Best of Cerulean Sanctum

Stay-at-Home Dads (or “Guys the Church Would Like to Forget Exist”)

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Just this last week, the following was posted to a few Christian blogs:

Probably if everyone in the United States circa 1960 had known that taking modest steps in the direction of feminism would, in fact, lead during their lifetimes to the legalization of sodomy, to gay men marrying each other, to a small but growing number of fathers staying home to take care of the kids, to legal abortions, etc., etc., etc. the public would have overwhelmingly rejected those early steps. But the poo-pooers won the day, the people did not believe, and now majorities support most of those developments….
—Matt Yglesias—“Slippery Slopes“

Sodomy. Homosexual marriage. Legal abortion. Stay-at-home dads.

In the Church in America, it is not hard to see how many—particularly of the Evangelical persuasion— are up in arms about the moral slide of this country. But when I read something like this, it hurts me. A lot. Dad with kidsThat’s because I find myself lumped in with women who murder their unborn children, with men who lust after other men, with people who seek to mock God’s great gift of heterosexual marriage.

You see, I’m a stay-at-home dad.

In the four years that I have been in this role, the one thing I have learned is that Evangelicals find stay-at-home dads to be that chunk of indigestible gristle that wedges in the back of the throat. Now while I don’t need for them to come right out and say this to my face, the position taken by so many Evangelicals is the literal “death by a thousand cuts” when it comes to stay-at-home dads. If every stay-at-home dad would simply vanish overnight, I think most Evangelicals would breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Open up any Christian book that discusses the American family and you see this:

  • Dad works a high-paying job outside the home as the sole breadwinner. He continues this till the day he retires from the firm with the solid-gold pocketwatch.
  • Mom stays at home with the three to four children and homeschools them until the last one gets pushed out of the nest at age eighteen.

These are the two gold standards by which Evangelical families are judged for their conformity to a Scriptural mandate for the home. Any variance from this and the wrath of God is incurred.

I know this is the case because I read. Plus, any casual glance at the bestselling books on How to Have the Perfect Christian Family will tell us that this is the measure by which Christ judges us from His Bema Seat. Never have I seen an Evangelical Christian book or magazine that ascribes to this model even once consider stay-at-home dads except to brand them a breech of the natural order and anathema in the Church. As Mr. Yglesias points out (whether intended or not), a family with a stay-at-home dad can easily be equated to a household with two same-sex parents.

I also know the trouble caused by the existence of stay-at-home dads because I’ve been a Christian for almost thirty years. I’ve seen how families are treated when they don’t perfectly hew to the Evangelical family model. The judgment is passed (“As a family, you get an ‘F'”) and the arms come out to keep your perverted family at a safe distance.

This plays out in many ways. My son cannot come over to another house for playtime if the other child’s at-home parent is a woman. Wouldn’t be seemly for her to be seen with an “unknown man” coming into her home while her husband is away. I can understand that to a point, though it paints the at-home dad as a sex machine that will seduce any female he manages to get alone.

As an at-home dad, I’m not welcome into “parenting group” activities with at-home moms. In one such group that I was investigating, it was made all too clear that by my presence I was ruining the moms’ chance to catch up on daily gossip. How clear? One of the moms came up to me and told me that right to my face. Now she didn’t call it gossip (gossip is a sin, you know), but I’m not stupid. I recognized what I was hearing.

Whenever the Church devises mid-week events for parents, the at-home dad gets a sinking feeling because “parent” is not really the word they intend, unless the sole definition of “parent” is “mother of the children.” Simply showing up for such an event throws the organizers into chaos.

Now you would think that Evangelicals would be overjoyed that a family chooses to have one parent at home raising the children. You would think that they would celebrate the fact that some families have chosen to abandon the dual-income rat race that is afflicting so many families. You would think. But you would be wrong, dead wrong, if you think that the Church would be happy if the parent staying at home happens to have a penis.

