Category: Uncategorized

---

My kids have a little wooden nativity set that each year we assemble beneath our Christmas tree. This time of year, you see them everywhere—plastic ones illuminated in front yards, wooden ones set up in front of McDonald’s, some metal and wrapped in Christmas lights, others expensive porcelain or olive wood.

This year, nativity scenes even made the news being used by some churches to make political statements. Growing up, some of the Catholic churches in my home town were forced to bolt down their baby Jesus—stealing them having become the popular teenage seasonal prank.

That little scene is more than 2,000 years old, and although 2,000 years of nativity nostalgia have slowly evolved some details of the original scene, where else do we set up historical depictions from the First-Century world.

It’s easy, these nativities yanked out of their ancient time and set alongside our wrapped presents and busy shopping lines, to lose a sense of the nativity’s actual place. We often imagine Christ’s birth wrapped in darkness, only the light of that brilliant new star washing down over the family: Marry, Joseph, and Jesus, aglow in heavenly light. The scene more made for holiday cards with glitter than the actual complexity of First-Century life on the margins.

Like the Christmas song puts it, “Radiant beams from thy holy face. With the dawn of redeeming grace.”

Jesus was born in Bethlehem. A small town, but rich in history, and in Jesus’ day, probably home to a few hundred people. First-Century towns like Bethlehem were built tight, families often adding rooms to existing houses as their families grew. With the census underway, Bethlehem was more crowded than usual, crowded enough that Mary and Joseph found space with the animals, probably in a seller, cave space beneath the family’s house.

The place of Jesus’ birth alludes to how little attention was given to it; after all, the families of Bethlehem must have been busy. With relatives in town, there were grandkids to play with, meals to be fixed, extra bedding to pull out, and talk of life in every other part of Judea. An out of town Jewish girl about to give birth was hardly a thing to note. Mary and Joseph slipped into their place, most likely unnoticed by the others going about their business. Maybe a few hellos. Maybe a few “good to see you again.” But never a bending knee or word of worship.

It’s not hard to imagine what had caught the attention of Bethlehem—there was plenty to talk about. Jesus was not born into a historical blank space. That year had not been divinely chosen because nothing else significant was on the world’s calendar. Hardly, the world into which Jesus was born was fully occupied with power and politics—revolutions, collapses, impassioned arguments, rumors, and growing divisions.

The Gospel’s subtle references to these tumultuous times have become such a part of our reading that very little of these events still color our Christmas imagination. But the gospel writers make several significant historical references surrounding that first Christmas morning.

The Political Atmosphere of Jesus’ Birth

First, there was the most proponent name in the list, Caesar Augustus. For us, it’s an Imperial name indistinguishable from the rest, but in Jesus’s day, Augustus was a name plenty were talking about round Bethlehem dining room tables, just an earshot from Jesus’ manger. Augustus had risen to power less than thirty years ago, the soul victor of the massive Roman civil war sparked by the assassination of Julius Caesar. The war had produced legendary names like Brutus, Cassius, Marc Antony, and Cleopatra. Surely, it was one of the most significant events in world history.

Augustus used the war to not only gain power but to reinvent Rome itself. He is remembered as the first Roman Emperor, having all but decimated the old Roman Senate. He was a man of vision and ruthless determination, and after the blood bath of eliminating his opposition, he ushered in an era, known by historians as the Pax Romana—the era of Roman peace. Peace earned by the sword and ensured by his legions.

The birth of Jesus intersects this monumental figure in the order of Caesar Augustus’s decree, “all the world should be registered.”

These censuses were extremely controversial in Israel because they were seen as an attempt to tighten control and inevitably raise more taxes. The jews saw the order as a political move in the wrong direction. There would eventually be several registrations taken of Judea, some before the rule of Quirinius, who is mentioned by Luke, and some during. The Jewish historian Josephus traces the Jewish revolt and the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 AD, all the way back to opposition to these registrations by Augustus.

The Jewish leadership, like the High Priest, were able to convince most of Jerusalem to participate, but more conservative regions like Galilee, where Jesus’ family was from, remained a hotbed for talk of revolt and opposition.

There is an interesting note in the Book of Acts when Gamaliel is the lone member of the Sanhedrin to recommend not persecuting the new Christians. He mentioned that maybe Jesus was a false leader like other revolutionary. He specifically named Theudas and Judas the Galilean who had led revolts against Rome and failed. We know for sure that Judas the Galilean lead his revolt from Galilee and in opposition to these very censuses we read about in Luke 2.

I know Christmas Eve is not typically a service to use as a history lesson, but I give you this history to hopefully make a point; Jesus was born into a world immersed and engrossed in politics, controversy, and hotly divided opinions. I’ve said nothing about the violence and insecurities of Herod the Great or the political divisions on how to handle Rome led in opposing directions by the Pharisees, and Sanhedrin, and Essences.

Politics at the Table

It’s not hard to imagine that night, a Jewish family whispering in the dim oil lit light of their Bethlehem home. One begins, “We are Jews. God is our emperor. Caesar Augustus is not our peace. And now he wants more money to pay for it.”

Another whispers back, “We should resist. I hear there is a man leading a rebellion near Galilee. Some say he may be the Messiah who will finally overthrow Rome.” Another family member pushes back. “It’s too risky. We still have the temple. I don’t want to risk losing that too.” Still, another, hearing mention of the temple becomes more frustrated, their voices now above a whisper. “The temple is as corrupt as Rome. We should leave while we can. There are priests in the desert who are practicing our faith as we all should.” In that day, politics and religion were topics no family could avoid, nor would they try.

But they find themselves at an impasse. What is this world with its kings and armies and taxes? What does it mean to follow God in it? Do you resist? Do you comply? Do you ignore everything and pretend?

They blew out their lamps and fell asleep, divided, yet with a mix of fear, uncertainty, frustration, and longing shared between them.

A few yards away, a baby is born and brakes the stillness with its first cry. What a world to be born into.

“And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger because there was no place for them in the inn.”

And to the shepherds, heavy-eyed, watching sheep on the margins of town, suddenly an angel, and a word, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”

“And this will be a sign for you..”

What will be the sign of this savior? What will be the sign of this new Lord? What is this good news and joy for all people? What is this revelation of God breaking into the darkness, into the silence?

“You will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.”

At that very moment, somewhere in Rome, Caesar Augustus was probably plotting and signing more decrees. Pundits were weighing-in on clashes between the emperor and the Roman senate. In Galilee, rebels were also plotting and planning their resistance. They would wait no more. There was a nation to save. In Jerusalem, priests were trying to balance conflicts and keep their own positions of power. There was so much at stake.

And yet it would be this little nativity scene—young unknown first-time parents, poor bowing shepherds, a stone feeding trough holding an infant, and scrapes of cloth for swaddling—it would be this scene that was remembered.

Remember This Christmas

I’ll offer you only this, Christmas reminds us that God is with us, but not in the ways or places many would expect.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,  for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

And I might add, for this Christmas, blessed are those wise enough to look for him, passing by kings and emperors and revolutions, to find him here, in this nativity. Because it is no easier for us to recognize him than it was for those of his own time.

The light of our Christmas Eve candles isn’t enough to burn away the complexity of our own time. There is just as much talk of power, and politics, and disagreement on how to handle them both. Such things matter, but maybe not as much as some others. Maybe not as much as this.

“And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.”

I want to close with this Christmas poem from G. K. Chesterton.

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost – how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky’s dome.

This world is wild as an old wives’ tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

I want to remind you tonight, far more is going on than the news finds reason to report. In fact, the headlines of Jesus’ world became nothing more than the historical footnotes surrounding his birth. Could it be true here as well.

It would be this baby by which history itself would pivot, the count of this Christmas, 2019, derived from that moment of his birth.

This is the ways of God. As Paul would put it, “God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.”

The kingdom of God is at hand. Here it is. Taste and see that the Lord is good.

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”

---

I’m aware; toxic masculinity is a phrase of extreme controversy. Wrapped up in the phrase are hotly debated ideologies, fueled by very different perspectives on what a man is and should be.

At the center of these masculine critiques is a concern of over-identification with the attributes of violence, aggression, and dominance. In 2018, The American Psychological Association released findings entitled “Harmful masculinity and violence: Understanding the connection and approaches to prevention.”

The APA summarized:

“In early childhood, violence and aggression are used to express emotions and distress. Over time, aggression in males shifts to asserting power over another, particularly when masculinity is threatened. Masculine ideals, such as the restriction of emotional expression and the pressure to conform to expectations of dominance and aggression, may heighten the potential for boys to engage in general acts of violence including, but not limited to, bullying, assault, and/or physical and verbal aggression.”

The APA suggests that instead of maturing out of childhood aggression, our socially constructed masculine ideals teach men to identify with and lean into their aggressive traits. The APA also suggested that a struggle by some men to live up to these masculine expectations leads them to overcompensate with aggression and violence.

The APA is not wrong in recognizing and condemning the violence and aggression many men act out. In a previous article, I considered the significant evidence that something is deeply flawed in the lives of, particularly, young men. Violence is a part of the problem.

However, the APA study went on to make several suggestions to help solve toxic masculinity. Consider these three suggestions: “Address social norms condoning male dominance and violence,” “Create marketing campaigns designed to modify social and cultural norms that endorse the unhealthy male code and consequent violence,” “Identify and treat psychological distress precipitated by gender role socialization.”

What’s Wrong With Us is More Complicated… And Much Older

The problems facing men are more complicated than the APA acknowledges. What’s wrong with men is not something an ad campaign or a public service commercial can solve. And the ways men go wrong are far more complicated than violence and aggression. It’s also worth remembering; we are hardly the first to deal with these questions. The problem is much, much older.

There is an Irish proverb that goes, “For every mile of road, there are two miles of ditches.”

I’m worried that our conversations about toxic masculinity have become far too narrow. Our culture’s characterizations of toxic men are incomplete. There is more than one ditch on this path to understanding manhood. Avoiding one doesn’t guarantee to miss the other. In fact, many drivers have learned that the real danger can be over-correcting, which often leaves you in the ditch on the other side of the road.

The Biblical Take on Man’s Aggression

The opening chapters of Genesis narrate how the first couple’s act of disobedience proliferated into a world that could only be described as cruel and perverse. As God put it, “every intention of the thoughts of [man’s] heart was only evil continually.” The evil which now dwelled in man’s heart spilled out across creation. Cain murdered his brother in premeditated hatred and soon men were killing and taking as it benefited them. We watch as Adam and Eve’s curse corrupts every corner of the human experience.

Just after Abel’s murder and Cain’s exile, we are given a genealogy of Adam’s descendants. Eventually, from the descendants of Cain came Lamech. Lamech was the first man to have two wives. More descriptively, Genesis records, “Lamech took two wives.” He was also the second to be credited with murder. He bragged about killing a younger, and, as seems to be implied, weaker man to his wives. He taunted, “If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech’s (talking about one’s self in the third-person apparently being a universally recognized sign of a scumbag) is seventy-sevenfold.” It was a reference to God’s promise to protect Cain even in exile. Lamech boasted of his own vengeance and his own power for protection. It’s probably safe to call Lamech toxic.

The genealogies then lead us to what has to be one of the most perplexing passages in all of scripture—Genesis 6.

“When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose… The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth…”

Lamech’s taking of wives becomes the pattern, as these “sons of God” began to take wives as they pleased, or as these women pleased their eye. These were the mighty men of old. We know very little about them. Commentators aren’t sure how to translate Nephilim. It literally means “fallen ones,” but may also refer to these men and their offspring as giants. And what are we to make of the title “sons of God?” Tradition has it that these are spirit beings who slept with women to produce demigods, legendary men of renown.

Ancient Men of Renown

The ancient world is filled with stories of such men—heroes. Heracles and Achilles. Perseus and Orion. These were the men whose names are forever remembered, the men whose stories are recorded in songs and memorialized in constellations of the stars. That generations of men would model their lives after such figures is how history progresses.

We can’t be sure if Genesis saw these legendary “sons of God” figures as truly divine or only as figures of mythical lore, many having claimed divinity. Still, we do know two things about how Genesis evaluated them. First, their tactics were oppression, violence, and wicked pursuit. They conquered women as they conquered land and cities. As Leon Kass put it in his commentary on Genesis, following these heroes, “The rest of mankind goes boldly and heroically wild.”

They become toxic.

In response, God would no longer allow men to live for hundreds of years, inflicting lifetimes of brutality and pain. Still, the toxicity of mankind became so great that God “regretted” that he had made man at all. He would send a flood to purge the earth of their violence.

But the second, and maybe the most surprising lesson of Genesis, is that the heroes of old have no place in the history of God. Their names are washed away with their time and with their violent deeds. Their power, their achievements, and their conquests are dismissed with a single summary sentence. “These were the mighty men who were of old.” Genesis has no interest in remembering their names or their achievements.

While the ancient world delighted itself in all the nefarious and sordid details of their heroes’ lives, Israel’s God paid little attention.

As Psalm 37 put it, “In just a little while, the wicked will be no more; though you look carefully at his place, he will not be there. But the meek shall inherit the land.”

The Man Who’s Name Was Remembered

Noah’s name is the one name remembered from those days. And what is it that placed Noah above the heroes of his age?

Genesis states simply: “Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God.”

That is the full extent of what we know about Noah. These are the traits that earned him a place in the story of God. As one commentator put it, “we are put on notice that it is these qualities, not heroic manliness (prized everywhere else), that are divinely favored.” Noah walked with God.

Noah’s character is, however, more complicated than your Sunday school flannel-board may have presented it. In fact, there are tensions which run through the story of Noah which too few readers have recognized. Noah’s story is more thann an ark and animals. Noah’s story presents the full complexity of what it means to face our broken identity and to discover that there is more than one way we go wrong.

Our Expectations for Noah

Interestingly, the hairy-knuckled Lamech, who boasted of murder to his conquered wives, is not the only Lamech in Genesis’ genealogies. There was a second Lamech—Noah’s father.

Upon the birth of his son, this second Lamech named him Noah, explaining, “Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.” In Hebrew, Noah sounds similar to the word, translated here, relief. Noah is a play on words for rest.

If the first Lamech was known for his bravado, this Lamech seems weary and pensive. The pain of centuries of toiling under the curse had left him longing for relief. His son might be the one to finally bring rest. No other son in all of the Genesis genealogies is given such expectations.

Both Lamechs were looking for relief, one by conquering it, the other hoping his son might accomplish what he had not. One through aggression, the other passively longing. Noah’s father makes no mention of God, but his hopes were messianic. Could Noah reverse the curse?

To then discover that Noah is, in fact, the single man to be recognized by God as worthy of saving, to the reader unaware of the story’s conclusion, the expectations could not be higher. But there is an interesting observation about Noah, which, once noticed, is impossible not to see. Noah never speaks.

He is the hope of humanity. He is the one selected by God. He is the one who thousands of years later, Fisher-Price continues to produce as a kids’ bath-time playset. Yet he moves through his own story speechless.

To his credit, Noah’s silence has the literary effect of reinforcing the consistency of his action and character. Each time God speaks, Noah obeys. There is no negotiating, no complaining, no boasting or fear. The simplicities by which God affirmed Noah’s righteousness is expressed in the simplicity of his obedience. His quiet dedication carried him through the floodwaters and onto dry ground where his silent sacrifice placed upon a fresh alter was received by God as a pleasing aroma.

But his long silence has another effect; it produces a jarring and horrific impact when Noah’s first utterance is a curse upon his own son. “Cursed be Canaan.”

Noah, the son who had been his father’s hope for rest from the cursed ground, now speaks his first words, a curse upon his own son to the devastation of his father’s hope.

