When women are told that the biggest issue they face is their self-esteem — not their sin — it doesn’t bring them closer to God or make them more likely to walk through the church doors on Sunday.
Instead, it leaves them feeling like they can find that kind of advice anywhere.
“Why would you go to church and sacrifice your free time if you’re going to hear the same message anywhere?” BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey asks ex-Green Beret and Virginia delegate Nick Freitas, noting that they’re simply being told what “they want to hear.”
And women aren’t the only ones being fooled.
“Do you feel like that also might be happening among the Andrew Tate acolytes of the world who say, ‘Okay, in order to attract these young men, we have to not be like Jesus was. We have to be crass, and we have to be rude, and we have to be arrogant, and we have to be materialistic, and we have to be promiscuous, and we have to talk about women like they’re objects ’cause that’s real masculinity’?” she asks.
Freitas agrees, calling the approach symbolic of the “manosphere.”
“So, I think there’s two things that we have to recognize whenever we talk about what we might call the manosphere — Andrew Tate, Justin Waller, some of these other guys, Fresh and Fit. … The first thing that we need to recognize is the reason why they resonated so much with young men was not simply because all these guys have admirable accomplishments in their own right,” he explains.
“But they tend to be strong. They tend to be wealthy, and they tend to, you know, women tend to be attracted to them, right? So, these are all things that, if you’re a young man without a spiritual basis in your life, you’re looking at these things going, ‘I want that,’” he continues.
“The most important component, though, is a lot of young men felt like those guys were sticking up for them when nobody else would,” he says, noting that “men associate loyalty with love.”
“And so, a lot of young men look at guys like Andrew Tate, and they say, ‘That guy had my back when none of you people in the church were mentioning any of this. And now the first time you want to come up and talk about the problems with masculinity, you want to bash Andrew Tate, the one guy that had my back,’” he explains.
“And so, the way I think we need to approach something like that is certainly not by excusing what I believe is disastrous, sinful, and ultimately not genuinely masculine behavior, but I think we need to recognize the source of the problem and from whence it comes,” he adds.
Freitas also explains that the “masculinity” that the manosphere pushes is “hedonistic masculinity,” which says that “you should dominate for the sake of your own pleasure.”
“Essentially, your will to power is the highest moral standard that you can appeal to. That is not in line with Christianity at all,” he says, adding that in order to be in line with Christianity it would have to be “sacrificial in nature.”
“The thing that I would tell young men is, I can appreciate that Andrew Tate is fit, right? I can appreciate that the man can fight. … But if you really want something that’s going to give you ultimate meaning and purpose, … you get that when you recognize that there is a God,” he explains.
“He has a meaning and purpose for your life,” he continues, adding, “and he requires you to be strong because it is a difficult world.”
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