Christian Masculinity Doesn't Have to Be This Way

Tap, tap, tap. I rap my knuckles against the glass pane.

A young man opens the sliding door, his shoulders fill the door frame as he raises his eyebrow at me. I was not invited to the party, and even worse, I had beef with some people present—the man with the furrowed brow included. The greeter turns his head to shout toward his friends, maybe to announce that an uninvited guest has appeared, or to call out for help. Who knows.

I came for one purpose. I grab the handle of the door and lean back for leverage, my weight shifting. I lunge forward and land a blow right on his unsuspecting chin. He falls back onto a table behind him, where it collapses from his weight. No introductions needed. I walk in.

I was 20-years old then. I am now 36.

This story from my past is one of many marked by regretful acts of violence, revelry, and a restless search for purpose. But my story and the questions it has caused me to ask since then are not solely mine. Other young men today are wrestling with their pasts, asking what it means to be a man and how to find meaning in the world. Many of us have inherited scripts built around the idea that “real men” should be self-sufficient, tough, and violent. Looking back, I wasn’t simply angry; I was lonely. At the time, I did not understand that. I had friends, but I wanted to be accepted, needed, and recognized by them as a man—even though I wasn’t sure what it meant to be one. Violence became one way I tried to prove my manhood. My version of masculinity had become entangled with aggression and the acceptance it seemed to bring.

There is a masculinity crisis. But the crisis is not that people are interrogating what masculinity is, or coming to recognize that masculinity manifests in various ways. Rather, the crisis is that many of the loudest definitions reduce manhood to dominance, sex drive, or political aggression.

My own faith journey forced me to confront my narrow definitions of masculinity. I learned that to ascribe a singular definition to masculinity is to reduce it to one archetype, which reduces complexity into simplicity and ultimately fails to get at the question young men are asking: Who am I?

My own faith journey forced me to confront my narrow definitions of masculinity. I learned that to ascribe a singular definition to masculinity is to reduce it to one archetype, which reduces complexity into simplicity and ultimately fails to get at the question young men are asking: Who am I?

The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer—who was executed for protecting Jews from the Nazis—wrestled with this exact question in his prison poem, “Who Am I?” While the prison guards and other prisoners saw him as cheerful and composed, Bonhoeffer knew himself as anxious, angry, and afraid. “Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine,” wrote Bonhoeffer in 1944.

Bonhoeffer would eventually conclude that even if he could never fully know himself, God knew him perfectly, and this belief gave him purpose. Although Bonhoeffer’s context is (somewhat) different from our own, his insights help us see through some of the fog surrounding our discourse on manhood. At the center of our search for self-understanding, through the maze of our own contradictions, there lies the tension between competing influences, social pressures, and redemption.

What are young men searching for?

Young men today—especially those who are part of Generation Z—have experienced distinctive pressures that shape how they approach questions of identity and acceptance: social media, economic uncertainty, disrupted education, the COVID-19 pandemic, and an increasingly competitive job market. In 2021, 56% of households with a college student reported changing their educational plans in some way, while the World Economic Forum reported in 2025 that Gen Z was entering one of the most competitive job markets faced by any recent generation.

These factors can deepen social isolation and leave many young men susceptible to messages that claim to recognize and understand their struggles, sometimes for nefarious ends. For men who tie their sense of meaning and self-worth to economic productivity and success, these pressures can further intensify feelings of loneliness and disconnection. Loneliness is not simply the absence of company, but also reflects a deeper crisis of belonging, purpose, and meaning.

Compared with older generations of men in the U.S and with their peers in other countries, American men under 35 report especially high levels of loneliness. In the U.S., 1 in 4 men say they experience loneliness regularly.

Another way to frame the search for meaning among young men is by looking at Gen Z’s relationship to religion and spirituality. Pew Research has documented a complicated pattern. While Gen Z is less connected to religious institutions and less likely to participate in traditional forms of religious life, many still report experiences of spiritual connection and transcendence when discussing meaning and value. In this sense, Gen Z may be less institutionally religious, but they can still be identified as spiritually searching.

The church can become a place where these competing dynamics converge. The online radicalization of young men can overlap with religious communities and draw upon religious language, yet those same faith traditions can also provide resources for challenging harmful visions of masculinity. At this intersection of spiritual longing, cultural anxiety, and political uncertainty, young men encounter a range of scripts that promise to tell them who they are, what it means to be a man, and where they belong.

A script is a religious, cultural, or political “text” that is inherited or accepted as true. In other words, scripts shape how people understand the world and guide how they live and act within it. What are the scripts available to young men—whose economic prospects feel uncertain, whose loneliness is increasing, and whose social and educational lives have been disrupted?

Violence

Violence can become a language through which some men prove loyalty and belonging. For many young men, violence emerges from a complicated mix of social pressures, peer expectations, learned behavior, and a lack of guidance.

