The Manosphere and the Fundamentalism Pipeline

Dr. Laura Anderson: Welcome, Dan, back to the Sunday School Dropouts podcast. I just thought of this — I think you are now officially the winner of most appearances, so your gold Sunday School Dropouts coat will be in the mail.

Dan Miller: I'll send my measurements right over, right?

Dr. Anderson: Yes, please do. We'll get you a crown also, and put you in our wall of fame.

Dan: Like one of those Burger King crowns, you know, in a gold coat. That'll be my — yeah, that'll be what I wear every time.

Dr. Anderson: I love it. It's gonna be so good. We'll start a club, and you're now the president of it, and anybody else who reaches your status, we'll get matching coats and crowns.

Dan: Sweet, yeah.

Dr. Anderson: Well, it is good to have you back. I feel like the last time we were on, we kind of teased, like, maybe we should do another episode, and then here we are — because you have been reading the best books lately.

Dan: The best, the very best.

Dr. Anderson: Yes. So for people who don't know, Dan has another podcast called Straight White American Jesus. You have been doing the "It's in the Code" Wednesday episodes for what, two years now?

Dan: Even longer. Yeah, it's been a lot of episodes now. Brad's the one who always counts the episodes — I think I'm up over 150 episodes now, maybe something like that.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah, it was originally gonna be 12.

Dan: It was gonna be like 12. It just turned into a thing, so yeah.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah, so you've been reading through just incredible material, and one of them that we are going to be using as a launching pad for our conversation today is Senator Josh Hawley's most recent book. Is it a New York Times bestseller? I don't even know if it is.

Dan: I don't know, or if it is, you're like — is it because the Republican National Committee bought, like, a bunch of copies? That whole thing that people do.

Dr. Anderson: The Mark Driscoll thing, you know, where Mars Hill bought tens of thousands of copies. Yeah, so it's probably something like that. But yeah, we're going to talk a little about manhood, might talk about the Roman Empire a little bit — what is this vision for manhood, the manosphere to fundamentalism pipeline, and all things in between. So for those of us who have not had the delight of reading Josh Hawley's book, Manhood, can you just kind of summarize what it is and the core arguments that he's trying to make, just so we have kind of a basis to go off of.

Dan: Yeah, so the title of the book is Manhood, and the subtitle kind of tells you what it is: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. His basic claim is that if men recover and reclaim authentic manhood and masculine virtue, it will fix what ails America. So, what's wrong with America is essentially a loss of authentic manhood, which is due to liberals and progressives — he calls us the new Epicureans. But it's ostensibly a Christian vision, a vision of Christian masculinity, Christian manhood. It's supposed to be drawn from the Bible and has biblical exemplars, and so on. The idea is that if you cultivate manhood — and he identifies six roles, sort of social roles that men are called to play — if they play these roles and fulfill them, America will be fixed. That's basically the long and short of it.

Dr. Anderson: That's so nice and easy, you know.

Dan: Tidy, yep.

Dr. Anderson: Mighty — which is what we need at a time like this. Well, I know when we were having our conversation about this episode, you talked about how he uses Adam in the book of Genesis as this primary model of manhood, not Jesus, but Adam. What are the theological claims he makes about men as a result of Adam, and their role?

Dan: Yeah, so I should give him some props, because I didn't actually expect it — he just has a fair amount of footnotes in his book. He's reading stuff; it's all conservative theological material, whatever. But basically his account is: in the very beginning of the Bible, for a few verses — it's not very long — in the book of Genesis, the first human, Adam, the Bible famously says is created in God's image. You have the whole story of the Garden of Eden, and basically it's this theology that says the Garden of Eden was intended to be a space of the divine presence, right? The temple. And Adam is created in God's image, and he's told to go and cultivate the earth and subdue it, and so forth. The idea is that Adam was tasked with transforming all of the earth, all of the world, into a kind of temple for God's dwelling, and that this is what it means to be created in God's image, and to be tasked with the same thing that God is tasked with. Adam fails, and so Hawley outlines what he calls the Adam saga. His way of reading the Bible is that all these other Bible stories are sort of recapitulations — like a new Adam coming up and continuing to carry forward this divine mission of making the world into God's temple. And this is the calling of men: the call of men now is to fulfill this calling, to be like Adam, and to do that.

Dr. Anderson: I do find it interesting that he is basing his picture of manhood on somebody other than Jesus. What do you think the reason is for that absence?

Dan: Yeah, I'll plug — I guess by the time people hear this, it will have come out, but I just recorded this week's "It's in the Code," and the title is "Jesus Isn't an Alpha." The simple fact of the matter is, I think part of the reason they don't use Jesus is that the Jesus of the Gospels is just not the model of manhood that the Christian manhood people tell us is the biblical model. They'll complain sometimes and say that Jesus has been feminized and the church today has turned him into a wimp, and kind of imply that there's some other, I don't know, super bro-y Jesus out there — but they almost never actually talk about Jesus when they want models of manhood. That's not where they go. They may go to other parts of the Bible. Josh Hawley looks at Joshua, right, the warrior in the book of Joshua. He looks at King David, or King Solomon. But sometimes they'll reach to pop culture. There was a book — it's an older book now — where they noted how often Braveheart comes up. That kind of thing. And Josh Hawley also talks about everything from Arthurian myth to the ancient Greeks and Romans to Gandalf. He's got a chapter on the priest, men are called to be a priest, and it's Gandalf — he literally cites Gandalf from Lord of the Rings. But the fact of the matter is, I think they don't look to Jesus because he's just not the dude they think he should be. He's talking about meekness and violating social gender norms. The pronatalists don't like him because he's not married, he doesn't have kids, he doesn't side with political authority, he's like a political loser, he gets executed by the Romans. He's just the wrong guy for the story, I think. And so they're always looking at other exemplars for their vision. And I'll just throw this out there before we move past Jesus, but it's a weird abstract thing for Christians — you're like, wait, I thought the whole Christian core claim was that this Jesus guy, who is in fact a man, is God, is God incarnate, and is the fullest revelation and manifestation of what divinity is. So, you would think, if you were going to say "biblical manhood," you'd go study what Jesus was like as a guy. Completely, completely absent from Hawley. And I should also say I'm looking at Hawley because he's not unique. There's nothing unique to him. If you look at lots of Christian masculinity stuff, the Christian side of the manosphere — all of that — you're just not going to hear a lot about Jesus. You're going to hear a lot about Christian identity and Christian manhood, this and that. But Hawley is typical in that regard, which is why I'm looking at him.

