rhoads, Taking Sex Differences Seriously (Encounter Books, 2004), p. 217;
http://aappolicy.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/pediatrics;100/6/1035.
2. Eleanor E. Maccoby, The Two Sexes (Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 268; Ross
D. Parke. Fatherhood (Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 49; Rhoads, pp. 204 and
221.
3. Maccoby, p. 272.
4. Maccoby, p. 260; Rhoads, pp. 198–199.
5. Parke, p. 122.
6. Jeffrey Rosenberg and W. Bradford Wilcox, writing in the US Department of Health
and Human Services’ “Child Abuse and Neglect User Manual Series,” 2005.
7. Wade Horn and Tom Sylvester, Father Facts (National Fatherhood Initiative, 2002),
p. 153; David Popenoe, Life Without Father (Free Press, 1996), p. 145; Thomas G.
Powers et al., “Compliance and Self-Assertion,” in Developmental Psychology 30
(1994); Kyle Pruett, Fatherneed (Broadway Books, 2000), pp. 32–33.
8. Powers, pp. 980–989.
9. Popenoe, pp. 143–144.
10. Pruett, p. 28; Michael Lamb, “Infant-Father Attachments and Their Impact on Child
Development” in Handbook of Father Involvement (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002).
11. Parke, p. 138.
12. John Snarey, quoted in Popenoe, p. 144.
11
13. Pruett, pp. 30–31; Popenoe, pp. 144–145.
14. J. Mosley and E. Thompson, “Fathering Behavior and Child Outcomes” in Fatherhood (Sage).
15. Popenoe, pp. 145–146.
16. Both studies Popenoe, p. 146.
17. Paul Amato and Alan Booth, A Generation at Risk (Harvard University Press, 1997);
Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent (Harvard
University Press, 1994).
18. Popenoe, pp. 154 and 157.
19. Cynthia Harper and Sara McLanahan, “Father Absence and Youth Incarceration,”
forthcoming in Journal of Research on Adolescence.
20. Eric Brenner, Fathers in Prison (National Center on Fathers and Families, 1999).
21. Robert Sampson, “Unemployment and Imbalanced Sex Ratios” in The Decline in
Marriage Among African Americans (Russell Sage Foundation, 1995), p. 249. See also Catherine Cubbin et al., “Social Context and Geographic Patterns of Homicide
among U.S. Black and White Males” in American Journal of Public Health 90
(2000); Michael R. Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi, A General Theory of Crime
(Stanford University Press, 1990).
22. Both studies Carol W. Metzler et al., “The Social Context for Risky Sexual Behavior
Among Adolescents,” Journal of Behavioral Medicine 17 (1994); Popenoe, pp. 158–
160.
23. Bruce Ellis et al., “Does Father Absence Place Daughters at Special Risk for Early
Sexual Activity and Teenage Pregnancy?” in Child Development 74; Bruce Ellis, “Of
Fathers and Pheromones,” in Just Living Together (Lawrence Erlbaum).
24. W. Bradford Wilcox, forthcoming.
25. Ellis et al.
26. Maccoby, p. 314
W. Bradford Wilcox is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia
and the author of Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
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Teaching Girls and Boys Differently: PsychologistDoctor Tells Why Divergences Run Deep
NEW YORK, JULY 9, 2005 (Zenit.org)
Boys and girls have marked physical and psychological differences and hence they
have to be educated differently. This is the thesis of a book published earlier this year by
psychologist and family doctor Leonard Sax. In “Why Gender Matters” (Random
House), he takes issue with the modern tendency toward gender-neutral child-rearing.
According to this theory boys and girls behave differently because of the way they are
educated, or because of cultural factors. Sax describes how in the mid-1990s he began to
see more and more young boys arrive at his office with requests for medication, due to
their supposed attention-deficit disorder. The real problem, Sax eventually discovered,
was that the second- and third-graders were being educated by teachers who did not understand the differences in how boys and girls learn. For a start, he explains, a girl’s sense
of hearing is more sensitive than that of boys, so the tone of voice used by a female
teacher may be fine for the girls, but does not engage a boy's attention.
This experience sparked off Sax's interest in the subject of sex-based differences. His
research showed that behavioral differences are not just caused by cultural factors. Research into men and women who have suffered strokes reveals that in men the left and
right hemispheres of the brain are strongly compartmentalized, with the former dedicated
to verbal skills and the latter to spatial functions. This division does not exist in women,
who use both hemispheres of the brain for language. And analysis of human brain tissue
shows that there is a difference in its composition, at the level of the proteins. This difference is not due to hormonal changes that occur at puberty, but is something innate and is
present even in children.
Sax also notes that girls and women can generally interpret facial expressions better
than most boys and men. He cites research carried out at Cambridge University, showing
that even young babies reveal differences in the way they pay attention to objects. Female
babies are more interested in other people's faces, while male babies prefer to pay attention to moving objects.
Seeing differently. In fact, evidence exists that from the composition of the retina to
the way images are processed by the brain, there are notable differences between males
and females. This results in females being more aware of differences in color and texture,
while males discern with greater facility location, direction and speed. This difference is
then reflected in the toys that young children prefer — dolls for girls and trucks for boys
— and the type of pictures they draw, with girls using more colors and including more
people in their drawings.
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This has consequences when it comes to schooling, Sax explains. Given that most
kindergarten teachers are women they tend to encourage their students to draw people
and to use lots of colors. This can lead to discouragement among boys, whose different
style of drawing is not appreciated by the teacher, leading them to conclude that “art is
for girls.” Male and female differences are also evident in the way people navigate. Men
are more likely to use abstract concepts such as north and south, and to refer to distances.
Women, by contrast, prefer using visual landmarks. Neuroscientists have found, Sax noted, that even by the age of 5 the male brain uses a different part of the brain to navigate,
the hippocampus, while the female brain relies on the cerebral cortex.
Feelings. Notable differences also exist in how emotions are handled. Children are
generally not capable of analyzing their emotions, because this area of their brain has not
yet developed. In adolescence, emotions are increasingly dealt with by the cerebral cortex, the area of the brain associated with higher cognitive functions. But this change is
far more pronounced in girls’ brains than in those of boys. So, if at school adolescents are
asked by their teachers to write or talk about their emotions this places boys at a disadvantage.
Another area with marked differences between males and females is in the willingness to accept risk. Most boys enjoy taking risks, and are also impressed by other boys
who take risks. This is not the same for girls, who generally are less likely to seek out
risky situations just for the sake of it. Boys are also more likely to disobey their parents
when told not do something risky. Sax explained that while boys enjoy doing risky
things, they also systematically overestimate their own ability, whereas girls are likely to
underestimate it. Researchers at Boston University noted that almost all drowning victims
are male, for example. They concluded that a major contributing factor to this was that
males consistently overestimated their swimming ability.
Boys are also more attracted to violence and conflict — for example, in their reading
preferences — than girls are. And in their relations with others, boys are notably readier
to fight and to respond aggressively than girls.
Friendships are also carried out differently. Girls tend to organize their friendships
around spending time together, talking and going to places. Friendships among boys,
however, revolve around a common interest in games and activities, with conversation
and secret-sharing not holding a high priority.
Brain development. Learning methods between the sexes vary greatly too. Most girls,
Sax explained, naturally tend to seek out a teacher's help, are more likely to follow instructions, and to do their homework. Boys, by contrast, will generally only consult a
teacher as a last resort and are less likely to study if they find a subject uninteresting. And
when it comes to motivating students, boys respond well to stress created by confrontation or time-constrained tasks, an approach that does not give good results for girls.
Sax is careful to point out that every child is unique and, also, that not all boys or all
girls are the same. At the same time, he writes, this “should not blind us to the fact that
gender is one of the two great organizing principles in child development — the other
principle being age.” Girls and boys, he explained, differ substantially in the speed with
which their brains mature. The various regions of the brain develop in a different sequence in girls compared to boys. Therefore, rather than saying that boys develop more
14
slowly than girls, it is more accurate to affirm that girls and boys develop at a different
pace. Language skills develop earlier in girls, for example, while spatial memory matures
earlier in boys.
In fact, Sax argued, these differences in cerebral capacities between the sexes are
larger and more important during childhood and adolescence than the differences between adults, when both males and females have reached full maturity. This difference,
he argues, should be acknowledged by educators, and then used positively. Just trying to
stop boys from fighting among themselves or playing dangerous games, for example, is
insufficient. The solution is not to try and eliminate this aggression in males, but to transform it by providing constructive alternatives. And when it comes to teaching, instead of
prescribing medications to boys to treat attention problems, a better solution would be to
separate the sexes and use teaching methods appropriate for each sex. In a word: letting
boys be boys.
15
What Does the Future Bring?
The historical novelty of our current social arrangement is pointed out dramatically
by Marion J. Levy, Jr., a sociologist who has studied extensively the process of modernization:
Our young are the first people of whom the following can be said: if they are
males, they and their fathers and their brothers and sons and all the males they know
are overwhelmingly likely to have been reared under the direct domination and supervision of females from birth to maturity. No less important is the fact that their
mothers and their sisters and their girl friends and their wives and all of the ladies
with whom they have to do have had to do only with males so reared. Most of us have
not even noticed this change, nor do we have any realization of its radicality. We certainly do not have any systematic body of speculation on what the significance of so
radical a change is or could be. To put the matter as dramatically as possible, we do
not even know whether viable human beings can over any long period of time be
reared in such a fashion. After all, this has never held true of any substantial proportion of any population for even one generation in the history of the world until the last
fifty years. This has not held true for two generations, for any substantial portion of
any population for more than twenty years at the outside. It has not yet characterized
any substantial portion of any population for three generations, but most of those living today will live to see what this will be like! ...
