We were standing among the milling crowds at the protests a few weeks ago. People of all ages, shapes, genders, and sizes stood with their signs, chanted occasionally, listened to speakers, and good-naturedly chatted with strangers. An older White guy walked past, and I instinctively wondered: wait, are you truly here as a protester… or as some kind of disrupter or spy?

Catching myself, I turned to my friend and confessed, “I think I’m prejudiced against White men now.”

She looked at me, wide-eyed: “Oh my gosh, me too!”

We admitted to each other that we have learned to regard White men as suspect. Unless we know them, and know they are safe, we wonder: Are they part of the cult? Are their minds filled with the slop and lies coming out of the podcast jocks and newstainer talking heads? Did they vote for you-know-who? Underneath their button-downs, are they wearing a “Your body, my choice” t-shirt, even if only in spirit?

And if I see a paunchy older White guy in a ball cap? Oh, buddy: I can size you up at twenty paces.

I realize this is a prejudice. I’m working on it, OK?

Let’s talk about trucks. People in Michigan love big trucks, especially White men. Listen, if you work in the trades and you need a truck for your business: blessing be upon you. But what is the matter with the rest of you, in your gleaming, gargantuan Dodge Mega Cab RAM 3500s, driving around town in your business casual? What are you trying to prove? You look ridiculous.

The words I spew in my head at these people! As I say, I’m working on this prejudice, but it’s hard, because I am so angry–as well as afraid.

You can understand my anger and fear, I hope, since cocky, militant, mean masculinity is now in ascendence. We are seeing it modeled with cruel glee in the federal government. You can argue—as Heather Cox Richardson and many others do—that leveraging the cowboy masculinity myth was exactly the strategy that won the last presidential election. This is the myth in which

a true American is a man who operates on his own, outside the community. He needs nothing from the government, works hard to support himself, protects his wife and children, and asserts his will by dominating others. Government is his enemy, according to the myth, because it takes his money to help undeserving freeloaders and because it regulates how he can run his business. A society dominated by a cowboy individual is a strong one.

What broils my bacon is the church’s past and ongoing complicity in this mythology. White evangelicalism in particular has embraced this view of masculinity as somehow the Christian way. Kristin Du Mez, as RJ readers know, traces this phenomenon all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt. By the 1980s (coincident with Reagan), White evangelical popular culture was fully on board and making bank on the dominating male. I remember the rise of John Eldredge’s ridiculous Wild at Heart, read earnestly by so many church men’s groups, with its nonsensical gender essentialist assumptions based on fairy tales and Mel Gibson movies. Real men need a battle! They can’t help it! Come on, ladies: play the role of the damsel in distress!

Many Christians (and not just White ones) are squarely to blame not only for countenancing but for promoting the myth of the dominating, independent, lust-driven male, whom God has designed for the good of empire. Boys will be boys—and God wants it that way.

Richardson argues that the myth-fantasy is now falling apart as reality demonstrates the ruthless ineptitude of it as a theory of governance. I hope so. But meanwhile, we’re seeing in terrifying technicolor the reductio ad absurdum of this mythology: sadism. In our federal leaders and their adherents, we are witnessing a release, nay, a celebration of sadistic masculinity.

It would be absurd, I should say, if it weren’t so deadly.  

The current president has no coherent policy, a fact which has the propaganda machine scrambling to cover every spasm of lunacy with a fig leaf of sense. The coherence at the heart of it all is simply this: causing pain to the weak. It’s a rape-ocracy. This explains why the president loves to hire men who have assaulted women. In fact, all the things the current president loves: oil drilling, logging, tearing apart science, firing people, cutting health care, lies, lies, lies, ruthless dictators, abductions and deportations, concentration camps—at heart it’s about dominance through destruction. It’s about violating whatever can be violated, even reality itself.

The sadists think that destruction and violation are strong. They may say it’s about protection, but this has nothing to do with protecting anyone, not US citizens, least of all women—maybe billionaires, though! In any case, there are plenty of henchmen who are only too glad to be granted permission and means to join in the destruction frenzy. Hurting things is the point, it is the pleasure. As one writer posted on Bluesky, these guys “get off on it.”

I’m not saying there aren’t women involved in the grotesquerie, too. I’m not saying these women are off the hook: they are also responsible. Some women have always found their own power by cozying up to dominance. However, complicit women are not my current focus.

Instead, I’m focusing on this gruesome pantomime of male strength and dominance. Worst of all is the current Secretary of Defense. This dude is an enthusiastic purveyor of sadistic masculinity, now with the nations guns and drones at his disposal. He is an insult to anyone who has served in the military with integrity. Oh but he has his fans. Here’s Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) defending Hegseth: “I will lead the breach. I will lay down cover fire. I will take the high ground. I’ll expose myself to enemy fire to communicate. We must bring back integrity, focus, and put the Warfighter first inside DOD. I stand with Pete Hegseth.”

