The leftist man fears the Christian ideal of manhood. He trembles in the face of its purity. He is terrified by its chivalry. He is afraid of its manly prayer. He even fears its compassion. Far from the meek caricature of the Nietzsche world, with the help of supernatural grace, the virtuous Christian man can do all things in He who strengthens him.
One troubling American demographic is the young white male. He is lagging behind in education, job placement, and self-esteem. According to the legend, he can be found playing video games while living out his early adulthood in his parents’ basement.
Such a depiction obviously distorts reality. However, there is an element of truth in it. The young white male, like his black counterpart, is in trouble.
Victimizing the Young White Male
Liberals have created a narrative of oppression to explain the plight of these white young males. It welcomes the sad situation of these young men as something they deserve.
For generations, white males have benefited from white culture and oppressed others. Their toxic masculinity has also imposed “patriarchy” upon society. This white male is often Christian and has forced his morals upon society. Now society is changing, and a time of reckoning has arrived for the triple “sin” of racism, patriarchy, and morality.
Thus, the young white male deserves his fall from grace, and liberals do everything possible to facilitate his defeat and deconstruction.
Not Guilty
The young white males see their situation differently. They do not feel guilty of anything. Most just want to live their lives without controversy.
Thus, many youths solve the problem by retreating to the basements, to live out their resentment in cyber-isolation inside the dark web of gaming or pornography.
Other white young men follow another narrative. They flip the Marxist script of class struggle rightward, turning themselves into an oppressed class and therefore free to use brutal and shocking tactics in their quest for vengeance. They proclaim themselves victims and blame their fall on the system, whether it be society, culture, government, or the liberal establishment. They claim the deck is now stacked against them (and it may well be). They adopt a post-liberal narrative that calls for the system’s demise.
Where They Go Wrong
These white young males have real complaints against the system that need to be addressed. It might be argued that they are less equipped to deal with them than past generations. Postmodernity has handed them a wasteland devoid of virtues as the place to work out their problems.
Tragically, virtue hardly enters into the discussion in either narrative since life is almost always framed in economic terms, not the moral ones that get to the root of what is wrong.
The Nietzschean Model
Unfortunately, the resentful white young males of the second narrative adopt a vision of manhood that only makes matters worse.
This manhood is expressed in the Nietzschean affirmation of the strong man obsessed with a “will to power” and domination. Steeped in false mysticism, this vision idealizes brutal behavior and vilifies compassion.
Thus, the Christian man is seen as weak because he is wrongly perceived as only charitable and compassionate. He is despised because he does not adopt a macho persona that gives free rein to his unruly passions. He does not engage in lewd and vulgar behavior, mistakenly seen as a manifestation of manhood.
These young men are often exposed to the political thought of illiberal figures such as Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Alain de Benoist, Francis Parker Yockey, and Samuel Francis. All these now-popular figures were occultists and avowed pagans who idealize fierce pre-Christian models. Their anti-Christian message sidesteps any talk of virtue and proposes a simplistic, brutal way out of their problems.
Not a Threat to the Left
In following this model, the young white male thinks that he becomes a threat to the left that mistreats him.
However, this false model actually poses no real danger to the left. The young male shares with his woke counterparts the same anti-Christian worldview, depraved morals, and godless outlook. He engages in a reverse, yet similar, class struggle that wrongly frames history as power plays and favors the left’s revolution against what remains of the Christian West.
Guilty as Charged
The real solution for the young white male is to proudly declare himself “guilty” of the Christian values and virtues of which he is accused. He must embrace those morals that bring down the left’s wrath upon him…and satisfy his manly instincts.
He must say: yes, I do deny my unbridled impure passions. Yes, I practice charity toward the weak. Yes, I strive to be strong and intransigent against those who offend God.
He is guilty as charged because there is no crime or sin—only honor—in affirming the Faith that naturally gives purpose and meaning to life. There is nothing wrong—only honor— with following the natural law that corresponds to human nature.
