[CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains references to, and discussion of, death by suicide]. In this episode, Dan begins exploring what Josh Hawley calls “a man’s battle.” Hawley argues that what defines men, what gives them purpose, is fighting and confronting evil, and maintaining order in the face of chaos. But what exactly does this mean? And how does it make “evil” necessary? Why is this a tragic and dangerous view of the world? And what is the alternative? How can we understand “order” and “chaos” without falling into the trap of Hawley’s worldview? Check out the episode to hear Dan’s answers to these questions.
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Hello, and as always, welcome to It's in the Code, a series that's part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Pleased as always to be with you.
And as always, want to thank you for listening, participating with us in the things that we do.
This series, it's in the code, as you know, if you listen, is driven by listeners in a way that I think not a lot else that we do in Straight White American Jesus exactly is.
So please let me know what you think.
Let me know of new episode topics, new series ideas, reflections on the episodes that are coming out.
This is driven by you.
I map these things out in advance.
I read the emails that folks send.
I hover around in the Discord listening to what people say.
Please keep the ideas coming.
I don't get to respond as often as I would like to.
I say this all the time.
I mean it.
It's true.
But I really, really value the feedback and the insights.
So please keep those coming.
You can reach me at Daniel MillerSwadge, DanielMiller, S-W-A-J at gmail.com, or you can put things in the Discord.
Or if you're listening to this this week, we are Friday having a get-together.
Information is in the Discord, or you can contact Brad or myself, StraightWhite AmericanJesus, for information on that.
Would love to see you there.
Would love to hear thoughts, questions, comments, ideas that you have in that context as well.
I want to dive into today's episode.
We are continuing to talk about essentially an exploration of right-wing cultural discourses on manhood and masculinity.
We've been doing this by taking a look at Josh Hawley's book, Manhood, and his vision of what he calls the masculine virtues that are needed to renew America and to get America back on track.
And we've been doing this for a while.
Going to be sort of just inhabiting his space for a while longer.
And we have looked at last episode, last few episodes, what he calls man's mission.
We're now turning to his third chapter, which he defines as a man's battle.
And so that's going to be our focus.
I do here want to give a content warning.
This episode and the discussion that follows, it's going to have a discussion of suicide.
That's taken from Holly's chapter.
It's something he discusses in chapter three.
So we'll be talking about that today.
So if that's a concern, just a fair warning that that's coming up.
And this might be a discussion that you want to skip.
So I'll give you a couple minutes to think about that.
But here we go.
Man's battle.
What is man's battle?
So I mean, the first thing for Holly is that the men are defined as having a battle, a battle with what?
A battle with evil.
Man, and specifically men.
So we use this language.
And when Holly says man or we talk about man in this context, he's not talking about like mankind or humans.
He's talking specifically about men.
He so far has had nothing to say about women, which is kind of interesting because often when you get in these discussions, you start talking about the role of manhood and so forth, you know, by implication, you can discern or end up bringing up what, you know, womanhood is supposed to be about or what feminine virtues might be.
But Holly isn't doing any of that.
So we'll see as we go along.
I think some of that's going to come through.
But when he talks about man, he's talking about men.
A man's battle, the battle that men face is a battle with evil.
Men are called to oppose evil and evil in turn takes shape as that which is opposed to God's design and plans.
And I think it's worth noting that Holly develops this, what we would call a theological anthropology, that is a theological account of human nature, the human condition, in this case, the condition of men.
He really does it based on just a couple verses in Genesis, and I think that's worth noting.
We've talked about the Genesis myth before and the concept of Adam, the first man, and all of that.
If you haven't had a chance to listen to that, go back, listen to some earlier episodes.
You can get caught up if you need to.
But he just notes that Adam, the first man, is basically told to keep the garden and to protect the garden.
God creates this garden space and so forth.
And it's just the idea that Adam is made the guardian of this space and he's therefore tasked with keeping evil out of God's domain.
I mean, that's this whole notion that man's purpose and man's battle is against evil.
