Pride

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

  The Maccabean rebels suffered terribly in fighting him, but they succeeded in returning Judaea to a native dynasty descended from heroes in the liberation struggle; known from an earlier ancestor as the Hasmoneans, they ruled as high priests for the Jerusalem Temple. Though the Hasmonean monarchy proved to be the last Judaean experience of prolonged independence in the ancient world, it was an extraordinary achievement against a great power: a victory to cherish, reinforcing the sense of a unique Judaic destiny and distinctiveness in God’s purpose. The Hasmoneans remained a significant regional force in the eastern Mediterranean for a century until conquered by a new imperial power arriving from far to the west of Judaea’s previous overlords. When the Hasmoneans first encountered the Roman Republic in the second century BCE, Rome was still a far-away city, a potential ally against their threatening neighbours. By 63 BCE, the Roman army’s invasion of Judaea was part of its mopping-up operations around Rome’s real prizes, the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires. Roman conquest led to a further Jewish Diaspora into the western Mediterranean: the Jewish community in Rome was one of the first to be affected by Christian activism in the first century CE. In 37 BCE, looking for a compliant local ruler for Judaea but finding no convincing Hasmonean candidate, the Romans displaced the last Hasmonean and replaced him with a relative by marriage, who reigned for more than three decades. Their choice, an outsider from the land of Edom (which the Romans called Idumea) south of Judaea, was Herod I, ‘the Great’. Herod rebuilt the Second Temple as one of the largest sacred complexes in the ancient world; its remnants still impress by their monumentality. Yet his subjects gave him little thanks, and self-conscious Judaean upholders of purity in God’s Covenant were angered by Herod’s Greek-style innovations such as public sporting contests (male nudity always a possibility), gladiatorial combats or horse-racing in newly built arenas. [4] After Herod’s death in 4 BCE, his sons divided the extensive territories that the first Roman emperor Augustus had allowed the puppet king to build up. For more than a century thereafter, and during the life of Jesus, Rome experimented with a mixture of indirect rule through various members of the Herodian family and, for parts of Judaea, direct imperial control through a Roman official.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Erasmus deserves credit for discerning the need of the times, and recommending the revival of the practice of preaching and the mission of preachers to the heathen nations. His views were set forth in the Ecclesiastes or Preacher, a work written during the Freiburg period and filling 275 pages,1162 each double the size of the pages of the hardcopy volume. The chief purpose of preaching he defined to be instruction. Every preacher is a herald of Christ, who was himself the great preacher. The office of preaching is superior in dignity to the office of kings. "Among the charisms of the Spirit, none is more noble and efficacious than preaching. To be a dispenser of the celestial philosophy and a messenger of the divine will is excelled by no office in the church." It is quite in accord with Erasmus’ high regard for the teaching function, that he magnifies the instructional element of the sermon. Writing to Sapidus, 1516, he said, "to be a schoolmaster is next to being a king."1163 Of the English pulpit, there is little to say. We hear of preaching at St. Paul’s Cross and at other places, but there is no evidence that preaching was usual. No volumes of English sermons issued from the printing-press. Colet is the only English preacher of the 15th century of historical importance. The churchly counsel given to priests to impart instruction to the people, issued by the Lambeth synod of 1281, stands almost solitary. In 1466, Archbishop Nevill of York did no more than to repeat this legislation. In Scotland the history of the pulpit begins with Knox. Dr. Blaikie remarks that, for the three centuries before the Reformation, scarcely a trace of Christian preaching can be found in Scotland worthy the name. The country had no Wyclif, as it had no Anselm.1164 Hamilton and Wishart, Knox’s immediate forerunners, were laymen.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Prove it?’ said Scalza. ‘Why, I shall prove it by so conclusive an argument that not only you yourself, but this fellow who denies it, will have to admit that I am right. As you are aware, the older the family, the more noble it is, and everyone agreed just now that this was so. Since the Baronci are older than anyone else, they are ipso facto more noble; and if I can prove to you that they really are older than anybody else, I shall have won my case beyond any shadow of a doubt. ‘The fact of the matter is that when the Lord God created the Baronci, He was still learning the rudiments of His craft, whereas He created the rest of mankind after He had mastered it. If you don’t believe me, picture the Baronci to yourselves and compare them to other people; and you will see that whereas everybody else has a well-designed and correctly proportioned face, the Baronci sometimes have a face that is long and narrow, sometimes wide beyond all measure, some of them have very long noses, others have short ones, and there are one or two with chins that stick out and turn up at the end, and with enormous great jaws like those of an ass; moreover, some have one eye bigger than the other, whilst others have one eye lower than the other, so that taken by and large, their faces are just like the ones that are made by children when they are first learning to draw. Hence, as I’ve already said, it is quite obvious that the Lord God created them when He was still learning His craft. They are therefore older than anybody else, and so they are more noble.’ When Piero, the judge, and Neri, who had wagered the supper, and all the others, recalling what the Baronci looked like, had heard Scalza’s ingenious argument, they all began to laugh and to declare that Scalza was right, that he had won the supper, and that without a doubt the Baronci were the most ancient and noble family, not only in Florence, but in the whole wide world. And that is why Panfilo, in wanting to prove the ugliness of Messer Forese, aptly maintained that he would have looked loath-some alongside a Baronci. SEVENTH STORYMadonna Filippa is discovered by her husband with a lover and called before the magistrate, but by a prompt and ingenious answer she secures her acquittal and causes the statute to be amended. Fiammetta had finished speaking, and everyone was still laughing over the novel argument used by Scalza to ennoble the Baronci above all other families, when the queen called upon Filostrato to tell them a story; and so he began:

