On Biblical Masculinity, The Boy Crisis, And The Church’s Missed Mission (Anthony Bradley) Ep. #226

Dr. Dru Johnson (00:01)
Do boys even matter? Join me with this episode with Dr. Anthony Bradley, a close friend and colleague of mine, when we discuss the 25th anniversary of Raising Cain Exploring the Lives, the Inner Lives of Boys in America. And this is a PBS special from 25 years ago that talked about how we neglect the emotional lives of boys and the developmental lives of boys in all these very different ways. And…

Dr. Bradley is going to help us understand how the church has succeeded and failed in some very strategic ways, why youth groups might be the wrong kinds of things that churches should be involved with, and what they might do differently to involve boys and girls and help to develop them in proper ways that would align with how the biblical authors seem to think about the world. Okay, it’s a lot. I was hanging on every single word he said. I hope you do too.

Anthony Bradley (00:59)
Right. So that 25 years ago would have been 2000, I guess one or so. And I was at the time teaching high school in Philadelphia at a small Christian school. And when I saw it initially, it just the lights came on because I was seeing it in the hallway. Everything that that document was saying about boys I saw with my ninth graders and

in this this Christian school, which was right down the street from Westminster Seminary, it was called Philmont Christian Academy. And this is what I saw. We saw girls who were who were diligent and had a plan for their future. They were driven. They were conscientious. They were all those things. And the boys we noticed were literally walking around the halls with their heads down.

and their shoulders slumped over. So another teacher and I noticed this and we said, something’s wrong. And we said, okay, we’re gonna launch a men’s Bible study Wednesday in the lunch room, in the art room, adjacent to the lunch room. So we open it up. We said, okay, we have a bunch of guys here that we know are struggling. We’ll open it up and then they will show up.

The ones that we thought were going to show up did not show up. The ones who were struggling the most weren’t the in terms of who showed up. They weren’t the boys from broken homes, bad neighborhoods, et cetera. The ones that showed up were the elders kids, the pastors kids, the Christian businessmen’s kids, the missionary. I mean, and we were like, wait, what?

Dr. Dru Johnson (02:26)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Anthony Bradley (02:52)
And basically, they were so downcast because they didn’t know where they fit in, in terms of the education environment, because it really didn’t cater to girls. And so that’s when I began to see that the entire educational environment really was…

Dr. Dru Johnson (03:03)
Hmm.

Anthony Bradley (03:10)
structured for the success of girls. And that boys were always getting in trouble because they were being boys. Sitting in class not paying attention distracted, throwing things right drawing dragons and and picking up sticks and trying to hit each other with them and making weapons out of pencils and stuff like that. They were always getting in trouble because they weren’t acting like the girls in class. And what began to happen over time

Dr. Dru Johnson (03:31)
Right.

Hmm.

Anthony Bradley (03:39)
is you slowly begin to see a preference for girls and disinterest in a lot of boys. Now, what you also saw around the same time, not to digress too much, but this is also sort of the peak of the punk ska emo movement at the time in Philadelphia. Bands like Oasis were popular, Everclear, Linkin Park, like those sort of bands were also popular.

Dr. Dru Johnson (03:57)
There.

Anthony Bradley (04:09)
and the sorts of content that they were singing about in those songs, like Champagne Supernova, for example, by Oasis, I saw it with my students, right? That song, Champagne Supernova by Oasis, is actually a song about boys who were wanting their parents to intervene in their delinquency. So it’s a lament. That’s why there’s a phrase in the song that says,

Dr. Dru Johnson (04:32)
Hmm.

Anthony Bradley (04:38)
Where were you while we were getting high? It’s a song of lament because they wanted their fathers in particular to tell them to stop smoking weed. So when Raising Cain came out, it just connected all the dots and I just saw it so clearly as a teacher and also just working in churches in the youth space.

Dr. Dru Johnson (04:48)
Right.

Wow. You know, as somebody who classically never listens to lyrics, like as soon as you said those lyrics, I could sing them in my head. I knew exactly what they were. Never put it together. Everclear certainly had some very strong lyrics about absentee fathers and ⁓ kind of the delinquency problem that follows from it. ⁓ Yeah, so I remember watching this. I’ll just be completely honest.

I remember watching this thinking, can’t believe they’re showing this on PBS. ⁓ Because it just seems so overtly. I think at the time I thought, this is so anti-feminist. This is the mood of the day, because I remember feeling like, we can’t affirm boys’ thoughts and feelings. Or the ones that most boys, on the average, have and feel and think. ⁓

It ⁓ was jarring to me. Do you know any of the backstory behind this ⁓ documentary? I never looked into it. I made ⁓ my Sunday school teachers, I made them all watch this. Because it impacted me so deeply. But I’m not even sure where this came from, besides Michael Jackson’s book.

Anthony Bradley (06:15)
Yeah.

Yeah, so I mean, it was it was a book first, right? So that’s a red cover. A Raising Cain in the book was at the time was such a splash because it came on the heels of a lot of books about masculinity in the mid mid to late 1990s. So we often talk today about the sort of crisis of men and boys.

Dr. Dru Johnson (06:34)
yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anthony Bradley (06:40)
but this is sort of round seven of the crisis that we’ve had since the Industrial Revolution. We also had the same sort of Manosphere macho masculinity, masculinity discussion, crisis of war discussion. In the mid 1990s, we were having the same discussion, Promise Keepers came out of that, that whole discussion. And basically, because we’ve been talking about men from essentially mid 1998,

Dr. Dru Johnson (06:43)
Right.

Anthony Bradley (07:09)
95, 96 to about 2000, no one had talked about the boys. And so we were having this discussion about men struggling. And then this book said, wait a minute, the boys are struggling too.

