{"id":1969317,"date":"2023-07-11T04:00:01","date_gmt":"2023-07-11T08:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/how-christianity-fixes-toxic-masculinity\/"},"modified":"2023-07-11T04:11:43","modified_gmt":"2023-07-11T08:11:43","slug":"how-christianity-fixes-toxic-masculinity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/how-christianity-fixes-toxic-masculinity\/","title":{"rendered":"Christianity addresses &#8216;Toxic Masculinity&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">8<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fhow-christianity-fixes-toxic-masculinity%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1969317&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div class=\"article-content\">\n<p>Man, argues Aristotle in Book VIII, Chapter 12 of his <em>Nicomachean Ethics<\/em>, \u201cis naturally inclined to form couples\u2014even more than to form cities, inasmuch as the household is earlier and more necessary than the city, and reproduction is more common to man with the animals. With the other animals the union extends only to this point, but human beings live together not only for the sake of reproduction but also for the various purposes of life; for from the start the functions are divided, and those of man and woman are different; so they help each other by throwing their peculiar gifts into the common stock.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In Book I, Chapter 2 of <em>Politics<\/em>, Aristotle offers a social genesis narrative that begins with the individual household, proceeds to a village formed out of a group of such households, and culminates with a city (or city-state; <em>polis <\/em>in Greek) composed of several such villages bonded together.<\/p>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-2-long d-flex justify-content-center\" style=\"margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center; \" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-312021743\">\n<div id=\"div-gpt-ad-1379703300879-0\" class=\"mb-30\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-4002ea747e2f984fa5d759f882c22f56 fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-2\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-4002ea747e2f984fa5d759f882c22f56\"><\/div>\n<p>The Greek word that Aristotle uses for household is <em>oikos<\/em>, which represents both the linguistic root of and the historical foundation for economics. Unlike our current nuclear family, the oikos was a complex, self-sufficient <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/ben-shapiro-the-real-story-of-the-great-reset\/\" title=\"BEN SHAPIRO: The Real Story Of The Great Reset\">economic unit<\/a> made up, in its fullest incarnation, of parents and children, grandparents and cousins, servants and slaves, lands and livestock, weavers and artisans.<\/p>\n<p>Everyone from the master to the servant, the farmhand to the milkmaid, the potter to the blacksmith had a function within the oikos. Within the family itself, fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters had distinct and separate roles, but all worked together for the common good of the oikos.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">An Industrial and Domestic Revolution<\/h2>\n<p>Nancy Pearcey does not use the word <em>oikos<\/em> in her newest book, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Toxic-War-Masculinity-Christianity-Reconciles\/dp\/0801075734\/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1A765DBI1PTPK&#038;keywords=The+Toxic+War+on+Masculinity%3A+How+Christianity+Reconciles+the+Sexes&#038;qid=1689018629&#038;sprefix=the+toxic+war+on+masculinity+how+christianity+reconciles+the+sexes%2Caps%2C144&#038;sr=8-1\">The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes<\/a>. <\/em>However, she argues \u2014 or, rather, <em>demonstrates<\/em> \u2014 that just such an economic unit was a common phenomenon in pre-industrial America. \u201cBefore the Civil War,\u201d she writes, \u201c90 percent of American freemen owned their own farm, shop, or small-craft workshop. \u2026 Often the living space was in one part of the house, with an office, workshop, or store in another part.\u201d<\/p>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-babec9bf89df234180affe6d9d5f81e1 fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-6\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-babec9bf89df234180affe6d9d5f81e1\"><\/div>\n<p>\u201cAs a result,\u201d she goes on to explain,<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p><em>[L]ife in the thirteen colonies was characterized by an integration of life and labor. Husband and wife were engaged in a common enterprise (though not necessarily in identical tasks). They worked side by side, suffering common defeats and rejoicing in common victories. A husband\/father was the head of a small commonwealth\u2014a semi-independent economic unit that often included members of the extended family, relatives, apprentices, servants, hired hands, farm laborers, boarders, and (mostly in the South) slaves.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The head of this patriarchal economic unit, this Christian <em>oikos<\/em>, was the father. He was not, as he would increasingly become after the Industrial Revolution, a distant breadwinner who went off to work in a factory or business and left the running of the domestic sphere to his wife. He was intimately involved in every aspect of his household, supervising family devotions and taking upon himself the lion\u2019s share of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual education of his children. In fact, I was surprised to learn, in \u201cthe colonial age, literature on parenting\u2014such as sermons and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/how-christianity-fixes-toxic-masculinity\/\" title=\"Christianity addresses 'Toxic Masculinity'\">childrearing manuals\u2014typically addressed fathers<\/a> instead of mothers.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Pearcey, professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University and bestselling author of <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Total-Truth-Study-Guide-Christianity\/dp\/1433502208\/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&#038;qid=1689018653&#038;sr=1-5\">Total Truth<\/a><\/em> and <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Love-Thy-Body-Answering-Questions\/dp\/0801075971\/ref=sr_1_2?qid=1689018653&#038;refinements=p_27%3ANancy+R.