In Bed With The Right - Episode 64： Whither the Preachers？ With Kristin Kobes Du Mez

00:00:00.000 You see this played out over and over again, all kinds of forgiveness, grace for the man who goes

00:00:06.540 astray, very ready to quickly forgive and forget and place him back in positions of power. For women,

00:00:14.060 for victims who try to hold men to account, who try to say, actually, this is a bigger problem.

00:00:19.360 It's systemic. Hey, there's a theological problem here. We need to address this.

00:00:23.980 They are the ones who are demonized, sometimes literally demonized, driven out of their

00:00:29.220 communities. They face vicious attacks. It is horrifying to see what they go through. And then

00:00:34.880 you see it on the political stage as well. So much forgiveness for men who have gone astray,

00:00:40.500 for men who assault women. And in the current administration, right, there are many examples

00:00:45.180 of this and does not diminish evangelical love of them at all.

00:00:50.060 hello i'm adrian dot and no more dot again whether we like it or not we're in bed with the right

00:01:00.080 so adrian our longtime listeners will know that here on in bed with the right

00:01:07.760 we've been working with our little like private informal taxonomy of right-wing masculinities 0.61

00:01:13.660 we talk a lot about the perverts the men who construct their masculinity around like

00:01:18.600 these, you know, vulgar demonstrations of like public dominance over women and over other men. 0.95

00:01:24.740 I'd put like Donald Trump in that camp. And then we've got the guys we call the creeps who we've

00:01:28.920 been talking about a lot lately. And that's this like constellation of insecure, like nerds.

00:01:35.600 These guys like often understand themselves as the enlightened architects of like this dystopian

00:01:39.840 future. Right. And I'd put like Elon Musk in the creep camp. Oh, yeah. And then there's the third

00:01:45.120 group we haven't been talking about as much lately, the preachers. This last group, I think,

00:01:50.560 is at something of a crossroads. Now, with the alliances between the Trump-led nationalist right

00:01:57.640 and the Musk-led Silicon Valley tech reactionaries, the controlling paradigm in conservative

00:02:03.580 masculinity over the last couple years has really been the pervert-creep alliance, right?

00:02:09.180 And the preacher mode of masculinity has largely fallen by the wayside, both stylistically, where it seems to have like virtually no influence, and politically, where the people from the Christian right advocating a Christian conservative kind of masculinity have been sort of retooling their rhetoric and their images to fit more in line with a lot of more pervert or creep projects.

00:02:36.580 So like on my beat, I look a lot of the anti-abortion movement who have moved to talking about abortion in ways that would appeal to creeps with like sort of pronatalist projects or inexplicably like sadistic and misogynistic terms that might appeal more to perverts rather than the like pretextually religious and righteous terms that used to be favored, at least in the mainstream of that movement.

00:03:01.240 right? So it seems like the preacher has sort of been like stepping back into the shadows a little

00:03:06.660 bit. Yeah, right. Like in the 2016 election, Donald Trump still felt he had to pick Mike Pence,

00:03:12.900 a man he did not seem to like very much, and that he tried to get killed later on as a kind of hat

00:03:18.620 tip to the Christian right. And it's very noticeable that, you know, whatever else is true of his

00:03:23.680 current vice president, he's not that exemplar of the kind of sexually repressed Christianity

00:03:28.980 a vowing preacher dude. Like that was an alliance between the preacher masculinity and this, you

00:03:35.080 know, thrice married philandering. And I guess we should still say alleged sexual predator like 0.99

00:03:40.480 Donald Trump. And I feel like the story of like, oh, will whatever Christian group, will the 0.98

00:03:46.480 evangelical Christians or will Mormons abandon Trump, right? Who seemed, let's say, less than

00:03:54.840 stellar on his biblical knowledge, less than unwavering in his commitments to kind of biblical

00:04:02.060 morality? Like, would they abandon him at some point? And I think if there's a story of the 2024

00:04:07.520 elections that this was actually no longer needed, that this was no longer really the question that

00:04:12.620 we were asking. And I think there's almost a sort of a sense that the evangelical movement modeled

00:04:16.740 itself instead of Donald Trump's example, right? You know, I think that bears something out that

00:04:22.540 you've proposed before, Moira, which is that the sexual repression promoted by these preacher

00:04:27.980 types and the sexual force touted by the perverts might not actually be irreconcilable, but might

00:04:33.900 come from the very same place. And, you know, there is kind of one person who has been ringing

00:04:40.760 this bell, like Cassandra and Troy, that, you know, the evangelical movements profess sexual

00:04:50.100 politics and profess gender politics don't always line up with their enacted or like revealed

00:04:56.100 preferences, right? And that's Kristen Cobes-Dumay. She is one of our preeminent theorizers of what 1.00

00:05:04.940 we call here on In Bed with the Right Preacher masculinity. And she's the author of what for me

00:05:09.580 has been the single most clarifying book on American Christianity's view of gender and of

00:05:15.140 masculinity in particular, which is 2020's Jesus and John Wayne. Kristen, thank you so much for

00:05:21.300 being here with us today to talk about this weird sector of the right and how they are thinking

00:05:27.040 about gender these days. Oh, thank you for having me. It's really good to be with you.

00:05:31.360 Yeah. So to start off, I mean, most of your book, which is amazing, is devoted to kind of explaining

00:05:36.200 how this apparent contradiction between the Mike Pence and Donald Trump visions of masculinity

00:05:41.980 is really no contradiction at all, or it's not as much of a contradiction as people would suppose.

00:05:48.340 Can you walk us through what your book does so beautifully and tell us about the longer

00:05:52.420 history of reverence for sort of domineering masculinity within the Christian right?

00:05:56.620 Yeah, so I started paying attention to issues of evangelical masculinity two decades ago,

00:06:04.060 so long before Donald Trump was on our political radar, at least. And it was because I teach at

00:06:10.700 a Christian university. And I had been lecturing on Teddy Roosevelt and Roosevelt's embodiment of

00:06:17.380 a particular kind of rugged masculinity that was linked to race and to foreign policy and

00:06:23.060 to a kind of militancy in the early 20th century. And a couple of my students came up to me,

00:06:29.080 a couple of guys came up to me after class and said, Professor Dume, you have got to read this

00:06:32.960 book. And they pointed me to a book called Wild at Heart by John Eldridge, which if you grew up in

00:06:40.980 evangelical spaces at all and are of a certain age, you will have read this book or you will

00:06:46.220 know many people who read it. At the time, this was early 2000s, every guy was reading this book.

