Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  At work, Trotsky sometimes swings by my desk just to talk. Apparently the women on the blog team have noticed that Trotsky and I are getting to be friends, and this bugs them. They don’t like Trotsky. Neither does Spinner, for that matter. Spinner complains to Cranium that Trotsky and I are getting too friendly. Cranium tells Trotsky that he needs to stop hanging out with me at work. That, anyway, is what Trotsky tells me. “The women on the blog team don’t like it,” he says. I can’t believe it. “What is this, middle school?” I say. “Well,” he says, “it’s not just that.” Spinner has told Cranium that some of our banter is making the women who sit near me uncomfortable. One woman who overheard one of our conversations felt it was inappropriate. Trotsky won’t say which woman complained, but he does tell me which conversation it was. We were talking about child care. Trotsky’s wife works full time. They’ve tried day care but are thinking about hiring a nanny. We’ve dealt with the same issue, and first hired a nanny and then resorted to getting au pairs to live with us and watch the kids. It turns out that having a nineteen-year-old German girl living in your house is maybe not the greatest idea. Nothing inappropriate ever happened, but it drove my wife nuts, I tell him. Trotsky says no way would his wife even entertain having an au pair live with them. This conversation has made someone uncomfortable. That person confided in Spinner, who reported us to Cranium. To me the whole thing seems stupid. But Trotsky takes it seriously. “You can get fired for almost anything and survive,” he says. “But the one thing you cannot survive is getting fired for sexual harassment. If that happens, you’ll never work again.” From then on I steer clear of Spinner and the women on the blog team. I say hello when I come to work and goodbye when I’m leaving, and that’s about it. Trotsky’s trouble with Spinner is just beginning, however. For whatever reason, she has decided that she hates him, and she’s waiting for another reason to pounce. One night, foolishly, he gives her an opportunity. It starts when Trotsky writes a Facebook post about the Ban Bossy campaign that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is promoting. Sandberg wants everyone to stop using the word bossy to describe girls. Trotsky says that instead of using her bully pulpit to pursue something as trivial as the word bossy, Sandberg should dedicate herself to more important issues, like the plight of the African elephant, which is on the verge of extinction. Trotsky loves elephants. He’s always ranting about the awful poachers who kill them for their ivory. I have no idea how elephants became so dear to him, or how his mind makes the illogical leap from Sheryl Sandberg’s feminist crusade to the issue of elephant poaching. I also don’t care.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Upon visiting Thomas Road, Frances FitzGerald remarked that “sports, the oldest of Anglo-Saxon prescriptions for the sublimation of male violence and male sexual energies, might stand as a metaphor for the whole social enterprise of the church.” In Falwell’s words, “God wants you to be a champion.”11 In the 1970s and 1980s, Falwell used military and sports analogies interchangeably. By the 1990s, however, as some evangelicals began to back away from militaristic rhetoric, sports offered a more palatable alternative. In 1996, for instance, Ralph Reed sent a memo instructing grassroots leaders of the Christian Coalition to “avoid military rhetoric and to use sports metaphors instead.” Still, sports and military metaphors could function in similar ways, critics pointed out. In a world destabilized by modern feminism, sports offered disaffected men a masculine haven. Like military metaphors, sports called to mind a world in which men, by virtue of their superior physical strength, still dominated. Both sports and the military, too, reinforced a dualistic view of the world. In athletics, as in battle, there were winners and losers. In this way, sports-infused rhetoric and pageantry allowed Promise Keepers to address male anxieties while maintaining the semblance of benevolent patriarchy.12 It was when the evangelical men’s movement elevated sports as the preferred metaphor for Christian manhood that “racial reconciliation” emerged as a guiding purpose. Under McCartney’s leadership, Promise Keepers was one of the few white Christian organizations in the country willing to take on racism. Critics viewed Promise Keepers’ focus on racial reconciliation with skepticism. Some accused leaders of “jumping on the racial reconciliation bandwagon, in part because it allows them to sound supportive of people of color, without actually having to support any of the political and social policies that would benefit people of color.” Framing racism as a personal failing, at times even as a mutual problem, PK speakers routinely failed to address structural inequalities. In this way, the pursuit of racial reconciliation could end up serving as a ritual of self-redemption, absolving white men of complicity and justifying the continuation of white patriarchy in the home and the nation. Several African American pastors critiqued this unwillingness to address deeper structural questions and called out the organization for racial tokenism. Yet, far more than other evangelical organizations, Promise Keepers provided a platform for African American voices. Black pastors like Tony Evans, Wellington Boone, and E. V. Hill, and sports stars like Reggie White frequently appeared at PK rallies.13 Promise Keepers’ pursuit of racial reconciliation did amount to more than mere posturing. Its 1996 book Go the Distance: The Making of a Promise Keeper (published by Focus on the Family) included chapters by Charles Colson, Bill McCartney, Stu Weber, and other white evangelicals, but it also included an unsparing critique of white Christianity penned by African American pastor and civil rights activist John Perkins. How much this commitment to racial reconciliation trickled down to the rank and file is difficult to gauge.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The community of belief helps us to expand our vision of this landscape, and encourages us to go ‘further up and further in’ (C. S. Lewis) to this way of thinking and living. Communities of faith provide an environment in which their underlying beliefs – again, whether political, religious or cultural – can be studied, internalised and appropriated. Particularly in religious communities – such as churches, synagogues and mosques – education is seen as integral to achieving a mature faith, capable of engaging the world and sustaining a meaningful life. This typically takes the form of explaining the core beliefs and defining practices of a community and pointing to exemplars who are able to enact and model the community’s distinctive ethos. There is now a growing awareness of the need to prepare communities of belief for the challenges of living in a pluralist western context, in which there are no universally accepted norms of truth, justice or goodness, and in which nobody is seen as having privilege in matters of belief. While some communities of belief are trying to find an appropriate place and voice within wider culture, re-reading their histories to see if the past might help them navigate the stormy seas of the present, others isolate themselves from the complexities of our social world to maintain the myth of their totalising truths. This isolationism is a source of concern because it detaches such communities from the cultural mainstream, often leading to the perception that they are at war with, or threatened by, wider society. This can easily lead to alienation or even radicalisation within these communities, which result in political or religious extremism. Some Islamic communities in secular France or alt-right networks in Germany provide illuminating examples of this problem, for which there appears to be no obvious solution. Charles Taylor noted the ‘fragilisation’ of belief in the modern period, which was catalysed by a growing awareness of alternative possibilities. The emergence of a pluralist culture ‘fragilises’ belief systems – whether religious or atheist – by undermining their self-evident correctness. ‘If my view of the world is right, why do other views exist?’ The hostility of certain forms of secular atheism to continuing religious belief in a supposedly secular culture is partly a response to the threat that they pose to its plausibility, heightened by the growth and enhanced visibility of religious immigrant communities in many western nations. ‘If my theory is right, religion ought not to exist.’ Peter Berger concurs: ‘The appearance of an alternative symbolic universe poses a threat because its very existence demonstrates empirically that one’s own universe is less than inevitable.’ 12 Communities of belief thus serve an important role in maintaining the plausibility of their own position in the face of a cultural milieu that suggests that their views are not as secure and self-evident as they might like to believe they are.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  The suspicious man inside stood with his arms folded while I used the phone in the entryway. On the wall was a gallery of Navy photos. I scanned from them to the crudely rendered tattoos on his forearms. On one was an anchor. On the other was a nude woman drafted in thick, tasteless lines. It was much too crude to be a portrait. It was more symbolic, like the anchor. I finished the call and waited. It was probably only ten minutes but it seemed like two hours, as I anticipated what I would receive when I got home. Dad was going through his black and blue period and had been for as long as I could recall. “Scott, this is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you,” was his mantra. On this occasion he would be right. He broke two bones in his hand. But before he drove me home for the inevitable, Dad paused to admire the gallery of Navy ships. The ex-sailor eyed Dad’s upper arm. Dad proudly pulled his sleeve up to reveal a dark green and red dragon tattoo. “That’s a beauty.” The sailor grinned. Dad smiled, but his eyes glared at me. “Thanks.” Leeny shrugged. Her hand disappeared in her pocket and she pulled out the ten. “I'll keep the five for my trouble.” Her coat gave the soft groan of hardened old leather as one arm disappeared inside it. I looked at that sturdy but very feminine body and her pale skin. That hair and those eyes. Damn. “No, wait.” She turned back and waited. I nodded softly, and she set the coat back down on a rusty Samsonite chair. I pointed to the brightly lit chaise longue. It was my models’ favorite platform back in the day. Canvas Back 383 It had a pristine carved frame and its richly padded sangria red velvet covering was comfortable enough to sleep on. I was glad I’d decided not to sell it for noodles during one of my many “I’d eat cockroaches” periods. Leeny kicked off her ratty tennis shoes and looked at the black fabric draped all around the chaise. She reached her hand under the lights, testing their warmth like the shallow end of a pool. She nodded then unbuttoned her jeans and let them fall. She hooked a prehensile big toe in one belt loop and ably tossed the jeans to the seat of the Samsonite. She peeled her tank top and tossed it atop the jeans. There was no hesitation to her stripping. There was a crude art to how she moved.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  It’s like living in Argentina during the 1970s. Every week someone else is no longer sitting at their desk, and we get an email from Cranium telling us that so-and-so has graduated, and hey ho, let’s all wish them well. One guy, who worked with Trotsky at his last company, and whom Trotsky recruited, lasts only for a few weeks and then gets the axe when someone decides they don’t need him after all. So many people are being let go that at one of our weekly marketing department meetings someone submits an anonymous question to Cranium: “Over the last two months, we have lost at least one male employee every week. Are the remaining males safe?” Cranium tries to make a joke of it. He assures us that HubSpot is not cutting costs, that companies make adjustments all the time. He says he is actively hiring, and the company is growing, and everything is awesome. In our next one-on-one beanbag chair bull session, I tell Trotsky that it seems to me that the company is trying to cut costs. I realize that I’m probably being paid more than most of the young people in our department, and it makes sense to cut me loose, I will understand. “All I ask,” I say, “is that you give me a little bit of warning. I’m asking this not as an employee, but as a friend. Just give me a little time, and I’ll go find another job. I’ll get out of your hair.” Trotsky assures me there is no pressure on him to cut his budget, but if things change, he will let me know. For a few months in the first half of 2014, things actually get better. I’m now working up on the fourth floor, in a newly renovated space, a world away from the ring of hell that is the telemarketing room. I’m writing e-books aimed at venture capitalists and chief marketing officers, which isn’t as fun as being a columnist at Newsweek, but it’s better than explaining HTML to Marketing Mary. I’m also helping write an update to Inbound Marketing, the book that Halligan and Dharmesh published in 2009. On the side, I’ve started picking up some freelance work, writing articles for Newsweek Japan on topics like robotics and artificial intelligence. Sure, there are still days when I go home and tell Sasha about some astonishingly stupid thing that some bozo has done, but most of the time I can just tune things out. The best thing is that I no longer have to work with Marcia, Jan, and Ashley, the women on the blog team, or Wingman. The only person I deal with is Trotsky, and he and I are becoming pals. I like Trotsky so much that one weekend I invite him and his family to a cookout at my house. I cook steaks and our kids play together.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Ward. and the present writer, in Mind, vol, xiii.