The Heresies of the Manosphere, Part 2

What the Manosphere Gets Wrong ... and Why

Apr 30, 2024

Welcome back friends, both old and new. If you missed last week’s newsletter (and didn’t guess from the title), this is the second of three (maybe four) essays that I’m writing about the heretical ideas prevalent in the current Catholic Manosphere. Last week, I talked about what the Manosphere is, why it appeals to so many young men in our culture—young men who are absolutely facing real and great challenges–and what the Church broadly has to say about sex and gender. If you haven’t read that yet, you should read it before diving in here. The third essay will be out at the very end of next week (or early the following week). I am determined to finish the Word on Fire Children’s Story Bible before Mother’s Day, so I’m going to give all my (limited) writing time to that until it’s finished, then be back with the (hopefully) final essay in this series after that.

Thanks, as always, for taking the time to read what I write. I pray it’s valuable to you. And speaking of time, this essay is a doozy (you’ll see why it took me so long to get it to you once you get into it), so if it’s easier to listen to the essay than read it, remember all full subscribers also get an audio podcast. You can listen to it in the Substack app or on Apple or Spotify. And if you’re not a full subscriber, I have a button for you.

Someone asked me last week why I was bothering with this series. Did I think it was going to change anyone’s mind? Did I have expectations of some HyperPatriarchy YouTuber, reversing his opinions on mothers working, the marital debt, or the equality of women? That would be lovely. But no, I don’t expect any of the men lurking about the Manosphere to read my essays, let alone take them seriously.

I am not, however, writing this series for them. I’m writing it for Catholic women, who are navigating a toxic dating scene made even more toxic by the Manosphere influencers. I’m writing it for Catholic moms and dads, who are worried about their daughters and sons. And I’m writing it for anyone, married or single, trying to understand what the Church actually teaches about men, women, and marriage.

For this reason, I’m not going to spend much time in the remaining essays talking about the secular Manosphere. If you’re a full subscriber to this newsletter, I presume you don’t need an explanation of why it’s wrong to encourage men to sleep around, abuse women, and devote all their free time to getting ripped. As I said last week, the errors of the secular Manosphere are not subtle. They are increasingly pervasive, especially among high school and college students with smart phones. Some of Andrew Tate’s biggest fans are in Catholic high schools. And if you’re a parent of a teenage boy, it’s important to know this and talk to your son about it. But again, the errors are not subtle.

Not so in the Catholic Manosphere. There, truth gets twisted up with lies in a way that can take in young men with good hearts and good intentions. Some of its loudest voices claim they’re helping men become good husbands and fathers, portend to be on the side of Christian marriage, and insist they have found the key to winning back the culture for Christ. Never mind that Christ Himself already told us the key (hint: it’s Himself, not the patriarchy), a lot still sounds good. And when you combine all the obstacles men in our culture face, with a lack of clear fatherly guidance from both spiritual and biological fathers, it’s not hard to understand why many young men are buying—in whole or in part—what the Manosphere is selling.

So how do you stop them from buying it? I am not a parent of a teenage boy. And until I’ve raised multiple boys to adulthood, I’m not handing out any advice about how to help them steer clear of the Manosphere. What I can do, though, is help you understand where the Manosphere goes wrong. And that can’t start with a line-by-line refutation of their various errors, but rather with a clear understanding of how Catholics read and understand Divine Revelation.

The Keys to Understanding

Scripture and Tradition

Let’s start with the most basic: how Divine Revelation comes to us. As Catholics, we do not believe in Sola Scriptura. We believe the Faith comes to us through Scripture and Tradition. More to the point, we believe Scripture itself comes to us through the Tradition of the Church.

