Jesus, John Wayne, and John Wesley: Why the Curious Silence on Masculinity in the Wesleyan World?
Photo by Henrique Jacob on Unsplash
As a young boy, I went with my dad to Freedom Hall in Louisville, where along with thousands of other fathers and husbands and sons we went to worship and learn what it meant to be a Christian man. The speaker was Reggie Dabs. He was a large, enthusiastic man who gave us a powerful testimony of his life being turned around by Jesus. The Promise Keepers movement called men to be faithful to their wives, leaders in their families, and, above all, committed to a life in Christ.
Years later I would go to Southeast Christian Church’s wild game night, a men’s event where all sorts of wild animal game could be eaten: squirrel, opossum, bison, deer. They gave out camouflage pocket bibles; many people wore John Deere hats and Bass Pro shirts. Neither my dad nor I were hunters, or fishermen for that matter, but we enjoyed the spectacle and the fun.
In college, I went to the Passion youth conference in Atlanta organized by Louie Giglio, and I remember a guy in our group saying, “I can’t believe they are letting a woman preach.” That woman was Beth Moore, who was permitted to do a group Bible study before thousands of attendees at one of the morning sessions. I remember having a hard time telling the difference between what she was doing in the morning and what some pastor I had never heard of named John Piper was doing in the evening.
These various memories came to my mind a few weeks ago as I was talking with my dad about Promise Keepers. He spoke about how much those events had meant to him at the time. It was encouraging to see other men taking up responsibility for their faith and their families. “Of course,” he said, “the guy that was in charge of it got caught having an affair—not exactly keeping his promise.”
I caught the note of disappointment in his voice as we both wondered at the failures of men—but there is a particular kind of grief when pastors you once looked up to have been exposed exploiting their power and abusing those under their spiritual authority. I thought of men like Bill Hybels, Jean Vanier, Ravi Zacharias, Mark Driscoll, and the victims, churches, and organizations left to pick up the pieces from their various scandals and failings. I thought of men I had personally known who had fallen from grace. As I sat together with my father, we both wondered, Can’t we do better than this?
Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s ingeniously titled Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation left me with a similar, but more widespread, sense of disappointment in Christian men. Her book convincingly and methodically reveals how American evangelical culture—a loose consortium of pastors, speakers, booksellers, convention organizers, radio personalities, church planting networks, lay people, televangelists, con artists, and political advocates—discipled men into a toxic, twisted, even anti-Christian way to think about sex, gender, and power. It’s a brutal read, but for me it provided context for my disparate memories of the evangelical world’s attempt to synthesize masculinity and Christianity.
Du Mez shows how evangelical leaders over decades attempted to articulate and defend a certain vision of masculinity, one embodied by John Wayne (and intentionally projected by our former president). The Christian man, according to this vision, is a (white) American one; he gets things done; he isn’t afraid of a fight and getting his hands a little dirty; he believes boys should be boys; he drinks beer and he loves guns; he would beat up anybody who dared call him a sissy. He is a tough, frontier man, the good guy, who nobly uses violence when needed to defend women and children from the scary threats of outsiders, who generally are people of color (be they Native Americans, Mexicans, African-Americans, Muslims). Du Mez draws this convincing image from decades of popular evangelical books on masculinity, such as Bringing Up Boys by James Dobson and Wild at Heart by John Eldridge. She quotes the Baptist scholar Alan Bean as saying, “The unspoken mantra of post-war evangelicalism was simple: Jesus can save your soul; but John Wayne will save your ass.”
Du Mez narrates how the patriarchal theology of evangelicals, in which men were treated like kings and male pastors like God, created an environment conducive to the current scandals of abuse in the evangelical world (particularly in churches of the Southern Baptist Convention). The #ChurchToo movement, inspired by Hollywood’s #MeToo movement, revealed a church culture that permitted, covered up, and denied the very real abuse of women and children in the evangelical world.
While reading this book, there were many times I heard myself saying, “Not all people who call themselves evangelicals are this way!” I wondered if everyone mentioned in the book got a fair hearing, and there’s really no way for me to verify this one way or another. But the evidence Du Mez presents is overwhelming and convicting. It left me with a general sense of disgust and grief, and even a healthy sense of fear at how many have morally failed in this work of ministry.
But I also wondered why this militant and toxic masculinity, to use the buzzword, was one that I rarely encountered in my own faith upbringing, in my somewhat evangelical Methodist church. Why did the Methodist men I knew not display the anxiety about manhood that seemed to plague men like Jerry Falwell and James Dobson?
