#126： Christianity, Masculinity and Some Manly Maxims With Stephen Mansfield
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, we discuss the challenges of manliness and christianity and how the two can be congruent, and why churches have a hard time reaching and resonating with men.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast so a few years ago
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i got in the mail this book called mansfield's book of manly men has a really cool vintage
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aesthetic to it looks like something you'd pick up from the 19th century full of vintage engraving
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illustrations of winston churchill or teddy roosevelt and then with these life lessons on how
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to be a man from these great figures from history anyways the book author is named steven mansfield
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and brought him on the show to discuss his manly maxims and his ideals of manhood that he espouses
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in the mansfield's book of manly men man it's a lot of manly there anyways this book is up geared
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towards christian men but i think the ideas and principles that he talks about in there are
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applicable to a man of any faith or lack of faith but on the podcast today steven and i discuss
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some of the unique questions or challenges of manliness and christianity how the two can can
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be congruent and why christian churches have such a hard time keeping a man's attention and getting
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them actually into the pews and what churches can what they should be doing to remedy that and then
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after that we start talking about just the manly maxims of stevens mansfield and the ideals and
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what we can learn from great men from history to live a more manful life uh so really interesting
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uh podcast i think a lot of great takeaways you'll think you'll feel a little invigorated and inspired
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and feel a bit more virile after you're done listening so without further ado steven mansfield
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and mansfield's book of manly men all right steven mansfield welcome to the show thank you very much
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looking forward to it all right so your book is mansfield's book of manly men and it's a great
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book and the thing to start off about it's it's directed primarily towards a christian audience
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though i think a man of any faith or no faith could get something out of it well i think it's
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interesting this whole christian angle because i think it's a great topic of discussion the
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intersection of christianity and masculinity because something that my friends and i discuss
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quite a bit it seems that the church has had a hard time reaching and resonating with men what is it
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the way that christianity is portrayed that puts a lot of men off well you know there's a natural drift
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in most christianity towards the feminine towards emotional experiences uh towards intensely internal
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things uh towards even intellectual things which doesn't inherently mean non-manly but it can in
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some cultures and and so if if we're not careful if we don't run our churches with in a man-friendly
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way and realize that uh men are critical to the whole process then yeah we we can turn churches into
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very feminine situations and that's why uh you know the stats show that about 70 to 80 percent of
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most church attendance is by women yeah and this isn't a new problem either um i think it's fascinating
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as i've done read books from the 19th century about masculinity um most of the books were christian
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books uh and they were basically authors were trying to make the case to men that yes indeed christianity
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is manly and christ was a manly figure and we should emulate him um so i think i think it's fascinating
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that this problem that's been around since a hundred years and more is still going on today
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there's no question you know i'm sitting in my office in nashville as we speak and i'm looking
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across my desk here at a book called manhood at harvard uh it's about a movement that happened
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right around the 1900 dawn of the 1900s with men like theodore roosevelt involved it was a great
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surge of masculinity uh it produced a lot of his great works and and other leaders out of harvard and
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yale uh you know this is described in a book by ann douglas that maybe you've read it's called the
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feminization of american culture and she's a columbia scholar and basically she says that
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when the pulpit when the churches uh turned liberal and thus turned feminine and she makes
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that connection not me um that it lost manhood it lost division for manhood and then it started
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losing men from the pews so that's you know it's a fascinating connection that we have to consider but
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the the bottom line is you're absolutely right i mean when uh initially uh christianity was seen as a
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a spur to manhood but by the time we get into the early 1900s that's been lost
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yeah and yeah the whole muscular christianity movement where the ymca and billy sunday wrestling
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with the devil uh i love that stuff it's it's a really fascinating parts of our history so okay so
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here's the question what what can churches do to connect more with men because you know i'm in
