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Chapter 1

A Crisis of Maturity

Grandchildren are the crown of the aged, and the glory of sons is their fathers.

Proverbs 17:6

Just posing the question “are you a real man?” can elicit anxiety or even anger from men. There seems to be an overarching insecurity about masculinity today at best, and debilitating confusion at worst. So many questions arise when we begin to speak of masculinity. Is “manliness” really something we can and should distinguish from, say, womanliness or humanity in general? If it is real, doesn’t it just happen? Doesn’t talking about it make it sound like an affectation? Is there anyone who can really say someone is a “real man” or not? Is that not silly and antiquated? Is it just preferences and tastes that land somewhere on a spectrum between sensitive and aggressive? If masculinity is really something so separate and distinct from childhood and femininity, where and how do we make that distinction? Does that not communicate, somehow, that women can’t do something men can do? Is that okay? Much of this confusion is cleared up when we receive willingly what God has communicated to us about being men and women through nature and divine revelation. “Male and female he created them,” and we know that all of creation was created good. God said so. Further, after the creation of man, God said it was “very good” (Genesis 1:27, 31).

In short, a Catholic happily and easily distinguishes femininity and masculinity. In creation, God divides things out of other things, not for the sake of division but for the sake of union and communion — they are divided out in the act of creating but then brought back into the communion of the whole of creation itself. He divides the light from the dark, but they are in communion in the day and night, with dawn and dusk showing their beauty in union. Woman was divided from man, but they, too, are brought into union and communion in the “wholeness” of marriage.

This book is not primarily about the distinction between man and woman, but between boy and man. There’s an obvious difference that we can view in the physical realm between a small boy and a grown man, but there are also cultural and even spiritual differences we can observe as well. Saint Paul describes how he recognizes two different stages of life in the boy and man, and how he is confident in his transition from the former into the latter. “When I was a child,” he explains, “I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” (1 Cor 13:11, emphasis added). This distinction does not seem as easy for us today. Our society, with its increasingly grotesque masculine identity crisis, cannot define “the things of a man.” What exactly is given up when a boy becomes a man?

Cultures and societies in other times and places, including Saint Paul’s society in the ancient world, had clear demarcations of manhood. Even today, many cultures in the world have established rites of passage from boyhood to manhood. For men in the West, however, the course to manhood today is murky, unattractive, or completely obscured. I’ve been involved with intentional mentoring of young men for a decade, and many of them have looked me in the eye and asked bluntly: “How will I know when I am a man?”

The fact that this question is so difficult to answer today reveals our deeper problems. Often, we demand that boys “grow up,” but then we continue to treat them like boys and do not provide ways for them to grapple with and understand masculinity. Boys and men in our society today are unfinished, and masculinity is more confused than ever.

Building on a Strong Foundation

Young men are struggling to grow up and “give up childish ways,” often because they literally keep on living as they did as children without marrying and growing families of their own. Many young men today are avoiding setting out on their own. They forgo marriage¹ and instead choose to live with their parents,² play video games,³ and look at pornography⁴ for much of their day. I’ve listened to men explain in great detail the acceptability of playing video games for hours on end, even when they do have a family. Perhaps games oriented toward mission and adventure are filling a void in their masculinity.

To put this in context, just look at some great men of history: Don Juan of Austria led the Holy League in the famous Battle of Lepanto (1571), thus saving Europe from Ottoman invasion and preserving what we today know as Europe when he was twenty-four. Meriwether Lewis was still in his twenties when he and William Clark led an expedition across North America. Alexander the Great died at age thirty-three (and managed to conquer most of the known world before that).

Yet today we boast that young adults can stay on their parents’ insurance until they are twenty-six. When I set out to write this book, I was told to keep it at a sixth-grade reading level — meaning I could not count on a readership with communicating abilities beyond those of a twelve-year-old adolescent. As I’m working on this project, the word “adulting” has entered our lexicon: young adults performing mundane acts of responsibility while praising themselves as if these things were remarkable. “Opening a bank account today,” someone might say on Twitter, with the hashtag “adulting.” The “adulting” phenomenon is yet another indication that many grown-ups today aren’t sure how to “be” an adult, so they just act like one and hope it works.