Dr. Dru Johnson (07:39)
And men there, when you say men in the 90s, we’re really talking about boomers, essentially. Yeah.

Anthony Bradley (07:44)
Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. And then was and then so what the data was showing is that the children of the boomers were also struggling as well. And there was all of this new interest in what was happening to boys because we were beginning to see them fall behind. I mean, today we have all the data that boys trail girls in every subject at every school at every every grade level. Girls are getting I mean, women are getting

majority of college degrees, women get the majority of all master’s degrees and doctorates, etc. But that was beginning to happen in the in the late 90s and early 2000s. So this book really dropped at a critical moment, when that discussion was happening. And I think at the time, people didn’t believe it. I remember this. mean, I remember having discussions about people with people about the crisis of boys. And it was like, boys are fine. They’re not

they’re not struggling. And the evidence, by the way, a boy’s not struggling, they would point to C-suite executives and say, well, look at all the men who are CEOs. So the boys are doing great. And we’re all saying,

Dr. Dru Johnson (08:58)
Great. That’s your typical

boy in the world. ⁓

Anthony Bradley (09:02)
Right,

we’re saying, you know, we’re saying, Hey, are you are you actually in schools? I mean, are you on the ground seeing what’s happening in schools? This is also the time when the ADD ADHD spike began to happen in terms of diagnosis for boys. You had all these sort of cultural streams happening in this book brought attention directly to boys.

Dr. Dru Johnson (09:26)
And he was, you know, saying some things that I think at the time didn’t seem to be so obviously true. mean, I remember one section where he just talks about crying and crying being a natural part of being a young boy and a man. And yet even, you know, even people who might claim to be sensitive to the issues of boys and girls.

were in very casual, unbeknownst ways, shaming young boys for crying ⁓ and not having this full range of emotional life. I’ve been claiming for years, you might be able to correct me, is that men are not less emotional than women. They spend their emotional energy in different places often. ⁓ men, at least American males, certainly Brazilian males, spend a lot of emotional energy on football, sports, et cetera. ⁓

But I don’t think I had ever heard a case from a psychologist who was using data for why young boys actually have this full emotional life that is being neglected and then how that’s harming them until I saw this documentary.

Anthony Bradley (10:33)
Yeah, it’s it’s not it’s actually boys are more emotional than girls in fact in fact the the Infant brain of a boy requires more interaction and engagement than a than an infant girl There’s a famous experiment that was done. You may have heard of this where they they stay Have moms in front of of toddlers. I’d say probably I think they were maybe between

Dr. Dru Johnson (10:41)
I believe it.

Hmm.

Anthony Bradley (11:03)
12 and 18 months. And so they so the mom stands there for a couple of minutes.

does the sort of goo goo gaga stuff, makes eye contact, teases, touches, tickles, et cetera, and then walks away. Same thing with the boys, right? Mom’s in front of girls, little baby girl, she’s doing this, da da da da da, walks away, silence.

Boys, three, two, one. I mean, they lasted maybe 10 seconds. And so from a developmental perspective, boys require a lot more interaction and engagement. And when there is any sort of neglect or there’s any sort of even abuse, it actually affects boys.

Dr. Dru Johnson (11:31)
Right. Right.

Anthony Bradley (11:54)
brains differently than girls early on doing those first 36 months of life. Boys require much more interaction than girls, their brains develop, as we know that frontal lobe develops much more slowly. And, and it really, the other thing that was interesting that this sort of came on the heels, and this is part of the context here. This sort of came on the heels of the AIDS crisis.

So what happened in the late 70s to the 1980s, there was this, there’s a scholar at, I think he’s at the University of Bristol, he’s in the UK, but he coined this term homo hysteria. Because what happened in the late 70s through the 1980s and early 90s, basically fathers were told, inadvertently taught, and some taught directly,

Dr. Dru Johnson (12:37)
Okay.

Anthony Bradley (12:50)
that if you’re too affectionate with your son, if you too emotional with them, if you let him show his emotions, then he’ll end up liking boys. And there was massive amounts of neglect and touch deprivation that happened in the lives of boys, particularly coming out of the AIDS crisis. And so there was this idea that, well, boys can’t show emotion because that’s not masculine.

Dr. Dru Johnson (13:01)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

And this is all response to, because AIDS had highlighted it it started in the homosexual community and was always more promiscuous in the, or more rampant in the homosexual community. so, adult men were really keyed into, well, I don’t want my son to be homosexual and I don’t want to be the cause of that is what I’m hearing you say. Okay.

Anthony Bradley (13:21)
Right?

Absolutely. I don’t want

my son to be effeminate. I don’t want him to walk like a girl, talk like a girl, have the emotions of a girl. He has to control those so he can’t cry. He can’t complain. can’t, right? He doesn’t need hugs and I’m going to put him in football. So the other thing that happened, sort of two things happened in the 80s. One is that there was a massive, massive spike in viewership of NFL games and a massive spike.

Dr. Dru Johnson (14:01)
Hmm.

Anthony Bradley (14:11)
and fathers putting their sons in football. The third thing that happened, is what to me is quite tragic, is there was a shift out of the arts for boys. So music, theater, chorus, those are the things. I mean, I’m old. And so when I was in high school, back in the 80s, in the good old days, it would not be uncommon to have a football player or a basketball player also also be in the choir. Right? It would not

Dr. Dru Johnson (14:21)
Hmm.

Right. Absolutely. Or be

in the musical theater production. Right. Right.

Anthony Bradley (14:44)
Absolutely, absolutely.

Today, not going to happen. Not going to happen. Theater kids, band kids, when I was in high school, those were also athletes, right? And when I was in the marching band in the fall, basically the track athletes and baseball players were also in the band. Right? In the spring, when football season was over, we’d have football players also be in the band, etc.

