Authority is positional, but effective leadership is by example and action
Christianity and masculinity
Continuing on with the theme of headship, I think one of the things that most Christians miss is the interplay between authority and effective leadership.
Matthew 7:28 When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, 29 because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.
The interesting thing here is that the Bible distinguishes between the differences that one may have the position of authority (e.g. teachers of the law in Jewish culture) from actually having effective leadership. Headship is the position in the case of husband’s and wives.
Ephesians 5:22 Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26 to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, 27 and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.
The big thing that is missing from Christian men and husbands these days are the masculine traits that tend to lead toward the difference between the position of husband in God’s eyes (e.g. the position of authority) versus acting as the head (e.g. leading as one in authority like Jesus did). Many of the masculine traits are naturally associated with authority such as confidence, assertiveness, and such.
The Church unfortunately only encourages the former rather than the latter. In fact, in many cases, it actively discourages the latter such as with certain Father’s day sermons cutting off husband’s headship at the knees as has been covered by Dalrock and others. This leads to a huge disconnect.
As we have explored on this blog on attractive traits such as PSALM and masculinity — confidence, assertiveness, independence, etc — tend to signal that a man is good at acting as a leader and/or taking dominion in various capacities. This is also one of the components of Jack’s recent post on pre-selection.
A man who is good socially with other women and men (which is why wingmen work) tend to have more PSALM and masculine traits and hence it’s a woman’s intuitive shortcut that she’s dealing with a man she would be attractive to. The case of a husband having regular sex with his wife boils down to he’s having his wants/needs met well and thus is more confidence, assertive, and such in both language and body language. Men probably don’t notice this but women intuitively pick it up. Pheremones too perhaps.
What helped me the most when I was single to change my mindset to the right frame is what I wrote in Practical advice to single Christian men establishing leadership and the right frame when starting a relationship.
This is precisely what you do. Take the example of Jesus and His disciples (e.g. Christ and the Church, which is the analogy we have for marriage in Ephesians 5) in all 4 gospels:
Jesus has started his ministry in Galilee preaching and teaching about the kingdom of God
While doing this, he invites various men to be His disciples to help Him (e.g. shades of Genesis 2 where the wife is created to be the man’s helper). Fishermen, tax collectors, etc. “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
He continues on His ministry which grows and has the disciples help him with miracles, instructs and teaches them, and then eventually has them go out and try during his ministry (e.g. Jesus sends out the 70).
Jesus continually sanctifies them by correcting and teaching them as necessary (e.g. Ephesians 5 – Christ loves the Church for the purpose of sanctification).
Jesus does ALL of this BEFORE engagement and marriage. The engagement of Jesus and His bride is generally defined as the body of Christ who have received the Holy Spirit (Eph 1) much like an engagement ring or dowry and the marriage of Jesus and His bride is at the end in Revelation 19.
As an aside, the discipleship model of Jesus generally follows the model of (1) tell them what, (2) show them how, (3) let them try, (4) send them out, (5) have them do the same.
Mission and honoring God above all is paramount. This puts everything in the right frame. Instead of chasing women the goal is to build your life around Christ and executing his mission. Then a woman can choose to follow, but one must act as a leader when single, in a relationship, engaged and married. Indeed, one must first be a good leader of one (yourself) spiritually, physically, mentally, emotionally, and so on prior to marriage otherwise there are many pitfalls along the way to fall into.
I personally found that as I started to act consistently as a leader of my own life and then expanding that into various spheres of influence such as my involvement in the Church, work, recreation, and such that women started to be much more interested. PSALM and masculinity obviously increased by both focusing on some of those but also inadvertently as cultivating leadership naturally improves confidence, assertiveness, and so on.
Implementation is hard because of Church incongruence on the position of headship and headship in action
The big issue with the conservative Church at least as mentioned before is that it actively preaches the position of headship but it actively discourages the example and action of headship. A husband that cannot execute the actions of headship which includes teaching, correcting, and training a wife will be unable to sanctify her much less garner the natural respect for the one who not only has the position of authority to act like one who has authority.
While we are able to respect authority, it is very hard to respect or obey authority that is corrupt. 1 Peter 3 is explicit in it’s commands to wives of husbands disobedient to God because it’s not a normal response. It must be done deliberately. In the same way, if the Church continues to cut husband’s off at the knees then it’s implicitly telling wives that husbandly authority is wrong and thus must be avoided in practice. This is why most “complementarians” are actually “egalitarians” in practice: they don’t preach “headship” but instead preach the gospel of “husband and wife agreement.”
The seeming success of the tingly-respect structure (which includes meet-cutes) is largely due to the fact that the wife tends to meet a man who she tends to naturally admire or respect. This can be due to PSALM and masculinity traits but it can also be due to other factors such as occupational hierarchy (e.g. doctor-nurse, professional-secretary, etc) or also believing she’s met a man who is close to the best she can get or that blows her expectations out of the water.
The tingly-respect structure also naturally tends to fit the headship-submission and love-respect model, so it has a big advantage in that respect. However, the problem is that only some percentage of men can get in the top. I think this is a bit too narrow because it’s easier to get into the top percentage of men in the Church as the Church tends to not care about physical appearance and obesity as much. However, this requires men to actually care and put in some effort.
The other issue is that other models like arranged marriage or marrying someone that you were only semi-attracted to or other types of models are even worse supported by the Church than headship. For instance,
Have you ever heard a sermon on obesity and losing weight to take care of God’s temple and be more attractive for your spouse?
When’s the last time you heard the fact that people in arranged marriages typically grow to love each other and have a strong marital bond over time?
How about the fact that almost all societies have had 90-95% marriage rates over time and very low divorce rates if the Church and community actively support them and discourage divorce?
The other scenarios other than tingly respect can work, but they tend to be somewhat to a lot more difficulty to sustain in a culture and especially Church that does not support them well. Even the Church discourages attraction and tingly-respect as non-godly, although it will try to take credit for the successful and godly marriages it produces.
Some or maybe even many pastors have an inadvertent tingly-respect because of their position as pastor attracts women to them. With a tingly-respect structure and a husband who is committed to his mission of building up the Church, usually spending more time with your wife works. However, the same is not the case of other men in the Church who don’t have that type of marriage where their wife doesn’t already respect them to a decent to large extent.
To put it bluntly, we need to peddle the truth to those in the Church to take it’s head out of it’s own ass in respect to attraction and preaching Truth about marriage and how God designed it. There’s no way it changes otherwise because it’s all still going the way of the culture.
The path forward is generally simple but is discouraged by the culture and even the Church, so we need to encourage men to walk that road.
