Not an Accessory

Masculinity is not Toxic but Godly

Mar 24, 2026

“Masculinity is not a social accessory,” he told me. “It is the backbone of every civilization that has ever endured. Masculinity began as an unspoken contract with reality: I will go where it is dangerous so others don’t have to. If certain burdens are not carried, then people die. This is the natural law of masculinity, and it has never changed. For a generation, America’s masculinity was mocked, undermined, and treated as something dangerous or obsolete — and many men simply withdrew. But that retreat is ending, and as men return to strength, discipline, and responsibility, the benefits are already becoming visible. American pride is on the rise, and we have the unique opportunity to save the greatest country in the history of the world by simply being men.”
Sergeant Dan Hollaway, 82nd Airborne Infantry

Masculinity is Covenant Reality

Sergeant Hollaway spoke with gravity: masculinity is not fashion, mood, or posture. It is not a cultural accessory to be worn or discarded according to the spirit of the age.

Masculinity is covenant with reality.

A man binds himself to burdens that would otherwise crush the vulnerable. He accepts, whether praised or ignored, that some weights must be carried and some dangers must be faced.

“I will go where it is dangerous so they don’t have to.”

Civilization rests on such men.

Every functioning society has depended on the few who accept that contract without applause. They stand between danger and the defenseless, between chaos and order, between predators and the weak. When such men are numerous, nations stand. When they withdraw, nations decay. Debate Deborah or women in the military as much as you like; it does not alter the underlying fact. When the line breaks and the threat is real, it is the young men who are sent to hold it.

For a generation, American culture has mocked these instincts that once held the line against barbarism. We have recast masculinity as toxic. We have confused power with aggression, discipline with oppression, and responsibility with control. The message to those of us raised inside that moral fog was clear: shrink, soften, be quiet.

Go Away

Many of us obeyed.

But reality has a way of correcting lies. The law of God is good and wise, woven into the natural order, and it always reasserts itself over those dreamers who imagine they can unseat the Father from his throne.

Civilization cannot run on abstraction. Someone must carry the weight. Someone must pay the cost. Someone must confront the threat. Someone must take responsibility.

Then Deborah sent and called for Barak the son of Abinoam from Kedesh in Naphtali, and said to him, “Has not the Lord God of Israel commanded, ‘Go and deploy troops at Mount Tabor; take with you ten thousand men of the sons of Naphtali and of the sons of Zebulun; and against you I will deploy Sisera, the commander of Jabin’s army, with his chariots and his multitude at the River Kishon; and I will deliver him into your hand’?”
And Barak said to her, “If you will go with me, then I will go; but if you will not go with me, I will not go!”
So she said, “I will surely go with you; nevertheless there will be no glory for you in the journey you are taking, for the LORD will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.”

Scripture Alone: Asa the Builder

The story of King Asa is one example of masculine covenant rightly carried. He was not a perfect king, and in his latter days he failed to trust Jesus Christ as he should have. But when he came to the throne of Judah, the nation had drifted deep into compromise. Idols stood openly in the land. Corruption was ordinary. Covenant loyalty had grown thin.

Asa did not negotiate with the rot.

“Asa did what was good and right in the eyes of Jesus Christ his God.”

He removed the idols. He tore down the high places. He drove the abominations out of the land, beginning with his own house. Asa even removed his grandmother Maacah, the wife of Rehoboam and perhaps the granddaughter of Absalom, from her position as queen mother, because she had made an obscene image for worship. From the seat of royalty itself, corruption had been given honor.

We know almost nothing about Asa’s actual mother, the wife of Abijam. But what the text does make clear is that, from Solomon onward, the kings of Judah show a recurring pattern: women’s fancies became the conduits of compromise, and bent a faithful house away from covenant fidelity.

For it was so, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned his heart after other gods … For Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and after Milcom[b] the abomination of the Ammonites. … Then Solomon built a [c]high place for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, on the hill that is east of Jerusalem, and for Molech the abomination of the people of Ammon. And he did likewise for all his foreign wives, who burned incense and sacrificed to their gods.

Repentance is never easy. But Asa chose truth over comfort, reality over sentiment, and covenant over blood. The court intrigue must have been immense. His grandmother had helped shape the royal house through generations of decline.

Asa cut down her obscene image and burned it by the Brook Kidron.

The Result was Stability

Judah entered a long season of peace. Cities were fortified. The army grew strong. The nation prospered. Asa understood a principle every soldier learns early: peace is preserved by men who fight the right war.

