Marriage, Bible, and Toxic Masculinity

Is God a boy?

The Bible suggests that He’s not genderless, nor is He male or female.

“He’s” both.

Torah’s account of creation suggests that Adam and Eve were together made in the “image of God:” it takes male and female to fully represent. As such, in scripture, one gender is not exalted above the other, nor are they considered to be the same. Both are given equal weight – an even share in the reflection of God, and equal, though sometimes different roles in His overall endgame.

In this story, God says, “it is not good for Adam to be alone,” then creates Eve. This is sometimes translated as “Adam is lonely and needs a girlfriend,” but there’s something much deeper afoot than Adam’s social life, or some unmet sexual thing.

Eve is next described as a “helper,” but we’re compelled to use caution with our interpretation here since humanity has such a long and disturbing history with regards to gender. What kind of help was Eve supposed to offer? The two were only given three commandments after all: don’t eat from the wrong tree, take care of הָאָרֶץ (ha’arets – Earth. land, ground, etc.), and make people. Adam doesn’t need any help with the first, but the other two are impossible to accomplish without someone else.

So Eve comes along to play the missing role, but not as some assistant whose main task is to make sure that Adam gets his morning coffee. For whatever reason, God wants הָאָרֶץ to be crawling with people, and He doesn’t want Adam to do that by himself. She is created as someone who, among other things, will be much more heavily invested, but nowhere does it say that this is her only vocation any more than making babies is Adam’s.

The two were called, together, to fill Earth’s humanless void, and, together, live as the fullest representation of God to be found in the universe, all the while choosing to operate under His authority.

This marks a big shift in scripture, by the way. Up until this point, God has created everything by Himself. Now, humanity and God will partner in all further creation. From this point forward, God doesn’t do anything alone, always enlisting the “help” of humanity – men and women – to further His purposes. It’s fascinating, and fringes on the irresponsible if you ask me.

A few thousand years later, St. Paul came along and ruined it all, teaching, very basically, that a husband is the “head” of his wife, just as Christ is the “head” of the church. That’s a literal translation of the ancient Greek, and there is no evidence that his words were somehow corrupted as the New Testament was copied/duplicated/restored over the next two thousand years. The guy who spread the Christian church farther than anyone in history actually said this.

For us folk who believe that the Bible (including Paul’s teachings) reflects the mind, heart, and will of God, this is extremely counter-cultural, and problematic for a guy whose wife was accepted into every Ivy League college in the country. Did Paul mean to say that the man is the boss of his marriage? That women should always be subservient? That’s how the church has interpreted it for most of its existence. It’s only recently that theologians have made attempts to reconcile this with the idea that men aren’t more important than women.

Others have used this as an excuse to ignore Paul entirely.

Let me pause for a moment and make it clear that no ancient Jewish person needed to hear “a man is the head of his wife.” That’s something they already believed. This reads as someone who’s about to say some difficult things, connecting first with his audience via common ground before introducing hard truths, such as the following:

“Husbands and wives should submit to one another.”

When a philosopher/theologian/prophet says two seemingly contradictory things, we should see it as an invitation into a deeper, albeit a much more complicated, most likely uncomfortable truth. In the same breath, Paul declared that a) man is second in the marriage hierarchy only to God, and b) that he should submit to his wife.

We should also note the legion of other places that Paul wrote about the equality of everyone – that nobody is above anyone else. Jesus himself took the lowest of the low and unleashed them to turn the world on its head. The Bible, in general, never exhalts one group of people, or one gender, over another.

But Paul’s thoughts on male leadership tie in nicely with an American cultural facet commonly referred to as “toxic masculinity;” the idea that male is the strong gender, the overcomer, the warrior, leader, winner. It gets toxic when “being a man” becomes more important than being a good father, or a good husband, a good president, etc.

As someone who’s spent a fair amount of time counseling men and marriages, I can attest to the fact that toxic masculinity is a problem in our culture, straining our relationships with a view of manhood that isn’t realistic, and super hard on everyone around us.

There are many others who believe that it’s not a thing.

In January of 2019, the Gillette razor company reworked their slogan, “The Best a Man Can Get,” into an introspective commercial that suggests an alternative to toxic masculinity, should it exist, offering a montage of men engaging the brokenness that allegedly attends our gender. Folks ripped the ad on social media, and the company, accusing Gillette of attacking the male gender and focusing on the worst things about us.

