The modern men’s movement took shape in the 1970s and 1980s as longstanding ideas about masculinity, family, work, and men’s roles were being reconsidered. New forms of brotherhood, initiation, and personal development emerged, encouraging greater emotional awareness, accountability, and maturity.

Influential thinkers including Robert Bly, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, Joseph Campbell, Sam Keen, and Carl Jung explored archetypes, shadow, transformation, and the development of the masculine. Founders of the New Warrior Training Adventure, including Bill Kauth, helped bring many of these ideas into experiential work, initiation, and sustained men’s circles.

Over time, however, some efforts to correct the excesses of masculinity began to cast suspicion on masculinity itself. Strength could be confused with domination, aggression with violence, hierarchy with oppression, boundaries with exclusion, and male spaces with something inherently problematic. Emotional openness and compassion were encouraged, while capacities such as agency, courage, directness, discipline, and protectiveness sometimes received less affirmation.

Men’s organizations were also influenced by broader cultural and political currents. In some spaces, supporting men’s growth became entangled with expectations that men adopt particular assumptions about identity, privilege, inclusion, safety, and acceptable belief.

Sacred Kings emerged from a different question: What if the task is not simply to soften masculinity, but to develop it in its fullness?

We believe mature masculinity draws on the full range of a man’s capacities. A man can be strong without being domineering, compassionate without becoming passive, emotionally open without relinquishing agency, and powerful without abusing power.

Drawing on this lineage, and inspired in part by Bill Kauth’s call to recover some of the original spirit of men’s work, a group of men began building Sacred Kings around that vision. They believed men still needed initiation, challenge, mentorship, accountability, sustained relationships with other men, and spaces where they could wrestle with difficult questions without being expected to arrive at predetermined answers.

Sacred Kings does not organize around a political ideology. We value inclusion without uniformity, safety without eliminating challenge, and respect for difference without treating disagreement as harm. Men should be free to speak candidly, test assumptions, encounter discomfort, and think for themselves.

Sacred Kings carries forward what has proven powerful in men’s work while addressing what has become imbalanced. We seek to cultivate a mature, integrated masculinity that draws on the full capacities of men while leaving each man free to determine for himself the man he will become.