A warrior-God masculinity sold over four million copies via Wild at Heart

Evidence

JOHN ELDREDGE DIDN’T LIKE OFFICE WORK. IT wasn’t good for his masculinity or his spirituality. Spiritual life was meant to be “frontier,” untamed. If evangelical men wanted to experience true Christianity, they’d need to get out of “their La-ZBoys and climate-controlled shopping malls and into God’s wild creation.” Eldredge’s 2001 book, Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul, set the tone for a new evangelical militancy in the new millennium. Eldredge’s God was a warrior God, and men were made in his image. Aggression, not tenderness, was part of the masculine design. Wild at Heart would sell more than four million copies in the United States alone, becoming a ubiquitous presence in megachurch men’s groups, college dorm rooms, Christian bookstores, and church libraries. Spawning dozens of copycat books that borrowed copiously from Eldredge’s formula, it would frame evangelical explorations of masculinity for years to come. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 395

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how a single commercial product (a paperback, not a sermon) became the transmission mechanism for a religious identity — the book as the real ‘church.’
• XREF: Connects to Du Mez’s broader method throughout the book: commercial artifacts (books, radio, merchandise) as the channel of theological formation, not pulpits.