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Series: “Manhood”
Title: “The Model Man”This episode kicks off a deep-dive in the cultural discourse on “manhood” that is such a defining feature of conservative high-control religion and contemporary Christian nationalism. Dan will be exploring this theme by looking at the way it’s expressed in US Senator Josh Hawley’s book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. In this episode, he asks, who is Josh Hawley, and what makes him (in his own estimation) the “model man” to guide us on a journey to authentic “masculinity.” The answers? Take a listen to find out!
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Axis Mundi Sous-titrage ST'501 Welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am Dan Miller.
I am pleased to be with you today, as always.
As always, keep the ideas for the series coming.
Daniel Miller Swagge, Daniel Miller, SWAJ at gmail.com.
Always value insight, feedback, ideas for new episodes, and so forth.
We are starting a new series today.
After this, I'm not positive which direction I'm going.
So again, if you've got ideas of additional series, additional topics, additional ideas.
We've been spending some time in books, and that's where we're going to live.
If there's something like that that you want to take a look at, if there's a another church flyer out there with a handy list of things that you think are worth talking about, whatever it is, please let me know.
If you're a subscriber, you also can access our Discord and lots of great ideas floating around in there.
Always love hearing from people there as well.
Want to dive into today's material.
We are once again walking through a book to do so.
This was another book recommended by a colleague last spring, and I added it to the list and have been, well, I don't know, excited might be the wrong word about this book, but very much looking forward to sort of going through it and decoding it and seeing what it has to show us about the right and the things we talk about in this series.
And the focus here is Josh Hawley's book, Manhood, The Masculine Virtues America Needs.
And as with Ali Beth's Stucky's book that we just finished on toxic masculinity, the value of this book, you know, such as it is, is not the originality or intelligence of what he has to say.
He doesn't really say anything new, I don't think.
I don't think that I'm likely to find his reasoning very compelling and so forth.
So why engage?
Why talk about this?
Why talk about this vision of quote unquote manhood?
I think the value is that this book provides a window, one of many possible windows into the discourse of masculinity that defines so much of the contemporary and the MAGA movement and Christian nationalism and conservative churches and so much of this discourse, as as you know, if you listen and you pay attention to what's going on around us, so much of this is central to the issues that are sort of ripping apart America at present.
So the value of the book lies in the fact that it is not unique.
And as with Stuckey's book, basically I'm reading it, so you don't have to.
If you've read it, I would love your thoughts.
If you read it along as you listen to this, I would love to hear what you have to say.
Okay.
Like Stucky's book, I'm going to be reading it as we go.
I've read the first chapter.
I haven't read more than that.
I have not read online reviews of it.
I have not read synopses of it.
I am going to be going through it chapter by chapter, week by week.
And so you're going to get more or less my relatively unfiltered, relatively immediate response to the wisdom that Josh Hawley has for us about the topic of manhood.
And with this in view, it's worth noting a few things that I hope to do as we move through this book through upcoming episodes.
I have given up on trying to guess how many episodes it'll take.
People tease me because I'm like, oh, I don't know, a couple more episodes.
And like six episodes later, we're still talking about something.
So I'm not going to try to estimate.
I'm just going to try to move through it and do our deep dive.
And you know, that'll take as long as it takes.
But what I want to try to highlight are the cultural codes and values that lodge within concepts like masculinity and manhood.
And put both of those terms in quotes because those are contested terms.
And I think that's that's the issue of work here.
And I want to see how they are coded and what values are embedded within them within the contemporary right, and in somebody like Josh Hawley writes a book.
I want to see the ways in which a certain kind of Christianity inflects these codes.
These are ideas that I think are gonna are going to play a central role in this book, how they are coded with the ideas of nation or America or American identity.
Those are the things that I'm looking for as I work my way through this text.
So what I what I want to do, in other words, is to untangle How this centrally reinforcing notion of masculinity ties in with notions of Christian identity and nation to form the movement that we now call Christian nationalism because folks, this is a Christian nationalist text.
Whether it goes by that name or not, whether somebody like Josh Hawley appreciates that term or not, that's what this is.
