Declaring War on Ecclesial Effeminacy
We don’t normally listen to Christian radio. But a few months ago, I put on a particular Christian station in the car just to see if things were as I had remembered. A typical worship song was playing with a male singer in the usual style to which we’ve all become accustomed. After no more than five seconds, my 6-year-old daughter turned to me and said:
“Dadda, I’m glad our church doesn’t sing boy barbie songs…”
I had to laugh both at her child-like candour and her astute perception. She wasn’t wrong. This song, though entirely “normal”, didn’t sound natural. It’s just not how men are meant to sing. Sometimes it takes a 6-year-old girl to tell it like it is. “Out of the mouth of babes,” as Psalm 8:2 says!
Over the next few weeks, I put the same radio station on a few times every now and then just to see if there was any variation, and there really wasn’t. It’s the same literally every time: either women singing emotively about the intensity of their relationship with God, or men (in unusually high pitch) singing emotively about the intensity of their relationship with God.
Yes, there are occasional tips of the hat to God’s general praiseworthiness, power, and greatness, but these often seem like line-fillers amidst the larger emotional tsunami of what has become the modern worship song, which tends to be more about us than God, essentially aping the genre of the casual modern love song. They become, as Mark Driscoll used to call them, “Jesus-is-my-boyfriend” songs. If someone occasionally does sing about God, it’s usually the same pool of generic and abstract phrases which crop up in every other song, with the general tenor centring on God’s love, which tends to mean that even attributes of God’s greatness tend to be myopically sentimentalised in service of our feelings.
It’s not that we shouldn’t sing about God’s love for us, of course. God’s love is wonderful and praiseworthy. It’s entirely understandable that we evangelicals should want to sing about it. It’s just that God gave us a whole book of songs with a lot more to sing about than just that, and with far sharper teeth than what the modern pop worship song tends to evoke. While David certainly sings about his relationship with God—often quite intensely—he also sings of war, conflict, judgment, conquest, and dominion. When you cherry-pick a few select themes from the Psalms for what “suits” congregational desires, you end up with a malformed version of Biblical beliefs.
You can guarantee that vast quantities of the content of the Psalms will never see the light of day on any Christian radio station today. Isn’t that interesting, when you think about it? Just imagine the swathes of worship leaders and radio stations and songwriters out there—thousands and thousands of them, whose primary aim is to produce and broadcast worship music—who will overlook the vast majority of the authoritative worship songs which God actually inspired in order for us to praise Him.
When Boys Sing Like Girls
The radio stations, like the worship leaders, merely act in accordance with the broader trends of the modern Church, which gets the worship songs it desires, often settling for what is comfortable and agreeable. And it does seem rather undeniable that modern evangelical churches in our time appear to have developed a thing for “boy barbie songs”, not only in content, but also in form and pitch.
I recently received pushback from a prominent evangelical worship leader on this point, who asked: “Are you saying men are always supposed to sing at a lower pitch?” In essence, yes. Most men have lower voices, and in congregational worship, the men should obviously be taught to sing noticeably lower than the women.
We need not invent unnecessary rules or gloss over obvious exceptions, of course. Many classical compositions, for example, include very high parts for men. There are also many examples in contemporary music of masculine singers who sing “higher” but in an ostensibly masculine way. “Everything is permissible; but not everything is beneficial.” (1Cor. 10:23). The evangelical “boy Barbie song” however, tends to lean feminine in both pitch and content in such a way that a six year old girl can notice, in the blink of an eye, that something’s not right. And so she should. One of the reasons we laugh at a character like Andy Bernard in The Office is because he sings with an eerily womanly pitch. We laugh because he is absurd. He is not “fitting” as a man because he is failing to act like one. Just because some men can sing like women does not mean they should, nor should they expect other men to do so when leading them.
All this may seem like a mere annoyance, a foible of modern churches which we should just “bear with” in love. But the effects go far deeper than a mere annoyance. While the songs themselves may be superficial, their effects are anything but superficial. They are indicative of an invasive and destructive weed that’s been colonising the Church for decades: effeminacy.
