^{June 20, 2024}

Is Christianity Repressive?

Inside This Episode

In this episode, New York City pastor and bestselling author Jon Tyson reveals the moment he went from what he calls a pagan childhood to a new identity in Christ and how that identity liberated him from the idols that controlled his life. Host Eric Huffman also talks to Jon about his new book on masculinity, Fighting Shadows, co-written by recent Maybe God guest Jefferson Bethke. In their latest work, Jon and Jeff expose the habits causing men to struggle with loneliness, apathy, and lust and offer solutions for how men can reorient their desires in a God-honoring direction.

Order Fighting Shadows: www.amazon.com/Fighting-Shadows-Overcoming-Becoming-Fully/dp/1400243300 

Head to YouTube to watch Maybe God’s full-length interviews!

Support future episodes (now accepting tax-deductible stock and crypto gifts): www.maybegodpod.com/donate 

Transcript

Julie Mirlicourtois: On this episode of Maybe God.

Jon Tyson: I'm really grateful for a radical, supernatural entrance into the Kingdom of God because in many ways it has provided an undeniable foundation for my own life that in my deepest times of doubt I've never been able to shake.

Julie Mirlicourtois: New York City pastor and best-selling author Jon Tyson reveals the moment he went from what he calls a pagan childhood to a new identity in Christ.

Jon Tyson: I think a lot of people think before you become a Christian that you live in freedom and Christianity is repression. But the truth is you live in slavery and Christianity is liberation. And I think you can't understand that until you're on the other side of it — that many of the things you thought you're enjoying, you're actually controlled by.

Julie Mirlicourtois: Jon also digs into his latest book, co-written by recent May Be God guest Jefferson Bethke, called Fighting Shadows. In this new book, they expose the dangerous habits keeping men from realizing God's calling on their lives.

Jon Tyson: The world says, release your desires, do whatever you want. And that has not helped. Religion, shame-based culture, says repress your desires, pretend you're not a sexual being. And the scriptures teach us that we're to form our desires in a God-honoring direction.

Julie Mirlicourtois: Jon offers real solutions for men struggling with lust, apathy, loneliness, and distraction. That's all today on Maybe God.

[00:01:24] <music>

Eric Huffman: You're listening to Maybe God, I'm Eric Huffman.

Jon Tyson, thanks for joining us on Maybe God.

Jon Tyson: Thank you for having me on the show, mate.

Eric Huffman: Of course, man. I've watched and admired your work from afar for years now and love your accent among other things about you. It's really cool to talk to you.

Jon Tyson: Thank you. I appreciate that. I'm glad to still have it.

Eric Huffman: You've been working on it and crafting it all these years, and-

Jon Tyson: That's a blessing.

Eric Huffman: I've got your book here. It's great. I can't wait for the whole world to see it. We'll talk about that more in a second, but first, just like our listeners and viewers to get a sense of who you are and a little bit about your story, so tell us where you're from and maybe how you became a Christian.

Jon Tyson: I grew up in Australia. I'm from a place called Adelaide, where nobody ever goes when they go to Australia to visit. But they're missing out. It's an amazing place. Wine country. Beautiful beaches. I grew up, in all honesty, it's kind of like a happy pagan kid. I was not religious.

I remember going to a youth camp and everybody going forward at the altar call, and this one girl pleading with me, like, you've got to get right with God. And I just remember, I'm probably 11, just going, "I'm just not feeling it. I don't want to do it. It's just not in my heart."

Whenever I read sort of the philosophy of romanticism, I sort of was like, that's what I was like when I was not a Christian. I was a dead poet, suck the marrow out of life sort of a person.

Eric Huffman: Seize the day.

Jon Tyson: Yeah. High levels of wonder, high levels of adventure. Dropped out of high school when I was 16. I started working in a meat factory when I was 14. And I started doing that full-time at 16, which means I had money. I bought a car. I had a VW camper van, would drive down the beach, camp on the beach. It was incredible teenage years.

Halfway through sort of my 16th year, I met a girl and started attending a Pentecostal church, and it really changed my life. I remember going to this church and honestly thinking, "This is a cult. But also, how bad can cults be? I mean, they seem pretty friendly, and she's really attractive. Just a teenager, but I was struck by their passion.

I'd never put together the concept of the fulfillment of longings and passion and desire with Christian faith. I just couldn't believe that these people were more passionate about God than I was about sin. And I was drawn to them. I was intrigued by them.

Over the course of about the next six months, I really had this sense there's something in this for me. And then the weekend I turned 17 at a Pentecostal youth camp through an old school word of knowledge, prophetic word I had a 1 Corinthians 14 experience. The secrets of your heart will be revealed, you'll fall on your face in worship, and you'll say, Surely God is among you.

I remember just thinking, "I've never told anybody these deep cries of my heart. How do you know this? How do you know this?" And then, it was a youth pastor just saying, God revealed these things. God's got a call on your life and a plan for you. And it just shook me.

When I became a Christian, I wanted to be… I didn't know who a Christian... I wanted to be Billy Graham or Smith Wigglesworth, whoever they were talking about. I wanted to serve God. I didn't want to just be a Christian. I was like, whatever this is, I'm all in. And that started me on a long journey of faith that's been over 30 years now.

So I'm really grateful for a radical, supernatural entrance into the kingdom of God, because in many ways, it has provided an undeniable foundation for my own life that in my deepest times of doubt I've never been able to shake.

Eric Huffman: I have maybe not as powerful a story from a supernatural perspective but a similar story and I'm grateful for it all the time. Because I don't think I'm mentally strong enough to withstand the trials and the seasons that come and without looking back on that experience. And not everybody gets that experience and a lot of people are like jealous of people that do. And I feel bad for people that don't. But I think God just-

Jon Tyson: We're in charge of it.

Eric Huffman: Yeah. I think He gives special grace to people. Maybe it's because I wouldn't have come to Him without it or it wouldn't have stuck with it without that. He knew that.

I want to back up a little bit to what you said earlier because it sounds like you had some semblance of Christian form or formation growing up. Like you got some access to what Christianity was.

Jon Tyson: Yeah, yeah. My parents are wonderful, wonderful folks. They were very wise in how they raised me. and this is what it was. They were like, if you don't want to go, you don't have to go. That was the genius of their ability to remove rebellion from me.

