Aaron Renn on Servant Leadership, Patriarchy, and Post-Industrial Culture

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Welcome to the conversations that matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We got a special guest today first time flyer on the conversations that matter podcast.

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His name is Aaron Ren. And some of you may have heard of him. He has a podcast called the masculinist, which is also a newsletter, you can sign up for on his website.

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He used to do work with urban policy and consultation. And now, well,

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I'll let him describe a little bit about what he's up to now with the masculinist. Welcome, Aaron. Appreciate you coming on. Thanks for having me on.

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So tell us a little bit about what can people expect if they go to the masculinist .com and they sign up for your newsletter?

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Well, the newsletter is a once a month newsletter, a long form newsletter that I've been publishing for about four years.

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I started it because, well, there was a few reasons. One is

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I really saw a disconnect between the church's persistent failure to attract men, on the one hand, and yet all these secular men's gurus attracting hordes of young men.

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Give me a few names, secular guys. Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, all the way down to, originally,

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I was pretty struck with these guys in the manosphere, say a guy like Mike Cernovich, for example. Originally, Milo Yiannopoulos was a guy, if you know who he was, that's a blast in the past.

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I mean, hundreds of thousands of people were following Milo, especially a lot of college kids.

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You know, there would be all these different like political rallies during the 2016 election. And you still can on Gab.

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Yeah, I didn't know that. And he, you know,

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I just go up to people on the street, you know, do young people and just look like I had Trump gear on or whatever. And I say, do you guys, do you guys know any of the following people?

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And I start off naming names. Always they knew who Milo was, always. So it was one of these things were like, that guy had a huge following.

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And I'm like, why are guys like that, you know, have so many men following them? And you could even, you'd even put a guy like Ben Shapiro in that category.

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He's more of a political figure. And yet there don't seem to be really, there hadn't seemed to be really an equivalent to that in the church.

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The church wasn't reaching men and the attempts at reaching men for people like, say, Mark Driscoll tended to blow up badly.

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So that was one reason I really felt like, you know, the church was not being competitive in reaching these people.

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And in part, you know, as I studied it, I realized, I said, you know, I feel like a lot of what's being taught in this conservative, reformed evangelical world, just inaccurate.

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And so I wanted to set the record straight. There's also the fact that, you know, people talk about like deaths of despair and opioid deaths among kind of working class and declining life expectancy.

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And I did a lot of work in my urban policy, you know, kind of realm with Rust Belt cities in the

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Midwest and a lot of these post -industrial communities. And a lot of their problems are not necessarily economic problems.

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They're more spiritual problems or personal problems. And that's where you're from, right? Yeah, I'm from rural Southern Indiana. And so I do believe there's economic policies.

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We need to change those public policies. But I really kind of wanted to say, we need to actually, you know, reach people, you know, first and foremost with the hope of the gospel here.

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And so I wanted to get upstream of that. So there was a lot of things, there was a lot of things going into it. So I started this newsletter and it just, you know, went from there.

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I started with 35 people and it just grew to now there's thousands of people on it.

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So it's been quite a ride. Well, you're a brilliant guy. I mean, I've read, people have sent me your newsletter and I've read it and I've listened to some of your podcast work and stuff.

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And it's, well, I'll let you describe kind of what level would you say educationally? Would you say what you talk about is kind of on a college level, high school level mixture?

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What do you think? Yeah, it's definitely targeted at college, you know, college level people.

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I do have sort of like, you know, rank and file guys that I'm trying to reach. But a lot of the people that I'm reaching and trying to reach are like pastors or they're theologians or they're, you know, teaching in seminary or they're other kind of thought leaders.

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You know, that's really the target market. Because I feel like, especially with like the working class people, the issue,

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I think, is not that we have some deficiency of democracy in our country, such that, you know, populism is really the answer.

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I think our problem is our elite are off base. We need reform in the elite. We need restructuring of the elite.

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And so I'm trying to reach, you know, in essence, the intellectual class of the

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Christian world and talk about things like, hey, you know, you're wrong in the way that you're talking about concepts like servant leader, for example, and to also give them frameworks to understand the world that we live in, you know, in this 21st century, you know,

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America is radically different than even 1990s America. And I feel like part of the problem with a lot of these churches and pastors is they're sort of grappling to try to figure out how do we how do we live as Christians as the 21st century.

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Right. And, you know, so I do a lot of frameworks and analysis around that as well, which, you know, I really draw on my consulting background for that, because that's what you do when you're a consultant.

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So, well, what do you make of this kind of gap that the intellectuals, I should say the elites have kind of left us where, you know, just going back 50 years, even you can see a remarkable difference when when you had even, you know,

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Billy Graham was on talk shows because he was considered part of the establishment, part of the elite, even though his role was much more to work in class.

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He set an example. And so did even just businessmen. There was sort of a the way they dressed everything they did.

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They had to set kind of a standard. What happened to all that? Yeah, it's a little challenging to figure everything out, but I would say people were talking about the fact that the elite of America were coming essentially detached from the mass population base for quite some time.

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Back in the early 90s, Robert Reich, who was, you know, he's a left -wing economist, was secretary of labor in the

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Clinton administration. He wrote a big op -ed in the New York Times called the Secession of the

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Successful, basically talking about how the elite class have essentially seceded from society, retreated into their own, you know, private universe in which things are good for them, but they really have a lot less concern about the country.

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You know, Christopher Lash wrote a book called The Revolt of the Elites. So this has been talked about for a while.

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But in essence, if we think back to industrial America, back when, you know,

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I can't remember the guy's name, Wagner was famously said, you know, I always thought what was good for America was good for General Motors.

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And what was good for General Motors was good for America. We don't have that anymore. You know, it used to be a company like General Motors, you know, in order to sell a lot of cars, we need to have a prosperous economy.

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And it took a lot of blue collar workers with good wages to make them. And so the executives wanted bigger bonuses.

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It means they want lots of people who can buy cars. They employ a lot of people. Today, there's a big disconnect.

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I mean, a lot of these tech companies don't employ all that many people, certainly not at high wages.

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You essentially have, you know, a lot of very poorly paid, say, warehouse workers at Amazon, you know, a few very highly paid software engineers and business people, and then maybe even, you know, a massive amount of offshore labor now that's being done.

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So, the link between the fortunes of the elite and the fortunes of America as a whole, you know, has really become detached and disconnected.