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oklahoma uh we have a lot of the big mega churches around here life church uh church on the move
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and i've seen some of the things they've done to reach out for men and it's like have like a harley
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davidson night um super bowl sunday and like incorporate football into the sermon and for
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some men that really resonates but i've had some of my friends who go to these churches where they
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sort of roll their eyes and they feel sort of patronizing um what can men do or what can churches
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do to connect more with men well you know i celebrate anything that churches can do that draw men so
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if the super bowl does it or you know the breakfast on saturday morning that's fine but i think i i'm
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with you i think a lot of that can tend to be um you know like having a soap opera party for women i
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think women would not be all that happy about that either uh but the bottom line is we need to
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understand the nature of men uh men are not uh engaged simply by processing emotions and uh sitting
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and contemplating things they're engaged by doing you know they they have uh they've done a number of
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studies over the years where they'll put children male and female in a room with chairs and toys
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and they basically let them do what they want and they observe them the girls turn the chairs just
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opposite each other look at each other and finally one of them says you know i like your hair and then
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uh the guys though turn the chairs side by side shoulder to shoulder and little boys will start
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looking around and saying things like hey i bet we can climb up on that cabinet hey i wonder how we
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can pull her hair wonder we can set that door on fire you know or whatever how much how much
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dynamite is take to blow up the cat i mean they start thinking of things to do so i think this is
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a key to how men think throughout the old testament whenever a man is commanded to teach his son there's
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always a phrase in there like you know on the way while you're walking as you're going while
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you're doing things so to circle men up in a fellowship hall and say process your emotions and
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check on each other is is uh not the optimal way the best way to do it uh the best best way to
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engage men is to have them connect and build manly relationships as they're doing significant
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things uh as they're doing things they care about it's in the doing i think that men really come to
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the fore so that's a major difference and if churches will pay attention to that i think it
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would make a big difference there's one other thing i'll mention briefly and that is uh that you
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know the vast majority of most church staffs are female uh about 80 percent and where pastors have
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decided to change that not to go anti-female at all but to make sure there's there are prominent
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manly men so to speak on the staff in the administration in every kind of position uh it
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you know people become what they behold the church will change in its composition uh if the leadership
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has a lot of uh of really engaged men in it and so that's that's been a major tactic too
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okay so be action oriented as opposed to emotions or feelings based
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yes exactly and i think i think that you know since our churches have tended in recent decades
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to turn a little bit therapeutic a lot of what passes for men's ministry is men circled up
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talking about each other's emotions and i that that may last for a short while it won't carry us
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long term and it won't make us the kind of people who are changing society and that's why i celebrate a
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lot of what you do because you know it's about uh getting men connected yes but also getting them
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busy doing the right things yeah i've been to a few of those men's fellowship things in the
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morning the donuts were good but like yeah like i i gave it like a shot you know a couple weeks and
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i was like i just stopped going because i just felt like i'm not getting anything out of this and
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i don't know it wasn't invigorating i guess exactly exactly i consider myself a pretty manly guy i hope
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i am i'm i'm okay on on football and watching football i don't hunt i'm not interested in
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motorcycles i'm a city boy um you know there got to be other ways to go so really the key is to know
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your culture know your men uh and build in that direction but keep in mind uh i'm saying this all
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pastors all leaders keep in mind that the basic nature of men which is processing the eternal sitting
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around and thinking thoughts is not the best way to engage them we've got to set them in motion okay
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so let's get to your book um and i love how you begin your book you talk about a moment when you were
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in damascus and this is when you were a grown man and you had children and that you said that was the
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night you became a man can you recount that story for our listeners i think it's a really cool
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story well thanks and i can uh i was part of a relief team that was going in and out of iraq to
