I don’t think Christian publishing has ONLY one problem (tailoring books to women). Another is that they want to sell more books than the true market will bear. I’m sure Banner of Truth or similar publishers have little problem selling thick books at [$29.99] because they are worth it and because they address real Christian matters rather than some girly therapeutic psycho-babel. The Christian publishing biz is also deaf to market signals.
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Newbie here, though I know (or know of) a lot of you. Greetings one and all.
I’ve read with interest the posts to this thread. The “new” thing I’d add is this: the problem Maxwell complains about (and most others agree with) is very old. Everything Maxwell describes was in full flower _35 years ago. I’m deadly serious, men. It was just that strong back in the late 80s.
At that time, my wife and I both began writing - she to women, I to men - on a comprehensive Biblical theology of manhood and womanhood, a thing that still does not percolate as such within any form of American evangelical Protestantism. Our first stop as we were writing was the standard evangelical publishing industry - Zondervan, Word, Nav Press, IVP, Baker, Crossway, and all the rest. We met very firm, very focused, very hostile rejection, both for the message we were presenting and for the audience these publishers were aiming at.
I say this not to register another cri de coeur from yet another victim of this Christian anti-male cabal, but rather to point to a different problem just as serious as the one Maxwell describes, to wit: it’s only in recent months that objections have arisen in far flung quarters of evangelicalism from the men who have been (supposedly) conspired against.
Why is that??
Here’s my guess: like secular feminism, religious feminism has proven to be a sort of Turkish delight for evangelical men. “The women want to run things? Great! I don’t have to!”
There is hope, of course. There’s always hope. I simply point to the hope (and the healthy fear) proclaimed by the herald of our Saviour, that gritty fellow out in the Judean wilderness 2,000 years ago. Men within the Christian camp who have a valid complaint such as Maxwell surveys in the original post above - such men need first to repent themselves of whatever there is within themselves that permits such anti-male cabals to run loose for the past three or four decades.
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Exactly. I think the issue of posing is paramount because I’ve met many Instagram personalities outside the Christian community (and some within) who’ve capitalized on the hunger for manliness in our culture, do a great job creating a social media feed that includes firearms, beard oils, and outdoorsy photos with their trophy wives, yet when you converse with those same men they’ll tell you it’s all for appearance. They don’t actually hunt that much, work on vehicles, or even enjoy the outdoors; they just know what sells. And I think it’s essential that as Christian men we really love biblical masculinity and pursue it out of obedience to Christ, not the applause it might bring us.
I’ll also say I think there’s a tendency in groups of guys that celebrate masculinity to pretend that you’ve already arrived or are somehow pure masculinity incarnate. Realistically, it’s a process of learning and admitting that, quite often, I need to challenge myself in a certain area because I’m not very manly. For example, I haven’t always been great mechanically. So I will intentionally carve out time each year to learn and grow—this year I rebuilt the front end of my truck and replaced rear shocks and front coilovers. It took me way too long, included a lot of head scratching and frustration, but when I’d finished there was pride in the work. Each day I’d rise and work from early in the morning to sometimes past midnight, with one or two breaks. My body was sore and drained, as the working man’s body often is. It also helped me connect with a lot of the men in our church, those who are as intimidated by theology as I am by steering rack components and leaking brake lines. We have to admit, as men, that we are in the process of hardening, like iron sharpening iron, and this means disciplining our bodies and minds for godly masculine virtue.
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Graham, agreed.
I think the depth of the Puritan and Reformed works published by Banner of Truth, when compared to modern treatments of the same topics strikes at the heart of the issue. Recently, I preached a series on holiness, studying works both modern and ancient. What did I find? You can’t get much better than J.C. Ryle, and almost everything modern was dumbed down, simplistic, and mildly unhelpful. Almost to the point I wouldn’t recommend much of the new literature.
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That’s encouraging to hear. I think the more we read older works and Reformed men from the past, the more we’ll start to see, collectively, how shallow the current evangelical content stream (from sermons to books) has become.
