Perhaps I should add that I do believe that marriage and even fertility are falling on hard times. I just think that proclaiming the benefits of marriage cannot be done without it being a gospel proclamation, which will inevitably be seen as folly to the worldling. No amount of talk of “human flourishing” or “thriving” will convince selfish men to abandon their selfishness. (Not that that’s what Renn is pushing for.)
And the Christian man who is too lazy to marry must be told that it’s time for him to stop playing video games and start working a second job. That’s what sanctification looks like for the lazy Christian man.
When it comes to MGTOW, I think a strong case can be made that it is the single women in the church who are avoiding marriage, at least at a suitable age, more so than the men. How many evangelical/PCA pastors and parents are encouraging women to get married in their early 20s rather than pursue independence and career? It’s not just that Christian women are feminist, it’s that many don’t consider marriage to be on the table until they reach their 30s and have much less to offer a prospective husband.
Absolutely. And again, we need to speak positively of marriage with women, too. But no amount of speaking positively will undo the fact that we are calling them to be led by a sinner and be vulnerable, etc.
I know of a pastor who recently suffered greatly for daring to say that feminism is bad for women.
To point out the fact that most of the pastors who are willing to speak hard truths are only willing to speak them to men, not women, is helpful. What I don’t want the correction to be “positive, uplifting” talk for both men and women!
Here’s an off-topic comment that you might enjoy. In the comment thread of a Baylyblog post on a similar subject 6 or 7 years ago, I lamented my own singleness and asked for advice on finding godly, non feminist women. Among several replies, one person recommended a Christian dating site that had recently started. Following that recommendation, I signed up and participated for a year or so before I met the woman who became my wife. She is a good woman and knows to fight against any latent feminism in herself. We got married 5.5 years ago and have three kids now. Marriage and (particularly) fatherhood have matured and changed me more than anything else. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t ever a hipster though. Thanks to whoever for the recommendation.
It is worth recognizing that there are various Christians who have been celibate for their whole lives. But as the Apostle Paul points out, most Christians do not have the gift of celibacy, and the “men” in the MGTOW movement most certainly do not have that gift.
Let’s be brutally honest. They are just cowards.
Wonderful, Matthew! Praise God!
“If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.”
The Disciples, the original MGTOWs?
The disciples were responding to the Lord instructing them in the limited permissibility for a man to divorce his wife. Women were given no permission in the Mosaic law to divorce a husband.
MGTOWs are a reaction to the other end of a legal swing. Whereas in 2nd Temple Palestine, a man faced little risk from the prospect of divorce while a woman faced it all, today is the opposite. In our context, the combination of child support, alimony laws, the Duluth model, the gynocentric bias of the “family” court system, divorce modeled by previous generations, and no-fault divorce has resulted in a very high divorce rate, 80% of which are initiated by the wife.
MGTOWs I’ve known are men who have been “divorce-raped”. These men have been left, had their children stolen by the state on behalf of an adulteress, and been forced to pay the majority of their productivity for the privilege. Other MGTOWs of whom I’ve known have heard the stories and have seen the statistics and at least claim to have made the rational calculation to avoid the hassle.
Men respond to incentives, and to stop at calling these men cowards or men-in-scare-quotes is unhelpful and ignores a very real problem that is destroying our civilization. A single man can support himself and his interests very easily. @jtbayly is right to say “proclaiming the benefits of marriage cannot be done without it being a gospel proclamation”. If you want a man to take a wife in this culture, you have to give him a reason for which it’s worth risking losing his children and treasure to a capricious, godless state. Otherwise, many women are easy, prn and video games are easier.
Dear b3k?,
Is there really anyone here who is stopping at calling these men cowards? Plus, who are these men exactly? Are you saying every man who suffers these things is a MGTOW? Of course not. The godly suffer and don’t give way to bitterness and misogyny.
Speaking of those non-cowards who suffer and are sanctified, we pour our lives into helping and crying with and going to court with them, showing them and their children the most tender solicitude as they suffer these things. Every church has them and their ex-wives leave families and churches in shambles. We know this personally and we stand with these men and their children. Solidarity is not too strong a word to use.
But even the cowardly MGTOWS, we stand with them by working to admonish and correct them. We tell them they are cowards and not men at all. We write books for them. We rebuke them. Not sure how long you have been reading us, but I did want to reassure you that we have had all our skin in this game forever. Love, Tim Bayly
Is there really anyone here who is stopping at calling these men cowards?
