The culture isn't just willing to sort of accommodate Christianity. No. Now our culture in many ways is openly hostile and antagonistic to all sorts of elements of the biblical worldview. So this means that one practical effect, many young men have no idea what it means to be a man, and how to practically be a man.
Welcome to Ideas have consequences the podcast of the disciple nations Alliance, a show where we examine how our mission as Christians is to not only spread the gospel around the world to all the nations, but to also transform the nations to increasingly reflect the truth, goodness and beauty of God's kingdom. Tragically, the church has largely neglected the second part of our mission. And today, Christians have little influence on their surrounding cultures. Join us on this podcast as a rediscover what it means for each of us to disciple the nations and to create Christ honoring cultures that reflect the character of the living God.
Well, welcome again, everybody to another episode of ideas have consequences. This is the podcast of the disciple nations Alliance. I'm Scott Allen, president of the disciple nations Alliance. And I'm here today with my friends and co workers, Luke Allen. And Dwight Vogt, and our once again, very special guest on Straughn.
Who's back with us, again, we had on on several months ago to talk about his book on the ideology of social justice and wokeness, which was just such a rich discussion. And Owen, we're so happy to have you back on today. Professor Strawn, I should say. Anyways, it's great to have you back on and we're going to talk today about your new book, which we are really excited to hear more about. It's called the war on men, why society hates them, and why we need them. And that's a book that's coming out in October, as I understand, is that correct?
That's correct. Thank you for having me back on. And yeah, the book comes out October 2023. From Salem, which is the same publisher that did the book, you mentioned, Christianity and wokeness. So it's my follow up.
That's great. I'm so glad that Salem is publishing your books. And you know, I read recently Eric Metaxas, his book, letter to the American church, which is also Salem. So I'm really happy that they're kind of filling out an important role like that. So yeah. For those of you who don't remember, we did listen to the first podcast just a little bit about Dr. stron on he is the you'll have to tell me the exact title, but he's a professor at Grace Bible Theological Seminary in Arkansas, and I, what is it? What is your specific title? Oh,
well, I mean, you know, it's not a big deal. But it's research professor of theology at GBT s and I'm also the Provost of the school, so and I get to count some beans and that sort of thing. Okay. At the school.
Yeah, right, a little bit under selling, I think you're important role there. Anyways, I, you know, for me, you've, you've become one of the most trusted voices in the culture, when it comes to matters of theology and the Bible, I just listened to you regularly, and I really appreciate your voice. And, and I know, it's not just me, I mean, many, many have come to appreciate, you know, the voice that you've got in, in the church and in the culture right now. And so we're really excited about the way that your influence is expanding and growing. And, and so keep up the great work we need. We need you to to keep being a voice for basic, biblical truth in a culture that's gone kind of wild right now. So yeah,
thank you. I really appreciate your kind words.
Thank you, brother. Now it's meant it's meant you mean a lot to us. And so we appreciate your your ministry. I would love just to jump right into the book. You know, you the first question is just why why did you move on from wokeness to this topic? Why did you write the book on Yeah.
manhood is a subject that's been on my heart for a long time. And I frankly have wanted to write a book on manhood for some years, but it seemed wise and getting some counsel to take some time as a man and put some effort into my family and my children, and that sort of thing. I have a son who's 11 Now
Turning 12 soon. So it just seemed right to to wait a bit. This isn't. This isn't a book though that is a lot of
type of book that it could be. That's a strange sentence. This isn't a book about how to be a father. This isn't a book about how to be a husband. It's not a practical book. In that sense. It's not a how to guide to raise a boy to a man. The book touches on all of those areas. It definitely does. It has multiple sections on the areas I just mentioned. But what this book is, is really a study of manhood. And it's a study of manhood with two main emphases. First, our culture is giving us a bad conception of manhood. So very similar to the wokeness book that you mentioned. Why this book after that one? Well, I think it's a second effort to help the church and help non Christians even who are seeing these crazy trends in our society, who are seeing manhood be called toxic, we can talk about that at some length if you want, and who have a sense that men no longer fit, boys no longer fit in things, but they may not necessarily have the biblical background and the tools to make all this coherent to offer a response to it. My book is an attempt then to say, the cultural conception of manhood we often get is deeply flawed, in multiple respects. In truth, there are multiple cultural conceptions of manhood that that are flawed. And then secondly, what the Bible really calls for is what I call strong manhood. And that strong manhood is misunderstood in all sorts of ways, left and right alike. But it is fundamentally a call to men to recognize that manhood is noble. It's made by God just like womanhood. It's for God's glory. And as sinners, every man needs to be redeemed. And the good news is that there is redemption for men, unlike the way our culture often portrays it.
You know, I want to dig into all that you've said, That's a great overview of why you wrote the book and kind of what you're trying to get at, you know, here at the disciple nations Alliance, we're all about the power of biblical truth for for bringing about positive change in culture. And that culture could be as small as a family, or a sports team, or as big as an entire nation, and just the powerful biblical ideas that, that bring about change that very often, especially in the West, we completely take for granted because they've been kind of sewn into the culture over many decades and centuries, even. But now we're at a point where they're, you know, they've kind of run out of gas in some ways, and we've kind of lost them. And so we look at lies, we want to look at some of these lies and distortions that are so destructive to culture. So let's start with that, you know, what are these ideas that you're talking about these conceptions of masculinity or manhood that we're getting from the society that leads society as your subtitle says, to hate them? What are these false ideas about masculinity that you're seeing on?
