Ep. 20: POOR MALE PORTRAYALS VS GOD’S ORIGINAL DESIGN w/ Nancy Pearcey

Andrew Marcus:

Hey, this is Andrew Marcus from THE INDOUBT SHOW. Thank you so much for tuning in. We have a fantastic show for you today. We have Nancy Pearcey. She’s unpacking her new book, The Toxic War on Masculinity. Now, these are buzzwords in today’s culture, and so we thought we’d want to take a deep dive and just learn from her as she unpacks her book. So we hope you enjoy this show. God bless you.

All right, we have Professor Nancy Pearcey with us. Where are you from right now? Where are you calling in from?

Nancy Pearcey:

I’m calling in from Houston. I teach at Houston Christian University.

Andrew Marcus:

Awesome.

Nancy Pearcey:

So yeah, I’m right here.

Andrew Marcus:

Awesome. Amazing. Thank you so much for tuning in with us. Before we dive into your newest book that comes out next week, which I’m very excited to dive in, very prevalent issues that I’m finding in the church and out of the church and just in culture today, but tell us a little bit about your story, how you came to faith, and what you’re doing now career and ministry-wise.

Nancy Pearcey:

I love it when people start an interview asking me for my story.

Andrew Marcus:

Awesome.

Nancy Pearcey:

In a sense, I’m finding that the older I get, the more I appreciate my conversion, the more I appreciate that God got hold of me.

Andrew Marcus:

Wow.

Nancy Pearcey:

So I’ve been using it in all my public lectures now. I start with my story.

Anyway, so I was raised in a Lutheran home, but it was Scandinavian Lutheran. And if any of you have been raised in an ethnic home, you kind of know what that’s like. Like all Irish are Catholic, all Scandinavians are Lutheran. So there tends to be almost an equation of Christianity with an ethnic background.

So in high school, I started asking questions and my parents didn’t know what to do. It was like, “Well, wait a minute. We’re Swedish. How can you have questions?”

I talked to a Christian college professor, and I just asked him point-blank, “Why are you a Christian?” He said, “Works for me.” That’s it. A college professor. And I also had a chance once to talk to a seminary dean, and all he said was, “Don’t worry, we all have doubts sometimes,” as if it was kind of a psychological phase that I would outgrow.

So when I wasn’t really getting any answers to my questions, I finally decided there was no meaning to life, there was no purpose to life, there was no foundation for ethics. There’s just true for me, true for you. I didn’t feel like there was even a basis for knowledge. All I have is my puny brain in the vast scope of time and history. But what makes me think I could have some sort of eternal objective, absolute truth? Ridiculous. So I became a moral relativist and a skeptic and totally secular in all my thinking.

It was a few years later, I was in Germany. I had lived in Europe when I was a child, and so I’d gone back, and I stumbled across the ministry of Francis Schaeffer, which is in Switzerland. Schaeffer is, of course, best known for having an apologetics ministry, and I was blown away. I had no idea Christianity could be defended with good reasons-

Andrew Marcus:

Wow, yeah.

Nancy Pearcey:

… good logic, good evidence. I had never heard any Christians talk like that before. So eventually… It didn’t happen right away. It took a year and a half, but eventually, I decided that Christianity did have a better answer than any other religion or philosophy. So that’s why all my books have something to do with apologetics, something to do with showing that the Christian worldview is true. And I teach apologetics at Houston Baptist University.

I should say, we are in the process of changing our name. So we’re actually Houston Christian now.

Andrew Marcus:

Okay.

Nancy Pearcey:

But I really have a heart to reach out to young people who had the kind of questions that I had when I was young.

Andrew Marcus:

Yeah, that’s huge. And a lot of young people are asking the same questions and are on these journeys just like you. How old were you when you finally decided?

Nancy Pearcey:

I was about 20.

Andrew Marcus:

Okay.