And that's what we're going to be talking about and looking for as we decode this over the next however many episodes.
So to get us started, I want to spend a little time talking about the model man taking us on this journey to a proper understanding of manhood.
Josh Hawley.
That's right.
Josh Hawley is our model man.
And I really think if you're going to write a book on manhood, the American masculine virtues that America needs, I think tacitly you're making a claim that you embody these virtues.
I really do.
And somebody can contest that if they want.
But I think that's there.
So who is Josh Hawley?
If you're familiar with his name, you may know a whole bunch about Josh Hawley already, but maybe you're familiar with his name.
Maybe you don't remember from where there's good reason why you would be familiar.
He is the senior U.S. Senator from Missouri, but he's young.
He's 45 years old.
Prior to his election to the Senate in 2019, he was the Missouri Attorney General from 2017 to 2019.
He is a graduate of Yale Law School.
He clerked for, among others, Chief Justice John Roberts of SCOTUS of the Supreme Court.
He was a uh a clerk there.
He taught at the University of Missouri Law School from 2011 until his election as attorney general.
Prior to that, from 2011, or sorry, during that time from 2011 to 2015, he was also active with the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty.
It is one of the many groups advancing the legal cause of so-called religious freedom.
I say so called, not because I don't support religious freedom.
I do support authentic religious freedom, but because this was an organization where religious freedom, it is code for the imposition of Christianity in various domains of public life and the continued privileging of Christian Americans.
We're going to see that.
We see this right from chapter one of this book forward.
In 2010, he married his wife Erin, whom he met when she was also a clerk for Roberts, and they have three kids.
This is going to be important.
Only I don't plan on talking about his family any more than he does, except to say that for Josh Hawley, being a man means obviously being straight.
That always goes almost without saying, but being married and having children.
So it's important that he is married and has children.
What are the takeaways from all of that from that background?
Why bother looking at this background?
Well, if you have any familiarity with discourses of faith and masculinity and politics in this country, it's immediately evident that this is the terrain where we'll find Josh Hawley.
He fits into that mold.
He is walking down that track.
And he's one of many within the GOP who has worked hard to hone his his MAGA qualifications, his MAGA credentials, and make sure he's viewed as a loyal Trump Apple acolyte.
So what we're going to see in Josh Hawley is somebody who embodies so much of the discourse about masculinity on the contemporary right.
So I'm calling Josh Hawley our model man, and he is here to guide us through this quest for manhood.
He's the one who will who will be our authority, who will walk us down this path, who will help us discover what true and authentic manhood is.
So what I want to do in this episode is spend some time thinking that, okay, like so like why this guy?
Why is this the guy we should listen to?
Okay.
He's a New York Times best-selling author of a prior book about big tech.
He is claiming an authority here.
So why should we listen to this guy?
What makes him a reliable guide?
And I think it's worth thinking about this because we're going to we're going to see just how vacuous the Wright's discourse about masculinity ultimately is right from the outset of looking and saying, okay, Josh Hawley, like why should we listen to you?
So as I read the first chapter of his book, he gives us essentially two reasons we ought to listen to what he says.
The first is his personal experience.
And the second, of course, is the Bible.
And I think we're going to be talking about the Bible and what he understands the Bible to be and how he reads the Bible a lot throughout this text.
Okay.
But let's start with his his personal experience, because he sets up his discussion in the same folksy way that all of these kinds of discussions do.
And this is this is not unique to people on the right.
This is unique to anybody who's in a position to write a book like this, who really wants to convince the readers that he's that he is one of them or she is One of them, that they're just a regular person.
And he tries to do this.
He wants to convince his readers that he's just an ordinary guy like them.
He understands what masculinity is and what it demands because he's just a regular old guy.
He's not the Ivy League educated government elitist.
We might think that he is.
No, no, no.
He's just Josh.
And this comes through loud and clear before we even open the book.
If you Google Josh Hawley, you'll get a lot of images, and most of them are the images of Senator Josh Hawley.
He's in a suit and tie.
He's very sort of quaffed.
He's done up.
It's that Josh Hawley.