Dr. Anderson: Why do you think that is? Because I know some of these books you're referencing — with Wild at Heart by John Eldredge, the amount of times he talks about William Wallace in Braveheart, you would think he's actually in the Bible, for the amount of esteem he gives him. I think Kristin Kobes Du Mez's book, Jesus and John Wayne, touches on this a bit — like, when and why did we transfer from the picture of Jesus as, here's what it means to be a Christian man in this world, to now, whether it's William Wallace or Gandalf or whatever the next biggest football star is? Why do you think there was that shift?

Dan: Yeah, I'll go way back to what I think is actually a really fundamental shift in Christian thought and culture, and it's Emperor Constantine in the Roman Empire. For the first two, three hundred years of Christianity in the Roman West, for example, it was largely assumed that to be a Christian, you had to be a pacifist. All of Jesus' teachings require this, and there were debates about whether Roman soldiers could become Christians, or if you were a Roman soldier, did you have to repent of that. Well, then the Roman Emperor becomes Christian, and all of a sudden Christianity has to be okay with being imperial, with being the religion of an empire. You get thinkers like Augustine who take on that role of essentially re-articulating it. Most of the history of Christianity in the West has been as the religion of power, the religion of empire. And so I think that vision of a certain kind of masculinity — about imperial power and warrior cultures and patriarchal society — gets kind of projected into the Bible and becomes the lens through which the Bible is interpreted, and therefore the Christian tradition and theology, and so forth. There are more proximate answers — everybody walking around now is not like, "Well, Emperor Augustine said this or that." But I think it's just a long, really long Western Christian cultural habit. I think what we see today is really the latest version of that. It's often been a kind of minority discourse to talk about Jesus as meek, as healer, as this and that. Those traditions have always been there as well, but I think they've often been counter-traditions to the culturally dominant forms of Christianity that Americans, through the colonial period forward, also inherit and modify in different ways.

Dr. Anderson: Do you think that's connected to a desire for power and control? Because when I'm looking at imperialist versus pacifist — a pacifist, generally speaking, is not going to be a person in a position of power or control, and your influence deeply diminishes at that point. I'm just curious about the correlation between those.

Dan: Yeah, I think they're absolutely related — surprise, surprise. Christianity becomes a discourse of power. And you can get that with Jesus too. The New Testament doesn't speak with one voice. You've got the Jesus of the book of Revelation, who comes back as a conqueror and fights his foes and tramples — literally tramples — his enemies, and there's blood flowing everywhere. So if you want the conquering warrior Jesus, you can get that too. I think it's absolutely about power and authority. It's about sanctifying power and authority — making it good. It's okay to exercise power and authority as long as it's for the right reason, or for the truth, or for Christian society, or whatever. And those all become pretty slippery terms that we can fill in in different, self-serving ways. But yeah, I think it absolutely is. And there have always been critics who have essentially seen Christianity as a religion of power. And I think that goes all the way back to that Constantinian shift.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah. So I think about the meme that's been floating around for a year or so — how often do you think of the Roman Empire? Some guys say at least once every day, and most people, women or those socialized female, are like, what? But when you put it in that context, it's like, yeah — they might not be thinking exactly of Constantine, but it's what it represents. Thinking about the Roman Empire on a daily basis, which represents conquering and power and control.

Dan: And often positioned as an expression of male virtue, right? There was a lot of language of virtue and moral development within this broadly militaristic, martial, imperialistic society. It was often very explicitly a self-reflective form of patriarchy — it could articulate why it's patriarchy, why it's men, here's what male virtue is. And Hawley cites that, because you look around in the Bible and you're like, I'm going to go find the list of male virtues — it doesn't ever say anywhere, "Here's what male virtues are." The Romans did. And again, longstanding cultural habits from the time of the collapse of the Western Empire — there was always this kind of callback to Rome. The Catholic Church was modeled on the administrative structure of the Roman Empire. It saw itself as the cultural inheritor of the Roman Empire. And as you get the emergence of Western Christendom, you had everything from the Holy Roman Emperor to this group to that group, always hearkening back to this vision of Rome as this high point of Western civilization. And you still have that. If people took Western Civ in college, you'd get the Pax Romana — the Roman peace. It's a really one-sided account of Roman imperialism. It was peace, so to speak, but it was peace through conquest. And if you were those conquered peoples, the Roman peace probably didn't seem all that great. If you were women in the Roman Empire, life wasn't great. If you were one of the many, many slaves in the Roman Empire, life wasn't great. It's a very specific kind of discourse, but I think it's one that has always fascinated Westerners. It put men at the top, and over time it becomes this story of Christian Rome, so it puts Christian men at the top. And so yeah, I think it's a pretty appealing story if you are a Christian man or want to claim that title — especially if you want to say, power is good, God doesn't tell us to be meek or powerless. Jesus said "if you live by the sword, you'll die by the sword," but it just meant to be nice to the people around you, it's not statecraft, you know, whatever. It becomes a really legitimating kind of discourse.

Dr. Anderson: I think that might sound like a quote-unquote boring history lesson, but if you start to step back and put the pieces together, it makes a lot of sense — how did we get to where we're at today, or even a book like this being written and touted as this vision of masculinity. I just see the connections in terms of the allure of religion and politics coming together and using this as a framework that is supposed to be holy and a template for what we should be moving toward or aspiring toward.

