Earlier this month, the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) published a survey [1] of two thousand American men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine. The results are a resounding affirmation of the problem I began to delineate in last week’s column [2], i.e. a crisis of masculinity that is pushing men into the orbit of toxic, pseudo-masculine figures like Andrew Tate.
The researchers gave their report a fitting title: America’s Demoralized Men [3]. What they find is that forty-three percent of the respondents agreed with the statement: “I am inclined to think that I am a failure.” Sixty-one percent said they often feel they have “little control over the things that happen” to them. Nearly half said they lack any real community. Almost one in ten reported having no close friends at all. Fifty-nine percent were not in a romantic relationship, and only sixteen percent were married.
The pollsters summarized their findings this way:
Fewer young men go to college…and fewer of them come away with a degree. Just 41% of degrees are now awarded to men. Young men have higher rates of conditions such as ADHD and autism and have more problems with drugs, gambling, pornography, and the law. Many young men today have lower earnings and career prospects compared to earlier cohorts. They have fewer friends, socialize less, and are less civically engaged. Fewer are making a timely transition to adulthood by meeting such milestones as having a full-time job, being financially independent, living away from their parents’ home, and getting married and having children.
However, one of the findings is especially poignant. According to the survey, these young men have not checked out [4] of marriage and fatherhood. They still want both. They simply cannot find the road that leads there. As they found, “most men who are not in a relationship are open to dating (74%), most unmarried men desire marriage (68%, with another 21% unsure), and most childless men would like to be a parent in the future (62%).”
Last week I began asking why the young men who have found Andrew Tate find him so attractive. What I would like to suggest is that the IFS numbers point toward the answer, and it is one the Church has been giving for decades.
They are looking for their fathers.
1 in 4 American Children Grow Up Without a Present Father
According to Census Bureau figures compiled by the National Fatherhood Initiative, 18.2 million American children [7] – roughly one in four – are growing up in a home without a biological, step, or adoptive father.
Over the past half century researchers have compiled voluminous data on the effects of fatherlessness. The findings are uniformly bleak. Children in father-absent homes are far likelier to grow up in poverty and food insecurity. They struggle more in school, suffer more behavioral and psychological problems, and are likelier to end up in the criminal justice system. Even infant mortality runs dramatically higher where fathers are absent.
And the damage compounds across generations. The research consistently shows that a boy raised without his father carries that absence into his own adulthood and is far likelier to leave children of his own behind. Fatherlessness replicates. A boy who never watched a man love his wife faithfully, hold a job doggedly, apologize humbly, or pray sincerely has never seen the thing he is now expected to become.
This is the engine of the crisis. In many ways, it explains the demoralized twenty-five-year-old in the IFS survey. He is not lazy. He is not indifferent to family life. He is untrained, having lacked access to the role models who might show him what authentic, selfless masculinity looks like. The consequence is that their children in turn pay the price, and on and on it goes.
What a Father Is For?
Our culture has spent decades communicating to men that fathers are, at best, optional, and at worst, a stumbling block. Our media are filled with depictions of weak, absent, incompetent, and selfish fathers.
The Church, however, has a far different, far more demanding, and also far more hopeful message. In Familiaris Consortio [8], Pope St. John Paul II teaches that a man reveals and relives “on earth the very fatherhood of God” (no. 25). In other words, a child forms his first idea of God the Father across the breakfast table, watching the man who raised him. Where that father is absent, or cruel, or merely indifferent, the loss runs deeper than a missing parent: the child has lost his first and most natural window onto the Fatherhood of God.
In the same passage, the Holy Father describes what this fatherhood requires concretely, i.e. “generous responsibility for the life conceived under the heart of the mother.”
Fatherhood begins not at birth, but at conception, which is precisely why fatherlessness and abortion are so tightly bound together. Ask any counselor at a pregnancy help center what the decisive factor usually is, and you will hear the same answer: the man. He has vanished, or he has issued an ultimatum, or he has offered to pay for the abortion and nothing else. Every abortion has a father somewhere.
In HLI’s work in more than one hundred countries, I have seen this pattern constantly. Where men abandon their posts, children die and families suffer. This is why I am convinced that one of the most critical, and lasting, solutions to the abortion culture, is the resurrection of authentic masculinity, which begins in the home.
The home built on such fatherhood becomes what the Catechism of the Catholic Church [9] calls the domestic church: “the place where children receive the first proclamation of the faith … a community of grace and prayer, a school of human virtues, and of Christian charity” (no. 1666). And in that school, Pope St. John Paul II wrote, the curriculum is self-gift:
The family is the first and fundamental school of social living: as a community of love, it finds in self-giving the law that guides it and makes it grow. The self-giving that inspires the love of husband and wife for each other is the model and norm for the self-giving that must be practiced in the relationships between brothers and sisters and the different generations living together in the family (Familiaris Consortio [8], no. 37).
In such a familial culture, there is no room for the selfishness and abandonment that ends in the death of a child because the father’s appetites took precedence over his responsibilities.
