Brandon O’Brien’s Christianity Today column, “A Jesus for Real Men,” is an unfortunate example of opinion offered from cursory knowledge. A little bit of religious history is a dangerous thing. In fact, the overall consensus of O’Brien’s disserts is that he misses the point and innacurately caricatures and revises John Eldredge, Mark Driscoll, David Murrow.

I completely agree. O’Brien’s named “masculinity movement” has been the subject of much conversation over the past 25 years or so because a dying church in America is witnessing the fruit of radical feminism and the warehousing of generations of passive or abusive men.

Here’s recent data from David Murrow:

The typical U.S. Congregation draws an adult crowd that’s 61% female, 39% male. As many as 90 percent of the boys raised in the church will abandon it by their 20th birthday. On any given Sunday there are 13 million more adult women than men in America’s churches. This Sunday almost 25 percent of married, churchgoing women will worship without their husbands. Midweek activities often draw 70 to 80 percent female participants. The majority of church employees are women (except for ordained clergy, who are overwhelmingly male). [Many only return when their girlfriends or wives bring them back.] More than 90 percent of American men believe in God, and 5 out of 6 call themselves Christians. But only 2 out of 6 attend church on a given Sunday. The average man accepts the reality of Jesus Christ, but fails to see any value in going to church.

We must wrestle with the fact that men have checked out of church-life in America.

Leon Podles provides a historical narrative of the masculinity crisis in The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity. Historian Anne Braude’s essay “Women’s History Is Religious History,” in the book Retelling U.S. Religious History readily admits that for quite some time Christianity has been, and continues to be, primarily oriented around meeting the needs of women and their children. Men are not around because American church does not connect.

However, O’Brien, doesn’t get it. The men he critiques are not trying to “re-masculate Jesus,” introduce “greater testosterone” into the church, or use natural instincts to define masculinity. Those are ridiculous assertions. They are addressing the fact that the average man in America simply does not connect with narrow image of Jesus presented in most churches today. The average man doesn’t feel like he fits into the overall ethos of church life since it has been, for far too long, almost exclusively oriented away from bringing men into a broader view of kingdom mission in ways that are unique to callings God has placed on men as they bear the image of God. Moreover, many of the men that do fit into churches organized primarily to meet the needs of women and their children are not the types of men that others look to follow.

O’Brien’s biblical theology is so bad that I’ll have to deal with it elsewhere but his claim that the only time Jesus appears as warrior are his “pre-incarnate” and “post-resurrection” debuts has no biblical warrant and largely misses the reality of spiritual warfare during Jesus life and ministry. Casting out demons is not spiritual warfare? The Kingdom needs warriors who are allied with God to fight against “principalities and powers.” Was Jesus not fighting the devil during his ministry?

Overall, O’Brien wrongly prejudices men against being challenged in good ways because of his own misunderstanding of church history, the reality of the church in America, and a biblical theology that may suffer from a lack of exegetical depth. If O’Brien “got it” a more accurate title to his unuanced opinion would be “The Bible’s Jesus for the Regular Guy.”

If O’Brien knows very little about the writings and teachings of the men he critiques, argues against a straw man, and mishandles biblical theology why should we take him seriously? This would be equivalent an accountant critiquing the Navy’s assessment of what makes a man a good Navy seal.

Brandon O’Brien’s Christianity Today column, “A Jesus for Real Men,” puts the masculinity of the incarnate Jesus into question. In attacking the so-called “new masculinity movement,” O’Brien constructs an unfair, unbalanced caricature of men like Mark Driscoll, David Murrow, and John Eldredge and then seeks to tear down metaphors that do not agree with his more sophisticated pallet. While giving lip service to the contributions of these men he essentially argues against the straw man.

O’Brien first gives an historical error. He claims that the first writer to popularize the masculinity crisis in the church was John Eldredge. False. The first ones to raise the issue were writers like Leane Payne author of Crisis in Masculinity (1995) and Harvard Divinity school graduate and psychologist Sam Keen author of Fire in the Belly: On Being A Man (1992). There was a substantial national discussion about men in the church for years in mainline Protestant and Catholic circles before Eldredge struck the keyboard.

O’Brien then aims his caricature at David Murrow, author of Why Men Hate Going To Church; Brad Stine, a comedian, who began a ministry called GodMen; and Mark Driscoll, pastor of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church. What is most bizarre about the critique of Stine is that one might assume, since Stine is a comedian, that many of his comments would be interpreted as comedic hyperbole. No so for O’Brien. He critiques Stein’s comedic hyperbole as if it were biblical theology.

Perfecting the art of out-of-context critiques, O’Brien takes a few quotes from a Driscoll sermon and caricatures his point as well. Although Driscoll has written an entire book on Christology, called Vintage Jesus, O’Brien seems content to assume the worst from a sermon clip. Why not reference the book?

What is most profoundly distorting about O’Brien’s critique of John Eldredge is the fact that Eldredge has directly addressed women’s discipleship issues in Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul, co-authored with his wife. Moreover, in his latest book, The Way of Wild Heart: A Map of the Masculine Journey, Eldredge spends an entire chapter developing the need for men to have an aesthetic conversion and to become lovers of beauty, the poetic, and so on.

O’Brien’s convenient caricatures miss the point that the goal of the recent masculinity reflections is not to “re-masculate Jesus” but to “re-masculate” the church’s men to be conformed to the Bible’s whole teaching about Jesus in his incarnation and exaltation. Then the church’s men can offer their needed strength to their families, the church, and work of the Kingdom.

O’Brien’s column should be taken with the smallest grain of salt because it lacks a fair assessment of the men he caricatures, fails to understand the rhetorical use of hyperbole, and is biased toward affinities of men who are among educated class’s Christian elite.