What Is A Man?

Is there any hope of recovering real masculinity? Not the toxic type you hear about or the shallow performative type of manhood you see online. Real, Biblical, virtuous manhood. The Mere Fidelity cast and crew flip the script, so to speak, in this episode. 

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Ian Harber 0:02

This episode is brought to you by Lexum Press, who publishes books that love the Word, love the faith, and love the church. Lexum Press was recently acquired by Baker Publishing Group. Our July book of the month is Meeting God and His Means of Grace. How Word, Sacrament, and Prayer Help Us Encounter Christ. You can receive a 30% discount on this title and all previous books of the month by visiting Bakerbookhouse.com slash pages slash Mirror Fidelity. You can find that link in our show notes to get 30% off our book of the month from Lexum Press.

Derek Rishmawy 1:11

I'm

Why Masculinity Feels Like A Crisis

Derek Rishmawy 1:12

joined by regular cast and crew members Aleister Roberts, James Wood, and Joe Minick. Good to see you, fellas. Today we wanted to talk um not just as fellas, but about the fellas. Uh we're going to take up the issue of how to talk about masculinity. You know, the the the this conversation is in the air right now for several years now. Uh I'm not going to rehearse all the data and all the conversations that are going on, but but people are wondering, finally, wondering what to do, uh, what that what what we have to do, what must be done, what must be said to help men, to encourage men to be men in good ways, right? That there's been a conversation about how young men are falling behind on all these metrics when it comes to college graduation and uh mental health and suicidality and finances and getting married and staying married and all those sorts of things. And then there's the there's just the frontline uh experience of so many who are who have young men in their lives that they love and they care for, and they look at them, and maybe the young men in their lives are doing well, but their friends are struggling. And so one of the things that they're struggling with is just this very question of what does it mean to be a man? How can you be a man? Is that is that something you should strive for? Is it something that just naturally comes to you? And so this crisis of masculinity. So we want to talk about that a little bit. Uh, how to talk about men? We thought we'd lead in by having James uh sort of sort of essay his own answers. I I think you you spoke on this recently at a plow event, right, James?

SPEAKER_04 2:51

Correct, yes.

Derek Rishmawy 2:52

How do how are we supposed to talk about masculinity, James? How should we talk about being a man?

SPEAKER_04 2:56

Well, I I began, yeah, I was asked to speak on this topic, um, which uh I found interesting because it's not necessarily a topic that I uh consider myself any sort of expert in. And um uh and I think they asked me partly because of that. I think they see me, they saw me as someone who definitely cares about the struggles of young men today and is probably, you know, within more traditional convictions about manhood, but probably uh occupies a complicated space, largely because of uh the essay that I wrote for them, where I kind of narrated my own um struggles with my upbringing and my fa my relationship with my father, but then had some male mentors in my life that are really significant. But then also I I said I was all you know, so I'm a funny figure also because I have five girls, five daughters, no men in my house. However, I would like them to have good men to marry eventually. Um I care about the plight of of young men. And I teach I teach, you know, college students, and all of us are connected to young men uh in our lives. And so we kind of both I think we all observe, you know, at varying capacities, you know, what young men are facing today, which are in some ways is not that dis different than what men have faced throughout history, but also in some ways has uh unique struggles and trials. But anyway, so I I started with by saying I'll just say a few things about what I shared in my address and we'll kind of see where it goes. But first of all, I do think it's good that we're talking about this as a culture. More and more people are talking about it. Um we even launched a conversation a few weeks ago from that Johann Kurtz essay on X that kind of addresses these uh from various angles. So I think it's good. Um, I think a lot of people are are waking up to this. There was the viral essays in in Compact over the last year. Also, just uh interesting fact that I like to bring up about this is there were people who were you know ahead of the curve on this. Um I think like Jordan Peterson, for instance. I'm not a huge Jordan Peterson fan, I always say that when I bring up his name, but I do think he was an interesting figure that really cared about this issue, probably years ahead of even many evangelicals caring about it. I often think Jordan is a very interesting figure in this space because I think if you don't pay attention to him, he often gets lumped in with figures like Andrew Tate or whatever in the or Manosphere figures, which is crazy. And that's just so funny because Jordan is not like that at all. Even if you don't like him, he's I think he actually is trying to pull guys back from the darkness of that space. And it was brought up in the conference, like you know, the the idea of stoicism. Does being a man mean you have to be stoic? And I think it's interesting. Jordan's also interesting on that front because in many ways he does advance pretty stoic ideas, which are one of the reasons why I don't think his arguments are often that interesting. Um but he himself is like one of the men in the man space who's most willing to cry at the drop of hat. Yeah. Uh he probably cries publicly more than any man I've ever seen. Uh anyway, so I I do think though, okay, so I think it's good we're talking about it. Not only the struggles of young men, which is one issue, but also what does it mean to be a man? You know, I mentioned at the beginning of my talk, we a few years ago we had a pretty big landmark video movie came out, What is a woman? Well, could we imagine a movie that would care about what is a man? But I I I share, I think it's difficult to talk about. I I think it's these topics are more difficult even for Christians to talk about because I think the Bible says something, but not as much as we wish it would say. And maybe Aleister's got a lot of thoughts on this. He's thought about this a lot more than I have. But when you actually go to the Bible to try to define what is a man, and if you try to define it in the abstract, apart from various roles that men might inhabit as husband, father, son, et cetera, it's actually not abundantly clear. And I think that is that's part of what makes this conversation difficult. The last thing I'll say is I also think now the men, especially in Christian spaces that often have stepped into the fray here and are really excited to talk about this topic and obsessed about it, I often think that they, again, overread the biblical data and are reading in certain stereotypes themselves. I'm glad that they step into it, uh, but I but I I don't find the people that are are most excited about talking about masculinity are tend to I don't find them often the most helpful. Now I will say the book that I looked at um in preparation for my talk that I I did enjoy was Seth Trout's book. I thought, and I could explain later why why I find that helpful. Well, I guess I'll maybe that's the last thing I'll say. I like that Seth starts with, what are the opposites? And so he kind of starts with a via negativa, you know, of a sort. Like he starts, so what is man not? Man is not God, so therefore he's a cre he's a creature, he needs to be humble. Man is not an animal, so he doesn't live by, you know, the beastly appetites, but he actually lives according to reason and and discipline. And then man is not a boy, and that's what I focused my talk on. It's that contrast. So he needs to be mature and care for others. And and um, but then the last one is man is not a woman, but I think too many of the conversations start with that one. And I actually like that um Seth kind of reserves that one for last. So anyway, those are some just initial thoughts about this conversation.

