Restoring Real Masculinity in the Church with Chase Davis

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast.

I'm your host, John Harris.

We have a special guest today who's been on the podcast I believe once before. That is Pastor Chase Davis. He is pastor at the Well Church in Boulder, Colorado. If you ever get near Boulder, what a beautiful place Boulder is.

What a crazy liberal town though. But Chase is obviously one of the lights in that area, trying to spread the good news of the gospel and also just biblical thinking in general. He just came out with a book called The Fence of Christianity.

I'm holding it in my hand. Restoring the Strength of Men in a Feminized Age. You can also check out his website, which is, well he's got a few, but offensivechristianitybook .com if you wanna check out the book or go to commonplace .study where you can look up all kinds of cool stuff on our forebears, what Puritan and reform thinkers thought about various topics and issues.

So with that, Chase, thanks for coming on the podcast and talking to us a little bit about your book.

Happy to be here, John.

Glad to come back.

And appreciate your endorsement on the book.

It means a lot to me.

I really respect the work you do, so I'm really glad to be here today.

I didn't make the back cover, so I was very offended. But if you look at the beginning though, there's my name there somewhere.

There it is.

There, right there. It's right there.

Between Doug Wilson and Eric Hahn. So yeah, you got a lot of people together to endorse this. How long did that take you, just out of curiosity? Because I was like, wow, there's a lot of names on this.

Theological Anthropology and the Study of Man

Yeah, I mean, I just made friends with a lot of people over the last five years, looking for guys that were showing courage, that were speaking to issues that I thought were important. And so I worked on this book last year, starting last March, finished it in about June, the first draft, and then been editing it ever since.

But when I got that first draft done, I was like, hey, there's a bunch of guys that I think would really resonate with this message from all across the spectrum on kind of the Christian, reformed, conservative, right, whatever you want to call it.

And I think it would be really helpful. And I think a lot of these guys agree that this kind of work is unique. My approach in the book is coming from a position of theological anthropology, for the listener, that's just the study of the nature of men, how mankind was made, who we are.

And that's not really talked about a lot when we talk about the church. There's been a lot of literature written in the last 30 years trying to help men, trying to get them out of their spiritual malaise.

And a lot of it does deal with feminization or the ecclesial matters, how the church has become kind of feminized and soft. A lot of it deals with the disposition of men. A lot of it attacks feminism.

I'm trying to go from the ground up and go, let's go back to the word of God. Let's go back to theological studies. Let's understand who we are biologically as men. And then the implications of that. So we're talking about physiology in the book, biology in the book.

I'm obviously not a doctor or anything like that. I'm a pastor, but I have the Bible and we have nature and we can learn and we can apply God's word to these matters. And yeah, I think that's why it inspired so many guys to rally behind it.

It just hit a number one bestseller in a particular category on Amazon on Friday, which was really exciting, receiving a lot of good feedback. And honestly, it's really funny, John, the people that are most critical of the book thus far, I don't anticipate it staying this way, is not liberals, is not leftist, is not feminist.

It's guys who are kind of neo -pagan right. I don't know if that's the right terminology, but guys who basically say, look, when you talk about beauty, when you talk about strength and men, that's our thing.

And we're godless pagans and we worship this material reality and you can't talk about this. Well, watch me, I wrote a book on it. You can go read it for yourself, OffensiveChristianitybook .com and then give it your evaluation then, but Christians have every right and authority to talk about these matters.

And so I just kind of threw myself into it.

Fatherhood, Tradition, and the Need for Deeper Formation

So Chase, let me ask you a question. This isn't directly related to the book, we'll get into that, but just about your background a little bit, so people know where you're coming from. Obviously you're a pastor, people know that, but for me personally, I had a pretty strong, I have, I shouldn't say had, he's still alive, I have a pretty good dad who was involved with us as a kid and I had a pretty masculine grandfather figure and I look back at that and I think, well, there was a template that was passed down, which is what you were just talking about.

