In order for thumos to repair our emaciated souls by giving us staying power, combating the treason of cowardice and gluing us to transcendent causes, we need first to contend with what it really means to be a gentleman.  Most people cannot say where the “gentleman” concept came from, or how it has evolved through the centuries.  And most of us have no idea how offensive a historical gentleman would be today if we were unfortunate enough to be stuck in the same room with one for more than a half hour.  He is our ideal in need of an overhaul.

The comprehensive evolution of what has been meant by gentleman is too extensive to cover here.  And besides, much of that development is pretty boring.  For our purposes, know this:  the definition, which has changed throughout the centuries, has always been a construction of what society has deemed best in men, and what it has deemed best has undergone some drastic alterations.  Those of us who respect liberty and equality would call a traditional gentleman, at best, a stuck-up weenie.

Though the Bible tells us a lot about the virtue of gentleness, it doesn’t include the long-popular concept of a gentleman.  In its original sense, the word gentleman described a male who came from an upper-class family—that is, he was of privileged birth.  A gentleman didn’t need to work, and if he did, blue-collar labor was far beneath him.  That was reserved for “lesser” men, like us.

Through much of history, a gentleman would not be someone you’d want to sit next to at a ball game or in church.  He represented the kind of rigid and punitive social order that revolutionaries saw and rebelled against.  That worldview would make the average American’s skin crawl.

Making matters worse, at times this privileged order was sanctioned by the church as being part of God’s divine providence.  For example, Charlotte Bronte was attacked by church people as godless and anti-Christian because in Jane Eyre she had undermined the God-given social order of her time.  How?  By the end of the novel she had allowed a mere governess to marry the lord of the manor.  For tradition lovers this was a scandal of biblical proportions—which is amusing, given Jesus’ aforementioned unmannerly disregard for convention.

At the same time, though, there have been certain better concepts associated with being a gentleman.  One is guardianship, or looking out for the well-being of those charged to your care.  Also, the gentleman was thoughtful and courteous, and we need more of this today.

Looking to the East also helps us gain a more authentic understanding of this ideal archetype.  For instance, Confucius called being a gentleman chun-tzu.  Such a man is “distressed by his own lack of capacity,” but he is never distressed at the failure of others to recognize his merits.  He will be “slow in word but diligent in action,” indeed he is “ashamed to let his words outrun his deeds.”  He remains “unperturbed when not appreciated by others.”  Like you, I would be more than happy to spend time with this kind of man.

Conservative feminist Katherine Kersten has said well what an ideal man should be:

True manhood means accepting responsibility for others, and making their welfare a primary focus of life.  It means developing a capacity for judgment, courage, honesty, generosity, determination, public-spiritedness, and self-denial in pursuit of a larger good.

Manliness, Kersten says, embraces both tough and gentle virtues.

All in all, it’s important to understand that amid the shifting historical definitions, in large measure we men are expected to be more conformed to the image of Mr. Gentleman than to that of Jesus Christ.  Nevertheless, we likewise must realize this: Mr. Gentleman doesn’t have the last say regarding what it means to be a man among men.

Mr. Gentleman is a compilation of both helpful and hindering impulses and desires.  Eh wasn’t brought to us from Mount Sinai, but from human fickleness, some of which is drenched in ugly tradition.  And as scholar Brad Miner has pointed out in The Compleat Gentleman, “A true gentleman—a chivalrous man—is just a bit more savage than most people imagine…A man who is not roused to combat evil is no gentleman.”

A gentleman once was expected to possess a martial spirit and, when necessary, to fight.  That this aspect of his nature is largely lost today isn’t accidental.  It’s a deliberate cultural jettison of valor in favor of a comfort-stupor.  Now when we think of a gentleman, we think of a pleasant and amiable guy.  He’s swell, a sweetheart, everyone’s buddy; he says “Golly,” with a grin, when he’s mad.  As I’ve said before, we aren’t very good at recognizing how cowardice and fear so smoothly masquerade as “pleasant and amiable.”

