To put this in context, just look at some great men of history: Don Juan of Austria led the Holy League in the famous Battle of Lepanto (1571), thus saving Europe from Ottoman invasion and preserving what we today know as Europe when he was twenty-four. Meriwether Lewis was still in his twenties when he and William Clark led an expedition across North America. Alexander the Great died at age thirty-three (and managed to conquer most of the known world before that).
Yet today we boast that young adults can stay on their parents’ insurance until they are twenty-six. When I set out to write this book, I was told to keep it at a sixth-grade reading level — meaning I could not count on a readership with communicating abilities beyond those of a twelve-year-old adolescent. As I’m working on this project, the word “adulting” has entered our lexicon: young adults performing mundane acts of responsibility while praising themselves as if these things were remarkable. “Opening a bank account today,” someone might say on Twitter, with the hashtag “adulting.” The “adulting” phenomenon is yet another indication that many grown-ups today aren’t sure how to “be” an adult, so they just act like one and hope it works.
Missing Maturity
At best, our modern society is delaying maturity for men, and, at worst, we’re punishing it. The delaying occurs primarily when we continue to treat young men as boys. They are often ready for great acts and sacrifices — worthy uses of their strength — but find themselves ushered around in the same way they were in kindergarten, even having to ask to use the restroom. Compare that to an Amish boy who, by age thirteen, is heavily involved with the working of animals, care of the land, and working alongside the men of his community.
Boys today are also often in environments where their quite normal rambunctiousness and desire for feats of strength are punished or labeled as violent. Sometimes they’re carrying on a tradition of wounding — they hurt people because they have been hurt, so causing pain is a way of life for them — and their outbursts do become violent. But instead of being handed over to men to be matured, they are placed in even stricter and tighter places. I have a small farm, and I regularly have to walk past a class of “trouble boys” in a building that has a farm store and other offices related to agriculture. Those boys sit in a room all day, are escorted to the bathroom, and are then watched closely during recess. If you look at them, you can see that they have strength, a desire to experience freedom, and a deep boredom, nearing on despair. I’ve seen boys like this my whole life. I grew up around them — the “trouble boys.” Many of them were helped by my father, who handed them tools and put them to work. I’ve had “that sort” on my farm, and one of the best things to do with “trouble boys” is to hand them an ax and get them to help you split wood. When you allow them to use their strength in that way and entrust them with a meaningful job, you can almost see a change when you look them in the eye and say, “You did a great job, and I’m proud of you.” To them it sounds a lot like, “You are my beloved son and in you I am well pleased.” They don’t need walls and supervisors. They need to join the men and be taught and affirmed in their masculinity.
I recall being on a coed hike to a mountaintop with hundreds of teenagers. This was a relatively easy hike, and I remember the leaders having a difficult time keeping one group of boys from “acting up.” But then one of the girls severely hurt her leg in a fall, and those same boys completely transformed into young men, eager to use their strength at the service of this young woman. They built a rather elaborate means to carry her, and all rotated shifts helping her make it to the top of the mountain, and then down again. It was a visible sign of their maturity, and it all occurred through a drastic change in what was needed from them. They changed from raucous boys to heroic men. How many “troubled” boys out there need to experience that change for themselves and those around them?
Few describe the societal loss of masculinity and accompanying rites of passage better than Robert Bly, an American poet and essayist. Ironically, Bly approves of the overthrow of the paternal order of society, because he sees patriarchy as essentially repressive. He does, however, recognize the issues of immature men, pointing out that they act like squabbling siblings and make up imaginary worlds to live in. “Where repression [patriarchy] was before,” Bly writes, “fantasy will now be.”5 In other words, the fatherly void caused by the masculinity crisis (because men that fail to be men fail to be fathers) is not being filled in healthy ways, so now all we have is immaturity. But Bly also recognizes that now that the father is no longer the “king” of society, there is really no place for boys to be initiated into. There’s no male “direction” in life, and certainly no meaningful end or purpose.
Much of the confusion we face is caused by the lack of the cultural rites of passage we once had. Bly writes, “With no effective rituals of initiation, and no real way to know when our slow progress toward adulthood has reached its goal, young men in our culture go around in circles. Those who should be adults find it difficult or impossible to offer help to those behind. … Observers describe many contemporaries as ‘children with children of their own.’”6 Note that Bly refers to “effective” rites of passage, not just programs and curriculums that will upload the right data that will make boys grow up. We have a cultural problem, not a problem of needing to present the right information.
Sadly, because Bly rejects the Western tradition he came from, he himself seems to go in circles, offering esoteric observations but failing to provide real ways out of the problem. We, as Christians and inheritors of the wisdom of the Church, have a challenge before us. But we also have hope, because we hope in the perfect man, Jesus Christ. And on that sure foundation, we also have a great cultural inheritance from the faith of our fathers — the stories and traditions of the great men who have gone before us. But we still face a challenge, because none of us has been spared in the crisis of immaturity.
Adolescent Christianity
The Church is anything but exempt from the maturity crisis. Men are leaving the Church in great numbers — and because boys always imitate the men around them, they are leaving too. Matthew Christoff of The New Emangelization Project has put together a “Catholic Man-Crisis Fact Sheet,” which collects data from a huge variety of sources, from Gallup Polls to sociological researchers like Christian Smith to the Church-sponsored report called CARA (the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate).7 Here’s just a sampling of those findings:
• “About 11 million adult men in the U.S. were raised Catholic but left the faith.”
• “55% [of men] agree that they ‘don’t get anything out of the Mass.’”
• “Only about 1/3 of Catholic men (33%) say they attend Mass on a weekly basis.”
• “Less than half of Catholic men (48%) feel that ‘religion is very important in their lives; this compares to 74% for Evangelical men.’”
This is going to have an effect on the next generation, and it already has. The period of adolescence is a time when a core identity is being formed, so young men are naturally learning from the men they see. It’s not looking good. Only 37 percent of regular Mass attendees are adult men,8 and 70 percent to 90 percent of catechetical leaders are women.9 This clearly leads young men, as one Notre Dame study puts it, to “assume that serious religious studies are a women’s business.”10 It should not be surprising then that, in 2005, fewer than 20 percent of young Catholic men still in the Church said they would never consider leaving the Church — which means 80 percent of them would or have considered it.11 Consider that the same report in 1987 found 40 percent of young men said they would never leave the Church. That’s a 100 percent increase in young men