Nick Bogardus

A Massive Culture Shift

There is a massive shift happening right now in our culture. The ink and pixels that have spilled on the change are markedly hopeless and without answers. To see the tip of the iceberg, we only need to look at the LA Times from last month. The nuclear family is now the minority of households in California.

“New census figures show that the percentage of Californians who live in “nuclear family” households - a married man and a woman raising their children - has dropped again for the last decade, to 23.4% of all households. That represents a 10% decline in 10 years, measured as a percentage of the state’s households.
Those households, the Times analysis shows, are being supplanted by a striking spectrum of postmodern living arrangements: same-sex households, unmarried opposite-sex partners, married couples who have no children…new sorts of households - blended families; bands of middle-class singles who live and vacation together; families that were once called “broken” - are increasingly the standard.” LA Times, US Census Data Show California Families Changing, June 22, 2011

Actors in Limbo

What it means to be a family is being re-defined, largely by a tectonic shift in gender roles. In the Wall Street Journal, Kay Hymotitz argued that because women are moving ahead more quickly and in greater numbers in our advanced knowledge economy, that husbands and fathers are now optional. This, she says, has created a situation in which today’s pre-adult male is like an actor in a drama in which he only knows what he shouldn’t say, and in which most men in their 20s hang out in a “novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance.”

Perhaps the things that really need redeeming are the church’s lack of a voice in what it means to be a man or woman.

Untethered, Lost, Mute, and Passive

In Hanna Rosin’s article in the The Atlantic entitled “The End of Men,” she paints a nearly identical picture of the alpha-female dominating mute and passive males. “He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man. ‘We call each other man,’ says Ben Stiller’s character in Greenberg, ‘but it’s a joke. It’s like imitating other people.’” 

The New York Times described this new “emerging adulthood” as a block box where 20-somethings delay reaching adulthood, often until their 30s.

The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain untethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.

Don’t Focus Just on the External

Of course that is true in the church, only you can replace the Teach for America jobs with short-term missions trips. For all of the time and energy spent on “redeeming the arts”, “redeeming cities”, and everything else we want to attach the word “redeem” to, perhaps the things that really need redeeming are the church’s lack of a voice in what it means to be a man or woman. Exerting so much effort on people’s activities is only addressing externals, symptoms. Chances are if a guy can be a man who loves Jesus, reads his Bible, gets a job, leaves his parent’s house, and loves one woman, then he will also be effective wherever God has called him, be that the arts or in business.

One important thing that needs to be pointed out about this cultural shift described in the articles above is that it is turning us into autonomous individuals. Mrs. Hymotitz even went so far as to say that husbands and fathers are optional in this new economic paradigm. While we might bandage the need for relationship with loosely-defined friendships, these float on the surface of lives marked by selfishly avoiding commitments, being untethered to romantic partners, or permanent homes.

Perhaps the most loving, most prophetic thing the church can do is to call men in their 20s to love Jesus, read their Bibles, get a job, to leave their parent’s house, and to love one woman.

Biblical Manhood and Womanhood

In the face of the confusion, hopelessness, and lack of any answers from our culture, one of the most radical things the church can call Christians to is back to God’s design for men and women. Men and women were created to cultivate and steward God’s creation—to rule over it as his representatives. But what is often underemphasized is that we were created to do that together. God made men and women in complementary ways to reflect his trinitarian nature, his covenantal love in marriage, and his authority and submission in the church. This ultimately points toward the unity that will exist when Jesus comes back for the bride he loves. All of this is his love towards us.

The Call

Perhaps the most loving, most prophetic thing the church can do is to call men in their 20s to love Jesus, read their Bibles, get a job, to leave their parent’s house, and to love one woman—according to the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and the New York Times, no one is doing that.

This article originally appeared on The Resurgence.

USA Today announced recently they’re significantly restructuring of their newsroom, starting with a big layoff. Underlying the physical effects are real changes in their business of journalism. As newspapers and magazines continue their sprint away from physical towards digitally distributed content, we gain some helpful visibility into how Americans consume news and, far more importantly, how and what news is reported on. Fundamental shifts in how Americans produce and consume news are happening quickly, and, rather subtly. We’ll take a look at why this matters to you, but first, some brief background.

“That’s the way it was.”

It’s no surprise that news outlets are tied to advertising. A recent article in the Atlantic explained that, in a typical newspaper’s business model, 80% of their revenue came from ads and 20% from subscriptions. As people started getting their news online, the number of subscriptions, viewers, and therefore advertising dollars tanked. Outlets had to become more targeted to sell more advertising and they essentially became advertising-delivery vehicles. T. David Gordon has helpfully shown that as that happened, important shifts happened in how the news is being reported:

• Popularity became more important than consequence, and readers’ tastes (invariably sensational) began to dictate media coverage, rather than editors’ perspicacity.
• Speed became more important than accuracy, which is how debacles like the Shirley Sherrod case happen.
• People began to look to news organizations, not for objective information, but for argument and opinion as to how to interpret the news, hence Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck, or even Jon Stewart. This recent PEW report helpfully illustrates this.