The Second Ditch of Masculinity

I have often wondered about the world into which Noah stepped from the ark. The images of doves and rainbows tend to wash the story in a sense of newness: green meadows, snow-capped peaks, and bubbling streams rinsed of their previous pollution.

But Genesis states only that Noah stepped out onto dry ground. After a year of floating on the ark, months of water covering the earth, the landscape may have appeared more martian than utopian. The horizon must have been stripped of its trees and bushes, the ground caked and cracking with mud. The ark, weathered and beaten, now wedged useless in the rock. And the animals, which God acknowledged, would now fear men, scattered, leaving Noah and his family with only their stone-piled alter and a thin wisp of smoke rising to heaven above.

Back in 2005, a dam broke not far from where I live. At 5:00 am, and with no warning, 1.3 billion gallons of water were leased down the side of a Missouri mountain, draining the 50-acre reservoir in a few minutes. The water stripped the ground bare down to the bedrock, piling up trees like tooth-picks at the bottom. More than ten years later, you can still see evidence of the disaster. It is an unmeasurable fraction of the water that was released in Genesis.

Into that bleak landscape, God commanded them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” This had also been his garden imperative to the first couple, but this was no Eden, a reality which would soon be evident in more than scenery. Onto this panorama, God’s rainbow stretched across the sky. The scene provides even more profound significance. Its colors now the only vibrancy in an otherwise barren world. Though the destruction had been catastrophic, and its aftermath must have been staggering, the world was not dark. By God’s covenant, there was color, light, and promise.

Noah was once again silent.

What does Noah do with this new world, with these new promises of God’s faithfulness? Noah planted a vineyard. “He drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent.” Noah cracked open a PBR and passed out half-naked on the couch. He becomes more Homer Simpson than Homer’s Odysseus.

Noah is alive—breathing at least—but unconscious and sprawled across the dirt floor, he has more in common with his neighbors washed away by the flood than his previous status of walking with God. And he is again silent, this time to his discredit. In Jewish history, Noah is credited with having invented alcohol, and he became the first of many who would disengage from the complexity of their world by the drink.

As G. K. Chesterton warned, “Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.” Far from reversing the curse, man was once again naked and ashamed.

As Kass puts it, “Noah’s drunkenness robs him – of his dignity, his parental authority, and his very humanity. Prostrate rather than upright, this newly established master of the earth has, in the space of one verse, utterly lost his standing.”

The one who was described as walking with God drank himself into immobility—passive and disengaged.

It’s not clear if Noah’s son, Ham, only mocked his father’s indecency or, as has long been posited, took advantage of his father’s unconsciousness with more perverse intent. What we do know is that Noah awoke to realize his shame and cursed his son.

And so, having avoided the ditch of violence and aggression, Noah slid into the ditch of passive disengagement. It, too, divided and wounded his family.

The Danger of a Passive Man

It’s customary to describe the Bible as a patriarchal tool used by generations of men to justify their misogyny. Critics point to what are clear injustices and oppression against women. But such readings don’t pay close enough attention. It’s like a middle school student reading the first racist pejorative and concluding that To Kill A Mocking Bird is a racist book and its author, clearly, a racial bigot.

The Bible offers plenty of evidence for how men tread along in the ditch of aggression—Cain, Samson, and Amnon, to name only a few—but the Bible also suggests the devastating tendency of man’s passivity and just as many examples of its destructive force.

Once you’ve recognized it, you’ll see it stretched across the Biblical story: Adam’s passive taking of the fruit. Abraham’s yielding to a perverse plan. David unable to discipline his disintegrating family. Barak powerless to take up the sword. And Noah, drinking away his reality.

Men produce destruction by more than violence. To warn only of man’s aggression is to imply that passivity makes him safe. Nothing could be further from the truth, for we all know that most passivity is only another form of aggression. As the novelist, Agatha Christie put it, “A weak man in a corner is more dangerous than a strong man.”

It’s not hard to look beneath the surface of most passivity to discover a brooding aggression. Our term, passive-aggressive, was first coined by a WWII Army psychiatrist, William Menninger. He noticed that some soldiers, while not openly defiant, exhibited more subversive forms of “aggressiveness” by “passive measures, such as pouting, stubbornness, procrastination, inefficiency, and passive obstructionism.” Menninger coined the phrase, passive-aggressive.

Is it possible that Noah’s drunken detachment is itself a kind of aggression, a refusal to participate in what God had ordered, a rebellion of apathy?

I worry that while our culture, often rightfully, warns about the dangers of violent men, we have produced too many disengaged men. Men who bear no responsibility for their children, nor time, nor pain they passively inflict on others.

Our culture, influenced by the suggestions of organizations like the APA, suggests that what men need are new models, new expressions of masculinity. So our shows are full of bumbling fathers who stumble their way through episodes, more joke than character. They never understand their wives, they feel awkward talking with their kids, and only seem happy when at work or in front of the TV. We play a zero-sum game, believing that to elevate women necessitates we degrade men.

To some degree, the APA is right about needing new masculine models, but the biblical model does not seem to be one they are willing to consider. The Bible offers both a fuller warning and a better way.

The violence of Genesis is perpetrated by men who are desperate and insecure. They are godless men who, afraid of being weak, use power to protect themselves. They see the complexity of the world and attempt to control it. Passive men see the same complexity and, seeking the same control, they content themselves to face only the smallest realistic possibilities which they can rule.

Both are anxious. Both are insecure. Both acknowledge very little of themselves yet depend only on themselves. Both are wounded animals—fight and flight—overwhelmed by their wounds and simmering frustrations. Both are dangerous. Passive and aggressive.

The single flash of light that illuminates the darkness of Noah’s story is the simple phrase, “Noah walked with God.” Here is the path which rises above the ditches. Here is the path that saves us from ourselves. Here is the path that promises true rest.

But to walk with God implies a way ridiculed by both the aggressive and the passive—the sacrifice of control. Maybe the best description for this better way is the virtue of meekness… more on that in the next article.

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28-30

---

 

The last few weeks have offered plenty of takes on both Kanye West’s new album, Jesus is King, and his newfound faith. Personally, I’ve found it refreshing to be reminded that the gospel is powerful and capable of transforming any life. Honestly, it feels kind of good to be optimistic.

As my social feeds are usually full of Christians arguing viciously about every possible detail of Christian belief, the simple proclamation of Jesus as King, characterized by so much of Kanye’s new message, is a palate-cleansing reminder of what matters most.

I don’t have much more to contribute about Kanye’s conversion than has already been said, but there is a part of Kanye’s story which I think hasn’t been given enough attention—at least not what it deserves. Kanye found a pastor. He has a pastor who knows his name, who can speak about his faith, and who has apparently been walking personally with him over the past months.

In October, Christianity Today published a profile of Kanye’s pastor, Adam Tyson. Tyson is not a celebrity. His church, Placerita Bible Church, has an average attendance of about 350 people. It is a primarily white church that often spends an hour expositing scripture each week. Search Adam’s name, and most of the photos show him in a conservative coat and tie. The church’s website could be any small church. The site currently has promotions for a women’s Christmas event and a dessert reception for a transitioning staff pastor. Adam’s Instagram has 877 followers. He hasn’t written a book nor appeared on any list of influential pastors. Adam seems to be like so many pastors I know.

But it was into Adam’s church that Kanye walked, invited there by an employee and friend. According to CT:

“After the service, they chatted for a few minutes and set up a meeting for a week later. They walked through the whole gospel, including passages such as John 3:16 and the Romans Road, concluding their conversation with a discussion that shifted away from justification and more toward sanctification, Tyson said.”

Tyson has also acknowledged that he didn’t initially know who Kanye was. In fact, when shaking Kanye’s hand after service in the church lobby, Tyson opened the conversation by asking, “I’m Pastor Tyson, what’s your name?”

Since that simple meeting, Adam has continued to walk with Kanye, helped lead bible studies with him, and spoken at his events.

Reading and listening to Adam recount those life-changing events, it struck me how un-innovative the whole process has been: a modest church service, an evangelistic explanation many believers learned as children, shaking hands in the church lobby, a coffee appointment, a bible study, and conversations about justification and sanctification.

Kanye found the gospel, but he also found a pastor.

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to talk with author Harold Senkbeil about his new book, The Care of Souls: Cultivating A Pastor’s Heart. We talked about the pastor as a physician of the soul. Like a doctor, a pastor takes the time to listen, to ask questions, to recognize challenges, and to walk with a patient back to wholeness. In our conversation, we noted how many Christians have never had the opportunity to have that kind of relationship with a pastor.

I wonder how many people have ever had a pastor who knew more than just their name—if that. How many people can walk into a church, talk to the pastor after service, schedule an appointment, and talk about their deepest personal struggles with faith? What struck me about Kanye’s story is the gift of a pastor with time and attention for that kind of relationship.

Everyone deserves a pastor.

In an age of leadership fascinations, staff delegations, scaling, and technological depersonalization, maybe the most culturally innovative ministry is the one in which a pastor attempts to know his flock personally. After all, the shepherd, by which we have inherited our work as shepherds, was willing to recognize the single missing sheep and to turn his attention to finding it.

Adam Tyson and Kanye West are a relationship few might have been able to predict. But who would have imagined Paul and Barnabas or Apollos with Priscilla and Aquila?

If you are a pastor, Kanye’s story should remind you of the dignity of your work. Small, unnoticed, and uninfluential are evaluations of this world. In the kingdom, this is the greatest work of all. This is what we do. We shepherd those God adds to our flock. We learn their names. We learn their stories. And we walk with them into greater faith.

It might not be a celebrity who walks through the doors of your church this Sunday, but it will be a person who needs a pastor.

“Before anything else, a church is a place where a person is named and greeted, whether implicitly or explicitly, in Jesus’s name.” — Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

---

---

The past years have seen a massive spike in debates, articles, and books on the topic of masculinity, most centered around a call to redefine what masculinity means. What does it mean to be a man?

We call for it constantly. Be a man. Act like a man. Man up. Real men don’t…

But it’s worth asking yourself, do you have a good definition for it? How would you define what it means to be a man?

It’s typical to respond with either a list of personality traits or one of “manly” skills. For example, the controversial APA guidelines on counseling men and boys listed the attributes of masculinity as including “stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression.” The APA concluded that these traits are harmful and has suggested their own evolved definition of masculinity.

On the other end of the interpretive spectrum are lists of skills. Men know how to use tools, smoke meat, and can throw a football. One recent study attempted to clarify what activities millennial men and women most associated with “feeling like a man.” At the top of their list, with 92% agreement was “cooking on the grill,” followed by, playing sports, fixing appliances, and paying bills.

Both attempts to define masculinity focus on inherent traits or abilities. Men, often subconsciously, seem to be feeling the pressure of our performance-based definitions. These approaches cut too many men out, and they tend to be based too much on shifting expectations. With such a weak foundation, it’s no surprise that masculinity is so easily called into question and supplanted with radically alternative definitions. If masculinity is nothing more than aggression and grilling, why not attempt to redefine it. But it’s a strawman. We may call ourselves men, but we are in desperate need of a stronger definition of it.

Is Bach less a man for taking up the organ?

Growing up, I was pretty terrible at sports. I assumed it was a lack of athleticism, strange considering my Dad played college football and my brother was a talented high school pitcher. My dad eventually became the superintendent of our State’s Highway Patrol, and my brother is currently a Captain in the Marine Corp. By some strange leap of genetics, my brother ended up six feet five inches with a varsity-clocked fastball while I ended up five foot eleven and playing first base, the position with the absolute lowest probability of having to throw a baseball. I played up until the year tryouts were required. I had enough self-awareness not to try.

Looking back, my real problem was not a lack of ability but a lack of competitiveness. I was more interested in conversation than competition. Neither can I honestly claim the masculine traits of stoicism or aggression. I’ve always been more empathetic, a trait I’ve come to recognize even more as I see it in my own son.

While I’m pretty handy with tools, a strange tick-borne disease has left me allergic to red meat (I’ve written about it previously on this blog). I often eat vegan—definitively not masculine; although, I’m also an avid bird hunter and enjoy few things more than an afternoon of sporting clays with my 20 gauge Benelli. I guess my point is that my own life fits oddly into the trait/skill definitions of masculinity. I think that is true for the majority of men I know. So why do we go about determining our masculinity by checking boxes and assigning ourselves a score? Ten points for driving a truck; minus five for crying at the Notebook.

These flimsy effort-based definitions fail one of my favorite philosophical ideas, Kant’s Categorical imperative. In explaining his universalizability principle, Kant stated, “Act only according to that maxim which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction.” In other words, if you’re going to claim that real men BBQ and drink beer, then be consistent. Tell the recovering alcoholic, sober for one year, that he has had to trade his man-card for his sobriety.

What I’ve been searching for is a definition of manhood which can be true for all men—a potential for all men. Do we really want to insist that all men should aggressively pursue sports and guns? Is Bach less a man for taking up the organ? Walt Disney less for doodling cartoon mice? How about Winston Churchill who loved to paint or Dr. Seuss who obsessed over kids rhymes?

I think most of us are intuitive enough to recognize that our lists aren’t actually the measure of a man, but what has surprised me is our inability—particularly as Christians—to provide an alternative definition. Interestingly, adding the qualifier, “Christian” makes the process of defining even more perplexing. What is a man? What is a Christian man?

The Bible On Masculinity

I’m struck by the fact that the Bible doesn’t provide a simple definition of masculinity. In fact, in my opinion, it speaks very rarely to the topic. There are distinct discussions about the roles of fathers and husbands. And often Christians turn to these responsibilities in defining biblical manhood, but what do we make of Paul’s passion for the calling of singleness. Does authentic manhood require a wife and children? You want to be the one to suggest that Paul was less a man for his singleness?

Other Christian definitions tend to take biblical texts addressed to “man” and individualize them to biological men, while at the same time universalizing the same word elsewhere to speak to mankind. Similarly, we often point to Christ as a model of true masculinity. But does Christianity offer a similarly ideal figure of femininity? Is Christ a model for only men? It is to both men and women Christ presents his call to follow. Where the Bible does offer definitive lists of attributes—the fruit of the spirit and the beatitudes—both men and women are called to their adoption. Both men and women are called to spiritual poverty, mourning, meekness, love, kindness, and gentleness.

But with equal conviction, I recognize that the Bible does not deny nor ignore the created reality of gender. It is one of the foundational elements of the creation account and constantly an undercurrent through both testaments. Being male is not something the Bible ignores.

As culture continues to question the authoritativeness of gender, appealing to cultural construction to propose a more fluid interpretation, believers have rightfully held to their conviction that God created a gendered world. And it’s our culture’s destabilizing interpretations that make the need for a Biblical definition more critical than ever.

So I’ve been asking, as Christians, how do we define masculinity? I’ve asked pastor friends. I’ve asked my millennial peers. I’ve asked older mentors. And while most of the Christian men I know are committed to being a “man of God,” when asked, they too struggle to articulate exactly what that means. We are aiming at a target we can’t quite make out and can’t quite describe.

In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Michael Ian Black lamented:

“To be a girl today is to be the beneficiary of decades of conversation about the complexities of womanhood, its many forms, and expressions. Boys, though, have been left behind. No commensurate movement has emerged to help them navigate toward a full expression of their gender. It’s no longer enough to ‘be a man’—we no longer even know what that means.”

Definitions Matter More Than You Think

Definitions matter, but maybe not in the way you think. Most linguists will acknowledge that the definitions of words are not nearly as fixed as that fifteen-pound Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary would like you to think. Words shift considerably in their meaning. In fact, a dictionary is more a historical document than an authority. Words are defined by usage, and dictionaries serve only to track how words have been used. Change how a word is used, and you can literally rewrite the dictionary.