There's a template and obviously it's ensconced in tradition and things that signal, like when you wear certain clothing or you do certain things it signals masculine or feminine. And I just inherited all of this and sometimes I feel like an old man, my wife reinforces it to me all the time, that maybe I am, but I walk around thinking like, okay, my grandpa, my dad, me, we all kind of had a template that we were given and we've just continued in that tradition.

And I realize most guys now, I don't know if most is the right way to look at it, but it feels like that in my neck of the woods don't have that. They don't have something that was handed down. For you personally, did your dad, did your grandfather, did other masculine men in your life just kind of hand you, hey, here's what it's like to be a man, to pursue a relationship with a female, to work hard and respect others, here are the boundaries in these particular areas, or are you one of these guys who's like, man, I didn't know anything about that.

I gotta rework that from the beginning, from the ground up, I gotta think through this so that I can then go tell others.

Yeah, here's how it worked for me. I grew up and I dedicated my book,.

I'm glad you brought it up,.

I dedicated my book to my father because he really taught me a lot about what it means to be a good man, a godly man. Particularly in the book, I talk about the differences between the contemplative life and the active life.

My dad really emphasized the active life. He's very physically present, always involved in sports, working out, he owns his own business, very, very busy, but also very godly in terms of wanting me to learn manners and respect, sent me to cotillion and other social events so I could learn these things.

Very, very high on discipline, I was the oldest child, so I got the brunt of my parents' authority. And so, yeah, I did get a template, but for me, the challenge was always that I was fine in a certain sense with the expectations for men, that's, okay, yes, you're my father,.

This is the expectation.

I didn't want ever to not be that. At the same time, I had questions. So what happens with that heritage that you've been handed down, that I've been handed down, if it's not reinforced with deep thinking, theological education, biblical reasoning on why we do the things we do, then a lot of people, when they do have questions, aren't given a lot of good grounding in scripture or nature about why we should dress up when we go to church, why men should look a certain way, why they should dress a certain way and behave a certain way around women and do all these kind of things.

If it's just kind of cultural, right, then it loses a lot of sticking and holding power over time. And so we do want to pass down traditions, and it's good to just kind of embrace those good traditions that are from the Lord, that are from our fathers.

At the same time, we want to give men something deeper. So I think it's gonna resonate with a lot of guys who either grew up in the church and there were a lot of traditions that they didn't really get education on, they didn't really understand, but also people who have never received this kind of education.

I mean, that issue has been going on for a long time, especially in America with no -fault divorce and broken homes and all this kind of stuff. What does it look like to grow up without a father figure?

This is a huge opportunity to help men understand how they were made, what they were made for. And this book will also be helpful for them to understand really the deep reasoning of the Bible and really the nature that God made men in so that they can pursue their eternal purpose in the Lord.

Who the Book Is For and Why Modern Evangelicalism Failed Men

Excellent. So tell me a little bit about the book that will others who are listening who might want to pick it up and give it to the young man in their life, who could you, or old, I don't know. I mean, do you have a target audience for this that you were thinking, these are the guys that I want to write to?

Yeah, the target audience is Christian men of any age. I was just on a podcast recently with an older boomer Christian, and he benefited greatly, and I've got Zoomers that read it and they love it. And so it's for any Christian man that wants to understand what it looks like to grow in godliness and holiness and live out kind of who God made them to be.

I don't want to get too like authenticity about it, but what we really want to be in line with God's creational design for manhood. And so in the beginning of the book, I offer a lot of diagnostic observations about the situation we're facing in the Christian West.

Why does the church seem weak? Why does the church, why did the church become woke? Why did the church become effeminate? And then I get into kind of the ideological movements that have underpinned that.

It's really popular today for guys to attack feminism as like the chief kind of villain, and it is a villain. There's no doubt about that. I'm very clear about that in the book, but there's other things that are happening in the West besides just feminism.

And the feminism is actually a symptom of deeper issues where our spiritual life has become so disconnected from our material life through things like the enlightenment and romanticism, I even get into Nietzsche in the book.

And then I show how evangelicalism itself became kind of a market commodity approach, the seeker sensitive approach, which devalued material engagement, political engagement, and really suppress the nature of men.

