Highlights
Some years ago, when I was a middle-school history teacher, I mentioned my family’s backyard garden while discussing the “victory gardens” of the Second World War—the last time a majority of Americans grew any of their own food. One student, with disgust and bewilderment written on her face, exclaimed, “Wait. You eat food from your yard? Like, in the ground, next to the dirt?”
I should not have been surprised. We Americans purchase tomatoes imported from India; clothes assembled in Bangladesh; houses built by strangers from supplies manufactured in factories the world over; phones designed in Silicon Valley and assembled in China from materials sourced via an intricate global supply train. These phones tell us how to get where we are going, so we no longer need to read maps—much less a compass, much less the stars. Our phones and all our other screened devices increasingly supplant face-to-face friendship and embodied work and play.
Disembodied America
In short, we modern Americans no longer provide for our own bodily needs, having off-loaded practically all of this work to corporations, robots, and professionals. Whatever the gains of this system (and there are many), it should come as no surprise that a culture thus alienated from creaturely embodiment is profoundly acedic and sexually confused. Consider the 21st century soul incurvatus in se: physically deformed from excessive sitting (“the new smoking”), mentally enervated due to our cultural “ecosystem of interruption technologies,” quite literally curved over handheld mirror-like windows into unreality. Somewhere Screwtape snickers.
This disembodiment is like acid eating away at the body-soul unity of the human person. It dis-integrates us; it exacerbates our disunion with the created order, and it deepens the relational and sexual confusion endemic today. And it is at or near the heart of the “boy problem”— the crisis of masculinity in contemporary American culture. If we want our boys to grow up into mature men, we need to think differently about our relation to material reality, to our neighbors and children, and to our governmental authorities. More to the point, we need to do more than think. If we are going to embrace the truth of our creaturely embodiment, we are going to need to live differently—to embody a different vision of human flourishing.
The Collapse of Masculinity
All of us suffer under disembodiment, but the particular struggles of boys and men are evident in the now-decades-long decline of male outcomes in education, the workplace, and overall health. What we are seeing in all this is the collapse of a culturally ubiquitous meaning of masculinity and of fatherhood, in particular.
For thousands of years, cultures across the globe upheld distinct but complementary roles for mothers and fathers—specifically, maternal nurture and caring paired with paternal protection and provision. Of course, good fathers have always nurtured, and mothers are proverbially protective of their young. The distinction is not absolute, but it is seemingly universal, and it is rooted in bodily differences that were enormously significant in pre-industrial societies. Broad sex-correlated differences in size and strength matter, but a woman’s ability to get pregnant and nurse babies made the husbandly role of provider and protector necessary.
Puberty removes a boy from his childhood, whether he likes it or not, and he only exits adolescence when he has achieved some degree of settled adulthood.
But, as physical strength has become less obviously relevant to the protection of the family, and as men are no longer assumed to be primary economic providers, the meaning of fatherhood has been cast into doubt. In his book, Of Boys and Men, Brookings Institution economist Richard Reeves says that, in the last 50 years, “The role of mothers has been expanded to include breadwinning as well as caring, but the role of fathers has not been expanded to include caring as well as breadwinning.” To be precise, it is not that “breadwinning” is now considered a maternal trait per se, but rather that the move of women into the workplace has not undermined cultural recognition of the enduring and irreplaceable significance of a mother’s distinctive nurturing role. What it has undermined is the notion of breadwinning as a distinctive fatherly role.
Rites of Passage
What does it mean to be a man in our postindustrial society? This is a civilizational problem for which there are no easy solutions. But, as Jason Craig argues in his excellent book Leaving Boyhood Behind, restoring the generally necessary conditions for masculine formation requires the recovery of traditional rites of passage—the methods by which cultures across time and space have brought their boys into mature manhood. Rites of passage involve three distinct parts.
- First, a boy is temporarily removed from his domestic family.
- He is then initiated into manhood through challenge—often with a kind of funereal quality, because the boy must die for the man to emerge.
- Finally, he is assimilated into an adult vocation and into a set of peers—his band of brothers, who are the men of the community.
These rites “work”—they help shape boys into men—because adolescence itself is a time of passage, liminal, and transitional by definition. Puberty removes a boy from his childhood, whether he likes it or not, and he only exits adolescence when he has achieved some degree of settled adulthood. Adolescent rites of passage are effective, precisely because they do not create but rather honor this given reality. That is the reason we find them practically everywhere—in virtually every culture that has ever existed, in coming-of-age stories ancient and modern, and throughout the Bible. The stories of Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Samuel, and David all feature removal, initiation, and assimilation. And, as Craig shows, the story of the boy Jesus in the Temple—the one story we have from Jesus’ youth—is deliberately framed as a rite of passage through which Jesus leaves his boyhood behind. When we consciously remove a boy from the domestic sphere, purposefully separating him from his childhood, when we then initiate him into manhood through challenge, and then assimilate him into an adult vocation and community, we are honoring the givenness of his development.
Rites of passage are most properly conducted not by any individual or individual family but by a community. Initiatory challenges work best when boys learn embodied competencies from men and then are able to demonstrate their own budding competence in a way that brings recognition from both peers and mentors. Some of these skills ought to involve a degree of danger and risk—safetyism is one of the greatest enemies of growth into adulthood, especially for boys—and they ought to be directed towards constructive ends. Cliff diving, for instance, demonstrates courage and can build solidarity, but its lack of communal usefulness limits its power as a rite of passage. The solution is mentorship in thoughtful risk-taking for the good of others and one’s own character—specifically, the kinds of risk-taking that empower a man to become a confident father—a father who knows that, whatever his shortcomings and failures, he has the courage to lead a family, has tangible things he can do for his family, and has skills he can pass along to his children.
Safetyism is one of the greatest enemies of growth into adulthood, especially for boys.
Forming and sending mature Christian men is the mission of St. Dunstan’s Academy, a farm, trades, and classics boarding school for high-school boys that we are building on a 176-acre farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. St. Dunstan’s is the only school in the commonwealth of Virginia that owns a building license as an institution. Two of our four faculty are licensed contractors. But we are not a trade school. The primary reasons we teach the trades are formational and pedagogical. (Though the skilled trades are also quite lucrative—increasingly so—and seem likely to be more AI-resistant than white-collar jobs.) Skilled trades animate against disembodiment, reorienting the tradesman towards creation and towards his own body.
We chose our rural campus to give boys the freedom to explore God’s good creation. We also chose it as a fitting setting for the challenges of strength and endurance that come from hiking the Blue Ridge Mountains, playing rugby, and splitting the wood that will warm them through the winter.
The prototypical rite of passage in our pre-launch phase at St. Dunstan’s involves felling a large tree with a chainsaw. Done rightly, after careful instruction and practice and with a skilled mentor at the elbow, this is not especially risky—driving to campus is riskier—but it still involves real danger. More importantly, it feels quite frightening to the neophyte. Conquering that fear is part of the challenge. Felling a tree is also a productive act. These trees are used in our building projects, and their removal improves the ecology of our forests in keeping with our timber-management plan. And it is a tangible accomplishment that rightly draws the admiration of others. There is nothing quite like the enormous “WHOMP!” heard and felt when a massive red oak crashes to the forest floor.
If we want to reverse the negative educational, workplace, and health trends affecting our boys and men, we need to restore meaning to masculinity. And if we want to do that, we will need more places for our young men to experience adult responsibilities, challenges, and risks within a thick community.
Father Mark Perkins is Chaplain and Assistant Headmaster of St. Dunstan's Academy and a priest in the Anglican Province of America.
*Photo credit: Shutterstock
