A note before we begin
I don’t write hit pieces about preachers or religion. That isn’t the work I’m trying to do here.
My work is about examining frameworks that promise certain outcomes and asking a simple question: do they actually deliver what they claim?
Many frameworks succeed at behavior modification. And to be clear, there is a strata of society that needs behavior modification right now. If that is as far as someone can go, I understand that.
But behavior modification is not healing.
Healing is nervous system regulation. Healing is integration. Healing is transcendence.
That is the lens I’m writing from here.
Why “Act Like a Man” Feels So Convincing
There is a growing genre of Christian masculinity teaching having a moment right now. It usually begins with a verse, a confident male authority, and a simple binary: boy or man, weak or strong, passive or decisive.
Joby Martin’s Stand Firm and Act Like Men is a clean, well-executed example of this genre.
The message lands quickly. Men sit taller. Shoulders square. Anxiety drops. The room feels aligned.
That response matters.
But it is not evidence of truth.
It is evidence of temporary nervous system regulation.
When I use the word safety in this article, I am not speaking metaphorically. I am talking about autonomic nervous system regulation. The body’s moment to moment assessment of whether it is safe enough to feel, think, choose, and relate without bracing for threat.
This framework does regulate men.
That is exactly why it works.
Paul Cannot Be Separated From His Operating System
The foundational scripture for this framework comes from Paul’s exhortation to “act like men.”
The issue is not that Paul said it. The issue is how casually that phrase is lifted out of the belief system it came from and presented as timeless instruction, detached from the rest of what Paul believed to be true about the world.
Paul did not write from outside history. He wrote as a first century Jewish man embedded in a Greco Roman world that assumed hierarchy as moral order. That world normalized:
- patriarchy as divine design
- obedience as virtue
- he belief that women’s bodies were not fully their own, but were subject to male authority and responsibility
- the regulation of female sexuality, reproduction, obedience, and moral standing through male oversight
- submission as holiness
- control as righteousness
These were not side opinions or cultural footnotes. They were part of a coherent moral architecture that also included the acceptance of slavery, the spiritual justification of household hierarchy, and the belief that authority flowed downward through divinely sanctioned roles.
Paul did not simply offer a few motivational phrases about courage or maturity. He wrote within, and helped reinforce, a system that treated hierarchy as holy, obedience as righteousness, and bodily autonomy as subordinate to authority.
This does not mean Paul had nothing meaningful to say. Humans say meaningful things inside limited and harmful frameworks all the time. Insight can emerge from constrained systems.
But meaning does not automatically confer authority.
If someone wants to ground modern identity formation, relationships, and internal healing in Paul’s words, intellectual honesty requires grappling with the entire system those words came from. You do not get to extract a command about masculinity while quietly discarding the rest of the worldview that made that command intelligible.
You do not get to say “act like a man” while ignoring that the same system normalized slavery, denied bodily autonomy, and sanctified domination as moral order.
That is not discernment.
That is selective obedience.
What This Framework Is Actually Promising
Joby does not explicitly say, “This is a healing framework.”
He does not need to.
Frameworks are defined by the outcomes they promise and the mechanisms they prescribe, not the labels they use.
Across the sermon and book, the framework repeatedly promises the following.
Inner Peace and Stability
Men are promised that anxiety, shame, and inner chaos will settle if they submit to God’s design and act like men.
This is a promise of nervous system safety and regulation.
From a biological standpoint, certainty, authority, and clear hierarchy reduce threat detection. Ambiguity decreases. Responsibility is outsourced. Choice is simplified.
The nervous system calms.
But this calm is achieved through suppression and external regulation, not internal integration.
Remove the authority, and the regulation collapses.
Identity Coherence
Men are promised clarity about who they are, what they are called to do, and how to live.
This works because identity confusion is metabolically expensive. The brain is a prediction machine, and uncertainty increases threat.
Binary roles reduce prediction error. Clear stories stabilize identity. Belonging quiets fragmentation.
This produces coherence.
But coherence is not integration.
An identity imposed from the outside compresses the self. Parts that do not fit the role, fear, grief, tenderness, uncertainty, are exiled.
The identity feels solid until stress hits.
Then it fractures.