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

  Domestic tranquility could be established through the imposition of law and order. It should come as no surprise that a country that embraced Wayne as its favorite movie star (he held the top spot as late as 1995) would also elect a man like Reagan president. White men in particular admired their swagger, their old-school masculine confidence, and their apparent willingness to exercise authority even if it required violence.7 To conservative evangelicals, Reagan was a godsend. In the face of Carter’s “wimp factor,” Reagan projected the rugged, masculine leadership they believed the country so desperately needed. (It was much easier to chalk up Carter’s failures to deficient masculinity than to blame US policy stretching back decades.) Reagan’s irrefutable masculinity also reassured conservatives unsettled by the gay rights movement. It wasn’t lost on conservative Christians that Carter’s own masculinity seemed lacking, even as “the homosexual movement reached its maximum level of influence” under his watch.8 In 1980, the election widely hailed as the moment the Christian Right came into its own, evangelical voters bypassed the candidate who shared their faith tradition in favor of the one whose image and rhetoric more closely aligned with their values and aspirations. Guided by preachers like Robison, Falwell, and LaHaye, 67 percent of white evangelical voters chose Reagan over Carter; just four years earlier, Carter had received 49 percent of the evangelical vote and 56 percent of the white Baptist vote. Although white evangelicals supported Reagan at higher rates than white nonevangelicals, they probably weren’t the deciding factor in the election; Carter’s widespread unpopularity, a stagnant economy, and the drama of the Iran hostage crisis likely would have ensured Reagan’s victory even without the mobilization of evangelical pastors and grassroots activists. The Christian Right may not have swung the election to Reagan, but it did succeed in securing the loyalty of evangelicals to the Republican Party. From Reagan on, no Democrat would again win the majority of white evangelical support, or threaten the same. Evangelicals’ loyalty to the Republican Party would continue to strengthen, and they would use their electoral clout to help define the Republican agenda for the generation to come.9 Reagan benefited from the southern strategy that his Republican predecessors had pursued. Since the 1950s, white southerners had been abandoning the Democratic Party, and Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Acts accelerated this process. Like Nixon, Reagan was adept at using racially coded rhetoric like states’ rights, “law and order,” and “forced busing” to appeal to white voters. Indeed, Reagan had launched his campaign at the Neshoba County Fair, praising states’ rights just a few miles down the road from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964, and he campaigned at Bob Jones University at a time when the school was a flashpoint for private Christian schools fighting against desegregation mandates.

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

  To Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell, the US soldier in Vietnam remained “a living testimony” to Christianity, and to “old fashioned patriotism.” A defender of “Americanism,” the American soldier was “a champion for Christ.”31 When confronted with undeniable evidence of American brutality, evangelicals could always fall back on the concept of human depravity. With sin lurking in every human heart, violence was inevitable, and only Jesus was the answer. When the young army lieutenant William Calley faced trial for his role in the murder of some five hundred Vietnamese men, women, and children in what came to be known as the My Lai massacre, Billy Graham remarked that he had “never heard of a war where innocent people are not killed.” He told, too, of “horrible stories” he’d heard from missionaries of “sadistic murders by the Vietcong,” and he reminded Americans that Vietnamese women and children had planted booby traps that mutilated American soldiers. His moral reflection in the pages of the New York Times was remarkably banal: “We have all had our Mylais in one way or another, perhaps not with guns, but we have hurt others with a thoughtless word, an arrogant act or a selfish deed.”32 In 1969, Graham sent a thirteen-page letter to President Nixon—a letter only declassified twenty years later—offering an array of policy scenarios, some of which clearly abandoned Christian just-war theory and the Geneva Conventions. It is unclear what effect Graham’s letter had on Nixon’s strategy, but Graham’s was certainly not a voice of restraint. Even as Graham became increasingly ambivalent about the war, he remained unwavering in his support for Nixon. Meanwhile, conservative evangelicals continued to celebrate American servicemen, and looked to returning soldiers to provide leadership on the home front as well. At a time when evangelical churches needed to take a stand, who better to lead a nation—and its churches—than men who had “carried those concerns through the jungles of Viet Nam”?33 The Vietnam War was pivotal to the formation of an emerging evangelical identity. For many Americans who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, Vietnam demolished myths of American greatness and goodness. American power came to be viewed with suspicion, if not revulsion, and a pervasive antimilitarism took hold. Evangelicals, however, drew the opposite lesson: it was the absence of American power that led to catastrophe. Evangelical support for the war seemed to grow in direct relation to escalating doubts among the rest of the public. After the Tet Offensive in the summer of 1968, a poll revealed support for continued bombing and an increase in US military intervention “among 97 percent of Southern Baptists, 91 percent of independent fundamentalists, and 70 percent of Missouri Synod Lutherans; only 2 percent of Southern Baptists and 3 percent of fundamentalists favored a negotiated withdrawal.” Aware of their outlier status, many evangelicals understood themselves to be a faithful remnant, America’s last great hope.

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

  121 Like the Yellow Emperor, Han rulers would use religious rituals in an attempt to take the bestial savagery out of warfare so that it became humane. At the start of his reign, Liu Bang had commissioned the Confucian ritualists ( ru ) to devise a court ceremonial, and when it was performed for the first time, the emperor exclaimed: “Now I realize the nobility of being a Son of Heaven!” 122 The ru slowly gained ground at court, and as the memory of the Qin trauma faded, there was a growing desire for more solid moral guidance. 123 In 136 BCE the court scholar Dong Zhongshu (179–104) suggested to Emperor Wu (r. 140–87) that there were too many competing schools and recommended that the six classical Confucian texts become the official state teaching. The emperor agreed: Confucianism supported the family; its emphasis on cultural history would forge a cultural identity; and state education would create an elite class that could counter the enduring appeal of the old aristocracy. But Wu did not make the mistake of the First Emperor. In the Chinese Empire there would be no sectarian intolerance: the Chinese would continue to see merit in all the schools that could supplement one another. Thus, however diametrically opposed the two schools might be, there would be a Legalist-Confucian coalition: the state still needed Legalist pragmatism, but the ru would temper Fajia despotism. In 124 BCE Wu founded the Imperial Academy, and for over two thousand years all Chinese state officials would be trained in a predominantly Confucian ideology, which presented the rulers as Sons of Heaven governing by moral charisma. This gave the regime spiritual legitimacy and became the ethos of the civil administration. Like all agrarian rulers, however, the Han controlled their empire by systemic and martial violence, exploiting the peasantry, killing rebels, and conquering new territory. The emperors depended on the army ( wu ), and in the newly conquered territories the magistrates summarily expropriated the land, deposed existing landlords, and seized between 50 and 100 percent of the peasants’ surplus. Like any premodern ruler, the emperor had to maintain himself in a state of exception as the “one man” to whom ordinary rules did not apply. At a moment’s notice, therefore, he could order an execution, and nobody dared object. Such irrational and spontaneous acts of violence were an essential part of the mystique that held his subjects in thrall.

