In Stephen Pressfield’s book, Gates of Fire, you have the ancient story of the Spartan’s fabled stand at Thermopylae against the invading Persians, under the leadership of Xerxes.  The story of how three hundred Spartan warriors, along with their battle slaves and their Thespaian allies, held back hundreds of thousands Persians for seven days has been recounted many times, first from antiquity by Herodotus in The Histories, and down through ages.  In our own day the movie, The Three Hundred keeps this tale alive.  The reason it has been told and retold is the same as when it originally happened in 480 B.C.  The tale of three hundred Spartans dying to a man to give their fellow countrymen a chance was such a tale of courage, honor, and valor, that it enflamed the passion of the rest of Greece, so that eventually the Greeks rallied to defeat the Persians and Western Civilization was saved.

Pressfield’s account is different from other accounts of the battle in that he spends a good deal of his book detailing what it took to train the Spartan warriors.  The tale is told through the eyes of one of the Spartan’s battle slaves names Xeo.  Xeo saw his city burn and was orphaned at an early age. For several years he survived in the hills of Greece with another child and Bruxieus the family slave. Before Bruxieus died he told Xeo he must find a city in which to live--a man was nothing without a city.  Xeo chose Lakedaemon, the home of the Spartans.  A few years after this, Xeo was being quizzed by the wife of Dienekes, the warrior whom he served.  She was curious as to why he chose to live in a country where he could never become a full citizen, and in some sense always be an alien.  She asked him, “Why not, then a polis (“city”) of riches or opportunity?  Thebes or Corinth or Athens?  All that can come to you here is coarse bread and a striped back.”  Xeo replied to her, “Other cities produce monuments and poetry, Sparta produces men.”

I have been reading this book at night to my younger boys, who are nine and eleven.  The language is rough, so I have to change some of the words  Some of the scenes are not suitable for their age, so I have to navigate my way around them, but the reason I have been reading this to them is the same as Xeo’s rationale for going to Sparta:  I want my boys to become men.

I have been blessed with four boys; the older two are in college now, and these younger two.  Several years ago, when my older two boys were ten and twelve, something in my soul went out to them.  I didn’t know what it was, but something was nagging at me that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.  I would come home after work and see my two big boys playing video games, or playing sports or just running with the pack in the neighborhood.  Then it hit me what it was.  When I was ten, I started spending summers on my grandfather’s farm.  On that farm in Northeast Mississippi, for about seven or eight weeks of the year, my cousin and I would work with my grandfather.  Every day was a new adventure, and to a boy of ten, a man who drives a tractor, wears overalls, has hunting dogs and rolls his own cigarettes is something of a god-like figure.  We would work in the sun all day with my grandfather and would constantly fight over who got to drive the tractor and who had to hoe.  Because my cousin was older than me, I usually wound up with the “wooden tail mule” (the hoe) in my hand as he drove by me on the tractor, pulling a cultivator and trying to look old and dignified.

When I was twelve, my dad, a salesman at the time came in one day and told me it was time to learn how to roof.  My uncle was a roofing contractor and my dad sometimes helped him out doing work with small jobs.  I don’t know why he decided to put me on a roof, but other than introducing me to Jesus, it was the best thing anyone ever did for me.  So, we started roofing houses in our neighborhood in the afternoons when he came home.  He was not a tyrant about it; I played baseball in the summers, but I still had a lot of time on my hands and he made sure they were not spent loafing, but with him.  It was hot and miserable, but being with my dad made it okay.  He paid me well and the more skilled I got the more he paid me.  When we would finish a job, he would stand back, point out areas of craft and skill I had completed, and say, “I might make a roofer out of you yet.”

When I was fifteen, I started working for my uncle in the summers, and at sixteen I was running one of his roofing crews.  I still managed to play three sports, date, loaf, make good grades, and do things a teenager does, but more than that, by the time I graduated I knew how to work, relate to responsibility, and commune in a man’s world of work and responsibility.  I also realized I had to go to college--there had to be an easier way to make a living.

So I suppose that the unrest I felt seeing my boys lying around the house was because of my own upbringing.  At their age, in a sense I was taken into a company of men, first by my own kinfolk and then by a bunch of salty and rough roofers.  I learned in a school of older men work and craft.  I knew the drudgery of working all day in the heat and humidity of Memphis, Tennessee, and not quitting just because I didn’t feel good.  I also knew the joy of affirmation that comes when, after carrying shingles and doing the menial task and just being the “boy” for a few years, I was finally accepted by these older men as a competent and skilled worker in my own right, and could take my place as a peer.

As I looked at my boys, I realized I had to find some way to get them into a world of work and responsibility, some way to harden them to what the real world was like.  So I started a lawn service.  Having just moved to the suburbs from a small town in Mississippi, I had a riding lawnmower and noticed that most people in the suburbs didn’t even cut their own grass.  I went to Home Depot and bought two returned lawn mowers, a couple of weed eaters, and a blower and rounded up about ten customers, as many yards as I thought I could manage late in the afternoons and on Saturdays--and we went to work.  It was hot, sometimes miserable, and a hardship coming in from the work of church planting, knowing we would be at it until dark several times a week.