This sexual revolution has come on little cat’s feet. So far no high levels of violence have been directly associated with this revolution, though we certainly don’t
know that these changes have nothing to do with the increasing levels of violence that
seem to characterize both the highly modernized and latecomers to modernization as
well. If the change to which I point has taken place on anything like the scale that I
allege, nothing is less likely than that it makes no difference or very little difference.
From Marion J. Levy, Modernization: Latecomers and Survivors, (New York: Basic
Books, 1972), pp. 117, 119-120.
16
What Men Are Like
This is a collection of readings about what men are like with a special focus on how
Christian things can be made more attractive to men. The last two were written by women.
What Sports Illustrate
Anthony Esolen on the Obvious Truth About Young Men & Religion
A few years ago, when I was traveling with my family through Italy, we stopped in
the Calabrian town where my grandfather was born. There something happened—a trivial
incident—that I return to whenever I wish to appreciate anew the wisdom of the Creator,
who in his exuberant comedy created us male and female.
We were in my cousin Francesco’s shop when his young son came racing home
from school. He stayed only long enough to let his father know he was off to the church,
and before his father could reply, the door had swung shut.
“The church?” I asked Francesco. “It’s Wednesday afternoon. Why is he going to
the church?”
“Oh, these priests are shrewd,” he said. “They bring the altar boys in for practice,
and then they let them use the game room they have in back. There’s a pool table and
everything.”
Not Good-for-Nothings
This I had to see, so I made my way to the small piazza tucked away behind the
church: On one side stands the church itself, with two doors leading I don’t know where;
on the street side there’s a building or two, blocking most of the piazza from sight; and on
the third side there’s a wall with standpipes, sheltering a nearly vertical embankment of
about twenty feet. As soon as I rounded the buildings and entered the piazza, I saw five
or six boys, between eight and eleven years old, lighting a smoke bomb at the foot of the
church.
“Che fai, monelli?” I shouted at them, and they approached me. “Noi non siamo
monelli,” they protested—“We aren’t good-for-nothings!”
17
With that amicable greeting, we proceeded to establish that I was that American
come to town to visit, and, conversation naturally turning to sports, they asked me to
show them what baseball was like. A soccer ball and a broomstick had to serve. So I
pitched a few, using the church wall as the backstop, and they hit a few, until, inevitably,
the ball went over the standpipes and down the embankment.
That should have ended it, but one of the boys ran up and said, “I’ll go,” and go he
did, scrambling over and down the wall like a construction worker. In the meantime, several teenagers had noticed that something was going on and had entered the piazza, proceeding to wrest the “bat” from the smaller boys and to chase them and cuff them. When
they learned I was the American, they came over to talk.
I’m not sure how it happened—probably it was spurred by my answering that I was
a professor at someplace called the “Collegio di Provvedenza”—but all at once one of the
teenagers piped up, motioning towards his friend. “Pietro qui non crede in Dio!”
And why did Peter not believe in God?
“Io credo nella scienza,” said Peter proudly. “Il big bang!”
That began ten minutes of argument about what science does and does not do, and
can and cannot prove, with the other boys pitching in sometimes and generally enjoying
the sport. So it went on until one of them committed, audibly, what you would call a minor social indiscretion.
“Hai scoreggiato,” I remarked. And the boys burst into laughter—how did the
American know that word?—and proceeded to cuff the offender, the conversation having
reached its comic punctuation.
Never in America
What I noticed right away about this incident is that it couldn’t have happened in
America, nowadays. None of the details fit. The American boys are not being called for
altar service; they are not playing outside; if they are getting into trouble, it is more serious than the mischief of a smoke bomb; no one addresses a stranger; the embankment has
a chain link fence, not so much to prevent accidents as to protect people from being sued
for them; the boys are too bored to learn a strange game; the teenagers are suspicious of
grown men; the older boys and younger boys avoid each other; no conversation gets off
the ground, much less a conversation about the existence of God.
At first, I attributed the incident to Italy, and it does have an Italian dash to it. But
such things could once have happened in America, and probably used to, back when children did not have their days devoured by television and its secret ally the totalitarian
school, when they could go outside because somebody was home to deal with a skinned
knee or the rare broken bone. But it cannot happen in America now. I might get questioned by the police.
Yet there’s another thing about this story that demands attention. It’s so obvious
that we miss it. All the characters are male. They are all boys, even the boyish professor.
Keep the scene and make every character female. It doesn’t happen. The mischief, the
sport (physical and intellectual), the pugnacious teasing, the intellectual pride, the sub-
18
mission to One Who Knows, the behavior ranging from reverent to gross—it doesn’t
happen.
That is not how girls are, nor how women are, nor even how female college professors are. I’ve asked many women I know to confirm it, and they agree. Indeed, my
daughter enjoys re-hearing the story, not to remind her of Italy, but to delight vicariously
in the antics of a sex so different from her own.
What of it? Traditional wisdom, as opposed to the quackery of gnosticism, is built
upon the obvious. The Lord did not intend for us to rely on geniuses to figure out how to
get along with each other. The obvious is a miracle overlooked. Chesterton was said to
have been a master at seeing the obvious, and that was no insult: Only second-rate minds
descend into the arcane. But in the case of the special gifts boys bring and the special
challenges they present, we are talking about obvious facts not just overlooked but energetically denied. That is worse than foolish. It is cruel to the boys and an affront to the
Creator.
What are the obvious insights—not an oxymoron, for there are things that everybody not self-blinded ought to know—to be gleaned from what happened to me in that
Calabrian town? There are many, I think, but one, the most obvious, is the most feared
and denied: Boys will place their intellectual trust in men, not in women. I do not mean
that women cannot teach boys. I mean that ultimately the boy will and must look to a
man for the formation of his intellectual character.
That is related to the more general truth that a boy needs a father, because someday
a boy has to become a man. Boys are proud to fight over the ultimate questions on a
wholly intellectual level (so they believe), free of emotion. They sense that a man will
allow them to do that, while a woman will not. In this cool estimation they are not entirely wrong. And so boys are drawn to a combination of competition, instruction, and male
leadership. How can we have forgotten, when every culture’s educational system used to
testify to it?
A Manly Institution
Indeed, how can we have forgotten it, when we Americans ourselves still possess
an institution, impossible to miss, that even now testifies to it? This institution, unlike
many churches (alas), stirs the passions and the intellectual interests of millions of people, most of them men and boys, but many of them women who, like my daughter hearing the story of the piazza, find in it a curious appeal. It requires from its initiates an intellectual discipline that would crush the typical indolent professor. It requires memorization and improvisation, and the former had better be exact and the latter had better be ingenious.
It punishes failure, sometimes cruelly. It demands a recognition of and obedience to
authority; yet it understands that hierarchy, too, must submit to the common good. Its
physical demands are unimaginable to those who have not experienced them; according
to those who have known both, it makes boot camp look like a beauty pageant. Men who
participate are under constant physical stress and are usually in pain. The enterprise is
dangerous. Though the institution has its glamor, most of the participants are relatively
unknown, and most of them will also, quite willingly, participate by adopting roles that
19
ensure their anonymity among all but the knowledgeable few. The institution requires
giving oneself up, day after day.
Its participants are all men. Its leaders are not only men, but men of a type now
scorned: masculine, law-setting, thinking and feeling generals whom other men are ready
to obey and for whom they will fight. Given the sheer physical might of the men, it is inevitable that some should turn to violence—as some men in any walk of life will, likewise. What is remarkable is that so few of them do. And more remarkable are the enduring friendships this institution builds among those men.
Most remarkable of all, though, is the spirituality that grows up among them. Not
for all, mind you; but if you take a hundred of these men and compare them with a hundred men and women from any other profession in America, you will see the difference.
There is something preparative, in obeying one’s leader, to obeying Christ. There is
something faintly similar, in enduring pain cheerfully, to imitating Christ. There is something distantly akin, in allowing oneself to be hurt repeatedly to protect one’s brother
without garnering more than a hint of glory, to being Christ, to taking up one’s cross and
following him.
That is why this institution, football, produces the most deeply religious men in all
of sports. Possessed of more asceticism in a single week than the entire post-Vatican II
Catholic Church practices in a year, possessed of a healthier respect for authority in a
trivial matter than have our laity and clergy in the matter of our eternal destiny, football is
not just a sport for men. It is a haven.
We men can at least pretend it means something, and admire the courage, the endurance, the self-sacrifice, and the obedience of men whose shoulders are broader and
whose legs are faster than ours, even as we hope that our hearts are no less brave. We
can, I say, pretend that it means something. Too often, boys cannot pretend that what they
“learn” in school means anything, and, alas too often, neither men nor boys can pretend
that the saccharine social welfare pronouncements from the pulpit, exhorting us to follow
the great god Smiley, mean anything either.
If it is said that women are more spiritual than men because more of them are to be
found in churchly places, I’m not buying. I’ll take the sacramentality of football over the
spirituality of uplifting chatter any day. A true man, and there are many still, struggling to
be both true and man, would sooner have his right arm wither than change his loyalty to
the Pittsburgh Steelers. Yet he leaves the Church. Why? Sin, of course; but in fact the
Pittsburgh Steelers present themselves as more worthy of his loyalty than does a church
that demands nothing. Of course, he is wrong. But they are more wrong who have made
it so easy for him to go wrong.
