Are you ready to challenge your perspectives on masculinity and gender roles? Buckle up, as Pastor Rich Lusk joins us for an enlightening discourse on these complex issues, dissecting the intricacies of Nancy Pearcey's The Toxic War on Masculinity. With a keen eye on the societal implications, we pull apart the concept of headship in a household, the role of women, and the need for impulse control in both genders. All the while, we don't shy away from critiquing Pearcey's work, pointing out both its strengths and pitfalls.
We also take a deep dive into the shifting dynamics of masculinity and family life in response to industrial and digital revolutions. Drawing on data and historical precedents, we ponder on the changing concept of 'common good' and the impact of the welfare state on men's ability to provide. As we journey through these discussions, we reference the works of George Gilder, particularly his book Men and Marriage. We scrutinize his views on the transformative effect of marriage, the superiority of the female sex, and the impact of the welfare state on male roles.
As we wrap up the episode, we tackle the delicate issues of feminized marriage and its impact on male sexuality, a topic that is often overlooked. Join us for this stimulating discourse, and prepare to view masculinity from a fresh, enlightening perspective.
Women are Disproportionately Hurting our Country, by Dennis Prager.
Pearcey'sToxic War on Masculinity, by Rich Lusk.
The Patriarchy Problem, by Andrew Sandlin.
Got a Minute Podcast with Rich Lusk and Larson Hicks on George Gilder.
Talk to Joe Garrisi about managing your wealth.
Sign up for Barbell Logic.
Place your meat order with Salt & Strings.
Start banking with Private Family Banking. You can reach Private Family Banking Partner, Chuck DeLadurantey at chuck@privatefamiliybanking.com, call him directly at 830-339-9472, or download his e-book HERE.
10 Ways to Make Money with Your MAXX-D Trailer.
Get your chicks at IdealPoultry.com.
Are you ready to challenge your perspectives on masculinity and gender roles? Buckle up, as Pastor Rich Lusk joins us for an enlightening discourse on these complex issues, dissecting the intricacies of Nancy Pearcey's The Toxic War on Masculinity. With a keen eye on the societal implications, we pull apart the concept of headship in a household, the role of women, and the need for impulse control in both genders. All the while, we don't shy away from critiquing Pearcey's work, pointing out both its strengths and pitfalls.
We also take a deep dive into the shifting dynamics of masculinity and family life in response to industrial and digital revolutions. Drawing on data and historical precedents, we ponder on the changing concept of 'common good' and the impact of the welfare state on men's ability to provide. As we journey through these discussions, we reference the works of George Gilder, particularly his book Men and Marriage. We scrutinize his views on the transformative effect of marriage, the superiority of the female sex, and the impact of the welfare state on male roles.
As we wrap up the episode, we tackle the delicate issues of feminized marriage and its impact on male sexuality, a topic that is often overlooked. Join us for this stimulating discourse, and prepare to view masculinity from a fresh, enlightening perspective.
Women are Disproportionately Hurting our Country, by Dennis Prager.
Pearcey'sToxic War on Masculinity, by Rich Lusk.
The Patriarchy Problem, by Andrew Sandlin.
Got a Minute Podcast with Rich Lusk and Larson Hicks on George Gilder.
Talk to Joe Garrisi about managing your wealth.
Sign up for Barbell Logic.
Place your meat order with Salt & Strings.
Start banking with Private Family Banking. You can reach Private Family Banking Partner, Chuck DeLadurantey at chuck@privatefamiliybanking.com, call him directly at 830-339-9472, or download his e-book HERE.
10 Ways to Make Money with Your MAXX-D Trailer.
Get your chicks at IdealPoultry.com.
This episode is brought to you by Backwards Planning Financial with Joe Garrissey. It's also brought to you by Private Family Banking, by Ideal Poultry and by Salt and Strings Butchery. Well, welcome to this episode of the Hard Men Podcast. I'm your host, Eric Kahn, and in today's episode we're going to be talking with Pastor Rich Lusk. He's a pastor in Birmingham, Alabama. We're going to be talking about Nancy Peerce's book, the Toxic War on Masculinity. Of course we had Nancy on the show in the last episode. In this episode we're going to break down the book.
Speaker 1:Rich has done a lot of writing about Nancy's book. He's also done some podcasting with Larsen Hicks on the podcast Got a Minute, which we'll have linked in the show notes, and we're going to delve into a number of questions, including theological questions, that are addressed in Nancy's book. For example, is man the head of his household? And if he is the head, does his wife have to submit to him? Does she have to obey? What does that mean? Is woman the Ezra, the helpmeet for man? Is this a right interpretation? Is woman really the weaker vessel? Does man exist simply to please his wife and to meet her quote unquote emotional needs? We're going to address this and more in this episode of the podcast. Again, Rich has an essay on this on his website. We're going to link to that in the show notes as well, but definitely appreciate this conversation. I hope it's edifying. I think what we're going to find in today's episode is that we still have a lot of work to do when we're talking about the mainstream evangelical church and the intellectual class. When it comes to things like headship and submission, A lot of the old terms, the traditional historical understandings in the church of gendered piety have kind of gone out the window and we're having a hard time rethinking them. So Rich is going to be very helpful for this task. As we jump in, I do want to say thanks to all our Patreon supporters. We could not make this show possible without you.
Speaker 1:Also want to give a shout out to Matt Reynolds at Barbell Logic. I've been doing Barbell Logic for oh I don't know six plus months now, Seen tremendous gains in a lot of my lifting I think deadlift close to 400 pounds now Bench press. I was really excited got up past 260 pounds on a one by three. So definitely excited and encouraged by all that progress. I've been talking to a number of guys, including Kendall Cornelson, CEO of MaxD Trailers. He was telling me he's been using Matt as well. He's seen tremendous gains in his weightlifting, Got a phenomenal garage setup at his place.
Speaker 1:But if you are at all interested in working on your physique, working on your strength as a man, would definitely encourage you to check out Barbell Logic, and you can start your online coaching today and use the show notes link, and that will, of course, help support this show, also help support the work that these Christian brothers Matt Reynolds is doing at Barbell Logic really appreciate them. Get strong. Today is the day to start. Now, without further ado, we jump into the conversation with Pastor Rich Lask. Well, welcome to this episode of the Hard Men Podcast. I'm your host, Eric Kahn, and joined today by a very special guest. We have Pastor Rich Lask. Rich, Thanks so much for joining me for this episode, Thanks for having me, Eric.
Speaker 1:It's been a while. Yeah, absolutely. It has been the last time I was blown away by the conversation and I know a lot of people said we had really good feedback on that one. This time we're going to be talking about Nancy Pirce in her new book the Toxic War on Masculinity, but it's probably worth pointing out, Rich, that you are doing this one from the injured reserve list. I mean like Aaron Rodgers you're a competitor, you're a fierce competitor. I am Torn Achilles. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Little bit of rehab, doing some rehab, yeah. So you're catching me between rehab sessions.
Speaker 1:That's right. That's right. Yeah, I'm guessing you and Aaron have talked about the difficulty of overcoming Achilles' tears.
Speaker 2:Everything he needs to know, everything he needs to know about coming back from this injury.
Speaker 1:It's very difficult. You guys are both about 40 years old, so you know.
Speaker 2:They are about. Yeah, roughly I got a few years on them, but that's right.
Speaker 1:Pickleball. Pickleball is a dangerous sport.
Speaker 2:It's a very dangerous sport. You would not only so, since my injury. Yes, you would not believe how many people have told me a pickleball injury story. I'm telling you it's brutal. You wouldn't think that, but it's brutal.
