Philosopher Nancy Pearcey — described in The Economist as “America’s pre-eminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual” — is offering a course this coming spring based on her recent book, The Toxic War on Masculinity (Baker 2023).

The course, which can be audited free from anywhere in the world, is sponsored by Houston Christian University. It will be held Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00 pm. Watch here for details.

Meanwhile, the excerpt, with permission:

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Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory inspired the idea that, at the core, men are animals — and that to recover their authentic masculinity, men need to reconnect with their inner beast. For example, Zane Grey said that in his Westerns he was trying to recapture the experience of our evolutionary ancestors. “Nature developed man according to the biological facts of evolution,” he wrote. “Something of the wild and primitive should forever remain instinctive in the human race.”

Male writers began to claim that civilization was merely a thin veneer over our animal nature. A book titled Savage Survivals (1916) said, “Civilization is only a skin. The great core of human nature is barbaric.” A book titled The Caveman Within Us (1922) argued that the human organism has only “a slight coat of cultural whitewash, which may be called the veneer of civilization.”

In fact, any man not primitive or barbarian enough risked being judged as a failure as a man. G. Stanley Hall, the most prominent psychologist of the age, remarked that “a teenage boy who is a perfect gentleman has something the matter with him.”

The earlier ideal of the Christian gentleman had urged men to live up to the image of God implanted in them. By contrast, the Darwinian worldview urged men to live down to their presumed animal nature— to compete in the ruthless struggle for dominance and power….

Darwin: Why Women Are Inferior

Any list of toxic male behavior includes disrespect for women, and Darwin bears some responsibility for that as well. He was convinced that males are superior to females— that man attains “a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman.” He concluded that “the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman.”

Darwin explained male superiority by proposing that among social animals, young males have to pass through many contests to win a female— and many ad- ditional battles to retain their females. Over time, he said, natural selection will favor the stronger, more courageous males. Although modern men do not literally fight for a mate, he wrote,

yet they generally have to undergo, during manhood, a severe struggle in order to maintain themselves and their families; and this will tend to keep up or even increase their mental powers, and, as a consequence, the present inequality between the sexes.

By contrast, Darwin wrote, women at home nurturing the young are out of reach of natural selection; thus they have evolved more slowly and their mental powers are lower. (It was assumed in his day that males pass on more of their traits to their sons, and females, to their daughters.)

Darwin did acknowledge that women have “greater tenderness and less selfish- ness” than men, and even greater “powers of intuition, and rapid perception.” But he dismissed these traits as “characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.”

Even women’s positive traits were devalued as evidence of their inferiority. Darwin’s theory thus gave supposedly scientific authority to the idea that women are intellectually inferior to men— that women have no ideas or insights that war- rant male respect. Women were pushed off their Victorian pedestal and relegated to a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder.

In reality, of course, the survival of the human species depends just as much on characteristically female activities like giving birth and nurturing the young. Nevertheless, evolutionary thinkers preferred to exalt the more typically male activities like hunting and fighting as most important for the progress of the species.

Beasts at Heart

Other evolutionary thinkers likewise promoted theories of male supremacy. The most influential popularizer of Darwinism in America was the sociologist Herbert Spencer, who argued that survival of the fittest weeds out all but the most aggressive men:

In the course of the struggles for existence among wild tribes, those tribes survived in which the men were not only powerful and courageous, but aggressive, unscrupulous, intensely egoistic. Necessarily, then, the men of the conquering races which gave origin to the civilized races were men in whom the brutal characteristics were dominant.

How could women survive in relationships with such brutal men? Spencer’s answer was that women needed to develop the “ability to please.” It would help if they also acquired “the powers of disguising their feelings” in order to hide the sense of “antagonism produced in them by ill treatment.”

The lesson of evolution, apparently, was that men are brutal beasts and that women must appease and placate them, while learning to hide their resentment of “ill treatment.”

Many leading scientists of the day agreed with Darwin that women were less evolved than men. Anthropologist James McGrigor Allan held that “physically, mentally and morally, woman is a kind of adult child.” Thomas H. Huxley, whose fierce defense of Darwinism earned him the moniker Darwin’s Bulldog, said even education could not lift women to intellectual equality with men. Since women’s inferior abilities were a product of natural selection, he argued, they were not “likely to be removed by even the most skillfully conducted educational selection.” There was no hope, apparently, for women to escape their inferior position.