I worked with them for four summers, and increasingly turned over more of the responsibility and money to them as they grew in competence and skill.  I remember the day when one of my sons looked at the freshly manicured lawn that we had just finished and said, “Dad, that is beautiful.” Shortly after that my dad gave my oldest boy the family heirloom (a 1986 Nissan pickup), and I turned the business over to him.  There were times they hated me for making them work like that and times when we laughed hysterically, and times when they wanted to just go play, but at the end of the day, I realized that there is one thing that exceeds a boy's inherent foolishness and laziness, and that is his need to prove himself by doing something hard, by passing some test that earns the affirmation of the older men in the community. 

This brings me to the point of this essay:  “What is happening to our boys?"  I have become more philosophical about the question as time has gone on.  I have been forced to think about what it means to see our boys mature into manhood.  Reality forces this on us, does it not?  The simple fact is that from Adam and Eve until about fifty years ago, most boys eighteen to twenty-two years of age were mature enough to marry, care for a household, assume lots of responsibility, go to war, were well into their vocation, and were certainly off the subsistence of the family household.  That is not the case today, where experts say most boys are still in adolescence till they are in their late twenties or early thirties.  (My assumption is you are still an adolescent until you are off Daddy’s pocketbook.)  What has happened?  Why are our boys maturing so late?  I even suppose this might be okay if they were just maturing later in life.  It would cause us concern, but not be that shocking if it were not for what our boys are doing in those years between ages fourteen and twenty-six--for the most part, not a lot of good is happening.  What we have for the first time in history is a new breed of male— the man/boy.

If you look at the recent movies that have come out, like Wedding Crashers or Failure to Launch, then you see that even Hollywood has noticed that there is a new breed of male out there.  This male is early twenties to early thirties and nothing much is expected of him.  He likes to have sex with weak-willed women who expect nothing of him.  He lives at home, and his parents might not like it, but they don’t know what to do or don’t have the will to do anything about it.  He is vocationally adrift and somehow has the idea that these are the best years of his life, after which he will get stuck in the rut of marriage, responsibility and career like his daddy.  I don’t know which is more sickening—the fact that the average father has projected maturity to his boys in such a negative light, or the hopelessness felt by a young man who thinks life is downhill after thirty.  I guess from one perspective there has never been a time is history where it is better to be a young man. Whether it is parents, church, or society—nothing is expected of you!

As I said, I suppose this would not be so appalling if this was just a phase our boys went through and then they went on to live happy though belatedly mature lives, but the truth is that it is destroying the souls of our young men.  In the movie Fight Club you see a portrayal of the culture of  aimless, purposeless young men who have had no ideals of manhood given to them and nothing of true purpose expected of them.  At one point in the movie one of the young men says this, "Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate to buy [stuff] we don’t need.  We are the middle people of history…no purpose or place; we have no great war – no great depression.  Our “great war” is a spiritual war.  Our great depression – is our lives…. We’ve been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars…but we won’t.  And we are slowly learning that fact….and we are very, very [angry].”

What is happening to our boys?  Not much.  They are just doing what is expected of them—nothing much of consequence.  It is part of the male soul that if nothing is expected of you then by default you will be driven and led by wit and passion.  The Greek version of this was the minatar—the head of a beast and the body of a man—one led only by the passions of its own body.  When we fail to discipline the appetites and affections, they will rule.  As C. S. Lewis points out in The Abolition of Man, we create “men without chests".  That is, if we fail to teach our boys an ideal of the glory of mature 
manhood within a company of men who will discipline, affirm and 
temper them, and embody those ideals to them, here is what we get: the 
man/boy, rootless and adrift with no idea or ideal of how to relate 
to a community of adults, the fairer sex, vocation, or their own bodies. 




In the following essays we will address a situation that has never 
been faced in the history of the world - how do we raise boys in an 
environment where men are essentially removed from their lives during 
the teen years?  My grandfather never asked this question and his grandfather before him never did either.  In fact, there was not an ever-expanding publishing industry on the subject because, for every generation before the present, boys for the most part got what they needed to mature by necessity.  As they got older, boys were a means of production, which meant at around twelve years of age, they entered a company of men whose admiration and affirmation they craved, and for the next few years this community of older men literally put them through the ringer of hardship and pain to shape their soul, so that they could take their place in a local community where fools were not easily tolerated.

How do we do this now when most boys are never around their dads, much less a community of mature older men?  How do we shape our boys when they live in a world where their labor is not necessary and most of their time is spent in the company of women?  This task is exacerbated by the fact that our communities are rootless and placeless, and that it takes time for a common life among older men to even take place, much less be the kind of male community a boy needs to emerge out of it into maturity.  Yet this is the dilemma that every community of men and women must wrestle with if we are to see the man/boy give way to a mature, happy and godly young man that is ready and eager to take on the glory and hardship of family, vocation and community.

Rev. Jim Holland is the Senior Pastor at St. Patrick Presbyterian Church in Collierville, Tennessee.