Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs , the new book by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), is a surprisingly well-written work about the crisis of masculinity. Men in the modern world are adrift, Hawley writes, and in order to right themselves, they need biblical guidance. This is true and good advice — although there is one point, and it’s not a small one, where I would take issue with the senator.

Manhood argues that men are called by the Bible to serve essential roles, including as husbands, fathers, priests — even kings. Our mission, as Dutch Calvinist politician, journalist, and social theorist Abraham Kuyper phrased it (in a line quoted by Hawley), is “to work on nature through human art, to ennoble and perfect it.” The Bible sees men as the facilitators of God’s creation. We are to play sports, work in the fields, raise families, and do the other hard essential things that reflect God’s own creative action. “Eden is itself already cultivated,” Hawley, the grandson of a Missouri farmer, wrote. “God did that part. If Adam is to till, he must till what is not already tilled. He must subdue what is yet wild; he must claim land from the wilderness.”

For Hawley, the biblical story of Adam and work offers a solution to the crisis facing men: “These are troubled times. But troubled times lead to renewal. If the Bible is right, the mission of Adam beckons, and the possibility of something better — for men, for America, awaits us.”

Hawley is an intelligent man and a good writer, but there is one aspect of manhood he is missing in Manhood. That is the idea of achieving true greatness. At one point, the senator noted that “depth psychologists,” particularly the “disciplines of Carl Jung,” are “fond of saying that when chaos and confusion threaten, opportunity awaits.” Yes, but Jung and his students also have deeply rich and profound things to say about manhood. One of their strongest points may not contradict Hawley’s argument, but it also goes beyond the liberal and conservative lines Hawley has drawn.

Swiss psychiatrist Jung once argued that despite family, fame, politics, or riches, a man would not feel fulfilled until he felt he had played his role in a larger divine drama. “That gives peace,” he wrote, “when people feel they are living the symbolic life, that they are actors in the divine drama. That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal. ... A career, the producing of children, all are maya [illusions] compared with that one thing, that your life is meaningful.”

Being a part of a cosmic drama does not require liberal selfishness (“finding myself”) or fame. Many men are called to love, get married, and raise children, and indeed, it is this kind of selfless calling that leads men to see their part in a divine plan and thus keep civilization going.

Hawley is also right about the value of sports as a form of initiation for young men. Psychologist James Hollis, whose book Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men is the best one I have ever read about men, often examines how, before the modern age, rites of initiation for adolescent boys were a crucial part of tribal and community life. Hawley noted this truth in an early chapter on growing up in a small town in Missouri. Joining the football team gave him male friends who would be mentors and friendships that would last for life. One of them committed suicide in his early 20s, a terrible sign of the epidemic of lifelines and depression that would plague men in the coming years.

Male friends can also form a tribe that reinforces honor — oftentimes, men are kept in line by wondering “what the guys would think.” Interestingly, former President Donald Trump is not mentioned in Manhood. Trump has the impressive manly trait of punching back hard against bullies, most notably in the media, but he also has displayed a dismaying lack of manly honor. He could have, for example, easily expressed his policy disagreements with the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) without slandering McCain’s experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Yet Hawley ignores one of the most exciting things about being a man: the desire to risk everything, including job, marriage, and money, for true greatness. This is powerfully dramatized in the great 2014 film Whiplash . The movie tells the story of a young jazz musician, Andrew Neyman, a drummer studying at an elite music conservatory. His instructor is Terence Fletcher, a man who treats his “studio band” at the school like Marine recruits. To Fletcher, telling someone “good job” is the same as saying they’re average, and that’s worse than death. Fletcher is no family man. Yet it’s impossible to take your eyes off of him. What makes Whiplash indelible is that its ultimate focus, the thing that it always comes back to, is manly greatness — and the required shedding of blood and sweat to realize your destiny. Another man who realized this and let nothing distract him from it was, of course, Jesus.

Too often today, men get beaten up by hard work with low pay, women who are passing them in school, and absent fathers. But the pain does not usher us into a greater cosmic meaning or purpose. Working the fields, playing football, and even raising a family just won’t provide that vision, which for centuries was the work of male tribal elders. As the grim statistics about fatherlessness reveal, those elders are now missing — and all the feminism in the world cannot replace them. Hollis sums this up brilliantly in Under Saturn’s Shadow:

Hawley’s Manhood, as good and necessary as it is, isn’t enough.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.