Dan Miller critiques Senator Josh Hawley's book on masculinity, arguing it lacks specific Christian content by ignoring Jesus and relying instead on an inerrantist Bible that elevates Adam and David while silencing the Gospels. Miller contends this omission allows Hawley to define God as an "empty signifier," projecting authoritarian values like power and violence onto a deity devoid of traditional constraints. By mocking Jesus' meekness and citing fictional figures like Gandalf for priesthood, Hawley constructs a non-Christian masculinity that sanctifies dominance. Ultimately, the episode reveals how Christian nationalists use this manufactured theology to justify authoritarian agendas while evading the transformative teachings of Christ. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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A Book That Is Not Christian00:02:50
Alexis Mundy.
Hello and welcome to It's in the Code.
The series is part of the podcast, Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Lamarck College.
Pleased to be with you as always.
And as always, I want to say thank you for listening and joining in and being a part of the discussion.
This series, more than anything else we do at Straight White American Jesus, depends on you.
So please keep the ideas, comments, feedback, topics for new episodes, anything, everything you've got, keep them coming.
Daniel Miller Swag, Daniel Miller SWAJ at gmail.com.
I check those out.
Do not respond to as many emails as I wish that I had time to.
And I am perpetually sort of ashamed of that fact.
But I will deal with the shame as best I can.
And please keep the emails coming.
We are continuing on in our look at Josh Hawley's book on manhood.
But looking forward to the next series, starting a new series here in just a few episodes.
Questions I was not allowed to ask in church or questions I wasn't supposed to ask in church.
And I continue to solicit your responses to those.
What were the questions that got you in trouble in church?
What were the questions that got you the talking to from a pastor or a parent?
What were the questions that maybe led you out of high control religion or church or whatever context you might have been in?
What are the questions that have kept you going?
Send those to me.
I'd love to hear about them.
Please put it in the subject line questions I wasn't supposed to ask or something like that that helps me spot them.
Daniel Miller Swag, Daniel Miller S W A J at gmail.com.
Look forward to hearing those.
Look forward to starting that series.
Want to dive into today's episode, though.
And as I mentioned, we are in Josh Holly's book on masculinity.
Those of you who've been listening know this is his account, Senator Josh Hawley's account of Christian masculine virtue, the virtues that he says will save America.
That if men just start being men and start cultivating and expressing masculine virtue, it will save the country.
And he identifies, again, to kind of situate where we are, he identifies six roles that he says men are called to play, excuse me, to cultivate and express their masculine virtues.
And we started looking at the fifth of those.
We're on the fifth of those six roles that he plays.
It is the role of priest.
Started looking at that last episode.
And I want to pick up on some themes where we sort of left off there.
If you've been listening to the series, you know that chapter really didn't throw me, but it was noteworthy.
The Problem with Masculine Virtue00:12:12
I've been reading this book as we go, and as we come up on the end of it, just one chapter left after this, I was struck by just how not actually Christian this Christian account is.
And by that, again, I don't necessarily mean that I thought all Christians would agree with it or something like that.
But I mean that despite his claim that this is a book about the God given Christian virtues that men are called to cultivate, despite the fact that the whole thing is presented as a biblical model of masculinity and masculine virtue, there's nothing specifically Christian about the account.
That is, there's no reference to Jesus.
Christians would call Jesus what?
Christ, the name built into Christianity.
The term, I should say, I'm aware that Christ is not his name, it's a title.
No reference to that.
Not a single reference to the New Testament, that is, to the portion of the scriptures that were written by Christians and so forth.
No reference to kind of, I don't know, mainstream elements of Christian theology as traditionally articulated.
There's just nothing there.
And I suggested there in that last episode, I'm not going to rehash everything.
I kind of want to recontextualize it because we're going to pick up with this.
I suggested that somewhat ironically, and I think this was kind of a new insight for me the claim that the Bible is inerrant, that is without error, that everything in the Bible is inspired by God and that it's all literally God's word.
