The Two Gospels That Keep Young Men from the Cross

May 25, 2026•20 min

"The voice that once called me out of softness began to keep me from the Cross."

The Two Gospels That Keep Young Men from the Cross

We are being catechized every day by two rival gospels. One preaches through pain: conquer your body, harden your mind, speak to yourself with violence until softness dies. The other preaches through leverage: scale your income, buy your time, turn every relationship and hour into an asset until nothing can touch you.

Both promise the same deliverance: that the restless, ashamed, half-alive young man scrolling at 3 a.m. can finally become someone. Both are lies wearing the garments of strength.

I say this not as one who stands above the struggle, but as one who once lived inside it. I followed the first gospel with something close to religious devotion. The man who embodied it for me was David Goggins. I do not write to shame him. I respect him deeply. His story of rising from profound brokenness through chosen suffering moved something real in thousands of young men, including me. He named the comfort addiction, the self-pity, the quiet emasculation that modern life breeds. For a season his voice functioned like a drill sergeant many of us never had. He misdiagnosed the cure, but he saw the sickness. I am not sure I would have recognized my own captivity without his blunt cartography. But even the best drill sergeant cannot give what only Christ can give.

I fell for the second gospel just as completely. I was the young man Andrew Tate was waiting for. I swallowed the binary whole: you are either a brokie or a G, and the only question is whether you have the stomach to work every waking hour until you escape the prison of being ordinary. I do not write to dismiss these men either. Some of them have named real wounds: the loss of meaningful work, the collapse of stable family formation, the spiritual vacuum left by a culture that offers young men only consumption or career as sources of meaning. Money was everything. I told myself I did not deserve sleep until the goal was crushed. I treated rest as sabotage and my body as rental equipment. The laptop screen became my mirror, and the revenue dashboard my reflection. I was not greedy for luxury; I was desperate for proof, a number large enough to make me feel permanent. But a higher net worth, like a lower body-fat percentage, still cannot love you back.

Eventually the voice that once called me out of softness, and the voice that promised me wealth, both began to keep me from the Cross.

Christ woke me up.

The False Asceticism of Self-Mastery

This is not a rejection of discipline or of bodily struggle. The problem lies in the spirit that animates it.

Consider the man who rises before dawn not because he loves the Light, but because he hates the version of himself still sleeping. He runs until his lungs burn and his knees scream, not to offer his body as a living sacrifice, but to punish the softness he despises. He stands in the mirror and speaks words no father should ever speak to his son. He calls this discipline. In reality it is often only a more refined form of despair wearing the mask of masculinity.

The Orthodox Church has always known that the path to God passes through struggle. We call it podvig, ascetic labor, the voluntary war against the passions. The saints fasted, kept vigil, labored with their hands, and subjected their bodies to hardship. But notice the difference in root and in goal. The modern self-mastery project begins with contempt for the self and ends with the glorification of the will. It treats the human being as a machine whose output can be increased through sufficient pressure and negative self-talk. It borrows the language of the arena while forgetting that in the Christian arena the opponent is not the self but the passions that distort the self. The victory is not autonomy but union with the One who was crucified in weakness.

St. John Chrysostom, preaching to a city drunk on spectacle and self-display, knew this distinction well. He saw men who could master their appetites yet remain enslaved to vainglory. He saw ascetics whose bodies were lean but whose souls were bloated with pride in their own leanness. He warned that the fast which does not lead to mercy, the vigil which does not lead to prayer, the suffering which does not lead to love - these are not Christian asceticism but a new form of idolatry. The same warning applies today with sharper force, because our idols now wear fitness trackers and quote military maxims.

When a man builds his identity on his capacity to suffer more than others, he has not escaped the passions; he has baptized one of them. The same ego that once sought comfort through pleasure now seeks glory through pain. The scoreboard has simply changed. He is still performing for an audience, even if that audience is only the harsher version of himself he has installed as inner critic and inner god.

This is why the discipline born of shame cannot ultimately satisfy. It produces a stronger self, but not a crucified one. It can make a man capable of running ultramarathons or enduring cold exposure, yet leave him incapable of forgiving his father, weeping in repentance, or receiving the mercy he has never shown himself. The armor grows thicker. The heart grows harder.

I once believed that if I could just become hard enough, the ache would stop. I treated Goggins' words almost as scripture. The cold showers, the brutal self-talk, the refusal of every comfort: these became my sacraments. They gave me a sense of control and a temporary identity, but they could not heal the wound they were trying to cauterize. The cold showers did not kill me; only, I had believed they could resurrect me. Only when Christ began to show me that I was not a project to be completed but a son to be restored did the entire framework start to collapse. The suffering did not disappear. It was simply relocated. It moved from the service of the self to the service of Love.

The Money Gospel and the Same Ancient Hunger

The second gospel follows the identical logic in a different costume. Where Goggins speaks through the body, Andrew Tate speaks through brute hierarchy: money is manhood, women are territory, violence is the lingua franca of the free. Alex Hormozi teaches the same mathematics with sterilized language: systems, acquisition, compounding, leverage. No cigars, no Bugattis, just elegant diagrams showing how to turn human attention into recurring revenue. Iman Gadzhi and the younger cohort sell the dream to those still in school: run the ads, flip the agency, make money while you sleep. The packaging varies from raw to respectable, but the promise is uniform: the void can be filled by what you acquire.

I know this terrain too. After I stopped trying to out-suffer myself, I tried to out-earn my anxiety. I remember the silence of my apartment at 2 a.m., my face painted blue by a screen that never stops auditing, watching numbers refresh in place of prayer. I was not greedy for yachts. I was greedy for evidence, a number large enough to make me feel permanent. The hustle whispered what Goggins had screamed: you are not enough, but you could be if you optimized harder. Tate offers warlord liberation; Hormozi offers machine liberation. Both ask you to become a device that generates proof of its own value.

