The 500% Problem: Why Men Don’t Have Friends Anymore
The Loneliness Boom and the Brotherhood We Forgot
Something’s broken in the modern male life—so broken there’s been a 500% increase in men who say they don’t have a single close friend. Deacon Charlie doesn’t treat that like a sad fact for a PowerPoint slide. He treats it like a mission field, and he offers a map: get the order right, pray like you mean it, choose relationship over transaction, and give God the best you got—not the leftovers.
Deacon Charlie Echeverry preaches and speaks throughout the USA, and he’s the host of Living the Call, a weekly podcast focused at the intersection of faith and influence. He’s been featured on EWTN, America Magazine, OSV, Relevant Radio, Max Studios, Catholic Answers, Redeemer Radio, and more. He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife Jessica of 22 years, and he’s a father of five.
He enjoys motorcycles, British comedy, functional fitness, ice plunges, and discovering cultures through travel.
St. Irenaeus and the Oven That Bakes the Bread of God
St. Irenaeus was an incredible man. He was a bishop, a martyr. He was actually the most recent Doctor of the Church, the 37th Doctor of the Church, named recently by Pope Francis. A man who loved scripture deeply. We know that because he cited the New Testament over a thousand times in his preaching and in his teaching.
It’s made special by the fact that he lived 250 years before the Bible was put together. That’s what makes it special.
He was a big part of why we retain and have this beautiful patrimony of scripture, and he was an essential person in bringing together the canon of scripture.
He had a very beautiful saying, at least attributed to him… the word of God, scripture, is the oven that bakes the bread of God.
Scripture is the oven in which the bread of God, the Eucharist, is baked and formed.
He was saying this in a liturgical context to say that scripture softens the ground, softens the earth a little bit, makes us ready to receive the Eucharist.
Every homily should prepare us for reception of the Eucharist. It should soften the spiritual earth of our hearts.
Missionary Discipleship… or Bust
This entire weekend is about missionary discipleship, because if we’re missionary disciples, then really what’s the point.
I have a friend who says once you ride Space Mountain, the rest of the park is closed. That’s a dated reference because there are new rides besides Space Mountain, but you get the idea. Space Mountain is the biggest best thing, and once you experience that, the rest of the park is closed.
That’s a type of missionary discipleship. Once we are missionary disciples, what else is there than to be on fire with the kerygmatic message, which is what God asks us to bear in mind and take to the rest of the world.
God is real. He loved each of us into existence. We were separated from that love by our own free will and our own sin. Nevertheless, he sent his Son to die for our sins. Now we have an obligation to go out to the rest of the world and share that salvific message with everyone.
Go out to all nations, baptizing them and teaching them in the ways of the Lord.
That is the kerygma. That’s what this entire conference is about.
The Curtis Martin Book and the Talks That Hit Hard
When I was first invited to speaking at this summit, Dan asked me about this book by Curtis Martin, Making Missionary Disciples. I’ve seen copies everywhere. Funny, my copy, one of my son’s dogs got to it. My dog almost ate my homework. I managed to grab it long enough to read it.
What a fabulous book.
It breaks down what you’ve been hearing throughout these keynotes, and by the way, how amazing has it been with these different talks.
It’s great to be Catholic. It’s great to be Christian, especially now. We’ve got the National Eucharistic Congress next month. We’re seven years away from another anniversary where Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared to a peasant guy and transformed an entire pagan culture, and that’s supposed to include us too. She’s the patroness of the Americas, not only Mexico.
We’re nine years away from the 2000th celebration of the foundation of the Church, the birth of Christianity in 2033, the Church born from the side of Jesus. We’re living in this time. It’s exciting.
The Job Today: Authentic Brotherhood
I’m excited, as you can tell. This entire thing is about kerygma. Jason touched on beautifully about divine intimacy.
My job today is to shape, a little bit, this idea of authentic brotherhood. To set you up so you can talk to one another and hear what God is trying to share with you.
So what’s the situation. It’s bleak if you look at the US.