Priests & Men
And what are the insights to be gleaned from this strange but obvious spirituality of
football? This for one: Priests must be men. I do not say males. I grow weary of the brittle arguments that rest two thousand years of our tradition, which is to say two thousand
years of common sense, upon the arcana of sexual symbolism. The only way the sexual
symbolism can work, for us embodied human beings, is if it reminds us of sexual reality
20
anyway. If a priest is a male but not much of a man, I had rather he were a woman; at
least I’d know where I stood.
Once everything is posed in terms of what women can or cannot do, or how a new
law might or might not affect women, we have given up the game and the feminists have
won. Instead, the question should be posed in these terms: What sort of leadership do we
look for from men, particularly from fathers or from those who serve a fatherly role?
What is it about some men that can inspire obedience, even when obedience requires sacrifice and suffering? What do we look for in a minister to the King?
I am no priest—but I am a father. Lest anyone think that being a priest has nothing
to do with fatherhood, I ask, for the sake of those boys, and that means ultimately for the
sake of the families they will father, that she, or he, think of my story. Can you be not
only a teacher, but a teacher who rebukes, loves, lays down the law, and naturally draws
the most recalcitrant to you? For you are sent to the pagan and the prodigal, to the enemy
and the atheist.
Will the young men listen to a word you are saying when you are telling them they
are wrong? Will they obey when you require from them sacrifice that their friends would
consider absurd? No one can do that, you retort? Football coaches do that for a living.
Can you be, not den mother to emotional dependents, not archsongster of a liturgical
club, but a master, a colonel, a vice-gerent, a father who can eschew the moment of truce
because he sees, for the hosts he loves and leads, a distant glory?
Can you give men the courage to suffer and obey and restore their lives to order, as
did the stern, soft-spoken, Christian coach of the Dallas Cowboys, Tom Landry? Can you
be the head, as Christ is the Head of the Church? Is that the aspiration you believe the
Lord has placed in your heart?
Let us then forget about whether women can be priests, an innovation that Scripture
wisely forbids. Let us instead try hard to see what men and women are, and what a priest
is supposed to be. If we could see a few obvious things there, the minor question of
women’s ordination would fade away—and a lot of major problems would fade with it.
Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, and the translator of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (Johns Hopkins Press) and
Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House).
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Excerpt from “Shooting the Rapids”
Anthony Esolen on Manhood in the Making
A Canoe Ride
They say that when boys are by themselves they run brutish and cruel. Yes, I know
about hazing, I know about initiation rites; but on the whole I have found the situation to
be otherwise. I think of the passage from boyhood to manhood as like a canoe ride down
bad rapids. If you are alone in that canoe you will wreck. If there are girls in that canoe,
and if you are, as I was, shy or clumsy or un-athletic or just a late bloomer, you will be
thrown overboard. You will be thrown overboard, and the girls will lend a hand.
Boys with whom you might exchange a word or two will turn surly or just plain deaf
in the presence of girls; there’s no abuse more effectively than that which boys visit upon
each other when girls are watching. This really shouldn’t come as a surprise. Put one or
two girls on a Little League team, and have them outplay two or three of the boys. The
best ballplayers will be too preoccupied with making sure that they beat the girls to bother with the runts, and the runts will be humiliated. I probably would not have signed up
for such a team in the first place.
But I look back upon it and see that I needed that Little League team, with my .058
average and all, and needed it desperately. I tried my best, we were all boys, there were
no girls around when we practiced (which was for me more enjoyable than the game), the
grown men took us seriously and kept us reasonably in line, and, under such circumstances, the other boys on my team forgave my strikeouts, and we moped together when
we lost and celebrated together when we won.
When I got to high school the same sort of thing happened. Schools hadn’t yet visited
upon kids like me the insanity of coed gym; so our coach, who was also baseball and
basketball or football or dodge ball, would give us boys a basketball or football or dodge
ball, sometimes show us a thing or two, and let us have fun. Under such circumstances
the better athletes took the rest of us in hand. Without getting too sentimental about it,
they were kind. They’d still choose up sides, and you’d still be chosen last or next to last,
but they’d make as if they’d gotten the better deal of it and that the other captain was a
dope. They were good. When girls came by, they were different.
I’m sure the Higher Achievement Program is no more. But that goodhearted priest
had been given a grace, and he returned the grace. It’s sad for me to consider that no such
program for boys is possible now, now of all times, when there are at least as many boys
like me and like those city toughs who would need it, and when so many boys do not
grow up in the same homes with their fathers. Boys Town is Girls and Boys Town: The
old Boys Club are Boys and Girls Clubs.
I used to do umpiring for Little League, but can’t bring myself to do it now; the folly
of it all, the over-organization, the stratification into levels of ability, the girls in the dug22
out, even mothers in coaching boxes, all make me wince. There is no Citadel, there is no
VMI. There are altar servers, not altar boys.
A Sole Preserve
That some things needn’t have been the sole preserve of boys never meant that nothing at all need have been. What do we call it when people who merely want something
take away or spoiled from those who need it? The girls are not to blame—they’re only
kids, after all. The parents and the other ostensible grownups are to blame. The lawmakers and lawyers and teacher are to blame. The churches are to blame.
It occurs to me; finally, that everything I have heard for thirty years now about how
we all want men and boys to express their feelings has been a bald lie. The last thing we
want is that men and boys express their feelings. They may, if they wish, express feelings
or weakness: They may cry, if they like, or be afraid, or look to their mothers for comfort.
They may not, however, show anger or indignation; they may not exult; they may not
be proud of their masculinity. As for their need, emotional more than intellectual but
surely both, to work with other boys or with men at something they can take pride in—
and their fear of humiliation or embarrassment before their more articulate sisters—well,
those on the left sneer and those on the right cough and look the other way.
That is cruelty and callousness I at least was spared.
23
David Murrow, Why Men Hate Going to Church (Nashville TN: Nelson, 2005).
Check Your Manhood At The Door
Not every man has a specific reason for hating to go to church. Some just feel a general
unease with it. Rod says, “Church just doesn’t work for me.” Lance is a little more specific: “The style of worship is not compelling to me. It’s just the feel of the whole thing.
Emotionally, the style doesn’t connect with me.” Conrad is blunt: “Every Sunday I feel
like I’m supposed to check my manhood at the door.” Why do men feel manhood and
Christianity are incompatible? Here are some specifics:
CHRISTIANS EMPHASIZE CHRIST’S FEMININE CHARACTERISTICS
WHILE IGNORING HIS MASCULINE ONES
As we saw in chapter 4, when people think of Christ, they think of His feminine side.
How does this happen? The feminization of Jesus begins in Sunday school. Think of the
images of Christ you saw as a child. Didn’t they suggest a gentle, meek Savior, a wellgroomed and tidy man wearing a shining white dress? In these paintings He taps gently
on a door, plays with children, or stares lovingly into the eyes of a lamb nestled in His
arm. Although these images are comforting, they do little to suggest masculine strength
and resolve. Bruce Barton attacked these holy pictures: “They have shown us a frail man,
under-muscled with a soft face—a woman’s face covered by a beard—and a benign but
baffled look. 1 ” Jesuit priest Patrick Arnold laments Christ’s frequent portrayal as a
bearded lady. Christ has become, as John Eldredge puts it, “Mister Rogers with a beard.
Telling me to be like him feels like telling me to go limp and passive. Be nice. Be swell.
Be like Mother Teresa.”2
Christians have so accepted the non-masculine Jesus that the very idea that He could
be sexually tempted touched off a firestorm with the release of the film The Last Temptation of Christ. I’m not defending this wretched movie, but the Bible says that Jesus was
“tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin” (Heb. 4:15 NIV). Nevertheless, many Christians couldn’t imagine Jesus tempted by sex. “He’s just not that kind of
man,” said one woman at the time.
No, He is gentle Jesus, meek and mild. This perception is widely held inside and outside the church. When people are quoted in the media about the character of Jesus, they
always stress His sensitivity, inclusivity and tender compassion. Politicians refer to this
1
2
Barton, The Man Nobody Knows, 23.
Eldredge, Wild at Heart, 22.
24
Jesus when justifying more government spending. Our songs reflect this view as well:
“Jesus, what a wonder You are! You are so gentle, so pure, and so kind.”
Apparently, Jesus is so nice He prefers to lose. Kevin Leman tells the story of a
mother who caught her two boys arguing over who would get the first pancake. Mom
thought she had a golden opportunity to provide a moral lesson, so she said, “If Jesus
were sitting here, He would say, ‘Let my brother have the first pancake. I can wait.’” The
older son turned to his brother and said, “Ryan, you be Jesus.”3
Liberal churches have re-created Christ as a benevolent Teacher who is always gentle, tender, and accepting. This Christ would never offend anyone, never judge anyone,
and of course, never send anyone to hell. If this Christ were a radio station, His slogan
would be “all tenderness, all the time.”
There are two problems with this view of Jesus: (1) it’s not accurate, and (2) no man
wants to follow a feminized man. Men are looking for a real man to follow: dynamic,
outspoken, bold, sharp-edged. They want a leader who is decisive, tough, and fair. They
respect a man who tells it like it is and doesn’t mince words, even when it makes them
mad. Men most respect a leader who doesn’t care what others think of him.
Ironic, isn’t it? The Jesus of Scripture was exactly this kind of man. He was fearsome:
the Bible says the disciples were “terrified” of Him (Mark 4:41 NIV), and “no one dared
ask him any more questions” (Mark 12:34 NIV). He was abrasive: He had no qualms
about offending people (Matt. 15:12), and He regularly ridiculed His disciples for their
thick-headedness (Matt. 15:16). He was ill mannered: He walked into a dinner party and
immediately began insulting His host (Luke 11:37-53). Truth is, the Jesus of Scripture is
more General Patton than Mister Rogers. Jesus Christ is the most courageous, masculine
man ever to walk the earth. But we’ve turned Him into a wimp. His manliness and toughness are seldom spoken of, and men fall away because of it. Present the Christ of Scripture, and men will be irresistibly drawn to Him.
