Written by Aimee Byrd, Ref21 | Monday, September 22, 2014

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On one hand we have completely cheapened the relationship by numbering our friends like notches on our social media belt. And on the other, our culture has become so hyper-sexualized that we cannot handle the intimacy of true friendship without suspecting scandal. The guys have it the worst. They can’t have close male friendships without suspicion of being gay.

I’ve noticed a theme lately in some of my reading in blogs, magazines, and books. Basically, guys can’t have close, dare I say vulnerable, friendships with other guys or they will lose their man card.

Carl Trueman recently shared something Scot McKnight posted on Charles Marsh’s biography, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. With the overwhelming evidence of a kind of biblical friendship that many would envy, Marsh suggests that Bonhoeffer was gay, and that he pursued such an intimate friendship with Eberhard Bethge to satisfy his romantic feelings.

And then last week, I get the latest issue of Christianity Today in my mailbox. This is interesting because I do not subscribe to Christianity Today and have no idea why it was mailed to me, but the cover story caught my attention: “Why Can’t Men Be Friends?” Well, dang, I was just wondering the same thing, so I thumbed through the article. In it, Wesley Hill shares a study social scientist and author of Deep Secrets: Boy’s Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, Niobe Way, conducted revealing how boys share intimate friendships with other boys until adolescence, and then they sadly disengage from such a close level of friendship with other guys as they age, because they do not want to be perceived as feminine or homosexual.

And just last night as I was reading reading through The Company We Keep, Jonathan Holmes has a section on The Homophobia Bogeyman in his chapter, “Threats to Biblical Friendship.” That about sums up the problem: there’s a bogeyman in the closet of every male friendship!

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