The Toxic War On Masculinity W/Nancy Pearcey

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Welcome, Zach. What's up, guys? Good to be here. You are very excited about the show today. Oh, very excited. I'm very honored to have our special guest on.

And so we're going to bring her in in just a moment here. But in terms of why this show on Apologia Radio, obviously we have a lot to overcome in our world and in our culture all around us.

And one of the primary points of attack is against the family, and it's against male and female roles, gender.

We are trying to blur the lines completely. Families don't matter. That unit doesn't matter. Maleness doesn't matter.

Femaleness doesn't matter. It's all malleable. And there's a portrait painted of men acting like men today as though that were some sort of a bad thing.

And in particular, evangelical men. Christian men. Christian men. They are the oppressors, the subjugators.

They are the ones causing so much of these issues in our culture, and things would be a lot better if we could just eliminate their role altogether.

Right. And, you know, the common thing you see now in media, it's just being fed is you're emasculating the man.

It's the man. What was the reason? He's the dunce. He's the butt of every joke.

The father is the one that's depicted as less than or, you know, as someone that's made fun of or shown contempt towards by the family, by the children, by the wife and all that.

And, of course, that is detailed in this work that we're going to be having our special guest on to review today quite effectively.

I'll let you introduce. Yes. So I'm very, very excited about our special guest. So we have joining us via Zoom, Professor Nancy Pearcy.

Nancy Pearcy is the author of The Toxic War on Masculinity, How Christianity Reconciles the

Sexes. That is her new book available now on Amazon, as well as Love Thy Body.

If you haven't gotten Love Thy Body, you need to invest in that. It is phenomenal. The Soul of Science, Saving Leonardo, Finding Truth, and Total Truth.

She is professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University. She has been quoted in The New Yorker and Newsweek, highlighted as one of the top five women apologists by Christianity Today and hailed in The Economist as America's preeminent evangelical

Protestant female intellectual. Ladies and gentlemen, Professor Nancy Pearcy, thank you so much for joining us,

Nancy. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Yes, we're grateful. And I say,

I just finished, actually, your new work. My wife and I finished listening to it on a road trip home yesterday on Audible.

Congratulations on another fantastic contribution for the Christian church. I know that your written work in particular, whether it be

Total Truth or Love Thy Body, has just been so helpful and so instructional. I think one of the things that you are most formidable at is applying the

Christian worldview to the issues of culture that we are facing today. I know you did that in Love Thy Body, whether it was homosexuality, the transgender issue, abortion.

I think that our young people in particular, the youth of this generation, the

Christian youth, are in desperate need of the kind of instruction that says, these are the categories of scripture, creation, fall, and redemption.

And that needs to be the lens through which we see everything else. And so thank you for your work, and thank you for coming on the show today.

I wanted to ask you, just to get started, this book, The Toxic War on Masculinity, right here,

How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes. How has this new book been received in comparison to the others that you've written thus far?

It's been the most controversial. This has been surprising to me. I didn't think it would be.

I did think that Love Thy Body would be the most controversial, because as you say, it deals with issues like abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, which is really the cutting edge issue today.

People say your book is more relevant now than when it was written. But to my surprise, this has been even more controversial.

So I taught the manuscript in my class and to various reading groups. And when they told their family and friends about it, invariably, the first question was, whose side is she on?

You know, with that tone, whose side is she on? You know, the assumption being you either have to be a male bashing feminist or an angry reactionary.

And so and even my students, I told my students I was writing a book on masculinity.

And one of my male students shot back, what masculinity? It's been beaten out of us. So to my great, yeah,

I thought that's so sad, isn't it? That that sense of being demoralized and beaten down has entered the

Christian church as well. I mean, it's in this public arena, as you guys both mentioned.

I caught I caught an article in The Washington Post that was titled, Why can't we hate men?

And I thought, really, that's it's become publicly acceptable to express that kind of hostility.

We're having to boast. Editors said she used the hashtag kill all men.

You can get books now that say the titles are things like I hate men, no good men.

And are men necessary? You can buy T -shirts that say so many men, so little ammunition.

So even and even men are jumping on the bandwagon. There's a male author who got quoted. It went viral because he said talking about healthy masculinity is like talking about healthy cancer.

So no wonder a survey a few years ago found that almost half, 46 percent of American men said.

Today, society seems to be punishing men just for acting like men. And so I really wanted to get to the bottom of this.

This is one reason I wrote the book. Where is this coming from? Why has the secular world decided that talks that masculinity is so toxic?

You can't address a social trend effectively if you don't know where it came from, how it developed.

And, you know, how did the secular view develop? How did we lose a Christian view of masculinity so that the prevailing script today is the secular script?

