Friday, August 29, 2025

Part I

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We are in (Another) Boy Crisis: Every Successful Civilization Has to Figure How to Turn Boys into Men – And We Face New Challenges

Well, we are told America has a boy crisis. You probably knew that already. The lead on the Sunday opinion page of the New York Times just this week says, lonely, detached and isolated, today’s young men are adrift. We faced this problem a century ago. We can solve the boy crisis again.

Two major intellectual figures are producing this Robert D. Putnam and Richard V. Reeves, and both of them are pretty well-known. Reeves has been leading into this space for some time. Robert Putnam, of course, has been very, very famous for theories such as the problem in America, Bowling Alone, the loss of social capital. Both of them are serious figures, and I think they’re right. There’s a serious problem here, and the New York Times, interestingly, in its own archives, has all the evidence you need about what it refers to here as a boy crisis of a hundred years ago, or the boy crisis of the last century.

And so what was that? What are we talking about? Well, if you go back to the late 19th century, the early 20th century, especially in America’s big cities, you had a boy problem. And that was also preceded and accompanied by developments in European cities elsewhere where you had industrialization, you had so many people moving into the cities. You had fathers working in factories and largely out of the home during the day, you had boys on the streets and boys by the thousands and the thousands and the thousands, and guess what? You had a problem.

You had social pathologies, you had juvenile delinquency, you had boys falling behind. You had a lot of boys staying out of school. The response of the United States at the time was to really increase the importance of public schooling. And this is where you also get a lot of mandatory attendance laws in terms of policies for kids, such that it was breaking the law not to be in school. And of course, this led to all kinds of fictional accounts of boys who were truants and all the rest, but there was also an effort to try to build social capital.

And it’s not even clear that that term was accessible then, but they did have the notion that you couldn’t just say, “Hey, don’t do that anymore.” You would have to say, “Okay, here, do something productive. Do something that will build social capital.” And so you had the emergence of the YMCA, the Young Men’s Christian Association and the rise of the Boy Scouts in popularity. One of the things that this article makes clear and documents is that in a relatively short amount of time, so many of these organizations came into being, and they did. It wasn’t a coincidence trying to build social capital, try to build a new boyhood culture and a new social expectation of what it meant to grow from a boy into a youth, as was the term used then and then into a young man and successful manhood. 

Okay, now here’s what is the common concern now. And so The New York Times, which is again declaring that there is now a boy crisis is looking at statistics we just can’t ignore anymore. Boys are falling behind in terms of academic aptitude in terms of schooling, they’re falling way behind girls.

They’re showing up in smaller numbers where they should be showing up in big numbers. They’re failing to show up when it comes, for instance, to college admissions where it is incredibly lopsided now. When you look at the preponderance of young women entering colleges rather than young men, boys are falling behind. They’re falling behind in social skills, they’re falling behind vocationally as well. This particular article says that if you take young men up to about age 25, about 10% of them are neither in school or at work, that’s an incredibly large number. And these statistics, these pathologies, and you have to refer to them as pathologies.

These are problems. The New York Times didn’t run this because they want to say there’s not a problem. They recognize there is a problem. They’re calling it again, the boy crisis saying we can solve it again. And in this case, Robert D. Putnam and Richard V. Reeves are suggesting more or less that the answer to this is building social capital. Once again, building social capital that involves boys will socialize boys, turn their energies and interests into something culturally productive and try to recover lost ground.

And of course, a lot of the pathologies here are really dark. You’re talking about juvenile delinquency, you’re talking about juvenile crime. You’re talking about in many ways a lot of boys moving out of the cultural mainstream before they frankly even really get into it. You’re also talking about of course, academic issues, aptitude, work ethic. 

And one of the saddest things in this article is how much time boys, at least according to many reports say of themselves, that they’re lonely. They experience a lot of loneliness. I want to say I think a contributing factor to that, by the way, is the prevalence of modern technology, which gives boys the opportunity. All children frankly, and men as well as boys, by the way, the opportunity to just check out and go into a virtual world, video games, internet and all the rest. And one of the big problems here of course is that you’re looking at the fact that boys and girls are different. Men and women are different, and so the temptations are different, the patterns are different.