The most convicting and revealing finding though, is that people have started going to news outlets to reinforce their view of reality and their preconceived opinions, not for information or education. Why do you watch or read the news you do? Let’s look at USA Today’s recent announcement in light of those trends:

What are they doing?

• De-emphasizing their print edition and ramping up efforts to reach more readers and advertisers on mobile devices
• Laying off 130 people, or 9% of their workforce
• They will no longer have separate managing editors overseeing its News, Sports, Money and Life sections
• Instead, the newsroom will be broken up into “content rings”
• The “content rings” will be “Your Life,” “Travel,” “Breaking News,” “Investigative,” “National,” “Washington/Economy,” “World,” Environment/Science,” “Aviation,” “Personal Finance,” “Autos,” “Entertainment” and “Tech.”
• The executive editor of content will have a “collaborative relationship” with the vice president of business development
• USA Today is looking at how to “usher in a new way of doing business that aligns sales efforts with the content we produce.”

It appears that the “content rings” will act to narrow the editorial focus in those areas to aid in attracting advertisers to more targeted segments.

Why are they doing it?

• Less advertisers are buying ads (580 advertising pages sold in its most recent quarter ending in June, a 50% drop from the 1,098 pages sold at the same time in 2006)
• Shrinking print circulation (1.83 million, down from 2.3 million)
• Parent company’s stock price down 78% in four years.
• “We have to go where the audience is,” Hillkirk said. “If people are hitting the iPad like crazy, or the iPhone or other mobile devices, we’ve got to be there with the content they want, when they want it.” [Emphasis mine.]

News & God Consumption

Why is this important on a church blog? Because it is partially illustrative of how Christians approach reading their Bibles or listening to sermons, not to mention really formulating right thinking about God, Christianity, or the Christian life. When 23% of Christians believe that there is spiritual energy in trees and in reincarnation, when 15% of Evangelicals and 30% of mainline Christians ages 18-29 don’t believe in hell, and when 52% of Evangelicals believe that there is more than one way to heaven - each related to tenets of the Christian faith - American Christians are consuming God, the Bible, and orthodox Christianity the same way they consume the news: to take only the bits they want to reinforce what they already believe, but not to challenge or inform those views.

See the Trends, Preach the Gospel

Enough ink and pixels have cataloged the ways the American Church has fed itself on convenience, comfort, and distraction to produce numbers like that so I’d rather give examples of how we’ve tried to not to fall into the same diet at Mars Hill Church. I don’t advocate following USA Today’s example but I do suggest we watch and listen to the results as they unfurl their new organization. I am challenging churches to see the cultural trends, but not to bow to them, and to communicate the glorious, transcendent, eternal message of the Gospel in its fullness, and with clarity and power, no matter the medium.

• Consequence over popularity. It is all about Jesus. We believe Jesus is the most consequential person who exists. We believe that the good news of His story, as revealed in the Bible, is the most significant truth anyone can know and be a part of. This is why our pastors preach through books of the Bible and for over an hour on Sundays. This is why we try to make even small differentiations, such as between testimonies and biographies. This is why we just did two series on the Mars Hill blog about Biblical manhood and Biblical womanhood. Jesus, the good news of the reconciliation offered through His death on the cross for our sins, and God’s revelation in the Bible may not always be the most popular but they are always consequential.
• Accuracy over speed. Most practically, we try to make sure every blog, video, printed resource, or piece of media points to Jesus and is theologically accurate. The majority of our content is written by our pastors, and the pieces that aren’t are checked for the same theological accuracy and applicability as a sermon. It is easy to fall into the trap of having to feed the Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/Blog/YouTube/Vimeo machine and to compromise the content because it needs to get out instead of checking it with a shepherd-like intentionality.
• Information over argument and opinion. Most practically, this comes back to our view of the primacy of Jesus, the gospel, and the Bible. If we put out a piece of content, we don’t want it to be our words or our opinions. It should seem obvious but we believe that ultimately people long for, and are truly changed by, Jesus and His word. Practically, on the Mars Hill blog, we try to take a journalistic tone; we try to source theological statements and let people tell their stories rather than running with journal-like, first person tomes.

The good news of reconciliation, salvation, adoption, and redemption offered to sinners through Jesus’ death on the cross is the most consequential truth that anyone can hear. It is something that everyone needs and never grows beyond. As a church it is our only message and mission, and it should be conveyed in its totality, centrality, and accurately and not traded for popularity, recognition, or personal opinion.

