Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host, and president to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Josh Hawley serves as the Senior United States Senator from the state of Missouri. As Attorney General, and as a practicing attorney before that, Senator Hawley earned a reputation as a leading constitutional litigator, arguing cases all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Since his election to the United States Senate in 2019, Senator Hawley has been a member of several important committees, including the Judiciary, Armed Services and Homeland Security committees. He is also the author of the recent book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, which is the topic of our conversation today.
Senator Hawley, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Thank you so much for having me.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I think you know started an argument, and I think you intended to start an argument. At least formally, you kind of started this argument at a 2021 convention, the National Conservatism Conference, when you spoke about a crisis of manhood. So what were you doing, and what was the argument you hoped to get started?
Senator Josh Hawley:
Well, the argument was that American men really are in crisis. And if you look across the data, it’s really clear. You can look at the number of men committing suicide, the number of men struggling with depression, the number of fatherless homes, which continues to go up and up in this country, the number of men who are out of work and not even looking for work. We’re not talking about unemployment, but not even in the labor force at all, a number that’s also staggeringly high. And I think if you look at those various indicators, what you can see is there really is a crisis of men in this country, and the question is why, and what are we going to do about it? And the book really began with me thinking through that, and then also thinking about my two little boys, who are 10 and 8 now, and thinking about my responsibility as a dad to help them become the men God meant them to be.
Albert Mohler:
Well, you write in your new book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues American Needs, about both the virtues and the roles that a man needs to play in society. And yet this argument you started back in 2021 really was an argument against, not just the face of the statistics, which are quite daunting in terms of a crisis of American men, but a crisis in the culture that makes it virtually impossible to talk about these things honestly in the public square.
Senator Josh Hawley:
That’s right. It’s really an argument about what the Left has done in terms of its cultural argument and its cultural power that it has amassed, and the argument that they have made to men—it’s not really an argument actually. It’s more of a hectoring shouting from the Left—which goes like this: if you are a man, you are toxic. If you are a man, you make the world a worse place just by being a man. That’s especially true of the “traditional masculinity,” which is of course for them, a curse word or a curse phrase. And so I think that American men have heard this. They’ve had this drummed into their heads for decades now. They start on it, the Left does, as early as when our kids go to kindergarten where boys are told that they shouldn’t be rambunctious, that they shouldn’t be playful, that they need to sit still, otherwise they’re medicated, their play is interrupted, and it continues on through their school years, and, of course, then reaches a crescendo when they go to college or university.
So I think that this message that the Left has sent, which is that there’s something fundamentally wrong with masculinity, and they’re now also saying that there’s something fundamentally wrong with womanhood—that it doesn’t exist either, that is itself a toxic message. You want to talk about what’s toxic, that message is toxic, and you can see it in the effect on men over years and decades.
Albert Mohler:
Senator, I think there are those who hearing this conversation would say, “Well, here you have just two conservatives complaining about the Left and an illusory figure we’re boxing with,” but this is not an illusion, nor is it a recent argument. I think most conservatives in the United States failed to understand this is the result of a sustained argument made over the course of say a century, at least, and with remarkable speed here in the more recent decades.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Yes. And in fact, it has really reached a crescendo, I would say, in this country since the 1960s. And I tell the story a little bit in the book. What really happened in the 1960s, in my view, is that a new form of Marxism, a form of cultural Marxism, really began to take root in American universities. And the focus of that Marxism was, frankly, on our biblical heritage.
It was on the distinction between male and female. It was on the traditional family, our history as a nation. Anything that smacked of the Bible and the Bible’s influence, these cultural Marxists wanted to overturn because they defined that as the oppressive obstacles that were preventing the revolution. So this new generation of Marxists really wanted there to be a cultural revolution. They were less interested in economics, a cultural revolution. And what stood in the way of that?
What was the obstacle to that, the villain? It was really the Bible, and our biblical culture, our biblically influenced heritage in this country. And they began to really launch an assault on that that started in the ‘60s and the universities. Now, of course, it is entirely mainstream on the Left. Now, this way of thinking has captured the Democrat party in large measure. It is hugely influential in the corporate C-suites. It is hugely influential in the entertainment industry, and of course, the media. And so men—and women too—are getting it force fed to them from the commanding heights of culture everywhere that they turn.
Albert Mohler:
You used the term cultural Marxism in the address and in the book, and I appreciated that because I also insist upon the term as a quite legitimate and appropriate term because the Marxists themselves used it in their own way, especially in German, referring to the fact that the Marxist revolution that they had predicted in the economy, as you said, didn’t come. And so, they were going to have to bring about a revolution in society by other means.
