(Image: Cornerstone Church of Orangeburg, South Carolina’s “Biblical Masculinity Week,” May 12, 2019.)

“Isn’t this a blessed day?” Bill asked.

Eight of us were on a boat in the middle of Lake Mohave, wilting under the desert sun and bathing in an atmosphere of sunscreen and boat fumes. We were on a “retreat” for college-aged youth from our Southern California megachurch. Bill and two other dads were chaperones. All three of their twenty-year old sons were on the boat with us. My friend Dave was the pastor in charge of the retreat. I was the retreat’s speaker.

It was July 2005, my last month on staff at the church, just months before I would leave the church—and the faith—permanently. By that time, I was running on empty spiritually and emotionally, and ready to abscond to England for a fresh start. But Dave had convinced me to speak at the retreat, so there I was helping the young guys to wakeboard and chit chatting with Bill and the other dads. As we made our way to the middle of the lake, someone began to wave and yell to one side of the boat. We all looked up to see Bill’s wife driving their family boat with the other moms riding along with her. They wanted to surprise us by shuttling out to watch their sons wakeboard.

As they got close enough for us to yell across to each other, Bill’s face grew red. He turned and screamed over to her.

“Get out of here! What are you doing? You don’t know how to drive a boat. Take it back!”

He was waving his hands wildly, spit spraying from his mouth.

“GET OUT OF HERE! NOW!”

Dave and I glanced at each other. It was awkward. But we’d been around the church long enough to see men yelling at their wives in public like this.

Bill then turned to us and said, “What a blessed day! Am I right guys?”

Though he wasn’t a pastor at the church, Bill considered himself a spiritual guide within the community.

“Who wants to lead us in a prayer before we get the wakeboard in the water?” Bill asked the group.

Before Dave and I could even finish exchanging knowing glances with each other, Bill had morphed his face from misogynistic rage to prayerful delight, and started to gather the guys for an impromptu prayer circle.

“Lord,” Bill prayed. “Thank you for family, fellowship, and this wonderful time together.”

The transition was jarring, but not out of the ordinary. During my seven years in evangelical ministry I had learned that there was no disconnect between public wife-shaming and a man’s spiritual leadership. They went hand in hand.

***

Tragedy calls back memories and impressions in unexpected — and often involuntary — ways. When I heard the news of the massacre in Atlanta by a white man who had been steeped in evangelical culture, my mind reverted to episodes like this one from my time in the evangelical world. As a teenager, I learned that God is the Most Masculine Man. The one who takes what he wants. Acts without hesitation. And punishes the wayward and the sinful. Violence and domination were at the forefront of how my evangelical elders taught me to understand God’s — and by extension my — sense of masculinity. In the wake of the Atlanta shootings, I returned to this storehouse of memories — or it returned to me — which led me to reflect on the connections between evangelical conceptions of masculinity and violence against women.

***

My hometown, Yorba Linda, is a hamlet in the northeast corner of Orange County, California. Best known as Richard Nixon’s birthplace, Yorba Linda exists in the shadow of Disneyland, which is only fifteen minutes away by car. When I was growing up, the town, like the rest of Orange County, was a pocket of conservative politics and racial homogeneity (over two-thirds white). Throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century, half the people in Orange County worked for the defense industry, so nationalism and patriotism were markers of manhood in my neighborhood and at my church. The men in my community touted conservative talking points and valorized the military.

As a teenager, I didn’t know any dads who were professors, writers, bureaucrats, or journalists. No orchestra professionals or playwrights. No dancers or singers, editors or artists. The men around me were like Bill (who was a successful salesman with a huge house that had a full basketball court and pool with a rock waterfall in the backyard): bankers, contractors, and small business owners who ran lucrative printing outfits or repair shops. The kinds of guys who vote Republican, drive trucks, wear flannel, but make well over six figures a year and probably have a boat docked at their family cabin. Few advanced degrees; many advanced bank accounts. They built housing complexes and strip malls, usually with a small army of undocumented workers who they needed, but would revile as “lazy illegals” when asked by their pals. Their heroes were not men of letters. I didn’t know what the New Yorker was until graduate school. Same goes for NPR.