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work with the kurds back some years ago and on one of my trips my papers got messed up and i got stuck
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in damascus and uh i was there pretty much alone there was a syrian parliamentarian this is back before
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syria ended up in the mess that it's in now um who knew i was there he was a christian he uh was
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concerned that i was alone and you know just every day trying to get my papers filed right
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and he finally decided to have a little gathering on the roof of a hotel in damascus well he invited
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a bunch of uh arabs of course who could hardly speak english i don't speak any arabic and we sat
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around we ate we nodded at each other we said what little we could said and finally uh one of the guys
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uh turned to me and broke in english and said do you have a son i said i do he said what is his name
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and i said it's jonathan and as though he was announcing you know something miraculous in the
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room he said well then you have a new name everybody stopped and looked at him he said your
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name is abu john well it turns out that in arab culture when a man has a son it's considered such
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an honorary thing such an amazing thing for him that he's given an honorary name an honorific they call it
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in arabic and um what it means is that uh they take uh the word abu which means father and they put it
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with a shortened version of the son's name and that's the honorary title uh for the father from
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that point on so my son's name is jonathan they started calling me abu john well that was sweet
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to know but the next thing that happened was these guys realized i had i did not know that they had
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never celebrated that with me um and so they began the manliest partying that i've ever been a part of
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uh they brought out food they turned up the music they started dancing some of the bad uzis in their
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hands you know and when uh when a guy's got an uzi in his hand and he's dancing with you he
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leads you know so we danced and we danced and uh and finally about in the wee hours of the morning
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they've they've kind of back slapped me back to my hotel and uh wished me well but they had spent
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hours celebrating me as a father well i have to tell you at that time i was in my mid-30s finishing
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a doctorate had a wife two children obviously a son um had lived a pretty normal american life
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military brat you know football baseball basketball lived all over the place i had never in my entire
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life been celebrated as a man there had never been a moment when men said we know who you are
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we know what this means whatever it is you know becoming an adolescent going to college marrying
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whatever it is there had never been a ritual in my life that had sort of commemorated and deepened the
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experience of some of some passage from one stage to another and so here these these muslim guys
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in damascus syria some of them probably terrorists for all i know i mean i didn't i couldn't even talk
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to them dancing and celebrating me as abu john it profoundly changed me you know i'm a protestant
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christian i'm not jewish we don't have a bar mitzvahs we don't have any ceremonies for manhood
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um and i gotta tell you that really began to make me realize that you know we're not we're not
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recognizing we're not helping boys grow we're not committing we're not marking these transitions
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with men and i'm always reminded when i tell the story of the african proverb uh from the villages
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that says if we do not initiate the boys they will burn the village down and that's very much what's
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happening in our society and i wasn't in any danger of burning anybody's buildings or village
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but i definitely was a man with an aching empty soul when it came to manhood and that was the turning
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point for me so i mean that's a great point that one of the problems there's lots of problems that
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are facing many days the sort of lack of a rite of passage um what's the solution to that because
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there's lots of organizations and groups out there that sort of provide that provide rites of passage
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experiences is that the solution where you sort of you go to this organization or you go to does it
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need to be more organic right like within the family or within a man's i don't know tribe if you want
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to call it whether that's your church or their close group of friends like how do you incorporate a
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rite of passage into your culture well i think it does have to be done first and formally in other
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words the father the immediate men around a boy around a young man needs to take responsibility
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for it doesn't have to be highly organizational or even or even liturgical or ceremonial um you know
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when my son was about to turn 13 we had what we called a christian bar mitzvah for him we had people
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in who knew him and said positive things about him we gave him a sword but before that i just drove up
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with him into the mountains we had a big old sex talk along the way we listened to some tapes by