Nancy Pearcey:

Yeah. But I had given up my faith halfway through high school, so there was several years of identifying as an agnostic, and I had no interest in going back. I mean, I felt like, well, Christianity let me down once, I’m not interested. So people ask me, “Well, why did you go to L’Abri, which is a Christian ministry, if you weren’t a Christian?” And the answer is I had some relatives passing through and they were stopping at L’Abri just for a weekend, and they said, “Hey, come down and see us.” So I went down to see my… It was my parents. I went down to see my family. I didn’t go to a Christian ministry.

Andrew Marcus:

Amazing. Amazing.

Nancy Pearcey:

That’s how I ended up there, yeah. It was evident, from my questions, that I was not a Christian. So back then, it was more unstructured. If they had a free bed, they’d say, “Hey, we have room. You want to stay?” And I thought, “Well, I’ve never met Christians like this before.”

Andrew Marcus:

Wow.

Nancy Pearcey:

And the other thing, of course, this was 1971, so everyone there was hippies.

Andrew Marcus:

Yes.

Nancy Pearcey:

And that too, actually, was a serious point, because at that point, there were no Christians reaching across the cultural divide and reaching out to these disaffected young people. And I thought, “Who are these Christians-

Andrew Marcus:

Wow.

Nancy Pearcey:

… that they can even talk to hippies?”

Andrew Marcus:

Wow.

Nancy Pearcey:

And a lot of people said because it was a kind of a residential ministry where you came and stayed and you lived with families, so a lot of people said that apologetics was persuasive, but it was also persuasive to be in a Christian community and see equality of love that we had never seen before.

Andrew Marcus:

Wow.

Nancy Pearcey:

So I think one reason Schaeffer was so effective… I tell my students, the two top apologists of the 20th century was C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer in terms of the sheer number of people who were converted through their work or brought through a crisis of faith. So I say if you’re going to learn apologetics, just start with them. Don’t read lesser figures. Read them. Why were they so successful?

Lewis was teaching, so he had relationships with his students. And Schaeffer had young people living in their home. So I think that was another reason he was so effective. He wasn’t just a talking head. He would fly into a conference and speak. You saw him day in and day out. You could see whether his Christianity was authentic or not, and it was.

Andrew Marcus:

Wow. Wow, that’s so beautiful. And what a good reminder that yes, the apologetics, yes, having theological conversations is so huge, but also we witness by our love and people seeing the family. And I think we can transition really well into our conversation today because the family is kind of breaking apart, and there’s a lot of narratives in the area of what men should be like, what women should be like, and the family’s breaking down. The family is a huge part of our testimony, of people seeing the love of God in our families.

I want to talk about first the good news. People often accuse evangelical Christian men of being oppressive, patriarchs, prone to abuse, but you make in your book surprising claims that they test out as having the lowest level of abuse and divorce. So let’s just kind of walk through some of the good news, and then we can kind of dive into some of the bad news that the world is kind of bringing up and these narratives that are happening.

Nancy Pearcey:

Yeah, it was really easy to find examples for this part of the book in terms of people making evangelical men the first target. Because if you believe in any form of headship in the home, which most conservative Christians do, theologically conservative, I found so many people, both Christians and non-Christians, saying that if you have any notion of headship, that will lead to abuse and tyranny and patriarchy. It will oppress women, it will silence them. They will lose their separate identity and so on. I found so many examples, and I’m sure you’ve heard it all too.

So it was quite a surprise when I actually dipped into the academic sociological literature. There have actually been studies done partly to answer the question. In other words, when people hear the charge that evangelical men are the worst in terms of being overbearing, tyrannical, misogynist patriarchs, the answer to that is, “Well, where’s your evidence? Do you have any evidence for that?”

If you look into the social sciences, it turns out that evangelical Christian men who attend church regularly, in other words, who actually practice it, test out as the most loving to their wives. They interviewed the wives separately, which is important. The wives do test out as saying that they feel loved and appreciated by their husbands. They test out the highest of any group in America. Evangelical fathers test out as being the most engaged with their children, both in terms of shared activities, like sports or church youth group, and in discipline, like enforcing screen time and enforcing bedtime and so on. They also do test out as having the lowest level of divorce, and surprisingly, the lowest level of domestic violence of any group in America.

