When I moved back to the United States from Europe in 2024, I was surprised how often I found myself in conversations with other men about “biblical masculinity.” I heard the common refrains: “Men today are effeminate,” “The church is becoming soft,” and “The way to advance the gospel is for men to become men.” Clearly, gone are the days when “hypermasculinity” or “toxic masculinity” was the culprit; now it is “femininity.”

Today, this idea that Christianity’s future depends on a gendered recovery project is not marginal but increasingly mainstream. It is delivered prepackaged daily, directly to young men who eagerly digest its contents. Consider the promotional blurb for Dale Partridge’s book, The Manliness of Christ: How the Masculinity of Jesus Eradicates Effeminate Christianity: “Today’s Christianity is fixated on emotionalism, pageantry, and a softly lit worship experience aimed to make you sway your hips for Jesus. … Dale Partridge demonstrates how the Bible presents the sheer manliness of Christ and how it should radically restore masculinity in the church.” While some of this language is familiar to me from evangelical culture, the sharpness of the rhetoric feels new.

Of course, this rhetoric closely resembles language in political settings. The same logic animates both critiques: one mocks today’s church as “feminine” while the other dismisses liberals as “effeminate.” The unspoken assumption is that femininity is bad and masculinity is good, even when we’re not talking about men but about a political party or a religion.

Growing Up Masculine

This takes me back to my own upbringing, glued to the couch, watching a VHS recording of a WWE match in the late nineties. Mick Foley, wrestling as Mankind, faced the Undertaker in the match known as the “King of the Ring,” where both wrestlers ended up perched on top of a sixteen-foot cage. The Undertaker threw Mankind off the cage, and he crashed through a table below. Somehow, after recovering, Mankind climbed back up, only to be choke-slammed through the roof of the cage in a fall that helped seal the match’s place in wrestling lore. Watching the screen, my pulse was racing as I absorbed the mayhem.

As a kid, these moments felt real, almost sacred in their certainty. I viewed these men as protectors, embodiments of strength and courage, fighting for what they believed in or simply fighting to win. Even though the storylines were scripted and the motivations were manufactured, my young, impressionable mind did not register these distinctions. What I saw instead was an ideal of masculinity, pain absorbed without complaint, dominance proved in public, and worth measured by how much violence a body could inflict and endure.

Through my childhood and adolescence, my idols reflected the same macho world I was consuming for entertainment. My film heroes were Jackie Chan and Jet Li, men who could take on dozens of enemies and come out unscathed. These men were the bravest and most courageous figures I could imagine. On Sundays, I loved watching my NFL team, the St. Louis Rams in the glory days of “The Greatest Show on Turf,” rooting for Kurt Warner, Marshall Faulk, and Torry Holt as they dominated the field with power and skill.

In my mind, “manly” meant kicking butt on screen and on the gridiron. I remember watching the original Mortal Kombat movie on repeat, and then The Matrix, completely absorbed. I was enamored by how cool it all looked, the choreography of violence, the sense that fighting and even killing could be rendered as style, as confidence, as something to admire.

Growing up, masculinity was not something adult men in my life sat down and taught me, even if it was modeled in small ways. Instead, I was formed by the liturgy of sports, entertainment, and a set of shaky assumptions about what being a man is supposed to look like. I honestly cannot recall a single conversation with an older male role model about what manhood was, not in youth group, not in school, not anywhere.

Enter Jesus

As I grew up, I bore the fruit of this masculine liturgy. The traits I absorbed – violence, aggression, and emotional hardness – were not treated as liabilities in the world I came from, but were praised as virtues. In high school, some of my worst impulses were only tempered by football and wrestling, where aggression could be redirected into something disciplined, even “productive.” And this experience was not unique to me; it was shared among my male peers. We drew from the same cultural ideals, heroes, and performances of toughness. It took years after I became a Christian to unlearn the habits that formed me and to recognize how deeply these values shaped my instincts. This is why I bristle when I hear people say the church has become “too feminine” and needs to become “more masculine.”

We find a better understanding of biblical manhood in David and Jesus. David was a renowned warrior, but he was also capable of tenderness. When he lost his best friend Jonathan, David had no trouble expressing affection, shedding tears, and putting his love into poetry (2 Sam. 1:11–27). Jesus, too, expressed emotion without embarrassment. Yes, he drove out livestock with a whip and overturned the money changers’ tables (John 2:14– 17), but he also wept at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:35) and over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41–42). Whatever else biblical masculinity is, it clearly makes room for grief, tenderness, and closeness without treating any of that as weakness (John 13:23–25). More importantly, Jesus was not afraid to show compassion and pity, especially to the weak and the outsider (Luke 10:25–37), and said his followers would be “poor in spirit,” “meek,” and “merciful” (Matt. 5:3–10).

When I became a Christian, one of the most important gifts I received was the Spirit’s work of making me honest with myself. I learned to notice my emotions rather than deny them, and to attend to them without being ruled by them. It felt like being given new eyes, a way of seeing my life beyond my ego and my limited perspective. In that sense, I began, slowly, to see myself as God sees me. That new vision gave me room to examine my motivations and actions with clarity, and to trace the patterns that had brought me there. I started rebuilding my life around different values, learning to care for others before myself, to listen rather than perform, and to recognize vulnerable people as precious in the sight of God.

Our Cultural Moment

As we move through a cultural moment that treats “effeminacy” as the problem, whatever that word is meant to signal, we should pay close attention to the virtues still shaping young men. We are at a crossroads. One path doubles down on aggression, dominance, and contempt, calling all this “strength.” The other looks to the cross-shaped life of Jesus, where strength is measured by restraint, courage is expressed through sacrifice, and maturity shows itself in tenderness toward the vulnerable.

Podcasts featuring tattooed pastors and “manly men” insist that men need to become more masculine. At the same time, a booming ecosystem of podcasts and platforms, often called the “manosphere,” is motivated and sustained by perceived threats to men from changing social norms. This broadly defined sphere offers “formation” through figures who signal toughness and dominance. The fantasy, often shaped around men trained to kill or fight for a living, is reinforced by rhetoric in churches that warns against a feminizing Christian culture and a broader effeminate society.

As someone who has lived and traveled widely across Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia and Africa, I have seen how American expectations of masculinity are not only unusually intense but also remarkably brittle. American men often read men from other cultures as less masculine, which suggests we are consuming a cultural and political trope, not a timeless ideal. In other countries, I’ve caught myself instinctively doing this, judging men as less masculine because they show affection differently, or carry themselves differently, or do not perform toughness in the ways I was trained to recognize. The speed of these comparisons tells me what I need to know. American masculinity is not neutral. It is a cultural liturgy, and it trains our sensibilities. The problem is not that American men are insufficiently masculine; rather, it is that our culture has already narrowed the definition of masculinity in unhelpful ways, glorifying physical strength, dominance, contempt, and control.

I am all for personal responsibility, financial wisdom, robust social circles, and male mentors. Sports can also be a great way to teach life lessons. Many men’s groups, podcasts, and books helpfully advocate for those things. But the obsessive fixation on an “effeminate” American society, and the proposal that we must reassert masculine norms to heal the nation, is misguided. I do not want our society or churches to become more masculine. Through conversion and repentance and spiritual formation in the way of Jesus, I have finally crawled out from under the shadow of an unhealthy, superficial, and distinctly American masculinity myself, and I know its dehumanizing logic and contempt for weakness. This “ideal” is not something we should desire, and it is not good for us. The way forward is to recover the virtues our culture mocks as weak, virtues that are, in fact, Christlike.