When Masculinity Became Toxic

The following program is recorded content created by the Truth Network. Since when has masculinity itself become toxic?

We'll talk about it today. There's something for just common sense, basic truth. There's something for some things that are just so obvious they're hard to deny.

This one reason that things are shifting in America, even in other countries, as people are saying, well, this just doesn't make any sense. Welcome to the line of fire, friends. This is Michael Brown. You've got my pledge. You tune in on a regular basis. You will get a steady dose of moral sanity and spiritual clarity. And, hey, we will bring together grace and truth. We will bring together word and spirit. We will bring together hearts of compassion with backbones of steel. And our goal, our vision, our calling is to help infuse you with faith and truth and courage so that you can stand strong, so that you can fulfill what God's called you to do as a mom, as a dad, as a teacher, as a pastor, as a missionary, as a student, as a single person, as an elderly shut-in.

We're all called. We all have a mission. We all have a purpose. And our goal is to infuse you with that faith and truth and courage so you can be strong.

We want to strengthen you in the areas that God's given us strength to be a blessing so that you can bless others. All right. Here's what's going to happen today. At the bottom of the hour, I'm going to be joined by Professor Nancy Piercy. She's got a brand-new book out, The Toxic War on Masculinity. She's a brilliant Christian thinker, but this is the first time, as I'm almost sure, the first time I've ever had her on the air, even though I've been on Daily Talk Radio since 2008.

So this has been a long time in coming. Delighted to have Professor Piercy with us. I think you're going to find it to be a really helpful and interesting discussion. But what I want to do now is open the phone lines wide so you can call in on any subject with any question of any kind.

I wasn't able to get to any calls yesterday. You can call me at 866-34-TRUTH, 866-348-7884. All right. I got to be totally honest with you. You know what bothers me? That so few people call in to differ with me. Now, they are out there.

I know you're out there because we hear from you day and night on other platforms. We read the attacks. We read the differences. And many of you, you know, your friendly differences with us, so on. Hey, that's within the body.

That's within the family. But others, I mean, hostile, ugly, damning, attacking, slanderous, libelous, whatever you want to call it. Every kind of ugly accusation and ignorance on this and wrong on this. And you're welcome to have your views. I mean, I fully understand that there are many things I'm going to say that folks are going to differ with. There are many controversies we're going to tackle. I don't tackle them. I don't raise anything on the line of fire because I know if I do, it's like clickbait and everyone's going to come running to it.

No. If we get into a heated topic, I want there to be more light than heat. All right. If I'm going to talk about a controversial issue, it's not to draw on more listeners and more viewers. The reason for talking about the controversial issue is because it needs to be talked about. Because people are struggling with it. People are asking about it.

Or because we're getting flooded with people saying, Dr. Brown, could you please address this? All right. So I'm not just trying to stir controversy. But I fully understand there are positions that I hold to that some of you will differ with. Some of you as followers of Jesus will differ with me. Some of you as people who don't believe in Jesus in terms of him being Lord or God or anything like that.

You'll differ with me. You might be an atheist. You might be Jewish. You might be Muslim.

You might be part of a group that I would call a cult, whatever it is. I just regret that so many will express their views on social media and challenge and question. And first understand the vast majority of comments I don't even get to see personally because of our social media reach and the many different platforms we are. And then secondly, even if I could see them because of the responsibilities on my life with radio and with writing and traveling and speaking and everything else, I couldn't possibly respond to everyone. But we, by live air time, a major reason that we do the live show is not just to be on top of anything that's happening in the world around us, but so that you can call and we can talk. So once more, from the heart, with a smile.

I know if you're listening, you can hear the smile in my voice. Feel free to call and give me a piece of your mind and just know that I will gladly respond. 866-34-TRUTH.

Okay, I'm just missing info. Jess, welcome to the line of fire. Where exactly are you, Jess? Hello? I'm from Dallas, Texas. Dallas. Okay, great.

