Google’s former company motto, now relegated to its code of conduct, was “Don’t be evil.” I thought of this cheeky maxim while reading Zachary Wagner’s Non-Toxic Masculinity: Recovering Healthy Male Sexuality. This book tries to tell the evangelical movement what “Don’t be evil” communicated to Google employees: don’t abuse those less powerful than yourself, don’t dehumanize others, and don’t allow your relationships to revolve only around satisfying your appetites. So far, so good.
Wagner’s main claim is simple:
This book is about male sexuality and, particularly, what has gone wrong with male sexuality in conservative evangelical churches. Even more specifically, this is a book about how purity culture has—despite the best intentions of many—contributed to the cultivation of toxic masculinity in the church. (10)
According to Wagner, evangelical subculture “produces and shelters abusers with alarming regularity,” and he blames a set of methods for teaching Christian sexual ethics and the respective roles of and relations between men and women (9). This isn’t just “a few bugs in the system” but is “baked into our theology” (13). Toxic evangelical masculinity has been, at least since the 1990s, “the mainstream evangelical vision of masculinity” (12).
Does Evangelicalism Nurture Abuse?
Wagner argues that purity teaching in particular, which centers on sexual abstinence before marriage and the expectation young Christians will pursue spouses, is “one piece in a larger system of idolatry toward the nuclear family” (41). He names names, books, and organizations.
Expressions of Christian sexual ethics like those in John Piper and Wayne Grudem’s Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, Elisabeth Elliot’s Passion and Purity, Eric and Leslie Ludy’s When God Writes Your Love Story, Stephen Arterburn’s and Fred Stoeker’s Every Man’s Battle, and Shaunti and Jeff Feldhahn’s For Women Only and For Men Only are all problematic in Wagner’s view and contribute to dehumanizing women, excusing and minimizing male sin, and insulating the toxic masculinity that gives rise to such evils.
Writing from within evangelicalism, Wagner’s real argument is that the church, despite its nominal opposition to such evils, has often hosted and even nurtured them. This was true particularly for the so-called purity culture movement, which was a significant force in publishing and moral discipleship in the 1980s to 2000s. Instead of crucifying destructive and toxic forms of male sexuality, he argues that purity culture inadvertently baptized them. He counts himself among those wounded by that error.
His solution is an overhaul of Christian teaching on sexuality—particularly male sexuality—that looks suspiciously like a new baptism of secular ideas: not those of the 1990s but of the 2020s, with an emphasis on a therapeutic view of sin and more flexible sexual ethics. Some may consider the result a less “toxic” form of masculinity. But I’m not convinced this form of masculinity is especially wise, biblical, or even—despite his subtitle—healthy.
Real Problems Identified
Wagner is right on several points. First, the church has undeniably experienced shameful scandals. Starting with the revelations of sexual abuse and cover-up on a massive scale in the Catholic Church in the early 2000s, a steady drumbeat of fallen pastors, evangelists, apologists, and organization heads has plagued North American Christianity. One of the most recent—the posthumous revelation of apologist Ravi Zacharias’s sexual sin—rocked many of the circles in which I worship and work.
It’s not just leaders caught red-handed. Christian men have collectively failed to live up to the moral standards we profess, and which Christ commands. An unconscionably high percentage of professing Christian males, for instance, consume pornography on a regular basis. Wagner is justified when he writes that “Christian men need to grow up . . . and become more Christlike in the way we think about, treat, and live in relationships with women” (145).
And then there are the purity culture figures who’ve jumped ship. For example, Joshua Harris, author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, renounced his earlier work a few years ago—along with the Christian faith and his marriage. The implication is that purity culture is so burdensome it must be deconstructed, even if that risks rejecting Christianity.
Wagner is right that all of this smoke must point to a fire. Male sexuality, even in the church, has often proved selfish, predatory, and hypocritical. But purity culture didn’t start that fire. If anything, purity culture was an attempt to contain it.
Murky View of Purity Culture
As Samuel James points out, many critics of purity culture don’t seem to appreciate the extent to which evangelical discipleship around sex was a reaction to the wider culture throwing off all sexual restraint. During the 1990s, American entertainment reveled in casual sex and entitled male libido in ways that shocked Christian parents then and would shock secular sensibilities in our post-#MeToo world.
Many critics of purity culture don’t seem to appreciate the extent to which evangelical discipleship around sex was a reaction to the wider culture throwing off all sexual restraint.
Wagner acknowledges purity culture was reacting against the sexual revolution but quickly moves on to blame purity culture authors and teachers for ills that are far from unique to the church. To cite just a few examples, he slams evangelical teaching on sexuality for getting men stuck in cycles of pornography addiction, extramarital affairs, buying sex, and abusing women and children.
Critics cannot seem to agree on what purity culture actually refers to. For some, it means extreme and restrictive ministries like Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles or Douglas Phillips’s Vision Forum. For theological liberals (like Nadia Bolz-Weber, whom Wagner cites favorably), purity culture appears to mean any teaching that sex belongs exclusively in marriage.
Wagner, too, is vague about what purity culture is, and he summarizes its supposed tenets in ways that seem uncharitable. According to Wagner, purity culture taught that “bodies are evil [and] sex is bad” (31); that “singleness is subhuman” (40); that “boys are dangerous (and so are girls)” (41); that if women ply their wiles, men will “certainly be unable to resist” their “overwhelming physical response” (42, 49); that sexual desire, by itself, is a good reason for young people to get married, “regardless of their life circumstances, maturity, and relational health” (164); and that young men raised in this way will inevitably view their wives as “the release valve for pent-up sexual frustration” (92). Many of these critiques are offered without citations to show where they were taught and by whom.
