RICH LUSK | Virtue and Polarity: Rebuilding Masculinity in a Feminist World

My name is Will Spencer, and you're listening to the very last episode of the Renaissance of Men podcast. Next week, God willing, this is going to become the Will Spencer podcast. That's right. We've almost made it. I hope you're all as excited as I am. Thank you all for coming with me on this remarkable journey and to officially close out four years of the renaissance of men. My guest this week is the pastor at Trinity Presbyterian Church and the author of Measures of the Mission.

Please welcome Pastor Rich Lusk. You are the Renaissance. Well, here we are, four years after the first episode of the Renaissance of men, and a lot has changed. Basically everything. I'd like to tell you a story you've probably heard piecemeal in other places. I first started thinking about what it means to be a man in 2001 during a college class I was taking about Carl Jung. The Lord of the Rings movies were just coming out at the time.

The fellowship of the ring was just about to drop, and the professor was talking about how the different male characters of the series represented different kinds of masculinity. Seeing the contrast between the traditional style heroes of Aragorn and Gandalf juxtaposed with the more humble but no less heroic everyday, average men like Frodo, Sam, merry, and Pippin got me thinking more broadly about valid ways to be a man.

I thought that because I never quite fit in with the frat boy jock archetype, there was something broken about me as a man. I really believed that. But that Carl Jung class helped me see that there are many correct ways to be a man, so long as he embodies certain characteristics, like discipline, integrity, honor, and more. As my friend Glenn Barker, my anniversary guest last year, used to say to me, men are like trees. No two trees are the same, but all trees have the same things in common.

I first realized the truth of that dimly way back in 2001. That is when I began to assemble myself as a man, understanding somehow that I had the capacity to rework many things about myself that I didn't like or that made me far less effective and happy than I knew I was capable of being. Because, believe me, if you had met me in the early two thousands, you might not have believed I'm the same guy. Sometimes even I don't.

Fast forward to 2013. That's when I went on my new warrior training adventure, a men's initiation retreat held by the Mankind Project, which was also based on jungian psychology, and the book king, warrior, magician, lover by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette. You may recall that I had Doug Gillette on my podcast a couple years ago. On that retreat in northern California, I saw more than 100 men grappling with the same questions I was about masculinity, purpose, and meaning.

These werent therapists, just average men from all walks of life, from beekeepers to neurosurgeons, high school seniors to senior citizens. And the same organization had initiated 60,000 men worldwide, including black men in the inner cities and at risk teens. In that moment, I realized that my own small questions about masculinity were much bigger than just me and included men literally around the world. From that point forward, I dived in.

I joined men's groups, facilitated men's retreats, and more. Every week, I was working to free myself for more than 35 years of expectations placed on me by the leftist tyranny of feminism. By 2015, I had defied the sisterhood, traveled to burning man, and met Christ, and finally been liberated to travel the world. I accomplished all that by the grace of God, in less than two years.

Fast forward then to 2018, which is when I discovered the red pill and the manosphere, because the YouTube algorithm, my most reliable source for radicalization, recommended a talk by Richard Cooper. Suddenly, I had discovered a massive online movement of men that had been around for almost two decades, and they were speaking openly and honestly about money, women, and fitness. These were performance oriented subjects that the mankind project explicitly left out of.

Now, at this point, I was surprised, because on one hand, I had the men's inner work world of the Mankind project, which had benefited me massively. But on the other hand, there was the men's outer work world of the manosphere, which was also answering questions that I had had for years. Why didn't these two worlds know about each other? At the same time, I also discovered Alison Armstrong's work, particularly her books, the Queen's code and keys to the Kingdom.

Now, here was a woman writing deep truths about men from a place of genuine love and appreciation. Why had I never heard any of this before? So the Mankind project, the manosphere, Alison Armstrong, and Jordan Peterson's overnight success all basically landed on me at the same time, while I was on the road, climbing mountains, sailing oceans, trekking deserts, and discovering who I was by subjecting myself to hard challenge after hard challenge.

Then, when I returned to the United States in 2020, carrying that knowledge and all the memories of my adventures, the world shut down. There I was, alone in my empty apartment, and I had the choice to sink or swim. So in one of the greatest gifts I've ever given myself, I put my knowledge to the test and began transforming myself based on what I knew.

That's when I found my way into online men's groups on telegram and discovered that men suddenly valued what I had to say in a way they never had before. I had answers for them about what it means to be a man, both inwardly and outwardly. But these werent answers id created for myself. They were ones id been taught and had tested when everyone could still go outside.

Thats when I realized that I had been shown something special, that there was, in fact, a worldwide movement happening to reappraise and rediscover what it means to be a man. Id gotten a glimpse of it in 2001, dove in 2013, and got swept away in 2018. And while traveling the world, id also traversed the landscape of the entire dialogue about masculinity at a pretty high resolution. I even understood at that point that men and women had a shared destiny together as husbands and wives.

It was the only arrangement that made sense. So even in 2020, I knew that there had to be a renaissance of women right around the corner. I then felt it was my duty to pass this knowledge on to other men and women. Not on my own authority, though, to point people to the leaders I knew who were already doing it. That is why I started the renaissance of men in 2020. You didn't know me at the time, but believe me when I say the last thing I would ever choose for myself is to be on a microphone.

My old cell phone didn't used to have an outbound voicemail message on it, because when I'd record one, the automated system would play it back for me. And I hated the sound of my own voice. I couldn't stand to hear it. In fact, I would go out of my way to avoid it. But I knew that if I didn't talk about this, no one would. And God and I are the only ones who know how hard it was for me to sit down and record my first episode on a Saturday night back in 2020.

The renaissance of men was also not supposed to be just a podcast, but a documentary series. By the time I started the podcast, I was already considering how I would go about visually documenting the movement that I'd studied, and in summer 2021, I set off on a cross country road trip to shoot the documentary. I traveled 14,000 miles over the continental US, conducted 25 interviews, and recorded over 60 hours of footage.

I didn't set foot in my apartment for more than 100 days, and by October 2021, I had produced a three minute trailer of the intended series. That trailer was the key that opened countless doors for me. It showed that I wasn't just another guy with a podcast, but a man with a vision. Many have wondered how I traveled so far, so fast, especially through the manosphere.

That trailer is how it, in the 20 minutes overview that I produced a year later, is what the renaissance of men was really supposed to be. You can find both the trailer and the overview in the show notes. By the end of 2022, however, that project had failed. Behind the scenes, I was working with the top documentary fundraiser in the entire world. But all of the accomplished men I interviewed could only understand their own bottom lines.

None of them grasped that a movement that benefited all men, and not to mention women, would benefit them as well. They were all asking, but what's in it for me? Without seeing that a rising tide could lift all boats, the true short sightedness of men that I admired was one of the great disappointments of my life.

Then Andrew Tate ate their lunch, and one by one, all but a couple of these men fell into personal sins and crises, extremist political ideologies on both the right and the left, and more. But by that point, I'd already made my exit from the world of masculinity into the world of reformed theology, which has welcomed me with open arms as a brother and in many ways a refugee and casualty.

Those of you who have listened to the podcast from the beginning have talked to me about your experience, hearing me make that transition. I'd never thought of it that way before, that it would be so obvious to I can literally only imagine what that's been like for you, considering that I've had backstage access to the trip, and it makes me appreciate your loyalty to me and to this podcast even more so.

Once 2023 rolled around, the renaissance of men as a brand and as a vision slowly started dying, it had lost its relevance. The moment that men had to change the world had passed, in part because so many of them failed to give God the glory, choosing instead to try and glorify themselves. I could say volumes about that, but as a result, the manosphere failed to christianize and died. The red pill did the same and has since become a zombie cringe version of what it once was.

Meanwhile, the church, praise God, has picked up the call and has begun to understand that speaking truth to men, about themselves and about women is the future of the church and the west, and that it must be done, no matter the cost. Which brings me to my guest this week. His name is Rich Lusk, and he's a husband, father, and the pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

And in God's incredible providence, there is no greater guest than I can imagine to close out the renaissance of men. For in many ways, unbeknownst to even me, when I booked Pastor Lusk, he embodies many of the themes I've just outlined to you from my own journey. First, he's explored much of the writing of the manosphere and the men's movement, describing it as the folk wisdom of the red pill.

Naturally, he's read Michael Foster, Aaron Wren, and more, but he's also read and written broadly about Rollo Tomasi and Jordan Peterson, digesting their wisdom, such as it is for christian audiences. Second, Pastor Lusk leads a Crec church in Birmingham, Alabama. And while I'm far from an expert in american denominations, I know enough to say that the crec is one of the few heading in a godly and faithful direction to that point.

And third, I heard in a recent interview Pastor Doug Wilson describe Rich Lusk as the, quote, oatmeal stout of federal vision. And rich is also good friends with the pastor of the church I'm currently a member of. In fact, my church sanctuary is where I heard rich lusks name for the first time in positive terms, which to me, after this interview seem well deserved.

So consider that in God's providence, outside of my own intention, Pastor Rich Lusk, as the final guest of the renaissance of men, represents aspects of my own journey in very particular ways. He's read and mastered the material that I was steeped in and that shaped my life for years. And he is highly regarded by two men.

I number among my most valued teachers in the faith that I can now see God was leading me to in the first place because while my professor in 2001 was making the Lord of the Rings about Carl Jung, if we were to ask Tolkien, hed say that the series is actually about aspects of God the Father and his son Jesus Christ, and men made in gods image. So what youre hearing today, right now isnt the end of just a four year journey.

