By Kerwin Holmes, Jr.

Let another man praise you, and not your own mouth; a stranger, and not your own lips.
-Proverbs 27:2

Recently, a man named Andrew Tate went viral on the up and coming media outreach platform that former Fox News host Tucker Carlson is building on the Twitter platform in a recent interview Carlson did with Tate. I admit that I have not seen the full interview, but I hope to at some point view the interview in its fullness.

What I write here has more to do with a sounding call for Christian men to take notice of what is happening in the social sphere, to become engaged and aware of the conversations arising, and to also help to become influential voices in the competing ideas and contest of masculinity in the public marketplace of ideas and culture. It is from a concern that I have held for years and which I have shown in various blog posts here for years. And that concern is this:

The Church at large has largely become filled with emasculated and/or passive ideals such that it is hardly a championing environment for the bolstering of a healthy Christ-like masculinity nor a suitable competitor against rival and powerful icons of masculine culture.

That sentence is constructed very intentionally, and I hope for the rest of this blog post to explain why it is so. But first, I should tie this back to why I mentioned the Tucker Carlson interview with Andrew Tate in the first place. Andrew Tate is the latest popular face in what is a surge of media personalities grasping for power to (re)define what masculinity is. This is an effort that is particularly engaged within what can be construed as the intellectual West… encompassing the geographical regions of the Americas, Europe, and some parts of Africa and the Middle East… by what is the intellectual West’s assault upon any idea of a coherent and binary masculinity.

But this movement is admittedly engaged in cultural conversations beyond the West, typically engaging in what is often described as the rather emasculated cultures of the Far East (China, Korea, and Japan) and locked in a sort of engagement with cultures alternative to the West (such as Southwestern and Central Asian cultures and societies). Such is the nature of today’s globalized media influence.

For Andrew Tate in particular, a key reason to his rise is not due principally to his seizing upon yet another opportune cultural zeitgeist that often propels bombastic and opportunistic personalities to stardom. Rather, as I have discussed within previous posts dedicated to the “wussification” of Christian leadership, the lack of adequate teaching on Christian romance, or the total absence of any Christian notion or doctrine of self-defense, the reason that men such as Andrew Tate have seen such skyrocketing success among impressionable young boys and men alike in today’s world is largely due to the paucity and total absence of impressive men in today’s society. And a great reason for this lack of impressive men, particularly in the Western nations whence these popular modern-day sophists derive, is because of the vacuum that Christian men have left upon the world’s stage by their own 1) absence, 2) dereliction of duties, and 3) apathy.

And this is why I have the concern up above for how the Church at large has surrounded herself with stories, lessons, and versions of Biblical stories and historical caricatures (“versions” being the operative word there) such that only emasculating and passive ideals remain.

The result is that Christian men largely do not have any natural response to any threats upon their Christian community, their masculine identity, nor their familial bonds. They largely are fleeced when it comes to satisfactory reasons necessary for arguments or debates about how men ought to be essentially distinguished in personality and mannerisms in contradistinction to the female species. Christian maxims such as “love” and “empathy” have so washed even the self-proclaimed “masculine” sermons on any given Sunday that it feels transgressive, almost brutal, even, to dare imagine a sermon being delivered exegeting what great pride God had in forging David ben Jesse as a blooded warrior and man of war who conquered in the Name of God (true story, by the way).

It is easier in the cultural imaginations of Christians to imagine a passive Christian martyr slain by oppressors to the doom for the women and children behind him than to imagine an advancing warrior Christian martyr going to his sure death for the sake of those same women and children behind him for the sake of the honor in strength that God has crafted in him as a man. I know this. I have already written about it as a testimony several times (see the aforementioned blog posts hyperlinked in the previous paragraphs).

It is no accident that, among his various self-accolades, Andrew Tate champions himself as a world-class kickboxer, a womanizer, and a leader of a generation (or even several generations) of impressionable males into what he would deem an exodus out of the “globalist matrix.” And he is not the only public figure vying for the limelight of masculine definitions– he is merely today’s convenient figure to demonstrate the point that I have been making.

Again, what have been some of the main concerns that I have written about concerning masculinity in Christianity? For a reminder: the total absence of any Christian notion or doctrine of self-defense (Tate is a self-styled world-class kickboxer), the lack of adequate teaching on Christian romance (Tate is a self-styled womanizer), and the “wussification” of Christian leadership (Tate is a self-styled leader of a generation of impressionable males)… these issues have long been my concerns.