So people… I mean, even Christians don’t know this. Most people are just shocked when they hear this. In fact, even Christian audiences, I often see people kind of sit back and go, “I never knew that.”

So the main sociologist that I quote… I quote a dozen of them, but the one who’s done the largest study, covered the whole book, recently wrote an article in the New York Times in which he said… It was for Valentine’s Day. So he talked about how evangelical Christian couples are the happiest couples in America.

In fact, hey, in my notes, I have it right here, in the New York Times, he says, “It turns out that the happiest of all wives in America…” Remember the idea is that it’s oppressive to women. So they test the wives in particular, “Are you happy in this marriage?” It turns out that the happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives. Fully 73% of wives, who hold conservative gender values and attend religious services regularly with their husbands, have high quality marriages. He got that in the New York Times.

Andrew Marcus:

Wow.

Nancy Pearcey:

Which is pretty surprising.

Andrew Marcus:

Wow.

Nancy Pearcey:

The happiest wives in America, otherwise of religious conservatives who hold conservative gender values. Nobody knows this. I mean, this was kind of the final trigger that made me decide to write this book. I said, “This material is sort of hidden away in the academic sociological literature. We don’t know it. We need to get the good news out and encourage Christian men that they are in fact doing much better than the rest of the culture.

Andrew Marcus:

Wow. So where is this false news coming from?

Nancy Pearcey:

Yeah, so when I talk to people, I always say, “Haven’t we all heard that Christians divorce at the same rate as secular people?”

Andrew Marcus:

Yeah.

Nancy Pearcey:

Yeah, everyone always says, “Yes, I’ve-

Andrew Marcus:

I’ve heard that.

Nancy Pearcey:

… heard that.”

Andrew Marcus:

I’ve heard that. Yeah, for sure. I’ve heard that. I don’t know where I’ve heard that. I’ve heard that.

Nancy Pearcey:

Well, I read a couple articles that said it’s one of the most widely quoted statistics by Christian leaders, so that’s why we’ve all heard it.

Andrew Marcus:

Wow.

Nancy Pearcey:

So what happened is the sociologist went back to the data and they separated out the really committed Christian men who attend church regularly and really live it out, from the nominal Christian men. So nominal Christian men are people who… If you do a survey like this, they’ll probably check the Baptist box, more because of their family and cultural background, but don’t really attend church rarely, if at all. And it turns out their ideas of masculinity are more absorbed from the secular world. In other words, they might hang around the fringes of the Christian world enough to hear concepts like headship and submission, but they don’t get the biblical meaning of those terms. Instead, they insert secular meaning into those terms.

These men, nominal Christian men, are less loving to their wives. Their wives report lower levels of happiness. They are less engaged with their kids. They have the highest level of divorce, even higher than secular couples.

Andrew Marcus:

Wow.

Nancy Pearcey:

And then the real stunner, they have the highest level of domestic violence of any group in America, higher than secular men.

Andrew Marcus:

Wow.

Nancy Pearcey:

So this is why our statistics get messed up, because if you just say evangelical and you put these two groups together, you’re going to get a misleading statistic.

Let me give you another quote. Let me see if I have it handy. This was also from that same sociologist. His name is Brad Wilcox. He’s at UVA, University of Virginia, and he’s considered perhaps the top marriage sociologist in America. He wrote an article in Christianity Today about this, and he’s quoted as saying, direct quote, “The most violent husbands in America are nominal evangelical Protestants who attend church infrequently or not at all.” So this is why the statistics are so misleading.

And it also tells churches in a sense what their task is. They’re doing a good job with men who attend regularly, but there’s a lot of men who hang out on the fringes, and they are actually testing out as worse than secular men. Because they do identify as Christian, as evangelical, and they kind of are in the cultural orbit of the church, I think the church needs to get educated on who these men are and how to reach out to them more effectively.

Andrew Marcus:

Wow. That’s a shocking statistic, actually. But I guess it makes sense now if you’re just kind of throwing everyone in that one group, that’s going to balance out to make it look like divorce is the same in and out, but that’s not true.