+Pearcey&#038;s=books&#038;sr=1-2&#038;text=Nancy+R.+Pearcey\">Love Thy Body<\/a><\/em>, has done a prodigious amount of research on the state of the American family before and after the Industrial Revolution.<\/p>\n<p>But she has not done so merely for the sake of illuminating the early history of our nation. She has done so to address one of the most pressing social problems of our day \u2014 the demonization of masculinity as inherently toxic. How did we arrive at our current state of affairs, Pearcey asks, what does it mean, and what can we do about it?\u00a0<\/p>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-b3a103539086c06f5f024faff4f0bdbf fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-10\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-b3a103539086c06f5f024faff4f0bdbf\"><\/div>\n<p>Let me begin by finishing the compelling, if tragic, story that Pearcey tells about the consequences of the Industrial Revolution on fathers and families. The need to leave the household unit for work did far more than reduce the amount of time men had with their wives and children. It catapulted them into a secular, amoral world that privileged competition, individualism, and acquisitiveness over cooperation, communalism, and stewardship.<\/p>\n<p>As such, it fueled the effects of an Enlightenment-inspired split between the public Darwinian facts of the workplace and the private Christian values of the home \u2014 a split that further drove a wedge between the secular battlefield of business and the sacred refuge of the home, between the rational-logical-objective \u201cmasculine\u201d world of working fathers and the emotional-pious-subjective \u201cfeminine\u201d world of domestic mothers.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFrom the time of the ancient Greeks,\u201d Pearcey explains, \u201cpeople had thought that knowing right from wrong was a rational insight, that men were more rational, and therefore, that men were more virtuous than women.\u201d After the Industrial Revolution, along with Romanticism, reordered society and the sexes, virtue became inextricably linked to feeling and considered the purview of the female. Once \u201cthe moral and spiritual leaders of the household \u2026 men were [now] told that they were naturally crude and brutish, and that they needed to learn virtue from their wives.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Sadly, this shift widened the gap between the sexes. Women began to accuse men, in private and public, of the same \u201ctoxic\u201d behavior that they are accused of today. Men, in response, reacted by either deferring submissively to their wives\u2019 moral superiority or giving themselves over to the very kind of debauchery that they were told was endemic to their masculine nature. Often, they did both at once, causing them to lead bifurcated lives between their amoral workplaces and their moralistically feminine homes.<\/p>\n<p>Wives suffered dearly on account of this split, but so did their children. In addition to losing time with their fathers, they lost the moral example and the moral discipline that fathers had previously set and enforced. This had a particularly devastating effect upon boys who, reacting against the sentimentalized, feminine nature of morality, modeled themselves after the new, secular vision of masculinity as self-centered, hard-living, and commitment-avoiding. Like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, these wild boys rejected the shrewishness and over-civilized prudery of their mothers and maiden aunts in favor of a primitive, savage, carefree life on the open road, the wild West, or the tameless sea.<\/p>\n<p>These social forces culminated in two political movements that Pearcey allows us to see from a new perspective: women\u2019s suffrage and temperance. It is well known that most women of the time were opposed to the suffrage movement. The reason for this was not that they were lazy or uneducated, but \u201cbecause they understood clearly that universal suffrage implied a shift from the household to the individual as the basic unit of society.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201c[It] struck a blow to the concept of male responsibility. For if society accepted that a man voted as solely an individual, then it no longer held him morally responsible for representing the common good of the entire household,\u201d writes Pearcey. \u00a0The result was that men, to use a phrase that Pearcey repeats often in her book, were let off the hook and allowed to indulge their base and selfish desires.<\/p>\n<p>As for temperance, Pearcey quotes academic studies to show that during the first half of the 19th century, the \u201cnumber of taverns and saloons skyrocketed, and drinking reached an all-time high \u2026 alcohol consumption hit a peak in 1830, when average Americans drank three times as much as they do today.\u201d This growth increased the separation of fathers from their homes and families and furthered the corruption of young men in flight from \u201cfemale\u201d religion. The women who fought to shut down the saloons were not fighting an abstract crusade against alcohol; they were fighting to protect their homes and their children from a kind of masculinity that was truly toxic.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Restoring Masculine Headship<\/h2>\n<p>In tracing these historical forces, Pearcey makes full use of her signature strengths, combining academic rigor with lucid accessibility, blending overlooked primary sources with cutting-edge sociological research, and humanizing history with stories of real people, including her own personal experience as the daughter of a verbally and physically abusive father. She also, as she does in all her books, quotes fairly the thinkers (and pundits) with whom she disagrees.<\/p>\n<p>Chief among those with whom she disagrees are secular and Christian public intellectuals who never tire of quoting the \u201cfact\u201d that evangelical Christians divorce at the same rate as the secular world. This well-known \u201cfact,\u201d Pearcey proves by quoting the most reliable sociological studies, is both wrong and deceptive. If \u201cevangelical\u201d means someone who identifies as such on surveys, then the \u201cfact\u201d is true.