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RICH LUSK | Virtue and Polarity: Rebuilding Masculinity in a Feminist World
Episode 199 • 4th October 2024 • The Will Spencer Podcast • Will Spencer
00:00:00 01:39:07

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The final episode of the Renaissance of Men podcast marks a significant transition as Will Spencer welcomes Pastor Rich Lusk to discuss the pressing issues surrounding masculinity and femininity in today's culture.

They delve into the challenges men face when seeking meaningful relationships amidst a backdrop of shifting societal norms, where many women are increasingly radicalized and men are left feeling frustrated and disconnected. Lusk emphasizes the importance of virtue and polarity in relationships, arguing that a strong foundation in godly character is essential for both men and women.

The conversation further explores the detrimental effects of overbearing maternal influences and the need for fathers to reclaim their roles in guiding their families. Ultimately, this episode serves as a poignant reflection on the journey of understanding masculinity and femininity, offering insights on how to navigate the complexities of modern relationships while fostering a healthy environment for future generations.

Takeaways:

  • The Renaissance of Men podcast concludes its journey, transitioning into The Will Spencer Podcast, marking a significant change for the host and listeners.
  • The conversation emphasizes the importance of understanding masculinity and femininity within the context of modern culture and its challenges.
  • Listeners are encouraged to seek a deeper understanding of gender dynamics to foster healthier relationships and family structures in their lives.
  • The episode highlights a shift in church dynamics, with more men returning to church and the implications of this trend for families and society.
  • Pastor Lusk discusses the need for churches to address the challenges women face while also emphasizing the importance of traditional family roles.
  • The discussion underscores that both men and women must take responsibility for their actions and choices in relationships to create a balanced environment.

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Transcripts

Will Spencer:

My name is Will Spencer, and you're listening to the very last episode of the Renaissance of Men podcast.

Will Spencer:

Next week, God willing, this is going to become the Will Spencer podcast.

Will Spencer:

That's right.

Will Spencer:

We've almost made it.

Will Spencer:

I hope you're all as excited as I am.

Will Spencer:

Thank you all for coming with me on this remarkable journey and to officially close out four years of the renaissance of men.

Will Spencer:

My guest this week is the pastor at Trinity Presbyterian Church and the author of Measures of the Mission.

Will Spencer:

Please welcome Pastor Rich Lusk.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You are the Renaissance.

Will Spencer:

Well, here we are, four years after the first episode of the Renaissance of men, and a lot has changed.

Will Spencer:

Basically everything.

Will Spencer:

I'd like to tell you a story you've probably heard piecemeal in other places.

Will Spencer:

what it means to be a man in:

Will Spencer:

The Lord of the Rings movies were just coming out at the time.

Will Spencer:

The fellowship of the ring was just about to drop, and the professor was talking about how the different male characters of the series represented different kinds of masculinity.

Will Spencer:

Seeing the contrast between the traditional style heroes of Aragorn and Gandalf juxtaposed with the more humble but no less heroic everyday, average men like Frodo, Sam, merry, and Pippin got me thinking more broadly about valid ways to be a man.

Will Spencer:

I thought that because I never quite fit in with the frat boy jock archetype, there was something broken about me as a man.

Will Spencer:

I really believed that.

Will Spencer:

But that Carl Jung class helped me see that there are many correct ways to be a man, so long as he embodies certain characteristics, like discipline, integrity, honor, and more.

Will Spencer:

As my friend Glenn Barker, my anniversary guest last year, used to say to me, men are like trees.

Will Spencer:

No two trees are the same, but all trees have the same things in common.

Will Spencer:

uth of that dimly way back in:

Will Spencer:

That is when I began to assemble myself as a man, understanding somehow that I had the capacity to rework many things about myself that I didn't like or that made me far less effective and happy than I knew I was capable of being.

Will Spencer:

Because, believe me, if you had met me in the early two thousands, you might not have believed I'm the same guy.

Will Spencer:

Sometimes even I don't.

Will Spencer:

Fast forward to:

Will Spencer:

That's when I went on my new warrior training adventure, a men's initiation retreat held by the Mankind Project, which was also based on jungian psychology, and the book king, warrior, magician, lover by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette.

Will Spencer:

You may recall that I had Doug Gillette on my podcast a couple years ago.

Will Spencer:

On that retreat in northern California, I saw more than 100 men grappling with the same questions I was about masculinity, purpose, and meaning.

Will Spencer:

These werent therapists, just average men from all walks of life, from beekeepers to neurosurgeons, high school seniors to senior citizens.

Will Spencer:

And the same organization had initiated 60,000 men worldwide, including black men in the inner cities and at risk teens.

Will Spencer:

In that moment, I realized that my own small questions about masculinity were much bigger than just me and included men literally around the world.

Will Spencer:

From that point forward, I dived in.

Will Spencer:

I joined men's groups, facilitated men's retreats, and more.

Will Spencer:

Every week, I was working to free myself for more than 35 years of expectations placed on me by the leftist tyranny of feminism.

Will Spencer:

By:

Will Spencer:

I accomplished all that by the grace of God, in less than two years.

Will Spencer:

Fast forward then to:

Will Spencer:

Suddenly, I had discovered a massive online movement of men that had been around for almost two decades, and they were speaking openly and honestly about money, women, and fitness.

Will Spencer:

These were performance oriented subjects that the mankind project explicitly left out of.

Will Spencer:

Now, at this point, I was surprised, because on one hand, I had the men's inner work world of the Mankind project, which had benefited me massively.

Will Spencer:

But on the other hand, there was the men's outer work world of the manosphere, which was also answering questions that I had had for years.

Will Spencer:

Why didn't these two worlds know about each other?

Will Spencer:

At the same time, I also discovered Alison Armstrong's work, particularly her books, the Queen's code and keys to the Kingdom.

Will Spencer:

Now, here was a woman writing deep truths about men from a place of genuine love and appreciation.

Will Spencer:

Why had I never heard any of this before?

Will Spencer:

So the Mankind project, the manosphere, Alison Armstrong, and Jordan Peterson's overnight success all basically landed on me at the same time, while I was on the road, climbing mountains, sailing oceans, trekking deserts, and discovering who I was by subjecting myself to hard challenge after hard challenge.

Will Spencer:

urned to the United States in:

Will Spencer:

There I was, alone in my empty apartment, and I had the choice to sink or swim.

Will Spencer:

So in one of the greatest gifts I've ever given myself, I put my knowledge to the test and began transforming myself based on what I knew.

Will Spencer:

That's when I found my way into online men's groups on telegram and discovered that men suddenly valued what I had to say in a way they never had before.

Will Spencer:

I had answers for them about what it means to be a man, both inwardly and outwardly.

Will Spencer:

But these werent answers id created for myself.

Will Spencer:

They were ones id been taught and had tested when everyone could still go outside.

Will Spencer:

Thats when I realized that I had been shown something special, that there was, in fact, a worldwide movement happening to reappraise and rediscover what it means to be a man.

Will Spencer:

Id gotten a glimpse of it in:

Will Spencer:

And while traveling the world, id also traversed the landscape of the entire dialogue about masculinity at a pretty high resolution.

Will Spencer:

I even understood at that point that men and women had a shared destiny together as husbands and wives.

Will Spencer:

It was the only arrangement that made sense.

Will Spencer:

So even in:

Will Spencer:

I then felt it was my duty to pass this knowledge on to other men and women.

Will Spencer:

Not on my own authority, though, to point people to the leaders I knew who were already doing it.

Will Spencer:

ted the renaissance of men in:

Will Spencer:

You didn't know me at the time, but believe me when I say the last thing I would ever choose for myself is to be on a microphone.

Will Spencer:

My old cell phone didn't used to have an outbound voicemail message on it, because when I'd record one, the automated system would play it back for me.

Will Spencer:

And I hated the sound of my own voice.

Will Spencer:

I couldn't stand to hear it.

Will Spencer:

In fact, I would go out of my way to avoid it.

Will Spencer:

But I knew that if I didn't talk about this, no one would.

Will Spencer:

e on a Saturday night back in:

Will Spencer:

The renaissance of men was also not supposed to be just a podcast, but a documentary series.

Will Spencer:

at I'd studied, and in summer:

Will Spencer:

I traveled 14,000 miles over the continental US, conducted 25 interviews, and recorded over 60 hours of footage.

Will Spencer:

days, and by October:

Will Spencer:

That trailer was the key that opened countless doors for me.

Will Spencer:

It showed that I wasn't just another guy with a podcast, but a man with a vision.

Will Spencer:

Many have wondered how I traveled so far, so fast, especially through the manosphere.

Will Spencer:

That trailer is how it, in the 20 minutes overview that I produced a year later, is what the renaissance of men was really supposed to be.

Will Spencer:

You can find both the trailer and the overview in the show notes.

Will Spencer:

By the end of:

Will Spencer:

Behind the scenes, I was working with the top documentary fundraiser in the entire world.

Will Spencer:

But all of the accomplished men I interviewed could only understand their own bottom lines.

Will Spencer:

None of them grasped that a movement that benefited all men, and not to mention women, would benefit them as well.

Will Spencer:

They were all asking, but what's in it for me?

Will Spencer:

Without seeing that a rising tide could lift all boats, the true short sightedness of men that I admired was one of the great disappointments of my life.

Will Spencer:

Then Andrew Tate ate their lunch, and one by one, all but a couple of these men fell into personal sins and crises, extremist political ideologies on both the right and the left, and more.

Will Spencer:

But by that point, I'd already made my exit from the world of masculinity into the world of reformed theology, which has welcomed me with open arms as a brother and in many ways a refugee and casualty.

Will Spencer:

Those of you who have listened to the podcast from the beginning have talked to me about your experience, hearing me make that transition.

Will Spencer:

I'd never thought of it that way before, that it would be so obvious to I can literally only imagine what that's been like for you, considering that I've had backstage access to the trip, and it makes me appreciate your loyalty to me and to this podcast even more so.

Will Spencer:

Once:

Will Spencer:

The moment that men had to change the world had passed, in part because so many of them failed to give God the glory, choosing instead to try and glorify themselves.

Will Spencer:

I could say volumes about that, but as a result, the manosphere failed to christianize and died.

Will Spencer:

The red pill did the same and has since become a zombie cringe version of what it once was.

Will Spencer:

Meanwhile, the church, praise God, has picked up the call and has begun to understand that speaking truth to men, about themselves and about women is the future of the church and the west, and that it must be done, no matter the cost.