It's drawn from this notion that God creates the garden and tells Adam to keep it or preserve it.
And so it just comes down to that verse.
So like that, that's a thing.
That's a thing we could talk about.
It's a fairly flimsy peg on which to hang this whole theological anthropology, but that's what he does.
At any rate, that's what Holly says man's battle is.
It's a battle with evil.
And here are some things he says.
He says this.
Men are part of God's solution to danger in the world.
Like Adam, we are called to expose ourselves to danger and protect others and serve what is right.
So we're supposed to oppose danger, but Holly is clear that there's a mortal moral, excuse me, valence to danger here.
What he calls danger is evil, right?
There are ways of envisioning danger.
We can all aware of what's dangerous, but we don't all think of it about being evil, right?
We could talk about, I don't know, driving too fast in a snowstorm is dangerous.
Is it evil?
No.
But for Hawley, danger, excuse me, is evil.
It is morally coded.
And I think it's going to be really important because this notion of evil is absolutely central to what he's doing in this chapter.
It's going to be central moving forward.
And we have to understand that it's central to people like Hawley, conservative, high control religionists, Christian nationalists.
We're going to come across this rhetoric a lot.
He goes on and says this.
He says, Genesis does not suggest that Adam's decisions created evil any more than ours do, but they did embolden it.
They let it loosen the world in a new and powerful form.
Of course, he's talking about, again, the story that Adam eats from the fruit of the forbidden tree in the garden, and this is what sort of unleashes evil in the world.
He goes on to say, the Bible says meaning is found and the soul is formed in confronting the darkness and setting oneself against it, standing between other people and evil.
So just a few places where Hawley says this in his chapter.
In a few minutes, I'm going to suggest another way of viewing the world coming from the same kind of context that Holly is talking about.
For now, I just want to highlight why I think this is so significant that he features or prioritizes evil the way that he does.
Why this is such a significant way in defining the purpose of man, which again is God's purpose, right?
When Holly says man's purpose is X, Y, or Z, it is the purpose given by God.
It is a divinely sanctioned purpose of men.
And here's why I think it's significant.
It makes evil absolutely necessary.
If man's divinely sanctioned purpose can only be to confront evil, evil becomes necessary.
We need to have an evil-filled world.
Christian nationalists and people like Holly who have this vision, you have to have a world that's full of evil to be opposed, or there is no meaning or purpose.
We need those who oppose us to be evil.
You can't just have opponents.
You can't just have people you disagree with.
They have to be evil.
It has to moralize those differences.
Everybody who challenges order has to be evil for reasons that we're going to see in a few minutes.
It makes evil absolutely necessary.
It makes it impossible to view the world in any other terms besides as a ground of conflict between good and evil.
And so when we live in a world that has to be populated by evil actors, when you have to have people who are evil, guess what?
We're going to look around the world and we're going to find evil actors.
We are going to identify people as evil.
We will generate evil because it defines us.
And that is exactly what Holly does in this book.
That is exactly what people like Holly do in the social sphere.
It is exactly what people in your family do if they tell you that you're an evil person because you support abortion access or queer rights or whatever it is.
This is Holly's Christian vision.
As we go through the book, again, we're going to see over and over and over how this energizes his thoughts and his beliefs.
But if we were just to pause, this would be a whole bigger discussion.
We could do it easily, but we don't have time right now.
If we reflect on our own society at present, we reflect on our own political discourse, when we reflect on the policies of Christian nationalists currently in power, we can find numerous illustrations of how this plays out in concrete terms, of defining, for example, political opponents not just as enemies, but as evil, of moralizing everything with which we disagree.
This is part and parcel of what Holly is doing.
So that's his vision.
Evil is central and necessary to his vision of man's identity, man's purpose, man's battle of Christianity, of all of it.
But I want to dive a little deeper into how he talks about evil and what he imagines it to be.
Because again, this is going to be foundational for where we're going.
Okay.
Not least of which is that this is going to be how he describes liberals.
And again, he describes liberals.
