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

And you see this played out over and over again.

All kinds of forgiveness, grace for the man who goes astray.

Very ready to quickly forgive and forget and place him back in positions of power.

For women, for victims who try to hold men to account, who try to say, actually, this is a bigger problem.

It's systemic.

Hey, there's a theological problem here.

We need to address this.

They are the ones who are demonized, sometimes literally demonized, driven out of their communities.

They face vicious attacks.

It is horrifying to see what they go through.

And then you see it on the political stage as well.

So much forgiveness for men who have gone astray, for men who assault women.

And in the current administration, right, there are many examples of this

and does not diminish evangelical love of them at all.

Hello, I'm Adrian Daw.

And I'm more advanced.

Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the Right.

So, Adrian, our longtime listeners will know that here on In Bid with the Right, we've been working with our little like private, informal taxonomy of right-wing masculinities.

We talk a lot about the perverts, the men who construct their masculinity around like these, you know, vulgar demonstrations of like public dominance over women and over other men.

I'd put like Donald Trump on that camp.

And then we've got the guys we call the creeps who we've been talking about a lot lately.

And that's this like constellation of insecure like

nerds.

These guys like often understand themselves as the enlightened architects of like this dystopian future, right?

And I'd put like Elon Musk in the creep camp.

Oh, yeah.

And then there's the third group we haven't been talking about as much lately, the preachers.

This last group, I think, is at something of a crossroads.

Now, with the alliances between like the Trump-led nationalist right and the Musk-led Silicon Valley tech reactionaries, the controlling paradigm in conservative masculinity over the last couple years has really been the pervert-creep alliance, right?

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.

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 in explicitly like sadistic and misogynistic terms.

It 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, right?

So it seems like the preacher has sort of been like stepping back into the shadows a little bit.

Yeah, right.

Like in the 2016 election, Donald Trump still felt he had to pick Mike Pence, a man he did not seem to like very much, and that he tried to get killed later on as a kind of hat tip to the Christian right.

And it's very noticeable that, you know, whatever else is true of his current vice president, he's not that exemplar of the kind of sexually repressed Christianity vowing preacher dude.

Like that was an alliance between the preacher masculinity and this, you know, thrice married philandering and I guess we should still say alleged sexual predator like Donald Trump.

And I feel like the story of like, oh, will whatever Christian group, will the evangelical Christians or will Mormons abandon Trump, right?

Who seemed, let's say, less than stellar on his biblical knowledge, less than unwavering in his commitments to kind of biblical morality.

Like, would they abandon him at some point?

And I think if there's a story of the 2024 elections that this was actually no longer needed, that this was no longer really the question that we were asking.

And I think that there's almost a sort of a sense that the evangelical movement modeled itself instead of of Donald Trump's example, right?

You know, I think that bears something out that you've proposed before, Moira, which is that the sexual repression promoted by these sort of preacher types and the sexual force touted by the perverts might not actually be irreconcilable, but might come from the very same place.

And, you know, there is kind of one person

who has been ringing this bell, like Cassandra and Troy,

that, you know, the evangelical movements profess sexual politics and profess gender politics don't always line up with their enacted or like revealed preferences, right?

And that's Kristen Cobes-Dumae.

She is one of our preeminent theorizers of what we call here on Embed with the Right preacher masculinity.

And she's the author of what for me has been the single most clarifying book on American Christianity's view of gender and of masculinity in particular, which is 2020's Jesus and John Wayne.

Kristen, thank you so much for being here with us today to talk about this weird sector of the right and how they are thinking about gender these days.

Oh, thank you for having me.

It's really good to be with you.

Yeah, so to start off, I mean, most of your book, which is amazing, is devoted to kind of explaining how this apparent contradiction between the Mike Pence and Donald Trump visions of masculinity is really no contradiction at all, or it's not as much of a contradiction as people would suppose.

Can you walk us through what your book does so beautifully and tell us about the longer history of reverence for sort of domineering masculinity within the Christian right?

Yeah, so I started paying attention to issues of evangelical masculinity two decades ago.

So long before Donald Trump was on our political radar, at least.