00:06:52.520 Churches, sponsoring groups, dorms at Christian colleges, like it sold millions of copies.

00:06:58.080 So I went down to Family Christian Bookstore, bought a copy, opened it up, and I saw immediately

00:07:02.880 what they were talking about, because right there at the beginning of the book, a quote from Teddy

00:07:07.160 Roosevelt. And then Eldridge went on to map out this really aggressive, militant vision of

00:07:13.480 masculinity. God is a warrior God. Men are made in his image. Every man has a battle to fight.

00:07:19.740 And I thought, you know, wow, this doesn't seem super biblical, or I'm a practicing Christian,

00:07:25.340 and there weren't a lot of Bible verses in that book. But instead, he was looking to kind of

00:07:31.540 Hollywood heroes to Mel Gibson's William Wallace, huge favorite, to cowboys, warriors, you know,

00:07:39.080 and really drawing out this very militant vision of masculinity. And so I'm trained in the study

00:07:45.920 of gender, and I asked the kinds of questions that we're trained to ask, which is, you know,

00:07:50.840 where is this coming from and what does it do? And this was the early 2000s, and there's all

00:07:56.280 kinds of survey data coming out at that time on evangelical views on foreign policy, on their

00:08:03.140 support for the Iraq war, for preemptive war in general, condoning the use of torture, embrace of

00:08:08.260 aggressive foreign policy. And so I just asked, you know, what might one of these things have to

00:08:11.820 do with another? And that's what started the research that eventually led to Jesus and John

00:08:17.060 Wayne. I set it aside for a time, had to finish another project, had a couple kids. And then it

00:08:23.600 was in the fall of 2016, in the days after the Access Hollywood tape released, that, you know,

00:08:29.980 everybody was asking, surely, you know, surely this is a bridge too far for his evangelical

00:08:35.160 supporters. Surely the moral majority will not be able to support a man who brags on video of

00:08:40.940 assaulting women. And of course, we know how that went. But I knew at that point that that was the

00:08:46.300 wrong question. I knew that this wasn't the betrayal of evangelical values that people were

00:08:52.980 setting it up to be because I remembered that research from years earlier. I remembered this

00:08:58.160 embrace of a rugged militant masculinity of saying that testosterone was, you know, God's gift to men

00:09:03.980 and they were protectors and providers and that aggression was absolutely necessary. And so I just

00:09:10.960 kind of pulled out those old files, wrote a piece on evangelical masculinity and militarism and

00:09:17.320 timed it to the inauguration, and that went crazy viral. And what really caught my attention there

00:09:23.640 was the comments from evangelical men themselves who read it and said, absolutely, absolutely,

00:09:30.220 this was my experience. And that's kind of the backstory to tracing how this rugged vision of

00:09:35.840 masculinity developed in the 1960s, 70s, Cold War era, and how it was absolutely central to

00:09:43.520 the emergence of evangelical politics, the rise of the Christian right, and now is really the

00:09:50.120 foundation of Christian nationalism. I'd love to dig in even a little bit deeper on these like

00:09:56.360 artifacts that you found in the history. When did this push for a more aggressive, more militaristic,

00:10:06.080 maybe even like a little more like swaggering or violent kind of masculinity start to emerge

00:10:11.740 within evangelical spaces and what were the historical forces that like encouraged American

00:10:17.200 Christians to go in that direction? Yeah, you know, so as you well know, there's not just one

00:10:21.900 masculinity. There are masculinities and, you know, what kind of stands in as, you know, masculine at

00:10:28.680 any point changes dramatically over time. It varies by class and by race and region and all of these

00:10:34.300 things. So just, you know, saying that, I'll speak in some generalizations. But if you look to the

00:10:38.340 19th century, the vision of Christian manhood looks quite different from this kind of warrior

00:10:43.660 masculinity, right? It's Christian men modeled self-restraint. That was really critical. And then 0.98

00:10:50.360 you see through various economic changes, social changes, that kind of falling out of favor,

00:10:57.100 seeming a bit more effeminate. And in the early 20th century, again, this kind of Teddy Roosevelt

00:11:01.380 era, you do have a return or an embrace of this more militant kind of masculinity. But then it

00:11:07.120 kind of merges with and transitions into a kind of businessman's masculinity, the Bruce Barton

00:11:13.060 type. Also power, right? Masculinity and power tend to be linked in, you know, power and whiteness

00:11:19.060 also. So there's, there are some through lines here, but it really is in the Cold War era where

00:11:24.360 we see a reemergence of a more militant kind of masculinity and with it, a strong sense of

00:11:32.720 gender difference. That gender difference is the foundation of the social order. It's God-ordained,

00:11:41.340 and by gender difference, they don't mean like some differences. You know, somebody like James

00:11:45.620 Dobson, a real leader in this area, would say, you know, men and women are different in every

00:11:50.980 cell of their bodies, which, okay, biologically, we could talk about that, but then what that means 0.94

00:11:56.040 is they're kind of opposites. Men are strong. Women are weak. Men like to play sports. Women

00:12:00.940 like to stand and watch on the sidelines and cheer on their men, right? That kind of thing. 1.00

00:12:04.880 And that becomes just really critical. And these are not just opposites or differences,

00:12:09.580 but these are arranged hierarchically. And so that hierarchy becomes a dominant theme

00:12:15.580 in the 60s and 70s across conservative white evangelicalism, many models of that.

00:12:21.240 And that is all kind of wrapped up as this is God's plan. And it's not just God's plan

00:12:26.400 for families, although it is that, it is also God's plan for society. And for Christian America

00:12:32.400 to be blessed and to succeed and to prosper, it must be founded on this hierarchical patriarchal 0.94

00:12:41.260 family model. And that's absolutely critical because the threat to Christian America, I mean, 0.93

00:12:47.760 lots of threats, but the external threat was communism. So to fight the communists,

00:12:52.380 We need to have strong families and strong men.