One of my favorite foils here at Cerulean Sanctum is Focus on the Family. Seeing that I am a conservative Christian would make you think I hold Focus on the Family in high regard. Yet one of the reasons I find the whole organization to be less than stellar is their unwillingness to admit that the cultural forces that are tearing the family apart are not necessarily the ones they think are causing the problems. FotF’s blindered look at Christianity and culture finds them upholding many of the cultural anomalies that are responsible for the outcomes they decry.

Case in point: feminism is an easy target. A much harder target is the Industrial Revolution. In Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, he discusses how prior to the industrial revolution, almost EVERY dad was a stay-at-home dad. But then so was every mom. In fact, the economy revolved around the home. FotF, on the other hand, seems to lean to dad being locked up in a cubicle all day at Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe. Likewise, almost every book I’ve read about being a perfect Christian dad makes dad out to not only be the captain of his household, but a captain of industry as well—even if this means the family never sees dad because he’s slaving away for fifty hours a week or out being Steve, the Road Warrior. I’ve never heard an Evangelical organization similar to Focus on the Family question whether the work world we have created as a result of the Industrial Revolution is hurting our families.

Many men are stay-at-home dads because of mitigating business factors that Evangelicals refuse to address or address in totally anti-Christian ways. For instance, I was recently given some links to Christian businessmen networks. On one of the online forums I read a message by a Christian business leader talking about how “Christian excellence” requires him to fire all his IT people and move his IT operations offshore. He believed such a move was God’s will. However, nothing seemed to register in him that perhaps a little less profit could be had and that he could keep the employees he already has in an action that is far closer to the heart of the Gospel than what he’s claiming as God’s will. His downsizing move creates a hardship for the fired male employee who must come to grips that his career is drying up and that his family might be more stable if mom became the breadwinner (because she’s less likely to be fired in a downsizing move by her company in her field of college study.) The fallout of this is that the Christian business owner just created the very Evangelical headache—a stay-at-home dad— that every Christian family bestseller on the shelf of the local Christian bookstore insists must not exist lest the sky fall and dogs and cats start living together in violation of the created order.

In other words, if Evangelicals don’t like stay-at-home dads, then just what are they doing to ensure that work world issues are addressed that prevent families from having to consider that option? Truthfully, the answer is that they simply don’t care about preventing the “problem” of stay-at-home dads at all, preferring to attribute their blighted existence to evils of feminism rather than the natural fallout of the Industrial Revolution and the very worst aspects of capitalism gone to greedy selfishness. It is far easier to point a finger toward the at-home dad than to do something about ensuring work for all men who truly want to be the breadwinners in their family (even if that is not necessarily God’s perfect design.) Nor is anything being done to restore the work of fathers and mothers back to the home, just like in the days when this country was founded. As much as parachurch Christian organizations like Focus on the Family idolize America of that day, they make no mad rush to take on that particular aspect of the economy of that day and bring it into today’s homes.

So yes, I am a stay-at-home dad. To all the Christians out there who express concern about the fact that I exist in that role, I say, put your money where your mouth is and stop crucifying me on the cross of your righteous indignation.

Or is that a little too harsh?

Singleness: Radical Answers for a Harsh Reality

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SinglenessIf you are single, this message is for you. If you’re married, this message is for you. I believe that we all need to confront the state of single life today in Christian people, both as marrieds and as singles. We must examine the messages we’re sending and what we can do as a Church to make life more fulfilling for young people confronting singleness.

What I want to say to you singles is hard to hear, but it needs to be said up front. The truth is that we’ve let you down. Worse still, the solutions to the problems you face won’t be resolved in your generation. The hope, though, is that you’ll be the ones who help the Church do a better job managing this issue in the generations that come after you.

Everyone is single at some point. I was single till I was 33. In a sex-soaked culture that perpetually whispers lies about the true nature of sex, that’s almost an eternity to be single. My body may have made it to my wedding night in one piece, but what our pornographic culture did to my mind is shameful. I think most Christian men know what I mean.