One problem is that gentle is such a misunderstood word today.  When Christian men hear or read about the virtue of gentleness, they often substitute “the vice of nice.”  This is especially true for younger men, and the results of confusing gentleness with niceness can be deadly when it comes to love, marriage, and fatherhood.

These guys get very nervous during conferences when I encourage them to embrace rugged virtues.  Our male-disdaining culture already has geared them to think manliness is wrong, so they huddle after I talk, and they pull their pastor aside, and they express their “godly concern” for what I’ve said, and they have “a check in their spirit” (whatever that means).  All the while their single Christian sisters pine for a man with some juice in him so they can respect him.

The force that a true gentleman brings into a situation or relationship is moderate and metered in its presentation—when being moderate and measured is an appropriate response.  It’s respectful—respectful enough to be both truthful and gracious.  Sometimes we see this in a show or a movie, when a mature police officer is able to diffuse a volatile situation with diplomacy, eye contact, direct speech, a straight back, and—this is critical—the threat of further force if necessary.  No need to use your Taser when its mere presence is working.

Chivalry is strongly connected to our current understanding of a gentleman, and that term comes from the French word for knight.  Most generally, knighthood has codified a set of principles for men to follow in three major arenas of life: (1) man to man, with the virtues of courage, valor, and fairness; (2) man and his God, with faithfulness in promoting good and battling evil; and (3) man to woman, how he should serve and honor his wife, and then, after her, how he ought to treat other women.  Chivalry had become established before the social invention of a “gentleman,” who tended to be more concerned about self-preservation than with defending truth, justice, and beauty. 

In thinking about a better understanding of masculinity, of what it means to be good guy, let’s go with chivalry, which is more receptive to our thumos than gentlemanliness.  And when doing so, let’s remember Edmund Burke’s observation (paraphrased): Men who lack a sense of responsibility to a power above themselves are easily swayed by vanity or self-pity, and they come to prefer softer virtues.  When men attach their strength to a power above themselves, they are better able to avoid the tendency to be sucked into the schemes of powerful and deceitful men who would employ another man’s thumos for their own gain.

Thumos brings wholeness to a man’s fractured soul in many ways.  Atop this list of healing is that it creates greater staying power, the absence of which is a source of great pain and shame for some men (especially Christian men).  Another term for “staying power” is fortitude, the ability to stick to a task and not give up.  Other words for this soul-repairing, meaning-producing attribute: gumption, moxie, verve, and the crowd-pleaser among young men, balls.  From this seat of animation flow both strength and endurance to fulfill difficult responsibilities. 

One of the unassailable facts of masculine life is that we have to fight to help foster our own spiritual growth and other attributes that help create a life well-lived.  The version of “life in Christ” that’s not about joining an army but rather a recreational co-op in which we watch our cholesterol and learn “Kumbaya” can sound appealing; it was to me for many years.  But it’s also incredibly boring after a while, and worse, it’s misleading, for it leaves us turned away from the trials and struggles of others.  This approach to life actually becomes a form of spiritual pot that causes us to languish.

In order for our thumos-courage to grow, and with this growth help to heal our own souls and to love others better, we need to sink our teeth into a juicier and grittier faith.  We will have to break away from rec-center Christianity in order to find abiding maturity, guidance, and meaning.  Especially during what I call Second-Half Spirituality—that time after a midlife crisis (which, in a healthy life, should really be a midlife celebration), where hopefully, if we’ve not yet done so, we discard our small lives for God’s larger life for us.

Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including Unleashing Courageous Faith, No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying. 

Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net

Visit Sandy's website for reluctant entertainers at: http://www.reluctantentertainer.com

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I, like so many men, was told that biblical prophecy was primarily, if not exclusively, about figuring out future events, especially the return of Christ.

It wasn’t until being part of the church for more than twenty years that I received a fuller view of prophetic writing: it inherently and vehemently critiques social evil and rallies a mighty call for justice.  Thumos is indispensable to this redemptive work, not only because it musters the righteous indignation required to righteously render force but also because it links faith to real problems.  Thumos drives a person to say no to a social ill and yes to the hard labor needed to combat it.