I previously referenced the APA’s guidelines for a new kind of masculinity. They explicitly acknowledged their goal is to do just that, to create a new, evolved definition for masculinity.

Definitions may seem boring, but we need them now more than ever. The discussion about masculinity deserves more than just consumer commercials, youtube rants, and 30 second sound bites.

Aristotle once wrote, “How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms.” I think he was right. Defining our terms won’t solve the conflict with culture, but it will consolidate the debate into its more fundamental questions. Definitions quickly highlight what is really in dispute. I’m convinced that beneath our talk of redefining gender rumbles a rebellion against the creator’s authority and his call to individual responsibility. That rebellion is, out of necessity, eroding the foundations of masculinity.

As Eugene Peterson put it: “We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them, and then they end up using us. Our imaginations become blunted. We end up dealing only with surfaces, functions, roles.” We owe it to ourselves, to our sons, and to our friends to dig deeper. Our words are a responsibility which we must bear responsibly.

There is plenty of evidence for the collapsing definition of manhood.

Man-this and Man-that

In a fascinating article entitled, “The Death of Words,” C. S. Lewis explained how words could gradually lose their meaning. One of the signs he pointed to was a word, once precious in meaning, now requiring modifiers to make it precious again. He used the word “gentleman” as an example. Lewis wrote, “As long as gentleman has a clear meaning, it is enough to say that So-and-so is a gentleman. When we begin saying that he is “a real gentleman” or “a true gentleman” or “a gentleman in the truest sense” we may be sure that the word has not long to live.” The modifiers expose the word’s lack of meaning.

Mark Peters makes a similar suggestion in comedically pointing out our cultural proliferation of “man” words, asking if it’s a prefix or an identity crisis. He writes:

“Is it time for a manogram? Did you get your manimony check? Or is what you really need a (shudder) manzilian? If you feel like you’re seeing man words everywhere, you’re not alone. Movies, TV shows, ads, and the Web have been pumping them out. Some are painful puns, some crude slang, and as a genre, they say a great deal about our ever-in-flux gender roles.”

I think Lewis and Peters expose the demise of the word “man.” Take the qualifiers we now had to masculinity. He is a real man. He is a man’s man. He is a good man. He is a godly man. He is an alpha male. A macho man. Some of these amalgamations have even been added to the dictionary.

I’m not a dictionary, but how we use these words matters more than the dictionary. So, I want to offer three preliminary definitions to help reestablish what it means to be a man. I want to look at the words: Male, Masculine, and Man.

Def. Male: “a male person: a man or a boy”

To be male is to refer to a biological distinction of sex. There are male horses, sometimes called stallions. There are male bears, technically called boars. And there are male lemur monkeys identified by biologists as dictators; the females are called princesses—Wikipedia it.

We similarly categorize humans into the sexes, male and female. These titles are given based on biological distinctions. We don’t expect a horse to earn its status as a male stallion, nor does it take a degree in biology or a license in veterinary medicine to recognize the distinctions between a stallion and a mare. To identify a male is to make a biological distinction.

Even the most progressive definitions of gender identity—those who considering gender socially constructed and non-binary—will usually acknowledge the basic sexual categories of male and female. Science has even identified the precise prenatal hormonal exposures which steer the developing fetus towards male and female physicality. Even here there are complexities though. Our genetics can produce anomalies, in the same way, that all human experience fails in some way to possess its potential ideal.

Here is where Christian faith inevitably interjects itself. The consequences of sin are not just individual and abstract. Creation cries out for restoration: storms, diseases, and chromosomal defects. Mount Everest is not the full realization of its creation. The Bahamas are not the full paradise of Genesis. Neither are our bodies the fully intended biology of their creation.

The distinction of being male and female is not a false reality forced on our existence; instead, it is the foundational reality complicated by the existence of human brokenness. It is male and female, which God created in His own image and called good. It also means that maleness is not an achievement but a created reality, one which we await the full realization of in a new creation.

In God’s image, he created them, male and female.

Def. Masculinity: “qualities or attributes regarded as characteristic of males.”

Here, the most important distinction I hope to make is pointing out that masculinity is too often expressed as the goal of being a man, but technically, masculinity is not an ideal to which we aim but rather an experience which we possess in complex and varying ways. Masculinity refers to common attributes men experience. If there is a biological distinction of maleness, then it follows that there would be a dissection in experiencing that maleness. Masculinity refers to those collective male attributes and qualities.

You can see this reference to attributes in the traditional definition of the word. Webster’s 1913 Dictionary defines masculinity as “qualities or attributes regarded as characteristic of men.” It goes on to offer an interesting example of the word’s use. “That lady, after her husband’s death, held the reins with a masculine energy.” Here, masculine is used to describe the characteristics of the woman’s actions. It isn’t a statement of biology but one of description.

Many will be familiar with theories on how the big five personality traits are distributed differently between men and women. Professor Jordan Peterson has done much to point out the research indicating that women tend to score higher in personality traits such as extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Other studies, such as one published by Italian cognitive psychologist Marco Del Giudince, have suggested that there is an “overlap of only 10% between the male and female distributions.” As Del Giudice concluded, “there are grounds to expect robust and wide-ranging sex differences in this area, resulting in strongly sexually differentiated patterns of emotion, thought, and behavior – as if there were two human natures.”

That’s a scientifically precise way of saying that there are measurable differences between men and women, and we should expect there to be different experiences. It’s these common traits, typical in biological males that we can categorize as masculinity.

It’s important to note, the possession of traits does not mean that those traits are necessarily good nor intended by God at creation. If sin has introduced genetic distortions, it has also introduced trait distortions, just as a genetic predisposition to alcoholism isn’t a justification of alcoholism. Neither is a potentially universal masculine trait justification for its promotion. But neither can it be ignored nor simply dismissed.

It’s also worth noting, that just because these traits are typical of males does not mean that all men will have all traits. In fact, on the Big Five Personality test, I personally score high in extraversion, agreeableness, and moderately high in neuroticism, all traits typically higher in women. It’s probably fair to say that my personality traits are not characteristically masculine. But that is not to say that I’m less a man or am incapable of bearing the responsibility of manhood.

Where we make our greatest mistake is in assuming that the traits of masculinity are also our goal for being a man. Traits and attributes are very different from goals. As an example, aggression is commonly articulated as a masculine trait, but calling aggression masculine hardly means women are incapable of experiencing it, nor does it mean that a man must possess aggression in order to qualify as a man. To acknowledge it’s typical existence is not to encourage its unrestricted promotion. The attributes are only characteristics typical to men. It is characteristic for men to experience aggression.

You might think about masculine traits as a palate of colors with which an artist can paint. One end of the color spectrum, we will call masculine and the other end feminine. It’s possible for a painting to only utilize colors from one extreme—just as there are men who seem to express every masculine extreme—but most paintings will utilize colors from the entire expression. They will, however, have some form of dominate shade. We could refer to a painting as masculine or feminine because of its dominate color profile. When we do so, we are still only using the terms to describe what already exists on the canvas. The color is its characteristics. Saying the painting is mostly blue and yellow hardly describe Van Gogh’s Starry Night just as listing masculine traits doesn’t adequately describe what we mean when we refer to manhood.

Take the line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, as he describes the mixing of elements to produce a man.

“His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, ‘This was a man.’”

Masculinity is not the goal, but rather the raw material by which we construct manhood. When we tell someone to be a man—without a clear definition of what being a man is—we inevitably produce a list of typical experiences and expect them to serve as a goal.

To better understand how we use the traits of masculinity, we need a definition of manhood for which we can work that material.

Def. Man: “An adult male person; a grown-up male person.”

Most fundamentally, manhood is a distinction of maturity. Historically, cultures have recognized a right of passage into adulthood by which a boy transitions from his child identity into the identity of a man. That transition is more a calling than a physically definitive change. There are echos of this in Paul’s call for the Corinthians to stand firm and act like men. There are echos in the dying words of David to his son Solomon, “Be strong and prove yourself a man.” Both seem to be calling for a kind of seriousness and the willingness to bear a greater responsibility.

Scientists tell us that the masculine and feminine distinctions which characterize adulthood begin their divergence during puberty. Up until puberty, boys and girls appear more similar in personality traits, size, and physicality, but by age 17 these attributes become more significantly aligned with adult patterns. This is true even across diverse cultures. As our bodies mature, we are expected to mature with them.

In other words, puberty, a biologically different experience for males and females, seems to initiate broader male and female distinctions. As our bodies mature into adulthood, we begin to experience our maleness in new and distinct ways. We are called to work these new attributes and experiences into mature manhood.

As Christians, the maturity for which we aim is largely genderless. Paul’s point that there is now no distinction between men and women is not an overriding of biology but rather a statement of how we are saved. The Spirit is poured out on sons and daughters. We must all humble ourselves, take up crosses, follow Christ, and seek first his kingdom. In the first generations of the church, persecution and death fell on both men and women, and the ways in which the sexes worshiped together was not only perplexing to the broader culture but created questions and challenges even within the church.

But the universality of Christian salvation doesn’t rework the attributes which make us male and female. Baptism and communion don’t modify our DNA. We each aim for Christ but often find ourselves on quite different paths while attempting a shared destination.

The course two ships take in traveling across the Pacific Ocean will depend primarily on the attributes of their vessel. A 100,000 horsepower cargo ship may cut a bee-line, while the single-handed sailor using only the wind. He may sail in the complete opposite direction to catch more favorable trade winds. Their attributes determine the best way to aim for the same destination.

So men and women must take inventory of their own masculine and feminine attributes in learning to follow Christ. This is what it means to be a man, particularly a Christian man. A man learns to understand his own masculine attributes and turn them in the direction of following Christ, maturing in faith. Just as there are typically masculine traits and experiences, so too, we would expect there to be typical challenges and disciplines associated with becoming a man.

So, some of a man’s attributes, like assertiveness, may make him bold in the face of persecution, while his aggression makes the call to meekness a sanctifying struggle. As the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier put it, “Peace hath higher tests of manhood than battle ever knew.” However, this same man’s wife may find meekness quite natural, while her own agreeableness makes the conflict of persecution a challenge. Both seek maturity—one through femininity, the other through masculinity.

Interestingly, the psychoanalysts believed that the second half of life involved integrating one’s opposite attributes. Men come to understand better and integrate femininity, not to become less masculine, but to become more whole. After all, Christ once described himself as a mother hen longing to gather her chicks, and that came only two chapters after he had turned over tables in the temple.

But Is There A Uniquely Male Responsibility

There is so much more we could explore about the Biblical calling to manhood. I’ve hardly touched on discussions of marriage roles, leadership, or the distinctive male/female curse articulated in Genesis three. But I have tried to lay a foundation for what I think is the most basic presupposition, ones which will inform my articles to come.

1. 1. Maleness is a biologically created fact
2. 2. Masculinity is the accumulated raw material and diverse experience of being male
3. 3. Manhood is a calling to mature those attributes into Christ-likeness

Maybe the most basic way to present this idea is that manhood is a calling—a responsibility. You are asked to be a man—asked by your creator. Manhood is not a list of skills. It is not a list of personality traits. It is not mere biological possession. To be a man is to take on a responsibility of maturity. To be a man is to learn to answer the call of responsibility. Men bear responsibility.

But a call to responsibility is a challenge to our culture. Responsibility implies authority. Without authority who are we responsible to. To bear responsibility is to be given that task by a greater authority than ourselves. The realization of that authority means that the chief definition of man is not something I get to decide.

Too many men live with no authority, no father, and no God. Their world is a gray windless horizon, moved only by their own unchecked passions. Without authority, they are responsible to no one but the lowest of their masculine impulses. They have channeled those forces for no good beyond self-pleasure. Nothing is expected of them, and they bear no responsibility.

What is missing from our cultural redefining of masculinity is a sense of authority. Without the call of God, without an image of his created goodness, who’s to say what a man should or shouldn’t be. But divinely called responsibility invites us into something far more. We must aim for more than being merely male.

A man is an artist, a gardener, like his most ancient father, the first man. His hands in the dirt of his own broken masculinity, working all his advantages and disadvantages, his skills and his sinful tendencies into selflessness, sacrifice, and faithfulness to his heavenly father. He does that work by painful toil, but he does it with hope and through faith. Faith that Christ goes before him and hope that a new earth is coming and with it a new experience of his masculinity—a day when he can fully feel the manhood he now struggles to bear.

I like how Richard Phillips puts it in his book, The Masculine Mandate:

“Our calling in life really is this simple (although not therefore easy): We are to devote ourselves to working/building and keeping/protecting everything placed into our charge.”

More to Come

But we are left with another question. What are those responsibilities we as men are called to take up? In pursuing Christ, are men given particular responsibilities?

---

 

Last week I got my hair cut. My barbershop has been feverishly adding locations and rebranding itself in an attempt to monopolize the cutting of all men’s hair within a 50-mile radius. As their website puts it, they are just “your traditional neighborhood barbershop and the future of men’s grooming.”

The nostalgia of your grandpa’s vintage aftershave, now with a whole new line of male hair care products, complete with old-fashion lather shaves, mounted taxidermy, white subway tile, and antique chainsaws hung on the wall. My grandpa used to pay five bucks for a cut; for this new man-space, I now pay twenty-two.

It’s the kind of place you expect to see beards, but sitting in the chair, I realized that nearly every single person in the room had one. To be fair, I do too. Mine has been mostly a long-term attempt to avoid the daily ritual of shaving, and I keep it pretty short, but the beards at my barbershop were something more. Long, full beards, being scissor cut and shampooed. A few of them were remarkable, but no man comfortably remarks about another man’s beard, at least nothing more than “nice beard.”

Apparently, the rule is, “beards are manly, but talking about beards is decidedly not.” They are supposed to seem like some badge of months spent tracking through Himalayan mountains or tarpon fishing in remote parts of South America. Hemingway never talked about what beard conditioner he used, I have a hard time imagining Ulysess S. Grant oiling his beard on the Appomattox battlefield, and even in a barbershop which offers “beard grooming services,” the conversations stayed on script: baseball, BBQ, and recent superhero movies.

I kept expecting a British accent to start whispering from the corner, “Here we have a prime example of the male species demonstrating masculinity. Notice the way they signal their masculine confidence through the strutting presentation of their facial plumage. And here we see the alpha, his majestic beard, and Cross-Fit t-shirt mark his dominance to the rest of the herd.” Okay, maybe I have gone too far, but us men can be a perplexing gender. Obsessed with “being a man,” and not quite sure what that means at the same time

Do you remember in Genesis when Jacob attempted to pass himself off as his older brother Esau? He wrapped goat hide around his arms, an attempt to convince his aged and blind father that he was his hairier older brother. I’ve always thought there was something archetypal about the Bible’s depiction of these two brothers and their father. Esau, the meat-eating, burly hunter, was so driven by raw desire that appeasing the growl of his stomach was more motivating than the responsibility of his birthrights. And Jacob, manipulated and prodded by his jealous mother’s favoritism, was a sad and pathetic image of masculinity, faking body hair to steal from his undiscerning father. One brother couldn’t care less about the father’s attention while the other was so desperate for it he would pretend to be the other.

It’s all there: the disengaged father, the insecure man, the masculine compensation, and a family of men profoundly incapable of understanding one another or saying anything more complex than “Let me have some of that red stew!” Competition, father wounds, resentment, disengagement, and isolation.

The Messed-Up Men of the Bible

The Bible has far more to say about the complexity of men than is often acknowledged. Rightfully, we have given attention to the Bible’s depictions of men abusing power, the repercussions of their unchecked passions, and their frequent subjugation of women and weaker men. It’s easy to track the consequences of these violent and nihilistic forms of masculinity. Interestingly though, the Bible doesn’t shy away from showing us the devastation such men leave in their wake.

