It's in the Code ep 178: “There’s No Such Thing”

Dan Miller: Hello and welcome to It's in the Code. This 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, as I say all the time. This is a series that only works because of you. This is a series that only works when you let me know what you think, when you let me know about new ideas, when you give me feedback about episodes, when you let me know what you want to hear about.

And we have been for a while, and still going to be for a while, working through Josh Hawley's book on manhood. So Senator Josh Hawley, one of the contemporary right-wing figures in our US Congressional group, is going to teach us about what it is to be a man and what manhood is and the masculine virtues that will save America and so forth. We're continuing to work through that, but I'm looking ahead, and I've gotten several emails from folks asking for more on a series on questions I couldn't ask in church, or questions I was afraid to ask in church, or questions I wasn't supposed to ask in church. If you've got thoughts about that, email me: DanielMillerSWAJ, DanielMillerSWAJ@gmail.com. Put in the header "questions I couldn't ask in church" or "wasn't supposed to ask in church," something like that. That'll alert me that it's there. Putting that together and getting some great examples from listeners. And so thank you to all of you for doing that, and please keep those coming.

I want to dive in here. Just as a reminder, as I said, we're looking through Hawley's book. We are currently in chapter five, where he discusses the first of the roles that he thinks men are called to play. Again, the first part of the book is a few chapters where he sort of lays out, I guess, his theology—we would maybe call it a philosophical or theological anthropology—his account of what men are, what they're called to be, their God-given purpose and so forth. Talked all this stuff about Adam and the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve and the temptation and the serpent and all that sort of stuff. And then he goes into the roles that men are supposed to play. And we are in chapter five. The first of those roles is husband.

And I was reading this—this will be the last episode in this chapter. There's more that we could say. It's true of all his chapters all the time. They're so bad, they're so bad. I read this. You don't have to read it. It's so bad, it's so dumb, and yet it is so common. The stuff he is saying is so much a part of contemporary right-wing discourse. But I was reading this chapter, and there was something interesting, because there are some points at which it sort of unravels on him a little bit. Now I don't know that Josh recognizes that he doesn't follow through where it might go, but I wanted to highlight these points. I'm hoping this sort of comes together here.

One of the—I don't know if it's either a strength or weakness of this series—is that you get me kind of, you know, as I'm working through things, as I'm processing them, and so you sort of get a little bit of a stream of consciousness here. So I hope this comes together here, but I want to return to a theme that I've brought up in the past. If you're a long time listener, you'll remember me talking about this, you know, episodes and episodes and episodes and episodes ago. But I've also brought this up in the context of Hawley, and it's the idea that he is presenting a sort of kinder, gentler articulation of patriarchy.

What he's doing is he's advancing a model of patriarchy and patriarchal authority, but he's trying to do it in a way where he doesn't just appeal to masculine authority, sort of as such. He doesn't only insist on it by saying, "This is what God wants, and this is the way it is, period"—kind of thing. That's all there, but the presentation is softer. It's kinder, it's gentler. He couches his patriarchy in terms of service and sacrifice and the benefits that come to all the non-patriarchs in the world and so forth. And that's the standard way of this. This model of a kind of benevolent patriarchy that, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, technically it's patriarchy, but it's good for everybody. These are patriarchs who protect, patriarchs who serve, patriarchs who sacrifice and so forth.

So he advocates a patriarchy and even a medieval vision of society. He keeps talking about lords and vassals, and has this notion of an ordered society on the model of European Christendom, this model of society that is completely at odds with and incompatible with a modern, pluralistic democratic republic. But he won't just come out and say that either, right? And there are Christian nationalists at present—we talk about this all the time in our weekly roundup. My partner and co-host Brad Onishi is phenomenal on developing this and tracking those down. The new monarchists, the people who will just come out and say, "Well, you know, maybe it's time to suspend the Constitution. Maybe it's time to have an authoritarian dictator" and so forth. That's not Josh Hawley. He's not just going to say that, but he's advancing a social model that doesn't fit with democracy.

