In many churches, the working picture of a godly man looks a lot like a hard man. He does not cry in worship. He does not admit need. He shows one emotion freely, and it is anger. Maliek Blade, who serves with the Kingdom Diversity Initiative of the President’s office at Southeastern Seminary, argues that this picture was borrowed from the culture, that churches have repeated it, and that it fails the only test that matters. His measure is Jesus, who wept at a friend’s tomb in front of a crowd and was no less a man for it.
Blade goes further than saying men should be allowed to feel. He argues that emotional health is a masculine strength. A man who can process his own emotions and engage someone else’s is equipped to lead a household. A man who has walled himself off is missing something his role requires. On that reading, hardness is a substitute for manhood, and a poor one.
Where the hard-man script actually comes from
Blade is careful about whose experience he describes. He says the pattern breaks down differently in white and Black church culture, and he chooses to speak about Black church culture specifically. He also says he does not want to make blanket statements. Then he speaks from what he saw growing up around Washington, DC, both in church and out of it.
His observation is about apprenticeship. In middle school, he watched a rapper’s look spread until it seemed every major Black male artist had it, and he watched boys around him copy it because those men were respected and women liked them. In Blade’s words, “guys literally would pick up whatever they saw rappers doing, almost like a dad type thing or a big brother type thing.”
That sentence carries the cultural argument. Enjoying the music is beside the point. The concern is that entertainers end up in the role of father, the person who shows a boy what a man is. Blade notes that many of these artists present themselves as former drug dealers or convicts. A model of manhood shaped by that world brings traits with it that he calls unbiblical: hyper-aggression, anger, and the refusal to cry. He says he and other men he has talked with have avoided crying in worship because they felt tears would make them less masculine. Those men were standing in the sanctuary when they held back.
Lisa Fields locates a second source. She describes the stoic posture as a Western inheritance, and she warns that “if we take on this kind of western view, then we produce stoic individuals that are out of touch with emotion and real life.” Blade does not leave the church out of the account either. When he lists what people raising young Black men must address, he names “the toxic masculinity that we do sometimes propagate from our churches, but also that comes from hip hop.”
Put together, these claims refuse an easy villain. If the script came only from hip-hop, the church could condemn the music and consider itself innocent. If it came only from a vague Western stoicism, the specific pressure on young Black men in one neighborhood would disappear into abstraction. Blade and Fields describe several streams flowing into the same channel: street survival, celebrity culture, an inherited ideal of emotional restraint, and pulpits that never challenged any of it. The church is one of the places where the script gets taught.
What armor is for, and what it costs
The strongest case for hardness is survival. A boy with no safe place learns to look untouchable because softness gets punished. Blade grants this, and he uses the main character of the film Moonlight to show what happens next. As a boy, Chiron is timid, quiet and reserved, traits Blade insists are not wrong, and he is verbally abused for them. As an adult he reappears muscular, intimidating and dealing drugs. Blade retells the character’s explanation: “I started over and I built myself hard.”
Blade’s reading is that Chiron became the very thing he did not want to be, picking up the macho, intimidating traits that had been used against him and turning them on others. Fields adds that he still cries, often, but alone, and cannot put his pain into words with anyone. The armor did not remove the feeling. It left him more isolated with it and made him a carrier of the harm he had absorbed.
That is the distinction the church needs. If hardness is a survival response to a wound, then preaching it as the ideal of Christian manhood baptizes the wound. A congregation that praises the wall is praising the damage.
The man who wept at Lazarus’s tomb
Blade sets one figure against the script. “Jesus is our model of true masculinity, and our model for how we should be as men,” he says, pointing to John 11. The shortest verse in the KJV sits in that chapter: “Jesus wept” (John 11:35).
Blade reads the tears carefully. Jesus did not cry because death had defeated him; he was about to raise Lazarus. Blade argues that Jesus cried because he was identifying with the pain of Lazarus’s sisters. The surrounding text supports the connection. In John 11:33, Jesus sees Mary weeping, along with the mourners who came with her, and “he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled.” His grief responds to theirs.
Interpreters differ on the exact emotion in that scene. Some read Jesus’s groaning as something close to indignation at death itself, the enemy he had come to defeat. Others, like Blade, emphasize compassion for the grieving. The readings can sit together. On either one, the sinless Son of God was deeply moved in public and let it show. The bystanders drew their own conclusion: “Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved him!” (John 11:36). They took his tears as evidence of love.
The limits of the passage matter. John 11 is narrative. It does not command men to cry, and turning tears into a new test of spirituality would misuse it. What it establishes is narrower and harder to escape. If the one perfect man grieved openly and was not diminished by it, then the claim that tears make a man less of a man cannot be a Christian claim. Blade states the consequence plainly: “if we stray away from the model and begin to look at the culture, we’ll end up with the perverted and or toxic view of masculinity.”
Isn’t this just a softer manhood?