So as somewhat of a rebellious kid, I was like, how do we take away his ability to rebel? It's like, hey, you don't have to go if you don't want to go.

Eric Huffman: Fascinating.

Jon Tyson: So I think I stopped attending anything religious at around 13 or so.

Eric Huffman: Because you didn't want to go anymore.

Jon Tyson: Somewhere around 13. Yeah, yeah. And then every now and then I'd pop into a youth thing. You know, there'd be some youth thing. My sister was pretty plugged in with a group of friends who went. I do remember going once to a Baptist event and having a very, very negative experience there. Felt really judged by kids, and that was like a real turn-off to me.

Eric Huffman: Sounds like a Baptist-

Jon Tyson: The truth is I don't think I ever consciously understood what the gospel was. I mean, it was

a form of tepid moralism at best. It was kind of like this beige, try not to sin sort of a thing that I just wasn't interested in. That's why I think these Pentecostal kids sort of shook me, because theirs was all based on hunger, love, passion. They're alive in a way I'd never encountered. And so I was really drawn to that.

Eric Huffman: You just dropped another word earlier when you introduced yourself and your background. You said you were just an everyday pagan or something. What did you mean by that? Just to clarify.

Jon Tyson: My life was defined with no vertical dimension to it. It was all just here, now, fun. You know, I was an existentialist, man. I was like sucking the pleasure out of life if I could get it. I had no... And I think my friends would say in disproportionate ways than a normal teenager.

I mean, I had a sort of sense of longing that marked my life, I just was trying to find the answer to. Never thought that you would route that through any kind of faith or religion or whatever. I mean, I loved my life. So I was quite surprised to realize that, as the Catholics say, the fulfillment of all desire was to be found in Christ. I mean, I didn't have a plausibility structure for that. There's no grid for that being life.

So, I think I shocked a lot of people when I sort of became an Assemblies of God convert. And people were sort of like, what has happened to Jon? People were like, I think he met God. It freaked my friends out.

Eric Huffman: Yeah, I'm sure. It's a radical change.

Jon Tyson: But to tell you what, mate, I love it. Love, love Jesus. Love being a Christian.

Eric Huffman: Well, what I love about it is that He didn't fundamentally change your wiring. He didn't change who you were. He just sort of realigned your priorities and set you loose for His kingdom instead of... you know, for your own desires and lusts and things.

Jon Tyson: Well, I think people don't know that. I think a lot of people think before you become a Christian that you live in freedom and Christianity is repression. But the truth is you live in slavery and Christianity is liberation. And I think you can't understand that until you're on the other side of it. That many of the things you thought you were enjoying you're actually controlled by.

And even that was my story. You know, even at a sort of junior, rather than a sort of full-bloomed hedonism. It was certainly there in experimental and early form. I just remember thinking, I wouldn't want to give this up.

And then after I became a Christian I just remember thinking, "I don't want to do this stuff anymore. This stuff's killing my heart." So yeah, it's an amazing shift

Eric Huffman: Yeah, it really is. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. When you became a Christian, did you also sense a call to being a pastor? Like you mentioned, you weren't going to be an ordinary Christian. You were going to be Billy Graham. Was that a call to ministry?

Jon Tyson: Well, he was my only reference point. It was like, who preaches? Is that like Billy Graham? I think our church had just livestreamed a Billy Graham crusade or something. And I was like, "Is that what it's called? I want to do that."

I just had... I mean, it's really hard to articulate. I just had a compulsion. I was put on this earth to serve God. This is it. This is a destiny. It's a calling. It's Ephesians 2. These are good works God's prepared in advance for me to walk in. I just became a radical Christian, man.

I was getting up at 4 a.m., praying for revival for two hours a day. I just was obsessed with God, and it felt so life-giving. It didn't feel like legalism or striving. It felt like the overflow of a river of joy coming out of the center of my heart. I mean, it really did.

I just wanted people to experience what I was experiencing, and I wanted to train on how to do it, because I felt I wasn't good at that. And so, yeah, I did another three years as a butcher. And when my apprenticeship ran out, I ended up getting a scholarship to come to the U.S. and study theology, and that's where I met my wife and where I've lived the majority of my adult life.

Eric Huffman: Got it. I thought the pretty girl at the camp was your wife, but that was some other girl before.

Jon Tyson: No, but you know what? I haven't talked to her in 30 years, but I'm sure she's a wonderful person. She's a woman somewhere thriving.

Eric Huffman: Yeah, I'm sure. So did you come straight to New York, or did you have another stopping point?

Jon Tyson: No, I've been in New Yorker... next year it'll be 20 years. So I've been there 19 years. If you were to ask me, do you feel American? The answer would be no.

Eric Huffman: Even now?

Jon Tyson: Yeah. And if you were to say, do you feel Australian? I'd say, sort of. But what I really feel like is a New Yorker. New York is not America. It's more European than it is American. It has the best and worst of America in it. I feel like I was built by God to be in New York, mate. I mean, this is my native environment.

Eric Huffman: Really?

Jon Tyson: Yes. I mean, there's many things that drive me crazy about it. COVID was very hard. I was there for the '08 crash. First visited New York in 2001 after 911. And that's where I think my heart really developed for the city.

But it's the people. It's the people of New York. It's New Yorkers that I love. It's not just the art, the culture, the museums, the parks, the restaurants. That stuff's amazing. It's very expensive, but it's amazing. It's the kinds of people in the city.

New Yorkers are the most fascinating people I've ever met. You're just surrounded by visionary people, quirky people, driven people, ambitious people. Nobody's mailing it in because the city chews you up, spits you out, and doesn't care that you came.

So you got a really unique slice of people who show up in the city. And I love these people and I love pastoring these people and helping them find Jesus. So that's the main thing. So the short answer is I did a little tour of the South going to school. I lived in Georgia, Texas, Atlanta, Tennessee.

Eric Huffman: Atlanta's Georgia, by the way.

Jon Tyson: Yeah, yeah. I love Atlanta.

Eric Huffman: You're such a New Yorker. You're like, I lived in Georgia, Texas, Atlanta. If it's not in New York, it doesn't even register.

