“Today the word manliness seems quaint and obsolete,” writes Harvey C. Mansfield. “We are in the process of making the English language gender-neutral, and manliness, the quality of one gender, or rather, of one sex, seems to describe the essence of the enemy we are attacking, the evil we are eradicating.”

The New York Times has been running a most interesting series of articles in recent weeks entitled “The New Gender Divide.” In today’s edition, the paper looks at a new pattern among men without college education — marrying late or not at all.

This article from Monday’s edition of The New York Times is a sign of deep cultural distress — of men without any sense of shame for not working. In “Men Not Working, And Not Wanting Just Any Job,” reporters Louis Uchitelle and David Leonhardt tell an amazing story:

Britain’s government is set to revise the nation’s Fertilisation and Embryology Act next year and the new law will represent a cultural shift that reaches far beyond the issue of reproductive technologies.

The fault lines of controversy in contemporary Christianity range across a vast terrain of issues, but none seems quite so volatile as the question of gender. As Christians have been thinking and rethinking these issues in recent years, a clear pattern of divergence has appeared. At stake in this debate is something more important than the question of gender, for this controversy reaches the deepest questions of Christian identity and biblical authority.

In the film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s violent novel, Fight Club, character Tyler Durden points to his generation of young men as the “middle children of history.” Played by actor Brad Pitt, Durden represents the absolute collapse of masculinity into raw violence. This character joins his friends in seeking personal release and ecstasy through violent fights that send the participants regularly to the emergency room. In a haunting comment, Durden remarks: “We are a generation of men raised by women.” Is this our future?