7 Ways Christian Men Can Model Virtuous Masculinity on Behalf of Women

1. Stop watching porn. Then help others stop watching it, too. Like any diet, it’s a matter of “what goes in comes out eventually.” Last year alone, humans spent over 4 BILLION hours feeding their brains toxic fantasies based on the degradation and exploitation of women and girls. Violence against women is heavily featured in more than 83% of the most prominent porn sites. Americans are the top consumers in the world of internet porn, and the problem is pervasive both inside and outside the church. Recent studies indicate that as great as 68% of Christian men and 50% of pastors struggle with porn addiction, but only 7% of the pastors reported the existence of a program at their churches to help people fight this new drug. Consider doing what you can to change this.
   

2. Get serious about confronting sexual abuse. Realize that churches can often be some of the safest places for abusers to hide. Talk to abuse survivors. Ask them to tell you about their experience. Encourage your church leadership to train their teams in this subject matter so they’ll be equipped to navigate these situations when they emerge. If abuse victims can’t come to the church to find support and healing, you can bet your bottom dollar they’ll go elsewhere.
   
   Don’t place anyone on a pedestal or assume they’re exempt from temptation or guilt. If David, the man after God’s own heart, could fall prey to sexual temptation, it can happen to anyone. Most sexual offenses are committed by someone with power against someone they perceive as easy to discredit or silence; it’s part of the formula.
   
   Don’t immediately doubt the victim. Don’t settle for the trap of “I’ll only believe the report if she brings evidence.” Pursue the evidence yourself. Turn over every rock until you find it. Sitting around twiddling your thumbs and waiting for someone else to do the work for you is an easy way to absolve yourself of any obligation to justice. Also remember that most victims don’t preemptively wear bodycams in anticipation of their assaults. Sometimes evidence is tricky. Sometimes it’s not as cut and dry as a full blown confession statement. Sometimes it’s more about identifying patterns of deceptive or controlling behavior.
   
   Does your church have official protocol in place for responding to allegations of abuse? Does the protocol involve complete transparency with the congregation, an external investigation team that includes law enforcement, and other objective, non-biased experts? If not, why not? Does your church have preventative measures in place that protect it from even the appearance of evil? Does it conduct background checks on everyone who works in conjunction with the children’s ministry? Does it implement policies that prevent staff from being alone with kids?
   
   If someone confides in you about abuse allegedly suffered at the hands of a church member or leader, do you know where to send them for support? If a convicted sex offender decides he wants to worship at your church, what parameters and safeguards will be set into motion to ensure his protection and the safety of the congregation? What does loving him well require in terms of accountability? These are all questions that Christians should be able to answer before a crisis ever arises.
   

3. Stop advising women to remain in abusive marriages or convincing them that God requires it. Don’t send beaten and berated wives back into the firing squad; intervene on their behalf! Secure their safety and then confront the offending parties and hold their feet to the fire. Put the burden of preserving the marriage on the shoulders of the one who chose to jeopardize it in the first place. In situations where physical violence is in play, at very least, encourage a physical separation while your church’s leadership team confronts him and requires aggressive behavior modification and intense accountability until either repentance is complete and the violent patterns are eradicated or you’ve helped the wife escape his rage and control.
   
   (As a side note on this point, don’t require wives to endure their husbands’ porn habits, which are a breach of their marriage vows and should be treated as such. Married people who indulge their porn addictions are engaged in infidelity and should be held accountable, not given free reign to continue sinning.)
   
   A husband who abuses his wife has abandoned every marriage vow he made. Blame him for violating his wife; don’t blame his wife for refusing to continue enabling sin.
   

4. Take a deep breath, as this one might be a doozy: Include women on your leadership teams. We see things you don’t, and some of them are super important to ministry. Wisdom itself is personified in the feminine all throughout the Bible. Don’t run your leadership team like a good ol’ boys club. The Creator Himself declared that “it is not good for man to be alone.” Our strengths complement yours, and teams are incomplete when void of thorough representation. Leverage our giftings as a supplement to yours, and refuse to put limits on us that God never intended. Do women in your church have opportunities to serve in a capacity other than running the nursery or answering the phone? If not, why not, and what can you do to fix this? Are women’s voices silenced or held in suspicion in your spheres of influence? If so, why? What can you do to challenge this?
   

