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.

My entry point into what is often called the manosphere is not theoretical but embodied. I have trained in Brazilian jiu‑jitsu for 25 years—long enough to see the art migrate from a marginal discipline into a cultural ecosystem that now overlaps significantly with online masculinity culture, including a distinctly Catholic variant. In some Catholic media spaces, the marks of “authentic” manhood are increasingly stylized: jiu‑jitsu, cigars, whiskey and culture‑war bravado. This convergence is not accidental. Combat sports offer discipline and resilience, while digital platforms quickly graft onto them grievance narratives, simplified moral binaries and a political identity.

Because of this, I occupy a privileged position. Younger men—millennials, Gen Z, even Gen X—approach me after training with questions shaped by podcasts and influencers. Sometimes the content is fascinating; sometimes it is openly toxic, praising vice as virtue and misogyny as moral clarity. These conversations reveal less about the influencers themselves than about the deep hunger of the men consuming that content.

What strikes me is not that young men are drawn to structure and hierarchy as well as struggle; the Christian tradition has always affirmed asceticism, discipline and sacrifice. The problem is that in the secular manosphere, these goods are severed from humility or empathy, as well as any sense of communion. Vices are inverted into virtues, and moral conscience is displaced by outrage. Identity becomes performative and reactive rather than formative. Even the Catholic manosphere, for all its comparative health, can fall prey to this dynamic when it centers masculinity over sanctity.

This became clear during a conversation I had after a jiu‑jitsu class just before Lent. Several men asked about my Ash Wednesday homily, and I shared a line that startled them: Young men are sometimes drawn to the church because it appears anti‑L.G.B.T.Q. and anti‑women, but the Gospel ultimately asks whether they can be anti‑themselves. That is, can they confront their own disordered desires rather than projecting moral failure outward? For some men, the church is imagined as a refuge where they can simply “be men.” The idea that Christianity requires self‑denial rather than validating grievances can be genuinely disorienting.

Here lies a central challenge for the church. Moral conscience is being reshaped in a digital marketplace that rewards resentment and simplified narratives. Online communities promise belonging without vulnerability and intellectual seriousness without genuine formation. They mimic depth but lack solidarity.

Drawing on Edith Stein’s early reflections on individuality and community, we see the contrast clearly. Healthy communities are bound by horizontal ties of empathy and shared responsibility, not merely by allegiance to a vertical figure or influencer. Totalitarian movements—whether political or digital—erode these bonds, leaving only surface-level and disembodied connections.

Some young men are drawn to online influencers not because of ideology per se, but because these figures appear to offer meaning and an account of suffering. They want to know why life is hard and how to endure it well. The tragedy is not their desire for ideas, but that the ideas offered to them are often pseudo‑intellectual, shouted loudly or lacking critical engagement. The church, if it wishes to respond faithfully, must recover its confidence as a true intellectual, moral and spiritual community.

This means more than producing counter‑content online. It means forming men in what could be called the Christian liberal arts: theology, philosophy, history and the moral imagination, all situated within lived community. Ideas must be incarnated. I have seen this tension firsthand while talking with a nondenominational pastor who also trains at my gym. We both recognize the difficulty of inviting young men away from an algorithmic understanding of church—one filtered through culture‑war incentives—into actual parishes marked by ordinariness, financial strain and service to the poor.

When I invite training partners and students to a parish where I occasionally assist, I warn them that it will be “boring.” There is no online outrage, no grand rhetoric—just a struggling community gathered around the sacraments, trying to feed the hungry and care for the sick. For men formed by digital drama, this ordinariness can feel like a letdown. Yet it is precisely here that Christian morality is lived rather than broadcast. The church must resist competing with the internet on its own terms and instead witness to a different measure of greatness.

Young men need stability and freedom at once: solid ground from which to do good and interior liberty from reactive anger. The church can offer both, but only if it presents holiness rather than masculinity as the telos. Saints—men and women—did hard things and embraced suffering—but did so for love, not dominance. If the church reclaims this vision and embodies it in real communities, the digital marketplace will lose some of its allure.

The church’s response to the manosphere must be pastoral, intellectual and embodied: forming consciences capable of empathy, communities capable of solidarity and men capable not merely of strength, but also of self‑gift.

This article appears in July/August 2026.

Peter Nguyen, S.J., is an associate professor of religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross. His research brings the theology and spirituality of Christian martyrdom into conversation with the dynamics of totalitarianism and its assault on the human person.