Darwin and the Male Revolt

The impact of Darwinism went even deeper, however. His purely naturalistic theory held that natural forces had the power to create everything that exists — that God was not necessary to explain the world in any way. And if God was not needed to do any creating, then he was out of a job. The idea of God might still be helpful for some people — but only for those who need that kind of emotional crutch. Christianity was reduced to the status of subjective feelings.

How did this affect people’s view of the relation between men and women? Recall that in the doctrine of separate spheres, women were thought to possess a greater sensitivity to morality and religion. Transcendent moral and spiritual truths were said to be transmitted primarily through the home. But Darwinian naturalism undermined confidence in the very existence of a spiritual realm. As a result, the home was recast as the center of an archaic religion and an outmoded piety. Christianity was derided as old-fashioned and repressive.

Historian Glenna Matthews describes how the impact of Darwinism continues even in our own day:

Men and women living in a modern secular society are under a handicap in dealing with transcendent values. Darwinism helped create a secular and materialist outlook. As a consequence, reflective people now lack a vocabulary for talking about love, nurture, or the social importance of home without sounding sentimental and faintly ridiculous.

Darwinism thus gave impetus to the male revolt against the home and family— in fact, against any “transcendent values” that would call men to a higher ideal, to a biblical standard of behavior.

Taming Men — Again

Jumping ahead to our own day, Social Darwinism continues to be highly influential. It has re- emerged under the label of evolutionary psychology. For example, economist George Gilder in his book Sexual Suicide (1973) argues that evolution has produced men who are naturally uncivilized:

Men are, by nature, violent, sexually predatory, and irresponsible: Men lust, but they know not what for; they wander, and lose track of the goal; they fight and compete, but they forget the prize; they spread seed, but spurn the seasons of growth; they chase power and glory, but miss the meaning of life.

Who must civilize these raging beasts? You guessed it: women. According to Gilder, an unmarried man is “poor and neurotic. He is disposed to criminality, drugs, and violence. He is irresponsible about his debts, alcoholic, accident prone, and venereally diseased.” It is women’s job to domesticate these unruly males: “Women transform male lust into love; channel male wanderlust into jobs, homes, and families; . . . change hunters into fathers; divert male will to power into a drive to create.”

No doubt you recognize this as an exaggerated version of the Victorian stereo- type described in previous chapters: women=good, men=bad. And it is extremely derogatory to men. In Gilder’s view, “the woman’s morality is the ultimate basis for all morality” — and men must learn it from women: “The success or failure of civilized society depends on how well the women can transmit these values to the men. . . . The community is largely what she is and what she demands in men.”

But does God really call on women to “demand” that men live up to “the woman’s morality”? Or does he call men to live up to God’s moral standard?

Gilder goes on: “The woman’s place is in the home, and she does her best when she can get the man there too, inducing him to submit most human activity to the domestic values of civilization.” But what if a woman cannot “get” the man to stay home? What if she cannot induce him to “submit” to domesticity? History is replete with unfaithful men and abandoned wives and children.

Gilder’s fundamental mistake is to assume that it’s up to women to take the initiative in marriage and family. By contrast, Scripture calls on men to take the initiative. As Genesis says, “a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife” (2:24). It’s the man who must have the impetus to separate from his family and childhood home and take up the challenge of starting a new family. It’s not the woman who is commanded to entice a man into marriage or to demand his faithfulness.

Gilder’s second mistake is to think men’s intrinsic nature is the urge to escape. In order to have a wife and family, he writes, a man must sacrifice “his most profound yearning, his bent for the hunt and the chase, the motorbike and the open road, the male group escape to a primal mode of predatory and immediate gratification.”

But is it really men’s “most profound yearning” to escape? To be “predatory”? To indulge in “immediate gratification”? Is that really how God created men?

Gilder is letting men off the hook. He is giving them a pass on moral responsibility. Men are allowed to be selfish, lustful, irresponsible, and violent— and then women are tasked with taming that behavior. But if men were really as uncivilized as Gilder portrays them, what woman would have the power to control them? What woman would want to?

In Genesis, we learn that God created the first human couple to be in relationship. That’s the software. Both men and women are wired for marriage. That does not mean all people should marry, but it does mean that men do not have to sacrifice their essential identity in order to marry and raise a family. What they have to sacrifice is their sin and self-centeredness — just as we all do….

Are Men “Flesh-Obsessed Pigs”?

