I turned on the TV last Sunday to watch a game. Just a game. Something simple. Something that used to feel like home, a beer in the fridge, my dad’s voice in the back of my head calling a play before it happened, a scoreboard that meant something for three hours and nothing the next morning.
I couldn’t find it. Not the game. The feeling.
What I found instead was a broadcast that spent more time talking about the point spread than the players. Instead, I got a halftime show lecturing me on politics I didn’t turn the TV on for. And leagues like the WNBA that can’t decide what they stand for, tripping over their controversies because nobody at the top has the courage to say what used to be obvious: men and women are different, and there’s a reason we don’t put them on the same court. Not because one is worth more than the other, because they’re not the same, and pretending otherwise doesn’t make anyone stronger. It just makes everybody confused. I want to see women compete against women and be celebrated for it, that’s real strength, real speed, and real skill. But when a league can’t stay out of its own way on the most basic questions of fairness and clarity, don’t be surprised when people stop tuning in.
Common sense used to be common sense. Now it’s controversial. And that right there shows you everything about how this country has changed.
This is the blog that everything else we build is going to stand on, leading up to something I believe matters more than any of that: The Power of Asking for Help: American Family Renaissance Men’s Summit. Before discussing brotherhood, fatherlessness, spiritual warfare, and asking for help, we must first address what we’ve traded away without even noticing.
We traded God, Family, and Country for a screen, a bet, and a scroll. And it’s costing us everything.
The Church of ESPN
I’m a sports guy. Always have been. I grew up in central Iowa, throwing a baseball until it was too dark to see, and some of my best memories with my dad were made on a field, while just as many were made around the dinner table, talking about the game we’d just played or watched. Sports built something in me. So don’t hear this as a man who hates the game; hear this as a man who watched something he loved get hijacked.
Turn on ESPN today and count how many minutes go by before someone tells you who to bet on. It’s not a sidebar anymore. It’s the main event. The “Play of the Day” is squeezed between two segments on the betting line. Prop bets scroll under the score. Former athletes turned bookies with studio contracts, hyping up your fantasy lineup like it’s a spiritual awakening.
Here’s the truth nobody in that building wants to say out loud: the casino always wins. Look at the skyline in Vegas. Look at who built it. It wasn’t built by the winners; it was built by everybody who was sure this was the week their team, their parlay, or their gut feeling was going to hit.
And I get it. The dopamine hit when your running back breaks a 60-yard touchdown, and your fantasy team goes off—that’s real. It feels like winning. But I need to ask you something, man to man: What did you actually win?
A trophy nobody outside your group chat cares about? A boost to your ego for six days until next Sunday resets the whole cycle? Meanwhile, your wife put your kids to bed alone again. Your son asked if you wanted to throw the ball around, and you said “in a minute” through four quarters and two overtimes. Your daughter stopped asking if you’d come watch her dance because she already knows the answer lives on a screen in the man cave.
I’m not against watching football. I’m against building your identity, your Sunday, and your family’s expectations around something that will never once ask how you’re doing.
The Dopamine God
Sports and betting are just one entry point into a much bigger problem, and it’s not really about sports at all. It’s about what we’ve let hijack our attention, because whoever owns your attention owns your life.
Social media works the exact same way as the sportsbook. You post something, you win an argument, somebody validates you with a like or a fire emoji, and for about four seconds you feel like you matter. Then it’s gone, and you’re scrolling for the next hit. It is, by design, built to function like a slot machine: pull the lever, see what you get, pull it again.
Ask yourself honestly: when was the last time winning an argument on Facebook improved your marriage? When was the last time doom-scrolling the news for two hours made you a better father? It hasn’t. It won’t. It’s not designed to build you; it’s designed to keep you.
And while you’re plugged in, chasing the next dopamine hit, something else is happening in your house that you’re not paying attention to. Your family is watching to see if you’re really there. Not physically in the room, but actually there. Present. Engaged. Leading. And too many of us are physically home and thoroughly checked out.
If this country is ever going to get back to greatness, it won’t come from Washington, D.C. It’s going to come from men putting their phones down, turning the game off, and looking their families in the eye as if it’s the most important broadcast of the week—because it is.