Well, fundamentally, Critical Theory, which we talked about previously, is the argument in the simplest form, per Karl Marx, that if a given group or an individual who belongs to a group has more power than someone else, that's essentially wrong. And that has been applied to men. It's been applied to men in that society in the West was, to some degree, what we would say is patriarchal men were leaders, men are expected to be leaders in the home and the church and in society. And, again, we're simplifying here. But our leftist culture, our pagan culture, has kicked back very hard against that idea, and the last 60 years in the post war era. And so it's been argued that it's basically wrong for men to have authority or leadership in those contexts. I mentioned in the home, in marriage, over children in the church as pastors and elders, and leaders in the society as statesman, politicians, generals, whatever it businessmen, CEOs, whatever it may be. And so what there are in truth, all sorts of problems with men, every man from birth by nature is a sinner. So you can observe many challenges with men. But fundamentally what our culture has done, is it it reads all these matters I've just laid out very quickly, and it comes to a very simple conclusion. Strong men are toxic, the kind of men that you're trying to raise up and I'm trying to raise up at Grace Bible Theological Seminary and in the church to whatever degree I can, the kind of men we would train up to be strong and God to recognize our own weakness fundamentally, but to know as well that we're called to act like men, First Corinthians 1613. To recognize that David said to his son, Solomon, in the Old Testament, First Kings to to be strong, and show yourself a man prove your manhood, essentially, in spiritual terms. Yes, but that kind of call is bad. In fact, there's a term for it, it's toxic. So strong manhood basically is defined as aggressive manhood assertive manhood, risk taking manhood, stoic manhood, these sorts of things. And all of that is toxic. And that's a therapeutic category. And that that viewpoint, is having a tremendous effect on boys and on young men.
Talk about that, too. How do you see you know, ideas have consequences? That's the title of the or that's the name we've given to our podcast. What? What are the consequences you're seeing in, in men in young men, especially in these next generation of men in the church and outside? What brokenness are those ideas contributing to?
I love the title of your podcast, and it's so true. What I argue in the war on men, this forthcoming book is that there really are four bad types of men that we find prominently in the Scripture. There is the there's the the absent man, the last man, I call him, and that's Adam, in the garden, in Genesis three, when the serpent shows up, Adam doesn't honor what the Lord said to do in Genesis 215, and keep or guard the garden. Adam stands passively by, in effect, Adam disappears. Then there's the angry man. Secondly, that's Cain in Genesis four. That's Cain, not producing the best offering he could, like Abel did. And thus, after God shows favor for Abel in Genesis four, what does Cain do? He lashes out at his brother, he strikes his brother down. So in a sense, right, Cain is aggressive. But that's not right. Aggression, that sinful aggression. That's that anger that men tend to have, in some measure, and it's coming out in a sinful way. Then there's soft manhood that's seen in Gideons example, in the book of Judges, soft manhood is passive, timid, fearful, unclear, rageous manhood. And Gideon shows us that in multiple ways, the good news there, just to say a quick word, the good news for all of these men, the good news for all men, and all human beings, is that God's grace is real, and God will save and God is persevering with Gideon. But nonetheless, soft manhood is a real temptation. And that's really, I would say, by the way, quickly, what our culture is most calling men to be, don't be hard men. Don't be strong men be soft men. That's the kind of man we're going to accept. In this new re envisioned Public Square and society in 2023. The final form of deficient manhood I lay out in the war on men is exaggerated. And that's also Samsung, that Samsung who lives by his lusts, writing lives by his flesh, lives by his eyes, the text in Judges 13, to 1713 to 16 Really makes clear that Samsung just lives by whatever he wants. He's ruled by his eyes, he sees a beautiful woman, women are beautiful, but he goes after her, he doesn't think about her soul, her spirituality, the fact that she's not an Israelite, he just goes and gets her. So and ultimately, of course, it's his eyes that are gouged out, and his life ends in a kind of Blaze of redemptive glory. But um, but on the other hand, it's so much less than it could have been given all God's blessing for Samson, four types of deficient manhood. And then the fifth is the strong man. And that's really what I lay out at length from Scripture in the book,
that's kind of the ideal of those four that the deficient for, you know, what do you see is that what's most worrisome to you, as you look across the landscape in our culture today? Is there one that kind of rises above and you say, Oh, this is such a problem. We've really got to correct this. Or think
fent? Yeah, excuse me. No, good question. I think feminism has really taken the necessary strength out of a lot of men. So what I see when for example, I watch a youth basketball game today. Yes, you still have you Your your dogs on the court, the ones who are aggressive, but a lot of boys kind of the general mass of boys today, my son you can tell is in the youth basketball stage. I love basketball, I was obsessed with basketball even to an idolatrous degree. And yet, hey,
hey, it's March Madness. This is a good time of year for you then. So hey, my son and I,
we spent hours this past weekend watching March Madness, and it was glorious. It's anyway. What you see with young men today is that, again, a lot of them have had the aggression taken out of them. They've not been trained to be assertive in the right way, in a biblical way, godly way. They've been trained or they've been allowed to be passive, and on their heels and not strong. The lockdown culture only only aided and abetted this kind of ill phenomenon. And so I think that soft manhood model is is having a tremendous effect on young men, you've got a generation of young men in their 18 to 35 year old face that really doesn't know the script for life doesn't have a plan doesn't plan to plan. They don't even know that they're supposed to be taking dominion of things, as God calls most of us to marriage, marry a wife is God leads build a family, children, build a vocation serve a church, they don't know these things. Now, sometimes in the manhood conversation, those who engage that demographic, young men, all they do is get the blowtorch out and just chastise young men. That's not what I do in the war on men, people are going to expect that I will do that limited slice of humanity that knows me and knows that I'm an advocate for biblical manhood on social media or something. They're going to expect that I'm just going to do another shout Fest and get red faced and say, You idiot, young men. You're such goofballs. You're on your video games. Why aren't you? Why aren't you growing up? Peter Pan?