Scripture is the inspired Word of God. He is its primary author. But none of us would even know which books were the inspired Word of God without Tradition. When the last of the Apostles died, Jesus didn’t return to earth, hand the Church a neatly bound volume of all 73 books of the Bible, and say, “Here. Read this.” It might have been much appreciated had He done that, though, since what exactly constituted the canon of Scripture had become a pressing question by the fourth century. The early Christians possessed more than a few opinions about which books of the Hebrew Scriptures were inspired, which Gospels were authentic, and which letters the Apostles actually wrote. Paul told Timothy that all Scripture is inspired, but no one told the first Christians which writings were Scripture. They had to figure that out. But not by themselves.

Catholics believe that the same Holy Spirit who inspired very human men to write the books of the Bible, also inspired very human men to know which books were inspired. That happened at the Council of Rome in 382, when the first definitive list of the Biblical canon was decided upon. We don’t, however, think the Holy Spirit stopped guiding the Church after the Council of Rome concluded. Jesus promised the Apostles in John 16:13 that the Holy Spirit would guide them “into all truth.” Catholics believe that for the past 2,000 years He has done just that, helping the successors to the Apostles—the pope and all bishops in union with Him—authoritatively interpret Divine Revelation. Not receive new revelations. But understand the truth of what God has already revealed and help the faithful in every age understand that too.

So, that’s the first thing you need to know if you want to sort out truth from lies in the Manopshere. The second thing is that Catholics don’t believe proof texting is a valid way to interpret God’s Word.

Context Matters

This can seem like such a little thing … until some guy on the Internet tells your husband it doesn’t matter that you just gave birth three weeks ago: men have needs and men have rights and Saint Paul says in 1 Corinthians that it’s okay for your husband to assert those rights. Then, suddenly, the Catholic prohibition of proof texting becomes a really big deal.

And it is a big deal. Proof texting is one of the easiest ways for someone to twist the truth of the Gospel and the fullness of the Faith beyond recognition. Which is why Catholics don’t do it. We don’t just pluck a line out of Scripture or a Magisterial document and say, “This is Church teaching. This is the Gospel.” Rather, we read the parts in light of the whole, recognizing that Scripture and Tradition illuminate each other, and that one part of the Bible or one aspect of a Church document has to be understood in relation to every other part. We also read the parts in light of the Church’s lived life for the past 2,000 years. We look at how the Church in history–her saints and the Christian faithful—has understood, interpreted, and incorporated the Gospel into their daily lives.

Approaching Divine Revelation this way makes room for context—both historical and literary. It helps clarify, deepen, or sharpen our understanding of challenging passages. It prevents us from remaking the Gospel in our own image, to suit our own needs, preferences, and beliefs. Or to increase our viewership on YouTube … as the case may be.

The Development of Doctrine

A third aspect of how Catholics understand Revelation, which is relevant to the errors of the Manosphere, is that we believe doctrine develops. Again, we don’t believe doctrine can be undone or disassembled. We don’t think that what the Church once said was black can later become white. But we do believe that the Church’s understanding of revealed truth can deepen with time. It can become more, not less, of what God always intended it to be. In his essay on the development of doctrine, Saint John Henry Newman compared this change to how we see a diamond. The diamond is the diamond. It doesn’t change whether we’re giving it the briefest of glances or looking at it under a microscope. But the more we look at that diamond and the more closely we examine it, the more we see. We come to comprehend dimensions, depths, and angles that weren’t visible at first glance. So it is with revealed truth. The more the Church looks at a particular truth—the more she thinks about it, prays about it, and defends it against challenges to it—the more the Holy Spirit guides her into a deeper, fuller understanding of that truth.

We see this throughout Church history. Just as Jesus didn’t drop a Bible into the lap of the early Church, He didn’t drop a Catechism into her lap either. Countless Church doctrines that we just assume as part of the Tradition—such as the Holy Trinity—actually took centuries to hammer out. It was all there, in Scripture and Tradition, from the very first, but the Church’s understanding of how God could be both One and Three, of what the relationship within the Godhead looked like, and all that relationship implies about Jesus had the whole Church at loggerheads for hundreds of years.