The men who gained our respect as baseball coaches and community leaders were fashioned in the mold of figures like John Wayne, who was a local icon. The airport in Orange County was named after John Wayne in 1979. It was a testament to his years of political and cultural influence in the region. Wayne often made appearances in Orange County at rallies for candidates like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon, where he advocated for the staunch, and at times extremist, anti-communism efforts in the county.

Wayne emanated what historian Kristen Kobes du Mez calls in her compelling work Jesus and John Wayne, “cowboy masculinity.” On the screen, he depicted what many considered to be the archetypal American man — a self-reliant individualist who never shows his feelings and never apologizes. The type of dude who forgoes reflection for action; doesn’t ask for permission; who knows he’s a good guy and knows how to spot — and annihilate — the bad guys. Both on and off the screen, Wayne modeled a mode of American manhood based on imperialist ideals, the superiority of whites, and free-market capitalism.

***

One of the constant refrains I heard as a teenager at church was that we Christians were not “of this world.” It was a marker of Christian character to draw a distinction between yourself and the godless society around you. But as time went on, it became clear that the type of man who we looked up to at church was the same kind of man who was looked up to in my local community. The world and the church were pretty much the same when it came to manhood.

Our church’s John Wayne was a guy named James. His imposing physical presence somehow matched the magnetism of his persona. Standing about six foot one, he seemed as wide as he was tall. A former college linebacker, James had a buzz cut and handlebar moustache, making him the kind of guy that fourteen year-old boys instantly recognized as the one not to mess with. All of this made him an intimidating 9^th grade Sunday school teacher.

James was one of my first male Christian role models. After growing up in a non-religious household, and dabbling with sex, drugs, and other teenage vices in middle school, I converted to Evangelicalism at age fourteen. In a few short months, I went from a budding teenage rebel with green hair and a bad attitude to a “Jesus Freak” who carried a Bible wherever I went. On Sunday mornings, I attended the high school youth group at Rose Drive Friends, a megachurch about two miles from my house. There were about a hundred high schoolers in the group each Sunday. After some singing and announcements, we broke into groups according to grade and gender. James was my assigned small group leader.

“Most of you guys play sports, right?” he asked a group of eight of us. We nodded. We were sitting in a circle in one corner of the church gymnasium. It was 9:30am on a Sunday morning and we had huddled in our small group with James.

“When I played football,” he responded, “How do you think I showed my teammates and my opponents a Christ-like character?”

Fueled by a convert’s zeal, I answered first. “By being kind, patient, and caring at every moment,” I said. I was recalling the characteristics of love that I had read in I Corinthians 13.

“Maybe,” he said hesitantly. Then he said something like this: “But in football you have to be tough. Vicious even. I determined to hit the hardest. Go all out. And never let my opponent see me back down. By being the ultimate competitor, I was serving God.”

I was taken aback. From my reading of the New Testament it seemed that the most important Christian virtues didn’t have anything to do with hitting people. Or being vicious.

A short while later my friend Josh and I walked past Ron, a guy in his mid-twenties who competed in bodybuilding competitions all over Southern California, on the way into church service. When James saw us looking at him, he walked by and said, “I could take him. Those muscles are all fluff.” Josh and I laughed in adoration. James’s confidence and aggressiveness were hard not to admire.

James wasn’t on the pastoral staff at Rose Drive. He was, however, a core part of the congregation. His parents helped found the church in the 1960s, and so he’d been there since the beginning. A father of three kids (all were eventually in my youth group when I was the youth pastor), he was a successful contractor in town. Like many of the men I grew up around, he found an affluent career without an advanced degree or spending undue time studying. Books, libraries, philosophy — these were a waste of time. Like John Wayne, James was a man of action, not reflection.