Speaker 1:Well, we're praying and hoping for a fast recovery. Unfortunately, that one is a tough injury to overcome. We jump in, rich. I want to let people know We'll be highlighting in this episode an article that you wrote, and I believe this is on the Trinity Press website. We'll include links for that in the show notes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's on our pastors page where I've got a blog, and I think there have probably been a few posts since then. But if you go to the Trinity Press, you know. So if you search for Trinity Presbyterian Church Birmingham, we should come up. Okay, find our website. It's trinity-presnet. Find our website. Go to the I think it's called the Pastors Corner. Find the blog there and my interaction with her book I won't call it a review, but my interaction with her book is there and that's kind of what generated this conversation. So I got into some online discussion that you were part of, and so this looked like it might be a good thing to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and I think a big part of it too is that a lot of people myself included, nancy's camp reached out. I'd read Total Truth. I really appreciated a lot of the work she's done in the past. I went up the interview, did the interview you and I were talking and really hadn't read most of the book. I read, like the introduction, some of the back cover, and so I think for a lot of people this hopefully will be helpful in thinking through some of the issues that we discussed in today's episode. I want to start with something that I read on the back cover, which I want to see if you agree with, but this is from Eric Metaxas. It's kind of the lead blurb that they used and he said this Nancy Peerce has written the definitive book on the subject of masculinity for our time end quote. So I want to start there. Do you think that's true? What kind of would be your overall assessment of this book?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm always curious whether or not people writing blurbs have read the book as well. Let me say this before I address that, because I do want to say something. You hinted at this, but I want to say this as well, and I do say this in my article on her book. I greatly appreciate Nancy Peerce. I have no doubt that she is a godly, faithful woman full of wisdom. She's a much better writer than I am, that's for sure. She's an excellent researcher, no doubt about that. You mentioned total truth. I've read bits and pieces of that one. The book of hers I read that I really like is Love Thy Body, and it's an outstanding book on transgenderism and homosexuality and all kinds of things like that.
Speaker 2:So it does overlap some with this book a little bit in content, but I thought that Love Thy Body was a much stronger book than this one. What about Metaxas' blurb there? I would say this is the definitive book on the subject of masculinity. If you are a thin complementarian, otherwise you're going to be really frustrated with it. If you are more of a thick complementarian or you like the label patriarchy, you're going to be frustrated with parts of this book, even though you might also still find some things to like about it. But I think part of the key here is understanding what she is doing, what I think she's up to in this book, and I think that's what drives her strategy. When I cracked open this book, I was really expecting a book with maybe a lot of biblical exegesis interaction with a lot of Bible passages, maybe then some church history, you know, thrown in. That kind of thing.
Speaker 1:That is not the kind of book this is.
Speaker 2:I mean it's got a little smattering of scripture here and there, but it's not really a Bible-based argument.
Speaker 2:I think actually, she probably envisioned herself as writing an apologetic book.
Speaker 2:I think that's really what she focuses on is apologetics, and I think she saw herself as writing an apologetic work that would basically serve as a defense of, let's just say for lack of a better term evangelical men.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think we would be lumped into that category, let's make it form sort of a subset of evangelical men, so evangelical men who get a really bad rap out there, who constantly get attacked and criticized and accused of all kinds of things. And the assumption is that if you believe in any form of male headship and marriage whatsoever, then you must be a tyrant and an abuser in your home. And I think if you just read it with that in mind, I think you could really say, yeah, there's a lot here that's good, there's a lot that does defend evangelical men. She uses a lot of sociological data. That's really the backbone of her book is, again, it's not scripture, it's really sociology, and she appeals to the sociology to say, actually, evangelical men are good men. You might even say they're the best men in our society in terms of husbands, fathers, all of that.
Speaker 2:And I mean I agree with that I think she's right about that. Now I think the problem is and we're going to get into this, I know in a few minutes what she gives with one hand she takes away with the other. Even if she makes her defensive evangelical men, she kind of, in a lot of ways I think, undermines that defense and actually then ends up providing some ammunition for the other side that wants to go on with this war, this toxic war on masculinity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's a great point. I want to ask you this just sort of as like a matter of principle this would be a good thing for reading any book, but we might find the same thing in the Manisphere reading Jordan Peterson. Again, secular psychology. What is the problem when your arguments are based almost solely on sociology and then maybe not exposition in theology? I mean, I kind of felt like at points the sociology was completely steamrolling. Anything you know? Theological? Yeah, yeah, yeah scriptural.
Speaker 1:So I just want to ask you about that. Do you think that's a problem? How should we think about that principle?
Speaker 2:Well, you have to ask what is sociology? If you think of sociology as a collection of observations about human nature, then it can be very useful. It can really serve its place. If you can think of sociology as mining, natural revelation, mining data about how people actually act, think how they respond, behavioral patterns, whatnot then sociology can serve its place. In that sense, I would say, when sociology is done right, the basic purpose of sociology is to confirm everything the scripture already teaches us. We have to be really careful here.
Speaker 2:I've used the line in talking about scientists because obviously science is never a neutral enterprise. I will say scientists are people too. Scientists. We might think, oh, there's something neutral and objective about the work that they do. It's kind of this detached objectivity. It's not the case. Scientists are people too. They've got their biases, they've got their prejudices, they've got their agendas, they've got the funding they want to get the people they're trying to please, and that drives a lot of the work they do. The same is true of sociologists. Sociologists are people too. The tendency for confirmation bias is huge. Progressive sociologists tend to give us data that confirms progressivism. Conservative sociologists tend to give us data that confirms conservatism. That's not my accident, that's just kind of how it works.
Speaker 2:What I would say is yeah, this sociology might be interesting, but it's not definitive, it's not authoritative Everything that we think we're learning from sociology. Just as with any science, it has to be tested against scripture. Scripture is always the standard, that's the plumb line. We see how it measures up to scripture. If it can help us better understand scripture, wonderful. If it contradicts scripture, then obviously something's gone wrong. I think there's a real danger in relying so much on sociology, sort of putting all your eggs in the sociology basket. I think that's a real problem here. I think it comes out at different points along the way in the book.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think even philosophically, this would be sort of an issue where you're saying you're trying to figure out what the ought from the is like looking at the way things are and then trying to figure out what they ought to be, what the telos is. It's interesting I was thinking about, because you have something like Matthew 19 on sexuality and Jesus will do something different. Basically, they say, well, the leading experts say this, this is what the teachers are saying today, and Jesus says, well, let's go back to the beginning. It's kind of the inverse of what's happening when we look at sociology. So I think that will be important to say like, okay, and even in this conversation we want to say let's go back to the passage. What does it actually teach?
Speaker 1:One of the things that you mentioned in your article is that some of the sociology she points out is really useful, including the Brad Wilcox study showing that men are Christian men, especially churchgoing, are not like buffoons and idiots and the worst men in society, as is often claimed. So talk just a little bit about where you think the success points are with her argument here on sociology. Yeah, you know, in general I like.
Speaker 2:Brad Wilcox's work I've read a lot of it myself, I think what his group is called the IFS the Institute for Family Studies, I think it is and I think they do very good work, you know, I know. To give you another example, Katie Fowles does someone who does something similar to what Nancy Pyrrhusi does here, trying to make arguments for, you might say, traditional or biblical positions, relying primarily on sociology for the sake of doing apologetics, basically trying to show people who wouldn't accept the biblical argument. Hey look, there's a lot of data to back this up. I think that's fine as far as it goes. I think that the sociological studies can help us understand why scripture teaches what it teaches. In a lot of cases I think you can help us fine-tune some things, but again, if it contradicts scripture, then obviously there's a problem.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I think some of the data she points out I think is very much resonated with me as somebody who's been in pastoral ministry for over 25 years now.
Speaker 1:It really resonated with me.
Speaker 2:So, for example, when she points out that men who believe the Bible's teaching and who go to church regularly basically men who identify as traditional Christians or evangelical Christians, whatever label you want to put on it that they're the best husbands and best fathers, I would say yeah, absolutely, there is no question about that. These are the best family men we have. I also thought it was interesting and this also fits with things I've seen that she pointed out that a lot of times, nominal Christian men, that is, men who have you know they might call themselves Christians, but they're not regularly in church, they're not really living out the faith, they're not really in the word regularly, they're not really, you know, they're not part of a church community.
Speaker 1:That those people actually make the worst husbands and fathers. I think there's a lot of.
Speaker 2:I mean that kind of resonated with me as well, because a lot of times I think what happens is you have men who maybe get a little bit of that head ship rhetoric but they don't have any content to go with it, and so it really does kind of become they can become tyrants, they can kind of try to, you know, use the office they have as a bludgeon, you know, with their wives and their children, and that does become a real problem. So that to me, I think, is probably something that is accurate based on what I've seen, and I think it makes a lot of sense. But there are some other places where the use of sociology, I think, gets her into some real trouble.
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Speaker 2:Well, I think one of the biggest blunders she makes in the book is when she takes the data about conservative men and evangelical men and basically looks at how they live out their theology and their marriage, and then she basically says I don't have the page right in front of me, but she basically says something like well, the reason these marriages are successful is because they're using maybe she says traditional ends or conservative ends, like in a progressive way. I'd like to find the page and actually read it. Yeah, so she's like. For example, on page 59, she says the upshot is that committed conservative Christian couples use the traditional rhetoric of male headship. Yet Okay, so no the yet. Yet in practice, these men fit the close relational model favored by progressives. In other words, they say that they're living out something that's biblical, but actually the reason it works so well is because they're actually living like progressives.
