It's in the Code ep 179: “A Father’s Virtues?”

Dan Miller: Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, which serves as part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. Pleased to be with you as always.

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And as I've said, after we complete the series that we're in right now, I'm going to be doing one on questions I was not supposed to ask in church, or questions I couldn't ask in church, or something along those lines. If you have those, if you have an idea of topics that were sort of verboten, as it were, in church, or questions you knew you weren't supposed to ask, or maybe questions you got in trouble for asking, let me know. Email me at danielmillerswaj@gmail.com and put that in the header: "questions I couldn't ask" or "questions I shouldn't ask" or something like that. I'm compiling those, and that is upcoming for us.

For now, we're continuing our look at Josh Hawley's book Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. We've been working through this. As I say, I'm reading it so you don't have to, and believe me, there's really no reason to put yourself through that. And we've begun looking at his chapters where he addresses the different roles that he believes men are called to play.

So again, the book is set up—the very first part he lays out sort of his account of: here's what masculinity is, here's what men are. And he's living biblically in the book of Genesis, in the Hebrew Bible. I'm curious if he's ever going to get out of the book of Genesis, if he's ever going to move past the first book of the Bible, but I'm reading this as we go, so we'll see.

But we're on the second of the chapters where he shifts from that background stuff to: here are the roles that men play, here are the virtues that they exercise in those roles and so forth. And we are on the second one of those chapters looking at the role of a man as father. This follows on the chapter that we talked about the last few episodes, the role of man as a husband.

And as always, there's a lot we could say, and it's sort of hard to know exactly where to start here. So as I've been thinking about this, what I wanted to start with is actually one of, I think, the core presuppositions—or it's more than a presupposition, it's one of the core features of Hawley's thought that he doesn't explicitly state, but that is implicit and assumed throughout his treatment.

And what that is, is that for Hawley, just like everybody else on the right, masculinity—when somebody says masculinity—they mean straight, cisgender masculinity. And the reason I say this is implicit is Hawley has not said anywhere—he's not come out and explicitly made any anti-LGBTQ+ statements. And there are plenty of people who will—there are plenty of people who will say masculinity is this, and there's no such thing as trans people, and so he's mocked people for choosing pronouns and things like this. But he hasn't come out and said that's not real, or there's no such thing as trans people, or whatever.

And I think we have to remember—and talked about this a lot last episode—that his is a kinder, gentler Christian patriarchy. He's trying to leave those things unsaid. He's trying to leave them implicit instead of explicit. So what he's not going to do is explicitly come out and highlight who—the people that he's excluding from masculinity. But that work is going on. And like all the kinder, gentler articulations of this, the content doesn't change just because he doesn't come out and say it. It doesn't mean that it's not there.

So when he discusses men, Hawley takes his cue from the Genesis myth of the creation of man and woman. This is a normative description: God created men and God created women. And again, like everyone on the right, he presumes that this means that there are two genders and only two genders. They're defined from birth, they're biologically determined and so forth.

And the entire logic of his presentation—entire logic of the book so far, and I absolutely don't think that this is going to change—the entire logic of his presentation is that those genders are fundamentally, essentially different. And that's a view that we call gender essentialism. That is, that there are two genders, and each one has sort of an essence or core that makes it what it is, and they're fundamentally distinct. And all of this is cisgender normativity—that's what he's imagining.

But he's also being heteronormative or just generally homophobic. Everything he says about men as husbands, like in the previous chapter, everything is about men married to women. And again, for Christians who read the Bible the way that Hawley does, the fact that God created the first man and the first woman—it's the first marriage. That's how they describe this. And you have to understand that for them, the description is normative. God creates a man, God creates a woman, he puts them together, they are the first pair. It's the first marriage. And so that's important to understand.

So what does that mean? It means that real men—real men, essential men, men who are living out their divinely ordained masculinity—they are straight men. There's no space here for queer men. And all of that is presupposed in this chapter as well. It was presupposed in the last chapter, it's presupposed here.

So when Hawley discusses men as fathers, he's talking about men who are married to women, and he's talking about men who have biological children. He is talking about the children who are the product, the biological product, of a marriage between one man and one woman. There's no space here for families with, for example, two fathers.