Over the ten years I knew him, a few things came into focus. First, James was a gruff, speak-my-mind-even-if-it-hurts-your-feelings kind of dude. When I was 19, about five years after he was my ninth grade Sunday school teacher, he yelled at my colleagues and me because we had decided not to repeat a house-building mission trip to Mexico that the previous youth ministers had run. After suffering a public and brutal verbal takedown, I realized the most respected and “godly” men in the congregation were the ones who were most likely to tear your head off whenever they pleased.

I also began to understand that not being on staff actually freed James to be an emblem of Christian manhood in our community. He wasn’t burdened by pastoral responsibilities; didn’t have to be an empathetic counselor or constant listener; didn’t have to find the right words to broach difficult topics in sermons; never had to compromise with those he disagreed with on important church matters. James could speak his mind. Voice his opinion. And generally be the toughest, most intimidating guy in church. Not being the pastor allowed him to be the man we all looked up to.

It took me years to realize that the type of godly manhood modeled for us at church was the same model prevalent in most of American culture. There was little difference between them, other than the call for Christian men to serve God rather than themselves.

According to Pew, white Republican Evangelical men are more likely to own guns than members of any other religious group. In presidential elections, white Evangelicals have voted for the likes of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump. For many Evangelical men, figures like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama weren’t manly enough to be real leaders. They wanted an “Alpha” in the White House, one who would protect America’s borders with ferocity and force. Someone more like a shirtless Putin than a dad-jeans-wearing Obama.

But the evangelical models of masculinity I witnessed at church weren’t totally secular in origin. It’s not that Evangelical leaders didn’t turn to the Bible to create their sense of manhood. It’s that these leaders started from an ideal of masculinity offered by men like John Wayne, and then looked for those traits in God in order to provide a biblical justification for their vision of manhood.

Evangelicals like to repeat the biblical adage that God made humans in His image. But humans more often than not make the divine in theirs. The philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach argued that people take all the traits considered honorable in humans and use them to create a deity from the ground up. The divine, in many cases, ends up being a projection of idealized human qualities. In my experience, John Wayne’s school of manhood served as the basis for biblical manhood. If cowboy masculinity is what you are looking for in the Bible, then cowboy masculinity is what you will find.

***

In graduate school one of my advisors gave me a peculiar book to read for one of my doctoral exams. In God’s Phallus, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz argues that the ancient Israelite conception of God as male had a profound effect on how Israelites approached gender and sexuality. If God is envisioned as male, and God has a metaphorical body — his hands and voice and mouth are all described in the Hebrew scriptures — then he must have metaphorical sex organs. Eilberg-Schwartz goes where most won’t by investigating what God’s metaphorical phallus might have meant to ancient Israelites. 

God’s Phallus opened my eyes to new “scholarly” issues. When entering a doctoral program in Religious Studies I never expected to Google “How big is God’s penis?” But the book brought back the lessons I had learned at evangelical church services, men’s retreats, and Sunday school small groups: God is the Most Masculine Man of All Men.

Though none of the biblical writers allude to divine genitals, it’s clear that God displays his masculinity by exerting dominion over the bodies of his people — especially their sex organs. This comes into focus in Genesis 12, when God calls on a man named Abram to leave his home and journey to the land of Canaan.

“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

God promises Abraham (then named Abram) that if he is willing to obey, God will make his descendants into a great nation and Abram will be remembered forever as the blessed man at the head of the nation’s genealogy. He also promises to protect Abram.

“Every male among you shall be circumcised,” God commands, “You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you . . . Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”

God’s deal with Abraham is based on the branding of every male Israelite’s sex organ. The mark of the covenant is made on the penis — a sign of the covenant, and more, a sign of God’s dominion over the fertility and sexuality of every male Israelite. God also exerts control over the womb. Female infertility coupled with divine intervention is a theme throughout the Hebrew Bible. Abraham’s wife, Sarah, wasn’t the only Israelite woman whose fertility challenges were solved miraculously by God. The message is clear: God controls the penis and the uterus; the semen and the womb. He is Israel’s maker and husband. The ultimate Daddy.