Dan: Yeah, I mean, I'm not trying to be the super wonky cultural historian, but on a long view, one of the things that fascinates me about Christian nationalism or some of these discourses is that yes, they're new in lots of ways, but also they're not in lots of ways. And even — people talk about the fusion of religion and politics like it's new, but for most of Western history, religion and politics were not the separate things we envision. Most of European history, they weren't. And so now you've got people hearkening back to a time when they weren't, and that's the other thing — those earlier histories become a kind of resource for them to be like, "Look, I know you lefties talk about separation of church and state and you assume Thomas Jefferson didn't want a Christian state" — which is true — "but look, here was this other time, this golden age of the past, and it was a golden age precisely because religion and politics were merged together and defined by masculine virtue, and look what we achieved." And so it really becomes this kind of mythic past that can be appropriated now, and it really is sometimes an increasingly self-conscious effort of recapitulation — we're going to recapitulate that, we're going to recreate that here in America, here and now. This is our chance.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah. Well, I think that's interesting too, because what Hawley is hitting on — and really all of this conversation — is that there does seem to be a void that a lot of men are experiencing in terms of identity and purpose. I wonder if we can talk about that a little bit, like what's going on that makes a book or a rhetoric like this even appealing or necessary.

Dan: Yeah, I think it's really important to recognize that there are real needs. Hawley identifies real social ills and problems. He's got lots of stuff in there about the unemployment rate among men, and how many men — especially young men — have just left the workforce entirely and are not even trying to enter it. And he and others talk about the so-called loneliness epidemic. As you probably know better than I do, there's a lot of social science and mental health evidence that that's a real thing, and that many men are lacking social support, and feelings of connection and meaning and purpose. All of that's real. So what Hawley is providing, what people like him provide, is they're putting forward an answer to that. I think it's the wrong answer, and I think it doesn't satisfy or work. But again, this goes much, much more broadly than Josh Hawley. If I'm going to tell the story of how we get to the place we are in America now in terms of jobs and everything, I'm going to start talking about really super exciting things like neoliberal economics in the 1980s and Reaganomics and deregulation and doing away with organized labor — all of which the right popularized and championed. And then you have, in many ways, predictable social and economic costs of that. And in some ways it is much easier, and can even feel more satisfying, to have this kind of mythic story about why things are the way they are and how we fix it, than to actually grapple with that. Certainly, if you're a person on the right who's been a champion of neoliberal economics for the last forty or fifty years, you're not going to turn around and say, "You know what, we made a huge mistake back in the Reagan years." No — you'll adopt other strategies. You can blame immigrants, that's one piece of it. You can blame women for disrupting the proper social order, that's another piece. And then you can sort of blame men themselves, but say, here's the vision, here's what it could look like if we just recover this. I think it's a real response to real needs and real problems, but I don't think it's a response that works. I think it fundamentally ignores the real causes — some of which I think we understand, some of which we don't fully understand — of the malaise that lots of men experience.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah, I mean, that's interesting, because yeah — we're talking about these systems being set up to give a very specific ideal of what a man is, in response to this very real thing that's happening, which whether we call it the male loneliness epidemic or something else, really boils down to an identity thing. But it's also interesting to me — thinking through a sociological or anthropological lens — that as other groups of people have become more equal, or there's a path more toward equality, the only solution it feels like for cisgender heterosexual white men, in particular, is just more power, rather than considering their identity could be found in something else. I don't even know if that's a question so much as an observation, but it feels like it's either we are without an identity or our identity is power. It makes sense, then, why some of these things — whether it's Josh Hawley or the manosphere or Christian fundamentalism — become so appealing.

Dan: Yeah, I think there are a few dynamics there. One is what we might call — and someone like Kristin Kobes Du Mez would call — militant masculinity. Or more broadly, it's a term I think is kind of overused and obviously not well defined, but you know, toxic masculinity — or what the Christian bros and the manosphere people will just call the alpha thing, whatever. I think they won the branding war, in the sense that that's what masculinity is, full stop. To be masculine is to be assertive, to be powerful, to not be subject to emotional expression — or if you do express emotions, emotions like anger are okay, but you're not supposed to be vulnerable. Vulnerability is weakness, things like that. But when I say they won the branding war, I think they also won the branding war oftentimes among those who don't support that vision. So one piece of this is that rather than conceiving of this as — we need to think about what are masculinities, what are ways of being masculine, what are ways of men being in the world — no, masculinity is bad because all it is is that, and it comes to be defined simply as that. So I think there hasn't felt like, for many, an alternative. "You're just attacking men" — that's the discourse you hear all the time. And you'll try to say, "No, I'm not attacking men, I'm just saying you don't have to be an asshole. Maybe that's all it means. Or you don't have to be a misogynist to be a man, maybe that's possible. Or you don't have to be straight to be masculine." But all of those come to be heard as just denials of manhood, right? And so I think that's one of the difficulties — across a political and social spectrum, a lot of people sort of accepted that equation, that toxic masculinity is masculinity as such. So when you critique that, there doesn't feel like anything else is left. Where do you go? What do you express? And I think that's one of the difficulties that confronts a lot of us trying to challenge those views. I run into it and somebody's like, "So what is masculinity?" And it's hard — we don't have a great answer for that, because we've spent a long time letting the other side define what that is, rhetorically speaking. And then you get the notion where everything's a zero-sum game. If women have greater social authority, it can only mean that I don't, if I'm a man. If the economy changes and it's not a production-based economy — that kind of ideal 1950s manufacturing economy model — if I'm a man and I'm not building with my hands, I'm not really a man. And so everything's a zero-sum game. Change can only be a loss — a loss of social status, a loss of identity, a loss of all of those things. Everything becomes a narrative of loss and threat, and then it provokes this response, which turns into a reassertion of that kind of masculinity.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah, which — whatever Josh Hawley is promoting in his book — is this very clear, here are these roles and virtues you're supposed to have, which then becomes very psychologically appealing. It's why fundamentalist religion can be appealing. It plays on our need for certainty and stability: if I match these ideals, I will be okay, accepted, I will survive.