And by the way, the antipathy to biblical Christianity and to the Christian shape of Western culture, as you know, that was held by Marx and Ingles. It just didn’t happen in terms of the economic catalyst for revolution. So they decided to take it to the culture. And I thought as a younger man, that cultural Marxism was more of a European threat. I was wrong. It is now what explains the current contours of American culture.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s important just to unpack a little bit what their thinking is because it is now so influential, and I really do think it’s the dominant threat of our time. The cultural Marxists came to believe that the revolution that Marx predicted hadn’t happened because he was only half right. Marx, according to them, had been wrong about the dominance of economics so that his materialism, his dialectical materialism, was too economically focused and that, in fact, culture was just as, if not more important and determinative, of human behavior than economics. And they identified with, in the United States, a western culture that they agreed with. Marx was totally oppressive, but they came to think that it was not only capitalism that was the problem. It was the cultural conservatism, frankly, the cultural biblicism, Christianity, and the influence of Christianity and Judaism on our culture that was really the most oppressive thing about America, and the whole west, and what was holding back the revolution they wanted to see.
And so they aimed their fire at the Christian influence, the biblical influence in our culture, and that’s been going strong now for 60 years. And we’ve seen it in recent years really reach a crescendo where that way of thinking has come to be very politically powerful, very economically powerful through the corporations, advertising, and entertainment, and I think it is much the threat of our time. And the only antidote to it that I see is to return to our biblical heritage, to go back to the foundational truths that are at the core of our culture. And the Left hates it when I say that, but that’s just the truth. And that’s why I spent so much time in the book talking about the Bible and the Bible’s vision of manhood.
Albert Mohler:
At that same conference, the National Conservatism Conference, a year later, I tried to make the argument that the Left right now tries to say that there never had been a Christian shape to Western civilization, but the best documentation for that argument, for my argument and your argument, is actually found on the Left because those who were the architects of that revolution made very point that what they were trying to overthrow was the Christian shape, the biblical shape of civilization. So the modern Left is just basically pressing a lie that that structure didn’t exist because their own forebearers identified it as public enemy number one.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Absolutely. And you can see this in the writings of the 1960s. Radicals, you can see it, and I quote a number of them in the book including Marcuse, who was very clear that the Christian influence in this culture, the biblical influence in Western civilization writ large is the problem. And by the way, it’s still clear today. Remember that Smithsonian exhibit from just a year or two ago that our tax dollars all paid for in which the Smithsonian announced that the nuclear family, and the traditional work ethic, and the idea of mother and father that these were white patriarchal influences, and that Christianity was also a white patriarchal artifact.
So there you have it. It’s the same agenda that all of these things are great cultural inheritances are in fact racist, are in fact bigoted, are in fact oppressive and need to be overthrown.
Albert Mohler:
This is a good juncture for me to mention someone I’m always glad to mention, and that’s Pitirim Sorokin, the Russian sociologists who really kind of founded sociology at Harvard University, although I doubt anyone in that department wants anything to do with him now. But he made several arguments back in the early 20th century. One of them was that every civilization basically finds its way to what we would call the natural family, otherwise it doesn’t continue to exist, period. The second point he made is that the second greatest civilizational challenge after reproduction is the successful transition of boys in manhood in every single society across human history. We’re deliberately foreclosing our own future on that score.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Yes, we are. And this reminds me of something that a more contemporary commentator said to me recently, but when I suspect your audience will know, which is Dr. Jordan Peterson. He commented to me, and I think this is a good insight, that nature initiates women into womanhood, but culture must initiate boys into manhood. And so you have to actually do something and there needs to be these cultural moments, this cultural effort, society-wide effort made where we say, here’s what it looks like to be a good man. Here’s what it looks like to not be a boy any longer. Being a boy is great. I’ve got boys. I want them to be boys, but at a certain point, we want them to mature into responsible, strong, dependable men.
And our society, under the influence of these ideologies we’ve just been talking about, has largely abandoned these rites of passage, these rites of initiation, and the whole idea of transition from boys to men. And I think that’s one of the reasons frankly, we see so many grown men who are acting like small boys and don’t seem to know how to find their way to manhood. And so part of what I try to do in the book is return to some examples, biblical examples of what strong male leadership and what strong good men look like.
Albert Mohler:
The point that you mentioned that Jordan Peterson made is a point that has been longstanding as a principle of conservative observation, and that is that no society in human history seems to have had a great challenge in the transition from girlhood to womanhood. Every society seems to have had a significant challenge in managing the transition of boys into manhood.
And by the way, this goes back to anything, whether it’s as universal and historical as Sparta and Athens, or for that matter, Eaton, where the British said the England’s wars are fought and lost, first of all, on the playing fields of Eaton, or the development of the Boy Scouts back when people in the Victorian age and in the early 20th century were very concerned about American boys and British boys falling behind in physical strength and in manhood of threatening German boys and the German empire, or the Nazis. And so in other words, this is a perpetual issue. Everywhere you look, including in the Bible, in the Book of Proverbs, you find the same pattern.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Absolutely. And that’s why I think that there’s so much wisdom to be had as we turn as we undertake this effort of cultural historical reclamation, and we realize that there may be something out of joint in our current historical moment. Maybe what we’re seeing right now is actually dysfunctional. Let’s look back to our history. Let’s look back to the biblical example and model above all, and look at what it looks like to become a healthy man, what it looks like to become a good man, and really ultimately try to recover the biblical picture of manhood of what it’s for.
