Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Nancy Pearcey, author of 'The Toxic War on Masculinity' || SLP476

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Nancy Pearcey, author of 'The Toxic War on Masculinity' || SLP476 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to this episode of the Speak Life Podcast, episode 476.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Thomas Thorrogood, media producer at Speak Life, and today we bring you a conversation that Glenn had with Professor Pearcy.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Nancy Pearce's latest book is The Toxic War on Masculinity, How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Her earlier books include Love Thy Body, Answering Hard Questions About Life and Sexuality, The Soul of Science, Saving Leonardo, Finding Truth, and two ECPA Gold Medallion Award winners, How Now Shall We Live, co-authored with Harold Fickert and Chuck Coulson, and Total Truth.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Her books have been translated into 19 languages.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: She is professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University, a former agnostic.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Pierce has spoken at universities such as Princeton, Stanford, USC, and Dartmouth.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: She has been quoted in the New Yorker and Newsweek, highlighted as one of the top five women apologists by Christianity today, and hailed in The Economist as America's pre-eminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: So it was an absolute privilege to have Professor Pearcy on the Speak Life podcast.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a really fascinating conversation.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: I will hand straight over to Glenn and Nancy.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's my great privilege to have Nancy Pearcy, Professor Nancy Pearcy, who is uh a professor in uh Houston Christian University.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: Is that right, uh Professor Pearcy?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_02: It it has been called Houston Baptist.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: That's why people sometimes get it mixed up, but we are in process of changing the name to Houston Christian.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: Broadening it out.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: And uh yes, you're you're you're for all those who are Christians.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I've so appreciated uh your books in the past.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I've I've loved Total Truth, I've loved uh Love Thy Body, and uh and now you've written uh a new book uh called uh The Toxic War on Masculinity, How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: And um as I've read your books, there is so much of a flavor of Francis Schaefer to what you're doing in the realm of cultural apolog uh apologetics, standing four square on the Bible and using the Bible as spectacles to look at the culture and and seeing it uh in in greater focus than uh any secular uh commentator might.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um now I know Francis Schaefer has had a part to play in in your story, or at least LeBrie has.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: Can you can you tell us um your journey towards uh these books?
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us how you became a Christian and and how you became the thinker that you are today.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, thanks for asking me, because I do I I have to tell you, the older I get, the more I appreciate the fact that God got hold of me and ch and so dramatically changed my life.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um so I was raised in a Lutheran home.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: It was Scandinavian Lutheran.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you know, but all Scandinavians are Lutheran in the way that all Irish are Catholic.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um so it was very much of an ethnic background.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: And the weakness of ethnic backgrounds is they tend to rely on the ethnicity to hold their kids instead of really having a strong personal, you know, vivid, living faith commitment.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so when I uh when I reached high school, I started asking questions, just you know, really just one question, which was how do we know Christianity is true?
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's what I was asking.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: And unfortunately, none of the adults in my life could answer that question.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I I talked to my father, who I do mention in this book, um, and so he I said point blank, why are you a Christian?
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: He said, works for me.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_02: And he said, Really?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: That's it.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I actually had a chance to talk to a seminary dean, and again, this was a Lutheran, uh an uncle of mine, and he said, Don't worry, we all have doubts sometimes, as though it was a psychological phase and I would outgrow it.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so I eventually decided, I guess Christianity just doesn't really have any answers.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so about h halfway through high school, I very intentionally laid apart laid aside my Christian upbringing and decided it was up to me to find truth.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: You know, so I and I literally started going down the hallway to the library at the public high school I attended and pulling books off the philosophy shelf because I thought, you know, if I can't get any adults to talk to me, maybe maybe these philosophers, isn't that their job, right?
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: That's that that's their job of a philosopher is to say, you know, what is truth?
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: How do we know it?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: Is there meaning to life?
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: Is there a foundation for ethics, or is it just true for me, true for you?
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I very quickly realized that if there was no God, the answer to all of those questions was no, there is no meaning to life.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_02: We're just on a rock flying through empty space.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: There is no foundation for for ethics.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um it really is just I I became the one in my friend group in high school who was arguing for relativism.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um back then, you know, a a friend says to me, Oh, she's so wrong, and I'm the one who jumps in and says, You can't say anyone's right or wrong.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I even decided there was no foundation for knowledge.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, I became a skeptic.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: I the way I thought of it at the time was if all I have is my puny brain and the vast scope of time and space and history, what makes me think I can have any sort of objective, universal, transcendent truth?
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: Ridiculous.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's how it struck me as a 16-year-old, you know, ridiculous.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so by the time I graduated from high school, I had really absorbed all of these isms of relativism and skepticism and even determinism.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: You know, from my science classes I was taught we were just complex biochemical machines with no free will anyway.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: And so it was a couple of years later that I was living in Europe.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: We had lived in Europe when I was a child, and so I had gone back.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_02: I'd saved my money off through high school because I really loved living in Germany.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: And and that's how I ended up sort of stumbling across Labri, which is the ministry of Francis Schaefer, which is in Switzerland.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: And that was the first time I had ever encountered any sort of Christian apologetics.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_02: And and I was blown away.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: I had no idea by then that Christianity could be supported with good reasons and arguments and evidence and logic.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um I had never heard that concept.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_02: And it so it didn't happen overnight.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: It took a year and a half.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but that is how I eventually came back to Christianity, but a totally different form of Christianity that I'd known when I was when I was a child.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: And so that is why I write books on apologetics, why I teach apologetics in my uh in my classes, and uh I I'm just very sensitive to the questions that young people have, you know, who are thinking like I was thinking as a teenager and and really wanting to help them sort through those ideas and see that that Christianity can really answer their questions.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: Can you think of some I'm I'm sure there are many uh points along the way, but can you c can you think of a moment or two in in which you like because it's quite the leap from going from determinist, skeptic, agnostic to somebody who writes total truth?
