It's in the Code ep 190: “The Atheists Are Coming!”

Dan Miller: Hello, and welcome to It's in the Code, a series that's part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. As you probably know, my name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. I am your host. Pleased to be with you, as always, though, as always, talking about topics that we don't love today.

Before we dive into that, I want to say, as I usually do, thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting the things that we do at Straight White American Jesus. Please know this series, more than I think anything else that we do, is driven by you.

We are coming to the end of the present series here in just a few episodes, and I am looking forward to where we go next. Have thrown this out a few times, but still looking for ideas on this, and the theme will be "Questions I Wasn't Supposed to Ask in Church," or "Questions I Wasn't Allowed to Ask in Church." The questions that got you in trouble, the questions that — I don't know — maybe you got that stern spiritual talking-to for raising certain points, or asking questions. Maybe it's why you left the church you were part of, or questioned the tradition entirely. I would love to hear what those are. Daniel Miller, SWAJ — danielmillerswaj@gmail.com — send those to me. Put in your header, if you would, "Questions I Wasn't Supposed to Ask" or "Questions I Wasn't Allowed to Ask." Lets me know what I'm looking for. Got some really interesting things from a lot of folks, and you're going to help me keep this going. That's where we're headed next. Please let me know what you think.

And, as always, I welcome your thoughts about these episodes, topics, ideas. I want to thank the folks who came to office hours last week — had some good discussion about Josh Hawley and his book, which is our theme here. And I want to thank Laura Anderson, the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery. As you probably know, if you listen, last week I was interviewed by her, and she was kind enough to share that and let us link to that. The discussion was more work on masculinity and this kind of notion of a Christian manosphere, as it were. So check that out if you didn't get a chance.

But pleased to be back with you this week as we continue our exploration of essentially what is emerging to me as a kind of right-wing fever dream about masculinity — and the masculinity that will save America. As you may or may not recognize, discourses on the right are always about the big threat to America, and it's always this wand that you can wave. There's just the enemy, and if we can remove the enemy, America will be fine. And in this case, the enemy is anything that stands in the way of masculinity as they envision it.

We have been examining Senator Josh Hawley's presentation of a certain kind of Christian masculinity, as he would think of it, looking at his book Manhood. And to reorient ourselves — if it's been a while, or maybe you've just lost track of where we are, or maybe you're somebody new checking this out for the first time — we've been exploring the six roles that he says men are called, uniquely called, that only men are called to play, and that these roles are what will allow men to express and reaffirm their masculinity in ways that will reshape and save America. And in this episode we're continuing and concluding our discussion of the fifth of these roles, which is the role of priest.

In the last episode — and if you didn't get a chance to check it out, I would suggest maybe you do that before listening to this one, as we're going to sort of build on it in some ways — I highlighted the fact that despite Hawley's presentation of his model of manhood as Christian, as biblical, what have you, there's actually nothing that is identifiably or distinctly Christian about it. And that may sound strange, but go back, listen to that episode, I talk more about it there, and the point is important, because what I want to look at is how the sort of vacuousness — the emptiness of his claims to be advancing a Christian conception of masculinity — how it informs the other half of what he's doing in his project, or what he's doing in this chapter.

And we've seen this repeatedly by now: that this book — and I think again this is in line with right-wing masculinist projects as such, it's not unique to Josh Hawley, that's why we're looking at him, because he's not unique — his project is not really affirmative. And what I mean by that is that he is not really willing or able to say, here's what masculinity is, here's how it should be lived out, here's what it looks like. He claims to do that, but he often doesn't. It's not really — we might say — a positive or constructive vision of masculinity. Rather, it's a substantially negative project. That is, it's a project that is built up around attacking all of those who don't affirm his MAGA-style masculinist vision of society. So it's not about building something up, it's really about attacking and tearing something down.

So, true to form, he spends a lot of time in this chapter hammering on his favorite targets — what he calls the modern Epicureans, or liberals, or progressives. We're all the same to him. All those terms are just one big melting pot for everybody who doesn't support his MAGA-aligned vision of society and masculinity. And so his vision of masculinity — it kind of can't stand on its own. It's not rigorous enough, or robust enough, or frankly explicit enough to stand on its own. It can only stand in opposition to something he opposes. But as we've seen over and over again, that to which he opposes that vision — the foil against which he develops it — is always a caricature. It's always a classic straw man fantasy of what it is that those of us who are not MAGA-aligned think and believe and do. And why that is — it would be difficult to go find people in the real world who affirm the things that he says that we affirm, and for the reasons that he says that we do.