Speaker 2:Well then I would say, well, why not just drop the rhetoric? I mean, let's just be honest. Then let's just say you know what? What the Bible teaches doesn't work. The progressive model actually does work. So let's get our rhetoric to match our practice. And there are people who have attacked Piercy's book in just this fashion, saying basically what your book shows is that the egalitarians have it right and the traditionalists, the conservatives or whatever you want to call them, have it wrong. And so male headship really is dangerous. And the only reason you don't see that in evangelical marriages is because they don't actually practice it. And if they did practice it, that would be disastrous. I would reject that altogether. I think that's if anything, I would say it's backward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I found that really interesting too and we'll get into that. But the stuff on headship I thought was probably the worst part of the book, or at least one of them. They're like there's strong things here, but particularly like if you're going to say we're complementarian and patriarchalist and then you're going to say, but we don't practice any of it and it's really just in name only and that's why it works so well, it's like well, I'm not sure what you're defending, I guess, is my point.
Speaker 2:Well, and I think she actually ends up with a contradiction, which I'm surprised that this didn't get resolved, because she says in one place so when she's talking about this, she says basically and this follows, wilcox, this is where I think that really goes off the rails. She says basically, a man's theory of headship does not matter. So it does not matter what he believes about headship. He can believe patriarchal or complementary or egalitarian things about his role as a man in the marriage. None of that matters. What matters is that he treats his wife well. What matters is that he has high emotional intelligence and so he knows how to honor and respect his wife. That's what matters, okay. So basically, be a nice guy and you'll have a happy marriage, no matter what your theory of headship is.
Speaker 2:Here in the book she actually says sociologists pin the blame for marriages that have gone wrong right where the Bible does, which is saying on the man, that the man is responsible. That sociologists here are lining up with scripture, she says, by holding the man responsible. So it's not women who are causing marriage problems, it's men who are causing marriage problems. Now we can unpack that here in a bit, but those two claims are contradictory. You can't say your theory of headship doesn't matter and then still say that the man is responsible. It's got to be one or the other. If you say the man is responsible, that is a theory of headship, that is a theory of headship. So there's a contradiction there that never really gets resolved in the book.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's interesting too, because I think you point this out in your article. I pointed it out before too but like this idea that a man has total responsibility for his marriage but no real authority, yeah, yeah, right, like you're in charge, but the main thing you're supposed to do the term Nancy uses and I think she's barring it from one of the sociologists but is doing the emotional work Like you need to be hyper attentive to all your wife's emotional needs and make sure she's got enough Hallmark channel watched or whatever. You know what. I don't know what it is, but it's like this, really what you would see in, like the pages of, probably Christianity today in terms of what women are looking for from a man.
Speaker 1:Like you said, emotional intelligence, very high, et cetera. Sort of a downplaying of the classic roles of protection and provision. Now, one of the things I think she does that's good and you point this out as well is kind of her historical work on the industrial revolution what happened to men? So maybe unpack that for me. What was good about that section?
Speaker 2:Well, I thought the whole history section was very interesting, even the parts I would have disagreed with. There was a lot about it, but I thought it was really. You know, I mean she basically crafts this narrative really, starting with colonial miracle, with Puritanism. We're basically have. You know, there you really do have a high view of a man's head ship over his household. She talks about how these men were really committed to the quote unquote common good.
Speaker 2:I know that's a term that gets abused a lot today, but I think the way she's using it context like it's fun. That's true of Puritan husbands and fathers, that they were public figures and they acted in the public square on behalf of their household and of course, what's good from one household should be good for others. There's kind of this, you know, this kind of corporate sense, so yeah, so I thought that was good. And then she kind of traces this out how our understanding and practice of masculinity has gone through. It's kind of morphed in different ways. It's gone through different transitions, largely in response to changing economic conditions, and so for her, really, the big change takes place with the industrial revolution, where men are pulled away from the farms okay where they actually get to be around their families, other members of the family, a lot during the day. You know, day to day life, family life and work life are very integrated because it's a family farm, everybody's working together. That's kind of her picture of the pre-industrial revolution world. And then the industrial revolution pulls men away from the farms to the factories and once they start working in factories and then of course after that offices, with the digital revolution, it's much harder to be a good father, because now fatherhood is something that's hacked on to daily life.
Speaker 2:You do your primary work apart from your family, say nine to five, and then on the margins, you know, in the early morning or late at night. That's when you have time for family and that's when you can pour into your kids. But obviously there's not a lot there. There's not a lot of time there. I think that picture is somewhat exaggerated in both directions. I don't doubt that there was that if you live on a family farm there are lots more opportunities perhaps day to day for interaction with one another in the family, and I don't doubt that. You know, say, if your son becomes your apprentice and you're training him to take over the family farm when you get too old or when you're dead and gone. Yeah, absolutely. You're going to be around each other a lot more than, say, if you go off to a factory or an office to work. But I think she exaggerates a little bit how easy family life was in the pre-industrial revolutionary world.
Speaker 2:For example, there were lots of situations where people actually lived in town and the family farmland was outside, like in the book of Ruth. This seems to be how it worked and this seems to be how ancient Israel was. You know you had. You know you might live in town, where your house is, and then you go out to the fields to work in the day, and you weren't necessarily taking your certainly not your little kids with you, so you might as well have been going to an office, you know, at that point. You know that kind of thing. I find it very interesting that you know Jesus called, you know, 12 disciples to be sort of his inner circle. I don't get the sense that any of them were men who worked from home. They've got fishing businesses or their tax collectors or what have you. I mean insofar as the ones we know about what they did none of them were working from home.
Speaker 1:If you've got, a fishing business.
Speaker 2:You're getting up early in the morning, you're going out to the boat, you're fishing all day and coming back home it doesn't look that different from how it might've looked for a modern man. So I think there's that whole issue. But then I think the flip side and maybe this is even more dangerous is, by putting so much explanatory pressure on the industrial revolution like this, really explains what went wrong with men. I think she actually even gives men in the post-industrial revolution world a kind of excuse where I don't think we ought to have one. The reality is, I think you can still do family life well in a post-industrial revolution world In a lot of ways. Quite honestly, family life should be easier because of the technology, the conveniences, the healthcare we have.
Speaker 2:There's so many hardships. This one thing that Jordan Peterson, I think, captures really well. We are oblivious to how difficult life was before the industrial revolution, the fossil fuel revolution. All of that Life was so, so difficult that just surviving took everything you had. The different roles that men and women played were just a matter of survival, really more than anything else. Then we're sitting around debating who should do what. It was just obvious, because this is what we have to do to survive. Really, family had to deal with infant mortality or perhaps even a wife and mother dying and childbirth. All those things were very real. There's all kinds of ways in which family I'm sure she would agree with this, but I don't think the book captures it where life is immeasurably better.
Speaker 2:To really harp on the downsides to me is a little bit unfair. I think of the industrial revolution as a great achievement. It's a great example of what masculine energy unleashed in the world to take dominion can accomplish. I think in that way it was a wonderful good. I think you can do family life well, but you do have to improvise in certain ways. Human nature doesn't change. God's design for the household doesn't change. There are ways to make it work in a post-industrial revolutionary world. I move lots and lots of families that have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a big part of it too is if you look at, even, okay, those guys on the farm, what kind of hours were they working on an annual basis? Versus now, there's actually, for most people, pretty ample time to be with your family in the evenings. Again, those are the blessings of the industrial revolution. I was surprised, rich. I asked her this in the interview and she just skipped. She was like well, it's about the industrial revolution. Were you surprised how little was said about feminism?
Speaker 2:Yeah, very little said about feminism in its corollary, which is statism or socialism Feminism. In fact. I was just listening earlier this week. It was one of those monk debates. I've never heard of these, but they basically just, and I haven't listened to many of them.
Speaker 2:But this one was Suzanne Vinker, if you know that name. I don't think she's a believer, but she's a champion of what you might call the traditional way of life. She understands that men and women are different and so that plays out in different roles. She's debating this very academic feminist. It was really interesting because basically Suzanne Vinker to make this argument for what you might call a traditional division of labor in the home, and of course she gets all kinds of qualifications. It doesn't have to be super rigid, you just have to recognize there's a basic structure Men and women are different. They're going to excel at different things.
