Josh Hawley identifies six roles that men are called to play. The first is that of “husband.” But what, exactly does that mean? And what is the point or purpose of marriage? For Hawley, marriage holds the promise of countering all the evils that confront contemporary American society. But who, exactly, is called to play this role of husband? And how can marriage possibly be everything Hawley says that it is? And perhaps most importantly, why does he argue that marriage is so significant? Listen to this week’s episode as Dan dives into these issues.
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Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Pleased to be with you as always.
And as always, more than anything else we do in Straight White American Jesus, this series depends upon you, your ideas, your feedback, your concepts for episodes, for series, what have you.
So please keep those coming.
Best way to reach me, old school, I realize, is Daniel Miller Swatch, Daniel Miller, S-W-A-J-Gmail.com.
Please keep those ideas coming.
And as I said last episode, looking past Josh Hawley's book, which is what we're currently doing to a series called Questions I Couldn't Ask in Church or Wasn't Supposed to Ask in Church.
If you've got some, those kind of topics that were off base, those topics that were out of bounds, topics you weren't allowed to talk about, things you weren't supposed to ask, the kind of questions that maybe got you in trouble in Sunday school or had you, had the pastor sit down and have a chat about, you know, the authority of the Bible or whatever, or just created awkwardness.
Those kind of questions, the ones that you know, let me know what those were.
I'd love to hear it.
I want to build this series about those questions, what they were, what they tell us about high control religion, what they tell us about the answers that high control religion gives, all of those kinds of things.
If you would, if you send me something about those, put questions I couldn't ask or questions I wasn't supposed to ask or something like that in the subject line of your email so that I can know and make sure to flag it.
Respond as many emails as I can.
I love the emails.
I read a lot more than I respond to, but I just can't keep up with them.
Kinder, Gentler Patriarchy00:15:32
So if you would help me that way, that would be great.
Helps us map out where we're going next.
And as always, if you're a subscriber, thank you for supporting us.
If you're not a subscriber and that's something that you might be in a position to do, I would ask you to just think about doing so.
And no matter what, thank you for listening.
Like us, tell other people about us.
Keep us doing what we're doing.
We can't do it without you.
Starting some new things in this new year.
Need you to keep doing that.
Thank you for the support sincerely and very seriously.
Want to dive in here?
We are continuing kind of a march through Senator, Senator Josh Hawley, not just Josh Hawley, Senator Josh Hawley's book on manhood and masculine virtue and how cultivating masculine virtue is going to save America.
And we're moving into the second and really the main section of his book.
We've been here for a while.
The first section, he had four chapters where he kind of lays out essentially his, what we would call theological anthropology, his account of manhood and what it is and the significance of it.
We've been talking about Genesis a lot, different things like this.
And we're moving into the second section that focuses on the roles that define men as men.
And Hawley identifies six of these key roles.
I think most of them are not going to be surprising to us as we move forward.
But in this episode, we're diving into the first one, starting our look at this.
There's a lot.
There's a lot to say about this chapter.
But the topic is husband.
The first role that men are called to play that will save America is the role of husband.
And so we're going to see how he defines men as husbands.
And as I say, there's a lot.
There's a lot here.
I had a hard time kind of sifting and sorting and trying to think about, you know, sort of what to pick up first.
And one of the things that has struck me as I've read this chapter and has been thinking about that is how my approach as we go through this book is different than it would be if, say, if I was teaching this text, which I don't plan on doing, or if I was writing my own book about it or something like that.
And I've said that by design, I'm reading the book as we go.
I'm not reading ahead.
I've now read this chapter.
We'll do more than one episode on this chapter, but I'm reading kind of a chapter at a time, going through it.
And part of that is because I want to sort of, I don't know, give a first impression, right?
I don't want it to be too thought out.
I don't want it to be too polished.
I want to just sort of, you know, on a first read, this is what we see.
And if I was teaching or presenting it, I'd read the whole book.
I would sift it.
I would think about it.
I would identify common themes.
And then I would sort of present my teaching or my presentation based around that.
