It's in the Code ep 164: “The Model Man”

Dan Miller: Welcome to In The Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. I am Dan Miller. I am pleased to be with you today as always. As always, keep the ideas for the series coming. danielmillerswaj@gmail.com, always value insight, feedback, ideas for new episodes and so forth. We are starting a new series today. After this, I'm not positive which direction I'm going, so again, if you've got ideas of additional series, additional topics, additional ideas, we've been spending some time in books and that's where we're going to live. If there's something like that that you want to take a look at, if there's another church flyer out there with a handy list of things that you think are worth talking about, whatever it is, please let me know. If you're a subscriber, you also can access our Discord and lots of great ideas floating around in there. Always love hearing from people there as well.

I want to dive into today's material. We are once again walking through a book to do so. This was another book recommended by a colleague last spring, and I added it to the list and have been, well, I don't know, "excited" might be the wrong word, about this book, but very much looking forward to sort of going through it and decoding it and seeing what it has to show us about the right and the things we talk about in this series. And the focus here is Josh Hawley's book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.

And as with Allie Beth Stuckey's book that we just finished on toxic masculinity, the value of this book, you know, such as it is, is not the originality or intelligence of what he has to say. He doesn't really say anything new, I don't think. I don't think that I'm likely to find his reasoning very compelling and so forth. So why engage? Why talk about this? Why talk about this vision of quote-unquote "manhood"? I think the value is that this book provides a window, one of many possible windows, into the discourse of masculinity that defines so much of the contemporary right and the MAGA movement and Christian nationalism and conservative churches and so much of this discourse, as you know, if you listen and you pay attention to what's going on around us, so much of this is central to the issues that are sort of ripping apart America at present. So the value of the book lies in the fact that it is not unique.

And as with Stuckey's book, basically, I'm reading it so you don't have to. If you've read it, I would love your thoughts. If you read it along as you listen to this, I would love to hear what you have to say, okay? Like Stuckey's book, I'm going to be reading it as we go. I've read the first chapter, I haven't read more than that. I have not read online reviews of it. I have not read synopses of it. I am going to be going through it chapter by chapter, week by week, and so you're going to get more or less my relatively unfiltered, relatively immediate response to the wisdom that Josh Hawley has for us about the topic of manhood.

And with this in view, it's worth noting a few things that I hope to do as we move through this book, through upcoming episodes. I have given up on trying to guess how many episodes it'll take... I'm just going to try to move through it and do our deep dive and, you know, that'll take as long as it takes. But what I want to try to highlight are the cultural codes and values that lodge within concepts like masculinity and manhood... I want to see how they are coded and what values are embedded within them within the contemporary right and somebody like Josh Hawley writes a book. I want to see the ways in which a certain kind of Christianity inflects these codes. And I want to see how the ideas of both faith and manhood... how they are coded with the ideas of nation or America or American identity. Those are the things that I'm looking for as I work my way through this text.

So what I want to do, in other words, is to untangle how this centrally reinforcing notion of masculinity ties in with notions of Christian identity and nation to form the movement that we now call Christian nationalism, because folks, this is a Christian nationalist text, whether it goes by that name or not, whether somebody like Josh Hawley appreciates that term or not, that's what this is, and that's what we're going to be talking about and looking for as we decode this over the next however many episodes.