It still does to its day. Many times when you go to these churches that are evangelical, you'll encounter men that essentially view the goal of the Christian life is to become more womanly, and this is not good or right.

But we can see over time how it's not just one series of events, it's not just one figure, it's been a slow erosion, and I kind of trace it back from the enlightenment on of how we've forgotten these pre -modern conceptions.

That's why you mentioned the top of the show, commonplace .study, a site I started to help Christians become more familiar with pre -modern sources and get better resources because a lot of the books that are written today, you've written a book, I just wrote this book, I would obviously stand behind these books, but a lot of the kind of popular books today, think of an author like John Mark Comer or other books that young Christians are reading, they're incredibly, not just simplistic, but I would say even harmful to the church and how they view the spiritual life.

They view it almost, not even like a monk, there's something noble about a monk, it's almost like a Gnostic, ascetic lifestyle where we can't enjoy material reality, we can't advance the mission of God materially, politically, in the home, in the church, and in political life, in social life, and so the last half of the book, what I'm trying to do is provide prescriptions, and a lot of the prescriptions actually get into kind of the biology of men, how men are hardwired, what they were made for, their purpose, and their purpose in life is to pursue glory.

Glory, Agency, and Offensive Christianity

Men were made for glory, and we want men to have that eternal hunger that God talks about in his word in Ecclesiastes, that hunger for eternity, that hunger for glory, that's actually good that God designed us with that, that tell us in mind, and of course, we can only find that in Jesus Christ, and yet, throughout life, as we have our pilgrimage to the heavenly city, as some have spoken of, we are pursuing glory in such a way that we're being satisfied in God with growth, with maturity over time, with finding a wife, with having children, with making a home, with advancing the cause of Christ in any domain we're in, and that's where I get into the offensive part, right?

We're going on offense, we're taking the ball and doing something with it, as Doug Wilson said in his endorsement, we're not just kind of sitting on this, we're not the unfaithful steward who's been given the riches of the gospel, and sitting back with it, we're investing it, we're taking risk, we're seeking to multiply it, and we're not gonna put up with false religion, wokery, all this kind of stuff, and we're gonna stand against it, and of course, I encourage wisdom and prudence in all of this in the book, we shouldn't, the Bible teaches about this, the goal is not to just go around offending people, the goal is glory, and in our pursuit of glory, we need to grow up in wisdom and maturity and exercise our agency, that's a big deal in the book, exercising our agency to advance the cause of Christ.

Amen.

So yeah, let's talk a little bit about kind of where we grew up in the Christian world, that is, the times in which we were sort of coming of age, the Young Restless Reform stuff was going on, and I think, I don't know when you got involved, I knew you were actually 29 at one point, so did you have a favorite pastor or someone that, like Piper, or someone who you thought, well, this is the guy, I wanna be like him?

Young, Restless, Reformed Influences and Seminary

Yeah, when I was in college, I first came across John Piper, that was my first introduction kind of to the Young Restless Reform, I didn't really know about that whole world, I didn't know what was going on, as a young person, a lot of times, you're just kind of thrown into these things, and God kind of directs your paths in some ways, and then you're exposed to different literature, so I was reading everything from John Piper to Shane Claiborne, I mean, I was kind of reading anything on the spectrum that was trying to help me grow spiritually, I grew up in a Southern Baptist Church, a mega church in Dallas, Jack Graham was my pastor there, got saved at that church, got baptized at that church, but I'd always kind of wanted more than just kind of the suburban mega church kind of spirituality, and I don't wanna critique that too heavily, I do critique some of it in the book, I'm very thankful for what the Lord has done in my life, and brought me to the place I am, and how he saved me under Jack Graham's ministry, but I always kind of had these questions that really just didn't get addressed about theological matters, biblical matters, you know, cultural matters, all this kind of stuff, and so I just started exploring all sorts of stuff, was it, you know, when I was coming of age, high school, college, around that time, Rob Bell was really popular, his NUMA videos were kind of going all over the place, and so I was like, you know, is this good spirituality?

