Military officer rhetoric in the 2000s borrowed directly from evangelical masculinity literature.

Evidence

Another air force parent, retired colonel David Antoon, was also alarmed at changes that had taken place at the academy. When he’d attended in the late 1960s, the emphasis had been on leadership, not just the art of war. But he was startled by the language he heard from General Weida; in his ninety-minute address, “Weida must have used the term warrior dozens of times,” Antoon recalled. (It turned out cadets had a game of ticking off the number of times Weida said “warrior” when he addressed them.) Weida’s rhetoric was uncannily similar to that of the literature on evangelical masculinity; according to Weinstein, it was “a page that could well have been lifted from Bobby Welch’s playbook You, the Warrior Leader.” — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 478

Categorization

• CANDY: Cadets playing a game of counting how many times the general says ‘warrior’ is a light humanizing detail — good elevator anecdote.