Wake Up, Look Up

Hello, everyone. Thanks for listening to wake up, look up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Zach Weirock. And in today's episode, we're asking the question, can the left save men? This is prompted by an article I read by David French in the New York Times looking at a new initiative among the Democratic party to figure out why they're not resonating with young men.

Now I'll come back to that. Let me take you through the movement in that direction. In the last five years, there's been the proliferation of something online called the manosphere. It's like a a public discourse space where different influencers are speaking into the lives of young men in particular, offering them guidance, offering them a plan, a path forward, a life of meaning and fulfillment. This is in response to the fact that we have a real masculinity crisis in our country.

Boys face rising, increases in, mental health, social health, academic achievement, risk of suicide, all kinds of things happening that are making it harder and harder to be a young man in our society. That to meet that need or to capitalize on that opportunity, depending on your perspective, different influencers have risen offering young men hope, a a a kind of a swift kick in the butt to get them moving. Now the most prominent of these voices is a guy named Jordan Peterson. We've talked about him on this podcast before, who among other things has released a couple of books designed to give young men a how to plan for moving forward out of kind of adolescence and into adulthood living lives of meaning and significance. Now those voices have tried to be helpful across the spectrum of life, but increasingly, people like Jordan Peterson are also becoming political.

So what used to be, hey, young man, here's how to get your life together, is now becoming, here's how to get your life together, and once you do, here's how you should vote. And the consequence of that is that overwhelmingly, young men that did vote voted for Donald Trump in the latest presidential election. That's in part because many of the influencers inhabiting the manosphere space were conservative. Now let's come back to the Democrats. As a response to that, the Democrats are spending $20,000,000 to try to figure out how they can build inroads with young men in America to actually become the voice these men are listening to.

Can the left move the needle with men the way the conservative right has done it? Well, that's an interesting question. Not because I care about the Democratic party or how they spend their $20,000,000, but because both of these parties are tapping into a social reality. Young men feeling disconnected, rudderless, and looking for somewhere to turn for answers, and neither of them, I think, ultimately, are the right place for young men to turn. Friends, this is pointing to a gap in the church's work to reach our country and to make disciples, particularly among young men.

Young men are starving for purpose. They're starving for meaning and the purpose and meaning they're looking for isn't found in politics. It's found in the kingdom of Jesus, the advance of the work of God on our planet to make things new. When the writer of Proverbs in Proverbs 20 says that the glory of young men is their strength, what he has in mind is young men leveraging that strength in pursuit of God and what God is doing in the world. Young men have a natural desire to be part of something bigger than themselves, to participate in moving a mission forward.

Political parties offer cheap facsimiles of the real mission and purpose that comes in what God is doing in our world. But of course, young men can't realize that vision if no one's telling them about it, which is why the church has to step into the manosphere space and bring the kind of clarity that comes from God's word. We need leaders, masculine leaders who can echo the apostle Paul who said something like, follow me as I follow Christ. Imitate me as I imitate Jesus. Young men need rallying figures to get behind but those figures need to be not pointing to themselves, but to Jesus.

The church can offer a vision of love and honor that gives young men purpose but keeps them from becoming toxic to themselves or to those around them. And really what this is a call to is for older men in the church to take seriously their responsibility to get in the lives of younger men. Older men to get in the lives of younger men who have questions about parenting and marriage and finance and career and to say to those younger brothers in the faith, you don't have to YouTube it, you don't have to Google it, Just show up on Sundays, and we will help you get there. I'll tell you what else, is that we as churches have to realize that over the last fifty years, we have radically feminized. And this is not to downplay our sisters in Christ at all because they have equal value.

But we've stopped asking how we can resonate with young men. Let me put it this way. We need to, issue a charge to young men to be watchful, to stand firm in the faith, to act like men and be strong. And if that sounds like misogyny, it isn't. It's actually first Corinthians 16.

It's the words of the apostle Paul who understood the call men needed to hear to participate in the mission of God. And that is a mission we have got to cast in both feminine and masculine terms so that we are raising a generation of young men to the glory of God and to their actual good. Hey. Thanks for watching this episode of Wake Up Look Up. If you enjoyed it, please help us get the word out by sharing it with someone you think might benefit from it.

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