CHRISTIANS EMPLOY FEMININE THEMES,
IMAGERY, AND VOCABULARY
Ninety-five percent of the senior pastors in America are men, but you could not tell it by
the sermons they preach. Weakness, humility, relationships, communication, support, and
feelings are constantly held up as the real values of a Christian. Again, men get the message that Christlikeness is synonymous with Mom-likeness. When was the last time you
heard a sermon on competence, efficiency, or achievement? Each of these words describes Jesus, yet He’s rarely credited with these attributes.
It’s not just pastors: feminine terminology flows freely from the lips of churchgoers.
References to sharing, communication, relationships, support, nurturing, feelings, and
community are sprinkled throughout the conversation of Christians—both men and women. Gordon MacDonald finds it strange that Christian men use words such as precious,
tender, and gentle. MacDonald admits these are nice words, but not typical masculine
3
Leman, Making Sense of the Men in Your Life, 26.
25
conversation. 4 Woody Davis found that Christian men emphasize themes and endorse
messages that unchurched people—both men and women—regard as womanly. In other
words, Christian men talk and think like women, at least in the eyes of the unchurched.5
Mainline churches have adopted inclusive language, stripping masculine pronouns
from hymns, liturgy and even Scripture, in an effort to make women feel more comfortable in church. It seems to be working: 60 to 75 percent of the adults in our mainline congregations are female. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit no longer authorize our baptisms;
that power now rests with the androgynous Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Bible
translations are expunging masculine references: for example, we are no longer sons of
God but children of God. Interestingly, feminine allusions such as the bride of Christ are
still widely accepted.
Conservatives use man-repellent terminology as well. For example, in the Baptist
universe you have two kinds of people: the saved and the lost. Men hate to be lost; that’s
why they don’t ask for directions. If you tell a man he’s lost, he will instinctively resist
you! George Barna notes that a majority of un-churched people resent being referred to as
lost.6 And the only thing worse than being lost is being saved. The term drips with passivity. I’ve heard many a man ridicule Christianity by crying out, “Hallelujah, I’m saved!”
When Hollywood released a movie mocking Christians, they titled it Saved!
Although Jesus used the term saved a number of times in the Gospels, only twice did
He pronounce someone saved (Luke 7:50; 19:9). But He called many to follow Him. Hear
the difference? Follow gives a man something to do. It suggests activity instead of passivity but being saved is something that happens to damsels in distress. It’s the feminine
role. So why not use the descriptor that Jesus preferred? By calling men to follow Jesus,
we put Christ’s offer in active terms that appeal to everyone—especially men.
Another term from the feminine side is sharing. Christians are constantly being asked
to share, as in, “Steve, would you please share with us what the Lord has placed on your
heart?” Regular men don’t talk this way. It sounds too much like kindergarten. Imagine a
gang member saying to one of his brothers, “Blade, would you please share with us how
you jacked that Mercedes?”
Jesus spoke constantly of the kingdom of God. Men are kingdom builders. They think
hierarchically. But many churches have replaced the masculine term kingdom of God
with the more feminine family of God. Jesus never uttered this phrase. It never appears in
the Bible.7 But we prefer family of God because it resonates with the feminine heart.
The term relationship gets a workout in church today. Evangelical churches frequently invite people to enter into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Does that phrase
appear in the Bible? Nope. Nowhere does Scripture invite us to have a relationship with
Gordon MacDonald, “The Conquering Male,” New Man Magazine, July/August 2003, 29.
Woody I. Davis, “Evangelizing the Pre-Christian Male,” Net Results, June 2001, 4,
www.netresults.org.
6
George Barna, “Unchurched Nation,” Moody Magazine, July/August 2003, 34.
7
The phrase “family of God” does not appear in the King James, New American Standard, or Young’s
Literal Translation. It appears once in the New International Version—1 Peter 4:17—but it is not a happy
reference. Rather, it is a warning of impending judgment!
4
5
26
God or Jesus. Yet it has become the most popular way to describe the Christian walk!
Why? Because it frames the gospel in terms of a woman’s deepest desire—a personal relationship with a man who loves her unconditionally.
Nowadays it’s not enough to have a personal relationship with Jesus; many of today’s
top speakers encourage men to have a passionate relationship with Him. These teachers
have chosen a very uncomfortable metaphor to describe discipleship! Speaking as a man,
the idea of having a passionate relationship with another man is just plain gross. Then we
have the ever-popular intimacy with God. When men hear the word intimacy, the first
thing that comes to mind is sex. Those dirty-minded guys! But guess what? Whenever the
words passionate and intimate appear in the Bible, they always refer to sex or lust.
When a man loves another man, he uses terms such as admire, look up to, and respect. Men do not speak of passionate, intimate, or even personal relationships with their
leaders or male friends. Can you imagine a couple of bikers having this conversation?
BIKER 1: Hey, Spike, let’s go for a ride in the desert so we can have a passionate relationship.
BIKER 2: Sure Rocco I’d like to enjoy some intimacy with you
It gets worse. More than once, I’ve been exhorted by a prominent men’s minister to
have a love affair with Jesus. I just saw a new book for Christian men: Kissing the Face
of God. An ad for the book invites men to “get close enough to reach up and kiss His
face!”8 Time out—this is a men’s book? Yikes! With the spotlight on homosexuality in
the church, why do we increase men’s doubts by using the language of romance to describe the Christian walk? Conservative churches may oppose homosexuality but their
imagery is sending another message entirely. The more we describe Christianity as a passionate, intimate: face-kissing relationship, the more nervous men become.
Ministers and teachers, I beg you to be more careful with these terms. Men are very
sensitive about their manhood. Using bedroom vocabulary to describe Christianity is not
only unbiblical, but it sows doubt in men’s subconscious minds. Here’s my rule of
thumb: when describing the things of God, use terms that would sound right on a construction site. Try words such as friendship and partnership. Challenge men to follow
God or walk with Christ. See the difference it makes!
One more thing on relationships: men really do need to have a relationship with God.
Religion without relationship is bondage! But men are not relationship oriented. Relationship is not a term men use in conversation, except when describing a male-female
couple. Also, men file their relationships by what they do together; they have fishing
buddies, business partners, army friends, and so forth. It’s helpful to talk about God in the
same active terms. Instead of encouraging men to have a personal relationship with Jesus, encourage them to walk with Christ. Invite them to partner with Jesus in changing
the world. Challenge them to build the kingdom of God. Now you’re talking a language
that men can understand. (One more quibble: Why are Christians always going on retreats? What kind of army is always retreating? Why don’t we advance now and then?)
8
Advertisement in New Man Magazine. The book is called Kissing the Face of God: Enter a New Realm
of Worship More Wonderful Than You Can Imagine, by Sam Hinn.
27
MUSIC IN THE LOCAL CHURCH FITS THE TASTES AND
SENSIBILITIES OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN
Children’s songs about Jesus always present His gentle side. I learned this song before I
was three years old:
Away in a manger, no crib for a bed,
The little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head.
The stars in the sky looked down where he lay,
The little Lord Jesus, asleep on the hay.
Such songs are appropriate for children, but many people carry a picture of sweet,
passive, sleeping Jesus their entire lives. Some boys never recover from this image. To
balance this impression, the church used to allow aggressive, warlike images of Jesus as
well. In 1865 English composer Sabine Baring-Gould wrote this song as a children’s
march:
Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before.
Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe;
Forward into battle, see His banners go!
But by the turn of the twentieth century, hymns had taken a decisive move toward the
feminine. In 1913, C. Austin Miles wrote “In the Garden.” Notice the difference in tone:
He speaks, and the sound of His voice
Is so sweet the birds hush their singing;
And the melody that He gave to me
Within my heart is ringing.
And He walks with me, and He talks with me
And He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known
“Onward, Christian Soldiers” is passé in most congregations, but “In the Garden” is
still widely sung. Christ has put down His sword and picked up a daisy. He is no longer a
warrior; He is a lover. The very image Christ taking up arms (as He does in Revelation
19) is simply unacceptable in a lot of churches today.
Praise music has accelerated this trend. Not only are the lyrics of many of these songs
quite romantic, but they have the same breathless feel as top forty love songs.9
“Hold me close, let your love surround me. Bring me near, draw me to your side.”
Here are the titles and writers of the songs mentioned here: “The Power of your Love” by Geoff Bullock (copyright 1992 Word Music, Inc. Maranatha Music—CCLI 917491); “Breathe” by Marie Barnett
(copyright 1995 Mercy/Vineyard Publishing—CCLI 874117); “Let My Words Be Few” by Beth and Matt
Redman (copyright 2000 Thank you Music—CCLI 14514); “You are so Good to me” by Ben Pasley, Don
Chaffer, and Robin Pasley (copyright 1999 Blue Renaissance Music, Hey Ruth Music, Squit Songs—CCLI
2757944).
9
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“I am desperate for you, I’m lost without you.”
“Let my words be few. Jesus I am so in love with you.”
“You are altogether lovely altogether wonderful to me.”
“Oh Lord, you’re beautiful. Your face is all I seek.”
“You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet song.”
Think of the mental gymnastics that must take place inside a man’s subconscious
mind as he sings lyrics like these. He’s trying to express his love to Jesus, a man who
lives today, using words no man would dare say to another, set to music that sounds like
the love songs his wife listens to in the car. (By the way, men never call each other beautiful, lovely or wonderful.)
