I was recently a guest of Collin Hansen’s on the Gospelbound podcast, talking about Digital Liturgies and the opportunities for the church in the coming years. Check it out!
A while back ago I wrote two essays on the emerging “gender war” in American culture and why, in my view, the cultural decline of marriage was a major contributing factor. My big takeaway in those pieces was that marriage creates empathy between the sexes in a way that platonic friendship or mere collegiality cannot. If this is true, in a society where fewer people are opting to get married, we should see evidence that men and women are becoming ideologically polarized and suspicious of one another. That’s what we see.
So, I think the most systemic, effective way to bridge the gap between men and women is to pair them off. But this is a cultural prescription, not an individually actionable one. Nobody can force people to get married. Even in evangelical churches, small membership often means that men and women of marriageable age don’t have enough options. And of course, in the meantime, there needs to be some kind of thought given to helping foster solidarity between Christian men and women that goes beyond marriage.
What follows are four observations that are important to frame a practical effort to bridge gendered divides. In a future post I hope to offer four practical steps that individuals and churches can take. For now, the hope is that these four observations will at least shed some light:
Men and women’s experiences in the church are going to be different, and they are going to be inflected by embodied, gendered life. There’s nothing that can or even should be done about that.
This might seem obvious, but to many, it’s not. There are a considerable number of Christian writers, influencers, and theologians who publish and speak and advocate as if the goal of every church ought to be creating a culture where men and women experience everything the exact same way.
Gendered polarization reveals this on either side of the ideological spectrum. Feminist-leaning evangelicals might speak of a “bro code” in church cultures or organizations. A close look at these conversations often shows some underlying assumptions about how interchangeable men and women ought to be in Christian service. On the other side, conservative evangelicals who are concerned about creeping feminism or “empathy” will often talk of church or theology as if it is a straightforwardly stoic space, one in which women must either disappear or else assimilate into masculine thinking.
Neither one of these attitudes takes seriously enough the inescapability of gendered life. A woman is not a man, and no man can look at a woman—even in the kindest, most fair minded work or ministry place—and not respond to her as a woman. Likewise, asking men to leave their empathy or nurturing side at the door when it’s time to do leadership ignores how marriage and sexuality, by making the sexes collide with one another in intimate ways, shape us.
Men and women are going to be influenced by different things, and navigating male-female relationships in Christian contexts requires some media literacy.
The most practical example of this is social media. In many ways, Instagram and Twitter (I’m not calling it X, sorry) are the gender binary of the Internet. Instagram’s flowery, facial, very asethetic design has made it one of the most obviously female-coded places on the Web. On the other hand, Twitter’s word-based, idea-skewed habitat tends toward the kind of argument and thought-collision that is typical of masculine spaces. Obviously this doesn’t mean that men don’t use Instagram or women don’t use Twitter. They do. But the characters of both online spaces have a gendered accent.
Instagram’s language tends to be very feelings-based, and its algorithm is drawn toward images and videos that attempt some kind of human connection. Even Instagram’s more polemical content—think parenting or women’s health topics—is often narratival (“I did this, here’s what happened”). Twitter’s culture is more ironic, more sarcastic, more likely to create distance between the user and the content rather than a connection.
One of the most difficult things about navigating emerging gender resentment is that the digital age makes curated reality more possible than ever, and there is less and less need for men and women to encounter the other’s patterns of thought. Men and women are increasingly coming to shared spaces—church, work, etc.—with heavy but very different kinds of media consumption. Monoculture might not be dead, but the individual’s power to filter experience online through following, liking, and consuming only content you already want to, makes it less likely that a man and a woman are looking at the world from a similar angle.
Many evangelicals have no functional theology of gender beyond the question of gender roles. We are often unprepared to think intelligently about gender questions when they don’t directly impact church polity (which is the vast majority of gender questions!).
In the scheme of things, gender roles in the church are a relatively small part of what it means to be a man or a woman. Yet evangelical conversation around gender has camped here. In fact, it is rare to come across a book, essay, or event about Christian thinking on gender that doesn’t basically cash out to complementarian or egalitarian action points.
It makes some sense why egalitarians would tend to go straight from questions of embodiment to roles. Egalitarianism is the minority report in modern church history, and given the stakes, it’s not surprising to see the questions of female ordination or mutual submission get pride of place in egalitarian discourse. If you truly believe that one half of the human race is being forced into oppressive obesiance by a theology, how theoretical can you comfortably get?