If you look at the book jacket, and you can probably find this online, you can find this in a bookstore.
If you feel like going and taking a look at that, you can.
But what you get is the I'm just a regular guy, Josh Hawley.
Josh Hawley is 45, as I say, he looks 20 years younger in his publicity photo on the jacket.
Which I actually find sort of interesting.
It's a strangely boyish image to me for a book on masculinity, and one where early on he's going to talk about, we'll get to this in a minute.
He's going to talk about sort of the stories he would hear from young men who felt, you know, directionless and rudderless and so forth.
And he even jokes about how young he was as a law school professor hearing these stories and how he probably didn't really have that much worldly wisdom to impart.
And so he chooses an image of himself where he looks very, very young, very boyish, in many ways, not sort of quote unquote manly in the way that he's going to present this later in the book.
We'll see what comes of that.
Okay.
He's also looking, if you look, if if you uh if you look at this, he's also working, pardon me, to channel his best Ryan Reynolds impression.
He looks like, I don't know, the the B list Ryan Reynolds.
Like, if you ever watch movies on like the Hallmark channel, and yes, I have watched movies on the Hallmark channel.
Those holiday specials, yes, I've watched them.
But they always have those actors who are like kind of doppelgangers of like the big name actors.
They don't have big name actors in them, but they have actors who look a lot like the big name actors.
That's kind of how he looks like.
He looks like a B list like Ryan Reynolds.
Like that's what he wants to be.
He's also dressed like a cool youth pastor, basically.
And like if you're listening and you grew up with like youth pastors, you know what I'm talking about.
He's got like the dark shirt and jeans.
He's leaking leaning forward with a grin on his face.
He's like, you know, this kind of like, yeah, I'm an authority.
I'm a senator, but I'm cool too.
I get you.
It's just just is it's it's youth pastor Josh Hawley.
And of course, the picture is also taken in such a way to ensure that we all see the wedding ring.
That we all see the wedding ring, and it's clear that he is in fact married, in case you didn't know that, in case you hadn't you'll Googled him and so forth.
Because of course, being married and straight is going to be a big, centrally important part of masculinity as he understands it.
So, right from the jump, before we even open the book, just looking at the dust jacket, we see Hawley trying to connect with all the regular guys who he thinks desperately need his book.
And this every man branding exercise, it continues when we open the book.
Hawley starts his book by reflecting on conversations he had with male law students as a law professor.
And he says this, he says, more often than you might expect, quote, that's a quote from him, more often than you might expect, he says, students coming to see him weren't just talking about things related to law school or the study of law, but about quote, what was going on in their lives, end quote.
Right?
Here's the young, cool youth pastor, only he's like, you know, working with law students.
Now, here's the key.
As a as a college professor, I get this.
And I'm sure he did have students who would bear their souls from time to time.
I get students who come to me and they're going through real things and they talk to me about real things, and they talk to me about stuff going on in their life.
I get this.
But from the outset, I call total bullshit on how often he suggests this happened, as well as the significance of it for the people talking with him, given his position as a law professor.
And I don't have any way to prove this.
Let me really clear.
I'm being speculative here, but I'm saying this smells off to me as somebody who has spent a decade and a half in full-time higher education working with undergraduates.
He's not working with undergraduates, working with undergraduate students.
I just, I think this is BS.
I don't think this happens all the time.
I think most people, they got somebody they want to talk to that's not going to be their law professor.
I don't think that that's what's going on.
So let me read to you how he describes this, how he describes these conversations.
He says, those were interesting conversations.
I was barely over 30 years old at the time and can't say I was a much of a position to offer Sage life counsel.
There's that thing where I'm not sure why he's positioning himself as so young and boyish given that statement.
He says, but I did soon enough begin to notice a pattern.
Many of the young men came to see who came to see me were struggling in ways they found hard to exactly define.
Some lacked confidence, some lacked direction, others could not seem to get motivated.
They were afraid to fail, to venture out and take a risk, but felt at the same time dissatisfied with their lives as they knew them.
One after another, in one way or another, said, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with my life.
And yet they felt they were failing at whatever that was.