Welcome to the broadcast. So I had a question. We saw a recreation of the temple a couple weeks ago, and they were explaining that there was showbread, but then I believe in the holiest part of the temple where the priest could enter once a year, I thought they might have said that there was manna inside that area, and I was kind of confused because I thought manna was provided by God during the expedite, and I was wondering, was that manna that was in the holiest of holies, or was that showbread in there? No, there was nothing. In the holy of holies, there was not manna, for sure.

You're 100% right. That was a one-time phenomenon, and then you had that in the first temple, okay? But once the temple was destroyed, you did not have that in the second temple.

There's no reference to the pot of manna. So in the first temple, you had certain things preserved. You had the tablets of the covenant. You didn't have those anymore. You had Aaron's rod that budded. You didn't have that anymore. You had the pot of manna.

You didn't have that anymore. What was called the mercy seat with the cherubim, you didn't have that anymore. So after the destruction of the temple, Jewish tradition says that there was a rock that was on the ground, a large rock, and where the holy of holies was, so when the priest would pour out the blood once a year for the Day of Atonement, it would be poured on the rock. But no, you did not have those other elements there in the second temple, for sure. Oh, okay, so that was only in the traveling temple that was in... No, the tabernacle. The temple never traveled. The tabernacle, and then the first temple. Got it? Oh, okay.

Cool. The tabernacle under Moses and up until the time of David, and then the temple from Solomon until the destruction with King Zedekiah in 586 B.C. So Solomon dedicates the temple around 966 B.C., so from 966 to 586, and then in the centuries before that, from Moses on during the tabernacle, you did have those elements there. But then after that temple destroyed, children of Israel, Jewish people go into exile in Babylon, and then after that there's no more Ark of the Covenant, you know, with the tablets and these other things. That's gone. Now of course there are traditions that it's hidden here or there, it's in Ethiopia being guarded by Ethiopic priests and things, but I know of no concrete evidence that we know whatever happened to the Ark.

You have Raiders of the Lost Ark and movies like that that are trying to figure it out, and there's always been a search for it, but I don't know of anything that to me has convinced me that we know where it is or that it hasn't been lost for all time. So then was there manna in the tabernacle in the Holies of Holies? Yes. And was that replaced on a daily basis?

No, no, no. That was supernaturally preserved. That would be... Oh, okay. So in other words, after the wilderness wanderings, this was a remembrance.

Awesome. Yeah, so these are great questions. In other words, where did it come from? How did it last?

But it was supernaturally preserved, because otherwise it would only last, you know, if you didn't get it early in the morning, it would go bad. Let me thank you for the questions. And Jess, I didn't ask you, how are you listening to the broadcast today? This is on 100.7 The Word.

Awesome, man. Thrilled to have you as one of our listeners. We just launched on K-word, K-W-R-D, 100.7 FM, blanketing DFW, which is like a home away from home for me.

So we just launched slightly over a month ago. Glad to have you as one of our listeners. God bless you, Jess. Thank you, sir. All right.

866-34-TRUTH. Yeah, just taking some different random questions now. When I was in Rome a few years ago with our oldest granddaughter, Eliana, and her older cousin, Becca, so we... They were with us when I was ministering in Sicily.

They were hanging out with some of the Italian young people during the day and after the meetings at night, come to the night meetings with me. Then we went to Rome, and it was just Rome in a day. Now, we had been near the Colosseum, so we got to see that in more depth. But we went into some of the key museums there, and it was just spectacular.

I mean, to do it in a day is absolutely overwhelming. And of course, we didn't see everything. But just one amazing thing after another amazing thing after another amazing thing. But there's the famous Arch of Titus, which shows the Romans carrying away items from the Second Temple as they destroyed the Second Temple and carrying away some of the sacred items.

So there were many sacred items in the Second Temple, but not some of the key ones that were in the First Temple. So, let me just get back to this subject here about common sense. That certain things are just hard to deny, ultimately, like biology. Like men being different than women and women being different than men. It doesn't mean that you can't have a man that has some feminine characteristics. Or a woman who has some masculine characteristics.

