It's in the Code ep 175: “You Can’t Tell A Good Story Without Bad Guys”

Dan Miller: Hello and welcome to It's in the Code. The series is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. I am your host, and pleased to be with you as always. As always, I want to thank everybody, all of you who listen and participate in what we do in so many ways. We can't do it without you. And if you listen to this series, you probably know it is driven by listeners in a way that I think other things we do are not as directly. My ideas come from you. Topics come from you. Been spending time on a couple books that have come from listeners. So please keep those ideas and thoughts coming. Can reach me at danielmillerswaj@gmail.com. Welcome your ideas, and I'm looking past Josh Hawley's book where we are currently, and had solicited ideas for this. I've got some, but I want to throw this back out there.

I want to do a series called Questions I Couldn't Ask in Church. Or you could think of it as Questions I Was Afraid to Ask in Church or Questions I Didn't Feel Like I Could Ask in Church. You get the idea. Questions I Couldn't Ask in Church. If you've got thoughts on this, specific questions or issues or topics, if you grew up in high control religion, if you're familiar with it, if maybe this is part of why you left it, email me those questions or topics. Again, I've collected some of these from folks, but I think this is where we're going next, and I want to open that up. And if you would put in the subject line of your email Questions I Couldn't Ask in Church, that'll help me to just sort of spot those. I go through the emails as fast as I can. I respond to as many as I can. I value so many things that you send, but that'll help me to sort of track those down. So again, I think that's where we're headed next. Questions I Couldn't Ask in Church have had some great insight and questions from folks. I've got some of my own that I think are worth talking about. I can promise you now the snake from Genesis is going to come back in, but I'd love to hear more. Love to have other ideas. So again, danielmillerswaj, danielmillerswaj, if I can pronounce my own name, let me know what you think. And let me know what those questions are. And I'll be prepping that series in upcoming weeks.

In the meantime, let's dive into today's episode, where, as I referenced a minute ago, we are continuing to explore Josh Hawley's book Masculine—excuse me, Manhood—about masculinity and manly virtue and so forth. We're living there because it's part of the kind of, essentially like right wing fever dreams about men and masculinity. And we're still there as a reminder. The book is divided into two parts. The first part is shorter, and it gives kind of his overview of everything. It's four chapters, and that's where we're at. We're about to finish that, and he will spend the rest of the book sort of zooming in in greater detail, what he thinks the roles of men are, what men are, what roles are called to play. And I think as we sort of come into this, gonna be the last of the episodes on chapter four, and then we'll dive into that other material. So it's again, to just kind of keep ourselves oriented of what we've seen from Hawley so far. I think one of the important things to recognize is that his book claims the place of theology. It's not marketed as a theology book. It's not marketed as a book about theology, but that's what he's really doing. He's providing what he believes—I think he really does believe it, and he desperately wants his readers to believe—but what he's giving us is a God-given understanding of and a God-given mandate for masculinity. And I've spent a good deal of time decoding and highlighting what I think are the fundamental flaws in that theological understanding, and that's not going to go away as we go along. But the other piece of this is what he's doing. He's fundamentally telling a story. He's providing us a narrative about men and about masculinity and about their proper place in society, and the calamities that befall a society in which men don't play that proper role. And I think that's important because he's telling a story, he needs a foil. A lot of stories work that way. It's not enough to sort of tell your story. Your story, you need a foil. His story isn't compelling or attractive enough that it can entice people or draw people in on its own. Gonna circle back around to this, but what he's saying is really unpopular. What he's putting forward in this book is not something that most Americans want. So it's not a good story. It's not an enticing story. So what does he do? Well, he tells us his story. He tries to sell us on his story by simultaneously telling another story, and that's the story of the enemies of masculinity and masculine virtue, and by extension, the enemies of American society itself. Because remember, he's saying American society faces all the problems it does, and it's on the verge of collapse and so forth, because men are not, you know, being properly men and exercising masculine virtue and so forth. So if you oppose his vision of masculinity, you oppose America.

