As a father of boys, I worry about them constantly. I’m far from alone. Boys have risen to the surface of our society’s consciousness as both a source of anxiety and an object of concern. There are many things worth worrying about—education, work, dating, friendship, faith—but at the center of it all are screens.
A Vision for Screen-Free Church
What I want most for my sons, besides knowing God, is a life that isn’t absorbed by digital surfaces. Like a horror movie, these devices simultaneously draw people in and reach into the “real world” with a kind of hypnotic, supernatural power. Such language may seem hyperbolic, but if you’ve ever been around children (or their parents) enamored with their devices, then you know that screens can bewitch.
At the same time, unless I am willing to abolish screens from my household—no TVs or tablets, no laptops or wireless, no smartphones or video games—the question is not whether my boys will use screens but which ones, for how long, to what end. This is the long campaign so many of us are waging. As a parent, you discover early on that some battles are worth losing if it means you’re more likely to win the war.
Lately I’ve been happy to lose one particular battle. Sometime in the last year, my boys (one in sixth grade and one in fifth) have become obsessed with a particular YouTube channel. To be clear, we don’t let our boys “on” YouTube, which is rightly considered ground zero for where screens and boys go awry. They don’t have the app, and they aren’t allowed to scroll. But we decided to let them try out this channel on the family TV together, and, in their minds, this is a great victory.
Parents of boys, male readers themselves, and certainly anyone from Texas will already know of whom I speak. But if that isn’t you, allow me to be the one to introduce you to the Dude Perfect phenomenon.
To begin, Dude Perfect is many things. It’s a YouTube channel with more than 60 million subscribers. It’s also an app, a regular multicity tour, and a flourishing business with merchandise, a multimillion-dollar headquarters just north of Dallas–Fort Worth, and a theme park in the works.
At bottom, though, it’s five buddies who roomed together in college continuing the fun in front of the cameras.
The fun started at Texas A&M in 2009, when the dudes—Tyler Toney, Garrett Hilbert, Cody Jones, and twins Cory and Coby Cotton—caught attention online with their backyard trick shots. Then they set a Guinness World Record by making a basketball shot from the third deck of Kyle Field. The video capturing the shot went viral, they kept making similar videos, and a year later they started Dude Perfect. It’s been going and growing in the 15 years since, with no signs of slowing down.
The “show,” if you want to call it that, has a thousand gimmicks: trick shots, pranks, Guinness Records, a game show, set pieces, murder mysteries. These barely scratch the surface. As its popularity has grown, guest appearances from celebrities and especially from professional athletes have become a mainstay: Tom Brady, Chris Paul, Keanu Reeves, Zac Efron, Paul Rudd, Russell Wilson, Drew Brees, Dak Prescott, Rob Gronkowski, Luke Bryan. These names give you an exact picture of the show’s vibe.
The core of the show isn’t the famous names, however. It’s the friendship between Tyler, Garrett, Cody, Cory, and Coby. Sure, the surface appeal—the reason people tune in, cheer, and laugh—is the crazy competitions, the running gags, the inside jokes. But the dudes aren’t trying to hide their deeper purpose. Each is a husband, a father, and a Christian. They’re trying to create entertainment for the whole family to enjoy together, boys and young men in particular.
And their faith is out in the open. “We’re about giving back, spreading joy, and glorifying Jesus Christ,” their website explains. The documentary covering their first national tour a few years ago concludes with a visit to a boy with leukemia who couldn’t make the show that evening. After some fun with him and his family, they finished their time by praying over him.
Watching Dude Perfect, you won’t find a hint of politics—there’s no rancor or division or conspiracism. It’s a refuge and escape from a polarized world perpetually set on edge. Call it antiapocalyptic content. On the spectrum of masculinity, if Andrew Tate is one pole, these dudes are the other.
And thankfully, as the numbers on their videos attest, there’s a lot of interest today in this style of masculinity. Dude Perfect is part of what commentator Ted Gioia calls “alternative culture,” which isn’t found in legacy media and elite institutions but is flourishing online nonetheless.
Granted: There are a lot of other things flourishing online too. Hence the convergence of cultural anxieties on boys and screens. I mentioned Tate, whose image trades on a glorified caricature of misogyny, wealth, and violence. Other online dangers and dead ends include video games, pornography, conspiracism, political extremism, and simple loneliness.
