On Becoming a Responsible Man

Let us start with some definitions. Males come in three versions. Masculinity is the glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility. Compromised and brittle masculinity is little more than the active avoidance of blame. Effeminacy is the pursuit of blame in a spirit of self-loathing.

Because we live in effeminate times, the capons and cotqueans have insisted that our default metric must be to “always and everywhere, blame the male.” For extra intersectionality points, we have seen this expanded to “always and everywhere, blame the white hetero male.” This standard was taken up, with some gusto, by the feminists, whose marching creed appeared to be something like “men are jerks, and women should pursue true equality with them.”

In the face of this “blame the male” standard, no one should be surprised that a somewhat surly reaction among men has set in, but like many reactionary movements, it was a thoroughly compromised move. In what was believed to be striking and courageous, it was out of the fire and into the frying pan—away from self-loathing and into blame avoidance. The rule of effeminacy blames the male, and the brittle men in reaction gathered up their skirts to run away from the blame. But “don’t blame meeee!” is hardly a fighting creed.

On certain subjects, it is wickedly shameful to be confused. One of those subjects would be the right relationship of the sexes, and errors on this point have had a cascading effect throughout all the rest of society. And as we will see in the conclusion, it is a sin which, if persisted in, it is a sin that results in a denial of the gospel.

Not to put too fine a point on it, because so many wives refuse to be submissive to their own husbands, and because so many husbands have refused to take up the mantle of responsibility that was assigned to them by God, our marriages and our families have put everything else out of joint.

In short, America is in the terrible shape it is in because you, Herbert T. Husband, apologized to your wife yesterday, not because you were in the wrong, but because you just wanted to make the conflict go away. America has got the spiritual staggers because you, Sally A. Wife, asked your husband what you should do about a particular situation, didn’t like what he said, and so you waited two days and went ahead with what you thought was clearly the better option. You did this, knowing that he, Herbert, wouldn’t ever bring it up. You know the ropes. And if he did bring it up, all you would have to do is cry, and he would apologize in order to make the conflict go away.

So am I maintaining that such petty domestic issues are the reason why America is in the Godforsaken shape it is in? Well, yes. And in defense of this proposition, I merely point out that no one raindrop feels responsible for the flood.

Because of this—because husbands do not exercise true masculine authority in the home and because wives don’t ever cooperate when their men try to—things are a royal mess. Because the two other foundational governments established by God—church and state—depend on the families they contain being rightly ordered, we find everything in the church all askew, and everything in our civil commonwealth almost completely deranged. That could not happen, whether in the sanctuary or in the public square, without the bulk of our families being seriously anemic or diseased.

Each marriage, each family, is a brick. The church is built out of these bricks. The civil society is built out of these bricks. And if most of the bricks are cracked or flawed because the wives are sly and manipulative and the husbands are an amorphous jellied mass, who should be surprised when the houses built from these bricks are so rickety?

Every brick is flawed and so the house is flawed. Every screw in the machinery has been loosened a turn and a half to the left, and so any attempt to run the machine will result in the whole thing being shaken to bits. Every egg in the omelet is a bit off, resulting in an omelet that is way off.

Self-government is the foundational form of all forms of free government. If that is missing, then nothing else can be right, and the only possible result is slavery. Not only so, but as self-government or self-control is a fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:23), this means that without a large percentage of regenerate individuals, societies that were formerly free will collapse into a morass of totalitolerance.

So let us return to the question of masculinity, and on what it means to be a responsible man. The first thing it means is rejecting every form of male self-loathing, on the one hand, and every form of simple blame evasion on the other. Authority flows to those who take responsibility, and taking responsibility is not the same thing as accepting the blame. It is accepting the responsibility, which means you have accepted the task of leadership. You are now responsible to lead.

Over many years of counseling and teaching, I have discovered that one of the most difficult lessons for men to learn is the distinction between guilt and responsibility. I believe that this is a difficult lesson for any man to learn in this fallen world, but our egalitarian generation has made it many times more difficult. This has been done through its resentful revolt against masculinity itself, coupled with its signature reflex move of routinely “blaming the man.”

After a few years of being blamed for absolutely everything, it is not surprising that a somewhat churlish “manosphere” began to take shape. Some of that was within the normal range of human reactions, making Jordan Peterson popular, while some of it was kind of out there. “You think masculinity is toxic? I’ll show you toxic.” Making Andrew Tate popular.

