Men

The Cash Value of a Man

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A woman only has worth if she’s young and beautiful.

Does anyone reading this believe that statement?

Tuesday night, my wife and I were driving home from a surprise birthday party for a long-time friend, when I made the mistake of turning on a Christian radio station. Yes, I said mistake.

Now most of you readers know that I don’t like to name names when it comes to Christian nuttiness. I tend to avoid pointing fingers at individuals or ministries, preferring to go with the understanding that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

I’m not going to let this one slide though.

The Family Life program was on, featuring a speaker who preached on real manhood, claiming that clueless men are proliferating at an exponential rate. In trying (pathetically and eisegetically, if you ask me) to preach on the husband and wife section of Ephesians 5, he noted that “to nourish and cherish a wife means…money.”

Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t see money mentioned at all in Ephesians 5. I do see a man called to love his wife unconditionally just as Christ loved the Church. The astute will notice that this call to unconditional love of one’s wife flies in the very face of the worldly statement that opened this post. Christians men are to love their wives, even when that fleeting beauty fades and age envelops like a wrinkled cloak.

Can we all agree on that?

As if the ridiculously eisegeted comment about money wasn’t enough, the same preacher (a noted “expert” on biblically-based sex roles) dropped this bomb:

If a man wants his wife to respect him more, he should make more money.

O.M.G.

Can I tell you what the world says about the worth of a man? It’s this:

A man only has worth if he is powerful and wealthy.

Does anyone besides me see that this preacher is just mimicking what the world says? We don’t accept that opening statement about a woman’s worth, yet we’re preaching that the respect due a man is directly tied to how much moolah he brings home? In cash we trust?So a Christian man should love his wife unconditionally, but a Christian woman should only respect her husband if he’s bringing home more and more cash?

By this standard, the apostles—at least the married ones—were damnable failures who deserved being nitpicked to death because their wives didn’t have a revolving account at Saks. And let’s not get into that poor carpenter, Joseph, and the miserable father he was for not ensuring Mary and Jesus a gilded, palatial estate overlooking the Jordan.

So much for seeking first the Kingdom! Better seek that fat pay raise or work two jobs, even if your kids never see you.

Who gave this “preacher” a microphone? Shame on Family Life!

Do I believe a man should provide for his family? Yes, I absolutely do. But what message are we sending when we Christians simply roll over and ape the world’s hellish message about a man’s worth?

For all our talk of conforming to biblical standards, we don’t. The Bible tells us that most people worked a farm. In fact, the entire household worked the farm. Distinctions between what men and women did for work didn’t really exist on a macro level. Yes, men did most of the brute strength farm work, while women did things like threshing (still a tough job), but they co-labored.

If we take a look at early America, often held up as Camelot by some Evangelicals, again, you see the same picture of farming and co-laboring, especially in the middle classes on the edge of the frontier. It was only after industrialization hit this country (and that only after a hundred years of factories and reforms) that we started seeing this sort of naïve ideal that a man can’t simply do a man’s work, he’s got to do his wife’s work, too. He better darned well do his work better than the guy next door, as well, because not everyone can have the good jobs. (Some guy’s gotta draw the short employment straw. Guess short straw’s wife won’t have much reason to respect him, now will she? I bet that’s a chilly bed!)

I’ve got to also wonder about a preacher who’s giving a message that the way to a wife’s respect is by making more money. A preacher. Think about that. Think about all the guys out there in the ministry who are making a pittance. I guess the only way those poor ministers are going to keep bringing home more bacon is if they start drinking the Church Growth Movement kool-aid! Butts in seats! Butts in seats! (And a mixed metaphor, too!)

Anyone out there besides me feel like crying?

Oops, can’t do that. Not manly enough.

Nowhere Men—More Thoughts

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Since people seem to enjoy talking about yesterday’s post on men, I thought I’d throw a few more disconnected thoughts out there to keep people talking. Just random thoughts here on the topic of men, but I hope they keep you thinking.

1. Every study I’ve ever read on this topic says that by the time a man gets to be 40 years old, his network of close friends has dwindled to one or two other men. For most men, their spouse becomes their closest friend, with most male relationships given little time. Women, on the other hand, are good at maintaining their network of friends, even from their youth. Men are far more disconnected and lonely than women are.

2. As someone who has almost no interest in professional or collegiate sports, I identify with men who feel left out of the brotherhood. For some reason, men who enjoy intellectual pursuits find themselves marginalized in today’s manly culture. Or a man may be athletic, but finds non-team-based or non-competitive activities more in keeping with his interests, only to find that ideal less appreciated by other men.

