Evangelicals Need to Stop Shaming Men
They need to stop delivering hectoring "Man up!" lectures that simply drive men away
Welcome to those of you who just joined after seeing me on Dr. Steve Turley’s show. Thanks so much for signing up. I cover a lot of topics here but the main focus is the intersection of the future of the evangelical church with men’s issues. I recently wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about why men turn to online influencers instead of traditional authorities. And I just finished a five part series digging a bit deeper into some of the reasons I highlighted.
What Jordan Peterson Can Teach Church Leaders (in the Wall Street Journal)
The Problem With Servant Leadership (An Aspirational Vision of Manhood)
Wouldn’t you know it, this week in World magazine’s opinion section, Nathanael Blake from EPPC wrote an essay arguing that an aversion to marriage by men is unmanly. He writes:
Anti-marriage influencers claim to be looking after men’s interests, but they are directing men toward unhappy, cowardly lives…The rejoinder from Davis and her followers was that the problem with marriage is in the potential for failure—sure a happy marriage might be great, but a bad one may be so miserable, or a divorce so devastating, that marriage is not worth attempting. Though Davis overstates the prevalence of these ills, they are real. Men can have their hearts broken, their bank accounts drained, and their children taken from them. Thus, though Lyman Stone is correct that the risks of divorce do not, on aggregate, offset the benefits of marriage, and furthermore that “divorced men have the SAME HAPPINESS as never-married men,” this is not really about the data. Rather it is about courage and what it is to be a man. [emphasis added]
He goes on to say:
Some risks are not worth taking, but marriage is not so intrinsically foolhardy as to be among them, even in 2023. Indeed, marriage is the vocation that the great majority of men are called to—and it is not as if Davis and the rest are encouraging men to remain unmarried in order to devote themselves to the service of God and His people. Rather, those telling men not to fulfill their vocations as husbands and fathers are basing this counsel on reasons that are weak and cowardly. For all of their supposed sympathy, it is they who seek to stunt men's nature and sacrifice our calling in exchange for the promise of a tame security. This is unmanly.
…
Men are not made to sit quietly, avoiding all perils in this life, but to grow and brave them. Cowards will shrink from this, but men—who want to live as men are meant to live—will welcome the dangers and difficulties as well as the joys and satisfactions of love and marriage.
I don’t know Blake’s own faith background, but I am assuming that he is evangelical given that this op-ed appears in an evangelical magazine. Evangelicals are certainly the target market.
Blake’s essay is classic evangelical shaming of men. They need to man up and marry all those single ladies in the pews. And if they don’t, they aren’t Real Men - they are cowards.
Notably, he doesn’t deny any of the arguments made by the anti-marriage advocates online - who are just the latest incarnation of a movement called MGTOW, for “men going their own way,” arguing that men should avoid marriage (and often any entanglements with women as much as possible).
These advocates tout things like the divorce risk facing men. It’s one of the most well known facts in social science that women initiate the vast majority of divorces - around 70% or so depending on the source you look at. It’s a fact I have never heard an evangelical pastor mention. In fact, as one feminist scholar found in her academic research, in evangelical sermons “women are framed primarily as receivers of divorce rather than initiators.” And, while there have been improvements, divorce court and child custody practices still favor women.
Now, I happen to be an advocate for marriage myself, which I believe is the normative pattern of human life (though isn’t for everyone, and I affirm that people are entitled to make their own decisions in life about what they think will work best for them). I too believe that the benefits of marriage outweigh the risks. I would also agree that there are things you can do to reduce your divorce risk. One of the most important is weighing the statistical likelihood of divorce based on the characteristics of both you and the woman you are planning to marry (“moneyball for marriage”).
At the same time, simply accusing men who are hesitant to get married in this environment of being “unmanly” or “cowards” is not productive.
It’s also worth asking what Blake - and by extension the rest of the evangelical leadership class - are doing to reduce these risks, help men manage them, or to create an environment in which men have a better chance of marital success.
The answer is basically nothing.
They could be equipping men to navigate this world by giving them the real facts around divorce risk, how online dating works, etc. But they don’t. In fact, they may be more likely to be giving bad advice than good.
They could tell men, “Get married and we’ve got your back.” But they don’t. Instead, should some man actually get married and any troubles arise, they will almost certainly blame him for it. In their public proclamations, they make clear that they blame men for everything that goes wrong in a marriage - some of them even make this a theological point.
They also don’t advocate for reform to divorce and custody laws to make modern marriage more fair to men, something even a secular feminist scholar like Richard Reeves wants to do.
They could create an aspirational vision of what it means to be married that attracts men to want it. Instead, they say that if you do get married, you job is to be, as in moralistic therapeutic deism’s view of God, a sort of combination butler and therapist to your wife.