Doesn't mean that at all. In fact, that's common. Girls being called tomboys and things like that. And not everyone fits in stereotypical patterns. Not every boy likes sports.

Not every girl likes dolls, etc. But generally speaking, as things play out over a society, the differences between males and females are clear. Biologically, socially, and otherwise. As things play out in society, the biological imperative, the desire for men to be with women and women to be with men. The desire to be together sexually.

The desire to have children. That these biological imperatives and biological realities tend to work themselves out. And as you keep pushing further and further against it. I was talking about some of this on Monday and said I wasn't planning on getting into it more on the week. But it's just everywhere I turn, almost every day, there's another story. There's something else happening in the news. There's something else going on. I think it's just good for us to remember that unless the world completely falls apart, or Jesus returns first, the sanity will prevail that the pushback is inevitable. Because things can only go so far before people say, This is crazy.

What are you talking about? This is crazy. You kind of go along with the charade long enough until you think this is madness.

This is cultural madness. So truth, friends, be encouraged. Truth will prevail.

2 Corinthians 13, 8 Paul writes, We can do nothing against the truth, but only for the truth. By the way, I came into this video today. My monthly shipment of TriVita products was waiting for me. You can hear more about them from our co-sponsor TriVita right now.

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Go to triveda.com or call 800-771-5584. Again, 800-771-5584. This is how we rise up. It's the Line of Fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get on the Line of Fire by calling 866-34-TRUTH. Here again, it's Dr. Michael Brown. Alright, I want to go right back to the phones.

866-34-TRUTH. Paul in Budapest, Hungary. Welcome to the Line of Fire.

Good evening from Europe. Dr. Brown, I accidentally caught your Facebook page that you were going live and I thought it would be fun to call in. And also the title of the show seemed very intriguing. The masculinity being toxic, I thought that was very interesting. So yeah, I do have a few comments about that. Yeah, I just think things are headed in the wrong direction in the United States, unfortunately. I think it happened rather quickly since our latest president got involved. And I think that the writing is on the wall for sure. I think that for Christians especially, many think that we're headed into the end times.

And this is just Sodom and Gomorrah just playing out again. And it's really very, very sad and tragic at the fall of the United States and how quickly that has happened. Let me just jump in though and say, nothing's happened quickly.

I wrote an article nine years ago saying, I hate to say I told you so, listing all the things that had already happened that I've been saying would be happening for years. And a lot of this has been unfolding really since the 60s in many ways. And it's just been on an inevitable trajectory. But Paul, the good news is that tens of millions of Americans are saying enough is enough. The good news is that it's gone so far and it's gotten so extreme and so bizarre.

Like I said a moment ago, it's just against biological reality. There's only so far you can go before people say this is crazy. So that's what's happening. It's a critical time for sure. It's a time when it's imperative that we get things right, otherwise there will be complete societal collapse. But many people are praying. Many people have not bought in to the madness.

Many people are praying. People are coming to faith, coming out of gay, trans backgrounds, really coming to know the Lord. So it's a critical moment for America right now. I believe that we're going to see a tide continuing to rise, a good and holy tide. But it is a critical hour and the madness that we try to export around the world and pressure other countries to conform to, that's a shameful thing that America does.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, what's sad about this whole thing is that I was here in Hungary during the elections and I was actually watching the 2020 elections on YouTube, which was live, being presented live. And so while most Americans were sleeping, I was watching the results and I was just extremely, extremely shocked at how Donald Trump was ahead.

And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Biden picked up massive amounts of votes out of nowhere, seemingly. So I, at that point, I realized that something was fishy and, you know, I started digging and searching and digging and searching. And I have a military background, so I, you know, I kind of looked at everything.

And I am also paralegal, so I research a lot of things. And I don't form any conclusions until I have all the facts. And with everything that has happened over the course of many months, it has become so clear to me that the left will do anything to stop, I call him my epic president, which is Mr. Trump, because I think he's done so much. You know, even with bringing peace for Israel during the Abraham Accords with three other Arab countries, I thought that in itself was epic alone. Yeah, and just to jump in, I voted for Trump twice.