The point is that the Christian men are simply not alright. Their Christian boys are simply not alright. Their Christian masculinity on the whole is not all-right. There are considerable elements missing from modern expressions of Christian masculinity as a cultural phenomenon.
We must rediscover them.

But first we must see the “why,” as in, “Why we must rediscover the considerable elements of essential manhood.” The fact is that there have always been competing forms and methods of behavior and lifestyle in any cultural expression of humanity. For every Yahwist Israelite village there was an element teetering towards the easier cultural influences of the Asherot and Ba’alim. For every John Adams there is a Thomas Jefferson. And for every W.E.B. Dubois there is a Booker T. Washington. There are also those in between, or even alternatives. There are Gideon’s, there are James Madison’s, and there are John Hope’s. Culture is messy and full of competing interests and conversation.

Masculinity according to Confucius who honored familial ties even over the ethics of righteousness is paradoxically different from the masculinity of Jonathan ben Saul in 1 Samuel who chose loyalty to his younger friend and protégé over loyalty to his own father and king.

The masculinity of the Christianized Old English tale of Beowulf is obviously different than that of the Norse tales of the thunder god Thor.

And the masculinity of mortal Hector whose parental lineage included not a single deity in the whole wide pagan pantheon was markedly different than the masculinities of the many Greek demigods that he faced upon the battlefields outside of Troy’s walls.

What is occurring now in the midst of the social throes of a dying masculine tradition in the intellectual West are the onrushes of competing masculinities to climb the gilded stairs to the throne of cultural dominance and ultimate definition. Christianity, with its Christian masculinity, is one of them, or else, it ought to be, if only us Christian men can get our pants on quick enough to join the contest.

Any wise and discerning eye can tell that Andrew Tate, for all of his pomp and circumstance, is what is best described as a “lesser man.” Lesser men can be powerful, and they can even be capable of violence and great feats of strength, yet they lack the core moral qualities which restrain such efforts into the ethos which turns warrior men into heroes. Tate is not someone whose lifestyle is worth emulating or condoning in any healthy expression of masculine virtue. For one, he overhypes his own record. His kickboxing career is not as impressive on the scale of an elite fighter for a professional as one should hope for a man who bloviates of himself as Tate does. He states that he is for “traditional” masculinity and that men should say “what [they] mean and mean what [they] say,” a call for integrous males. But even with the label “traditional,” as noted above, one must choose among several competing forms what that “traditional” stance actually entails. And even so, given his own lies and actions, Tate fails at his own self-centered standard (as can be seen below in a rather useful video compiling his words in contrast to his interview with Tucker Carlson).

But the fighter who shows up to the ring is always mightier than the absentee. And, along the lines of what I say has been the vacuum left behind by Christian men, the first critique is their relative absence in public display and conversations. This is not to say that there are not Christian men in the public eye. Unfortunately, several Christian men are prominently there, such as former vice-president Mike Pence, and they hardly have the strength of character and excitement of action, or even history of deeds, to inspire any generation to a competition with rival masculinities (including their own). But beyond the celebrity we must reinvest within the pedestrian.

Your local schoolboys should be able to point out the exemplary Christian males in their neighborhoods and be able to recall their names and mannerisms by heart.
Your local construction workers should know several men by name whom they can call upon for basic Christian advice without trepidation for becoming belittled/patronized or revulsion from encountering a wuss.
Your average mailman should be able to identify Christian households and their manner of raising their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord or the single Christian man still trying to get ahead in the world based upon the frequency in which he visits your home. But we cannot do this while we are absent in public and checked out of everyday life.
Absence is surrender.

And this feeds into the second characteristic needing to change for the vacuum that Christian men have created to become rightfully filled by their presence: the dereliction of duties. Far too often Christian males are in unhelpful and unfruitful competition with themselves to ever allow for competent men to rise to the occasion among their ranks. I have witnessed and experienced this personally in terms of the manners in which Christian leaders who happen upon Christian men who are gifted in some way (perhaps even gifted in ways that they are not, or perhaps more capable in some manner of action–be it sports or even fixing a faucet) that such Christian leaders often either rush to have such a man under their direct control or manipulation within a leadership capacity (so as to co-opt their glory) or (especially when such a man does not wish to join the Church bureaucracy) maneuver to minimize that man’s skills in the congregation.

