"Efilism"... The better things get, the harder we have to destroy it.
What is it about a wealthier society that inspires many people in it to despise it? Is it the depression that the higher standards of living don't bring ultimate satisfaction? Is it the extra free time to develop eccentric thinking? Is it the alienation from traditional life?
Yes to writing on men's issues. Your writings on this topic are realistic without becoming pessimistic, and celebrate virtuous masculinity without veering into toxic masculinity or pretending that every man is going to be a giga chad
Suggestion TLDR: A men’s topic that I think a lot of guys would benefit from learning about is the differences in how men and women experience suffering.
In Band of Brothers, the belgiums punished those who had slept with Germans by shooting the men and public shaming the women. A materialist evolutionary psychologist may see this an example of “eggs are expensive, but sperm is cheap.” And although this may be part of the dynamic, it is not the full picture. It is at least partly due to the fact that men and women experience suffering differently. Men who endure suffering gain masculinity points. If you are dealing with a man that must be removed from the social order, he cannot merely be severely punished. Because his endurance of it may gain him status. He must be killed (or maybe exiled). On the other hand a woman, does not get the same thing out of suffering that men do. She really only gets femininity points from suffering if it gives her positive attention. This is why shaming the women was sufficient. It provides punishment without running the risk of increasing her social standing. The goal is after all, to prevent traitors from having influence in the group.
A lot of guys expect their wives to endure suffering the same way they themselves do, without realizing they are actually asking more of their wives. Women are seen as more womanly through the attention hierarchy, and so suffering only benefits them if it gains them attention. A mother dramtacically telling her labor story - translation: give me your attention. A church lady talking about how women struggle with porn and not just the men, after hearing a sermon on the subject - Translation: one of my friends is trying to use the bad thing she did to get attention. (Btw pastors all too often take the bait IMHO)
There is so much in this topic. And it gets more complicated that women’s desires are thoroughly more mimetic than mens. It ties directly into the divorce moment, church and gender, marriage etc.
How should husbands meet their wife’s attention needs without becoming a doormat?
How should pastors refrain from inadvertently rewarding bad behavior?
What are some ways that a husband can structure the family life so that the wife benefits from taking on the necessary sufferings in the home?
These are just some of the questions that this subject addresses. But I wrote way too much.
That nyt divorce article is complete manipulation. She told on herself by saying she knew before he did. That's her own thing, and she's passing it off to others.
Burge's arguments are talking past the diagnosis of the Mainliners. Yes, there are lots of people, many of them seniors, who are theologically and politically conservative within the Mainline churches. I have close family members who are those people. The point, however, is that these people are inert within these churches.
I have Episcopal family members, attended Episcopal churches for over ten years, and even was an employee of Bishop Jenkins of Louisiana for a while. I know these people, lived with them, and heard it all. When New Hampshire elected Gene Robinson, do you know what several people told me? "It's just those Yankee Episcopals. We Southerners have common sense. They're troublemakers and enjoy causing controversy. Ignore it or you're giving them what they want." They did nothing, and the disease spread.
There are two countervailing motions in the liberal Mainline. When people become too liberal, they drop out of the Mainline Churches to become Nones. This causes the laity to begin trending right. However, the remainder happens to also be rather old as younger people have less attachment to the Mainline denominations and convert out to Catholicism and Evangelicism. We've seen a balancing point over the last couple of decades where the theological conservatives are dying as fast as the theological liberals are apostatizing. This is a recipe for inertia. Old folks aren't going to fight a battle to reclaim their denomination, young folks exit left and right, and the remainders are those who have institutional interests and salaries.
What about that young fellow and his reconquista? We've seen what happens when the laity revolt. They get their church sold out from under them. The Mainline Churches are utterly dominated by their ecclesiastical bureaucracy to the point that they don't even own their places of worship like most Evangelical churches do. Look at the disaster of the UMC breakup. As much as I complain about the SBC, at least we own our church. At least I can talk to the people in charge and have a chance at convincing them to change without running into lawsuits from some real estate portfolio run by a coven of lesbian deacons. That's what deceptive about Burge's numbers. It doesn't matter if it becomes 66% or 75% Republican. Episcopal laity are locked out, plain and simple. I've seen it with my own eyes. Bishop Jenkins tried to sell off my great-grandfather's church and give the money to one of the precursors to BLM. Luckily, he was diagnosed before he went through with it and stepped down before putting ink to paper. Not everybody is so lucky to have their bishop diagnosed as mentally ill, despite the fact that most of them are.