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like what what what what was some of the pennies or what what was w like can you think of a moment?
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it was an existential moment, was a it was a it was a truth that got a hold of you.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um how did how does that transformation happen?
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well, there was a conversion moment.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: You know, some people wondered if it was a gradual process because it did take a year and a half.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: But there was an actual moment when I had to decide, you know.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: Here's how I thought of it.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um I was very concerned by the f the fact that I found LeBris so attractive actually concerned me because I was afraid of being drawn in emotionally.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, here was a place where they they could engage with the secular ideas.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'd never met Christians who could engage with secular ideas.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they understood the isms even better than I did and could give me good answers to them.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um and of course, uh Francis Schaefer is also known for promoting the arts.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I was studying violin at the University of uh not not at the universe, I was studying violin at the Heidelberg Conservatory in Germany.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: So I, you know, the his um interest in the arts uh spoke to me deeply.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: And uh of course I was there for the first time in 1971, and so everybody there were everyone there were hippies.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: They were they were all hippies, you know, hair down to I had hair down to my waist, you know, and um it's and I thought, and actually that was a serious uh consideration because nobody at that time was reaching across that cultural divide and reaching out to these uh disaffected young people.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_02: And so I thought, who are these Christians that they can actually talk to hippies?
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so I I was actually concerned that I w might be drawn in for emotional reasons because this was such an attractive form of Christianity.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: And as you know, um LeBris grew up out of Francis Schaefer's home, and it grew um as other people said, we know we'd like to join your ministry.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: Many times they had actually converted through LeBrie, and so they would buy a home down the street and open their home, and then another couple would come and open their home.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so the whole thing was very much of a Christian community.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: It was not like a school or an institution.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: You actually lived in people's homes and helped wash the dishes, you know.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so many people who were at Lebris said just as important as the um apologetics was the experience of Christian community, you know, experiencing a quality of love that they had never experienced before.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I would say that was the same for me as well.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: You know, seeing a form of love that I had never seen in my Christian church or family back home.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: So, but the the upshot of that is I was afraid that I might be drawn in emotionally, and Christianity had let me down once before.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so I was not going to do this unless I was absolutely convinced intellectually that it was true.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so after a month, I actually left LeBris.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I needed space, you know, I needed space to think.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and it was a year and a half later, uh, because of LeBrie I had discovered apologetics.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_02: So Lewis, I had never known C.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_02: S.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_02: Lewis, uh, Chesterton, you know, and of course Schaefer's own books, Os Guinness, I think, had written his first book by then.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_02: At any rate, uh, through LeBrie I discovered apologetics, and just through my reading, I finally reached a point where one day I thought, you know, I actually am.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_02: I am at the point where I'm intellectually convinced it's true.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: You can keep learning your whole life, of course, but you reach a point where you say, Yeah, I am convinced.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: And that's when um I had a, you know, a definitely one-time sort of conversion experience where I had to say, okay, God, here's how I put it, you know, God won the argument.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_02: He won the argument, I give up.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um so so there was a definite moment.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: But it was not any one thing so much as the cumulative effect of seeing that Christianity had solid answers to all of those isms that I had b totally absorbed as a secular person before.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and a holistic process as well, in that you're talking about the arts and you're talking about hospitality.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and Edith and Francis them themselves, like what what what was their impact on you?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, well, especially Francis Schaefer.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um Francis Schaefer, um, now that I've been in the Christian world a long time and I've seen a lot of Christian celebrityism, I will say that Francis Schaefer was authentic.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: He was the real deal.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's that's what made him different, I think, from many, even of the Christian leaders and celebrities of our own day.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: You know, when he went to Switzerland, he went to Switzerland with Child Evangelism Fellowship.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: It was after World War II.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: They sent him to Europe to s to assess the state of the churches after World War II, you know, and to come back with a plan to help rebuild the churches.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_02: So he came back and the mission the mission board, Child Evangelism Fellowship, said, We think you should do it.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: We should, we think you should go.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_02: So he did.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_02: That's how he ended up in uh having a ministry in Europe.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um but because he was in Europe, by the way, he was much more aware of European trends, intellectual trends like postmodernism.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: He was the first Christian really writing to a postmodern culture, and I think that that's one reason that his work spoke to me.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um I was very postmodern by that time.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I would never have been drawn in by the sort of classic apologetics.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: You know, William Lane Craig does great stuff, I would never have been drawn in by that.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um I actually had one person, my brother had become a Christian before me, and so he tried biblical apologetics on me, you know, the reliability of scripture, evidence for the resurrection.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, I was left cold.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: He asked me one time once, um, I was in Germany and with a German friend, and he said, Okay, let me just tell me this.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think Jesus rose from the dead?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: And my German friend said, Oh, well, that's sort of the crux of it, isn't it?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, No, it's not.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_02: It could be a wonderful parable that gives some people meaning to their life.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't have to be true.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: So you can see the postmodern mindset.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_02: You know, my German friends still thought there was true and false.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, Who cares?
