Canter Bridge

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John Eldredge launched a new phase of the Christian men’s movement with his 2001 publication of Wild at Heart.

Until then, events like the mass Promise Keepers gatherings and their local offshoots provided men with a sense of community that many had felt lacking. But there existed little theory to explain what was actually going on under the surface of all the hugging and male bonding.

Eldredge thinks he knows. He believes that traditional and genuine masculinity has been suppressed by a society-wide and church-nuanced emasculation perpretrated by a culture that has drunk too deeply and uncritically of some feminists’ view that men and boys are the problem.

Eldredge thinks that a deep structure is at work in the tales that people tell of men and women, adventure and the home, assertion and receptivity, rescue and battle. He believes that every man is wired to fight a Battle and rescue a Beauty. Men go deeply wrong when they are taught to avoid this adventure, or when they shrink from it out of their own cowardice.

Redemption of a powerful kind is available to men who push back against the instruction to be nice, choosing instead to embrace a kind of wildness that Eldredge repeatedly considers ‘dangerous’. This, the author argues, is what women want most, even when they are evasive about saying so.

This reviewer might once have considered Wild at Heart to be the slightly pathetic, testoserone-soaked cry of a man fairly unsure about himself who finds comfort in the raving.

No more.

I have come to see remedial, corrective, and even redemptive value in the somewhat simplified Myth to which Eldredge calls men and boys to return. Though I could wish that he would more often reduce his metaphors (‘the Wound’, for example) to descriptive prose or that his biblical exegesis were more astute, I do believe his premise is sound.

Hombres de gelatina (‘gelatin men’) is the term I found myself using during years of teaching in Latin America to describe the passive and apologetic behavior by which Christian men drive their women mad and their colleagues to exasperation. It seemed that they had somehow never been taught to be men, simplistic as that sounds.

The avoidance of risk, offence, and decision seems to coalesce as a paralyzing venom shot through the veins of men who simply need to get over their fear and actually make something happen. For Eldredge and this reviewer, there is a degree of autobiography in this. Bred to be courteous, we mistake that virtue for its evil twin: offense-less-ness. By no means offend anyone.

There’s a reason Eldredge has sold more than a million copies of this book. He’s touched a nerve. Even if he’s been less than entirely exact in explaining the origins of today’s endemic of bored, purposeless males with nothing larger than themselves to live for, he has pointed out the huddled masses they comprise and megaphoned to them that life can be different.

This book should be read by men who want to recover a bit of holy wildness, and by their women who so often look on, perplexed.