I was asked to be a panelist for Reformed Evangelical Seminary’s roundtable discussion answering the question, “What is your message to future pastors on the subject of masculinity?” Other panelists included Bill Smith, Aaron Renn, and C. R. Wiley.
This is the gist of my presentation (because of time constraints I did not get through all of it, though I did a few of further points during the discussion that followed the presentations):
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The question we are supposed to answer today is, “What is our message to future pastors on the subject of masculinity?”
It’s all about looksmaxxing, right? I mean, if you’re not hitting your face with a hammer, are you even a man?
No, actually, that’s not it. Looksmaxxing is gay. Adding “maxxing” to the end of any word is gay.
The question before us is a really important one because we live in one of the most effeminate societies in history. We are witnessing what the lack of masculine leadership in a culture looks like all around us. Of course, just as we have lost true masculinity in our culture, we have also true femininity.
In 1886, Henry James complained that masculinity was fading out of the world. He lamented that we were raising up soft, effeminate men and so the world was losing the gift that is masculinity. Here it is in his own words:
“The whole generation is womanized, the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine hysterical, chattering, canting age.”
If that was true in 1886, I shudder to think what James would say about 2026.
But what we can see today is that when you lose masculinity, you also femininity. If the masculine tone passes out of the world, the feminine does as well. If our men have been soft and hysterical whiners, our women have become overly disagreeable girl bosses. The beautiful dance between the sexes God created us to enjoy has been dismantled.
The reality is that the sexes stand or fall together. There is no way for one sex to succeed while the other flounders. Today, the beauty of femininity is passing out of the world every bit as much as the ruggedness of masculinity. Even as we have emasculated our men, we have masculinized our women. Even as kids grow up with father hunger, they grow up with mother hunger. We have poured the acid of the sexual revolution over everything and it’s eating us up from the inside. Everything that makes for a stable social order is disintegrating. This is catastrophic because the balance between and the bond between masculinity and femininity is at the heart of God’s creational design and forms the bedrock of stable social life.
A man aspiring to the pastorate today has to understand this about the world in which we live in. Societies that have as much sexual perversion and confusion as ours usually don’t last long. It’s a sign of divine judgment.
The church helped us get into this mess, and the church is going to have to lead the way out by showing what real repentance looks like. If grace really does restore nature, that should be seen in the church more than anywhere else. Sadly, for much of the 20th century and into the 21st century that church has aided and abetted the revolt against God’s order instead of pushing back against it. The church has favored feminine forms of piety since at least the Industrial Revolution. The modern church caters to women in its worship style and programs. The Christian publishing industry is almost entirely geared towards women. The church has gone soft on sexual sin, has not taught or enforced marital roles for husbands and wives, and has a terrible track record in helping children stay in the faith and in the church.
Modern men and women are locked in an antagonistic battle. When the sexes are at war with one another, everyone loses. Chesterton put it well, capturing the mutual interdependence of the sexes:
“We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.”
What does the young aspiring pastor need to know about masculinity for his future ministry? In one sense, this is a hard question to answer because none of us knows what the future holds. We can extrapolate from current trends, but of course current trends often get interrupted by new trends that break into history. The future will emerge from the present, but it will not be identical to the present and the ways in which it will be different are impossible to predict.
I’ve been in pastoral ministry over 30 years and I have encountered many things that could not have been anticipated when I started. I have 4 kids all in their 20s – three are married, and the fourth is about to be. All are walking with the Lord. But the world they face as Christians in their 20s is very different from the one I faced at that age. It’s much more difficult to navigate than the culture today than the one I lived in in my 20s. It’s not just that American culture in general has apostatized; its that even churches that are still orthodox on paper have compromised, and are often blind to the ways they have compromised. We can’t prescribe a cure because we can’t see our own illness. Feminism is no longer a thing “out there” to be opposed; it is simply the water we all swim in.
I’m very aware of the challenges young men face because I see it with young men in my church. I see it with my son and sons-in-law. The world they live in is obviously wildly different than the one that existed just a couple generations ago, and many older men don’t get that. I’m sure I don’t fully get it even though I’ve worked at understanding the issues.
The world will likely have changed just as much, if not more, 30 years from now. Some of the changes that will take place can be anticipated, but others cannot be.
What were things like 30 years ago versus today for pastors? Of the changes that have taken place in the course of my ministry, which ones could have been foreseen and which ones have been a surprise?