So what he'll do is he'll downplay that, and he'll mask it all under the language of service and sacrifice, and what a big help these self-sacrificing men will be for society. That is what will save society. But here's the key, and I've talked about this—I think it's important. It's important to see this. The overall vision is the same. The kinder, gentler presentation is just an illusion. The end result is no different from what the Christian monarchists would advance.

And this isn't unique to Hawley. Again, we're talking about Hawley because he doesn't say anything special or unique. It is not limited to discussions of patriarchy and sexuality. This is a feature of a lot of high-control religion in America. It's a common way of making ideas that would repel most Americans feel much more palatable, feel inviting—the kinder, gentler presentation.

And this is the aspect of this that I presented on a long time ago. And you should know, if you don't—I know a lot of you listening have familiarity with being within these high-control religious contexts. I know many of you, like me, used to be clergy members within these contexts. But if you don't know, you should that learning how to communicate high-control religion in those inviting terms, that's an explicit strategy. It's a skill that people work to develop. There are skills that are taught in order to win other people over to that religious worldview and their institutions.

It was a part of my experience as part of high-control evangelical Christianity. It was a topic of discussion, and frankly, a topic of practice in seminary courses. You take seminary courses on evangelism, on how to share your faith, and on church growth and so forth. And these things were baked in. We would talk about it with other church staff. I would talk about it with ministerial colleagues and so forth. These are explicit things that people would talk about—how to make it more inviting. Now we might say how to brand it. The issue of branding. How do we take this message that can sound shrill and awful and anti-democratic? How do we brand it to show that it's not?

But here's the trick. Okay, as central as that is, as common as that is, as successful as many people are in putting forward that vision, it's not easy to maintain the kinder, gentler vibe within high-control religion. For one thing, there are people like me now, and like a lot of you listening, who just see through that shit and call it out. Like it's that simple. You're just like, "Nope, I call bullshit." And I think the opposition, the active opposition to American high-control religion, has increased. And so those voices of critique, I think, are more prominent than they were a few decades back. And so that's one reason why it's not easy to maintain.

Okay, but let's just set that aside. Let's set aside that there are cultural commentators and ex-evangelicals and faith deconstructionists and so forth, who can see right through it. Let's just set all of them aside. Here's what I think is the difficulty for high-control religion when they try to maintain the kinder, gentler religious articulation: there is no such thing as a kinder, gentler high-control religion. There's just no such thing. It doesn't exist.

So you can maintain that persona and that vibe for a while, but it's hard to maintain because it's something that's not real. It is intended to draw people in, to invite them to be part of the group, and a way to do that is to soften and blur the distinctions between insiders and outsiders. But it's hard to maintain, and there's a risk in this for people within high-control religion who talk in this way, because when you try to take a religious tradition like this, and you're trying to make it so that it's different, but not too different. You're trying to claim to be countercultural, but not so countercultural that people can't still go to work or hang out with their friends or be cool to other people or whatever. And it's the message—the high-control religion is—again, they often try to project we're different, but we're not that different. I'll tell you that they're distinct from the secular world, but you can still go do the things that you like and so forth. And so you get this tension that develops.

And so there's a tension, number one, because there is no such thing as a kinder, gentler high-control religion. And number two, because projecting that kinder, gentler persona, it requires breaking down or softening or blurring the distinction between your high-control religion and the world in a way that threatens the very identity of the group. Okay? And this is a tension that has defined high-control American Christianity, specifically American evangelicalism, since it emerged.

So what we now call evangelicalism in its current form kind of emerges after the Second World War, when you get this younger generation of what had been called fundamentalists who want to kind of re-engage culture and so forth. It's in that context that tension has always been there. Evangelicalism always hitched its wagon to engaging with secular culture, and that meant that it always had to find ways to create common ground with people who were not evangelicals. It means that there's always been a tension at some points extreme between the claims of popular high-control religion to be countercultural, and its dependence on culture.