Precisely one of the questions that I wanted to ask you about in doing this, and I think that the way that you write this book, just like your other ones, you do such a wonderful job of weaving together story, anecdotes, history, theology, sociological research.

You even include some of your own personal testimony at the beginning, which I won't divulge. I want the readers to go get the book and read, but you write not from a detached perspective.

You're writing from your own personal experience, too, with actual toxic masculinity.

And so you mentioned that masculinity is under assault in our culture, like this is what's happening.

This is kind of the air that we breathe and how we, you know, the area in which we live now and Christian masculinity in particular.

Right. The idea of the evangelical man, he's considered dangerous and harmful. You know, you even have a section at the end where you deal with domestic violence and abuse in the church and how

Christian leaders should think through these things. So how does this narrative line up with the empirical data on the subject?

Are evangelical men responsible for the oppression and subjugation of women that we are led to believe?

That's the cultural line, you know, and even people throughout statistics, even such as, you know, this many

Christian marriages end in divorce, no different than the world. Right. So how do these narratives line up with the research that you found and that you included in your book?

Yes, this is really the reason I decided to write the book is because the sociological data shows that committed

Christian men who live what they really believe, who are authentic, who attend church regularly, test out very well.

There are two groups of Christian men, those who are really living it out, test out as the most loving husbands and the most engaged fathers.

So, by the way, one of the pushbacks I get immediately from both

Christians and non -Christians is, oh, sure, you know, the women are not going to admit what's really happening if their husband's sitting right there.

So I have to clarify, no, the wives were interviewed separately. And so what they're really finding is that the wives report the highest level of happiness with their husband's expression of love and affection.

Evangelical fathers are the most engaged with their children, both in terms of shared activities like sports and church youth group, and in terms of discipline, like setting limits on screen time or enforcing bedtime.

Evangelical couples are actually the least likely to divorce. And the real stunner is they have the lowest level of domestic violence of any group in America.

Even Christians don't know this. And let me give you a quote. Sometimes the quote really sums it up.

One of my favorite sociologists who's done the most work on this, too, is he's known as perhaps the top marriage researcher in the nation.

His name is Brad Wilcox. He's at the University of Virginia. And he wrote an article in the New York Times.

That gives you an idea of his status. He gets published in the New York Times. And here's what he said.

It turns out that the happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives.

And, of course, they're focusing especially on the wives because supposedly these marriages are oppressive, tyrannical, patriarchal.

You know, so they focus especially on the wives. The happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives.

Fully 73 % of wives who hold conservative gender values and attend religious services regularly with their husbands have high -quality marriages.

And so when I talk about this, even in a Christian context, you know, people kind of sit back and their jaws fall open because this is all hidden away in the academic literature.

I had to read a lot of academic sociological journals to pull this out.

And it was one of the main reasons I wrote the book is I thought, we need to get this out where we can encourage

Christian men, the ones who say things like, what masculinity? It's been beaten out of us. We need to encourage them that they actually are doing a good job.

And this is, like you said, empirical research. This is solid, quantifiable studies done by psychologists and sociologists.

Fantastic. That's so helpful, I think. And it is encouraging for Christian men who are living it out to hear these things.

So, I mean, the contention of the book is that masculinity isn't inherently sinful as our culture would lead us to believe.

And you actually paint a wonderful portrait of this in your description of Puritan men.

So not to romanticize that era, but these were men that were not only faithful to their own families, but they were communal fathers.

So they used their strength. They channeled the usage of their strength and their resources into their homes.

The home was seen as the center of economic productivity, education, moral instruction.

But then there was an element of outward facing focus, too, in which fathers were communal fathers, right?

They serve the community. They serve what you describe in the book as the common good. But there were some cultural factors that led men out of the home.

And I wondered if you could just briefly sketch what happened. How did we lose that sense of communal fatherhood and the role that fathers played not only in their own families, but in a healthy society and community?

What was it that led to that changing? Right. So people wonder where the concept came from that masculinity is toxic.

And typically they'll go back to maybe the 1960s with second wave feminism. No, no, no.

It goes much further back. It does go back to the Industrial Revolution, because prior to the

Industrial Revolution, as you as you noted just now, fathers were working side by side with their wives and children all day on the family farm, the family industry, the family business.

And so the ethos, the cultural expectations on manhood at the time were very much caretaking and responsibility.

And you're working with your kids. You have to be patient and loving and kind as you train them in adult skills.

And you're right, they were not only thought to be fathers of their families, but a common phrase back then was fathers of the community, meaning they were supposed to bring that caretaking ethos out into the wider community as well.

And even the concept of authority had a very specific meaning back then. I think most people today have a fairly negative view of authority.