I understand how hard it is to block out the siren call of a pornographic culture like ours. Singles are sent an unending stream of lustful thoughts by the American entertainment culture, the mainstream media, and even our schools and universities. Where we Christians have let singles down in the Church is that we send a purity message that is almost impossible to bear in a society hellbent on countering every word of it. We’ve laid upon the shoulders of today’s singles a very heavy cross.

As I mentioned in several of my posts, including the recent “The Problem of Porn,” if Christians are to be all God desires us to be we’ve got to start thinking counter-culturally. Many of the problems we face today are ingrained in the very fiber of our culture and we Christians have bought into that culture without understanding the consequences of our actions. If we’re to lighten the heavy cross we’ve put on the backs of single Christians, we’ve got to start radically thinking outside the box.

Many of the most intractable issues in addressing singleness are bound up in several other problems that are in themselves difficult to unwind. But Christ is Victor and I believe that if we’re honest and carefully unpack these problems, start talking about them, and most of all praying to see God’s way, perhaps the next generation will be spared what today’s singles must bear. That way of preparation is highly involved, so please bear with me in what may seem like the completely off-subject reasoning that follows.

One of the principle lies we’ve bought into is the way we think about a young person’s life after high school. Our society has made college mandatory, but I believe that a day is soon coming when college costs will be beyond what Christian parents can reasonably handle (especially if those parents acknowledge that they need to slow down their hectic lives and consider work that keeps them near home, even if it makes less money.) It’s not unreasonable to think that a college education at a good school will soon run a quarter million dollars for four years. With our culture now claiming that graduate school is a virtual necessity in the global economy, education costs become even more prohibitive.

I mentioned in my post on pornography that six-year olds have become burnouts due to parents filling their schedules to ensure the kids will get into the best schools by having a “schooling résumé” loaded with one expensive, esoteric learning or sports experience after another. Pollster George Barna has even found that Christian parents care more about their children’s educational futures than they do that their children know Jesus deeply and intimately. This simply cannot continue.

We Christians need to start talking about alternatives to college and grad school. We need to consider setting up trade schools and intensive apprenticeship programs (like those in some European nations) that will teach our children highly desirable skills, especially for jobs that cannot easily be taken outside the United States. We also must find a way to keep our children from assuming the survival of the fittest mentality that permeates today’s work environment.

We must own up to the reality that colleges today, even Christian ones, have become little more than a means to cheap, commitment-less sex with a degree on top. If high school is hard to get through in one piece, then college is impossible. I went to a Christian college; parents, it is no safety net.

There was a tiny chapel on my campus where I would pray. It wasn’t particularly popular, so I was usually alone at the time of day I would frequent it. On the altar of that chapel was a student prayer journal. I used to pray for the students who left requests. The primary request was for God to forgive a student who had sinned sexually while enrolled at the college. (The second most requested prayer played into that: young women who were ashamed of torturing themselves through various eating disorders in order to supposedly stay desirable to the men on campus.)

At secular universities, the situation is even more dire. Hookups—commitment-less sexual encounters with acquaintances and virtual strangers—are now the norm for most collegians. Anymore, almost no one makes it out of college a virgin, even the Christian kids who take abstinence pledges.

One reason for this failure is we parents from the day our kids are born have done a terrible job instilling in them a complete Christian worldview. Not just a moral code, but an ability to rationally think like real Christians. In our culture, Darwinian worldviews dominate, even among Christians. We’re living every day in survival of the fittest mode. And because we are repeatedly told that we’re little more than accidents of nature, especially by college professors, we begin to think that our morality is based on fairy tales. Given that we already believe that education is more important than faith in Christ, as Barna noted, it’s a short trip to this kind of pitiful reasoning.

And so the solution begins:

  • We need to train our children in a comprehensive Christian worldview.
  • We need to start developing alternative means of post-secondary education.

But these two are not enough. Truth is, people are simply waiting too long to marry. Part of this is because Christians are caught up in the materialism of our times; we look identical to the perishing world around us, especially in America. Finding alternative means of living, alternative Christian communities that reduce the need for every family to duplicate the goods of every other family, can provide us with ways to step off the treadmill and start living less as rugged individuals and more like the Body of Christ. Learning to live with less and to be more dependent on each other will help us weather the tough times that may be coming for those who claim the name of Christ. (For a more developed view on this, I’ve blogged extensively here.)