00:12:55.280 Right.

00:12:55.460 And that was absolutely essential.

00:12:57.220 Oh, and then there's an internal threat as well, which is, you know, take your pick.

00:13:02.200 Secular humanists, feminists, liberals, Democrats, it's a very, you know, kind of fluid category

00:13:08.280 and very convenient.

00:13:09.140 And this builds up a kind of us versus them mentality that then justifies this kind of

00:13:16.380 militancy and aggression politically and really in every direction.

00:13:21.320 it occurs to me as i'm listening to you that like sometimes sometimes uh i think secular people and

00:13:28.760 like people from religious institutions or backgrounds could talk past each other because

00:13:32.520 sometimes we use different vocabulary for the same thing but i i think part of what you're

00:13:36.320 talking about is the emergence of this philosophy of like complementarianism which like me as a like

00:13:41.560 a liberal feminist from san francisco i just call like misogyny or like gender hierarchy right but

00:13:46.920 you folks in the evangelical world, like it's got a different name. And I've also heard, you know, 0.99

00:13:52.560 like far right people from like the Southern Baptist Convention talk about complementarianism,

00:13:57.760 particularly in contrast to what they call egalitarianism, which is understood as sort of

00:14:01.760 like a theological mistake or an intellectual mistake. Can you talk about the emergence of

00:14:07.740 these like kind of buzzwords in the evangelical world? Yes, yes, yes. So complementarianism is

00:14:14.240 this theological idea that really emerges in the 1990s kind of as a brand, but it has deeper roots.

00:14:22.040 And this is the idea that God created men and women to complement each other. So again, very

00:14:26.980 different, the kind of opposite that, again, the men are strong, women are weak, men have authority, 0.98

00:14:32.120 and women are to submit. But it's a kind of kinder, gentler branding of straight-up patriarchy.

00:14:40.780 And inside conservative evangelical spaces, there has long been kind of debates about,

00:14:46.960 you know, so those on the outside will say, oh, come on, complementarianism is patriarchy,

00:14:52.100 right?

00:14:52.260 You can certainly make a case for that.

00:14:54.300 Inside those spaces, it's somewhat contested.

00:14:57.080 There are actually people who say, absolutely, amen, this is patriarchy, you know, and then

00:15:01.660 there are other complementarians who say, no, no, this is kind of a separate but equal

00:15:05.280 thing.

00:15:06.120 Of course, it's not equal because it's hierarchical and one has authority and the other has to

00:15:10.000 submit, but the softer versions of it, kind of soft complementarianism, really don't press that

00:15:15.860 as much. Now, what this looks like varies, but there's a kind of whole industry that developed

00:15:23.500 around this complementarianism, which is in some religious spaces, it really comes down to women

00:15:32.060 should not preach, they shouldn't be elders, and, you know, they shouldn't hold religious authority

00:15:36.840 over men. And yes, they should submit to husbands, but that's kind of, you know, 0.62

00:15:40.980 in a good marriage, you don't really, it doesn't come down to that. And that's about as far as it

00:15:44.340 goes. Others will work out an elaborate system of female submission in all sectors of life. 1.00

00:15:51.700 And, you know, somebody like John Piper, a leading complementarian, has lists of, well,

00:15:57.020 can a woman be a police officer? Well, that's exercising authority. That's, you know, well, 0.95

00:16:02.040 could a man ask for directions from a woman if he's lost or she, you know, these kinds of things,

00:16:09.440 like really, so it's an all of life thing. What if she's a demure police woman?

00:16:15.660 I mean, seriously, this is, I mean, this is a logical extension of these, you know, well, 0.95

00:16:21.460 what can a woman do? What is usurping masculine authority? And so it's an umbrella under which, 0.89

00:16:27.960 you know, a whole range of views from the far extreme patriarchy can exist to a much

00:16:35.580 more casual, you know, yeah, we'll pay lip service to it, but we actually go about our

00:16:39.900 lives.

00:16:40.820 But this is interesting to me because to divide all these different sectors of like human

00:16:47.320 culture and endeavor and just character into male or female, you know, or masculine or

00:16:53.460 feminine, appropriate, like buckets, implies that masculine and feminine are stable categories,

00:16:59.380 right? But as you pointed out, the Christian conservative understanding of what masculinity

00:17:05.180 is has changed a lot through history. And you said something earlier that I wrote it down because it

00:17:10.360 struck me as such a good insight. You said that like self-restraint and like the denial of impulse

00:17:16.000 used to be considered a masculine virtue and has now become very feminized. Can you tell me a

00:17:21.840 little bit more about that historical process, because I think we see a political moment now,

00:17:26.640 or at least a cultural moment now, where impulsivity and the gratification of desires

00:17:34.460 are seen as masculine ideals, at least in the MAGA right, in a very big way. So it's interesting

00:17:40.440 to me that that used to not be the case. Yeah. You know, and even now, there is not just one

00:17:46.740 or even one dominant vision of evangelical masculinity.

00:17:51.060 You've got kind of the popular and the political one,

00:17:54.260 which is this warrior masculinity.

00:17:56.820 But then you still have the operative one

00:17:59.580 in many evangelical churches,

00:18:01.500 but they aren't mutually exclusive, right?

00:18:04.120 One actually can support the other.