3. Nearly every book I’ve ever read on Christian marriage states that spouses should be open and honest with each other. However, I’ve found that this openness and honesty is truly only available to women. Men are not allowed to confess their mistakes or weaknesses without suffering undo hardship for doing so, not only from their wives, but also from the rest of the culture. In other words, despite the fact we men are encouraged to let our guards down, when we do, we typically wind up savaged. Despite all our talk in our culture, and especially in our churches, we like our men to keep all “that stuff” buried inside.

4. Modern Evangelism has no idea what to do with men who are not successes. If a man isn’t a success in his work life or his community life, we simply don’t know how to deal with him. (Worse, we tend to measure that success solely by the world’s standards.) I’ve known men, even national Christian leaders, to lie rather than be seen as a failure in some part of their lives.

5. I know that one aspect of my own life that I struggle with is the expectation that I will always have a solution for whatever problem I face. Though I consider myself a smart person, sometimes I don’t have The Answer™. I think a lot of other men face this dilemma, too. Men are encouraged to live out of their brains, but not every problem has a satisfying intellectual solution. Many men don’t know where to turn for practical advice when they can’t put all the pieces together. Again, even admitting we might not know it all is a sign of weakness not well tolerated in some circles. Women can get by with saying, “I don’t know.” Men can’t. This is one reason that men let some intractable issues fester for years.

And those are my thoughts for today.

Nowhere Men

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We visited the in-laws this last weekend. One of my father-in-law’s rituals is to play hymns on the piano before we head off for church. When I came downstairs after getting dressed, I heard the following hymn:

I come to the garden alone
While the dew is still on the roses
And the voice I hear falling on my ear
The Son of God discloses.

And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.

He speaks, and the sound of His voice,
Is so sweet the birds hush their singing,
And the melody that He gave to me
Within my heart is ringing.

I’d stay in the garden with Him
Though the night around me be falling,
But He bids me go; through the voice of woe
His voice to me is calling.
— “In the Garden” by C. Austin Miles, 1913

I admit that I always liked that hymn, but as I sat there last Sunday morning, it bothered me. A lot.

Forty-five minutes later we were singing “Fairest Lord Jesus” in my in-law’s church. And then we sang a modern worship song speaking of how beautiful Jesus is.

In the last couple months, I’ve had conversations with guys who confessed that God seems to answer the prayers of their wives more than He does their own. One went so far as to tell me that whenever he received a positive answer to prayer, it disappointed him to find out his wife had been praying for the same thing. He attributed the success in receiving that answer to prayer more to his wife’s prayer life than his own. In those times when his prayers didn’t line up with his wife’s, nothing seemed to happen.

It makes me wonder if Christian men today feel like second-class citizens of heaven.

Consider the image of Jesus we proffer in our churches today. He becomes a sort of benevolent, winsome character who is handsome (in a glossy, Western sort of way), considerate of others, good with children, intelligent, deeply spiritual, and a hard worker. In our churches, we sing about how much we love Him, talk about His beauty, go on about how we want to be near Him, and so on. In short, He sounds like the perfect husband.

I suppose that a few men out there are crushed by that notion, especially since nearly everything in our culture points out that men are stupid boors who think with their genitalia, love sports mindlessly, and mess up everything they touch. Then there’s Jesus who is none of those things. Is it any reason that the little woman loves Jesus? Or that it’s hard for men to identify with the Lord?

I think this is why I’m hearing that men feel their wives have got it all over them when it comes to being spiritual. I think it explains the disconnect that some Christian men experience when it comes to having a meaningful relationship with Christ. They look around and see that what they are told they must experience seems a bit off. They can see how their wives can go on and on about how beautiful Jesus is, Thinkin' about it...but to men, the contemporary image of Christ they are told they must assent to, and the way they are to live out their faith feels at times, well…gay.

There, I said it.

One of the problems of our age is that none of this is truly news. The modern Christian men’s movement has been trying desperately for a couple decades to counteract what they see as the emasculation of the Church, and I believe they have a legitimate cause there. However, I think that books like Wild at Heart by John Eldridge, the “Bible” of the Christian men’s movement, blows the solution to the problem by encouraging men to find answers by hunting bear with a pointy stick. That attempts to counteract the image of a weepy-eyed Jesus by telling men they need to be testosterone-laden, elk-choking scalliwags. We simply trade one graven image for another.

I don’t believe that the problem is with us men as much as it is with the image of Jesus we project today in our churches. Attempting to pump ourselves up will yield no change unless we re-examine who Jesus is.

In light of what I was thinking about that morning before church as my father-in-law played piano, the sermon proved fortuitous. The pastor preached on Jesus’ question, “Who do men say that I am?” I think that question sums it up for most men. Who is Jesus? And are we exalting a graven image of Him that drives men away from the Church?

What do you think? If you agree that we’ve distorted the image of Christ to make Him overly appealing to women at the expense of men, how would you rescue that image?

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