Yet at the heart of these concerns lies an ambiguity. When thinking about boys today, you can frame the issue in one of two ways: nature or nurture. The technical term for the first option is endogenous, meaning the problem is masculinity as such. For example, in 2019 the American Psychological Association issued guidelines for best practices with men and boys. It asserted that “traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful.” The question for such a view then becomes how best to educate males out of such things, which is to say, out of ourselves.
No doubt the APA would protest that “traditional” masculinity is not the only type of masculinity, but their guidelines give away the game. It’s a laundry list of male-coded traits that transcend local culture; pick a time and place in history, and you’ll find them well represented. Consider competitiveness. To seek to root out competitiveness per se is to seek to root out part of what makes boys boys (to say nothing of competitive girls!). Put differently, it’s to stipulate in advance that there are no healthy or “pro-social” avenues into which competitiveness can be funneled.
For Christians, at least—in fact for pretty much everybody—“masculinity” cannot be a problem to be solved. God made us male and female. Christian parents raising boys and girls are raising sinners, one and all, but the solution to sin isn’t to destroy nature. It’s to discover how God’s grace might heal, restore, and perfect nature. We want our children to grow into mature, faithful adults. In the case of boys, that means becoming men.
If, therefore, the problem isn’t nature, then it’s nurture, which means the issue is exogenous. On this view it’s not masculinity itself that needs addressing but a culture-shaped, “toxic” masculinity. This is the approach of Richard Reeves in his book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. Reeves agrees that boys and girls are biologically different and that this difference is not pathological. Men are no more malfunctioning women than women are second-class men. Whereas patriarchal societies are beset by the latter prejudice, egalitarian cultures are tempted by the former.
Christians are right to welcome Reeves’s intervention. Sex differences are not a problem to be solved but a gift to receive with gratitude and delight. We might haggle over terms—toxic seems to me overused to the point of meaninglessness—but it’s a wonderful sign that public discourse has converged as much as it has on this point. Believers can join with all parents and scholars of goodwill in seeking out reliable strategies for raising boys well in a time when that has become particularly tricky.
This is where Dude Perfect enters the picture, at least for my family. Discovery of a suitable YouTube channel may seem like a small thing, and in a sense it is. Moreover, it’s no mystery what my boys need most day to day: a father and a mother who love each other and them (together with their little sisters); a safe and hospitable home in a safe and familiar neighborhood; a church that welcomes, teaches, and forms them; an extended family of cousins and grandparents, aunts and uncles; Christian adults to mentor and model the life of faith; friends, friends, and more friends; and finally thousands of hours offline, outdoors, climbing trees, playing sports, reading books, riding bikes, scraping knees, getting lost, and finding home again.
Yet on top of all that and intermixed within it will be screens—not unlimited, not unsupervised, but screens nonetheless. My wife and I ask ourselves: Which options run the least risk of reaching out and absorbing them, of casting a spell we’re unable to break? And which, by contrast, are most likely to push them off screens, to give them ideas for the real world, even to model life-giving pursuits? Might we dare to hope for role models of a sort?
For me and my house, Dude Perfect has been one answer to these questions. My oldest now creates “murder mysteries” for his younger siblings to solve. He does trick shots in the yard. Just this year, over spring break, he convinced his mom to shoot a basketball from a fourth-story window. And she made it! Like the dudes, we’ve got the video to prove it.
Yes, Dude Perfect is on YouTube. Yes, it’s part of the digital ecosystem. Yes, it’s one more thing begging for clicks and eyeballs and dollar bills. In a perfect world, maybe, there would be no YouTube, no alternative culture, no self-starting streamers and podcasters and influencers. In that world, you and I wouldn’t own TVs or smartphones, we wouldn’t have wireless internet, and you wouldn’t be reading this article.
But so long as we don’t live in that world, so long as the question is how and not whether, I for one am grateful, as a father of two boys, that Dude Perfect exists. I’m glad to know my sons aren’t bleeding brain cells while watching MrBeast play a video game. I’m glad they’re not scrolling social media. And I’m certainly glad they’re not chasing rabbits down crazy digital rabbit holes.
Instead, for their daily allotted time—and maybe mine too if I care to join them—they’re watching some 30-something friends, brothers in the faith, joke around and have some fun before heading home to their families. In a time as troubled as ours, that’s an unexpected answer to prayer.
Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.