Dan: Yeah. And identity — I like to do a fair amount of work in identity theory, and a couple of theorists I like will point out that identity is more of a verb than a noun. We talk about it as if it's something we possess. What they'll point out is that identity is always a social process. We're always identifying and being in certain ways, and we're recognized by others, and we recognize ourselves, and it's always this ongoing dynamic process. That's hard. That can be really scary and uncertain. And so to have a nice pre-made template that you can just adopt — nope, that's what masculinity is, and then what we do is work to enact that template — I think that's what high-control religion can provide. That's what the kind of manosphere vision can provide. And of course it's a pretty nice identity if it says you're always the winner, like others are supposed to be subordinate to you. And all those soft people tell you that your aggression is a bad thing, that taking advantage of people is bad — but no, these are strengths. There's some appeal to that too. I don't have to do any work on myself; I can just embrace all of my most, you know, maybe socially damaging features. Turns out those are all my strengths. And so it provides a lot of certainty — the kind of template — and we don't have to do the really hard thing about living, which is living with ambiguity and figuring out who we are, and recognizing that that changes over time, and all of those things that I think are really hard to face up to.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah. Well, I appreciate the inclusion of the manosphere, because I think it's important to talk about that, and maybe even talk about how it can be such a nice pipeline for Christian nationalism and fundamentalism. When we look at the broader ecosystem, we do have the manosphere — people like Andrew Tate. And I know that documentary just came out on Netflix — the Louis Theroux doc called Manosphere — they have an extreme amount of influence with young men in particular. From your thoughts, opinions, and research, what do you think the manosphere is actually offering young men?

Dan: Yeah, I think what it promises — first of all, there are so many layers. And Theroux shows this in his documentary — the capitalist piece of it, they're all shilling investment opportunities and things like this. There's also a certain broader self-help discourse that gets in there. I used to — long ago, when people read self-help books and didn't have online influencers — I came up with this concept that I called public esotericism, by which I meant: you get the person who's the self-made successful one, whatever, and they sell their book or their package, and they say, "I did it, you can too. Anybody can do it, you just gotta spend the fifty bucks to buy my thing and I'll teach you the secrets." It's like this esoteric knowledge, but also convincing you that everybody can do it — which is a kind of paradox. It's the newer version of that. You have these guys who are incredibly successful and wealthy, or at least all look wealthy — there are sometimes questions about how exactly — and they're all self-made. "I made six thousand pounds today before I got out of bed. What did you do?" And so there is the classic self-help, get-rich-quick piece of this that I think just appeals. But there's also this distinctly masculinist conception built in. They're all the alpha stuff — lifting weights, surrounded by beautiful women, almost all straight, wealthy, with attractive women hanging all over them. They'll talk about their body count, all of this stuff. And so it's pitching again: all the things society says are bad about you that you need to work on? I didn't change those, and look what it got me. Often it didn't — they're making their money not because they're men, but because they're getting a percentage of all the clicks people make to invest in whatever, to buy this or that. It's just capitalism, that piece of it. But it does speak to that need. It's that same public esotericist knowledge that anybody can do this — but if anybody could do it, everybody would do it. If it was that easy to make six thousand bucks a day laying in bed, I'd be doing it. But it sounds good. And when you have those real challenges that young men are facing — and I recognize young men are not the only people in the world who face challenges — but the promise that if you're just more confident, more aggressive, if you just believe in yourself, if you just quit listening to negative voices, you too can achieve this — it's really appealing. And I think it's important to normalize it, in the sense that people get exploited: older people get exploited by reverse mortgage promises, women get exploited by fitness trends, people who can prey on fundamental insecurities. People who are skilled at identifying real anxieties and using those as leverage points — this is another version of that, I think. What makes it feel, and maybe be, more significant at present is that it's a central part of why we have the political situation we have. It's in this culturally ascendant moment right now. But it's all built on being exactly the kind of authority-wielding, power-wielding man that, as you talk about the fundamentalist pipeline, fundamentalist Christianity has also said is the ideal, right? The male head of the household, the breadwinner, the spiritual authority. And we see the effects — there's some pretty significant percentage, I guess roughly a third or something, of Gen Z men who report that women should defer to their husbands in discussions about finances, or whatever — the numbers shift, but it's a notable chunk of that younger population that shows real effects of this, I think.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah. As you were talking, two things came up. First, the similarity to fundamentalism or any sort of high-control religion — in terms of it really not being about your actual character. It's about checking off a list of things. You do these things and that makes you whatever — a good Christian, a good religious person, a holy person, a good man, a strong man, a confident man, the right man. I know we'll get into the pipeline from manosphere to fundamentalism, but I think that definitely tracks in terms of how easy it can be to go down that road. And it also strikes me that it's a way to deal with discomfort that doesn't actually make you deal with the discomfort. If you're feeling badly about yourself, if you feel guilt or shame or discomfort — whether it's in the manosphere system or a high-control religion system — you don't have to deal with that. You just do these five things, or outsource your blame. It's somebody else's fault. And that's supposed to take away your discomfort, but it actually just deadens you to the experience of life, because it's everybody else's fault and you never learn how to sit with your own big feelings, discomfort, sadness, grief, and all of that.

Dan: Yeah. In the documentary, Theroux makes a point — and I don't think this is going to be generalizable to everybody — but he makes a point that the manosphere influencers he's looking at all come from kind of damaged households, often didn't have a father or male figure, or experienced neglect or abuse or whatever. He opens up the issue of trauma and says that there's some potentially unresolved trauma here, and often there is. When people experience trauma or emotional dysregulation of whatever kind, you've kind of got a number of things you can do with that. The hard thing to do is to look at it and say, wow, I've got some things I need to work on. I keep flying off the handle, or I keep alienating people, or I got in trouble at work because I said something rude, or I can't sustain a relationship because of this or this. One of the things that they do — and this is where I think Theroux may be onto something — is it's a way of not just bypassing that work, but saying: nope, the problem really is everybody else. The reason I don't have any relationships that work is really because everybody else is wrong, and they just don't recognize that I'm right. And, man, that's a lot more comfortable kind of response.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah.

Dan: It may not be as sustainable, and it deadens you to a lot of real things that are going on. But that is one piece of it — I think it often takes what are, let's call them maladjusted social traits, exploitative social traits, and turns them into strengths. So if women have a problem with the way I talk — well, women are just oversensitive. We all know this, right? Just that misogynistic, repeated thing that women have heard for as long as there have been women: "you're oversensitive, you're out of line," or whatever. And it does away with the need to reflect — are there ways that I could be better, for me and for others? Are there ways to live in community with others where everybody kind of flourishes? That can be really hard to do, especially if it means processing perhaps trauma, or a cultural model that has been normalized, and having to reach for something else. That's hard. So it can be a lot easier and very comfortable when some guy with big muscles and women all over, driving a fancy car, comes along and says, "Hey, if you just embrace all of that instead of trying to change it, look what it does."

