Dr. Wayne Braudrick – Real Manhood

January 15, 2016 2

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Back to our special guest, Pastor Braudrick, who has this wonderful new book called Whatever Happened to Manhood? A Return to Biblical Manhood. Where we left off here in talking about the manhood and masculinity of our Lord, Pastor, you had mentioned and written about a character in the Book of Ruth called Boaz. What makes Boaz stand out to you? Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike: Back to our special guest, Pastor Braudrick, who has this wonderful new book called Whatever Happened to Manhood? A Return to Biblical Manhood. Where we left off here in talking about the manhood and masculinity of our Lord, Pastor, you had mentioned and written about a character in the Book of Ruth called Boaz. What makes Boaz stand out to you?

Pastor Braudrick: So many things, so many things. We mentioned earlier two great Hebrew words. [speaking Hebrew] That’s translated, depending on your Bible, as man of standing or man of power or man of wealth. It’s much more significant than that. It means somebody who has great power and chooses to use it for good. My sister-in-law parents their children brilliantly. My brother does okay. No, I’m kidding. He’s great. My sister-in-law uses Boaz as an example all the time. Her favorite line with her kids is, she’ll stop and have them look her in the eye. She’ll say: Use your powers for good. The kid will then go off like a superhero, determined to use the powers. It’s really brilliant to watch. That’s Boaz. Boaz uses his power for good, which, of course, makes him a type of Christ. It also makes him an example for us as men. This is a remarkable man. The Book of Ruth, I hope you all read it tonight after the debate. It’s just a quick, brilliant read. There’s so much to learn there. Especially as men, we can learn a great deal about what a real man should be, a person of power who develops his power and uses it for good.

Mike: I get confused sometimes. Was Ruth the one that was married to Xerxes, or was that Judith?

Braudrick: That’s Esther.

Mike: Nice try, Mike. You got one out of three. It’s kind of like the old joke: How do you pronounce the capital of Kentucky? Is it Louisville or Louisville?

Braudrick: It’s Frankfort.

Mike: It’s Frankfort, you idiot. It’s neither.

Braudrick: Actually, I think it’s the Cincinnati which is in Kentucky that’s the capital of it. I just made everyone in Kentucky mad at me. I’m so sorry. Blame me, not Mike.

Mike: Also in the book, you listed five or six things, friendship between males.

Braudrick: Friendship between men was number six of the six traits that we think scripture can turn around manhood in our culture. The critically important same six friends are really tough because, while God loves everybody and we all love everyone, we don’t pretend that any – we love our friends enough to call sin what it is. We live in a culture that doesn’t want to do it. It wants to everybody to call sin natural and normal when it’s actually not. The upshot of that, in a kind of interesting, convoluted twist, is it makes us not really have friends anymore. I think there’s a certain truth base that – you worry and talk a great deal about truth on your network, do a great job with that. There’s a reason you do that, because truth sets people free. We’re not free to have friends when we can’t be on a truth basis. Men are having fewer and fewer friends, partly because there’s less and less truth. One of the big truths that causes men to have a hard time having friends is because homosexual relationships are being seen as normative when it actually, though God loves everybody, homosexuality is sinful, no way around it.

Mike: It’s unnatural, too.

Braudrick: It makes guys not want to be close to each other.

Mike: It’s sinful, but it’s sinful because it’s unnatural. If we go back to the – if we want to go back to the roots of how we identified sin after Adam’s fall, in the old days in the old country, the Old Testament, it was unnatural acts. That’s what they were doing at Sodom and Gomorrah. The fascinating part about that to me is, if you say it’s an unnatural act, that means there’s a natural act. If there’s a natural act, then it must occur in the natural world. If there is a natural world, how did the natural world get here? If you’re an atheist fan of Professor Lawrence Krauss, then it’s a universe out of nothing. It just kind of happened. There was a big bang and bammo, it was here. If you’re not, the only conclusion is that there was a supernatural force that brought it into existence. It seems to me also that it is the supernatural force of God that really has taken a beaten under modernity, and certainly in the technological age. Man seems to now be the source of supernatural wonders. We can clone things.