Why do I bring that up?
I bring it up because we're now in this book far enough that a lot of those themes are starting to come out.
And I think we're going to see those circulate throughout.
I think that they're going to become more and more sort of structuring dimensions of how we look at this.
And there are a few.
So for example, I am absolutely sick of hearing Hawley evoke what he calls the modern day Epicureans.
I talked about this several episodes back, his appeal to Epicurus, ancient Greek philosopher, and the idea that everybody in America who doesn't agree with him is an Epicurean, a hedonist who's self-centered and believes that there's no higher good than doing what we as individuals want to do and so forth.
I'm so sick of hearing about this from him.
It's a terrible reading of Epicurus.
It's not really about Epicurus, but the way that it levels social complexity, all of that, I'm tired of hearing about it.
We're going to have to revisit it, but that's a theme.
The radical oversimplification of social and cultural life is absolutely a guiding theme, and it's on purpose.
Holly is trying to divide society into two groups.
His group, the people who are just using common sense, good Bible-believing salt of the earth people and everybody else.
And it's just, it's just harder and more complex than that.
The way that he actually uses the Bible to launder, as I've put it, distinctly modern ideas and contemporary cultural norms, the norms of his preferred culture and social vision, the way of sort of pretending to get them from the Bible so that he can lend authority to them.
And we're going to see that today.
It's going to come up today.
It's going to come up, I think, in every episode.
This is a defining feature.
And I should pause here and say one of the things I'm thinking about is a whole other series or maybe another kind of project.
I don't know.
That looks at, you know, how do conservatives like Holly, how do they actually use the Bible?
Just developing that into a theme.
What are some of those strategies and themes and ways that they actually use the Bible might be something to think about.
I don't know.
Something I'm toying around with.
But it's very much here, very much present over and over in this book.
The place of nostalgia in constructing his narrative and specifically the nostalgia for him about, you know, his farming grandparents and I think everything that comes from that.
We're going to talk about some of that this episode.
And I think also the really subtle appeals to a way of talking about things like civilizational identity.
That's code.
We know that.
Whenever we talk about maintaining a civilizational identity and so forth, that's white supremacy code.
That's all that is for saving our cultural identity as white Americans, Christian Americans who come from a European and preferably northern and western European heritage.
And that flows through here as well.
I don't know a number of times he's, you know, we will kind of hear about his grandparents of Scandinavian descent, right?
Making sure that we know that they're Scandinavian, that they're not from somewhere else.
So there's a lot of, there's a lot of these themes that come through.
And why does it matter?
I think it matters because, and I want to keep this in front of us.
They're not unique to Hawley.
We're not talking about Josh Hawley.
not forcing myself to read Josh Hawley because he's special or unique.
I'm reading him because he's not.
His themes are themes that run throughout right-wing discourses about so many cultural issues at present.
Everything in the culture war has these themes all woven in it.
So what Hawley does is he gives us kind of a window into how those discourses work and how those people think and into the reasoning behind them.
And I think it also allows us to kind of, and I've said this before, to look behind the curtain. and see how people like Hawley actually understand American identity.
What does it mean to be an American and how they actually understand the people whose visions for this country are different from their own?
What they actually think about, for example, somebody like me, and probably most of you listening.
If you're listening to this, you're probably sympathetic to the views that I put forward.
It gives a window into what he thinks about you and what he thinks about me and what he thinks about every American who doesn't support MAGA and didn't vote for Donald Trump and so forth, which is a majority of Americans.
So these are things I've been thinking about, these common themes that are starting to come through.
And as I say, they're going to come up today, some of them, and they're going to come up as we move forward.
And I wanted to just sort of lay that out there.
So diving into this chapter, the chapter on husband, I'm going to take a look.
And the first thing I want to start with is a point that illustrates another dimension of Holly's text that I talked about in other episodes.
And that is this notion of Holly presenting himself as the kinder, gentler cis heteropatriarch.
He's putting forward a patriarchal vision of American society, pure and simple.
