#36: Gender Pt. 1: Where the Gospel Meets Manhood

 

#36: Gender Pt. 1: Where the Gospel Meets Manhood

Note: The Love Thy Neighborhood podcast is made for the ear, and not the eye. We would encourage you to listen to the audio for the full emotional emphasis of this episode. The following transcription may contain errors. Please refer to the audio before quoting any content from this episode. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so did you hear that last week the actor formerly known as Ellen Page announced that he will now be called Elliot Page?

RACHEL SZABO: Ellen Page, like from the movie Juno?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. Juno, Umbrella Academy, the X-Men movies.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay so Ellen Page was born a biological female, but now she — or, I guess he — is identifying as a male?

JESSE EUBANKS: Well, it’s a little confusing. Uh, he actually identifies as non-binary, which actually means that he is neither male nor female.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, man, gender in our society is really confusing to talk about. Like I feel like there are no rules and no structure and everything’s constantly changing and it just is whatever you want it to be.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, like in the broader culture, that is definitely how it feels. And then, we have a whole other set of issues when we get within the church, right? Because sometimes in the church we’re overly rigid. We’re very prescriptive, very particular about ‘this is manhood’ and ‘this is womanhood.’ In the broader culture, there’s like a nebulousness to gender. And then in the church sometimes it feels like caricatures of a man and caricatures of a woman.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah so, no matter where you look, gender is not an easy or a simple thing to talk about.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, not anymore. 

RACHEL SZABO: So that’s why we’ve actually decided for these next few episodes to address gender in a three-part series because, y’know, one episode by itself is not enough time to navigate all the complexities and nuances that go with this topic. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Right, and even three episodes really isn’t enough, so we’re not gonna cover everything. For example, like we’re not gonna go super deep into LGBTQ issues.

RACHEL SZABO: Right, yeah, instead what we wanna do is lay some groundwork for the genders that God created, y’know, male and female, and look at what does it mean to be a man and what does it mean to be a woman.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, are there timeless aspects of our gender regardless of culture or time in history?

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, so that’s what we’ll discuss on the first two episodes. And then in the third episode, we’re actually gonna look at gender dysphoria — so what do you do if physically you’re one gender but you actually feel more like the other one?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and we hope that this mini-series will be helpful to you and your community as you seek to navigate gender in this modern context we’re all living through. 

RACHEL SZABO: Alright, let’s get on to the first episode.

JESSE EUBANKS: Let’s do it.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Okay. Do you guys know who Jordan Peterson is?

LEANDRO LOZADA: I do. I do know who Jordan Peterson is.

RACHEL SZABO: I have heard that name before, but I actually don’t really know who he is other than he’s like well-known and famous. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, he’s become like a YouTube star. So Jordan Peterson is a professor of psychology in Toronto. And you’re right, over the past two years, his popularity has exploded — mostly centered around the way that he addresses men in particular.

JORDAN PETERSON CLIPS: More than 90% of the people who watch my videos on YouTube are men… I like the masculine spirit. It’s necessary, and it’s not fundamentally carnage and pillaging… People treat you like you’re a selfish, arrogant son of a — maybe that’s because you are. It’s like ‘Okay, so what do you do about that?’… We know what happens if people act poorly. If men act badly, we should learn that lesson…

LEANDRO LOZADA: Listening to him is refreshing for me. He touches a fiber of my heart. There is something about the way he’s speaking that is doing something to me. I need to pay attention.

JESSE EUBANKS: Well here’s what people can’t see. Like as you’re listening to him, you were like flexing your muscles. Even as you’re talking, you were like, y’know, tensing up, like you are into it.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yes, yes, yes. I don’t know why, but I think he is saying things that I have not heard in a long time that really energize me.

RACHEL SZABO: This must be something related to being a man because I feel none of that listening to him. (laughter)

JESSE EUBANKS: It does seem like there’s something with this guy and men in particular. I mean, his YouTube channel, it has 2.7 million subscribers. His podcast has almost 1 million listeners per episode. His website attracts 25,000 views a day. But here’s what else is crazy, in particular for us. So as Christians we would say that our standards for manhood — they come from the Bible, right? Can we agree on that?

LEANDRO LOZADA: Absolutely.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay. And while men are coming in droves to listen to Jordan Peterson, here’s where they aren’t going — they’re not going to church. According to USA Today, ‘Women outnumber men in attendance in every major Christian denomination. And in fact, an average American congregation is roughly 61% female and only 39% male.’

RACHEL SZABO: So what you’re saying is, okay, we’ve got Jordan Peterson, who’s attracting all these men, and then we’ve got the church, which should be the place that’s attracting men, and it’s not. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. And if you look at other religions — you look at the Jewish faith, the Muslim faith — y’know, they’re still attracting a ton of men. But then you look at Christianity, and we’re not attracting nearly as many men. And I think that that means that when it comes to manhood — we as the church are doing something wrong.

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JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

RACHEL SZABO: And I’m Rachel Szabo. Every episode we hear stories of social action and Christian community. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Today’s episode is where the gospel meets manhood. And for today’s conversation, we’ve actually brought in Leandro Lozada, who is our program director here at Love Thy Neighborhood. Hey Leandro.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Hey there.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so I wanted you to be a part of this episode because you’ve actually done a lot of thinking and exploring on manhood recently.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yes, I have. As the program director at LTN, I have had to pay a lot of attention to culture. I’ve been paying attention to all the conversations that have been happening around masculinity, and those conversations have led me to ask myself, ‘Well, how does this apply to me?’ I’ve been, yeah, trying to figure out what it means to be a man for the sake of the program that I lead, but also for my own sake as a married man.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and just to be clear, y’know, this episode is about manhood, but it isn’t just for men. All three of the gender episodes are for everybody to listen to, and they’ll actually make the most sense if you listen to all of them as a set.