So to get us started, I want to spend a little time talking about the model man taking us on this journey to a proper understanding of manhood: Josh Hawley. That's right. Josh Hawley is our model man. And I really think if you're going to write a book on Manhood, The American, you know, The Masculine Virtues America Needs, I think tacitly you're making a claim that you embody these virtues. I really do... So who is Josh Hawley? If you're familiar with his name, you may know a whole bunch about Josh Hawley already... He is the senior U.S. Senator from Missouri. But he's young, he's 45 years old. Prior to his election to the Senate in 2019, he was the Missouri Attorney General from 2017 to 2019. He is a graduate of Yale Law School. He clerked for, among others, Chief Justice John Roberts of SCOTUS, of the Supreme Court. He was a clerk there. He taught at the University of Missouri Law School from 2011 until his election as Attorney General. Prior to that... he was also active with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. It is one of the many groups advancing the legal cause of so-called religious freedom. I say so-called... because this was an organization where religious freedom, it is code for the imposition of Christianity in various domains of public life and the continued privileging of Christian Americans. We're going to see that. We see this right from chapter one of this book forward. In 2010, he married his wife, Erin, whom he met when she was also a clerk for Roberts, and they have three kids... for Josh Hawley, being a man means obviously being straight... but being married and having children.

What are the takeaways from all of that, from that background? Why bother looking at this background? Well, if you have any familiarity with discourses of faith and masculinity and politics in this country, it's immediately evident that this is the terrain where we'll find Josh Hawley. He fits into that mold. He is walking down that track. And he's one of many within the GOP who has worked hard to hone his MAGA qualifications, his MAGA credentials and make sure he's viewed as a loyal Trump acolyte. So we're going to see in Josh Hawley is somebody who embodies so much of the discourse about masculinity on the contemporary right.

So I'm calling Josh Hawley our model man, and he is here to guide us through this quest for manhood. He's the one who will be our authority, who will walk us down this path, who will help us discover what true and authentic manhood is. So what I want to do in this episode is spend some time thinking about, okay, like so like why this guy? Why is this the guy we should listen to? Okay? He's a New York Times best-selling author of a prior book about big tech. He is claiming an authority here. So why should we listen to this guy? What makes him a reliable guide? And I think it's worth thinking about this because we're going to see just how vacuous the right's discourse about masculinity ultimately is right from the outset of looking and saying, "Okay, Josh Hawley, like why should we listen to you?"

So as I read the first chapter of his book, he gives us essentially two reasons we ought to listen to what he says. The first is his personal experience, and the second, of course, is the Bible. And I think we're going to be talking about the Bible and what he understands the Bible to be and how he reads the Bible a lot throughout this text, okay?

But let's start with his personal experience, because he sets up his discussion in the same folksy way that all of these kinds of discussions do... He wants to convince his readers that he's just an ordinary guy like them. He understands what masculinity is and what it demands because he's just a regular old guy. He's not the Ivy League-educated government elitist we might think that he is. No, no, no, he's just Josh.

And this comes through loud and clear before we even open the book. If you Google Josh Hawley, you'll get a lot of images and most of them are the images of Senator Josh Hawley. He's in a suit and tie. He's very sort of quaffed, he's done up. It's that Josh Hawley. If you look at the book jacket... what you get is the "I'm just a regular guy" Josh Hawley. Josh Hawley is 45... He looks 20 years younger in his publicity photo on the jacket... It's a strangely boyish image to me for a book on masculinity... He even jokes about how young he was as a law school professor hearing these stories and how he probably didn't really have that much worldly wisdom to impart. And so he chooses an image of himself where he looks very, very young, very boyish, in many ways, not sort of quote-unquote "manly" in the way that he's going to present this later in the book... He's also dressed like a cool youth pastor, basically... it's just just it's Youth Pastor Josh Hawley... And of course, the picture is also taken in such a way to ensure that we all see the wedding ring... because of course, being married and straight is going to be a big, centrally important part of masculinity as he understands it.

So right from the jump, before we even open the book, just looking at the dust jacket, we see Hawley trying to connect with all the regular guys who he thinks desperately need his book. And this everyman branding exercise, it continues when we open the book. Hawley starts his book by reflecting on conversations he had with male law students as a law professor. And he says this, he says, "More often than you might expect," he says, "students coming to see him weren't just talking about things related to law school or the study of law, but about quote, 'what was going on in their lives,'" end quote, right? Here's your cool youth pastor only he's like, you know, working with law students. Now, here's the key. As a college professor, I get this... I get students who come to me and they're going through real things and they talk to me about real things and they talk to me about stuff going on in their life. I get this. But from the outset, I call total bullshit on how often he suggests this happened... given his position as a law professor. And I I don't have any way to prove this. Let me be really clear. I'm being speculative here. But I'm saying this smells off to me as somebody who has spent a decade and a half in full-time higher education, working with undergraduates. He's not working with undergraduates. Working with undergraduate students, I just, I think this is BS. I don't think this happens all the time. I think most people, they got somebody they want to talk to, it's not going to be their law professor. I don't think that that's what's going on.