Dr. Anderson: Yeah. Especially when we're talking about younger boys, adolescents who are just coming into their own, whose brains are not fully formed and are therefore highly suggestible and influenceable. And adolescence is already such a time of awkwardness and discomfort. I think back to when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen — I would never want to go back and live those years again, because everything inside of you and outside of you is changing, and it's just a recipe for —

Dan: — for all the things that happened, right? All the awkwardness and the embarrassment. I don't know if I've ever met anybody who's like, you know what I want? I want to be fourteen again.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah.

Dan: Twenty-five? Give me twenty-five. I'll be twenty-five again. But I don't want to be fifteen again.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah, absolutely. But you know, it's such a natural time in that adolescence phase for figuring out who am I, what do I like, who do I like, what do I want, what is life going to look like. And it's part of normal developmental psychology. It's just that these systems are co-opting those normal developmental processes and questions and experiences that we all have to go through in order to get to adulthood, and they're saying: well, because you're feeling this way, like you said, we're outsourcing it to someone else, and you don't have to learn how to self-reflect, you don't have to learn how to develop emotional regulation. You just have to say that whoever it is causing this is the problem, and I can just bump up against it.

Dan: And it is — I mean, again, I recognize the analogy doesn't always hold — but there is a real feel of arrested development to a lot of this. It's just this perpetual adolescent stage where you're like, dude, just grow up. Like, I get it, but why does it still bug you so much whether somebody's into what you're into? How insecure do you have to be to really care whether you bench more than that guy over there?

Dr. Anderson: It's important, Dan. It's important.

Dan: Yeah, but there's that part — I think what can make it hard to take seriously is that some of us who maybe aren't completely arrested in our fifteen-year-old development can look at it and think, like, dude, you are so insecure. It projects such strength and security and assurance, but many of us look at it like, can you not see just how insecure that person is? But people don't — and that person doesn't — because they're this perpetual fourteen, fifteen-year-old trying to make their way in the world. Instead of figuring out what it means to grow up, they're just — I don't know — like the Lost Boys or something, living in the island of the manosphere, stuck in perpetual adolescence, and turning that into a new norm of masculinity.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah. And I think if we add the religious component on there too — and research even talks about this a lot — there's a lot of cult-like, high-control religion, groups that specifically target adolescents for the purpose of forming their identity. Their brains are not fully formed. If we can get them now, the chances that they will repeat this and have children who will do this — it's all part of the system. But yeah, let's talk about that — the manosphere to Christian nationalist or fundamentalist pipeline. How do you see that working?

Dan: I see it as — sometimes they're connected and sometimes they're not directly. There are plenty of manosphere folks who are leaning into the whole "America's a Christian nation" thing. But I think there's a kind of feedback loop. On the fundamentalist or high-control Christianity piece — and I recognize there are other forms of high-control religion in America, but that's the biggest and most significant in terms of numbers — it's explicitly patriarchal. Men are called to be the head of the family and the head of society and the spiritual head, and so on and so forth. That's a pretty natural homology with secular manosphere stuff, if you like. And so the two can become mutually reinforcing. The same kid who's maybe hearing sermons or being taught in youth group — if he's like a fifteen-year-old who's dating somebody, he's supposed to be the spiritual — I don't even know what that's supposed to mean — the spiritual head of his relationship with his fifteen-year-old girlfriend. What is that? But that's what he's being taught; that's maybe what his dad says, if his dad grew up in this context. And then you've got the manosphere people talking about being an alpha and always being in charge and never letting others take advantage of you. So I think there's a very natural fit, and that's why — if you drew the Venn diagrams, the circles — there's a lot of overlap. There are points where they do overlap, what I would call the Christian manosphere. But even where there isn't, there's such a commonality of emphasis and the centrality of masculinity and a vision of what that looks like and an understanding of the social role of that, that one can shift from one side of that Venn diagram to the other very naturally and very easily. And I also think — as you look at the manosphere — there aren't a lot of sixty-five, seventy-year-old manosphere influencers. You can be as big and strong as you want to be, but when you're in your sixties, you're probably not going to keep up with the twenty-four-year-olds. There's a little bit of a time stamp on that. The high-control religion is cradle to grave. And so I think it also provides a kind of landing spot, as some people maybe shift from the manosphere thing, even recognize how puerile it can be. But now we've got this thing that lets me essentially occupy a lot of the same social roles, but it feels like it has greater depth, and it's about spirituality. It lends more gravitas to it, as somebody maybe has to go get a job and starts having a family and doesn't get to just watch TikTok six hours a day — but they can still go hear the same message as something that feels more robust and has a landing place for them in their thirties and beyond.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah. And I think as humans we are designed to want to have something bigger than ourselves to be a part of — whether it's religion, a service opportunity, your family, so many things. But yeah, if this space is providing not only the same messaging, which puts you in this similar position of power and leadership and control, but now it's for this greater purpose, and you get to live forever — that's absolutely more appealing.

Dan: That's definitely a good bonus, right? You also get eternal life out of it.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah, exactly. And it kind of feels cleaner too, right? Because in the manosphere, it's really very self-serving — the end goal is me, myself, and I. And there's something that feels more noble and clean, that it's for this greater good, and not only that, you're looking out for all of these other people and trying to convince them of the same thing. It gives a savior complex in some very real ways.

