Do You Have to Come to Christ to be Fully a Man?

You Tell Me

An important question being asked by many men today is “What does it mean to be a man?” In a cultural context where a Supreme Court nominee refused to answer, “What is a woman?” This question has an increasingly pressing urgency. It is widely observed sociologically that male identity is more fragile than female identity because there are obvious embodied aspects to femininity. It is for this reason that historically societies have developed explicit rituals to demark the becoming of a man. We lack these. We have instead prolonged male adolescence. We even lack in many cases the example and voices of fathers. In our time, the male identity is not simply fragile, it is in crisis. 

How you address this crisis depends on how it is framed. I’ve thought a lot about the crisis of masculinity since writing Aspirational Masculinity: On Making Men Whole. Here I seek a positive framing of men based on their spiritual dependence.

The media’s default position is that the crisis of men is a feminist problem. Men’s problems are viewed through the lens of how they negatively impact women. This is reflected in the New York Times opinion piece “Why Women are Weary of the Emotional Labor of ‘Mankeeping.'” The very term “mankeeping” frames men as a burden to women. This article Aaron Renn points out is a good example of the manosphere concept of “female solipsism,” in which the problems of men are framed in terms of how negatively they impact women. This is the common media narrative and frame on masculinity. 

The church’s default position is the opposite: that the crisis of men is assumed to be the man’s fault. Entire books are written listing a litany of behavioral problems of men (despair, loneliness, shame, lust, ambition, apathy, anger) urging men as men to address their own problems, which are of their own doing. The source of their toxicity is their own weakness. Man up.

The manosphere’s default framing rejects both framings and gleefully embraces the alleged toxicity. “To hell with your critiques, we will just be men. Deal with it.” There is found here a kind of transgressive freedom from the self-reflective, self-doubting, cultural nagging. Instead, men retreat to their online man caves with cigars, bourbon, and porn.

In none of these framings is the ideal of masculinity celebrated. Nowhere are men positioned as central to families and foundational to civilization. Such a notion in today’s world reeks of patriarchy, misogyny, and “me-too” denial. Historically, you must go back to before Jane Austin to find the celebration of a positive masculine ideal. C.S. Lewis observed that there is a Great Divide that separates the Old World with the Modern World.

Lewis puts it at about the time of Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott at the end of the eighteenth century and a little way into the nineteenth. And those who lived before the Great Divide are those he calls “Old Western Man.” But, like the long-drawn-out Fall of Rome, this later Greater Divide is gradual. Old Western continued in unaffected areas. Lewis himself is, he says, an Old Western Man. 

The Great Divide impacts every aspect of society: political, economic, religious, social, intellectual, aesthetic. Its impact on the family is paramount as it is here that we see the impact on men. It is my contention that the crisis of men is a cultural headwater issue, that it is a singular problem from which flows a cascading number of other problems. But, of course, this reflects my bias to the perspective of the Old Western Man. 

The family in decay—that rock-hard institution of Old Western Man. Marriage itself breaking down: multi-marriages or, so to speak, serial polygamy. Or no marriage at all. Social morality is all but dead. And for good or ill—since Lewis’s lecture—a change that would be almost unbelievable to Old Western Man, a change as great as any in all history: feminism. If feminism (unisexism) is here to stay, it will be overwhelmingly the greatest social change of all time, equal to the coming of the machine. Overwhelming change and very possibly overwhelming error, too. Socially, there is no question that it is the Great Divide.

The power of culture is its ability to define reality. It is apparent that there is no positive public cultural discourse about men. Men are a burden, toxic, or worse, dangerous predators in waiting. This is the cultural ethos in which young men are growing up. It feels impossible to be a man today.

There is yet another way to frame the crisis of masculinity, that is spiritually. This is the approach I take in Aspirational Masculinity. If our male identity is not designed or merely discovered but derived based on an ongoing dependent relationship with God, then the frame shifts radically back to the pre-modern framing of Lewis’ Old World. It is my view that we must return to the pre-modern view of identity to be equipped for the challenges and complexities of a postmodern world.

