Well, God just decides to sell a book for you.
I remember the day that I went into my local Christian bookstore and there was my book.
You are not God! You are just a man!
The Total Money Makeover book, which is sold almost...
The number one best-selling book.
Book? Book? Book?
No, because it's gotta read the book!
Or he's gotta read the book!
This is Bad Christian Books.
Welcome to Bad Christian Books, a podcast about the worst bestsellers Christianity has to author.
Hmm, author. It's a... I made a pun. We're gonna go with that.
How are you doing, Mary?
I'm doing great. I'm enjoying a little bit of downtime vacation before I start a new job.
Which means that I'm currently recording this under a blanket in a bathroom in an Airbnb.
But I'm excited. I'm excited for this episode. I know you've been laboring over it for a bit.
I have been. I've been doing a lot of emotional labor.
We're both kind of in a unique situation.
I think my best at the end of the day.
And so for me, it's almost 7am in LA.
I have been awake since 3pm yesterday, so I've never been thinking better.
Mary, can you sum up for me what you know about John Eldridge's book Wild at Heart,
Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul, in a sentence?
I don't even know if I have a sentence.
Really all that is coming to mind is like wild horses, like an image of wild horses.
And I don't know if that was like a cover at some point or if I made that up.
I know you and I have talked about that every time you mention this book,
I get a flashback to the old movie The Bachelor, not the TV show, who like that whole movie is about.
With Chris O'Donnell.
It's one of my dad's favorite movies, but like it's about a single guy who's afraid of committing to his longtime girlfriend.
And he represents bachelorhood as like wild mustang.
So that's like every time you mention this book, that's all I think of.
But that's not a sentence. That's just an image.
Similar for me, when you first had this book on lists of books we could potentially cover,
I pictured the Barry Gifford novel of the same name, which was later adapted into a movie by David Lynch,
which I've actually also done a podcast about on my other friend's podcast, I Know Movies and You Don't, with Kyle Rule.
So really, I'm just the wild at heart guy, I guess.
Yeah. Yeah, that's a fun little like crossover episode.
Well, enough about David Lynch and more about John Eldridge.
Mary, I've given you a link to John Eldridge's podcast by the same name.
Give that a listen.
And he himself can sum up for you what the book is about.
I'm going to kind of take a safari of the soul.
We're going to go on an adventure, a treasure hunt.
What we're looking for is the true heart of God and the heart that he put within us as men.
If you go back into the story in Genesis chapter one, the very first thing that's said about you refers to your gender.
Right? Genesis one, God creates this phenomenal world in all of its wild goodness.
In its beauty.
And then he does something really remarkable.
He creates his own image. Right?
Male and female, he created them.
This is the very first thing that is said about human beings, that you are made in the likeness like God.
You are his son.
And secondly, at the level of gender.
It doesn't say that God made people. Right?
God made humankind. Right?
It says he made them male and female.
I mean, right there, one of the most distinctive, crucial, important things about us is being revealed.
It's absolutely phenomenal.
We've lost this, especially this late stage in Western culture.
We've lost this.
The dignity of it.
Your story doesn't begin with sin, by the way.
Okay? The story doesn't begin with Genesis three.
It doesn't start with the fall.
So many attempts of presentation of the gospel or of Christianity try and start there.
Oh, no. Oh, no.
It starts earlier.
It starts with this dignity bestowed with a strength that is given.
You have the heart in you that you do because it's a reflection of the heart of God.
You have a masculine heart.
Um, I have thoughts.
And that heart bears the image, contains within it the heart of God, the same heart he does.
I mean, really, if we could just get this, I mean, down into like the marrow of our bones,
it would change our lives forever.
It absolutely would.
It'll take a little time to get there.
But this is so transformative.
You have a heart.
That might be a new piece of information.
That heart is how you bear the image of God.
And it is male.
Gender is at the level of the soul.
It's the deepest thing about a human being.
Oh, I don't think I agree with that.
That and the image of God, because that's how and where we bear the image of God.
Women bear the image of God also, but in a very different way, in a distinctly feminine way.
And so what we want to chase after, what we want to get to is that true heart of God
and the heart that he has put within us as men.
Yeah. So, OK, my first thought is he says that the the first thing God says about humans is their gender,
which is false.
The first things God says about humans is that we're created in God's image.
Right.
A small group I was in a couple of years ago, or well, the house church I was in,
we did a study of Ruth by this woman who is a scholar.
And she has another book that we kind of looked into a little bit that talks about this exact section of Genesis.
And it's she makes her argument for egalitarianism and for
kind of pushing back against this very like feminine versus masculine view of God,
specifically from this passage, because she says, number one, likely the reason why it says
man and woman were made is because at that time it was not assumed that women were made in God's image.
God was male. And so women were like this extra lesser weaker being.
And the second thing is, is that the word used for female Eve in this session,
in this section, is the same word used as warrior throughout Judges.
And first and second Samuel, it has a very masculine vibe that he's arguing as only male.
I'm sure you're going to get into it.
And then just like the statement that our soul is gender,
our soul, gender is the most important part of our soul.
I don't even know how to start unpacking that. So maybe I should turn it back over to you.
Well, at the very least, I'll say I'm reminded of the average Boomer trope of like, oh, I don't mind the gays,
but I hate it when they make it their whole personality.
And then you've got a Boomer like Eldridge who is making gender his whole personality.
That's not exactly where I'm going to go with all this, but it's something it is.
Perhaps if we look at the definition of cult as a fixation on a specific thing,
his obsession with gender is cult-like.
