The Male Identity Crisis: Why Young Men Are Searching for Meaning Again

In this 80-minute documentary-style podcast, apologist and author Justin Brierley seeks to get to the bottom of the male identity crisis seen across the west today. Masculinity is branded as “toxic,” gender roles and distinctions are called into question, misogynist influencers like the Tate brothers are on the rise — and young men are searching for identity. Join Brierley as he traces the roots of this crisis, the voices competing for men’s attention online, and the unique position the Church is in to change the tide.

Editor’s Note: The transcript that follows was automatically generated and lightly edited, so please be aware there could be typos or other small errors. The Stream is working toward a transcription service that does fast, accurate, and reliable work; thank you in advance for your patience!

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Hi there, it’s Justin. Just before we jump into today’s episode, I wanted to check something really important. Are you subscribed to my think Faith newsletter? If not, you’re missing out on articles, news, events, and updates. Subscribe today and I’ll send you the first chapter of my Surprising Rebirth book. And one more thing with the return of season two of the podcast.

00:00:22:13 – 00:00:48:10
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Go to the links with today’s episode.

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Bullying the MeToo movement against sexual masculinity.

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Is this the best a man can get to get out? Is it 20 until he has a problem? We can’t hide from it.

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Sexual harassment is taking over.

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It’s been going on for far too long.

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In 2019, a commercial for Gillette, the well-known men’s shaving brand, became an international talking point.

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Want to see this new ad that they put out and in the ads? Been causing a lot of conversation. It’s about toxic masculinity. This guy’s really mad because it’s like an anti masculine Gillette commercial. It makes like every man look like a misogynist piece. It’s such a disturbing commercial. It’s like, hey, bro, aren’t you selling razors?

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The ad was seen by many commentators as an overreach of progressive feminism.

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Here’s a hint. Conservative men who value masculinity. And by your products don’t appreciate being endlessly attacked by the media feminists. And now Procter and Gamble.

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A few years later, it felt like history was repeating itself.

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Hi. Impressive carrying skills, right? I got some Bud Lights for us.

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This is transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a paid promotion for the brewing company Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Light brand.

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This month I celebrated my day 360.

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Five of womanhood and.

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Bud Light sent me possibly the best gift ever. A can with my face on it.

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Cheers. Go, team. Whatever team you love. I love to, you know.

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This is progressive podcast The Young Turks covering the response.

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Dylan Mulvaney was celebrating the fact that Bud Light had sent a special beer can over to her. Of course, she’s a TikTok star who has been, basically documenting her transition. Now, of course, that simple video led to a little bit of a hissy fit on the right.

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That hissy fit included this memorable moment when music star kid Rock lined up several cases of Bud Light in the countryside.

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Bud light Anheuser-Busch. Have a terrific day.

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The singer’s use of the beer brand for target practice was part of a backlash against Bud Light that led to a plummet in sales.

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For more than two decades. Bud Light was America’s top selling beer before being thrown by modelo back in May. Now, this came after a boycott of Bud Light and its parent company, Anheuser-Busch, by some consumers.

00:03:38:06 – 00:04:07:06
Gillette and Bud Light are both products aimed squarely at men. From a purely commercial point of view. Their controversial adverts were a failure as the resulting boycotts proved. But I believe the backlash was more than just conservatives having a hissy fit. Male identity has been undergoing a long period of deconstruction, and these advertising campaigns were a manifestation of a new, more progressive approach to gender and identity.

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The increasing rise of identity politics and diversity initiatives has impacted cultural and work spaces, where men have traditionally taken the lead, traditional male roles and role models are being questioned, and the word toxic has frequently been attached to the word masculinity. For many, this was a long overdue swing of the pendulum away from old fashioned patriarchy. But an incipient resentment was growing among many men who felt they were being sidelined or patronized by the wider culture.

00:04:40:17 – 00:05:10:21
In my view, the backlash against Bud Light and Gillette was in fact just one symptom of a wider problem already well underway in the West. In an age where many young men have grown up without any father figure, where gender identity and traditional roles are being questioned, when male suicide rates have reached an all time high, and a whole set of online influencers are vying for the attention of teenage boys, a male identity crisis has been in full swing.

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But a crisis is often the catalyst for change and growth.

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Young men are asking the big meta questions that interest is taking them right back to to religion. Religion broadly. And in in the West, a Christianity in particular. And so they’re open.

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Part of what we’ve got to do is provide them with a better vision of manhood. We’ve got to provide them with better models. And I genuinely believe this is an opportunity for the church to serve.

00:05:50:07 – 00:06:24:21
I’m Justin Brierley, and in this podcast series, I’m bringing you the inside account of why a meaning crisis in the modern world and the search for a better story about life are leading many 21st century people to reconsider Christian faith. Welcome back to season two of the Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Episode seven Confronting the Male Identity Crisis.

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So to support, just go to the links with today’s episode info.

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Wide ideological gap is emerging between young men and women across the globe. According to Gallup data in the United States, UK and Germany, women between the ages of 18 and 29 are heading in the Liberal direction and more men in the same age range are trending conservative.

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American Gen Z women are 30 percentage points more liberal than their male counterparts. Women aged 18 to 29 take more progressive positions on issues like immigration and racial justice than young men do. Even as the sexes still roughly see eye to eye in older generations.

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And it’s triggered a furious row on social media, with the right blaming the new gender gap on what they see as excesses of identity politics and modern feminism. And the left blaming on what they see as toxic masculinity and a reactive, anti-feminist misogyny.

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Last year, a new global gender divide emerged. New data showed young men were growing far more conservative in their politics than Gen Z. Women who remained largely progressive.

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It’s plausible that this widening gender gap could have some pretty severe social consequences.

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This is Tldr news host Jack Kelly.

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For instance. Some commentators have suggested that this widening political chasm could be contributing to declining marriage and fertility rates in the developed world. As South Korea’s gender gap has widened, its marriage rate has declined, and it now has the widest gender gap and the lowest fertility rate in the world.

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The global research was led by the Financial Times columnist John Byrne. Murdoch explained why, alongside big social changes in education, industry and family, the online world of young men and women is driving them apart.

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Men and women are just simply spending less time together, right? Like in person versus online is diminishing. We’re spending more and more time online. And of course, for young people, when they’re online, you increasingly get these sort of filter bubbles. So if you’re a young, say, late teens, early 20s, man, he’s not gone to university, there’s a significant chance that you’re going to be bombarded by things like consent from Andrew Tate.

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If you’re a young woman, you’re not going to be seeing that at all. So more and more of people’s time is being spent in these sort of sex segregated spaces. And so that means that these, these sort of underlying long running structural factors like that industrial decline are just being sort of catalyzed and exacerbated.

00:09:57:12 – 00:10:10:00
Unknown
My name’s Kate and so am I. We’re definitely having my own surveys. Will check me out. Yeah, I just can’t.

00:10:10:02 – 00:10:36:02
In 2023, the Barbie movie’s male character can satirize the insecurities of men who feel lost in a new world of female empowerment. But young men who feel ignored or even mocked by progressive culture are undergoing a vibe shift towards conservatism and being influenced by a growing army of male oriented YouTubers willing to take their concerns seriously.

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You know, I must have had 50 or 100 episodes on my podcast about this. People can go and.

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Listen to them. I think that the biggest problem is that we’re not really listening to men’s problems.

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This is popular podcaster Chris Williamson.

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They are being dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that men no longer feel a part of. I think that we are being made to pay for the advantages of our fathers and grandfathers in that way, like just look at the mental health.

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Of young men.

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In 1990, the number of men, percentage of men who said that they had zero close friends was 3%. And in 2020 it was 15%. So it five out of the space of 30 years. It’s not good. And yet, all of the benefits that men have had throughout history, are continuing to be used to dismiss any of the concerns that they have now.

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And also outliers successes are being used to forget what the.

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Normal area of the distribution, the bulk of that.

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Is actually doing. Look at how many, you know, male CEOs are. And it’s like, yeah, okay. But look at how many guys kill themselves. Look at how many guys, in prison are addicted to drugs or homeless. Like, you can’t use Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to excuse 14 million unemployed NEETs not in employment, education or training in the US like that.