Derek Rishmawy 8:17

I I'll I'll turn it over to Alistair and Joe in a minute. I will say I I also highly commend uh that uh set Seth's book. I blurbed that one. Um, and it's actually it's an excellent option for taking young college men through. Yeah. Oftentimes the guys who are most excited online about that stuff. Um yeah, it goes in weird directions. It is interesting. It is interesting as growing up evangelical and then reformed and and then all that kind of thing. This thing comes in waves, right? It's having having men's ministries and and masculinity discourse and what does it mean to be a biblical man and all those sorts of things. You women have been talking about you know the how common biblical womanhood discussions has been, but it's been extremely common for biblical manhood to be in the bloodstream of our conversations for a long time. It just kind of ebbs and flows from, hey, we're focused on this, hey, this is awkward, hey, let's not talk about it. Hey, uh gosh, we stopped talking about it for a while. We should we should talk about it more again. And and so these these these life cycles, these ebbs and flows come and go. Um, but I I think the focus on it again is salutary. The need is there. Um, but I I do think getting to a good normative account is really important. Alistair?

Alastair Roberts 9:35

A challenge

Online Masculinity And Lost Reality

Alastair Roberts 9:36

in the conversation, I think, is that so much of it is taking place online. And the internet is a place where we're representations. It's not grounded in real activity. It's a realm of representations, and so much of what's taking place is the production of images, a focus upon creating a certain image or performance of masculinity that makes it very difficult to actually have a healthy masculinity that is grounded in about something. If we want to have a healthy masculinity, one of the challenges is we can't pursue it directly. We pursue the world and engagement in actual relationships and commitments and duties, and masculinity arises out of that. You need to have the soil for it. Whereas if you don't have that soil of concrete relationships, of concrete contexts, of specific duties that fall upon your shoulders, then you're going to get a very distorted form of masculinity. So a lot of the character of online masculinity is a sort of drag for men. There's a sense in which the sort of performativity that's described within the work of such as Judith Butler applies to just identity online more generally. And that's even for people whose identity aligns with their um with their biological sex. Besides that, I think there's a focus in the fragilized uh sense of identity that we have online and more generally within the contemporary world, there's a tendency to focus very much upon definitions and uh certain specific roles that are well defined that are given to men or to women that help to distinguish them. But most of the things that pertain to being a man or a woman is not some universal definition that applies to each and every man. It's something that is uh seen in a specific form or iteration of faithful masculinity or femininity. It's something that can't be captured in a single definition that exceeds it. And the more that we focus upon definitions, the more that we focus upon rules, etc., the more we end up actually diminishing the reality that masculinity or femininity represent. And so I think, first of all, it's not something that we can pursue directly. It's not to be found in representation primarily, and also the more that we focus upon definitions, the more that we'll end up with a diminished sense. And also the fragilization of identity will increase because we'll have to differentiate ourselves in ways that just feel forced and arbitrary and artificial So that so that that all sounds right in the abstract.

Derek Rishmawy 12:32

But

Scripts Rites And The Three Ps

Derek Rishmawy 12:33

part of me is just wondering about the concrete, though. I mean, but you you're you're wanting to push us to the concrete, but you start to think about the concrete. I think about the conversations I've had with some young men over the over the last couple of years. And guys guys need concrete direction. Young men need concrete direction. And a lot of it, a lot of it has come out from me just asking them, like, hey, what what makes your dad your dad? What does he do? What is he like, what did he teach you about what's the portrait that you have absorbed from him about what it means to be a man when you grow up, right? So the boy, the boy to man is a real thing, right? A boy does this, but a man, once he grows up, once he matures, uh does that. There there are some concrete scripts that have to be given to some degree. Uh without any script, even the variations, it's kind of like you gotta learn the po rules of pro poetry before you start breaking them to make m to make meaning, so to speak. And so that's I I do think at some point you have to give men, young, yo, young men, concrete scripts. And and this is where I'm I'm curious. I'm curious how you guys how you guys think about the the very the very um the very common framework of you know what three three three Ps Prov, protect, procreate. These are kind of just three generic scripts that have been handed on across time, culture, space. Everybody has rituals around them, you know, uh and and and kind of rites of passage where, okay, now you've got to start providing for yourself.

