Introduction

The destruction of men is the most significant event of the last fifty years and worth the most significant attention of the church. That’s why I was delighted to finally read the helpful book by Michael Foster and Dominic Bnonn Tennant, It’s Good to be a Man: A Handbook for Godly Masculinity. Foster’s claim to fame is his relationship with Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama. Not really, but we were honored that he came to speak at our 2021 conference on biblical masculinity. You can check that out here.

The attack on fathers is a strategic move by the enemy. Satan hates fathers. But he doesn’t try to eliminate fatherhood. He tries to redefine it. Without fathers in the home, a greedy federal government becomes dad. Broken families lead to large bureaucracies. Bureaucrats only exist if there is a problem that needs fixing. They pretend to help the problem by providing government services. In truth, they only spread turmoil, which is then presented as a new problem that only an aggrandizement of bureaucratic power can fix. As the family is torn apart, men are unseated from their fatherly role. A new man takes his seat and becomes the new father. His name? Uncle Sam. The patriarchy hasn’t been removed. It has been redefined. The new patriarch, far from dispensing indivisible justice, is more tyrannical, more rapine, and more deadbeat than any man from an Emma Donoghue novel.

So the issue isn’t whether or not there is a patriarchy. “Patriarchy is inevitable” (1). Patriarchy will exist whether it’s shaped by the church or not. To not meet the enemy’s strategy is to throw down our weapons and betray men—especially young men—who otherwise have no defense against the serpent’s wiles. The heresies of the early church were Christological. The heresies of the twenty-first-century church are anthropological. Good anthropology must exist because bad anthropology needs to be spayed and neutered.

The authors write, “This book is our contribution to the work of repair. In writing it, we did not want to create a timeless work but a timely one: our goal is to help modern Christian men understand what God made them for, and how to start doing it intentionally” (x). How does the book help men to do this? “We will … focus on the goodness of God’s creation order, how it got all messed up, and how you, as an individual man, can work toward restoration” (15). At the core of the book is the idea that God made man for dominion. Through the Fall, man is easily persuaded to take leave of his task and build a household for his glory rather than for God’s. Dislocated dominion has many causes.

The Causes of Dislocated Dominion

First, the church has failed to understand that dominion-taking is part of the nature of man. Taking dominion is not toxic. It is good (Chapter 2). “The reason that God creates man on the earth, according to Genesis, is for productive, representative rulership. This is what it means to exercise dominion: to fruitfully order the world in God’s stead” (19).

Second, the church has failed to teach young men to harness their sex drive into faithful energy (Chapter 3). God gave men a strong sex drive. This is not part of the curse and it is not an alien impulse. The sex drive pushes men to fulfill the dominion mandate, establish a household, and fill the earth. Young men need to direct their sex drive as a force for good and multiply “the productive power of man” (32). The sex drive should drive young men to competency and headship.  It should cause a young man to take responsibility for a family. But “Satan hates sex” (39). Satan’s war on sex is intended to cause confusion and division between males and females, thereby destroying the household (Chapter 4).

Third, the church has been complicit in spreading androgyny and rejecting the hierarchy of God’s created order (Chapter 5). God’s judgment is “a specific curse fitted to their sin” (60). “Who will he serve and worship? The choice is stark: serve God to bring heaven to earth—or serve Satan to bring hell” (68).

Fourth, the church has cultivated toxic sexuality (chapter 6). The real toxic masculinity is when men make their own names great, practice violence, tyranny, sexual perversion, and corrupt marriage (74). Toxic femininity is a bewildering and recurring crime in Scripture (1 Kings 11:4-11; Prov. 6:26; 7:25ff; 14:1) and it also destroys the created order. The toxic woman is loud and stubborn (Prov. 7:11; 1 Pt. 3:3f). The godly woman is quiet and deferent (1 Tim. 2:9-15). Women should not draw attention to themselves by way of their clothes, speech, or will (80). Toxic femininity has created two kinds of problems. One is when wives are persuaded to pursue their alleged premarital mission rather than submit to their husbands’ mission. The other is the tactic used to inflict the feminist lie and make it stick. She picks a beta-male husband that she can control and manipulate (83). Toxic women invert the biblical pattern of the household (83f). Because toxic femininity has a safe harbor in the church, the evangelical church is now “the church effeminate” (Chapter 7).

Fifth, the church is full of “clueless bastards.” This is not an indecent insult but a veritable description. “Without fathers, sons remain boys. They grow up clueless about how to harness and aim their masculine natures. They are functional bastards” (108). The father is the head of the family. His influence is significant. If there is no father, then the family is headless. As the father goes, the household goes. Without a good father in the home, boys can’t learn to be good sons. Since learning to be a good father starts with being a good son, this is a hand-me-down dilemma. Clueless bastards need fathers. So young men indemnify themselves with the internet. “The clueless bastards are groping for fathers.  So they find Jordan Peterson, Rollo Tomassi, Joe Rogan, pickup artists, and secular men’s rights advocates” (14). It is an extraordinary idea that podcasters in search of a buck are proper substitutes for the intimacy of fraternity.