JESSE EUBANKS: So let’s dive into our first episode on gender and talk about what it means to be a man. Welcome to our corner of the urban universe.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so, Rach, I’d be curious to hear your answer on this — what is a man? 

RACHEL SZABO: Um, I consider a man to be someone who takes responsibility, someone who leads, somebody that can carry large furniture (laughter), and someone that has a penis. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, okay. Yeah. Fair enough.

RACHEL SZABO: Like I feel like there’s a lot of ways you could describe manhood — 

JESSE EUBANKS: Right, like it seems like such a simple question, but it’s actually not as simple as one would think. So we actually went out and asked people — what does it mean to be a man?

CLIPS FROM STREET INTERVIEWS: Yeah, what it means to be a man is that you are born a man… Pretty much a man should always do for other people around them… A man is someone who thinks of others before himself… Uh, manhood I think is whatever men think. I mean I can’t speak for men… At this day and time, it’s kinda complicated because like it’s not the traditional way anymore… I think it’s rooted in how we’re made by God… A man has been assigned with XY chromosomes… What’s it mean to be a man for me is because God made me the way I am… I can’t even answer that question… I have a younger brother that’s gay and we hang out and have fun and do everything, y’know, and you are what you are and live with it… 

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yeah, masculinity can be a hard thing to define. I see this especially with the young adults that come to our program. They oftentimes don’t have a clear idea of what it means to be a man or a female. It’s very hard to define. Gender is confusing. The Bible does not give us one verse with a particular definition of what it means to be a man. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. So I think that before we go any further, we need to make sure that we’re all on the same page and do some basic gender 101. In today’s culture, gender can be seen as ever-changing or even non-existent. So let’s lay some groundwork for a biblical understanding of gender.

LEANDRO LOZADA: In the Bible in the book of Genesis, we see that God created humans as male and female. From that verse I think it’s very fair to understand that male and female are not the same. There is a difference, and God created that. There are females, and there are males. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Clarifying that distinction is where things get tricky. Y’know, if you picture a Venn diagram, there are actually a lot about males and females that overlap. I mean, we have so many similarities — in the makeup of our bodies, our ability to think and create, even the duties that we perform. However, everything is not the exact same. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, I think the most obvious difference, y’know, would be our sex organs. But even beyond that — men tend to have more muscle mass than women, and certain parts of a woman’s brain are larger than a man’s brain. We have different sets of chromosomes. We’re very similar, but we’re still unique.

LEANDRO LOZADA: And we recognize that not everybody’s body fits this. However, 99% of the population is born with a distinctly male or female body. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, okay, so if we go back to that Venn diagram image — y’know, in the past, society sought to separate that Venn diagram, those two circles of manhood and womanhood, so far apart that they tried to make as little overlap as possible, like men should be the sole providers of their families and women should not work and they should only raise children in the home. And now we live in this culture that’s trying to completely overlap that Venn diagram so that there’s really no difference between manhood and womanhood. Y’know, what examples come to mind?

LEANDRO LOZADA: I mean Harry Styles recently was the cover of Vogue magazine — which is historically a magazine for females — and he was on the cover, he’s a man, and he’s dressed as a woman, and in interviews he has expressed that he wants men to have the freedom to dress however they want, even if that is looking like females.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I even think about, like, the way that we’re now applying pronouns. Y’know, we don’t say ‘him and her’ anymore. Now it’s ‘they.’ You have to literally clarify even what the pronouns are as to how people should address you. And neither extreme is really what God created. So, if we’re gonna talk about manhood — which was God’s idea — then it’s important for us to consider what the Bible has to say about being a man.

At the beginning of First Kings, we see David, the king of Israel. He’s grown old and he’s about to die and his son Solomon will be the new king in his place. So before he breathes his last, David gives a charge to his son. He tells him — ‘I am about to go the way of all the earth,’ he said. ‘So be strong. Act like a man.’

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yeah, I love those verses. I would love to hear my dad tell me, ‘Look, I’m giving you responsibility. Be a man. Go for it.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and that’s why folks like Jordan Peterson are so popular. I mean they’re charging men in this way, and frankly, like, it’s very compelling.  

RACHEL SZABO: So, I mean, I’m curious — what about this charge, this call to be strong, what about that resonates with both of you?

LEANDRO LOZADA: It’s very difficult for me to give a easy answer. It’s not cognitive. It’s not something that I think. It’s something that I feel deep in my bones. I want to be strong. I want to go out and conquer. I don’t know. It’s very guttural. I don’t know how to explain it.

JESSE EUBANKS: I think that’s a fair way to say it. For me, I’m not the archetype of American masculinity, but like there is something innate inside of me that, like, is like a frontiersman. I just wanna push into new countries, new boundaries, new ways of doing things, to go explore. So this idea of my strength being called forward and called out — like, that’s compelling.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, so the reason I ask that is because I’m not resonating with this that much, so I think maybe what we need to do is you all have your bro time and hash out manhood. I’m just gonna kind of sit back and listen, and then I’ll rejoin you guys towards the end.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so you’ll come back.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay. I think that’s great. Okay, so Leandro, let’s talk about some of the stakes here, some of the problems regarding manhood. In the Bible, y’know, we just heard there’s this charge to be men, and in guys like Jordan Peterson we see them calling men to be men. But the sad reality is that the church — it doesn’t seem to be joining the conversation.

PRESTON HOCKER: I know when I was growing up I noticed that there was just a lack of things that were like men-specific.

JESSE EUBANKS: This is Preston Hocker. He grew up a pastor’s kid. But when it came to conversations about what it meant to be a man, he found that his church didn’t have much to offer.

