FamilyLife Today®

Speaker 1

As a little girl, I looked up to my dad so much. I was the youngest of four, but I can remember being scared of the dark. I would run into my parents' bedroom and snuggle in between my mom and dad.

I remember my dad would put his arm around me, and I would feel so protected. My little head would move into his rib, and I could feel and hear his heartbeat. I felt so cared for and protected.

I loved my mom and had a great relationship with her, but there was something about my dad that made me feel safe. I always wanted his attention; I wanted to be seen by him because he was so important to me.

Speaker 2

Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Dave Wilson.

Speaker 1

And I'm Ann Wilson. And you can find us at Family Life. This is Family Life Today.

Speaker 2

You know, we've been talking for the last couple of days about sort of toxic masculinity. And we've got Nancy Beck, who's declared war on toxic masculinity.

Nancy Pearcy is back in the studio and I'm joking, but the title of your book is *The Toxic War on Masculinity*. And in a sense, you have a fiery spirit in you.

College professor and mom, you've delved into this. You've got boys. We've talked about the journey men have been through from the colonial age to the industrial revolution.

Speaker 1

Well, let me say this too, Nancy.

Am I right in saying, as you've seen the culture defining and bashing men and who they are and how they're so toxic?

Did you feel like, wait a minute? I feel like you've said that like she did kind of go to war against it a little bit.

Speaker 3

Well, one of the things I think is really tragic is that it overlooks the fact that men and boys are actually falling behind today. They are doing worse than they did in the past.

Boys are falling behind at all levels of education, from kindergarten to college. You know, the average college now is 60% female and 40% male. Graduate school sees more women than men attending, and the same trend is evident in professional schools.

Speaker 2

Why? You know, you're the, you're the expert.

Speaker 3

Well, let me tell you more of the problem, okay? And not just boys, but men, you know, men are falling behind. Men are much more likely to commit suicide, to be addicted to drugs or alcohol, and to be both victims and perpetrators of violence. Ninety percent of people in prison are men. And men are falling out of the workplace. By the way, the rate of employment among men today is at Depression-era levels. Wow. Depression-era levels. And we don't know it because they're falling out of the employment statistics. They're not trying to find work anymore, and so they're not counted. You have to count them other ways. Their life expectancy has gone down while women's has stayed the same over the last four years or so.

There was a publication called the New Scientist that said the major factor in early death now is being male. So this is the irony that while men are being attacked and accused of being toxic, men are actually doing worse today. If you try to bring any sort of programs that are just geared to men, like Christ, who wrote the first book on boys falling behind, she called it the War Against Boys. She writes that as she tried to get programs for boys, feminist groups would constantly oppose them. "No, no, no, you can't help out boys. We have to help the girls." But as a result, there's no money going into creating programs that are helping men and boys today.

So that's the irony of the war on men, quote, unquote, is that men are actually doing worse. Perhaps it's partly because they're being accused of being toxic. That's what I wonder too—that they're losing their confidence. I did quote in my book a psychiatrist, her name is Erika Commissar, and she writes for the Wall Street Journal. She said, "I am getting more and more young men into my practice who feel defeated because they're growing up in a culture that's so hostile to masculinity." I'm seeing it in my practice, particularly with young men, because they're the ones who've grown up with that negative message. So I'm very concerned about boys. I have two of them.

Speaker 1

Yeah, yeah. And we have three. So even as we read your title, like it's concerning of what's happening not only to boys and men today.

Speaker 2

So where do you go to say, we gotta change the narrative?

Speaker 3

So the biggest long-term solution is fathers. Fathers being more engaged with their sons.

And that's a problem too, because America has the highest level of single parenthood in the world. 40% of children in America are growing up with no contact with their natural father.

Speaker 2

40%.

Speaker 3

40%. And it's the highest in the world. And our media treats fathers as the doofus, the dimwit, you know, the butt of the joke. You know, so much of our movies and so on. So I got into that and I have a whole chapter on fatherhood. Because we all know that if fathers are not involved with their children, especially their sons, their sons are gonna have more trouble in school, more trouble with addiction, more trouble with crime.

I used to work for Prison Fellowship, which is an international prison ministry. And we knew all too well that most of the men sitting behind bars are coming from fatherless homes, especially violent criminals. They're coming from fatherless homes. So what do we do about fathers being disrespected and mocked and ridiculed in the media? Again, everyone knows that, but they don't know where it comes from. And once again, it's the Industrial Revolution.

What happened when fathers were no longer working side by side with their children all day, day in, day out? Well, they got out of touch with their children. They got out of touch with their children's needs, their children's personalities and skills and talents. They no longer knew the dynamics in the household. And so already in the 19th century, you see this in the literature. People start mocking fathers and saying, oh, they're so irrelevant, you know, they're so incompetent. What are they good for anyway? Actually, that's from a novel that was written in the 19th century. One of the characters said, I can't figure out what fathers were made for anyway.

