Of God and Men

Throughout American history, the roots of manhood was often pretty straightforward. It may not have been easy, or even right for everyone. But most people would probably have agreed to be a man you need to work hard, be strong, and take care of your family. Integrity and accountability. You have to be responsible. You have to be a leader. Being a provider for your family. Being strong. But over the last several decades, sweeping social and economic changes have brought that ideal into question and made the path to a fulfilling life as a man more uncertain. All of the conflicting input and ideas that are out there about what it means to be a man. There's a wall and I don't know what's on the other side of that. I don't want to know what's on the other side of that. Many men are feeling angry, confused, isolated, and even hopeless as they strive for increasingly unattainable ideals. Or wrestle with an identity that may feel more like a burden than a strength. To help us understand how we got here and how we might find a healthier way forward. We'll talk with Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. I think that all societies in one way or another had to figure out what is the role of men. Why do we need men? What do we need men to do for us in the tribe now? And as more young men turn to Christianity for answers, we'll talk to Dr. Russell Moore, editor of Christianity today, about the danger this composed for society if men follow religion down the wrong path. You're dealing with a needy adolescent view of what it means to be a man in opposition to a woman, rather than anything that Christian maturity would have seen as what it means to be a man. And we'll hear from Rousseau Barry, a pastor at the Bridge Church in Brooklyn, and a leader of the Holman Project, about how and why religion done right can help men through difficult times. I think there's something very redemptive when we can find spaces men to say, "Hey, I'm not just going to trust God, but I'm also going to admit when I have a difficulty." Finally, we asked a group of men in their 20s and 30s to share their own experiences of navigating manhood in a changing world. Those are the voices you heard at the top, and you'll be hearing more from them throughout the episode. I'm Dave Dosteno, and this is How God Works. For most of US history, men have been the dominant gender. They've had more rights more power, more education, more money. The list goes on. But that's been changing. To the point that now the narrative has flipped, boys and men are in crisis the headlines say, "They're falling behind. They're struggling more than any time in history. Gender equality isn't an issue for women. It's a problem for men." For many, this can be an unpopular, even unbelievable story. When you look at the world's billionaires, the politicians, the ones in charge, the majority are still male. So are men really struggling that much? Or are they just whining about threats to their power? The reasons why a lot of boys and men are struggling are not the same as the reasons why many women and girls have been historically, and continue to do so in many places. Richard Reeves has become an expert on the challenges facing men, and through the research and policy solutions he laid out in his book of boys and men, why the modern male is struggling, why it matters and what to do about it, he started a national conversation. So the facts are that in education, we see in terms of relative performance, the gender gap on college campuses today is actually slightly wider than the gender gap was in the 1970s, but it's the other way around. So women are further ahead of men today than men were ahead of women in the early 70s. And it isn't just college. From the very start of school, boys face structural disadvantages that can follow them for years. On average, boys' brains develop more slowly than girls, especially in areas tied to impulse control, planning, and focus. All traits that schools tend to reward. At age 5, boys are 14% less likely than girls to be ready to start school. By adolescence, there's still 2-3 years behind on average in key areas of brain development. That may help explain why boys are less likely to get good grades, and more likely to be diagnosed with a developmental disability, or drop out altogether. It's no surprise then that boys are also less likely to enroll in college, and more likely to drop out once they do. And because education is closely tied to economic security, these early disadvantages often carry over into working life. We have no increase in wages for men who don't have a college degree since 1979, so completely flat wages. Men without college degrees earn no more than their father's stead, if they were similarly educated. And that is ripple effects, especially when it comes to family. A man without a steady income is less likely to get married, and if he becomes a father, financial instability can make it harder to stay involved. Among fathers without a high school diploma, 40% with apart from their children, compared to just 7% of college educated dads. Overall, 1 in 5 fathers isn't living with his kids. The number of children who lose contact with their fathers post-assaporation, especially if their parents were not married, is very, very high. So the breakdown of romantic relationships has led to a breakdown of father-child relationships, and that's been very bad news for kids, but especially for boys. And the challenges boys and men are facing aren't just socioeconomic. For many, the emotional toll is just as serious. We've seen a huge rise in male suicide. So 40,000 years