Okay, so what I want to do in this episode is I want to look at sort of a couple things in this chapter related to that as we prepare to sort of dive into the rest of the book. And I want us to look about at how this narrative foil, the antagonist, who are the antagonists that he's presenting in this chapter. And I think it also gives us a view of how people like Hawley really see the world. I think that they really do see anybody who doesn't view the world this way could circle back around to a fundamental lack of empathy on their part. And I also want to look at the tone he tries to set when he presents his antagonist the way that he does, how he tries to tell this story, and in terms of, I think, what he wants us to sort of feel about the story. So let's talk about that. Who are his antagonists? Who are the villains, who are the bad guys, and I guess bad women in his story, and we've already come across some elements of them before. It's going to come up again. I've talked about before that basically, his antagonists are anyone who doesn't share his vision. There is no ambiguity, there's no complexity, there's no middle ground, there's no I agree with this person up to this point, but I don't go this far, or I share these fundamental ideas, but maybe they're more extreme than I am, or something like that. No, no, no. Anybody who doesn't agree with him is an enemy, and they are simply cast as liberals. Liberals are the enemy. Or, as we've also seen, there are a bunch of other terms that he'll use. Elitists or elites comes up, ill-defined terms like contemporary culture, or one of the favorite shibboleths on the right, cultural Marxists and so forth. But they're all the same people, and they're the same people are everybody and anybody who doesn't think what he thinks.

So here's the point of that. Here's why that matters is the first element of Hawley's narrative antagonist story strategy of his telling a story and creating an antagonist that is like his opponent is he wants to reduce the complexity of social and religious and political reality to just two actors. He wants to reduce things to two. There are people who agree with him, and there's everybody else. That's it. All of society. Everybody in society falls into one of those two camps. Now we know that social reality is a lot more complex than that. I think Hawley knows that too. He's a guy who's a senator. He's a senator, and he's one of them who actually talks about things like ACA subsidies and things like that. So he's at odds with some of the hard line people in his own party and so forth. He knows society and politics and everything else is more complicated than he lets on. But the way he tells his story, he wants to break society down into two components, and he needs that. Us and them. And that's how populism and high control Christianity do their work. In large measure, they do that work by presenting a simplified account of social reality, and this is one of the reasons those movements are so appealing. People ask all the time like, why would anybody be drawn to this? Why would anybody be drawn into high control religion? Why would somebody be drawn into the MAGA movement? Why would somebody be drawn into nationalist populism or Christian nationalism in these movements? Why? And lots of reasons. Okay, it's not one simple reason, but one reason that does appeal to many is it offers a simplified account of social reality. The complexities and contradictions of living in a society like ours, they can be really hard and they can be, frankly, frightening to navigate. So Hawley, like a lot of other people on the right, very effectively, he reduces that complexity and tells a story about just two kinds of social actors. You take, excuse me, you take all that complexity, you break it down into two camps, and that's one of the reasons that there's appeal to the kind of story that he's telling. Excuse me, my throat gets a little scratchy doing this.

So the two kinds of social actors: there are those who affirm manhood and masculinity, and therefore, by extension, those who hope for the prosperity of the US and even Western civilization itself. And then there are those people who hate men. That simple. They hate men. They hate masculinity, and by extension, they hate America. Those are the camps.

So his reduction of social reality to just two groups, it's also a story about who the real Americans are. And I talk about that all the time, that that's part of what nationalism and populism are like. Like who really are, quote unquote, the people. Who are the real Americans. For him, real Americans, Americans who actually care about America and want to see it be the best society it can be, they can only be those who accept his vision of masculinity and masculine virtue, and everybody else fundamentally is anti-American. Doesn't matter if they have US citizenship. Doesn't matter if they got a social security card or they pay taxes or whatever. Those things don't make you really American. What makes you a real American who cares about America is accepting his vision of masculinity and social virtue. So that's what's going on. That's what the story he's telling is doing.

