Is Christ Manly? A New Christian Movement Seeks to Restore Manliness to Scripture
A new type of religious revival for men has been getting increasing attention lately. A men’s gathering called “GodMen: Where Faith Gets Dangerous” sets out to create a space for men to explore their faith “with absolute honesty, transparency and openness – not sugar coated or framed in church language but instead spoken in frankness and maturity where men can see their innermost fears, shames, and secrets brought to light in a safe environment.”
The movement was a collaborative project between men like Christian comic Brad Stine and Paul Coughlin, author of No More Christian Nice Guy. In an interview with TWC, Stine credits his manager with the initial push to get GodMen started. “It really started with me and my manager, Mike Smith. He had read this book Why Men Hate Going to Church and kind of resonated with a lot of its points.” From that research, the realization emerged that the modern church was failing to address the real needs of men. “I sort of felt like, instead of me just going in and performing, we could go in with a couple of guys and make it sort of an event,” said Stine, “where you’re just giving guys some space to explore
their Christian spirituality.”
The motivation for the group, said Stine, is that “church in the United States oftentimes seems to not have elements that resonate with men.” Stine and others like him feel that Christianity promotes the peaceful, “meek and mild” Jesus without presenting the other,
more aggressive side of Christ. As Stine put it, “We’re saying that there was another part of Jesus which was just as a true.” After all, Stine continues, “Jesus insulted people. He called religious people a generation of vipers. That’s an insult. He said they are fit for hell. That’s a curse. So this is not some meek, little girly Jesus.”
Nevertheless, Stine is emphatic that GodMen wasn’t created to usurp the role of the church. Rather, the group sees itself as an auxiliary to the Christian movement by providing something churches cannot. “Now, we’re not against the church either, we’re not blaming the church,” cautions Stine, “I mean it’s got a difficult situation, it has teenagers mixed in there with old people and middle aged people. It does have men in there and women. There are so many diverse demographics in there, so it’s not as if they can say, tough, we’re just making it for guys. They are trying to reach as many people as possible.”
A brazen, independent movement, GodMen is nevertheless often mentioned in relation to Promise Keepers, which was founded in 1990 by former University of Colorado head football
coach Bill McCartney. GodMen tries hard to distinguish itself as something separate from Promise Keepers. “This group targets the guys who went to Promise Keepers once and didn’t go back, the guys who believe in God, but relationships in church to them seem forced and fake,” says former pastor Nate Larkin. “There is an underserved market and I think it is a rising tide.” Eileen Finan wrote in her Newsweek article about the movement that one attendee even referred to GodMen as Promise Keepers on crack.
But Stine is quick to point out that he is not against the Promise Keepers movement.
“I love Promise Keepers. They are doing everything they do because they actually, genuinely care about men and about teaching to teaching them to be great fathers and husbands and lovers.” GodMen’s advantage is in its freshness. “Once you start something, you get branded and it’s hard to get beyond that,” said Stine, “Once you say, this is what we are, people expect you to stick with it.” So, whereas Promise Keepers has traditionally had pastors lead their sessions, GodMen has had from its start laymen who the founders felt would be able to be more real. Stine intimated that laymen better represented the everyman, and weren’t seen as so set apart from the ordinary guy like pastors are.
Similarly, the sessions themselves can deal more honestly with real issues facing men. Describing the GodMen events, Stine said, “It’s a little more raw, a little less sugar coated. We talk about lust – it’s such a big problem for men.” But whereas most Christian events would speak more abstractly about “temptations,” explains Stine, GodMen hosts a former pastor who admits to the assembled men that he picked up his first prostitute on the way to preach at a candlelight service on Christmas Eve. “It’s that rawness that you don’t see if other events,” says Stine finally. As Finan wrote in her Newsweek article, GodMen “isn’t your Daddy’s religious revival.”
But that is precisely what has attracted as many detractors as supporters. A veteran Christian comic, Stine is no stranger to controversy. In his online blog he jots down his thoughts on different contemporary issues. He concludes one entry saying, “I want to see political correctness die in my lifetime, but first…I want to watch it suffer. Anyone along for the ride?” And his latest venture, this GodMen movement, has certainly done its best to take a stab at the PC culture. The Los Angeles Times wrote an article which, according to Stine, “contrived some things to make it seem less…or not what it was. So that was interesting because I’m not used to being spun.” A number of feminist groups have objected for all sorts of reasons ranging from accusations of sexism to the reinforcement of stereotypical gender roles. “All we want to do is have is a men’s event,” sighs Stine, “And we want to say, women you’re not invited. And its not because we don’t like you, it’s because it’s ours. You can start your own event.” (Wabash men might be especially able to relate to this sentiment if they were to replace “event” for “college”.)
“In school, when a girl acts like a girl, she’s rewarded for being smart and studious,” Stine continues “When a boy acts like a boy, he’s given Ritalin because he won’t settle down.
It’s this squashing of the male spirit that we want to address. What GodMen is exposing is this attack on maleness in the United States. Look at the sitcoms, men are the idiots. Look at the commercials; we’re the punch lines of society.”
But whereas many of the complaints have come from the secular world, others
have pushed back for more religious reasons. An excellent article in First Things seems to object to the movement, not because it doesn’t toe the politically correct line, but because it’s an incomplete view of Christ. “It’s mockable—and yet all such movements are trying to react against the bad and seek the good, writes First Things Assistant Editor Mary Angelita Ruiz, “The Jesus Mean and Wild men are confronting a serious problem. Many Christians are frustrated by the Christianity presented to them: too polite, too sunny, and too nice to help them in their struggles. GodMen uses the straight-talking, guns-blazing atmosphere of its meetings to help its participants deal with sexual temptation and sin.”
This is an argument which engages the issue in a way that other detractors don’t, namely on a religious level. Ms. Ruiz seems to admit that there is a problem facing Christianity
– on any given Sunday, over 60% of the attendees are women, which according to David Murrow’s book Why Men Hate Going to Church, translates into 13 million more women attending church than men. The difference is that Ms. Ruiz sees the manly Christian movement as insufficient to bring about a solution. “The aim of meditating on Christ is to know him and love him—all of him: the judge, the spouse, the brother, the child, the friend, the king, the shepherd. The aim of imitating Christ is to become like him,” writes Ruiz, “There are no shortcuts. Slogans, self-help books, rallies, makeovers—these will not substitute for worship of Christ, not as we might like him to be, but as he is.” And yet, Stine readily admits this. “I would never, ever like to remove the merciful God, the forgiving Jesus, the guy who went in while people were in the middle of sin and gave them grace and mercy. All those parts are beautiful parts of Christianity. I mean it’s the only religion that says to love your enemy.”
The theological concern, then, is that people understand that, as with most things with Christ, he was both at once. Just as He was both fully divine and fully human, he was similarly both loving and full of compassion while being aggressive and bold. For many the realization is that only Christ can mediate this divide flawlessly. When observed through that lens, the GodMen movement becomes yet another expression
of man’s attempt to live a life modeled on Christ.
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