What you've just heard is a good summary of the book itself.
This is a 200 page book and that little three minute segment really dives into it.
But what is Wild at Heart?
Wild at Heart, Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul, was published on March 2, 2001.
And like you heard, seeks to argue that gender is the heart of the human soul
and that men won't be truly happy until they become real men.
I'm going to tell you right now, Eldridge doesn't really settle on what a real man is.
He is very fixated on what a real man isn't.
Eldridge claims men need a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.
He repeats these three tenets of manhood throughout the book.
And then I've listened to his podcast, the most recent podcast of his I listened to is from like 2021.
For 20 years he has been repeating battle to fight, adventure to live, and beauty to rescue.
He says all men are haunted by the fear that they're their opposer
due to a wound that needs to be healed that emasculates them.
Mary, can you guess who is the only person who can heal this emasculated wound?
I feel like the right answer is Jesus, but it's probably like his mother or something.
You are actually right, he does say Jesus is the only person who can heal that wound.
But who is Jesus to John Eldridge? We'll get into that soon.
But first, let's look at who John Eldridge is.
On one hand there's his resume.
Eldridge was a Christian counselor in the biblical tradition, which we'll get into.
And trust me, we will get into that.
He also taught at Focus on the Family Institute until he left in 2000 to launch Ransom Heart Ministries,
which now operates under the Wild at Heart brand.
I can only guess, he at some point took an office job, which he never names in the book,
I'm guessing that it's Focus on the Family,
because clearly his hatred of the corporate life is what inspired this book.
And I remember actually starting it out.
I don't talk about this much, but I spent a good deal of time, a decent amount of time in the corporate world.
You know, it's funny, it actually wasn't that much time. It just felt like a lot of time.
Yeah, that's how that goes.
Seriously, the way it dilates time, and I am not being dramatic when I say it nearly took my life.
And when I started out the book, I like to go into these books relatively blind.
And I kind of thought to myself, you know what, this might not actually be as bad as I Kiss Dating Goodbye,
because I see the place where he's coming from, and I too sometimes want to leave the office and howl at the moon.
But it's where he goes that's kind of interesting.
Before I get ahead of myself, his website says John grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, which he hated,
and he spent his boyhood summers on his grandfather's cattle ranch in Eastern Oregon, which he loved.
And he does mention that cattle ranch quite a bit.
So Mary, your image of the horses chasing the men, or I believe it's bulls chasing men, right, in The Bachelor?
No, it's wild mustangs. Wild mustangs.
The men are the wild mustangs, and then there's like a lasso that comes out of nowhere that's supposed to represent the wife.
And it has to do with all of his girlfriends catching the bouquet, and then the next one, clucked, I guess we should say.
That's pretty accurate to Wild at Heart, his image of masculinity.
There's hints of another John Eldridge that never fully got to grow into the Imago that he is now.
He's described in his bios as a graduate of LA's drug culture, which I didn't he doesn't mention that like at all in the book.
But you can totally tell when you hear him speak, not to be like you can tell this guy did drugs.
He's got a very like hippie style of communication.
John Eldridge the type to stop at the end of making his own point and go, wow, like that's verbatim the noise he makes during a talk.
He's very, very in awe of the points he's making in a very like, in an almost innocent sort of way.
It is very hippie.
So wait, what time, like when did this book first come out?
Oh, we will get into that. But it did come out. Don't jump the gun, but it came out in March of 2001.
Oh, that late. Interesting.
That late.
Okay.
But this man is so he's currently like 63, I think.
So the hippie thing is he's not actually a hippie.
He's I think he's just from LA.
According to him, he spent, he says, I spent 10 years of my life in the theater as an actor and director.
So he's kind of yet another Christian influencer who cosplays the rugged West, but hails in fact from the snowflake West.
To be fair, on an episode of his podcast, also called Wild at Heart, Eldridge says,
At one point I thought I would be in the Royal Shakespeare Academy in London.
God took me on the path he had for me.
I think it's worth noting, as he writes in Wild at Heart, that God thwarts us to save us.
I don't, I don't want to speculate too much because I'm sure at this point, he's probably perfectly happy with where life took him.
But I do notice this trend in a lot of like cultural influencers where this work will come from a sense of disappointment that an initial passion couldn't be fulfilled.
Hmm. Yeah, that's oh, I know who that's making me think of.
Yes, you're totally right.
I've been doing a deep dive into the history of the prosperity gospel and several of the kind of forefathers of that health and wealth.
I tell God what I want through prayer like movement wanted to be something else.
One of them actually said that if he had not been enlisted in war, he would have been the next Elvis.
And I will not tell you who that is. So, a little teaser, but I was just like, what?
They're like in denial, but he's like, but God knew and wanted me to be great here.
And I'm just like, that's a bold move to be like, I should have been Elvis.
Well, I remember even when we were at chapel at our college that we went to, there would be the chapel speakers who would talk about this.
I remember one who I like, remember liking decently was a general superintendent, Jim Deal.
His whole thing was like, oh, I was going to be a sports announcer, but God had other plans.
And some part of me does wonder, like, I'm not dragging Jim Deal here. We're really digging into Samuel's nostalgia for Nazarene.
But I was going to say I love Dr. Deal, but I remember that story. Yeah.
Dr. Deal was actually one of the ones that like I really, I really appreciate him. I do too.
I like I remember I was obsessed with he was like my favorite pastor when I was a kid.
Truly kind man. Yeah, he's just like such a nice guy. But I think that is like a trope in Christian sermons and how people even talk about their testimony.