The great challenge, for many, is that Chandler and others market themselves as staunchly reformed guys, so it takes discernment and help from our pastors and teachers to sort them out.
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Eric, I see the problem right there. You preached on holiness. You probably even mentioned “sin” and “righteousness”. Didn’t you take “Man-pleasing 101” at cemetery?
One thing I notice the more I read Ryle - he was always straightforward, but never abrasive; he would confront his hearers, but never antagonize them. One gets the sense that they have been both warmly loved and duly warned under his preaching. He is a man for our day, if ever there was one.
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Catching up on the conversation…
Throughout this thread, a number of comments are made about reading dead fathers in the faith and I’m about as sympathetic to that as a man could be. For years I was a big supporter of everything Banner or Truth did, and my two brothers and I went to their conference each year out in Grantham, PA. Then we stopped. Why?
Because it became clear Banner of Truth was incapable of rising above museum reproductions. They were never helpful on the subject of sexuality, for instance, except in their repetition of what had been said a century or three ago. While it’s good to cultivate respect and love and the devouring of past scholarship and pastoral care and instruction, there are actually new errors and new expressions of old errors which must be fought by the men of today in the language of today.
As Joe Brown points out in his “Heresies,” we grow in our understanding of God’s Word by fighting the errors of today. This is quite different from rehearsing the battles and parries of dead men against the errors of yesterday, and this is the work we men today must absolutely must without question give ourselves to.
Ryle’s “Holiness” is superb, but some of the best parts are best because of how closely they touch on, and condemn, the cheap-grace movement of the Reformed church of our time. Yet every last pastor among us should be able to start from Ryle’s “Holiness” and continue writing warnings and exhortations and rebukes concerning holiness that are even more helpful than Ryle is now. Likely not better written, but more helpful because more focussed on the particular strain of virus we and our loved ones and flocks have.
Concerning Joseph’s mention of women being the vanguard of language change, gentlemen, start your engines:
“The role of gender differences in language change has been widely discussed in the variationist sociolinguistic literature. The broadest generalization is that women are at the vanguard of change in monolingual settings (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2003, Labov 2001).” http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wss/6/paper2863.pdf
" women are more likely to use [prestige (Prestige (sociolinguistics) - Wikipedia) forms and avoid stigmatized variants than men for a majority of linguistic variables, but that they are also more likely to lead language change by using innovative forms of variables." Gender paradox - Wikipedia
“Sociolinguistic studies have long observed that women use more forms of standard language than men, so much so that the stereotype of women’s hypercorrect language has emerged as somewhat of a universal principle in the field. By extension, sociolinguists have also recognized women’s important role in the initiation and dissemination of language change. Earlier studies identified women as the leaders of linguistic changes that that spread from above the level of public consciousness and involved new prestige forms emanating from the upper ranks of the social strata. In contrast, men were found to lead changes in vernacular forms spreading below the level of public awareness.” http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6362-gregoire.htm
From Smithonian.com: “Teenage Girls Have Led Language Innovation for Centuries. They’ve been on the cutting edge of the English language since at least the 1500s.”
Teenage Girls Have Led Language Innovation for Centuries | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine
“Sociolinguistic research on gender has shown that, while women as a whole tend to stick closer to standard language than men, young women are often pioneers in linguistic development.”It’s generally pretty well known that if you identify a sound change in progress, then young people will be leading old people and women tend to be maybe half a generation ahead of males on average.” says Mark Liberman, a University of Pennsylvania linguist.” Young Women Leading the Way in Linguistic Change | Autostraddle
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Agree on the point about reading older writers … I think it was CS Lewis who observed that while older writers had their blind spots, they wouldn’t be your blind spots". Specifically:
The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.
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Yup, and this is why, in addition to dead fathers, we should read Africans and women and pagans and Evangelicals. Smile. Love,
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Excellent points, Tim.
I love this:
We grow in our understanding of God’s Word by fighting the errors of today. This is quite different from rehearsing the battles and parries of dead men against the errors of yesterday, and this is the work we men today must absolutely without question give ourselves to.
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