Who Fights for Them? The Plight of Missouri's Young White Men
“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness.” — Ephesians 6:12
Rev. Jason Braaten recently hosted Rev. David Ramirez on the Gottesdienst Crowd to discuss the alienation of young adults in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS), but especially white men. It is long (2 hours; ~16,750 words), but beyond outstanding and should be required listening everywhere.
Without any co-ordination, the podcast was a perfect complement to our article yesterday:
Pr. Ramirez delivered one of the most unflinching assessments of generational abandonment within the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) that has ever been committed to a microphone. Missouri will not like the harsh facts, but they are all true. He outlined more than a demographic problem or an inconvenient cultural trend to reveal a slow-rolling institutional betrayal of the Synod’s own sons. It wasn’t an act of malice, but rather of neglect and enculturation, to produce an imprint of Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s description of Dead Orthodoxy, “But we mustn’t be disturbed. There’s nothing wrong with us.”
Ramirez sketched the chasm between the world that shaped the LCMS’s current leadership (and majority of parishioners) and the world their sons and grandsons actually inhabit:
If you were born in 1960, out of wedlock births were very, very few. No-fault divorce didn’t exist. Your mother was probably raising you during your younger years at home, if not a full-time homemaker your entire childhood. Boys were boys and girls were girls, and very importantly, each had their own separate time and spaces to develop on their own. No Title IX. Every state had anti-sodomy laws on the books.
Against this, he set the world of those born around 2000:
If you’re born in 2000, you are probably in some sort of daycare for as long as you remember. That is a totally night-and-day difference between the millennials and zoomers and the boomers. For many people, it was normal for your mom to go back to work after six weeks from your birth. There’s never been a society in the history of the human race that’s done this before recent decades. Our ancestors would think that we are literally insane.
The comparison was offered to underscore the lack of awareness among Boomer churchmen specifically, but it is a general indictment of the LCMS’s failure to grasp what was happening. They refused to acknowledge how radically different the formative experiences of younger generations have been. The world that made the Boomers’ faith intuitive and culturally normative no longer exists, and the institutions those Boomers inherited greased the skids for where we are now.
Ramirez was especially pointed about the asymmetry in how the LCMS treats its discontented young people. Young women who drift toward progressive theology are handled gently, pastorally, with sensitivity to their feelings. Young men who express frustration with the direction of the church and the culture? They get, in Ramirez’s words, “punched in the face”:
Young conservative men within the LCMS have real gripes, but they are punched in the face, while liberal-leaning young women are treated with kid gloves. Schools were designed for girls. Boys were pathologized and drugged. And then the economic inheritance was not passed down faithfully.
This is not a petty complaint about tone, but mirrors a devastating structural reality in which the concerns of young men about the hostility and obstacles they face are ignored or belittled. They are dismissed as reactionaries with a chip on their shoulders who need to pull harder on their boot straps; they are given short shrift as a legitimate class of serious pastoral problem.
The generational divide, Ramirez argued, is intensified by mass media to a degree that previous generations never experienced. A Boomer’s formative influences were shaped by a relatively narrow set of cultural inputs that had continuity with their grandparents. However, a young man born in 2000 and after has had his head held below the waterline of destructive ideological messaging1. His father and grandfather can scarcely comprehend, but they should.
Yet it is those elders who decide which grievances are legitimate, which frustrations deserve a hearing, and which young men get written off as malcontents. Ramirez’s characterization of the Boomer generation as “unreflective” is powerful: they are, as a cohort, remarkably resistant to examining the assumptions that governed the world they inherited, the world they remade and are bequeathing.
The Negative World
To understand why the LCMS’s young men feel abandoned and entirely alienated, it helps to grasp the framework that Ramirez himself invoked: Aaron Renn’s triptych of Christianity’s cultural position in America.
In Renn’s view, Christianity moved through three phases. The “Positive World” (roughly pre-1994) was an era when Christian identity carried social prestige; being known as a churchgoer was an asset in public life. The “Neutral World” (1994–2014) was a transitional period in which Christianity was neither rewarded nor penalized; it was simply one option among many. And then came the “Negative World” (post-2014), in which open Christian commitment became a social liability, particularly in elite institutions, media, academia, entertainment, and the professional managerial class.