The serious objection is that Scripture does call men to strength. Paul writes, “Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong” (1 Corinthians 16:13). The archaic phrase “quit you like men” means to conduct yourselves like men, with courage. A church worried that men are drifting into passivity has a real verse to stand on.
The next verse tells the reader what kind of strength Paul means: “Let all your things be done with charity” (1 Corinthians 16:14). The strength in view is steadfastness in faith carried out in love. Nothing in the passage equates courage with emotional absence. A man who stands firm and loves well fits the text. A man who stands firm by refusing to feel has borrowed his definition from somewhere else.
Blade is also not asking men to be governed by their moods. He describes the capacity Jesus displays as “the ability to process through your emotions and express them, and sometimes through crying.” Processing is work: naming what is happening inside, weighing it, and responding with self-control. That is discipline, the opposite of indulgence.
Fields adds a point from the shape of Scripture itself. The Bible does not present one male temperament. She contrasts the warrior image people usually reach for with the brothers in Genesis: “Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the field; and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents” (Genesis 25:27). Jacob is the one cooking when Esau comes in hungry. The verse describes; it does not rank, and Jacob is hardly a model of virtue in every scene. Still, the God of the Bible names himself the God of Jacob, the son who stayed by the tents, and that should keep the church from treating one temperament as the only shape a faithful man can take.
Why a walled-off husband is a leadership problem
Blade’s most practical argument concerns the home. He calls the ability to express emotions and deal with others’ emotions a masculine trait, because “that’s what’s needed for a man to lead his household.” He declines to cast women as the emotional ones. Everyone is emotional, he says, and both spouses bring emotions into a marriage. A husband who is meant to lead and shepherd has to receive his wife’s emotions and articulate his own in a healthy way. He says he has lost count of the Christian wives who describe their husbands as emotionally distant, or say they feel like they are loving a wall.
His theological answer is specific: “We know that through the gospel, we’re able to let those walls down knowing that God looks out for us.” The wall exists because a man believes no one else will protect him. The gospel addresses that belief directly. A man who knows God keeps him no longer has to guard himself against his own wife. Marriage, Blade adds, requires two people to become one, and that cannot happen with the walls still up.
He also traces the damage across generations. “We end up sending young men to school angry because their fathers don’t show affection,” he says, and those young men grow into fathers who are distant or can only express anger. His diagnosis is pointed: “we’ve really demonstrated how to express anger a lot of different ways, but we haven’t really unpacked how to express other emotions.” Anger is the one feeling the hard-man script allows, so it ends up carrying every other feeling the man has no words for.
Affection without suspicion
The script also teaches men to read closeness between men as sexual by default, which cuts fathers off from their sons. Blade insists that “there’s room for physical touch in male relationships that is nonsexual,” and he names a father’s hug, or a kiss on his son’s forehead in some contexts, as ways to affirm a boy.
Scripture describes such closeness without embarrassment. At the last supper, “there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved” (John 13:23). Fields cites this as affection that affirms rather than sexualizes. Blade points to David and Jonathan, of whom 1 Samuel 18:1 says “the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” He acknowledges that people read that relationship differently, and he limits his claim to this: deep love between men is needed, and its absence does damage. A culture that can interpret male tenderness only as a threat has made itself poorer, and its sons pay for it.
A borrowed identity
Fields notices something about Chiron that reaches past the film. Nearly everything he becomes is handed to him: a slur from other children and his mother, a trade from the drug dealer who took him in, a nickname from the one friend who treated him normally. Her conclusion is that a Christian’s identity has to come from who Christ is and what he has made us, because “even well-meaning people that actually love us, will give us an identity that might not necessarily be our true identity.”
The hard-man ideal is that kind of identity. Rappers, neighborhoods, inherited stoicism, and sometimes pastors who meant well handed it down, and boys received it before they could weigh it. Blade’s charge to anyone raising or discipling young Black men is to examine it before passing it on, and to measure it against the man in John 11, whose love for his friends was visible on his face.
Quick answers
Is it unmanly for a Christian man to cry?
No. Blade points to Jesus weeping at Lazarus’s tomb in John 11 as the model of true masculinity. If the perfect man wept in public, tears cannot disqualify anyone from manhood.
Where did the church get the idea that a man should be hard?
Blade traces it in Black church culture partly to hip-hop, whose artists functioned like fathers for many boys, and Fields traces it partly to a Western ideal of stoicism. Blade adds that churches themselves sometimes propagate it.
Doesn’t the Bible tell men to be strong?
Yes. In 1 Corinthians 16:13-14, Paul calls believers to stand fast and be strong, then says everything must be done with charity. Strength in that passage is faithful love, with no requirement to stop feeling.
Why does a man’s emotional health matter for his family?
Blade argues that leading a household means receiving a wife’s emotions and expressing one’s own in a healthy way. Fathers who only know anger tend to raise angry sons.
Is affection between men always sexual?
No. Blade says there is room for nonsexual touch between men, such as a father hugging his son, and Scripture describes deep love between David and Jonathan and a disciple leaning on Jesus.