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some uh some wise psychologists who were talking to young boys and uh you know we went up in the
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mountains and we swam naked we you know junk food until four in the morning and we watched old movies
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and and we just had a great time i think he considers both of them to have been the marking of
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his passage in the adolescence i tried to do the same thing when he uh went to college and he's not
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married yet but when he is i'll do the same thing then so what we can do is simply start shifting
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some of these moments that we recognize as transitional moments uh you know into having
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an emphasis on manhood he even you know i got married and had children no one ever talked to
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me as a man celebrated me as a man or a father and i think that uh we can we can certainly do that but
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then i'm i certainly welcome uh more ceremonial approaches and churches men's organizations shoot
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even amongst a few friends or in a business you know there's there's certainly anything that we do
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that confirms a man confirms his journey calls out the best in him and points them towards a
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valiant future maybe gives them some symbols some lasting things he can keep that that speak of all
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that i think it will really change lives and we know the value of ceremony but you know we shouldn't
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have to be in the military or the boy scouts you know or a highly liturgical church to uh to have
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these moments okay so be proactive be intentional yes you lay out what you call your manly maxims
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there's four of them what are those four manly maxims that sort of guide the rest of your book
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well i wanted to give men a simple on-ramp for for masculinity if they didn't have one the first
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one is manly men do manly things now of course i'm having some fun with this we call them
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mansfield's manly maxims but the first one is manly men do manly things and the idea is simply to
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get men focused on the doing i'm a little concerned that a lot of our emphasis on men and
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our programs and ministries and what have you uh really focuses on the emotional and men retreat
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from that you know i've had guys say to me when i invite them to one of our you know gatherings do
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we have to hug and stuff you know they're just afraid somebody's going to grab them and look in
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their eyes and sing kumbaya or whatever and so what what i want to do is get them and focus on the
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doing um the second one is that manly men tend their field the thing they're doing is tending their
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field now this is language that comes from the apostle paul when he said uh you know i i know
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the field assigned to me i know what god's given me to do and i start asking men what are you
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responsible for what are you have you been given to do because the opposite of great manhood is that
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you are irresponsible that you're sitting in your you know recliner while the house falls apart
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you're neglecting your white who's bitter and gaining weight the kids who are doing things they
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ought not be doing and everybody's lonely and hurting well this is this is your responsibility and i
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think men grow in strength authority wisdom uh and certainly honor when they take responsibility
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um the third one is really the one that really galvanizes in my mind and that is that manly men
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build manly men in other words i'm all for seminars conferences books every kind of thing
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um but ultimately i think that noble righteous manhood gets built into a man when he has a band of
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brothers and uh i think you every man's got to have a band of brothers and there's got to be in
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among those band of brothers a free fire zone where anything can be said that needs to be said
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to make me better and i'll do the same for you my band of brothers we have a lot of fun along the way
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we do a lot of rowdy things we do a lot of social service things but we make each other better and
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there's a free fire zone and then finally my fourth one is that manly men live to the glory of god i i'm
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of the opinion uh that a man really can't do what he's made to do do it well do it powerfully
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uh on his own strength he's got to have the gift of god the grace of god the guidance of god the
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counsel of god uh to do what he does and so those are the four and they're not everything a man needs
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to know but at least they're the on-ramp that i think helps most men get up and running yeah the
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one the two that really stuck out to me i mean all of them are great um was the the tending your
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fields i never thought of it responsibility in that that light and i love the metaphor um and then
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also the yeah the importance of of building other men up because i think one of the problems in our
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our modern culture is it's very self-centered right uh but like it's not in a it's yeah we're all about
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self-actualization self-improvement and then we forget the other and then in my experience maybe this
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is your experience too that i've always become a better person whenever i'm serving others right
