They’re Donald Trump’s Most Loyal Voters. I Didn’t Understand Why. After a Weekend in the Woods With Them, That Changed.

Here is a partial list of the things I don’t talk about with the men in my life:

• Shame

• Failure

• Money

• Fear

• Ways I’ve hurt women

So when a gentle-voiced coordinator called me on the phone to find out what I wanted to get out of the three-day Christian men’s retreat I’d signed up for, I didn’t hesitate: “I want to be more honest and open about what I really think and feel,” I said. “I want to have better relationships with men.”

Steven thanked me for my honesty and my vulnerability. And then he made me feel much more vulnerable: The retreat was going to be intense, he promised, potentially “triggering.” My phone would be confiscated, as would any other timepiece I might try to smuggle in. Indeed, between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon, I would have no idea what time it was or what would happen next. This policy, he explained, helped maintain a “space of sacred focus.”

If I got overwhelmed, Steven said softly, I could “call timeout.” There would be no shame if the experience proved too intense for me. “But I suggest you trust the process and lean into it,” he concluded. “So Nat. Let me ask you: Are you willing to do whatever it takes to get what you want out of this weekend?”

I wasn’t about to let this man doubt my toughness: I immediately told him yes. Then, because I felt I was keeping a secret, I blurted, “You should know I’m not a Christian. I go to Quaker meetings now and then, but that’s it.”

Steven assured me that people of all faiths and of no faith at all had experienced transformational change through the Crucible Project. “Our work is based on the peer-reviewed scientific evidence supporting a process called shadow work,” he explained. “I’ve been through what you’re about to go through. During my weekend, my inner walls crumbled, I found out who I really was, and I left with the tools to build something new.”

Steven was very good at his job. I believed his testimonial. What’s more, his kindness and openness set me at ease about what had been my main concern: that the retreat would present a vision of masculinity that more closely resembled Donald Trump’s example than Christ’s.

My concern had not come from the Crucible Project’s materials but from my own assumptions. On the group’s Facebook page, I saw photo after photo featuring a population of men that was much whiter than America’s. And with Trump winning nearly 80 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2020 and 2024, it was hard not to wonder how peaceful and loving the weekend would actually be, whatever Steven said. (Names have been changed throughout this essay; many of the men I spoke with feared professional repercussions for candidly discussing masculinity.)

But when I looked at what the group actually said, the message spoke right to me. The weekends were for men “hungry for deep, life-giving relationships.” If I took a good hard look at my life and discovered my true self, the Crucible Project promised, I could “move beyond blaming others” to “experience lasting change.”

I am far from the only man who finds this message compelling. Since its founding in Illinois in 2005, the Crucible Project has expanded to offer retreats all over the country and on three continents. Thousands of men have attended. Many of those return over and over for “second-level weekends,” which focus on more specific concerns such as joy, sexuality, and leadership.

The group’s success should come as no surprise. To put it mildly, American men aren’t doing quite as well as they used to be. Men kill themselves at four times the rate of women. Men die of accidental drug overdose at nearly three times the rate. About 15 percent of men say they have no close friends at all—not one.

All of these trends have worsened over the past generation. Collectively, they don’t just constitute a public health crisis, but a political crisis. While the voting gap between men and women as a whole was no larger in 2024 than in 2020, that was not the case with men under 30: These men swung right at nearly double the rate of young women. Whatever it was that young men were looking for as they tried to carve out places for themselves, many of them were finding it in right-wing spaces.

If I was serious about my desire to connect with men, I saw only one option: go where the men were. So the second week of January, I drove down to Bergton, Virginia, where Steven and a team of men promised to transform my life. By the time I left, I understood why men who worked so hard to imitate Christ could also become Trump’s most loyal followers.

In the days leading up to the gathering, I worked my way through my pre-retreat assignments. In my journal, I was instructed to respond to a series of unpleasant prompts: “Where in my life am I out of integrity?” and “What wounds do I carry from my father? How were those wounds given?”

I was not permitted to merely speculate about my flaws. One pre-retreat exercise required me to ask people in my life the three things they liked most about me and the three things they disliked most. I wholeheartedly recommend this exercise—but I also recommend you have nothing scheduled after these conversations.

With these conversations echoing in my head, I was a bit raw as I drove along narrow country roads, deeper and deeper into Virginia’s Appalachian mountains. The sun had set, but the night was bright, snow glowing blue under the moon in the steep-shouldered valleys. A mile from West Virginia, in a no-stoplight town, I turned onto the driveway of the Highland Retreat. I pulled over to the side of a narrow lane to hold the wheel, breathe, and get a handle on my fear: All my life, large groups of men have usually brought me rejection.

