Have you noticed that it seems more and more people are killing themselves in recent years? Have you noticed the vast majority of those people killing themselves are male? Have you noticed the last two generations are seeing the young girls and young women a little more on “the ball” than the boys and young men? Have you noticed the young women seem to smoke much less marijuana, they seem to speed less, spend less time playing video games? Young women statistically speaking are going to college in greater numbers than young men. And in the work force have you noticed that young women are generally more timely?
SOMETHING OMINOUS IS HAPPENING TO MEN IN AMERICA. EVERYONE WHO PAYS ATTENTION KNOWS THAT.
There is a new statistic out there that shows today’s young men are, physically, the weakest generation in recorded history.
“If you’re the average Millennial male…your dad is stronger than you are. In fact, you may not be stronger than the average Millennial female … The very idea of manual labor is alien to you, and even if you were asked to help, say, build a back porch, the task would exhaust you to the point of uselessness. Welcome to the new, post-masculine reality.”
How often do we hear our public officials/leaders pledging to create more opportunities for men? I generally hear this sort of rhetoric when it applies to young women. Men don’t need help. There the patriarchy, they’re fine, more than fine. Are they fine? Here are the numbers. Start with the most basic, life-and-death pair the average American men will die five years before the average American woman. One of the reasons for this is addiction. Men are more than twice as likely as women to become alcoholics. There also twice as locally to die of a drug overdose in New Hampshire, one of the state’s hardest hit by the opioid crisis, 73% of overdose deaths were men. The saddest reason for shortness of life span is suicide. 77% of all suicides in America are committed by men. The overall rate is increasing at a dramatic pace between 1997 and 2014, there was a 43% rise in suicide deaths among middle-aged American men. The rates are highest among American Indian and white men who kill themselves at about ten times the rate of Hispanic and black women. You often hear about America’s incarceration crisis.
That’s almost exclusively a male problem too. About 98% of inmates are men. These problems are complex, but we know that they start young. Relative to girls, boys are failing in school. More girls than boys graduate high school considerably more go to and graduate from college at every level
“We must recover the idea that the marker of a true man is his moral strength, not his muscular fitness.”
They want to know why so few males these days can perform feats of strength, build their own houses, or fix cars without a mechanic. There was a time when these sorts of skills were crucial to fulfilling the creation mandate. Expressing the image of God for most men in history meant being able to hunt or farm food or keep a fire on the hearth. And I’m thankful every day for those, like my dad, who still do this kind of work. But the age of brute strength is in many ways’ past, and that would be the end of the argument if we were at the same time seeing a corresponding increase in other, less tangible, kinds of strength: like moral courage, fortitude, leadership, and a willingness to sacrifice.
But we’re not. Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact. Most men today aren’t just physically weaker than previous generations. They’re weaker as people: guys stricken with “Peter Pan syndrome” never leaving adolescence; “safe spaces” on college campuses protecting perpetually fragile constant-victims from serious debate; the hookup culture and porn addiction replacing chivalry; and the sexual revolution being spread through the media, education, and now law that there’s no such thing as male and female. What we’re seeing isn’t a different expression of masculinity adapting to new cultural realities. What we’re seeing is no masculinity at all.
One of the early Church Father, Irenaeus, said, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” And man fully alive doesn’t play the victim, or wallow in a sense of entitlement. He embraces the creation mandate to “fill the earth and subdue it.” He’s a maker,not a perpetual taker.
It’s this kind of masculinity that’s in desperately short supply these days. It’s a kind that has nothing to do with how much you can bench press.
Have you ever walked into a church and silently asked yourself: Where are all the men? Although the majority of religious congregations in America identify their pastor or religious leader as male, you’re not imagining that shortage of men in the pews.
Why does this matter, and what are the far-reaching consequences of a shortage of churched men?
A Barna study conducted in 2007 showed that roughly 75% of mothers said that faith was important in their lives, while only around 66% of fathers agreed. What’s even more thought-provoking is the fact that 5 out of 6 men consider themselves Christian and profess faith in God, but only a fraction of this number actually go to church. This data point would seem to suggest that it’s not that men are less inclined to be believers, they’re just less inclined to go to church. What in the world would cause such a phenomenon?
It seems men don’t find sermons to be relevant to their lives. When asked, most men in our society today do not see the value of going to church. It is not speaking their language, and it is not addressing the issues they face.”
There is also new research that indicates a shift is underway… in how young men envision “manhood” — in their attitudes, their values, and their behavior — in their relationships, their careers, and their view of “success.” I think we’re in the midst of a generational evolution with large-scale societal and political implications.
All this information begs the question, “where are young people getting their morality in this day and age?” Does science have the answer? The movies and shows we see on TV? How about the conduct of our elected officials? What do you think?