One of the recurring burdens of this interview series has been the sense that many of the crises we describe with specialized language are, at bottom, crises of anthropology.
We do not know what a human being is.
Or if we do know, we no longer trust what we know.
Or if we trust it in principle, we have lost the language and habits to live it with confidence.
That was one of the strongest impressions I took away from my conversation with Chase Replogle.
On the surface, our discussion was about masculinity, fathers, character, and the body. But beneath that was something larger and more unstable: a civilizational disorientation around sex, identity, authority, embodiment, and formation. If I were to put it bluntly, I would say we are living through a kind of mass gender dysphoria—not merely as an individual clinical phenomenon, but as a cultural condition.
By that I mean this: generations of global wealth, technological power, abundant information, extended leisure, and post-Christian moral drift have created a world in which many things that once seemed given now seem negotiable. What used to appear black and white has dissolved into endless shades of gray. And the result is not freedom in the deepest sense. It is often bewilderment.
We are not just confused about sex.
We are confused about selfhood.
We are confused about the body.
We are confused about what authority can be trusted.
We are confused about whether being male or female names a reality to be received or merely a script to be edited.
And somewhere near the center of that confusion—spoken in some places, unspoken in others—is the question of the Father.
Not merely fathers, plural, in their human fallibility and absence, though certainly that matters. I mean God as Father: whether that language can still be trusted, whether authority can still be imagined as good, whether origin can still be received as gift rather than experienced as oppression.
That is why the title of this show, Created in the Image of God, matters more than ever. The biblical claim is not simply that humanity is spiritual, significant, and beloved. It is also that humanity is created distinctly: male and female. Difference is not an accident to be overcome. It is part of the image-bearing drama itself.
And behind that biblical vision stand two psalms that feel, to me, increasingly contemporary.
Psalm 1 opens with a simple and almost scandalous claim in our age: blessed—happy, flourishing, rooted—is the man who delights in the law of the Lord, who walks in God’s ways rather than in the counsel of the ungodly. He is not fluid, not endlessly self-invented, not anxiously reinventing himself by the hour. He is planted. He is nourished. He bears fruit in season.
Then Psalm 2 turns and shows the other side of the human story: the nations rage, the peoples imagine a vain thing, and they say in effect, Let us break these bonds. Let us cast His cords from us. That is not merely ancient rebellion. It is modern too. We increasingly live in a civilization that hears any divine pattern—especially around sex, embodiment, fatherhood, sonship, daughterhood, limits, obedience—as bondage to be thrown off.
That is not a popular message. It cannot be. We have drifted too far for it to feel immediately comforting. But it may be one of the clearest biblical lenses through which to understand the fog we are now living in.
Chase’s work helps illuminate what happens when a civilization loses confidence in that pattern.
The question is no longer just “What is a man?”
One of Chase Replogle’s most useful observations is that masculinity is no longer one stable public question with competing answers. It has fragmented.
The old debate was: What does it mean to be a man?
The newer and more unstable question is: What kind of man am I becoming, and who is forming me?
That is a different problem.
In an earlier era, masculinity was often overdefined in rigid and sometimes damaging ways. Today, in many places, it is underdefined or externally assembled. Men and boys are no longer simply inheriting one script. They are being fed thousands of fragments—through influencers, algorithms, aesthetics, brands, grievance communities, reactionary countercultures, and social media personas.
This is one reason our contemporary conversation about gender feels so disorienting. It is not only that boundaries are being challenged. It is that formation itself has become decentralized, digitized, and commercialized. Many people are trying to build an identity from floating parts.
Chase put this in terms of the shift from the general category of masculinity to the intensely practical question of influence. Who is teaching young men what strength is? What desire is? What tenderness is? What courage is? What responsibility is? More and more, the answer is not a father, a pastor, a teacher, a local friend, or a known community.
It is the feed.
And the feed does not love you.
That, too, is a Psalm 1 problem. The old language of “walking in the counsel” of one thing or another can sound quaint until you realize that most modern people live immersed in counsel all day long. It streams, pings, scrolls, flatters, provokes, catechizes. It tells us what to fear, what to desire, what to mock, and what to become. The question is not whether we are being counseled. The question is by whom.
Many guides, few fathers
One of the most piercing moments in the conversation came when Chase invoked Paul’s line that we may have many guides, but not many fathers.
That may be one of the defining conditions of modern life.
We have guides everywhere.
Advice is infinite.
Content is infinite.
Commentary is infinite.
Instruction is infinite.
Influence is infinite.
But fathers—real fathers, spiritual fathers, relationally invested men and women who know us, challenge us, and remain present long enough to help form us—are rare.
