Move aside tradwives. Here’s how social media is shaping LDS men’s views of masculinity — for better or worse

Sun-soaked family portraits. Practical tips on healing from childhood trauma. Advice for styling white jeans to achieve that perfect balance of casual and classic.

Oh, and absolutely ripped pecs.

Add these together and you get the social media account of any number of male influencers making their name by codifying a new kind of masculinity online among Generation Z and millennial men.

Some are homesteaders. Others are entrepreneurs. Nearly all are podcasters.

In many ways, the phenomenon parallels so-called tradwife influencers — beautiful (frequently Latter-day Saint) women who reenact a nostalgic version of 1950s motherhood for millions of followers. In this case, these male content creators, believing men have been increasingly marginalized in today’s society, seek to reclaim meaning and fulfillment for their sex through an appeal to an idealized past.

Take, for instance, influencer David Lea’s definition of a “masculine husband.”

This “enlightened,” modern man, the relationship coach explains in a video shared with his nearly 190,000 TikTok followers, “is not a tyrant, and he’s not a dictator.” Rather, “he leads — and he leads because he leads himself first. He takes seriously his personal growth, healing and transformation.”

It’s a message repeated by countless similar “male empowerment” accounts boasting audiences ranging from the tens of thousands into the millions.

It’s also one actively shaping how myriad men — including members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and heavy social media users — see themselves and their roles, both in and out of the home.

In doing so, the phenomenon reinforces many of the global faith’s own teachings around masculinity and gender, while often exposing individuals to more extreme views about male dominance the church has long rejected.

Beards and babies

It’s no accident that these male influencers have found an audience at a moment of intense debate about gender roles in society. These individuals generally lean conservative and, in some cases, toward Donald Trump’s “MAGA” crowd. They take at face value the argument that the balance of power has shifted away from men in a society that, in their perspective, increasingly looks down on them.

Indeed, as scholars like the Brookings Institution’s Richard Reeves have highlighted, research shows men are falling behind girls and women educationally, economically and on many indicators of social well-being.

Then again, it’s hard to point to a time in history when American society wasn’t worried about its men, said Chiung Chen, a professor of media and culture at church-owned Brigham Young University-Hawaii.

In recent decades, Chen explained, the warring camps have fallen into two main groups: those advocating for a more “traditional masculinity” (read: raw, muscular, dominant) and what has become known as “new masculinity,” emphasizing maturity, emotional openness and sensitivity.

Not anymore.

The emerging masculinity embodied by the likes of Lea rejects these binaries. Men, he and a growing chorus of 20- to 40-something male influencers argue, should be sensitive and strong. Or, more precisely, the ideal male is sensitive because he is strong.

“Most men are walking around today as grown adult children,” relationship coach Ryan Moresby-White declares in a video to his nearly 290,000 followers. The reason, explains the Viking look-alike with a predilection for bathing in rivers and meditating under trees, is unhealed shame and trauma.

Only when “you finally feel [emotionally] safe enough to relax” can the inner child take a back seat and allow “the man to come through. It’s about going in and loving and accepting all parts of us.”

Tough and tender. The result: a whole swath of the internet populated by built dads with beards and babies.

An easy alliance

By braiding these new and traditional forms of masculinity, these influencers speak directly to Latter-day Saint men, who, Chen said, have long been exposed to elements of both.

Much of the art, for instance, adopted by the church depicts Book of Mormon heroes as square-jawed, hunky he-men. Stories of great battles and righteous prophet-warriors get translated into action figures for sale at church-owned Deseret Book.

It’s a vision of manhood that could not be further from the frail frames of the church’s all-male top brass — older, clean-shaven leaders who regularly grow tearful during their sermons about love, sacrifice and humility.

Latter-day Saint men, Chen explained, are taught to valorize both.

It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that this social media-driven version of manhood, with its power-through-vulnerability mentality, feels to many Latter-day Saint men as custom-tailored as the influencers’ neatly pressed peacoats.

Presiding — with love

Theologically, too, the overlap can be easy to see.

Like these influencers, the church preaches that men should lead — but from a place of humility.

The church’s official blueprint on family structures, The Family: A Proclamation to the World, teaches that “fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness, and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families.”

The church’s General Handbook for lay leaders defines presiding as leading one’s family members back to God with “gentleness, meekness and pure love.”

This style of “enlightened” leadership is also the underlying ethos of accounts like @theprimalfathers (with its TikTok tally of 162,000 followers), dedicated to “healing” men’s “masculine energy” to help them helm their families from a place of emotional security and maturity.

In short, distant dads with short fuses when a toddler spills her milk or a teen breaks his curfew are out. So say these content creators and church leaders.

As Andrew Smith, a Latter-day Saint father and co-host of the podcast “Brothaz in the Foyer,” put it, “I want to be a protector, a provider and a presider for my family …not just financially but by being emotionally available to my spouse and someone my children feel safe with.”

The Jordan Peterson phenomenon

No figure arguably looms larger in this corner of the internet than Jordan Peterson, a Canadian firebrand and psychologist known for his verbose opposition to liberal intellectuals and tough love for his largely male followers.