I should have tagged this post above by @ConservaTibbs. He may wish to respond.
Plus, who are these men exactly?
The three I picture first in my mind are an uncle, a friend from undergrad, and a friend from high school. One divorced and his child stolen while on overseas deployment. One divorced by the drug addict who was given custody.
Yes, I know you know these men, personally. These are the men killing themselves at epidemic rates across America. Have you read Murray’s Coming Apart? I think you’d like it quite a lot. And thanks for clarification on tagging. Love,
My post was 55 words, so there’s no way it could have been an exhaustive look into all of the issues surrounding the MGTOW “movement,”
and I was not advocating ONLY saying they are “cowards” and using scare
quotes. That’s an unfair representation of my post.
Obviously
the Church has to work with these men, bring them to repentance and teach them to be men… and to work with the women who have badly mistreated and embittered the husbands they have abandoned, calling them
to repentance and faith.
I do stand by what I said. Refusing to marry out of fear is a denial of manhood and it is cowardly.
I continue to be astounded by just how pervasive the truth is that there is nothing new under the sun. I too discovered recently that MGTOW is really nothing new. I’m reading “When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe,” by Steven Ozment; and in the first chapter he writes:
“Three years before his own marriage, Martin Luther wrote a treatise, Vom elelichen Laban (On the estate of marriage, 1522), his first lengthy discussion of the subject, in which he complained that ‘marriage has universally fallen into awful disrepute,’ that peddlers everywhere are selling ‘pagan books which treat of nothing but the depravity of womankind and the unhappiness of the estate of marriage’—a reference to classical misogynist and antimarriage sentiments and to the bawdy antifeminist stories that were popular among Luther’s contemporaries.”
A proverb by Jerome was also popularly used in Luther’s day: “If you find things going too well—take a wife.”
One of the most helpful books out there on the Reformation. There’s no way to understand the Reformation outside its context of restoring the Christian discipleship of marriage and family life.
I haven’t read the book, but it sounds good. It seems to me that most Christian teaching on marriage and 99% of sermons on Eph. 5:25 undermine the husband’s discipleship of his wife.
yes, absolutely; and I would go so far as to say it’s intentional
For comment and possible disagreement.
In the early years of Baylyblog, I can recall someone observing that couples in the NYC metro area “live in Manhattan, if they do not have children; Brooklyn, if they have one; Long Island, if they have two, and New Jersey if they have more than two”. Have I remembered correctly?
At any rate, this possibly explains why a church in Manhattan will have in its ranks a high proportion of singles. But this environment will attract other Christian singles who do want to marry, and who figure that in being in a large church like that, will make it easier to find someone. As as they meet, marry and have families … they will then shift into family churches in the suburbs.
I have seen this process at work in a far smaller church than Redeemer. It was planted with a relatively large number of singles, and then attracted more, but the happy result was a good number of covenant marriages and families.
Oh my yes. In No Trump, doubled and redoubled.
“Discipleship of his wife” is the KEY message of Eph. 5:22ff for a husband, and it is the one idea which you will see suppressed, ignored, and discounted in every exposition you pick up if it was published after the feminist conquest of Christian publishing back in the 1980s.
Sheesh! You can’t find this idea even in ostensibly complementarian publications at … say, CBMW. Or in the published inventory of Crossway. Who wants to be pilloried, tarred and feathered, and run out of town on a rail for endorsing such an idea that a husband has a responsibility laid on him by our Lord to disciple his wife??
And, yes, ask me when I’m not in a hurry (like now) and I’ll tell you what I REALLY think.
Another issue.
- Our evangelism with adult women, single or married, does seem to connect more than our evangelism with adult men, single or married. (The latter does need prioritising, but I am preaching to the choir on that one).
- This then has the effect that in the singles’ community, there is a surplus of women to men; it is certainly clear once all concerned are in their thirties. If we had a surplus of single men to single women, and that has never happened, many of the issues thrown up by “women in careers” would not be there, because marriage would be the realistic option.
- My take on things is that many Christian single women who would like to marry ‘if the right man came along’, take a look at what is available and figure that they are better off staying as they are. This approach to things could be challenged more?
Paul Maxwell speaking to this point just yesterday:
https://selfwire.org/article/beautiful-women-evangelical-company-men