Interesting thoughts, but the issue seems created from a patchwork of reality, rather than an accurate reflection of it! Plus it misses the whole teaching of Jesus and the Apostles in the NT about the purpose of God's kingdom during its time on earth IMO - unless of course the goal is to get better culture warriors for Evangelicals so they can compete better in a society of wolves.
Also it seems part of the masculinity "question", just thinly veiled and reflected in the author's worldview. IMO this issue is cobbled together from broad assertions that can't be proved or confirmed, since the subject is so big and has so many moving pieces...
I would want to hear how this perspective interacts with prescriptions such as we find in Paul:
"Now about your love for one another we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other. And in fact, you do love all of God’s family throughout Macedonia. Yet we urge you, brothers and sisters, to do so more and more, and to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody." (1 Th 4)
I agree that safetyism is stifling young people, especially young men. (It's stifling our society at large.) Yet I wouldn't recommend entrepreneurship for entrepreneurship's sake.
Is the disappearance of a "frontier" the issue? A young man can no longer simply "go west."
Living on Long Island for five years, I see the difficulties that safetyist bureaucracy creates for young people. I have recommended to many of them that they do go west. Move to places where you can mind your own business, without others minding it for you, and build.
One thing I found missing from your analysis there was how dang expensive life has gotten. I tell young men to go on a road trip in the summers. See if you can take extra time off around a holiday, drive with a buddy or two. Sleep in the car or in cheap lodging. Pack some road snacks and eat cheap food, and just make sure you get a few showers. But that's expensive now! If they don't have a decent job already, stashing away cash for a trip like this is hard.
Maybe something else which you've recommended is important here: Parents need to give their kids money now, not later. I toured South America in college, mostly with money from my college jobs, but underwritten by my parents toward the end. That experience was deeply valuable. Parents should recognize such value. I hope to do so as my kids grow.
We're reading the Little House series to our kids, and the life of Almanzo Wilder is interesting to consider. As a preteen, he was working alongside his dad in dangerous conditions. He learned how to take appropriate risk.
If you are a parent you will be risk adverse-- because your kids come first. If we exclude people from consideration who came from established fortunes, and people with hereditary power, many of history's transformative leaders were childless: Plato, St Paul, Justinian, assorted popes, assorted great saints, Elizabeth I.
I am wondering if the aversion to taking risk and building something significant in society simply reflects the view in evangelical circles that the "negative world" is no longer a place where a Christian man would want to build something. The thinking might be that it would just require too much frustration and moral compromise. If you try to build a company, for instance, you couldn't hire the people you wanted either because of DEI pressure or because the only people available would be tattoo-covered, nose-pierced weirdos who are more interested in protesting their latest grievance than working. If you stand up for Christian values in a new enterprise, you'd be subject to lawsuits. Most of the new growth businesses are manacing new technologies, like robots and AI. So the best thing is to keep your head low and concentrate on serving God (which we should be doing in any event), raising a family, earning good income in order to support the family, and pursing challenging hobbies. If those reasons weren't enough to stifle worldly ambition, another deterrent is that there are very few good role models of successful Christian men. Most of the successful men in high places are not examples of Christian virtue.
I do agree that a man should try to punch through this kind of thinking to pursue his dreams and do something positive for the world. However, with all the headwinds, it is understandable if he doesn't.
Mostly agree. I've never encountered evangelicals describing failure as a lack of prayer or anything. However, I do feel ambition can be quickly ascribed to a lack of contentment and worldliness, and anything outside the 9-5 risks that gravest of sins: missing a church service. As an Indy Baptist I certainly feel like many of my brethren make an idol out of church attendance. All any institution would have to do to cut out Indy Baptists out of any institution is to schedule meetings Wednesday nights during midweek service.
Rings true. Certainly for the PCA, which I refer to as, "The First Church of Middle Management." The PCA isn't Tony Stark, it's Pepper Potts--administrative assistant.
The author is correct about the fundamental assessment that the Christian world, generally, creates "cubicle dwellers", not leaders, though the general concept of "leaders" also needs review. Most real leaders aren't maintainers of the status quo, they're disruptors, but in a world which values people who are simply "large and in-charge" they tend to just be jerks, and bullies, not innovators. Also, there is a firm belief in the majority -- if the majority believe it, then it must be true, and right. Anyone who goes against the majority is also going against the received religious/theological thinking, and ought to be cast out. After all... to my second thought....