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: You know, if you have a lovely story that makes you feel good, who cares about true or false?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_02: So you can see that uh Schaefer was the first person who was really picking up on that because he lived in Europe.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: You know, all my German friends were reading Camus and Sartre, the existentialist philosophers.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_02: I still remember conversation with my German boyfriend where he kept telling me, life is absurd.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: That's the starting point, you know, is life is absurd.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: So Francis Schaefer was in Europe and, you know, really dealing with these existential, at that time existentialism, now postmodernism.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he was the first Christian apologist to really understand where these young people were coming from.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so and so that's where, you know, I am just so grateful I ended up there.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: Because obviously I was not open to any other form of apologetics.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_02: And Francis Schaefer really had um a great impact on me because of that.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: So that's fascinating to hear the story um by which you've come to be the thinker that you are, and you've just written this book, uh The Toxic War on Masculinity, How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: Can you just give us a sort of a snapshot of the book?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: I I was fascinated by uh you're talking about two different scripts for masculinity that people think of today.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: That might be a helpful way in for people to understand your thesis.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, um, I found this a fascinating study.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's from a sociological study.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_02: And um, you know, I wrote the book because there is such uh overt hostility that it's become socially accepted to express against men.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um one of the uh articles that caught my eye was in the Washington Post, and the title was Why Can't We Hate Men?
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_02: In a in a respected, you know, mainstream publication, or a Huffington Post editor who tweeted, hashtag kill all men.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_02: You can buy t-shirts that say so many men, so little ammunition.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and there were books out with titles like I hate men, no good men, and are men necessary?
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: And to my surprise, I found a lot of men actually joining into the chorus.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: There's a fairly well-known male book author who wrote, Talking a beer about healthy masculinity is like talking about healthy cancer.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_02: And then this one you may have seen because it was just maybe a few months ago now, in the news.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, the director of the movie Avatar, James Cameron, said testosterone is a toxin that you have to work out of your system.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: So this is why I had this was the first reason I wrote the book, right?
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's that masculinity as a whole is being judged toxic.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, people say, oh, we don't mean it's all toxic.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_02: But the message that often comes through, right, is that there's something inherently wrong about masculinity itself.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_02: In one survey, almost half of American men s agreed with the statement, these days society seems to punish men just for acting like men.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: And there was a more recent one, you may have seen it, it came out in Britain.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so it's not in the book because it's more recent, but 55% of British men agreed as well.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: So whether you whether you agree or not, that's a lot of people who now think that men are getting a bad deal.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so one of the things I did at the beginning of the book, I put it right at the beginning, was this study that you're talking about.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: The sociologist, you know, gets invited to speak all around the world.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so he came up with this very clever experiment where he asks young men two questions.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_02: The first question is, what does it mean to be a good man?
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: If you're at a funeral and then in the eulogy, somebody says he was a good man.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: What does that mean?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: All around the globe, young men have no trouble answering that.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: They immediately say things like honor, duty, integrity, sacrifice, do the right thing, look out for the little guy, uh be a protector, be responsible, be a provider.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so the sociologists would ask them, Where'd you learn that?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: And they'd say, Well, it's just in the air we breathe.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_02: Or if they were in a Western country, they would say, It's part of our Judeo-Christian heritage.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: And then he would ask a follow-up question.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: What does it mean if I say to you, man up, be a real man?
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_02: And the young man would say, Oh no, that's completely different.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_02: That means be tough, be strong, never show weakness, win at all costs, suck it up, play through pain, um, be competitive, get rich, get laid.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm using their language.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so the sociologists concluded that men seem to be sort of trapped between these two scripts.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_02: On the one hand, all around the world, men do know what it means to be a good man.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we would say they are made in God's image.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_02: And they do have this instinctive, inherent, innate sense of what it means to be a good man.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: You know, not just a good person, but a good man, or good at being a man.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes people will make that distinction.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um but they feel this cultural pressure and to be the quote unquote real man.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: And those are traits that we tend to consider more toxic, at least if you know, if decoupled from a moral vision, they can slide into things like entitlement and control uh and and uh exploitation and so on.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so I I love this because it does, I I think it gives us a better approach to these issues.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: Instead of accusing men of being toxic, which most people, you know, most men would not uh respond well to that, surprisingly, um, but can we tap into their innate knowledge of what it means to be a good man and affirm it and support it and encourage it?
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_02: You know, what they already know it means to be uh a good man.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_02: And it also, from an apologetics point of view, by the way, tells us that the Christian ethic is not contrary to masculinity.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the masculine the secular script for masculinity, the sort of Andrew Tate uh style of masculinity, right?
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: Fast money, fast cars, fast girls, um, they would reject the Christian ethic, right?