But he tries to mask this. That's what I mean when I talk about the tone or the way that he tells his story. He doesn't want to just come out and say that. There are people who do. Hawley's not one of them. He doesn't come out and say, if you don't accept masculine virtue the way I define it, you're not really an American, or you're a terrible person, or whatever. He doesn't say that. He tries to mask that. That is the implication of what he is saying, and what he tries to do is to present his patriarchal social vision as a kinder, gentler patriarchy. And I've talked about this before, the articulation of a sort of a kinder, gentler high control Christianity, or a kinder, gentler patriarchy, or a kinder, gentler homophobia. And what I mean by that is it's one of those ways of articulating the same thing, but you're kind of sanding down the rough edges. You're making it feel more appealing. You're making it feel better. You're being nicer about it, but what you're saying is the same. And we all know what that's like when somebody says something really nasty, but they're very friendly and polite about it. That's Josh Hawley, and he does this a couple ways. One is by trying to distinguish himself from other masculinists. I don't know if masculinist is a term. I just made it up. I think I made it up. Maybe there's somebody who has that term. I don't know people who are going to sort of foreground masculinity in this way. I'm going to call them the masculinists.

And there are a lot of voices on the right in this camp. I mean, there are almost no voices on the right at present who aren't in this camp. So he tries to distinguish himself from some of them, and here's what he has to say. Okay, so first, he casts his story as an invitation, right? Not a demand, not a manifesto, an invitation. He says it is, quote, "an invitation to accept the mission of Adam, the divine calling of masculinity and masculine purpose." So it's an invitation. And then he goes on to say this—I'm quoting him here. He says, "This invitation, if we take it, leads to a kind of manhood that is not defensive or strident or anxious about itself, unlike some today, whose defensive manhood sounds shrill or shot through with fear." End quote.

There's a lot going on in that sentence. A lot. Let me read it again. Says, "This invitation, if we take it, leads to a kind of manhood that is not defensive or strident or anxious about itself. Unlike some today whose defensive manhood sounds shrill or shot through with fear." I'm gonna stick on the sentence. I wanna sort of pry apart some things here, because this tells us a lot about the story that he's telling, the way that he's telling it, and it'll bring us into this discussion of who are his enemies.

The first thing he does is he sets his patriarchy up as kinder and gentler by contrasting it with other articulations of patriarchy on the right. So he's not, he's claimed, to this point, calling for domination or the exercise of raw power. He's not couching his presentation in, say, the explicitly militaristic terms that other advocates of masculinity are fond of. He's not echoing someone like Matt Walsh, who says that if men can't bench press enough, they shouldn't be able to vote, or something like that. He says that those presentations are shrill and shot through with fear. So he has other people on the right in mind, and he's trying to distinguish himself from them. No, his presentation, it's an invitation, and he emphasizes service and selflessness and leadership.

And he's the guy who would probably respond to me—I don't think I'm ever gonna hear from Josh Hawley, but I don't know if he had an aide somewhere that said, "Hey, this guy has been like poking at your book. You should talk to him or something." I have had discussions like this with evangelicals and other high control religionists where I'm critical of patriarchy. He would say something like this. He'd be like, "Whoa, hey, hey, I never said anything about patriarchy." In fact, in his chapter, in this chapter, I think the only time the word patriarchy comes up, he puts it in scare quotes. He's distancing himself from the notion of patriarchy. He's not explicitly calling for it. He'd be like, "Nobody said anything about patriarchy." He'd be like, "I'm just talking about men being leaders and servants, talking about being selfless. I'm just talking about men being what God has said that they should be. That's all I'm doing." That's how he'd respond. And again, I'm confident of that because I've had that real discussion with people before when I critique purity culture or patriarchy or notions like male headship or whatever, and they'll be like, "Hey, hey, hey, whoa. Hold up. Hold up. You're making it sound pretty bad. That's not what I'm saying."