Now some have taken my teaching on a man’s responsibility as being simply a pious variant of “blame the man”—their condemnation is just—and so we need to walk through this. I will take care to write slowly and bluntly. Abandonment of responsible masculinity is a grave sin. Rejection of feminine responsiveness is a grave sin. And both of them together are incredibly destructive.

Let us say that we have an unhappy marriage, with significant tangles in it. Perhaps the husband is to blame, but that is not the same thing as his responsibility. This is because his responsibility is exactly the same if his wife was the one to blame.

Sometimes the guilty party is also the responsible party, and so everything seems pretty straightforward to everyone. But there are other situations where the guilty party is not the responsible party, and here is where the lesson lies. Say that a man gets falling down drunk, climbs into his car, and in the subsequent accident a number of innocent people are killed. In such a case, we can use “who was guilty?” and “who was responsible?” as interchangeable questions. We are asking the same thing—which is, who did it?

But here is an illustration of an occasion where they are not interchangeable. Suppose a man purchases a business from another man, and the seller, through a series of legal but unethical maneuvers, manages to hide from the buyer the fact that there is about $50K of accounts payable owed to various other parties. Who is guilty? The seller. Who is responsible? The buyer. He now owns those obligations. He owns the business and is therefore responsible for whatever it contains.

Suppose a sailor manning the helm of a ship in the middle of the night disregards the orders that the navigator left with him and he runs the ship aground. Who is guilty? That sailor is. Who is responsible? Whose head is on the admiral’s desk the following day? The captain’s. And why? The sailor is guilty, but the captain is responsible. This is how God made the world. Responsibility flows upward. Moreover, this is how it ought to be. There is nothing wrong or unfair about this. It is certainly uneven, but uneven is not the same thing as unjust. The captain had a lot more perks than the average sailor also, which he rarely complained about, so it follows that he should not complain about his greater responsibility.

Because we live in an individualistic age, we want to ensure that we are never saddled with the consequences of anyone else’s misbehavior. I just said we live in an individualistic age, but another way of saying this is that we live in anti-covenantal age. And that is saying we live in an anti-gospel age. This is because covenants necessitate robust interaction when it comes to guilt and responsibility, and an intelligent grasp of covenants requires that we mark and understand the difference. We need to understand the difference in our bones.

If you don’t understand the blame/responsibility distinction, this means that you don’t understand covenants. And if you don’t understand covenants, you don’t understand the gospel.

The great Job exhibited this covenantal mentality in a wonderful way. After his grown children had finished a course of celebratory feasting, what did Job do?

We should not only take note of what Job did, but we should also consider how he is praised in the text for having this mentality. “Thus did Job continually.” And three verses later, Jehovah is bragging on Job to Satan. “None like him in the earth” “perfect and upright” (v. 8). And what was Job doing just before this? He was taking responsibility for something that one of his sons or daughters might have done, in their hearts. These grown children might have cursed God silently, in their hearts, and so their father offered burnt offerings—”according to the number of them all.”

What kind of man does this? Here is the beginning of a quick answer, if we want to start narrowing it down. Not 21st century man. Not 20th century man. Job was a covenant man, and he knew how covenants work. Marriages and families are much more than the sum total of the individuals involved. There is a corporate reality that ties them all together, and when one part of that body hurts, the whole body does. When one part is shamed, the whole is shamed.

A father who is ashamed of a lazy son, for example, is ashamed because he himself is aware of the standard. He knows what hard work is. He is ashamed of his son’s behavior, not because he shares in the guilt, but rather precisely because he doesn’t share the guilt. But just because he is not guilty doesn’t mean that he is not responsible. And why is he responsible? Because he is the covenant head. He is the father. That’s the only reason needed.

Instead of kicking against the blame, the father should simply accept the responsibility. Doing so doesn’t give him automatic power to fix everything, but it does put him in a position of being able to go before God in prayer as the covenant representative of that particular mess, and ask God for deliverance.

The reason we kick against this is because individualism has seeped deep into our bones. It doesn’t seem fair to us that a man can be held responsible for the guilt that someone else incurred. But the reason it doesn’t seem fair is because it isn’t. It is covenant unity. Is it fair that when I cut my hand, my whole body has a difficult time of it? The whole body can’t sleep because of it? Again, that is certainly uneven, but it is also just how bodies work.