Have you noticed how angry the prophets got when it came to injustice?  Have you ingested the fighting language they used in their denunciations?  Look at these examples:

            How the faithful city [Judah] has played the whore,

            Once the home of justice where righteousness dwelt—

            But now murderers!

            Your silver has turned into base metal

            And your liquor is diluted with water.

            Your very rulers are rebels, confederate with thieves;

            Every man of them loves a bribe

            And itches for a gift;

            They do not give the orphan his rights,

            And the widow’s cause never comes before them.

And now, you priests, this decree is for you: if you will not listen to me and pay heed to the honouring of my name, says the Lord of Hosts, then I will lay a curse upon you…I will cut off your arm, throw offal [the organs of animals] in your faces, the offal of your pilgrim-feasts, and I will banish you from my presence.

Most of us think the sin that brought God’s wrath upon Sodom was homosexuality.  According to Ezekiel, it included something much different.  In his allegory of comparing unfaithful Jerusalem to Sodom, the prophet writes,

This was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.  They were haughty and did detestable things before me.

It’s safe to say that these blunt and spirited words from history’s most captivating prophets will not be found on the wall of a Christian bookstore, framed and inset under a painting of an elk, sniffing the morning air, backlit by amber sunrays.  Neither Isaiah, nor Malachi, nor Amos, nor many such others would be allowed into church leadership today.  They’d be forced to take thumos-management classes instead.

Our thumotic inner heat fuels prophet-like indignation.  Yet there are few directives as contrary to contemporary Christian belief as those of Paul: “Be angry, and yet do not sin.”  Christians, especially men, aren’t supposed to get angry about anything, are we?  Give us a shot of sodium pentothal, and we’ll tell you that anger itself is a sin.  We are God’s most denatured creatures.

Anger can be a creative force.  It can crack inertia and drive us past persistent conundrums.  Anger, properly handled, helps us fulfill our aspirations by causing blessed dissatisfaction with our lives and with the plight of others.  Anger, seasoned to create courage, can be prophetic in the truest and best sense.

Righteous anger can compel a man to confront the world’s deceptions and misrepresentations and rationalizations.  It can shape his purpose and bring deeper meaning to his life.  It takes thumos to confront suffering and misery, to rescue the persecuted, to stand against the crowd.  This is what motivates a person to be like the real Jesus—not the sugar-coated Jesus we’ve been given.

Without this prophetic martial spirit, one not found in many believers today, a man can’t serve God well because he doesn’t possess enough urge to rise above the world’s approval, attachments, and addictions.  Without this spirit, men too often succumb to the “disease to please,” the ailment Peter repeatedly suffered as he denied even knowing Jesus.  By contrast, through the prophetic voice born of thumos, a man can become free to serve in the way the prophet Micah told us the Lord desires: “To do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

Our spiritual training has us object and say, “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.  Generally this is true, and it’s best—for instance, in marriage—to understand this sooner rather than later.  But the Bible doesn’t say gentleness is the only disposition that turns away wrath.  A stern response can also do the job.  Sometimes, depending on the circumstances, sternness does it even better.

Said Martin Luther,

When my heart is cold and I cannot pray as I should, I scourge myself with the thought of the impiety and ingratitude of my enemies…[Soon,] my heart swells with righteous indignation and hatred and I can say with warmth and vehemence, “Holy be Thy Name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done!”  And the hotter I grow the more ardent do my prayers become.”

I call these moments “blessed dissatisfaction.”  Bill Hybels, a man with plenty of thumos (which has gotten him into trouble, especially with legalists), calls this attribute “holy discontent.”  It comes during instances where you don’t ignore your God-given thumos.  You grapple with it, learn from it, and let it propel you.

Hybels explains the power of this key to courageous living and muscular faith:

This energy causes you to act on the dissatisfaction that’s been brewing deep within your soul [thumos] and compels you to say yes to joining forces with God so that the darkness and depravity around you gets pushed back.