So you start to see this denigration of fathers just because they're not there. And so they're not integrated into their family the way they used to be. And so the long-term solution has got to be fathers. There's a psychiatrist, Frank Pittman, who says, we're not going to turn out better men until we have better fathers. Better fathers raising them.

I do have an entire chapter in the book on, well, what does that look like? Practically, like you said, we can't undo the Industrial Revolution, so what do we do? So I do have a whole chapter on men who found ways to be more flexible in their job, find ways to work two days at home or start a home business. I have one person I interviewed who just left early, left at 4:30, two days a week to coach his son's basketball and soccer. His boss gave him a hard time and told him he was coasting, but it did not end up hurting his job. And when his sons grew up, they said, we want to be a dad like you, which is a whole lot better than any workplace award.

Yeah, I'll give you one story from the pandemic too, because the pandemic has helped a lot of men discover, hey, I actually like being closer to my family. The New York Times had an article where the title was, during the pandemic, many fathers got closer to their children and they don't want to lose that.

Speaker 1

I see that.

Speaker 3

I love that title.

Speaker 1

Me too.

Speaker 3

Another survey said 65% of men don't want to work full time in the office anymore. They want to be at least part time home.

One of my students, her husband was an IT professional who came home during the pandemic. Being home, he was able to be more involved with the homeschooling. He was able to take the kids to soccer. He decided he would do lunch every day. He took that on and made lunch for the family every day.

His wife, who was my student, was an opera singer. She started a voice studio, and the whole family benefited from the additional income.

When I interviewed her husband, this was the crowning point. He said the time that he used to spend commuting every morning, he now spends praying with his wife. He said, "I'm never going back to a cubicle."

Speaker 1

So it sounds like anything a man can do to be able to navigate his job, to possibly spend more time at home, is definitely beneficial.

Speaker 3

And millennials want that. Yeah, I read a really cool article with a survey showing millennials want to share both the breadwinning and the caretaking in a little bit more even way.

Speaker 1

I like that they're doing this. I think it's good for the kids too.

Speaker 2

Well, I mean, I think old enough to live through several decades of watching men and work. And there is a time. I'm glad to hear this, because it's changing.

There was a time where if you saw a man in your neighborhood at two in the afternoon or dropping off the kids, you thought, what's wrong? He's not a man. He doesn't have a job. One of my best friends, Rob, lost his job in Michigan, what, 15 years, 20 years ago, and didn't have a job for maybe three months.

And he told me, one of my best friends, he goes, you know, I love that I get to walk now in the afternoon with my wife. He goes, I literally was self-conscious that people are looking at me saying, he's a loser, he doesn't have a job. Thinking that the only way a man can work is leave the home, go to an office, go to a work site, and then come home at dinner time or later.

And what you're saying is that that whole paradigm is shifting in a good way.

Speaker 1

This is a good thing, to be a good thing.

Speaker 2

There's different ways to work.

Speaker 3

A little silver lining in this pandemic is that a lot of men discovered that they really did like being home more. I know that it's sort of anecdotal at this point in the sense that you can't say, well, here's some general principles.

All you can do is give stories. So that chapter I just have lots and lots of stories of men who found ways to be more flexible in their jobs and who found that it did strengthen their family relationships enormously.

Speaker 1

Well, I'm remembering because Dave was a pastor and his schedule was somewhat flexible. He would come home early some days and without a doubt, if it's summer in Michigan, he's outside. As soon as the kids in the neighborhood see that Dave's outside with our three boys, every boy on the block is in our front yard because they know Mr. Wood Wilson's outside. We're going to play some game that's going to be a blast.

But sometimes we would say we're the only parents out there. Like, where are all the parents? Let's play and be with our kids. I'm not kidding; kids would knock on our front door and not ask our younger children to come out and play. They would say, "Hey, can Mr. Wilson come out and play ball? We're playing down the street. Can he come with us?"

It was pretty sweet, but it also showed me they want to be with him; they want to be with a man. And you were always encouraging boys.

Speaker 2

Well, the other side of that story is their dads weren't available.

Speaker 3

Yes, yes.

Speaker 2

And you know, you talk about in your book, the fatherless boys, they were either working or they had left. They weren't home.

Speaker 3

And it's something that the church, I think, needs to think more clearly about. You know, how do we have a ministry? Yeah, the fatherless boys, I think that should be a top-level ministry for churches because father substitutes can have a tremendous impact.

Church youth group leaders and youth pastors. And I have some anecdotes on that too. A man I talked to who coaches rugby, I think it was a somewhat unusual sport. He coaches rugby and he said, I'm doing it for my kid. But you know what, I'm doing it for all these other kids too, because so many of these kids, these boys don't have a father in the home.

