The Heroism Required for Modern Fatherhood

Between the cost of living crisis, cultural decay, and the deficit of righteous role models, becoming a man capable of raising a flourishing family requires a heroic transformation

I'm single. I want a family. I'm getting older. And the more I study what it actually takes to be a worthy patriarch in 2025, the more overwhelming it becomes.

It's not just about making a baby with any woman. It's about becoming someone capable of being the bedrock that attracts and maintains an equally yoked wife, then raising children who become lights in a world deliberately designed to corrupt them.

The bar is so high it feels rigged against us.

The Economic Gauntlet

The economics are brutal. It's barely possible to support yourself as a single man, let alone a non-working wife and multiple children. Housing costs have exploded. Healthcare is bankrupting families. The American dream of one income supporting a thriving household feels like ancient history.

Our parents and grandparents could afford families on single incomes 30–40 years ago. Today, even dual-income families struggle while childless adults drown in debt.

The career trap is especially brutal for those with valuable skills. As a software engineer, the highest-paying opportunities often require compromising your conscience. High finance has destabilized our society. Consulting demands constant travel that destroys family life. Defense contractors are weapons manufacturers. Surveillance companies build oppression infrastructure.

You can make good money building AI for pornography or optimizing gambling addiction. But try to build something that serves human flourishing, and you'll struggle to find funding or competitive salaries.

This forces a brutal choice: take the lucrative job that compromises your values, or work much harder as an entrepreneur or hunt for the rare ethical company that pays decently—while family formation becomes financially harder every year you delay. See: Work With Righteous People for building your own platform of independence so you never have to choose between principles and paycheck.

All this said, my friend Mayssam, now expecting his first child, offers a different perspective on the financial fears:

"If I would break down my cost of insurance, my cost of raising the child, preparing for him, the school, my rent and all this, I would obviously be overwhelmed, I would break down. In fact, it would stop me from getting married... There is a very strong level of surrender and trust that I should embody. I should take things step by step... When the time comes, I know he will provide the money. I cannot think about this now, I will not think about this now... There is a level of surrender, of anticipating the present, and most importantly, trusting him, trusting him, that he will provide it. If we don't do this, everything you wrote can overwhelm us, and it is overwhelming. We can drown in all this and say fuck marriage, and this is what they want to do. They want to show us that economically it doesn't make sense, so that we get overwhelmed with fear and the numbers and move away."

But this faith-based approach requires spiritual leadership skills that many men lack. Mayssam continues:

"A future father must also remind his wife of the Lord. Quiet her heart. Let her know that everything will be available in time. And that his confidence and strength comes from the Lord... My wife asks me: how are you so calm? The Lord baby. The Lord. Why do you think I share with you the stories of how he carried me during my debt, my medical surgeries?"

This captures a crucial dimension often overlooked: the husband must be spiritually mature and entrenched in Christ enough to lead his wife's heart toward trust in God's provision rather than worldly anxiety. This requires deep personal faith, proven through previous trials, not just theoretical knowledge.

This tension between rational financial planning and faith-based trust captures the spiritual dimension of the challenge. The enemy uses economic anxiety as a weapon against family formation—and uses wives' natural maternal protective instincts to amplify that anxiety unless the husband can provide spiritual leadership.

Raise a Child in This Culture?

The culture is poison. We live in a society that celebrates everything that destroys family formation. Hook-up culture has replaced courtship. Divorce is normalized as "finding yourself." Children are treated as nice-to-haves rather than sacred responsibilities.

Social media monetizes envy, lust, and pride—the exact sins that destroy marriages. Dating apps turn relationships into consumer choices. Entertainment glorifies infidelity, rebellion, and immediate gratification over patience, commitment, and sacrifice.

The legal system itself has inverted the importance of sacred vows. As Father Josiah Trenham observes:

"I tell people, especially in Southern California, a lot of people have swimming pools. Most of the people who have swimming pools have contracts with a pool cleaner. He comes once a week. He cleans your pool. He puts some chemicals on. You never see him. But if you break your contract with him, he's going to sue you. In California where we did this, we're the ones who created no-fault divorce in 1969... if you break your pool contract, you're going to go to court. But you can break your sacred vows that you made usually in front of a minister of God and a congregation. Nobody watched you sign your contract with your pool cleaner."