It's not true that Mainline churches are dominated by their bureaucracy and don't own their own buildings. Of the 7 mainline denominations, 3 of them practice congregational polity with the local congregation owning its own building, just like some evangelicals. On the other hand, some evangelicals do not own their own property, for example: the Church of the Nazarene, the Foursquare Church, and the Church of God. The difference between Mainline and Evangelical is not one of polity.
You also talk about the Mainline being old, but the age-statistics for the SBC and their mainline counterparts ABCUSA (i.e. the Northern Baptists) are nearly identical per the Pew Religious Lanscape survey, despite the South on the whole being younger than the North. Some evangelical denominations are quite young, but not all and not the SBC.
Aaron is right: "evangelicals don’t have nearly as a good a handle on the reality of mainline Protestantism as they think they do."
For starters, I'd suggest you begin with some of the classics: Kelley's "Why Conservative Churches Are Growing" and Hoge, Johnson, and Luiden's "Vanishing Boundaries" to get the core of the Mainline collapse.
For some of the specific claims I make, try Putnam and Campbell's "American Grace," Finke and Stark's "The Churching of America," and Coate's 2006 Rutgers working paper "Who (or what) caused the decline in membership in the Episcopal Church" on the aging of the Mainline Churches vis-a-vis Evangelicals. Also try Smith and Denton's "Soul Searchers" on the failure of Mainliners to retain their own children to Evangelicals and Bullivant's "Nonverts" on their failure to retain their own children to atheism.
Everyone already knows that the line between Mainline and Evangelical is fuzzy, so cherry-picking outlying denominations isn't a convincing argument.
Broad, Pew-style studies lose granularity versus the deeper case studies that sociologists of religion can perform. Don't trust those kinds of reports because they bury confounding and collinear variables in a mass of aggregated datapoints.
I'm seconding Jack on the mens' issues. I was reading you back in your Masculinist days and there is such a complete dearth of writing on mens' issues by Christians written for Christians that doesn't fall into the typical Churchianity/tradcon slant.
Aaron, love your work. I personally like some of your variety (within your focus). I would like men’s lifestyle and men’s issues to continue to be a part of your work, but I like a lot of the other things you have to say too, especially on elites, history, the church, etc.
I read Bachiochi's piece. I can tell there's a lot that this lady and I wouldn't see eye to eye on. But it's at least different. I think Aaron is a little too hard on it.
When I think of the stereotypical tradcon "step up" dialogue, it's someone telling young men that they need to quit video games, excel in school, move out of the basement, get a good job, and become pillars of the community, all to be worthy of even the most unremarkable woman, whose journey of sexual exploration heretofore is part of the past and need not be mentioned. Bachiochi is really not doing that here. She's just saying quit the porn, and everything else will fall into place. I don't think that's quite true, but it's still an improvement over the usual material in this genre.
The basic transaction she seems to be proposing (which is apparent in that excerpt Aaron quoted) is that young women focus on avoiding premarital sex while young men focus on avoiding porn addictions. That's at least a pretty straightforward quid pro quo. Sure, she's still mostly blaming young women's failings on young men not stepping up. But she's at least trying to arrive at a result that I would want for both my sons and daughters.
"Unremarkable woman, whose journey of sexual exploration heretofore is part of the past and need not be mentioned"
I think within tradcon discourse the assumption is that the women these guys are going for didn't embark upon such a journey but instead kept herself pure for her future husband.
Now, the statistics indicate that this is very rarely the case within society, and is probably not true in the majority of cases even within tradcon circles, but that is the assumption.
Right, but I think in the genre of “man up” commentary, including that coming from the right, women’s failings are seldom given any attention, even if the speaker, when pressed, would acknowledge that promiscuity is a problem for women. I thought this piece was more direct about it than most. But maybe that’s just my impression and I have a Platonic ideal of awful “man up” commentary in mind that I'm comparing it to.