Get out of your basement, right? Yeah, yeah.
I've got some hopefully fatherly words, I've got some strong words. I've got some clarifying words. But what I'm actually trying to do is say, why would we expect young men to be assertive in a biblical way, if the culture has trained them the exact opposite way? We can't, we can't only fault young men, we have to fault those who are supposed to train young men. And we've got to fault churches in some form. And we've got to recognize by the way, there is a bonafide war on men that feminism has been waging for decades. And that has had massive effects on young men such that the caste of our society itself the caste of the classroom, and movies and entertainment, and the public forum is itself a feminine mold. What did Jordan Peterson say some years ago and become globally famous for saying, well, he essentially challenged the idea that women are social and men are antisocial. And that antisocial ness is bad. It's true, that women tend to be empathetic and listening and to form groups, and meant have that tendency to go out on their own and be pioneering and tough and not easy to entreat. That's true. But what Peterson challenged was the idea that the antisocial traits are bad traits, what he what he was saying and has been saying in some form, from his own worldview, which is not a Christian worldview, but he's getting something right here, I think and common grace terms, is that actually you need antisocial traits to some degree in a hard and fallen world. There's so much more I could say. But I'm trying to say some of these things from a distinctly Christian standpoint, in the war on men. Yeah.
I'm curious. You've been teaching this probably for a while now. What's been the response to the men or the the boys you've been teaching? I've you I mean, what's that? Like? Do their eyes wide go wide open? How do they react?
There's there's two main reactions. First, I'm seeing as I'm starting to present this material at churches, and conferences, and in different forums. I'm watching as men especially but also women, who have been severely impacted by the feminist attack on manhood. And now the, the, what you could call Neo pagan attack on manhood with transgenderism and, and gender fluidity being the late stage of the sexual revolution that we're currently in. As you say things like men are called to be men. When it's good for men to be strong, men can't become women. It's not good for men to embrace gender and drogyny. These sorts of things, people, people, their eyes light up, not because I'm some brilliant theologian, I'm not. But because this is so against the grain. You're not supposed to say these things. This is breaking all the rules. And that's why Peterson to go back to him for just a second. Sorry. That's why Peterson went global. He was a father in public the same way to some degree in the Christian world, Doug Wilson, or John MacArthur are different men with different views on some things. But the same reason they in the last three years got such attention is because it turns out there are some men, whether Christian or not, who will speak up against lies. And Peterson, of course, became famous for first saying he would not use transgender pronouns as mandated by the Canadian government. So when men stand up and say truth, and especially from a Christian vantage point, the first response is like, whoa, can he say that? The second response is then, honestly, thankfulness as you start digging into the Word of God, and what it teaches about manhood. A lot of people certainly not every person, a lot of people hate what I'm saying, and they're gonna hate this book, and they're going to work against it. I'm girding my loins for that, no. Apologies for the language, but but I am. But I anticipate that as, as we stand on God's truth and proclaim God's truth, by the grace of God, God will use that powerfully. And that's what I'm asking God to do through this book, to give men their manhood back by the grace of God.
You know, why is it all when you're in the business of training, our next generation of pastors, and I think for all this is my own observation, but for a long time in America, as the church, we we could take a lot of things for granted, you know, because again, the culture was so shaped by biblical ideas. And, you know, one of those would be, you know, just what does it mean to be a man or a woman, you know, or, or court courting, or you name it, any number of things were kind of shaped by biblical norms, you know. But, you know, the way I read the kind of the woke ideology is it's the first really powerful and aggressive, comprehensive worldview that is kind of supplanting kind of the older biblical idea. And it doesn't there's no connection to the Bible, very little connection. I mean, this is truly a, an unbiblical ideology. Like you said, it's rooted in Marxism. And, you know, post modernism, but but the church, it so I think it's, it's out of its out of practice, in just teaching some of these basic biblical things. are, you know, the gentleman who helped found the ministry, Darrow Miller here he has a saying that he loves, if the church isn't discipling, the nation, the nation's discipling, the church, it's always kind of going one way or the other. You know, the church discipling, the nation is taking these powerful biblical ideas, and influencing the culture with them. But of late, you know, it's been the other way around. It's the ideas from the culture about what it means to be a man or woman or everything to do with sex and gender, and just, it's influencing the church coming into the church. So just Yeah. Any thoughts on that observation? And what can we do? I feel like we've got to we, we being the church, and people that are training the next generation of Christian leaders, we have to be a lot more intentional about doing these things, you know, well, theology at this level of Theology at this level. Yeah. Go ahead, Dwight. Yeah,
that's what I'm saying. If it's up to you, what do you think I mean,
