The present “crisis of masculinity” has its origins in ongoing confusion about what a man is. It also involves the contemporary angst of men, especially young men,with a sense of lack of purpose or vision they have for their lives. What does it mean for a young man to “make something” of himself? Is there a reliable and general script men can follow that will guide them towards maturation and meaning?
In The Masculinity Pyramid, I argued that men ought to be differentiated from God, animals, boys, and women. When properly considered, those four distinctions yield the four core masculine virtues of humility (in our differentiation from God), discipline (in our differentiation from animals), responsibility (in our differentiation from boys), and chivalry (in our differentiation from women). This is a follow-up to that post.
After establishing what a man is (in the ontological sense), and what he ought to be like (in the moral sense), now we’ll discuss what roles a man ought to inhabit (in the practical sense).
There are five roles men will inhabit in their lives; all men must do the first three and most men ought to do the final two. Those roles are son, brother, maker, husband, and father.
Obviously, any fool can be someone’s child, sibling, make stuff, take marriage vows, and father children. The question is “what does it take to honorably, rather than shamefully, live into these roles?”
Before a man is anything else, he is a son. From conception, he is a male with a mother and a father. This is the sine qua non, the foundation, and arche (or, beginning) of a man. When it comes to asking questions of identity, this is where we must begin.
What does it mean to be an honorable son?
There are two simple things that need to happen here: first, we have to make sense of the cards we’ve been dealt, and, second, we have to play those cards. How? Here are two paradigms with practices to consider: first, gratitude and grief, and, second, honor and shame.
Make two lists on the notes app in your phone or on separate pages in a journal. Keep that list with you for a few weeks so you can add to them as things pop into your head. Begin with the practice of gratitude. What did you get from your parents that you are thankful for? Start with the general gift of existing and go from there.
Once that list gets going, then move into grief. The order is important: ontologically speaking, Creation comes before Fall. What did you get from your parents that you wish you weren't given? What did you not get from your parents that you wish you were given? Start with the general curse of original sin and go from there. Get increasingly specific.
Here are some examples of things you might write:
Make note of generational patterns you want to maintain and what patterns you want to break. After it has grown for a while, share your gratitude list with your parents. If you feel so compelled, you might share your grief list as well.
Whether you had good parents or not, you are supposed to try and honor them and not shame them. These are basic questions to ask in decision making:
We are familiar with the command to "honor your father and mother" (Exodus 20:12). What that looks like is often less clear to us. The book of Proverbs tells us some ways we might do that:
The opposite of honor is shame, so, at a minimum, the way we honor our parents is by not shaming them through being a fool who wastes the life they gave us. There are other ways to honor your parents, but that is square one. Even if we had horrible parents, we must “turn the other cheek” and not return the insults.
The pinnacle of this work of sonship is coming to the Father in faith and in repentance; embracing the greater-identity we have as a son of God Most High.
After a man’s relationship to parents as a son, comes his relationship to siblings as a brother. The gospel widens the scope of this relation towards our siblings in the family of God. Paul tells young men to “encourage other young men as brothers” and to treat “younger women as sisters in all purity” (1 Timothy 4:1-2). Men are to cheer on their peers with purity.
Rather than encouraging one another, men tend to compete with other men. Jealousy-infused comparison begets insecurity and haughtiness. If I’m comparing myself to you in order to measure my own value, I’ll end up pompous (if I judge myself better) or depressed (if I judge myself worse).
Love-infused comparison, however, can beget gratitude and encouragement. Many have said that comparison is the thief of joy; that is not necessarily true. If I compare myself to you and recognize gifts and talents you possess that I don’t have, the proper response is gratitude that rejoices with those who rejoice. I can encourage you in your strengths. Comparison can beget thankfulness.
If a man will not do the work required to make and maintain meaningful friendships, he’s abdicating a key aspect of his masculinity. It is broadly understood that there is an epidemic of male loneliness. One reason for this is the masculine icon of The Lonely Cowboy, which haunts many Western men:
Avoiding relational connection and dependence perpetuates (and perhaps created?) this stereotype. Often this is learned in childhood; we convince ourselves that we don’t “need” other people in order to survive unloving or uncaring environments. This mechanism that begets surviving does not simultaneously beget thriving. The counter to these disorders is becoming a true and honorable brother.
