In Part 2 of our two-part conversation on masculinity and gender roles, Dr. Nancy Piercy joins Dr. Kelly to discuss the role of masculinity in Christian culture and the importance of biblical masculinity. Dr. Piercy is the author of several books, including Total Truth, Love Thy Body, and her latest book, The Toxic War on Masculinity.
00:16:48.620So Louise Perry became more conservative because she realized a lot of those rules, like chivalry, for example, are in place to protect women.
00:16:59.700And we're not acknowledging that men, if we don't acknowledge that men have greater physical strength, then we won't put the moral restraints up to keep them in line.
00:17:13.740And I think that's for me, that's a very realistic approach to why the Christian ethic is so much better for society.
00:17:20.960I have to tell you, Ali, I even became more conservative when I wrote my two chapters on domestic abuse.
00:17:27.600I have a background, a history of being much more feminist in my younger years and which I write about in the book.
00:17:37.000But I became more conservative writing the two chapters on domestic violence because I saw much more clearly that if we do not teach men to restrain their greater strength, then they can do more damage, which is what you said earlier in the program.
00:17:56.060Men have more strength and therefore they can do more damage.
00:17:59.100It's not that they're more evil, you know, than women.
00:18:01.440It's just that they can do more damage because of their greatest strength.
00:18:04.500And there's a very realistic reason why we have special rules for how men treat women and why the Bible is so real.
00:18:22.980And, you know, hang around domestic violence shelters or like Louise Perry did, rape shelters, and you will start to change your understanding of male-female relationships and the incredible importance it is to address especially men because they have more physical strength.
00:18:39.840And what Christianity offers that feminism doesn't because feminism may also say we need to restrain those.
00:18:59.340We need to suppress those natural instincts of men.
00:19:02.580But Christianity says we need to channel them, that these are characteristics that God gave men.
00:19:08.480And he made them to be physically stronger.
00:19:13.500And that aggression that comes with that, that ability to dominate, that's actually, I mean, that's part of why we are safe in marriage.
00:19:21.980That's why I'm safer in marriage than living by myself or being a single mom.
00:19:26.960Because my husband has the ability to kill a predator.
00:19:30.040Like, because my husband has the ability to physically defend us and do those things that it would be much more difficult for me to do.
00:19:39.340So it's about channeling, as you've said, those strengths into an aggression that is, that fulfills its telos, that fulfills the purpose that God gave it, that provision and protection.
00:19:51.980Yeah, and what I did in the book, I mean, people said, you know, people have asked me, what side are you on, you know, complementarian or egalitarian?
00:19:59.660I said, you know, I actually don't even argue that because this is a very fact-based, fact-based book.
00:20:05.380And what I do is I just look at the sociological data.
00:20:12.100Chapter three is just surveying Christian couples and how they live out their understanding of headship and submission, you know, in the real world, not just what they say, but how they actually live it out.
00:20:25.920And, you know, the most widely quoted, the most frequently quoted passages, passage is Ephesians 5, you know, husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church.
00:20:38.500All of these couples would quote Ephesians 5, not just the wives, but the part that addresses the husbands.
00:23:09.140In fact, one pastor said, if you have to pull rank, you know, in other words, if you have to say, hey, I'm the boss, so this is what happens.
00:23:16.800He said, you probably have something wrong with your marriage.
00:23:19.540You know, if you've gotten to that point, maybe there's something in your marriage that needs work.
00:23:24.620So this is one of the parts of the book that I found really fascinating,
00:23:28.400is that when you talk to Christian men and women on how they live out headship and submission,
00:23:33.580it's far different from what the outside world thinks.
00:23:37.300So different than the misconception that so many have.
00:23:52.520Even I was surprised looking back at the Puritans.
00:23:55.260You know, the Puritans are often seen as these very just restrictive, oppressive, restrictive people.
00:24:01.200But when you look at what some of the Puritan scholars and pastors said about marriage, said about their wives,
00:24:07.420how they just dignified their wives and appreciated their wives and relied on their wives' strength and their wives' wisdom and making decisions and being discerning.
00:24:16.360Yes, of course, they believed, as we do, that the husband is the head of the wife.
00:24:20.720And at the end of the day, those decisions that have to be made are going to be made, protection, provision, all of that.
00:24:27.000But they talked very sweetly of marriage and women and that equality of dignity.
00:24:35.840I won't read it all, but there's an article in Table Talk magazine that talks about this.
00:24:40.280How did the Puritans understand marriage by Joel Becke?
00:24:44.920And one of the Puritans that he quotes, he writes about marriage, a curious knot that God made in paradise, a true love knot more sweet than spice.
00:24:55.880Just so many beautiful poetic declarations of marital love and women made by the Puritans and the appreciation of their wisdom.