But here's the thing: it's still patriarchy. It still is, even after he launders his ideology through the Bible. That's what I talked about last episode. He takes his weird stuff about like King Arthur or the Romans, or all the stories about his grandpa the farmer or whatever, and kind of feeds him through scripture so he can pretend to get him from there so they have divine warrant. Even if he does that doesn't make it non-patriarchy. It's still patriarchy, which means that the content of what he's saying, it's the same as those other people on the right that he seems like he's distancing himself from. He can talk about how different his vision of manhood is. It's not different. The presentation is different, but the content is the same. It's still patriarchy with all the same implications as any other patriarchal articulation, even if Josh Hawley sets himself out as a nice guy. His image on the book jacket, it's all about being a nice, inviting guy. Stories about reading to his kids at night, they're nice. His story about losing his friend to suicide, it is hard, and it makes him a truly sympathetic character. His story is about coaching kids in rowing. These are all nice stories. Josh Hawley is a nice guy. He wants to be nice. He can be the nice patriarch, but it's still patriarchy. The content is the same.

So like his presentation, I think it does feel less shrill than some people in the MAGA sphere, sure. But his message and his social vision is essentially and fundamentally the same. And if you're not sure about that, it's like, I don't know. I don't know. Josh Hawley seems like a nice guy compared to some of these others. Just think about it this way. Okay, ask this question: Has he presented anything so far in his book that those more shrill folks would disagree with? Would any of them actually disagree with what he fundamentally has to say about masculinity and masculine virtue? They might not use the same reasoning or examples. They might not spend as much time in Genesis. They might not tie it to Adam. They might not do those things. But the kinds of conclusions he's drawing and the direction he's moving and the social vision he's putting forward is fundamentally the same. Matt Walsh, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Allie Beth Stuckey, they would all love it. They're not going to have no problem with the social vision he's putting forward. So don't tell me, Josh Hawley, that what you're doing is any different than those more shrill presentations. It's a kinder, gentler vision of patriarchy, but it's still a vision of patriarchy. He's just, it's just the same as the rest. It's just got those smoother edges. He's no different than they are in terms of what he thinks society should be like, and his understanding of men's roles within that society. He's very typical.

Okay, so that's some of it on I think the tone that he has, and this is one of the ways that he's trying to position himself, is he's different from those on the right. But I also, I want to come back to that sentence once again that he said, because I think it really is, it really is sort of interesting. Trying to find it. He goes on, and he says—this is it again. It says, "This invitation, if we take it, leads to a kind of manhood that is not defensive or strident or anxious about itself, unlike some today whose defense of manhood sounds shrill or shot through with fear."

So we've basically talked about the shrill part. He's not as shrill, but the content is the same. This is the guy, just to let you know where we're going in the book, he says that men are called, quote, "to acquire the character of a husband and father, a warrior and a builder, a priest and a king." These are the six things that he thinks men are called to be: husband, father, warrior, builder, priest, king. Again, nobody on the right is going to contest those. That's fine.

Okay, so let's think about the other elements of this. He says that his presentation isn't defensive, but all he has done in this book is defend a very traditional patriarchal vision of masculinity. It's the whole point of the book. It's been a virtual workshop in defensiveness, and that's why he needs a dangerous antagonist, a kind of narrative foe to present a threat. He has to justify that defensiveness. This book is fundamentally defensive in nature.

He says his vision of masculinity isn't anxious about itself like those others, but everything he says is wrapped up in the impossibly hyperbolic claim that American society is on the verge of collapse because—wait for it—people don't think about masculinity the right way. Like, really? It's not economics, it's not changing social dynamics. It's not bad political decisions. It's not any number of different things. Nope, it's about masculinity. That's a deep-seated sort of anxiety driving his text. His narrative only gains persuasive force to the extent that he can manufacture anxiety on the part of his readers. He has to make his readers feel anxious enough that his story makes sense to them, that it resonates with them.