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It's a very, very, very complicated, very complicated subject, but it's now very possible for, say, the top 10 to 20%, you know, of the people, you know, at the top of the socioeconomic ladder to live incredible lives while the median

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American is seeing their life expectancy decline, real incomes decline, their communities fall apart, etc.

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And that's not a healthy place for our country. I'm going to just give you an opinion, and I want you to just tell me if I'm right or wrong on this or what you think about it.

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It seems to me that people like Jordan Peterson and others have filled this gap, and they've done so in a way that's almost, whether they realize it or not, semi -religious.

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And I think back to a book I had read by Richard Weaver years ago, Ideas of Consequences, which I know is formative for a lot of conservatives.

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And, you know, he talks about the philosopher kings, the gentlemen, and then the specialist. And I almost sense that there's been a failure of the specialists, that the specialists, they're an empty suit.

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They're so narrow, they don't really have any way of connecting to the people they're supposed to be helping.

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And Jordan Peterson walks in, and he's going back to the philosopher king, kind of, or the theologian, as someone who wants to kind of figure out what makes reality tick.

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And for men, especially, who don't have role models or don't have ways of thinking about themselves as men, because we don't have specialists in that category, they just latch on to him.

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So tell me, is that a fair analysis? What do you think about that idea? If you look at our society, sort of the ideologies or belief systems of mainstream society are very hostile towards men and masculinity.

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You could think about, for example, toxic masculinity. I mean, there's any number of articles you could read in the mainstream publication, always viewing masculinity as some sort of a fault, basically.

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And a lot of young men are growing up essentially fatherless. Out of wedlock, birth rate today is at 40%.

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Divorce rate still remains very high. So a lot of people did not have their father as a strong presence in their life.

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A lot of the baby boomer parents were somewhat detached from their kids, certainly in the older generation.

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It's less true, I think, in the younger generation of boomers. And so there's kind of a deficit of people, men connecting into the lives of younger men and talking to them in a way that affirms who they are as men.

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And Jordan Peterson, I think one of the biggest things that's different between, say, a Jordan Peterson and a

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Mark Driscoll or a Matt Chandler. I mean, Driscoll and Chandler just brutally beat down men in their congregations.

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And they kind of forgot that the drill instructor isn't just there to tear you down. He's there to build you back up.

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That's right. And so a guy like Jordan Peterson, when you hear him, he does deliver some tough messages maybe to some of these guys about taking accountability and responsibility for themselves.

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But you also get the sense that he's on your team, that he cares about you, that he wants to help build you up.

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He's not just there to build himself up at your expense.

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And so I think this idea, I think one of the reasons somebody's talking to somebody yesterday, he's like, I noticed so many of these millennial women hate

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Jordan Peterson. I can't figure it out. He's so anodyne. Well, one thing that Jordan Peterson does that I cannot think of a single

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Christian pastor who does is Jordan Peterson treats men, young men, as if they are ends in and of themselves.

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They are not here just for the benefit of society. They are not here just for the benefit of their wives and kids.

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But he treats them like they're important, who they are themselves, not as instruments to something else.

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And that's powerful. That's very powerful. That's something the church does not do. Even the supposedly pro -men people who say things like, well, if you reach the man, you'll reach the family.

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You'll hear that a lot. Well, what is that really saying? It's like, I'm not here to reach you.

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I'm here to reach your family. And you're just the vector that I'm using in order to do that. And I'm not saying that's what they're thinking consciously, but there's a lot of that embedded in it.

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And all of the talk about servant leader is really essentially about that.

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And I'm thinking about this a lot. Nowhere do you see in evangelical teaching the idea that a man has any legitimate right to assert his self -interest or preferences in any situation.

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It's pretty astonishing to think about. And Peterson, guys like that don't do that.

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They don't talk to men that way. Talk to me, if you would, about two things. You mentioned servant leadership. Something else you didn't mention, though.

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I'd love to hear your thought on the modern patriarchy movement, if you want. I don't know how to label this, but there's sort of an undercurrent of men who want to be men.

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But they often do so in these. I'm just going to stereotype it. I'm not saying this is my assessment.

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I'm saying this is the assessment a lot of people have of this. These kind of like really long beard, hyper homeschool, family integrated, goat herding cults.

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That's the perception some people have of that. And they have 10 kids, and their wife is just without modern assistance trying to make meals for them all day.

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Talk to me about those two things, if you would. On the left wing, this sort of more servant leadership idea, if we want to call it left, but this establishment.

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And then this kind of undercurrent rebellion that's kind of homeschoolish and all that.

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Yeah, so servant leader is a term that you even hear it used in secular society. And I don't think the term itself is objectionable.

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But what you see of servant leadership in sort of conservative, this conservative evangelical world, is it comes out of this complementarian gender theology.

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So essentially, you know, the traditional view that sort of, you know, the husband was the head of the home came under a lot of attack during second wave feminism.

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And, you know, most of the Christian church ended up, you know, rejecting the previous approach in favor of essentially gender equalism, or some kind of egalitarianism, as you might say it.

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And in the 80s, a number of these more conservative people, John Piper and Wayne Grudem were kind of the two main figures in that, decided to push back on that and say, no, you know, the husband is the head.

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And so we have to affirm that. But in essence, they agreed with a lot of the feminist critiques of the traditional approach.

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And what they did was, ultimately speaking, they sort of nominally affirmed headship in the home, but they redefined it to mean something other than what had traditionally understood.

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So it's sort of like, you know, new wine and old wine skins, if you will. So in essence, what it means to be the head of the home is to be a servant, right?

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Your role as the head is not to be a leader, but to really be a servant. And so you display your leadership by being a servant.

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And, you know, this is, you know, often attached to, you know, various scriptures where, you know, you know,

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Christ said, yeah, you know, I did not come to be served, but serve, or they'll use the foot washing episode. But you'll notice one of the things that they never do is they never define, well, who decides what form the service takes, or who decides whether the person's doing a good job serving.

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You know, Peter famously didn't want his feet washed by Jesus. The disciples did not get to choose how

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Jesus served them, right? So there's a lot of ways that they kind of take little bits and pieces of scriptures and package them and things like that.

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And so in essence, they've essentially taken this headship idea and turned it on its head.

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You know, essentially, they've defined it as basically pleasing your wife, serving your wife, all of these things.

