Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne attempts to explain “how white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation.” Her answer is a story about how John Wayne came to be seen as “an icon of Christian masculinity,” and it’s easy to see why it became a bestseller. Its anecdotes of Christian hypocrisy are like car wrecks, and you can’t avert your eyes. There’s much for Christians to mourn in the pages of her book.
One significant issue with Du Mez’s narrative is that it starts a century or more too late, kicking off the story after the defining action has already taken place—as if a reader were tasked with evaluating the Lord of the Rings series entirely on the basis of The Return of the King, having never read the earlier books.
By the time Du Mez picks up her account, the traditional Christian script for masculinity has already been supplanted by secularism, social Darwinism, and the Industrial Revolution. Previously, American masculinity had much healthier roots in Christianity and the rhythms of household life.
Nancy Pearcey details a broader history of masculinity that Du Mez leaves unexplored. Pearcey is a scholar in residence at Houston Christian University and has been deeply engaged in Christian apologetics for decades, including through her work with Prison Fellowship. In The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes, she demonstrates that Christian manhood, when lived out, encourages the flourishing of men and women in society.
Another contributor to the conversation is Josh Hawley, the senior United States senator from Missouri and a vocal conservative who brings theological insights to bear on political life. His book Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs calls for embracing virtuous Christian manhood, which is being replaced on both the political left and right by a rival philosophical tradition.
Each of these authors has written a volume recognizing the significance of Du Mez’s line of critique and pointing toward the proper antidote to toxic masculinity: a more faithful appropriation of biblical ideas about manhood. Both have in view a definition of masculinity that includes a way of being for males that is distinct from femininity. The expression of these traits is shaped by surrounding cultures to some degree, but consistently reflects God’s creational differentiation between male and female beyond mere anatomy.
Positive Christian Masculinity
Reaching back far beyond the beginnings of industrialization, Pearcey provides a persuasive account of Christianity’s leavening influence on masculinity and the treatment of women.
Instead of following their pagan counterparts who treated marriage as a mere legal contract for begetting legitimate heirs and who normalized extramarital sex, the first Christians demanded husbands be faithful to their wives and love them “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). The mutuality of marriage and equal dignity of both male and female were Christian accomplishments amid a dehumanizing pagan environment.
The mutuality of marriage and equal dignity of both male and female were Christian accomplishments amid a dehumanizing pagan environment.
Pearcey proves with exhaustive evidence that, far from “toxic masculinity,” faithful Christian practice produces compassionate husbands, marital happiness, and sexual satisfaction. Practicing Christian men are empirically better spouses, outperforming their secular and nominal Christian counterparts. “The real problem,” Pearcey argues, “is not an inherent flaw in masculinity itself. It’s that American society has become secularist and has lost the biblical vision of manhood.”
American Christian masculinity is more faithfully represented in the model of John Winthrop than in John Wayne. Unlike ancient Stoics and stoical cowboys, Winthrop (like other Puritans) was effusively and unabashedly in love with his wife. As Pearcey points out, Winthrop pours out his praises constantly for his wife, always reminding her of the “better husband” she has in Christ and ending his letters with “I kiss my sweet wife.” This affectionate outpouring wasn’t a mere matter of manners. Puritan Massachusetts enacted the world’s first laws against wife beating and child abuse.
Not ‘Real Men’ but ‘Good Men’
Pearcey criticizes cowboy culture, but she characterizes it as an explicit break with Christian norms. Its origins aren’t in the church.
The relocation of work from the home to the factory transformed the way we think about men. Prior to this transformation, the whole family joined together in the household’s economic responsibilities.
As household and workplace were separated, men became disconnected from family worship and the spiritual formation of their children. They came to be considered irreligious, undomesticated, and even dangerous or intrinsically bad. Meanwhile, women were thought of as “angels.”
As household and workplace were separated, men became disconnected from family worship and the spiritual formation of their children.
The cowboy ethos emerged out of these developments. “Real men” came to embrace separation from the family as natural and justified by the new Darwinian science. In place of Christian ideals about the family, cowboy culture promotes an allegedly more authentic and pre-Christian mode of being a man: returning to nature and embracing the ways of the “noble savage.” These were explicit themes in the works of authors like Zane Grey, one of the early popularizers of the Western genre.
These shifts, Pearcey argues, “let men off the hook,” shearing them of responsibility for their actions. They substituted this secular script of the “real man” for the older Christian script of the “good man.” For Pearcey, the answer to “toxic masculinity” isn’t to reject manliness. Instead, Christians need to recover the positive biblical vision of manhood, for the sake of men and also their wives and children.
Rejecting Epicurean Masculinity
In contrast to Pearcey’s predominantly constructive approach, Hawley tends to be more adversarial with more contemporary political ideologies in view. The chief adversary in the narrative of Hawley’s Manhood is the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, whose modern descendants teach that seeking personal happiness is the sole purpose of life. For Hawley, the problem of toxic masculinity comes from choosing pagan self-indulgence over Christian self-sacrifice.
These “Epicurean liberals” include sex-positive progressives who think the nuclear family is patriarchal and masculinity intrinsically toxic. They also include people like hypermasculine far-right influencer Andrew Tate, whose “idea of success apparently involved sleeping with as many women as possible, berating them, abusing them, and celebrating it all as manly.” The failure on both flanks is a commitment to the unobstructed self-fulfillment of individuals.