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: Because ever since Nietzsche they said the Christian ethic means be be weak, you know, be soft, be effeminate.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not true.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_02: This Christian ethic does in fact fit with the innate knowledge that men have of what it means to be a good man.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that that is encouraging on to on the part of Christians to you know get out there, get out there into the public square arguing for the Christian vision, knowing that it will resonate at some deep level.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: One of the obvious things to ask you, Nancy, is that you're writing about masculinity as a woman.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: So uh what is it what is it that you're able to say because you're a woman and not a man, and what is it what are what are the things that that might be more difficult for you to say because you're a woman and not a man?
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Glenn, I have to tell you, this has proven to be the most controversial book I've written, and that did surprise me.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_02: Uh uh I wasn't expecting it.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: My earlier book was Love Thy Body, which deals with abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, which is of course exploding today.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so I thought that would be more controversial.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_02: This one was more controversial.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I ran several classes on the manuscript when I was, you know, in process and several reading groups.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_02: I re I do reading groups to get lots of feedback, you know, rub off the rough edges.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: And when they would tell their family and friends about the manuscript, their first question, invariably the first question was, whose side is she on?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_02: You know, with that tone.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh whose side is she on?
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: And men di tended to assume I would be some kind of male-bashing feminist.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_02: Progressives tended to assume I was some sort of angry, defensive, reactionary, you know, defending men.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um and by the way, the second question, and the second question was always, and why is a woman why is a woman writing a book on masculinity anyway?
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm not sure it was it was easier to be a woman writing on this subject.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um and even after the book came out, um, okay, the book came out, and the very next Day, a a Twitter storm erupted.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: I saw it.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_02: And now it was uh so and so this was by uh the book was attacked by Christian egalitarians who thought I was giving ammunition, their word, I was giving ammunition to complementarianism.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um and that was evil, bad, and dangerous.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: And the irony of all that, uh and and when that died down, that took three or four weeks, uh when that died down, it got jumped on by conservative Christians.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: Uh anyway, so um so even after coming out, it has been it has been controversial.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_02: And the irony is that I don't even deal with the egalitarian complementarian debate.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_02: And he and here's and I tell people why.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: I say in the in the uh book, I quote my two of my top researchers.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: So the book is very data-driven.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's it's the most fact fact-based book that I've ever written.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: You know, f I have a lot of facts, some sociology, the social sciences, and I have a lot of historical facts.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_02: And so I I I quote two of my top marriage researchers on why gender theory is not the main issue.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: So the first one is uh Brad Wilcox, who's a sociologist at the University of Virginia and a very prominent sociologist.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and he's done also the largest study on this question of evangelical men.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um and he said in his research he found that a husband's gender theory is not really what plays a major factor in whether he has a good marriage, whether his wife is happy or not.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_02: By the way, they often gear it by, is the wife happy?
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: Because of course the assumption is that if you you hold to any sort of male headship in the home, that will turn you into an overbearing, tyrannical, oppressive patriarch.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_02: And so they often ask, well, you know, the wives.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: And he said in his research he did not find that evangelical men, theologically conservative men, who held to some sort of uh headship in the home.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_02: They didn't their wives were sure, in fact, the opposite, they were testing out the top of the heap.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_02: They they were testing out as the the um most loving and engaged husbands and fathers, and the wives were reporting the highest level of happiness.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: And then he did also do, by the way, he he and one of his colleagues did a a study of egalitarian marriages, and he said they didn't test out any happier.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we might expect that they would.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, in intuitively, I might think that if you have a more egalitarian th marriage that you would, and he said, no, they they weren't any happier.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_02: And then the second expert was John Gottman, he's a psychologist, and he's not a Christian, but he's become very famous because he used to be a mathematician before becoming a psychologist, and so he does all this very quantifiable research where he he uh brings couples into sort of a bed and breakfast uh a lab that's outfitted like a bed and breakfast, and they wire them up to test their heart rate and their breathing rate and their sweat rate and their hor their stress hormones.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm stressed already just hearing about it.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: Gestures.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_02: I know.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's amazing that people actually can they can get all wired up like that and then ignore it.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_02: If you're like that for 72 hours, they do ignore it eventually.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then he also uh has has codes for gestures like rolling your eyes or uh and for and for everything you say, you know, put downs to placating.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, he feeds all this into a computer and he's been able to predict with 93.6% accuracy which couples would will divorce after a very short observation period, 10, you know, uh f 10, 20 minutes.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's why he's famous.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: But he said, I get couples in my practice, some of whom are, you know, do believe in male headship, that the man should be in charge, and I get couples who are very egalitarian.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_02: And he said, I don't see a difference.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: Here's how he puts it emotionally intelligent husbands, and that's his phrase, emotionally intelligent husbands have figured out what's most important, and that's how to convey honor and respect to your wife.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_02: And gender theory does not really affect that.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: So that was that was surprising to me, but I put in the book, and I said this is why I'm not dealing with this.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: But as soon as the book came out, everyone was trying to push it in one camp or the other.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_02: And uh that you know, they just could not understand that somebody could say, No, I'm not, I'm not, I'm just not talking about that.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um I'm talking, you know, my book is is geared to what the social scientists have found out about evangelical men.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's the focus, not this sort of in-house debate.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: So what what are people getting at when they talk about toxic masculinity?
