They Promised Basic Training. They Delivered Group Therapy.
Why Boomer Men Were Pre-Loaded to Fall for the Father Wound
There’s a tell in men’s ministry that most men sense but can’t name.
You sign up for the retreat. The branding is masculine with names like Basic Training, The Crucible, Survival School, etc. The promotional video has a voiceover that sounds like a movie trailer. Men hiking or praying with clenched fists. They’re staring meaningfully into campfires or throwing axes.
Then you get there.
And two hours in, you’re in a circle processing your father wound.
Something in you knew it was coming but you just couldn’t name it.
What’s happening? At these men’s retreats, the therapeutic framework is doing the work, and the masculine imagery is just the packaging to get you there. It’s like visiting a therapist wearing a cowboy hat. Strip away the camo and the campfires, and you have the same anthropology you’d find at a secular trauma retreat. The core diagnosis is damage and woundedness. “You are a victim.” The end goal is healing the wounded self. “Know your worth.”
John Eldredge, author of Wild at Heart, didn’t invent masculine spirituality. But he dressed a therapeutic spirituality in masculine clothes. Wild at Heart is Brene Brown with Bible verses: the same deep wound, the same absent father, the same recovery of the authentic self that’s been buried under performance and expectation. The masculine register is aesthetic, not substantive. It changes the vocabulary without changing the anthropological (and redemptive) blueprint.
This is why men leave those retreats vaguely unsatisfied even when they were emotionally moved. They felt something. But they weren’t actually changed. They processed some pain, which isn’t nothing, but they left without a telos, without a vision of what a man is for, without the categories of virtue and vice and the ordering of the will. And without a clear purpose, not a made up mission, but a design and end goal in mind, men will be weak.
At the end of the day, many of these men’s retreats are more like a group therapy session with a praise band than Basic Training.
But what I find more interesting is the historical question: how did this approach land so effectively, specifically on Boomer men?
Because it did. It swept through that generation like few things in evangelical history. As a result, it shaped churches, many of which are led by boomers, to engage the men in the pews with the same therapeutic model.
Boomers were the perfect recipients for exactly this synthesis. Three things converged on them simultaneously.
First, they were the first generation for whom therapy was ambient culture. It was the noise and norm around them. What had once required a couch and a credentialed professional became a self-help book, then an Oprah episode, then a small group curriculum. By the time it reached the church it had been so thoroughly absorbed into the culture that nobody recognized it as a foreign import. It just felt like finally being honest. By the time Boomer men hit midlife, the language of wounds and needs and inner life wasn’t foreign. It felt, for many of them, like the church was finally learning to speak in a way that made sense to them.
Second, the father wound diagnosis was autobiographically resonant for a huge swath of them. Their fathers were largely WWII and Silent Generation men known for being stoic, hard working, not given to emotional expression. These were men who came back from the Pacific or Normandy, built the suburbs and provided materially without narrating their inner lives. Eldredge told boomer men that this was damage. That the silence was a wound. That what they were missing was their father’s verbal blessing over their masculine identity.
But notice what that diagnosis requires you to believe: that the stoic father was failing his son by not emoting, rather than forming him by modeling self-mastery and obligation. The therapeutic framework smuggled in its own anthropology and called it a wound. Boomer men accepted the diagnosis because the culture had already taught them to speak that language not because it was necessarily true.
Third, Wild at Heart found them at midlife and midlife is when men start asking the questions that evangelical culture had never given them tools to ask: Is this all there is? What was I made for? Do I matter? The book gave them a spiritual vocabulary for that disruption without requiring them to actually repent of anything, reorder their priorities, or take on the cost of genuine transformation.
Underneath all of it though, there were no theological antibodies. Classical anthropology, think telos, virtue, the rightly ordered will, mortification of the passions, had largely been evacuated from the evangelical tradition they inherited. The seeker sensitive churches provided them with very little instruction about these realities. And so, they had no reference for what real depth looked like. When something arrived that felt emotionally resonant (like Wild at Heart) and was wrapped in Scripture, it felt profound.
What this means is that the men’s ministry industry wasn’t a counter-movement to the feminization of the church. It just gave men their own version of the same therapeutic religion women had been sold for decades. Come process, heal, and feel. Just with a bonfire and a deer skull on the table.
Real formation for men doesn’t look like that. It looks like the imposition of telos: here is what a man is for, here is the shape of the good life, here is what it costs, here is the work. It produces men who are harder to manipulate, harder to satisfy with emotional experience, harder to keep comfortable in a church that has lost its nerve.
Which is probably why we don’t have more of it.
It isn’t hard to imagine how novel all of this is. I cannot fathom a pastor in England in the 17th century asking men how their dad made them feel or if they felt affirmed as men. The Puritan theology of vocation didn’t offer men a weekend to process their wounds. The early church didn’t build men through cathartic experience. It built them through catechesis and the concrete expectation that they might be asked to die for what they believed. In each case the mechanism was the same: here is the shape of the good life, here is what it costs, and here is where it is going. Telos before therapy.
The men’s ministry industry didn’t fail because the men who built it were malicious or stupid. It failed because it inherited an evacuated anthropology and tried to fill the hole with experience. You cannot form men with a framework that has no account of what men are for.
That’s the argument I’m making in my upcoming book, Offensive Christianity. Not that men don’t have wounds. Not that fathers haven’t failed their sons. But that a church serious about forming men has to go deeper than the wound. It has to go all the way down to the question of telos. What is a man built for? What does it cost to become one? Those are the questions therapeutic religion cannot answer. And they’re the questions men are actually starving for, whether they can name it or not.