So that, and the idea that flows from that, that everything in the Bible is equally valid and of equal worth because it has God as its author and so forth.
That the result of that is that Holly can do things like spinning out an entire thing.
Theory of the Bible based on the story of Adam.
He reads a few verses, literally a handful of verses, in the book of Genesis about this figure, Adam, and a figure that the Bible actually hardly ever talks about.
There are very few references to Adam in the Bible, Adam being the first human.
But he's got this whole account of like Adam is this sort of figure in the Bible, this founding figure, and everything else that follows in the Bible is this recapitulation of the Adam story, what he calls the Adam saga.
He can spin that whole thing out.
And along the way, he'll come out with lots of exemplars of what he thinks Christian masculinity looks like.
And he'll talk about Joshua or he'll talk about David or whatever.
But he can do all of that, his whole theory of the Bible and everything else, talk about all these different accounts without making any reference to Jesus or the New Testament or traditional New Testament teachings or Christian teachings or anything else.
Because of this view of the Bible that he has, that so many conservative Christians hold.
And as I said, I think it's even more noteworthy that the focus of this chapter on priest, I talked about this last time, that there's a passage in the New Testament that describes Jesus of Nazareth as the great high priest, the fulfillment of, from an early Christian perspective, the office of priest within the Jewish temple tradition.
No reference, no reference to Jesus at all.
We talked about this core Christian teaching that this person, this male identified person, this man in Nazareth named Jesus, the claim is.
That's God.
God became incarnated, literally enfleshed as this person, and that this person is the fullest revelation of God.
It would stand to reason if you're like, I'm going to put together a model of biblical masculinity or Christian masculinity or masculinity as God visions.
It's like, well, okay, cool.
Let's look at the man that God became as a part of that.
No hint of that in Holly's book.
Okay.
So that was the focus of the last episode.
It was essentially a focus on how Christian nationalist Josh Holly, Somebody with extreme Christian nationalist credentials, you can go Google him, look at the things he's supported, look at his Trump support, look at his history of fighting for quote unquote religious freedom, which means Christian privilege.
Go look at those things.
He's a dyed in the wool Christian nationalist.
How he has, the self professed Christian nationalist, self described Christian, and so forth, developed a piss poor Christian theology despite whatever claims he might make about religion or the Bible or anything else.
That's what we talked about.
And I don't think this is intentional on his part.
That is, I think, I suspect, again, Josh has not reached out to me.
His people have not reached out to me.
If they do, and if I had a chance to sit down and ask him, I think he probably thinks that this is a robust Christian account of masculinity, that it is exactly what he pitches it to be.
I think he's putting forward a Christian vision.
Okay.
But he's not.
And if we were to consider his book and his vision of masculinity from that perspective, it would be an abject failure.
If this were an account where, like, Okay, what's a distinctly Christian vision of masculinity?
It's a complete failure because there's nothing distinctly Christian about it.
Okay.
But we can sort of flip our perspective on this.
And that's what I want to do in this episode.
I want to look at it from a different perspective.
And what I want to suggest is that this failure on Holly's part, and I think it is a failure, I think, again, I don't think he's doing that intentionally.
It's a feature and not a bug.
That is, it's something that actually helps and is incredibly useful for his account of masculinity.
And again, I'm not just concerned about Holly.
His vision of masculinity is not fundamentally different from everybody on the Christian right and from the manosphere and all these other versions.
As I've said before, it's sort of a A kinder, gentler version of it.
But at the end of the day, it's the same view of masculinity.
And I think the poor theology, I think that the bad enactment of anything distinctly Christian is actually a feature of that.
I think it helps him out.
Okay.
And again, I think it's important because the way he uses the Bible, the profession I think he would make about what the Bible is, and the way that he actually uses it is typical, typical, completely typical of how Christian nationalists and conservative Christians more broadly. Use the Bible all the time.