My fear faded quickly: Impatience, it turns out, is an antidote to fear, and my hosts spent an unfathomably long time processing my arrival. “Go see that man,” I was told over and over as I moved from station to station, each one occupied by a “staff-man.” At one, my possessions were given an inspection that would have shamed the TSA. At another, I answered an interminable list of poorly worded questions about my health, such as “Do you have any physical limitations?”

“No?”

The staff-man seemed satisfied.

At last I was admitted inside, into the main hall, a cold room with an unlit hearth and a ceiling of blond pine. My first thought: This place could really use a woman’s touch. The posters were so crooked I wanted to touch the wall to steady myself. Sheets of black plastic, secured with copious amounts of blue painting tape, covered the windows. There was a pervasive smell of what I would learn was wet, sweaty long johns.

A staff-man soon informed us that this first portion of the weekend was called “Challenged & Tested.” We were given the four core values—accountability, integrity, power, and passion. Also a dizzying list of rules—I was not to have sex with other men, do drugs, go out to my car, have sex with myself.

We were then, indeed, challenged and tested, with a slew of activities that added up to little more than a light hazing to bond us. The other “participants” and I spent long hours out in the snow. We were made to do team-building activities clearly designed to make us fail. Yes, I had to do push-ups. I am a fussy man, so my greatest test came that night, as I got ready to share bunk beds with five unshowered men. (Bathing was allowed, but we were exhausted.) One heavyset man on a bottom bunk held out a little open box and shook its contents. “Earplugs, anyone?” he said. “I snore pretty good.” He sure did.

The next day, we moved on to the retreat’s main event: shadow work (or, as the staff-men called it, “Wrestling with God”). I had read all about this practice as part of my commitment to doing whatever it took to get what I wanted from the weekend, so I was ready.

Please forgive my gross simplification of Carl Jung’s ideas. According to Jung, there are aspects of yourself that you present and aspects you repress. The public-facing version of you is your persona, while the hidden parts constitute your shadow self. So if you grow up in a family where you are punished for expressing your anger, you will construct a persona who never gets angry. Instead, your anger gets relegated to your shadow self, hidden from everyone, perhaps even from you. “The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself,” Jung wrote.

The problem with denying parts of yourself is that your repressed anger—or sexuality, or fear, or sadness, or whatever it is you’ve been bullied and shamed into concealing—is going to come out somewhere. And it comes out, in the words of one of the staff-men, “sideways.” So, instead of expressing yourself in a way that will help you address whatever is making you angry, you might punch a hole in the wall or go out and get plastered. Usually, it will come out in ways that make you and the people in your life unhappy.

But it’s not just these outbursts that are the problems. Crucially, without a fully integrated self, you will also be dissatisfied when your life is “going well.” If as a child you only received love for your victories, you may find yourself in a high-powered career, wondering why your successes leave you cold. The trouble is that a persona cannot genuinely want anything—only a person can. The persona goes after what it has been told to want and experiences “love” as a series of approvals and disapprovals, instead of acceptance and nurturing of the true self.

Practitioners in the Jungian tradition pursue many treatment courses—dreamwork, psychoanalysis, interpretation of the patient’s art. In Virginia, I found myself circled by men I didn’t know while a staff-man looked me in the eye and asked what was keeping me from expressing what I really feel.

“Humiliation,” I said. “Fear of humiliation. Then rejection.”

The staff-man asked me how long that dynamic had been a part of my life.

“At least since I was 8. I had to lie to get by.”

The staff-man gave me a choice: I could interact with someone who had insisted I live a lie, or with my 8-year-old self.

“Me.”

At random, I picked a man, Nick, from the surrounding group to play me as a young boy. He knelt on a pillow to make himself small. I stooped to embrace him and told him what I’d needed to hear as a boy. “I love you just as you are. Life won’t always be like this. You will meet people who love you as you are, too. Try to trust them. It can actually be fun to share your feelings.”

Nick and I then switched places. Crying, he repeated into my ear everything I had said to him. Without warning, the hands of countless men pressed on my shoulders, in my hair, on my arms. For a time, we were a clump. When I stood, the pressure on my diaphragm, the fear that usually keeps my breathing tight and shallow, had vanished. I felt utterly free.

This moment felt like a glimpse of Christianity at its best. Not simply that I was receiving so much love, but that I was receiving so much love after making myself ugly. I had told these men how my shadow had come out sideways. I had told them how lying that had started as a means of surviving had metastasized into a way of getting what I wanted. And the men had shown me love and acceptance all the same.