When he says that his vision isn't shot through with fear like those others, all he wants to do is make his readers afraid of liberals and the social collapse that they're supposedly seeking. The book is fundamentally about anxiety and fear. It is about driving fundamental anxiety and fear. It's about driving that up. And he says his narrative is not strident. When we take a look at the way he presents his opponents, and we're getting to it, there's no better word than strident. It's a strident opposition of what everybody who doesn't agree with him.

So there's a lot of disavowal on Hawley's part. Okay, that's where we're at. So far, he's telling a story, and so far he's tried to change the tone of the story and say it's different from the way that other people talk about masculinity. It's not shrill, and I'm saying it's not as shrill. Okay, fine, I'll grant you that. But the content's the same. But he also says a bunch of stuff—it's not about fear, it's not about anxiety, it's not about defensiveness. It's about all of those things. He is disavowing all of those things to try to make his story more attractive. But my claim is that disavowal alone, it's not enough to make people buy the story that he's telling. Simply saying it's not about defensiveness or anxiety or whatever, it's not enough. He needs bad guys. He needs antagonists. He needs the liberals.

So let's just listen to how he describes his antagonist. I just pulled a few examples from just this chapter. We could go all the way through. Here's how he describes me. Also here he calls them the Epicurean left. We did the episode we talked about Epicureanism, and this weird link that he tries to make between anybody in contemporary society who doesn't agree with him and like ancient Epicurean philosophy.

So this is how he describes his antagonist. They are the Epicurean left. They are passive, and they abjure leadership. They say that leadership is the problem, society's original sin. I want you to think about that and think about if you have ever in your life either had the thought or encountered anyone, anywhere who says, you know what? The problem with society today is leadership. We just need to get rid of what. We need to have no leadership. Leaders are the problem. He doesn't mean like the claim that would say the problem is the leaders that we have, or that the people in charge of our society or the big institutions in our society are exercising bad leadership. No, his claim is that liberals think or the Epicurean left or cultural Marxists or whomever that they believe that leadership is bad. We shouldn't have leaders. Okay?

They claim that all men are tyrants. Again, I've never heard anybody say this. I also wonder, as I read this, where liberal men fit into this scheme of his. Like, I wonder where I fit. Like, if do I believe all men are tyrants? I mean, I don't, and it feels like that'd be a really weird thing for me to say as a man. I don't know. I don't even know. I don't understand where I would fit. Maybe he will reach out. Maybe we'll get to talk about it.

He says that they only seek self-promotion and self-advancement. They're fundamentally selfish. They, quote, "do not aspire to anything, but feel free to spend as much time as possible on screens or reconsidering your pronouns." Quote, it's a weird statement that the Epicurean left, they don't aspire to anything. Here's so a couple questions about this for Josh Hawley. One, they don't aspire to anything. Why are they such a threat? Why do you have to attack them at every turn if they don't aspire to anything? They're all just like sitting in their basement, I guess, smoking dope and, you know, asking people about pronouns and watching porn. And that he says that elsewhere too—they spend time on screens and watching porn. That's all they're doing. Like, why? Like, why? Why are you so adamant in opposing them? Let them go do their thing and like you're unopposed.

It's also this fixation they have on pronouns. I've talked about this before. You know, like when people on the right will say that people on the left are woke, or they're obsessed, or they make everything about race. And you're like, "Dude, you are the one who talks about race every single time." Or I did the episode on sexuality and the high control religion, and they'll talk about a sex-obsessed culture. I'm like, nobody talks or worries about sex as much as people on the right and in high control religion. Here it's the same thing with pronouns. Like, I absolutely affirm gender fluidity and gender diversity and that people should be able to use the pronouns that feel most comfortable to them, and it's a reasonable expectation the people around them, who are not just assholes, will recognize that and use the pronouns they want. But it's not hard. It's like a tick box on a form: preferred pronoun. Or you could say, you know, if you have a preferred pronoun, you can list it or something like that. Like, that's it. It's not a big deal. It's on the right that it's a big deal. It's people on the right who think that those of us on the left are like sitting around constantly fixating or ruminating about pronouns or asking people about pronouns. I'm like, "Dude, I spend almost no time talking to people about their pronouns. You're the ones who are fixated on this."