So let me read to you how he describes this, how he describes these conversations. He says, "Those were interesting conversations. I was barely over 30 years old at the time and can't say I was a much of a position to offer sage life counsel."... He says, "But I did soon enough begin to notice a pattern. Many of the young men came to see who came to see me were struggling in ways they found hard to exactly define. Some lacked confidence, some lacked direction, others could not seem to get motivated. They were afraid to fail, to venture out and take a risk, but felt at the same time dissatisfied with their lives as they knew them. One after another, in one way or another, said, 'I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with my life,' and yet they felt they were failing at whatever that was."

That's how he describes this. Now here's the question: How often are we supposed to believe that these conversations happened and at what depth? To Josh Hawley, the law professor, that his law students are coming to him with these conversations, we're really supposed to believe that as a law professor, he had students who were regularly bearing their souls to him. Why him? Of all the people in their lives, he is that guy? I just don't buy it. One after another, said, he says, "one after another I heard this." You get the sense of this endless line of students coming in and bearing their souls. Again, I call BS. If he was a former pastor or a counselor, maybe. Maybe that would make sense... I just don't buy it, okay?

I also don't buy this because he wasn't a college professor, he was a law school professor. Folks, he's talking to graduate students... These are not the driftless, aimless men he describes. I just feel an implausible lack of fit between his social location as a law professor at a law school, Yale educated, SCOTUS clerking law professor, his description of his students one after another, again, as lacking confidence and lacking direction and lacking motivation. I just don't buy it. When he says that these students were all saying, in effect, "I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with my life," I think this has to be taken with a massive grain of salt... I just don't buy that they were all sort of clueless and aimless and so forth. Maybe they're not sure what kind of law they want to practice. Maybe they're not sure if they want to practice law or use their degrees to launch into some other career, just as Josh Hawley did. But I don't think they're the aimless drifters that he suggests they are, okay?

So what's the point of all this? Why am I honing in on this point? The point is that Josh Hawley, Senator, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, former Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, former law professor Josh Hawley, former SCOTUS law clerk Josh Hawley, former Yale Law School alumni Josh Hawley, guess what? You are not a regular guy, Josh, and you do not spend your days interacting with regular guys. You just don't. So there's a lot of effort expended here to show us that we should listen to him because he's just a regular guy. He gets it. He has his finger on the pulse of the American man. And this is what qualifies him to weigh in. He doesn't say it that way, but it's there, and it drips off of the text. It's present in the image that he presents, the literal image that he puts forward, and it's all nonsense. It is all a carefully cultivated, marketed, and groomed front from somebody who is, in every sense of the term, a cultural elite. But he's part of a political party and a movement that positions itself as being quote-unquote "anti-elitist," even though it is full of people who occupy elite positions. That's Josh Hawley. Sorry, Josh, your Yale-educated, SCOTUS-trained U.S. Senator, you are not everyman, you are not the regular guy, but he is trying to present himself as if he is, and that's what I see in these early pages of this chapter.

So that's his first qualification... What else is supposed to qualify him to talk to us? Like why else should we be picking up his book and reading what he says about manhood? Why? The Bible, of course, because, you know, what would qualify somebody more to interpret the Bible for us than being a law professor with absolutely no education or training in theology or biblical interpretation? Like, you know, he's just a regular guy reading his Bible, so we should listen.