And we're going to see this when he gets into like the later roles that men play, like king and prophet and thing or priest, rather, and kings and rulers.
And we're here to rule and to lead and so forth.
It's patriarchy, okay?
But as I've said before, it's a kinder, gentler patriarchy.
And this is why I think it's important because his first chapter, the first role is husband.
The second role is going to be father.
That's the next chapter.
Don't mean to spoil that, but that's where we're going.
And the reason I bring this up is that in this chapter, he never explicitly says that husband means and only means a cisgender man who's married to a cisgender woman.
The cis heteronormativity, to use that term, is not something that he explicitly says, but it is absolutely what he means.
But he never actually comes out and says it.
He never actually comes out so far and says anything about or negative about queer folk.
Except he does say things about questioning gender and so forth, but certainly lesbian, gay, bisexual people doesn't say anything about them explicitly.
And I think that this is the way that that kinder, gentler kind of patriarchy or kinder, gentler, high control religion works.
So it's the same kind of thing that were he to listen to this and I were to say, you know, this is a, it's a homophobic, transphobic, queer phobic presentation, he might say something like, I don't know what you're talking about that.
I never said that.
I never said anything bad about queer people.
I never said that gay men can't be husbands or something.
But he means it because throughout a husband is a man.
The man is married to a woman.
It's husband and wife.
There's no reference to anything else.
It's absolutely what he means.
So the idea is the same.
And that's when you get the Hollies of the world.
It's the nice guy patriarchy.
JD Vance is the a-hole patriarchy.
Donald Trump is just the raw exercise of power patriarchy.
Josh Hawley is the smooth-edged patriarchy.
He's the one that wants to seem nice.
He wants to seem friendly and reasonable and inviting.
But the ideas are the same.
And it's worth highlighting that.
It's worth highlighting that because I'm not going to spend time in all of these episodes where it'd be relevant talking about that there's no place for queer identity here and so forth.
There isn't.
There's absolutely no place for queer identity.
It's just right there on the surface all the time.
So just know that, that this is baked into what Holly is doing.
And I want to put that out there because we have to remember that he absolutely takes it as a given fact, something he thinks he doesn't have to argue for.
He doesn't have to defend.
He doesn't have to demonstrate that there are only two genders, that they are biologically determined from birth, and that part of masculinity or being a man is being attracted to women and vice versa for femininity.
He absolutely presupposes those things.
And we could see that if we want to step outside of the book and look at just Josh Hawley as a senator, this week, the time I'm recording this, earlier this week, he pressed an OBGYN testifying before the Senate about whether or not men could get pregnant in a hearing about Mithopristone.
The reason he was doing that, of course, is he's critiquing the notion of gender fluidity, gender nonconformity, transgender identity, and so forth.
So we know that that's who Josh Hawley is, but he doesn't come out and say it in the book.
It's the kinder, gentler form of high control right-wing ideology.
So I throw that out there.
Talked about that before.
It's going to come through, I think, in other chapters.
What I want to look at for this episode is getting into this notion of husband and therefore of marriage.
That's his whole point.
Is I want to look at the myth that Hawley really consciously constructs about what marriage is.
I want to start.
And we can't go line by line.
There's too much in here.
I could go literally line by line by line in this chapter and have something to say.
We can't do that.
But I want to look at the myth he has about marriage.
The reason I want to do that is that one of the things he does throughout this book is he always attacks his imagined opponents, the modern day Epicureans or the elites or liberals or Hollywood or whatever.
He always attacks them for putting forward mythical views of gender and masculinity and sex and so forth.
And what he's doing there, it's a good rhetorical move, is he positions himself as offering a view that is just, you know, it's just common sense.
Or for the Christian audience, is he just being biblical?
Or at times, he's going to say he's just being historical.
He's just being scientific.
He's going to cite some social scientists in this chapter.
He's going to try to give those credentials.
And so he's creating a contrast.
Those of us who disagree with him and think something different from him, we're working with mythical conceptions of human identity.
