The Return of the Curious Christian Man
Something weird has happened in recent years. Modern men are finding themselves strangely interested in Christianity.
In restaurants and bars, a droll question is being repeated with increasing seriousness: “What if the crazy Christians are right?”
I feel confident in saying that very few experts anticipated this trend. Whether looking at large-scale trajectories since the Enlightenment or listening to the shrill barking of the new atheists of the early 2000s, most critics have assumed that Christianity was taking a last gasp before giving up the ghost. Yet, like Jesus Himself, Christianity seems to have the propensity to resurrect as soon as it dies. No matter how vigorously tyrants and philosophers try to seal the cave and bury the body, the stone always ends up rolled away and news spreading that there is more to Jesus than meets the eye.
And thus it seems that a lot of men today find themselves unexpectedly curious about the faith of their forefathers. They may not yet believe in Jesus, but they respect Him and want to learn more about Him. They have the niggling feeling that somewhere tucked away under the floorboards of Western civilization is a dusty Bible and an old, wooden cross. In fact, the suspicion is even greater: men are wondering whether these old relics might not just be the pillars holding up the moral fabric of the modern world - at least the part of it that is worth conserving.
But, flirting with Christianity is one thing; becoming an actual Christian is something else. The interest of a lot of guys might be compared to seeing an attractive girl on the opposite side of the street. They admire from a distance; however, walking over and making a connection is a step they are hesitant to take. In the present moment, men are open to thinking about principles of traditional morality or about how the demise of Christendom may account for the social decay of the world around them. But here they stop and sit comfortably on the fence. In most cases, men are not finding their way into churches, and they are not staying up late at night reading a Bible. Instead, like teenage boys feeling a first crush, they are admiring Christianity from afar without understanding much about what is attracting them.
In many ways, such reluctance is not surprising. Men today are distanced from Jesus not just by time but by multiple layers of culture. To pick up on a famous image, there often appears to be a broad and ugly ditch separating the modern world and the truth claims of the New Testament. This can leave a man feeling as if he is looking at Jesus from afar through a telescope, but uncertain of how to bridge the abyss so that Jesus and he are standing on the same soil. A man looks out of his window and sees paved roads, plasma screens, fancy gadgets, and busy commerce. He then picks up a Bible and reads about priests, sin, blood rituals, and crucifixion. The first set of items is incontestably real, tangible, and important. The second feels foreign, detached, and of little consequence. Therefore, for a lot of guys, Jesus is something like a cloud - an object nice to look at for a minute or two, but utterly disconnected from the turf where the game of life is actually played.
This distance between Jesus and modern life can leave a man with little motivation to go out and investigate what it means to be a Christian. Sure, he might listen in to a spiritual conversation if an internet celebrity like Bishop Barron is featured on Jordan Peterson’s podcast. However, such interest is, at most, casual. When it comes to the business of a normal day, working through questions about the resurrection of Jesus is located on the to-do list just beneath “brush up on Spanish” and “learn the bass guitar”. Most men live by the assumption that a good and successful life does not require any nailed-down religious convictions. Wealth creation, life management, health and fitness - even politics and sports - these are the topics that matter on a Thursday afternoon. The fine points of God, ethics, and salvation are like bar nuts at a pub counter: one can take them or leave them according to appetite.