Jon Tyson: That's so awesome. That's so awesome. I lived in... I was gonna say I lived in Tampa, but that's Florida. So I lived a few places. But really, I mean, New York is... I'll fly in. When you see that skyline, something happens in your heart.

I preached Sunday night, this past Sunday night, we did a Q&A panel on all the hardest questions of faith. Last Sunday, I preached on why does God care what I do with my sexuality. I just feel like I was made to do this. I was made to do this. So I love it.

Eric Huffman: And I think about your context in particular and what challenges come with that. And just not every pastor... most pastors would not be up for that challenge probably. And I think you're right. God has specifically wired you for that. But did you move to New York to start the church?

Jon Tyson: Yeah, I did. I had a pretty good run as a suburban megachurch youth pastor. Full-blown send on programs, skate park, lock-ins, Xbox nights, all the things that come with early 2000s student ministry. And I really loved it, man. I loved these kids. I loved reaching kids far from God and seeing them really experience God's love. I really enjoyed that.

But in my mid-20s, I started to think, what do I do as an adult? I was not one of those guys that wanted to be a youth pastor forever. I heard about church planting at the first-ever Catalyst Conference, I think. And it was Andy Stanley had a throwaway line about "when I planted North Point". And I just remember it was like a bolt of lightning came from his mouth, pierced my spirit. And I was like, "Hang on, you can start a church? Whose permission do you need? Who says you're ready? Who says you get to do this?"

And I was like, "I feel like I'd be good at that. I'm super entrepreneurial, high pain threshold, high-risk taker. Wow, that sounds like a job description I can get into."

So, I moved to Orlando to work at a church where the pastor had planted a church. He was a remarkably gifted leader. I served there for a few years, and then I did a 20-something ministry that really exploded, grew very, very quickly. And I took that team to New York to start that church. So there's about 10 of us who moved up. It grew very, very quickly.

Eric Huffman: What do you attribute that to because it's such a secular culture? How do you grow a church in a place where no one wants to go to church?

Jon Tyson: Well, it's very interesting. New York is very secular at a high level, and people in groups are very secular at a conversational level, but most people are open spiritually on a personal level, man. You know, it turns out life is hard not just for Christians.

Christians are always talking about how hard secularism is and how hard New York must be. Try doing it without a transcendent sense of divine purpose and the comfort of the Holy Spirit. I mean, it's a lot harder for a non-Christian, I think.

So, we just found that people are disproportionately open. I think the secular narratives failed us. There's been a great flattening, and people are just kind of like, there's got to be more to life than this. And when you can present it in a way that is honest, with a community of people that take it seriously, I think people are surprisingly open.

Eric Huffman: You've made a habit of talking about, honestly, just some very controversial topics. I don't think you do it to be controversial. I think you just do it to be truthful.

Jon Tyson: I actually do it to be helpful. I do it to be helpful.

Eric Huffman: Sure. Like you mentioned, your sermon on Sunday about sexuality is so powerful and maybe I'll ask the team to link it in the show notes or whatever because it's just really worth the time. Why do you think it's so important for the church to have conversations about the things people are thinking and talking about on a daily basis on the streets of New York?

Jon Tyson: If you love people, and people are wrestling with questions, and you don't answer their questions, you're not loving them well. If you only preach what you're comfortable at preaching, or what you're good at preaching, you're serving yourself through the pulpit, not the people you're called to lead. And if I don't give my people sort of a biblical framework on this, they're just going to get a default one from whatever they Google or whoever they listen to.

So, I feel like it's a form of pastoral love to address the topics that people want sound biblical counsel on. And this may sound crazy, but I do believe what the Bible teaches is good news. And so, it's a joy to… People are so riddled with lies, and lies oppress people, and it distorts them, and it holds them back.

Jesus says, you know the truth? The truth will set you free. And seeing people be set free from lies and discover the joy and freedom of walking in the truth, there's nothing like it. So I want to tackle the stuff that's holding people back.

Eric Huffman: Amen.

Jon Tyson: I do feel fear and trepidation sometimes.

Eric Huffman: I bet.

Jon Tyson: It takes courage to do it. It's not just like, Oh yeah, this will be easy, let me just trot out that sermon on whatever. It takes a lot of courage and help from the Holy Spirit. But love overrides the fear of self-preservation.

[clip of Jon preaching starts]

What's more confusing is that the church in a lot of ways is, some of them are, changing their position on sexuality. One denomination, just for example, the United Methodist Church, this is a Wesleyan church and they've historically held to what was called the Wesleyan quadrilateral interpretation principle. Let's pull that up. So here's what they said. "The most important thing is what the scriptures teach.

Then we look to church tradition, how this has been lived out by saints and sages over the course of time in multiple contexts, then we apply human reason and then we analyze our experience. But here's what's happened. Next slide here. This has been reversed to a subjective reversal where now the church is saying the most important thing is my experience. And then it's reason, and then it's church tradition, and then it is the scriptures. These are a reversal of the order.

Paul, I think actually... so I'll say this. Some people are sincerely trying to figure out how Jesus loves sexual minorities. I'm not talking about those folks. But there's other people who are just like, I just want to do what I want with my sex and God to bless it.

Paul says to Timothy that in the last days people will change their doctrine to suit their own desires. There will be desire-driven doctrine. And he said that they're gonna heap up a multitude of teachers to tell them what the itchy ears want to hear. Please tell me I could do whatever I want with my sex and God doesn't care. Please tell me. Please revise the Bible. Please revive church history. Please let me just do whatever I want. Let God bless it.

[clip of Jon preaching ends]

Eric Huffman: I just am so encouraged by it because it breaks my heart to see churches and preachers sort of, at best, just sidestep issues, and at worst, succumb to the cultural narratives and lies. You rightly say it's lies. Like we were talking off, before we started off camera about the United Methodist stuff, my denomination, my home denomination that I'm no longer part of, taking these steps to just accommodate people without being truthful and loving in the ways that you are, it's just so heartbreaking and harmful, in my opinion, to watch that happen.

So to me, that's the wide road Jesus warned us about. And you're taking the narrow path. And it's not easy, but man, I just want to encourage you to keep going because we're all blessed by it.

Jon Tyson: Well, I appreciate that. I think I actually mentioned the United Methodist Church in my sermon on sexuality as an example of compromising.

