It's in the Code ep 181: “It’s Not About Sacrifice”
Dan Miller critiques Josh Hawley’s Manhood, arguing his biblical framing of fatherhood as sacrifice lacks specificity and ignores real parenting dynamics. Hawley’s model, rooted in Abraham’s story, oversimplifies devotion while masking political ambition—like Hawley’s law career and Senate tenure—as selfless. Miller exposes this as hypocrisy, weaponizing fatherhood to demonize opponents like "modern-day Epicureans" who support marginalized groups, then pivots to Hawley’s warrior chapter, urging listeners to challenge unexamined religious rhetoric. [Automatically generated summary]
My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought Landmark College.
I am your host.
This, of course, is a series as part of the podcast, Straight White American Jesus.
Glad to be with you as always.
Been under the weather for the last week or so, but starting to crawl out of the hole now.
So excited to sit down and do this.
As always, I want to start by saying thank you for listening to everybody who listens to the different things that we do or viewing us.
If you're on YouTube and watching this, you can see us in all of our glory and see me in my various t-shirts.
The t-shirts that Brad O'Nishi is envious of.
He acts like he's not, but he is.
That's what it's really about.
In all seriousness, we can't do it without you.
And thank you for your support.
This series in particular only works with you.
It comes from you.
Your ideas, your feedback, your input.
To that end, I'm looking forward to starting a series here in a few weeks called Questions I Was Not Supposed to Ask in Church or Questions I Wasn't Allowed to Ask in Church, something along those lines.
And as I've been saying, I want to continue to just invite you.
If you've got thoughts about that, questions that you couldn't ask in church, questions that got you in trouble in church, questions that led you to leave the church, please send those to me.
Daniel MillerSwadge, Daniel Miller, S-W-A-J at gmail.com.
Put in the heading questions I couldn't ask or something like that.
And that'll flag those for me.
And I'm continuing to collect those and think about those and starting to put that together for future episodes.
And really excited to do that.
I want to go ahead and dive into today's episode.
And again, a little bit of context.
We are continuing our exploration of right-wing conceptions of manhood and masculinity.
And we've been using Josh Hawley's book, Manhood, as our guide for doing this.
Sole Focus on Parenting?00:08:41
And as always, it's useful to kind of remind ourselves where we are within his text.
Over the first few chapters of his book, I'm looking at it.
It's over here on my right.
After the first few chapters of the book, where he sort of lays out the broad overview of what he thinks masculinity is, the biblical case he's trying to build for this, talked a lot about how he's using the Bible and trying to convince us that his ideas are coming from the Bible and so on.
And then in like the last like two-thirds of the book, the second major section, he goes through six roles that he believes men are called to play.
And it's in these roles that they enact manhood, they develop masculine virtue and what have you.
And that's where we are.
We are in the second of these sections and the second of these roles that men are called to play.
It's in chapter six, focusing on fatherhood.
And we're going to conclude our discussion of Holly on fatherhood today.
We've hit on several elements of this already.
And what I think I want to focus on today are his themes of service and sacrifice.
And as we look at what he has to say about these, service and sacrifice, ostensibly as they relate to fatherhood, I think we're also going to get a chance to clap back at some of what he has to say about the modern day Epicureans.
These are his opponents who supposedly hate fatherhood and in so doing oppose any notion of service or sacrifice.
And along the way, we're, again, as we have to do with Holly, we're going to get a look at how he appeals to the Bible to make his ideas feel more persuasive or legitimate than they actually are.
So let's dive in here.
And I want to start with this theme of sacrifice.
Here's what Holly has to say about fatherhood in one of his more focused statements.
He says this, fatherhood is a work of sacrifice.
There you go.
It's all about surrendering your life to someone else, giving someone else first priority.
That's his statement.
Okay.
I'll say it again.
Especially the second sentence.
It's all about surrendering your life to someone else, giving someone else first priority.
Okay, I can, especially as a father.
I'm in this role, Josh.
I can go along with that to a point.
As a parent, I'm going to say parent here.
So we talk about this a lot.
In his discussion, there feels like there's nothing in this chapter at all that is specific to fatherhood as opposed to being a parent or even being a caregiver or being a guardian or whatever.
There's nothing specifically masculine about this.
Okay.
But as a parent, I agree that you absolutely have to give your kids first priority.
Fair, fair, okay.
But I don't like the language of sacrifice.
And people ask me sometimes why, and that's a discussion that would go beyond kind of what we have the parameters to talk about here.