I've alluded to this a couple of times, and I'll read one of his chapters.
I'll be like, okay, this is like every crappy evangelical sermon that I ever heard.
It's just that.
It's a completely typical usage of the Bible.
Okay.
So here's the question Why is it a feature?
Why does it work?
Why is it, from a Holly perspective or the perspective of Christian nationalism, why isn't it an advantage that this theology isn't actually Christian, that there's nothing distinctively Christian about it?
And by the way, I'm getting emails from people, and somebody asks, Are you saying that there's nothing distinctively Christian about lots of evangelical Christianity?
Yes, that's what I'm saying.
If you look at how they use the Bible, the arguments that they make, the way that they preach, and so forth, yes, on any given Sunday, you will hear sermons about which there is nothing distinctly Christian.
Okay.
And I think it's a deep irony at the heart of those traditions.
It's a broader topic.
Maybe it'll come up in the next series.
We'll look at questions we weren't supposed to ask in church.
But here's the question Why is the seeming shortcoming of this book?
That it's not really Christian at all.
Why is it actually a strength from a Christian nationalist perspective?
Now, here's my answer to that question it is because Josh Hawley's God and the God of Christian nationalism is completely vacuous.
They invoke the name of God all the time.
It's the same way that Hawley throughout the book will say, God teaches, or the Bible says, the Bible says, the Bible says.
Usually, when he says that, he doesn't tell you where it says it.
And the reason is it doesn't actually say that.
They'll invoke the name of God with great authority, but it's actually a vacuous term.
What I mean by that is that Holly's complete ignorance of anything specifically Christian means that his God is not defined in any particular Christian way.
I'm a religious studies scholar.
I teach intro to world religions, among other things.
And I often run into the view, either among students or when you're just out in the world talking to somebody and they ask what you do and what kind of classes you teach, and you tell them, like, oh, well, aren't all religions basically the same?
They all kind of teach the same thing about God and whatever.
And the answer is no, they don't.
First of all, they don't all teach about God.
And second of all, there's a lot more to religion than beliefs in God.
But if you want to get down to like teachings about God, no, they don't all teach the same thing.
They describe God and define God and understand God in really different ways.
And the fact is that Hawley's God, despite the claim that it's Christian, is completely empty because it's not defined or constrained in any specifically Christian way.
What that means is that God becomes what I call an empty signifier, or you can think about it this way it's like the word God becomes a kind of empty container.
That you can fill with whatever you want.
Because it's not constrained in any Christian understanding, he can invoke the term, but he can invest it with whatever meaning he wants.
And so that's why people like Holly can claim God, you know, throw out the word God, the G word, and then they can pick up whatever part of the Bible gives them an illustration of something that they like and they can fill it in.
We're talking about God, but we're going to talk about Joshua or we're going to talk about retaking the land.
We're going to make up a bunch of stuff about Adam and we're going to put all of that into God.
They can take whatever they want images of power, images of privilege, images of violence.
Holly's God, he hasn't told a story, chosen a biblical exemplar yet of like a regular person.
They're all big names, they're all powerful, they're warriors, they're violent, and so forth.
You can take whatever image you want from the Bible and stick it into God.
And then they can say that that image, the image they like, go trawling through the Bible, find something you like.
I like violence.
Okay, let's take violence.
Ooh, I like patriarchy.
Let's take patriarchy.
Oh, I like strong, powerful, strong man political leaders like King David.
Let's take that.
I like that.
And they put it into that concept of God.
And then they say, see, we got it from God.
That's what God is.
It's in the Bible.
That's what God is.
And so, voila, what they do is they take whatever their favorite image is violence, power, authority, privilege, race, nation, whatever it is.
They take their favorite concept and boom, they've made it godly.
They've found it in the word of God.
They've made it Christian, which means that then their views have divine sanction.
And friends, that is how evangelical preaching works all the time.
Again, I'm not just picking on Josh Hawley, Josh Hawley is not special here, but that's how it works.
