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.

PEW’s Project for Excellence in Journalism does some great studies and reports on the practice and consumption of news. Their newest study from earlier this month is helpful in understanding how and where people are getting their information.

Why have we moved into this new phase — where people are not simply replacing old technologies with new but using new ones for different things or in different ways, augmenting their more traditional behavior?

One explanation is that the content is changing. News producers are beginning to understand how they can deliver news in new ways to create new understanding, whether through the use of online graphics, customizing news to fit a consumer’s interest or location, or recognizing the public as a community that participates in the news rather than an audience that receives it.  Another factor is improved connections and faster speeds that bring the technology’s potential to life. A third is that consumers themselves are changing, recognizing that each platform has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. The strength of an aggregator or search engine, which allows someone to find answers to his or her own specific questions, is very different from the agenda-setting power of a newscast or a newspaper front page (even online), in which the news is ordered and presented for you. The power of a social networking site to tell you what people you know are thinking about or reading is different than the convenience of using a smartphone on the spur of the moment to check a fact or scan a headline.

And these notions are reinforced in the data about why people say they use different media. News has many different functions in our lives; the proliferation of devices, platforms and products makes that variety more recognizable for us as consumers. The quick scan of news we might get from a cell phone is a different experience from the deeper interaction that users of the iPad say that they experience with those devices. The survey data show this is even true for traditional media. A large majority of regular CNN viewers say they turn to it for the latest news and headlines, while Bill O’Reilly’s viewers turn to him for interesting views and opinions. The numbers reveal USA Today has a different function for its readers (primarily the latest headlines) than do the two other national papers in the United States, the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, which are more valued for in-depth reporting.

The numbers also reveal some older publications, because of their strengths, are appealing to new audiences in ways they almost certainly never could have without the creative destruction and promise of the digital age. Regular readers of The New York Times are young – 34% are younger than 30, compared with 23% of the public – suggesting that a new generation of readers is discovering virtues of the newspaper that had been known as the Old Gray Lady. The growing popularity of search engines, directing people to sites like nytimes.com, apparently has had an effect.

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.