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Did those two people.

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Somehow, like, make those 14.

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Million feel better? I don’t think so.

00:12:07:06 – 00:12:16:10
Conor Tomlinson is another member of the podcast fraternity, speaking here with the trigonometry hosts about the crisis of masculinity.

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It sounds like the Fight Club quote of where a generation of men raised by women, and we’ve been told that a woman is another solution. If you haven’t been raised by a man, which lots of young men haven’t. Then you’ve got to look for surrogate male father figures online healthy versions to meet some of the unhealthy things like underweight.

00:12:32:12 – 00:12:58:15
Or you’re going to the so incapable of defending your masculinity that you fall prey to social trends. Which is why you’re seeing either they’re identifying in consumer goods, like all the people that hold Funko Pops, or the young boys that are from age 11 upwards getting addicted to pornography. And there’s now a mass prescription I think was 4 million last year of erectile dysfunction medication to young men.

00:12:58:17 – 00:13:45:15
So if you’ve been institutionally gaslit out of thinking there is value in masculinity and you haven’t had a father in the home, to understand the value in that and how to transmit that value down a long civilizational chain, then it’s no wonder that you either completely check out civilization, that you retreat to your goon cave, where you’ve just got pornography and video games and resentful red pill podcasts that tell you that all women know the problem, or you gravitate towards the LGBT ideologies that allow you to achieve escape velocity from being a man, or you actually find identity in reclaiming masculine vitalism in some way, because you feel like if you can’t be authentic, if

00:13:45:15 – 00:14:06:17
you can’t be virtuous necessarily, in a sense you must be at least consonant. You must wear the personas of the past like some kind of skin suit, until it becomes natural. And so that’s, I think, the split we’re seeing in Gen Z, we’re seeing between algorithmically driven resentment versus those people that want to reclaim something of the past, that that thing that they’re nostalgic for but never actually quite experienced.

00:14:06:19 – 00:14:13:02
Essentially, what you’re talking about, Connor, is that basically men don’t know how to be men.

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And that’s a real problem.

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Already we’ve stumbled across some names Andrew Tate and terms that we’ll unpack soon. But perhaps the phrase most associated with the current male identity crisis is toxic masculinity. Social scientist Richard Reeves, author of the influential book on Boys and Men, explains why he doesn’t like the phrase.

00:14:40:00 – 00:14:54:19
By putting those two words right next to each other. It actually repels a lot of boys. And then from a conversation about what it means to be a man, what what it means to be particularly mature, I think to talk about mature masculinity in a mature masculinity is quite useful.

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But the idea of toxic, it’s like puritan. It’s like it’s not. It’s not as with the idea of original.

00:15:00:05 – 00:15:10:24
Sin in Christian theology. Right. And you need these exorcisms. You need someone to come and exercise. If you just weren’t so male, you’d be okay. And having raised three boys to adulthood, I got to tell you.

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That idea is something toxic in them has to be expunged, is not a helpful way to raise them. So, if we could, if we could just consign that particular term back to the obscurity of.

00:15:22:03 – 00:15:24:04
Academic journals, that would be great.

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Business entrepreneur and author Scott Galloway, after seeing repeated examples of young women succeeding while young men retreated to their parents basements to play video games, says he’s been shocked to discover the worrying new gender gap, opening up.

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A 7 to 10 high school valedictorians or girls for every one male college graduate. Over the next five years, there’s going to.

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Be two female college graduates. 93% of mass shooters are men, three times more likely to overdose, four times more likely to commit suicide, 12.

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More times more likely to be incarcerated. They do worse in single parent households.

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For some reason, girls have the same outcomes in a dual parent household versus a single. We have more single parent households. Our education system is biased against men, men on a behavior adjusted, our boys on a behavior. Just boys are twice as likely to get suspended for the same infraction as a girl. Two thirds to 80% of all primary and secondary teachers are women, and understandably, they’re going to champion little girls who they see themselves in.

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So young men just have the.

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Deck stacked against them.

00:16:27:15 – 00:16:42:16
But Christian thinker Nancy Piercey, author of The Toxic War on Masculinity, says the roots of the modern male identity crisis go back much further than our own era to the rise of an increasingly industrialized and secular culture.

00:16:42:18 – 00:17:14:09
Historians agree that the 19th century saw a huge increase of drinking, gambling, gang activity, crime, prostitution because men were becoming more secular in their outlook and the 19th century, as a result, was also the period of great reform movements. But the reform movements were all basically focused on male misbehavior, that men were starting to act differently because they were no longer embedded in the family in their church, you know, in the local community anymore.

00:17:14:11 – 00:17:42:16
So historically, if you go back to the 19th century, it’s amazing how already then you see the language. Well, let me give you a quote of one of my favorite historians. Puts it this way. All of the all of the reform movements of the 19th century were implicit condemnations of males. Why? Because there was little doubt as to the sex of the tavern keeper, the slave master, the drunkard and the seducer.

00:17:42:18 – 00:18:12:19
That’s her who quote. So a lot of the hostile language toward men actually goes back to that era. And of course, it does also indicate what the solution must be. The solution has to be how can we reconnect men to their families? How can we reconnect men to their children and especially the next generation of sons? A psychiatrist wrote a book in which he said, we’re not going to get a better class of men until we get a better class of fathers in raising the next generation.

00:18:12:20 – 00:18:29:19
So in my book, I end up making you saying that the long term solution is to recover, especially the father son relationship. That’s the main, the main, solution to any sort of toxic behavior. And then.

00:18:29:21 – 00:19:00:02
Toxic masculinity has inevitably become a loaded term. But the roots of why men are struggling with identity obviously go deep in preparing for today’s episode, I reached out to several Christian leaders who is seeing a renewed interest in faith among men, but I began by asking them what their take on toxic masculinity is. I spoke to New York Pastor John Tyson, a popular author and speaker on the topic of masculinity.

00:19:00:04 – 00:19:23:20
I definitely think it’s it’s a very significant factor. Nancy Pierce, you wrote a book called The Toxic War on Masculinity. Very, very good books, just sort of outlining the journey of how that happened. Let’s let’s just start by saying one thing. Men, not all men, but many men through history have done atrocious things that in many ways have been toxic.

00:19:23:22 – 00:19:48:12
So this, in some senses, is an earned reputation, lack of restraint, the way that women have been treated, the way that power has been used, there has been a lot of harm by men exerting and using power poorly. So part of it requires repentance for, you know, certainly for Christian men and a call to something, for, for the rest of society.

00:19:48:14 – 00:20:09:04
So, yeah, there’s, there’s an earned reputation there. But a step beyond that, acknowledging that the dynamics of that now, the challenge, I think a lot of people feel, is that we’re saying masculinity itself is toxic. And that’s the point she’s making, like that being a man is a fundamentally a bad thing rather than very good. So yeah, I think that that’s a part of it.

00:20:09:04 – 00:20:29:10
And like many things, we’re only highlighting the extreme, okay. No one’s talking about the good dad working as hard as he can to show up for his kids games, you know, share the household load and, be emotionally present with his kids. There’s a there’s a lot of men like that. This probably more men like that than not like that.

00:20:29:10 – 00:20:56:15
They don’t get the attention. So a lot of times, yeah, gender ideology shakes up a cultural conversation. People react in a hyper way, which is probably sort of that Andrew Tate sort of overcompensation. And then in the middle, a lot of times the typical man just gets lost in the shuffle, figuring out, how to move forward. So, yeah, to the, the fringes often assault the middle and shake us all up and destabilize things.

00:20:56:15 – 00:21:00:11
And I do think a lot of Minnesota got stuck in the middle of that.

00:21:00:13 – 00:21:10:05
Evangelist Glenn Scrivener of Speak Life told me why he believes the church has a significant role to play. The young men growing up without male role models.

00:21:10:07 – 00:21:34:11
Increasing numbers of men and women, boys and girls, and growing up in households without fathers. And that plays itself out differently for for a woman than it does for men. And I think, a boy not feeling that he has been fathered has all sorts of knock on effects. And that might not just be that, you’ve never met your biological father.