Dan: One of the ways I talk about this — and it feels like it tracks with what you're saying — is I'll talk about the kinder, gentler patriarchy. That's Josh Hawley's book. He doesn't read like the manosphere folks, right? It's a much kinder, gentler version — men are called to sacrifice for others, and so on. They're still called to lead and rule, and one of the social roles they have to play is that of king, but they're called to serve others. In my view it's not different, but it's the same song in a very different key. And it provides, as you're saying, that wholesome feeling — the kinder, gentler patriarchy. This is also a kind of discourse we've seen in high-control religion for decades, right? You've got the really militant in-your-face ones, but you've got the ones that say, well, you know, it's patriarchy, but it's about serving our wives and protecting our little princess daughters. And you're kind of like, yeah, but you're still demeaning women, and your daughters aren't princesses, and maybe you should teach them how to take care of themselves and develop their own capabilities. It's the same thing, but it feels nicer, kinder, gentler — it can be more benevolent. But I think the same underlying structure is there.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah, absolutely. And it's hitting the same core needs. I remember hearing a talk a long, long time ago about core human needs, and they listed six or seven, and one of them was autonomy and individuality and identity. I think about those adolescent years — it's all about figuring out your own identity, which has pretty much been suggested to you by parents up until that point. When you're breaking out of it, which is natural and developmental, it feels untethering. Part of why I would never want to be fourteen or fifteen again — or probably even twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two — is I felt like I had nothing to stand on. I felt like I was out to sea with the waves chopping, just trying to keep my head above water. And that's where I really started leaning into purity culture, because it gave me this sense, or this illusion, of safety — something to stand on. Even though there's so much chaos around me, if I follow these rules and become this person, I will get this reward. And I think about what's being sold in the manosphere, or Christian nationalism, or the Christian manosphere, however we want to say it — it's a sense of stability and certainty in the midst of choppiness. Which is so normal for that stage. And what's happening is they're selling this identity, and it's meeting some deep psychological, relational, and emotional needs.

Dan: Yeah. As somebody with two adolescents at different stages, I get the front row seat to this, yeah. It's real stuff, and it's hard. You can see these young people in my life trying to feel their way through that, and yeah, it could be nice to just have a nice template to follow. You see that at that age with peer groups too — what does that do? It gives them the template. It gives them the group to fit into. And to that point — that these are real needs, real developmental steps and processes — I think we have to understand that the reason high-control religion and manosphere stuff are such a threat is precisely because they appeal to something real. I think they're not helpful, and I think they don't actually help people meet the needs they're trying to meet or deal with the things they need to deal with, but they're promising to respond to something real, and something people really, really struggle with.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah. We've talked about how much this focuses on power and control and dominance and authority, but I see that as masking a lot of deep insecurities and fear. I wonder if that's like part of the conversation we should be having — what does all of this tell us about what's actually happening on a human level.

Dan: I couldn't put a date on it, but I do remember — and this is going to sound weird, I promise I'll land the plane — the first time I told somebody that I was envious of them. Like, instead of getting defensive or just resentful toward them, I said, yeah, I'm really envious that this thing happened for you and not for me, and I'm really having a hard time with that. And it was obviously a very vulnerable kind of thing, but I remember how freeing that felt, and how all of these emotions that had been going on inside of me to mask that — the resentment, the anger, whatever it was — it was in college, I think, when I had this first experience of just telling somebody: I'm really envious that this happened for you. I'm happy for you, but I am also really envious and disappointed that it didn't happen for me, and I'm having a hard time with it. It was amazing how transformative that was, but it's also amazing how hard that was to do. I think recognizing that there are insecurities and fears that are there — and it can be hard to be compassionate when you're engaging people who are spewing this kind of stuff. Or to go back to adolescence — certainly not my adolescence, but perhaps others will remember when adolescents say unkind things to caregivers or parents. And anybody with adolescents in their life knows how hard it can be to not take that to heart, or to want to respond in kind, and to just have the compassion to recognize that this is being said out of fear or insecurity — to recognize that that's what's going on, and to try to get to that.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah.

Dan: I don't pretend to have all the answers of how to do that, but to give just an anecdotal experience — I've had conversations with people where they're really into, like, the Bible has to be this way, the Bible says this, and there's the certitude and the vitriol that comes out of it. And I remember asking someone once: I can hear how important that matters. What would it mean for you if that wasn't what the Bible said? Like, what would be put at risk? And they actually started talking about how the world would kind of fall apart for them. And you're beginning to get at that real issue. And I think that's a real key. On one hand, I'm going to sound like such a pop psych kind of person, but creating the space for that — trying to create the space for people to actually articulate that — absorbing some of that vitriol or letting it slide away so that you can get to the emotion. But also trying to model other ways of being. There are other visions of masculinity in society that don't get the notoriety. I was thinking about — in anticipation of our discussion — the anti-ICE protests in places like Minnesota. Guess what? There were lots of men participating, standing up for the rights of others and exercising, you know, a certain degree of authority or male privilege, or whatever it is — things they didn't choose, it's just who they are in the world and how people respond to them — to try to help others. People who are prioritizing not just their family and their immediate sphere, but total strangers. I think trying to elevate those visions of masculinity is important too, to help counter that discourse. Because that's the trick with the influencers, right? Their aim is to influence — they're so visible, they're there all the time, they're self-promoters. And regular people out in the world living a different way are not self-promoters and not influencers, and they're not going to get lots of likes. So I think elevating those as alternative models, but also trying to create spaces of — how do we really get at the true emotions driving these things? Often recognizing that they are about emotions and deeply felt affects, not things out in the world, right? The concern about immigrants isn't really about immigrants, it's not really about those people — it's about some feared loss of status, a fear that you're going to lose identity. Let's find ways to try to get to that real issue.

Dr. Anderson: Well, there are those memes — you know, men will literally do X, Y, or Z, like go to war with a country, instead of going to therapy or whatever.

Dan: Yeah.

Dr. Anderson: And it's funny, but also not totally untrue. Whenever I'm working with a client and I can see them holding on to something so tightly, I will ask them: what is it that you're afraid would happen if you were to let go? If you were to not be in control? And that almost always gets to the heart of what's actually happening, and it's usually: I am scared of something. I'm fearful that I am unworthy or unlovable — some very core wound that is not pleasant to sit with at all, and often doesn't have clear answers. I think about some of these identity pieces, even as an adolescent — who am I? So much of the work we do with clients is not necessarily figuring out a five-point plan — it's sitting with discomfort and letting it ride through you. But I think humans are so averse to feeling that, that we move into ideals and control, and then we try to put that on other people to make ourselves feel better, when in reality it's like, yeah, just make space for whatever that is, and it starts to work itself out a little bit.