One of the reasons male worship leaders tend to sing higher than most other men is to not exclude women. Since the practice of singing with separate male and female parts gradually disappeared from most modern evangelical congregations, it became more desirable to pitch for an androgynous compromise. This may seem innocuous, and even helpful on occasion, but when it becomes the functionally perennial standard, the expectations and norms for singing—and in time, for songs—become radically malformed.
The Price of Effeminate Worship
It is difficult to calculate the level of collateral damage caused by effeminised worship in the Church, particularly on men and boys. But it also affects women and girls, who grow up either confused or disappointed that Christian men are increasingly trained to sing (and act) more like women than men.
Those men who cannot be taught to sing like women often just stop singing at all, or they mime under their breath, or sing absentmindedly, barely processing the generic sentiments that no longer even register with them. Men not bound by a particular duty to keep showing up each week will often just stop going altogether. The worship songs became too saccharine, severed from the sharp edges of reality.
Ironically, this is alien from the weird and wonderful world of the Psalms, which are full of historical particularity, contextual detail, a sense of place, sharp exhortation, human dignity, daring adventure, missional camaraderie, severe judgement, rapturous delight, devastating mockery, high drama, potent analogy, glorious exultation, and—above all—barefaced honesty.
So much of this is what so many of the modern winsome churches choose to exclude from the church living room as “unapproved” themes for public worship. Perhaps they know better than God? But who knows how many men left such churches because they couldn’t follow the perpetual softening (or outright absence) of masculine motifs, expressions, and presence in worship? And over time, who knows what effect this softening had on the men who stuck around?
As Dave Murrow argued twenty years ago in Why Men Hate Going to Church, it’s hard for men to stick around unless they respect and resonate with the masculine spirit of the church. This is often based on the character of the leader, but also on the content of what is said, done, or sung:
“[M]ost churches today are out of balance, brimming with the feminine spirit while short on the masculine spirit. Men sense this and withdraw.”
The point is not that the feminine spirit is bad, but that in many cases it is out of kilter, and not only no longer complements the masculine spirit but often directly opposes and dominates it within the life of the church in general:
“When the masculine spirit shows up in church, Christians and non-Christians roundly condemn it. People who speak the truth too boldly are stifled because they might hurt someone’s feelings. Leaders who make bold moves are accused of being power hungry…”
I wrote a bit about this in a longer journal article last year on the way the phrase “spiritual abuse” is often wielded today, fundamentally undermining the masculine pioneer spirit in mission. It’s not that the masculine spirit in a Church cannot become corrupted and abusive. It’s more that our suspicion that it might be—or inevitably will be—stifles it in the cradle.
“But men shouldn’t leave just because ‘the masculine spirit’ is devalued,” say the feminists. “Rather than withdrawing, men should get over it and learn to submit to the leadership of women.” Well, they don’t, and they won’t. And if they do, they will shrivel as men in the long run. And God appears to agree with them, hence the many directions to the early church to ensure women do not exercise authority over men (e.g. 1Tim. 2:12). This isn’t some hidden mystery in the Bible accessible only to expert scholars. It’s right there, in clear daylight, as seen by virtually all of the church for all of its history up until the sexual diatribes of modernity. Indeed, more often than not, modern scholars are wheeled out not to shed light on what the Bible says on such themes, but to make the Bible unsay what it clearly says.
I have reflected recently on the ecclesial harm of women bishops in the Church of England, accentuated by the Bishop of London, Sarah Mullaly, breaking down in tears at a General Synod due to the apparent spate of “microaggressions” and “institutional barriers” against women in the Church. This, from a female bishop in the most institutionally feminist Church in its entire history—you couldn’t write such an ecclesiastical dystopia! Men simply do not do well as men when they are not led by men.
Indeed, as Isaiah knew, they become accursed under the rule of women (Isa. 3:12). Unfortunately, merely being led by biological males is no longer sufficient to counter this because so many men even in professing conservative churches have been malformed by the kind of worship which makes them lead more like women regardless of their biological sex. Such men have not been taught how to “act like men” (1Cor. 16:13) in part because they have not been taught how to sing like men.