I think one of the big issues that we have now and that I certainly find in talking with young men—for a time I taught them and you, of course, teach them, and I suspect that your experience is like mine—is young men say they don’t really have a vision for their lives. They’re not sure what it is they’re supposed to be doing as men. What is it as a man? What’s their mission supposed to be? They don’t know because our culture no longer gives them one.
The Bible does. And I think that’s why returning to this most important of our moral sources—of course the one that also happens to be true with a capital T—is so vitally necessary and promising.
Albert Mohler:
And by the way, the school—the seminary and the college—I have the honor of leading we basically understand we’re getting the most focused, most mature of the young men of that generation because they can’t come here unless they have a pretty good idea of their place in the world and what God’s called them to do. But every single one of them will tell you about all of those in their own generation left behind in that massive confusion. I want to turn to the argument you make in your book, but I want you to do one thing for me first.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Sure.
Albert Mohler:
The boy crisis in America right now, it is so acute, and you document this in your book. I want you just to lay it out just in summary. But I also want to ask you, why is it that the entire society doesn’t see this as one of our most important civilizational challenges?
Senator Josh Hawley:
It’s a good question. I do think it’s because the folks who are principally responsible or largely responsible for fostering it—in terms of the ideology that they have pushed that has gotten us here—can’t bring themselves to admit that what they’ve done is wrong. And you start to see some now on the Left, and I credit them, including the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who wrote not long ago about the problem with boys where he said, “Actually, there’s a problem with young men and boys in this country. We should admit it.” He’s right. That’s great. It is surprising how few voices there are, though, in his camp on this. And I think it’s because it’s hard to look in the mirror and say, “Wait a minute, maybe the message we’ve been sending, maybe the practices we’ve been urging have been bad for boys.”
And when you look at the crisis across the board, whether you’re looking at the numbers of young boys in early childhood years who are diagnosed with ADHD or ADD who are prescribed medications—by the way, this is way off the charts in the United States compared to our comparable nations in Europe or elsewhere, way, way off the charts—you can look at the studies that say that young boys play is interrupted at far greater rates than young girls play is as early as kindergarten. So you look at this with boys and then what happens is they get older, they start dropping out of high school, they’re doing that now in greater numbers than in decades, and in college now, a huge collapse, in just the last four or five years, in the number of men who are going to college.
Women now outnumber men two to one. It’s really, really striking. And then by the time we get into the ‘20’s, we have the crisis of suicide. We have the crisis of mental health and depression. We’ve got drug abuse at all time, high levels for young men. It truly is a crisis. That is not too strong of a word. And I don’t know how you can look at any of those numbers, any slice of that data, let alone the whole picture, and not agree that we’ve got to do something different here.
Albert Mohler:
Well, let’s turn to the book. Again, the title is, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. I have to tell you, Senator, I was a bit surprised by your book in two ways. The first was, and I say this as a theologian, it was a far more biblically based argument than I had expected. And I’m going to come back to a little bit of the surprise there. But how did you come to think through the framework for the argument you wanted to make in this book?
Senator Josh Hawley:
Well, it’s an interesting question. I did not set out to write the book in this fashion, to be honest with you. But as I started to think about manhood, and I started to think about what is it that makes a man a man. To me, it’s awfully question begging to say, “Well, it’s this character trait,” or “It’s that virtuous, it’s this practice.” You have to explain why would that be true? Why is it that courage is important to a man? You have to have some underlying definition understanding of manhood.
Albert Mohler:
A reason why is courage is preferable to cowardice.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Correct. And particularly when you push beyond things that—probably few people would argue that courage is better than cowardice—but when you start to push a little bit more controversial, let’s say in our present cultural moment, and you say, “Actually, no, it’s a good thing for a man to choose to be a husband. It’s a good thing to prioritize being a father, or a warrior, for instance,” another moniker I use in the book. Then I think you’re going to get pushback from the Left on that. And then you have to answer why. And for me, there’s only one why, and that is the biblical picture. So I found myself, as an author, pushed back toward the biblical picture of manhood. And as a believing Christian myself, I mean this is ground zero for me.
And so I really thought through this. I had to think out my argument in terms of the biblical viewpoint. And that’s why I ended up writing the book the way I did, and it took the shape that I did. And frankly, it is totally baffled. My critics on Left put it to me like this, Dr. Mohler, one reporter stopped me in person and said that he’d only read the first two chapters, and he said, “Is the whole book full of the Bible like this?” And I said, “I’m afraid it is. Yes, I’m afraid it is.”