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You'll often see this, sometimes they literally do this. Are you going to serve yourself? Or are you going to serve your family, going to serve your wife and kids?

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You say, well, obviously you can't serve yourself, that's selfishness. We know as Christians, we're supposed to care about others and all this stuff.

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But it's sort of like, it's sort of like George W. Bush's, are you with us? Are you with the terrorist? Like, as if those are the only two options in the whole world.

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False dichotomy. Yeah, the idea is, you know, well, maybe you could be using all your talents and energies in the service of mission.

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And I, you know, I like to use the example of Tim Keller, right? When he was sitting in Philadelphia and his wife was not sold on going to New York to start

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Redeemer, he made a decision, like, we're going in. And they talk about that story in their marriage book.

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And he was leading on mission. And actually, I think it's a great example because they actually were on mission together.

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It wasn't just him doing something while she was, you know, making pancakes. They actually went in there together on mission.

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And so it was an outward focused thing. So there's a lot of things like that. The other thing to get wrong about servant leadership is they essentially say that women are attracted to servant leaders.

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You know, women, Christian women, they want a man who's on fire for God, right? They want this guy on fire for God, who's, you know, kind, conscientious, emotionally affirming, all of these things.

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Who plays a good acoustic guitar, yeah. All that sort of stuff. And, you know, the truth is they sort of conflate two different sets of criterias.

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Criteria one is, you know, what makes someone a, you know, a good marriage match? Right. And that's where being godly comes in.

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If someone's not a Christian, if they're not godly, if they're not kind, if they're not kind, there are all these things, you probably don't want to marry them.

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But the second thing is, what makes someone attractive? And there's some overlap between those, but a lot of ways, what makes someone attractive is not what makes them a good marriage candidate.

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And I think most guys, if you just look at yourself, say, you know, are there women that you think are very attractive, but you're like,

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I'm not interested in dating or marrying that person? Yes. Conversely, are there people who, you know, you think, wow, that's like a really high quality woman.

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She's great, but I'm just not attracted to her. So, there's two different sets of things, and we need to cultivate both.

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You know, guys like Matt Chandler says, you know, godliness is sexy to godly people. Jordan Peterson says, girls are attracted to boys who win status competitions with other boys.

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And so, who's more accurate? I'd say Jordan Peterson is much more accurate, right? That's why people want to be with the captain of the football team, or the rock musician, or people who've achieved a lot of status, like, you know, what's attractive in it?

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Status, power, confidence, charisma. Many of these things generate attraction.

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That's sort of left out of the church's teaching. And that's what a lot of, again, the Petersons and a lot of the secular men's guys will tell you.

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They kind of give you a more accurate view of attraction. So, I think there's like a lot of things that are kind of mistakes buried in this servant leader notion.

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So, we're going to circle back to take a phrase from our new, what's she called?

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Press secretary. We're going to circle back to the Tim Keller thing, because I got some questions on that. But I wanted to just say real quick, for some people who are listening,

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I think you recognize, I certainly do, that Jordan Peterson has a faulty foundation for some of these things.

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So, he's coming to the right conclusion sometimes through the wrong avenues. I think he uses kind of a Darwinian approach to why women are attracted to men and stuff.

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And we would probably say, I'm assuming you would say that the reason is because God created men to have dominion and to accomplish goals.

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And that's what, that's the reason it's built into us that women see that and are attracted to it.

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Yeah, I do find it interesting. If you look at all of these men's gurus, virtually all of them are either atheists or have some sort of new age spirituality.

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I would put Jordan Peterson's Jungianism in the new age category. And they all heavily rely on evolutionary psychology as their basis.

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And to me, evolutionary psychology is like a story we tell ourselves to make sense of the world.

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We see something and then we sort of tell a story of, we must have evolved this way. That must be why it is.

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But it's not like they've got some collection of genes that, well, we know this gene controls this behavior and we can see how this gene has mutated over time.

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Yeah, it's very deductive. It's very, it's very, it's very, it's sort of like, you know, it's like, why did, you know, why did

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Tim Keller, we'll talk about Tim Keller. Why did Tim Keller succeed in New York? Why go back? Well, he succeeded because of X, Y, and Z.

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Well, if he'd failed, I could probably say, well, he failed because he did X, Y, and Z. Right, right. You know, it's like, it's the same story.

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You know, I think it's, you know, if you want to use evo psych stories to, you know, kind of help you as a tool,

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I'm not totally opposed to that, but I do think, you know, looking at what God tells us about creation is probably a better way, maybe.

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Yeah, yeah. I would probably take a little stronger stance there. I'd say I wouldn't want to use any of that stuff, but I still recognize that the thing that attracts people to Jordan Peterson, it's not, it's not the psychology as much as it is the, he's, he's providing, he's trying to approach an answer that they are not getting anywhere else.

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They, they know that they're wired a certain way because that's reality and no one's offering any kind of explanation or guidance for them.

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Why don't you talk to me now, though, about, for our listeners about that second category, because this undercurrent overreaction, some would say to feminization within the church.

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What about the guys who say, I'm a patriarch and I, you know, I run my house this way and they put their foot down?

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Yeah, I think it's indisputable that the Bible is a patriarchal book. So I think we just, we have to acknowledge that.

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Where I, I think we run into challenges is, you know, the Bible was written in a pre -industrial society.

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And so I've written a lot about the changes that occurred from pre -industrial society into industrial and post -industrial society.

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So in a pre -industrial society, the household was actually the, the center of economic production.

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You know, most people were like farmers or, or, you know, you know, shepherds or things like that.

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Virtually everyone worked in food production. It was a rural society. And the household basically was the place where all economic production occurred.

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It's the place where healthcare occurred. It's the place where old age, old people were taken care of. It was where, you know, the social safety net was.

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It's where sort of defense and policing even was. You can think about when lots kidnapped

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Abraham. He doesn't call the cops. He gets his guys and goes and gets them. I mean, that was basically it.

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And when we switched to an industrial society, you know, in the pre -industrial society, women had a very economically productive role in the home.

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You know, they were, you know, preserving the foods, making the clothes, doing a lot of the medical care.

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They were doing economically productive work. When we switched to the industrial society, you know, the husband ceases to do any economic role in the home.

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And he goes off to work in a factory, an office. And the wife kind of becomes a homemaker. And so you end up, you know, with these 1950s kind of scenarios that produce kind of Betty Friedan style malaise among some women, because in essence, they didn't have anything to do.