Speaker 2:Then you've got this academic who everything she had to say about what we need to do involved the state, basically making her vision of equality possible. At one point Suzanne just asked her. She says so what public policies are you talking about? What can the government do to change human nature? I thought that was a great question. Of course, at that point the academic feminist lady just said well, I don't really think it is human nature. But it is not human nature, why do you need the state to impose it on us, like?
Speaker 2:she was talking about, we need universal free daycare and everybody needs to have like 16 months leave when they have a child before they go back to work. Men need to share housework more. We'll try legislating that and see what happens.
Speaker 2:Men never do housework the way women do it, because we're just not. We don't nest, we're not domestic in the same kind of way. What if men don't want the house to be cleaned in just the way she wants? Then what? What are you going to do If you want to hold a galle-tearing model as a complete disaster, like I think, if you want to have an, a galle-tearing marriage? My question always is like well, what would an a galle-tearing football team look like? Are you going to require an offensive lineman to throw half the passes and the quarterback to throw half the blocks so they're equal? I mean, is that what you want? Like, is that really for the best of the team? I guarantee you an a galle-tearing football team will lose every game. Oh yeah, an a galle-tearing family that tries to make the man do half of what the woman's best at and the woman do half of what the man is best at is never going to work. You cannot make water run uphill, you just can't.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's interesting too, because I think when you start looking at stuff like that and how it actually plays out in society, you're going to have these long-term problems that, again, it's not just economic. You've got, as you said, the statism and feminism being so connected. You replace men in society, you vilify them, so what you're going to have to do is the state is going to have to step in and basically fill all those roles. It is interesting, though I want to ask you I've been reading a little bit of the George Gilder book from Canon. I've been reading this. I almost would say kind of similar things about the books so far, of what I've read, meaning I think they both had some really good insights.
Speaker 1:I think there's some helpful stuff in there, but correct me if I'm wrong. Like I don't think either, one of them sees the problem down to the root. I don't know if you would say the same thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean both books are filled with great insights. I mean Gilder has some really amazing insights and particularly in the point I just talked about, like he understands what feminism gets wrong, whatever other worldview problems Gilder might have with his and at least in the book, his commitment. I mean I've got I've actually got the old version. I haven't seen the new Kenan version I read I first read it like in 1993 or something.
Speaker 1:So I've got the old version.
Speaker 2:I don't know what he might update in the new version, like with his new intro and stuff like that that I've heard is there. But yeah, he whatever other problems there might be with the worldview that he had when he wrote the original version of the book he understands really well how destructive feminism is and he understands really well how destructive the welfare state is and how those two things go together. And it's not that men failed and then the state had to step in. It's rather that the state came in and undercut fathers, like when he talks about, you know, the in the ghetto, the young girls having their liberation day when they would turn 16. And now you can get a check from the government for every child you have out of wedlock, but the check goes away. Have you married the baby's father? Ok, there's no question there that that is the intentional destruction of the family. It happened by design. So you got welfare laws undermining a man's ability to provide his role, as you know, as a husband who would provide for his family.
Speaker 2:You've got things like gun control laws and things like that that undercut a man's desire to be a protector for his family. You got all these attacks on masculinity. I mean basically everything that men like, everything that men enjoy, everything that men want to do is under attack in the modern world and I think Gilder really captures that well.
Speaker 2:I mean, in that sense you might say, gilder goes even more with greater depth into this toxic war on masculinity than Peerce does. Now, ironically, I actually thought some of Peerce's criticisms of Gilder along the way were exactly right, because Gilder's whole view that the woman is the superior sex is very problematic and I think that you know, basically Gilder wants to say well, women have this responsibility to civilize men. Men are by nature barbarians and and women have this role of civilizing them. And I think that's not really a helpful way to think about it. I'm not saying there's no sense in which that's ever true, you know, in any way whatsoever, but just in general, men are the builders of civilization and, as Doug Wilson likes to say, men who have mouths to feed build civilization.
Speaker 2:So, yes, you do anchor it to marriage, but it's not that the woman civilizes the man, it's really that the institution of marriage itself puts pressure on man to build a civilization as a protector and a provider for his wife and his children. And I think that Gilder captures that really, really well. But I think he taught, but I think by his whole view, that the that the woman is the superior sex is really the wrong way to understand what's what's happening. It's the wrong way to understand the dynamic, and in doing so, I think Peerce does make a really good point that he really puts responsibility in the wrong place. He puts the initiative on the woman, he puts the responsibility on the woman and, in a way, sort of gets men off the hook, and that's not good.
Speaker 2:And the result of that further is that he sees single men as society's big problem, and I think that was probably plausible back in the 1980s and 1990s. Maybe that was plausible then, but in 2023, I think you can make a really big argument that single women are actually the biggest scourge of society, or you maybe should say equal to the men in being a scourge to society.
Speaker 2:If you look at things like voting patterns and the and the things they inject in society and that kind of thing it's. It's different than what the men do, who are unattached and unanchored, but it's a huge problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was going to ask you about that, one of the things we were talking about before this show. I was reading an article that you had recommended this is from Dennis Prager and we'll provide a link in the show notes for this as well but it's titled women are disproportionately hurting our country. So it's it's this thesis, right, that women have and are doing a lot of damage. It's the men who get picked on. So I wonder if you would unpack that just a little bit about that article. You've been talking about it, but as you go into depth into that problem, I mean I can't help but think of we've been beating this drum for a long time among Michael Foster and myself. But you can look at Matt Chandler and it's like when women sin, jesus wants the rose, and when men sin, it's like how dare you? You pig, you piece of garbage. Yeah, so just just speak to this issue. Why is it important for for people to understand this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, prager is a real mixed bag himself, of course, but I think it's hard, and he's not the one saying this, but he that. That article, I think, captures what's happening particularly well. He says we've all he says for a long time. We we focused on how, you know, we got to train boys to control their nature, because if boys don't control their nature then they lash out in anger or they become rapists and murder. You know you? Basically, I mean boys can become really dangerous if they don't learn how to control their impulses.
Speaker 2:Okay, he says we can always assume that women were fine just the way they are. I mean, that's the gilder thesis even makes this point in article that women are fine and it's men who need to change. Women are fine how they are, it's meant have got to learn to control themselves. But now what we're seeing is that when you don't teach girls how to control the worst impulses of their female nature, their fallen female nature, that manifests itself in all kinds of destructive ways.
Speaker 2:So so much of the perversion that we see in our society, like, say, the transgenderism, so much of that is driven by women. Okay, I'm not saying 100% of the time, you obviously have the Bruce Jenner thing, but so much of it is driven by women. It's women who want, you know, who think it's a good idea so often to get the drag queens in for the public library story hour for kids or something like that. It's women who are driving a lot of this. So many times it's the in a divorce custody battle. It's the mom who's saying the kid needs to transition to the different gender, that's what he really wants. And the dad saying, nope, not with my kid, you're not, we're not, that's not going to happen.
Speaker 2:Or you look at voting patterns. The single most radical voting block we have is single women. They swing to the left politically far more than any other group swings any direction, you know. And so you have to ask the question why is that? You know, it's like I said yes, I mean, I don't so much mind women voting, but I wish they were better at it. It's like I mean, like this is crazy, like you keep voting for things that are destroying our society.
Speaker 2:I think Prager is right, I think that women are disproportionately hurting our society right now, and so that that, I think, is a real challenge to Gillard's thesis. Again, maybe that wasn't so obvious back then, but if you're not training women, you're not training girls to control the worst impulses of their nature, the same way you've got to do with boys to control the worst impulses of their nature you end up with a real problem on your hands.
Speaker 2:And again, I think that rather than saying that women civilized men. What I would want to say is the institution of marriage can have a transformative effect on both men and women. The institution of marriage can actually have a maturing effect on both men and women. Obviously, it does it for everybody. Some people get married and rebel against everything that marriage means, but still, that's that's certainly one benefit.
Speaker 2:I think if you have more people in society getting married, you're going to see more people who are future oriented. You're going to see more people who understand responsibility, more people who have skin in the game, so to speak, and who've got, you know, stakeholders in the future well being of society. So, yeah, I think we're much better off. So the fact that marriage rates are plummeting and with that birth rates are plummeting, that's a real problem and that's why it's so important to get this stuff right. I mean, there's not academic debates like, oh you know, let's get this stuff right to a headship, just so we can say we did it. I mean, I think the future of our civilization is at stake in whether or not we get this right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've often wondered Rich, why so like from Gilder to Peercy and some of the errors mixed in, you know, sort of like husbands as doormats are made to. Your only leadership is that you have to serve your wife, all that stuff. This is where it kind of concerns me. Is that for my lifetime, that's what the church has taught, right, right, so it really does get down to the practical. I'm curious if you think that it will change. I'm curious if you think that more pastors will kind of start to see, as I have, you know, just working with families and realizing like there are legitimately bad women who destroy families and then take the kids and the money and you're like, wow, that legal system is actually kind of rigged against the guy. This is not good.