And that pattern is as true of this chapter as it's been anywhere else in the book, and I think it's in some ways maybe becoming more stark. I admit I don't know if that's because we're getting further through the book and we've seen it lots of times. I'm not sure if it's sharpening up over time, but it feels even more out in the open than it has been.

So, like virtually everything on the right now, his book is about opposition. It's not about an affirmative position — it's about opposition. There is no positive view of America, or masculinity, or masculine virtue here. Instead, everything is oriented around opposition to and demonization of one's enemies. To make your enemies seem so bad, so outlandish, so extreme, that your own view — no matter how outlandish or extreme or empty — seems superior. And this is what we find in his discussion of men in their role as priest.

Okay, so here's what he says in his opposition to the new Epicureans. In this chapter, he puts religious claims front and center. He doesn't always do this as explicitly, but he does it here, and it's presented in his section called "The Atheist Project." So, this is the whole section where he talks about those who oppose his vision, and it's not just a group of people that oppose it — it's certainly not Americans who have a different vision of society or something. Nope, it's a unified atheist project. So his vision of masculinity, his vision of the male priesthood as he seems to understand it, is Christian, and anybody who opposes it is atheist. And again, it's worth noting the binary options. Josh Hawley loves his binaries. He loves his either/or, he loves his black-and-white thinking, he likes his "this way or that way, and those are the only two options" way of approaching things. So you're either a Christian — meaning you align with Josh Hawley — or you're an atheist. There's nothing else.

So, it's worth taking a minute to recognize how this sort of framing works, how setting things up this way works. We've seen for almost the entire book — at this point we're coming up on the end — we have seen that Hawley claims his model of masculinity as a biblical, Christian model, and in the logic of the kind of Christian nationalist he is — and Christian nationalists and conservative Christians generally — he presents it as not just a Christian model of masculinity, but the Christian model of masculinity. If you're a Christian, this is what masculinity is, and if you affirm anything else, you're not a Christian. It's that simple.

But I argued in my last episode that what we also see really clearly by now in this book, and in this chapter, is that despite this framing, despite framing it as the Christian vision of masculinity, there's nothing distinctly or identifiably Christian about his presentation at all. What do I mean by that? I highlighted this last time: there's no reference to Jesus of Nazareth, despite the fact that he was in fact a man, that the Christian confession is that he was in fact God, that God became that man, despite the Christian confession that this is the highest revelation of who and what God is — not a reference to Jesus anywhere. Almost no references to mainstream Christian thought. There's the occasional sort of toss-out reference to a theological concept or something, but no discussion, no sustained treatment, not a single reference to a New Testament Christian text in the book. Nothing identifiably Christian.

And I also said that for Hawley's account of manhood, this would look like a failure: I'm going to put forward a vision of Christian manhood, but there's actually nothing Christian about it. I also said that this is a feature, not a bug for his theory. Why? Because it makes it so that concepts like God and Christianity and even the Bible are essentially empty. They're empty concepts. They lack any fixed content. But the reason that's a feature, not a bug — the reason that's something that benefits his proposal, not just a failure of it — is that that emptiness allows him to fill those concepts any way he wants.

And I think it's worth noting that this is typical again of Christian nationalism, and I think the Christian manosphere in general. We could go and do a discourse analysis of the way that they talk and the arguments that they make. I think we'd find the same pattern. So, what Hawley can do is he can take whatever he wants masculinity to be and fill in concepts like God and Christian with that content. Christian masculinity becomes whatever he wants masculinity to be, and it becomes God's will, because those terms have been emptied of any determinate content. So he can take his vision of masculinity and sanctify it as Christian, or biblical, or whatever else. And that's why his so-called biblical or Christian model is so full of references to things like Gandalf the Wizard, or King Arthur and his deeds of derring-do — I still can't get over the fact that he actually described King Arthur that way — or the ancient Greeks and the Romans, or his football coach, or whomever else. Again, everybody but Jesus.

Okay, and the priestly nature of men — and this is what we talked about last episode as well — it seems to just be that they're sort of charismatic or confident or inspiring. So, because there's nothing distinctively Christian about his supposedly Christian model, it doesn't have to be constrained by anything Christian at all. It sort of opens it up to be whatever he wants it to be. Christian masculinity just becomes whatever Josh Hawley wants masculinity to be.

And there's a flip side to that, because just in the same way that his concepts of Christian and God are empty and vacuous, so are other concepts in his treatment, including the accusation that his opponents are atheists. That's the accusation this time — that those who have a different vision of masculinity than he does, a different vision of American society, those who are not on board the Josh Hawley train, are atheists.

