I wonder, if we are serious about attracting men to church, if the solution is less to infantilize them by waving steaks and guns in front of their noses and more to challenge them by teaching the rich ideas and contentious debates from the Christian tradition. Clearly there’s no shortage of important questions to be debated… It goes without saying that the various evangelical denominations will prefer different answers to these and other questions, but the issue is less one of providing the “right” answers and more of taking the questions themselves seriously.

On May 24th, 1738, John Wesley had his famous Aldersgate experience. Frustrated with the emotional iciness of the Church of England, Wesley sought refuge at evening worship with some Moravians who were reading Martin Luther’s preface to Paul’s epistle to the Romans. Describing the night in his journal, Wesley wrote:

About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.

Wesley probably didn’t realize it, but it was arguably in this moment when he invented modern evangelicalism.

Too often, when we talk about “attracting men” to church, what we mean is tricking men into walking in the door by baptizing whatever infantilized conceptions of masculinity the broader culture has invented.Evangelicalism, after all, is a weird, modern, mutant form of Christianity, much as it might like to pretend to be its definitive form. As Molly Worthen writes in Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in Modern American Evangelicalism, evangelicals “are the children of estranged parents — Pietism and Enlightenment— but behave like orphans.” The tradition is an awkward marriage of experiential knowledge and personal piety, resulting in the sort of emotionalism Wesley advocated, frequently to the denigration of almost everything else. Only in the evangelical sphere do we place such a high premium on things like “letting Jesus into your heart,” “seeking God’s will,” and the like.

I acknowledge this reality, but not to advocate for its destruction; I am not here to tear down evangelicalism. I do, however, want to make the argument that when we look at our contemporary problems we ought to consider the possibility that the seeds were sown at our beginning. Consider, for instance, the much-heralded problem of men leaving the Church.

The dominant narrative at the moment is that, while church attendance is down across the board, men in particular are staying home on Sunday mornings (some stats here). And while there has been much hand-wringing over this reality, there has, to my knowledge, been very little serious introspection over it.

I remember once, during my college years, having a conversation with a fellow parishioner of the Presbyterian Church in America, an evangelical denomination that at the time was my de facto home sect. She lamented how hard it was to get men to come to church or campus events, and I asked her why she thought that was.

“I think because it’s so relational,” she said, matter-of-factly.

I was struck by how casually she had made that declaration, as if it were obvious that the essence of Christianity was the Pietist-style Bible study — a huddle of believers, each clutching their NIVs to their chests and sharing what a particular Psalm “means to me.” The corollary of this attitude, presumably, is that if we want to bring men (or, I suppose, less-people-oriented women) back into the Church, we need to teach them to be more relational. Is it really true that Christ built a Church only capable of appealing to a certain kind of person (mainly women)? That seems unlikely.

It’s possible to acknowledge that there is value in an emotional and relational approach to Christianity without treating it as the be-all and end-all of the faith. In fact, the broad spectrum of the ancient faith has both a strong material component (that is, the sacraments) and a strong intellectual component as well. (My Presbyterian friend in particular should have been aware of the latter at least, being that the Westminster Confession, Presbyterianism’s foundational document, is among Christianity’s most intellectually rigorous theological explications.)

In other words, it’s possible, at least in theory, for Christianity to be appealing to people who like ideas and things as much as people who like people and emotions. So the real question we ought to be asking ourselves is, why is that not the case?

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