—The present chapter is only the filling out with detail of an article entitled 'The Spatial Quale,' which appeared in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for January 1879 (xiii. 64). [296] Reprinted, with additions, from 'Mind' for July. [297] Compare this psychological fact with the corresponding logical truth that all negation rests on covert assertion of something else than the thing denied. (See Bradley's Principles of Logic, bk. i. ch. 3.) [298] See that very remarkable little work, 'The Anæsthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy,' by Benj. P. Blood (Amsterdam, N.Y., 1874).Compare also Mind, vii. 206. [299] To one whose mind is healthy thoughts come and go unnoticed; with me they have to be faced, thought about in a peculiar fashion, and then disposed of as finished, and this often when I am utterly wearied and would be at peace; but the call is imperative. This goes on to the hindrance of all natural action. If I were told that the staircase was on fire and I had only a minute to escape, and the thought arose—' Have they sent for fire-engines? Is it probable that the man who has the key is off hand? Is the man a careful sort of person? Will the key be hanging on a peg? Am I thinking rightly? Perhaps they don't lock the depot'—my foot would be lifted to go down; I should be conscious to excitement that I was losing my chance; but I should be unable to stir until all these absurdities were entertained and disposed of. In the most critical moments of my life, when I ought to have been so engrossed as to leave no room for any secondary thoughts, I have been oppressed by the inability to be at peace, and in the most ordinary circumstances it is all the same. Let me instance the other morning I went to walk. The day was biting cold, but1 was unable to proceed except by jerks. Once I got arrested, my feet in a muddy pool. One foot was lifted to go, knowing that it was not good to be standing in water, but there I was fast, the cause of detention being the discussing with myself the reasons why I should not stand in that pool.'' (T. S. Clouston, Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases, 1883, p. 43. See also Berger, in Archiv f. Psychiatrie, vi. 217.)" [300] Note to Jas. Mill's Analysis, I. 412-423 [301] Classics editor's note: James' Insertion. [302] Classics editor's note: James' Insertion. [303] Classics editor's note: James' Insertion. [304] For an excellent account of the history of opinion on this subject see A. Marty, in Vierteljahrsch. f. wiss.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The allegorical or typological approach to sacred text was best exemplified in the voluminous writings of an Alexandrian Jewish intellectual who was a rather older contemporary of Jesus, Philo. Philo’s work was later more esteemed by Christians than by Jews, particularly because it enabled Christians to explore their whole Bible, ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Testaments together, using his method to reconcile their varied messages: to begin with, in Alexandria, but later throughout the Christian world. There were, after all, already clear examples of allegorical meaning in the biblical text. For instance, Jesus told his disciples to beware of ‘the leaven of the Pharisees’, helpfully explaining that by ‘leaven’ he meant their teaching (Matt. 16.12). Noting that enabled the reader of Scripture to be alert to any use of the word ‘leaven’ anywhere in the biblical text, and then to explore it in the same way. The problem, of course, is that one may sift the biblical text with some particular agenda and come up with allegories to prove the correctness of that proposition. Commentators have frequently found allegory and typology a lifeline to boost some particular argument on sex and marriage, and we will be meeting with more than one example. Sixteenth-century Protestants, infuriated by what they considered absurd over-use of the method in biblical commentary from the Western Latin Church, compared the results to a ‘nose of wax’, a comic false nose such as people wore at carnival time, capable of being twisted in any shape to please the wearer. They might have a point, though they themselves were not above resorting to the allegorical method when all else failed. [3] Both Jews and Christians reading the Septuagint through such Hellenistic lenses might be drawn to think of the God of Abraham rather as Greek admirers of Plato viewed the transcendence and perfection of the supreme deity of the Greek pantheon. Yet even in its Septuagintal form, the Hebrew Bible obstinately pulled its readers back to the physicality of their God. That problem was one of the perpetual fault lines between Judaism and Hellenism. It passed into Christianity and has never been resolved, especially since Christianity adds to the mix the audacious claim that in Jesus the Christ there is God. If that is so, then which God is it: Jewish or Greek? Christians spent the first five centuries after the life of Christ trying to find answers to the conundrum; they have never satisfied everyone. * The second century BCE witnessed a more violent and immediate confrontation between Judaism and Hellenism. In 198 BCE, the Hellenistic Seleucid dynasty of Syria wrested control of Judaea from the Ptolemies of Egypt. That led to open revolt in Judaea in 167 led by Judas Maccabeus, when the Seleucid king Antiochos IV grossly interfered with the cult at the Temple in Jerusalem. His religious aggression was most uncharacteristic in Mediterranean society, but all of a piece with the King’s megalomaniac award to himself of the title Epiphanēs or ‘God manifest’.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Lurking in the background in the USA was the defeat of the slave-holding Confederacy in the Civil War of 1861–5, which left many Southern Evangelicals unreconciled to the idea of equality for African Americans; that racist ethos had actually been the raison d’être for the Southern Baptist Convention separating from abolitionist Baptists in the North in 1845. [26] Protestant identity would in the end splinter into two contrasting directions for world Christianity, but in 1914 the present-day divisions between liberal and conservative theologies were not yet at all fixed, let alone the global political consequences that have flowed from them. An important stage in the process was a series of very widely distributed short British and American essays published in twelve volumes between 1910 and 1915, The Fundamentals. They articulated increasing unease among some Evangelicals about nineteenth-century Protestant explorations of the Bible, and set out a series of points to be defended. These five main principles were ‘verbal inerrancy’ (that is, no possibility of the Bible being mistaken in its literal meaning); the divinity of Jesus Christ; his Virgin Birth; the affirmation that Jesus died on the cross in the place of sinful humanity (a theory technically known as penal substitution); and the proposition that Christ was physically resurrected to return again in the flesh. [27] In 1919 the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association was founded, expanding through its use of mass rallies from a mainly Baptist base, with Pentecostalism a growing component, to affect most Protestant Churches. It was then not at all obvious that within a century matters of sex and gender would be the chief battleground on which Fundamentalists would take their stand, in alliance with other varieties of conservative Christians. Yet already the expansion of anglophone Protestantism through formal and informal imperialism had turned its theological debate on sex into a global conversation. VICTORIAN VALUES AND IMPERIAL CULTURES As nineteenth-century Britain built up an increasingly vast empire on the back of generally successful achievements by its army and navy, so it evolved a masculine ethos similar to that of the citizen armies of mainland Europe in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. There were important differences: this was a patriotism of deference, shaped by British pride in its constitutional monarchy and attendant aristocracy, both of which had been strengthened after previous humiliations in the American War of Independence by their epic achievements contributing to Napoleon’s defeat. All that was framed from 1837 by the long reign of Queen Victoria, who by 1901 had managed to outlive any previous ruler in the Atlantic Isles, and who learned over time how to play the role of grandmotherly figurehead for her subjects worldwide. British territorial reach continued to expand into the 1920s (its largest nominal extent came with its acquisition of a League of Nations’ mandate over the former Ottoman territories of Palestine in 1923).

