How Can We Help Men and Boys to Rise to Their Full Potential?

 Families are stronger when men and boys as well as women and girls fulfill their God-given positions in life. “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” tells us that husbands and fathers are to preside, provide, and protect their families, and wives and mothers are to nurture their children and families. It also tells us that men and women are to work together for the good of their families – and their communities by extension. However, things are not as they should be.

In an article published at the Deseret News, Samuel J. Abrams (a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute, explained what is happening with boys and young men as well as what they need. 

NYU professor Scott Galloway deserves credit for saying something too many cultural leaders still avoid: Boys and young men are not OK. They are falling behind in school, withdrawing from work, retreating from relationships and disappearing into digital worlds that offer stimulation without meaning. Galloway’s writing on “healthy masculinity” resonates because it names realities parents, teachers and researchers confront daily. In a culture that increasingly treats masculinity itself as suspect, simply affirming that boys matter is no small thing.

But the crisis facing American boys – and the deeper danger facing American society – cannot be solved by health alone. What we are witnessing is not merely a breakdown in confidence or emotional regulation. It is a collapse or moral formation. Boys are not just struggling; they are unanchored. They are growing up in a culture that has emptied manhood of purpose, stripped masculine strength of meaning and replaced inherited moral expectations with vague warnings about what men must not become.

For years, boys have absorbed a steady message: Masculine traits are liabilities. Physical courage is framed as aggression. Competitiveness is treated as pathology. Risk-taking is something to be managed away. The drive to build, protect or lead is often met with suspicion. When boys misbehave, the culture has a rich vocabulary of condemnation. When boys ask what they are for, the culture offers little more than silence.

The result is not gentler men. It is drifting ones.

“Healthy masculinity,” as Galloway presents it, encourages responsibility, empathy, ambition, emotional openness and self-control. These are real virtues. But the framework remains fundamentally therapeutic. It treats masculinity as a personal wellness project – habits to cultivate, impulses to manage, behaviors to moderate. It teaches boys how to cope in a confusing world, but not why they should rise to meet it. It offers guidance, not a calling.

Boys need more than coping skills. They need a horizon.

What I call sacred masculinity begins with a simple but unfashionable premise: Masculinity is morally consequential. It is a form of power – physical, emotional, social – that demands direction….

Sacred masculinity does not romanticize men or excuse abuse. It binds strength to obligation. It treats courage as something owed, not displayed. It understands masculinity as a calling ordered toward others rather than an identity optimized for self-expression. Where healthy masculinity asks how a man manages himself, sacred masculinity asks what – and whom – his strength is meant to serve….

Sacred masculinity offers a harder but more hopeful path. It tells boys that one day others will depend on them. That self-control and endurance are not about feelings but responsibility. It teaches that freedom is not the absence of obligation but the capacity to carry it well.

This vision appears in fathers who remain present when disengagement would be easier, in coaches and teachers who demand discipline to prepare boys; and in men who commit to work, marriage and community rather than drifting in permanent adolescence.

Crucially, sacred masculinity also places responsibility on adult men. Boys do not drift because no one lectures them. They drift because too few men invite them into a shared life of duty….

Healthy masculinity teaches men how to cope. Sacred masculinity teaches them what they are for.

If we want stronger families and a more resilient civic culture, we must stop treating masculinity as an embarrassment and start treating it again as a charge. Boys will rise to expectations – if we are brave enough to place any at all.