Nancy Pearcey is an acclaimed scholar, and her latest work about masculinity has seen praise and hostility alike. In this conversation, she joins us to discuss the toxic AND transformational realities of masculinity.
Become a Disruptor and shape this show! https://www.provenmen.org/disruptors/
The Toxic War on Masculinity: https://www.amazon.com/Toxic-War-Masculinity-Christianity-Reconciles/dp/0801075734
Love Thy Body: https://a.co/d/hecyzza
Nancy Pearcey is the author of The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes, as well as Love Thy Body, The Soul of Science, Saving Leonardo, Finding Truth, and Total Truth. She is professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University. She has been quoted in The New Yorker and Newsweek, highlighted as one of the five top women apologists by Christianity Today, and hailed in The Economist as "America's pre-eminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual."
Nancy Pearcey is an acclaimed scholar, and her latest work about masculinity has seen praise and hostility alike. In this conversation, she joins us to discuss the toxic AND transformational realities of masculinity.
Become a Disruptor and shape this show! https://www.provenmen.org/disruptors/
The Toxic War on Masculinity: https://www.amazon.com/Toxic-War-Masculinity-Christianity-Reconciles/dp/0801075734
Love Thy Body: https://a.co/d/hecyzza
Nancy Pearcey is the author of The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes, as well as Love Thy Body, The Soul of Science, Saving Leonardo, Finding Truth, and Total Truth. She is professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University. She has been quoted in The New Yorker and Newsweek, highlighted as one of the five top women apologists by Christianity Today, and hailed in The Economist as "America's pre-eminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual."
Hello and welcome to the Naked Gospel, where we have conversations about sex, singleness, marriage, pornography and everything in between. We bring on cultural thinkers, parents, important folk and normal folk alike. I am your host, shane O'Neill. All of these episodes are available on every major podcast platform, whether you're listening or watching, do subscribe and continue to track with us. Thank you for tuning in and enjoy the episode. Hello folks, welcome back to the Naked Gospel.
Speaker 1:Today we have a very fun conversation, as me and the guests were just talking. It's filled with strife and we have a lot of questions about this. The guest I have on today seems to intentionally look for the most difficult cultural questions and then goes after them. I am amazed by her. I really appreciate her work. She has taught me a lot. She's actually helped my wife, who's in Medwifery, to process a lot of body paradigms when it comes to femininity and love and birth and the beauty they're in. So I'm endeared to our guest. She has helped our family. So, without further ado, today we're joined by Professor Nancy Piercy. We've had her on in the past to dialogue through her book Love Thy Body, answering hard questions about life and sexuality. That book is a marvel. Her current book, the book that recently came out is called the Toxic War on Masculinity how Christianity reconciles the sexes. Both those books will be available in the show notes, as well as maybe further ways to follow what Professor Piercy is doing. Nancy, thank you so much for joining us again.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks for having me again. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:For sure I'm going to start out of order a little bit, but I'm really just curious to know how you maybe first stumbled how do you stumble across what you're going to do next? You know you did love thy body and then you're like masculinity. I will do masculinity Like how do you pick? How do you decide?
Speaker 2:I don't usually tell people why I love thy body because it's too personal and my family members are not ready to go public. But just to let you know, those were issues I was dealing with in my own family and sometimes people say I wish. Some people say if we knew you'd been there, you would have more credibility. Well, I have been there, I just can't say it publicly yet. And similarly with masculinity, I start the book talking about my abusive childhood. I grew up in a severely abusive home. My father was physically abusive.
Speaker 2:Sometimes books on abuse will ask was it open hand or closed fist? And it was closed fist, you know, with a middle finger slightly extended to make a sharper stab of pain. So it it. He was punting and kicking and so on and so well, naturally, when I became so in my teenage years, I ricocheted off into extreme feminism, right? So I was pretty much angry at all men for the abuse I had suffered. And it was only after I became a Christian and started going through a lot of emotional, psychological, spiritual healing that I started getting a handle on. You know how to deal with my past, my childhood abuse, my childhood trauma, in a biblical way, and so, of course. Well, as I put it in my book, I've been writing this book my whole life, in a sense because I've had to work for years and years in figuring out what is a biblical, healthy, positive view of masculinity.
Speaker 1:Man, that's big. So why? Why decide now? Well, what was there like a threshold that you hit where you're just like okay, after love thy body, I'm going to finally go after this book I've been writing my whole life.
Speaker 2:Well, I certainly did Notice. My attention was captured by the extreme hostility that it's become socially accepted to express against men. So the Washington Post had an article titled why Can't we Hate Men? And I thought, really, in an established mainstream publication, a Huffington Post editor tweeted hashtag kill all men. You can buy t-shirts that say so many men, so little ammunition. And you can buy books that are very bluntly titled I hate men, or no good men and our men necessary.
Speaker 2:And what really surprised me is that even male authors are sometimes jumping on that bandwagon. One male author wrote a book and he said talking about healthy masculinity is like talking about healthy cancer. And then this one you might have seen because it was in the news. It's not in the book because it's more recent, but the director of the movie Avatar, james Cameron, was in the news saying testosterone is a toxin that you have to work out of your system. So I did finally say this is the time to start writing this book, because one poll a few years ago showed that 46% of American men almost half of American men, agree with a statement.
Speaker 2:These days, society seems to punish men just for acting like men. So whether you agree with that or not, that is a large percentage of the population that does think that men are getting a bad deal these days, and so I wanted to get to the bottom of this. Where is the notion coming from that masculinity is toxic? I am an apologist at heart. I like to defend Christian truth. That's my goal. That's what I teach here at Houston Christian University. So I think of it as an apologetics book, in the sense of asking why does the secular world get its view of masculinity so wrong? Where did it get the wrong impression that masculinity itself is toxic, and what can we do about it? How can we show that Christianity has a viable answer?
Speaker 1:Another personal question, if you're okay with it, since you've done I mean you, you so sometimes we talk about, we frame our faith in propositional ways and that's that's valuable and helpful. But God thought there was something really important about embodied truth, hence the incarnation. And to hear you talk about your upbringing, the way you have obviously indicates a whole ton of conversations and growth and prayer and tears. And so I've been interested, like even in your own research of you know, discovering antecedents, like not just kind of some of your origin story, but maybe your dad's and your father's father, just like where did this toxic masculinity come from? And wondering if that's been medicinal for you. Like in your own process of writing the book was helpful and healthy for you.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely yes. Yes, I learned a lot and grew a lot, even in the research I had to do for this book. Not that I hadn't done a lot already, but this gave me an excuse to do even more. So one of the things that I talk about in this book is how the psychological and spiritual healing was part of my conversion. Actually, it's all bound up together.