Its actually the end of an adventure that ive been on for 23 years, literally half of my life. Its stunning, actually. Praise God. Thank you all for being a part of it, and I cant wait for you to see whats coming next. In our conversation, Pastor Lusk and I discussed the tropes of women centric religion, his sympathies to angry men, what happens when her emotions run the show, fulfilling the creation mandate in a fallen world the protected class of mothers, masculinity as emotional grounding.

And finally, the best thing you can do for your kids if you enjoy this podcast. Thank you. Please give us a five star rating on Spotify and a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. If this is your first time here, welcome. I release new episodes every week about the christian counterculture, masculine virtue, and the family. To all my listeners. I'm deeply grateful for your time and attention. Thank you.

And if you prefer an ad free listening experience, as I do, please visit my substack at willspencerpod dot substack.com and become a paid subscriber for weekly ad free audio and video episodes. And please welcome this week's guests on the podcast for the last episode ever of the renaissance of Men, the pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama, Rich Lusk. Pastor Lusk, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. It is great to be with you, Will.

I've really enjoyed, I think we connected a bit on Twitter, and I've enjoyed your tweets lately. You've just been crushing it. Extra base hits. I think I described it. Thank you. Thank you so much for that. I've been looking forward to this conversation. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I'm kind of new to Twitter or x as far as posting, so it's been kind of an interesting experience the last couple months, but very glad and thankful to connect with people like yourself.

Yeah, it's a very cool networking tool, and it's a great way for getting ideas out quickly. For better or worse. I suppose it is. Yes, yes. And you can I just, every day I'm on there, I see a lot of tweets, and I'm like, this is not going to age very well. I think that's probably the point. I put out stuff that will, but it's just. But yeah, it is very useful. So very thankful for it.

So one of the things that you tweet about that I've really enjoyed is you're one of the few men in the general christian space today who's actually explored many of the manosphere writings. And that was how I came into this world. I came in through the manosphere and also the mythopoetic men's movement before that. So I was exploring the men's movement for, I guess, a decade of, before I discovered the reformed theological world.

And what I appreciate is that you've tried to harvest the wisdom and perspective of that world, such as it is, and make it relevant to christian men today. So just to sort of start off the conversation, I'd like to share the context that we're talking in. So this, I'd like to share just a quick graph. This came out yesterday from the Wall Street Journal. And so perhaps you've seen this. I'm going to share this on my screen. The top issues for voters both. You did see this.

Yeah. So you can look at the. And this is the Wall Street Journal. This isn't some random pollster. This is a very high level, well respected, center right ish kind of outlet. So obviously, the economy is by and large the most important issue for men, along with democracy, immigration, inflation. But you can see that for women ages 18 to 29. So these are young people. You have abortion. For women, it's like 22%. I'm not sure if these are percentages and anti right wing ideology.

So this conversation is kind of crystallized in a very public way in the public dialogue. So that's the context that we're talking in today. Yeah, that's good. And it is interesting what I would call the gender voting divide, where men, and especially young men, are skewing in a much more conservative direction and women are being radicalized in a leftward direction. That is one of the most, I think, significant trends of our day.

And I think as christians, for me, as a pastor, it's very important to understand what's happening, why these trends are happening, why men. I just saw in the last few days, Jamie Brambrick, I don't know if you know that name, but he did something on how young men are coming back to church. And the numbers show, or wintry night, also did an article on this, which, which was, got similar data to what you just showed.

And so a lot of people are noticing this trend where men are coming back to church in droves. And for the first time in modern history, first time in modern american history, you've got more men attending church than women. Okay, that's really different. I mean, there's kind of this trope for a long time that women are more religious, women are more friendly to the christian faith. Of course, sometimes people put a slant on that. Well, that the church kind of caters to women, that kind of thing.

But certainly for at least 150 years, the church in America has been significantly more female than male in terms of regular attendance tropes in country music and pop culture, where you've got a godly woman married to a not so godly man and shield Dracula him to church sometime. And that kind of, that's kind of been, those are the stereotypes that we've lived with that have been just woven into the fabric of our culture.

And now, all of a sudden, in a very short span of time, we're seeing that flip flop where women are leaving the church in droves and men are coming back to the church in a pretty significant number. I see that on my own tour. We've got a lot more young men and single men in my congregation than we do women. So I've seen it in my own congregation. So, yeah, it is really, really interesting, and there are a lot of factors, I think, that go into it, and I think we need to understand those things.

So you mentioned the manosphere, and the manosphere is really kind of an online discussion that has taken place over the last, let's say, ten to twelve years, maybe even a little bit longer than that. But we're men, especially on a non Christian Mendez. But a lot of men have come together to basically discuss how to build a relationship with a woman. And, of course, in some cases, it was a very depraved kind of thing, you know, temporary relationship. Yeah, men who want to just sleep around.

But then also, you got a lot of men who are interested in having a healthy relationship with women and want to know how to do it. They want. They want to get married. They want to. They want to raise a family and leave a legacy and all that kind of thing. And it's interesting going to those, you know, to the. To the graph you just showed when you look at that, it's. It's like, you know, for men, the biggest issue is the economy. And that's because men think of themselves as providers. Okay?

That's what men want to do. Build a family, provide for that family. That that's. There's kind of this innate masculine desire for that. But what you see with the women in that chart, and this is, this is, this is, this is, you know, this is something that's been growing for a while, but now it's really, you know, it's hit a. It's. It's. It's hit a sort of breaking point in our culture.

The number one issue there is women who want to have the freedom, the right, I mean, whatever you want to call it, to murder their own offspring in the womb. Because abortion is so tied in with the feminist lifestyle and the feminist worldview they have adopted, abortion is central to. To a life of promiscuity.

Abortion is central to a woman who wants to prioritize career over family and who would see having children as an interruption to what's really important in life, which is climbing the corporate ladder, making money, getting ahead, that kind of thing. So you've got this disconnect between men and women where men want to be providers and have families more and more.

And, you know, they're sort of coming back from the sexual revolution, realizing it was a bad thing and wanting to reassert a much more, I'd say, traditional or even christian form of manhood. And then women who are being radicalized in the other direction, thinking the most important thing for us is to be able to kill our offspring in case we had sex with the wrong guy and got pregnant. Yeah, I guess. Had a question about the men who are showing up in your church first and foremost.

Then we can dig into some of that and then the women as well, because one of the things that gets talked about amongst my circle of friends, many men are single or looking to get married or court, I suppose you'd say, is that a lot of pastors will talk about, there are so many young men and there are so many men and women, single men and women are churches, but they won't actually talk about that.

There's a big age difference between the young men who show up in church looking to get married, who are generally under 30, and the women who are showing up to get married. Oh, we can't find anyone to marry these perfectly good women. Yeah, they're all like 35, 40 and older. And so no one's talking about that big gender divide where it's like, yeah, there are single men and women, but, like, things are completely backwards. Yeah, no, I think you're exactly right.

And so I think what you've seen happen in our culture is a lot of women have wasted their twenties trying to get ahead in their career and partying. And so then when they realize, oh, no, I would like to have a family, and I'm really not that fulfilled in my career, and so I need to go find a husband. Then all of a sudden. Yeah, they might go looking for that in church or somewhere else where they think they're going to find it. And it's very difficult, you know, at that point.

So, yeah, you've got that issue. But the flip side, you know, so with the men, I think what you're seeing is a lot of young men are figuring out that what they, what they really want is a family, and they want to be providers, and they're, they are willing to rebel against the system. They see a system that is rigged against them.

And so they, they realize that they are going to have to work twice as hard to have the kind of life that maybe their grandfathers were able to create rather easily, and they're going to have because they've got to fight against this system that is rigged against them and all kinds of anti male bias and just even bias against. I mean, obviously, the whole economy now is structured for two income households.

And so if you want that more traditional life where you as a man are the breadwinner and the provider and your wife is home nurturing the children that you have together, it is very hard to build that kind of lifestyle today. There's no question about that. So, you know, so that's a huge issue as well. But I think that it is really interesting.

So you've got a shortage of men for the older women who want to get married, and then you've got a shortage of women for the younger guys that want to get married in a lot of ways now, I do think that in very conservative christian circles, like the one ones that I'm in, I do think you have a, you have a lot of guys and girls who want that.

Okay, so, I mean, I'm in a, you know, like a subculture of a subculture where, you know, I mean, like, I've had, you know, basically three of my four kids got married right out of college, pretty much, which is, that's when my parents got married, was right out of college, and that's when I got married, was right out of college, you know, so, so that, you know, kind of seeing that as a traditional, you know, sort of early twenties, you know, prime time to get married kind of thing.

And they've had, and my only child is not, is still in college. So, and they've had tons of friends who have done the same thing. So I think that there are christian circles, very conservative christian circles where that desire for an early marriage and where there's that, you know, that shared vision of what married life and family life should look like, it's still there. You can, you can still find it. But, yeah, it's harder and harder.

Things that used to be pretty mainstream now are very much a subculture, and that's something that young people need to think about and young people need to think about. What do I want my life to look like? What is my vision? How do I envision my future? And where do I want to be in 510 15 years and what's going to get me there?

And I think that prioritizing family and so prioritizing marriage and then understanding the different roles that a man and a woman will play in the marriage and in family. Life is absolutely crucial. If you get too far behind, you know, say, with a lot of debt or something like that, it's just really, really hard to catch up. So I want to. You said something very interesting.