As Meidas Touch writers wryly noted: “Mullin never served in the military. He is a plumber.” But like too many other men in this country, he is super excited by combat porn. Combat porn results in real-life, deadly military cosplay, as David Hoekema wrote about this month when he described the armed vigilantes who come to the border to threaten and shoot things for kicks. Why not? They have every permission right now to indulge their most sadistic tendencies.

I have seen how sadistic masculinity damages young men. I have seen young men students on my campus drinking in the boy-jock podcasters, who make millions by substituting cockiness and slick production values for actual knowledge or expertise, while soothing and stoking the dominance fantasies of young men. Mostly, though, I have seen how the young men students in my classes are grieved over the poisoned masculinity in this country. These tender souls, these beautiful, brilliant, decent young men! They don’t want to adapt to the American good ol’ boy mold—and they couldn’t, even if they wanted to. So what do they do?

Moreover, as is obvious to my students and to anyone formed well in the faith, sadistic or even just militant masculinity—despite Eldredge et al.—is absolutely antithetical to Christianity. One of my doctoral students at Western Seminary, Paul Van Kempen, recently wrote a compelling and powerful thesis in which he identified the priorities of the American Dream as it is commonly understood today across the political spectrum: individualism, expansion, prosperity, and power. And then he demonstrated that the Gospel’s priorities are in direct opposition: community, simplicity, generosity, and humility.

How are we teaching young men to practice the priorities of community, simplicity, generosity, and humility, in imitation of the Christ who—as Hugh Cook recently wrote—humbled himself to wash his disciples’ feet, and instructed them to do likewise?

Ron and I traveled a couple weeks ago to Minneapolis to interview the good people at Mount Olive Lutheran Church about their ambitious climate justice work. This is a theologically progressive church, mostly White, situated only blocks from George Floyd Square. We were privileged to worship with them on Palm Sunday in a delightfully high church style, with bells and chanting and thuribles. And boy, they could sing! Those good Lutherans were ringing the rafters.

As we alternated verses between low voices and treble voices, Ron turned to me and whispered: “I think men outnumber women in this church.” I looked around. He was right. There were some trans folks here and there. Quite a few kids. And lots of men of all ages, and yes, they probably somewhat outnumbered the women. But this was no macho, Driscolly church. A woman pastor preached the sermon on the kenotic hymn in Philippians 2. They honored the servant Jesus, riding on a humble donkey. All the emphasis in the service was about self-emptying and serving others. They live this out, too. I had seen it the day before in our interviews about their climate work.

I turned back to Ron and said: “Truly strong men are servants.” We looked at each other. Yes.  

Domination and destruction are easy and cruel. Serving, building, creating: that takes humility, which is true strength. So how can we provide a counter-narrative in which we reclaim for men the fundamental wisdom of Christianity: the truly strong are the ones who humble themselves and serve others.

On Earth Day, I listened to the online service offered by Creation Justice Ministries. My friend Derrick Weston preached a sermon on the story of Jesus healing the hemorrhaging woman. He spoke of how Jesus not only healed her physical malady but conferred dignity on her. Derrick used the words of the late Pope Francis to describe this as our human vocation, in imitation of Christ. Our role is to confer dignity, and thus power, on those who are weak and vulnerable, and this includes the earth itself, vulnerable to our greed and destruction. In fact, the Pope’s 2015 masterwork, Laudato si’, includes a scathing indictment of greed and destructiveness and a call to “hear the cry of the earth, and the cry of the poor.”  

Real men show their strength, then, by humbling themselves and serving others, by conferring dignity on all people and all the earth. This is what God does in Christ. This is what we are called to do, this paradox of strength. “My strength,” wrote Paul, “is made perfect [complete] in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). Real men understand that dominance is an illusion, a grievous temptation, something to be resisted and replaced with humility and service.

So, my brothers—especially my White brothers swimming against a tide of White male supremacy and sadistic masculinity—thank you to all of you who understand the true path to strength and live it out.

Thank you to all the good men in my life, men who I know are safe and can be trusted. Thank you to those of you who are calling out your fellow men in whatever way you can—even with humor and mischief, like the fellows who took old Dirk down a peg or two in Keith’s recent post. Thank you to those of you who are modeling the fruits of the Spirit. Thank you to those of you who are training your children and grandchildren to firmly denounce bad masculinities, to practice a zero-tolerance policy toward these blasphemies.

I will continue working on my prejudice, I promise. But can we all please continue to call out these anti-Christian models of masculinity wherever we see them, including in church? Unfortunately, most of us (women, minorities, anyone with less power) can’t get through to the men lured in by dominance mythologies and theologies, partly because these men (like all people) often remain unconscious of their assumptions. But mostly because our voices are unimportant to them by definition. Or even reviled.

So, older White men, especially those of you with some status, I’m afraid a lot of this falls on you. I know this is an uphill climb. But we have the model we need in Jesus himself, the one who emptied himself in service, conferring dignity upon all people and on this beloved and beautiful world.