It's in the Code ep 184: “A Crappy Sermon?”

Dan Miller: Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is 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, and as always, want to say thank you for listening. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for supporting the things we do at Straight White American Jesus. We can't do it without you.

And as always, inviting your thoughts, feedback, comments, ideas for upcoming series and topics in this series. You can reach me at danielmillerswaj@gmail.com—best way to reach me. I also haunt the Discord that subscribers can access and so on. And as I've been saying, I'm working up a series on questions I was not supposed to ask in church, or questions I wasn't allowed to ask in church. Maybe if you were a churchgoer or spent time in that world, the questions that got you in trouble, the questions that got you labeled as somebody your friends weren't supposed to hang out with, the questions that upset your pastor, got you sent to the proverbial corner, what have you—send those to me. I want to hear them. Put in your header "questions I wasn't supposed to ask" or something like that, and I look forward to exploring those with you.

In the meantime, I want to continue on. Here we are continuing our ride, or our forced march I guess maybe, through Josh Hawley's book Manhood. We continue exploring his vision of, as the subtitle suggests, the masculine virtues America needs. That is Josh Hawley's vision of how we will save America by cultivating the proper masculine virtues. And again, we're not reading Hawley because he's Josh Hawley or because he's otherwise special or notable in some way. We're reading him because his account of masculinity opens such a window into the reasoning of the contemporary MAGA-aligned right in so many different social and religious domains.

And we're continuing on. We're in the seventh chapter of the book, for those who are keeping score—we've made it that far, the seventh chapter of the book, in which Hawley presents the third of the distinctly masculine roles he believes men are called to play. In other words, the latter portion of his book is a series of roles that he thinks men are called to play, where they exercise these distinctly masculine virtues that will save America and so forth. And we are on the role of warrior, the third of these.

And we've already looked at this role some. We've seen that Hawley plays fast and loose in telling us exactly what the so-called warrior virtues that men are supposed to cultivate are. When he wants to rail against liberals or progressives or what he calls the modern Epicureans, those virtues sound really militant and violent. In other moments, they apparently include things like ambition and drive—we talked about that before—and leadership, which exactly no one opposes. I don't know anybody who's like, "Yeah, leadership's a terrible virtue, we should be opposed to it." So he's slippery in those things.

We've also seen that when he reaches for a biblical model of the warrior man—and remember, Hawley is a biblicist. He wants to be basing this in the Bible. He wants to be claiming that what he's saying is a biblical model, a Christian model. He is a Christian nationalist, self-avowed and open about it. He believes that America is a Christian nation. He believes that only an embrace of America's Christian identity can save us. So this is supposed to be a distinctly Christian vision of masculinity.

So when he looks to the Bible for his exemplar, he looks to the figure of Joshua, who was tasked with conquering the so-called Promised Land. And here the masculine virtues are apparently strength and courage. Joshua is told multiple times in the text to be strong and courageous, and so strength and courage are the virtues. Again, despite what Hawley says, I don't think I know anybody who's like, "Strength and courage are inherently negative traits" or anything like that. And they're also certainly not obviously masculine in character. I don't know what it is about being a guy that supposedly would make us able to exercise strength or courage and people who don't identify as male couldn't. But there we are. We talked about that.

And we also talked about the fact—and this was the real focus last time—that Joshua is a hard choice to live with, since his warrior calling involves undertaking divinely sanctioned genocide against those peoples who already live in the so-called Promised Land. By the time in the biblical text that the Israelites are coming back to the Promised Land to, quote unquote, reclaim it, it's not sitting empty. There are whole civilizations there, and the idea is that they have to be wiped out and utterly destroyed and so forth. And we saw that Hawley doesn't actually acknowledge or deal with that issue. It's an obvious problem with the book of Joshua. And if somebody's not predisposed to just kind of give the Bible a pass, or to assume that the Bible is a morally good book, if somebody reads it and they read all of these commands to utterly destroy everybody who lives there, it's an obvious problem. Hawley just doesn't talk about it. He just doesn't deal with it. He just kind of pretends it's not there.

