Am I a Man?

“Did you see that ludicrous display last night?”

That question is a running joke in my family.  It comes from The IT Crowd, a British sitcom that’s a cross between the Office and the Big Bang Theory.  In the episode “Are We Not Men?”, the featured computer nerds, worried about their masculinity, desperately try to follow the script of masculinity, including, of course, enthusiasm for sports they have no understanding of.

The episode came to mind as I was reading Kristin Kobes Dumez’ excellent book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.  The subtitle is misleading, perhaps, in that it doesn’t convey the heart of the book, which is to trace the culture of masculinity as it took shape in white American evangelical culture since the birth of the “neo-evangelicalism” associated with Billy Graham in the 1950s.  The book doesn’t attempt a comprehensive overview of all the political agendas that corrupted this faith nor all the ways it contributed to the fracturing of the nation, nor need it do so.  The focus here is on gender.

I’m not writing to attempt a review of DuMez’ book, which has been ably done elsewhere, but to use it as a launching pad for some reflections of my own.  But a few observations are in order to get us oriented.  DuMez argues that we shouldn’t look at American evangelicalism primarily as a movement of theological ideas or spiritual practices, the way it has traditionally been defined by David Bebbington and used by historians of the movement like George Marsden (one of my own grad school professors).  Rather, she sees it as an American subculture defined as a market, particularly a media market: evangelicals are not so much those who believe in the authority of the Bible or who have had “born again” conversions (though they’ll say they do, or feel they ought to), but those who listen to Christian music, read Left Behind novels, watch Veggie Tales and shop at Hobby Lobby.  So she’s analyzing how manhood and gender are treated in this subculture, not so much what exegetical or theological ideas are taught (though it spills into that).

As the title suggests, it turns out that there’s a lot of testosterone getting pumped through evangelicals’ veins that has little to do with the Bible or theology in any proper sense.  John Wayne is the icon of this prominent trend.  Wayne made little pretense to being a Christian of any stripe, nor was there anything evangelical about his lifestyle.  Yet, again and again, Dumez shows that evangelical leaders reverently invoke the image of the hard-bitten tough guy actor as the essence of what “real” Christian manhood is supposed to look like.

It’s a stark image, seemingly drawn straight from Hollywood screens, of testosterone-drenched manliness, rippling with muscle and ever ready for aggression, sexually insatiable (Christian womanhood, of course, having as its submissive duty the ready fulfillment of all men’s desires, lest they go astray), hunters, providers, and protectors for the weaker sex.  All in God’s righteous cause, of course.  Dumez argues that massive evangelical support for Donald Trump’s presidency, seemingly a contradiction of all their purported principles and values, actually flows naturally from this culture of masculinity, as Trump eagerly projected a mood of pugnacious masculine domination.

Thus far, the culture of exaggerated masculinity woven into American evangelicalism.  What Dumez’ book does not do however (nor did it need to), is answer the question I’d like to pursue here:

What IS Christian manhood?  What IS a man, from a biblical point of view?  Why is the John Wayne image not a Christian one, and what image should replace it?

I became aware of the insidious toxic character of the kind of masculinity Dumez describes a long time ago, when I was a teenager.  My mother told a story of a church potluck that took place while I was away at college.  An old-school visiting preacher found himself ahead of her in the buffet line.  In a show of gallantry, he invited her to go ahead of him.  My mother declined and told him to go ahead.  Rather than do so, he seized her elbow in a vice-like grip, forced her forward, and rasped through gritted teeth, “I SAID, you FIRST!” His show of gallantry, thus, he exposed as an gesture of domination, not to be defied.

Clearly, this kind of harsh patriarchal domination is not what Christ intends his followers to live by.  So, for a man, what DOES it mean to be a Christian man?

I can’t examine every possible relevant biblical text here, but let me offer a few suggestions.

First of all: No false generalization.  You can find all kinds of characters in the Bible who are male.  You cannot presume that, merely because any one of them IS male, that whatever character traits he has are essential traits of masculinity.  Take King David, for example.  He was a warrior; he was also a poet and a musician. He had a libido, but his sexual sin led to one of the Bible’s central declarations of repentance (Psalm 51), hardly an endorsement of his libido as his most godly trait.  When one looks at the “John Wayne” spirituality rampant in modern evangelicalism, you find a great deal of insistence that “real men” are warriors; hardly any that real men are poets.  If David’s example means that a “real man” MUST be the one, then it necessarily follows that they MUST also be the other.  I have yet to meet a man, Christian or otherwise, who feels his masculinity is in question because he can’t write good poetry or play an instrument.  Meanwhile, however, there are plenty of other godly men in the Bible who are neither (Solomon, David’s own son, comes to mind).  In short, David was a warrior because it was David‘s calling to be a warrior; not because being a warrior is a calling of masculinity per se by which all men should measure themselves.