I had reservations about various aspects of behavior and the negative fallout with that. And the question is, is the good that comes out better than the bad, et cetera, so that debate can be had. The one thing that was clear to me, Paul, is I never saw so much prayer for an election as I did before the 2020 elections and then after where there was concern that the elections had been stolen. And my conclusion, whether it was blessing, whether it was judgment, that God installed Joe Biden as president. That was my conclusion, that we prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed, and that was the end result. And therefore, and of course, like it or not, he's our president, just like many people didn't like Trump.

Like it or not, he's the president, so we pray for our president. The good thing is, though, that the brazen, extreme position of some of the government is becoming more and more clear. And when it comes to the current indictments of Donald Trump, I mentioned it yesterday, let justice be done, and fairly. In other words, if he's really as guilty as charged, he should suffer for it. However, if the charges that were brought against Hillary Clinton are real or the charges that are being brought about President Biden are real, then let there just be the same justice for everybody. That's my concern and that's my opinion.

Let the same justice be for everybody. Hey, Paul, thanks for weighing in. I happened to mention the beauty of Budapest yesterday while checking out of Whole Foods, chatting with a lady there. I said, you've taken care of me a few times before, where's your accent from?

She goes, Hungary. So we got to chat about that. All right, I've got time for another call. Bonnie in Groveland, Illinois.

Time is short, so please jump right in with your question. Yes, the caller before the last one kind of mentioned something about the ark. And I was just wondering if you had heard of Ron Wyatt, an archaeologist back in the 1990s, and he's deceased now. But his thought was that Jeremiah had hid the ark in a cave to try and protect it.

It was an archaeologist, so he studied this far more than I did, you know, and I'm not an archaeologist. However, there are endless numbers of theories about what happened to the ark. The one thing we know is that we don't know where it is. And we don't know if it was destroyed, we don't know if it was hidden. There's no historic evidence that Jeremiah hid it, and there's no reference to Jeremiah hiding it. What's interesting is in the book of Jeremiah there's a prophecy that when God restores Israel that no one's going to miss the ark anymore because of the presence of God being there. No one's even going to talk about it anymore, which would be an odd thing to say. If you hid it somewhere, you think at that point you'd now say it's going to be recovered, it's going to be restored, right?

Whereas, in contrast, actually nothing is, you're not even going to talk about it anymore because it's not going to be needed because of the presence of God. So, I had mentioned, it may be Ron Wyatt who had made the claim, I don't want to misstate it, but I may have read it in regard to a Ron Wyatt claim about the ark being hidden in Ethiopia and that there are priests who stand guard over it and they're just profusely sweating every day because they're focused so much on guardedness. I read that, maybe it wasn't Ron Wyatt who said it, but again, I don't know any evidence for any of these claims. It's fascinating, but all I know is it was lost to history.

And my assumption would be destroyed and gone, but wouldn't that be amazing if it was hidden somewhere or if there would be the archaeological discovery of all time, even bigger than Dead Sea Scrolls and some of the others where the actual ark was found, but it does not combine my thinking beyond it. Hey, Bonnie, thank you for the call and for mentioning the work of Ron Wyatt. I have some of my friends that really respect this work, but I never dug into it in sufficient depth to make a serious comment about it. Alright, thank you for the call. Everyone that's on hold right now, I may get to some calls a little later in the broadcast. Depends on how long I talk with my guest, Professor Nancy Pearson.

So feel free to hang on or you can try to call back tomorrow or Friday if you're able to hold on. Next, my guest, Professor Nancy Pearson, as we talk about her book on the toxic war on masculine. We'll be right back.

