The Last Men: Is the Masculinity Crisis Biological?
Raw Egg Nationalist thinks liberalism is a low-testosterone system and that the church can't afford to ignore biology.
Charles Cornish-Dale wants you to know that the crisis of modern masculinity is not only in your head. It’s in your blood.
Better known online as Raw Egg Nationalist, Charles is an Oxford- and Cambridge-trained historian who spent years in the archives writing about the Reformation before he became one of the most influential voices in the health-and-politics world. He was the star of Tucker Carlson’s The End of Men, a cited influence on senior figures in this administration, and now the author of a book that names the problem plainly: The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity.
The premise is simple. We keep diagnosing the collapse of manhood as a cultural or spiritual problem and all of that is real. But Charlie argues we are missing the thing sitting right underneath it: a biological substratum that is quietly being dismantled. Plummeting testosterone. Endocrine disruptors in the water, the food, the packaging, the personal care products. Processed diets. A whole civilization bathed, as he puts it, in a toxic soup.
Most of the current conversation seems stuck between two bad options. On one side is a purely spiritual Christianity that treats the body as an afterthought, as if a man could kill his sin and cultivate virtue while ignoring the fact that he is overweight, sedentary, and running on fumes. That instinct is more Gnostic than Christian. We worship a Savior who rose bodily from the grave. We confess the resurrection of the dead. The body is not the problem to be transcended; it is part of what God redeems.
On the other side is a secular vitalism that reduces man to his hormone panel, ex. get your T over 800 and civilization is saved. Charlie refuses that too. His most interesting move is theological in shape even when it isn’t explicitly Christian: he takes Francis Fukuyama’s “last man,” the deflated, satisfied, spiritless creature at the end of history, and argues that this figure isn’t just a cultural archetype. He’s a physiological reality. Fukuyama’s thumos, the Greek word for spiritedness, turns out to be a pretty good proxy for testosterone. Liberalism, on this reading, is a low-testosterone system: a machine that produces quiescent, conformist, easily governed men, and then reinforces the very biology that keeps them that way.
Fukuyama has interesting parallels with Nietzsche. Nietzsche critiqued Christianity as a slave morality so we get into that in this conversation. We talk about Christian vitalism, and where it’s real versus where it’s a LARP. And we press the hardest question of all: does institutional Christianity have the vitality left to fight or has it already surrendered?
Charlie joined me on episode 200 of Full Proof Theology to walk through the book, the biology, and the bigger question hanging over all of it: can masculinity survive under liberal democracy?
Listen to the episode: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1249781/episodes/19512136
Watch the episode:
Pick up your copy of The Last Men here.
Men are struggling and suffering at staggering rates, and much of the church has decided the body doesn’t matter. The Last Men offers a counter-narrative mirroring my work in Offensive Christianity. Enjoy!