This also means we should not overgeneralize from natural, as opposed to biblical, observations about average or common male traits, to decree an essence of masculinity based on those traits.  For instance, men tend to be taller than women on average.  But that does not mean that height is an essential trait of masculinity, that tall men are more “real” men in the eyes of God (nor that a tall woman is not a real woman), or that shorter men should doubt their masculinity.  Those are false idols.

Secondly: nothing that pertains to the fallen condition of humanity can be an essential trait of masculinity.  A great deal of the patriarchal ethos Dumez describes insists that men must be “protectors of women.”  But what did Adam need to “protect” Eve from in the Garden of Eden? One might say the serpent, and some do.  But that interpretation is entirely speculative; there is not a single scripture that states or implies that Adam was supposed to act in some protective capacity there.  What will there be to protect women from in our resurrected state at the consummation of eternity?  In fact, with as much emphasis as there is in Old Testament histories of the kingdom of Israel’s wars, hardly ever is there a note struck that the men of Israel must fight bravely in order to protect Israelite women.  Lamentations over defeats do mourn the fate of the women, but the connection is never drawn that men were supposed to fight for the purpose of protecting them.

Note also that it is in the curse on Eve – not her creation – that she is told, “your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”  This is not a command to men to dominate women, any more than there’s a command to deliberately suffer at work. Rather, it’s a declaration of the misfortune that sin has brought on humanity.  It may be, in the social structures that arise in a fallen, sinful, humanity, that sometimes men find themselves called upon to particular tasks; but for a Christian, these cannot be the essence or measure of their manliness.

Third: manliness is not to be measured by sexuality.  Here the example is Christ in particular; he was adored by prostitutes, loved them and was loved by them, but with no hint of sexual intention toward them.  Nor is he supposed to be utterly unique in this; for besides the usual run of sexually active men, he added that some are eunuchs by nature, some by human action (i.e. castration, common in the ancient world), and some make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven.  Paul, single and celibate, expressed the wish that others could be like him, but recognized that each have their own calling.  There are different situations and callings.  Sexual renunciation is, of course, a kind of sexuality in itself. But the point for our purposes is that there is no particular sexual posture that makes one “more of a man,” not such that a Christian man needs to work himself up to it.  The notion that God made men to be bursting at the seams with libido, barely able to contain themselves, has no biblical warrant.

A fourth principle, implicit in some of what I’ve already said; we should always distinguish between a man’s calling in particular life situations, and his being a man in essence.  Marriage would be a good example here; there are certainly passages of scripture about how husbands and wives should understand and approach their relationship to each other.  But being a husband is a specific calling, and not one that all men are called to, as Christ and Paul demonstrate.  We will go astray if we confuse an understanding of Christian marriage (or fatherhood, or other roles) with Christian manhood in itself.

Each of these is a negative principle; they rule out various candidates or theories for the nature of manhood, rather than define what that manhood actually is.  We cannot cherry-pick individual biblical men and elevate them to a model for all men; we cannot apply the conditions of sin like dominance or violence as though they were sacred callings; we cannot prescribe any one particular sexuality as the proper masculine one.  Yet God created humanity “male and female”: the sexes can be distinguished.  So what’s the difference? What makes the man a man?

I would suggest – very little.

If each of the principles I’ve proposed above are sound, then they rule out the vast majority of efforts to try to “essentialize” manhood, to try to construct any single strong “role model” that defines biblically how men “ought” to be or what their “true nature” is.  Masculinity is simply not a biblical yardstick by which anyone ought to measure themselves.  Righteousness is: wisdom is: love is.  Not “manliness.”

This does not mean that sex and gender are meaningless, only that we need to think more carefully and more flexibly about them.  In Genesis, God does create humanity in his image, male and female. A few thoughts on that:

I proposed above that no particular sexuality is essential to manhood; that the calling of a husband is distinct from being a man, and not a calling for all.  Nevertheless, maleness is sexual.  “Be fruitful and multiply” is a command to humanity generally, not a calling for every individual, and it is as a species with two sexes that we fulfill it. It may be one of very few biblical commands that cannot be fulfilled by an individual alone.  (I do not intend here to get into issues of intersex and transgender; I confine my attention to human reproduction, which requires sperm and ovum, and thus the bodies that produce them).