But back then, what it meant was, who has responsibility for the common good?

So I look out for what's good for me, you look out for what's good for you. But who looks out for the common good, whether it's of the marriage, of the family, of the church, civil society, and so on?

That's what authority was for. The person in authority was supposed to be disinterested.

That was the most common phrase at the time. And what that meant was not looking out for your own interest, but looking out for the interest of the whole.

And how did we lose that? The Industrial Revolution took work out of the home.

And of course, men had to follow their work out of the home into factories and offices. And for the first time, you begin to see the literature of the day actually starts to protest that men were losing that caretaking ethos, that sort of family -centered ethos, that men were becoming individualistic.

They're working now not with people they love and have a moral bond with, but they're working as individuals in competition with other men.

And so they begin to become more egocentric and greedy and acquisitive and look out for number one, get ahead.

This is the language of the day, by the way. So that's when you actually see the change.

People began to complain that men were losing the family -centered ethos because they were working apart from the family all day.

And secularization was happening at the same time. So the colonial period, of course, a lot of people were

Christian. So this was also a Christian view of manhood, the loving, caring definition.

Of course, they were also tough guys because they were making their way in a wilderness. But they had to be resilient.

They had to be strong. There were always a wilderness to penetrate, a new field to plow, a new business to start, a new building to build.

So, yeah, they were tough, resilient guys, too. But the cultural expectation was you didn't do it for yourself.

This was not personal advancement. This was for your family. But as the

Industrial Revolution began to build up a public sphere of factories and offices and financial institutions, banks, universities, and, of course, the state, people began to say that the public square should operate by scientific principles, by which they meant value free.

In other words, don't bring your private values into the public arena, which is what we still hear today.

Right? Right. Yes. Because men were the ones getting that secular education, working in that secularized public arena.

They became secular earlier than women did. And so they stopped going to church as often.

They stopped being as committed to a biblical view of masculinity. And once again, you can read it in the literature of the day.

People were protesting that men were beginning to have sort of a sacred secular split.

You know, they would adopt secular values in the public realm, and then they try to sort of have Christian values just at home and in the church, which, of course, doesn't work.

No. It doesn't work to be divided in half that way. So that's really when the cultural narrative began that masculinity is somehow harmful and toxic.

And I love the way in the book how you present the paradigm through which you examine and break all these things down.

There's the good man. And then there's the real man. Right. The real man. In other words, get tough.

You know, be a man. Stop crying. All of that. Kind of the secular script that most men have imbibed culturally through osmosis.

And then you have the ideal biblical man who is the good man. The one who obeys

God. The one who follows principle. And then how that gets skewed with, and I think, Nancy, you do this so well with the constructive criticism of all these dualisms.

And just exactly what you mentioned, this fact value divide and how truth, there was a particular view of truth before the scientific revolution.

And that was Christianity is not a collection of individual truths, but a unified system of truth meant to be applied to all of life.

So Christianity itself is comprehensive. It's unified. It's holistic. It's the lens through which you view everything, the

Bible. And then things shifted with this. And now we have this secular script for truth.

And it had some radical effects for how we view these things. But it also had impact for what happened to men.

So there were culturally ramifications for men. You detail it in the book.

They were now considered lewd, crude, and rude. These self -made men. And that had effects on their women.

And how women viewed their men. And the moral superiority that they now embodied because they were back at home.

And then you have effects on the children when you actually pull fathers out of the home. And there's no more moral guidance outside of just the mother's instruction in the home.

I was wondering if you could briefly touch on those impacts. How did it impact men, their women, and the children ultimately?

Well, that's about five questions. Let me start where you began. You started with that divide between what some people call the good man and the real man.

That came out of a very interesting sociological study. The sociologist is not a

Christian. But he's invited to speak all around the world. And so he came up with this clever experiment where he would ask young men two questions.

He would say, what does it mean to be a good man? If you're at a funeral and in the eulogy they say he was a good man, what does that mean?

And he said young men all around the world had no problem answering that. They said things like honor, duty, integrity, do the right thing, be a provider, be a protector, be generous, be responsible.

And he said young men inherently, innately understood what that meant. And he's talking about all the way from Brazil to Sweden to Australia.

And so then he would follow up with a second question. And he'd say, well, what does it mean if I say to you, man up, be a real man?

And the young men would say, oh, no, that's completely different. They would say that means be tough, be strong, never show weakness, win at all costs, be competitive, get rich, get laid.

I'm using their language there. And obviously, the real man is what most of us consider more toxic traits.

At least when they get separated from a moral vision of the good man, they can easily slide into traits like entitlement, dominance, control and so on.

But what I think this study shows us is that men are made in God's image and they do innately know what it means to be the good man.

