Chapter 10

NO MORE CHRISTIAN NICE GUY

JOHN ELDREDGE DIDN’T LIKE OFFICE WORK. IT wasn’t good for his masculinity or his spirituality. Spiritual life was meant to be “frontier,” untamed. If evangelical men wanted to experience true Christianity, they’d need to get out of “their La-ZBoys and climate-controlled shopping malls and into God’s wild creation.” Eldredge’s 2001 book, Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul, set the tone for a new evangelical militancy in the new millennium. Eldredge’s God was a warrior God, and men were made in his image. Aggression, not tenderness, was part of the masculine design. Wild at Heart would sell more than four million copies in the United States alone, becoming a ubiquitous presence in megachurch men’s groups, college dorm rooms, Christian bookstores, and church libraries. Spawning dozens of copycat books that borrowed copiously from Eldredge’s formula, it would frame evangelical explorations of masculinity for years to come.¹

For Eldredge, masculinity was thoroughly militaristic. Little boys loved to play with capes and swords, bandannas and six-shooters. Yearning to know they were powerful and dangerous, someone to be reckoned with, they specialized in inventing games “where bloodshed is a prerequisite for having fun.” God made men to be dangerous, Eldredge explained. Women didn’t start wars or commit many violent crimes. But the very strength that made men dangerous also made them heroes. If a neighborhood was safe, it was because of the strength of its men. Men, not women, brought an end to slavery, apartheid, and the Nazis. Men gave up their seats on the Titanic’s lifeboats. And, crucially, “it was a Man who let himself be nailed to Calvary’s cross.”²

According to Eldredge, God created all men to long for “a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.” But society offered confusing messages. For thirty years people had been redefining masculinity into something “sensitive, safe, manageable and, well, feminine,” yet now they berated men for not being men. The church bore a large share of the blame. A “crisis in masculinity” pervaded both church and society because a warrior culture no longer existed, but men needed a place where they could learn “to fight like men.” Eldredge dismissed the charge that Jesus instructed his followers to turn the other cheek: “You cannot teach a boy to use his strength by stripping him of it.” Eldredge’s Jesus more closely resembled William Wallace than either Mother Teresa or Mister Rogers. Attempts to pacify men only emasculated them. “If you want a safer, quieter animal, there’s an easy solution: castrate him.” Sadly, “clingy mothers”—and the public-school system—effectively did just that.³

Eldredge opened his book with a portion of Matthew 11:12: “The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force.” Much of his inspiration, however, came from popular culture. It wasn’t women, after all, who made Braveheart one of the best-selling movies that decade. Mel Gibson’s William Wallace was one of Eldredge’s favorite heroes, but the American cowboy also occupied a special place in Eldredge’s vision of masculinity. The cowboy embodied a yearning every man felt, the desire “to ‘go West,’” to be “wild, dangerous, unfettered and free.” Eldredge also showcased the heroic masculinity of Teddy Roosevelt, tenacious American soldiers, Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Bruce Willis in Die Hard.⁴

It was from popular culture that Eldredge discovered the underlying truth that it was not enough for a man to be a hero; he must be the hero to the woman he loves. James Bond, Indiana Jones, young soldiers going off to war—every man required his own beauty to rescue. Women, too, possessed something “wild at heart,” but it was “feminine to the core, more seductive than fierce.” They yearned to be fought for, to be wanted, to share a man’s adventure. According to Eldredge, a woman sinned when she tried to control her world, when she was grasping rather than vulnerable, when she sought to control her own adventure rather than share in the adventure of a man. Echoing Tim and Beverly LaHaye, Eldredge believed that God had written on little girls’ hearts a fairy-tale dream of Prince Charming coming to their rescue. (This theme was then picked up by Christian singer Rebecca St. James, whose 2002 Wait for Me, a book promoting purity culture, sold over 100,000 copies.) Women wanted to be pursued, delighted in, fought for; the “deep cry of a little girl’s heart is am I lovely?” Rather than “brutalizing” femininity, Eldredge warned, we should take these princess dreams seriously. For Eldredge, gender difference resided at the level of the soul.⁵