It's just his catch-all term for everybody who thinks anything differently than he does.
Liberals are evil.
Liberals are bad.
He's also going to say that part of what makes liberalism evil is that it doesn't recognize evil.
We're going to get to that in sort of the next episode or so, but hold that in mind right now.
But here's how he thinks about evil.
Here's how the kind of conservative Christianity he represents thinks about evil.
And we're going to get a very convoluted picture of this as we go forward.
Okay.
So here's my take.
I think his view of evil is governed essentially by two assumptions.
And these are two assumptions, excuse me, that I think are core beliefs within his kind of brand of conservative, high control Christianity.
That is, these are two assumptions that are, as it were, in the code.
They are part of the source code of this kind of Christianity.
And here they are.
The first is that evil is everywhere.
It's everywhere.
It's all around us all the time.
And we've already seen this, right?
If your purpose is to confront evil, you have to generate a vision of evil as sort of constantly present and a constant threat.
Evil is everywhere.
And the other one is that it originates outside of us.
It is fundamentally foreign to us.
It is not a fundamental part of who we are in this Christian vision created to be.
And this is a crucial sense.
Now, somebody's going to listen to that.
And they're going to say, wait, hold on, Dan.
That sounds weird.
Because Christians like Holly believe in the doctrine of what they call the fall.
And that is the view that humans are inherently sinful and incapable of good without God's help.
So the logic of that would seem to be that evil is naturally within us.
And here I am saying that evil is something that sort of befalls us, that originates outside of us, that comes from beyond us.
So what do I mean by that?
Here's what I mean.
I think that despite the core Orthodox Protestant claim that humans are sinful and fallen, I think that the story is actually more complicated than that when it comes to Christian practice.
And I think the language of fall captures that.
The idea that is that as humans were originally divinely created, our human nature did not involve sinfulness or evil.
Evil was a fall from an original state.
And many conservative theologians will even say humans are not necessarily defined as evil, but as fallen, that there's actually a distinction between those things.
So there's a sense in which even if it becomes fundamental to who we are and what we're capable of and incapable of and so forth, evil is something that is introduced into the human condition.
It comes from somewhere else.
And Holly echoes this view in this chapter.
He talks about the Genesis myth about the serpent.
So the snake comes into the garden and it says it's crafty and it's talking to Eve, the first woman.
And there's this one tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that God said not to eat from.
And he basically, as it's presented, sort of convinces her to eat from the tree.
And then she has Adam eat from the tree and so forth.
And so you get this vision of the fall coming from this interaction with this weird figure of the serpent who sort of comes from the outside.
We're going to talk more in other episodes about the significance of God telling them not to eat from that tree.
It's a pretty, I don't know, in my view, a pretty shitty move by God, but we'll talk about that.
But what Holly does is he suggests that the serpent didn't introduce evil into the world.
And that's what he says.
He says that Adam's or Eve's decision to eat from the tree, it didn't invent evil.
But he does say that the presence of the serpent represents a failure to keep evil out of the garden.
Adam was tasked with preserving the boundaries of the garden.
He clearly failed in this because the crafty serpent comes in and is able to lead them astray.
And Adam's decision, undertaken at the behest of the serpent through Eve or whatever, it unleashes evil in a way where it wasn't present before.
This is, in traditional Christian teaching, this is the site of the fall.
This is where evil befalls humans.
And that's what I mean when I say that even though it becomes endemic to our situation, it comes from outside of us.
It comes from beyond us.
So right in the origin myth, right from the beginning, we have this idea that we have to oppose evil because it comes from outside of God's intended order.
Okay.
Now, we could open up all the questions about why did God create the serpent?
Why did God let it happen?
And all of that, all valid questions.
But I just think that within this framework, this makes evil something that befalls us.
It's something that happens to us.
It's something that has come upon humans from somewhere else.
And the whole myth of the garden illustrates this.
It's a myth of primordial goodness and innocence, free from evil.
Evil is a kind of import that has invaded God's order, so it has to be opposed.
And there are Christians who talk about evil in this way all the time.