And I wonder if it almost comes from a I need some kind of transformative moment because especially like Protestantism,
Evangelicalism like has put so much emphasis on having a testimony that people who, you know, grew up in the faith and didn't have a specific drug phase,
they needed something to be like, well, I could have gone a different way, but I chose God, you know.
I give all that background because hearing he's a counselor, what sources would you guess he cites the most in a book that ostensibly is psychological and sociological?
I would hope whatever the psychological journal of the era is, but it's probably like pop culture.
Bingo. Originally, when I wrote these notes, I said he cited movies the most.
And then I realized, no, he does cite the Bible the most. But movies and poetry are what he cites most loudly.
What I mean by that is the Bible more stands as a support for his movie references and poems interspersed throughout Wild at Heart.
I do not recall other than these broad statements like in this culture, men have this initiation ritual.
There is no reference to like a peer reviewed psychological study. And there's a very good reason for that.
We'll get to that later. He references the movie Braveheart as a near biblical text, and he cites it nearly every chapter, often spending multiple pages on examples from it.
I was meaning to watch Braveheart in preparation for this episode, and it is a three hour movie and I work night shifts and it just wasn't it wasn't convenient.
But I didn't really need to because he sums it up multiple times in the book, oftentimes simply recreating scenes in his own voice.
Yeah, this is makes sense why my dad liked this book because Braveheart is one of his favorite movies of all time.
And I don't know that I would say this is his favorite book of all time, by any means. But like my memory of it is that he read it.
He was like, sure, Braveheart is an interesting text to base an entire gender, literally half of humanity around.
Half of humanity, even now on his podcast and boot camps and now in our year of our Lord 2023, Braveheart is his seminal text on the podcast, which is which is not what this episode is about.
But I did just dive in to be like, you know, did this guy go on the Josh Harris journey? Is he now sitting up there being like gender is a construct?
He's not doing that. So on his podcast, he will every once in a while reference friends who are therapists.
And you can tell deep down in his heart of hearts, I think there is I want to say there's this conviction that maybe he's got to dig a little deeper.
But that's not in the book. He never references scientific or social studies nor the work of even other foundational psychiatrists.
He'll make cultural claims, but those are anecdotal.
Mary, I have an excerpt for you and I think I'd like you to read it in your manliest voice possible.
Oh, gosh. And you'll see what I mean by the way he writes.
That is why I have written this book.
I'm here to tell you that you can get your heart back.
But I need to warn you, if you want your heart back, if you want the wound healed and your strength restored to find your true name, you're going to have to fight for it.
Notice your reaction to my words.
Does not something in you stir a little?
A yearning to live?
And doesn't another voice rush in urging caution, maybe wanting to dismiss me altogether?
He's being melodramatic. What arrogance?
Or maybe some guys could, but not me.
Or I don't know. Is this really worth it?
That's part of the battle right there.
See, I'm not making this up.
He's not making this up, Mary.
I mean, it's kind of ingenious when you make like the skepticism of your claims, the evidence for your claims.
Exactly. And that's the point that I was going to I was being charitable earlier when I said his reasoning was anecdotal.
It's actually circular.
You doubt what I say?
That just proves I'm right.
And I got to tell you, that is the framework for every claim that I'm about to share.
So I'm curious, like he's talking a lot about like a wound healed, strength restored.
Is he just talking about feminism?
That's the vibe I'm getting that it's this like culture that's attacking men or manliness or like emasculation.
You are right on all of those terms. And yet he never does the service of fully explaining.
So we'll get into this. But the wound is part of his whole branding and this belief that every man has this wound.
He definitely blames modern culture for the decline of men, as he puts it.
And he's he's building off of other writers who were anti-feminist like Lionel Tiger, which is a real name.
Kind of a great name. I mean, he could have gone far with that name.
Especially because apparently John Eldridge's father called him Tiger and he bases his whole masculinity off of that.
He goes, men want to be called something like Tiger.
And I'm like, I don't think every man wants to be called Tiger.
I would be a little perplexed if somebody called me that.
I mean, we talked about Spider-Man on our About Us episode.
That's what Mary Jane calls Spider-Man from the 60s.
Oh, from the 60s, like the old ones.
Yeah, she says go get him, Tiger, which she says again in the Sam Raimi movies.
But that's because she said it in the 60s.
There is an era that I'm realizing existed in this period, mostly from reading a series of books by different counselor, Christian counselor that we will explore in the future.
That there was this like era in I think like the 90s, early 2000s ish, where post feminism, men knew they couldn't really like say, oh, women should be at home in the kitchen anymore.
They kind of knew that was like wasn't acceptable, but they were still deeply ambivalent, if not threatened by their existence in the workplace.
And so I think what you see is a series of Christian men seeking to justify those feelings as God given.
So you have, oh, well, we know like we can't oppress women, but if gender is God given, then it's okay, which just like produces a very weird theology that I think maybe was the impetus for a lot of purity culture.
And even like this cult of celebrity and like different things that have become really apparent as awful, you know, in the last five to 10 years, I think had a root in this unspoken fear that I'm not even sure these authors knew that they had.
Yeah, I think a lot of these people don't realize how afraid they are.
Fear is the number one emotion that I feel that I can feel from John when reading the book and fear and pain, pain is not really an emotion, but it is all coming from a place of pain.
And so did he like, I mean, he talks about you said wound is like one of his main things. Does he talk about like what his own wound was he does.
I'm jumping the gun, but I'll mention it now because I don't have a whole lot about it later. His wound is that his father was an alcoholic and didn't spend enough time on him.