But I don't like it when people attach it to parenthood.
I don't like it when they attach it to a lot of other things.
What I would say is that I think, I guess we're getting like Dan Miller's parenting philosophy here, such as it is, and you can take it or leave it.
But I think that making our kids our quote unquote first priority or maybe anything our first priority should not come at the cost of ourselves.
And that's because we can't be good parents or partners or citizens or co-workers or anything else if we're literally sacrificing ourselves.
If we are literally using ourselves up, fully giving ourselves over to something, destroying ourselves, that's part of what a sacrifice is.
It's a destructive act.
If we're literally doing that, we have nothing left to give to those things.
So I would argue that I could say, sure, sure.
Let's make our kids our first priority.
It's not the same thing as making them our only priority.
And that's what Holly is implicitly saying when he talks about sacrifice.
I also think there's a time stamp on this.
And what I mean by that is that we don't spend our entire lives actively raising our kids.
As parents, again, in my mind, our task is to raise our kids and give them the resources they need to no longer need us to actively raise them.
At some point, we hope they're going to be full-fledged adults out in the world doing all the adulting things and so forth.
That doesn't mean we're not there to support them or help them or maybe advise them, but I think those roles change.
I think being a parent of adult children is radically different from being a parent of in-the-house children.
And even in the house children, it's a different game.
If you've got young kids versus teenagers versus, I don't know, maybe the kid coming back from college or whatever it is, I think those are really, really different points.
And that is my point, is that there are times in children's lives when they absolutely need us to make them our first priority.
And then there are times, probably most of their lives, when they don't.
And I'm harping on this reason for a couple reasons, or this point for a couple reasons.
I'm giving you my philosophy of parenting, I guess, for a couple of reasons.
First and the most basic is that I think Holly gives a simplistic, reductive account of parenting.
Of course, this is what he does with everything is give simplistic, reductive accounts.
And it doesn't really amount to much more than a shallow Hallmark card vision of parenting.
Make kids your first priority.
Oh, that's that's sweet.
As always, he doesn't do well with the complexity of lived life.
And so we get this simplistic vision.
And I also think it's simplistic because as my kids get older, and as I watch friends and colleagues who have adult children, I mean, everything from like kids who are just leaving the house to go into the workforce or college or whatever, all the way to kids who have grand, you know, kids who have kids and people becoming grandkids and so forth.
It seems to me that sometimes that children are your first priority stage is actually in some ways the most straightforward parenting stages.
I think it actually gets more complex as you go along.
And so these are just the things that Holly overlooks.
Fine, whatever.
That's not my main point.
What's my second point?
It's this.
I think the ideal of sacrificing ourselves, which is deeply encoded within strictures of high control religion, I think it's really, really damaging.
It is central within high control Christianity.
I think it's colossally damaging.
We can have models of serving or of caring or loving or devoting or committing, all kinds of models that don't devolve into the absolute demands of self-sacrifice.
And I think appeals to sacrifice are almost always used as a coercive means to get us to do what some special interest or another wants us to do.
And I think that that's exactly how it works in high control religion.
And in my coaching work, you know, working with folks who are working through religious trauma with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, I run into this all the time.
People who are working to overcome the legacy of a demand to sacrifice, a demand to give themselves completely over to some cause or movement or pastor or whatever.
I think it's just colossally damaging.
So there's that.
And then third, even for Holly, it's bullshit.
This notion that, you know, it's about sacrifice.
It's just bullshit.
No matter what he says, Holly's sole focus in life is not his children.
And I don't think it should.
I don't think anybody's sole focus in life should be their children.
Okay.
And I know there could be exceptions to that.
You can email me and talk about, like, I don't know, what about refugees who are fighting to save their children's lives and get across borders?
Like all real things.
Okay.
But in general, in an ideal world, in a world where we can have children grow up and they can go out and they can do their adult things and so forth, I just don't think the children should be one's sole focus in life.
Okay.
I think if they are, it's because something's gone really, really wrong.
Okay.
But regardless of that, no matter what Holly says, they're not his sole focus.
And I don't accept for his second that his life is the life of radical sacrifice undertaken for their benefit.
I think he's an absolute hypocrite.
And I want to talk about why it is that I think he's making that hypocritical move, what it is that he's trying to mask in that, how he's trying to mislead us.
Okay.
Abraham's Wishes Exposed00:15:52
And I want to bring these points together, these last two points in particular together, by looking just a little at his biblical model for this part of his vision of manhood.