It’s not about altering the worship style of a church merely to reach a certain demographic of men. The answer is not a new form of Warrenesque seeker-sensitivity (which is arguably where some of Murrow’s suggestions end up pointing later in the book). It needs to be more fundamental than this. It’s not that we need to make church life “seem” more masculine just so that fewer men leave. It’s that we need to see (1.) that there are some elements of Christian worship which do not make any sense if they are not led in a masculine way, and (2.) that because men have not been leading, those elements of worship—including a good deal of the Psalms—disappear from the life of the Church altogether as a result.
Call me a sexist, but most women, if left to themselves, will not choose to sing about God using Moab as his washbasin and casting his shoe on Edom (cf. Ps. 60:8). And it is fitting that they don’t; it is not germane to their nature (1Pet. 3:4). They need men to lead them where they would not otherwise choose to go: to think and sing of God not as they might wish Him to be, but as He actually reveals Himself to be. And it is also fair to say that godly women—acting as women—genuinely do complement men by reminding them of what may not always come “naturally” to male instincts, too. The crucial factor is whether the Biblical hierarchy is preserved amidst such complementarity. Often it isn’t, and so the men—led by their instincts to “protect” women—become led by women, regardless of whatever it says on the church website.
There will certainly be churches here and there that do better with this balancing act, of course, where women value the masculine spirit and seek to follow it rather than subvert it. But in the vast majority of “nice” modern churches, a subtle form of feminism stifles what was left of the masculine drive, leaving many men scurrying behind. This is where the Psalms ought to come marching in, if we will let them.
Neglecting the Battle
Christians have much to sing about because Christianity is an inherently singable thing. It comes with singing “attached” whether you like it or not. But in these dystopic modern times, we have lost our grip on the capacity of Christian songs to remind us of the greatness of God’s glory and of the great mission to which He called us. One of these glories is that of battle with and—with God’s help—definitive triumph over our enemies (a very prominent feature in the Psalter).
Tied in with triumph over our enemies is God’s violent judgement of our enemies, which Israel would sing about often, and in great detail (e.g. Ex 15:1-18; Judg. 5:1-31). When was the last time the average evangelical sang a line like this on a Sunday morning?
“He also prepares for Himself instruments of death;
He makes His arrows into fiery shafts.” (Ps. 7:12)
Our neglect of militaristic battle and judgment speaks volumes of our general neglect of the whole counsel of God, the whole character of God, and our general sleepiness toward enemy operations in our time, which have lulled so many pockets of the Church into a harmless sleep. It is this general harmlessness—this loss of a sense of warlike mission—that often keeps men away from church.
Most men feel an instinctive draw to combat. It is men (not women) who have often invented all of the aggressive sports with clear winners, losers, and hierarchies. If we can’t compete (or fight) in such contests ourselves, we are happy to watch others do so and debate endlessly over championship lore. Not all male instincts for aggressive combat are good, of course. They can be corrupted in various ways. But they are there, and God put them there, just as He also put the Psalms there, which found their way into the middle of our Bibles with all those aggressive motifs kept in.
The modern effeminised Church decided it would be a good idea to shelve most of these motifs and concentrate less on the battle-like state of the Christian life. “We can’t have that—it might rouse the men into action!” This is why many men came to see Christianity as mild and toothless, and why even where men today are seeking an antidote to western civilizational decline in Christianity, they are more likely to look to Eastern Orthodoxy than evangelicalism. To many men, Christianity had no fight in it. This was not Christ’s fault, but ours. We have misrepresented the tenor of His Word. In the hopes of winning many more people to shiny happy megachurches, we may have lost more than we will ever count.
The cover-up was long in the making. The neglect of, say, the imprecatory Psalms in the modern church is not solely down to the impact of movements like Bethel and Hillsong. They inherited and expanded what was already in utero for centuries, even with some of our most beloved English hymnwriters. The Nonconformist Isaac Watts (1674-1748), for example, scandalised some in his time by emphasising subjective emotive details well beyond Scriptural norms, and even came to see some Psalms as fundamentally unusable for Christian worship. I believe Watts was still a blessing to the Church, but he also set in motion many of the Biblically selective and pacifistic errors we see today. In various ways, the modern Church gradually reshaped itself in the direction of its singing.