So, just like God and Bible or Christian don't name anything determinate in his approach, "atheist" here doesn't name anything specific either. And it really doesn't have anything to do with questions about belief in God. Right, that's what an atheist is — somebody who doesn't believe God exists. That's not really what "atheist" is for him. It's another empty concept that he can fill in any way he wants, and he uses that to great effect, which means that "atheist" here just becomes a code word, a code that he can fill in with the opposite of whatever he thinks or feels or values. You just take whatever he — Christian Josh Hawley — thinks or feels or values. What is the atheist position? Something else. Anything else — that's atheist. Everything he opposes about those with a different vision of America than his own becomes attributed to atheism. That's what atheism is about. It is just about "not Josh Hawley."

And, man, is that on display in this chapter. In that section on the atheist project, he traces his social and political opponents — he traces them to the ancient Epicurean philosophy. It's worth pointing out, like, that's one piece of ancient Greek intellectual tradition he doesn't like. He's got other places where he talks about the Greeks and affirms them, like ancestor veneration, which is a very sort of non-traditionally Christian thing to do. But this piece of Greek intellectual history he doesn't like. But he includes all your Epicurean philosophy, and then he jumps into the French Revolution, and from that to supposed cultural Marxism, with a particular focus on thinkers like Herbert Marcuse. And if you're sitting there saying, "Who the hell is Herbert Marcuse?" — that's an important point to raise, because it's one of these figures that he throws out like this big central name that I think most people, including most people that he opposes, have no idea who Marcuse is, no idea — let alone are they tracing their ideas to Marcuse, or like running around being quote-unquote cultural Marxists. But these are the lines he draws. It's like I connect the dots for him: Epicurean philosophy, French Revolution, cultural Marxists, right up into modern heresies, such as the recognition of the significance of slavery in America's founding — he decries that right up there with the Epicureans — the recognition of trans rights, the recognition that there might be more than two genders. Josh, that maybe gender exists on a continuum, not a binary scale. Those sort of modern heresies, for him, it's a straight line all the way back to the Epicureans and denials of God, and so forth.

Okay, so that's what he does. All of that becomes an image of atheism. Now, here's why that's to me patently ridiculous. And the reason is that there's a lot more to the many, many cultural and social movements that he opposes than opposition to God. Never mind the fact that you don't draw a straight line from the Epicureans to the French Revolution to the Marxist critical theorists he's talking about to support for trans rights — there just is not a straight line to be drawn there.

Okay, but the bottom line is, society is more complex, social history is more complex than he can allow, and I would make two points here. There are a lot more we could make, but two I want to highlight.

Okay, here's the first one, and I hope that you stick with me. I hope this makes sense. For the vast majority of people who are part of those cultural and social movements that he opposes — the vast majority of people he would call the modern Epicureans, or the liberals, or progressives — for the vast majority of people, the things that they support, believe in, has very little, if anything at all, to do with reflections on God. What do I mean by that? I mean that most of the people who support those movements, who are involved in those movements, they're not walking around thinking about God one way or another. And I think that this is — when I talk about his project being a kind of fantasy of what he thinks his opponents are like — here's part of what I think is going on. I think that people with the kind of Christian identity that Hawley has, I think they often are fixated on the idea of God and a godly society. I think it's empty, I think they fill it in in different ways, but nonetheless it occupies their thoughts a lot. And I think that they have this vision of the world where all of us, all the time — because they're busy fixating on that — everybody's fixating on that. So they really do think, I think, oftentimes, that if people don't agree with them, it's because they hate God. They're opposed to God.

But I think the reality is that most people simply don't move around the world that way. They're not usually walking around being opposed to God. I think if you talked to most people and said, "Man, why do you hate God?" — they'd be like, "What are you talking about? I'm talking about trans rights. I'm talking about immigration reform. I'm talking about tax policy and people losing SNAP benefits. What are you talking about, hating God?" You'd be like, "You hate God so much." The point is, it's not going to make any sense. It's going to be an incoherent claim to people who hear that. The only time it'll start to feel relevant is when somebody like Josh Hawley or Pete Hegseth or Marco Rubio or whoever else comes along and makes it about God and starts quoting Bible verses or labeling everybody who opposes them Pharisees or whatever else — then it becomes about God, but even that's not opposition to God. It's opposition to you — the Christian asshole — who are saying these things. I'm opposed to you, I'm opposed to your policies, I'm opposed to what you're trying to do. It's just not about God for almost all the people that Hawley has in view as his enemies. They don't care about God. It's not about God for them.

