A Christian’s Manhood

Salon’s Right Hook brings to my attention Doug Giles, Pastor of Clash Christian Church and His People Christian Church, Miami. Giles has just written a call for the return of Christian masculinity. He notes that

The masculine spirit being absent…has…weakened our nation’s morality.Put an end to preaching by cheesy, whiny, quiche eating, preening Nancy Boys…Hire a pastor who throws off a good John Wayne vibe instead of that Boy George feeling…The Church has got to eliminate its effeminate drift and re-establish a masculine base…Beware, young man, of parents and pastors who want to “mother” you.

One can sympathise when he calls worship music “saccharine-laced slush”, and anyone who has dealt with some of the more creepy passive-aggressive Evangelical characters will most likely prefer a full-blooded Ian Paisley. Of course, we’ve had the Promise Keepers for a while now, and pictures of Jesus as a body-builder, but Giles would appear to be part of a new trend explored a few weeks ago in New York Times  (click here for bootleg copy):

The gentle, pacifist Jesus of the Crucifixion is sharing the spotlight with a more muscular warrior Jesus of the Second Coming, the Lamb making way for the Lion.

Stephen Prothero points out in the article that

When you see [Jesus] stand up at the end of [The Passion], he reminds you of Schwarzenegger. I think that movie shows more of a macho Jesus, who, in this case, is brutalized instead of brutalizing.

The Times also points out the Jesus of Glorious Appearing, who massacres the ungodly.

Giles’ His People Christian Church is described as targeting

the twenty something crowd with the purpose of getting the slack out of slackers. Doug giles is creative and a preteen, teen and adult audience hear is message and get restless and unsatisfied with status quo chrisitianity. This church is into christians taking the bible, philosophy, economics, history, law and just about everything else as seriously as god does. Don’t sleep on this church. The next generation of god’s warriors are coming out of this ministry.

The website for his Clash Church connects him with David Limbaugh (whose brother, we all know, was a real warrior in the 1960s battling the anal cyst), David Aikman (author of Jesus in Beijing, and whose views on Christianity in China I discussed a while back), and David Barton, Vice Chairman of the rather disturbing Republican Party of Texas.

For further hints on how to proceed with injecting Christendom with testosterone, Giles could check out the old muscular Christianity movement. Miss Poppy Dixon also makes available John Cross’s 1946 tract The Hard Road to Manhood:

I am acquainted personally with many young men who have voluntarily denied themselves all feminine companionship. … Instead of having a family of six or eight, they have thousands of boys who feel that these young men are like brothers or fathers to them. Many boys will grow up better men and fathers because these young men set everything else aside in life and devoted all their time to showing boys the pleasure and happiness that can be found by taking the hard road to manhood.

Meanwhile, for another all-American Christian warrior, may I commend Jesus’ General?

9 Responses

  1. This is much too complicated. Why don’t they just print up some more “Real Men Love Jesus” bumperstickers?

  2. Wow! Theclashministries.com and clashradio.com sites are hyperbole at its finest – if you can wade through the insufferable Flash segues!
    He calls men “tripods” which I assume is a sexual reference and warns them away from the “wet womb of wussville,” e.g., church as we know it today – a place maintained almost entirely by the female race. He wants to get rid of the “preening, quiche-eating Nancy boy” preachers and then calls his own style provocative when it’s mostly just hackneyed and shrill. He’s created two websites devoted to proving that he’s anatomically correct.

    Women do maintain the church, and instead of joining and working with women, he says that all we have to do is bring “reason” back to the church and men will flock to the pews.

    So here’s the program once again, kick the girls out of the sandbox, play a little GI Joe, then abandon the sandbox to play spaceman or some other self-important colonialist fantasy.

    This guy might be a danger if he ever makes it out of puberty.

  3. […] by not mastering the serpent (and he means that literally, lest you are thinking Freudian). As we saw previously, Giles makes a living from a message of Christian masculinity and dominion. But where did he get it […]

  4. […] presence of David Barton and David Limbaugh. But only the modest agenda page, which I overlooked at the time, noted a couple of other prominent speakers: Friday 23 […]

  5. I think it’s just a case of a guy using the media (in a poor and unoriginal way) to present his notions, provide for his family and perhaps get something done. I understand the Giles phenomenon and I understand why he is going about his ministry the way he is.

    Obnoxious? Absolutely. Copycat? You bet. (He’s Ann Coulter and Ted Nugent in one.) He needed an agenda to further launch his ministry – and he latched on to the whole man movement, about 5 years too late.

    I think if you guys paid him a little less attention, he might just disappear. The far right has their darlings and always will. So do the faithful. Doug Giles is vying for darling status in both of those camps and won’t make it. Most of the faithful see through the jive. They’re not as lockstep and stupid as you think.

    Doug: Don’t confuse the right with the faithful. Don’t mix politics and religion. Don’t tell me we are a Christian nation or that we are one nation under God. Whose God? What God? Name this god! God of Israel, Doug? I think that God already has a nation – called Israel.

    Your faith is a branch of Judaism. Your country has no faith – by law. We aren’t going to “take America back” for God.

    Somewhere along the line, a bunch of us started worshipping the flag and got our eyes off the truth. We started believing the crap.

    Doug – what about our boy, our bro, Jimmy Carter? Just a stupid limp-wristed unmanly man? Just a wuss? Man – I’d take Jimmy in a fistfight with GW any day, even though he’s in his 80s. Annapolis, WWII, sunday school teacher and farmer, among other things. He even makes your hunting videos look girly, where you go guided on a tour and are kept safe, with a guarantee of a chance at your trophy. If I were you, bro, I’d stop making money that way. Some call it karma – we know it as “you reap what you sow.” The caca is getting ready to hit the air-moving equipment and you are gonna be found with poopie on your pretty face.

    You are galvanizing your enemies against you and you are not working for the kingdom, Doug. You’ve got no love in your rhetoric and you are doing harm to the cause. Either become a fulltime right wing zealot with inflammatory langauge – or start acting like a real preacher man. (I just can’t see Jesus hunting on a ranch for sport. Now, if Jesus needed some food and saw a lion, I have no doubt that he could kick it’s ass, barehanded – and then eat it.)

    It’s all about the media these days – the microphone or the website are the pulpits and eveyone’s a preacher of one thing or another. You preachers have got to find your audiences. The audience is simply this: the fed up. Don’t feed them more crap. And quit trying to reach the church – they’re reached. You are supposed to be salt and light. You are not supposed to “Clash!”

    If Jesus came to earth today in a humble way – like the first time – he’d be hanging out with the enemies of Doug Giles – talking with them – teaching them – and Doug Giles would be freaking out.

  6. […] 25, 2005 by Richard Bartholomew Back in May commentator “Dave” left a comment on my first entry on conservative pastor and columnist Doug Giles: I think it’s just a case of a guy using the […]

  7. […] I was also welcomed by SZ of World O’Crap, who liked my take on the absurd Florida pastor Doug Giles and who brought me into contact with the lads at Sadly No! and with the wonderful Pete M. of […]

  8. […] certificate also shows that one of the witnesses was his brother David, who is more closely associated with the Christian […]

  9. Miss Dixon, how may I get ahold of a 1939 version of ‘Book One, Let’s Take the Hard Road’?

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