Because these studies were done all around the world. And so they have an inherent sense of what it means to be a good man.

And it suggests a better strategy. Instead of calling men toxic, most men don't really respond well being called toxic.

Who would? No one would. So a better strategy is to try to encourage and support and affirm their innate knowledge of what it does mean to be a good man.

And that gives us a much more positive approach to these issues. Absolutely.

And so, you know, these consequences of what happened, you know, with this view of truth and, you know, taking men out of the home.

There were effects, though, like it was it was widespread. And I love you detail in the book how it even affected the kind of, you know, novels that were published, the art that was published because of how men were viewed during this time.

And how even the moral reform movements of the time were impacted. So much changed during that time.

I was wondering if you could talk just a little bit about the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the family.

Yeah, well, you mentioned the children, so that might be a good place to start. And you mentioned earlier, too, how the dad is always portrayed, you know, mockingly.

He's ridiculed. He's the dimwit dad. He's the butt of the joke. Where did that come from?

Where did we get this denigration of fathers? And by the way, it has a very negative consequence because, of course, fathers are not going to be as motivated to become what men are not as motivated to become fathers.

And this goes back to the Industrial Revolution as well. When fathers were no longer in the home day by day as a moral guide, as a role model for their children, they began to be out of touch with the family dynamics.

Naturally, they're not there day by day anymore. And so they didn't know their children as well. They didn't understand the children's thoughts and concerns.

And again, you see it already in the 19th century that people began to lament that fathers were just no longer connected to their families anymore.

As one woman put it at the time, you know, the father is supposed to be the image of God in the home and he's not there except on Sunday, basically.

And so people began to say, well, I guess, you know, men are sort of irrelevant then.

That's when they began to be painted as well. They're irrelevant to the family. They're incompetent as parents.

You know, they're not around enough to really know how to be good parents. So the denigration of fathers started because of that.

And, of course, I would suggest that that's the main solution then as well to toxic behavior in men today is fathers getting reconnected, especially to their sons.

And there's a psychiatrist who I quote who says, we're not going to get a better group of men until we have a better group of fathers, fathers who are around to raise their sons.

And as you know, probably fatherless homes are much more prone to all kinds of social pathologies.

Fatherless boys in particular are more prone to dropping out of school and drug and alcohol addiction, sex outside of marriage, children outside of marriage, crime.

I used to work for Prison Fellowship, which is a international prison ministry.

And we knew very well 90 percent of those behind bars are male and the majority of them grew up without fathers.

So it is really a significant part of why men's behavior has gotten worse is that they don't have fathers in the home anymore.

40 percent of children in America today are growing up apart from their natural fathers.

And often they never even see their fathers. That's the highest rate in the world. We have the highest rate of single parenthood in the world.

Wow. So I do have you have to have some solutions. So I do have a whole chapter on how we might be able to flex the workplace somewhat in order to allow fathers to be more involved with their children.

And the pandemic had won one silver lining, which is a lot of men discovered they did like being home more and being closer to their kids.

So one survey found that 65 percent of fathers said they did not want to go back to the office full time after the pandemic.

And the New York Times had a really, really fun article. It was titled something like during the pandemic, fathers got closer to their children and they don't want to lose that.

So when fathers have a chance to be closer to their children, they find that it's a big part of their own sense of fulfillment and even part of their masculine identity.

Beautiful. And I think that's one thing that you made. You made me think, Nancy, too.

And just, you know, listening to the conclusion of your book with my wife, it really got us thinking, how can men, you know, husbands, wives, families recover the home, so to speak, as you know, where the education happens, where the industry happens.

How can we effectively balance life and be a team together on mission as men and women as equally bearing the image of God?

How can the home become that again? You know, one of the things that you talk about in the book is

Darwinian evolutionary theory and how, you know, that normalized many traits in men that have come to be labeled as toxic and how

Christianity comes into contact with that. It's a completely diametrically opposed view to the good man, the

Christian man. So what's the collision there that you present and how does

Christianity overcome those effects of evolutionary theory?

Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because in the book, The Toxic War on Masculinity, I take readers through several stages in the secularization of the masculine script.

And I think one of the most important stages was the rise of Darwinian evolution, because Darwinian thinkers began to say, well, the men who came out on top in the struggle for survival would by necessity be those men who were the most rugged, ruthless, brutal, savage, barbarian, and even predatory.

And so the script began to be, well, this is men's true nature. If this is how we evolved, then therefore this is our true nature, the beast within, as they used to say.

And they would say, oh, sure, you know, civilized people have a thin veneer. That was a common phrase back then, a thin veneer of civilization.

But their true nature is what's under the surface. This is, by the way, when the Tarzan books became popular.