This isn't just a theological point or an argument about origin stories.
There's a common way of talking.
It's more common in charismatic and Pentecostal circles, but it's not limited to them, where you'll hear the language of being afflicted by what?
By temptation.
or afflicted by physical pain or afflicted by desires.
And when somebody does something sinful or when they do something evil, they do something that reflects that fallen nature.
They will often talk about giving into the affliction of sin.
And sometimes this is spiritualized to like literally the belief that there are supernatural agents, demons or the devil or what have you, that are sort of leading us to do this.
And sometimes it's only metaphorical, but sometimes it's more literal and it can become very thoroughgoing.
So for example, you'll have somebody will talk about the language.
If you grew up within the church, you've heard this.
People might talk about a child having a spirit of disobedience.
Not the child's at a developmental stage where it's normal to do this or that or the other or something about personality types or anything like that.
No, a spirit of disobedience, that language, that metaphor that that disobedience, that evil, that sign of their fallenness is some sort of spiritual force sort of external to them.
You will hear people within a trans and homophobic religious context talk about being afflicted with same-sex desire.
Sometimes people will talk about physical afflictions.
They will say, I'm under attack.
I'm under demonic attack.
That's why my back hurts or why I'm having heart problems or whatever it is to take our focus off of God.
The point is you will hear this language of affliction all the time.
And when you hear that language of affliction, that is the view that this evil is something that confronts us from the outside.
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These are things that are properly external to us.
They may be within us.
Again, the child with the spirit of disobedience or the person with the same-sex desire, but they don't belong there.
They may be inside us, but they are foreign to us.
So evil becomes a result of malign forces acting against us and against God.
Even if we want to trace that all the way back to this origin story, it still comes, as it were, from the outside.
And Holly adopts this language as well.
This is how he talks about evil.
And here's the content warning.
This is where we're going to get into the topic of suicide.
So again, if you're listening and want to take pause of that or want to maybe stop, this would be the time to do it.
But Holly opens his chapter with a moving and very sad and very touching account of the death of his friend, a friend of his from childhood all the way through their college years and so forth, who dies by suicide.
And I absolutely feel the sincere pain Holly communicates about this event.
I think that that's real and I want to acknowledge that.
But the way that he talks about this and the work that this story does in his book, I think is also revealing and tragic.
So he offers no discussion of context.
There's no discussion of mental health.
We don't know if there were any messages left behind or what spurred this action.
He just sort of describes it.
He talks about the devastating effects it has on him.
But he ends his discussion of his friend with this reflection.
Here's what he has to say.
His death was shattering in many ways.
And among the things that destroyed in my life was any illusion that all is well with the world or with me.
The world is not as it should be, nor am I, nor is any man.
There is darkness in the world that resists what is good and strains to destroy it.
I don't want to shit all over Holly.
I really don't.
And again, I think the pain is real.
And this is an event that has obviously brought him real pain.
But the points are clear here to me.
The darkness in his friend was evil.
It resists the good.
His friend gave into evil.
And I think the clear implication is that his friend tragically failed to resist evil, to oppose it fully.
Remember Holly saying, the purpose of man, man's purpose is to battle evil.
And sadly, his friend failed to battle evil.
I think it's hard not to read this as a kind of tacit condemnation of his friend's ultimate failure as a man, of his falling short in his battle as a man.
His friend was afflicted by darkness.
He was afflicted by evil.
He was afflicted by forces sort of beyond him and beyond his control.
And he ultimately failed to stand up to it.
I find that so tragic, but again, so telling about the view of evil that Holly has here.
And more importantly, you know, because you could listen and be like, who cares?
Who cares about the metaphysics of evil?
And, you know, all of this.
It matters because it has concrete impacts on social practice and how we understand ourselves and how we understand others in the world.
And we hear that in Holly.
So Holly talks about it this way in a way that's very personal as evil is something that has to be opposed because it's like this foreign force that comes against us.
So with all of that, what exactly is evil for Holly?