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Which is second wave, second wave feminism. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, when we had a homestead economy in like the 1820s, you know, men and women were basically both working hard all day, every day, just to put food on the table, just to survive.

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Now we essentially have economic surplus. And, you know, women had essentially lost much of their functional role in the home.

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And for people who had talents that they wanted to put to use, that produced a lot of, you know, a lot of kind of anxiety and negativity.

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So I think when we try to take this old kind of concept of a patriarchal society and apply it in the modern industrial and post -industrial society, it does sometimes end up, as you say, like guys and beards kind of LARPing, right, a little bit.

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Because our society, again, as I always say, Rome was an actual patriarchy. And it was sort of a legal cultural patriarchy.

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Today, we live in a legally and culturally egalitarian society. That's just reality. And so how we live out what the

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Bible says in the modern world is important. One of the things that you've noticed a lot of people talking about is how to restore, you know,

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C .R. Wiley talks a lot about this. How do we restore some semblance of real functionality and substance to the household?

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Because the household today is basically a, you know, somebody called it's a consumption cooperative, right?

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You know, you're home with your wife and your kids. So basically you're consuming stuff together. You have this sort of emotional bond together and you raise kids together.

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But other than raising kids, there's no real function to the household. So, you know, it used to be that if you weren't part of some household structure, you were, you know, really in bad shape, which is why the

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Bible talks so much about widows and orphans and people who are marooned outside of that. Well, today, you know, that's one reason the divorce rate is so high is because you don't really need to be married in order to, you know, make ends meet and live in today's society.

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You know, the household doesn't do much. You know, we buy things on the marketplace or the government provides things for us that used to be produced at home.

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So I think we need to think in a more sophisticated way about society and how we live in that way.

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And so I think just saying going back to being, you know, going back to, say, patriarchy. I don't think that anyone has really cracked the code on that.

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You know, I think there's, you know, there is something admirable if someone says, you know, the

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Bible says this. And so I'm going to embrace what I believe the Bible is telling me. I actually have a lot of respect for fundamentalism because it's like, hey,

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God said it. I believe it. That settles it. That sort of simple faith that says this is what the Bible says. I have to believe it.

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I have to live it, I think is very powerful. But it's also the case that, you know, a lot of times in our society, you know, it doesn't necessarily provide a lot of guidance in how to live in our society.

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So I think, I think how to live out the Bible's kind of commands in today's world is really a big challenge because our world is so different from, say, the world of Proverbs 31.

26:58

Yeah, yeah. I think that's a very good point. That's a very good point. Yeah. If you think about, you know, again, if you think about Proverbs 31, you have the woman at home overseeing this large home -based economic enterprise.

27:12

Her husband is out at the gates of the city. So he's one of the elders of the city. He's administering the public realm, you know, so he is out there as the public facing representative of the home, like involved in governance, right?

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It's not like he's just, he's just out there hanging out with his buddies. They're actually running the town. And so there's, you know, there's a lot of things like that that were structured in, you know, a pre -industrial economy that looked totally different in a post -industrial economy.

27:41

Sure. You know. This is a great place to insert this question because I put out on a few different social media platforms the offer that if anyone had questions they could write in.

27:51

Here's one from one of the patrons. Aaron, are you part of a church body that is living out masculinity according to God's definition where men are leading their wives and families well and the older men are pouring into the younger men?

28:04

If so, how has that body of believers worked together to create this environment and enjoy the fruits of that labor?

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And so anyway, he's asking kind of from the same perspective of not maybe seeing a clear example of this.

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Can we get practical for a moment? Tell me kind of what this looks like. Maybe in regards to we're not in this pre -industrial society, but what does it look like to follow these commands that were given in that society today?

28:33

Yeah, I think that's a really great question. You know, the churches that I've attended have tended to be, you know, that professional class, upper middle class type people.

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And what I would say, just as we've seen from scholars like Robert Putnam or Charles Murray have written about how basically that top 20 % of people going to get a socioeconomic attainment, you know, they're doing pretty well socially.

28:57

So they tend to get married and stay married. Right. So I would say, you know, kind of the churches

29:02

I've attended have had, you know, mostly stable families, you know, mostly people you would say by the standards of the world, quote unquote, have their life together.

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I would not say there's been this great community of men thinking about, you know, how to really live out life in this world in this way.

29:21

I do think that the people I think, again, the person I think is kind of on the leading edge of this is C .R.

29:27

Wiley, wrote a great book called Man of the House, and another one called The Household and the

29:32

War for the Cosmos that I think do give some practical tips about this.

29:38

So I think there's, you know, more focus today on entrepreneurship, more focus on a lot of other things. I think some of what, you know,

29:45

Doug Wilson and his guys have done in Moscow in terms of the environment that they've built there, you know, you can put aside his teachings, you know, if you don't like his teachings, some people don't like him.

29:55

But like what they've built in Moscow, I think is trying to build something like that as well.

30:01

That's good stuff. What about for yourself personally? Like maybe just give everyone without, you know, getting too intrusive here, maybe a day in the life of Aaron Ren with his family.

30:12

What does that look like in light of what you're advocating on your podcast? Yeah. So, I mean, essentially

30:19

I'm self -employed, you know, so the masculinist is now essentially my job. So I'm working on that.

30:26

So, you know, a couple of things I did, I mean, if you roll back to when I started the masculinist,

30:32

I was single and, you know, I was older, I was single, I'd previously been married and gotten divorced.

30:39

And that divorce with no children, that divorce was really, you know, a very difficult time for me and sort of catalyzed me becoming a

30:46

Christian. Actually, I wish I could have this, my conversion story is in essence a very standard one.

30:54

And that, you know, you run into some troubles in life and all of a sudden you're like, oh, maybe I don't think about God because I can't handle this. Which, you know, is a good thing,

31:02

I guess. But I sort of rebuilt, you know, rebuilt how I thought about being a man.

31:09

And, you know, I said, first off, I want to get married. So, you know, I did get married. I said, I want to have kids. I want to live life differently.

31:15

So, got married, had kids. We moved back here to Indiana from New York.

31:23

One reason was, I said, I want to be embedded in a place where I have organic community. Organic in a sense that is natural community.

31:30

So, my wife and I are both from Indiana originally. So, we have an organic community, connection to this community.

