Josh Hawley argues that America’s restoration can only come as men develop and exercise their unique, God-given masculine virtues and the play their assigned roles in society (the first of these is husband). This is a patriarchal vision of America that most Americans would reject, so he softens the presentation of his high-control religious vision to try to make it seem less radical, more inviting, and more inclusive. But by softening his message, he actually shows readers what he most wants to hide: There is no such thing as a kinder, more inclusive expression of high-control religion. Join Dan this week as he takes a look.
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Series is part of the podcast, Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Lamar College.
I am your host.
As I say all the time, this is a series that only works because of you.
This is a series that only works when you let me know what you think, when you let me know about new ideas, when you give me feedback about episodes, when you let me know what you want to hear about.
And we have been for a while and still going to be for a while working through Josh Hawley's book on manhood.
So Senator Josh Hawley, one of the contemporary right-wing figures in our U.S. congressional group, is going to teach us about what it is to be a man and what manhood is and the masculine virtues that will save America and so forth.
We're continuing to work through that.
But I'm looking ahead and I've seen, gotten several emails from folks asking for more on a series on questions I couldn't ask in church or questions I was afraid to ask in church or questions I wasn't supposed to ask in church.
If you've got thoughts about that, email me, Daniel MillerSwadge, DanielMiller, S-W-A-J at gmail.com.
Put in the header, questions I couldn't ask in church or wasn't supposed to ask in church, something like that.
That'll alert me that it's there.
Putting that together and getting some great, some great examples from listeners.
And so thank you to all of you for doing that.
And please keep those coming.
I want to dive in here, just as a reminder, as I said, we're looking through Hawley's book.
We are currently in chapter five, where he discusses the first of the roles that he thinks men are called to play.
Again, the first part of the book is a few chapters where he sort of lays out, I guess, his theology.
We would maybe call it a philosophical or theological anthropology.
His account of what men are, what they're called to be, their God-given purpose and so forth.
Talked all the stuff about Adam and the Garden of Eve, Garden of Eve, excuse me, Garden of Eden, and Adam and Eve and the temptation and the serpent and all that sort of stuff.
Last Episode in Chapter Five00:03:05
And then he goes into the roles that men are supposed to play.
And we are in chapter five.
The first of those roles is husband.
And I was reading, this will be the last episode in this chapter.
There's more that we could say.
It's true of all his chapters all the time.
They're so bad.
They're so bad.
I read this so you don't have to read it.
It's so bad.
It's so dumb.
And yet it is so common.
The stuff he is saying is so much a part of contemporary right-wing discourse.
But I was reading this chapter and it was interesting because there are some points at which it sort of unravels on him a little bit.
Now, I don't know that Josh recognizes that.
He doesn't follow through where it might go, but I wanted to highlight these points.
And I'm hoping this sort of comes together here.
One of the, I don't know, it's either a strength or weakness of this series is that you get me kind of, you know, as I'm working through things, as I'm, as I'm processing them.
And so you sort of get a little bit of a stream of consciousness here.
So I hope this comes together here.
But I want to return to a theme that I've brought up in the past.
If you're a longtime listener, you'll remember me talking about this, you know, episodes and episodes and episodes and episodes ago, but I've also brought this up in the context of Holly.
And it's the idea that he is presenting a sort of kinder, gentler articulation of patriarchy.
What he's doing is he's advancing a model of patriarchy and patriarchal authority, but he's trying to do it in a way where he doesn't just appeal to masculine authority sort of as such.
He doesn't only insist on it by saying, this is what God wants and this is the way it is, period, kind of thing.
That's all there.
But the presentation is softer.
It's kinder.
It's gentler.
He couches his patriarchy in terms of service and sacrifice and the benefits that come to all the non-patriarchs in the world and so forth.
And that's the standard way of this model of a kind of benevolent patriarchy.
That, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
Technically it's patriarchy, but it's good for everybody.
These are patriarchs who protect.
They're patriarchs who serve.
They're patriarchs who sacrifice and so forth.
So he advocates a patriarchy and even a medieval vision of society.