00:18:06.680 For instance, a lot of evangelical men

00:18:09.180 who are gonna be supporting the kind of warrior masculinity

00:18:13.000 or the more ruthless politics

00:18:15.380 who may be paying lip service to these ideals of, you know, absolute patriarchal authority and so

00:18:22.740 forth, they're not rugged warriors in their own person. They, you know, are probably wearing polo

00:18:29.680 shirts and khakis and, you know, attending accountability groups at church. They probably

00:18:35.320 are middle managers, but that doesn't mean that these warrior ideals don't really impact them or

00:18:42.540 that they aren't actually feeling that, right? There's a kind of compensation often. And there's

00:18:47.100 a sense of, okay, there's the alpha male. There's the male that God has really placed as somebody

00:18:55.040 who ought to have authority, as somebody created to step into this position of leadership. And

00:19:01.160 although they themselves in their own family, in their own church may not exhibit all of those

00:19:06.080 qualities. And in fact, if they tried, their wife might not be very happy with them, right? But when

00:19:10.800 you're looking to the person who really has to step in and lead, say, a nation, then you can

00:19:16.920 really embrace that more militant posture. And so, you know, how did we get here? We have to

00:19:22.920 understand this idea of masculinity linked with the broader culture wars mentality that we see

00:19:31.360 just absolutely fueled by religious leaders and politicians since the 1960s. So the threat is

00:19:42.100 always imminent. Again, it changes, but there is always an imminent threat. And conservative

00:19:47.600 Christians have this unique position of being really the heirs to the founding era and the real

00:19:54.980 leaders, the real Americans, those who, you know, really have been entrusted to keep the nation on

00:20:02.320 the right course. But at the same time, they're embattled. They are persecuted. You know, liberals

00:20:09.100 deride them and they are always this close to losing power. Within that framework, then,

00:20:16.900 that urgency fuels this defensive militarism, kind of the flight 93 election sort of thing.

00:20:24.980 where, man, it is your last stand. The culture is against us. The liberals have taken that.

00:20:32.300 And if we look to recent history, the Obama years in particular, you know, first of all,

00:20:38.320 it's hard to overstate how disruptive Barack Obama's election was to conservative white

00:20:45.080 evangelicals for all sorts of reasons, including his race. Oh, and also the fact that a small but

00:20:52.700 not insignificant number of young white evangelicals switched parties and voted for Obama.

00:20:58.220 And they took that extremely seriously and wanted to make sure that would never happen

00:21:02.460 again, really targeted Obama.

00:21:04.900 But during his presidency, we also see this dramatic demographic shift really come to

00:21:11.100 the fore.

00:21:11.940 And that is the, you know, what one sociologist has called the end of white Christian America.

00:21:17.060 So you have conservative white evangelicals who already are looking for, you know, us

00:21:21.400 versus them, militancy, seeing themselves as embattled as a fuel to consolidating their

00:21:25.860 power, a long history of that.

00:21:27.700 Now they're actually saying, oh, we're not in the majority anymore.

00:21:31.740 And then you have the Obergefell decision, and you have this increasing anxiety, not

00:21:37.140 just organically produced, but anxiety over religious liberty.

00:21:40.960 And all of this really comes together in 2016 and fuels the sense that what they need is

00:21:48.720 not a Sunday school teacher. 0.86

00:21:50.480 What they need is not an upstanding Christian gentleman. 0.98

00:21:54.240 They don't need somebody who has the morals to pastor a church.

00:21:58.280 They need, in their words, an ultimate fighting champion.

00:22:01.260 Right.

00:22:02.180 I mean, that's so fascinating.

00:22:04.440 So if Trump embodies sort of the pinnacle of evangelical masculinity now,

00:22:10.320 what happened to other, you know, Christian masculine ideas like, you know, say, Jesus, right?

00:22:16.900 Russell Moore, who's a former leader of the Southern Baptist Conference, and as we say on the podcast, the guy you absolutely do not have to hand it to, has spoken about his sense that the evangelical church's turn towards Trump sort of meant a kind of lowering of Jesus in the esteem of the faithful.

00:22:34.540 Like, for example, his famous anecdote about the preacher who reads the bit from the Sermon of the Mount about turning the other cheek and has a parishioner come up to him afterwards and ask where he got all these liberal talking points, right?

00:22:46.020 So, what happens to Jesus in all this? Does he come off as weak or effeminate to evangelicals, like, when compared to Trump?

00:22:53.040 And how does one reconcile that, you know, the dude who's in the name of the religion suddenly seems to not really conform so much to its ideals?

00:23:03.600 Oof, yeah. First, I'll say that most evangelical Christians would not agree with a statement that they have embraced kind of Trump as their model of masculinity.

00:23:13.820 Most will offer a little gentle disclaimer.

00:23:17.400 Oh, you know, I don't like everything he does.

00:23:20.360 And, you know, I wish he would tweet a little less or, you know, it's a little rough around the edges.

00:23:26.060 You know, a little distancing.

00:23:28.180 And then there's always a but that follows that.

00:23:31.180 That said, you know, I think it is fair to say inside these spaces, especially the more conservative and Christian nationalist spaces, there is actually very little talk of Jesus.

00:23:42.220 Very little talk of Jesus.

00:23:44.600 And when I was researching Jesus and John Wayne, too, I noticed the same, except for there was a Jesus they liked.

00:23:53.240 And that was a Jesus from the book of Revelation.

00:23:56.260 Right.

00:23:56.620 Where you get this kind of apocalyptic warrior, bloody sword, battle kind of thing.

00:24:03.240 And, you know, different ways to interpret that apocalyptic literature.

00:24:07.020 But that's the warrior Jesus they like.

00:24:10.100 No more Mr. Nice Jesus.

00:24:11.840 Exactly.

00:24:12.660 The Jesus who slays all of his enemies, that's their Jesus.

00:24:16.120 And then every once in a while, the Jesus who, you know, turns over the tables at the temple kind of thing.

00:24:20.640 But that one gets a little less airtime, and that's nice for a, you know, burst of aggression.

00:24:24.620 But when you look at the context, it's like a little bit uncomfortable there.

00:24:27.360 So their favorite is the warrior Jesus in the book of Revelation.

00:24:31.600 Otherwise, though, I mean, there's very little talk of Jesus and very little talk of things such as, you know, the fruit of the Spirit.

00:24:37.600 which is, you know, the attributes of a follower of Christ.

00:24:42.200 That's what the fruit of the Spirit are.

00:24:43.620 You know, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control.

00:24:48.080 Wow, that sounds effeminate, doesn't it?

00:24:50.260 Right?

00:24:50.560 Within this framework.