Rather than considering women as sisters, men tend to objectify and dehumanize them. Brains programmed in pubescence by sexually provocative ads and pornography skew and oversexualize the opposite sex. Not only that, but in more conservative circles, treating women as possible temptations for an affair (a different approach to sexualizing), and walking in hyper-avoidance of the other sex, also obscures our ability to be friends with our sisters.
Men who want to walk in congruence with their biblical calling will do the work required to celebrate their sisters, alongside their brothers, and covenant with themselves like Job did, “I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a young woman.” (Job 31:1 NIV) Biblically speaking, all lust for sisters in Christ is incestuous. Stop normalizing this.
The dominant metaphor for how we relate to our male and female peers in the Scriptures is brother and sister. Let’s reimagine our relationships accordingly.
Men, like women, are made in the image of the creator God. This means, in part, we are also called to be creators. To subdue and have dominion has often been called the Cultural Mandate by theologians. For most of us, this collective human task is to grab a hold of creation and make something of it. Simply put, we are made to make.
Another word for this is work. Subdue is kneading bread. Dominion is treading grapes for wine. Together, these words call us to authorized creative pressure in God’s world.
The first problem in the Garden of Eden, before sin, was “there was no man to work the ground” (Genesis 2:5). God prefers to delegate the development of the world he made to men. While your work isn’t the whole meaning of your life, it is absolutely a part of your purpose on earth.
This is truly a matter of stewardship; am I properly leveraging the investment that God has made into me? As we develop our talents and passions, we then mobilize them in such a way that promotes the common good. (Jeremiah 29:7)
Work is primarily about productivity and is only secondarily about compensation. Much of the work we do isn’t compensated, and, ideally in retirement, we’ll continue to contribute to the common good even when we don’t have the carrot of a paycheck adding to our motivation. Nonetheless, most men in most situations have to learn how to make and manage money.
Most men should become husbands. The normative path established in creation is that men would grow up and get married. (Genesis 2:24) Not all men will do this (for example, Jesus was single and Paul recommends singleness in some circumstances in 1 Corinthians 7), but that ought to be seen as an exception to the standard or assumed creational path.
Men are designed to become husbands; to pursue, care for, and cherish a wife is a unique privilege that men have in their endeavor to point past themselves to Christ. The Apostle Paul writes, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25).
The masculine virtue of chivalry most clearly presents itself in marriage: “husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel” (1 Peter 3:7). Being considerate of literal, physical power-dynamics, husbands have a disproportionate responsibility to pursue the heart of their wives.
The creation mandate to “be fruitful and multiply” is the call to have kids. The act of love can create life in such a manner that it images the Triune God; God is love and out of the overflow of that love he creates the world. To image the life-giving love of God over the face of the earth as his vice-regents is the original Great Commission.
To image our Heavenly Father in parenting is no easy task. Paul’s command to fathers corrects the fleshly instinct of dads everywhere: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). Children were given to you by God, in part, to push your buttons and require you to grow as you rise to the task of being a dad.
This is not merely about begetting, but fathering. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky writes, “Let us say straight out: he who begets is not yet a father; a father is he who begets and proves worthy of it.” Parenting, not merely procreating, is the aim here.
The call to reproduce and pass on the faith is broadened and spiritualized in the New Testament. To baptize and make disciples of the nations (Matthew 28:19) is a new way for the church to be fruitful and multiply. To establish elders in the churches highlights the possibility of spiritual fathering: to train up younger men and women in the faith is more than, not less than or altogether different than, the initial exhortation Adam receives in the garden.
You do not need to be a biological dad to be a father figure: one who images our Father in heaven by helping to produce maturity in younger persons. Whether or not a man formally becomes a biological father, or an elder, in the context of a local church, he should aspire to the spiritual and moral character necessary to fulfill such roles honorably.
Why the emphasis on these masculine roles? First, because younger men need to have handles with which they can imagine their future.
Second, the challenges to men’s mental health are inextricably related to how they function in their various roles and relationships. The so-called deaths of despair cannot be divorced from feelings of meaninglessness or a sense of powerlessness related to thriving in these roles.
Third, the basic path God gives his people when they are living as a marginalized people is congruent with what he establishes as normative in Creation: work, marriage, parenting, and generational mindfulness. See the text of Jeremiah 29:5-6:
Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there.
As older men, we ought to use the Roles Pyramid as a grid for self-evaluation even as we inspire and instruct younger men on which targets to shoot at as they begin to build their lives.