REVAMPING CHRISTIAN CULTURE

It's Failing Young Men and Others

The following is a paraphrased transcript of the above video. The channel is called Effective Purpose. A more recent video is linked at the end.

I just read the transcript. I saw the other video yesterday. The author seems very insightful. He says people need a sense of certainty and culture pretends to give us that, but it fails to deliver in many cases, because of a faulty foundation.

Modern Christian culture has broken nearly all of its promises to young men — and it’s no surprise that many want nothing to do with it anymore. Let me be clear: when I say “Christian culture,” I’m not talking about all followers of Jesus or the things Scripture explicitly calls us to. I’m talking about the unwritten norms, expectations, and lifestyle formulas the generations have added around the core faith. That’s what young men are increasingly rejecting.

Culture in general is a mixed bag. On one hand, we need it — it gives us shared language, common values, and goals. But no culture is perfect. Every one of them eventually becomes out of touch, doing more harm than good unless the people inside it are willing to adapt. The problem? Christians are often notoriously bad at that. Right now, the dominant version of Christian culture is working great for some people — but not for most young men. And that’s where the story of broken promises begins. You might be wondering: “Promises? What promises?”

Well, every culture has to offer a deal to keep its members engaged — a kind of social contract. The message is simple: “Follow our way of life, and it will lead to prosperity,” or as John Mark Comer puts it, “the good life.” Think of the old American Dream: work hard, go to college, climb the social ladder, and you’ll get the spouse, the house, the pension. That dream’s collapsed — and young men noticed. They stopped trusting a culture that couldn’t deliver what it once promised. And when they turn to Christian culture, too often they find more of the same.

For years, Christian culture has promised: “Play by the rules, speak the lingo, serve quietly, stack chairs after the service, and take lots of sermon notes. Do that, and you’ll get a life that matters. You’ll find purpose, community, maybe even a good Christian wife.” We’ve made it sound like the Christian way isn’t just a good path to the good life — it’s the only legitimate path. That’s a bold claim. So what happens when it doesn’t work?

What happens when a young man does all the “right” things and still doesn’t flourish? He doesn’t fit in. He’s lonely. He’s mentally unwell. He’s still single, and nothing he tries seems to help. He’s stuck. The culture gave him tools that no longer work, and it forbids him from using anything outside of its narrow framework. He’s trapped in a dead-end life — and it’s soul-crushing. I’ve lived that. I’ve seen it play out in the lives of countless others. Friends who gave everything to the mission field now whisper, “I don’t know if I can do this anymore.” They’re not abandoning Jesus — but they are seriously questioning the system that claimed to represent Him.

It’s not that Christian culture fails everyone. If you’re a woman, or a married man, it can be a welcoming place. But if you’re single and male — especially if you don’t fit the mold women are drawn to — it’s a brutal landscape. Unmarried men are often treated like second-class citizens. At the same time, no one dares talk honestly about attraction, dating dynamics, or how to actually form healthy relationships. So these men are not only ignored — they’re blamed. They’re told that their struggles are their own fault. That if they just “manned up,” everything would work out. That worked for a while. Not anymore.

Now we have the internet. And guys are comparing notes. Realizing they’re not alone. That maybe the failure isn’t personal — it’s structural. And when that dawns on you, everything changes. And so they can confirm with other people that, no, I'm not an outlier — this is a major trend. This really isn't working for us, and this does not seem to just be God's will. Something is broken here, and what we're being told just doesn't add up.

It's gotten so bad that even when we do say the right stuff to them — or we even just try to build up their faith — they don't listen, because in their minds, everyone has screwed them over so badly for so long that all of us have lost the right to speak to them. The only people they will listen to now are people who get them results, which we don't.

Now, my heart here isn't to complain about these problems. It's to solve them — or try to. But before we can do that, we need to understand them. How does a culture like ours, that has God's Word of truth as our anchor, get so disconnected from reality for so many people?

In ancient Israel in Jesus' time, systematizing worked its way into the culture — a culture that eventually got so disconnected from reality that, even though they were God's chosen people and they had God's Word of truth, they still shouted, "Crucify Him!" And it all started because they needed to feel certain, but Jesus made them feel uncertain. This need for certainty is an extremely powerful, instinctual craving that we all feel.