I will say this again - and probably be ignored again. There is no institutional solution to this demise in Christianity in America. We didn't get into this situation overnight and won't get out of it overnight. We must remember God always keeps a remanent.
I'm over 70 years old now and married over 44 years. We have three daughters - two of which are married with their own children giving us nine grandchildren. Our youngest daughter who is adopted has developmental issues and is still living with us.
My answer is that Christian parents should raise their children to be married and have children. Not that it will always happen, but it should be the goal - not an occupation/career or education. Those are a means to an end - to raise Godly children. Our daughters were (and are being) raised to be Christian wives and mothers - not to go to college or pursue a career for themselves. If we had had boys, we would have raised them with goal of being Christian husbands and father. Again, a career and education are a means to an end.
My wife, who is a very talented woman, continually tells me and her daughters and their husbands that what kept her going many times, was me praising her for being a Godly wife and mother - and not diminishing her role.
Again, there is no institutional answer - the church, the government and the culture will not fix this. It will be God working through Godly parents in the long, persistent and many times difficult struggle of raising your children.
Glad you made mention of Freya's First Things piece. Having read your stuff for a while, and paying attention, it seemed like just the kind of article you'd (correctly) mention.
Aaron, please keep writing about mens' issues. You are one of very few influencers who have good takes on this topic, and it's the main reason why I'm a subscriber.
"Because women will continue to think it’s in their best interest—and, frankly, I think they are right—to decline becoming mothers with the profound vulnerability and dependency that entails—with men in whom they cannot put their trust."
I agree with her completely about what's objectively in women's best interest (i.e., not to have a baby with a man you can't trust). However, our persistent 40% illegitimacy rate suggests that as a descriptive matter quite a few women are willing to have a baby with an untrustworthy man.
This might be a bifurcation, where status-conscious women will mostly avoid or delay motherhood as much as possible, and women who aren't as status conscious won't care about having a child out of wedlock
More men stuff!
"Efilism"... The better things get, the harder we have to destroy it.
What is it about a wealthier society that inspires many people in it to despise it? Is it the depression that the higher standards of living don't bring ultimate satisfaction? Is it the extra free time to develop eccentric thinking? Is it the alienation from traditional life?
Yes to writing on men's issues. Your writings on this topic are realistic without becoming pessimistic, and celebrate virtuous masculinity without veering into toxic masculinity or pretending that every man is going to be a giga chad
Suggestion TLDR: A men’s topic that I think a lot of guys would benefit from learning about is the differences in how men and women experience suffering.
In Band of Brothers, the belgiums punished those who had slept with Germans by shooting the men and public shaming the women. A materialist evolutionary psychologist may see this an example of “eggs are expensive, but sperm is cheap.” And although this may be part of the dynamic, it is not the full picture. It is at least partly due to the fact that men and women experience suffering differently. Men who endure suffering gain masculinity points. If you are dealing with a man that must be removed from the social order, he cannot merely be severely punished. Because his endurance of it may gain him status. He must be killed (or maybe exiled). On the other hand a woman, does not get the same thing out of suffering that men do. She really only gets femininity points from suffering if it gives her positive attention. This is why shaming the women was sufficient. It provides punishment without running the risk of increasing her social standing. The goal is after all, to prevent traitors from having influence in the group.
A lot of guys expect their wives to endure suffering the same way they themselves do, without realizing they are actually asking more of their wives. Women are seen as more womanly through the attention hierarchy, and so suffering only benefits them if it gains them attention. A mother dramtacically telling her labor story - translation: give me your attention. A church lady talking about how women struggle with porn and not just the men, after hearing a sermon on the subject - Translation: one of my friends is trying to use the bad thing she did to get attention. (Btw pastors all too often take the bait IMHO)
There is so much in this topic. And it gets more complicated that women’s desires are thoroughly more mimetic than mens. It ties directly into the divorce moment, church and gender, marriage etc.
How should husbands meet their wife’s attention needs without becoming a doormat?
How should pastors refrain from inadvertently rewarding bad behavior?