Again, as Ollie, as always, as almost makes Holly and always up, as always, Holly needs to try and find a masculine Bible figure for the vision he's putting forward.
It's his way of trying to make it seem like it isn't just his idea, or it's not just what's prevalent on the right, or it's not just garden variety patriarchy.
No, he needs to try to show that it's God's vision.
And so he's going to try to find a biblical model for this.
And his model here is Abraham.
And I could go on about Abraham forever.
If you're familiar with the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish and Christian traditions, you'll know a lot about Abraham already.
But to set this up, as most listeners probably know, maybe not, if you don't have familiarity with the Bible, large portions of the Hebrew Bible are narratives.
They're stories.
And Abraham figures really prominently in some of those early biblical narratives.
And the narrative dimension of the Hebrew Bible is part of what makes it distinctly the set of scriptures it is.
I teach world religions.
And sometimes when I teach that class, we'll look at other kinds of religious texts that traditions use.
And students who invariably are more familiar, if they have any familiarity with religion, it's going to be Judaism or Christianity.
If they have any familiarity with a religious text, it's almost certainly going to be the Bible.
They're often struck by the non-narrative dimensions of a lot of other religious scriptures.
So it's something that really makes the Hebrew scriptures what they are.
And I think in many ways, we're used to stories.
And so when somebody reads the Hebrew Bible, the stories can feel really familiar to us.
It can feel like a kind of literature that we might understand or connect with because we're used to stories.
But here's the thing to understand about the stories in the Hebrew Bible.
They're not written like contemporary stories.
And that shouldn't be surprising.
They're thousands of years old and they're spread out over diverse cultures and written for completely different reasons and all of that.
But if you look at them and read them and think about them a little bit, they're not written like contemporary stories.
There are lots of features of those biblical narratives that make them different from the kinds of stories or narratives that we might be used to.
And in particular, and this is why I'm talking about this, biblical narratives don't tend to delve into the inner motivations and psychologies of characters the way the modern stories do.
They also don't tend to occur in the first person.
They're not written from a first person perspective that give us that kind of omniscient awareness of what a character is thinking or feeling that we might be used to.
We don't get the sort of inner view that we're used to in a lot of narratives now.
That's not complete all the time.
There are certainly points at which the narratives will tell us what somebody thought to themselves, so-and-so thought to himself or said to himself such and such or that kind of language.
We'll get visions of that, but it doesn't approach what you have with contemporary narrative.
So in general, they are more sort of descriptive in character.
They narrate what's happening sort of from the outside.
It's like observations of these characters.
And here's why that matters.
Here's why I'm talking about this.
What it means is that those biblical characters become a kind of blank slate where readers can sort of write in whatever motivations or interests or beliefs or values they want to.
In other words, because the narrative doesn't tell us what a character is thinking or feeling or what their motivation is all the time, we can create that.
We can fill that in.
And that's what Bible readers and preachers within high control religion are really good at.
Really good preachers in those traditions will read these narratives and they'll really just personalize and tell you the story of these characters.
And it winds up being a much richer story than often what is in the biblical text, which can actually feel kind of stilted and wooden compared to it.
And what they're doing is they're filling in those gaps.
And this is part of what Holly does when he talks about Abraham.
It's part of the way he uses the Bible and its stories.
He uses them to kind of, as I've said, to essentially launder his political and social ideologies, to take his political and social ideologies, to project them into the text, and then to sort of bring them back out of the text and say, see, here's where I got them.
They were here in the text.
They're not my ideas after all.
And so here's an example of how he talks about Abraham, saying all that to set up the way that he talks about Abraham.
And it puts into effect this mechanism of projecting his values onto the biblical character.
So here's what he says.
This is on page 93, if you were keeping score.
So here's what, and again, just as a reminder, if people don't know, Abraham was advanced in years and didn't have a child, and God promises him a child, and through various imaginations, he eventually comes to have a child, right?
So here's what Holly says.
He says, whatever ideas Abraham may have had for his life beforehand were upset and overturned by God's call to become a father.
As a consequence, the rest of Abraham's life would be spent looking beyond his wishes, living for more than his desires, and giving of himself until he was spent entirely.
Fatherhood would claim him and direct him outward toward others and toward the future.
His purpose would no longer be to preserve himself or indulge his whims, but to give himself away so that his children might flourish and the mission he served outlive him.
Fatherhood is the business of replacing yourself.
This is what he says.
Now, if somebody could look in my book, when I write and read books, like I have all these little plastic tabs I stick in there, but in the margins, I also have lots of like exclamation points and question marks and things.