00:24:52.120 And so that's kind of how far this has gone. 0.98

00:24:54.880 By separating the genders and making them opposites, 0.97

00:24:59.800 what you have in the end is, you know, the virtues end up in the feminine sphere. 0.75

00:25:05.820 And that leaves you with a lot of aggression and testosterone and lack of restraint and, you know, capacity for violence all over there in the masculine.

00:25:17.220 Yeah, this is something that we've attended to a couple of times on this podcast, that historically, how to put this, the masculinity of Christianity has been up for some debate. And for decades now, you have these kind of worries about that this is a women's religion that is overly feminized.

00:25:36.800 And, you know, something that I think we pointed out in one of our episodes was that in some way, religiosity, of course, itself is kind of feminine coded in many ways, like commits you to a bunch of things, to being nice to a lot of people.

00:25:49.080 You know, it's not the number of religions that are, and then you have to punch them in the face and yell is probably kind of small.

00:25:54.940 I mean, I'm sure they exist.

00:25:56.260 I'm sure Jordan Peterson is seeking them out right now.

00:25:58.980 But by and large, this is a longstanding anxiety.

00:26:02.960 How would you locate it in that tradition?

00:26:04.700 Is this a renewed flare-up of an old anxiety, or is there a new dimension to it now?

00:26:10.740 Oh, the answer to that question is always both and, I imagine.

00:26:15.760 You're right, right. 0.64

00:26:17.000 Religion, Christianity itself has often been coded feminine.

00:26:20.920 You could go back to the early church where, you know, women were flocking to this new faith.

00:26:27.100 It elevated women over against the rest of the culture. 0.94

00:26:31.060 And also, if you look at the teachings of Christ, if you look at the New Testament, 0.91

00:26:36.560 and if you look at what Jesus says his followers are supposed to do, it's kind of wild.

00:26:42.920 It's loving your enemies, loving your neighbors.

00:26:46.440 It is turning the other cheek. 0.99

00:26:48.740 It is self-sacrifice, not just for women, but for everybody.

00:26:53.560 to follow Christ is to take up your cross, to suffer, right? To put others ahead of you.

00:27:01.420 And over and over again, this is like Jesus' disciples are thrown off by this. This was not

00:27:06.520 the Messiah they were expecting. They wanted the warrior Christ. And Jesus just over and over again 0.61

00:27:13.220 turns that on its head. So this is arguably the theological heart of Christianity. This is what

00:27:21.740 makes the faith so revolutionary in its time, and this is a tall order. I, again, you know, I'm a

00:27:29.180 Christian. I've never identified myself as evangelical, but you could put me on the edges of

00:27:33.300 that. I'm a Calvinist. I teach at Calvin University here in Michigan, and so in our particular

00:27:39.880 tradition, we tend to really like sin, or at least, you know, talk a lot about sin and human

00:27:45.420 depravity. So within this theological system, then we are prone to sin. We are prone to the

00:27:51.740 sin of pride. We are prone to usurping power over others. And it is precisely our faith that ought

00:27:59.340 to restrain us from that. It goes against our human nature to put others ahead of ourselves,

00:28:05.580 to put others to love our enemies. I mean, that is not a natural response, but that arguably is

00:28:12.240 what Christianity calls us to do. Now, that is not a convenient theology for seizing political power

00:28:19.520 or claiming cultural power, right? That's not a convenient theology if you're trying to coerce

00:28:25.020 others to live, you know, within your system. And so, a lot of theological gymnastics have to be done

00:28:33.520 to get from point A to point B. Now, that said, all theologies have elements of interpretation,

00:28:39.880 right? We can all argue theologically about which is true, which is not. They're all human

00:28:43.920 constructions. But still, it's quite a stretch to get from the Jesus of the New Testament

00:28:49.460 and what he commands his followers to do and kind of this aggressive, militant Christian 0.66

00:28:56.880 nationalism, Christian masculinity. Yeah. You know, it occurs to me that what Jesus actually

00:29:02.240 spends a lot of time doing in the Gospels are things like he spends a lot of time healing

00:29:06.780 sick people. Washing feet. Yeah. Washing feet. He like comforts people who are like grieving or

00:29:13.040 scared a lot and is always telling them to like calm down and trust in God. And then he he feeds

00:29:19.200 the hungry. Right. And these are all like things that moms do, like taking care of you when you're

00:29:24.740 sick, shushing you when you're scared, feeding you lunch. Like this is what Julian of Norwich

00:29:30.100 also said about Jesus. Like he's kind of like he's got a mommy vibe in some ways. And then when

00:29:36.500 When the big man gets mad, he's like, forgive them, they don't know what they do, right?

00:29:41.220 They don't know what they do, yeah.

00:29:42.060 He's like, look, they're kids, what do you want?

00:29:45.320 He's running interference with dad.

00:29:46.980 Exactly, right?

00:29:47.880 But that's like not the part they lean into.

00:29:49.660 They really lean into like, I have come not to bring peace, but a sword, right?

00:29:53.480 Like they lean into the stuff that better suits their other agendas.

00:30:00.860 Exactly.

00:30:01.200 And it's kind of wild, too, because these are the, you know, self-proclaimed Bible-believing 0.97

00:30:06.100 Christians, and they have embraced, you know, inerrancy, the idea that goes hand-in-hand

00:30:12.660 with a very literal interpretation of the scriptures. 0.99

00:30:15.100 So they say, when you actually look, right, all of these passages that we're referencing

00:30:19.800 and a whole lot more, right there, you have some elaborate theological work being done

00:30:24.380 to explain a way why, oh, no, no, this doesn't really apply in this moment.

00:30:28.060 Or, you know, it's harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a camel through the eye of the needle kind of thing.

00:30:33.840 Like, oh, my gosh, we can explain that.

00:30:35.520 You know, like, it's not what it seems.

00:30:37.220 You know, love your enemies, turn the cheek.

00:30:39.080 No, no, no, no, no.

00:30:40.080 I mean, they'll literally say in these popular books that I read, like, you know, you can't teach a boy to be a man by teaching him to turn the other cheek.

00:30:48.300 Oh, wow.

00:30:48.420 So, you know, just, you know, no, throw that out.

00:30:50.420 Doesn't apply to this day and age.