And going even further—and this is implicit—he throws out a lot of social data about fathers and families with fathers in this chapter, and we might have time to get to that and talk about some of that in another episode, I'm not sure yet. But he throws out a lot of data, and it's a little bit implicit in there, it's kind of buried in there. But if you read it carefully, he's even kind of implicitly excluding stepfathers from fatherhood here, making a distinction when he talks about "fathers in the home." He means biological parents of children. He means men who are married to women and who have produced children with them.

So it's a very exclusive vision that he has. It's a very heteronormative vision that he has. And again, we talked about this before—in earlier chapters he has criticized those on the right whom he described as sounding angry or shrill or defensive. He's talked about the tone. He doesn't want to sound like that. So this is part of what I'm calling his kinder, gentler approach. He doesn't want to sound angry or shrill or defensive or dogmatic, so he speaks in this way.

But again, the content of what he's saying is the same. At the end of the day, only cisgender straight men are real men. Masculinity properly envisioned, masculinity as God intends it, is the masculinity of cisgender straight men. The content is the same. You could be as angry or as shrill as you wanted to be saying that—you'd be saying the same thing that Josh Hawley is saying.

And I think it's important to talk about this because I want to sort of pause and step back a little bit. As I say all the time, we're talking about Hawley not because he's unique or special or has some great insights that others don't have, but because he's not unique. He is typical in many ways. And again, this is a really common strategy within high-control religion. I've talked about that, but I want to revisit it, because it explains part of how people often get sucked into high-control religious frameworks like the one that Hawley's working within. And I think it also explains, going further, how people eventually come to be radicalized.

And the reason I bring this up is this week was sort of brought to me—people ask me all the time about why do people get drawn into high-control religion? Or I talk to people and maybe they have family who have been really drawn into MAGA movements or sort of hyper-patriarchy stuff, or tradwives stuff, or what have you. And they'll just say: this is not the person that I thought I knew a few years ago. They were always reasonable, they were always kind, they were inclusive. I don't understand how they fell into these kind of radical articulations.

And there are a lot of dynamics to that, and a lot of different answers to that. And of course, the patterns of those dynamics and answers are going to vary from person to person. But this kinder, gentler approach—it's one of the mechanisms that catches people. It is one of the mechanisms that draws people into high-control religion. It is one of the mechanisms that enables them to become radicalized over time.

And it's an approach of essentially leaving more objectionable parts or elements of a movement implicit, of leaving them unsaid, and of essentially not saying the quiet part out loud. If you have the model of saying all the offensive stuff out loud and just kind of owning it and being proud of it and so forth, this works in the opposite direction.

And I was reminded this week when I was talking with a friend—and maybe this is why this was kind of weighing on me. I was talking with a friend, and he recounted the conversation that he had had with a casual friend of his. So somebody I don't know, and it's just a friend telling me the story about another friend that he encountered, a casual friend that he had that he hadn't talked to in some time. When I say a casual friend, this is somebody that he is on friendly terms with, talks to some, not super close, they don't talk all the time.

And they ran into each other, they're catching up. And his friend related how he'd been attending a local evangelical church, a local theologically conservative Protestant church. And my friend was surprised by this, because he had always known this person to be generally accepting and inclusive of everybody—inclusive of everybody, especially LGBTQ people.

And if you don't know and haven't heard me say, I'll say it again: there's a lot more to being inclusive, obviously, than only queer folk. But it's a kind of litmus test. If you want to know where somebody's at religiously or socially, their views on the LGBTQ+ community will often tell you their views on a lot of other things. It's kind of a scale that you can use to evaluate them.

So he knew that this friend of his had always been fairly inclusive and so forth, and he was surprised that he was part of this church. And he knew about this church, but he went and he looked it up online, and he looked up their statement of beliefs. And sure enough, digging around in the "who we are" section, or "what we believe," or however that website was set up, they talked about their views on marriage, and they said that marriage is a lifelong monogamous relationship between a man and a woman.