Speaker 2:So, not surprisingly, because of my father, I did start having questions about Christianity when I was in high school. In fact, I asked my father one day, point blank why are you a Christian? He said works for me, that's it. He was a university professor, and so I also had a chance to talk to a seminary dean who happened to be my uncle, and all he said was don't worry, we all have doubts sometimes, as though it was a psychological phase that I would outgrow. And so about midway through high school, I thought well, I guess Christianity just doesn't have any answers, and I thought of it as a matter of intellectual honesty that I should leave my faith behind, because if you don't have good reasons for something, you shouldn't say you believe it. That's how I thought about it, and I obviously didn't have any good reasons at the time and no one was giving me any. So I very consciously walked away from my Christian upbringing about halfway through high school.
Speaker 2:And that's how I got involved in philosophy, because I thought, if I can't get any adult in my life to answer my questions, maybe that's what philosophy is about, right, that's the job is to ask questions of is there truth and how do we know it? Is there meaning to life? Is there a foundation for ethics or is it just true for me, true for you? And I quickly realized that if there was no God, the answer to all of those questions was no. There is no meaning to life. There's no foundation for ethics, there is not even a foundation for knowledge, because if all I have is my puny brain and the best scope of time, space and history, what makes me think I could have access to some sort of universal, transcendent, absolute truth? Ridiculous, and that's how I thought of it as a 16-year-old, really ridiculous. And so I had absorbed all of these secularisms and one more too determinism. In my science classes I was taught we were just complex biochemical machines anyway and there's no free will. And I didn't have the labels for all of these. But these were all of the secularisms that I had absorbed before I even graduated from high school, and so I was very much the type of person who was sort of set up to encounter apologetics.
Speaker 2:Finally, and that was when I went to Francis Schaefer's ministry Francis Schaefer is, for my students who don't know who he is, I've told them that Francis Schaefer and CS Lewis were the two major apologists of the 20th century in terms of the number of people who became Christian through their work. And I happened to be in Europe we lived there when I was a child, and Francis Schaefer's ministry is in Switzerland and so I sort of stumbled across his ministry and discovered for the first time that there were people out there, there were Christians out there who could answer your questions, who could deal with the secularisms that I had absorbed by that time, who could answer them, who could show that Christianity had better answers. And I've told that story before because it's part of my testimony. But what I add to it, which I've not told before, is that this was also the beginning of the emotional and psychological healing, because on staff at Le Bris his ministry was called Le Bris he was in the French-speaking part of Switzerland and Le Bris is French for the shelter and at Le Bris was a psychiatric social worker.
Speaker 2:Her name was Sheila Bird and we called her Birdie, and Birdie's the one who helped me realize I had to really deal with my childhood trauma. I had thought when I left home I was going to leave it all behind, I was going to create a blank slate, I was going to recreate my whole identity from scratch. That's what I wanted to do. And she was the one who told me no, it doesn't work that way. You actually have to deal with these issues and work through them, and a lot of it was just her herself.
Speaker 2:She was so loving that I had never experienced human love in the way I experienced it from her. And that was kind of a stepping stone into experiencing God's love. Because when I left Le Bris, when I prayed, I would just think you know, act like you're talking to Birdie, because Birdie will understand, birdie will love me and if I can just sort of transfer that to God, it worked. It really did help me to experience God's love in a deep, healing way, and I would say that that is the ultimate source of healing, for any sort of childhood trauma or emotional wounding is just love heals. It's very hard to explain, because love heals. I mean we do know that in human relationships, right being loved heals, and so if you work your way to a really deep, profound, transformative relationship with God, his love is what ultimately heals us.
Speaker 1:I have never thought of the priesthood of all believers in that way, as kind of standing representations of God's affection for us. I was wrestling with unconditional love. How can I receive it? I can't understand that. Somebody pointed to my parents and asked do they love you? Have you ever exhausted their love for you? Do they still love you and they'll probably continue to love you? I was like, yes, so it's been unconditional thus far. I was like, oh, that's cool, and in that way, like Birdie was able to do that for you and we're able to do that for one another, so detracted here. Okay, so thank you so much for sharing all of that with us. It's really again. It's incarnational. It's good, it's good to see Jesus embodied. So thank you for sharing yourself with us. Okay so masculinity. So it brings us to the topic at hand what is toxic masculinity? Is it an expression of masculinity that people are saying, hey, we should stop expressing this way, or this expression of masculinity is bad, or is it that all masculinity is toxic?
Speaker 2:Right. Even people who use the phrase will say of course we don't mean all masculinity is toxic, and that's one reason I did not want to use the phrase in my title, as you noticed. I wanted to get both words in there because you know those are the trigger words. But I didn't want to use the phrase because I didn't want to imply that I agreed that masculinity is inherently or universally toxic, and so I have kind of a play on words the toxic war on masculinity to give people sort of a double take. So yeah, even the most diehard critic of masculinity is not saying that all masculinity is toxic. But in fact maybe the easiest way is to get it into into a study that I cite right at the beginning of the book.
Speaker 2:Sociologists did a study and he's very well known, so he speaks all around the world and he came up with this ingenious experiment where he asked young men two questions. First she asked them what does it mean to be a good man? You know you had a funeral and in the eulogy somebody says he was a good man. What does that mean? And the sociologist said all around the globe, young men had no trouble answering that Immediately they would start listing things like duty, honor, integrity, sacrifice. Do the right thing, look out for the little guy. I kind of like that one. Be a protector, be a provider, be responsible. And the sociologists would say where'd you learn that? And they'd say it's just in the air we breathe. Or if they were in a Western country, often they would say it's part of our Judeo-Christian heritage. And then he would ask a follow-up question. He'd say what does it mean if I say to you man up, be a real man? And the young men would say no, that's completely different. That means be tough, be strong, never show weakness when it all costs. Suck it up, be competitive, get rich, get laid. I'm using their language. And the sociologist concluded that all around the world, universally, it seems to be an innate knowledge that men have that they know what the good man is. It's inherent, it's innate. They all know what a good man is, which is very encouraging. But they also feel cultural pressure to live up to the quote-unquote real man, which doesn't include traits that we might consider more toxic. Or at least, if it gets decoupled from the moral ideal of the good man, it can slide into traits like entitlement, dominance, control and so on.
Speaker 2:The Andrew Tate phenomenon right Fast cars, fast money, fast women. It can become that, and so what I did in my book? I used it in the front of my book. I'll tell you why because this has proven to be the most controversial book I've written. You mentioned that I seemed drawn to controversy. Well, I did not actually realize how controversial this would be, but I was teaching the manuscript in my classes and in reading groups. I like to get a lot of feedback, and when they would tell family and friends that they were going through a book of masculinity, invariably the first question was who side is she on With that tone? And men tended to assume that if a woman was writing the book, it would be a male bashing feminist and progressive types tended to assume it was an angry, reactionary culture warrior just defending men. And so I put this at the front of the book.