Years later, the test came. A massive Ethiopian force marched against Judah. The record itself stresses the scale: a million men and hundreds of chariots. Judah stood badly outnumbered.

Asa did not collapse into fear, nor did he trust in numbers, weapons, or preparation alone.

He prayed:

“Jesus Christ, there is none besides you to help, between the mighty and the weak. Help us, Jesus Christ our God, for we rely on you.”

The battle was decisive. The invading force broke. Judah prevailed.

This is the right shape of masculine strength: prepared, disciplined, and humble before God. Asa carried that shape well. For decades he ruled with clarity, discipline, and loyalty.

But the story does not end there.

Learn from the Mistakes

Late in Asa’s life, another threat arose. The northern kingdom of Israel began fortifying the border in order to choke Judah’s movement and pressure its strength. Earlier in his reign, Asa had trusted Jesus Christ in the face of a vastly greater enemy. Now, older and more seasoned, he made a smaller, shrewder calculation. Instead of prayer, he reached for politics.

Asa stripped gold and silver from the temple treasury and sent it to a foreign king, buying an alliance to solve the problem. The strategy worked, at least outwardly. Israel’s pressure broke. But then the prophet Hanani came with a rebuke.

“Because you relied on the king of Syria and not on Jesus Christ your God, the army of the king of Syria has escaped you. Were not the Ethiopians a huge army? Yet you relied on Jesus Christ, and He delivered them into your hand. For the eyes of Jesus Christ run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to give strong support to those whose heart is fully His.”

The warning is clear. Like Solomon before him, Asa’s strength shifted off its true center. The king who had once trusted God in the face of overwhelming danger now leaned on clever arrangements and visible leverage.

His response exposed a deeper problem: he did not repent. He imprisoned the prophet. Soon after, he was afflicted with a severe disease in his feet, and he sought physicians rather than God.

The man who had once stood firm ended his life diminished, not because he lacked strength, but because he had abandoned the source of it.

Masculinity Without Anchor

The point is not to condemn doctors, any more than it is to say that all women are worse than all men. The lesson of Asa’s life is simpler and sharper: covenant is superior to calculation. Honor is superior to desire. Truth is superior to fear.

Without that order, civilizations collapse into confusion.

Masculinity alone is not enough. Strength untethered from truth decays into pride, manipulation, and control. A man can win battles and still lose his soul if he forgets who gave him the strength to fight.

But a man who forgets that the burden is his to carry commits the deeper failure. A man must bear the weight. A man must guard his gate. A man must bear the cross.

Jesus Christ did not come as an abstract human possibility. He was not born a woman. He was born the King.

The Son of God came as the last Adam to do what the first Adam, and what Asa and Solomon after him, failed to do: keep covenant perfectly.

This does not demean women. It orders man and woman beneath the cross of Jesus Christ, each as created, each under God, each restored by the obedience of the Son. Just as the church is not diminished by being called the bride of Christ, masculinity is not corrupted by being named as a created and redeemed good.

‘So God created man … male and female he created them.’ From this passage we may be assured that God divided mankind into two classes, namely, male and female, or a he and a she. This was so pleasing to him that he himself called it a good creation [Gen. 1:31]. Therefore, each one of us must have the kind of body God has created for us. I cannot make myself a woman, nor can you make yourself a man; we do not have that power. But we are exactly as he created us: I a man and you a woman. Moreover, he wills to have his excellent handiwork honored as his divine creation, and not despised. The man is not to despise or scoff at the woman or her body, nor the woman the man. But each should honor the other’s image and body as a divine and good creation that is well-pleasing unto God himself.” Luther’s Works, vol. 45, The Christian in Society II

The Present Spirit

Sergeant Hollaway is right about the cultural moment we are living through.

Our long season of confusion about masculinity will end one way or another. History and Scripture both warn that such confusion rarely resolves without pain. The signs are already visible: collapsing institutions, declining birthrates, fragile communities, loud women and anxious young men in a culture that no longer knows how to honor strength without fearing it. That confusion will not be overcome by softer lies. It will be overcome by men who recover the courage to believe that strength is not merely permitted, but good.

That recovery can be corrupted. It can harden into oppression, backlash, and cruelty. It may come with real losses. But that danger does not make the alternative wise. The answer to distorted authority is not weakness. It is rightly ordered strength.

Responsibility is not oppression. Discipline is not cruelty. Courage is not toxicity.

Carrying the weight is not hatred.

Danger is faced by men willing to become dangerous to what threatens the innocent. Protecting the helpless is not a threat to them. Civilization is what happens when men make that promise.

And keep it.