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Fired? Really? Over a Facebook comment? This makes no sense. “I’m going to talk to Cranium and see what he wants to do,” Trotsky says. “I’ll get back to you.” Later in the day Trotsky starts badgering me to get on the phone with him. I’m with my kids at Six Flags, and it’s their last day in California, and I’d really like to spend the day focusing on them but Trotsky insists on talking now. I’m still reeling from Trotsky’s earlier remark about me being as close to fired as you can get without being fired. Early in the afternoon I see the news that HubSpot has filed its IPO registration paperwork. I realize that this might have something to do with why everyone is so hyped up. We agree to talk at four o’clock my time, seven back East. I call Trotsky from the car, inching along on the 405 freeway in stop-and-go traffic. The kids are in the backseat, wiped out. I’m talking on earbuds so they can’t hear what Trotsky says. I figure it won’t be pleasant. For all I know he’s going to fire me, and if so, I would just as soon they didn’t hear that. I’d rather wait until tomorrow to have this chat, so I would not have to do this in front of my kids, but Trotsky won’t relent. He enumerates the problems my joke has caused and how it demonstrates poor judgment on my part. His tone is officious. He seems to be choosing his words carefully, as if he has written down everything he is going to say and is working his way through a list. Instead of Trotsky, my pal, the guy with the raunchy sense of humor, the one who was so friendly with me that the blog women complained about us, now there is a new Trotsky, and this one is telling me, in a very serious and solemn voice, that I have committed a grievous crime against the Cult of the Orange People, a near mortal sin as far as HubSpot is concerned. Maybe it’s because I’ve been spending weeks on end sitting in a room with writers who talk about huge cocks and dry vaginas, but really, honestly, my little comment on Atticus’s post does not seem like a big deal to me. But it is, Trotsky says. This thing I have done is very, very serious. It is very bad. This is a huge problem. It is going to take a lot of hard work for me to earn back the trust of my colleagues. “You’ve dug yourself into a hole,” he says. “I’m not sure you’ll ever be able to climb back out of it.” I don’t argue with him, or mention that it’s creepy to have people watching what I post on Facebook and then threatening to fire me over it. I’ve resolved to just hear him out, listen to everything he says, and find out what happens next.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  At worst, it confirmed their darkest fears about what a Clinton presidency would mean. Conservatives also painted Clinton as a virulent opponent of religious freedom, only heightening their anxiety over the election and what it would mean for the future of the Supreme Court.2 Then there was the matter of her gender. John Piper had given a special dispensation to vote for the McCain/Palin ticket, but Hillary Clinton was no Sarah Palin. All policy issues aside, the fact that Clinton was a woman disqualified her in the eyes of many conservative evangelicals. But in the 2016 election, evangelical views of gender didn’t just affect Clinton’s appeal—or lack thereof. Gender was also a key factor in shoring up support for the unconventional, morally challenged Republican candidate, Donald J. Trump. EVANGELICAL INFATUATION with Donald Trump wasn’t instantaneous, and it didn’t start with leadership. Initially, prominent evangelicals preferred more traditional Republican candidates, and they had plenty to choose from. Candidate Mike Huckabee wasted no time in denouncing same-sex marriage, reproaching “trashy” women who swore, criticizing the Obamas for letting their girls listen to Beyoncé, warning that ISIS was a greater threat than the “sunburn” people might get from climate change, and declaring “war against a ‘secular theocracy.’” Ben Carson, too, was popular among evangelicals. An African American conservative, Carson knew how to play to the white evangelical crowd. He suggested that a Muslim should be disqualified from serving as president, defended the right to fly the Confederate flag, compared political correctness to the practices of Nazi Germany, and suggested that the Holocaust would not have happened if Jews had been armed. Carson appealed to evangelicals who claimed, and often sincerely believed, that they held no racist convictions, without requiring them to sacrifice any of their social and political commitments. Marco Rubio, meanwhile, was making a strong play for the evangelical vote. He had gathered a “religious liberty advisory board” that included Wayne Grudem and other evangelical academics and faith leaders, and his appeal was especially strong among northern establishment evangelicals—the Wheaton and Christianity Today types.3 Texas senator Ted Cruz also emerged as a contender. The son of a traveling evangelist, Cruz was raised in the dominionist tradition, and even more than Huckabee, Rubio, and Carson, he knew how to stoke the fears of conservative Christians. Cruz drew stark distinctions between good and evil; he, of course, was on God’s side, opposing the forces of evil. He talked of the need to “Restore America” and he echoed the militarized vocabulary that had come to permeate American evangelicalism. The nation was “under attack” and it was only going to get worse. With the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Cruz painted a doomsday scenario of what could happen with a liberal appointment to the Court: unlimited abortion-on-demand, the end of religious freedom, the Second Amendment disappearing from the Constitution. After his victory in the Iowa caucuses, Cruz drew endorsements from James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer, and Glenn Beck.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Self-denial, after all, was a useful virtue for entrepreneurial businessmen and industrious workers. But by the 1890s, this model of manly restraint had begun to falter. A new corporate, consumer economy meant that more men were earning a living by punching the clock, and self-discipline no longer promised the same payoff. As men moved to cities, the work they did changed significantly. For men whose strength had become superfluous, who no longer identified as producers, their very manhood seemed in question. There were other disruptions, too. Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe began arriving at the nation’s shores, and “new women” started going to college, entering the professions, riding bicycles, wearing bloomers, and having fewer babies. In response to all of these changes, old ideas of manhood seemed insufficient. In their place, white native-born Protestant men began to assert a new kind of masculinity—a rougher, tougher masculinity. Nothing less than the fate of the nation, even the future of white Christian “civilization” appeared to be at stake.1 No one advanced this new American masculinity with more gusto than Theodore Roosevelt. As a young man, Roosevelt had been ridiculed for his “high voice, tight pants, and fancy clothing” and derided as a “weakling” and “Punkin-Lily.” But Roosevelt wanted power. Determined to reinvent himself, he went west, rechristening himself the “Cowboy of the Dakotas.” It was on the frontier that a new masculinity would be forged, a place where (white) men brought order to savagery, where men served as armed protectors and providers, where violence achieved a greater good. If the Wild West could mold “the exquisite Mr. Roosevelt” into a rugged