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In this episode, Dan continues decoding a card from a church bulletin that outlines the features of a particular church. The focus this time is the promise of “strong handshakes.” There’s a lot to decode with this idea: What does it express about gender? About sexuality? About the family? About this church’s view of proper social order? Check it out to find the answers to these (and other!) questions.
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Welcome, as always, to It's in the Code, the series that's part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am your host, Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Delighted, as always, to be with you, and as always, thank you to you for listening, for supporting us, for all the different things that you do.
The feedback, the Discord comments, the emails, all of those things, so important, continually building this series with your help, so thank you for that.
I want to dive in today.
We're still living in the place we've been for a little while.
We've been looking at this insert that presumably went into, say, a church bulletin or could go in church mailers and so forth.
And it's just this little card, but it tells us so much about that kind of high-control religion, that high-control conservative Christianity in America in such a brief format.
We've been unpacking this and decoding this for a while, just working our way down the card.
And just as a reminder, maybe if you've missed the last couple episodes or haven't had a chance to check those out, It's just this small card that highlights eight things that folks will encounter at the church in question.
It doesn't tell us what the church is.
It does have a symbol, and Enterprising listeners tracked that down and figured out what church this is.
I haven't named that church, and I don't plan to do that.
But it tells you a lot of things about this church and what you'll encounter.
We looked at the first three of these things.
There was smiling wives, obedient children, and loud singing.
And today we get to the fourth one.
And this is one that I've really been waiting for.
And as I was putting together my notes and thoughts for this episode, I was like, I could go forever on this.
And I won't, I promise.
But there would be a lot more to say than we're going to have time to get to today.
But it's one that brings us back to issues of gender, issues of sexuality, issues of family, and it is strong handshakes.
I kid you not, the card says smiling children, excuse me, smiling wives, obedient children, loud singing, and strong handshakes.
Why?
Well, let's dive in and find out, okay?
So let's start with this.
And I think everybody listening, you know this.
I tell my students all the time that this kind of sort of deciphering or decoding is often about taking what is obvious or implicit in something and making it explicit, of identifying how it operates on us, what it's communicating in ways that we may not even be aware of or we just take for granted.
And the first thing about this is there's absolutely no doubt But when this card refers to strong handshakes, it's talking about men.
Now, don't misunderstand me.
I absolutely believe that people who are not men can have strong handshakes and whatever.
But with this card, within this context, within the context of everything we've seen about this, it's talking about men.
It's presupposing that men should have strong handshakes, and if you have a strong handshake, you are encountering a man.
One of the striking things about gender essentialism and gender complementarianism, these ideas we might talk about, And one of the central features about the view of the family put forward within this kind of traditionalist vision is that it is so culturally ingrained that we can recognize elements immediately.
And a strong handshake is a defining feature of masculinity, I think, is one of those.
So when we refer to strong handshakes, we're referring to men who give strong handshakes.
When you come to this church, let's say you're a visitor, you walk in, you're going to be greeted by new people.
You're going to be invited in.
You're going to be welcomed.
And when those new people are men, you can be assured that when you extend your hand and introduce yourself, you'll be rewarded with a strong handshake.
So this is about men.
But what about them?
We know we're talking about men, but of course our interest is not just that, but it's about what kind of men are encoded or presupposed in this two-word phrase.
And the first thing to think about here is that strong handshakes complement smiling wives and obedient children.
Those things fit together.
They're a unit.
We said that language of smiling wives evokes an image of the woman standing and smiling brightly.
She is standing by her husband.
When you walk into that church, the first thing you're going to see are couples.
Men and women.
Next to the man is standing this smiling wife.
He extends his hand.
You get a strong handshake.
She's smiling as he extends that hand, and together they are a kind of a vision of who and what this church is about.
He compliments her.
That's why we call it gender complementarianism.
The two of them together complement one another.
It is only together as a couple that they represent something full and complete.
This is a core idea, a core conception, a visceral reality within this kind of religious vision and religious practice.
He completes the set piece at the absolute center of the conservative Christian vision of social life.
Completing the set piece of the cishet nuclear family couple.
The couple that originates the nuclear family.
A man and a woman.
And so strong handshakes here, more than just some generic conception of men, it evokes the literal core of gender complementarianism, the idea that neither men nor women are complete in and of themselves.
And that is a really core idea, again, within this kind of Christian articulation.
It is only together, as a pair, complementing one's essential but fundamentally different features and roles, that they are complete.