It is not enough to be born of water. The gender distinction while real at birth is inadequate. You must also be born of the Spirit. That is to become fully a man you must have the presence of God living within you, animating through you, and enabling you to be what you cannot be apart from God’s presence in your life. Without a mystical spiritual presence in your life, your life will be missing its animating dynamic. You will be driving a truck without an engine.

Now it is possible to talk about the chassis and the wheels, but it’s hardly worth the discussion if you must get out of the truck and push it yourself to get any motion. Most of the conversations addressing the crisis of masculinity are of this nature. They talk of everything except what really matters in terms of being a man.

Our identity as men is the outgrowth of the indwelling Christ within us. In less religious terms, we are talking about “embodied enchantment.” C.S. Lewis explains, “God became man to turn creatures into sons; not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better [all the behavioral modification books on masculinity] but turning a horse into a winged creature.” We don’t want a better man, but a god-infused man. This is the engine that will reframe the crisis of masculinity.

Now for some this sounds overly pietistic: too much grace and too little nature. This is a debate I had recently with Aaron Renn about my book. He rightfully pointed out that much of the church has a theology that is woefully weak on creation, common grace, and natural law. I couldn’t agree more. We always think first in pictures. Let me see if I can picture the disagreement. Here is the common evangelical view:

GRACE

NATURE

In this view grace takes precedence over nature, so that the practical outworking in people’s lives looks more like this:

GRACE

In such a framing, there is nothing that can be learned from psychology or sociology about masculinity, because grace supersedes all. You either come to Christ, or I have nothing to say to you. Renn is right in reacting negatively to such framing and practice. There is much that can be learned from psychology and sociology. To this end, I speak as an academically trained sociologist.

However, I fear that this reaction to a framing error, though unlikely in Renn, can also lead to another framing error, which looks like this:

NATURE

Here our efforts to correct the over-spiritualization of identity to the exclusion of nature, leads to an inadvertent secularization of identity with grace removed or downplayed.

My debate with Renn helped me see my own position more clearly and for that I am most grateful. The problem is in the two-story framing of reality, first taught to many of us by Francis Schaeffer. Secularism is the compartmentalization of God and religion, and everything else, into autonomous and unrelated parts of our lives. Secularism doesn’t need to deny God’s existence; it only needs to put him in his rightful place. If instead we live in a “one-story universe,” avoiding the dualistic segregation of God in the two-story model, then the picture changes. Theologically, this is a sacramentalist vision of reality. For more see Alexander Schmemann and Hans Boersma.

NATURE / GRACE

The most immediate impact of our conversion is becoming a new person in Christ. Jesus’ actual incarnated resurrection presence in our lives is the difference that makes all the difference. You cannot become fully you without the embodied reality of this woo. This is the same dynamic we see in the process of photosynthesis in a plant. This is the way reality works, everywhere. Nature and grace run on the same track.

In conclusion, to drive this point home, let me again quote C.S. Lewis. “Every person is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.” Lest we think of this in an abstract two-story manner, Lewis unpacks what this means.

Let me make it quite clear that when Christians say the Christ-life is in them, they do not simply mean something mental or moral. When they speak of being “in Christ” or of Christ being “in them,” this is not simply a way of saying that they are thinking about Christ or copying Him. They mean that Christ is actually operating through them; that the whole mass of Christians is the physical organism through which Christ acts—that we are His fingers and muscles, the cells of His body.”

Do we need grace? Do plants need the sun? It’s the same question. 

Our emerging masculine identity is the fruit of and the outgrowth of the indwelling Christ within us. God did not come to make us marginally better persons, but a whole new kind of person. This hope is the answer to the crisis of masculinity. To man up is to “Be supernaturally infused with strength through your life-union with the Lord Jesus. Stand victorious with the force of his explosive power flowing in and through you” (Ephesians 6:10, The Passion Translation). Without apology, true masculinity is a spiritual reality and dependent relationship.

David John Seel, Jr. is a writer, cultural analyst, and educator. He is a principal at Reframe Consulting LLC. He is the author of eight books, the most recent being Aspirational Masculinity: On Making Men Whole (Whithorn Press, 2025). He and his wife, Kathryn, live in Wilmington, North Carolina where they attend Christ Community Church.

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