masculine specimen, perhaps it could do the same for American manhood generally, so the thinking went. But there was a flaw in this plan. Even as Roosevelt was honing his masculinity on the western frontier, the mythical West was fading away. Rugged American manhood would need to be forged elsewhere—on the new frontiers of empire. This shift to a global stage was perfectly encapsulated in Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders,” a volunteer cavalry who fought in the Spanish-American War—a war that Roosevelt himself helped bring about. In this way, the new American imperialism was framed as a conservative effort to restore American manhood.2 When Roosevelt became president in 1901, the embodiment of heroic American manhood became the undisputed leader of the American nation. By fashioning a violent, fantasized masculinity, and then injecting that sensibility into national politics, Roosevelt offered ordinary men the sense that they were participating in a larger cause. Roosevelt’s hypermasculinity appealed to men anxious about their own status, and the nation’s. For many, these anxieties would become inseparable.3 FOR AMERICAN CHRISTIANS , the challenge was to reconcile this aggressive new masculinity with traditional Christian virtue. With its emphasis on gentility and restraint, Victorian Christianity suddenly seemed insufficiently masculine. Virile, aggressive men could hardly be expected to submit themselves to such an emasculating faith, and so in the 1910s, Christian men set out to “re-masculinize” American Christianity.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  By the 1980s, then, the Democratic Party had become the party of liberals, African Americans, and feminists, and the Republican Party the party of conservatives, traditionalists, and segregationists.10 White evangelicals didn’t just participate in this realignment, they helped instigate it. Billy Graham aided and abetted the southern strategy, advising Republicans on how to make inroads with southern evangelicals who, like him, were birthright Democrats. Southern Baptist pastors, too, switched to the Republican Party earlier than white southerners generally. The Southern Baptist shift to the Republican Party coincided with a “conservative resurgence” within the denomination. Traditionally, Baptists had supported a separation of church and state and advocated a civil libertarianism when it came to social issues. Their power secure in the South, Southern Baptists had largely avoided the challenges of modernism in the 1920s, and the reactionary response modernism provoked; in the 1940s, they’d seen no reason to join the NAE. Having devoted less energy to delineating doctrinal boundaries, Southern Baptists allowed for a relatively wide range of views on theological and social issues. Thus the SBC was home to Billy Graham, W. A. Criswell, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, among others.11 To be sure, many Southern Baptists backed the status quo, including both patriarchy and white supremacy. By the end of the 1960s, when explicit white supremacy was no longer tenable, gender became even more significant. Until that time, Southern Baptists held varying views on gender roles. Some believed the Bible prohibited women from preaching and teaching, while others supported women’s religious leadership. Beginning in the 1960s, however, fundamentalists began to battle for control of the SBC, and gender was at the heart of the struggle.12 By 1979, conservative Southern Baptists’ sense of cultural crisis was acute, and they set out to take over the denomination. Paige Patterson, Paul Pressler, W. A. Criswell, and other like-minded pastors and laymen had hatched a plan that involved electing conservatives to the presidency of the SBC and controlling strategic committee appointments. That year, through carefully orchestrated designs, they succeeded in electing one of their own as president of the Houston convention. Moderates cried foul—political machinations of this sort were not the Baptist way—but conservatives were unapologetic; they were “going for the jugular.” One by one, conservatives gained control of the denomination’s seminaries, purging faculties of moderate voices. Moderates denounced this “power-crazed authoritarianism, a win-atany-cost ethic and a total disregard for personal values and religious freedom,” but to little avail.13 Accounts of the battles over the SBC commonly focus on the question of biblical inerrancy, but the battle over inerrancy was in part a proxy fight over gender. Conservatives were alarmed by women’s liberation, abortion, and changing views on sexuality generally, but they also had concerns specific to the SBC. “Evangelical feminism” had been making inroads in Southern Baptist circles, and growing numbers of Baptist women had begun challenging male headship and claiming leadership positions; between 1975 and 1985, the number of women ordained in the SBC increased significantly.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The great genius of the Shiah was its tragic perception that it is impossible fully to implement the ideals of religion in the inescapably violent realm of politics. Ashoka had discovered this even earlier than the Shii Imams when he promoted his compassionate dharma but could not disband his army. At best, people of faith can either bear witness to these values, as Khomeini did when he castigated the injustice of the Pahlavi regime in the 1960s, or provide an alternative that either challenges or seeks to mitigate state violence. But as we have seen throughout this story, even the most humanitarian traditions are unable to implement their ideals if they identify with a state ideology that inevitably depends upon force. Khomeini believed that the revolution had been a rebellion against the rational pragmatism of the modern world. The goal of his theory of velayat-e faqih was to institutionalize Shii values: the supreme jurist ( faqih ) and the ulema on the Council of Guardians would have the power to veto any legislation that violated the principles of Islamic justice. 104 But in practice, Khomeini would often have to reprove the guardians for playing selfish power games, just as he himself had felt compelled to pursue a cynical realpolitik during the hostage crisis. We have seen that revolutions can take a long time, and like the French Revolution, the Iranian Revolution has passed through many stages and is still in progress. As in France, Iranians feared that powerful external enemies would destroy the Islamic regime. In the summer of 1983 the Iraqis attacked Iranian troops with mustard gas and then with nerve gas the following year. 105 Khomeini was convinced that America would organize a coup similar to the one that had deposed Musaddiq in 1953. Because Iran had antagonized the West, she had forfeited essential equipment, spare parts, and technical advice; inflation was high, and by 1982 unemployment had risen to 30 percent of the general population and 50 percent in the cities. 106 The poor, whose plight Khomeini had championed, were not doing much better under the revolution. Yet Western observers had to acknowledge that, despite the growing opposition of Westernized Iranians, Khomeini never lost the love of the masses, especially the bazaaris, the madrassa students, the less-eminent ulema, and the poor. 107 These people, whom the shah’s modernization program had overlooked, still thought and spoke in a traditionally religious, premodern way that many Westerners could not even comprehend. After the Iranian Revolution, one exasperated U.S. official was heard to exclaim: “Whoever took religion seriously?”