Now the feminist wants to blame the man as a device that enables her to challenge his authority in the home. Mark this. Blaming the man is an exercise in taking the man down a few notches, taking authority away. But urging men to take responsibility is an exercise in establishing the man’s authority in the home—it is the path to true Christian authority. It is the only path. This is because, as I have argued for many years, authority flows to those who take responsibility. Authority flees those who seek to escape or evade responsibility. And those whose main interest is running away from blame usually run away from responsibility also, and they find the result of authority running away from them.

And this brings us to the ultimate example. We could have begun with this, but I believe is more effective to build up to it. The Christian faith has an absolute center, and that center is the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus. When He was crucified, what was the Lord doing? He was taking responsibility for sins He did not commit. He was not guilty of any of those sins, but He bore the responsibility for them. This is set before us in Scripture as the greatest act of love that human history has ever known. And that act of love was one of taking responsibility.

The just for the unjust.

And so here is the final point. Husbands are commanded to love their wives, imitating the Lord Jesus at just this point. Of course, as I never tire of saying, no fallen husband can possibly duplicate what Jesus did. But whether we can duplicate it or not, we are still commanded to imitate it. And what are we imitating? We are not just imitating a willingness to die physically for the sake of another person—although that would certainly be included (John 15:13). We are commanded to be willing to be held responsible for things we didn’t do.

The second Adam did what the first Adam did not do. When Eve ate the fruit, and offered it to Adam, what should he have done? Two things. First, he should have refused the fruit. And second, when the Lord came down to walk in the garden in the cool of the day, Adam should have sought Him out, and said, “Take me instead.” He would not have been to blame, but he was responsible. In this thought experiment, he was responsible, not because he ate, but rather because he was the husband.

We know he should have done this because that is what the final Adam did do. He turned to the Father, and said, “Take me instead.” Husbands, love your wives that way. To which command all the evangelical husbands of America say that they would really rather not. And their wives echo the disobedience, saying that they can stand on their own two liberated feet, and don’t need some officious husband walking around like he thinks he’s Jesus.

So there it is. Christ assumed responsibility for things He didn’t do, taking them all upon Himself. What should husbands therefore do? They should take responsibility for the state of their marriage. And if you immediately translate this into a statement that makes the man out to be blamed, then you have slipped off the point, almost entirely. Many times the man avoids responsibility by making sure that his wife is never blamed. That is why he apologizes simply to make the conflict go away . . . trying to build a great marriage on the foundation of a lie.

And so he is always the responsible one. And why? Because he is the husband. So if he accepts this, we are not blaming him. Rather, we praise him. Authority flows to those who take responsibility. Authority, and honor, and glory, and blessing.

But it is very easy for husbands to writhe when reading this kind of thing. They live in a generation that blames them for everything, and then I come along saying that the alternative is this? Yes. This is actually the only alternative. Love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her. The just for the unjust. If you complain that this is impossible, then you are merely revealing what you find distasteful and difficult. What? Will you not love your wife the way Moses loved the Israelites (Ex. 32:32)? Will you not love your wife the way that Paul loved the Jews (Rom. 9:3)? Will you not love her as Christ did the church (Eph. 5:25-26)?

You want out of the longhouse? Good for you. This is the only way out. The effeminate males crawl toward the matriarchal court being held at the far end, pleading to be included as an ally. The brittle sort gather at the other end, but not too close to the door lest it alert the guards, and there they stand, grumbling under their breath about the attitudes emanating from the other end. But the men who want to be masculine do what the Bible says.

Were you dismayed by the midterms? And so you want to save America, but don’t know what to do? Start here. Wives, knock off the manipulative emotional games, and submit to your husband. Obey him. Go into sweetheart mode. Husbands, lay yourself out for your wife, taking full responsibility for her. Wash her with the water of the Word. Be sure to include the kids. Bleed. Die.

Today’s Giveaway

For the next five days the Canon Press free Kindle giveaway is No Time to Be Dumb. You can get it here. You also still have time from Monday’s giveaway. And new for NQN Vol. 9, we are also giving away actual books—all you pay is shipping. Today’s hardback giveaway is this summer’s blockbuster, Five Views on Christian Nationalism. Quantities are limited, and you can only pick one free book, so get in line at noquarternovember.com.

The giveaway from my Mablog Shoppe is Letters of Marital Counsel. It will be free through the rest of November, along with Letters to a Rootless White Kid.