To put it more scientifically, the pathologies are different, but the fact is that girls are doing better. And of course, one of the interesting things about this article is that even as The New York Times says, we can solve the boy crisis again, and this isn’t the first time The New York Times or major media have conceded the problem. 

The interesting thing is that they have to right now in this political context, in this cultural moment, they have to come back and say, “But this doesn’t mean that we need to do something special for boys we’re not doing for girls.” It is an egalitarianism that increasingly is female-tilted, and so there’s the open accusation. You’ve seen feminists make this argument for years that if you do something special for boys, even if you have organizations just for boys, that’s discrimination. 

And yet the fact is that no human society has really found a way to grow boys into manhood without two things. And the first of them is men and in particular, fathers. And then beyond that, a structure of male-defined spaces where they learn from older men and in the company of other boys how they actually move forward into adulthood and maturity. And for a long time you even had a lot of social psychologists and others who just want to deny there’s a basic difference between boys and girls. And even today there are some who want to say it’s all environmental. It’s all by social expectation. Parents treat boys differently than girls and thus they have different interests aptitudes than girls, but there’s nothing native, natural. But frankly, that just doesn’t work. That just doesn’t work. 

I’ve often mentioned a study that I found just really illuminating years ago in which you had two 13-year-old boys and two 13-year-old girls, and the scientists just created a room. They had two chairs randomly arranged and they put two thirteen-year-old girls who don’t know each other in the room. They put the chairs facing each other, the girls locked on and had nonstop conversation for the entire length of the experiment. You put two 13-year-old boys in the room with the random chairs. They put the chairs side by side like their pilots and co-pilots on an airplane. They’re staring out an invisible windshield. They don’t look each other in the eye, not a lot of eye contact. Girls immediately lock on the eye contact. Boys, not so much the eye contact. And let’s just say the conversational space is different. Lots of empty spaces. I don’t know, what do you know? It’s just very, very different. You want to see how different it is? Go to the emergency room. How many of the kids waiting for treatment in the emergency room are girls who are in trouble because they said, “Hey guys, watch this,” It’s a completely different dynamic

This is something that successful civilizations have understood. And by the way, it’s a part of what we have to come back to time and time again is creation order. Now of course, that can be exaggerated, it can be contorted and corrupted, but frankly it has to be respected and any successful civilization understands that. One of the figures that has been very influential on me thinking about this is a Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin and years ago he made the observation, he said, “There’s not one civilization that has had a girl crisis, but every single civilization has a boy crisis.”

He says, there isn’t a single civilizational moment in history when a civilization had trouble with girls growing into womanhood. He says, but virtually every civilization is at a crisis turning boys into manhood. And I think there’s something biblical about that. I think we just understand that men and women are different. Boys and girls are different, the challenges are different, but here’s the big thing. You take this big front page opinion section article in The New York Times, and I think it does a pretty good job of laying out the problem.

I think it does a pretty good job of acknowledging there is a problem. I think the historical parts of it are pretty accurate. I’ve given a lot of attention to this in my own work, the Boy Crisis of the early 20th century, the rise of all these organizations, but I’ll just simply note that it’s the cultural powers that have basically torn all these things down. It’s the cultural Left that is subverted virtually all of these organizations, and it was cultural pressure upon the Boy Scouts to stop being the Boy Scouts and just become the Scouts, and the interesting thing is that this article makes clear that in a lot of spaces that have been dominated by boys, they’re now not equal  they’re dominated by girls or young women. 

It’s not just the college campus in so many ways, it is also certain professions. It is also even in sports becoming a differential. The rise of the number of girls in organized sports has come with a decline in the number of boys in organized sports and a disproportionate ratio. Now, I’m not saying there’s cause and effect. I’m simply saying as a society, we’re doing something wrong. Something is broken and we’re going to have to fix it, and I want to tell you what I think is missing in this article.

So Robert D. Putnam and Richard V. Reeves, again, well-known figures in American intellectual life, they’re not at all from the far left. I think they’re from the center left is where I would describe them, but both of them are pretty well credentialed members of the cultural elite. They’re both people who will show up in all the right places, cited by all the right people. Let me tell you what is not in this article, and again, it’s in The New York Times.

