Becoming a good man absolutely requires input from both men and women. Not everybody’s blessed with a mom and a dad, and fewer still are blessed with functioning examples in both of them, but we need to find that input somewhere if we’re going to grow well. Think Proverbs: literally a dad writing a manual for his sons, and it repeatedly exhorts them to heed their father’s advice, and not to forsake the law of their mother. It presents Wisdom as a woman throughout, and all the things that are true of Wisdom early in the book are true of an excellent wife later — a good woman is Wisdom incarnate, and that’s essential to making a good man. And there’s Dad, writing the book that says so, imparting a pile of his own masculine direction in the process.
Our culture has absolutely failed to embrace this dynamic of older men teaching younger men how to be. Men have contributed to that failure by refusing to step up and exercise a measure of moral authority, preferring to mind their own business and let the “experts” take the stage. Dunno if you noticed, gents, but the experts are how we got where we are. It’s time we quit leaving a vacuum for them to fill.
It’s not all on the men, either. Too frequently, otherwise decent women have contributed by privately loving, but publicly disrespecting their husbands. “They never do grow up, do they?” “He’s the only one of my kids that didn’t move out!” Ladies, the culture has given you these tropes to play with; do not be conformed to the world. When you indulge in these tropes…well, let me put it like this: do you want more men to be like your husband? Then stop running him down. No young man listens to a wife insult her husband and thinks “I really want to be him when I grow up.” If you want your daughters to have good men to date and marry, then quit driving the young men away from good men.
Young men will seek advice, and if we insist on leaving a vacuum, various toxic idiots — pickup artists, professional athletes, influencers and the like — will fill it. Even for the young men who have the sense to steer clear of those folks and seek a better class of podcaster, there are hard limits on what mass media can teach. You can’t get wise counsel tailored to your specific situation from a podcast. So what are we to do?
The answer is actually simple. Not easy, but simple enough. We don’t need a Christian Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson or whoever. We need an army of utterly ordinary men willing to care for the young men within their reach. Not one influencer that can reach 50,000 young men at a time, but 25,000 ordinary, admirable, salt-of-the-earth guys that can reach 2. Which is to say that the answer is the Kingdom of God, and the Kingdom of God is like leaven….
Full Contact Christianity 