Living this life can address the spiritual void that corrodes the hearts of so many young men who search for meaning inside the postmodern wilderness. Best of all, this cause can and must be defended in a manly fashion, with strength, Christian courage and forceful affirmation in the public square.
Why the Christian Model Can Work
There are three reasons why this Christian model can succeed.
The first is that this kind of program is generally attractive to young men. It appeals to their broad outlooks, passion for justice, and mode of action. They like challenges and high ideals.
Secondly, this program can work because many young males are already heading in this direction. They are attracted by the structured discipline of ancient liturgy and purposeful vocation. They are converting to the Catholic Faith in increasing numbers as they search for and find a manly ideal infinitely superior to that of Nietzsche—the way shown by Our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Left Fears the True Christian
Finally, the Catholic ideal of manhood is a very powerful proposal. The Nietzschean man cannot compete, since he is not really strong but, like the bully, given to insecurity, anxiety, and weakness.
The Christian man represents so much more. Indeed, the leftist man fears the Christian ideal of manhood. He trembles in the face of its purity. He is terrified by its chivalry. He is afraid of its manly prayer. He even fears its compassion. Far from the meek caricature of the Nietzsche world, with the help of supernatural grace, the virtuous Christian man can do all things in He who strengthens him (see Phil. 4:13).
A Strong Identity Transcending Race
When a young male pursues this strong identity, the adjective “white” curiously falls off. The young man sees the broad picture and realizes that the left really targets Christianity, not just masculinity.
He is then free from the heavy weight of Nietzsche’s unmanly and unattainable Übermensch. The now-young male can then live in accordance with the qualities that God endowed manhood (regardless of race). He can survive by aggressively attacking those who want to destroy what remains of Christianity. He can truly be who he is called to be.
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Always enjoy your thoughtful insights, John!
I have always thought that this kind of honesty is the best policy in dealing with the psychosis of these sycophants of Satan. Our life is greater than this world will ever understand in its blindness.
By the way… Excellent essay. Thank you.
John Horvat puts his finger on something that is almost never named directly: this is not primarily an economic, racial, or political crisis, but a crisis of formation.
What struck me most is how both dominant narratives fail these young men in opposite ways. The left indicts them morally without offering a path to responsibility, while the reactionary alternative offers power without virtue, identity without discipline, and grievance without purpose. Both leave formation untouched.
The Christian model succeeds precisely because it restores ordered identity—one rooted in restraint, duty, sacrifice, and meaning rather than expression or domination. That is what modern culture withholds. When virtue disappears from the conversation, resentment rushes in to fill the void.
What also stands out is that this same formation vacuum is visible at the civic level. A republic cannot survive on participation alone if citizens are never formed into the role self-government requires. When moral and civic formation erode together, men drift into isolation, nihilism, or false strength.
The answer is not indulgence or deconstruction, but recovery of discipline, responsibility, and rightly ordered manhood. In that sense, this essay is not just about young men. It is about the prerequisites of freedom itself.
Thank you for naming the problem honestly.
I’m in broad agreement with this essay, but I find it odd that the author keeps dragging in Nietzsche, without ever actually discussing Nietzsche or offering any explanation. (Other than that the ubermensch is unattainable, which is certainly true.)
Nietzsche’s alter-ego Zarathustra says, “I love all pious men.” While he is certainly not the solution to our problems, he at least provided an early partial diagnosis, and the author is tilting at windmills in fixating on him.
