WHY DOES NANCY PEARCEY FOCUS ON THE ATTACK ON MASCULINITY?
Hostility against men has become so acceptable
in mainstream publications that the Washington Post had an article called ‘Why
can’t we hate men?’ And the Huffington Post had an article saying, ‘My favorite
hashtag is kill all men.’ You can buy t-shirts that say, ‘So many men, so
little ammunition.’ And then books come out with titles like ‘I hate men.’ ‘No
good men.’ ‘Are men necessary?’ And I thought, wait a minute, where did this
come from? A couple of months ago, the director of the movie Avatar said,
‘Testosterone is a toxin.’
The trigger that made
me say, ‘We have to address this,’ was the incredible hostility against men.
There was a survey done in 2016 in which 46% of American men said, ‘Society
seems to punish men these days just for being men.’ These days, this
discrimination against men has become worse than the discrimination against
women. You can’t address something effectively if you don’t look at where it
came from and how it developed. So that was one of the major goals of the book.
WHERE DID HOSTILITY AGAINST MEN START?
One of the surprising things that I found in
writing this book is that if we want to deal with it effectively, we have to go
much further back. Families worked together in the colonial age before the
industrial revolution. The father worked with his children all day on the
family business.
Early America was primarily Christian, so a
Biblical view of masculinity existed. The dominant social expectation of the
time focused more on men’s caretaking role. Their authority in the family meant
they were responsible for the common good. That authority didn’t mean you could
do whatever you wanted. Rather, it meant you had responsibility for the common
good of the marriage, family, and church. All of this changed when the Industrial
Revolution began. That’s when the rhetoric changed. As men no longer worked
alongside people they loved, they were now competing with other men.
I quote a letter to the editor in a newspaper
from the nineteenth century saying, ‘In the pursuit of economic success,
American men are losing their souls.’ Elizabeth Katie Stanton, one of the first
feminists, gave a speech titled ‘The Destructive Male.’ In it, she said, ‘The
male element is a destructive force; stern, selfish, aggrandizing, loving war,
violence, conquest, acquisition, and breeding discord, disorder, disease, and
death. What America needs is a new evangel of womanhood. To exalt beauty,
virtue, morality, true religion, to lift man to the higher realms of thought
and action.’ She preached a gospel of feminism. This double standard meant that
women were expected to hold men in line. But on the other hand, men were
expected to be immoral or lack integrity. My book goes back there and traces
the history so that we can understand it better.
NANCY PEARCEY EXPLAINS THE HEALTHIEST FAMILIES
‘Conservative protestant gender ideology can
lead to abuse both physical and emotional. It is no secret that abuse is
prevalent in conservative churches that embrace headship theory.’ The problem
with these accusations is that they ignored the data from the social sciences.
Sociologists have examined these accusations and asked, ‘What was the
evidence?’ So they went back and did the studies.
And now it’s very clear that husbands and
fathers who attend church regularly are the most loving husbands and engaged
fathers. Unlike the average American family, evangelical men are the most
loving to their wives. These wives report feeling the most loved and
appreciated by their husbands. They’re the most engaged with their children in
terms of shared activities like sports and church youth group and discipline
like setting screen time and bedtime. They have the lowest level of divorce of
any group in America. They have the lowest rates of domestic violence of any
major group in America. Even Christians don’t know this.
THE HAPPIEST MARRIAGES
Brad Wilcox wrote an article in The New York
Times, saying that the happiest of all wives in America are religious
conservatives. 73% of wives who hold conservative gender values and attend religious
services regularly with their husbands have high-quality marriages. Then he
says, ‘You academics need to cast aside your prejudices against evangelicals,
and religious conservatives in general and realize that evangelical, protestant
men have the best marriages, are the most loving husbands and the most engaged
fathers.’
The reason that the statistics show something
else is that we hear that Christians divorce at the same rate as others. Those
researchers returned to the data and separated truly committed authentic
Christian men who regularly attended from nominal Christian men. These men
might check the Baptist box, but whose Christianity is mostly cultural, they
don’t attend church regularly. The differences between these two groups are
shocking. Nominal Christian men have the worst marriages and report the lowest
level of happiness. They’re the least engaged with their children and have the
highest divorce rate and domestic violence, even above secular men.
And this is why the statistics become skewed.
You get a misleading statistic if you take truly committed Christian men and
put them alongside nominal Christian men who are worse than secular men. That’s
another reason most of us don’t realize that truly committed Christian men are
doing far better than any other group in America.
EVANGELICAL PROTESTANTISM HELPS WOMEN
In my book, I focus mostly on America because
otherwise, it would be too big. But I have a few examples from other countries.
In Colombia, there was an anthropologist/Marxist. She expected that
Protestantism would lead to patriarchal males dominating their families. She
shockingly discovered the opposite. What she found is that when a man converts
and becomes an evangelical protestant, he stops drinking, he stops gambling,
and he stops visiting prostitutes. His money goes to his family. His family
experiences a rise in the standard of living. This anthropologist concludes
that if there is a women’s movement that helps women, it’s evangelical
Protestantism.
Then there was a large study done by an
anthropologist at the University of London. She included not only Latin America
but Africa and Asia. She found the evangelical gender paradox creates a
partnership between women and the church where they hold men accountable for
the typical male vices, like drinking and adultery and visiting prostitutes,
and so on. In her words, ‘The church helps men put the needs of the household
above their own pleasure.’ She also says if there’s a women’s movement, it’s
not the Western AIDS organizations or Western feminism. The so-called backward,
unsophisticated evangelicalism has done more for women than anything
else.