Speaker 2:The study which said no, actually, young men themselves seem to be caught trapped between these two competing scripts the good man versus the quote unquote real man. Of course, for Christians they should be the same right. The good man should be the real man. But in our secular, secular culture, they become decoupled from one another. And we? It gives us a different way to approach these issues. It doesn't usually work very well to accuse men of being toxic. They don't respond very well to that. Nobody would. So the better strategy is to say is there a way we can support, encourage and affirm men in that innate inherent knowledge of what it means to be the good man, and then that gives us a much more positive way to approach these issues.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is helpful. So let's, we'll take even a step back further and you do quite a bit of just history work, historiography in your, in your, in your book, and you you story tell in a really cool way. So would you mind? Just how did we get here? What are some of the, as we mentioned earlier, some of the antecedents that are have gotten us to the boiling points that we find ourselves at when it comes to framing masculinity the way we do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so most people would think it's probably second wave feminism, 1960s, and if you go in the man is fear, you know it's all feminism's thought. Actually it started much earlier. It starts with the industrial revolution, because before then men were working all day with the family members, right, their wives and their children, on the family farm, the family industry, the family business. And so the cultural expectation for men focus much more on their caretaking role. You know, be gentle, you're working with your kids. You know, and and in fact this is an interesting historical fact Most books on child wearing back then, on parenting, were addressed to fathers. Today, if you go in a typical bookstore, most of them are dressed to mothers, right, but back then the father was thought to be the primary parent, he had the primary responsibility.
Speaker 2:And even secular historians will put right this one with one historian puts it this way the colonial, the colonial definition of masculine virtue was duty to God and man. So how did we lose that definition of masculine virtue? The industrial revolution took work out of the home and of course men had to follow the work out of the home into factories and offices and for the first time men were not working alongside the family members, people they loved and had a moral bond with. Instead, they were working as individuals in competition with other men and, as you can imagine, that began to change their character and you see it in the literature of the day. People started to complain, to protest that men were losing the caretaking ethos of the colonial era, that they were becoming egocentric, self centered, aggressive, assertive, greedy, acquisitive that's some of the language of the day, greedy and acquisitive and and making the making the work into an idol.
Speaker 2:You see that already in the 19th century and then they were starting to make their work into an idol. You know, instead of their primary loyalty being to God and the family, they were beginning to redefine the identity in terms of their career success, the financial achievements. So that is when we first start seeing negative language applied to the male character. That's so. That's the beginning. Now in my book, like you say, I go through several more stages of how the secular, how the script for masculinity, became secular. But that's a starting point and, of course, if the starting point was men being disconnected from their families, the solution, by the end of the book, when I get to solutions, I talk about ways. Maybe we can try to reconnect fathers to their families, even today, that's helpful.
Speaker 1:So I want to come back to that. First I want to just connect to another, another point of reference that is of a significant in your work, your current work specifically applying toxic masculinity to evangelical men. So you looked at certain research that caused you to go kind of find different, even like stats, different studies than some of the ones that maybe we're more culturally familiar with. So when it comes to just evangelical men, a lot of people kind of see them as the paradigmatic kind of example of toxic masculinity. And you know, there's kind of like this, this it's almost like concentric, it's like sure it's cultural, but then you move in but it's like, but then it's Christian, you know, and so would you mind just connecting, connecting those dots?
Speaker 2:Yeah, finding this research was actually the final reason I said I have to write this book because I had to dig in academic literature to find it, and what I found was that well, let's back up. You are right. Evangelical men are usually considered exhibit a of toxic masculinity, and it was really easy for me to find examples. But I'll give you just one quote. This is the co founder of the church to movement, which followed the me to movement, and she said the theology of male headship feeds the rape culture that we see permeating American Christianity today. Yeah, what happened is social scientists so that means psychologists, sociologists were looking at these accusations and saying where's your evidence? You're making these charges, but where's your data? And so they went out and did the studies and I cite about a dozen or so studies in my book and what they found was that the actual, the facts themselves debunk the secular narrative or even, as you say, a narrative that's permeating the Christian church as well. It debunks the idea, shows that Christian husbands and fathers are actually the most loving and engaged of any group in America. There, wise report, the highest level of happiness there and, by the way, the pushback I get on that was, of course the wife say they're happy to husband sitting right there. But no, that's not the case. And most of these studies are done with large secular objective databases, like the general social survey which is out of the University of Chicago and which is used by journalists and policymakers and so on. So they're not that. Most of them are not, you know, two little Christians sitting in front of a Christian researcher. So the wives were interviewed separately and they do test out as being the happiest event. All the fathers spend the most time with their children, 3.5 hours per week, more than secular fathers, even though couples are the least likely to divorce 35% less likely than secular couples. And the real surprise, they have the lowest rate of domestic abuse and violence, lower than any major group in America. And sometimes they a quote can crystallize this. So so let me give you a quote.
Speaker 2:One of my, one of the researchers who did the largest study was Brad Wilcox at the University of Virginia, and he's and his status such that he gets invited to write for the New York Times. So that kind of tells you his reputation In the New York Times. He wrote an article in which he said the happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives, you know, because they're looking at the wives, because the assumption is that these you know men, you know even middle local men are abusive, tyrannical patriarchs. So no, in fact, the happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives. Fully 73% of women who hold conservative gender values and attention to regularly with their husbands have high quality marriages.
Speaker 2:And then actually my favorite part of the quote is he then turns to his secular colleagues. You know, because sociology is a very secular discipline and says academics need to cast aside their prejudices against religious conservatives and evangelicals in particular. Conservative, protestant, evangelical men are consistently the most loving and engaged husbands and fathers. So this is not a pep talk from a religious leader. You know. This is hard, empirical fact, this, these are evidence based findings and we need to take them both into the church to encourage Christian men that they are doing well and into the public square right to debunk the secular narratives that we hear so often.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's important. Okay, so let's, let's play there for a little bit. So so I think probably what me and listeners are most familiar with are the consistent claim that we've been hearing for years that divorce amongst Christian men, divorce amongst Christian marriages, has reached the same threshold as divorce amongst secular's. And then so you've got like the divorce and then the abuse stuff of the church to movement, so you have this cultural movement hashtag me to and then all of a sudden it gets applied in church context and it doesn't, it's not localized like. It becomes like a big thing. You know, like it's, it's all over the place.
Speaker 1:It probably I mean it probably hit a hit, hit a crescendo with like the Ravi Zachariah stuff. And I think like once we hit that point, people almost like felt like we almost feel like we have to say that abuse in the church is systemic, and that's a point I think that it's become like just instinctual to come to. And so this research that you're pulling out is really interesting and I'm wondering if you can just further contrast it with the data and the experiences. I mean, there has been abuse. You know we have only heard about the worst of it, but we heard about a lot of the worst of it, it seems like, and so, hearing this contrasting data, wondering how you situate the two.
Speaker 2:So the first pushback I always get, of course, is haven't we all heard that Christians divorce at the same rate as everyone else? In fact, in my research I learned that that was one of the most widely quoted statistics by Christian leaders and so, but so what? What happened is the researchers went back to the data and they separated out people who actually tend to regularly, you know, who are authentic in their Christian commitment, versus nominal Christians. And in America we have a lot of nominal Christians, more than any other country, you know, because of the two great things. So there's a lot of cultural Christianity and, by the way, my students don't know what the word nominal means, so I have to explain.