Oftentimes, the development of doctrine happened in the context of challenges to the Faith. Someone would say something like, “Well, you can call Mary the mother of Jesus, but you can’t call her the mother of God.” Then, someone else would respond, “So, you’re saying Jesus isn’t God?” and the whole Church would be off to the races, looking at the Scriptures, looking at the Tradition, and calling on the Holy Spirit as they argued and wrangled over what God meant when He was inspiring folks to write the Bible.

Other times, doctrine developed in the context of historical change. Something would happen—like the advent of chattel slavery in the Americas—that would force the Church to look more closely at how Scripture and Tradition could be applied to that particular situation. What Paul had to say about slavery in ancient Rome when he thought Jesus would be returning post haste and how the Church talked about slavery when it was more a form of indentured servitude or the consequence of war, had to be reevaluated in light of brutal, race-based enslavement that treated entire continents of people as sub-human. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, that reevaluation didn’t happen in an instance. It often doesn’t. The Church’s response on chattel slavery was more than a bit stuttering, as various popes (and Christians of all stripes) worked their way towards a clear and consistent articulation of why slavery is always and everywhere evil. She eventually got there. But, as with so many other things, it took time.

The Two Wings

The fourth key aspect of how Catholics understand faith is that we don’t think faith stands alone. It works hand in hand with reason, to lead us to a deeper understanding of God and man. In the prologue to the encyclical Fides et Ratio, John Paul II described faith and reason as the “two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” That is to say, the two work together. Reason helps us make sense of what has been revealed. It helps us understand Divine Revelation more fully. Likewise, faith illuminates reason. It helps us reason more reasonably, allowing reason to do more and see more than it ever could on its own.

This symbiotic relationship of faith and reason is ultimately ordered towards Christian freedom. This is because freedom is what God wants for us. He wants us to be free—free from slavery to sin and also freely His. He doesn’t want us to be slaves, blindly and unquestioningly obeying Him. Rather, He wants us to be children, who see the good He sees, love the good He loves, and freely choose the good He offers. He wants us to be mature, faithful disciples, capable of integrating revealed truth into the ever-changing circumstances of our lives and also of discerning the movement of the Spirit in our hearts.

To help us achieve that maturity, God has chosen, in a sense, to trust us. Not trust that we’ll always do right or make good decisions. That would be lunacy. Rather, He trusts us to make decisions about our own life that are informed by faith, but not dictated in every aspect by faith. He has revealed who He is and the broad principles of what He wants from us. He has given us a Church to help us more fully understand those things, as well as to transmit the graces to us that we need to become who we are. But neither God nor His Church has delineated every step we need to take, at every moment of the day, as we go about that becoming. Every decision we need to make has not been spelled out. Every action we need to perform has not been told to us. The exact shape of our days and our lives has not been handed to us, whole cloth, ready-made. It’s been left to us to shape our own lives—our work, our vocation, our habits, our hobbies, our family rhythms and family mission—all with the help of both faith and reason.

Unmasking the Heresies

So, why does all this matter? What does recognizing the heresies of the Manosphere have to do with Scripture and Tradition, the problems of proof texting, the development of doctrine, and the relationship of faith and reason?

Everything.

On Submission

When you know that God speaks to us through Sacred Tradition, as well as through Sacred Scripture, you’re not beholden to some particular pastor, priest, or YouTuber, who, for example, interprets Ephesians 5:22 (“Wives be subject to your husband, as to the Lord”) to mean that the wife owes slavish obedience to her husband or that submission is a one-way street. It’s not their subjective opinion on what that passage means that matters. It’s the Church’s authoritative opinion. It’s she who has the power to bind and loose and she who has the authority to judge the Holy Spirit’s meaning.

And what she says on the matter is that “whereas in the relationship between Christ and the Church the subjection is only on the part of the Church, in the relationship between husband and wife the ‘subjection’ is not one-sided but mutual,” (Mulieris Dignitatem, 24). The Church likewise teaches that “Authentic conjugal love presupposes and requires that a man have a profound respect for the equal dignity of his wife,” and warns against “a wrong superiority of male prerogatives which humiliates women and inhibits the development of healthy family relationships,” (Familiaris Consortio, 25).