But the Bible also offers a much more nuanced depiction of men and their plight. It presents a deeper struggle to understand what a man is. This lust for power and blood is only a single distortion of the larger male question? It may account for men like Nimrod or Samson, but it fails to represent men like Jacob, Gideon, or Timothy. They are all broken but in more than stereotypical ways.

Something about the goodness of the garden’s male and female has been deeply marred by sin, degrading our genders into awkward attempts to regain something we can’t quite identify but know is lost. The Bible presents men who struggle to understand what it means to be a man. How do we find our way back into the garden, past the flaming sword and the angelic guard, to what being a man once was and ultimately is? This missing masculinity is spread all across the bible.

Read more closely. Adam, who once penned love poetry for his wife, ended up blaming her in an awkward attempt to justify himself before God. The first brothers, Cain and Able fell into a resentful competition that ended in the first spilling of human blood. Noah preserved the human race by his righteousness and then got wasted and exposed himself to his kids. Abraham passively participated in his wife’s scheme to produce a son through their slave. Saul sat helplessly under a pomegranate tree as the Philistines invaded. David murdered to cover up his sins and then wrecked his family by his inability to engage the complicated lives of his own children—lives which replayed many of his own sins. The disciples kept dozing off as Jesus sweat drops of blood. And while the women faced the danger of preparing Jesus body at the tomb, the men hid afraid behind locked doors. It’s to these women God granted the first news of Christ’s resurrection.

That list could be much longer, but it’s enough to demonstrate that men have been struggling for quite some time. Not with achievement. We’ve always mistaken masculinity as a kind of achievement—action over being. We imagine we can make ourselves men. And we get plenty done, through virtue and vice. We have conquered the world, built civilizations, mapped the globe, and explored the universe, yet most of us live with a deep sense of inner confusion. We don’t know who we are supposed to be, not as men, and each day, our missing masculinity is becoming only more apparent.

The question is now being asked more openly, and the recent string of mass shootings has propelled the conversation onto the pages of nearly every news organization. The single thread which connects all of the recent violence is not weapons, religion, or the political ideologies of its perpetrators. What unites all of these events is that they have all been perpetrated by men—particularly young men.

As the Florida Senator, Rick Scott put it, “There is something wrong with our young men in this country, and we are going to have to figure it out.” The problem is no doubt complex. Like most complex problems, there is no single legislative solution. The challenges men face mostly likely have no political solution at all, and depending on our politicians to sort it out is asking far too much. There is something deeply broken in the souls of men, and we are finding ourselves incapable of even talking about the problem.

This will be the first in a series of articles on the topic and my hope is to begin by diagnosing the problem. As our culture struggles to understand what masculinity is or should be, more men are disengaging from the question and its responsibilities. The consequences are significant.

Disengaging from Society

Let’s start with social and religious disengagement. Adult men report having fewer friends than any other demographic. The Boston Globe recently suggested that the greatest threat to middle-aged men is no longer smoking or obesity, but now loneliness. And this social isolation is a predictable feature in the profiles of men who commit mass shootings and acts of violence. David Brooks observed in his book, The Second Mountain:

“These mass killings are about many things – guns, demagoguery, and the rest – but they are also about social isolation and the spreading derangement of the American mind. Whenever there’s a shooting, there’s always a lonely man who fell through the cracks of society, who lived a life of solitary disappointment and who one day decided to try to make a blood-drenched leap from insignificance to infamy.”

Historically, religious communities have provided their members with these social networks, yet it’s long been documented that men are participating less in churches and religion. According to the Pew Research Center, in the United States, women are 8% more likely to attend a weekly religious service, 10% more likely to practice in daily prayer, and 13% more likely to acknowledge the importance of religion in their lives. As opinion columnist, Ross Douthat expressed in the New York times:

“Male absence and female energy has also been the story, albeit less starkly and dramatically, of Christian practice in many times and places since. Today, most Christian churches and denominations in America — conservative as well as liberal, male-led and female-led both — have some sort of gender gap, sometimes modest but often stark. Despite their varying theologies, evangelicalism, mainline Protestantism, Mormonism and Catholicism all have about a 55-45 female-male split in religious identification; for black churches, it’s 60-40.”

Disengaging from Fatherhood

It’s not just from friendships and religion that men are checking out. Statistics suggest that 1 in 4 children are growing up in a fatherless home. That’s 19.7 million children without an actively involved dad. This fatherlessness is creating a cycle of problems for each new generation of men, as they struggle to be fathers having grown up without one themselves. As the National Fatherhood Initiative put it, “There is a father factor in nearly all social ills facing America today.” Fatherlessness has been linked to a greater risk of poverty, a higher likelihood of teen pregnancy, substance abuse, incarceration, and a higher likelihood of committing violent crimes.

President Obama recognized the crisis in his 2008 Father’s Day address, explaining :

“Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives … family is the most important. And we are called to recognize and honor how critical every father is to that foundation…. But if we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that too many fathers are missing — missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.

Disengaging from Intimacy

In late 2018, several news agencies reported on recent studies indicating that millennials are having significantly less sex than previous generations. While the number of Americans who now believe that sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” has continued to increase, millennials seem to be acting out those views less frequently. There have been positive results. In a study from 1991 to 2017, The Centers for Disease Control reports that teen intercourse has dropped from 54 to 40 percent. Teen pregnancy rates have fallen dramatically. Many sociologists have been perplexed by the contradictory views and actions of millennials. Sex has never been freer and yet it has never been practiced less.

Many sociologists and commentators have suggested that we are just beginning to experience the impact of the pervasive consumption of online pornography. A Barna study found that two-thirds (64%) of U.S. men view pornography at least monthly and between the ages of 18 and 30 that number is eight in ten (79%).

In a 2018 edition of the Atlantic, titled, The Sex Recession, Kate Julian explained:

“Today, masturbation is even more common, and fears about its effects—now paired with concerns about digital porn’s ubiquity—are being raised anew by a strange assortment of people, including the psychologist Philip Zimbardo… In his book Man, Interrupted, Zimbardo, warns that “procrasturbation”—his unfortunate portmanteau for procrastination via masturbation—may be leading young men to fail academically, socially, and sexually.”

The Atlantic also reports that in a study conducted from 1992 to 2014, the number of men who reported masturbating weekly more than doubled. Men seem to be avoiding the complexity and vulnerability of actual relationships in favor of digital sexual consumption. The consequences are deeper isolation, more disengagement, and ongoing relational distortions.

Disengaging from Advancement

Over the past few decades, men continue to show signs of academic disengagement, a remarkable turn, considering that just a generation ago, women were massively underrepresented in higher education. In 1947 women accounted for 12.2% of college enrollment. Today they account for 60%. But it’s not just more women attending, fewer men are. Today there are 2.2 million more women in college than men. Men are more likely to drop out of school. This disengagement of men in education is playing out in the workplace as well. As reported by the New York Times in 2018, in 1950, 4% of men within the age range of 25-54 were not working or looking for work. Today that number is 11%. The New York Times labeled it the “Vanishing Male Worker.”

More than twice as many adults age 25 to 34 are still living at home compared to the late 1960s. That number represents 11.5% of all women within the age range and 18.3% of all men. Online forums like 4chan and 8chan, have produced entire subcultures of disengaged men. They have developed self-identifying terms like “neets” (not in education or employment) and “incels” (involuntary celibates). Under the protection of anonymous online aliases, these communities champion being “alone together” on the internet. It was to these forums that the recent El Passo shooter was a member and posted his manifesto prior to the event. Slate has noted that he was the third mass shooter to post a manifesto within the forum.

Disengaging from Life

Having disengaged from social networks, education, relationships, and work, it’s even more sobering to consider statistics on male suicide and violence. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, “In 2017, men died by suicide 3.54x more often than women.” White men accounted for 69.67% of all suicide deaths. Death by suicide continues to be the 10th leading cause of death in the US. The Los Angeles Times called the current rate of teen suicide a “high-water mark” and has pointed out that it is being driven by a “sharp rise in suicides among older teenage boys.” Men are also more likely to be the victim of a homicide and also the perpetrators of it. The Federal Bureau of Prisons reports that 92.9% of inmates are males. That’s 164,323 men to 12,570 women. Even our nations current opioid crisis is being led by men. Men are more than twice as likely to die from an opioid overdose. On average, men start using drugs at an earlier age, and men are statistically more likely to abuse alcohol and tobacco.

Confused About Being a Man

What are we to make of the ways so many men are disengaging from traditional expectations and responsibilities? Psychologist Helen Smith has labeled the problem, “men on strike.” She argues, in her book by that title, that men are doing the rational thing, responding to our culture’s lack of incentives for male engagement. As she has written, “Our society tells men they are worthless perverts who reek of male privilege… you reap what you sow.” Smith is convinced that male disengagement is a consequence of men receiving mixed messages and unclear expectations from culture.

Men are presented with a tangled and confused representation of masculinity. Take the Superbowl as an example. It is the most-watched television event of the year. Even men completely uninterested in football find themselves participating. We celebrate the traditionally masculine virtues of aggression, competition, and physicality. We love hard hits, spectacular plays, and the commercials. Typically they range from women in bikinis selling cheeseburgers to seductively interrupted scenes which tell you to go online to watch more. Then we were given Gillette’s “toxic masculinity” commercial in which men were told that everything they had previously learned about masculinity was out-of-date, that is until the commercial ended and we were back to football. That a major consumer brand would attempt to lead our national discussion on masculinity is a testament to our lack of proper dialogue. We need something far more than marketing to solve this challenge.

It’s not hard to find other ways our culture is confusing men, particularly young ones. In 2014, The Atlantic published a fascinating piece on Dads in sitcoms. As the article puts it, “On TV if there is a dad in the home, he is an idiot. It must have reflected our own discomfort with dads being competent… You put a dad in front of his kid, and the dad gives the worst advice. You put a dad in front of a toaster, and he burns the house down.” But it’s not as simple presenting men as fools. The definition of masculinity itself is up for grabs.

Earlier this year, the American Psychological Association published their first-ever guidelines for practice with men and boys. Their guidelines are based on offering solutions to many of the trends we’ve already outlined. The APA acknowledges in the report, “Something is amiss for men,” but they went on to describe the problem as steaming from traditional understandings of masculinity. As the report explains, “The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful. Men socialized in this way are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors.”

David French, in commenting on the APA’s guidelines for the National Review wrote:

“It is interesting that in a world that otherwise teaches boys and girls to “be yourself,” that rule often applies to everyone but the “traditional” male who has traditional male impulses and characteristics. Then, they’re a problem. Then, they’re often deemed toxic. Combine this reality with a new economy that doesn’t naturally favor physical strength and physical courage to the same extent, and it’s easy to see how men struggle.”

French is not nostalgic about masculinity. He rightfully points out in his article that past virtues came with plenty of vices. But guidelines like the APA’s do little to offer men a definition of what masculinity should be. They discard the tools and hand back an empty toolbox.

C. S. Lewis, writing on his culture’s attack on traditional values, explained:

“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

How About the Church’s Contribution?

And how has the church responded? I’m afraid the church has failed to do much better than contribute more confusion. While attending Bible College, we often attended men’s and women’s chapels. There was never any question about the topics that would be covered. While the women would be encouraged in their value, worth, and beauty us men would listen to yet another talk on pornography and lust. A friend once commented, “they are princesses, and we’re perverts.”

Pastors find themselves caught in awkward attempts to reach men, some going as far as pyrotechnics, cursing, and free beer. There are calls for more “macho” pastors driven by macho descriptions of Jesus and his ministry. At the same time, we are attempting to come to terms with the devastation many men have wrecked on congregations. The Me Too movement is forcing us to reconsider our own concepts of “Christian masculinity.” As Campaign, a marketing and communications media group, put it, “Millennial men feel pressure to ‘be it all’ in ‘Me Too’ era.” They explain, “When it comes to masculinity, researchers found that 65 percent believe the most important job of a good man is providing for his family financially. Meanwhile, 92 percent of men and women surveyed chose Barbecuing as the “most masculine” activity for modern men.”

I think the survey captures well the complex absurdity we’ve attempted to define masculinity by—financial success and knowledge of grill briquets.

The surprising discovery through all of this messy process is that most men don’t have any clue what a man actually is. Just ask them. I have, and most of us struggle to offer any definition we feel confident about, and we sure don’t know what it means to be a Christian man. What makes a man? Are there characteristics unique to masculinity? Does the Bible offer a unique form of Christian masculinity? Get a man, to be honest, and even the most macho will often admit, we’re mostly faking it, not quite sure what “it” even is.

The Male Malaise

I would like to call this the male malaise. Malaise is a French word meaning ill-ease. It is a deep sense of uneasiness, a feeling that something is wrong but an uncertainty in diagnosing it. It is this malaise that is allowing so many to simply disengage. To abandon the complexity altogether.

Without a mark to aim at, men have retreated into late-night video games, pornography, and forum rants of bitterness and resentment. It’s not hard to see how such men are easily caught up in fantasies, destructive ideologies, and in the most extreme cases, radicalization.

We discover that it is not the strong man who is most dangerous but the weak one who’s desperation to reaffirm his power without any good definition of how power is properly used leads him not into masculinity but into a shallow characterization of it. Cain murders out of resentment and Jacob wrecks his own family out of insecurity.

I think the novelist Walker Percy captures this malaise best in his 1961 novel, The Moviegoer. The book tells the story of a young man struggling with the trauma of his Korean War experience and navigating the collapse of southern tradition in postwar New Orleans. Struggling to establish purpose or relationships, he finds himself living vicariously through movies. He articulates this male malaise better than anything I could write.

“Men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.”

Something is deeply wrong with your young men, and so much depends on us figuring it out. In the following posts, I want to explore some of the ways the church might better engage the masculinity crisis and reach many lost in the confusion.

---

 

It’s hard to estimate the impact Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book, Life Together has had on my concept of pastoral ministry. And maybe no sentence has ever impacted my work more than Bonhoeffer’s, “God hates visionary dreaming.”

I’m honored to have been able to share more about this passage in a recent article on Christianity Today Pastors.

---

Read the Article

Can you imagine Ron Swanson waking up to discover he was suddenly allergic to meat? No steaks, no brats, no bacon, no cheeseburgers. Can you imagine his reaction? It would have made a great episode, but maybe it sounds too far fetched. Believe it or not, a meat allergy is a real thing, and I was as horrified to discover I had it as Ron Swanson would have been.

Two years ago, I developed what I thought was strep throat. I found myself with a cough and having trouble swallowing. Quickly it worsened into headaches and then dizziness and then the hives—hives on my chest, back, arms, and face.

The doctor was confident it was an anaphylactic reaction, but we couldn’t determine to what. I had never been allergic to anything, not even poison ivy. I didn’t even know what hives looked liked until I had them. We tried everything. I changed soap, and laundry detergent, and vitamins, but for three weeks, I continued to deteriorate. Each afternoon I would lay under a fan in my underwear, dizzy, short of breath, and miserable with hives. But things would get much worse.

I finally started to notice that when I ate beef, my reactions were more severe the next day. I searched online, “can you become allergic to meat?” To my dismay, I discovered the recent spread of a tick born illness known as Alpha-Gal, “the Mammalian Meat Allergy.” It didn’t take me long to remember. A few weeks before the symptoms, I had removed two ticks from my legs after shooting handguns in my parent’s woods. The doctor soon confirmed what I feared; I had Alpha-Gal—goodbye, cheeseburgers.