He's offering something different, something that's not mythical, something that's not a fiction or a story or a narrative.
But I said last episode, that's exactly what this is.
He's telling us a story.
It is a narrative that he is putting forward.
And that's all a myth is.
A myth is just a narrative about why things are as they are, how they've come to be, and so forth.
And that's what he's giving us in this chapter.
And I find it fascinating because there are these places.
There's lots of places in this book.
And if you stick with people like Holly long enough, you'll find these where the cracks are there and like what they're really doing sort of shines through.
You can see what they're actually doing, what they spend all their time sort of carefully hiding from you sort of comes into view.
And this is one of those chapters where that happens because his myth-making is right on the surface and it structures everything he has to say about marriage.
So here's where he starts.
If you, again, I read this book so you don't have to, but if you decide to read it, you're going to get kind of tired of the stories.
You know, it's a mass market book.
It's intended for a broad audience.
And I'm sure that the editors tell everybody who writes these books that, you know, this is how you should start.
So he always starts with some folksy, nostalgic reflection or recollection about something that I think is supposed to do a lot of work, but he's no different in this chapter.
And he starts with a long reflection about his grandparents' house and about how it was full on holidays and birthdays and how much he treasures those men or memories and so forth.
And he tells us things like, you know, his grandparents had six kids and 15 grandchildren.
And he talks about at holidays and birthdays and how full it was just to bursting with people.
And he reminisces about hearing the adults sit and tell stories.
And he says that he associates that house as home more than even a house he grew up in.
He almost, he never talks about his parents or his own upbringing.
It's always the grandparents and the grandparents' house, and that's reflected here.
And he describes it, he says this, he describes it as, quote, a never-failing haven of joy and happy memory.
A spiritual outpost in my life, as much as it was a physical outpost on the prairie, tucked there among the fields, end quote.
So we get more of this nostalgia about his grandparents.
He's talked about this before.
But we also get, and we've gotten this before, but I think it's stronger in this chapter, the valorization of a kind of an agrarian American cultural context.
That language, again, is the house as a physical outpost on the prairie.
As if, I don't know, as if they're out there in the middle of the prairie all by themselves, you know, homesteading or something.
It's this kind of ridiculous vision that he has.
And the reason I highlight this is it might be personally meaningful to him.
I'm not going to pretend to read his mind.
I don't know if he's just telling this to try to win readers or let's assume it's true for him.
But it's also a strategic move that he makes throughout the book.
And this is why, like most people on the right, he absolutely valorizes rural Americans over anything urban or anybody urban.
And he idealizes an imagined American past where farming and rural life were the foundations of American virtue.
He sets up one of the dichotomies structuring this book is urban and rural and rural wins.
20% Value Discrepancy00:04:24
And the problem for him, this is why I think he spends so much time talking about his grandparents and not his parents.
The problem for him is that his actual story isn't that story.
So he has to go two generations back and try to claim it as his own.
That's why we always hear about his grandpa and the farming and the work he does and so forth.
We don't hear about his immediate family because it's not that same story.
But as a kind of aside, I don't know how much of an aside this is.
I don't know if this is important or what he's doing.
We'll see how it plays out.
But as kind of a side note, when he talks about this, this chapter, he also reveals the disdain.
And this is typical on the right.
If you watch discourses on the right about politics and voting and voting rights and vote counting and everything else, you know that this is typical of the right.
He reveals the disdain for anyone who doesn't come from that kind of cultural background.
And he makes this really telling statement later in the chapter.
Here's what he says.
He says, as someone who grew up in a rural place, I had and still have a strong preference for home, for family, and the people I know face to face.
End quote.
Here's the key.
There's no obvious connection between those values and being quote unquote rural.
I don't know anybody in an ideal world to be like, nope, I don't want home or family or the people I know face to face.
I know people who would say, yeah, families are complicated and I can't really be around mine or we have issues or whatever.
But in an idealized world, in a perfect world, I think everybody would be like, well, yeah, I would value home and family and people I know face to face, friends and neighbors and people I care about.