You want one example of this? Just think about the fact that most evangelicals are absolutely committed to the idea that free market capitalism is the divinely sanctioned economic model, even though it's an impossible—I think it's an argument you just simply can't make from the Bible. But it's also not the model, the kind of capitalism that they're talking about now was not the model in the US, certainly in the 20th century, until you get up into the Reagan period. They're tied to culture, and that stands in contrast, if you want to contrast, to sort of extreme fundamentalist groups, which are defined by their withdrawal from culture. They don't tend to engage culture. They withdraw from it. They put up their walls. They maintain a different kind of distinction.

So that's another reason why it's hard to consistently maintain this discourse, to hold up the facade of the kinder, gentler high-control religion, is that, number one, it's not a real thing. But number two, you're blurring the distinction that you have to have to maintain your religious identity. And so that becomes especially prominent when people do see through it and call it out. So it breaks down, that high—excuse me, the kinder gentler persona. It breaks down. And I think it goes in one of two directions.

The first is to retrench, to drop the kinder, gentler pretense when it encounters that pressure, or somebody comes along and calls them out or whatever, and what happens is it just kind of unmasks it, and they fall back to a position of asserting their authority as spokespersons for God or whatever.

This was the experience in the church where I worked. And so for those of you who are unfamiliar, maybe you're new to listening, I was the junior of two pastors in a small church—church about 100 people, 100, 120—and my pastor and my boss. So the head pastor, as he was called, was also my boss. He was a master of articulating and really believing the kinder, gentler high-control religion discourse. He was a master at the kinder, gentler presentation. I think he really believed it most of the time. He really thought that that's the faith that he had, and that that's what he was offering people.

But as I became more and more disillusioned with my religious context, again, sort of experiencing what we now call faith deconstruction in a time when those weren't the words that we had, we would butt heads over various issues—me and the pastor. And I was essentially pushing back on the kinder, gentler ideology, which is a fundamental feature of our expression of high-control Christianity. I was beginning to question that.

And for me, that led to theological questions, questioning the theology behind it. And invariably, what would happen when we would have these discussions is his kinder, gentler pretense, it would crumble. He would fall back to a much more authoritarian position. He would go from the, you know, "we're doing this because God loves you and has a plan for your life," to "the Bible says this, and we obey the Bible. God says this. God is the supreme authority. We do what God says. We have been appointed to be spokespeople for God. That is our role in the world." And on a more mundane level, he would just threaten to fire me.

Okay? If you're listening to this and you're familiar with that kind of high-control Christian context, you've probably had similar experiences. Okay, you encounter someone, maybe someone who sounds a lot like Hawley, who expresses their high-control religion in inviting, kind, gentle terms. You might even take that at face value and think that they're really, actually inviting dialogue and discussion. That was my mistake more than once. So "Hey, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Love to talk more about that." And I, naive young person that I was, believed them and thought that they wanted to hear my thoughts and talk about it, and then we find out that they didn't.

So you ask your questions, or you highlight your concerns, or you share your critique, and all the pretensions fall away and in their place, all the dimensions that make high-control religion what it is—that make it high control—they all come into full view. It shows itself for what it is.

Okay, so you can have the kinder, gentler presentation that tries to mask the high-control nature of high-control religion. And one way that that can unravel is that that pretense just falls away and it really comes out as what it is. But there's another way that the kinder, gentler articulation can unravel, and that's what's finally bringing me to Hawley here. All that's kind of preamble for what I want to talk about in Josh Hawley today. And I want to decode this book and what I'm seeing in it.