This applies far beyond men, but it bears especially on the modern crisis of masculinity. A civilization can survive a certain amount of confusion. What it cannot survive indefinitely is the collapse of intergenerational formation. If young men are primarily being initiated by performance media, commercial incentives, or ideological tribes, then they are not being formed into maturity. They are being recruited into imitation.
The issue, then, is not simply whether masculinity is toxic or traditional or recovering or embattled. The issue is whether men are being known at all.
That distinction Chase drew between being seen and being known may be one of the most important in the whole interview.
To be seen is to be curated, branded, signaled, affirmed, reacted to.
To be known is to be accountable, interpreted, corrected, loved, and called upward.
One can be seen by millions and known by no one.
And if that is true of men, it is increasingly true of women as well. Which is why this is not finally an article about men alone. It is about a culture that has confused visibility with intimacy and self-display with selfhood.
If God as Father is no longer imaginable as trustworthy, then fatherhood itself becomes suspect. And if fatherhood itself becomes suspect, then sonship and daughterhood become unstable as well. We may still use the language of identity, but we lose the relational architecture that once made identity intelligible. We become self-narrating creatures cut loose from origin.
Psalm 2 again feels hauntingly current here. To “cast his bands asunder” is not only to reject moral rules in the abstract. It is to reject creatureliness itself. It is to deny that being a son or daughter under a good Father could possibly be the path to blessedness. And once that suspicion takes hold, nearly every other form of confusion becomes easier to explain.
The crisis of masculinity is really a crisis of character
One reason I appreciated Chase’s framing is that he steps outside the stale and often performative culture-war vocabulary around “toxic masculinity” and asks a more serious question: how does a man become mature?
That moves the conversation from ideology to character.
In The Five Masculine Instincts, Chase names instincts like sarcasm, adventure, ambition, reputation, and apathy—not as simplistic sins, but as tendencies that can become distortions if left unformed. That strikes me as a more fruitful approach than merely defending or attacking masculinity as a concept.
A healthy civilization teaches men—and women—how instincts mature into character. An unhealthy one either shames instincts indiscriminately or celebrates them without discipline.
Both errors are now common.
We shame difference, then wonder why people become unstable.
We indulge appetite, then wonder why people become weak.
We mock seriousness, then wonder why honor collapses.
We call all authority oppressive, then wonder why nobody trusts fathers, pastors, teachers, or God.
Which returns us to the hidden theological center of all this: fatherhood.
If God as Father becomes unusable language, then human fatherhood is left without a transcendent pattern. And if human fatherhood is absent, abusive, mocked, or disposable, then the divine title itself becomes harder to hear without suspicion. These two crises reinforce one another.
That does not mean every appeal to fatherhood is healthy. Far from it. Chase was clear about the dangers of overreach and false authority. But the answer to distortions of fatherhood is not the abolition of fatherhood. It is its redemption.
And redemption, biblically, does not mean endless grayness. It means recovering the form of things. It means learning again that blessedness is not found in casting off every limit, but in inhabiting rightly the form God has given.
The body is not a prop in the drama of the self
The final section of my conversation with Chase opened onto what may be one of the most important fronts in this whole discussion: the body.
His forthcoming work on what he is currently calling A More Physical Faith gets at a deeply neglected problem in modern religion. We often live as practical gnostics, even when we deny gnosticism theologically. We prioritize mind, will, feelings, and “spirituality,” while treating the body as either a machine to optimize, a temptation to suppress, or an inconvenience to ignore.
That cannot hold forever.
If we do not know what the body is for, we will misuse it.
If we do not receive the body as gift, we will either idolize it or despise it.
If we do not connect body and soul, we will split the human person in ways that produce shame, confusion, and exhaustion.
This was one reason I recently appreciated my conversation with Kelly Edmiston, who approached some of these same issues from a female perspective. Kelly is a pastor, teacher, author, and speaker committed to helping people break free from shame and move toward healing and flourishing. Raised in a church tradition where women were not permitted to preach or lead, she now lives boldly into that calling. Her work creates honest, grace-filled conversation around faith, identity, sexuality, and the topics many churches avoid. Her book, Shame-Free Sex Talks, offers families a practical and hopeful way to talk about sex, relationships, and emotional health without fear or silence.
What struck me in speaking with Kelly, and now with Chase, is that though their emphases differ, both are pressing against the same fracture: the severing of truth from embodiment and embodiment from grace.