The cancer-like growth of feminism could have been anticipated, because that was already trending. Feminist careerism was already on the rise for women. Outsourcing motherhood to daycares was already on the rise. The “softer, more sensitive male” was already a thing in the 1990s even though many of us laughed at it at the time. But I don’t think anyone expected marriage rates to collapse as completely as they have. The idea that men and women would reject marriage (and dating) so broadly and for such different reasons was not widely anticipated. There is no question: THE existential issue of our age is the failure of family formation. A civilization without marriage and children is dying. If people do not get married and have children, it’s “game over” no matter what else we do. The bitter fruit of our culture’s sexual rebellion is landing us in a social situation in which sex has become totally fake — porn, erotica, and now sexbots are replacing real relationships. Women are replacing men with the state/socialism and men are replacing women with technology. Sexbots were definitely not on my pastoral Bingo card 30 years ago.
Rewinding 30 years, no one was anticipating anything like COVID. That was a curve ball that no pastoral training could have really prepared us for – though it was also an opportunity for courageous pastors to step up and lead. COVID was an apocalyptic moment that revealed the reality that many pastors are spineless cowards, though also revealed many still have a spine.
I really didn’t expect the glamorization of same-sex attraction to happen in conservative churches the way that it has with things like Revoice. The political and cultural embrace of sodomy was already underway 30 years ago, and the warnings were being sounded even then, but tragically, they were not heeded the way they should have been. The degree to which sodomy and the “vile passion” of same-sex attraction have been normalized even in conservative circles is surprising and sad.
The rise of transgenderism could have been anticipated but not that it would be mainstreamed to the degree that it has been, with men in woman’s sports and restrooms, the widespread acceptance of drag queens performing in front of children, and other perversions. The sexual revolution continues to come full circle.
The rapid rise of the alt-right is another surprise. My grandfather fought Nazis on the beaches of Normandy in the 1940s; I did not expect to be fighting with Nazis on the internet in the 2020s.
I didn’t expect looksmaxxing to become thing…
So one thing a young pastor has to expect is the unexpected. A man prepares for the unexpected by growing in wisdom and courage as much as possible before the unexpected crisis hits.
What will the next 30 years hold? Will we get a conservative backlash against the progressive movement in Gen Z? Or will progressivism continue to trample down historic Western civilization, with the Trump era as a brief brake tap as we speed towards the cliff? There are certainly signs that Gen Z, at least Gen Z men, will be far more conservative and traditional than their predecessors but its’ hard to know what difference this will make. We can hope that women will follow the lead of the men, as has happened historically, but there are no guarantees. It’s too early to say for sure how things are going to play out in the years to come.
How will AI interrupt the job market? Will the college bubble finally burst? Will the affordability crisis get better or worse? Will American hegemony continue or will we shift into a multi-polar world, and if so what will that mean? Are we due for a economic collapse and/or a world war? So many things in our civilization seem unsustainable and fragile. I don’t think anyone really knows for sure what’s coming. We are at a fork in the road civilizationally, but it’s took early to say which path we will take — or if the divisions deeply embedded in our culture will tear us apart.
I am not a prophet or son of a prophet so I won’t try to make too many predictions what the future holds for today’s aspiring pastor. Instead I will give what I think must be constants in ministry no matter what happens in the wider culture. And compared to predicting the future, this is easy.
A young man entering pastoral ministry today needs to focus on three things related to masculinity.
First, he must be a model of masculinity himself. He must be a good man who is good at being a man. He must command the respect of other men. He must be courageous in and out of the pulpit. He must be willing to say the unsayable truths. He must model what confident and competent manhood looks like. He must be theologically grounded and culturally aware. He must be self-disciplined. He must have his own family in good order. He must be competent at his craft, and for a pastor that includes preaching, counseling, and congregational leadership. You can’t train other men to be leaders in their domain if you don’t lead well in yours.
Masculine leadership starts in the home. In 1 Timothy, Paul gives the qualifications for eldership in the church. He includes “the husband of one wife,” or more literally, “a one woman man.” As a pastor, your marriage will be under the microscope. The way you lead and love your wife, and the way she expresses respect for you, the happiness of your marriage and the culture of your home, are critical aspects in shaping the life and direction of your congregation. As pastor, you will be the pace-setter for your people.
Paul also says in 1 Timothy 3, “he must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive.” Obviously, a man’s family life is the training ground for congregational leadership – Paul adds, “for if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?” If you can’t lead the smaller household of your family effectively, you are not fit to lead the larger household that is the congregation. It’s a shame that “pastor’s kids” have such a terrible reputation in the broader culture. A man needs to be able to train, disciple, and discipline his own kids or his pastoral ministry will be a failure. No matter what happens in the culture, your family culture needs to be faithful. A strong family makes your ministry much more anti-fragile.