And so I was kind of interested in anything that was popular in the evangelical sphere, and I'd found a path, and God kind of led me into it, in his providence, into the young, restless, reformed, found myself gravitating more towards the Matt Chandler style more than the Mark Driscoll style, always kind of found, at the time, Driscoll a bit off -putting, coming from the South, coming from kind of a more conservative Bible Belt Christianity, but found myself in that, and started reading a lot of the literature, and I also went to seminary, went to Denver Seminary, got a couple of degrees from Denver Seminary, because not only did I wanna be equipped to be a good pastor, I wanted to have a lot of questions that I had answered.

I know a lot of people call seminaries cemeteries, where a lot of people go to shipwreck their faith, and that is true in some cases, but for me, it was a great opportunity to kind of have a pressure test of like, hey, this is what the Bible teaches, this is why we believe the Bible to be the word of God, this is what we believe about Christianity, and even though Denver Seminary is very woke nowadays, it's very Arminian, egalitarian, and I did not like it at first, God taught me kind of how to be a fighter in that environment, that I'm not gonna go those directions, and I'm really thankful for one of my professors, Doug Grotice, who's written a lot in the apologetics realm, he kind of got me back on track in terms of biblical foundations, he introduced me to Francis Schaeffer, and Nancy Piercy, and these great thinkers, a lot of whom have, whether they like it or not, inspired my work, my book, Offensive Christianity, and so that was kind of the path I took, and looking back on the Young Russell's Reformed, I think a lot of my questions involved around maturity, formation, how people grow in Christ's likeness, discipleship, and so when I look back on that, you know, I don't have a lot of regret about it, it's not like I look back and I'm embarrassed or ashamed that I was ever part of that movement, I know it was just part of how people grow in their understanding of the faith and grow in maturity, but there's a lot of critiques, of course, I would have for the Young Russell's Reformed, and I've aired those publicly on my podcast, Full Proof Theology, and some faults that I see in that movement, but I'm very thankful for what the Lord has done and continues to do in my life.

Masculinity, Masculine Heroes, and the Limits of Proxy Identity

Yeah, and I don't wanna turn it into a full -on critique of the Young Russell's Reformed stuff, I just noticed growing up, similar to what you're describing, having a good dad, a good grandfather, I had some masculine figures that I looked to, I never felt like I had to source my masculinity or understand it through these online preachers that I didn't even know, but I was kind of excited about, for me it was more like Paul Washer, to some extent John Piper, John MacArthur had always been kind of a steady in my house, so I always had a favorable view of him, but guys who would say offensive things, like predestination's an offensive thing, but it's a true thing in the scripture, and they would communicate it in ways that I found not to be jerks, but to also be accurate, and they didn't care if people didn't like it, and I thought, well, that's really good.

And I've realized after the fact, though, friends of mine, people I know who were even more so involved in the movement, in that world, who got into Platt and Chandler and Driscoll and whoever, like I think a lot of them who had broken backgrounds, they tried to source their masculinity also in this, like I'm gonna find out how to be a man from this guy online who's talking about it, Driscoll's being the chief example from that period of like saying just offensive things, but he wasn't just breaking taboos that the world thought were taboos, like he was actually breaking Christian taboos at times, saying things from the pulpit that you just didn't say from the pulpit in mixed audiences that were inappropriate sexually and so forth, and profanity and colorful language, and this sort of became, for some guys, like that was appealing, that was what a pastor should look like.

And I just think back to those times a little bit, and I think about your book, and I'm like, you know, there were several examples that were given of what it looked like to be a Christian man, and there were guys that I knew who were Christians who gravitated, like even you just said, I wasn't more about Driscoll, I liked Chandler better, but there was a lot of that going on, and post -Young, Restless, and Reform, because we really are after that movement, and I think we're in the ashes and the fractures of all of that, I think there's a lot of guys who wanna kinda keep going on a masculine journey, they still want to find those heroes they can look to, and since that movement has somewhat failed, which isn't really the purpose of this podcast, but they're looking now towards, I don't know, again, you used the word pagan, right, maybe that's a good word, but they're looking towards Nietzsche and stuff, they're looking towards sort of like, they're making a horizontal move towards like Bronze Age perverts universe, and all the spinoffs that have come from his initial critique of feminization in the West, and I've seen this stuff, man, now in Christian circles, like even if it's not overtly referenced, I see the shadow of Bronze Age pervert, and what he says a man ought to be as the kickback, and so given all that, I'm curious to hear what you have to say about kind of the responses to feminism, but responses that really aren't masculine, that are more immature, that are still juvenile, that just miss the mark, and how the template that you provide here addresses even those.

