About 16 percent of American men identify as religiously unaffiliated, and the proportion is higher in most Western European countries, Japan, and Australia. They are, by demographic measures, a distinct population: better educated on average, higher earning, more likely to live in urban areas, more likely to delay or forgo marriage. They are also, by mental health measures, more likely to report loneliness, less likely to have close male friendships, and more likely to describe themselves as lacking a sense of purpose than their religious counterparts.
This is not a polemic against atheism. It is an observation about what atheist masculinity currently looks like in the data, and what it suggests about what secular men are and aren’t successfully providing for themselves. Because secular masculinity has a genuine philosophical tradition — a serious, rigorous account of how to be a man without God — that most secular men are completely unaware of. And the gap between that tradition and the actual lived experience of secular men today is worth examining honestly.
The Philosophical Inheritance
The philosophical tradition most relevant to secular masculinity is Stoicism — developed by Zeno of Citium in Athens around 300 BCE, elaborated by Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca, and experiencing a remarkable contemporary revival through books like Ryan Holiday’s Obstacle Is the Way and Massimo Pigliucci’s How to Be a Stoic.
Stoicism’s central insight is the distinction between what is up to us and what is not up to us. Your opinions, desires, aversions, and responses to events are up to you. Your reputation, body, property, the behavior of others — not up to you. Virtue, for the Stoics, consists entirely in the proper management of the first category and the proper indifference to the second. A Stoic man who loses his business is no less virtuous than before he lost it; only his response to the loss is within his control.
This framework provides secular masculinity with something important: a basis for self-worth that is independent of outcomes. You are not your net worth. You are not your status. You are how you respond to what happens to you. In a culture that ties male identity to professional and financial success with extraordinary intensity, Stoicism offers a dissent that is both psychologically useful and philosophically serious.
But Stoicism has limits. Its framework for meaning is primarily negative — reduce attachment, cultivate equanimity — rather than positive. The Stoics can tell you what not to put your happiness in. They are less helpful on what to put it in. Marcus Aurelius, who was arguably the most powerful man in the world during his reign, wrote a private journal (Meditations) filled with what can only be described as existential melancholy. Doing your duty, for Marcus, was enough — but “enough” carries its own weight.
Nietzsche and the Will to Power: What He Actually Meant
Friedrich Nietzsche is the secular philosopher most frequently invoked in discussions of masculinity, usually by people who have not read him carefully. The phrase “will to power” gets attached to a kind of aggressive self-assertion that Nietzsche himself would have found contemptible. His actual position is more interesting.
Nietzsche’s will to power is not primarily about dominating others. It is about the creative self-overcoming of one’s own limitations — the drive to become more than one currently is. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the Ubermensch (overman) is not a bully but an artist of existence, someone who creates values in a world where traditional values have collapsed. The “death of God” in Nietzsche is not a celebration — it is a diagnosis of crisis. If the metaphysical framework that gave life meaning has dissolved, the question becomes what men do next.
Nietzsche’s answer is creation: men must become value-creators rather than value-followers. This is genuinely difficult. Creating meaning from scratch requires a kind of courage — amor fati (love of fate), the willingness to affirm one’s existence including its suffering — that is not obviously easier than religious faith. And Nietzsche’s own fate — a mental collapse in 1889 from which he never recovered — does not suggest that he himself solved the problem his philosophy identified.
Camus and the Absurd: Living Without Resolution
Albert Camus is perhaps the secular philosopher most useful for men who cannot make themselves believe and cannot make themselves be comfortable not believing. His concept of the Absurd is the collision between the human demand for meaning and the universe’s silence on the subject. Neither side of this collision can be resolved: you cannot force meaning onto a cosmos that offers none, and you cannot talk yourself out of needing it.
Camus’s prescription — absurdist revolt, the “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” — is not optimism. It is defiance. The man who knows his boulder will roll back down and pushes it anyway, knowing it will roll back, is not consoled by illusion. He is choosing to push because the pushing is what he has, and he is going to do it with full awareness. This is secular masculinity as a form of existential courage rather than a form of problem-solving.
What Camus understood, and what distinguishes him from Nietzsche, is that meaning cannot be manufactured by individual will. It is relational — it emerges from love, from solidarity, from the recognition of shared suffering. His The Plague is essentially about men discovering that the only response to absurd suffering that does not further diminish humanity is tending to each other. This is a secular account of community that does not pretend to be something it isn’t.
What Secular Masculinity Gets Right
The secular tradition’s genuine achievements deserve acknowledgment. Secular men, on average, show less authoritarian rigidity in their social relationships. They are less likely to be caught in religious frameworks that pathologize homosexuality, that assign roles based on gender theology, or that require suppressing genuine doubt. The freedom to question — everything, including the premises of one’s own worldview — is a real intellectual achievement.
Secular masculinity also gets something right about the relationship between suffering and meaning. Where religious frameworks often offer theodicy — explanations for why suffering is ultimately meaningful — secular masculinity accepts suffering as simply what it is, and finds that this acceptance, paradoxically, can be less distressing than the theological gymnastics required to make it “make sense.” Camus’s Sisyphus is, in some respects, more at peace than Job, because he has stopped expecting an answer.
And secular masculinity has generated genuine ethical seriousness. Peter Singer’s utilitarian ethics, secular but rigorous, has motivated more actual change in how humans treat other animals and distant humans than almost any religious movement of the past fifty years. Sam Harris’s Waking Up makes a secular case for contemplative practice that is philosophically honest in a way that much religious instruction is not. These are real contributions to how men can live.
What It Quietly Struggles With
The data on secular male psychology is not flattering in certain dimensions. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest longitudinal study of male wellbeing ever conducted, found that the single most consistent predictor of late-life flourishing in men was the quality of their close relationships — and that secular men showed systematically worse performance on this measure than religious men, not because they were worse people, but because they lacked the infrastructure.
Secular masculinity has not solved the community problem. The bar, the gym, the poker game — these provide companionship without depth. Men’s groups and therapy can provide depth but require active construction and are culturally stigmatized in many secular environments. The religious community provides both, pre-built, recurring, free at the point of use. Until secular culture builds an equivalent, the data will continue to show the gap.
There is also the mortality problem. Every major religious tradition has a framework for helping men accept death — not solve it, but metabolize it in a way that permits life to be fully lived. The secular traditions’ accounts of mortality — Epicurus’s “when death is, I am not” argument, Heidegger’s Sein-zum-Tode (being-toward-death) — are philosophically respectable but psychologically thin. They convince intellectually without helping emotionally. Men who are not religious have to come to terms with death without the tools most humans have historically used for the purpose, and many of them simply avoid the subject rather than confront it — which is precisely what Heidegger said they would do.
The Honest Accounting
Secular masculinity is not failing. It is incomplete. The philosophical tradition it inherits — Stoicism, existentialism, absurdism — provides a serious account of how to live without God that is genuinely adequate for men who do the work of engaging it. Most secular men do not do this work. They are secular by default rather than by philosophical commitment, which means they have discarded the resources of religious tradition without acquiring the resources of secular philosophy.
The secular man who has actually read Marcus Aurelius and taken him seriously, who has thought through Camus’s absurdism and chosen defiance, who has built real community through deliberate effort rather than institutional inheritance — this man is psychologically equipped in ways that compare favorably with religious men. There are not many of them. But they exist, and they show what secular masculinity looks like at its best: honest about what it doesn’t have, rigorous about what it does, and unwilling to pretend either that God exists or that his absence doesn’t cost anything.
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