Braudrick: Exactly. Nancy Pearcey does a brilliant job with that in her book Total Truth, where she describes from David Hume forward, what we did was we divorced feelings, thoughts, and ideas from factual, what we call factual scientific truth. We made an upper story and a lower story and pretended they weren’t supposed to be together. In actuality, that’s a hilarious – that’s what everybody is taught in just about every school across the nation and across the Western world. It is a completely untenable worldview. In fact, it’s a lot of fun to take it apart, which I’m sure you do all the time, because it doesn’t work. Nobody really can live – a worldview only works when you can live it out. Nobody really can live that out. That’s why Richard Dawkins ends up on the Expelled movie saying: Maybe it was crystals that made the world or aliens. There has to be some supernatural force. Everybody knows that and understands it. By dividing truth, we end up making it where people don’t really want to learn because there’s an inherent falseness to it.

Mike: You said the Expelled movie – you’re the second person in the last week that’s been on this show that’s referenced that movie. I haven’t seen it, but that’s the Ben Stein movie, right?

Braudrick: Yeah. It was a scream. It was a number of years ago, but it’s still worth the watch. It’s fun stuff.

Mike: This is where he goes into a classroom that has something to do with evolution. He raises his hand and goes: Well, why do I have to believe that? Can’t it just be that maybe there’s a God that created all this? I guess he gets expelled, right?

Braudrick: Yeah, that’s right. He goes to investigate it all. He basically comes to the conclusion that the only reasonable conclusion is some kind of intelligent design. One of the chapters of the book we talk about how real men think and learn. Because of this false dichotomy, learning feels really forced to the modern person. There’s a great – better than my chapter in the book, if you want to understand this, there’s one image people ought to pull up on their smartphone. It’s called “Sunday Morning” done by Norman Rockwell. I think 1956, something like that.

People – we’re talking about men here. Men need to be learning about the world and what’s going on and they need to be learning about scripture. Both are how we think. Both are how we deepen ourselves and really grow. The dad in that picture, if you’ve ever seen it – you probably have. The painting has the dad leaning down in his chair and the mom and the two daughters and the son are on their way to church. They’ve all got Bibles in their arms. The dad is still in his pajamas on Sunday morning and smoking his cigarettes and not going to church.

Rockwell, I don’t think, is given enough credit for his depth of thought. Normal Rockwell was capturing something that really bothered him about his beloved England, that he was watching happen in the 1950s. Men were not continuing to learn. They didn’t want to go think. They didn’t want to go be challenged. They didn’t really want to learn about the world. Though he has a newspaper, he’s reading the comics, which I love. You see, the problem he’s capturing is that man doesn’t want to learn. Here’s the most fascinating part of the painting when you pull it up. The mom and daughters are walking out the door, their noses kind of high. The son is leaning toward the dad. The sad part there is when we don’t keep, as you do so well, bringing in thought and helping people challenge – if we don’t do that, if men stop it, what happens is the other young men that are following us, they don’t learn how to learn either. They just lean toward the funny pages with us and it’s left only to women. It’s wonderful that women are learning and leaning, praise God, but men need to as well.

Mike: Is it that men don’t want to learn anymore, from the point of view that they can’t humble themselves to admit that they don’t know everything, or is it that they are just counseled and coached and steeped in this world of sin and heresy and apostasy and they don’t think that they have to go to mass or have to go to church anymore?

Braudrick: I think that’s very true. I think another one thrown that is very sad, since probably the 1970s, the model that is pushed, especially through mass media, is a dummy. Look at all the successful TV sitcom shows. The dad is a lovable idiot. He’s never smart. He’s never really doing anything well. It’s only the females who are allowed to be that. Over time, that image becomes beaten into the brain of the culture.

Mike: It’s unfortunate that it gets beaten into the brain of the culture. I think that from where I sit and from what I hear, it’s no longer – it doesn’t even take a beating anymore. I think it is almost like it’s programmed in now. It’s so difficult to avoid it. I remember one of my favorite essays – maybe if you’re looking for something inspirational for a sermon or something you want to write, one of my favorite essays that I’ve ever read in the last 15 years, it doesn’t have anything to do with the subject at all but it kind of does. Mark Steyn wrote for The New Criterion back in 2008, I think on the 40^th anniversary of the issuing of Sgt. Pepper. He wrote about how: It was 20 years ago today that Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play, and it took Professor Alan Bloom 20 years to muster up the courage to finally write what people should have been writing and thinking all along, and that is that the band had nothing to say. It was Steyn’s take on: This is music? No, this is not music. It’s not beautiful. When Snoop Dogg is elevated as high culture, then there is no high culture.