In other words, their view was normatively cisgender and heterosexual in nature—all the gender essentialism, all the anti-LGBTQ stuff, all of it implicit there in their doctrines.

So my friend has another conversation with this friend of his, and he kind of gently asks his friend about this. In other words, he kind of says, "Hey, I took a look at this church, and I've always known you to be very kind of inclusive and accepting and so forth. Does it bug you that this church has this position?"

And his friend said, "Well, they don't really teach that." His friend basically said, "No, no, I've got no problem with queer people, and they're fine, and they're great, and some of my best friends," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. "But the church doesn't really teach that. They don't really talk about that."

And my friend was like, "Well, hey, okay, but their website says..." "Yeah, but I haven't really heard him preach about that, and when we talk that's not really the things that they talk about and so forth."

What's my takeaway from this—which is just an illustration for me again, it's not my friend, it's not somebody I know, but it's the kind of conversation I've seen unfold a lot of times—my takeaway is that the sermons and the teachings that this friend is encountering, they're a lot like Hawley's book. They're kind and gentle. They talk like Hawley, making sure that what they're saying from the pulpit, or what they're saying in maybe individual Bible studies, or what they're saying when people get together for the coffee time after the service, or whatever—they talk like Hawley. They keep their exclusionary positions implicit. They don't make them explicit.

Now they're on the website. You can go find them if you look. But they're not going to lead with those. And they're going to do things I've talked about other places where they'll say things like, "Well, you know, everybody is sinful and fallen. We shouldn't single out one thing." They're not saying that they affirm queer people. They're just gently saying, "Well, yeah, we are critical of queer people, but also other people as well." They're not making it explicit.

So what happens is—and this is why I find his friend's response still so illustrative—is his friend is drawn into this church, he's drawn into this community because of their kinder, gentler messaging, despite the content of what is actually there. Despite the fact that they hold views that he himself, as he's coming into contact with this community, might not—they hold views, in other words, that if he went there the first time, the first time he went there and they preached a sermon against the evils of "homosexuality" and the sins of Sodom, or something like that, he might be like, "Man, I'm out. I'm out. That's harsh."

But they didn't lead with that. And what happens is you begin to build that community, you begin to belong, you begin to feel good about the people. You develop friendships. They accept you. And over time, by the time those views do become explicit, by the time they do come into view, by the time that there is—I don't know, let's say a Father's Day or a Mother's Day sermon and those themes come out, whatever they might be—by then he's part of the community. By then the community is part of his identity. By then the community has been meeting his emotional and spiritual needs.

So when that view begins to come out, he finds himself buying into it, often without even any reflection. Views that he would once have rejected now feel normal because the community he's a part of—it's just part of the community. It's part of his identity.

So over time, his views will shift more and more in the direction of his high-control religious context. And that's how people come—not limited to high-control religion, I think in lots of movements—this is how people come to be radicalized over time. The kinder, gentler approach invites people in, and once they belong, they come to adopt the positions and attitudes they would not have had before entering the movement.

And this is how radicalization occurs. Positions that they would once have rejected, that they would have seen as extreme, they now seem reasonable or moderate because people that they care about, people they identify with, hold those views. And once a movement becomes a part of your identity, it's hard to not hold those views, because you are calling your own identity into question. Your membership in the community is at risk.

There's a tremendous pressure, often implicit, often not conscious at all, a pressure to conform in those beliefs. And psychologists and others tell us that that's how people actually form their beliefs—that identity shapes beliefs.

So I think it's worth noting that this is the strategy Hawley uses here. I've been reading for a while, and I've talked about it some, but looking to say, what would he say about queer folk? And so far—I mean, I've gotta be around halfway through the book, I'm looking around, I don't have my book with me, I'm a good way through the book—and he has not come out explicitly and made a bunch of anti-LGBTQ statements. And I think that that's significant.

The content is there. If you know the language that's used, it's there. If you know the codes and the cultural tropes that come out, it's there. But it's implicit. And I think that that's why it's significant.