Okay, so today, sort of carrying all of that forward—and this is our last chapter where we'll be talking about his warrior vision—today we're going to take a closer look at what he actually does with these seemingly convoluted ingredients of a men's warrior task. How do they all finally come together? And for me, this carries through from the last episode, because there's still this ongoing question of: what do you do if you're going to point to Joshua as your exemplar? What do you do about the little issue of genocide? There's a little, tiny, teeny, teeny problem that God commands genocide through Joshua—that was the title of last episode, "Genocide Joshua." And we're going to see how Hawley, in my mind, how he tries to take the offensive and the morally problematic elements of his appeal to Joshua out of the account of masculinity. We already saw that he doesn't deal with it explicitly. He doesn't say, "Oh, here are some problems with Joshua, people read it this way, or here's how I respond." He just doesn't mention them at all. But what we're going to see here is another strategy that he uses that runs through this.

And so what we ultimately get in this last part of the chapter on warriors is exactly the kind of lame evangelical sermon that those of us who grew up in this tradition have heard a thousand times. We get a really crappy "here's how this applies to your life" kind of message from Josh Hawley, and that's what I want to talk about today.

Okay, so let's start with this. Those who have listened to me talk about how conservative Christians actually use the Bible—and I know this is a thing I talk about a lot, but you cannot talk to people who claim a conservative Christian identity for very long before they are going to claim biblical authority. They are going to tell you that what they hold is what they hold because the Bible teaches it, and that it should be accepted because the Bible is the Word of God and so forth. And so I talk about this a lot, and people know that I say all the time, if you listen to me, that conservative Christians are not actually biblical literalists.

Why does that matter? It's because they will often say, "I read the Bible literally. I'm a biblical literalist"—it'll be a point of pride. "The Bible is literally true." And it's also an issue that gets picked up by other regular people. Commentators on evangelicalism and other forms of conservative Protestantism will often describe, quote unquote, biblical literalism as a defining feature. Scholars of religion will do this. They'll talk about biblical literalism. And I have said multiple times that they're actually not biblical literalists—that I've said that there's no such thing as a biblical literalist. They might claim to be. They might believe that they are, really go to bed at night, putting their head down on their pillow, feeling confident that they are biblical literalists, and that the reason why they believe what they believe is because the Bible tells them to and so on. But they aren't. They are not really biblical literalists.

And when I have discussions with people, they're often surprised when I make this claim. Certainly other religion scholars—I've discussed it with them and they're like, "Why do you say that? That seems like a strange thing." We'll get down in the nuts and bolts of it. Definitely people who are still conservative Christians—I've had more conversations than I can count with conservative Christians who consider themselves literalists, trying to show them that they're actually not, and sort of laying little traps and things to catch them in the fact that they're not actually literalists. But also people who've undergone, you know, what we refer to as faith deconstruction, or they've left that kind of religious subculture behind, and they will say, "I grew up, I was a biblical literalist. I grew up in a church that believed that the Bible was literally true. The way I used to read the Bible was literally," and so forth. And so even though they don't think that now, that's still how they understand their former position.

And I cannot—and I'm not interested in fully developing why it is that I say that there's no such thing as a biblical literalist. But I can show you an example, because in this chapter, Hawley gives us a great example of exactly why I say that and what I mean. And in giving that example, he shows us the other way that he's going to try to sidestep that whole messy, "What about the fact that Joshua was commanded to commit genocide?" sort of issue.

Okay, so here I want us to listen to how Josh Hawley gives his summation. He's an attorney. This is his summation. This is his kind of summary, or kind of closing argument on some of the stuff he's been saying about Joshua. I want to listen to how he sums up the account of Joshua taking the Promised Land and his transition—that is Hawley's transition, Josh's transition—to how this should inform our understanding of masculinity and masculine virtue.

So here's what he has to say. Those who want to do a read-along, I'm on page 117. Again, I'm reading this book so you don't have to, but if you're a glutton for punishment and you want to read it, it's page 117. So this is how he sums it up. He says, "This is no ordinary piece of land where Joshua is. God is going to do something special with this ground. This is to be the site of a New Eden, and Joshua has a role to play. His task is to redeem it, clear it"—I'm going to pause. So where he leaves out the whole "clearing it" thing—he's supposed to clear it by, like, genocidally wiping out everybody who's there, whatever. Doesn't say it. "His task is to redeem it, clear it for God's purposes. To be accomplished, Joshua must rid the land of the giants and the monsters that have taken control. He must break a path for the light."