This perfectly captures the absurdity: violate a pool maintenance contract and face legal consequences, but violate sacred marriage vows witnessed by hundreds—often affecting children—and society shrugs.

The sinfrastructure is so pervasive that staying spiritually clean requires constant vigilance. How do you protect children from influences that previous generations never had to consider? See: Recognize and Resist Sinfrastructure for understanding how these systems are engineered to promote sin.

The role models are catastrophic. Look at who our culture elevates as examples of masculinity:

• Donald Trump—married multiple times, credibly accused of rape, connected to child trafficking networks. This is our president.

• Andrew Tate and similar "manosphere" influencers—teaching young men to objectify women, glorify materialism, and mock the sacred institution of marriage.

• Elon Musk—having children with multiple women while providing no real fatherhood to any of them, creating broken families in his wake while claiming to solve the birth rate crisis.

Even supposed Christian leaders fail spectacularly. Carl Lentz's infidelity. Jerry Falwell Jr.'s scandals. Countless pastors caught in corruption or sexual abuse.

Where are the examples of men who maintain loving marriages through difficulty, raise children who replicate divine patterns, and demonstrate what righteous manhood actually looks like?

Heroism Is Required to Rise to the Challenge

The spiritual warfare is real. Every screen in your house can deliver pornography to your children instantly. Every app is designed to fragment attention and destroy the contemplative life necessary for spiritual growth. Every institution—schools, universities, entertainment—actively undermines the Christian worldview you're trying to instill.

The formation crisis runs so deep that most Christian parents unconsciously outsource their children's spiritual development to systems that oppose everything they claim to believe. See: The Formation Crisis for a comprehensive analysis of why raising godly children has become nearly impossible and what to do about it.

Despite all this, men are still called to rise to this challenge. God hasn't lowered His standards because our culture has collapsed. The calling remains: be the spiritual, financial, and emotional foundation that enables a family to flourish.

This requires becoming someone worthy of that trust. Not just financially capable, but spiritually mature enough to model character your children will absorb. Disciplined enough to create the calm, stable environment where love can grow. Wise enough to navigate a hostile culture while protecting innocent hearts.

As Father Josiah Trenham puts it:

"Marriage and sexuality is such a big deal that if you don't get it right, it will ruin your life. God created marriage in his wisdom to be able to unify a whole bunch of extremely important things together... If you take any one of those things outside of the bonds of marriage, you're going to have trouble."

This is precisely why the preparation for fatherhood is so demanding—because getting marriage wrong doesn't just affect you, it affects generations.

As a future father, you have to develop the skills to earn enough money to support a family in an economy designed to prevent family formation. You need the spiritual strength to resist cultural pressures that will constantly tempt you toward compromise. See: Sever Your Ties With Modern Culture for practical steps to disentangle from systems that make sin feel natural and righteousness feel heroic. You must cultivate the patience and wisdom to guide children through their formation when every external force works against you.

It seems that most men have given up on trying. It's hard to blame. Too many have accepted childlessness as inevitable or postponed family formation indefinitely while chasing careers, experiences, or personal fulfillment. The ones who do attempt families often do so without the spiritual preparation the task demands.

Rebuild Yourself According to Divine Patterns Today

The path forward isn't obvious, but it starts with an honest assessment: Am I becoming someone worthy of the trust and followership of an equally yoked wife? Am I developing the character, competence, and spiritual depth that family leadership requires?

Look in the mirror and honestly reflect. The formation you received as a child was probably incomplete. The culture you absorbed growing up was compromised. The role models you had access to were almost certainly inadequate.

This means you must actively rebuild yourself according to divine patterns, not cultural expectations. You must seek out the rare examples of righteous fathers and study them intensively. See: Study Wise Spiritual Elders for guidance on finding and learning from mature believers. You must create the spiritual infrastructure in your own life that enables you to create it for your family.

This is why documenting exemplary families matters so much. Boys become men primarily through modeling, not instruction. We need to see what righteous fatherhood looks like in practice, not just read about it in principle.

The challenge is immense. The culture is actively hostile. The economics are punishing. The role models are scarce.

But God has not changed His design for human flourishing. Families remain the foundation of civilization. Children still need fathers who can guide them toward their divine calling.

The question isn't whether the task is difficult. The question is whether you're willing to undertake the formation necessary to be worthy of it.

"Unless the LORD builds the house, the builders labor in vain." — Psalm 127:1