Our culture won’t
say what a man should be. The church can.
Johnny Manziel doesn’t mention the gun until the third act of Untold:
Johnny Football, the Netflix documentary, released this month, about his brief career as
an NFL quarterback. But when he does, he’s aiming it at himself. By that point,
his career had flamed out, and all bridges to family, friends, teammates, and
coaches had been burned.
“I had planned to do everything that I wanted to do at that point in my
life,” Manziel says, as images flash by of Johnny Football waving stacks of
cash and partying in Vegas. “And then my plan was to take my life,” he
continues. “I still to this day don’t know what happened, but the gun just
clicked.”
Untold is an anthology, focused on sports past and present. But the series
title is almost too on the nose for the Manziel chapter: It’s more revelatory
in what it doesn’t say than what it does, coming right to the edge of an
uncomfortable reality at the heart of the story but flinching every time.
The documentary has plenty of space for Manziel’s dissolution and plenty
of furrowed brows lamenting his collapse. But it doesn’t reckon with how people
who should have cared for him enabled his “$5 million bender.” Nor does it
present an alternative vision, even at the end, of who Johnny Football could
have been. Johnny survived, and thank God—but what now? What kind of man will
he become?
Untold isn’t alone in its unwillingness to face that question. What a man is,
what he should be, what roles men may fill—these all seem to be beyond the scope
of our culture’s current conversations about masculinity. We increasingly know how to recognize and condemn “toxic
masculinity,” and rightly so. But what about nontoxic ways to be a man? Better
yet, what about going beyond merely avoiding toxicity to bring a constructive
vision of masculine virtue to men in crisis?
Because we are in crisis, even if not so visibly as Manziel. The
gap in his story is reflective of a larger gap in our cultural imagination.
Richard Reeves, author of Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It
Matters, and What to Do about It, describes it in terms of “social
scripts.” In decades past, he says, the social script for men was fairly straightforward:
Be a breadwinner, be a protector and guardian, and instill the values in your
family that were handed down to you from your own father. It’s a script loaded
with responsibility and purpose, and that was a burden most men felt eager to
carry.
But the accompanying social script for women had serious flaws. The
mid-century ideal gave women no sense of agency to choose a vocation outside
the home, and women lacked the economic freedom to leave abusive and unfaithful
marriages.
As women won economic independence, they not only rose to the challenge
of equality but blew right past it. By almost every conceivable measure, women and girls
are outperforming men and boys in education. And while the pay gap has been
slower to close, evidence suggests it is indeed closing. (According to
Reeves, when you adjust the numbers to account for
women taking unpaid leave to care for children, men and women are paid about
equally.)
The new social script for women is at once purposeful and libertarian.
Girls can do anything, as the slogan goes, including—if they want—pursuing a
traditional model of marriage and family. Meanwhile, Reeves says, men have yet
to find our new social script. The old role of breadwinner, protector, and
spiritual head of the household isn’t merely viewed as quaint; it’s often seen
as paternalistic or worse.
For some progressives, the best social script for men seems to be the
role of ally—someone who uses his privilege to lift up others. Director Greta
Gerwig envisions this role in Barbie with the character of Allan. Played
by Michael Cera, Allan is the remarkably forgettable friend of Ken,
deliberately—as with many of Cera’s best roles—a bland nonentity.
Allan isn’t really a hero. He’s not a love interest for Barbie, and we
don’t know what happens to him in the end. Barbie herself embraces embodied,
gendered humanity as the gift that it was meant to be. Ken recognizes the
failure of his own “Kendom” and the absurdity of his utopia, but we’re left
wondering what he’ll do next. With Allan, we don’t really care—but that’s the
point. He’s just Allan the ally, and his only job is to support Barbie.
Forgive me if this sounds harsh, but no man wants to be Allan. No man
wants to go to war to help Barbie reclaim her kingdom and end up forgotten in
the friend zone. Allyship alone is simply not a compelling vision of
masculinity.