Again, I just—I can't resist. He has to clear the land of the giants and monsters. Last time I said, these are actual people. And yes, the text sometimes uses that kind of language, but Hawley dehumanizes them by sort of picking up on this theme of giants and monsters, as if Josh was out fighting mythological creatures or something, and not commanded to wipe out other people.

Anyway, this is what he says. That's his summation. God is going to do something amazing and transformative through Joshua as he goes into the Promised Land and he wipes everybody out. And then listen to the next line: "The same is true for us in our lives."

There's the transition, and I want to pause for a minute, and I want us to think—I want us to catch how this transition is supposed to work for us as we read this.

God's going to do something great through Josh, who is going to take the land and wipe everybody out. And the same is true for us in our lives. Okay?

It works pretty much the way that my phone feed does. People who know me know that I like analogies and metaphors of my own. So here's one, and I promise I'm going to circle back around. I'm going to land this plane, okay? So just stick with me.

It works the same way my phone feed does. About a year and a half ago, I started working out again. I'm a middle-aged guy, and I'm like, I need to start getting in better shape. Heart things are real, and blood pressure things are real, and glucose level things are real—all this stuff you don't need to worry about. But I started working out again. And as a middle-aged guy whose body doesn't work like it did when I was in my 20s or even my 30s, I looked stuff up about working out in middle age—like things that you should do or shouldn't do, or recommended things, or whatever. And of course, in looking that up, the algorithm got me. So now I—and I'm sure a lot of you are in the same boat—I get all kinds of ridiculous unsolicited workout stuff in my phone feed. Like I do the same thing a lot of other people do that you're not supposed to do for sleep hygiene and all that. But somewhere before I go to sleep, I'll scroll through my phone and I get all kinds of weird workout stuff.

And a lot of them work like this. They work by highlighting somebody with a superhuman physique or superhuman physical prowess—some athlete, or I don't know, maybe an influencer or a well-known celebrity or whomever—and they tell me that if I work out like them, if I adopt their workouts, I can do it too. So you get the one that's like, you know, something like "Here's Jason Momoa's secret biceps workout," or "Check out Travis Kelce's monster leg day for real results," or "Here's the old school workout that Arnold used in his heyday," or whatever. And the idea is, it worked for them, it'll work for you.

And I know—again, like most of you also know with the stuff that comes along in your phone feed—this is pure bullshit. It's pure bullshit. No matter how much I try to adopt—and I don't, I don't, I know this is bullshit, I don't try to do this—but if I were to go like, "Oh, Arnold used to do this," or "Jason Momoa does that," or "John Cena does this," or "I don't know, Dwayne Johnson does whatever," I can go and do their workout all I want, assuming it doesn't kill me, and I'm still going to be me when I look in the mirror. It's going to be middle-aged Dan Miller looking back. Maybe I'll be a little leaner, maybe I'll be a little fitter, maybe I'll be a little stronger. I'm not going to be Jason Momoa. I'm not going to be Dwayne Johnson. I'm not going to be John Cena or Travis Kelce or whomever else. It's not going to be me. Nope, not going to do it.

This is how Hawley's message works here. And it's completely typical of evangelical preachers. It's exactly what he does. God did all this amazing stuff in Joshua's life, and yeah, he's going to rid the land of giants and monsters taking control, he's going to make it holy land. And he can do the same for you. It's the same thing. God did amazing things for Joshua, and he promises this for you too.

And this is—like I say that Josh Hawley is typical here—he is typical. I can't even tell you how many lame-ass sermons I have sat through with some pastor who does the same thing. Some Bible passage, you're just waiting for it. You're waiting for the flip of like, "And you can do it too," kind of thing. It's every bit as predictable and every bit as lame and every bit as bullshit as the stuff that comes through in your phone feed. And that's what Josh Hawley is feeding us here.

And here's what I think: I think that Josh—and I think every evangelical preacher deep down—they also know that it's bullshit. They know this. And here's what they know. Josh Hawley knows full well that the story of Joshua is absolutely irrelevant to virtually all of us. Maybe there'll be some small subset of people who are going to be real, quote unquote, warriors. Maybe they'll be in the military or something. Okay, still, a hell of a difference between being in today's military and being in the military thousands of years ago in the ancient Near East and so forth. Okay, maybe some of us might at some point in our lives be called upon to exercise violence or force in defense of ourselves or someone else. That could happen. Okay, but those cases really, they're few and far between, and they are far from the kind of calling to literal holy war that features in the story of Joshua.