This Is Spiritual Warfare — Not a Metaphor
I want to say something that’s going to sound extreme to some people, and I’m okay with that, because I’d rather tell you the truth than keep you comfortable.
We are in a war. A real one. Just not the kind with tanks and guns.
The political establishment in this country is not primarily fighting to strengthen your family. Watch what actually gets funded, what actually gets prioritized, and what actually gets celebrated in the culture, and ask yourself honestly whether the traditional family, the two-parent home, and the father who leads with strength and humility are being built up or torn down. You don’t have to be a political scientist to see the pattern. You just have to be paying attention which, see above, is exactly what we’ve been trained not to do
Here is what I believe with all my heart: the enemy does not need to destroy a nation one soul at a time. He just needs to take out the head of the house. Take the father out, through passivity, addiction, absence, distraction, pride, or just plain exhaustion, and the family destabilizes. Take enough families down, and you don’t have a nation anymore. You have a collection of isolated, exhausted, angry individuals arguing with strangers online about who’s really to blame.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s just what happens when the leader of the home goes missing, whether he left the house or just left the room.
So yes, call it spiritual warfare. Call me a Bible thumper if you like. Call me a Christian nationalist. I’ve heard it all, and here’s my honest answer to every label anyone wants to throw at me:
How’s it working out for you?
Does it feel good going to bed at night knowing you defended your political party like it was your identity but haven’t defended your marriage with half that energy? Does winning that argument about gender, or war, or whatever the outrage of the day is actually change anything in your house? Are you sleeping better because your team covered the spread? Because your side “won” the news cycle?
I’m not asking to shame you. I’m asking because I’ve lived both sides of that question, and I know which one actually lets a man sleep in peace.
What Winning Actually Looks Like
The real win was never on a screen. It never was.
The win is a relationship with Christ that isn’t performance-based, where you don’t have to have it all figured out to show up honestly before God.
The win is your family back around a real table, phones face down, actually looking at each other, actually talking, and actually laughing about something that has nothing to do with a bet, a headline, or a hashtag.
The win is your kids remembering you as the man who was there, not the man who was in the room but was somewhere else entirely.
The win is a country that rebuilds itself the only way it’s ever actually been rebuilt: one strong man, leading one strong home, multiplied by every man willing to do the same.
God. Family. Country. In that order, for a reason. You cannot lead a family well without first being led well by God. Everything else- the politics, the sports leagues, the culture wars, the algorithm feeding you outrage at 11 p.m.—is noise designed to distract you from that order.
Where This Goes From Here
In the days ahead, we’re going to go deeper: fatherlessness, isolation, the lie of the lone wolf, the marriage covenant versus the culture’s contract, what real spiritual armor looks like day to day, and what it actually costs a man to keep pretending he’s fine when he isn’t.
Because here’s the thing I’ve learned building True Man Life Coaching and now American Family Renaissance: no man fixes his life alone. Not the distraction, not the isolation, not the slow drift away from the man he was called to be. The way back always runs through other men, honest ones, strong ones, willing to say “me too” instead of pretending they’ve got it handled.
That’s precisely what we built The Power of Asking for Help: American Family Renaissance Men’s Summit for.
If any part of this landed on you today, if you felt that gut check about Sunday afternoons, about the phone in your hand, about the war you didn’t realize you were already in, don’t just nod and scroll past it. Do something with it.
Listen to the conversation that’s already happening: truemanpodcast.com
Watch it play out on YouTube: @truemanpodcast
And reserve your seat for the summit that’s going to pull all of this together: Reserve Your Seat — The Power of Asking for Help
This is a free, one-day gathering unlike anything we’ve built before, and seats are limited. Don’t just read about the fight for God, Family, and Country. Show up for it.
Let’s go build the man, so we can restore the home, so we can save the country.
Build the Man. Strengthen the Family. Restore the Nation.
MVP (Mike Van Pelt) is the Founder & CEO of True Man Life Coaching and Founder of American Family Renaissance. He helps Christian men reclaim their God-given identity, break isolation, and lead with authenticity through faith, character, and brotherhood.