Why Men are Breaking Bad

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America has a problem with its men. Performing the following simple mind experiment will highlight the issue.

Ask yourself, which comes to your mind first, men or women, as you read the following:

• Spouse abusers
• Pornography addiction
• Child abandonment
• Terrorists
• Rapists
• Mass murderers
• Gangs
• Prisoners
• Drug cartels
• Computer hackers

If you answered “women” to any of the above, I’d wonder what planet you live on. The truth is, men make up the vast majority of practitioners of anti-social behavior.

While it has always been the case that more men than women engage in anti social and self destructive behavior, until the last half of the twentieth century men who exhibited pathological behavior represented a minority on the fringes of our culture. The vast majority were stable, self assured, goal oriented men who formed a functional and productive part of society as husbands and fathers as well as business, church and community leaders.

Now, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that men in general have a problem; men as a whole no longer know who they are, why they are here, nor where they are going. They are not fitting into society well. What exactly is an adult man supposed to be and do, anyway?

Kay Hymowitz, author of Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys, cites a long list of book and magazine article titles that demonstrate how rudderless men have become. Articles and books with such titles as “The End of Men,” “Are Men Necessary?,” The Decline of Males, “The Death of Macho,” “Women Will Rule the World,” and Is There Anything Good About Men?” point toward a growing recognition that men are not thriving in today’s cultural and economic environment.” To this growing literary genre we can add these alarming titles: Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity; Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care; Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, The Demise of Guys, The Myth of Male Power, Why Men Are the Way They Are, Mismatch: the Growing Gulf Between Men and Women.

While I could talk about the various sociological explanations for this modern phenomena of male role model amnesia – i.e., the feminist movement and the sexual revolution have had a negative impact on male identity, or changing economic conditions favor females, or mass media and consumer culture are eviscerating the male ego – the explanation I want to put forward is this: as our culture has strayed from a biblical world view, we have lost the ability to define who and what a man is.

When one takes away the biblical view of reality – that all that we see has been created by a personal God, that people have been created in God’s image and are immortal souls – then all we have left is materialism. And if all we have is a material universe, then men are animals and nothing more. The result is exactly what we are seeing in the general culture: if you tell us men we are just animals over and over for a long enough period of time, then we will act like we are just animals and nothing more.

In this new universe, men have been inculcated with the attitude that sex is merely an animal function. “Their problem,” observes Kay Hymowitz, “is coming of age in a culture without reliable conventions to tame the raw egotism and roughness of nature’s mating dance. It’s all about sex anyway, a lot of guys conclude, so why dress it all up in silly manners?” So men shrug off normal family relationships like sweaty socks and become completely immersed in their selves. As a result, they take American individualism to its extreme conclusion: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for me”. Why should men sacrifice for women and children if there isn’t any real need for men anyway, if society only winks at their mutiny, and if there are no moral codes to condemn their behavior?

What we need to understand as Christians is that it’s not just the church that is having a problem with men, it’s society in general. Consequently, the solution we offer is not just a solution for our churches, but for our entire culture.

This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.

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