The Trad Movement Is the Death of Masculinity

Sons of the Burning Ground

I don’t care if you go to the Latin Mass or the Novus Ordo…

so long as you go with consistency to participate in the sacrifice.

But if you’re a man, a husband, a father, and you’re not in formation, not training, not suffering? You’re a liability.

Not because you’re weak, but because you chose to be.

Weakness isn’t a sin. Cowardice is. And in far too many corners of the Church, the trad movement has become a sanctuary for cowards— men who want authority without crucifixion, aesthetics without asceticism, and doctrine without discipline. They wrap themselves in lace, incense, and Latin as if it’s penance.

It’s not. It’s a costume.

We're not critiquing the Latin Mass, and this isn’t me punching down on men.

It’s a confrontation with the culture that has metastasized around it. This is me calling faithful men UP, because what we’re seeing isn’t a movement of reverence. It’s a retreat, a collective LARP where unformed men cosplay as patriarchs, theologians, and warriors while abandoning the very trenches where formation begins: the home, the body, and the will.

Bow out now if your tribalism is ignited already. Again, your fight isn’t with me. Yours is spiritual, and that requires a priest. But if you want to identify a threat, hone in on your formation, and sharpen your training, then this is for you.

The Great Substitutions

What happened? The men made a trade.

• They traded discipline for decorum.

• They traded sweat for silence.

• They traded fasting for fashion.

• They traded spiritual warfare for liturgical cosplay.

They’ve replaced cruciformity with condescension. They don’t fast, but they’ll debate rubrics. They don’t train, but they’ll correct your posture. They’re not forming their sons, but they’re fluent in outrage. They don’t speak with language inspired by the Desert Fathers or even Christ himself, but they tone police and denigrate your communication. They are fake nice and faux diplomatic, but inside they harbor deep feelings of hatred and resentment while taking the Eucharist.

This is a retreat. There is nothing reverent about this.

This is mimicry. There is nothing masculine about it.

This is pure theater. There is no fidelity.

It’s Not the Mass. It’s the Sacrifice.

Let’s be even clearer: The problem isn’t the Traditional Latin Mass.

The problem is the radical ideologies that have taken root in communities that claim to preserve it. And even worse, the faithful who have watched it take root and have done nothing.

These ideologies—antipapalism, anti-sacramental individualism, liturgical elitism, and thinly veiled ethnic nationalism—aren’t fruits of the TLM, but they are multiplying within it at a rate the Church cannot contain, hence the measures.

And unfortunately, they transcend liturgy.

They show up in Novus Ordo spaces too. But the hub, the breeding ground, the concentration point is the TLM movement. That’s the issue.

Not the Mass. The sacrifice.

The willingness to offer oneself, to suffer, and to lose.

And these ideologies actively form men away from that posture. They give men the illusion of being righteous without requiring surrender. They turn the altar into a bunker, not a battlefield. Where is the formation? Where is the training?

“The Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life.” (CCC 1324)

But to receive it rightly, to offer it truthfully, a man must first be in the posture of Christ crucified. These ideologies have trained men out of that. Instead they seek status, not sanctity.

This Is Refuge, Not a Revival

I write for Catholic husbands and fathers who want formation and discipline. Men of every race and background who were failed by the Church and are still showing up, still training, still asking, “What must I do to be saved?”

Let’s not lie to ourselves; for over a decade, the cultural narrative has been unrelenting:

1. White men are the problem.

2. They are the source of all racism, misogyny, oppression, and collapse.

They have been mocked, disinherited, and blamed. I’ve watched this unfold and was disgusted by it then and disgusted by it now. The war on men is constantly taking new forms.

So what happens when a white husband or father—angry, tired, scapegoated—discovers someone like Harrison Butker?

A tall, articulate, athletic, successful, traditionalist Catholic who refuses to apologize?

He says, “I’ll have what he’s having!”

Understandable. Reasonable, even.

But let’s name the deeper issue: This movement is about retaliation, not formation.