What are some ways that a husband can structure the family life so that the wife benefits from taking on the necessary sufferings in the home?
These are just some of the questions that this subject addresses. But I wrote way too much.
Thanks, Sid.
That nyt divorce article is complete manipulation. She told on herself by saying she knew before he did. That's her own thing, and she's passing it off to others.
Burge's arguments are talking past the diagnosis of the Mainliners. Yes, there are lots of people, many of them seniors, who are theologically and politically conservative within the Mainline churches. I have close family members who are those people. The point, however, is that these people are inert within these churches.
I have Episcopal family members, attended Episcopal churches for over ten years, and even was an employee of Bishop Jenkins of Louisiana for a while. I know these people, lived with them, and heard it all. When New Hampshire elected Gene Robinson, do you know what several people told me? "It's just those Yankee Episcopals. We Southerners have common sense. They're troublemakers and enjoy causing controversy. Ignore it or you're giving them what they want." They did nothing, and the disease spread.
There are two countervailing motions in the liberal Mainline. When people become too liberal, they drop out of the Mainline Churches to become Nones. This causes the laity to begin trending right. However, the remainder happens to also be rather old as younger people have less attachment to the Mainline denominations and convert out to Catholicism and Evangelicism. We've seen a balancing point over the last couple of decades where the theological conservatives are dying as fast as the theological liberals are apostatizing. This is a recipe for inertia. Old folks aren't going to fight a battle to reclaim their denomination, young folks exit left and right, and the remainders are those who have institutional interests and salaries.
What about that young fellow and his reconquista? We've seen what happens when the laity revolt. They get their church sold out from under them. The Mainline Churches are utterly dominated by their ecclesiastical bureaucracy to the point that they don't even own their places of worship like most Evangelical churches do. Look at the disaster of the UMC breakup. As much as I complain about the SBC, at least we own our church. At least I can talk to the people in charge and have a chance at convincing them to change without running into lawsuits from some real estate portfolio run by a coven of lesbian deacons. That's what deceptive about Burge's numbers. It doesn't matter if it becomes 66% or 75% Republican. Episcopal laity are locked out, plain and simple. I've seen it with my own eyes. Bishop Jenkins tried to sell off my great-grandfather's church and give the money to one of the precursors to BLM. Luckily, he was diagnosed before he went through with it and stepped down before putting ink to paper. Not everybody is so lucky to have their bishop diagnosed as mentally ill, despite the fact that most of them are.
It's not true that Mainline churches are dominated by their bureaucracy and don't own their own buildings. Of the 7 mainline denominations, 3 of them practice congregational polity with the local congregation owning its own building, just like some evangelicals. On the other hand, some evangelicals do not own their own property, for example: the Church of the Nazarene, the Foursquare Church, and the Church of God. The difference between Mainline and Evangelical is not one of polity.
You also talk about the Mainline being old, but the age-statistics for the SBC and their mainline counterparts ABCUSA (i.e. the Northern Baptists) are nearly identical per the Pew Religious Lanscape survey, despite the South on the whole being younger than the North. Some evangelical denominations are quite young, but not all and not the SBC.
Aaron is right: "evangelicals don’t have nearly as a good a handle on the reality of mainline Protestantism as they think they do."
For starters, I'd suggest you begin with some of the classics: Kelley's "Why Conservative Churches Are Growing" and Hoge, Johnson, and Luiden's "Vanishing Boundaries" to get the core of the Mainline collapse.
For some of the specific claims I make, try Putnam and Campbell's "American Grace," Finke and Stark's "The Churching of America," and Coate's 2006 Rutgers working paper "Who (or what) caused the decline in membership in the Episcopal Church" on the aging of the Mainline Churches vis-a-vis Evangelicals. Also try Smith and Denton's "Soul Searchers" on the failure of Mainliners to retain their own children to Evangelicals and Bullivant's "Nonverts" on their failure to retain their own children to atheism.
Everyone already knows that the line between Mainline and Evangelical is fuzzy, so cherry-picking outlying denominations isn't a convincing argument.
Broad, Pew-style studies lose granularity versus the deeper case studies that sociologists of religion can perform. Don't trust those kinds of reports because they bury confounding and collinear variables in a mass of aggregated datapoints.
