Zuckerberg’s and Rogan’s masculinity sounds like evangelical complementarians

This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on January 16, 2025.

“It’s also good to know that you can kill people,” Joe Rogan opined in his podcast interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the men began to giggle.

“There’s a certain confidence from that,” Zuckerberg affirmed.

“If you could sell it in a pill, everybody would buy it,” Rogan added. “No one would say, ‘I’d like to be the vulnerable guy walking around with a bunch of fucking assassins.”

As Zuckerberg recalled entering the jiu-jitsu ring for his first tournament, using his first and middle name while wearing sunglasses, a hat and a COVID mask to disguise himself, he said martial arts awakened something within him.

In 2023, Mark Zuckerberg posted on Instagram a photo of him posing with Israel Adesanya and Alex Volkanovski , legendary Jiu Jitsu champions.

“It’s like you want like feminine energy. You want masculine energy,” he told Rogan. “You’re going to have parts of society that have more of one or the other. I think that’s all good. But I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung toward being this somewhat more neutered thing. And I didn’t really feel that until I got involved with martial arts, which I think is still a much more masculine culture.”

Rogan replied, “That’s how you become successful at martial arts. You have to be at least somewhat aggressive.”

Then Zuckerberg reflected, “There are like a few of these things throughout your life where you just have an experience and you’re like, ‘Where has this been my whole life?’ And it just turned on like a part of my brain that I was like, ‘OK, yeah, like this was a piece of the puzzle that should have been there and I’m glad it now is.’”

Of course, these views of masculinity in the workplace have been around a long time in conservative Christianity. Traditional Catholic men like Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker and Vice President-elect JD Vance have led the conversation this past year over whether women should even be in the workplace to begin with or if they should get married, stay home and make a bunch of babies. But since men and women are all in the workplace together, Rogan and Zuckerberg, neither of whom is a Christian, suggested we need to move toward a more aggressively masculine work environment. It’s almost as if all these men have been reading Desiring God or The Gospel Coalition.

Mature masculinity and femininity at work

For men like John Piper of Desiring God, masculinity and femininity in the workplace means ensuring women are never allowed to be in charge of men.

John Piper

“To the degree that a woman’s influence over man is personal and directive it will generally offend a man’s good, God-given sense of responsibility and leadership, and thus controvert God’s created order,” Piper claims.

Piper suggests workplace environments that maintain proper masculine hierarchies while allowing women to have some level of authority must be either “personal and non-directive” or “directive and non-personal.” For example, he says, “A woman who is a civil engineer might design a traffic pattern in a city so that she’s deciding which streets are one-way, and therefore she is influencing, indeed controlling in one sense, all the male drivers all day long. But this influence is so non-personal that it seems to me that the feminine/masculine dynamic is utterly negligible in this kind of relationship.”

In contrast, Piper says, “If a woman’s job involves a good deal of directives toward men, they’ll need, in general I think, to be non-personal, or men and women won’t flourish, I don’t think, in the long run in that relationship without compromising profound biblical and psychological issues.”

Continue reading at Baptist News Global.