Eric Huffman: You did. And the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.

Jon Tyson: Well, I feel that was important. You know, there's some people in the sort of progressive conversation who are genuinely driven by love and friendships with people in particular communities who desire to help them have access to the gospel and their sincerity. And they would view it more like a 1 Corinthians 15 thing, you know, which... sorry, Acts 15, which was like, how much of the Jewish law do you have to practice in order to be a Christian? Because these are people who want to be Christians, and there's a yoke imposed on them. And there would be other people who would be saying, how much of traditional sexual orthodoxy do you have to hold to in order to still be considered a Christian?

So I think there's some sincere people deeply wrestling. I hold those people, even though I fundamentally disagree with them, and I honestly believe they're wrong, I really appreciate the love-based, thoughtful approach.

That's not the majority of people in that conversation. A lot of it is just like, you know, it's the sovereignty of self. I want to be able to just do what I want with my own sexuality, and I think the Bible's outdated, and I want to stand over the Scriptures and reinterpret it. And you know, the thing that's almost embarrassing that I think is hard to see is that truth offends in every age. It doesn't fit perfectly anywhere and at any time.

But these people just end up changing doctrine to match the needs of the moment. I can't understand why that's not so clear. Hey, in a hundred years, you may be completely embarrassed of your accommodation to this issue. Accommodations that fit the spirit of the age always, I think, later on, do tremendous damage. And they end up hurting people who we think we're going to harm them. Again, that's different than the category of people who I think are genuinely wrestling with it.

Eric Huffman:

I appreciate that. You're right. I need to hear that. And I think we all should be gracious with each other and assume the best about each other. It's just so heartbreaking. When I contrast that with your approach to

just fearlessly speaking the truth in love in a place like New York City, there's a vast difference.

Jon Tyson: Well, it's easy to say as a non-Methodist, isn't it? I'm not in the room getting worn out through the debates. So the distance probably produces, you know, like a fresh energy and you may just be worn out from getting after it.

Eric Huffman: I got out too, so it's all good. So at what point did you realize among this sort of myriad of issues that we have to tackle as Christians in modern culture, masculinity is a piece of that puzzle that we have to help people figure out? When did masculinity sort of rise to the surface?

Jon Tyson: Well, to state the obvious problem, I think there's a ton of social science research that basically tells us that men are not doing well. The majority of suicides in America are committed by men. Rates of mental health amongst grown men, particularly young men, are very, very unhealthy.

The job market is changing in such a way that men feel like they don't have a place. There's conflicting messages about what men should do with the core attributes of historic masculinity, where they feel just like shut down, do not know how to bring who they are into the world.

So, I think I've always had a sort of awareness, probably the last 10 years, just pastoring that men didn't seem to be doing as well as women in general in the church. But really, I'd written a book called The Intentional Father. It was about a discipleship journey I took my son on, sort of retaining a vision of rites of passage, and so from 13 to 18 I walked him through this sort of pathway to really become a godly, responsible young man that would be good for the world.

So when that came out, I had a ton of dads reach out to me and just say, I'm trying to take my kid through this and no one took me through this. Do you have anything to form men? The answer was no, nothing specific.

And so I was working on some of this stuff with Jefferson. We were working on a thing called the Art of Teaching that was for preachers and communicators. And he said, Hey man, we've got a skill set for sort of training and equipping. You've got all this, I've done all this research on rites of passage and forming men." And it was sort of like, "Hey, man, why don't we do something about how to help men be formed? Is there something we can do to help men become like Jesus?"

So, we launched it, and to be honest with you, it's a total surprise to me. It's had more traction than anything I've ever touched in my life. You know, I don't know if there's like a gap in our consciousness. You know, there was the men's movement. Robert Blythe was a big driver of the men's movement. Then there was Wild at Heart, which sort of came out, sold 4 million copies. I think, more than that. A total phenomenon.

Eric Huffman: People still talk about it like it's brand new.

Jon Tyson: There's obviously been other books written for men, but there hasn't sort of been something that's come out that I think has addressed, really from a Christian perspective, and... I don't want to be controversial, but from a non-complementarian perspective, a vision of men being men, and that addresses all of the complexity of these social issues.

We're talking about despair. I don't think a lot of men's stuff talked about despair. We talk about loneliness, shame, lust, ambition, futility, apathy. These are the drivers we keep bumping up against, and it felt like people just weren't touching on it.

Maybe in the 2013, 2014, there was a bunch of books around the crisis of pornography. But that sort of drifted off. Maybe it was a generational change. Gen Y sort of skipped what millennials were wrestling with, and this wasn't incorporated as a core theme for younger folks. I don't know. But there was just a resurgence of interest in this.

And we felt like after working with thousands of men and hosting retreats and talking and thinking, we were like, man, we feel called to it. So we started it and it got immediate traction and then we wrote a book out of the stuff we've sort of read and studied on it.

Eric Huffman: I understand why you probably felt surprised by the initial feedback. I am not surprised at all because I mean, I'm a father of a, now he's 14. I still think of him as four, but he's 14.

Jon Tyson: It goes quick, doesn't it?

Eric Huffman: It does. And I know a lot of other dads of boys. I think that's where what y'all have been working on, it really sort of crosses into a territory that's uncharted for a lot of people, which is not just how men should be men, but how boys can be men or become men. And it's the initiation that you introduced, the rite of passage idea that is ancient and just, it goes deep into our past as human beings.

It's so obvious to us we should be initiating our boys and everything the world says about boys is wrong. Like they say boys are too much this, too aggressive, hyperactive or hypersexual or whatever. And really boys are just uninitiated.

When you see it up close, when it's your boy, it obviously hits very close to home. And you start to see things like your boy either becoming hyper-aggressive, I guess, in the ways that he relates to others or withdrawn. And that's, I think, where personally for me, I've seen my boy just withdraw in COVID, especially in the aftermath of COVID. Like finding him sort of crying alone, you know, with no real like thing going on to, you know, precipitate that. It's not like he's in trouble or anything. And yet there's something going on beneath the surface that we haven't intentionally brought out in him and haven't given him the opportunity to work through some of that in a way that's healthy and graduates him from who he is to the man he's becoming.