It's full of exclamation marks and question points, which is my way of saying, like, what the hell are you talking about, Holly?
Okay.
So, I mean, here's the point.
Just listen to how he makes this fairly elusive, completely foreign, shadowy, ancient character sound exactly like him.
All the stuff he said in the chapter up to here about what fatherhood is.
Oh, well, look, lo and behold, that's exactly what we find if we look at Abraham, right?
Again, the rest of Abraham's life would be spent looking beyond his wishes, living for more than his desires, giving himself until he was spent entirely.
Abraham's life before kids is about his own whims and desires, but once he's a father, bam, he's all about service and sacrifice.
Sets all that aside.
He lives for his kid.
The Bible's relative silence on the inner life and reasoning of Abraham, that's what allows Holly to effectively narrate Abraham in his own image.
He is rewriting Abraham in the telling here, and he's doing that by filling in all these motivations and aims and desires and so forth in Abraham that the Bible just doesn't tell us about.
And what that means is that he can look to the Bible to license whatever vision of sacrifice he's after.
That's what he's doing.
So all of that is one issue I have with his appeal to Abraham.
For those who are keeping score on all the stuff I say about the Bible and like, I don't know, if there was some sort of drinking game or bingo game or something of the number of times I have said that people should not describe biblicists as literalists, this is another one of those cases because they invariably read way beyond the text and kind of create these characters in their own image.
And that's what he's doing.
Okay.
So my point here is the Bible just doesn't say what he wants us to say.
The Bible never says, let's see.
So Abraham is Abraham decided, I'm going to not live according to my wishes.
I'm not going, I'm going to set aside my desires and give of myself until I'm spent entirely.
I'm going to live for myself.
It never says that.
Never says that.
Okay.
Here's the other issue.
Let's imagine that it did.
Let's imagine that it said all of that.
Let's imagine that we accepted all of that.
I call bullshit on this account of Abraham, even if that's what the Bible said.
And here's why.
Abraham isn't thrown off by becoming a father.
He says, whatever ideas Abraham may have had for his life beforehand were upset and overturned by God's call to become a father.
Nope, I don't buy it.
I don't think that he spent his life looking beyond his wishes or living for more than his desires or giving of himself until he was spent entirely.
I don't think any of that.
I don't think he sacrifices himself or his interests because he's a father, not even a little.
And here's why.
Becoming a father fulfills all of Abraham's interests.
So famously, in the story of Abraham, the whole point of Abraham, the significance of Abraham for the so-called Abrahamic religious traditions, is that he makes a covenant with God, a kind of contractual arrangement with God, and he promises to be his faithful follower and servant and so forth.
But in return, God promises that he will make Abraham a great nation with land and numerous descendants, descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, right?
It's the ultimate promise of wealth and power and posterity in the ancient world.
In the social kind of context or the social imaginary in which this text is written, it is the ultimate promise of wealth and power and significance.
Abraham becoming a father is the fulfillment of this.
It is not a notion that he looks beyond his wishes.
What are his wishes?
His wishes are to become a great nation.
So he has to have posterity to do this.
Living for more than his desires?
Nope.
His desire is to be a great nation.
And so he needs to have posterity to do this.
Giving of himself until he was spent entirely, maybe to the cause of becoming a great nation.
There's nothing sacrificial in there.
I'm sorry.
There just isn't.
So I think this has nothing to do with sacrifice and serving others.
Abraham has everything to gain by both having a child and serving God.
He is not disinterested.
Like he's promised all of this great stuff if he's faithful and he needs to have a child.
So even in the story, the most famous and dark story about Abraham, when he is called upon to literally sacrifice his son, you can go and read that.
And this whole like, yes, it says he loved his son, but the sort of hangup for him is he's like, well, I've been promised a great nation.
I've been promised to be a nation and great people.
How's that going to happen if I don't have a son?
Well, I guess God gave me one son.
He could do it again.
And then God, of course, doesn't have him sacrifice his son or whatever.
The point is, Abraham never sets that aside.
He doesn't serve or sacrifice, except for the cause that he wants, right, to be a great nation and so on.
I also have huge doubts about that Abraham would have thought and felt the kinds of things Holly describes, because that's not how families worked.
The whole relationship between parents and children, the concept of parenthood and childhood and the emotions that come with those, those are not universal.
They are not unchanging.
They change in different cultures and times and places.
So I think that the language that Holly uses would be completely foreign and incomprehensible to somebody like Abraham.