It's very interesting to see him use what his father wasn't as a basis for what men ought to be because it's, it's as somebody who feels that their own dad in fact reading this book I messaged my dad and I was like, thank you for not being like this guy.
I don't think john Eldridge has ever had a good example of masculine leadership.
I understand then the need that arose within him to like find that but he's based his whole personality around that it's kind of like a kid who's not allowed to have frosties when they're young and as an adult they're constantly getting frosties from from Wendy's it's just it's a little absurd.
I mean men often like children of alcoholics feel that their parents don't love them enough to fight for them. That's such a good summation of literally his whole viewpoint is he thinks men need to fight, which makes sense.
And then you consider he feels that his dad didn't his grandfather, his cattle ranch you recall he visited in Oregon I think his grandfather was that masculine example. And it sounds like it was about as stereotypical as it could be, which I think for john was fine.
There's nothing wrong with liking horses and cattle ranching. It's when you say every man needs to be like this. And it's, it's interesting because Eldridge even says, oh, I'm not trying to say every man needs to be john Wayne or macho.
But he also doesn't not say that he's clearly trying to cover his butt. He's like, well, here's what being a man is but it might be different for you. But here's what it is and conflating that inside you or the lack thereof with how attuned you are to who God made you to be.
And that's very dangerous. And that kind of gets us into the claims of the book. And this isn't the order that the claims are presented in but I sort of put them in tears and I would say his chief claim is that gender is central to the human soul.
He doesn't make as big of a point out of it in the book as he does in that talk that I shared but that viewpoint permeates every other point that he makes. And you saw in that talk, how little he actually says to support it other than a misreading of the book of Genesis that's on par with Joseph Gordon Levitt's misreading of the graduate in 500 days of summer.
His second claim is that masculinity is aggressive. And so I took some bullets from he goes on this lightning round of claims about men versus women, which is always always fun.
I love a list of gender claims. My fave.
Women be shopping except he doesn't say that he says women don't start wars. He says violent crimes aren't for the most part committed by women. He says our prisons aren't filled with women and I put next to that this one is just stupid.
Is he not aware of women's prisons.
Yeah.
Yep. He says Columbine wasn't the work of two girls, which again, is he aware of I hate Mondays.
Yeah, there's some there's some missed readings of cause and effect there. He really is taking this view that the culture that exists supports that men are this way so therefore men must be that way, which no society was created by men who were that way.
So therefore, that's the voice that's heard. This is completely inane. And one of my least favorite cultural arguments for things where it's just like, no, no, no. Okay, go on.
I want to piggyback off of that. So, I'm going to share a little bit from her later but I reached out to my friend Megan who is a licensed professional counselor in Ohio, she talked to me about the concept of gender roles and it's like that question of are they entirely biological or social which kind of gets down to like nature versus nurture, the consensus is usually that it's a bit of both and it's hard to say where one thing.
One thing ends and the other begins. She kind of use the example of a rat raised in a hostile environment is going to have genes expressed that allow them to enter fight or flight faster but prevent them from forming meaningful long term social attachments with their mother or mates.
She was also talking about like with gender, pretty much the observation is that it's a spectrum. There's a lot of there's the most evidence for that she's saying like she's worked with kids who have known they were trans since they were around for which is developmentally, when we begin to understand our identity, whereas
we've also met people who are fluid that it differs from week to week. It's a very case by case thing, and not at all this one size fits all explanation that Eldridge is involving, and we haven't even gotten to what he says men are about yet.
I would also just, I would also add that even if you consider yourself straight, a cis human not queer and anyway, there's also just a spectrum of what gender is within womanhood within manhood.
Also, like even what those characteristics are widely changed from culture to culture.
I think to over focus on gender kind of downplays how both men and women are humans. And we have way more in common than we have not in common.
Yeah. So according to Eldridge, he says, if a neighborhood is safe. It's because of the strength of men. He also says that slavery was stopped by the strength of men, and I put in parentheses, who started it.
Yeah, Nazis were defeated by men, again, sure, who, who were all the leaders of the Nazi Party apartheid wasn't stopped by women, and then I put in parentheses, was it stopped.
I mean,
Okay, and then there. And then he says, who gave their seats on the Titanic so that women and children would be saved and I added the poor john. And then finally we have, it was a man who let himself be nailed to Calvary's cross.
And you're going to find that with a lot of complementarians, it's not just, it's not enough for them that Jesus was a human. And this is actually one reason why out of the Trinity Jesus is the one that I struggle with the most because the fixation on the maleness of his avatar is so important to so many Christians, especially in reformed Calvinist spaces.
Although I don't want to downplay how important he is in a unegalitarian, you know, Wesleyan spaces as well.
I actually think like, Jesus had many feminine characteristics.
He's constantly painted in an extremely effeminate way to highlight the divinity that to me indicates what a relatively new and wrong conception of Jesus that it is claim three is that adventure beauty and battle are the three pillars of masculinity, and he's pretty much operating off of vibes and poetry here.
Men need to go on an adventure. He's oh and his examples are always just like, can you keep a voice, can you keep a little boy still and I'm like, also as someone who has recently been the parent to a two year old foster child, you cannot keep girls still either.
This is true. Yeah.
They will find a way to constantly be moving unless you put on cocoa melon, which is melting the brains of the next generation. He focuses a lot on adventure how men need to go out into the world to be stimulated which could could be said of women to I mean everybody loves a good hike.