00:21:34:11 – 00:21:55:10
It might be that you had a biological father in the household with you, but he didn’t know how to father you because he himself wasn’t fathered, didn’t know how to kind of discipline and disciple you and and grow you up as a man in that sort of a way. Well, there are a number of resources now that you can come to if you’re a Christian.

00:21:55:12 – 00:22:20:04
The number one thing is theologically, Jesus Christ invites you to the father. He he invites you to God as far but to be a son and heir alongside Christ the son and heir, filled with the spirit and brought by the spirit of adoption to cry, ABBA, father, and you can be fathered by God in a way that you might not have experienced on an earthly plane.

00:22:20:04 – 00:22:53:08
And let’s be honest, even if you’ve had the best earthly father in the world, they’re not going to be as good as God the Father is. And so from that theological point of view, I think young men can have an experience of being fathered in that, theological sense, in that vertical sense. But also we can be engrafted into a church community in which, as as the Book of Titus says in the New Testaments that, you know, you are to treat older men as fathers, with all respects.

00:22:53:08 – 00:23:22:19
And, you know, younger man is sort of brothers in the faith here to treat older women like this. And younger women like that. And actually, there is an age appropriate way of discipling one another that’s entirely written about in family terms. And I know that I have been fathered, yes, by God, but but also by people within the church, who have done life and they have gone ahead of me and they have, passed on, you know, the wisdom of following Jesus in those sorts of ways.

00:23:22:19 – 00:23:38:20
So I think with a crisis of fatherlessness that the church has really unique resources that it can offer to this cultural crisis.

00:23:38:22 – 00:23:52:11
Like Glen and John, I believe there are a whole mass of young men looking for identity. And you don’t have to look far online to find the dark underbelly of where the lack of meaningful relationships is leading many of them.

00:23:52:13 – 00:23:54:10
So you’re not having any luck with the ladies.

00:23:54:15 – 00:23:58:17
You’ve exited your formative years with zero achievements to speak of, and are now entering your.

00:23:58:17 – 00:24:17:21
Glory years at the speed of sound, with the social skills of a 160 year old Galapagos tortoise in a world full of bully jock assholes. Discuss eating Roasties an idiot. Chad’s obese loser. That’s me. And I’m gonna try to do the impossible. Make a guide to help you survive and seldom.

00:24:17:23 – 00:24:43:04
This guy, obese loser may be a deliberately self-mocking gamer on YouTube, but his description of life as an incel and involuntary celibate fits with a wider and more disturbing trend of young men checking out of real life work and relationships as they settle instead for a world of gaming, porn and an often embittered attitude towards women in the online forums they hang out in.

00:24:43:06 – 00:24:49:24
Speaking on the Big Think, Washington Post columnist Christine Imber describes the phenomenon.

00:24:50:01 – 00:25:28:00
So I also think about the number of men who seem like they’ve just disappeared from society. These are men who are known as NEETs in their sort of wonky parlance, not in education, employment or training. So what are they up to? Well, it seems like they’re on the internet. Many of them are at home, sort of pouring out their woes to these online forums, whether it’s incel forums or men going their own way, discussion groups where they talk about how dissatisfied they are with life and how it feels like the world has wronged them.

00:25:28:02 – 00:25:51:08
Then you’re seeing a lot of men playing video games, frankly, instead of engaging with the world. And that’s actually compelling in understandable ways. It does seem like gaming gives you the opportunity to achieve goals or achieve success in a way that might not be as visible in the real world. If you aren’t able to find fulfilling employment, or if you feel like you’re left out of other societal pursuits.

00:25:51:10 – 00:25:58:24
This is Amber describing some of her research and why many on her own left leaning side haven’t taken the issues seriously.

00:25:59:01 – 00:26:28:10
You know, we do have the statistics, right? We see that for every 100 women who graduate from college right now, only 74 men do. For every 100 women, men make up three out of four deaths. Some despair. So we know that there is something going on. The problem that I outlined in this piece specifically is that progressives and the left especially, seem to not want to acknowledge this, or at least not acknowledge that men might be a.

00:26:28:10 – 00:26:28:21
Group.

00:26:28:21 – 00:26:51:22
In need of assistance itself. There’s a sort of hesitance to talking about men as men, and instead people want to say, well, we just need to be good people. But what does that look like specifically? Because young men especially, are asking for a specific path.

00:26:51:24 – 00:26:56:17
Our bodies, for the most part of this, are the same as they have been for thousands of years.

00:26:56:19 – 00:26:58:07
John Tyson.

00:26:58:09 – 00:27:22:19
Much of our instincts, our wiring, our expectations have been, for the most part, pretty consistent up until the last sort of 70 years. That’s what we’ve really seen, particularly with the start of the sexual revolution and acute violent changes in all of our expectations. And so a lot of men and again, ideas and academics tend to lead in society first.

00:27:22:21 – 00:27:47:22
And so you’ve got all of these radical ideas which the typical person hasn’t had the time to sort of process and make sense of how to integrate that their instincts into the modern world. And so a lot of guys feel like they’re status stepping all the time, the status stepping all the time, and the reason that men often behave badly in groups in private is because they don’t know how to take action.

00:27:47:22 – 00:28:10:23
So who would be an example? What if you were having a really challenging time, during the weekend? Horrible porn binge, suicidal ideation, real despair, lack of nervousness. And you show up at work on Monday morning, you’re just doing a little team huddle. Hey, how’s it going? How’s the weekend? And if you just said, oh, listen, I just was crippled with suicidal ideation.

00:28:10:23 – 00:28:35:20
Total despair. Bingeing porn on the edge of a total existential crisis that is not welcomed. What’s what’s your boss going to say? You say that in your mixed gender small group. What’s your small group going to say? They’re going to be polite and kind, but where do you deal with this? And for the answer for the most. Plus, men have not had those mechanisms isolation, lack of community.

00:28:35:22 – 00:28:57:04
So I think that has produced a sense of a crisis for how men should be men with the expectations in the modern world. Once I read that, I felt was fascinating, sort of dealing with the escapist nature. Nearly half of men, 48%, say their online lives are more engaging and rewarding than their offline lives. They can they can master the rules of the online world.

00:28:57:04 – 00:29:06:01
It’s very hard to master the new, rules in the modern world. So I think, yeah, that’s a that goes a long way towards it.

00:29:06:03 – 00:29:29:18
If the sexual and internet revolution have worked in tandem to contribute to the male identity crisis, then it’s no surprise that the internet is also offering answers, both good and bad, to men searching for a solution. Doctor Anthony Bradley of Kuyper College is a professor whose research interests span fatherhood. The men and boy crisis, youth and family, race in America, and more.

00:29:29:20 – 00:29:50:14
He began engaging with questions of male identity after teaching in high school in the 90s and seeing young boys, often from homes without fathers, falling behind girls. Now, a few decades on, he says that young men looking for a role model are frequently finding a hollowed out version of masculinity from online influences.

00:29:50:14 – 00:30:16:22
When you look at some of these influencers, what’s really massive right now in the US, in the UK is self-improvement. And because the culture in general hasn’t given really important signals about why you’re needed, well, the one thing that you can do then is improve yourself. So what does it reduce to how to become more physically fit? How to make more money?

00:30:16:24 – 00:30:59:15
How to become independent, how to conquer women? How to be in control of your future? How to be in control of your destiny. To live your life on your terms. How to retire at 35. Right. So it’s all these sort of self-improvement, categories. And and it’s on the positive side, you have this interest in stoicism and that and the wisdom tradition there on the negative side, you have this intersection of stoicism and narcissism and self-centredness and self-preservation where you become the center of the universe and that your masculinity is here to serve you.

00:30:59:17 – 00:31:29:05
This idea that masculinity is here to serve other people, which is the more traditional understanding it’s been swept in the context of some of the negative influences you seen in the. No, no, no, no, your masculinity is here for you and you alone, and you will be completely free. It is the masculinity of of autonomy. I’m I’m phrasing this prosperity masculinity where personal peace and affluence without any demands of your life.