You said many things that are very interesting, and I don't want to spend too much time here, but I think it's important to touch on is you had said that young men want to rebel against the system, and I agree. And there's a lot of that happening right now, especially on Twitter, especially in christian circles. You may have seen, and it's very interesting to kind of see, because I see this rising response of a reappraisal of fascism is essentially what it is as being a response to feminism.

Feminism has run society off the rails. Birth rates are crashing. We have this egalitarian, but really sisterhood driven gynecotic society. And so men, naturally, after decades of mail bashing Miss Andre and destroying all of our heroes and all of that, they're just leaping into the other ditch of fascism and lionizing dictators. And so let's talk about this for just a minute, and then we can get to some of the other social issues as well. Yeah. Yeah. So I think you're right.

That is happening with a lot of young Mendez and I don't know how many. It's hard to tell because how. How much of what you see happening on Twitter, it's X, but we still call it Twitter. It'll always be Twitter. It's gonna always be Twitter. That's always gonna stay X is just. Weird to say, like, x it is. And then it's like, what do you call it? What do you know with Twitter? You had tweets. I don't know what you do when you call it x. Zy. Come on. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So I think you are seeing that with young men. So they see what feminism has done, what feminism has done to our society, what feminism has done to women. And so they push back against that really, really hard and so that some of them. Yes, will leap all the way over to fascism of some sort and see that as a kind of, you know, an answer. But, you know, I don't think it's just, like I always say, the answer to identity politics is not identity politics.

Like, if, like, if the left is doing identity politics, the answer to that is not going to be, you know, left wing identity politics. The answer to that is not right wing identity politics, because then you're still playing the same game. Okay. And if you go from feminism to fascism, you're really still playing the same game and you're not going to win it that way.

You think about this with feminism, there are a number of different responses or a number of different ways that men could go in responding to feminism and trying to push back against it. So one is, like you described, you go from, you see feminism, and so you go in this fascist direction.

Another would be to go the islamic direction, you know, and there's a handful that have done that because Islam has got a patriarchy, too, is, you know, Islam has got, has got very defined role, you know, social roles for men and women, and it's very structured and that kind of thing. So it could provide some of the things that men think they're looking for. So you could have fascism as a response. You could have Islam as a response.

What I want to do is for men to make a christian response to feminism. And that's going to look very different than, I think, a lot of what we're seeing online with the leap to fascism or again, in some cases a leap to Islam. Those are not healthy answers. They're not healthy solutions politically and certainly not spiritually. So I think there is a different way.

And that's what we need to help young men find is a christian way forward, a way forward that arises out of the scriptures and out of the gospel and out of what I would call a view that grace restores nature. And so what we're seeing is feminism is about the denial of femininity in women. It's the twisting and perversion of femininity in women. And we're seeing a lot of movements on the right that basically twist and distort masculinity in certain ways, and it's just not healthy.

And so, yeah, we need to help young men find the right pathway forward. And what a genuinely evangelized, what a genuinely christianized masculinity would look like, because that's what God's designed us for. And I think what men would say in response, frankly, what I would say in response is it's great to talk about that.

But when we start bringing ideas of what an actual christian masculinity looks like, like a godly christian masculinity, and you clear away all the smoke of like, oh, that just means oppression and tyranny, and you actually paint a picture. There's substantial resistance within many corners of the evangelical church to any of those ideas. And that, I think, is where men start to get really mad. They might be like, hey, we're angry about feminism.

We're angry about degeneracy porn and all this stuff and the sexualization, the degradation of culture. And they're like, hey, I read the Bible, and this is what it says about being a man. And then I also read these other sections that are pretty clear about what it says to be a woman. And then their own pastors or their own large scale evangelical institutions smash down on them. And I think that that's a very fair critique. Well, and here's the thing.

And I have found this just in my few months of being active on twitter and just have ended up engaging with a number of young men there. And I'm very sympathetic with them and very sympathetic with their plight. So, I mean, I would say, obviously the culture is arrayed against them. I talked about the system, so to speak, is very much against them. But in so many ways, the church has been as well. And so I am sympathetic with them.

And a lot of the critiques, I mean, I think some of it is problematic. I mean, a lot of the, I mean, I'm not a boomer myself age wise, but I mean, I think a lot of the. Okay, boomer stuff is kind of disrespectful. But I also get it because you've got a lot of pastors who are absolutely clueless about what young men are up against today. They don't understand the problems and the challenges. They don't understand that maybe what worked or what came easy a generation or two ago no longer does.

And so I'm very sympathetic with them. But again, it's just a matter of finding the right path pathway forward, which is, you know, it's proving to be harder to do than you might think because there are so many false pathways and in some cases, they're much easier to take. So, yeah, so I am simultaneously sympathetic with these young men who I think have been misled and mistreated in a lot of ways.

But I'm also critical of them because I do see them getting, in many cases, radicalized in a way that's going to be just as unhelpful as what they're trying to get away from. That's right. And what I've been saying lately is obviously the masculinity dialogue has been very focused on the notion of women's submission. Very unpopular word. But I think what's even more unpopular is the notion of men's submission not to women but to pastors or to authorities. That's vital for being a mandehead.

Absolutely. You cannot be in authority unless you know how to be under authority. So you should never be in charge of something unless you've proven that you can be under charge. So, yeah, absolutely. So I think you have a lot of men who are maybe in some cases arrogant or short sighted. Young men discipled. Yeah, I know, I know. It's hard to fathom that, but.

So, yeah, so I think you're seeing a lot of that and that kind of bravado, and then, and then it's getting kind of mixed in with a lot of christian jargon, and that's a real problem. So one thing that I have, you know, I've tried to use my Twitter account to do this some. I've done a lot of writing. If people wanted to go check out my blog, I've done quite a bit of writing on this, on, you know, what's called the red Pill.

I've dealt with, you know what I think young men really need to understand about the world that they're living in and how they can best deal with those challenges. I've written quite a bit of on those kinds of topics precisely because I do think, I mean, let me put it this way.

So, you know, you go back to that chart that you had, and you can see this crazy gender divide where men are going one direction and women going the other direction, and it's like, you know, how are we ever going to get men and women together? We've got collapsing marriage rates and related to that, we've got collapsing birth rates.

And so in a very real sense, like it, like, just at a very practical level, you can say that the future of our civilization depends upon us figuring out the male female relationship once again and how to get men and women to come back together and bond with each other in the covenant of marriage and build families and households and pass along generational wealth and all of those kinds of things. If we can't do that, our civilization really is over.

Now, there's other things, other things we need, too, obviously. We need revival and reformation. We need the christianization of our country and our culture again, at the heart of that. And I think those things are very much related. But there's not going to be any people to evangelize unless people are having kids. So the great commission presupposes the creation mandate. So you got to be fruitful, multiply in order for there to be a future.

And so I think that helping young men understand what it takes to attract a woman and pursue her and then marry her and then build a life together with her and build a happy and joyful marriage and family life. I mean, men have to understand those things. And so a lot of what we mentioned, the manosphere, a lot of what has been discussed in the manosphere over the last decade and a half plus, I think it's all stuff that if you could go back 100 years, was pretty much common sense.

I mean, there was this kind of a folk wisdom passed along from one generation to the next. Men understood what they needed to do to get a wife, and women understood what it meant to be a wife and to have a husband. And whether you went into a bar, you know, 100 years ago and talk to people or you went into a church, you know, and talked to people in the pews, I think people in general, in the culture would have understood these things. Okay? Just basic male female dynamics.

And because of feminism and egalitarianism and the widespread confusion brought on by the sexual revolution, we've lost all of that. And so now we're starting from scratch. I mean, I've said this many times over the years, and I think I probably tweeted about it at some point along the way, but I think if you could go back in time, like, you know, to our great, great, great grandparents and tell them, hey, you know, there's going to come a day wherever, you know, x percentage of people.

I don't remember what the exact percentage is, but, you know, like, there's gonna be all these people age 30 and up that have never been married. They would. They would just find that astounding. Like, how can people get to that stage of life and not have found somebody to spend the rest of their life with? Or if you told them, you know, people are gonna feel like they need to read a stack of books in order to be married, and they would have said, like, read a stack of books.

Like, what are you talking about? There's nothing more natural. There's nothing more natural than a man and a woman living together in the covenant of marriage. Now, obviously, there are always going to be, because of sin, they're going to be issues you have to work out and points of friction and whatnot. And you've got instruction in the Bible about these things.

And pastors, of course, over the generations and millennia have always preached and written on these things, but not like we have today. The kind of the explosion of teaching and writing that you see on marriage and family issues today is actually a sign of our sickness, okay? Not our health. It's a sign that we have lost touch with certain basic realities.

And so a lot of what I, you know, what I think, you know, a pastor, you know, like myself or, you know, you with your podcast and your ministry, a lot of what I think we're trying to do is bring people back into touch with these basic creational realities, God's creational design and how sin wrecked it and how grace restores it. And so if you want to have a happy marriage, it's actually very, very simple.

But there's a few things that you need to know and understand that our culture is not going to tell you. And in fact, our culture and much of the church is going to lie to you about these things. And so we need to set the record straight. So can I, can I push back? Obviously, you and I are in agreement, but I want to push back on a couple things.