I'm very aware that there are lots of MAGA people who want America's army to be a Crusader army, and who view everything that goes on as an American holy war or whatever. But it's not. Okay, setting them aside, the point is, if we're looking for a direct application and relevance of the story of Joshua, it lands on almost none of us. Just like those things that pop up in my feed, the promise that "the same is true for us in our lives" is pure nonsense. "The same is true for us in our lives"—it's exactly what Josh Hawley says. It's pure nonsense.

What does that mean? Here's what it means. Here's why this matters. The Joshua story, taken literally, is absolutely irrelevant for almost all of us, almost all the time. It has no direct relevance in most of our lives. For some of us, never. Most of us, almost never.

So what does Josh do? Well, he's going to make the story relevant. I just said it's irrelevant. He's going to make the story relevant. But the way he's going to do it is by not taking it literally. He is going to turn it into a metaphor. He is going to extend it metaphorically. And again, this is typical. This is what all those conservative Christian preachers do. Meanwhile, they're all standing up there talking about taking the Bible literally, but in their actual preaching and teaching, what they do is precisely not to take the Bible literally. They have to turn it into a metaphor so that it has some relevance and connection to regular people.

So I want to read his sentence again, but I was tricky. I only read the first part of the sentence. I want to read the second part of the sentence. Here's what he says. He says, "The same is true for us in our lives, and above all, in our characters."

Wait, what? True in our lives, but in our—relates to our character. It's a metaphor. It's a metaphor for our character. He turns the whole story of Joshua into a metaphor.

Here's what he says. Here's the next paragraph after the paragraph about all the big things God's doing for him. This is where that sentence starts. Here's what he says. He says, "The same is true for us in our lives, and above all, in our characters. Joshua's story is not just about Canaan." Canaan is a place, but it represents more than land. What is it? Canaan is a metaphor, guys. It's not really a literal place. "It stands for the whole of the earth and for our lives as well. God has made the world to be holy. He has made our lives to be holy. And the two go together. In the story, Canaan is overrun with wild beasts and enemies, but our souls can be like that. To clear the ground of our lives for a garden, we must break new paths of character. The path to the world's renewal runs through our souls."

It's touching. Turns out, it's not really a story about a place. Doesn't really matter if it happened historically or whatever. All those claims to literality, they don't matter. It's a story about our lives and our souls and our character.

What Hawley does—our friend Josh, what he does—is he metaphorically shifts the story to being one about our personal, inner, and sometimes to some extent interpersonal lives. But he makes it a story about us as individuals. It's about our inner lives and our inner struggle and our development of character. It's not actually about a Promised Land or fighting real enemies or doing literal warrior stuff. It's about our internal battle.

So a few pages later—I promise I'm not going to read from the book in detail anymore. Well, I'm not going to do it in this episode. Can't promise in the future. A few pages later, he's got a whole section about how our Canaan is pride. Oh my god, this is the cheesy sermon move. Joshua's Canaan was a place, but each of us have our own Canaan to face up to. Each of us has a Canaan. "For all of you in the congregation today, what is your Canaan? What is your Promised Land that is overrun by beasts and enemies?" That's what he's doing.

He says our Canaan is pride. Our battle is an internal battle, not to be prideful. And then after that, the next section, he tells us that our task is to develop love and hope. Okay, love and hope.

Now, sort of interestingly—and I could do so many episodes on every chapter of this—he uses an example. And the example in this chapter is protesters in Hong Kong protesting Chinese policy, and how brave they are and how they're showing love and hope for society and whatever. But this from a guy who, like, if you were to ask about, I don't know, protesters in Minnesota protesting ICE actions, he would tell you that they're lawless and they're evil and that they're not law-abiding and so forth. So it's just an aside: when they're protesting something he supports, it's an expression of love and hope. When it's something he doesn't support, they're lawbreakers.