Several other versions of evolutionary psychology are circulating today that all send the same message— that men are naturally crude and irresponsible. One popular version speculates that it is to the male’s evolutionary advantage to spread his sperm around as far and wide as possible to maximize his chances of getting his genes into the next generation; therefore, evolution has hardwired men to be sexually promiscuous. A cover story in Time magazine was subtitled “Infidelity: It May Be in Our Genes.” The author, an evolutionary psychologist, claims that “lifelong monogamous devotion just isn’t natural.”

In the New Yorker, Steven Pinker of Harvard expands on the same theory, writing, “A prehistoric man who slept with fifty women could have sired fifty children, and would have been more likely to leave descendants.” The man’s descendants would also have “inherited his tastes” for promiscuity.

But the idea that men are genetically hardwired for infidelity does not make sense scientifically. Human infants are so fragile that they need extraordinarily long and consistent care. Infants conceived by a man who abandons them quickly to move on to his next sexual conquest would have a much lower chance of survival. And of course, if they do not survive, then the male’s genes will not get into the next generation. For reproductive success, evolution should select for faithful husbands and devoted fathers.

Evolution does not give men a pseudoscientific excuse for sexual promiscuity. Yet evolutionary psychology tends to be only loosely tied to any scientific data. As the saying goes, behavior leaves no fossils. As a result, theories can be freely invented— and often are. Journalist Robert Wright, in his bestselling book The Moral Animal, claims that “human males are by nature oppressive, possessive, flesh- obsessed pigs.” He concludes, “Giving them advice on successful marriage is like offering Vikings a free booklet titled ‘How Not to Pillage.’”

What an insulting message to men. And if men really were akin to pillaging Vikings, women would have neither the power nor the desire to restrain them.

It is far too easy for evolutionary psychologists to come up with Just- So stories— narratives with no solid empirical evidence. Several years ago, a book came out titled A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion. The authors, Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer (a biologist and an anthropologist) make the inflammatory claim that rape is not a pathology, biologically speaking. Instead, it is an evolutionary adaptation for maximizing reproductive success. In other words, if candy and flowers don’t do the trick, some men may resort to coercion to fulfill the reproductive imperative. The book calls rape “a natural, biological phenomenon that is a product of the human evolutionary heritage,” just like “the leopard’s spots and the giraffe’s elongated neck.”

Thornhill and Palmer conclude that all men are violent, rapacious predators who will flare out whenever “the necessary environmental factors are present” — and not surprisingly, those factors are “sometimes present in all societies studied to date.”

The authors insist that they are not justifying or endorsing rape; they are just presenting the biological facts. Yet given their evolutionary premise, it follows logically that any trait that has survived must have some survival value— otherwise it would have been weeded out by natural selection. In other words, by sheer logic, the authors were forced to find some positive benefit even in the crime of rape. When Thornhill was interviewed on National Public Radio, he stated repeatedly, “That’s not a debatable matter.” As Christian psychologist Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen explains,

Once you have reduced all behavioral tendencies to inexorable genetic mechanisms, then humans are no more responsible for their behavior than my local ATM machine is when it fails to give me the money I’m trying to withdraw from my account. You cannot get ethics from mechanics, so the obvious evolutionary default setting is simply that might makes right.

The appeal of evolutionary psychology is that it claims to be scientific. It claims to ground concepts of masculinity in science. But its scientific underpinnings are being radically questioned. The discovery of DNA has revealed that at the heart of every living cell is coded information. A single cell of the human body contains as much information as the Encyclopedia Britannica — all thirty volumes of it — three or four times over. As a result, the question of the origin of life has been recast as the origin of biological information. And in all of human experience, information is the product of a mind. Natural forces do not create messages.

It is reasonable to conclude that life is likewise the product of a mind, an intelligent agent.

As Darwinism is discredited scientifically, we should also challenge the way it has shaped the secular code for masculinity. We should refuse to accept an evolutionary script telling us that men are, at the core, brutish and barbarian — that they are “flesh-obsessed pigs.” From a biblical perspective, we should certainly acknowledge that men are sinful beings, and that throughout human history, many have committed rape and violence. But that is not how God created them. And because it is not in their intrinsic nature, they are not locked into it. God’s forgiveness and sanctifying power can transform any man to live according to a godly ideal of the Good Man.

The biblical view of manhood offers men far greater dignity than any secular view. We should be confident in arguing for it in the public square.

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