It was thumos that urged me to birth The Protectors, so far the only faith-based solution of its kind to adolescent bullying.  I was indignant that so many of the people to whom I minister were bullied as children, so I harnessed my discontent with the status quo and underwent the difficult work of creating a program that would provide a Christian response to this growing worldwide problem.

The Protectors is one example of preventative medicine against future crimes and their crushing influence upon the living.  Through our curriculum, Awana, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and other faith-friendly organizations around the world are learning how to push back against the scourge of bullying by taking seriously God’s love for justice and his hatred for cruelty.

Remarkably, interest in The Protectors is coming more from private Christian schools than Sunday schools.  There’s something about a martial spirit’s penchant for forging courage and creating justice that doesn’t go down well with many evangelical churches.  Some churches feel it’s off limits, but private schools know they can’t succumb to such an illusion because they must grapple with the real world in real time.  They can’t afford the kind of Petri-dish thinking that survives in a cloistered environment but soon dies when exposed to reality.

Years ago a friend of mine, who’s a kickboxing coach, tried to encourage his congregation to take their protection seriously by teaching them how to take down a potential bad guy at church.  “Some of the elders and deacons loved it,” he said, “but other were shocked and outraged that the church would even consider such training.”  As for objectors, he had served with them for years and couldn’t remember their ever expressing a strong opinion about anything—until it came to using force justly to protect the weak and the timid.

Incredibly, we’ll fight for our right to by-stand, but we won’t fight for a righteous policing force that protects the innocent and the helpless.  There are brave pacifists, such as Clarence Jordan (1912-1969), a powerful, visionary Christian who established an admirable interracial cooperative in the deep South during the 1950s—a courageous act that was met with prejudice, guns, and even dynamite.  But there are also many cowards who hide behind pacifism and will contend only to maintain the status quo of their fearfulness.  Anemic spirituality and a vacuum of courage have us believing that the most impact we can have is by dropping to our knees and praying really hard…even if a madman were to rip through our church, injuring and killing others.

During conferences, I explain how Catholic priests in New York slums during the early 1800s weren’t chosen only for their ability to comprehend God’s Word; they also were selected for their ability to subdue an intoxicated man who was abusing his family.  His wife would summon the church, which usually would dispatch two priests.  They’d explain to the man that if he beat his family again, he’d receive a beating from them.  This martial spirit kept many men in line during a time when police would not respond to such injustice.  It reminds me of Shakespeare’s wise observation: “Lions keep leopards tame.”

However, most guys don’t know what to do with this information.  Their gut and their lungs applaud it, but their spiritual training, so opposed to martial spirituality, has labeled it sinful.  Christian men can’t act that way, they think.  Tell that to the wife and kids of an abusive man.  Lots of church foil will call you a sinner if you behave like those priests.  But vulnerable women and children will call you a hero.  You’ll have to choose whom to please and whom to offend. 

And lest we forget, it’s God—not the timid herd—we don’t want to offend.  When it comes to the truly weak, the outmanned and outgunned, we are to move toward them with power and boldness.

A Greek word for manliness, andreia, is the same word used for courage.  Talk about setting the bar high.  Can we say today, without blanching from embarrassment or growing queasy from remorse, that contemporary man, sweet lover of comfort, highly trained to be innocuous in and out of church, is courage?

Men: Courage is what we were made to embody.  It’s the very trait that must be manufactured in the neglected portion of our soul that is home to the martial spirit.  It is from this deep, heated, rumbling place that our unique form of love flows—this is exemplified by police officers who risk their lives to safeguard citizens, by firefighters who rush toward (not away from) danger, by soldiers who fight for freedom and protect the weak.  It’s found in the teachers who denounce and defy bullying, thus defending human dignity.  It’s found in missionaries who sacrifice themselves for the lives of others.

Again, for many of us, this is the piece in our spiritual grid that when fitted into place electrifies and repairs the entire circuit.  The military has shown us for centuries (if not for millennia) that it needs to be trained, not jettisoned.  And the rediscovery of courage will prove to be providential right here, right now.