In a recent episode of “Good Morning BBC,” two men and three women debated the in’s and out’s of the ad; the women arguing in defense, appreciative of what Gillette tried to communicate, while the men argued against it, reducing it to a sexist attack, talking 85% of the time, frequently interrupting, totally dominating the discussion.

That’s what toxic masculinity does.

For a few different reasons, I’m not a fan of the Gillette company, but I appreciate a thoughtful montage of men engaging American maledom’s broken places. It’s easy in today’s world to be confused about what it means to be male, and what our role in this crazy place is. When someone brings a little encouragement, I’m all for it.

Part of our confusion stems from the growing belief that gender isn’t real, it’s merely an ancient cultural construct that modern people should try to move beyond. As you might guess, this doesn’t land for me. It might be that I’m old and growing tired of America’s breakneck cultural revisions, but there are too many consistent physiological differences between male and female to ignore.

You can be sure that there’s some ancient cultural junk, still alive and well, born from the many broken ways that humanity has tried to live with the tension that these differences create. For most of our existence, men have considered women to be “less” in a variety of ways, leveraging their physical strength and aggressive tendencies to create what is still a very androcentric world. We’ve grown beyond that, to a degree, but continue to live with a multitude of inequities and broken beliefs that have left women disadvantaged on many levels.

That might be why it’s un-PC to mention the differences between us, especially if it’s suggested that men are “better” in some arena: it smacks of the old garbage that’s been festering on our doorstep for so long now.

There are many other things that complicate any distinctions between male and female that we might want to make. Our culture’s openness to alternate sexual orientations, transgender, gender fluidity, etc. all seem to suggest that the traditional idea of gender is written nowhere in stone.

So it’s understandable that any discussion about masculinity in a way that differentiates it from feminity can be seen as a nod to the outdated idea that men and women are different.

Nonetheless, according to this blogger, toxic masculinity is a thing, and can be found rooting around in so many of our marriage problems.

I’ve struggled here, especially in the early years of my marriage. As a Southern born-and bred Evangelical, and a student of the Bible, I firmly believed that the buck stops with me, all the while far less qualified to run our household than Elaine. As such, for the first parts of our marriage, we had some epic battles over who the boss would be. We’ve since worked through much of that (another story), but I still feel the pull to “be a man” when things get tense between us.

I can also tell you that, for me and all the other men struggling with “be a man,” it’s not about some cultural phenomenon constantly whispering in our ears.

It’s about identity.

We don’t get sucked into this current because of the sheer force of it, we get sucked in because so many of us struggle to find something inherently valuable about ourselves. We feel good when we succeed, or somehow distinguish ourselves above a group of peers, typically male, but we tank when things don’t go the way they’re supposed to.

When we fail, we’re not someone who did their best, took risks, etc. We see ourselves, down to the core of everything we are, as failures, whimps, weaklings.

So we live from mountaintop, to valley, to mountaintop, scratching and clawing for anything that might help us feel good about us. Instead of the peace, hope, and comfort that the Bible calls us into, we set our sails for troubled waters, a bucket of chum for the cultural voices that want nothing more than a lethal chunk out of our true selves.

A friend of mine once said, “If you don’t know who you are, you’ll spend your life listening to people who have no business telling you who you are, tell you who you are.” He actually began with, “If you don’t let God tell you who are..,” which forever changed the way I approach God, and life in general, but that’s another story as well.

Either way, the power of toxic masculinity has more to do with the weakness in how we view ourselves than anything else. And you can rest assured that people who enter into marriage with this brand of brokenness will find much trouble.

I speak from experience.

For men, regardless of toxic masculinity’s roots, the trouble comes in two forms that represent two extreme expressions. When things are unhealthy, you’ll find him angry, aggressive, and dominant, or, at the other extreme, and much more common among Christian men, passive, checked out, repressed, “easy going.”

For all of us men who are left scratching their heads wondering what in the world Paul meant with his words about “headship,” toxic masculinity answers that question well, with all manner of predictable behaviors (above) that leave her feeling unwanted, undervalued, and unloved.

To that, Paul offered a bit of marriage counseling that you’ll be hard pressed to find anywhere else in antiquity:

“husbands, love your wives.”

He didn’t say that because loving her is his unique roll, or that love isn’t important for both genders. He said it because men and women show up differently in unhealthy relationships.