He keeps talking about lords and vassals and has this notion of an ordered society on the model of European Christendom.
This model of society that is completely at odds with and incompatible with a modern pluralistic democratic republic.
But he won't just come out and say that either, right?
And there are Christian nationalists at present who do.
We talk about this all the time in our weekly roundup.
My partner and co-host Brad O'Nishi is phenomenal on developing this and tracking those down.
The new monarchists, the people who just will come out and say, well, you know, maybe it's time to suspend the Constitution.
Maybe it's time to have an authoritarian dictator and so forth.
That's not Josh Hawley.
He's not just going to say that, but he's advancing a social model that doesn't fit with democracy.
So what he'll do is he'll downplay that and he'll mask it all under the language of service and sacrifice and what a big help these self-sacrificing men will be for society.
That is what will save society.
Tension in Religious Reengagement00:06:55
But here's the key.
And I've talked about this.
I think it's important to see this.
The overall vision is the same.
The kinder, gentler presentation, it's just an illusion.
The end result is no different from what the Christian monarchists would advance.
And this isn't unique to Hawley.
Again, we're talking about Hawley because he doesn't say anything special or unique.
It is not limited to discussions of patriarchy and sexuality.
This is a feature of a lot of high control religion in America.
It's a common way of making ideas that would repel most Americans feel much more palatable, feel inviting, the kindler, kinder, gentler presentation.
And this is the aspect of this that I presented on a long time ago.
And you should know, if you don't, I know a lot of you listening have familiarity with being within these high control religious contexts.
I know many of many of you like me that used to be clergy members within these contexts.
But if you don't know, you should, that learning how to communicate high control religion in those inviting terms, that's an explicit strategy.
It's a skill that people work to develop.
There are skills that are taught in order to win other people over to that religious worldview in their institutions.
It was a part of my experience as part of high control evangelical Christianity.
It was a topic of discussion and frankly a topic of practice in seminary courses.
You take seminary courses on evangelism, on how to share your faith and on church growth and so forth.
And these things were baked in.
We would talk about it with other church staff.
I would talk about it with ministerial colleagues and so forth.
These are explicit things that people would talk about.
How to make it more inviting.
Now we might say, how to brand it?
The issue of branding.
How do we take this message that can sound shrill and awful and anti-democratic?
How do we brand it to show that it's not?
But here's the trick.
Okay.
As central as that is, as common as that is, as successful as many people are in putting forward that vision, it's not easy to maintain the kinder, gentler vibe within high control religion.
For one thing, there are people like me now and like a lot of you listening who just see through that shit and call it out.
Like it's that simple.
You're just like, nope, I call bullshit.
And I think the opposition, the active opposition to American high control religion has increased.
And so those voices of critique, I think, are more prominent than they were a few decades back.
And so that's one reason why it's not easy to maintain.
But let's just set that aside.
Let's set aside that there are cultural commentators and ex-vangelicals and faith deconstructionists and so forth who can see right through it.
Let's just set all them aside.
Here's what I think is the difficulty for high control religionists when they try to maintain the kinder, gentler religious articulation.
It's this.
There is no such thing as a kinder, gentler, high control religion.
There's just no such thing.
It doesn't exist.
So you can maintain that persona and that vibe for a while, but it's hard to maintain because it's something that's not real.
It is intended to draw people in, to invite them to be part of the group.
And a way to do that is to soften and blur the distinctions between insiders and outsiders, but it's hard to maintain.
And there's a risk in this for people within high control religion who talk in this way.
Because when you try to take a religious tradition like this and you're trying to make it so that it's different, but not too different.
You're trying to claim to be countercultural, but not so countercultural that people can't still go to work or hang out with their friends or be cool to other people or whatever.
And it's the message the high control religionists, again, they often try to project.
We're different, but we're not that different.
They'll tell you that they're distinct from the secular world, but you can still go do the things that you like and so forth.
And so you get this tension that develops.
And so there's a tension, number one, because there is no such thing as a kinder, gentler, or high control religion.