yeah, what do we do? Yeah, I mean, first, we've got to just get our bearings back. It's kind of like the bomb exploded. And we're at the point in the movie where everyone has their hearing impaired, and they're kind of wandering around and staggering in the smoke. And we've got to get our bearings back. And I think, I hope this book is a small effort in that direction. Because you can't respond to a culture and its ideology unless you first get your bearings unless you first get back to the solid rock of the Word of God. And only then can you respond. Fundamentally though, we've got to recognize this van cube has not been created by accident. Many Christians have not heard from pulpits much about biblical manhood and biblical womanhood. It's, it's been hard to teach these things, it's been hard to say men should be a provider and a wife, a mother should embrace the high calling of motherhood in the home, when at least when the children are young, and that sort of thing. A lot of pulpits, even conservative evangelical pulpits have recognized that they're very quickly going to get in the kitchen of people. And those people, if the if the goal of the churches to be big, and to have 1000, or 2000, or 3000, or whatever, 1000 people coming. And that's when the ministry really, really has significance and wait, well, you're gonna drive people off, because a lot of Christians have lived feminist influenced lives. And it's hard to go against the grain, it's hard to speak against culture, it turns out, so there's a fair number of churches that haven't really been prepared for the culture to shift. So significantly, and and now we're, they're in a, in an especially hard spot, because now, the culture isn't just willing to sort of accommodate Christianity in a bunch of different ways. It won't attack it, it will accommodate it, it's not really going to give it a privileged position anymore. No. Now our culture, in many ways, is openly hostile and antagonistic to all sorts of elements of the biblical worldview. So this means that one practical effect, many young men have no idea what it means to be a man, and how to practically be a man. Yeah, and I'm not first and foremost, faulting them for that. They didn't ask for that situation. They didn't ask for no fault divorce to ravage this country and destroy lots of families. They didn't ask for pornography to become this all pervasive scourge, where, you know, you put a phone in a kid's hand when he's nine, and he can access any sin imaginable in two seconds. They didn't ask for feminism to wreak havoc on the church and the society. This is where they've grown up. This is where they find themselves. They have. It's the title of my book, again, they find themselves in a war. They haven't asked for colleges and universities to have HR sessions on How Men Women are inherently virtuous, basically, but men are inherently toxic. They haven't asked for that. They haven't asked for confession, booze about masculinity, okay? All this means I'm going on here. But all this means that because the church has found itself in a hostile culture with regard to manhood and other realities, and thus many pastors have chosen to go, Whoa, this is really tough. I'm going to just play this one. Quiet. Maybe I'll keep standing for biblical manhood in general. But I'm not going to get into the weeds of this stuff. The more I do that, the more hostility I'll bring on myself in my church and these sorts of things. So young men have turned to Christian young men, men from Christian homes. Jordan Peterson, yeah. Joe Rogan, Jocko Willink, David Goggins, Andrew Tate, and that's a spectrum of them, non Tucker Carlson, that's a spectrum of men who I don't know to be Evan Jellicle. I may be wrong, some of them are less helpful, some of them are more helpful to be sure tape being less helpful to be clear, but young men are desperate to have a father, this isn't this isn't rocket science. They don't, they haven't had a father, many of them in the home, disciple them into manhood. And they haven't had a father, so to speak in the pulpit. And then our culture has actively Ward against things like the Boy Scouts. So we've lost a lot of the supporting institutions, yes, that historically trained boys to be men. And you add all this up, you've got a disastrous cocktail, and we have a ton of work to do.
And I think the default to is and you've, you've alluded to this, that the default is to go back to an unredeemed manhood.
I mean, you know, it's this pretend manhood. It's the angry man. It's the I mean, that's part of it. I think I see out there it's least are you talking about in the church wide or no, no. What am I trying to say?
Men are reacting against toxic this, this, this idea that they're toxically masculine, but some and I'm thinking young boys, really their default is to go back to where you started on with this. The unredeemed man, he's passive. He's angry. He's, he's, he's a pretend man. And I kind of see you know,
If that is part of the default to people go back to that. And just say, here's a real man, and he's in Scripture. And theology supports this as a man. That's a new, that's a new thing.
Yeah, excuse me there. That's exactly right. So this is complicated, right? Because you've got like a Peterson, who I would say is more helpful. And you've got like an Andrew Tate on social media, who I would say is less helpful. Andrew Tate, and Jordan Peterson are both strong men. They're in different ways. They have their own personality, their own speaking style, voice, physical presentation, et cetera, and so on. But they are both I would say, strong men. I don't mean that in, in a Christian sense. Ultimately, I mean that in a kind of traditional manhood form. And so, young men, including many young men in the church, have looked to Peterson for guidance, because Peterson is like, like, take dominion of your life. Clean up, stop being stop being, you know,
a passive little specimen, being pounced on by the world be a lobster, that's his famous thing be a lobster fight back. You've got to be you've got to be tough. Which is a common,
biblical strong, good. Well, that's intense. Peters. Yeah, that's what I mean. He's leaning towards the biblical side of strength.