Dr. Dru Johnson (14:47)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Anthony Bradley (15:09)
So if you think about that in terms of the sort of cultural markers of how we define what masculinity was for boys, it was characterized by do not act like girls.

Dr. Dru Johnson (15:18)
you

Wow.

Anthony Bradley (15:25)
Right? And so if there was any sort of indication, both with either fathers or peers, then that you were presenting any sort of emotion or anything like a girl would, it was just completely shame.

Dr. Dru Johnson (15:42)
Where do you think, and I know there’s a long story to be told here, but where do you think cool culture ⁓ settles in here, this idea that you’re supposed to be, almost like modern stoicism, where you don’t show any passion, you can’t be displaced by anything, to the point where it does become toxic or dysfunctional in relationships. ⁓ But yeah, I’m trying to think now, well, why wouldn’t a quarterback be in the high school musical?

because it wouldn’t be cool. And I don’t even know what that, I can’t even justify what I’m saying, but I know what I mean, right?

Anthony Bradley (16:19)
Yeah, I mean, there was a developed sense of what it meant to be cool. I would say there’s also a developed sense of really not being X or Y, right? So for example,

Dr. Dru Johnson (16:33)
Hmm.

Anthony Bradley (16:34)
I don’t want to be called a sissy. Right? So I got to do whatever I got to do because I don’t want I don’t want the boys, my peers to call me a sissy. And I don’t want my dad to call me a sissy. There were lots of lots of stories I’ve heard of fathers shaming their sons and calling them sissies because they like to sing or something like that. Right. And so and so the

Dr. Dru Johnson (16:57)
Hmm.

Anthony Bradley (17:01)
The definition of cool as you know, always changes, kind of ebbs and flows. What’s cool in 1950 would not be cool necessarily now. You know, looking like Jimmy Dean or something like that. Although it might, it actually might pass today. It sort of kind of full circle. But there was a peer pressure to conform to a masculinity that was quote unquote no homo or non sissy.

Dr. Dru Johnson (17:05)
Right.

Right. That’s eternal. Yeah. ⁓

Hmm.

Anthony Bradley (17:32)
right? It was masculinity by negation. It wasn’t masculinity in terms of these are the sorts of values and virtues that men ought to pursue. It was more like, don’t put yourself in the position to be ridiculed, to be called soft, to be called weak, avoid that at all costs. But what was missing and I think this is still missing today

Dr. Dru Johnson (17:35)
Hmm.

yeah.

Mm.

Anthony Bradley (17:58)
those aspirational sorts of virtues and values that we’re raising boys and pointing them toward, that’s been missing for the last 30 years. Now, insert the internet in the 90s and you’re pouring gasoline on it because now boys are going to seek understanding about what it means to be a male from all these sources.

not just movies and video games but websites and

online chat rooms and, and things like that. So that sort of began to develop then. And we’re seeing the fruit of that right now. I mean, we’re sort of like, you know, like you said, 25 years of seeing these patterns. And so when people talk about the, the crisis of men and boys today, and like, yeah, the crisis of men, well, they were the boys of 25 years ago. Right. And so to me, it makes sense. They’ve been in a position

Dr. Dru Johnson (18:54)
Right.

Anthony Bradley (19:01)
where they were given a script about what it meant to be a man, and that script was a script of negation.

Dr. Dru Johnson (19:09)
So, Enter, if we could turn this conversation, at least for a little while, ⁓ to the Christian ⁓ medicine for this problem seemed to be, ⁓ well, let’s give them that list of things they should be to be manly men, but that didn’t always seem to me to be rooted in scripture or biblical ideals of what it means to be a man, which to me, even saying, you know, as a biblical scholar,

It’s very difficult for me to say with a straight face, biblical ideas of what it means to be a man because it’s, yeah, what does that even mean? Yeah.

Anthony Bradley (19:45)
Well.

It doesn’t exist. Right? I mean, one of the most viral articles I wrote for my substack is that quote, biblical masculinity does not exist. That was not the Bible’s aim. These sort of current discussions. And the Bible never compares sort of masculinity and femininity. It doesn’t do that. It compares masculinity to immaturity.

Dr. Dru Johnson (19:50)
Right, right.

Hmm.

Right. ⁓ interesting.

Anthony Bradley (20:18)
right?

So when men are being rebuked about their quote unquote masculinity, they’re being buke because they’re acting like children.

Dr. Dru Johnson (20:30)
And sometimes by wise women who are rebuking them. Yeah. Yeah.

Anthony Bradley (20:33)
Absolutely. Right.

So so the encouragement to boys was like, at like men. Meaning don’t act like a boy. It didn’t Paul did not mean don’t act like a woman. That’s not what that means. means act like an adult grown man, where your God is not your stomach. You’re someone who’s marked by self control and self discipline and self sacrifice. Like, those are the things that mark you as a mature person.

Dr. Dru Johnson (20:46)
Right.

Yeah.

Anthony Bradley (21:02)
And so what’s interesting is that that that interpretive key of maturity also applies to women.

Dr. Dru Johnson (21:10)
Right.

Anthony Bradley (21:11)
Right? And so whenever I get into these discussions about, well, I mean, so you say that, that the Bible wants men to do X, Y, Z. What about women? Like, no, God wants women to do the exact same things. Right? Galatians five and six, Colossians three, Ephesians four and five, that stuff’s not gendered. Like, are you kidding me? Unless it’s something specific about mothers or fathers.