So because their God is empty, the God that they appeal to is just sort of an empty term, they can essentially create God in their own image.
We want an image of the divine that likes power, that likes status, that likes privilege, that likes authority, that likes violence.
We can love those things.
We want a God that looks like that.
We create God in that image.
And then if you're Ollie, you turn around and say, Hey, see, God created us in his image, and God's a God of masculinity and violence and power and authority.
So, hey, you know what?
Created in God's image, men are called to be violent and masculinist and authoritarian and everything else.
That's how it works.
That's why it's a bonus for his theory that there's nothing specifically Christian about it because he can choose whatever he wants masculinity to be, whatever he feels it has to be, and say that he got the idea from God.
So it's completely empty.
And we see it play out.
We've seen it play out in these roles that he highlights.
Projecting Values onto God00:12:43
So let's look at this one the role of priest.
Last time, we didn't even get a chance to get into what he actually says about.
The role of priests.
So, I want to take a look at this.
So, here's what he says.
He says this in a section of his chapter called The God Bearer.
Okay, so I guess a priest is a God bearer.
And this is what he seems to think a priest is.
And I say he seems to think that because he doesn't actually say anywhere here's what a priest is, here's what a priest does.
And again, of all the topics in the Bible that you could pick where there is a plethora of information and historical development and so forth, priest is definitely it.
Not a single reference.
So you've got this section a priest is a God bearer.
Okay, well, what does that mean?
Well, you know, being Holly, Holly's not very into defining terms.
So what does he do?
He gives us examples.
Okay.
So, what are his examples of a priest?
Anomaly is King David again.
We talked about David on his chapter on Builder.
He highlights David, though, there again, there are a lot of actual priests he could discuss.
It's a complex question.
There are times when David, as king, undertakes these kind of priestly activities, but technically speaking, he's not a priest, but you know, whatever.
But you know, so he highlights David, but he doesn't talk about David very much.
When he talks about who really shows us what the God bearer is like, I kid you not.
I'm not making this up.
Okay.
If I gave you like 30, I'm not going to give you 30 seconds.
That's a lot of dead air time.
But if I gave you 30 seconds or you wanted to pause this and just, just guess, just guess who Holly chooses as his example of a priest, I don't think you'd ever guess it.
Okay.
You ready?
You ready for it?
It's Gandalf from Lord of the Rings.
That's right.
The wizard from Lord of the Rings.
That's his vision of a priest.
And why Gandalf?
Because Gandalf says it's in the part where he's like, Blocking the bridge on cause of doom and facing the Balrog.
If you've seen the movie, it's the big fiery, demon-y looking thing that he does battle with.
Gandalf says that he is the servant of the secret fire.
And Holly loves that.
He loves the servant of the secret fire.
Again, does he get that from the Bible?
No.
Does the Bible anywhere say a priest is a servant of the secret fire?
Nope.
Doesn't say that anywhere.
Doesn't ever say that.
But Lord of the Rings says it.
And he's like, that's a good line.
So here we go.
That's a priest.
He's a servant of the secret fire.
And here's what he says.
Like the next sentence he says, that is the idea.
Men are meant to bear fire within them, to forge the sort of character that has the power to transform.
How would you like to be someone of whom this is true?
Okay.
Okay, Josh.
So his model of the priest is Gandalf.
It's a wizard, it's a fictional wizard from a fantasy book.
How would you like for that to be true?
Someone who can transform.
People.
So a priest is somebody who bears the fire within them, I guess.
What does that mean?
No idea.
No damn idea.
This is how Holly works.
It sounds good, I guess, but you're like, cool.
Like, what does that look like?
We don't know.
So where does he find it?
He's going to give us another example.
Is he going to go to the Bible this time?
Nope, he doesn't.
He goes to a wizard.
And then, and then, how do we find what it means to be a priest or to carry the fire, to have the power to transform?
Who is his exemplar?