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I’m glad it is, but honestly, I was surprised. And the second surprise is that this isn’t just Bible pastiche here. This is not just a bunch of pay stubs of Bible verses here. There’s a sustained biblical theology behind this, one that, by the way, has only really surfaced or resurfaced after the reformation in our circles over the course of the last several decades. It’s the understanding that there’s a sustained narrative in scripture that follows the themes of creation, Fall, redemption, and new creation. And you actually make that pretty much the structure of how you make this argument. And I say that in order to just say to those joining this conversation, listening to it, there’s a lot more here than just the recitation of survival verses.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Well, I’m glad you think so and that is what I tried to do, and you’ve laid out my understanding of it. Just to go all the way back to square one. When I start in Genesis, I start with the Garden of Eden. I start with the first man with Adam. But I really think that there, we see, of course, the entire story of the Bible laid out in a microcosm. What is Eden? I argue that it is a garden, of course, but even more than that, it’s a temple, and it’s a picture of what God wants the whole world to be like. He wants to fill all the world with his presence. He wants to fill all the world with his glory. Adam was supposed to be part of that. Let me talk about that some in the book. And of course, I only barely scratched the surface, but Adam and Eve had a significant role there to play as God’s representatives, as indeed his icons on the earth in this temple, which they were, I argue.
And Adam was supposed to expand that temple into all the world. And of course, how does the Bible end—with a temple, new temple coming down from heaven, the new heavens and the new earth, the new Jerusalem, where finally there at the end of Revelation, all the world is indeed made a temple where the Lord is glorified, where Jesus is on the throne. So there’s an incredible unity of the biblical story, I believe, and I try and trace that, and follow that, and unpack what that might mean for men in the book.
But yes, it has left my liberal critics quite baffled, partly because they’re very unfamiliar, just generationally now very unfamiliar with even very basic biblical narratives. And so one reviewer said that they just couldn’t figure out how the argument progressed here, and I wanted to respond. It’s very simple. It just follows the Bible chronologically. It’s not complicated. But in any event, that was my hope and my thought in writing it that way.
Albert Mohler:
One of the ways I try to deal with things in terms of helping Christians to understand the cultural sphere is by trying continually to help people to understand where to place the beginning of something, because it really matters whether you begin in Eden or after the God’s judgement of casting out Adam and Eve from Eden for their sin. And so if something is in Eden, it’s good by definition, unquestionably good, good in an unmitigated sense. But every good is tarnished on the other side. Or to put it this way, marriage is found in the Garden, adultery is found in the world after the Fall. And so noticing that’s very important, but I hear Christians misrepresent something when it comes to manhood and vocation and our purpose in life. I’ll hear people say, “Well, God’s judgment was that now we’re going to have to work.”
That’s not the way the Bible reads at all. We’re to work in the garden. Adam was assigned, and Eve was assigned to work. Adam had a distinctive role in the garden. After they sinned, and God’s judgment fell upon them when they were cast out of the garden. They weren’t told they’re going to have to start working when they hadn’t been. Adam was told, you’re going to have to work, and it’s going to be much much, much harder now.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Yes, absolutely. And I think that is so critical for men in particular, but absolutely, Adam is assigned tasks. He’s assigned to be a co-laborer with God. That is really the incredible high calling. He is, with Eve, God’s representative. Again, to go back to the temple imagery—and I try to develop this a little bit in the book without boring the reader too much—but in the ancient near East, particularly at the time of Genesis or thereafter, readers would’ve been familiar with the idea of temple stories and temple imagery. Well, what’s in the center of every temple that they would’ve been familiar with? Well, a representation of the God, an icon. In this case, that is Adam and Eve, who are the images, the representatives of God on earth, an incredibly high calling. Before the Fall, absolutely, critically, of course. And so as of that work, as the image of God is the representatives of God, they are to join him after his pattern and the work he is doing. And so work is a high and noble calling, and the part that’s difficult for us now is that a curse lies on our work.
Albert Mohler:
That’s right.
Senator Josh Hawley:
That, of course, is part of what Jesus came to address and will ultimately be addressed in the new heavens and new earth fully reversed, but work is vitally important. And I think that’s one of the reasons that when you start talking to a man about working, about contributing, about whether it’s as simple as showing up to a job on time, there’s a reason why your life begins to get into order when you start doing things and say, “You know what? I’m going to get a job. Yeah, I am going to show up on time. Yeah, I am going to apply myself to a task.”
What happens? Your life starts to click into order. There’s a reason for that. You were made that way.
Albert Mohler:
Exactly.
Senator Josh Hawley:
It reflects what God has meant for you to do.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. And that assignment is something that both in Genesis 1 and 2, and also in Genesis 3, is addressed uniquely to Adam. Now, it’s not exclusively addressed to Adam. As we see in texts, the narrative texts of the Old Testament and the New Testament, as well as passages from say Proverbs, there is a distinctive assignment made to Adam, and thus to men, in both the creation mandate, and also on the other side of the Fall in terms of the responsibility now to work and to work hard.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Absolutely. And Genesis 1 and 2, it’s a Genesis 2 in particular to Adam. He’s given the instruction to keep the garden and to cultivate it. And both of those words are very, very significant at keeping, protecting gardening, maintaining, cultivating, to continue to make the garden flourish—and as I argue in the book, also to build it out and to expand it. And I tell stories about my grandfather who was a farmer, a cultivator, and what all men are called to do in being keepers. We’re supposed to protect and provide, but also be cultivators who are supposed to build and who are supposed to be willing to bring gardens to the wilderness, as it were, to extend out the metaphors.