Religious authority trumps all. Having grown up around Christian ministries, and then working in one for a dozen years, the theological dimension trumps all. A guy gets promoted (seldom women), and even if he feels inadequate or beyond his abilities, he was promoted by his theological "betters", so they must be right. This follows all the way up the chain, such that there can never be any questioning if a guy is a jerk, or incompetent, or worse. It can also foster an attitude of entitlement. This goes equally for accounting and other professional practices: "We are good people, we don't need to follow FASBs or other rules for "those" other people."
Finally, all of the above leads to people who are looking for approbation, but more than that, waiting for permission. I spent time in a European country last year where it was pointed out to me that if there isn't a sign clearly giving permission, the behavior must be prohibited. This is all over the country, and quite the opposite of the prevailing thinking here in the U.S. It's probably what is making a colleague of mine a bit crazy, because he can't get the people helping him with a project to get off the dime. I've found the same mentality all throughout the Christian world, and doubly so because of the theological implications of bucking the prevailing opinions. Disagreeing about anything isn't just disagreeing, it's potentially heresy.
I think rather that evangelicalism ATTRACTS risk- and failure-averse people. Many evangelical churches preach a certainty: stay within these boundaries and you'll be safe with God. And then once you're in you find yourself surrounded by other people doing their best to live lives of low risk and therefore low failure. Then this kind of life becomes conflated with what a genuine Christian life should be.
"Boys are formed around a coherent set of virtues: responsibility, deference to authority, moral seriousness, and reputation management."
This is one of the reasons why I've never quite been able to take seriously the feminist "men are raised to be more assertive/aggressive/whatever than women" spiel. There are definitely subcultures where this is the case, but middle-class evangelicalism is not one of them.
Next...yeah, he's not wrong about the issues within evangelicalism, but I am kind of curious about how he wants to develop risk-taking and entrepreneurship.
Kirk was not a cubicle guy, but like most evangelical leaders (Mark Driscoll comes to mind), he encouraged his young male followers to pursue the opposite of what he did -- stop trying to change the world, get a 9-5, and print as many dollars as possible for your wife to spend. In other words, become a cubicle guy.
I don't blame Kirk for this very much -- he was a political pundit and not an evangelical scholar, so he deferred to the church's teachings. But it does explain why he bequeathed his org to his wife rather than to a protege.
Renn wrote about Kirk in the days following his assassination and summarized a lot of this.
I know Renn summarized a lot of this. I don't think he was quite so bald-face in reducing Kirk's gospel to "become a cubicle guy" as you have just done. Crude and obviously wrong. You weren't paying attention.
"...he deferred to the church's teachings." Care to elaborate? You surely aren't talking about his observance of the Jewish Seventh-day Sabbath. You and Renn are the ones preaching, 'be a cubicle guy.' And you are both too dense to see it. The old world of university, collegial, collective status and rising to leadership by following the rules is crumbling before our eyes and you can't see it. Evangelical scholar in the age of AI? What are you talking about?
"deferred to the church's teachings" refers to its teachings on gender and gender roles, specifically in that the primary function of men is to make money and give it to their wives -- a teaching I strongly disagree with, for what it's worth.
The primary function of university was teaching the use of the mind, teaching one how to think. Despite much watering-down of the curriculum in the past 50 years, this is largely still true, and it's certainly more true in university than the alternative. This isn't 2004; you're not going to ascend the ladder overnight by throwing a hasty PHP application onto a Linux box. And no, AI isn't going to help you if you don't know how to think. Men with IQs above 115 belong in college.
Are you really suggesting that it's a good thing that good leaders are rare?
The only language evangelicals seem to truly understand is sports, so let's go with a sports example. The Dodgers are a very successful baseball team for many reasons, and that they are rich helps immensely of course, but what they consistently do (and what many other teams fail to do) is find middling talent and develop them into competent, above-average, 3-4 WAR players in the minors. The Brewers and Rays are also good at this, although they lack the finances to go out and sign Shohei Ohtani. The Mets are horrific at this, which is why they keep failing even when they have the finances to sign Ohtani.