I have focused mostly on men, and here’s why: Men have more martial spirit in them than women.  History confirms it, and our experience confirms it as well.  Most women just don’t have men’s taste for fighting, physical or spiritual (though some do).  My observation has been that most don’t want it either—and again, that’s most women, not all.  As the expression goes, fighting is just not in their blood.  By the way, soul-blood is another term the Greeks used to describe thumos.

I think back to my favorite Thanksgiving: My kids and I and another father and son got together to fire about six hundred rounds into an abandoned car.  We took out taillights, headlights, windows, gauges, tires.  My sons and I would do it again in a heartbeat.  I hadn’t felt such childlike glee and delight in a long time. 

But not my daughter. 

“Here you go, baby,” I said, handing her my rifle.  “Just aim and shoot.”

Abby hesitated a very long while.  Eventually she raised the barrel, sheepishly popped off one round, then asked, “Can I go inside now?”  Her blood ran cold, not hot, from that visceral experience.

Shooting an abandoned car is not the same as fighting on a battlefield—I’m just trying to illustrate by example.  Harnessing that sort of power, part of a martial spirit, just isn’t in my wife or my daughter the way it is in me and my boys.  And even if it were, this would be the exception, not the rule.  That doesn’t make either gender one bit better or worse than the other—it just makes us different.  The company of the Thumos-Courageous includes both men and women, but this quality and its offshoots aren’t brought out of us in the same ways, and this difference, like countless others, should be honored and respected.

Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including Unleashing Courageous Faith, No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying. 

Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net

Visit Sandy's website for reluctant entertainers at: http://www.reluctantentertainer.com

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I recently completed a speaking tour that included Promise Keepers Canada and Iron Sharpens Iron in Shiloh, IL. Seventeen talks in nine days is hard on anyone's system. Thankfully, all went as planned, including a powerful 5-part Canadian television interview with It's A New Day host Bob Meisner. 

Our many thanks to the many men of Promise Keepers Canada and Iron Sharpens Iron whose behind the scenes work will likely never receive the recognition it deserves as they co-labor to lift men's burdens across North America.

I'm fortunate and privileged to speak in different kinds of churches. From Pentecostal to Mainline churches, I witness the diversity in the body of Christ, a diversity that I wish more people could witness first-hand. If they did, I think we would spend less time arguing over theological minutiae, which makes us appear increasingly irrelevant and is sometimes a hiding place for fear of intimacy with others, and more time loving one another in a more substantial way, which makes us look increasingly Christ-like. 

During our men's conferences, I talk about the importance of knowing what makes you indignant, which means in part, "much to grieve." Though Jesus was often indignant, our spiritual training has us shunning this godly reaction to what is wrong and broken in our world. Indignation, properly handled, is often a path out of nice but boring and eventually lifeless spirituality and into a larger, richer and more God-glorifying life. It fuels our capacity for a more muscular and courageous faith, and brings us into a deeper relationship with God. 

One of the people listening was Chris Kutyn from Comox, British Columbia, who showed me what happens with men get together and take muscular love seriously. At a men's breakfast, more than 50 men stoked their indignation and their inner capacity for courageous protection and raised $800 in one sitting to rescue women in Nepal from forced prostitution. "We're using the money to buy them the first electronic sewing machine in the area," he told me. These men of muscular faith are helping women escape forced prostitution by providing for them a path toward another livelihood and out of darkness and despair. For some, the donation was a real sacrifice and hardship.

The quality of our lives expands or contracts based upon the amount of courage we possess or don't possess. With courage, we are far more likely to attach our lives to a transcendent cause and mission, which demands sacrifice of our time, treasure and talent. But through this sacrifice comes the deepening of our soul and our faith. Our lives have greater meaning, purpose and significance. With courage, we are better able to produce tangible expressions of faith in action. We move away from Sweet Christianity and into a more rugged and satisfying relationship with Christ.