So there’s something very powerful about that that is for men. And as you said, that it comes in Genesis 1 and 2, particularly 2 for men, that they are supposed to be doing. And again, that’s why I say I think for young men, that’s why there’s such power in leaning into the responsibilities God has meant for you. When you start to take on those responsibilities he’s given you, there’s a reason why your life changes and things in your life begin to change. It’s because this is how he’s made you to be. And men can feel that. Even if they don’t yet know the Lord, they can see that as they begin to live into the pattern that he’s designed them for.
Albert Mohler:
In the first part of your book, you kind of lay out the cultural, and say sociological crisis and make it rather personal. But I want to ask you, when you talk about the battle to which men are called, that’s after Genesis 3. That’s a perpetual reality or a perennial challenge. But it seems that an incredible number, millions, of young men in our society don’t even know they’re called to that battle.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Yeah, that’s right. I think that the battle is several fold. We’re talking about the battle against evil, against sin in the world, which all of us, of course, have a hand in. I mean, we come into the world now confronting that battle and in the midst of that battle. And of course, we’re personally implicated in it. And I tell some of the stories in my book about seeing that up close and personal, my own life and the lives of other people. I lost my best friend to suicide when he was 22, and I had just turned 23. And I tell that story in the book. It’s just what really, for me as a young man, brought home the reality of sin, a brokenness of evil in the world. And we’re called to confront that, both from out and within.
And I think part of my message to men in this book is that the path to manhood really is a path to character. It begins with having your own heart and soul shaped. And of course as Christians, we’d say a little more than that. I’m scratching the surface with that, but only the surface, right? What we really know is that the path to true manhood is to grow up into the image of Jesus Christ, into in the full maturity of Christ, as Paul will say. And that’s the full gospel there. That’s the pattern that we’re called to. But that is going to mean a confrontation with and reckoning with the sin in our lives, the sin in the world, the evil in our lives, the evil in the world.
And part of our job as men, and part of our calling, is to confront that both without and within. And again, I just say that while that certainly can be difficult and is difficult, there’s also a certain joy in it. Because to be able to live your life and to see change come, to see other peoples’ lives change, to see your family grow, to see the Lord at work through you and other people’s lives, there’s a fulfillment and joy in that that is incredible. And that really only comes if you’re willing to confront the darkness that all of us harbor, and that, of course, we face in the world.
Albert Mohler:
You address some issues, many issues, but several come immediately to my mind with some amazing candor. And I guess at the top of that list would be United States Senator writing about the problem of young men, in particular, and pornography. And you deal with that pretty straightforwardly. And I just want to make the case that through throughout most of human history, first of all, there was a very limited amount of personal privacy. Everybody lived in one house, in one room. There was very little personal privacy. We’ve created a very different context now. We’ve developed a sense of personal autonomy, which is now being downshifted into childhood. And then we set a teenager alone with a smartphone, and then we take the moral boundaries off when it comes to something like pornography and the legal boundaries. This turns out to be a very deadly weapon against faithful manhood in this generation.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Oh, hugely, hugely deadly. And I think it’s hard. I’m 43. I think it’s hard, even for me at my age, to fully grasp because I was a teenager or in the early 20-somethings before the smartphone. And I think the smartphone came out in, what, 2006, 2007? I was in my mid-twenties by then.
So I think that it is hard to fully comprehend the effect of having pornography so ubiquitously available. As one scholar who I quote in the book says, “A young man today can see more bare flesh,” if you’ll pardon the expression, “in five minutes than his,” or probably really five seconds, “than his grandfather could see in a lifetime.” And the sheer…
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, if ever.
Senator Josh Hawley:
If ever. Right, if ever.
The sheer amount of just the volume of imagery constantly bombarding young men, in particular, is incredibly desensitizing. And we’re seeing it show up in the data everywhere. And I quote some of this in the book. We’re seeing it in delayed rates of marriage and family formation. We’re seeing it at a loss of confidence. This is something I want to point out because I think it is a little counterintuitive just because of the way that the porn industry frankly sells their product. What they seldom in is that it’s a very macho thing to do to look at porn, and it sort of makes you a manly man and it increases your confidence. No, it doesn’t. That’s not what the data says. The data says the more time you spend alone the at porn, the less confident men become, the less outgoing they become, the less likely they are to actually take the initiative with a real-life woman and be able to form a relationship with her in a healthy way.
So it’s really striking what this is doing to young men’s ability—actually men of all ages—because the usage is huge across all ages, but particularly young men, their ability to form relationships, to form marriages, to raise families, it’s devastating, and we need to talk about it.
And by the way, the Left absolutely detests this. This is one of the first things they picked up in my book, and in that speech I gave that you referenced a couple of years ago, I think I mentioned porn in passing in the speech, and it was a lightning rod for them because there’s something about it. There’s something about that issue that I think gets at the Left’s view that personal autonomy should mean doing whatever you want to do, how you want to do it. And especially if it is in defiance of the sexual ethics of the Bible, then it’s really good, and we’re really for that. And I think this issue really animates them in that way.