Will Spencer:

Which brings me to my guest this week.

Will Spencer:

His name is Rich Lusk, and he's a husband, father, and the pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

Will Spencer:

And in God's incredible providence, there is no greater guest than I can imagine to close out the renaissance of men.

Will Spencer:

For in many ways, unbeknownst to even me, when I booked Pastor Lusk, he embodies many of the themes I've just outlined to you from my own journey.

Will Spencer:

First, he's explored much of the writing of the manosphere and the men's movement, describing it as the folk wisdom of the red pill.

Will Spencer:

Naturally, he's read Michael Foster, Aaron Wren, and more, but he's also read and written broadly about Rollo Tomasi and Jordan Peterson, digesting their wisdom, such as it is for christian audiences.

Will Spencer:

Second, Pastor Lusk leads a Crec church in Birmingham, Alabama.

Will Spencer:

And while I'm far from an expert in american denominations, I know enough to say that the crec is one of the few heading in a godly and faithful direction to that point.

Will Spencer:

And third, I heard in a recent interview Pastor Doug Wilson describe Rich Lusk as the, quote, oatmeal stout of federal vision.

Will Spencer:

And rich is also good friends with the pastor of the church I'm currently a member of.

Will Spencer:

In fact, my church sanctuary is where I heard rich lusks name for the first time in positive terms, which to me, after this interview seem well deserved.

Will Spencer:

So consider that in God's providence, outside of my own intention, Pastor Rich Lusk, as the final guest of the renaissance of men, represents aspects of my own journey in very particular ways.

Will Spencer:

He's read and mastered the material that I was steeped in and that shaped my life for years.

Will Spencer:

And he is highly regarded by two men.

Will Spencer:

because while my professor in:

Will Spencer:

So what youre hearing today, right now isnt the end of just a four year journey.

Will Spencer:

Its actually the end of an adventure that ive been on for 23 years, literally half of my life.

Will Spencer:

Its stunning, actually.

Will Spencer:

Praise God.

Will Spencer:

Thank you all for being a part of it, and I cant wait for you to see whats coming next.

Will Spencer:

In our conversation, Pastor Lusk and I discussed the tropes of women centric religion, his sympathies to angry men, what happens when her emotions run the show, fulfilling the creation mandate in a fallen world the protected class of mothers, masculinity as emotional grounding.

Will Spencer:

And finally, the best thing you can do for your kids if you enjoy this podcast.

Will Spencer:

Thank you.

Will Spencer:

Please give us a five star rating on Spotify and a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

Will Spencer:

If this is your first time here, welcome.

Will Spencer:

I release new episodes every week about the christian counterculture, masculine virtue, and the family.

Will Spencer:

To all my listeners.

Will Spencer:

I'm deeply grateful for your time and attention.

Will Spencer:

Thank you.

Will Spencer:

And if you prefer an ad free listening experience, as I do, please visit my substack at willspencerpod dot substack.com and become a paid subscriber for weekly ad free audio and video episodes.

Will Spencer:

And please welcome this week's guests on the podcast for the last episode ever of the renaissance of Men, the pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama, Rich Lusk.

Will Spencer:

Pastor Lusk, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It is great to be with you, Will.

Will Spencer:

I've really enjoyed, I think we connected a bit on Twitter, and I've enjoyed your tweets lately.

Will Spencer:

You've just been crushing it.

Will Spencer:

Extra base hits.

Will Spencer:

I think I described it.

Will Spencer:

Thank you.

Will Spencer:

Thank you so much for that.

Will Spencer:

I've been looking forward to this conversation.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah, thanks.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah, I'm kind of new to Twitter or x as far as posting, so it's been kind of an interesting experience the last couple months, but very glad and thankful to connect with people like yourself.

Will Spencer:

Yeah, it's a very cool networking tool, and it's a great way for getting ideas out quickly.

Will Spencer:

For better or worse.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I suppose it is.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yes, yes.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And you can I just, every day I'm on there, I see a lot of tweets, and I'm like, this is not going to age very well.

Will Spencer:

I think that's probably the point.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I put out stuff that will, but it's just.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But yeah, it is very useful.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So very thankful for it.

Will Spencer:

So one of the things that you tweet about that I've really enjoyed is you're one of the few men in the general christian space today who's actually explored many of the manosphere writings.

Will Spencer:

And that was how I came into this world.

Will Spencer:

I came in through the manosphere and also the mythopoetic men's movement before that.

Will Spencer:

So I was exploring the men's movement for, I guess, a decade of, before I discovered the reformed theological world.

Will Spencer:

And what I appreciate is that you've tried to harvest the wisdom and perspective of that world, such as it is, and make it relevant to christian men today.

Will Spencer:

So just to sort of start off the conversation, I'd like to share the context that we're talking in.

Will Spencer:

So this, I'd like to share just a quick graph.

Will Spencer:

This came out yesterday from the Wall Street Journal.

Will Spencer:

And so perhaps you've seen this.

Will Spencer:

I'm going to share this on my screen.

Will Spencer:

The top issues for voters both.

Will Spencer:

You did see this.

Will Spencer:

Yeah.

Will Spencer:

So you can look at the.

Will Spencer:

And this is the Wall Street Journal.

Will Spencer:

This isn't some random pollster.

Will Spencer:

This is a very high level, well respected, center right ish kind of outlet.

Will Spencer:

So obviously, the economy is by and large the most important issue for men, along with democracy, immigration, inflation.

Will Spencer:

But you can see that for women ages 18 to 29.

Will Spencer:

So these are young people.

Will Spencer:

You have abortion.

Will Spencer:

For women, it's like 22%.

Will Spencer:

I'm not sure if these are percentages and anti right wing ideology.

Will Spencer:

So this conversation is kind of crystallized in a very public way in the public dialogue.

Will Spencer:

So that's the context that we're talking in today.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah, that's good.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And it is interesting what I would call the gender voting divide, where men, and especially young men, are skewing in a much more conservative direction and women are being radicalized in a leftward direction.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That is one of the most, I think, significant trends of our day.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I think as christians, for me, as a pastor, it's very important to understand what's happening, why these trends are happening, why men.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I just saw in the last few days, Jamie Brambrick, I don't know if you know that name, but he did something on how young men are coming back to church.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And the numbers show, or wintry night, also did an article on this, which, which was, got similar data to what you just showed.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so a lot of people are noticing this trend where men are coming back to church in droves.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And for the first time in modern history, first time in modern american history, you've got more men attending church than women.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay, that's really different.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, there's kind of this trope for a long time that women are more religious, women are more friendly to the christian faith.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Of course, sometimes people put a slant on that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Well, that the church kind of caters to women, that kind of thing.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But certainly for at least 150 years, the church in America has been significantly more female than male in terms of regular attendance tropes in country music and pop culture, where you've got a godly woman married to a not so godly man and shield Dracula him to church sometime.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And that kind of, that's kind of been, those are the stereotypes that we've lived with that have been just woven into the fabric of our culture.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And now, all of a sudden, in a very short span of time, we're seeing that flip flop where women are leaving the church in droves and men are coming back to the church in a pretty significant number.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I see that on my own tour.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

We've got a lot more young men and single men in my congregation than we do women.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So I've seen it in my own congregation.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, yeah, it is really, really interesting, and there are a lot of factors, I think, that go into it, and I think we need to understand those things.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So you mentioned the manosphere, and the manosphere is really kind of an online discussion that has taken place over the last, let's say, ten to twelve years, maybe even a little bit longer than that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But we're men, especially on a non Christian Mendez.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But a lot of men have come together to basically discuss how to build a relationship with a woman.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And, of course, in some cases, it was a very depraved kind of thing, you know, temporary relationship.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah, men who want to just sleep around.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But then also, you got a lot of men who are interested in having a healthy relationship with women and want to know how to do it.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They want.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They want to get married.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They want to.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They want to raise a family and leave a legacy and all that kind of thing.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And it's interesting going to those, you know, to the.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

To the graph you just showed when you look at that, it's.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's like, you know, for men, the biggest issue is the economy.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And that's because men think of themselves as providers.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's what men want to do.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Build a family, provide for that family.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That that's.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There's kind of this innate masculine desire for that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But what you see with the women in that chart, and this is, this is, this is, this is, you know, this is something that's been growing for a while, but now it's really, you know, it's hit a.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's hit a sort of breaking point in our culture.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

The number one issue there is women who want to have the freedom, the right, I mean, whatever you want to call it, to murder their own offspring in the womb.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Because abortion is so tied in with the feminist lifestyle and the feminist worldview they have adopted, abortion is central to.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

To a life of promiscuity.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Abortion is central to a woman who wants to prioritize career over family and who would see having children as an interruption to what's really important in life, which is climbing the corporate ladder, making money, getting ahead, that kind of thing.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So you've got this disconnect between men and women where men want to be providers and have families more and more.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And, you know, they're sort of coming back from the sexual revolution, realizing it was a bad thing and wanting to reassert a much more, I'd say, traditional or even christian form of manhood.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And then women who are being radicalized in the other direction, thinking the most important thing for us is to be able to kill our offspring in case we had sex with the wrong guy and got pregnant.

Will Spencer:

Yeah, I guess.

Will Spencer:

Had a question about the men who are showing up in your church first and foremost.

Will Spencer:

Then we can dig into some of that and then the women as well, because one of the things that gets talked about amongst my circle of friends, many men are single or looking to get married or court, I suppose you'd say, is that a lot of pastors will talk about, there are so many young men and there are so many men and women, single men and women are churches, but they won't actually talk about that.

Will Spencer:

There's a big age difference between the young men who show up in church looking to get married, who are generally under 30, and the women who are showing up to get married.

Will Spencer:

Oh, we can't find anyone to marry these perfectly good women.

Will Spencer:

Yeah, they're all like 35, 40 and older.