Okay. So I think that there are a lot of men who would say, I'm down, I got a good job, I got a future, I'm in shape, you know, things are going well, and where are the women? Where are they? And because I think what's happened now is that it used to be pretty reliable. You've read Rolo Tomasi, so you're familiar with the epiphany phase. You know, girls are partying through their twenties and then it used to be somewhere around 28, 29, 30 that hit their quote unquote epiphany phase.

Like, oh, I should probably settle down now. That epiphany phase, quote unquote for women isn't happening until they're 35. Its not happening until theyre 37, in some cases 40 years old. Thats when theyre realizing. And I think that used to be a function of whats called the biological clock.

I dont particularly like that metaphor for it, but the way that I think about that is it was leverage over a woman to say like, hey, you have these biological realities that youve been experiencing once a month since you were 13 years old, 240 times or whatever it is between the ages of, say, 13 to 33. That's your monthly reminder of what your body is for. But women have been so sufficiently able to ignore that that leverage is gone over them now.

There is no leverage over them to bring them into the home. And so what I've been saying, and I think a lot of men agree, is that plenty of women will experience this leverage of, okay, I want to be a mother, so I'll get married, but women don't want to be wives. That I think is the part where it's like a man can be completely ready to do his duty as a husband and a father. But he's looking at two, three generations of women that want to be mothers, but not so much the wife thing.

So what do we begin to do about that? Well, it's a great question, and I think. Question, isn't it? Yeah. One of the single biggest issues, and so several things I want to say about that. One thing is if you've got a man who is like you described, he's got a good job and he's in shape, so he's marriageable and he wants to get married and he's having a hard time finding someone. I would want to ask first, are you, are you around women who are marriageable also?

And if you are, then are they turning you down? And let's start to see if we can figure out why they're turning you down. If you're just not around women, then let's deal with that problem. So there would be an issue there to sort through. But, so I think the other thing that's going to happen is we got to do a much better job of discipling our women. It's interesting to me how so nobody has any problem at all talking about how terrible modern men are. We hear a lot about masculinity.

Okay. That's right. Everybody will talk about that. And there is such a thing as toxic masculinity. I don't deny that masculinity can go wrong. And when it goes wrong, it goes wrong in one of two ways. You get men who either become tyrants or men who abdicate, so they basically become, you know, monsters in their masculine arrogance or they become effeminate. You know, those are kind of the two directions that when, when manhood goes wrong, it goes strong in one of those two directions.

And those are both toxic. Those are both forms of toxic. Yeah. Toxic effeminacy is a huge issue, too, among men. So you've got a lot of men for whom that is an issue. But, but with women, nobody will talk about the sins and the failings and the shortcomings of the modern woman.

Okay. And this has been pointed out a lot, you know, like the, you know, the classic, you know, Father's day sermons versus Mother's Day sermons where the men get berated and the women get praised, you know, because, you know, nobody's going to criticize a woman or talk about characteristic sins of women. I saw Anthony Bradley not too long ago.

I don't know if this, I should go back and look and see if this got, if he did get an answer but at one point, it's been the last few weeks, Anthony Bradley asked the question, you know, is there such a thing as toxic femininity? And why isn't anybody talking about it? Or what would it be? What would toxic femininity be? I replied to that when I looked at the thread, it was like, basically nobody could answer the question. And I thought that was just so interesting.

I'm like, well, there is an answer to that question. There's lots of ways that femininity can go wrong, whether it's the overbearing mother or the masculinized feminist career woman. There's a lot of different ways femininity can go wrong, too, and we need to recognize that. So we've done a really bad job of discipling women because we have been too scared to be honest. That's right. Instead of fearing God. I think one of the great sins of the modern church is that we have feared women.

And so the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of woman is the beginning of foolishness. Okay. It's interesting to me in psalm 128. Psalm 128 is about the God fearing man, and then it goes on to describe his family. And when I teach on that psalm, I must always point this out. It's the God fearing man. And because he fears God, he does not fear his wife, and that's why she's the fruitful vine in the heart of his house. Okay. And, like, you know, I'm in Birmingham, Alabama.

One thing I think that people really misunderstand about the Southeast is that, you know, people think, oh, you know, southern culture, it must be so patriarchal down there. And you guys got traditional, you know, christian families and all that. The south is incredibly matriarchal, and it has been since at least 1865. Okay. I mean, and you can say, well, a lot of the men died, you know, in the war. Okay, yes. But at least since 1865, the south has been very matriarchal.

And so we have a lot of men in the south, in the south who have, I would say they have masculine hobbies, like fishing, hunting, sports, okay. But they don't have a masculine core. And the philosophy of life that most southern men adopt is a happy wife, happy life kind of philosophy. That's what's common.

I mean, like, we've had some renovations and whatnot done to our house several times over the years where, you know, these blue collar guys will come in and, you know, do the plumbing or electricity or whatever, and I always end up talking to these guys. And of course, it's interesting because they find out I'm a pastor, and then, you know, usually they want to talk eschatology or they want to talk about marriage.

But what's interesting is that literally every single one, and a lot of these guys, I mean, most of these guys would be professing christians of some sort, and most of them would have, you know, would go to church with some degree of regularity. And every single one of them, you're not five minutes into the conversation, and they talk about their wife is the boss. That's how they'll refer to her. Some variation of happy wife, happy life.

I mean, that is how they describe their marriage and family life. And these are the blue collar guys, you know, these are the tradesmen, okay? And they are completely henpecked and overrun by their wives. And their wives would never admit it. I mean, CS Lewis talks about this. Their wives would never say, oh, I'm the head of the household, okay? But, you know, it's the old saying, if Mama's not happy, nobody's happy. She runs the show. It's really her emotions that run the show, okay?

And he is constantly working to placate her and sort of keep her happy. And that, that is the recipe for a disastrous marriage. Nobody is fulfilled by that kind of marriage, okay? She's not going to find it fulfilling, and he's not going to find it fulfilling either. And so that, you know, that is a huge, huge issue. And so that's. And I think a lot of this is because the church has been highly feminized and. And pastors do not address the sins of women.

Churches don't have Titus, two older women who can disciple the younger women and who will teach them to. How to love their husbands and their children and how to be submissive, obedient wives. I mean, that, you know, Titus, too, gives the curriculum what the younger women need to be taught, and churches just simply do not do that, right? They just. They give up on it.

Everyone, as I've been saying, everyone wants to do solo scriptura until it comes time to do solo scriptura, stuff particularly related to marriage and the family, like how we don't really talk about those verses. Like, what do you mean you don't talk about those verses? Like, it's all throughout the Bible. You have all. For all the talk about the proverbs 31 woman, there's not a lot of talk about the proverbs. Seven woman.

In fact, all throughout scripture, as I've been reading it, there's all these very clear portrayals of women's sin. And it's never like, oh, it's probably your dad's fault, like the woman at the well or the hemorrhaging woman. It's like, go in peace. Your father's faith has made you well. It's not like that. It's like, this is her faith. These are women's faith. Women interact. Christ interacting with women directly as individuals made in the image of God.

But the church pulls way back on that and be like, well, it's probably a man's fault somewhere, right? And it's disappointing for men who see themselves trying, and maybe they are trying appropriate for their station in life. Like a 23 year old man, truthfully, can only put in so much effort because he's a 23 year old man, but a 35 year old man can put in much more.

So when a 23 year old man is at a place appropriate to his station, right, and he's still not able to find anybody, of course, I think, and maybe now would be a good time to talk about men like Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson in his own way.

They're very different branches, but from a very similar tree where it's like, okay, Andrew Tate will say, no, you have to be so alpha, elite beyond your capacity and full of arrogance and privato that it's like, that's the only thing that you can possibly do to become a man to find a woman is bye achieving to that level. And Jordan Peterson speaks to that in a somewhat different way, more with his person.

And so I can understand how young men would get very frustrated and burned out if their choices are, well, I can be a weak, passive pastor who's afraid to standing up to his own wife or the women in the congregation. Or I can be Andrew Tate. And those seem to be my two options for getting married. Yeah, well, let me go back to the women's issue and just say one more thing about that and then talk about Tate and Peterson and that kind of thing.

So, yes, so, so churches obviously do need to address the sins of women. I mean, that, that's something that we have failed to do. So pastors are culpable in that.

And I like having been a pastor for about 30 years now, or in pastoral ministry for about 30 years, and, you know, knowing a lot of pastors and talking to a lot of pastors and hearing a lot of pastors preach and whatnot, I can tell you that pastors are, you know, pastors are fearless when it comes to critiquing men and pointing out men's characteristic sins. But they are very cowardly and fearful when it comes to pointing out the characteristic sins of women. And so that is a huge issue.

And that kind of feeds into this idea. I think there's actually a lot of arrogance on the part of women who really don't understand their own nature very well. And so I don't know if you've read the book. It's a recent book, Megan Basham's book, Shepherd's for sale, that's got a lot of attention recently. Very interesting book. Really well done, very well researched. I was not at all impressed with the criticisms of it. I think it's a really good book.

But she has a chapter in there on basically how the hash metoo movement impacted the church. And she starts out the chapter talking about this christian comedian, John Christ, who got really popular and then had some sexually inappropriate relationships with women. And then when the story broke, the way that it broke is that, you know, Christ is some kind of sexual pervert and these women are victims.

But the re and Meg Basham did a really good job, basically showing that there's actually no indication at all that any of these women were victims. They were all of age. There wasn't even really any kind of power differential per se between Christ and these women that he had inappropriate relationships with. But the narrative, it's just taken for granted that the man has acted sinfully and the women are innocent victims. Okay, I saw.