And we'll be looking at what Josh Hawley... has to say about the Bible throughout his book. But in his first chapter, he presents us with a thumbnail sketch of why the Bible is so important to his account of manhood. What men are missing, he says, is a good story, a good myth that tells us how to be men. And he hearkens back to an '80s movement known as Deep Masculinity. Now, this is what's kind of weird. He cites this, he appeals to this, but he doesn't actually indicate that he knows much about this movement. Here's how he describes it in his book. He says, quote, "There was a movement in the 1980s, I understand, that promoted something called the Deep Masculine." Right? He's like, "I'm given to understand that this movement existed." He tells us that it was, quote, "before his time," but that he's been, quote, "told about it." He's like, "Somebody told me about this movement for the Deep Masculine." The dude didn't even bother to Google it or look it up himself... But the movement was based on the idea that what men needed was to tap into kind of mythopoetic archetypes to recover an authentic, affirmative sense of masculinity. That myth and a kind of archetypal image of masculinity is what they needed to tap into. And it's this dimension that Hawley likes. This is what he picks up on from this movement that he's been told about...

For him, that mythopoetic source of strength and knowledge for men, it comes from the Bible. He affirms what he calls the power of myth and symbol and story, and he goes on to say this. This is the good news. He tells us that, quote, "The West was formed by a powerful story that had a good deal to say to men. It happens to be the oldest and most profound story there is. It is the story of the Bible." Just to be clear, the Bible is not the oldest religious text that there is, not by a long shot. Certainly there could be disagreement about whether it is the most profound, but that's what he says. "It is the story of the Bible." And that's an interesting phrase, "the story of the Bible," not the story in the Bible or the story that the Bible tells. He says, "the story of the Bible." And I think it's fitting because he really does give us quite a story about what the Bible is and about what it teaches. On his right reading, the Bible places masculinity and men front and center, start to finish.

Here's how he describes the story that he thinks the Bible tells. Okay, here's what he has to say, quoting Josh Hawley. He says, "It is a shame then that the story of the Bible is so little known today. The Bible story is an epic that speaks directly to the purpose of men. Indeed, from the Christian perspective," notice that, "the Christian perspective." You're always going to get this language on the right. "From the Christian perspective, the story comes to center on a man," capital M, presumably he's talking about Jesus. "The story in thumbnail form is this: From chaos and nothing, God created the world for a purpose. He created it to be a temple. Why a temple? The world was a place to be filled with his presence, and man was to have a role making it so. At the center of his creation, God placed a garden, and in the garden, a man, and he instructed the man to cultivate that garden, to protect it, and to build it outward, to expand it into all the world. That was the man's calling, his sacred duty, and his purpose in life. Man was to be God's representative on the earth, to serve God by helping build the earth into an Eden, the temple it was meant to be, a place of beauty and order, liberty and peace, a dwelling for God himself. This was the first man's mission, according to the Bible, and now the mission of all men."

Now, as I say, we'll have ample opportunity to engage what Hawley has to say about the Bible and men's place in it and what it means for American men. Here I just want to repeat his point that the story of the Bible is so little known today. It's a telling point because this reading of the Bible, this account of the fundamental story of the Bible, it reflects a profoundly ignorant and selective understanding of the Bible and what it says... To make this the story of the Bible, to make this the point of the Bible is to fundamentally ignore huge portions of what it says and to elevate particular passages above others, while reading those passages with a very particular cultural understanding.

Now, on the one hand, you've listened to me... You've heard me talk about the Bible. You've heard me talk about inerrancy. You've heard me talk about how the Bible actually works in the hands of conservative Christians and biblicists who claim that they believe it's literally true and so on and so forth. You've heard me talk about this. And you've heard me say things like this, which is that this is exactly what we should expect from a Christian nationalist reading the Bible. They, like conservative high-control Christians generally, they do not go to the Bible to draw their teachings. No, they go to the Bible knowing exactly what they need it to say and making sure they find it no matter what. So if you want a story that places men at the center, that makes patriarchy, deep structural patriarchy, a divine norm, a divinely instituted social order and you go to the Bible looking for it, you're going to find it. That's what this is. We also know that this kind of reading, which is completely typical, goes against what these kind of Christians actually say the Bible should be. Right? On the basis of their own teachings, they will tell you that you don't get to pick and choose what the Bible says, elevating minor points to central... importance and ignore all the rest, but that's how they actually read it. Okay? That's how they've always read it.

