Even Tom Cruise is confused as to how his character in Magnolia materialized into a real-life Evangelical preacher.
Thank the Lord for testosterone. Without it, these guys would have absolutely no way to justify behaving like childish, sexist, sef-indulgent jerks.
The strobe lights pulse and the air vibrates to a killer rock beat. Giant screens show mayhem and gross-out pranks: a car wreck, a sucker punch, a flabby (and naked) rear end, sealed with duct tape.
Brad Stine runs onstage in ripped blue jeans, his shirt untucked, his long hair shaggy. He’s a stand-up comic by trade, but he’s here today as an evangelist, on a mission to build up a new Christian man — one profanity at a time. “It’s the wuss-ification of America that’s getting us!” screeches Stine, 46.
A moment later he adds a fervent: “Thank you, Lord, for our testosterone!”
At least he didn’t say “puss-ification,” right?
Stine’s daylong revival meeting, which he calls “GodMen,” is cruder than most. But it’s built around the same theory as the other experimental forums: Traditional church worship is emasculating.
Hold hands with strangers? Sing love songs to Jesus? No wonder pews across America hold far more women than men, Stine says. Factor in the pressure to be a “Christian nice guy” — no cussing, no confrontation, in tune with the wife’s emotions — and it’s amazing men keep the faith at all.
“We know men are uncomfortable in church,” says the Rev. Kraig Wall, 52, who pastors a small church in Franklin, Tenn. — and is at GodMen to research ways to reach the husbands of his congregation. His conclusion: “The syrup and the sticky stuff is holding us down.”
John Eldredge, a seminal writer for the movement, goes further in “Wild At Heart,” his bestselling book. “Christianity, as it currently exists, has done some terrible things to men,” he writes. Men “believe that God put them on earth to be a good boy.”
Yeah, who ever said religion was about being good?
These manly men even have a theme song:
Forget the yin and the yang
I’ll take the boom and the bang….
Don’t need in touch with my feminine side!
All I want is my testosterone high.
Is it just me, or does this seem a little… juvenile?
Martinson considers the experiments with high-testosterone worship “an important attempt to address at least one aspect of the difficulty Christianity is facing with men.” He just worries it might go too far. “Too often, it turns into the man being in charge of the woman,” he says. “Christianity has been there before, and we learned how wrong it was.”
Or in other words, Seduce and Destroy: worship the cock, tame the cunt. But don’t be in charge of her. That would be wrong. Except when it’s not:
In fact, men taking charge is a big theme of the GodMen revival. At what he hopes will be the first of many such conferences, in a warehouse-turned-nightclub in downtown Nashville, Stine asks the men: “Are you ready to grab your sword and say, ‘OK, family, I’m going to lead you?’ ” He also distributes a list of a real man’s rules for his woman. No. 1: “Learn to work the toilet seat. You’re a big girl. If it’s up, put it down.”
Where else have I heard this sword imagery before?
We get it. You have a cock, and a cock is sort of like sword in that it’s hugely powerful and we should all bow down to it. Moving on.
But some men at the conference run into trouble when they debut their new attitudes at home. Eric Miller, a construction worker, admits his wife is none too pleased when he takes off, alone, on a weekend camping trip a few weeks after the GodMen conference this fall.
“She was a little bit leery of it, as we have an infant,” he reports. “She said, ‘I need your help around here.’ ”
Miller, 26, refuses to yield: “I am supposed to be the leader of the family.”
And everyone knows that the best leaders are deserters.
This quote, though, really illustrates how ridiculous these “manly” movements are. While these men complain about their victimization at the hands of “feminized” churches, it’s their wives who are stuck at home doing the actual work of maintaining their families. And with all the ego-driven talk of leadership and taking charge, I can see how the big family boss might get the idea that he doesn’t actually have to do anything but tell his first mate what to do.
Stine argues that the genteel facade of a Christian nice guy inhibits introspection and substitutes cliches for spiritual growth. GodMen is his attempt to encourage men to get real. His speakers admit to masturbation and adultery. A workshop called “Training the Penis” encourages men to talk openly about temptation and bond with guys who share their struggles.
These guys hold workshops on training their penises as if the cock is some sort of mad dog over which they have no control, and it’s feminists who hate men?
It’s this essentialism that’s always left me confused about these “manly men” groups. They reduce men to charicatures of insensitive, blundering, power-hungry fools, and don’t account at all for variations in personality and interests. There’s nothing wrong with watching sports or drinking beer or blowing shit up or jerking off or cursing; I’ve been known to do a little of all of the above, and they certainly have their pleasures. However, there is something problematic with arguing that interest in these things is inherent to teh cock. And there’s something extremely problematic when the primary definition of “manly” has more to do with control than anything else — and that control is naturally exercised over “the family” (in other words, women and children).
Men who don’t fit into a hyper-masculine mold, then, are left out. Men (like women) already have enough problems trying to negotiate their identities with a social system that dictates how they must behave in order to be acceptable. Their primary duty is to be a breadwinner and a provider. They aren’t supposed to be overly-emotional, especially when the emotion in question is sadness. They’re supposed to be aggressive. They’re supposed to be animalistic when it comes to women, acting as if they can’t control their supposedly baser “instincts” and simultaneously trying to own and control their female partner. Failure to fit into one or all of these categories could mean that you are (1) a failure as a man, or (2) teh gay, which is basically the same thing.
File this one under How Patriarchy Hurts Men, Too.
They even have a website. The tagline: GodMen: where faith gets dangerous.