PRESTON HOCKER: I remember having like the men’s breakfast, but I remember being a young man — like 18, 19, 20 years old — and never like thinking, ‘Oh yeah, let me get up at 7:00 in the morning and go have some pancakes.’ If I wanna have pancakes, I’ll make pancakes at my house when I wake up at, on my time or I’ll just go to IHOP or something. You know, like there wasn’t anything that was like really for men.

JESSE EUBANKS: Y’know, which Preston found confusing because he could see calls to manhood all throughout the Bible.

PRESTON HOCKER: It’s contrasting because there are so many fantastic warriors, especially in the Old Testament.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yeah, like we just referenced David. He was a mighty warrior. He had physical strength.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, but also you look backwards and the truth is that it was just a totally different culture. It was a totally different world, where being a warrior was just more required. Not every warrior in the Old Testament, y’know, was a godly man, and not every even quote unquote ‘godly man’ in the Old Testament is even really a role model for us. But I understand what he’s getting at — that there are aspects of manhood that are being overlooked by the church.

PRESTON HOCKER: And so like this man who was a man after God’s own heart, who was this incredible warrior, but I’m not supposed to really emulate him unless it just has to do with, like, playing harp and singing. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Preston saw this example of manhood in the Bible — strong, courageous, unshakable. And then he saw this example of manhood in the modern church — tame, safe. And he just couldn’t square those two images. 

PRESTON HOCKER: I think the church largely has done a good job at teaching men how to be good men, but I think we have also missed the mark when it comes to teaching men how to be good men who are also good at being men.

LEANDRO LOZADA: I think Preston is hitting on a key point. There’s a difference between being godly and being masculine. You can be very godly and not be very masculine. You can also be very masculine and not be godly. As a church, we need to find ways to make godly men masculine as well.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. That’s something that Preston wanted to do something about, but he just didn’t know how to do that — actually that is until one night.

PRESTON HOCKER:  I had just been married, I was like 22 years old, and I was at my in-laws’ house. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So the family was just hanging out, and the news was on the television in the background. Suddenly the news anchor said a name that caught Preston’s attention. It was the name of a friend from all the way back in junior high. 

PRESTON HOCKER: My friend’s name came up on the news, and it was a very specific — like she had this very specific, long, specific, original last name. So when it popped up, I was like, ‘Oh my goodness.’

JESSE EUBANKS: So as Preston listened to the news story, he found out that his friend had actually been murdered — shot in a parking lot by an ex-boyfriend. Y’know, this was impactful for Preston not just because his friend had died. As a kid, Preston had always wanted to stand up to bullies on the playground, y’know, to be a protector for kids who got picked on, but he was always told that the right thing to do when things got tough was just to walk away. Don’t do anything. Stay out of it. And seeing that news story about his friend and her ex-boyfriend — it suddenly made Preston think back to all those bullies on the playground, and he decided that he wasn’t gonna sit on the sidelines anymore. He wasn’t gonna just not do anything. He wanted to teach men something that he hadn’t been taught — how to protect and defend.

PRESTON HOCKER: But that just kind of sparked something in me, and, um, I wanted to learn how to fight.

JESSE EUBANKS: Y’know, but in order to teach others how to properly fight and self-defend, meant that actually he first had to learn how to do it himself. He had to become a fighter.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yes, I love that line. Jesse, when you say ‘he wasn’t going to sit on the sidelines anymore,’ I love that line. I think men are not created to sit on the sidelines and witness what’s happening.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, y’know, like, I’m not like a big mixed martial arts fan. I don’t have like this innate desire to like wrestle other guys to the ground. That’s just kind of not how I’m made. But I can definitely understand his frustration and his desire to do something. I think we also just need to, I don’t know, acknowledge this — that for a lot of people they see fighting as like a hyper-masculine thing, almost like a caricature of manhood. In this modern age, it feels like any display of, like, hyper-masculinity is seen as toxic. And, I don’t know, I just know that guys are tired of hearing those words thrown around, like ‘it’s toxic, your masculinity is toxic.’ And I think that that just reveals the fact that like our society is fearful of men being strong because men have abused it so much in the past. 

LEANDRO LOZADA: That’s why people like Jordan Peterson because he talks about strength, he acknowledges that as a part of being a man, and he invites men into that. I love that.

JESSE EUBANKS: I do think that you and I should be clear here. Hypermasculinity — it does exist. There are men out there who have abused people. There are men who have used their strength against others, y’know, to put people down. They’re out of line. It’s not okay. But I also think that the other terrible side effect of this is the culture has talked now so much about all that could go wrong with masculinity that it’s literally made young men afraid to be men. Like you see this all the time in our program. Y’know, you work with young men in our program, and there are guys that are literally scared to embrace manhood because they’re so scared of being a ‘toxic man’ that instead they just kind of don’t embrace anything.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Here’s what’s interesting though. In the past, things were different. That attitude has not always been the case.

AARON RENN: Nowhere did the evangelical literature have a greater effect, including in secular society, than in its demonization of men.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Coming up — how the church helped demonize men. We’ll be right back.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

LEANDRO LOZADA: And I’m Leandro Lozada. Today’s episode is where the gospel meets manhood.

JESSE EUBANKS: So guys like Jordan Peterson are attracting men in droves, but the church isn’t. Part of that has to do with the way church views men.

LEANDRO LOZADA: So what I’d like to do now is, uh, take a look at history and see how church has understood men.

AARON RENN: Essentially around the year 1800, just as society is undergoing the shift from a predominantly pre-industrial, rural economy to an urbanized, industrial economy, there was a big shift in how the church started talking about and perceiving piety and gender.

LEANDRO LOZADA: So this is Aaron Renn. He runs a website called the Masculinist. And much like Jordan Peterson, he is trying to understand masculinity, except that he does it from a biblical perspective. And he says that before the 19th century, men and masculinity were seen in a positive light.

