There is nothing wrong with a barbecue, a gun range, a cool beard, or a bench press. Not even close. I like all of these things, to be sure. But I confess that when I see churches hosting “men’s meetings” and “men’s retreats” that heavily emphasize guns, grills, guts, and gusto, particularly highlighting them as inexorably manly things, it gives me pause. Not because I think those things aren’t manly (they totally are) or that they aren’t fun (they absolutely are) or that they aren’t profitable (they sure can be). But rather it’s because in our well-intentioned efforts to promote manliness and encourage camaraderie among men by embracing some traditional and good hallmarks of masculinity (that our culture seems dead set on erasing), we can inadvertently sing the Song of the Sword if we’re not careful.
Explain before I start shooting, sissy
Ok, hold on. I need to first lay a bit of background first, because these elements like guns and cookouts and Bowflex machines and UFC bouts are culturally linked to manliness for good reason. For instance: guns. It wasn’t a militia of women that liberated any given country from her captors. Traditionally (and rightly), it has always been men. Chivalrous, noble, brave, honorable men who trained, sweat, bled and sometimes died for their (or another’s) freedom and security. Men who defended their homes, their wives, and their children, exactly as their God-given design both facilitates and demands. It wasn’t women who conquered the frontier, agonizing and asserting their agency over the wild and dominating nature. It was men. The desire to defend, conquer, and liberate is engineered into our souls and is manifest in our bodies, from our minds to our muscles, from our hearts to our hormones.1 And it is good.
Also, consider something as innocuous as the barbecue, an inexorable fixture in the typical “mens’ retreats” at many American evangelical churches. This also has a reason: in a post-WWII society, men returned to domestic life and yearned for something they could see as primal, natural, wild, unfettered, non-sanitized. So the grill, insignificant of a thing as it is by itself, won out as the designated male space and became so much more than it intrinsically ever was in isolation. It was now a shrine, an altar where men could grill their quarry over an open flame and enjoy the fruits of their hunt (or supermarket run, but whatever). A place where they could bond and identify with other men. A place where they could jest and argue and discuss. A stoa for the everyman, if you will. All while cooking a really, really good Tomahawk steak. This, too, is good.
Same with the bench press and boxing and all kinds of similar disciplines — it’s an inherently and thoroughly male desire to compete with oneself and others, desiring to build strength and perfect one’s physical body through sacrifice and dedication. To condition oneself to be capable of defense, performance, and hard, backbreaking labor. From carrying six chairs under each arm as a teenager in youth group to wrestling in the dorms, I’ve seen this expression of masculinity in my cultural and religious sphere, and it’s all good. After all, every functioning society was built by — and still needs — strong, capable, backbone-like-a-railroad-iron, flint-faced men. This is good.
Now hold on, you sexist bigot. whatabout —
Wait — I need to hit a few brief but important disclaimers here. I’m not saying a woman shouldn’t use the grill or hit the gym or know how to put two in the chest and one in the head at the firing range. Nor am I saying that a man needs to flame-broil his burgers or own a couple of .45s to be a man. Not hardly. And I sure hope I’ve been clear so far in saying that there’s nothing wrong with any of these things I’ve been describing; to wit, I own plenty of guns, I go to the gym a couple of times a week, I have a beard, and I love a good steak or burger cooked on the Coleman we have on the deck. I’m simply trying to explain the why behind these cultural associations, and I think they’re good reasons.
So there’s many solid historical, cultural, and psychological roots underpinning the cultural association of “manly” things with, well, men, even if they’re not extrinsically performed exclusively by men. Therefore, I hold that it’s not at all a bad thing if I go to a cookout and see the ladies by the pool and the men surrounding the grill. It’s not a net negative to see that most physical labor jobs are performed by men. It’s not a “toxic” thing to see men bodybuilding or boxing or armwrestling. These are good, natural, explainable things, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Ok, so Then what’s your point?
All right, now we’re moving to the reasons why I think that a correlation of these inherently naturally manly things with the highest expression of manliness can be alarming, particularly in any given religious or church environment. Simply put: I think it’s really easy to get this wrong.
Let’s get this out of the way: I think we’re all aware of how destructive a caricatured, idea-of-masculinity-gone-wrong can be. I’d call it “toxic masculinity,” but this term has been used and abused in all the wrong ways all too often and is now effectively bankrupt of any real meaning or impact. But there are definitely harmful and misguided (and woefully unbiblical) ideas about what it means to be a man, and they can destroy self and others through aggression, abuse, emotional suppression, and isolation. It’s destructive to distort masculinity as raw power and dominance. This is Lamech-style stuff2, and it’s antichrist. In fact, I’m going to use Lamech as a template for how all of this can so easily go wrong. Listen to his “Song of the Sword” found in Genesis 4 as follows:
The Song of the Sword
Lamech said to his wives,
Adah and Zillah, listen to me;
you wives of Lamech, hear me out:
I killed a man for wounding me,
a young man who attacked me.
If Cain is avenged seven times,
for Lamech it’s seventy-seven!
-The Message, Copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson
- First, we see the glorification and exultation of violence not only as a thing unto itself, but a solution to one’s problems. Violence is the knee-jerk reaction here, and it’s set in the stone of a song as the proper and best recourse to being hurt.
- Second, we read a policy of intimidation, vengeance and disproportionate retaliation: “if you hurt me, I’ll not only hurt you back, but I’ll kill you.” Lamech perverted a divine edict meant to protect Cain, distorting and weaponizing it as a threat of escalation.
