Punching Life in the Mouth? Why Christian Manhood Isn’t About Machismo

Christian manhood cannot be grounded in a cultural masculinity script (aggression, dominance, avoidance of the “feminine”), because such scripts are durable cultural constructions rather than biblical categories. What the church owes Christian men is discipleship — learning to live under the authority of Christ — not a “masculinity” that functions as a de facto rival authority.

Key Takeaways

• Masculine and feminine are durable cultural constructions, not biblical categories. They shift over time and vary across societies. Ancient writers already used these categories flexibly — women could be praised for “masculine courage,” men criticized for “feminine weakness.” Treating these categories as theological givens smuggles cultural consensus in as biblical anthropology.
• Levant and Richmond’s four-part traditional masculinity script captures the cultural content. Avoid the feminine; pursue success; project strength; embrace adventure and violence. None of the four is a biblical criterion for Christian manhood.
• A 2024 MDPI study shows gender role orientation predicts aggression more reliably than biological sex. Females adopting traditional masculinity score higher on aggression than females adopting traditional femininity. Performing “masculinity” is running a cultural script, not expressing nature.
• D. C. Schindler’s Freedom from Reality names the underlying move. Cultural masculinity makes goodness a function of the will’s choice — selected traits treated as if they were “the good” itself. Evangelical books like Mark Driscoll’s Act Like a Man ratify the cultural script under theological cover.
• The Telos Problem is the deepest error. “Christian manhood” defined by cultural masculinity points men toward a standard other than Christ. Masculinity becomes a de facto authority. A Christian man is a disciple learning to submit to the will of God on behalf of others — not a man who has passed a cultural inspection.

Primary Sources Cited

Is “Girly” a Biological Category or a Cultural Script?

When I was in the fifth grade, I asked a girl out on a date—or asking one of her friends to ask her for me. She declined. The reason she gave was what stuck: I was too “girly.” Admittedly, I was a late bloomer. I wasn’t particularly good at sports. I was “bookish” and tended to excel at art, particularly sketching. I wasn’t overly aggressive either tending to avoid conflict rather than seeking it out. Looking back, the description of “girly” made some sense.

As I got older, I kept drawing and reading, but I found the weight room. At 48, I weigh in at a reasonably lean 215lbs, qualified for the 1000lbs club (sum of deadlift, squat, and bench press equals 1000lbs or more), and have tattoos covering three-quarters of both my arms. By most cultural measures, I stopped being “girly” a long time ago.

Still, something about the “girly” label has never made much sense. What changed between fifth grade and now wasn’t my biological sex, but my relationship to a set of cultural expectations. While we have a reasonably clear account of what makes someone biologically male or female, what it means to be masculine doesn’t follow from biology in the same way (if at all). It looks more like something we have constructed collectively and culturally. If that’s the case, building a Christian theology of manhood based on that cultural consensus is riskier than most people may want to admit.

As I began to look into these matters, I started reading books and journal articles, as well as watching sermons and lectures on masculinity on YouTube and various podcasts. I also had some guests on my own podcast—Thinking Christian—as part of my research process. Eventually, I ran across some of Mark Driscoll’s videos on YouTube and then purchased his book titled Act Like a Man. While I don’t disagree with Driscoll on every point, I’ve chosen to use his work as a running example of the sort of assumptions that often drive conversations about Christian manhood. My goal is not to demonize Driscoll, but to use an easily accessible, non-technical body of work to illustrate some of the challenges I see in Christian presentations of manhood.

In choosing Driscoll, who represents a more conservative stance, I am also not endorsing more liberal treatments of Christian manhood. My goal is not to sway God’s people to adopt one or another cultural conception of masculinity, but to think biblically about these matters so that what it means to be male in the world emerges from discipleship. Discipleship involves learning to live under the authority of Christ and is the only adequate framework for understanding what it means to be a Christian human who happens to be male—not the other way around. Discipleship will always position us at a unique angle to the various ideas presented within our cultures and societies because discipleship is ordered to the only human whose life resulted in resurrection, ascension, and glorification. Jesus shows us what it means to live surrendered to the will of God, and in doing so, what it means to give oneself away for others.

What Do Cultural Stereotypes of Masculinity Actually Measure?

Terms like “masculinity” and “femininity” are hard to avoid in these conversations. They are embedded in the way we talk about men and women. Abandoning them entirely would likely create more confusion than clarity. However, we need to understand what these terms are. They describe relatively durable cultural constructions that can shift over time, vary across societies, and do not map cleanly onto biological sex.

In his lecture “Maybe We Just Need a Different Chicken…Politeness and Civility in the Function of Contemporary Ideology,” philosopher and cultural critic Slavoij Žižek argues that ideologies influence the questions we ask about the real problems we face. He suggests, “The lesson is that there are not only wrong answers to questions. There are also wrong questions I the sense that the way we perceive a problem, which can be a very real problem, is effectively a part of the problem.” Framing masculinity or femininity as ideologies suggests that they reflect an (1) underlying set of values and characteristics (2) reflective of a particular culture that are (3) not necessarily connected to biological sex.

