Strong Man, Weak Man

I’ve been wanting to write this post for some time, but never found a perfect time to do so. In light of the Ted Haggard scandal, with so many advocating a greater honesty, more openness, and a greater reliance on personal confession (myself included), I wish to discuss one enormous barrier to that advice.

Two months from now will mark the 30th anniversary of my conversion to Christ. I’ve witnessed plenty of trends in the American Church during that time, but only in recent years has the Lord opened my eyes to one of the more intractable prejudices.

We Christian men have a serious disconnect concerning honesty, openness, and personal confession. We may claim that those things are good for the soul, but God help any man who truly practices those disciplines.

How so?

While I’m speaking solely from what my own eyes have seen, men who consistently share their personal failings will eventually get a cold shoulder from other men in the church. Men who talk about their mistakes, who are unafraid to communicate with others, get treated like wimps, pansies, wusses and any other unmasculine name you can think of. Strong man, weak man Other men will start spending less time with them, choosing instead to huddle up with the group of guys who prefer to talk about last night’s football game—the same group of guys that never lets their inner demons be known.

At a time when Christian men are sucking up men’s books featuring tough-as-nails guys who hunt bear with a pointy stick, the man who weeps over his own sin gets relegated to the quilting bee. How we ever ended up with that sort of thinking is beyond me, but I’ve seen it. Better to be the strong silent type and laugh at a ribald joke on occasion than to communicate one’s failure.

I’d like to think this misperception’s only been around since churches started mimicking the “win-at-all-cost” propaganda of the business world, but I’m not so certain. Perhaps we’ve always cast a negative glance at the man who talks just a bit too much about his failings. Nothing kills more men in their hearts than to have someone think them soft. And nothing is softer than to talk about one’s own sin.

Is it any wonder then that so many men flameout in spectacular ways? And it’s usually the man’s man, not the confessional guy, who winds up incinerated. Why the enormous pressure? Are we that performance driven in the man’s world that we can’t handle a little personal confession?

We’ve got to stop the denigration. We can talk all we want about communicating our own failings and sins, but if we’re still equating that kind of openness with being a wimp, we’ll never get anywhere. I don’t care if it’s fear, pride, or self-loathing that’s driving that shunning, we’ve got to convince Christian men that living a life of honest confession won’t wither their cojones.

The Real American Christian “Either/Or”

Yesterday, I promised that the last few posts here before I go on break for a month would be incendiary. Thus begins the fire…

Those familiar with Cerulean Sanctum know that one of my pet peeves is making Christianity into a set of “either/or” dichotomies. One of my favorites to skewer is the classic “Doctrine or Good Works” silliness that seems to be the hallmark of great swatches of the Godblogosphere. In fact, I would say that “Doctrine or _______” is the classic formula for most of these false dichotomies.

But as I get older, one true “either/or” emerges as so unyieldingly true that it functions as the bellweather of what we in America consider right and good. Unfortunately, I believe we fall on the wrong side of the either/or.

In recent days, there have been two great posts over at The Thinklings, one of the first blogs I linked to here at Cerulean Sanctum. The first includes a quote from Soren Kierkegaard on Christian scholarship:

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

The second post discusses all the “young dudes” and quotes a well-known pastor on how the Church in America can’t live without them:

The problem in the church today is just a bunch of nice, soft, tender, chickafied church boys. 60% of Christians are chicks and the 40% that are dudes are still sort of…chicks. It’s just sad.
We’re looking around going, How come we’re not innovative? Cause all the innovative dudes are home watching football or they’re out making money or climbing a mountain or shooting a gun or working on their truck. They look at the church like that’s a nice thing for women and children. So the question is if you want to be innovative: How do you get young men? All this nonsense on how to grow the church. One issue: young men. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. They’re going to get married, make money, make babies, build companies, buy real estate. They’re going to make the culture of the future. If you get the young men you win the war, you get everything. You get the families, the women, the children, the money, the business, you get everything. If you don’t get the young men you get nothing.

At first glance, they seem unrelated. But that’s only because we’re missing the true “either/or” here.

Jesus makes that dichotomy clearer:

Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you.
—John 6:27a ESV

The “either/or” I’m talking about here is money or ministry.

When we wonder why the Church in America is so ineffective compared with the Church in other nations of the world, the reason can be summed up simply: we chose money over ministry.

Many Christian writers have lamented the increasing loss of men in our churches. We’ve got books seeking to explain why men are bored with church. Great minds wrestle with the malaise that’s settled over the typical Christian male in America. Not that I’m a “great mind,” but I’ve talked about this in great detail, too. (See the post category “Men” in the sidebar.)