But that's speculative.
Even if it was, even if Abraham could agree with the kind of stuff that Holly says, the idea that everything Abraham did was somehow sacrificial and a setting aside of his own hopes and aims and desires, it's pure nonsense.
It's just nonsense.
Which means, of course, the idea that Abraham is some model for us doing that also becomes nonsense.
But here's the bigger thing.
The same thing goes for Holly.
Okay.
I have no doubt that Holly loves his kids.
And he opens this chapter with a very moving account of the difficulties he and his wife had in starting a family and experiencing a miscarriage and sincerely sad and tragic.
And I feel for him and I feel for his family.
That is all, that is all true.
And I mean it.
I have no doubt that he loves his kids.
And I'm sure that in a million ways, as with most parents, his young kids are and have been his quote-unquote first priority in lots of ways, no doubt.
Okay.
But let's not kid ourselves.
I just realize what a terrible pun that is.
Let's not delude ourselves.
Josh, they are not your only priority.
And don't try to tell me that your whole life has been about sacrifice for the sake of your kids.
Law school, clerking in the Supreme Court, becoming the Attorney General of Missouri, running for and becoming a U.S. Senator.
I'm sorry, these are not the acts of sacrifice undertaken as a father.
They're acts of self-fulfillment and ambition and power and advancement and desire and all of those things.
And I have, in principle, I have no problem with that.
Okay.
My criticism, Josh, if you're listening, he's not listening, but if he was listening, my criticism is not that you wanted other things or that you worked hard to attain them or that you sought to keep reaching higher or you set goals or all of those things.
Great, cool.
Good on you.
I would have made radically different decisions than you.
I don't share Josh Hawley's views on almost anything, all of that.
But the idea of attaining and ambition and desiring to succeed, all of that, great, cool.
I don't have a problem with that.
My problem is the sanctimonious hypocrisy of using his kids and appealing to his position as a father of a way of essentially positioning himself as someone whose whole life is focused on service and sacrifice.
Like it's not even about his kids or fatherhood.
No, the story about his kids, it's really about just trying to mask the fact that he has attained what he has attained and has had the ends that he's had.
Josh Hawley essentially uses his position as a father as a mechanism for misdirection.
He uses it as a mechanism so we don't pay attention to how he has actually lived his life and what he actually values.
And I could go off forever about like, do not tell me about how much you value fatherhood when you attack immigrant children and you support taking health care from minors and your economic and social policies are such that you impoverish millions of children.
Like, don't, don't, just, don't, don't tell me that you're a father, that your fatherhood and your sacrifice for children motivates everything you do when that's how you have built your entire legacy.
Okay.
He likes to talk about legacy.
Sorry, Josh, that's your legacy.
We could talk about that.
But what I want to talk about, and because we're running out of time here, is I think the final dimension of this chapter that stands out for me before we move on to something else.
He not only wants to mask the fact that he is someone who's lived a life of ambition and power seeking instead just claiming that he's lived a life of sacrifice.
He wants us to see that.
But he also positions himself and all fathers, I guess, he positions himself this way to set up a contrast once again with what he calls the modern day Epicureans.
Masking Ambition00:07:58
The people who he assures us all hate fatherhood and fathers.
And he's got a whole section about declining numbers of fatherhood and statistics and whatever, and does all the spurious kinds of things that people like him do with social science data, where everybody, the cause of all of that are the modern day Epicureans, the people who don't share his social values.
So once again, he's not content to just put forward his vision.
No, he has to demonize others as well.
So let's just set aside the fact that millions of people who disagree with him, millions of people that he would call the modern day Epicureans, are in fact parents or caregivers or guardians who do in fact place their children as their first priorities and so forth.
Let's just set that aside, that just factually it's nonsense.
And let's set aside the fact that people who also pursue other interests and careers and find purpose in other domains of life, whether they have kids or not, people who don't find all of their meaning and purpose in child rearing are no different from Holly.
Just talked about that.
They're no different than he is.
Okay?
Let's just set that aside too.
Those are worth noting.
Let's set them aside.
Here's what I want to note here.
What I want to highlight is what his real move is here.
I want to decode what he's really doing here.
His real move is this.
He wants to suggest that service and sacrifice and living for others is limited to one's family, to one's nuclear family.
So he paints a picture of Epicureans as anti-family and then because of this, claims that they're essentially self-centered.
And this is a core move on the contemporary right.
We've discussed it a lot on Straight White American Jesus.
Brad has done lots of interviews about this and lots of reflections on this.