It is none other than his high school football coach.
That's right.
He's a high school football coach.
And I get it, Josh.
I get it.
A lot of us played high school football.
I played high school football, and a lot of us looked up to our coaches.
High school coaches can play a big role and be role models for high school athletes, not just men, but athletes in general.
So, sure.
So, he extols the virtues of his football coach, who we suppose, again, is his model of a priestly man.
This whole thing is supposed to be a discussion of priests, but he doesn't tell us anything exclusively about priests.
So, what makes his coach priestly?
What makes him a model in the line of Gandalf?
He says he was confident and commanding.
He says he radiated strength.
He says he could inspire.
He says he could, quote, walk into a place and change the atmosphere.
Confident, commanding, radiating strength.
He could inspire.
He could change the atmosphere.
He then goes into his sales pitch again and then says, hey, this could be you.
That's a direct quote in the text.
This could be you.
You too, masculine reader, can be a priest.
Well, what is priest?
You got confidence and swagger, I guess.
There you have it.
To be a priest is to have confidence and strength and swagger.
I guess that's all it is.
And all along the way, Holly can continue to insist that this is a Christian vision of masculine virtue.
And to circle back around, how?
Because his concept of God is empty.
So he can take values he likes, things he wants, maybe things he wants to look in the mirror and see confidence and commanding and radiating strength and inspiring others and changing the atmosphere in a room.
Man, I want to be that kind of person.
That's what God is like.
Yeah, God calls men to be that.
That's what it means to be a priest.
Okay?
It just illustrates exactly what I'm trying to bring into view here.
He can take whatever example of masculinity he wants.
The ancient Romans, the ancient Greeks.
He's talked about King Arthur.
He's talked about the Chronicles of Narnia.
He's talked about Gandalf the Wizard.
He's talking about his football coach.
He's talked about his grandpas.
You can take whatever vision of masculinity you want.
And you can sanctify it as Christian precisely because his God has no content to it.
His Christianity and his vision of God is vacuous.
So he can just project onto it everything that he wants God to have said about masculinity.
And that's exactly what he does.
And that is how Josh Hawley and every Christian manosphere guy and youth group bro out there.
That is how they can take their alpha model of masculinity, call it Christian, and tell us that it's God's model of masculinity.
It's how God becomes an alpha because their God isn't defined by anything specific.
They just take their own vision of alpha, toxic masculinity, project it onto God.
God becomes an alpha.
That's all it is.
Okay.
And that brings me to one last point that I want to talk about today.
Okay.
And that is the issue of Holly completely leaving Jesus out of his account of Christian masculinity.
And folks, this is not unusual.
If you were to get into, as I've started to diving into some of these texts and the discourse and the way these people talk, they will talk a lot about Christian identity, even the Bible, but they don't talk about Jesus a whole lot.
Okay.
Christian nationalists and manosphere folks, they almost never talk about Jesus when they talk about masculinity.
And what's interesting is they will often.
Mock and decry what they see as like a liberal sissifying of Jesus.
They're like, oh, they've made Jesus effeminate.
They've turned Jesus into a woman.
They've emasculated Jesus.
Jesus wasn't the wimp that they say he is, and all this other stuff.
They accuse those of us who don't buy into the alpha, you know, alpha God, alpha Jesus model of masculinity of having sort of softened or weakened or feminized Jesus.
But what's interesting is that they will say that, but they almost never then go and say, here's what the Bible actually says about Jesus and try to show that he's.
Tough or masculine or whatever.
They usually just mock people for putting forward a weak Jesus, and then they're going to go talk about people like King David or Joshua or somebody else, you know, big and powerful and strong in the Hebrew Bible.
And why?
Why is that?
It's simple.
Jesus just isn't alpha enough.
New Testament Jesus is not the alpha male that they present as their exemplar.
He teaches meekness of all damn things.
The pronatalists, the pronatalists who think that the Christian godly calling is to get married and have as many children as possible and whatever.