I mean, you can imagine to say, okay, but like, so he gave into darkness like in evil, what about like, what is it?
Like, what makes evil evil?
When you say darkness, what makes darkness darkness?
His answer is this.
It is chaos or disorder.
When he says darkness and evil, it's another way.
If you read his text carefully, there's a series of words that he uses that are like equivalences to each other.
So chaos and disorder and darkness.
These are the images of what is evil.
And this goes back again to that creation story.
God brought the good creation out of chaos.
Again, if you haven't listened to the early episodes on this portion, this sort of series where we're looking at Holly, go back and listen to those.
Okay.
So the idea is that out of chaos, the formless void, and it says everything that exists was formless and void.
And then God creates.
God brings order out of chaos.
The idea is that chaos or disorder is the opposite of good.
God creates everything that says it's good.
So chaos is its opposite.
Chaos is evil.
And so the garden becomes the image of this order in a chaotic universe or a chaotic world.
And the borders of what is good have to be maintained by keeping everything else out.
And everything that needs to be kept out, everything on the other side of that border is evil.
So this is the theme for Holly.
And this is going to come up, I suspect.
Again, I'm reading the book as we go.
I anticipate this theme is going to govern everything else that he's doing.
It's the theme of order versus chaos.
God creates by bringing order out of chaos.
The garden is an ordered space.
And that means that chaos is evil.
That's what Holly says.
Any threat to order can only be evil.
He links chaos and darkness and disorder.
He says that his friend's death brought him, quote, face to face with the disorder of the world.
It brought him face to face with evil.
So all of this highlights something that's like absolutely central to Holly's worldview as both a high control Christian and a Christian nationalist.
And it is key.
If you want to understand high control Christianity and you want to understand Christian nationalism, this is absolutely key.
Order is morally good.
Disorder or chaos is morally evil.
Not better, not worse, not useful, not unuseful, good and evil, which also means that anything that challenges order is evil.
Or, and we're going to see this as we go, anyone who challenges order is evil.
Absolutely crucial ideas.
So anything or anyone who is felt to challenge the Christian order is an evil to be opposed at all costs.
This is the logic that Holly is putting forward.
This is his Christian vision.
This is going to be his vision of America.
This is going to be his vision of masculinity is maintaining order at all costs against anyone who opposes it because they are evil.
So that's Holly's vision.
I want to spend just a few minutes here and try to lay out a different way of viewing this.
And this is something I want to sort of put out today.
And I think it's going to carry us forward in the next couple episodes, at least, as we consider this idea of, you know, man's battle against evil.
Okay.
So the themes of order and chaos, they are absolutely central elements in Christian and Jewish creation narratives, right?
It's specifically the narratives in Genesis that Holly is interested in.
But I reject his reading of them.
And I know it's a fairly traditional reading in lots of ways.
There are lots of Jewish commentators that read it this way.
There have been Christian traditions that read it this way and so forth.
But I want to reject it and I want to propose a different reading.
So we back up a little bit.
Christians have also theologically traditionally claimed that God creates ex nihilo or from nothing.
Part of what makes God God is God creates everything from nothing.
But that creation narrative about the world being form and void and God creating out of it, it actually doesn't mean that God creates from nothing.
He creates out of this pre-existing chaos.
And that's what Holly himself points out.
Okay.
And what that means for me is that that chaos cannot simply be seen as evil because it's productive.
Yes, order stands in contrast to chaos, but order emerges only out of chaos.
Chaos is like the pre-existing well from which we draw or which God draws to create order.
In that regard, I would suggest that the chaos is amoral.
That is, it's neither good nor evil.
It has no inherent moral valence.
It is just like a site of potential that can be developed in different directions.
So all different kinds of things can emerge out of that chaos, but there is no order or meaning or value or whatever apart from it within this sort of Christian framework we're imagining.
I'm trying to work within a framework that Holly has given us.
So that means that the chaos, the formless and void, it's not inherently evil.
But I would also argue that it's not something that simply afflicts us from the outside.