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

  He had two significant tasks: to lead the Friday prayers and to lead the army into battle. The latter was a new departure because the Umayyads had never personally taken the field with the army, so Harun was the first autocratic ghazi-caliph. 71 The Abbasids had given up trying to conquer Constantinople, but every year Harun conducted a raid into Byzantine territory to demonstrate his commitment to the defense of Islam: the Byzantine emperor reciprocated with a token invasion of Islamdom. Court poets praised Harun for his zeal in “exerting himself beyond the exertion [ jihad ] of one who fears God.” They pointed out that Harun was a volunteer who put himself at risk in a task not required of him: “You could, if you liked, resort to some pleasant place, while others endured hardship instead of you.” 72 Harun was deliberately evoking the golden age when every able-bodied man had been expected to ride into battle beside the Prophet. Despite its glorious facade, however, the empire was already in trouble, economically and militarily. 73 The Abbasids’ professional army was expensive, and manpower always a problem. Yet it was imperative to defend the border against the Byzantines, so Harun reached out to committed civilians who, like himself, were ready to volunteer their services. Increasingly, Muslims who lived near the empire’s frontiers began to see “the border” as a symbol of Islamic integrity that had to be defended against a hostile world. Some of the ulema (“learned scholars”) had objected to the Umayyads’ monopoly of the jihad because it clashed with Quranic verses and hadith traditions that made jihad a duty for everybody. 74 Hence, when the Umayyads had besieged Constantinople (717–18), ulema, hadith-collectors, ascetics, and Quran-reciters had assembled on the frontier to support the army with their prayers. Their motivation was pious, but perhaps they were also attracted by the intensity and excitement of the battlefield. Now following Harun’s lead, they gathered again in even greater numbers, not only on the Syrian-Byzantine border but also on the frontiers of Central Asia, North Africa, and Spain. Some of these scholars and ascetics took part in the fighting and in garrison duties, but most supplied spiritual support in the form of prayer, fasting, and study. “Volunteering” ( tatawwa ) would put down deep roots in Islam and resurface powerfully in our own day. During the eighth century, some of these “fighting scholars” started to develop a distinctively jihadi spirituality. Abu Ishaq al-Fazari (d. c. 802) believed he was imitating the Prophet in his life of study and warfare; Ibraham ibn Adham (d. 778), who engaged in extreme fasts and heroic night vigils on the frontier, maintained that there could be no more perfect form of Islam; and Abdullah ibn Mubarak (d. 797) agreed, arguing that the dedication of the early Muslim warriors had been the glue that bonded the early ummah.

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

  The pioneer – a veritable English male counterpart to Wibrandis Rosenblatt – was Thomas Cranmer’s episcopal colleague William Barlow, who, like the Archbishop and his brother Edmund Cranmer, was a priest who married in the 1530s when it was still illegal to do so in England. Bishop Barlow fathered five daughters, all of whom wedded clergy in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church who then became bishops (in one case eventually Archbishop of York). He was thus a father-in-God in more than one sense; he had many imitators. In the parish of Buxhall in rural Suffolk, four or five miles from my own childhood Rectory home, over an extraordinary chronological span of 1569 to 1948, the clerical and gentry family of Copinger (and then Hill, latterly Copinger-Hill) managed to find an almost uninterrupted succession of male family members capable of ordination and therefore of residence in their increasingly stately Rectory beside the church. [24] This was a triumphant re-creation of those clergy dynasties that the Gregorian reforms had sought to eliminate. Its ultimate expression was in the Principality of Transylvania, where in 1629 the militantly Reformed Protestant Prince Gábor Bethlen took to a new level the already high prestige of the ministry throughout Reformed Europe by ennobling the entire clerical order in his principality. Later political changes in the region did not diminish the social prominence of Reformed Transylvanian pastors. [25] Now that Protestants had closed monasteries, together with chantries and most devotional guilds, Christian life concentrated on the parish; far fewer clergy than before ministered within the parish and they became very different in character. All of them would be expected to preach, essential to conveying a new formulation of the Christian message in the early Reformation but persisting as the main public duty of the Protestant pastor: a constant renewal of God’s Word in spoken words. With the Orders of friars dispersed, preaching required far more professional education than before for local ministry. The change can be expressed in statistics. In 1500 the pre-Reformation diocese of Utrecht, comprising most of the northern Netherlands, boasted around 18,000 clergy; by the early seventeenth century that had been remodelled in the same area into an educated and Reformed Protestant parochial ministry only 1,524 strong, mostly married with families. [26] The clerical paterfamilias even looked different from his priestly predecessors: commonly he would boast a generous beard, proof of masculine potency as well as conveniently like everyone’s mental image of an Old Testament prophet. The beard also deliberately countered the smooth chins of Catholic clergy. Cleanshavenness had been a product of the eleventh-century Gregorian revolution, when Pope Gregory VII himself had threatened punitive action against obstinately bearded clergy in Sardinia. Ironically that reflected his antagonism to the Eastern Churches; they may have mandated clerical beards so that clergy might resemble Graeco-Roman philosophers – or possibly so that they did not resemble eunuchs.

