The Weight Room Down at Hotel California

Introduction

There is no one single cause of the cultural disintegration that we see happening all around us, but one of the more significant factors has been the impact of a horde of fatherless boys coming of age. Not only have many fathers been absent, the boys have grown up to manhood in institutions—like schools, colleges, and companies—that have been conquered by feminist sensibilities. With some of these boys the response has been one of rage, and with others it has been a collapse into a fatal acquired sense of helplessness. These are the boys in the basement. Other boys—not having had any men around to teach them how to be a man—conclude that perhaps they ought to try being a girl. Not knowing how to be a boy, they think that maybe they could be better at something completely different.

Father Hunger

But tens of thousands of others are simply ravenous to learn what they should do with their massively under-educated and under-prepared masculinity. One of the symptoms of our widespread gender-fog about sex, sexuality, and roles is the massive following that figures like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate have garnered. The answers offered need not be orthodox—they just need to look and smell like answers of some kind. With someone like Peterson, his answers make enough sense that he is in danger of becoming a Christian himself. With Tate we have someone who is brash enough to say “this is the way,” and all the sheep without a shepherd don’t know any better.

Change the metaphor. I am not vouching for all the cooks—I am just saying that it is obvious that the boys are famished.

Here’s another indicator. Consider the fact that the You Tube channel, “Dad, how do I?” has 4.5 million subscribers.

One of the tragedies of our time has been the way in which respectable evangelical leaders have helped to dismantle “stereotypes” that they considered damaging because they were thought to be “forms of idolatry.” The end result is that their respectable strategy of drifting along behind the world’s agenda helped to foment an almost total confusion. There is a kind of evangelical thought-leader who—well, to be perfectly honest, is the kind of person who uses terms like thought-leader—but as I was saying, who used to bridle at statements like “boys like to play with trucks and girls with dolls.” They bridled at such statements consistently over the course of so many years, and yet are now dismayed and confused over the fact that surgeons are taking parents’ money to perform double mastectomies on perfectly healthy teen girls. Moreover, they do not see the straight line connection between these two sets of behaviors. Someone ought to tell them about it.

They are like the architectural reformers who persuaded the dean of the cathedral that all the stone in the flying buttresses was a waste of perfectly good rock, and that it could be better used to build an empowerment center for junior high girls out back of the cathedral. When the cathedral collapsed one day, no one was more dismayed than they.

There have been a handful of orthodox Christian teachers speaking to this screaming need, as seen by the book It’s Good to be a Man (Foster/Tennant). And, as it happens, the documentary with the same theme and name just dropped this last week. You can have a peek at the trailer in the first few minutes of this interview.

Like a Father Would Speak

This is all to the good. There are now a number of voices out there, saying what needs to be said. Their number is increasing all the time, and I thank God for it. These are voices that are saying what needs to be said, and grounding it where it needs to be grounded—in the Scriptures. Here is another good example. Young men today need fathers in the faith, and should not be a source of shame to them that they do. The shame should be found in the fact that there have been so few willing to speak or write in that role.

Consider me a strong supporter of all these scriptural teachers who instruct men on how to be men, and who do not wince when the feminists tell them to. So much is really very encouraging. Consider me a fan of the rising new guard. I am going to addressing some pitfalls that the new guard is facing, but I still like the new guard’s way of doing it rather than the old guard’s way of not doing it.

So with that said, what I want to say here is intended to be a kind of fatherly voice to the upcoming fatherly voices. I don’t think I take too much on myself when I say that decades ago I was among the first to begin warning that much of complementarianism was simply a form of right wing egalitarianism. There were other faithful voices saying the same back then, like the Baylys and others, but by and large it was pretty lonesome. That is not the case today, and I rejoice in all the reinforcements. But if you will indulge me for I short time, I want to speak to you all the way a father would speak. If you don’t like something I say, just chalk it up to my dotage.

I am not writing this as an opposition coach, but rather as your coach, preparing us all for the upcoming games. This is a really tough schedule, and we can’t afford too many missed tackles or other rookie mistakes.

Avoiding Man Cave Sororities for Men

So recovering genuine masculinity is not an easy thing to do. There are ways to get it wrong, and there are ways to overshoot. The fact that you have begun to sing the bass line does not mean that it is impossible to sing flat or sharp. Sometimes a number of Christians wince at the way some guys sing about these things online, but not because they are singing bass—rather it is because they are singing sharp. Or flat. There is an important difference between masculinity and machismo.

Whenever masculinity is valued, as it ought to be, there will be counterfeits of it from the hypocrites, along with unsuccessful attempts at it from those who are sincerely trying, but who do not yet know how. Take the tie as a metaphor. They want to know how to tie the neck tie, but they can’t tie the neck tie. And there are varying degrees of this lack of success. For some, the knot is a little too big, while others tie it on like it was a headband, like they wanted to be Cochise or something.

