Month: August 2020 (Page 3 of 4)

The lack of healthy male relationships is a subject not easily discussed in our culture. If you were to google “loneliness” you would find loneliness among men, especially today, to be a public health crisis. Men tend to live in isolation, while women overall more readily connect with other women. This leaves men alone to suffer in their shame, not knowing how to deal with whatever inner pain there may be.

One counselor who works with men gave the following five reasons why loneliness among men is a worsening epidemic that is “literally killing” men: 1) Men fear appearing weak, 2) Men don’t talk about their feelings, 3) Many aren’t comfortable being vulnerable, 4) Hypermasculine assertiveness, and 5) Few bonding opportunities. I want to address this last point.

In the church, men get mixed messages about what a man is supposed to be. Jesus can be portrayed along a continuum from being super-sensitive and caring to being like the warrior portrayed in Revelation 19. In the age of “toxic masculinity,” men in the church have learned to hide behind their protective emotional shields, afraid to express whatever confusion, sadness, anger, or loneliness there may be. Men have been emotionally wounded by the gender wars and don’t know how to process their pain. The festering wounds spill over into dysfunctional relationships with those who are closest to them, especially within the family.

Some “churched” men have “forfeited their souls” to the feminist rant for a new masculine. They have been shamed into being emasculated men, unable to express any genuine masculine strength – often for fear of being called a bigot. Men are caught in the double bind of being shamed for being a man, while being told they have not been responsible in addressing male patriarchy.

Men need intergenerational male communities of brothers and fathers where soul talk among men is normal conversation. Here, men can be heard as they risk telling their stories of navigating life through the good, the bad, and the ugly. “Celebrate Recovery” (look it up on Google) gives good guidance: “Realize I’m not God; I admit that I am powerless to control my tendency to do the wrong thing and my life is unmanageable.”

Men can learn to “fight for each other’s hearts.” A good watchword would be Proverbs 4:23: “Above all else guard your heart, for it affects everything you do.” Alastair Roberts makes this observation regarding gatherings of men: “Male groups tend to broad and shallow: larger numbers of persons, but typically less intimate and closely bonded… Male groups have a greater tendency to socialize and bond around agency, ritual, action and competition… We principally bond through sharing ideas, activities, arguments, and obsessions, not through sharing feelings, personal narrative or secrets.”

While the church needs to provide opportunities for men to grow spiritually through activities together, there is a real need to provide space for men to process their journey with other men. It will take time and practice to move beyond “agency, ritual, action, and competition.” In the days to come, men will need to find and have brothers who stay with them in the battle.

If you are a man who is caught in the dark web of loneliness, you may feel like a lost sheep. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, knows your need. Tell him your honest need and ask him to direct you to a group. The big step is to reach out and make yourself available to a group of men. He knows your need and will provide the opportunity. But you will need to be vulnerable.

The title of this blog might surprise you.  It is the title of an article by Robert P George,  professor of law at Princeton.  He points out that secular liberals or “progressives” are making little effort to maintain “the pretense of  neutrality.”  “Having gained the advantage” notes George,  “on battle front after battle front in the modern culture war, and having achieved hegemony  in elite sectors of the culture….there is no longer any need to pretend.”

Steven Smith in his book “Pagans and Christians in the City” names this aggressive liberalism as “paganism.”  What he [Smith] perceives,  notes George, “is that contemporary  social liberalism reflects certain core ideas and  beliefs …… that partially defined the traditions of paganism that were dominant in the ancient Mediterranean world……..until the point at which they were defeated….by the Jewish sect  that came to be known as Christianity.”  Christians were like “resident aliens” in the world,  following a God who was transcendent, whereas pagans located the sacred within the world. 

These two worldviews clashed with the spread of the gospel in the first centuries of the church.  No where was the clash greater than in sexuality.  “The Christian view of sexuality was not only radically alien,” notes Smith, “it was close to incomprehensible.”  There was a fear that Christians would “turn the lights out on the party.”  In the West, the Christian sexual ethic prevailed until the present time.   

But now in our day the lights have been turned on once again and the party is going again.  It is “live and let live” when it comes to sexual morality.  The old Christian ethic is “no longer operative.”  We are entering into what George calls a “new Diocletian age,”  similar to the last and most severe persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire. 

“The culture war is over; they lost,  we won…..Taking a hard line is better than trying to accommodate the losers who are defending positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all” declares Mark Tushnet.  The neo-pagans are not willing to accommodate Christians in the public square, when they dissent from progressive orthodoxy.  

There are people “who want to ensure that we never again get near the light switch and that we are properly punished for having switched off the lights to the party in the first place.”  So what are believers with a biblical worldview to do in the coming days. 

George give three options.  First that of capitulation and acquiescence.  There are whole denominations that practice a visible evidence of faith but have  no moral substance.  George believes they have made themselves “useful idiots” of neo-paganism. 

The two other options are between “flight or fight.”  Rod Dreher has a strategic retreat in his promotion of the “Benedict Option.”  Christian are to build arks in order to endure the coming flood.  Believers would still be involved in the affairs of the world, while attending to intentional community for the sake of maintaining to faith.   

The third option is that of staying in the public square and fighting.  George opts for fight, saying “the cost of discipleship is a heavy cost……the days of comfortable Christianity are over.”  We are, in his opinion, “back in the position of our forebears in imperial Rome.”  

So men we are at a crossroads.  Accommodation is not an option.  Will it be flight or fight?  I personally lean toward flight ( building an ark through my church) rather than fight.  But I know that I will need to take a stand among the pagans.  God give me grace to stand for Jesus