And he said, I'm doing it as a ministry to these boys.

Speaker 2

Yeah. One of the reasons I coach high school football for 12 years is to be with my boys. That was actually motivation number one. I want to be there. They're going to be there; I'm a football guy. I have a background, so maybe I can be on the field with them. But as they left, I stayed.

And it was that I was like, most of these boys in this high school don't have a dad in their home, or they don't have a good model for a dad in their home. I knew every day as I walked down to the practice field, I prayed and said, "God, use me as a dad and a model in these young men's lives." They don't have a model. They don't even know what a dad looks like or feels like. I get to be a representative of you to these boys, to show them what a man is.

Your last chapter, "The Power of a Man." Not that women don't have power. You have incredible power. But there's a uniqueness as God has put in us as men, as husbands and dads; we can impact not just a family, but a whole community.

Speaker 3

What's interesting to me is that even non-Christians see this. There's one non-Christian historian who writes that a culture's view of manhood derives from the view of God. He said, take the polytheistic religions. Here's his language: they fought, they wenched, and they elevated military power. So, polytheistic religions think of the ancient Greek gods or the Norse gods. To be a man is to be a warrior. He acknowledges that there is some truth to that, but he believes it's incomplete.

So, what about monotheistic religions? Some monotheistic religions treat God as completely transcendent and separate. For example, in Islam, God does not have a relationship with people. I actually quote a Muslim who says that the very idea of God condescending to have a relationship with mere mortals is repugnant. That's how he put it; it's repugnant to Islam. This view of God emphasizes power and authority—the guy on top.

Then, the same historian says that Judaism comes along, and Judaism is monotheistic. However, God does have a relationship with people. God has a covenant relationship with His people, so God is a father—a loving father. To be a man in Judaism is to be a loving father.

Then he says that Christianity came along, emerging from Judaism, but Christianity complexified the view of manhood because Jesus comes as a servant leader. He states, "I come not to be served, but to serve." All of a sudden, character traits that were thought to be more feminine—such as gentleness, love, forgiveness, and compassion—become appropriate for men. He argues that Christianity gave rise to a much more full-orbed, balanced view of men than any other religion. I thought this was fascinating.

Speaker 1

Me too.

Speaker 3

Christianity calls men to be whole. Not to be chopped off just certain stereotypes, but to be whole persons made in God's image, reflecting the whole personality of God. And that even a non Christian could see the difference that Christianity makes.

Speaker 2

That's beautiful.

I mean, as you ladies think of a title for God, which one comes to your mind? I mean, he's King, he's Creator, he's the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, he's Father.

Jesus was a son. I mean, does any one of those come like, this is the one I resonate with the most?

Speaker 3

I go for Father.

Speaker 2

That's what I thought would be true.

Speaker 1

Well, I think part of that, like, if you would have asked me this years ago, years and years ago, I would have probably looked at the God of the Old Testament different than the Jesus of the New Testament. And I could have seen the God of the Old Testament as being a little scary and judgmental. I don't think I had a good context of who he was.

And so when Jesus says, when you've seen me, you've seen the father, all of a sudden I'm like, oh, now I'm seeing the goodness of God and I'm seeing the Father piece. Yeah, I would say father too now, but back in the day, I was a little scared of God.

But I was like, I'd hang out with Jesus, and it's because some of the older pain and the wounds that I had and the unworthiness that I felt before God. I thought that he would smote me.

Speaker 3

And let me expand our scope a little bit too, on how the Christian view of God has an impact in other cultures. Because in my book *Toxic War*, I focus mostly on America because you've got to put limits. So the book gets too big. But I did put some findings from other cultures because it was just so amazing.

The cultures like South America. There was one anthropologist who studied Colombia, for example, a very secular person. She expected to go in and find that the impact of Christianity would be to make men more patriarchal and more domineering. She found the opposite. She was so stunned; she said, no, no, no, it's machismo culture. It's the general secular culture that teaches men it's okay to ignore your family, that you become a man because you're out there gambling and fighting.

When a man becomes an evangelical Christian, he takes all his money and invests it in his family. The family experiences a higher standard of living. The whole family benefits because the father becomes engaged with his family. Here's how she put it: she said Christianity is the best women's movement.

Speaker 1

Jesus was, yes.

Speaker 3

And there was the even largest study done by a British anthropologist. She went beyond Columbia, she went through into Africa as well and Asia. And she found the same thing. Bernice Martin, I think is her name.

Speaker 2

I don't know how you remember all this.

Speaker 1

I am amazed at this.

Speaker 3

But she said the same thing. She said it's not liberal Christian groups that have helped women. It's these quote unquote, backward, unsophisticated evangelicals who've helped women more than any other group. And she too said if there's anything that can be called an international women's movement, she said evangelical Christianity is it.