Speaker 2:And om is Latin for name, and so it means in name only, and that means it's men who might, in a survey like this, check the back to Spock's, for example, but they attend church rarely, if at all, and it's mostly a cultural or family background. And these men test out shockingly different. They fit all of the toxic stereotypes Otherwise report the lowest level of happiness, they spend the least amount of time with their kids, they have the highest rate of divorce, 20% higher than secular men, and the real shocker is they have the highest rate of domestic abuse and violence, even higher than secular men, and so, because these groups are roughly the same size, you know, you and I probably hang out mostly with committed Christian men, so I kind of thought the nominals would be a smaller group. They're not, so that's why, you know, the nominals are in many ways framing the stereotypes of what evangelical Christians are, and people sometimes ask me well, why would they be even worse than secular men, though? And the answer seems to be that your typical secular guy who's maybe hitting his wife and kids does not feel any religious justification for behaving that way. But the nominal has hung around the fringes of the Christian world enough that he uses terms like a chip and submission, but he infuses them with with meanings from the secular world. You know he doesn't give them biblical meaning, he gives them meanings from the secular world of things like, you know, entitlement and dominance, and you know she wouldn't submit, so I had to put her in her place, and until they end up actually being worse than secular men, if the religious justification that they think they have actually makes them worse than secular men.
Speaker 2:So that's what we're up against in the church, right on the one hand, how can we encourage the men who are doing well, and they do need encouragement? One of my graduate students was the head of a large Christian, large women's ministry at a Baptist church and she said on Mother's Day we would hand out flowers and tell the women they're wonderful. On Father's Day we would scold the men and tell them to do better. And so I think we've had too much scolding in the church. I think it's time to say for the men who are really committed, you know, the data is just showing that they're doing a good job and we need to encourage them and uplift them.
Speaker 2:On the other hand, how can the church reach out to these guys who are hanging out at the fringes and who, in many ways, the story and the reputation of evangelicals, we might say, because they they're using biblical language, but they're using it with secular meanings? How can we form discipleship in such a way that we bring those men in and help them to understand what the Bible really means by its notion of headship, for example? What does the Bible really say and how can we, you know, disciple them into a biblical worldview?
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Speaker 1:Okay, so I'm going to ask a question by stringing together some of the things I've heard. If I've misunderstood at any point, just let me know. So Industrial Revolution started taking men outside of the home, men together, this kind of a setting in context of, like, competition, away from family and children and gentleness and mutual submission, right, and and just, yeah, just the service of family. So they're still serving family, but they're doing it in a context with a lot of men in industrial settings. And so then it sounds like when I was, when I was listening to earlier that they're there, a perversion or distortion of masculinity started to, started to grow and develop at that point. And and what I hear you saying is that a lot of the studies and a lot of things that we're familiar with look at cultural Christianity as framing Christianity, but when it comes to actual praxis, actual like just following Jesus, people who go to church, people who read the Bible, specifically, particularly men, we find different results. Am I hearing you correctly so far?
Speaker 2:Okay, yes, yes, and just for clarification. Of course that doesn't mean for active church going Christian men, the rate is not zero still. It's just very, very low. So I do get pushed back sometimes from people who say, well, he's. Well, my dad, my dad, he made sure we were in church every Sunday. We were Lutheran. I don't know if you know this, but all Scandinavians are Lutheran. It's kind of like all Irish or Catholic, so it was kind of an ethnic thing as well. But yeah, we were in Lutheran church every single Sunday and obviously that didn't take. So it is in making sure that we understand how statistics work. Active church going Christian event document test out better than any group in America. But it's not zero. So you, we still have, we still have work to do.
Speaker 1:And it comes to the church, to stuff, a lot of it was emphasizing yeah, pastors, youth pastors, clergy, would you say.
Speaker 1:In those situations it was looking at the, the not zero part of things you look at. You look at people like Sheila Gregoire and like they're following what's okay, like those, there's a lot of housewives and in those, in those situations, it's easy to say like okay, Easy to easier to square your data with yeah, maybe a majority of those women are married to nominal Christians and I mean it's pretty characteristic of like you know, you see it like movies and shows of women trying to get their men to do things, trying to get them to go to church, and that's that sort of situation. So I can look at those sorts of situations where people are are responding and jumping on the church to expression as being in marriages that they are unhappy with, to satisfied with. But then, yeah, how do you do? But when it comes to like the, the church, to like the stuff that actually makes headlines, a lot of it was just clergy, youth pastors and pastors.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, the data I was looking at was not looking in the church, and so the church is whole. No, I, it needs a book of its own. What the researchers were looking at was marriage. In other words, how do these men fare as husbands and fathers? Because they were answering the secular world. Right, the secular world was saying evangelical men are going to be these abusive people who you have sex in the home, because if you believe in male and ship in the home, that that geometry will turn you into an abusive person. And so the researchers will. Looking at married men with children, you almost all of them were married men with children. You have to keep that context in mind when you're looking at this data. It's not speaking to what about clergy sexual abuse? That's just not what they were studying. So I was happy to bring this data to the fore because most of us don't know it and, like I say, even in the church most people don't know this. But I think we have to keep clergy sexual abuse separate. It needs its own study.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's helpful, that distinction matters. While we're listening, that distinction would be really helpful for me. How do you define masculinity?
Speaker 2:Well, one of the things I do in my book that's unique is I don't just give a devotional answer, you know, or a theological answer. I do two things. One is I draw on actual research. So there was an anthropologist not a Christian who did the first ever study on cross-cultural concepts of masculinity. That's cool, it was really interesting. So, you know, he found some differences, but what was the most interesting is that he found that there was a common code of manhood that was shared by all cultures and he summed it up as the three P's provide. You know, the good man will provide, protect and procreate, meaning become a parent, become a father, build into the next generation. And he found this in every culture. That it's kind of like the previous study that I mentioned, where the sociologist found that it's universal, it's innate, it's inherent. And then do know what the good, they know what it means to be a good man. They know that their unique masculine strengths will not give them just to get whatever they want, you know, but to protect and provide for those that they love. And so I found that very encouraging.
Speaker 2:That, again, when we speak on these issues, can we start? Can we start with the good news? Can we start by saying men do have this inherent knowledge. You know, they're made in God's image. That's probably the explanation, right? Even non-Christian men are made in God's image and they have that inherent sense of what it means to be good. Or you could call it general revelation, right, general revelation is what we know just from God's creation, as opposed to special revelation, which is what we know from the Bible. And so, just by general revelation, most cultures seem to understand. You know what good masculinity is, and they are. I mean, let's face it, men are bigger, stronger, faster Because of testosterone. They're more aggressive on average and more risk-taking, and these are obviously biological givens. They start in Genesis, when God creates male and female. It's pre-fall, it's not the product of the fall. So, as Christians, I think what we need to do is say these are the creational givens, this is what masculinity is, starting just with biology, because you know, a lot of the differences between men and women rest on the biological differences. Right, it starts with the biology, and so I think we should affirm and honor men for the way God made them, biologically to start with, and as a note of caution if we don't.
