A real crisis, a thin answer, and the manhood the Gospels actually show.
A lot of young men are lost, and saying so out loud is the first honest thing anyone can do here. They’re lonelier than their fathers were, falling behind in school and work, and short on older men who’ll show them how to live.[1] The wound is genuine, and so is the hunger underneath it: a hunger to be needed, to be strong for someone, to belong to a band of brothers, to spend a life on something that matters. Into that ache has come a confident chorus of voices promising to tell them what a man is and how to become one. Some of those voices belong to the new right. They’re worth taking seriously, because they’ve understood something the rest of us keep missing, and because their answer, for all its energy, is too small.
The voices and what they promise
The movement holds several camps that share a diagnosis and an enemy. The diagnosis is the loneliness above. The enemy is feminism, a managerial and therapeutic culture, and a soft modern church that treats ordinary maleness as a defect to be corrected.
The loudest and most profitable camp is the manosphere around figures like Andrew Tate: status, money, dominance, and women collected as proof of success. A steadier register belongs to Jordan Peterson, who tells young men to stand up straight, take responsibility, accept hierarchy as natural, and stop nursing their grievances.[2]
Further out sits the vitalist camp, whose best-known voice is the pseudonymous writer Bronze Age Pervert. His self-published Bronze Age Mindset reads like a neo-Nietzschean call to arms: worship strength, beauty, and the heroic body; despise the “bugman,” his word for the soft conformist; and break free of the “longhouse,” his term for a feminine, egalitarian, managerial order he treats as a prison.[3] His complaint runs all the way to Christianity, which he casts as the original slave morality, a faith that praises weakness and worships a God who let himself be killed.
The fourth camp keeps the name of Christ. Doug Wilson and the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, along with books like Michael Foster and Dominic Bnonn Tennant’s It’s Good to Be a Man, teach that a man’s aggressive instincts are gifts from God for founding households and exercising dominion.[4] Their claim is blunt: patriarchy is woven into creation like gravity, men were made to rule, and the only live question is which men and how. Wilson’s network puts this into practice, keeping women out of church leadership; he’s said on the record that giving women the vote was a mistake.[5]
Why the answer stays small
Each camp runs the whole of manhood through a single channel: power, ranked from strong to weak, ruler to ruled. A human life is wide, and this funnels it down to one measurement. Strip away the surface differences between a gym influencer, a Nietzschean, and a Reformed patriarch, and the same idol sits at the center of all three: power as the measure of a man.
The picture of the person underneath is thin. The vitalist sees a man as raw will to power. The patriarchy camp sees him as a rank in a fixed chain of command, where as the man goes so goes his household, his church, his nation. Both leave out the relational, self-giving, breakable center of an actual person, the very part that makes love possible.
The appeal is easy to feel. A young man drowning in confusion gets offered clarity, a hierarchy with a place reserved for him, and a story in which he’s the hero. Clarity is a real good, and a place to stand is a real gift. The trouble is what gets smuggled in alongside them.
These visions also feed on what they hate. An identity built mostly in opposition stays tied to its enemy and starts to mirror it. The vitalists grow as fixated on hierarchy and resentment as the order they claim to loathe. And the cure corrupts the diagnosis. The loneliness is real, and naming it is a gift. The remedy on offer, a mix of resentment toward women, endless status competition, and a paid course at the cynical end, deepens the wound it promises to close. A man who learns to see other people as rivals to dominate has been handed a lonelier life.
The deepest trouble is theological. The vitalist frame finds a crucified God absurd and discards him. The Christian-nationalist frame keeps his name and recasts him as a strongman, a warrior-king with the cross cut out of the middle. Both hand back a Jesus shaped to fit the project. Kristin Kobes Du Mez has traced how a long line of American teaching did exactly this, blending patriarchy, sex, and power into a militant masculinity and remaking the Jesus of the Gospels in its own image.[6] The “patriarchy is gravity” move performs a smaller version of the same trick, dressing a contestable social arrangement as a fixed law of creation so the argument ends before it begins.
What Jesus shows
Start where Christian faith starts. God became a particular man, Jesus of Nazareth. So there’s a Christian answer to the question these young men are asking, and the answer is a life you can look at. The surprise is that the man God became looks unlike every model the new right is selling.
Jesus is strong, and his strength takes the shape of service. On the last night with his friends he kneels and washes their feet (John 13:1-17).[7] Paul describes him taking the form of a servant and emptying himself (Philippians 2:5-8). This is power held under control and spent on others.
Jesus is fierce when the moment calls for it. He drives the traders out of the temple, names hypocrisy to the faces of the powerful, and sets his course for Jerusalem knowing what waits there (Mark 11:15-17; Matthew 23; Luke 9:51). His courage works for truth and for other people.
Jesus is gentle in the same breath. He gathers children into his arms and rebukes the disciples who try to shoo them away (Mark 10:13-16). He calls his own heart gentle and humble, and promises rest to everyone who comes to him weary and overloaded (Matthew 11:28-29). Strength and gentleness live together in him without strain.