Again, part of doing this is because it shows us in the way that Hawley constructs his antagonists. It tells us how it is that he actually understands society, what it is that he thinks we are, what it is that he thinks we're about. So his opponents, they don't aspire to anything. They just want to spend time on screens or, you know, reconsidering pronouns. They are slaves to their passions and emotions. They're fundamentally irrational. They're not governed by rationality. They refuse to submit to anything. They don't recognize any kind of authority. And these are all things directly from this chapter. I've got in my notes, I've got page numbers and all of those. If you are like, "I don't know if he actually said that," he says it. I've got the page numbers. As Brad, my colleague, would say, I've got the receipts. If you want those, let me know. And we could multiply the examples, but this makes the point, just a few examples from one chapter in the book.

And here's the question I have: who, in their right mind, would embrace the kind of person that Hawley describes here? I don't know anybody. Like, if this was an actual list of what somebody is like, I don't know anybody who'd say, "Yep, that's the person I want to hang out with. That's the kind of person I want to be. That's the person I want to elect." Nobody would. No one would support that, and that's Hawley's rhetorical move. This is how he makes his own story feel like it's not just kinder and gentler and inviting, but also reasonable, because, as he presents it, we only have two choices: his way or the way that he just described, the outline the person who looks like that. And nobody wants that person. Nobody wants to be friends with that person. Nobody wants to be that person. I don't think any of us want people to look at us and say, "Yep, that's who that person is." Nobody wants to be associated with that.

So he creates this, this vision of society that you either agree with him or you're that. What makes his idea seem pretty reasonable, if you like, especially if you're somebody, you're somebody, maybe you're in one of these churches, and you don't follow politics closely, and I don't know you're like a lot of us. You live in a space where a lot of people think what you think, or you only consume social media that agrees with what you agree with, or you only watch news that does, or whatever, and you don't actually get to meet any of these so-called liberals and cultural Marxists. All you know about them is what Hawley tells you, and what he does is he feeds all your fears and dark fantasies about who those people are. And you read that he's like, "Oh, my God. God, no wonder we need a response to this." And suddenly Hawley's story feels reasonable. It feels not just inviting, not just kinder, not just gentler, not just less shrill, but it feels reasonable. He presents himself as a kind of voice of reason and carer crying out in a wilderness of liberal cultural Marxist selfishness and nihilism. And so faced with that choice, confronted with that antagonist, who wouldn't choose, who wouldn't choose him? Who would possibly choose the antagonist? And here, in that presentation of the people he opposes, in that he is as shrill as anybody else that he's critiquing.

But of course, the reason why these antagonists are so unbelievably bad is because they're utterly unbelievable. They don't exist. I don't know anybody who thinks or believes or feels the things that Hawley describes, and let me tell you, I am firmly in the camp of what he calls liberals, because I don't buy the stuff he's selling at all. I'm one of the bad guys. I don't think those things, and I don't know anybody who does. Lots of people could challenge Hawley's patriarchal vision without being unified or agreeing among themselves. Point being, society is more complex than that. Just because somebody disagrees with Hawley, we could have different, could have different reasons for doing it. Doesn't mean that everybody who disagrees with Hawley is going to agree with me. It's more complex. We are not all one. We don't all think the same things, and society is just too complex to be boiled down to those two camps. And again, I don't think there's any camp that believes the things that he says, because those who oppose Hawley, they're not just simply selfish and they're not simply nihilists. They advocate for the needs and rights of those who are marginalized or disadvantaged by the policies and social norms Hawley supports, and they often do so at great cost to themselves.