Along with a strong family life, you need strong friendships with other men. Friendships with other men are integral to the life of a masculine man. You need your band of brothers from whom you can get counsel, encouragement, and accountability. A band of brothers is another way of equipping yourself to be anti-fragile in ministry. Too many pastors try to go it alone and it just doesn’t work. When you face adversity or sabotage in your ministry, you need other men who have your back.
If young men are in crisis, you have to make your own life a visible solution to that crisis, a sign to others that it can be done. Model what you want the men in your congregation to become. A pastor must be a model of godly masculinity himself. That’s where it begins. You cannot give to others what you do not possess for yourself.
Second, the pastor of the future must show masculine courage by speaking truth in precisely those areas where so many pastors in previous generations have failed. This is particularly true on sexual issues. Anthropology is the great battleground in our day.
There is so much confusion about masculinity and femininity right now. It’s not just the young men who are in crisis; young women are in crisis too, though it looks very different.
Our culture has largely destroyed the scripts people used to live by when it comes to finding a spouse and the roles of husband and wife within marriage. In the niche Christian subculture of which I am a part we have largely preserved those scripts. Most people growing up in my church get married young. They start having children soon afterwards. They are committed to the Biblical sex ethic. But you can’t take this for granted. You have to aggressively teach these things. They have to be central to your shepherding work.
Aaron Renn has pointed out that the church is guilty of lying about the male/female relationship, especially when it comes to attraction, e.g., the claim that women will find godliness sexually attractive in men. It’s no surprise men have turned to less savory voices outside of the church to get insight. We have more psychological and sociological data on what men and women actually find attractive in one another than almost any other topic in those domains, and yet much of the church still traffics in culturally-approved and politically-correct lies. The result is either confusion for those who listen to the lies, or loss of trust for those who have to learn the truth elsewhere. I think the church at large does not have much creditability with young men because the church has not defended men and masculinity in the ways it should have. Regaining that trust has to be a priority. Rebuilding a pro-marriage, pro-family culture has to be at the top of our list of priorities.
Thus, perhaps the most important thing a pastor can do (beyond preaching the gospel) is help his congregation preserve and/or rebuild those natural, biblical scripts for men and women. You have to teach on the husband’s headship over his family. You have to teach wives to submit to their husbands. You have to teach on the blessing of children. And when things go wrong, you cannot white-knight on behalf of the woman. White-knighting is just a form of gender identity politics creeping into the church. Nothing will cause you to alienate the men in your congregation faster than white-knighting.
I have seen many men who were in conservative churches get hung out to dry. Their wives went off the rails (maybe adultery or an unjustified divorce), and the church did not hold the woman accountable for her sin. It’s rather easy to hold men accountable because men are used to it. But it’s hard to hold the modern woman accountable because she is not accustomed to being called out for her sin. Most women today seem to think their biggest flaw is a lack of self-esteem. Meanwhile, they disobey and disrespect their husbands. They marginalize motherhood instead of embracing it as central to their identity/calling. Your congregation needs to know that you do not play the game of gender identity politics. You must be even-handed in addressing the sins common to men and sins common to women.
I would expect a young, rising pastor to be well acquainted with the typical sins of men, and to address them. But can he do the same with women? Does he understand women and their characteristic weaknesses? Will he have the gravitas to speak to these issues with authority?
This is rather obvious at this point, but it’s important to understand that most women even in conservative churches have feminist tendencies. It may be a soft feminism compared to the hard feminism of the wider culture, but it’s still there, it’s still a cancer, and it has to be addressed. So prepare yourself to do that. If you cannot stand up to your wife, you won’t be able to stand up to the ladies in your congregation. We all know that most men would rather face Mike Tyson in the boxing ring than stand up to an angry or aggrieved woman. But it must be done. For at least the last couple of generations, first rule of pastoral ministry (always unspoken) has been “thou shalt not offend the women in thy congregation.” You have to break that rule. Likewise, husbands have to learn to be true patriarchs. A man has to risk making his wife temporarily unhappy in order to bring her lasting, true happiness in marriage.
Training men to lead in their homes prepares them for leadership in other domains — business, politics, academia, and so on. Teach your men the difference between selfish ambition and holy ambition, the difference between entitlement and confidence, the difference between serving from a position of strength and serving as a people-pleaser.
Another area where pastors need to preach against the grain is on the topic of work. The Protestant work ethic that built our nation has been in decline for a long time. We cannot restore our nation without recovering the kind of work ethic that built it in the first place. Some think that AI is going to make work obsolete. It will not. Work is built into what it means to be human. To put off work is to dehumanize yourself. There is no life satisfaction apart from a job well done. Perhaps AI can enhance our productivity — that’s certainly true in some fields. But AI cannot replace human productivity. We were built to work. In today’s world, pastors will need to train their people (especially their men) in these truths. God has not changed the rules of the game; we still live under the dominion mandate/creation mandate, and subduing the earth does not happen apart from sustained diligence. Humans can use machines to enhance their work, but not to replace their work.