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Families purchased silver “purity rings” to provide girls with a constant reminder of the value of their virginity, and of their obligation to guard it vigilantly. “Purity balls” started popping up across the country, offering families opportunities to enact their commitment to sexual purity through public ceremony. At these events, fathers provided a model of masculine headship by “dating” their daughters, and girls pledged their sexual purity before their families and communities. Like “servant leadership” and complementarian theology, the purity movement enabled evangelicals to reassert patriarchal authority in the face of economic, political, and social change. The widespread popularity of the purity movement was fueled in part by an injection of federal funds. As early as 1981, President Reagan began directing government funding to abstinence-only sex education, and this funding continued through the 1990s, reaching its peak under the George W. Bush administration; by 2005, more than 100 abstinence-based groups would receive more than $104 million in federal funding. Here was a case of government intrusion into the most intimate of matters, yet evangelicals didn’t seem to mind.42 THE EVANGELICAL MEN’S MOVEMENT of the 1990s was marked by experimentation and laden with contradictions. “Soft patriarchy” papered over tensions between a harsher, authoritarian masculinity and a more egalitarian posture; the motif of the tender warrior reconciled militancy with a kinder, gentler, more emotive bearing. Inconsistencies within the evangelical men’s movement reflected those within evangelicalism as a whole in the post–Cold War years. Earlier in the decade, it might have appeared that the more egalitarian and emotive impulses had the upper hand. It was a new era for America, and for American evangelicals. Rhetoric of culture wars persisted, but evangelicals’ interests had expanded to include a broader array of issues, including racial reconciliation, antitrafficking activism, and addressing the persecution of the global church. At the end of the decade, however, the more militant movement would begin to reassert itself. When it did, this resurgent militancy would become intertwined both with the sexual purity movement and with the assertion of complementarianism within evangelical circles. In time it would become clear that the combination of all three could produce toxic outcomes. Chapter 10 [image file=Image00000.jpg] NO MORE CHRISTIAN NICE GUYJ OHN ELDREDGE DIDN’T LIKE OFFICE WORK. IT wasn’t good for his masculinity or his spirituality. Spiritual life was meant to be “frontier,” untamed. If evangelical men wanted to experience true Christianity, they’d need to get out of “their La-ZBoys and climate-controlled shopping malls and into God’s wild creation.” Eldredge’s 2001 book, Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul , set the tone for a new evangelical militancy in the new millennium. Eldredge’s God was a warrior God, and men were made in his image. Aggression, not tenderness, was part of the masculine design. Wild at Heart would sell more than four million copies in the United States alone, becoming a ubiquitous presence in megachurch men’s groups, college dorm rooms, Christian bookstores, and church libraries.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  The fact that some of the more militant fundamentalists had started their own organization (the American Council of Christian Churches, under the leadership of fundamentalist Carl McIntire) helped with this project, enabling the NAE to distance itself from more reactionary elements, and it was at this time that “evangelical” came to connote a more forward-looking alternative to the militant, separatist fundamentalism that had become an object of ridicule. But evangelicals never entirely abandoned a combative posture, and even as evangelicals worked to bring a new respectability to their “old-time religion,” fundamentalists fought to define the contours of that faith. The affinities ran deep, and it was not always possible to distinguish one from the other; eventually, fundamentalists would inject their militancy back into the broader evangelical movement. In his opening address of the first meeting of the NAE in 1942, the Reverend Harold John Ockenga warned his fellow “lone wolves” of the ominous clouds looming on the horizon that “spell[ed] annihilation” unless they decided to “run in a pack.” For decades, evangelicalism had “suffered nothing but a series of defeats,” but the time had come to usher in “a new era in evangelical Christianity.” As “children of the light,” they could learn a thing or two from “the children of this world,” from the Soviets and the Nazis. In matters of both church and state, defensive tactics had proven disastrous. Evangelicals must unite and take the offensive, before it was too late.13 Just how small was this remnant? When delegates came together the following year, news reports estimated that the NAE represented about two million members, based on denominational affiliation—a fraction of the 60 to 70 million Christians who were represented by the more liberal Federal Council of Churches. But the evangelical movement was never limited by denominational affiliation, and its influence was on the rise.14 The path forward was clear, and it would not be through denominational structures. To evangelize the nation, evangelicals needed magazines that could reach millions, and access to the airwaves for national radio broadcasts. They needed organizations for missions, and for evangelical colleges and Bible schools. They already possessed the resources and the brain power. What was missing was a network that would support and amplify these individual efforts.15 WHEN IT CAME TO evangelicals’ rebranding efforts, it was a handsome young North Carolina minister who would play the starring role. More than anything else, Billy Graham’s celebrity knit together the disconnected universe of American evangelicalism—so much so that historian George Marsden once quipped that the simplest definition of “evangelical” might well be “anyone who likes Billy Graham.” A one-time Fuller Brush salesman, Graham became the face of the new evangelicalism—and that face was an attractive, masculine one, a fact that rarely went unnoticed.