If order only comes out of chaos, if chaos is the precondition of order, It means that there's a sense in which chaos is always presupposed in order.
The two remain entangled.
They're not simple opposites, but they rely upon each other.
And I would argue that that notion of chaos, it is endemic to reality as we know it.
Whether we're talking about like, I don't know, physics and cosmology and the notion that you have this swirling chaos out of which everything that we know to exist eventually takes shape, or whether it's our own sort of muddled internal lives or our relations with other people that can get so complicated and so messed up and so convoluted and yes, so chaotic.
Chaos is part of what defines us.
It's part of our experience from the grand scale of the cosmos all the way down.
Chaos is, for me, internal to the human situation.
It is not something that simply assaults us from the outside.
There has never been some primordial time of innocence and order which stands apart from chaos.
And I think it's incredibly dangerous, not just misleading, but dangerous to suggest that there is.
I am so opposed to kind of these images of a primordial past that was perfect and good and pure and whatever for precisely this reason that I think it masks the fact that that kind of chaos and that disruption, it is just part and parcel of what it is to exist and to be human.
So what does that mean to say that number one, it's not inherently evil.
And number two, it doesn't come from the outside.
It's not foreign to us.
What does it mean?
Well, one of the first things is, you know, a question we might ask, do we need order as human beings?
I would say, absolutely.
Absolutely, we need order.
And does that order sometimes break down?
That is, we live lives that are meaningful and ordered and things fit together and they make sense and they're intelligible.
And are there times when that order breaks down and we experience the inbreaking of chaos?
Absolutely.
Like Holly experiencing a friend who takes his own life?
Absolutely.
Do we experience that kind of disruption?
We absolutely do.
But here's what I reject.
And this is where I think people like Holly go radically wrong.
And to the extent that I think Holly's account is a very Christian account, I think this is where what I'm calling high control religion goes really, really wrong.
I reject the notion that we can simply equate order with what is good or chaos with what is evil.
And so I think we can't just condemn the breakdown of order as inherently evil and something that has to be resisted at all costs.
And I don't think we can view it as an attack from outside forces.
So let me try to illustrate this.
Okay.
And I'm thinking here of Holly's friend and how he might have reconsidered or reimagined the plight that his friend was going to that led him to take his own life.
But I'm also thinking more broadly.
Okay.
There's a psychological model called internal family systems theory that basically says humans are not the kind of unified, simple, you know, egos that others might think that we are, but instead we're a kind, what we emerge as, what makes me, me, and you, you, and everybody who they are, is we emerge as a kind of ongoing conversation and effect of different parts within us, right?
And if you want an image of this, think of the, the, the animated movie Inside Out or the sequel, where you've got like all of these sort of different voices in somebody's head and that that's kind of how we work.
And I think most of us have some sense about that.
Just think about when you go out to eat and you're, you know, somebody asks you what you want to eat.
You're like, well, I don't know.
I'm kind of thinking this, but another part of me is thinking this.
Or when we talk about experiencing insecurity and we're like, you know, I'm moving along fine in the world.
And then I get that little voice inside of me that's saying I'm not good enough or my mom's voice from when I was a kid and she would criticize how I dressed or whatever.
That's the idea.
And so we have these sort of complex parts and sometimes they work together really well and sometimes they don't.
And sometimes they help us and sometimes they create problems for us and they might even become maladaptive and we might need to go to therapy or counseling or get some help to kind of bring them into balance again.
Sometimes they lead us to undertake actions that harm ourselves or others.
But sometimes they lead us to do great things.
And sometimes they coexist in an ordered fashion and sometimes they collide chaotically and it creates a lot of distress and discomfort for us.
But all the time, and this is my point, all of the time, they are part of us.
They are not something from the outside.
They are not spiritual forces.
They are not demons or something else afflicting us.
They are part of us.
And I think it is profoundly unhelpful and unhealthy to define them as evil.
On the absolute contrary, we can only work through them.
We can only work with them.