00:30:52.100 And yet their brand that they have promoted and actually successfully defined the narrative

00:31:00.640 for decades now is that they, they are the Bible-believing Christians. 0.92

00:31:05.440 And everybody else, every other Christian under the sun, they're the false teachers. 0.99

00:31:12.040 So I wondered if maybe we could talk a little bit about what is emerging, to my understanding, 0.70

00:31:18.700 as like Trump's own quasi-messianic claims.

00:31:22.600 So he's had his, you know,

00:31:24.480 his famous declaration at the 2016 Republican convention,

00:31:28.460 I Alone Can Fix It,

00:31:29.820 putting him as sort of like a unique historical individual

00:31:33.760 with like quasi-supernatural

00:31:36.320 or divinely ordained historic position, right?

00:31:39.500 And then he's got his more recent claim

00:31:41.340 that he just made at his address to Congress

00:31:43.060 that I had to watch for my sins

00:31:45.460 as part of my job with a guardian,

00:31:47.380 where he said you know god spared me in my assassination attempt he took this guy who

00:31:53.200 who was killed at my rally whose family was there in the house chamber but he spared me because

00:31:59.940 he wants me to make america great again right he's like claiming this position of having been like

00:32:05.200 anointed for this historic task there's also this like repeated language i'm noticing from some

00:32:10.620 national like high profile republicans in which they will thank god explicitly for president trump

00:32:15.660 So should we understand this as like, and I think you're the person best equipped to

00:32:21.120 go this for me.

00:32:22.340 Should we understand this as like an appropriation of Christian rhetoric or is it more of an

00:32:26.840 effort to like displace Christ as a Messiah figure in this like sort of schema he's creating

00:32:33.020 of his own mythology?

00:32:34.640 Yeah.

00:32:35.800 So is appropriation and is displacement.

00:32:38.920 And to understand, you know, when we use terminology like evangelical, that too is an umbrella term.

00:32:44.840 and there's different traditions within that.

00:32:48.100 So for instance, when Trump appeared on the scene

00:32:50.620 and first evangelicals weren't sure

00:32:52.600 what to make of him back in 2015,

00:32:54.640 but as early as August, 2015,

00:32:56.620 we start seeing the earliest polls,

00:32:59.200 August, 2015, that evangelicals are favoring Trump

00:33:05.160 in the plurality of voters.

00:33:07.340 And I remember you mentioned Russell Moore before

00:33:09.380 because back in 2015, at that time,

00:33:11.300 when that data came out, he said, no way, no way.

00:33:14.420 He said, I don't know a single evangelical pastor who's supporting this guy.

00:33:19.360 Well, that was a couple of years before he got pushed out of his job at the Southern

00:33:23.860 Baptist Convention because he wouldn't bend the knee to Trump.

00:33:26.620 So here we are.

00:33:28.160 But at that time, as the evangelical support became clearer, as they understood who he

00:33:32.740 was and what he could do for them, then you start having various justifications.

00:33:38.280 So you have somebody like James Dobson, kind of a traditional evangelical figure, family

00:33:43.080 values guy, say, well, Trump, he's a baby Christian. He doesn't know a lot. He gets a

00:33:50.340 lot of stuff wrong. He's just a little baby. Be nice to him. Be nice to him, right? So all the

00:33:55.560 grace, all the grace for somebody like Trump and very little grace for a whole lot of the rest of

00:34:00.740 us. But then you also have this very important strand that was beneath the radar for a while

00:34:06.980 of most media, and in fact, many scholars of evangelicalism, and that is the charismatic

00:34:11.780 revival strand, the new apostolic reformation and kind of adjacent streams. And it's in those spaces

00:34:18.500 that you're going to hear the kind of prophecies about Trump. And so back in 2016, it was the King

00:34:24.620 Cyrus prophecy, which is pagan ruler, right? Not one of God's people, but God has anointed him 0.99

00:34:33.020 to play this redemptive role on behalf of God's people. And so he was the King Cyrus. That was

00:34:40.580 2016. 2024, it was amped up a bit, and so we got the King Jehu model in those New Apostolic 0.98

00:34:49.640 Reformation spaces. Now, King Jehu, it's a different story. He was the king that drove out 0.63

00:34:56.000 the wicked Ahab and Jezebel, and we started hearing a lot of Jezebel, and oh, look, Kamala Harris, 0.87

00:35:01.780 Jezebel, it makes sense, but if you look at that Old Testament story, it gets really bloody, 0.52

00:35:06.920 and it's essentially, they don't just drive out Jezebel and Ahab, they have Jezebel thrown out

00:35:13.520 the window, run over her with horses and feed her body to the dogs and then go after all of 0.99

00:35:18.740 the religious leaders who supported them and like quite literally drain the swamp and kill them all, 1.00

00:35:25.580 right? So it's a very bloody story filled with a vengeance and something that caused me 0.97

00:35:29.960 significant concern. All of this is to say, in these charismatic spaces, there is a sense of,

00:35:38.060 yes, he has a divine role. And they mean that very literally, very seriously. And the way this

00:35:46.520 works is there's prophets in this movement who deliver these prophecies. And then they share

00:35:52.280 them on YouTube and on Facebook and on television. And these just travel through the networks.

00:35:59.960 And so there are some evangelicals, some conservative Christians who just see Trump as,

00:36:06.280 no, he's not a Christian.

00:36:07.260 No, he's not the best guy.

00:36:08.240 But hey, he's doing some good things for us.

00:36:10.260 There are many others who see him absolutely as God's anointed one.

00:36:15.760 And that can sometimes slip into this messianic language, which serves Trump extremely well.

00:36:22.340 You know, as arguably a narcissist, I think he very much enjoys being seen as a godlike

00:36:28.060 figure, and he will lean into that.

00:36:29.520 And if you look at that social media thing that he shared a week or two ago, the one with the bearded-breasted dancers and such, you know, there you have the golden statue of Trump.

00:36:38.880 Now, you would think that conservative Christians who care about, you know, idolatry and such, that might be a bit of a red flag, golden calf, golden Trump.

00:36:48.400 Yeah, I've heard that they don't like golden statues.