Yeah. Peterson is giving young men a strong manhood, but it's not a Christian manhood. But here's what we have to say. The Bible gives those young men what they're looking for. And it also speaks to the Andrew Tate form, Tate is this cool, dapper guy, who's got a lot of money and cool cars, and, and draws attractive women and these sorts of things. And lots of young men, again, even in the church, have no idea how to engage a young woman. And lots of young men don't know how to be confident around a young woman, they've never had a dad tell them how to engage a girl. They, so they're going to men who display bravado, instead of here we are back to Scripture, a kind of confident Christian manhood. That's not That's not exaggerated. It's not the swagger that you see. But it is also as a father trains his son, it is confident in the right way. So what we need to say in Psalm is that we've got, we've got to not let our young men in the church ultimately be trained by unbelieving men. There are elements of common grace in other men and how they live, yes. But we're the ones who can train young men to be rightly confident and rightly engage young women. But again, a lot of pastors and a lot of fathers just have stopped discipling young men in these ways. So what a shock that they would go to YouTube for help.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's, let's go. I want to touch back on why we're not doing that as well as we could pastors and fathers and Christians in general. But I want you to just pick up this picture that you're painting of, you know, what does biblical manhood look like? And I know that's a big question. But if you could just touch on it a little bit and paint that picture for us, we've looked at these four kind of examples of manhood that veer off of kind of the ideal. But how would you paint that picture for the ideal here for us on the biblical Yeah,
I would say, I would say that Adam is made not as the perfect man, of course, he's, he's fallible in Eden, so he's not perfect, just like Eve is not perfect, but he is made without sin. And he is called to lead, protect and provide. You see that in Genesis two in different ways. And so Adam really gives us a good sense of what a man is called to be and is made to be. He's made to work and guard the garden (Genesis 2-15). He's called into marriage. He's the one who was supposed to hold fast to his wife (Genesis 2-24). So obviously, God has built a lot into Adam from the start. And then of course, we know that manhood, as with humanity itself, comes to perfect expression in the man Christ Jesus. And Jesus is many things and has many virtues, and glorious abilities and traits. But fundamentally, I would say, Jesus shows us men, that it is right to be both tough and tender. Jesus is the one who makes a whip of cords and John 2 and scourges the temple. Jesus is the one who is richly compassionate to women and children, who, for example, calls the little children to himself and indicates that they're not bothering him as his disciples fear. He loves little children. So Jesus is is not only tough, and Jesus is not only tender. Sometimes today in our conversation about even Jesus, we focus on how he was gentle and lowly in heart (Matthew 11-29). Well, that's a glorious truth about Jesus, you just have to make sure that you don't read that in a kind of cultural way, such that you end up with a soft Jesus in a cultural form, who is not also the Lion of Judah, who is not also the one who has come to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3-8). So there's so much we could say, all this manhood has to be powered by the gospel, you're not truly a man in creational design until you're born again. And when you're born again, then you are enabled in the grace of God to glorify God in these roles of leader, protector and provider, especially. Unbelieving men can fill those roles, but again, you're not living to the glory of God as a man until you're regenerate--until you're born again, you're made new. Now, that also doesn't mean though, that when you're born again, the conversation stops. All 'being a man of God is,' is being born again, no!--you've got a masculine body, you've got masculine duties, you need to conduct yourself in an appropriately masculine way. Anyway, these these things, a lot of them challenge all sides. It's a huge discussion what biblical manhood is, but those are some of the core truths.
Yeah, thanks for painting that picture for us. Luke was telling us a story before you came on today about how hardwired men are, even though society has worked so hard over, you know, so many years to shape us kind of away from these manly attributes, and how hardwired young men are. And men just in general, you know, leadership. You mentioned protecting and providing. Tell that story, Luke, I just thought that was, you know, oh, yeah, really powerful. Yeah.
Yeah, I heard this on a different podcast, but it was about this was during World War Two, blitz in England. And before the Blitz started in England, there was this psych ward hospital, mostly guys struggling from PTSD from the first the Great War. And these guys were fully in the psych ward, you know, being taken care of the Fed, washed everything, then all sudden, the bombs start dropping on London. And all of a sudden, a bunch of these men are totally, you know, in, in April, incapacitated, all of a sudden rose up, and they're out there on the streets, protecting, protecting the city, protecting the nurses that were taking care of them, you know, many anti aircraft guns, setting up sandbags. And it's this is such a cool story that when you give men a mission, and something outside of themselves, to protect, provide for the rights that occasion because it's so ingrained in us that's, that's one of this is distinctive, that that makes us men, I just
thought that was really a potent story. They were incapacitated. But when they needed to rise up, as you know, there's a threat and they needed to protect their people from that threat. They overcame whatever incapacitation they had, because it was so hardwired into them. So
yeah, and that's, that's what men need. And that's in the cultural sense, again, that's what Peterson, to some degree has called men back to. And that's what some of those other voices that I mentioned, have called men back to. And that's what but that's ultimately what the church must do. We don't offer men one mission among many that they can choose from, we offer them the ultimate mission, which is following King Jesus, and taking dominion of the world. And being by the power of God's grace, the most godly man, you can be the most consequential, impactful man you can be not every man is called to be an elder, a pastor, a teacher, a missionary, some are and that's glorious. But every man of God has great purpose and worth and value, whether his job is secular or not. But we we've gotten away from calling men to mission, because calling men to mission involves recognizing the reality that men are made by God to be leaders. And that again, is a very controversial idea. A lot of pulpits don't want to voice it. Men, on average, have 2,000% more testosterone than women. Men, on average, have 30 to 40% more upper body strength than women. God has built these things into men. And the men who say such realities who voiced such realities on social media, the internet, Reddit boards or whatever, those men are going to get a following. I'm trying to be over here in the church and say, Guys, you you you're hearing resonances of the truth and different figures and voices. But ultimately that mission you're looking for is the biblical script. It's, it's to follow King Jesus and take them minion every chance you get.
Yeah, you know, this Easter Week because we're talking about this. And you know, when I think of Jesus and the manliness of Jesus, it doesn't come into sharper focus, at least for me than it does this week when you see Jesus, you know, just with his face set like Flint towards that cross. And, you know, the incredible courage that that took and the mission that he was on, and he was going to fulfill to the glory of God the Father, I mean, it inspires me to be a man to fulfill that mission, God's God for me, even if it costs me everything, you know, in terms of my own life. And so very powerful, you know, example of biblical manliness there in Jesus.
One more question, how is what you're calling for different from the Promise Keepers movement?
Maybe you could explain what that Promise Keepers movement is.