Fatherhood can’t be disembodied. Discipleship happens in real-life relationships, not through podcasters. The authors address those men who need to mature. “Do you think you are a mature man, but you consider a pastor unnecessary in your life? God is not mocked. What a man sows, so shall he reap; a child who spurns the correction of his father grows to be a fool. You cannot represent God’s rules without submitting to him as Father—and you cannot submit to him as Father without submitting to His design for his household” (121f). In other words, apart from the gospel of Jesus Christ bringing men into the church, the hideous, frantic, and violent farce of clueless men will continue to sow societal disorder (117-125).

Solutions

Chesterton once said, “The life of a man is a terrible thing at many times and in many places.”[1] Only with difficulty will man find his way back. The authors summarize the problem, “Households are broken. Fathers are absent—often not by their own choice. Male spaces for mutual encouragement are disallowed or opened to girls. Burgeoning manly desires are subdued or redirected by Adderall, video games, and pornography. Feminism reigns in the Church and the broader culture. Little boys grow up thinking there is something wrong with being masculine. Christian men are told the same thing” (ix).

God gave embodied existence (118), which means maturity comes by spending face-to-face time with honorable men who have a genuine love of honesty, actuality, and prayer. Boys can't inherit maturity apart from spending time with mature men. The strange and subtle effect of a mentor is not because of preachy denunciations. Rather, the young man says, “Did you see the latest internet kerfuffle?!” The wise man says, “I don’t know about it or care about it.” The clueless bastard thinks to himself, “Stupid boomer.” The growing man says, “I wish I didn’t care. Can you teach me how?”   

The authors are aware, having looked into the souls of men desperate for guidance, that restoring biblical masculinity is not a matter of manosphere self-help. Shame, impotence, self-hatred, low testosterone levels, and male suicide are pathologies that only the grace of God can fix. And God’s grace includes the unambiguously virtuous design of male human nature. “There is no hint in the Bible that your aggressive instincts are a result of the fall” (25). The natural yearning of men is to conquer, subdue, build, form, and shape. The problem is not the natural yearning, but when it is done on behalf of the self rather than on behalf of God. Christ is a model for taking dominion (23ff). Christ is the foot-washing servant and the warrior king (Rev. 19:11-16). This combination is how men will lay waste false temples.

The masculine virtues are at odds with the witlessness of wokeism just as much as red pill outrage is at odds with the peace of Christ (Col. 3:15). The solution is gravitas, which “was a Roman virtue, referring to a man’s seriousness, his dignity, his weight” (127). Men of substance meditate on God and are equipped with the Word of God. Only by knowing the character of God and his Word are men able to pursue their duties, fulfill their responsibilities, and develop the virtues that produce godly gravitas. Men with gravitas create order. Those without it create chaos. Immature boys make common what is holy. Gravitas requires mastery of the tongue. Taking yourself too seriously is the opposite of gravitas. “The grave man is a man who has learned wisdom. He has trained himself in rightly judging and ordering both himself and his world. His very presence exerts force that orders those around him. He is a bulwark against chaos” (141). Wisdom is facing the failure of society where it arises, speaking God’s Word where we must, and doing each as cheerfully as Paul on trial for his life (Acts 24:10).

Fulfilling your mission requires three things. First, is virtue. With the virtues of wisdom, workmanship, and strength (145-150), men form a mission that rejects selfish ambition and the foolish properties of pride. It is a mission that matches their interests, skills, and opportunities with a commitment to ora et labora—prayer and work (Chapter 12). Second, mission fulfillment needs brotherhood. Isolation is not masculinity. Friends provide correction and support (Chapter 13). Third, mission fulfillment needs a wife (Chapter 14). Marriage is a great serpent smasher. A man and woman in union, forming a household, is deeper, more daring, and more interesting than any of the recent attempts to remake marriage into a disgusting union of sameness. God uses the household as a pattern for asserting His personality over the paltry wills of miserable humanity.

Conclusion

The manosphere presents manhood as an arbitrary riddle of spurious bluster. Biblical manhood is part of God’s original scheme, minus the interpolations of recent vintage. One can picture an evangelical feminist throwing It’s Good to be a Man across the room, which suggests a good reason why you should read it. For all its intensity, the authors have written a pastoral book that is full of thoughts that breathe and words that burn. The book's burden is to convince the evangelical church to leave the inverted picture of reality behind. Feminism, rather than patriarchy, is exploitative. It leads to the unhappiness of Christian men and women because it causes division between the sexes. Indeed, there is a war between the sexes. But not the one the feminists say. The world needs to be reconciled and that is the meaning of this book. The church can have a future that is better than the past fifty years, but only when God restores the respective places of men and women. It’s time for the church to leave the dream of a flattened world behind and abandon the lies of feminism. What has the church surrendered so she can copy the culture, shame masculinity, and fling down tradition? What trade-offs has she made? What tricks has she fallen for? Foster and Tennant lay it all bare and tell us how to restore the goodness of God’s created order.

[1] “A Much Repeated Repetition,” Daily News, March 26, 1904.