I think it was Julie Royce the other day who's kind of been a thorn in the side, kind of just a constant critic of people like John MacArthur and some other big shots in the evangelical world. But basically she said something like, if there's any kind of power differential at all, then there can't be in some kind of sexual issue, if there's any kind of power differential, it's impossible to give consent.

And so basically, because men always have more power, it's almost like saying women can't sin sexually. I mean, that's really the implication of that. And that is absolutely insane. So, yes, you are right. We need to confront women about their sins, whether it's the immodesty of the proverb, seven type woman or wives who do not want to be submissive and have maybe heard sermons that so redefine submission that it doesn't mean anything. Okay. You know, so.

So, you know, so they hear that and then they latch on to that and think, well, this is great. I don't. You know, submission doesn't really mean submission. Okay. No, it does mean submission. It means obedience obedience is a word that's used. It means obedience. You do need to obey your husband, you know, and women don't like to hear those things, but they need to hear those things. They need to be told that they're responsible for keeping their emotions in check. You know, if.

If for men, men have to learn to control their desires. That's your. Your, you know, your most basic issue. Women have to learn how to control their emotions. They have to learn emotional self control and emotional discipline. Just because you're a woman doesn't mean that you get to let your emotions run free, you know, and you'll hear people say things like, well, shouldn't every emotion be validated? No, it should not be that. That very idea comes from the pit of hell, okay?

Your emotions, just like the rest of you, your emotions need to obey Jesus. Your emotions need to bow before Jesus and submit to the law of God and the word of God, period. So we've done women a huge disservice, I think, by not confronting their sins and dealing with them and discipling them and pointing out what those characteristic sins are. Everybody knows the characteristics. Characteristic sense of men. We're kind of oblivious to the characteristic sins of women. And that's a problem.

Now. Yes, about Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, that kind of thing. Like, what sort of models do men have? And here is where we really see the result of the church failing to speak with clarity in these areas, is that a lot of men now go outside of the church to get their training, their. Their teaching, basically, their view of what manhood is. And so, yeah, if you start googling about manhood, you'll end up with a Jordan Peterson, or you'll end up with a. An Andrew Tate or a Rollo Tomasi.

And, I mean, Peterson is not a believer, but he's a little. He's definitely more benign than those other names. I mean, he's not. He's. He's. I'll just say he's closer to the kingdom than those other men. But, you know, guys like Rollo Tomasi or Andrew Tatum, and they're gonna. They're gonna send you down a very different path if that's who you. If that's who you start to take your cues from when it comes to understanding manhood. And the thing that's really dangerous about it is that there are.

There are some really significant things that they get right that so much of the church has gotten wrong. Okay. The church has actually. This is one of the ways the church, I think, has really misled men. And, and failed men is the church has taught men a lot of things about the male female relationship that are simply wrong. I mean, I remember when I was in youth group, like in 6th grade. Okay?

So, like, I'm at that age where you're just first started starting to notice girls and get interested and that kind of thing. And, you know, I grew up going to big public schools and that kind of thing. But I remember, you know, I was in like 6th grade and my youth pastor said, you know, he's doing kind of the, you know, the typical relationship talk, you know, for young guys.

And, you know, he basically says, you know what, what a female is really going to want from you is for you to be kind, caring, sensitive. And I remember thinking to myself, no, from what I've observed in the hallways at school, what they really want is the quarterback of the football team. That's right. Did not make sense to me then. And I just remember thinking, I just, that just doesn't really sound. That doesn't hold.

Like, I had heard girls talk, you know, like, I knew how they talked about guys and I was like, I just. I don't think that's right. I mean, I obviously, you know, men do need to be kind. And, I mean, there's some truth in that. It's not totally false, but, but what men need to understand is what actually generates attraction with a woman. And it's not those things. Okay? Now, you don't have to be the Andrew Tate, you know, sort of. I mean, people would say, oh, that's, that's alpha masculinity.

I would say, no, that's kind of a caricature of masculinity. You don't have to drive a Lamborghini and make a million dollars a year to be attractive either. You do have to be a man who is oriented towards Dominion, a man who has skills and competencies. Okay? I mean, every, every man should aspire to be a human swiss army knife. Okay? That, that should be the goal. I always think of David in one Samuel 16. He's a young Mandev. And he catches the eye of some of Sauls servants.

And they give this list of this descriptive list of David and his qualities and accomplishments, even as a young man. And hes a mighty warrior. And his speech is seasoned with wisdom and hes a skillful musician. How did this guy accomplish so much at such a young age? But that should be what men aspire to, you know, is you should aspire to, you should develop yourself physically, spiritually.

And I would just say vocationally there's a lot of words you can put in that, in that third slot, but I'll just say vocation. But the only way for you to develop yourself vocationally is to learn skills, okay? So think in terms of the dominion mandate. Everything goes. Goes back to the creation mandate in Genesis chapter one. Genesis chapter one frames what life is all about.

And if I were talking to women, I would say different things about the creation mandate than what I will say here, because we're speaking mainly to a masculine audience here, a male audience here. But think about this. The creation mandate in genesis one basically breaks down into two categories. Take Dominion rule, subdue the earth. So you've got the dominion part of it, and then you've got be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth. You've got the multiplication part of it.

So it's dominion and multiplication. Those are the two categories, okay? Now, the book of proverbs is all about how to fulfill, you know, how a man fulfills the creation mandate in a fallen world. So the book of proverbs is basically about a man's work and a man's wife. Okay? Here's what your work should look like. You know, there's a whole lot of proverbs about that. And then here's what it. Here's the kind of woman you should not pursue. Here's the kind of woman you should pursue.

Shun harlot folly, pursue lady wisdom. And at the end of the book, you know, you marry her and she becomes your queen. Okay, so. So proverbs is about fulfilling the creation mandate in a fallen world, okay? So what it means to pursue dominion, and what it means to pursue a woman, a fallen world, okay? So that. That's what life is about for men. So in order to do those things, what do you need?

Well, you've got to realize, and I also point this out, God gave Adam a job, a vocation, before he gave Adam a wife. Okay? So Adam was commanded to tend and guard the garden before he's given a wife, okay? Tending to the garden, that will make him, you know, that that's a form of productivity. That's a form of provision. Okay? You're going to be a provider guarding the garden. You're going to be a protector. That's the other side of your masculinity. Protect and provide.

That's the mantra of masculinity. It's right there in Genesis two. Okay, so I think to be a man who can be attractive to a woman so that. So that you can pursue a woman successfully, that's what you've got to do. That's what you've got to figure out is how can I be a protector and provider? So being a provider in our world is going to mean developing a set of skills that have value in the marketplace. And the more skills you can accumulate, the more value you have.

So you should be, you know, we talked about being a high value man, but that's really what that ought to mean. And then being a protector. Okay? You know, the best protector is going to be somebody who's basically physically fit, who makes the most of himself physically. He's going to develop himself physically. And that's really important, too. Okay? There's other skills and whatnot that can come with that also. But, you know, you get the picture. Okay? So that's what it takes.

So again, you don't have to drive the Lamborghini or make a million dollars. Okay? Now, I do think there's one other aspect to this. When it comes to men who want to get married and sort of what you're up against women today are, they have more unrealistic standards and expectations than ever before. Okay?

Some of that is because the sexual revolution and promiscuity, and they might think that a guy that would never consider marrying them might sleep with them, and they think, oh, I should be able to get a guy like that as my husband, when really he would have no interest in marrying her. So there's what the red pill guys call the alpha widow. That's a real thing. And that's one of the reasons why the sexual revolution has been so destructive.

There's also what's called hypergamy, which is the idea that a woman wants to marry up. She wants to marry somebody who is superior to her because she was built to submit to him. She was made to be in submission to him. So she wants to marry somebody who she's too, who she deems as worthy of submission.

And I always tell people, and I kind of pick this up from CS Lewis, headship and respect are not just practical necessities in marriage to make the marriage work in a, you know, in a peaceful, functional way, they are erotic and romantic necessities as well. Okay. She's not going to be attracted to a man she doesn't respect, so she's got to respect you.

Okay. So. But the problem is today a man is not, you know, it used to be, you know, again, 50 years ago, you're sort of competing with the other men in your hometown for all the ladies there. Okay, well, now you're competing with, you know, millions of other men across the whole planet on dating apps and whatnot. So, so, so the competition, so to speak, is a whole lot more difficult. Okay. Now, again, I think in christian circles, we can reign a lot of that in. Okay. Because, I mean, I'm not.

I'm not saying nobody should ever do online dating. I know people have found their spouse that way, and it's turned out really well. But I do think that women need to be realistic in their expectations, and oftentimes today, they're not. And so this is another thing that young men are up against, and it's very, very difficult. How do you compete with every single man across the world with a dating profile? Just very, very difficult to do. So those are things that men have to recognize.

So men should treat life like a video game and keep leveling up, work on yourself, become the best possible version of yourself, the best possible version that you can be. By the grace of God, if grace restores nature, the gospel is going to make you more of a man, not less a man. It's going to make you more masculine, not less. Okay. Not toxically masculine, but genuinely masculine. Okay. And then come down, you know, understand female nature.