That's how he describes this.
Now so here's the question.
How often are we supposed to believe that these conversations happened at a what depth?
To Josh Hawley, the law professor, that his law students are coming in with these conversations.
We're really supposed to believe that as a law professor, he had students who are regularly bearing their souls to him.
Why him?
Of all the people in their lives, he is that guy.
I just I don't buy it.
One after another said, he says, one after another, I heard this.
You get the sense of this this endless line of students coming to him and bearing their souls again.
I call BS.
If he was a former pastor or a counselor, yeah, maybe.
Maybe that would make sense.
If he was like working with clients on a regular basis, like you know, expressing themselves in this way, I just don't buy it.
Okay.
I also don't buy this because he wasn't a college professor.
He was a law school professor.
Folks, he's talking to graduate students.
He's talking with men who certainly had enough wherewithal to complete college, presumably doing well enough to get into law school.
They also had to take the LSAT exam to get into law school.
They had to clear a relatively high bar to get into law school, and then who chose to then go on and study law?
These are not the driftless, aimless men he describes.
I just feel an implausible lack of fit between his social location as a law professor at a law school, Yale educated, SCOTUS clerking loss law professor, his description of his students, one after another, again, as lacking confidence and lacking direction and lacking motivation.
I just don't buy it.
When he says that these students were all saying in effect, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with my life.
I think this has to be taken with a massive grain of salt.
They're in law school, which tells me that most of them probably have some idea of what they want to do with their lives.
Are there people who just go to grad school or law school?
Because I don't know, their parents expect them to, or they've been told that they should, or you know, they're they're not sure what the next thing.
Sure, some people do that.
But it's a massive financial investment.
It takes a lot of time and work and energy to do that.
So I just don't buy that they were all like sort of clueless and aimless and so forth.
Maybe they're not sure what kind of law they want to practice.
Maybe they're not sure if they want to practice law or use their degrees to launch into some other career, just as Josh Hawley did.
But I don't think they're the aimless drifters that he suggests they are.
Okay.
So what's the point of all this?
Why am I like honing in on this point?
The point is that Josh Hawley, Senator, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, former Missouri Attorney General, Josh Hawley, former law professor, Josh Hawley, former SCOTUS law clerk, Josh Hawley, former Yale Law School alumni, Josh Hawley.
Guess what?
You are not a regular guy, Josh, and you do not spend your days interacting with regular guys.
You just don't.
So there's a lot of effort expended here to show us that we should listen to him because just a regular guy, he gets it.
He has his finger on the pulse of the American man.
And this is what qualifies him to weigh in.
He doesn't say it that way, but it's there and it drips off of the text.
It's present in the image that he presents, the literal image that he puts forward, and it's all nonsense.
It is all a carefully cultivated, marketed and groomed front from somebody who is in every sense of the term a cultural elite, but he's part of a political party and a movement that positions itself of being quote unquote anti-elitist, even though it is full of people who occupy elite positions.
That's Josh Hawley.
Sorry, Josh, you're Yale educated, SCOTUS trained, U.S. senator.
You are not every man, you are not the regular guy, but he is trying to present himself as as if he is.
And that that's what I see in these these early pages of this chapter.
So that's his first qualification.
Just hey, hey guys, I'm one of you.
I'm cool like you, I get it.
I'm like cool youth pastor, Josh Hawley.
I'm like a cool, relatable Ryan Reynolds, I get it.
I'm one of you.
Well, what else is supposed to qualify him to talk to us about this?
Like, why else should we be picking up his book and reading what he says about manhood?
Why the Bible, of course.
Because you know what would qualify somebody more to interpret the Bible for us than being a law professor with absolutely no education or training in theology or biblical interpretation.
Like, you know, he's just a regular guy reading his Bible, so we should listen.
And we'll be looking at what what Josh Hawley has says, excuse me, what Josh Hawley has to say about the Bible throughout his book.
But in this first chapter, he presents us with a thumbnail sketch of why the Bible is so important to his account of manhood.
What men are missing, he says, is a good story, a good myth that tells us how to be men.