And number two, because projecting that kinder, gentler persona, it requires breaking down or softening or blurring the distinction between your high control religion and the world in a way that threatens the very identity of the group.
Okay.
And this is a tension that has defined high control American Christianity, specifically American evangelicalism since it emerged.
So what we now call evangelicalism in its current form kind of emerges after the Second World War when you get this younger generation of what have been called fundamentalists who want to kind of re-engage culture and so forth.
It's in that context.
And that tension has always been there.
Evangelicalism always hitched its wagon to engaging with secular culture.
And that meant that it always had to find ways to create common ground with people who were not evangelicals.
It means that there's always been a tension at some points extreme between the claims of popular high control religion to be countercultural and its dependence on culture.
You want one example of this.
Just think about the fact that most evangelicals are absolutely committed to the idea that free market capitalism is the divinely sanctioned economic model, even though it's an impossible, I think it's an argument you just simply can't make from the Bible, but it's also not the model, the kind of capitalism that they're talking about now was not the model in the U.S., certainly in the 20th century, until you get up into the Reagan period.
They're tied to culture.
And that stands in contrast, if you want to contrast, to sort of extreme fundamentalist groups, which are defined by their withdrawal from culture.
They don't tend to engage culture.
They withdraw from it.
They put up their walls.
They're sort of, they maintain a different kind of distinction.
So that's another reason why it's hard to consistently maintain this discourse, to hold up the facade of the kinder, gentler, high control religion is that number one, it's not a real thing.
But number two, you're blurring the distinction that you have to have to maintain your religious identity.
And so that becomes especially prominent when people do see through it and call it out.
So it breaks down.
Excuse me, the kinder, gentler persona, it breaks down.
And I think it goes in one of two directions.
The first is to retrench, to drop the kinder, gentler pretense when it encounters that pressure or somebody comes along and calls them out or whatever.
And what happens is it just kind of unmasks it and they fall back to a position of asserting their authority as spokespersons for God or whatever.
Kinder, Gentler Pretense Unmasked00:15:00
This was the experience in the church where I worked.
And so for those of you who are unfamiliar, maybe you're new to listening, I was the junior of two pastors in a small church, a church about 100 people, 100, 120.
And my pastor and my boss, for the head pastor, as he was called, it was also my boss, he was a master of articulating and really believing the kinder, gentler, high control religion discourse.
He was a master at the kinder, gentler presentation.
I think he really believed it.
Most of the time, he really thought that that's the faith that he had and that that's what he was offering people.
But as I became more and more disillusioned with my religious context, again, sort of experiencing what we now call faith, excuse me, faith deconstruction in a time when those weren't the words that we had, we would butt heads over various issues, me and the pastor.
And I was essentially pushing back on the kinder, gentler ideology, which was a fundamental feature of our expression of high control Christianity.
I was beginning to question that.
And for me, that led to theological questions, questioning the theology behind it.
And invariably, what would happen when we would have these discussions is his kinder, gentler pretense, it would crumble.
He would fall back to a much more authoritarian position.
He would go from the, you know, we're doing this because God loves you and has a plan for your life to the Bible says this and we obey the Bible.
God says this.
God is the supreme authority.
We do what God says.
We have been appointed to be spokespeople for God.
That is our role in the world.
And on a more mundane level, he would just threaten to fire me.
Okay.
If you're listening to this and you're familiar with that kind of high control Christian context, you've probably had similar experiences.
Okay.
You encounter someone, maybe someone who sounds a lot like Holly, who expresses their high control religion in inviting, kind, gentle terms.
You might even take that at face value and think that they're really actually inviting dialogue and discussion.
That was my mistake more than once.
He said, hey, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
I'd love to talk more about that.
And I, naive young person that I was, believed them and thought that they wanted to hear my thoughts and talk about it.
And I would find out that they didn't.
So you ask your questions or you highlight your concerns or you share your critique and all the pretensions fall away.
And in their place, all the dimensions that make high control religion what it is that make it high control, they all come into full view.
It shows itself for what it is.
Okay.
So you can have the kinder, gentler presentation that tries to mask the high control nature of high control religion.