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Here again, it's Dr. Michael Brown. All right, we are going to have a great conversation now with a great guest. I was saying in the first segment that I think it's the first time that Professor Pierce and I have talked other than interacting via email or message. I don't believe we've had the pleasure of having her on the air. I don't think I've been on a broadcast with her in a different setting. But she has been hailed as America's preeminent, evangelical, Protestant female intellectual. Yeah, one of the top five female Christian apologists in America.

She is, let's see, I want to make sure I get this right. Professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University and herself a former agnostic. Worked on books many years ago with Chuck Colson and other leading thinkers. Maybe you've read books of hers in the past like Love Thy Body.

Her brand new book, I'm holding a pre-copy of the final which is on its way to me. The Toxic War on Masculinity, How Christianity Reconcils the Sexes. With that, Professor Piercey, is this our first time actually talking one to another beyond messages and emails and things like that? Yes, I think it really is.

Yeah, remarkable, remarkable. I've appreciated your work then from a distance over the years. So how is it that you got on this topic from Love Thy Body now to the Toxic War on Masculinity? What drew you in to begin addressing these major controversies of the modern age?

You know, I saw a problem and I saw a solution. And so the problem was that it has become socially acceptable to express incredible hostility against men. One of the articles that caught my eye was in the Washington Post that was titled, Why Can't We Hate Men?

And I thought, really? In a respected publication like that? Or a Huffington Post editor who said, she used the hashtag, Kill All Men. Books have come out with titles like, I Hate Men, No Good Men, and Are Men Necessary? So I really wanted to get to the bottom of this. Where is this hostility coming from and how can we explain it? Because you can't really counter a social trend unless you know where it came from.

But I don't think I would have written the book if I didn't also have a solution. And this came from reading literature by sociologists who were doing studies on Christian men. And they were finding out that Christian men test out as the most loving husbands and the most engaged fathers of any group in America. And nobody knows this because it's all hidden away in the academics of theological literature. So I thought, we've got to bring this out, both for the public, because the public treats Christian men, if anything, as the worst examples of toxic masculinity. And we need to get it out into the Church to encourage Christian men that they're actually doing quite well.

Wonderful. All right, so we're going to unpack this again, the brand new book, The Toxic War on Masculinity, by Nancy Piercy. So, Professor, let's step back. I wrote a book a few years ago called Jezebel's War with America. And one of the chapters I talked about radical feminism and the hatred of men and the emasculating of men in America. And I talked about observations that even secular folks were having about, hey, dads used to be highly respected. You know, I grew up, I was born in 1955, so, you know, shows like Father Knows Best and Ozzie and Harriet and all those kinds of things that the husband was stable and strong and was a protector. And those were good things. And I didn't remember watching those shows with my sister and thinking, what kind of world is this?

It just seemed like normal household to us. And over the years, then, it shifted to the father being the idiot, the jerk. So you've done in-depth study.

And one great thing about your books, you do the research, but then you unpack it in a way that others can follow. So where did this all come from? What's the origin of this toxic war on masculinity? Well, if we cover fathers in particular, you know, it goes back much further than most people realize.

They think it's maybe second wave feminism in the 1960s. Actually, you begin to see the literature describing men change after the Industrial Revolution. Before that, families worked together, fathers were with their children and with their wives all day on the family farm, the family industry, the family business. And so the ethos of manhood back then was very much geared towards caretaking, about responsibility. You know, a man had to be gentle and patient because he's working with his wife and children.

And it was the Industrial Revolution that took work out of the home. Are you there? Yes, I'm getting an amber alert. Ah, okay. Well, unless it's for someone in your family, we'll keep going, all right? Trust that it's not. That is crazy.

Yes, no, it's not for my family. Okay, go ahead. So Industrial Revolution, things change with the work cycle. For the first time, men are not working with people that they love and have a moral bond with, but instead they are working as individuals in competition with other men. And it began to seem that to get ahead in that kind of commercialized workplace, it was necessary for men to be more self-interested, egocentric, ambitious, you know, bottom line is all that counts. And you begin to see this already in the 19th century. You begin to see people protesting that our men are changing.