I was a part of that. That was back in the States back in the what is it? 80s 90s? I don't know what it was early 2000s. Yeah. For for men to be men to lead their families. And it was it was powerful. And I was a part of some of those meetings. And they were extremely clear word, right? Yeah. But it's it sort
of faded away, fizzled out, didn't it? I'm like, what happened? Yeah. Anyway,
what's your view? Yeah, I think in human terms, movements have, you know, unique personalities and leaders who often spearhead them. And so that was the case you had Bill McCartney, a Christian, for example, who strikes gold at the University of Colorado and wins the national championship. Right. And, and so and then uses that bandwidth, that cachet, to call men to be men. And I think that was a real movement that had many good effects in the 80s and 90s, especially. And even beyond. I, there's probably more of a theological cast to the work I'm doing in the war on men in my own little ministry, than Promise Keepers Promise Keepers was quite broad, I would say and ended up having some elements that I would say were not not great theologically, ultimately. But it's a similar call, I would say with that noted and stated and on the record, this is a similar burden, to again, call men to be men, this problem is not new. This isn't something that has just debuted in 2023. Oh, no men are struggling. No. America has been losing. Its at least Judeo Christian framework for generations, right? The sexual revolution has had devastating consequences in the last 60 years, Christians in different times have been trying to punch back against the darkness. And I would say there's a new emphasis in our time among men, among young men, on building in the ashes. So this is a hard time. Easier times easier days, have created soft men. And now we're in truly hard times. And that's very, that's very bad in many respects. But here's a good outcome. Here's a note of hope, in hard times, strong men are created. And so as God works and moves, I fully believe that a lot of young men, even outside of coming to Christ are waking up to the reality that they can't let the culture babysit them. They can't just trust that their life is gonna go great, and live passively, and just have an easy life. No, they're under attack. They're under fire. I don't like that. But in another way, I'm glad for it, because I think it's having a major major effect among young men. And a lot of them are waking up in a common grace sense to the fact that they are in a war. And then my prayer is just that Christians will step into this situation and provide not only a kind of traditional manhood in response, but a gospel powered gospel shaped Christ's like manhood.
Yeah, I want to talk just a little bit more about this because earlier you mentioned the Church and its response you know, when you say that church of course it's it's you're on dangerous ground there but but in general, its responses when you deal with issues of sex and gender and masculinity. Oh, this is very controversial. Right? This is very divisive in the culture right now. I don't want to deal with it. I'm just going to preach from the book of Daniel or whatever it is, I'm not going to deal with these these hot button cultural issues. And or, you know, the attitude might be the way that we have an influence in the culture is by by not being controversial by being affirming and kind and nice, you know, there's this whole, you know, win some kind of debate that we've been having an evangelicalism and I know when you've been really clear in my mind, I've learned so much from you and your, your messaging on that issue. What are your thoughts on on just kind of our general posture right now that you see, hey, we just can't talk about that. It's too controversial. Let's not go there. Let's keep our heads down. Like you say, we are in a time in the culture where to be an outspoken Christian is going to be controversial, right? It's going to be Yeah, it's you're going to be despised, right? Aaron Wren calls it the negative world and we're in the negative world right now. And yes, so what what's your what do we need to do in the church to kind of get us away from this posture of, you know, we can't talk about these important issues. Because if the church isn't doing it, somebody else is right. Somebody's going to be discipling our nation's I'm just going to be discipling men on what it means to be a man it's going to happen. But it's not going to be biblical ideas. And when ultimately we're to blame for that, that, you know, right. Yeah, go ahead and just share your thoughts on that.
Yeah, I mean, I may have said this to you guys on the last one. But when wokeness was raging in America, and numerous cities were burning, and all sorts of evil ideology was advancing under the banner of wokeness and social justice. There weren't many people who would stand up and call a spade a spade who would say for example, okay, whatever, whatever sins there are in this world, whatever problems may be in different communities, to some extent, the solution to those problems, is not to kill people, and torture American cities. That's not good. This is not true justice. This is this is Marxism, that is wreaking havoc in our society. There weren't many who would who would speak up in those tones? Well, I don't agree with everything the man says. But if you turned on Fox, I don't agree with everything Fox would say certainly. But if you turned on Fox, and you listen to a Tucker Carlson monologue, he was absolutely fearless, and exposing the lies of Black Lives Matter of wokeness critical race theory of the social justice movement, call, call it whatever you'd like to call it. And that was such a sharp contrast to the church, yeah, to so many in the church, where it was just assumed that because this was controversial, and America does have real racist sin and sins in the past, we, especially white people, so called, should just shut up and say, nothing. And the prevailing mindset there is that when there is controversy, the church just plays dead. When there are hard edged issues, the church, if it does engage, engages in the absolute softest form possible, and does not draw lines in general unless it absolutely has to. And in so doing, that's the way to make disciples and when unbelievers Yes, it is right to be gentle, open to reason, humble, tender, and so on and so forth. A lot of what I just said, is covered in the fruit of the Spirit, Galatians 522, to 23, which every man and every Christian will bear by the Spirit's power and must pursue. Having said that, the Gospel advances under the banner of truth, truth, the Ministry of Truth depends upon drawing lines, guarding the good deposit of the gospel Second Timothy 113 to 14, saying, this is true. This is a lie. In so doing, you allow people to know truth and thus not be taken captive by ungodly ideology. Second, Colossians, two eight, and you go further even than that, you add that defensive word in Scripture, which is a glorious word to the offensive word, which is Second Corinthians 10. Three to six. You destroy strongholds, you destroy ideologies. You don't just soft gloved them, you don't just bump up against them. Well, there are racial concerns and so we should be a people of empathy. Okay. Yeah. To framed rightly Absolutely. But here's the other deal. This ideology pastor is Imperial. It wants all your people it wants to trap them in a NEO Marxist stronghold. You as the shepherd of the sheep are called to warn the sheep about the wolves. You are called to destroy the stronghold. So is that what all pasture Oral ministry reduces to for example, no, no, if you're always on social media blasting something, if if your pulpit is taken over by, you know, calling out every lie under the sun, that's not good. We've got to form people according to the teachings of Scripture. There's a lot to teach people, right, not just about ideologies. But if you're not teaching them about Imperial ideologies, you're not equipping the sheep, you're not protecting the sheep, and you won't make disciples because disciples are only made, where the truth is preached, where it's proclaimed. There's so much to say, and I'm sure this is an adequate answer. But I'll just close with the book of Acts, a reference to the entire book of Acts, there you go. How did the apostles advance the faith? Was it by not drawing lines? Was it by not saying that this worldview and this worldview, and this worldview is not the true worldview? The true worldview is only in the blood of Jesus Christ. That's how the gospel advances God blesses the true biblical worldview, with all of its elbows and edges, and definition. And that's how true disciples true sheep are brought in. That will get you a lot less goats as you preach, but it will get you a lot more sheep as God works.
