{"id":7453,"date":"2004-04-20T07:42:13","date_gmt":"2004-04-20T07:42:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/men_and_christianity.html"},"modified":"2004-04-20T07:42:13","modified_gmt":"2004-04-20T07:42:13","slug":"men_and_christianity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/men_and_christianity.html","title":{"rendered":"Men and Christianity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Someone blogged this when it appeared…maybe Relapsed Catholic<\/a>, but someone else sent it to me today, so….here it is.<\/p>\n

Doug Giles on men and church<\/a><\/p>\n

If the Church wants to recover its losses, we\u2019ve got to draw the knuckle draggers back to church. Masculine men are pretty easy. Toss in reason, competition, initiation, struggle, fun and a problem to spiritually throttle, and we\u2019ll be there like stink on a monkey. Blow off, suppress, and spiritually emasculate the environment of these holy testicular necessities and your church, as far as men go, will be more empty than an Oktoberfest in Hialeah.<\/p>\n

My ClashPoint is this: if concerned conservative Christians want to improve our nation biblically, then the Church has got to eliminate its effeminate drift and re-establish a masculine base. Our times demand strong men: the Church must produce them, not repel them. The Church needs men, who start a ministry, start a business; get involved in politics, the arts and education, and who are not afraid of the secular thugs and pimps who try to keep Christians marginalized in a religious ghetto. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nI hasten to add, from an historical perspective that this is not a new concern<\/em>. The greater affinity of women for organized Christianity, at least in the West, has been noted by observers and insiders almost from the beginning. In this country, thoughts similar to those expressed here were widespread in American Protestantism, leading to, among other things, a movement for “Muscular Christianity” and, eventually, the YMCA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Someone blogged this when it appeared…maybe Relapsed Catholic, but someone else sent it to me today, so….here it is. Doug Giles on men and church If the Church wants to recover its losses, we\u2019ve got to draw the knuckle draggers back to church. Masculine men are pretty easy. Toss in reason, competition, initiation, struggle, fun…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nMen and Christianity - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/men_and_christianity.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Men and Christianity - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Someone blogged this when it appeared…maybe Relapsed Catholic, but someone else sent it to me today, so….here it is. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7453\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}