- Third, notice the domineering and oppressive tone of Lamech. He’s not a person who’s used to being told “no.” People are not partners, allies, comrades, but rather a captive audience, subjects, whelps and thralls. They’re underlings. This is further evidenced by the accumulation of wives — how many of those wives married Lamech willingly, do you think? Moreover, how likely do you think they are to leave him when he gets out of hand?
- Lastly, see how Lamech established himself as the law of the land. No one was going to tell him what to do. No amount of laws, taxes, borders or boundaries were going to fetter and domesticate this guy. Not Lamech. He’s a man, and he’s going to write the laws himself.
A reminder of the disclaimer is needed, methinks
I again remind you that I’m not against the gun range or the open range. I’m not against grilling steaks on the fire or grilling our buddies around the fire. I’m for the gym, I’m for the hunt, I’m for the overtly Biblical husband-is-the-head-of-the-home model. I’m a physically strong guy, I have hair on my chest, and I love Parks and Rec’s Ron Swanson and secretly wish I could be him (for the most part).3
But my point is that the overwhelmingly male tendencies to compete, to go exploring, to go hunting, to wrestle, to shoot, to start a fire, to blow something up — all good, natural expressions of power and provision — are far too often abused to be handled lightly or jovially encouraged without guidelines. We simply get it wrong far too often, far too easily. And so we make mistakes. We start singing the song of Lamech without knowing it.
How we sing the song by accident
When, with good motives (and often in an attempt to reclaim a masculinity that society seems so determined and eager to erase), we incorporate a certain precast idea of manliness (can I say Ron-Swanson style?) into Christianity, we are mixing incompatible elements. As a result, some traits will win over the others rather than blend seamlessly. So it happens, then, that we inadvertently elevate some of the more overtly dominant and powerful aspects of masculinity (strength, bloodlust, competition, power) over the less-obvious but just as important aspects of masculinity that the former traits were meant to protect and propagate: nobility, justice, chivalry, kindness, sacrificial love, and unconditional forgiveness, as seen in Christ, our Master and Teacher. So to slightly rework the opening sentence: In our efforts to promote manliness by embracing some traditional and good hallmarks of masculinity, we often inadvertently incorporate Lamech’s philosophies with Christ’s teachings. And when this happens, Lamech’s Song of the Sword overpowers the Suffering of the Servant.
Listen, it’s good to be a man. I don’t think most men lean into that enough, to be honest. But we need to be especially mindful of what Christ’s masculinity looked like in contrast to Lamech’s. When all of our instincts say, “you hurt me, so I’m going to hurt you, whether by physical force or by court of law,” we are singing in chorus with Lamech, “[fool] around and find out.” We are, with our rich, booming, deep, bellowing, manly voices, unfortunately belting out Lamech’s song, the Song of the Sword. Oh, sure, it’s rough. It’s tough. It’s wild and untamed (interestingly, exactly how the earth was before the Spirit interceded in Genesis 1:24). It’s John Wayne and John Wick rolled into one. But Jesus’s song is the opposite.
Instead of killing those who hurt him, he offered them forgiveness. Instead of climbing to the top, he knelt and washed people’s feet. He moved toward people not in violence or intimidation, but in unrestrained, unlimited love. Most notably, instead of promising 77 times revenge, he required of his followers 77 times of forgiveness. That wasn’t an accident. It was a direct and deliberate reversal of Lamech’s code. Instead of retaliation, he practiced nonviolence, and he prayed for and did good to those who hurt him. And then he told us to do the same.
This is the stuff that usually doesn’t make the cut around the grill or on the gun range. Because as fun as those are, and as natural and good as they are, and as profitable as they can be, they unfortunately usually tend to drown out the more Christlike attributes so indispensable to true manhood. It’s all good to shoot at a target or roast an artery-clogging steak. But it’s never okay to celebrate these aspects of manliness at the expense of Master’s brand of manliness.
so there it is
And that’s my concern. When we center our men’s meetings and devotionals and breakfasts and what-have-yous around guns and BBQs, I don’t think it’s inherently wrong. At all. But we need to be very careful to not accidentally be conflating manliness with Lamech’s laws. Instead, let’s draw closer to our Rabbi, our Master, our Leader, who lived a life of suffering, sacrifice, and servanthood. It doesn’t always sound or look as good or fulfilling as Denzel Washington’s vigilante mission The Equalizer, but it’s the only way for the Song of the Redeemed to overpower Lamech’s Anthem of Avarice.
- See here and here for the military angle on this, here for the testosterone angle (men have 10-20 times more testosterone than women, here for the social angle (the book itself isn’t linked, but ask your favorite AI for a synopsis), here for the evolutionary angle, here for the sexual angle, and here and here for the dimorphic angle. We are different, men and women. Men are better at some things than women, and women are better at some things than men. To the point of this blog entry, men are heavily favored biologically (physically, hormonally, and psychologically) to engage in the “manly” attributes I’ve described, even as paltry substitutes for actual world-building and nation-conquering exhibitions of power (i.e. playing Call of Duty or football instead of actually fighting in war or the Colosseum). ↩︎
- Read about Lamech here. ↩︎
- Ron Swanson is the man. He’s nothing like the actor who portrays him, but hey. This just goes to show we can’t all be Ron Swanson. Not even Nick Offerman. ↩︎
- The words תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ (tohu wabohu) in Hebrew are best translated as “wild and waste.” ↩︎