Now, I want to get nerdy about this for a minute, because like Russell Kennedy says, “If you can't see your thoughts, you're destined to be your thoughts.” If we don't expose our instincts like this and bring them out into the light, they will probably continue to rule us from the shadows. And also because these instincts reveal a lot of patterns that, once you see them, a lot of things that seemed like random chaos before will start to make perfect sense.

All of us, as humans, crave certainty. We need to feel that sureness, that I'm right, and I'm correct. We feel lost and anxious without that. This is why we make so many assumptions that wreck our lives and destroy our relationships — because our brains want to jump straight to certainty by taking what little we do know and stretching it to cover over what we don't know. And that's why we assume the worst. We'd rather believe the worst catastrophe imaginable and be certain about it than dare to hope for the best — because certainty makes us feel like we're in control of the situation.

This craving for certainty is also why we like strong, confident leaders and teachers who make everything simple and clear and firm. Love him or hate him, that's why Trump got elected. It's nothing to do with his policies or his platform. Most people have no idea what his platform is. What they know is that he's firm, strong, confident. He makes people feel certain in a time when most of our lives are anything but. It's also why guys like, say, Mark Driscoll, for example, can allegedly abuse his power and even hit his staff — allegedly — and even though he hasn't shown any real repentance for that, people still flock to his churches because he has that gruff, firm veneer of masculine power and confidence. "They can't cancel me, and you can't criticize me." He makes people feel certain.

This is also why we don't like nuance, right? We like things that are simple and clearly defined. And we like binaries too. It's black. It's white. It's this. It's that. We hate sliding scales or conditional truths, because simplistic explanations make us feel certain. This is why people trade complex-but-true answers for simplistic-but-false explanations all the time. It's not because they're stupid. It's because complexity kills clarity, which creates uncertainty — and makes us feel uncomfortable.

Side note: this is also why that girl you like always ends up with a guy that you think is kind of a jerk. Yeah, he seems a little harsh and arrogant, but he makes her feel certain. While all the wishy-washy nice guys who just defer to her ("Well, I don't know, what do you want to do? You're so pretty. Huh? You tell me where to go") yeah, they don't give her any sense of certainty. In fact, they make her feel more anxious.

This need for certainty makes a lot more sense when we understand how our brains work. Right? Our brains are not processors. They're not computer chips, like the popular analogy. They don't even process data very well. But what do our brains do more than anything else? They make decisions. They're not very fast at processing, but they are lightning-quick at categorizing and reducing down, filtering out all the irrelevant noise down to just what we need in order to make a decision. And decisions are kind of a big deal, because that's how we control the outcomes that we get in life. Whether we're alone or together. Whether we're hungry or our belly is full. Whether we live or die. It all comes down to the decisions we make.

Now it makes more sense why our brains would hate uncertainty, right? If what they really want to do is make decisions, uncertainty throws a wrench into that process. Certainty helps us feel like we know what to do. It gives us a sense of control and security about the situation. No wonder we get so anxious these days — with way too much sensory input and information coming at us all the time, overloading the filter so we can't feel certain about anything. And our brain feels like it's going to die, because it can't make any decisions. So to make sure that we can make decisions quickly and survive, our brains are constantly at war with uncertainty.

This is where our culture comes onto the scene, because culture is one of the main tools we use to fight uncertainty. Our first line of defense is actually just systems. For example, just like the leaders in Jesus' time, we feel uncertain about how to interpret and apply the Bible — so we make systematic theologies to take all that uncertainty out of the Bible. From there, we systematize all of our ministries and services, outreaches — everything that we do as a church. And then we, the people, turn those systems into culture.

Culture is basically when we take our systems and forge them into a path to the good life. Then, once the culture has set up that haven of certainty and path to the good life, people start to enforce it. Anyone who questions it, or steps out of line is seen as a threat — because they might pull everyone off of that path to the good life. So they get punished — sometimes with a light nudge, sometimes with heavy things like gossip, making fun of them, shaming them, or sometimes much worse.