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for some reason it gives me more motivation to improve myself when i feel like i'm building
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someone else up well i couldn't agree with you more you know i i think that what we've done is
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we've defined this issue of destiny and becoming what we're supposed to be or what we want to be
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uh in terms of a very self-focused process like you say but i tell men look you have a destiny
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but your destiny is fulfilled by investing in the destinies of others i mean this is this is the
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truth of almost every great religion it's the truth of uh certainly what i believe as a christian
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it's the truth that i see practically lived out around me um i don't get better by you know getting in a
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room by myself and focusing on myself and looking in the mirror and you know just doing doing things
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to build up myself i get better as a man as i invest in other men as i invested in my son my
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daughter my wife as i as i man the boundaries of the field assigned to me sacrificially if necessary
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so i couldn't agree more and that's why even in scripture for example we we see so many examples
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and direct statements where you know if a man's going to be a good man to his wife he's going to have to
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lay down his life i mean this is the pattern so you're absolutely right the the self focus of our
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age our society i think works against great manhood all right so you you have a chapter where you the
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title is from a famous line from the bible and it's an exchange between king david of israel
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he's about to die and he's giving his final blessings on his children he tells his son solomon
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to be strong and show yourself a man what does it mean to show yourself a man and how can men do that
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today well first of all just taking a little bit of information about that verse you know there are
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very few times in the bible when the word man means uh the characteristics of a man the nobility of a
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man the good things a man ought to be doing and not just males and that's one of them david didn't turn
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to solomon and say be a male he said be a good a righteous a noble man and i think that the beginning
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of it is very much what you and i are discussing i think a man needs to recognize that he's put on
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earth for certain purposes and his own pleasure and personal fulfillment is not it alone and that he
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needs to invest in the lives of others uh build a manly culture bring up the boys around him and not
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just his own by the way but others uh in that manly culture and begin to do good in the world
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when men really begin to understand the gift that it is to be a man and invest that gift in society
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in the young in their wife in noble causes that's when i see men really engage and other things start
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to get easier it's like it's like it's like you're grabbing the ski rope and once you grab the ski rope
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and you're balanced on the skis now things start moving forward before that you were just plowing water
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and a lot of guys are plowing water but they're not they're not really up and moving quickly and
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engaged when they make this critical change and begin to realize that manhood is a powerful thing
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but it has to be invested in others to really have its power fulfilled its purpose fulfilled
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uh that's when men become noble when they become great men and it's it's it's absolutely wondrous to
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behold okay so the the rest of your book after you lay out your manly maxim sort of this road
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this on-ramp and then this ideal of showing ourselves or shooing i love the the king james
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version of show shoe yeah that's great um that's our goal you you dedicate chapters to virtues or ideals
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that we should aspire for and what i love about it is that you you take a famous person or famous man
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from history and look at his life and and how that individual represented that ideal and what lessons
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we can take from that and you include like all my my all-time favorites and then one of them
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is winston churchill what virtues or ideals of manhood can churchill teach us today well in all
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the book i what i wanted to do was take some of our heroes and show the dark side of their lives and how
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they overcame that in other words i i i love celebrating these guys and could have written you
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know real positive happy chapters but i decided to go to the dark side and with churchill uh perhaps the
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most damaging potentially deforming thing in his life uh was that his father hated him people often
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don't know this uh his father was descending into a form of madness throughout most of churchill's young
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life um probably induced by a disease of some kind um but churchill was simply a disappointment to
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his father even as if his father had not been in some kind of medical condition and uh churchill's
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father treated him horribly um and so churchill lived in his shadow lived in fear of him uh lived
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wounded by this man and uh later in life uh churchill literally thought that his father was appearing to