And one way that that can unravel is that that pretense just falls away and it really comes out as what it is.
But there's another way that the kinder, gentler articulation can unravel.
And that's what's finally bringing me to Holly here.
All that's kind of preamble for what I want to talk about in Josh Holly today and how I want to decode this book and what I'm seeing in it.
That brings us to Holly's chapter.
Because Holly is presenting this kinder, gentler vision, but he gives us a glimpse of the other direction in which that kinder, gentler articulation can unravel.
So here's what he's argued.
He has insisted that men, as men, have a special, unique role to play in society.
And sort of built into that, obviously, is the notion that there are two genders.
They are divinely sanctioned.
There are only two genders.
There are men, there are women, and men have this unique special role to play.
It is not a role they create or take upon themselves.
It is given by God.
It is a God-given calling.
And within that framework, he's arguing that there are distinctly masculine virtues that men, as men, are called to cultivate and to exercise.
That this is part of what it is to be a man.
And those virtues of properly masculine character are expressed in the different roles that men and only men are called to play, the first of which is husband.
We're going to move into the second of these next week.
Now, there are a lot of things wrong with that model, and I've had a lot to say about them here and in other contexts.
But here's an obvious one.
Okay.
Here's the obvious one that comes up.
What about men who don't play those social roles?
And he talks about men who are coaches and leaders and husbands.
You're like, well, okay, but like, what about men who don't play those roles?
Is it really the case that all men are called to be husbands, Josh?
Imagine the conversation.
Like, okay, like that, that's interesting.
Let's say it's there, but like, sure there'd be some guys who don't get married?
It's like, what does that mean?
Are you actually saying that this social role is the only way to develop and express these virtues?
And so on.
You can hear those questions coming.
And questions like these are where we start to push back on Holly's kinder, gentler articulation.
Now, this is what's different about Holly.
He doesn't respond most of the time.
He doesn't respond the way the pastor of my church did.
He doesn't respond the way the more hard-edged right-wing masculinists do.
There are plenty of people on the right who are advocating what I'm calling the same vision of masculinity, who will just lean on masculine authority and obeying men.
And they would say, yeah, yeah, if you don't, you're not a husband.
You're not doing that.
You're not taking on these virtues.
You're just not, you're not an alpha.
You're just not an alpha.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, you're a beta male.
You're a lesser man.
They would just say it.
But that's not what Holly says because we've seen that.
Holly has said earlier in the book that he finds those kinds of responses to be shrill and defensive.
He views what he's doing as something different.
That's what I've said brings him to his kinder, gentler articulation.
So he goes in a different direction.
And here's how it unravels for him.
He leans into the kinder, gentler articulation, and it actually calls his entire project into question.
Because the logic of kinder and gentler, the logic of inclusion, the logic of acceptance, the logic of divine love, the logic of grace, it is the opposite of high control religion.
But that's what Holly does.
He tries to maintain the kinder, gentler line, and it undermines his whole model of masculinity.
So here's what he says.
His whole line in this chapter, specifically in this chapter on husbands, is that man, that men must, quote, give themselves away.
They must vow.
They must commit themselves to another and so on.
And of course, marriage becomes the context in which they do this.
And for him, of course, marriage is cis-hetero-monogamous lifelong marriage.
So that is the context in which men give themselves away and vow and commit and so forth.
And these are among what he calls the husband's virtues.
These are all his words from this chapter.
So husbandhood, if we could call it that, is the renewal.
He says this explicitly is the renewal of everything Adam destroyed in his disobedience.
It's God's kind of way of starting over so that every man is called in a marriage relationship to essentially hit the reset on God's ideal in Adam.
That's how significant marriage is.
That's his line.
And that's a line that, again, fits right into any number of expressions of the kind of right-wing discourse about masculinity.
But then Josh Hawley, the nice guy.
Josh Hawley, the kinder, gentler patriarch, he kind of blocks Josh Hawley, the right-wing dialogue.
Excuse me, the right-wing ideologue.
Because you can imagine the conversation.