The body matters because the image of God is not merely abstract. We are not souls trapped in meat. We are embodied creatures. We hear, taste, sleep, hunger, labor, ache, age, desire, and receive the world through these bodies. Scripture knows this better than many modern Christians do. It speaks about food, sleep, labor, sickness, shame, delight, resurrection, and discipline with a concreteness that many of us have forgotten.
A civilization that turns the body into either a costume or a prison will eventually produce mass confusion about identity.
Psalm 1 once more offers the better picture: not disembodied transcendence, but rootedness. A tree planted by streams of water is not ashamed of being a tree. It does not envy the river or resent the soil. It receives its limits as the very condition of its flourishing.
That is not how modern civilization teaches us to think.
A post-Christian civilization can generate freedom without form
This may be the deepest problem of all.
The modern West has generated immense forms of freedom—mobility, leisure, wealth, privacy, information access, technological agency, and the loosening of inherited structures. Some of this has been genuinely good. Some old injustices needed to be challenged. Some inherited silences needed to be broken.
But freedom without form is destabilizing.
When every inherited category becomes suspect, when every authority becomes negotiable, when every body becomes plastic, when every desire demands recognition, and when every identity can be mediated through markets and machines, people do not become effortlessly whole. They often become anxious, suggestible, lonely, and fragmented.
That is part of what I mean by a modern mass gender dysphoria. Not simply that more people are questioning gender identity in explicit ways, though that is certainly part of the landscape. I mean that the civilization itself has become dysphoric—estranged from the givenness of sex, the meaning of the body, the legitimacy of fatherhood, and the goodness of created distinction.
In that environment, the biblical claim that we are created male and female in the image of God sounds not merely old-fashioned, but subversive.
Subversive because it says reality is not infinitely editable.
Subversive because it says freedom is not self-invention.
Subversive because it says distinction is not oppression.
Subversive because it says flourishing begins not in denial of limits, but in truthful reception of them.
That does not answer every pastoral question. It does not erase complexity, pain, trauma, intersex realities, abuse histories, or the many difficult situations that call for patience and compassion. But it does insist that confusion is not the same thing as liberation.
And it reminds us that some forms of grayness are not wisdom. They are fog.
To say that now is to risk sounding severe. Yet Psalms 1 and 2 are severe in precisely this way. One path leads to rootedness, fruitfulness, and genuine happiness under God. The other path is full of restless invention, resistance, and eventual disintegration. One receives God’s order as life-giving. The other insists on remaking life on other terms. One knows God as Father and ourselves as sons and daughters. The other seeks to dissolve those givens and call the dissolution freedom.
No wonder it is controversial. We have been catechized for decades now to experience divine form as repression.
This conversation is not over
One reason I wanted to write this article now is that I can feel this theme intensifying across the conversations I am having.
I have already been interviewing women who have important things to say about Godly feminism and true Motherhood. What it means to be a home maker. That began in a more explicit way with Kelly Edmiston, and it will continue with Mollie Engelhart, featured in the sneak peek below. From there, this thread will deepen through November and December, and likely continue to gather force beyond that.
Why? Because this is not a “men’s issue” or a “women’s issue” in isolation. It is a human issue. It is a theological issue. It is a civilizational issue. And if we are going to speak honestly about it, we need both men and women helping recover what has been fractured.
Chase Replogle’s contribution is an important one. He helps us see that masculinity is not solved by slogans, nor healed by reaction, nor secured by performance. It is formed in character, relationship, embodiment, and truth.
And perhaps that is where the wider culture still has something to relearn: being created in the image of God is not an erasure of difference, but its sanctification.
Male and female.
Body and soul.
Freedom and form.
Authority and love.
Fatherhood and flourishing.
These are not enemies unless a civilization has forgotten how to hold them together.
Sneak Peek
Next on Created in the Image of God, we continue with another aspect of this larger conversation.
On Sunday, October 4 at 7:00 a.m. US Central time, I’ll be speaking with Andrew Arndt—pastor, author, and spiritual formation teacher—about the work of the soul and how prayer, contemplation, and the life of the spirit can shape us from the inside out. From the wisdom of the Christian contemplative tradition to cultivating a deeper, more rooted, and transformative life with God, it promises to be a rich conversation.
Then on Tuesday, October 6 at 8:00 p.m. Central time, I’ll be joined by Mollie Engelhart—chef, farmer, entrepreneur, and regenerative agriculture advocate—to explore the connection between food, faith, and the healing of the land. If Chase’s comments helped us think more carefully about the body as part of our discipleship, Mollie’s perspective extends that reflection into food, soil, stewardship, and our relationship to creation itself.
And beyond that, look for this broader theme—identity, embodiment, shame, healing, masculinity, femininity, and what it means to be created—to pick up real steam with guests in November and December.