now, four times as many men as women lost to suicide. And since 2010, the rise has really been driven by suicide among young men, where it's risen by about 40%. The picture-richered paints is a sobering one, but part of what makes it hard to grasp, especially in some circles, is that these trends aren't playing out the same way for everyone. Recent class play a major role in shaping the scale and severity of the crisis. So whether this feels painfully obvious or hard to believe, probably depends on who you are, and where you live. I've recently moved location in the last few years from Bethesda, Maryland, one of the most highly educated, highly affluent, most liberal areas in the US, to Butler, East Tennessee, one of the most Republican and lowest income parts of southern Appalachia. And I think part of the issue, if you talk to people around here in my new home in southern Appalachia about the struggles of boys and men, the answer you're going to get is something along the lines of "well, duh." But in Bethesda, it was still more difficult because in those senior positions, in elite colleges, particularly in senior leadership, at the apex, you still see if anything is cute towards men. So much less visible. And so I think it's important to say that some of these problems do run across the socioeconomic scale, but by and large, they're much worse for working class men and/or black men. And so in higher education, for example, there are twice as many black women getting college degree as black men. So it's already two to one. On HBCUs, there are actually more non-black students than there are black men. Because of the cratering share of black men in those areas. I think that when we're looking at whatever these trends are, try and look at it through different lenses at the same time. So don't just look at the gender pay gap. Look at gender and race. And what you see if you do that, for example, is not that the zero isn't a gender pay gap. But all of a sudden, you notice that white women now hugely out-earned, not only black women, but black men. Whereas black women have almost caught up with black men in terms of earnings. And so the story becomes quite complicated if you look at it through those different lenses. And it doesn't take any of the gaps away. It just means that if you're serious about following the data, then you've got to look at the way in which these different trends are playing out the race and class. In other words, race and class are on side notes. They're central to the story. What makes this even more complicated is that the challenges men are facing weren't caused by a single factor. Some are the result of economic shifts, like deindustrialization and global trade, which hit less educated men especially hard. Others stem from social and cultural changes to institutions like schools, places of worship and the family. No one set out to disadvantage men. But when all these forces converge, they can leave many boys and men unsure of where they fit, or why they matter. I think a connective tissue is the sense of being needed and being sure that the tribe needs you and that your role in the tribe and society in community is articulated in a way that is understandable to you and attractive to you. And I think that's a much more cultural point. And it might then lead to differences on other fronts. So no for example, men who are not married or don't become fathers are much less likely to work. And there's a causal effect. There's a supply side effect of becoming a father or husband on labor market. I think it's plausible to suggest that. Yes, one of the reasons why my dad went to college was because he knew that he was gonna be a breadwinner. Okay. If it's not clear that you're gonna be needed as a breadwinner, then the incentives around education might go down too. The incentives to move to a different county to get a better job might go down. And so there could be a connective tissue here, which is just what are the signposts or what is the script that we as a society are asking you to follow? We've torn up the old scripts for women and men. Replace the female one with a good, new one around empowerment and independence and autonomy, at least I think is a good one. I'm not really replaced the male one and I think what that means is a lot of men are being left improvising and that's a very difficult thing to do. I think the hardest part of being a man today is all of the conflicting input and ideas that are out there about what it means to be a man. I also think that the world wants us to always be in positions of control. We're supposed to have like a lot of fortitude and I think people kind of screw up what it means to have fortitude. They think having fortitude means just taking it. Needing to be the strong provider, be guarded, not share your feelings. But then also getting simultaneously this message that men need to heal all our wounds and be open and vulnerable and do all these other things. The result is nothing short of an existential crisis for men. But according to Richard, this isn't necessarily new. If you examine the history of crises of masculinity, they recur with startling regularity. To some extent, the male role is always somewhat more socially constructed and is always there for somewhat more fragile and you know how people say the fragile male go all masculinity and role where I is, I think that's actually anthropologically true. I think that all societies in one way or another have had to figure out what is the role of men? Why do we need men? And to articulate a script and a role that is an attractive and a positive one for men? And so