SPEAKER_04 14:06

Well that's a big loss, though, today, right? I mean, right there. I mean, so a a great episode that just addressed this was Ross Daltett's last conversation with Scott Galloway. And so he's like a guy, center left, who's trying to address these, I would call him a reality respecter of a sort, trying to address these conversations from a kind of a different vantage point, but he ends up on the the three P's. Uh and I love how Ross was trying to push him towards like traditional family, he just wasn't able to get there. But the scripts thing and the rights, I think the scripts and the rights, those those are two big conversation points that I think are very relevant. And that's actually what I did in the rest of my talk was I provided images uh from various movies. Uh and my joke in the talk was I was going to, you know, was at the plow conference, so it was mostly Bruderhof people. And when they told me to speak on this, like, hey, but don't make it too nerdy and academic. And so the way that I do that, and you guys might appreciate this, you're instructors for young people, is I'm like, well, I'll just go to we'll talk about movies then. I had a little minor freakout on the drive out to the Bruderhof because I realized, wait, do these people watch movies? So they assured me that some of them do. Uh, but I think though those images um were helpful. They're not all perfect, but I think we need to give young men, even though they this can fall the the danger is does this fall into a stereotype that actually isn't the full picture, I think was what Alistair is getting at, and is this typecasting masculinity in a certain respect. But I think what you're getting at, Derek, before I get to the Wright's point, is it's very similar to what Alistair was saying, is that it gets at the vernacular aspect of gender. Every context, every culture is gonna have it's going to be um inflected differently by what it means to be a man. But I think what we feel like we're losing in our culture is that not only is there a variety that's specific to our time, it's like we don't we're not even willing to admit that there's something concrete here in our culture that we're trying to advance, promote, encourage young men, guide them in. And so then young men are just like stuck and they're lost. And so I think we don't have the scripts often. But then the the rights point is either do we have rites of passage? I mean, that's a big problem. So you say, I know what it means to become a man from a boy, but the predominant right of passage into manhood in the popular culture is losing your virginity, which is like very tragic and infant, actually juvenile and actually not masculinity of the biblical vision. And so I think we don't even have those.

SPEAKER_03 16:28

Yeah, so one of the just tying a couple of these threads together, um, I think it's a really good question that people need something concrete, and maybe one way of getting at it um is actually to do the via negativa, but make the via negativa concrete rather than abstract. You know, man is not a woman, man is not of this. That's very helpful. That's an I haven't read that book.

Derek Rishmawy 16:49

Sounds helpful, but you could also help.

SPEAKER_03 16:53

Uh and for our sake, one way to just continue that metaphor is I think you can make you could make some of the concrete actions through the via negativa as well, partially because uh to riff on stuff Alistair has said before and what James just said, the context and the rights through which we feel those actions, those concrete actions, are kind of absent to us socially in the way that they have been there before. And one of the dangers, and I think this is one of the things that we need to point out to young men, which we'll we'll get to that concrete larger point, is the the degree to which um so much of the male discourse functions within the same headspace in psychology as the very identity politics they tend to be otherwise be critical of. Um and it's the same thing going on with racial identity politics, gender identity politics. A lot of these things are people in America, for instance. The reason this comes from America is we're all just kind of generically white, and there's a very thin civic order at this point holding us together. And the same thing is true of um of uh African Americans in America. Tribal identities are mostly lost over hundreds of years, and you kind of have a thin generic identity, and you almost and there's some grief to be had in that. It's not natural that humans have that thin of a corporate identity. There's a loss there. But what happens in the context of a grieving people very often is that we, through our anger, go seize uh uh uh the positive, some some kind of LARPy positive vision of what we feel the loss of rather than recognizing something's just not here, and it we have to do the slow and hard work of recreation. And one of the things I think we can say, and so here's the via negativa in the in the concrete, is real men do not move through the world by resentment. One thing we can say. One thing we can say is it's not this reseizing the old ways out of a resentment of the way the world is, real manhood arises to the occasion of the circumstance you've been thrown in, right? It's it's the Lord of the Rings. I don't want to be born right now either. I wish I was born during nicer times as well. But you know what real men do? They stand up and they and it is their delight in a way, it is their easy yoke to bear the burden, to bear the burden of that slow endurance and that movement, and even uh last thing I'll say, and even to get people to to recognize it as a peaceable vocation that they have. A vocation in which, and I think this gets to the depths of it for me, training young men to look out at the world and say all the way down in their heart, it is good that things exist, and it's good that I exist, and it's good that these people exist. Tapping into the depths of that I think is the the animation of masculine movement. Uh it's it's not moving out of this resentment, even though it is taking up the battles.

Alastair Roberts 19:54

One aspect of my concern about the emphasis upon scripts is maybe taking something like the Lord of the Rings as an example. There are just so many different types of men and many good ways to be a man. The uh characters that we see in the Lord of the Rings present uh a myriad different versions of masculinity and virtues of masculinity, and there's not just one kind. And the danger, it seems to me, is having lost the patterns, and I don't think what people had primarily in the past was scripts. What they had were patterns and models and contexts within which masculinity would naturally thrive. And what we're looking for now is something a bit more artificial. We're looking for definitions, we're looking for scripts, and to apply those almost top down. Whereas this is the sort of thing that uh is not typically learnt that way. Um, it's something that you learn as you spend time with other men, as you have contexts within which you are brought out into the world into realms of responsibility, realms that stretch you, that enable you to grow, that give you dignity in who you are, give you a sense of your specific responsibilities and how you might rise to those. Now, that takes many different forms within a typical society that's healthy. And it seems to me that when we're looking for scripts, definitions, rules, etc., we're actually going about this in a way that most societies that have had healthy masculinity have not. Most of them have had far more organic ways of approaching this and less r less rationalistic ways, perhaps.