The expectation that a young person will wade through the sexual minefield of college, then spend several years as a single while building up a career, is an increasing difficult burden for unmarried Christians struggling in our pornographic culture. The apostle Paul said that it is better to marry than to burn, yet we expect young Christians to spend almost ten years (on average today) on fire before they finally settle down. Is it any wonder that they fail in this, or that sexually transmitted diseases afflict half the people in this country—and almost as many in the Christian community? Who would wish that on their child?

I believe that long before young people graduate from high school, we older Christians should work harder to bring couples together at an earlier age. If the expectation of being away at college is removed, this becomes possible. If we consider doing more to help young people pick suitable mates, they could be married even while they are working in the alternative trade schooling and apprenticeship programs we are developing. Yes, this flies in the face of how our culture tells people they must find a mate, but I believe that young people will see through the cultural lies if we build in them a proper world view. If we set an expectation that young teens get teaching in our churches on what it means to be married, setup “manhood” and “womanhood” classes and restore traditional rites of passage within the church, and start setting a foundation and expectation of maturity at a younger age, we can make this possible.

  • We need to prepare our children to live with less.
  • We need to teach our children what true community living is and build those communities.
  • We need to train our children to conduct themselves in a mature, godly, marriageable manner at a younger age.

Key to this is the acknowledgment that our generation is responsible for the generation that comes after us. To my generation I say, It’s time to grow up and look beyond ourselves. If people in our churches look only after their own kids, none of this will work. I believe that each man and each woman in a church must not only ensure the spiritual growth and maturity of his or her own children, but the children of every other family in the church. (Even nature teaches us this truth; herd animals will gang together to encircle and protect the young against predators, even those young that are not physically their own.) I can’t ignore my church neighbor’s child. Nor can you. Sadly, we in the church have spent too much time living out our rugged individualism to care about this crucial truth. We look at the troublesome young people in our churches and say, “Someone else’s problem.” We couldn’t be more wrong.

I believe that if we start developing these five areas

  1. Training our children in a comprehensive Christian worldview.
  2. Developing alternative means of post-secondary education.
  3. Preparing our children to live with less.
  4. Teaching our children what true community living is and building those communities.
  5. Training our children to conduct themselves in a mature, godly, marriageable manner at a younger age.

we can make headway against the poisonous sexual lies of our culture and stem the relational heartache that afflicts too many of our kids. Even for the already married, these life changes would eventually cut our divorce rates, too.

If these sound like radical ideas, they are. But radical ideas are needed. The current solutions we’ve erected simply do not work; we’re literally handing our children unprepared into the hands of the Enemy.

To today’s singles I can only say hang in there. I walked the same, difficult path you’re now on because no one in my era was willing to face the truth. I know how rough it is out there. Singleness is a gift and most people don’t possess it in our culture, so it’s hard being single today. (If you want to write me, I will pray for you and read your stories.) It may sound simplistic, but stay true to the Lord. Find folks who are willing to make you a part of their family. Watch how they live and learn from them. Don’t let Christian singles groups be your only outlet for godly relationships. Maybe even stay away from them altogether if they only cause you more problems. Ask the Lord to make you a desirable marriage partner and be willing to listen to Him when he tells you things you may not want to hear about yourself, especially concerning what you may need to alter in your life. Keep yourself busy, for idle hands are the devil’s tools. Devote this time to the Lord while you have it; when you eventually have a family of your own, you won’t have the the kinds of opportunities to serve Him that you have now. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day; don’t worry about tomorrow. And if you’re spending all your time looking for a mate, stop; God has a way of surprising you with a mate when when you cease your earnest searching and let Him be in charge of this part of your life. Most of all, singles, lend us your time, your stories and your hard-learned lessons in the area of sexual purity so we can help the next generation avoid all the hell you and I have been needlessly put through.