Jesus didn't get married.
He didn't have kids.
He's not a tech bro.
He's not bowing at the feet of Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or anybody like that.
He's not voting to put oligarchs into the White House.
Nope.
He's got nothing to say positive about the rich and the powerful.
He's the one who says that it's almost impossible for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.
That's this guy.
He actually gets executed by those in political power.
Because they view him as an opponent.
That's not the alpha male our guys are looking for.
He challenges the patriarchal norms that those Christian patriarchs uphold.
He has women following him around in his inner circle.
He passes judgment on social sanctions undertaken against them within the society in which he lives.
He does a whole bunch of stuff.
It's just not alpha enough.
That's why the Christian nationalists don't actually talk about Jesus, because he's just the wrong kind of man.
He doesn't model the alpha male mystique that they want.
So they actually looked at Jesus.
If they actually wanted to play a certain kind of Christian game, undertake a certain kind of Christian practice, and say, okay, well, let's look at what Jesus tells us about a model of godly masculinity, they'd have to abandon their alpha male bullshit.
The Jesus of the Gospels is a condemnation of that alpha male model.
It just is.
Now, I guess they could go to the Jesus of the book of Revelation.
They're one of the big, strong, sword swinging Jesus, separate discussion, but they don't go there either.
They just go somewhere else.
And again, the reason they can do that is that there's nothing distinctly Christian about what they're saying.
They're just invoking God and Christianity in a way that allows them to project their own values onto it.
And those of you who know Christian history and history of doctrine will email me and you will be right.
If you say, hey, guess what?
That's a practice Christians have had for a really long time, arguably from the beginning.
Fair enough.
It's Marx's critique of religion.
There's something to it.
So let's wind this down here.
Let's sort of tie this up.
Josh Hawley promises us an account of Christian masculinity.
But like all the Christian patriarchs, all the youth group bros, all the Christian manosphere guys, all he does is sanctify his own valorized vision of the alpha male as a Christian vision.
That's all he does.
His masculine priest, to stick with the theme of this chapter, he's just a guy with strength and confidence and swagger.
That's all.
And I invite anybody to find those virtues laid out in the Bible the virtue of confidence.
Thou shalt be confident.
I don't know that one.
I don't know that commandment.
I must have missed it.
And like all the other Christian patriarchs and the Manosphere bros, Holly's manufactured vision of Christian masculinity serves his own interests and his own needs.
That is why it's a feature, not a bug.
That's why.
The powerful Senator Josh Hawley, who has lived a life of privilege, who has lived a life of power, who grasps after power, who has hitched himself to the MAGA wagon because he wants power.
That is how he can take that vision of masculinity and make it his norm.
And the flip side of this like all the other Christian patriarchs and Manosphere bros, he also uses that supposedly Christian vision of masculinity to attack his opponents.
Those folks are never just interested in defining their own identity or defending their own Christian practice or what have you.
What We Will Explore Next00:01:28
They are interested in destroying and dominating others.
He uses his vision to do that.
And that is what we will pick up in the next episode.
How does this language of man as priest continue to use that to set himself and the Christians like him and the Christian nationalists who run this country up in opposition against anybody who isn't on board?
We'll pick that up next episode.
For now, I want to say again, thank you for listening.
I say it all the time and I mean it.
If you're listening, if you're watching, you could be doing something else.
Thank you so much for your time.
Again, starting a new series soon, just a few more episodes.
Would love to hear from you, Daniel Miller Swag, Daniel Miller SWAJ at gmail.com.
Let me know what you think.
What were the questions you weren't supposed to ask, you weren't allowed to ask in church?
Really excited about this.
There are some interesting ones that have been coming through, starting to give some thought to what that'll look like.
Really excited about it.
Please keep it coming.
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Continuing to do new things, we're going to start doing more live streaming.
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Please keep your eyes out for it.
Thank you so much.
And as always, be well until we get a chance to talk again.