The culture in Jesus’ time believed that strict adherence to the Jewish cultural codes was the way back to God’s favor. So by breaking those cultural codes, Jesus was seen as a threat to their path back to the good life. It's part of the reason why it was so easy for the Jewish leaders to stir up the crowd to kill Jesus.

Not that it's remotely on the same level — but it is the same mechanism that causes Christian culture today to come down so hard on men who try to tell the truth about the way life works. So that explains why the Boomers and X-ers who've been in charge of the Church for decades made church culture the way they did — and why they defend it so strongly, even when it's clearly gone bad. But if that culture was so good for them, how did it get so bad for so many people today?

Well, it probably happened for us the same way it happened for the people in Jesus’s time. See, the teachers who wrote all of those extra rules and cultural expectations were usually of a higher class than the people they were teaching. They were also often more secure in a lot of ways — which means, in multiple ways, they were insulated from the consequences of their teachings. It's easy to write a law that says “Don’t pick heads of grain on the Sabbath because that's work” when you yourself are never starving, hungry enough to even consider doing it.

Jesus actually refers to this problem in Matthew 23:4. He says, They tie up heavy, burdensome loads and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them. When the people creating the systems, the culture, and the enforcement don't experience the consequences of what they teach, they will always drift farther from reality. And this is why — I think it was N.T. Wright or someone like him — said basically, “If someone isn’t able to be harmed by the things they teach, you probably shouldn’t trust them,” because they have no skin in the game. There are no consequences.

Like again with the dating example: if you're a woman or a married man, you can dream up any fantasy you want about how women choose men and how they treat them, because you don’t have to date anymore. You’re not going to be the one starving, so it won’t hurt you if you get it wrong. Now, it will hurt someone. You might not suffer if you get it wrong — but your kids will. The young men will suffer. They already are.

When reality isn’t hurting us, other incentives start to creep in. If you’re one of those married guys trying to teach the next generation how to go about dating, and you do tell the truth — just straight-up say, “Listen guys, this is how women operate, it’s not pretty” — the women in your life won’t want to hear it, and they’ll make you feel terrible about it. So to protect his peace, he’ll start to shy away from telling the truth. This is how an entire culture drifts away from reality.

Now, you might say, “Yeah, but we have God's Word. That’s what anchors us to the truth. So we don’t really need to worry about this.” Except… that's not quite how it works. See, the teachers in Jesus’s day drifted from reality — but that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was: they didn’t see any difference between God's Word and their words about God's Word. We have a very similar problem today.

Now, I have to be very clear about this: We need to teach the Bible. Most of the problems we see in the church today are because Christians don’t know what the Bible says, let alone understand it. We need to explain the Word. We need to contextualize it. We need to help people live Christlike lives. But we still have the same problem they had back then. The Bible still doesn’t say everything. Sometimes it’s completely silent on entire topics that are really important to us — like dating.

So on the one hand, we do have to extrapolate from God’s Word. But we have to remember: when we extrapolate, we’re using human reasoning. It might be good reasoning — but it’s still human, and it’s never perfect. There is a gap between perfect and imperfect — no matter how good that imperfect thing is. So we always have to recognize: unless we are quoting the literal words on the pages of the Bible (we don't actually know the original words), that gap is there, and our words are always on the weak side of it. We also have to remember: our extrapolations are never purely logical. That’s just not how it works. Your temperament. Your experiences. Your old wounds. Your emotional needs. Your instincts. Your biases. Your sin. Your hungers — floating around in your subconscious — all of them have a say in the way you reason out your extrapolations.

And just like in Jesus’s time, things get harmful when you combine a culture that has drifted from reality with teachers who stop seeing the difference between their extrapolations about Scripture and Scripture itself. They stop teaching with humility. All their personal interpretations get codified into Christian cultural law. Now, those cultural laws will benefit some people very well. But because they’re human, they’re not perfect. And the flaws in them will hurt people.

So this is the problem. How can we solve it? I genuinely wish it were as simple as just pointing it out. But unfortunately, there are a lot of really strong, instinctual, emotional forces working against us. You could tell people: “Hey, no, sorry. Your systematic theology is not the same as the Word of God itself. It’s a theory. It’s not even the only plausible one. Yours might be the most plausible — but it’s still a man-made creation. If you try to elevate it from ‘plausible’ to ‘indisputably correct,’ you’re essentially claiming to be God — because only God is that perfectly correct.”