Will Spencer:

And so no one's talking about that big gender divide where it's like, yeah, there are single men and women, but, like, things are completely backwards.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah, no, I think you're exactly right.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so I think what you've seen happen in our culture is a lot of women have wasted their twenties trying to get ahead in their career and partying.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so then when they realize, oh, no, I would like to have a family, and I'm really not that fulfilled in my career, and so I need to go find a husband.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Then all of a sudden.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah, they might go looking for that in church or somewhere else where they think they're going to find it.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And it's very difficult, you know, at that point.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, yeah, you've got that issue.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But the flip side, you know, so with the men, I think what you're seeing is a lot of young men are figuring out that what they, what they really want is a family, and they want to be providers, and they're, they are willing to rebel against the system.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They see a system that is rigged against them.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so they, they realize that they are going to have to work twice as hard to have the kind of life that maybe their grandfathers were able to create rather easily, and they're going to have because they've got to fight against this system that is rigged against them and all kinds of anti male bias and just even bias against.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, obviously, the whole economy now is structured for two income households.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so if you want that more traditional life where you as a man are the breadwinner and the provider and your wife is home nurturing the children that you have together, it is very hard to build that kind of lifestyle today.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There's no question about that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, you know, so that's a huge issue as well.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But I think that it is really interesting.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So you've got a shortage of men for the older women who want to get married, and then you've got a shortage of women for the younger guys that want to get married in a lot of ways now, I do think that in very conservative christian circles, like the one ones that I'm in, I do think you have a, you have a lot of guys and girls who want that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay, so, I mean, I'm in a, you know, like a subculture of a subculture where, you know, I mean, like, I've had, you know, basically three of my four kids got married right out of college, pretty much, which is, that's when my parents got married, was right out of college, and that's when I got married, was right out of college, you know, so, so that, you know, kind of seeing that as a traditional, you know, sort of early twenties, you know, prime time to get married kind of thing.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And they've had, and my only child is not, is still in college.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, and they've had tons of friends who have done the same thing.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So I think that there are christian circles, very conservative christian circles where that desire for an early marriage and where there's that, you know, that shared vision of what married life and family life should look like, it's still there.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You can, you can still find it.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But, yeah, it's harder and harder.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Things that used to be pretty mainstream now are very much a subculture, and that's something that young people need to think about and young people need to think about.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

What do I want my life to look like?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

What is my vision?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

How do I envision my future?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And where do I want to be in 510 15 years and what's going to get me there?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I think that prioritizing family and so prioritizing marriage and then understanding the different roles that a man and a woman will play in the marriage and in family.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Life is absolutely crucial.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

If you get too far behind, you know, say, with a lot of debt or something like that, it's just really, really hard to catch up.

Will Spencer:

So I want to.

Will Spencer:

You said something very interesting.

Will Spencer:

You said many things that are very interesting, and I don't want to spend too much time here, but I think it's important to touch on is you had said that young men want to rebel against the system, and I agree.

Will Spencer:

And there's a lot of that happening right now, especially on Twitter, especially in christian circles.

Will Spencer:

You may have seen, and it's very interesting to kind of see, because I see this rising response of a reappraisal of fascism is essentially what it is as being a response to feminism.

Will Spencer:

Feminism has run society off the rails.

Will Spencer:

Birth rates are crashing.

Will Spencer:

We have this egalitarian, but really sisterhood driven gynecotic society.

Will Spencer:

And so men, naturally, after decades of mail bashing Miss Andre and destroying all of our heroes and all of that, they're just leaping into the other ditch of fascism and lionizing dictators.

Will Spencer:

And so let's talk about this for just a minute, and then we can get to some of the other social issues as well.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So I think you're right.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That is happening with a lot of young Mendez and I don't know how many.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's hard to tell because how.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

How much of what you see happening on Twitter, it's X, but we still call it Twitter.

Will Spencer:

It'll always be Twitter.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's gonna always be Twitter.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's always gonna stay X is just.

Will Spencer:

Weird to say, like, x it is.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And then it's like, what do you call it?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

What do you know with Twitter?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You had tweets.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I don't know what you do when you call it x.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Zy.

Will Spencer:

Come on.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So I think you are seeing that with young men.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So they see what feminism has done, what feminism has done to our society, what feminism has done to women.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so they push back against that really, really hard and so that some of them.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yes, will leap all the way over to fascism of some sort and see that as a kind of, you know, an answer.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But, you know, I don't think it's just, like I always say, the answer to identity politics is not identity politics.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Like, if, like, if the left is doing identity politics, the answer to that is not going to be, you know, left wing identity politics.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

The answer to that is not right wing identity politics, because then you're still playing the same game.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And if you go from feminism to fascism, you're really still playing the same game and you're not going to win it that way.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You think about this with feminism, there are a number of different responses or a number of different ways that men could go in responding to feminism and trying to push back against it.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So one is, like you described, you go from, you see feminism, and so you go in this fascist direction.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Another would be to go the islamic direction, you know, and there's a handful that have done that because Islam has got a patriarchy, too, is, you know, Islam has got, has got very defined role, you know, social roles for men and women, and it's very structured and that kind of thing.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So it could provide some of the things that men think they're looking for.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So you could have fascism as a response.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You could have Islam as a response.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

What I want to do is for men to make a christian response to feminism.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And that's going to look very different than, I think, a lot of what we're seeing online with the leap to fascism or again, in some cases a leap to Islam.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Those are not healthy answers.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They're not healthy solutions politically and certainly not spiritually.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So I think there is a different way.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And that's what we need to help young men find is a christian way forward, a way forward that arises out of the scriptures and out of the gospel and out of what I would call a view that grace restores nature.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so what we're seeing is feminism is about the denial of femininity in women.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's the twisting and perversion of femininity in women.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And we're seeing a lot of movements on the right that basically twist and distort masculinity in certain ways, and it's just not healthy.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so, yeah, we need to help young men find the right pathway forward.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And what a genuinely evangelized, what a genuinely christianized masculinity would look like, because that's what God's designed us for.

Will Spencer:

And I think what men would say in response, frankly, what I would say in response is it's great to talk about that.

Will Spencer:

But when we start bringing ideas of what an actual christian masculinity looks like, like a godly christian masculinity, and you clear away all the smoke of like, oh, that just means oppression and tyranny, and you actually paint a picture.

Will Spencer:

There's substantial resistance within many corners of the evangelical church to any of those ideas.

Will Spencer:

And that, I think, is where men start to get really mad.

Will Spencer:

They might be like, hey, we're angry about feminism.

Will Spencer:

We're angry about degeneracy porn and all this stuff and the sexualization, the degradation of culture.

Will Spencer:

And they're like, hey, I read the Bible, and this is what it says about being a man.

Will Spencer:

And then I also read these other sections that are pretty clear about what it says to be a woman.

Will Spencer:

And then their own pastors or their own large scale evangelical institutions smash down on them.

Will Spencer:

And I think that that's a very fair critique.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Well, and here's the thing.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I have found this just in my few months of being active on twitter and just have ended up engaging with a number of young men there.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I'm very sympathetic with them and very sympathetic with their plight.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, I mean, I would say, obviously the culture is arrayed against them.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I talked about the system, so to speak, is very much against them.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But in so many ways, the church has been as well.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so I am sympathetic with them.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And a lot of the critiques, I mean, I think some of it is problematic.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, a lot of the, I mean, I'm not a boomer myself age wise, but I mean, I think a lot of the.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay, boomer stuff is kind of disrespectful.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But I also get it because you've got a lot of pastors who are absolutely clueless about what young men are up against today.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They don't understand the problems and the challenges.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They don't understand that maybe what worked or what came easy a generation or two ago no longer does.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so I'm very sympathetic with them.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But again, it's just a matter of finding the right path pathway forward, which is, you know, it's proving to be harder to do than you might think because there are so many false pathways and in some cases, they're much easier to take.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, yeah, so I am simultaneously sympathetic with these young men who I think have been misled and mistreated in a lot of ways.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But I'm also critical of them because I do see them getting, in many cases, radicalized in a way that's going to be just as unhelpful as what they're trying to get away from.

Will Spencer:

That's right.

Will Spencer:

And what I've been saying lately is obviously the masculinity dialogue has been very focused on the notion of women's submission.

Will Spencer:

Very unpopular word.

Will Spencer:

But I think what's even more unpopular is the notion of men's submission not to women but to pastors or to authorities.

Will Spencer:

That's vital for being a mandehead.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Absolutely.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You cannot be in authority unless you know how to be under authority.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So you should never be in charge of something unless you've proven that you can be under charge.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, yeah, absolutely.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So I think you have a lot of men who are maybe in some cases arrogant or short sighted.

Will Spencer:

Young men discipled.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah, I know, I know.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's hard to fathom that, but.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, yeah, so I think you're seeing a lot of that and that kind of bravado, and then, and then it's getting kind of mixed in with a lot of christian jargon, and that's a real problem.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So one thing that I have, you know, I've tried to use my Twitter account to do this some.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I've done a lot of writing.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

If people wanted to go check out my blog, I've done quite a bit of writing on this, on, you know, what's called the red Pill.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I've dealt with, you know what I think young men really need to understand about the world that they're living in and how they can best deal with those challenges.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I've written quite a bit of on those kinds of topics precisely because I do think, I mean, let me put it this way.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, you know, you go back to that chart that you had, and you can see this crazy gender divide where men are going one direction and women going the other direction, and it's like, you know, how are we ever going to get men and women together?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

We've got collapsing marriage rates and related to that, we've got collapsing birth rates.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so in a very real sense, like it, like, just at a very practical level, you can say that the future of our civilization depends upon us figuring out the male female relationship once again and how to get men and women to come back together and bond with each other in the covenant of marriage and build families and households and pass along generational wealth and all of those kinds of things.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

If we can't do that, our civilization really is over.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Now, there's other things, other things we need, too, obviously.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

We need revival and reformation.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

We need the christianization of our country and our culture again, at the heart of that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I think those things are very much related.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But there's not going to be any people to evangelize unless people are having kids.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So the great commission presupposes the creation mandate.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So you got to be fruitful, multiply in order for there to be a future.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so I think that helping young men understand what it takes to attract a woman and pursue her and then marry her and then build a life together with her and build a happy and joyful marriage and family life.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, men have to understand those things.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so a lot of what we mentioned, the manosphere, a lot of what has been discussed in the manosphere over the last decade and a half plus, I think it's all stuff that if you could go back 100 years, was pretty much common sense.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, there was this kind of a folk wisdom passed along from one generation to the next.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Men understood what they needed to do to get a wife, and women understood what it meant to be a wife and to have a husband.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And whether you went into a bar, you know, 100 years ago and talk to people or you went into a church, you know, and talked to people in the pews, I think people in general, in the culture would have understood these things.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Just basic male female dynamics.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And because of feminism and egalitarianism and the widespread confusion brought on by the sexual revolution, we've lost all of that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so now we're starting from scratch.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, I've said this many times over the years, and I think I probably tweeted about it at some point along the way, but I think if you could go back in time, like, you know, to our great, great, great grandparents and tell them, hey, you know, there's going to come a day wherever, you know, x percentage of people.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I don't remember what the exact percentage is, but, you know, like, there's gonna be all these people age 30 and up that have never been married.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They would.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They would just find that astounding.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Like, how can people get to that stage of life and not have found somebody to spend the rest of their life with?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Or if you told them, you know, people are gonna feel like they need to read a stack of books in order to be married, and they would have said, like, read a stack of books.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Like, what are you talking about?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There's nothing more natural.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There's nothing more natural than a man and a woman living together in the covenant of marriage.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Now, obviously, there are always going to be, because of sin, they're going to be issues you have to work out and points of friction and whatnot.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And you've got instruction in the Bible about these things.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And pastors, of course, over the generations and millennia have always preached and written on these things, but not like we have today.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

The kind of the explosion of teaching and writing that you see on marriage and family issues today is actually a sign of our sickness, okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Not our health.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's a sign that we have lost touch with certain basic realities.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so a lot of what I, you know, what I think, you know, a pastor, you know, like myself or, you know, you with your podcast and your ministry, a lot of what I think we're trying to do is bring people back into touch with these basic creational realities, God's creational design and how sin wrecked it and how grace restores it.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so if you want to have a happy marriage, it's actually very, very simple.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But there's a few things that you need to know and understand that our culture is not going to tell you.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And in fact, our culture and much of the church is going to lie to you about these things.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so we need to set the record straight.