00:31:29:07 – 00:31:45:16
Right. This is what masculine and he is it is it is serving the the God of autonomy.

00:31:45:18 – 00:32:16:01
The manosphere of jacked up influences selling solutions to easily influenced young men disillusioned by feminism and progressive ideology has an extreme end. The so-called red pill content creators who, having been awakened to the genuine reality of biological difference between the sexes, have gone on to inhabit a worldview of alpha versus beta males teaching men how to control and master multiple women, and promoting an extreme view of male dominance.

00:32:16:03 – 00:32:32:24
Christian YouTuber Ruslan KD says that while some of the red pill influencers he’s engaged with sometimes share cultural concerns in common with Christians, we shouldn’t confuse their content with a Christian ethic of family and relationships.

00:32:33:01 – 00:32:54:12
The interesting thing about the Red pill is that there’s a lot of overlap, so they assess the right problems, but prescribe the worst solutions. But they claim they don’t even give prescriptions, but they clearly do. So they’ll assess, hey, you know, women’s rights and third wave feminism and, birth control. We’re not net positives to women in the sense that, hey, men are hurting.

00:32:54:12 – 00:33:15:23
Men are the most likely to die on the job, most likely to commit suicide, most likely to be depressed, most like. But if they if you get divorce, it’s really hard on a man. So they assess a lot of the right problems. It’s just that they’re very incomplete solutions. And so it’s this interesting thing because intrinsically people know some of it is true.

00:33:15:24 – 00:33:35:15
You could just look around society and be like, this is kind of wild, right? But then the application of how to navigate it is the complete opposite because you’re really just adding to the problem. Right? So a high value woman to them is a woman that’s younger, who’s a virgin and yada yada yada. Yeah. The prescription is to go split spin plates and to date women on Wednesdays.

00:33:35:15 – 00:33:43:22
But the girls that are sexually active with you prioritize them for Fridays and Saturdays. This is an it’s it’s just a mess. Like all of it is a mess.

00:33:43:24 – 00:33:51:07
Whether or not you’ve come across red pill content, you’ve probably heard of its most famous personality.

00:33:51:09 – 00:34:18:08
Bill. Andrew Tate, now 36 years old, began his rise to fame as a kickboxer, winning multiple titles around the state and starting to build his online empire and a webcam business where he paid women to perform on camera. Tate claimed the business once earned $600,000 a month. Success is actually nothing to do with being good at your job.

00:34:18:10 – 00:34:19:02
I was first.

00:34:19:02 – 00:34:45:16
Alerted to Andrew Tate when my own teenage son told me about how much influence his content was having among teenage boys around him, who were enamored with his confident swagger and claims of money, power and sexual prowess. But the tawdry reality is that Tate is an abusive exploiter of women. Be warned, this short clip contains some offensive content and language.

00:34:45:17 – 00:35:06:23
I don’t give a shit about how beautiful women I am, so they listen to me so I can get what I actually want, which is not them. It’s a means to an end. Every single bond girl was exploited. That’s exactly what I do when I watch a bond film. When I see him basically pimp approach to me that speaks to my heart.

00:35:06:23 – 00:35:25:00
I’ve been there, I’ve done that. Anyone who’s followed me long enough knows I first made my million dollars with a webcam business. I have met beautiful women with a good personality and thought she will make me money. I have this, I want to strive to need the money.

00:35:25:02 – 00:35:43:07
You get the picture. Andrew Tate and his brother remain under investigation in Romania, charged with human trafficking and other offenses around exploitation of women. So why has he become so popular among young men? I asked John Tyson.

00:35:43:09 – 00:36:04:16
Well, part of it is that he is custom made for social media. He’s built for TikTok. So the 32nd clip, where he’s got a is it a Bugatti and a cigar talking about girls and a pile of money? That’s every immature man’s vision of success. So in some sense, he’s not drawn teenage boys into a mature vision of manhood.

00:36:04:16 – 00:36:37:11
He’s meeting them in their immaturity. And but in terms of social media, I think that that happens very, very well. He also, I think this is probably similar to Trump and why Trump appeals to, to many people that they don’t care about political correctness. And a lot of folks don’t have the courage to say how sort of fed up they are feeling, like they’re self-censoring both sorts of things, fitting in, going along for the sake of, you know, just just the sake of peace, even if they disagree.

00:36:37:13 – 00:36:56:14
And these guys just come out and say whatever they think. And for a lot of guys who have sort of that pent up frustration about not being able to speak their mind, these guys do what they’re like, look, that’s a real man. He’s got courage. There’s a difference between saying whatever to draw attention to yourself and genuine courage, but it’s so they can certainly look like one another in the short term on social media.

00:36:56:14 – 00:37:18:04
So I think a lot of guys look up and they’re like, my teenage energy wants money because I’m broke. I want girls because I’m, you know, I’m going through puberty and this is this is what it’s about. And he looks free, like he’s living his dream life. So I think it’s an appeal to adolescence. It’s an appeal to immaturity, custom built by social media to meet them where they are.

00:37:18:06 – 00:37:40:05
And. Yeah. And that, that sense of courage. So I think part of what we’ve got to do is provide them with a better vision of manhood. We’ve got to provide them with better models. You know, a lot of people talk about the Proverbs 31 woman, you know, Proverbs 31 starts by talking about the Proverbs 31 man.

00:37:40:07 – 00:38:04:15
And at the start of it’s actually the advice of a mother to a son. Many scholars believe critiquing the failures of King Solomon at the end of his life, who took all the power he had accumulated that was designed by God to steward and set up the next generation and squander it on foreign wives and their gods. And it’s, you know, says, don’t spend your strength on women, your vigor on those who ruin kings.

00:38:04:17 – 00:38:24:00
And he basically says, every man with influence has a capacity to determine what he does with his strength. He says, do not squander it on those who ruin your character. And do not waste it on the undisciplined pursuit of women. And then at the end of it he says this verse which everyone talks about when it comes to justice, but they disconnected from the context.

00:38:24:00 – 00:38:45:17
Speak up for those who can’t speak for themselves, for the rights, who are destitute, speak up, judge fairly, defend the rights of the poor and needy. So we’ve got to give them a model of men who he’s he’s a king. He’s a man with a realm of responsibility. And what’s he doing with that realm? He is stewarding his power for the good of others rather than squandering and using on himself.

00:38:45:17 – 00:39:14:00
So I think when we see those sort of archetypal men who give themselves on behalf of others, who are great according to what the Bible says is greatness, who steward well and lead to the flourishing of others. The more we hold that up, the less appeal Andrew Tate will have in the long run.

00:39:14:02 – 00:39:27:23
In 2022, Andrew Tate claimed to have converted to Islam, though many Muslims question whether he shows any signs of genuine adherence to his part. Tate seems to see the religion as in keeping with his philosophy of men and.

00:39:27:23 – 00:39:46:11
Women who have a problem with feminism, Islam will fix it. If you have a problem with your wife not obeying you, Islam will fix it. Islam fixes a lot of the problems that men are currently facing, the problems we’re discussing on this show, Islam fixes all of it.

00:39:46:13 – 00:40:04:00
Whether you take Tate’s religious claims seriously or not, his apparent conversion does reflect a growing interest in Islam among young men looking for answers. Islamic conversion has been on the rise among ethnic minorities in prisons and in other areas. Anthony Bradley.

00:40:04:02 – 00:40:31:20
One of the things that I’ve noticed over the last few years is, is Muslims are extremely successful at speaking to working class white lads, and here’s what they provide for them right off the bat structure. It’s not simply the misogynistic stuff, but it’s also things like this. We want to help you break your addiction to pornography. We want to get you off of drink.

00:40:31:22 – 00:41:05:02
We want to provide you a schedule to pray 4 or 5 times a day. What we want to provide for you is ritual. And tradition and other worldly ness so that when you come into a mosque, you experience it as a distinct sacred space that is separated. Because it’s ancient, it’s distinct from what you experience in the village.