Everyone in baseball recognizes the value of this; the problem there is just that they lack either the scouting to recognize talent that is underdeveloped or the coaching to develop it. Meanwhile, we have evangelicals saying that it's actively a bad thing to even try to recognize or develop evangelical talent!
One of the warnings Isaiah gives us concerning the failure of a culture is that the captain of fifty disappears. We are in desperate need of captains of fifty.
Own your own business. It's the only way back. Captains of the cubicle fifty. Forget about sports. Remember the Colosseum is a cautionary tale. Remember Jesus for Christ's sake. That's leadership. It will get you killed.
Yeah man, owning a plumbing business and cleaning toilets and whitewashing fences is definitely the way back for men, here in the big 26. I'm sure you think working at Panda is also a great path. A guy could have a real impact if he went to law school and started a family law firm, but you wizened boomer types hate college (unless it's for women, of course). It's just not possible to change your mind unless I frame it in terms of how it affects women.
The entire point of Christ's death is so that I wouldn't have to die. There were a lot of martyrs who died for their faith; there were even more who died in that they gave their life to performing well in their chosen vocation. Kirk died for his faith, but he would've been a lot more effective had he lived. The system has to change to make that happen. WE have to change the system to make that happen.
Sorry, we just changed the system. Family law firm? Haha haha. You are clueless to what is happening. You really don't understand AI.
Be like Jesus, that's my song
In the home and in the throng
Be like Jesus all day long
I would be like Jesus
I expect to be persecuted, reviled and hated. Because He warned me. Jesus told us to expect it. The system is in control, we aren't. Jesus didn't change the system. He obeyed God, rather than man. He died alone, humiliated and naked. According to your perverted Gospel, Kirk got killed for being stupid. Jesus died so you don't have to??
Interesting thoughts, but the issue seems created from a patchwork of reality, rather than an accurate reflection of it! Plus it misses the whole teaching of Jesus and the Apostles in the NT about the purpose of God's kingdom during its time on earth IMO - unless of course the goal is to get better culture warriors for Evangelicals so they can compete better in a society of wolves.
Also it seems part of the masculinity "question", just thinly veiled and reflected in the author's worldview. IMO this issue is cobbled together from broad assertions that can't be proved or confirmed, since the subject is so big and has so many moving pieces...
I would want to hear how this perspective interacts with prescriptions such as we find in Paul:
"Now about your love for one another we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other. And in fact, you do love all of God’s family throughout Macedonia. Yet we urge you, brothers and sisters, to do so more and more, and to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody." (1 Th 4)
I agree that safetyism is stifling young people, especially young men. (It's stifling our society at large.) Yet I wouldn't recommend entrepreneurship for entrepreneurship's sake.
Is the disappearance of a "frontier" the issue? A young man can no longer simply "go west."
Living on Long Island for five years, I see the difficulties that safetyist bureaucracy creates for young people. I have recommended to many of them that they do go west. Move to places where you can mind your own business, without others minding it for you, and build.
Your article from last year raises good points around this: https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/adventure-and-entrepreneurship
One thing I found missing from your analysis there was how dang expensive life has gotten. I tell young men to go on a road trip in the summers. See if you can take extra time off around a holiday, drive with a buddy or two. Sleep in the car or in cheap lodging. Pack some road snacks and eat cheap food, and just make sure you get a few showers. But that's expensive now! If they don't have a decent job already, stashing away cash for a trip like this is hard.
Maybe something else which you've recommended is important here: Parents need to give their kids money now, not later. I toured South America in college, mostly with money from my college jobs, but underwritten by my parents toward the end. That experience was deeply valuable. Parents should recognize such value. I hope to do so as my kids grow.
We're reading the Little House series to our kids, and the life of Almanzo Wilder is interesting to consider. As a preteen, he was working alongside his dad in dangerous conditions. He learned how to take appropriate risk.
If you are a parent you will be risk adverse-- because your kids come first. If we exclude people from consideration who came from established fortunes, and people with hereditary power, many of history's transformative leaders were childless: Plato, St Paul, Justinian, assorted popes, assorted great saints, Elizabeth I.