AARON RENN: Angels, for example, in art were typically represented as male figures. This shifted to where piety began to be seen as a predominantly female characteristic. Angels, for example, shifted to much — be much more portrayed as women. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so wait. When he’s talking about piety, he means having inherent reverence or religious qualities. 

LEANDRO LOZADA: Right. And basically all evangelical literature or art after the year 1800 began to attribute inherent goodness or holiness with women and inherent evil or crookedness with men.

JESSE EUBANKS: Why is that?

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yeah, this came in conjunction with the rise of cities and the Industrial Revolution. So basically men were away from their home more, which created more opportunities for them to fall into things like drunkenness or gambling or cheating on your wife. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, I see. Okay. So there was a rise in men’s social sins, sort of publicly, like the spotlight was just suddenly put on them.

LEANDRO LOZADA: That’s right. And this created a new narrative for society and also for the church.

AARON RENN: The woman is essentially the guardian of morality, the guardian of the family, essentially a somewhat naturally good, naturally holy — and the man came to be seen as a little bit intrinsically evil, you know, fallen for certain. And that the sins of men became the greatest threat to the family and to society. 

JESSE EUBANKS: I think this just illustrates the truth that oftentimes men are seen as inherently more sinful and women are seen as inherently more virtuous. When a man cheats on his wife, that’s just an example of a man acting like all men really truly would be. Women, y’know, when she cheats on her husband, she’s like an exception to womanhood. It’s like not the norm.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Or it’s the husband’s fault because he did something.

JESSE EUBANKS: Right. He was like the trigger that caused her to behave in that way.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yeah, he’s a dummy or something and therefore she cheated on him and in some form or shape he deserved it.

JESSE EUBANKS: Right, but if the husband has the affair, she didn’t do anything really to deserve the husband doing that.’ Like, in both cases, the husband really was the primary reason that it happened.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yes. And this is still largely the way the church views or interacts with men — more than 200 years later.

AUDIO CLIPS: I am primarily provoked in spirit by our men. God designed you to go to bed tired. Why are you going to bed so strong?… If you put the bar too low, you’ll find plenty of little boys who can shave that are willing to step across that little two-inch bar you set for ‘em… Some of you guys coming here for years — still not praying with your wife. Some of you guys have already given her that look — ‘don’t cry, don’t let ‘em know they’re talking about me, just hold it together.’… How dare you neglecting a woman, being a coward, being like your father Adam? Who do you think you are?…

JESSE EUBANKS: I listen to guys like that, and I just think this is part of the reason that men don’t wanna go to church now. Of course as Christians, we do believe we are sinful. We do believe that we need to be confronted in our sin. I also look at Scripture, and I see plenty of examples of men being very forcefully confronted. But I do think about the frequency with which men are often chastised from the pulpit — in contrast with women especially — and it’s harsh, man, and it’s shaming. 

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yeah, I wonder when was the last time that men heard from the pulpit, ‘Men, you are awesome. You are good. You go get the job done. You can do it. You have what it takes.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, so often it’s about the ways that we’re lacking, not the ways that we are capable or possible. Y’know, Barna did a study recently. Here’s what they found. They said, ‘Given a choice between two words that describe the state of masculinity today — so these are things like endangered versus thriving, confused versus vibrant, in crisis versus stable — Christian men are far more likely to choose the negative word. In contrast, U.S. men in general are less likely to choose the negative option.’ Here’s what that means — Christian men have a more negative view of manhood in general.

LEANDRO LOZADA: So what you’re saying is that Christian men have a more negative view of masculinity overall?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. And I think that that goes back to that issue that we were talking about, y’know, toxic masculinity. Y’know, I think it’s right and necessary for the church to have addressed this topic, but I also need to be honest. I think that we’ve swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction. Y’know, instead of teaching men how to be men, we’re more teaching men how to — I don’t know — beat themselves up and essentially be doormats to those around them. 

LEANDRO LOZADA: This cluelessness about what masculinity is and this fear of toxic masculinity has led the church to adopt a model of servant leadership. Aaron Renn talks about it, and he says it’s not very helpful.

AARON RENN: And so I think one of the challenges you run into with the servant leader concept is — well, just the very word ‘servant.’ What does it conjure up? It kind of conjures up this idea of being like a butler or something like that in England, someone who is sort of a butler/therapist, that is to say ‘emotional support’ for his woman — this theory that says, ‘women are very interested in a man who’s on fire for God, super serious about his faith, super conscientious, not spending a lot of time hanging out with his friends, spending more time at home with his wife and kids, trying to be attentive to his wife or girlfriend’s emotional needs, being very affirming and uplifting of her all the time, essentially making his own desires subservient to, you know, kind of the needs of, you know, his wife/girlfriend/kids. 

JESSE EUBANKS: I don’t think that what he’s saying here is that servant leadership is bad. I don’t think that’s what he’s getting at. He’s talking about this notion of like we have a bad understanding of what servant leadership actually is.

LEANDRO LOZADA: And I say this from my own experience — this approach of masculinity that the church teaches, of being a butler/therapist and having no agency of your own, really doesn’t work out. As an example of that, let me tell you a story about a guy named Luke Sharrett.

LUKE SHARRETT: It all started March 19, 1989 when I emerged from my dear mother’s womb screaming and afraid, and that’s when my masculine journey started. 

LEANDRO LOZADA: This is Luke Sharrett. He grew up, he got married, he had a kid. And through it all, he really tried to live out what the church told him he should be as a man.

LUKE SHARRETT: For the longest time I had been a person who was essentially operating to please others around me. I was figuring out — ‘What do I need to do to get the approval of my parents, of my teachers, of my friends, of my wife, and even of my young children? What do I need to accomplish? Who do I need to be? How do I need to talk? What do I need to look like? How hard do I need to work to get the stamp of approval from other people?’