I think this is why women generally enjoy praise music more than men do. Lyrically
and stylistically, praise music resonates with a woman’s heart. Men can and do enjoy
praise music, but it’s an acquired taste.
We can’t go back to “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” But no one has composed masculine praise songs to take its place. Songwriters, please fashion some songs that speak of
battle, strength, and victory. Imagine Christ as our Commander, Coach, or Scout, not our
Boyfriend. If you need inspiration, look to the Psalms. It’s time to balance Christ the
Lover with Christ the Warrior again. The men are depending on you.
…
FEMININE HOLINESS IS THE NORM IN CHRISTIANITY
Oftentimes men’s holiness is mistaken for sin because it does not look like holiness. Our
modern notions of holy behavior were formed during the 1800s, the era when women
completely dominated church pews. Victorian women were expected to conduct themselves in a certain way and we still focus lots of energy on getting Christians of both genders to behave as such. So when a man tries to be godly in a way that feels right to him,
others might see his actions as sinful. Douglas Wilson gives us a terrific example:
Suppose a young girl notices that a friend at school seems somewhat discouraged. She
asks if anything is wrong and leaves an encouraging note in her friend’s locker. She looks
her up after school and offers to pray with her. A teacher who sees all this will naturally
thank God for this obvious dedication to love and good works. But that same teacher will
not readily make this same assumption when he walks by a boy who is slapping a friend
on the back of the head, calling him a fathead—even though the boy was doing this because his friend had asked a non-Christian girl out on a date the night before. His zeal for
righteousness is not recognized as such.10
Few Christians would recognize a slap on the head or name-calling as godly behavior,
yet for a young man ministering to another, such methods are far more effective than
10
Wilson, Future Men, 94.
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notes, cards, or flowers. Bottom line: we often fail to recognize godliness cloaked in the
masculine spirit.
The masculine spirit burst forth unexpectedly in my church just yesterday. The pastor
was halfway through his sermon when he turned to a man in the crowd who recently began walking with God. He asked, “Ray, has becoming a follower of Jesus changed your
life?” In his exuberance, Ray let a mild profanity slip out. After a moment’s pause, Ray
edited himself, “Sorry; I meant to say darn right.”
Did Ray sin? Did his spontaneous utterance please or displease God? If the standard
for holiness is a Victorian womanliness, Ray committed a sin. Christian ladies don’t use
naughty words. But God looks at a man’s heart. Ray’s intent was not to curse, but to
bless. He expressed his love for God using the emphatic language of men. It wasn’t religious, but it was real.
And the men loved it!
CHURCHES DO NOT ALLOW MEN TO ACT LIKE MEN,
AND GET UPSET WHEN THEY DO
There’s something ferocious within a man. John Eldredge says men are wild at heart.
“Aggression is key to the masculine soul,” he explains. “Take that away from a man and
what you have left is passivity” But when men bring ferocity into the church, people get
upset. Things get unpredictable. Feelings get hurt.
Before he became president of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt was a Sunday
school teacher. One day a boy showed up for class with a black eye. He admitted he’d
been fighting, on the Sabbath no less. Another boy was pinching his sister, so he took a
swing at the scoundrel. The future president told the boy he was proud of him and gave
him a dollar. When word of this got ‘round the church, Roosevelt was let go.
TR was caught between two scriptural imperatives: turn the other cheek and defend
the weak. One soft, the other tough. He chose to praise the boy for his tough response, but
was fired for it, because in most churches the right choice is always the soft one.
When men lead like men, they are censured. I remember asking an entrepreneur in
our church to become an elder. He rolled his eyes and said, “No, thanks. I’ve been an elder.” His look said it all. Being a church leader is a frustrating experience, because a man
cannot lead like a man. Instead he must be careful, sentimental, and thrifty; make every
decision by consensus; talk everything to death. Decisions take months or years to make,
and if someone’s feelings might be hurt, we don’t move forward.
Men are also reluctant to volunteer for ministry positions because they can’t act like
men. Men are often more physical with kids, and they communicate by giving noogies,
wrestling, and teasing their protégés. Men take risks in ministry, which can earn them a
rebuke. My friend Randy took the youth group downtown to minister to street people, but
got in trouble for giving a ride to a man who had been drinking. Several mothers were
incensed. “You’re supposed to keep our children safe!” one mother said. “Why can’t you
just meet at the church and teach the Bible?”
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If men are to return to church, we must let them be men. Ferocious, aggressive, risktaking men. We can no longer expect men to act like proper Victorian ladies. Today’s
church needs a few more Teddy Roosevelts.
Nothing in the last three chapters is an absolute soul killer for men. But weighed cumulatively, you have the straws that break men’s fellowship with the church.
It’s not a sin to focus on Jesus’ feminine side, to sing songs that feel feminine, or to
dress up for church. On behalf of men, all I ask is equal time for the masculine spirit.
What do men need? Men need permission. Permission to walk with Christ as one man
walks with another. Permission to use their masculine gifts to change the world. Permission to awaken the long dormant masculine spirit. How we rekindle that spirit in our congregations is the subject of our next section.
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First Things, January 2010
The Killer Instinct
By Sally Thomas
A friend of mine, in her college days, had a bumper sticker that offered this peaceful
counsel: Don’t Buy War Toys. Once, she and a companion were stuck in a traffic jam on
the highway, next to several young men in a pickup on their way home from deer hunting. The traffic was creeping along, one lane inching forward and coming to a halt, the
next lane overtaking it momentarily before stopping a few yards ahead. Every time my
friend’s car had to stop, the men in the pickup pulled alongside, windows cranked down,
and held up various examples of the deer-rifle genre. They also hollered in tones of goodnatured hilarity that became more good-natured and hilarious the lower my friend’s passenger cringed in her seat, “Hey, ladies! Don’t buy war toys? Like this?”
As it happens, in my family, with boys in the house, we do buy war toys—not nuclear
missiles, of course, just the normal assortment of blasters and cork shooters and swords
of various kinds, including an actual antique Indian scimitar in a moth-eaten velvet scabbard, which was the one thing our eleven-year-old wanted for his birthday.
We don’t buy toys of any kind often, mind you, relying as much as we can on nature
to provide materials for hours of imaginative play. And what nature provides a lot of are
war toys. Even as I write this, my front porch and my back steps are littered with sticks.
the boxwoods outside my kitchen window have gone bald under the constant swashbuckling onslaughts of my stick-swinging seven-year-old. Light saber, scimitar, muzzleloader:
A boy with a stick in his hand has all those things and more. So when somebody wants a
weapon for Christmas, we say, Why not? People don’t poke each other’s eyes out with
cap guns.
Girls may like weapons, but boys like the actions that weapons enable. They like
shooting and slashing and stabbing at things, and if they don’t have anything to shoot,
slash, or stab with, punching is good, too. Hand a girl a rock, and she will make a pet out
of it. Hand a boy a baby doll, and—if no adult is looking—he will point its head at somebody and say, “Pow.”
The default mode of many parents is to be as alarmed by this proclivity in their sons
as my friend was by the deer hunters. To be sure, it is wearying, sometimes, to live with a
person whose way of greeting you is to line you up in imaginary sights. I can see that,
after a while, if you didn’t just become oblivious to it, an obvious fascination with shooting things might come to seem like one of those warning signals we all read about: If
Johnny does X, call Dr. Y. It used to be that parents waited for Johnny to start torturing
the cat before they worried. My generation of parents seems to worry that owning a rubber-band shooter will make Johnny want to torture the cat.
As a toddler, one of my sons—he didn’t own any war toys then, as far as I know—
liked to stand behind his baby sister’s chair and pull her head back as far as it would go,
32
to watch it spring up again like a punching bag on its stem. Her round brown eyes opened
wide in astonishment, her mouth formed an O, the whole world went still for an instant,
and then she screamed. From my son’s point of view, it was altogether a gratifying exercise. My intervention was always swift and decisive, not to say hysterical—although I am
struck, now, by the strangeness of what I said to him. We don’t tell someone struggling
with lust simply not to want sex; we don’t tell a glutton that his problem will be solved if
he stops being hungry. Yet, reflexively, over and over, I implored my son, “Don’t be
rough. Be gentle.” I might as well have said, “Stop being a boy.” Anne Roche Muggeridge, who reared four boys in the 1970s and 1980s, observes that
prevailing society now thoroughly regards young men as social invalids. . . . The fashion
in education for the past three decades has been to try to make boys more like girls: to
forbid them their toy guns and rough play, to engage them in exercises of cooperation and
sharing, to involve them in dolls and courses in the domestic arts, to denounce any boyish
roughness as “aggressive” and “sexist.”
Muggeridge writes of a visit to a doctor who urged on her a prescription for Ritalin,
saying that a child as constantly active as her two-year-old son must be disturbed. “He’s
not disturbed,” she responded. “He’s disturbing.” Meanwhile, psychologist Leonard Sax, author of the 2007 book, Boys Adrift, cites the
example of a typical junior-high literature assignment on William Golding’s Lord of the
Flies that a preteen boy has crumpled and left, with other unfinished homework, in the
bottom of his backpack. “Write a short essay in Piggy’s voice, describing how you feel
about the other boys picking on you,” reads the assignment. This is stupid, the boy says,
and he isn’t doing it. Why not? “I’m not Piggy,” the boy says. “I’m not some fat loser. If
I’d been on that island, I’d have smashed his face myself!”