Who the hell would say that they don't value those things?
But that's what Holly does is he makes this connection.
He says, as a rural person, I value these things.
And the clear implication is that anyone who's not from a rural place, as he describes himself, does not have a strong preference for home or family or people they know face to face.
You see how he does that?
And here's what puts that claim in perspective.
80% of Americans live in areas that can be defined as urban, which means, of course, only 20%, I'm not a math guy, but I can do that math.
Only 20% of Americans have the kind of experience, the being from a rural place that Hawley says he has, that he says is integral to valuing family and home and people that you see face to face.
What he's saying, folks, is that only 20% of Americans have a shot of being real Americans.
Only 20% of Americans can really identify the way he does.
Only 20% of Americans are authorized to speak about what real America is.
That's what he's claiming.
So forget images we might have seen and some of you might have experienced and we all know of, say, for example, tightly knit blue-collar urban neighborhoods where families have lived on the same street for generations.
Forget that.
Nope, not rural enough.
They don't know what it's like to value family and home.
Forget apartment buildings full of people who have roof parties and shared cookouts or block parties.
Nope, nope, nope.
No real community there because they're not rural.
Forget the Chinatowns and the little Italys and the Korea towns and all the places, the enclaves where people have banded together for generations.
Nope.
Nope.
No desire for home, for family, for people we know face to face there.
Forget the people like Josh Hawley who go off to colleges and universities and non-rural areas and form the deepest connections of their lives.
Nope, not rural enough, not tied enough to home and family.
Nope, they don't value family and home and face-to-face connection.
Holly does.
So we've got this whole nostalgic reflection, this whole thing about his grandparents and the house.
And that's part of what he's trying to tell us is like his value for home and even though it's not his home, for home and family and people that he knows face-to-face and so forth.
Why?
What is the point?
If you were to read this chapter, you're reading the nostalgia piece and you're just like turning pages like, okay, where are we going, Josh?
Marriage as Eden's Recreation00:15:25
Where are we going with this?
What's the point?
I'm reading a student essay that spends this much time getting to the point of like, where are we going?
What are we doing?
Like, let's cut to it.
Here's his point.
His point ultimately in this chapter is his grandparents' marriage.
That's the key to this image of home and family and people that he cares about face to face.
Why?
What is marriage for Holly?
We need to know this.
Marriage, he says, and here he appeals to the Bible again.
This is what he says.
Marriage, quote, comes with a promise, the promise of Eden.
Yep.
The vision of paradise of a perfect social order grounded in Holly's view in the first couple, the couple in Genesis, Adam and Eve imagined as married.
It never says that they were married.
Genesis never says that they were married, but that's how it's always understood.
That image of a paradise of Eden, the Garden of Eden that was destroyed by Adam, it can be restored in the institution of heterosexual marriage.
When social commentators and others talk about the centrality of the cis hetero family unit, the nuclear family, the centrality of that concept in right-wing ideology, this is what they're talking about.
Hawley literally says marriage is so important.
It is the restoration of Eden.
It is the restoration.
It promises to restore the paradise kind of existence that humans were intended to have from the start.
So this is the calling of straight men for him to reenact the promise of Eden by getting married.
And his grandparents' marriage, he tells us, gave him a vision of this Edenic recreation.
When he looks at his grandparents' marriage, he sees it.
Paradise.
Their home that he nostalgically reminisces about, quote, this is what he says.
His grandparents' home, quote, represented what my grandparents Harold and Mabel had built together, end quote.
And then he says this.
He goes on, he says, I kid you not, you couldn't make this up.
If you said, if you said to somebody, that person's view is, I don't know, the marriage is so important that it restores the Garden of Eden.
So I'd be like, God, that's grandiose.
That's a weird thing to think.
Talk about an unrealistic expectation.
They'd think you were making it up.
Here's what he says.
He says this.
If their home seemed to me like a kind of Eden, that's because in a very real sense, it was, end quote.
His grandparents of good Scandinavian stock, good farmers, living a rural life, they gave a view of the restoration of paradise in their marriage.