Albert Mohler:
By the way, footnote here, we won’t have time to trace, but one of my arguments is that the big loser on the Left for the last 30 years has been second wave feminist. It is because, even on the issue of porn, it turns out that the sexual revolution is far more powerful than feminism. And now the transgender revolution turns out to be far more powerful than feminism. So it is interesting to see that the Left is monolithic in one sense, but in another sense, it has its own winners and losers, and the feminists are the losers.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Yea, and I think you can see now that women of all ages, all backgrounds, women are really the losers in this porn epidemic with men. You can see men are getting married much later. Women who want to get married are having trouble finding suitable partners. Some of that is because of education. Some of it is job status. Some of it is the fact, though, that men are less and less relationally, interpersonally able to form relationships, to make commitments and to stick to them. And there’s all kinds of dysfunctions that are attended on that, and porn is a huge, huge driver. And it’s like everybody loses. The men lose too, but it is really women who are asked to bear the brunt of it. They’re not asked. They are forced to bear the brunt of it.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. I have so many young women everywhere I go and who write in to the programs who just make very clear to me and say, “Look, I desperately want to be married. Where are the young men?” And there’s one thing for that to be true in society, but frankly, Christians have far greater tragedy for that to be true in the church.
When I was making that reference to feminism, let me be clear: it’s a strange thing right now that you have some of the old feminists and conservative Christians who are the last people willing to make a moral judgment against pornography. It’s not the same moral argument, but that tells you a great deal about where our society has gone.
I want to turn to two big issues in the time that remains, and we’re kind of just at the threshold of the big argument of your book, about these six roles that men are called to fulfill. And I just want to set you up Senator by saying I’m concerned every time I see this kind of list because I’m afraid what’s coming is union archetypes, that these are just illusory helpful metaphors for men to consider. I want to say that one of the things I appreciate most about your book is that these are not metaphors for you. They are actual roles that men are called to fulfill. How did you get there?
Senator Josh Hawley:
Well, I got there by trying to trace the scriptural pattern and trying to think about after Eden as then we go forward, as we are propelled forward and men are propelled forward after the Fall, and still called by the Lord to expand the garden as it were, to make the world a temple. But what does that look like now in a fallen world? And what does it look like to live in that? What kind of character does that call require? And as I trace the biblical story, then, I came upon these different roles—these different responsibilities would be another way of putting it—that I think men are called towards. And they are husband and father, and warrior and priest, and builder and king. And I look at these and illustrate these from the lives of different figures in the Old Testament following it chronologically leading up to and finally culminating with King Solomon.
And there is a little bit of a narrative arc there in that. I don’t harp on this, but there’s a reason that it culminates with the building of the temple. You really see the narrative arc that runs from Genesis 12 through Solomon’s kingship. There’s a crescendo there. And then obviously, as you know, then there is a de crescendo, and there’s a coming apart after that in the biblical narrative and will await a better king than Solomon was for some time in the person of Jesus. But in any event, I follow through. I try to trace through this narrative and look at the different kinds of responsibilities and roles that I think the Lord calls men into by virtue of his commission to them that runs all the way back to the garden.
Albert Mohler:
Senator, I was doing some work a few years ago deeply into census records, which is actually fascinating data as it represents very, very fascinating information. But nonetheless, one of the interesting things is that if you look at American history and if you look at how the census was asking questions, it would ask questions with the clear assumption that the default is going to be that there’s a family in this home, and that begins with marriage and then leads to children. And then there would be categories, for instance, other adults in the home and things like that. But it is just reassuring to understand that at least for much of our nation’s history, there’s a pretty good understanding that there was a base definition of a man and a woman united in marriage, and then the children who would come from that marriage. There’d be others connected to extended kinship, but that’s the core.
And the assumption was that it was the responsibility of a society, and of a congregation for that matter, and for parents, to get boys ready to become husbands. And nature, as we said, has a lot to do with girls becoming wives and mothers. It takes a lot more to produce a husband than a father.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Yes, it does. And I think there’s something very significant about the fact that in Genesis 12, when God calls Abraham, when he calls him to take back up, I argue, the mission of Adam in a new way. When he calls him to take that back up, what’s he calling him to do? What’s the promise that he makes to him? He’s going to be a father. I think there’s something very significant about that that men need to hear.
If you want to do something significant with your life, if you want to have a legacy—and I think every man does—be a husband, be a father. There is a God-given shape to those roles. There is a God-given blessing on those responsibilities that if you will live in that, you will see your life. You’ll see your life really come into to balance, and also see meaning, see purpose, see legacy.
But I think it can’t be emphasized enough in this generation when men are told constantly by pop culture that being a dad is a waste of time, that kids are a drag, that they’re expensive, that they suck up your time, and to delay marriage as long as you can, that is decidedly not the biblical picture. And I think men need to see the power, and the profundity of being a husband and a father, and the joy of it. And I try to get that across in the book by sharing some of the stories of my own boys and my kids. There’s incredible joy in being a father, but it is also, I can say, the most significant and worthwhile thing I have done in my life.