Speaker 2:So that was another thing in the book that I thought was just astounding in that I'm surprised that Peercy didn't explore this a little bit more. We know that women initiate 80% of divorces and pretty much the rate is on the statistic. It's 90% if it's a college educated woman 90% 90%.
Speaker 2:Percy just assumes that that is because men are getting all their needs met, because wives are doing a great job being wives, but the husbands are lousy husbands and that's why the wives get discontent and then have to divorce. And I just want to say, you know, I think it's a little more complicated If you want to talk about egalitarianism. I think there's a little more equality in how men and women are wrecking marriages here than what's being. You know what's being what she allows for in the book. I would say you know that assumption that it's all. The wife is always doing everything right and the husband's always doing everything wrong. That is the toxic war on masculinity. And so, like at that point in the book, percy is really waging the war, the toxic war on masculinity, rather than fighting against it. You know she's certainly not helping us win it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean she really does. I was thinking the same thing. When she's talking about what makes for a happy marriage, it's all about how well, how much, is the husband serving the wife, and she only talks about how satisfied are the women in the marriage.
Speaker 2:So, and the fact that I think, she does it without realizing it tells you how deep this is woven into our society. Whether or not a marriage is a good marriage is determined by the wife. Whether or not a husband is being a good husband, the criteria to judge that it's entirely up to the wife to decide. So you don't go to scripture, some standard outside of the marriage where, like you'd have some measure of objectivity, you go to the wife and she's going to be the one who determines and it's going to be whether or not she feels like her needs are being met. It's going to be how she, so basically her feelings, become the authority in the marriage at that point, because the man's job is to keep the woman happy and the way you know. So that's totally determined by how she feels, and so then he's judged by her.
Speaker 2:Basically is what happens and it's really a one-way street. It's not like there's a Like there's this other side of it where the man gets to judge how well the woman is. I mean, there's nothing like that allowed, so it's all one-sided, and you can see how, in this way of thinking about marriage, it's a completely feminized institution. You can see why a lot of men would say you know what I don't think marriage sounds very attractive. It doesn't sound like a very good deal to me today. As much as I might want to be married and have kids and all of that, I'm scared to death of getting married because I see what we've done to marriage. So in making the woman's expectations the normative standard for a good marriage, I think we've really created a disaster.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with that. One of the other things that you brought up that I was thinking was kind of interesting is so it's like a 300-page book. One of the subjects that's not covered is sex, one of the most powerful impulses of the human physiology. Did it surprise you that that wasn't included as part of the conversation?
Speaker 2:I think it's one of the liabilities of a woman writing a book on it. It's going to be, perhaps. Well, actually, I will say this To her credit Nancy Percy did a really good job with 1 Corinthians 7.1-9. In Love Thy Body, you know, she talks about sexual obligation within marriage. She actually handled that well In this book. It only shows up briefly, followed by a quotation by an egalitarian Philip Payne, I think, is his name. He basically says look, this egalitarian dynamic in marriage was unheard of in the ancient world. Okay, yeah, that's true, it wasn't. But what Paul says about mutual sexual obligation in 1 Corinthians 7, that's not the only thing, obviously, about marriage. It's not the only structural thing we're told about marriage. For that you'd have to go to somewhere like again, ephesians 5, where it talks about the man's headship and the wife's submission and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there is a kind of sexual mutuality.
Speaker 2:Sexual refusal in marriage is, generally speaking, a sin Either way. I mean, a wife owes her husband sex and a husband owes his wife sex. It goes both directions within marriage and that's Paul's point in 1 Corinthians 7. But here's the thing. So she writes a 300-page book about masculinity that never talks about the male sex drive. This to me is about as astounding as Tim Keller writing what a 300-page book on marriage that never talks about kids. It's like we're missing something really fundamental. And it's interesting about the only time sex shows up in the book.
Speaker 2:Of course is a very negative context and we go back to the beginning of the book. Yeah, like sexual abuse and that kind of thing. But also, if you go back to the beginning of the book, she starts with this contrast between two scripts the good man script and the real man script. Now, the good man script and she actually she fills that in with what some people have said and surveys and that kind of thing. It's the sociology thing and some of what is said there. I'm sure that real people have said that and answered the questions that way.
Speaker 2:But here's the problem. You have the good man script and that's the man who is kind, generous, sensitive, dependable, all those things, and they're necessary qualities for men. I'm not attacking any of that at all. I would affirm all of that as necessary ingredients in masculinity. But then you have the real man. And the real man is actually the bad man. And what's the bad man into? He's into making money and having sex. Okay, I mean, that's what it comes down to. And I want to say you know what? Good men want sex too, and good men want to make money too, if they're really good men because they want to be providers, they want sex.
Speaker 2:They want sex with their wives, you know. They do want to bed a woman, but they want to do it in an honorable way, which means with her as my wife.
Speaker 1:But I mean it's not like good men are not interested in sex and real men are, all men are interested in sex.
Speaker 2:It's just a matter of whether or not the sex drive is disciplined and directed towards marriage and a wife. Okay. But you would never know that reading her book, you would think that the good men don't really have sex drives. Basically, it's the way she puts it and she's using their language. But it's real men who just want to get laid. Okay. Well, good men want that too with their wives, okay. So there's nothing in the book that would help you understand that component of masculinity.
Speaker 2:And I would actually say that God has given men incredibly powerful sex drives for a reason, and so it shouldn't be the kind of thing that we just pathologize. I think that's what happens in these discussions is the male sex drive gets pathologized into a problem to be solved. And if it weren't for the man's pesky sex drive getting in the way of everything, sexualizing everything in his relationship with a woman, you know here. So we have to ask the question why has God given men such powerful sex drives? Well, if you understand that sex only belongs in marriage, then what is his sex drive make a man do? It pressures him into making himself marriageable.
Speaker 2:And what does he have to do in order to become marriageable? Well, one thing he might need is a job, because if he's going to ask this woman out on a date and eventually ask her for her hand in marriage, he's probably going to need to go through her dad at some point. Okay, wherever that happens in the relationship. And one question that dad is going to ask is how are you going to take care of my daughter? How are you going to provide for her? I've been taking care of her needs, paying her bills, putting food on the table for her, putting clothes in her closet for all these years.
Speaker 1:If you're going to take over that.
Speaker 2:I want to know how you're going to do it, and so he's going to have to be. This is why I say for young men, it is mission before marriage. That's how it was for Adam. Adam had a mission and then he was given a wife. Okay, it's mission before marriage. You have to make something of yourself to show that you are a marriage worthy, marriageable man. You have to show some potential, some demonstrated potential as a man who can take dominion in a productive way. That's what makes you a candidate for marriage.
Speaker 2:Okay, if a man can get sex without doing that, he'll sink to whatever. You know, whatever that low level is, you know, whatever he'll do, the bare minimum of what it takes all too often, because men are fallen creatures Okay, no doubt. But if you hold sex and marriage together, as we should, and then you say, okay, the sex drives the most powerful drive in a man's life, so what does he have to do to satisfy that drive? He's got to become marriageable, he's got to make himself marriageable, and he does that by finding his mission in life. And so marriage, then, will serve the purpose of this mission. His mission, ultimately, will include not just having dominion and ruling over the earth. It also includes being fruitful and multiply, and he can't do that without a woman, so he can't fulfill the whole mission without her. And of course she helps in the dominion side of things too in various ways, but obviously he can't.
Speaker 2:Adam. You know Adam's aloneness in Genesis, chapter two. It's not just that this psychological condition, like Adam is feeling lonely, it's that he's alone and he can't fulfill the mission God has given to him all by himself. It's too big for that, and so he's got to have a helper. Not a helper who would do just the same things at him, because that would double up the things he can already do, but it would still leave undone these things he can't do. He's got to have someone who can compliment him Okay, hence complimentarianism.
