Tomboys, Patriarchy, and Women as Leaders in the Church--Part 2

Tomorrow's Sunday School lesson is a study of Genesis 34.  It's a sordid and violent tale of sexual predation and retribution for it.  After she had gone out to meet with the women of a nearby town, Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, was raped by Shechem, a local young man.   Dinah's brothers were furious and plotted revenge.  

As for Dinah and Shechem, they apparently moved in together while Shechem and his family set about trying to arrange a proper marriage.  The negotiations were tainted with deception, however, and great harm came to everyone associated with Shechem and the city in which he lived.  Jacob's sons "rescued" Dinah by treachery, murder of all males, looting, and enslavement of women and children.  The actions of Jacob's sons could hardly be a better illustration of what Kristin Kobes Du Mez calls militant masculinity.  

When Jacob remonstrated with his sons afterward, reminding them that he would now be regarded as a pariah in the land, and he would be destroyed if everyone ganged up on him, his sons replied with this:  "Should he treat our sister like a prostitute?"  In other words, to them it seemed that all that potential fallout (for Jacob and his family) would be a lesser tragedy than leaving unpunished a wrong done to their sister.  

In Du Mez' (pronounced due-may) book, Jesus and John Wayne: How Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, she shows how, in many Evangelical churches, militant masculinity took over as the predominant principle in male-female relationships.  Militant masculinity was linked to the ideals of complementarianism, the idea that men and women rightly have distinctive but complementary roles.  Complementarianism itself is based on some of the Scripture passages that reference male-female relationships, primarily within marriage and in the church. In these passages, men are generally designated as leaders and women as followers; this is the main idea behind the term "patriarchy."  Most significant in this discussion, however, is the idea that men are protectors for women.  This in itself is not disputed either within or outside the church, to my knowledge.  Men protecting women is usually seen as a desirable element of society.   

The big problem that Du Mez highlights is that Evangelical men have become a little too enamored with this protective role, or perhaps it's more correct to say that they have too enthusiastically embraced a corrupted version of it.  In its most laudable form, the desire to protect others is an act of self-sacrificing love.  In the corrupted version--the militant masculinity version--it tends to selfishness, pride, irrationality (e. g. tilting at windmills--taking umbrage at imagined threats), and violence.  

It's easy for Americans to notice the extreme form that militant masculinity takes in some Muslim societies when the honor of the family is threatened by conversion to Christianity, and killing the convert is seen as a necessity to preserve the family's honor.  A close relative of the convert is responsible to perform the murderous deed.  Pride and violence is what I see here.  

In El Salvador, a friend of mine witnessed what happened when a young girl who had been kidnapped and raped was returned to her family.  Her father beat her terribly.  All of us know how wrong this was.  I believe this action was somehow connected to protecting the family's honor, just as killing a Muslim convert is.  I'm not sure how this makes sense unless rape is seen as being akin to promiscuity, and the beating could be seen as a disincentive for future promiscuity.  Irrationality seems to be added to pride and violence in this case.  

I'll use a Wikipedia quotation to introduce another iteration of militant masculinity: Southern (U.S.) Culture of Honor.   "The traditional culture of the Southern United States has been called a "culture of honor", that is, a culture where people avoid intentionally offending others, and maintain a reputation for not accepting improper conduct by others. A theory as to why the American South had or may have this culture is an assumed regional belief in retribution to enforce one's rights and deter predation against one’s family, home and possessions"  

Chivalry is an element of Southern Honor Culture that we did not see in the previous examples.  An insult takes on an outsized significance in this culture, especially when directed at women, because men see it as an attack on someone weak who needs defending.  To mangle a well-known saying, in this culture, words may hurt so much that throwing stones or breaking bones may be warranted.  Pride, violence, and irrationality ("words can never [physically] hurt me") all seem to be part and parcel of Southern Honor Culture.  J. D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, articulated this culture with more vividness than I had ever heard, although I had heard snippets of this way of thinking in tales from Shifflet Hollow near Mission Home, Virginia, and in reading history about the feuding Hatfields and McCoys.  

"Not accepting improper conduct by others" is an element of Southern Honor Culture that is seen also  in the tradition of the American cowboy. An almost mythical rugged individualism in cowboy culture adds its distinctive flavor to militant masculinity. 

Redneck?  All of the above with a side of being rural, white, and part of the working class.  Also, being prickly and reactionary about politics 

What if evangelicalism's male-female roles really has much more in common with the above expressions of manhood and womanhood than the ones presented in the Bible? What if what we have now is predominantly pride, violence, and irrationality, all dressed up in religious garb?  I'll quote Du Mez here, along with some commentary in this article, written by an Australian  Christian: 

Despite Evangelicals’ frequent claims that the Bible is the source of their social and political commitments, Evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than a community defined chiefly by theology. Evangelical views on any given issue are facets of this larger cultural identity, and no number of Bible verses will dislodge the greater truths at the heart of it. (Page 298).

From the start, Evangelical masculinity has been both personal and political. In learning how to be Christian men, evangelicals also learned how to think about sex, guns, war, borders, Muslims, immigrants, the military, foreign policy, and the nation itself. (Page 296).

Du Mez sees Evangelicalism in her country as inextricably tied to being “American and maintaining the white patriarchy”. For at least 50 years, the white evangelical male has been looking for a hero, someone to defend their worldview. They first embraced John Wayne (whose lifestyle was anything but evangelical), then a procession of other “strong men”, and eventually in 2016, endorsed and even embraced Donald Trump. Du Mez has really done her homework and shows the statistics to prove her point that the majority of evangelicals did eventually support him. The point of the book being that white Evangelicals embracing Trump was not an anomaly, but an inevitability given the trajectory of militant masculinity in the previous 50 years.

I'm not ready yet to teach the Sunday School class tomorrow.  If my night editor functions as I hope, some of what I've been writing here today between gardening and doing laundry might help us all make sense of Simeon and Levi's murderous rampage.  Better yet, maybe it will help us make sense of what is happening around and among us right now, on the cusp of spring 2022.

I haven't read Du Mez's  book.  I know only what I've learned online.  If you're interested in learning more, Google will be glad to help out.