What I'm also interested in is the connections you draw in your chapters in the book, particularly about lust and porn. You mentioned porn earlier. But why do you think that is something that has sort of fallen off the table? You mentioned we were talking about it for a while. We're not talking about that much anymore. Why is it so important to bring it back up?

Jon Tyson: Well, I mean, I think it's several reasons. Number one, I think it's damaging men and it's commodifying women. And we're all smiling and normalizing like it's not doing those things and it's just fun and fine. I think the research is out that that's just not true. It's not true.

God did not design women so that their bodies would be isolated and commodified by men as units of sexual pleasure. That's not what sex is designed for. It actually cultivates the worst aspects of masculinity. I think God gives men some measure of strength to use what they have to care for others, to use their strength well.

And when a man in a sort of predatory way isolates one component of a woman, doesn't care about her personality, her emotional needs, her career, her vision for her life, and says, I don't want to bother with any of that stuff, you're not worth it, let me just extract the sexual component from you.

And then obviously when masturbation gets connected to it, your brain and your body are wiring around sort of violent, misogynistic porn, and particularly for Christian men. Jesus was a man that women could trust, women felt safe around Jesus. And we're being formed into men who are predators when we're alone with women because of violent pornography.

I think there's so much damage, there's so much heartache, there's so much pain connected to it, and for men in particular, there's so much shame. I think we stopped talking about it because we didn't feel like we had a way to overcome it, and that we were destined to wrestle with it quietly, and so many people just gave up and shut up, and now it's a perpetual feature of their life. And it's doing a lot of damage.

And so you don't talk to a man who is happy about his porn addiction, who's a Christian. There is always shame and deformation associated with it. And ultimately, if you love someone, you want to help him recover a sense of agency, nobility, dignity, and then get out of a fantasy world where women make no demands on him, where he actually has to become a man who has something to contribute and win the love of a woman.

I mean, it's a combination of personal spiritual development, a theology, becoming like Jesus, functioning well in the real world, but it's an epidemic. I mean, it's really heartbreaking.

Eric Huffman: Oh, it's obviously an epidemic. And I like some of what's happening in the culture now about people going after... at least in Texas, I know legislators are starting to go after certain porn distributors, and at least the conversation's happening on that level.

But I do agree that in Christian circles, it's only ever talked about like it was something we struggled with before we became Christians. It was obviously before I was a Christian, I struggled with it. No one who's a Christian still struggles with this particular sin of porn and lust.

Jon Tyson: I think the research is about 70% of a typical Christian man is looking at pornography every month. That was the latest research I heard. I mean, that is staggeringly high rates. It's the technology as well. I mean, I didn't grow up in a world where I had access to any of that. But I imagine if I was like a typical kid in America these days, your parent hands you an iPad with no filters on it, bang, that's the first thing you're going to search.

Eric Huffman: Totally cooked. If I was a kid in this world, totally.

Jon Tyson: So I'm not here in a kind of moralizing, condescending judgment.

Eric Huffman: Sure.

Jon Tyson: Oh, I get it's hard. I mean, but I just want to help men sort of recover a vision of who they can be, what it means to be like Jesus, what it means to respect women and treat them as holistic beings.

Eric Huffman: Yeah, getting free from that particular sin, sexual sin, and lust and porn in particular, and masturbation, those sorts of compulsions, getting free from that makes us stronger. It makes us more confident. It just makes us clearer headed. It sets us on a better path.

But what I love about your book and how you tackle these different things, and lust is one of the shadows that we're fighting, is that before you tell the truth about it, you sort of expound upon the lie and you expose the lie. And the lie about lust is that I'm a slave to it. It's like, I'm hungry, so I've got to eat. You know, I'm thirsty. I got to drink water. Like, I'm whatever and so I've got to do that too. And that's the lie. And we have to break through that. But talk a little bit about why you settled on exposing that lie.

Jon Tyson: Well, it's fascinating. That passage you're referring to, 1 Corinthians 6, that's the one I just preached on. Paul says in that section, seven times, do you not know? He's like, literally, do you guys not know? Jesus says the same thing in Matthew 19, when he's talking to the Pharisees about divorce: have you not read?

And so there's an assumption of a forgotten theological understanding of the world, like they're smuggling in cultural slogans that are shaping their view of sexuality. That's how the lies get in. So, you know, when the Corinthians say, "I have the right to do anything. Then Paul's like, yeah, but not everything's beneficial. You know?

So he's basically trying to fight these cultural lies that are damaging their practice. We see this in the church. Again, now, by the way, I'm not here to tell the world how to live its sexuality. Like, I believe the way of Jesus is the way of life. I believe that reduced promiscuity is better in every aspect.

However, I'm really concerned about forming Christians into the image of Jesus and their sexuality. I think Paul was too, according to 1 Corinthians 5, but he doesn't want these lies to get in the church because it distorts the church. So he's going to go on saying to them, your gatherings do more harm than good. Like, the fact that you get together and practice faith the way that you've let worldliness come in, it's actually more... I wish you didn't meet because when you get together, it's worse than if you never did church.

He actually says there's a sexual immorality reported amongst you that even the pagans don't practice. I mean, how bad is this when the church gets corrupted? So what he wants them to know is that the purpose of your body is a mechanism of love designed to express love and commitment that mirrors and images God. And so you've got to have a theological vision of sex, not just a war of desire alone.

It's got to have a telos for your sexuality, a vision about what's the point of this? Where's this headed? How do I use it properly? And so our central idea is on sexual formation. The world says, release your desires, do whatever you want. And that has not helped. Religion, shame-based culture says, repress your desires, pretend you're not a sexual being. The scriptures teach us that we're to form our desires in a God-honoring direction.

Paul says to the Thessalonians that each of you should learn to control your body in a holiness and nobility, not in passionate lust like the pagans who don't know God. So there's that process of learning how to redirect your desires out of the flesh and align them with God's heart for His desire for sexuality. That's a process. It's about formation. It's holistic, it's theological, it's communal, it's practical, it's emotional. But the goal then is to make our sexuality a life-giving gift for others rather than a commodity or a distorted mechanism.