So there you have it.
His grandparents recreated Eden.
But he also says this.
This is weird.
This is where the cracks come through.
It's like, okay, he says marriage is Eden, but here's where like there's a crack that you kind of look through to see what's behind it.
Here's what else he says.
He says, I actually know very little of my grandparents' marriage.
Wait, Josh.
So your grandparents' marriage was the basis of a recreation of Eden, but you're also saying that you don't actually know what their marriage was like?
And I get that.
Like what kid talks to their grandparents about marriage?
I had the misfortune that my mom's grandparents, the side of the family we were closest to, they both passed by the time I was in grade school.
I wasn't talking to them about their marriage.
That's what he says.
I actually know very little of my grandparents' marriage.
That seems like a contradiction.
He's talking about how it's a vision of Eden and so forth, but he doesn't know anything about their marriage.
Here's what he's doing.
He's creating his own myth.
He doesn't need to actually know about their marriage.
He's got this vision that marriage recreates Eden.
He's got all these nostalgic, positive memories of his grandparents' house.
So he's not going to let little old facts like that he's never actually talked to his grandparents about their marriage, doesn't know what it was like, doesn't know if they would describe it as a return to Eden or not.
He's not going to let that mess up a good story.
And the story that heterosexual marriage restores Eden, that's a good story.
He's making his myth.
He is spinning his myth right in front of us.
And he as much as tells us that in this section.
So supposedly his grandparents' marriage is his window into what marriage is intended to be, but he doesn't even know what their marriage was like.
But he likes the story of a new Eden.
And he likes the story of a new Eden.
And very frankly, he likes the cultural authority it gives to cis heteromarriage and to men within cis heteromarriages.
He likes that story and he's not going to let facts stand in the way of a good story.
So he's not offering us some just simply true or common sense or biblical account that contrasts with the mythical account of the American left.
He's just offering us another myth.
That's all he's doing.
And it's as close to explicit in this chapter as you could be.
And what's his basis for that?
What is his basis?
If somebody were to press him and say, wait, whoa, Josh, you're telling us that you're like, your grandparents' marriage tells us that, but you're saying you don't actually know anything about their marriage.
Like, how do you know about that it actually modeled this recreation of Eden?
Here's what he says.
His basis for holding to this myth is this.
I'm quoting him again.
It is the simple fact that it, his grandparents' marriage, the simple fact that it was and they together endured.
Okay, Josh, hold on.
So how do you know that your grandparents' marriage was like a paradise on earth?
recreated the primordial paradise that humans were intended to exist within.
How do you know that?
Well, they were married and they endured.
Their marriage lasted.
Oh.
So his vision of paradise is that you endure your marriage.
There's some people with great marriages.
They have great marriages for a really long time.
They stay great and their marriage is always great.
I suspect, on the other hand, though, I feel like I've got a good authority on this, that lots of people experience marriages that are not edenic.
They're not paradise on earth.
And I frankly wouldn't advise anybody to like that, what's the sign of a great marriage?
You endure it, a marriage that you can endure.
That doesn't sound great.
But that's what he has to say.
Okay.
Now, we're going to talk more as we go, I think, about what he thinks that is, like what marriage is, what the masculine virtues that are cultivated in marriage are.
We'll get to those.
But this notion of enduring marriage, that's kind of his view.
Marriage recreates Eden, and he knows it from his grandparents how, because they endured it.
Okay.
But somebody could still say, well, okay, Josh, it's great.
Let's say that your grandparents had a great marriage.
Let's say it was awesome.
Let's say that it was as close to paradise on earth as it could be and so on.
Let's imagine that they would have described it as a recreation of Eden.
Okay.
Still, that's your grandparents.
Like, who cares what your grandparents experience?
Like, how are your grandparents an authority for me?
Let alone, how are your grandparents an authority for like all men everywhere, all women everywhere, anybody who could get married, et cetera?
Like, why, who gives a shit about your grandparents?
With all due respect, Senator Josh Hawley.