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: Because they are putting their finger on something.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: You you mentioned in the book, I mean, it is simply true that men have, you know, vastly superior upper body strength when it comes to partner-on-partner crimes, it's 95% of of uh if there are murders, you know, uh among partners, 95% of the time it's the man killing the woman, not the woman killing the man.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um physical abuse is a real and genuine issue.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: So people are people are genuinely trying to put their finger on something that goes wrong with masculinity.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: So just to sort of steel man their their side of things, what what what are they trying to say when they use the phrase toxic masculinity?
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that is why I started the book with my own story.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um because I did grow up in a very abusive home.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um my father was severely physically abusive.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh books on abuse will sometimes ask, was it open hand or close fist?
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_02: It was close fist.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: You know, he was punching us.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_02: His his favorite was the knuckle fist, you know, for sh to to create a sharper stab of pain.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, my father was punching and kicking, and um and I'm sure it is one reason that Christianity lost its credibility with me as a as a teenager.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and of course I ricocheted all the way to a very strong feminist position.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um I read all the feminist books, all the all the uh groundbreaking ones, you know, from from uh Betty Ferdinand, uh to Simone de Beauvoir, to Kate Millet, to Susan Brown Miller.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_02: I read them all.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_02: I always had some feminist book on my bedside table.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um so it it I mean which is natural.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um you you you you're angry at men.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I had a um psychologist interview interview me for this book, and he said, When I picked up your book and I read your story, my first thought was, oh no, an abused woman who's angry at men.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: And then he said, as I continued reading, I realized, you have totally overcome that.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the book is actually very positive uh toward men, very supportive, very encouraging in its tone.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um but here's what he said your t your story shows that you're not coming from an ivory tower.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_02: You're in the you're writing from the trenches, you've been there, you know, you've really struggled with uh a very toxic form of masculinity in your own life.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_02: And and so it th when you say, you know, can't we acknowledge the other side has some some uh truth to it?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, clearly.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I from firsthand experience, not just not not just theoretically, I I saw toxic masculinity growing up.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_02: And and you know, this book is not like well, like that psychologist said, it's not an ivory tower.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's uh come it's not hypothetical.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, so I I think that that helps me to see both sides, and as you noted, I do end up with two chapters on domestic violence, because uh, you know, you cannot acknowledge that it exists without, you know, without dealing with it and talking about maybe how the church can do a better job of of responding to domestic violence.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, you talked about stats.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um half, half of all women who are murdered, it's by domestic partners.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_02: Half.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_02: The the comparable number for men murdered men is three percent.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_02: But half of uh women who are married murdered, half of female homicides are by husbands, former husbands, boyfriends, former boyfriends.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so it is you know out and out uh violence against women uh is a very serious issue.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_02: And when it occurs in the church, we need to take it very seriously.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd love to uh think for a minute uh just about your kind of apologetic strategy there, because I I think we can all learn from the way you're addressing this issue.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: You're starting with the first person narrative and coming with that that personal experience, and you know, I I honour you for for opening yourself up like that.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: I uh that that that was brave and it was wonderful, and um and I think people will be will be helped by that, whatever the cost was for you personally in in doing that.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then you you go to the data and you bust some myths um about the data, and then at the end of the book you kind of circle back to, and now, church, what do we need to do in order to do better?
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um talk to us a little bit about um uh what what apologist Nancy Pearcy is thinking about in terms of taking that strategy, because I think that strategy can be used for all sorts of things, and I and I thought it was very well pulled off in your book.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, well, you know, this was the final reason I said I have to write this book, is because the data was, as you put it, very myth-busting.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um I came across data showing that evangelical men are in fact doing very well, and this evangelical men are often considered exhibit A of toxic masculinity, right?
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_02: The I uh I I it was very easy to find quotes with a quick Google search.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so I will give you just one.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_02: So that this is the co-founder of the Church To movement, which uh followed the Me Too movement, and she says, the theology of male headship feeds the rape culture that we see permeating American Christianity today.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so uh the social scientists were reading these accusations and saying, Where's your evidence?
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you're making these charges, but where's your data?