Sports Church And Organic Formation

Derek Rishmawy 21:45

Sure, and that's that's all true. And I love the caveats that are necessary for good pastoral practice and not not pigeonholing folks. Um I g I guess here's the thing we do live in our society though. We live in a weird like in the world.

SPEAKER_04 22:01

So it's not happening organically and healthily. No.

Derek Rishmawy 22:04

It's it's just not. It's not. Again, you know, you come back to uh a theme that we come back to on this, on this, on this uh show a lot is is oftentimes you're you're recreating that within the organism of the church where the you know the natural is being reborn, rebirthed, re re you know, re-sit restitched, resituated, and and and kind of an organic way of life where you know a young man can walk into a church and and find fifteen different ti 15 different kinds of good men, right? There and in it's almost and this is where I don't talk about sports a lot, um, but but this is one of the values of of of team sports as a uh as just a general formative reality is you know young men find themselves oftentimes and and understand their place and their way of being a man in the context in contexts and relationships with other men. And oftentimes in a team, one of the great things is you get to understand, like, hey, that guy's really good as a s you know, pick pick, pick, pick, pick your football, right? Um, there's a there's quarterbacks, there's there's linemen, there's wide receivers, there's all these different kinds of guys who like that guy runs real fast, that guy can catch, that guy can lay a hit. But e everybody kind of has to everybody has to be able to lay a hit somehow somehow. Everybody has to be able to take a hit, everybody has to be able to uh coordinate themselves and the way that they are with the other with the other men on the team in order to advance the ball down down uh the field and or you know, switch it out. Some guys are strikers, some guys are defenders, some guys are whatever, but everybody has to be able to shoot and defend and you know, pass and all those sorts of things. But you can within teams, you can start to recognize, hey, that guy, that guy's not the biggest guy on the field, but that doesn't make him less of a guy. He's fast, he's quick, he's all these sorts of things are like, hey, he's not, he's not the strongest man, but he he's agile. You you you you gain categories for different for different types of good men who know how to play well with others and know how to uh work towards that common end, that common goal, and that sort of thing. And within the church, you have that. I think oftentimes you have the guys who are good deacons and elders and all that, but the thing is what you they have a goal. They have a very specific goal that they're all attending to. And there is something concrete about like in soccer, you have to get the ball into the other goal, and you have to keep the ball out of our goal. And that is like a definitional thing. That is a script. That is a there are generic rule ground rules that enable us to play the play the game in our specific ways that are still nevertheless proper ways of playing soccer, whatever it is. And I think that's kind of what I'm getting at when it comes to talking about young men. There's gonna be a lot of ways that the young men I'm talking to are gonna be good, that can be good at being young men, but you know, we still have to aim them at a goal. And we still th there's there are still like general, broad two or three script level, rule level things that you have to give people concretely that they then work out the particularities of the way they pursue. And that's that I still think we we can't avoid that. There still has to be something at that level where it's like, hey guys, there's a million different good good ways of being men, and you just gotta get I don't think anybody's saying this, but but in the absence of those things, we we have to we have to give them something, is what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_03 25:33

Just to sympathize with your point, I think one of the tensions that we're highlighting here is the tension that as Alistair was pointing out, one of one of the reasons I think Alistair is saying these wouldn't have been scripts before is because life and the patterns of life would have just nudged uh a person through the habits of a community naturally toward some role of provision, protection, and procreation. The amount of pairings off, whether you were a weak-willed person or a strong-willed person, the whole profile of personalities tended through the social nudges, as it were, to wind up paired off. When that's not true anymore, though, it still is the case that we're driven by natural law to those three Ps, procreation and the role of men to provide and protect, those are orienting things. And I think one of the questions is in what way are they orienting? In one sense, I think we can say they're they're again orienting almost in a via negativa way, uh, in the sense that a society that recognizes we are not providing the nudges by which 80% of young people pair off, male and female, that's a problem. That's just straight up a problem. A society that just sees that's what's happening with young people needs to say we are sick and we have a there's a disease in the body in some way, because these three Ps aren't just half. That doesn't mean you're not a man if you don't do those three P's. But uh in an Aristotelian sense of a sort of are there always or for the most part, it's generally the case that the average person should be paring off in this way and kind of take on this sort of role. Again, there's plenty of exceptions, but it's it's right on the other hand, that's different than saying, okay, you, the individual man, your only goal in life is those three Ps. And then those can animate, and maybe it maybe it should those should drive you in a certain sort of way. Yeah. But there's there's there's different levels, I think, at which we find orientation and different levels at which we identify the problem and the fix there. And it is one of the saddest things you we've all met, uh, and I think it's just worth saying out loud, we've all met young men who are frustrated. Maybe we all know uh uh not that I'm not an awkward guy, but maybe we know a couple of awkward dudes who you look at and you're like, all right, you know, 200 years ago, the guy with this personality and these this set of gifts and competencies probably would have paired off in his community. And he just knows that. He knows that he was born into a time, and it's hard for him not to be resentful, and this is where the manosphere is going to play into something, but you know that guy, and and there's something sad, there is something to be grieved there. And so I think there is something. This is really to get to Derek's point. Those things really still are concrete. Maybe one of the questions is left is how do they become concretely orienting uh for the individual?

