Culture Friday: Faith, gender, and masculinity

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Friday the 24th of January.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I'm Myrna Brown. It's Culture Friday and joining us now is speaker and author Katie McCoy. Good morning, Katie.

KATIE MCCOY: Good morning, Mary and Myrna. When was the last time it was just us girls? This is fun.

REICHARD: It's been a while, it's been a while. And I'm so glad that it's just us girls, because I'm going to ask you about Andrew Tate. He's got a huge following among young men. He promotes riches and misogyny and sexual immorality. Now, of course, this is a problem. In writing for WORLD Opinions, Pastor Seth Trout argues that Tate's appeal is rooted in the universal allure of sin. Young men are drawn to the false promises of power and rebellion that Tate represents. He is a digital echo, if you will, of people like Hugh Hefner. Trout says Christians have to offer a better vision of masculinity that's rooted in the gospel of self-conquest, self-control, and Christ-like service. So my question for you, Katie, is how can the church combat distorted visions of masculinity like Tate's?

MCCOY: Andrew Tate, what an evolution, because he started out as being kind of this counter-formational influence on the feminization of men that we saw throughout society so pervasively. And he was really a backlash to that.

If I could summarize it, I think what we see is on both of those extremes, you have men trying to pattern and define themselves according to their relationship to power, rather than the relationship to their Creator and who God designed them to be.

There was a wonderful quote by Pastor John Tyson up in New York City. I'm going to paraphrase it, but he said that male strength—as God designed it—is a gift to the world. And it is this Christian vision that our strength, our abilities, they are always to be in service to someone else rather than self-gratifying for our own pleasure, for our own power. And what a stark contrast that is to the perspective of masculinity that is the biblical vision of it. The self-restraint for the sake of another. And I hope that we see more and more men talk about a biblical vision of what it means to be a man from those perspectives of character and who God created them to be, not from the perspective of power and how they use it to dominate others.

REICHARD: I had a follow-up to that. I've got a young man in my family and he tells me it's very difficult to find young women who are looking for masculine men, that they want their feminist ideals to be front and center in the relationship. What do you think about that?

MCCOY: You know, the rise of Andrew Tates is in some ways a backlash to a backlash to a backlash that goes all the way back to the sexual revolution. We can trace a lot of things back to that seismic moment in the 1960s. And among them is how women have themselves disconnected their sense of purpose from their creator, disconnecting who they are from God's created design for women and how women are to relate to men.

So it's sad but true. We need a real revival, not only of what it means to be men and women, but what it means to be human. And with that humanity, that embodied humanity, how we relate to one another as male and female.

BROWN: Katie, let's talk about the last minute declaration by former President Biden that the Equal Rights Amendment passed. What are your thoughts on that?

MCCOY: Okay, Myrna. So I love how you said that: “the declaration” because that's exactly what it was. And when I heard that, I thought, you know, there's two big ironies here. The first is that part of the rhetoric that we heard from the outgoing Biden administration was this deep concern for democracy. Well, for all the concern for democracy, he effectively—declared by fiat—an amendment to the Constitution that has failed to pass for the last 50 years.

If you go back and look at the Equal Rights Amendment, it started back in the 1970s. It failed to be ratified by the states by a three-fourths majority of the states, which our Constitution requires. And in the last several years, it's been in the news in part because Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, you got to start over. You didn't make it. We didn't get the three states over the finish line in time. So, begin again.

And what was so fascinating to me is since that has happened, we have had another irony to the ERA and that is the language. When you look at the language, it is protecting people on the basis of sex, meaning biological sex. Well, that is terribly out of fashion. In our world today, we talk about biological sex as not as important, or is at least as important as gender identity. So the idea that we would have an amendment protecting people on the basis of their biological sex seems to fly in the face of a lot of gender related conversations that we have today, ironically, from the same sector of society that is promoting the ERA.

BROWN: And as we speak of gender, I'd like to know how President Trump's declaration that there are only two genders, male and female, how that hit you, especially as the author of a book about what it means to be a woman.

MCCOY: Well, President Trump's executive order is exactly correct, that biological sex, the fact of our biological sex is different than one's self perception of gender identity. What struck me was two things. First of all, it's a very welcome change. The former Biden administration housed Rachel/Richard Levine, the former assistant secretary for Health and Human Services, who pushed quite a few different aspects of the gender ideology agenda. Among them that puberty blockers were safe, medically necessary and life saving. Interestingly, in contrast to the Biden administration's own food and drug administration, which said that they had major risks. So on the one hand, this is a very welcome change. But, I wonder how this is going to play in the courts. Because of course, if you remember the recent case before the Supreme Court, and it was Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch who conflated gender with biological sex.

So I think this is a good step towards common sense. We've heard that, but the larger cultural issue is how this relates to values versus laws. Now our laws do and should reflect our values. But as we can certainly see from issues like abortion, a lot of times there is a huge disconnect between the laws that are on the books and the values. that are espoused by a nation's citizens. Laws are important, but it is only one component of larger cultural change. Cultural change happens when we change ideas, when we change beliefs. That is much more arduous and long-term than the signing of an executive order.

REICHARD: So Katie, I want to ask you this as a follow-up as well. You use the terms gender and sex, meaning biological sex. Are those two the same thing or are they not?

MCCOY: They should be considered the same thing. And one of the things that I talk about in my own writing is that categorically speaking, in the definition of it, sex refers to our biology and gender refers to how we express and understand that. Now, up until about 20 years ago in our cultural vernacular, sex and gender were interchangeable concepts. One of the things though that happened with that Supreme Court case is that they became divided concepts, but not only that, not only were they divided and completely separated from each other, but Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch made them equal and distinct categories of discrimination.

So in other words, he placed gender identity on the same sphere as one's race, one's biological sex, and one's religious identity. So, they should be interchangeable. We should use them interchangeably. But in our cultural vernacular today, we have made them not only two distinct concepts, but two completely disconnected concepts.

REICHARD: I would love to shout that to the mountains. Okay, I have one more question, Katie, and I've got to get your take on this. What did you think of Bishop Marion Budde, who told President Trump to have mercy upon immigrants and the gender ideology crowd, saying that they fear for their lives? This was at the National Cathedral Prayer Service for the inauguration. Now, mercy is a fine and good message, but it didn't really go over well with many people. What did you think?

MCCOY: No, no, it didn't go over well. My first thought was what a massive cringe, not only a cringe to listen to it, but I thought, oh good grief, how disrespectful to be lecturing and preaching at world leaders that are just having to sit there and take it. It was completely inappropriate.

She would have been far better served and her issues would likely have gained at least somewhat of a hearing had she done it in a gracious way of talking to him privately. And instead she leveraged her position and her platform in a way that I think was unbecoming of the role that she has.

You know Mary this also brings up that that question whenever we talk about ministry and people in some type of priestly or pastoral position and Christian nationalism. Can we go there today? Because when you hear people talk about political issues like abortion and use their platform to talk about those issues in front of world leaders, well, that's a bridge too far. However, to our larger cultural conversation, talking about immigrants and LGBT people, specifically from a very decided partisan vantage point, that tends to get a pass. And I think it speaks to the larger conversation that we're having as a country of what is the role of religious leaders speaking into political issues.

BROWN: Katie McCoy, author and speaker. Thank you Katie for joining us.

REICHARD: Thank you.

MCCOY: Always great to be with you.

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