Many young men are too addicted to easy pleasures. The culture expects nothing from young men and so it receives nothing from young men all too often. In a world that requires them to work harder than previous generations, they are often working less hard. We live in a sensual, indulgent, decadent age that appeals to the worst sensibilities of our flesh. A pastor must warn his whole congregation, especially young men in his congregation, to steer clear of the broad, easy path. A pastor should teach his people to choose godly purpose over godless pleasure. We live in a culture full of distractions, a culture of shallow hot takes, a culture of ever shortening attention spans. We live in a culture of irrationality and impulsiveness, a culture that chooses feelings over facts. A pastor has to counter all of this as he disciples the young men in his congregation.
Third, you have to understand the tendency of young men today to black pill, and you must help them resist it. I would imagine most young men going into the pastorate today know all about this because they’ve lived it or seen it in their own lives and those of their peers. They’ve seen it going on all around them. We are all swimming in a sea of propaganda designed to demoralize us. “You’ll never get a good job.” “You’ll never find a wife.” “You’ll never own anything.” This is the relentless messaging. A huge part of pastoral ministry today is training your people to be propaganda resistant. The powers-that-be might want us to live in an Orwellian dystopia, but we should fight it every step of the way.
There is no point in denying that young men today face some really difficult challenges, much more so than the men of the last few generations. They don’t so much need sympathy or pity as they need (a) encouragement that they can still make life work even though it isn’t easy, and (b) wisdom to craft a vision for their lives that they can execute despite the obstacles. Young men need to know there is a pathway forward even though it has more landmines than their fathers and grandfathers faced.
We must teach our young men to be masculine without permission. I’ve joked that being a man is illegal today – but like all jokes, it contains more than a grain of truth. Masculine men are the real “illegals” in our culture. The restoration of masculinity requires ambition, risk-taking, and a rejection of safetyism. It requires being willing to offend for the sake of truth, in love. It requires training men for leadership, for institution-creating and institution-building, for taking their place on the front-lines of the so-called “culture war.”
I would guess the young man going into ministry today understands the online world better than I do, but you need to be very aware of what the young men in your congregation are picking up from online sources. The red pill/manosphere has always been a very mixed bag, but there’s no question in the 2010s, men found a lot of good information in those spaces that helped them grow as men, even if it had to be filtered to be of use to Christian men. But in the 2020s, it’s really taken a turn. There are certainly some Christian voices in those spaces worth listening to, but the secular side of the manosphere has really gone off the rails. The manosphere is not just about intersexual dynamics or self-improvement now; it has become a breeding ground for alt-right extremism. You need to know what online voices the men in your congregation are listening to and you need to help them navigate what they’re going to encounter in those spaces. And we all know, what happens in the online world quickly bleeds over into “real life.” Often times, the biblical position on an issue is more complex and variegated than the online influencers will allow for. The tendency to go to extremes is real — but also really dangerous. Just “noticing” is not always innocent. Pastoral ministry today requires the pastor to be able to thread needles and not just fall into podcaster-assigned boxes. Misogyny, racial and ethnic hatreds, Hitler-love, and black-pilled nihilism are real threats to young men today; a pastor has to know how to wisely push back against them, lest they disturb the peace and purity of the church. A pastor has to know how to harness and channel the masculine energy of the young men in his congregation so their masculine qualities are used to build and not destroy.
It’s very difficult to get most older pastors – particularly Boomers, but also some Gen Xers and even millennials – to understand the plight of young men today. A Boomer will typically tell a young men, “Just do what I did.” But the world has changed too much for that for that advice to work in most cases. We need to give young men counsel that will keep them on track but that is also suited to the times.
A young man today actually has tremendous opportunity in the job market if he will work hard at mastering marketable skills. The bar has been set pretty low because so many young people don’t really want to work hard. But a young man who is driven, who is ambitious, who is willing to put in the effort, can carve out a living for himself and his family. It can be done. But he must be smart about it.
Same with marriage. I understand why men would be frustrated with the dating market today. Let’s be honest: The single biggest problem facing young men today is young women. While it is commonplace to point out that young men are in crisis, young women are also in crisis – but the crisis amongst women is not as easily recognized. Women are more mentally ill, more medicated, more miserable than ever in our culture. But because they go to college and get good jobs, they are “doing fine” according to many. That just isn’t so. While men have men have been lied about, women have been lied to — and the lies have been very effective. Any man entering pastoral ministry today has to be skilled at unraveling those lies.
