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Biblical Masculinity: Jesus Already Nailed It

Biblical Masculinity: Jesus Already Nailed It

Last updated on: August 12, 2026 at 6:18 pm by Shawn Paul Wood

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Biblical Masculinity: Jesus Already Nailed It 2026-08-12T18:18:47-05:00 Shawn Paul Wood

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Biblical masculinity is having a moment. And if you squint, it looks suspiciously like every other moment it’s had since the Garden of Eden.

The most recent uprising of Holy Ghost machismo stemmed from The Wisdom Pearl. This organization is throwing a conference this fall called “Men, Will You Be Made Whole?”

One of the faces orbiting that world is Nala Ray, a former OnlyFans creator turned purity-course influencer who appears to be a wild enthusiast of TikTok dances, social media filters, and eyelashes so long that they would appeal to a camel. By her own telling, she found Jesus and a new revenue stream at roughly the same time. Don’t you love it?

Cue the eye roll. No, no, not because a woman can’t have opinions about manhood. Any woman absolutely can, and has done so since the dawn of man being stupid in that aforementioned garden. Actually, it’s that we’ve reached the point where “biblical masculinity” needs a keynote speaker, a hashtag, and a ticket price.

One problem: It needed none of that.

All men needed for a role model was a humble carpenter from Nazareth who had a certain panache for public speaking to other men (and women and children) 2,000 years ago. He never charged admission, offered “7 secrets to scriptural manhood,” or struggled through a haze of woke-ism, having to apologize for who He was.

So here’s what nobody selling a conference badge wants said out loud: The blueprint of biblical masculinity was never lost.

It’s been sitting in Scripture the whole time, gathering dust while every generation of men’s ministry reinvents it like a startup pitch. Let’s walk through four helpful things concerning this discussion in the public forum close to home:

Explore where this “trend” actually came from
Understand why it caught fire again in 2020
Explain why almost nobody running the conversation is getting it right
Underscore what the real thing has looked like all along

Before your pastor mentions the news in the announcements, stay aware of other faith-based issues that hit “close to home.” Subscribe to our free newsletter to stay informed about what’s happening in the Church and how real Christians can help defend the love and work of Christ.

This Isn’t a 2020 Invention; It’s a Rerun

Two men, one with a backward baseball cap, praying for each other inside a football stadium

Men embrace in prayer at a Promise Keepers rally, RFK Stadium, 1997. | Photo by Elvert Barnes, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons.

Every few decades, the American church convinces itself it has just discovered a crisis of men, and every time, it’s the same crisis wearing a new jacket. Pull the thread back to Victorian England, and you’ll find muscular Christianity, a movement born because pastors like Cotton Mather were already grumbling that “in a Church of three or four hundred Communicants, there are but a few more than one hundred Men.”

Thomas Hughes wrote Tom Brown’s Schooldays to make faith look athletic instead of effeminate. He described how the YMCA built gymnasiums specifically to lure boys who wouldn’t sit still for a Bible study. Even President Theodore Roosevelt became the movement’s poster child, a sickly kid who rebuilt himself into the Bull Moose.

Fast-forward past two world wars and a sexual revolution, and you get Bill McCartney filling stadiums with Promise Keepers in the 1990s. There was also the Eagle Mountain Motorcycle Rally, hosted by Kenneth Copeland Ministries. And those were followed by John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart in 2001, which told a generation of men they were secretly warriors who needed a battle to fight.

Same anxiety, same solution, different marketing. Call it muscular Christianity, motorcycle macho, or Promise Keepers. Go crazy and call it biblical masculinity. Whatever the label, you’re describing the same rerun with a new logo.

This matters because it wrecks the premise that “biblical masculinity” is some novel 2020s invention cooked up to fight wokeness. It isn’t.

It’s a recurring church reflex whenever men look bored, absent, or soft, and the reflex almost always reaches for cultural strength before it reaches for the actual text. Our own review of the top 10 Christian news stories of 2025 file is basically a highlight reel of this same instinct playing out in real time, just with better lighting and worse theology.

Why 2020 Poured Gasoline on Biblical Masculinity

A group of Christian bikers gathered for peace and prayer.

A group of Christian bikers gathered for peace and prayer. (Image Credit: Luis Becerra Fotógrafo via Pexels)

What’s actually new isn’t the concern about men. It’s the internet’s ability to weaponize it overnight.