But It Gets Worse

They say the disease can fade after a period of ten to fifteen years. That is a long time without a steak. It’s hard to articulate how massive this dietary change has been for me. I’m a bacon cheeseburger kind of guy. I also love to hunt. Since I was ten, I haven’t missed a deer season. I usually process deer myself. The day a fresh venison backstrap hits the grill is one of the best days of the year. Now, that same piece of meat is likely to send me to the emergency room.

Technically, Alpha-Gal is an autoimmune condition. There is a carbohydrate common to mammals which humans don’t have. The current theory is that a tick’s bite introduces this carbohydrate into your body. Your immune system recognizes it as a threat and creates a plan for elliminating it. The next time you eat meat and digest more Alpha-Gal, your immune system recognizes it again and now attacks your body.

Over the last two years, the disease has laid waste to my immune system and has caused me to develop additional food sensitivities. This past year, I also began to experience more debilitating migraines. These migraines became so severe, I started to develop neurological systems. I had trouble formulating sentences, ordering words, and remembering basic details.

One Sunday, at the close of service, I wanted to read through the Beatitudes. I know the beatitudes are found in Matthew chapter five. Usually, that’s an easy recall, like remembering the Pledge of Allegiance or the last year the Cardinals won the World Series. But this time, I stood flipping through my Bible, completely unable to remember even where to start looking. It’s hard to describe it. I wasn’t sure which book of the Bible to open. Genesis? Habakkuk? Corinthians? It really was that bad.

To my embarrassment, I finally had to ask the congregation, “where are the Beatitudes?” Thankfully, they knew how sick I had been and were incredibly gracious, but something was obviously wrong. After more than three hours in an MRI machine, I was diagnosed with what my neurologist called Complex Migraines. These are migraines which present neurological symptoms similar to a stroke. The doctor wanted to put me on longterm migraine medication, but we were unable to find one which did not contain gelatin, a mammal product.

So, the solution was to become even more aggressive with dietary restrictions. No mammal, no dairy, no sugar, no gluten, and the elimination of a long list of individual foods which, after testing, showed signs of stimulating my immune system.

I have now terrified many men from going into the woods. And to the complete humiliation of my previous self, I eat a lot like a vegan. I haven’t deer hunted in two years.

If you listen to the Pastor Writer podcast, you might have noticed that my battle with Alpha Gal coincides with the launch and growth of the podcast. It was just a few months after I began working on my Samson book when the disease first hit. I can not tell you how discouraging it has been to find myself struggling with words, energy, and migraines during the same season in which I had hoped to spend more time on preaching, writing, and podcasting.

Does God Bless Excellence?

As a pastor, writer, and podcaster, mental clarity is everything. A writing coach once explained that “good writing is good thinking.” It’s also true of good podcast interviews, good sermons, and pastoring a congregation well. I depend on my ability to formulate and articulate coherent thoughts. And as I have often heard pastors say, “God honors excellence.” I want to be excellent. I want to preach excellent sermons and write excellent articles and produce an excellent podcast. So much seems to depend on excellence—success, progress, future opportunities, even blessing? But there were now very few days I managed the excellence I hoped for.

How could God, just when everything seemed to be taking off—the church, my writing, the podcast—allow me to develop a disease which put me at my worst? How do you grow a church when you know you’re nowhere near your best? How do you keep writing when you know it’s not what it could be? Is it even worth continuing?

Maybe the most painful realization has been it’s impact on me as a father and husband. I want to be a great dad—an excellent one—and to my shame, there have been days I’ve been far less. That is a hard thing to reconcile. Harder still to understand by faith. This was not how things were supposed to go, not in my thirties, and not when my vision, productivity, and energy were supposed to be at their best.

I know I’m not the only one who has wrestled with these questions. For some, it is sickness, for others loss, doubt, conflict, shame, addiction, or depression. The disappointment of our condition can be crushing. We live in the age of obsessive enhancement. Self-care, self-help, self-improvement. We must always be improving. To toss in another pastoral cliche, “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.” As pastors, we strive to keep improving. As writers, we grow bigger platforms. As a family, we want happiness and perfect family portraits. But what do you do when you aren’t improving, when excellence seems far out of reach? Does God honor barely making it through the day?

The Fruit of Sickness

At some point, I came across these words by the Catholic priest Henri Nouwen. “We have been called to be fruitful – not successful, not productive, not accomplished. Success comes from strength, stress, and human effort. Fruitfulness comes from vulnerability and the admission of our own weakness.” Those were kind words considering most of my life felt like a public display of my weakness. My congregants got a fresh showing of it every Sunday morning.

When I think about pastoring and writing, it’s so easy for my mind to fill with expectations for the future: a growing congregation, a book contract, a sense of having finally made it. I want to see the progress, track the results, and feel the energy of it. With such worthy ideals pulling me into each day’s work, a migraine felt like such a setback, three days of migraine felt like I had missed the whole opportunity.

But Nouwen forced me to ask a much different question. What might be the fruit of my sickness, and how might it make me a better pastor, writer, and even father? Honestly, I haven’t been able to answer that question fully, but I have begun to see signs of a new kind of maturity. I understand my congregants’ suffering in ways I didn’t before. I’ve been forced to pursue my writing at a pace God and my physical condition set for me. I pray more. I hope more.

I’m not sure there is always an obvious 1-to-1 correlation between our suffering, and it’s fruit as if I could connect every allergic reaction with some future moment of individual blessing. A migraine doesn’t guarantee the next day’s patience.

Instead, our moments of suffering have more to do with the long trajectory of who we are becoming. This disease has changed me. It’s changed my diet. It’s changed my body. It’s impacted my relationships and my ministry. But maybe the thing that has changed the most is my sensitivity—and no, it’s not because I’m now basically a vegan. That’s not the sensitivity I have in mind. It is a sensitivity to my daily dependence on God. I can’t guarantee a clear mind for tomorrow. I can only be faithful to what is put in front of me for today.

I’m rarely at my best, yet these days, I don’t think about my best nearly as much as I used to. I’ve grown far more interested in faithfulness. I wonder what years of this sickness might produce. It has, in an ironic way, already made me healthier. But I also wonder if it might cultivate a wisdom and a voice which speed and excellence never could. Might I be a better pastor for? Might I write things I otherwise never could have? Might it deepen my relationships with my wife and friends?

In the end, there is a kind of grace in it, hard to see when my eyes are blurry from migraines, but at other times so obvious. God is doing something. His plans and paths are wiser than mine. If he can work a crucifixion for my good how much easier an allergic reaction.

Finding Your Own Fruit

If I could offer any prayer for your suffering, it would rightfully be for God to alleviate it, but I would also add the request, however long it persists, you might discover a deeper contentment and grace through it. I would pray for a kind of depth to develop in your weakness that might open your eyes to a joy discovered by no other means. I would pray for fruit—fruit sweetened by the adversity of your condition; like a wild berry, persistent through frost, protected and guarded by thickets, ripened only by time. There is no other way to produce such fruit, and to the one who manages to find it, there is no better taste.

Might it be that the truest excellence is a grace we discover not one we can pursue?

“The way of Jesus cannot be imposed or mapped—it requires an active participation in following Jesus as he leads us through sometimes strange and unfamiliar territory, in circumstances that become clear only in the hesitations and questionings, in the pauses and reflections where we engage in prayerful conversation with one another and with him. After all, we are not just learning how to think right about God. For that we would enroll in a classroom so that we could concentrate, protected form distractions. And we are not just practicing ways to behave right before God. For that we would go to a training camp set up for behavioral modification that would provide the necessary protection from interruptions.

We can not remove ourselves form the way in order to have more favorable conditions for learning the way. We are already “on the way,” acquiring insights and developing habits of obedience, following Jesus in our homes and neighborhoods and workplaces, gradually and incrementally maturing in the way so that who we are and what we do is realized coherently and comprehensively.” — Eugene Peterson

This year’s debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek was marketed as one of the greatest intellectual debates of the century. At one point, tickets were being scalped for over $1,500 a seat. To many’s disappointment, but probably for the best, the event went off without the anticipated drama. Peterson and Žižek managed to find significant common ground.

The debate, which lasted over two and a half hours, has been watched online by more than 350,000 viewers. The interest in Peterson and Žižek represents a growing online audience who are routinely consuming multi-hour lectures and debates through youtube and podcasts. Figures like Žižek and Peterson are having a profound influence on, particularly, young men. While Peterson describes himself as a person who “lives as if there is a god,” his precise views on Christianity are complex and intentionally hard to categorize. Alternatively, Žižek describes himself as an atheist but provocatively contends that the only true path to atheism is through Christianity.

Since their debate in April, there has been one moment which I continue to see shared and discussed online. It is often referred to as, Christ’s moment of atheism on the cross. It was Žižek who introduced the topic into the night’s discussion. He represents a growing trend of individuals who articulate a path of Christian Atheism, honoring the value of Christianity while maintaining there is no God.

The topic came up in Žižek’s description of Christ’s cry from the cross: “My god, my god, why have you forsaken me.” Žižek explained:

“The crucifixion is something absolutely unique because in that moment of, father, why have you abandoned me?, for a brief moment, symbolically, God himself becomes an atheist, in the sense of getting a gap there. That is something absolutely unique. It means you are not simply separated from God. Your separation from God is a part of divinity itself.”

Peterson, visibly struck by this observation, responded, “There is something that is built into the fabric of existence that tests us so severely in our faith about being that even God himself falls prey to the temptation to doubt.”

The Rise of Christian Atheism

For some time, Žižek has been reading the gospels as an argument for atheism. Žižek goes so far as to claim that the only path for atheism to have developed was through Christianity. In his view, Christianity sowed the first seeds of an atheistic worldview. Christ was abandoned on the cross. When Christ turned to God, he came to the realization that there was no God.

Žižek articulated this brand of Christian Atheism in an interview with Third Way. He explained:

“I take seriously those words Christ says at the end: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? It’s something really tremendous that happens. G K Chesterton (whom I admire) puts it in a wonderful way: Only in Christianity does God himself, for a moment, become atheist.

And I think – this is my reading – that this moment of the death of God, when you are totally abandoned and you have only your ‘collectivity’, called the ‘Holy Spirit’, is the authentic moment of freedom.”

When making this point, Žižek often turns to the writings of G. K. Chesterton, a twentieth-century Catholic writer and contemporary of C. S. Lewis. This week I went digging through my copy of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, and sure enough, I found the lines which have caught Žižek’s attention. In chapter eight, entitled “The Romance of Orthodoxy,” Chesterton writes:

“In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologise in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt…

He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God…. Nay, (the matter grows too difficult for human speech,) but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”

Chesterton himself warns that we can not be too careful in speaking of this topic. Yet, it’s interesting that when quoting Chesterton, Žižek eliminates the word “seems.” Chesterton’s words were, “God seemed for an instant to be an atheist,” but they are remembered by Žižek as “God himself, for a moment, became an atheist.” In a nearly three hour debate, who would expect a person to recall quotations word-for-word? We always allow for rough paraphrasing. But here, more than the word has changed. Chesterton’s point is fundamentally altered.

Žižek suggests that in Chesterton, he has found a Christian theologian, who supports his radical reading of the crucifixion as not just the death of the son of god, but the death of God himself. Jesus’ cry from the cross and heaven’s empty response prove that there is no god. But something significant is missing from Žižek’s reading.

Follow the Footnotes: The Source of Jesus’s Cry

Chesterton was right about the nature of approaching Jesus’s cry of abandonment; it is dark and difficult to consider. Church history is filled with writers who have been shocked by Christ’s words, and surely there is something about it which pulls all of us to the edge of the darkness. But there are important points about that moment in the gospels which Žižek seems to be completely unaware of. I hesitate to say that, Žižek’s familiarity with the text and historical theology are evident, but it’s hard to understand how a person can draw such massive implications from a Biblical text without taking the text itself equally serious.

Of all the gospel writers, Matthew, in particular, makes Jesus cry of abandonment central to his story. A careful reading of Matthew 27 reveals that much of his passion narrative has been structured around allusions to Psalm 22. In fact, Jesus’s prayer, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” is a direct quotation from the psalm’s opening. The parallels go on. Both the psalm and Matthew describe the mocking crowd, those who “wag” their heads, how the sufferer has trusted God, and yet how he has had his hands and feet pierced. Both Psalm 22 and Matthew 27 describe enemies dividing up the victim’s garments. Matthew clearly wants us to read his passion story in the echos of Psalm 22.

As modern readers, having far less familiarity with the Hebrew texts, it’s difficult to understand how these references would have struck an early Jewish reader. The Psalms, in particular, were the spiritual foundation of Israel’s prayer life. The Psalms formed the vocabulary of Jewish worship and religion. Mentioning even the first word would call to mind the entire Psalm and set the cross in the context of David’s reflections.

As an example, when Jesus was tempted in the garden to turn stones into bread, he had responded, “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the Lord.” We might hear that as a kind of cryptic, sagacious response, but Jesus was referencing Old Testament scripture. He was quoting from Deuteronomy 13 which explained that God had fed the Israelites in the wilderness with manna so that they might learn that man’s need is greater than his belly. Satan’s temptation of hunger wouldn’t work. Jesus’s quotation pulled in a broader context beyond just his single sentence citation.

To offer a more current example, you might say to a rival after your defeat, “you may have won the battle.” Though that appears to be a statement of defeat, we know it isn’t because what is implied is the next line of that saying, “but you won’t win the war.” The assumed familiarity with the referenced content fundamentally changes the meaning of what is being said. With the right context, we can ironically say one thing while implying the opposite.

A quick reading of Psalm 22 reveals, that while it opens with an expression of abandonment, it is hardly a song of defeat. Quite the opposite. Psalm 22 builds towards the triumphant ending of faith and trust in times of darkness and isolation.

Psalm 22 concludes:
For he has not despised or abhorred
the affliction of the afflicted,
and he has not hidden his face from him,
but has heard, when he cried to him.
From you comes my praise in the great congregation;
my vows I will perform before those who fear him.
The afflicted shall seat and be satisfied;
those who seek him shall praise the LORD!
May your hearts live forever!

Jesus could have cried any phrase of abandonment from the cross. He could have invented his own. The thieves surrounding him had no problem turning to curses. The crowds imagined he was crying to Elijah for help.

It’s hard to imagine Jesus would have selected the opening line of this psalm in an attempt to articulate God’s nonexistence when every Jew would have immediately associated that Psalm with the reassurance of God’s presence. That Žižek would claim to “take seriously those words Christ says at the end” and yet not even mention David’s psalm is reading far too simplistic and crude. Matthew uses every literary detail of his passion narrative to turn our minds to Psalm 22. There is no discussing Jesus’s words without taking the time to consider David’s.

A Darkness Deeper Than Death

What Žižek does manage to capture is the horror of what Christ experienced on the cross and the unexpected possibility of that experience. Christ’s suffering faced its greatest test in the temptation to doubt, to abandon God in the face of having been abandoned. What does it mean for God to reach out to God and for the first time in all eternity, find nothing? In this way, Christ, in his humanity, tastes the atheist’s deepest experiences of nothingness. Christ took on the most fundamental human experience, alienation. And so Matthew records, a verse before Jesus’s words, “darkness came over all the land.”

As a painter, Rembrandt is known for his dramatic use of light and darkness. Nowhere does he deploy this contrast more effectively than in his painting of Christ being raised on the cross. In the painting, a large crowd has formed around Christ, as three men work to hoist the cross upward. Interestingly, the man central to the raising is believed by scholars to be a self-portrait of Rembrandt. Christ is cast in warm and bright light, but the source of that light is mysterious because surrounding the scene is a black shadow. It is the noon hour, but there is no sun in the sky. As the cross is still being raised, it has not yet reached its vertical position. Its angle forces Jesus’s view upward on to the vast open darkness which dominates half the painting. Jesus stares into the empty black.