I can’t think of a mother, myself included, who could hear her child voice that sentiment and not cringe. To consider that your baby not only could want to smash another
person’s face but could assert with perfect certainty that he would if the chance arose, is
to recoil in horror. It is to realize, as Anne Roche Muggeridge did while watching her
sons take turns throwing each other into a brick wall, that what you have in your house is
not a human like you but a human unlike you. In short, as Muggeridge puts it, you are
bringing up an alien. And, if that alien has things his way, he will be armed. In Tennyson’s Idylls of the
King, the half-savage Balin laments:
Too high this mount of Camelot for me:
These high-set courtesies are not for me.
Shall I not rather prove the worse for these?
Chivalry, Balin intuits, is at best an imperfect cure for his nature. At court, the company of Lancelot, in thrall to the queen, at first inspires then disgusts him. As long as he
bears a sword for Arthur, Balin has salvation in his grasp. Absent the sword, he chafes
miserably, unmanned and marooned among the courtly lovers. Absent the king, he is
powerless against his own bloodlust.
What I think I have come to understand about boys is that a desire to commit violence
is not the same thing as a desire to commit evil. It’s a mistake for parents to presume that
a fascination with the idea of blowing something away is, in itself, a disgusting habit, like
33
nose-picking, that can and should be eradicated. The problem is not that the boy’s hand
itches for a sword. The problem lies in not telling him what they are for, that they are for
something—the sword and the itch alike. If I had told my aggressive little son not, “Be
gentle,” but, rather, “Protect your sister,” I might, I think, have had the right end of the
stick.
Several years ago, two boys in our parish, faced with a school assignment to form a
“good-citizenship club,” surprised their mother by deciding to start a Eucharisticadoration society. Each month this club, which now numbers more than twenty boys, offers hours of adoration for various prayer intentions. This year, in honor of the Year of
the Priest, the boys are praying for all the priests in our diocese by name, in monthly rotation.
If it seems a little unlikely, this vision of twenty teen and preteen boys choosing to
spend hours of their time kneeling silently in church, let me divulge two secrets. The first
is the name of the club: the Holy Crusaders. They chose, deliberately, a title that evokes
knighthood, even war. No pastel, goody-two-shoes club, this.
The second is the initiation rite, devised and performed by our parish’s young priest
twice a year in the church. This rite involves a series of solemn vows to be “a man of the
Church,” “a man of prayer,” and so forth. It includes induction into the Order of the
Brown Scapular, the bestowing of a decidedly manly red-and-black knot rosary, and the
awarding of a red sash. What the boys look forward to, though, with much teasing of
soon-to-be inductees about sharpened blades and close shaves and collars pulled protectively high on the neck, is the moment when a new boy kneels before Father and is
whacked smartly on each shoulder with a large, impressive, and thoroughly real sword.
These Holy Crusaders are, after all, ordinary boys—sweaty and goofy and physical.
For them to take the Cross—to take it seriously—requires something like a sword. For
them to take the sword, knowing what it’s for, requires the Cross. Heaven forbid, we always say, that our boys should have to go to war. Still, what even a symbolic knighthood
accomplishes is the recognition that a boy’s natural drive to stab and shoot and smash can
be shaped, in his imagination, to the image of sacrifice, of laying down his life for his
friends. In the meantime, this is the key to what brings these boys to church. It’s not their
mothers’ church or their sisters’ church; it is theirs, to serve and defend.
On a recent Sunday evening, at a friend’s house in the country, I stood on the porch
watching a group of boys lighting firecrackers in a shadowy corner of the yard, where the
lawn gave way to scrub woods. A few hours earlier, these boys had been serving at the
altar, stately and grave in cassock and cotta. Now, in the half-dark, they were bent over a
sputtering little flame, piling plastic army men onto a firecracker pyre. Among the
watchers on the porch, there was a moment of tense silence. The boys broke apart and
scattered, legs flashing, across the grass. A series of small explosions cracked the quiet.
Laughter erupted from the shadows, a detonation of energy and the happiness of boys,
falling like a rain of sparks on the darkening air.
Sally Thomas, a contributing writer for First Things, is a poet and homeschooling mother
in North Carolina.
34
Welcome Back, Duke
From the ashes of September 11 arise the manly virtues.
By PEGGY NOONAN from the Wall Street Journal, Friday
October 12, 2001
A few weeks ago I wrote a column called “God Is Back” about how, within a day of
the events of Sept. 11, my city was awash in religious imagery — prayer cards, statues of
saints. It all culminated, in a way, in the discovery of the steel-girder cross that emerged
last week from the wreckage — unbent, unbroken, unmelted, perfectly proportioned and
duly blessed by a Catholic friar on the request of the rescue workers, who seemed to see
meaning in the cross’s existence. So do I. This is how God speaks to us. He is saying, “I
am.” He is saying, “I am here.” He is saying, “And the force of all the evil of all the
world will not bury me.”
I believe this quite literally. But then I am experiencing Sept. 11 not as a political
event but as a spiritual event. And, of course, a cultural one, which gets me to my topic. It
is not only that God is back, but that men are back. A certain style of manliness is once
again being honored and celebrated in our country since Sept. 11. You might say it suddenly emerged from the rubble of the past quarter century, and emerged when a certain
kind of man came forth to get our great country out of the fix it was in.
I am speaking of masculine men, men who push things and pull things and haul
things and build things, men who charge up the stairs in a hundred pounds of gear and tell
everyone else where to go to be safe. Men who are welders, who do construction, men
who are cops and firemen. They are all of them, one way or another, the men who put the
fire out, the men who are digging the rubble out, and the men who will build whatever
takes its place.
And their style is back in style. We are experiencing a new respect for their oldfashioned masculinity, a new respect for physical courage, for strength and for the willingness to use both for the good of others.
You didn’t have to be a fireman to be one of the manly men of Sept. 11. Those businessmen on flight 93, which was supposed to hit Washington, the businessmen who
didn’t live by their hands or their backs but who found out what was happening to their
country, said goodbye to the people they loved, snapped the cell phone shut and said,
“Let’s roll.” Those were tough men, the ones who forced that plane down in Pennsylvania. They were tough, brave guys.
Let me tell you when I first realized what I’m saying. On Friday, Sept. 14, I went
with friends down to the staging area on the West Side Highway where all the trucks
filled with guys coming off a 12-hour shift at ground zero would pass by. They were
35
tough, rough men, the grunts of the city construction workers and electrical workers and
cops and emergency medical worker and firemen.
I joined a group that was just standing there as the truck convoys went by. And all we
did was cheer. We all wanted to do some kind of volunteer work but there was nothing
left to do, so we stood and cheered those who were doing. The trucks would go by and
we’d cheer and wave and shout “God bless you!” and “We love you!” We waved flags
and signs, clapped and threw kisses, and we meant it: We loved these men. And as the
workers would go by — they would wave to us from their trucks and buses, and smile
and nod — I realized that a lot of them were men who hadn’t been applauded since the
day they danced to their song with their bride at the wedding.
And suddenly I looked around me at all of us who were cheering. And saw who we
were. Investment bankers! Orthodontists! Magazine editors! In my group, a lawyer, a
columnist and a writer. We had been the kings and queens of the city, respected professional in a city that respects its professional class. And this night we were nobody. We
were so useless, all we could do was applaud the somebodies, the workers who, unlike us,
had not been applauded much in their lives.
And now they were saving our city.
I turned to my friend and said, “I have seen the grunts of New York become kings
and queens of the City.” I was so moved and, oddly I guess, grateful. Because they’d always been the people who ran the place, who kept it going, they’d just never been given
their due. But now — “And the last shall be first” — we were making up for it.
It may seem that I am really talking about class — the professional classes have a
new appreciation for the working class men of Lodi, N.J., or Astoria, Queens. But what
I’m attempting to talk about is actual manliness, which often seems tied up with class issues, as they say, but isn’t always by any means the same thing.
Here’s what I’m trying to say: Once about 10 years ago there was a story — you
might have read it in your local tabloid, or a supermarket tabloid like the National Enquirer — about an American man and woman who were on their honeymoon in Australia
or New Zealand. They were swimming in the ocean, the water chest-high. From nowhere
came a shark. The shark went straight for the woman, opened its jaws. Do you know
what the man did? He punched the shark in the head. He punched it and punched it again.
He did not do brilliant commentary on the shark, he did not share his sensitive feelings
about the shark, he did not make wry observations about the shark, he punched the shark
in the head. So the shark let go of his wife and went straight for him. And it killed him.
The wife survived to tell the story of what her husband had done. He had tried to deck the
shark. I told my friends: That’s what a wonderful man is, a man who will try to deck the
shark.
I don’t know what the guy did for a living, but he had a very old-fashioned sense of
what it is to be a man, and I think that sense is coming back into style because of who
saved us on Sept. 11, and that is very good for our country.
Why? Well, manliness wins wars. Strength and guts plus brains and spirit wins wars.
But also, you know what follows manliness? The gentleman. The return of manliness will
bring a return of gentlemanliness, for a simple reason: masculine men are almost by defi36
nition gentlemen. Example: If you’re a woman and you go to a faculty meeting at an Ivy
League University you’ll have to fight with a male intellectual for a chair, but I assure
you that if you go to a Knights of Columbus Hall, the men inside (cops, firemen, insurance agents) will rise to offer you a seat. Because they are manly men, and gentlemen.
It is hard to be a man. I am certain of it; to be a man in this world is not easy. I know
you are thinking, But it’s not easy to be a woman, and you are so right. But women get to
complain and make others feel bad about their plight. Men have to suck it up. Good men
suck it up and remain good-natured, constructive and helpful; less-good men become the
kind of men who are spoofed on “The Man Show” — babe-watching, dope-smoking nihilists. (Nihilism is not manly, it is the last refuge of sissies.)