Eldredge’s fans were legion, but he was not without critics within evangelicalism. Randy Stinson, executive director of CBMW, took issue with Eldredge’s theology. Stinson alleged that Eldredge neglected the reality of sin, and he accused Eldredge of promulgating “an unbiblical view of God” by depicting God as a “risk-taker,” thereby implying that God did not have full knowledge of the future. Theological quibbles aside, Stinson praised Eldredge for rightly identifying several key problems: the feminization of men by our culture and churches, the emasculation of our boys, and the truth that “every man needs a battle for which he can live and die.” In other words, Eldredge based his conclusions on a faulty theological foundation, but those conclusions were nevertheless largely sound. A decade later, Stinson would follow in Eldredge’s footsteps, coauthoring his own book on “biblical manhood.”⁶

Calvin College professors Mark Mulder and James K. A. Smith also called out Eldredge’s failure to reckon with the reality of sin, but they considered it a more fundamental flaw. While Eldredge claimed to root his notion of masculinity in a theology of creation, in the God-given “essence” of men and women, Smith and Mulder insisted that “what Eldredge attributes to creation, biblical Christianity ascribes to the Fall!” War, conflict, and enmity resulted from humanity’s sinfulness, not from God’s good creation; thus “it cannot be the case that being a warrior is essential to being a man.” The Bible promised a coming kingdom of peace; endorsing this “warrior-ideal” would foster “sinfulness, not redemption,” they warned. Mulder and Smith, however, were in the minority, certainly if book sales were any measure.⁷

ELDREDGE’S BOOK was the most popular book on evangelical masculinity published in 2001, but it wasn’t the only one. Other writers, too, had tired of tenderness. The time had come to toughen up American manhood, starting with boys. In January of that year, James Dobson published Bringing Up Boys. The key to understanding boys, according to Dobson, was testosterone. The hormone made boys “competitive, aggressive, assertive, and lovers of cars, trucks, guns, and balls.” A “masculine will to power” was evident in little boys who dressed up as superheroes, cowboys, and Tarzan. It was why boys fought, climbed, wrestled, and strutted around. Feminists and liberals seemed to think that testosterone was “one of God’s great mistakes.” They preferred to make boys more like girls, and men more like women—“feminized, emasculated, and wimpified.” But “reprogramming” men and boys interfered with God’s careful design.⁸

Men’s competitive nature was evidenced in their proclivity for risk and adventure, as well as in their greater political and economic achievements—these despite feminist affirmative action campaigns—and the wars they had prosecuted throughout history. From his office at Focus on the Family, Dobson could peer across the valley at the United States Air Force Academy. Watching cadets train to be pilots and officers, he pondered how men’s competitive nature explained “the bloody military campaigns that have raged through the ages,” yet how “this masculine thirst for conquest” had also produced “daring and adventuresome feats that benefited humanity.” General MacArthur, “one of the greatest military leaders of all time,” was one of Dobson’s heroes.⁹

In his book about boys, Dobson found occasion to denounce Hillary Clinton, “bra burners,” political correctness, and the “small but noisy band of feminists” who attacked “the very essence of masculinity.” He praised Phyllis Schlafly and recommended homeschooling as “a means of coping with a hostile culture.” He advised girls not to call boys on the telephone (to do so would usurp the role of initiator) and encouraged fathers to engage in rough-and-tumble games with their sons. He lamented that films presenting moral strength and heroism had given way to “man-hating diatribes” like Thelma & Louise and 9 to 5, and that “lovely, feminine ladies” on the small screen had been replaced by “aggressive and masculine women” like those in Charlie’s Angels. Mel Gibson’s The Patriot, a tale in which Gibson starred as a Revolutionary militia leader who ruthlessly avenged his son’s death, proved the exception to the rule.¹⁰