We’ve heard it in different ways, but the statistic blew me away. In a generation, go back to 1990. I was in high school. Flashback to high school to today, there’s been a 500% increase in guys who say they don’t have a single close friendship.
We’ve heard it described as a crisis of isolation, an epidemic of loneliness. Different ways of describing the same phenomenon. Isolation. It’s real.
This is the mission field. This is what we’re being called out into.
What Happened to Us: A Few Causes of the Loneliness Spike
If you’re like me, you ask why. What happened over the last generation that could lead to this?
There are a number of things, and this isn’t comprehensive.
One is a massive explosion of technology and media. We’ve seen it, used it, bemoaned it, like I did moments before this presentation because none of these slides would work. All of this has happened over this time. Even though the PR of much of this technology was to bring us together, and it can, as you heard moments ago about what Heroic Men is doing with their brotherhood, the net effect has been increased isolation. That’s new.
Another is economic pressure. Right now, if you’re a millennial man, between 25 and 42 or so, almost half have multiple sources of income. Gig economy, side hustles, all those things. The idea of going to work someplace, having a career, building a foundation, sharing that with your family, that’s changed over the same period, leading to pressure and change.
Another is new social norms, driven by the technology. We live in individualized reality, hermetically sealed little bubbles. You see this in big urban areas. You’re sitting six inches away from somebody on the train, and it’s like they aren’t there. These are new phenomena.
And to me, the most important: despite the ways we’ve tried to recreate it, this is a secularized moment in human history. There’s always been religiosity.
Three months ago I was in the UK and I visited Stonehenge, a childhood dream, to walk up and see stones assembled five, six thousand years ago. Why did they do it. They probably wouldn’t have called it God the way we do, but they were moved by something spiritual, a religious impulse. Man is a religious creature. So being so secular is new in human history.
These are reasons, and they contribute to the loneliness problem. So we need to recover authentic friendship.
Two Imaginative Visions: Secular Progress vs Catholic Faithfulness
The world offers a vision. It says success, ambition, accumulation, forward, progress. That is the secular imaginative vision. Anybody who’s read Mona Charen’s work knows that vernacular. Constant progress. Always going forward, and if you hold us back, you’re against us.
The Catholic imaginative vision is different. We aren’t about achieving success, are we.
Mother Teresa of Kolkata said greater than success is faithfulness.
We know that’s true.
Here’s the challenging part. There’s something more than faithfulness. It’s not enough to hand on the faith. It’s not enough to teach the faith to our children. It’s not enough to live the faith ourselves with God, though those are good.
We have to do something else.
We have to go out into the world and produce fruit. We have to be fruitful.
We know this because there are historical biblical characters who made it a point to tell us in clear terms. One was St. John the Baptist, who said produce fruit.
When people were telling him, we’re the sons of Abraham, so… we’re good. Today, the 2024 translation is, “we’re in a Catholic men’s group, we’re good. We go to Mass, we’re good. We pray the rosary, we’re good.”
As good as those are, they aren’t enough.
St. John was saying don’t say the fact that you’re children of Abraham will save you, because God can raise up children of Abraham from these rocks.
So we can’t say that merely attending a men’s group, being in ministry, being a Christian leader, is enough.
We have to go out into the world and produce fruit.
Fruit Comes From Love That Wants the Other Person’s Good
We do that by genuinely loving those that we serve.
What does that mean?
Genuinely loving someone is desiring their good for their own sake, for them, not for you.
Even desiring someone’s good is challenging. That’s why I loved the prayer earlier, during the intercessions at Mass, about praying for those we can’t stand, those who’ve hurt us, wounded us. That’s a challenge. To love those we serve when we don’t get along, or when they don’t see the world the way we do.
But it’s also loving them for their own sake. That’s how we begin to produce fruit.
Here’s a few stories from my own life.
Before we do that, before we understand anything about loving those we serve, we need to get our house in order. We have to understand the proper hierarchy of being, the proper hierarchy of relationship with God, the proper hierarchy of reality.
Our mission is noble. As good as it is, it’s the foundation, the base of our structure. It isn’t the top. Above that are our kids, for those of us who have children. Above that are our wives. Above that is God.
