Al Mohler has a piece on Crosswalk.com discussing the strange situation facing young boys today, who are desperate for a way to develop and assert their manhood but are often without healthy role models and outlets for this purpose. More and more boys grow up in home without dads, and for whatever reason even those families that do have men in the picture find that they struggle with sons who seem to have no direction, no focus, and no sense of what it means to grow and mature into a man.
I like the themes that he touches on in this essay. He emphasizes the role of the church in teaching young men to what they should aspire. When combined with an education in and appreciation for the classical virtue of manliness (bravery, stability, honor, headship, etc), this gives young men a wonderful model to emulate. So many boys today, it seems, are robbed of their maleness by a culture that would castrate them mentally so as to hamper their physical impact on the world. It’s really a shame. And we women wonder why there aren’t any real men out there anymore. It’s not a cliche to say that chivalry is dead because women have killed it in our blind pursuit of “equality.”
In order to reach young men, some churches are turning to mixed martial arts, defined as “a sport with a reputation for violence and blood that combines kickboxing, wrestling, and other fighting styles.”
The main issue here is not the legitimacy of martial arts, but the fact that these churches are making a self-conscious effort to reach young men and boys with some kind of proof that Christianity is not a feminized and testosterone-free faith that appeals only to women.
Of course, Christianity honors the man who fights “the good fight of faith,” and the most important fight to which a Christian man is called is the fight to grow up into godly manhood, to be true to wife and provide for his children, to make a real contribution in the home, in the church, and in the society, and to show the glory of God in faithfully living out all that God calls a man to be and to do. This means a fight for truth, for the Gospel, and for the virtues of the Christian life. The New Testament is filled with masculine — and even martial — images of Christian faithfulness. We must be unashamed of these, and help a rising generation of men and boys to understand what it means to be a man in Christ. The Christian man does not embrace brutality for the sake of proving his manhood.
This much is clear — we are living in strange times, getting stranger by the minute. Churches and parents are right to be concerned about the new challenges of helping boys to grow into manhood. The crisis is real, and this one demands urgent attention.