Dan: I think what you're highlighting is that we humans — all of us — have these defense mechanisms, ways of trying to protect ourselves from unpleasant feelings and experiences. We've got fight, flight, and freezing, and you know, some people shut down and some people withdraw. But I think what people often miss is that anger and aggression are also defensive responses. And it can be really hard to respond to them as defensive responses, because the whole purpose of them is to feel offensive. I think it helps people get a sense of agency when maybe they don't have agency, or when they feel vulnerable or out of control. I think raging gives you a sense that you're in control, that you're doing something. So I think it's hugely important to recognize that that is a defensive reaction and to try to approach it that way. Which is hard. My defensive response — one of my primary ones — is fight. I'm a fight response person. If somebody comes at me a certain way, I want to cut back. You escalate and you go back, and I have to fight the intuition to respond that way. Or for somebody else who just withdraws and shuts down and goes away — those fundamental intuitions have to sometimes be fought on our own part, to engage at that level and recognize that this is a defensive reaction. They don't know it is; they don't think it is. It's not going to do any good to tell them it is. But being able to try to stick with it enough to start getting at some of those deeper things — that's really, really hard to do. I'm glad you mentioned therapy. Women are what, like twice as likely as men to seek it out — and even most women don't, right?

Dr. Anderson: Yeah.

Dan: But on the flip side — we look for reasons for hope in our podcast — and so in prep today I was like, there've got to be some reasons to be hopeful here. More men than ever are seeking therapy, and they are learning how to do that. I think that's important, and to keep feeding that — to say to somebody who's really angry: there are spaces you can go where you can be really honest about how you feel and nobody's going to judge you for it. And that can be as much of a benefit as anything with therapy or coaching — maybe there are things you don't need to tell your partner right now, maybe now is not the time, but there are spaces where you can do that and begin exploring it. I think trying to see that as what's needed and as part of the solution — that's really important.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah. No, I think so too. I think about, like, I have some really great male friends, and I never mind having conversations about this stuff with them, because I see their effort. They don't need to do things perfectly or feel things perfectly — it's just the effort that they put in, and it makes me, as a human, more prone to say, yeah, let's navigate this, let me show up and support you in whatever way I can. But I think that can be part of the daunting process — finding people who will not bristle and get defensive when we're trying to muddle our way through these murky paths. Maybe that's just a challenge for all of us, to be open to that.

Dan: Yeah. I think it's got to be one of the most counterintuitive things — to recognize that those aggressive responses are defensive in nature. Let alone — and I recognize it's a big ask — asking people to respond to that. And it's not something everybody should do, frankly. If somebody's attacking you, you're under no obligation to be like, "Oh please, keep it coming." I'm not saying that to excuse it either, but I am saying that to start untangling this really messy knot of a problem, recognizing what's really going on and what's really driving it — that's an important piece of it.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah, absolutely. So, we talked about Josh Hawley and all of his incredible examples of his version of manhood, but when we think about a newer vision — and it sounds almost religious, like "the new masculinity," or whatever — what are examples? What are things that offer more of this vision that is just, like, approachable by anyone?

Dan: Yeah. I don't think anybody has the magic formula — it's just thinking about this. I don't have the magic book that shows you the other thing. But I think identifying and maybe foregrounding people who are men, who are male-identified, who do the things that traditionally aren't the alpha things — who are men in the caring professions, and why do they do that, and what do they get out of that. Let's hear from them. Like, Hawley actually has this part in his book where he kind of craps on male teachers a little bit. He's sort of like, it's good that they're teachers because young men need male role models — kind of implying that it's a lesser thing that they could do to be an educator, but okay, because young men need male role models, so you're doing that. That's not right. But let's talk about people who do these things that traditionally weren't considered masculine or manly. How do we foreground those? How do we foreground the men who are protesting on behalf of women's access to healthcare? How do we foreground the men who are protesting on behalf of people who are politically targeted, and sacrificing for that — things that are not the alpha manosphere vision? I suspect they're kind of all around us, but they don't have the notoriety. And I think what we need to do is start looking a little more around us, because I think they're there. Precisely because they're not the angry, vitriolic alpha male people, they tend to go unnoticed. And I think that's a failing on the part of a lot of us who want to counter that other kind of masculinity — to fail to notice that, to fail to foreground it, to fail to normalize it. And I think it's not some counter-influencer thing — there's a role for that — it's not just another book somebody can write — there's a role for that — but I think it's going on around us all the time, and it's learning to see it, recognize it, and value it. Whatever that looks like — the male-identified people who are living in the world as men, but in a different way. Just recognizing and normalizing that.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah. Since you are a father of adolescents, I'm curious — how would you talk to the parents who are saying, I want to raise my children differently, while still acknowledging that they are in this weird, funky time of not knowing who they are and being highly suggestible and all of these very real things? So instead of just putting another form of authoritarianism on them — you must be this identity — what would you say to some of those parents?

Dan: All the answers, here we go. No, I think — one thing is, I've had this discussion with a lot of friends and others, and I think all of us feel like we're working without a playbook, because I have not met anybody who's like, my parents got it all right, and I'm doing everything they did. It tends to kind of go a different direction. I think some of it is — I find myself doing this when I have a knee-jerk reaction to something, a request to do something, or some behavior that an adolescent is involved in, and I want to shut it down. I've got to ask myself: what is my rationale? Can I actually give a reason why they should or shouldn't do this thing? And oftentimes I kind of can't. It really bugs me, but I'm like, does it just bug me because that's how my parent would have reacted? Do I actually have a reason to be opposed to this? I think a certain degree of collaboration with the adolescents — I'm very well aware that I'm the adult and they're not, and my prefrontal cortex is developed and theirs isn't, and this is not a one-to-one — but actually being able to talk through things with them, like, if you do this or this, and we say that this would be the consequence, what do you think? Walking through the positives and negatives of decision making. I think part of it is just recognizing that all the trying-on of identities is real, that some of the mistakes and bad decisions they're going to make are real and also developmentally appropriate. And that most of us who did those things grew up to be okay. It's probably not the end of the world. And that's really hard. But I think part of it for me is recognizing how much they are trying to figure these things out, and that their answer today is not going to be their answer tomorrow. There's nothing that makes me feel funnier than when one of my kids will be bad-mouthing a certain pop artist, and I'm like, you were so into that person six months ago. It's just part of what it is. And I think recognizing that and creating that space, and just not — I think the idea that there isn't a template that a kid has to be, right, whether it's gender, whether it's sexuality, whatever it is — and so having to reverse engineer that and say, if I really believe that, what does that mean about the decisions I make on a daily basis? And which ones do I choose to prioritize, and which ones I don't? And then I think you mentioned the authoritarian thing. I think a lot of us, of a certain age, probably grew up in relatively authoritarian parenting styles. And I think being conscious of that and trying to consciously — sometimes it's just take a beat. Something happens, and I want to respond right now. And I'll think, what we're going to do is talk about this tomorrow. And what I don't say is that I'm going to spend the next twelve hours trying to sort out for myself why I'm actually bothered by this. Is this about you or is it actually about me? And I think all of those — a lot of self-reflection. For me, I feel like I'm having to invent who I am as a parent as I figure out how to parent, because I just don't think you have great templates for it at this point.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah. And I think even if you didn't grow up in a high-control religion — that was also just a cultural piece that was very present, whether it's "children should be seen and not heard," or the expectation around corporal punishment, or whatever it might be. I think there were cultural pieces that just aligned really well with religious pieces.