The Church doesn’t deny the husband’s headship. She recognizes that the husband is the head of the family as Christ is the head of the Church. But she also recognizes the husband, is not Christ. Human husbands are just that: human. They are flawed sinful men whose judgement is as likely wrong as right. No wife, no person, is called to give unquestioning obedience to another human person. Rather, as “head” and “heart,” husband and wife are to work together to help their marriage and their family flourish (Casti Connubi. 27).

That metaphor, as employed by Pope Pius XI, is a powerful one. It illustrates its point well (better perhaps than Pius XI intended), for in a healthy human person, times exist when the heart must be led by the head—deferring to it wisdom. Times also exist when the head must be led by the heart—acknowledging its wisdom. So too in a healthy marriage, where both husband and wife recognize the wisdom of the other, trust the other, and exercise wisdom and humility in deferring to the other. That’s what having Sacred Tradition, as well as Sacred Scripture, helps you to see.

On the Marital Debt

Likewise, when you know that the Church does not consider proof texting a valid way for interpreting Scripture and that every passage must be interpreted in context, you know, for example, that Saint Paul’s “concession” to concupiscence in 1 Corinthians 7:3 (“The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband”) has to be read in light of the rest of Scripture and Tradition. And the rest of Scripture and Tradition tells us that: 1) Marriage is a sign of the relationship between Christ and the Church; 2) Husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the Church; 3) The ability to freely give our complete selves, body and soul, in love to another is one of the primary ways we image God; and 4) All the baptized are called to the perfection of chastity, where our bodily desires are rightly ordered and become subject to our reason.

Sexual love is an important part of a joyful, healthy marriage. And if one spouse is always saying no to intimacy without good reason or withholding physical love from the other as a kind of weapon or power play, that is a problem.

But the whole of Church teaching also tells us that it’s a problem if one spouse is never accepting that “no” with grace, love, and understanding. It’s a problem if their spouse’s perfectly reasonable “not tonight” is met with anger, resentment, churlishness, or childish petulance. And the reason it’s a problem, as I’ve written here before, is because, “a concession to concupiscence does not trump a husband’s duty to love his wife as Christ loved the Church, which is the central mystery of Christian marriage. A concession to concupiscence also does not trump free will and the freedom inherent in self gift, which are fundamental ways the human person images God. And a concession to concupiscence does not trump the call to chastity and charity at the heart of the human vocation to holiness.”

On Women and Work

Now, what about the development of doctrine? Well, when you understand that Church teaching can and does deepen with time, you can make better sense of all the papal quotes from the nineteenth and twentieth century (so frequently posted by Manosphere YouTubers), which seem to condemn the employment of mothers outside the home and imply that women are not men’s equals. If you check the context of those quotes, you’ll see they almost all come from Church documents responding to the social upheaval caused by the Industrial Revolution (and eventually the beginnings of the Sexual Revolution). The upheaval caused by the former—the upending of old economies, the migration of families away from farms and villages, and the employment of women and children in unsafe factories—raised countless questions that both the Church and the culture needed to address. Those included questions about the nature of work, the role of government, and the essence of the common good. It also quickly evolved to include questions about women’s rights, women’s dignity, and women’s place in the culture, questions which grew more pressing, not less as the twentieth century progressed.

In the most fundamental respects, the Church’s initial response to those questions remains unchanged today. Both then and now, the Church affirms woman’s great dignity, as man’s equal in Christ. Both then and now, the Church condemns economic and cultural structures which force mothers to leave their young children and seek employment outside the home (Quadragesimo Ano, 71; Familiaris Consortio, 23). Both then and now, the Church believes the work of mothers in the home is of “irreplaceable value,” (Casti Connubii, 75; Familiaris Consortio, 23). Also, both then and now, the Church directs her condemnation at the economies which are unjustly structured and the employers who don’t pay just wages, not at the families doing the best they can in light of those circumstances. It’s always been the unjust employers committing mortal sins, not the women working out of necessity, to help support their families.