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

  Trump believed “in a black-and-white world of right and wrong, good and evil.” It was like in the movies, where you always knew the good guys from the bad guys, and you knew America was on the side of the righteous. Trump, in other words, was a real man, a man whose rugged masculinity was forged in 1950s America, a time when all was right with the world.43 In 2016, nearly three-quarters of white evangelicals believed America had changed for the worse since the 1950s, a more pessimistic view than any other group. They were looking for a man who could put things right, a man who could restore America to a mythical Christian past. Like Bachmann, they believed that God had blessed America and they believed Trump understood this; he wasn’t ashamed of Christian America. Trump wasn’t just a nationalist, he was a Christian nationalist, and he wasn’t afraid to throw his weight around.44 Evangelicals hadn’t betrayed their values. Donald Trump was the culmination of their half-century-long pursuit of a militant Christian masculinity. He was the reincarnation of John Wayne, sitting tall in the saddle, a man who wasn’t afraid to resort to violence to bring order, who protected those deemed worthy of protection, who wouldn’t let political correctness get in the way of saying what had to be said or the norms of democratic society keep him from doing what needed to be done. Unencumbered by traditional Christian virtue, he was a warrior in the tradition (if not the actual physical form) of Mel Gibson’s William Wallace. He was a hero for God-and-country Christians in the line of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Oliver North, one suited for Duck Dynasty Americans and American Christians. He was the latest and greatest high priest of the evangelical cult of masculinity. Chapter 16 [image file=Image00000.jpg] EVANGELICAL MULLIGANS: A HISTORYT HREE MONTHS INTO DONALD TRUMP’S presidency, three-quarters of white evangelicals approved of his job performance, nearly twice as high as his approval rating among the general public. Trump’s evangelical support was strongest among regular churchgoers. Most evangelicals appeared to be far less conflicted about their crude, egotistical, morally challenged president than many had imagined them to be. But this shouldn’t have come as a surprise.1 Since the 1960s and 1970s, evangelicals had championed discipline and authority. To obey God was to obey patriarchal authorities within a rigid chain of command, and God had equipped men to exercise this authority in the home and in society at large. Testosterone made men dangerous, but it also made them heroes. Within their own churches and organizations, evangelicals had elevated and revered men who exhibited the same traits of rugged and even ruthless leadership that President Trump now paraded on the national stage. Too often, they had also turned a blind eye to abuses of power in the interest of propping up patriarchal authority.

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

  Here Weber turned to the ancient Hebrew word for man, Ish , which means “piercer,” and the Hebrew word for woman, Isha , or “pierced one,” insisting that the distinction went beyond the obvious “anatomical or sexual elements.” In this case, the physical was “a parable of the spiritual.” Man, at his core, was tough and strong, a risk taker, “an initiator—a piercer, one who penetrates, moves forward, advances toward the horizon, leads.” Women, on the other hand, preferred security and order; they were gentle responders, tender companions, “aloneness fighters.” These differences were woven through all of Scripture, and nothing was more pitiful “than a man forfeiting his masculinity or a woman her femininity by transgressing the created order.”28 For models of masculinity Weber looked to the Western, and, like Dalbey, to the mythopoetic men’s movement pioneered by men like Robert Bly, author of the popular Iron John (1990). Weber thought Bly had journeyed far in his search for manhood, but not far enough. Instead, Weber directed men to the “Genesis spring,” to the biblical source of masculinity. In Scripture, one learned that man was given dominion to rule “with all power and authority,” to defend, guard, and protect. A man’s most critical function was that of warrior. According to Weber, “warrior tendencies” were evident even in little boys: “It doesn’t matter if you never give your little guy a gun; he’ll use his finger.” As for its “unmistakable” presence in Scripture, no one could debate the warrior imagery of the Old Testament, but Weber insisted that God was the warrior of both testaments. The apostle Paul, after all, was an “ancient warrior,” a “never-say-die kind of guy” who withstood “imprisonment, torture, betrayal, and beatings that left him an inch from death.” Rambo had nothing on him, and he “would have done Louis L’Amour proud.” And then there was Jesus, the “ultimate man,” the “complete Hero.” Tragically, images of Jesus had been grossly disfigured by “a media that either hates and distorts Him or vastly misunderstands Him.” Too many men had become victims of a “demasculinized” portrait of Christ, making it difficult for them to follow Jesus and leaving them looking elsewhere for models of manhood. In the final chapter of the Bible, Weber reminded readers, Jesus “closes the Book on a white war horse, in a blood-spattered robe, with a sword in His mouth and a rod of iron in His hand.” The Bible ended in a roar, not a whimper.29 At the same time, a true warrior had a tender heart. For Weber, the “tender warrior” was the perfect solution for navigating a path between an outmoded “macho” masculinity and an unacceptable, effeminate one. Here, even John Wayne as masculine icon came up short. It was hard to imagine John Wayne diapering a baby, and that’s because Hollywood didn’t understand the tender warrior.