Renn’s framework helps explain why older LCMS leaders and younger LCMS men seem to be living in different realities. The Boomers who run synodical institutions formed their instincts in the Positive World. Their default posture, be respectable, don’t make waves, trust the institutions and the bosses, made sense when the culture was at least nominally cordial to Christianity. But that posture is disastrously maladapted to the Negative World, where respectability politics earns you little more than high chair at a table that has already been set against you.
The young men know this by experience and instinct. The old men, by and large, have no clue, and don’t wish to find out.
The Lost Generation
What the culture did to young white men specifically has now been well documented and rehashed. Last December, Jacob Savage published an article in Compact magazine that was instantly viral and the data he presented could not be dismissed as mere generational ethnic grievance
Savage reports that in 2011, white men were 48 percent of lower-level television writers, but by 2024 they had been slashed to just 11.9 percent. At The Atlantic, editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track humanities positions at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023. Since 2021, eleven movie directors under age 40 have been nominated for Emmys, but not one of them has been a white men.
As Robby Soave noted in his commentary on Savage’s article for Reason, the cruelest dimension of this transformation was generational: “The Gen X and Baby Boomer whites, comfortably ensconced in management positions, engaged in very little self-sacrifice: They did not step aside and hand their jobs over to black women. They just made it much, much more difficult for much younger white men to be hired in the first place.” The tenured professor was safe. The young PhD hoping for an appointment was, in Soave’s word, “utterly screwed.”
Christopher Rufo, also writing in response to Savage, set these developments within the broader institutional capture accomplished by DEI bureaucracies during the “Great Awokening” of 2013–2018. Informal “progressive” preferences (Liberal prejudice) solidified into formal hiring pipelines, diversity mandates, and equity rubrics that became state sanctioned discrimination without consequences. Young white men suffered intense disparate treatment, but the courts look the other way and encourage the elite doing the damage.
2014 was the hinge year. DEI became institutionalized across American life, invading every institution and social interaction. And it was precisely the period during which LCMS millennial men were trying to launch careers, form families, and find their footing in a culture that they were demonized as the problem.
The People’s Policy Project, analyzing census data, has corroborated the broad contours of Savage’s argument. Across sectors, the pattern is consistent: older white men retained their positions while the entry-level pipeline was systematically redirected to non-whites and women. The result was not a more equitable workforce but a generational sacrificial lamb, and the Boomer and Gen X gatekeepers were happy to wield the knife on their sons. As Declan Leary observed in a February 2025 essay for Chronicles magazine on “Post-Boomer Conservatism,” the younger generation’s rejection of the conservative establishment is not an ideological detour of naïvete. It is the inevitable and predictable response of men who were loaded up with the debt from a moral and social revolution they never assented to.
The Economic Betrayal
Ramirez devoted substantial time to the economic dimension of the alienation of our men, invoking the Cost of Thriving Index developed by American Compass. In 1985, it took 39.7 weeks of median male labor income to cover the major costs of a middle-class life - housing, health care, transportation, and education. By 2022, that figure had risen to 62 weeks. In other words, today’s man cannot afford the baseline of a middle-class family life on even an entire year’s income!
That’s not a statistical abstraction, but a devastating generational solvent that produces delayed marriage, fewer children, and a conviction among young men that they have been willfully betrayed. The Boomers truly had it easy, but they engineered economic, cultural, political, and religious transformations that made the same life impossible for their own sons and grandsons. And when those sons and grandsons express frustration, they are told they lack what it takes to be successful.
With characteristic, and very necessary, bluntness, Ramirez connected this reality as the root cause of the collapse of family formation. It’s a cascading crisis with obesity rates among 18-to-25-year-olds have soared from 24 percent in the late 1970s to over 40 percent today. 56 percent of young American adults are reportedly overweight or obese. Ubiquitous internet pornography has destroyed the most basic norms of sexual prudence. The “dating market” has become a battleground of mismatched attention, expectations for casual sex, and algorithmic manipulation, all producing high mutual resentment between young men and women who have been culturally “nudged” to view each other as adversaries rather than potential partners and parents.
In all of this, the church, the one institution that should have been warning fathers and grandfathers not to abandon their sons and grandsons, and to be radically steadfast against the several iterations of mass formation psychosis, shrugged its shoulders. In too many cases it was worse: the church was actively importing the culture’s assumptions about masculinity being inherently suspect, about traditional gender roles being outdated, about the need to make the church “welcoming and winsome” in ways that invariably meant making it less challenging, less demanding, less male.