5. When you see men disrespecting women, speak up. Every time. Even if it’s just on a Facebook post. Even if you don’t think it will ultimately change his mind. Your advocacy (or lack thereof) is a bold statement to women about our value in your eyes. Care enough for our dignity to use the power and influence we lack to challenge bullies.
   
   I was so deeply discouraged a few months back as allegedly Christian men hurled insult after degrading insult at women with the audacity to express an opinion that conflicted with their own. One man told me that if I wanted to learn more about the Bible, I should “go home and ask my husband,” rather than consider going to seminary where women, in his estimation, should be excluded for the greater good. Another man, a PCA minister, informed me that the value of women’s intellect is questionable, as our primary purpose is to breed and raise children, not to think grand thoughts. Comments of this nature stacked into the dozens, but none of the 15+ men who had previously commented on the thread said a darn word in our defense until finally, one particularly antagonistic fellow declared that western women were unfit even for a pile of dog excrement. It had to get that bad for anyone to intervene on behalf of the womenfolk. And it happens often. Another pastor recently got frustrated by my opinion about a matter and referred to me as a “butch evangelical feminist” and a “termagant.” As far as I am concerned, there is no excuse whatsoever for Christian men to call any woman names. Champion our dignity when it’s under attack, and respect for you will inevitably follow.
   

6. Teach girls that their bodies are beautiful, not dangerous. Don’t peddle unbiblical dogma that encourages girls to believe their value as humans is directly linked to their purity quotient. I recently read a hideous blog from a well-known pastor that compared sexually promiscuous women to “useless locks that open to any key.” His message essentially declared that our worth as women is directly connected to our sexual integrity and that any misstep in this department will dramatically reduce our market value in the world. In essence, our value is rooted in our own holiness. It’s a blasphemous, abusive message at heart, reducing women to our sexual capacities and, worse, spitting in the face of the Gospel truth which assures us that our worth is rooted not in our own righteousness but in His and that even our scarlet A’s are washed clean in His scarlet blood and separated from us as far as the east is from the west.
   
   Encouraging girls to live with the dignity of knowing they are precious daughters of the King is a much different thing than scaring them into compliance with legalistic performative standards of purity that leave them terrified of losing market value the minute a wayward bra strap becomes visible or they kiss a boy they probably shouldn’t have.
   

7. Lead with transparency, and model the repentance you beseech in others. Be strong enough to boldly say, “We got this wrong. We turned a blind eye to this harm; we are sorry, and we will do better.” Care more about defending your sisters’ hearts and bodies than you care about defending your egos. When you hear women expressing pain or frustration with harm inflicted by men, resist the urge to respond to their complaints with some variation of, “But what about the women? They do bad things, too, you know.”
   
   This one’s tough for me, guys. During the Kavanaugh debacle, my Facebook feed was absolutely cluttered with alarmist memes declaring a state of emergency and encouraging humankind to lock up their sons and husbands as “men are under attack!” While I personally think Kavanaugh was innocent, it pained me to realize that never in my life had I seen a similar meme positioned on any of these peoples’ pages to voice concern about the decades-long epidemic of actual physical and sexual attacks on women, who are legitimately and literally “unsafe” to so much as go on a run around the city park without a rape whistle or a guard dog.
   
   Similarly, it stung a bit to see so many good men lose their minds and choose to boycott a razor company whose commercial they perceived as an attack on men when most of these same guys did absolutely nothing when Target actually jeopardized the physical safety of women and girls by implementing their stupid new bathroom policy.
   
   Many women are angry because too many women have been deeply harmed by bad men and then dismissed and ultimately punished for trying to pursue justice. No, not all men should be punished for the sins of a few bad eggs. No, #notallmen (an official feminist hashtag, by the way, used to describe the now obligatory disclaimer required before naming harms perpetrated by bad guys) deserve to be stigmatized as dangerous or violent.
   
   But all good men? All good men care about the well-being of the “weaker sex.” And all truly great men (I’m grateful to know so many of you who fit this description) will find enough humility and moral courage to slay some of the giants that are doing the most harm to their sisters and to use the great power that’s been afforded them responsibly.