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

  Due to his hybrid theology, and no doubt also to his cantankerous personality, no established Reformed denomination would claim him. Undaunted, Wilson started his own denomination. In 1981, he founded the Logos School, a classical Christian academy, and he became a leader in the classical Christian education movement, establishing the Association of Classical and Christian Schools in 1994, and that same year founding New Saint Andrews College, a four-year classical Christian college with the motto: “For the faithful, wars shall never cease.”12 Wilson’s Future Men was a perfectly timed primer on militant masculinity that reached far beyond his enclave. Looking to Theodore Roosevelt as a model of Christian masculinity, Wilson asserted that as future men, boys were “future warriors.” Consistent with Reconstructionist thought, the concept of dominion was central to Wilson’s definition of masculinity; like Adam in the Garden of Eden, all men were made to exercise dominion. Boys had an innate drive to conquer and subdue, and they should be trained to be adventurous and visionary, to become “lords in the earth.” For this task, it was essential for young boys to play with toy swords and guns, and for older boys to be trained in the use of real firearms. Indeed, Wilson called for a “theology of fist fighting” to instruct boys when, where, and how to fight. Lest there be any doubt, Wilson clarified that Christianity was in no way pacifistic. True, Old Testament prophets foretold a time of peace, or an “eschatological pacifism,” but the peace Christ brings was purchased with blood. Until that time men and boys must study war; to do otherwise would leave men “fighting the dragon with a pruning hook.”13 Like other writers, Wilson defined masculinity in terms of initiation. As he explained in his earlier writings on marriage, “a man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” Although egalitarians might rebel against the concept of authority, Wilson believed that the submission of wives to husbands, when occurring “in countless families,” would bring about “a larger patriarchal society” and a greater social good. According to Wilson, marriage had three purposes: companionship, producing godly children, and the avoidance of sexual immorality. With regard to the latter, God offered very practical help for Christians struggling with temptation: sexual activity. Like Marabel Morgan and the LaHayes, Wilson believed that sexual relations within marriage should be frequent. God intended for women to meet their husbands’ (considerable) sexual needs; it was woman’s duty “to submit to the will of God and gladly bear children for her husband.” Moreover, marriage could not be “spiritually consummated” if the husband acted as a “spiritual eunuch,” as one “impotent in his masculinity.” Women must understand that they were “led by a lord .” To this end, young suitors should be “disruptively masculine,” cheerfully interfering with a future wife’s plans. Woman was made for man, not the other way around.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “This fight must stop now”, he said loudly, “if another blow is struck or word said, I’ll report the disobedience to the Doctor.” Without a word I went and put on my coat and waistcoat and collar, while his friends of the Sixth escorted Jones to the schoolhouse. I had never had so many friends and admirers in my life as came up to me then to congratulate me and testify to their admiration and goodwill. The whole lower school was on my side, it appeared, and had been from the outset, and one or two of the Sixth, Herbert in especial, came over and praised me warmly: “A great fight”, said Herbert, “and now perhaps we’ll have less bullying: at any rate”, he added humorously, “no one will want to bully you: you’re a pocket professional: where did you learn to box?” I had sense enough to smile and keep my own counsel. Jones didn’t appear in school that night: indeed, for days after he was kept in sick-bay upstairs. The fags and lower school boys brought me all sorts of stories how the doctor had come and said “he feared erysipelas: the bruises were so large and Jones must stay in bed and in the dark!” and a host of other details. One thing was quite clear; my position in the school was radically changed: Stackpole spoke to the Doctor and I got a seat by myself in his class-room and only went to the form-master for special lessons: Stackpole became more than ever my teacher and friend. When Jones first appeared in the school, we met in the Sixth room while waiting for the Doctor to come in. I was talking with Herbert; Jones came in and nodded to me: I went over and held out my hand, “I’m glad you’re all right again!” He shook hands but said nothing. Herbert’s nod and smile showed me I had done right. “Bygones should be bygones”, he said in English fashion. I wrote the whole story to Vernon that night, thanking him, you may be sure, and Raleigh for the training and encouragement they had given me. My whole outlook on life was permanently altered: I was cock-a-hoop and happy. One night I got thinking of E… and for the first time in months practiced Onanism. But next day I felt heavy and resolved that belief or no belief, self-restraint was a good thing for the health. All the next Christmas holidays spent in Rhyl, I tried to get intimate with some girl; but failed. As soon as I tried to touch even their breasts, they drew away. I liked girls fully formed and they all thought, I suppose, that I was too young and too small: if they had only known!

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

  [44] The binary gendering of nineteenth-century Western culture did mean that the mission field reflected Protestant first-wave feminism as well as the masculinism of both government and Church. From mid-century, female energies that had begun expressing themselves in anti-slavery and temperance organizations were turned towards the already flourishing worldwide missionary enterprise, both sides of the Atlantic. In the British Empire, the missionary growth burst out of its original Evangelical context to involve Anglo-Catholics as well; as early as the 1860s even the new Orders of Anglican nuns. In the USA, the missionary movement soon outgrew the impressive achievements of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, with missionary societies reaching memberships of around 3 million by the 1920s, supporting around twice as many women as there were male missionaries. [45] Those involved, both male and female, had become very conscious that, in most of the cultures to whom mission was addressed, it was impossible for men to have any useful contact with women in households. Female missionaries in India made much of the concept of zenana, the segregated space for women in both Hindu and Muslim contexts, to which their femininity held the key; it became a more general metaphor for a special female missionary role beyond the formal existence of zenana. [46] Woman’s Work for Woman was the title of the monthly magazine of the main US Presbyterian missionary organization from the 1870s; it stood as a programme for the whole movement, which broadened in its self-understanding and aims as the work expanded, away from simple evangelism towards medical skills, childcare, education and a broadening concept of women’s rights. The overwhelming majority of female missionaries through the period were single, and so not constrained by families in patriarchal mode: they could justifiably claim to be more free than men to listen to the experiences of those women to whom they sought to minister, and they had the capacity to acquire multiple skills after appropriate training that formed them into as much of a profession as the male clergyman. All this was so successful that after the 1920s a half-century of separate female leadership was subsumed in mixed missionary societies. In one sense that was a statement of equality between the sexes, but it was also an end to the separate female world of control and initiative which possessed its own distinctive agenda. [47] Nevertheless, by that time, female missionary efforts had created institutions that carved out a permanent place for women to co- operate and express themselves in ways that cut across male institutions. The Mothers’ Union, one of the most large-scale and effective, was created for Anglicans in 1876 by Mary Sumner, the wife of an Anglican bishop. Notably it was one of the very few voluntary organizations in the Anglican Communion not to take on the colours of one theological ‘party’.