One of the ideas we talk about, I think this is particularly true for men, Paul says that none of you should defraud each other on this. And I call sexual fraud to promise with your body that which you will not pay with your life. So you're making a physical commitment, but you're not making a whole life commitment. And Paul calls that a kind of sexual fraud. You're defrauding a woman of a full commitment. You extract the sexual part of her without a commitment to all the other parts of her life.

So yeah, we try to give people a vision of how to be formed in the way of Jesus with sexuality and not repress it or just give into it.

Eric Huffman: Right. And I think it starts with fathers and sons. If fathers can get ahead of this, they can save their sons so much heartache and tough lessons later. I know you mentioned in the book that your first exposure to pornographic material was pretty young. Mine was too, and it became part of my story very young. And before I was even aware of what I was looking at or ready to deal with it, not that you ever really are, but I was exposed to that stuff pretty early on, as were you.

And how important do you think it is for parents now to be vigilant in monitoring sort of what their kids are up to, but more importantly, having conversations in particular with boys about pornography and integrating their desires?

Jon Tyson: Well, I can say this. I mean, if you haven't talked to them already, it's probably too late. I mean, this stuff is happening younger and younger. Yeah, it's really tragic. Jonathan Haidt in his book, talking about the anxious generation, says that we tend to overprotect our kids in real life and then underprotect them online. And we've got to reverse that dynamic.

I mean, look, the odds of your kid being abducted are statistically zero, and the odds of your kid being exposed to pornography online are about 99.9%. So we're just misallocating our anxiety, which a parent has a job to care and protect, it's just being misallocated and misunderstood. So I think you've got to be super vigilant.

I mean, is it a form of abuse to give a kid a device without a filter on it? It could be. It's going to absolutely destroy their life. I did this journey with my son and I was as vigilant as I could be, man. I had every kind of filter you can... I had filters on filters. And I asked him last month, he's just about to get married, I asked him, Just give me like a recap of like... you know, you've got a strong awareness of who I am as a man and what I try to do for you as your dad. What could I have done better?

I was like getting the feedback for a bunch of dads I was mentoring on how to disciple their sons. And he said, I wish you'd given me video games less and screens later. He said, I think you did it as well as any dad I know. And it was still wasn't strong enough.

Eric Huffman: Wow.

Jon Tyson: That's a very small sample size, but I think there's probably some truth to it.

Eric Huffman: Oh, it is. For most of us as parents, that's a struggle, something we need to be more vigilant about... We talked a lot about lust and it's easy to sort of hyper-focus on lust as the, you know, every man's battle as they call it, but that's not the only battle that men face.

For some of us, it's not even maybe the primary battlefront in our spiritual war. A lot of men face other things like ambition is one that you lift up in the book, Fighting Shadows. Why did you decide to talk about ambition as part of the book?

Jon Tyson: Well, I believe ambition is a gift from God and a man without ambition is a sad man. But ungodly ambition terrorizes our lives. I think a Christian with ungodly ambition is at an incredible disadvantage to a worldly man with worldly ambition. But a Christian with holy ambition has a total advantage over a worldly man with worldly ambition.

So the goal is really to really figure out how to transform worldly ambition into godly ambition. So I do that because I think, you know, you're working with a wide range of men and some men struggle with apathy. They have no vision for their life. And some people have so much vision, but it's often just the same vision as the pagans.

It's like, hey, tell me about what you want with your life. And it's going to be something like financial success, emotionally healthy kids, pretty happy marriage, second house, some killer vacations every year, retirement security. And it's not even that those things are wrong. It's just that those things are what every pagan thinks about just about every day. It's not enough vision for a person who was put on earth to seek first the kingdom of heaven.

So the book is about how to elevate men's visions away from that small vision of the kingdom to a larger vision. It's going through the story of Nehemiah, who I love, who wasn't a priest. And it's really just a parable about what happens when God gives a man holy ambition. How much is possible when your heart is freed up and aligned?

God's looking for men with holy ambition. He doesn't want to elevate idolaters who are going to screw up in public and dishonor His name and blow their world up. We've seen enough of that. He wants to elevate men He can trust so they use the influence they have for the good of others. So yeah, it's like that chapter is my favorite chapter in the book to be honest with you.

Eric Huffman: Really?

Jon Tyson: Yeah. Because I pastor so many New Yorkers where I see what worldly ambition does and then I see what holy ambition can do. And watching a man get a vision for the kingdom when he's only had a vision for himself, it's like being born again and again. It's a remarkable pivotal point in his life. So yeah, I'm trying to help men. If they have apathy, that's another issue. But if you've got ambition, you've got to redeem that ambition so that it becomes something God can use for His glory.

Eric Huffman: What do you think would be some of the key markers or differences between a man who has kingdom of God ambitions and achieves a certain amount of success and a man who has just pagan worldly ambitions and maybe achieves the same amount of success? What would be the differences you'd see in those two men in their lives?

Jon Tyson: James K. Smith wrote a wonderful book called On the Road with Augustine. St. Augustine is a weeper. I love that book. And in it, he's got a chapter on what do we want when we want ambition. He says ambition is marked by two distinctives: domination and attention or domination and recognition.

That's the essence of worldly ambition, which means I got to win. I got to kill it. I got to crush it. I got to beat you. It's a winner-take-all mentality. And I have to have recognition that I've done this. And that's a key trait, which is do people recognize me as someone who has beaten other people.

So winning without attention is not enough. And that's a pretty toxic combination for our world today. If your whole goal is to beat everybody, humiliate them, and look good while winning, you are not going to build a society that's good for others and your heart is not going to be in a healthy place in the way that you interact with others.

Again, the goal of our faith is to be formed in a people who love well. And if you're looking everybody as a competitor that you triumph over, that you shame through your success, you're just going to have the wrong approach to people.

But the opposite of that is not, well, we should never aspire to anything. Now, that's called cowardice. What we should aspire to is what God wants. It was William Carey who talked, you know, attempt great things for God, expect great things from God. But if you look at how he lived, he was a very humble plotter. Just, you know, day at a time, translate a few verses, deal with his wife struggling with mental health issues, serve the poor, try and help change the rates of finance that were crippling people, and deal with widows being burned alive. I mean, this is just like day-by-day, slow grind.

And I think that's sort of the keys when your vision gets lifted beyond "I have to beat you and I have to look good doing it." You're just going to start and move towards what God wants.