For me, for whatever reason, love is typically the first thing to go.

That’s how it’s been for Elaine and I, and for every difficult marriage, without exception, that I’ve counseled.

Note that Paul didn’t command me to claim the role of “head” over my wife, reminding her over and over again who the boss is. He was speaking directly to wives when he talked about heirarchy. He told me, speaking clearly as one can, to do one thing, and added that it’s supposed to look something akin to the way Jesus loved us, and how far He took that love.

“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave his life for her.”

Toxic masculinity has a different commandment for me, one that takes out the sacrificial love part, while overly emphasizing the idea that I’m the captain of this voyage, the winner, the dominator. If my wife should attempt a coup, toxic masculinity says “get louder!” or completely back off and find some other way to win, or at least feel like I’m winning.

And so, for the first years of my marriage, I almost completely ignored the Bible’s expectation here. When I finally decided to embrace it, I found myself confused about what love looks like in a marriage.

Thanx to the many churches I’ve been part of, I’ve never lacked an example. Over the years, I’ve befriended many a fellow who’s managed this kind of love, who also enjoyed its many happy returns. I also know some men who read “love your wife” in a much more passive way, always agreeing, always doing nice things, whatever it takes to stay out of trouble, etc. But that’s not love. There are times when love pushes back, fights, calls things out into the open, etc., but the endgame isn’t some screwed up manliness goal. Love does whatever is required to take the relationship to the next level, and that doesn’t happen without conflict and the courage it requires.

I’ve also come to understand what it looks like when Elaine is feeling unloved, a barometer of sorts that helps gauge how my end of the relationship is going. The behaviors that signal a need for deeper engagement on my part are similar to the way I’ve seen other women respond when their husbands are losing the plot, all suggesting, again, that men and women tend to show up differently.

Either way, countercultural as Paul’s words are, I’ve been given one simple commandment to redirect me when I’m feeling like things aren’t going well, or when I feel disrespected, or betrayed, or the legion of other negative things that come part and parcel to close human relationships.

Now, in this 20th year of life with her, “love your wife” means something very specific to me, resulting in a list that I can turn to when my selfish proclivities, or my poor identity, and/or the toxic masculinity sharks come calling.

I’ll share it here:

1. 1. 1. 1.  Have one weekly business meeting where we talk calendar, money, marriage, tension, and kids.
         2. Set aside at least one day a week where we spend a few hours together, sans kids, and talk. This one’s hard for me as I’m not a verbal processor, but a beer and good walk together loosens up my mind a bit.
         3. Develop a growing understanding of what makes her feel loved, what helps her get through the week, and what I can do to help her see her true worth.
         4. Develop a growing understanding of what it looks like when she’s not getting what she needs from me.
         5. Show up in healthy ways when we fight, making sure that I speak my mind, or circle back around to the issue later if I get scared in the moment and hide. 
         6. Have a go-to person(s) that I can process things with when I feel stuck. 
         7. Engage our family’s problems, challenges, and opportunities.

          

   There are places where I lead, areas of our relationship where I’m more at ease, more qualified to take the helm, and there are places where she’s much more capable. Over the years, we’ve grown more comfortable submitting to each other in these arenas, and have a much easier time making big decisions, working through tension, and enjoying our relationship.

   Given Paul’s commandment, I’m to pursue all of this regardless of whether or not she’s holding up her end of the bargain, or failing to respect whatever it is about me that she’s supposed to respect. Even in the worst of times, the above list, and all future ammendments, stand.

   As a Christian, I’m compelled to embrace and articulate love at an unconditional level, based solely on the character of God and the commandments of scripture. Of course, that’s not always how I show up. I’ve gotten better at aligning my life with these values, but the force of unhealthy manhood is strong with this one, constantly pulling me away from God’s general trajectories, always whispering in my ear that life will be much more fulfilling if I can somehow manage to get my own way, or dominate things, win, prevail, etc.

   You’ll find much missing in my thoughts above. What about toxic feminity, or Paul’s words to the wife, or Gay married relationships? These are merely my reflections, not intended to be an exhaustive review and commentary of every marriage issue know to humanity. I could however spend another month working through all of this, but will need to lay down my quill and move on to some of the other marbles that are rolling around loose in my head.

2. But I do hope that you’ve found this helpful. If you’re struggling in your marriage, or anywhere else, please feel free to contact me if you need to talk.Peace.