Editors’ note: This article is part of a roundtable discussion in America on “Faith, morality and the ‘Manosphere’,” adapted from a panel conversation organized by the McFarland Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., on Feb. 26, 2026.

The first challenge in thinking about how the church might respond to the migration of moral authority from deeply interconnected communities to the digitally mediated manosphere is understanding what the manosphere is. Is there anything shared by this clashing and contradictory group of podcasters, proselytizers and provocateurs?

Certainly it is not the content they offer. The sports analyst and media figure Bill Simmons’s bro-sphere, with its frat ethos and fandom-obsessive metaphysics, has almost nothing in common with the bitter rage-baiting of a Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson. But if it is not the similarity of content that makes the manosphere a “thing,” then what does?

Perhaps it is that all of these would-be mentors are fighting over the same audience. In the different topics they take up, the inside jokes they develop and the kinds of relationships they model, they are all battling for the attention and allegiance of a huge group—a group that is asking what it means to be a good man in the modern world.

It is the restless hunger for an answer to that question, not the answers given by each influencer, that creates the enormous, amorphous crowd that we call the manosphere. What the manosphere is, in other words, is a cacophony of conflicting answers—some encouraging, some infuriating—to the shared question of what it means to be a man today.

Understanding this is the first and primary challenge because it shapes everything that follows. After all, if we take the manosphere to be nothing more than a buzzing hive of resentment and indignation, then we will respond with pesticides. But if we can look deeper, we have a chance not only of understanding more clearly but of offering better answers to the question that is being asked.

Important as it is, understanding what the manosphere is does not tell us what answer we should give to the question that generates it. But we can be helped in facing this second challenge by trying to understand how and why it became a question at all. How did our social scripts get so unsettled that masculinity itself became a question? 

The short answer is that we tore them up. 

The slightly longer answer is that we tore up our old social scripts because we wanted, even needed, to write new ones.

We wanted this because many people experienced the identities those social scripts offered—what they said about what it meant to be a wife or a citizen or a man—as inhibiting. Those scripts prevented people from becoming their most authentic selves. As the great philosopher Charles Taylor shows in his essay “Politics of Recognition,” people often felt that those prefabricated social identities distorted their self-understanding by mirroring back to them “a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture” of themselves. In his understanding, the expressive revolutions of the 1960s were both a large-scale rejection of these off-the-shelf identities and a collective effort to build new ones.

In this way, the movements for civil rights or women’s liberation were more than just criticisms. They not only tore up the old social scripts, they did the hard work of writing new ones. But the same cannot be said for masculinity. For all their flaws—and there were many—the old scripts of masculinity provided a roadmap to manhood. The problem is not that we wanted to redraw that patriarchal map, but that we did not follow up its deconstruction by drawing new and better ones. We did the critical work, in other words, but not the constructive.

This is why there are so many young men who are more or less desperate to know what it means to be a good man today. Most of them find themselves in a vacuum of social meaning. This is a situation in which they all know what they are not supposed to be—chauvinistic, misogynistic, “toxic”—but they are given little help in imagining what they might be, what it might look like to be good and to be a man at the same time. Or, to put it more precisely, they are given little help from anywhere outside the manosphere.

The absence of collective scripts does not mean that good models do not exist. They do. I think of my dad, for example, who without complaint quit his job and spent years as a homemaker, raising my sisters and me so that my mom could pursue her dreams of being a journalist. Because of his example, the question of whether it was “masculine” to cook dinner or do the laundry or comfort someone never even crossed my mind when I was young. It never occurred to me to pose the question of what it meant to be a good man because there was one there to greet me when I got off the school bus.

But mine seems to be the rare case. And even if it were not, individual examples provide little remedy for social problems. This is because social problems, as Catholic social teaching insists, require social solutions—not just individual exemplars but collective action. This brings us in sight, it seems to me, of an answer to the question of how we, the church, might respond to the situation in which we find ourselves. We ought first to see the manosphere for what it is: a group of people who share not an answer but a question. Second, we ought to be in the business of helping to write new social scripts—scripts that make an inclusive masculinity visible and attractive and accomplishable.

I do not pretend to know precisely what such a social script would contain, but it seems to me it should include a vision of what we might call “relational generativity.” I am gesturing here toward a vision of masculinity in which men generate more than they need, not so that they can accumulate for themselves or pretend to a false self-sufficiency, but so that there is an excess that can be given away. In this “excessiveness” we might glimpse a style of relationship that, like that of the Father and the Son, is always overflowing its borders.

This article appears in July/August 2026.

Patrick Gilger, S.J., is an assistant professor of sociology and director of the McNamara Center at Loyola University Chicago, and a consulting editor for culture at America Media.