I was telling you earlier about a New York Times columnist too who wrote the book *Half the Sky*. It's a bestseller, so maybe some people in the audience will have heard of it. *Half the Sky*. He too says it's the Christian groups that help the poor more than any other group. They'll go out and really help these women.

In the book, they say it's Christianity that has helped so many women be able to counter the alcoholism, the adultery, and the other sort of traditional male vices in these cultures. They get the church supporting them. That's how he puts it. He's not a Christian, but the church helps them in a sense pull men out of that secular culture into the church culture where they focus on their families, to coin a phrase.

Speaker 2

I remember an actress on a show that we used to watch decades ago. So I knew who she was because I liked the show. And I remember reading this quote in a magazine that she said she was asked if she was a Christian. And she says, "I was at one time as a child, but I'm not anymore because of what Jesus did to women." That was her quote.

I remember this was before social media. Today I would direct message her. You know, if I could have gotten a hold of her, I would have said that can't be true. If you understood what Jesus did to women in that time and in that culture, you would not make a statement like that. He elevated women; he celebrated them. It's crazy to study, you know as well as anybody, what he meant for women in that time.

As I think about that, I think that's what women should feel now. When we evangelical men live out our faith, they should feel seen, worthy, and alive because we're not toxic. We are the best thing that ever happened because we copy and we live as Jesus did.

Speaker 3

Yeah. So I do have a section in my book on how Jesus treated women.

But it's also helpful to ask, well, where did the misconceptions come from? There are two major places.

One is Genesis 1, where it says that Eve was created, or woman was created, to be a help. We tend to think that "help" means being like the assistant, where he does the really important stuff, and she's the little assistant.

Speaker 1

I struggled with that, Nancy, when I was younger, and I thought, well, maybe I'm getting that term wrong.

And so I looked it up in the Webster's dictionary and it said, a gopher, a person who does the dirty work. Someone important tells them what to do.

So obviously, when God created woman and he said the word helper, that's not what he had in mind.

Speaker 3

We have to go back to the Hebrew. First of all, Webster's is not gonna help you.

Speaker 1

Exactly.

Speaker 3

But the Hebrew, it's pronounced azer. And in the Old Testament, it is used most often of God when it's, you know, our ever present help in trouble. So clearly it does not indicate an inferior subordinate person. The word itself does not mean that.

And it's in some male names like Ebenezer, Eliezer. Hebrew fathers would not give their sons names that meant they were weak or less than. So the word itself, I think it's very important that we.

Speaker 1

Me too.

Speaker 3

Explain. The word azer means an ally, someone who comes to your side and helps you when you're in trouble.

Speaker 1

An ally. As I was thinking about men and leading and loving in the home, the picture that came to my mind was when we were in Israel and attended a Shabbat dinner with an Orthodox Jewish family. It was beautiful. When the woman, the mother of the children and the wife, lit the candles, which is a place of honor, the husband stood up and read from the Torah, or what we would call Proverbs. He would stand up and say, "A wife of noble character, who can find?" He would lay his hands on his wife, kiss her, and then bless her. After that, he would turn to each one of his children, bless them, and speak life into them.

As I looked at that picture of our Heavenly Father, I realized this is what a man does. He looks at his wife and blesses her. He sees his children, blesses them, protects them, and lays down his life for them. And Dave, I feel like you've done that. I feel like you've always done that for me. You've done a really good job of it. You have blessed me, honored me, and talked so highly about me. You've done that for the boys as well. You lay down your life every day for us.

There might be some toxic masculinity out there, but our evangelical men who are walking with Jesus and seeking Him are the ones representing Jesus and the church in a beautiful way. To the families, it's marking us and making a difference. Don't give up, men. You're doing it. Thank you, Nancy, for all you're doing.

Speaker 3

Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Speaker 2

For David Ann Wilson on Family Life today and the last three days with Nancy, I think it's life changing.

Speaker 1

Me too. I love these interviews with her.

Speaker 2

Well, I mean, anytime you get to talk about biblical godly manhood, a vision of manhood being defined by God and his word, that is, you know me, that's like that sets men on fire. That gives them a direction.

And when a man lives as a man is called to live by God, that impacts everybody, not just his family and his home and his kids and his grandkids. That impacts his church and his community, his workplace. Man. That's why, I mean, I get excited.

Like men go be men. Like God wants us to live. And it'll impact everything and everywhere you go.

And I would encourage you get Nancy's book, the Toxic War on Masculinity. Just go click the link in our show notes. That'll take you to our Family Life shop. And I'd say get the book and maybe get two or three and share them with us.

Speaker 1

I don't know if you know this, but we at Family Life would love to pray for you.

I think one of the greatest gifts that we can give people is to pray for them.

And we have a team here at Family Life that would love to pray for you.

You can go to familylife.com/prayforme.

Speaker 2

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