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May 1 - May 10, 2025
Long before O’Reilly invented the “War on Christmas,” evangelicals knew he was on their side. Within two decades, the influence of Fox News on conservative evangelicalism would be so profound that journalists and scholars alike would find it difficult to separate the two.28
No longer preoccupied with defending against the spread of communism, many evangelicals began to embrace a more expansive foreign policy agenda as they turned their attention to global poverty, human trafficking, the global AIDS epidemic, and the persecution of Christians around the world.
Likewise, “gentleness, compassion, tenderness, meekness, sensitivity” were not essentially feminine characteristics, but rather healthy human ones—traits modeled by Jesus Christ himself. Oliver urged men to get in touch with their emotions and he rejected the patriarchal chain of command, instead endorsing egalitarian marriage.
In this way, men could find within Promise Keepers both a justification for traditional masculine authority and a defense of an emotive, egalitarian, reconstructed Christian manhood.6
Since the 1960s, male blue-collar work such as construction, manufacturing, and agriculture had been in decline, shrinking from approximately half of the workforce to less than 30 percent at the end of the 1990s. Over that same period, sectors that employed pink-and white-collar women—areas such as health care, retail, education, finance, and food service—expanded to well over half of the workforce; by 1994, 75 percent of working-age women worked for pay.
For the most part, however, PK speakers preferred sports metaphors to military ones. Rallies invariably took place in sports stadiums, and athletes often took center stage.
In 1954, evangelicals founded the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, an organization that sought to leverage the popularity of sports for evangelistic purposes. (If sports celebrities could sell shaving cream and cigarettes, why couldn’t they sell Christianity?) In the Cold War era, sports had seemed an ideal domain in which to instill Christian values in young men.
In 1996, for instance, Ralph Reed sent a memo instructing grassroots leaders of the Christian Coalition to “avoid military rhetoric and to use sports metaphors instead.”
Like military metaphors, sports called to mind a world in which men, by virtue of their superior physical strength, still dominated.
Framing racism as a personal failing, at times even as a mutual problem, PK speakers routinely failed to address structural inequalities.
Yet, far more than other evangelical organizations, Promise Keepers provided a platform for African American voices. Black pastors like Tony Evans, Wellington Boone, and E. V. Hill, and sports stars like Reggie White frequently appeared at PK rallies.13
The movement remained overwhelmingly white; a 1998 questionnaire revealed that whites made up 90 percent of its membership. Moreover, some observers link the decline of the Promise Keepers movement to its pursuit of racial reconciliation.
In 1996, for instance, 40 percent of complaints registered by conference participants were negative responses to the theme of racial reconciliation.
Promise Keepers as a movement began to wane, but by spawning dozens of smaller denominational ministries and parachurch groups, its influence persisted.
The proliferation of men’s groups sparked “a minor revolution in the Christian publishing and retailing industry.” At PK events one could find “a virtual messianic mini-mall, hawking books, T-shirts,” souvenirs and baseball caps. Christian retailers, too, began stocking shelves with men’s products. As the president of the Christian Booksellers Association explained, more men started shopping in Christian bookstores because there was more there for them to buy;
In Healing the Masculine Soul, Dalbey introduced themes that would animate what soon became a cottage industry of books on Christian masculinity. First and foremost, Dalbey looked to the Vietnam War as the source of masculine identity.
If the warrior spirit was indeed intrinsic to males, then attempts to eliminate the warrior image were “intrinsically emasculating.” Women were “crying out” for men to recover their manly strength, Dalbey insisted.
“What if we told men up front that to join the church of Jesus Christ is . . . to enlist in God’s army and to place their lives on the line? This approach would be based on the warrior spirit in every man, and so would offer the greatest hope for restoring authentic Christian manhood to the Body of Christ.”
“If you are a husband/father, then you are in a war. War has been declared upon the family, on your family and mine. Leading a family through the chaos of American culture is like leading a small patrol through enemy-occupied territory.
“Now don’t get me wrong,” Weber quickly clarified. “There is a difference between ‘tender’ and soft.” Weber wanted tender warriors, not soft males.
Yet, within evangelicalism two parallel movements would also play key roles in shaping understandings of Christian masculinity. One was the “complementarian” theology espoused by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW). The other was the sexual purity movement.
There, under the leadership of Grudem and fellow Reformed evangelical John Piper, they crafted a statement affirming what would come to be known as “complementarianism”: God created men and women “equal before God” yet “distinct in their manhood and womanhood.”
“Mature masculinity” convicted a man of his responsibility “to accept danger to protect women,” and a mature woman accepted this protection: “She is glad when he is not passive. She feels herself enhanced and honored and freed by his caring strength and servant-leadership.”
In other words, moral justification for combat was derived from and thus linked to self-sacrificial male headship.
IN TANDEM WITH EFFORTS to promote “biblical manhood and womanhood,” an elaborate “purity culture” was taking hold across American evangelicalism.
Wives were tasked with meeting husbands’ every sexual need, but it was the responsibility of women and girls to avoid leading men who were not their husbands into temptation.
Influenced by the writings of Elisabeth Elliot, Harris introduced a generation of young Christians to “biblical courtship,” the idea that fathers were charged with ensuring their daughters’ purity until their wedding day, at which point they handed unsullied daughters over to husbands who assumed the burden of protection, provision, and supervision.
