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Chris and Beth Bruno host conversations at the intersection of psychology and theology. This podcast is powered by ReStory Counseling.
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Thanks for joining us today.
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I'm Beth Bruno and I lead our strategic initiatives at Restory Counseling, a Colorado-based center of therapists, story work coaches, spiritual directors, and all-around amazing people. We're excited to be back, trying some new things, still committed to bringing you conversations at the intersection of psychology and theology. This month, we're doing a series on the remnants of purity culture. If you're a Christian who grew up in the 90s and are white,
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evangelical, chances are you know exactly what I mean by this. If you aren't or weren't, you're probably still familiar with the effects of that movement and perhaps living out some of them today. Well, I am so pleased to bring you the voices of two of our story work coaches at Restory Counseling, Michael Kromendyk and Lisa Russell. You can watch them dive into this topic together in a webinar we've recorded.
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over at restory.life/webinars, and you can listen to their interviews with authors of recently released books on this topic right here on the podcast this month. In today's episode, Michael talks with Zachary Wagner, author of Non-Toxic Masculinity, recovering healthy male sexuality.
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Zachary is the editorial director for the Center for Pastor Theologians and is currently pursuing a PhD in New Testament at the University of Oxford, where he lives with his wife and children. Listen in. Hello, my name is Michael Kromendyk. I am a Restory coach here with Restory Counseling. And I'm here with Zachary Wagner, who's the author of the new book, Non-Toxic Masculinity.
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Recovering Healthy Male Sexuality. Zachary, welcome to the ReStory Podcast. Thanks so much for having me. I'm looking forward to the conversation. Yeah. Thank you so much for being willing to spend some time with us. I was wondering if you might just start briefly by telling us a little bit about yourself and kind of this season of life that you find yourself in. Yeah, I am married to Shelby.
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for coming up on nine years. We have three kids, six, three, and then a nine-month-old. Currently, we live in the United Kingdom where I am working on a PhD in New Testament. About two years, two and a half years into that with probably another year, year and a half to go. And then also- On the back end, which is good. Yeah, well.
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It doesn't always feel that way, but according to the schedule, if all goes according to plan, yeah, kind of over the hump potentially. And then I also work for an organization called the Center for Pastor Theologians. I'm the editorial director and I work part-time remotely for them. They're based in the Chicago area as well. Awesome.
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Well, hey, we are here to talk about this book that you wrote. And I just want to say personally to you, Zachary, thank you for writing this book. I came across it a month or so ago before it got released from your publisher. Sure. They sent our staff a book and it was passed on to me because I was actually preparing a presentation to talk to some local pastors about this very topic. Oh, really?
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I initially opened it up and like with the intent to like, you know, try to get some more material in this, because honestly, Zachary, like, you maybe know this, there's not a lot out there. No. Yeah, I can tell. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm curious. I'm happy to I'm happy to comment on that. But when you say this very topic, which what topic do you mean? Do you mean human sexuality? Do you mean masculinity? Do you mean male sexuality? Yeah. Yeah, I think it's I think it's all of those things within the context of the purity culture.
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Sure, yes. Is really, that's actually where I was going with that presentation. And as I began reading it, I began seeing the intersect with my story and my own journey with this as well. So this book for me is not only just a work thing, but for me it's become something that has been very significant for me. So I just wanna say thank you to you for that to start out. But I'm curious,
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with this kind of work in front of you, like, why were you the guy? Like, why did you feel like, man, this is something that I need to do, and tell us a little bit about your journey in doing so. Sure, yeah. Well, when I first started thinking about writing the book, I very much did not feel like I was the guy to do it. And perhaps others can assess.
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whether I was or not as the book gets out and is getting reviewed and getting read. I really more than anything just hope it proves helpful. And also thank you so much for saying that. That's really encouraging for me to hear about just even the way the book has impacted you personally. But there are really two streams of the story that led to me making the decision to write this book.