Eric Huffman: It's idolatrous in a way.

Jon Tyson: Yeah.

Eric Huffman: Okay. The last one I want to talk about from the book, the last shadow, so to speak, is futility. I think you referred to it earlier briefly, but the idea that my work doesn't matter. And this is sort of being the other side of the coin, right, from ambition, somebody who just doesn't think anything he does matters at all. And, you know, life is just fleeting, so eat, drink, be merry, whatever. And you're the truth that counters that is you have a calling to serve and heal the world.

What is the specific calling for Christian men that you're talking about here, especially in terms of the role of men to rule in this order?

Jon Tyson: Well, we've got to be honest. I mean, a lot of our work just feels like it's completely meaningless. You know, a lot of our jobs are being outsourced. AI is terrifying. If you're not terrified, you haven't used it properly. I mean, it is terrifying.

Eric Huffman: It's already writing better sermons than me.

Jon Tyson: Yeah. It's got a clearer definition of the gospel than 90% of sermons I've heard preached lately. I mean, it's wild. So a lot of men, you know, because there's been such a change since the Industrial Revolution and other periods of history where men's strength was seen as an asset for the good of society. Men on average are about 70% stronger in their upper body. Most men are larger. They're more competitive by nature. They're task-oriented, less collaborative, less relational. That was all seen as a gift, not a threat.

But now we live in a world where your strength is irrelevant. Functionally, I mean, unless you're on an intramural team or your wife needs you to lift stuff, it's just not seen as an advantage. And so we don't know what to do with these instincts of strength and protection and building and all that, that in many ways have been utilized throughout the whole human history.

So a lot of guys who are showing up working jobs that don't pay as much as they need to cover their bills, and they're looking around and, you know, they just feel lost. I have tremendous empathy for, you know, working a job that you hate is a form of hell on earth, you know?

So you got to recover a kind of inbuilt dignity. I talk about a five-stage scale of understanding work. It's not in the book, but it's called this little bonus nugget. If a man is unemployed, he experiences shame. There's no nobility. It's an embarrassed man who can't get a job because he knows he wants to and he knows he should.

If someone is underemployed, they experience a futility. That's where it really kicks in, which is like, I'm better than this, but I just can't get anything other than this.

If you get a man who's employed and he's making a livable salary, he's going to have a sense of dignity, which is like I'm providing it for my people here. So it's not going to be about the meaning, the interior meaning of the job as much as it is the ability to provide for his world.

Then people always say, you don't just want a job, you want a career. And career is where you get a vision of success. First generation of kids to go to college, I'm now successful. I've got lifestyle dynamics that match my success.

But there's a level above that the church has always taught, which is a level... it's called vocation. And it is our sense of calling before God in the task that we do. And what that brings is meaning. And it's not about success. It's about an inward sense that this has a divine reference point for what we do.

Paul mentions this. I think it's in Colossians, where he says, do this unto the Lord. Your reward will come from Him. It is Christ that you serve. So you've got to help men get a vertical component of their vision of work again. We were put in a garden, and it says that we were given two jobs, to work and keep. These are two Hebrew words. One of them has the idea of domination and cultivation, which is that creative component. And the other one means to guard or to defend.

And so a man's got to find a way to build and a man's got to find a way to protect. Whatever you build for God will be attacked by the enemy, doesn't matter what it is. So there's something in us by divine design that says men are meant to build and men are meant to protect. So getting into your life, where you start taking responsibility... and all the research... Viktor Frankl's done so much research on the link between... he calls it logotherapy. But the combination of meaning and responsibility.

The typical person is asking, what do I want out of life? That's about happiness. Viktor Frankl says, you have to respond to what life throws at you. That's where meaning comes from. And I think a lot of men, when we're having reduced options in our careers, can't rely on that happiness with my job. There's got to be that sense that like, there's meaning in this.

There's a Jewish concept you've probably heard of, it's called kavanah. It tells a story about a rabbi who... the rabbi, sorry, tell a story about a cobbler. And they believe that the Shekinah glory of God was shattered because of sin, and is potentially present in every molecule of the universe. And that when we do a job with holy intent, the attitude of our heart is to do a worshipful job for the glory of God and the good of others. We reunite that glory... And glory means weight, heaviness. We bring significance, weightiness, heaviness to even the most menial task with holy intent.

And they tell the story about a cobbler who was stitching the sole of a shoe to the top of a shoe. And as he's stitching, he's rethreading the glory of God into the universe itself.

Eric Huffman: Oh, wow.

Jon Tyson: Listen, you get a vision like that, and you really believe it. I used to do this as a butcher. When I became a Christian, I would go into my workplace, get on my knees, offer my knives to God after I sharpen them. And I'd say, "Lord, nobody else is here yet. Nobody else is going to really notice how excellent this is. But every cut of me, I do for your glory as a witness to heaven that this is for you." And, mate, that got me through futility in the workplace like you would not believe.

So, yeah, we want to bring dignity back to work, help men get a sense of vocation and calling in it, and then get some courage and confidence from being able to contribute in a meaningful way for those who are around them.

Eric Huffman: Yeah, man. I just had a conversation with my kids last night at the dinner table, and I'm... like I'm some kind of super dad or something. This wasn't typical. We don't do this every night. But we had a pretty deep conversation last night, and we were talking about this very thing.

And my kids who are 16 and 14, both of them kind of asked in their own way, how do you know what God wants you to do? And when you come to a crossroads, you're like, I can go there and do that. I can go there and do that. This college, that college, this school, whatever, this, whatever.

And there are some things where God's clear about which direction to take, but a lot of times He's not. And it comes down sometimes to like not what you do, but who you are as you do what you do. God's gonna meet you on either path you choose in some instances. I think as Christians especially, we just get locked into waiting for some kind of clear sign where there's no risk, there's no faith necessary because it's crystal clear what God wants from us. And we think that's what being a Christian is.

Sometimes it's really breaking free from that sort of apathetic way of looking at life and say, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna trust God no matter what. And everything I do, I'm gonna do it for His glory, whether it's cutting meat or preaching the gospel or whatever.