We can only begin to sort of harmonize those parts and bring ourselves into balance to bring about a new order, a new way of ordering those parts and finding new meaning when we recognize that they are a part of us.
They're not evil.
They're just us.
And their chaotic interplay, it can be threatening and it can be dangerous and it can lead to bad things.
It can absolutely do those things.
But it is also, I would argue, the only way that we grow and develop into the people that we are always becoming.
So that sort of those chaotic moments, those moments when a given order, a given solidity to who we are and how we experience ourselves, when it is called into question, that is precisely and the only way that we grow, that we develop, that we continue to become the people that we're becoming.
And I cannot help but wonder how Holly might view his friend's struggle and ultimate death, death, excuse me, ultimate death differently if he had an understanding like this.
When Holly describes his awareness of disorder as deeply disorienting, that's correct.
That experience of chaos or the breakdown of our ordered experience of the world or ourselves, that is absolutely disorienting.
But what would happen if he also recognized it as productive?
Or he recognized that calling it evil is just too simple to capture the complex reality of who we are.
The same way that saying that his friend gave in to evil, it just misses the complexity of the human condition, which Holly thinks he recognizes, but he doesn't.
So on the individual level, I think we can re-envision this notion of order and chaos, but I think we can also see how it matters at the social level.
So let's imagine, we don't have to imagine it's a real thing, the emergence of individuals and groups who demand social recognition, the emergence of queer communities that demand their rights and recognition and their place in society, the place of women demanding recognition and rights and their place in society, people of color demanding recognition and equality, undocumented immigrants and on and on and on.
We can name those.
All of those are chaotic forces that call into question an established order.
Absolutely.
And Holly defines this challenge as a threat from evil forces.
That's what we're going to see as we go through this book.
That is what we see in Christian nationalism all the time.
These are evil forces that must be challenged because they challenge our order.
But what if that disorder is a productive site for the emergence of a new order, for something new and more and better?
What if it is the site for the growth of our society?
What if it's a site for imagining a society that is more just and equitable?
What if it is a site or the condition for imagining a society in which an increasing number of people experience true flourishing?
That's a vision I threw out there in an earlier episode.
What if chaos and disorder are not reduced to evil, but are recognized as the productive conditions for the emergence of something new and better, that you don't have growth without chaos and disorder?
That is what I think chaos represents.
I think it represents that in Genesis.
If you want to stay with the Genesis narrative, we don't have to do that, but that's where Holly is.
So that's where I'm living.
But I think it's a way of envisioning personal growth.
I think it's a way of envisioning our relationships with others.
I think it's a way of envisioning society.
And it is radically different from what Holly is suggesting.
So we need to wrap this up.
And here's the point.
Holly's Christian worldview, and it is the Christian worldview of high-control religionists like him and Christian nationalists like him.
His Christian worldview is built on a dichotomy of good versus evil, order versus chaos.
And that dichotomy is going to condition everything he has to say about not just masculinity and manhood, but about society itself.
And I think it is profoundly misguided and tragic and dangerous.
Because again, we can't have meaning or purpose apart from our opposition to evil.
If that's the case, if we have to oppose evil to find meaning and purpose, that means evil has to be present.
Evil becomes necessary.
And it also guarantees that order must be preserved at any cost.
It makes it impossible to challenge authority.
It makes it possible to question why an order is the way that it is.
It makes it impossible to change things because you are saying that by definition, an established order is always good.
And I think that, again, that is profoundly dangerous.
And we're going to pick up on that theme as we move further forward, just even in this chapter, that notion of order and authority and what Holly has to say about that.
In the meantime, I hope, I hope, it's been a kind of a wonky episode, kind of a theology-heavy, theory-heavy episode.
I hope to at least show, number one, the centrality of evil in Holly's worldview.
And number two, the way that we don't have to accept that understanding of chaos and disorder.
And we're going to see that as we move forward.
As always, thank you again for listening.
Please let me know what you think.
New ideas, new topics, all of those.
Daniel Miller Swedge, Daniel Miller, S-W-A-J at gmail.com.
Would love to hear from you.
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