The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity

In all the discussion of women’s roles in the Church, we’ve ignored a pressing question:

Why don’t men go to church anymore?

Why are the most common traits of the modern Church doves and quilts and little old ladies? Dr. Leon Podles documents the current feminized state of the Western Church, the masculine traits that once characterized Christianity, and how they can be restored.

Look Inside the Book

While the masculine exodus from churches is dangerous for the Church, it is also dangerous for society as a whole. Masculinity will out. Detached from Christianity, it will reappear as its own substitute religion—with horrific consequences.

And when divorced from masculinity, the Church emasculated fades into universalism and quietism, the effects of which run rampant through the Western Church of today. In The Church Impotent, Dr. Leon Podles examines, with meticulous scholarship, three aspects of Christianity through which its virility might be restored.

From the Book

The crisis of the church in every age is a crisis of saints. There is no modern, accessible model of saintly lay masculinity in Western culture. A man can be holy, or he can be masculine, but he cannot be both. Studies (such as this one) can only point out a problem and perhaps make the Church aware of its needs. It can correct wrong concepts, because misguided preaching and spiritual advice only makes the problem worse. But studies alone, commissions and articles and programs, will not themselves create the masculine saints, who alone can show to men that holiness is not the negation, but the fulfillment of masculinity. That can only be done by saints who are both dedicated to holiness, not by their own work, but by the work of the Holy Spirit, and who are fully masculine. These saints will be ordinary Christians, who come into contact with other men in sports, business, or the military.