The Heroism Required for Modern Fatherhood
Between the cost of living crisis, cultural decay, and the deficit of righteous role models, becoming a man capable of raising a flourishing family requires a heroic transformation
I'm single. I want a family. I'm getting older. And the more I study what it actually takes to be a worthy patriarch in 2025, the more overwhelming it becomes.
It's not just about making a baby with any woman. It's about becoming someone capable of being the bedrock that attracts and maintains an equally yoked wife, then raising children who become lights in a world deliberately designed to corrupt them.
The bar is so high it feels rigged against us.
The economics are brutal. It's barely possible to support yourself as a single man, let alone a non-working wife and multiple children. Housing costs have exploded. Healthcare is bankrupting families. The American dream of one income supporting a thriving household feels like ancient history.
Our parents and grandparents could afford families on single incomes thirty to forty years ago. Today, even dual-income families struggle while childless adults drown in debt.
The career trap is especially brutal for those with valuable skills. As a software engineer, the highest-paying opportunities often require compromising your conscience. High finance has destabilized our society. Consulting demands constant travel that destroys family life. Defense contractors are weapons manufacturers. Surveillance companies build oppression infrastructure.
You can make good money building AI for pornography or optimizing gambling addiction. But try to build something that serves human flourishing, and you'll struggle to find funding or competitive salaries.
This forces a brutal choice: take the lucrative job that compromises your values, or work much harder as an entrepreneur or hunt for the rare ethical company that pays decently—while family formation becomes financially harder every year you delay.
The culture is poison. We live in a society that celebrates everything that destroys family formation. Hook-up culture has replaced courtship. Divorce is normalized as "finding yourself." Children are treated as nice-to-haves rather than sacred responsibilities.
Social media monetizes envy, lust, and pride—the exact sins that destroy marriages. Dating apps turn relationships into consumer choices. Entertainment glorifies infidelity, rebellion, and immediate gratification over patience, commitment, and sacrifice.
The sinfrastructure is so pervasive that staying spiritually clean requires constant vigilance. How do you protect children from influences that previous generations never had to consider?
The role models are catastrophic. Look at who our culture elevates as examples of masculinity:
Donald Trump—married multiple times, credibly accused of rape, connected to child trafficking networks. This is our president.
Andrew Tate and similar "manosphere" influencers—teaching young men to objectify women, glorify materialism, and mock the sacred institution of marriage.
Elon Musk—having children with multiple women while providing no real fatherhood to any of them, creating broken families in his wake while claiming to solve the birth rate crisis.
Even supposed Christian leaders fail spectacularly. Carl Lentz's infidelity. Jerry Falwell Jr.'s scandals. Countless pastors caught in corruption or sexual abuse.
Where are the examples of men who maintain loving marriages through difficulty, raise children who replicate divine patterns, and demonstrate what righteous manhood actually looks like?
The spiritual warfare is real. Every screen in your house can deliver pornography to your children instantly. Every app is designed to fragment attention and destroy the contemplative life necessary for spiritual growth. Every institution—schools, universities, entertainment—actively undermines the Christian worldview you're trying to instill.
The formation crisis runs so deep that most Christian parents unconsciously outsource their children's spiritual development to systems that oppose everything they claim to believe.
Despite all this, men are still called to rise to this challenge. God hasn't lowered His standards because our culture has collapsed. The calling remains: be the spiritual, financial, and emotional foundation that enables a family to flourish.
This requires becoming someone worthy of that trust. Not just financially capable, but spiritually mature enough to model character your children will absorb. Disciplined enough to create the calm, stable environment where love can grow. Wise enough to navigate a hostile culture while protecting innocent hearts.
You have to develop the skills to earn enough money to support a family in an economy designed to prevent family formation. You need the spiritual strength to resist cultural pressures that will constantly tempt you toward compromise. You must cultivate the patience and wisdom to guide children through their formation when every external force works against you.
It seems that most men have given up on trying. It's hard to blame. Too many have accepted childlessness as inevitable or postponed family formation indefinitely while chasing careers, experiences, or personal fulfillment. The ones who do attempt families often do so without the spiritual preparation the task demands.
The path forward isn't obvious, but it starts with honest assessment: Am I becoming someone worthy of the trust and followership of an equally yoked wife? Am I developing the character, competence, and spiritual depth that family leadership requires?
The formation you received as a child was probably incomplete. The culture you absorbed growing up was compromised. The role models you had access to were almost certainly inadequate.
This means you must actively rebuild yourself according to divine patterns, not cultural expectations. You must seek out the rare examples of righteous fathers and study them intensively. You must create the spiritual infrastructure in your own life that enables you to create it for your family.
This is why documenting exemplary families matters so much. Boys become men primarily through modeling, not instruction. We need to see what righteous fatherhood looks like in practice, not just read about it in principle.
The challenge is immense. The culture is actively hostile. The economics are punishing. The role models are scarce.
But God has not changed His design for human flourishing. Families remain the foundation of civilization. Children still need fathers who can guide them toward their divine calling.
The question isn't whether the task is difficult. The question is whether you're willing to undertake the formation necessary to be worthy of it.
"Unless the LORD builds the house, the builders labor in vain." — Psalm 127:1