to that extent, masculinity is always in crisis or put differently, it's always under construction. And it has to be reconstructed for new circumstances, such as the circumstances we have now, where we've just seen a really extraordinary change in the economic relationship between men and women. I mean, you don't change the economic relationship between men and women as much as we have in 40 years and you're not going to have some turbulence, right? Given that both genders have faced challenges, why do you think male identity is the more fragile one? Well, I think the challenges that women have historically faced and to be clear, still face in many areas of life. The problem has been putting a ceiling on women's opportunities, women's roles and saying that women couldn't do XYZ. And so we were confining the role of women. We were saying women that it is, that here's the area that's marked out for you. These are the female roles, this is what women can't do, then we were defining it that way. So the goal was really about clearing obstacles so that women could expand into the fullness of their capacities and their humanity. Whereas for men, I think it's been much more a question of whether you are at some deeper level needed by the tribe. And this is a weird thing to say and I am going to risk making a statement that a lot of people perhaps disagree with, which is that if we think about this in the longer arc of human history, one of my favorite facts is that we've had twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. Men historically have only had a 50% chance of reproducing. It's called by Joe Henrick in his book Weird. He calls it the math problem of surplus males, which is kind of brutal. But it's true to put it very bluntly, Roy Balmeister says most societies have a surplus of penises but can't have too many wounds. And that's a very blunt way to put it, but he's right, of course. And so I think what that means is that at some level, the question of is my personhood, my body needed by the tribe. I don't think that's as much of a question for women as it is for men. The fact is you just don't need that many men. And so if you don't need that many men, the question is, well, why do we need you? So it sounds like there are two things going on there. One is male identity is a little more fragile, but two, part of the ways that that gets filled in is understanding what the community expects of you and how to have their support. Now it's been suggested that men who lack strong, personal or community ties are more vulnerable to extreme ideologies or online radicalization. Do you see that connection there? Yeah, isolation predicts vulnerability to all kinds of damaging messages and to, in particular, to reactionary ones. It's very striking to me that if you look at some of the people who are following some of the truly reactionary online figures, they're much more likely to have grown up without a father. I think it's perfectly intuitive to say there's, there's on the search for something. And I think what a lot of the young men, boys and young men who are drawn to some of those figures or at least to some of their work, they're asking like, well, how am I supposed to be? What does it mean to be a man? And unfortunately, I think many of them have heard messages about what not to be, what they should not be like. Don't be toxic. But there hasn't been a very good job of putting out a positive agenda. I think that's created a really dangerous vacuum. Do you think in some ways that's one of the things that's responsible for the rise of folks like Jordan Peterson who, if nothing else, is offering a roadmap to men for how to be a man and how to live? Yeah, but it's also, I mean, if you actually read his work, 12 rules for life, I think Jordan Peterson's prescriptions are banal. They're obvious. They take responsibility. Make something of yourself. Make your bed. Be disciplined. I mean, great parenting advice. But as I said, banal. What Peterson did was to tap into a ocean of male neglected need. All he really did was to say, I see you. I hear you. I like you. I feel for you. And so what's interesting about Peterson is not what he's supplying. It's the demand. And it exposes to me a huge cultural failing honestly, to have a conversation, which includes those young men and makes them feel needed. If he can pause a big claim that society's turned its back on you, but I'm here for you, well, there's gold in those hills as he discovered, but there shouldn't be. And so I think it's a sign of our failure, more generally culturally, to be able to be having those conversations. And more importantly, to make boys and young men feel the way that he can make them feel without having to turn to more reactionary conclusions. Are you looking to reclaim your health, tune into the Real Food Allege podcast hosted by me, Courtney Swan, Integrative Nutritionist, and Real Food Activist. I am on a mission to transform our food system by challenging the corrupt practices that undermine our health and replace them with choices that genuinely support our well-being. Listen to Real Food Allege podcast on your favorite podcast app, new episodes every Tuesday. Reverend Russell Moore has been paying attention to Peterson's rise too. And he has his own take on what makes it so effective. Jordan Peterson is somebody who can have in the same conversation, good wise counsel for how to live, mixed in with pop-youngian nonsense. There's something about the confidence of assertions that at least in the short term can give a kind of comfort with someone who is saying, if you do this, this will be the result. Long