Will Spencer:

So can I, can I push back?

Will Spencer:

Obviously, you and I are in agreement, but I want to push back on a couple things.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Will Spencer:

So I think that there are a lot of men who would say, I'm down, I got a good job, I got a future, I'm in shape, you know, things are going well, and where are the women?

Will Spencer:

Where are they?

Will Spencer:

And because I think what's happened now is that it used to be pretty reliable.

Will Spencer:

You've read Rolo Tomasi, so you're familiar with the epiphany phase.

Will Spencer:

You know, girls are partying through their twenties and then it used to be somewhere around 28, 29, 30 that hit their quote unquote epiphany phase.

Will Spencer:

Like, oh, I should probably settle down now.

Will Spencer:

That epiphany phase, quote unquote for women isn't happening until they're 35.

Will Spencer:

Its not happening until theyre 37, in some cases 40 years old.

Will Spencer:

Thats when theyre realizing.

Will Spencer:

And I think that used to be a function of whats called the biological clock.

Will Spencer:

I dont particularly like that metaphor for it, but the way that I think about that is it was leverage over a woman to say like, hey, you have these biological realities that youve been experiencing once a month since you were 13 years old, 240 times or whatever it is between the ages of, say, 13 to 33.

Will Spencer:

That's your monthly reminder of what your body is for.

Will Spencer:

But women have been so sufficiently able to ignore that that leverage is gone over them now.

Will Spencer:

There is no leverage over them to bring them into the home.

Will Spencer:

And so what I've been saying, and I think a lot of men agree, is that plenty of women will experience this leverage of, okay, I want to be a mother, so I'll get married, but women don't want to be wives.

Will Spencer:

That I think is the part where it's like a man can be completely ready to do his duty as a husband and a father.

Will Spencer:

But he's looking at two, three generations of women that want to be mothers, but not so much the wife thing.

Will Spencer:

So what do we begin to do about that?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Well, it's a great question, and I think.

Will Spencer:

Question, isn't it?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

One of the single biggest issues, and so several things I want to say about that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

One thing is if you've got a man who is like you described, he's got a good job and he's in shape, so he's marriageable and he wants to get married and he's having a hard time finding someone.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I would want to ask first, are you, are you around women who are marriageable also?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And if you are, then are they turning you down?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And let's start to see if we can figure out why they're turning you down.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

If you're just not around women, then let's deal with that problem.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So there would be an issue there to sort through.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But, so I think the other thing that's going to happen is we got to do a much better job of discipling our women.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's interesting to me how so nobody has any problem at all talking about how terrible modern men are.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

We hear a lot about masculinity.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Will Spencer:

That's right.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Everybody will talk about that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And there is such a thing as toxic masculinity.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I don't deny that masculinity can go wrong.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And when it goes wrong, it goes wrong in one of two ways.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You get men who either become tyrants or men who abdicate, so they basically become, you know, monsters in their masculine arrogance or they become effeminate.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You know, those are kind of the two directions that when, when manhood goes wrong, it goes strong in one of those two directions.

Will Spencer:

And those are both toxic.

Will Spencer:

Those are both forms of toxic.

Will Spencer:

Yeah.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Toxic effeminacy is a huge issue, too, among men.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So you've got a lot of men for whom that is an issue.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But, but with women, nobody will talk about the sins and the failings and the shortcomings of the modern woman.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And this has been pointed out a lot, you know, like the, you know, the classic, you know, Father's day sermons versus Mother's Day sermons where the men get berated and the women get praised, you know, because, you know, nobody's going to criticize a woman or talk about characteristic sins of women.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I saw Anthony Bradley not too long ago.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I don't know if this, I should go back and look and see if this got, if he did get an answer but at one point, it's been the last few weeks, Anthony Bradley asked the question, you know, is there such a thing as toxic femininity?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And why isn't anybody talking about it?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Or what would it be?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

What would toxic femininity be?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I replied to that when I looked at the thread, it was like, basically nobody could answer the question.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I thought that was just so interesting.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I'm like, well, there is an answer to that question.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There's lots of ways that femininity can go wrong, whether it's the overbearing mother or the masculinized feminist career woman.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There's a lot of different ways femininity can go wrong, too, and we need to recognize that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So we've done a really bad job of discipling women because we have been too scared to be honest.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's right.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Instead of fearing God.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I think one of the great sins of the modern church is that we have feared women.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

The fear of woman is the beginning of foolishness.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's interesting to me in psalm 128.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Psalm 128 is about the God fearing man, and then it goes on to describe his family.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And when I teach on that psalm, I must always point this out.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's the God fearing man.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And because he fears God, he does not fear his wife, and that's why she's the fruitful vine in the heart of his house.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And, like, you know, I'm in Birmingham, Alabama.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

One thing I think that people really misunderstand about the Southeast is that, you know, people think, oh, you know, southern culture, it must be so patriarchal down there.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And you guys got traditional, you know, christian families and all that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

nd it has been since at least:

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, and you can say, well, a lot of the men died, you know, in the war.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay, yes.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But at least since:

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so we have a lot of men in the south, in the south who have, I would say they have masculine hobbies, like fishing, hunting, sports, okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But they don't have a masculine core.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And the philosophy of life that most southern men adopt is a happy wife, happy life kind of philosophy.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's what's common.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, like, we've had some renovations and whatnot done to our house several times over the years where, you know, these blue collar guys will come in and, you know, do the plumbing or electricity or whatever, and I always end up talking to these guys.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And of course, it's interesting because they find out I'm a pastor, and then, you know, usually they want to talk eschatology or they want to talk about marriage.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But what's interesting is that literally every single one, and a lot of these guys, I mean, most of these guys would be professing christians of some sort, and most of them would have, you know, would go to church with some degree of regularity.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And every single one of them, you're not five minutes into the conversation, and they talk about their wife is the boss.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's how they'll refer to her.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Some variation of happy wife, happy life.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, that is how they describe their marriage and family life.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And these are the blue collar guys, you know, these are the tradesmen, okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And they are completely henpecked and overrun by their wives.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And their wives would never admit it.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, CS Lewis talks about this.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Their wives would never say, oh, I'm the head of the household, okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But, you know, it's the old saying, if Mama's not happy, nobody's happy.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

She runs the show.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's really her emotions that run the show, okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And he is constantly working to placate her and sort of keep her happy.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And that, that is the recipe for a disastrous marriage.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Nobody is fulfilled by that kind of marriage, okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

She's not going to find it fulfilling, and he's not going to find it fulfilling either.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so that, you know, that is a huge, huge issue.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so that's.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I think a lot of this is because the church has been highly feminized and.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And pastors do not address the sins of women.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Churches don't have Titus, two older women who can disciple the younger women and who will teach them to.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

How to love their husbands and their children and how to be submissive, obedient wives.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, that, you know, Titus, too, gives the curriculum what the younger women need to be taught, and churches just simply do not do that, right?

Will Spencer:

They just.

Will Spencer:

They give up on it.

Will Spencer:

Everyone, as I've been saying, everyone wants to do solo scriptura until it comes time to do solo scriptura, stuff particularly related to marriage and the family, like how we don't really talk about those verses.

Will Spencer:

Like, what do you mean you don't talk about those verses?

Will Spencer:

Like, it's all throughout the Bible.

Will Spencer:

You have all.

Will Spencer:

For all the talk about the proverbs 31 woman, there's not a lot of talk about the proverbs.

Will Spencer:

Seven woman.

Will Spencer:

In fact, all throughout scripture, as I've been reading it, there's all these very clear portrayals of women's sin.

Will Spencer:

And it's never like, oh, it's probably your dad's fault, like the woman at the well or the hemorrhaging woman.

Will Spencer:

It's like, go in peace.

Will Spencer:

Your father's faith has made you well.

Will Spencer:

It's not like that.

Will Spencer:

It's like, this is her faith.

Will Spencer:

These are women's faith.

Will Spencer:

Women interact.

Will Spencer:

Christ interacting with women directly as individuals made in the image of God.

Will Spencer:

But the church pulls way back on that and be like, well, it's probably a man's fault somewhere, right?

Will Spencer:

And it's disappointing for men who see themselves trying, and maybe they are trying appropriate for their station in life.

Will Spencer:

Like a 23 year old man, truthfully, can only put in so much effort because he's a 23 year old man, but a 35 year old man can put in much more.

Will Spencer:

So when a 23 year old man is at a place appropriate to his station, right, and he's still not able to find anybody, of course, I think, and maybe now would be a good time to talk about men like Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson in his own way.

Will Spencer:

They're very different branches, but from a very similar tree where it's like, okay, Andrew Tate will say, no, you have to be so alpha, elite beyond your capacity and full of arrogance and privato that it's like, that's the only thing that you can possibly do to become a man to find a woman is bye achieving to that level.

Will Spencer:

And Jordan Peterson speaks to that in a somewhat different way, more with his person.

Will Spencer:

And so I can understand how young men would get very frustrated and burned out if their choices are, well, I can be a weak, passive pastor who's afraid to standing up to his own wife or the women in the congregation.

Will Spencer:

Or I can be Andrew Tate.