Daily Liturgy Network Announcement

Ian Harber 28:22

Mirror Orthodoxy is excited to announce that the Daily Liturgy Podcast has joined our podcast network. The podcast is produced by our friends at Corum Deo Church in Omaha, Nebraska, and features prayers from the riches of the church, new written prayers, and daily scripture readings. We are integrating the Daily Liturgy throughout Mir Orthodoxy. You can receive the Daily Liturgy every morning on the Daily Liturgy Podcast in written form through the Daily Liturgy newsletter and on our website. We've made it possible to use your preferred Bible translation and even switch to a Bible in two years plan on the web version while still integrating with the Daily Liturgy. We want to see every Christian grow in their devotion to Christ in Scripture and in prayer. We believe this daily resource can serve as an aid for individuals, families, and even entire churches who adopt it. You can start listening and reading by going to our website, Mirrororthodoxy.com, or clicking the link in the show notes.

Dating Initiative And Practical Guidance

SPEAKER_04 29:32

I think it's related to the idea of script or just that general theme, to an analog to me here is like the the meta modern conversation in film, right? And like how you we've moved out of a modern period where the scripts are really tight and predictable, stereotyped, to uh into a postmodern period where we're deconstructing those, we're showing you know, there were you know, the the things weren't as neat as as they made it out to be. And now it's like, but what do we do? And so I think when you live in an era of massive deconstruction of all the scripts, I think r returning to something like that idea to some degree is helpful in orienting uh people like and I think it's like the concrete, for instance, like getting very the th the three Ps are often in what you just mentioned, Joe, of the pairing off. The nor I think we should probably help retrieve kind of some normal scripts for life pathways. Like most men probably should be thinking about getting moving towards marriage. There are obviously people called to celibacy, but we can't completely over-orient to that rec to that uh uh issue to not help people, and also the dating culture is very fraught in our moment. So, how do we just help young people have some pathways even towards like dating in a healthy way? Again, not being overly dogmatic or stereotyped or overly pressuring. If you don't do this, then you're less human, all of the caveats. Yeah. But just giving them something. And that's one of the things I try to help my young, and I actually ended my talk with some of that. I was like, hey, guys, like you need to ask your part, I know this might sound too stereotypical, but like it's your job to take initiative and ask the girl out. Like, okay, there might be a variation of that, might be exceptions, but just like be brave, my dudes, you know? And things like and just like little concrete things like that. I've taught my students these things, and they just like gasp like of relief. Like they just want someone to help them.

Derek Rishmawy 31:25

And I guess I mean, just to just to reiterate, and I want I want to get to Alistair in a minute. Um in past, like to just to stereotype again, in traditional cultures, the the scripts could be stoltifying, and they're there the stereotyping could could actually not make space for folks who actually, by the Lord's appointment, they don't fit well with that, but they actually have good, God-glorifying ways of being in the world. And modernity and liberalism creates space for the unique individual and all that sort of thing. But on the other side of hypermodernity, hyper, you know, hyper neoliberalism, whatever you want to say, it's too liquid. We're we're all we're all drowning in in the demand to be that specific individual, et cetera, et cetera. It's like, yeah, but like 85 to 90 percent of you actually just just accept being a normie and like stick to the script without being a jerk if somebody is is is is walking down a slightly different path or whatever it is. And I'll even say that that even those scripts, like within the within the church, there's all these different mentions of everybody knows, everybody knows the guy who's unmarried and has no kids, but he's a wonderful spiritual father. And the same thing with a woman in in our church who's like wonderfully motherly uh towards the towards the younger folks in her in her orbit, she still inhabits that role in different ways and in spiritual ways that, like, yeah, she's working a job, she's doing this, but like so so there's even ways where the scripts, as long as we are making space for the um providential particularities of the way of the way the Lord is writing that person that person's story, there's still ways that they offer guidance and shape. Um But Alistair, you want to uh push back or or caveat or or remind us of some biblical themes?

Alastair Roberts 33:18

I think the idea of scripts is just misguided. I don't think Okay. I just don't think that's what's a better term for this kind of thing? Like what what's a better way of framing the normative, the the the average in the normative problem is that so much of the modern world is shaped by a certain, first of all, representation and performance. And that whole concept of a script is in many senses playing into that model. And also the idea of you as an individual and expressivism, all these sorts of things are bound up in unhelpful ways in the concept of script. Traditional societies, the the point I was making is not primarily that there's there are let a thousand different versions of masculinity be expressed. No, my point is that within most traditional societies, there are a variety of different types of men. They are not performing masculinity in the same way as we do. They are men. There's not a sense in which they have to perform masculinity in the way that we feel that.

Derek Rishmawy 34:22

Sure.

Alastair Roberts 34:22

As a to create a representation of masculinity, to um become something that they are not, in fact. There's certainly rites of passage that must occur, but they are shepherded through rites of passages. They have uh patterns, they have models, they have uh ways in which the society the society is not just giving them an individual script that they must follow. The whole society is ordered towards marriage, the whole society is ordered to pair people off. Um and so I think a lot of the concept of a script has unhelpful modern assumptions about how our societies operate bound up within it. And I'd like us to kind of step back from that and recognize the ways in which the sorts of emphasis upon performance, expression, um, role, all of these things that are very important for us. Now we may have to work with those because that's the context that we're in. But it's also important to recognize that that is, in many respects, a dysfunction, and we'll not arrive at functionality simply by reacting against the dysfunction. We need to understand how these are.