Our men are no longer the caretaking, loving, responsible men that they were in the colonial era. And also with the period of time when society was secularizing. Before that, even secular historians say the colonial era, the ideal of manhood was duty to God and man.

That was the line, duty to God and man. Well, as the Industrial Revolution took place and big factories and industry and financial institutions and the state and universities, all of these large public institutions grew up. And people began to say, these public institutions should be run by scientific principles, by which they meant value-free.

And you know what that means? That means what we hear still today, don't bring your private values into the public realm. And so once again, men were becoming secularized before women were. And so a secular definition of manhood becomes more and more popular. And I think a lot of what people label toxic today are just secular definitions that have gotten sort of disconnected from a moral vision based on a biblical view of manhood. All right, so what is a biblical view of manhood? You know, the whole, what is a woman controversy, so let's spoil this down. What is a biblical view of manhood?

You know, let me, let me, you answer that with another sociological study. This is so interesting, because this guy, again, he's not a Christian, but he found that there really are two competing scripts for masculinity. He's very well known in this field, and so he gets invited to speak all around the world. And so he came up with this ingenious experiment where he asked men, young men in particular, what does it mean to be a good man?

And they had no trouble answering that. All around the world, they knew that it meant honor, integrity, sacrifice, do the right thing, be a provider, be a protector, be responsible, be generous. He said, it's amazing, we all know what it means to be a good man. And I would say, they are made in God's image, and they do innately know what it means to be good.

This is Romans 2, right, we all have a conscience, we all know what it means to be a good man. And then he would follow up with these young men, and he would say, what does it mean if I say, man up, be a real man? And the young men would say, oh no, that's completely different.

And they would say, that means be tough, be strong, never give up, suck it up, be competitive, get rich, get laid, I'm using their language, get laid. So in other words, men themselves experience a tension between what they innately know, because they're made in God's image, and what the culture tends to define as the real man. And if that real man gets kind of separated from the good man, those tend to be the traits that we look at and we say, well, that could be toxic. You know, that can easily slide into being entitlement and dominance and control and so on.

And so this suggests a better strategy. Instead of calling men toxic, I mean, most people don't respond well to being called toxic, but instead what you should do, what we should do with the culture, is affirm and support men for what they do know, what it means to be the good man. They do innately know this, so we can encourage them, we can support them, we can affirm them, and this gives us a much more positive way of dealing with these issues of masculinity. So pointing to the right model and encouraging people to do that, because innately that is what they look for. You know, it's interesting that the world on the one hand can hate the church, but then the world also expects the church to be different. Well, you Christians should be caring for the poor, and you Christian leaders shouldn't be involved in all those scandals.

So they may despise us on the one hand, but then expect something better of us on the other hand. It's the same thing with the world may have certain negative impressions of manhood, et cetera, but when a man does what a man should do in the image of God, and as you said, provide a protector, having integrity and courage and those kinds of things, that that brings a good outcome to it, and you say that data supports that in terms of Christian men. We've just got a minute before the break, so we'll have to pick this up on the other side of the break, but are you saying that in America today, or is this worldwide in terms of Christian men, that they really are setting the example of what this should look like?

How widespread is this? We'll pick it up the other side of the break, but get us started here. Are you there? Yes, uh-huh. Yeah, so the study that you're talking about, and we'll come to this on the other side of the break, was this about men in America, Christian men in America, who checked out as being the best husbands, fathers, et cetera, or is this an international study? Most of the studies were in America, but I do have some studies from other countries around the world, which is really cool, because they are showing that evangelicalism, everywhere it goes, like in developing countries, for example, everywhere it goes, it reconnects men to their families, they stop spending all their money on drinking and prostitutes and so on, and even secular anthropologists are saying Christianity has a positive impact on men in every country where it goes. All right, so we're going to pick up on that on the other side of the break, get a few more minutes with our guest, Professor Nancy Pearson, the book, The Toxic War, a Masculinity, How Christianity Reconcils the Sexes. In other words, this is the best thing for women and children, too.

