How Should Christians Think about Masculinity- A Conversation with Nancy Pearcey, Part 1

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, onto today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I am excited today to have Professor Piercy from Houston Christian University on with us today on the program. She is not only a professor of apologetics at Houston Christian University, but a scholar in residence and the author of numerous books, including The Soul of Science, Told Truth, Finding Truth, Love Thy Body, and the one we're going to be talking about today, which is The Toxic War Against Masculinity. And so, I'm really excited. This is sort of like, I'm going a little bit of fanboy. I've been reading Nancy Piercy's books for a really, really long time and really just appreciate you being on the show. And it's great for you to be here. So, thanks for being here, Nancy. Well, thank you for inviting me. I appreciate that. So, let's dive in and talk a little bit about The Toxic War Against Masculinity. What was it that motivated you to write on this topic? What brought it to your consciousness that this needed to be addressed? You know, it was largely the hostility that I saw against men, even in respected mainstream publications. Like the particular article that really triggered me was an article in The Washington Post, which was titled, Why Can't We Hate Men? And I thought, really? A Huffington Post editor tweeted, hashtag, kill all men. You can buy t-shirts that say, so many men, so little ammunition. And then there are even books that are coming out very bluntly titled, like, I hate men, and no good men, and the end of men. And to my surprise, by the way, there were also some male authors jumping on the bandwagon. So there was a male author who wrote a book in which he said, talking about healthy masculinity is like talking about healthy cancer. And then the final one, which is actually not in the book, but you may have seen it because it was in the news. So the director of the movie Avatar, James Cameron, was quoted in the news saying, do you remember this? Testosterone is a toxin and you have to work it out of your system. So when I saw that it had become so socially acceptable to attack men this way, I said, we've got to get to the bottom of this. Where is this coming from? You can't really stand against a social trend unless you know where it came from and how it developed. And so that was my goal in this book is to kind of help people get a sense of where is this coming from and how can we stand against it more effectively? You know, and having read the book, I mean, I think I have a good sense of where you'd say it came from. And I think one of the most compelling parts of the book actually is the shift from what you call, I believe, a covenantal sort of social relationship to a contractual or social contract theory sort of imagination. Could you talk through that just a little bit? Oh, yeah, I'd love to talk about this because I think it has affected a lot of Christians and they don't know it. You know, we use the language of covenant when we talk about marriage, for example. But we've been very much influenced by a secular culture that the technical term is social contract theory. Social contract theory was the idea that it was during the early modern era when social philosophers, political philosophers, were trying to find an alternative to Christianity as the basis for modern culture. These were guys who were out to, you know, get rid of Christianity and form a new basis. Well, you know, up until then, the basis of our social institutions was covenant, not just marriage, but obviously church and even the state. You know, God had established the state and we obey God by obeying the state. And it was God's principles of justice and fairness and right, you know, what's right versus what's wrong. That was the foundation of politics. And so it was a big job to see, can we kick God out of politics? And the early modern thinkers, we're talking about Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. And what they did is they said, let's just suppose that society, human society, began not in the Garden of Eden, but in a state of nature. And in the state of nature, which was obviously a substitute for the Garden of Eden, humans had no social relationships. There was no marriage. There was no state. There's no civil society. People are running around under the trees as autonomous, disconnected, independent individuals. And then the state is formed when these individuals come together and form a contract, you know, an agreement. So there's nothing organically connecting people. There's nothing, you know, it's all choice. It's all choice. Here's how one political philosopher puts it. Liberalism at the heart is a claim that we can have no obligations to which we have not consented. Consent makes it everything. Now, on the one hand, that doesn't seem so bad in politics. Consent of the governed. But the attitude of contract then permeated all of our social institutions so that, you know, marriage is now treated mostly as a contract. And what's the difference? You know, a covenant is where two people, you know, unite their lives. A contract is what an