00:36:50.380 I've heard that that was kind of a big deal at one point for them.

00:36:53.340 No, no, no.

00:36:53.500 I mean, if you go to CPAC and, you know, the golden Trump, that all works.

00:36:57.900 And if, you know, if anybody calls them out on it, it's like, oh, come on, you know, don't you have a sense of humor, right?

00:37:03.680 So there's always an answer to a criticism.

00:37:07.080 So do we see something like a revisionist Christian theology sort of appearing in the wake of Trumpism?

00:37:15.100 So I'm thinking here of things like Joe Rigney's book out this month proclaiming the sin of empathy.

00:37:20.260 And if Trumpism is kind of rewriting or revising religion or becoming maybe a religion in its own right, what exactly are its tenets?

00:37:28.900 Yeah, yeah, we're seeing theological revisionism.

00:37:31.560 Again, as a religious historian, I'll have to say that, you know, theology is always kind of in conversation with culture.

00:37:38.660 As much as Christians would like to present, you know, whatever theology they hold as timeless and eternal and as truth, theology is always a kind of human construction responding to a sense of the divine.

00:37:52.500 And so, you know, any Christian could be accused of revisionist theology, simply trying to take the teachings that they deem sacred and then interpret them in their lives.

00:38:02.980 that said, yeah, it's a, you know, it's quite something to now have a book on the sin of

00:38:10.040 empathy. And Rigney's book actually was preceded by an article he wrote back in 2019. So this has

00:38:16.540 been around for a while and even the idea of floating around before then, which has been

00:38:21.100 fascinating. First of all, like, what does he mean by empathy? It's helpful just to look at the

00:38:26.500 examples, right? So in Rigney's world, the bad kind of empathy is the empathy, for example, that

00:38:33.080 survivors of sexual abuse might stir in trying to bring to justice their perpetrators, particularly

00:38:41.400 inside churches like the Southern Baptist Convention. And, you know, Rigney's part of

00:38:46.780 Doug Wilson's circles, and there's a lot of allegations of abuse there. So this kind of sin

00:38:51.960 of empathy, the untethered empathy, is the empathy that survivors can stir in the hearts

00:38:57.940 of other, you know, Christians to actually do something about abuse. Sin of empathy also comes

00:39:03.220 out when it comes to LGBTQ folks and, you know, being kind and treating them with dignity and in

00:39:08.840 the context of racism, right? So, you know, the bad compassion, the bad empathy coincidentally

00:39:15.740 aligns very closely with right-wing political agenda. So what you see happening here is,

00:39:22.980 I think, an attempt to blunt the natural human empathy, aside from any particular theological

00:39:32.660 call, to love our neighbors, right? To respect the dignity of others, including and even especially

00:39:41.200 those who are different from us. And so it is quite wild to see how inside these spaces it's

00:39:48.000 getting a lot of traction, whereas for like any other Christian who's not, you know, online or

00:39:53.160 not exposed to these teachings, just like, you know, what the heck? What is this even? What are

00:39:58.100 we talking about here? But the consequences of this defining empathy as a sin, I think are quite

00:40:03.860 clear. By not allowing people to feel compassion, and I'll use those interchangeably, or to feel

00:40:11.180 empathy for people who are different from you is dangerous. And it is dangerous politically,

00:40:19.000 but it is necessary for anybody who wishes to pursue a coercive political agenda to align with

00:40:27.560 authoritarianism, right? As a scholar, my outside field was in 20th century Germany,

00:40:33.540 and studies of authoritarianism in my background. And so I think in this current context,

00:40:40.320 We have to bring any discussion of, you know, kind of abstract theological musings about the sin of empathy into our current political context and ask what this theological shift actually does for them.

00:40:53.640 I'm glad that you mentioned some of these examples from Rigney's book, because I was struck when I was, like, looking up evangelicals' responses to Trump by this Russell Moore affair, l'affaire de Russell Moore at the Southern Baptist Convention.

00:41:10.320 And if our listeners don't know, the sort of exile of this never Trump religious leader from the Southern Baptist Convention is really interesting to me, among other things, because part of what aroused opposition against him or sort of animated opposition against him within the Southern Baptist leadership was his support of survivors of sexual violence.

00:41:37.980 And, you know, on our podcast, we talk a lot about sexual or I talk a lot and Adrian rightly listens about sexual violence and sexual force as being sort of like two different styles of the same project of masculine domination, which is about, you know, enforcing gender hierarchy through the control of sexuality.

00:41:58.400 I think most secular listeners really do associate Christianity heavily with, like, sexual repression and less so with sexual force. But your book, and I think what's kind of, like, bubbling up to the surface, for me, at least, as I learned more about evangelical life, is that, like, sexual violence has been, like, a pretty central part of evangelical spaces.

00:42:21.860 And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about how this like perceived contradiction between Christian conservative principles and Trump's behavior and alleged behavior towards women might not be so contradictory after all.

00:42:36.940 Yeah, yeah. You know, that was actually quite shocking when I uncovered this in the historical research, because you're right, it seems like, oh, when it comes to sex, conservative Christians, evangelicals, they're prudish, they're all about restraint, and they're repressed.

00:42:58.020 In fact, if you go back to the 60s and 70s, the evangelicals were writing all kinds of things about sex, books about sex. 0.83

00:43:07.360 We read Maribel Morgan's The Total Woman, which is a weird, weird and horny book. 0.93

00:43:12.320 Very, very.

00:43:13.700 Tim LaHaye, another, you know, author on this.

00:43:16.640 I'm actually, my next book is on not masculinity, but femininity in these spaces.

00:43:22.120 And so I've really, really delved into the Maribel Morgan story, and that has been a

00:43:27.780 whole lot of fun. 0.76

00:43:28.860 But yeah, so the way this is supposed to go is, again, men and women are opposite.

00:43:34.340 Men filled with testosterone, they are not good at restraint, sexual or otherwise, but

00:43:40.840 they have a lot of sexual needs.

00:43:43.300 So how are we going to have a stable society?