One in every two hundred human beings living today descend from Genghis Khan.
I am wondering if the aversion to taking risk and building something significant in society simply reflects the view in evangelical circles that the "negative world" is no longer a place where a Christian man would want to build something. The thinking might be that it would just require too much frustration and moral compromise. If you try to build a company, for instance, you couldn't hire the people you wanted either because of DEI pressure or because the only people available would be tattoo-covered, nose-pierced weirdos who are more interested in protesting their latest grievance than working. If you stand up for Christian values in a new enterprise, you'd be subject to lawsuits. Most of the new growth businesses are manacing new technologies, like robots and AI. So the best thing is to keep your head low and concentrate on serving God (which we should be doing in any event), raising a family, earning good income in order to support the family, and pursing challenging hobbies. If those reasons weren't enough to stifle worldly ambition, another deterrent is that there are very few good role models of successful Christian men. Most of the successful men in high places are not examples of Christian virtue.
I do agree that a man should try to punch through this kind of thinking to pursue his dreams and do something positive for the world. However, with all the headwinds, it is understandable if he doesn't.
Mostly agree. I've never encountered evangelicals describing failure as a lack of prayer or anything. However, I do feel ambition can be quickly ascribed to a lack of contentment and worldliness, and anything outside the 9-5 risks that gravest of sins: missing a church service. As an Indy Baptist I certainly feel like many of my brethren make an idol out of church attendance. All any institution would have to do to cut out Indy Baptists out of any institution is to schedule meetings Wednesday nights during midweek service.
Perhaps this is a manifestation of passivity, because we don't have a good model of how to work with God.
Rings true. Certainly for the PCA, which I refer to as, "The First Church of Middle Management." The PCA isn't Tony Stark, it's Pepper Potts--administrative assistant.
The author is correct about the fundamental assessment that the Christian world, generally, creates "cubicle dwellers", not leaders, though the general concept of "leaders" also needs review. Most real leaders aren't maintainers of the status quo, they're disruptors, but in a world which values people who are simply "large and in-charge" they tend to just be jerks, and bullies, not innovators. Also, there is a firm belief in the majority -- if the majority believe it, then it must be true, and right. Anyone who goes against the majority is also going against the received religious/theological thinking, and ought to be cast out. After all... to my second thought....
Religious authority trumps all. Having grown up around Christian ministries, and then working in one for a dozen years, the theological dimension trumps all. A guy gets promoted (seldom women), and even if he feels inadequate or beyond his abilities, he was promoted by his theological "betters", so they must be right. This follows all the way up the chain, such that there can never be any questioning if a guy is a jerk, or incompetent, or worse. It can also foster an attitude of entitlement. This goes equally for accounting and other professional practices: "We are good people, we don't need to follow FASBs or other rules for "those" other people."
Finally, all of the above leads to people who are looking for approbation, but more than that, waiting for permission. I spent time in a European country last year where it was pointed out to me that if there isn't a sign clearly giving permission, the behavior must be prohibited. This is all over the country, and quite the opposite of the prevailing thinking here in the U.S. It's probably what is making a colleague of mine a bit crazy, because he can't get the people helping him with a project to get off the dime. I've found the same mentality all throughout the Christian world, and doubly so because of the theological implications of bucking the prevailing opinions. Disagreeing about anything isn't just disagreeing, it's potentially heresy.
I think rather that evangelicalism ATTRACTS risk- and failure-averse people. Many evangelical churches preach a certainty: stay within these boundaries and you'll be safe with God. And then once you're in you find yourself surrounded by other people doing their best to live lives of low risk and therefore low failure. Then this kind of life becomes conflated with what a genuine Christian life should be.
"Boys are formed around a coherent set of virtues: responsibility, deference to authority, moral seriousness, and reputation management."
This is one of the reasons why I've never quite been able to take seriously the feminist "men are raised to be more assertive/aggressive/whatever than women" spiel. There are definitely subcultures where this is the case, but middle-class evangelicalism is not one of them.
Next...yeah, he's not wrong about the issues within evangelicalism, but I am kind of curious about how he wants to develop risk-taking and entrepreneurship.