exchange of goods and services. You know, and it lasts only as long as it's benefiting me. And so a lot of people do treat marriage like, well, as long as I'm happy, but if I'm not, I'm out. And even abortion. Our abortion law is based on the notion that the mother is not organically connected to the child. That she has the right to, you know, consent or not consent. It's social contract theory. And that's how our laws about abortion are, that's how they're framed. So even something as intimate as, you know, you grow a baby inside of you, if you're a woman, that is not considered an organic relationship. In my book, Love Thy Body, I actually quote some liberal philosophers who say, you know, the fetus is an intruder. It's like my private, this is my private property. And the fetus is an intruder and I can drive him off if I want, even to the point of killing him. It's a matter of self-defense. So that is, that's how deeply contractual thinking has permeating, has permeating the American society. And I think even a lot of Christians kind of treat marriage that way as well. So it's a big change. And so, yeah, in the book, I show how, well, to bring it to the topic of masculinity, I show how that especially influenced concepts of masculinity because men were no longer thought to be just naturally, organically having certain obligations to their wives and children. Instead, it was, well, it's a contract. So I have obligations if I choose. And if I choose not to, I'm out of here. So it's a big part of why masculinity has become, in some ways, harmful or toxic in its secular version because men no longer feel that covenantal relationship with their wives and children. So I have a couple of follow-ups to that. Number one, you know, I'm most familiar with, like, Emile Durkheim and after the French Revolution, you know, where they're sort of really separating the church out and making it, you know, trying to marginalize it as a moral authority within society. And he's advancing sociology as sort of a substitute religion, let's say, right? And there's a reason that that is coming about. What was the reason for, you know, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau to make these shifts within American culture? Was there something that was pressing in? Was this related to industrial revolution kind of thing? Was this related to, like, what needed to change that it made sense to move from, you know, covenantal to social contract theory? Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop...

Up in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up, and many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Well, two answers. One is the person who has done the best work on this, I think, is a French political philosopher named Pierre Manon, and he very, by the way, he's a former Marxist who converted to Catholicism. And so when he writes this book, he says, well, they were really trying to get rid of the church because the church was the primary society by that time, right? The church had pretty much overcome ethnic divisions and racial divisions, national divisions. Remember Paul, there's no Jew or Greek. There's no male or female. There's no slave or free. But it took a long time for that to actually change society. And what happened is the church then became the overarching social institution that gave up a community might be a better word. The church, in a sense, replaced all of these other loyalties, all these other commitments. You know, we were Christians first. You know, there was in France, in the early church, there was a young man who was being persecuted for his faith, and they kept asking him, well, who are you? What's your name? Where are you from? And he just said, I'm a Christian. I'm a Christian. I'm a Christian. It's a really fun story of where all of his other identities were totally overwhelmed by the fact that I'm a Christian. And that's first. And so to overcome that, secular thinkers had to say, let's see if we can get rid of the impact of the church. We don't want that to be people's primary community anymore if they were not Christians. So Pierre Manon says that was their primary motivation. But I like the fact, though, that you've also brought in the material conditions of the Industrial Revolution, because ideas don't really take, you know, they don't really permeate until, you know, society changes. And the Industrial Revolution had a huge impact on concepts of masculinity. Most of us think the concept of toxic masculinity came from like the 1960s, second wave feminism. But actually, you see it starting already in the 19th century. So before the Industrial Revolution, men worked alongside their wives and children all day on the family farm, the family industry, the family business. And so concepts of masculinity, ideals of what it meant to be a man focused much more on their caretaking role and their responsibility for their family. Authority was defined even in terms of responsibility for the common good. It didn't mean you get to do whatever you want. You know, it meant you were responsible for your family. And it's fun when you can read even secular historians say things like masculine virtue was defined as duty to God and man. So