A pastor in Baton Rouge got arrested this week.
He'd allegedly crossed the street and put hands on a 20-year-old neighbor who — according to the pastor and backed by members of his congregation — had just threatened to rape his wife, rape his grandchildren, and kill his family the next time he left town.
Then he went back to church, stood in the pulpit, and told his congregation: "I fulfilled the scripture. I laid hands on the sick. I don't know how much recovery they're going to have — but I laid hands on the sick."
The internet erupted.
Not in condemnation. In applause.
And there's something here that caught my attention much more than the story itself.
One of the comments flooding social media wasn't from a church member. It wasn't from a theologian or a culture warrior or a political commentator.
It was from someone on the outside looking in — and what they said was this:
"What church is this and when is the next service — because I belong here."
Friends, we have to pause here for a moment… Because that comment is not just a reaction to one pastor in Louisiana.
That is a culture — starved. Starved for something it lost so gradually it didn't realize it was gone until it saw a flash of it on a Tuesday afternoon in Baton Rouge.
Let me tell you what that something is…
For the better part of two generations now, a deliberate and coordinated effort has been underway in this country to dismantle the God-given identity of the American male.
I personally believe it was started in order to make us easier to rule — for true men will not be hogtied into obeying the Orwellian, freedom-stealing edicts of totalitarianism.
It didn't start in the church. It started in the cowardly underbelly of American culture.
It was installed in our classrooms, where little boys were told that their energy, their aggression, their instinct to compete and protect and dominate their environment was a disorder — something to be medicated, managed, and apologized for.
It was furthered by the entertainment industry, where the strong, capable, unashamed male was first mocked, then marginalized, then written out of the script entirely.
Then, it was accelerated by many evil forces working to redefine manhood entirely — the alphabet mafia and others — who decided that the very category of "man" was a social construct, a problem to be solved, a binary to be dismantled.
The John Wayne of America didn't die. He was systematically executed — quietly, patiently, one institution at a time.
The capable man. The protective man. The man who didn't need a committee's permission to stand between his family and a threat. The man who looked danger in the eye and didn't reach for his feelings — he reached for his God-given responsibility.
That man has been the target.
And now comes my least favorite part: We must also indict the pulpit and the pews — because the church doesn't get to stand on the sideline of this indictment.
We may not have started the fire. But we stopped fighting it a long time ago.
Somewhere along the way, a significant portion of the American church decided that the highest virtue a Christian man could display was the absence of confrontation. Be nice. Be calm. Be inoffensive. Be a peacemaker, at any cost.
Turn the other cheek — which somehow got translated from a call to absorb personal insult without retaliation into a mandate to do absolutely nothing in the face of any threat, ever, under any circumstances.
Godless American culture handed the church a neutered vision of manhood dressed in therapeutic gobbledygook — and too many pulpits baptized it, gave it a few Scripture verses, and handed it back to our young men as if it were a hard-coded doctrine in the Bible.
It wasn't. It was the disgusting product of a culture that had already decided strong men were dangerous.
And we imported it. We signed off on it. The church should have been the counterculture. Instead, we became a reflection.
Friends, that is not what the Bible teaches. My Lord didn't teach or approve of such nonsense.
Nehemiah didn't tell the men of Israel to pray harder when enemies threatened to slaughter their families while they were rebuilding the wall.
He told them to pick up a sword.
"Be not ye afraid of them: remember the Lord, which is great and terrible, and fight for your brethren, your sons, and your daughters, your wives, and your houses." — Nehemiah 4:14
That is not a pacifist text. Nor is it a text your liberal pastor will ever preach from. Instead, it is a call to courage from a man who also prayed without ceasing and trusted God completely. Nehemiah held a trowel in one hand and a weapon in the other — and God blessed the work.
The Bible does not produce doormats. It produces brave, caring, and protecting shepherds.
And that's exactly the thing about shepherds that has been conveniently whitewashed out of our Sunday school lessons.
The shepherd's job is not just to feed the sheep.
It is to protect them. Willingly, sacrificially, at all costs.
Jesus said in John 10:11 — "I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep." And two verses later, He described the hireling — the man who looks like a shepherd but isn't — as the one who "seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth."
The one who runs when it gets dangerous — Jesus called him a hireling.
The one who stands — He called him a shepherd.
Do you mind if I pause here for a moment and point out something extremely important? Because this imperative truth has a ditch on both sides of the road.
The man who uses "I was protecting my family" to justify every explosion of temper, every act of aggression, every moment where his pride felt threatened — that man is not a shepherd.
He's a hothead using theological language to cover his own lack of self-control.
There is a line — a real and serious line — between protecting the sacred things God has placed in your care, and becoming the very kind of threat you're claiming to oppose. The John Wayne archetype was never just about the fist. It was about the judgment to know when the fist was the answer — and the character to use every other option first.
A man of God knows the difference. He has to. Anyone otherwise is using Scriptural precepts to damage his fellow man, or his family - - - and that man is a coward.
But let's move on to what I believe is the deeper truth this story is exposing — aka the real story.
The men sitting in our pews — and the men who aren't sitting in our pews — are hungry.
Hungry for a picture of manhood that is strong without being cruel. Capable without being reckless. Protective without being controlling. They are hungry for the picture the Bible has been painting all along — one that the culture and, too often, the church have conspired to paint over.
The biblical definition of meekness is not weakness. It is power under control. It is not the absence of strength — but strength, submitted to God, held in check until the moment it is genuinely needed.
Moses was called the meekest man on the earth - - - Yet he also threw the tablets of God at a golden calf and ground it to powder.
Meekness is not the inability to act. It is the discipline to know when to act — and the courage to act when that moment finally comes.
I truly don't know everything that happened on Hooper Road in Baton Rouge. The courts will sort out the details. There are disputed facts and a complicated history, and a wise man holds those things carefully until the full picture is clear.
But here is what I do know…
When someone outside the church looks at a pastor who stood up to defend his family — and their first reaction is "where is this church, because I want to be there" — that is not just a cultural moment.
That is a mission field moment.
People are not just cheering for one man's fists. They are cheering for the return of something they were told no longer existed. Something the culture spent fifty years trying to kill. Something the church was supposed to be guarding all along.
Praise God! The John Wayne of America isn't dead.
He's just been waiting for the church to remember that we were never supposed to apologize for him in the first place.
I don't care what this world says… Every church, every family, every wife, every kid, and every elderly person needs a man like this in their lives. A protector. One who would gladly go to jail in order to handle his God-ordained business.
Yes indeed, the sheep need a shepherd.
Not a hireling. Not a hothead.
But a shepherd.
It is past time the church started producing them again.