Why Netflix’s ‘Inside the Manosphere’ is a wake-up call for the Church
Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary “Inside the Manosphere” has already become one of the most-watched films on the platform, drawing 15 million views in its first few weeks, which tells you this subject has broken into mainstream attention.
The film follows Theroux around the world as he interviews controversial masculinity influencers and explores how they shape modern views on gender, dating and identity.
As president of a Christian university who sees hundreds of young men up close each year, I view this documentary not as a distant cultural curiosity but as a window into forces that are shaping boys before they arrive on any campus. It is uncomfortable viewing because it exposes an online world where young men are surrounded by role models driven by ego, self-aggrandizement and the pursuit of money and luxury. Women are treated like objects, and misogyny is encouraged and applauded, so that contempt is marketed as confidence and restraint is mocked as weakness. The documentary exposes the truth that boys see this unfiltered and unchallenged and consume it as truth and normal behavior.
Many parents, teachers and pastors have sensed these influences for years because they have watched boys grow more cynical, more distracted, less patient and less prepared for adult responsibility. The film forces the question into the open: How did this come to pass, and how did so many young men end up learning “manhood” from men who profit by inflaming appetite, resentment and contempt?
A nation gets the men it nurtures, which means we get the men we celebrate, the men we excuse, and the men we allow to become the loudest teachers in a boy’s life, whether we meant to or not. That is why the manosphere matters, because it is not just entertainment; it is formation, and it is offering boys a counterfeit masculinity that sounds bold in clips but collapses under the weight of real life, because it promises confidence without character, status without responsibility, pleasure without covenant and power without restraint.
The deeper problem, however, is not that these voices exist but that a vacuum has opened and, for too many boys, there has been nothing compelling, consistent and good enough to fill it. Boys want purpose, standards and older men who will challenge them with something better than slogans. Yet too many have been left to drift with screens as their primary mentors, while adults have grown hesitant to praise ordinary virtues or correct corrosive behavior early, and then act shocked when disrespect hardens into habit.
That is why I have coined the phrase “raising noble men,” because it captures what our society, and especially the Church, must urgently recapture — the deliberate formation of boys into trustworthy, responsible men who can be counted on when life stops being easy and responsibility can’t be dodged.
“Noble” does not mean passive, and it does not mean weak; it means strength under control, ambition governed by character, courage that serves others, and a relationship with women marked by dignity and respect rather than pressure, mockery or control.
But what do we do beyond shaking our heads at a documentary and hoping our sons will be the exception?
To begin with, parents must restore standards at home that do not evaporate the moment a boy resists them, because boys do not learn self-control if every boundary is negotiable. Responsibility should be real, consequences should mean something, and disrespect should be addressed early, including the casual contempt for girls that often begins as humor and ends as habit. Parents must speak plainly about pornography and what it does, because it trains the mind to objectify and erodes the capacity for real intimacy.
Churches must fill the vacuum in the moral formation of young men and stop assuming boys will simply mature on their own. Instead, we must build communities where older men bear responsibility to shape, challenge and correct the next generation with love, because boys become men by watching them.
The Church should be the one place where a young man can say, “I know men who live a just life, and I know how to become one of them.” If boys are being taught for hours a day by what they watch online, the Church must become far more present and visible in their lives, because someone will form them, and if it isn’t us, it will be the so-called “influencers” in the manosphere. That means churches urgently need a deliberate, well-thought-through mentoring strategy, and it has to be more than good intentions or a once-a-year men’s breakfast. It requires real investment of time, leadership attention and resources in older men being at the shoulder of young men, week after week, until character is formed and maturity and faith take hold.
“Inside the Manosphere” is a warning that too many boys are learning manhood from algorithms instead of from men who know them, love them and take responsibility for forming them.
The answer is not another argument about the internet but the recovery of real mentorship: fathers, coaches, teachers and older men who model strength with restraint, confidence with humility and authority with sacrifice.
At the center of that renewal must be the Church, not as a mere commentator but as the place where noble men are formed.
Eric Hogue is president of Colorado Christian University.