00:41:05:04 – 00:41:24:21
Antony’s experience tallies with my own. I know more than one young, white British working class man who’s embraced Islam under the influence of Muslim evangelists on TikTok, for instance. So why are young men turning to Islam over their local church? In many instances?

00:41:24:23 – 00:41:59:04
I think one of the problems is that what baby boomers did, particularly some gen-xers, they wanted to make Christianity more quote unquote, relatable, connect to the culture. And when they stripped it of the very same things that attract young men. And so Islam and some Eastern Orthodox churches retain the same thing structure, tradition, ritual, habituation. A lot of evangelicals or a Protestant would call that legalism, and that’s what’s drawing them thence.

00:41:59:04 – 00:42:25:24
I’ve watched these videos where Muslim evangelists have been in Birmingham, or they’ve been in London, and I’ll watch them approach a young lad and they’ll say things like this. Do you want a more disciplined life in the lads? Like, yes. Do you want to know what it means to love and care for a wife? Yes. Do you want to know what it means to go to bed at the same time?

00:42:25:24 – 00:42:57:19
Yes. Do you want to have an experience of religion that’s completely separate? From what? From the debauchery that you see in the culture? Yes. And Islam has done an amazing job. And I absolutely amazing job of connecting to those pressure points. Here’s a couple of I’ve of podcasts in the UK it’s called Free Muslims or these these these lads are in their mid 20s and and they have hundreds of thousands of views.

00:42:57:21 – 00:43:18:12
And it’s men, all young men all across the world, but mostly the UK who are listening to them, give them the, the sort of rules for living and it’s, it’s really impressive to watch. I would argue that all of those things are in the Christian tradition, but we have buried them because we think that those things are legalistic.

00:43:18:12 – 00:43:33:20
But those are the very things that provide a lot of direction and life. Giving a context for the expression experience of something like liturgy.

00:43:33:22 – 00:43:58:21
Whether it be the strength that figures like type see in Islam, or the desire of the wider red pill community to dominate women and build a modern day harem, it feels like many male influencers are pushing not for a post-Christian world, but a pre-Christian one. Sarah Coppin from Westminster Theological Center says she’s noticed a difference between the different culture warriors influencing young men.

00:43:58:23 – 00:44:16:10
I mean, the Tom Holland. But Dominion really impacted me, and I read it two years ago. And, you know, Christians often talk about kind of church versus the world. And I’ve been thinking about that a lot because I don’t actually think that the biblical sense of the world is what we mean, because when we talk about the world, we mean the secular.

00:44:16:12 – 00:44:39:06
But actually in the Bible, they were either talking about the cosmos or they were talking about the inhabited world, which was Rome. And I think in the West. Tom Holland is very cleverly articulated how we now have this intermingling of what you might call empire culture or Rome and Jesus, Jesus’s ethic, you know, kingdom or whatever, whatever you want to call it.

00:44:39:08 – 00:45:15:04
And some, like you, Andrew Tate’s, are swaying back to those Roman ideals of the paterfamilias at the head. And, you know, all of your, your wife and then your other women, male concubines or whatever. And they are they’re trying to go back, I would argue they’re trying to go back to Rome, and then you’ve got your others, like your Jordan Peterson sort of saying, oh, actually, maybe, you know, maybe the Jesus stuff actually is the thing to go back to, but that requires men to forego some of their liberties and it requires discipline and actually also asks, are of women, you know, you know, which we don’t like either.

00:45:15:06 – 00:45:51:14
And so I think where the rubber meets the road will be whether people want, I guess you think about the cost, you know, that, born of a line about costly discipleship. And we’ll see whether people view it as a valuable enough story to truly inhabit and actually count the cost of living it out.

00:45:51:16 – 00:46:10:16
Sarah mentioned another significant influencer, Jordan Peterson. He’s someone we devoted a whole episode of our first season to, looking at how the Canadian psychologist and author of the self-help book 12 rules for life has been pointing many young men back to Scripture as a significant source of meaning and wisdom.

00:46:10:18 – 00:46:14:07
What advice do you have for a young man in his 20s?

00:46:14:09 – 00:46:56:15
Make a plan. Look at what you’re interested in. Get disciplined about something. Allow for the possibility that you have something important to contribute to the world, and that the world would be a lesser place without that contribution. Don’t be afraid of taking on responsibility. It’s where you find what sustains you in your life. The the Christian insistence is that Christ embodies the pattern of loving sacrifice, marriage in the order that you establish in your family, to the degree that you embody the spirit of loving sacrifice as a father, then you’ll create out of the potential that’s your family relationships, the order.

00:46:56:15 – 00:47:22:16
That’s good. Well, that’s what you do on behalf of your children, right? You you put them first, not you. You certainly put them first before your whims. You put what’s best for them before their whims, too. And so there’s an upward aim in that. And all that upward aim is sacrificial. And then, well, then we get to the issue of what constitutes the ultimate sacrifice, which is partly what’s explored in the gospel account.

00:47:22:20 – 00:47:32:16
The principle of sacrifice is the basis of sophisticated psychological integrity and community.

00:47:32:18 – 00:47:59:07
Sometimes I hear Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson being mentioned in the same breath, but like Sarah Coppin, I believe that’s a mistake. Yes, they both command great influence and are both responding to the same issues of lost and lonely men, but they’re pointing their audience in very different directions. Peterson has described Tate’s views as reprehensible. For his part, Tate describes Christianity as weak, tame, and too easily mocked.

00:47:59:13 – 00:48:31:22
It is, after all, the story of a God who got himself crucified by the powerful and forgave those who cursed and mocked him. But Peterson sees this as a sign of true strength, often encouraging his audience to model themselves after Christ as an exemplar of strength through sacrifice and the lifting up of the weak and powerless. I asked John Tyson why Peterson has been so successful in attracting young men to his own biblically influenced message, in ways that many church pastors could only dream of.

00:48:31:24 – 00:48:53:22
Aaron Wren. He wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal called What Jordan Peterson Can Teach Church Leaders. Why a one line manosphere? Guys sort of get the traction. He had five observations. I think this really bear out. Number one, online influencers are men speaking to men with most of the content about men is women talking to men about who there should or should not be.

00:48:53:24 – 00:49:15:24
So very few men directly address men as men. It’s everybody else giving commentary, on men. So who are the voices that just speak to a man, man to man? The typical sermon is, sort of mixed gender environment. Very few places men from here hear from other people. And Jordan Peterson would, like, look in the camera and tell you to make your bed stand up straight with your shoulders back.

00:49:15:24 – 00:49:41:13
And it was very men had not had dads or other figures who spoke them directly as men. Secondly, they treat men as ends and not just means actually caring about how men are doing. You know, it’s been the mental health crisis, deaths of despair, all of the statistics about, men struggling. And there’s very few places even Christian, Christian men’s movements tend to talk about men as servants.

00:49:41:15 – 00:50:01:24
That’s important. They tend to talk about the good men. Can do, but they rarely just ask men, how are you doing that? Don’t talk to men just as people who need care. And, online influencers do that. They’re talking to you like a father to a son caring about who you are. And they provide an aspirational. This is his third point.

00:50:01:24 – 00:50:21:10
They provide an aspirational and appealing vision of manhood in ways mainstream figures don’t. They’re just willing to say things that are that may be controversial to, you know, gender ideologists or whatever, but they just don’t care. They just say, hey, listen, I want to tell you how it is. Meaning comes responsibility. One of you know, Jordan Peterson’s Viktor Frankl pickups.

00:50:21:12 – 00:50:41:01
And so take responsibility in your life will get better. Work hard, set your alarm. And in some ways, I think there’s an intuitive sense in a man’s heart where he says, yes, that’s right. I can see that bringing order out of chaos is better than sort of languishing. They give practical, actionable advice to help them improve their goals.

00:50:41:01 – 00:51:02:05
So, so much of the stuff is literally life skills that many young men didn’t get from their dads. And then they create community. They literally say, hey, you know, there’s probably more men who did book studies on 12 rules for life than any other Christian book I can think of. So they created a place where men could have, conversations and it needs to be pointed out.