There's this battle that needs to be fought that men are forged from struggle. Specifically he says God created Adam for adventure beauty and battle, which is there's already a little bit of a problem here, because battle comes from conflict and conflict comes from sin.
So if God created Adam for battle, then why was the fall of man a problem.
Even Christians of like the Calvinist persuasion took issue with that I found an example Mark Mulder and James K Smith of Calvin College went on the record saying what Eldred's of what Eldred attributes to creation, biblical Christianity ascribes to the fall.
Well, and I mean the the image of heaven, you know the end of days is that all war will cease all conflict will cease, there will be no battles. So like even the thing that we're striving towards is not conflict, men are just going to be useless that in heaven at the tail end here of the claims about aggressive masculinity
Eldridge gives an example of like his son gets bullied. And so he tells his son, don't turn the other cheek. I want you to hit the bully as hard as you can, which was the word choice there was interesting to me because he doesn't explicitly mentioned Fight Club.
But the whole thing in Fight Club is when Edward Norton's character first meets Jack, the main character when he first meets Tyler Durden Durden says to him, I want you to hit me as hard as you can. And it's this big moment in the movie and I think for a lot of Gen X men.
Notice that's not particularly biblical. No, no, it's not. I can think of several verses that say the exact opposite but yeah, this like, my brain is going in a lot of places. I don't know if you can tell but this I mean I know I'm realizing why you took the extra weeks on this.
Oh, you can't you tell it was so exhausting. It was exhausting reading this book, because you're just constantly bombarded with no, no, no, and I got to follow up with that and I got to follow up with that.
Let's jump into claim two because it dovetails so well, Jesus is inherently masculine, and in that masculinity, inherently aggressive don't like that Eldridge is really upset with the way churches have described Jesus as a nice guy.
And it's interesting because did Jesus get angry and overturn the tables when the church was being used as a den of thieves. He sure was. That's not the part that Eldridge is gravitated towards.
He's really upset that Jesus is described is almost like Mr Rogers with a beard and I got to tell you these first few chapters of the book, there's a lot of Mr Rogers hate, which is absurd.
I don't understand how you can not like Mr Rogers, as just this like incredible human who all he dedicated his entire life to creating public education for kids. Maybe it's the sweater vest, I agree it's outdated but like it's Mr Rogers.
Mr Rogers was unapologetically himself, which that too, you will find is hidden in like even Eldridge has to admit that there's not really any good example of what masculinity is, other than being the person you're supposed to be.
I don't know how you can have a problem with Mr Rogers when there's no indication that Mr Rogers was anything other than who he really wanted to be. He, I mean you said he uses this word like poser.
But essentially in this book he's arguing for like one type of masculinity that really flattens the characteristics and personalities and values of different male humans. I believe when you encounter God, more of our unique aspects and our worth, and what we're supposed to do is what emerges.
I mean there's that he's definitely arguing for all men to look a certain way and act a certain way, which is completely against like the idea that I think is very central to Christianity that like we were all created unique and like intentional to be different from one another.
So this concept, and it's so funny that you mentioned flattening because I totally agree with that there's no seasoning there. And that is exactly what Eldridge tries to claim this Jesus he doesn't like is he's like oh telling me to be like him feels like telling me to go limp and passive.
This is just this was a really wild part to me of the book no pun intended.
Is Jesus more like Mother Teresa, or William Wallace. The answer is, it depends. He is the Lord of hosts, the captain of angel armies. And when Christ returns. He is at the head of a dreadful company mounted on a white horse with a double edged sword.
His robe dipped in blood. Now that sounds a lot more like William Wallace than it does Mother Teresa. No question about it. There is something fierce in the heart of God.
I hate this. I hate this worldview. I just hate all of it.
I just, it feels so good to hear you say this because I thought the whole time I was reading this I was like, I need to come to Mary with something better than just I hate this. No, that's all I have. I have like I just hate everything about this.
I hate idolatry with a passion, which is like, it's kind of funny because this, this is oddly an episode where I really have to take the mask off and say like though I am ex-vangelical I still very much believe in God. And part of my reason for being ex-vangelical is I believe that evangelicalism is making an idol of the church.
In Eldridge's case, he's making an idol of just what he thinks being a man is. I couldn't even say in good faith he's making an idol of being a man because that's whatever you want it to be cowboy.
Much of Eldridge's illustration of masculinity comes from the film Braveheart, which stars its director Mel Gibson, a Scottish warrior William Wallis, who leads his countrymen in a rebellion to free his homeland from the tyranny of King Edward I of England.
Eldridge references a lot of movies in the book. I started actually keeping a tally of them and counted 10 other movies used in regular support of his points in addition to Braveheart. Among them, a rather disquieting scene from a Kevin Costner movie, A Perfect World.
Mary, I did send you this one to read. This is an excerpt from the book that includes dialogue from A Perfect World. When you get to dialogue, and I've marked it in your notes, you be the boy and I'll be Kevin Costner.
Oh no.
There comes a moment when Costner buys the boy a pair of pants. The symbolism in the film is amazing. But the boy won't change in front of him. He's a shy timid boy who has yet to even smile in the story. Costner senses something is up.
What's the matter? You don't want me to see your pecker?
It's punny.
Puny.
It's punny.
It's puny.
Sorry.
It's puny.
What?
You say it again.
Oh.
It's puny.
Who told you that?
The boy, Philip, is silent. It is the silence of emasculation and shame. The absence of the father's voice is loud and clear. So Costner intervenes and speaks.
Let me see. Go on. I'll shoot you straight.
The boy reluctantly bears himself.
No, Philip. That's a good size for a boy your age.
