Why Does Secular Culture Get Masculinity So Wrong?

The cover of an academic book features a cartoon of a generic superhero—fists clenched, chest puffed out, muscles flexed. Titled Toxic Masculinity: Mapping the Monstrous in Our Heroes, the book purports to give a scholarly analysis of “hegemonic masculinity and the spectrum of hypermasculinity” in American pop culture. 

Why are universities pushing the idea that masculinity is toxic? And it’s not only the academic world, but the popular media as well.

• A Washington Post article was titled, “Why Can’t We Hate Men?”
• A Huffington Post editor tweeted #“Kill All Men.”
• You can buy T-shirts that say, “So many men. So little ammunition.”

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

Even some men have taken to demeaning their own sex. A book author wrote, “Talking about ‘healthy masculinity’ is like talking about ‘healthy cancer.’” 

The director of the movie Avatar, James Cameron, said testosterone is “a toxin that you have to work out of your system.”

No wonder that in 2020, the Public Religion Research Institute found that half of American men agree with the statement, “These days society seems to punish men just for acting like men.” Among young men the numbers are even higher. In the Wall Street Journal, a psychotherapist writes, “In my practice, I’ve seen an increase of depression in young men who feel emasculated in a society that is hostile to masculinity.”

“Beaten Out of Us”

Ironically, this negative rhetoric may be one reason boys and men are in fact falling behind today. Boys are doing worse than girls at all levels of education, from kindergarten through college. The average university is now 60% female, 40% male. More women than men are going to graduate school and even professional schools like law and medicine. 

Books are coming out with titles like The Boy Crisis, The Trouble with Boys, and Why Boys Fail. 

As adults, men are more likely than women to be addicted to drugs or alcohol, to be homeless, to commit suicide, to suffer mental illness, and to end up behind bars. Some 90 percent of prison inmates are male. 

Even men’s life expectancy has gone down in recent years, while women’s has stayed the same. The New Scientist says, “Being male is now the single largest demographic factor for early death.”

I wrote the Toxic War on Masculinity to get to the bottom of this. Why does our culture get its ideas about masculinity so wrong? 

The Good News

Let’s switch to the good news. We often hear Christian men accused of being Exhibit A of toxic masculinity. To give just one example, the co-founder of the #Churchtoo movement (which followed the #Metoo movement) said the theology of male headship “feeds the rape culture that we see permeating American Christianity today.”

But social scientists were listening to these accusations and asking, Where’s your evidence? You’re making these charges, but where’s your data? As a result, sociologists and psychologists decided to do the studies (in my book, I quote about a dozen studies). Surprisingly, what they found is that evangelical family men who attend church regularly actually test out as the most loving and engaged husbands and fathers.

Compared to the average American family man:

• They are more loving to their wives (their wives report being the happiest).
• They are more engaged with their children, spending 3.5 hours more per week with them than secular fathers.
• They have the lowest rate of divorce—35% lower than secular couples.
• And, the real surprise, they have the lowest rate of domestic violence
• of any group in the U.S.

Sociologist Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia reported his findings in the New York Times, writing, “It turns out that the happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives. Fully 73 percent of wives who hold conservative gender values and attend religious services regularly with their husbands have high-quality marriages.”

This is not a pep talk from a religious leader. These numbers are the results of rigorous empirical testing. They are evidence-based findings showing that Christianity has the power to “reconcile the sexes,” as I put it in the subtitle to my book. We should be confident about bringing this message into the secular arena to debunk the disparaging media stereotypes.

Men on the Fringes of the Church

When I publicize these positive statistics, the first pushback I always get is, “But haven’t we all heard that Christians are just as likely to divorce as the rest of society?” 

So researchers went back to the data and made a crucial distinction. They divided evangelical men into those who attend church regularly and are authentic in their Christian convictions, versus those who are only nominal Christians. The definition of nominal is men who, on a survey, might check the “Baptist” box for example, but who attend church rarely, if at all.

Nominal men are shockingly different—they fit all the toxic stereotypes:

• Their wives report the lowest level of happiness.
• They are the least engaged with their children.
• They have the highest rate of divorce—20% higher than secular couples.
• The real shocker is that they have the highest rate of domestic abuse and violence of any group in America—higher than secular men.

Wilcox summarized his findings in Christianity Today: “The most violent husbands in America are nominal evangelical Protestants who attend church infrequently or not at all” (his emphasis).

It seems that nominal men hang around the fringes of the Christian world just enough to hear the language of headship and submission but not enough to learn the biblical meaning of those terms. Instead, they infuse the words with meaning picked up from the secular script for masculinity—like male superiority and entitlement.

The challenge to the church, then, is twofold. On one hand, we should support and affirm the men who are doing well, as the empirical evidence shows. One of my graduate students leads a women’s ministry at a large Baptist church, and she told me, “On Mother’s Day, we hand out flowers and tell the mothers they’re wonderful. On Father’s Day, we scold the men and tell them to do better.” 

Instead of scolding, we need to bring the positive sociological data into the churches to encourage men. Men can be confident that when they are committed to doing things God’s way, they will have happier marriages and families. 

At the same time, churches need to meet the challenge of how to reach out to the nominal men who are at the fringes. How can they be better discipled with a healthy, genuinely biblical view of masculinity? 

It is crucial for men, whatever their spiritual state, to find in the church a place where masculinity is honored, where men are affirmed for the way God created them. We can start with the basics: because of testosterone, men are on average larger, stronger, and faster than women. Typically, they are also more physical, more competitive, and more risk-taking. These are simply creational givens, and Christians need to affirm these God-given traits as good when they are used to guide, provide, love, and protect. 

True masculinity is a gift, and we should be grateful to the men who embody it.

Nancy Pearcey is a featured speaker at this year’s Pure Desire Summit. Join us September 20-21 to hear Nancy and other experts in the field of sexual health, betrayal trauma, and healing. Register now!

The views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are those of the author alone and do not reflect an official position of Pure Desire Ministries, except where expressly stated.