Well, here's where the other move comes in.
He doesn't just appeal to his grandparents.
He also draws on a biblical example, right?
So once again, he's going to do, this is one of those themes I identified, talked about in a previous episode.
What he's going to do is he's going to project his own values and his own understanding of marriage back into the Bible to effectively launder them, to cleanse them.
And then he's going to pretend, it's like he sticks them in the Bible.
He's like, oh, hey, look, what I found in the Bible.
He takes them back out, pretending that that's where he's actually getting his views.
And then they supposedly have biblical authority, which to a lot of his audience matters.
So we're going to talk more about those specific dimensions are as we get through the chapter.
But for now, I just want to highlight how he does this because it's another weird move.
So it's highlighting who he chooses as a biblical exemplar of marriage.
So conservatives love to talk about marriage.
They love to talk about it as a divinely ordained institution.
They love to talk about quote-unquote biblical marriage.
He's no different.
So who is his exemplar for a biblical marriage?
Wait for it.
Because if you know the Bible, you're like, oh, that's the best you can do.
It's Abraham.
Now, if you don't know who Abraham is, that's fine.
If you do know who Abraham is, you know the Abraham stories in the Bible, you're like, wow.
Okay.
That's your model of good husband.
Abraham and Sarah's marriage, that's your model of a restoration of Eden?
Okay.
On the surface, it feels like a weird choice.
Why?
Well, he addresses some of the things that for contemporary readers are going to be the problematic dimensions of Abraham as a husband.
Okay.
So like a reader in the 21st century reading this story, there are two accounts where he passes his wife off as his sister, basically exposing her to sexual violence twice.
Two times, he says that she is his sister and wants her to pretend to be his sister instead of his wife.
And she is exposed to sexual violence as a result of this.
He, you know, Produces an heir with his wife's handmaid.
Whole complicated story of that, common practice in the ancient Near East and so forth.
The purpose of marriage was to, you know, create a family line and a legacy and so forth.
He doesn't believe that his wife is going to be able to provide this in the biblical stories, despite the fact that God has promised him that she will.
And so at her suggestion, he fathers a child with her handmaid.
Common cultural practice in the context in which this text is produced.
But to contemporary readers, it's going to be a problem and doesn't kind of sound like maybe the idea, the actions of an ideal husband.
Certainly not the cis heteronormative monogamous kind of husband that Josh Hawley presupposes.
So it seems like a weird choice.
And then to make it even weirder, Hawley says this.
He concludes his discussion of Abraham by saying this.
It's what he says.
The only thing in which Abraham was consistent as a husband was failure.
What?
Like that's your exemplar, a guy who you say just you're basically like, yeah, what Abraham really shows us is how not to be a good husband.
So he's our exemplar of good husbands.
Doesn't sound like much of an endorsement, but he still also says this in the same chapter.
He says, this is on page 84.
If anybody wanted to go look, the only thing in which Abraham was consistent as a husband was failure.
But pages earlier on page 68, he says this, that the Abraham narrative presents the true alternative to contemporary social attacks on marriage and so forth.
So how can he say that?
Like, how do you hold that contradiction together?
How do you say, well, Abraham's the model, but he only shows us failure, but he's the true alternative.
How do you do that?
It's the same way he does with the story about his grandparents.
He's not going to let what the Bible actually says get in the way of a good story.
And this is one of the things about how he reads the Bible, how conservatives like him read the Bible.
They appeal to the Bible all the time.
And often when you go to the passages they look at and you read them, and folks, I debated, man, we could really dive more into the Abraham narrative and we could talk about ancient biblical narrative and how it's different from, say, you know, modern day narratives and so forth.
But I'm tired of talking about the Bible and I think people are tired of me always talking about the Bible.
So I didn't do that, but we could do that.
The point is that conservatives are always telling you that they find stuff in the Bible.
But if you go and take a close look, oftentimes you're like, what are you talking about?
The biblical scholar Bart Ehrman once said something along the lines of that the Bible is much revered but little read.
This is a great account of that.
