There are times when I would like to include sports in blogs, but I don’t want to be over zealous in my interest of sports.  However, the following note in the Daily Caller, prompts me to comment on PJ Jules, a safety who survived the mandatory roster cut for the Cincinnati Bengals.  I am always looking for clues about the character of a player, who realizes he has been given a gift from God, as an athlete.  Even the NFL football commentators speak of players being “a character guy.”  Many have had an impact on the locker room by the way they live their life.  I imagine being a player with “high values” can be quite a challenge.    

Anyway, I sense from Jules’ post that he is a character guy.  For the whole 2024 season, Jules was a member of Cincinnati’s practice squad.  The team had signed him as an undrafted free agent.  He had played college football at Southern Illinois, where in the  2023 season he became a first-team FCS All-American.  But that all changed in 2025 when he landed a spot on the Bengals roster.  In a post, after he had received confirmation, Jules sent out a message in which he talked about his father. 

“I made the team, I’m active.  Thank you Lord for the opportunity.  I miss you so much Dad.  Wish you was here to see me.  You believed in me.  I know you watching.  I do this for you, from nothing to something.  This [is] just [the] beginning of something great.”

I, of course, don’t  know PJ Jules.  I  take at face value, what he is saying is from his heart in his excitement of making a professional football team.  After being cut the previous year, he is now celebrating his accomplishment.  I want to comment on his post. 

In relief after his disappointment of not making the team, he notes, “I made the team. I’m active.”  Then he thanks the Lord, “for the opportunity.”  It seems that this young man knows that he had the Lord’s help in his opportunity to play on a professional football team in the NFL.  He knows that life is bigger than his own success.  God has given him the platform to excel in his God given abilities.  

But most telling is how in this moment of success as a young football player, the young man speaks of his  departed father.  He evidently had a bonding relationship with his father.  He writes, “I miss you so much dad.  Wish you was here to see me. You believe in me. I know you watching.  I do this for you, from nothing to something.  This [is] just [the] beginning of something great.” 

Every young man needs to know his father is in his corner, cheering him on in life, as he seeks to make his mark as a man.  To say publicly in this moment of celebrating, that PJ had a father who believed in him, is very telling.  Many young men are fatherless and lonely.  Living without guidance and not knowing what it is to be a man.  Jules, in my discernment, is thanking his father, for helping him become a man.  When he says, “from nothing to something” he is realizing his dream of playing pro football, even when he wanted to quit.  It takes a father cheering on his son, for his son to make it.

For PF, ” This [is] just the beginning of something great.”  This young man  had the modeling and support of a Dad who believes in him.   Becoming a man is more caught than taught.  

Anthony Bradley in a candid article, ends with this challenge.  “I’d recommend that people stop whining  about ‘Andrew Tate’ and instead, out-complete him and others with better content that fits with their view of world if they think the manosphere is a problem.”  As a member of “the silent generation” and a retired senior male, but still writing bogs about masculinity in our culture, I can only express my comments as a concerned senior.  But I can speak as a male who has been on an intentional masculine journey, having sought spiritual wholeness in following Jesus.

Bradley is writing about the “manosphere” and the young men who are gravitating to their messaging.  He notes, “this digital migration reveals less about the seductive power of online characters and more about the profound dereliction of duty by the very cultural and religious institutions designed to forge masculine virtue. What happens when the wellsprings of genuine guidance run dry, and who precisely rushes in to fill the void?”  

Gleaning result from a survey of over 3,000 young men (16-25) across the UK, US, and Australia, he found 61% of young men in the UK regularly engaged with masculinity influencers online.  The influencers were most popular among white, older (within the 16-25 range) full-time employed, university-educated young men from high-income households.  83% believe men must be providers, 70% believe women have it easier than men, while 67% believe feminism is used to keep men down.  50% found the content to be entertaining, 47% motivating, and 43% as thought-provoking.   

Young men are seeking guidance online in dealing with modern masculinity.  There  seems to be a “siren song of confident, powerful men promising direction to legions of younger men adrift in a sea of cultural confusion.”  Young men gravitate toward the loudest and seemingly most self-assured voices, expounding stoicism, self-reliance and control. “These online figures often offer pathways emphasizing action, reclaiming power, or adhering to specific codes, bypassing the often messy and difficult work of risk-taking, repentance, vulnerability, relational healing, and enlisting in the work of fighting evil.”  

What young men need, Bradley maintains is encouragement, “which involves viewing them not as problems needing solutions, but as sources of potential value to those around them.”  A vacuum of virtuous, masculine leadership is found in the church.  What is needed includes, “the rare combination of intellectual rigor, deep compassion, unwavering conviction, and the proper confidence of a man submitted first to God – a model of virtuous masculinity equipped to truly mentor the next generation.” 

“The choice confronting us is stark,” according to Bradley, “Either we undertake the demanding work of cultivating environments where authentic, virtuous masculine leadership can actually flourish……..or we resign ourselves to watching successive generations of young men seek affirmation and direction from the distorted reflections offered by digital hucksters and failed archetypes.  The consequences of continued apathy are not merely cultural, but profoundly spiritual, bearing witness to our own institutional failure.”

Bradley has given the church a warning about the siren call of the male influencers on the internet.  There is a void in our culture that the influencers are filling among young men.  We as a church have not been able to fill that void with our messaging of the “Good News.” I agree that spiritual formation of young men in our day will involve risk-taking that will be “messy and difficult.”  Are men’s groups open to such call.  Young men need the encouragement of older men, who are mentors, having grown up in the hostile culture where men are considered toxic.  Bradley warns us of our “apathy” and our failure to fill the vacuum in the lives of younger men.