Losing the Good Portion: Why Men Are Alienated from Christianityby Leon J. Podles
St. Augustine's Press, 2019
(276 pages, $29.00, hardcover)
reviewed by S. M. Hutchens
I have sometimes sensed in "men's ministries" a penumbra of at least moderate artificiality, as though they were appended to the main program merely to give men, otherwise uninterested in church activity (it being, as they see it, the proper occupation of women, children, and effete religious hobbyists), something "manly" to do under church auspices to keep them from abandoning Christianity altogether. In this book, Touchstone senior editor Leon Podles explores at length the phenomenon of male church abandonment, beginning with the broadly shared intuition that the ecclesial domus is not a naturally male environment, but a female space where, while men built it, once completed, they cannot enter without relinquishing the vulgarity of maleness and submitting to the distinctly female (and I might add, increasingly juvenile—but that's another story) regime of the place.
While the enclosure that is the Church is in fact a womb, and holy because of that, in its central and forward part, to which every eye must be drawn as the purpose and meaning of the sanctuary, must be the preeminent and unmistakable tokens of the Man for whose occupation it has been made and whose purposes it serves. Podles's Losing the Good Portion widens the channel he explored in The Church Impotent (1999) of bridal mysticism—the pervasive and persisting emasculating effect of Jesus-as-the-bridegroom-of-every-Christian—associated with male distaste for Christianity, elaborating in this new work his search for the reasons men reject Christianity because they find it at best irrelevant and at worst destructive of the maleness they prize but cannot see in the churches. Here is continued the quest to answer the question of why men so often have difficulty perceiving the male who is like them and is the meaning and purpose of the Church, within the Female that serves and nurtures him.
Stated thus, it becomes obvious that at least part of the reason lies in the church-sponsored transposition of male and female:
As Charles Lippy observes, "as Protestant religious institutions were opening the ranks of their clergy and other leadership positions to women," they [were] thereby "unwittingly cementing even more the cultural equation of that which is generally accepted as religion as being feminine rather than masculine." As early as the mid-1970s, Episcopalians recognized that "the ordained ministry may become a profession chiefly for women, like nursing." . . . A male clergy will not necessarily attract laymen—it has not done so in the past; but a female clergy may further cement the identification of Christianity and femininity. (246)
Other Factors in Play
This, however—increasingly on the liberalizing Catholic agenda as well—according to Podles's analysis is only one of the factors in play, and perhaps not even the greatest. His book is a copiously documented consideration of influences militating both for and against masculine interest in Christianity. Jesuit and monastic piety and that of the Cursillo movement and the Promise-Keepers, for example, are decidedly masculine, whereas resentment of clerical attempts to control the behavior of men, as in Prohibition, and husbandly loathing of wives' sharing intimate information with priests in the confessional, appear historically among the greatest alienating influences. To such he adds the female eroticism of much popular hymnody, noted many times in this journal by Anthony Esolen and
myself.
In the end, Podles delivers no easy solutions. The strength of the book is in the mass of clear-sighted observations of what does and does not serve the churching of men. The appropriateness of this approach lies in the essence of the problem he addresses: while the Church is feminine, the Lord it exists to present and serve is a Man, and where the latter is in any way obscured, other men will not apply there to seek the Liege and Captain who is their own deepest desire. With their defection go (as the statistics testify) their women and children, so the end of the matter is that the churches that fail in recovering and retaining their men, which cannot be done with artifice but only the hard truth of things, will continue the death march so many of them are presently upon.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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