Yeah. That was phenomenal. I didn't know that. When you included that information in the book, I said to myself, wow, that's incredible.

Not even knowing the origin of where these stories come from. Yes, and it was intentionally written from a

Darwinian perspective to show that if a man was raised by the apes, he would retain that inner wildness, that inner savagery, so that even after Tarzan learns

European languages and customs, he turns to Jane and says, I'm still a wild beast at heart.

And that was exactly what was thought to be the message of evolution. And you did mention literature.

There was also a more serious kind of literature that was influenced by Darwinism. It was called literary naturalism.

And the best known would be Jack London. When he was a young man, he read books about Darwinism and experienced what historian calls a conversion experience to radical materialism or naturalism.

And so even though he wrote about dogs, they were intended as metaphors for humans, in order to communicate a worldview that said we're all just products of evolutionary processes, natural selection, genes and environment.

We have no real free will. As one literary naturalist put it, we're just animals, nothing more.

That's it. So how did that affect the view of masculinity? Well, obviously, if this was our true nature, in the past, men had been urged to live up to the image of God in them.

And now they were being urged to live down to their presumed animal nature.

And so, by the way, you say, well, in that case, what about women? Well, Herbert Spencer was the most influential popularizer of Darwin here in America.

And so he said, well, women have to learn the ability to please because these men are brutal, they're savage.

So women have to learn how to placate and please them. And then he added, it would also help if they learn to hide their resentment at poor treatment.

So the message of evolution apparently was men are brutal beasts and women need to learn how to please and placate them.

And you could easily see, I don't mean to interrupt you, Nancy, but you could easily see how this translates to today's culture of domestic abuse within the home and even in the church and what some women are counseled about when they receive abuse.

Yes, we kind of skipped over that earlier when I talked about the really two groups of evangelical men.

And we should come back to that because, as you mentioned earlier, we often hear evangelicals, don't

Christians divorce at the same rate as the rest of society? In fact, in my research, I found that that is one of the most widely quoted statistics by Christian leaders.

I've heard many pastors use it. So the researchers went back to the data.

And what they did is they divided out the truly authentic Christian men defined as those who attend church at least three times a week versus nominal

Christian men. My students don't even know what nominal means. So I have to explain to them. It means in name only because NOM is

Latin for name. And so these are men who in a survey like this might might check the

Baptist box, for example, but who actually don't go to church very often.

It's a cultural Christianity. And these men test out shockingly different. I mean, they fit all the toxic stereotypes.

Their wives report the lowest level of happiness with the way their husbands treat them. They spend the least time with their children.

They have the highest rate of divorce, even higher than secular men. And the real shocker is they have the highest rate of domestic violence, higher even than secular men.

And so this is what we're up against. First of all, it explains why the statistics are so misleading.

If you just look at evangelicals as a whole, you're going to be putting together men who are better than secular men and men who are worse than secular men.

So, of course, the statistics will be misleading. They'll be skewed. It also means what does the church do?

You know, how are we going to then support and affirm and encourage men who are doing a good job?

But how do we reach out to these nominals who are out there claiming an evangelical identity, but who are actually doing worse than the secular world?

I think we have some responsibility for reaching out to them as well. And I get some people asking, well, why would they be worse?

If they're taking Christian concepts like headship and infusing it with secular meaning, they're taking their definitions from the secular script, why would they actually be worse?

And apparently it's because they feel religious justification. In other words, more than secular men, they can put a religious coating over it and say, well, see,

I'm justified. And so they actually end up being worse from the studies. They end up being worse than secular men.

So this is quite a job that faces us. How do we reach out to these nominal men in America?

There are a lot of them, you know, not not necessarily in other countries, but we have a lot of cultural Christianity in America.

And I only found one study that gave the numbers and said same numbers in terms of sheer numbers.

The number of committed evangelicals is the same as the number of nominals.

So it's a large group. And we also need to warn young women that if you meet somebody who claims to be a

Christian, you have a 50 -50 chance that they might just be nominals. So I just throw that in there as one of the practical outcomes is that we need to be careful in our churches, you know, who to be more discerning and support those who truly are living it out.

Yes. And I did have one more question for you. And then I want to also include Jeff in this, too. I'm good.

I'm good. Listen, it's great. Yeah, no, this is such helpful information. I think it's just really encouraging for Christian men.

That statistic, by the way, is just shocking. It's jaw -dropping about nominal Christian men versus secular men in terms of relationships and abuse within the home.

It's utterly shocking. I wonder, Nancy, if you could maybe just speak for a moment.

You know, the subtitle of your book is How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes. And you take a few minutes in the book to talk about the original creational intent and harmonious design of God in the garden.