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

  He praised Dabney’s “prophetic” views on the evils of public education and women’s equality, and he found Dabney’s anti-feminism “refreshingly virile.” Phillips skirted around Dabney’s proslavery sentiments, although Phillips, too, diminished the horrors of slavery and denied the genocide of Native Americans. Phillips also revered Theodore Roosevelt, and in 2001 he published The Letters and Lessons of Teddy Roosevelt for His Sons . The next year he published Poems for Patriarchs . He felt a need to explain that, yes, it was a book of poetry, but the poems were “neither fluffy nor frilly, foppish nor foolish, but virile and often savage.” He included poems on God and Christ as warrior kings, and counted Stonewall Jackson among his Christian heroes. He called on men to assume patriarchal leadership “more noble than the valiant deeds of shining knights of yore,” and, quoting Charles Spurgeon, he instructed wives to set aside their own pleasure, to sink their individuality into their husbands, to make the domestic circle their kingdom and husbands their “little world,” their “Paradise,” their “choicest treasure.” Phillips believed that patriarchy and patriotism were inextricably connected, and both were God-given duties. Patriarchy was key to the success of nations, and to be “anti-patriotic” was “to be a spiritual ingrate.”5 Phillips’s Vision Forum thrived in the 2000s, producing an array of materials distributed and promoted at homeschool conferences and online. An All-American Boy’s Adventure Catalog contained cowboy costumes, knife and tomahawk sets, slingshots, and an “All-American boy’s crossbow” to train boys in heroic manhood. The Beautiful Girlhood collection, meanwhile, offered books and DVDs promoting “purity and contentment,” “heritage and home,” and products such as “Southern lady doll dresses.” Vision Forum’s gender order was ensconced within a foundational Christian nationalism; the organization led “Faith and Freedom Tours,” and for those who could not attend, they produced an array of books and DVDs celebrating Christian patriotism. By 2011, Vision Forum’s revenues approached $3.4 million. Phillips also sponsored a Christian Filmmakers Academy and a Christian film festival. Kirk Cameron taught at Phillips’s academy and was awarded Best Feature Film at the 2009 San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival for his 2008 Fireproof , a film about a heroic but angry firefighter who feels his wife does not show him sufficient respect and turns to a Christian self-help book to save his marriage. Phillips was meeting the growing demands of an expanding homeschool market, but he was also reaching evangelicals beyond that market niche. His dominionist-inspired teachings celebrating a patriotic, militant Christian masculinity resonated with evangelicals awakened to the “problem” of masculinity by the broader evangelical men’s movement, and he found common cause with evangelicals far beyond his immediate circles of influence.6 By the 2000s, Phillips emerged as a leading figure in the Quiverfull movement, a pronatalist movement within conservative Protestantism that was especially popular in homeschool networks. It took its name from Psalm 127:4–5: “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth.

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

  The first tells of a single military campaign, probably reflecting some real war of centuries before, in which Greeks besieged and destroyed the (non-Greek) city of Troy in north-west Anatolia (Asia Minor, today Turkey). The Odyssey chronicles journeys home to Ithaka from the siege by one Greek hero, Odysseus, over ten years. The two epics took shape orally in recitation sometime in the eighth or seventh century BCE, attributed to a poet named Homer, of whom we know nothing for certain. They were written down in a form of script that the Greeks borrowed from the Phoenicians, another coastal Mediterranean people, and refined for their own purposes: the alphabet, ancestor of our own alphabet via its later adaptation by the Romans. The Israelites, neighbours (and frequently fractious neighbours) of the Phoenicians, took the technology of the alphabet in a different direction to record their own Hebrew language and write down their own sacred literature. In both cases, literature reinforced or created self-identification. For the Greeks identity was based on their shared knowledge of Homer’s epics, together with certain religious sites, temples and ceremonies which they saw as common property in Hellas – especially the oracle of the god Apollo at Delphi and a shrine and associated pan-Hellenic games held at Olympia in the Peloponnese. It is notable that the Iliad portrays the defeated Trojans as no different in culture from the Greeks besieging them. Greeks loftily told themselves that all non-Greeks were barbaroi, an expressive way of saying that non-Greek languages were as meaningless as a baby’s ‘ba-ba’ babble. In reality they were keenly interested in other sophisticated cultures, particularly in two great empires impinging on their lives: Persia (Iran), which long dominated their eastern flank and actually ruled many of their cities; and Egypt, south across the Mediterranean. While Greeks were impressed by the antiquity of these civilizations, they were not enthused by the political organization of such giant powers, and they showed an emphatic preference for living in and identifying with small city-states. That made perfect geographical sense in the fragmented and mountainous heartlands of Greece and Anatolia, but Greeks deliberately replicated such independent city-states in flatlands when they founded colonies far dispersed round the Mediterranean coast. These colonies affectionately remembered their origins for centuries, and in time of trouble might draw on the link with an ancient Greek founder-city. [2] The outlook that nurtured such long-term relationships reflected this sense that a city-state was the natural Greek way to live. The Greek word for city is polis (pl. poleis) – but Greek is a language where apparently simple words can have as many resonances as ripples from a stone thrown into a still pond, and with polis the resonances are rather like those of the English word ‘home’. A polis was more than the cluster of houses and marketplaces around a temple which was universally its visible embodiment in Hellas.

