The Strut Is Fear

There is a performance of manhood loose in the world, and I have come to hate every version of it. I hate the gym-floor strut and the muscle-shirt swagger. I hate the internet alpha selling other men lessons in dominance. I hate the conservative version, where a man performs headship like a drill sergeant and calls the performance godliness. And I hate the liberal version too, where a man performs enlightenment and apologizes for his own existence with the same anxious eye on the audience. The culture war tells you these are opposing armies. They are not. They are different uniforms on the same armor, and under every one of them is the same scared thing dressed up as a strong one.

Because that is what the strut is. The strut is fear. A man at peace with his strength has nothing to advertise, and no appetite for an audience. The man who cannot stop performing strength is telling you, louder than he knows, that he does not believe he has any. The men who most need to be seen as strong are the smallest men in the room the moment the audience goes home. The armor is not worn over strength. The armor is worn over the hole where strength was supposed to be.

And I will say this as plainly as I know how. I would rather spend one minute in the company of a tender woman than a hundred hours in the company of the strutting man. That sentence will cost me with a certain kind of reader, and I am at peace with the bill. What grieves me is that the church, of all places, should have been immune to the strut, and instead whole sections of it baptized the thing and started selling it from the pulpit as biblical manhood.

So let us check the ruler against the Scriptures. When Paul lists the fruit of the Spirit, meekness is on the list (Galatians 5:22-23). Not on the women's list, for there is no women's list. It is the Spirit's fruit in every believer He indwells, man or woman. And when the Scriptures want to describe Moses, the man who stood in front of the most powerful throne on earth and would not bend, they say this: Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth (Numbers 12:3). Meekness is not the absence of steel. Moses faced down Pharaoh. Meekness is steel that has no need to rattle. He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city (Proverbs 16:32).

But the verse that settles it for me is the one where the Lord Jesus describes His own heart. He does this exactly once in the four Gospels. He had one opportunity to tell us, in His own words, what is at the center of Him, and here is what He said: Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls (Matthew 11:29). Meek and lowly. The self-portrait of omnipotence is two words the strut would laugh at. And this same meek and lowly Lord braided a whip and turned over the tables of the moneychangers, and then went back to gathering children onto His lap. The same hands flipped the tables and washed the feet. That is the shape of true strength. It is gentle by default, it is terrible for one necessary moment, and then it is gentle again. It does not live in the terrible moment. The strut lives there, because the strut has nothing else.

And when the Scriptures finally tell a husband what his manhood is for, there is not one syllable of swagger in the instruction. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it (Ephesians 5:25). There is the whole job. A man covers. A man carries. A man pays. A man gives himself up. The culture's manhood competes, and Scripture's manhood covers, and the two have nothing to say to each other. Strength that has nothing to prove goes quiet, and gentleness is what it does with its hands.

So if you are a tender man, and you have spent years being told by the strutting world that your tenderness is a defect, hear me. Check the ruler, because the ruler was lying. The fruit of the Spirit in you is not your weakness; it is your resemblance to your Lord, who told you Himself that His heart is meek and lowly. And if you are a man still wearing the armor, still performing for an audience that never loved you, there is better news than the strut ever gave you. The yoke He offers is easy, and the burden is light, and the rest is for your soul. Take the armor off. It was never strength anyway.

Grace and Peace, Brandan