His compassion is active and physical. The Gospels keep reaching for a visceral word, that he was moved with compassion in his gut, when he saw crowds harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd (Matthew 9:36), when a leper begged him for cleansing (Mark 1:41), when he met a widow walking behind the body of her only son and raised the boy before she could even ask (Luke 7:11-15). His kindness has hands: he feeds the hungry, stops for the blind beggar everyone else talks over, and lets the desperate reach him. He enters human suffering instead of floating above it; the letter to the Hebrews says we have a high priest who can sympathize with our weakness, because he’s been through the whole of it himself (Hebrews 4:15). At Lazarus’s grave he weeps with the grieving sisters before he says a word about resurrection (John 11:33-35). And his compassion costs him everything: he’s the shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep (John 10:11), the seed that falls into the ground and dies so that it can bear much fruit (John 12:24). Empathy, in him, means climbing down into another person’s grief and carrying it out the other side.
Jesus carries a mission, the very thing these young men are starving for. His sense of purpose is total, and the purpose is the Father’s work of love, carried all the way to a cross. There the strongest thing he ever does is lay his life down for his friends (John 15:13). He gathers a band of brothers and calls them friends (John 15:15), and he becomes a kind of father to a new family that outlasts blood. The mission, the brotherhood, and the fatherhood the new right keeps reaching for are all here, reordered around love instead of mastery.
He also overturns the “men were made to rule” thesis to its face. When his own disciples jockey for rank, he tells them the rulers of the nations throw their weight around, and that it works the opposite way among his people: the great one serves, and the Son of Man came to serve and to give his life for others (Mark 10:42-45). The kingdom runs upside down to the order of dominance.
His treatment of women breaks the expectations of his world at every turn. He teaches them as disciples: while Martha hurries to serve, Mary sits at his feet in the posture of a student, and he defends her choice as the better one (Luke 10:38-42), seating a woman exactly where his culture reserved the place for men. Women travel with him and bankroll the mission out of their own resources (Luke 8:1-3). He holds the longest recorded conversation of his life with a Samaritan woman at a well, someone his world counted an outsider three times over, and he trusts her with the secret of who he is; she runs back and brings her whole town to meet him (John 4:1-42). He lets a woman who had bled for twelve years, unclean by every rule in the book, take hold of his cloak, and instead of pulling back he calls her daughter and makes her well (Mark 5:25-34). He steps between a woman and the stones meant to kill her and sends her accusers away ashamed (John 8:1-11). He straightens a bent and overlooked woman and calls her a daughter of Abraham, handing her the dignity of full belonging (Luke 13:10-17).
And he gives women the place that mattered most of all. A woman pours costly perfume over him before his death, and he says her act will be told wherever the good news is preached (Mark 14:3-9). Women stay at the cross when most of the men have scattered, and women reach the tomb first (Mark 15:40-41; 16:1-8). The risen Jesus shows himself first to Mary Magdalene and sends her to carry the news to the rest, making a woman the first witness and the first preacher of the resurrection, in a world that wouldn’t accept a woman’s word in court (John 20:11-18). Here the point bites hardest against the patriarchy camp: the Lord they claim entrusted his rising to a woman and welcomed women as students, friends, patrons, and messengers. A vision of manhood that keeps women small has lost the thread of the man it says it follows.
The cross opens onto something further. God raised him, and that resurrection is the verdict on the whole pattern: the self-giving way that looked like defeat turns out to be the shape strength takes when it tells the truth about God, and the empty tomb is its vindication.
So the Christian shape of manhood, and of personhood, is a calling: to carry God’s image, to grow into the full stature of Christ (Ephesians 4:13), to love and stay faithful and act with courage on behalf of God and neighbor. Its marks are the fruit of the Spirit, love and patience and kindness and gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). The dominance model reads gentleness and self-control as weakness. The Gospels read them as the steadiness of a person fully alive.
Hold onto what the new right gets right. Young men do need purpose, mentors, brotherhood, and a mission worth a life. Those longings are good, and the church that ignores them leaves the field to Tate and Wilson and BAP by default. But look at what the fullest human being who ever lived was actually like: the most compassionate, the most willing to suffer for others, the freest to honour the people his world shoved aside. Jesus meets every one of those longings, and he fills them with something stronger than mastery, a life poured out in love. The movements seat a young man on a throne. Jesus hands him a basin and a towel, and calls that greatness.
Bibliography
Associated Press. “What to Know About the Archconservative Church Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Attends.” PBS NewsHour, August 12, 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/what-to-know-about-the-archconservative-church-defense-secretary-pete-hegseth-attends.
Bronze Age Pervert. Bronze Age Mindset. Self-published, 2018.
Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. New York: Liveright, 2020.
Foster, Michael, and Dominic Bnonn Tennant. It’s Good to Be a Man: A Handbook for Godly Masculinity. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2021.
Peterson, Jordan B. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018.
Reeves, Richard V. Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2022.
References
[1]Reeves, Of Boys and Men.
[2]Peterson, 12 Rules for Life.
[3]Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset.
[4]Foster and Tennant, It’s Good to Be a Man.
[5]Associated Press, “Archconservative Church.”
[6]Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne.
[7]Scripture references follow the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition.