When asked what is the greatest expression of love, Jesus did not provide a sentimental example, such as giving your wife 12 long-stem roses on Valentine's Day. Rather, "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" [John 15:13]. Jesus was foreshadowing his own death, but he was also telling us that the greatest form of love is more Marines than Mother's Day, more courage than sentiment.

More so, we are called to love people through our courageous strength. Jesus said that the greatest of all commandments is to "Love God with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself" [Mark 12:33]. Not only do we see once again the three parts of our human essence (logos, eros and thumos, our seat of courage within), we are told that we are to love God and others through our courageous strength-not God's strength in our lives. Each of us is given the capacity to love others through our courageous strength, and we're commanded by God to exercise it.

But be warned: this more muscular, protective and rescuing love is disruptive--among the biggest sins within naive and comfort-loving spirituality, which should not be mistaken for historic Christianity. Many who go to church today due so to flee the world--not to change it. They are too easily satisfied with low-level goodness. So don't be surprised when your heroic desire to love and protect others is met with opposition--even within the church.

Courage is sometimes enemy-making. We see it throughout the life of Christ, including some of his most gracious and merciful acts, such as the woman caught in adultery. We are so conditioned to only acknowledge Christ's gentle side that we neglect to see how his capacity for tough love and courage make his mercy and grace possible. Without the courageous capacity to withstand the anger and slander of the religious leaders of his day, there would be no rescue of the woman caught in adultery, who could have been stoned to death by Mosaic Law. 

Courage is the virtue that underpins all other virtues, and its absence, cowardice, is a sin on the same level as murder (Rev 21:8). The men of Comox, through their mercy for women forced into prostitution, will likely make enemies with the pimps of Nepal. Like all of us at sometime in our lives, they made an important choice: Offend man, or God, whose will is for justice to roll on like a river and righteousness like a never-failing stream (Amos 5:24).

And finally, courage fuels the most noted examples of Christian witness and faith--examples that even the cynic cannot ignore. Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King Jr., William Wilberforce, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Mother Teresa, Harriet Tubman, Pope John Paul II, Chuck Colson, Dr. James Dobson--to name just a few-all in their own way, through their courageous capacity, have battled to defend human dignity, which is a gift from God that no person should tear asunder. In their own way, the men of Comox, British Columbia, can add their name to this enviable list. 

Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including Unleashing Courageous Faith, No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying. 

Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net

Visit Sandy's website for reluctant entertainers at: http://www.reluctantentertainer.com

Original publication date: May 22, 2009 

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For those of us who grew up during the Sensitive Man era, Promise Keepers (God bless them) inserted the religious component back into the ideal-male construct.  Promise Keepers deserves our heartfelt thank-you.  I call their teaching “the First Turning.”  Now a Second Turning has begun.

Men across the globe hunger for a more earthy, raw, powerful, and pugnacious spiritual dimension that is—I’ll say it—more manly than what they have now.  I’ve talked with them face-to-face, at home and abroad.  I receive their letters and e-mails from England, New Zealand, Malaysia, Japan, Germany, France, Uganda, Canada, and from countries I’ve had to Google to find on the map.  They want a vitality of soul that their ancestors had but that now seems to have skipped at least a generation or two.

One man from Australia writes:

The “nice” perversion [the misconception that being nice is the same as being good] is widespread across society, and as a parent of a five-year-old boy I am appalled at the prevalence of weak, non-masculine male role models in children’s media as well as the church.  Promo shots for leading male stars of the Christian Music industry look sweet, sickly sweet, to comply with the phony image of our Saviour.

There has been a determination to recreate God in our own image and [to] give my son a complete “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” makeover.  That scruffy Hebrew carpenter with questionable manners, too inclined to embarrass his betters, apparently became over time clearly unacceptable to the church he originally founded, much as he had been to the Pharisees and Sadducees of his time on earth. 

No wonder there has been a crisis in church membership and a serious failure to bring seekers to the one true God.

Another from Kansas wants men to remain men when they come to Christ.