Christ Over Nietzsche and the Call to Courageous, Discerned Masculinity

Yeah, I think I would say two things. One, there's always gonna be a propensity in any man or woman to seek out older, wiser people. God designed us this way, we're always gonna be looking. With mass media, it's very common, but this isn't unique to our age.

I think it is unique in some ways. Back in pre -modern times, you would have famous figures. You would have Spurgeon or George Whitefield or other famous pastors that had a lot of influence, but there wasn't a lot of obsession with authenticity, identity, becoming your true self.

It wasn't the Disneyfication of these figures. It was these people were obviously powerful, good rhetoricians, could teach well, were anointed in many ways, and nowadays what you're talking about is kind of this formation through proxy where we look at these figures outside of us, and I remember growing up in a home, we watched John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.

I thought Clint Eastwood was like the man's man. My dad loved Clint Eastwood, and so we would watch all of his spaghetti westerns, and I still love those to this day, but there's always that propensity in a young person to look to older people, and that's who they're going to aspire to be like, and those are often just handed to them.

You don't choose. I didn't choose that my dad would like Clint Eastwood and he would pass that down to me, but that's kind of how it works, and so I don't think there's necessarily a fault in any person looking for heroes, but there needs to be caution, obviously.

We should be discerning, and that's obviously with your critiques that are very fair on Driscoll. That's always kind of what put me off about Driscoll. It did seem a bit at least uncouth what he was saying, but I think what it was speaking to and what it still speaks to, what you're identifying, is there's still a dominant stream in evangelicalism, what some have called Big Eva, which are incredibly, to a fault, not just cautious, but almost feminized in how they speak, how they engage things.

This is the dominant force that many Christians just, that's their option in town. That's the option if they want to find a wife. That's the option if they want to go to a church that is sustainable, that has kind of a long -term track record.

It's still very much guarded by kind of a boomer evangelical class, and so, yeah, the answer isn't to go pagan or Nietzsche or all this kind of stuff, and I think Nietzsche actually had some really insightful critiques that actually resonate with a lot of people today.

That's why people find him compelling. The answer is to go back to Christ, go back to his word, and understand who men are, how God designed them biologically, and what God made them for, and so with the observations you're presenting, which are, again, accurate, I think, largely, about what some men are doing, kind of rehashing kind of the same ethos, this rebellious, kind of angsty, kind of this youth pastor energy, where they're trying to mimic somebody else or pretend to be somebody else.

I always cringed at this. When we were in Acts 29, we'd encounter pastors who would mimic either Chandler or Driscoll, or everybody's trying to, young men mimic. This is how people work. We have the same tone, typically, as our father, the accent of our father.

We are looking for people to imitate. That's part of how we grow in life, and a lot of times, we can't even control that, but it was always cringy when I would meet a guy who was not Mark Driscoll, who would try to imitate Mark Driscoll.

I was like, dude, you do not have what he has. Whatever he has, you're not him, so please stop. Instead, what we need to do is go back to God's word and live out who you were made to be, learning that you're gonna make mistakes over time.

You can take risks. It's not wrong to offend. You need to have wisdom in your offense and when that needs to be deployed and when you need to hold back. Proverbs speaks a great deal about this, but there's still, in evangelicalism, in the broader landscape, an unwillingness, many times, to confront obvious issues, culturally, politically, socially.

I think about my home state, Texas, where I grew up, and the church seems largely silent in the face of, one, mass immigration, two, false religion. Two things which I know, and I have my disagreements with Stephen Wolf.