Nancy Pearcey:

Exactly. Yes. It’s very important to separate them out. Because when you’ve got church-attending evangelical men testing out as higher than secular men, but nominal Christian men testing out as lower than secular men on divorce and abuse, again, I think the most important thing is to ask, “Well, where are these nominal men coming from? And, well, how many are there?”

I read one study that said it’s about the same size. You and I probably hang out mostly with men who are pretty committed to their faith. So I thought the nominals were kind of a small group. No. No. At least one study I read, it’s about the same size. That means you have a 50-50 chance. When you meet somebody who identifies as evangelical, you have a 50-50 chance that they’re going to be really committed or they’re going to be nominal.

Andrew Marcus:

Wow.

Nancy Pearcey:

So it is a large group.

Andrew Marcus:

Can you give us just a little insight of what the biblical perspective of manhood and what research you found as you were working on this book?

Nancy Pearcey:

Yeah, I do think we need to start by saying what’s good about men, just because men do feel like there’s a lot of-

Andrew Marcus:

We’ve been getting beat up, man. We’ve been getting beat up. It’s not fair. We’ve got to stand.

Nancy Pearcey:

In fact, the book starts with… Can I read some of these quotes?

Andrew Marcus:

Please. Please.

Nancy Pearcey:

Even respected secular outlets, like the Washington Post. Washington Post, very mainstream. Read an article titled, “Why Can’t We Hate Men?” Really?

Andrew Marcus:

Sheesh.

Nancy Pearcey:

Why Can’t We Hate Men? Huffington Post, where you might expect it more, tweeted, “Kill All Men.”

Andrew Marcus:

What?

Nancy Pearcey:

It’s become kind of a hashtag. It’s a hashtag, kill all men. She said, “My New Year’s resolution is to kill all men.”

Andrew Marcus:

Oh my goodness.

Nancy Pearcey:

You can buy T-shirts that say, “So many men, so little ammunition.”

Andrew Marcus:

Wow.

Nancy Pearcey:

Books have appeared with titles like, “I Hate Men,” “No Good Men,” “Are Men Necessary?”

But what really surprised me is that even men are starting to say this. I have a handful of quotes from men saying things like, “Women have every right to hate men,” or… That’s an author of a book, and he wrote, “Saying healthy masculinity is like saying healthy cancer.”

Andrew Marcus:

Wow.

Nancy Pearcey:

And I don’t know if you saw this, but the director of the movie Avatar-

Andrew Marcus:

I did see this. That was so ridiculous.

Nancy Pearcey:

Did you see that one?

Andrew Marcus:

Yeah, he’s talking about testosterone as just a toxin and…

Nancy Pearcey:

Yeah.

Andrew Marcus:

James Cameron, who also directed Titanic. Where is this coming from?

Nancy Pearcey:

Well, let me give you one more example and then I’ll tell you where it’s coming from.

Andrew Marcus:

Okay.

Nancy Pearcey:

So I told my class I was writing a book on masculinity, and one of the male students shot back, “What masculinity? It’s been beaten out of us.”

Andrew Marcus:

Wow.

Nancy Pearcey:

There was a survey that came out for International Women’s Day a few months ago. 55% of men agree with the statement, quote, “Society has gone so far in promoting women’s rights, that it’s now discriminating against men.” 55%. So whether you agree or not, that’s a lot of men who now feel that the male bashing has gone too far.

So that was the first question I started working on this book. I just wanted to know where did it come from. Because you can’t really effectively oppose something unless you know where it came from and how it developed.

And to my surprise, it has a much longer history than most of us realize. You really have to go back to the Industrial Revolution, because before the Industrial Revolution, well, it wasn’t the father’s job, it was the family industry. And husband and wife were working side by side, and fathers are with their children all day long, teaching them work skills. So men were bound… They were working with people they loved and had a moral bond with. So the model for masculinity at that time really stressed the caretaking role, being responsible for your family and having to be gentle, because you’re dealing with women and children and you need to be gentle in your treatment of them.