As climactic as this moment felt, the staff-men made clear it was just a beginning. Learning to live with “my shadow out in front of me,” they told me, would be the labor of a lifetime. But receiving love for my whole self, warts and all—that was the first step toward transformation. Indeed, the central insight on display all weekend was that unconditional love is not an alternative to accountability; it is a prerequisite to accountability and therefore to transformational change. Or, as G.K. Chesterton put it in his book of Christian apologetics, “A thing must be loved before it is lovable.”

Practicing that kind of love proved to be our task all day long. Man after man told the group the worst things they’d ever done and the worst things that had been done to them. It would be unethical for me to talk about what those things are, and anyway there’s no need: If you’ve spent any time on this planet, you know the awful things men do and the awful things that are done to boys. What I can tell you is that each time, men who had been strangers the day before treated each other with love and grace. The staff-men had created a space in which it felt safe to do so and then modeled how it was done for those of us who had never learned back home.

This kind of vulnerability among men isn’t just unusual in American life; it is atypical of Christian retreats. “I’ve been to a lot of men’s weekends,” my fellow attendee Kyle told me. “They’re a great chance to catch up with your boys and meet new people, but I wouldn’t say you do any work. But this weekend? How do I put it? Those retreats are a refreshing White Claw, but the Crucible Project is a double shot of Maker’s Mark.”

I believe I understood what he meant. While there is a therapist out there to whom I will always be grateful, one-on-one clinical work is no substitute for what was on offer this weekend. The difference is as stark as that between a doctor’s gloved touch and the full embrace of a loved one.

As the Crucible Project helped me find my way toward life as a fully realized man, I noticed a curious omission in the staff-men’s teachings: Even on the third and final day—“Reclaiming the Masculine Soul”—they did not tell me what such a soul looked like.

In my post-retreat conversations with my fellow participants, I found I was not the only one in the dark on this point. Each man, however, spoke with admirable clarity about what true masculinity was not. “It’s not about pushing for more money, more women, bigger houses, and bigger muscles,” Liam told me. “That’s a misdirection of the healthy desire to be enough.”

“It’s not about having a beard or being into cars,” Nick said. “My wife makes fun of me for taking baths, but I say baths aren’t girly because I’m comfortable with them.”

“It’s not about trying to get your wife to live barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen,” Steven said with evident scorn. “In the garden, Adam and Eve were equal partners with different roles.”

But when I asked the same men to tell me what true masculinity actually was, most turned to vague abstractions.

“Someone who’s truly masculine lives with balance,” Nick said, “especially between self-reliance and dependence.”

“Masculinity is about living with accountability and vulnerability,” Steven said before conceding he would also foster these traits in a daughter.

It was Kyle who spoke in concrete terms. His point of reference was the scene in Mary Poppins in which the Banks children flee their scary father and encounter Bert in an alley. The chimney sweep comforts the kids by showing why their father should not be feared, but pitied. The two have their mother and Mary Poppins to look after them—but who looks after poor Mr. Banks?

“The kids look to Mom, she looks to her husband, and he looks to God,” Kyle said in summary of the healthy family. “But that doesn’t mean a true man can just do what he wants. Boys take, men contribute. A man serves God first, then his family, his friends, and his community—in that order. The self comes last, and that kind of selfless leadership is hard. I’m a Scout leader, and every leader I know, myself included, has spent time crying alone in the woods.”

Not that Kyle shied away from leadership and the service it demanded. Like all the men I spoke with, he was deeply enmeshed with a Christian men’s group that looked out at a country full of struggling men and took responsibility for helping them. The men regularly met to challenge each other to be better husbands, better fathers, better mentors, better Christians.

Ian, a young man from D.C., told me a story that illustrated the vision of tough love that was the bedrock of these relationships. He had recently attended a wedding where, in her toast, the maid of honor had thanked the bride for being her “trusted trespasser.” That is, the bride was the person she trusted to violate her normal boundaries and challenge her on anything because she had proven, again and again, that she did so with loving intentions.

Or as Kyle put it: “You need to be filled up, and you need to fill someone else up who isn’t as far along on the journey as you are.” That’s why he’d spent years mentoring a fatherless young man to help him find his way in the world. Being a good man, Kyle went on, is not something anyone knows how to do on his own. It’s something your elders have to teach you and that you need help with every single day. There may be no male or female in Christ, but here in America it was another story.