A smile breaks out on his face, like the sun coming up, and you know a major threshold has been crossed for him.
So can we talk about what was just described to us?
So what is the, I guess I don't know this movie, what is the like context of the relationship between the man and the boy?
The boy, the man is an outlaw and the boy is like, I think he kidnapped him or something or the boy's a runaway. I have never heard of this movie. Full disclosure.
He, because he gives more insight into the movie, but it's just like basically this outlaw is teaching this boy the ways of being a man and is being this father, like surrogate father figure to the boy.
Sure.
The man is not this boy's father, or if he is, he is still a stranger, and he is like, there's nothing inherently wrong on one hand, if we were living in a completely innocent world.
But I just think about all of the abuse that happens in Boy Scouts and the kind of, I think this kind of, lionizing this kind of scene to me is really groomery.
Yeah, I encountered this a ton in Every Young Woman's Battle that I'm still making my way through.
Yeah, there's a misunderstanding of like what grooming is, where your boundaries should be, and if you make it sexual like as the child, it's your fault.
I think now we look back and we're like, in my head I was like, why MCA rule? If you're a counselor and an adult, you're never with a child alone.
There's always two adults or two kids. And that's always the rule because of abuse that has existed in these spaces.
Right.
Well, and yet like using this discussion, which I'm assuming the point is like, boys are taught to feel insecure about their dicks and is that a cuss word? I don't know.
I think it's safe.
It's off the edge. Sorry, whoever's listening.
Like, they feel, I don't know, maybe as a man, you can tell me more about this, but I just, I have never quite understood the whole idolatry is the only word I can think of of penises and like, why?
And why is that, why is that tied into your understanding of who God made you? Like that feels weird.
Yeah, and this man is a counselor and furthermore, he's an adult. Like, have I been in male spaces between like high school and college where there was this obsession with with dick size? Absolutely.
Did that make sense to me then? Not really. No. I always felt like, I was just like, that's not your business, quite frankly. That was, that's, that's always the way it's felt to me.
It's very juvenile.
It's extremely juvenile.
You're supposed to grow past that and your comparison to like high school locker rooms is apt. Man.
And he thinks this is an amazing scene. And I think for him specifically, it's that Kevin Costner is like, no, your dick is the right size.
Which, okay, we'll get into this. So he, this brings us to the to another big claim the book makes. And it's so funny because we were talking about grooming, which was not on his mind at the time, but he says masculinity is about initiation, which is a synonym for grooming.
Bestowed by men and men alone. And he really, he really drives this point home. He says masculinity is not bestowed by other boys or by women.
In fact, Eldridge says that mothers emasculate boys with their fears for their safety. He goes so far as to say that boys, well, he says like boys are inherently rowdy, which we talked about, and men are inherently aggressive. And he blames the emasculation from mothers or imperfect fathers for creating wounds that cause men to lash out against their partners or turn devices like pornography or drinking or spousal abuse.
He makes this really, really weird statement, which is, if a mother does not let a father take her son away from her, she will emasculate him.
What the actual heck.
Yeah, I was gonna say we've decided we're not casting podcast but that one could bring me close and I also love that you knew I had something to say when I like had only opened my mouth and didn't make any noise.
So, I think it's pretty obvious I hope it's obvious to people listening like why that is so horrible and has led to so much abuse and spiritual trauma and physical trauma. This is where the view that men are higher than women leads.
This will probably be an unpopular statement but just where I come from, I think the complementarian viewpoint, especially in its like fully fleshed out version is sinful, especially if you look at sin at its core as being this idea that anything can separate you from the love of God, which is kind of blasphemous in and of itself.
Then complementarianism is this idea that a man stands between a woman and God, and then a man stands between his son and God.
That to me seems like a violation of at least two commandments. And I do know that complementarianism is also not one, one specific thing so there's different versions and, and then people say they believe one thing and live out another, that's a whole nother thing so I want to get away from like this specific type of theology versus
just like the overarching like thought pattern.
But he accuses the average man of being a poser, and he says that this posing comes from the aforementioned wound. There's kind of less to say about this than you would think.
I mean it just comes off, again, very juvenile where he's basically saying, I'm not like the other boys at church, they're all posers, and I've been a poser too but not anymore. You know he's doing that thing where a guy like talks a bunch of crap on Twitter but then adds myself included, which I've totally never done.
And it is just basically talking about imposter syndrome but he's refusing to use the word imposter syndrome. And at first I thought this was just ignorance, but I think he is actually averse to using psychological language.
So instead he has to use kind of these like hippy syllogisms that I think make more sense to him than they would to the average reader, which actually kind of works in his favor because then if that means anything to you then he's one.
So his big claim is that men have to come through, which can be seen in the form of fixing problems for their families or spouses.
It was very interesting listening to an episode of his podcast that he did post pandemic, where even he admitted that his idea of masculinity made the pandemic really hard because he was trying to fix it.
And one man cannot fix a global pandemic. And I was like, yeah, John. It's almost like there's a few other things that one man cannot fix.
He also has choice words about the role women have, and he talks a lot about how women so this is getting back into complementarianism, he talks about how the woman is the help meet or in the Hebrew, as their connecto.
And basically surmises women are controlling and manipulative because of Eve's mistrust of God. Good ol Eve. It's her fault.
He even suggests men should kiss dating goodbye to find themselves. And I should note that this was published just a few years after I kissed dating goodbye, or in the 90s bad Christian book cinematic universe.
I know I mentioned it earlier that there's like a word that is associated with the name Eve that means warrior that specifically Ezra. Oh yeah like Ezra.