This is where Kierkegaard comes in. We talk and talk and talk about ministry, but we don’t do any (at least not much that amounts to anything like what you see in China or South America right now), for no other reason than it forces us to decide the question of money or ministry. So we numb ourselves to the reality of what the Bible repeatedly says on this issue because if we come to the conclusion that ministry comes first, our neat little Christian American world straight out of a Thomas Kinkade painting MUST come to a crashing end. Or as Soren so ably notes: “My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?”

The easy choice... To the “dude” mentioned in the other quote above, choosing ministry first means an end to the fast track to the corporate boardroom. It means obscurity and lack of earthly success and worldly power. It means no bestselling book on how it was done MY WAY. It means no pneumatic, bleach-blonde trophy wife; no McMansion; no 401k; no vacation home in the Bahamas; no outrageously fast sports car or freeway-churning, Mini-Cooper-consuming, 4×4 SUV; and it means a whole lot less of everything that America has come to stand for in the beginning of this new millennium.

Choosing ministry scrambles everything that “prominent pastor” wants to leverage. The hotshot young men he claims he wants so badly will be boat anchors in his church because they already made the choice and money came up the winner. Sure, these young dudes may conjure up some business-variant church program that will look good for a couple years in the church before it sinks, fruitless, into oblivion, but then what?

The real men who chose ministry? Few limelighters want them. Ministry isn’t sexy. It looks bad on a résumé. The world considers Christian ministry and thinks, What a massive waste of time.

Sadly, that’s what 99.9 percent of Christian men in America think, too. And it’s one of the reasons they’re bored, and why the Church is so ineffective.

The man who chooses money first MUST spend all his waking moments doing everything he can to ensure the steady supply of money comes in. What ministry can he possibly do? Something’s gotta give and it’s the ministry.

It’s not all the men’s fault, either. The juxtaposition of Christianity and shopping that seems so natural in the lives of so many Christian women has much to explain why Christian men chose money first. You can’t read a blog by Christian women and not stumble upon the criteria they use to judge a man to be a proper Christian husband, the first being—always—that he be a good provider.

But when did being a provider get the “good” modifier? And what determines “good”? Is that the difference between a no-name handbag from WalMart versus one from Saks with a Versace label on it? To butcher the title of a famous novel, the devil may wear Prada, but so do a lot of Christian women.

It’s hard to avoid the strange Evangelical definition of manhood we’ve developed. Evangelicals affirm that men are called to be the prophets, priests and kings of their household, but a lot of Christian women have tended to de-emphasize the prophet aspect of it to focus on the king—or perhaps that should be “captain of industry,” instead. Yet what soul-stirring, repentance-laden prophetic message can be expected from a man who’s always thinking, How can I make more money so my wife can buy more of the stuff that makes her happy?

The best blog entry of 2006 goes to Michael Spencer over at Internet Monk. In fact, I would go so far as to say that his post “American Idolatry: The Good Life” is the single best blog post I’ve read in five years of blog reading. There is NO HOPE for the Church in America if we don’t start saying yes to ministry and no to money. God’s taken His Spirit elsewhere, and not only do we not realize it, we simply substituted Him for whatever our money could buy. (Although that’s been tried before—unsuccessfully: Acts 8:18-24.)

Now you might find this odd in light of last week’s posts, but honestly, I’m not immune to this problem. I freely admit that I’m trapped in the middle of this either/or. It eats at me day and night. What scares me is that for all those Christians who choose ministry over money, they won’t find support from other American Christians because other Christians can’t understand their rejection of money. That’s primarily because those others don’t have their hearts and minds focused on eternity. They’re focused on the moment because, in their own view, Christ simply isn’t compelling enough to warrant so extreme a response.

But the response is EXTREME. It means death. The cross says, Now here you die, here and now. All your desires, all your hopes, all of you. It also means real life. Have we tasted it?

We talk about counting the cost. It’s great talk. Everyone feels good talking about it because it sounds spiritual, makes us look devout, and smacks of ministry. But then, as Kierkegaard so ably notes, we go back to our cushy, monied lives, look in the mirror, and then immediately forget what we look like.

But God knows.

God help us.

Leer and Foaming in Las Wendy’s

Oh yeah, THAT poster... The three of them stood at the Wendy’s counter. Eyes would flit off in one direction, then the guy closest to me would look me square in the face for a nanosecond before returning to that object of fixation.

My son and I had stopped for lunch at this Wendy’s on our way home from a visit to the doctor. Eerily quiet place. None of the customers said a word, though at least fifteen people sat at the tables.

I finally followed the blank stare of those three young male employees after one overfilled a drink, his attention shattered. What consumed their thoughts?

A table of four 50-ish men, a table of two teenage guys, then two construction guys over in the corner, a table with a stunning example of the female of the species, a table of….