To be a man, then, is to have a body that stands on one side of this synthesis, and thus to have to interpret one’s body, to navigate a path in life which takes account of the anatomical fact.  The process of interpretation of the sexual self, of creating patterns of understanding and expectations of behavior pertaining to it, is what we call gender (as opposed to the bare anatomical fact of sex). One can place one’s sex in the foreground or background of one’s identity; one can regard it as a subject of enjoyment, of obsession, one can abuse it or exploit it or sideline it, feel pride or shame in it, can take it as the basis for all sorts of other roles (lover, husband, father, etc.) and so on.  Gender identities can be tremendously variable.  While there is biblical guidance as to how a Christian should live out some of those key roles that pertain to gender (such as husband or father), none has biblical warrant to be considered a standard of manhood against which to measure oneself.  There are many ways to be a man, and at the final judgment, none of them will matter much.

Finally, there is the issue of what it means to be a man relative to women.  Genesis narrates the creation of man and woman twice; first as a unity, in chapter one (“male and female He created them”), and then again in chapter two, where Eve is made from Adam’s rib.  That rib has provoked a tremendous amount of discussion, of course, and whether the account should be taken to stress more woman as secondary and subordinate to man, or as an equal counterpart alongside him.  I would favor the latter interpretation, for two reasons.  One, the narrative describes the reason for creating woman as being that no animal was found to be a suitable companion for the man.  Whatever is meant by “suitability,” then, clearly it excludes the idea that a being could be suitable if it did not share in the man’s own nature; anything less already turned out to be unsuitable, if the companion could be an inferior one of the animals would have been adequate.  That nature, in turn, had already been said to be bearing the image of God, and it’s hard to envision what a lesser image would look like; that’s rather an either/or proposition.  Adam’s own response at awakening and seeing Eve reinforces this; he doesn’t describe her as his inferior or subject, but as “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.”

Paul, reflecting on this account in 1 Corinthians 11, shows some of the multivalency it carries.  In the immediate practical context of instructions for a church in the Roman Empire, he uses it to illustrate the need for women to signify their submission through wearing long hair, and head coverings in prayer.  Paul says that this is because Christ is the head of the man, and the man in turn is the head of the woman, so that the covering of the head signifies this hierarchy.  The question, however, is whether the hierarchy in question is essential and eternal or contextual and symbolic.

The common argument, that the hierarchy Paul describes is essential and eternal, runs afoul of other scriptures.  As I pointed out earlier, it is ONLY with the curse, not beforehand, that Eve is told her husband will rule over her.  Such rule thus is only a consequence of sin, not inherent to nature.  This is reaffirmed by Galatians 3:28, which includes male and female with ethnic categories, like Jew and Greek, and social statuses like slave and free, as identities that do not exist “in Christ.”  Even in 1 Corinthians 11, Paul qualifies his own remarks.  In a somewhat confusing aside, he points out that, while Eve was made from Adam, yet in the subsequent history of humanity, men are made from women, coming from their mother’s wombs.  Thus neither is independent of the other, and apparently cannot be said to have priority over the other; man and woman each come from the other and are interdependent for their very existence.

It seems likely, then, that the hierarchy Paul instructed the Corinthian church to observe is not a statement about the essence of masculinity nor femininity, but is a representation of the body of Christ communicated in the medium of gender relations, particularly among those who are married (which, remember, not all are called to).  Paul says that all this is “because of the angels,” another confusing remark.  But if we remember that the Greek “angeloi” means not necessarily supernatural beings, but can also mean just “messengers” (the gospel itself is the “evANGELion,” the “good message”), it makes more sense.  As the Church bears witness to the gospel in the world, the households of believers themselves demonstrate that gospel as its members live orderly lives of mutual submission, love and service.  How to do that is a matter for more detailed study and discussion, but I won’t go into it here, as the topic of this blog is not about Christian life and marriage but about how we conceptualize the nature of manhood in itself.

So how to conclude: Jesus rebuked the Pharisees harshly for, among other things, laying burdens on others without lifting a finger to help carry them.  The modern Church easily has its share of Pharisees.  I would argue that false claims to allegedly biblical teachings on gender, including supposedly “biblical” manhood, is one of those burdens that we have laid on many, to crush them rather than lead them to redemption.  Much of the bitter controversies we see today over gender and sexuality, I would argue, have their roots in precisely the damage done by these crushing burdens.  Christ’s yoke is easy and his burden is light, and living up to some artificial, worldly notion of being a “real man,” has no part in it.  There are many ways to be a man, each of us reflecting the infinite glory of God in our various ways.