So when God creates Adam, and then God creates Eve from him, brings her to him, and together they embark, or the intention of God is that they ought to embark, as his image bearers equally, in this task of the cultural mandate.

And so how does Christianity reconcile the sexes?

How does it bring peace and the kind of glorious flourishing that God originally created us to have as men and women together in light of the cultural mandate in Genesis?

Yeah, so about half of my students have never heard the term cultural mandate. So it might be good to start with that.

So Genesis talks about, you know, God's created the universe. He's created the earth.

He's created the animals and plants. And then he finally creates the first human couple. And what does he say to them?

The first thing he says to them is, he gives them their job description, we might say, you know, is the purpose for which

I created you. Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue the earth. So in the streamlined language of Genesis 1, we can unpack whole layers of meaning there.

So be fruitful and multiply starts with the family, but all the social institutions actually historically grow out of the family.

You know, first you have the extended family and the tribe and the clan and the village, and then the city, the nation.

And then also social institutions form for certain purposes like you need a school, you need a church, you need a marketplace, you need a state.

And so it means really to develop all of the social institutions that make society work.

And including the laws and treaties and constitutions that govern them. So it's really a very rich understanding of what it means to be a social creature.

The second one, subdue the earth, means harness the natural resources. So, of course, most cultures start with agriculture, but it includes mining, it includes inventing technology, it includes, you know, creating computers, it includes composing music.

One of my students said, oh, come on, composing music. And I play the violin. So I said, what's a violin made out of?

Wood. What's the bow made out of? Horsehair. So I think all of the transcendent beauty we associate with music starts with harnessing the raw materials of nature.

I love that. Beautiful. So it's called the cultural mandate because what it says is before the fall, when

God was giving his job description, why did I create you? What's your purpose? It is the cultural mandate to be deeply involved in the social world, deeply involved in creative and socially useful work.

And one reason I come back to this, by the way, several times in the book, is that the secular script for men today often focuses on getting away.

You're a true man if you go out mountain climbing and whitewater rafting and elk hunting.

And there's nothing wrong with those things, of course, but it's just how you measure your masculinity. And I say, no, you measure your masculinity by going back to the cultural mandate, not by escaping from your family, not escaping from civilization.

If it's done with that kind of escape mentality, I'm going to find my true self out there. And you mentioned the literature, the literature of the 19th century was full of stories about men who find their true self by getting away, getting out, being a mountain man, an adventurer, a scout, a cowboy.

I think that you referred to the Boy Scouts and even cultural examples that we see in depictions of men on screen, such as Western movies.

The real man is that rough and tumble Western hat wearing gunslinger who finds his identity by being isolated, not using his masculine strength and channeling it into serving a wife and children.

These are the things that we've just imbibed without even knowing it. Exactly. I'm thinking, for example, of Shane, which is one of the earlier

Western movies. And who's the hero? Who's the good guy? You know, it's not the farmer who's raising a child and supporting his family, you know, doing the tough work.

It's the stranger who drives into town long enough to shoot up the bad guys. And then it's just as quickly disappears.

And in this introduction to the book, it says, you know, he came from nowhere and went off to nowhere, rootless, solitary.

And that's held up as, you know, some kind of ideal. And that's why I keep coming back to, you know, the cultural mandate says you find your true masculinity by rolling up your sleeves, being deeply embedded in your family, in your community and in creative and productive work.

I love it. Yeah. And you just gave me a fantastic excuse, Nancy, because I've always hated camping and the woods and all of that.

And so now I have a reason to say I'm resisting all that lonesomeness and detaching myself.

I'm all about the cultural mandate. Now you have a biblical excuse. I ain't camping. I'm not into that. I like true masculinity.

I'm just kidding. I do have to be careful, though, because I love camping. No, I know. I'm teasing.

Yeah. I grew up in the woods. But I do get that pushback sometimes by readers who don't quite understand.

No, yeah. No, I fully understand you. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just trying to find every excuse

I can not to turn down camping when I'm asked to go camping. By the way, don't ever ask me to go camping because the answer will always be no.

Now you can use the cultural mandate as an excuse. It'll be good. No, I really appreciate that, Nancy.

I think just, I mean, ending on that note, how do we help men find the truest sense of who

God created them to be? And it's in there, and I think your book accords with this 100%, taking responsibility.

Taking responsibility for yourself. Taking responsibility for those around you that God has entrusted to your care.

And really, prayerfully, that's what will recover the moral vision and sanity of our nation, is men who fear

God, who keep his commandments. One of the passages that you reference in your book is from King David giving his son

Solomon the charge in the Book of Kings, be strong, show yourself a man, and how that is so vastly different than the secular script that we've been given as men.

This is a father charging his son with a moral vision saying, build, reclaim, take responsibility for yourself and for those around you.