I don’t know if this daddy-knows-best attitude has met a better critic since Mary Wollstonecraft took it down more than two centuries ago. In The Vindication of the Rights of Women, she described sexual politics that force women to express their reason as feelings and force men to express their feelings as reason. This imbues men’s prejudice and lust for power with the authority of logic and facts. Worse, she wrote, these mutually corrupting sexual relations become the template for all social relationships, regardless of sex: Someone must take the role of the powerful man and someone must be the subordinate woman. To take her example, within the military the generals who give orders are the men, while the soldiers who obey are the women. Or, as she would have perceived at the retreat, the staff-men who knew the time of day and hid the agenda were the men, while participating men like me were the women.

Wollstonecraft is describing the same vision of masculinity that Kyle had articulated with help from Dick Van Dyke. What is a man? The one who leads others. Why should a person have power to lead others? Because he is a good man. What is a good man? The one who rewards you for trusting his trespasses. His thoughts, feelings, and will are blessed with God’s imprimatur.

Despite speaking forcefully all weekend about the power of accountability, the Crucible Project does not want accountability for itself. To honor my confidentiality pledge, I have only discussed practices and rituals the group has revealed in its public-facing materials. The leader said that if everyone knew what really went on at the retreats, fewer people would come. I think he is wrong. What’s more, the group itself puts out pictures of men holding swords near fake camels, which would be the moment to hide if the primary concern was enrollment.

Men will continue to enroll because the Crucible Project really does know how to empower them. It absolutely delivered on its promise to me. The morning after I left, I found it easier to express myself than ever before, just as I’d wanted. I felt loving toward everyone I met and completely, utterly, wonderfully at ease in my body.

After a few days back home, as I felt the familiar fear corseting up my stomach, I was finally able to name the contradiction between the evangelical culture and the progressive circles in which I ordinarily move. Here in the city, most people take it as given that masculinity is constructed. The question of what a true man looks like is therefore nonsensical: All children should be raised to be good people and simply encouraged to be themselves. Yet it was these Christian men, the ones who believe in an intrinsic masculinity, who were actually out on the front lines constructing a generation of men they wanted as fellow citizens.

I would not know where to go in Brooklyn to get this kind of male support outside of a place of worship. What’s more, many men I know are actively hostile to open discussion of the most difficult subjects. In the lead-up to the retreat, I asked a male friend to tell me the three things he most disliked about me; he assured me such honesty could only do our relationship harm. And so, like most men, I called on women for my most vulnerable conversations.

I do not think my experience is anomalous. To offer just one example: Another friend of mine is in a book club of new dads and recently proposed the group read a guide on how to be better fathers. “It was absolutely shot down,” he told me. “The guys didn’t want to go there when we could be having a chill time.”

Among progressive men, the prevailing ethos seems to be that discussions of our worst flaws are best reserved for the psychologist’s office. This idea is no longer tenable—and not just because telling a man he must relegate discussion of his true self to the doctor’s office looks a lot like telling a boy he must hide his feelings to receive love. The retreat made it perfectly clear how many men hunger for relationships with other men who will love them as they really are. You don’t have to be a Jungian to believe that men’s unmet hunger for love from other men is going to come out somewhere. If they have to go to right-wing spaces to get it, they will.

Indeed, they already are. This fall, just before the election, I reported on a Trump rally in rural Virginia. Because doing so involved registering my phone number, I was flooded with promotional texts. One I saved: “From Trump: THIS TEXT IS NOT FOR EVERYONE. You’re getting it because I love you, Nathaniel.”

At the weekend’s closing banquet, after the last exercises to reclaim my masculine soul, it seemed perfectly clear why so many of these Christian men had fallen for Trump while also championing unconditional love. The format of Trump’s offer to voters was identical to what the Crucible Project had offered me: We won’t tell you exactly what’s coming, but we’ve got some secret plans that have your well-being at heart. Trust us. We know best.

In the leaders’ final remarks over dessert, the twin calls to love and power sat comfortably side by side. Staff-men called on us to give love to everyone in our lives and to do so on the terms that worked for others. We were cautioned against making grand promises of how we’d changed; our loved ones had surely heard all our lines before. The way to prove our newfound manhood was through action, not words.

At the same time, the leaders warned against the hazards that awaited us on reentry into a country that wanted to rob men of power. It was a society that, as one staff-man put it, wanted to “castrate” us. It was our duty not to succumb, but to “penetrate” the world with our masculine “power and passion.” To do anything less was to be less than a man.

This vision of masculinity may be based on domination, but, in the absence of a clear progressive alternative, it’s the only vision on offer. Little surprise, then, that given the choice between something and nothing, more and more young men all over America are rolling the dice on tough love.