That was the first thing I wanted to talk about, kind of reflecting as I continue through this book. The next thing I wanted to talk about a little bit here is I want to look a little more specifically in this chapter at what Hawley has to say about fatherhood. Because once again, this kinder, gentler approach he has, it also cuts deeper than he probably wants. I talked about this a lot last episode. I'm not going to repeat all of that, but the patterns here—again, I think it's worth noting.

And so to start with, let's take a look at: what does he say are the virtues of fatherhood? What does it mean to be a father? What are these virtues that fathers have?

He identifies three primary ones in this chapter. The first is what he calls "a work of sacrifice." Fatherhood, he says, quote, "is all about surrendering your life to someone else, giving someone else first priority," end quote. So a work of sacrifice.

The second one is humility. He says—summing up something—he says, quote, "that is fatherhood, in brief: to take the seemingly impossible step of accepting responsibility for another life from the moment of its very conception," end quote. So humility, and this humility of recognizing that you have this responsibility. It's not necessarily a responsibility you simply choose. It's wrapped up in the whole Abraham story in the Bible. We're going to come back to that in another episode. But humility.

And the third one, he says, is "a legacy to last," a legacy that goes beyond ourselves. He writes here, he says, "Fatherhood works against the curse of death by drawing our lives into the future," end quote. And he's obviously here referring to progeny, to a legacy.

Okay, fine. Let's just take those: work of sacrifice, humility, a legacy to last. And I might modify them a little bit. In general, I don't have a huge problem with those virtues. I don't like the language of sacrifice. I think it sounds self-negating in a way that's not very healthy. But if we talked about serving others, I could go with that. Humility—I'm not going to complain if somebody says that it's a virtue to be humble. Establishing a legacy—again, for me this could be progeny, yes, but a way of creating something to last beyond ourselves, and even suggesting that maybe we should live our lives in such a way that the impacts that we have extend beyond ourselves and the limits of our own finite existence. Sure. And you can tie that in with service—to serve in such a way that you leave a legacy that goes beyond you. Cool. I could affirm those virtues or some form of them.

But then I have to ask this: Hey, Josh, cool—how are those specifically fatherly or even masculine virtues? I mean, the first one, "work of sacrifice," he says surrendering your life to someone else, giving someone else first priority. I can think of lots of ways of doing that. I've already suggested the notion of legacy. I can think of lots of ways of doing that that aren't necessarily tied to families or kids or even masculinity.

So you've got your whole book on masculinity and these are father's virtues. How are they specifically masculine virtues? And his answer is, again, that apparently they aren't.

Now his dominant discourse—what you call the main thrust of what he says—is that these are all masculine virtues, and they're unique to men, and he's going to find biblical examples of men who have these virtues and so forth. But if you scratch the surface just a little bit, we once again see that he opens these virtues up to non-fathers.

It's the same thing he did with the virtues of husbands. He sort of generalizes them in such a way that you don't actually have to be a husband to have the virtues. He does the same thing here, and here's one place where he kind of subtly gives that away. This is what he says: "We need fathers to confront the chaos and darkness around us, and we need men who have the character of fathers."

He seems to be talking about two groups here. We need fathers and we need men who have the character of fathers. What does that mean? It means that he's introducing a distinction here and saying it's possible to be someone with the character of a father, the virtues of a father—sacrificing for others, humility, establishing a legacy. It's possible to do those things and to have those virtues and to not be a father.

But of course, if other men can have the character of fathers, they don't have to be fathers. You've now taken this key role that men play to exercise their virtues—the role of fatherhood—and said, well, actually, it's not about fatherhood. You don't actually have to play this role to carry out those virtues.

And again, as we saw, he's not only going to suggest here or imply that you don't have to be a father, a man who is a father, to have these virtues. He's also going to suggest, in a way, that if we press on it at all, we say: well, I mean, are these even distinctly masculine virtues?

So for example, when he outlines the virtue of fatherhood as accepting responsibility for another life, it's completely unclear why that would have to refer to fathers or even men, and not to other kinds of caregivers or service givers. I mean, think about this: what mother is not going to say that they're accepting responsibility for another life? What caregiver isn't going to say that they're responsible for another life? What medical professional, people in the care professions, who might say that they are dedicating their life to the care of other lives?