And it was because I teach at a Christian university and I had been lecturing on Teddy Roosevelt and Roosevelt's embodiment of a particular kind of rugged masculinity that was linked to race and to foreign policy and to a kind of militancy in the early 20th century.

And a couple of my students came up to me, a couple of guys came up to to me after class and said, Professor Dumae, you have got to read this book.

And they pointed me to a book called Wild at Heart by John Eldridge, which if you grew up in evangelical spaces at all and are of a certain age, you will have read this book or you will know many people who read it.

At the time, this was early 2000s, every guy was reading this book.

churches, sponsoring groups, dorms at Christian colleges, like it sold millions of copies.

So I went down to Family Christian Christian bookstore, bought a copy, opened it up, and I saw immediately what they were talking about.

Cause right there at the beginning of the book, a quote from Teddy Roosevelt.

And then Eldridge went on to map out this, this really aggressive, militant vision of masculinity.

God is a warrior God.

Men are made in his image.

Every man has a battle to fight.

And I thought, you know, wow,

this doesn't seem super biblical.

I'm a practicing Christian, and there weren't a lot of Bible verses in that book.

But instead, he was looking to kind of Hollywood heroes, to Mel Gibson's, William Wallace, huge favorite, to cowboys, warriors, you know, and really drawing out this very militant vision of masculinity.

And so I'm trained in the study of gender, and I asked the kinds of questions that we're trained to ask, which is, you know, where is this coming from and what does it do?

And this was the early 2000s, and there's all kinds of survey data coming out at that time on evangelical views on foreign policy, on their support for the Iraq war, for preemptive war in general, condoning the use of torture, embrace of aggressive foreign policy.

And so I just asked, you know, what might one of these things have to do with another?

And that's what started the research that eventually led to Jesus and John Wayne.

I set it aside for a time, had to finish another project, had a couple kids.

And

then it was in the fall of 2016, in the days after the Access Hollywood tape released, that, you know, everybody was asking, surely, you know, surely this is a bridge too far for his evangelical supporters.

Surely the moral majority will not be able to support a man who brags on video of assaulting women.

And of course, we know how that went, but I knew at that point that that was the wrong question.

I knew that this wasn't the betrayal of evangelical values that people were setting it up to be because I remembered that research from years earlier.

I remembered this embrace of a rugged, militant masculinity of saying that testosterone was, you know, God's gift to men and they were protectors and providers and that aggression was absolutely necessary.

And so I just kind of pulled out those old files, wrote a piece on evangelical masculinity and militarism and timed it to the inauguration.

And that went.

crazy viral.

And what really caught my attention there was the comments from evangelical men themselves who read it and said, absolutely, absolutely, this was my experience.

And that's kind of the backstory to tracing how this rugged vision of masculinity developed in the 1960s, 70s, Cold War era, and how it was absolutely central to the emergence of evangelical politics, the rise of the Christian right, and now is really the foundation of Christian nationalism.

I'd love to dig in even a little bit deeper on these like artifacts that you found in the history.

When did this push for a more aggressive, more militaristic, maybe even like a little more like swaggering or violent kind of masculinity start to emerge within evangelical spaces?

And what were the historical forces that like encouraged American Christians to go in that direction?

Yeah, you know, so as you well know, there's not just one masculinity.

There are masculinities and, you know, what kind of stands in as, you know, masculine at any point changes dramatically over time.

It varies by class and by race and region and all of these things.

So just saying that, I'll speak in some generalizations.

But if you look to the 19th century, the vision of Christian manhood looks quite different from this kind of warrior masculinity, right?

It's Christian men modeled self-restraint.

That was really critical.

And then you see through various economic changes, social changes, that kind of falling out of favor, seeming a bit more effeminate.

And in the early 20th century, again, this kind of Teddy Roosevelt era, you do have a return or an embrace of this more militant kind of masculinity.

But then it kind of merges with and transitions into a kind of businessman's masculinity, the Bruce Barton type.

Also, power, right?

Masculinity and power tend to be linked in, you know, power and whiteness also.

So there's, there are some through lines here.

But it really is in the Cold War era where we see a re-emergence of a more militant kind of masculinity and with it, a strong sense of gender difference.