Mr. Horvat presents a compelling diagnosis of the contemporary crisis facing young men and proposes Christian virtue as the antidote to both liberal narratives of deserved decline and reactionary Nietzschean models of domination. He argues persuasively that neither retreat into passivity nor adoption of pagan masculinity can address the spiritual void afflicting young males, and that authentic Christian manhood offers strength, purpose, and moral clarity. The appeal to traditional Catholic ideals of chivalry, discipline, and purposeful vocation speaks to genuine needs in young men seeking transcendent meaning beyond the postmodern wasteland. Yet history suggests we must approach this prescription with caution, acknowledging that institutions explicitly dedicated to cultivating virtuous manhood have repeatedly become sites of profound corruption. The Catholic Church’s ongoing sexual abuse crisis and the similar scandals within the Boy Scouts of America reveal a troubling pattern: organizations that most loudly proclaim their commitment to purity and masculine virtue often harbor the very vices they condemn. This is not coincidence but perhaps reveals something about human nature itself, what Carl Jung called “the shadow” that grows in proportion to our conscious ideals. As he wrote, “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” The rigid insistence on certain models of virtue may create the psychological conditions for their opposite to flourish in hidden spaces.
The historical record demonstrates that movements seeking to establish virtue through clear doctrine and forceful affirmation often carry the seeds of their own corruption. Confucius built an entire civilization on ritual propriety and virtuous conduct, yet Mencius observed that “the great man is he who does not lose his child’s heart,” suggesting that systematic virtue cultivation can calcify into mere performance. The Pharisees whom Christ condemned were precisely those most dedicated to detailed moral observance, prompting his warning that “you are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones.” Dostoevsky, himself a Christian, warned through the Grand Inquisitor that institutional religion tends to replace authentic faith with “miracle, mystery, and authority,” using virtue as a mechanism of control rather than liberation. Even successful moral reformers recognized this danger: Gandhi acknowledged that “the moment there is suspicion about a person’s motives, everything he does becomes tainted,” and his own ashrams were not immune to the abuses of power he fought against in wider society. The very structure of creating elite moral communities, separate from the fallen masses, seems to generate the conditions for hypocrisy and abuse.
Mr. Horvat’s prescription deserves serious consideration, yet we must ask whether the “manly ideal” itself, divorced from humble recognition of universal human frailty, contains inherent dangers. Reinhold Niebuhr observed that “the final form of self-righteousness is the claim to be without sin,” and organizations built around masculine virtue have repeatedly demonstrated what happens when fallible men are elevated as paragons of spiritual strength. The anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that humans create “hero systems” to deny death and limitation, and religious systems promising transcendence through virtue may amplify rather than resolve this existential anxiety. When young men embrace Christian manhood as the solution to their resentment and displacement, are they finding authentic virtue or another form of the “will to power” disguised in holy language? The Taoist tradition teaches that “the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao,” suggesting that virtue itself becomes corrupted the moment it is systematized, proclaimed, and defended “in a manly fashion.” Perhaps the very act of creating a program to cultivate virtue, of dividing the world into the virtuous elect and the depraved masses, of promising that supernatural grace will enable men to “do all things,” plants the seeds of the pride that goeth before destruction. The Christian ideal may indeed be powerful, but power itself has corrupted every human institution that has wielded it, and to ignore this pattern while calling young men to forceful public affirmation risks recreating the cycle of idealism, corruption, and disillusionment that has marked religious history. The solution to the crisis of young men may require not a stronger program of virtue but a more tragic wisdom about human limitation and the dangers inherent in all our attempts to transcend it.
Religion, including the Christian Church, has lost its moral leading role in Western society. Why? Because the Church has been surrendering to the woke Left, practically giving Christianity’s virtue leadership role voluntarily to leftist intellectuals, political parties, demagogues, activists, and worse.
Yes, there is nothing wrong with following the natural law that corresponds to human nature—and that is precisely the path the Church abandoned a long time ago.
Yes, following the natural law can address the spiritual void that corrodes the hearts of so many young men who search for meaning inside the postmodern wilderness. Unfortunately, they cannot look at the Church for the rock-solid support they would need—and they will not.
And none should blame the forlorn messenger Nietzsche for the Church’s spiritual surrender, lack of ideological certitude, and its abandonment of virtue-leadership.