There are men online who really want to be men, and they are pursuing it avidly. Great. Do so more and more. Now one of the things commonly urged (by them and upon them) is that guys need to get off their butt and hit the gym. But there is a danger here. We live in a time when it is not that difficult to get men to hit the gym in the same spirit that a famous woman influencer has on Instagram in getting everyone to ooo and aaa over her hoop earrings. That’s not how men do it. It is actually not how real women do it either, but those issues are different, and that is another topic for another time.

When a man successfully benches 300 lb. and he posts the fact on Facebook, the thread of affirmation that frequently follows this news is just like the influencer with the hoop earrings being told that she is “stunning and brave” for just going for the silver ones. Sometimes, when men talk about how awesome they are being at the gym, I expect their friends to come into the thread with a “you go, girl.” And non-ironically too.

When actual men work out together in the real world, they spend a lot of their time making fun of each other. Guys working out like guys don’t spend very much time on the affirmation neck rubs. And so it appears to me that a lot of this might be some kind of a juke move—calling someone “king” because of how many times he curled fifty pounds might not be just a simple compliment. Perhaps there is the additional goal of annoying the feminists.

But there is more to being biblical than annoying feminists. Living biblically is hard, and annoying feminists is easy.

It was my father who taught me to “always act, never react.” This is a challenge because reacting to the egalitarians really is far too easy. The egalitarianism of our age really is terrible, and it has brought us 200 pound “body-positive” Victoria Secret models, along with a prohibition of body-shaming. And so many of our guys say, “You know what? I am going to body shame even harder.” But that is not the way.

A Christian leader today is not worth anything much if he is not being accused of racism or misogyny. He is also not worth anything much if there is actual substance behind the charge. It is necessary to be slandered in this way, but it is equally necessary that it be slander.

Structural Narcissism

There is a temptation that some of our young bucks are now being confronted with, which is the idea that masculinity can be identified with what you can get in a gym that covers its walls with mirrors, like the weight room down at Hotel California. We live in a culture that makes self-absorption easy. They have greased all the skids.

I am going to need you to work with me here for a minute. Hear me out. One of the things we need to recognize is that the fitness world is structurally narcissistic. Narcissism is the spirit of self-absorption. Christian discipline, including the discipline of working out, is the practice of learning to deny yourself. But this is hard to do when you are being encouraged to take selfies of your biceps. And we should perhaps be a bit more suspicious of words like selfies.

It is a very short step from watching yourself in the mirror doing those reps to inviting all your Instagram friends to watch you doing those reps also. And look at me, look at me is not a masculine move.

Every sensible person around here admires masculine strength and toughness, and it was a central feminist failing that refused to admire it. But I am here talking about the kind of muscular men who got that way fishing in Alaska for 30 years, or carrying sheetrock at multiple build sites, or working on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. And I am also talking about the man who works out in a gym without caring about the mirrors, because he is building his strength in order to serve others. His is not a spray tan masculinity. He knows that man looks on the outward appearance, while God looks on the heart (1 Sam. 16:7).

And the same kind of thing goes for secondary male characteristics, like beards. Beards make a statement out in the world, and it is part of God’s design that they do so, as I argued decades ago in Federal Husband. I admire the Sennacherib look. But we live in a generation where we have to work hard to keep things like that from becoming lumbersexual—bromantic affirmation of one another’s beards just comes off as gay. It is like insecure girls online, telling one another how hot they are. Not a healthy take for either sex.

Churchill’s BMI

A related temptation is that of thinking that we can red-pill our way out of this mess, and that we need lots of burly men to step up to the microphone. But when burly men step up to the microphone, the results are not necessarily good.

In an online discussion about all of this Andrew Sandlin joked that the ideal male shape was “round like a pumpkin.” This struck the wrong note for some observers, who thought that young men today, hungry for role models, would never follow a pumpkin into battle.

But okay. Consider the example of Winston Churchill. “We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, We shall never surrender.” But what was Churchill’s BMI score? Did he have any right to talk like that? Does anybody care? Did anybody care back then? Did he have to look like Conan the Barbarian in order to be credible to the British people?

If someone moves the discussion to Christian cultural influence and leadership, I would be happy to ask the same BMI question about Spurgeon. Or about Chesterton. Or about C.S. Lewis. One time George Bernard Shaw, who was a beanpole, walked up to Chesterton, patted his stomach, and said, “What are you going to name the baby, Gilbert?” Without missing a beat, Chesterton replied, “If it is a boy, John, if a girl, Mary. But if it turns out to be only gas, we are going to name it George Bernard Shaw.”

Biblical presence and leadership mojo is the confluence of a host of factors, and weight can actually be one of them. There are different ways to fill a pulpit. If a man waddles up to preach, that would be truly unfortunate. Nobody wants to hear Eglon bring the Word to us this morning. But I have also seen men who have what I call an authoritative pulpit presence, and their size was a genuine part of it. A small man can have that presence also, as John Piper most certainly does, but many other factors have to go into that.

We are not gnostics, and bodies do matter. But different bodies matter in different ways, and when God prepares to paint His picture, He mixes His paints in strikingly different ways. I have before defined masculinity as the glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility, and when that is done, the results can be really good. They can be good in different ways, and in different areas. A Navy SEAL giving his testimony to a bunch of high school boys can really show them what sacrificial masculinity can look like. But God is not limited to just one way of doing things. Remember that Sandlin’s self-deprecating joke was also masculine.