What is it about church that turns us Christian men into such weenies?  I’ve seen men come to our church, men who were known for being bold and decisive.  And instead of blessing us with their boldness and ability to make tough decisions so we can take more hills for the kingdom, they become so pliable and innocuous.  We already have plenty of those.  It’s the main reason why we don’t do anything meaningful!

Perry Atkinson, a mentor of mine for nearly twenty years and general manager of The Dove radio station, often says that when his thumos gets rumbling, Christian men hide their cowardice behind a gentle spirit.  But it’s not fooling him.

For some reason Christian men leave their guts [behind] when they enter the church boardroom.  They forget about commonsense practices that make organizations healthier and better and instead make decisions that no one would make in their own homes.  They don’t want to make the hard decisions, so they make the easy ones, which ruin churches.

I think this is as good a definition of a martial spirit as any other; the ability to make the hard decision when the easy one looks so “Christian.”

Have you tried to grow spiritually, love deeply, and lead reliably without a fighting animus?  How’d that work for you?  If you’re like me—for decades I was told that all I really needed to do was pray hard, read my Bible regularly, and “sacrifice” everything for my wife and family—you’ll conclude that this model is a colossal failure.

A non-martial approach toward male life doesn’t work.  It never has.  The successful, handmade-suit-wearing ministers who have sold this recipe for disaster from expensive sanctuary stages don’t live it themselves.  I’ve met some of them, and I keep meeting them; they, like the Pharisees, are telling you to live one way while they live another (after the microphones and cameras are off).

One reason they do this is that they know a Christian man just can’t be very honest about his thumotic nature.  Most congregations don’t want a tough minister (until they face hardships)—they want someone who’s going to make them feel warm inside.  So pastors think that if they reveal too much of their pugnacious spiritedness, the kind Jesus possessed, they’ll be condemned as not being Christlike.  So like Clark Kent, they keep their true identity hidden, especially from older congregants, the blue-haired mafia, which hold a lot of power in most churches.

One spiritually negligent pastor of mine, a man who punctured my martial spirit, was a stellar player of “the thumos shell game.”  His sermons were constant warnings against assertive and aggressive behavior.  One of his favorite passages is where King David and his men were pelted with rocks by an angry man:

[One of David’s men, Abishai,] said to the king, “Why should this dead dog curse my lord the king?  Let me go over and cut off his head.”

But the king said…”If he is cursing because the Lord said to him, ‘Curse David,’ who can ask, ‘Why do you do this?’”

The pastor’s clear message: If people attack you, it’s the Lord’s will.  Give no place to your martial spirit—do not defend yourself or others.

Unfortunately, I and many other young men listened.  Amazingly, hypocritically, this same man later hired bodyguards for personal protection.  The only time he publicly expressed anger was when he attacked beliefs that threatened his fine-point theological stances.  I never heard him get angry about injustice, or lack of mercy, or the other matters God says he wants us to take most seriously.

This spiritually naïve pastor told us that if we experience resistance in life, then God clearly is telling us no.  Again, though, he had no interest in walking his own talk.  For instance, when his church had a hard time getting building permits in order to expand—that is, it received resistance—he fought back )contrary to his constant harping about God’s supposed will).  And when the church still couldn’t get the permits they wanted, they built anyway.

If resistance were God’s way of telling us no, then no book worth reading would be written.  There would be no Pilgrim’s Progress (written in prison), and we wouldn’t have most of Paul’s epistles (written in prison).  We can thank God that Martin Luther, Dorothy Sayers, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, Tony Campolo, James Dobson, Chuck Colson, Mike Yaconelli, Gary Haugen, Desmond Tutu, and so many others who have changed the world for the better did not follow an insipid and simplistic belief that helps define invertebrate Christianity and that could have killed their godly martial spirit.

Most successful people, like the aforementioned pastor, regardless of the path they’ve taken or the path that has taken them, do have a martial spirit.  Well, all people do.  Let me clarify: These people tap into it while most other Christians don’t.  They feed it red meat.  They train it, discipline it, argue with it, and employ it.  But many of them compel you to scourge and crucify it because this is what the unbiblical, hypocritical, and spiritually destructive Official Script demands.  The Official Script (see chapter 6) is what we come up with when we sift the Scriptures and only emphasize the mild ones so that we can sanctify mildness and eradicate discomfort from our lives.