So I think increasingly, for an increasing number of Americans, and I think for most of the Americans that Hawley opposes, God is not something that they oppose, or don't believe in, or actively even think about. God is just something that's irrelevant. It's just not a relevant part of the discussion for most of them. That's my theory. I think it's more than a theory. I think if I needed to, I could go and sort of build the case, but for now I'll just throw that out there.

Here's the second part: there are a lot of people who are involved in those social and cultural and political movements that he opposes who do think about God. I think most people don't, but I think there are a lot who do. And when they do, they hold the views they do, they're engaged in the activities they are, they support the policies they do, because they believe in God — whether it's a Christian God or not. They believe in God, and if they're Christians, it's often because this is their view of what their Christian faith requires of them.

So what does that mean? It means this: as virtually everyone — except Christian nationalists — can recognize, there are people who support, for example, abortion access, or LGBTQ+ rights, or social justice, because they are Christian. Not because they're atheists. The simple equation Hawley has — that if you disagree with me, if you disagree with Josh Hawley, you're an atheist — it doesn't work. And of course, that's not accidental. Hawley, and everybody like him, they have a vested interest in mischaracterizing this as a battle between Christians and atheists. Full stop. That social complexity, that complexity of identity, that complexity of politics and social policy, that complexity of religious identity — all of that is what they need to reduce. They need to get rid of that complexity. So, what his framing does is it reduces a very complex and messy social reality into something simple and binary, and it recasts the Christian nationalist vision of society as morally pure, as Christian, and as a battle against evil atheists. That's what he does.

So the way that his concept of Christianity, or the Bible, or religion, or whatever, is empty, his concept of his enemies as atheists is also empty. And that's what lets him fill it in any way he wants. That pattern of emptying concepts — Christian, God, atheist — of any content, so that he can fill them in different ways. That's one of his most consistent strategies in this book. And I would argue that again, that's a strategy that people on the right use routinely. We could keep hammering on example after example. You could go through his book and just pull out examples. We're not going to do that, but I do want to highlight one more example that I think is really important from this chapter, and that is the concept of sacrifice.

Because he says that men are called to be priests, which entails fire and sacrifice. Sounds pretty intense. They're supposed to carry the fire. He didn't really tell us what that means — I guess it's like the wizard Gandalf, Keeper of the Secret Fire. He never really tells us what that means. But they're also called to sacrifice. And here he does give an example. He gives us an example of what sacrifice means, drawn from the Bible. He gives us an example of one of his Hebrew Bible heroes who models what priestly manhood is, and it is absolutely trivial. He once again reaches to King David in the Bible. And Holly likes people that are powerful as his exemplars. When he goes to the Bible, he never picks the marginalized or the minor figures. It's always people who are rulers. So it's King David. King David sacrifices — and what does he sacrifice? How does he sacrifice? Once again, we're hanging on it. Josh, you're going to tell us what sacrifice is. A priest is defined by fire and sacrifice. What does a priest sacrifice? What does a man have to sacrifice? How does David sacrifice?

Here it is. Are you ready for it? He dances in public. That's right. David sacrifices by dancing. He tells the story of David when he runs around Jerusalem dancing — that's how he sacrifices. So, how is that a sacrifice? Well, he says — and I can't make this up, I promise I'm not making this up, it's ridiculous — but this is what he says: it was a sacrifice in the sense that essentially he embarrassed people around him by dancing. It was kind of embarrassing that he danced, that the king danced. That's his sacrifice.

Talk about evacuating a concept of any meaningful content. He could have even chosen, like, maybe the story of David and Bathsheba — David has a son, according to the story, conceived in sin and disobedience to God, the whole Bathsheba tale, and so forth, and the judgment on that is that the son is going to die. I mean, you talk about maybe a model of sacrifice, or something like that, that you could do something with — man, that would be intense. But no, it's that he danced. And so once again we get Hawley telling us that men are called to sacrifice, and this is his example: David dancing.

Why? Why that example? That's the thing we need to ask. It's easy to point and say, "What a stupid, trivial example." Okay, but like — why? Why that example? Well, I don't have Josh here to ask him. Once again, no one has reached out to line up a time to talk. If they do, hey, I'm here. Let's chat.