Dr. Dru Johnson (21:24)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Anthony Bradley (21:39)
everyone sort of has to have these aspirations and goals for sanctification and things like that. And so, and so what essentially what happened, and by the way, this is not the first time Christians have done this. We saw this also at the end of the 19th century. What both fundamentalists and evangelicals did is they adopted these sort of cultural norms.

about what masculinity is. And then they they shoehorned them into the Bible, and then cherry picked verses to apply to those very, very cultural models of what it meant to be a man. We have all we I want to say always but this this is a post Industrial Revolution phenomenon. By the time we got to the late 1890s in the US.

men and boys were gone from the church. They were essentially non-existent. About 90 % of church membership was driven by women. About 75 % of church attendance by 1899 was women. And so in order to encourage boys to come back and to get men back, we introduced all of these different organizations like the Young Men’s Christian.

Association. We introduced camp, the sort of camping culture came out of that. Another organization that was created as a sort of post industrial revolution, post industrial revolution phenomenon hit was something called scouting. Right, these were all designed to bring boys back into and men back into the life of the church, but it was sort of using sports and recreation

Dr. Dru Johnson (23:21)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Anthony Bradley (23:35)
as a way to, to extricate some principles and then find some proof text for those. and, and so if people see that today in 2025, I just want them to know that, that we’ve been doing this for 120 plus years, at least at least at least Christians as a Christians have not been immune to sourcing the cultures, understanding of these issues.

Dr. Dru Johnson (23:52)
Yeah.

Anthony Bradley (24:04)
and then trying to Christianize those things by sprinkling some ⁓ Bible verse dust on them.

Dr. Dru Johnson (24:10)
Nothing new under the sun. ⁓ I don’t know if you’ve ever seen ⁓ Nancy Murphy, Nancy Pearcey’s book, The Toxic War and Masculinity. She made a point in there that kind of blew my mind. And she cites the sources of these women who are writing these diatribes against their husbands because they’re going off to work and they used to spend all their time on the farmstead with their family.

And they’re basically abandoning their children by going into the factories to work. ⁓ And I love one comment, like it was an op-ed where the woman was saying, and he thinks when he gets home from work, he no longer has to help me with the house chores. Like the guy doesn’t do chores anymore. He used to help do the dishes and clean up and churn the butter and et cetera. I thought, wow, okay, this really is a big cycle we’re running into here.

Anthony Bradley (25:04)
Absolutely. And also at that time, I think it was it was it was in the 1890s in Chicago was when the juvenile justice system was created. Right. And why? Because we had a whole population of young men who were just unruly and idle. And their fathers run around.

Dr. Dru Johnson (25:15)
Right, right.

Anthony Bradley (25:30)
fathers were at the factories, but their fathers were active factories or whatever. And when they got home, they were shut completely shut down. They weren’t going to church and the kids were just running wild. And the Latin phrase that was used to form the juvenile justice system is in locus parentis, which means right in place of the father. So judges

Dr. Dru Johnson (25:43)
Hmm.

You

Right.

Anthony Bradley (25:56)
and police officers and corrections officers and sheriffs basically became the surrogate fathers for all the boys. And so what’s really fascinating to me is that what what Christians did not do, and this this blows my mind. I’ve been reflecting a lot on Malachi chapter four at the end of that 4:6 right?

Dr. Dru Johnson (26:19)
⁓ yeah. It’s an

enigmatic phrase, right?

Anthony Bradley (26:23)
Absolutely, right. Turning the hearts of the father, the parents who are their children, and the children toward their parents. Right? Now, it’s so fascinating to me, that’s the last verse before the intertestamental period. Right? So from Genesis all the way through Malachi, the plan lands, lands right there on the family. And so what Christians did not do,

Dr. Dru Johnson (26:31)
Their parents, yep.

Hmm.

Anthony Bradley (26:54)
125 years ago was try to figure out how to do Malachi 4-6. They didn’t do that. What they did was do whatever the culture did, which was go after the youth. So this is kind of when the kind of youth culture really began to take on its own industrial complex. And that was how they solved it, right? Youth for Christ, even Young Life later on. We’re gonna reach the youth, we’re gonna reach these boys.

Dr. Dru Johnson (27:13)
Hmm.

Anthony Bradley (27:23)
and not try to, for lack of a better phrase from James Dobson, focus on the family.

Dr. Dru Johnson (27:28)
Talk about land in a plane. Yeah ⁓

Well, you said a lot of things there. Hold on, I lost, what was the last thing you said before you went, sorry, the focus on the family got me. Malachi, yeah. I also feel obliged to say Luke chapter one quotes Malachi about John the Baptist. Like the project has started up again and he quotes that exact same phrase. He’s gonna come to the hearts of the children towards their parents.

Anthony Bradley (27:55)
Hmm.

Dr. Dru Johnson (27:58)
and then extends it out to those who don’t know God as well. So it’s not like it was a throwaway statement. It actually is at the very beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ and Luke’s gospel as well. I too have puzzled over that phrase. I’m just like, wait, how is that happening? What’s going on there? Where are we doing that? Where are we missing it? So ⁓ you have kind of famously decried youth groups in the church as a former youth leader, right? Or did you work with youth groups? Yeah, okay.

Anthony Bradley (28:27)
yes.

Dr. Dru Johnson (28:29)
So I think that will initially strike people as puzzling, like, wait, what’s wrong with youth? We need to reach the youth. What’s wrong with youth for Christ and RUF and all this stuff? So what do you see as the problem? And I’m especially interested in what you see as maybe better roads to go down rather than worse ones. We don’t have to talk about the right and wrong ones.