SPEAKER_04 35:34

Yeah, but I I think what Derek is saying is okay, so we have to deal with the society we're in, which you're kind of saying, but we don't live in those societies where those nudges that Joe is talking about are so obvious. So you might have to make what was previously implicit a little bit more imp explicit, I think is what the the conversation is about.

Alastair Roberts 35:54

But you also need to think about how do you move beyond scripts?

SPEAKER_04 35:59

Because this script I think I think it just depends on how we're defining.

Derek Rishmawy 36:02

But here's the thing. Here's the thing. We're all like we're all 40 plus. We're all 40 plus. I'm thinking about 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds who, you know, sorry, this is I'm gonna back off a minute here. There's this level at which some of this stuff I didn't really wrestle with as explicitly. I didn't I didn't identify with the whole masculinity conversation, whatever it is, in my early 20s, when when all the young reform guys were into all that, all the all the kind of discussion there. I was like, whatever, it's just you know, just be a man, marry your girl. I I I my my parent my parent, I had a family where a lot of things were organically just modeled and that kind of thing. The the self-consciousness of these things came to me working with the 18 to 24-year-olds that I work with right now, uh, who are even further down the timeline of liquid disembodiment, and having my kids, which forced on me a consciousness of things at a at a at a visceral level, maybe that was already natural for certain other guys, but it just it it uh like you know, I the impulse to up my life insurance uh coverage just it it was it was almost biological uh when when I when I saw my kid. So some of these things we're already past, we've already embodied, we we we we've grown up with, but I'm looking at these I'm looking at these kids who when you when you're dealing with the when you're dealing with a youngster who doesn't have the rules. Like they weren't given the rules, they weren't given the embodied rules, they weren't given the embodied organic, whatever, and they just don't have it, you you have to give them something. Like that's what I'm saying. Like it you know, you definitely have to give them something, but so I was saying what do you think we should give them besides scripts? What's your term? Because you gotta use something.

Alastair Roberts 37:50

Contexts and models. So you talk, for instance, about the what you were discussing earlier, the team and sports. It's one of the things that a lot of young men lack are male contexts and context and mentorship and formation like you'd have with a coach. Um that's a very different thing from a script. And when we're thinking about um what many men lack, it's not so much a script sometimes as just the context that would make many of these things plausible, or many of the things uh many of the ways in which they could be formed. One of the struggles of being a man today is that you spend much of your time in mixed or female-dominated contexts. And that's not a healthy situation for men. That's not the primary context within which men will develop masculinity. And so there is an importance of relating to women and developing your masculinity in that context too. But if you have no male contexts and male intergenerational context particularly, you're going to struggle to find any sort of orientation. That you might get script. That is also something that often people will look for in male contexts online, which can often be fairly feral. But ideally, what you need is a healthy real-world context with intergenerational relationships, with healthy mentors and examples, with patterns that have been worked out in that community, and um a group of fellow travelers who are moving through this, a cohort that are moving through it together. And that is a very different sort of thing from a script. It's giving you direction, it's giving you pointers, it's giving you models, but it's not a script.

Derek Rishmawy 39:36

And I think what I'm hearing is an in-real life podcast, right? Like an embodied podcast. Sorry, dude. I couldn't I couldn't resist.

SPEAKER_03 39:44

Mere Fidelity 24-7. Yeah, I think um one of the tensions I think here is that uh I suspect that a lot of um precisely because we're living an era without the nudges and disorientation, and yet still remain natures, still have the natures that we have to re-invigorate the action of those natures and to re-engage it, uh, is going to we acquire by conscious action. We it requires of us a certain kind of conscious engagement, what would have been given by background noise in one sense in the past. And the consequence of that is that most of what we're going to do to re-engage our nature is going to look a little LARPy and at its worst become cult. Uh, on the other hand, no good thing that we do in this area probably would have looked, wouldn't look strange to somebody living in a context where all of this was nudging and might look uh, and I maybe we're overusing the metaphor script, uh, but might have looked scripted compared to how this would have been instantiated in their own context and past. And maybe one of the things here is I I'm thinking of two different senses of script, and I hate to achieve ecumenicity through etymologies, but uh uh but there's the sense of script as like a script for a narrative. Here are the steps that everybody should go take. But uh when I first heard the word script in this conversation, I was thinking more of like a prescription, uh, which some people would call a script, like the script the doctor gives you. And in those senses, I think some of the traditional things are good orienting points for young men where it's like, what am I supposed to be doing with my life? And it's like, hey, maybe marriage, maybe, maybe going in marriage and having a family to care for, maybe that's a good thing for you. Maybe that actually would be. And I think um, yeah, I I suppose I come at some of this, you know, thinking in terms of scripts, uh, somewhat like Derek did, which was, you know, when all this conversation was going on in the early 2000s, it kind of missed me. Uh, and I think that was probably because I was raised in a context where masculinity was talked about, not necessarily in my home, but in my larger world in a way where I was already kind of tired of the conversation. Uh and so that discourse more or less went by, but it was um interesting. It was engaging an email group that um a lot of us were a part of, uh uh uh the the our our famous email group in the past, where I I came to realize, in some sense, I was um uh uh some of the ways in which uh I felt like it was this was a normal way to be a man were not normal. I I wound up having a lot of male friends and coming to realize, oh, this is just what normal guys are like. This is what it's like to engage a normal person. This is the level of edge they have, this is what it's like to be in a group of men and have a conversation, this is what you need to develop, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And what was weird is that was not native to me at all. And oddly it wasn't, but but I wasn't alienated from it, even though I, you know, felt a little different on some days, you might say. But it was interesting because it was a it was a context in which, on the other hand, I felt certain things engaged in me and flowered in me through engagement with other men, even though, you know, I didn't leave that ever feeling like I was, you know, particularly appealed to by a lot of things that uh that appeal to others. And yet now I find myself, and and and I'll I'll stop after this, but uh, I find myself in a similar context, which Derek is, which is, and this is a lot of us, you're teaching young men. And one of the reasons this has become a much more important discourse to me is not so much that I'm trying to figure out something for myself, uh, but that I'm around all these young men who really do take these questions a lot more. It's not, it doesn't matter how much I feel about them. This is so live. The voices in their heads are loud. Yes, and you do have to, I I have to be, I can't sit around and be triggered by it. And you can't just sit and dismiss it and treat it like it's stupid, or you have a Generation of young people that won't you can't get to. And it's like, yeah. And so there's I I feel myself in those waters. And so wanting to have a sense, I feel your the pain Derek is talking about, because they really do need this.