Missing Maturity

At best, our modern society is delaying maturity for men, and, at worst, we’re punishing it. The delaying occurs primarily when we continue to treat young men as boys. They are often ready for great acts and sacrifices — worthy uses of their strength — but find themselves ushered around in the same way they were in kindergarten, even having to ask to use the restroom. Compare that to an Amish boy who, by age thirteen, is heavily involved with the working of animals, care of the land, and working alongside the men of his community.

Boys today are also often in environments where their quite normal rambunctiousness and desire for feats of strength are punished or labeled as violent. Sometimes they’re carrying on a tradition of wounding — they hurt people because they have been hurt, so causing pain is a way of life for them — and their outbursts do become violent. But instead of being handed over to men to be matured, they are placed in even stricter and tighter places. I have a small farm, and I regularly have to walk past a class of “trouble boys” in a building that has a farm store and other offices related to agriculture. Those boys sit in a room all day, are escorted to the bathroom, and are then watched closely during recess. If you look at them, you can see that they have strength, a desire to experience freedom, and a deep boredom, nearing on despair. I’ve seen boys like this my whole life. I grew up around them — the “trouble boys.” Many of them were helped by my father, who handed them tools and put them to work. I’ve had “that sort” on my farm, and one of the best things to do with “trouble boys” is to hand them an ax and get them to help you split wood. When you allow them to use their strength in that way and entrust them with a meaningful job, you can almost see a change when you look them in the eye and say, “You did a great job, and I’m proud of you.” To them it sounds a lot like, “You are my beloved son and in you I am well pleased.” They don’t need walls and supervisors. They need to join the men and be taught and affirmed in their masculinity.

I recall being on a coed hike to a mountaintop with hundreds of teenagers. This was a relatively easy hike, and I remember the leaders having a difficult time keeping one group of boys from “acting up.” But then one of the girls severely hurt her leg in a fall, and those same boys completely transformed into young men, eager to use their strength at the service of this young woman. They built a rather elaborate means to carry her, and all rotated shifts helping her make it to the top of the mountain, and then down again. It was a visible sign of their maturity, and it all occurred through a drastic change in what was needed from them. They changed from raucous boys to heroic men. How many “troubled” boys out there need to experience that change for themselves and those around them?

Few describe the societal loss of masculinity and accompanying rites of passage better than Robert Bly, an American poet and essayist. Ironically, Bly approves of the overthrow of the paternal order of society, because he sees patriarchy as essentially repressive. He does, however, recognize the issues of immature men, pointing out that they act like squabbling siblings and make up imaginary worlds to live in. “Where repression [patriarchy] was before,” Bly writes, “fantasy will now be.”⁵ In other words, the fatherly void caused by the masculinity crisis (because men that fail to be men fail to be fathers) is not being filled in healthy ways, so now all we have is immaturity. But Bly also recognizes that now that the father is no longer the “king” of society, there is really no place for boys to be initiated into. There’s no male “direction” in life, and certainly no meaningful end or purpose.

Much of the confusion we face is caused by the lack of the cultural rites of passage we once had. Bly writes, “With no effective rituals of initiation, and no real way to know when our slow progress toward adulthood has reached its goal, young men in our culture go around in circles. Those who should be adults find it difficult or impossible to offer help to those behind. … Observers describe many contemporaries as ‘children with children of their own.’”⁶ Note that Bly refers to “effective” rites of passage, not just programs and curriculums that will upload the right data that will make boys grow up. We have a cultural problem, not a problem of needing to present the right information.

Sadly, because Bly rejects the Western tradition he came from, he himself seems to go in circles, offering esoteric observations but failing to provide real ways out of the problem. We, as Christians and inheritors of the wisdom of the Church, have a challenge before us. But we also have hope, because we hope in the perfect man, Jesus Christ. And on that sure foundation, we also have a great cultural inheritance from the faith of our fathers — the stories and traditions of the great men who have gone before us. But we still face a challenge, because none of us has been spared in the crisis of immaturity.

Adolescent Christianity

The Church is anything but exempt from the maturity crisis. Men are leaving the Church in great numbers — and because boys always imitate the men around them, they are leaving too. Matthew Christoff of The New Emangelization Project has put together a “Catholic Man-Crisis Fact Sheet,” which collects data from a huge variety of sources, from Gallup Polls to sociological researchers like Christian Smith to the Church-sponsored report called CARA (the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate).⁷ Here’s just a sampling of those findings:

• “About 11 million adult men in the U.S. were raised Catholic but left the faith.”