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so they went out and did the studies.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_02: I quote some dozen or so different studies that have been done of evangelical couples, and what they found out was that the media narrative is completely backwards, it's completely wrong.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: That in fact, evangelical men test out as the most loving husbands and fathers.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_02: And by the way, the first pushback I often get is well, of course their wives said they were happy, their husbands sitting right there.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_02: And that would be true in cases of abuse.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_02: You don't want to m ask women about their marriage with their husbands sitting there.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: But actually, these studies were not done like that.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_02: They were most of them were actually not even done by Christians.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_02: There were these large databases like the General Sir So it's called the General Social Survey.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_02: You know, thousands of people across the nation.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_02: This one was that one in particular is done by the University of Chicago.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_02: And these are large databases that are used by policymakers, politicians, journalists, social scientists, and so on.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_02: And yes, the women are asked separately.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so what they're really showing is that evangelical wives test out as the happiest, uh, reporting that they're the happiest in with their husbands' expressions of love and affection.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_02: Evangelical fathers are the most engaged with their children, both in terms of shared activities like sports or church youth group, and in terms of discipline, like setting limits on screen time or enforcing bedtime.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_02: Evangelical couples have the lowest rate of divorce of any group in America, uh 35% lower than secular couples, and they have the lowest rate of domestic violence of any major group in America.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_02: And that's that's the real shocker.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that nobody expected that.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_02: And um and when I read that, you see, you see, I had to go digging in the academic literature to find these studies that's not out there in the public yet.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_02: So I thought this needs to get out there.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_02: We need to get it out there for the um for the church to encourage men.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but also uh here's the you you mentioned the apologists part of it.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_02: Also into the public square to help dem debunk the the uh secular narrative.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes this a quote can really ca encapsulate it.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_02: So let me give you one quote on this.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um this is Brad Wilcox, who I mentioned earlier at the University of Virginia, and to give you some sense of his stature, um he gets published in places like the New York Times.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_02: So this was a New York Times article that he wrote.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_02: And he says, and this is a direct quote, it turns out that the happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_02: Again, they're focusing on the wives, because the assumption is that these marriages are oppressive to wives.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_02: The happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_02: Fully 73% of wives who hold conservative gender values and attend religious services regularly regularly with their husbands have high-quality marriages.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: And then he goes on, this is actually my favorite part, because he turns to his secular colleagues, uh uh because, as you probably know, sociology is a highly secularized discipline.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_02: He says academics need to cast aside their prejudices about religious conservatives and academ and evangelicals in particular.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_02: Conservative Protestant married men with children are consistently the most active and expressive fathers and the most emotionally engaged husbands.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_02: And by the way, uh Wilcox himself is Catholic, so you know, I'm not sure he was, you know, the all that happy to find out that pro evangelical Protestants outdo the Catholics.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um they test higher than Catholics.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, the point is that this is not just a pep talk from a religious leader.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_02: You know, this is solid empirical research.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_02: You know, this this is evidence-based findings that show that Christianity does have the power to to reconcile the sexes, as I put it in my subtitle.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: But people don't like that evidence, Nancy.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: And as you say that, I'm to I l I spend far too long on that website formerly known as Twitter.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: And as you read those statistics, I'm I am I am anticipating the the response of of many people.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, they must have the data wrong, they must have you know terrible you know sample sizes.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure the women were afraid, and that's that's what the answer is.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: What why do people not like this data?
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_02: Well, uh to to balance it out, let me say that they also found some more negative data.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, good.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_02: But here's here was the difference.
• 37:02
  unknown: Okay.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um people often say, but uh but don't haven't we all heard that Christian couples divorce at the same rate as the rest of society?
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_02: And that actually is the first pushback I always get.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_02: And in my research I found that that is one of the most widely quoted statistics by Christian leaders.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_02: And so the the researchers went back to the data and they carefully weeded out the evangelical men who are in fact very authentically committed to their Christian faith, who attend church regularly and so on, from nominal Christians.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_02: My students don't even know what the word nominal means, so I have to explain.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_02: N-O-M is Latin for name, so it means in name only.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so these are men who, in a survey like this, might check the Baptist box, for example, but who attend church rarely, if at all, you know, with a kind of a cultural Christianity.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's a family background.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_02: And these men test out shockingly different.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_02: They fit all the negative, toxic stereotypes.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_02: Their wives report the lowest level of happiness of all the groups in America.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_02: They spend the least amount of time with their children.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_02: They have the highest rate of divorce, 20% higher than secular men.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_02: And then the real shocker is that they have the highest rate of domestic violence of any group in America.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so this is what skews the statistics.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_02: If you just do a study on evangelicals, you're going to get men who are better than secular men, and you're going to get men who are worse than secular men.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_02: And so, of course, the numbers are going to end up being misleading.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so this was a crucial finding that was done, especially by uh Brad Wilcox, who I've mentioned.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um he did the largest study, it feels a whole book.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_02: So he did the largest study, and is um he's the one who really articulated this difference in an important way.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_02: So, what this suggests is that the church does have a difficult task at hand.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_02: On the one hand, can we encourage the men who are doing a good job?
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_02: One of my graduate students was the leader of a the women's ministry in a large Baptist church here in Houston.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_02: And she said, On Mother's Day, we tell mothers they're wonderful and we hand out roses.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_02: On Father's Day, we scold the men and tell them to do better.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so I thought that's what a great microcosm of how the church has handled men.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they've been they've had sort of scolding tone, you know, you need to do better.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so I I was very careful to avoid a scolding tone in my book.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um what we need to be building up Christian men and encouraging the ones who are doing a good job.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_02: On the other hand, how can the church reach out to these nominal men who are identifying as evangelical and a sense skewing the statistics, but who in fact are well it it's some who in fact they're taking words like headship and submission and they're not giving them the big biblical meaning.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_02: Instead, they're infusing, you know, importing uh meanings to those words from the secular script.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_02: So they're they're importing meanings like dominance and entitlement and control from the secular script for masculinity.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that we need to really think through how do we do a better job of discipling these men and drawing them in from the fringes and helping them to have a more biblical understanding.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_02: And people sometimes ask me though, well, why would they be worse than secular men?