Oh. Oh my.

That male instinct kicked in and my head immediately swiveled back a table for one brief second. When I snapped back around to pick up my food, the tallest counter guy greeted me with one of those smiles.

She was about 19 or 20, a gorgeous young brunette, shades of Jennifer Connelly at about that age. Wearing a pair of loose bell-bottoms and a peasant blouse, she munched casually on her meal, oblivious to the stares she drew.

Her choice of outfit was perfectly acceptable on the average woman. The church pastor’s wife could wear that same outfit to the church picnic and no one would think twice. But on this young woman, the ensemble bordered on obscene.

My son, of course, picked a table right next to hers. He seems to have that affinity for beautiful women, so I positioned myself so she wasn’t in my field of view. This left me with the perfect chance to watch the other men in the restaurant—and besides her, it was only men.

The 50-year-olds, all of whom could have been her father (as could I), stole glances like kangaroos popping up to scan for predators. The oldest of them gave a leering chuckle every so often. The table of teen guys practically foamed at the mouth and stared…and stared…and stared…. A man sitting by himself with what looked to me like a Christian book, finally spotted her, then raised his book over his eyes, only to drop it surreptitiously twice every minute to steal a peek. The construction guys said nothing and, believe it or not, appeared uncomfortable. A few guys sat behind me, so I couldn’t watch them, but I could guess their behavior.

No one said a word.

When she finally dumped her trash and walked out, an audible sigh rose up among every guy there, and they started laughing and talking among themselves for the first time since we’d sat down ten minutes before. The table of 50-year-olds proved to have Aussie accents. Two of them looked my way with one of those “Did you see her?!” expressions that’s universal among men.

A whole host of posts on modesty have sprung up in recent days on Godblogs everywhere. Everyone feels compelled to comment on the fashions worn by women today, especially as the weather heats up and the clothing shrinks to beanbag-sized swaths of fabric strategically placed.

No matter where you turn, someone pontificates about modesty and which fashions are wrong and which are right. Lists of approved styles are posted, and everyone feels better about being the modesty police.

Useless. All of it.

Modesty isn’t necessarily in clothing. That young woman in Wendy’s could’ve been in a burlap sack and men would’ve gaped at her nonetheless. We could give her Godblog fashion advice till we’re blue in the face and she’d still be slaying guys in her Gothard-approved denim skirt, formless white blouse, and flat, white tennis shoes.

Modesty begins in the heart of both the clothes wearer and the watcher. You can put a prostitute in a tasteful evening gown, but she’s still a prostitute. Clean up the inside and the outside changes by default.

People complain about today’s sex-soaked culture. However, I lived through the 1970s, and I can vouch that the summer fashions then were far more lascivious than the standard attire of most folks now. But even then, not all of the standard modesty advice worked. We modesty police can recommend that women spurn bikinis and go with the tasteful one-piece, but I recall that Farrah Fawcett wore a maillot in her famous ’70s-era poster and that didn’t keep a gazillion teenage boys from plastering her poster up on their walls.

No, the outside is not the source of the problem.

The biggest lie in American Christianity consists of 30 percent of Christian men admitting they’ve seen pornographic images. The truth is that the other 70 percent are too ashamed to admit it. Our entire culture is pornographic, so how can anyone say they’ve never seen such a thing? Or just as bad, thought such a thing?

No matter what we preach about modesty, too many of us are running around with unclean hearts. Sure, your pastor’s heart may be 99 percent clean, but God’s still concerned about that remaining one percent.

Most of us would long to be 99 percent clean inside, but our shame over only being 15, 27, or 45 percent becomes the hidden secret that no one lets on. Instead, most of us are like the guy in that Wendy’s who hid behind his Christian book, but made sure he didn’t lose out of the fun, either.

I suspect that more men will read this than women. To you, I ask: What is it going to take for us to move beyond where we currently are with respect to modesty? Given the society we live in, we’re at a supreme disadvantage with regard to modesty, but that’s still no excuse.

To the women, though, I want to ask how we got to this Girls Gone Wild culture we have today, where so many young women act like hookers. Is it solely the fault of lousy fathers? What’s more sad than a 40-year-old woman with a strategically placed tattoo who dresses like her teenage daughter? Shouldn’t modesty accumulate in the heart over time? At least a little?

I feel for a young woman as physically attractive as that one in Wendy’s because she’ll inevitably attract jerks and probably scare off the kind of decent guy she deserves. But regaling her with the kind of clothing we approve is not going to change her lot unless those of us around her change on the inside.

Yes, put a modest young woman in some Frederick’s of Hollywood get-up and she’ll lose some of that modesty. But clothing is not the only issue here. It’s the simple answer, but not the one that strikes at the heart of the matter.