The Educational Emergency
Nearly twenty years ago, Pope Benedict XVI wrote a letter to his own diocese of Rome [10] on what he called an “educational emergency.” In it, he diagnosed the collapse of our capacity to form human beings who can distinguish good from evil, commit themselves to others, and find meaning in their lives. At the root of the crisis, he suggested, lay a loss of confidence in life itself. And he exhorted parents to recognize that the remedy begins with them.
Pope Benedict was writing in 2008. Since then, the data have only continued to compound, validating his point. Just this month, researchers publishing in the journal Developmental Science reported [11] that across seventy countries over three decades, declining religiosity in the raising of children tracked closely with rising rates of anxiety disorders among children and adolescents. Religion, the researchers noted, reliably supplies “belonging, order, meaning, purpose, routine” – the very goods our demoralized young men report lacking.
This is where no social program can replace present parents, who model for their children a different way of living – one that is oriented towards the transcendent through and through. A father who drops his children at religious education and then reads his phone through Mass has taught them a lesson far more powerful than anything the catechist managed that week. The father whose children never see him on his knees, asking for the divine guidance every man needs to become the man he was meant to be, is quietly training them in the isolated, despair-inducing reductive materialism that is endemic in our culture.
However, the reverse is also true. Researchers who study religious transmission across generations keep arriving at the same conclusion: the father’s practice weighs unusually heavily in whether children keep the faith as adults. Where a father prays, children tend to keep praying. Where he is indifferent, they tend to drift, however devout their mother.
It is a fearful responsibility, and a magnificent one.
How Do We Teach Men How to Be Fathers?
Which brings us to the practical question: how do we form good fathers when a generation of men never had one?
The answer is not another pamphlet. Fatherhood is a craft, and crafts are learned by apprenticeship. Every parish contains men in their sixties and seventies who raised faithful children through decades of ordinary sacrifice. Every parish also contains young men who have no idea how to lead a family in prayer, how to have a mutually respectful, giving relationship with their spouse, or how to say to a son the words their own fathers never said to them. That these two groups so rarely meet is one of the great wasted opportunities in the Church today. Pair them. A young father needs an older father the way an apprentice needs a master.
Here is where organizations like the Knights of Columbus have such a critical role to play. I have seen many active Knights councils, where the men meet with a sense of mission and purpose. They are not there simply to run through the minutes of last month’s meeting or to put on another pancake breakfast, but rather to find ways that they, as a group, can challenge each other to become better, and improve their parish and the surrounding community, through acts of service. This can involve everything from lending helping hands to the local pregnancy center, fundraising for the local food bank, providing assistance with disaster relief, and engaging in study of Scripture or Church documents. In these cases, you find young men walking alongside older men, giving their time, talent and treasure to others, rather than focusing on new ways to feed their appetites.
Most men who keep their distance from parish life have not rejected the faith. They simply cannot see a place in it that asks anything of them. A men’s group that exists solely to cook and eat pancakes will attract men who want pancakes. This is not to say that the pancake breakfast doesn’t have its place in fostering parish community. However, a men’s group that also meets at six in the morning to pray, study, and hold one another accountable will attract men who want to become saints.
Priests, too, have an irreplaceable role here. Men will not be formed by homilies addressed to a generic congregation. They need to be addressed as men and given something difficult to do. Call them to daily prayer with their children, to weekly confession, to fasting, to leading the family Rosary however awkwardly. Men do not flee from demands; they flee from being treated as unnecessary. And bishops, who bear the title of father themselves, might ask how much of their pastoral planning is aimed at the fathers in their dioceses – the men who will determine, more than any program, whether the next generation keeps the faith.
Young Men, Look to St. Joseph
Above all, we must recover the conviction that this work is worth a man’s whole life. The world tells a young man that fatherhood is a burden that will cost him his freedom, his money, and his fun. The Church tells him the truth: that in laying down his life for a wife and children he will find the deepest joy available to a man on this earth, and become, in the process, an image of God Himself.
In the Litany of St. Joseph, we call him “head of the Holy Family” and “pillar of families.” Scripture records not a single word he ever spoke. What it records is what he did. He protected, he provided, he obeyed God at considerable personal cost, and he raised a Son. In the eyes of his neighbors he was an unremarkable man, a village carpenter whose name would have meant nothing in Jerusalem. The vocation of fatherhood asks for no extraordinary gifts. It asks a man to be present, faithful, and unafraid of sacrifice.
To the young men in the IFS survey who feel like failures, the Church says something the culture cannot: you were made for this, and grace is available for it. Your life is not an accident, your strength is not a defect, and the family you have not yet begun is waiting for a man who will lay down his life for it.
Let us pray for men this week: for the faithful ones who may be exhausted and demoralized by the toxic messages of our culture or the daily demands of fatherhood, for the drifting ones who are falling under the influence of the Andrew Tates of our culture, and for the next generation of boys who are yearning for a father to love them enough to tell them that they are enough, as they are, while also challenging them to become more than they are.