I'm recording this at a time when we are still socially dealing with the shooting that happened in Minnesota of a woman protesting ICE who ended up sacrificing her life in defense of other people. That's not selfishness. She may have an ideology that somebody like Hawley doesn't agree with. She's not selfish. It was not a selfish act. There are people that he opposes. They challenge the kind of story he tells with his nostalgia for Rome and medieval Christendom. They challenge that story. I challenge that story, not because they hate the Bible or Christianity. Some do. Some are anti-religionists, but not all of them are. Some are. Some are Christians. The reason, though, that they challenge those stories is not because they just hate Hawley or hate men or whatever, but because they value democracy and Republicanism and equality. That's the kind of society they want to live in, and they are fully aware that models like ancient Rome and medieval Christendom are fundamentally anti-democratic, anti-Republican visions of the social order, and they oppose those.

There are people like me in a broad sweep of history that would say there are reasons why human societies chose to move out of those social models. They, the people that he just labels under 111 camp of liberal, they challenge his simplistic appeals to masculine virtue as the remedy for every social evil, not because they hate men or they hate God or they're all selfish or they're all Epicureans or whatever, but because they recognize that it's not about masculine virtue, that masculine virtue isn't going to fix everything. It's about really difficult, complex questions about economics and history and social policy for which there is no simple solution. That's why these persistent problems are persistent problems. That's why they're hard to deal with. And let me tell you that tackling those things, trying to understand them, trying to address them, trying to articulate them, trying to attack them and remedy them, that is as far from nihilism and selfishness as you can get.

So Hawley creates an antagonist, a vision of his antagonists, because he needs it to make his account, his story, more appealing. The simple fact is, he's telling a story that is out of step with what most Americans want or value. You run through the things that he's advocating, polls and other data will tell us most Americans are not with him. So he tries to mask that. He tries to mask it by making his story feel warm and inviting and reasonable, and he does that by denying the emotional drivers behind it. On one hand, the lust for power, the nostalgia, the fear, the anxiety we're going to feel, those emotions just oozing out of the book as we move forward. He tries to deny those and he does it by constructing his antagonists, the bad guys, a caricature of anyone who would oppose his views that few in their right minds would support. This is a classic example of the so-called straw man argument. He creates a caricature that's easy to criticize, shows it to be ridiculous, and by that is supposed to be lending credence to his own views, instead of attacking views that actually makes sense or are complicated and so forth. We know better, Josh, we know better. We see you, and we know what you're doing, and we're not going to be fooled by it.

But that's what he's doing. That finishes up the kind of introductory section of his book. Again, the first four chapters, we're going to dive in next week. We're going to look at the specific roles that define masculinity and masculine virtue, and we're going to begin with the first, which is husband. The first role that men are called to fill is that of husband. I'm sure that that's going to be loads of fun to dive into. We've got a good idea what that's going to be, but I'll take a read again. I'm reading the book as I go to sort of keep it fresh and to not, I don't want to be interpreting what he's doing now but what he does later in the book. So I'm kind of moving through it that way. But that's where we're headed. His account of men as husbands.

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And as always, this series in particular cannot run without you. I want your insights and your feedback and your input on all topics, but series where we're going next will be Questions I Couldn't Ask in Church or Questions I Wasn't Supposed to Ask in Church. Send me an email if you've got one, and whether it's about sexuality or questions about the Bible or questions about why your church did certain things, or why you didn't like certain people, or why there were no Black people there, or whatever it might be, send those to me. danielmillerswaj, danielmillerswaj@gmail.com. If you would put in the heading Questions I Couldn't Ask in Church, that'll help me find those. But I'm putting that together and going to be getting ready to start that series after this. I think that's where we're headed next.

Thank you for listening sincerely. Thank you for your time. I'm always aware that you could be spending your time doing something else instead of listening to this means so much that you're here with me and please be well until we get a chance to talk again. Thanks everyone.