01/28/2024 – “God’s Good Gift of Masculinity” – AFA’s “The Stand Magazine” – October 2023 – Interview of Nancy Pearcey.// Nancy’s latest book: “The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes.” / (post in progress through today)
https://www.discovery.org/p/pearcey/
This is just a two page article; If you would like the full interview, email me at semikkah7@protonmail.com, administrator account for our blog: Semikkah7.com.
For now, I will share a few excerpts:
“What role should Christian women play in this current cultural battle?
NP: Women can help by encouraging men to fulfill the high ideals that men already hold.
A few years ago, anthropologist David Gilmore conducted the first-ever-cross-cultural study of concepts of masculinity. He found that virtually all cultures share a common ideal of what it means to be a good man. Whatever their differences, they all share the expectation that a man should perform what he calls the three P’s: protect, provide, and procreate — that is, raise a family.
Because men are made in God’s image, all around the globe, they seem to understand that their unique masculine strengths are given not to get whatever they want, but to support those they love.
Our goal should be to affirm and encourage men in recovering their innate sense of God’s original plan for manhood.”
Q: Explain the subtitle of your book, How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes.
… One of the nation’s top marriage researchers, sociologist Brad Wilcox from the University of Virginia, wrote an article in the New York Times, saying, ‘It turns out that the happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives. Fully 73% of wives who hold conservative gender values and attend religious services regularly with their husbands have high quality marriages.’
The bottom line is that Christians have a practical answer to reconciling the sexes — one that has stood up to rigorous empirical testing. We should be bold about bringing it into the public square as an evidence-based solution to the charge of toxic masculinity.
Q: How should the church approach this toxic war?
NP: Churches need to get the word out. Church leaders frequently tell us that Christians are just as likely to divorce as the rest of society. But that statistic is false.
Researchers went back to the data and divided evangelical men into two groups: those who attend church regularly verses those who are only nominal Christians. The differences between these groups are stunning. Nominal men’s wives report the lowest level of happiness. These men are less engaged with their children. Nominal couples have the highest rates of divorce, even hgher than secular men. And the real shocker — they report the highest rate of domestic abuse and violence than any group, even higher than secular couples.
In a Christianity Today article, Brad Wilcox summarized his findings:
‘The most violent husbands in America are nominal evangelical Protestants who attend church infrequently or not at all.’
It seems that nominal men hang around the fringes of the Christian world just enough to hear the language of headship and submission but not enough to learn the biblical meaning of those terms. They interpret the words through a grid of male superiority and entitlement that they have absorbed from the secular world.
This is the challenge to the churches:
On one hand, they need to encourage and support committed Christian men in an age that is attacking masculinity. On the other hand, churches need to find effective ways to reach out to the men that are on the fringes.”
Soli Deo Gloria!