the question is, where did we lose that? Anyway, the Industrial Revolution was a key changer. It took work out of the home. And of course, men had to follow their work out of the home into offices and factories. And for the first time in American history, they were not working alongside people they loved and had a moral bond with, you know, their wives and children. Instead, they were working as individuals in competition with other men. And this did have a change on their character. And this is where you see the literature start to change. People started to complain. They started to protest that men were becoming egocentric, self-centered, aggressive, greedy, acquisitive. I'm using the language of the day. And I was surprised how many people said they were making their work into an idol. In the 19th century, you find a lot of people saying men are starting to make career success. You know, financial achievement has become more important than caring for my family. So that was the beginning of the change in the language describing men. It's the first time ever that men's character was described in negative terms. And so, of course, if we want to figure out how to solve that problem, we have to go back and say, okay, it was when men got disconnected from their family. That suggests the solution has to do with reconnecting men with their family. Even in an industrial age, are there ways that we can still do that? And so what strikes me in all of that, and you make a comment at one point that, you know, people's perception of Jesus and his followers and the ideals of masculinity that they exhibit really aren't the sort of masculine characteristics that we'd normally see in men. You know, it's about harmony and fellowship and community as opposed to aggressiveness and competition and, you know, violent acts or what have you. And so, you know, now we've sort of lost this, what is masculinity? We've got almost a false sense of what masculinity actually is. Is that what people end up identifying as sort of, quote unquote, toxic? Yeah, well, I would say it's the secular definition of masculinity that has become toxic. Let me give you a study. I start the book with this study because I found that this book is more controversial than any book I've ever written. I was not expecting that because my earlier book, Love Thy Body, was on questions of abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism. And people are saying that book is more relevant now than when you wrote it. But actually in the Christian world, this one has been more controversial. When I write a book, I always do a lot of reading groups because I want to rub off the rough edges. And for my reading groups, and I also teach in my classes, so I get lots of feedback. That's my goal. And when they told their friends and family that they were working through a manuscript on masculinity, invariably, the first question was, whose side is she on? Like, what? You have to have a side? So men tended to assume that if a woman was writing a book on masculinity, that I was a male bashing feminist. And more progressive types tended to assume that I was some reactionary culture warrior, you know, defending men. And so I did put this study right at the beginning of the book because it tended to overcome that initial suspicion. So it was done by a sociologist named Michael Kimmel, and he is invited to speak all around the world. And so he came up with a very clever experiment. He would ask young men two questions. First, he would say, what does it mean to be a good man? If you're at a funeral and in the eulogy, somebody says he was a good man, what does that mean? And this sociologist said, young men all around the globe had no trouble answering that. They would immediately start listing things like duty, honor, integrity, sacrifice, do the right thing, be a protector, be a provider. Oh, and look out for the little guy. I kind of like that one. Be responsible. And he would ask them, where did you learn that? And they would say, I don't know, it's just in the air we breathe. Or if they were in a Western country, they would often say it's part of a Judeo-Christian heritage. But then he would follow up with a second question. He would say, what does it mean if I say to you, man up, be a real man? And the young men said, oh, no, no, that's completely different. They said that means be tough, be strong, never show weakness, win at all costs, suck it up, play through pain, be competitive, get rich, get laid. And again, I'm using their language. And so this sociologist concluded that there actually are two competing scripts that young men feel today. On the one hand, universally, they recognize what it means to be a good man. And this is very encouraging. I mean, I was very heartened to read this. Now, even in non-Christian cultures, you know, apparently it's intrinsic. It's innate. It's because men are made in the image of God that they do know what it means to be a good man. And another, by the way, another study, this one by an anthropologist, found something very similar. It was the first ever cross-cultural study of concepts of masculinity. And he said that despite the differences in cultures, all cultures share a common code.