00:25:22.900When I had my students read my manuscript in the classroom, I literally got students saying,
00:25:31.200at a Christian university, I literally got students saying,
00:25:34.860I have never heard anything positive about the Puritans until I read your book.
00:25:41.440But yeah, I found that what you just said, I found very wonderful quotes expressing a tremendous love and affection between husband and wife.
00:27:27.320And by the way, the men that they were looking at were men who, before the Industrial Revolution, right?
00:27:32.460So these were men who were working with their wives and children all day.
00:27:36.020And they had to be gentle and patient.
00:27:38.640They were on the family farm, the family business, the family industry.
00:27:42.520And they're working with people they love and have a moral bond with.
00:27:45.820So the ethos, the expectation of masculinity back in the colonial era was very much focused on caretaking and responsibility for the whole.
00:27:56.980You know, not just look out for number one, you know, not just get ahead personally, like personal ambition.
00:28:02.680But it was always tied to how are you doing this for your family and your community?
00:28:06.880So, yeah, it's really interesting to start with the colonial era, which is what I do in my book, partly so that we have a baseline to see how concepts of masculinity then degraded from that point on.
00:28:22.620The colonial era was very much a Christian understanding of manhood.
00:28:26.600Even the concept of authority was different.
00:28:28.640Nowadays, we think authority means, hey, I'm in charge.
00:28:51.920And the person who held that office had the responsibility for the common good of the whole.
00:28:57.540In fact, the favorite term back then was that he was to be disinterested, meaning that he was not supposed to look out for his own interests.
00:29:06.840He was supposed to be the one who looked out for the interest of the whole.
00:29:10.700And when my students read that, they say, well, if we had that notion of authority, I think I'd be happy with that.
00:29:32.060I love that authority is the one being in charge of the common good.
00:29:37.360I mean, who doesn't want to submit to that?
00:29:39.600I mean, who as a woman wouldn't say, wow, it's a privilege to be a wife, to submit to the person who is in charge of the common good for myself and for my family?
00:29:51.080And so I do think when we see authority as that, we see masculinity as that, when we see the husband as a reflection of Christ as the head of the church, that does, it changes everything.
00:30:03.940And Christians have been in the business of, through the power of the gospel, changing everything, changing cultures, infusing culture with a good view of men and women, of children, of slaves for a very long time.
00:30:17.160And we should be carrying that torch, but sometimes it takes people reminding us that that is the church's legacy, that there is the power of the gospel.
00:30:25.540And that's what you help us do in this book.
00:30:27.960So is there anything else you want to say about this book and where people can find it and all that good stuff?
00:31:03.080It was common to commit abortion and infanticide, and especially of baby girls.
00:31:08.920It was very rare for a Roman family to have more than one daughter.
00:31:11.940Any other daughters that were born, they would just put out exposure.
00:31:15.260My students don't even know the word anymore.
00:31:18.360It means exposure means they put the babies out into nature to be eaten by the wild beasts and so on.
00:31:24.080And sometimes they were rescued by sex brothels, by the way, and brought up as sex slaves.
00:31:29.060So there's a whole book on this that you probably enjoy reading sometime on how Christianity is what gave us the notion of the child as a special.
00:31:38.800Yes, O.M. Backey, When Children Became People.
00:32:01.380You know, they tended to have more emotional attachment.
00:32:03.700If you're attached to something that's seen as having little value, that means, you know, you have little value because you're spending so much of your time and energy raising children.
00:32:13.180And so the elevation of children also led to the elevation of women.
00:32:19.300Anyway, yeah, we, we've, I talk about that in Love Their Body as well.
00:32:27.860It's, we have forgotten that so much of our Christian heritage is part of the West.
00:32:35.600You know, even Richard Dawkins, just throwing this out, even Richard Dawkins, who, right, was one of the new atheists and who has been incredibly hostile to Christianity, is finally starting to say, actually, I kind of like Christian civilization.
00:32:50.800He's beginning to realize how unique it is.
00:32:53.360As we lose it, he's beginning to realize how unique Christian civilization is.
00:32:58.420Now, you know, he doesn't want to know, he doesn't want the religion that caused it, that gave birth to that civilization, but he is beginning to realize Christian civilization is worth saving.
00:33:20.940My publisher has helped me to redesign the website.
00:33:24.740So it's fun and colorful now, nancypiercy.com.
00:33:28.620And that way you can take a look at my other books as well, if you're interested.
00:33:31.980But the book is certainly available at all the normal places that you like to shop, whether it's Amazon, christianbook.com, or hopefully you still have a brick and mortar store nearby.
00:33:42.900So it's pretty much available everywhere.