We've talked about them. I don't think our differences are actually that great. I don't think it's the church's place to necessarily lead politically, but the church does have a responsibility to educate.

Pastors have a responsibility to educate and raise Christian men in the things of God and speak to God's word on reality and what they're experiencing in daily life and then educate them on how to engage political matters with Christlikeness.

And what I see is a lot of evangelical churches that are either too scared, they don't want to upset people, and they're kind of obsessed with attracting the lost, and by the lost, I mean oftentimes wolves.

They don't want to offend the wolves, which is really distressing to me as a pastor on kind of the front lines in Boulder, and I'm like, hey guys, I am seeing what your future will look like if you do not stand firm in the faith now, if you don't make some changes in your ministry now, if you don't kind of embrace an offensive Christianity now, I can tell you what's coming, and it's not good for society.

It's not good for your neighbor. It doesn't glorify God. It's much harder for you, and you do not want this. So that's kind of the posture I'm riding for on these things.

We're getting at the fact that men are protectors, right, that they're given strength for reasons. One of those is to ensure that their families and their broader society are staved off, that threats are staved off, and that's something that I think has been challenged by a male passivity that exists where, I mean, I see guys who will invest a lot, obviously in the realm I'm in, you invest a lot of time in the online world, which I think obviously we're doing that now.

There is a place for this. You can get unbalanced, though, where a Twitter ratio means a lot to you, but you've done nothing politically to stave off the actual threat in your community, and it might make you feel good, assuage some kind of insecurity you have, but it really is meaningless when it comes to 100 years from now.

And one of the things I think you talk about is long -term thinking. I want what I do now, the actions I take, I want them to matter for my grandkids and my great -grandkids. I want them to resonate in the Lord's will, in His providence, but as much as possible so that when they look back, they can still have a future.

They can have some of the things that I grew up with that I find so valuable. And I don't see that thinking. I see short -term thinking, even with guys who are claiming to be masculine and so forth. I don't know, to me, that's one of the chief things about being a man, is you see yourself as part of something bigger, and you're one of the guardians of society in that way.

Our founding fathers were that way, certainly. They're trying to set up a system that will be stable for their posterity. And long -term thinking, I mean, investing your money, your wealth, not just spending it on pleasurable things in the here and now.

Having multiple children if you can. Trying to, making sure your wife's happy, but not happy in the sense of like, oh, she can just, independent from me, go and buy all the jewelry she wants, but happy because she's got a husband that tries to understand and love her, and is not harsh with her, but actually guides her and leads her.

You talk about all this stuff in the book, and that's what I think men need to hear right now. And it's very different than messaging they're getting in many of the popular places online, including Christian places.

It's just not, I don't know if you see this, Chase, maybe the question I have is, what would you say to a young man in this position? But I do see a lot of blackpilling about the conditions being so bad.

So like, hey, no girl is worth it. They're all, well, I don't know, if I wanna say the words that I hear, but like, they're all spoiled goods, essentially, or they won't talk to me, or whatever. It's never work.

I want a wife, but under a certain parameters, and those parameters aren't presenting themselves. I'd like a house. It seems really difficult now. I can't find the job to pay for what I want. Some of these things are very legitimate complaints, and some of them do root back into feminism.

At the same time, men don't whine. Men accept the providence that they're in, what God has, through circumstances, allowed them to undertake. And there's been challenging times in the past for men, too, in other ways, you know, wars, had even just where you're at in Boulder.

I mean, man, how hard was it to get to Boulder 200 years ago? I mean, you just had to have men who are willing to navigate some of these challenging circumstances. So talk to the young man who's like, man, I'm starting to listen to some of these super red pill podcasts.

They make some good points about feminism, and at the same time, though, they're causing me to just get complacent, angry, and not productive.

Protective Instinct, Bitterness, and Agency

Yeah, so with A Protective Instinct, particularly, I'm glad you mentioned that, because I do get into the book, and Piper is one of the figures I critique in the book. He has suggested an approach to agency and power and masculinity that's almost unrecognizable to our forebears.