Was Charlie Kirk a cubicle guy?
Kirk was not a cubicle guy, but like most evangelical leaders (Mark Driscoll comes to mind), he encouraged his young male followers to pursue the opposite of what he did -- stop trying to change the world, get a 9-5, and print as many dollars as possible for your wife to spend. In other words, become a cubicle guy.
I don't blame Kirk for this very much -- he was a political pundit and not an evangelical scholar, so he deferred to the church's teachings. But it does explain why he bequeathed his org to his wife rather than to a protege.
Renn wrote about Kirk in the days following his assassination and summarized a lot of this.
I know Renn summarized a lot of this. I don't think he was quite so bald-face in reducing Kirk's gospel to "become a cubicle guy" as you have just done. Crude and obviously wrong. You weren't paying attention.
"...he deferred to the church's teachings." Care to elaborate? You surely aren't talking about his observance of the Jewish Seventh-day Sabbath. You and Renn are the ones preaching, 'be a cubicle guy.' And you are both too dense to see it. The old world of university, collegial, collective status and rising to leadership by following the rules is crumbling before our eyes and you can't see it. Evangelical scholar in the age of AI? What are you talking about?
"deferred to the church's teachings" refers to its teachings on gender and gender roles, specifically in that the primary function of men is to make money and give it to their wives -- a teaching I strongly disagree with, for what it's worth.
The primary function of university was teaching the use of the mind, teaching one how to think. Despite much watering-down of the curriculum in the past 50 years, this is largely still true, and it's certainly more true in university than the alternative. This isn't 2004; you're not going to ascend the ladder overnight by throwing a hasty PHP application onto a Linux box. And no, AI isn't going to help you if you don't know how to think. Men with IQs above 115 belong in college.
Time out pal, get back in your cubicle. Tell your wife to get back in hers too.
Charlie Kirk was also very rare.
rarity is a quality attending leadership.
Are you really suggesting that it's a good thing that good leaders are rare?
The only language evangelicals seem to truly understand is sports, so let's go with a sports example. The Dodgers are a very successful baseball team for many reasons, and that they are rich helps immensely of course, but what they consistently do (and what many other teams fail to do) is find middling talent and develop them into competent, above-average, 3-4 WAR players in the minors. The Brewers and Rays are also good at this, although they lack the finances to go out and sign Shohei Ohtani. The Mets are horrific at this, which is why they keep failing even when they have the finances to sign Ohtani.
Everyone in baseball recognizes the value of this; the problem there is just that they lack either the scouting to recognize talent that is underdeveloped or the coaching to develop it. Meanwhile, we have evangelicals saying that it's actively a bad thing to even try to recognize or develop evangelical talent!
One of the warnings Isaiah gives us concerning the failure of a culture is that the captain of fifty disappears. We are in desperate need of captains of fifty.
Own your own business. It's the only way back. Captains of the cubicle fifty. Forget about sports. Remember the Colosseum is a cautionary tale. Remember Jesus for Christ's sake. That's leadership. It will get you killed.
Yeah man, owning a plumbing business and cleaning toilets and whitewashing fences is definitely the way back for men, here in the big 26. I'm sure you think working at Panda is also a great path. A guy could have a real impact if he went to law school and started a family law firm, but you wizened boomer types hate college (unless it's for women, of course). It's just not possible to change your mind unless I frame it in terms of how it affects women.
The entire point of Christ's death is so that I wouldn't have to die. There were a lot of martyrs who died for their faith; there were even more who died in that they gave their life to performing well in their chosen vocation. Kirk died for his faith, but he would've been a lot more effective had he lived. The system has to change to make that happen. WE have to change the system to make that happen.
Sorry, we just changed the system. Family law firm? Haha haha. You are clueless to what is happening. You really don't understand AI.
Be like Jesus, that's my song
In the home and in the throng
Be like Jesus all day long
I would be like Jesus
I expect to be persecuted, reviled and hated. Because He warned me. Jesus told us to expect it. The system is in control, we aren't. Jesus didn't change the system. He obeyed God, rather than man. He died alone, humiliated and naked. According to your perverted Gospel, Kirk got killed for being stupid. Jesus died so you don't have to??
You wage slave. Lick boots