It's in the Code ep 166: “Manhood”

Dan Miller: Hello, welcome to It's in the Code, a series as part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. I am Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. Pleased to be with you as always.

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I want to dive into this today. In this episode, we are continuing our exploration of Josh Hawley's book Manhood, which looks at what he has to say about the nature of manhood and the loss of masculine virtue that he thinks lies at the heart of everything that ails contemporary America.

As I've said before, we're not looking at this because Hawley has any unique or important insights. I don't think that he really does, but we're looking at it precisely for that reason. We're looking at it because he is typical of so much on the contemporary political and religious and cultural right. We're looking at what he has to say because he is a point of distilling all of that down into a way that we can take a look at it and decode it and see what's going on there.

We've been sitting here in his first chapter for the last couple episodes. In this first chapter, he really just lays out the basis of what he sees as the crisis of masculinity confronting American men. As I say, we've already had a lot to say the last couple episodes, and I wasn't planning to stay in this chapter for another episode. I was planning to cover more ground. I was planning to move forward.

But there has been something about this chapter that has been just nagging at me all week long. It's something that I felt like I was missing. I would sort of think about it, and I'd go back and I'd reread, and just something, something sort of tugging on my brain a little bit. And then I realized what it was.

What it is is the appeal that he makes to story, or more specifically, it's the way that he links the concept of story with his particular vision of Christianity and of American culture. The way that all these things fit together into what he might call the story of America - that's what was bothering me. It was bothering me because I don't think that there's anything unique about Josh Hawley in this. But as I reflected on it more, what I think it did is help me to bring into view what exactly is nagging at me about this. It's something that I think can help us to understand broader right-wing discourse, Christian nationalism, high-control American Christianity, Christian conservatism, whatever we want to call it.

So for good, bad, or otherwise, I wanted to share those reflections in this episode. That's what we're going to take a look at.

There's not a lot about the world where I'm going to agree with Josh Hawley, but one thing that he says, a thing that he highlights that I think is real, is that human beings are storytelling creatures. Some scholars and people really even go so far as to describe human beings as Homo Narans - that is, storytelling humans. In other words, the idea of telling stories is so central for us, it's like a defining feature. It's what makes us us.

If you think about it, that makes a lot of sense as a description. Storytelling can play a lot of different roles in our lives and experiences. It's a way of ordering our experience and giving meaning to it, of imposing meaning where there might not be any. It's a way of explaining where we come from and where we're going. It's the basis for explaining why things are as they are.

We often think about this dimension of storytelling as a domain of myth making, including religious myth. I think for a lot of us, myth means falsehood. But I think it also explains even the most ardently secular or atheistic or humanistic explanations. Because no matter how we're offering that explanation, no matter how we're explaining who we are, what our place is in the world and so forth, we're telling a story about what is, why it is, what our place is in it and so forth.

Fundamentally, telling stories is just something that we do.

When Hawley suggests that one of the dilemmas faced by men - and I don't think this is unique to men, okay, we'll get into this for the rest of the book, I don't think it's unique to men - but he suggests that the dilemma faced by men is that they have lost their story. This notion of story and finding a story, I think he is touching on something real and significant.

But here's where my very limited agreement with Josh Hawley ends, and this is where we get into the need to decode his appeals to story and what he means by story and the story that he's going to be telling us for the rest of this book.

Here are my points of disagreement. This is where I think he's wrong:

First: I disagree with his analysis of the problem as the absence of story. He says that in America we lack a story, and I think what we're actually dealing with is a competition of competing stories, not the absence of story, but competing stories.

Second: I disagree with what he has to say about the history of the modern West and the Christian story.

Third: Related to that, flowing out of that, I disagree with a particular Christian story that Hawley tells.

That's a lot. That's obviously way more than we can hit in one episode. So I'm going to try to just give some broad brush strokes and invite you as always - please reach out, let me know what you think about this. Let me know if we should talk more about it. Let me know if we spent too much time talking about it.

To start it out, like everybody on the contemporary right, Hawley blames everything he thinks is wrong with America on liberals and the left. He never defines exactly what those are. These terms, I feel like, are always negatively defined. For those on the right, it's just anybody who disagrees with them. You find a term that is basically the equivalent of a nasty name. You call them that, and then you don't have to address anything that they say. You don't have to say who they are. You don't have to do any of that.