I mean, I remember when I was growing up, you know, and I told the youth pastor story. The other thing that was kind of a trope among young men, you know, when I was growing up is that, oh, women just can't be understood. They're just. They're forever a mystery and a riddle. You know, it's a riddle wrapped in enigma, and you're never going to understand women. And I remember reading when I was, before I was married, first Peter, chapter three.

And Peter says, live with your wife in an understanding way. In other words, you've got to understand your wife. And I remember thinking, that's really interesting. What does it mean to understand her? And I came to the realization over time that, well, yeah, there are certain things that can be understood about women. I can understand everything. Proverbs 30 talks about how the way of a man with a maiden is a mystery. Okay. It's one of those unexplainable things. So there's. There's.

You're never going to eliminate the mystery, but you can. You can understand women. You can understand your wife. You can understand that girl that you want to pursue and make your wife. There are certain things about her as a woman that you can understand. And if you do understand those things, it will greatly help you in your pursuit of her. And I think a lot of men just don't understand female nature.

Well. And again, these are things that used to just be passed on, I think, from father to son. You know, kind of. There's kind of a folk wisdom just passed along, you know, things that just kind of everybody picks up and absorbs along the way. And again, that cycle got broken somewhere. That passing of the baton got lost, I think, because of the sexual revolution and just the confusion brought on by separating sex from marriage and God's design and all of that.

And so men are having to relearn that in our day, and that's where we are. I think there was a baton that got failed to be passed to women as well. Absolutely. Mothers just used to tell their daughters, this is how men are. But that baton didn't just get failed, it got thrown out. Like, oh, this baton. This has been pure oppression. I've got a dozen different questions that I can ask from what you said.

But I think the thing that feels most relevant to get into is like, okay, let's say that we have a lot of men that have genuinely been working on themselves, and they are walking into a situation where it's literally like the antwives. They're gone, they're gone. Maybe they'll come back, maybe they won't. And so you have a lot of young, successful men in various ways appropriate for their station, again, whose prospects they're looking like.

Marriage is going to be a near impossibility until a certain point, and then, and only then, will a woman come limping back into the church. And it's like, hey, I got this situation from my past, or whatever it looks like. And the guys are like, we did everything right, and now you're coming back in. So there's that component which I think feeds into a lot of men's anger.

So maybe we can talk about that, that sort of reconciliation, because I don't see a magic wand getting waved to fix the situation where women are getting heavily more radicalized into the sexual revolution as men are exiting. Like, men are walking out of the building and women are still playing around inside. And so how does that get fixed? So that's the problem on one hand. So the problem on the other hand is that in the meantime, while men are waiting, they're just.

Because young men, I think, are made very much to take on the responsibility of wife and children and family. And I think it's Doug Wilson who says, like, a truck drives better with a load in it, right? And so you have these young men with nothing to pull, and they find each other online because their pastors or the men's communities at their churches don't have much to them.

And so while they're waiting, they have all this excess energy that if they're not going to put into porn in video games, they tend to be putting into. That appears to be radicalization. I mean, I think you're right. So on one hand, you have a situation where you have young men who are just waiting, and they don't understand the notion of being in submission to authority. And then for their waiting, they'll be rewarded with the woman who's been used and discarded by the sexual revolution.

This is a problem. I was talking with someone yesterday, and how many guys, praise God, this is not a problem for my generation, nor for yours, but how many men are really going to have to worry about the issue? And I shudder to even say it. Like, yeah, I met this girl. She's really nice. You've been dating for a while. But then she told me she had an Onlyfans profile for a little while, and now there's all this stuff for, all over the Internet. Like, that's going to be a thing.

That is going to be a thing. It is. What do we, what do we do about. I don't. I don't even know there's an answer, but I have to ask. Well, yeah, and again, I mean, there's, you know, in a case like that, there's not a clear answer. I'm not saying that no man should ever marry that woman, but, I mean, there's baggage, and then there's baggage. I mean, you know, that that is going to be a whole lot for somebody to deal with. And I. Yeah, it's just gonna be very, very difficult.

So. And, yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, the hope would be that men are keeping themselves pure and chaste in the meantime. I mean, that's the kind of scenario you're describing where men have done that, women have it. That's not always the case, obviously. Sometimes the men, sometimes the men are looking at porn or onlyfans or they've been promiscuous themselves. So, you know that. And, you know, we talk about double standards, and double standards can go both directions.

So sometimes you think about, like, in the past, and there was kind of this double standard that, like, a man can be promiscuous with no consequences, but then he wants to marry a woman who has not been promiscuous. Okay, well, there's a fundamental injustice to that. Not to mention that actually being promiscuous does impact men in negative ways, not perhaps to the same degree or in the same ways that it would a woman. Okay, but. But it. But it.

But it's not like you can ever sin and there not be consequences. Consequences to that. Okay, so there are consequences. So, you know, ideally, you've got men and women getting married as virgins, and, you know, they gain their sexual experience together in the covenant of marriage. But today, you've got a double standard that works the other way. You know, you've got a lot of times where the double standard advantages the woman, you know?

And some of that is the kind of thing I talked about, like with the magbation book, where the woman is the innocent victim. I think sometimes women re narrate things in their heads where they're the innocent victim because they really can't bear the thought that, you know, of what their promiscuity means. So they. They lie. They basically lie to themselves, you know, about. About what's happened. And I made reference to that, to that chapter in Megbatia's book.

I'll just say the whole chapter is really good. And I thought she dealt with the issue very, very wisely, and it's because she is one of those women who understands female nature. A lot of women don't understand their own nature, and a lot of women don't understand how, for example, devious women can be in trying to attract men's attention with immodesty and whatnot.

So, I mean, she understands those things and understands that women really do have agency and really are responsible for the decisions they make and some kind of, you know, if you're going to use a power differential to excuse sexual sin, you can really use a power differential excuse for anything. You know, your boss asks you to do something unethical, well, there's a power differential. So obviously, I'm no longer culpable for this. This is what the Nazis said. We were just obeying orders.

You know, if you're given unethical orders, you're, you know, you're still. You're responsible for what you do with them, you know? And so you should not. You should not, you know, just because somebody in authority over you tells you to sin doesn't mean that you can sin and it's no longer sin.

So. Or, you know, anybody that ever denied the faith under threat of persecution, we just have to say that they didn't do anything wrong because there's a power differential between the persecutor and the persecuted. So therefore, you could just deny the faith under pressure, and there would not be anything wrong with that, which obviously, that's just nonsense.

So there are all kinds of problems with the way our culture thinks about these things, all kinds of problems with the way our culture deals with the male female relationship. And, and, you know, I remember Harrison Butker, you know, the, the player for the Kansas City Chiefs that gave the talk at the, at the small Catholic, you know, very conservative Catholic, Roman Catholic college. And they got in a lot of trouble for it later, you know, in the, in the media.

But he said to the women, you most of all have been lied to. Like, you've been lied to more than anybody. And I think that is exactly right. And, but the thing is, you can't, it's not like you can have one sex that thrives while the other sex flounders. Okay? The sexes stand or fall together. Okay? And this is why a, you know, like, a war between the sexes is nonsense, because either both sexes win or both sexes lose.

There's no way that you can get what you want without the other sex also getting what they were made for. So, you know, the sexes are going to win or lose together. There's this mutuality. We're bound together. And so in cases like this, like what you've described, I mean, the man and the woman are both going to lose. They're both losing something that's really, really valuable. So, I mean, what do we do?

I think the best possible thing we can do is try to disciple the up and coming generation in a much better way than the boys and the girls. I think for those who are already, like you described, guys already in their twenties and trying to find someone, and are there girls out there that don't have so much baggage that it's not somebody you want to marry? I would just say get yourself into circles where you've got a much better chance of finding somebody who is worthy of marriage.

That's the best thing I could tell somebody to do in that kind of situation. And I think there are uncle, you know, today there's all these memes out there that communicate this where, like, you know, to be a rebel in 2024 is basically to have a wife and kids and, like, a normal family. That, that's, that's the counterculture now because the mainstream culture has, has become so perverted that now just doing normal stuff makes you the counterculture.

So, you know, there are still pockets where that's the way of life that people are looking for and expecting. And I'm thankful that, you know, my kids basically found that it is out there, but you might have to work to find it, depending on where you are and what your circumstances are. I have so many questions and so much. This is great. I mean, I've been living in this stuff for so long.

I think if I'm going to do my choose your own adventure path through the conversation, I think the thing that I want to touch on first is actually something that you said in one of your articles, and then I want to get to maybe some advice for parents on how to raise that next generation.

But I think one of the things that we're seeing is it was in your article about Nancy Pearcey's toxic war on masculinity, and you articulated the problems that I had with that book very well, while also being very gracious to the things about that book that I thought were quite good. There was a phrase that perhaps she used it in the book, or maybe you coined it, but I loved it. It was free bird masculinity. I think you described it.

It's awesome because I think there's a younger generation parallel to that, the whole sigma male thing, like the Joker and Ryan Gosling from drive and stuff. So, like, I see these as a generational wave of what masculinity was, perhaps to the boomer generation. Right. When they were young was like, you know, one of my favorite songs is Midnight Rider by the Allman Brothers. Right. And what's that kind of thing? Exactly.

So. And that echoes forward into this whole sigma male, no one understands me, I'm outside of the hierarchy kind of vibe. Maybe we can talk a little bit about that, because that's a big. That's a big thing that's out there for young men right now. Well, I think. I think a lot of it is about fleeing responsibilities. Okay? And that's what often gets, you know, glorified or glamorized for men is being detached so that you can flee responsibilities.