That gender difference is the foundation of the social order.

It's God-ordained.

And by gender difference, they don't mean like some differences.

You know, somebody like James Dobson, a real leader in this area, would say, you know, men and women are different in every cell of their bodies, which, okay, biologically, we could talk about that.

But then what that means is they're kind of opposites.

Men are strong, women are weak.

Men like to play play sports, women like to stand and watch on the sidelines and cheer on their men, right?

That kind of thing.

And that becomes just really critical.

And these are not just opposites or differences, but these are arranged hierarchically.

And so that hierarchy becomes a dominant theme in the 60s and 70s across conservative white evangelicalism, many models of that.

And that is all kind of wrapped up as this is God's plan.

And it's not just God's plan for families, although it is that.

It is also God's plan for society.

And for Christian America to be blessed and to succeed and to prosper, it must be founded on this hierarchical, patriarchal family model.

And that's absolutely critical because the threat to Christian America, I mean, lots of threats, but the external threat was communism.

So to fight the communists, we need to have strong families and strong men.

And that was absolutely essential.

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

Secular humanists, feminists, liberals, Democrats.

It's a very, you know, kind of fluid category and very convenient.

And this builds up a kind of us versus them mentality that then justifies this kind of militancy and aggression politically and really in every direction.

It occurs to me as I'm listening to you that like sometimes

I think secular people and like people from religious institutions or backgrounds could talk past each other because sometimes we use different vocabulary for the same thing.

But I think part of what you're talking about is the emergence of this philosophy of like complementarianism, which like me as a like a liberal feminist from San Francisco, I just call like misogyny or like gender hierarchy, right?

But you folks in the evangelical world, like it's got a different name.

And I've also heard

far-right.

people from like the Southern Baptist Convention talk about complementarianism, particularly in contrast to what they call egalitarianism, which is understood as sort of like

a theological mistake or an intellectual mistake.

Can you talk about the emergence of these like kind of buzzwords in the evangelical world?

Yes, yes, yes.

So complementarianism is this theological idea that really emerges in the 1990s kind of as a brand, but it has deeper roots.

And this is the idea that God created men and women to complement each other.

So again, very different, the kind of opposite that, again, the men are strong, women are weak, men have authority and women are to submit.

But it's a kind of kinder, gentler branding of straight up patriarchy.

And inside conservative evangelical spaces, there has long been kind of debates about even, you know, so those on the outside will say, oh, come on.

complimentarianism is patriarchy, right?

You can certainly make a case for that.

Inside those spaces, it's somewhat contested.

There are actually people who say, absolutely, amen, this is patriarchy, you know, and then there are other complementarians who say, No, no, this is kind of a separate but equal thing.

Of course, it's not equal because it's hierarchical and one has authority and the other has to submit.

But the softer versions of it, kind of soft complimentism, really don't press that as much.

Now, what this looks like varies, but there's a kind of whole industry that developed around this complementarianism, which is in some religious spaces, it really comes down to women should not preach, they shouldn't be elders, and they shouldn't hold religious authority over men.

And yes, they should submit to husbands, but that's kind of, in a good marriage, you don't really, it doesn't come down to that.

And that's about as far as it goes.

Others will work out an elaborate system of female submission in all sectors of life.

And, you know, somebody like John Piper, a leading complimentarian, has lists of, well, can a woman be a police officer?

Well, that's exercising authority.

That's, you know, well, could a man ask for directions from a woman if he's lost or is she, you know, these kinds of things, like really, so it's an all-of-life thing.

What if she's a demure policewoman?

I mean, seriously, this is, I mean, this is a logical

extension of these, you know, well, what can a woman do?

What is usurping masculine authority?

And so it's an umbrella under which, you know, a whole range of views from the far extreme patriarchy can exist to a much more casual, you know, yeah, we'll pay lip service to it, but we actually go about our lives.

But this is interesting to me because

to divide all these different sectors of like human culture and endeavor and just character into male or female, you know, or masculine or feminine appropriate like buckets implies that masculine and feminine are stable categories, right?

But as you pointed out, the Christian conservative understanding of what masculinity is has changed a lot through history.