The Church as a Blunt Instrument

What’s happening now is the final form of manosphere ideology:

• Redpill grievance.

• MGTOW detachment.

• Sigma nihilism.

• TradCath aesthetics.

All converging under the banner of the most authoritative institution in the world: the Catholic Church.

And these men are not coming to die with Christ; they’re coming to align with power.

They don’t want to bleed.

They want to win.

There is no revival happening here. It’s radicalization, and it is weakening men by the thousands. Especially the young ones, because these aren’t men who will take a hit in a losing battle because it is just. These are men tired of being punched down on and unwilling to do something about it meaningfully and positively.

No. These are men who will hide behind any tradition as long as it punches back on their behalf, with not a finger of their own lifted. What exactly about this imitates Christ? His sacrifice?

There is no imitation or sacrifice here. This is purely about vengeance.

As men, we understand this progression. And yet it doesn’t change that it is cowardice in its purest form.

That is the rot. That is why this must be burned out of the Church like a disease.

You Let It Happen

And here’s the deeper irony: the same men who now hide behind tradition to feel powerful are the ones who allowed it all to fall apart in the first place.

Let’s get real.

Yes, white men have been unfairly scapegoated in modern culture.

And many of them also abdicated their posts.

• You traded your heritage for entertainment.

• You traded your birthrate for bachelorhood.

• You traded catechesis for football clubs.

• You traded the Cross for comfort.

• And when it all started burning, you didn’t fight; you fled.

You didn’t raise your sons, disciple your daughters, or protect the borders—physical or spiritual—and you didn’t confront the heresies or the pagans. You made peace with them. You allowed yourselves to be publicly humiliated and made examples of.

Now you’re angry. Now you’re flooding back into the Church looking for order, tradition, and hierarchy. But instead of repenting, you’re lashing out. You don’t want to build the Church; you want to weaponize it.

And then you post comments like this:

Let’s decode that:

“Hands off. You don’t belong here. Stay in your lane.”

That’s the subtext. That’s the spiritual gatekeeping. And let’s be honest, many of you would say the quiet part out loud if you thought you could get away with it.

Is that about reverence? Charity? Stewardship?

That’s not about Christ. It’s barely even about liturgy.

That’s just cowardice wearing vestments.

And the real irony? You act like Roman Catholicism is the apex of everything while forgetting that it came second.

Carthage gave us the theology. Rome gave us the bureaucracy.

And now? Rome is headed for the same fate as Carthage—overrun by pagans, collapsing under its own decadence. Because when you trade crucifixion for cultural nostalgia, you don’t get Christ, you get collapse.

And you know what’s even crazier?

Even the Tate brothers are saying this.

They’re not Catholic. They’re not theologians. They’re not even holy.

They’re dual American-British nationals and just secular men with enough clarity to see the fallout and say:

“You let this happen.”

And they’re right.

The difference?

The Tates offer you power as the fix:

Control. Status. Dominance. Empire.

Christ offers you crucifixion.

Sacrifice. Obedience. Death to self.

And if you can’t tell which one your ideologically charged movement is choosing, then you’ve already lost.

The Real Ones Don’t Train to Perform. They Train to Obey

When I talk about toughness, I’m not talking about two tours in Afghanistan or an 800 lb deadlift. I’m not talking about rucking 20 miles on torn ligaments or bleeding through Navy SEAL selection.

Those are all hard. But they’re chosen.

What I’m talking about is the kind of toughness that gets assigned by Heaven.

The kind of grit that Christ demands of you through your vocation:

• Opting to stay home because your kids need you more than your ego needs income.

• Choosing to speak gently and consistently with the mother who emotionally abused you—because you’re the only man in her life who still prays for her.

• Enduring the emotional and spiritual dryness between you and your wife without collapsing into pornography or flirting with attention from other women.

• Getting up at 4:30 AM to prep meals, meds, or routines for your kid with special needs—and doing it with zero applause.

• Leading your home without ever having seen it done—and mourning a brother or father who never showed you how.

That’s toughness. That’s fire. That’s imitating Christ.