before he became a theologian, Russell was raised in the church, the grandson of a Baptist preacher. And as a pastor himself, he's seen firsthand the issues men are facing. When I was serving as a local church pastor, I remember one time there was a kind of a rumor going around that there might be furloughs and pink slips at the factory down the road. I knew I was going to have to clear out time in my schedule because five months, six months down the road, I was going to have a lot of marriage problems, a lot of alcohol problems, a lot of porn problems, all kinds of bad behavior going on because I would have men who wouldn't know what to do with the sense of insecurity of that. And he wouldn't know how to see themselves or to view themselves in that place of precarity. In 2022, Russell became the editor-in-chief of Christianity today, an evangelical Christian magazine started by Billy Graham in the 1950s. He's chronicle the links between religion and society for decades and hasn't hesitated to point out both the strengths and shortcomings of Christian institutions. Russell is also no stranger to an interesting demographic change that's been occurring in the church. With many young men looking for answers about their role in the world, Gen Z men are more likely to attend services weekly compared to their millennial and Gen X peers. In fact, for the first time ever, young men are showing a greater interest in religion than young women. While you might think that's encouraging to a pastor, Russell is the first to point out that there's a danger if the answers they find aren't authentic ones. Christianity has become trendy in many reactionary circles, and with it, so too as an influencer culture that is focused on feeding men a seductive message about reclaiming power. There's a way of paganizing masculinity that seeks to replace a Christian view of what it means to be a follower of Christ with a heroic pagan view that's explicitly repudiated. I mean, the mighty men of great renown in Genesis are rejected by scripture as being something that has gone wrong. You have Joseph, who is expressing a godly masculinity by laying down his own life for the sake of this woman and a baby that he adopts into his own family. It's a very different picture of masculinity than would have been normal in the Roman Empire. And so sometimes you can see often in the so-called manosphere, this valorization of certain aspects of masculinity that are distinctively Roman in ways that Jesus explicitly repudiates. And so any idea that says what it means to be a man is dominance and winning is out of step with who Jesus is and is out of step with what God created men to be. And what inevitably happens there is that you end up with an attempt to become more than human that ends up making you less than human. It ends up in an animalistic view of what it means to be a man. - Do you think that where that valorization of the hero view is happening? Is there a danger that that can lead to some forms of misogyny or do you think that's maybe part of the reason why we're seeing women leave the church in greater numbers than men? - I think we see a great deal of misogyny happening right now. And one of the reasons for that is because you have men who have no idea what it means to be a man. And so are then looking for some distinctive of manhood, usually that means sexually dominating or in some other way dominating a woman, which is a really sinful, but also just a childish view of manhood. It's fake, it's cosplay. - Like Russell, Richard Reeves agrees that the struggle to define masculinity in the church stands as an important bellwether for where we're headed. - I think that the debate about the role of men, for example, in the Evangelical Church in the US is one of the most important ones that's going on. How that debate plays out around what kind of manhood might masculinity will be promoting. What's happening in the Evangelical Church is much more important than what's happening on the pages than New York Times. - The debate Richard is referring to is around something called Christian complementarianism. The idea that a man has the God-given responsibility to provide for, protect, and guide his family, and that it's his wife's responsibility to manage the household and nurture and raise the children. Put another way, this view means that gender roles are distinct, but also complement each other. - There's a sense among some Evangelicals that it is about going back. It's about going back to a very traditional division of labor. It is about going back to a model of religious leadership and priesthood, which is very patriarchal. And you've seen serious schisms, rifts, public arguments now, particularly from many women, saying, "I'm having this." The whole theology of complementarianism in the wrong hands, the idea is that men and women are very different, but complementary. And I'm like, "Well, we're not that different." And if you overemphasize those differences, you end up with a very sexist view of the world. And then there are a bunch of other people in the Evangelical Church are saying that a Christian faith rightly expressed has huge glories to offer both men and women, but it does not put men above women, and that we cannot have a theology of gender, which is based on male dominance or male hierarchy. And that, there's obviously a huge debate about that, theologically, in terms of biblical interpretations and so on. But I do think that the outcome of that serbling porn, if we think that religion is going to continue to play a huge role, which it will. - As a practicing Christian, Russell Moore believes