By comparison, many medieval painters filled their Good Friday skies with angelic creatures and beams of heavenly light. Many of Rembrandt’s contemporaries, like Peter Paul Rubens, opted for dramatically clouded skies. Rembrandt sought instead to draw our attention to that overwhelming, empty section of the canvas. This was also the experience of Christ. To look upward and find emptiness.

This same observation led Chesterton to consider Christ the God of atheists because no other god could better relate to the crushing weight of doubt. The atheist’s sense of God’s apparent absence has never been experienced as deeply as Christ did on the cross. Christ himself stepped into the experience of doubt in ways more profound than any human before him.

As C. S. Lewis put it, “To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell is to be banished from humanity.” What Christ saw in that great emptiness was hell opened before him. It was a space void of God’s presence. It was the nihilistic world of the atheist’s most crushing doubts.

Chesterton also pointed out that, “In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden, God tempted God.” When man was tempted, we each failed. We continue to. Even waking each morning into the preserving grace of God’s patience, even walking daily with him in the garden, as the first man did, we continue to fail that test. We live as if there is no God. It takes less than God’s abandonment for our hearts to turn against Him.

But, and it’s an important but, a test of one’s faith in the face of doubt is not necessarily a denial. It may be, as I think Rembrandt captures, that the greatest light of faith shines brightest in the greatest darkness. Rembrandt’s mysterious source of light is Christ himself. And Christ’s cry is no curse. Instead, Christ does what no man has been capable of doing. In the honesty of his cry, acknowledging his abandonment, he sows the seed of hope. He turns us to Psalm 22. Christ threw himself into the emptiness. But far from cursing God, Luke records Jesus’s final words as, “Then Jesus called out in a loud voice, “‘Father, into Your hands I commit My Spirit.’ And when He had said this, He breathed His last.”

By his allusion to Psalm 22, Jesus forces into the darkness expectations of faith. In the absence of God, Christ still believed. Even when alone, he called out, “my God!” How, in the echo of Christ’s words, do we not hear the psalm’s final conclusion still to come? “He has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him… May your hearts live forever!”

Jesus plunged into the abyss, entrusting his spirit to a God he couldn’t see and believing in a vindication still to come. So Søren Kierkegaard would write, “This is one of the most crucial definitions for the whole of Christianity; that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.” Christ is made perfect in faith. His power is revealed in weakness. His vindication in defeat. His faith in the face of doubt.

The Absence of Resurrection Light

It’s striking that, as seriously as Peterson and Žižek discuss the cross, neither makes mention of the Gospel’s resurrection finale. The gospel writers could not have imagined a conversation about the cross, which dismissed the resurrection. As the Apostle Paul would put it, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain… if Christ has not been raised, your faith is empty.” The meaning of Christ’s cry on the cross hangs on the actuality of his resurrection. Christians have believed this since the first century.

To imagine you are reading the gospels carefully while lopping off their final culminating event is hard to reconcile. Try telling the story of the Trojan war without the Trojan horse? Could you recount Lord of the Rings without Frodo finally casting the ring into the fires of Mordor? Is it still a fairy tale if you delete it’s final happily ever after?

Paul was correct. Even two thousand years ago, he recognized that life and death—defeat and vindication–depend on the resurrection. The message of the cross hangs on the resurrection. There is no way to read the gospels with any semblance of respect while simultaneously stripping them of their conclusion. The moment we reduce Christ’s resurrection to the symbolic, we forfeit the vindication of his suffering. Without that vindication, Christ’s abandonment becomes defeat. He is nothing more than mistaken or disillusioned. The entire edifice of Christianity collapses in on itself. We are left to the scraps.

In a novel move, Žižek attempts to cast this collapse as Christianity’s strength. In a Nietzschean proclamation, Žižek declares the cross the actual death of God. Or as Žižek has described it, “The truly dramatic point is in Christianity, and that is why, although I am (I must admit it) an atheist, I think that you can truly be an atheist – and I mean this quite literally – only through Christianity. That’s how I read the death of Christ – here I follow Hegel, who said: What dies on the cross is God himself.”

I think Chesterton, a self-acknowledged favorite of Žižek’s, offers the final pages of the gospel story the fuller reading they deserve. Chesterton saw in the death and resurrections story, not the death of God but the death of humanity. He saw in it not a dawning of man, but a dawning of God—a new creation. I have rarely read words by any Christian author more profound than Chesterton’s description of resurrection from the Everlasting Man.

“There were solitudes beyond where none shall follow. There were secrets in the inmost and invisible part of that drama that have no symbol in speech; or in any severance of a man from men. Nor is it easy for any words less stark and single-minded than those of the naked narrative even to hint at the horror of exaltation that lifted itself above the hill. Endless expositions have not come to the end of it, or even to the beginning. And if there be any sound that can produce a silence, we may surely be silent about the end and the extremity; when a cry was driven out of that darkness in words dreadfully distinct and dreadfully unintelligible, which man shall never understand in all the eternity they have purchased for him; and for one annihilating instant an abyss that is not for our thoughts had opened even in the unity of the absolute; and God had been forsaken of God.

They took the body down from the cross and one of the few rich men among the first Christians obtained permission to bury it in a rock tomb in his garden; the Romans setting a military guard lest there should be some riot and attempt to recover the body. There was once more a natural symbolism in these natural proceedings; it was well that the tomb should be sealed with all the secrecy of ancient eastern sepulture and guarded by the authority of the Caesars. For in that second cavern the whole of that great and glorious humanity which we call antiquity was gathered up and covered over; and in that place it was buried. It was the end of a very great thing called human history; the history that was merely human. The mythologies and the philosophies were buried there, the gods and the heroes and the sages. In the great Roman phrase, they had lived. But as they could only live, so they could only die; and they were dead.

On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.”

While Žižek reads the cross as God’s defeat, he reads Chesterton very wrongly to come to that conclusion. Instead, Chesterton saw in Christ’s cry a kind of courage. It is the courage to believe even when abandoned. This is the great contribution of Christ to man. This is what separates the Christian God from others. As Chesterton put it, “Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point–and does not break.”

Christ’s prayer of abandonment was a subversive act of faith. When tested, and even when acknowledging the sheer horror of his isolation, still Christ does not break. He leads us not to atheism but pulls us by faith through our doubt.

Christ did not give in to the doubt. “Not my will but yours,” was his prayer. He passed through hell and was vindicated in resurrection. This is not the story of denial or defeat; it is the story of courageous faith, a perfect faith. A leap of faith, as Kierkegaard would describe it.

I can’t help but end in reflecting again on Rembrandt’s painting. At the foot of the cross is a shovel stuck in the ground before a freshly dug grave. For those soldiers who placed Christ’s body in the tomb, death was the finale. How shocked those who had carried his cold body must have been to have seen him resurrected: eating fish, walking with his disciples, and bearing his scars. Christ’s resurrection transcends our certainty.

Or remember the words of Lewis’s imaginary tempter, Screwtape, “Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

“For me the most radical demand of Christian faith lies in summoning the courage to say yes to the present risenness of Jesus Christ.” — Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child

I recently found a computer emulator for playing vintage Super Nintendo games. And who knew you could buy USB Nintendo controllers on Amazon for eight bucks. Two days of waiting for our Prime package to arrive, and I sat down to introduce my son to the video games of my childhood. The first game I downloaded was Aladdin.

Like so many of the other 30-somethings packed into this past Saturday evening’s showing, I was nervous and excited for the remake. Disney’s recent streak of live-action remakes has been pretty hit and miss. Overall, the new Aladdin was entertaining but predictably less than the one of my youth. At first, I found the casting of Will Smith as a blue genie hard to buy into. But eventually, with his Fresh Prince hip-hop take on Robin Williams classic character, I started to enjoy it. The songs are all there, along with a few new ones. But some changes felt odd and, by the end, had me shaking my head.

Jafar is much younger and less mysteriously evil than the original. He is also given a backstory, having grown up as a street thief like Aladdin. The new Jafar seems to function as a kind of foil character to Aladdin and Jasmine. The three, all now similarly aged, are after the same upward mobility to power, but for very different reasons. This reworking of Jafar has reasons we’ll look at below.

Jasmine also undergoes an update. Thankfully her character is far less sexualized than the ’92 version. As producer Jonathan Elrich admitted, “I think my wife told me, ‘If you put Jasmine in a midriff, I’m divorcing you.’”

A Tale of Power’s Temptation

The original plot and themes are mostly retained throughout the film. The Aladdin story has always served as a warning of the destructive seduction of power. The genie makes this point abundantly clear in warning Aladdin, “that’s not a cup you want to drink from.” Even as a child, I remember how it was Jafar’s desire for ultimate power—for the lamp and the throne—which ironically became the thing that enslaved him and shrunk him into the confines of his own lamp—“Phenomenal cosmic power! Itty-bitty living space.”

There is something profoundly true about that point, and it serves as the ethical backbone of both old and new storylines. Unlike Jafar, who is defeated by his desperation for power, Aladdin is heroic for his willingness to sacrifice the possession of his final wish to free the genie. The point? Heroes are not made through power but through their overcoming of power’s temptation.

As it’s been expressed, “Nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power.” Aladdin proves to be the diamond in the rough because of his final ability to hold power without being overcome by it.

That’s a message we need right now, maybe even more than we did in 1992. But that point gets obscured by the new themes Disney attempts to fold into the remake.

A New Tale for A New Time

At the World Premiere of Aladdin, producer Dan Lin explained, “We love the original movie, but when you watch it now, there are some things that are dated. Some of the political issues and the way they treat women just needed to be updated for today.”

I often think about the stories my son and daughter consume for entertainment. Disney is one of the loudest of those voices. I know the way Disney movies formed the soundtrack to my childhood and I see the way they are already capturing my daughter’s imagination. Stories are the foundation of culture, and Disney has a deep influence in shaping the identity formation of our kids. You could read my concerns as a kind of stuffy fundamentalism, but those who know me, know that’s far from my perspective. My issue is not with Disney’s attempts to empower Jasmine, my concern is that what Disney offers my daughter is not nearly empowering enough.

I’m thankful that my daughter will inherit female characters with more significant heroic traits than beauty and poise, but as forcefully as Disney tried to recreate Jasmine as a character of empowerment, I think the effort failed and exposed the clichéd and disjointed hero narrative which Disney seems to be sadly stuck on.

Jasmine’s character always had an independent mind and voice, even in the original, but her new depiction allows her independence to aim at more than prince charming. The new Jasmine has her passion set on being Sultan, motivated by an interest to serve her people better. But Jasmine is in a world in which women cannot rule. She is in a world in which they can’t choose whom to marry, nor share their opinions in public.

As Naomi Scott, who plays Jasmine, explained, “I kind of want people to come out of the cinema and go, ‘Oh, it makes sense that she leads. It’s not just something she wanted.’ She does showcase the skills necessary to lead and she cares about her people, so for me that’s what I want little girls to take away from it — the idea that you can lead, and you can have love. You can have both.”

But Jasmine’s new story is not strictly a political struggle for power to rule, after all, that’s the very thing Jafar was after. Instead, Jasmine’s story is one about identity. While she sees herself as capable of ruling, others, including her own father, see only the traditional expectations of marriage and passivity.

This new plotline, Jasmine’s search for empowerment through identity, also has a featured new song: Speechless. You can probably expect it to get nominated for best song and Scott’s musical performance is by far the strongest of the film. It’s her “Frozen moment,” and the song delivers themes overtly similar.

“Written in stone, every rule, every word
Centuries old and unbending
Stay in your place, better seen and not heard
Well, now that story’s ending”

“I won’t be silenced
You can’t keep me quiet
Won’t tremble when you try it
All I know is I won’t go speechless
Speechless!”

This expression of self against tradition has been a Disney obsession for the past decade or more. The traditional hero narrative calls for the hero to sacrifice their personal interest for the good of others. In Disney’s recent stories, heroics are recast as the individual’s courage to embrace their true selves in the face of traditional expectations of others. The hero is the one willing to find and embrace their true selves no matter the cost.

There is a technical term for this philosophical idea, and it’s found far beyond Disney cinema. Robert Bellah has given it the name, expressive individualism. The Philosopher Charles Taylor describes it as “The Age of Authenticity.”

Bellah explains, “Finding oneself means… finding the story or narrative in terms of which one’s life make sense… In most societies in world history, the meaning of one’s life has derived to a large degree from one’s relationship to the lives of one’s parents and one’s children… Clearly, the meaning of one’s life for most Americans is to become one’s own person, almost to give birth to oneself. Much of this process, as we have seen, is negative. It involves breaking free from family, community, and inherited ideas.”

Honestly, that storyline is so frequent in nearly every modern movie that it is becoming its own cliché. The damsel in distress mold has needed breaking, but the damsel power-ballad of self-expression is becoming just as overused. That Disney can see no other form of heroic empowerment for girls than “speak your truth,” is honestly sad and deeply problematic.

These identity adventures always run into two fundamental problems.

1. Villains and The Lack of Temptation

If a happy ending is to be found in the power to express one’s individuality, then the role of the evil antagonist shifts to any person or force bent on keeping us in our pedestrian place.

I’ve written before about the lack of a true villain in Disney’s Moana story. Taka, the fire-hurling monster, turns out to be Te Fiti, the mother goddess who’s heart was stollen and identity was misinterpreted. Moana cloaks it in a catchy island song, but the real power of this suppression is revealed in Moana’s own father and family who refuse to recognize who she uniquely is.

Casting family and community as the enemy is a tough sell for a family movie, but that’s exactly what the Aladdin producers needed to do to incorporate this new hero archetype into the story. In the previous version, Jasmine’s father was a bumbling naive traditionalist more a jester than an oppressive ruler. He had been fooled into trusting Jafar. The Sultan was wrong but in a mostly likable way. But for Jasmine’s new story to work, we have to see both her father and the encompassing system of cultural authority as the protagonist. Jasmine’s father now shuts down her requests in ways more authoritarian than in the original.

In the original version, the Sultan felt as helplessly trapped in the tradition as his daughter, in the remake, he seems stuck on defending it. In an awkward attempt to make it work, Disney gives Jafar the most blatant articulation of it when he informs Jasmine that the sooner she learns her place—to be quiet—the better things will go for her.

In actuality, it isn’t Jafar that has Jasmine confined to quiet submission; it’s primarily her own father. Though he later claims to be motivated by his fear of losing her, it doesn’t make sense. If he really believed she was incapable of ruling simply because she was a woman, how is he different than Jafar? But Disney can’t bring its story to the bluntness by which this narrative is expressed in our actual culture, where any suggestion of patriarchy is clearly villainy. If self-expression is our highest aim, then any authority which denies us the affirmation of it is logically the villain. For many, all forms of authority are villainy.

Traditionally, villains represented and exposed the conflicting nature of the hero. The external evil exposed bits of internal evil that threaten to undo the hero. Aladdin is tempted to use the same forms of manipulation and deception that characterize Jafar. Both Jafar and Aladdin lie to and manipulate the royal family for their own gain. The more Aladdin leans into the disguise of Prince Ali, the more he enters the domain of Jafar. The villain is always the embodiment of a path tempting the hero.

But if the challenge facing this new self-expressive hero is the suffocating expectations of others than what’s needed is not the power to overcome oneself, but the courage to embrace oneself. Evil is not lurking within but embedded in the systems and structures which oppress us into subjection. Evil is external, and so Jasmine’s challenges are only external. Somehow, we are to believe that offering internal signs of weakness and temptation are disempowering. I couldn’t disagree more. It’s the realization of a hero’s flaws and strengths that make them not only relatable but give them the potential of heroic.