31:36

Our family's there. You know, she has a lot, she had lived most of her adult life in Indianapolis, had a lot of friends there.

31:42

So, we wanted to embed ourselves in a community of people, you know, in a kind of an extended family network, in a network of connections where we have a real organic connection.

31:55

Attachment to place. Right. And so, the idea of starting a masculinist, right, before we got married,

32:03

I said to my wife, now wife, I said, I just want to let you know, there's a few things you got to be comfortable with if we're going to get married.

32:09

One of them is, I'm going to go do this men's thing. I hadn't started it yet. I want to do something on men's issues.

32:16

And I'll tell you now, the ride might get bumpy. So, if you're not on board with that, if you're not on board with that, then, you know, that's the mission.

32:25

I'm taking on a mission. So, one of the things that I did personally is I went into marriage, you know, with a kind of a mission focused frame.

32:34

I said, I want to be outward. This is something that's very important. There's a mission in the world that I feel called to do.

32:41

I would love for you to be part of that mission with me. But if we don't have, if you don't have alignment on the mission, what's your vision for your household, then you got problems.

32:50

So, there was that. And then, I have worked to become, again, call it self -employed. This is a household -based enterprise that's there.

32:58

Another thing that we did in New York, you know, there's a lot of people in New York who are single.

33:05

And, you know, they're living that kind of New York single lifestyle. And when we were married and we had a kid, you know, we wanted to invite people into our home so they could see how we live and just say, you know, here's us eating home -cooked meals instead of ordering every meal out on Seamless, you know.

33:25

So, that kind of like having our home be a place of hospitality and a place, a lot of people do that. A lot of people do that,

33:31

I think, you know. So, I'm not going to say there's anything unique to that. But wanting to basically be something of a, you know, call it counter -cultural example and how we're living our lives there.

33:46

Obviously, you know, we were very involved in our church community, trying to embed ourselves in networks of people.

33:52

You know, again, I tried to build up in New York a band of brothers. I think a lot of guys don't really have a lot of friends other than like the husbands of their wives' friends.

34:06

And so, I've gone out and said, you know, I want to have, you know, men that I'm engaged with in life, my own relationships with these people as we're building each other up and kind of propelling each other forward, you know, in our faith and our missions and things like that.

34:20

But I would say I don't claim to have, you know, I don't claim to be perfect by any means in what's, you know, what

34:28

I do. But I have made some intentional choices to try to be more, you know, more aligned with what

34:39

I call healthy patterns of living, you know. And that's important. And man, you can't,

34:44

I mean, you do have to be intentional about your life. I do think that's very important. But, you know, you also have to have, you know, certain things have to happen organically, right?

34:53

So, I can say I want to be married. But, you know, if I hadn't met my wife, it wasn't someone that like, wow,

34:59

I really want to be married to this person. Maybe I wouldn't be married today, you know, I can't just say,

35:04

I'm gonna go marry this person over here. So, there has to be like a real organic connect. You can't just treat it as sort of a bloodless, you know, business plan or something like that.

35:13

There does have to be like organic connection. But you also have to be intentional about your life and about relationships and things like that.

35:21

You know, a few years ago when I was living in the place where I had grown up,

35:27

I had a number of guys I was friends with. And in fact, just the other day, someone was asking me about, you know, how many weddings were you in,

35:35

John? And I couldn't remember how many weddings I was a groomsman in because I just had so many friends that were guys.

35:41

But one of the things, you know, we'd often do and it's kind of dawned on me that I didn't plan it this way. But it wasn't like there was some men's ministry, like an official program in a church that just, you know, bound us together because, you know, we sat listening to someone lecture on scripture.

35:57

It was more, it was organic, as you said, and in doing a lot of things guys like to do.

36:03

So, you know, I would sometimes go to people's houses if they were working on their car and kind of like hang out with them there or go on a hike.

36:11

You know, I loved hiking or outdoor sports. So, you know, who wants to come? And that's kind of how those relationships formed.

36:18

And there was ministry opportunities in that that I didn't even, I wasn't trying to bring about ministry opportunities, but it was normal course of everyday life.

36:25

Men doing what men are designed to do, want to do, like doing.

36:32

And I just, you know, I kind of thought, wow, this is almost like revolutionary, even though it shouldn't be.

36:39

This is just normal. Why aren't, you know, pastors and church leaders, more of them at least, kind of tapping into this?

36:46

Because I think Jordan Peterson kind of taps into that intellectual desire men have to sit around and, you know, we think of Spurgeon with his cigar talking about these big ideas.

36:56

Well, there's men who like to do that. And it sounds like that's kind of what you're tapping into as well in some respect.

37:03

Why is it that Christians in general or churches, church leaders, they don't have this kind of embedded in them.

37:13

They almost want to do something extra for the men that doesn't even fit the men to try to attract them when we know that that's usually a disaster.

37:21

What is it about that? Why this deficit? Yeah, that's a good question.

37:27

I will say our society used to have a lot of spaces where men naturally formed relationships with other men.

37:37

So, for example, it used to be common that men served in the military. That's that used to be standard. Almost everybody went to the service at some point.

37:44

Not true anymore. You know, far few people in the military. There used to be a lot of essentially all men's clubs, you know, which could be some kind of fraternal society.

37:55

It could be major kind of downtown city clubs. There were a lot of all -male organizations. Ninety -nine percent of those have gone, you know, coed, if you will.

38:05

You know, they've essentially, you know, they've been relentlessly attacked. So, you can think about a golf club like Augusta National.

38:13

I think the New York Times literally ran hundreds of articles attacking

38:19

Augusta National for being an all -male club. And so, you essentially almost not allowed to have an all -male organization today.

38:26

There's still plenty of all -female organizations, right? They created this all -female kind of club called

38:31

The Wing. You may think it was called The Wing or something like that. And so, there are a lot of organizations and things catering to women, but if it's a male space.

38:38

So, essentially, all the places where, you know, men might have naturally come together, like at the Masonic Lodge.

38:44

And you're probably not a Freemasonry guy. I'm going to guess you're not into Freemasonry. Or the Elk Lodge. Or the Elk Lodge or any of these places.

38:51

You know, and even the military now. The Proud Boys. Everything's integrated, right? And so, you know,

38:57

I do think, you know, you mentioned the Proud Boys. I think one of the attractions of organizations like that is people want to be in some type of fraternal organization with other men.