Did most pastors and Christian authors really teach these things? Many of our parents gave us these books and talks. If we ask them now whether these were their intended messages, would they say yes? There’s no question it’s possible to find examples of bizarre and troubling presentations on sexual morality. I’m sure there were techniques and illustrations for teaching sexual morality that, however well-intentioned, risked giving the wrong impression. I’m sure there were even parents and church leaders who used these messages as a cover for their own sin.
But do these facts invalidate the earnest efforts of a generation of parents and pastors to pass on biblical virtues to their kids against powerful cultural headwinds? In critiquing the failures of overcorrection by past generations, we should be wary not to fall into a similar trap camouflaged for a different moral terrain.
Consider a more reasonable summary of some of purity culture’s claims: That our bodies, while still good, are also fallen and beset by disordered desires that tend, as Scripture says, toward death (Prov. 5:5). That lifelong singleness, while possible, is not normative for Christian young people. That men are especially vulnerable to the lure of habitual pornography use and must take special care to mortify lust and flee temptation. That we can love one another by what we choose to wear, in keeping with the biblical exhortation to modesty (1 Tim. 2:9). That saving sex for marriage does, as research demonstrates, tend to produce more fulfilling relationships, even if it’s not a money-back guarantee. There was enduring wisdom at the heart of purity culture, however it failed in its delivery.
Therapeutic Theology
This book is an effort to share the wisdom of experience. Wagner is honest about his painful and complicated relationship with his own sexuality. He and his wife have struggled to connect. He entered marriage with guilt surrounding sexual pleasure. He openly discusses the years of therapy he’s undergone to resolve these issues and admits that, looking back, his own “temperament” and “emotional immaturity” were at the root of his woes with women (136). Yet he doesn’t seem to consider that his temperament and emotional immaturity might also have caused him to take reasonable advice to an unhealthy extreme, or to caricature it in hindsight.
Perhaps because Wagner found help through therapy, he appropriates therapeutic rather than theological language to make his case. Throughout his book, the vocabulary of “dehumanization,” “abuse,” “trauma,” and “health” conspicuously displaces the language of sin, obedience, chastity, and sanctification. It’s not that Wagner never uses these words. It’s that they’re not load-bearing for his argument.
Indeed, he makes it clear the historic Christian sexual ethic itself is nonessential to his argument. While he still believes it’s beautiful and beneficial to save sex for marriage, he confesses,
[This belief is] not the most important thing about my Christian faith. It is, to me, a secondary issue. And I believe it should be. We need to be careful about how we equate a certain sexual ethic with the gospel itself. (58)
Wagner concludes the real and “more urgent ethical imperative of our time isn’t whether teenagers are having sex with their boyfriends or girlfriends. It is how we can stem the ongoing epidemic of abuse and dehumanization in our churches” (58).
The way to accomplish this, he argues, is to withdraw from the sexual culture wars and implement a new kind of sexual discipleship that centers on consent, human dignity, psychotherapy, and most of all, deconstruction of toxic ideals of masculinity. Which toxic ideals, exactly? Well, the ones that anticipate men will have intense sexual desire, that encourage stoicism, that tell stories about slaying dragons and rescuing princesses, that sharply differentiate fatherhood from motherhood, and that find something admirable in characters portrayed by John Wayne.
At the heart of this vision for restored sexuality is a conception of male nature as essentially harmless, beset not by original sin but by the conditioning of a rotten Christian subculture. The problem isn’t within humanity but without; the way we evangelicals treat male sexuality as “especially or even hopelessly depraved” (49). Sex isn’t the battlefield on which our souls will be won or lost, and the root of sexual scandals in the church is a toxic culture, not concupiscence. The argument is that if we eliminate rotten teaching and reinforce Scripture with some counseling and culturally approved sensibilities, then a nontoxic masculinity can emerge and flourish.
But, of course, this is naive, as anyone who has heard names like Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nassar, Bill Cosby, or Brock Turner will know. These men were hardly pupils of purity culture, yet they had no difficulty becoming deeply toxic or dehumanizing their victims. The fact that predatory male sexuality seems to have no special preference for religious subcultures shows that purity culture—no matter how flawed—was never the root of the problem. It was, in fact, an honest effort to apply Christian teaching on sex against the withering headwinds of a revolution dedicated to liberating sinful libido.
Partial Success
Zachary Wagner’s Non-Toxic Masculinity is a halting attempt by a hurting soul to address real and unconscionable harms within the church. At moments, he shows signs of reaching for something nobler and older than the demands of the #MeToo movement and modern psychology. I was pleasantly surprised by his chapter on fatherhood, in which he foregrounds the procreative potential of male bodies and actually calls it the “chief end” of our sexuality (175).
Purity culture—no matter how flawed—was never the root of the problem.
Yet he fails to grasp the centrality of the Christian sexual ethic and the natural family for securing and preserving that good. These things aren’t the gospel, but they are the law of love (Matt. 22:40), and they’re certainly not minor issues.
In that sense, Wagner delivers on his title but falls short of his subtitle. The quest to make men merely harmless is no substitute for recovering a biblical, historical, and, yes, masculine Christian sexual ethic.
“Don’t be evil” is fine advice as far as it goes. But like nontoxic masculinity, it’s a negative. We need a positive ideal. And if you write a book condemning the last ideal a generation of young Christians was taught to pursue, you should be prepared to offer something better. Those who pick up Non-Toxic Masculinity looking for that fresh ideal will be disappointed.
The Gospel Coalition