Without a clear antagonist and without inner temptation, Jasmine’s situation collapses into shallow nonsense. Aladdin must handle ultimate power without allowing it to corrupt him. Jasmine, by comparison, is left with the internal struggle to speak her truth? What must she overcome to grow as a character? What does this courage cost her? Nothing. Her defiance comes after Jafar has already seized the throne and is executing judgment. It ends up feeling more desperate than empowered.

It didn’t have to go this way. If you’ll allow me the presumption of writing my own possible ending, why not have Jafar ready to execute the Sultan before the crowds of Agrabah. Jasmine could step in and offer her life in place of her father’s. At least Belle can be credited with that heroic act. Jasmine offering her life before the city would put her close enough to Jafar to convince him that he wouldn’t possess ultimate power until he was as powerful as the genie. Giving Jasmine this clever move, at the risk of her own life, would make her both hero and demonstrably the kind of character capable of ruling. Aladdin could still have his heroic scene freeing the Genie and Jasmine’s father could offer her the throne because of her willingness to sacrifice it for others. Far more empowering than a desperate speech.

Take the oddly similar Biblical story of Esther. Esther was not after power. Her heart was not set on the throne, yet like Jasmine, she knew what it was to be reduced to a pretty face in the king’s palace. Esther found herself a hero in Israelite history not because of her defiance of speech or claim to power, but because of her willingness to abandon herself and risk death in exposing corruption, cruelty, and the plot against her people. She saved her people, not by obtaining a position, but by sacrificing her position. In doing so, she appeared more capable and wise than the king himself. Jasmine, alternatively, imagines she will subvert power by gaining power herself.

2. Self-Expression Makes for Sad Endings

Fairy-tales are supposed to have happy endings, which means we need it to all work out. The genie freed, Aladdin able to marry his love, and Jasmine becoming Sultan. In the director’s move to reinforce Jasmine’s empowerment, it is not her father who finally changes the law allowing for her to marry Aladdin; Jasmine is instead named Sultan and given the power to rewrite her destiny for herself. Its an easy move, but it reveals something complicated about writing happy endings for the self-expressive hero who succeeds in rising above family and tradition.

It’s after Jasmine’s father witnesses her display of courageous speech that he finally recognizes that she is capable of replacing him on the throne. The final scene is of her father embracing her and affirming the identity she has longed for others to see. Why is that ending moving and why is it almost the only way for Disney to wrap things up with a happily ever after? If Jasmine has finally stood up to the established powers, if she has finally found her own internal strength, why does she need her father to affirm it?

The ending works because, though it can never be acknowledged, this new hero needs not just self-confidence but the affirming recognition of others they love. And this is where the whole modern identity narrative collapses on itself. The peak of self-expression turns out to be another’s affirmation.

We desperately want not to need the approval of anyone but ourselves, but we can’t help longing for our self to be affirmed by a meaningful other. The philosopher Charles Taylor offers a whole chapter to this irony in his book, The Ethics of Authenticity. Taylor points out that in an age of individuality, we continue to find personal relationships and romance salvific. He explains, “it reflects something else that is important here: the acknowledgment that our identity requires recognition by others.”

Our need to have our uniqueness affirmed by others means that our relationships are fundamentally changed. Love is no longer self-sacrificing but motivated by the continual affirmation of another in recognizing and supporting our individuality. The true friend and parent is not the one who challenges but the one who affirms and recognizes the uniqueness of our identity. The irony is that our unique self-expressions are only unique when they are recognized by another. Our self-sufficiency has a dependency.

Jasmine’s story fails the first literary convention of all great characters, they must go through a change. The only change this new hero is capable of creating is in another. Jasmine may be able to reform the stuffy traditional expectations of her father into new affirmations and acceptance, but she undergoes no fundamental change and offers little opportunity for the audience.

Aladdin is freed from the temptation of power by sacrificing his self-interest for the interests of the genie. But Jasmine? What does she sacrifice? How is she changed? It is her father who controls her, and it is her father who finally offers her the affirmation she has longed for. Far from empowering Jasmine, the story fizzles out not knowing how to lift her above her family’s expectations and finally her family’s approval. Disney can’t find a way for Jasmine to escape the very dependence she rejects.

Disney’s failure is thinking that this new hero narrative can simply be slipped into an ancient story; after all, the Aladdin story traces its roots back to ancient times. But what was meant for empowerment, simply doesn’t go far enough. My daughter needs female heroes who do more than speak. She needs heroes who reflect deeply within themselves, who know their own flaws, who challenge and push themselves, and who are capable of rising above temptation for the good of those they love. The affirmation my daughter will need to produce that kind of courage isn’t found in culture or even from her father. The affirmation she needs is in Christ. But that’s a story Disney will continually struggle to tell.

And if the state of our current world is any indication of how this self-expressive hero story really ends, its far from a happily ever after. Studies continue to find that anxiety rates are increasing. People are more isolated and lonely than ever before. We are divided, agitated, restless, frustrated, and yet more determined to find our own way. We look more like street thieves than heroes.

We want a father’s embrace and despise his authority at the same time. We want self-confidence but depend on others to affirm it. The story we keep being handed isn’t working. I think Aladdin puts on display a need which three wishes, accumulated power, nor self-expression can ultimately fulfill. So we go on looking for the diamond in the rough.

“Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.” Luke 17:33

When season eight of Game of Thrones (GOT) premiered this year, HBO estimated that 17.4 million viewers were watching. Considering GOT is one of the most pirated shows in history, that number is probably much higher. HBO has spent more than 90 million dollars marketing the final season, and experts are estimating that the finale may beat the premier’s record viewership.

There is no disputing that the show has forever changed how we think about entertainment and left a deep impression on our culture. It has captured the attention of a generation and sparked endless debates, maybe nowhere more than within the church. Just google “Should Christians watch Game of Thrones?” and brace yourself for debates as fierce as the show itself.

---

This article is going to have two big problems that need to be addressed straightaway. First, I have never watched 2 seconds of the show, though you would have to live under a rock to not know about it. I realize, for many, that may disqualify me from having an opinion. I’m not unaware of your concerns. As a positive, there is far less risk I’ll spoil an ending.

Second, the way these conversations tend to go is that when I admit that I have not watched the show due to my concern with its graphic nature, both sexually and violently, you tend to lump me in with, what you imagine to be, all the other stuffy-nay-sayers. You do it quite justifiably, assuming I’ve lumped you in with all the other sex-obsessed libertine Millennials. (I’m actually a millennial as well, though I hate being categorized by that title just as much as you do).

The one thing most apparent to me is that the church has no clue how to talk about Game of Thrones. The level of our discourse seems to have only been able to rise to the level of, “It’s so good!” and “It’s so bad!” What we are missing is the challenging work of theology. That is, attempting to understand how the reality of God and his revelation of Christ intervene in this world and our time, how his kingdom has come and how the decisions we now make either refect it or distract from it.

So, where I hope this conversation can go is down a less worn path. Setting aside our personal opinions on what Christians should and shouldn’t watch, I think it’s worth considering what Game of Thrones, and our culture’s obsession with it, demonstrates about you and I. If I can articulate why you find yourself so interested in it, maybe you can recognize my hesitation for it. Sound fair?

I want to look at three theologies, that due to their anemic and underdeveloped form are limiting our ability to think deeply about watching shows like GOT.

1. 1. A Theology of Nihilism
2. 2. A Theology of FOMO
3. 3. A Theology of Clothes

Not your typical systematic theology, I realize.

1. A Theology of Nihilism

Game of Thrones is the kind of show that sounds massively appealing to me. Having grown up with The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition Boxed Set and having spent many hours building Lego castles complete with my own shielded warrior armies, I find the immersive medieval world of GOT intriguing, dragons and all.

Game of Thrones is based on a series of books written by George R. R. Martin. I’ve never heard Martin credit J. R. R. Tolkien with his choice of name initialism, but Martin has often spoken of the influence Tolkien had on his interest in fantasy fiction. Tolkien’s trilogy format and immersive world building are now foundational components of modern fantasy.

The themes behind The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) reflect Tolkien’s personal and horrific experience fighting in the trenches of WWI and his deeply held Catholic faith. In fact, Tolkien’s friendship is credited with having led C. S. Lewis to the Christian faith. While LOTR is not explicitly Christian, its hopeful tone and values of friendship, honor, and self-sacrifice are evident to most. You can imagine Lewis thinking of Tolkien when he wrote, “The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.”

But as influential as Tolkien was in forming the fantasy interests of Martin, Martin had one primary problem with The Lord of the Rings: it was too optimistic and too simplistic. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Martin explained:

“Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?”

Game of Thrones is alternatively an exploration of these unaddressed questions—power and politics in its most brutal and nihilistic forms. It is a world without God, without values, awash in Darwinian survival of the fittest. Martin and the show’s producers wanted to make this not only clear but shockingly clear to their audience.

The series will always be remembered for initially leading viewers to believe it was a story framed around the heroic Ned Stark—played by Sean Bean, by far the most recognized actor on the show and known in large part for his role in The Lord of the Rings. To the surprise of the audience, Stark was shockingly beheaded in season one. The statement intended was as brutal as the act. This is not Tolkien’s story. This is not about heroes. This was a rebellion against the stories you’ve previously been told.

When asked what he thought made GOT such a success, Bean explained:

“I mean, the sheer balls of the thing. It takes no prisoners. It touches upon all those very deep emotions — anger and jealousy and love and hate. People can see themselves in it. The characters might seem out of this world, but they’re very much like all of us. And anything can happen. When you can kill the main character in the first series, everybody’s in danger! It’s pure fantasy, but rooted in issues with power — the power of the throne, the power of the families, and the lengths that they would go to to achieve this ultimate power, which is quite a curious thing.”

That topic is a curious one for Martin as well. Martin was a conscious objector to Vietnam and has acknowledged how that war led him to question the ways in which power is used and manipulated in our own world. Again, he explains his thoughts to Rolling Stone:

“Why did anybody go to Vietnam? Were the people who went more patriotic? Were they braver? Were they stupider? Why does anybody go? What’s all this based on? It’s all based on an illusion: You go because you’re afraid of what will happen if you don’t go, even if you don’t believe in it. But where do these systems of obedience come from? Why do we recognize power instead of individual autonomy? These questions are fascinating to me. It’s all this strange illusion, isn’t it?”

In comparing Martin’s Game of Thrones to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, you might not find a better line than Martin’s. “Why do we recognize power instead of individual autonomy?” While Lord of the Rings captured the struggle of Froddo to pay the personal price required to bear the ring and saving Middle Earth, GOT is a story about the lengths we will go to protect our power and defend our autonomy. It is a world in which individuals are brutalized and objectified by power claims and power grabs. Martin forces us to face the raw potential of power used for self-preservation.

Martin has resisted the idea that his story is Nihilistic though, insisting that his “worldview is anything but nihilistic.” To be fair, Martin effectively puts on display the real brokenness of humanity and reveals to us the raw potential of our self-interests. If it is nihilistic, as so many critics have suggested, Martin sees this truth as necessary to capture the realistic condition of humanity. Fantasy has long been a tool for displaying our lives in ways contemporary portrayals would never be allowed to do.

It’s this reason that has prompted many to find the show’s horrific depictions of violence, torture, and unprecedented nudity necessary to capture the nihilistic existence the show wants us to feel.

Our infatuation with these nihilistic stories is hardly new for society, though. There was the cultural obsession with Christopher Nolan’s Joker and the equally brutal and award-winning No Country for Old Men. While it may be that writers like Martin have intended their nihilistic stories to catch us off guard and shock us into seeing something of our own horrific nature, we have done something equally shocking in our consumption.

As an illustration, there are plenty of other movies which aim to depict human depravity and force us to acknowledge our manipulation of power. Consider Schindler’s List. While not as nihilistic in its final message, the show includes graphic violence and nudity which IMDB ranks as “Severe.” But the striking difference lies in our reaction to it. No one is throwing Schindler’s List cosplay parties. There’s no Schindler’s List night at the ballpark. No ones hashtagging selfies with Schindler’s List movie props. And absolutely no one is taking online tests to determine “which Schindler’s List character you are.”

You can tease out philosophical, even spiritual implications from Game of Throne’s nihilistic tone, but maybe more shocking than its content is how it has captured our culture as entertainment. That our culture can look into the horrific truth of our own depravity and find it strangely thrilling, that’s something worth thinking about—an IKEA coach, a bag of popcorn, and an evening of nihilism.

Nihilism and Our Inverted Maturity

While we host watch parties and spend Sunday nights bingeing on broken humanity with our friends, we imagine that our ability to stomach it is actually a sign of our maturity. Listen to someone try and recommend the show to a friend. “It’s so good. I mean there is a lot of bad stuff, but if you can get past that, the show is so good.” Eventually, you’ll get the, “it doesn’t cause me to sin.” Fair enough.  But anyone who suggests that the show is contrary to Christian values is quickly written-off as judgmental, stuffy, and immature in their understanding of culture, art, and the general reality of things. Being “in on it” has become the new maturity.

And it’s not just me pointing out this trend. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in his monumental, A Secular Age, explains similarly:

“This means that this ideal of the courageous acknowledger of unpalatable truths, ready to eschew all easy comfort and consolation, and who by the same token becomes capable of grasping and controlling the world, sits well with us, draws us, that we feel tempted to make it our own. And/or it means that the counter-ideals of belief, devotion, piety, can all-too-easily seem actuated by a still immature desire for consolation, meaning, extra-human sustenance.”

In a nihilistic world which GOT depicts, the person who stands for “belief, devotion, piety” is thought to be immature and usually quickly beheaded. Any desire for meaning or transcendent “sustenance” is a sign of naiveté. True transcendence and maturity is the man who can courageously acknowledge unpalatable truths and crush the comfort and conclusions of weaker positions.

We find the person willing to go where no one else has most courageous, and we find ourselves oddly drawn to their confidence and displays of nerve. Our heroes become those willing to repudiate heroics. And so we come to, as Paul would put it, glory in our shame, or at least what once shamed us.

This isn’t strictly a religious argument I’m attempting to make. In 1985, Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. In the introduction of the book, he compares two dystopian views of our future. One is represented by George Orwell’s 1984. Orwell imagined society run by a “big brother,” a dominating governmental bureaucracy which denied human rights and controlled every detail of life. He imagined we would be controlled by force. Alternatively, Postman also considered Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley saw our enslavement coming not by power but by pleasure. He imagined a world in which we were pacified by entertainment.

Postman concluded, “There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first—the Orwellian—culture becomes a prison. In the second—the Huxleyan—culture becomes a burlesque.” Postman warned about a world which devolves into entertainment. Where experience and shock capture so much of our attention that we forget how to pay attention to things less easily consumed. We no longer debate ideas but argue about celebrities, fads, and sitcom plots.

We imagine ourselves mature, thoughtful, and independent, but our hunger for more entertainment enslaves us to shallowness. It’s not GOT’s nihilism, which ultimately concerns me; the Bible has stories from the book of Judges that leave you feeling pretty nihilistic. The Bible depicts incest, rape, sexual exploit, genocide, and horrific violence, and it’s used for the similar effect of revealing our brokenness, but those stories never deteriorate into forms of pop-entertainment.

As Postman explained, “The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.”

That deterioration is happening all around us. Consider how educational channels like TLC (The Learning Channel) and Discovery have now given us Honey Boo Boo, My 600lb Life, Sister Wives, Naked and Afraid, Pawn Stars, and the Amish Mafia. VH1, once known for playing music videos, has turned to shows like Dating Naked. Even CNN has opted for bizarre food and exotic world travel. Our appetite for more entertainment continues to press producers to keep up.

Where Does This Nihilism Come From?

