Does Evangelicalism Produce Soft Men?
Leading political commentators suggest that individuals who oppose society’s surrender to toxic empathy are insufficiently Christian. Responding to this view, which encourages Christians to avoid engaging in conflict over vexed topics, Allie Beth Stuckey confronts New York Times columnist David French's mischaracterization of her views on empathy by demonstrating that unbalanced empathy inevitably leads to immoral decision-making. Such decision-making allows many Americans to exhibit greater sympathy, for example, for the plight of illegal immigrants rather than their murder victims, who are often American citizens.
At the same time, Stephanie Potts’s book Social Justice and the Deification of Man confronts false teachings that have both infected the Church and muddled the idea of who God is in our me-centered world. Muddled ideas about God and who he has called us to be, combined with unbalanced empathy and other factors, contribute to the production of what Evangelical professor Anthony Bradley calls "safe cubicle men."
Bradley explains. A few years ago, he had dinner with a group of Christian college men and asked them what they were planning to do after graduation. Each of the men offered the same answer: rather than become leaders, they were prepared to fight for little more than a job that pays “good money” and allows them to support their families. In other words, they were prepared to flee from the opportunity to lead a purpose-driven but highly risky life, a life dedicated to protecting their children and grandchildren from a world driven by craven self-interests, child-sex trafficking, toxic (if not suicidal) empathy, and parasitic ideas.
Instead of striving to lead, they were looking for stability, which is often an identical twin of compromise on a road that flees the necessity of conflict. Striving for safety has left the commanding heights of American culture to be dominated by non-Christians. This situation leads inexorably to what scholar Aaron Renn calls a Christianity characterized by weak institutions, thin intellectual networks, and a retreat from public life. In other words, it produces men who fill cubicles, track the progress of their 401(k)s, and focus on their next vacation, while the society around them implodes.
Put differently, cubicle men are simultaneously a success and an abject failure. They are participants in a self-effacing life, which mid-twentieth-century psychoanalyst Karen Horney suggests is characterized by a deep need to avoid conflict and seek safety. Bradley argues that this formula produces just the kind of males we have often come to expect: the proliferation of acceptable Christian men unconcerned with building something significant.
The pursuit of safety is both peculiarly American and peculiarly Western. Scholars Haidt and Lukianoff explain the pursuit of safety in a brilliant book, The Coddling of the American Mind. They show that by embracing a series of untruths about humans and healthy human development, American parents, schools, and universities have produced a culture of safetyism that retards young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development.
Lukianoff and Haidt explore contributing factors such as changes in childhood, the rise of fearful parenting, and the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play. These moves designed to eliminate risk have been particularly tragic for boys.
Such moves are part of a trend that Helen Andrews explores. She shows that culture, politics, and life itself have become feminized, a move that denies that men and boys naturally enjoy taking risks and revel in engaging in conflict. Andrews also demonstrates how individuals such as Jeffrey Sachs, Al Sharpton, and Sonya Sotomayor sought to empower the oppressed but ultimately empowered new oppressors. This move is perhaps made possible by emasculating, and thereby softening, opposition on a road ostensibly designed to eliminate conflict. Risk-averse Christian parents, far from resisting these trends, have often embraced them.
Consistent with the tendency to avoid risks, scholarly research uncovers two things. First, research shows that higher religiosity correlates with lower rates of new venture creation. Second, data demonstrate that religious entrepreneurs tend to select lower-risk business activities.
Given this evidence, it is difficult to imagine the next Martin Luther or Dr. Ben Carson emerging from a society in hot pursuit of safety. Indeed, it is virtually impossible to believe that a particular vision of Christianity characterized by softness and weakness can survive in the face of brutality and terror in a world in which conflict is unavoidable.
Contemporary Europe supplies a cautionary tale since soft border policies have allowed large groups of foreign males to enter, even though they have one stated goal in mind: to conquer culture and defeat and replace the remains of Christianity. Infected by generational cowardice that allows young European girls to be assaulted by roving migrant gangs without consequences, it is doubtful that the soft, cubicle men—the native-born officials and citizens—of contemporary Europe will prevail in the continent’s coming civil war.
To combat this possible development in America, Christian parents ought to be prepared to eviscerate everything that contributes to the production of soft-cubicle men rather than leaders. Instead, Evangelicals should encourage boys to engage in necessary conflict, take risks, flee safety, and learn to fight for something more enduring than another deposit in their 401(k).