Like as her connecto. Yeah, and a really good book called the, the Gospel of Ruth. Like I said this woman she takes the story of Ruth but kind of talks about how it is a model of Jesus's narrative of what the gospel is through a book that's largely only women.
He does actually mention Ruth quite a bit because he uses Ruth as an example of how women should seduce their husbands. He is a child playing with matches when it comes to the Bible, one of the wildest things is him talking about what a man owes a woman and you would not believe which Bible story he uses to illustrate that point.
I was gonna say lay it on me. Are you familiar with the story of Judah and Tamar, which is what the term onanism comes from. Yeah, I was gonna say either that one or the other one was like Isaac.
Was it Isaac who like slept with his daughter because there were no more women. Oh yeah, yeah you're right. Anyway, my brain went to one of the many rape stories in the Bible and the Old Testament, and you would not guess who he holds at fault in that story
because you look at that story and you're like well of course this angered the Lord. This is so fundamentally, we can't use curse words, messed up.
This is from BibleStudyTools.com so I have no idea how credible that is but it seems to just sum it up pretty well.
So Judah is one of the twelve sons of Jacob, one of Joseph's brothers. That's the context. This is in Genesis. Judah left his brother and married a Canaanite woman who gave him three sons.
And it's Judah's sons that are kind of the central men in this story. His oldest son Er, E-R, marries Tamar but Er was wicked and so God killed him. So then Judah gave Tamar to his second son Onan.
Modern ears may not love that but that was a tradition basically ensuring that like women were not left as widows or without provision.
Onan was also wicked and God killed him. Then Judah should have married Tamar to the youngest son but he didn't want to lose his third son so he sent Tamar back to her father and said when Seila is old enough, I guess he was too young to marry, you can come back and wed Seila.
But he did not do that. So years pass, Judah's wife dies and he's traveling around. He's like traveling near where Tamar is and I guess she knows this. So she disguises herself as a prostitute, puts herself in his path and he doesn't know, he doesn't recognize her so they like do the adult things.
And he gives her some stuff, then she gets pregnant and she comes back to Judah and says, you're the father and she brings out the stuff that he gave her.
I guess this is saying he confesses that she was more righteous than he for he didn't fulfill his promise to her and so then I think he marries her? It's not saying that here but I think they must have because it says she went on to give birth to two twin boys, Perez and Zerah, and King David and Jesus were descendant from the line of Perez.
Which is a key part of the narrative of Jesus' line that he came from, less than ideal circumstances.
So guess who he had an issue with in that story? I'll give you a hint, it wasn't Tamar, thank goodness.
Probably Judah? The sons?
Onan.
Onan?
Onan.
The second son.
Onan shouldn't have, and apologies to our listeners, he said Onan shouldn't have pulled out. That he was shirking his male duty by pulling out.
Oh, that was a part of this.
Yeah, because that's the whole thing is that Onan pulled out and did the old spray and pray method, and God was like no no no, it's all got to go inside.
He didn't want Tamar to have a son or a child. Well then this summary totally missed a big piece of the story.
Yeah, I mean it's like, I think Onan was understandably a little uncomfortable with the situation.
And so he was just like, yeah, we'll just kind of, it's just very interesting that Eldritch chooses something that's clearly so much a product of a very ancient era and a very ancient custom.
And I think to him that was the perfect story because he believes masculinity should be ancient.
But I'm like, man, there's so many variables in that story that just don't make it translate to today.
And so what's his point that like men, so men owe women sperm? Is that the point?
Basically, let me read you straight from the horse's mouth here.
The horse lover's mouth, my apologies. Have you seen the Barbie movie yet, Mary?
I have not. Have you?
The horse stuff is, yes, it's incredible. The horse stuff is especially funny when you find out what Ken's subplot is.
It is Onan's responsibility to raise up children in his brother's name, but he refuses to do it.
He is a proud and self-centered man who angers the Lord so he puts him to death also.
You're beginning to get the idea here. Selfish men, a woman wronged, and the Lord is mad.
Again, I want to just point out that the main thing Onan does here is pull out.
Right, because in that era, when you took in the wife for provision, you were also supposed to,
whatever children you had with that woman took her first husband, your brother's, I guess the equivalent of the last name.
I don't know if they had last names back then. I guess they kind of did.
Basically, like, they inherited the brother's stuff so that each male had a lineage coming, even if he died.
Eldridge says, It's a sobering story of what happens when men selfishly refuse to spend their strength on behalf of the woman.
But the same thing happens in all sorts of other ways. Pretty women endure this abuse all the time.
They are pursued, but not really. They are wanted, but only superficially. They learn to offer their bodies, but never ever their soul.
Most men you see marry for saviour. Okay, and then he goes on and on about...
I really don't think that the problem with misogyny in society is that men are...
How did he phrase it? The first one it was like...
Not spending their strength on women.
Yeah, I don't think men's strength is the problem in society.
No. His conclusion... Oh, let's see here.
First, he talks about spiritual warfare and how our choices to be a man, i.e. engage with the world instead of fleeing from it, not inherently a bad message, help win these wars.
And then he goes on to say that he cured his wife's depression and dizzy spells by her telling him, first of all, that she had these things.
And then essentially by them just kind of thinking it away, like praying for it.
But the implication being here that now that the man knows, he's fixing it.
Which I just felt like a very odd note and kind of goes along with a lot of unhealthy Christian conceptions about depression.
You know, it's not a chemical imbalance. It's spiritual warfare.