JESSE EUBANKS: I mean, it sounds like he was really just trying to be a people pleaser. As somebody who grew up in the church, like I can understand that this whole servant leadership conversation and people-pleasing — the lines between those two things become very blurry.

LEANDRO LOZADA: And he never heard a different kind of message, which could have been something along the lines of — ‘Lead. Assert yourself. Make decisions. Do what’s best, not necessarily for you or your wife, but for your family, even if your wife doesn’t like it. It’s okay.’ So from the outside, Luke is checking all the boxes. He’s being attentive to his wife, he’s saying yes to her. He’s being attentive to his kids, he’s taking care of them. But if you just scratch the surface, you realize that actually Luke is not very confident. He doesn’t know what it means to be a man.

LUKE SHARRETT: Feelings of inferiority that I would feel bubble up inside me when I was around other men. I definitely was aware that I didn’t feel like I measured up or was like those men that I was friends with or that I was in church with or that I bumped into on the sidewalk. 

LEANDRO LOZADA: Living this way left Luke wildly unprepared and afraid and anxious — like the time he decided to take his family on a trip.

LUKE SHARRETT: It was a few months after my first son Truman was born. We were flying to Colorado for a little trip. I was going to do some work out there and decided it would be great to bring my family with me.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Luke, his wife, and his six-month-old son Truman get to the airport, get on the plane, the plane takes off…

LUKE SHARRETT: Basically as soon as we were airborne, little Truman just started screaming and screaming and screaming, as babies do on airplanes.

LEANDRO LOZADA: So that was pretty normal actually. What was not normal was Luke’s reaction.

LUKE SHARRETT: I just immediately began to freak out. I wasn’t concerned about him. I was concerned about the people sitting around us being angry with me, shooting me dirty looks, thinking mean things about me. And I just immediately panicked. And I turned to my wife and said, ‘We’ve gotta do something. We’ve gotta feed Truman. We’ve gotta make him stop crying.’ As if my poor wife didn’t have, you know, enough to worry about with trying to comfort and feed a newborn on an airplane, she also had a husband who was freaking out and not focused on supporting his wife and his young son at the moment that they needed him. 

JESSE EUBANKS: I fully resonate with Luke in this situation, like I just remember so many times that my kids would just lose it in a public space and I just felt completely overwhelmed. I’ve done the stuff that Luke’s referring to, which is that sense of like I am worried about everybody else’s opinion in the room and I’m looking at my wife and I’m going, ‘Fix this. Make this go away. I’m embarrassed right now.’

LEANDRO LOZADA: I think that what Luke is experiencing in that moment is a lot of fear of men. Instead of taking responsibility, he’s blaming his wife. He’s trying to put the weight of the situation on his wife. Luke told me many stories like this, but the sad part is that none of his stories led him to reconsider his masculinity. He started to reconsider what it means to be a man after he and his wife got a divorce. 

LUKE SHARRETT: I started to really think about what masculinity is and how it applies to me and what it means specifically for me to be a man as I was in the midst of my marriage of four years falling apart. This is something that has been contributing to the downfall of my marriage, to, uh, friction in my relationships, in my friendships.

JESSE EUBANKS: Leandro, let me ask you a question. What do you think’s really at stake if a man never learns how to be a man?

LEANDRO LOZADA: I think that it’s a tragedy. It is deeply dissatisfying to be a person that is afraid of pursuing, and to be a person that is a slave of fear — to fear of rejection or to fear of failure — is a deeply dissatisfying life.

JESSE EUBANKS: So we’re back to the original question — what does it mean to be a man? How does someone like Luke begin to step into real manhood? 

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yeah, actually Aaron Renn talks about that. Here’s what he had to say.

AARON RENN: In essence, manhood is an earned status. That is to say one does not become a man through just growing up and growing into the role. It was a performance standard that you had to live up to the code of manhood in that society, and as part of doing that it means you have to actively be present in the public square performing on display in the arena in the things that define manhood. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So this actually reminds me of this book that I read. It’s a book by a guy named John Sowers, and it’s called The Heroic Path. And in it, Sowers tells his own journey of trying to figure out how to be a man. One of the things that he notes is that almost every other culture has a sort of ritual, a physical act that clearly defines, ‘Okay, you were a boy and now you’re a man.’ For example, in some tribal villages, the way that you become a man is that you go out, you kill a bear, and you come back a man. There’s a confrontation, you overcome it, and that proves you to be a man. 

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yeah, but in our culture today, we don’t have anything like that. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Right, and so Sowers makes this argument that we need to get back to this model. And of course, like, he’s not saying that every man needs to go out and kill bears. But if we wanna be men, we need to face what Sowers calls ‘Something Terrible’ — capital S, capital T. To step into the ring, to confront the monster. Y’know, why do you think men are so drawn to video games? Because they offer a sense of facing ‘Something Terrible’ and overcoming it. But in order to become a true man, we need to be taught how to do this in real life.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yeah, I love what you’re saying, which leads me to Luke Sharrett. He is about to face that in his story. 

LUKE SHARRETT: I was invited to a weekend, uh, a men’s retreat.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Stay with us.

COMMERCIAL 

JESSE EUBANKS: Welcome back to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

LEANDRO LOZADA: And I’m Leandro Lozada. Today — where the gospel meets manhood.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so we’ve seen that part of being a man means going on a journey, stepping into the arena, and facing ‘Something Terrible’ — and coming back a man.

LEANDRO LOZADA: And for Luke Sharrett, his ‘Something Terrible’ showed up at a men’s retreat. So Luke was invited by a friend to join this retreat. 

LUKE SHARRETT: ‘Hey, you should give this a try, or you should think about attending.’ And I said, ‘Sign me up.’ And attended this weekend, and really for the first time got a taste of emotional intimacy with other men.

