The Challenge of Masculinity

Christian ways to think about masculinity

Photo by Craig McLachlan on Unsplash

Two recent articles have had me thinking about what a positive vision for masculinity looks like. The first is entitled “All Men Want to Be Heroes” by

Chris Arnade

, an insightful cultural critic and excellent ambulator. The second is entitled “Defining Healthy Masculinity: A Response to Louise Perry” and was written by Luke Simon. Both articles argue that a positive vision for masculinity is possible and necessary and that heroism has something to do with it, particularly the self-sacrificial hero.

Simon’s argument is that Christ is our model for masculinity, a man who stood up to injustice but also sacrificed himself for others. I see the appeal of this answer and agree with the basic principle that proper masculinity is sacrificial in nature. The challenge of holding up Christ as the model of masculinity is that we’re all called to model our lives after Christ, men and women. And yet Christ was born a man, and that matters. How to resolve this tension? It seems to me that one of the implications of Christ’s example is found in Ephesians 5:25, where husbands are commanded to love their wives as Christ loved the Church. Although all of us are called to love sacrificially, it seems that God has called men, and specifically husbands, to a particularly standard of severe sacrifice for their wives. Christ is the model for that sacrifice. I discussed this a week or so ago in regard to declining college enrollment among young men. We avoid becoming the Andrew Tates of the world by learning from Christ to practice “cruciform masculinity.”

Arnade’s point is that men, particularly young men, need to have some positive account of masculinity to strive toward or they will naturally drift toward antisocial forms of heroism. Many years ago, I worked with high school felons, and I certainly saw among them a romantic image of their own lives, a sense that they were destined to do grand things, even if those grand things were auto theft. They would talk in epic language about fights in prison and escapades they had out of prison. At the time I was reading Le Morte d'Arthur and I couldn’t help make the connection to the knight errant. Outside of prison, these young men wandered the landscape, looking for adventures, challenging rivals to combat, and avenging their honor. There was a sense of chivalry and certainly an honor culture among these young men. Except, as Arnade predicted, these young men were antiheroes, looking not so much to protect the innocent as harm their rivals. But the basic drive toward doing something meaningful, something that truly mattered and stood out among the dull numbness of modernity was notable.

It seems to me that both of these articles are touching on some important truths about masculinity. A positive Christian account of masculinity involves the use of power for protecting, sacrificing for, serving, and caring for the vulnerable. It also sees the pursuit of greatness, magnanimity, not as a perverse egotism, but as a striving for excellence for God’s glory and the good of the community (I talk about this in Re-Collecting Your Life). I’m not implying that women don’t also desire greatness, but I think men, particularly young men, often feel this desire acutely. At least, that is my sense of things. They experience it as a great burden.

There are a couple of problems with this burden. First, its source in the modern world is rarely an organic desire to honor God and serve your neighbor. It’s more often the product of social pressures to existentially justify your existence in a hypercompetitive world. You need to make yourself known, to stand out from the crowd, to be seen, to make your mark on the world, to leave a legacy, to Be Somebody, to know that your life is a life that matters. Now, underneath all that societal pressure still beats the basic masculine drive to create, build, invent, discover, explore, overcome, and so on. But in the contemporary world, those deeper drives are co-opted into a narrative of expressive individualism. It’s not just that these young men want to be heroes; they want to validate their existence. If they just wanted to live into their telos as men, I would have no objection. In fact I would applaud them! But what worries me is that they might be seeking something else, something which can only be found in relation to God: existential justification. And because they are looking for something in their identity and actions which only God can provide, they will inevitably make an idol out of greatness.

Second, the drive to be a hero is focused on creating an exciting “meaningful” narrative for your life, having “main character energy” and feeling as though your life has enough drama to be a good story, one worth the attention and affirmation of other people. This is a major problem for the modern world which tends to feel flat, stale, and without significance or the sacred. So we all invent rituals, narratives, or drama to give our lives meaning. But “meaning” here is morality neutral. As Arnade notes, if young men don’t have healthy visions of masculinity they will turn to antisocial ones, violent ones, because the only standard is meaning, not morality.

So part of what we need to inspire in young men is the truth that their innate desire for a life of meaning and purpose has a specific fulfillment. They were created to know God and enjoy him forever. And so whatever form of greatness they pursue, whether it be carpentry or engineering or poetry or education or politics or sales, their task is to glorify God and bless their neighbor. And if they do that, it is great. That is the telos of their greatness. Important here is the idea that Arnade touches on in his article that you can be a “hero” by doing what is viewed as “mundane” work. And I would say greatness can be achieved by doing what some view as mundane work if you do it with excellence toward God and for the good of your neighbor.

Literature is filled with examples of men who were driven by a masculine desire for greatness: Walden and Victor in Frankenstein, Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, Mr. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. But what they each have in common is the lack of inner virtue to check and direct their desire toward the good. For example, of Mr. Kurtz we read that he “lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him.” Later Marlow says that “It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.” This is part of the problem for young men (and modern people in general, Conrad would seem to say), that we are fill of “efficiency” and drive and power but lacking in the internal virtues necessary to restrain those drives for the good. Shelley makes a similar argument about Victor in Frankenstein. This is one of the reasons I’m writing a book on the virtues as a guide to life for my fourth book. A masculinity without virtue is a hollow man. And our world is filled with hollow men.

The value of this understanding of masculinity as devoted to God and neighbor and restrained and guided by virtue is that it doesn’t emasculate the natural desire to achieve and strive and overcome challenges. I think many young men feel that they have to either repress their natural drives for greatness or turn to negative models (like Andrew Tate) for affirmation, and that simply isn’t so.

On the other hand, some young men have no drive, and I fear a large reason for that is cultural. We’ve discouraged risk-taking, we’ve discouraged resilience, we’ve criticized masculinity, we’ve created a hypercompetitive social marketplace on social media and a hypercompetitive business world, so that for some young men feelings of inadequacy and inhibition seem like natural, reasonable responses. When you are not trained to be in a competitive culture and you are launched into a hypercompetitive culture, why even try? In You Are Not Your Own I referred to these individuals as the Resigned. These young men need to know it’s okay to strive and fail and strive some more. It’s good and ennobling to work toward a goal. It honors God to risk failure for the Good. The virtue of courage is essential to masculinity, and courage entails the risk of suffering for the sake of the good, which is precisely what you do whenever you strive toward some greater goal. You risk your time, failure, and embarrassment, for what you believe to be good. So reclaiming a vision of masculinity is not just about curbing the violent tendencies of the already driven; it’s also about inspiring greatness in those with no vision of masculinity.

To reiterate, I don’t believe that men are the only ones who have a desire for greatness. History is filled with counterexamples of that claim. Women desire and achieve greatness all the time. I do believe most men have an acute desire, as Arnade argues, to be a hero, and that to be a hero means seeking greatness through sacrifice. And I believe that without a proper vision for heroism, young men will often fall into destructive models of masculinity, whether that be the hypermasculinity of Andrew Tate or the faux-heroism of video games. Young men, like the rest of us, need a vision for our lives. They need to understand that the greatness they are called to is a greatness of service and sacrifice to glorify God and bless their neighbor, particularly their vulnerable neighbor.