Dan: Expectations of gender, expectations of sexuality — what we call purity culture. The idea that one has to wait until they're married to have sex — that was not a uniquely Christian kind of perspective. Lots of people didn't believe that, but there were still lots of people who thought you should, right? You get these cultural norms. So yeah, I think we're all kind of working without a nice handbook.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah. And I think even, like, I've tried to look back generationally — if the Boomer generation is like this as parents, they also grew up in a generation that was parented with a lot of what we would now very much consider abuse and neglect. More children-seen-not-heard, keep the family business in the family, right — all of these things. So it's not coming from nowhere. But what gives me hope is that whether it's with my clients or my siblings or my friends, there is more of a tendency to go, like, hey, is this a me thing? Am I getting all riled up because my kid is actually doing something that's inappropriate, disrespectful, or illegal? Or is this a preference thing that is my own stuff coming up? And I would say, probably at least half the time — and I'm not a parent, so I don't know — it's like, oh yeah, that's my stuff. I think millennials and Gen X are the first generation that are really doing that in a proactive way with their kids — not getting it perfect, but that's actually not the goal. It's just to try something different rather than doing either the same or the exact opposite of how they grew up. They're trying to find this middle way of being like, yeah, this might be a me thing a little bit.

Dan: Yeah. The other piece is the desire for control — wanting to control what can't be controlled. Adolescents are unruly.

Dr. Anderson: Oh my god, yeah.

Dan: Most of us remember what it felt like when somebody would do the authoritarian move, and it's why some of us don't have great relationships with parents now. I don't know how much time with my clients is spent dealing with dysfunctional relationships with parents, and so there's a little bit of reflection: so you have that impulse sometimes to impose control, and you're like, yeah — pragmatically speaking, if nothing else, how effective was that? How well did that work for me? It didn't. So I'm going to try something else, maybe it'll be better, maybe it won't. But here's a strategy I'm pretty confident didn't work for me, and I don't think it's going to work when I try it. So maybe I'm going to try something else. We all grow up being like, I'm never going to do that when I'm a parent — then what do we do? We do all the same things. I think trying to keep that front of mind sometimes. I grew up in a household of occasional explosions, but there was never any verbal resolution afterward. There were ways that parents would express remorse — I knew they were expressing remorse — but nobody would ever say, "I shouldn't have responded that way," or "I'm sorry I said that." And so even those moments of having to come to a kid and say, "I didn't respond the way I should have, and you didn't deserve to be addressed that way" — I think that's a big step. It takes a lot of vulnerability. You're setting aside a veneer of unquestionable authority. And I think there's value in that even when it happens after the fact. I think the goal we're all shooting toward is to start getting it right the first time, instead of having to pick up pieces later, but even the picking up of pieces is often a departure from what had been models of masculine, and maybe models of dads — dads who never had to admit they were wrong, who never had to admit emotion, who never had to apologize, who never had to do all of those things that a certain vision of masculinity told them wasn't masculine.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah. You said earlier, kind of like the reasons for hope — kind of underhandedly, that's where we got to. And I feel like that's something that feels really helpful about a conversation like this. Somebody like Josh Hawley or Andrew Tate has such a huge platform that sometimes it can feel insurmountable to try to go up against that. But I think a conversation like this invites very practical ways that you can just show up ten, twenty percent different in the relationships you're in right now, whether that's with your family, your neighbors, your community. And that actually feels a bit more tangible, at least to me.

Dan: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah. So what gives you hope about the future of masculinity? Anything?

Dan: I think, as we talk about this, there's a lot of great things going on that are just not as visible. In a social media-saturated world, what we see is not everything — it's often not the whole thing, and often not most of something. I realize I might be squinting to find positives sometimes, but — somebody's going to contact you or me and tell me that my statistics are wrong — but whatever it is, that roughly a third of Gen Z men who say women should defer to their husbands, that also means that two-thirds don't, right? So let's amp up the two-thirds. I think that's the hopefulness — in a world where a very small sliver of reality can soak up all of our bandwidth, just remember that that's not the whole story. And how do we look for and find those other pieces?

Dr. Anderson: Yeah. No, I really appreciate that, because I see that being true in so many different ways. And this is absolutely one of them. It can be so easy to get lost in the shuffle of these really extreme ways of living, thinking, speaking. So yeah, that is helpful to know that there are more people than not who are not in those screaming camps of what a man should be — William Wallace —

Dan: — or Gandalf, right? Yeah.

Dr. Anderson: Whatever floats your boat. So, I've really appreciated this conversation. For people who are wanting to get in touch with you or follow along with your work, where can they find you?

Dan: So, Straight White American Jesus — you can Google that, find all the work we do on the podcast and "It's in the Code." People who want to reach out to me directly, I have an email — it's old school, but they could reach me at danielmillerswaj@gmail.com. Always welcome thoughts, questions, comments. Subscribers to our podcast also have a Discord that we hang out in and do different things, and we do live events. Lots of ways for people to see what I do and to engage if they want to, and would love to hear from folks.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah, well, I'll make sure that all of that information ends up in the show notes. It's been great to have you — I think now five times, or is it six? I'll go back in my notes. The jacket will be coming. No, I appreciate this conversation, and I'm just hopeful that people will get a lot out of it — that it'll be both realistic and hopeful.

Dan: Yeah.

Dr. Anderson: Awesome.

Dan: Great. Well, thanks for having me.

Dr. Anderson: Thank you. Bye.