The evangelical masculinity movement fused secular men’s mythopoetic ideas with Christian psychology

Evidence

Setting the stage for the genre was Gordon Dalbey’s Healing the Masculine Soul. It was published in 1988, but Dalbey had been struggling to come to terms with masculinity since the 1970s. In 1983, he had come across a newspaper article by Robert Bly. Influenced by Carl Jung, Bly was concerned that fathers no longer initiated sons into proper manhood; drawing on fairy tales and myths, he pointed to the role of a heroic quest in preparing young men to assume roles as productive members of society. Lacking this proper male development, society would be left with “soft males” unable to fulfill their roles. Dalbey also read Leanne Payne’s 1986 Crisis in Masculinity. Payne, a Christian psychologist, identified the roots of this “crisis” in men’s failure to separate themselves from their mothers’ femininity. Only a father could affirm a son’s masculinity and a daughter’s femininity, according to Payne, but with absent or overly authoritarian fathers (and overbearing mothers), a generation of men had become separated from their own masculinity. The results were devastating: “homosexual neurosis,” addiction to pornography, the proliferation of androgynous gender roles, widespread confusion and despair. Dalbey found inspiration in both Payne’s and Bly’s “explorations on the frontiers of masculinity,” but wondered why “a secular man and a Christian woman” should be paving the way. “Was there no Christian man to pioneer the journey?” — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 365

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the specific intellectual origins (Bly’s Jungian heroic quest, Payne’s psychologized crisis) that this commercial masculinity genre drew upon.
• XREF: Robert Bly’s mythopoetic men’s movement is the secular twin of the evangelical masculinity genre Du Mez traces — a parallel cultural formation worth contrasting.
• SEED: Angle: how the evangelical masculinity industry borrowed its entire intellectual scaffolding from secular sources (Bly, Jung) while claiming a distinctively Christian mandate — a case study in cultural co-optation.