Where did things go wrong? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
So we have a culture in America that prizes women, where men are told to treasure them. Men actually lead their families. Everyone works together and men are guardians of virtue leading the family in prayer and Bible study. That all sounds good. What changed?
Answer: Technology.
In the past, men would often work on their own turf and eventually one day, the Dad would call the son over and introduce him to the craft. The family would work together. When the Industrial Revolution came along, men got separated from that and they were more in a work environment than a home environment.
Pearcey tells us that the work environment was quite different and many of the traits we deem toxic today, started showing up, like the strong competitive win-at-all costs mentality and the desire to get ahead. I think to some extent, men have always been competitive, but now it was a dark side of competition.
Men had to do this because they had to provide for their families and they had to show that they could not be replaced. Pearcey tells us the criticisms Marx had of the working environment were common in his day. Man was becoming a machine to earn profit and it was not about the family business anymore.
In the past, there was the Protestant Ethic, whereby it wasn’t just ministerial work that was a calling of sorts, but so was secular work. The person who was making shoes could serve God just as much as the priest could. All people were to play a part in the Kingdom of God. The priest could travel the roads, but he certainly needed someone to build those roads!
This also led to a public and private divide. The private was the home and the public was the work. The public/work was that which could be verified, think science. The private/home was the subjective. Those familiar with the Schaeffer idea of the lower and upper story, which Pearcey definitely knows well and references, will be familiar with this. Because of this, morality did not control work like it did the home and men working in that environment were more influenced by it than they did influence it.
Not only that, but we needed to know how to get along in a workplace that was amoral. What if we made a set of dictums to follow artificially? We could call it, an, oh, I don’t know, social contract maybe? Yep. That’s where it began. It was even called social physics. How does a contract work as a system of ethics? Pearcey says:
What’s the difference between a contract and a covenant? Both are agreements, but the differences between them are crucial. A contract defines an exchange of goods and services. But a covenant defines a moral relationship between persons. In a contract, I seek my own interests, I strike a deal. But in a covenant, I seek the common good of the relationship and everyone in it. A contract includes an opt-out clause so I can leave if I no longer feel my interests are being served. But a covenant is a moral commitment of the whole person.
Pearcey, Nancy. The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes (p. 98). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
As an aside, do you see what happens when we treat marriage like a contract instead of a covenant? In a contract, each person enters for their own good in an exchange and they leave when they are not getting what they want. In a covenant, the parties enter a moral relationship for the good of the other and the relationship.
She goes on to then say:
But in social contract theory, a social institution was no longer defined as an organic unity with a common good. It was merely an aggregate of autonomous individuals, all pursuing their own interests. And if there was no common good, then a man’s duty could no longer be defined as responsibility for protecting the common good. Men were set free to pursue self-interest.
Pearcey, Nancy. The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes (p. 99). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
One place of common good was the household which gets us to women’s suffrage. When the idea first came up to allow women to vote, it had a lot of opposition. From the “patriarchy?” No! From women!
When the issue of women’s suffrage was first raised, most women actually opposed it—a fact that puzzles modern historians. Even the early feminist leaders acknowledged that the vote was not popular with women. Alice Stone Blackwell, a leading suffragist, wrote, “The chief obstacle to equal suffrage is the indifference and opposition of women.” Suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Ida Harper wrote, “In the indifference, the inertia, the apathy of women lies the greatest obstacle to their enfranchisement.”
Pearcey, Nancy. The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes (pp. 99-100). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The right of women to vote would be seen as breaking the house into not one common unit all voting together as one, but as individuals who could each go their own way. The woman would thus be her own individual and the man would no longer be looking for the good of the whole household.
Now that we have a division in place, women started to be seen as more superior. After all, they were the ones raising the families for the most part. One aspect of this I hadn’t considered was angels. Typically, angels in the Bible are fearsome creatures. They constantly seem to have to tell people to not be afraid immediately.
But in the Victorian age, angels began to be portrayed as young women—delicate, sweet, and guarding little children. Brown concludes, “One of the great mythic transformations of the early nineteenth century was the feminization of angels.”
Pearcey, Nancy. The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes (p. 109). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Also interestingly in the past, the strong sex drive was not seen as being on the part of the men. It was on the part of the women. The women were seen as having insatiable lust that would men astray. This is not to say that men don’t have a strong sex drive, as many of us men will attest, but it does mean that feminism has come to be something quite different.
What this would mean eventually was that men needed to have women in their lives to ensure that they were virtuous and if there wasn’t a woman, well the man could pursue his self-interest. Women do contribute to men, but a man can be and needs to be virtuous even without a woman in his life. We now have it that men are bad boys and once a woman gets a man, she has to shape him up.
This had an effect then on church life and ministry:
Even the tone of American evangelicalism became softer and more emotional. In a classic book on the subject, The Feminization of American Culture, Ann Douglas says the ministry lost “a toughness, a sternness, an intellectual rigor which our society then and since has been accustomed to identify with ‘masculinity.’” Instead, the ministry took on traits society has typically identified with femininity, such as care, nurturing, and tenderheartedness.
Pearcey, Nancy. The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes (p. 115). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Around this time, we also had attacks coming in based on higher criticism, evolution, and philosophy. The church should have responded with intellectual rigor, but no, they went into retreat. Christianity was based on the emotional experience at that point. Christianity then became a private faith. (Want to know what God is saying? Don’t go to public Scripture, but go to private experience.)
Right now, things are not looking good for the church in the world and a lot of it has had to do with the erasure of masculinity.
We shall continue next time.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)