You mentioned Go ahead, look. Well, yeah,
I'm just thinking about the winsomeness project has wreaked a lot of havoc on the church's ability to be a witness, especially to young men. It's not attractive to young men seeing this this passive, soft, and I think a lot of churches. Well, I don't know about making that broad. But, you know, be nice is this hallmark characteristic right now of a Christian, you need to be nice. I mean, and that's really hurting,
you're speaking from experience coming out of a Christian university, you know, with a lot of young Christian young man. So you've got a certain perspective on this right now. So
yeah, and I think it's interesting, because you mentioned Andrew Tate earlier in the discussion, I saw a video once of him talking about how, at some point, in his own words, he was interested in Christianity, but the softness of Christians is what turned him away to it. He was saying, for example, if you had someone walking through the streets of London wearing a t shirt that says, Jesus is gay, nothing would probably happen to him, people would just walk on by, whereas if you saw him wearing a shirt that said, Muhammad is gay, you would he would be confronted, immediately the person wearing that T shirt. And he, he's now in his own words converted to Islam, because of their courage of their conviction, they stand on something, they actually have a rock that they're willing to defend courageously. And we do too. We just, you know, in his eyes don't do that. Well, and that that passivity that that softness is what turned him away. And I think for a lot of other men, probably looking in from the outside, also see that in that that that hypocrite nature, that's
wherever there are strong men, there's going to be a long line of young men behind them. It's just the weight of the world, you can hate that. You can love that, or you can feel indifferent about it. It is the way the world works. Yes. So men want to be strong. Men aspire to be strong, that can easily go in bad directions according to our sinful nature. Or it can go in positive directions as God works. And so if the church has a whole bunch of weak men leading it, there's no reason to expect that young men are going to be disproportionately drawn to that. If the Church has, according to Scripture, what Scripture calls for strong men leading it? Well, I'm bullish on the church, because that's exactly what Christ was. And that's exactly what the apostles were. And there's a long line of faithful, courageous leaders and martyrs and pastors and theologians in church history. And that's what God wants that that's that's the principle. That's what we call creation order. The world is wired, so that strong men would lead in the home. Strong men would lead in the church, and strong men would lead in the public square. And no matter what the culture does, no matter how much it attacks us, how much it demeans us how much it tries to infantilize us how much it tries to ensnare us in our lusts. You don't need to work. You don't need to have a hard life. You can just watch porn on your phone and play imaginary games on your huge TV. And you don't have to go to church. No, you don't have to serve anyone. You don't have to lay your life down. Just embrace a, a passive entertainment driven responsibility, evading life, and you'll be truly happy. And here's what is happening with young men. They are rebelling against that even in the non Christian sense.
No, yeah, they if I can many of it just I just you're bringing up a point I've thought about since I saw this phenomenon happen. You know, back when ISIS was kind of on the rise, remember this? Yeah. And you had this phenomenon of European young men and American young men showing up in Syria fighting for ISIS. And as you kind of like, What in the world is the worst possible cause that somebody could, could fight for? And yet, yeah, they were going there, because they were looking for a cause to fight for and there wasn't anything on tap in the West, other than just exactly what you said, sit in front of your TV, watch porn and have no purpose in life. And they just, they couldn't live with that. And but what all that said to me is like, what, what's the, what are we doing is the church that these young men have to go to fight for ISIS? To find a purpose and a meaning in life? When we've got the greatest meaning and purpose, but we're not communicating it somehow, you know, so it Yes. Oh, gosh.
Yeah. So we've got, we've got a, I know we're wrapping up here. We've got to like, we've got to punch back. Okay. Yes. We need to be those who speak the truth in love Ephesians 415, our response to feminism and Neo paganism today is not to get crazy and wild and off the handle. Right? Right. We are we are preaching a strong manhood that is fundamentally strong by the grace of God. And that strength manifests not in not in most of the time, going after people beating people down or something like this, that strength is first and foremost, First Kings to to again, be strong, and show yourself a man, its spiritual strength. Its people think that self control is not strength. The strongest man in our world is not the man who is sleeping around with hundreds of partners and killing people left and right, or at the very least, brutalizing people according to the strength of his will and getting whatever he wants. That's a weak man. The strong man is the man who has self rule by the power of the Holy Spirit. The strong man is the one who is killing sin by God's grace. The strong man is the one who knows Jesus Christ is the Savior. The strong man is the one who is embracing physical discipline of his body. The strong man is the one who is embracing discipline of his free time, so to speak, the strong man is the one who has vocational discipline, he's building a vocation, he's not just having a job, even if he has a low end job. He's attacking it. He's the best employee he can be. The strong man is the one who is ruled by the Spirit and so doesn't serve himself but serves his church, even in even in mundane ways. Even if it's parking ministry, he's out there, he's got a smile on. He's strong to serve. The strong man is the one who isn't sleeping around. But who, as God leads is dedicated to one wife. And the strong man is not the one who is out doing whatever he wants, avoiding his wife and kids playing golf on the weekend, never seen his family. The strong man is ruled by the Spirit. He embraces self rule. So he is loving his wife, and he is paying attention to his kids. He's on the floor with them. He's figuring out what makes them tick. He's not exasperating them. He loves them. He invests in them, he leads his family and family worship one or two times whatever times a week he can. So we've got to call in some for strong men. But strong manhood is not defined by the world. It's defined by Scripture.