The Adam Story
Hawley’s book could be characterized as an attempt to rethread the two separate scripts about masculinity Pearcey identifies—the “good man” and the “real man”—through the biblical narrative, or as he calls it, “the Adam story.” As Hawley explains, “The commission God gives [Adam] is one the Bible says God means for all men.”
The Adam story is “a series of stories, running from the Garden of Eden and well beyond . . . that unfold as the men of the Bible struggle to do what God made them to do: expand the garden, subdue the darkness without and within—as they struggle to become men.” Hawley believes, quoting Christian statesman Abraham Kuyper, that “to be what God made him to be, a man must improve his nature, he must work upon himself.”
The story Hawley tells of this work moves from Adam’s responsibilities as a husband, Abraham’s development as a father, and Joshua’s career as a warrior to David as a kind of builder of Jerusalem and priest of the Lord, to the kingship of Solomon. Though this is not the main point of the biblical narrative, Hawley argues these biblical archetypes show what men were made to be. However, each of these Adam figures only stumbles toward that goal, hinting at something greater.
Masculinity Shaped by the Gospel
Along the way, Hawley introduces readers to some of Christian history’s “good men.” Blaise Pascal stands out among these because he defies most modern stereotypes of masculinity.
Despite Pascal’s international intellectual renown for contributions across multiple fields, he wasn’t physically strong, nor did he demonstrate a forceful personality like many other characters on Hawley’s list. Instead, Pascal is included because he loved the Lord with all his heart. He encountered the Lord in a “night of fire” and found “his new purpose was to burn for God in the world.”
As Hawley tells it, “Pascal lived what every man was born for.” Though he never married or had children, Pascal wasn’t just a brilliant man but a good man. He was a man whose goodness was ultimately dependent on the work of the gospel in his life.
Throughout the book, Hawley hints at this gospel. But he makes it clear in the book’s final lines that true manliness begins with God’s goodness toward humanity:
The work of manhood has ever depended on God’s promise. It has ever depended on his grace. No man could fulfill man’s mission, not finally. Not Adam, not Abraham, not Joshua or David or Solomon or anyone else. Men are as flawed as the world they inhabit. Every man needs saving, as the world needs saving. God’s promise to Abraham reveals God’s intention to save it—and us—from the first. He answers our need: He becomes a man, one last Adam. And this Man takes the failures and shortcomings and the malice and pain of all men into himself and gives his life to overcome them. And he offers the new life he has won to all who will receive it. He becomes himself the ultimate temple, where God and humanity are united. And one day, he will unite heaven and earth, and make all the world a new Eden at last. That is where the story is headed. And that determines how we live now.
Men Will Fail, God Will Not
While making important contributions to the conversation about virtuous masculinity, both books have shortcomings.
At times, Pearcey seems overly optimistic about our ability to turn back the clock on the Industrial Revolution’s transformation of work, home, family, and masculinity. While the COVID-19 pandemic opened up new possibilities for work-from-home arrangements, the latest data about the effects on companies and workers isn’t so sunny.
Pearcey’s skeptics might not care that Christian masculinity is healthy on the whole when there are so many awful instances of abuse within the fold. Pointing to worse and greater abuse outside authentic Christianity doesn’t make Christian abuse any less bad or unjust. But, as Pearcey shares at the outset, she’s writing as one who knows this kind of abuse firsthand and cannot fairly be accused of seeing the forest but not the trees.
While the Bible tells us judgment begins at the house of God (1 Pet. 4:17), Hawley’s judgment begins with the other side of the aisle, struggling to name anyone other than Andrew Tate who could be corrupting conservatives’ understanding of masculinity. He is less cautious of some culturally exaggerated versions of manliness than Pearcey. Although careful to say the corruption that men must struggle against isn’t just “in the world” but “in ourselves,” the benefit of Hawley’s book will be limited by his thumb on the scales here. And, right or wrong, many readers won’t be able to separate beneficial counsel in Hawley’s book from his conduct on January 6, 2021.
Pearcey’s approach is more constructive and balanced, and thus more beneficial for readers. In a world where there is confusion about masculinity on both flanks, Pearcey works diligently to show what manhood can be when grace-filled action flows from faithful theology.
However, both Pearcey and Hawley remind readers that the best answer to the failures of men is to become more faithful Christians. They both recognize the damage cultural influences can have on men and women inside and outside the church. Both of the books provide strong critiques of truly toxic masculinity. They recognize that when those toxic traits appear within the church, foreign ideas about manhood have displaced a biblical vision.
The best answer to the failures of men is to become more faithful Christians.
There are and will continue to be painful instances of men failing to live up to God’s calling, even cases of Christians “corrupting a faith and fracturing a nation,” as Du Mez reminds us. Men who are supposed to be protectors will sometimes turn out to be cowards or abusers.
However, the good news is that, more often than not, Christian men will rise above the rest of society in loving their wives and their children. The even better news is that Christ is making all things new and will one day wipe away the tears of everyone hurt by men who failed to live up to their heavenly calling.
The Gospel Coalition