What’s not here is any clear acknowledgement that what’s missing in the picture is dad, because it’s politically impossible for people in this space to say creation order not only tells us there’s a difference between men and women and boys and girls. Creation order also tells us that God’s intention was that there be a mother and a father in the home. And all the way from the beginning, from the beginning, it has been clear that there are circumstances in which there’s not a mother and a father in the home, one or the other, and more often than not, just the father who’s missing.

And there were a lot of reasons for that that had to do with everything from warfare and the workplace to just different patterns among men and women. But the fact is Pitirim Sorokin would show up again to say, “One of the first tasks of a civilization is to create a context in which men have to get married and have to function as husbands and fathers in order to have standing in society in order for the society to work.” Again, it’s a disproportionate energy in pushing males in that direction as compared to females. But let’s face it, we have had a subversion of marriage, a subversion of the family we’ve had a subversion of fatherhood.

Honestly, we’ve had generations of gender feminists who have argued that being male is the problem and frankly that we need to subvert the patriarchy all over. But you know what? Where you have a boy in the picture, you pretty much need a patriarchy. That’s just the way it works. 

Interestingly, I’m going to cite the fact the same paper just about a few weeks ago ran an article by Claire Cain Miller. So again, the same newspaper, it’s a vast newspaper. So I’m not saying that people in the newspaper talked about the fact that both of these articles appeared, but it is interesting, The New York Times itself ran an article back in July. Here’s the headline “Shaped by Women, Boys Feel Dearth,” that is a lack “of Strong Male Mentors.” Now, let me just say that the fact that that’s a new story tells us a whole lot about the world in which we live. The fact that it takes journalists to point that out, and that’s considered interesting enough that it would be a headline in a news article.

You take that apart and you realize, “Wow, we are well downstream from the problem.” But the point I want to make is that as much as I agree with the writers here, with Putnam and with Reeves about so much of the problem they describe, I want to say I don’t think there’s any recovery without recovering a biblical understanding of marriage, a biblical understanding of family, an understanding of the distinctive and vital roles of fathers and mothers, of husbands and wives, and of the context of the family as the principle context in which this battle is going to be won or lost.

I want to be very clear, it’s not the only context in which this battle is won or lost, but I do want to say this: a society that thinks that you can subvert the family, subvert parenthood, you can subvert marriage as the union of a mother and father and expectation that the mother and the father will remain married, I guess you should say first, get married, be married, stay married, and raise their children together. When you subvert that, no number of organizations you create on the other side is going to come close to meeting the problem.

Well, I’ll just say also just in recent days, the New York Times had another front page article, this one with the headline due to some of the big headline news right now concerning President Trump and Washington DC, law enforcement and all the rest front page: “Juvenile crime, a DC” that’s District of Columbia “Concern for Many Years.” Front page article, again, lots of interesting stuff in it. Let me tell you what, what’s really not in it is an acknowledgement of the fact that if you take the gender breakdown of this problem, it’s not 50/50, it’s not close, and any successful civilization understands what it’s got to do to address this kind of issue.

The problem is our powers that be, don’t even want to touch the truth, and they want to subvert it and stay away from it as far as possible.

Part II

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Why Did God Create Human Beings as Male and Female? Why Does Gender Distinction Matter to God? — Dr. Mohler Responds to a Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

All right, now let’s turn to questions. I appreciate all the questions, listeners send in such good questions. You can write me at mail@albertmohler.com. 

A listener writes in who teaches in a Christian high school. She says this, “Currently I am designing a unit about gender identity from a biblical worldview. I would love to know your thoughts on these questions. Number one, why do God make human beings male and female? Number two, why does gender distinction matter to God?”

Okay, good questions. I want to press back a little bit. However, on the question of gender identity, I think that’s a construct we at least need to question up front. In other words, what would gender identity mean other than a male knowing he’s a male and a female, knowing she’s a female. And a male, knowing that he’s not a female and knowing who a female is and a female knowing that she’s not a male and knowing who a male is. It seems to me that that’s the pretty comprehensive scope of gender that we would want as Christians to teach, that’s it.