Anthony Bradley (28:47)
Sure. Yes, I mean, I’ve been working with church kids for 25 plus years. I think I initially started in 1999. So I’m hitting 25, 26 years. And there’s just some really good data out on faith persistence. There’s a great book called Faith and Families that covers this data. Christian Smith also has a great book called Passing.

or handing down the faith also covers the data. We have about 40 years worth of data that shows that the most important predictive factor for faith persistence in children into early adulthood and beyond is the parents. And the data explicitly states that it’s not youth ministry, it’s not Sunday school, it’s not camps, it’s not Christian schools.

it’s Malachi 4-6. That’s what the data shows, right? And the data also shows that 40 to 50 % of youth group kids are completely unattached and distant from the church by the time they hit their 20s. So on the one hand, the data doesn’t support its existence as it’s been done since the 50s. And then secondly, it doesn’t really work.

I mean, what other sort of institution has a 50 to 60 % failure rate and we’re like, yep, let’s keep doing that.

Dr. Dru Johnson (30:23)
Right.

Anthony Bradley (30:25)
right? So I’m not I’m not I’m not against this is what I’m not against. I’m not I’m not against Children in the church K to 12th grade having fun together not against that. I’m not against them. You know, watching movies and playing games and doing pizza. I’m not against any of that. What doesn’t make any sense because the data doesn’t support and I would also I would also say the Bible doesn’t is the expectation

that spiritual formation happens there. That’s not what the data shows. The data shows that spiritual formation happens at home. And instead of churches focusing on the youth, they need to be focusing on Malachi 4.6 and creating spaces where children and their parents are advancing in their connection and intimacy with each other.

both spiritually and emotionally and even economically and psychologically and all the Gs, right? Because that’s where, as one of my mentors, David Jones, would say, that’s where the rubber meets the pothole, right? So what the data shows is that what really leads to faith persistence is when children can engage in

Dr. Dru Johnson (31:30)
Hmph.

Anthony Bradley (31:50)
day-to-day conversations about the intersection of faith and real life. And that happens at the dinner table. It happens in the car. It happens while you’re mowing the lawn and doing your artwork together. mean, kids will just randomly ask a big question at a random moment, right? You’re in the checkout line at Walmart and they’re like…

Dr. Dru Johnson (32:11)
Mm-hmm.

Anthony Bradley (32:15)
Dad, does God have a name? know, it’s some really big question like that. And what the data also shows is that children want to talk about deep things of faith and life with their parents. They really do. That’s actually their preference, right? And what happened in the 1950s was this assumption that there was a gap between parents and their children.

and their children. that so parents lost the ability to communicate with their kids. And so we needed to create something some sort of via media between adults and their kids in order to sort of facilitate formation. But what should have happened is instead of instead of creating a via media, what should have happened is bringing parents and their children together. Right? That’s what should have happened.

Dr. Dru Johnson (33:08)
Right.

Anthony Bradley (33:11)
All of those fun activities should have been for the whole family. All those outings, all the missions trips, all of those things, Habitat for Humanity, it should always be parents side by side with their children. That was pre-industrial revolution Christianity.

Dr. Dru Johnson (33:18)
interesting, yeah.

Yeah. Shared experience that drives conversation. It’s Deuteronomy 6. Yeah. Yeah.

Anthony Bradley (33:29)
right? That it is, it’s the Shema in Deuteronomy four and six, right?

As you walk along the road, when you lie down, when you wake up, that’s how faith persistence happens. It’s always been that way. It’s always been that way. And beginning 1950s churches gave parents permission to outsource that formation.

and it’s been an abysmal failure over the years. So what I really want to do is, or rather my recommendation would be, is that if you’re really concerned about faith persistence in children, then you need to create a context that children and their parents can enjoy each other and be really close.

Dr. Dru Johnson (34:25)
Mm.

Anthony Bradley (34:26)
If you do that, then you’ll have faith persistence and the kids will stay in the church. If you don’t do that, then the kids will be in that 40 to 50 % group. And then you’ll wonder why, what happened, because you put them in the Christian school. You did the summer camps, right? You did the youth Bible study. They were in D groups. They might have been a worship leader when they were in the 11th grade, and now they’re 25 doing nothing.

How did that happen? Well, it happened according to data, because the main vehicle sort of driving this persistence were those deep conversations with their parents and especially and even particularly the father really, really does drive that. And so when I’m going around churches right now talking about these things, I’m saying, listen, I think Wednesday night should actually be for the parents.

Dr. Dru Johnson (35:22)
Mm.

Anthony Bradley (35:22)
let

the kids go do whatever they can go watch a movie get pizza. But Wednesday nights should be helping in helping the parents train the parents on how to have better connection with their kids, which also means by definition, that their marriages need to be good. Right? So good marriages create the context for family and faith formation at home. And that’s what’s been missing.

Dr. Dru Johnson (35:38)
Right.

Anthony Bradley (35:50)
And I’m kind of reinserting Malachi 4-6 as a model back to Deuteronomy, chapters 4-6 as the primary model for how to instill that sort of faith persistence across generations.

Dr. Dru Johnson (36:05)
I never thought of it until I’ve worked through that passage a dozen times in classes, the Malachi passage, ⁓ but I hadn’t really thought about it until just now, how much of an indictment that, Malachi comes at the end of a very tumultuous period in Israel’s history, almost an indictment of like, this is the problem that, I mean, if you look at what gets Israel exiled, it’s.

they’re selling their children into prostitution. They’re giving them, you know, in the worst cases, they’re giving up their own children as human sacrifices. ⁓ That actually is the thing that needed to be mended at the end of that period of Israel’s history. ⁓ I could imagine that a lot of people could get on board with what you’re saying. Anecdotally, during COVID, when we were doing Home Church, we just sat around the table and we read passages of scriptures and then we…

like all shared what we thought about it, what we had heartburn with and what we didn’t agree with. what we, I agree with all of it, but, you know, let the kids say like, well, I have trouble with that, right? And my kids will all tell you that’s probably the most meaningful time they’ve ever had at, you know, church or home church or whatever. And it was the only time that they ever like, that I got to hear their, ⁓

theology like in full on a particular passage and I thought, why haven’t we been doing this up till now? And then the kids really did not like going back to church because they’re like, well, we’re just listening to some guy talk. We’re not actually engaged. We’re not hearing what dad or mom thinks about this or each other for that case.

