What It Means To Be a Man

Lead image from the load page (click to enlarge)

Behold—the grotesque and alarming spectacle which is the 21 Convention: Patriarch Edition. Like a train derailment, I can’t make myself look away. The website promises four days of seminars, sermons, rallies, and speeches exhorting men to be more manful, in ways which the site defines only through broad comedy. The site promises to “Make Women Great Again,” and “Make Men Alpha Again,” for the low, low price of $2,500 for two for four days.

I’m uncertain how seriously to take this website. On one hand, its roster of promises includes such appalling pledges as that you, poor benighted beta male, can “Dominate Your Wife, Dominate Your Life,” and promises speeches from pastors, entrepreneurs, fitness gurus, male models, power-lifters, and more. Of twenty-five listed speakers, twenty-one are men, only five of whom are clean-shaven in their headshots. This Nuremberg-style rally promises a form of manhood premised on aggression and spectacle.

On the other hand, about two-thirds of the way down the loading page, the text suddenly reverses itself. “This page is funny,” it suddenly says; “The assault on fatherhood is not.” Apparently everything we’ve seen to this point was slapstick. This includes the pledge to Dominate Your Wife, the pastor who compares himself straight-faced to Marvel’s Thanos, and the promise that you can tune-up your wife like a malfunctioning car. What a thigh-slapper, amirite guys?

Conservatives famously enjoy saying things like this to flick people’s noses. The “Just a Joke” defense after saying something dangerously inflammatory has been a beloved technique of Rush Limbaugh, Steven Crowder, Gavin McInnes, and Carl Benjamin. Self-described comedians love making violent statements toward disadvantaged people, then concealing the consequences of their statements behind jazz hands. Whenever somebody like me acts offended, they then act chummy with those hip enough to be in on the joke.

It’s hard to say how seriously we’re meant to take this

This broad burlesque is especially chilling to anybody who reads American religious history. Most Americans outside religious circles probably haven’t heard of Christian Reconstructionism, a theory that emerged from the excesses of postwar prosperity. However, as religious studies professor Julie Ingersoll writes, Christian Reconstructionists have perhaps been the militant vanguard of a strictly hierarchical, and sometimes violent, religious political movement, one which has its fingers in countless pies in American right-wing politics and media manipulation.

Ingersoll writes that, while progressives consider “patriarchy” a backward principle that hampers free people, Christian Reconstructionists see patriarchy as a God-ordained natural order, against which headstrong humans rebel. Reconstructionists believe society is organized in tiers: family supports church, while church empowers the state. A nuclear family, headed by an authoritative male lawgiver, is the foundation of all power structures. Male headship is the only bulwark against violent rebellion; empowered women literally want to overthrow society.

Reconstructionists don’t call themselves political, because they don’t endorse candidates or initiatives. But, Ingersoll writes, they advance a specific theory of political power and secular authority, which privileges those already well-protected by our paternalistic, White supremacist order. They want a hierarchical state derived from male authority, with discretion to involve itself heavily in our private lives in accordance with Levitical law, but an economic order based on Libertarian capitalism; no Year of Jubilee for them.

You thought I was kidding about Thanos, didn’t you?

It’s difficult to find meaningful information on Pastor Michael Foster, the Patriarchy Convention’s keynote speaker. He’s apparently influential enough to headline a rally, but not important enough for his personal website to appear on Google. His professional profile on his parish page shows him surrounded by his wife and seven children—sons in polo shirts, daughters in princess dresses. That encompasses two of Reconstructionist patriarchy’s hallmarks: large families, mostly homeschooled, and strictly monitored gender roles.

Well-informed critics will undoubtedly respond to me by citing women who support patriarchal social roles. Indeed, as researcher Jim Henderson discovered, it isn’t hard to find Christian women who support female disfranchisement, who are complicit in their own second-class status. But that doesn’t mean much. It’s also possible to find poor people who hate the poor, and Black people who hate racial equality efforts; that doesn’t mean we should let such people write our positions.

Pastor Foster apparently thinks it’s funny to compare himself to Thanos, destroyer of billions. Big deal, conservatives love pretending to be the villains they think their opposition calls them. Except it is a big deal, because just like Thanos, Foster can’t control where The Snap goes, or who it hurts. Like Thanos, he divides his world into allies and enemies. Which means that, if we don’t stop him now, his Snap may come for you.