In recent years, a growing chorus of public voices has urged men to “step up,” reclaim leadership, and take charge of their families—and society itself. The movement goes by different names and arises from different places, but its message is consistent:
Society is in decline because men have been weakened.
Restoration requires men to reclaim authority, dominance, and control.
This vision appears across cultural, political, and religious spaces—often labeled the Manosphere, Christian Masculinism, or Traditional Masculinity. While the language varies, the story remains the same: strength is framed as danger under control; leadership as command; maturity as moving forward without looking back.
The tone is unmistakable in the quotes most often cited:
“A harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control.”
“Be a monster—and then learn how to control it.”
“Jesus is a prizefighter with a tattoo down his leg, a sword in his hand, and the commitment to make someone bleed.”
“We need a church full of men, not a church full of chicks.”
“Testosterone rocks.”
“Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”
“There is a direct connection between the collapse of the American society and the collapse of male responsibility.”
“We’ve told young women that their highest calling is professional success, and that family is something to delay or avoid.”
Across these voices, masculinity is framed as something to retake, leadership as something to assert, and social repair as something achieved through control. Vulnerability is treated as weakness. Memory is seen as liability. Healing is collapsed into functioning.
What unites these claims is not merely a concern for men, but a deeper assumption:
that order is restored through dominance, and that strength is proven by command.
Strength, Memory, and the Kind of Life We Produce
For much of my life, I absorbed a quieter version of the same rule:
Real men ignore their past and move on.
To dwell on the past creates victims.
It sounded practical—even virtuous.
And in certain seasons, it helped me survive.
But survival and flourishing are not the same thing.
Later in life, what I had never examined began to surface—and nearly dismantled the life I had built. Despite capable leadership, well-meaning advice, and even therapy, I felt the ground beneath me giving way. What I eventually discovered was not a lack of effort or discipline, but a foundation that had never been supported.
With the right help, I began to look backward—not indulgently, but honestly. I learned to name experiences I had never associated with trauma. In my case, the wound ran deep enough that I didn’t know it was there, yet it shaped nearly every relationship I had.
Healing required more than insight. It required dwelling—reliving, grieving, and reimagining what should have been. It meant staying present long enough for truth to surface and be held.
Am I fully healed? No.
But I am recovering—and that distinction matters.
That earlier rule belongs to a broader logic—what Scripture often exposes as empire. Empire is not only political power; it is a way of organizing life around control, efficiency, and forward motion at all costs. Within that logic, the past becomes dangerous. Memory threatens momentum. Vulnerability feels like a loss of authority.
So empire teaches us to forget.
Or at least to stay silent.
Pain is reframed as weakness.
Lament is treated as indulgence.
Healing is reduced to productivity: Are you functioning yet?
For a while, that works.
You can build a career.
You can lead teams.
You can hold yourself together.
But over time, something fractures beneath the surface.
What Flourishing Asks Instead
The central question of this journey has never been, Can I keep going?
It has been:
What kind of life do my beliefs actually produce—over time, in real people?
Biblically, flourishing is closer to shalom than success. Shalom is not comfort or ease. It is wholeness—the slow integration of truth, memory, body, community, and love.
And shalom does something empire refuses to do:
It remembers.
Israel is commanded to remember its slavery.
The Psalms give voice to unresolved grief.
The prophets refuse premature closure.
Even resurrection does not erase crucifixion—Jesus carries the scars.
Jesus does not command his disciples to dominate their pasts, but to take up their crosses. He does not bypass suffering through control, but moves through it with love—and invites others to do the same.
In Scripture, memory is not the enemy of agency.
It is the pathway to restored agency.
The Lie Beneath the Lie
The worldview I inherited assumed a simple equation:
Memory → victimhood → loss of agency
But lived experience—and Scripture—tell a different story:
- Unnamed memory leads to fragmentation
- Named memory leads to integration
- Integrated memory opens the way to freedom
The problem is not remembering the past.
The problem is being ruled by an unexamined one.
Empire tries to heal by suppression.
Shalom heals through truth-telling—held within community, patience, and grace.
What This Produces Over Time
I’ve come to see that the “just move on” ethic often produces:
- strength without tenderness
- leadership without listening
- faith without lament
- families where silence is mistaken for peace
Shalom produces something quieter, slower, and far sturdier:
- integrated selves
- resilient relationships
- communities capable of repair
- a faith that moves through truth into renewal
Not damage erased.
Damage redeemed.
A Gentle Invitation
Flourishing does not mean being defined by what happened to us.
But neither does it mean pretending it didn’t happen.
I no longer believe strength is amnesia.
I believe strength is the courage to remember—without being ruled by the past—and to allow what was broken to be reworked into something whole.
If you have been told that strength requires forgetting, silencing, or dominating—
and if that story has left you fractured rather than whole—
there may be another way to walk.
Not toward control, but toward integration.
Not away from memory, but through it.
Not toward empire’s version of strength, but toward the kind of life that leads to shalom.
That, for me, is what it means to truly flourish.
SeePhas 