And you said something earlier that I wrote it down because it struck me as such a good insight.

You said that like self-restraint and like the denial of impulse used to be considered a masculine virtue and has now become very feminized.

Can you tell me a little bit more about that historical process?

Because I think we see a political moment now, or at least a cultural moment now, where impulsivity impulsivity and the gratification of desires are seen as masculine ideals, at least in the MAGA right, in a very big way.

So it's interesting to me that that used to not be the case.

Yeah, you know, and even now, there is not just one or even one dominant vision of evangelical masculinity.

You've got kind of the popular and the political one, which is this warrior masculinity.

But then you still have the operative one in many evangelical churches, but they aren't mutually exclusive, right?

One actually can support the other.

For instance, a lot of evangelical men who are going to be supporting the, you know, kind of warrior masculinity or the more ruthless politics who may be paying lip service to these ideals of

absolute patriarchal authority and so forth.

They're not rugged warriors in their own person.

They, you know, are probably wearing polo shirts and khakis and attending accountability groups at church.

They probably are middle managers, but that doesn't mean that these warrior ideals don't really impact them or that they aren't actually feeling that, right?

There's a kind of compensation often.

And there's a sense of, okay, there's the alpha male.

There's the male that God has really placed as somebody who ought to have authority, as somebody created to step into this position of leadership?

And although they themselves in their own family and their own church may not exhibit all of those qualities, and in fact, if they tried, their wife might not be very happy with them, right?

But when you're looking to the person who really has to step in and lead, say, a nation, then

you can really embrace that more militant posture.

And so, you know, how did we get here?

We have to understand this idea of masculinity linked with the broader culture wars mentality that we see just absolutely fueled by religious leaders and politicians since the 1960s.

So the threat is always imminent.

Again, it changes, but there is always an imminent threat.

And conservative Christians have this unique position of being really the heirs to the founding era and the real leaders, the real Americans, those who

really have been entrusted to keep the nation on the right course, but at the same time, they're embattled.

They are persecuted.

Liberals deride them and they are always this close to losing power.

Within that framework, then that urgency fuels this defensive militarism, kind of the Flight 93 election sort of thing, where, man, it is your last stand.

The culture is against us.

The liberals have taken that.

And if we look to recent history, the Obama years in particular, you know, first of all, it's hard to overstate how disruptive Barack Obama's election was to conservative white evangelicals for all sorts of reasons, including his race.

Oh, and also the fact that a small but not insignificant number of young white evangelicals switched parties and voted for Obama.

And they took that extremely seriously and wanted to make sure that would never happen again.

Really targeted Obama.

But during his presidency, we also see this dramatic demographic shift really come to the fore.

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

So you have conservative white evangelicals who already are looking for, you know, this us versus them militancy, seeing themselves as embattled as a fuel to consolidating their power, long history of that.

Now they're actually seeing, oh, we're not in the majority anymore.

And then you have the Obergefell decision and you have this increasing anxiety,

not just organically produced, but anxiety over religious liberty.

And all of this really comes together in 2016 and fuels the sense that what they need is not a Sunday school teacher.

What they need is not an upstanding Christian gentleman.

They don't need somebody who has the morals to pastor a church.

They need, in their words, an ultimate fighting champion.

Right.

I mean, that's so fascinating.

So if Trump embodies sort of the pinnacle of evangelical masculinity now, what happened to other, you know, Christian masculine ideas like, you know, say

Jesus, right?

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.

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?

So, what happens to Jesus in all this?

Does he come off as weak or effeminate to evangelicals, like when compared to Trump?

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 oof yeah uh you know 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 most will offer a little uh gentle disclaimer oh you know i don't like everything he does

and you know oh i wish he would tweet a little less or you know it's a little rough around the edges kind of you know says it's a little distancing and then there's always a but that follows that.

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.

Very little talk of Jesus.

And when I was researching Jesus in John Wayne, too, I noticed the same, except for there was a Jesus they liked.

And that was the Jesus from the book of Revelation,

where you get this kind of apocalyptic warrior, bloody sword, battle kind of thing.