Having No Enemies is Bad, Actually
The reason many Christians became accustomed to singing as though they’re not at war is because they made Biblical warfare motifs an exclusively personal metaphor for their prayer lives, as if it had nothing at all to do with the material or socio-political world around them, as if God lost all interest in anything beyond our strangely warmed hearts.
More than a generation of Christian men have not been taught how to sing worship songs in relation to the wider cultural attacks upon the kingdom of God in their time. We distracted ourselves away from the fight, not because we were more pious than our psalm-singing forefathers, but because we were far less pious. We were lulled into the sleep of avoidant cowardice , and we dared to call it “Christlike gentleness” or “neighbour love” or “peace-making”. We became like those Jeremiah lamented, singing of “peace, peace” when there really was no peace (Jer. 6:14).
When effeminate songs become the norm in the Church, this reflects the fact that effeminate lives have become the norm in the Church. Christian men in our time have been actively encouraged to live passively compliant lives before their enemies, a far cry from the abundant lives our Saviour called us into when we dropped our nets to follow Him into a life of kingdom conquest and adventure. Many Christians like to congratulate themselves for being “a good witness” because most people like them. We need not seek to be belligerent or disagreeable as a virtue, but too many Christian men in our time have assumed they must be doing such a good job of loving their enemies because they no longer have any.
The kingdom of darkness is happy to leave you largely alone if your life is essentially complicit with the secularism, feminism, multiculturalism, and consumerism of the modern liberal order. Once you start challenging—in words or actions—the apostasy, idolatry, immorality, and abominations within and beyond the walls of the Church, out come the scoffers, mockers, and demons. And it usually doesn’t take long, believe me.
When the attacks come—when “the mighty waves of the sea” rise against you (cf. Ps. 93)—that’s when you see just how life-giving it is to sing songs of war in unison, as brothers not at war with one another, but united against our common foe, united by our common Saviour, with many more hills to take for His kingdom.
Notice how Paul’s Ephesian exhortation to sing Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to one another is prefigured by an awareness of the evils in the world:
“Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is…be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.” (Eph. 5:13-21)
The love within the life of the Church—including our mutual submission to one another, where we look to the needs of our brethren above our own—is especially needed because we live in the midst of evil, which opposes us. It is the epitome of folly not to recognise this, nor to live (and sing) accordingly.
The Church’s songs are the lived expression of the Church’s convictions in unison. I believe it is no coincidence that the Psalms are mentioned first in Paul’s exhortation for us to address one another in “Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs”. The Psalms are meant to be the songs that lead our songs. Those songs are meant to unify us as a people and to lead us into battle against the darkness—men and women alike, but led by men who act like men and sing like men.
Surprised by War
Churches should sing songs as though we are at war, because we really are. Though some of us have become accustomed to emphasising this more particularly in “the negative world”, have we ever not been at war with the darkness around us? Does our enemy not prowl around like a lion seeking to devour us (1 Pet. 5:8)? Churches that don’t sing as though they’re at war are still at war regardless. They’re just more likely to lose that war in the long run. Instead, we should see worship times both as opportunities to praise and commune with God amidst the saints and as training times to strengthen our souls and spines, and to equip our hands and hearts for the battle before us.
I’ve written before about the blessing of teaching David Erb’s excellent and varied psalm melodies to my children, often in a more classical Hebraic style. But I’ve also found the contemporary indie-style of Brian Sauvé’s Psalms just as much of a blessing in realising the power of the psalmists’ words and reminding us both why we fight and what we cherish.