Violence offers a distorted sense of meaning and becomes a way to demonstrate courage and earn the recognition of other men. For some, violence becomes a means of self-definition and survival, converting fear into identity and disenfranchisement into meaning. While these forms of masculinity are often reinforced by institutions that ultimately criminalize them, violence becomes a ritual in which they attempt to answer the question of who they are.

In religious contexts, violence is sometimes intertwined with notions of faith and authority. During the Second Great Awakening, the itinerant Methodist preacher Peter Cartwright became known for his brashness. He was said to have fired a weapon into the air to capture a crowd’s attention and to have punched a disruptor at one of his meetings. Similarly, Mike Cosper, host of the podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, has described how Mark Driscoll spoke in violent and threatening terms from the pulpit. Violence, then, is not absent from certain expressions of Christianity, but surfaces in ways that become intertwined with notions of righteous faith and “true” manhood.

Theobros and the manosphere

“Theobros” is a label given to a group of pastors and authors who combine ethnonationalism, patriarchal masculinity, and a right-wing political theology. The “manosphere” refers to a broader online ecosystem that promotes hypermasculine ideals and offers a wide spectrum of content, ranging from self-help and dating advice to more extreme forms of misogynistic and authoritarian masculinity.

The manosphere is popular, in part, because it responds to the genuine concerns of young men. The appeal of these spaces should not be dismissed too quickly. Many young men are looking for friendship, direction, and a place to speak honestly about insecurity. Evangelical “man camps” and other men’s retreats offer solidarity and spaces for vulnerability, even as some reinforce narrow assumptions about what men should be. The deeper problem is not that men are seeking brotherhood or guidance. Rather, the issue is that many manosphere content creators and their theological counterparts in the theobro movement equate masculinity with control and aggression.

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Doug Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist pastor who is popular among theobros, illustrates this conflation in the way he speaks about women’s roles in society. One of his most frequently cited remarks is that “women are the kind of people that people come out of,” which reduces women primarily to their reproductive role. His broader political vision also includes “household voting,” in which a single representative—typically the man—casts a vote for the entire family. For Wilson, such a system would undo the individual voting rights secured for women by the 19th Amendment. Within this patriarchal system, women are subservient to the men in the household and are restricted from casting their own vote.

Christianity, masculinity, and politics

When politics and masculinity are mixed in the cauldron of Christianity, it produces an unholy and dangerous recipe. At times, faith and righteousness are refracted through the language of violence and conquest to fight the perceived foes of “multiculturalism” and the supposed “feminization of society.” We see this mixture in the person and politics of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has cast the United States’ war with Iran in divine terms. Hegseth represents the culmination of a much longer history of growing evangelical influence within the U.S. military. While this trend has recently added a noticeably Protestant flavor, it goes far beyond it. Eric Martin, writing for Sojourners in 2020, reported on the growing white nationalist faction within Catholicism as well.

Historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez argues the following in her book, Jesus and John Wayne,

“Like [John] Wayne, the heroes who best embodied militant Christian masculinity were those unencumbered by traditional Christian virtues. In this way, militant masculinity linked religious and secular conservatism, helping to secure an alliance with profound political ramifications. For many evangelicals, these militant heroes would come to define not only Christian manhood but Christianity itself.”

In other words, public figures who embody aggressive attitudes are often hailed as virtuous heroes, and their expressions of faith become cultural paradigms through which young men understand their own identities. Masculinity, in this framing, is cast as a civic duty and a prerequisite for national survival.

Walking through a new door

But once we strip these paradigms of manhood down to their underlying assumptions, we begin to see that the journey toward self-understanding and self-realization is not the problem, but part of the solution. We don’t need all the answers at once. Our quest to answer young men’s question of “who am I?” isn’t to discover a rigid prescription. Rather, it is to encourage a continual searching, learning, and growing toward deeper insights into our own souls and the divine.

The 16th-century Spanish mystic St. Teresa of Ávila, in The Interior Castle, frames the spiritual life as a directional movement. In her contemplation on spirituality, she imagines the soul as a castle with many rooms, each one opening into further possibilities on the journey toward deeper self-knowledge and union with God.

Life is a series of doors through which we walk. Sometimes, we mistakenly—or even willfully—step through doors with violence, revenge, or hatred marked on the door frames. Other doors are defined by peace and redemption. No matter which doors we’ve previously walked through, we always have the option of exploring new ways of understanding what it means to be men. Some doors draw us deeper into performance, striving, and the expectations of others; other doors lead us toward greater honesty about ourselves and deeper communion with God.

To ask, “Who am I?” is to ask a fundamentally human question. A wide spectrum of possibilities for what it means to be a man exists, and each of us must wrestle with that question for ourselves. Yet when certain segments of Christianity offer young men rigid paradigms of identity, we can help by showing them the limitations and dangers of those conceptions. Not every door is worth walking through.