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him um and taunting him even when he was prime minister of england but what i find powerful about
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the whole thing is that when when lord randolph churchill's father died uh churchill had to make a
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decision am i going to live now in bitterness and regret and let that define my life or am i going
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to live out my father's legacy am i going to pick up his discarded legacy so to speak because uh lord
00:22:58.460
randolph ended his life pretty much in some shame and and you know popular disrepute um or or churchill
00:23:04.800
had to think will i live out his legacy or will i just be crushed under it and he decided uh as he wrote
00:23:11.600
in his book my early life uh that he would take up his father's legacy and cause and live it and he did
00:23:17.200
that publicly for the rest of his life and i think that's a very defining moment in churchill's life
00:23:22.340
there are a number of them as you know but um when he decides not to be bitter not to be angry not to
00:23:27.840
live a life of regret and snarling anger but to live out his father's legacy and see him see himself
00:23:34.000
as a champion of his father's cause i think that's when churchill takes major steps up towards what he
00:23:40.320
would become and we all know that many men you know and certainly in my own life i could i could
00:23:44.640
choose to others could choose to allow bitterness towards their fathers to crush them um but that's
00:23:50.300
a major defining issue right there how will you live out a sense of family destiny how will you extend
00:23:56.280
your father's cause in the world and i think that's uh that's that's one of the things that defines a
00:24:01.100
great man yeah i love the whole idea of like connection to family in a way even if your your family
00:24:08.060
you're not there's nothing to really be proud of about your family in a maybe there's some some
00:24:13.120
skeletons in your family's closet but using that right like like churchill did to sort of go against
00:24:20.060
that and like i'm going to do something different i don't have i'm not trapped by this i can take my
00:24:23.320
family's legacy and make it something different uh i think it's really inspiring well that that's what
00:24:29.000
i've had to do in my own life even um i don't have the near the level of abuse in my life that
00:24:33.820
churchill did i come from a long line of military commanders fairly high-ranking military commanders
00:24:38.440
in the american military and they were all terrible fathers i just have to say love them as i do they
00:24:43.660
were all terrible fathers and i've sat many times with my children and said listen you know what we
00:24:49.320
can receive from these men is not just you know pride in their accomplishments and their medals and
00:24:53.540
their rank but we can receive the the sense that we have a family called to fight in noble causes we
00:24:59.640
have a uh we have a family that that that really is charged with living for uh something passionate
00:25:06.820
maybe having to sacrifice for it well man my kids eat that up it's not that's not something i'm just
00:25:11.020
making up i really believe that you know that's what's passed on to them and then i explain to them
00:25:15.940
that you know it within the soil of your of your greatness are the seeds of your destruction so to
00:25:21.040
speak and and uh and that these these guys weren't great parents so my kids none of them are married
00:25:25.920
you know they're too young but um but i'm telling you they are ready to be great parents and to
00:25:30.680
overcome sort of the negative family history so uh you know you usually can find even in a troubled
00:25:36.880
family something to pass on to the next generation and something to live out yourself and i think that's
00:25:42.400
again the the great benefit of churchill's example so in the next one of the chapters you make a case
00:25:48.020
that men need to learn or relearn the skill of friendship why are friends so important in a
00:25:56.160
man's life and why is it so difficult for grown adult men to make friends you know it's one of the
00:26:03.280
great questions of our age i think that most men simply friends friendships happen so naturally in
00:26:10.620
early life that unless someone teaches them how to build friends how to build a band of brothers the
00:26:16.440
priority and importance of it and the skills of it then they just sort of uh outgrow their friends
00:26:21.300
in a sense i don't mean that they wouldn't benefit from them most of us have friends when we were in
00:26:25.640
high school you know before uh playground friends up to sports college it's fairly easy you know you're in
00:26:32.180
dorms you go into class with people but then most guys get married have children get busy and a
00:26:37.280
decade later they you know a friend is someone you call once a year if you if you call it all
00:26:41.500
um most guys don't have those skills but men are need other men number one uh they they are most of
00:26:50.460
what they're made to do they are not made to do alone women bond quickly easily uh those those
00:26:55.900
relationships are meaningful uh women they can function alone usually better than men uh most of
00:27:01.840
the studies show but men need other men they need the reflections of other men they need the insights of
00:27:07.420
other men um and and i think that our society just isolates um and causes a man to turn towards his
00:27:14.520
entertainments for whatever manly input he's getting rather than to other men so to shut off
00:27:19.280
the tv and the devices to build a band of brothers uh to do noble things and to create that free fire
00:27:24.620
zone where men are uh speaking into each other's lives what they need to know to be great men i think
00:27:29.220
that's just essential i mean where do you start i mean can you do you start at church do you if you
00:27:33.460
don't have a church like can you go to work i mean how do you find these other men well most men are in
00:27:39.520
a sea of casual relationships and so that the art of this thing is to take the relationships you have
00:27:46.040
at whatever level and move them towards relationships that are beneficial to each other uh and then include
00:27:54.040
discussion of the serious matters of what it means to be a man as i teach men how to do this it's usually
00:27:59.260
just a matter of starting to turn the topics that are discussed in light conversation over lunch at
00:28:03.900
work or you know the basketball game once in a while whatever turn the discussion turn it to uh you
00:28:10.440
know what do you think about this i'm struggling with it what do you think about that how do you
00:28:13.380
overcome that have you ever had to battle that just turn it from the some of the caca we tend to
00:28:17.760
discuss you know just in just to buy the time and deepen them a little bit and to see to see who
00:28:22.980
responds and the guy responds well then now you may you may be moving from friendship to a real
00:28:27.700
brother um you know keep doing things keep having fun but but see if this person won't partner with
00:28:33.680
you in the great project of being a man and sometimes to do your own transparency is the