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And 100% of your first order will go to the support of Line of Fire. Go to triveda.com or call 800-771-5584. Again, 800-771-5584. It's the Line of Fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get on the Line of Fire by calling 866-34-TRUTH.

Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. You know what I did just a few minutes ago? I actually donated a month's supply of Nopalea to a loved one.

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Tell them Dr. Brown sent you. All right, back with my guest, Professor Nancy Piercy. Her new book, The Toxic War on Masculinity. I remember reading a survey years ago by a major women's publication. And it was a survey about sexual satisfaction. And it ranged from women having one-night stands and sleeping with a lot of different men, to married women who had been in monogamous relationship their entire lives with the man that they were married to. And it was who had the highest levels of sexual satisfaction. And it turned out that by far it was the married women in monogamous relationships. And when I was writing my book, Saving a Sick America, a few years ago, I referenced that study to a friend. He said, oh, there are many, many similar studies.

So I ended up really beefing up that end note with it. Sociologist Rodney Stark has talked about why Christianity became very popular among women in the ancient world. It's because it called men to the same morality that women were expected to live by. And now called men to be good husbands, fathers, et cetera. So, Professor Piercy, you're saying, and you cite this in your book, Toxic War on Masculinity, that there are studies worldwide showing where the gospel goes and men are transformed by the gospels, that it brings the best outcome for wives, mothers, children as well. Is that correct? Right.

So these would be more recent studies. And they're often in response to the criticisms, criticisms made of evangelical Christian men who, very commonly, it's that anyone who believes in any form of male headship or authority in the home will turn into an oppressive, chauvinistic, abusive patriarch. And it was very easy to find quotes.

I'll give you just one. This is from the co-founder of the Church 2 movement. She says, the theology of male headship feeds the rape culture that we see permeating American Christianity to today. And so psychologists and sociologists looked at those charges and said, where's your evidence?

Where's your evidence? So they went and did the studies. And what they found is that evangelical Christian men are actually the most loving husbands and the most engaged fathers of any group in America. And, by the way, they start by asking the wives separately, which is important.

So what they're really saying is that the wives report being the happiest of any group in America. Evangelical fathers are the most engaged in terms of both shared activities, like sports and church youth groups, and in terms of discipline, like setting limits on screen time or enforcing bedtime. Evangelical couples have the lowest rate of divorce of any group in America, and the real stunner, they have the lowest rate of domestic violence of any group in America, which is completely contrary to the media messages that we get today.

And I will give you one summary. This is a great summary written by a sociologist named Brad Wilcox. He's considered perhaps the top marriage sociologist in the country and works at the University of Virginia. And he wrote an article in the New York Times, of all places, and he says, it turns out that the happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives. By the way, they often mention the wives because the assumption is that these marriages are oppressive to wives. The happiest wives of all wives in America are religious conservatives. Fully 73% of wives who hold conservative gender values and attend religious services regularly with their husbands have high-quality marriages.

So this is astonishing. Most Christians don't even know this. I had to go digging in the academic journals to find this, and so it's really one of the main reasons I wrote this book, because I thought we've got to get this information out into churches and into the public arena to help show that the negative messages that are constantly being bombarded on us from the secular media is just wrong.

It's simply false. And you mentioned around the world, I do have a little bit on studies around the world as well in my book, because there have been several studies of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and so on, and by a variety of different anthropologists, some of them Christian, some of them not, but they all end up agreeing that wherever Christianity goes, and especially evangelical Christianity, in other words, people who actually believe the Bible, wherever it goes, men stop spending their money on drinking and gambling and visiting prostitutes, bring their money home, and their wives and children experience an increase in the standard of living. As one sociologist put it, she's at the University of London, and she said, this is a gender paradox. She calls it the evangelical gender paradox, because of course it is so contrary to what the secular critics say, and she says, Christianity is the best women's movement out there, in the sense that it raises the status of women everywhere it goes, because it reconnects men to their families. It addresses, the church joins women, that's how she puts it, the church joins women in pulling men away from things like alcoholism and adultery and so on, and pulls men back into their families. She calls it, if there's a women's movement out there among the developing nations, evangelical Christianity is the one that fits the bill.