LEANDRO LOZADA: So here’s the thing. At this retreat Luke found men who were confronting what was inside of them, men that were actually paying attention to their emotions, and he had never had a chance to do that. At that retreat he was faced with a challenge — is he going to face his junk or not? Is he going to face this deep darkness inside of him or not? And for him, there were two particular emotions that he needed to deal with.

LUKE SHARRETT: The first emotion that I was really able to step into for the first time as a man in a healthy way was anger. Really realized I’ve got a lot of anger inside me and it’s righteous anger and it’s like a holy anger and from time to time a healthy man will have anger rise up inside of him. And so for the first time in my life, I felt like I was allowed to be angry. I was allowed to be angry about injustice. I was allowed to be angry about things that had happened to me that were not right and were not fair. I was allowed to be angry at words that were spoken over me and actions that were taken against me that I had never processed. 

LEANDRO LOZADA: The other emotion Luke confronted was sadness.

LUKE SHARRETT: Tapping into that sadness was really important for me. I realized I had been carrying around a lot of sorrow deep down in my heart that I had never let out, that I had never expressed.

JESSE EUBANKS: You know, we repent of the things that we’re guilty of, but we need healing for our wounds. And when men fail to grieve their wounds, they can’t be healed. They need the Lord to come and to heal their wounds. 

LEANDRO LOZADA: I also think it’s very powerful because it is allowing Luke to be who he is. It’s allowing Luke to take a claim in life and say, ‘I am allowed to be sad, and I am allowed to be angry.’ Whereas the message that Luke received perpetually is — ‘if you are angry or sad, you are being selfish. You need to say no to yourself. You need to say yes to just about everyone and deny yourself as much as you can. You are not allowed to be angry at, for example, your wife.’ And the reality is that sometimes we can be angry at our wives, and that’s perfectly fair and fine.

LUKE SHARRETT: It was a really, really powerful weekend to finally get in touch with my emotions as a person, with my emotions as a man. It was like I was set free from this prison of just like repressed emotion that I’d been carrying around inside me, and it was, um, I don’t even know what cliche to use. It was, it was so much more than a breath of fresh air. It was so much more than a light bulb going off. Um, it was what I had been looking for my entire life — which was to be seen, to be known, to be accepted, to be loved, and to be challenged by other men. And it was glorious. 

LEANDRO LOZADA: I can attest to what Luke is saying here. The retreat he went to is called Men of the Cross and he actually invited me to go to it and it was awesome. One of my absolutely favorite parts of the retreat was when the leaders called us. They said, ‘Men, stand up.’ And as soon as they said that, I felt something deep in my gut. They were calling me into my manhood. I had never heard anybody speak to me and say, ‘Men, stand up.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I think that for some of us, our ‘Something Terrible’ is found inside of us. Y’know, there’s some part of ourselves that we need to confront. For others of us, ‘Something Terrible’ might be an external battle. Can I tell you a story?

LEANDRO LOZADA: Absolutely.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so I don’t know that this is when I became a man. Maybe it was. But I will tell you, like, this was definitely me facing my ‘Something Terrible.’ A little context — my wife, before we were together, dated another guy and they were together for quite a while and she ended up breaking things off with him because he actually became abusive. Here’s the other thing you should know about him — he was a weightlifter and he was so big that he actually used to pick her up when they were dating and do bench presses with her over his head. He was a big guy. So less than a year after we’ve been married, I get a message from my mother-in-law that this guy has shown up at their house unexpected. She’s panicking, she says, ‘he’s here at the house.’ Other family members who are also present at the house — no one knows how to handle it.

LEANDRO LOZADA: So what did you do?

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so I walk in and this guy stands up and he’s, like, super charming and he’s like, ‘Hey, nice to meet you.’ And I’m like, ‘Hey, let’s go outside.’ So we go outside on the front porch. All my family’s inside, y’know, all my in-laws. He’s like, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ And I just look at him and I say, ‘It’s not appropriate for you to be here. Go inside, say goodbye to these people, get in your car, and don’t come back.’ And he’s like, ‘No, no, no, man. It’s not like that.’ So I repeat the exact same thing a second time — ‘It’s not appropriate for you to be here. Go inside, say goodbye to these people, get in your car, and never come back.’ Immediately, his whole demeanor shifts. So the charm wasn’t working, he wasn’t able to manipulate me, so this guy gets close to me. He’s a big guy, he starts pushing in on me — like, basically, like, his chest is coming into my face — and he’s like, ‘You don’t wanna do this.’ And so I say to him, ‘What are you saying right now?’ Because I could tell what he was wanting is he was trying to say, ‘I’m gonna pummel you.’

LEANDRO LOZADA: He was trying to intimidate you.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, he was trying to intimidate me. And he says, ‘Trust me, you don’t wanna do this.’ And you know what I thought — ‘I don’t wanna do this. I don’t wanna be here right now doing this, facing this guy. This guy could snap me in two and never break a sweat.’ But the whole thing is this — I was totally scared, I was also never gonna change my mind. That was my moment. There’s nobody else in that situation that could protect my family. That was the family I married into. That was my wife. That was my in-laws. That was my family. And this man who was a threat to them — he would have to go through me.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yeah.

JESSE EUBANKS: He could totally absolutely have destroyed me, and I was willing to let him do that. The point wasn’t whether I would win. The point was am I willing to face him.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Even if you lose.

JESSE EUBANKS: Even if I lose, it is my fight to lose. It is no one else’s fight.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Right, yeah.

JESSE EUBANKS: And so I repeated for a third time — ‘It is not appropriate for you to be here, go inside and say goodbye to these people, get in your car, and never come back.’ And you know what? He went inside, said goodbye, and we’ve never seen him again.

