Your Jesus Christ has canine teeth
— Clutch
Neo-Calvinism? Really? Is there anything bored Americans can’t turn into a retro-trend?
IOZ already stole the Moby Dick allusion, so I decided on quoting Billy Sunday. Other memorable lines from him: Jesus “was no dough-faced, lick-spittle proposition. Jesus was the greatest scrapper that ever lived.” Hey, if I thought the world was going to end next month, you’d best be believin’ I’d go fuck some people and places up too (upending a few tables? Pfft). It probably is liberating to be an apocalyptic whackjob.
Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus has many more examples of how the cultural pendulum has swung between Lovey-Dovey Jesus and the Manly Redeemer over the last couple centuries. In light of Katie Ladd’s assertion from the article that “It’s only been since women have been in church leadership that this backlash has come,” something else from that book struck me as interesting:
Perhaps the most important factor behind the masculinization of American culture was a creeping sense that women were beginning to encroach on what in the past had been all-male preserves…Many American men responded to these perceived assaults on all-male turf by attempting to overturn the “separate spheres” doctrine. While in the past such men had valued “civilization” and identified it with supposedly feminine virtues such as passivity and self-denial, they now gloried in the savage and the primitive, and reinterpreted traditionally male vices such as assertiveness as necessities, even virtues.