Dobson’s Bringing Up Boys found a receptive audience. Its sales would eventually top two million copies. By that time Dobson had amassed a considerable following; his radio program was reportedly carried on over 4200 stations around the world and heard daily by over 200 million people. Charles Colson boasted that “All people, Christian and non-Christian alike” should read the book: “It just could save America.”¹¹

Less than five months after Dobson’s book appeared, Douglas Wilson published Future Men: Raising Boys to Fight Giants. The son of an evangelist who settled in Moscow, Idaho, Wilson had helped found “a Baptist-leaning, ‘hippie, Jesus People church.’” He had little formal theological training, and his church was, in his words, a “Baptist-Presbyterian ‘mutt.’” After encountering the teachings of Rushdoony, he inculcated Reconstructionist-inspired values within his faith community. Due to his hybrid theology, and no doubt also to his cantankerous personality, no established Reformed denomination would claim him. Undaunted, Wilson started his own denomination. In 1981, he founded the Logos School, a classical Christian academy, and he became a leader in the classical Christian education movement, establishing the Association of Classical and Christian Schools in 1994, and that same year founding New Saint Andrews College, a four-year classical Christian college with the motto: “For the faithful, wars shall never cease.”¹²

Wilson’s Future Men was a perfectly timed primer on militant masculinity that reached far beyond his enclave. Looking to Theodore Roosevelt as a model of Christian masculinity, Wilson asserted that as future men, boys were “future warriors.” Consistent with Reconstructionist thought, the concept of dominion was central to Wilson’s definition of masculinity; like Adam in the Garden of Eden, all men were made to exercise dominion. Boys had an innate drive to conquer and subdue, and they should be trained to be adventurous and visionary, to become “lords in the earth.” For this task, it was essential for young boys to play with toy swords and guns, and for older boys to be trained in the use of real firearms. Indeed, Wilson called for a “theology of fist fighting” to instruct boys when, where, and how to fight. Lest there be any doubt, Wilson clarified that Christianity was in no way pacifistic. True, Old Testament prophets foretold a time of peace, or an “eschatological pacifism,” but the peace Christ brings was purchased with blood. Until that time men and boys must study war; to do otherwise would leave men “fighting the dragon with a pruning hook.”¹³

Like other writers, Wilson defined masculinity in terms of initiation. As he explained in his earlier writings on marriage, “a man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” Although egalitarians might rebel against the concept of authority, Wilson believed that the submission of wives to husbands, when occurring “in countless families,” would bring about “a larger patriarchal society” and a greater social good. According to Wilson, marriage had three purposes: companionship, producing godly children, and the avoidance of sexual immorality. With regard to the latter, God offered very practical help for Christians struggling with temptation: sexual activity. Like Marabel Morgan and the LaHayes, Wilson believed that sexual relations within marriage should be frequent. God intended for women to meet their husbands’ (considerable) sexual needs; it was woman’s duty “to submit to the will of God and gladly bear children for her husband.” Moreover, marriage could not be “spiritually consummated” if the husband acted as a “spiritual eunuch,” as one “impotent in his masculinity.” Women must understand that they were “led by a lord.” To this end, young suitors should be “disruptively masculine,” cheerfully interfering with a future wife’s plans. Woman was made for man, not the other way around. Young women should be instructed to be homemakers; women became “increasingly beautiful” when they cultivated “a gentle and quiet spirit.” Not surprisingly, Wilson thought women had no place in combat; they were a sexual distraction to male soldiers, they could get pregnant, they distorted “covenantal lines of authority,” and they were not as good as men in “the important work of violence.”¹⁴

Wilson understood that some readers might recoil at his use of the word dominance to describe the husband’s role, but in his view such a response testified to the extent to which the church had been influenced by feminism, “whether the man-hating secular variety or the sanitized, ‘evangelical’ kind.” The real problem was “the wimping out” of Christian men. By wandering from biblical teaching, Christians had replaced “the hardness of masculinity with the tenderness of women,” and the results had been disastrous. Wilson was no fan of Promise Keepers. In 1999 he critiqued the movement for promoting “a quiet adoption of feminism” rather than a masculine approach to godliness. As Wilson put it, “Contrary to popular teaching on the Christian home, a man’s duty is not to be a real sweet guy.” With characteristic bluntness, Wilson denounced much of the Christian men’s movement as “nothing more than a discipleship program for weenies.”¹⁵