Speaker 2:This is one of the things that became clear to me in writing the book because I do have two chapters on abuse, since nominal men have higher rates of abuse than even secular men. I did have to deal with that, right. I couldn't soup it under the carpet. And in writing the chapters on abuse, I did come to feel even more strongly that if we do not acknowledge the differences between men and women, you know, which our culture tries to erase, right they don't want to acknowledge.
Speaker 2:I have even seen feminists literally on Twitter, of course. I've seen feminists literally argue men would not be stronger than women if women would just work out more. You know, and this is not true Men have 75% greater upper body muscle mass, 90% greater upper body strength. And to tie it back to abuse, if we don't acknowledge that, we won't put moral guidelines down, we won't hem it in with moral rules, and men will be more dangerous, not because I'm more evil, but because they have greater strength and so they need moral guardrails even more than women do, just to make sure that we put these moral constraints on their greater strength.
Speaker 1:And see, there there was a I can't remember her name. Off the top of my head I think she teaches at Princeton. She's a philosopher, secular, she. She did a lot of work in feminism, engaging pornography and abuse and rape and those sorts of things. And then she was on vacation with her husband out in I think it was France and she went for a walk and she got raped and she was beaten, left for dead. The guy dragged her into like a ditch, left her there, thought she'd die.
Speaker 1:10 years later she writes a book called Aftermath. That book wrecks my junk, just messes me up. So all of a sudden, this kind of these ideals that she'd been fighting for and these victims that she'd been a voice for all this and she had to. She experienced that and she had to go through a lot, so much. It's so gnarly, but one of the things she talks about is when it comes to the acknowledgement that men are different from women, which she does. Well, a lot of the application to that knowledge is therefore women, check your back seats or universities, hey, women, make sure you're indoors past this hour, and so it seems like you know, just to reduce rape on campuses and those sorts of things, and one of the things I really loved about your book is that you challenge men to be good men, and one of the things I really appreciated and that's that question.
Speaker 1:I have to ask that what is masculinity? And one of the answers is, like I am masculine because I'm a man, you know, and like just the dignity of that. Like, no, like I am my own brand of masculinity because I'm Shane and I'm a man, you know, and then like being able to flourish from there. And you do, you know you challenge men and you you help the church to imagine how to do this. Could you just speak to that? What does it look like to? Because you said earlier that that you don't think that all men are regarded as toxic, but I find myself often kind of seeing that or feeling that, and it does, it does there's an invalidation that takes place there of being, you know, white, male, cisgendered. So you're, there's, there's an interesting empowerment you're doing, but you're also not challenging, just like the women, to live a particular way. So I like your application. I just want you to speak to that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so many things. Let me respond to some.
Speaker 1:Please, yeah, go wherever you want.
Speaker 2:He used to. You know, I teach at Houston Christian University. When I told my class that I was writing about book of masculinity, a male student shot back what masculinity it's been beaten out of us. Oh, even in the church we do have. We do have Christians feeling like you know, beaten down from the culture. And a psychotherapist who writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal said in my practice I'm seeing it especially with young men. Young men feeling defeated and demoralized and demeaned because they feel like they're growing up in a culture that's hostile to masculinity.
Speaker 2:And just days ago I found a news tabloid from Australia. It's kind of this kind of a large image like this. On the front cover was a seven year old boy and it said how do we stop this kid becoming a monster? And then underneath it says schools need to address toxic masculinity. And I thought what you're teaching seven year olds? That they may grow up to be toxic and that we need to put you know, we need to know teaching young boys to hate themselves when there's seven. Yeah, so I do think you're right. It's become, if anything, worse lately.
Speaker 2:And here's the other thing. So I'm going to be speaking on the boy crisis at a conference coming up and trouble is, most of the emphasis is on boys falling behind, and that's very good. That's very true. Your boys have been falling behind in education for the last couple decades, starting with kindergarten. Right, they don't have the same fine motor control that girls have, so they can't operate a scissors as well. So already in kindergarten they feel like they're falling behind, as one psych psychologist put it.
Speaker 2:In schools boys are treated as deformed girls At any rate, and then off to high school they're getting worse grades, worse, worse test scores in college. Now, the average college today is 60% woman female students and 40% male students, and colleges like Harvard have been quietly performing affirmative action to get more men, because they know the pretty soon women won't come either If they're no man. Yeah, and we are to. Actually, he's in Christian, where I teach. When I came here 10 years ago, we was 7030, 70% female, and so they started a football team and they started an engineering school to track more male students.
Speaker 1:And then after college.
Speaker 2:Men are falling behind from where they used to be, so men are more likely than before to be addicted to drugs and alcohol, to commit suicide, to be homeless, to be in mental hospitals, to to be in prison. 95% of people in prison are male, and so the unemployment level has gone way down. It's not showing up in the normal statistics because they stopped looking for work Right. So they, the researchers, had to dig deeper and they tell us that male unemployment is now at great depression era, and we think of the crisis of the Great Depression. So that was pretty shocking. And then male life expectancy has gone down. Women's have stayed the same, so it's not a general trend. Only men's life expectancy has gone down, so that a magazine called the new scientists was reporting on these findings and said the major demographic factor in early death now is being male.
Speaker 2:So, and then, finally, I wanted to respond to one more thing. You said you talked about the book by the Princeton University professor. So there's another one like that, not quite the same but similar. Have you seen Louise Perry's book, the case against the sexual revolution?
Speaker 1:I don't know. No, it's not coming to mind.
Speaker 2:She was very leftist leftist publications like the new statesman, you know. It was fairly well known as a leftist journalist and then she worked at a rape shelter. So she didn't get raped yourself, that's, but she worked at a rape shelter and she completely changed and now she's written a book called the case against the sexual revolution and arguing you have to start with the basic fact that men and women are different. Because when a woman and a man are half drunk, you know, and in a dark corner somewhere the woman can't get away, it matters very much that the man is bigger and stronger and faster. He has more fast twitch muscles. I had to learn that phrase. It means he can react more quickly.
Speaker 2:Those differences matter very much. Once you start talking about rape, abuse and so on, did you know that half of female homicides, half of all female homicides, are by domestic intimate partners? So that means husbands, former husbands, boyfriends and former boyfriends half of all female homicides. So we do have to think about the differences between men. By the way, the comparable number for men is 3%. For the men who fight back and I get that on Twitter, yeah, but what about women? You know they can be pretty aggressive too.
Speaker 1:Okay, I see.
