The Western church has gone feminist. God has given men authority in the home, church, and society. Yet the church has rebelled against God's design and embraced the unbelieving world's teaching that women should take on the same roles and duties as men rather than focus on the home and children. Christian scholarship and Bible commentaries are dominated by feminist arguments that both husband and wife should submit to each another ("mutual submission"), that women may be pastors and preach sermons to men, and that the Apostle Paul's teaching on men and women was limited to Greco-Roman culture and has been transcended by our unity in Christ. Sadly, the conservative response to feminism-complementarianism-compromised several historic Christian teachings and has thus given feminism an even stronger foothold in the church. Many complementarians fail to root gender roles in the differing natures of men and women. As a result, they have refused to apply the Bible's teaching about men and women beyond the home and church, leading to the embrace of women in civil office and military combat. In addition, the vast majority of complementarians have adopted the novel interpretation of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 ("the women should keep silent in the churches") that Paul only prohibited women from evaluating prophecy, which has opened the door to women preaching and teaching men in the church. The result is that the Western church has become effeminate and weak. Pastors are afraid to teach important Bible passages on the roles and duties of men and women, and it is no surprise that young Christian women are trading babies for careers outside the home and that churches are regularly capitulating to subversions of biblical sexual ethics. What the church needs is to recover its masculine calling, where men embrace their God-given authority-and responsibility-in the home, church, and society. This book affirms the historic Christian teaching on men and women, critiques feminist scholarship, and urges complementarians to hold a more robust and consistent position. This is a call to return to the Bible's teaching on men and women. This is a call to Masculine Christianity.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The “paradigm-influencing” book (Christianity Today) that is fundamentally transforming our understanding of white evangelicalism in America. Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism—or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.” As acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. Many of today’s evangelicals might not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex—and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes—mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done. Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump in fact represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community. A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans.

Discover the path to true masculinity—to an adventurous life of strength, purpose, and clarity. Didn’t we used to understand manhood? Wasn’t there a time once when it was clear and straightforward? Are we lost? Dudes, look around you: The trail we once traveled from boyhood to maturity is now so overgrown, it’s almost impossible to trace. Our vision is blurred, rendering the map that previous generations followed unreadable. Our compass needles are spinning in circles, making navigation impossible. We are stuck in dense, dangerous woods, and our communities—the wives, children, friends, and colleagues we could be influencing—are suffering as a result. It can be tempting to give up and, like so many men today, simply exist, but take heart: Now is not the time for men to abandon our quest. We can discover the path to true masculinity—to an adventurous life of strength, purpose, and clarity. In The Dude’s Guide to Manhood, pastor, author and dude Darrin Patrick charts a course back toward real manliness, mapping out a vision to help men find significance and influence in today’s broken, mixed-message culture. Revealing his own frailties and missteps, Patrick doesn’t preach at you but walks with you on a journey toward healing and wholeness. Filled with timeless wisdom, accessible insights and practical guidance, The Dude’s Guide to Manhood issues an encouraging and doable call to all men, whatever your age or stage. We need not settle for wandering aimlessly through our days, wounded, weak, and passive. Instead, we can get back on the trail, embrace our gifts while facing our imperfections, and trust the God of new beginnings to lead us into all that we are destined to become: forgiven, connected, determined, teachable, content, heroic, and so much more.

In the mid-nineteenth century, when the idea of religion as a private matter connected to the home and the female sphere won acceptance among the bourgeois elite, Christian religious practices began to be associated with femininity and soft values. Contemporary critics claimed that religion was incompatible with true manhood, and today's scholars talk about a feminization of religion. But was this really the case? What expression did male religious faith take at a time when Christianity was losing its status as the foundation of society? This is the starting point for the research presented in Christian Masculinity. Here we meet Catholic and Protestant men struggling with and for their Christian faith as priests, missionaries, and laymen, as well as ideas and reflections on Christian masculinity in media, fiction, and correspondence of various kinds. Some men engaged in social and missionary work, or strove to harness the masculine combative spirit to Christian ends, while others were eager to show the male character of Christian virtues. This book not only illustrates the importance of religion for the understanding of gender construction, but also the need to take into consideration confessional and institutional aspects of religious identity.

Bjorn Krondorfer, one of the leading scholars in this field, has collected 35 key texts that have shaped this field within the wider area of the study of gender, religion and culture. The texts in this critical reader engage actively and critically with the position of men in society and church, men's privileged relation to the sacred and to religious authority, the ideals of masculinity as engendered by religious discourse, and alternative trajectories of being in the world, whether spiritually, relationally or sexually. Each of the texts is introduced by the editor and accompanied by bibliographies that make this the ideal tool for study.