And we're, you know, different ways to interpret that apocalyptic literature, but that's the warrior Jesus they like.

No more Mr.

Nice Jesus.

Exactly.

The Jesus who slays all of his enemies.

That's their Jesus.

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

But that one gets a little less airtime.

And that's nice for an burst of aggression.

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

So their favorite is the warrior Jesus in the book of Revelation.

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, which is, you know, the attributes of a follower of Christ.

That's what the fruit of the spirit are.

You know, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control.

Wow, that sounds effeminate, doesn't it?

Right.

Within this framework.

And so that's kind of how far this has gone by by separating the genders and making them opposites.

What you have in the end is, you know, the virtues end up in the feminine sphere.

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.

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.

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, it commits you to a bunch of things, to be nice to a lot of people.

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.

I mean, I'm sure they exist.

I'm sure Jordan Peterson is seeking them out right now.

But

by and large, this is a long-standing anxiety.

How would you locate it in that tradition?

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

Oh, it's the answer to that question is always both.

And I imagine

you're right, right.

Religion, Christianity itself has often been coded feminine.

And you could go back to the early church,

where, you know, women were flocking to this new faith.

It elevated women over against the rest of the culture.

And also, if you look at the teachings of Christ, if you look at the New Testament, and if you look at what Jesus says, like his followers are supposed to do, it's kind of wild.

It's loving your enemies, loving your neighbors.

It is turning the other cheek.

It is self-sacrifice, not just for women, but for everybody.

To follow Christ is to take up your cross, to suffer, right, to put others ahead of you.

And over and over again, this is like Jesus' disciples are thrown off by this.

This was not the Messiah they were expecting.

They wanted the warrior Christ.

And Jesus just over and over again, turns that on its head.

So this is, you know, arguably the theological heart of.

Christianity.

This is what makes the faith so revolutionary in its time.

And this is a tall order.

I, again, you know, I'm a Christian.

I've never identified myself as evangelical, but you could put me on the edges of that.

I'm a Calvinist.

I teach at Calvin University here in Michigan.

And so in our particular tradition, we tend to really like sin, or at least, you know, talk a lot about sin and human depravity.

So within this theological system, then we are prone to sin.

We are prone to the sin of pride.

We are prone to usurping power over others.

And it is precisely our faith that ought to restrain us from that.

It goes against our human nature to put others ahead of ourselves, to put others to love our enemies.

I mean, that is not a natural response, but that arguably is what Christianity calls us to do.

Now, that is not a convenient theology for seizing political power.

or claiming cultural power, right?

That's not a convenient theology if you're trying to coerce others to live, you know, within your system.

And so a lot of theological gymnastics have to be done to get from point A to point B.

Now, that said, all theologies have elements of interpretation, right?

We can all argue theologically about which is true, which is not.

They're all human constructions.

But still, it's quite a stretch to get from the Jesus of the New Testament in what he commands his followers to do and kind of this aggressive militant Christian nationalism, Christian masculinity.

Yeah, You know, it occurs to me that what Jesus actually spends a lot of time doing in the gospels are things like he spends a lot of time healing sick people.

Washing feet.

Yeah, washing feet.

He like comforts people who are like grieving or scared a lot and is always telling them to like calm down and trust in God.

And then he

feeds the hungry, right?

And these are all like things that moms do.

Like taking care of you when you're sick, shushing you when you're scared, feeding you lunch.

Like this is what Julianne of Norwich also said about Jesus.

Like, he's kind of like, he's got a mommy vibe

in some ways.

And then, when the big man gets mad, he's like, forgive them.

They know what they do.

They don't know what they do.

Yeah.

He's like,

look,

what do you want?

He's running interference with dad.

Exactly, right?

But that's like not the part they lean into.

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

Like, they lean into the stuff that

better suits their other agendas.

Exactly.

And it's kind of wild, too, because these are the self-proclaimed Bible-believing Christians.

And they have embraced inerrancy, the idea that goes hand in hand with a very literal interpretation of the scriptures.

So they say.

When you actually look right at all of these passages that we're referencing and a whole lot more, right there, you have some elaborate theological work being done to explain away why, oh, no, no, this doesn't really apply in this moment.