00:43:45.240 Because boys will be boys. 1.00

00:43:46.960 That's where women come in. 1.00

00:43:48.380 So women, opposite. 1.00

00:43:50.000 They don't have these sexual drives. 1.00

00:43:51.480 They don't have these sexual needs and God gifted them with a gift of restraint, but

00:43:55.420 it is on them to keep men on the straight and narrow, straight and narrow.

00:44:00.520 And so that means that they cannot seduce any man who is not their husband, but that

00:44:06.340 will be hard because, you know, the way God made them.

00:44:09.280 So they have to be very modest.

00:44:10.800 They have to not place themselves in any position where he could be enticed.

00:44:15.340 And then when they get married, then their job instantly overnight is to fulfill their

00:44:20.680 husbands every sexual need. And then they're promised that if they obey these rules, they will

00:44:24.900 have the best sex ever. And I mean, this is just a whole thing. And this has been an industry,

00:44:31.280 right? Since the 60s, these books on sexual fulfillment, sexual repression, you know,

00:44:36.320 two sides of the same coin, these have sold millions of copies, right? This is like youth

00:44:40.480 group culture, this purity culture, all of that. Now, what I saw then in reading these books was

00:44:46.760 that given that framework, in any case of sexual misconduct, there is always a woman to blame.

00:44:53.660 So, I was stunned reading not just these early books, but throughout up to the present,

00:45:00.440 when even in the cases of child abuse, a little girl could be accused of seducing a grown man.

00:45:09.700 Absolutely shocking. The first time I came across an instance of that, I just thought,

00:45:13.080 no way. I'm not even going to touch this because this is too much of an outlier. And then I saw it

00:45:18.180 again. And then I saw it again. And so the kind of moral system exists in this patriarchal hierarchical

00:45:27.620 order in which obedience to the authority that God places above you equals obedience to God.

00:45:36.200 So here's the other piece. There's this gender difference, and then there's this hierarchical

00:45:40.060 ordering, which means women must submit to men, even if they are sinful. And this is where you 0.99

00:45:48.720 get some wild stuff, which, you know, in kind of the Christian Reconstructionist traditions,

00:45:54.980 spaces like Doug Wilson's theology, where, you know, very strict rules for victims of sexual

00:46:02.460 abuse. Did you scream? Did you scream loud enough? You know, what were you wearing? Even underage

00:46:08.340 girls who are groomed, well, they were complicit in the sin. And, you know, this kind of stuff that

00:46:13.460 to outsiders seems morally revolting and absolutely stunning, within these theological systems,

00:46:20.320 there is a logic there as revolting as it still is. And so, yes, these things do go hand in hand,

00:46:27.460 and you see this played out over and over again, all kinds of forgiveness, grace for the man who

00:46:33.840 goes astray, very ready to quickly forgive and forget and place him back in positions of power.

00:46:41.100 For women, for victims who try to hold men to account, who try to say, actually, this is a

00:46:46.780 bigger problem. It's systemic. Hey, there's a theological problem here. We need to address this.

00:46:52.000 They are the ones who are demonized, sometimes literally demonized, driven out of their

00:46:57.220 communities. They face vicious attacks. It is horrifying to see what they go through. And then

00:47:02.880 you see it on the political stage as well. So much forgiveness for men who have gone astray,

00:47:08.880 for men who assault women. And in the current administration, right, there are many examples

00:47:13.560 of this and does not diminish evangelical love of them at all.

00:47:19.020 So to close us out, I wanted to ask you to engage a little bit in the, well, it's both the lowest

00:47:25.500 form of journalism and probably the lowest form of being a historian, which is, can we get you

00:47:29.780 you predict something for us, please? Where do you think the sex and gender politics of the

00:47:35.300 evangelical movement are heading? What will preacher masculinity become over the next,

00:47:40.500 I don't know, 10 years? Yeah, this is such a hard question. I could talk with quite some

00:47:47.740 authority on the past and then you try to get me to predict what's happening next week. I'm like,

00:47:51.480 oh my gosh, because one thing we have learned from history is, my goodness, you just never know

00:47:56.580 what's right around the corner. So with that said, in a performative space, I would predict

00:48:05.020 more of the same for quite some time. It plays well in kind of the podcast circuit. It meshes

00:48:10.340 well with kind of the tech bro masculinity, and it meshes extremely well with authoritarian tactics

00:48:17.960 and the strongman. So I am not foreseeing any retreat for some time. Again, in the performative

00:48:26.280 space in particular. Now, when we get down to people's lives and we get down to actual pastors,

00:48:32.680 the thing is, you know, guys who embrace this model of masculinity tend to be jerks or this 1.00

00:48:37.940 turns them into jerks, chicken and egg, I guess. So that may not be the type of man that you want 0.99

00:48:47.820 as your pastor. You know, that could get old. If you go to your pastor, you know, for spiritual

00:48:53.920 direction. And it's clear that, you know, perhaps in his own life, he doesn't embody the traits that

00:49:01.540 when you read the scriptures yourselves, you think actually do belong with, you know, Christian

00:49:06.500 character. When you have an illness in the family and you are looking for somebody to bring spiritual

00:49:14.920 comfort and assurance, are these guys the best guys to do it? You know, maybe they have a hidden

00:49:20.520 softer side. I just haven't seen it. But, you know, I think there's a real life situation that

00:49:27.260 may bring about a course correction. It will take some time and I'm not sure what form it will take

00:49:35.000 right now. The power is certainly amassed on, you know, the other side of the scale. But I do like

00:49:41.860 to think that despite all the propaganda, despite the power of these platforms, there still is real

00:49:48.280 life that happens underneath. And I would like to think that in those spaces, people will be able

00:49:54.700 to see what is good and what is harmful, what is abusive and what is noble. You heard it from

00:50:02.500 Kristen Dume, log off. Nothing good there right now. Thank you so much for joining us. I thought

00:50:12.380 this was really enlightening and I understand a lot more now. I don't like it, but I understand it.

00:50:17.580 It's all bad, all bad, but thank you.

00:50:19.700 Thank you so much.

00:50:20.460 This was wonderful.

In Bed With The Right - March 18, 2025

Episode 64： Whither the Preachers？ With Kristin Kobes Du Mez

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