For him, liberalism has become a problem because it is, as he says on page 10 in his book, it is "anti-story." And what does he mean by that? This is what he says:

"It teaches that life is meaningless, that there is no God, no heaven or hell or eternity, that we must each do our best to make our lives bearable in this passing moment, in this cold and pointless universe, knowing full well it will amount to nothing in the end."

That's what he says. He says there is no story. I want you to note the specific story he's telling. His story - there has to be a God, there has to be a heaven or hell, an eternity. There has to be a given meaning and so forth.

He argues that liberalism has eradicated story, undermining our nature as storytelling creatures. That's fundamentally what's wrong. So he argues that it's only by returning to the story, the true story, the Christian story - those are all parts of the story that he says has been taken away. It's only by returning to those that we can recover our authentic American vision, and that's going to be the purpose of the entire book, helping us to do that. Masculinity is tied into that, the whole deal.

But here's the point: there's a sleight of hand here. This is a bait and switch, or it's a shell game, or whatever other metaphor you want for that. It's crucial that we don't miss it.

Hawley isn't actually affirming story over the absence of story. This isn't about some people who have a story and some people who don't. He's elevating one particular story above all other stories. There are multiple stories about all the things he's talking about, and he's taking one particular story and lifting it up as if it were the only story there.

What he's trying to do is actively mask the fact that we're involved in a contest of stories. By doing that, he can claim the status of truth for his. In other words, if he can make us buy into the fact that there's only one story, one way of giving meaning to reality and existence and society and all that stuff - if there's only one way of doing that, then that has to be the true way. So he brings truth into it by masking these other stories.

His favorite story is that of Christian supremacy and its logical outflow, Christian nationalism. That's his story.

I don't think that those of us who challenge his story - whatever we want to call ourselves, you want to call yourself a liberal or a progressive, or I don't know, a socialist or a social democrat, or whatever, you just want to call yourself like, I don't know, not a Christian nationalist, whatever you want to label yourself - I absolutely refuse to acknowledge that the difference between us and him is that we don't have a story and he does. I think we have a story.

In this first chapter, Hawley lays out his thumbnail sketch of his story. I read that a couple episodes ago. I'm going to come back to it again in a few minutes. He lays out his thumbnail sketch of that story. So as I was thinking about this this week, I was like, here's mine. Here's my thumbnail sketch. And I don't think it's just mine, but there are other stories. I'm not trying to put this forward as like if I put what I really believe and hold dear and the reason why I oppose Christian nationalism and people like Josh Hawley and the ideologies they put forward, here it is in kind of story form.

It's a story that I outline in terms of queer democracy. If you really want to deep dive in that, you can go read my book Queer Democracy.

What is it? It's a story in which we come to understand the idea of the people, the demos - we talk about democracy, the democratic people - as truly free and equal. That's the story we're telling of true freedom and equality for all people.

It's a story in which the values of freedom and equality are extended to broader and broader segments of society. It's a story in which we increasingly come to recognize the value of all people in all their diversity, and we recognize their rights and their fundamental equality. That's the story I'm telling. That's what I define as queer democracy.

If we wanted to - you don't have to, okay - but if you wanted to, you could describe it as a redemption story. It's a story in which we redeem our society over time by bringing it into alignment with our most fundamental stated values and principles, the values that we have never fully lived up to. This is that line - I'm not unique in this - of saying the American project is built on this series of promises and conceptions and ideas. We've never fully lived up to them, but we could. That becomes the vision that drives us. That's the story I would tell.

Here's the issue: Christian nationalists are far better at telling a story than most of us who oppose them. It's a broader issue. It's maybe an issue to explore further, but that's what I think. This is one of the reasons they're able to so effectively present the same vision as Hawley - that same vision that they have a story and the rest of us don't.

Our story, the story that I'm telling, it's often implicit and it's often poorly formed. But I still think it's a powerful and compelling story, and we need to get better at telling those counter-stories. I think that's a whole other issue in all of this, and confronting these things is that we're just not good storytellers, and Hawley and the people on the right are.

But there's more than one story.

Here's the issue: for someone like Hawley, a story like mine, other stories that people would tell, they are threats to his story. Because the story that Hawley and Christian nationalists tell is a story based on inequality and domination and submission.

It's a story in which there are clear winners and there are clear losers, and the winners need losers. It can't be an "everyone wins" sort of situation. It has to be something where there are people on top because there are people below them. That's the story he's telling.