Speaker 2:That's something complimentarianism captures well. So he needs a woman, one who is similar to him yet different, okay, one who can help him fulfill that mandate in a holistic kind of way. So, yeah, and to me, the fact that she leaves the whole sex drive piece out of it, I think is one of the really big flaws in the book, and I think it's one of the reasons why this book is not going to really. I mean again, there's a lot of really good information here that you know, maybe middle-aged guys like me would be interested in. But for young men looking for actionable ways to fulfill their masculine drive and put their masculine energy to good use, and for young men who want to ultimately build a household and leave a legacy and all of that. I think Nancy Piracy is going to help them a whole lot with that. There's just not a whole lot here that really gives them something to work with. There are other books that do a much better job of that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's interesting that you break it down in your article into three main categories. The first one we've talked a lot about that, but we need a more comprehensive script for masculinity. It is interesting when she breaks these things down into kind of just two camps. There was a lot that was in the you know the quote unquote real man category where it's like those actually seem like good things.
Speaker 2:That seems like a good thing, like necessary things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, being like physically strong, and I've even written about this before like there's a time for men to be violent, there's a time for men to have aggression. Like you need these categories and you need categories, like you know, as you said, being productive, so that you can, you know, make money, provide for your family. You got a place for ambition, you know.
Speaker 2:I mean she kind of treats ambition like it's bad. So the sex drive is bad, Ambition is bad. Things that might make you dangerous or bad. I mean the reality is men need to be able to be dangerous. If you're going to be a protector, you got to you have to be dangerous at times. Okay, you know, think about me and my. When they're rebuilding the wall, he wants the men there to be dangerous and that's actually what's going to quell. The threat against them is when they show that, when they got a, you know, a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other to show that, hey, we will fight if we have to. That's absolutely necessary.
Speaker 2:Jordan Peterson says good men are dangerous, they just have it under control. I think that's exactly right. Nancy Percy kind of gives you this pacifist view of men. You know some inner pacifists, uh, and pacifists like in a sense of like, you know, not fighting, but also passive, like, uh, not ambitious, not driven. I mean she basically kind of gives you this very beta male picture of what masculinity should look like and I would say you know, those are necessary qualities of a man's going to be a good husband. He's got to have those qualities, but that's all you have. That is not masculinity, that's a feminacy, and I wonder in some ways if she's written a book aiming at defending masculinity that actually ends up defending a feminacy, like if she's actually defending the wrong thing.
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Speaker 1:Do you desire to be shrewd financially for the sake of your family and future generations? We know that a robust society depends on getting this right Success in building and passing on personal wealth. This must be mature, responsible leaders with the resources God expects us to turn a profit on To love our children and children's children. Well, joe Garrisey, with Backwards Planning, financial integrates, investments, debt insurance, tax strategies and legacy planning in a holistic approach, coaching his clients to act wisely. You can do better than you received. You can affect your family trajectory and maximize your efforts to set up long term fruitfulness. Joe starts with your values and goals, then provides impactful counsel to help you form and implement your financial plan. Click on the link in the description for Backwards Planning Financial and contact Joe today to get started. Well, I think a lot of it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like a lot of it. Is this unspoken right, like saying I want to make masculinity appealing to all these feminists? I know, yeah and this was kind of the complementarian thing.
Speaker 1:From the beginning I feel like reading it was like there's a little bit of no, no, no, no, it's not so ugly and no dominance. Let's take that away. Rule no, no rule. He's there to serve you Like. He's there to meet all your emotional needs and all of those things. But I think that who isn't helped by that you're right is young men. It's also interesting, rich, because I think that when you dig into the biblical interpretive issues, like she'll say in Genesis, as you mentioned, that as her help meet, she says and I'm quoting the word she uses is mangled. Help meet is a mangled interpretation. I'm looking at the original in the Hebrew and I'm going through all this. I'm sure you've done the same thing and I'm like I think help meet is actually a pretty good ideal here.
Speaker 1:But, she says and this is the quote, I think she's quoting somebody else, but she cites it and is relying on it she says the woman was not created to serve the man but to serve with the man. So I'm immediately like, yeah, that's not what the passage says.
Speaker 2:But if we're talking about men, men are created to serve women. I mean, see, that's the thing about it. So if we talk about men, men are created to serve women's needs, but we would never say that a woman was created to serve man's needs.
Speaker 1:Okay, I mean, it's interesting. First Corinthians 11 addresses this.
Speaker 2:It says the woman was made for the man. So let's just quote. Yeah, let's just quote. I mean, the woman was made for the man. Okay, so I'm not offensive, but that is what the inspired apostle said. Now I think the whole question about being a helper, yeah, so there's kind of this tendency. I think it goes back to, as a Dan Allender that wrote, intimate allies, you know the kind of ones to make helper into a like a, you know, like a fellow warrior kind of thing, something like that. And I'm not saying there's no sense in which that's true, because obviously, like, if we're thinking of a spiritual warfare or something like that, yes, your wife is a fellow combatant, but the thing is, if what Adam needed was military help or political help, the reality is another man would have been better suited for that, because everywhere.
Speaker 1:So this is interesting.
Speaker 2:Everywhere else the Old Testament, when the word helper is used, it's either used of God or of men.
Speaker 1:It's never used of a woman again Okay. So think about.
Speaker 2:So God, obviously, I mean that's kind of a category by itself how God helps his people. But then any other time it's used, like, for example, david's mighty men are called his helpers. Well, how do they help? They help him in political and military ways. Now, if we want to say, well, okay, so obviously being a helper is a that's a military and political category, I want to say, well, that's what it might mean for a man to be a helper to another man.
Speaker 2:But what does it mean for a woman to be a helper to a man? We still haven't answered that question, because women help in different ways. That's really the whole point. Adam doesn't need help in doing things he can already do. He needs help in doing things he can't do. That is the whole point. I'm like flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. Where I'm strong, I'm weak. Where she is strong and where I'm weak, she can be strong, and vice versa. That's really kind of the point of it. So, yeah, I would say what does it mean for the woman to help? Well, again, it goes back to that creation mandate. She helps the man fulfill the creation mandate. He cannot fulfill it on his own. He certainly can't fulfill the fruitful, multiply part of it without her. I would also say he really can't fulfill the subdued rule. Have dominion part of it without her as well. So there's something of a division of labor within the creation mandate but it's a somewhat soft division of labor because obviously men are involved in multiplication and being fruitful as well.
Speaker 2:Men do have to play a role in fathering their children, nurturing their children, all of that. And women do have various work that they do, various forms of dominion that they take. But there's still this division of labor where he's oriented towards dominion. He's made from the ground and he's oriented towards the ground. He's oriented towards taking dominion over the earth. He's oriented towards figuring out how to get oil out of the earth to power cars and how to turn sand into microchips. He's oriented towards transforming the earth into a civilization. That's what men do.
Speaker 2:The woman is created from the man's side. She's oriented towards the man, towards the relationship, towards the family they built together. Fundamentally she's about nesting and nurturing. That's how she helps, and scripture everywhere bears this out. What does Titus 2 tell women, the workers at home? What does Proverbs 31 describe the woman doing? She's at home, she's anchored to the home. I know she's doing all kinds of tasks, you might even say dominion-oriented tasks. That's fine, but she's anchored to the home. Where's her husband? He's not in the home, he's out at the city gate. She's in the home, he's out in public. There's a contrast there between their respective spheres or domains.
Speaker 2:In Psalm 128, that Psalm that describes the ideal family, it's described from the man's point of view. The whole thing, it's his wife, the possessive's matter, it's his children, it's his table, it's his bread, all of that, it's his blessing. So there's a very real sense in which he's obviously presented as the head of his home, the head of his family. He rules over it, he's responsible for it. All of that. She is a helper, she's an aide. There's the old line If he's the head of the home, she's the heart. That's what Psalm 128 says. She's a fruitful vine, so fruitful. There's her primary task fruitfulness in the heart of your house.
Speaker 2:She's in the house. She's fruitful in the house. He goes out, he's the breadwinner. He brings the bread home, puts it on the table. It's his table, his wife, his kids. That's how it works. That's the description you have. Yeah, if you want to like that today, they want an egalitarian marriage where nobody has ownership. They want an egalitarian marriage where we're just interchangeable pieces, interchangeable cogs in the machine. That's not the picture that Scripture gives us. What Scripture gives us is more like a traditional dance where there's a leader and a follower. That's how it's supposed to work. When it works in this way, it really is a thing of beauty. There's nothing more beautiful than a household where the husband and the wife, and even the kids, they're all doing their part, playing their role, doing what God's called and designed them to do.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting too. In this section where she addresses headship, and particularly with Ezra, she says it does not mean subordination or authority over the denial of hierarchy. She'll also say something similar in Ephesians 5. She quotes Liz Curtis Higgs, though this is what's interesting to me. She's relying on a female interpreter of Scripture who wrote the book Bad Girls of the Bible to give the interpretation On Ephesians 5, this is what said who is asked to die and surrender and sacrifice? Not the woman but the man.