Speaker 2:Right Half of the female homicides are by the intimate partners. 3% of male homicides is by the female partner. So all that to say, yeah, even you're starting to see even some very secular feminist beginning to change their tune as as the secular script has unleashed men from a biblical ethic and their behavior grows worse. There are some prominent feminists, like Louise Perry, who have changed their tune. Mary Harrington is another one you might know she's British as well. Again, extremely leftist, radical feminist who's now turned around completely says fascinating to watch how even secular people say you don't acknowledge the differences between men and women. The outcome is actually harmful to women.
Speaker 1:That's interesting. At a certain point it's almost like looking at the same data but going a different direction. It's like you could look at 50% of the homicides, male on spouse homicides, and then the 3%. You could say, okay, men are more violent, we need to monitor them, we need to be careful of them, they're obviously naturally dangerous. But you then or you can take it a completely different direction, and this is so something you just touched on, I think you, as well as Sam Albury, put me on to that there are, like actually quite a few female feminists, like philosophers particularly, who are at odds with even the trans movement and that's been interesting to peer into, even with Kaylee being in midwifery school, where it's not the mother, it's the birthing person, and it's shifting from protecting that midwifery is providing safe, holistic care, safe and safe care to a mother and a child, to just the mother because of abortion, those sorts of things, and so it's been interesting to see that it's almost okay. So my point is that it's been.
Speaker 1:There's a sad aspect to this of women getting a voice and being able to speak in ways that they clearly have wanted to, but then all of a sudden denying that gender exists at all, and so I want to actually take a step back with you, because I want you to speak to that of.
Speaker 1:Do you think that there is any credibility to the feminist outcry, the feminist longing, when I look back at what is it? It was the feminine mystique, betty Friedman Back in 1963, the feminist mystique it really is looking at, men are going out, women were consigned at home and it became so popular so quick. So many women resonated with it of like I am so dissatisfied, they're medicating, they're drinking, their life is dull and they're unsatisfied and they're bitter. It's hard for me to look at that and say I can't. Look at that and say you're wrong. And so I'm curious how you look at that and say, okay, how do we? One, do you even think that there is a core longing that is good and true in that? And two, how do we affirm that while affirming masculinity at the same time?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, there's definitely, definitely something valid there, which is why I was a feminist for so long myself. But it's not so much. Betty Friedman was really not writing so much against men as against the industrial revolution. We have to go back there again, because when the industrial revolution took work out of the home, it was not just men's work, it was women's work, because most before that, most manufacturer was home based manufacturer, you know, in the home and its outbuildings, right. So the women who are home raising children were also involved in economically productive work, which is challenging, interesting skill building, and also won her respect because her work was just as important, just as valid and just as necessary for survival as her husband's work, and so there's a social status involved with that as well. Well, so that women's work was when it was taken out of the home. So what are we talking about? You know, making all your food from scratch, right from baking bread and turning butter, making all your clothes from scratch, from carting the wool to spinning it, to making cloth, to making your own patterns, making your own buttons, candle making, canning food, smoking meat. I mean women had a whole range of interesting and intellectually challenging activities in the home that were all removed. Dorothy Sayers, who was a friend of CS Lewis, writes a really good book on this and she says even the dairy maid, you know, with her little bonnet, was replaced by a male mechanic with a milking machine. And she says, and she says it's ridiculous to take women's traditional work away from them and then complain when they look for new work.
Speaker 2:And I bring it back to the cultural mandate in Genesis. Not all, not all my students have heard of the cultural mandate, but in Genesis one, when God creates the first human couple, what's the first thing he says to them? He gives them a job description, right. He tells them what their purpose is, why he created them. And it's to you know, be fulfilled, multiply. Fulfill the earth and subdue the earth, have dominion. And in the streamlined language of Genesis one, we sort of have to unpack many layers to that, because be fruitful does not just mean have a family, but historically all of the social institutions grow out of the family, right? So the family becomes an extended family, then a clan, then a tribe, you know, then a village, a nation, whatever. You also have social institutions for particular purposes, like a government, a state, a church, a marketplace. So be fruitful and multiply includes all these wonderful, interesting, creative activities of building up the entire social world. So do the earth means harness the natural resources of creation.
Speaker 2:So of course most cultures start with agriculture, but then mining and technology and inventing computers and composing music. And one of my students once asked me come on composing music. So I said I play the violin. I said what's the violin made out of wood and what's the bone made out of horse hair? So all of the transcendent beauty we associate with with music starts with harnessing the raw materials of nature.
Speaker 2:And so many theologians call this the cultural mandate, meaning that God has created us to create cultures, to create civilizations, to make history. And so women were called to the cultural mandate just as much as men were. They too were created to work and so, of course, when their traditional work was taken out of the home and we have to remember the industrial revolution is just a tiny slip of modern history when we're talking about the cultural mandate and women working from home, we're talking about millennia of human history. Right, the proverb 31, woman right who, from her home, is buying, buying fields and planting them and making growing crops and whatever. I forget what else she does, but she has several businesses, businesses running, but of course she's home based because that's all.
Speaker 2:Industries were home based back then. So that's most of human history. Women have in fact contributed economically to their families, to their, to their families, to sustenance. So for to tell women, well, now you don't have any interesting activities in the home, you have early childcare and cleaning house. Of course they felt unhappy and unfulfilled. They were not made to just, you know, do such simple work. They were made to fulfill the cultural mandate. And to tell you the truth, most women I know who are home are in fact working. I mean not just homework but paid work.
Speaker 2:Most women, according to one recent poll, two thirds, two thirds of women who are home raising their kids are also working part time from home. They have home based businesses. They created their own businesses. 25% created their own businesses. And you know, I've always worked from home as a writer. Those of us who have the laptop class we're being called now have you heard that the laptop class consultants and writers and journalists and so on, a lot of researchers, can do their work from home, and during the pandemic, of course that was a game changer Because it meant for both men and women. They discovered how much they did like having a more integrated life and being closer to their kids.
Speaker 2:A Harvard University study found that 68% of fathers said they don't want to go back to the office full time, that they want some kind of at least a hybrid situation so they can be closer to their kids. The New York Times ran an article on the study, and I love the title. The title was something like during the pandemic, fathers got closer to their kids and they don't want to lose that. So I would suggest, though, for both men and women, trying to recreate somewhat of the colonial pattern or the pre-industrial pattern. You know all of human history. The home was a center of economic work as well, and that gave both men and women a chance to be involved in work and child rearing, and it's a much better balance, and I think we should strive for that as much as we can, even today.
Speaker 1:Nancy, I want to ask you like just another question or two, but are you doing okay, on time?
Speaker 1:Oh, yes, Okay okay, something that Kaylee and I have. We've realized that we don't have. We weren't given many models of marriage that where the couple builds something together, like at best. So at best they both have their courage to have separate occupations. They work 40 hours a week. Maybe they make dinner together, they make a baby and they try to figure out how to raise this baby, this child, while working separately 40 hours a week. And that kid.