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.

Like, oh my gosh, we can explain that.

You know, like, it's not what it seems.

You know, love your enemies, turn the cheek.

No, no, no, no, no.

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.

Oh, wow.

So, you know, just, you know, nope, throw that out.

Doesn't apply to this day and age.

And yet, their brand that they have promoted and actually successfully defined the narrative for decades now: is that they, they are the Bible-believing Christians.

And everybody else, every other Christian under the sun is,

they're the false teachers.

So, I wondered if maybe we could talk a little bit about what is emerging, to my understanding, as like Trump's own quasi-messianic claims.

So, he's had his, you know, his famous declaration at the 2016 Republican Convention, I alone can fix it, putting him as sort of like a unique historical individual with like quasi-supernatural or divinely ordained historic position, right?

And then he's got his more recent claim that he just made at his address to Congress that I had to watch for my sins as part of my job at The Guardian, where he said, you know, God spared me.

in my assassination attempt.

He took this guy who was killed at my rally, whose family was there in the House chamber, but he spared me because he wants me to make America great again, right?

He's like claiming this position of having been like anointed for this historic task.

There's also this like repeated language I'm noticing from some national, like high-profile Republicans in which they will thank God explicitly for President Trump.

So should we understand this as like,

and I think you're the person best equipped to decode this for me.

Should we understand this as like an appropriation of Christian rhetoric?

Or is it more of an effort to like displace Christ as a Messiah figure in this like sort of schema he's creating of his own mythology?

Yeah.

So

is appropriation and is displacement.

And to understand, you know, when we use terminology like evangelical, that too is an umbrella term and there's different traditions within that.

So for instance, when you know Trump appeared on the scene and first evangelicals weren't sure what to make of him back in 2015.

But as early as August 2015, we start seeing the earliest polls, August 2015, that evangelicals are favoring Trump in the plurality of voters.

And I remember you mentioned Russell Moore before, because back in 2015, at that time, when that data came out, he said, no way, no way.

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

Well, that was what, how many?

A couple of years before he got pushed out of his job at the Southern Baptist Convention because he wouldn't bend the knee to Trump.

So, so here we are.

But at that time, as the evangelical support became clearer, as they understood who he was and what he could do for them, then you start having various justifications.

So you have somebody like James Dobson, kind of a traditional evangelical figure, family values guy, say, well, Trump, he's a baby Christian.

So he doesn't know a lot.

He gets a lot of stuff wrong.

He's just a little baby.

Yeah, be nice to him.

Be nice to him, right?

So all the grace, all the grace for somebody like Trump, very little grace for a whole whole lot of the rest of us.

But then you also have this very important strand that was beneath the radar for a while of most media, and in fact, many scholars of evangelicalism, and that is the charismatic revival strand, the new apostolic reformation, and kind of adjacent streams.

And it's in those spaces that you're going to hear the kind of prophecies about Trump.

And so, back in 2016, it was the King Cyrus prophecy, which is a pagan ruler, right?

Not one of God's people, people, but God has anointed him to play this redemptive role on behalf of God's people.

And so he was the king Cyrus.

That was 2016.

2024, it was amped up a bit.

And so we got the King Jehu model in those new apostolic reformation spaces.

Now, King Jehu, it's a different story.

He was the king that drove out the wicked Ahab and Jezebel.

And we started hearing a lot of Jezebel.

and oh, look, Kamala Harris, Jezebel, it makes sense.

But if you look at that Old Testament story, it gets really bloody.

And it's essentially, they don't just, you know, drive out Jezebel and Ahab.

They have Jezebel thrown out the window, run over her with horses and feed her body to the dogs, and then go after all of the religious leaders who supported them and like quite literally drain the swamp and kill them all, right?

So it's a very bloody story filled with vengeance and something that caused me significant concern.

All of this is to say, in these charismatic spaces, there is a sense of, yes, he has a divine role.

And they mean that very literally, very seriously.

And the way this works is there's prophets in this movement who deliver these prophecies and then they share them on YouTube and on Facebook and on television.

And these just travel through the networks.