But our task is to develop love and hope. And then summing it all up, he says that, quote, "courage and love and hope are the inner masculine virtues we need to develop." He talked about pride. It's funny, he's like, "Pride is the source of everything." He just has this kind of basic Augustinian notion that pride is the source of sin and whatever. And he says that, but then like when he's listing the virtues, once again, humility disappears. Like there's no reference to pride even though he said that's the big thing. But the point is, he said these inner masculine virtues: courage and love and hope.

And he makes the metaphorical extension clear. So he's summing up the story at the end of Joshua's life, and he says this. He's talking about Joshua at the end of his life. He has, quote, "marshaled the armies of Israel. He has led them into war. He has driven back the enemy from the Promised Land." Okay?

And then on the next page, he starts to shift, and he says Joshua was transformed by these events. Says he confronted his giants and he grew as a person. The Bible doesn't say that. The Bible does not talk about Joshua confronting his inner demons or his inner giants. Doesn't say Joshua grew and developed as a person. Doesn't say that.

And then we get the extended metaphor, and then he says, "The same is true for us all. We are called to and can confront the giants and the beasts within ourselves, and we too can be transformed."

Do you see what's happening here? Hawley isn't appealing to the Bible as literally true. He's got the whole story of Joshua, but it turns out that the story of Joshua is not actually about anything that Joshua did. It's all just a big metaphor for us to focus on our inner selves, to be the best people we can be. He's turning the Joshua story into a metaphor that is relevant for all of us. And this is how conservative Christians actually use the Bible, no matter what they say. There's nothing remotely literalist here. And this is just a prime example of when somebody says, "Why do you say they don't read the Bible literally?" Here it is. It's not unique to Josh Hawley. Again, it is typical of every crappy evangelical sermon you'll ever hear.

You grew up in those churches, you knew it. I can't tell you, even as an evangelical, I got sick and tired of the same sermon every time about, "You can do it too." I mean, Josh Hawley here, he's just following the preaching paradigm that is taught to conservative Christians. Every conservative Christian who goes to seminary and takes a preaching class is taught about how you have to have the application section. How are we going to apply it to our lives? It's where you turn it into a big metaphor. Literally, it doesn't have any relevance, so it has to be metaphorically extended like this.

So Josh Hawley gives us a literal textbook example of why it is that I say conservative Christians don't read the Bible literally, and he certainly isn't. Okay.

So Josh Hawley doesn't actually read the Bible literally, neither do other conservative Christians. But so what? Why am I talking about this? What does that have to do with masculinity and masculine virtues and his specific point?

For me, there are a few relevant takeaways that this illustrates for us. The first is this—and this is not, I didn't invent this language, other people will talk about this—it's what we can call the sort of therapeutic turn that defines a lot of contemporary popular conservative Christian teaching. You listen to all that language there about confronting pride and fighting our own inner demons and being hopeful and whatever. What Hawley actually offers is just like, it's just a kind of basic self-help, motivational guide with a veneer of Christian teaching slapped on top. And scholars of religion and popular culture, or people who study like religion and media and fields like that, they've noted this general therapeutic shift for decades—that conservative Christians, when they talk about these notions of, like, why you should believe these things and what the Bible means or whatever, it's just this sort of therapeutic self-helpy kind of language.

So in suggesting that the warrior virtue—that was the focus of the chapter, we got to be warriors—that this warrior ethos, as Pete Hegseth might call it, that this warrior ethos is really to master ourselves and be better people, Hawley and Hawley's Bible isn't telling us anything we couldn't find on the self-help shelves of any bookstore anywhere. He's not giving us anything here that you couldn't find in a lot of other sources.

The second point is that by metaphorically extending the warrior motif, he actually undercuts it. He goes from suggesting men should be aggressive and tough and even violent, fighting for what's right, to the really basic and pretty mundane teaching that we need to work to make ourselves better people. Thanks, Josh.

Now what does it mean to be a warrior man? Tell me that sounds awesome, Josh. I'm in, I'm gung-ho, I'm pumped. My algorithm says I can do it, Josh. Teach me how to be a warrior, Josh. Well, you got to be less prideful and work on love and hope and, oh yeah, be brave and courageous and driven, ambitious. Okay, the model of warrior masculinity before—it doesn't seem very different at all from the kind of liberal or progressive or Epicurean ideas of masculinity he mocks. If you know, you get the liberals or progressives, it'd be like, "Well, yeah, let's just be guys who, like, maybe aren't assholes all the time and aren't violent and aren't aggressive and aren't domineering." It's kind of what he's saying. His warrior is humble and loving and exercises hopeful, courageous, brave attributes. It's a list of virtues I don't think anyone would oppose, considered in the abstract.