I had hoped to develop more on this, but I’ve already gone too long. Thanks for staying with me. Let me know what you think and let’s see if we can make this a reality.

God bless you all.

The Problem of Porn

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My recent post, Another Look at the Church’s Missing Men, has struck a major chord among those who are trying to understand why the church is less appealing than ever to men. In that light, I want to talk about another issue that primarily afflicts men. With apologies to C.S. Lewis for mangling one of his book titles, it’s The Problem of Porn.

Man looking at computer screenI like George Barna’s studies. I believe they hold the mirror up to the face of the American Church and help us to get a look at who we are, wrinkles and all. In the last few years, Barna has published disturbing info about the penetration of porn use into the ranks of born-again Christians. Barna’s site is filled with poll statistics concerning this (Barna Site-keyword search “porn” and Barna Site-keyword search “explicit”), so you can check out the figures for yourself.

One of the figures that I could no longer locate on the site (having been pulled for use in a new study—for purchase only) had about a third of born-again Christian men responding that they had viewed sexually explicit images. In truth, this is a figure I seriously question. Given that we live in what can only be classified as a pornographic culture, two-thirds of the men claiming they had no exposure to porn lied. I don’t believe I have ever met a man, Christian or not, who has not seen porn at some time in his life. It is virtually everywhere.

I talk with men who by all accounts others would consider to be pillars of their churches, yet the majority are struggling with staying away from porn. The Internet is largely responsible for this. No longer does one have to lurk around the racks of an adult bookstore or keep one’s head down when entering the “Adults Only” section of the local video rental store. All that is needed is a computer and a man can have whatever flavor of perversion he so desires right there in the cloister of his own home or office.

While hundreds of Christian websites decry the issue, this post is all about the “why” of porn use. It is conventional wisdom to classify porn as a “spiritual issue.” Anyone reading this now will agree that porn has a spiritual component that affects men negatively. Some will go so far as to equate porn with demonic forces. But for all the hew and cry about the rise of porn use by church-goers, very few people are asking why. And it is the why that is most important.

I believe this post will be controversial because it seeks cultural reasons behind porn use among men that are not being addressed by churches in this country. The sub-surface reasons are far more intractable than many are willing to admit and few will attempt to tackle them head-on. But I firmly believe if we are to put the porn genie back into its gaudy bottle, the Church must tackle these issues. They are not presented here in any order, primarily because they are hopelessly entangled—part of the issue of why so few are speaking to them.(For the purposes here, I only look at married men who use porn. I hope to address the problem from a single man’s perspective in the future.)

One of the primary contributors to the problem of porn is this: Our culture is on scheduling overload. Simply trying to get four couples together for a night out is a scheduling dilemma that falls into the mathematical problem of how a traveling salesman can hit fifty towns in the order that makes for the least travel. Your standard supercomputer would overheat trying to handle all the schedules of those four couples. This is attributable to four key factors:

  • Dual-income households—Dual-income households came into existence in large part due to the feminist movement of the 1960s. As women were told that they could have a life outside the home, they explored this option. Society ramped up to accept them into the workplace. Now forty years after the fact, our society is geared specifically for the dual-income family. Dual-income families are also better equipped to endure the chaos of the work world, better weathering downsizing, outsourcing and a number of other employment factors.
  • Preparing our children educationally for a “survival of the fittest” future global society—Parents, realizing the vagaries of the current work world, are obsessed with ensuring that their kids can compete in a global society of the future that is the essence of the survival of the fittest. Due to this, toddlers now are expected to speak multiple languages, play an instrument, participate in sports, and have their college diploma by sixteen. Parenting magazines are now featuring articles on burned-out six-year olds who can’t handle their schedules.
  • Business travel—Travel is an enormous issue. The better-paying jobs in almost every company require extensive travel. Some moms and dads are away from the home for half a month or more. Consulting firms are famous for their “four days away, three days at home” work weeks.
  • Church and schooling commitments—Churches are asking for more and more volunteerism or group commitments. It is not unusual for a Christian man or woman to be in three different church group meetings in a week. Likewise, parents are being asked to be more involved in their children’s schooling. With homeschooling being pushed as the only acceptable option by some Evangelical groups, parents are now asked to create full, daily lesson plans and to research the best school materials for their children.