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

  Across the parking lot stood the World Prayer Center’s global headquarters, a “spiritual NORAD,” and in its atrium stood another bronze warrior angel armed with enormous biceps and packing a sword. The chapel contained computers where visitors entered personal prayers; the center’s staff provided more politically oriented prayers—for a marriage amendment, for the appointment of new justices, and for the president. The center also offered prayers for US foreign policy, for God to “crush [the] demonic stronghold and communist regime of Kim Jun II,” and for the forces of good to prevail in Iraq.9 Those at New Life were aware of the strategic position they occupied. Colorado Springs was a battleground, a “spiritual Gettysburg,” explained one man who understood his own role in militarized terms: “I’m a warrior, dude. I’m a warrior for God. Colorado Springs is my training ground.” Like the military, New Life employed a rigid chain of command to ensure strict ideological conformity. Male authority and female submission were essential to that hierarchical order. The church also elevated the role of sexual purity, though Haggard insisted that purity didn’t diminish pleasure; evangelicals, he boasted, had “the best sex lives” of anyone. All this came together in a larger mission. Evangelicals who flocked to Colorado Springs shared in a mythical dream “populated by cowboys and Indians, monsters and prayer warriors to slay them, and ladies to reward the warriors with chaste kisses.” Haggard’s New Life Church was a hotbed of militant evangelicalism. Together, Haggard and Dobson worked to spread this militant faith throughout the US military.10 FOR HALF A CENTURY , evangelicals had been working to strengthen the military and imbue it with evangelical values, and they’d been warmly received, particularly by evangelicals already entrenched within the armed forces. By the 2000s, however, some service members began to object to the overt proselytizing and coercive religious atmosphere they encountered within the military. The air force academy in Colorado Springs was ground zero in the battle over religious expression and coercion. The mission to combat an alleged evangelical takeover was led by Mikey Weinstein, a 1977 honor graduate of the academy, former air force officer, and former legal counsel to the Reagan White House. Weinstein and his family were Jewish, and both of his sons attended the academy, where they encountered aggressive Christian proselytizing at times tinged with anti-Semitic undertones. Weinstein began to gather documentation, and his complaints led to an investigation that revealed a “pervasive” religious intolerance at the academy. A number of questionable activities came to light. Johnny A.

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

  Etheldreda did have a continuing usefulness for tenth-century reformers because of her emphatic defence of her virginity through her two marriages. Beyond her was the ultimate example of the divine favour offered to virginity, in Mary. There is previous evidence of the cult of Mary from the seventh century, but that evidence mainly comes from the north and west Midlands, the kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia, suggesting that it may have been an overspill from devotion in Irish or Welsh Christianity. A new phase in the tenth century has a different distribution in southern England, with its central energy in Winchester, just at the period and in the area most involved in monastic reform. [44] There was more to Mary than simply a symbol of virginity. Prominent in the lively literature that Marian devotion generated was the theme of Mary as Queen of Heaven, which chimed with the long-standing Anglo-Saxon devotion to queens who were saints. Even if their royal successors had lost much of their actual power in the Church, a turn to Mary was perhaps a way of squaring that rhetorical circle. In the same fashion as the links of the whole monastic reform movement with Francia, English Marian devotion could draw on a century or more of Frankish Marian literature. Such literature had grown increasingly fascinated by Mary’s genealogy that made her Queen of Heaven: she now became the pinnacle of the genealogical line of Jesus set out in Matthew’s Gospel, regardless of the complications of that genealogy which we have already observed as leading not to Mary but to Joseph (above, Chapter 4). The Marian family tree was a development that well suited an age of royal families struggling to retain or reclaim their power. [45] 14. This late fifteenth-century French translation of the Golden Legend puts Mary emphatically at the centre of the family tree back to Jesse, father of David, though the caption below hints at the complications of genealogy in Matthew and Luke’s Gospels. Church reform in England created a second set of victims, this time male. Contemptuous of what remained of the former Anglo-Saxon system of religious foundations organized with families and dynasties in mind, the reformers bitterly attacked the supposed sinfulness and debauchery of clergy living as ‘canons’ of English minsters, whether married or professedly celibate – the distinction was not always clear. Bishop Æthelwold led the way in expelling the existing clerical staff of two adjacent minsters in his cathedral city of Winchester, all with the backing of King Eadgar and the King’s thegns. Such reformers as Æthelwold were reading Bede’s diatribes against those monasteries of which he had disapproved, and behind Bede was the ‘Apostle of the English’ Gregory the Great. Both these venerated authorities reached back to the writings of the mysterious Easterner Pseudo-Dionysios the Areopagite, and they confronted their readers with Dionysios’s resonant identification of true ascetics as angels: remember the investigative journalism of Bede’s angel at Coldingham. [46] Conversely, Bishop Æthelwold (ventriloquizing King Eadgar in a royal charter to the refounded New Minster in Winchester) compared his clerical victims to the angel companions of Satan/Lucifer/the Devil whom God had expelled from Paradise, ‘cast[ing] out the filth of the rebel angels with their puffed-up haughtiness’. The Wessex campaigners for purity were in the same way ‘clearing away the filth of evil deeds’. [47] In the Byzantine world, eunuchs had seized on the image of the angel for their own purposes (above, Chapter 8), but eunuchs hardly impinged on the consciousness of Latin Westerners, and so the angelic metaphor was now left in the sole possession of monks. Nuns rather fell out of this comparison, in keeping with the unexamined assumption that the genderlessness of angels was still vaguely male: as vague as the maleness of a monk should be. Therefore nunneries were not going to share much of the benefit of this literary construction. Nor could a nun celebrate the Eucharist, unlike an ordained monk, who upstaged her virginity by his resemblance to an angel. Prolonged and serious resistance from married clergy no doubt encouraged the violence of the reformers’ rhetoric, who might have had to recognize that in the Atlantic islands, as in the coastal regions of Francia facing England, most clergy were in fact the sons of clergy right into the eleventh century, if not