Remember the Omega Male coverage in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Slate that I pointed to this week? The thing is, by the time a topic gets to the point of being commented on in mainstream media it is already pervasive. What seemed like timely cultural commentary on what looks like a far-reaching issue looks fatally late after coming across this story about a new animated feature for kids, Alpha and Omega.

From the Slate post:

It’s about a boy wolf and a girl wolf who get relocated by well-meaning park rangers thousands of miles from home and have to find their way back. On the journey, the usual adventure and romance ensues. The twist: SHE is the alpha and HE is the omega.

From the movie’s synopsis:

Quick-witted Humphrey (voice of Justin Long) likes to frolic with friends and play video games with squirrels; disciplined Kate (voice of Hayden Panettiere) likes to call the shots and hunt caribou. Normally, an omega wolf like Humphrey would never stand a chance with an alpha wolf like Kate, but when they’re both transported halfway across the country they must work together to get back to their natural habitat.

Sidenote: was this Dennis Hopper’s last movie?

He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man. - Hanna Rosin

There has been significant attention in the media recently about changing roles between men and women; most notably in The Atlantic, Slate, and the New York Times.(Interestingly each written by women) One of the major themes in the trend that the articles point out is the rise of two things: The Omega Male and women who don’t need them.

The entire article in the Atlantic is worth a read, but I wanted to highlight a few paragraphs I thought were especially insightful.

“As the traditional order has been upended, signs of the profound disruption have popped up in odd places. Japan is in a national panic over the rise of the “herbivores,” the cohort of young men who are rejecting the hard-drinking salaryman life of their fathers and are instead gardening, organizing dessert parties, acting cartoonishly feminine, and declining to have sex. The generational young-women counterparts are known in Japan as the “carnivores,” or sometimes the “hunters.”

“American pop culture keeps producing endless variations on the omega male, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack. This often-unemployed, romantically challenged loser can show up as a perpetual adolescent (in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up or The 40-Year-Old Virgin), or a charmless misanthrope (in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg), or a happy couch potato (in a Bud Light commercial). He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man.[Emphasis mine] “We call each other ‘man,’” says Ben Stiller’s character in Greenberg, “but it’s a joke. It’s like imitating other people.”

“At the same time, a new kind of alpha female has appeared, stirring up anxiety and, occasionally, fear. The cougar trope started out as a joke about desperate older women. Now it’s gone mainstream, even in Hollywood, home to the 50-something producer with a starlet on his arm. Susan Sarandon and Demi Moore have boy toys, and Aaron Johnson, the 19-year-old star of Kick-Ass, is a proud boy toy for a woman 24 years his senior. The New York Times columnist Gail Collins recently wrote that the cougar phenomenon is beginning to look like it’s not about desperate women at all but about “desperate young American men who are latching on to an older woman who’s a good earner.”

Here’s the thing; you might be this guy. You might know one, or ten, of these guys. The Omega Male is not a phenomenon; which is why we need to familiar with it and them.

The Complications of Roles

This is clearly a loaded subject; packed with a slew of issues like the following:

• Sociological: the well documented prolonging of adolescence into emerging adulthood.
• Philosophical: according to the New York Times article, questions of self-understanding.
• Pop-Cultural: as the references in each article to movie and TV characters illustrate, the media that helped to create this phenomenon is selling it back to us and perpetuating it. I could’ve sworn there was a line in Fight Club about this.
• Economic: are cultures without America’s vast economic luxury facing the same cultural issues? Are Belize, Rwanda, or Ecuador struggling with the same confusions?

The end result of all of it is wide-spread confusion over the roles of men and women, love and sex, relationship and friendship.

The Omega Male and the Church

What none of these articles have touched on is how this has invaded and effected the church.  Like any other social entity, the church tends to overemphasize certain things to the detriment of others. Beneath the din of culture war issues like abortion and gay marriage, we have to ask if the church been faithful in teaching young people about proper roles for men and women. In large segments of the church that clumsily “embraced the arts” in the last 7 years, did they spend as much time teaching those same artists what the Bible teaches about what a man is, what a woman is, and how they should interact in friendships and relationships?

The Omega Male and the gender roles confusion associated with them are only recently being popularly analyzed and diagnosed, but by the time issues reach a popular level they are already ubiquitous. This would make it a good time for the church to ask how it can teach Omega Males to be men; to contend for the faith (Jude 3), to treat girls as sisters (1 Tim. 5:2), and to work hard like a farmer, sharing in suffering, competing by the rules like an athlete (2 Tim. 2:1-6) - all activities that Omega’s aren’t prone to do but about which the Bible is clear.

For further thought-provoking commentary on men, women, & relationships, I strongly suggest this video.