Sunday's Cool: Jesus and Bruce Wayne
Men in the Church tired of being remade into the likeness of Christ and decided to remake Christ into their own likeness.
In these divided times, let’s all take solace in the face that pretty much everyone agrees the state of masculinity is emphatically not great. This goes double for the state of masculinity in the Church, in which everyone agrees that there is a problem but there are a lot of conflicting opinions about just what and who the problem is.
I’m sure nobody reading this needs any further introduction to Kristin DuMez’s Jesus and John Wayne, which I think is very good. But to build on Kristin’s analysis, I’ve been really enjoying Laura Robinson’s past few days of Twitter (RIP!) musings about all this. She’s fired these out in several threads, which you can and should read here, here and here. The tl;dr of her argument is that a lot of guys mistook their want for standard guy stuff (a lifetime supply of status, money and porny sex) as a spiritual need, and reverse engineered a Christian theology that would both baptize those needs as legitimate and also help meet them.
You want proof? Here’s Michael Foster, author of a book called It’s Good to Be a Man, unironically making more or less exactly that case.
I’m a little bit reminded of a criticism of superhero comics made by both Alan Moore and Grant Morrison (two of the best to ever do superhero comics). They have both argued (Morrison, lovingly; Moore, less so) that superhero comics fans ruined the genre by refusing to grow up. When you’re a little kid, you’re fall in love with Batman and Superman and splashy tales of good versus evil. Time was, you eventually grew past superheroes and moved on to more adult interests. But what’s happened over the last few decades is that instead of growing out of the genre, superhero fans have insisted on dragging superhero comics along with them into adulthood, demanding that the medium cater to their budding new interests.
I can speak with personal experience on this subject. You start growing up and your taste starts to gravitate towards edgier fare. But you’re still reading or (more likely) watching superhero content and finding it doesn’t scratch the same itch it did when you were nine. Could superheroes no longer be a suitable storytelling device for your maturing interests? No, impossible, your taste is impeccable — it’s the comics that are wrong! So you start backpacking lots of heady psychoanalysis onto Bruce Wayne and poor Peter Parker, and demanding the medium fit your new fan-fic’d analysis of the canon. Marvel and DC comply to consumer demands and occasionally even manage to churn out some genuinely impressive stuff that hits the new target. All it took was remaking an entire medium in the image of its newly grownup fans, ignoring entirely the simpler original stuff that got fans hooked when they were kids.
I think this is a pretty good picture of where American Christianity in general and Masculine Christianity in particular finds itself today. Men grow up going to Sunday School and youth group and get a dose of the Gospel. But as they get older, they start demanding the Gospel keep up with their evolving wants instead of analyzing the validity of those wants. It simply does not occur to most men that the things they consider “inherently masculine” are the result of lots of marketing (“Women fall for marketing campaigns that make them feel insecure! Men just like when products are made for men!”) So when the Bible is at odds with their “inherently masculine” urges, it’s the Bible that ends up changing — or, sorry, getting recontexualized.
Take the “inherently masculine” desire to get rich. Men want to do this and because men want it, it must be virtuous. The fact that the Bible has nothing good to say about getting rich isn’t a problem, because I want it, so it must be good and the Bible will just have to grow up.
Same with sex. Christian men’s pornified brains have decided that the desire to spend all day tossing huge-boobed, clean-shaven tens around is natural, manly, probably virtuous and — sure, why not? — biblical. So when their wife doesn’t wake up with freshly applied mascara and lipstick, purring for dick, she’s not living up to God’s standards for marriage.
So, like Zach Snyder deciding that Batman uses guns now, Christian Men tweak the Bible to fit their market-generated notion of masculinity and eventually fanfic an entirely new religion into existence, cobbled together from truck commercials, military recruitment ads and Truth Social memes, with a Jesus action figure as a mascot.
I feel a little sheepish about all this, like I’m pretending I’m above it. Reader, I am not. I like being a man and am very into guys being dudes. The ad campaigns worked on me! With the notable exception of sports (which I don’t care for) and making money (which I’m bad at), I fit a pretty simple stereotype of the most basic bro alive. I’m totally fine with that, since I think most of it is totally benign and basically dissimilar from “interests” and “hobbies.” But elements of it are extremely toxic and arguably playing a big role in destroying the world.
So, some reflection is in order. I am not here arguing that all the Ron Swanson-types out there need to put down the black coffee and pick up the mint tea. All I am saying is that we need to recognize how much of our current definition of masculinity has been (a) created by advertisers to sell shit and (b) at odds with the teachings of Jesus. I actually agree with the title of Michael Foster’s book. It IS good to be a man! But right now, it’s not clear that most men arguing such have any idea what they’re talking about.
Speaking of being a man, I am very into Cormac McCarthy’s latest, The Passenger, which early on features a conversation with a trans girl about the love of God so beautiful and clear it made me cry on the plane. Some reviews are describing the book as bleak which, well, yeah, it’s Cormac McCarthy. But I disagree both in terms of the book’s content and on principle. As a rule of thumb, I don’t think most books even can be bleak. Putting any sort of art into the world, maybe especially a novel, is an act of hope and defiance, whether or not the author recognizes it.
Speaking of authors, I hope you’ll forgive me Wife Guying for a second here, but my wife Liz sold her debut novel to Riverhead this week. It’s been a real joy to watch her labor over draft after draft of LO-FI, and I’ve read it at several stages along the way. Of course, I always thought it was good, but it’s a little hard to trust your editorial instincts when you’re reading your wife’s stuff. The fact that a publisher of Riverhead’s caliber is in confirms my suspicions! Coming spring/summer of 2024!
Coming to the Substack next week: I’m gonna write a few thoughts on Andor and probably the whole Elon Musk situation. Get excited, HUCK NATION!!!
If you want more on the shift in the superhero genre, you can Google pretty much any interview with Alan Moore from the last few years. But I also really love Grant Morrison’s Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human. Morrison’s written some of my personal favorite superhero comics in the game, from New X-Men to All-Star Superman to their well-loved Justice League tenure, and they take a more measured approach to superhero criticism than Moore’s scorched earth campaign. I’d guess that’s probably at least a little bit because Morrison has been treated a lot better by the business end of the industry. But in either case, Moore and Morrison are both giants in superhero fiction and seem by turns amused, annoyed and apocalyptic about the current state of things, superhero-wise. Being a grownup fan of superheroes this day and age means getting routinely excoriated by your heroes. You get used to it.