Anthony Bradley (37:49)
And what’s interesting is that what the data shows, again, they want to talk to their parents about these things. They prefer that over a non-family member. They’ll use a non-family member when their relationship with their parents is bad.

Dr. Dru Johnson (38:03)
Mm-hmm.

Anthony Bradley (38:10)
Right. I’ll never forget the day I had I had a ninth grade student told me this and I could not believe it. He said my dad’s my best friend.

I was like, what? He said, Yeah, my dad’s my I was like, I was like, something’s wrong. Something’s wrong there. And I said, What do mean? He said, Yeah, we talked about everything. I said, like everything? Yeah, he said everything. I mean, I said, Wait, so the so everything a ninth grade boy struggles with all of those things. You talked to your dad about all of those? Yes. Right. And I’ve been I’ve been tracking a group of

Dr. Dru Johnson (38:19)
They were like, well, that’s going to be dysfunctional. Yeah. ⁓

Anthony Bradley (38:45)
of guys for about 25 years. They’re now about around 40 years old. And I can tell you just from observing this group of about 10 guys, the ones who have had the deepest and most enduring faith growth experience were the ones who were really close to their dads.

And these were Christian school kids, right? But it wasn’t the Christian school, wasn’t really me. What it was is that their parents, particularly their dads, were really invested in integrating whenever, again, as you walk along the road, right? When you’re errands. Look, son, look at that. Look, look, look over here. See that lady over there? What should we do? Like, it’s those sorts of things, these sort of micro, kind of micro-dosing theology and apologetics. That’s what leads to faith persistence.

Dr. Dru Johnson (39:35)
Yeah.

Yeah, I’m at the age now where my kids are almost all in their 20s. My youngest is getting ready to turn 20. And so we get to hear how they assess our parenting from a more removed person. They’re not caught up in it anymore. And it’s funny how often they point to very little moments as some of the most significant.

turning parts in their own thinking or their own like, okay, that really made me think more carefully about that thing that I was ready to dismiss, ⁓ which is shocking. And then I look back in my own life, I’m like, yeah, I wonder if my mom and dad even knew the kinds of things they did. ⁓ You know, the long conversations where they’re trying to talk me out of being an idiot weren’t the times. Even though I needed those conversations desperately, those weren’t it. It was the really small times that only come when you spend a lot of time with your kids.

Which leads me to, think, my biggest concern here. So our church in Newark, New Jersey spent a lot of its energy reaching out to the kids in the housing projects. Most, statistically speaking, most of their dads were dead or in prison. ⁓ And if they were with their moms, great. A lot of them were grandmas and aunts, and they’re with the extended family. So I wonder if that kind of a situation

where many of these kids are not gonna be Christian, but they might be Christian adjacent or interested or their grandma’s a Christian or whatever, if you would see a role for something like a specialized youth work with those kids, or would it still just be pizza and donuts for them?

Anthony Bradley (41:19)
Yeah, I mean, it would still be pizza and donuts for them because what they actually need is to be integrated into the life of a family. So for example, instead of going to youth group, actually, I’ll say this way, they go to youth group. But I would say on Sunday, that a family in the church needs to take one of the kids home for the the for Sunday dinner, or to do Sabbath together with their family.

Dr. Dru Johnson (41:40)
Mm.

Anthony Bradley (41:48)
They need to be integrated. So if they come from a broken home, they need to be brought into a more structured stable home to physically experience it. Exactly. Exactly. The idea, the idea that what impacts them is just their head, that it’s not embodied.

Dr. Dru Johnson (41:59)
Right, because otherwise they wouldn’t think it exists. Or it’s all a front, yeah.

Anthony Bradley (42:16)
Right, they need to physically experience almost in a sacramental sort of sense what a godly family is. And so I think again, the mistake that was made was believing that we can form children disconnected from older adults.

Dr. Dru Johnson (42:36)
yeah, amen. Yeah.

Anthony Bradley (42:37)
That is not a biblical model. That

is not Israel, right? This idea of age segregating for the sake of spiritual formation is foreign to the world of the Bible. It’s uniquely and distinctly Western. And I would say it’s also uniquely and distinctly British and American, Australian and Canadian, right? And German.

Right? mean, it’s really that. So here’s what I’m telling churches. If you’re in a community where, let’s say you’ve got, you you’re doing urban ministry or rural ministry, you’ve got 15 kids from broken homes, you need to find 15 families in your church to basically be a surrogate family for them. They can still do all the youth groups stuff, but what’s really gonna…

drive those things home, really drill it down, is if these kids can have an embodied experience with some older adults. So they can have some surrogate fathers, surrogate mothers, surrogate aunts or uncles or big brothers, etc. They need that. They need to be, again, I think this is biblical and covenantal, they need to be brought into a community.

Dr. Dru Johnson (43:59)
Mm-hmm.

Anthony Bradley (44:00)
of multiple adults. What the data shows is that secondarily, outside of the family, the other key variable to faith persistence is intergenerational relationships. Right? So a kid in crisis at 15 needs to be in relationship with someone in their 40s and their 60s and 70s.

Dr. Dru Johnson (44:13)
Right.