Imagine that you're going to say, okay, but like, what about the dudes who don't get married?
And Josh Hawley, maybe he is, maybe, maybe Josh Hawley's a nice guy.
I don't know.
But he says something like this.
He says, not all men become husbands in fact, but all men can have a husband's virtues.
It's on page 63.
A few pages later, he says this, even if you are not married, the same pattern holds.
And he's talking about that pattern of masculine virtues and so forth.
Huh.
Let's think about this.
Again, here's what he says.
Not all men become husbands in fact, but all men can have a husband's virtue.
Okay.
And even if you're not married, the same pattern holds.
Huh.
He says on one hand that it is only as husbands that men cultivate the virtues of masculinity, the virtues that restore the divine promise given to Adam, that they give themselves to others and so forth.
But then he doesn't want to be an a-hole, I guess.
And he says, well, but you know, I recognize not all men will get married.
It's like he doesn't really want to say that they're not really men.
So he says that they can still cultivate the husband's virtues.
But here's the problem.
Okay, it's a pretty obvious one.
It's easy to read past him in this chapter.
It's easy to get washed over by all the stuff that he says.
But if you read for these points, you'll see this.
Here's the point.
How are they the husband's virtues if you don't have to be a husband to exercise them?
He's saying on one hand, it is only as husbands that men cultivate these virtues.
But then he's saying, even if you're not married, you got to cultivate these virtues.
What that means, folks, is that those virtues aren't actually tied to this masculine role.
The kinder, gentler Josh Hawley wants to recognize and listen, I think, and I think, frankly, be compassionate to those who say, are you sure you really want to marginalize all men who aren't married?
It's like, no, They can cultivate the virtues too.
But if they can cultivate the virtues too, they're not the husband's virtues.
They're not tied to marriage anymore.
He just undercut a leg of his own argument.
But maybe we could say this.
Okay, okay, okay.
Maybe like, I hear you, Dan.
Maybe Josh would be like, all right, okay.
Oh, I shouldn't have said that.
But I mean, there's still masculine virtues.
I'm just saying that to be a man, to exercise masculine virtues, you don't, you don't need to, you don't need to be married to do that.
Even though not tied to marriage.
Cool.
But he's not done undermining his whole argument because he goes on to say this.
He says this, and he's summarizing after he's been talking about these virtues and so forth.
He says this.
He says he, like all men, like all people, requires another person to activate his potential.
This is that notion of giving yourself to another.
He's basically saying, we can't fully be ourselves without others.
It's an idea that I don't mind.
I don't mind that idea.
Stated that way.
Again, he says he, like all men, like all people.
Hold up.
Right here he is.
Kinder, gentler Josh comes forward.
He wants to make his model sound more appealing.
And to do that, he says it's not really about masculinity at all.
Now he's telling us that these are virtues that all people can develop.
I thought this was a book about masculine virtue, Josh.
I thought this was a book about the unique role that only men could play.
I thought this was a book about how men have to develop these unique virtues and play these unique roles to save America.
And now you're saying this is a role all people are called to play.
So now he's telling us that advancing these virtues is not only not limited to men as husbands, but these are virtues that aren't limited to men at all.
They're virtues for all people.
Do you see what's happening here?
He has gone from advocating a narrow set of specifically masculine male virtues to advocating virtues that he says are for everyone.
His whole point has been that men are unique, that they have a unique calling.
America can only be redeemed by men who exercise this, all of that sort of stuff.
But it turns out that now he's saying in this moment that these are virtues for everyone.
Well, what does that mean?
This undermines everything.
That means that gender doesn't matter the way that he thinks it does.
Oh, sorry, Josh.
You're now saying kind of the same thing everybody says.
I say, you know what?
Maybe our role in society and our value society doesn't depend on our damn gender.
So it doesn't matter if we're male or female or somewhere else on a spectrum.
It just doesn't define our social value.
Sexuality doesn't matter.
He said it's got to be the heterosexual cisgender monogamous marriage, but hey, you know what?
These are virtues everybody's called to do and not everybody's going to be married.