Will Spencer:

And those seem to be my two options for getting married.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah, well, let me go back to the women's issue and just say one more thing about that and then talk about Tate and Peterson and that kind of thing.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, yes, so, so churches obviously do need to address the sins of women.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, that, that's something that we have failed to do.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So pastors are culpable in that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I like having been a pastor for about 30 years now, or in pastoral ministry for about 30 years, and, you know, knowing a lot of pastors and talking to a lot of pastors and hearing a lot of pastors preach and whatnot, I can tell you that pastors are, you know, pastors are fearless when it comes to critiquing men and pointing out men's characteristic sins.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But they are very cowardly and fearful when it comes to pointing out the characteristic sins of women.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so that is a huge issue.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And that kind of feeds into this idea.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I think there's actually a lot of arrogance on the part of women who really don't understand their own nature very well.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so I don't know if you've read the book.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's a recent book, Megan Basham's book, Shepherd's for sale, that's got a lot of attention recently.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Very interesting book.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Really well done, very well researched.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I was not at all impressed with the criticisms of it.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I think it's a really good book.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But she has a chapter in there on basically how the hash metoo movement impacted the church.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And she starts out the chapter talking about this christian comedian, John Christ, who got really popular and then had some sexually inappropriate relationships with women.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And then when the story broke, the way that it broke is that, you know, Christ is some kind of sexual pervert and these women are victims.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But the re and Meg Basham did a really good job, basically showing that there's actually no indication at all that any of these women were victims.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They were all of age.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There wasn't even really any kind of power differential per se between Christ and these women that he had inappropriate relationships with.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But the narrative, it's just taken for granted that the man has acted sinfully and the women are innocent victims.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay, I saw.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I think it was Julie Royce the other day who's kind of been a thorn in the side, kind of just a constant critic of people like John MacArthur and some other big shots in the evangelical world.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But basically she said something like, if there's any kind of power differential at all, then there can't be in some kind of sexual issue, if there's any kind of power differential, it's impossible to give consent.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so basically, because men always have more power, it's almost like saying women can't sin sexually.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, that's really the implication of that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And that is absolutely insane.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, yes, you are right.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

We need to confront women about their sins, whether it's the immodesty of the proverb, seven type woman or wives who do not want to be submissive and have maybe heard sermons that so redefine submission that it doesn't mean anything.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You know, so.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, you know, so they hear that and then they latch on to that and think, well, this is great.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I don't.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You know, submission doesn't really mean submission.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

No, it does mean submission.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It means obedience obedience is a word that's used.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It means obedience.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You do need to obey your husband, you know, and women don't like to hear those things, but they need to hear those things.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They need to be told that they're responsible for keeping their emotions in check.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You know, if.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

If for men, men have to learn to control their desires.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's your.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Your, you know, your most basic issue.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Women have to learn how to control their emotions.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They have to learn emotional self control and emotional discipline.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Just because you're a woman doesn't mean that you get to let your emotions run free, you know, and you'll hear people say things like, well, shouldn't every emotion be validated?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

No, it should not be that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That very idea comes from the pit of hell, okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Your emotions, just like the rest of you, your emotions need to obey Jesus.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Your emotions need to bow before Jesus and submit to the law of God and the word of God, period.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So we've done women a huge disservice, I think, by not confronting their sins and dealing with them and discipling them and pointing out what those characteristic sins are.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Everybody knows the characteristics.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Characteristic sense of men.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

We're kind of oblivious to the characteristic sins of women.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And that's a problem.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Now.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yes, about Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, that kind of thing.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Like, what sort of models do men have?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And here is where we really see the result of the church failing to speak with clarity in these areas, is that a lot of men now go outside of the church to get their training, their.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Their teaching, basically, their view of what manhood is.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so, yeah, if you start googling about manhood, you'll end up with a Jordan Peterson, or you'll end up with a.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

An Andrew Tate or a Rollo Tomasi.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And, I mean, Peterson is not a believer, but he's a little.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

He's definitely more benign than those other names.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, he's not.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

He's.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

He's.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I'll just say he's closer to the kingdom than those other men.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But, you know, guys like Rollo Tomasi or Andrew Tatum, and they're gonna.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They're gonna send you down a very different path if that's who you.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

If that's who you start to take your cues from when it comes to understanding manhood.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And the thing that's really dangerous about it is that there are.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There are some really significant things that they get right that so much of the church has gotten wrong.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

The church has actually.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

This is one of the ways the church, I think, has really misled men.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And, and failed men is the church has taught men a lot of things about the male female relationship that are simply wrong.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, I remember when I was in youth group, like in 6th grade.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, like, I'm at that age where you're just first started starting to notice girls and get interested and that kind of thing.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And, you know, I grew up going to big public schools and that kind of thing.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But I remember, you know, I was in like 6th grade and my youth pastor said, you know, he's doing kind of the, you know, the typical relationship talk, you know, for young guys.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And, you know, he basically says, you know what, what a female is really going to want from you is for you to be kind, caring, sensitive.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I remember thinking to myself, no, from what I've observed in the hallways at school, what they really want is the quarterback of the football team.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's right.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Did not make sense to me then.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I just remember thinking, I just, that just doesn't really sound.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That doesn't hold.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Like, I had heard girls talk, you know, like, I knew how they talked about guys and I was like, I just.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I don't think that's right.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, I obviously, you know, men do need to be kind.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And, I mean, there's some truth in that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's not totally false, but, but what men need to understand is what actually generates attraction with a woman.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And it's not those things.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Now, you don't have to be the Andrew Tate, you know, sort of.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, people would say, oh, that's, that's alpha masculinity.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I would say, no, that's kind of a caricature of masculinity.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You don't have to drive a Lamborghini and make a million dollars a year to be attractive either.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You do have to be a man who is oriented towards Dominion, a man who has skills and competencies.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, every, every man should aspire to be a human swiss army knife.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That, that should be the goal.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I always think of David in one Samuel 16.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

He's a young Mandev.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And he catches the eye of some of Sauls servants.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And they give this list of this descriptive list of David and his qualities and accomplishments, even as a young man.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And hes a mighty warrior.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And his speech is seasoned with wisdom and hes a skillful musician.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

How did this guy accomplish so much at such a young age?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But that should be what men aspire to, you know, is you should aspire to, you should develop yourself physically, spiritually.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I would just say vocationally there's a lot of words you can put in that, in that third slot, but I'll just say vocation.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But the only way for you to develop yourself vocationally is to learn skills, okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So think in terms of the dominion mandate.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Everything goes.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Goes back to the creation mandate in Genesis chapter one.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Genesis chapter one frames what life is all about.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And if I were talking to women, I would say different things about the creation mandate than what I will say here, because we're speaking mainly to a masculine audience here, a male audience here.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But think about this.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

The creation mandate in genesis one basically breaks down into two categories.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Take Dominion rule, subdue the earth.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So you've got the dominion part of it, and then you've got be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You've got the multiplication part of it.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So it's dominion and multiplication.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Those are the two categories, okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Now, the book of proverbs is all about how to fulfill, you know, how a man fulfills the creation mandate in a fallen world.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So the book of proverbs is basically about a man's work and a man's wife.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Here's what your work should look like.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You know, there's a whole lot of proverbs about that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And then here's what it.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Here's the kind of woman you should not pursue.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Here's the kind of woman you should pursue.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Shun harlot folly, pursue lady wisdom.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And at the end of the book, you know, you marry her and she becomes your queen.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay, so.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So proverbs is about fulfilling the creation mandate in a fallen world, okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So what it means to pursue dominion, and what it means to pursue a woman, a fallen world, okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's what life is about for men.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So in order to do those things, what do you need?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Well, you've got to realize, and I also point this out, God gave Adam a job, a vocation, before he gave Adam a wife.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So Adam was commanded to tend and guard the garden before he's given a wife, okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Tending to the garden, that will make him, you know, that that's a form of productivity.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's a form of provision.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You're going to be a provider guarding the garden.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You're going to be a protector.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's the other side of your masculinity.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Protect and provide.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's the mantra of masculinity.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's right there in Genesis two.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay, so I think to be a man who can be attractive to a woman so that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So that you can pursue a woman successfully, that's what you've got to do.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's what you've got to figure out is how can I be a protector and provider?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So being a provider in our world is going to mean developing a set of skills that have value in the marketplace.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And the more skills you can accumulate, the more value you have.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So you should be, you know, we talked about being a high value man, but that's really what that ought to mean.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And then being a protector.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You know, the best protector is going to be somebody who's basically physically fit, who makes the most of himself physically.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

He's going to develop himself physically.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And that's really important, too.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There's other skills and whatnot that can come with that also.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But, you know, you get the picture.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So that's what it takes.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So again, you don't have to drive the Lamborghini or make a million dollars.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Now, I do think there's one other aspect to this.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

When it comes to men who want to get married and sort of what you're up against women today are, they have more unrealistic standards and expectations than ever before.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Some of that is because the sexual revolution and promiscuity, and they might think that a guy that would never consider marrying them might sleep with them, and they think, oh, I should be able to get a guy like that as my husband, when really he would have no interest in marrying her.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So there's what the red pill guys call the alpha widow.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's a real thing.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And that's one of the reasons why the sexual revolution has been so destructive.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There's also what's called hypergamy, which is the idea that a woman wants to marry up.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

She wants to marry somebody who is superior to her because she was built to submit to him.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

She was made to be in submission to him.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So she wants to marry somebody who she's too, who she deems as worthy of submission.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I always tell people, and I kind of pick this up from CS Lewis, headship and respect are not just practical necessities in marriage to make the marriage work in a, you know, in a peaceful, functional way, they are erotic and romantic necessities as well.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

She's not going to be attracted to a man she doesn't respect, so she's got to respect you.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But the problem is today a man is not, you know, it used to be, you know, again, 50 years ago, you're sort of competing with the other men in your hometown for all the ladies there.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay, well, now you're competing with, you know, millions of other men across the whole planet on dating apps and whatnot.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, so, so the competition, so to speak, is a whole lot more difficult.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Now, again, I think in christian circles, we can reign a lot of that in.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Because, I mean, I'm not.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I'm not saying nobody should ever do online dating.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I know people have found their spouse that way, and it's turned out really well.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But I do think that women need to be realistic in their expectations, and oftentimes today, they're not.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so this is another thing that young men are up against, and it's very, very difficult.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

How do you compete with every single man across the world with a dating profile?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Just very, very difficult to do.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So those are things that men have to recognize.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So men should treat life like a video game and keep leveling up, work on yourself, become the best possible version of yourself, the best possible version that you can be.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