That brings us to Hawley's chapter, because Hawley is presenting this kinder, gentler vision, but he gives us a glimpse of the other direction in which that kinder, gentler articulation can unravel. So here's what he's argued. He has insisted that men, as men, have a special, unique role to play in society. And it's sort of built into that, obviously, is the notion that there are two genders. They are divinely sanctioned. There are only two genders, there are men, there are women, and men have this unique, special role to play. It is not a role they create or take upon themselves. It is given by God. It is a God-given calling. And within that framework, he's arguing that there are distinctly masculine virtues that men, as men, are called to cultivate and to exercise, that this is part of what it is to be a man, and those virtues of properly masculine character are expressed in the different roles that men, and only men, are called to play, the first of which is husband. We're going to move into the second of these next week.

Now, there are a lot of things wrong with that model, and I've had a lot to say about them here and in other contexts. But here's an obvious one. Okay, here's the obvious one that comes up. What about men who don't play those social roles? And he talks about men who are coaches and leaders and husbands, and you're like, "Okay, but like, what about men who don't play those roles? Is it really the case that all men are called to be husbands?"

Josh, imagine the conversation like, "Okay, like, that's interesting, in a sense, there. But like, should there be some guys who don't get married?" Like, what does that mean? Are you actually saying that this social role is the only way to develop and express these virtues and so on?

You can hear those questions coming, and questions like these are where we start to push back on Hawley's kinder, gentler articulation. Now this is what's different about Hawley. He doesn't respond most of the time. He doesn't respond the way the pastor of my church did. He doesn't respond the way the more hard-edged right-wing masculinists do. There are plenty of people on the right who are advocating what I'm calling the same vision of masculinity, who will just lean on masculine authority and obeying man. And they would say, "Yeah, yeah. If you don't, you're not a husband, you're not doing that, you're not taking on these virtues. You're just not, you're not an alpha. You're just not an alpha. I'm sorry, yeah, you're a beta male. You're a lesser man." They would just say it. But that's not what Hawley says, because we've seen that Hawley has said earlier in the book that he finds those kinds of responses to be shrill and defensive. He views what he's doing as something different. That's what I've said brings him to his kinder, gentler articulation, so he goes in a different direction.

And here's how it unravels for him. He leans into the kinder, gentler articulation, and it actually calls his entire project into question, because the logic of kinder and gentler, the logic of inclusion, the logic of acceptance, the logic of divine love, the logic of grace, it is the opposite of high-control religion. But that's what Hawley does. He tries to maintain the kinder, gentler line, and it undermines his whole model of masculinity.

So here's what he says. His whole line in this chapter, specifically in this chapter on husbands, is that men must—quote—"give themselves away." They must vow, they must commit themselves to another and so on. And of course, marriage becomes the context in which they do this. And for him, of course, marriage is cis, hetero, monogamous, lifelong marriage. So that is the context in which men give themselves away and vow and commit and so forth. And these are among what he calls "the husband's virtues." These are all his words from this chapter. So husbandhood, if we could call it that, is the renewal—he says this explicitly—is the renewal of everything Adam destroyed in his disobedience. It's God's kind of way of starting over, so that every man is called in a marriage relationship to essentially hit the reset on God's ideal in Adam. That's how significant marriage is.

That's his line, and that's a line that, again, fits right into any number of expressions of the kind of right-wing discourse about masculinity. But then Josh Hawley the nice guy, Josh Hawley the kinder, gentler patriarch, he kind of blocks Josh Hawley the right-wing ideologue. Because you can imagine the conversation. Imagine, "Okay, but like, what about the dudes who don't get married?"

And Josh Hawley—maybe he is, maybe Josh Hawley is a nice guy. I don't know, but he says something like this. He says, "Not all men become husbands, in fact, but all men can have a husband's virtues." It's on page 63. A few pages later, he says this, "Even if you are not married, the same pattern holds." And he's talking about that pattern of masculine virtues and so forth.

Huh? Let's think about this again. Here's what he says: "Not all men become husbands, in fact, but all men can have a husband's virtue." Okay? And "even if you're not married, the same pattern holds." Huh? He says on one hand that it is only as husbands that men cultivate the virtues of masculinity, the virtues that restore the divine promise given to Adam, that they give themselves to others and so forth. But then he doesn't want to be an asshole, I guess. And he said, "Well, but you know, I recognize not all men will get married." It's like he doesn't really want to say that they're not really men, so he says that they can still cultivate the husband's virtues.