You've now marginalized marriage, Josh, the institution you're out to defend.
Relational status doesn't matter.
You've got all this stuff about like regulating sexuality and so forth.
But now if gender and marriage don't matter, then why does that kind of sexual regulation matter?
Now, I don't know that Holly actually thinks any of that.
My guess is he has no awareness with these few kind of throwaway statements, what the implications of that are.
I think they're far too subtle for him to catch.
And they're not what he wants to say.
He doesn't spend most of his time saying that.
He pulls back from it.
What I'm trying to highlight is that's the other way that the kinder, gentler model unravels, because if you actually follow it through, if you actually want to be kinder and gentler and more inviting and more inclusive, it undermines your high control religion.
It undermines his coldly patriarchal view of society.
It undermines the gender normativity he presupposes.
It undermines his homophobia and his transphobia.
It undermines all of those things.
That's the logic that's there.
Which is why he's got to pull back and he's going to start leaning on the Bible and he's going to tell all his Bible stories and he's going to demonize his opponents.
He's going to do all of those things.
He ultimately pulls back from that.
Not in the full authoritarian manner, but in that way, but he treads right up to the edge and he shows us.
He shows us the cracks in the foundation of what he's building and what he's arguing.
He lifts the veil and he shows us that the alternative to his authoritarian, high control vision of society, it's the abandonment of high control religion.
It undermines the core components of that religious articulation.
What he shows us is, again, there is no such thing as a kinder, gentler, high control religion.
Radicalization Revealed00:03:27
There's not.
That's what he shows us.
So what's the point of all this?
I realize it feels like I spent a long, long time sort of circling around and talking about Holly.
So I'm like, let's tie this together here.
The most effective articulations of high control religion, they're effective by pretending not to be articulations of high control religion.
That's how radicalization works.
People get radicalized because they don't know that they're getting radicalized.
I don't think anybody probably wakes up in the morning and says, you know what?
I want to become radicalized today.
They're drawn into ideas or beliefs or ideologies or practices or institutions that feel normal and inviting and so forth.
And they slowly slide over to that.
That's how high control religion works as well.
And their proponents, the high control religionists, they present all of their norms and their values and their judgments as expressions of care or sacrifice or God's will.
The folks we see through it.
And in this chapter, those little cracks in Hawley's position where he says, well, you know, you just, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, marriage, but you don't actually have to be married.
You don't actually have to be a husband to exercise these virtues.
And hey, turns out you don't actually even have to be a guy.
These are virtues for everyone.
We get those cracks.
And if you look through them, you see the light shining through those cracks.
He shows us that we're right, that we do see through it.
He shows us that all the distinctions and the values and norms that he insists are natural and expression of God's will, that they're nothing of the kind.
They are just one more ideology.
And for a few brief moments in this chapter, a glossy, kinder, gentler, shiny advocate of high control religion, he lets his guard down.
And we see that there is nothing positive or affirmative there.
I was a Josh Hawley.
I was one of those people that put forward the inviting, you know, affirming, kinder, gentler vision of high control religion.
And I believed it.
I believed it for a long time.
But over time, I came to recognize that it didn't fit, that there was no kinder, gentler, high control religion.
And my response was the same as many of you listening and many other people.
My response was to leave.
I recognized that I had a choice between a vision of society and maybe religion that was kind and gentle and affirming and caring and grace-filled, or I could maintain high-control religion.
And I left high control religion.
I chose the other path.
It's not where Josh Hawley's at.
He chooses the high control religion, but he shows us, even he, a very, very good articulation of this.
Even in his articulation, we get these places where we can see what's behind it.
And he shows us that there is simply no such thing as a kinder, gentler, high control religion.
Those are the reflections that hit me as we concluded chapter five.
Here's the book.
We're going to pick up next episode in chapter six, which is, if I can find the table of contents, the second role is father.
All you got to think is cis heteronormative stuff.
So first is husband, then father.
We'll pick up on that next episode, dive into what Josh Hawley has to tell us about husbands as men as fathers and what that means.
Thank You, Subscribers!00:00:53
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