Opinion

I’ve been a pastor for 40 years. Young men are struggling and I think I know why

One in four American young men report loneliness as community institutions collapse

By Russ Ewell Fox News

Published March 1, 2026 8:00am EST

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Young men aren’t toxic, so much as they are unformed. The major paths to community, life advancement, social and personal intelligibility have all more or less disintegrated in the past few decades. That disintegration was accelerated dramatically, even completed, by the pandemic.

Which means that men aren’t getting the formation they desperately need to become good men — and that they have historically received.

One in four of American young men report feeling lonesome. Many of them have either been excluded from or dropped out of their generation’s dating scene.

Their educational attainment and motivation continue to fall further and further behind those of their female peers. Suicide rates among men — and especially young men — are growing at alarming rates. They’re also worryingly prone to political and religious radicalization.

A cheerful son sits on dad's lap and helps him do laundry.  (iStock)

A generation of malformed or unformed young men is a serious social and political issue, in addition to being a real tragedy for each and every young man struggling this way.

But when discussing how and why young men seem to have lost their way, we tend to over-focus on the problem and over-simplify the solution. We tend to discuss all the ways these young men fail themselves and others, and focus far too little on what has failed them.

Our culture is quick to take the worst expressions of male behavior and label masculinity as toxic. But as Scott Galloway writes in "Notes on Being a Man," "[There’s] no such thing as ‘toxic masculinity — that’s the emperor of all oxymorons. There’s cruelty, criminality, bullying, predation, and abuse of power. If you’re guilty of any of these........

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