"By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness..."
The Family: A Proclamation To The World
I want to try and tackle a somewhat controversial subject but perhaps look at it in a new light. Elder Christofferson in the Oct 2012 priesthood session talked about how so many books seem to have been written about the failing of this generation of men. It is an accepted fact that women outperform men in every level of education and are pulling ahead in the professional world as well. It's not necessarily a competition, but if it was it seems that my generation of men has forfeited. Men in today's society shirk responsibility, maximize personal gratification and generally engage in excessive self indulgence. Recently, one of my professors talked about video games in class. He said something to the effect of: the men are just playing video games all day. There were a few chuckles and then he said "women, if you want to marry a man who plays video games all day, raise your hand." Of course, none of the women raised their hands, but I found myself thinking "if you want to get married at all, you had better be willing to raise your hand because you won't find many guys who don't play video games all day." What a sad commentary about where our society is. Now it is not my intention to comment on whether video games are good, bad or in between, but avoiding marriage, kids and responsibility for anything including video games is not ok. I go to BYU. The vast majority of the potential marriage partners for these women were returned missionaries. They should know better and be better. These women should be able to find strong, stalwart, motivated men who have the desire and the drive to match them. In fact, the only thing that makes some of these men even close to worthy of these women is their mission experiences, but given the numbers of female applicants for missions vs the number of male applicants, there will soon be far more returned sister missionaries than elders. What will these poor women do then? Men... what are we doing?
As I have contemplated my own life and observed those around me, I feel that men are suffering from a general loss of direction. Before the rise of women in the latter part of the 20th century, men were traditionally the head of their families and of society in general. Now, I really want to make it perfectly clear that I believe that the feminist movement has done wonderful things for both women and men, but while women have jumped into this new social and political environment, men seem to be a little behind in adapting. It just doesn't seem like most of the men my age know exactly where they fit and are needed in families and society as a whole. And so, without proper motivation, many are simply coasting. I feel, and I think that the proclamation, scriptures and general authorities agree, that the answer to this problem is to reinstate the man as the head or the leader of the family.
Now, I feel that traditionally this idea of "leader" has been more about who gets to tell who what to do than it has been about real leadership. Leadership in my book simply means responsibility. The leader is responsible for everything his/her organization does or fails to do. By saying that the man should be the leader of the home, I am certainly not suggesting that men should be able to dictate to their wives their whims and expect because of their "leadership" that the women will just do what they say. Indeed, a true leader does more and sacrifices more than anyone else in an organization. In Ephesians 5, Paul says "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands... for the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church." He later goes on to command that husbands love their wives even as Christ loved the church and should love their wives as their own bodies because indeed we are supposed to be "one flesh." Now many would suggest that Paul was a chauvinist or that his views are outdated, but I doubt many women would object to the kind of leadership that Paul is actually suggesting here. If I am the head of my wife, the same way that Christ is the head of the church, I will, like Him, give everything including my life if necessary in the service of my family. I would seek to heal and bless and teach and serve. I would be expected to go without so that my family could have. Indeed, if I were a leader like Christ I would be the exact opposite of the chauvinistic male who sits on a couch watching football while yelling for his wife to bring him a sandwich or a beer.
So why is there even a need for a leader? Isn't there equal authority and responsibility between man and wife? The proclamation says that men should preside but then it says that men and women should be equal partners. Where does that leave us? Why must there be a "president" if both are equal partners? C.S. Lewis gave an insightful answer to this question when he presented the following case. What if the husband and wife disagree, and after talking it over and hashing it out they cannot agree and compromise is not possible? He says that they have two options, to separate or to allow one opinion to have a casting vote. He says "if marriage is permanent, one or other party must, in the last resort, have the power of deciding family policy. You cannot have a permanent association without a constitution." So, a man cannot be a dictator and any good marriage will have agreement as the rule with the exceptions being few and far between. But at the same time, when there is a disagreement about "family policy" there has to be a leader to decide a course of action and then take responsibility for that decision. That leader should be the man. Why? C.S. Lewis again asks "is there any very serious wish that it should be the woman?" I don't think that there is. The marriages I see without a head are marriages that don't even attempt the "one flesh" directive and instead the parties live completely independent lives so that the "family policy" problem isn't there. Indeed, in these kind of relationships there is no such thing as family policy as each party has his or her own agenda and policy. Marriage in this sense is a pooling of economic resources of work and money and is more of a business partnership than anything else. The goal is not unity or oneness but selfishness and the maximization of personal utility. We need look no farther than society to see what happens when men fail as leaders in their homes. Study after study has shown that fathers are crucial to their children's well being and development. We need stronger families and in order to have those we need the men to rise up and be the leaders that they are supposed to be.
I can imagine far too many women who would read this and say "I want my husband to be the leader, but he just isn't doing it." I would argue that in most relationships, there is no desire for the woman to be the leader. She becomes the leader by default of her husband's lack of leadership. On the contrary, many women, at least in the church, want their husbands to "step up." What prevents these men from fulfilling their divinely given responsibility? I think that it is a culture of complacency. Not enough men understand the plan of salvation. If one truly contemplates that the end goal for all of us is to be like our Heavenly Father, then we must consider that we will at some point in eternity have to give up all ungodly attributes. In LDS doctrine, salvation is not a piece of candy or a toy that Heavenly Father hands those who have balanced the eternal checkbook, or who have done more good things than they have done wrong. In fact, the Gospel is much more about becoming than it is about doing. I do not believe that God will wave a magic wand and change those who enter Celestial glory into Celestial beings, rather I think that only those who have become Celestial beings will want to enter into Celestial glory. So how do we become Celestial beings? We become Celestial beings by consistently choosing to do what Heavenly Father would do. I have so often heard this statement "Sure I do __, but God won't keep me out of heaven for doing that." It's true. Any action alone probably will not keep us from God's presence, but the attitude that we can pridefully keep faults that we know we could change will. At some point in eternity we will have to give up everything that we do that is not Godlike. We will have to give up that hour of TV, our Facebook or Pinterest addiction, video games and anything else that we could not see God doing. My fear is that we are "procrastinating the day of our repentance until the end," when we think that "one hour of video games a day doesn't hurt" or "it's not that bad of a show" (I use these examples because they are things that I have justified myself). But complacency is not just evident in things we choose to do but also in things we choose not to. For some reason, many in the church look up to the general authorities but do not seek to emulate or listen to them. Why can't we all be as righteous as Peter, Paul, Joseph or Pres. Monson? The answer is that we just don't want to. And unfortunately guys, it's mostly us who are choosing to live beneath our potential. In the words of Lehi, let us "arise from the dust and be men."
http://www.lds.org/general-conference/2012/10/brethren-we-have-work-to-do?lang=eng
http://www.lds.org/general-conference/2006/10/let-us-be-men?lang=eng
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