Band of Brothers

A concert and a vision

I’m with my dad tonight in Lancaster, PA, to hear a group called Brothers of the Heart. This is a kind of ad hoc group of country and gospel musicians; probably the most famous is Jimmy Fortune, who was the tenor for the Statler Brothers. This group started making music together right around the onset of the pandemic and their music was a gift to me during that time.

Part of the group’s allure for me is the wonderful harmony, which my dad and I both love (as did his dad before him). But part of it is the group’s unabashed affection for each other and their sense that love is essential to their music. Bradley Walker described the aptness of the group’s name this way: “it’s so true because we love each other so much…for me, this is so much more than music. When you hear people talk about this group they say, ‘You can tell that you all love each other, and you can tell you all are having fun.’ That’s the best thing about it to me. That’s so much of the appeal of the group. It’s not just songs, the music, the harmonies and all that, but the love between us and our love for people. I’m so thankful to be a part of this.”

I expect this concert tonight will be like the last time I saw this group at a county fair in Virginia, also with my dad—the group talked openly of how much fun they were having, how grateful and honored they were to be there, and encouraged us to show kindness to each other. It is strange and wonderful to hear a group of men talk about how much they love each other and other people, and how this love naturally gives birth to a shared, beautiful activity that brings something fruitful and wonderful into the world for everyone to enjoy.

This is such a different vision of manhood than the one currently on offer in the world, and even in the church. So often we are told that women are feelers and men are thinkers, that women are cooperative and men are competitive, that wives want to talk and men want to have sex. (Somewhat ironically, we are taught that women obsess over interior design and how a room looks, but that men somehow are the “visual creatures” who have to be taught to bounce their eyes from a beautiful woman.) The thought that a group of men would say “our love for each other and the world bonds us together, orients our life, and helps us create” is not considered typical.

Stereotypes like this have consequences because we move very easily from saying “this is how I experience things” to “this is how things are.” In the church, there is an extra, especially pernicious step—from “this is how things are” to “this is how God created them to be.” The result is that we understand men as having essential tendencies toward competition, control and violence, and a deep and often-unexplored need to be respected as authority figures. All of this often presents as sexual compulsiveness. We cannot imagine that these tendencies stem from painful wounds rather than the created order. We cannot imagine that men might be healthier if they accepted and sought to understand their feelings, tried to grasp the limitations of competition, and acknowledged how easy it is to use sex and conquest to short-circuit and ignore what’s really going on inside of us. Often, Christians who try to suggest this are told that we’re not really as Christian as we think we are.

On the margins of the church and world, there are other models for masculinity. Many of them are built around the idea of brotherhood: the brothers at the monastery, their backs hunched from years of bowing and praying the Psalms. The brotherly love evident in Wesley’s classes and bands, who invite each other to a deep exploration of their lives for the sake of the common good. The brave choice for celibate living that many men make in order to follow Jesus more fully by being a brother to all instead of husband to one, showing us that manhood is not tied to sexual conquest or even sexual expression. And tonight, it will be good to be with another model, the Brothers of the Heart, as they invite us to discover what brotherly love can really do.