In this episode, Dr. Allie Pipps talks about how she became a Christian, how she got started in apologetics, and how she ended up writing a book about the War on Masculinity. This episode is brought to you by GoToRanchers.
00:32:00.120That means be tough, be strong, never show weakness, win at all costs, suck it up, be competitive, get rich, get laid.
00:32:11.400So, in other words, when he asked about the real man, the traits that they listed tended to be the things that our culture calls toxic, or at least if disconnected from the ideal of the real man, a moral ideal, it can slide into entitlements, dominance, control, and so on.
00:32:32.200And so, clearly, young men have two scripts going on, running through their minds.
00:32:40.220On the one hand, it reinforces that earlier study, showing that they do know what the good man is.
00:32:45.920Universally, across all cultures, they do know what it means to be the good man.
00:32:51.120I keep coming back to, they are made in God's image.
00:32:54.120Or Romans 2, right, which says we all have a conscience.
00:32:57.220We all inherently, innately know right from wrong.
00:32:59.900But cultures create a cultural script, a secular script for masculinity that is telling them, you know, what you just said a moment ago.
00:33:10.360Even here in the States, we have these competing scripts.
00:33:14.240But knowing this gets us, I think, a better strategy for dealing with it.
00:33:19.840Men don't respond very well to being called toxic, right?
00:35:25.720And so, it seems to be very dire that we distinguish between how masculinity and aggression and bravery and courage and toughness can be used for edification and how it can also be used to destroy.
00:35:41.240I think about fatherlessness, which has an effect that motherlessness, motherlessness is rare, is more rare.
00:35:48.320But it also is less, it seems to have less of an effect or different effects than fatherlessness does.
00:35:54.560Like men have a unique capacity to create coherent and strong communities and families and also the unique capacity through their absence to completely destroy them.
00:36:07.620So, you could kind of see, I don't know, from a secular and certainly feminist perspective, when you see the destructive parts of men or masculinity or what they do to just say, you know what?
00:36:24.480And if they were just more like us, then everything would be calmer, less crime, all of that.
00:36:31.460Because men are, I mean, men are responsible for the vast majority of sexual crimes, for the vast majority of violent crimes, for the vast majority of sex trafficking and pornography consumption and things like that.
00:36:42.480So, from a feminist perspective, you could see how they're just like, ugh, masculinity is the problem without thinking of all the good that masculinity has done.
00:36:50.620Yes, I totally agree with you, and I do have two chapters in the book on domestic violence and abuse.
00:37:01.000But let's get there, let's get there through another sociological study.
00:37:06.800Christian men show that same divergence between, you know, the good man and the real man, to use the language of that study.
00:37:15.920And this is actually the main reason I wrote the book, because sociologically, it turns out that Christian men do far better than any other major group in America.
00:37:30.160So, I put this, it used to be at the back of the book, and then I realized, hey, people are going to be a lot happier if you put the good news first.
00:37:37.460So, this is right at the beginning of the book.
00:37:39.440Look, if there are, if we acknowledge that there's a lot of hostility against masculinity today, like you were mentioning, you know, what caught my eye was the Washington Post had an article called, Why Can't We Hate Men?
00:38:34.320And that was kind of the big project I undertook with this book.
00:38:37.740But, of course, we've all heard that exhibit A of toxic masculinity is evangelical men, you know, the Christian men, if you believe in any sort of male headship or authority in the home.
00:38:48.860And that was easy to find, too, by the way.
00:38:51.360A quick Google search, I found lots of examples of people saying things like, you know, any notion of male headship in the home is going to lead to abuse.
00:38:59.640Or the founder of the church tomb movement said, Protestant theology on headship feeds the rape culture that we see permeating Christianity today.
00:39:13.360So, it's Christian men who are particularly targeted in the media as being toxic.
00:39:21.720Well, what I found out is that this is contrary to what social sciences say.
00:39:26.820The social sciences have completely debunked this.
00:39:29.700What happened is that the psychologists and sociologists were reading these accusations and saying, where's your evidence?
00:39:36.960Wait, what is your evidence for those positions, for your accusations?
00:39:42.060And so, they went and did the studies.
00:39:43.780So, most of them are fairly recent studies.
00:39:46.800And what they found was just the opposite.
00:39:48.680They found that evangelical family men, men who are married and have kids, are more loving fathers and more loving husbands than any other group in America.
00:39:58.880And they do, by the way, interview the wives separately, which is important if there is abuse, for example.
00:40:07.640So, what they're actually saying is that the wives report being the happiest with their husbands' expressions of love and affection.
00:40:15.260Evangelical fathers test out as the most engaged with their children, both in terms of shared activities like sports and church youth group,
00:40:24.820and in terms of discipline, like setting limits on screen time or enforcing bedtime.
00:40:30.820Evangelical couples are the least likely to divorce.
00:41:13.100And so, they will even publish, even though he's conservative, they will publish him.