And in country music and especially a lot of rock music, I mean. Absolutely. And, of course, a lot of just pop culture in general, this is. This is absolutely what gets pushed. Like, the ultimate male is the self made man who can't be tied down. He sort of drifts from one woman to another. And so he's getting his sexual needs met, but there's kind of the sexual adventurism, and he's never tied down by anything.

Okay. And that, for a long time, I think, was held out as kind of like, that's the ideal male wife is. You know, you don't have the responsibilities that come with a permanent relationships in your life. And that's actually a feminist ii know, in my opinion, because it is. It is avoiding responsibilities that God wants you to take on. Okay, so in the song Free Bird, you know, he's saying goodbye to this woman. He's like, I can't be tied down. I'm a free bird.

Okay. And again and again and, you know, and so much rock music. I mean, that's kind of a theme. Like, you know, you just kind of move from woman to woman, and. And that's kind of the heart of the sexual revolution. The heart of the sexual revolution for men was sex without consequence. So sex outside of marriage. And so sex that's not procreative, that's just recreational sex. That is basically using another person to have my own needs and desires met, and I can't be tied down.

And of course, women then try to imitate that, and it's a disaster for men. It's an even greater catastrophe in certain ways for women. But, yeah, so that is a huge issue. And I think what you're describing and what I'm seeing is a lot of men who see the problems with that and they don't want that anymore. They can see that that's not going to be fulfilling, that.

I want to be a man who's got a family and who builds a household and who leaves a legacy and who passes wealth on to the next generation. That's what I want, and that's good. That's good. But that tendency for men to try to flee responsibility is. I mean, that's one of the ways that masculinity goes wrong. Yeah, and I think you nailed it. It is a flight from response, a romanticized flight from responsibility. In fact, from maturities. Another word I would use, it's a flight from maturity.

So we've talked about the failure to launch for a long time, boys who don't really grow into men and who simply don't take on those masculine responsibilities. And it's the same kind of thing. It's a failure to launch. Well, maybe we can divert for just a second, because many of the men who fail to launch, and you mentioned this earlier, they have overbearing mothers.

And I think this is probably one of the biggest dirty secrets that's going on in America right now, is the overbearing, narcissistic, smothering mother who purposefully prevents her boy son from growing into a man by subtly subverting his manhood, by subtly picking away when he tries to show independence, by subverting the father. Because this is a real thing, the narcissistic mother. It completely undermines our cultural image of the mothers as gods. You can't say anything about the mother.

It's like, no, motherhood can go very, very wrong. Maybe we can talk about that for a minute, because I know many men that have been through that, and they find that that is a subject that's like the biggest red line area. Like, no one can say anything bad about my mom. It's like, well, let's talk about your childhood. So the smothering mother, the controlling mother, the overbearing mother. Cs Lewis captured this really well in a few different places in his writings.

Yes. That is a very common form of toxic femininity. Okay. Femininity gone wrong. And it is hard because you're criticizing mothers and, you know, like, mothers are just. Have always kind of been this protected class. Like, you can't say anything, you know, to criticize a mother. But we have to. I mean, we absolutely have to because motherhood can go wrong, and it's incredibly destructive when it is. But here's the thing.

When I see an overprotective mother or an overbearing mother, okay, and I could give you lots of stories where I've seen this play out. What I always want to know is, where is dad? Okay. Now, a lot of times, the single mother situation. And then what I would say is, well, what that kid needs is a lot of male father figures, father like figures in his life who can counteract some of that.

And he also needs somebody to just come tell his mom how she's doing a huge disservice to him, by the way she's raising him. And she's, you know, she's gonna have to. She's gonna have to basically learn to kind of, you know, lengthen the leash a little bit and not be so smothering. But. But in a situation where dad is around, and I see that happening, I was gonna. Where is. Where is dad? And why is he abdicating?

Okay. What I would say is that behind every overprotective mother is an effeminate father. Okay. And that's just the dynamic. Okay? So. So dad needs to step in. So. So I think what a lot of homes lack, I I like to think of masculinity as kind of emotional grounding. Like, if you've read Edwin Friedman, one of the flaws with Friedman's book failure of nerve is that he leaves gender out of it. He kind of writes as if leadership is this androgynous thing. That's the problem.

With the book, one of several you could point out. And Joe Rigney has done, I think, some good work trying to fix some of those flaws in the book, basically by writing his own book on this. But I think of masculinity as a kind of grounding in the home. And so when masculinity is functioning as it should, it kind of grounds, you know, think of, like, an electrical ground. It kind of grounds the emotional charge that would otherwise sort of make the home very explosive and very reactive.

And so when a dad's not doing his job and there is no masculine grounding, then the emotions of the mother just start to kind of run the home and kind of fill it with this hypersensitive reactivity. And a mother becomes hypercritical of her kids. She becomes extremely anxious about her kids, and then she projects. I mean, why do we have so many anxious kids around today? Because they have anxious mothers. They've got anxious parents, but especially anxious mothers.

That's why we have so many anxious kids today. So it's just a rule that effeminate men are always at the root of toxic femininity. Okay, this is another way I put it. It's kind of, you know, I mean, somebody could take this out of context, but behind every crazy woman is a man who made it necessary. Okay. Because he failed her in some way. Okay. Perhaps behind every crazy woman is a man who drove her to it because he did not act as the kind of man he should have been.

That female craziness is the result of not having a man take care of her and ground her emotions and guide her emotions and provide framing for her emotions the way that he should. Okay? So when you see that in the home, that that is the dynamic. When I talked about, you know, southern families being very matriarchal, I mean, that that's really what's happening is the mother runs the show, and dad doesn't have any idea how to deal with his wife.

He doesn't have any idea how to confront her or correct her. Like when he sees her being hypercritical of the kids or when he sees her anxiety. You know, anxiety is contagious. It spreads when he sees her anxiety, basically making the home this very reactive place, he's got to be the one to step in, confront that, deal with it, and then basically contain those emotions and redirect them.

And a husband and father who won't do that for his household, he's really, you could say it's fatherly malpractice. He's failing his family. By not doing that. So, yeah, that's absolutely a huge issue. So I want to push back on that just a little bit. Just because I typically push back on the notion that women's behavior is entirely determined by men. I can go with you maybe like 90% of the way, but realistically, some women are just, there's a gravitational pull towards crazy in them.

So if we can just agree on that, because I think that the dialogue men naturally take on responsibility, that's what we're built to do. Authority flows to. I'm going to butcher Doug Wilson's great quote. Authority goes to where responsibility goes. Something like that. The man who takes on more responsibility is given more authority.

And there does come a point in every woman's life and path where she has to say, I have to get myself under control, and that they have the ability to do that even in scenarios where husbands and fathers are failing them. So that women's behavior is not. Deter is not hard. Deterministic is the word that I was looking for based on men's choices. And what I'm giving you is not a determinism but a pattern, correct? Yes. I would be fine with your 90% comment.

I'm talking about a pattern, not something that's deterministic. You can have a husband who does a really good job with these things, and his wife just rebels against it. That's right. Okay. I mean, that's totally possible. You can have a husband who loves his wife well, seeks to lead her well, and she rebels against it. Okay, that's totally possible. But as a general pattern. Correct. Okay. When men do their jobs well, women fall in line just as a general pattern.

So I would say it's more proverbial wisdom than some kind of ironclad, you know, deterministic law. So I think we're agreed on that. And in saying that, too, in saying that a, you know, behind every woman's craziness is an abdicating man. I'm not excusing craziness. I'm not saying she's not culpable, but she is. I mean, you know, if somebody provokes you to sin, you're still responsible for your sin. You should have resisted the provocation.

Okay. You know, but it's just interesting to me that if a man, if a married man's wife will not have sex with him and he starts using pornography, everybody knows that. Her sin of sexual refusal does not excuse his sin of pornography. Everybody knows that. And everybody would, you know, every, every sane person would agree with that. But when you, when the roles are reversed. Okay. Um, oftentimes, the. The other person's sin is used as an excuse. The man's sin is used as an excuse for the woman.

Okay? If a woman hasn't. Has an adulterous relationship, sometimes that gets excused because, well, her husband was just not, uh, emotionally connecting with her. That's right. You know, so. So again, it, you know, who. Who, you know, basically, who's held responsible and who gets excuses made for them. And the way our gynocentric culture is set up, women's sin gets excused, and men sin, you know, men bear the brunt, you know, of their. I mean, all too often.

I'm not saying there are cases where men get off the hook or where women aren't held responsible. There are, obviously. I'm just, again, talking about a general cultural pattern. That's what you see. Okay? I mean, you see it. You see it in the legal system, wherever men and women can commit the same crime, and the men. The man gets a harsher punishment than the woman does. Okay, what about equality there? You know, you see it.

I mean, if we really believed in an egalitarian version of equality, you know, there would be no such thing as alimony or something like that. Because why, you know, if they're really equal, why can't she just pay her own way? You know, why do his wages need to be garnished to pay her expenses? You know, it's just so.

I mean, there's all kinds of ways in which, I think, basically, our culture is very schizophrenic about these things and all kinds of ways in which, basically, feminism has overrun common sense and any notion of justice. And, again, it's just created or intensified all kinds of problems for us. I agree. I agree. Thank you for all that.