THE BOOKS BY Wilson, Dobson, and Eldredge appeared in the months before September 11, 2001. When terrorists struck the United States, their call for “manly” heroes acquired a deep and widespread resonance among evangelicals. A very real, not merely rhetorical, “battle to fight” had suddenly materialized for American men. The success of these books, and their cultural impact, can be understood in light of the renewed sense of crisis.

The new millennium had ushered in a new era for American evangelicals. The Clintons were out of the White House and a cowboy president was back in the saddle. Of course, George W. Bush had bought his Crawford Ranch just before announcing his candidacy; it made for good photo ops. Still, Bush’s evangelical faith was authentic. Reflecting the less militant strand of 1990s evangelicalism, Bush had campaigned on a message of “compassionate conservatism.” The terror attacks, however, would transform him into a crusader.¹⁶

The moral certainties of the War on Terror—framed as they were by an evangelical president—put an end to any post–Cold War uncertainty among evangelicals. Not since the height of the Cold War had foreign affairs so clearly connected to domestic concerns. In fact, in the days and weeks following the attacks, many Americans turned to Cold War rhetoric and thinking as they grappled with how to respond to this new threat. Once again, America needed strong, heroic men to defend the country at home and abroad. Evangelicalism had never completely abandoned its Cold War militarism, and those who had become unsettled by the “soft patriarchy” of the 1990s men’s movement were primed for this moment. The very existence of the nation again depended on the toughness of American men, and raising young boys into strong men became elevated to a matter of national security. Instructional books already lined the shelves of Christian bookstores.

The actual events of September 11 had called for all the manly strength men could muster. As Phyllis Schlafly put it, one of the unintended consequences of the attack on the World Trade Center was “the dashing of feminist hopes to make America a gender-neutral or androgynous society.” When the firemen charged up the stairs of the burning towers, the death tally was: “men 343, women 0.” Clearly this was no place for affirmative-action women. Fighting the Taliban, too, was a job for “real men.” Fortunately, a “warrior culture” had survived thirty years of feminist assaults, so there were still some men “macho enough to relish the opportunity to engage and kill the bad guys of the world.” Watching the war unfold on television, Schlafly almost expected to see “John Wayne riding across the plains.” America needed manly heroes.¹⁷

In 2005, Steve Farrar echoed this renewed urgency in his first book published after 9/11, King Me: “When those two planes hit the Twin Towers on September 11, what we suddenly needed were masculine men. Feminized men don’t walk into burning buildings. But masculine men do. That’s why God created men to be masculine.” Like his Point Man, Farrar’s King Me illustrated the versatility of evangelical notions of militant masculinity; masculine men were needed to save the nation from terrorists and defend against cultural forces that threatened America from within. But such men were hard to come by because the media, the public-school system, and the academic elite colluded in the emasculation of boys. The church wasn’t helping matters; by emphasizing “feminine traits” like tenderness, compassion, and gentleness, churches had neglected the equally spiritual but masculine traits of aggressiveness, courage, and standing on the truth. Again Farrar castigated the church for feminizing Jesus. Songs about Christ’s “beauty” were especially galling. As he wrote, “If you went up to John Wayne and said he was beautiful, he would separate several of your molars and bicuspids into a new world order.” Mel Gibson’s film The Passion offered a good antidote to the image of a wimpy Christ, but more needed to be done. Farrar didn’t shy away from the fact that he was advocating a more militant turn. The trend had been to “major on the ‘tender’ and minor on the ‘warrior,’” but “in the trenches you don’t want tenderness.”¹⁸

