Among my most distinctive memories of growing up Catholic in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is accompanying my father to the meetings of our church men’s group, the Holy Name Society. We met in the community space on the bottom floor of the church building, the same room in which we did school plays and gathered after Mass to share coffee and doughnuts. As a boy, I looked forward to the pancake breakfasts that accompanied each meeting. Today, as masculinity and the role of men in society become increasingly contentious, the seriousness with which many of these men took the work of being men seems especially important. Catholic men’s groups like the one I attended in my youth offer a powerful model for how men can be men together, while living out all that masculinity has to offer.
A lot of the men who gathered in that space were probably reliable Democratic voters, as were my father and grandfather, though that was before people associated the Democrats with effete coastal liberals. Among the people who gathered after church every few Sundays was a radio announcer who served as the voice of Iowa Hawkeyes basketball, assorted wrestling and football coaches, veterans of wars across the 20th century, and, most notably to me, a lawyer who served as both our church groundskeeper and as an N.F.L. referee. When we did things together, a lot of it was stereotypical guy stuff: fishing, golf, cookouts, and trips to Iowa football and basketball games.
But the Holy Name Society didn’t engage all that much with “manliness” as it is often defined today. Some of the men had actually seen war and had no interest in military cosplay. There were plenty of hunters, but they used shotguns or muzzleloaders rather than AR-15s. Their trucks were small, and more often they drove sedans. They did not display Punisher skull stickers, or whatever the ’90s equivalent may have been.
Instead, for this group, the work of “manliness” was almost boring. They organized food drives, helped raise funds for the church and saw to the broader needs of our community, whatever those happened to be. The purpose of the Holy Name Society was to help all of us be good servants—to spouses, children, parents and communities.
In the context of Catholicism, there is nothing particularly notable about this idea. To be a man in the church is to be a good servant leader, someone who models Christlike values of humility and sacrifice in the service of the greater good. In our community, it was no idle talk, either. I had more than a few male role models who did things like teach and coach while their wives made most of the money. Closer to home, my father and grandfather spent a lot of time volunteering on Habitat for Humanity projects or ferrying neighbors to and from doctor’s appointments.
It’s striking how different this kind of manliness is from the kind that has become so common in our culture. The masculinity of servant leadership is grounded in the Gospels and centuries of thinking about what it meant to take Christ’s sacrifice as a guide for how one might act in the world. It emphasizes both strength and vulnerability, precisely because both of these qualities are brought together in the cross.
The manliness one sees extolled on social media and, increasingly, in our politics, may represent a comparatively small number of American men, but its growing influence, especially among American youth, makes it worth taking seriously. Most significantly for this discussion, this version of manliness is decidedly post-Christian: It rejects softness and vulnerability in favor of dominance and aggression. It teaches that there is no good but what a man can take for himself, no relationship that should not be exploited for personal gain. Manliness, in this view, is not a matter of character. Instead, masculinity is reduced to simulacrum—the relentless cultivation of a series of images, attitudes and tastes.
No wonder that some Christian churchgoers, according to Christianity Today editor Russell Moore, have complained to their pastors that core Gospel teachings are “liberal” or “weak.” But this version of manliness is just another form of the idol worship condemned in the Old Testament. The Israelites worshiped a golden calf when Moses left his flock to go to the mountain. Now, many Americans idolize a man who famously owns a golden toilet.
This collapse has too many causes to delineate here. It is hard not to think, however, that at least part of the problem with men is the retreat of Christianity as a cultural force in American life, the repercussions of which the American left has not yet recognized. There are certainly plenty of examples of Christian men, including members of the clergy, engaging in shameful, even criminal conduct in spite of their professed devotion to the Gospels. But I also think the church exerted a salutary influence on men that is increasingly hard to find as we move further into the 21st century. Servant leadership and the fellowship it fosters can create a positive and pro-social form of manliness, one that appeals to a desire for strength and dignity while also enabling men to engage with each other and others in meaningful works of care.
It is this latter piece that is so often missing from popular archetypes of masculinity. The basic thesis of the contemporary “manosphere”—a loose collection of writers and influencers that might include Joe Rogan, Jake Paul and Andrew Tate, but also political figures like Elon Musk and JD Vance—is that the world has fallen because the work of care has escaped the feminine space of the home and entered the realms of manly life. Today’s men are soft, weak, passive, this version of the story goes, and the only way we can get back on track is by reorganizing ourselves around a renewed version of traditional gender roles. Private care work for the women, and public, performative work for the men—and the more testosterone, the more spectacle, the better.
What I learned growing up in the church, though, is that this temptation to make one’s manhood a spectacle is a grave form of error. There is nothing durable about building one’s persona around a series of Instagram posts, no way to avoid the hard, daily work of being useful to oneself and others.
Today’s cult of masculinity sometimes claims to hearken back to a classical age, suggesting, as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has written, that the world of combat sports and physical fitness is where men can be most fully themselves. But this not only gets the significance of works like The Iliad and The Odyssey deeply wrong, it also gives the dullest performances of manhood a depth and clarity of purpose they do not deserve.
The challenge of being a man in the present is not fashioning some kind of epic purpose out of the fragments of modern life. It is not rejecting the moral and physical duties that some regard as belonging to women. One does not need to abandon the concepts of gender difference or complementarity to acknowledge that masculinity as defined by the church encompasses far more than today’s “manosphere” allows. The tradition of servant leadership, embodied in so many Catholic groups past and present, provides a framework in which men could be together in community in the fullness of their masculinity—one that encompasses not just traditionally masculine behaviors and activities but the fullness of human experience.
As we move into a future in which men and boys seem more lost than ever, servant leadership can also remind us of a basic, but increasingly forgotten truth: that care might be the most manly activity of all.
[Read next: “Dudes thinking big thoughts: Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson and the lure of the rabbit hole”]
