Evangelicals Don’t Produce Leaders. They Produce “Cubicle Men.”

Why a culture obsessed with safety, reputation, and moral control is quietly eliminating the kind of risk-taking required to build institutions

Below is a post from Dr. Anthony Bradley, who is one of the best evangelical voices on masculinity. If you haven’t already listened to it, you should check out the podcast we did last year.

Bradley has his own Substack where he posted this great essay with his reflections on why evangelical men don’t become elites. He graciously gave me permission to republish it. You should definitely subscribe to his newsletter, as part two of this series is coming out today - Aaron.

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A few years ago, I was at dinner with a group of Christian college men and asked them what they planned to do after graduation. As they went around the table, each one described some version of the same goal: find a job that pays “good money” and allows them to support a family. That aim is not wrong in itself, despite what some argue.

What was striking was not what they said, but what was missing. There was no sense that a career might be pursued because it could shape an institution, serve a community, or leave a meaningful mark on the world. No one talked about building anything. No one talked about leading. No one talked about risk. Their imagination stopped at stability and safety.

They were not describing vocations. They were describing outcomes: a paycheck, benefits, and predictability. In other words, they were not aspiring to become builders or leaders. They were aspiring to become well-positioned employees. What they wanted was not a mission or purpose-driven life. It was a safe and respectable life, secured in advance.

Aaron Renn has spent considerable energy documenting the absence of evangelical elites from the commanding heights of American culture. His diagnosis is serious and worth engaging. His Washington Post piece and his longer First Things essay point to weak institutions, thin intellectual networks, and cultural retreat from public life. These observations are accurate as far as they go. But Renn’s framing stops one level too shallow, because it focuses on what evangelical culture lacks rather than on what it systematically and reliably produces. The problem is not an absence. It is an output. Evangelical culture has spent generations overproducing risk-averse men, and risk-averse men do not build, disrupt, or lead at the levels Renn is describing. They fill cubicles.

The pattern is visible in almost every earnest Christian household. Boys are formed around a coherent set of virtues: responsibility, deference to authority, moral seriousness, and reputation management. Pastors and parents, motivated by genuine love, channel young men toward careers that signal stability and respectability. Law, medicine, ministry, corporate management. These are honorable vocations, but they share a defining feature. They are low-variance paths inside existing systems, not launching pads for building new ones. A young man who lands a comfortable, well-paying job with good benefits and a respected title is celebrated in these communities as a success. What rarely gets asked is whether he is a builder, a founder, or a leader in any substantive sense, or simply a well-compensated follower operating inside an institution someone else had the courage to create. Getting a safe, respectable job is not leadership. It is the appearance of it, and evangelical culture has spent generations treating the appearance as the substance.

The specific failure is not simply that these men avoid risk in the abstract. It is that they are trained to avoid failure, which is a different and more crippling problem. Failure tolerance is not a personality quirk. It is a developed capacity, built through repeated exposure to real stakes, real uncertainty, and real loss. The men who found companies, reshape industries, and accumulate lasting institutional power were not simply born with thicker skin. They were formed in environments where failure was treated as information rather than indictment, where a collapsed venture or a bad bet was processed and learned from rather than moralized over. Evangelical formation runs in the opposite direction. Failure in these communities frequently becomes a spiritual category. Poor discernment. Lack of prayer. Insufficient accountability. When failure gets theologized, young men learn to avoid it at all costs rather than absorb it and move forward. That single dynamic, more than any institutional weakness Renn can identify, explains the scarcity he is documenting.

Karen Horney, the mid-century psychoanalyst, described a personality pattern she called “self-effacing,” characterized by a deep need to avoid conflict, subordinate personal ambition, and seek safety through compliance and approval. She also identified what she termed “self-resignation,” a settled acceptance of limits driven by anxiety about failure and rejection. Evangelical formation does not set out to produce these profiles, but it frequently does, because it prioritizes moral safety over institutional ambition and mission.¹ The working goal of much evangelical parenting is to produce a young man who does not do anything wrong, who keeps his reputation clean, who stays inside the lines of acceptable behavior. This is understandable. It is also, functionally, a training program for followers rather than leaders. The man preoccupied with not doing anything wrong is not free to take the kind of action that building something significant actually requires.

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff traced this impulse at the cultural level in The Coddling of the American Mind, arguing that American culture has broadly embraced safetyism, the belief that young people must be shielded from risk, failure, and discomfort. Evangelical households do not invent this pattern, but they intensify it by adding theological justification. Caution becomes prudence. Risk avoidance becomes faithfulness. The result is a formation environment that does not simply fail to produce bold men. It actively trains boldness out of them.

The research makes this concrete. A working paper on religion and risk attitudes found a consistent positive correlation between religious participation and risk aversion in economic behavior, with church membership linked to more cautious financial and career decisions. A meta-analysis on religion and entrepreneurship found that higher religiosity correlates with lower rates of new venture creation. Research published in the Journal of Comparative Economics found that religious entrepreneurs who do emerge tend to self-select toward lower-risk business activities to manage uncertainty. And a global behavioral study on entrepreneurial risk-taking and culture found that cultures with high uncertainty avoidance produce significantly less entrepreneurial activity than those that reward initiative and normalize failure. Evangelicalism, at its cultural center of gravity, looks far more like the former than the latter.

This is the formation pipeline Renn’s institutional analysis cannot see. Family environments and church cultures shape psychological dispositions. Those dispositions drive career selection. Career selection, aggregated across tens of thousands of men over decades, produces the social outcomes we observe. Evangelical men are not absent from elite spaces because institutions failed them. They are absent because they were formed to prefer the spaces where they are present: stable, predictable, bounded environments that reward rule-following and competence over the willingness to build something that does not yet exist. Getting a safe, respectable job is not leadership. It is the appearance of it, and evangelical culture has spent generations celebrating the appearance while the substance slips away.

Some voices inside the church have begun to say this plainly. Writers working in the Christian leadership space have argued that congregational cultures have become risk-averse organizations where bold action is treated with suspicion and failure is something to be avoided rather than processed and learned from. This is not a management problem. It is a spiritual formation problem with structural consequences.

The biblical tradition is full of figures who act under radical uncertainty, leave behind security without any guarantee of return, and pursue callings at enormous personal cost. Abraham leaves without a destination. Joseph endures catastrophic failure before any vindication arrives. Paul builds something new in every city he enters, usually at the cost of his physical safety and social standing. That tradition is not a template for cubicle life. The gap between what the faith actually commends and how evangelical formation actually operates is large, and closing it will require far more honesty than most communities are currently prepared to offer.

Bradley is planning to post a second installment with his proposed solutions today. Be sure to check out and subscribe to his newsletter.

1. Monergism: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD) is a contemporary term used to describe a common among younger generations. It was first coined by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton in their 2005 book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, which summarized the findings of the National Study of Youth and Religion. While not a formal, organized religion, MTD reflects a set of vague, shallow beliefs about God, morality, and personal happiness like, God wants people to be Good, nice, and fair to each other, the central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself, etc. Be good, be nice!