The present reality makes it clear: we must face the crisis head-on in our churches. Today many churches are experiencing a void of spiritual grown-ups. Even among the few men who remain active in their faith, many lack spiritual maturity. Thomas E. Bergler, a Protestant professor at Huntington University in Indiana, has argued that modern American Christianity is actually stuck in a sort of spiritual adolescence. His book The Juvenilization of Christianity traces the historical development of what we know today as “youth ministry” and how it has been imported into the broader Christian landscape.13 Too often in our churches we have appealed to youth as youth and left them there, and they grow up into what Bergler calls “adolescent Christians.” Bergler thinks this is part of the origin of the hyper-emphasis on the “personal relationship with Jesus” movement and “falling in love with God” sermons. These are not bad messages in themselves, and reaching young people is a good thing, but taken in isolation and without a trajectory toward maturity or a connection to older generations, puppy-love faith can promote a culture of spiritual immaturity.
How does this immature spirituality take shape? Writes Bergler:
Adolescent Christians see the faith as incomplete unless it is affecting them emotionally. They are less likely than adults to settle for a faith that offers only dutiful adherence to particular doctrine, rules, or institutions. … They are drawn to religious practices that produce emotional highs and sometimes assume that experiencing strong feelings is the same thing as spiritual authenticity. They may be tempted to believe that God’s main role in their lives is to help them feel better or to heal their emotional pain. Juvenilized adults agree that a main purpose of Christianity is to help them feel better about their problems.14
Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia has voiced similar observations of our culture and our view of faith and morals. He noted that appeal to youth with youth makes some sense, speaking of seeing Jesus in a youthful way for example. But Jesus, he said, did not remain a youth, “[he] matured into an adult man of courage, self-mastery, and mercy guided by justice and truth.” In the same discourse, the archbishop also framed our broader cultural crisis as a crisis of seemingly intentional immaturity, framing it as a defining feature:
The wealthy societies of today’s world that style themselves as “developed” — including most notably my own — are in fact underdeveloped in their humanity. They’re frozen in a kind of moral adolescence; an adolescence which they’ve chosen for themselves and now seek to impose upon others.15
How, then, can we stop all this immaturity? The question is better formulated this way: how can we bring men out of immaturity and into maturity? That is the purpose and logic behind a rite of passage — to bring people out of childishness into maturity. But the movement from boy to man is just one form of a rite of passage. In order to help men, specifically, move away from boyishness, we have to understand how and why a rite of passage works at all so as to avoid spinning our wheels with more over-promising programs, or worse, causing harm.
Chapter 2
What Is a Rite of Passage?
Therefore, if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.
2 Corinthians 5:17
Some transitions in life are so radical that the old form of life simply cannot continue into the new form; the old form must give way and the new form be embraced. A man cannot be both married and unmarried, ordained and lay, or dead and alive. This transition, when one state of life “dies” and another is “born,” is the more universal understanding of a rite of passage: the passing of one state that allows for the embrace of a new one.
The French anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep (1873–1957) first coined this terminology in his book Rites of Passage.16 His work explains how cultures and communities ritualize and guide the transitions in life from infancy to old age. “For every one of these events [rites of passage] there are ceremonies whose essential purpose is to enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another which is equally well defined.”17 Van Gennep identifies three distinct parts that are present in varying degrees in any rite of passage: separation, initiation, and incorporation.18
• Separation: the leaving behind or “death” of the previous state in life, when a new way of living and understanding oneself requires that the old way and understanding be put away.
• Initiation19: usually the actual rite or ceremony. This process is intentionally guided by those who have already “walked the path.”
• Incorporation: the final stage of being brought into the community and receiving instruction in the new form of life.
Van Gennep has identified and described a truly human need and practice. In other words, initiation is a human need. It helps us to understand and mark transitions, as well as embrace and live our identities within a living community.
This pattern of separation, initiation, and incorporation is discernible in other realms as well, most notably in the Church. The pattern is noticeable especially in the sacraments of initiation: Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Eucharist.
• In Baptism, we are “[buried] into Christ’s death”20 so as to be “reborn as sons of God”21 — separation.
• Confirmation “confirms” and “strengthens” the baptismal graces22 with the oil that is “a sign of consecration,”23 the full initiation into the new life in Christ — initiation.
• The Holy Eucharist fully incorporates the Christian in the Body of Christ, the Church (CCC 1396) — incorporation.
As we will see, a true rite of passage is not a curriculum-like program but an act of culture arising out of a distinct, organic need. Changes in life can come with great challenges, so rituals and experiences that help mark and instruct us to face those challenges have great value. Regarding maturity and masculinity specifically, Van Gennep’s observations help us both identify the problems and chart a path to solutions.
Why Male Initiation is so Dramatic
When most people think of a rite of passage, they think of boys becoming men. The reason male rites of passage are so striking in our imaginations is that they are more orchestrated or public than those of females. We might think of an African tribe sending a boy out to kill a lion or Australian Aborigines circumcising their adolescent boys in an elaborate and public ceremony. Something within masculinity has a need to be fully equipped and challenged, or else it has a tendency toward a dangerous distortion. Masculine initiation is also a constant thread in ancient and classical literature and culture. Achilles, for example, was given over by his father to Chiron, a centaur, to be initiated into manhood.24 “Jack and the Beanstalk” was originally a story of a boy separating from his mother, going through the “battle” with the beanstalk and the giant, and then actually liberating his father so he could become a man like him and reclaim his inheritance. (The giant’s castle actually belonged to Jack’s father.) Whether it’s Telemachus in The Odyssey or Daniel in The Karate Kid, we can see that boys need to be guided by mentors and fathers into mature and capable masculinity.
Women also go through rites of passage to womanhood, but these rites are deeply rooted in their physical and psychological makeup. In other words, they’re naturally occurring and naturally powerful. I was once in a room with my wife and two midwives as they discussed the