The widespread popularity of the purity movement was fueled in part by an injection of federal funds. As early as 1981, President Reagan began directing government funding to abstinence-only sex education, and this funding continued through the 1990s, reaching its peak under the George W. Bush administration; by 2005, more than 100 abstinence-based groups would receive more than $104 million in federal funding.
Eldredge’s 2001 book, Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul, set the tone for a new evangelical militancy in the new millennium. Eldredge’s God was a warrior God, and men were made in his image. Aggression, not tenderness, was part of the masculine design.
Men, not women, brought an end to slavery, apartheid, and the Nazis. Men gave up their seats on the Titanic’s lifeboats. And, crucially, “it was a Man who let himself be nailed to Calvary’s cross.”
Attempts to pacify men only emasculated them. “If you want a safer, quieter animal, there’s an easy solution: castrate him.” Sadly, “clingy mothers”—and the public-school system—effectively did just that.
Feminists and liberals seemed to think that testosterone was “one of God’s great mistakes.” They preferred to make boys more like girls, and men more like women—“feminized, emasculated, and wimpified.” But “reprogramming” men and boys interfered with God’s careful design.8
In 1981, he founded the Logos School, a classical Christian academy, and he became a leader in the classical Christian education movement, establishing the Association of Classical and Christian Schools in 1994, and that same year founding New Saint Andrews College, a four-year classical Christian college with the motto: “For the faithful, wars shall never cease.”12
Lest there be any doubt, Wilson clarified that Christianity was in no way pacifistic. True, Old Testament prophets foretold a time of peace, or an “eschatological pacifism,” but the peace Christ brings was purchased with blood. Until that time men and boys must study war; to do otherwise would leave men “fighting the dragon with a pruning hook.”
Wilson thought women had no place in combat; they were a sexual distraction to male soldiers, they could get pregnant, they distorted “covenantal lines of authority,” and they were not as good as men in “the important work of violence.”
The church wasn’t helping matters; by emphasizing “feminine traits” like tenderness, compassion, and gentleness, churches had neglected the equally spiritual but masculine traits of aggressiveness, courage, and standing on the truth. Again Farrar castigated the church for feminizing Jesus. Songs about Christ’s “beauty” were especially galling. As he wrote, “If you went up to John Wayne and said he was beautiful, he would separate several of your molars and bicuspids into a new world order.”
In his 2003 edition, Dalbey blunted his former critique, removing any mention of Jesus as healer and peacemaker. Instead, he added thoughts on how boys must be ushered into a vision “of conflict and warfare.”19
In language rife with militaristic imagery, Luce called for a “wartime mentality,” for young people to awaken to the dangers of “culture terrorists.”
In October 2001, eight in ten Americans supported a ground war in Afghanistan. The war in Iraq, however, was a harder sell. Connections between Saddam Hussein’s regime and America’s national security remained sketchy,
The National Council of Churches urged the president to refrain from a preemptive strike; the Vatican warned that preemptive war would be “a crime against peace.” Conservative evangelicals begged to differ.24
As one evangelical parishioner explained, Jesus might have preached a gospel of peace, but the Book of Revelation showed that the suffering Messiah turned into the conquering Messiah; in the Bible, God didn’t just sanction “war and invasion,” God encouraged it.
By 1999, 850,000 children were homeschooled in America; by 2016, the number was at 1.7 million, about two-thirds of whom were religious.3
But in the 1990s, Doug Phillips began to introduce a Gothard-inspired “biblical patriarchy” far beyond the cultlike community Gothard had established.4
In 1998 he founded Vision Forum, a Texas-based organization devoted to promoting biblical patriarchy within the homeschool movement, churches, and in the Christian film industry.
Quiverfull women had a critical role to play in birthing an army of God; the culture wars needed as many soldiers as possible. Outbreeding opponents was the first step to outvoting them, and in their reproductive capacities, women served as “domestic warriors.”
But the popularity of the Duggar family’s 19 Kids and Counting TLC reality show, which ran from 2008 to 2015, introduced Quiverfull values to the larger American public.7
In 2004, Farris and the HSLDA launched Generation Joshua to recruit homeschooled teenagers as foot soldiers for the Republican Party. Trained to advance the next iteration of the culture wars, homeschoolers infiltrated the halls of power, finding work in the White House and on Capitol Hill.
New Calvinists claimed to find in sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin and later Puritan scholars a meatier Christianity that would serve as an antidote to a “softer” evangelicalism. Suppressing the emotive side of evangelical revivalism, they emphasized the existence of hell and the wrath of God, which required Jesus’ substitutionary atonement, his bloody death on the cross to atone for humanity’s sins. Theirs was a properly masculine theology, the story of a vengeful Father-God taking out his rage on his own Son.
Such people were attracted to an ideology that was “absolutistic, logical (or seemingly so), simple and practical.” The notion of “God’s chain of command” offered precisely this absolutist certainty.
In 2006, Dever, Duncan, Mohler, and Mahaney founded Together for the Gospel (T4G), a biennial conference featuring themselves and other celebrity pastors in the conservative theological orbit, most notably Piper, MacArthur, and Sproul.