00:51:02:06 – 00:51:23:11
There is almost zero places specifically designed for male formation and community in the modern world. They have disappeared. So I think a huge part of it is these people act in some sense like the father figures we never had, and it just shows the hunger and need for that in larger society. And in some ways the church has not addressed those needs.

00:51:23:13 – 00:51:53:08
And interestingly, as I say, one of the places Jordan Peterson has been pushing these young men is, is to consider the Bible. You know, he that might just be a quirk of Jordan Peterson, but actually, I’ve seen it kind of repeated in other ways. And a kind of general trend among these influences to kind of push for kind of ancient wisdom, you know, the stoic tradition or whatever, that it’s interesting, isn’t it, that that that seems to be not kind of necessarily modern answers, but kind of pointing these young men back to sort of ancient, ancient wisdom and so on?

00:51:53:10 – 00:52:17:20
Yeah, I, I definitely see that, a lot of people talk about the, the sort of crisis, men’s crisis or masculine crisis in our society. And if you look at what’s offered very little addresses it. Whereas the Stoics and, you know, those sort of folks tend to speak into this. So just thinking about this, who’s giving answers to questions like, what is gender?

00:52:17:22 – 00:52:41:05
What does what is gender roles? How do they change? Here’s how to navigate the changing job markets. Here’s here’s how to deal with the shifting societal expectations of men. There’s no shame in being you. Take responsibility and express your full heart without fear of others. And here’s how to deal with your loneliness. Who’s speaking to that for men so stoic stoicism is got a decent amount to say.

00:52:41:05 – 00:53:01:18
I’m taking personal responsibility, you know? And so I think a lot of times when people look at the cultural challenges, they realize other societies have resources for these challenges that this society is not offering. And I also think there’s a deep sort of psychological tension that men face. I think a lot of men have a fear of obsolescence.

00:53:01:20 – 00:53:18:19
The world is telling them we just sort of thanks so much for getting us here with your oppression. We just don’t we’ll take it from here. And that’s a bit of a stereotype. But there’s something to it where I think some men fear obsolescence. A lot of them haven’t had fatherhood and nurturing. So these, these Stoics just sort of give it to you.

00:53:18:19 – 00:53:40:24
And many of the, the people using ancient wisdom frame it. You know, Ryan Holiday’s, you know, the daily Dad. He’s the mentoring you never got. They provide pathways, recognition. I deal with a crisis of purpose. So I think a lot of those folks address that. Whereas a lot of other guys. What’s the alternative? Video games, online gaming, online bingeing.

00:53:40:24 – 00:53:45:15
And I think these sort of draw you in a real life with a set of tools to face the challenges of the world today.

00:53:45:15 – 00:53:57:09
So what’s leading to kind of this stunt? It may live the ones who basically just decided to opt out of kind of IRL in real life, and they do essentially live in an online world.

00:53:57:14 – 00:54:17:08
Well, it’s it’s probably multifaceted. One thing I sort of did in my research, you know, my son’s, 24. So I have two adult children who’ve left home, Gen Z. And when I was trying to just sort of ask that question of raising my own son, how do I help him move from being a boy into a man?

00:54:17:10 – 00:54:47:20
And then you just get to discuss how do you do that? And it turns out there’s almost nothing on how to do that. You know, this traditional things like you graduate from primary school, you go to high school, you go off to uni. There’s sort of a few cultural moments, but there’s there’s no, in the modern world, clear outlined rites of passage that have existed in almost every human society to channel male energy into something healthy.

00:54:47:22 – 00:55:05:16
So I did a whole series of research and came across this, sort of this path. I ended up calling it the Primal Path. Just but not because I wanted something good, solid, masculine. I was trying to motivate a 13 year old boy, you know? But I also saw this, for the most part, have had six stages to help a boy become a man.

00:55:05:16 – 00:55:28:08
Stage one, remove them from the childhood environment. That means they, go from an environment where their focus is on play and female influence to a place where the community of men gather around them and tell them it’s time to grow up. Second stage a severing of childhood thinking, you know, the apostle Paul would say, when I was, a child, I thought like a child, act like a child.

00:55:28:08 – 00:55:45:23
Now I’m becoming a man. I’ve got to put that away. There’s a severing towards that. Number three, the formation, a training that primarily taught you what it is to be a man. They taught you the stories of your community, the myths and religions, and then they gave you the skills to be recognized and to contribute to society as a whole.

00:55:46:00 – 00:56:05:20
Then they would send you out of what they call the ordeal. You know, in Australia for Aboriginal, men, they would send them out and they would just have to survive based on the skills and resources they had. And, then if they survived this and passed it, they’d be recognized by the community of men that had an eternal sense of confidence.

00:56:05:20 – 00:56:27:04
I can stand on my own. So that sense of blessing and welcome back. And then they’d be reintegrated into society for the common good. Play your role in supporting our people. That does not exist in the modern world. And so as a result, men self initiate a lot of the violence we see, can be quite barbaric.

00:56:27:06 – 00:56:52:05
Ronald Russell has a commenting on how ancient societies had a pathway of initiation and the modern world says when we hear about how they used to do it, we kind of go, that’s barbaric, that’s too aggressive. But he says, you look at the the rates of suicides, depression, despair in young adults. He said, what’s more cruel? A conscious process that’s hard, that makes you resilient and civic minded for the common good or no process.

00:56:52:05 – 00:57:12:08
When young men ache for it, leaving them in the wilderness, caught between adulthood and adolescence with no pathway, learning for all of our rates of depression, deaths of despair, those sorts of things. So yeah, we need to sort of recover this. And I genuinely believe this is an opportunity for the church to serve.

00:57:12:10 – 00:57:41:07
Seeing the need for rites of passage in the modern West, John Tyson has developed a program called the Primal Path, with a curriculum focused around the main shifts every teenage boy must make to transition into manhood. Doctor Anthony Bradley has also researched the transformational effects of mentoring on young men, and told me why it helped him to understand the popularity of Peterson when he began his rise to fame.

00:57:41:09 – 00:58:12:09
One of my students, 1819 year old students, said, hey Doctor Bradley, you should go with me to here, Jordan Peterson. And I’m like, who is that? I had no idea who he was. And I’m sitting in this auditorium as he’s going through the 12 rules. But what really struck me was afterwards, in the Q&A part, there were two microphones lined up on this auditorium, and they were in each line about 20 to 25 young men asking Jordan Peterson questions.

00:58:12:09 – 00:58:38:06
But they would preface their questions by saying things like this you saved my life. You essentially resurrected me from the dead. I had no ambition, no vision, no interest. And I read your book. I watched your your videos on YouTube, and now I have a vision and mission, I have interests, I have things to pursue. You basically gave me motivation and I’m thinking, what is going on?

00:58:38:06 – 00:59:16:03
I’m thinking and what I discovered over time because I’ve been asking this very same question for years now, that young men in general are void of older men who serve as spiritual directors, as mentors, as father figures, to speak life into them, to validate them, to encourage them, as the scriptures say, to encourage each other daily. Most 20 year old men can’t name you a 45 or 50 year old man that they can call at 3:00 in the morning if there’s an emergency.

00:59:16:05 – 00:59:40:04
They can’t name a man who is committed to their flourishing, to their development. And Jordan Peterson essentially became a father figure and a grandfather for some. And that favorite uncle. And essentially what I’ve discovered in working with with young adult men between the ages of, say, 15 and 30 over the last several years, is they want to be great men, but they don’t know how.

00:59:40:06 – 01:00:11:05
There’s no roadmap to. So Jordan Peterson comes up with a list of 12 things right? He makes it really clear. And what he does a really good job of is he he extends the consequences of what happens if you do it this way. Following pathway or following path B last point here, one of the the courses that I taught, we read the 12 Rules of Life and we read the Book of Proverbs concurrently.

01:00:11:07 – 01:00:38:22
And what we discovered is that Jordan Peterson is saying nothing that’s not already in the book of Proverbs, but the average 22 year old does not have a man who is speaking that sort of wisdom from the book of Proverbs in his life. And so he is turning to Jordan Peterson to be that voice of wisdom that we would see very clearly in the book of, of Proverbs.