39:06

And they just don't exist. In the way that they used to. Intergenerational, too, to some extent.

39:12

Yeah. And so, there were, you know, there were a lot of things there. And some of that, you know, you know, some of it's, you know, men's own fault.

39:18

You know, Robert Putnam wrote the book Bowling Alone about the decline of bowling leagues. You know, people still bowl, but, you know, league bowling went down.

39:25

So, a lot of the civic, kind of the civic organizations went into decline. But there used to be a lot more all -male spaces and all -male organizations that men were part of that they created sort of, you know, fraternity.

39:38

As you know, there's a difference between, you know, say a locker room or, you know, a boardroom that's all men and one that has women.

39:46

The social dynamics are going to be different. Oh, totally different. Totally different. Yeah. Yeah. So, it becomes, you know, so that's been one where I think there's been a decline in men connecting with each other.

39:58

And so, that is one thing where I think people try to set these things up. I mean, I'll say church men's programs are one of the things about them.

40:06

They may be positive, but it is one of the few places where you're sort of like allowed, if you will, to have like a men's ministry.

40:13

Right. In a way that you couldn't necessarily have a, you know, a men's, you know, secular organization.

40:19

And there are some good ones. I'm not knocking all of those at all. I'm just, my experience being in many different churches has mostly been when they try to do that, it ends up being not distinctively, not that you have to try artificially, but it doesn't,

40:35

I don't know, it ends up being a place where men kind of sit and are lectured or, you know, we're going to tell you how to, all the things you need to do to memorize, to be a man or to learn.

40:47

And there's not like a free forum there for organically kind of, you know what I'm saying. Yeah. You know,

40:53

I do. And yeah, this sort of idea of how the church can reach men, serve men, it's a long standing, you know, the church is skewed female, you know, basically since the beginning of the country.

41:03

You know, you know, at the end of the day, you trace it back that far. Yeah. You know, it go by, I think even in like Massachusetts, Puritan, Massachusetts, you know, far more women than men were attending church.

41:15

You know, I do, I do think some of the patterns that I talked about, about, you know, because the man, bad women, good pattern goes back to about 1800, but in England, later than that in the

41:26

United States. But there was always this kind of, kind of gender skew and worries about how industrial, this idea about industrial society, you know, there's nothing new about that.

41:35

So the muscular Christianity movement, I think was a, you know, an example of, you know, institutions like the

41:41

YMCA. And even the Boy Scouts were probably part of that, that were like, we have to create these organizations to, you know.

41:48

Supplement. Yeah. Supplement, create manly men, you know, men are kind of becoming feminized in this industrial world.

41:55

Boy Scouts. Yeah. So I think, you know, and they've had some success, they've come and gone.

42:00

And so I think, I think there has been that. And that's what it's like, this idea that like, oh, I have all the answers. I do not have all the answers.

42:07

Like, and people all along the way have, have been sort of struggling with like how to reach men.

42:14

So I, I'm not trying to have all the answers, but I'm trying to be, I'm on the, I'm on,

42:19

I'm on a, at least on a search for truth. I think some of the things like, I can at least know what's Socratic wisdom. I know what's not true.

42:25

You know, I've learned a lot of what I don't know. Right. You know, it's like, I know that I don't know, but I know that that stuff over there ain't true.

42:32

So it's perfectly fine. You're having the conversation. You're starting the discussion. That's what matters, I think, in all this.

42:37

And that's what Jordan Peterson does. I mean, and we've mentioned his name several times. I know there's others, but I want to ask you about kind of the, the, the gap in the church.

42:47

Why, why we're still talking about Tim Keller, John Piper, John MacArthur, you know,

42:54

Mark Dever, the list goes on. All these guys are boomers. Um, where I think John MacArthur is even older than a boomer.

43:01

Yeah, he would be, wouldn't he? He might, he might be. He's like, yeah, I think he is. I think you're right. He is older. So, so these guys, it's aging.

43:08

We have an aging church, aging leadership in, um, Christianity or evangelicalism, broadly speaking.

43:15

Uh, I don't see the young guys coming on. In fact, what I see with young guys, if there are rising stars, if you want to call them that, um, it's guys like, you know, it's like guys like Jim Artispe, who's not even, he's not a pastor.

43:28

He's not a guy who's going to be, um, exegeting scripture really. He's more of just, uh, he's more of a social justice guy who's brought in and platformed by these other guys because they want to kind of get their congregation on board or point to him to show,

43:43

Hey, we're, we're not racist. We're on board with this guy. So he doesn't exude the same kind of leadership. I don't know where there are young guys who are exuding that kind of leadership in, in the church, broadly speaking.

43:55

Why is that? Well, there, there are certainly a lot of young, you know, hip mega church pastors who've done very well.

44:01

I think what you see is a lot of them are, you know, they're kind of more showman, you know, and it's like Mark Driscoll kind of fell into that, that a little bit.

44:08

It's like they're pastoring a church. They're very charismatic people. Um, they've got big followings, but they're not, you know, nobody's looking to them for intellectual.

44:18

Right. They're not intellectually. That's what I mean. You know, they're not, they're not building institutions organized other than their church. So, you know, they've essentially, you know, and maybe even

44:25

Jordan Peterson falls in. He's a boomer. I think he falls into that, right? He's this charismatic guy.

44:30

He's attracted a large personal following. He does have a more intellectual side to him. Um, but I think, you know, these other guys have been looked at really as, uh, thought leaders, you know, in essence, thought leaders and not just thought leaders, but like, these are the people, who do we look forward to see what the church should be doing?

44:48

Where should it be going? It's, it's that group of people you were talking about. And I think it goes back a lot of it's generational.

44:55

You know, the baby boomers were this huge generation that came into fairly senior positions relatively early in life in the eighties and nineties, and basically are still running the country, you know, you can, you know, today.

45:11

And so Biden, you know, you know, you know, but, you know, and I, yeah, I mean, I sort of draw the, um,

45:20

I kind of divide the baby boomers into two groups, early cohort and late cohort. And culturally,

45:25

I said, the baby boomers, culturally early cohort, baby boomers night for 1942 to 1960, 1954.

45:32

And then the late cohort is 55 to 64. And it's that early cohort of people who are really dominant.