The Puritans talked about duty to God and man. Duty was defined back then as self-sacrifice. In other words, we all look out for our own interest. You look out for what’s good for you, I look out for what’s good for me. But the person in authority was tasked with looking out for the common good, the good of the whole. The favorite word back in the colonial era was a man should be disinterested, which meant not pursuing his own interests, but pursuing the interest of the whole, the family, the church, the village, the community. They talked about them as fathers of the community, as well as being fathers of their family. So it was a very different model of masculinity.

And of course, it was nice to start with early America in my book, because most people were Christian at that time. So it also gives you sort of a starting point in explaining what is a Christian man.

And of course, I kind of skipped your earlier question, what is the biblical view. Well, you have to start with sheer biology. God created male and female. And men are stronger, faster. Because of testosterone, they do tend to be more assertive. And we have to affirm these as good qualities. God gave them to men. And-

Andrew Marcus:

That sounds like a cultural swear word that you’re saying there though. You can’t say that.

Nancy Pearcey:

Which one?

Andrew Marcus:

Well, just like that they’re stronger and faster. No one talks like that anymore.

Nancy Pearcey:

No. In fact, there are feminists who say, “It’s not true. If women would just work out more, they’d be just as strong.” I’m sorry, no.

Andrew Marcus:

Yeah. I feel like if I said it, I would be… “We hate you. You’re a man, you’re wrong.” But you’re saying as well, no.

Nancy Pearcey:

You’ve got to start with biology. I mean, these are facts. And men do have more testosterone and women have more estrogen, and it does affect them all across the board physically and emotionally.

Andrew Marcus:

In your book, you say that there’s two competing scripts of masculinity. Can we walk through both of those scripts?

Nancy Pearcey:

Yeah. This is really helpful because it disarms a lot of critics. When people heard I was writing a book on masculinity, their first question was always, “Which side is she on? Is this going to be a male-bashing feminist book, or is this going to be sort of the men’s rights, yay, rah men kind of book, defending men?” And I don’t think we need to get trapped into that.

So right at the beginning, I put this study. This was done by a sociologist, the two competing scripts for men. Here’s what he did. He’s gone all around the world. And again, multiple cultures. So he talks to young men and he asks them two questions. His first question is, “What does it mean to be a good man? If you go to a funeral and the eulogy says, ‘He was a good man,’ what does that mean?” Well, men have no problem answering that. They said honor, integrity, sacrifice, protect, provide, look out for the little guy. I thought that was cute. Look out for the little guy, be generous, give to others. And this sociologist says, “Well, where’d you learn that?” And they always say, “It’s in the air we breathe. It’s everywhere.” And if they’re in a Western culture, they’ll say, “It’s in our Judeo-Christian heritage.”

And then he asks another question and he says, “Man up. Be a real man. What does that mean?” He actually is more crude. He says, “Man the F up.” So he’s trying to capture that sense of what does it mean to be a real man. And the young men always say, “No, no, no, that’s completely different. That means be tough, play through pain, never give up.” And the last two were, “Get rich, get laid.”

So this sociologist said, “Look at this. Universally, men know what a good man is.” As we would say, they are made in God’s image, and they do sense what it means to have a God-centered masculinity. They really know that. But then they feel pressure from the culture to be a “real man,” quote, unquote, in terms of being tough and stoic and uncaring and very competitive and so on.

So that’s very helpful because then through the rest of the book, I could talk about, yes, we want to defend the good man, and we all know what that means. But now let’s ask, “Where did the idea, the script for the real man come from?” Where did that come from and what does that look like? How can we critique that and help men… Basically, one thing I say is the real debate is not between men and women. It’s within men’s own head between these two competing scripts-

Andrew Marcus:

Interesting.

Nancy Pearcey:

… and which one are they going to go with.

Andrew Marcus:

Yeah. Wow, I feel like I’m getting a free counseling session right now. This is so great. So would you say on that other script about competitive and warrior and all that kind of stuff, the manly stuff, would some of those still be a biblical perspective of a man, but just twisted?