Earlier I mentioned a “Second Turning,” currently underway, of grafting the martial spirit back into men.  This is one of my goals during conferences: to help men more accurately see their male essence, an essence that for decades has been portrayed as synonymous with their sin nature.  The Second Turning retains sensitivity to women and children and God, but it shows itself in stronger, more emboldened, more courageous ways.  It protects and cherishes the church as well as family, mercy, and justice.

This model provides wholeness, and with it, integrity.  Men with integrity use force, but they use it justly.  Remember Jesus’ words at the beginning of this chapter—the words that, like so many other Jesus statements, appear so unchristian?  “The kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing, and forceful men lay hold of it.”

We don’t trust people who do not use force justly, or at least we don’t trust them for very long.  Women certainly don’t trust men who lack the willingness to use force, and children are nervous around fathers incapable of using force.  When these fathers fail their children, it feels to them like far more than a mere mistake.  It is remembered as a betrayal.  Children expect their father to flex his power when it’s needed, and they are filled with disdain when he won’t.

I was a paperboy in Reseda, California, when I was ten.  And one day I came home from school to some very bad news: I broke someone’s window with a newspaper—or so the owner said.  So my dad drove me to the scene of the crime, an old two-story apartment complex.  The window I supposedly broke belonged to an elderly couple who kept their apartment thermostat at around boiling.  I could barely breathe when my father and I entered the low-watt-bulb apartment of this strangely quiet and very guilty-looking couple whose apartment smelled like an old shoe packed with Vick’s VapoRub.

They showed us their broken window.  I searched my troubled mind to remember if I had broken it and if so, how?  I was a pretty good shot with a newspaper back then, so I actually never went up to the second story to deliver their paper.  I would throw it from below, lobbing it over the guardrail, floating it onto their front doorstep.  My father knew that there was no way such a small paper could pack that kind of wallop.  But still, the window was broken, and these two old people were pinning it on me.

We were about to leave their sweltering apartment, guilty as charged, when my father stopped and, like Columbo, looked to his left at the window one last time.  “Your window, it’s broken from the inside,” he said in his Irish accent.  “It’s sticking out, not in.”

My father spoke as if you were fined for using too many words, which made him both intriguing and frustrating to me as a son.  So instead of calling them rats, he just stared at them for their response.  That sandcastle frail, ghost-like, and dishonest couple just stared back at us, more half-dead than alive, without a sign of remorse.  We left silently as well.

This story may not sound like much to you, but on our ride home, next to my old-Spice-smelling father in his mustard-colored short-sleeved permapress Penney’s work shirt, my soul swelled, because I knew I had an advocate, protector, defender, a catcher in the rue—a father of quiet and judicious force that I could rely upon.  I do the same for my three kids.  I’ve done the same for other kids.

Unlike the contemporary, synthetic male, men who complete the Second Turning are more organically connected to their God-created nature.  They are more comfortable in their god-fashioned soul.  As such, they’re far better able to embrace and fulfill their destiny as a warrior of light.

The martial man will fight spiritually because not only will he have permission, he also will have a new set of spiritual weapons.  Thumos, as the Christian monk and ascetic Evagrius Ponticus observed, is “an essential weapon in the spiritual arsenal which must be properly controlled and employed against the enemy.”  Life without thumos is how men remain soulfully flat and self-absorbed.  It’s not because they don’t have regular Bible studies or attend accountability groups, but because they fail to emulate biblical courage, and their gatherings usually lack thumotic earthiness, spiritedness, and playfulness.  Take those qualities away, and you take away real male fellowship and brotherhood.

Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including Unleashing Courageous Faith, No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying. 

Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net

Visit Sandy's website for reluctant entertainers at: http://www.reluctantentertainer.com

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