Men, in and of themselves, are incomplete.
Women, in and of themselves, are incomplete.
It is only when they are paired, as a couple, in marriage, that they complement one another fully and sort of embody the fullness of what humans are supposed to be.
And of course, we don't get to this idealized vision of the family without children, and obedient children to boot.
Children are the purpose and fulfillment of this vision of monogamous cishet bliss.
That's the purpose of marriage, is ultimately children.
Which is why I still don't completely get the insertion of loud singing before strong handshakes, you know?
But nobody asked me.
It's not my flyer.
It's not my little card.
If I'm laying out the card, I keep all that family stuff in like one, well, one unit.
But hey, you know, they did what they did.
Welcome the insights of others as to why it's broken up that way.
But they're a unit.
They fit.
And I suggested when we talked about, you know, these smiling wives, that those smiles express their full approval of and satisfaction with their appointed social role.
And I think that coupled with this, what Strong Handshakes does is it tells us that in this church, we'll encounter men who give their wives something to smile about.
The reason why the wives here are satisfied and affirming of their appointed social role is that the men in this church are playing their proper social role.
For example, as we've seen, they are first and foremost fathers and husbands.
But they fulfill these roles as they should be filled, rather, so that the families they head, and again, the men are absolutely the head of the family, the family that they head, they are as they should be.
Wives are happy and supportive and satisfied and children are obedient, and those things are true because these men are the husbands and fathers they should be.
So, strong handshakes evokes, once again, proper social order.
It's about so much more than just knowing how to give a good handshake or project confidence or something like that.
It evokes proper social order, which begins in the nuclear family as a microcosm.
and a building block of society as a whole.
These are things we've talked about for years on this podcast and other series that have been done through Straight White American Jesus.
You all know this.
You've heard this.
If you haven't had a chance to, go back and listen to those.
A properly ordered family is the basis of a properly ordered society.
It's absolutely key.
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I'm Leah Payne, a historian and expert in Pentecostal and charismatic movements in the United States and beyond.
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So let's say more about that.
Proper order, a man playing his proper role, proper role as father, proper role as husband.
But we need to unpack a little bit about the kind of man who makes his wife smile and raises obedient children, who embodies proper social order.
Because this phrase is not just about men, it's about masculinity.
It evokes so much about the vision of masculinity at the heart of this conception of cisheterosocial normativity.
And the most obvious, but again implicit dimension of this, but one of the most obvious, is strength.
Masculinity in this model, in this kind of religion, in this church, is fundamentally about strength.
There's an obvious physical dimension to this.
Men are physically strong.
The strength expressed in the handshake is physical strength.
No matter exactly what the guy might look like, no matter what body type or what his dimensions are, he has a measure of physical strength.
This is an essential part of masculinity.
But strength is not merely physical.
It also expresses authority.
This is a man who is confident in the knowledge of what God and society demand of him.
He knows he's the head of the family.
He knows he is called to be the spiritual leader.
He knows that his family is the linchpin of social order.
He knows these things, he leans into these things, and he expresses his authority on the basis of these.
And what better way to express that authority than through obedient children?
This is a key idea.
This is why I link these things so strongly.
The fact that he has obedient children tells us that he properly exercises authority.
The fact that he properly orders his own family assures us that he will properly exercise his authority in all domains.
And if he doesn't have a properly ordered family, this calls into question his masculinity, it calls into question his leadership, it calls into question his social role.
I was reminded as I was putting this together, the church that I grew up in, there was this kind of scandal.
There was a church member who was everything about this vision of masculinity.
He was a big man.
He was strong.
You know, he was caring and kind and so forth, but he was big.
He was strong.
He was a father.
He was a husband.
He was a deacon in the church, sort of a part of the church leadership.
His kids were involved there all the time and so forth.
And the scandal that erupted was his daughter became pregnant.
She was in high school, obviously out of wedlock.
He had to step down from his position as A church leader.
Why?
His family was disordered.
He was no longer fit to serve in that role until he had brought his family back into order.
And again, this has broader cultural overtones.
We've seen this in politics, I don't know how many times, where some sort of scandal comes along and the man steps down to do what?
To spend more time with his family or whatever.
That's always the code to spend more time with their family.
If one can't manage their own family, if one can't lead their own family, if one can't exercise authority in his own family, a man has no business exercising authority or leadership anywhere else.
And of course, within this model, leadership is the domain of men to begin with.