I'm seconding Jack on the mens' issues. I was reading you back in your Masculinist days and there is such a complete dearth of writing on mens' issues by Christians written for Christians that doesn't fall into the typical Churchianity/tradcon slant.
Aaron, love your work. I personally like some of your variety (within your focus). I would like men’s lifestyle and men’s issues to continue to be a part of your work, but I like a lot of the other things you have to say too, especially on elites, history, the church, etc.
I read Bachiochi's piece. I can tell there's a lot that this lady and I wouldn't see eye to eye on. But it's at least different. I think Aaron is a little too hard on it.
When I think of the stereotypical tradcon "step up" dialogue, it's someone telling young men that they need to quit video games, excel in school, move out of the basement, get a good job, and become pillars of the community, all to be worthy of even the most unremarkable woman, whose journey of sexual exploration heretofore is part of the past and need not be mentioned. Bachiochi is really not doing that here. She's just saying quit the porn, and everything else will fall into place. I don't think that's quite true, but it's still an improvement over the usual material in this genre.
The basic transaction she seems to be proposing (which is apparent in that excerpt Aaron quoted) is that young women focus on avoiding premarital sex while young men focus on avoiding porn addictions. That's at least a pretty straightforward quid pro quo. Sure, she's still mostly blaming young women's failings on young men not stepping up. But she's at least trying to arrive at a result that I would want for both my sons and daughters.
"Unremarkable woman, whose journey of sexual exploration heretofore is part of the past and need not be mentioned"
I think within tradcon discourse the assumption is that the women these guys are going for didn't embark upon such a journey but instead kept herself pure for her future husband.
Now, the statistics indicate that this is very rarely the case within society, and is probably not true in the majority of cases even within tradcon circles, but that is the assumption.
Right, but I think in the genre of “man up” commentary, including that coming from the right, women’s failings are seldom given any attention, even if the speaker, when pressed, would acknowledge that promiscuity is a problem for women. I thought this piece was more direct about it than most. But maybe that’s just my impression and I have a Platonic ideal of awful “man up” commentary in mind that I'm comparing it to.
Make Women Virgins Again.
Men also. Both is good.
I will say this again - and probably be ignored again. There is no institutional solution to this demise in Christianity in America. We didn't get into this situation overnight and won't get out of it overnight. We must remember God always keeps a remanent.
I'm over 70 years old now and married over 44 years. We have three daughters - two of which are married with their own children giving us nine grandchildren. Our youngest daughter who is adopted has developmental issues and is still living with us.
My answer is that Christian parents should raise their children to be married and have children. Not that it will always happen, but it should be the goal - not an occupation/career or education. Those are a means to an end - to raise Godly children. Our daughters were (and are being) raised to be Christian wives and mothers - not to go to college or pursue a career for themselves. If we had had boys, we would have raised them with goal of being Christian husbands and father. Again, a career and education are a means to an end.
My wife, who is a very talented woman, continually tells me and her daughters and their husbands that what kept her going many times, was me praising her for being a Godly wife and mother - and not diminishing her role.
Again, there is no institutional answer - the church, the government and the culture will not fix this. It will be God working through Godly parents in the long, persistent and many times difficult struggle of raising your children.
So ends the sermon.
Glad you made mention of Freya's First Things piece. Having read your stuff for a while, and paying attention, it seemed like just the kind of article you'd (correctly) mention.
Aaron, please keep writing about mens' issues. You are one of very few influencers who have good takes on this topic, and it's the main reason why I'm a subscriber.
"Because women will continue to think it’s in their best interest—and, frankly, I think they are right—to decline becoming mothers with the profound vulnerability and dependency that entails—with men in whom they cannot put their trust."
I agree with her completely about what's objectively in women's best interest (i.e., not to have a baby with a man you can't trust). However, our persistent 40% illegitimacy rate suggests that as a descriptive matter quite a few women are willing to have a baby with an untrustworthy man.
This might be a bifurcation, where status-conscious women will mostly avoid or delay motherhood as much as possible, and women who aren't as status conscious won't care about having a child out of wedlock