***

After studying the Bible and Christianity for two decades now, I have come to see Christian and Jewish monotheisms as forms of monogamy. In the Hebrew Bible, Israel is repeatedly framed as God’s wife. In the New Testament, Christians are called the Bride of Christ. When God demanded the Israelites swear off all other gods, He was asking for complete exclusivity. Other ancient peoples recognized the legitimacy of gods other than theirs while choosing to worship their own. The Israelites had to renounce the authority of any deity other than Yahweh, like a bride denouncing all other lovers except for her groom. In exchange for protecting Israel, providing her with food and shelter, God takes full control over her existence and destiny. Her life depends on Him.

This is clear in the book of Hosea. At this point in Israelite history, God is upset with Israel for having worshipped other gods. He compares Israel to a cheating wife who has emasculated her husband:

“Plead with your mother, plead — for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband — that she put away her whoring from her face, and her adultery from between her breasts, or I will strip her naked and expose her as in the day she was born, and make her like a wilderness, and turn her into a parched land, and kill her with thirst. Upon her children also I will have no pity, because they are children of whoredom. For their mother has played the whore; she who conceived them has acted shamefully.”

Hosea contains perhaps the most extreme expressions of Yahweh’s jealousy and abuse. God likens Israel to a whore for worshipping other deities. For Yahweh, idolatry is adultery. He goes so far as to command Hosea to marry a promiscuous woman in order to illustrate to the Israelites how their worship of other gods has made Him the husband of a prostitute. Like an abusive spouse, Yahweh rages with anger, telling Hosea he will strip Israel naked and expose her as the adulterous whore she is.

“I will remove my wool and my flax, which were to cover her nakedness,” Yahweh says in Hosea 2. “Now I shall uncover her genitals before the eyes of her lovers, and no one shall rescue her.”

God pledges vengeance on his spiritual wife, promising to expose her and leave her shamed and destitute. Following this cycle of abuse, he envisions reconciling with her once she has endured her punishment and shown penance for her unfaithfulness.

“Therefore, I will now allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her,” Yahweh says.

Biblical scholar Rhiannon Graybill observes that even though God turns from punishment to eroticization, “the desire to exercise control over it, however, remains the same.” Some of God’s anger stems from what He perceives as the breaking of the agreed covenant. But it really comes from a loss of control over her. In these passages, God’s masculinity is dependent on dominion — or domination. He is a bulldozer who displaces others in order to make a home for Israel in Canaan. A hero who rescues Israel from slavery in Egypt and exile in the desert. A knight in shining armor who promises not to allow anyone to take advantage of her, as long as he is her one and only in every sense of the word.

Yahweh never apologizes for stripping Israel naked in front of others, for abusing her, for treating her as something to dominate. He eventually softens and forgives, but treats the abuse as necessary for the relationship. It keeps her in line. Reminds her of who the man is — the one with power and authority.

The Bible is thousands of pages long. It contains a universe of stories, parables, and proverbs. There is an expansive matrix from which to construct ideals about sex, love, and gender. But Evangelical men hold fast to the image of the dominant God imposing his will on others. They prefer the angry God of Hosea over the turn-the-other-cheek Christ of Matthew.

***

As an Evangelical, Jesus was the most important thing to me. My personal relationship with God took place through the unconditional love of his Son. But when it came to figuring out how to be a godly man, my elders rarely used Jesus as the prime example.

Instead, the model for manhood was the God who destroyed his enemies, rescued Israel — the damsel in distress — from outsiders, and exerted control through a dominant sexuality and physical power. My leaders taught me that most of the Old Testament’s covenant was nullified by the life and death of Christ. The savior brought us a new relationship with God and thus a new set of rules on how to relate to him. At every turn, the new covenant of Jesus overshadowed the old one. And yet, when it came to masculinity, we turned from Christ back to the Most Masculine God in Genesis, Hosea, and other select parts of the Old Testament.

