Anthony Bradley reflected on his experience being in college fraternities.  Bradley remembers the adventure of college of not knowing anyone.  It forced him to build relationships, confront discomfort, and develop resilience.  But for young men today, the sense of adventure seemed entirely absent. They are building their adult lives on one operating principle: “stay safe, stay familiar.” 

If a young man is to grow, he needs an “Abraham  experience.”  God told Abraham, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you” (Gen 12:1-3).  In other words, “leave everything you know and enter into something unknown – something filled of uncertainty, risk, and even danger.”

Bradley believes younger men are not being exposed to enough real risk, challenge, or responsibility to mature into capable men.  “We are engineering a culture that allows young men to extend the comforts of childhood indefinitely…. we insulate them from hardship with a steady diet of familiarity. safety, and predictability.”  He notes that throughout history, healthy societies require young men to separate….. break from the safety of childhood into the discomfort and danger of the unknown.” 

“Real adulthood,” observes Bradley, “does not emerge out of comfort – it is forged through separation and struggle.” In the Biblical narrative, God calls men out of comfort and into real risk.  It is demonstrated in the lives of Abraham, Elisha, Isaiah, Paul and Jesus.  “These individuals grew not because they avoided danger, but because they endured it.”  Manageable adversity builds “psychological immune system” and a form of “stress inoculation” By overcoming real challenges, young men can develop the resilience to face future adversities with greater confidence and stability. 

Observing  Abraham and Moses we find a biblical pattern of just not brief discomfort but rather a prolonged wilderness.  Character formation requires real exposure.  We are then forced to fall on our knees and cry out to God for help.  Bradley is very pointed when he says, “I struggle to trust any man who has never been driven to his knees in desperate need.”  He quotes Michael Meade: “If the fires that innately burn inside youths are not intentionally and lovingly added to the hearth of community, they will burn down the structures of culture, just to feel the warmth.” 

Bradley then observes, “We see this playing out everywhere: young men channeling their untapped need for danger and purpose into destructive outlets – addiction, escapism, ideological extremism, crime, sexually assaulting women, and perpetual adolescence.”   The journey to manhood has never change.  It involves, “separation, struggle, vulnerability, and return.”  Bradley gives this challenge, “If we want our sons to become the kind of men who can lead, love, and sacrifice, we must allow them to suffer.  We must send them into the wilderness – not to destroy them, but to make them.” 

I am so thankful that my parents let me go, when I went out to California in 1960 as a young man of 20.  I grew and matured as a man through the “hard knocks” of life.  I remember period of loneliness, despair and great insecurity as a young man.  I came to know Jesus out in California, found a wonderful future wife, and surrounded myself with fellow believers.  Mentors such as Maynard Force and Pastor Hax pointed the way for me.  

Those early years in California and then in college, forced me to grow up into manhood.  It was difficult because of all my insecurities.  I remember well the words of Eccl 12:1 “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, ‘I find no pleasure in them.'” 

When I read recently about the Democratic Party being informed by SAM, code-name for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan.” I know I had to do a blog on an effort to influence men.  Again, my focus in life is threefold: Scripture, Jesus and the Kingdom reign of Jesus (incarnational reality).  This focus cuts across political parties and cultural issues.  There will be times when I will view a subject through this threefold Prizm that will be critical of one of the political parties.  In this case, it is the democratic party.

It was revealed that this prospectus, costing $20 million, was being studied in order to find ways, “to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online.”  The plan was to “study the syntax, language and content that gain attention and virality in these spaces.”   As former Democratic staffer, Rotimi Adeoye noted, “Democratic donors treating men like an endangered species on a remote island. The need to study probably won’t rebuild trust.”  He added, “People don’t want to be decoded, they want to be understood and met where they are.” Another strategist said frankly, “We need authenticity, and you can’t manufacture it in a lab, a war room or a donor meeting.  We can’t figure this out in a week or two. It has to be part of an ongoing conversation, and we’ve just not there yet.”  

I contrast this report to a recent essay by catholic sociologist, Mary Eberstadt, entitled “Beyond Jeremiads: Signs of Cultural Revival, Circa 2025.”  She wrote, “Perhaps the time has come to set aside jeremiads.  Perhaps the time for recitation is over, and the time for joyous defiance has begun………Christianity today is being rejected in large part because it is more demanding than people weakened by the sexual revolution’s indiscipline want it to be.”

She goes on to point out that living in opposition to religion is not liberating people.  It is rather making people miserable and lonely.  “Today’s troubled voices do not rage in vain. …..They amount to primal screams for a world more ordered than many of today’s people now know – a world ordered to some of Christianity’s essential principles, like mercy, community, and redemption.” She quotes Pope Benedict, “when the trial of this shifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church.”

Ms. Eberstadt wrote back in 2020 on the “The fury of the Fatherless.” She sees a wide spread of social disorder as a “crisis of filial attachment that has beset the Western world for more than a half a century.  Deprived of father, Father, and patria, a critical mass of humanity has become socially dysfunctional on a scale not seen before.” She goes on the say, “father, Father, and filial piety toward country …….[are] the sinkhole into which all three have collapsed is now a public hazard.  The threefold crisis of paternity is depriving many young people – especially young men – of reasons to live as rational and productive citizens.”  America’s youth have been “left alone in a cosmos with nothing to guide them, not even a firm grasp of what constitutes their basic humanity, and no means of finding the way home”  

Young men are not an “endangered species.”  They are looking for authenticity.  It could be, that in our day, we are witnessing the defiance of young men. The “primal screams” and “the fury of the fatherless” is being heard.  Through all the voices of our cultural wars, the voice of the heavenly Father is calling men home.  Men are not left alone in the cosmos.   Jesus is saying, “Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep” (Luke 15:6).