What just as we wrap up here on what steps can we take to bring that into reality today? What are some practical steps that people can take and churches can take? And I know this is obviously a huge question in and of itself. But if you could just just kind of leave us today with a few kind of here's some practical ways we can rebuild this kind of culture,
read his new book.
For sure, and the title of that book, by the way, is the war on men why society hates them and why we need them. What are your
Yeah, it would be tremendous help anyone whose interest is piqued by our conversation, thank you for the great conversation as as usual, to preorder the war on men. You would be shocked at how much pre orders help authors people don't know this, but huge help. Yes, it's on Amazon. It's elsewhere. That's that's that'd be a blessing. But forget the book. Forget the book, who cares about the book The Um, I would just reduce, I could say a lot of different things in terms of application. Yeah. But I would reduce to. Once we know Christ as our Lord and Savior, once we're born again, we have faith in the death and resurrection of Christ for us, we turned from our sin. Now we're born again, we're a Christian, we're made new. I would say, the secret to growing and strong manhood is to embrace discipline, it's to start embracing discipline, anywhere. Don't think within one week is a man of God, you've got to have all your life figured out and perfect and in airtight arrangement. But once you start chipping away at that, passivity, it is shocking how the dominoes start falling. So I'll just illustrate quickly. Your appetite may be out of control, you may have no discipline, you may have no discipline to read the Bible. As another example, well in either of those areas, once you start just saying, You know what, maybe I shouldn't eat bad all the time. Or, or maybe I should read the Bible for 10 minutes a day, here's what will happen. dominoes will start falling by the grace of God. And in one, when you start being disciplined in one area of life, you'll start seeing effects. And you'll start going, Wait a minute, wait a minute, why is there self rule here, but there's no self rule here. Men desperately want at some level, we have kind of two instincts, don't we? Naturally, we have an instinct to run wild. But we also have that, that love the heart aspect, Scott, that you rightly talked about that where we want to be controlled, and we want to grow, and we want to be something greater than we are. So we've, we're at war with ourselves in the flesh. When we're a Christian, now, the spirit has mastered us. And so I would just say start pursuing discipline. And as you start eating better, it's a funny thing to say, right? But as you start pushing back against that culture that says, gratify yourself, at every turn, in every way, what will happen is, you'll start going, Wait a minute, okay, I'm eating better. I should probably start working out, not because bench pressing 600 pounds is what every man is going to do. I gotta look like Schwarzenegger, okay? No, but because my body is the vessel of the Holy Spirit. And I've got to start honoring God with my body. And then what will happen? As discipline is dawning there, then you're going to go, Wait a minute, should I be watching these movies? Should I be on my phone all the time? And that's going to change. And then you're gonna go, Wait a minute, okay, I've been a passive consumer of church, all I do is show up once in a while, and not even do anything and just sort of listlessly mumble the words I don't sing, I don't serve, I don't contribute. Maybe discipline should Dawn there too. And okay, fast forward to the end here. What's going to happen is that God is going to make you by His grace, a strong man, you're not going to be perfect. None of us on this zoom session are perfect. We're all very much a work in progress. We all stumble in many ways. James Three, two, but there is truly infinite hope for every human being. And thus, for every man. God's grace is that powerful. So I don't end my discussion of manhood. on a on a sour note. It's all on fire. We're all going down. The ship is headed for the bottom of the sea. I say men are under men are under fire, excuse me, men are under attack. But God's grace is stronger. And by the power of Christ, we can rise and build like Nehemiah.
That's a great word. Well, there's so many more things we could talk about in terms of application. But I think that's just a great one to focus in on is just the need that we have to exercise what we call here, the DNA, you know, it's just self government, you know, it's this authority over ourselves and starting there in one small area. And I completely agree as you you know, success breeds success. So it can be a very small area. But if you can find some success there, you're exactly right. dominoes will start to fall and you learn you begin to learn what it means to build these good habits. And, and that can be such a positive thing. So thanks for that real, practical way that we can begin to apply this. I think we had more time, it'd be good to talk about churches and what churches could do as well. But maybe we'll save that for our next conversation. Oh, and thanks again for for coming on today. And for this new book. The book again, the title is the war on men, why society hates them and why we need them. I encourage all of you who are listening today to go to Amazon to pre order that book and take my word for it. You need to listen to on stran the voice that he has in the culture Right now is indispensable. So, thanks for your time on and God bless you.
Thank you, man. Thanks for having me on. Really appreciate it. Look
forward to having you back again. God bless take care. And thank you again for listening to another episode of ideas have consequences. This is the podcast and the disciple nations.
Hi friends thank you for listening to this discussion with Dr. Owens drawn. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sending it to a friend and especially to the young man that God has placed in your life. To find out more about oh, and he is on Twitter at o stran and Instagram at Prof. stren and from those you can find his podcast the antithesis which I highly recommend, and information about all of his books, including updates on the release of the toxic war on men, like Oh, and said those pre orders really helps. So if you're interested in getting the book, hop on Amazon or wherever you get books and order your copy today, ideas have consequences is brought to you by the disciple nations Alliance. To learn more about our ministry you can find us on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube or on our website which is disciple nations.org. Thanks again for listening and have a great rest of your week.
