There is a hardwired instinct in all men that drives them to give their lives and use their strength in projects and ambitions beyond themselves. This drive is built into them by their creator, because he made them in his image, and it exists around the world, across all religions, nations, and generations. It is part of masculinity. All men have this instinctive drive, it is only a matter of how they use it.
For a few hundred years, Christianity held influence over American masculinity. Men used their strength and ambition to build, bless, provide for, and protect the weak. This is not the only kind of masculinity there is, but it is the kind that develops from a worldview centered around Christ, who used his power to serve and not to be served, and who gave up his life for the sake of others, knowing his eternity was secure. Men who follow Christ will use their strength the way he did for the same reasons he did.
Christian masculinity built the United States from its infancy, starting over a century before it became a nation. Christian masculinity fought wars for independence, not wars for dominance. This is a unique trait found nowhere else in history. Christian masculinity shed its own blood to set others free, and built businesses to serve their neighbors and provide jobs and wealth to their communities. After several centuries of unprecedented wealth, freedom, and security, Christian masculinity died of a thousand cuts, many of them self-inflicted by a lukewarm and passive church.
This leaves a masculinity vacuum to be filled. Christian masculinity will either be replaced by non-Christian masculinity, or it will resurrect, but something will fill the void. It is only a matter of what.
Woke Feminism
Feminism will not fill the masculinity gap. If feminism could do this, it would have. Feminism is a false religion that attacks Christian masculinity and Christian femininity but builds nothing in its place. Feminism has nothing to offer. It is an empty worldview. Women cannot be men. They can be bad women or good women, but they cannot be men. The harder they try the stupider all of it gets.
China
China has a surplus of about 30 million men. These are men who have no chance of marriage and family, because the previous generation “aborted” murdered all the girls. When the Chinese government ordered a one-child policy for an entire generation, the parents chose to have boys, and if they were pregnant with a girl, they killed her.
The Chinese government removed the existence of God from their minds, and became futile and evil in their thoughts. God said “It is not good for the man to be alone,” and China raised up a generation of 30 million men to be alone. The results will not be good. China did not raise these men to use their strength for building, providing, and protecting. China raised them as atheists who fear and obey the state instead of God.
What will these surplus and godless men do with their strength? They will do what all men do who have no direction, no eternal worldview, and no domesticating influence in the home. They will kill and die in wars or be enslaved. The ones who survive these evils will become the enslavers and destroyers themselves over whatever is left. It is not because they are Chinese, but because they are statists with no fear of God. The only reason they are alive is because their parents sacrificed their sisters in their place, and these men live every day in that worldview.
If American men give up their Christian masculine identity, they run a real risk of being conquered and replaced by men who were taught to kill to live.
It is not whether men will fill the gap, it is which kind of men.
Islam
Christian masculinity went soft, grew ashamed of itself, and quit, but Islamic men have not gone soft. It is noteworthy that Moms for Liberty and other such groups that protect children in the government schools, have found Muslim men joining in on the same side. Where are the Christian men?
Historically speaking, a cultural clash involving Muslim men and Christian women does not usually find them on the same side. Muslims worship a god who rules by force and demands submission. Men who follow that god naturally behave the same way. It demonstrates how serious and evil the woke leftist government schools have become that a group of smart and upright women would find ground with Muslim men.
Who Will Win?
The battle of masculinity will be won by the men whose core convictions are strongest. The first to lose will be the woke, because they have no core convictions and no unifying standard. The woke, feminized manhood of the USA will disappear in a moment. It has no core.
This is why there are no transgender, gay, and woke activists in China or the Islamic world. These cultures are dominated by men with unbending convictions, for better or worse. The soft, post-Christian, feminist man of the USA will not survive forever. He will either resurrect his Christian masculinity, or be replaced by non-Christian masculinity.
Lessons of history teach that when soft men are replaced, they are replaced by hard men, usually quite suddenly, and not on favorable terms. The passive and feminized manhood of the USA will not go on forever, therefore it will stop. Who stops them, and who replaces them are the only questions.
Signs of Hope
If there is hope for Christian masculinity in the west, it is because at its core, Christianity believes in the resurrection. The hope of the resurrection is the ground motive that built Christian masculinity in the first place. Christian men, of all the men in the world, ought to be the most joyful, bold, courageous, and serious. Christian men believe in a resurrection, so they laugh at fear. They have no fear of man, no fear of death, and eternal hope in the making of earth as it is in heaven. This provides an infinite degree of hope, joy, and courage. It also provides a heavenly tether to morality that holds Christian men to high standards. Secular Statism does not offer this eternal hope at all, and Islam corrupts it.
In many evangelical circles there is frequent talk of revival. The word “revival” has connotations all over the map, but the kind of revival that is necessary at this hour is a full-scale revival. It must be a revival of manhood and womanhood, skilled trades, faithful men, large families, small businesses, private schools, laughter, and a parallel economy that is distinct and better than the slop and tyranny being produced everywhere else.
This kind of revival will need men to lead it, because that is the nature of Christian masculinity. It will either rise and take on the mantle of faithful and bold leadership, or it will passively stand by while men of greater resolve take over.
T.S. Weidler is a pastor in Pennsylvania who writes regularly at City on a Hill. https://tsweidler.substack.com
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/the_masculinity_vacuum.html