LEANDRO LOZADA: And that was you facing your ‘Something Terrible,’ Jesse.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, it was definitely a defining moment for me. And it also is sort of similar to the ‘Something Terrible’ that Preston Hocker ended up facing. So when we last heard from Preston, he was training to be a professional fighter so that he could disciple men to use their strength to defend and protect physically. He’s spent months training, learning techniques — and now, he actually has to face his very first fight. 

PRESTON HOCKER: So I took this first fight. Um, I don’t remember the name of all of my opponents, but I remember Kyler Von Wald was the guy’s name. He stood like almost a head taller than me. I had no business being in the cage with this guy. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Dude, like, what do you think when you hear the name, like, Kyler Von Wald?

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yeah, I think of this Russian guy, uh, that was in —

JESSE EUBANKS: Like, he’s gonna pummel you like Rocky.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yes. Uh, Rambo or Rocky.

JESSE EUBANKS: Rambo! Rambo. Yeah! Dude totally.

LEANDRO LOZADA: That big white guy from Rambo.

JESSE EUBANKS: Like you’re going down. 

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yeah.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so Preston actually decided to do cage fighting, uh, because he says it’s actually one of the safest ways to fight.

PRESTON HOCKER: There’s two guys of the relative same size with a guy in the cage with you making sure, y’know, everybody stays as safe as possible. You know, it’s relative safety, but still as safe as possible.

JESSE EUBANKS: So here’s the thing, like, Kyler Von Wald was not the guy who was supposed to be in the cage. The guy Preston was supposed to fight dropped out at the last minute. Guess who gets in the cage with him — Kyler Von Wald. It was either fight him, or do not fight at all. And it was just by looking at him that Von Wald was clearly several ranks above Preston’s skill level.

PRESTON HOCKER: He was the one guy in the room without a shirt on and my dad sees the guy and he goes, ‘Man, I’d hate to be the guy that has to fight him.’ Not knowing (laughs), not knowing that it was me. I was the guy that was gonna have to fight him.

JESSE EUBANKS: Totally like a David and Goliath scenario. But, like, at least David, like, had some skill. Preston was a rookie — first time ever.

PRESTON HOCKER: You have to understand — this was the first time I’ve ever been in a fight period. The first time (laughs), the first time my fist ever hit somebody’s face was Kyler Von Wald. I hit him with a right, and I’ll never forget it. It was like slow motion, like, and just feeling the energy, like, just transfer from my body to my shoulder down to my hand to his face. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Preston gave Von Wald that one good punch, but then he ended up being just dominated for the rest of the fight. 

PRESTON HOCKER: I hit him, and I turned him around. He fell into the gate, into the cage — and being that it was like my first time ever hitting a human being that hard, I didn’t really know what to do, like I just didn’t have the experience to go finish what I started. He ended up winning a split decision, and I had the time of my life. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So Preston lost the cage fight. But like in this other sense, he won because, I mean, he had faced his ‘Something Terrible.’ He came out the other side. 

PRESTON HOCKER: There’s no recipe — ‘add, you know, a cup of this, a cup of that, and now you’ve got masculinity.’ It’s an approach to life. It’s the way you look at life because life throws tons of fear at you — you know, if you’re gonna lose your job, if you’re gonna get your job, if she’s gonna say yes, all of those kinds of things, even down to like some people just feel like, I don’t know, paralyzed by fear because they don’t know what shirt to put on in the morning. That’s one of the reasons why I love fighting is because it helps me understand, you know, I can deal with fear. I can deal with anxiety. It proves to me that I’m not made of glass and that there are things that we have to go through sometimes that we feel like they’re gonna break us, but really they’re not.

JESSE EUBANKS: So today, Preston is actually a pastor and he still is a fighter and he actually teaches fighting to other men. And get this — he has a fighter’s name. You wanna know what his fighting name is?

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yeah, I do.

JESSE EUBANKS: ‘Pastor of Disaster.’ (laughs) So, where does all this leave us? I know that for me, as a man, I like practical action, y’know, something that I can put my hands on. So, if you’re a man and you wanna step into your manhood — here are three things that you need to do.

LEANDRO LOZADA: First, surround yourself with other men. 

JESSE EUBANKS: In particular, a spiritual father and a band of brothers because they can help you discern your ‘Something Terrible.’ You need an older man to look up to who can guide you through the next stages of your life, but you also need a camaraderie of other men to journey with you as well.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yes, a group of men that can support you and can encourage you and can tell you, ‘This is what it means to be a man.’ Second, develop your strength. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And we mean this physically, like guys, you are embodied creatures for a purpose. Y’know, God made you embodied for a reason. Live into your physical strength, like nurture it. But also, don’t think of strength only in terms of physical — care for yourself mentally and spiritually as well.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yeah, Jesse, it’s actually very interesting because one of the key aspects of my journey into masculinity started to happen when I started to do pushups. I had never been a guy that had exercised his core, but one day I decided to do pushups. I could hardly believe that I would do them, but I set a goal to do 50 pushups every day for one month. I actually finished that month, and after that month I was very surprised that I had done them — but not only that, I was very excited about doing them. That started two years ago. The point is, as I have developed my muscles, I have in parallel developed confidence and mental strength and emotional strength and endurance. It has been incredibly beneficial for me to develop my physical strength. I encourage you to do it.

JESSE EUBANKS: And here’s the thing. Like, you develop your strength not to be some, y’know, comically massive bodybuilder. You do this for the sake of others. You do this for your community so that you can help them and serve them and step into situations as a man. Okay, so those are the first two things. The third thing is — develop your emotions.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yeah, there is this idea that men are not emotional. There is this idea that men should be stoic. And there is a sense in which I agree with that, particularly in the face of dangers or particularly in the face of adversity, but you cannot use that as a rule of life. You have to pay attention to your emotions. Allow yourself to feel this deep shame that you probably carry, this deep anger, this deep sadness. As a man, you are required to pay attention to your emotions and deal with them and to cultivate good and healthy emotions. You need to cultivate a good emotional life.