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

  Better to look to a real-life hero like General Norman Schwarzkopf, the “conquering commander of Desert Storm,” who wasn’t afraid to get a little misty-eyed on occasion. “Now don’t get me wrong,” Weber quickly clarified. “There is a difference between ‘tender’ and soft .” Weber wanted tender warriors , not soft males . Weber’s tender warrior motif was perfectly suited to the soft patriarchy of the evangelical men’s movement, and Weber was a popular speaker at Promise Keepers events and a regular contributor to PK publications.30 Like the larger Promise Keepers movement, Weber emphasized male companionship: “every fighter pilot needs a wing man.” Here, again, John Wayne’s model of masculinity needed tweaking. “As much as we love John Wayne,” Weber acknowledged, “all you ever saw was the steel.” John Wayne left the impression that real men stand alone, and they do, when necessary. But it was important to realize that real men also stand together.31 Within the evangelical men’s movement, men did stand together, citing each other—sometimes even bordering on plagiarism—sharing platforms, and promoting each other’s work. The pursuit of warrior masculinity helped forge a larger community across the evangelical subculture. Books on evangelical masculinity were marketed to suburban megachurch men’s groups, denominational and nondenominational men’s ministries, and homeschool networks, binding disparate strands of American evangelicalism together in a shared cultural identity. At first glance, these books didn’t appear to be about politics; they were merely helpful handbooks on family and child-rearing. Yet they were both subtly and profoundly political. Farrar liked to cite the bogus Tocqueville line that had appealed to Reagan, too: “America is great because she is good, and if America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” They were, after all, in the midst of a war for the soul of America. For America to be good—and great—the warrior must be awakened.32 WITH ITS MASSIVE PUBLIC RALLIES and the enthusiastic participation of men across the nation, Promise Keepers captured the attention of the larger public. Yet, within evangelicalism two parallel movements would also play key roles in shaping understandings of Christian masculinity. One was the “complementarian” theology espoused by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW). The other was the sexual purity movement. Whereas the popular arm of the evangelical men’s movement often rested on somewhat shaky theological footing, CBMW marshaled the power of conservative theologians to fashion a scriptural defense of patriarchy. With close ties to the Southern Baptist Convention, CBMW helped ensure that gender would remain firmly embedded at the center of evangelical identity. In 1986, in an address before the Evangelical Theological Society, theologian Wayne Grudem had called for a new organization to uphold biblical manhood and womanhood. The next year an informal group gathered to discuss the rise of “unbiblical teaching” about women and men, and in December of that year they convened more formally, this time in Danvers, Massachusetts.

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

  White evangelical support held steady for the man who redefined the meaning of “presidential.” In the aftermath of the election, it was #NeverTrump evangelicals who ended up on the defensive. Russell Moore found his job in jeopardy when more than one hundred SBC churches threatened to withhold donations unless he resigned. (When Trump invited evangelical leaders to a Rose Garden ceremony to celebrate his executive order on religious freedom, Moore was not in attendance—a matter of grave concern to members of his denomination looking for access and influence.) Moore retained his position, but only after undertaking an extensive “apology tour” to expiate the unflattering things he had said about Trump and his evangelical supporters.37 For some, the question of evangelical support for Trump had a simpler explanation: rank hypocrisy. Indeed, in the weeks between the release of the Access Hollywood tape and the election, PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) social scientists identified a curious “Trump effect.” Five years earlier, only 30 percent of white evangelicals believed that “a person who commits an ‘immoral’ act could behave ethically in a public role.” The month before the election, 72 percent believed this was possible. According to the PRRI’s Robert P. Jones, “This dramatic abandonment of the whole idea of ‘value voters’ is one of the most stunning reversals in recent American political history.”38 However, for many evangelicals, Donald Trump did not represent the betrayal of many of the values they had come to hold dear. His testosterone-fueled masculinity aligned remarkably well with that long championed by conservative evangelicals. What makes for a strong leader? A virile (white) man. And what of his vulgarity? Crudeness? Bombast? Even sexual assault? Well, boys will be boys. God-given testosterone came with certain side effects, but an aggressive and even reckless masculinity was precisely what was needed when dealing with the enemy. If you wanted a tamer man, castrate him. Among those who embraced this sort of militant masculinity, such character traits paradoxically testified to Trump’s fitness for the job. Some white evangelicals did end up “holding their nose” to vote for Trump, but for many, he was exactly what they had been looking for. Or at least close enough. Some stated this explicitly; for others, the affinities were apparent in the language they used to explain or excuse their support for Trump. He was strong, he wouldn’t bow to political correctness, he was their “ultimate fighting champion.”39 [image "image" file=Image00016.jpg] Willie Robertson speaking on behalf of Donald Trump at a campaign rally at the Oklahoma State Fair in Oklahoma City, September 25, 2015. AP PHOTO / J PAT CARTER . Just a little over a year after Trump’s inauguration, two of his evangelical supporters published The Faith of Donald J. Trump: A Spiritual Biography .

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  But I didn’t want to leave the restaurant, because I wasn’t sure what else to do. And because the restaurant was ours now, publicly tied to his name and mine, I didn’t want to let go. Brandon convinced me to hire a cook to replace myself and to trim back my work to only admin, the bare tasks of ownership. I liked these tasks, anyway, and it turned out I had a knack for them. I found a place I could accept in the thing I hadn’t chosen. And Brandon was right: this restaurant was us, the best parts of us. We got to feed people good food, give them a good night, do work we could be proud of. And it was successful enough that he wanted to open more. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I was in it with him through the heat and chaos of opening. I could pretend this was our restaurant, say it like that, even believe it a lot of the time. But I was no restaurant creature. So now I was back at home most days, at Delancey only part-time. I could try to remember who I was, try to figure out what to do next, try to get back to writing. The house was quiet. I began to cook in our kitchen again. I’ve never minded cooking only for myself, never needed to be feeding another person in order to justify doing the work. So while Brandon manned the restaurant, I cooked, walked the dog, and started to write a new book, the story of opening Delancey. I started going to therapy to try to make sense of what we’d just lived, and soon I asked Brandon to join me. It helped us, and it helped me. A couple of nights a week, I’d go to the restaurant for dinner. I sat at the counter, facing the pizza oven, taking in the near-miracle of the place: We did it. I was proud of Brandon for opening a business at only twenty-seven and making it into something so good. I was proud of the community it grew and relieved by the money it made. I also knew it wasn’t my place. I had to get back to me again. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Did I miss him those nights at home? If I missed him, who exactly was I missing? The husband who’d cooked with me every night, sat at the table with me, played Think Tank with me and Sam over a couple of beers? Or the husband I had now, a chef who was rarely home before midnight?