And he harkens back to an 80s movement known as deep masculinity.
Now this is what's what's kind of weird.
He like cites this, he appeals to this, but he doesn't actually indicate that he knows much about this movement.
Here's how here's how he describes it in his book.
He says, quote, there was a movement in the 1980s, I understand, that promoted something called the deep masculine.
He's like, I'm I'm given to understand that this movement existed.
He tells us that it was, quote, before his time, but that he's been, quote, told about it.
He's like, somebody told me about this movement for the deep masculine.
The dude didn't even bother to Google it or look it up himself.
And if you want to, you can Google the deep masculine or deep masculinity movement or something like that, and you can find information.
He didn't want to do that.
Okay.
But the movement was based on the idea that what men needed was to tap into kind of mytho-poetic archetypes to recover an authentic affirmative sense of masculinity.
That that myth and a kind of archetypical image of masculinity is what they needed to tap into.
And it's this dimension that Hawley likes.
This is what he picks up on from this movement that he's been told about, though he seems to not actually know anything about it.
For him, that mytho poetic source of strength and knowledge for men, it comes from the Bible.
He affirms what he calls the power of myth and symbol and story.
And he goes on to say this.
This is the good news, he tells us that quote, the West was formed by a powerful story that had a good deal to say to men.
It happens to be the oldest and most profound story there is it is the story of the Bible.
Just to be clear, the Bible is not the oldest religious text that there is, not by a long shot.
Certainly there could be disagreement about whether it is the most profound, but that's what he says.
It is the story of the Bible.
And that's an interesting phrase, the story of the Bible, not the story in the Bible or the story that the Bible tells.
He says the story of the Bible.
And I think it's fitting because he really does give us quite a story about what the Bible is and about what it teaches.
On his right reading, the Bible places masculinity and men front and center, start to finish.
Here's how he describes the story that he thinks the Bible tells.
Okay, here's what he has to say.
Quoting Josh Hawley.
He says, It is a shame then that the story of the Bible is so little known today.
The Bible's story is an epic that speaks directly to the purpose of men.
Indeed, from the Christian perspective, no sad the Christian perspective, you're always going to get this language on the right.
From the Christian perspective, the story comes to center on a man, capital M, presumably he's talking about Jesus.
The story and thumbnail form is this.
From chaos and nothing, God created the world for a purpose.
He created it to be a temple.
Why a temple?
The world was a place to be filled with his presence, and man was to have a role making it so.
At the center of his creation, God placed a garden and in the garden a man.
And he instructed the man to cultivate that garden, to protect it and to build it outward, to expand it into all the world.
That was the man's calling, his sacred duty and his purpose in life.
Man was to be God's representative On the earth to serve God by helping build the earth into an Eden, the temple it was meant to be, a place of beauty and order, liberty and peace, a dwelling for God Himself.
This was the first man's mission according to the Bible, and now the mission of all men.
Now, as I say, we'll have ample opportunity to engage what Hawley has to say about the Bible and men's place in it and what it means for American men.
Here I just want to repeat his point that the story of the Bible is so little known today.
It's a telling point because this reading of the Bible, this account of the fundamental story of the Bible, it reflects a profoundly ignorant and selective understanding of the Bible and what it says.
To make this the story of the Bible, to make this the point of the Bible is to fundamentally ignore huge portions of what it says and to elevate particular passages above others while reading those passages with a very particular cultural understanding.
Now, on the one hand, if you've listened to me, you've listened to me enough, you've heard me talk about the Bible, you've heard me talk about inerrancy, you've heard me talk about how the Bible actually works in the hands of conservative Christians and biblicists who claim that they believe it's literally true and so on and so forth.
You've heard me talk about this.
And you've heard me say things like this, which is that this is exactly what we should expect from a Christian nationalist reading the Bible.
They, like conservative, high controlled Christians generally, they do not go to the Bible to draw their teachings.
No, they go to the Bible knowing exactly what they need it to say and making sure they find it no matter what.
So if you want a story that places men at the center, that that makes patriarchy, deep structural patriarchy, a divine norm, a divinely instituted social order, and you go to the Bible looking for it, you're gonna find it.