Returning to the question of why being labeled “girly” as a fifth grader makes sense, then, when viewed from the perspective of gender ideology. A more sophisticated way to say “girly” would have been to say the fifth-grade version of myself didn’t exhibit the culturally determined values and characteristics stereotypically signifying someone as “a male.” While there isn’t a single definition of masculinity, Levant and Richmond suggest that there are “a common constellation of standards and expectations associated with the traditional male role in the Western world.” These common standards and expectations include: (1) avoiding “feminine” things, (2) orientation toward success and achievement, (3) portrayal of strength and avoiding the appearance of weakness, and (4) the pursuit of adventure and the use of violence when necessary.

Masculinity ideologies don’t seem to be particularly helpful even when decoupled from sex. For example, a 2024 study found that gender role orientations had a greater effect than sex on aggression in both males and females. Females with characteristics associated with traditional masculinity exhibited higher levels of aggression than female with characteristics associated with traditional femininity. As males and females seek to conform to societal standards of masculinity—and, presumably, femininity—they may not be acting out their sex but running a cultural script. Though sex—or nature—is not unimportant, this research points to the influence of culture—or nurture—on the dispositions that men and women adopt. Playing into existing notion of masculine and feminine cannot be the church’s strategy. Instead, we must allow discipleship to mold us into male and female followers of Christ under the authority of God’s word not under the thumb of a set of cultural expectations.

“One sometimes hears the rather glib complaint that modern freedom represents a rejection of all constraints: people think you can just do whatever you want, whatever “feels good,” regardless of the consequences it might have for oneself or for others. This is not the criticism we are making; the point here is more subtle. To say that the goodness of the options is effectively a function of the will’s choice is compatible with a recognition of all sorts of constraints on that choice; it is simply a denial of the very specific “constraint”—which we have suggested is at the same time an “empowering”—of actual goodness.”

Masculinity and femininity may well be gesturing toward the good, true, and beautiful. Their conceptualization is not problematic because they have no connection to these realities but because they are only selectively guided by them. In other words, the option—the selection of cultural values and characteristics associated with masculinity and femininity—is misrepresented as the good.

Because gender role orientations are not completely disconnected from reality of what is good, true, and beautiful, it can be easy to adopt them as our own cultural scripts, baptizing them into Christianity and encouraging men to conform to cultural stereotypes rather than pursuing the image of Christ. Such encouragement is a subtle legitimation of a type of “masculinity” that creates misperceptions about what it means to “act like a man.” Consider, for instance, the following passage from Mark Driscoll’s Act Like A Man:

“True or false: Can women feel comfortable in a masculine environment if its not angry or aggressive? True. Can you take your girlfriend to a sports bar? Yes. Do comfortable, healthy heterosexual normal men feel comfortable in a profoundly feminine environment? No. I’ve never seen a healthy guy ask his gal, ‘Can I go to the nail salon with you?’ If your’re that guy, you need to know, with the full love of Jesus, you are a weirdo.”

If spending time with my wife and daughters means I need to get a manicure or pedicure, I am 100% comfortable heading to the nail salon. Driscoll’s statement and, in my estimation, much of his book, is built on underlying assumptions about masculinity justified by scripture but not rooted in it. While Driscoll would likely agree that manhood should be rooted in and emerge from Christian discipleship, I believe he would want to advance a cultural picture of what sort of man would emerge from such discipleship. Though there is much to agree with in Act Like a Man, such as the call to be responsible husbands and fathers—if one decides to get married and have children. However, when Driscoll says that the Church is to “be a countercultural subculture where men are masculine” and “women are feminine,” it is difficult to understand just what he means by “masculine” and “feminine.”

For example, at one point, Driscoll discusses emotions. He rightly notes that expressing emotion is appropriate for men. He offers a critique about “unhealthy men” who assume that there are “feminine and masculine emotions” (e.g., men don’t cry or show affection). This seems to be a plausible extension of particular masculine ideologies (e.g., not showing weakness). However, Driscoll closes the paragraph noting, “Men and women both bear the image and likeness of God and have the same emotions; they’re just expressed in masculine and feminine ways.” While it may be tempting to say “amen” and move on, it is important to recognize that apart from a cultural script about gender role orientations, what it means to express emotions “in masculine and feminine ways” is non-sensical. Can we really identify Jesus’s tears at the death of Lazarus (Jn 11:35) as masculine and the weeping of Mary during the same incident (11:32-33) as feminine? Aside from the difference in their sex (i.e., Jesus was male and Mary female), there is no indication that Jesus weeps in a masculine way while Mary weeps in a feminine way. Both just weep.

Why Does “Christian Manhood” Grounded in Masculinity Point to the Wrong Telos?

The problem with advocating for a particular notion of “Christian manhood” based on cultural ideas of masculinity isn’t simply that the cultural content is wrong (though it often is). The deeper problem is that doing so points men toward the wrong telos. They push men to a standard other than Christ. Masculinity becomes a de facto authority.

About the Author

James Spencer, PhD, is a theologian, author, and host of the Thinking Christian podcast, where he writes and speaks on Christian formation, political theology, and technology. He holds a PhD in Theological Studies from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and completed the Institute for Educational Management at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He serves as President of the D.L. Moody Center in Northfield, Massachusetts, as adjunct faculty in Wheaton College's MA in Leadership program, and as an Associate Research Fellow at the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, Christianity.com, and Sojourners; he has been quoted in The Telegraph; and he is a regular guest on Stand in the Gap Today with the American Pastors Network. His forthcoming book is Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press, Fall 2026). Learn more at jamesgspencer.com.