And that is how you find your truest sense of self. This is who God made you to be.

Yes, and it is important to note that secular people have taken that phrase, you know, act like a man, be a man, and have turned it into something negative.

They say, oh, that means be tough, be rough, don't suppress your emotions, don't be a girl.

And actually, when King David said that, manhood was not contrasted with womanhood, it was contrasted with childhood.

So what it meant was grow up, be mature. I actually read a secular sociologist who said up until the turn of the century, it still meant that.

It still meant just grow up. So it didn't have this negative connotations of, you know, don't be effeminate, you know, as if femininity were a bad thing.

But it meant don't be a child. As Paul says, you know, I used to be a child.

And when I grew up, I gave up childish things. So it has more to do with adulthood.

And in the English language, that's what the term meant right until recently. So it's really sad that a phrase that had a very positive connotation in scripture has been shifted into twisted into something negative by our secular culture.

Well, thank you so much, Nancy. I do want to just reiterate, you know, the toxic war on masculinity.

And by the way, you have to love that title. Yes, because masculinity is what's normally referred to as this is toxic.

So toxic masculinity. But this is the toxic war on masculinity.

So there is a poisonous cancer eating away. But it is opposed to biblical manhood, how

Christianity reconciles the sexes. Nancy, remind us here. I know I said when I introduced the book and you that readers can pick this up on Amazon.

Is there any other way that you would like people to get connected to you and connected to your work that our listeners can take advantage of?

Oh, yes, I do have a new website. So I'd love to have you come and see it. Nancy Piercey dot com.

And that way you can also browse through all my other books as well. So, yeah, do that. Do that as well.

And the book, of course, is available anywhere that you normally buy books. Wonderful. Thank you so much,

Nancy. We thank you, Nancy. This was a treasure to listen to today. Wonderful. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

I appreciate it. God bless you. Thank you. All right. Excellent, man. That's fantastic.

Yeah, just phenomenal. Yeah. No, I didn't get a chance. It's been so busy with everything. Having a chance to actually read through the book. I'm definitely getting it.

Yes. It's phenomenal. Oh, I would commend it to any man and any woman. I mean, listen to it together as a couple. Karen came over today to the house with Candy and all the other ladies.

And the first thing she said was like, have you heard the book? Have you listened to the book yet? Yeah. And she loved it. And if you know

Professor Piercy's work, I think she is just the reason that her voice is so needed as far as applying a creational

Christian worldview to the culture at large is because she does it so well with the modern cultural issues that we're facing.

Like with Love Thy Body, we do so much work in the realm of abortion. The way that she applies a holistic

Christian perspective to these issues is so needed, especially for our young people.

All the time we're talking to our young people about, you know, you have to see this through the lens of scripture. It's God's word that has to be the foundation for everything.

You have to view the culture. You have to view everything that you're hearing. You have to constantly filter it through the biblical worldview, right?

How did God create things to be? What was his intent? What is his design? How does sin pull us away from that design?

How does it force us to deviate from God's good, created order, his design? And then how in Jesus Christ is it restored?

Is it redeemed? Is it brought back? And that's what every Christian, and in particular our

Christian youth, need to hear and need to be applying every day in every issue because we're constantly bombarded with things like this.

Toxic masculinity. Yeah, no, you've been passionate about a lot of things. You read a lot of books, but I don't think

I've seen you as passionate about a book as you are this one. It's a good one.

I would say get Total Truth. Love Thy Body is fantastic.

And this is just a bonus. This is just her newest slam dunk. I think that she's very effective and compelling.

She studied under Francis Schaeffer. Obviously. I was going to ask you that.

You can hear so much of Schaeffer. How Shall We Then Live. I think that's what makes it so practical and so applicable.

And she also writes at a level that is very comprehensible. I think she even said about her own books, she put them through some kind of process where it's like, at what level is this read at?

And it's typically like high school level. So it's very accessible, very resourceful, and it'll just encourage your socks off.

And I do appreciate it. Maybe we can talk about this in the after show. At least have you kind of talk more through what impacted you the most in terms of reading the book and going, oh, my goodness, didn't even think about that.

In terms of what the last part of the conversation, that discussion about, it's because she's right.

She's exactly right. It's not the guy in the town that has the family, that's running the farm, that's caring for the family.

He's not the hero of the story. It's the loner that comes in, the individual rugged man. He comes in, wipes things up, and then takes off again.

And it's like, what about all the great men there that are actually handling business? They're the ones that are left with all the ruin, too.

Yeah, exactly. She makes some good points in terms of how we have been trained to think about who the hero of the story is.

And that's really important. And it's interesting because it's like, why is it taking us so long as Christians to understand that story conveys so much and teaches so much, disciplines, sorry, disciples so much?