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The first is this broader cultural conversation that I think you could say started in force around the Me Too movement and the election of President Trump and scandal after scandal from Bill Cosby to whoever else of all these well-known men that fall quote unquote. And the church as well, right? Well, yeah, that's where I was going next.
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is it kind of started in the celebrity culture and then women speaking out about their experiences of sexual violence and sexual abuse. And then the parallel hashtag church to, which was started a little bit after that by Emily Joy Allison and some others, showed that this problem was not limited to the kind of toxic expressions of masculinity in the culture at large, but also in the church.
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And early 2021, there were just a few things in the church context. I grew up in conservative evangelicals and still live and move in that world in a lot of ways. But early 2021, you had the news about Robbie Zacharias, Josh Duger, Bill Heibel's news was still pretty fresh.
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expose in the Houston Chronicle about Southern Baptist churches. And then these Atlanta spa shootings where this young man who shot and killed women primarily of East Asian descent cites his sexual addiction and his need to eliminate temptation as his motive for doing so. So there's this broader conversation. And I think like many was really, really disturbed and alarmed by this pattern that I was seeing.
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And then that intersected, this broader narrative, intersected with my personal story in that I grew up very much in the thick of what we've already alluded to, purity culture, where I was shaped much in every way by the resources, from Joshua Harris to Steven Arterburn to all the rest of it. Would you mind Zachary, just briefly just defining, what do you mean when you say purity culture? Yeah, when I have a...
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definition that I offer in the book, I don't know if I'll be able to produce it verbatim right now, but it is the Theological assumptions, discipleship materials, events and books that mostly white conservative evangelicals offered in response to the sexual revolution. So it is, I understand the purity culture and the purity movement as a
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reactive cultural movement in response to a wider and larger cultural movement that is the sexual revolution. So it's often most closely associated with the kind of the king of purity culture is Joshua Harris and his book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. But in my focus, and this is getting ahead a little bit, in my focus on the male
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burdens and carried and harms associated with purity culture, I think more influential is Everyman's Battle by Fred Stoker and Stephen Arber. I agree with that. So, purity culture placed a strong emphasis on things like waiting until marriage to have sex, but also often included a lot of promises and hype around what sex in marriage would be like. And that's where this
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Um, first, like many young men of my generation, um, I was struggling, you could say, um, or dealing with and having experiences around masturbation and pornography in my teen years, advent of high, high-speed internet. Um, and then, uh, the smartphone, a few, just a few years after that meant, uh, this was something that a lot of young men and young women, it should be noted, were, were dealing with. And
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that mixed together with this high stakes rhetoric around purity culture and staying pure until you are married and the negative consequences that will be associated with that and supposedly and the ways that will harm your marriage or ruin you or compromise your relationship. We got all of that, all of that really, really intense rhetoric in the purity movement around these things. Plus just, you know, teenage kids trying to navigate this led to, for me and many others, a
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a pretty crazy mix of shame and struggle and frustration going through my teen and into my college years and my twenties. But as much as that was a characteristic struggle, my girlfriend, then fiance, now wife, we stayed good. We followed the rules that purity culture had commended to us and we did not sleep together until we got married.
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But pretty quickly, after we got married, we found that the beautiful, shame-free, struggle-free, satisfying, joyful, frequent sex life that was promised so often in purity culture did not materialize for us. So we just kind of struggled with that for the first five years or so of our marriage. And...
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I talk about this in the book, that was hard and that was frustrating for each of us in different ways. One, the kind of my side of the equation is that I was still carrying a lot of those kind of mental pathways and shame-fueled habits in my body and in my brain as it associated with any experience even of sexual intimacy.
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including the ones in marriage that I had been told that this is good, this is where you don't need to be ashamed. I was still feeling a lot of that. And then my wife, we come to find early in the marriage, we weren't thinking in these terms and hadn't quite realized this in this way, but she is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, church-based sexual abuse. Wow. And that's a huge other piece to...