By the grace of God, if grace restores nature, the gospel is going to make you more of a man, not less a man.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's going to make you more masculine, not less.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Not toxically masculine, but genuinely masculine.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And then come down, you know, understand female nature.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, I remember when I was growing up, you know, and I told the youth pastor story.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

The other thing that was kind of a trope among young men, you know, when I was growing up is that, oh, women just can't be understood.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They're just.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They're forever a mystery and a riddle.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You know, it's a riddle wrapped in enigma, and you're never going to understand women.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I remember reading when I was, before I was married, first Peter, chapter three.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And Peter says, live with your wife in an understanding way.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

In other words, you've got to understand your wife.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I remember thinking, that's really interesting.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

What does it mean to understand her?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I came to the realization over time that, well, yeah, there are certain things that can be understood about women.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I can understand everything.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Proverbs 30 talks about how the way of a man with a maiden is a mystery.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's one of those unexplainable things.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So there's.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There's.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You're never going to eliminate the mystery, but you can.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You can understand women.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You can understand your wife.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You can understand that girl that you want to pursue and make your wife.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There are certain things about her as a woman that you can understand.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And if you do understand those things, it will greatly help you in your pursuit of her.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I think a lot of men just don't understand female nature.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Well.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And again, these are things that used to just be passed on, I think, from father to son.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You know, kind of.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There's kind of a folk wisdom just passed along, you know, things that just kind of everybody picks up and absorbs along the way.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And again, that cycle got broken somewhere.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That passing of the baton got lost, I think, because of the sexual revolution and just the confusion brought on by separating sex from marriage and God's design and all of that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so men are having to relearn that in our day, and that's where we are.

Will Spencer:

I think there was a baton that got failed to be passed to women as well.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Absolutely.

Will Spencer:

Mothers just used to tell their daughters, this is how men are.

Will Spencer:

But that baton didn't just get failed, it got thrown out.

Will Spencer:

Like, oh, this baton.

Will Spencer:

This has been pure oppression.

Will Spencer:

I've got a dozen different questions that I can ask from what you said.

Will Spencer:

But I think the thing that feels most relevant to get into is like, okay, let's say that we have a lot of men that have genuinely been working on themselves, and they are walking into a situation where it's literally like the antwives.

Will Spencer:

They're gone, they're gone.

Will Spencer:

Maybe they'll come back, maybe they won't.

Will Spencer:

And so you have a lot of young, successful men in various ways appropriate for their station, again, whose prospects they're looking like.

Will Spencer:

Marriage is going to be a near impossibility until a certain point, and then, and only then, will a woman come limping back into the church.

Will Spencer:

And it's like, hey, I got this situation from my past, or whatever it looks like.

Will Spencer:

And the guys are like, we did everything right, and now you're coming back in.

Will Spencer:

So there's that component which I think feeds into a lot of men's anger.

Will Spencer:

So maybe we can talk about that, that sort of reconciliation, because I don't see a magic wand getting waved to fix the situation where women are getting heavily more radicalized into the sexual revolution as men are exiting.

Will Spencer:

Like, men are walking out of the building and women are still playing around inside.

Will Spencer:

And so how does that get fixed?

Will Spencer:

So that's the problem on one hand.

Will Spencer:

So the problem on the other hand is that in the meantime, while men are waiting, they're just.

Will Spencer:

Because young men, I think, are made very much to take on the responsibility of wife and children and family.

Will Spencer:

And I think it's Doug Wilson who says, like, a truck drives better with a load in it, right?

Will Spencer:

And so you have these young men with nothing to pull, and they find each other online because their pastors or the men's communities at their churches don't have much to them.

Will Spencer:

And so while they're waiting, they have all this excess energy that if they're not going to put into porn in video games, they tend to be putting into.

Will Spencer:

That appears to be radicalization.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, I think you're right.

Will Spencer:

So on one hand, you have a situation where you have young men who are just waiting, and they don't understand the notion of being in submission to authority.

Will Spencer:

And then for their waiting, they'll be rewarded with the woman who's been used and discarded by the sexual revolution.

Will Spencer:

This is a problem.

Will Spencer:

I was talking with someone yesterday, and how many guys, praise God, this is not a problem for my generation, nor for yours, but how many men are really going to have to worry about the issue?

Will Spencer:

And I shudder to even say it.

Will Spencer:

Like, yeah, I met this girl.

Will Spencer:

She's really nice.

Will Spencer:

You've been dating for a while.

Will Spencer:

But then she told me she had an Onlyfans profile for a little while, and now there's all this stuff for, all over the Internet.

Will Spencer:

Like, that's going to be a thing.

Will Spencer:

That is going to be a thing.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It is.

Will Spencer:

What do we, what do we do about.

Will Spencer:

I don't.

Will Spencer:

I don't even know there's an answer, but I have to ask.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Well, yeah, and again, I mean, there's, you know, in a case like that, there's not a clear answer.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I'm not saying that no man should ever marry that woman, but, I mean, there's baggage, and then there's baggage.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, you know, that that is going to be a whole lot for somebody to deal with.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah, it's just gonna be very, very difficult.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And, yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, the hope would be that men are keeping themselves pure and chaste in the meantime.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, that's the kind of scenario you're describing where men have done that, women have it.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's not always the case, obviously.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Sometimes the men, sometimes the men are looking at porn or onlyfans or they've been promiscuous themselves.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, you know that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And, you know, we talk about double standards, and double standards can go both directions.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So sometimes you think about, like, in the past, and there was kind of this double standard that, like, a man can be promiscuous with no consequences, but then he wants to marry a woman who has not been promiscuous.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay, well, there's a fundamental injustice to that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Not to mention that actually being promiscuous does impact men in negative ways, not perhaps to the same degree or in the same ways that it would a woman.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay, but.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But it.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But it.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But it's not like you can ever sin and there not be consequences.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Consequences to that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay, so there are consequences.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, you know, ideally, you've got men and women getting married as virgins, and, you know, they gain their sexual experience together in the covenant of marriage.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But today, you've got a double standard that works the other way.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You know, you've got a lot of times where the double standard advantages the woman, you know?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And some of that is the kind of thing I talked about, like with the magbation book, where the woman is the innocent victim.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I think sometimes women re narrate things in their heads where they're the innocent victim because they really can't bear the thought that, you know, of what their promiscuity means.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So they.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They lie.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They basically lie to themselves, you know, about.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

About what's happened.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I made reference to that, to that chapter in Megbatia's book.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I'll just say the whole chapter is really good.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I thought she dealt with the issue very, very wisely, and it's because she is one of those women who understands female nature.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

A lot of women don't understand their own nature, and a lot of women don't understand how, for example, devious women can be in trying to attract men's attention with immodesty and whatnot.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, I mean, she understands those things and understands that women really do have agency and really are responsible for the decisions they make and some kind of, you know, if you're going to use a power differential to excuse sexual sin, you can really use a power differential excuse for anything.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You know, your boss asks you to do something unethical, well, there's a power differential.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So obviously, I'm no longer culpable for this.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

This is what the Nazis said.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

We were just obeying orders.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You know, if you're given unethical orders, you're, you know, you're still.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You're responsible for what you do with them, you know?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so you should not.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You should not, you know, just because somebody in authority over you tells you to sin doesn't mean that you can sin and it's no longer sin.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Or, you know, anybody that ever denied the faith under threat of persecution, we just have to say that they didn't do anything wrong because there's a power differential between the persecutor and the persecuted.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So therefore, you could just deny the faith under pressure, and there would not be anything wrong with that, which obviously, that's just nonsense.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So there are all kinds of problems with the way our culture thinks about these things, all kinds of problems with the way our culture deals with the male female relationship.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And, and, you know, I remember Harrison Butker, you know, the, the player for the Kansas City Chiefs that gave the talk at the, at the small Catholic, you know, very conservative Catholic, Roman Catholic college.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And they got in a lot of trouble for it later, you know, in the, in the media.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But he said to the women, you most of all have been lied to.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Like, you've been lied to more than anybody.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I think that is exactly right.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And, but the thing is, you can't, it's not like you can have one sex that thrives while the other sex flounders.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

The sexes stand or fall together.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And this is why a, you know, like, a war between the sexes is nonsense, because either both sexes win or both sexes lose.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There's no way that you can get what you want without the other sex also getting what they were made for.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, you know, the sexes are going to win or lose together.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There's this mutuality.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

We're bound together.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so in cases like this, like what you've described, I mean, the man and the woman are both going to lose.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They're both losing something that's really, really valuable.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, I mean, what do we do?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I think the best possible thing we can do is try to disciple the up and coming generation in a much better way than the boys and the girls.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I think for those who are already, like you described, guys already in their twenties and trying to find someone, and are there girls out there that don't have so much baggage that it's not somebody you want to marry?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I would just say get yourself into circles where you've got a much better chance of finding somebody who is worthy of marriage.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's the best thing I could tell somebody to do in that kind of situation.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

e, you know, to be a rebel in:

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That, that's, that's the counterculture now because the mainstream culture has, has become so perverted that now just doing normal stuff makes you the counterculture.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, you know, there are still pockets where that's the way of life that people are looking for and expecting.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I'm thankful that, you know, my kids basically found that it is out there, but you might have to work to find it, depending on where you are and what your circumstances are.

Will Spencer:

I have so many questions and so much.

Will Spencer:

This is great.

Will Spencer:

I mean, I've been living in this stuff for so long.

Will Spencer:

I think if I'm going to do my choose your own adventure path through the conversation, I think the thing that I want to touch on first is actually something that you said in one of your articles, and then I want to get to maybe some advice for parents on how to raise that next generation.

Will Spencer:

But I think one of the things that we're seeing is it was in your article about Nancy Pearcey's toxic war on masculinity, and you articulated the problems that I had with that book very well, while also being very gracious to the things about that book that I thought were quite good.

Will Spencer:

There was a phrase that perhaps she used it in the book, or maybe you coined it, but I loved it.

Will Spencer:

It was free bird masculinity.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I think you described it.

Will Spencer:

It's awesome because I think there's a younger generation parallel to that, the whole sigma male thing, like the Joker and Ryan Gosling from drive and stuff.

Will Spencer:

So, like, I see these as a generational wave of what masculinity was, perhaps to the boomer generation.

Will Spencer:

Right.

Will Spencer:

When they were young was like, you know, one of my favorite songs is Midnight Rider by the Allman Brothers.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Right.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And what's that kind of thing?