Albert Mohler:
And gloriously exhausting.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Yes.
Albert Mohler:
And completely obsessive.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Yes.
Albert Mohler:
And that’s the way it has to be because you’re not just raising children, you’re raising your children. You’re not just the father to children, you’re the father to three children who have very clear expectations and needs.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Yes, absolutely right. And this is one of the things I think that is so important: why fatherhood is a gateway to full manhood is that what fatherhood—and for that matter, marriage since, fundamentally, the two go obviously right together—demands from a man is that he no longer lived for himself, that he placed others ahead of himself, that he learned to make himself expendable. And there’s something that’s beautifully anticipatory of Christ there. Maybe I should say reflective rather than anticipatory. Since we’re made in Christ’s image, not the other way around, but we are reflecting the Lord there who gave his life as a ransom for many, who came to be to serve, not to be served. That’s the pattern, whether men recognize it or not, whether they’re believers or not. Nevertheless, that’s the pattern that being a husband and being a father calls them into, into serving others, into sacrificing themselves, into disciplining their own wants and desires for the good of other people. And I think that’s why it is both so profoundly difficult, but also so profoundly meaningful and significant.
Albert Mohler:
I get into trouble in a lot of circles, even in Christian circles, when I make very clear that the category of single is just not found—or unmarried just as a preference or a lifestyle—is just not found in the scripture. There are clearly people who are not married and there are explanations for why they are not. But by the time you get to the New Testament, I think Luther distills this better than anyone else in the Reformation when he says everyone has a calling. And there are certain persons called to do certain things that are incompatible with marriage. The Apostle Paul is an example of one who, if he were married, would not have been able to fulfill the apostolic mission that he had, traveling at great risk throughout the Roman Empire, and eventually we believe facing execution for his faithfulness to Christ.
But by the time the New Testament is complete, it’s very clear that the household codes are establishing the fact that the norm is going to be that, for the sake of civilization and the sake of the church, you’re going to have a man leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh, and they shall raise the children that are given to them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. And without that you don’t have civilization. Period.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Exactly right. And that’s a message that is not popular in the United States today, but it’s one that is absolutely true. And in the book, what I say to young men is maybe you’re not married yet, maybe you’re not a father, but you can begin to acquire the character of a husband and the character of a father, and you should. You should try to become a man. You should work to become a man who can be counted upon, to make a commitment and to keep it. That’s what a husband does, to provide and to protect. That’s what a father does, who lives sacrificially for others. That’s what husbands and fathers do. Every day of the week, they have to. We may do it imperfectly, certainly I do it imperfectly, but that’s the overall calling.
And I think for young men, we need to send a clear cultural message that being a husband and father is the best thing you can do with your life, number one. And that number two, acquiring the character of a husband and father is a lifelong venture, but it is an incredibly exciting and meaningful one, and they should go for it.
Albert Mohler:
I have one suggested addition for your second edition, which may need to come out a generation from now, and I say that because I’m a generation older than you. And I will tell you that the biblical vision is not just of being a father, but of being a grandfather. It is not just a covenant and a promise made to our children, but to our children’s children. And I can just tell you, on the other side of being a grandfather, it just makes the promises given to Abraham and his descendants all the more precious. My goodness, I wouldn’t trade this for anything.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Yeah, that’s wonderful. That’s a wonderful vision. And I say in the book, I tell the story about my grandfather, and I try to capture some of this at one of my enduring memories of him, that he was a farmer. He’s gone now, but he was a farmer. His life was long, not famous, not important in the world’s eyes, not wealthy, none of that, but a simple man in the best way who loved the Lord, who loved his work, who loved his family.
And one of my enduring memories of him is towards the end of his life, we used to have these big family pheasant hunts where we all go pheasant hunting. It’s how I learned to hunt with my grandfather and my dad. And I can still remember him—I tell this story in the book—of these pheasant hunts surrounded by his five boys. My mother was the only girl, youngest of six, his five boys, their kids, their children’s children, all of us. There’d be 40 to 50 of us men there. I was just a young boy at this time. And seeing him at the sort of apex of this, to me, I thought, that is what it looks like to be a man. It looks like someone who has given his life for these other men who now has around him these generations who’s getting to enjoy. I mean, what a blessing to see them flourish. And there’s a beautiful fullness there that I think that deep in his heart every man longs for.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I tell people, in one way, I had three mothers, with my mother and then two grandmothers. But in a far more profound sense, I had three fathers, with my father, and his father, and my mother’s father. I was surrounded by models of fatherhood and manhood. And so even if my entire world had just been a little cosmos of that extended family, it would’ve been intact. And for that, I’m just incredibly thankful. I feel like as a society, we are making it less likely that that biblical picture is going to be found many places and among many people.