So this guy's strong handshake assures us that we're in the presence of someone who gets it, someone who knows the score, someone who's ready to play his role in leading his family and leading his society and playing that social role.
And as I was thinking about this, You know, if I had to pick one word to capture this, to capture this expression of strength, to capture this expression of authority, to capture this this cis hetero vision of masculinity, it would be hard.
The guy is strong and tough.
He's a disciplinarian.
He's a leader.
He's hard.
And there's also an obvious sexual element to this.
In case you heard the word hard, well, wow, that sounds kind of provocative.
Yes, yes, there's a sexual dimension to this as well.
Because this vision of masculinity is irreducibly tied to sexuality.
And obviously, when I say sexuality, heterosexuality.
A lot of cultural discourse right now from the J.D.
Vance's of the world about the need for married women to have children or for women to be married and to have children.
But within this vision of society, all of those women have children because of virile husbands.
It's a vision of married women with children, which means women with husbands.
This notion of the strong husband is right there with that.
And the masculinity of any man who isn't demonstrably virile is suspect.
Again, the end goal of marriage is children, which is why There's an implicit questioning of the masculinity, the virility of any man, even if married.
Even if married to a woman who doesn't have children.
Marriage and children are essential components of authentic masculinity within this vision.
And of course, once again, the wives are smiling.
This man not only exercises authority and leads his family, he also satisfies his wife, and this will include sexual satisfaction.
This kind of HCR, this of high-control religion, if you've spent time in these kinds of conservative Christian contexts, they are absolutely obsessed with sex.
Now they're obsessed with sex in a context of straight married people but obsessed.
It's a strong focus that will come up a lot.
Wives are called to be sexually available and pleasing to their husbands and there's a lot of focus on this and lots of great work done on the conceptions of femininity within this and how femininity applies to sexuality and sexual availability to men and so forth.
But there's also an element of masculinity here.
A defining mark of masculine sexuality is the ability to please women, to sexually satisfy women, to sexually satisfy one's wife, one's partner.
So to put it bluntly, tying that together, that smiling wife beaming next to her husband, she has reason to smile.
She's not only smiling because she accepts her social role, because she affirms her social role, and vice versa, the role of her husband.
She's also smiling because she is satisfied.
She is fulfilled sexually by him.
That is part, a huge, implicit, central part of the vision of masculinity here that we find expressed.
I said at the outset here, I could talk about this all day and I could keep expanding on these themes, but we need to wind things down.
What we find with strong handshakes is not just a reference to men.
It is clearly that.
It is clearly a reference to men, but I think it's important for us to see that it's also reference to a very specific and still very culturally pervasive conception of masculinity.
The man behind this handshake is a stereotypical man's man.
Many of us, myself included, will remember, you know, sort of lessons in masculinity that we got from our father or our grandfather or an uncle or some other, you know, trusted masculine feature in our life who would tell us, you know, how important it was to be able to shake hands properly, to have a strong handshake, to look somebody in the eye, to stand up tall.
It was a teaching about the embodiment of this vision of masculinity, and it was not limited to church context.
It was not limited to religion.
It's culturally pervasive, and it remains so.
It's certainly been challenged in many ways, but it remains culturally pervasive.
The guy behind this handshake is that vision of the quote-unquote man's man.
What does that mean?
It means there's no space here for any version of masculinity that would depart from that vision of strength and authority and virility.
There's no queer masculinity here.
There can't be any soft masculinity or anything that's too sensitive or too artistic or too whatever, too much of a departure from this masculinity.
There can be no feminine masculinity.
An interesting and paradoxical and informative concept that people have talked about for some time.
The guy behind this handshake, yeah, he might be sensitive.
He might be kind.
We want him to love his children, not just to exercise authority.
It'd be nice if he's in touch with his emotions.
But none of those features are essential core components of his masculinity.
No.
Masculinity is about strength.
It's about authority.
It's about virility.
Those are central components.
Anything else is icing on the cake.
But those are the core.
And we're going to continue to explore the outflow of this vision of masculinity next episode.
We're going to keep moving down the card.
The next item on the card is young marriages.
So we're going to see what that means and how all of this masculinity flows into this emphasis on young marriages.
We'll hit that next episode.
As I said at the outset, as I always try to say, thank you so much for the support.
We could not do what we do without you.
Please keep the ideas coming.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Always welcome the new topics, new ideas, feedback on existing episodes and topics.
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Recently experienced a loss in my family and that set me back a little bit in responding to the emails.
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