in complementarianism, but he argues that this isn't a justification for a misogynistic model of male dominance. According to him, the patriarchal model where women are subservient to men is actually a misinterpretation. He says that if you read the Bible correctly, there is far more nuance to be found there. - If you look at Genesis, you have the man and woman who are created and given the exact same inheritance of all things are under your feet, there, together. That is central and that is key, I think, to the rest of scripture. And then you have in scripture this sense of differences between men and women, where most of what the Bible is saying is speaking to us as persons. So for Paul to say to Timothy, for instance, that the men should not be quarrelsome, does not mean that women cannot be quarrelsome, but it means that there's a specific vulnerability and temptation generally speaking for men to ward quarrelsomeness. And when he says, see to it that the women don't express their identities through what they wear and how they look. That doesn't mean that men don't have that temptation, but generally speaking, and especially in that cultural context, it's more of a stumbling block for women. And so we're moving into a time where what we're seeking to do is to carry out that createdness toward the same inheritance, the same calling. And again, that has mothering and fathering distinctions. But mothering and fathering does not mean that one is better or more important than the other. They both need each other. If you look at the church movements that are presenting this caricatured view of masculinity that has to do with domination of women sexually or in some other way, you're dealing with a needy, adolescent view of what it means to be a man in opposition to a woman, rather than anything that Christian maturity or even in pagan maturity would have seen as what it means to be a man. And why? Because it's easy. It's a lot easier to be a pretend Bronze Age warlord than it is to be somebody who is crucifying self and cultivating the fruit of the spirit in order to sacrifice oneself for others. In some cases, what you end up with are people who are choosing aspects of a tradition in order to give themselves this kind of veneer but not actually committing themselves and giving themselves to the wholeness of that tradition. That's the danger. We often point out on the show that religion can be practiced in two ways, a hollowed out, thin kind of religion where what you embrace are superficial interpretations and convenient answers or a thick kind, one that challenges you to grow through humility and contemplation, engage deeply with sacred texts and wrestle with the complexity of your faith. And in this version, biblical role models are no Bronze Age warlords, as Russell says. To be a man in the model of Jesus is the opposite. To be a man means showing up with integrity, vulnerability and compassion. For me, that's deeply tied to my faith and Jesus is a model of this kind of manhood. Not one that was about power or status but about humility, justice and love. Being a man in that sense means choosing service over control and showing strength through gentleness. being a man is about being like selfless and like sacrificing for other people. people that model of Jesus as a man being so vulnerable on the cross. You know, there's a lot still in culture, I think, around men needing to be self-sufficient, needing to have it all and self-reliant. A lot of times as a man, you know, I'm not as open about my feelings. So, you know, I keep that stuff bottled in. And the only place I can really express it is to God and is with God. In First Corinthians, where Paul is talking about the body of Christ and how different body parts can't tell each other that they don't need each other because then it wouldn't be fully functional. And I think that's something that ideally the church does really well is creating space for strong men, for strong women and for softness as well. The radically different model of manhood offered by Jesus is one that resonates deeply with Rasul Berry as well, which you see at these very tender moments of emotional vulnerability as well as strength of conviction. Rasul is a pastor at the Bridge Church in Brooklyn and a leader of the Home Man project. So maybe we should start with a question. What does it mean to be a home man? A book, video and discussion series seeking to redefine manhood in the context of the Black church, particularly as men, maybe even more so as Black men. There may be a cultural norm to not be as transparent or vulnerable. I think that showing the whole picture that doesn't see meekness as weakness, but that sees meekness as strength under control, I think, which is what is God life, you know, to mean strength under control and strength on use on behalf of those who are more vulnerable. Much of his work focuses on providing the kind of support and guidance he could have used more of himself when he was young and he understands the importance of having strong role models to turn to, in part because he didn't have many himself when he was young. My father was a murder when I was seven. So the question of what it meant for me to be a man loomed even larger. My mother put us into a unique private boarding school and what we had in common was that almost none of us had a father in our lives. By the time I got there, my older brother and I, it was now predominantly Black. My graduating class was 28 boys and five girls. And so my experience of what it meant to be a man was very much brought by the fact that I'm in this very boy driven context that