Speaker 1:I find that so interesting because just think of our wives. We can look at Scripture you pointed out a bunch of stuff but just let's practically think about our wives. You're trying to tell me that our wives are going to bring these children into the world, care for them, love them, feed them, nourish them, be our helpmeat, and they're not sacrificing and surrendering and dying for their family. That's ludicrous. We've seen the ways in which our wives have done that. The other one that's in here that's interesting, and this is Nancy Pearcey. She says the English translation in 1 Peter 3.7 of Women as the Weaker Vessel is a misinterpretation. This is another one where I was like this is just appalling. Any classic reformed conservative Bible theologian, even the guys that we've taken issue with and the soft complementary camp, when they saw these interpretations, they were like this is hardcore egalitarianism, that's what this is.
Speaker 1:I think Nancy would call herself a complementarian, but this is not complementarian, it's very soft. It's also interesting because one of the things I didn't expect it but Andrew Sandlin is quoted in here. I've actually read this argument before and I want to get your take on it. Andrew does not believe that the father is the head of the household. She quotes him as saying that the mother and father have equal parental hierarchy over the home. Would you defend fathers as heads of household? If so, why?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I would I'd love to look up the context of the Sandlin quote. I noted that too.
Speaker 1:I mean Andrew's a friend, yeah yeah, yeah, it has a lot of great writing. That surprised me, because I know that, andrew is not a egalitarian.
Speaker 2:That surprised me a little bit. I would say absolutely meant our heads of their households. Think about this. She basically wants to set it up where, basically, in marriage, headship doesn't mean rule, the man doesn't have a, he does have a, he's got some kind of unique responsibility but he doesn't have authority.
Speaker 2:That's a problem in itself, Okay, but then she says, when it comes to parenting, basically mothers have their own independent authority over the children, and so basically it's like. It's like the family is a two-headed thing and anything with two heads is a monster. It's just like a work. I mean it just can't work.
Speaker 1:I mean basically at that point.
Speaker 2:you don't have one voice in the home. You have a cacophony, unless husband and wife happen to agree on what to do with the children. But I mean, obviously there's going to be disagreement over the course of raising children and you create this chaotic environment where there are multiple.
Speaker 1:you can't so think about it from the child's point of view.
Speaker 2:Like, let's say that you had at work, in your job, you had two bosses to answer to and they disagreed with each other. How would you possibly function in that environment? You can't Right it, just it just can't. You can't do that. So but that's the kind of thing she's setting up in the home. I totally agree that mothers have authority over the children, that motherhood can be thought of as an office, even as fatherhood is a kind of office. There is authority. She has authority over the children but nevertheless still under her husband.
Speaker 2:So if you want to thank you for his kind of middle management, okay, I despise the bureaucracy it gives us that kind of language. But I mean, but we know lots of situations where people are both in authority and under authority at the same time, like, like, the example I use is think about an offensive coordinator on a football team's coaching staff. He's in authority over the players and he's under the authority of the head coach. So whatever, whatever trickles down through him to the players, I mean, obviously he's going to use his own initiative and he's got his own ideas and his own ways of I mean that's why he was hired, you know. And a good head coach is not going to micromanage his offensive coordinator. He hired the guy to do a job. You let him do it, okay. But still, in terms of the overall vision and the overall philosophy, what governs this thing as a whole? It comes from the top down, it comes from the head. Note. That word the head coach Okay, he's got authority and responsibility. He's the head coach Okay. So he's headship over the team Okay. And so the assistant coaches, in the way they exercise authority over the players. That's got to be consistent with what the head coach wants. And I would say that's how it is.
Speaker 2:For a mother Okay, she's got authority over the children. That's a real authority. But the way she exerts her authority needs to be consistent with the overall vision and philosophy of the head coach. The head of household, the husband this should not be that hard to understand. We deal with layered authority all the time in life. Every institution pretty much has ever existed has layered authority. Schools have layered authority with principals, teachers, students. The military has layered authority. I just talked about how sports teams have layered authority. Government has layered authority. There's layered authority everywhere. It's just a fact of life.
Speaker 2:Of course there's going to be layered authority in the family. That's just the way it is. It should not bother us. To me it's really interesting. We don't attack this model anywhere else, just like we don't attack authority anywhere else. Everybody knows that civil magistrates have to have authority. You can't deny authority. It's like if you say this civil magistrate doesn't have authority, the authority doesn't go away, it just gets relocated somewhere else. There's always going to be authority in the civil sphere. Same with parenting, same with business. There's sports teams. There's always going to be authority, but there's something unique about the authority of a man in the household that makes them the unique target for attack. We just don't see other authority figures get attacked in the same way.
Speaker 2:We don't have 300-page books explaining how CEOs have responsibility but not authority, or 300-page books about how coaches have responsibility proud the team does, but they don't have authority to tell any player or assistant coach what to do.
Speaker 1:They're just there to serve the players, Rich.
Speaker 2:They're just there to serve the players, right.
Speaker 1:Well, a lot of times the way they serve the players is by telling them exactly what to do.
Speaker 2:The other thing is, I don't disagree with saying it's service, but the best service that you can give when you're in a position of authority is the gift of competent leadership, and that just seems to be completely lost here. In fact, it's interesting when she doesn't really I don't think she really used the language of servant leadership, but she does use the example of John 13.
Speaker 1:Again, when she talks about men authority gets qualified to death. When she talks about women, she didn't give any qualifications at all, really about the mother's authority.
Speaker 2:It's just moms have authority to tell their kids what to do. Period, that's it. But it's interesting, she uses John 13. And yes, it is true, john 13 starts out by talking about Jesus' authority, and because he has authority, that's why he's students to serve. But then think about this. Let's just say that you had a husband who said, okay, I want to be at John 13. Like I want to be, I want to lead my family the way Jesus led the disciples in the upper room. Well, what does Jesus do? He washes their disciples. One of the disciples doesn't want his feet washed. He doesn't want to be served in that way. And Jesus overrides his objection and does it anyway.
Speaker 1:He says Peter, you don't know what's good for you.
Speaker 2:You don't want your feet washed. I'm going to serve you in this way, whether you like it or not, and then you basically spend the rest of the night giving them authoritative commands, telling them in detail exactly what he wants them to do. So the idea that Jesus is some kind of servant without a plan, like he's a servant, but he uses his authority to serve the mission, to serve the mission, and that's the thing.
Speaker 2:So I would say, yeah, husbands can definitely learn a lot about leadership from Jesus in the upper room. But let's not just stop with the foot washing. Men should not think of themselves as being above menial tasks. Do the menial tasks that need to be done. Doug Wilson's got that line and I think goes further back than him. But authority flows to those who serve yes, absolutely. Authority flows to those who take responsibility yes, absolutely. So do those kind of things to serve. Don't be above the menial labor. Okay, but it's about your mission, and part of the way that you exercise your headship in the home is going to be by saying hey, you know what this is what we're going to do. As for me and my house, we're going to serve the Lord. Okay. Who's got authority to say that it's the head of the family? He's got to be willing to do it and he's got to be willing to implement it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I think that's really helpful and a lot of times, as a leader, I think about this CEO of a media company. You can be a pastor, it doesn't matter. A lot of times, if you're doing all the menial tasks, you're actually failing the organization Exactly.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Because you need to be seeing things from the top and seeing the overall vision.
Speaker 2:Maybe that means it's your time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, that can serve you to the whole. I'll also include a link for the article. But yeah, so going back to the Doc Sandlin, he has an article called the Patriarchy Problem which is on docsandlincom, and he says this he's talking about proverbs. He says no reasonable reader of this wisdom literature, calculated to instruct the naive young man in the way of wisdom, would assume patriarchy or father rules. Rather, he would get the distinct impression that God vests the parents with a parody of authority. Interestingly, in fact, the term father rarely appears in proverbs without the term mother. This is another way of saying that, with reference to their children, father and mother share equal authority in the family. And he goes on to say therefore, the biblical family familial hierarchy goes like this parents, then children. The father has no more say in the children's ring than the mother and therefore patriarchy, denotatively speaking, is no more valid than matriarchy. The Bible does not teach that the father is the head of the household. It teaches that man is the head of woman, and altogether different issue.
Speaker 2:Okay, I disagree with almost every line of that. That's a problem.