JESSE EUBANKS: And a practical way of doing that is literally begin to incorporate emotional language into your everyday talk. ‘I feel sad. I feel excited. I feel like I’m longing a little bit today.’ Literally look up an emotions wheel online and begin to learn emotional language and incorporate it into your speech. Because here’s the thing — when you begin to use emotional words, it’s actually helping you begin to label the emotions that you’re experiencing. Whether you like it or not, you’re probably experiencing a lot of emotions, but you haven’t learned how to label those things so that you can identify them. So start using emotional language so that you can label and identify.

LEANDRO LOZADA: And if you start to feel that that is putting you in a weak or vulnerable position, that might be true and that’s okay. As you journey through that, you’re gonna come out a much stronger man. Men that know and understand and can address their emotions are much stronger than men that suppress their emotions.

JESSE EUBANKS: So again, if you want to step into your manhood, here are the three things that you need to do. So first, surround yourself with other men. Second, develop your strength holistically. And third, develop your emotions. 

LEANDRO LOZADA: Yeah, I mean this is so exciting. These three things are things Luke is now striving for. He has such a different outlook in life. 

LUKE SHARRETT: It’s a really exciting time for me. I wake up in the morning and I roll out of bed and the first thing I do is make my bed. And as I’m making my bed, I just think to myself, ‘I can’t believe I get another day to be a man in a world that is in desperate need of men.’ It’s so exciting to feel like I know who I am and I know my goals and I know my mission and I know the type of person I’m trying to embody, which is a competent, capable, courageous, virtuous man.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so Rachel, you’ve sat quietly in the corner this whole conversation.

RACHEL SZABO: Mm-hm.

JESSE EUBANKS: What jumps out at you? Any takeaways, maybe for some of the women that are listening?

RACHEL SZABO: I think listening to this makes me excited to see the men that I have in my life, to see them live out manhood, and to try to like encourage them in that.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. Well, let me tell you — as a man, we appreciate it when women encourage us towards that instead of discouraging us. It’s something that really actually means a lot to us. Okay, so here’s the thing — whether you’re a man listening to this or a woman listening to this, gender is best understood in the context of our faith. When King David charged his son Solomon, he not only told him to be strong — he told him to be godly. ‘I am about to go the way of all the earth. Be strong, act like a man, and keep the charge of the Lord your God, walking in his ways and keeping his statutes.’ But here’s the thing — y’know, even Solomon failed to really be a man. You look at his life, and there are so many ways in which he failed. And probably for some guys listening to this episode now, you’re thinking, ‘I can’t be the kind of man that you’re calling me to be.’ Well, I just wanna tell you, welcome to the club. Y’know, if we’re gonna explore what it means for the good news of the gospel to intersect with manhood, here it is — none of us can be the type of man that God really, truly calls us to be, at least not in this lifetime. But the good news is that Jesus has been the perfect man. Jesus has fulfilled all that it means to be a man, and his grace covers your inadequacy.

LUKE SHARRETT: I tell them to look at Jesus, the true and perfect man, and emulate him. Look at the man who performed the ultimate act of sacrificial service in carrying his cross up the hill and dying for our sins. Look at the man who walked into the temple, fashioned a whip, and flipped over people’s tables and cracked that whip and said, ‘Get out of my father’s house. What do you think you’re doing defiling this holy place?’ I say look at that man who was in touch with his emotions, who knew there was a time to be angry and embodied righteous anger and sadness and wept in front of his friends’ tomb, Lazarus, who burst into tears at the pain of losing one of his best friends, even though he knew he was about to bring him out of the tomb and raised him from the dead. I see Jesus, and I see him as the perfect embodiment of these masculine virtues.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Men, I want you to know that it’s good to be a man. There is no shame in it. You have permission to be a man, and you have permission to step into the world with confidence, with passion, with desire. You do not have to hide your energy. You do not have to hide your passions and desires. Stake your claim. Make a statement. Go for it.

JESSE EUBANKS: When God created man, he said that it was good. He made you a man on purpose. It was not a mistake, it was not a flaw, and the world needs you to show up as a man. It doesn’t mean that you’re not gonna stumble along the way. It doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be scared at times. It doesn’t even mean that you won’t be very terribly confused on this journey. But the truth is the world needs you to face your ‘Something Terrible’ because we need men in the world. The rest of us are counting on you, and God — he is with you and before you.

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JESSE EUBANKS: For even more resources on manhood or to hear past episodes of this podcast, visit our website at lovethyneighborhood.org/LTNpodcast.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Special thanks to our interviewees for this episode — Preston Hocker, Aaron Renn, and Luke Sharrett. Special thanks also to John Sowers.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Our senior producer and host is Jesse Eubanks.

JESSE EUBANKS: Our co-host today is our program director, Leandro Lozada.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Our media assistant and audio engineer is Anna Tran. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Our media director and producer is Rachel Szabo, who is also most likely secretly Ahsoka Tano.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Additional reporting by Alex de Freitas.

JESSE EUBANKS: Music for today’s episode comes from Lee Rosevere, Podington Bear, and Blue Dot Sessions. Theme music and commercial music by Murphy DX.

LEANDRO LOZADA: Apply for your social justice internship supported by Christian community by visiting lovethyneighborhood.org. Serve for a summer or a year. Grow in your faith and life skills. Learn more at lovethyneighborhood.org.

JESSE EUBANKS: Which of these was a neighbor to the man in need? The one who showed mercy. Jesus tells us, ‘Go, and do likewise.’