Fighting Back When The World is Against You
Staying strong against the forces of despair.
You probably feel the pressure that this world puts on your shoulders. Being a man is challenging enough on its own, and it’s made even more difficult by the fact that we are now living at a time when the greatest social crime is being a Christian man.
Our faith gets mocked and ridiculed everywhere we go. Masculinity is deemed “toxic” unless it complies to the demands of the feminist mob. Hollywood, corporations, and the entire entertainment industry spend billions of dollars trying to “deconstruct” gender norms and feminize men.
A few decades ago, these attacks on Christian masculinity were more subtle and harder to recognize. Now, they have become open frontal attacks by forces of darkness that know full well that evil can only spread if Christian men fail to hold the line. Thus, they seek to shut us down, emasculate us, surround us with confusion and ostracize us.
My goal here, however, is not to complain. Things are as they are, and we shouldn’t whine about it. But it’s important to recognize what’s going on before we can devise strategies to change it. And it’s even more important to do so when you consider that there’s a wide array of men who remain dormant and anaesthetised to the hostility of the postmodern world.
One of the risks of waking up to this reality is to try and find a tangible enemy in the people who —often through no fault of their own— have served as the instruments of these destructive ideologies. We need to remember that no human, no matter how misled, brainwashed, or even evil, is the actual enemy. Our fight shouldn’t be directed against our fellow men, but against evil itself, against the spiritual forces that seek to usher in destruction and chaos:
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
— Ephesians 6:12
This battle is spiritual. It always has been and it always will be. And throughout history, the greatest saints have known this, and understood that their purpose on earth was to fight those powers and principalities, by standing firm in the Truth amidst the onslaught of a hostile culture.
St. Athanasius, for example, spent the better part of his episcopal career in exile — five times, under four emperors — for refusing to compromise on the full divinity of Christ when Arianism had captured not only the culture but much of the Church hierarchy itself. There is even a phrase attributed to him that shows how much of an outcast he’d become: Athanasius contra mundum (Athanasius against the world).
Athanasius and many other revolutionary saints are our spiritual ancestors, and they fought back at a time when rebellion could mean exile or even death.
In contrast, all that’s being asked of us is to face a little discomfort and to muster the courage necessary to preach our faith loudly and clearly and to live coherently with it. We’re not being asked to perform deeds of great courage —although we should still aim for that—, we’re simply being asked to commit to our faith fully, to stop hiding it, and to preach a different message than what the world promotes.
A handful of men committed to living virtuously, fully determined to pursue holiness as their life’s mission can completely transform our culture. I recently announced my new book, The War on Christian Men, and that’s exactly what it is: a serious attempt to equip the Catholic man with the theological clarity, historical memory, and practical formation he needs to hold the line in his own life, his household, and his community.
The devil fears holy, masculine Christian men more than anything else. Because we’re the ones who build cathedrals, establish orders, convert nations.
— The War on Christian Men
I am convinced that it is at times like these, when everything seems hopeless, that great saints are born. We can be those great saints. We can refuse to misuse our ambition or shut it down altogether, opting instead to aim it towards the only goal worth pursuing: holiness.
God needs men who are willing to step up to the arena, to be warriors in this spiritual war. He needs men who commit their entire lives to pursuing sanctity, who don’t pick and choose their faith when it’s convenient but who openly proclaim the Gospel and the name of Christ.
In the book, you’ll find practical strategies to combat sin, historical and theological breakdowns, and exclusive essays not available anywhere else. If you are one of the many Christian men who feels like you’re called to something higher, this book was written for you, to help you order your ambition towards virtue and strengthen your soul and will against the hateful culture that wants nothing more than for you to remain mediocre, lost, and purposeless.
May we all have the courage to fight back, devote our entire lives to service in the name of Christ, and bring the light of Our Savior into a world that desperately needs it.
Ad Maiora Nati Sumus,
Juan