My home church, Middletown United Methodist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, certainly dipped its toes in the evangelical world. I think every curriculum we used could be bought at Lifeway and I know most Veggie Tales songs by heart. But when it came to gender, we maintained an egalitarian ethos. Our longtime associate pastor and a personal mentor of mine was a woman named Nancy; she preached once a month my entire life. Consequently, I was blissfully, even naively, unaware that there were people, especially pastors, who seriously questioned a woman’s place in the pulpit or workplace, or who said women must submit to their husbands in all things. That was as foreign to me as the old black-and-white photos of the angry 1960s protesters who opposed school integration. Were those kinds of people really still around?
Though I never heard it articulated much in the pulpit, I can’t help but think there is an undervalued strength in what I might call the “mainline masculinity” by which I was surrounded. My mother is one of the strongest, most outspoken people I have ever encountered, and yet I never sensed that her strength diminished my father’s. I was never taught the idea that his identity as a man was dependent upon the submission of his wife. Manliness was a thing rooted in a gentle confidence in doing the right thing, taking care of your family, keeping your word, doing hard work, humbly seeking God’s will, and treating everyone equally and fairly. I absorbed this not from fiery sermons or men’s retreats, but from a lifetime of observing my father and hoping to emulate him in all that I do. I witnessed this version of masculinity in the youth leaders I respected, the fathers of my friends in the church, and the older men in the congregation who taught Sunday school and asked how I was doing. These men never sat us down and told us what it meant to be a man, and yet they demonstrated it in the best way they knew how: by living honest, humble lives.
Though I know for a fact that there are many examples of toxic masculinity and instances of abuse in the United Methodist Church, I can’t help but wonder if our history and theology gives us a better environment for boys to learn what it means to be men and for women seeking positions of leadership and authority in ministry. I can’t help but be grateful to have been formed in the legacy of Susanna Wesley’s son John, who felt in the 1700s that women being told only to submit to men and stay quiet was a “deepest unkindness,” “horrid cruelty,” and “barbarity” (Sermon 98, On Visiting the Sick).
Why have we preachers neglected this hidden strength? I believe it’s past time for us in the Wesleyan world to go beyond our quiet example and articulate a positive and better vision of what it means to be a man and a Christian. For me, it’s easy to describe what kind of man I want to be: I want to be like my father. But for men lacking that kind of example, words are needed: sermons, articles, podcasts, books, conferences, etc.
This clarity becomes all the more important as we wrestle in United Methodism with how to hold to a traditional vision of Christian marriage and sexuality, as I am hoping we do. In our context of a deepening division between a liberal, mainline Methodism and a global, evangelistic Methodism, it is necessary for us to teach with clarity the deeply biblical, egalitarian vision that men and women are created equally in the image of God and equally called into all levels of ministry. How do we disciple and form men who are unequivocally committed to honoring the gifts, talents, and leadership of women at all levels of the church and society without erasing the real differences between men and women as testified in scripture?
As someone trained to answer these kinds of questions, to exegete the Bible prayerfully and speak about what it says, I find this task incredibly hard. Imagine, then, how hard it is for the everyday Christian who is getting no clear teaching on the matter and attempting to scrape together an identity as a man or a woman from the confusing and vestigial ruins of modern life? Silence, as it turns out, is no match for fundamentalism, be it of the left- or right-wing variety. An actual word is needed if we are to hold to the beautiful nuance of what the Bible teaches on gender and sexuality throughout the scope of God’s story of salvation.
After surveying the damage done in American evangelical culture, Du Mez offers a word of hope: she writes, “what was once done can be undone.” I agree—but not if the topic remains shrouded in silence, creating a vacuum for others to fill the void. Where men might be learning from the church how to emulate the humility, gentle strength, and sacrificial love of Jesus as a man, instead they will hear the cry to become alpha males from YouTube influencers, podcast hosts, and the complementarian preachers who for some reason rule the internet. To be a man, they will learn, means being a warrior. It means using dominance and violence to assert your needs and desires. It means fearing and suppressing your emotions. It means despising the cowardly and avoiding any presentation of weakness. It’s a vision many men believe yet few enjoy, and for most ends in loneliness and quiet despair.
We as Wesleyans can offer something so much better. We can offer our men the radical, challenging, and wonderfully subversive call of Jesus to give up their power, lay down their lives, take up their cross, and follow him. Instead of the warrior—or John Wayne, for that matter—we can offer them the saint as their model for manhood. He is illuminated in holiness and love, hooded, humble, hard-working, perhaps even celibate. We could even lift up that saint of saints, the one hanging on the cross, who refused to participate in the violence of this world or mankind’s petty games of power, who defended the vulnerable and the abused and the hurting, who came as a servant to all. Even more than my father, Jesus is the man I’d like them to look up to. Jesus is the man I’d like them to emulate. What would happen for the boys and men in our churches if we faced our fears, did the theological work, broke our curious silence, and showed them how?
Cambron Wright is an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church and serves as the pastor at Asbury United Methodist Church in Highland Heights, KY.