The upshot of all this is that married men and women have no time for each other. When there is time, sleep becomes the recourse. Newsweek had a feature last year about couples who rarely have sex, and the problem in most cases was no available time for it. As I talk with Christian men who struggle with porn, there is an indisputable direct connection between a lack of sexual intimacy in their marriages and porn use. If the wife is tired—or even the husband—it is far easier for the man to get his sexual desires met by turning on the computer and surfing for porn. In short, many married couples in our churches simply aren’t having enough sex together.

I’ve seen much that bears this out. I worked for several years as a computer technician. In that role I handled hundreds of notebook computers owned by road warriors, the men most likely to be heavy business travelers. Without fail, the notebook computers of the most frequent business travelers were loaded with porn, even when company policy made it a fireable offense. It was a proportional finding, too—the more a man traveled, the more likely it was to find porn on his computer. Since the highest salaried positions within many companies require extensive travel, it should be no surprise that porn use is highest among those with the biggest paychecks. A study done about five years ago came to that exact conclusion.

Since heavy traveling makes it difficult for husbands and wives to have a normal sex life, porn intrudes. Most hotels that cater to business travelers know this and have provided a variety of options to get porn into the traveler’s rooms. The porn industry itself would lose enormous amounts of money if the business traveler instead stayed at home.

But it is not simply business travel. The time-pressures that many couples endure beyond the issue of business travel are oppressive. When dual wage-earners must juggle their work schedules, the quality time they are supposed to have with their children, the children’s hyped-up schedules, and all the commitments their churches tell them they must fulfill in order to be good Christians, is it any wonder that when it is time for a bedroom romp, the romp gets tossed in order to squeeze in five or six hours of sleep?

But single wage-earner families are not exempt. Evangelicals place much pressure on families to conform to a “Focus on the Family” ideal nuclear family with mom at home schooling the kids and dad serving as the perfect Christian man (I’ve blogged about the requirements for being such an idyllic man here, here, and here.) And the ramped-up education issue for kids is shockingly high on the list of essentials for such families. Barna recently reported that for born-again Christians, it was more important that the kids get that hyped-up education than that they know Jesus. So the pressures in those other three areas highlighted above remain (and could be worse) for families that conform to the new Christian ideal.

All of these factors combine to bring us to the point where a Christian man comes home to his Christian wife and kids only to find them as run ragged as he is. He might give his wife a peck on the cheek sometime before they both hit the sack, but that’s as good as it gets. If the wife is burned out more than he is from driving kids all over the city to get their Chinese language and/or violin lessons in between soccer or baseball practice, then she hits the hay and he, wondering what happened to their newlywed sex life, hits the computer for the sexual outlet he’s just not getting.

The apostle Paul speaks to this issue very clearly. Beyond the fact that Internet pornography obviously did not exist in Paul’s day, sexual temptation has not changed all that much:

But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
—1 Corinthians 7:2-5 ESV

Is the Church speaking to this issue? I hear a lot of talk in the churches in this country about the issue of porn, but almost no one is getting to the root. I do not want to diminish the other factors that contribute to porn use among married Christian men, but these bedrock problems mentioned here are being ignored by the Church in America. The reason these issues are not being discussed by church leaders is simple: fixing them would require a massive overhaul of how we Christians work and live in today’s society. It would mean that we truly become counter-cultural in all aspects of our life, not just in our profession of faith in Jesus.

Christian couples who do have the time for each other, who are not pressured by frantic schedules, who are not trying to raise uber-children with IQs that hover near 200 (and the ability to throw a rising fastball 100 mph), who have possibly settled for a single wage or two part-time positions (all without travel—therefore potentially being lower paying), and who get eight hours of real sleep seem to be less prone to porn.

Now how are we in the Body of Christ going to make that a reality for every Christian man and his family?