So in other words, gender identity is biological sex. Now I know that increasingly in the culture you hear people say, “No, biological sex and gender identity are two different things.” Well, I think we can understand that in a fallen world, confusion can certainly enter the picture and one can have an internal apprehension of, I guess, gender different than biological sex. But the Christian worldview is that they can’t be separated. And so biological sex actually does establish what should be recognized, owned, assumed, and celebrated as one’s gender.

Even the use of these terms is somewhat slippery. The use of gender in this way as an English word is fairly new. And it really came about, at least in part as an effort to say, “Here’s a distinction between biological sex and what may follow in terms of identity, behavior, et cetera.” So we need to press back against that, but if we are going to talk about gender identity, I think we have to start with the premise. It is biological sex, that is what is determinative. And then you ask the question, so I’m assuming you’re with me on this.

You then ask the question, “Why did God make human beings male and female?” Now I think the clearest answer to that is what we find in Genesis 1 in the text where God speaks. And God says that his purpose in creating the human creature in his image, male and female, was for biological reproduction. Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Now in biblical theology, that’s filling the earth, not just with babies, it’s filling the earth with fellow image bearers, which increases the visible reality of the glory of God.

God is glorified when a man and a woman come together in marriage and unite, and it takes a man and a woman in a unitive act, that brings about procreation, that allows us to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Now in Genesis 2, it is also made clear in biblical theology that there is a complementarity of the man and the woman and a common need, the one for the other that is a part of creation order itself. It was God who said it is not good for Adam, the man to be alone.

It was the creator who made the complement, the mate, the woman for the man, and presented her to the man. It was Adam, informed by God’s revelation, who understood exactly who the woman was, who Eve was later to be named. And he said, “This is now flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones.” But she’s woman, she’s different. She’s absolutely necessary. The completion of humanity requires the man and the woman in complementarity and common need and in union.

This becomes of course a picture of all things of the relationship between Christ and the church. In other words, it’s not just a minor theme in biblical theology, it’s something that is picked up without embarrassment in the New Testament where the church is described as the bride of Christ and thus there is a need and a fulfillment that is found in Genesis 1 and in Genesis 2, and that need and fulfillment points to an even greater need and fulfillment.

So if we ask why did God make human beings male and female? That’s the way he showed his glory in creation, in the pattern of complementarity. The fittingness of the one for the other, the need of the one for the other, the completion of the one in the other. So no apology for that. Full speed ahead. You got biblical theology to tell you exactly how to address this. 

Number two, “why does gender distinction matter to God?” Oh, this is so good. I am so thankful I had the question phrased this way. This is really, really helpful. Why does gender distinction matter to God? It’s because the Old Testament, Genesis, specifically Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 tells us that God’s creative act is all about making distinctions. That’s exactly what we find in Genesis 1. The creation distinction between the waters and the dry land. The distinction between the sky and the surface of earth. The distinction between animals of different kinds.

The distinction between birds and creeping things on the earth. The distinction between all animals and the human God made in his image. These distinctions, every single one of them are important. The distinction between human beings and all the other creatures is absolutely essential to moral sanity. It’s absolutely essential to biblical theology. It’s absolutely essential to the Christian worldview, and it’s just great to have a question like this.

Why does it matter to God? It’s because a good deal of Scripture is about nothing other than God making distinctions. Those who are in Christ and those who are not. Those who are in the church and those who are not, those who worship him and those who worship the idols, the distinctions are just made abundantly clear and the distinction between male and female, evidently it is a divine mandate just as clearly as the distinction between the waters and the land.

All right, I’m thankful for a Christian teacher teaching as a Christian and teaching biblical truth in a Christian school about these matters. So God bless you.

Part III

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You Say That Christians are in a ‘Battle of Ideas.’ Where Do You See That in Scripture? — Dr. Mohler Responds to a Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

All right, another question comes in, this one comes in from a man listening and I appreciate him listening carefully. He said, “You said Christians are called to a battle of ideas.” And then he asked, “Where does Scripture say this? And how is it defined in Scripture?” Okay, that’s a great question.

