How a Christian Man Dies

On Ben Sasse's manly suffering

In Netflix’s documentary Inside the Manosphere, there is a wrenching scene between mild-mannered host Louis Theroux and two fanboys of Justin Waller, one of the odious streamers Theroux has set out (with mixed success) to deflate. Unlike their idol, these young men come across as nice lads, albeit hopelessly lost. One of them reveals that he first moved to Miami to try to “make it big” when he was wrestling with grief over his brother’s suicide. At first, he was living out of his car, “feeling sorry for myself, crying every night.” Then, he tells us, he had an epiphany: “Maybe, as men, we’re meant to suffer. We’re not meant to be happy.”

That sentiment has been echoed almost word for word by Braden Peters, the young streamer known as “Clavicular” who has become infamous for “looksmaxxing”: a macabre regimen of self-harm deceptively pitched as a form of self-improvement, towards the ultimate goal of making your face as beautiful as possible. Most gruesomely, this regimen includes lightly tapping one’s face with a hammer to induce hypertrophy as the bones heal. There are also various drugs that are supposed to boost this whole process if you inject yourself with them. None of this sounds like fun at all, but as he explains solemnly in one interview, “Men aren’t supposed to be happy.” Most things in life that a man does to improve himself aren’t designed for his happiness, after all. One doesn’t go to the gym to be “happy.” Peters sees his “looksmaxxing” program as something like a particularly extreme gym regimen. It’s grueling, but he undergoes it to “ascend” to the highest level he can as a man.

In isolation, one could agree that young Peters is expressing a true saying. As Job says, “Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward.” I can actually see why certain young men would be drawn to this. They crave an ancient tonic against complacent, soft modernity. They don’t want to be carried through life on flowery beds of ease. They want a challenge. This is the need Jordan Peterson rose to meet in his prime. To quote his famous catchphrase: “Pick up your cross and carry it up the Gawddamn hill!”

But the tortured professor would go on to collapse very publicly under the weight of his own cross. In his absence, all manner of unsavory characters have rushed in, offering lost boys a simulacrum of tough masculinity stripped of anything resembling integrity or virtue. There’s a moment in the Netflix documentary where Justin Waller talks about how these boys constantly stop him on the street to thank him for “helping” them. It was a depressing reminder of how often Peterson used to say the same.

The “looksmaxxing” trend is perhaps the most disturbing variation on the theme of snake-oil masculinity, sadder and more twisted even than the decadence sold by an Andrew Tate figure. Although Peters does indulge in various decadent pleasures (drugs, women), it’s been observed that his program of fleshly mortification presents more like a twisted form of ascetic monasticism. It sounds insane to ordinary people, but he counts his sufferings not worthy to be compared to the glories of “ascending” and “mogging” (that is, upstaging the less beautiful faces in your vicinity). He has even said he would gladly accept a shorter life if it meant he could mog more. Earlier this year he was hospitalized with a drug overdose, but he immediately proceeded to get back on his beat and open a new club after being discharged. “The worst part of tonight,” he informed the public in a selfie caption after the ordeal, “was my face descending from the life support mask.”

There is an unintentional poetry in the fact that while this grim Digital Age Picture of Dorian Gray is unraveling in front of us, we are simultaneously watching the slow public death of former senator Ben Sasse—from a disease whose treatment has, among other things, ravaged the skin of his face.

Though he appears better made-up in other contexts, Sasse was bleeding freely throughout his Interesting Times conversation with Ross Douthat. For all his self-deprecation, Sasse still retains his boyish good looks, but Peters would say he is “descending.” Though odds are that the former senator isn’t even on the boy’s radar. The lack of knowledge appears mutual: When Sasse joked that Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast must have invited him “for my looks,” Douthat joked back that they’d tried and failed to get Clavicular, and Sasse confessed blissful ignorance. Douthat pronounced this a “small mercy” and moved on.

When Douthat asked Sasse how his face was feeling, he laughed and replied cheerfully, “Nuclear.” The visual Passion parallels were inescapable. Douthat said later that he felt as if he was looking into the face of Christ. So are we all, as Sasse chooses to put the daily trials of his white martyrdom on display. He is, one might say, suffering as efficiently as is Christianly possible. I’m reminded of how Fr. Richard Neuhaus described his impressions of the painfully slow death of Pope John XXIII. As the pope declined, regular news bulletins reported that he was offering up each day’s suffering for another group of suffering people—cancer sufferers, mothers with difficult pregnancies, homeless refugees, and so forth. Neuhaus, a young minister at the time, was powerfully affected by how this holy man was wasting none of his pain.

Sasse frames his trials in Protestant language, but like the former Holy Father, he in his own way is offering them up—for God’s glory, for the world’s edification, and for his own sanctification. This suffering, he would say, is purposeful. It is meaningful. And it is uniting him ever more deeply with Christ’s suffering.

This is the necessary complement to the truth that men are born to suffer: They are not born to suffer meaninglessly, nor to suffer alone. They are created by a God who offers up Himself as the perfect pattern of suffering manhood.

Suffering with a cheerful smile is not a necessary condition of suffering well, but it is difficult not to notice that Sasse appears consistently joyful through his various public appearances, while young Braden Peters appears consistently miserable. Both men are suffering intensely—Sasse from his mortal illness, Peters from whatever inner torment is driving him to destroy himself. But only one is suffering alone.

Peters is not unaware of Christianity, but he declines to recognize it as the true antidote to an emasculating modernity: a way of life that prepares men for life’s inevitable trials, but on God’s terms, not their own. When Michael Knowles tried to nudge him towards the contemplation of something deeper than “mogging,” it emerged that Peters can only conceive of a spiritual practice as something like deciding to teach yourself French or take up the trombone—a hypothetically nice, cool thing to do some day, when you have the time and energy. Most people lack such time and energy, so he encourages them to do as he does: put it off for another day. But as Ben Sasse understands well, we are not promised another day.

There’s a moving little book by the Christian musician Michael Card called The Walk, about his close friend and mentor William Lane. Lane was a formidable biblical studies professor who became like a second father to the budding young artist. Decades later, when Lane was diagnosed with cancer, he and his wife chose to relocate and spend his last days near Card’s family in Tennessee. Explaining this choice, Lane told Card, “I want to show you how a Christian man dies.”

By tragic coincidence, Card’s teenage nephew was in the final stages of his own cancer battle at the time. Lane took it upon himself to spend as much time as he could with the boy. On his last visit, he opened up a favorite psalm, Psalm 91. Card reflects candidly on how curious it is that Lane took such comfort from David’s bold assurance of being spared from “deadly pestilence and plague.” Neither the dying man nor the dying boy he prayed over had been saved from anything. But they believed they would be saved through it.

Lane lived just long enough to participate in the boy’s funeral—barely able to stand, but managing to deliver a prayer and a last reading of the psalm. He died two months later.

The gift William Lane gave to Card, to his nephew, and to all who were with him in his final days, is the gift Ben Sasse now gives to all of us: the gift of a true manly suffering that has not gone to waste. But I fear that those who most desperately need that gift have no men in their lives who can offer it to them—or else, perhaps, they have shut those men out. Maybe one day, they will understand. One day, they will see how a Christian man dies.