Any change in the order creates chaos. It does.
Many times, personally, I will take something like work, which isn’t even on this slide, and put that above my kids, or above my time of prayer with God.
Everything flows downhill. We have to start with proper order.
Father Larry said to put a note on your mirror in your bathroom. The note says: I am third. I like that. Great reminder.
Becoming Who You Are: The Glow
I am third is a good model. The more I reflected on it, I thought, I find the fullness of who I am when I live this out. When you live this hierarchy, this proper order, you discover who you really are.
Kind of like a scene from probably the greatest 80s movie, for those of you who like 80s movies, Barry Gordy’s The Last Dragon.
Bruce Leroy is looking for the master who can teach him the highest level of kung fu, and at the end he discovers, I’ve learned what I need to learn, now I can pass on what I’ve learned to others. And at that moment he begins to glow. I loved that scene. It gave you chills as a kid.
Why is this not ridiculous in the Christian worldview?
I heard a story told by Father Carlos Martins. If you don’t know him, he’s on tour nationwide with the arm of St. Jude, the relic. Thousands show up. He’s an exorcist, religious priest, and he has a popular podcast called The Exorcist Files.
He tells a story about St. Jude I’d never heard. He said St. Jude, after the Resurrection and Ascension, on one of his first apostolic missions, went to the king of Edessa in Armenia, who was sick. The king had written a letter to Jesus asking to be healed. Legend says Jesus responded, I have to fulfill my mission, but I’m going to send somebody to you after I fulfill it.
St. Jude was that person.
The scribes of that time write down that when Jude showed up, he was glowing, his skin was glowing. Was it literally glowing like a lightsaber. Probably. But you could tell he was living the fullness of who he was, who God made him to be.
That’s the glow when we live the fullness of who we are.
Three Signs of Authentic Friendship, Plus a Bonus One
Here’s three signs of authentic friendship, authentic brotherhood.
These are things you can cultivate within yourself or recognize in others who are authentic friends, authentic brothers.
You get a bonus one. So there are four.
Sign One: Praying Always, The Jesus Prayer, and The Way of a Pilgrim
Here’s the first one, and you heard me pray it earlier.
One sign of an authentic friend, or behavior we can model, is someone who prays always.
This is the Jesus Prayer. The prayer I opened with. An ancient Eastern Christian prayer.
I read a book called The Way of a Pilgrim years ago. If you haven’t, do it. Game changer.
It’s an anonymous book from the Eastern Church, part of that patrimony, like The Cloud of Unknowing in our tradition. It tells the story of a man wandering through Russia looking for an answer to a question.
He walked into a sermon and heard the words about praying always, pray unceasingly, and he can’t wrap his mind around it. What does that mean. How can you pray always. What does that look like.
He goes town to town, on foot, walking months, years, meeting wise men and monks, asking and getting advice, until he meets one man who teaches him the Jesus Prayer.
He says: say this to recognize your total and utter dependence on a God who loved you into existence. Pray this prayer.
He says: go back to your hut and say it a thousand times. So he does. He comes back the next day. The monk says go say it two thousand times. He prays it. Back and forth for weeks.
Until he’s saying the prayer twelve thousand times a day.
His hands, his fingers, are bloody from the beads. His tongue has a contortion because he can’t repeat the words anymore.
Then one moment, it dawns on him that he’s no longer saying the prayer, no longer physically manipulating beads, but he’s living, with every beat of his heart, a love for Jesus Christ. That’s when he receives the fruit of the Jesus Prayer.
So that first sign, my brothers, is someone who prays always.
I love St. Dominic because his brothers would say about him, he was either talking to God or about God.
That’s what we need to cultivate. Before the Gospel is read, we do the sign of the cross over our mind, our lips, our heart. Lord be in my mind, on my lips, in my heart.
Cultivating that, having divine intimacy, is key for real brotherhood and friendship.
Sign Two: Living Witness, A New Age Temple, and A Marriage That Got Rewired
My wife used to be unchurched. When I met her, she wasn’t Christian, wasn’t Catholic. When we moved to California, she did what a lot of people do. She explored spiritually.