I’m just so accustomed to saying Christians are called to a battle of ideas. I think most Christians kind of intuitively know it, but I think it’s a good thing to ask where does this come from? I want to go back to the Old Testament again. I think one of the clearest things we need to see in terms of the battle of ideas in the Old Testament is something as clear as 1 Kings 18 with the battle of the gods, so to speak, where you have the confrontation between Elijah and the prophets of Baal, and it’s a classic confrontation, which is a battle of ideas.

It’s a battle that comes down to of course, our worship. And it’s in that cataclysmic battle when it comes to the prophets of Baal that God makes very clear the battle of ideas is a battle of eternities, a battle of good and evil. It’s a battle of the one true and living God against all idols, idols of the mind is something the Bible also makes very, very clear, it’s not just idols of wood and stone, it’s also idols of the mind. 

This is made very clear, if you’re looking for a biblical text, the text to which I would direct you is 2 Corinthians 10. In 2 Corinthians 10, beginning in verse three, Paul writes, “For though we walk in the flesh, we’re not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds.” Listen to verse five. “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience when our obedience is complete.”

Okay, so there it is, black and white, right in the biblical text. We destroy strongholds. We destroy, what? Arguments. There’s the battle of ideas and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God. So there you have a 2 Corinthians 10 analogy to 1 Kings 18, where it’s a battle that is a battle of ideas. Yes, but as both in 1 Kings and in 2 Corinthians, we find the battle of ideas is really a battle between God and the idols. It always is.

It’s against truth and error. It’s against divine revelation and untruth and wow, I thank you for the question. It’s good to be reminded. The language of Paul in 2 Corinthians 10 just couldn’t be stronger. We wage warfare against arguments and lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God. That’d be a good subhead for what we try to do on this program, and I thank you for reminding me.

Part IV

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Do Mandatory Reporting Laws Violate First Amendment Rights? — Dr. Mohler Responds to a Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

I got kind of a hard question sent in by a listener that has to do with developments in the state of Washington, and this is something perhaps you have heard about. The Department of Justice, the Trump administration has issued a temporary injunction against a new law in the state of Washington, Washington state that would’ve required all clergy to have reported, it’s called mandatory reporting of child abuse and neglect. A challenge to that was brought by Catholic bishops because of what they define as the sanctity of the confessional and the sacrament of the confession. And so this is an evangelical writing: “Do we have the same kind of concerns?” And I just want to respond to that. I think we can do so pretty quickly. I am a proponent of mandatory report laws.

I think this is the only way we can protect vulnerable people. And I think it’s also a rightful understanding of the New Testament relationship between the Christian and the state, the Christian and government. I think government has a rightful responsibility here. Now, government can overplay that, government can do this wrongly, but government does have a responsibility in the maintenance of order and the protection of the vulnerable. And so I think mandatory reporting is absolutely necessary. And I think also by experience we can see where there was a failure to report that sometimes led to further abuse, worse abuse, just the spread of abuse.

We need to understand that when someone comes to us, even in a pastoral conversation and says something that triggers a mandatory report, I think it’s a part of our Christian responsibility, even the responsibility of a Christian pastor to say, “At this point, I have a responsibility to report this.” Now, that’s not morally uncomplicated. I’ll admit that. That’s not morally uncomplicated in a context in which someone comes for counsel. But the specific question here has to do with the Catholic sacrament and the entire Catholic notion of confession and priestly, the sanctity, the priestly confidentiality in that context.

The listener’s asking, “Do we have a specific analogy to that? A match to that?” The answer is no, no, no. This is where the fact that we don’t believe there’s any biblical basis for a sacred ministry becomes really, really clear. We don’t believe in a priestly ministry in which we see the preacher as a priest who is standing in mediating between the sinner and God and being able to declare the forgiveness of sins. We don’t understand that to be a part of the pastoral role at all.

We don’t believe that to be a biblical practice at all. We do believe in biblical conversations, biblical counsel, we do believe in pastoral conversations, but those are very different than the understanding of the confessional in Roman Catholic theology and practice. And quite frankly, I’m in no position to speak to this in Washington state. I am in a position to say the rightly ordered pastor, I believe, should not see himself in a position analogous to a Catholic priest, and there is no corresponding sacrament.

And I think we should see pastoral conversations as sacred, but that does not mean that in legal terms they can always be secret.