sometimes felt like Lord of the Flies, you know, I was a sensitive kid. I was emotionally thin skinned, you could say. And that made me a target. After a particular intense moment of taunting in my middle school years, I literally remember it thinking I can't show emotion anymore because the show emotion in this environment is the show weakness and it's just like blood in the water. And so in my mind at that time, the need really to disassociate and disconnect myself from my emotions. I ended up in a lot of ways trying to figure out what this thing of manhood was on my own. And this was 80s, 90s. I looked at hip hop as a way that was this very masculine African American urban expression. That very much a manhood was a key part of it. And that in some ways gave me a voice, helped me find my voice. And in other ways, let me down some negative paths, seeing how damaging it was, especially to women in my life. What we now refer to as toxic masculinity or defining manhood by, you know, female con quest or your ability to inflict violence on someone. Resoul ultimately found a better answer through religion, which helped redefine the meaning of manhood for him. And this was the first time I'd ever seen someone referred to Jesus as the epitome of masculinity, a manhood. What you see is the combination of both humility, servet, hood, compassion and prophetic strength and moral clarity. And so I think that for a lot of men who don't fit into the narrow space of what the culture defines as the manly manly, you know, we see something there in this struggle and even in the African American tradition that didn't shy away from the cries of the heart and the soul, but that actually welcomed them. And I think there's something very redemptive when we can find spaces men to say, Hey, I'm not just going to trust God, but I'm also going to admit when I have a difficulty, I believe, but help my unbelief. That's soul right there. Resoul found that a key to this kind of productive questioning, one that would lead to growth rather than despair, didn't just come from reading scriptures, but from the safety and direction good counsel could provide. And that's the reason why he structured his role at his church and the whole man project to emphasize mentorship and community building. In terms of everything happening in our world geopolitically, economically, but also just very practically, we lost a lot that we're still yearning to find in terms of community and what does it mean to find the sense of ourselves? And I think that that is the ultimate source. The project defines maleness according to four core attributes, head, meaning mental health, heart, meaning relationships, hands meaning vocation and purpose and soul meaning spirituality. Resoul and other project leaders have been using the book as a discussion guide to bring boys and men together to talk and connect on these issues. And sometimes to confront uncomfortable truths and emotions. I see relief. I see more than relief, though. I see catharsis. I see a greater vision for who they are meant to be. And that is more expansive. It recognizes that it's by opening up sharing vulnerabilities and finding purpose that a more healthy male identity can form. And that's something you can't do alone. There was a conversation we had. We did a screening in a men's time at a church in Charlotte, the park church. And there were a group of young men that were their teenagers. All of their fathers were in the room. And so I asked them like, what do you love about your dad? What do you like about it? What do you wish they would do differently? And to a person, every one of the young boys mentioned, I wish they would listen to me more. And I wish that they didn't just see the bad stuff, but they saw the like the good stuff that they weren't so concerned with me being so lost to the world that they just were always warning me of the dangers. Well, we in that meeting and these these fathers who desperately wanted to connect with their sons, got a chance to hear on a deeper level where they were missing the mark. And and so that was so redemptive and fulfilling for them. And I think those are the type of conversations in the spaces that we need that go beyond. I want you to do good at school. I want you to avoid falling into the patterns that you see in the hood. I don't, you know, I don't want you to be a victim. But oftentimes there, the angst of that can be so intense as a parent that you end up over emphasizing the dangers and projecting your sense of fears and they don't end up feeling a lack of what they really need the most, which is that sense of love. And so I, I, that was just a moment that to me, accentuated how these spaces are so powerful. Creating a space for emotional reflection is one powerful and often neglected way to create male connection. But Richard Reeves says that's not the only way in which church men's groups can bring men together to help them find meaning and purpose. I'm just thinking about my own experience of having men's groups. Very often are about formation and you can do some study together, etc. And they're about community. But they're also often about service. What I've discussed, what you find quite often is that those men's groups will quite often go and fix stuff or paint stuff or build stuff or dig stuff. And what that means is that's becoming a very male friendly form of service and solidarity because it's shoulder to shoulder. It's doing stuff together and men really seem to get more value out of that kind of socialization quite often. And it's also making it very clear the tribe needs you. Right. We the church need you