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what was going on there and why we were facing some of these struggles and why it wasn't working in the way that purity culture had told us it was going to pan out. There was a formula, right? Yes, exactly. It was like, let's B equals C. Yeah. Guaranteed almost, right? 100%. Yeah. So follow these rules and God will bless you with your best sex life later, pretty much is something I say in the book. So those two stories came together.
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in early 2021 for me. And I had thought maybe at some point in the future, I would write a book about masculinity. It's something that I had thought about. But man, the cultural pressures and the moment through some prayer reflection, conversations with mentors, on paper, it did not make sense at all for me to write a book when I was in the middle of a PhD program. But, you know, I- Many reasons, yeah. Yes.
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And I should say my Ph.D. research is not on this topic. It's a completely different thing. But, you know, felt like this is what I was being called to and went ahead and did it and here we are. Well, I'm so glad you did it, Zachary. I truly believe that this book is a gift and to me, it just feels like one of those works that's gonna live on and is really significant, particularly for us in this generation.
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I want to, we're going to get into the masculine messages and all that stuff. But something that was very striking to me at the very, towards the beginning of this book, you began talking about the voices of the women who have spoken out, right? And who have written about their experiences in purity culture. And I'm not going to name all the authors, but there's so many of them, right? And you say these words, you say so much of what I have learned about sexual brokenness in the church.
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I've learned from women who are courageous enough to say to the men in their lives, you're hurting us. This book is a work of gratitude to these women and an apology. And I feel like that sets the book up because one it places you just in it like, I feel like you understand where you are in this, this voice as a whole, right? On this topic.
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Could you talk for a minute, like, what, about the importance of us as men taking responsibility for some of the things that we have caused to women in this whole movement as well, and just an awareness of that. Would you be willing to bring that? Yeah, I mean, I'll start, and I'll try to keep it together here. I'll start by saying that, you know, included in that comment about so much of what I've learned
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I've learned from women is certainly all these authors. But it is also my wife, Shelby. And I should say, I didn't say this before when I mentioned that she's a survivor, that she gives her consent for me to share this and is very open about her story. And I'm not kind of like speaking on her behalf but with her blessing. But in my own life, I think,
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Shelby had the courage in a very vulnerable and intimate space in our relationship to tell me that my sense of
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entitlement to this part of our relationship was harming her. And in a world where there's so much pressure for her to kind of just do the dutiful thing and be the good wife and make herself available, all these really dehumanizing modes of thinking that both of us had been subjected to.
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Uh, she advocated for herself and said, I'm not, I like, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm not going to do this. Um, and I'm, I'm, I'm worth more than this. And, uh, even signaled to me in the ways that I wasn't aware of that, uh, I was re-traumatizing her, uh, through my neediness and my, um, you know,
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assumptions that, excuse me, sex was something that I needed even as a man. So that's number one. Number two is, I think so much of what prevails in churches or in books and resources around human
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has a
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dangerously male-centric perspective in its approach to sexual ethics, sex, and marriage. Yeah. Any number of things. And I think as part of this broader cultural movement around me to in church to there has been an important kind of groundswell of women speaking out and adding their voices to
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the conversation and speaking out against some of the dehumanizing patterns and rhetoric that they've seen. And I would be lying if I said that it didn't take women talking about this to get my attention on the topic. And it was not me. So when I write this book, it's not like
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Hey guys, I've been thinking about this. I think we've got it all wrong. It's actually, here's the new way to think about male sexuality. So much of any kind of wisdom and insight or value in critique or revisioning of sexuality that I offer in my book, a massive percentage of it, I'm just indebted to so many women for. Yeah. And that's a humbling place to be when you...