And it is completely invisible to the trad men who spend all day online rehearsing theological arguments instead of laying down their lives.

“A man is not a monk because he lives in the desert, but because he is crucified.” (Abba Moses)

These men confuse geography with grit. Just like monks aren’t formed by sand, they’re not made holy by Latin. Formation is found in the fire, not the form. These men wouldn’t last one week in the kind of suffering real Catholic fatherhood requires because they don’t train for it. They train to debate and to appear elite. They train to perform.

But grit isn’t visible in your rubrics. It’s visible in your obedience.

And Christ never said, “Take up your Latin and follow me.”

He said, “Take up your cross.” (Luke 9:23)

Burn the Costume

If your liturgy has become a hiding place from suffering, burn it.

If your aesthetic has replaced your ascetic, burn it.

If your “tradition” is forming you into someone too fragile to be corrected and too proud to be broken, burn it.

God doesn’t care how reverent your Mass attendance is if you’re faithless in your home. He doesn’t want your incense if your ego is uncrucified. He doesn’t honor your lace if you refuse to kneel before your responsibilities.

The Mass is not your safe space; it’s your funeral.

Benediction: From Costume to Cruciform

So why are you still a spectator in sacred robes when you were called to be an apostle in chains? On fire. In blood.

Burn the costume.

Pick up your cross and follow Him, because in the end, it’s not about what rite you attend; it’s about the man you become, and if you’ve never been crushed into dust, never been scourged, and never offered yourself in secret, then you’re not a trad; you’re a tourist.

This message is your training, regardless of your ideological position.

Christ himself retreated into silence, fasting, and fire to hear God. So did the Desert Fathers.

I suggest you do the same, because your test is coming. And when it does, you’ll either be forged, or you’ll be exposed. Some of you are more terrified of being wrong than being judged by God himself and risking him saying, “I never knew you.”

I don’t wish that fate on any man.

Go into the desert and train.

The Desert Novitiate:

I don’t care about trends.

We’re not arbitrarily performing ice baths and obsessing over biohacks, or dopamine resets. Cold exposure, fasting, and silence are submission drills, not “health hacks” or nervous system optimization.

You’re learning to tell your flesh: you are not in charge. That’s Catholic endurance training, not content coaching.

30 days.

• Silence.

• Daily cold exposure (as mortification, not optimization)

• One meal a day.

• Early rising.

• Daily training.

• Daily Marian devotion and Scripture, especially the Gospels, Psalms and the Sayings of the Fathers.

• No social media: Specifically, no dope-dealing podcasts and no pseudo-mystic influencer accounts. You know the types. They sound smart. Their words read like gospel. But they’re preying on your lack of spiritual fatherhood—or the absence of one in their own lives. They’re monetizing your attention, or worse, your pain. They know full well 99% of their audience won’t do the hard thing. But you’ll stay close anyway because you want proximity to grit, proximity to obedience, proximity to transformation. And you’ve let that replace the action itself. Cut that out.

No announcements, accountability posts, or group chats.

Just Christ, the Cross, and the work.

If you want masculinity back, this is where it starts. Build your toughness and your spirtual callouses in silence and obscurity

The Desert Judges You Now

Just like the last one, I know this will make the rounds. I know it’ll trigger the loudest, most tribal, most anti-cruciform corners of Catholicism.

Fine. You don’t scare me.

I don’t write for virality. I’m not a “content creator.”

I write to signal other men—men looking for formation—that there is a place for them in the desert. Men like me who needed this and can’t find it because of all of the noise. Men who don’t strive for sainthood. Men who know damn well they’re sinners and want to be apostles.

There is no promise of pleasure. Only pain, mortification, prayer, and effort. And on Sundays you rest and take in God’s beauty.

But before you comment, examine yourself.

If your words don’t form men, train men, or drive them toward the Cross, then your words are useless.

Go into the desert before you react. You’re being watched—not by me, but by your own fruit.

⸻

Built in the Desert. Covered by Mary. Forged in Fire.

☩ Sans Peur

– Emmanuel