While I learned these lessons as a teenager at church from guys like Bill and James, they are also prevalent in evangelical resources about gender and sexuality. For example, in Gospel-Powered Parenting, Pastor William Farley teaches that God is “unadulterated masculinity.” As the model for the Christian father, Farley explains, God exemplifies the most important characteristic of being a man — acting first and refusing passivity.

“Although God does not have a male body,” Farley says, “He is the ultimate initiator. He is the ultimate servant-leader. In this sense, God the Father is absolute masculinity.”

Bestselling author John Eldredge takes it a step further in Wild at Heart. According to Eldredge, God made men like stallions — aggressive, dangerous, and wild: “A stallion is dangerous all right, but if you want the life he offers, you have to have the danger too,” Eldredge writes. “They go together.” Like many prominent Evangelical writers, Eldredge explains that God “hardwired” men to be aggressive. It’s their nature to run free, resist compliance, and buck authority. Sure, they might overstep their bounds once in a while. Yes, they will react with anger and violence from time to time. But isn’t that worth it in exchange for a passionate protector? A heroic character? An aggressive man’s man?

Dr. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and perhaps the most influential Evangelical voice on issues related to gender and sexuality of the last half-century, explains in Bringing Up Boys that boys are designed to be disruptive and even violent. As a boy grows, Dobson says, “He loves to throw rocks, play with fire, and shatter glass. He also gets great pleasure out of irritating … other children. As he gets older, he is drawn to everything dangerous. At around sixteen, he and his buddies begin driving around town like kamikaze pilots on sake. It is a wonder any of them survive.”

Then there’s Mark Driscoll, the controversial — yet immensely popular—Evangelical megachurch pastor and author.

Mark Driscoll at his megachurch in 2014. (Photo: Scott Cohen/Associated Press)

“The first thing to know about your penis is, that despite the way it may seem, it is not your penis,” Driscoll wrote in 2001. “Ultimately, God created you and it is his penis. You are simply borrowing it for a while. While His penis is on loan you must admit that it is sort of just hanging out there very lonely as if it needed a home, sort of like a man wandering the streets looking for a house to live in. Knowing that His penis would need a home, God created a woman to be your wife and when you marry her and look down you will notice that your wife is shaped differently than you and makes a very nice home.”

Men are an extension of God’s phallus. Women are penis homes. This is the crudest, and yet most honest expression of evangelical sexuality I can imagine.

***

As high schoolers, my friends in youth group avoided raunchy teen movies. Unlike our peers, we didn’t partake in the genre of film where teenagers engage in hijinks on the way to prom, get drunk at house parties, have awkward sex in the backseat of a car, or partake in other youthful frivolity. In our small groups, we policed ourselves to ensure no lust-inciting content crossed our respective paths.

Yet when it came to violence and gore, we actively encouraged each other to use on-screen warriors and combatants as the models we should emulate. Our favorite was Mel Gibson’s “Braveheart.” My male friends and I watched it almost every week. We could recite whole scenes by heart. If our dads were enthralled with John Wayne, we couldn’t get enough of Mel Gibson as William Wallace, the Scottish hero who drove out the English through sheer audacity and savagery. When Gibson rode his horse frenetically in front of a phalanx of loosely organized Scotsmen, riling them by explaining that all men die, but not all men truly live, we cheered. When he beckoned them to fight, screaming “Freedom!” at the top of his lungs, our faces glowed with admiration. When he avenged his wife’s death by ruthlessly murdering the perpetrators, we took notes. And when he went valiantly to his death without fear or remorse, we saw in William Wallace a Christ-like figure. I idolized William Wallace so much that on my first trip outside of North America in 2004, my group made a special trip to Stirling, Scotland, to see William Wallace’s sword.

I wasn’t alone in feeling this way.