Senator Josh Hawley:
No, absolutely. This is one of the real problems with the epidemic of fatherlessness that we now have is that so many men and young women don’t have that role model. They don’t have that protector. They don’t have the beautiful continuity of the generations. But I will say this, my message to young men is, even if you grew up without a father, or your relationship with your father is not good at all and is troubled or difficult or downright bad, you can be the person who breaks that cycle in your family. You can change the destiny of your family by living into these promises that God has for you. And that’s incredibly hopeful. We don’t have to be controlled by our past. There’s a deep gospel truth there, right? We’re not controlled by our past. We have an incredible future ahead of us, and every man can be part of that. And so I think for men who feel unfathered, you can find fathers out there in the world, not necessarily your own biologically, but also you can become one yourself and be transformative in that way.
Albert Mohler:
And this is one of the glories of the gospel as manifested in a congregation where we all have many fathers, many mothers, many brothers, many sisters, and it’s one of the most powerful promises of the Bible that God declares himself the Father of the fatherless. And that’s gendered language, as the modern theorist would say, but he declares himself the Father of the fatherless. And in the sense that he names himself Father and declares himself the Father to the fatherless, that’s an incredible promise.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Incredible promise. And I’m glad you mentioned just that, the beautiful picture of the congregation. I think, as I talked to young folks, one of the things that they sorely miss and sorely long for: they usually use the word community, which is a little bit flabby, but you know what they’re getting at. They long for that picture of healthy families of the many generations together, and what you see in the family of God, what you see in the congregation. And that’s why I think more than ever before the local congregation—the example and the witness of the local congregation gathered together, the generations gathered, families gathered worshiping the Lord together, doing life together—there is a powerful witness right there just in the gathering and the life of the local church that I think is only going to become more powerful as we grapple more and more with the society, the fallout of broken families and fatherlessness.
Albert Mohler:
Senator, you intended to make an argument in your book, and you certainly did. You intended, no doubt, for that argument to be made in public, and you expected a public response. The response is, in one sense, almost as important as your book, in terms of the public conversation. And I mean by that that it’s fascinating the response to your book has been following several lines.
Number one, oh no, another book on manhood that’s one. The other is, oh no, another prosaic call manifesto for toxic masculinity, or another far right propaganda volume. And by the way, on that latter score, it’s really clear that so many people don’t know what to do with most of your book. All they can deal with—and perhaps, all they read was—the introduction.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Oh, clearly, clearly. I actually don’t read the reviews, but what people have gleefully repeated to me about what others have said, I think it’s pretty clear. And even folks who I’ve talked to and in interviews, some of whom are more hostile than others, it’s clear that many of them just haven’t read the book. But also, I think when we get to this biblical vision that we’ve been talking about, they just don’t know how to take that on board. They just don’t know what to do with that. One reviewer that I did see said that I was—how did she put it?—an especially dreary sort of fervent Christian for all of this Bible talk. And I thought, well, you say dreary, but I would say profoundly hopeful. Because if you look again at the vision that the Bible holds out for men, it’s bracing, it’s exciting, and it’s hopeful.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I did look at some of the response to your book because I think it’s a part of the intellectual context for this discussion, and I understand why you don’t, but I did. And another point that came to me looking at that is those who are looking for some kind of far right promotion of toxic masculinity. They can’t deal with the fact that the virtues you’re calling for and the functions that you’re calling men to fulfill just don’t fit that category at all. So they have to say it’s just in a genre of literature that inevitably leads to toxic masculinity. So Senator, have you just inevitably added to the problem?
Senator Josh Hawley:
Well, Here’s what I think that the problem that the Left has: they say that all masculinity is toxic, and this gets to the point that you’re making. So even if that’s not at all the argument that I’m making, they lump me into that category. But I do think—and I try to confront this in the book too—there are some who would react against this leftist, Marxist narrative by taking the wrong cues. Some who would say that, “Actually maybe, yeah, manhood is inherently toxic, and will revel on that and will glory in that.” So to be a man is to be toxic. It is to be oppressive. It is to be overbearing.” And I try to point out in the book that that’s wrong too. That actually gives way too much credit to the, frankly, lies of the cultural Marxists and the Left. I mean, that that’s just not true at all.
That’s certainly not the biblical picture. And I think what we need is not the cultural Marxist, but we don’t need those on the—call it on the right or wherever—who would react to them by taking on board their basic premise. We need to recover the true center ground, which is that men are called to responsibility and to leadership. And I don’t shy away from that.
Listen, I also use the words men and power together a lot—we want stronger, powerful men. And I will say, again, I want powerful men. You bet. But I want them to be powerful in the way the scripture calls them, that the model God has intended has called them, and that is authority in service to others for the good of others. And of course, the ultimate model of that is Jesus.
Albert Mohler:
Well, Senator, you’ve certainly joined an argument and you have—I think very hopefully—extended that argument. I appreciate your book. I want to tell you, it was far more than I expected from a busy United States Senator writing on a controversial issue. I can see there’s a great deal of your heart, your family, and a far deeper urgency invested in this project.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Well, thank you so much. And those are kind words from you as a theologian as well, so I appreciate it, and thank you for letting me come on and talk about it.
Albert Mohler:
Senator Josh Hawley, thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.
Many thanks to my guest, Senator Josh Hawley for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you’ll find more than 180 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab Thinking in Public.
For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com.
Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public, and until next time, keep thinking.