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The Quran seems aware that some Muslims would not be happy to hear that God had encouraged fighting: “Fighting has been ordained for you, though it is hateful to you.” 36 Once the ummah had started to engage in warfare, it seems that one group, which was strong enough to warrant extensive rebuttal, consistently refused to take part: Believers, why, when it is said to you, “Go and fight in God’s cause,” do you feel weighed down to the ground? Do you prefer this world to the world to come? How small is the enjoyment of this world compared with the life to come! If you do not go out and fight, God will punish you severely and put others in your place. 37 The Quran calls these people “laggers” and “liars,” and Muhammad was reproved for allowing them to “stay at home” during campaigns. 38 They are accused of apathy and cowardice and are equated with the kufar, the enemies of Islam. 39 Yet this group could point to the many verses in the Quran that instruct Muslims not to retaliate but to “forgive and forbear,” responding to aggression with mercy, patience, and courtesy. 40 At other times, the Quran looks forward confidently to a final reconciliation: “Let there be no argument between us and you—God will gather us together and to Him we shall return.” 41 The impressive consistency of this irenic theme throughout the Quran, Firestone believes, must reflect a strong tendency that survived in the ummah for some time—perhaps until the ninth century. 42 Ultimately, however, the more militant groups prevailed, possibly because by the ninth century, long after the Prophet’s death, the more aggressive verses reflected reality, since by this time Muslims had established an empire that could be maintained only by military force. A favorite text of those involved in the wars of conquest was the “Sword Verse,” which they regarded as God’s last word on the subject—though even here the endorsement of total warfare segues immediately into a demand for peace and leniency: When the forbidden months are over wherever you encounter the idolaters, kill them, seize them, besiege them, wait for them at every look-out post; but if they repent, maintain the prayer, and pay the prescribed alms let them go on their way, for God is most merciful and forgiving.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  36 For some time, Egyptian peasants had engaged in this type of disengagement ( anchoresis ) to escape economic or social tension. During the third century, there had been a crisis of human relations in the villages. These farmers were prosperous but acerbic and quick with their fists, yet the village’s tax burden and the need for cooperation to control the floodwaters of the Nile obliged them to live in unwelcome proximity with uncongenial neighbors. 37 Success was often resented. “Although I possess a good deal of land and am occupied with its cultivation,” one farmer explained, “I am not involved with any person in the village but keep to myself.” 38 When neighborly relationships became unendurable, therefore, people would sometimes retire to the very edge of the settlement. 39 But once Christianity reached the Egyptian countryside in the late third century, anchoresis was no longer a disgruntled withdrawal but had become a positive choice to live according to the gospel in a way that offered a welcome and challenging alternative to the acrimony and tedium of settled life. The monk ( monachos ) lived alone ( monos ), seeking the “freedom from care” ( amerimmia ) that Jesus had prescribed. 40 Like the renouncers of previous times, the monks set up a counterculture, casting off their functional role in the agrarian economy and rejecting its inherent violence. A monk’s struggle began as soon as he left his village. 41 At first, explained one of the greatest of these anchorites, he was plagued by terrifying thoughts “of lengthy old age, inability to perform manual labor, fear of the starvation that will ensue, of the sickness that follows undernourishment, and the deep shame of having to accept the necessities of life from the hands of others.” 42 Their greatest task, however, was to still the violent impulses that lurk in the depths of the human psyche. The monks often described their struggles as a battle with demons, which we moderns usually understand as sexual temptations. But they were less preoccupied by sex than we are: Egyptian monks usually avoided women because they symbolized the economic burden they wanted to escape. 43 Far more threatening than sex to these sharp-tongued Egyptian peasants was the “demon” of anger. 44 However provocative the circumstances, monks must never respond aggressively to any attack. One abbot ruled that there was no excuse for violent speech, even if your brother “plucks out your right eye and cuts off your right hand.” 45 A monk must not even look angry or make an impatient gesture. 46 These monks meditated constantly on Jesus’s command to “love your enemies” because most of them did have enemies in the community. 47 Evagrius of Pontus (d. 399), one of the most influential monastic teachers, drew on Paul’s doctrine of kenosis and instructed monks to empty their minds of the rage, avarice, pride, and vainglory that tore the soul apart and made them close their hearts to others.