Good, the manhood, that the good man will provide, protect, and procreate. He calls it the three Ps, provide, protect, and procreate, meaning become a father, you know, build into the next generation. And so both of these were global studies showing that men do know that their unique masculine strengths, because they do have unique strengths, were given them not to get what they want, but to provide, protect, care for those that they love and are responsible for. But on the other hand, of course, there's this competing script, what the young men responded to as the real man, which if it's separated, if it's detached from a moral vision, can become entitlement, dominance, control, you know, the things that we tend to consider more toxic. The Andrew Tate phenomenon, right? Fast cars, fast money, fast girls. That has become kind of the secular script of the quote-unquote real man. And so on the one hand, this gives us a much better way to approach these issues, right? Most men don't respond well to being called toxic. Nobody would. So it's much better to try to support them, encourage them, affirm them in what they intrinsically and innately know is the good man. And on the other hand, we need to sort of trace the roots of the real man and help people to see through it. And a lot of my book is taken up with, you know, where did the real man come from? How did our society become so secularized that it's led to Andrew Tate? Andrew Tate, I'll just give you one more anecdote. This was a former graduate student of mine who now teaches at a Christian school. And she recently emailed me and said, all my male students are into Andrew Tate. She teaches high school. All my male students are fans of Andrew Tate. You know, they're even using his quotes in the yearbook. And I said, well, where do you teach? At a classical Christian school. So even young Christian men are reaching out to these online influencers. We have to help them to be able to think critically about where the secular script for the quote-unquote real man comes from so that they have a critical grid in place and can figure out what's biblical and what's not biblical. Well, let me stop us there for a minute. We're going to take a quick break. And then when we come back, I want to dive into that issue. That's really sort of amazing to me that any Christian, even a young Christian man, would gravitate to Andrew Tate. And so I'd kind of like to dig into that a little bit more. But let me take a break. And when we come back, we'll kind of dig into it. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide. Or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide. Or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Okay, welcome back, everybody. We are here. We're going to continue the conversation with Professor Pearcy. And before we went to break, you had mentioned this influence of Andrew Tate. And I've kind of watched Andrew Tate from afar. I've watched some of his YouTube stuff and those kind of things. I would say especially after reading your book. I didn't know too, too much about him. I think I probably, you know, just moved past him because I didn't get the attraction. What is it that you think? I mean, I guess to me, when I hear you talk about, you know, true masculinity and you have these things like integrity and honor and, you know, duty and caring for the little guy. For whatever reason, I gravitate more toward those than I do to things like aggressiveness, competitiveness, you know, vulgarity, for lack of a better term, promiscuity, maybe, you know, all those things. And like I realized I've got a unique background, you know, coming out of theological studies. And so maybe that has a bigger influence. But I'm just wondering why you think that part of it, the bad side, is so much more compelling than the good side? Or how are they confused? By the way, to bring you up to date, I didn't, by the way, I didn't get edutained into my book either. And in hindsight, I wish I'd been one, you know, on top of these trends. But now there's a new one who has been hailed in the New York Post as the new Andrew Tate. His name is Myron Gaines. And his tagline is, I help men transform from simps into pimps. And he argues specifically that the relationship between men and women has always been transactional. And here's a direct quote from his book. All men are Johns. All women are whores. And he's being hailed as, you know, the next Andrew Tate. So where does this come from? I think it comes as a reaction to the fact that men and boys are falling behind and have been for quite a while. You know, boys have fallen behind at all levels of education, starting in kindergarten. You know, they don't have the same fine motor control that a girl has. And so they can't handle the scissors as well. So they already feel like they're falling behind. And all the way up through high school, you know, girls are doing better in grades in terms of homework and grades and in terms of extracurricular activities and so on. And then college. Colleges now, on average, are 60% female in their students, 40% male. More women than men go to graduate school and even professional schools like law and medicine. And so there have been a host of books that have come out on why boys are falling behind with titles like Why Boys Fail, The Trouble with Boys, The War Against Boys. So people have been noticing this. And then when those boys grow up, they're falling behind too. Men are doing worse than they were in the past and worse relative to women. Men are much more likely than women to be homeless, to be drug addicted, drug or alcohol addicted, to have mental illness, to commit crime by 90% or more of prison inmates are male. And unemployment is not showing up in the unemployment statistics because they've stopped looking for work. And so researchers have had to go a little deeper and they now tell us that male unemployment during the key earning ages is at Great Depression era levels. Great Depression era. I mean, that was shocking when I read that because we remember what a tragedy that was. And then life expectancy has gone down. You know, women's has stayed the same, but men's has gone down so that a magazine called The New Scientist had an article in which it said the major demographic factor now for early death is being male. And so and even in Christian circles. So, you know, I teach at Houston Christian University. And when I told my class, I was writing a book on masculinity. A male student shot back. What masculinity? It's been beaten out of us. Thanks for joining us for this first segment of the interview with Nancy Pearcey. We've got about another 25 minutes left and so we're going to air that tomorrow. But this is a really important topic and the rest of the conversation is as fascinating as the first part. Nancy has just amazing things to say. She's really up on this topic. I'd encourage you to go check out her book, The Toxic War Against Masculinity on Amazon.com. Order that. Check out her other books, too. She's a fantastic writer and author and thinker. Of this interview with Nancy Piercey. Take care, everyone. Just want to take a second to thank the team at LifeAudio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to LifeAudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts.

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