by | Aug 29, 2023 | Uncategorized
The church can’t compete with “manosphere” influencers. But it doesn’t have to.
The plight of young American men has become a serious concern of late. They’re earning fewer college degrees compared to women, falling out of the labor market, and dying from overdose or suicide more often than women. Many are addicted to porn, video games, or online outrage.
They’re “trying on new identities, many of them ugly, all gesturing toward a desire to belong,” writes Christine Emba in an incisive essay for The Washington Post. “It felt like a widespread identity crisis—as if they didn’t know how to be.”
What’s the cause of all this trouble? Some argue for a purely materialist explanation by looking at the decline of manufacturing jobs that used to provide a steady income for men without college degrees. Others suggest that men are merely entitled brats—so accustomed to patriarchy that now “equality feels like oppression.” Still others, like Richard Reeves in The Atlantic, point to problems with our education systems.
The sheer scope of the problem has led to “manosphere” influencers who offer a vision of masculinity and the steps to achieve it.
Aaron Renn has been a persistent critic of the church’s overfeminization, accusing both liberal and conservative Christians of “vicious negativity towards men and excessive pedestalization of women” that “repels men.” The popular psychologist Jordan Peterson has shaped these conversations for years. On the far right, Andrew Tate, the former champion kickboxer indicted on charges of sex trafficking, has a massive social media presence built from vulgar hedonism and brazen materialism.
If their collective followings are any indication, it’s …
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by | Aug 29, 2023 | Uncategorized
An interview with author Tara Isabella Burton on the history of self-creation—and how the habit usurps our need for God.
One of my most recent posts on Instagram is a picture of a loaf of bread I baked. I baked it because I like bread, especially fresh bread, hot out of a 450-degree oven and covered in far too much butter. But why, exactly, did I post the picture on Instagram?
It’s a nice-enough loaf, but I’ve no great baking talent. Part of my motive was simple enthusiasm for work I enjoyed. But some of it, if I’m honest, was about my image—as a writer, as a keeper of my household newly back to full-time work after maternity leave, and as the sort of person you might find interesting at a cocktail party.
There, look, I remember briefly thinking as I hit “Share,” no one can say I’m slacking on the homemaking front. I made bread!
This is ridiculous and vain and embarrassing, of course. But I come by it honestly in an era of self-creation, in which social media has given each of us the opportunity to craft a public image that is objectively artificial yet imagined as a display of authenticity.
That very dynamic is the subject of Tara Isabella Burton’s Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, published earlier this year. I reached out to Burton to ask about the theological underpinnings of her book and how the modern urge to self-create comports with Christian faith.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Let’s start with the trio of elevator questions I’m sure you’ve answered on a thousand podcasts by now: What is the book about? Why did you write it? And what readers did you have in mind?
Self-Made is an intellectual history of self-creation, the wider story of secular modernity’s idea that human beings not only can …
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by | Aug 28, 2023 | Uncategorized
The New York pastor never wanted to build a megachurch.
Redeemer Presbyterian Church’s building on West 83rd Street in Manhattan does not call attention to itself. The Crunch gym next door has a bigger, louder sign and doors plastered with offers for memberships. Redeemer’s building of glass and neutral brick blends into the buildings around it, except that if you look up, a cross shoots up above the fifth story. The church’s founding pastor, Tim Keller, was reluctant to even buy it.
“For years Tim didn’t want to be a megachurch,” said Andrea Mungo, Redeemer’s first staffer for its diaconate in the 1990s. “He wasn’t interested in purchasing a building. For years it was, ‘We want to rent so we can focus our money and energy into local ministry.’”
Keller, who died in May, was a globally known preacher, bestselling writer, leader of a 5,000-member church before before stepping down, and founder of big organizations like The Gospel Coalition in 2007. He spoke before the UK parliament and at Google’s headquarters. But for most of his adult life, he built small. His fame was derivative of his local church work.
People like Mungo—as well as Yvonne Sawyer, Justin Adour, Sobeyda Valle-Ellis, Peter Ong, and Mark Reynolds—aren’t globally recognized names but were the faces of the local church in New York and then beyond. They built an ecosystem of local institutions that are carrying on Keller’s vision of evangelicalism away from the spotlight. They planted churches and started community development organizations and counseling centers that are spreading the gospel and serving the disenfranchised.
Keller did not follow the American evangelical tradition of networking with the powerful, like …
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by | Aug 28, 2023 | Uncategorized
Tim Keller: We often seek short-term satisfaction. But what Jesus offers is far better.
The governor and mayor, whether they know it or not, are using the gospel story line. It’s the best one there is. The moralistic story line is, “We are the good people; you are the bad people.” That doesn’t really help much in the long run. When your stance is, “We are the good people. We have been telling you that you have been sinning, and now you finally got what you deserved,” it doesn’t work terribly well.
The gospel story line is the one that works. To the extent that it is working in our culture right now, we can bring a better city out of the ashes. But Jesus says, “I can give you something so much more. If you want an even greater resource—the ultimate power to handle this apart from a kind of altruistic wishful thinking—you have to believe.”
Do you? I hope you do. What I am about to tell you is contingent on your having a personal encounter in faith with the Son of God.
Here is what he offers: not a consolation but a resurrection.
What do I mean by that? Jesus does not say, “If you trust in me, someday I will take you away from all this.” He does not say, “Someday, if you believe in me, I will take you to a wonderful paradise where your soul will be able to forget about all this.”
I don’t want a place like that right now. I am upset and mad about what we have lost. But Jesus Christ does not say he will give us consolation. He says he is giving us resurrection. What is resurrection? Resurrection means “I have come not to take you out of the earth to heaven but to bring the power of heaven down to earth—to make a new heaven and new earth and make everything new. I am going to restore everything that was lost, and …
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by | Aug 25, 2023 | Uncategorized
But it doesn’t mean what you think it means.
At the first Republican presidential primary debate of the 2024 election, the last biblical reference of the night was also its most significant—and the most often misunderstood.
“In his pitch to get to the Oval Office, President Reagan called America the ‘shining city on a hill,’ a beacon of hope and optimism,” prompted moderator Bret Baier.
“So, in your closing statement tonight, please tell American voters why you are the person who can inspire this nation to a better day,” said Baier’s fellow Fox News host, Martha MacCallum.
Former vice president Mike Pence’s response stuck closest to the theme, evoking the same 1630 speech Reagan quoted, with a reference to Americans’ Puritan forebears. “God is not done with America yet,” Pence said, “and if we will renew our faith in him who has ever guided this nation since we arrived on these wilderness shores, I know the best days for the greatest nation on earth are yet to come.”
City on a hill—this captivating little phrase has a complicated American history, one that often ignores the phrase’s true origin: not among the Puritans, but in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.
The phrase was used by the governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony, John Winthrop, in his 1630 treatise “A Model of Christian Charity”: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” Historians are not certain when (or if) Winthrop delivered the speech, but the popular story is that he gave it on the flagship Arbella to his fellow Puritan travelers on their way to Salem, Massachusetts.
Winthrop’s words have been …
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