An uncredentialed television producer became a leading Christian men’s voice

Evidence

Also in 2005, David Murrow’s Why Men Hate Going to Church urged the church to embrace danger and shed its reputation “as a place for little old ladies of both sexes.” Murrow admitted he didn’t have the usual qualifications to write books about men and church. He wasn’t a pastor, professor, or theologian, he was just “a guy in the pews” who noticed a disturbing trend. (A television producer, Murrow had written and produced Sarah Palin’s first television commercial in 2002.) But Murrow had done his reading. He cited Eldredge, Dobson, Dalbey, Lewis, Cole, and Wilson. He, too, celebrated the “wildness of Jesus,” praised Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, and thought the church needed “a few more Teddy Roosevelts.” Murrow agreed that aggression was “key to the masculine soul” and that “without men and their warrior spirit in church, all is lost.” Murrow didn’t have much new to say, but the timing was right; boasting more than 100,000 copies of his book in print, Murrow emerged as a leading voice in the Christian men’s movement. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 417

Categorization

• XREF: The Sarah Palin connection is a concrete thread into later chapters on the 2008 campaign and evangelical-political alignment; Murrow produced her first TV ad. — connects to: A talk-show host’s spiritual authority rivaled institutional Christianity — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 808
• SEED: Angle: the pattern of media-adjacent laymen, not theologians, becoming the movement’s authorities — worth tracing as evidence for Du Mez’s commercial-artifacts method.