I was a lukewarm Catholic, culturally Catholic. I took the kids to Catholic school, but if she wanted to explore, that was okay.
She would meditate on Sundays at the Self-Realization Temple while I took the kids to Mass when they were little.
One day she was meditating and saw sunlight glinting off the top of their temple. She’d never been in. Only in meeting rooms. She saw that glint and thought, I’m going to walk in there.
She walked into the temple and saw this. Their avatars, the people they consider anointed. Gandhi, Paramahansa Yogananda, and in the middle, Jesus.
Now this is an unchurched woman, non-Christian, but she knew what Jesus looked like. She said, what are you doing here.
And at that moment, she had a mystical encounter with Jesus Christ. He came out and spoke to her. He said hi, I’m glad you’re here. I see you’ve met my friends, but it’s me you’re looking for.
She fell to her knees. Every ounce, every pore in her body was filled to superabundance. Then it was gone.
She came home and told me. And God forgive me, because I’m supposed to be Christian, supposed to believe Jesus is real, I thought she was crazy. I’m going to be honest. I thought she was crazy.
That doesn’t happen. Jesus doesn’t walk out of a tapestry and welcome you in a New Age temple. That’s bananas.
But she didn’t respond to my incredulity with more incredulity.
She said, you Catholics say Jesus is in your church. I met him. I want to see him again.
Talk about your life changing in a moment.
That’s what she said.
And she knew that because my mom, her mother-in-law, made her do the sign of the cross every time we drove by a Catholic church. She’d say why are we doing that. Because Jesus is in there.
She remembered it. She started going to Mass.
Her conversion led to my reversion, which led to my vocation as a deacon, etc.
My wife was a living witness. She lived that faith out. Her love for Christ was undeniable. She showed it. It was attractive. It made me want to change my life.
Sign Three: Relationship Beats Transaction, And Homelessness Ministry That Changed Me
This is a picture of a Christmas party we call the Christmas of Hope, run by an organization my wife and I started in Los Angeles over 20 years ago.
These are homeless families.
We started this organization because my wife was homeless for seven years, between 14 and 21. Homelessness is a calling deep in our hearts.
When I got started in that ministry, working with homeless kids and their parents, I did it reluctantly. I didn’t want to get my hands dirty. I did it from a distance.
This is her thing. I’ll carry bags, set things up, pay for things, but I’m not going to get close.
That ministry taught me another sign of authentic friendship.
Relational is always greater than transactional. Always. A relational approach will always be greater than a transactional one.
Why does it matter.
Homelessness shows it. In Southern California we spend $400 million a month trying to deal with homelessness. The stats: for every hundred people who leave homelessness, 120 enter it.
It isn’t about money, tools, resources.
It’s about entering relationship with people who are wounded, and loving them through their journey.
That’s what that ministry taught me, and that’s a sign of authentic friendship.
Bonus Sign: Giving God the Best First, A Village Elder in Ghana
This is a story I remember from a trip to West Africa, to Ghana.
We landed in the capital city, drove for 15 hours on progressively smaller transportation, ended the last couple miles on foot, my friend and I, going to a village.
My friend is Ghanaian and invited me. I’m that guy where if he says you want to go to Africa, I’m like sure, let’s go.
We got to the town. He asked if I’d like to meet the elder. I said sure.
We went to the elder’s house, a hut, dirt floors, and super happy people. Everything you hear about that is true.
We walk in, and the elder starts rifling through his cabinets looking for something to serve us because we’re guests. He takes out a bottle of liquor, I don’t even know what it was, but it was precious because it was stored deep in the cupboards.
He came out with four cups, four glasses. There were three of us, me, my friend, him.
He served all four.
He took the first cup, held his hand out in front, turned it over, dumped it on the ground, and said, that one’s for God.
It blew me away. Someone with nothing, literally nothing, took the best thing he had and gave it to God first.
That’s a sign of authentic brotherhood, authentic friendship.
Someone who invests and gives you the best first, not last.
God bless you.