And the last one was a bestselling book, Half
the Sky, by Nicholas Kristof. He went around the world to look at the status of
women in other countries and concluded that Christians were helping women more
than anyone else. He said, ‘The evangelical church applies community pressure
to bring wayward husbands back in line. It discourages alcoholism and adultery
practices that have caused tremendous hardship to women, especially in places
like Africa.’
THE UNITING IDEA OF GOOD MEN
There was a sociologist, he’s not a Christian,
but he’s very well known in his field, so he gets invited to speak worldwide.
When he does, he asks young men two questions. First, he says, ‘What does it
mean to be a good man? You’re at a funeral, and in the eulogy, somebody says he
was a good man.’ People had no problem answering that. They said things like
honor, integrity, sacrifice, looking out for the little guy, providing,
protecting, and being generous.
And he would ask where they learned that. They
would say, ‘It’s just in the air we breathe.’ In the West, they would say,
‘It’s a Judeo-Christian heritage.’ Then he would follow up with, ‘What if I say
to you, man up; Be a real man.’ And the young men would say that’s completely
different. That means be tough and strong, never show weakness, win at all
costs, be competitive, get rich, and get laid.
That’s the competing grips to masculinity in the
culture today. God made man in His image, and they know what it means to be a
good man. The first ever cross-cultural study done on the concepts of
masculinity by an anthropologist found that no matter how different they were
in understanding what it means to be a man, all cultures expect men to perform
what he calls the three p’s: provide, protect, and procreate. This means
contributing to society for the next generation.
MEN AND WOMEN ARE DIFFERENT
Biologically men are bigger, stronger, faster,
and have more fast twitch muscles (which means they can react more quickly).
They have 75% greater muscle mass and 90% greater strength. It’s natural that
all cultures expect men to be the providers, protectors, and procreators. Can
you imagine if a woman was pregnant and nursing and went off to war? Of course,
she’s not going to go off to war. We also have to ensure we’re always talking
about women regarding their strengths.
It’s important to say, ‘Women’s superpower is
having babies.’ It takes incredible strength of character to raise an infant.
You have to be on call 24 hours/day. You have to be willing to drop whatever
you’re doing at 3 in the morning when the baby wakes up hungry. Whenever the
baby’s in distress, you don’t scold them, and you don’t reason with them; you
meet their needs, no matter what you want to be doing. It takes incredible
character strength and sensitivity to nonverbal cues and threats in their
environment.
WHAT NANCY PEARCEY SEES AS THE LONG TERM SOLUTION
The most important long-term solution to toxic
behavior in men is close, loving bonds between fathers and sons. And right now,
40% of American children grow up without contact with their natural father. A
psychiatrist, who I quote in the book, says, ‘We’re not going to get a better
group of men until we get a better group of fathers who are willing to stick it
out and be there for their sons.’ So the long-term solution is we need to look
at these fatherless kids. Everyone knows that single-parent families are not as
effective. They have children, especially boys, who are more likely to drop out
of school, be addicted to drugs and alcohol, get pregnant outside of marriage,
and end up behind bars. 90% of violent offenders are from fatherless
homes.
We need to focus on getting fathers more
involved with their children. I would suggest that churches should have a
ministry for fatherless boys. Father substitutes like a youth pastor, a youth
group leader, a coach, and a teacher can have an incredible impact on a young
boy. I think churches should rethink and reprioritize some of their ministries
and make this one higher on their list. How do we reach out to fatherless boys?
NANCY PEARCEY PROVIDES HOPE FOR HEALTHY MASCULINITY
In my book, The Toxic War on Masculinity, I look
at the changing views of fathers because today, the media mocks fathers. No
wonder fatherhood has lost status, and fewer men want to become fathers. That,
too, started with the Industrial Revolution. Fathers were no longer in the
home, teaching their children daily what it meant to be a man and what it meant
to acquire adult skills. Now men were in the workplace, and the kids didn’t see
them all day. In the nineteenth century, people protested that fathers were no
longer involved with the kids.
The leading Psychologist of the nineteenth
century said, ‘Never before in American history have boys been so wild because
fathers were not there to discipline them. Never before have they been so half
orphaned and left up to female guidance in family, school, and church.’ In
their day, they were acutely aware of what they’d lost by fathers being out of
the home all day. People began to say that fathers were irrelevant and
incompetent because they were no longer in touch with what was happening in the
home.
I have a chapter on practical ways that men can
tweak the workplace. We can’t undo the Industrial Revolution, but can we tweak
it so that fathers have more time at home? The slight silver lining in the
pandemic was that 66% of fathers liked being home more. A recent headline in the New York Times said,
‘During the pandemic, fathers got closer to their children, and they don’t want
to lose that.’ On surveys, men report just as much work-family conflict as
women do. I think the solution for both is to bring more work home.
ABOUT NANCY PEARCEY
Nancy Pearcey is the author of the upcoming book The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles
the Sexes. Her most
recently published book is Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and
Sexuality. Her earlier
books include The Soul of Science, Saving Leonardo, Finding Truth,and two ECPA Gold Medallion Award Winners: How Now Shall We Live(coauthored with Harold Fickett and Chuck
Colson) and Total Truth.
Her books have been translated into 19
languages. She is professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian
University. A former agnostic, Pearcey has spoken at universities such as
Princeton, Stanford, USC, and Dartmouth. She has been quoted in The New Yorker and Newsweek,
highlighted as one of the five top women apologists by Christianity Today,
and hailed in The Economist as “America’s preeminent evangelical
Protestant female intellectual.”