A rival story like the one I'm telling - it's a threat to the privilege of those who win in the other story only at the expense of those who lose. It threatens their power, their authority, their social status. This book is going to drip page by page by page with the sense of threat and anxiety that comes there.

Those who win in the other story do everything they can to deny the legitimacy of counter-narratives to their own. They try to gaslight us into thinking that we are the nihilists, that we have no different story to tell and no different vision of society to enact. That's what's going on in this text.

That's the first piece - I reject his notion that this is about story versus non-story. It's a competition of stories.

The second issue is the story he tells about the West. We could go into whole episodes about problems with the concept of the West and whatever. I'm not going to do that here. Just know that we could.

Hawley appeals to Christianity, which he just simply calls "the Bible," as the source of his story. For him, the Bible and Christianity are the same thing. He doesn't tell us anything about how you read the Bible, or what he understands it to be, or anything like that. He's not going to do that kind of thing. He simply tells us the source of his story. To hear him tell it, it's momentous. It's an important story.

This is what he says. He says:

"The Bible is" - note the use of that particular article - "the source."

There are no other sources. It's the only source, he says.

"It is the moral source of the Western tradition. It is the fount of our most cherished moral ideas, from equality to freedom."

He repeats a trope here that is absolutely rampant among Christian nationalists and other American Christian conservatives. It's the story that says that America and the West are properly Christian because Christianity is their source. Christianity is what birthed the West and America. They're Christian. That's the story he's going to tell.

For the right and for people like Hawley, when you hear them talk about the West or Western civilization, or Western culture, or America, or American culture, or American civilization, or what have you, these are all just code words for Christian. They're just coded terms for Christian. And not just Christian, but for their vision of Christianity, for Christian supremacy and Christian nationalism.

But the real story is way more complicated than this. And folks, again, we're going to have to get a thumbnail sketch. There are - I don't know how many millions of pages have been written about this.

The history of Christianity is absolutely wrapped up with the history of the West. You can't tell the story of the West without the story of Christianity, or Western Christianity certainly. But many of what had become defining features of so-called Western culture - concepts like freedom and equality and human rights and democracy and things like that - they have developed in opposition to those of earlier Christian society.

We can look back to an earlier time and see something that could properly be described as a "Christian society." We called it Christendom. And those concepts and doctrines were not widely operative there.

Even in cases where they arguably have deep roots within the Christian tradition - and there are lots of histories of ideas and concepts and political thought and what have you that will identify the Christian roots and the Christian origins of a lot of these ideas as they develop in the West, or at least the partial Christian origins - but even where they have those roots, they've also taken shape in opposition to earlier expressions of Christian society.

The way you could say this is that oftentimes the history of the so-called West, a lot of these key concepts, is this really fascinating story of a certain kind of Christianity undermining itself with its own ideas and values and concepts

We could look at this in lots of places if you wanted to study Western history. For example, the same Reformation impulse that challenged the authority of the Catholic Church - something that Protestants like to champion - it developed in radical directions that challenged all accepted authority, including the authority of Christianity itself.

The idea that all people were equal because they're all created in the image of God, for example, to use another example, took root in a way that challenged the strictures of the very same tradition it came from.

So Christianity did play a role in the development of these really foundational concepts and ideals, but so did lots of other stories. So did the Renaissance and humanism and the European Enlightenment and the non-European world and the scientific revolution. We could talk about all of these other movements. All of those, even at the same time as they had complex relationships with Christianity, they also fundamentally challenged it.

In this way, the story I would tell: the West, in many ways, is a story in which, yes, Christianity gave birth to some of these concepts and ideas, or contributed to them significantly. "Giving birth," I think, is probably too strong a term, but it did so in a way that Christianity birthed the very secularity that continues to displace it in the West now.

What people like Hawley see as the overcoming of Christianity and its rejection are, in my view, an outflow of it. Again, that's a longer story. That's a bigger story than we have time for in an episode. But that's a key.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche summed this up really well when he said - I'm paraphrasing here - but he said that Jesus's command to seek the truth - Jesus said, "If you seek the truth, and the truth will set you free," and so forth - he said Jesus, when he told Christians to go find the truth, he sowed the seeds for the destruction of Christianity. And I think he's not wrong. I think he's not wrong.