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realize you've been wrong about something and also realize that you have been part of and participated in a problem that has led to great harm for others and also for yourself. So yeah, that's some thoughts in response. No, yeah, I feel like you, even going into a book like this, honestly, even going into a topic about this, about the harm
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that has come to men due to things like the purity culture, the things you're talking about, right? It almost feels, I felt this deeply as I was preparing for this presentation that I was telling you about. This deep like sense of like, oh, like I know, like I've experienced, I know we as men have experienced some harm in this, but it feels like...
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And again, I hate to put any percentage on it, but it feels like a brunt of the harm has come to so many women that I'm connected to. My wife being one, so many other women in my small group. This is something we've talked about and something they brought up, like you said. They started the conversation. And part of me is just frustrated that, why did it take that? Why couldn't us as men humble ourselves and recognize man, aren't this system that we have?
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setup is so toxic. It's so unsafe. I don't know. But do you hear what I'm saying? I wonder if you feel that same tension of just the weight of responsibility of what we as men have poured into. But also, when you talk about a subject like this, the harm that we've experienced as well. Yes. Yeah. I think...
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It makes sense, and I think you're right, that women bear the brunt of the harm associated with purity culture in terms of the responsibility that is placed on their shoulders, not only for their own sexual integrity but the sexual integrity of the men around them and of the entire community. That's a heavyweight that purity culture places on women. And also, purity culture tends to
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hinder to men's immature expressions of their sexuality. It too often doesn't exhort men to grow up out of an immature and hyper-sexualized vision of who they are, but merely creates boundaries and structures around this animalistic understanding of maleness and puts all the pressure on external systems and women.
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to make sure that men are under control, rather than exhorting men to self-control and maturity where they can not just restrain themselves, but live into a beautiful and mature and humanizing expression of who they are as sexual beings. So.
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I think while it's a central thesis of my book that men too are dehumanized by purity culture and are harmed by purity culture, men do get some benefits from the system, it seems to me, including a vision of one, a diminishment of responsibility where they
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sin and when they hurt somebody else, it's like, well, what did you expect? And everything is diminished in terms of male responsibility. And a sense that access to an entitlement to sex within marriage is their birthright as men, as husbands. And this kind of future held out of sexual ecstasy in marriage as...
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God's design and guarantee for them as almost a consolation prize for not indulging in the worldly passions of promiscuity culture or something like that. So there's been a lot of the rhetoric around purity culture will sometimes say that women are harmed and men get all the benefits.
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And in some ways that's true. But when I, early before I thought about writing this book, when I was reading some of these books and things that come out, when I would read that, I would be honest, I was like, ah. I feel like I carry a lot of scars from my experiences with purity culture. Yeah. And it is not just all hunky dory, I get to have sex whenever I want now that I'm married. Right. And.
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I feel like I have been malformed by much of the teaching that I received. Yeah. On this topic. So that got me thinking, what are the ways that this has, because it's different. It's, it's different than the way it harms women, but what are the ways that this system harms and dehumanizes men as well? Yeah. And I'm curious. I mean, that just kind of leads me to kind of where I want to go. I'm curious about some of those, those, those aspects that you talk about in the book, as far as like, you know, everything from.
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the dehumanization, right? That we feel that we, you know, the, the, um, you know, the unhealthy, um, perspective that we gain of our bodies, that our bodies, because our bodies long to have sex and we're not allowed, like, the response from the church is no, don't shut it down. Right. Yeah. Then if we have these desires in our bodies and our bodies are, are wrong, there's something wrong with us. Right.
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until we get married and then there's a magical like switch that's flipped, right? And then everything's okay and the shame is gone. Miraculously. So I'm just curious for you to talk some about a little bit about some of those harmful messages that we received this morning. Well, I mean, we've touched on a few of them already, but I'll...
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I'll list off what you were just talking about, number one, is this kind of ambivalence around human sexuality. Like, is human sexuality good or is it bad? Is my sexual desire good or bad? And there, for all of the, like, sex is a beautiful gift from God rhetoric that often prevails, there's also a deeply ingrained fear of sex and sexual desire, I think, particularly for men.