45:39

And, um, you know, so there are a lot of people, I think Biden, was he born in 42? You know, Newt Gingrich was born in 42.

45:46

A lot of the people born during the war sort of are sort of baby boomer like culturally, but yeah,

45:52

Bill Clinton was the first baby boomer president. He was like the third youngest guy ever elected president 1992.

45:59

And he, you know, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump were all born the same year, 1946.

46:05

Hillary was born in 1947. I think John Piper was born in 1946. Wayne Green was born in 1948.

46:13

I mean, a lot of these guys are, um, you know, they're all in a disproportionate share of them are in that early cohort boomer group.

46:22

No, there's a disparity. Or they're even older than that, like, like MacArthur. And for whatever reason, you know, they've just, they're just, they don't want to go away.

46:33

They don't want to retire. You know, there's no concept of retirement, real retirement for these people. I've noticed that.

46:38

Yeah. You know, a few years ago it was pointed out. There are more people over the age of 80 in the Senate than at any time in our history.

46:46

And just think about how many people are dying in office at very advanced ages. You know,

46:51

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John McCain, Robert Byrd, Teddy Kennedy.

46:59

Like, is it really necessary to die in office? You know, this Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, uh, was, you know, he was defeated in like his attempt to be reelected for his sixth term.

47:11

He would have been well into his eighties, you know, at the end of that, it's like they're holding on. I mean, uh,

47:16

Dianne Feinstein is going to be like 92 at the end of her term or something crazy like that. And so I think part of it is that, um, these people got, got power at a relatively early age and they've never brought up a younger generation under them in a lot of ways.

47:36

And I think that is different. So one of the things, the silent generation people and, uh, the kind of called the greatest generation, the silent generation, they did create, many of them did create, um, a, you know, did create, uh, kind of a next generation.

47:51

So Richard Lugar, I mentioned him, you know, he was elected mayor of Indianapolis in his thirties and a bunch of young guys that he brought up, like Mitch Daniels, who then became governor of the state and president of Purdue.

48:03

He brought up Mitch Daniels, a bunch of other guys. He sort of built up a bunch of young guys under him. These guys don't necessarily have a lot of great proteges and people that they've built up and handed off, you know, real power to.

48:17

And, um, and so I do think it's interesting. I do think there's something culturally about the baby boom generation. They were such a large generation and so much of Christianity and evangelicalism was tuned to their cultural sensibilities.

48:30

And I think that's one of the problems is, you know, as we've got like, you know, new generations now, a lot of things don't necessarily resonate with them.

48:38

So, so it is interesting. You know, uh, I think Piper and Grudem were like 40 -ish when they invented complementarianism and sort of became the, the theological leaders of this gender thing that they were going.

48:53

And there were older people. If you look at like who was, who was involved in that, they, you know, if you look at the original

48:58

Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, they had some older people. Right. Bill Bright was involved. I mean, they were sort of there, but they sort of were like, they had like a background.

49:06

They had like this, uh, they called it a board of reference. So it's like, here's like the elder statesmen who endorse what we're doing, but they weren't leading.

49:14

And so, uh, you know, there was some space, um, there was some space in there for these guys to, to become something.

49:22

And then, but they'd just been, you know, there's still the guys are looking to us. Like people are still, you know, looking at what those guys have to, not that that's bad, but when there's no, when there's no next generation, that's not, that's not good.

49:35

Yeah. Not good either. So I, I think it, I think it's really interesting, uh, to, to see, I think that's, that's our society in a nutshell.

49:42

Yeah. And nature reports a vacuum. Someone will fill it. I wanted to, um, to do a lightning round with you kind of let's, let's do some questions from people, uh, maybe take a minute, you know, tops to answer some of these, and then let's do some word association just for fun.

49:56

So here's, here's a question. Uh, one minute advice on pursuing a woman. I'm sure you could go longer than a minute, but what?

50:05

Well, I, I said this one, you actually have to pursue a one. You can't just wait for, you know, lightning to strike.

50:11

Um, you have to be intentionality. If I have intentionality about it, I think number one, that means you gotta like ask women out on a date physically in the real world, you know, hiding behind one of the things

50:21

I did said no online dating period. I'm not going to do it. I'm not telling you not to do it. I'm not going to just say, but like, there's no substitute,

50:29

I think, for having the confidence to walk up to a woman and ask her out on a date.

50:34

And of course she, she might say, no, she might go nuclear on you. But being a man is yet I have courage to put yourself out there.

50:42

And it's good for you. And if you're good, if you're, if you are the high quality Christian man, then if she turns you down, it's her loss.

50:50

Good point. All right. Here's another one. Any, uh, oh man, this is such a broad,

50:56

I don't even know how to ask this question. Um, okay. Any practical ideas for, um, exercising virtues?

51:04

I'm, this must be something you've been talking about on your podcast or something, but that's such a broad question. Um, I don't know,

51:11

I would say read the Bible. What's the answer? Well, I would use virtue maybe in the, the classical sense of excellences.

51:18

Uh, and, and so there's, you know, I think we need to be gaining new skills. You know, I try to, you know,

51:23

I, I borrowed this from someone else, but this idea is try to learn one new skill a year. And I don't always do that because some skills take you longer, longer than you plan to learn them.

51:35

Um, you know, but I said, um, you know, I started the masculinist like issue two, I talked about skills and I said, you know what,

51:41

I'm going to try to learn French. And four years ago I said, I'm going to start learning French. I took classes in New York. And since I come back,

51:47

I've continued self -studying and I, I subscribed to some French publications. I'm not yet fluent enough in French.

51:52

I really need to go. It will be great. Wouldn't it be amazing if I could live in France for, you know, a year and learn French. But, you know, something like that takes longer than, you know, a year to learn a foreign language.

52:01

But what are those skills that you're constantly learning and constantly doing to grow?

52:06

And how do you become more competent in something? I really like developing competencies is important. Um, it's, uh, here's another guy he's, uh, you've been doing an excellent series on conservatism and this person wants to know your thoughts on how the evangelical church should move forward in the arena of politics.

52:24

Can you do that one in a minute bite? Yeah, I think the most important thing to understand is evangelicalism, um, got attached to political conservatism, you know, in the late seventies, in the early eighties.

52:37

And essentially there, there has been a sort of a baptized political conservatism, uh, that has become kind of almost like a theological norm within the evangelical church.