You could say all of that, and you might be right. But it wouldn’t matter. They’ll just get mad — because you just poked at the thing that makes them feel certain: the system. And they want that more than they want the truth. You could go after the culture, too. You could say, “No, your Christian cultural norms are not the same as the commands of God. Only God is perfectly correct — and He never actually said to do that.”

Again, you might be right. But you’ll still just make them mad — because those cultural norms make them feel certain. And without them, they feel lost. Worse, those systems and that culture are woven into their identity. So when you go after them, it feels like a personal attack. These are incredibly powerful emotional forces at play. But before we get too hopeless about it, I do still believe that God is above all of that.

The first thing we need to do is get back to finding our security and our certainty in Christ instead of in our systems and our culture. We won't be able to withstand the culture around us if we aren't secure in Him first. So then, if we can do that, the next thing we need to do is rebuild trust. We have let them (e.g. single men) down. Our culture has failed them. It hasn't delivered on a lot of the stuff we promised them — just like American culture hasn't either. And we need to do some work to rebuild that trust.

Now that's going to take some reprioritizing. There are at least three things we need to reprioritize here:

1. Listen first, speak second. Our first instinct when we hear that young men are struggling is to project and assume — and, of course, we always assume the worst. We assume that they're soft. We assume they're arrogant. We assume they're lazy or entitled. But when we come down on them with those harsh judgments, we're disparaging their character based on nothing but assumptions. You don't actually know — you're just assuming the worst about them. What on earth makes us think they're going to stick around to take those lashings? Remember: in their minds, we lost the right to speak to them by failing them so many times. If we want them to listen to us, we have to earn that right back first. So if we're going to rebuild trust, the very first thing we need to do is get back to just listening to them — and listen with humility. Don't assume they're wrong about everything they say. Many of them have done their homework on this — sometimes more than the grown-ups have.

2. Honesty first, certainty second. Don't get me wrong — we do need certainty. If you go totally wishy-washy about everything, yeah, everybody's going to walk out the door again. There's a reason people gravitate toward leaders like Mark Driscoll — he makes them feel certain. We do need to offer people a degree of certainty. But we need to prioritize honesty and accuracy first. This takes humility — because it means we have to untangle our words about God's Word from God's Word itself. If we're not quoting the literal words on the page of Scripture (which we don't have the original of), then we have to treat what we're saying as a working theory, not indisputable truth. Because if it's not a direct quote from Scripture, it's not indisputable. We have to recognize that gap — that infinite gap — between the perfection of God's Word and our words about God's word.

3. Relationship first, systems second. We like to systematize theology. We like to make things clear and logical and neat and pretty. But think about it: What is the greatest commandment? Love the Lord your God... and love your neighbor as yourself. That's not a logical-system thing — that's a relationship thing. With apologies to the Westminster Catechism, glorifying God and enjoying Him forever is not the primary purpose of human beings. God already told us what our primary purpose is. If God says, “My highest command for you is to love Me and to love other people,” then His highest command is also probably our highest purpose.

I get it, why that's tough for people. Because relationship is messy. It's dynamic. It's uncertain. Logic and systems — we can organize those. They feel safe. They give us certainty. But relationship is better. It's deeper. It's more meaningful. It's healthier. It’s where we receive life — and the spiritual riches and blessings that He is pouring into our hearts through the relationship we have with Him.

That relationship was restored by Jesus' death on the cross. He didn't suffer and die so we could turn it into a system. He did it so we could have a relationship. And we have to get back to prioritizing that relationship — over all our theological head knowledge, over our systematizing, over our desire to be right. We need to return to the messy thing that is relationship with God — and the even messier thing that is relationship with other people.

Tell me what you guys think.

(My comment was in part:) Acts 15 seems to me to state the solution most clearly. Elsewhere it's described as Unity. I believe "Sociocracy" is the most advanced version of achieving unity (to reform our Culture for the benefit of all).