Our desire to entertain ourselves with shocking depictions of depravity has a motive. And it’s part of the inevitable consequence of embracing a nihilistic worldview, of rejecting moral authority. The philosopher Nietzsche defined nihilism this way, “What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves… ‘Why?’ finds no answer.”

You can think of nihilism as a flattening of all values. Nihilism doesn’t mean that there are no values, only that there is no hierarchy of values or transcendent authority by which values are compared. Nihilism is fundamentally the absence of any authority or responsibility to a higher power. Without the traditional expectations of submission to this authority, we are each left to determine how values should be constructed personally.

Nietzsche famously captured this new reality in his parable of the madman. He writes:

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it?”

Without the authority of God, what is left to call valuable? If there is no human accountability to the divine, how do we determine what is valuable? Nietzsche’s depiction of God’s death inaugurated an age skeptical of all authority. No one has any authoritative right to tell another person what to think, believe, or value. Nihilism thus turns our attention to the only thing that is left, ourselves. Existence is flattened to the individual. This is precisely the world GOT depicts. It is a world in which each character must pragmatically determination their own way and the means by which they will find it.

Similarly, our world now sees all value judgments concerning another person as claims of power. Suggesting that another person’s actions might be morally wrong feels like a prideful reach for authority. In the flattened world of nihilism, nothing can be implied, inferred, or inherited, which is not grounded first in a personal benefit. Otherwise, it is seen as a claim to authority and a manipulative use of power.

For instance, anyone who suggests you might turn the show off for moral reasons is considered stepping beyond their rights and implying authority over someone else. What’s wrong for you is personal. And what’s right for me is personal.

While this disorienting reality of having no ultimate right or wrong—what Nietzsche described as using a “sponge to wipe away the entire horizon”—may seem hopeless, Nietzsche was ultimately optimistic about our ability to construct a new morality. If nothing was inherited, then we would create the values that served us best. We would become the transcendent ourselves. We would, as Nietzsche put it, be left to become our own gods.

The impact of this nihilistic perspective is the inevitable elevation of the individual as sovereign. Each person is given the task of discovering their own values. Personal transcendence replaces knowledge of the transcendent. Our heroes become those capable of defying the old expectations and demonstrating their uniqueness. And we find the shocking depictions of traditional lines being crossed ever more entertaining. Nothing feels more empowering than watching others go where we’ve been told we can’t.

Lord of the Rings captured our attention with hope and the possibility of good beating the odds against evil. Game of Thrones has captured our attention with its attempt to liberate us from the supposed power structures of tradition, expectations, and the world of established values. We find ourselves imagining we are mature, empowered, and free when we find ourselves most entertained, shocked, and nonchalant.

2. A Theology of the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)

This is where you’re probably thinking, I’m not so sure about nihilism. I just watch Game of Thrones because it’s so good. In a culture of binge-watching, GOT has been described as the most binge-worthy show in history. With eight seasons, the show now offers nearly 48 hours streamable on HBO. At the time of my writing, there are seventy-one episodes.

As one viewer, attempting to catch up on the show, explained, “I have FOMO and I almost never have FOMO about anything. It feels like literally, everybody but me is watching the show, and while that’s not true, it might as well be. But people I love to talk pop culture with are all watching and I have to stand outside the fence, dragging my shoes in the dirt waiting for the conversation to change to something I’m up on.”

The fear of missing out on one of the greatest shows in history, the thing everyone is constantly tweeting about, is a real kind of fear. And even if not outright anxiety, it has proved to be more than many can resist. Laugh all you want, but psychologists have quantitatively identified FOMO and describe it as, “‘the uneasy and sometimes all-consuming feeling that you’re missing out – that your peers are doing, in the know about, or in possession of more or something better than you. Under this framing of FOMO, nearly three-quarters of young adults reported they experienced the phenomenon.”

This is where we need to momentarily step back into our conversation on philosophical nihilism. Not everyone was as optimistic about humanities ability to construct values in the absence of divine authority as Nietzsche. Let me introduce you to the 20th Century German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger feared that with a flattened value system, and with each individual now tasked with finding their own meaning and guiding principles, most would retreat into private experience as a means of establishing value. As each person looked for significance, inevitably experience would become the dominating arbiter of values. We would use our feelings and personal experiences to construct what seemed most valuable to each of us. Heidegger believed our society’s ultimate value would eventually shift to experience itself.

In his essay on Heidegger, Nihilism, and Art Burkley Professor Hubert L. Dreyfus writes:

“Heidegger sees this move to private experience as characteristic of the modern age. Art, religion, sex, education—all become varieties of experience. When all our concerns have been reduced to the common denominator of ‘experience,’ we will have reached the last stage of nihilism. One then sees ‘the plunge into frenzy and the disintegration into sheer feeling as redemptive. The lived experience as such becomes decisive.'”

I want to be very clear about what Heidegger is saying because it is profoundly important. As we more often depend on experience to validate our values, realities such as art, religion, sex, education, and entertainment itself become redemptive. They take on redemptive significance because of their ability to awaken emotional experiences in us, the pursuit of which shape meaning and serve as our new morality. Our feelings become transcendent. Experiences become salvific. Morality becomes relativized to individual preference and taste. We prove what is right by how it makes us feel. Even as believers, our faith itself can shift into subjective categories of experience and emotionally derived morality.

Our generation is living in what Heidegger imagined would be the final stage of Nihilism. And, though he would have probably been forced to sheepishly ask his twenty-something granddaughter to explain the acronym, I think Heidegger would have recognized FOMO as evidence of our condition. In a world where experiences form our most important pursuits, where those experiences now serve to replace religious traditions of meaning and authority, how would we not fear that we are missing out on what others are finding? The world offers more experience than any life can explore. When do we ever sleep?

As Heidegger put it, “The loss of the gods is so far from excluding religiosity that rather only through that loss is the relation of the gods changed into mere “religious experience.” Experience itself becomes our religion. We have traded the actual transcendent authority of God for the pursuit of experiences which feel transcendent. The only authority is our personal pursuit of adventure.

A recent study conducted by the event registration company Eventbrite found that 69 percent of millennials experience this FOMO when they are left out of an event attended by their close friends and family, and the study concluded, “For millennials, FOMO is not just a cultural phenomenon, it’s an epidemic.” Or consider this recent article title from Adweek—a publication chronicling trends in the advertising industry—”Ways Marketers Can Successfully Leverage FOMO Amongst Millennials.” When marketers are “leveraging” it, you can be sure it’s real. Capitalism has no margins for philosophical pontificating. Adweek talks about your FOMO because they know just how much it impacts the decision you make and the money you spend.

The irony is that our generation is starting to show the signs of being crushed by the very philosophy that was intended to free us. We have been given a world in which we are free to construct our own values. Erased is the tired and worn morality of previous generations. What Nietzsche described as, “herd animal morality.” We are more enlightened. Ours would be a world of tolerance, encouragement, and liberation. A world where each person could live the life most meaningful to them. The world was placed in our hands, and the treasure was ours to find. We rolled our eyes at the notions of God, holiness, judgment, and authority and then returned to our frantic searching, more and more afraid we’re missing it, and never quite convinced we’ve found it. To again use Nietzche’s line, “Do we not feel the breath of empty space?”

You might think it’s a stretch to suggest that Millennials are trading God for GOT, after all, plenty worship Sunday morning and watch Sunday night. We want all the experiences. There are plenty of Christians who see no problem in participating. My question is maybe a more important one though, not why would you watch it, but why do you find it so difficult not to? What are you afraid of missing out on?

I think our fear of missing out on Game of Thrones reveals that, though we imagine ourselves independent, self-expressive, and morally mature, we are desperately insecure and not wanting to be left out on anything that might offer even a moment of meaning.

3. A Theology of Clothes

Bodies and swords are often the weapons of rebellion. Game of Thrones has spared little in utilizing both. Entertainment Weekly calculated that in the first 67 episodes of GOT there are “a whopping 82 nude scenes.” The list of scenes on IMDB are awkward and graphic, even to read, including rape, incest, and full frontal male and female nudity.

That has caused many to raise boisterous concerns, which have been met by equally boisterous counter-reactions. A GOT cast member lamented to one UK news agency, “why are we so offended by nudity anyway because you’re seeing things that everyone’s already got?” After fans complained that women were primarily the ones being undressed on the show, a social media campaign to “free the [member]” was waged online and the show responded as demanded.

I’ve been surprised by how many Christians seem indifferent to watching such displays. I’ve met none who endorse it, but most shrug their shoulders and surrender to the way our culture is today. And this is where things continue to get more confusing. Our concept of nudity is fundamentally changing, and our conversations on the question often seem incomprehensible.

Consider that half of millennials admit to having sent naked selfies. Who knows how many more have taken them. Millennials are behind nationwide efforts to repeal public exposure laws. Gallop reports that 59% of 18-34 year-olds saw pornography as morally acceptable. And when segmented by those who said, “Religion is very important,” 22% still saw no moral issue with pornography. One study found that a significant percentage of young Millenials ranked not recycling as worse than viewing pornographic material.

The data, scientific and anecdotal, has led some to declare Millennials the most sexually promiscuous culture in history. But Millennials rarely describe themselves that way. And there are plenty of sources to demonstrate the opposite. Studies have found that Millenials are having less sex than previous generations. Some have even called Millennials a modest generation. And if you want some really interesting studies, search online for how condominiums and public gyms are catering to Millennials who prefer not to be nude in public showers or even in their own homes when sharing a bathroom with a partner or spouse. Some high-end developments now are building his and her bathrooms.

There is something fundamentally different about how Millennials see the human body and think about nudity. At its best, Millennials have rightfully argued that a body is not an object to be sexualized, a serious critique of our parent’s generation. Many suggest that GOT uses nudity in a way that is not sexual or pornographic at all but rather artistic and required to express the true nature of its characters. I suspect there is something more being hidden in even our non-sexualized interest in nudity.

Let me demonstrate with an example. A few years ago the actress Jenifer Lawrence was the victim of a cyber-hacking which stole her personal nude photos and posted them online. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Lawrence argued, “Anybody who looked at those pictures, you’re perpetuating a sexual offense. I didn’t tell you that you could look at my naked body. It’s my body, and it should be my choice, and the fact that it is not my choice is absolutely disgusting.”

By the way, I couldn’t agree more that the crime and mass-consumption are both disgusting, yet Time magazine pointed out the interesting fact that Lawrence poised topless for the very cover of the Vanity Fair issue which included her statements about that hacking.

In the article, “How Nudity Became the New Normal,” Time went on to offer this statement by sexuality educator Dr. Logan Levkoff. “It’s our image, it’s not us,” she explains. “We’re not engaging with someone face to face, so the perception is that we’re not vulnerable.” The fundamental issue for many Millennials is not nudity but the power of an individual to express their strength through their body. Dr. Levkoff goes on to say something remarkable, “The majority of adolescents who are out there naked, it’s not because they’re necessarily comfortable, it’s because they want to show people they’re comfortable.”

In other words, nudity has become a cultural symbol of self-acceptance, confidence, and strength. In previous generations, nudity was almost exclusively sexualized. Nudity was a marketing tool for drawing attention. It’s not that nudity is now never sexual, hardly, but Millennials think of nudity in terms broader than sexuality.

If experience has become the dominant value of my generation, than its closest partner is acceptance. Any value, honestly and passionately held by another, is no better than your own. Acceptance of our differences is the highest dogma. But accepting one another has proven far easier than accepting ourselves. While we enthusiastically affirm the choices of others, we struggle to feel self-confidence. We struggle to accept ourselves with the same enthusiasm. Nudity has become a tool, not just of rebellion against traditional prudishness but against self-vulnerability. Barring all is the test of ultimate self-confidence and that confidence is the highest ideal—to accept yourself. Being nude and unashamed feels like reversing the cures, which is another way to describe heaven. Ultimate self-acceptance is the highest ideal. And so our magazines are an endless parade of celebrities taking their stand by bearing their bodies.

To again quote from times article:

“It’s the difference between posing nude and feeling naked. We use “naked” and “nude” like synonyms, but there have always been differences between bare bodies, even in art history. A naked figure is supposed to have clothes on, but doesn’t (like the naked woman surrounded by clothed men in Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass.) A nude figure doesn’t have to worry about pesky social conventions like pants, because it’s usually some kind of Classical or Biblical hero, like Michelangelo’s David.”

Nakedness is vulnerability, but a confident nude figure is the stuff of Biblical heroics.

With this shift, the modest expectation of our Christian communities, predicated on notions of purity, have been heard as a form of oppression. Any authority or judgment concerning what a person wears, or doesn’t wear, is considered to be robbing an individual of their sacred right to self-expression and self-determination. The iconic red capes of The Handmaiden’s Tale capture the Millennial take perfectly. Conformity and expectations are tyranny. Put on more clothes sounds something like, “shut up and know your place.” Alternative nudity promises liberation and expresses the nihilistic ideal of self-acceptance alone.

What the church is missing is not a theology of purity or nudity but a theology of clothes. My youth group talked a lot about avoiding nakedness in all its forms; what we didn’t get was a proper theological view on why we wear clothes at all.

You might remember from the garden that clothing was first introduced by Adam and Eve in their mad scramble to cover up their guilt and shame. Their nakedness had them feeling vulnerability for the first time. It’s always fascinated me that the first consequence of sin was our realization of nakedness. It’s as if, having spent their whole lives with their eyes fixed on the goodness of God, the goodness of creation, and the goodness of their partner, they had never looked down to see themselves. Having eaten the forbidden fruit for their own gain, they suddenly shifted their gaze down to themselves and were shocked to realize they were naked. All this time, they had been exposed. Vulnerability entered the world.

They had attempted to take God’s place, to replace his values with their own. What they gained was not the confidence of self-actualization or defiant nudity but instead the shame of their own nakedness. And they hid.

What you would imagine God doing, as his first real act of grace, would be to restore their idealistic nudity back to how they had been created. Instead, God replaced their sloppily pinned fig leaves with garments of animal skin. God covered them. Unlike animals, we wear clothes. It is the memory of our fall, the unsolvable problem of vulnerability.

Clothes are a sign of humility. They are a sign of our naked state. They are a sign that the solution to our deepest fears and insecurities lies not within us but beyond us. We are in need of a covering.

Our clothes are not symbols of status, wealth, taste, nor a work of self-expression. What matters most is not how they make us feel or what we like. Our clothes remind us that we are not in a nihilistic world. They remind us that we have been promised new and eternal garments, white and spotless. They remind us that our confidence can never be secure in our own naked bodies. Our clothes demonstrate that we are submissive to a higher power and that God’s values are not for our shame but for our defense.

I fear that Christians casual participation in a culture of unclothing risks our participation in a rebellion against God. More than being a question of just sexuality, lust, and purity, it is an act of open defiance against authority and the transcendence of God. And you think it’s no big deal.

Eat, Drink, For Tomorrow, We Watch Game of Thrones

My choice not to watch Game of Thrones is not about ego or judgment. I do it as an act of subversion. God’s people have always been a peculiar people. I want in on that. I want to call out insecurity parading itself as maturity and confidence. I want to expose the game we’re all playing. Sunday night, I won’t be watching. Instead, I think I might go for a walk with my wife and kids.

That’s no guilt trip. But don’t be naive. Don’t surrender to the ways this world manipulates and sells your fears. Don’t live for shock. Don’t give in to nihilism. Stand for something greater than passing moments of thrill. Articulate more than fandom. Search for more than an experience. Trust a transcendence higher than yourself. Hold on to a value larger than you could self construct. Hold on to Christ. Enjoy him. Taste and see. Drink and be thirsty no more. You’re not missing out by turning it off.

“One way to define spiritual life is getting so tired and fed up with yourself you go on to something better, which is following Jesus.” — Eugene H. Peterson