Derek Rishmawy 44:11

And the one thing, and James is going to talk, the one thing I'll say is when you are an educator and a teacher like many of us are pastors, you are often the one setting the temperature for the culture of that group and that there are the normative conditions in which that natural organic give and take is and formative power is being exercised. James?

SPEAKER_04 44:33

Yeah, I mean, I I was gonna say something related to that. And Alistair kind of brought it up a minute ago, but with reference to your sports analogy. Because the thing I kept thinking about when you were sharing that is the one thing that you hadn't talked about is maybe one of the most important pieces was uh on sports teams, a very important figure is the coach.

Derek Rishmawy 44:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 44:52

And and related to I think manhood and helping young men today is, and this is where I totally agree with Alistair, and this is what I shared in my talk, also is the a major answer. It's not just scripts that we distribute online, but in-flesh relationships of mentoring intergenerational and getting guys offline. Because I think one of the frustrations for me is how these conversations often happen are in context where there actually aren't in-flesh mentor coaches, but rather in the context of just online brother wars, right? A bunch of brothers ganging up together. They're frustrated with their the elder generation. They're kind of living in that grievance resentment that Joe was talking about earlier. And this actually isn't help but helping them transition from boy to man. They're actually kind of like uh what uh what's his name? Uh Kale Zeldon refers to as Peter Pan's Lost Boys. So much of the online space of the masculinity conversation is just keeping guys in that immaturity and calling it masculinity. And what I think the big answer is, and but it's simple and it's and that therefore it's frustrating for how simple it is, I think often is pushing guys to get real in-person male mentors, and especially within the context of the church. But and then lastly, I'll say one of the other things I shared in the talk was related to kind of like pathways you're trying to encourage and things like this for helping guys, and and this is one of the things that I came upon, came to just in studying this topic as I need, was forced to present on it and like trying to go back to the scriptures uh to be my guide was I really think it's important to help guys retrieve also the not only the glory of mentors, but the glory of the mundane. And as I try to present the men, the images and and stories that I think can motivate young men to just be responsible and adult men, I often think of the stories like it's a wonderful life. Or uh I shared one of my favorite little uh exchanges in a movie is Large and the Real Girl, which is not a movie most people think of when they think about what's a good image of masculinity. It's about Ryan Gosling. Well, Gosling's become kind of a machismo guy. You know, he's literally me, Mr. Gosling. But uh one of my favorite films is him at Large and the Real Girl, where he's this troubled young man. He's really confused, and largely because his elder brothers abandoned him and he had an abusive dad. And there's this beautiful scene in the movie, and so he becomes a recluse and the way, but then there's the pivot in the movie is him realizing I need to grow up because my brother's about to have a kid and I don't want to repeat the failures that I had uh receive, and therefore he develops his relationship with his blow-up doll. Okay, that's another conversation. But there's this beautiful scene in the movie where his he asks his brother, How did you know when you were a man? Which is like, it'd be good if more guys just asked that question, by the way. It's a great question. And his brother stumbles, doesn't know what to answer, and he answers with this line. He's like, Look, it's not, it's not, you know, he's like basically when I realized I had to I had to be responsible for other people, even when it costs something. And I was like, dang, like I know that might sound too stereotyped. It might sound too scripted, but man, that's pretty good. And I think that really helped him start thinking differently. And I that's what I think. So that but it's it's the glory of the mundane of just like caring for other people that God's put in your path. Stop obsessing about how you perform masculinity. Try to be someone who takes care of others.

SPEAKER_03 48:11

Yeah, if I were to just say one more thing myself to add to that. Um, you know, I don't feel like uh, you know, I'm sitting around talking to young men uh a lot these days, and sometimes I don't feel like I have a whole lot to say, you know, in the concrete. But I think one thing I do keep coming back to, and I'll I'll just reiterate it here for whoever's listening. I do think one thing that's huge in this generation is getting out of your mind and into the world. Uh I struggle with that, but getting out of your head and into the world. It and because the world really is a good thing, I don't think we know how deep our jadedness, our cynicism, our lack of motivation, our depression. There are things, there's a flat, a flatness in our relationship to the goodness of this grand world God has made. And it's a flatness that exists in me. I don't, but uh, you know, I'm I teach philosophy, and so I guess I can't I can't uh not end, you know, thinking of it more metaphysically, right? But uh being is good. It is good to be, and and and and to be a man is is is to to to the mode in which you be. Again, sorry to wax philosophical. For me, uh I think if I were to inflect that, uh I it is discovering my life as a life in which I'm an agent. I'm only here for a time, and to have a sense that God has given away a share of freedom to you to move through this world with the gifts he's given you is is to have the awesome responsibility of adult awesome adult responsibility. Uh and I think and it's good. It's good to have that gift, and there's a good world to move into with it. It's a hard world, and it's a war, and there's a battle to be fought, but it's a good thing, and there's a good God to rest in.

