Sen. Josh Hawley is a throwback

Let's throw him back

Recently, Missouri’s Lanky Fascist™ appeared on Fox and constructed a culture war straw man, named it the “modern left,” and then wrung his hands over it. Rather than make you watch the entire clip, Sen. Hawley distilled what he said into the above tweet.

Hawley has sought to make a career out of defining manliness, and he bases his bleatings on something called “Muscular Christianity,” a backlash to the so-called “feminization” of Christianity circa the 1850s, when someone looked around and said, “Oh, hell! We have too many skirts here!” because women made up two-thirds of the Christian pew-warmers.

Obviously, if you let women take charge, the fear from people like Hawley is that women will turn around and treat men as badly as men have historically treated women. I personally have no plans fro that, but the early response was for certain British theologians to infuse sermons, activities, and other Christian-related activities with an emphasis on health and manliness (think “Teddy Roosevelt with a bear,” according to this Timeline article). That approach didn’t take long to jump the water to the U.S. (see: Dwight Moody), and American Christian men began to leave behind sissy Jesus and the sad fact is they dragged the whole operation with them.

Now, if Christianity as interpreted by so many didn’t already urge this kind of woman-dismissing/hating (Oh no! Women outnumber us!), this approach would have been no more than a blip on the screen, but Muscular Christianity — where Jesus totes a gun and Josh Hawley thinks he has the keys to the manly kingdom — refuses to go away (see: Promise Keepers).

This is one of the most damaging religious fairy tales today, that Jesus bench pressed 350. I honestly don’t know what Jesus could have bench-pressed, but even a quick read of the scriptures shows a Jesus who was about service, not swagger. He gathered the poor and the meek, and he praised them. His short life was spent not flexing his muscles, but helping others. In fact, that may be the best definition of “manly” there is. It is also the best definition of “womanly.” Was he muscular? Who cares? Lord, but these people are exhausting.