Brandon Powell has a simple test for masculinity: What are you willing to give up when the people you love, or the truth you believe, require something costly from you?
For Powell, a father of six and former Protestant pastor, that question stopped being theoretical years ago.
He spent 17 years preaching in an evangelical denomination, part of a family tradition that stretched across four generations. His father had served as a pastor. His social world, career and future all grew inside that tradition.
Then Powell became convinced that the Catholic Church was true.
“I had to leave behind a lot for that,” Powell said. “Left behind my career, left behind my social net, left behind a lot of friends and left it all behind to become Catholic.”
He resigned as a pastor in September 2018. He and his wife entered the Catholic Church in 2019.
That experience now sits near the center of how Powell thinks about manhood. Masculinity, in his telling, is less about projecting strength than accepting responsibility when responsibility carries a price.
“We constantly have this spiritual battle within us between complacency and courage,” Powell said.
A Father Starts Asking a Harder Question
The conversation began with a story Powell heard through his work in parish digital media in the Diocese of Dallas.
A woman he knows fled a communist country as a teenager with her sister. The two girls crossed seven countries in search of safety, leaving behind their family, home and everything familiar.
Powell kept returning to the risk.
“As a father, I have six kids,” he said. “The older you get, the more you start wondering and worrying about the unknown at times.”
For a younger man, courage can look like adventure. For a father, courage carries names, faces, bills, children, a spouse and consequences.
Powell found himself asking whether he could uproot his own family if circumstances demanded it.
“Would I have what it takes to move my family, to take my family from one country to another place to be in a better situation?”
The question reaches beyond migration or war. Most men will never lead their families across a border under threat. Yet Powell sees the same conflict on a smaller scale whenever comfort competes with duty.
“The love you should have for your family and the love you should have for God should be greater than the love that we have for comfort,” he said.
That may be one of the harder definitions of masculine courage because it leaves little room for theater. A man can look formidable while remaining deeply attached to ease. He can talk about sacrifice while arranging his life around avoiding it.
Powell’s own conversion forced the issue.
“What Am I Going to Do About This?”
As a Protestant pastor, Powell cared deeply about giving people answers that could survive real suffering.
He became increasingly troubled by disagreements over Scripture and authority, especially when those disagreements carried consequences for marriages, spiritual lives and moral decisions.
“So as a pastor, you’re trying to provide answers for people,” Powell said.
The deeper he studied, the more he believed early Christianity differed from the form of Christianity he had inherited.
Eventually, study became decision.
“You do have to kind of condense it down to a question of like what I’m going to do about this,” Powell said. “When you face that realization that what you are preaching, what you are saying, what you are leading people in doesn’t really reflect what God laid down, I mean, you have to do something with it.”
The choice, as he saw it, was to harden himself against what he had found or leap.
“In that case, that leap cost me a lot,” he said. “But, you know, I still jumped.”
The host pressed him on the point.
“What was it that was in you?” Dominic asked. “You find a problem, like you get your teeth around, you can’t let go of that thing, right?”
Powell traced part of that instinct to his father, who encouraged him to ask theological questions. He traced another part to college, where he studied political science and philosophy under professors who regularly challenged Christianity.
One professor, Powell recalled, openly described himself as a militant atheist and told students his job was to destroy their faith.
The environment forced Powell to decide what he believed and why.
“If you only have easy answers, you either give up or you dig deeper,” he said.
Masculinity Without Harshness
Powell’s models of manhood include martyrs and historical figures, though two of his strongest examples come from men he knows personally.
He named Jamie Apt and Dennis Grendel, older friends whose generosity and humility changed the way he understands masculine strength.
“Masculinity can be strong but at the same time gentle and generous,” Powell said.
That distinction matters.
Much of modern conversation about masculinity can become trapped between caricatures. One side treats masculine strength as dangerous. Another can answer by making aggression itself a virtue.
Powell offers another model: strength governed by love, sacrifice and self-command.
Historically, he points to figures such as Thomas Becket, the English archbishop who entered a lethal conflict with royal power.
Powell admires the willingness to draw a moral boundary and accept the cost.
“Here’s the line,” Powell said, describing the principle. “And if you push me back past this line, then you also kill me because this is the line.”
He also points to Blessed Stanley Rother, the Oklahoma priest and missionary who returned to Guatemala after leaving amid escalating violence. Rother was murdered in 1981.
Powell sees something powerful in men who go back.
They could remain safe. They return because another duty has become more important than safety.
Heroism at Work, at Home and in Small Irritations
Most masculine sacrifice, Powell said, arrives with far less cinematic lighting.
It arrives through coworkers. Or children. Or neighbors.
Or the person whose problem lands in your lap at the least convenient moment imaginable.
“Can I respond with generosity and with gentleness,” Powell asked, “or do I respond with agitation and annoyance?”
He sees inconvenience as one of the most available forms of sacrifice.
A coworker needs help. An elderly neighbor needs the lawn mowed. A family member needs patience. A child interrupts the plan.
The act may be small, but the spiritual question remains serious: Will a man place another person before himself?
Powell’s masculinity is therefore demanding in an unglamorous way. It asks a man to become dependable when nobody applauds, merciful when retaliation feels satisfying and reverent toward responsibilities that have become familiar.
Even fatherhood can become familiar enough to be handled casually. So can marriage. So can prayer.
Powell’s recurring question is whether a man recognizes the weight of what he has been given.
Prayer Without Performance
That question eventually leads Powell to prayer.
He grew up in a pastor’s home, yet he said nobody sat him down and taught him a personal method of prayer beyond mealtime prayer.
As a Catholic father, he wants to give his children something more deliberate.
He uses structured prayers, including prayers from the St. Gregory Prayer Book, and teaches his children a simple framework of adoration, confession, thanksgiving and requests.
Yet his strongest advice for men is even simpler.
God cares more about honesty than elegance.
“God cares way more about our honesty than he does about our elegance,” Powell said.
For Powell, masculine prayer has little use for posing.
A man angry with his wife can say so. A man disappointed with God can say so. A man who feels weak, resentful, afraid or overwhelmed can bring that reality into prayer rather than trying to sound polished.
“You can’t be honest with God until you’re honest with yourself,” Powell said.
Then comes the harder part: listening.
Powell described pouring everything out before God and then leaving space for an answer.
“I’ve had my turn,” he said. “Here’s your turn.”
The Measure of the Man
Powell’s story moves from teenage refugees to conversion, from Thomas Becket to coworkers, from martyrs to bedtime prayer with children.
The theme beneath all of it is responsibility.
A man receives people, truths, duties and gifts. Then he decides what they are worth.
Will he defend them?
Will he sacrifice for them?
Will he choose mercy over revenge, generosity over irritation, courage over complacency?
Powell has already made one enormous leap. He also knows yesterday’s courage provides no guarantee for today. We keep going, one day at at time.