Critics want to dismiss all that as a groyper radicalization pipeline myth, but that just underscores the extent of the institutional neglect that the LCMS has practiced. When the church fails to give young men a framework for understanding their suffering, offering neither solidarity nor a theology of vocation adequate to their actual circumstances (“lived reality”), it should not be surprised when they decide to quit church and even life.
The Synod’s Misdiagnosis
The LCMS’s response to its demographic freefall has been, at best, a misdiagnosis. From roughly 2.6 million members at its peak in the late 1960s, the Synod has declined to somewhere around 1.5 to 1.7 million, but only 500,000 people are in the pews on any given Sunday. The median age of LCMS congregations continues to climb and Young families are not replacing the elderly who die or transfer out.
The synodical leadership’s primary strategy for addressing demographic decline has been outreach to immigrant communities. This is not inherently misguided; the Great Commission knows no ethnic boundaries, but as a response to the hemorrhaging of and discrimination against native-born young men, it’s an attempt to change the subject. LCMS President Harrison finally acknowledged, very belatedly, that young white men were grievously harmed. But acknowledgment without action is merely a more polite form of abandonment.
Worse still, the Synod, at many levels, has devoted substantial institutional energy to hunting for a problem that barely exists within its ranks: “white nationalist surpremacy”. The eagerness to scour the pews for ideological contaminants sends an unmistakable message to the very young white men the church is hemorrhaging: you are suspect. As Ramirez notes, there is no equivalent effort to suspect every young lady as an Only Fans model. The institution that cannot be bothered to fight for young men against the culture’s discrimination has boundless energy to police them for potential thought crimes. It is difficult to imagine a more effective strategy for driving young men away, but it is not surprising given the programming their parents received.
Meanwhile, the institutional culture of the LCMS itself underwent changes that compounded the alienation of the young men. Pr. Ramirez noted the transformation of the seminary experience where women are now present in classrooms, fundamentally altering the atmosphere of what was once an exclusively male formational environment. The common liturgical language that used to bind LCMS congregations together has fractured, replaced by a bewildering diversity of worship styles that leaves young men with no sense of a shared tradition to inhabit and transmit to their children. The theological seriousness that once characterized LCMS life has given way, in too many congregations, to a vaguely evangelical “niceness” that offers young men nothing worth fighting for and, therefore, nothing worth staying for.
The Canyon and a Bridge
Pr. Ramirez concluded with the parable of Lazarus and the rich man (the great chasm fixed between heaven and hell, Luke 16:19-31). He suggested that while the generational gulf may never be fully spanned, at least an attempt must be made. Boomers don’t have to confess to ruining everything and nor are young men entirely blameless in their own struggles. However, you cannot love people you refuse to understand, which goes both ways.
Understanding requires honesty. To be honest is to be willing to hear certain uncomfortable truths spoken forthrightly. The LCMS slipstreamed the broader culture’s war on young white men. It did so not through overt hostility but through a lethal combination of inattention, institutional self-preservation, and a reflexive deference to elite cultural norms that were, in fact, hostile to its own sons and its own future. The young conservative men in the pews, the ones who actually wanted to be faithful, were left to fend for themselves in a culture that told them they were oppressors and a church that told them to be nicer about it.
The Bible verses invoked in this article’s title (Ephesians 6:12, Isaiah 41:13, 1 Corinthians 10:13, Romans 8:2–3, Hebrews 4:16) all promise divine aid in the face of spiritual warfare, temptation, and condemnation. They promise that God fights for His people. The bitter irony is that our churches charged with proclaiming these promises to young men was too busy navel gazing the Synod’s decline to notice that those young men were cast off.
Who fights for them? It’s a question that has not been answered since 2000.
Much of the damage probably cannot be undone. However, the question is whether the LCMS, and the broader church, will acknowledge what Pr. Ramirez has so clearly laid out: a generation of young men who were failed by every institution and the tenured leaders in the corner offices. You cannot just expect the young men to trust those same institutions and leaders with their futures because the mood has shifted and Jacob Savage introduced their discrimination to polite society.
It’s a dilemma the church had better deal with soon, because the young men are not waiting around for it.
