Men Without Chests: Why Do Christian Conservatives Find It So Hard to Understand the Importance of Testosterone Decline?
Declining testosterone is eroding the biological foundation of courage, virtue, and civilization.
“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
Those were the famous words of C. S. Lewis in his celebrated essay, The Abolition of Man. His target was modern education and its failure to teach men what to value and how to value it, in a decisive break with the entire Western tradition of pedagogy dating back to Plato and Aristotle.
The spread of subjectivism—the belief that all statements of value are nothing more than expressions of the speaker’s inner feelings—was hollowing men out, Lewis argued. Without the necessary “chest,” by which Lewis really meant something like “courage,” man is little more than an animal, incapable of reflecting and acting in a fully human manner.
“Organ,” “chests,” “castrate,” “geldings”—the language was biological but also clearly a metaphor. And yet, Lewis knew that biology and the physical reality of the body were a necessary part of masculinity and the virtues associated with it. Lewis made Aslan, the Christ-figure in the Narnia series, a magnificent lion, the most fearsome and powerful creature in the animal kingdom, for a reason.
Lewis’s metaphor of “men without chests” is one of the organizing images of my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity. But unlike in Lewis’s famous essay, I use that unforgettable phrase in a very literal sense. In 2026, legions of men don’t have chests at all—they’re as wide across the underarms as they are at the waist, maybe wider at the hips—and it’s making it even harder for them to be men and do what they should.
Not only are men not taught to be men like they once were, but the very biological substrate of masculinity, the physical basis of courage, is withering away. And there is a physical basis of courage.
If C. S. Lewis was warning of the abolition of man as a thinking moral agent distinct from animals, I’m warning of the abolition of men—full stop.
By “biological substrate,” I mean testosterone, the master male hormone. Testosterone levels across the Western world are falling precipitously, as part of a broader decline in male reproductive health. The best studies, like the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, suggest testosterone levels are falling at a rate of 1 percent year on year and have been for decades. Testosterone is the master male hormone, responsible for sexual differentiation and development, muscle mass, libido, and motivation, and, as I argue at length, political orientation and virtue.
A man with more testosterone is more likely, for example, to be comfortable with inequality and hierarchy and to be generous toward members of his own “tribe” and hostile to members of other “tribes,” an attitude that’s generally referred to by social psychologists as “parochial altruism” but is obviously just the basis for all traditional attitudes and societies throughout human history.
One of the principal challenges I’ve faced over the last six years or so in my guise as the Raw Egg Nationalist has been convincing right-wingers and conservatives why health and fitness matter as a political concern. Why should I, a conservative, care what consenting adults eat in the privacy of their own kitchen?
Thankfully, with the arrival of Make America Healthy Again, which surely helped Donald Trump return to the White House, conservatives are starting to get the message.
Starting: There’s still a long way to go, I think, and the default attitude remains, largely, one of disinterest and incomprehension. This is especially true of religious conservatives, by which I mean Christians.
Christianity has a complicated relationship with the body, as you might expect from a religion whose central image is God nailed to a cross and dying. But for all St. Paul’s talk of his “wretched” mortal body, for all the fasting and self-mortification and, at least in the early Church, self-castration, Christianity has great resources for expressing joy in the body and for understanding its moral and spiritual importance. The body is, after all, a temple of the Holy Spirit.
Not that you’d know it if you read the latest review of my book in the Christian conservative journal First Things. The review completely misses the point of the book, which is precisely that testosterone and male virtue are linked, and attempts to reduce my argument to “[mere] materialism” and therefore dismisses it out of hand.
The book isn’t a theological book, I’ll grant you, and it’s not couched explicitly as a Christian book either, although I draw heavily on C. S. Lewis and my argument is made in terms whose significance Christians can—and should—understand.
The book, apparently, “sidesteps the question of testosterone’s significance, if any, for the cultivation of the closely connected virtues of truthfulness and courage and their importance for political leadership.” But these are precisely the virtues that are at issue, as I make clear. With regard to truthfulness, I discuss a very striking study that shows men administered a dose of testosterone by scientists are more likely to defend a minority view in the face of opposition from the majority: Men with higher testosterone will stand up and defend what’s true, even when outnumbered. Remember how gymgoers—“gym bros”—were one of the main groups resisting the tyranny of the pandemic lockdowns? This is just one example of a great many from the book.
If I wanted to reframe my conclusions in explicitly Christian terms, I might say that a society of men without testosterone is one that is much less likely to produce a Charlemagne or a Louis the Pious; or knights who embody the great virtues of chivalry and noblesse oblige; or the winged hussars who rode down on Vienna in 1683, routed the Turks, and saved Europe from the seemingly irresistible onward march of militant Islam. These kinds of men are not incidental to the history and enduring success of Christianity.
If your vision of Christianity includes any place for men at all and for the traditional masculine virtues, you should be worried by the trends I’ve laid out in detail in The Last Men. The endpoint of precipitous testosterone decline is something like the hikikomori of Japan, millions of extreme social recluses—maybe as many as ten million—who live at home with their parents and do nothing but play computer games, eat junk food, and watch porn if they can somehow summon the libido. Research has shown that Japanese teenagers and young men are more likely to become hikikomori if they have low testosterone.
The argument, as I’m at pains to say in the book and also in media appearances and interviews, isn’t that the man with the most testosterone is the manliest man in the world or the most admirable. Nor are we precluded from recognizing, as the First Things reviewer notes, that “sainthood is possible even with a decrepit body in a deeply degraded environment.”
I would retort, though, that sainthood is a very rare thing indeed and has always been recognized as such.
In a strange way—or in fact a not-so-strange way—conservative Christians who deny the importance of what’s happening to men today on a biological level mirror the attitudes and rhetoric of left-wingers, radical feminists, and men-haters, who label testosterone a poison or “toxin” we should be glad is disappearing. For the radical misandrists, a group that includes many men too, the suffering and plight of men today is a necessary evil on the road to a fairer, more equal society. And not even a form of evil, because many of them enjoy seeing men suffer. It’s a punishment for hundreds of thousands of years of patriarchy and male domination—just desserts. Revenge.
The Nietzschean critique of Christianity centers in large part on its supposed life-denying impulses and on its sublime cruelty, much of which is turned inward to create what Nietzsche calls the “guilty conscience.” I’m generally described, in a rather uncomplicated way, as a Nietzschean because of the vitalist influences on my work, often by people who don’t know or choose to ignore the fact I wrote a PhD at Oxford on the Reformation and have been a student of the Christian Middle Ages for two decades. I may be a Nietzschean, but I’m also a Christian with deep admiration for the religion and its achievements. My admiration and sympathy run pretty close to dry, though, when I’m told it’s “materialism” to care about the biological changes wreaking havoc with men’s health and their prospects of a fulfilling, meaningful life as sons, brothers, fathers, warriors, and leaders. To me, that’s a very sublime form of cruelty indeed.
About Raw Egg Nationalist
Raw Egg Nationalist writes extensively on nutrition, exercise, and masculinity. He is the author of the Raw Egg Nationalism Cookbook and the editor of Man's World.
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