Speaker 1:There's just something really tragic about working really hard to get good at something and then having a kid, and that kid never gets to see how good you are at a particular thing. They can't see you in that context. They don't get to see mom or dad as superhero in that way and to see what an at-formed adult looks like. So just going back to so, kaylee and I worked pretty hard over the last year, year and a half, to create our own stories, our own scripts of like.
Speaker 1:What does it look like to work together? What does it look like to build something together, and not just something like you're passionate about, like I feel, like you're nagging me to do, or something I'm passionate about that you need to come and submit and do, but something that we dreamt up together, like it's something we dreamt up together. So how do you engage? How do you encourage? It's because there are a lot of levels here, so there are people listening who are thinking at the individual level, at the relational level, within a romantic setting, in the church and then in culture. You know, and you're encouraging that sort of thinking. What do you want I mean, like readers of your book, to really walk away with? So that's something Kaylee and I have had to discover and, like, figure out how to practice. And you're trying to give us imagination as we work through your, yeah, what you're giving us. So can you, yeah, just share that?
Speaker 2:Some of what you said ties into the chapter I have on fatherhood, because they use that same term. Writers said after the Industrial Revolution, fathers became invisible, which is what you just said. Fathers became invisible and boys no longer had a day-to-day model of what it meant to be an adult man. Now the mother was still in the home, so it was a little easier for girls, but it was especially hard on boys and, by the way, let me start out sort of the why is this important? We all know that fathers are mocked and ridiculed in the media today, right From advertisements and movies, commercials, the Homer Simpson pattern or the Bernstein Bears. One of my kids loved the Bernstein Bears, but the dad was always the doofus.
Speaker 1:Peter Griffin and Family Guy. Yeah, yeah exactly.
Speaker 2:And so everyone kind of knows that and they know that's not good. It certainly is demotivating Demotivating men from wanting to become fathers if they have these negative images. But most people don't know what it started After the Industrial Revolution, for the first time, boys were growing up with our day-to-day supervision by their fathers, and I have several quotes from historians saying things like for the first time in American history, boys had an identity crisis. One of them puts it that way. Another one says boys became alienated from the adult world because their father was their connection to the adult world and now they no longer have that connection to the adult male world. Another one said use the word that you just use invisible fathers became invisible. And so what? We're so used to today that we don't realize how shocking it was at the time. At the time it was very shocking.
Speaker 2:Let me quote a 19th century psychologist, leading psychologist of the day, said never has the American boy been so wild. So wild because he was not being supervised by his father anymore and so half orphaned. I love that phrase. He says boys are half orphaned in the sense they have a mom still, but they don't have their dad their day by day. And he ends saying they've been left up to female guidance in the school, the home, the church. And what happened then? Well, as these boys grew up, many of them began migrating to the cities to find work. So they were also separated from traditional moral authority structures like family, church, village. And that's why we had a huge crime wave in the 19th century. There was a huge increase in drinking, gambling, gang activity and prostitution, and sometimes a single fact can crystallize it In 1830, americans drank three times as much as they do today. So there was a reason people were concerned and that's why there were a whole host of reform movements in the 19th century as well.
Speaker 2:But it all came back to what you just said that boys were growing up without that day-to-day model. One psychiatrist that I quote puts it this way. He says we are not going to get a better class of men until we get a better class of fathers, because a long-term solution to toxic behavior that does exist in men is the father-son relationship. Can we restore that? Oh, I remember another quote I wanted to give you. A psychologist said the love bond. The love bond that was most damaged by the Industrial Revolution was the father-son bond. So that's what we need to ask how to restore.
Speaker 2:And at the end of the book I do give a couple of hopeful studies. One was a 35-year longitudinal study so it was longer than most and won all kinds of awards and on how parents succeed in passing along their religious faith, and it came up with two surprising findings. Number one the father matters more than the mother. If the father is a strong Christian, the kids will follow him. If the mother is well, the numbers are lower. But if the father retains a strong Christian faith and lives it out in practice, the kids will are more likely to follow the father.
Speaker 2:The second thing they found was what matters is the close, warm, loving relationship between father and son. In other words, if the father is a teller of the community or of the church, if he's a moral exemplar, if he has perfect doctrine and his theology is faultless, but he's perceived as cold and distant, this kids don't follow him. This kids will not follow him in the faith. Wow. What matters is is there a close, warm relationship? And this was reinforced by a secular study. By the way, the guy who did that study became a Christian halfway through. I thought that was kind of cool.
Speaker 2:But then there was a secular study that was slightly different. It was on how do we raise masculine boys, how do we raise our boys to be masculine? And he found almost the same thing, but in secular terms. He said it doesn't matter how masculine the father is, it matters if he has a warm, loving, close relationship with his son. The son will be confident in his own masculinity if the father has that loving relationship, no matter what the father is like himself. So isn't that fascinating. It all comes down to the father. The father has influence, whether he wants to or not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that'll preach. It's interesting. What's interesting is you're saying some things so the father's impact on faith transmission to the next generation, over against the wife, and you said other things like that. I feel myself squirm. I'm like Nancy, you're not supposed to say that. Like don't say it. And I really appreciate you as a woman who had a dad who professed Jesus, like you're not blind to stuff, like you know what's up. And for you to be able to just share that sort of content while at the same time is it unnerves me in really good ways and I'm really grateful for it, really grateful for this content.
Speaker 1:I can't imagine what sort of maybe pushback you've gotten on this material. I will hold off on more questions just out of consideration for time, but I am having a blast talking with you. In my last interview I was interviewing therapist he's a psychiatrist Kurt Thompson, md, and Dan Allender, and I was using your methodology of helping us shift from culture wars to rescue mission to try and imagine with them together. And so you're contributing in ways that you don't even know and it was fun to play that out and they were both familiar with it and it was fun to play that out with them at a couple of points. So thank you for your work. I think that you challenge us in really important ways and even for somebody who I like that you wrestle with the data. So even somebody who disagrees, they're not necessarily contending with you, but contending with the research. We always end with two questions One, how can people track with what you're doing, you share about the book? And two, how can we be praying for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so well, you can buy the book on Amazon, like you can buy anything on Amazon or, if you prefer, places like Christianbookcom. And my publisher very kindly helped me redesign my website. So NancyPiercecom and Pierce is P-E-A-R-C-E-Y, but come on over to NancyPiercecom and you can browse my other books and you can leave a comment. I do read them all. I don't have time to answer them all, but, nancypiercecom, come on over, as they say in the South, come on over and say hello.
Speaker 1:And how can we be praying for you?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, as I said, this has been the most controversial book I've written and I was a bit surprised by it. And you're right, it's also the most fact-based book. So I do have a lot of data, so I do have good answers. You know, it's not just my opinion and so that's good. Somebody on Twitter the other day actually said you know, I appreciate Nancy's calm, calm, thoughtful answers and she has the receipts. And I thought, okay, you know the fact that I can always say well, here's the study that says this, so here's the study that says that, but nonetheless it has.