So we're going to get the Bible as read by the formal law professor Christian nationalist. That's the Bible we're encountering here. This is the guy who's going to guide us through the Bible to a view of authentic manhood. And his qualifications for doing so, he tells us, is a set of ideas about masculinity that he's been told about. Deep Masculine. Okay. He says in the chapter, too, he's like, "I don't know any better story than the Bible." Cool, Josh, I guess you just don't know good stories... That's his rationale for the Bible. I have no doubt, as we go, he will have more to say. He has more to say in chapter one, we'll continue with some of the things he says in the next episode.

But that's what he says. His two claims for why we should listen to Josh Hawley are just his personal experience. He's an everyday guy and he understands masculinity, and the Bible, again, as read by Josh Hawley.

So we're going to spend a lot of time decoding what Josh Hawley has to say about manhood. And the point, again, and I really want to re-emphasize this, is that in doing so, we're going to be decoding a lot of what the contemporary right believes and understands about manhood.

But before we go too deeply into that... I thought it was a good idea to look at who exactly this person is who claims to speak for manhood. That's a big claim... "I'm going to tell you what manhood is. I am going to tell you what are the masculine virtues America needs. I am going to tell you what the Bible says." Those are those are big, bold claims. And I think it's a good idea to look at who this person is. Josh Hawley, whose entire adult life has been spent in the pursuit of privilege and political power, that's who. A guy whose day-to-day life certainly does not give him deep insights to the plight of American men. That guy. A guy who I'm sure considers himself a person of faith, but with nothing to commend his reading of the Bible other than the fact that he can make it say what he wants it to say, and he's been quote-unquote "told" that the Deep Masculine is in there, and that's that's his lens through which he reads it. And he'll make the Bible say anything he needs it to say. We are going to come across this again and again. I have not read past like, I think it's page 13, first chapter yet. I put money on it, folks. He's going to make the Bible say whatever he needs it to say.

Why? Because for him, the stakes could not be higher. And what he thinks is what has become a core doctrine within conservative high-control Christianity in America. It is the merging of politics and religion in this movement we call Christian nationalism. This is what he says, and this is really the central claim of the book. He writes, quote, "That no menace to this nation is greater than the collapse of American manhood, the collapse of masculine strength," end quote. Everything wrong with America is about the collapse of manhood, the loss of masculine strength. And Josh Hawley is our model man who will walk us through this to recover an authentic vision of manhood.

So we now know a little bit about who Josh Hawley is and why he claims that we should give a damn what he says and why the Bible provides a solution, but a solution to what? In the next episode, we'll start looking at that. What exactly is going on with men? What is the collapse of American manhood? What is the collapse of American strength? We'll begin looking at what he thinks that is in the next episode.

As always, I want to thank you for listening. I say often and I mean it. I'm very aware that if you're spending time listening to this, it's time you could be spending doing a lot of other things, and so thank you. Thank you for supporting us in so many ways. Please reach out, danielmillerswaj@gmail.com. Would love to hear from you. New ideas, comments, what have you. Would love to know about that. I'm always looking for sort of future directions of where we're going next in this series. If you're not a subscriber, I'd invite you to consider doing that, supporting us in that way. You get access to a lot of stuff and help us keep doing what we're doing. But if that's not something you're ready to do, it's not something you're able to do, we get that, too. And listening is supporting, so thank you so much. Like us, follow us, tell others about us. Thank you. And as always, please be well until we get a chance to talk again.