The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes<\/em>. I must add my own grateful endorsement to the vast number of others who have already admonished you to stop everything and read this book. It\u2019s excellent. I\u2019m sorry it took me so long to get to it. It is a cooling zephyr blowing away the progressive miasma of the last twenty-five years.<\/p>\nAs I was \u2018splaining to one of my children, I\u2019ve read through so many accounts of the West since the dawn of the Industrial Age. I\u2019m no expert, of course, but I am plenty familiar with the historical and philosophical events of this period. In fact, almost every non-fiction book today refers in one way or another to what\u2019s happened since whenever that first factory loomed up over an unsuspecting and startled world to belch out smoke and stuff. One would have to be colossally ignorant not to have any sense of the ideological shifts that bring us today. Not to discount ignorance\u2013there is plenty of it to go around. But if you read anything, you probably have some general idea. The facts are all there\u2013the wars, the cult of domesticity, Freud, Marx, Margaret Sanger, Billy Graham, Mary Tyler Moore, Helen Gurley Brown, Hitler, and on and on. Each event or idea pushed one way or another until here we are. It\u2019s not rocket surgery to understand.<\/p>\n
But in the last ten years, how the story is shaped\u2013you may have noticed\u2013has taken on a rancid fetor. It turns out that there are, apparently, some real villains over the last century. No, not Hitler or Mao, not Communism or Marxism or even Capitalism, or any \u2018ism.\u2019 According to the intellectual heavy-weights of today, it was actually Christianity, and in particular, the men who persisted in being Christian and being men, though all the world had discovered that being a Christian and a man is wicked. This narrative is assumed to the point of being banal, unnoticeable even to the people who are its most devoted disciples. There simply is no other way to understand the past.<\/p>\n
Except that there is. Pearcey tells the story another way, both methodically and movingly. In contrast to the narrow, sightless accounts of The Making of Biblical Womanhood<\/em>, Jesus and John Wayne<\/em>, Moral Combat<\/em>, and any other number of volumes, The Toxic War on Masculinity<\/em> is illuminating and brilliant. I\u2019m deeply grateful to encounter this tired story with some fresh eyes, in a way that doesn\u2019t hide any of the sins of Christian men but examines them as all other historical times and people should\u2013with a soup\u00e7on of affection and empathy.<\/p>\nIsn\u2019t it ironic that in the age of overweening empathy, the one type of person who is beyond the pale, cancelable at any moment, to be derided at every turn is someone who represents either half the population\u2014men\u2014or an ever-diminishing number of Christians. But this loss of empathy itself comes from somewhere. The creeping yet certain flight of masculinity out of our culture began a long time ago. It isn\u2019t just that we all woke up one evening when Donald Trump ascended the Presidential throne to discover something new and bad had taken place, no matter how much the hew and cry of progressivism tries make him the scape goat of all our problems. Forces were sent in motion too long ago to be easily and conveniently remedied brought us to this moment. It\u2019s like a slow-motion car wreck. And on that note, because my female child has, fulfilling the stereotype, lightly dinged another car, I must get on with my day. I\u2019ll be working out these various thoughts this week on my Substack<\/a> if you\u2019d like to follow along. Have a nice day!<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Modern Man by Aedan Kennedy I am almost through Nancy Pearcey\u2019s The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes. I must add my own grateful endorsement to the vast number of others who have already admonished you to stop everything and read this book. It\u2019s excellent. I\u2019m sorry it took me so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2373,"featured_media":13732,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6,16],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-16190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-culture-watch-2","category-men-are-human","tag-feminism"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a><\/p>\n