I mean, you could bring the service piece together with this. There is nothing in this that would require Hawley's cis-heteronormativity. There's nothing about caring for others and being responsible for another's life that is somehow tied to being cisgender or straight or male. There's nothing that requires masculinity about that. There's nothing that even requires a biological connection to the young life over which somebody has responsibility.

Here's the point: Hawley, once again, seems to advance some virtues that are not distinctly masculine or distinctly male. When he gets at the content of these virtues, there's nothing masculine about them. And he even has these places where he sort of indicates that people who aren't fathers can exercise them.

So why call them the virtues of fatherhood? Why call them the virtues of masculinity or of men? He doesn't give us any reason for this.

And this is what I think: I think again it's an attempt to make his proposal sound more inviting. You can hear the people who might read it who say, "Well, okay, but I'm a guy, but I'm not a father. Maybe I haven't been able to produce children, or maybe I've just never found a person I want to do that with, or whatever." And he says, "Well, you know, you can still develop the character of a father."

He said the same thing about husbands. He wants to be inviting, but in trying to be inviting, he undermines his own position. And again, here's the reason why: there is no such thing as a kinder, gentler, inclusive high-control religion. As soon as you start actually inviting people in, as soon as you start acknowledging that everybody can live this way, you are undermining the foundations on which high-control religion is built, because it is an inherently exclusionary social structure.

So he once again illustrates this.

Those are the two points I wanted to look at today. We're kind of running out of time here, so let me tie this together. We're going to have a lot more to say. We're not done with Hawley and fatherhood. I read the chapter—as always happens, I read these chapters, my blood gets boiling, I've got all kinds of things I want to talk about.

But here's, I think, a final takeaway from this chapter. I think it sets these two considerations we've brought up together. Despite his claims to be advancing an account of masculine virtue that is uniquely embodied by men, Hawley keeps letting it slip that the virtues he's identifying don't actually connect to masculinity in any organic way. There's nothing distinctly masculine about them.

And what that means is—understand, he's a gender essentialist. He has this view that there are two genders and they have different roles to play, and they're divinely ordained and so forth. That model of gender essentialism and the model of virtue that he's putting forward—that's what the essence of being a man is. That to be a man is to have these virtues and these responsibilities, to occupy these roles that only men have. That is their essence.

And so there's a mutually reinforcing piece of this. On the one hand, we affirm gender essentialism, which means there have to be real differences. So we go out and we look for differences between men and women. And on the flip side, the existing differences between men and women, the fact that we can identify virtues that are distinctly masculine, reinforces or justifies the idea of gender essentialism. The two ideas work together.

Hawley undermines that every time he has to acknowledge or lets it slip that these virtues are not really about masculinity or the roles that men play at all. They're not limited to that. What he does is he reveals the truth about his gender essentialism and his cisgender normativity and his heteronormativity. What he reveals is—it's simply dogmatism.

The high-control religionists like to try to pretend, and like to try to convince us, that they hold these views that they do because there's some pragmatic purpose to them, that there's a moral purpose to them and so forth, that it's not just dogmatism or a claim to authority or something like that. And what Hawley reveals here is he has no basis for his cisgender exclusionary views or his heteronormative views other than dogmatism, other than the simple privileging of the fact that people like him are cisgender, heteronormative men, and that that's the norm, that that's the vision they have for America and for American society.

What he reveals is that there's no rationale other than his preference.

One of the things I plan on coming back and talking about is just to remind us that conservatism as such, and certainly what Hawley's doing here, is marked by a profound discomfort with difference. And that's what we find—all it is is dogmatism. That's all.

So once again, he undermines his core claim that there are essential masculine virtues. And in doing that, he also reveals that his privileging of cisgender people, his privileging of straight people—it's just dogmatism. That's all it is. And that's what high-control religion does—is it takes pure dogmatism and tries to find ways to enforce that on others. That's what we see in Hawley.

We're going to have a lot more to say. We're going to continue next episode, still looking at more of what he has to say about fatherhood. I want to look at more at what he has to say about the present-day Epicureans, the supposed enemies of fatherhood and so forth. We'll have other things to say. Stay tuned. Come back for that.

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