Evangelical men’s movement authors recycled the same canon of militaristic masculine heroes

Evidence

Other works reveal the extent to which new writers came to rely on common tropes. In 2005, Paul Coughlin published No More Christian Nice Guy, a manifesto against alleged distortions of Christian masculinity. Citing Dobson, Weber, Generals MacArthur and Patton, George Gilder, Robert Bly, Teddy Roosevelt, and Mel Gibson’s The Passion, Coughlin offered a familiar critique of emasculated Christian manhood. He acknowledged that his book testified to men’s anger: “They’re angry with their culture, their church, and their God, and sometimes their anger is directed at women.” But he wanted to transform that anger into a redemptive force. Coughlin took care to distance himself from more extreme views. He affirmed his full support for women’s suffrage, countering the apparently popular notion “within the realm of Christian publishing” that a man ought to cast the vote for his entire household. He recognized, too, that prior to 1965 “it was not uncommon for an attractive young woman in the work force to be treated like a piece of flesh, a toy to be used by men.” And he acknowledged that men had previously showed troublingly little interest in their families, a problem that organizations like Focus on the Family and Promise Keepers had addressed. He also parted ways with those who advocated a hierarchical authority structure that placed men under the authority of their employers. He couldn’t stomach the idea that a boss “holds God’s proxy as our employer,” although he expressed no such discomfort with a hierarchy of authority based on gender. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 416

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Du Mez’s earlier chapters tracking this same canon — MacArthur, Patton, Roosevelt, Gibson — as the stable vocabulary across generations of evangelical masculinity literature.
• DEFINE: Shows the movement’s self-defense: authors distinguish themselves from ‘more extreme views’ while retaining gender hierarchy — a useful example of how the boundary of ‘extreme’ gets drawn.