Fr. Patrick Gilger, S.J. writes:

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….

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….

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….

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.

Margaret Felice writes:

But some of what attracts is within the church’s purview: community, care, narrative and identity. Young men want to be seen, to be cared for and to have someone advocate for them. They respond to stories that help them to understand the world, and they construct a vision of the world based on what they hear. If influencers are building a world in which men are attacked from all sides, where scapegoats are responsible for life’s challenges, where only the strong survive and hateful aggression is the trait most advantageous for our age, then those of us who oppose that vision need to build worlds that promote an alternative.

Schools and parishes ought to consider what stories their communities are telling: Do they make the reign of God visible and believable? Put another way, do they make the vision of the viral hatemongers seem ridiculous by manifesting something better?

Perhaps world-building, with its implications of facades and even falsehoods, does not perfectly capture this formative task of our institutions. What we do is reveal the world that our tradition tells us God wants for us: a world of relationships and love where we do our best to cooperate with God’s grace as it helps us grow in virtue and holiness. The sugar high of online hate does not hold up against the deep nourishment of love, and it is our job to let adolescents know that there is a healthier diet available to them.

Fr. Peter Nguyen, S.J. writes:

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….

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….

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.

Susan Bigelow Reynolds writes:

The Christian persecution narrative at the heart of the Catholic manosphere’s brand of apologetics relies on a fantasy of defense—of the faith, of the church, of a narrowly defined vision of the true and good and beautiful. It is a worldview that is powerfully and insidiously consoling to young men emerging into adulthood in an economy that has left them behind, and with them the sense of identity that traditionally comes from starting a life. Many influencers in the Catholic manosphere console their followers by assuring them that such failures are not their fault, but are instead the result of postmodern social engineering aimed at upending traditional gender roles. Men, they insist, are owed something that they have been denied.

At a moment in which grievance is a particularly lucrative kind of political currency, it is not difficult to pinpoint the allure—or the already disastrous consequences—of this narrative. As we witness the rise of far-right movements worldwide, we should recall with necessary alarm the role of right-wing Catholicism in facilitating the rise of 20th-century fascism. The church must stop allowing itself to be used as a tool in the extremist resurgence in the United States today.