Will Spencer:

Exactly.

Will Spencer:

So.

Will Spencer:

And that echoes forward into this whole sigma male, no one understands me, I'm outside of the hierarchy kind of vibe.

Will Spencer:

Maybe we can talk a little bit about that, because that's a big.

Will Spencer:

That's a big thing that's out there for young men right now.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Well, I think.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I think a lot of it is about fleeing responsibilities.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And that's what often gets, you know, glorified or glamorized for men is being detached so that you can flee responsibilities.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And in country music and especially a lot of rock music, I mean.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Absolutely.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And, of course, a lot of just pop culture in general, this is.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

This is absolutely what gets pushed.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Like, the ultimate male is the self made man who can't be tied down.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

He sort of drifts from one woman to another.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so he's getting his sexual needs met, but there's kind of the sexual adventurism, and he's never tied down by anything.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And that, for a long time, I think, was held out as kind of like, that's the ideal male wife is.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You know, you don't have the responsibilities that come with a permanent relationships in your life.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And that's actually a feminist ii know, in my opinion, because it is.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It is avoiding responsibilities that God wants you to take on.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay, so in the song Free Bird, you know, he's saying goodbye to this woman.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

He's like, I can't be tied down.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I'm a free bird.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And again and again and, you know, and so much rock music.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, that's kind of a theme.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Like, you know, you just kind of move from woman to woman, and.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And that's kind of the heart of the sexual revolution.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

The heart of the sexual revolution for men was sex without consequence.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So sex outside of marriage.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so sex that's not procreative, that's just recreational sex.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That is basically using another person to have my own needs and desires met, and I can't be tied down.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And of course, women then try to imitate that, and it's a disaster for men.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's an even greater catastrophe in certain ways for women.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But, yeah, so that is a huge issue.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I think what you're describing and what I'm seeing is a lot of men who see the problems with that and they don't want that anymore.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They can see that that's not going to be fulfilling, that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I want to be a man who's got a family and who builds a household and who leaves a legacy and who passes wealth on to the next generation.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's what I want, and that's good.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's good.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But that tendency for men to try to flee responsibility is.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, that's one of the ways that masculinity goes wrong.

Will Spencer:

Yeah, and I think you nailed it.

Will Spencer:

It is a flight from response, a romanticized flight from responsibility.

Will Spencer:

In fact, from maturities.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Another word I would use, it's a flight from maturity.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So we've talked about the failure to launch for a long time, boys who don't really grow into men and who simply don't take on those masculine responsibilities.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And it's the same kind of thing.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's a failure to launch.

Will Spencer:

Well, maybe we can divert for just a second, because many of the men who fail to launch, and you mentioned this earlier, they have overbearing mothers.

Will Spencer:

And I think this is probably one of the biggest dirty secrets that's going on in America right now, is the overbearing, narcissistic, smothering mother who purposefully prevents her boy son from growing into a man by subtly subverting his manhood, by subtly picking away when he tries to show independence, by subverting the father.

Will Spencer:

Because this is a real thing, the narcissistic mother.

Will Spencer:

It completely undermines our cultural image of the mothers as gods.

Will Spencer:

You can't say anything about the mother.

Will Spencer:

It's like, no, motherhood can go very, very wrong.

Will Spencer:

Maybe we can talk about that for a minute, because I know many men that have been through that, and they find that that is a subject that's like the biggest red line area.

Will Spencer:

Like, no one can say anything bad about my mom.

Will Spencer:

It's like, well, let's talk about your childhood.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So the smothering mother, the controlling mother, the overbearing mother.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Cs Lewis captured this really well in a few different places in his writings.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yes.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That is a very common form of toxic femininity.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Femininity gone wrong.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And it is hard because you're criticizing mothers and, you know, like, mothers are just.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Have always kind of been this protected class.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Like, you can't say anything, you know, to criticize a mother.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But we have to.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, we absolutely have to because motherhood can go wrong, and it's incredibly destructive when it is.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But here's the thing.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

When I see an overprotective mother or an overbearing mother, okay, and I could give you lots of stories where I've seen this play out.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

What I always want to know is, where is dad?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Now, a lot of times, the single mother situation.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And then what I would say is, well, what that kid needs is a lot of male father figures, father like figures in his life who can counteract some of that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And he also needs somebody to just come tell his mom how she's doing a huge disservice to him, by the way she's raising him.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And she's, you know, she's gonna have to.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

She's gonna have to basically learn to kind of, you know, lengthen the leash a little bit and not be so smothering.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But in a situation where dad is around, and I see that happening, I was gonna.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Where is.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Where is dad?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And why is he abdicating?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

What I would say is that behind every overprotective mother is an effeminate father.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And that's just the dynamic.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So dad needs to step in.

Will Spencer:

So.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So I think what a lot of homes lack, I I like to think of masculinity as kind of emotional grounding.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Like, if you've read Edwin Friedman, one of the flaws with Friedman's book failure of nerve is that he leaves gender out of it.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

He kind of writes as if leadership is this androgynous thing.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's the problem.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

With the book, one of several you could point out.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And Joe Rigney has done, I think, some good work trying to fix some of those flaws in the book, basically by writing his own book on this.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But I think of masculinity as a kind of grounding in the home.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so when masculinity is functioning as it should, it kind of grounds, you know, think of, like, an electrical ground.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It kind of grounds the emotional charge that would otherwise sort of make the home very explosive and very reactive.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so when a dad's not doing his job and there is no masculine grounding, then the emotions of the mother just start to kind of run the home and kind of fill it with this hypersensitive reactivity.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And a mother becomes hypercritical of her kids.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

She becomes extremely anxious about her kids, and then she projects.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, why do we have so many anxious kids around today?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Because they have anxious mothers.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They've got anxious parents, but especially anxious mothers.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's why we have so many anxious kids today.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So it's just a rule that effeminate men are always at the root of toxic femininity.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay, this is another way I put it.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's kind of, you know, I mean, somebody could take this out of context, but behind every crazy woman is a man who made it necessary.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Because he failed her in some way.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Perhaps behind every crazy woman is a man who drove her to it because he did not act as the kind of man he should have been.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That female craziness is the result of not having a man take care of her and ground her emotions and guide her emotions and provide framing for her emotions the way that he should.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So when you see that in the home, that that is the dynamic.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

When I talked about, you know, southern families being very matriarchal, I mean, that that's really what's happening is the mother runs the show, and dad doesn't have any idea how to deal with his wife.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

He doesn't have any idea how to confront her or correct her.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Like when he sees her being hypercritical of the kids or when he sees her anxiety.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You know, anxiety is contagious.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It spreads when he sees her anxiety, basically making the home this very reactive place, he's got to be the one to step in, confront that, deal with it, and then basically contain those emotions and redirect them.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And a husband and father who won't do that for his household, he's really, you could say it's fatherly malpractice.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

He's failing his family.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

By not doing that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, yeah, that's absolutely a huge issue.

Will Spencer:

So I want to push back on that just a little bit.

Will Spencer:

Just because I typically push back on the notion that women's behavior is entirely determined by men.

Will Spencer:

I can go with you maybe like 90% of the way, but realistically, some women are just, there's a gravitational pull towards crazy in them.

Will Spencer:

So if we can just agree on that, because I think that the dialogue men naturally take on responsibility, that's what we're built to do.

Will Spencer:

Authority flows to.

Will Spencer:

I'm going to butcher Doug Wilson's great quote.

Will Spencer:

Authority goes to where responsibility goes.

Will Spencer:

Something like that.

Will Spencer:

The man who takes on more responsibility is given more authority.

Will Spencer:

And there does come a point in every woman's life and path where she has to say, I have to get myself under control, and that they have the ability to do that even in scenarios where husbands and fathers are failing them.

Will Spencer:

So that women's behavior is not.

Will Spencer:

Deter is not hard.

Will Spencer:

Deterministic is the word that I was looking for based on men's choices.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And what I'm giving you is not a determinism but a pattern, correct?

Will Spencer:

Yes.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I would be fine with your 90% comment.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I'm talking about a pattern, not something that's deterministic.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You can have a husband who does a really good job with these things, and his wife just rebels against it.

Will Spencer:

That's right.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, that's totally possible.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You can have a husband who loves his wife well, seeks to lead her well, and she rebels against it.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay, that's totally possible.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But as a general pattern.

Will Spencer:

Correct.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

When men do their jobs well, women fall in line just as a general pattern.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So I would say it's more proverbial wisdom than some kind of ironclad, you know, deterministic law.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So I think we're agreed on that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And in saying that, too, in saying that a, you know, behind every woman's craziness is an abdicating man.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I'm not excusing craziness.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I'm not saying she's not culpable, but she is.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, you know, if somebody provokes you to sin, you're still responsible for your sin.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You should have resisted the provocation.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You know, but it's just interesting to me that if a man, if a married man's wife will not have sex with him and he starts using pornography, everybody knows that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Her sin of sexual refusal does not excuse his sin of pornography.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Everybody knows that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And everybody would, you know, every, every sane person would agree with that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But when you, when the roles are reversed.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Um, oftentimes, the.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

The other person's sin is used as an excuse.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

The man's sin is used as an excuse for the woman.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

If a woman hasn't.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Has an adulterous relationship, sometimes that gets excused because, well, her husband was just not, uh, emotionally connecting with her.

Will Spencer:

That's right.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You know, so.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So again, it, you know, who.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Who, you know, basically, who's held responsible and who gets excuses made for them.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And the way our gynocentric culture is set up, women's sin gets excused, and men sin, you know, men bear the brunt, you know, of their.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, all too often.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I'm not saying there are cases where men get off the hook or where women aren't held responsible.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There are, obviously.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I'm just, again, talking about a general cultural pattern.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's what you see.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, you see it.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You see it in the legal system, wherever men and women can commit the same crime, and the men.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

The man gets a harsher punishment than the woman does.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay, what about equality there?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You know, you see it.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, if we really believed in an egalitarian version of equality, you know, there would be no such thing as alimony or something like that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Because why, you know, if they're really equal, why can't she just pay her own way?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You know, why do his wages need to be garnished to pay her expenses?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You know, it's just so.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, there's all kinds of ways in which, I think, basically, our culture is very schizophrenic about these things and all kinds of ways in which, basically, feminism has overrun common sense and any notion of justice.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And, again, it's just created or intensified all kinds of problems for us.

Will Spencer:

I agree.

Will Spencer:

I agree.

Will Spencer:

Thank you for all that.