Gordon Dalbey, too, reflected the revitalized militarism among evangelicals in a revised edition of his Healing the Masculine Soul. In 1988, he had criticized the “foolish extremes” men’s ministries went to, such as hosting fellowship evenings showing films about “the latest jet fighter planes.” Sure, this met men where they were, but so would X-rated movies; a Jesus who “healed bodies and blessed ‘the peacemakers’” and urged his followers to “turn the other cheek” surely wouldn’t be comfortable with fighter-plane movies any more than with X-rated ones. In his 2003 edition, Dalbey blunted his former critique, removing any mention of Jesus as healer and peacemaker. Instead, he added thoughts on how boys must be ushered into a vision “of conflict and warfare.”¹⁹

Other works reveal the extent to which new writers came to rely on common tropes. In 2005, Paul Coughlin published No More Christian Nice Guy, a manifesto against alleged distortions of Christian masculinity. Citing Dobson, Weber, Generals MacArthur and Patton, George Gilder, Robert Bly, Teddy Roosevelt, and Mel Gibson’s The Passion, Coughlin offered a familiar critique of emasculated Christian manhood. He acknowledged that his book testified to men’s anger: “They’re angry with their culture, their church, and their God, and sometimes their anger is directed at women.” But he wanted to transform that anger into a redemptive force. Coughlin took care to distance himself from more extreme views. He affirmed his full support for women’s suffrage, countering the apparently popular notion “within the realm of Christian publishing” that a man ought to cast the vote for his entire household. He recognized, too, that prior to 1965 “it was not uncommon for an attractive young woman in the work force to be treated like a piece of flesh, a toy to be used by men.” And he acknowledged that men had previously showed troublingly little interest in their families, a problem that organizations like Focus on the Family and Promise Keepers had addressed. He also parted ways with those who advocated a hierarchical authority structure that placed men under the authority of their employers. He couldn’t stomach the idea that a boss “holds God’s proxy as our employer,” although he expressed no such discomfort with a hierarchy of authority based on gender.²⁰

Also in 2005, David Murrow’s Why Men Hate Going to Church urged the church to embrace danger and shed its reputation “as a place for little old ladies of both sexes.” Murrow admitted he didn’t have the usual qualifications to write books about men and church. He wasn’t a pastor, professor, or theologian, he was just “a guy in the pews” who noticed a disturbing trend. (A television producer, Murrow had written and produced Sarah Palin’s first television commercial in 2002.) But Murrow had done his reading. He cited Eldredge, Dobson, Dalbey, Lewis, Cole, and Wilson. He, too, celebrated the “wildness of Jesus,” praised Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, and thought the church needed “a few more Teddy Roosevelts.” Murrow agreed that aggression was “key to the masculine soul” and that “without men and their warrior spirit in church, all is lost.” Murrow didn’t have much new to say, but the timing was right; boasting more than 100,000 copies of his book in print, Murrow emerged as a leading voice in the Christian men’s movement.²¹

Books on evangelical masculinity were not meant for mere armchair reading. Christian fathers designed initiation rites for sons modeled on medieval knighthood involving expensive steak dinners and commemorated with symbols of great value, such as “a Bible, a shotgun or a plaque.” Knights, after all, were “the Promise Keepers of the Middle Ages.” Christian men retreated to the “wilderness” to participate in Wild at Heart Boot Camps or engage in “weekend paintball wars,” or they fashioned their own events featuring homegrown “Braveheart Games,” with activities ranging from changing tires on a car to throwing axes and chasing greased pigs. Larger organizations followed suit. At frenzied BattleCry youth rallies, evangelist Ron Luce warned students that communists, feminists, gays, and Muslims threatened to destroy the nation’s morality as surely as Osama bin Laden had destroyed the Twin Towers. In language rife with militaristic imagery, Luce called for a “wartime mentality,” for young people to awaken to the dangers of “culture terrorists.” With guest speakers including Jerry Falwell and Charles Colson, Luce’s ministry brought in the old guard to recruit a younger generation to militant Christianity.²²