• From Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997)

  When arousal continues (because discharging it is too threatening), we find ourselves in a no-win situation. We feel compelled to find a source of threat, but the compulsion is internally generated and even if an external source of threat is identified, the compulsive, hypervigilant stance will continue because the internal arousal is still present. We will persistently try to find the source of the threat (where is it?) and identify it (what is it?), because that is what the primitive orienting response is programmed to do when the nervous system becomes aroused. The catch is that there is often no threat to be found. Hypervigilance becomes one of the ways we manage the excess energy resulting from an unsuccessful defense against an original threat. We use hypervigilance to channel some of that energy into the muscles of the head, neck, and eyes in an obsessive search for danger. When combined with the internal arousal that is still present, our rational brains can become irrational. They begin to search for and identify external sources of danger. This maladaptive practice channels much of the energy into a specific activity that will become more and more repetitive and compulsive. In the hypervigilant state, all chang e( including changes in our own internal state s) is perceived as a threat. What may appear to be unfounded paranoia may actually be our interpretation of the excitement of sexual arousal or even the effect of caffeine in a soft drink. As the freezing response gradually becomes more and more entrenched, the tendency for hypervigilance and defense grows stronger. Hypervigilant people are keyed to a state of intense alertness at all times and may actually develop a slightly furtive or fearful, open-eyed appearance due to this constant watchfulness. There is a growing tendency to see danger where there is none, and a diminished capacity to experience curiosity, pleasure, and the joy of life. All of this occurs because, at the core of our beings, we simply do not feel safe. Consequently, we will continually be on edge, ready to initiate a defensive response, but unable to execute it coherently. We search compulsively for the threat that can’t be found, even when a real threat stands before us. The nervous system can become so activated that it cannot readily tune down. As a result, behavioral and physiological rhythms (e.g., sleep) may be disturbed. We will be unable to unwind or relax, even in those moments when we feel safe enough to do so. Mrs. Thayer

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Now one night, when Talano happened to be staying with this wife of his at one of their country estates, he dreamt that he saw her wandering through some very beautiful woods, which were situated not far away from the house. As he watched, an enormous and ferocious wolf seemed to emerge from a corner of the woods and hurl itself at Margarita’s throat, dragging her to the ground. She struggled to free herself, screaming for help, and when at length she managed to escape from its clutches, the whole of her throat and face appeared to be torn to ribbons. So when Talano got up next morning, he said to his wife: ‘Woman, your cussedness has been the bane of my life since the day we were married; but all the same I should be sorry if you came to any harm, and therefore, if you’ll take my advice, you won’t venture forth from the house today.’ When she asked him the reason, he told her about his dream, whereupon she tossed her head in the air and said: ‘Evil wishes beget evil dreams. You pretend to be very anxious for my safety, but you only dream these horrid things about me because you’d like to see them happen. You may rest assured that I shall never give you the satisfaction of seeing me suffer any such fate as the one you describe, whether on this day or any other.’ ‘I knew you would say that,’ said Talano. ‘A mangy dog never thanks you for combing its pelt. But you may think whatever you like. I only mentioned it for your own good, and once again I advise you to stay at home today, or at any rate to keep well away from those woods of ours.’ ‘Very well,’ said the woman, ‘I’ll do as you say.’ But then she began to think to herself: ‘Here’s a crafty fellow! Do you see how he tries to frighten me out of going near the woods today? He’s doubtless made an appointment there with some strumpet or other, and doesn’t want me to find him. Ah, he’d do well for himself at a supper for the blind, but knowing him as I do, I should be a great fool to take him at his word. He certainly won’t get away with this. I shall find out what business takes him to those woods, even if I have to wait there the whole day.’ No sooner had she reached the end of these deliberations than her husband left the house, whereupon she too left the house by a separate door and made her way to the woods without a moment’s delay, keeping out of sight as much as possible. On entering the woods, she concealed herself in the thickest part she could find, and kept a sharp lookout on all sides so that she could see if anyone was coming.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  plagiarized. The sudden male preoccupation with a primordial human habit in the eighteenth century is yet another symptom of the age of individual choice, for few pursuits are more shaped by individual decision than masturbation. It must have been encouraged by the general development of greater privacy in the design of northern European housing, and the value on personal privacy that sprang out of that: many more sexual activities could now take place in private than would have been the case for earlier generations. [30] Society’s inability to control masturbation unnerved the self-confident philosophe or the moralizing clergyman just as much as did the self-assertion of women or the public emergence of homosexuality. At the end of the century, the lifelong bachelor Immanuel Kant accompanied his exposition of Enlightenment with extended intemperate remarks about masturbation: he loaded ‘self-abuse’ with preconceptions shaped more by personal dread than by logic, condemning it as worse than self-murder, that is, suicide. It was the ultimate enemy of the mature government of the self that Kant proclaimed as Enlightenment. This was in the context of his affirmation that any sexual act is of itself automatically debasing: ‘a stance almost religious in its dourness’, in the splendid phrase of one modern commentator on the German Enlightenment and society. [31] THE CHANCE TO CHOOSE: EVANGELICALISM European Protestant religion meanwhile was striving against dourness in a series of religious movements emphasizing human passions as much as did the Enlightenment. These twin phenomena may seem unrelated, or even opposed, since the religious fervour of what came to be known as ‘Evangelicalism’ sprang out of the Augustinian theology of Martin Luther, who had reaffirmed Christian pessimism about humanity in sharp contrast to Kant’s praise of humanity coming of age in the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, many religious leaders were in fact keenly interested in the scientific advances that accompanied Enlightenment thought, notably the founder of Methodism, John Wesley. Wesley’s championing of a doctrine of ‘Christian perfection’ crafted out of Reformation Protestantism was an emphatic rejection of the conclusions that John Calvin had drawn from Augustine on salvation, putting Wesley bitterly at odds with fellow Evangelical leaders who self-consciously championed Calvin’s predestinarianism. [32] The new-found freedoms of choice encouraged people to choose, shape and even re-invent their religion, pouring new life into Churches of the Reformation just at the moment when Protestant powers were beginning to create overseas empires that spread the Word across the world. What is remarkable is the interconnection of the various movements, which all took their immediate and their long-term origins from Protestant Germany, still recovering in the long aftermath of its seventeenth-century trauma in the Thirty Years War (1618–48). As we have noted in Chapter 14, from the 1670s a movement that came to be known (at first abusively by its opponents) as ‘Pietism’ affected first the Lutheran and later the Reformed Protestant Churches, and it was appreciatively noted by the serious-minded in England.