Speaker 1:I don't even know where to begin. Really, here's one thing to think about Proverbs 1-8, my son.
Speaker 2:Okay, who's speaking here?
Speaker 2:It's the father. My son, hear the instruction of your father and do not forsake the law of your mother. Okay, who's telling the son to obey his mother? The father, okay, I think that matters. Okay, I think that really really matters. So there's that issue.
Speaker 2:The whole book of Proverbs is basically. I mean, I realize there's even instruction that gets more explicit from a mother later on in the book. But the whole context here is this is a father training his son. The book as a whole is put together by Solomon. So even when he's included in this package of teaching things that come from a mother, it's his teaching. So he's the one who's passing this on. So that's one thing. Second thing is Ephesians 5 says wives should submit to their husbands in all things. All things surely has got to include how they raise their children together. And the fact that in Ephesians 6, then just a few verses later, the only you know who's instructed there about raising the children? Only the father. Because he's responsible. Only the father, okay, because he's got ultimate responsibility, and in exercising that ultimate responsibility he's also got authority over the whole of his household. Here's another way to think about it.
Speaker 2:Throughout Scripture we'll run into this language. You know, house of Abraham, house of Isaac, house of Jacob, you never have language. House of Sarah, house of Rebecca? You know, whatever it's always that the house is always named from the man. Okay, genesis 18,. Abraham is commanded to direct his whole household in the righteous and just ways of God. Now, included in his household is his wife. She's part of the household that he is to instruct. So again, he's got that ultimate teaching authority in his household. Now, I have no doubt Sarah would help instruct much of the rest of the household in these things too. No doubt about that, not denying that. And she would even do so in an authoritative kind of way, don't doubt that at all. But who's got the higher authority? Again, thinking in terms of a layered authority, who's got the ultimate responsibility? It's clearly Abraham. Okay, and go on and on and on with these kinds of examples. But it just makes no sense. My guess is that Andrew Sandlin, in that article, is responding to some hyper-patriarchal tendencies that he saw somewhere along the way.
Speaker 2:And I don't doubt there are people who, in the name of patriarchy, do make a mess of things, and there are fathers who have, I think you could say, exaggerated notions of their own authority. There is a ditch on the other side always. So there is this we might call it hyper-patriarchy, and we do have to correct that. But I would consider what he's writing there as a way over correction Again anything with two heads is a monster, and so you know it doesn't.
Speaker 2:It just does not make sense to say that man is the head of the wife and so in that role you have this headship relationship. And then, as soon as we talk about the kids, it's this dual headed thing where husband and wife are in tandem, rather than hierarchy. That just makes no sense at all. It makes no sense at all.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's what that means is we can talk about a matriarchy, because mothers do have authority, but the matriarchy is subordinate to the patriarchy. Yeah, okay. So it's not just a matriarchy, but the matriarchy functions inside of the patriarchy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I was just going to ask, like, as you're kind of thinking through this. We've been talking about masculinity. One of the trends that I've seen is that there are a lot of people writing from a lot of different perspectives in this space. I know when the Gilder book came out a lot of people were like burn Ken into the ground. They've jumped the shark. They're horrible.
Speaker 1:There's sort of this reaction that is I don't know. I don't know if it's the polarity of our times or what it is, but what I've generally kind of counseled guys is like you know, that book came out. I reached out to the guys at Canon. I was like explain this to me. I'm going to read it first before I really say anything. I don't want to think through it before I just have a knee jerk reaction. So just for men on this issue of you know you're a pastor. I'm sure you know young men in your church may come to you from time to time and say what should I make of this book? How do you help them be measured and wise about these types of issues?
Speaker 2:Well, the funny thing is with the Gilder book in particular. I've been reading it for a long time. I've already done a couple podcasts on that. I've got another podcast I do with Lars and Hicks called God a Minute. We've done I think we've done two episodes on Gilder so far. We'll probably do one or two more. Oh nice, yeah, I mean here's the Gilder book has some mistakes in it. The mistakes are also very easy to correct.
Speaker 1:So think about this.
Speaker 2:Okay. So here's what's wrong with Gilder. Imagine if I told a story in which Jesus is this uncivilized barbarian and he needs to church his bride to civilize him. He's saying yeah basically. Right, right, okay, so that's a problem. And again here I want to give credit to Nancy Percy, since we're talking about her. She is right that Gilder wrongly pedestalized women. Okay, he's right about that.
Speaker 1:That.
Speaker 2:Gilder tended to let men off the hook and put the responsibility on the shoulders of women. Okay, that was a big mistake and there's some people who follow Gilder in that mistake, but that's wrong.
Speaker 2:But I don't think it's that hard to correct that mistake, in fact he had a tweet the other day I think I sent this to you where he says it's not and I don't think he words it quite this way, but what I took it as it's not the woman that is the transformative force in the man, it's marriage. And I think if we're willing to say that and then say, in addition to that, women also need transforming. So women are not fine just how they are. They also need maturing, they also need transformation, they can also take place within marriage, then I would say you know, you've kind of fixed what's wrong.
Speaker 2:So Gilder's got a lot of insights. I mean, there's a lot of insight in his book and there's a lot of things that are like so so close to being really right on the money and maybe just missed by a little bit. I think when Wilson says that a lot of what they have done in Moscow flows out of Gilder's work, I think he's being serious about that. I think he picked up a lot of principles and I've not seen this get any attention. But what Gilder says about parenting at the end of the book is absolutely amazing, when he talks about parents as the true entrepreneurs, because parents are the ones who are invested in the future, and he kind of makes this connection even between parenting and free market economics or parenting and capitalism. It's just amazing. I mean it's incredible and it reinforces all of the right things you know about parental responsibility and a future orientation and prosperity, and it's just, it's really really good. So I, you know, I would say there are all kinds of great things to get from the book.
Speaker 2:My guess is that in republishing it for Doug there's at least a little bit of nostalgia involved, like all of us have those books that they were very formative early in our Christian life and we might look back on them now and say, well, I mean, there's some things. Like you know, I learned a lot of great things from that book but it could be better, it could be improved in these ways X, y and Z, because I've learned more now. But we still have kind of this attachment to them because of the role they played in our life at a certain time. I don't doubt that for Doug this book is kind of like that, honestly, for me I'm not quite as old as Doug, but for me even I think about this book very fondly because you know I read Gilder when I was still in college. I was really, you know, still forming my view of manhood and womanhood, and I actually read the book with a mentor you know who's given it older than me and he actually pointed out a lot of the problems.
Speaker 2:I mean he pointed out this, and you know, when I read the book with him in 93 or 94, right in there, and said, hey look, you know, one of the issues here is that it, you know it basically makes men into barbarians and women into princesses, and that's not really the whole picture. Women are fallen to their centers too, and actually, you know, masculinity is it's, it's, it's not all bad in that kind of way. I mean that's not really what he's saying, but I mean you know there are lots of good things about men that don't depend upon women, you know that are just good enough themselves.
Speaker 1:So you know I when.
Speaker 2:I read the book. I got a lot of those corrections, you know, along the way. So I would say that it's a book that's very worth reading and engaging. I would say take the parts of it that are good, you know, spit off the parts that are not. And that's what we do with every book. You know, that's what we do with every book. I think that Gilder's book has enough strong points to warrant its reprinting. I would be glad for a new generation to benefit from it, even if we want to say there are some things that he missed. And I would say the same about the piracy book in a way. I mean, I'm not going to tell somebody to not read the Nancy Piracy book. I would say read it, but understand. It's got some really serious issues and it should be really. It should be obvious what those issues are, but they're real issues.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's really helpful. Well, rich, I really appreciate it. You mentioned one of the podcasts. You said God of Minutes. We'll provide links for that on the show notes so people can listen to that. And then I guess the other one, just the essay which is on your website, right, we'll have that as well. Were you, did you do a different podcast on Gilder?
Speaker 2:It's just that's the only one I can think of that I've done. Okay, I think I did this too with Lars, and I think that's it yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, perfect. Well, we definitely encourage people to check that out Again. Pastor Rich Lusk, thanks so much for joining us for this episode of the podcast. Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Hardman Podcast, and special shout out to our Patreon supporters. If you're not yet a Patreon supporter, you can join today for as little as $5 a month, and that definitely helps keep this work going. We are glad to partner with you for content that builds a new Christendom and reclaims biblical masculinity. At the same time, you can check the show notes for the link to become a Patreon supporter of the Hardman podcast today. Stay frosty, fight the good fight. Act like men.