00:41:19.060So, this was in the New York Times, and he said, it turns out that the happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives.
00:41:29.000And, of course, they focus on the wives because the assumption is that evangelical men are oppressive, tyrannical patriarchs.
00:41:37.200So, it turns out that the happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives.
00:41:42.940Fully 73% of wives who hold conservative gender values and attend religious services regularly with their husbands have high-quality marriages.
00:41:55.740You know, if I use these statistics, you know, in Christian audiences, you see people visibly sit back and their mouths drop open because we've all heard that Christian men are, in fact, you know, the worst in terms of toxic masculinity.
00:42:08.380And the numbers are now totally debunking the media stereotypes.
00:42:13.040And that was the final reason I decided I have to write this book.
00:42:17.020I've got to get this literature out there.
00:42:19.260Because right now, I had to go digging in academic sociological journals to find this material.
00:42:26.500And I wanted to bring it out and make it accessible to Christians so that Christian men can be encouraged.
00:42:31.220They are actually doing a very good job.
00:42:33.000I want to read something by Brad Wilcox.
00:42:48.840You reference him several times in your book.
00:42:51.740And so, here's something he wrote in Christianity Today.
00:42:53.960In general, setting aside nominal Christians, the research indicates that evangelical Protestantism does not pose the kind of risks that are often alleged.
00:43:03.000Indeed, at least judging from the studies here in the United States, it looks like churchgoing may may well help men steer clear of violence.
00:43:12.120In the National Survey of Families and Households, Wilcox found that churchgoing evangelical Protestant husbands were the least likely to be engaged in abusive behavior.
00:43:22.420Sociologist Christopher Ellison also found that men who attend religious services several times a week are 72% less likely to abuse their female partners than men from comparable backgrounds who do not attend services.
00:43:38.720He does say that nominal Christianity, people who are nominally Christian, so people who just say that they're Christian, they don't attend church, they don't really have a relationship with Christ, that there is vulnerability for abuse there.
00:43:51.220But the faithful evangelical Christians who are going to church, who, as far as we know, are reading their Bible, trying to actually live out their faith, according to these studies, he talks about them in his book, Soft Patriarchs, New Men, are the least likely to be abusive and oppressive.
00:44:08.580And you're exactly right. We hear the opposite every day. And I've heard I've seen several studies over the years saying people, though, people who are happiest with their sex lives, people who are just happiest in general, happiest with their work life balance, happiest with their home life are actually Christian women.
00:44:25.560Yes, and I'm glad you brought up the nominal men, because the first pushback I always get is, but wait a minute, haven't we all heard that Christians divorce at the same rate as the rest of society?
00:44:40.340In fact, in my research, I found that that's one of the most widely stated statistics among Christian leaders. And it turns out that it's false.
00:44:48.540But the reason we know it's false is researchers went back to the data, and they made that important distinction that you just mentioned, between committed Christian men who actually do attend church regularly and live it out from nominal Christian men.
00:45:03.420And by the way, my students don't know what the word nominal means anymore. So I have to explain to them, it means in name only, N-O-M is Latin for name.
00:45:12.520And the research shows that these two groups diverge dramatically, that nominal Christian men, if you ask, you know, if you say for their wives, their wives report the lowest level of happiness in their marriage.
00:45:28.060They are the least engaged with their children. They have the highest levels of divorce, even higher than secular men.
00:45:36.340And they have the highest rates of domestic violence, even higher than secular men.
00:45:42.520So this is the real shocker. These are men who hang around the fringes of the Christian world, enough to pick up religious language like headship and submission.
00:45:54.600But then they infuse those words with secular meaning and concepts like entitlement and dominance and so on.
00:46:04.340And so they really are, they end up worse than secular men. I have people ask me, well, why would they be even worse?
00:46:10.160Apparently, it's because they're taking the secular ideas of masculinity, but they're putting a Christian venue on top so that they feel justified.
00:46:20.160They feel as though, you know, their religion has given them permission to act like this.
00:46:24.240And so they end up actually being worse than secular men.
00:46:26.840So this is the challenge I would say for us today is how do we, in a church, for example, how do you minister to both sides of the good man and the real man?
00:46:41.620You know, this is the Christian version of the two scripts, right?
00:46:44.520The good man who's living out a biblical worldview and the real man who's actually living out a secular worldview, but who claims an evangelical identity.
00:46:53.520You know, we want to encourage the men who are doing a good job.
00:46:56.220And we want to reach out to the men who think that they're Christians, but who actually are living out a very secular view of masculinity.
00:47:04.740Okay, I know you loved the first part of that conversation, and the second part is even better.
00:47:15.580Such a fascinating look at the history of masculinity, the history of the view of women,
00:47:22.500and how Christianity totally changed the game and still changes the game on these things.
00:47:28.280And why we actually need a biblical masculinity and femininity to have a healthy relationship between men and women in society today.
00:47:37.720So stay tuned for that episode coming up.