No, really. Andrew Tate racked up more than 11.6 billion views on TikTok alone, selling what researchers call “aggrieved entitlement,” the idea that men are owed dominance they’ve been cheated out of, and telling followers to reclaim a “primal and traditional masculinity” through strength and, when necessary, force. That’s a discipleship pipeline with better production values than most youth groups, and pastors noticed.

Lockdowns, deconstruction headlines, and a genuine cultural argument about gender gave the panic a fresh trigger, and 2020 became the year “biblical masculinity” got rebranded as the church’s answer to secular decay. The trouble is that plenty of pulpits answered a cultural fire with cultural fuel, wrapping Tate’s aggression in Bible verses instead of actually correcting it.

We’ve made this mistake before: Whenever the church decides its identity is a reaction to the news cycle rather than the text, we walk into the same trap in “Are We Really a Christian Nation, and Why is No the Answer?” It’s the same trap here, just with a gym membership.

Why Almost Everybody Fumbles the Handoff

A white tattooed man kneeling holding a small wooden cross.

Men, whoever they are and wherever they come from, have a model of a real man in Jesus. (Image Credit: Cottonbro Studio via Pexels)

Two camps keep dropping this ball, and they’re not as far apart as either would like to admit.

Camp one is the dominance crowd, the pastors and influencers who baptize hierarchy-as-authority and call submission “biblical order.” Journalist David Ruybalid documented that Gen Z men are now twice as likely as Baby Boomers to believe wives should obey their husbands, while researcher Andrew Bauman found 82% of women in Protestant churches report experiencing sexism or abuse. That’s not masculinity; that’s a liability with a worship set.

Camp two is the wellness-guru crowd, where “biblical masculinity” gets repackaged as a product line, complete with keynote speakers, merch, and a conference registration fee. Nala Ray’s orbit is Exhibit A.

Neither camp is reading the room that the text actually built. As “Close to Home” argued in the article “Yes, there are women preachers and the Bible settles it.” Scripture keeps handing authority to Deborah, Huldah, Priscilla, and Junia without apologizing for it, which should have already killed the idea that “biblical” gender roles mean rigid dominance.

It didn’t, because shallow theology is easier to sell than exegesis, a pattern we flagged as one of the five most alarming Christian challenges right now. Both camps have swapped the Sermon on the Mount for a sales funnel.

The Blueprint Never Faded Its Color

Crown of Thorns and two rusty nails

The “Passion” was Christ’s real suffering. It took a real man to do this. (Image Credit: @Kalhh via Pixabay)

Strip away the branding, and Scripture already answered this. Philippians 2:5-8 shows Jesus emptying Himself of status rather than grabbing for it.

John 13 shows Him on His knees washing feet, including the feet of the guy about to betray Him.
John 2 shows Him flipping tables in righteous anger, proving strength and self-control aren’t opposites.
John 11:35 shows Him weeping in public. Matthew 20:26-28 has Him defining greatness as service, not rank.
Ephesians 5:25 tells husbands to love their wives the way Christ loved the church, which is to say, sacrificially, not the way a landlord loves rent.

Theology in the Raw makes a point worth sitting with: most of the virtues Scripture actually commands- love, kindness, courage, and self-control- are gender-neutral, applying to men and women alike. Focus on the Family lands in a similar place, defining masculinity by character rather than muscle: humility, integrity, self-control, empathy.

Put it together. Here’s the actual list nobody needed a conference to write:

Choose humility over ego
Sacrifice yourself instead of promoting yourself
Aim your courage instead of swinging it recklessly
Admit how you feel instead of wearing stoicism like a costume
Serve rather than pull rank, and revere God rather than chase the algorithm’s approval.

That’s it. That’s the whole seminar. Due respect to Nala and her ilk, this one is absolutely free, and it’s been in print since before the advent of the printing press.

There’s nothing left to debate. Jesus already nailed it, literally, and the receipt’s still hanging at Calvary for anyone who wants to check the math.

General Christian

Relationships and Religion

About Shawn Paul Wood

Shawn Paul Wood, Th.D., is an award-winning copywriter, contributor, and content strategist, and ghostwriter of several faith-based articles, speeches, columns, and books who has worked for some of the most admirable brands in their respective industries for over 20 years. As Founder of Woodworks Communications, he leads teams of content strategists and marketing professionals to expand the brands of corporate leaders, serial entrepreneurs, and respected ministers of the Gospel. He aims to help others develop self-discovery through stories and the written word to proclaim the Word to the world. For more information about his portfolio or help telling your story, visit WoodworksCommunications.com. You can read more about the author here.

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