And so there are some evangelicals, some conservative Christians who just see Trump as, no, he's not a Christian, no, he's not the best guy, but hey, he's doing some good things for us.

There are many others who see him absolutely as God's anointed one.

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

You know, as arguably a narcissist,

I think he very much enjoys being seen as a godlike figure, and he will lean into that.

And if you look 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 like the golden statue of Trump.

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.

Yeah, I've heard that they don't like golden statues.

I've heard that that was, that was kind of a big deal at one point.

I mean, if you go to

CPAC and, you know, the golden Trump, that all works.

And if, you know, if anybody calls him out on it, it's like, oh, come on,

don't you have a sense of humor?

Right.

So there's always an answer to a criticism.

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

So I'm thinking here of things like Joe Rigny's book, Out This Month, proclaiming the sin of empathy.

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

Yeah, yeah, we're seeing seeing theological revisionism.

Again, as a religious historian, I'll have to say that theology is always kind of in conversation with culture.

As much as Christians would like to present 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.

And so

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.

That said, yeah,

it's quite something to now have a book on the sin of empathy.

And Rigny's book actually was preceded by an article he wrote back in 2019.

So this has been around for a while and even the idea floating around before then, which has been fascinating.

First of all, like, what does he mean by empathy?

It's helpful just to look at the examples, right?

So in Rigny's world, the bad kind of empathy is the empathy, for example, that survivors of sexual abuse might stir in trying to bring to justice their perpetrators, particularly inside churches like this other Baptist convention.

And, you know, Rigny is part of Doug Wilson's circles, and there's a lot of allegations of abuse there.

So this kind of sin of empathy, the untethered empathy, is the empathy that survivors can stir in the hearts of other, you know, Christians to to actually do something about abuse.

Sin of empathy also comes out when it comes to LGBTQ folks and being kind and treating them with dignity and in the context of racism.

So

the bad compassion, the bad empathy, coincidentally aligns very closely with right-wing political agenda.

So what you see happening here is, I think, an attempt to blunt

the natural human empathy, aside from any particular theological call, to love our neighbors, right?

To respect the dignity of others, including and even especially those who are different from us.

And so it is quite wild to see how inside these spaces it's getting a lot of traction.

Whereas for like any other Christian who's not, you know, online or not exposed to these teachings, just like, you know, what the heck?

What is this even?

What are we talking about here?

But the consequences of this defining empathy as a sin, I think are quite clear.

By not allowing people to feel compassion, and I'll use those interchangeably, or to feel empathy for people who are different from you is dangerous.

And it is dangerous politically, but it is necessary for anybody who wishes to pursue.

a coercive political agenda to align with authoritarianism, right?

As a scholar, scholar, my outside field was in 20th century Germany and studies of authoritarianism in my background.

And so I think in this current context, we have to bring any discussion of, you know, a 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.

I'm glad that you mentioned some of these examples from Rigny's book, because I was struck struck when I was like looking up evangelicals' responses to Trump by this Russell Moore affair, La Faire de Russell Moore at the Southern Baptist Convention.

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.

And, you know, on our podcast, we talk a lot about sexual, or I talk a lot and Adrian Blightly 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.

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 learn more about evangelical life, is that like sexual violence has been like a pretty central part of evangelical spaces.

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.

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.

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

We read Maribel Morgan's The Total Woman, which is a weird, weird, and horny book.

Very, very Tim LaHaye, another

author on this.

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

And so I've really, really delved into the Maribel Morgan story, and that has been a whole lot of fun.

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

Men, filled with testosterone, they are not good at restraint, sexual or otherwise, but they have a lot of sexual needs.

So how are we going to have a stable society?

Because boys will be boys.

That's where women come in.

So women, opposite.

They don't have these sexual drives.

They don't have these sexual needs.

And God gifted them with the gift of restraint, but it is on them to keep men on the straight and narrow, straight and and narrow.

And so that means that they cannot seduce any man who is not their husband, but that will be hard because, you know, the way God made them.

So they have to be very modest.

They have to not place themselves in any position where he could be enticed.

And then when they get married, then their job instantly overnight is to fulfill their husband's every sexual need.