He traces this out in his work.
We've talked about it.
The sort of reworking of the Catholic doctrine of love and the idea that one ought to begin by loving those who are closest to them.
So family, and then from that, people who are like us and so forth.
What he's putting forward, again, in his more subtle, kinder, gentler way, but it's the same idea.
What he's putting forward is the idea that good Christian Americans are called to love those who are like them, who are in closest proximity to them, especially their families.
They are called to love them more than anyone else.
And going even further, they are called to love them to the detriment and expense of anyone else.
It is part and parcel with the discourse about, for example, the evils of empathy.
And those who've listened to the series I did on Ali Beth Stuckey's book will know about that.
Other work that we've done on Straight White American Jesus, that's what it's all about.
It's about trying to limit our concern and our care and our love for those who are closest to us and sort of put up walls so that we don't extend that care to others.
That's what Josh Hawley is doing here.
It's another attempt at misdirection.
What he wants us to miss, and the reason why he's highlighting this is he wants to present the so-called Epicureans as those who hate the family and they hate those who are closest to them.
What he wants to do is he wants to mask the fact that they do, in fact, undertake actions of service, that they do place others' needs above their own.
And that what is notable about them is that those needs and those acts of service are not limited to people like them.
They are not limited to their immediate family or their posterity.
That's what he wants to hide.
That's what he wants to mask.
And to see this, all we have to think about at the time that I'm recording this, this is still going on and it's something that has been front and center for weeks.
All we have to see are the millions of so-called Epicureans, as he would call them, who are risking their safety and their well-being and their freedom to serve all of those communities, most notably immigrant communities that are actively targeted by people like Josh Hawley.
Or we could talk about women's health care providers who risk their livelihood and in some cases their freedom to extend health care to women in places where they can't access it.
These are people who are prioritizing others and serving others.
And what Josh Hawley wants us to miss, the reason he is so eager to try to suggest that the modern day Epicureans don't understand service to others, can't prioritize others, is he wants to mask the fact that they are doing this all the time, but they are doing it in ways that reveal the evils of the social policies he actively advances.
These Americans have sacrificed more for their vision of America than Josh Hawley ever will.
In his cushy Washington office or his nice rural home that he talks about, where he will never have to confront armed agents bursting through his door.
So, and this is what just incenses me about these endless attacks on the so-called modern day Epicureans that Hawley has, is that it's not that he doesn't see it.
He knows full damn well what those people are doing, how they're serving, how they are, in fact, in some cases, sacrificing to the highest point of giving up their lives.
And he wants to mask that and hide that and get us not to look at it.
And he wants to do it with silly readings from the Bible and saccharine accounts of his own, you know, endless sacrifice for his kids as attorney general and as U.S. Senator.
So there's a double effect of all of this talk he has of service and sacrifice in this chapter.
The first is to mask the fact that his life isn't defined by these things.
And the second is to mask the fact that the lives of so many people he opposes are defined by these things.
Those are what he wants us to not see.
That's what he wants us to miss.
It's all wrapped up in vague notions of masculinity and fatherhood, even though the chapter really has almost nothing to say about anything distinctly masculine or limited to fatherhood.
Except Josh Hawley's a man and he's a father and he's elevating that social role.
This book, this book, I don't know.
I don't know what it's doing to me.
It's not surprising.
It's totally unsurprising at this point that Holly isn't really telling us anything specific about manhood because that's not really what the book is about, even though he thinks it is.
He's just seeking to baptize his political party and the social order it champions.
That's all he's doing.
He's seeking to lend it greater authority than it has.
And like every major figure on the right, his social vision only comes at the cost of demonizing anyone who doesn't share it.
And that's what we see with these sort of endless, hackneyed, and utterly ridiculous presentations of the so-called modern day Epicureans.
That's going to wrap it up for here.
I've had as much, you know, Holly as I can handle for one episode.
We'll pick this up again in the next episode.
We're going to keep seeing this theme.
We're going to move on to the next role that he thinks men are called to play.
And I can promise you this next chapter is really, I think it just might come unglued.
It is the role of warrior.
So we're going to hear Josh Hawley talk about men as warrior.
I'm sure it will be enlightening.
I will be here for it.
I hope you'll be here for it.
Thank You Supporters00:00:54
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As always, we'd love to hear from you.
Daniel Miller Swadge, Daniel Miller, S-W-A-J at gmail.com.
Please drop me a line.
If you've got questions you weren't supposed to or weren't allowed to ask in church, let me know those.