Cover Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
Multiculturalism
Mass immigration
Drug-based behavior modification
A ludicrous childhood vaccine schedule
Zero tolerance schooling
Homosexual triumphalism
Transgenderism
Third wave feminism
Aggressive US foreign policy adventurism
School mass shootings
Smartphone-mediated childhood and adolescence
Social media as the primary social environment (algorithmically curated reality)
Pornography easily accessible from early childhood
The opioid and fentanyl epidemics
“You will own nothing and love it”
Hyper inflated college education with crushing student debt normalized as a rite of passage necessary for a “well-paying job”
Rapid decline of religious participation and community institutions that gave cohesion and meaning to American civil society
Helicopter parenting and the erosion of unsupervised play
Cancel culture and social media public shaming
Pervasive government and corporate censorship
Therapy-speak as a replacement for moral reasoning
Gamified attention economy
COVID lockdowns and remote schooling during formative years
Collapsing male academic achievement with no institutional concern
Rampant anti-white male DEI discrimination in university admissions and corporate hiring
Permanent war as background noise (no memory of pre-9/11 America)
The 2008 financial crisis crashing expectations about economic security
Climate change anxiety as a pervasive psychological backdrop and threat to optimism
Race hoaxes and riots
Declining trust in nearly every institution simultaneously
Their parents suffered job offshoring, but they suffer labor substitution at home with cheap immigration
Hourly work and the gig economy replacing stable employment expectations
Unprecedented access to information alongside unprecedented misinformation
The advent of chimeric AI destabilizing what we accept as real and true
Imminent mass job displacement by agentic AI
Spot on, but generational impacts are limited in full explanation. I'm a boomer but have been subjected to what we used to call "affirmative action" for most of my corporate career. Taking daughters to work was a thing in the 80s while leaving sons at home. Requiring boys to pay for largely invented past sins of patriarchy isn't new certainly, but in my observation growing in intensity.
I notice that Pastor Ramirez prominently features college in the necessity bucket, which undoubtedly gives rise to the crushing debt burden he references. As an old guy looking back at my own mistakes I would say that a good deal of the nonsense can be laid at the feet of American higher education and our refusal to notice that the emperor increasingly has fewer and fewer clothes. Church folks going way back to the Founding passed along the high ideal that a college education is the golden fleece for happiness and success. Beginning with the Greatest Generation having endured a major world war and the great depression, finally reached the place where they could grant the ancient gift to their children (notice that most often the cost was born by the parents). At long last, the great family dream was going to be realized and the greatest generation could look back at their ancestors with pride for finally being able to make the Dream Come True.
But, as always happens with pride, with each passing generation the ideal devolved into a (subtle at first, increasing with time) idol worship. It grew to the point that carrying on the parent's and grandparent's Great Pride, youngsters are now shucking out large fractions of a kings ransom (most often funded by debt THEY pay for) for an otherwise worthless piece of paper (vocationally) and a devastating destruction of a young person's world view (spiritual).
Saddled with a debt note that must be paid and poor job prospects for white boys in a feminized cultural ethos, is it any wonder that young men turn to distractions of food, sex, on-line games, thin digital social structures and products that immediately impact the senses? Is it any wonder that girls, intoxicated with their new found sexual powers and daily reminded of their aggression and dominance over men have turned to destructive explorations, forever dooming them to a life of loneliness and cats?
College is lie, folks. Hugely disproportionate relationship between cost and value. For most employment (other than very high income professions like doctors, lawyers, politicians) the value proposition just isn't there, and hasn't been for some time. Don't hear me say that I'm blaming younger folks. The blame, in my mind, is squarely on the shoulders of those of us that children naturally look to for guidance. The church has generally forgotten our great-grandmother's advice to never, ever, go into debt, for any reason. We actively send off our children and grandchildren to a literal hell-hole that will wreck their morals, destroy their faith and doom them to economic slavery. We pat them on the head and say "That's my boy/girl!"
Glad you noticed this. I've been railing on this for at least 25 years.
There are many elements to a solution (if the church gets around to wanting a solution).
But there's one very clear thing the Missouri Synod can do, to get started dealing with this.
Repeal the 1969 change of polity, which was to allow female suffrage in the congregation.
The sleight of hand involved in how this was done has been documented by more than one person who was there.
It was a doctrinal change. That means the synod was in error before, or is in error after.
Almost every time I've brought this up, the response has either been resignation or hostility. Notable exceptions to this have been the few church women I've discussed it with. They understand better, and are more supportive of rolling back this error, than the poor whipped men.
I expect hostility from big men in the church if they even bother to respond. You will be ignored.