This too is pride disguised as improvement. It is the same attempt to become one's own provider, one's own savior, one's own source of significance. The lust for money is especially seductive because it can masquerade as love for family, as stewardship, as wisdom. A man can tell himself he is building generational wealth while he is actually building a fortress against the fear that he is still not enough. And because the number on the screen can always be made larger, the deception can continue for decades.

Here prelest, spiritual delusion, finds fertile ground. When success is interpreted as proof of God's favor, when ethical compromises are justified by "the mission," when a man begins to believe his own marketing about impact and legacy, he has entered the territory the Fathers warned against. He may still attend church. He may still speak of values. But his heart has been captured by another gospel, and the sacraments begin to lose their power against the quieter religion he is actually practicing.

The Image That Tries to Repaint Itself

The deeper error is anthropological. Modern self-improvement culture, whether it speaks of discipline or of financial leverage, assumes that man is fundamentally raw material awaiting his own genius. The body is a machine to be optimized. The will is a muscle to be hypertrophied. The future self is a product to be engineered through enough grit and systems.

But we were not made as raw material. We were made as icons.

An icon does not improve itself by adding better paint or sharper lines. It is restored when the original image is uncovered and the distortions are healed. The process requires skill, yes, and careful work, but the skill belongs to the iconographer, not to the icon. When the icon begins to repaint itself according to its own idea of beauty, the result is not restoration but distortion upon distortion.

This is the quiet blasphemy at the heart of autonomous self-improvement. We take the place of the iconographer. We declare that the image is insufficient and that we will finish what God began. The language sounds responsible - "personal growth," "leveling up," "becoming the best version of yourself" - but the posture is the posture of the Prodigal who decides he will make his own way rather than return to the Father's house.

The goalposts move because the project was never designed to arrive. A self that is its own architect can never be satisfied with its own architecture. There will always be another weakness to eliminate, another metric to improve, another version of "enough" waiting just beyond the next achievement. The man who lives this way does not become free. He becomes a slave with better equipment.

The Podvig That Flows from Love

None of this means that a Christian man should be passive about his body or his resources. The opposite is true. The man who has been awakened by Christ often trains with greater seriousness and stewards his resources with clearer eyes, precisely because the root has changed.

I still wake before dawn. I still run while the city is dark, and I still stand under water cold enough to steal my breath. But the root has shifted. These acts are no longer attempts to atone for my existence or to manufacture a self that can finally be loved. They are, at their best, small daily assents to the life I have already received. The cold water no longer functions as punishment; it becomes a reminder that this body, fragile as it is, has been claimed by Christ and will one day be raised. The early hours are no longer stolen from sleep to prove something; they become space carved out for prayer, for study, for the quiet work of becoming the kind of man who can actually bear the weight of love and responsibility. The habits survived the death of their old root. They were grafted into something that already lives.

I still budget. I still work hard. But the spreadsheet is no longer the score of my worth, and money is no longer a talisman against the fear of being ordinary. It is simply oil in a lamp that should give light.

When the struggle is no longer fueled by self-contempt or by the lust to secure oneself, it becomes something else entirely.

It becomes podvig in the true sense: labor offered to God, suffering united to the Cross, habits formed not to prove worth but to make space for Love.

The early mornings can remain. The cold exposure can remain. The disciplined study and the careful budgeting can remain. But now they are carried by a different spirit. They are no longer attempts to build a self that can finally rest. They are expressions of a self that has already been received and is being restored.

This is the difference between the Stoic who conquers himself to achieve apatheia and the Christian who struggles so that Christ may increase while he decreases. Both may look similar from the outside. The inner movement is opposite. One moves toward greater autonomy. The other moves toward greater union.

Chrysostom would have recognized the temptation immediately. He preached to men who could fast from food yet devour their neighbors with their tongues, who could master their bodies yet remain slaves to reputation. He would tell us today what he told them then: the asceticism that does not lead to humility, to mercy, to the love of God and neighbor, is not Christian at all. It is only another way of loving oneself, even if that love now wears the severe face of discipline rather than the soft face of pleasure.

The Only Freedom That Does Not Deceive

The young man scrolling at 3 a.m. is not primarily looking for better habits or a higher net worth. He is looking for a way out of the ache that tells him he is not enough. Both gospels on offer - the gospel of self-mastery through suffering and the gospel of self-securing through money - promise to silence that voice by making him stronger or richer. Neither can do it.

Here is what I wish someone had told me when I was that young man: the cold shower will not resurrect you, and the revenue dashboard will not resurrect you. They are not curses. They are only scaffolding, structures that can hold you upright for a season, but cannot build the house. If you leave them in place too long, they become cages.

Only the voice that called Lazarus out of the tomb can call a man out of the tomb of his own self-construction. Only the One who was despised and rejected can heal the shame that no amount of self-discipline has ever been able to kill. Only the love that was crucified can teach a man to suffer without becoming hard, to strive without becoming proud, and to receive without needing to earn.

Here's the clean final section with the questions in bullet points:

So if you are that young man, still scrolling, still aching, here is my question:

The lie is attractive because it feels like strength. It tells you that you are the one who must carry the boats. But the truth is stranger and more merciful - Someone has already carried the Cross.

The only structure that endures is the one whose cornerstone was rejected by the builders. And the only freedom that does not lie is the freedom of the sons of God: the freedom to fail, to be carried, and to wake again not as a project, but as a son.