Anthony Bradley (44:27)
They need a grandfatherly figure. They also need a fatherly figure, maybe some sort of uncle, sort of that. And so what I’m telling churches is listen.

Quit being snowbirds.

Right? Like, stop going to Phoenix for six months and playing golf. Your local church and your local community needs your physical presence to help people who are in crisis. And if your retirement is about leisure, you miss out on this this very key missional opportunity to love your neighbor well, you’re missing out on that.

Dr. Dru Johnson (44:42)
Mm.

Right.

Anthony Bradley (45:02)
And so for kids who come from disadvantaged neighborhoods, they need more community. They need more intergenerational relationships because they need to see what a good grandparent is like, what a good father is like. They need to be in a home and watch a family have dinner together, listen to the conversation, be brought into the conversation. The rhythms of family life, like your family worship example.

Dr. Dru Johnson (45:26)
Mm-hmm.

Anthony Bradley (45:32)
to bring in the kid from the neighborhood, just kind of place them there and let them and let them let them see that. It’s a it’s it’s amazing the impact that that has, longitudinally speaking, on on reframing the imagination that a child has, or an adolescent has about their about their future. That’s right.

Dr. Dru Johnson (45:54)
So it sounds like you’re actually talking about how the church not only thinks about young people, but how they think about older people as well. I mean, my father, who’s 80, 80, 81, the last few years, his church was the one who said, hey, you’ve got a lot of wisdom. You’ve been around the block a few times. We got all these 30 and 40 year old young men that are really struggling, divorcees, et cetera. My dad’s once divorced.

And he has been more active as a retired person. I he’s got like a full schedule meeting with young men in their 30s, 40s. ⁓ And he’s like, he is like full bore. It’s given him like he realizes his life, you know, it’s got all kinds of good things for him. Great things for the people he’s working with. And I feel like this is the first church I’ve ever seen where they looked at their older people and said, hey, you got work to do. They’re like, you are needed in this community. And so it even…

like opened my eyes to a couple of things. I also, on the flip side, I don’t know if you run into this, but I’ve walked into churches where it was like 300 35 year olds, you know, and the oldest, they had 100 kids in the congregation and they were all like under 12 years old. And I remember looking around thinking like, well, this is just a bunch of affairs waiting to happen. And there’s not, like there’s none of that intergenerational.

There’s no intergenerational knowledge in the church community. so what you’re saying sounds like, okay, this is great, we need to think about our boys. But to me, I hear you also saying some churches are gonna have to actually restructure based on this and start thinking about who, like going out in the streets and knocking on the doors in the nursing home saying, can you come to our church? We need you here, right?

Anthony Bradley (47:38)
Yeah, and I think again, again, I have a mountain of data that talked about the importance of fathers. In fact, I have a book coming out next fall on father absence, a dad deprivation. And the data is just so, so, so clear about the impact of that kind of strong male voice in a kid’s life.

not in a teaching sort of way, not in a lecturing way, but in a supportive, it’s a safe place to ask questions, a safe place to explore things. It’s a safe place to ask quote unquote dumb questions. Like, you know, it’s sort of safe to, to explore these things. And to me, given the impact of the parents in the lives of the kids, I you mentioned that some parents were incarcerated or some, you know, maybe dead, but I’ve always wondered why some churches were content.

to reach the community’s youth, but not their parents, right? Like if you’re gonna reach John, and John is with his mom, well, you need to reach John’s mom too. And if John’s dad, if it’s just divorce and John’s dad lives, you know, five miles away, well, you got to knock on his door too. Because no matter what you do at church and youth group, the stuff that lasts is what was normed at home.

Dr. Dru Johnson (48:40)
Right. Right.

Anthony Bradley (49:07)
That’s the stuff that lasts. And by the way, that’s also an encouragement to parents. I’ve also seen situations where parents have done the best they could, they’ve read all the Christian books that did all the Christian things, and their kids didn’t really seem at the time to get it, right? They’re kind of worried, oh my gosh, my kids saved. What I’ve seen over the years, and this is kind of basic covenant theology, I’m like, no, just wait. Just wait it out.

Dr. Dru Johnson (49:32)
Yeah, it comes back.

Anthony Bradley (49:34)
I cannot tell you, mean, I just have a, I could write out a long spreadsheet of names of teenagers I’ve seen who were wild in high school, who later became pastors, or later became elders, or later became something. In fact, I won’t name him or the school that he’s teaching at now, but I will say this as an example.

Dr. Dru Johnson (49:49)
Yeah, that’s me.

Anthony Bradley (50:03)
When I was teaching high school, one of my students who smoked pot every day, multiple times a day, whose whose pupils were so dilated, I didn’t know if he had right. He struggled in high school, everyone’s worried about him. Right? Went to college, sort of got his bearings straight, then went to seminary. Right? Did that.

and now he’s an administrator at a Christian college, a very conservative Christian college. So I’m like, just wait. Be faithful to what the Lord has you do as parents and then let God work out all the details. Do not lose hope because what you see on Monday is not what you expect. This is not how God works. If you look at the history of right? If you look at the history of God’s people,

Dr. Dru Johnson (50:51)
Mm-hmm. All right.

Anthony Bradley (50:56)
It’s not a straight line. It’s kind of bumpy. We had a professor at Covenant Seminary named Gerard van Groningen, a great, great Dutchman there. Taught at RTS as well. He told this great story about a woman in her 90s who prayed for her son. And he finally got his faith and life together at the age of 75.

right, she waited 75 years to see the fruit of her spiritual nurture of her son. And if you think about it theologically, God does a lot of that waiting on his people, the long suffering God. And so I think that’s something that all the parents may not be prepared for, that in some cases, you may have to long suffer before you see the fruit.