Recognizing that their version of evangelical masculinity was out of step with contemporary trends, Promise Keepers rebranded accordingly. To appeal to “The Next Warriors for Christ,” the organization replaced promotional images of men hugging, crying, and holding hands, with pictures of sword-wielding men charging on horseback, climbing rocks, and covered in mud, accompanied by the reassuring promise that “This Ain’t Your Daddy’s PK!” Of course, the organization had only been around for a little over a decade at this point. No longer asking men to “Stand in the Gap,” more manly conference titles challenged men to rise up and “Storm the Gates.” Given the recent military buildup, some Christians thought the hypermasculine language and militant imagery to be in poor taste. Was this the time for Christian men to be “strutting our biceps and pressing spiritual iron”? For many evangelical men, it was the ideal time.²³

IN THE EARLY 2000S, white evangelicals were enthusiastic supporters of a military response to the September 11 attacks, but they weren’t alone. In October 2001, eight in ten Americans supported a ground war in Afghanistan. The war in Iraq, however, was a harder sell. Connections between Saddam Hussein’s regime and America’s national security remained sketchy, and many religious groups in the country resisted the administration’s efforts to drum up support for another war. The National Council of Churches urged the president to refrain from a preemptive strike; the Vatican warned that preemptive war would be “a crime against peace.” Conservative evangelicals begged to differ.²⁴

In October 2002, five evangelical leaders sent a letter to President Bush to assure him that a preemptive invasion of Iraq did indeed meet the criteria for just war. Written by Richard Land, president of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, and signed by fellow evangelicals Charles Colson, Bill Bright, D. James Kennedy, and Carl Herbster, the “Land letter” expressed appreciation for Bush’s “bold, courageous, and visionary leadership” and reassured him that his plans for military action were “both right and just.” Referencing the appeasement of Hitler, they urged Bush to disarm “the murderous Iraqi dictator” and reminded him that “the legitimate authority to authorize the use of U.S. military force” belonged to the United States government, not the UN. Elsewhere, Land cited Romans 13 to argue that “God ordained the civil magistrate” to punish evildoers.²⁵

It wasn’t just the evangelical elite who supported a preemptive strike. In 2002, ordinary evangelical Christians were “the biggest backers of Israel and Washington’s planned war against Iraq”: 69 percent of conservative Christians favored military action, a full 10 percentage points higher than the general population. In 2003, once the war commenced, 87 percent of white evangelical Christians supported Bush’s decision to go to war, compared to 70 percent of Protestant mainliners and 59 percent of secular Americans. As one evangelical parishioner explained, Jesus might have preached a gospel of peace, but the Book of Revelation showed that the suffering Messiah turned into the conquering Messiah; in the Bible, God didn’t just sanction “war and invasion,” God encouraged it. The evangelical parishioner’s pastor concurred, adding that President Bush “would fit right into this church . . . being on the same spiritual wavelength counts for a lot.”²⁶

Steeped in a literature claiming that men were created in the image of a warrior God, it’s no wonder evangelicals were receptive to sentiments like those expressed by Jerry Falwell in his 2004 sermon, “God is Pro-War.” Having long idealized cowboys and soldiers as models of exemplary Christian manhood, evangelicals were primed to embrace Bush’s “‘cowboy’ approach” and his “Lone Ranger mentality.” God created men to be aggressive—violent when necessary—so that they might fulfill their sacred role of protector.²⁷

At the 2004 Republican National Convention, Christian recording artist Michael W. Smith stood on the stage of New York’s Madison Square Garden, declaring his love for his president and his country. He then recounted how, only six weeks after the September 11 attacks, he had found himself in the Oval Office with his good friend, President Bush. They spoke of the firefighters and other first responders who had given their lives trying to save others. “Hey W,” said the presidential “W” to the singer. “I think you need to write a song about this.” Smith did as he was asked. And there, standing before the convention audience as patriotic images flashed on the screen behind him, he performed “There She Stands,” a song about the symbol of the nation, the American flag, standing proudly amid the rubble. It was a small rhetorical step to change the feminine “beauty” all men were created to fight for into the nation herself.²⁸