01:00:38:24 – 01:01:04:03
I’ve met a lot of young men who kind of he’s given intellectual permission, basically to take Christianity seriously. Often these were young men who were the same demographic turning out for Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, but very different kind of answers being given in those on those platforms and so on. So what’s what’s led to this kind of, I suppose, willingness to kind of point people back in the direction of Christian faith?

01:01:04:05 – 01:01:37:17
Yeah, that’s a fantastic question. So, so Jordan Peterson is a young guy in psychology. So call Carl Young. And if people are not familiar with Carl Young, it’s a particular school that uses archetypes to frame mental thriving and psychological health. And and Jung was was open to using the archetypes of the Western canon of Western tradition. And Christianity was included in, so Carl Jung is actually written a commentary on the Book of Job.

01:01:37:19 – 01:02:09:10
So the fact that Jordan Peterson is, is doing these lectures on Genesis and Exodus is pretty consistent with the young guy in school psychology. But it’s it’s it is instrumental. That is it is utilitarian. It’s pragmatic. That is openness to Christianity, openness to to what’s in the book of of of of job and Exodus and Genesis because it’s useful, not because it’s true.

01:02:09:12 – 01:02:36:18
It can help you out in your life, but you don’t have to believe it. Right? So that’s the big distinction. So he can talk about the themes. Well, we can learn the sort of moral value use and virtues from the books. And I’m perfectly open to hearing people talk about that because it’s in there. But the difference is and it’s just consistent with Carl Jung, it’s not something that needs to be necessarily true in order for it to be good and useful.

01:02:36:20 – 01:03:03:03
So he’s really open to that. Now, listen, for someone like myself, I am someone who’s completely wide open to whatever it gets. People introduced to reading the scriptures again, let’s do that and let the Scripture speak back to people. And so if Jordan Peterson is the gateway drug or the on ramp, that people coming to faith because they reading the text that they would not normally read, I’m totally okay with that.

01:03:03:03 – 01:03:10:10
I think the difference is I want people to also know that it’s true for.

01:03:10:12 – 01:03:34:18
I believe there is a search for truth going on in the hearts and minds of many young men today, disillusioned with the life they’ve been handed by a confusing culture, they’re looking again for real meaning, purpose and identity. After speaking with researchers, thinkers and plenty of young men, two I’ve come to believe that the modern male crisis is especially being fueled by a lack of identity.

01:03:34:20 – 01:04:14:21
This seems to stem from the loss of the traditional categories of male and female, and the roles that once accompanied those. Also at play is the scrutiny that so-called toxic masculinity has put men under, along with the loss of father figures that once guided men through the rites of passage into mature and healthy members of society. Add to this the rise of Western affluence, the sexual revolution, and the internet, allowing a whole generation of men to check out of real life relationships and responsibility, becoming isolate, depressed and often pulled down online rabbit holes that take them in dangerous directions.

01:04:14:23 – 01:04:36:10
As I’ve argued before in this podcast, the loss of the Christian story that once gave people a sense of meaning, purpose, and identity did not lead to a godless utopia. Rather, it opened a void that our culture has been trying to fill with other stories ever since. Young men are still looking for a story to make sense of their life.

01:04:36:12 – 01:05:08:15
Historically, Lost boys have searched for belonging in all the wrong places gangs, hooliganism and violent behavior. Today, many are instead following online gurus in the manners sphere, or even being influenced by the identity and structure that Islam offers. But there are a significant number of young men who, whether via Jordan Peterson or any number of other spiritually minded influences, are finding their way back to church to rediscover the Christian story and an identity in Christ.

01:05:08:17 – 01:05:37:22
Whatever you think of Peterson’s brand of politics, I, like Anthony Bradley, have encountered many young men for whom he’s biblically infused. Motivational speaking has served as a gateway drug to real Christianity. One of them is film maker Oliver Murray. We met him briefly in season one, but I want to share with you his fuller, surprising rebirth story as it reflects the rebirth journey of many young men I’ve been meeting since this series began.

01:05:37:24 – 01:05:47:22
Oliver, tell me how things began for you. You didn’t particularly grow up, as I understand it, in a church going background particularly, or have a lot of Christian influence in your life?

01:05:47:24 – 01:06:11:11
No, actually not not at all. I never went to church as a child. Never picked up a Bible. So this was all completely new to me. I was, I was doing a little bit of truth seeking, sort of after university, in my sort of mid 20s, I started dabbling a little bit in philosophy and theology, books by C.S. Lewis.

01:06:11:13 – 01:06:37:22
Things like that. I admit that in my in my 20s, I started to feel as though society had become a little bit unmoored. So I started to wonder what what the source of our values were, what brings people together, and what we sort of celebrate. But I had no philosophical or theological training. I got a degree in film, so a bit of a Mickey mouse degree, but my interest was was therefore was in was a narrative.

01:06:37:24 – 01:06:40:15
And so story was what was motivating me.

01:06:40:17 – 01:06:49:08
By his mid 20s, Oliver was beginning to go on a spiritual search, but wasn’t sure how to make sense of Christianity in the modern world. I mean.

01:06:49:08 – 01:07:14:20
I read me Christianity about a year before the whole Jordan Peterson phenomenon happened. And reading it, and it’s a brilliant little book, but reading it, it didn’t kind of speak to me in this kind of post-Christian world. So Lewis was writing in the 40s, speaking to a culture very much still in a kind of Christian milieu. I could, I could, I could see what he was saying, but it kind of felt almost stuck in a certain time.

01:07:14:22 – 01:07:40:21
And then Jordan Peterson emerged with a kind of energy and, passion for the figure of, of Christ, which I hadn’t seen. And I think it appealed. I’m sure you’ve heard this many times before, but I think I found it as a kind of agnostic, as a kind of sort of secular person. I found what he was saying quite appealing precisely because he wasn’t he didn’t profess to be a believer in Christian.

01:07:40:23 – 01:07:46:19
And so suddenly then, I suppose, I encountered the figure of of Christ.

01:07:46:20 – 01:07:52:24
I asked Oliver what it was about the way Christ was represented by Peterson that resonated with him.

01:07:53:01 – 01:08:25:18
So I think the figure of Jesus is incredibly appealing. You know, it’s we still live in this culture that’s obsessed with, you know, the savior, the self-sacrificing hero, the, who’s resurrected. And we can’t be defeated. So I think what Jordan did for me was he really brought the sense of the existence of evil and a sense of we all know that the world perhaps isn’t as it should be.

01:08:25:20 – 01:08:49:24
And so he was addressing, in a way, the fall. And so from there, I suppose I was able to say, okay, these stories, let’s take Genesis, for example, have a tremendous power and value to them. And I don’t use story in a pejorative sense. They seem to record something that’s happening as something that happened and, and actually is happening all the time.

01:08:50:02 – 01:09:12:24
You know, we we all sort of miss the mark. We all we all fall short of a perhaps what we’re aiming for. And so he was able to say, look at the symbolic power within these stories. Look at the snake in the garden. You know, this this this false. It’s for the wants to lead you astray, let’s say, using sort of cultural language that, and he certainly breathed life, life into it.

01:09:12:24 – 01:09:33:14
And, and and he made me realize, okay, there’s something here which I hadn’t seen, I don’t I, I think it’s very difficult for someone who’s not a Christian to say, just read through Genesis and to take much from it today. You know, was we’re sort of wrestling with how to understand these stories today in the West with this kind of reductive materialism.

01:09:33:16 – 01:09:53:19
And Peterson was able to say, there is treasure here, you know, if you know how to read it. And of course, say, now I’m, I’m a I am a Christian. And he’s he was doing in a kind of union way, which is, which is not quite maybe there, but he was building bridges. He certainly built a bridge for me.

01:09:53:23 – 01:09:58:18
Yeah. Obviously you perhaps sort of.