But here's the problem. Okay, it's a pretty obvious one. It's easy to read past him in this chapter. It's easy to get washed over by all the stuff that he says. But if you read for these points, you'll see this. Here's the point: How are they the husband's virtues if you don't have to be a husband to exercise them? He's saying, on one hand, "It is only as husbands that men cultivate these virtues." But then he's saying, "Even if you're not married, you got to cultivate these virtues."

What that means, folks, is that those virtues aren't actually tied to this masculine role. The kinder, gentler Josh Hawley wants to recognize—and listen, I think, and I think, frankly, be compassionate to those who say, "Are you sure you really want to marginalize all men who aren't married?" It's like, "No, no, no, no. They can cultivate the virtues too." But if they can cultivate the virtues too, they're not the husband's virtues. They're not tied to marriage anymore. He just undercut a leg of his own argument.

But maybe we could say this: Okay, okay, okay, maybe, like, "I hear you, Dan. Maybe Josh should be like, 'All right, okay, I shouldn't have said that. But, I mean, there's still masculine virtues. I'm just saying that to be a man, to exercise masculine virtues, you don't need to be married to do that.'" Even not tied to marriage. Cool.

But he's not done undermining his own argument, because he goes on to say this. He says this—and he's summarizing after he's been talking about these virtues and so forth. He says, "He, like all men, like all people, requires another person to activate his potential." This is that notion of giving yourself to another. He's basically saying we can't fully be ourselves without others. It's an idea that I don't mind. I don't mind that idea stated that way. Again, he says, "He like all men, like all people..."

Hold up right here. He is kinder, gentler. Josh comes forward. He wants to make his model sound more appealing, and to do that, he says it's not really about masculinity at all. Now he's telling us that these are virtues that all people can develop. I thought this was a book about masculine virtue, Josh. I thought this was a book about the unique role that only men could play. I thought this was a book about how men have to develop these unique virtues and play these unique roles to save America. And now you're saying this is a role all people are called to play.

So now he's telling us that advancing these virtues, it's not only not limited to men as husbands, but these are virtues that aren't limited to men at all. They're virtues for all people. Do you see what's happening here? He has gone from advocating a narrow set of specifically masculine male virtues to advocating virtues that he says are for everyone. His whole point has been that men are unique, that they have a unique calling. America can only be redeemed by men who exercise this, all of that sort of stuff. But it turns out that now he's saying, in this moment, that these are virtues for everyone. Well, what does that mean? This undermines everything. That means that gender doesn't matter the way that he thinks it does.

Oh, sorry, Josh, you're now saying kind of the same thing everybody says. They say, "You know what? Maybe our role in society and our value in society doesn't depend on our damn gender. So it doesn't matter if we're male or female or somewhere else on a spectrum. It just doesn't define our social value."

Sexuality doesn't matter. He said it's got to be the heterosexual, cisgender, monogamous marriage. But hey, you know what? These are virtues everybody's called to do, and not everybody's going to be married. You've now marginalized marriage, Josh, the institution you're out to defend.

Relational status doesn't matter. You got all the stuff about like, regulating sexuality and so forth. But now, if gender and marriage don't matter, then why does that kind of sexual regulation matter?