What's the point here? The point is that the claim on the right, the claim by people like Hawley, that the story of the West or America is just a Christian story - it's flawed. It is, once again, an effort to mask all the other stories that have shaped Western culture and American history.

The idea that Hawley's Christianity - we zoom in even further - that Hawley's Christianity, which is a very particular version of an already very particular story, that his Christianity is the story of the West or the story of America - it is beyond simplistic, and that's the point.

Hawley and those like him need us to believe something simplistic. They need to reduce complexity to something that is implausibly simple. They need us to believe that our social reality is as simple as the story they tell us.

That brings us back to this: what is Hawley's story? In this first chapter, he gives us what he calls kind of a thumbnail sketch of the story he's going to be telling for the rest of the book. So I'm going to read it. I'm going to read from Josh Hawley.

On page 11 of his book, this is what he says:

"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 to be a place filled with his presence, and man was to have a role in 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 and 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 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 man's first mission, according to the Bible, and now the mission of all men."

That's his story. That's the story the rest of this book is going to focus on.

Here's the trick: the Christian story, quote unquote, has never been one thing. From its origins, Christianity has always been a contest of stories. You can read the New Testament, and you can see that the earliest Christian sacred writings, the writings that have been canonized, don't present a single Christian story.

So what Hawley presents as "the Christian story" - it's no such thing. It is one Christian story among many, many, many others, an almost infinite variety that could be told.

That's why Hawley gives us no reason to accept his or any version of the Christian story as the truth of the West or America or masculinity or anything else. He just asserts it, folks. He doesn't ever give us a reason to think it. He doesn't defend the claim that there's no other story. He just says there's no other story. He doesn't defend the claim that those on the left don't have a story. He just says there's no other story.

Why? Because you can't defend it. It's an indefensible claim to say that this is the story of Christianity. So what you try to do is not even address the other stories, not engage at that level. You just declare by fiat that there is no other story, and that's all he does.

It's that simple assertion, it's that sleight of hand, that move to just declare this to be the story. That's where we have to be attentive. That's where we have to decode everything that Hawley is doing.

By only referencing a single story, Hawley and everybody like him - again, it's not just Hawley, it's everybody that he represents - he wants to gaslight us into thinking that we are crazy or nihilistic if we don't accept his story. We're going to run into this over and over and over. He is going to present everybody who doesn't agree with him as being irrational or nihilistic or not believing in meaning, or being crazy or whatever.

That sleight of hand, that move - that's a central foundation on which everything in this book rests, and we have to understand that.

Here's what Hawley and those like him want to do: they want to force us into a false dilemma. We either accept his story, or we're nihilists. We either accept a Christian nationalist vision of America, or we have no story. We hate America. We hate Western culture, what have you. It's a false dilemma. It's a false choice that he's forcing us into.

Without that false alternative, everything he has to say falls apart because it can't stand up to any level of scrutiny. That's why the people who tell these stories don't engage other stories. It's why they don't engage with facts. It's why they don't do the work to show you where they're getting the ideas or where they're getting them from, because they just can't stand up to any scrutiny.

He simply asserts it without any explanation or defense, because that's the only way the story can make any sense.

As we go through the rest of this - and we're going to start the next chapter in the next episode - as we go through the rest of what he says to us, we have to bear in mind that there are different stories to tell than the one he's telling. He and the right are counting on people not seeing that, so that we will be swept up in his story. And for millions of Americans, it has worked.

Again, we've got to get better at telling counter-stories. That's a whole other issue. Maybe that's something to spend some episodes on. I don't know, you tell me.

But as we move through this book, as we look at what he says about manhood and masculine virtue and all of these kinds of things, I'm going to be reading this and doing my best to bring out, at least from time to time, the stories he's not telling and the things that he's not telling us that he's trying actively to hide from us, to make us believe what it is that he's trying to say to us. That's where we're headed.

I don't know if any of that made sense. Let me know. Daniel Miller SWAJ - daniel.miller.swaj@gmail.com - I would love to hear your feedback. I would love to hear your thoughts. I would love to know if this is something we need to spend more time on. Maybe after Hawley we spend some time on like, what are our counter-stories? If we are about decoding the stories of the right, what do we need to encode? What social codes do we need to be putting out there? Maybe that's something to explore. I don't know.

Right now, I know we need to wind this down. So I want to thank you again for listening. Thank you again for supporting us. In particular, if you're a subscriber, we cannot do what we do without you. So thank you so much.

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