And while I am in this neck of the woods, I should mention something about the ways different generations of men should talk to and about each other. It is a temptation for young men, distressed at the absence of fathers and grandfathers in their lives, to backhand some older men who were not among those who abdicated their responsibilities, backhanding them with an ok boomer attitude. That’s not good. But it is an equivalent temptation for such older men to climb up on their dignity in order to tell the punks to keep a civil tongue in their heads. That’s no good either. The Bible tells young men how to remonstrate with older men (1 Tim. 5:1). And the Bible also tells older men how to speak to younger men, the way fathers do (1 Cor. 4:15). And those instructions go triple for any online interactions.

Pretty Women Walking With Gorillas

Another theme in all of this wonderfulness is the way of a man with a maid. One of the very helpful things that Aaron Renn has argued in his newsletter The Masculinist is that being a beta male, or perhaps even a gamma male, is actually not sexy. This argument clashes sharply with the soothing arguments presented by evangelical, um, okay, thought-leaders, soothing arguments which try to reassure men into believing that dish soap suds are too an aphrodisiac.

But the metrics of attraction can be pretty mysterious sometimes.

Pretty women out walking with gorillas down my street . . .
There, here comes Jeanie with her new boyfriend
They say that looks don’t count for much
If so, there goes your proof

Joe Jackson, Is She Really Going Out With Him?

Winning the affections of a godly woman, and leading her successfully, is largely a matter of confidence in the Lord. It is not rooted in the externals, although the externals are certainly affected by it, and do have something to do it it all. Renn is exactly right about what women find attractive, but there is a nuance even here. Remember that the serpent is much more subtle than all the beasts of the field. Confident men work out, but so do insecure men. Working out should be working out your confidence, not trying to work something in. The altar sanctifies the gold, not the other way around.

And a man who is actually leading his wife and his family is a man who should be comfortable in his own home. The whole home, I mean. Many men have come to believe that they are being a macho man if they are allowed to have a man cave at their house—like Bonaparte hanging out at Elba. But being allowed to decorate the place where you were exiled is not exactly the range of freedom you should be looking for.

The problem is that men shouldn’t have to get away from the women in order to act like men. The women need the men in their lives to act like men. Men should be at home in the domestic realm of the household—but not domesticated.

I say all this because some of the online manosphere stuff is becoming more and more like a man cave. It is an isolated and self-referential masculinity. But men need to learn how to behave like men everywhere they go. They should be men when they lead their families to worship, men at the dinner table, men when they are teaching their children, men when they mow the lawn, men when they take their wives out to dinner, and men when they go hunting with the boys.

And here is the optical illusion. They don’t go hunting with the boys the same way a sailor goes on shore leave. That is not his masculine “getaway”—it is not his “guy time.” All the time should be guy time . . . for the guys. All day is girl time . . . for the girls. Everybody should be what they are all the time. So a hunting trip should not be a reprieve from the girly world he has to live in. It is simply one more of his masculine activities, lined up next to all of his other masculine activities. One of his other masculine activities is reading to his daughters.

I speak in dark parables.

Tu Quoque, Pal

At some point in a discussion of all such matters, especially if I am involved in the discussion, somebody is going to wheel on me and say something hurtful that rhymes with tubby. I bring this up so that you don’t have to feel awkward in thinking about it.

Now it is quite true that when my grandchildren tell their grandchildren about me—as I certainly hope they will do—it is not likely they will feel compelled to use the word svelte. Unlike so many of you, I don’t have to jump around in the shower to get wet. These are the plain facts, manfully acknowledged.

Such being the case, there are those who believe that I should be disqualified from weighing in on any topics like the above. For example, I remember one time when someone online backhanded a comment I had made on this topic by saying that I clearly had no idea what the inside of a gym looked like.

And so here is the point where I can feel the apostle Paul might tap me on the shoulder, suggesting that perhaps I would be out of my mind to talk like this. But he talked like this once, and so here goes anyhow. I have gone through three-a-day football practices in August for one of the championship high school football programs in Michigan, and consequently know what it is like to have my body tell me that it might be high time to throw up. I went through boot camp back when they knew how to run those things. I then spent the course of many years in the gym lifting weights such that, if you allowed me to select from a row of my critics, I could bench press the equivalent of two of them together. And I only discontinued that regimen in my forties in order to build my own house, which involved a goodish bit of heavy lifting, and also which, to my great pleasure and delight, is a house that has not yet fallen down. Since that time I have been busy typing, which has been a different kind of arduous. Many people don’t realize how heavy these metaphors are, particularly the gaudy ones, and I carry them around all the time—just for you.

But with all that said, let us be frank, you and I. I could afford to lose a few pounds, and no harm done. And yet if someone with a wand offered to take away twenty pounds in exchange for all the sabbath meals I have enjoyed with my people, my response would be something like “not for twenty million dollars.”

Comments are open because these things need to be discussed. But, as always, whenever comments are open, remember to behave.