00:28:38.240
best way to do this you know uh you know i'm really i mean i'm on i'm on the porn all the time
00:28:42.800
have you ever have you had to overcome that have you had to battle that or you know i've i'm really
00:28:47.360
i'm just eating myself to death here banking well how do you stay trim and and you know how do you
00:28:52.500
break through the whole lethargic man thing you know and just just start to really get enlist
00:28:57.500
people and purposes most men want a bond they want to help their friends they want to be tight
00:29:02.960
we've just simply lost the skills so it takes one guy i think uh starting to turn the friendships he
00:29:08.040
has at a very light level towards something deeper and meaningful and then i think it starts to take
00:29:11.800
on a life of its own okay so i was pleasantly surprised to find humor on your list um because
00:29:17.980
in running the site you know we hit some really serious topics and we were really serious and
00:29:22.720
earnest about helping men become better men in their lives but every now and then we'll do something
00:29:26.880
that's just fun and when we do these fun things you always have like the sourpuss like church lady
00:29:31.900
types are just like no you need to be serious and like being you know manhood is a serious topic and
00:29:36.840
you shouldn't joke around and it's just like a buzzkill but i love how you use gk chesterton one of my
00:29:43.420
favorite writers to sort of exemplify this ideal of humor why is humor important in a man's life
00:29:48.460
well a man communicates a great deal through his humor and we not only need to lighten up and see
00:29:54.580
the humorous side churchill said if we can't see the humorous side of life we're not going to be able
00:29:58.240
to deal with the most serious side of life uh but but i really think that uh for most men more is caught
00:30:04.140
than is taught in the sense with humor a little boy falls skins his knees crying his father says you
00:30:09.920
know did you kick that sidewalk don't kick that sidewalk the kid stops crying he you know starts
00:30:14.500
to laugh and then we can go to mom get the medicine i mean this is the way men are we comfort each
00:30:19.220
other we encourage each other um i've been in iraq during the war listening to soldiers talk and
00:30:24.620
they're always talking smack and humor it's about lightening the load it's about saying we're going
00:30:28.600
to be okay so so uh one of the philosophers said that humor is the way we explore the difference between
00:30:34.200
the way things are and the way they ought to be and i think that's what men do inherently with
00:30:39.560
humor well when when they start to get into hyper serious situations and start to get talked out of
00:30:44.400
their humor i think it's evidence that they're losing their souls they're losing their groove
00:30:48.640
they're losing uh who they are on the inside and so um i think you're absolutely right we don't need
00:30:53.600
church lady men we need men who you know know how to be serious and do do things in a focused way
00:30:58.340
but know how to play talk smack tease each other encourage each other and break up some of the
00:31:03.240
hyper seriousness that keeps us from really being the best we can be
00:31:06.400
um so you include the virtue of wildness or being wild and what's interesting because a lot of
00:31:13.160
when you go to church there seems to like you know they de-emphasize that like no you got to be
00:31:18.320
calm and meek and you know nice and don't don't don't don't be wild that's that's what we're trying
00:31:24.620
to get rid of but you make the case that no you know men if they want to be good men need to
00:31:30.260
harness their wild side why is that well i think men are made for confrontation for controlled
00:31:37.940
violence uh you know men we all know you put three men in a break room uh and close the door they're
00:31:44.180
going to fold up a piece of paper and turn it into a triangular football and wreck the room and play in
00:31:49.140
a football game men need to bark at the moon they they need to blow something up they need to pee in
00:31:54.120
the sink they need to be outside the boundaries and uh i think that most men need some controlled
00:32:00.040
wildness by that i mean they don't need to go crazy and kill themselves hanging off a mountain
00:32:03.740
but some controlled wildness in their lives um it keeps us alive it keeps us awake and in a church
00:32:10.120
situation i have to say it's a little bit weird that we go to church uh to worship jesus this is the
00:32:15.120
same jesus uh who was a carpenter who got furious and flipped tables and made a whip to drive people out
00:32:21.360
of his father's temple you know he was a man of passion he wept um i can just see him walking
00:32:27.000
along to see a galilee dumping peter into the water and then start the free-for-all i mean i don't i
00:32:31.640
don't think i think we've got the wrong image of jesus as a guy in a bathrobe with a sheep under his
00:32:35.820
arm and that's why we all think that religion is just you know behave yourself um but really i think
00:32:41.480
the spirit of god in us and the example of jesus wants us uh to know how to be passionate fully
00:32:47.180
engaged and fully throttle full throttle and that's why um you know having some some wildness
00:32:52.980
in your life having some confrontation um you know hitting hard i think that's that's something
00:32:57.920
we should never lose i love how you use teddy roosevelt to exemplify that yeah you know teddy
00:33:03.640
roosevelt is a great example for men to read about but you know his mother and his wife died in the
00:33:10.140
same house on the same day and he was devastated and how did he recover himself uh he he had a
00:33:17.060
little property out the dakota territories and he went out there and basically lived as a cowboy
00:33:21.300
um for the better part of two years and uh it restored something in his soul and every historian
00:33:27.280
and roosevelt himself says he would never have been what he became um if he hadn't had that time
00:33:32.860
recovering himself in wildness i think men are overly domesticated and we suffer for it yeah i love that
00:33:38.220
idea of getting out into the like actually getting out into nature get into the wilderness like not
00:33:42.420
only teddy roosevelt did that um who said that being out and taking a sojourner in the wilderness
00:33:46.920
was beneficial uh jack london uh he said that he's kind of in a funk and he went out into the dakotas
00:33:53.300
or not the dakotas alaska to go pan for gold and he said that he found himself in the wilderness
00:33:58.180
uh jesus you know started his ministry went to the wild yes that's exactly right so there's something
00:34:04.260
about that um so that's like a post i need to write um so you also you i thought this is interesting
00:34:12.120
you included suffering as an ideal or virtue why what what is it that about suffering or embracing
00:34:18.380
it that can help us become better men well we're living in a generation where the hardship of life
00:34:24.200
itself is seen as an evil but but men really improve through hardship hardships the price of things i mean
00:34:31.160
none of us liked you know the harder parts of football practice or baseball practice or you
00:34:36.440