Some aspects, however, of how the Church speaks of women’s rights, including her right to receive an education, work outside the home, and vote, have changed. Now, when the Church speaks of women who work, she says we make “an indispensable contribution … to the establishment of economic and political structures ever more worthy of humanity,” (Letter to Women, 2). She also asserts that the “equal dignity and responsibility of men and women fully justifies women's access to public functions,” and that a “fully human society” requires that its people find a way to “harmoniously combin[e]” women’s roles in the home and the culture,” (Familiaris Consortio, 23).

This change is partly because the context in which the Church is talking about these issues has changed. Mothers working as professors, lawyers, and doctors on schedules that allow them to be present in the home much of the day is different from women working 16-hour shifts in factories. For many of us, working now means something much closer to what it meant prior to the Industrial Revolution, when women worked on their family farms or in their family shops. It’s something that can be integrated into family life in a healthy way. The Church takes that into account. The change is also because the ills of the Industrial Revolution and the great evils of the twentieth century’s wars spurred the Church to develop a more perfect articulation of every person’s dignity, both men’s and women’s. There is a fuller grasp now of what was revealed in Scripture: “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”

On Much of the Rest

The relationship of faith and reason also figures into the development. The rapid changes in our industrialized, globalized society—more rapid than at any time in history—combined with the radically different life circumstances of Christians in different cities, countries, and cultures, underlined for the Church the sheer impossibility of laying down absolutes about women and work. She recognized that, like countless other questions of the Christian life, the question of whether mothers work inside or outside the home, what kind of work we do, and how much we do it, is not a question of doctrine. It’s a question of prudence. It’s something for each family to determine, in light of both faith and reason.

So too with other hotly debated topics in the Manosphere. Whether families homeschool or not, whether women wear pants or not, whether moms manage the family accounting or not, whether dads wash dishes or not—none of that is proscribed. None of that is dictated to us from on high. Every family has to sort those questions out for themselves, based on the needs, gifts, vocations, and circumstances of the particular people in that family. The Church trusts that we know the answer to these questions far better than she does. She trusts even more that we know the answer to these questions far, far better than random people on the Internet do. She knows God gave each of us the gift of reason, as well as the gift of faith, and she expects us to use both gifts as we go about the business of following God in the world.

Together, an understanding of the importance of Sacred Tradition, the inadequacy of proof texting, the development of doctrine, and the relationship of faith and reason unmask a host of Manosphere heresies. The constant presence of holy women in Scripture and the Church (from Miriam, Deborah, and Anna to Macrina, Hildegard, and Catherine), who have taught the faith, advised popes, and chastised bishops shows that there is more nuance than the Manosphere will admit regarding Saint Paul’s prohibition of women teaching or holding authority in the Church. The canonization and beatification of women who have had careers and small children, including Gianna Beretta Molla, Zelie Martin, and Maria Corsini Beltrame Quattrocchi) underlines what the Church has repeatedly said about mothers working in the world: that our presence is valued and needed. The mother in Proverbs 31, who “considers a field and buys it … perceives that her merchandise is profitable … makes linen garments and sells them,” (v. 16, 18, 24) and Lydia, “a seller of purple goods” who was baptized with her children in Acts 14, likewise remind us that women have worked in some capacity or other throughout Church history. And the focus on Mary’s time assisting Elizabeth in her home, both in Scripture and the Rosary, reveals the Manosphere’s condemnation of mothers receiving any outside help, even from family, as the manipulative trick of abusers it is.

All that is good. All that is helpful. But there is a fifth interpretive key to unlocking the errors of the Manosphere that we haven’t talked about yet. It is a key that doesn’t just show us what’s wrong with the Manosphere, but also charts a path forward for all of us: a true, beautiful, holy path for what authentic masculinity looks like in this world. That key is the sacramental worldview.

And this is what we’ll talk about in the next essay: what the sacramental worldview is and what it reveals about true Christian masculinity.