Peterson’s diatribes against the “fearmongering cabal of authoritarian elitists, drunk on the fumes of their own self-righteous delusions” have gained him millions of followers on social media, a popular podcast and, it turns out, legions of admirers among Latter-day Saint men.

“Peterson’s support of and ability to intellectualize traditional gender roles,” said Latter-day Saint theologian James Jones, “and his heroic rugged individualism rhetoric seem to appeal to a lot of Mormon men.”

Jonah Barnes — co-host of the raucous “Ward Radio” podcast aimed at Latter-day Saints looking for a less button-down version of Sunday school — offers an even simpler explanation for Peterson’s appeal, which he believes runs deep among his show’s majority male audience.

“A lot of young men feel maligned,” said Barnes, a small-business owner in Washington state and father of six. “They feel betrayed by many institutions.”

Peterson, meanwhile, is critical of what he calls an unjustified “backlash on masculinity.”

Barnes spoke positively of Peterson, as did his fellow co-host Tikla Fife, a mother of four, including two boys.

In particular, she appreciated how Peterson has argued that meekness, as it appears in the New Testament, should be understood as “those who have swords and know how to use them but keep them sheathed.”

“We need men who are capable of great harm so they can protect us,” Fife added. “But we need them to not use that capability in the wrong way.”

Other metrics for just how deeply Peterson’s influence is felt include Reddit conversations and Facebook groups by and for Latter-day Saints discussing, among other things, the author’s takes on masculinity (“If you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of”); Christianity (“It’s not that the Bible is true. It’s that the Bible is the prerequisite for the manifestation of truth”); and gender (“trans women are men — enough already”).

Three researchers — Spencer Greenhalgh of the University of Kentucky, Amy Chapman of Arizona State University and Levi Sands of the University of Iowa — found that the LDS Freedom Forum website mentioned Jordan Peterson at least 307 times between 2016 and 2023.

Old ideas in new packaging

It’s hard to argue against a man taking an active role in parenting or getting help with his anger issues.

There is, however, a darker side to this internet subculture, researchers warn. That occurs when these projects of self-improvement morph from simply good advice into steps men must take to assert their power in the home and in society, such as those who advocate taking the vote away from women.

Writer and Lutheran pastor Angela Denker, a mother of two boys, has spent years studying this “male empowerment” trend, which she described as a backlash to feminism.

Its goal, the author of the forthcoming “Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood,” is to “repackage old ideas about gender and male dominance for Instagram, emphasizing physical beauty — once coded as ‘gay’ — and co-opting the language of therapy to give it an air of respectability.”

The Andrew Tate effect

What shape that dominance takes ranges vastly in this male-centric slice of the internet.

A male teenager with self-esteem issues might be drawn to videos of Peterson critiquing feminism (a movement the patriarchal church, too, has its own uneasy feelings toward), only to have algorithms send him down an ever-angrier path.

For millions, that path leads straight to Andrew Tate, the kickboxing champion and self-described misogynist currently facing trial in Romania on allegations of human trafficking and rape (accusations he denies).

Among the many statements Tate, a candidate for British prime minister backed by Elon Musk, has made about women are that they are property, “inherently lazy” and that survivors of sexual assault are responsible for their abuse.

" Tate is a whiplash reaction to [society’s] hyper-feminization,” Barnes said. “And while that might deserve a response, Tate is way too toxic and egotistical and misogynistic.”

Despite their extreme nature, these views appear to be taking root among young men around the world. In a recent study, a quarter of men ages 18 to 29 in the United Kingdom who had heard of Tate said they agreed with his opinions about women.

What this could mean for LDS men

To date, Chen has detected little of this darker strain of the subculture, known as the “manosphere,” among her students at BYU-Hawaii or in her Latter-day Saint congregation.

“However,” she noted, “some toxic elements are present among some minority of right-wing Latter-day Saints online.”

Researcher Levi Sands agreed with this assessment (data that found more than 300 references to Peterson in the LDS Freedom Forum found 11 for Tate).

Part of the reason for this, Sands suggested, had to do with the church’s own teachings about gender, which, while supportive of male leadership, routinely emphasize the need of men to treat their wives with love and respect — and flatly reject abuse in all forms.

Even so, he speculated that “many members” have been exposed in church settings to ideas plucked from this online world, “never knowing their origins.”

Said his colleague Chapman, who has spent years studying the Latter-day Saint online group DezNat: “My informed hunch is that it is more widespread than we know.”

Barnes, meanwhile, has a warning about the influence of the Tates of the world: The most well-intentioned sermons, he cautions, can go only so far in preventing Latter-day Saint men who feel powerless and down on themselves from adopting the mega-influencer’s uglier ideas of masculinity.

As long as “young men feel they’ve been painted as enemies,” he said, some portion of them may eventually “be sucked into Andrew Tate.”

At the same time, there are those trying to break down the walls between the Petersons and Tates of the manosphere. Among them is men’s clothing stylist Tanner Guzy.

Guzy declined to be interviewed but described himself in a recent podcast interview as someone who actively strives to straddle the two worlds.

“Guys like Andrew Tate,” he said, “are colleagues of mine.”

Guzy’s religious background? Latter-day Saint.

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