Editor’s Note: Losers, Loners, and Rebels: The Spiritual Struggles of Boys (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007) is coauthored by Princeton Seminary professors Donald Capps and Robert C. Dykstra, and Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary professor Allan Hugh Cole Jr. The book has received a positive review in Publishers Weekly and was featured in a session at the November annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. The book can be ordered from Cokesbury at www.cokesbury.com. The following is excerpted from the book’s introduction.

Boys’ Hunger for Connectedness

Early adolescent boys, those eleven through fourteen years old, are now receiving the focused attention from clinical psychologists, psychotherapists, and counselors that they have devoted to the troubled teenager, and many books have been written recently for parents who are troubled, and justifiably so, about their own early adolescent boys.

William Pollack’s Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood begins this way:

Boys today are in serious trouble, including many who seem “normal” and to be doing just fine. Confused by society’s mixed messages about what’s expected of them as boys, and later as men, many feel a sadness and disconnection they cannot even name…. Over the last several years, I and other professionals who work with boys have become increasingly aware that even boys who seem OK on the surface are suffering silently inside—from confusion, a sense of isolation, and despair…. Many boys feel a loneliness that may last throughout boyhood and continue into adult life. (New York: Random House, 1998, p. xix)

Lack or loss of connection is, for Pollack, the basic, underlying problem, for loneliness and shame result from weak or nonexistent connections. A recurring theme throughout the book is that fathers experience difficulty in connecting with their boys, in large part because they did not experience such connectedness with their fathers when they were boys.

Connecting with Our Own Boyhood

As we thought about Pollack’s view that the underlying cause of early adolescent boys’ struggles and difficulties is a lack or deficiency in connectedness, and especially the fact that the most self-evident form of such disconnectedness is the distance they experience from their fathers, it occurred to us that one step that fathers of boys can take to enable them to be more emotionally accessible to their sons is to become better connected to their own boyhood. Much of the disconnectedness that today’s fathers feel from their own sons is due to the fact that their fathers were not there for them when they were boys, but we also think that another reason is their disconnectedness from their own boyhoods. In other words, there is a disconnectedness within themselves, a disconnectedness of the man from the boy.

The three of us are seminary teachers, and most of our students are in their early and mid-twenties. More than half of them are male. We teach the kinds of courses that, directly or indirectly, invite these young men to share their own lives with us, and, on occasion, with their classmates. One of the recurrent themes in the stories they tell us is that their relationships with their fathers were not what they had hoped and longed for. Another recurrent theme is that they were attracted to the ministry when they were boys. We think that these two themes are interrelated, so we encourage our male students to explore their own boyhoods in order to gain a better understanding of why they are pursuing a career in ministry and what they hope, perhaps unconsciously, that it will do for them. We ask them to consider whether this profession can fulfill the expectations that they have placed upon it, especially the connectedness that they wanted so badly when they were boys. Our object is not to dissuade them from entering the ministry but to help them gain greater insight into the emotional burdens they have placed upon their career choice and into some of the dangers that may lurk therein in the likely event that it cannot bear up under the weight of it all.

Spirituality: What All Boys Share in Common

Those who work with troubled boys tend to emphasize how the lives of boys today are so different from the lives of boys of previous generations. It is extremely important that we recognize these differences. But is there something that all boys, extending far back in time and into the unforeseeable future, share in common? Is there something that truly connects all boys to one another, not only their own contemporaries but also their fathers, their father’s fathers, and so forth? We believe there is and that this “something” is their spirituality.

We came to this important insight as we thought about the tendency of men to sentimentalize their own boyhoods, especially the early adolescent years. For many men, these were their “golden years,” the years in which they were consummately happy, without a care in the world. Having engaged in an effort to reconnect with our own boyhoods, we knew that this picture of the golden years of boyhood was largely a myth. So we asked ourselves: What in the world is going on here? How could men misrepresent their boyhoods to such an egregious degree? Then, however, we posed a somewhat different question: Is there some element of truth in these mythical renditions of their boyhoods? And is this a truth so important to men that even the boys of today will, one day, create the same myths and expect others to believe them? Despite our skepticism, we came around to the view that the answer to these questions is yes.

