Kerby Anderson

A very important book written by Nancy Pearcey came out this week. The Toxic War on Masculinity is well researched and full of surprises. The first surprise is the claim that there is good news about Christian men.

The standard response from both the secular and Christian media is that biblical teachings about such topics as headship in marriage make Christian men more likely to commit abuse and pose major difficulties in a marriage. The problem with the social science research in the past is that it failed to identify two distinct groups of men: religiously devout vs. nominal evangelicals.

The first group (who attend church regularly) shatter the negative stereotypes. They are more loving to their wives and more emotionally engaged with their children than any other group in America. They are less likely to divorce and the least likely to commit domestic violence.

By contrast, the nominal Christian family men do fit the negative stereotype. They spend less time with their children. Their wives report significantly lower levels of happiness. And they are 20 percent more likely to divorce than secular men. Sociologist Brad Wilcox reports, “The most violent husbands in America are nominal Evangelical Protestants who attend church infrequently or not at all.”

Nancy Pearcey has a few suppositions for this difference. She observes that “nominal men hang around the fringes of the Christian world just enough to learn the language of headship and submission but not enough to learn the biblical meaning of those terms.” She believes they “cherry-pick verses from the Bible and read them through a grid of male superiority and entitlement that they have absorbed from the secular guy code for the Real Man.”

This is just one of the many insights you will discover in her new book on The Toxic War on Masculinity.