We see this especially in his rendition of Psalm 144:
“Blessed be the Lord my Rock,
Who trains my hands for war,
And my fingers for battle”
(Psalm 144:1)
Following the pattern of the psalm, Sauvé’s rendition alters tone from singing of God training our hands for war to a volte in verse 12. Here, the music seems to take a brighter turn, as though the sun had suddenly come out through the grave clouds, opening up a joyful flourish which serves to remind us why anyone resort to war at all—not for the sake of fighting per se, but for the peace, protection, and prosperity of what we hold dear—including Christendom itself:
“May our sons in their youth
be like plants full grown,
our daughters like corner pillars
cut for the structure of a palace;
may our granaries be full,
providing all kinds of produce;
may our sheep bring forth thousands
and ten thousands in our fields”
(Psalm 144:12-13)
When I first heard this, I was especially struck by that line about sons and daughters. It really jumped out at me. Initially, I thought Brian must have inserted it himself. It couldn’t be in the Bible, could it? God couldn’t want us to sing about how we raise our boys as boys and our girls as girls, could he? Is it not the case that if we must insist on holding such antiquated beliefs about the different roles of men and women today, we ought to do so sheepishly? Aren’t we supposed to not admit it too loudly? Aren’t we supposed to ensure that we lacquer such views into oblivion with endless apologies and disclaimers? Apparently not. Apparently, we’re actually supposed to sing about it out loud, for anyone and everyone to hear.
Beyond the Feminist Trap
It almost seems that Psalms like this were kept from us in the evangelical churches, as if some worried what might happen if too many men actually started to believe such things were “good” again. Just think of it: the early church sang these songs about raising sons and daughters to be different, that boys would mature and be strong, and that daughters would be like “polished cornerstones” in the palace. Yet the modern church acts like such songs aren’t even there. Feminists really ought to stay away from the Psalms—they’re dangerous things for phantastic ideologies like theirs.
In those same verses there is also a grain of what even the most hardened feminist at root would claim they seek for women: a great purpose and noble dignity at the heart of civilization, protected from the darkness of evil men who might exploit them. The difference is, they likely disagree with God on what that purpose and protection looks like in reality. Where many feminists sought to win greater purpose for women by having them act more like men, many women began to realise that the taboo-free dystopia spawned by the sexual revolution ultimately destroyed their true purpose and dignity as women.
In contrast to what has been called “the feminist trap”, Christians ought to have offered a ballast of contrast to the androgynous grey-land of the feminist mirage. We could have been singing of this gloriously different God-given purpose for women as beautiful load-bearing pillars in the great palace of God’s kingdom. The tragedy is that “at such a time like this”, with all the gender confusions that beset the western world in our time—where the Esthers and Deborahs and Priscillas are inflated into feminist heroines which distort the Biblical chorus—few Christian women are encouraged to sing such lives into being. Whatever anyone says, it seems obvious that the primary reason the Church stopped singing about daughters as polished cornerstones is that it became afraid of what the feminists might say.
This compromise not only weakened the Church’s fight against the cultural masculinisation of women, it also led many men to gradually disgrace themselves into effeminacy and taught them to pretend it was godly. It need not have come to this. The Church can ill afford to keep overlooking the treasures in its storehouse. Doing so has had major consequences for entire generations of its men and women, paralysing the Church’s ability to be genuine salt and light in a world as sex-confused as ours.
Finding the Lost Songs
Once again, all this becomes more noticeable when you hear the words sung well—where the content appropriates the form–and then learn to sing them for yourself. It is in actually singing of such things that we cannot help but be confronted by them, challenged by them, inspired by them, and blessed by them in ways we may not have been had we merely read them or heard about them from afar. This, in turn, opens up much of the rest of the Bible, including those parts we spend so much of our time meticulously trying to avoid. These “lost” parts of Scripture so often involve the kind of things to which men are instinctively drawn: pioneering adventure, fatherly rule, purposeful combat, triumph over enemies, and cultural dominion.
It’s not that the mere singing of some Psalms cures effeminacy, but the singing of all Psalms. And it’s not even the mere singing of all Psalms, but the meaningful singing of such Psalms. There must be an embrace of what these curious ancient songs actually say within the life of our faith and in the way our churches actually operate, including what such churches choose to emphasise (or not) and what decisions and statements they choose to make (or not). All our varied ecclesial activities are informed by the words we sing and the nature of the public worship we offer.
To return to the Psalms—especially those which have been dubiously overlooked in our time—may just help to put the hair back on the chests of the churches again, that we might see men arise like in the days of Nehemiah (cf. Neh. 4). Such men will be righteously troubled by the broken-down walls of Jerusalem and will yearn to stand up to fight in order to build them up once more, enemies be damned. May it be sung and may it be done.
Image Credit: Unsplash