Finding a good wife in an Instagram-and-Tinder culture is not easy. A man entering pastoral ministry today will likely need to coach many younger men through this process. It’s easy for young men to think there are no good women left to marry, but that’s simply not true, and you need to remind them of that. They are out there, even if it takes more work to find them than in the past.
There is a tendency towards victimhood and scapegoating among young men today. They adopt a victim mentality. The problem is not identifying real ways men, especially white Christian men, get discriminated against today; the problem is how men often respond to that discrimination with a victimhood mentality. The answer is not anger or self-pity; the answer is masculine strength and resilience, while we work to restore the social system. Likewise, there is a tendency to look for someone to blame for personal problems. It’s the feminists, or the Jews, or whoever. Again, there really are people and groups who are seeking to subvert our civilization and they must be opposed. But scapegoating is all too easily and all too often a way of seeking to escape personal responsibility. Victimhood and scapegoating are effeminate self-protection mechanisms that do not bear good fruit.
The Apostle Paul suffered through much more hardship than young men today and yet in 2 Corinthians 11-12, he did not embrace a victim mentality or a scapegoating posture. He did not let undeserved opposition throw him off his mission. Rather, he looked to God to give him strength even in the midst of his trials. He expected hardship and was prepared when it arrived. Paul was weak in the face of his circumstances and yet he drew strength from God’s grace. Elsewhere, we see Paul was able to be joyfully contented in hard circumstances (e.g., Philippians 4), because he walked by faith. Young Christian men will have to learn to live a Pauline life, working hard, suffering bravely, acting with conviction, staying on mission — and they will need to learn those lessons from their pastors.
This means that hard times do not automatically create good men. Apart from faith, hard times just create bitter and angry men. Hard times only create virtuous, strong men when men face those hard times with soft hearts resting in God’s promises.
I understand why young men are angry. I understand why young men are radicalizing. In many ways, it’s our fault – the fault of older men who have not done enough to preserve what was good about the world we grew up in. Young men have grown up in a world where their sex means they get blamed for all historical wrongs, but no credit for all that has been built. They are accused of having privileges they’ve never actually experienced; in fact, in their experience, being a man has been a liability not a benefit. But burning everything to the ground is n ot the answer. God might choose to burn our civilization down in judgment, but that’s his prerogative. Our duty is to do what is right now matter what.
I keep coming back to the counsel Charlie Kirk repeatedly gave young men, which is almost offensive in its simplicity: Find Jesus and join a good church; work hard and master your craft; get married and have more kids than you can afford. Maybe all of that is easier said than done in today’s world, but it still needs to be said and it definitely needs to be done! Life is supposed to be hard. The prosperity previous generations enjoyed is not anyone’s birthright; indeed, much of that prosperity was historically unique. Today’s pastor needs to teach his men to rise above their circumstances, work hard, suffer gladly, and get the job done. We do not know what the future holds, but we do know God wants us to be faithful. We do not know what challenges lie around the next corner, but we do know God will use them for our good.
While I think it’s easy to tell young men to “man up,” I am skeptical such messaging will work today. It’s been tried one too many times. The society in which that kind of mantra could be effective is gone, at least for now. At the same time, I fully believe that if young Christian men are given real opportunity, they will rise to the occasion. The best thing we can do for young men today is create space for them to find their own way and become the leaders God designed them to be in their masculine souls. That will mean some older men will need to step aside so the younger generation of men can get their shot. It means reining in women and putting them back in their proper place in family life and cultural life because men and women were designed to be complements, not competitors. It means leveling the gender playing field, instead of privileging women in college and the job market. It means giving young men the encouragement and training they need to take on the obstacles in their way and overcome them.
Despite all the chaos in the world, the book of Proverbs remains true. Faithful diligence still generally brings blessing. Society may have changed, but the law by which God governs the universe has not. God’s recipe for success is what it always was. Resist the black pill; swallow the Proverbs pill instead.
Many young men do not trust pastors for obvious reasons. That trust must be rebuilt, one brick at a time. If a pastor wants to be heard above certain internet voices, he has to prove his mettle and demonstrate real pastoral wisdom and courage. He has to understand the times and push back against the evils of the world as hard as they push against his church.
So what does the young future pastor need to know about masculinity? He needs to know how to model faithful mature masculinity himself; he needs to know how to teach and preach on masculinity and femininity in our sexually corrupted and confused culture; and he needs to wisely coach the up and coming generation of men in how to make life work in the culture in which we live.
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