to come do this. Be an usher, be it's all to serve or whatever. Oh, and by the way, we need you in our men's group because oh, by the way, the men's group needs you to come next Saturday and help. This has happened hugely where I live, which is hugely hit by the hurricane. The men's groups from the churches and the women's groups are doing great work too. I don't want to in any way diminish that, but the men's groups are going out and fixing houses and clearing stuff and, you know, just and could you find a better way to signal to men the tribe still needs you. And by the way, some of the men doing this stuff, some of them aren't in work. They're not employed. They're really struggling in the labor market. And maybe they've some of them, well, I know one guy, lost touch with his kids and he's really struggling and he's former drug addict and but guess what? We're shoulder to shoulder fixing a house together and so that guy knows that we still need him despite the fact that he will have he's struggling on so many other fronts and that's incredibly powerful. For those of us that believe in God and believe in the power of prayer, we lean on each other for support. I think community helps you with accountability but it also helps you with when things go wrong and helping you get back up when you fall in short or falling down. I know there have been several times like a really bad week and I can just go to church on Sunday and like it's all good like none of that really matters there. Every single person there has my back and sort of that like mutual love for each other that's just a great like support system to have. I've really come to believe that we're all formed. We're all formed by our family environment, our religious environment, our culture etc and so I think the question is who are we being formed by and with what ethics, what structure and so if you're detached from those flesh and blood institutions of family and community religion etc and you're spending a lot of time online so I think we end up with some quite unformed individuals and particularly for men who if you buy my earlier premise actually if anything boys and men need more formation. I think that churches, religious institutions generally played an incredibly important role in binding men into the community into the tribe and giving them clear roles to play the clear sense of stuff we need them to do and the casualty of the decline in organized religion has been some of those places of not just moral formation but I think only male formation honestly. So religion can provide a sense of community meaning and purpose all things that help men find their way in a world that suddenly become more challenging but as we like to point out on this show religion isn't just a social club or about what you believe it's also about what you do it offers technologies of a sort that work deeply in the mind and can powerfully reshape how we view the world and our place in it and when it comes to becoming a successful adult member of society that's where rates of passage come in. I think what actually is needed is a series of rights of passage which have the effect of showing that you are growing into the tribe and you're kind of moving from being a kind of taker to a giver and so on and that could be moving from JV to varsity. It could go from being a Cub Scout to being a scout. It could go from taking communion to therefore serve the alter. Anything actually in modern society you're likely to have a plurality of different rights of passage and many people will likely go through different ones but I think accumulative effect is just to say you're going through these structured rituals and transitions which are signaling to you that you are maturing and you're becoming an adult. Around the world and throughout history rates of passage helped form young boys into men. They offered ways to prove to the community and to themselves that they had worth that they could contribute to society that they had a purpose and while it's easier to write these rituals off as vestiges of the past Richard says they're as important today as they've ever been. We don't have to take our boys out bow hunting for three weeks you know in the middle of Alaska but we don't want to inadvertently destroy the other rights of passage that I think many institutions have had. My own experience of going from being a Cub Scout to a scout is still incredibly seared on my memory. It's really just imprinted on my identity I remember that day that evening incredibly strongly had a huge effect on me and it was very well done. We had our scout uniform on underneath our Cub uniforms the Cubs are at one end of the hall the Scouts are at the other end of the hall you went under a parachute and the parachute was being held on both sides and kind of way and so you went into the the liminal space but you're under the parachute and while you're under the parachute you take off your Cub Scout uniform and you come out the other side you come out with your Scout uniform on and the Scout group is at the other end they all cheer they then sing a song you then say the Scouts promise and so you're pledging your allegiance to this new thing as flags it's unbelievable and it was a small rickety church hall in Pita Burr on a wet Thursday night in February with an old parachute and you know what it was magical and I think it would be very easy to sort of look at that and roll your eyes and like do we still need this staff honestly I think that's part of the problem is that we are in danger of like losing the value of those traditions so Richard I know this is a in some ways maybe