But here's the point.
He's not going to let what the Bible actually says get in the way of a good story, a good myth.
So to this failure of an exemplar of marriage, he also imports his very modern, historically anachronistic understandings of marriage.
For example, that marriage is a partnership, that it involves love and devotion and self-sacrifice on the part of men.
These are all fairly modern conceptions of marriage and historians of marriage, and there are historians who study the institution of marriage and ideas about marriage, will tell you that this is a very sort of modern, distinctively modern, and in some cases, even contemporary notion of marriage.
He projects all of those back into a cultural and historical context in which marriage meant nothing of the kind, the Abraham story.
And then he tells you that he found it there.
So he appeals to both his grandparents and Abraham, basically so he can take all of his favorite privileged conceptions of marriage and give them biblical authority.
That's what he's doing.
We're going to say a lot more about Holly's vision of men as husbands, right?
But I got to wrap this up.
So like, what's the point?
Where are we going here?
My point here is basically this notion of marriage as the recreation of Eden, the recreation of a paradise.
That's a tall order.
And it's interesting that when you press Holly's discourse at all, there's nothing to kind of support it.
But that's the point.
Everything he's going to say is going to take place against this backdrop of, I think, a hopelessly naive and mythical understanding of what marriage is.
And marriage, as always, again, between a cisgender or within a cisgender heterosexual couple.
And that's the way that we reenact the Edenic paradise that was lost in the human fall.
One of the defining features of the cultural right, and lots of great people have written about this and talked about this, is the elevation of the modern nuclear family.
Again, that's an ideal that has been normative since around the Victorian period.
It's a very white, you know, European, Euro-American, kind of Victorian ideal of family.
They elevate that vision of family to the status of cultural foundation.
This is all reflected in what Holly is saying here.
Holly tells us that we want to restore Eden, the ideal human state, the ideal state of human existence, the ideal state of human partnership, the ideal state for the basis of civilization.
Holes in His Theory00:02:23
We have to restore the white cis hetero family, starting with the institution of marriage.
Which are you listening to this?
Are you catching what he's saying?
He's saying that the restoration of a white cis hetero American society, starting with the family and building out from there, the family is the basis of society, that the restoration of a white cis heteroamerican society, that is the restoration of Edenic paradise.
It is not only God's design.
It is not only God's will.
It is God's ideal for living and experiencing the fullness of what we can be as humans.
That's a lot.
We're not done.
We're going to look more at what that looks like.
We're going to look at what he has to say about those of us who don't fit into that paradigm.
I'm also going to poke holes in his ideology in lots of different ways because, you know, it's what I do.
We'll explore those things in further episodes.
But for now, I want us to just sit with that.
I want to throw that out to you.
I want you to think about that and hold that for next episode.
When he says husband, he means cisgender, heterosexual husband.
But he is also saying this gives a man this central role in recreating Eden, recreating paradise through the act of marriage.
That's how significant it is.
What if you're a man and you're not married?
Again, he's got no space for people who aren't straight.
Maybe like, what about a gay person and them getting married?
Nope, no place for that.
What about men who can't get married?
We'll talk about that because there's some real holes in his theory when it comes to this.
What about those who don't agree with him?
What about the quote-unquote Epicureans who hold a different view?
We're going to talk about that and how he envisions those who oppose him.
And we're going to, this is a chapter where he also gets into the, the fixation on the right when it comes to marriage and family, the issue of pornography.
We're going to talk about all those things as we go along.
We need to wind this down.
So please keep listening, keep tuning in.
Questions You Couldn't Ask00:00:35
Thank you for listening to this, as always.
Again, questions you couldn't ask in church or weren't supposed to ask in church, email me, let me know what those are at Daniel Miller, Swedge, Daniel Miller, S-W-A-J at gmail.com.
Can't wait to hear them.
I think a lot of them have to do with topics like this.
So let me know.
Put that in the subject line so I can find your email easily.
And I look forward to putting that material together.
You could be doing something else.
You're sitting here listening to me, supporting what we do.