All the secular left-wing isms of our day (feminism, progressivism, liberalism, cultural Marxism, secularism, etc.) have culminated in a phrase so oxymoronic it must have been invented by Satan himself: “toxic masculinity.” To be masculine in the fevered, relativistic imagination of the secularist is poison. To our cultural elites this is simply axiomatic, so obvious only irrational religious people deny it. But true masculinity is never toxic, and in fact necessary for true human flourishing. (The popularity of Jordan Peterson with young males is one encouraging signs that the lies of the isms are possibly exhausting themselves.)
To the end of making toxic and masculine synonymous, we get a new report by the American Psychological Association on boys and men. John Stonestreet at Breakpoint does a good job of exposing this as the secular leftist propaganda that it is:
The game here is painfully obvious. This isn’t science, it’s a worldview that sees masculinity as anyone would have defined it just a generation ago as a problem needing to be solved. But as David French writes at the National Review, the APA has it all backward. The real plight of boys and men today coincides with our culture’s rejection of traditional masculinity, not the embrace of it! To say that the answer is to further deconstruct what it means to be a man is ludicrous.
Our society has no fixed categories of what it means to be a man, much less any resources for catechizing the next generation of men.
And this is why it is incumbent upon Christian fathers to raise men. The word catechize is not common in most Evangelical circles. It means to instruct someone in the principles of Christian religion by means of question and answer, typically by using a catechism (doctrinal manual). To catechize is to teach. The point Stonestreet is making is that boys have to purposefully be brought up to be men, that manliness and masculinity are no longer natural byproducts of growing up as they once were in America. How do we do that?
First, as fathers we have to be culturally engaged enough to identify and challenge the unbiblical cultural messages regarding masculinity that are bombarding our boys. This APA report is a good example and opportunity to do just that. If they’re old enough, pass on the Breakpoint article, and mock the APA’s secularist propaganda. Teach them that contrary to these lies, God created man, male and female he created them, and he did that for a reason. Aristotle came up with a term for that reason: telos, or the purpose or end of a thing. Satan’s goal has always been to destroy the telos of God’s good creation, and getting Adam and Eve to think they could be “like God knowing good and evil,” was the beginning of “toxic masculinity.”
You read there in Genesis 3 that one of the consequences of the curse of sin, death, is the perversion of male/female relationships: “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” Being masculine and feminine as God created us to be would ever after be problematic. Men abuse their strength with dominance, and women their weakness with manipulation. But without true masculinity, the telos of what it means to be a man, a woman can’t be feminine the way God made her to be, and not only do both suffer, but their children suffer as well. For true human flourishing to happen, men and women must be what God created them to be, complimentary beings that can become literally one flesh.
As important as teaching our boys about about masculinity and manliness, more important is teaching them how, what it looks like in practice. This of course means we as fathers are examples, and thus the leaders of our homes. That is a huge topic that can’t be addressed here, but just living in a home that accepts the biblical God-given mandate for men to be leaders of their homes is tremendously important, however imperfectly it works out in practice. And trust me, as sinners, in practice it will always be imperfect. I also believe it’s critical that fathers need to wrestle and roughhouse with their boys; men should turn the other cheek, but sometimes they can’t. We need to teach our boys to shake hands “like a man.” Or to “man up,” or act “like a man.” Or, one that will get me in trouble with any PC crowd, quit acting “like a little girl.” The point is that we are responsible to mold our sons to be men, masculine in the way God created masculinity, for a reason.
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