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_02: You know, if they they're they're at least at the fringes of the Christian world.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_02: And here's what seems to be happening.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_02: They feel like they have religious justification for their bad behavior.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I was gonna ask.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the secular guy who's mistreat right the secular guy who's mistreating his wife and kids, you know, he doesn't feel any transcendent religious, you know, justification or permission.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas the nominal Christian acts the same way, but feels like he has religious justification for it, and then he ends up being even worse than secular men.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like Blaise Pascal.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: Men men never do evil so cheerfully as w when they do it in God's name.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's it's it's that whole yeah, dynamic.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: Perhaps, perhaps.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm you know uh don't want to overread the data, but um when we turn to part two of your book, um I I think you um you move f from from the data to dates.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you turn you turn your attention really to history.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I f I found that um again quite myth busting and very refreshing, and giving us a history lesson on what it is that has been so disruptive to family life and to the balance of the sexes, and it hasn't been uh necessarily, you know, horribly patriarchal theological men.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's been this thing called industrialization, and how this massive asteroid has just fallen into our world that has disrupted home life and split things apart so that by and large men have had to leave the domain of the home and go out to work, and the the the home has been the the domain of care, and we've kind of split kind of care from autonomy and choice and making it in the world and this uh sort of secular script, this this historical dynamic really um is uh the the major driver, or a major driver anyway, in how the sexes are are relating.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um can you just just help us with um in particular, let's let's just zero in because we haven't we haven't got as long as as the book takes, but how has industrialization really fed into the the battle of the sexes?
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, um I think this is really important because most people, if they're asked, you know, when did the concept of toxic masculinity you know, when did that arise?
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_02: Many people will say, well, it was probably in the 1960s with second wave feminism.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, no, no.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_02: You have to go much further back.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_02: Before the Industrial Revolution, men worked side by side with their wives and children all day long, on the family farm, the family industry, the family business.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_02: And so the cultural expectation uh on men focused on their caretaking role, on the responsibility for the good of the family.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, most books on child rearing, you know, sermons, advice manuals, were addressed to fathers, not to mothers.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_02: You know, if you go into a bookstore today, most of the books on parenting are addressed to mothers.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_02: Back then they were addressed to fathers because fathers were held to be the primary parent, especially in the intellectual and spiritual education of their children.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_02: And fathers were in fact just as involved as mothers were in terms of day to day contact with their children.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, where did we lose that?
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the Industrial Revolution took work out of the home.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, men too had to follow their work out of the home into offices and factories.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_02: And for the first time in American history, me and British history, you had the Industrial Revolution there first.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: We got it from you.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_02: It was imported into the the States shortly afterwards.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_02: But um it took men out of the home, and for the first time, men were not working with people they loved and had a moral bond with.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_02: Instead, they were working as individuals in competition with other men.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_02: And that began to change their character.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_02: And in the literature of the day, already in the 19th century, you begin to pe see people saying that men are becoming individualistic, egocentric, self-centered, greedy, acquisitive.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_02: This was their language, you know, look out for number one, win at all costs.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_02: And the language of the day, people were protesting that men were losing that caretaking ethos that they had in the colonial era.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_02: So that was really the first time that you start to see negative language applied to the male character.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_02: It started way back then, which does of course suggest maybe some of the solutions.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_02: You know, some of the solutions are can we find ways to reconnect men more closely with their children and especially their sons.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_02: So I do have a chapter on that as well.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_02: But we do have to go all the way back to the Industrial Revolution.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_02: You know, if you can't if you can't figure out where a social trend came from, you're not going to have an adequate solution.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_02: So that's why that's so important.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, and it chimes so much with uh what Mary Harrington has said.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_01: She's been on the channel earlier this year where she says because of industrialization there were two kinds of feminism that actually grew up.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: And because if the work and the home life is split, then I I guess women could either concentrate on that home domain and have a feminism of care, or they could seek liberation from the home in order to join the men at in the workplace and seek a feminism of autonomy.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: And she says, you know, over over the last sixty, seventy years there has been the triumph of the feminism of autonomy to the point where we can't even recognize a feminism of care as feminism at all.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that even historical movements like the temperance movement, for instance, um uh the feminist impulses there are invisible to modern day feminists of autonomy because it's not kind of pushing the choice button.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually um a feminism of of interdependence and that sort of thing.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_01: I I know you're aware of uh of Mary Harrington's work.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: Do you do you see some overlap with what you're saying?
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_02: Oh yes, definitely.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um I I'm really glad that she sees the Industrial Revolution as a turning point.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_02: But I actually disagree with her on the feminism of care.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_02: Most of the women at that time who were involved in the reform movements, like the temperance movement, the abolition movement, what was called the social purity movement, which was against prostitution and sex trafficking, most of those women did not identify as feminist.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_02: Feminist historians have gone back and claimed them, but they were not, they themselves did not consider themselves feminists for the most part.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, for example, the most single the single most influential woman of the 19th century was the president of the women's Christian Temperance Union.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_02: Her name was Frances Willard.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_02: You never read about her in feminist books.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_02: Why?
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_02: Because she wasn't a feminist.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_02: And yet she was the most influential woman of the 19th century.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_02: And the women's Christian Temperance Usement movement is, well was, was the largest ever m women's movement in American history.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_02: Do you ever hear about it?
