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A a few weeks ago I was speaking to a group of men – some atheists, some Christians, some Jews; some conservatives, some progressives, some centrists – from completely different geographic, cultural and professional backgrounds.
They all wanted to talk about one thing: how many young men they know who seem lost and aimless. For some of them, the problem was urgent because it concerned their own sons. For the most part, these were their nephews or godchildren or the sons of their friends and neighbors.
For the most part, they didn’t talk about the kinds of things people used to worry about with boys and young men. They didn’t worry about gang violence, drug addiction, drag racing, or street fighting. They didn’t even talk about sexual promiscuity or excessive drinking. They were talking about something entirely different: a kind of desperation, a lack of ambition, in some cases even to leave home, let alone go out into the world and start their own family.
One way to identify this problem is to follow the old tried and tested path of blaming the next generation for their laziness and pampering themselves. You know you’re getting older, not when you see the first gray hairs or when your muscles ache from picking up a sock off the floor, but when you see Instagram memes for your generation showing streetlights at dusk with the words Hey Gen Z, this is the app that told us when to go home.
Usually this kind of Kids, get off my lawn (Or Sit on your own lawn instead of playing on the couch) mentality is vapid – a mixture of deceptive nostalgia and We are better than you generational narcissism.
Additionally, those of us who are around young men and women know that these stereotypes are simply not true. I would trust my senior and junior sons more than I would have trusted myself or any of my classmates at that age. Those I know who lead campus ministries often say the same thing about the young men and women they know.
However, you don’t have to give in to all of this to realize that something is seriously wrong and that, in some ways, it affects boys and girls, young men and young women, differently. . It is also important that we see that this is not something wrong with children so much that something is wrong For the children.
The conversation about young men failing to get started, like the one I had with my friends, is itself rare to the point of becoming obsolete because it involves putting aside for a moment who we are. supposed” to say to stay within the boundaries of one’s tribe.
For those on the left, this means saying what might get you reported to human resources in some workplaces: that there really is a male/female gender binary, and that the differences between men and women are superior (but not inferior) cultural constructs. For those on the right, this means recognizing that raising boys with “traditional values” and shielding them from liberal ideas does not solve the problem – and that one of the main crises facing the country is the radicalization of a too many young men towards the white race. nationalist or white nationalist-adjacent ideas online.
Of course, there are many factors at play here, some of which we don’t fully know and won’t know for years. But we know some things. Jonathan Haidt coming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Remake of Childhood is Driving an Epidemic of Mental Illnesspresents what I think is the best and most compelling argument I’ve seen about how technology has “rewired” an entire generation, while also demonstrating how the illnesses resulting from all of this tend to strike differently boys and girls.
Part of the problem, even for some Christians, is a reluctance to recognize what almost all of us know: that you don’t have to indulge in gender stereotypes to see that men and women – well that they are the same in the most important aspects of creation and fallenness – are also different in some important respects. Scripture is primarily addressed to all of us, men and women, as peoplebut it also speaks specifically to men and women on issues that generally present more vulnerability for one group or the other.
When the apostle Paul instructed Timothy that men should pray “without anger or contention” (1 Tim. 2:8), he was not suggesting that women are free to argue during prayer requests. Rather, he was talking about the main temptation to quarrel. Likewise, when Paul and Peter commanded women, in particular, to avoid expensive clothing and displays of wealth, finding their identity and worth not in outward comparison with others but in godliness (1 Tim. 2:9; 1 Peter 3:3-4). ), he did not mean that men could be dressed like peacocks. Again, generally speaking, the points of vulnerability were different between the two.
To address why so many young men go astray, we must address the crises facing both sexes in that they are similar and in that they tend to be different.
This means first and foremost recognizing where the problems really are, rather than focusing all our attention on where they were before. The main problem facing young men today is generally not Lord of the Flies a kind of debauchery but a kind of death which comes from an imagination which cannot envisage another path. Yes, as in every era since Eden, there have been overt sins of immorality and violence, but even these today tend to be overwhelmingly digital rather than personal. This doesn’t make the situation easier, but more difficult to locate.