We would not have America if Christian men had followed him 250 years ago. And so men do need to reclaim their protective instinct. That's challenging in a day where the state of nature has been so anesthetized, we're so detached from the need to defend our homes from either savages or bears or things like this.

The best a man can do is be kind of the designated bee killer in his home if a bee gets inside the house, or a spider, you know?

You don't have bears in Colorado.

Yeah, one of our elders shot one in his home because it invaded his home.

So you'll get that sometimes. No way, inside the home?

Yeah, yeah, it's great. You can go look it up. The video kind of went viral a few months ago.

Oh, man.

And so my point is that men often don't get a chance to express their protective instinct, so they've got to manufacture it. But having that long -range view, having the protective instinct not just be like immediate threat, but also thinking about cultural threats, right, and how you guard your home, guard the church, and guard your society, I get into all that in the book.

But I'm glad you brought up the young men particularly because I have a real heart for them. And I'll tell you some of my story. I grew up, when I was growing up, I was kind of that typical dissatisfied millennial suburban kid, okay?

So I got into kind of this bitter spirit about what I didn't have or what I thought I needed and all this kind of stuff. And God really had to work in me a great mercy for me to get over that and put that to death because I was bitter against my dad for really no legitimate reasons other than that I perceived him to be too mean to me sometimes.

And really what I discovered, once you learn to forgive and kill bitterness, your life becomes much better, much more productive, much more content. That doesn't mean you become passive. It means you actually are living in line with the Ten Commandments.

You're living in line with God's creation to honor your father. And so at the end of the book, and I talk about this because the Nietzsche critique is really powerful, the concept of resentment, resentment, if you want to be fancy, is that there's this idea in society where the people who don't have power and agency and authority become like bitter and then accuse the powerful of being sinful for simply having goods.

So they're sinful because they're rich. They're sinful because they can have what they want. They're sinful for these, you saw this, I saw this in the kind of the Wall Street protest back in 2008 where this is 1%, these 1 are evil, blah, blah, blah.

But young men today are incredibly hard pressed. I speak plainly about this in the book. These are very hard times, not only have they been, there's been widespread kind of a perverse incentive structure in the workplace and in hiring, not just by prioritizing, deprioritizing men in America, particularly with certain rules and regulations, but also market factors where wages really haven't kept up with the cost of inflation, whether it's home or anything else like that.

And so there's really tough challenges that men face today that are unique compared to probably their parents. And that can be totally acknowledged. When we acknowledge these things, when we look around and we say, things are really hard, things are really bad, we can say, yeah, they are really hard and really bad.

The question is, what are we gonna do about it? Are we just gonna complain about it? Are we just gonna lament how hard they are? Are we gonna be sympathetic at least? Yes, we can be sympathetic, but are we gonna give into bitterness?

Are we gonna give into resentment? No, these are not things that men do. These are not things that the mature man should do. The mature man looks around and says, what can I do about this? Can I get involved politically?

Maybe there are some things I can do about it. Can I write? Can I start a podcast? Can I do anything to contribute to building up other guys, to building up my family, my church, my society? Where can I use whatever talents God has given me so that they can be leveraged to make things better for my life and for the coming generation?

Because at the end of the day, bitterness is very much like rust on a boat. It's gonna corrode everything it touches, bitterness in your marriage, bitterness against your kids, against your father, against the world.

These things are not what God made you for. We wanna reject that. And yet I do have a great deal of sympathy. I'm in a college town. I see these young men who are entering a marketplace that's very tough.

And especially with the rise of AI, there's a lot of fear about that. What's gonna happen? What's employment gonna look like? All this kind of stuff. So what I'm trying to encourage men to do is reject that because I don't think it's in line with God's design for them.

I don't think resentment is ever something that should be celebrated without dismissing their concerns. And that's what I think a lot of older Christians have a hard time doing is whether they don't wanna take responsibility in any kind for the world that they've passed down, or they wanna look at the young man who's taking risks or maybe saying things and they go, I can't believe he's this way.