• “55% [of men] agree that they ‘don’t get anything out of the Mass.’”

• “Only about 1/3 of Catholic men (33%) say they attend Mass on a weekly basis.”

• “Less than half of Catholic men (48%) feel that ‘religion is very important in their lives; this compares to 74% for Evangelical men.’”

This is going to have an effect on the next generation, and it already has. The period of adolescence is a time when a core identity is being formed, so young men are naturally learning from the men they see. It’s not looking good. Only 37 percent of regular Mass attendees are adult men,⁸ and 70 percent to 90 percent of catechetical leaders are women.⁹ This clearly leads young men, as one Notre Dame study puts it, to “assume that serious religious studies are a women’s business.”¹⁰ It should not be surprising then that, in 2005, fewer than 20 percent of young Catholic men still in the Church said they would never consider leaving the Church — which means 80 percent of them would or have considered it.¹¹ Consider that the same report in 1987 found 40 percent of young men said they would never leave the Church. That’s a 100 percent increase in young men with a foot out the door.¹² Young men are leaving the Church in the precise period when they are trying to navigate their way to manhood. This tells us that they perceive that becoming a man necessarily means leaving faith behind as something boys and women do. By grace some come back, but the consequences and baggage linger and often need serious work before spiritual progress can be made. Many who return struggle deeply with sins and wounds gathered in their younger years that hurt their ability to be faithful fathers and leaders in their home now.

The present reality makes it clear: we must face the crisis head-on in our churches. Today many churches are experiencing a void of spiritual grown-ups. Even among the few men who remain active in their faith, many lack spiritual maturity. Thomas E. Bergler, a Protestant professor at Huntington University in Indiana, has argued that modern American Christianity is actually stuck in a sort of spiritual adolescence. His book The Juvenilization of Christianity traces the historical development of what we know today as “youth ministry” and how it has been imported into the broader Christian landscape.¹³ Too often in our churches we have appealed to youth as youth and left them there, and they grow up into what Bergler calls “adolescent Christians.” Bergler thinks this is part of the origin of the hyper-emphasis on the “personal relationship with Jesus” movement and “falling in love with God” sermons. These are not bad messages in themselves, and reaching young people is a good thing, but taken in isolation and without a trajectory toward maturity or a connection to older generations, puppy-love faith can promote a culture of spiritual immaturity.

How does this immature spirituality take shape? Writes Bergler:

Adolescent Christians see the faith as incomplete unless it is affecting them emotionally. They are less likely than adults to settle for a faith that offers only dutiful adherence to particular doctrine, rules, or institutions. … They are drawn to religious practices that produce emotional highs and sometimes assume that experiencing strong feelings is the same thing as spiritual authenticity. They may be tempted to believe that God’s main role in their lives is to help them feel better or to heal their emotional pain. Juvenilized adults agree that a main purpose of Christianity is to help them feel better about their problems.¹⁴

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia has voiced similar observations of our culture and our view of faith and morals. He noted that appeal to youth with youth makes some sense, speaking of seeing Jesus in a youthful way for example. But Jesus, he said, did not remain a youth, “[he] matured into an adult man of courage, self-mastery, and mercy guided by justice and truth.” In the same discourse, the archbishop also framed our broader cultural crisis as a crisis of seemingly intentional immaturity, framing it as a defining feature:

The wealthy societies of today’s world that style themselves as “developed” — including most notably my own — are in fact underdeveloped in their humanity. They’re frozen in a kind of moral adolescence; an adolescence which they’ve chosen for themselves and now seek to impose upon others.¹⁵

How, then, can we stop all this immaturity? The question is better formulated this way: how can we bring men out of immaturity and into maturity? That is the purpose and logic behind a rite of passage — to bring people out of childishness into maturity. But the movement from boy to man is just one form of a rite of passage. In order to help men, specifically, move away from boyishness, we have to understand how and why a rite of passage works at all so as to avoid spinning our wheels with more over-promising programs, or worse, causing harm.