Braden Sorbo, speaker and author of Embrace Masculinity, said Gen Z men are the most conservative generation in American history, but are losing the battle for marriage and family to a culture deliberately designed to make both sexes miserable and alone.
“Through polling specifically, Gen Z young men — we’re the most conservative generation in the history of America,” Sorbo said on the Restoration Spotlight Podcast by Restoration News. “Even more conservative than the founders or the generation that went and fought in World War I to the Korean, the Gulf, all of these wars. We have an opportunity with my generation.”
Conservative identity among Gen Z men surged from 31 percent in late 2023 to 45 percent in late 2024, while 58 percent of Gen Z male voters backed Donald Trump in 2024, the first time a majority of young male voters backed a Republican presidential candidate since George H.W. Bush in 1988, according to The Hill.
Sorbo said the largest gender political divide in American history can be summed up in a single poll that shows young men and young women now want completely opposite things out of life.
“There was a poll done right before the 2024 election. Young women overwhelmingly, 67%, said reproductive rights. Only 26% of women put on their list at all having a family,” he said. “The young men’s top three issues were border security, economic stability, and family.”
Gen Z men who voted for Trump rated having children as the top marker of personal success, while Gen Z women who voted for Harris ranked it second to last out of 13 choices, and young men were nearly three times more likely than women to describe marriage as essential, according to an NBC News poll of nearly 3,000 Gen Z adults.
Sorbo said social media was not designed to connect people but to make them feel permanently inadequate and it has done its job with devastating efficiency on an entire generation.
“Social media is targeted to make you feel inferior,” he said. “We have convinced a generation of people that they can go out and party, they can do whatever they want, and they will still find true love at the end of the day. We have told them that the next best thing is right around the corner. To never be content with what they currently have. We’ve taught people to never be happy.”
Sorbo said the collapse of male-female relationships has reached a crisis point that the mainstream culture refuses to acknowledge because it created it.
“45% of men aged 18 to 25 as of this year have never approached a woman in real life. We’re not talking to each other,” he said. “The amount of sex that is being had is still the same, but the number of people that are having it is not. The top 10% of men who are not Christian, who are not living by faith, are the ones who are currently practicing the act of procreation.”
One in three members of Gen Z is projected to never marry, and one in four will never have children, coinciding with the U.S. fertility rate dropping to a projected 1.6 births per woman over the next three decades, well below the 2.1 replacement level, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Sorbo said the red pill movement and the feminist movement are mirror images of the same error, and the only answer to both is the radical self-sacrifice at the heart of Christian marriage.
“People need to understand Ephesians 5. St. Paul writes, ‘Wives submit yourselves to your husbands.’ But then he says, ‘Men, love your wives like Christ loved the church, sacrificing himself for it,'” he said. “Men and women are co-heirs to eternal glory. It is our job to help each other achieve that.”
Sorbo said he voted for Trump and would do so again, but warned that young men who look to the president as a model of godly biblical masculinity are making a category error that will cost them.
“The problem that I see with pedestalling Trump as a figure of masculinity — not as a president, but as a figure of godly, biblical masculinity — is numerous marriages,” he said. “My endorsement of him leading the country over Kamala is not an endorsement of his morals, nor is it an endorsement of his history. It’s an endorsement of his business.”
Sorbo is an actor, author, and speaker with over 2 million followers across his platforms. Son of Hollywood icon Kevin Sorbo, he is the author of Embrace Masculinity and a leading Gen Z voice on faith, masculinity, and social media. His latest film, I Feel Fine, is streaming on Amazon Prime and Paramount TV.
Restoration News is an investigative outlet affiliated with Restoration of America, covering cultural issues, political funding, and border policy for conservative readers, with an emphasis on stories it says receive limited mainstream media coverage.