Dr. Dru Johnson (51:39)
Yeah.

Anthony Bradley (51:50)
of all the investment you’ve had in your kids, but just keep praying and wait.

Dr. Dru Johnson (51:54)
So I could go on for about another hour and listen to your insights here, but we do need to wrap it up. And going back to Raising Cain, exploring the inner lives of boys, it sounds to me, pulling together many of the things that you’re saying here, that when a church or Christian community is really focused on, well, just get them saved, right? that’s, get them to stop masturbating and just get them saved, right? Like the two key.

purposes for a youth group. ⁓ Yeah, drinking, drugs, sex, that kind of, yeah, keep, as my wife says, like the worst sin she could have possibly committed, you know, in her Southern Baptist Church community was getting pregnant. And like, that was no, like that was the worst possible thing you could do. ⁓ So keeping them from committing these deadly sins as they might be viewed, and then making sure they’re saved, right, that they have this trust in Jesus. If those are your only goals, then…

Anthony Bradley (52:26)
Drinking and drugs.

Dr. Dru Johnson (52:53)
kind of a lot of the things that you’re saying don’t matter as much or they can get put on the back burner and the win is still like, okay, well, at least they know Jesus and they’re not pregnant, you know, or something like that. And it sounds like you’re really, a lot of what you’re doing is saying, well, A, that’s not the biblical model and B, ⁓ exploring the inner lives of boys, which is what that Raising Cain subtitle is, is actually kind of what the church’s task is.

and that’s an intergener exploration, that’s intra-family exploration, and not just boys, of course, of daughters as well. And a lot of this is the outsourcing of that work or the failure to do it, if I hear you correctly.

Anthony Bradley (53:39)
Yeah, think one of the things that maybe has been missed over the last 120 years of American Christians trying to discern these things is not paying attention to the fact that boys develop internal lives where they’re asking really big questions about who they are, what their role is in society, what their role is in the church, how to handle

Dr. Dru Johnson (53:56)
Right.

Anthony Bradley (54:07)
their emotions, the good ones and the bad ones. How do you handle?

disappointment and anger and passion. How do you handle those things? So one of the things that has not happened because we’ve been so, so keen on this minimalist approach of making sure that they know the gospel and that they behave a certain way, they’re actually still drinking milk at 18, 19, 20. And then we toss them out into the world.

and they implode because those other parts of their life and their world were never developed spiritually. They don’t have spiritual emotions. They don’t really have really mature ways of thinking about their future. They don’t really know about marriage. They aren’t thinking about what it means to be a husband. They aren’t thinking about how do I be a Christian employee? They aren’t thinking about those things.

They actually have not been trained on how to handle disappointment. Right? Like, imagine this. Imagine being 18, 19, 20, and you’ve never had an experience being tutored on how to handle disappointment, or how to handle anxiety, or depression, or insecurity, or doubts. How do you handle all the messages you get all day long about who you should be and why? Like all those sorts of things, nothing. And so they get out.

Dr. Dru Johnson (55:24)
rough.

Anthony Bradley (55:38)
And they have no deep resources to learn how to do those things. And in today’s era, they go right to YouTube to try to figure it out. Right? Or they try to find some guru. Yeah. Yeah, they try to find some guru on Instagram. Or they follow someone someone’s tick tock account to do that. And that’s exactly and this is a whole nother podcast discussion. That’s exactly how Jordan Peterson rose to prominence. Because of the void.

Dr. Dru Johnson (55:48)
Great. And there’s somebody there, yeah, happy to tell them, yeah.

yeah.

Anthony Bradley (56:08)
of addressing the other parts of what it means to be a whole person. Right. And again, the Bible does this. The Bible talks about the whole person, not just the spiritual side, not just behavior modification, but everything. mean, the Psalms, for example, is a great book about about the emotions, like how to handle emotions. Right. But they don’t they don’t get trained on those things. And we’re kind of where they’re kind of

⁓ their their sheep being sent into wolves because they’re so underdeveloped. The one of the things I’ve told parents over the last couple years, and I’ll, I’ll, I’ll end with this. What you really want are self confidently, you want you want self confident kids who are wise. That’s what you want. You want children who are confident enough that they

can say no to invitations to do something stupid because they don’t care about rejection.

Dr. Dru Johnson (57:11)
Wow.

Anthony Bradley (57:13)
Right? So when my ninth grade student told me that his dad is his best friend, what it meant, what it really meant is if his friend said, hey, let’s go get drunk, he’s like, I’m not going to go do that. And they’re like, well, then, well, then you’re out of the group. And he’s like, well, I don’t care. I have my dad.

Dr. Dru Johnson (57:30)
you

Anthony Bradley (57:31)
Right? So if I don’t get included in your group, it really doesn’t matter because my father still accepts me. And my father still loves me and I do not want to disappoint my father. Therefore, I’m not going to do what this group is doing. You got to have that kind of self confidence in order to exercise wisdom. Right? But we’re not building up that level of self confidence in our kids because that self confidence comes out comes out of a home.

and it comes out of the relationship that kids have with their parents. You want self-confident kids who are wise. If your children excel in wisdom, if the book of Proverbs is literally a part of the neural synapses in their brains, they will be fine.

Dr. Dru Johnson (58:21)
Hmm. That’s a very powerful word picture. The wisdom and acceptance and disappointment development. Okay, I literally could go on for another hour. ⁓ You’re a good friend and colleague and it’s amazing to I’ve known you 15 years and I never ever tire of listening to you, which I would not say about most people I’ve known for 15 years. So thank you very much. Thank you, Tony, for being on and thank you for your wisdom.

Anthony Bradley (58:23)
Right?

well you’re you’re very kind thank you

Thanks for having me.