Yeah, I think from having come out of the manosphere, and I still interact with some of those guys, not in the christian world, but in the secular world, I've noticed that there's a tendency for fatalism. All women are like that. And then determinism somewhere it's a man's fault. And so I've tried very hard to navigate, like, hey, so there's truth in those patterns. So, like, how do I. How do I navigate through all that?

So I appreciate that, because I think it's really important in the christian world that we hold up scripture as, like, this is the objective standard that we're all accountable to. And that's. That's what. That's what gives. That's what I think, theoretically, is supposed to give the christian church so much stability and weightiness, like, this is the word of God. It's not going anywhere. It's eternal, it's unbreakable. You can break yourself against it, and that's what you're supposed to do.

But there's a reluctance in some ways to do that for all the reasons that we talked about. Yeah, you're exactly right. So I guess I want to, with the time remaining that we have, I do want to talk just briefly about.

So there are parents now who are raising young children, teenagers and younger, say like adolescents and younger, twelve and below, who are looking at this and wanting to avoid, wanting their daughters, particularly to avoid the multi car pile up that is feminism, that's ahead of them down the road.

But the cultural pressure, the pounds per square inch that feminism puts on both husbands and wives, mothers and fathers today to guide their daughter's choices in a particularly culturally acceptable way must be immense within the church as well. Particularly when young girls themselves will report repeatedly that when they say, I would like to be a housewife and a mother, they get mocked by their own peers.

So I guess the question that's up for me is that particularly to undo the sexual revolution? I think it starts with guiding women because there's been no shortage of guidance for men in that regard. What can parents of children, adolescents and younger, begin to do within themselves, within their communities, within their households, to undo these and withstand the pressures that they may face in their workplace and their communities, and potentially also within the churches and even themselves?

Yeah. So many different answers to that question need to be given. So I'll start with this one. Is to model what you want in your own home and in your own marriage. Okay, so, for example, motherhood needs to be prized and celebrated, not treated as second best or an interruption to career. I mean, I remember when my kids were growing up, and as they got a little bit older, I was like, I would say at the dinner table, like, aren't you glad that you did not have a feminist mother?

That your mom was always there for you, that she was making the home a great place for you, and filling this home with love and beauty and goodness and aren't you glad you had that? And not a woman who is out there trying to drawn away from her family to go try to pursue the corporate ladder and that kind of thing? So model it in your own home.

The best way to prepare your kids for happy marriages of their own is for them to grow up in a home where there is a happy marriage it's kind of cliche to say the best thing that you can do for your kids is to love your spouse really well, or if your husband love your spouse and if you're a wife, to respect your husband. But that, that is what you need to do. That. That is where it begins.

And I've seen a lot of kids, you know, kids that are now getting into their twenties who do not want to, they come from christian homes but do not want to be married because their parents marriages seemed so unhappy. Yeah. And so it's kind of given them the sense that, why would I get married? It just didn't look like it was that much fun. And I think that pastors also play a role in this. We need to be really careful how we talk about family life and marriage.

I think there's a tendency amongst pastors to only talk about the negatives and the challenges and the sacrifices required and not also talk, or talk even more about the joys and the blessings. Like, think about psalm 128. Psalm 128 does not describe any of the. I mean, obviously there are, you know, there are struggles and difficulties and sacrifices to be made in family life, but psalm 128 is just this beautiful celebration of what God designed the family to be.

And I think we need a lot more of that. I mean, I would tell you to sing, you know, sing song. There's some great metrical versions of psalm 128. Sing psalm 128 in your family and make that the vision that your kids grow up with, that this is what family life is supposed to look like, and it's filled with blessing and joy and peace. There's nothing better than this. And, you know, it even ends with, you know, seeing your, you know, your, your grandchildren is how the psalm ends.

So that's even planting a seed of, like, oh, you know, mom and dad want grandkids, you know, so I would say that kind of thing, and. But I would say, in addition to the example, there's got to be a lot of explicit teaching and training done. I mean, I had a conversation with a dad a while back, not somebody from my church, but somebody whose kids kind of grew up alongside mine. And, you know, my kids are getting married and his are not.

And he's like, why are your kids, you know, why are your kids. I mean, it's just interesting that your kids are married and mine don't seem to really have any interest, and he's got girls, and he and I just, I mean, we didn't have a full conversation. I didn't get to say everything that I was thinking but apart, part of what I wanted to communicate is, I know what you emphasized with your girls, and it was sports and it was academics.

I mean, you really pushed your girls hard to pursue athletic competition, and you really pushed them to pursue the best possible, you know, school opportunities with little regard for what that might do to them spiritually. And I don't think, you know, I don't think this dad ever really emphasized the glory that is found in being a wife and a mother and a homemaker and how glorious that really is. And so he kind of got what he trained them for.

And I think now he's realizing, I mean, again, I don't think he's seeing this, but, I mean, I think this is what he would need to see, is that he basically made a mistake by what he emphasized when his kids were growing up. So I think far too many conservative christian households raise their kids in an androgynous way. They raise their girls like they were boys. Okay? And that's a huge, huge, huge mistake.

So you talked about, you know, the little girl who says she wants to be a wife and a mother someday. She needs to be applauded for that. And, yes, there's nothing better for you than that. Now, you may do some other things. You may be a school teacher for a while or whatever. You know, I mean, a lot of women will do other things along the way, but what needs to be most celebrated is motherhood.

What needs to be most celebrated is the fact that a woman can bring a new, everlasting soul into this world through her body. There's nothing, there's nothing more amazing than that. There's no greater miracle than that in this world. So, you know, I think a lot of it is the teaching and training we do. And then, so, and then I think the other thing, it really. So, so I actually just had a, I mentioned this on Twitter earlier today, actually, and I've written a blog post on this before.

I think having a happy marriage is really pretty simple. I mean, it's not easy. Simple is not the same as easy. But it really comes down to two things. Okay. It comes down to virtue and polarity. Okay. Virtue and polarity. You have to have virtue. Okay? Yeah. What I would call just the fruit of the spirit or godly christian character, because without that, there's just going to be constant, just constant friction in the home. You've got to have virtue.

You've got to have high character to have peace in the home. But you, but the, but the way the fruit of the spirit gets expressed is never androgynous, you know, everything is qualified by your sex. You're either, you know, a man or a woman. So there's got to be sexual polarity. There needs to be. And I'm. The Bible does not prescribe a sexual division of labor. Down to every last detail. But it does in a big picture kind of way. Show us a sexual division of labor.

And you see this, I think, especially in Genesis, chapter three. Where the man is cursed mainly in the realm of provision. And the woman is cursed mainly in the realm of multiplication. Because those are their respective zones where they're going to be most. That's the center of gravity. The center of gravity for a man is, I am a provider. I go take Dominion in the world to provide for my family. And the center of gravity for a woman is I am a life giver.

I nurture new life and bring it into the world. Okay? That, you know, what does it mean to be a man? You're oriented towards dominion. What does it mean to be a woman? You're oriented towards multiplication. Now, men also have a role in multiplication. Women also have a role in dominion. I'm not. I'm not. It's not, you know, it's not. I'm not compartmentalizing here. But I'm saying in terms of an emphasis, that's your fundamental vocation.

We need to be teaching our children about sexual polarity from an early age. Boys do this, girls do that. Okay? Now, you can end up with overly rigid stereotypes. But the reality is, in our day, in our world, in our culture, that's not our problem. Okay? That's not the main problem we fall into. So teach sex, teach virtue, teach the fruit of the spirit. Because that's one key ingredient. The other ingredient is sexual polarity. Teach about the differences between men and women.

And obviously, as your kids get older, you teach that in more. Well, just in deeper and fuller ways. And you get into the biology of sex itself. And how babies are created and all that kind of thing. But parents sometimes talk. Okay? When do I have the sex talk with my child? And I would say it's not a talk. It is an 18 to 20 year and beyond, even in some ways, conversation. You're teaching your kids about the differences between men and women all along the way.

And so when you get into the actual specifics of reproduction. That kind of fits with everything else you've been teaching and saying about the differences between men and women all along. Incredible. I wish we had double the time that we do. As I know you have an appointment to get to. The listeners of this podcast will know that this is actually the final episode of the Renaissance of Mendez. It's about to become the Will Spencer podcast.

And so this will be the last interview under the renaissance of men banner. And you've just said in over four years, you've said everything I've ever wanted anyone to ever say. So I could not think of a better capstone to this. Thank you so much, sir. I'm deeply appreciative. I've been very blessed by this conversation. I think my listeners have been as well. Well, thank you, Will. Thank you for your work and it's been great being with you, and I'd be glad to come on again sometime.

We can continue the conversation. That will definitely happen. Is there any place you'd like to send men and women to find out more about you and what you do before we go? Yeah. Yeah. So I have got a our church, of course, has got a website, so if you search for Trinity Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, you're likely to find you should be able to find us. We've also got a pastor's page, which is where my blog is. It's TPC. So Trinity Presbyterian church tpcpastorspage.com.

i've got a blog there and then I also am on Twitter and I always have to look to make sure I can remember my exact handle. Vicker 1970 319 73 so. Vicker 1973. Yeah. Yeah. That's where people can find me. Those will be in the show notes. Thank you so much, sir. I'm again very blessed by this conversation. Very grateful for your ministry and your thoughtfulness. Thank you, Will. Thank you for your work and your time. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Renaissance of Men podcast.

Visit us on the [email protected] or on your favorite social media platform at Ren of men. This is the renaissance of men. You are the renaissance.