Revisiting the Masculinity Crisis
I’ve been long interested in discussions about masculinity and manhood in Christian and secular discourses. Being a man myself, and concerned with the performance of manhood and maleness as a Christian, in a contested and gendered culture, I have to admit that negotiating the world is a little confusing for the best of us.
This is why I’ve written previous posts on The Case for Post-Patriarchal Manhood, Christianity After Mark Driscoll, and Do Men Need Some Chivalry.
Generally, I think there is agreement that there is a manhood/masculinity crisis but there are significant debates over what it is (men increasingly prone to depression, dropping out of school and college, loneliness, drug addiction, incarceration, gendered-based violence, suicide, etc.) and what is its underlying causes (absent fathers, shifting gender roles, economics, social media, etc).
I came across a few things this week that touch explicitly on this topic and it does kind of confirm my own thinking about what the crisis is and what the solution is!
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First, over at Wisdom of Crowds there is a panel discussion about the masculinity crisis. To be honest, it mostly sounds like upper-middle academics in a scholarly bubble trying to figure out who Merle Haggard is. Yet there is one point where one of the panelists makes a good insight. She notes that the men she interviewed did not know who they were supposed to be and or how to behave, AND, they desperately wanted someone to tell them both (9:40). To which I say, “Bingo.”
Here’s the thing, if there is no prescriptive way of being a man, it promotes confusion and anxiety, not an opportunity to reinvent masculinity. Men don’t want to reinvent manhood in some postgender fantasy world. No, men want to be validated and valued by other men, and they will look for older, outspoken, or successful men to tell them how to be men and then crave their validation. This explains the male magnetism of Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate: men who are strident, confident, outspoken, and want to influence other men to be men (NB Peterson and Tate are not moral equivalents in my book).
If a boy grows up with no father, no mentor, no male figure to regard as the baseline for how to be a man and how to behave as a man, then they fill that gap with drugs, dangerous activities, or other things, unless they discover some male pattern that they wish to imitate, whether it’s Jesus, James Bond, or Justin Timberlake. Men are mimetic creatures and crave an example to imitate to allay their confusion and anxiety about their own masculine status.
The best thing boys need, rich or poor, black or white, is good fathers and good male role models in their lives who interact with them.
Second, over at RNS, there is an article on Pope Francis’ call to demasculinize the church. The Pontiff said:
“The church is woman,” Francis told the theologians, “and if we cannot understand what a woman is, what is the theology of women, we will never understand the church. One of the great sins we have witnessed is ‘masculinizing’ the church.” The pope charged those present with the task of reflecting on the role of women in the institution. “This is the job I ask of you, please: Demasculinize the church,” he said.
On this, I partly concur, because I’ve opposed John Piper’s famous aphorism “Christianity has a masculine feel” and in counter-point I’ve advocated instead Maybe Christianity Has a Feminist Feel?
We should stop thinking of the church as a visible manifestation of a male God, Jesus’s manhood, and a male-centered and male-authoritative religious institution.
However, there is the danger that masculinity is treated like a kind of demon that needs to be ritually exorcised or a disease from which it needs to be continually cured.
What we need is not a phallologist church (worshipping maleness), but neither a gender-neutral church (the church is the bride of Christ), for the church is people who are male and female and their biological sex is a gift to the church when exercised the manifold graces of God.
True, spiritual gifts do not come in pink or blue, but godly masculinity as well as godly femininity is a blessing to the church.
Lots to think about here. I agree that humans are memetic creatures and need a model to imitate.
This brings to mind Paul’s call to imitate Christ and also frequently his call to imitate himself (as he imitates Christ). But it does seem that this call is clearly extended to both men and women - and Paul seems to be calling both to imitate Christ and Paul - as humans first - not a particular gender.
And while I agree that our biological sex is part of the gift of a body that God has given us, it’s also interesting how little there is in scripture that prescribes a certain model of masculinity or femininity for imitation. It seems perhaps the goal is to be asking first “am I becoming the kind of human that Christ modeled” rather than am I becoming a certain model of male or female.
Gender performance differs so radically in different contexts and I wonder if scripture is more concerned to call us all together to model Christ and then gives us the freedom to contextualize what that looks like at the gender level.
Rather than having an ideal man or an ideal woman to model after, if both men and women are living in Christ and growing in the fruits of the spirit, it seems that they would have the wisdom to exhibit those fruits in creative and diverse gender specific way - without having other humans tell them there is some platonic form of masculinity or femininity that they are failing at.
Seems to me that the boat is missed when we lament that men don’t know how to be men or women don’t know how to be women, when the problem is we all don’t know how to be the humans God created us to be unless we are in Christ.
Doesn't Christ model the perfect masculinity for us? One that uplifts male colleagues, respects and values women and their voices, resolves problems with wisdom, not violence, and endures difficulty for the good of others? He explicitly asks people to be accountable for their desires instead of gendering their gaze. I mean, after all, he's a grown man who is still close with his mother.
As a teacher and coach of high school students, I see young men looking for older models, and I absolutely agree with you that they will find someone to fill the vacuum (a la Peterson or Tate). Definitely the complementarian stuff and Piper stuff makes Christianity a bastion of problematic masculinity, especially when alloyed with the hypermasculine Western macho stuff a la Trump.
The solution, as Christians, is we need to point back to Christ as the model.