know whatever we were doing none of us none of us like having to do those hard things but that's how
00:34:40.760
we improve and so if we don't see suffering as a as something that that is part of life then we're
00:34:46.840
going to be in trouble we're going to we're going to shy away from it but but embracing suffering
00:34:51.040
throwing yourself into suffering realizing the person's suffering times are his best improving times as
00:34:55.940
one philosopher said uh that that's how we grow and i think men have a special gift from that i have to say
00:35:02.020
when i go to the weight room uh when i see guys you know working hard doing extreme sports uh it's it's like
00:35:08.320
something comes together in a man's soul when he has a struggle and a battle and uh so so the so to convince
00:35:14.520
ourselves that that pleasure and comfort is the ultimate goal and to be shocked and offended by hardship and
00:35:19.960
difficulty and suffering i i think that's going to cause us to be less than we're made to be so i'm not a guy who wants to
00:35:24.960
build a you know whole culture of suffering i don't i don't have some kind of weird cult idea in mind
00:35:28.880
but i do believe that we've got to throw ourselves into uh the hardships that come our way and see them as
00:35:34.400
redemptive so you you in the book um i love this that there's this ideal of presence in a man or a manly presence
00:35:42.420
i've can you describe what that means i because i know i've i've seen men who've embodied that but what do you
00:35:48.420
mean by a manly presence well probably the best way for me to explain it is to tell briefly the story i told in the book
00:35:54.780
and that is that i had the privilege in college of spending the day with john wooden famous coach
00:35:58.740
from ucla and i there were many things he said to me and taught me that day uh as he as he
00:36:03.980
high college sophomore but the but the main thing i noticed was him having been a champion athlete
00:36:10.140
being this noble and famed coach uh and having lived and having built all that really on certain
00:36:16.040
solid principles it emanated in his life it was a presence it was something strong that emanated from
00:36:21.580
him i don't mean anything occult or weird here i didn't see some aura you know wafting off of him
00:36:26.700
but he had he he there was a presence and i'm i mean this is going to sound very mystical but
00:36:31.720
he would walk into a room and i would see people with their backs to him sort of straighten up and
00:36:36.800
turn around to see what had changed about their immediate environment we went down to the big
00:36:40.860
basketball arena at my college and um you know that the basketball team was practicing down there
00:36:46.340
and they all stopped playing and turned in our direction we had walked in from a direction that
00:36:50.420
nothing usually happens and some of the players just started walking over in our direction and
00:36:54.660
finally they they saw john wooden and of course were thrilled but but he had a presence it changed my
00:37:00.200
life um it was a combination of authority uh and uh sort of a favor sort of a positive you like
00:37:06.260
this guy kind of thing um but it was a weightiness i think the main thing to say about it is when he
00:37:11.260
walked in the room there was a gentleness and a love but there was gravitas weightiness there was
00:37:16.740
authority he what he's a small man by the way i'm six four and a half uh he was a small man and so i
00:37:22.300
dwarfed him physically but i had nothing to do with it you wanted to get down on your knees and ask him
00:37:27.360
to teach you and it's because he simply carried with him something that you felt beyond just looking
00:37:33.220
at him and i think that's what a man has when he steps up to his responsibilities walks in the
00:37:38.720
ways of noble manhood um and and exercises his his authority and strength in a righteous and
00:37:44.740
virtuous way i think it emanates from his life and briefly very very briefly i'll tell you that i
00:37:49.780
used to my daughter used to go to a school where i had to pick her up and she said dad it's very
00:37:54.700
strange when you walk in the door and a boy is talking to me uh he'll have his back to you but when
00:38:00.020
you walk in the door this great big room uh they this boy some of the boys i'm talking to will change
00:38:05.440
they'll they'll kind of get more to get gentler maybe some of them get a little bit more polite
00:38:09.820
she said one boy actually called me ma'am and then got all confused and looked at me embarrassed because
00:38:13.900
he he just felt i think she said i think they feel your presence without seeing you and i think well
00:38:19.580
of course of course you know i'm her father i pray for her you know disciplined her raised her and
00:38:26.300
yeah i have authority for her life i think that's how it works but this is something you can't fake
00:38:30.640
right like this is something you can't do like you know stand up straight and like wear certain
00:38:35.200
clothes and then talk like this is not something you can sort of acquire through artificial means
00:38:39.560
it requires you living a life of virtue and integrity yeah i think it's spiritual and i think
00:38:46.900
that what men are sometimes trying to do is recreate that in the natural sense i mean i'm not picking on
00:38:52.320
how anybody dresses or looks or whether they have tats or piercings or whatever i don't care
00:38:56.100
but but some guys you know are trying to compensate for the lack of gravitas and authority in their
00:39:01.700
life by you know sort of developing a commanding style or something that's not what i'm talking
00:39:06.660
about john wooden was dressed rather blandly uh he was smaller than i was there was nothing about him
00:39:12.300
to commend him physically um but he commanded without moving a muscle every place he was because he was
00:39:19.100
john wooden with all that history with all that you know everything from from prayer to practice to
00:39:24.060
devotion to love all of it uh and yeah it's not something that you can fake it's not something
00:39:29.460
you can recreate naturally it's something that comes from living the life a man is supposed to live
00:39:34.140
all right well steven this has been a fantastic discussion where can we learn more about your book
00:39:38.020
and your work uh best place to connect with me is stevenmansfield.tv and from there all the twitter
00:39:45.160
facebook pinterest instagram everything is mansfield rights just mansfield rights one word
00:39:51.120
so i'd love to hear from everybody fantastic well steven mansfield thanks so much for your time
00:39:55.200
it's been a pleasure great to be with you thanks for all that you're doing too thank you our guest
00:40:00.420
today was steven mansfield he's the author of the book mansfield's book of manly men and you can find
00:40:05.280
that on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere and for more information about steven's work go to
00:40:11.200
well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
00:40:18.400
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00:40:22.620
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00:40:40.660
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00:40:49.600
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