Rehabilitating Masculinity

We have all been repeatedly warned against toxic masculinity in church leaders. But in “It’s Good to Be a Man: A Handbook for Godly Masculinity,” authors Michael Foster and Dominic Bnonn Tennant warn us against a toxic femininity that has browbeaten men into being ashamed of their masculinity and embracing androgyny.

It’s Good to Be a Man: A Handbook for Godly Masculinity by Michael Foster and Dominic Bnonn Tennant (242 pages, Canon Press, 2022s)

I have been an English professor for thirty-one years at an evangelical university with a student body that tends toward the conservative and the traditional. Nevertheless, I have noticed increasing confusion among my students as to the nature of male and female, masculinity and femininity husband and wife. To address some of this confusion, I have increasingly felt compelled to weave three reflections on the sexes into my classes. On the whole, these reflections have been received well by students.

First, whereas, when I was young, a man would be called a sexist if he treated men and women exactly the same, today, a man is called a sexist if he does not treat men and women exactly the same. Over a century ago, G. K. Chesterton defined a feminist as someone who dislikes the chief feminine characteristics. The modern attempt to deny that God made us male and female (see Genesis 1:27) and then collapse all essential distinctions between the sexes has not brought greater respect for either. Rather, it has weakened the masculine while causing the true feminine to all but disappear.

Second, the last several generations of Christians, especially evangelicals, have been raised to believe that God has a single soulmate out there for us, and that if we can find him or her, we will have a perfect married life. This notion, while very Romantic, is unbiblical. It hails instead from a myth the Greek pagan playwright Aristophanes tells in Plato’s Symposium. There is only one example in the Bible where God brings together a couple in a way that seems to fit our desire for God to reveal to us our one and only soulmate: Isaac and Rebecca. It’s a lovely story, but the two go on to have one of the most dysfunctional marriages in the Bible, with Isaac favoring the “manly” Esau over Jacob, and Rebecca teaching her darling Jacob how to deceive her old, blind husband.

Third, the same Christians who have been taught to believe they have to seek and find their soulmate, have been further taught that once we find him or her, that person will fulfill all our needs. This is also a lie. It is absolutely vital for the husband to maintain his male friends and the wife to maintain her female friends. One cannot, and should not, expect one’s spouse to fulfill all one’s needs. That is not how God made us. There are kinds of support that we can only get from our fellow men or women.

Although these three reflections have proved helpful for students hungry for direction in the increasingly muddled area of gender, the growing strength and ubiquity of the attack—from without and within the church—on the essential nature of marriage and the sexes has forced the defenders of biblical masculinity and femininity to be bolder and more direct in their defense. Enter Michael Foster and Dominic Bnonn Tennant, who have written a book on masculinity that is sure to ruffle secular and, even more, Christian feathers, but which the church desperately needs to hear if it is to get back on track.

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In It’s Good to Be a Man: A Handbook for Godly Masculinity, Foster and Tennant second most of the things that I have been trying to teach my students over the last decade, but they ratchet everything up several notches. Rather than acquiesce to the status quo and spend their book bemoaning the excesses of “toxic” masculinity, they make it clear that it is not masculinity itself that is toxic, but the perversion of masculinity.

Just as women can so pervert their God-given nurturing qualities as to strangle their family members with a kind of poisonous “smother love,” so can men so pervert their God-given leadership qualities as to become tyrants who crush those who sit under their (rightful) authority. Male headship (patriarchy) is not a result of the Fall, but the Fall has made men prone to abuse that headship, just as it has made women prone to corrupt the biblical call to submit to and respect their husbands into passive-aggressive manipulation.

In what follows, I will highlight some of the much-needed advice that Foster and Tennant offer to their male readers, but first I want to make clear what they do not advise. Though I will concede that the authors often use overly-strong language, make a few too many generalizations, and don’t offer enough footnotes—though none of these things alters the biblical, biological, and anthropological truth of their book—they do not perpetuate the unbiblical myth of the ideal man as a loner who indulges in his own private war of revenge against society.

Since, oddly, the authors do not dispel this myth until their second-to-last chapter, I will mention it first to prevent readers from putting down the book because they don’t want to be told that John Wayne movies represent the pure embodiment of masculinity. A hero like Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven or Keanu Reeves in John Wick, they insist, “is a man who has untethered himself from community, so that he can pursue some selfish mission that will ultimately come to nothing. It is the fetishization of self-reliance” (192-193)

Instead, Foster and Tennant hold up the heroes of The Magnificent Seven, who, through their fraternity, “[polish] over each other’s flaws, [fill] in for each other’s weaknesses, and [combine] each other’s strengths” (194). “Sexual polarity,” they explain, “is what forms the strong bonds of marriage—but sexual homogeneity is what forms the strong bonds of friendship” (194). It is not good, Genesis 2:18 tells us, for the man to be alone; that is why, the authors argue, he needs both a wife and a band of brothers to help him fulfill the mission assigned to him by God.