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_02: Because the fact, you know, the temperance movement uh was so discredited, you know, after after the you know the prohibition after prohibition was discredited, the the temperance movement was.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_02: But in fact, here's here's the difference.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um most of these women who were involved in the reform movements in the 19th century uh did not call themselves feminists because because, as you put it, you know, they were focusing on what were said to be more distinctively feminine traits like care and interdependence and um love and affection and morality, you know, social bonds and so on.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas even the earliest feminists began to speak in terms of autonomy and individual rights.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_02: And this had a dramatic impact on certain issues.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_02: Like the one reason that the uh my Twitter feed blew up is because I actually talked about the vote, women's suffrage.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um the feminist of the day, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, openly said the main opposition t to women having the vote comes is coming from other women.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_02: And modern feminists, you know, they just can't deal with this.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_02: But it is true.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_02: Why would they why were many of the women at the time opposed to uh the vote?
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_02: Well, because they liked the idea that the family is a center of society.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that the the bonds that pull together, that draw together the family into an organic unit, um, that they thought that was very important.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_02: They did not make an argument for the vote in terms of autonomy and individual rights, whereas the first feminists did.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_02: Most women at the time that did not resonate with them.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um it they did not start accepting the idea of the vote until it began to be reworded in terms of protecting the family.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_02: Not the individual rights of the woman, but protection for the family.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_02: So Francis Willard, who I just mentioned, the president of the women's Christian Temperance Union, finally came around to saying, actually the vote is going to protect the family.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_02: And she called it the the ballot for family protection.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_02: She actually relabeled it that.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_02: Not women's vote, but family protection.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_02: And here this was her reasoning.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_02: She said, women have very little power uh against drunken husbands who are coming home and beating them.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_02: They need the vote.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_02: That was her argument.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_02: So it was a very different argument.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_02: And when they finally came, when the majority of of American women came around to uh uh accepting the vote, it was not for feminist reasons.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_02: So this is a part of history that gets often confused.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_02: Like my f my uh female students are like, what?
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_02: Every book I've ever read said that those early reformers were all feminists.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_02: But the books I read, uh one reason my perspective is different, by the way, is there's there's libraries full of books on women's history because of feminism.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_02: There were only a very few books on the history of concepts of masculinity.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_02: Those are the ones I read.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_02: So they were giving a f a somewhat different perspective.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_02: They were not, you know, obviously, for example, they were not motivated to try to gather up all women activists of the 19th century and label them feminists.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_02: They were more open to saying, well, actually, if you listen to them in their own words, they were not feminists.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_02: So that's where I might disagree with Mary Harrington, because I think feminist feminists have overstepped a little bit in trying to claim all of these women uh for their own pet causes when in fact most of them did not themselves identify as feminists.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think you would you would only disagree about literally the the label um w whether a feminism of care ought to be called a feminism at all.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I I yeah, uh yeah.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: I I think that would be the the only thing you'd you would you would disagree on at that point.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well I am gonna ask Nancy one more question that is just for YouTube members.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_01: But before I do that, uh Nancy, could you uh let us know how we can grab hold of the toxic war against masculinity?
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, well, like everything, you can get it on Amazon, uh, or if you prefer places like Christianbook.com.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and come on over to my uh website.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_02: My publisher very graciously redesigned my website so it's fun and colorful now, and you can peruse my other books.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_02: I mentioned Love Thy Body, so that one's still very relevant with the transgender movement.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um so come and look at the other books and my endorsers and and leave a comment.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_02: There's a place where you can leave a comment and I read them all.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_02: I don't have time to answer all of them, but uh come on by and say hello.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_02: Nancypeercy.com, and Pearcy is P-E-A-R-C-E-Y.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_02: So nancypiercy.com.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: Excellent.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I highly recommend uh those books and checking out more of that.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_02: I appreciate it.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there we go.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoyed that conversation.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_00: As Glenn mentioned at the end, there is a bonus question with Nancy.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_00: He asked her about Mark Driscoll and the Mars Hill stuff.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_00: So you might have heard of the the podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill and some of the issues of masculinity and unhealthy views of masculinity that were discussed there.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_00: So Glenn asked Nancy about that.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_00: And if you are a Speak Life partner, that means you give uh£4.99 or more a month to the work of Speak Life.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_00: You will have access to that bonus question along with all our other bonus contents.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_00: We really appreciate all the ways you support the work of Speak Life.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_00: Just listening to this podcast is a great support to us.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: We really appreciate your prayers.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_00: And if you are able to give financially in any way to the work of Speak Life, you can go to speaklife.org.uk forward slash give.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_00: The best way to access our bonus content is to join our Discord server.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_00: So you can find the link to do that on our website again, speaklife.org.uk forward slash give.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_00: You'll find a link there to join our Discord server.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's basically an online community.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_00: If you've never used Discord before, it's very easy to join.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_00: It will take you through the steps and it's an opportunity to interact with the Speak Life team and other Speak Life supporters.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've let us know that you're a Speak Life partner, you'll have access to some special rooms within the Speak Life online community, the Discord server, including our bonus contents.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think that's all from me.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_00: We will be back soon with another episode of the Speak Life podcast.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_00: God bless.