Will Spencer:

Yeah, I think from having come out of the manosphere, and I still interact with some of those guys, not in the christian world, but in the secular world, I've noticed that there's a tendency for fatalism.

Will Spencer:

All women are like that.

Will Spencer:

And then determinism somewhere it's a man's fault.

Will Spencer:

And so I've tried very hard to navigate, like, hey, so there's truth in those patterns.

Will Spencer:

So, like, how do I.

Will Spencer:

How do I navigate through all that?

Will Spencer:

So I appreciate that, because I think it's really important in the christian world that we hold up scripture as, like, this is the objective standard that we're all accountable to.

Will Spencer:

And that's.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's what.

Will Spencer:

That's what gives.

Will Spencer:

That's what I think, theoretically, is supposed to give the christian church so much stability and weightiness, like, this is the word of God.

Will Spencer:

It's not going anywhere.

Will Spencer:

It's eternal, it's unbreakable.

Will Spencer:

You can break yourself against it, and that's what you're supposed to do.

Will Spencer:

But there's a reluctance in some ways to do that for all the reasons that we talked about.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah, you're exactly right.

Will Spencer:

So I guess I want to, with the time remaining that we have, I do want to talk just briefly about.

Will Spencer:

So there are parents now who are raising young children, teenagers and younger, say like adolescents and younger, twelve and below, who are looking at this and wanting to avoid, wanting their daughters, particularly to avoid the multi car pile up that is feminism, that's ahead of them down the road.

Will Spencer:

But the cultural pressure, the pounds per square inch that feminism puts on both husbands and wives, mothers and fathers today to guide their daughter's choices in a particularly culturally acceptable way must be immense within the church as well.

Will Spencer:

Particularly when young girls themselves will report repeatedly that when they say, I would like to be a housewife and a mother, they get mocked by their own peers.

Will Spencer:

So I guess the question that's up for me is that particularly to undo the sexual revolution?

Will Spencer:

I think it starts with guiding women because there's been no shortage of guidance for men in that regard.

Will Spencer:

What can parents of children, adolescents and younger, begin to do within themselves, within their communities, within their households, to undo these and withstand the pressures that they may face in their workplace and their communities, and potentially also within the churches and even themselves?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So many different answers to that question need to be given.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So I'll start with this one.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Is to model what you want in your own home and in your own marriage.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay, so, for example, motherhood needs to be prized and celebrated, not treated as second best or an interruption to career.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, I remember when my kids were growing up, and as they got a little bit older, I was like, I would say at the dinner table, like, aren't you glad that you did not have a feminist mother?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That your mom was always there for you, that she was making the home a great place for you, and filling this home with love and beauty and goodness and aren't you glad you had that?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And not a woman who is out there trying to drawn away from her family to go try to pursue the corporate ladder and that kind of thing?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So model it in your own home.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

The best way to prepare your kids for happy marriages of their own is for them to grow up in a home where there is a happy marriage it's kind of cliche to say the best thing that you can do for your kids is to love your spouse really well, or if your husband love your spouse and if you're a wife, to respect your husband.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But that, that is what you need to do.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That is where it begins.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I've seen a lot of kids, you know, kids that are now getting into their twenties who do not want to, they come from christian homes but do not want to be married because their parents marriages seemed so unhappy.

Will Spencer:

Yeah.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so it's kind of given them the sense that, why would I get married?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It just didn't look like it was that much fun.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I think that pastors also play a role in this.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

We need to be really careful how we talk about family life and marriage.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I think there's a tendency amongst pastors to only talk about the negatives and the challenges and the sacrifices required and not also talk, or talk even more about the joys and the blessings.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Like, think about psalm 128.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Psalm 128 does not describe any of the.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, obviously there are, you know, there are struggles and difficulties and sacrifices to be made in family life, but psalm 128 is just this beautiful celebration of what God designed the family to be.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I think we need a lot more of that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, I would tell you to sing, you know, sing song.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There's some great metrical versions of psalm 128.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Sing psalm 128 in your family and make that the vision that your kids grow up with, that this is what family life is supposed to look like, and it's filled with blessing and joy and peace.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There's nothing better than this.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And, you know, it even ends with, you know, seeing your, you know, your, your grandchildren is how the psalm ends.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So that's even planting a seed of, like, oh, you know, mom and dad want grandkids, you know, so I would say that kind of thing, and.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But I would say, in addition to the example, there's got to be a lot of explicit teaching and training done.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, I had a conversation with a dad a while back, not somebody from my church, but somebody whose kids kind of grew up alongside mine.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And, you know, my kids are getting married and his are not.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And he's like, why are your kids, you know, why are your kids.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, it's just interesting that your kids are married and mine don't seem to really have any interest, and he's got girls, and he and I just, I mean, we didn't have a full conversation.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I didn't get to say everything that I was thinking but apart, part of what I wanted to communicate is, I know what you emphasized with your girls, and it was sports and it was academics.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, you really pushed your girls hard to pursue athletic competition, and you really pushed them to pursue the best possible, you know, school opportunities with little regard for what that might do to them spiritually.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I don't think, you know, I don't think this dad ever really emphasized the glory that is found in being a wife and a mother and a homemaker and how glorious that really is.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so he kind of got what he trained them for.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I think now he's realizing, I mean, again, I don't think he's seeing this, but, I mean, I think this is what he would need to see, is that he basically made a mistake by what he emphasized when his kids were growing up.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So I think far too many conservative christian households raise their kids in an androgynous way.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

They raise their girls like they were boys.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And that's a huge, huge, huge mistake.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So you talked about, you know, the little girl who says she wants to be a wife and a mother someday.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

She needs to be applauded for that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And, yes, there's nothing better for you than that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Now, you may do some other things.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You may be a school teacher for a while or whatever.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You know, I mean, a lot of women will do other things along the way, but what needs to be most celebrated is motherhood.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

What needs to be most celebrated is the fact that a woman can bring a new, everlasting soul into this world through her body.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There's nothing, there's nothing more amazing than that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There's no greater miracle than that in this world.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, you know, I think a lot of it is the teaching and training we do.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And then, so, and then I think the other thing, it really.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So, so I actually just had a, I mentioned this on Twitter earlier today, actually, and I've written a blog post on this before.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I think having a happy marriage is really pretty simple.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I mean, it's not easy.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Simple is not the same as easy.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But it really comes down to two things.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It comes down to virtue and polarity.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Virtue and polarity.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You have to have virtue.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

What I would call just the fruit of the spirit or godly christian character, because without that, there's just going to be constant, just constant friction in the home.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You've got to have virtue.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You've got to have high character to have peace in the home.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But you, but the, but the way the fruit of the spirit gets expressed is never androgynous, you know, everything is qualified by your sex.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You're either, you know, a man or a woman.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So there's got to be sexual polarity.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

There needs to be.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I'm.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

The Bible does not prescribe a sexual division of labor.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Down to every last detail.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But it does in a big picture kind of way.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Show us a sexual division of labor.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And you see this, I think, especially in Genesis, chapter three.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Where the man is cursed mainly in the realm of provision.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And the woman is cursed mainly in the realm of multiplication.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Because those are their respective zones where they're going to be most.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's the center of gravity.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

The center of gravity for a man is, I am a provider.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I go take Dominion in the world to provide for my family.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And the center of gravity for a woman is I am a life giver.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I nurture new life and bring it into the world.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That, you know, what does it mean to be a man?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You're oriented towards dominion.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

What does it mean to be a woman?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You're oriented towards multiplication.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Now, men also have a role in multiplication.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Women also have a role in dominion.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I'm not.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I'm not.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's not, you know, it's not.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

I'm not compartmentalizing here.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But I'm saying in terms of an emphasis, that's your fundamental vocation.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

We need to be teaching our children about sexual polarity from an early age.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Boys do this, girls do that.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Now, you can end up with overly rigid stereotypes.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But the reality is, in our day, in our world, in our culture, that's not our problem.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's not the main problem we fall into.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So teach sex, teach virtue, teach the fruit of the spirit.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Because that's one key ingredient.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

The other ingredient is sexual polarity.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Teach about the differences between men and women.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And obviously, as your kids get older, you teach that in more.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Well, just in deeper and fuller ways.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And you get into the biology of sex itself.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And how babies are created and all that kind of thing.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

But parents sometimes talk.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Okay?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

When do I have the sex talk with my child?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And I would say it's not a talk.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It is an 18 to 20 year and beyond, even in some ways, conversation.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You're teaching your kids about the differences between men and women all along the way.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

And so when you get into the actual specifics of reproduction.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That kind of fits with everything else you've been teaching and saying about the differences between men and women all along.

Will Spencer:

Incredible.

Will Spencer:

I wish we had double the time that we do.

Will Spencer:

As I know you have an appointment to get to.

Will Spencer:

The listeners of this podcast will know that this is actually the final episode of the Renaissance of Mendez.

Will Spencer:

It's about to become the Will Spencer podcast.

Will Spencer:

And so this will be the last interview under the renaissance of men banner.

Will Spencer:

And you've just said in over four years, you've said everything I've ever wanted anyone to ever say.

Will Spencer:

So I could not think of a better capstone to this.

Will Spencer:

Thank you so much, sir.

Will Spencer:

I'm deeply appreciative.

Will Spencer:

I've been very blessed by this conversation.

Will Spencer:

I think my listeners have been as well.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Well, thank you, Will.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Thank you for your work and it's been great being with you, and I'd be glad to come on again sometime.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

We can continue the conversation.

Will Spencer:

That will definitely happen.

Will Spencer:

Is there any place you'd like to send men and women to find out more about you and what you do before we go?

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So I have got a our church, of course, has got a website, so if you search for Trinity Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, you're likely to find you should be able to find us.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

We've also got a pastor's page, which is where my blog is.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

It's TPC.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

So Trinity Presbyterian church tpcpastorspage.com.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

i've got a blog there and then I also am on Twitter and I always have to look to make sure I can remember my exact handle.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Vicker:

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Vicker:

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Yeah.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

That's where people can find me.

Will Spencer:

Those will be in the show notes.

Will Spencer:

Thank you so much, sir.

Will Spencer:

I'm again very blessed by this conversation.

Will Spencer:

Very grateful for your ministry and your thoughtfulness.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Thank you, Will.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Thank you for your work and your time.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Renaissance of Men podcast.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

Visit us on the web@renofmen.com or on your favorite social media platform at Ren of men.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

This is the renaissance of men.

Pastor Rich Lusk:

You are the renaissance.

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