Who am I?

The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children [and] everyone born of God overcomes the world.

Romans 8:16; I John 5:4 (NIV)

Being a boy is not a good thing.  Not in the world.  Not in America.  Not among those who are of the social constructionist school of gender identity.  However, after more than forty years of radical feminist social dominance, boys have not matured into less violent, less aggressive, less warlike men.  Read the paper, watch the news, walk the halls of your local high school, attend athletic events; wherever you turn you will see out-of-control boys and men, who are causing more trouble than at anytime in recent memory. 

As a boy-child, one of the first things you learn about yourself is that you are male.  You do not think about that, or try to become that, you just are that.  My sons and grandsons, from their earliest ages, independently chose to interact differently with their worlds than did my daughter and granddaughters.  They were and are, still, attracted to the mechanical thing, the noisy thing, and the fast and glowing and dangerous thing.  They are Tiggers-in-training.

Nobody told one of my grandsons about backhoes, graders, front-end loaders and John Deere tractors; he just picked up on it at the age of two, and could quickly recognize and name them all.  On trips, he would call them out as he spotted them through the car window – on his own and without prompting.  No one told another of my guys to play with the cowboy and horse dolls instead of the baby dolls that were all lined up together.  From his earliest age, he just did, and he revels in tossing them around until they break.

Contrary to the strident voices which assert that, other than anatomy, there are no differences between boys and girls except those that we purposefully “construct” by nurturing, the objective evidence is indisputable that this is just not true.[1]  Much of what it means to be male is biologically constructed.[2]

According to Christina Hoff Sommers, a Ph.D. philosopher, an expert on feminism, and a former university professor who has been embroiled in social controversy over the last decade, “It’s a bad time to be a boy in America.”[3]  She goes on to outline how it is that, by virtue of their sex alone, developing naturally under the influence of their fathers and other men, boys have come to be regarded as defective, violent, and pre-oppressive men-in-training.  It is a basic article of faith, among what Sommers refers to as “girl partisan” ideologues, that the family must be deconstructed.  The traditional role of father must be redefined.  Better, father should just be removed so that boys can become more like girls.[4]  So, tell me, educators and activists, how is your re-engineering of boys working out?  Hmm?

This extremist social agenda, grounded in ideological lies and false science, must be challenged and changed if we are to build boys into the honorable men that God has designed them to be.  It will change, when Christian men, fathers and sons, abandon passivity and engage the lies with the truth of what it means to be a real man.

The massive appeal of the Promise Keepers movement, since its 1990 beginning, shows us that men need the society of other men.  Great opposition arose from leftist anti-male voices, but clearly the world was, and is, waiting for the man who knows who he is; the confident man, the compassionate man, the man of strength, the man of honor, and the man who is the champion protector of women and children, the man who threatens postmodern ideas of masculinity. This is not the hairy Iron John[5] man, pounding his chest and baying at the moon to get in touch with his primal maleness.  It is the real man, the faithful and true man, the noble man.

Arise, man of God.  “Have done with lesser things!”  It is time to “give heart and mind and soul and strength to serve the King of kings.”[6]  Who are you?  Like King David, you are a man after God’s own noble heart,[7] built by Him and for Him.  He has both a journey and a destination for you.  In His strength, you can and will overcome the world and bring your sons to manhood.