The failure of complementarians (like myself) to articulate a more robust vision of gendered life is more disappointing. The complementarian position makes for smoother sailing when talking about how our bodies have personal and social significance. And yet the topic of roles is, for complementarians, usually the limit of the imagination. The downsides are obvious: Complementarian conversation, locked in as it is to headship/authority application, often fails to compellingly address the experiences and dynamics of gendered existence for people who have no opportunity to submit to a husband or no ambition to become an elder. That leaves at least 90% of gendered life—labor as a man or woman, worship as a man or woman, politics as a man or woman, etc.—untouched. The result is that, when confronted with something like the mental health crisis of young online girls or the radicalization of young men, evangelicals often reach for cliches, if they even know it’s happening at all.
Sin and dysfunction among men and among women are equally harmful, but not symmetrically consequential.
There have been recent questions about whether evangelicals blame men for things that ought to properly blamed on women. Some have suggested that pastors are unwilling to say hard things to women, while men make easy scapegoats.
This is an appealing take for many (and not just men), since it honestly ascribes moral agency to women and seems to take seriously the powerful ideas and ambitions that are often peddled to women in a discreet way. For example, while a popular male influencer like Andrew Tate is an obvious degenerate, and thus easy to point to as an example of male decadence, the more subtle, charming, maybe-you-should-divorce-your-husband-and-realize-your-dreams content that is common among glitzy influencers often goes unnoticed in the church.
It makes a certain kind of sense, then, to say that evangelicals need to start calling out these female-coded sins more explicitly, and that if they don’t, they cannot be surprised if men flee their churches. But there’s a problem with this logic: Women are not immaculate paragons of virtue, but neither are they the natural rudders of community. Men are. Women are capable of deceit and vice, yes. But the deceit and vice of men has a unique potency.
Given a society that is both highly pornographic and dismissive of marriage covenants, which tendency is worse? Neither answer would be a wrong place to direct a church’s energy, but to the degree that a society’s men are pornographically captured, the efforts to ennoble marriage covenant will be frustrated. The point is not that porn is always worse than divorce (certainly not). The point is that a society in which a plurality of men are adrift in vice and self-occupation is a society that has a crack at its foundation, and distributing the blame more equitably across gender lines is like making sure every inch of the dam has equal support when there’s one spot gushing water.
Navigating the estrangement between men and women will absolutely mean settling accounts with the illusios of the sexual revolution and the dysfunctions of a third-wave feminist regime. But taking gendered embodiment seriously at all means starting with men.
Thanks for another very helpful and balanced post.
That Instagram is female-coded and Twitter male-coded makes sense, but I've never thought about it that way. It definitely seems plausible that spending a lot of time on these platforms skews our vision of reality.
One thing I'm not so sure about though is the “functional theology of gender". You suggest Christians ought to develop how men and women ought to approach and politics, work etc. different as men and women. I think one reason why this has not happened yet is that this is very hard to do. Even though I myself believe men and women to be different, I've observed hundreds of different ways how individual men and women do things. When I discuss gender issues with friends I often struggle to articulate specific things that are generally different because just from my own experience I've seen so many unique ways how the genders operate.
For example, as a high school teacher I've many great colleagues that have various teaching styles and it is (very) hard for me to say which of these is due to them being “male” or “female”. You could say generalities like male teachers tend to be a bit more tough and less nurturing and caring, but even while saying this many counter examples come to mind.
So I wonder if it is really necessary and useful to always specify and articulate things down to each detail. In a way, each individual Christian has to prayerfully and thoughtfully find out and practice what being an authentic male or female _____ means for him/her specifically. I know the language of “authenticity” raises many alarm bells for conservative Christians, but nonetheless I do believe that our bodily make up, our biography, our environment and our personality all contribute to a unique and potentially healthy representation of masculinity or feminity we should aspire to.
This is great.
Dr. Anthony Bradley is one person I see promoting male issues from a wholistic lense: sociological, psychological, theological factors all work together to create healthy Christian men. (For example: https://anthonybbradley.substack.com/p/reaching-college-guys-hbcu-edition)
So many people miss this.
I appreciate your own take on these gender dynamics, and how truncated our dialogue can sometimes be.