01:09:58:20 – 01:10:23:09
Graduated a bit beyond the kind of Jordan Peterson thing, which obviously was very valuable. You know, highlighting the symbolic value and the psychological value, the Bible stories and so on. But I think still leaves it very open as to exactly who Jesus was. Is he just a an extraordinary archetype, you know, for the highest, you know, values we hold of love and sacrifice and everything.

01:10:23:09 – 01:10:35:03
Or, or was he the God man? Is he really God in human form? What what led you to that ultimate conclusion to, in a sense, the traditional orthodox claims of Christianity?

01:10:35:05 – 01:11:07:16
I think, again, it’s this kind of, the point that Lewis and Tolkien were making about the kind of myth entering into, history, because I couldn’t sort of get away from the fact that Jesus of Nazareth seems to have lived his teachings, profound. His example is extremely profound of how he lived and reaching sort of all corners of society.

01:11:07:18 – 01:11:29:05
He was killed in a rather unusual way, I think, for someone of his status. And then the fact that he seems to have been seen again and this movement seems to have started and there doesn’t seem to have been much the people that started this movement, Christianity, didn’t seem to have a great deal to gain from it.

01:11:29:07 – 01:11:53:23
And so and so that’s why. Yeah, I suppose for me it quickly became more than just psychological self-help territory, because it’s something seems to have happened and, and so, you know, what, what what is one to do with that?

01:11:54:00 – 01:12:10:05
Having never had anything to do with church before, all of his search led him to begin attending a local Anglican church where both he and his wife would eventually be baptized and confirmed. I asked Oliver about the journey that led towards faith in Christ.

01:12:10:07 – 01:12:30:02
I think if one looks for, the truth deeply enough and has a deep enough longing for truth, I of course, that sort of secular people are probably going to roll their eyes at this, but I think if one looks for the truth long enough, you’ll find the one who said he was truth and and I can’t really say any more than that.

01:12:30:02 – 01:12:57:16
I feel like that’s what happened. Jesus of Nazareth is an incredibly compelling figure. And if you sort of. If you look at him for long enough seeking, you’ll find, knocking on the door will be opened. And you ask that question that Lewis C.S. Lewis asked, you know, who is this man? You know, the, the historical, the historicity element as well.

01:12:57:16 – 01:13:16:01
Something that I’m not sure I’ve spoken about yet, but but that sort of started to fall in line around that time. So my wife and I were married. My I was sort of reading Screwtape Letters and things like that still and sort of giving it a go. And as I say, sort of halfway house. My wife did an Alpha course.

01:13:16:03 – 01:13:36:11
And this was, this was well, it was on zoom, and I popped into a session and they were talking about the historicity of Jesus. So I picked up E.P. Sanders, the historical Jesus, which which I think is a great, a great album. And so then I started to kind of connect these pieces together.

01:13:36:13 – 01:13:46:17
I can’t really explain as to why. Why me? I think you’re right. And I probably wasn’t a very obvious candidate, but there we go.

01:13:46:19 – 01:14:06:00
So any thoughts on how we get more Oliver Morris in our churches? What could churches do better? What could Christians do better in terms of presenting this message in and the depth and the, the sort of the strength that that is there. But it’s often doesn’t seem to be apparent.

01:14:06:04 – 01:14:06:11
To.

01:14:06:11 – 01:14:07:11
People who, you know.

01:14:07:11 – 01:14:09:19
Are living their lives completely oblivious to it.

01:14:09:21 – 01:14:41:01
I think one way, and it’s been said many times before, but I think perhaps the church should be less afraid of what the culture thinks of it, and to not be afraid to look at the kind of grittier elements of faith one doesn’t need. Jesus, if there is no evil in the world of evil, doesn’t exist. And so I think the church really needs to make this case that actually we need to we need to be saved from something.

01:14:41:03 – 01:15:03:07
Without that, the message of the church, which is ultimately salvation in every sense of the word. So not just in an Oscar traditional sense, but but perhaps even now to be living our fullest lives without that message, you don’t need you don’t need this divine Logos. You don’t need this, this crisis. Chris does this, you know, the Messiah.

01:15:03:09 – 01:15:29:20
And so I think the church really could, could, could do a lot worse than actually just focusing on that and focusing on those elements and, and focusing also on, on the mysteries, on the miracles, on things that may sound strange and weird, but actually are quite wonderful and engaging and enchanting and a far more exciting than, than, than is on offer in a, in a secular kind of materialistic culture.

01:15:29:22 – 01:15:49:14
Today, Oliver’s film work has turned towards documenting the lives of the early saints of northern England, but also to a new vocation training for ministry himself in the Church of England. Beyond these significant changes to the course of his life, I asked Oliver what difference faith in Christ has made at a personal level.

01:15:49:16 – 01:16:10:10
I think there’s a there is a joy there. I want to say that with a bit of caution, this kind of Christian joy that C.S. Lewis talks about with the realization of perhaps, you know, this world isn’t all there is, but I would say, I would say there is always a struggle. The end of the day. There is always a struggle to to accept the miraculous.

01:16:10:12 – 01:16:35:12
I think our world as has made it very difficult to sort of to see God or to connect with God with all of the technology and the distractions. And the pull of secular culture, which kind of pulls us away from, from sort of living as we perhaps should. But moments of joy and bliss. And my wife’s been on this journey at the same time with me, and we now have a, one year old baby girl.

01:16:35:18 – 01:17:09:10
So, a sense of, I think, not being estranged from the world. Our, our culture is sort of the first culture to have of kind of completely removed a spiritual core, any sense of the spiritual, any sense of a kind of spiritual core. And so that was restored for me, has been restored for me. And so I do feel more contented than I felt before with a sense of of the existence of more than myself and more than that sort of empty dead matter.

01:17:09:12 – 01:17:42:04
You can find Oliver Murray’s writing and film work at his Saints of the North website, and it seems Oliver is not alone. As a young secular man, finding faith despite all the wrong turns that are on offer in today’s manosphere, and all the possible pitfalls that the vibe shift in politics is bringing to the public expression of Christianity, I’ve nevertheless been encountering more and more surprising stories of young men walking into church for the first time, and it turns out that this trend is far more than just anecdotal.

01:17:42:06 – 01:18:08:06
In our next episode, we’ll be hearing why many researchers and church leaders are talking about a quiet revival among young men in the West. The demographic that’s been most absent from church for the past several decades is starting to show up again. Not only that, I believe many of them are encountering the Christ who is not only the archetype of true masculinity, but the God who became a man, Jesus.

01:18:08:08 – 01:18:25:01
In order that anyone seeking true purpose, meaning, and identity could find it in him.

01:18:25:03 – 01:18:45:22
You’ve been listening to the surprising rebirth of belief in God with me, Justin Brierley, continuing to tell the story of why many secular 21st century people are considering Christianity again. As ever, please do rate and review the podcast and share it with others. This podcast is also a book you can read chapter one for free when you subscribe to my newsletter.

01:18:46:02 – 01:19:06:21
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01:19:06:23 – 01:19:21:10
And now suddenly I’ve got all these friends, all of the mail, all of them university educated, all of them had previously been quite hostile and mean, and now all quietly sort of coming out of the woodworks asking if they can have conversations about good.

01:19:21:12 – 01:19:29:11
Young guys, especially who are showing up what we used to do and call it men’s ministry. That is kind of now our evangelism.

01:19:29:13 – 01:19:42:06
And the most rapid or most exciting, change within these young people is among the young men. It has surprised us. I’m not gonna I’m not gonna lie. It is remarkable.

01:19:42:10 – 01:20:08:19
And with unprecedented new data showing that young men are returning to church across the West, we’ll be looking at the challenges and extraordinary opportunities presented by the surprising rebirth among men. But don’t forget, you can listen to that episode right now when you become a silver or gold supporter. Again, the links are with the show notes, where you can also find links to all today’s guests and archive material.

01:20:08:21 – 01:20:42:21
The surprising Rebirth of Belief in God is a production of Think Faith in partnership with Genexus and The Jerusalem Trust. Editing Assistance by Isaac Simmons. Thanks for listening and see you next time.

01:20:42:23 – 01:21:07:02
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01:21:07:08 – 01:21:13:23
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