But this competition also comes in other forms, the most pernicious and common being a nullification or emasculating of the hardened and gritty characteristic of valorous, heroic men with an adulterated version of a Biblical character profile or story. How many times has the claim that Christ was ever only critical against the Pharisees as “religious theologians” been used to promote the idea of the Christian’s irresponsibility to fight for the Gospel through activism and participation within the government? And how many times has such a version of Christ’s life been used even though Paul, once he too was face to face before that exact same Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, manipulated the partisan Pharisaical (Pharisees!) and Sadducean (Sadducees!) divisions within that very same Judean government in order to appeal to Caesar?

Was Caesar just a fancy Roman with a cool name, and the Sanhedrin simply a body of nerdy Judean schoolboys?
How could at one point the Pharisees simply be a religious denomination and yet, in the same judicial context for a contemporary of Christ they are a partisan faction of the bipartisan Judean government?
Were these not these selfsame governing authorities, the Sanhedrin and the Caesar, in direct gubernatorial power over both of those men?
Yet we continue to say that Christ never once spoke in rebuke to governing officials. Are we serious? How can we be? How many times more must we hear of turning the other cheek than hear about when the Christ also whirled whips and hurled exegetical rebukes and even insults to those who were impious authorities in power– teachers of “the Law?” What governs if not “the Law?”
Dereliction is cowardice.

Lastly there is apathy. Many men have simply had their hearts snatched out of their chests, or simply have had their chests snatched out entirely, and this is due to many factors, some being a lack of secular eschatological hope given certain theological commitments, others being the overt and exclusive pacification of all Christian virtue and expression. For the first, there is plenty of room for reflection, and I have written on it here before. But for the second, a more pernicious cause is afoot. Even Christian apostates such as Paul Maxwell have pointed out (while they were in our midst) the overtly and exclusively feminine manners by which Christian influencers market themselves even to other Christians. And, within feminine expression, the paradigms of grit and steadfast strength are less prominent and emphasized than within the masculine. The result is passivity misplaced, tenderness inappropriately applied– which is μαλακία: cowardice.

However one takes Maxwell’s delivery, and as tragic as his current apostasy and personal struggles are (we must pray for him and his wife and family), as a man who formerly worked within such Christian influencer camps, his words ought to at least be reckoned with.

In order to compete within the current cultural struggle for “masculinity,” the victorious masculinity must be both capable of fighting and prepared to fight. But in order to do that, that victorious masculinity must be motivated to fight. And that motivation can only come when we realize that masculinity itself will die culturally if we allow an imposter, impotent form to seize the throne of cultural definition.

The victorious masculinity must be valorous and capable of resisting the pull towards immoral actions and amoral reasoning which reside among the “lesser men,” what the Bible calls the “sons of Belial.” The victorious masculinity must be heroic, and in that, it must amass the highest morals and the protective Christlike spirit for those who are weaker and weakest in society by upholding righteousness and executing justice against all manners of wickedness.
The victorious masculinity must strive for the greatest praise that comes in the form of increasing in favor with God first, and then with fellow humanity.
The victorious masculinity must ascend in humility.
In short, it must be informed by God in man by God as man, all of God, and that includes the God who trained David’s hands for struggle and who stands today, even now, to do the same for His sons. And God has given us great witnesses in our brothers in the Bible and throughout history to look towards as examples of obedience.
Apathy is death.

Let’s start a new movement together, brothers. Group together sometime this week, hang out over a nice meal or drinks, and share in one another ways in which you may hold each other accountable to this charge. Because it will take all of us. We can no longer sit idly by. This vacuum must be filled, and let it be filled by God’s men and not by others.

And here, let me appeal especially to my Christian sisters: Please, my dear sisters of Christ and co-partakers of divine and everlasting glory, be reasonable and wise and loving to us and do not allow this current zeitgeist to blind you to the need of the masculine expression of your Christ within your Christian brothers. We need you, and you need us. Do not allow the current trend of the intellectual West that swings like a wanton pendulum to privilege female expressions over those that are male to influence you into endorsing exclusively feminine Christian beauties and expressions. Encourage your brothers to their masculine duties and even your leaders to share both masculine and feminine beauties as glorious to God above and let us cherish one another as we ought without being tossed back and forth by the world’s confused, pendulous culture.

Brothers, let’s be present in this moment that we are born within.

In lieu of a pithy quotation at the end, which is custom, please partake of these two short video resources for getting the ball rolling.