“In your life you are William Wallace — who else could be?” John Eldredge writes in Wild at Heart, “You are the hero in your story. Not a bit player, not an extra, but the main man.” Mark Driscoll liked to use “William Wallace” as a pseudonym. Kobes du Mez points out that in 2006 he wrote on his church’s message board under the name “William Wallace II,” declaring, “I love to fight. It’s good to fight. Fighting is what we used to do before we all became pussified.” When a woman from the church tried to ask about this statement, he responded that he doesn’t reply to women and thus she would be ignored.

***

In 2004, about a year before I left the church and Evangelicalism, I met Jim for the first time. Jim was the son of prominent members of our congregation and community. His dad was a county sheriff, and the family donated generously to the church. After growing up in the youth group, Jim came out as gay in college. Shunned by his family, he began a career in international business that took him to a different country every six weeks or so. He used to recount smoking cigarettes at outdoor cafes in Rome and having espressos in Parisian bistros. Eventually he wound up in Palm Springs with a long-term partner. The relationship deteriorated over time, leaving him financially destitute and personally broken. At a critical moment, he decided his misfortune was the result of his sinful gay lifestyle and resolved to come home.

After reconciling with his parents, re-committing his life to Christ, and swearing off his “deviant” sexuality, Jim soon became a leader among the young adults in our community. He enrolled in a seminary program and eventually became one of the “Singles and Young Adult” pastors at the church. One of the unspoken dynamics of Jim’s prodigal return was how he and the rest of the church community viewed the “formerly gay” guy’s masculinity. Jim seemed to understand intuitively that leaving behind his “sinful” lifestyle meant refashioning his masculine persona. Always a gregarious extrovert, he never missed a chance to show the rest of us that he had fully returned to Christ by becoming a red-blooded heterosexual American male. He began training for triathlons and bike races; became the most outspoken member of staff when it came to forming strong young men’s groups that would guide teenagers along the path to becoming godly adults; and, oh yeah, he started hunting a bear.

In the summer of 2004, Jim served as a summer camp counselor for several weeks at Quaker Meadow, the summer camp our church attended in the Sequoias. Since it was seven hours from Orange County, Jim stayed up at the camp on weekends with the permanent staff. That year a bear kept popping into camp at night to look for food, leaving overturned trash cans and scared campers in its wake. Jim decided that his mission would be to hunt and kill the bear, thereby saving camp from the intruder. He obtained a license from the state ranger’s office and then made sure everyone around him knew that he was the guy hunting the local monster. He showed off his rifle and recounted his most recent attempts to take down the furry menace. After several legendary run-ins, no doubt embellished by Jim and others, by the end of the summer Jim had hunted and killed the bear. He paraded pictures around the office, beaming with delight. It was more than a hunting trophy. It was proof that he was a real man. A bona fide “man’s man” who had shed his old sexual identity and become more like William Wallace than anyone else in our community. No one else had killed a bear. And thus no one could question Jim’s masculinity. Killing made him a godly example to us all.

***

Cowboy masculinity. Dominant sexuality. The virtues of violence and savagery. These were the foundations of manhood in my Evangelical community. When I heard the news that a white Evangelical man had killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent, my mind raced. In the ensuing hours, I tried to weave together the threads of race, gun violence, purity culture, and masculinity in my mind. As an Asian American I lamented yet another instance of cruelty toward Asian and Asian American people. While all those threads remain salient in my thinking about this tragedy, my mind often wanders back to that day on the boat with Bill; that Sunday school group with James; the time at camp with Jim. I have been taken back to God as Ultimate Masculinity — the one who dominates immoral women and eliminates outsiders. Seeing the face of the Atlanta killer is haunting. More than anything, it makes me think that Feuerbach was right. We often forge the divine in our own image. And sometimes the gods we create are monsters.

Dr. Bradley B. Onishi is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College and co-host of the Straight White American Jesus podcast. His work has appeared at the New York Times, Huffington Post, LA Review of Books, Religion News Service, Religion Dispatches, and other outlets.