Speaker 2:The day after it came out, my Twitter feed was totally overtaken by controversy. It was I know you don't wanna keep going and it was the egalitarian versus the complementarians. And they've been fighting over my book too. And the irony is I don't even engage that debate. And I tell them why because my two top marriage researchers both said it doesn't seem to make much difference, that whatever a husband's gender theory is, what matters more is does he know how to convey honor and respect to his wife? You know, and you can do that. In fact, one of them said you know what really makes a difference, not the gender theory. What makes a difference is whether a man sees his family as the most important thing in his life.
Speaker 1:It's solid.
Speaker 2:Isn't that good, yeah that family centered value system.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:He said, is what will make a man work hard for good marriage and to be a good father as well. So gender theory. So I tell my readers I'm not gonna engage gender theory. And then, of course, immediately, immediately, people on both sides started creating controversy over that question. So prayer, just that I for the continued grace to respond, to respond with grace and clarity to the controversy that this book has driven up, and fortunately it's now being, it's getting some publicity in the secular world as well. Next week I don't know when this is going to air, but next week, as of today, I'll be in Washington DC speaking at the Heritage Foundation. Oh, that's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So I'm really hoping that will be a first step to maybe getting more, a greater audience in the secular world as well. Start with the Christian world. That's fine, because I do speak mostly to the Christians, but it would be cool if it started to make its way into the public realm as well.
Speaker 1:Nancy, just because I think that clarification is important. You are not defending the masculinity of male headship. A lot of people look at male headship as like the kind of like the container where all the problems are placed. But when I actually read the book because I've Kaylee has actually had me read the secular authors who engage this stuff and I just the point always seems to be they don't have the language of male headship, it's just he's not at home, and when he's at home he's not with me, and so it's really just like this longing for companionship and for partnership in ways that really matter. So hearing you say that the data, it's not male headship, that's the issue, or that you're advocating for, you're not bringing up egalitarian, complementarian stuff, but being present and having a warm, loving relationship.
Speaker 2:To start with, the researchers were not researching egalitarian versus complementarian. But they're not caught up in those little in-house debates. Researchers, sociologists, psychologists, they're looking at the secular world, and the secular world, of course, has a very low view of evangelicals in general. Right and so when not they're not all Christians, but majority of them are, when a Christian enters one of these fields, not surprisingly, one of the things they often do is try to see whether the data really confirms the secular view, and it's negative view, of evangelicals, or whether it counters it. The first, one of the first persons to do this, for example, is David Larson, who is a psychologist, and I tell a story in my book, total Truth. So if you want to find the story, it's very encouraging.
Speaker 2:He was told by his graduate advisor. His advisor literally said to him one day your faith is your Christian. Faith is really important to you, isn't it? And David Larson says, yeah, he said well, you need to get out of this field. You can't really be a Christian in the field of psychology because ever since Freud, we've all known that religion is associated with mental illness. Because Freud called religion a neurosis, an infantile regression. You can't grow up, so you project imaginary father figure into the sky, and so that's what psychology has thought ever since. But David Larson stuck it out and he saw that when he actually did the research the Christians were in the healthy groups, not the sick groups, because you always have to have a control group of healthy people and then you have your sick group, the one that has mental illness or other psychological problems.
Speaker 2:And he said yeah, you always have to have a control group when you're doing research. And he noticed that control groups had the Christians, the healthy groups, and so he set up his own research institute and for years was churning out studies showing that Christians in fact have fewer mental health issues, have better family relationships, and not only mental health but even physical health, because they take care of each other. Christians help within the church. If somebody's sick, they help take care of them. So he put out a lot of research that single-handedly changed the whole field of psychology, because now even secular people will say oh yeah, I don't believe in God, but it's clear that religion is good for us. There's a guy at Harvard, harold Benson, I think, is his name, benson, anyway. He became famous because he said we are wired for God. He said I'm not a Christian myself, but it's clear that we are wired for God in the sense that we are going to be psychologically healthier and happier if we believe in God, which does kind of.
Speaker 1:Do you know who? Jonathan Haidt is? Righteous minds, he's a social psychologist, but he believes that religion is a greater good than it is a harm, and he actually believes. He uses the language that. He believes that we have a God-shaped hole inside of us. He just believes we got there through evolutionary mechanisms and means. So you are right, there is a sensitivity and awareness in the field where people Jonathan Haidt, I mean that guy's he's a heavyweight, you know. So you are right. That is interesting. All of this came from. How can we pray for you? We will absolutely be praying for you. I would be remiss in saying are you doing okay? How are you in the midst of all of this?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I found out. It's kind of fun. I mean, all of this controversy. My Twitter feed is still blowing up often not daily anymore, but it's pretty often. But I like it because I think it's a skill we should all learn right, it's how to talk to people who disagree with us, how to do it with grace and charity and facts. So I feel like it's been a really good learning experience and so I'm very grateful for it.
Speaker 2:You know, I really believe in James when he says rejoice when you encounter various trials. I've been through enough trials now to have confidence that God will use whatever comes along for good, for ultimate good, even if it's temporarily painful. You know my verse. People used to ask me what's your life verse and I finally found one, and it's in Job, when Job says when he has tried me, I shall come forth as gold. And it builds on a verse in Isaiah when it says God is refining you through the fire of affliction. Let me remember in the Old Testament, several times, god's refining is compared to how we refine silver, right? So I have refined you not as silver, as refined, but rather I have refined you in the crucible of affliction. And then Job says and when he has tried me, I shall come forth as gold. So I firmly believe that any affliction, any trials, god has a way of bringing something good out of it. Not necessarily the good you were hoping for, but he will bring good out of it.
Speaker 1:And you're determined to be with him in that process.
Speaker 1:That's really that's really cool, nancy. I love every bit of that. We will absolutely be praying. We'll be praying that, yeah, that you continue. Count it pure joy when you face trials of many kinds. Right that you'll have the grace to know how to do that, because that is its own spiritual discipline and formation. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for sharing yourself with us. I always really appreciate when people come on and don't just share their ideas with us, but share themselves with us. So thank you for sharing yourself with us. It's been such a joy to be with you.
Speaker 2:Thank you for being the type of interviewer that wants people to share the whole self. I do appreciate that.
Speaker 1:Yes and amen. Folks, thank you for joining for another episode of the Naked Gospel. All of Professor Piercy's content is down in the show notes, so check out her website and check out her book. They have been really good resources in my life Love Thy Body has. I have no idea how she wrote that book. It's incredible. It still blows me away and I've read it several times. And her latest book is well worth the read, especially considering our current cultural moment, and one of my favorite things is to figure out where I'm at and what I believe and be challenged by reading other content. So, even if you're not on the same page as Professor Piercy, I would encourage you to check out the Total War on Masculinity. It is down below. If you appreciated this podcast episode, please share it with somebody else you think would Likewise appreciate it. We will catch you next time on the Naked Gospel.