Here's one of the things that I think. I think that maybe it's because he doesn't have any personal examples of meaningful sacrifice that he's ever made, so he has to trivialize the notion so that his own actions can be described as sacrificial. If you're going to write a book about models of masculinity, there's a kind of implicit claim there that you need to be embodying that. And Josh Hawley just doesn't have a lot of sacrifice in him. It's why, again, I think most of the stories he tells are stories about other people, not him. So I think he has to find ways to make his own actions be described as sacrificial. He's got to sort of lower the bar on what qualifies as sacrifice, so that he could be described as sacrificial.

But here's another reason. I think this is a more important reason. I think it's because if he highlighted a more meaningful conception of sacrifice, he would open the door to recognizing that those people he accused of being selfish and self-centered — those modern Epicureans, those people he calls atheists — the liberals and the progressives who only care about themselves, about their self-interest, and don't care about society and others — if he recognized a more robust sense of sacrifice, he'd have to recognize that those people he opposes have often sacrificed. He might have to highlight all the people who sacrificed for African American civil rights, including, of course, lots of Christians, for whom he just has no space in his thought. He'd have to highlight all the people who sacrificed for queer rights. He'd have to highlight all the people who sacrificed for women's rights. He'd have to highlight all the people who sacrificed for workers' rights. He might have to acknowledge all the people currently sacrificing to defend immigrants' rights, or to provide abortion access, or to provide trans health care.

He would have to look at the real sacrifices people all over this country make all the time — sometimes for themselves, sometimes for people they know, but oftentimes for others they don't — sacrificing their money, their time, sometimes their lives in the defense of others, the rights of others, the rights of others that Hawley denies. And the former law professor, the former Missouri Attorney General, the U.S. senator has to decry them and deny the fact that they've ever sacrificed anything. He has to couch all of that as not sacrificial, but selfish, as quote-unquote atheistic.

And we have talked on the podcast more times than I know about the people of faith involved in all of those things. Now he's going to describe sacrifice as David dancing, so he can point to himself and look in the mirror and see something sacrificial, and ignore the real sacrifices going on around him all the time, on the part of those out in the world sacrificing in real ways for others.

I'm going to go ahead and throw this out. If we wanted to make a Jesus reference, we don't have to — this is not that kind of show. I don't care if you want to make Jesus references or not. But if somebody wanted to, they could say, well, you know, Jesus says that if you're serving him, you have to serve the least of these — the oppressed, the marginalized. There's a vision I could get on board with. He has to deny the people who've done that, and he has to find ways to make his own life look sacrificial — his life of privilege. He's worked hard, I get that. He's achieved a lot. But he's never had to sacrifice the way that those people have. And that's the other reason that he wants to pick a trivial example of sacrifice.

I think it's also why he picks examples of powerful people doing things, because I don't really think he has much of a vision for common, regular people and what they do. So what he has to do is trivialize and redefine sacrifice, so that you can define his own life as sacrificial, and so that you can deny those real sacrifices people perform all the time — the people that he dismisses as selfish and self-centered, and as atheistic, and whatever else.

Gotta wrap this up. Where are we? We've got one chapter left in the book. We're going to dive into that. It's the chapter on the last role that men are called to play. It's the role of king. I can't wait — again, I'm reading the book as we go. I've skimmed a little of that chapter, but I don't know everything he's going to tell us. I'm sure it's going to be crazy. We'll get there. But we know his game by now — and it's not just Josh Hawley's game. I want to really just keep emphasizing this. We're talking about Josh Hawley because he's not unique, because he is an example of something broader. And when it comes to masculinity, his game is the right-wing playbook: affirm a certain form of militant, kind of alpha masculinity, and call it Christian, so that it's sort of above reproach, so it has the divine stamp of approval, etc. And then you mobilize that to attack anyone who doesn't believe that that masculinity and those men are the backbone of Christian American society. That's the playbook. And Josh Hawley — again, he's not done yet. We've got one more chapter to go. We'll dive into that next week.

I want to end as I do by thanking you for listening, or watching — however you are hearing what I am saying. Thank you for doing that. There are lots of other things you could listen to. There's a world full of podcasts, and some are good, and some are not, and some are just entertaining. If you're listening to this, you're choosing to listen to this — that means the world to us. Thank you for your support. Please keep supporting us, keep your eyes and ears out. We're coming out with some new things that we're going to be doing, some new things that we'll be communicating with you — to keep trying to put out new content and new ways of doing things, and keep doing all the things that we do, increasing what is already really a lot of content. We can't do it without you. So thank you for your support. Thank you for your time. And, as always, please be well until we get a chance to talk again, everyone.