Nancy Pearcey:

Yeah, yeah, that’s why I started out with the biology, because I think we do have to acknowledge that because of testosterone, men are stronger, faster, more aggressive and so on, and that we need to affirm. So even in the colonial era where the caretaking aspect of manhood was sort of front and center, they were still making their way in a wilderness, right? They still had to have strength, courage, resilience, because they were out there, creating farms. There was always new businesses to create. They had to create a government. They were creating a civilization in a wilderness. So yes, all of those more traditional masculine qualities were also affirmed. But it was not seen in terms of personal advancement, individual success. It was always you were doing this for your family and your community. So that was the difference.

Do you know in the colonial era, they literally thought ambition was a bad word? Because they looked at scripture, and in Galatians, in several passages, the scripture says it was selfish ambition. Selfish ambition is a bad thing. I found about four places in the New Testament when I was writing the book. Wow, it is there several times, selfish ambition. Well, the early Americans took that very seriously. They thought selfish ambition was definitely a vice.

So again, after the Industrial Revolution, that all changed, and suddenly it was good for a man to be ambitious and push yourself as far forward as you can above everybody else, get to the top of the heap. So that was definitely a change.

And as you say, some of those qualities are good. I mean, in a crisis, you want people who can stay strong and not collapse. But that’s meant to be for a crisis. It’s not meant to be a way of life. So you want those strengths, but then you want it balanced. The tough guy balanced by the tenderness. Or the courage balanced with the caring.

Andrew Marcus:

Totally.

Nancy Pearcey:

I think men have a hard time. They’ve got a lot of qualities they have to balance.

Andrew Marcus:

Yeah, that’s really hard to lean towards one or the other. I keep thinking of King David where he’s playing his instruments and he’s worshiping the Lord, the next thing you know, he’s killing a lion with his bare hands. I’m like, “That seems pretty cool.” It’s a good balance. He’s not killing every lion, but when the crisis comes, like you said, he mans up.

Nancy Pearcey:

He’s one of my favorite examples too. He also had that very, very deep friendship with Jonathan. Male friendships that today, it’s hard for men to have friendships because there’s always a suspicion that there’s some homoerotic dimension to it, and men don’t tend to have the deep friendships. So I like that too.

When it says, “Your love is greater than the love of women,” some people said, “Well, see, he was a homosexual.” No, what he meant was the only love of women that he knew was his harem. You’re not going to get intimacy with 200 women. Of course he didn’t have experience of a close, intimate, warm, one-on-one relationship with a woman, because he had a harem. So having the relationship with a man that was actually a real friendship was much better than anything he’d experienced with women.

Andrew Marcus:

So that’s a good point.

Nancy Pearcey:

Today, male friendships, I think, is a challenge. It is an area that men need to really focus on and try to develop.

Andrew Marcus:

Yeah, we’re not good at it. We’re not good at it. I will admit it. But it is really important.

Nancy Pearcey:

Well, the real man script does not encourage it. It doesn’t encourage you to be open with your whole life. To be open today, you have to go to a AA, Alcoholics Anonymous. We celebrate recovery. You have to go to a special group where they focus on that.

Andrew Marcus:

Yeah.

Nancy Pearcey:

But you don’t get it in normal life.

Andrew Marcus:

Totally. Totally. Wow. Well, there’s so much for us to absorb. I really appreciate your time, and I’m excited about your book coming out next week. Where can we find it? Just for our viewers and our listeners who are listening, where can we find your book? I guess it’s available, I’m sure, everywhere.

Nancy Pearcey:

Yeah, yeah. It is. It is. And-

Andrew Marcus:

Just go anywhere, and you can find it.

Nancy Pearcey:

I confess, I usually shop online. So it’s Amazon or christianbook.com.

Andrew Marcus:

Amazing. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for your wisdom, your insight. I know our people will be so blessed. And all the best on the new book and all you do.

Nancy Pearcey:

Well, thank you so much, and thanks for having me today. It was great talking with you.

Andrew Marcus:

Hey, thanks so much for joining us today. For more great content, check out THE INDOUBT SHOW on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you stream your podcasts. We hope you enjoyed it today. Feel free to check out indoubt.ca. We have some great resources available to you. Have an awesome day.