However exaggerated or distorted men’s accounts of boyhood may be, there is something uniquely special about this period in our lives, and we believe, further, that it has something to do with the fact that these are the years when a boy experiences himself as having something that he did not have before. This “something” is a somewhat mysterious but altogether real and palpable sense of spirit. We submit that boys acquire this sense of spirit—an ineffable sense of vigor, enthusiasm, and excitement—and become aware of its place in their lives in the early adolescent years.

For the purposes of our book, we suggest that the spirituality of early adolescent boys has everything to do with this newly discovered sense of spirit. We further suggest that this sense of spirit has many qualities involved in the shaping of a boy’s spirituality, but that the central ones are self-awareness, self-transcendence, and self-sufficiency.

Negative Experiences Give Rise to Spirituality

This view of spirituality informs the basic thesis of this book, namely, that the spirituality of early adolescent boys is more likely to issue from experiences the boy considers negative than from experiences he considers positive. That is, an early adolescent boy’s spirituality is formed out of experiences that he wishes he had not had and that as an adult may therefore forget he had or, if he remembers them, will treat them as insignificant and unimportant.

Our purpose in advancing this thesis is not to claim that men are wrong to view their early adolescent years with affection, fondness, and good feelings. We have already indicated that we believe there is a fundamental truth in the highly mythical accounts they give of their early adolescent years. Our point, rather, is that in the normal course of things early adolescent boys will have experiences that they consider negative, and that these very experiences are the anvil on which their sense of themselves as self-aware, self-transcendent, and self-sufficient will be forged.

That spirituality should be formed in and through one’s experience of the “dark night of the soul” is a deeply held conviction of many who are experts in spirituality and in the ways spirituality is cultivated and developed. What may be somewhat novel in our approach, however, is our contention that such experiences are unlikely to be viewed as spiritual by the boy who is having them, because he doesn’t think of them as positive ones. And this means that he does not necessarily want to be—or be thought to be—a spiritual person. His parents and other adults may want this for him, but the very fact that they do may be puzzling and exasperating to him: “I don’t want to be spiritual. I want to be a normal kid.”

We suggest that there are three general types of negatively perceived experiences that contribute to an early adolescent boy’s emerging spirituality and that they correspond, more or less, to the three manifestations of spirituality already noted. Though somewhat contrived, they have the merit of connecting spiritual modalities to psychological realities. In our view, the very reason certain experiences are deemed negative by a boy himself is that they are perceived as more than mere isolated experiences. Rather, they reveal something about the boy himself. They tell him, rightly or wrongly, that he is a certain type or kind of boy. Thus, they foster in him a certain negative image, an image that he thinks others ascribe to him as well.

This image can be one of three: the loser, the loner, or the rebel. In general, these are not positive self-images, though some boys may, over time, embrace them as though they were positive. We propose a rough correlation between the loser and self-awareness, the loner and self-transcendence, and the rebel and self-sufficiency. Like the spiritual qualities, however, we view these three self-images as a system or cluster of images, so that a boy may experience himself as predominantly a loser, or a loner, or a rebel but also have a sense of himself as being, to a lesser degree, one or both of the others. In the very course of his early adolescent years, he may shift from one to another, depending, in part, on contextual factors beyond his control. These, therefore, are types, and individual boys may relate to them in various and idiosyncratic ways. These are also, in the American context, familiar social types portrayed in films, books, magazines, and other media. These social types have a long tradition of their own, and this very fact contributes to our conviction that the sense of spirit that emerges in boyhood is what affords men across the generations a sense of common brotherhood. More specifically, they provide a bridge for fathers and sons to walk across and meet one another halfway. If the boys of today are losers, loners, and rebels, so their fathers have been, and so their fathers’ fathers have been.

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