Jon Tyson: Yeah, totally. I mean, listen, if you're a Calvinist, it doesn't matter because God's decree whatever happens. And if you're an Arminian, your choices have significance. So choose wisely for the glory of God. We gotta get the pressure off. You know what I mean?

I understand that crippling pressure. But I'm a little bit with Augustine, which is love God and do what you want. Make sure you're loving Him, you're loving Him, and you're oriented towards His glory. And you just step out and say, Lord, you know? It's so good being a Christian, mate. He's got good works prepared in advance. He gives us the Holy Spirit to lead and guide us. If we screw up, He can work all things together for our good. And then it's based on grace and on our works in the first place, mate.

Eric Huffman: Man, I wish I had the presence of mind to pull up that Augustine quote last night with my kids. That would've been really good. Should've called Jon Tyson.

Jon Tyson: Dinner tonight, mate.

Eric Huffman: That's right. That's right. Man, we're almost out of time. Just sort of writ large, let's look at masculinity one more time and just say, this is how the world looks at masculinity, this is how some in the church look at masculinity, and this is how Jesus, you know, frames masculinity for us. This is our model.

Because what I love about you is you don't just talk about the bad things the world has done to masculinity. You always hear about that. Like the world just effeminizes men or says men are bad. And then on the other side, we've got this problem with like what I call the Theo bros or the macho dudes that are like, we need to revive 1950s, you know, stoic masculinity where dad's in the shed with a six-pack of soda and not beer, but still alone and sort of rough and tumble. But you've been quick to criticize that as well.

Jon Tyson: What we're not talking about there is those are men who came home from World War II who had no space to talk about their PTSD, whose hearts were shut down so they could function. That in no way... we need to apologize to the society. Those men inherited not model it as some norm. Those men weren't allowed to weep. They had no places to deal with this.

I mean that they took off their uniforms after going through the most hellacious stuff as young men and were never allowed to talk about it again, really in public. To me, that is no model of masculinity. I mean, we're always reacting and overreacting. Our basic vision... It's called forming men because we want people to be formed into the image of Jesus.

We talk about a five-step process. You've got to have an understanding of who you're formed to be. An end goal. Then you have to understand your deformation — what has messed you up, family of origin, lies from the world, sinful choices, painful events. You've got to be aware of those things. They're shaping you in some way.

Then we talk about counter formation, understanding your heart, and who God's made you to be. Then transformation, which is being made like Jesus. That's the end goal. Predestined to be conformed to the image of a Son. 2 Corinthians 3, we behold him, we become like him.

And then confirmation, which is choosing the way of the cross, which is what you do with your healthy restoration, which very few people get to.

Our definition of masculinity is the joyful pursuit of sacrificial responsibility. A man is at his best when he is joyfully pursuing, not waiting for, sacrificial responsibility. And to me, that's Jesus. For the joy set before him, he is enduring the cross. Jesus is a wholehearted man. He knows when to weep and He knows when to get angry. He knows how to be tender with a leper and He knows how to scream at a Pharisee. He's living from both sides of His head and His heart.

Our goal is not to put a cultural stereotype over you. You know, I pastor in New York City. I've got a lot of men from the gay community. And these men often present with very effeminate traits, I guess you'd say. But these are some of the strongest men I've ever met in my life.

So to me, it's not just about getting stereotypical traits in place. It's about the forging of character within to help the person of Jesus be expressed through the personality of that particular man. So we put our emphasis on character formation more than cultural formation.

Eric Huffman: I love it. I love it. And it's what more of us need to hear. And I confess that sometimes as a reaction against the world, I've probably erred too far on the other side, and like, men need meat, let's build fire.

Jon Tyson: The truth is men do need meat. I mean, I love it. As a former butcher, I mean, that kept that sort of fed my people.

Eric Huffman: For sure. But it's so much more than that. I mean, so many layers.

Jon Tyson: 100%. If we keep Jesus, not just parts of Jesus... this is why I tell people the healthiest thing you can do is just read the gospels. You know what I mean? Again, if you're destined to become like Jesus, the spirit is trying to make you like Jesus, the disciplines are meant to help form you like Jesus, and you never read the gospels, that's going to become religion real quick. You gotta get the model of Jesus back in your mind. That's who God wants you to be like. That's your eternal destiny.

So reading the gospels, how did Jesus respond? What did he think about? What did He care about? How did He react there? Where did He show compassion? Where did He show courage? How did He treat women? Why was that a scandal? Like, you just got to get that in you all the time.

To me, if there was a keystone habit for masculine formation, it would be reading the word of God, so you get that standard in your heart, not just cultural ones.

Eric Huffman: Right. I would add, maybe with respect, just a little caveat, which is for men reading the gospel out loud with other men. Like that's where I've seen the biggest transformation happen in men is when we're reading it together with other dudes that are trying to figure it out. And some dudes that have maybe more figured it out than the rest of us. And then taking that home and establishing disciplines with our families and friend groups to read out loud together the word of God, particularly.

Jon Tyson: Yeah. We're working on what you would... I think you'd appreciate this. I'm not sure a lot of other people would. We're working on a thing called Man Year, which is like... it sounds like a Theo bro thing, but it's a year of spiritual formation, physical, spiritual, mental, emotional. It's all based off Wesley's band system.

Eric Huffman: Come on.

Jon Tyson: The whole thing is about small cohorts of men covenantally meeting weekly to like get into it, get below the surface, and get into the stuff.

Eric Huffman: That's right.

Jon Tyson: So yeah, I love that. Community is obviously very, very important.

Eric Huffman: Yeah, man. Well, Jon, thank you again for making the time today. You stayed longer than we expected you to, and I just pray you keep going. Keep being courageous. I know you will. You don't need me to tell you that, brother.

Jon Tyson: No, I appreciate it, man. Encouragement is always, always needed, and I'm always grateful for it. So thanks for taking some time and having us on the podcast.

Eric Huffman: Awesome. Thanks, Jon.

Julie Mirlicourtois: This episode of Maybe God was produced by Julie Mirlicourtois, Adira Polite, and Eric and Geovanna Huffman. Our editor is Justin Mayer, and Donald Kilgore is the director of Maybe God's full-length YouTube videos. Please help more listeners find Maybe God by rating and reviewing us wherever you're listening today. Thanks for tuning in.