But good luck finding an acceptable alternative in progressive spaces.
Describe other attributes men long embraced as marks of masculinity—desire for
competition, aggression, or strength—and you’ll discover that they’re often treated as pathologies, indistinguishable
from a toxic desire for sexual conquest. It seems the only
acceptable masculinity is one that historically would not be recognized as
masculine at all.
The problem is different on the right, especially the very online right,
where transgression against progressive pieties is sometimes half the fun (and
most of the clicks). But here, the social script doesn’t look like the old one
either.
Instead, you’ll find arguments about prepping for economic apocalypse,
avoiding seed oils, and determining whether a new father should ever change a single diaper. (He should change
thousands, and if he’s a Christian, he almost certainly will.)
Unlike that of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, this masculinity
is performative and reactionary, interested in aesthetics and display on social
media more than the serious, lifelong work of being a good and faithful man. To
the extent that it’s meant to be taken seriously (and mostly it’s not), it
doesn’t seem interested in the formation of virtues that would make masculinity
distinctly Christlike—such as gentleness, self-control, sobriety, compassion,
and generosity.
Evangelicals have sometimes tried to provide an alternative script, with
varying degrees of success. While silly examples of hypermasculinity abound, movements
like Promise Keepers or the work of writers like John Eldredge struck a chord with a broad group of
men—particularly when they spoke biblically about the attributes of masculinity
that relate to fatherhood and the Fatherhood of God.
These movements come and go, and I suspect that has as much to do with
consumer cycles as any deeper cultural shift. But the core idea of a biblical,
fatherhood-based vision of masculine virtue could resonate regardless of the
cultural milieu. While not all of us will be fathers, and far too many of us
grew up without fathers, we all share a universal longing for a father—and even
the shape of that absence can inform a vision of masculinity. We long for a
presence who watches over us, providing and protecting when we feel weak or
vulnerable, blessing and filling us with courage when we face conflict or
obstacles. The doctrine of adoption informs that vision too, wherein we find
ourselves claimed as sons and daughters by God our Father (Rom. 8:14-17).
Evangelicals could articulate a social script for our moment that
accounts for the economic realities of a post-feminist world without ceding
ground on our theological commitments about the meaning of marriage, the nature
of men and women, and the goodness of being made in the image of God. We could
celebrate the mysterious ways men and women are similar and different without
indulging in stereotypes or enshrining a single, midcentury household economic
arrangement as a supposedly divine ideal.
We could tell a story about men’s unique responsibility to shape
Christians’ understanding of God as Father. We could recognize that men’s strength
is a gift meant to be used in service and protection of others and that gender
differences—seen in our contrast with the feminine attributes of our wives and
daughters—are likewise a means of grace to be dignified, not belittled or
diminished in either direction.
This kind of masculinity could empower men without authorizing us to
become tyrants. It could honor our strength while recognizing that it exists to
serve others. It could inspire hard work and ambition without fostering the
illusion that a man must always fit shallow ideals of productivity and success.
Johnny Manziel achieved that success as very few men do, but he still
found himself facing a gun. And his story is hardly unique. In the absence of a
meaningful script for our lives, men are in crisis. In the past 30 years, men
have dramatically outpaced women in deaths of
despair. Last year, nearly 40,000 men committed suicide in the US, four
times the number of women who did so. A growing
portion of them were in midlife, a season when many men are especially starved for
purpose.
These deaths aren’t solely attributable to a missing social script, of
course. But it should be no surprise that men starved for a constructive vision
of masculinity would come to despair. Like preaching the message of the gospel,
communicating a vision of embodied Christlikeness as men is necessary and
regularly requires renewal. We need fresh language and new metaphors that are
resonant with the longings of our moment and communicate to men not only who we
can be but also who we are as bearers of God’s image.
Our culture is flinching away from this question. The church must not.
by Mike Cosper August
31, 2023
Mike Cosper is the director of Christianity Today Media