I should discuss how manliness and its brother, gentlemanliness, went out of style. I
know, because I was there. In fact, I may have done it. I remember exactly when: It was
in the mid-’70s, and I was in my mid-20s, and a big, nice, middle-aged man got up from
his seat to help me haul a big piece of luggage into the overhead luggage space on a plane.
I was a feminist, and knew our rules and rants. “I can do it myself,” I snapped.
It was important that he know women are strong. It was even more important, it turns
out, that I know I was a jackass, but I didn’t. I embarrassed a nice man who was attempting to help a lady. I wasn’t lady enough to let him. I bet he never offered to help a lady
again. I bet he became an intellectual, or a writer, and not a good man like a fireman or a
businessman who says, “Let’s roll.”
But perhaps it wasn’t just me. I was there in America, as a child, when John Wayne
was a hero, and a symbol of American manliness. He was strong, and silent. And I was
there in America when they killed John Wayne by a thousand cuts. A lot of people killed
him — not only feminists but peaceniks, leftists, intellectuals, others. You could even say
it was Woody Allen who did it, through laughter and an endearing admission of his own
nervousness and fear. He made nervousness and fearfulness the admired style. He made
not being able to deck the shark, but doing the funniest commentary on not decking the
shark, seem . . . cool.
But when we killed John Wayne, you know who we were left with. We were left with
John Wayne’s friendly-antagonist sidekick in the old John Ford movies, Barry Fitzgerald.
The small, nervous, gossiping neighborhood commentator Barry Fitzgerald, who wanted
to talk about everything and do nothing. This was not progress. It was not improvement.
I missed John Wayne.
But now I think . . . he’s back. I think he returned on Sept. 11. I think he ran up the
stairs, threw the kid over his back like a sack of potatoes, came back down and shoveled
rubble. I think he’s in Afghanistan now, saying, with his slow swagger and simmering
silence, “Yer in a whole lotta trouble now, Osama-boy.”
I think he’s back in style. And none too soon.
Welcome back, Duke.
And once again: Thank you, men of Sept. 11.
37
Talk 3. Men and Women in Christian Community11
Outline for Participants
1. Introduction: sameness and difference
a. The reigning ideology tries to say men and women are the same, except sexually.
b. The sameness approach is increasingly being seen to be defective.
2. The fundamental biblical teaching: equal, different, complementary
a. Men and women are the same (equal):
1) in God’s image: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God
he created him; male and female he created them (Gen. 1:27).
2) in sin: For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Rom 3:23).
3) in receiving the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:17-18).
4) Men and women are one in Christ (Gal. 3:27-8): For as many of you as were
baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there
is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one
in Christ Jesus.
b. Men and women are also different
1) The scriptures teach that there should be social role and personality (character
trait) differences (Titus 2:1-6).
2) Scientific and social scientific evidence indicates that these differences correspond to psycho-social patterns that are rooted in our biological makeup (created by God).
c. The differences between men and women are complementary
11
This is the talk in the basic community instruction that presents our approach to the roles of men and
women.
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1) Two things are complementary when they go together to create a whole,
something greater than each one alone.
2) Each has a contribution to make that cannot be simply replaced by a contribution from the other.
3. Social roles in a changing culture
a. In our culture we are living through a time of tremendous social change in this area
– This change is contributing to some significant problems, especially in family
life.
b. The scriptural pattern for differences:
1) There should be an order in relationships:
– The husband is the head of the family (e.g., Eph. 5:21-33)
The wife shares in authority (e.g., 1 Tim. 5:14)
– Men are the elders of the community (e.g., 1 Tim. 3:1-7; 2:11-12)
Women share in the leadership (e.g., Titus 2:4-5; 1 Tim. 3:11; Rom. 16:1)
2) There should be outward expressions of sexual identity (e.g., Deut. 22:5; 1
Cor. 11:4-5, 13-16).
3) There should be some task distinctions between men and women.
c. Women’s and men’s contributions
1) Roles are primarily a matter of special contribution, not of limitation or restriction.
2) Both men and women should be strong and capable, but in somewhat different
ways.
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Talk 3. Men and Women in Christian Community
Presentation of the Content with Comments
1. Introduction: sameness and difference
So far we have looked at family life and God’s plan for it. As we saw in the first talk,
God created the human race male and female so that it could increase and multiply, begetting and raising the new generation. Now we will look at the way God created men
and women differently, so that they could fulfill his plan.
In our society, we face a concerted attempt to say that men and women are the same
and there should be no role differences between them. Such a view has become an integral part of what could be called “the reigning ideology” in the previous decades. 12 Yet,
during the same period, it has been increasingly established by scientific research not only that men and women are significantly different from one another, but that many of
their differences are innate (genetic, hormonal, and developmental). Moreover, not only
are those differences physical, they are also a matter of personality. In certain important
ways men and women handle relationships and relate to life differently.
There is, however, a new reaction against the “sameness” approach. Many are seeing
that it does not handle the human realities well. Moreover, it has produced bad effects,
among them a contribution to the current disintegration of family life. It weakens the
bond between husband and wife and it weakens the wife’s investment in family, and as a
result it weakens family life. Failure to recognize the differences between men and women also produces relationship conflicts and is one of the causes of marital problems leading to divorce.
Even more important for our purposes, the scripture and Christian tradition teach that
men and women are different, and that this difference is important. They were not created
to be simply the same, but were created to be complementary to one another. Many
Christians have decided to give up on the scriptural approach, either because they have
accepted the reigning ideology or because they want to fit in with the society around
them and be accepted by others. Others have just gone along with the flow without mak-
It is better to avoid the term “Feminism” in referring to this ideology. While it is true that those who
have propagated this ideology refer to themselves as Feminists, many who do not accept the ideology, or
certainly do not accept all the key elements in it, want to refer to themselves as Feminists or think of Feminists as “not all bad”. Avoiding a controversial label will avoid some problems.
The sociological situation is somewhat different from community to community. For the foreseeable
future, the sameness ideology will probably be dominant everywhere, increasingly so in more traditional
societies. The speaker, however, should tailor the description of that ideology and the responses to it to the
current conditions in his own country. Of course, scientific evidence for the innate differences will only be
more firmly established every year.
12
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ing any clear decision. We desire to preserve a scriptural and traditional approach adapted
to modern circumstances.
2. The fundamental biblical teaching: equal, different, complementary
Sameness (equality). There is a fundamental sameness and therefore equality, or, to
use a common scriptural word, a fundamental oneness of male and female in Christ. We
can see that taught in many places in scripture.
In the beginning, in Genesis 1:26-28, 31, a passage we have already looked at, we see
that the human race was created male and female — one human race created in the image
and likeness of God with two sexes. Turn to the section in your materials on foundation
texts and we can read it together:
Then God said,
Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion
over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over
all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them,
Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over
the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that
moves upon the earth…
And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
In other words, men and women are both human beings, both created in the image and
likeness of God, both entrusted with the responsibility for God’s material creation. This
means that the most important things about human beings are the same for both sexes: we
can choose the good and reject the evil, enter into loving relationships with one another,
serve one another, live the life for which God created us, love God.
Of course this truth has a dark side as well. Both Adam and Eve contributed to the
Fall and both men and women are fallen and in need of redemption. And both even now
contribute to the problems of the human race (Rom. 3:23). Both are sinners.
We also see in scripture that both men and women are integral to the redemption, the
new covenant, and the life of the new covenant people of God. Jesus, a man, was born of
woman (Gal. 4:4), and a woman’s act of faith was crucial for the incarnation (Luke 1:38).
The Spirit and his gifts are given to both men and women — both can speak the Lord’s
word and serve in the Spirit’s power, as we can see by the way the Spirit was poured out
at Pentecost (Acts 2:17-18).
In Galatians 3:27-28 Paul teaches that men and women have equal access to God in
Christ and are one in him (a change from the old covenant).
For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew
nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all
one in Christ Jesus.
There are some Christians who see this passage as meaning that there should be no differences in how men and women relate or are treated. In other words, they think that this
text teaches the complete sameness of men and women or, to put it differently, the elimi41
nation of all social role differences between men and women. That, however, is a misinterpretation. The passage teaches that men and women both are fully Christians. It also
teaches that in what pertains to Christianity they are the same and both should be treated
as full Christians. But we can see by reading other passages that Paul wrote on the subject,
that he did not think what he was teaching in this passage eliminated all social differences.
The scripture does not speak much about “equality” and when it does, it does not
mean by the word what modern people do. It never uses the word to speak about the relationship between men and women. It says that men and women are both human beings
and full Christians. Probably the best way to restate that in modern terminology, however,
is to say that they are equal in worth and dignity.
Differences. Scripture also recognizes differences between men and women. This is
expressed in scripture mainly in terms of the different roles and character traits appropriate to men and women In Titus 2:1-6 we can see one among many examples of this:
But as for you, teach what befits sound doctrine. Bid the older men be temperate, serious,
sensible, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness. Bid the older women likewise to be
reverent in behavior, not to be slanderers or slaves to drink; they are to teach what is good,
and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be sensible, chaste,
domestic, kind, and submissive to their husbands, that the word of God may not be discredited. Likewise urge the younger men to control themselves.
In other words, if we are going to follow sound Christian doctrine, we have to live in a
certain way, one which includes how we relate to one another in terms of the human
characteristics of age and sex. We should treat people differently depending on whether
they are older or younger than we are and depending on whether they are the same sex or
the opposite sex. We have different social roles, roles that differ by age and sex.