In his novel The movie buff, Walker Percy identified what he calls a “discontent,” a kind of despair that doesn’t see its place in the world. We do not notice it, he writes, because we are accustomed to seeing sin in the outward commission of immoral acts. The problem today, he writes, is that when it comes to manifest sin, “the truth is that today we are hardly up to the task.” We are always trying to anesthetize the problem we are facing – often on one side or the other of the problem, usually in a way that makes it worse.
The other day I met the British historian Tom Holland on my podcast to discuss his book, People, on the Roman Empire. I asked him what I’m sure almost everyone has asked him lately: why the meme/news history from a few months ago, how many times a day does the typical man think about the viral Roman Empire? He responded with the words: “Tyrannosaurus rex.”
Holland explained that little boys (and some little girls too) tend to be fascinated by T. rex, the apex predator of old. Holland said it was for two reasons: power and extinction. The dinosaur is scary, formidable, and towering over any potential enemy – and the dinosaur no longer exists. It’s scary but it can’t really hurt you anymore.
Except when possible.
Too often these days, when our young people wonder what it means to be a man, too many of us offer them Roman virtues. Some of these, at times, overlap with Christian virtues, but the fundamental paradigm is not only wrong, it is explicitly denounced by Jesus himself (Luke 22: 25-27). The Roman way of seeking domination and rising in rank is what Paul contradicted, among other places, in the Book of Romans. And the Beast of the Apocalypse of John is literally Caesarean and, like the T. rexan alpha predator (Revelation 13:4 says, “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?”).
The cross is a Roman instrument of torture, a power struggle that it seemed would prove that Caesar always wins, so be careful. The Cross undoes all that, not by giving us a different Caesar to fight the old one, but by giving us what we never thought we needed, a crucified king who willingly lays down his life for the world.
This is exactly what is still needed today.
When I think about how I came to internalize – from my earliest memories – what “success” looked like as a man, I could see my own father, of course, but I could also see the men of my church take responsibility, take responsibility. offering, praying for the lost, turning on their chainsaws for disaster relief after a hurricane. I could see the man who remained faithful to his wife through years of cancer; the man who continued to love his prodigal children even after others thought they were embarrassing him.
And what’s really important is that they didn’t leave us little boys behind. There were rites of passage, times when we knew we had made a transition from a kind of childhood to a kind of manhood. This transition was clearly not about feats of strength or talk of sexual immorality in the locker room, but about how we were now expected to model self-control, orienting our lives toward serving the rest of the body.
When this is lacking, how can young men tell the difference between childhood, adolescence and adulthood, aside from how much money to spend on your passions? More so, how do young men know how belong– not only as human beings or as Christians in general, but specifically as Men who is supposed to define manhood not in terms of self-satisfaction but in terms of belonging, responsibility, sacrifice and loyalty?
When we ignore this issue, we ignore how much the next generation is suffering. And we leave them to the old dead gods who can only destroy them.
If a young person does not know how to take the cross of Christ to follow him, he will often take Thor’s hammer to follow him. him. If by default the model of mature manhood we give is that of Barabbas, not that of Jesus, if our model of manhood resembles the crucifiers more than the Crucified One, we should not be surprised if we find ourselves with a quest. to pretend Caesar and pretend harems. We should therefore not be surprised if the skeleton of a dead Tyrannosaurus seems more powerful than “a lamb standing as if it had been slain” (Revelation 5:6, ESV).
And with that we are left with many others who do not want to follow this pagan path, resist it, but are caught, as Percy warned, between a surging but horrible paganism and a dead and lifeless Christianity. The result is despair.
There’s too much at stake for that.
Russell Moore is the editor-in-chief of Christianity today and directs its public theology project.