That's what this is.
We also know that this kind of reading, which is completely typical, goes against what these kind of Christians actually say the Bible should be.
Right?
On the basis of their own teachings, they will tell you that you don't get to pick and choose what the Bible says, elevating minor points to central importance, excuse me, to central importance.
I'm getting too excited.
You don't get to elevate minor points to central importance and ignore all the rest.
But that's how they actually read it.
Okay?
It's how they've always read it.
So we're gonna get the Bible as read by the formal law professor, Christian nationalist.
That's the Bible we're encountering here.
This is the guy who's gonna guide us through the Bible to a view of authentic manhood.
And his qualifications for doing so, he tells us, is a set of a set of ideas about masculinity that he's been told about.
Deep masculine, the deep masculine.
Okay.
He says in the chapter two, he's like, I don't know any better story than the Bible.
Cool.
Josh, I guess you just don't know good stories.
You're limited on your repertoire of stories, whatever.
That's his rationale for the Bible.
I have no doubt as we go, he will have more to say.
He has more to say in chapter one.
We'll continue with with some of the things he says in the next episode.
But that's what he says.
His two claims for like why we should listen to Josh Hawley are just his personal experience.
He's an everyday guy and he understands masculinity and the Bible, again, as read by Josh Hawley.
So we're going to spend a lot of time decoding what Josh Hawley has to say about manhood.
And the point again, and I really want to re-emphasize this, is that in doing so, we're going to be decoding a lot of what the contemporary right believes and understands about manhood, what they understand manhood to be.
But before we go too deeply into that, I didn't want to dive into the content yet.
I thought it was a good idea to look at who exactly this person is who claims to speak for manhood.
That's a big claim.
That's a big claim.
I'm going to tell you what manhood is.
I am going to tell you what are the masculine virtues America needs.
I am going to tell you what the Bible says about.
Those are those are big bold claims.
And I think it's a good idea to look at who this person is.
Josh Hawley, whose entire adult life has been spent in the pursuit of privilege and political power.
That's who.
A guy whose day-to-day life certainly does not give him deep insights to the plight of American men.
That guy.
A guy who I'm sure considers himself a person of faith, but with nothing to commend his reading of the Bible, other than the fact that he can make it say what he wants it to say.
And he's been quote unquote told that the deep masculine is in there.
And that's his lens through which he reads it.
And he'll make the Bible say anything he needs it to say.
We are going to come across this I have not read past like page, I think it's page 13, first chapter yet.
I'd put money on it, folks.
He's going to make the Bible say whatever he needs it to say.
Why?
Because for him, the stakes could not be higher.
And what he thinks is what has become a core doctrine within conservative high control Christianity in America.
It is the merging of politics and religion in this movement we call Christian nationalism.
This is what he says.
And this is really the central claim of the book.
He writes, quote, that no menace to this nation is greater than the collapse of American manhood, the collapse of masculine strength.
End quote.
Everything wrong with America is about the collapse of manhood, the loss of masculine strength.
And Josh Hawley is our model man who will walk us through this to recover an authentic vision of manhood.
So we now know a little bit about who Josh Holly is and why he why he claims that we should give a damn what he says.
And why the Bible provides a solution, but a solution to what?
In the next episode, we'll start looking at that.
What exactly is going on with manhood?
What is the collapse of American manhood?
What is the collapse of American strength?
We'll begin looking at what he thinks that is in the next episode.
As always, I want to thank you for listening.
I say often and I mean it.
I'm very aware that if you're spending time listening to this, it's time you could be spending doing a lot of other things.
And so thank you.
Thank you for supporting us in so many ways.
Please reach out, Daniel Miller Swagge, Daniel Miller S W A J at Gmail.com.
Would love to hear from you.
New ideas, comments, what have you.
Would love to know about that.
I'm always looking for like sort of future directions of where we're going next in this series.
If you're not a subscriber, I'd invite you to consider doing that, supporting us in that way.
You get access to a lot of stuff and help us keep doing what we're doing.
But if that's not something you're you're ready to do, it's not something you're able to do.