And then they're promised that if they obey these rules, they will have the best sex ever.

And I mean, this is just a whole thing.

And this has been an industry, right?

Since the 60s, these books on sexual fulfillment, sexual repression, you know, two sides of the same coin, these have sold millions of copies, right?

This is like youth group culture, this is a purity culture, all of that.

Now, what I saw then in reading these books was that given that framework, in any case of sexual misconduct, there is always a woman to blame.

So I was stunned reading not just these early books, but throughout up to the present when even in the cases of child abuse a little girl could be accused of seducing a grown man wow absolutely shocking the first time I came across an instance of that I just thought no way like I'm not even going to touch this because this is this is too much of an outlier and then I saw it again and then I saw it again and so the kind of moral system exists in this patriarchal hierarchical order in which obedience to the authority that God places above you equals obedience to God.

So here's the other piece.

There's this gender difference and then there's this hierarchical ordering, which means women must submit to men, even if they are sinful.

And this is where you get some wild stuff, which, you know, in kind of the Christian Reconstructionist traditions, spaces like Doug Wilson's theology, where, you know, very strict rules for victims of sexual abuse.

Did you scream?

Did you scream loud enough?

What were you wearing?

Even underage girls who are groomed, well, they were complicit in the sin.

And this kind of stuff that to outsiders seems morally revolting and absolutely stunning within these theological systems, there is a logic there as revolting as it still is.

And so yes, these things do go hand in hand.

And you see this played out over and over again.

All kinds of forgiveness, grace for the man who goes astray, very ready to quickly forgive and forget and place him back in positions of power.

For women, for victims who try to hold men to account, who try to say, actually, this is a bigger problem.

It's systemic.

Hey, there's a theological problem here.

We need to address this.

They are the ones who are demonized, sometimes literally demonized, driven out of their communities.

They face vicious attacks.

It is horrifying to see what they go through.

And then you see it on the political stage as well.

So much forgiveness for men who have gone astray, for men who assault women.

And in the current administration, right, there are many examples of this

and does not diminish evangelical love of them at all.

So to close us out, I wanted to ask you to engage a little bit in the

well, it's both the lowest form of journalism and probably the lowest form of being a historian, which is, can we get you to predict something for us, please?

Where do you think the sex and gender politics of the evangelical movement are heading?

What will preacher masculinity become over the next, I don't know, 10 years?

Yeah, this, this is such a hard question.

I could talk with, you know, quite some authority on the past and then you try to get me to predict what's happening next week.

I'm like, oh my gosh.

Because one thing we have learned from history is, my goodness, you just never know what's right around the corner.

So, with that said,

in a performative space, I would predict more of the same for quite some time.

It plays well in kind of the podcast circuit.

It meshes well with kind of the tech bro masculinity, and it meshes extremely well with authoritarian tactics and the strongman.

So, I am not foreseeing any retreat for some time.

Again, in the performative space in particular, now when we get down to people's lives and we get down to actual pastors, the thing is, you know, guys who embrace this model of masculinity tend to be jerks or this turns them into jerks,

chicken and egg, I guess.

So that may not be the type of man that you want as your pastor.

You know, that could get old.

If you go to your pastor, you know, for spiritual direction, and it's clear that, you know, perhaps in his own life, he doesn't embody the traits that when you read the scriptures yourselves, you think actually do belong with, you know, Christian character.

When you have an illness in the family and you are looking for somebody to bring spiritual comfort and assurance.

Are these guys the best guys to do it?

You know, maybe they have a hidden softer side.

I just haven't seen it.

But, you know, I think there's a real life situation that may bring about a course correction.

It will take some time, and I'm not sure what form it will take.

Right now, the power is certainly amassed on the other side of the scale.

But I do like to think that despite all the propaganda, despite the power of these platforms, there still is real life that happens underneath.

And I would like to think that in those spaces, people will be able to see what is good and what is harmful, what is abusive, and what is noble.

You heard it from Kristen Dumae.

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Thank you so much for joining us.

I thought this was really enlightening and I understand a lot more now.

I don't like it, but I understand it.

It's all bad.

All bad, but thank you.

Thank you so much.

This was wonderful.

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