52:48

And evangelicals have gotten nothing in return, basically for being the most loyal voting block of the

52:54

Republican party. And so the question is, you know, are you going to continue supporting people who basically aren't going to give you anything?

53:01

And so I, I think there needs to be a, a rethink, uh, of, of the relationship between evangelicals and the

53:10

Republican party. And some of these things like, especially this reflexive free market is, I mean, private companies can do whatever they want.

53:17

No, they can't. I mean, no, there's a lot of things they can't do. So this like idea of like,

53:22

Oh, social media can kick off whomever they want because it's a freedom. That sort of stuff is just, it's first off, what does that have to do with theology?

53:29

Nothing. You might believe that, but let's not conflate it with theology. So I think we need to move beyond like a lot of these old

53:35

Reagan, tired Reagan era talking points that weren't, you know, were imported from other people.

53:40

Yeah. Anyway, what the answer is, I don't know, but I think we need to be rethinking, you know, rethinking that. Okay. Um, here, here's the

53:48

Tim Keller question. What do you think of Tim Keller's social justice teaching? That's the specific question, uh, because it's, this person says you seem to be very positive towards Keller with the exception of his views on men and women.

54:00

So what do you think of Keller's social justice teaching? You know, I'm not a deep student, um, of, of his social justice stuff.

54:08

I think he's, he's unlike a lot of the very woke people, he's been talking about this for a while, you know, so I, you know,

54:15

I'll give him credit for not just jumping on the bandwagon. I have found some of his teachings to be a little bit scripture light, um, and, and use that there's kind of a shifting hermeneutical principle when it comes to gender.

54:28

You know, the Kellers have taken this stance of what I call absolute biblical minimalism, right?

54:34

Anything that the Bible does not specifically and explicitly no wiggle room prohibit women from doing is allowed.

54:40

So it's just like, you know, a woman could do anything an ordained man can do. It's like, you know, did the Bible, does the Bible really say a woman can't do

54:46

X, Y, or Z that, you know, all those things. But when it comes to some of these justice issues, the

54:52

Bible is interpreted in a very, very expansive manner. So like when Daniel's praying over the sins of his people, that creates a very elaborate theology of, you know, corporate guilt and repentance.

55:03

So I do think there's like some inconsistent hermeneutics, uh, there, uh, you know, uh, you know, so I'm not, you know, that, that one,

55:11

I think I did find a little interesting to juxtapose between how narrowly they read gender and how broadly they read social justice.

55:17

But I haven't, I haven't studied it in great detail. That's just the one thing that really jumped out to my mind.

55:23

Fair enough. Let's do some word association. So give me, give me a word, uh, you know, two words, I guess it's fine, but I'm going to give you some, some words, uh, to, for you to describe.

55:31

So the first one is nationalist. What do you think of? Nationalist.

55:38

That's a good question. This is like, I'm not, I'm drawing a blank, like, you know, nationalism, it's a boogeyman.

55:46

It's a boogeyman. Okay. All right. I like that. How about servant leadership? Bogus. Wage gap.

55:56

Doesn't exist once you properly adjust for all the factors. Okay. What about toxic masculinity?

56:04

Undoubtedly. There are men who do a lot of very bad things, but I think it's, it's, it's an oversold concept, but let's not.

56:12

I know associations are getting much longer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, it's hard to, they're getting a lot, they're getting a longer, you know, you know, let's say mixed, mixed, mixed reviews.

56:22

Make sure. Okay, good. Jordan Peterson. You know, basic. Basic. That's a good one.

56:29

Okay. Socialism. You know, a boogeyman. So socialism and nationalism are both boogeyman then?

56:38

Yeah. I mean, like, you know, what it was people even mean by socialism. I mean, socialism was state ownership of the means of production in European context, you know,

56:47

Francois Mitterrand, who nationalized all the companies in, in France.

56:53

So state owned enterprises and things like that. You know, I just don't think these terms are helpful today.

56:58

What about a specific term? Great reset. Same stuff, different day, different name.

57:07

Okay. Situation comedy. In no opinion.

57:19

Okay. All right. You've talked a little bit about, I think, men being like, kind of given the rub and some of the situation comedies.

57:25

Yeah, yeah. All right. What about? I don't watch TV. So that's really like, that's about. Oh, well, here, let's see if you listen to stuff here.

57:33

This is going to be, you're going to have a dividing line right here. And half the people will either like you or not like you, depending on how you answer this.

57:39

Country music. I like it. Indiana. Indiana is coming out.

57:45

You know, I listened to mostly opera today, just to be quite honest with you. But, you know, when I was young, I used to listen to a lot of, a lot of countries.

57:51

So I'd say the eighties country is really more of my style. Modern country. I don't, I don't listen to a lot of it, you know, but, you know, today, but, you know,

57:59

I'm not, I'm not negative on that. The alt country genre, which was big in the nineties.

58:05

You know, I was really into that. I loved it. Favorite book of the Bible. Hebrews. Hebrews.

58:18

Okay. That's not the most masculine book. If I were going to choose a book. I would write second. Timothy is the most kind of, you know, kind of a treatise on manhood.

58:26

Actually. I, I, in fact, I even wrote my own commentary on second Timothy, but I do,

58:32

I, but I do like Hebrews. I do like Hebrews. All right. All right. Well, that, those are all the words

58:37

I had for you. And I probably could have come up with more. That was, that was good. I think if people want to find you, then go to the masculinist .com

58:46

and I'm there right now, actually looking at it. You got articles, your podcast newsletter. Anything else you want to tell everyone?

58:54

No, it's great. Check out, get on the newsletter. That's what I say. If there's one thing you want to do, just sign up for the newsletter. It's once a month.

59:00

And you know, I think you'll enjoy it. All right, cool. Well, it's, Hey, it's been a pleasure.

59:06

I really appreciate you talking about these things is you're a very, in my opinion, you're very sharp and you do great long form conversation.

59:15

So I hope, you know, those who are listening, go check out Aaron's stuff. And, I know some people listen to have bigger platforms and stuff.

59:24

If they want to send you an invite to speak or to go on a podcast or something, I'm assuming they can get ahold of you through your website.

59:31

Yeah. I'm very easy to find Aaron at aaronrent .com. All right. And on Twitter, I believe as well with at Aaron underscore rent.

59:41

Yeah, I barely tweet these days. Not really the main platform, but you can look at me there. All right.