Men and the Church - Sundays with John Ball

Look around any church or chapel these days and you will see more women than men.
Why is modern Christianity so feminine?
To many people, Christianity appears to be soft and girly rather than virile and vigorous.
No doubt there are many reasons for this phenomenon, but here are a couple of suggestions.

Christianity is about giving, and the gift economy is fundamental to women’s lives. A woman usually cares for her family, the young and the old, her husband, her home, in her free time and without pay. A large amount of a woman’s self identity comes from this giving and her success in doing so, even in these liberated days of begrudged toil.
On the other hand men do the dirty work, the work of reward and punishment, of buy and sell, of bargaining and expropriated power, of hierarchy, obedience and denial. To give freely in such a competitive environment is seen as weakness, as foolishness.

Secondly, not so long ago a man’s work was valued. These days it is not.
Nowadays when English Christians talk about working for God they usually mean going off to help foreigners or working for the institutional church.
But not so long ago a man who worked hard for his family was regarded as a good man. He didn’t have to cycle round Timbuktu to raise money for some so called charity.
But these days his hard work is often regarded as selfish egotism. It is assumed that he must be working to his own greater glory, that he must be oppressing some poor woman and preventing her from taking her rightful place in the world of regimented drudgery, that he is a bully and a tyrant, treating his wife as no better than a skivvy, some kind of a cheap servant.
For behaving like a good Christian man, he is damned by society, or at least by the state. A good man is a public enemy and his work is counted as nought.
And saddest of all, many churches, because they are dominated by the bureaucratic class, also scorn the work of men.
When a man gives his sweat, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, giving his heart and his love to provide for his family, does he too not live as a Christian, does he too not do work that is pleasing to God?