Evangelicals portray marriage as an unattractive life of troubles and drudgework. They blame men for everything that goes wrong in a marriage. Then when men decide not to get marriage or delay it for a significant period of time, they try to shame those men into getting married by calling them names.
These are the people who pile up heavy burdens on men’s shoulders, but won’t lift a finger to help carry them.
As evangelical scholar Anthony Bradley, who is one of the best and strongest voices on men’s issues put it:
We've been down this road before. Shaming men to "get married" is a failed strategy in culture where many of them experienced the reality of divorce. What Pearl is talking about has nothing to do with why the vast majority of men in their 20s are marriage avoidant. This type of article is exactly why young guys prefer Peterson, Rogan, etc. Most of the young men I've worked with on this issue for 25 years who are marriage-avoidant aren't "cowards" nor "unmanly." Most are children of divorce and/or were raised in homes of overbearing/smothering/emasculating mothers in the matriarchal South. This is missing somehow in the discourse about this issue. This is what we really need to be discussing. Pearl's not relevant. Since women initiate most divorces, young men aren't marriage-avoidant so much as they are divorce-avoidant or they don't want to be in emasculating marriages like the ones their fathers were in and have witnessed for 30 years. They don't want to live a life of domesticated emasculation. It's actually, in many ways, a rational choice. [emphasis added]
Bradley is exactly right. We treat men like this and then wonder why they go somewhere else for guidance in life.
Do evangelicals actually want to reach men? If so, they need to start changing some of these things and correcting their approach. One simple and easy thing to do right away would simply be to stop shaming men.
Featured image credit: Anthony Easton/flickr, CC-BY 2.0
When I was teaching at LCU, I remember walking into a classroom in the middle of a conversation that several of the male students were having. They had just been in a chapel service and were talking in disgust at the topic of the service: born again virginity. Evidently, from what the students told me, a woman had been invited to speak, or rather brag, about spending her 20's in promiscuity, and then "repented," was made a "spiritual virgin" again, and evidently her husband had sat on the stage beside her during this entire humiliating display. The lesson of the service, I suppose, was something about God always having a plan for whatever you go through, and never having to be held accountable because God takes away all your shame. And the students were agreeing that this woman was quite shameless.
Unfortunately, Aaron, I think there's a nexus of bad theology, bad social science, and bad incentives at the heart of this which isn't going to go away until these institutions begin to suffer serious consequences. Big Eva is invested in women-heavy ministries, women-heavy congregations, and that's why these absurd teachings keep popping up, the most absurd of which is Born Again Virginity. Pastors know that they can't tell the truth to a late-30-something single woman who spent the last decade in serial-monogamous relationships with secular men. Their young adult ministry would dissolve overnight. Necessity is the mother of theological innovation.
Men, even very young men like my students, know that they're something contemptable about a women with a high body count that they don't want to be involved with. They don't want to vicariously be made one flesh with half the men's lacrosse team. And this is the hard part that we leave unspoken because we Evangelicals are allergic to speaking the truth when it's icky: we're not talking about guys not wanting to date 20-year-old virgins. We're talking about guys not wanting to date late-30's who came to Jesus after a series of LTRs with secular men.
The hard lesson, which these pastors are not going to admit (or else only admit while weasel-wording away the core of it) is that repenting of your sin doesn't make the worldly consequences of sin go away. Nobody is entitled to marriage, and nobody is obligated to romantically pursue a woman. Sorry, folks, Hosea is not God's model for human marriage, his marriage was unique and it was a metaphor for Israel. Pastors want to please a large and well-tithing chunk of their congregation, and it's natural to let yourself be swayed by tears and sob stories. But the result of caving to that pressure is to become contemptable. My students saw through it clearly - the harlot on the stage, the humiliated, virtually cuckolded husband next to her, and the saccharine, greasy smile of the pastor behind them. I don't blame the boys for not buying that.
Hi Aaron,
I pretty much agree with everything you write, but I wanted to make a minor point about how you refer to Jordan Peterson and similar men.
I react negetively (and I don't think I'm alone) to the terms "influencer" or "online influencer." To me, this term brings to mind primarily a young, fit, beautiful, and/or daring person primarily involved in marketing activities through internet views, clicks and likes while (often) flaunting her body (in the case of women), wealth, possessions, or connections. I find this type of "influencer" repugnant and emblematic of our cultural decline. Of course, I understand you do not mean this in the case of persons like Mr. Peterson. Nevertheless, in the mind of the reader, an "influencer" might lose to a "pastor" out of the gate because of this negative association.
I like to think of Mr. Peterson and similar men as "teachers" or guides, mentors, coaches, professors (perhaps even "experts") in becoming a man and a better man. Could we come up with a more positive term? Just a thought.
Keep up the good work!
Pete