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So I remember even reading and being exposed to some of this before I hit puberty and thinking about my sexuality as this terrifying thing that was coming over the hill at me. That was a destructive force that would complicate my life and lead to pain and potential harm for me and compromise of my relationship with God or whatever the case may be.
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13 and you think maybe I'll get married in my early 20s or something like that, I have this decade of like terror in front of me associated with my sexuality. So this vision of sexuality as in itself dangerous and something to be feared is contrary to the biblical and Christian traditions
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statement over our bodies as very good, including all the constituent parts of human embodiment. Absolutely. Our sexuality as an abstraction, but also our sexual organs themselves. Right. So in as much as purity culture led men, women and men to despise their sexuality, it led them to live in fear of and despise
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and despise their bodies, which is not a Christian way of thinking about bodies. Our bodies are very good and blessed by God. So let's start there. Another really common harmful message it seems to me is this formula thing that we've already talked about. Insert this amount of self-control
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will be blessed with guaranteed a sexual fulfilling future, a marriage, children, whatever the case may be. And in my personal story, that just did not pan out. It did not. I'll raise my hand to that too. Yes, exactly. I can say, same story. And I think you asked plenty of people, like, is, if you waited, quote-unquote, is sex what your 16-year-old self,
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thought it would be in marriage. And I think, you know, most people are gonna say absolutely not. Right. Did it live up to the hype? So, and then the flip side of that coin is this, the kind of scare and fear tactics and rhetoric around the opposite. If you do this, it will ruin your life, lead to this, you know, the mean girls joke, you'll get chlamydia and you'll die. But it's...
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Like I know plenty of people, Christians and otherwise, that did all sorts of things that I didn't as young people. And as far as I can tell, and in as much as I've had, you know, conversations with good friends about what this experience of their life is like, seem to have like perfectly happy and healthy marriages and functional intimate relationships with their partner. And it's not like if you had sex beforehand, your life and your marriage is ruined. Right. So...
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This kind of formulaic approach to sexual behavior for young people just is not, it's not true. And the world is much more complicated from that. And there's no guaranteed way to avoid sexual suffering on the one hand, nor is there a guaranteed way to attain sexual fulfillment, quote unquote. Yeah, more I could say, but it sounds like you want to jump. No, I mean, in addition to what you said, it's not only that our sexuality was tainted if we fell.
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But in many ways, like you tie this together in the book, which is actually something I haven't really thought much about until I read this, but it was directly connected to our faith, wasn't it, Zach? Absolutely. As far as like, if you fall in this area, holy smokes, you're unpure before the living God, and good luck. Yes, yeah. This is something that Samuel Perry and some others have described as sexual exceptionalism. That's a language I use in the book. I think, well,
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for men and women in different ways, I think. If you're feel like you're measuring up as it relates to your sexuality, I'm not sleeping with my boyfriend or I'm not watching porn or I'm not masturbating or I'm not getting distracted by the billboard, you could list a bunch of things. Then I have attained to...
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Christian maturity and righteousness and I'm doing okay. But if I struggle or fall or compromise in one way, my entire relationship with the Lord is a farce and my entire faith is seen. This is the battlefield on which your life, spiritual life will be lost or won. Even the title, Every Man's Battle, right? 100%. This was like...
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put on that mountaintop that this is it. This is the epic of all battles, right? So yeah, the kind of centering of sexuality in Christian discipleship, it seems to me, was really, really problematic. And it's certainly something that Christians have thought about and that scripture speaks to. But it is not the be-all and end all of what it means to walk.
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with the Lord or live into the kingdom of God. I wanna throw a little bit of a curve ball at you. Okay. I'm trying to prep you for it, but Zachary, as you think about your story as a whole, right, your story with this whole idea of masculinity and your sexuality, and you think about what the messages that you heard and internalized from the church, what do you wish that younger version of yourself would have heard?