Extraordinary. And this is such life-giving information, and confirming what we know to be true, not just by faith but by experience, that God's ways are ways of thriving and liberation. And really, this is where you find a true egalitarianism, where the value of each human being is rightly esteemed, it's where the Gospel goes, so that even though you have distinct differences, there's no caste system, there's no class system. In that sense, neither male nor female, slave nor free, junior or Gentile, this is extraordinary when lived out, and the stats bear it out. Of course, we're not hearing about it, thank God for this book that is now shouting them out to a much wider audience. Very quickly, and folks, you've got to buy the book, Toxic War on Masculinity, we're barely scratching the surface of what's in there. People are going to say, no, no, no, but evangelicals and Christians divorce at the exact same rate as the world, what are you talking about?

Please respond to that. Yes, that is the first pushback I always get, and in fact, in my research I found that that is one of the most widely quoted statistics by Christian leaders. It turns out, the researchers went back to the data, and they separated out the truly committed, authentic Christian men, who do attend church regularly, from the nominal Christian men. My students don't know what the word nominal means, so I have to explain. It means in name only.

N-O-M is Latin for name. And so these are men who might, on a survey like this, they might check the Baptist box, for example, but they don't actually attend church, rarely, if at all. And these men test out shockingly differently.

They do test out with all the toxic traits. Their wives report the lowest level of happiness, they are the least engaged with their children, they are the most likely to divorce, even more than secular men, and, the real shocker, they have the highest rates of domestic violence, even higher than secular men. And so this is what faces us in the church today, is how do we, on the one hand, really encourage the men who are doing well, and help them to realize that the numbers show that committed Christian men are doing very well. And this isn't just a Yay Ross sermon from the past, this is solid sociological data.

This is empirical, rigorous testing. And, on the other hand, how do we reach out to very nominal men, who are, in a sense, skewing the statistics? If you just have a study that looks at evangelicals, you're going to combine men who are better than secular men with men who are worse than secular men.

So, of course, the numbers are going to be skewed. So this is one of the most helpful results of all of this research, was realizing, okay, we've got two very different populations here that require very different approaches. And we can help people realize that Christian men who are authentic and living it out actually do much better, and this is hard science. You know, we can be confident in bringing this into the public arena, and standing up for the Christian view of manhood. Wonderful.

Wonderful. Again, encouraging to hear that. And, of course, you deal with the issue of abuse.

We don't, by any means, deny that or sweep that under the rug. And really, in my view, Professor, to the degree that men are biblical men, to that degree, they will confront abuse, sexual abuse of the church, wherever it happens, rather than cover it up, that men really being men will absolutely have that desire to protect the victim, not the victimizer. So this is something, by God's grace, that we can do a much better job on, and by His grace, we'll get right.

Hey, very quickly, we're out of time. What are you hoping that readers of your book will get out of it? You know, I really am driven mostly by the desire to hold up Christian men and encourage them. Let me give you one final quote. So this is my same researcher, Brad Wilcox, at the University of Virginia, and he turns to his colleagues, his secular colleagues, and says to them, academics need to cast aside their prejudices against religious conservatives and evangelicals in particular. Conservative Protestant married men with children are consistently the most active and expressive fathers and the most emotionally engaged husbands. So this is the bottom line.

Christians do have a practical answer to reconciling the sexes, as I put it in my subtitle. Wonderful. Hey, thank you so much for joining us. Hope it's not the last time.

The new book, Toxic War on Masculinity, I'm using some of this amazing research in a book I'm writing right now. Thank you for the hard work. We appreciate it. Thank you so much. All right. God bless.

Never have it. This is how we rise up. It's our resistance. You can't resist us. Another program powered by the Truth Network.