True, a bad marriage can turn a man away from his divine calling just as bad friends can steer him toward being a thug, a rapist, and an outlaw. But these, like toxic masculinity, are perversions of something good and godly. Our “masculine nature” the authors remind us again and again, because our age needs to be reminded of this again and again, “is how we are designed to image God as men. This nature must be redeemed, not rejected. Sin does not eliminate our natural inclinations; it corrupts them. In the same way, grace does not replace our natural inclinations; it restores them” (26).

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Why then did God create men, and how are they to carry out their calling? Well, first let’s get one thing straight. “There is no hint in the Bible,” Foster and Tennant assure their male readers in bold face, “that your aggressive instincts are a result of the fall.” “You are not,” they go on to clarify, “a defective woman. Your desire to conquer and to subdue, to hew down and to build up, to form and to shape, has nothing to do with the curse. It is man’s natural, pre-fall, created purpose. You yearn to bend the world to your will because Adam was created to bend the world to his will” (25).

This is not some adolescent form of male boasting or swaggering. It is a simple biblical truth. God created us to rule over the earth and be fruitful (Genesis 1:26-28). God began that process in the six days of creation, but he commissioned us, the crown of creation, to fill the earth and exert dominion over it. Though this commission was given to Adam and Eve, and though it could not be carried out without their collaboration, God did not create them as carbon copies of each other. Together, the man and his helpmeet (Genesis 2:18) would create households through which the whole earth would be subdued.

In Genesis, God orders by division, horizontal as well as vertical, a process that includes the sexes, marriage, and the church: that is, the Body of Christ. “God’s ordering of creation by division is not just a separation into kinds, but into hierarchies. Authority and submission, strong and weak, height and depth, holy and common, inner and outer, greater and lesser—these are all built into the structure of the cosmos from the very days of creation… and they are all very good” (47).

Unlike many Christian books for men, Foster and Tennant do not place their emphasis on helping their male readers find a wife. Indeed, in their final chapter, they caution their readers away from making the finding of a wife their mission. Far from being his mission goal, a godly wife should be his support in achieving that goal, which is why God commissioned Adam before creating Eve.

“This creation pattern,” the authors explain, “reveals two key principles about God’s general design:

1. Men should generally have a mission before they seek a wife to magnify it.
2. Women will generally desire a man who is already on mission—a man who can carry her along because he is already going somewhere” (211).

A man who seeks after a wife before pursuing his God-given mission risks turning his wife into a second mother. Instead, if he cultivates in himself the necessary qualities to perform his mission—the authors identify these as the virtues of wisdom, workmanship, and strength, the traits of enterprise, constancy, and readiness, and the duties of envisioning and planning, building and supplying, and guarding and fighting—then the proper woman will be drawn to him and desire to partner with him in his mission. A man, that is to say, does not need a soulmate but a godly helpmeet to aid him in fulfilling his mission—along with a godly fraternity of men to spur him on to virtue and duty.

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What Foster and Tennant write about the biblical view of marriage and the sexes will not sit well with Christians who have adopted, perhaps unconsciously, the progressive definition of sexism as the belief that there are essential differences between the sexes and that those differences manifest themselves, in part, in differing roles and ministries. What will sit even less well with evangelicals who have absorbed the zeitgeist is their critique of the feminization of the church.

Putting to one side the specific issue of female pastors, Foster and Tennant argue that when “women hold power in the church—whether officially or unofficially—two things tend to happen:

1. They strive to include anyone agreeable, regardless of error.
2. They strive to exclude anyone disagreeable, regardless of orthodoxy” (89).

By using their God-given feminine gift for peacemaking in the wrong way and the wrong place, these controlling women end up allowing heresy into the church. Why are they not prevented from doing so by men in the church? Because the men have been taught to suppress their masculine aggression and to seek out and defer to the validation of women.

To make matters worse, because these men “are ‘nice guys,’ and conditioned in using feminine tactics, they will seldom engage with masculine strategies like direct confrontation and factual refutation. Rather, they will turn to covert maneuvering and character assassination, trying to manipulate the offender into going away through subtle ostracization, turning others against him behind his back” (93).

We have all been repeatedly warned against toxic masculinity in church leaders. Foster and Tennant warn us against a toxic femininity that has browbeaten men into being ashamed of their masculinity and embracing androgyny. They warn us as well about the subtle ways in which churches teach men “to see themselves as androgynous spirits, trapped in bodies that, unlike women’s, have nasty, sinful urges” (86). This emasculation of men, when combined with society’s call to women to act like men in order to displace men in leadership roles, plays perfectly into Satan’s hands—for Satan enjoys nothing more than preventing us from fulfilling God’s mandate to be fruitful and multiply.

Reading It’s Good to Be a Man is like bathing in a cold stream. It is fresh and bracing, but it stings and burns. And yet, the church needs that stinging and burning if it is to replace niceness with faithfulness and a desire to please with a passion to transform.

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