Why Young Men Are Failing To Launch—And What The Church Can Do About It

Russell Moore (Christianity Today Op-Ed), Why Young Men Are Failing to Launch:

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a group of men—some atheists, some Christians, some Jews; some conservatives, some progressives, some centrists—from completely different geographical, cultural, and vocational backgrounds.

They all wanted to talk about one thing: the number of young men they know who seem purposeless and lost. For some of them, the problem was pressing because it was about their own sons. For most, it was about their nephews or godsons or the sons of their friends and neighbors.

In most cases, they weren’t talking about the sort of things people used to worry about with boys and young men. They weren’t concerned about gang violence or drug addiction or drag racing or street fights. They weren’t even talking about sexual promiscuity or binge drinking. They were talking about something quite different: a kind of hopelessness, a lack of ambition, in some cases even to leave the house at all, much less to go out into the world and start families of their own. ...

There are, of course, many factors at work here—some that we don’t fully know, and won’t for years to come. But we do know some things. Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, makes what I think is the best, most convincing argument I’ve seen about the ways technology has “rewired” an entire generation, while also demonstrating how the maladies resulting from all of this tends to hit boys and girls differently.

Part of the problem, even for some Christians, is the reluctance to acknowledge what almost all of us know: One need not veer off into gender stereotypes to see that males and females—while the same in the most important ways of createdness and fallenness—are also different in some important ways too. Scripture mostly speaks to all of us, men and women, as people, but it also directs specific words to men and to women about issues that generally present more vulnerability to one group or the other.

When the apostle Paul instructed Timothy that the men should pray “without anger or disputing” (1 Tim. 2:8), he wasn’t suggesting that women are free to brawl during prayer requests. He was speaking instead to where the primary temptation to being quarrelsome would be. Likewise, when Paul and Peter directed women, particularly, to avoid costly attire and shows of wealth, finding their identity and worth not in external comparison with others but in godliness (1 Tim. 2:9; 1 Pet. 3:3–4), he was not implying that men could be clothed like peacocks. Again, generally speaking, the points of vulnerability were different between the two. ...

The primary problem for young men right now is not usually a Lord of the Flies sort of debauchery but a sort of deadness that comes from an imagination that cannot envision another way. Yes—as in every age since Eden—there are overt sins of immorality and violence, but even those tend to be overwhelmingly digital today rather than personal. That does not make the situation easier, but more difficult to locate. ...

The other day I had the British historian Tom Holland on my podcast to discuss his book, Pax, on the Roman Empire. I asked him what I’m sure almost everyone has asked him lately: Why was the meme / news story of a few months ago, about how many times a day the typical man thinks about the Roman Empire, so viral? He responded with the words, “Tyrannosaurus rex.”

Holland explained that little boys (and some little girls too) tend to be mesmerized by the T. rex, the apex predator of old. Holland said that was for two reasons: power and extinction. The dinosaur is scary, fearsome, and dominant over any potential enemy—and the dinosaur no longer exists. It’s scary but can’t really hurt you anymore.

Except when it can.

Too often right now, when our young men are asking what it means to be a man, too many of us offer them Roman virtues. Some of these, at certain aspirational points, intersect with Christian virtues, but the fundamental paradigm is not just wrong-headed, it’s explicitly denounced by Jesus himself (Luke 22:25–27). The Roman way of seeking dominance and pulling rank is what Paul contradicted in, well, the Book of Romans, among other places. And the Beast of John’s Revelation is literally caesarean, and is, like the T. rex, an alpha predator (Rev. 13:4 says, “Who is like the beast and who can fight against it?”).

The cross is a Roman instrument of torture—a contest of power that, it seemed, would prove that the caesar always wins, so watch yourself. The Cross undoes all of that—not by giving us a different caesar to fight the old one but by giving us what we never thought we needed, a crucified King who willingly surrenders his life for the world.

That’s exactly what’s still needed today.

When I think of how I came to internalize—from earliest memory—what “success” looked like as a man, I could see my own father, of course, but I could also see the men of my church taking responsibility—taking up the offering, praying for the lost, powering up their chainsaws for disaster relief after a hurricane. I could see the man who stayed faithful to his wife through years of cancer; the man who kept loving his prodigal kids even after others thought they’d embarrassed him. ...

If a young man doesn’t know how to take up the cross of Christ to follow him, he will often take up the hammer of Thor, to follow him. If by default the model of mature manhood that we give is that of Barabbas, not that of Jesus, if our model of manhood looks more like the crucifiers than the Crucified, we shouldn’t be surprised if what we end up with is a quest for pretend caesars and pretend harems. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, if the skeleton of a dead Tyrannosaurus looks more powerful than “a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain” (Rev. 5:6, ESV).

Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:

• David French (New York Times), Being There: The Cure For The Male Loneliness Epidemic (Oct. 1, 2023)
• Jessica Grose (New York Times), The Church Of CrossFit (July 30, 2023)
• Ruth Graham (New York Times), F3 (Fitness, Fellowship, Faith) — A Cure For Middle-Age Male Loneliness? (Oct. 2, 2022)

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