Moral Strength and Self Control
Men are promised victory over inner conflict, temptation, and so called sin struggles through obedience and willpower.
This is a category error.
Willpower is a function of the prefrontal cortex, which governs planning, inhibition, and conscious choice. Trauma and threat responses are generated subcortically, in systems like the amygdala, brainstem, and autonomic nervous system, which operate faster than conscious control. You cannot override a subcortical survival response with prefrontal discipline any more than you can think your way out of a reflex.
You cannot override nervous system injury with discipline.
What happens instead is shame. Men white knuckle behavior. Failure is moralized. The cycle repeats.
Calling this sin does not heal it.
It reinforces dysregulation.
Relational Repair
Men are promised better marriages, restored family order, and safer homes through male leadership and hierarchy.
Hierarchy does create order.
Order is not safety.
Secure attachment is built through attunement, responsiveness, and repair. Authority without attunement produces compliance or withdrawal, not connection.
Relational calm achieved through dominance is fragile.
The nervous system remains braced.
Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging
Men are promised usefulness, calling, and participation in something larger than themselves.
This works through several well documented mechanisms:
- co regulation through shared belief, ritual, and collective attention
- predictive processing through reduced uncertainty and clear narrative
- dopaminergic loops activated by mission and challenge
- oxytocin release through in group belonging
- narrative coherence that organizes pain into story
- attachment substitution where divine authority functions as a surrogate attachment figure
All of this regulates the nervous system.
And none of it heals it.
This is borrowed safety.
Remove the group, the authority, or the story, and the regulation collapses.
Why Acting Is Required
There is a reason the command is to act like a man.
Because genuine human healing feels counterintuitive to a dysregulated nervous system.
Healing requires slowing down when everything in the body wants to speed up. Feeling when avoidance feels safer. Listening inwardly when external certainty feels relieving.
Performance is easier than presence.
Armor feels safer than tenderness.
So the framework asks men to act, to perform a role, because becoming human again feels dangerous to a nervous system shaped by threat.
What Men Are Actually Looking For
Men are not drawn to this teaching because they want dominance.
They are drawn to it because they want to feel safe.
Their nervous systems are overwhelmed, fragmented, and braced. They want the internal noise to stop.
This framework offers:
- certainty instead of curiosity
- hierarchy instead of self trust
- obedience instead of integration
- identity instead of healing
That is why it works.
And that is why it is harmful.
It teaches men how to hold themselves together, not how to be whole.
Where My Work Enters the Conversation
In my book The Outsourced Nervous System, I explore how humans learn to borrow regulation from outside themselves when internal safety was never reliably established.
Religion, masculinity frameworks, ideology, productivity, and even relationships can all become sources of outsourced regulation. They help the nervous system feel stable without actually resolving the underlying threat.
The Survival Identity Framework grew out of this work. It maps how specific identity strategies form as adaptive responses to early instability, attachment disruption, and chronic stress.
From this lens, what we are seeing in modern masculinity teaching is not strength being restored. It is survival identities being reinforced.
They work until they don’t.
The False Identity Beneath the Promise
Putting on masculinity as a role is not strength.
It is outsourced regulation.
It is the nervous system saying, “If I perform correctly, I will be safe.”
That is not transcendence.
That is survival.
Real healing begins when safety is reclaimed internally, not borrowed from authority, hierarchy, or identity.
You Don’t Need to Act Like a Man
You do not need to perform masculinity.
You do not need to inherit an ancient hierarchy.
You do not need to silence tenderness to be strong.
What actually heals men is:
- nervous system regulation
- integration of fragmented parts
- repair instead of dominance
- presence instead of performance
- internal safety instead of external control
When a man does this work, everyone around him benefits.
Not because he is more masculine.
Because he is more whole.
The Question Beneath the Scripture
The real question is not whether Paul said “act like men.”
The real question is this:
Why do so many modern spiritual frameworks still rely on identity performance to regulate fear instead of teaching people how to heal the nervous system carrying it?
If a framework promises freedom but requires armor, it has failed.
You do not need to become more masculine.
You need to become integrated.
That path is slower, quieter, and far less dramatic.
And it is the only one that actually heals.
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27 Dec, 2025