Because it seems as though in Christian history, you can definitely see throughout

Christendom the emphasis upon story and narrative. And of course, it's all over the

Bible. The Bible is story and Jesus loved to tell stories and that educated people.

It actually discipled them. But especially during the time of the 60s, the sexual revolution, all these waves, different waves of things and how leftists and secularists, humanists, unbelievers wanted to transform culture away from a

Christian world and life view. They understood they had to do it through story. And so they specifically wanted to not just take control of academia, but to take control of media and movies, story.

And you can see they actually employed their techniques very effectively because as you read some of the experts,

I'm not the expert on this, but as you read some of the experts and the scholars that have actually told their story, oh, this is what they said they were going to do.

They were going to get into media and movies and storytelling and they were going to make sure that they painted the family is not so great.

And individual ruggedness, of course, was in there as well, like the single mom and all that stuff. But also you're going to paint the homosexual characters as the good guys, as the lovable, as maybe even the oppressed.

And how dare you oppress them? And so, yeah, we went through that and I grew up throughout the 80s. We talked about this before. I grew up through the 80s and you could see that transition start to happen where it goes from the bad to these are the good guys.

These are the good way. This is awesome. And then all of a sudden now the devil is the Christian family.

It's the Christian man. Those are the devils. Those are the hate mongers. Those are the bigots. And that's the story that's told so often.

And they're so good at telling stories. It's so interesting. I think you're right. Human beings were made to run on hope.

We love stories. Yeah. We love fantasy. We love fairy tales. Right. We love the good guy triumphing against evil.

It's so compelling. I think God has just created us to be story loving creatures. It's interesting you mentioned how men are portrayed.

There's a statistic in the book that she goes into about the

Disney Channel. So kids just watching the Disney Channel on TV. They said in an average sitcom or show on there, the father is portrayed as contemptible, a dunce, a moron, someone that the children or the mother roll their eyes at or disobey or, you know, the father is someone that they have to bring around to the true moral vision of the home because he's just out of touch.

That happens at a rate of every several minutes, like three or four minutes. Every three or four minutes, the father is treated in a substandard way in these sitcoms.

And it just it's mind blowing. Yeah. There you go. That's what our children are ingesting. That's why they come to us and say,

I don't have to listen to you. Right. You know, and this just you don't know. Awful effects.

Yeah. The father is portrayed as incompetent. Yeah. Media feeds us a vision of the world.

Movies, stories feed us a vision of the world. Whether we realize it or not. Right. And so you're giving your children a vision, a vision of the father, a vision of the family, a vision of gender, a vision of the world.

That's what they're taking. And now that's what that lens through which they see things because they're passionate about it. I loved how that story touched me.

I love how that felt. I love I love the feelings that I had. And so that's how I want to see the world.

And so that's the vision I get. Yeah. And so, wow. It overcomes that the mental or intellectual barrier and appeals to the emotions, appeals to the feelings.

And that is one of the reasons why it's so powerful. That's right. All right, guys. So thank you so much. Pick up the book. I'm going to be listening to it.

Toxic War on Mass. I think on my next trip, I'm going to download that and listen to that on one of these trips. We're trying to save some babies. Absolutely.

So, hey, ApologiaStudios .com, guys. Go sign up for your free account for Bonson U. Don't forget to sign up for all access.

When you do, you partner with us in this ministry, guys, and you make everything possible. But to drop, or it's probably about time you see this.

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Share that with the world. We've seen Jehovah's Witnesses come to Christ after watching those videos. That's why we do them. And we do them, of course, to challenge

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Jehovah's Witnesses. The last one we did was in Salt Lake City. And then this one was here in Phoenix. And then right as the conversation starts, someone walks up to me in the middle of the conversation.

Thank you so much for your videos. And I'm like, you're in one now. I'm glad you like them.

Right. But just for all of you guys who are a part of this ministry with us, you'll see in this video with the

Jehovah's Witnesses, the guy walks up, says how thankful he is for the ministry. He's like, your videos, I watch your videos all the time.

He goes, and I'm a Mormon. Oh, wow. Which I thought was great for all of us that are investing so much in this outreach, in this mission, in this evangelism.

I'm doing evangelism with Jehovah's Witnesses. And this Mormon comes up to me. He's like, I watch your videos all the time. Thank you for your video.

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Millions and millions of people a month are viewing the content and getting the gospel. And so thank you, as we always say.

Thank you for being a part of this ministry with us. So, apologiastudios .com. Head over there right now for the after show. That is

Zachary Conover, Director of Communications for EAN. And I'm Geoff The Coleman Ninja. We'll catch you next week right here on Apologia Radio.