an unfair question because it's a big one I thought some of the other ones were pretty big what do we do so look I could put my policy on hat on and talk about we should start boys in school year later and we should invest more in apprenticeships we should have more paid leave for dads that is available we should reform family law so that we don't inadvertently break unmarried fathers especially away from their children and so on and so on but the two things I would push on one is more policy and one is more personal the policy one is I do think that if we can't at least arrest the decline in the share of male teachers in our classrooms then shame on us it's gone from 33% to 23% in recent years and and we lose coaches as a result but I think the whole idea that we could allow teaching as a profession to just empty out the men and then lament the lack of male role models in our society I mean shame on policy makers but good for the ones like the governors of Maryland, Connecticut, Indiana and Michigan just in recent weeks all saying that they are going to work on this issue hooray hallelujah but on a more personal note I also think there's a danger here to just go too quickly to policy and I say this as a policy person because the truth is that very often progress is made in the thick of daily life and I can guarantee you everybody listening to this every man listening to this there is a man a young man or a boy in your life who needs you more than you know right now so find them text them right now get in touch with them look them in the eye asking how they're doing and then when they reply ask them again how are you really doing and volunteer there is a huge gap right now in the number of male volunteers I just signed up for big brothers big sisters and I was told that the waiting list for boys is three times longer than for girls boys have to wait nine months in my area rather than three months why because there aren't enough male volunteers why are we seeing it decline in boys sports because there aren't enough male coaches why are churches struggling quite often to provide the service services used to provide because they don't have enough men and so there's also a call to men here which is the tribe does still need you the community needs you the boys and men in your life need you so let's let's get out there like we not we can actually do something right now in our own lives as well and not just wait for the politicians to fix this it does take a village but some of the villagers need to be men and those men are us as Richard points out good policies can help but they'll take time to have an effect and truth be told they won't really solve the deeper problems men are facing while they might level the economic playing field they won't provide answers to questions of meaning to what it means to be a man when societies norms are rapidly changing and I think that's part of where religion comes in people turn to it in times of stress and uncertainty not because it's a crutch but because it's a tool one that can offer community empathy identity and purpose but finding those doesn't come just from reading scripture or listening to influencers they come from congregation from a group of people who support one another as they try to grow morally and spiritually whether it's through a religious group or some other form of community the key is not going it alone find ways to reach out to one another as mr. Rogers who was himself a minister not just a television icon like to say when things seem scary look for the helpers right now that might be the best advice we've got no one has all the answers no one knows exactly where we're headed but if we stand together we'll find our way next time on how god works people pray for all kinds of reasons and in all kinds of ways alone together out loud in silence from memory or instinct but whatever form it takes there's a reason prayer has been part of just about every spiritual tradition out there its effects run deep the more you use a particular conglomeration of neuron the stronger those connections become the stronger your beliefs become and that's why prayers become part of the fabric of who that person is you know we say these prayers every day or every week or every year and the prayers are the same but we're not in Judaism we understand prayer as not necessarily even changing God above but Definitely changing us. I am saying a prayer in which I'm acknowledging that God is a God of acts of loving kindness. And we say that as a reminder that we too should do acts of loving kindness. Join us next time as we explore the science and practice of prayer and how it might help all of us religious or not to find connection and meaning. This episode was written by Josie Holtzman, Sophie Eisenberg, and me. With additional production help from Alex Leech and Emmanuel Desarmé. Our senior producer is Josie Holtzman. Our producer is Sophie Eisenberg, and our associate producer is Emmanuel Desarmé. Genevieve Sponsler is our executive producer. Merit Jacob is our mix engineer and composed our theme arranged by Chloe Dosteno. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzalez. This podcast was also made possible with support from the John Templeton Foundation. To find out more about the show, go to howgodworksalloneword.org. You can also follow us on Instagram at howgodworkspod or me on XerBlueSky at David Dosteno. Special thanks to Bennett Boulard, Clint Brown, Ben Chow, Mason Diab, Shawn Ennis, Alex Leech, Baines Pierre, Ernst LaZon, and Diane Zivkovich for sharing their stories of what it's like to be a man today with us. (upbeat music)