\u00a0However, when a distinction is made between nominal evangelicals and evangelicals who attend church and live under the authority of Christ and the Bible, an astounding truth emerges.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cCompared to secular men, devout Christian family men who <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/could-you-fairly-judge-a-catholic-lindsey-graham-reminds-biden-nominee-of-anti-catholic-treatment-in-amy-coney-barrett-confirmation-hearings\/\" title=\"\u2018Could You Fairly Judge A Catholic?\u2019 Lindsey Graham Reminds Biden Nominee Of Anti-Catholic Treatment In Amy Coney Barrett Confirmation Hearings\">attend church regularly<\/a> are more loving husbands and more engaged fathers. They have the lowest rate of divorce. And astonishingly, they have the lowest rate of domestic violence of any major group in America,\u201d she writes. In sharp contrast, \u201cnominal Christian men have the <em>highest<\/em> rates of divorce and domestic violence\u2014even higher than secular men.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The evidence, Pearcey shows, not only gives the lie to the supposedly equivalent rates of divorce in the evangelical and secular communities; it explodes the claims made by feminists and the secular media that evangelical notions of complementary headship and submission are a breeding ground for violence against women.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt seems,\u201d Pearcey explains, \u201cthat many nominal men hang around the fringes of the Christian world just enough to hear the <em>language<\/em> of headship and submission but not enough to learn the biblical <em>meaning<\/em> of those terms.\u201d Evangelicals who know and believe the true meaning of biblical headship practice it in relation to their wives \u2014 who report the highest rates of happiness among American women \u2014 and their children.<\/p>\n<p>Churchgoing dads are \u201cthe least likely to yell at their children\u201d and \u201cthe most likely to be warm and affectionate\u201d and they \u201cspend more time in activities with their children, such as eating meals together, reading to them, playing games, coaching sports, attending school activities, and leading a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/strange-watermelon-snow-seen-in-us-mountains\/\" title=\"Unusual 'Watermelon Snow' Spotted in US Mountains\">church youth group<\/a>. All told, religiously active fathers spend about 3.5 more hours per week with their children compared to secular fathers.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>If we are serious about protecting women and children from abuse, abandonment, and other male-inflicted traumas, then we need to do two seemingly opposite things simultaneously. First, we must stop treating men as if they were toxic merely because they are men. Male aggression is not, in and of itself, a toxic thing; to the contrary, it is a natural component of the masculinity that God created and called good. It is not aggression, but the misuse of it, that makes a man toxic. Channeled properly, aggression empowers men to protect and provide for their families.<\/p>\n<p>Second, we must hold men to a higher standard and praise them when they achieve that standard. They must be encouraged to take back their traditional, God-ordained role as head of the household, not to lord it over their families, but to love and serve them as Christ does the church. Fathers who do so bring joy and stability to their wives and children, while gaining for themselves a deeper sense of purpose and dignity. Research, Pearcey reports, \u201chas found that becoming a father brings about a significant improvement in men\u2019s well-being and mental health.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the closing chapters of her book, Pearcey offers helpful advice for identifying behavior that is truly toxic and calls on churches to hold men accountable when they give way to such behavior. But she also calls upon churches to lead the way to recovery by modeling a workplace ethos that assists and rewards employees, male or female, who intentionally balance their duties to their workplace and to their families. If they do so, Pearcey promises, they will discover what many secular critics and companies have already learned: \u201cParents who are committed to family time may work fewer hours \u2026 [b]ut parenting makes them more effective when they\u2019re on the job.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Everyone in America who cares about the future of the family must read <em>The Toxic War on Masculinity<\/em>. And they must encourage their secular friends to do so as well. Pearcey provides the history, the data, and the biblical and sociological analysis necessary to transform the toxic war being waged against masculinity into a movement to reconcile the sexes and restore men to the responsibility of running their households in a loving, godly, community-building way. \u00a0<\/p>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-242ce29a97191ec8a5b6941bf5c93cd5 fdrlst__b89e9-after-post-content\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-242ce29a97191ec8a5b6941bf5c93cd5\"><\/div>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\">    \t\t\t\t\t   \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Book VIII, Chapter 12 of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle asserts that humans have a natural inclination to form couples. This inclination is even stronger than their desire to form cities, as the household is more fundamental and essential than the city. Additionally, reproduction is a shared trait between humans and animals, whereas animals only form unions for this purpose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":645,"featured_media":1969318,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1969317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1969317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/645"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1969317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1969317\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1969318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1969317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1969317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1969317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}