Braudrick: That’s excellently said. It’s actually because we’ve steeped ourselves in nonsense. There is a reason that modern art, while decorative, doesn’t really have any lasting impact. I’m sorry for all you who love modern art. I’m sure it has a place for image. Art is expected to tell a story, such has been the case throughout history. When we have put ourselves in the culture of where stories are considered bad and art is supposed to only say what you want it to say, something in us snaps and says: Wait a minute, that can’t be true. Anybody who ever says to you “What’s true for me is not true for you,” all you have to do is steal their purse. Suddenly they believe in absolute truth. It’s fascinating how that works. Because there is this inherent foolishness, people just kind of retreat and quit learning. That’s not the answer. The answer is to keep engaging in that culture and keep learning and keep standing up for truth and keep developing yourself. That’s what we’re trying to call men to do.

Mike: My definition of truth has not varied from the one that people have been repeating since Aristotle, and that is truth is conformity of the mind to reality. The reality is that today – we tend to think, though – by the way, let me refresh here. Pastor Wayne Braudrick, the author of Whatever Happened to Manhood? A Return to Biblical Manhood, a great book you can find at Amazon.com. Maybe one day in the future we’ll have it in the Founders Tradin’ Post and some autographed copies of it for listeners to purchase, if we can get in touch with your publisher. That would be fantastic. We tend to elevate ourselves, and I think that’s one of the things that we always have to be careful about, especially when – I try to catch myself as an occasional historian. I stop myself from doing this. We tend to separate ourselves from the historical figures that we study. [mocking] “There’s never been a time like this. No man has ever had to . . . no man has ever been tempted like this before.” We talk about the porn and the drugs and the vulgar language and all that. [mocking] “This has never happened before.” Oh yes it has.

Braudrick: Yeah it has.

Mike: St. Paul even writes about it in his letter to the Romans. He goes: Wait, what are you people doing? You’ve got men lying with men, men acting and looking like men, women lying with women and women trying to look like men. He was describing 2015.

Braudrick: What’s funny is, not too many years before he wrote that, a [??] whom we call Cicero gave the same speech in which he lamented the horrors of bad language and abortion, and how terrible it was and how it was tearing up the empire. Solomon said it: There’s nothing new under the sun. There are nuances of expression for each generation, and each generation gets to fight the good fight. This is our fight.

Mike: I think that’s correct. My dear friend who’s the editor of the St. Austin Review, Joseph Pearce, says: Michael, what most of we American Christians and English Christians do not realize is that we are 2000 years into being born into the church militant. There’s never been a time when the Christian hasn’t been brutalized, hasn’t been ridiculed. There’s never been a time when the Christian has been in control or has been above reproach or hasn’t had a rough go of it. We should just suck it up and just enjoy it and this is life. This is how it’s going to be. This is how our children are going to live at Christians. I hope he’s not listening. That’s a horrible impersonation. He does say that. It made me think about it. He’s right.

Braudrick: That’s why it’s so important that we fight for right. Graciously, appropriately, we stand up for what’s right. There’s not going to be – until Jesus returns, there’ snot going to be a golden age. There never really has been one. Certainly we want to be as effective as possible and be as good of servants as possible, so we fight for right. It’s not so we can rest; it’s so we can be faithful.

Mike: You spell your name Braudrick.

Braudrick: They can blame my great grandfather, who came over from Ireland and realized there was a quota in. He changed the spelling of his name and adopted a German accent so he could pretend he was German. Then he came and married a Native American Choctaw princess and led to all of us Braudricks everywhere.

Mike: We’ll look for the bio of your grandpa in the next book. It sounds like a fascinating story.

Braudrick: It is, it is.

End Mike Church Show Transcript