Which means, and this is the kind of final point, that at the end of this chapter, like we've been waiting and waiting and waiting: tell me, Josh, show me what the warrior is, Josh. These are the—let's again—the masculine virtues that America needs. These are the masculine virtues that will save America. These are the roles that men can play that will turn America back into what it needs to be, that will make America great again. Okay, turns out that they're not very Christian. There's nothing specifically Christian about this. That's the therapeutic piece. Like you could come to this from any number of directions. And they don't really have much to do with being a warrior, not in any straightforward sense. And that's what happens when you metaphorically extend something—you kind of undercut its literal meaning. And that's what he's doing.

Which brings up the next issue. This is an issue we've seen over and over in his book: they don't seem to be specifically masculine either. Are people who aren't men not supposed to master their pride? Should they not be loving? Should they not be hopeful? Should they not be courageous? Should they not be brave? Should they not be ambitious? Like, what is distinctly masculine about this? He can't answer that question.

So at the end of the day, when you boil it all down, this chapter, like most of his book, it says nothing of substance about masculinity but manages to use a lot of words doing it. You cut through all the words and the verbiage and his folksy stories and whatever, and you find there's just, there's no there, we might say.

So this is the question, as we finish this chapter, that leaves us with: what specifically does this give us with the idea of men as warriors? Well, on one hand, if you cut through the rhetoric and the polemics, all the places where he's attacking the liberals and the elites and the new Epicureans and all of that, you cut through all of that, he doesn't really have anything of interest to say. And in fact, he says a lot of stuff that his supposed opponents wouldn't probably mind. He has nothing to say about distinctly masculine virtues or the concept of masculinity itself, which means he really has nothing to say about the loss of those either. In other words, if he can't really tell us what masculinity is or what masculine virtues are, he can't really tell us how it matters if masculinity is somehow lost or attacked. He is giving us an answer of, like, the kinds of people we should be and maybe what good Americans should be, but the masculinity piece is just falling away.

But here's the other piece of this, the other side. You cut through all the polemics, it turns out there's no there there. But that's the point. The point of this book is not really masculinity. It's not masculine virtue. The point of this book is the polemics. It is the argument. It is the attack. The point of this book is not really about defending masculinity against its detractors, or empowering men within a society that has disempowered them or whatever. That's not really the point.

About halfway through his book, that's about where we are—I think I'm eyeballing it, we're like halfway through his book—he still hasn't actually said anything unique about men or masculinity. But I'm arguing that's not really his point. The point of the book is to attack anyone who is not like him. It is to attack anyone who is not MAGA-aligned. It is to attack anyone who's not a Christian nationalist. It is to attack anyone who doesn't accept his patriarchal vision of society. It is to attack anyone who doesn't accept his theocratic understanding of US law and US policy. It is to attack anyone who affirms the LGBTQ community and on and on and on. We can expand that list. That is the point.

When we boil down the message and find that there's nothing of substance underneath the polemics, that tells us that the polemics, the attacks, the culture war, the character assassination—that is the point. It is a feature of the argument, not a bug. All the rest is misdirection. And I think that's the temptation, that's what's easy to miss when we read or engage with people like Josh Hawley. We come to that point of recognizing that there's no real argument there, and we say, "Ah, we're done. There's nothing. No reason to engage it, no reason to look at it." What we miss is that it's not really about the argument. It's just an attack. It's an attack on anybody Josh Hawley doesn't think is a real American or a real Christian—and those are the same thing for him.

All right, we're going to wind that up. We're going into chapter eight next time. The next role that men are called to play—they are called to be, are you ready for it? Builders. The man is called to be a builder. I have a hunch that I know exactly—sorry, I got distracted by the first sentence in the chapter there. I have a hunch I know exactly what biblical character he's going to look at. If you know how these kind of things work, I think you probably know the biblical text that's going to come along as well. We'll start diving into that next episode.

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