Now I don't know that Hawley actually thinks any of that. My guess is he has no awareness with these few kind of throwaway statements, what the implications of that are. I think they're far too subtle for him to catch, and they're not what he wants to say. He doesn't spend most of his time saying that he pulls back from it. What I'm trying to highlight is that's the other way that the kinder, gentler model unravels, because if you actually follow it through, if you actually want to be kinder and gentler and more inviting and more inclusive, it undermines your high-control religion. It undermines his coldly patriarchal view of society. It undermines the gender normativity he presupposes. It undermines his homophobia and his transphobia. It undermines all of those things. That's the logic that's there, which is why he's got to pull back, and he's going to start leaning on the Bible, and he's going to tell all his Bible stories, and he's going to demonize his opponents. He's going to do all of those things. He ultimately pulls back from that—not in the full authoritarian manner, but in that way. Because he treads right up to the edge, and he shows us. He shows us the cracks in the foundation of what he's building and what he's arguing. He lifts the veil, and he shows us that the alternative to his authoritarian, high-control vision of society, it's the abandonment of high-control religion. It undermines the core components of that religious articulation.

What he shows us is, again, there is no such thing as a kinder, gentler high-control religion. There's not. That's what he shows us.

So what's the point of all this? I realize it feels like I spent a long, long time sort of circling around and talking about Hawley. Let's tie this together here: the most effective articulations of high-control religion, they're effective by pretending not to be articulations of high-control religion. That's how radicalization works. People get radicalized because they don't know that they're getting radicalized. I don't think anybody probably wakes up in the morning and says, "You know what? I want to become radicalized today." They're drawn into ideas or beliefs or ideologies or practices or institutions that feel normal and inviting and so forth, and they slowly slide over that. That's how high-control religion works as well.

And their proponents, the high-control religionists, they present all of their norms and their values and their judgments as expressions of care or sacrifice or God's will. The folks who see through it, and in this chapter, those little cracks in Hawley's position where he says, "Well, you just, yeah, yeah, yeah, marriage, but you don't actually have to be married. Don't actually have to be a husband to exercise these virtues. Hey, turns out you don't actually even have to be a guy. These are virtues for everyone." We get those cracks, and if you look through them, you see the light shining through those cracks. He shows us that we're right, that we do see through it. He shows us that all the distinctions and the values and norms that he insists are natural and expression of God's will, but they're nothing of the kind. They are just one more ideology. And for a few brief moments in this chapter, a glossy, kinder, gentler, shiny advocate of high-control religion, he lets his guard down, and we see that there is nothing positive or affirmative there.

I was a Josh Hawley. I was one of those people that put forward the inviting, you know, affirming, kinder, gentler vision of high-control religion. And I believed it. I believed it for a long time, but over time, I came to recognize that it didn't fit, that there was no kinder, gentler high-control religion, and my response was the same as many of you listening and many other people. My response was to leave. I recognized that I had a choice between a vision of society and maybe religion that was kind and gentle and affirming and caring and grace-filled, or I could maintain high-control religion and I left high-control religion. I chose the other path.

It's not where Josh Hawley is at. He chooses the high-control religion, but he shows us, even he—a very, very good articulation of this—even in his articulation, we get these places where we can see what's behind it. And he shows us that there is simply no such thing as a kinder, gentler high-control religion.

Those are the reflections that hit me as we concluded chapter five. Here's the book. We're going to pick up next episode in chapter six, which is—if I can find the Table of Contents—the second role is father. All you got to think is cis, heteronormative stuff. So first is husband, then father. We'll pick up on that next episode. Dive into what Josh Hawley has to tell us about men as fathers, and what that means.

In the meantime, I want to say thank you for listening. As always, we can't do this without you. As I said, I can't do this series without you. We can't do anything we do at Straight White American Jesus without you. Please check out the website, straightwhiteamericanjesus.com. If you're a subscriber, you can be a part of the Discord. We've got lots of great things coming as we've been talking about—new interviews and additional people doing interviews and live events and live streaming events, and times when you can connect with us, and all those kinds of things. We can only do that because of you. So thank you, especially if you're a subscriber. If you're not a subscriber and you're somebody who has helped financially support us in other ways, we thank you for that. If you're somebody who says, "Hey, I value and love what you do, I just am not in a position to spend money on that," we get it. Thank you for listening. Tell people, like us, subscribe, do all of those things. It helps us so much. Thank you for listening and viewing and, as I say, please be well until we have a chance to talk again.