Weighty Mission And Embodied Agency

Alastair Roberts 50:03

I think there's a connection between masculinity at its best and seriousness, weightiness. There's a sense in which the greatest threat to masculinity in our day is a sort of juvenilization where, first of all, there's a lack of a generational transition, the sort of thing that James was describing, where a person has to take responsibility because they are now in a situation where another life is dependent upon them. Or they're thrown into a situation and they find that they have a mission, and that mission is important, and they can't go around like boys anymore. They have to be serious, they have to act like grown-ups. There's a sense in which the father figure and growing up, making a generational transition, all these sorts of things, and rights of passage, rights of passage are hugely important for men. And in ways that they're not for women in the same way, because nature itself tends to give women more of a right of passage in the bearing of children. And men, it seems to me, require um something more of a social framework within which to make those transitions. And we live in a society that's trivial trivializing where we and here is one of my concerns about um the benefit for all the benefits of sport, and there are real benefits, there is a danger that masculinity is something that we primarily experience and pursue in the context of entertainment and consumption. And that is whether we're playing a game or whether we're watching a game and drinking some beers with the guys, masculinity tends increasingly to be associated with more juvenile practices. And those things have their place. But if we're going to be engaging in mature masculinity, we need to have a serious weighty mission. And again, it's difficult within part of the problem is that men have a particular way of going about these things, but the loss of male spaces connected with weighty missions is one of the things that tends to limit masculinity and its expression. And so it tends to go into those margins of entertainment and shared consumption that don't offer as much in terms of helping men to become men, to grow up and to move beyond a sort of boyhood. And the sorts of visions that we have to resist a society that's heavily neutralized tend to be the rebellion of a certain juvenile young man rather than actual grown-up uh father figures, um male figures who represent a serious weighty mission in the world, all of these sorts of things. And it's one of the reasons I think that people responded to someone like Jordan Peterson because he spoke to that particular desire for a weighty engagement with the world that takes seriously the the difficulty and the challenge and the sorrow and the trauma and the uh just the tragedy of life, but also just the glory of actually taking weight upon yourself and growing under that weight. And for many men, that was just uh it was cold water on in the wilderness. This was uh uh a vision of what they could be. And it seems to me that if we're looking for masculinity, we need a sense of a weighty mission. And it's one of the things that I think we see in scripture. Adam was created before the woman, and he was ordered out into the world. And without being ordered out into the world on a weighty mission, uh it seems to me we will struggle to attain to uh real masculinity.

Derek Rishmawy 54:01

And that that is part of what I've been wrestling us towards to some degree. And one of the things that I I know we're closing here, and this is a typical uh mere fidelity thing to get to the nub of an issue in the last five minutes right before we have to close. But the the weight we keep coming back to that word weightiness, but weight, weight is formative, uh pressure is formative. The capacity to bear up under in the particular ways that are inscribed by the Lord in our bodies, in our souls, that are distinctly-I mean, women bear up under weight, women bear up under pressures, women, I mean, women can bear bear children, all these sorts of things. But but this is the kind of thing that I'm talking about is is thinking about the ways we tell young men, you were built to bear weight in particular ways, and you're built to respond in particular ways. Uh you were wired by the Lord to, like Adam, till the earth, to build the earth, to um do these things for the glory of God. Um you're supposed to do these things out front for the protection of your people. You're supposed to do these things not solely for yourself, because your glory is being able to bear weight for others to some degree, right? And this is why, you know, the the the you talk about sport. Sport, sport is good when you're a young man, it's formative in those ways as a practice arena for the world. Um not being stuck in the same thing, you know, until you're 40s or 50s or whatever. Um but but that element, the the one thing if we return to this conversation that I'd love for us to do is maybe in a part two, is actually try and actually think about the way that these pressures are supposed to call some for something that is unique in our bodies and unique in our souls, unique in the ways that we're wired. And I know there's there's variations and all that, we can get into that. But um I think pushing young men out into the world to touch grass, to carry weights, to even lift some weights, fellas, um, is is uh is about telling them to be fully embodied agents who were made for agency by God specifically in concrete ways, that that they're there's something that they need to feel that they're answering and responding to with their whole selves, their whole their whole their whole souls, their whole with their hands, with two hands, gripping and not just thinking and grasping mentally. Um and I I think if we can't point them to those things, we we can't really say that we've talked to them about what it means to be a man before the Lord, responsible before the Lord, uh responsive to the Lord. So um with that, uh I hope we have tilled the soil of the concepts at least in this conversation. If you've listened to us thus far, thanks for

Closing And Listener Feedback

Derek Rishmawy 57:13

sticking with us. And if you found this beneficial, um, you know, rate and review us on iTunes, that sort of thing, or just email in. Uh we do we do we do read our emails. We don't respond to all of them, but we do read them. So if you if there's if there's a thread you'd like to hear us talk about more, um, we'd love to hear that. But for now, this has been Mirror Fidelity.