Scripture, then, recognizes human differences that are part of our nature. God created
us men and women, and did so for a purpose. That purpose should be expressed by the
way we live our daily lives. It is good that we are different, and the difference should be a
valuable resource.
There is much scientific evidence that the differences between men and women correspond to psycho-social patterns that are rooted in our biological makeup (created in us by
God to equip us to fulfill our particular roles). The differences between men and women
are not restricted to physical differences connected to our sexuality, but they are psychological and social as well. The following are some differences that would be widely recognized by modern science and social science:
a. Women tend to be more immediately responsive, more nurturant, more attentive
to how others feel and to details that affect personal relationships. Men tend to be
more capable of distancing themselves from situations and of maintaining a broad
overview, more aggressive and more achievement oriented, more analytical, more
able to establish order.
b. Men and women relate differently to social groups: men are more inclined toward
larger, hierarchically ordered groups; women are more inclined toward smaller,
more intimate, unstructured groups.
c. The list could go on.
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These are not absolutes, but tendencies. They should not be exaggerated in how we relate,
any more than any characteristics naturally in us should be exaggerated, but they should
be built upon as we develop a good Christian life together. They were created into us for
a purpose and we should “work with the grain, not against it”. They are resources for a
better human and Christian life.
Many contemporary people see equality and differences as mutually exclusive. Either
men and women are different or they are equal, not both at the same time. For that reason
modern ideologies try to deny the differences. The historic Christian understanding, however, sees equality and differences as compatible. People can be different and yet still be
equal — if the differences are complementary.
Complementary. To complement one another means to complete one another, so that
each adds something to the other. Two things that are complementary make up something
whole or perfect when put together. The differences between men and women are intended to be of this kind. Men and women are not supposed to be in opposition to one another
or competitive, but to live and work together and cooperate so that they complete each
another in the formation of social groupings like the family or a community.
In order to be complementary, the differences between men and women have to be
based on something more fundamental that is the same and allows them to form a group.
In this case, what is the same is their humanity. Men and women are both human beings
and therefore the same in the most important ways. Precisely because as human beings
they are the same, they can form human social groupings like society, community, and
family.
The complementarity of men and women means that both have something to contribute that the other cannot contribute as effectively. Women are not defective men; nor are
men defective women. God created them differently because it was better to have both
men and women than to have one sex.
The sameness approach to men and women claims to be the route to recognizing the
value of women. It says that women are valuable because they can do the same things as
men can (and just as well). It is helpful, however, to notice that the sameness approach
does not see any value to a woman as a woman. It does not recognize the ways in which
women are valuable as women, valuable precisely because they are different then men.
The difference in sex is part of God’s plan. God designed the two sexes in a complementary way so that they might serve and live together well. Both are needed; both
should be valued. We should rejoice in who we are as men and women, and be glad about
the differences. As a community, we want to recognize those differences and draw out
the advantages of having both men and women.
3. Christian social roles in a changing culture
The culture. We live in a time of tremendous cultural change that is strongly affecting
the roles of men and women. Social and economic changes have produced new opportunities and new challenges for women. Technological advances reduce the workload in the
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home and increase the number of jobs that women can perform outside the home. Smaller
average family size also reduces the amount of time needed in the home. In addition,
economic pressures sometimes make the two-income family hard to avoid.
As we have already noted, powerful new ideological forces have also arisen which
seek to eliminate all distinctions between men’s and women’s roles. These forces have
arisen in part as a response to a genuine need experienced by women in our society, but
they have tended to cause more problems than they solve. Some of the thinking behind
these movements has explicitly anti-Christian roots (e.g., the Enlightenment, Marxism).
The confusion about men’s and women’s roles and identity in our society is correlated with (results in) a widespread breakdown of family life and an increase in serious psychological disorders.
The scriptural pattern for differences.13 As a community we are committed to adopting the scriptural pattern of men’s and women’s roles and living it out within the modern
context. Have a look at the supporting texts in the Foundational Texts section. In this
course we will only have time to consider the ones dealing with the family, primarily in
the next talk.
Scripture teaches an order to community relationships between men and women: men
are the heads of the family (e.g., Eph. 5:21-33, which can be found in the Foundational
Texts) and the elders of the community (e.g., 1 Tim. 3:1-7; 2:11-12). This order is based
on innate differences between men and women. When men have the overall ordering role
and bear overall authority in communal situations, life usually goes better for both men
and women.
Scripture also teaches that there should be women who have a significant leadership
role in the Christian community in subordination to the elders (Titus 2:4-5; 1 Tim. 3:11;
Rom. 16:1) and that the wife has an overall leadership responsibility for the family along
with the husband (1 Tim. 5:14). In other words, to give men a certain overall responsibility does not mean that women have no active responsibility and exercise no authority. A
healthy Christian community needs active leadership from women, as does a healthy
Christian family.
The scripture most commonly uses the word “submission” or “subordination” to
speak about how men and women work together in leadership. The word was used in
Greek writing of time to speak about putting several things or people together in an order,
usually for better functioning. For instance, it was used to describe the drawing up of a
fleet in battle order or the order that prevails among the parts of the body.
Submission does not mean inferiority and is not based on being of less worth. Rather
it means that we fit into an order that makes life go better and more effectively. There is
even an order in the Trinity: Christ was submissive to his Father, and the Holy Spirit has
been “sent”. One of the distinctive features of scriptural teaching in contrast to modern
13
For time reasons, the speaker should not go through the texts in this section or argue from them, but
simply refer to them, unless there is a special need to do so. He should, however, be able to discuss them if
they come up in the discussion, as they often will. He should also note that the texts cited here are examples,
not a complete survey of the relevant texts.
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social trends is the emphasis it puts on good order in personal relationships. When that
order is followed, many things work better. In this course, we will only look at how this
works in the family, mainly in the next talk.
Scripture also teaches the importance of outward expressions of sexual identity, such
as clothing and hair-style (Deut. 22:5; 1 Cor. 11:4-5, 13-16). Task distinctions can also be
a way of expressing sexual identity, and so take on a greater importance than they otherwise might. In most societies, women do most of the child care and men do most of the
heavy physical work.14
Scripture does not teach a difference in abilities between men and women. Moreover,
it does not (exactly) say that the woman’s place is in the home and nowhere else or that
certain jobs are for men and never for women. It does, however, indicate a primacy for
the home in the woman’s life. Moreover, the differences between men and women point
to the appropriateness of some job distinctions, although how to do this in our society
must be determined from experience and not solely from the scriptures, because the significance of different tasks today is not always the same as it was in biblical times.
In summary, men and women, when they are together, should be distinguishable (and
honored) in their primary spheres of responsibility. They also should be distinguishable
in the way they look and comport themselves. However we need to find culturally appropriate ways of expressing these differences.
Women’s and men’s contributions. Because of the reigning ideology, there is a mentality that infects almost everyone in our culture, ourselves included. That mentality influences people to think that if there is any difference between men and women in their
social roles, someone, in this case women, are being restricted or viewed as inferior. This
is not true.
Just as there could be no family life without the contribution of both men and women,
there can be no healthy community life without the special contribution men and women
both make. Moreover, using the reigning ideology, a scriptural approach would not be
“restricting” just women, but men are restricted as well. But “restricting” or “limiting” is
a poor word to use. Role differences do not consist mainly in prohibitions. They are more
a matter of the main contributions we make to social situations. More importantly, not all
differences are limitations or restrictions. Because a doctor does not function as an engineer, we would not say that he is limited to or restricted to being a doctor. Rather, he
makes a different contribution to society. In our current cultural climate, we therefore
need to say some things about women’s contribution.
Women do not have different roles because they are less capable than men. Christian
women should be strong and capable. Not all Christian women are, of course, nor are all
Christian men, for that matter. But many, hopefully most, Christian men and women are.
The Victorian image of women as weak and sheltered is not the Christian image. The
14
Here the key point is the principle: there need to be some external expressions. It is better if at this
point not too much attention (or discussion time) is focused on it. Most people readily see the value of
some external expressions of men-women differences.
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“valiant woman” of God in Proverbs 31:10-31 is strong, confident, active, and capable.
We want our women to be strong and capable just as we want all the men to be.
Such an understanding should not, however, get us to approach men and women as
simply the same when we work together. Many things are easier for men to handle than
for women, just as other things are easier for women. When women are engaged in certain activities that involve meeting the personal needs of others or showing patience in
detailed or careful work, they normally show more endurance than men do, and are more
productive. They can also endure more physical pain than men. On the other hand, women have less tolerance for work that involves structuring or hierarchies or in handling responsibilities that involve competition or confrontation. They are weaker than men in
work that involves exerting physical force and more vulnerable in physical fighting.
The goal is to maximize the contribution of each sex. That involves wisdom in learning about the differences between them, and what works best. Having a Christian community is something like building a house. A variety of materials are useful. The goal is
to choose the material that is best for the various purposes, avoiding using something in a
place where its weaknesses make it less effective. This applies to individuals, but it also
applies to men-women differences. We want to respect the differences between them and
maximize the contribution they can each make.
As we go through community teaching, we will explain to you how we understand
the way men-women differences should be expressed in our community life as we go
through community teaching. Of course, we think that all Christians, all human beings in
fact, would benefit from living out role differences between men and women in a way
that conforms to the scriptural pattern. Our concern here, though, is how we can live them
in a helpful and effective way in our community in our modern culture.
4. Conclusion
Everything that God created has a blessing attached to it when it is used in the way
God intended. In our experience, the differences between men and women are one of
God’s blessings. They are a gift from God to be appreciated and developed fruitfully, rather than a curse to be bemoaned or an obstacle to be overcome. As in everything, following God’s way of life is a great advantage.
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