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from church leaders.
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A few things. One is that it actually, it genuinely is a wonderful and beautiful thing to be a man. That your body is good. And even when you feel like it's out of control or you're struggling with the way your body is feeling, that does not compromise the goodness of you as a person and the beauty of you as a person, and the delight that God takes in who you are.
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Not in spite of your sexuality, but indeed because of it. It's not like God loves us and our sexual desires are something he tolerates. He loves our sexual selves. He loves our sexual bodies. And then also just like, struggling to figure this part of being human out is part of growing up.
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And of course, you know, when you're given the keys to the car, as your body goes through the process of puberty and all of that, you're going to have some bumps and you're going to have to figure stuff out. And you might have to learn some better habits and you might struggle to shake some unhealthy habits that you don't feel good about or you know are not ways of respecting others or respecting yourself.
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But that is just part of growing up. And this entire paradigm of our purity is something that is intact when we enter the world and then we can compromise it through sinful choices. Right.
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think is really destructive for young people. Whereas a better paradigm, it seems to me, is this idea of growing up into maturity and growing up into Christlikeness and growing in the virtue of chastity, if you wanna use that language. And growing up is a process that doesn't happen overnight. It takes time. So if you're as a young person, figuring it out, that makes sense. You have...
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years to figure this out. And you do need to be careful because there are ways that sexuality can, if wrongly or foolishly kind of lived out, can lead to real harm for you and for other people and can seriously complicate your life. So it's not like these warnings around this part of being human were in vain. Like there's...
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really serious stuff going on here. But I think along with that, we can hold intention, this idea that like, hey, kids are gonna make mistakes. Like there's no kind of future where you arrive at your marriage unscarred by any form of sexual sin or suffering. And I don't think that's what we see commended in scripture when we think about marriage is like.
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just kind of white knuckle it, and then you make it to cross the finish line and then go nuts. That seems to me is actually a pagan way of thinking about human sexuality. So there might've been one other one, but those are some of the messages that I feel like when I have the opportunity to talk to young people about this, or when I think about my own kids in the future, those are some of the things that I hope may prove helpful. So...
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That is not only for our own selves, as you know, but it's also like for the listeners, like it's for you and your teenagers. It's for you and your preteens. And how do we care for them? How do we walk them through? You know, another one that I was just, as I asked that question, I had, you know, some thoughts in my own head. And sure. One of the things for me is like, man, I just wish I knew, I wish I had somebody who like would walk with me, not just tell me what's, what's, what, what to not do and just, and only be there for me when I did do it. Right. That's like.
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with somebody to walk with me and somebody honestly just teach me what it's like, what it looks like to love a woman, right? Like what, like some, some godly training on this is how you care for your wife. This is how you have intimacy, like without sex, right? Like not sex intimacy, just regular relational intimacy with your spouse, right? Like those are things that we don't, we don't really, we didn't really learn. At least I didn't, but would have been super helpful.
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So, I don't know, like, it's we've got a long way to go. But I think I think just what you're sharing and everything is a really good way to approach this, not only for ourselves and man, Zachary showing kindness to ourselves. Yes. Oh, my goodness. And all that as well. Right. Like recognizing that as I talk to my younger self and you talk to yours, that there needs some that those younger versions of us.
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whether you're male or female, need a lot of care and a lot of kindness, a lot of compassion. One of the things we talk about around Restory is that one of the things, one of the main things we believe that disarm shame is kindness, is just the kindness and compassion of Jesus and speaking those things into those younger selves that experience that shame so deeply.
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Join us next week as Lisa interviews Sheila Gregoire, author of She Deserves Better, Great Sex Rescue, and many more. And don't forget to check out ReStory.live/webinars to watch Michael and Lisa's conversation on the impact of purity culture on them personally and those with whom they work. Thanks for listening to the Re Story podcast. I'm Beth Bruno and I'll catch you next time.