Why the World Needs Heroic Men
Here’s why I think the fight that Heroic Men is fighting is so critically important.
Less than half of American children reach adulthood with both parents in the home. And it’s usually dads who leave. Approximately 80% of single-parent homes are led by mothers. At this moment, 19.5 million children live without a resident father.
That equates to the entire population of New York City, including suburbs, full of fatherless kids.
American fatherlessness has risen in lockstep with American contempt for masculinity. And that’s an accident. In the last four decades, our culture has developed contempt for all things masculine. This contempt has ultimately produced the very thing that it seeks to destroy, that is, toxic men.
How so? Well, there’s an old saying that goes, boys will be boys. But that saying overlooks an even more deep-seated desire in young boys.
Boys want to be men. Held within the mind’s eye of every wild-eyed young boy is an image, a picture, a sense of the man that he wants to become. The trick to ensuring that boys become good men is making sure that they have the right picture in mind.
Unfortunately, today’s culture doesn’t give boys a positive picture. Instead, our culture seems to reject masculine pictures and masculine role models altogether.
In his 2021 article published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal for the Psychology of Men and Masculinities, Brian P. Cole notes that the majority of research conducted on male psychological traits implicitly treats those traits as negative.
Specifically, Cole notes that in the 20-year history of perhaps the most globally influential psychological journal on masculinity, only 15% of the articles published took what he classified as a positive view of masculinity. Most articles treated masculine traits as negative things.
Of course, negative references on masculinity aren’t only limited to academia.
In any given month, negative allusions abound in the entertainment industry, in popular media, in politics, both in academia and in society at large. Masculinity has a bad reputation.
And the problem with treating all masculinity as a bad thing is that doing so denies young boys the positive models of masculinity that they need in order to become good men and good fathers.
Fatherhood doesn’t simply happen. Sure, biological procreation, that happens quite easily. But committed, faithful, intentional fathers, they don’t arise out of thin air. They’re forged by positive culture.
They come from cultures that give young boys a road map for what masculinity looks like.
Culturally speaking, if we do not give our young boys good masculine role models for what it looks like, for example, to be a good father, then we’ll get exactly what we asked for. We’ll get a world full of boys happy to procreate, but wildly deficient as fathers.
We’ll get a fatherless world. And to state the obvious, that is a painfully bad thing.
As illustrated by groups like the National Fatherhood Initiative, the presence of an involved father positively correlates with a child’s success in almost all relevant sociological metrics, including educational success, psychological stability, and future job performance.
Conversely, the absence of an involved father does the opposite, correlating with things like poverty, infant mortality, and prison.
So again, to deconstruct masculinity is to deconstruct fatherhood. And to deconstruct fatherhood is to hurt children.
The work at Heroic Men matters.
The crisis of men and masculinity is bad in our day. But the current crisis is even more problematic when one considers what it might mean for future generations of the Church.
Why?
Numerous studies across diverse populations have demonstrated that a faithful father is far and away the strongest predictor of what faith will look like in the next generation.
One of the most rigorous examples is a four-decade longitudinal study published by Oxford University Press, Vern Bengtson’s faith and family study, Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down Across Generations.
In this study, researchers followed 350 families and over 3,000 individuals across five generations, seeking to uncover the secret to successful religious transmission, to getting the faith from one generation to the next.
The findings of the study showed that there is a stronger correlation between the faith practices of children and their fathers and grandfathers than with their mothers and grandmothers.
In June of 2023, the Communio Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships revealed that the collapse of marriage and the resulting decline in resident fatherhood may offer the clearest explanation for the decline in Christianity throughout the whole of the United States.
These conclusions are drawn from the results of a nationwide study of over 19,000 Sunday church attendees conducted during worship in 112 evangelical, Protestant, and Catholic congregations in 13 different states.
And the same results were corroborated in a new study from the Institute for Family Studies, released only three weeks prior to this Heroic Men’s Convocation in June of 2026.
I cite all of these studies to demonstrate that there are academically sound reasons to believe that it is the father who plays the critical role in passing the faith on to his children.
Fathers are critical for rebuilding society and rebuilding the Church. We must emphasize men.
Rebuild the man, you rebuild marriage. Rebuild marriages, and you rebuild families. Rebuild families, and you rebuild the Church and the culture.
The work being done at events like the Heroic Men’s Convocation is critical and will resound for generations to come.
About two and a half years ago, I left my previous work in campus ministry to devote myself full-time to the fight for men. I founded an organization called Forge, and you can find out more about it at myforge.org.
The basic idea of our organization is this.
Satan attacks the Church and the culture by attacking the family. And he attacks the family by attacking men.
So at Forge, what do we do? We reverse the strategy.
We build exceptional men to build strong families to renew the Church and the culture.
How do we do that? Forge is known for large events and high-quality curriculum. Those things matter because they build identity and provide solid formation.
But small groups lie at the center of our organizational strategy. Why small groups? Well, in part because it’s what Jesus did. More personally, it’s what I’ve seen work.
Small groups aren’t complicated things. If you gather men consistently, engage some strong content, and create space for honest, candid conversation about real challenges in life, growth happens.
Give it enough time, and you will see conversion. That’s why so many fruitful ministries around the world are built around a small group model. It’s rocket science. Jesus did it, and so we do too.
Since founding Forge on January 1st of 2024, we have seen tremendous fruit.
We started in Des Moines, Iowa, with regular events, a conference, and a methodically growing network of small groups.
About 18 months later, a talented man from Wichita, Kansas, left his career as an aerospace engineer, fundraised his support, and launched Forge in Wichita.
I’m happy to report that we have two more cities and men in those cities who, in the next six months, plan to leave their careers and launch Forge in their Midwestern cities as well.
We’re excited about what God is doing in Forge cities, but we also want to serve men all across the country, even outside those cities.
Early on, Forge was blessed by a very generous group of benefactors who collectively invested more than half a million dollars so that we could collaborate with world-class scholars and an outstanding production team to create resources for men’s small groups.
Today, we offer four video-based courses.
One is called Fathers and Sons, and it addresses the question, how do we raise sexually healthy sons in the midst of a sexually toxic culture?
Two of our other courses, called Home Church and Patriarchs, respectively explore how fathers and grandfathers can pass the faith to the next generation.
Our most recent course, called Men and Work, explores what it looks like for a man to be a saint in the workplace, providing not only financially for his family, but also emotionally and spiritually.
Forge also wants to collaborate with men’s conferences throughout the country.
And if any man at the Heroic Men’s Convocation would like to have me out to speak at a local Catholic men’s conference, we would be happy to open up our entire content library for every single attendee at your conference to access for free on the occasion that you have me come speak.
This provides a launchpad from the conference to an empowering post-conference experience for your men.
I couldn’t be prouder of the work that Heroic Men is doing. Thank you, and God bless all of the folks at Heroic Men.
John Bishop
Forge founder | MyForge.org