And he believes women are inherently empty vessels longing to be filled.
And if men don't create boundaries, women will always ask too much of them.
And certainly in a relationship, any member of a relationship could ask too much of the other.
But he's really digging into just some like urtext misogyny by saying women are empty and a man runs the risk of being poured into them and them still not being satisfied.
Yeah. Oh, man.
So like this kind of rhetoric, I think it's important to point out because I could see like maybe people who are still in the church but aren't experiencing like this kind of rhetoric specifically being used against them.
I mean, this is what's used to like gaslight and abuse women to like.
I mean, there's so many stories now of women who were like told to stay with an abusive husband.
You are absolutely right.
You know, I have these conversations a lot with people who have experienced this trauma and also people who are like in the church and like, this was not the traumatic messaging that they received.
And I just like would want to point out that like, if it's if this is making you uptight like this idea that this could be lead to like abuse.
I would sit with it for a minute because I've I know stories of men and women who this is what they were taught and it just led to incredibly destructive relationships.
Amen to that.
So from all of this, Eldridge concludes that essentially masculinity can only be expressed through taking risks.
He makes it clear he is not asking men to leave their wives or to hurt somebody.
It's more clear what he doesn't think adventure is than what he does.
It's a vague ethos and most of it is directed by Mel Gibson.
Having said all of this, he also says explicitly near the end of the book, there are no formulas with God.
Period.
And I really feel like that should be period with a little T at the end, you know, period.
I was thinking of period question mark.
That's accurate.
This moves us on to our next section.
Criticism.
So what's wrong with all this, Mary?
Others.
Obviously, the bad vibe, the aggression based portrayal of masculinity is I put in my notes like this is anti-social a lot of times and narrow minded at best.
But I wanted to give a more concrete rebuttal to these claims than this is obviously wrong, which was going through my head the whole time I was reading it.
I want to give a shout out.
I want to thank my friend Megan, who is a licensed professional counselor in Ohio, for giving her insights.
I reached out to her because I'm not a therapist.
I don't have any I don't have psychological training.
So I kind of wanted to see what a professional had to say about some of this.
But she also pointed me in the direction of researching biblical counseling.
So let's start there.
As John's background is Christian counselor and it's his main source of credibility, the Christian part is important here.
I know I play up my ex-vangelicalism a lot on this podcast, but there is a gulf in qualification between a Christian counselor certified through the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors,
which I'll be referring to hitherforth as ACBC because we will be talking about it a lot, which, by the way, John associates with.
There's a big gulf between that and a formally licensed therapist.
Part of this is certification.
The Association of Certified Biblical Counselors operates on the Naothetic tradition, which has rebranded recently as the biblical tradition.
Naothetic counseling was coined by author Jay Adams in his 1970 book, Competent to Counsel, which could very well be a bad Christian book for us to cover.
Per their own website, Naothetic, which is coined from the Greek word for admonish, their counseling seeks to reorient disordered desires, affections, thoughts, behaviors and worship toward a God-designed anthropology in an effort to restore people to a right fellowship with God and others.
This is accomplished by speaking the truth in love and applying scripture to the need of the moment, by comforting the suffering and calling sinners to repentance, thus making them more mature as they abide in Jesus Christ.
Run on sentence, please see me after class.
QED, all you need to be, a Christian counselor, is a literal biblical worldview, no prior understanding of psychology needed.
In fact, the ACBC stance on psychology is historically skeptical of what they call a humanistic and secular pseudoscience.
They are calling mainstream psychology pseudoscience, which I put in my notes is a real pot calling the Christmas tree black situation.
Now, Eldridge, to his credit, does have a master's in counseling.
It's from Colorado Christian University.
The methodology of Christian counseling itself is problematic.
To illustrate my point, Mary, have you ever heard of the bed of Procrustes?
The what?
I'll describe it to you.
The Encyclopedia Britannica comes from a Greek myth.
Procrustes was a robber who had an iron bed on which he compelled his victims to lie.
Here, if a victim was shorter than the bed, yeah, they usually call it Procrustian.
If a victim was shorter than the bed, he stretched them by hammering or racking the body to fit.
Alternatively, if the victim was longer than the bed, he cut off their legs to make the body fit the bed's length.
In either event, the victim died.
So why am I bringing this up?
A study published in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality surveyed more than 200 Bethel students
and found that where students held Calvinist views and adhered to gender-complimentarianism,
there was a strong correlation, and this totally illustrates the point you were making earlier,
with believing domestic violence myths.
So this correlated with agreement with phrases such as,
women can avoid physical abuse if they give in occasionally,
and women instigate most family violence, i.e., why are you making me do this to you?
This kind of stuff, like you can see, it directly leads to incredible violence
and the breaking down of a woman as a God-created, unique being as well.
I mean, it's crazy because it makes gender into an idol.
Yeah.
If you're saying that gender is the primary way that a human being expresses the image of God,
that's idolatry. It's almost cult-like.
Well, and it's not good for anyone.
No, it doesn't benefit men.
Yeah, it doesn't benefit...
It benefits men politically, but it doesn't benefit them in their soul.
No, I mean, yeah, exactly. The idea that they're trying to live up to actually is what emasculates them,
not how they feel about themselves.
But then at the same time, there are women that are indoctrinated into being one version of what womanhood is
in a way that completely strips them of any significant contribution to their community.
And I truly believe men are going to have to be judged by the way they treated women and girls
in their institutions before God one day.
I think you're absolutely right that these men will have to answer at the judgment.
Christ himself says,
But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble,
it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea.
If we look at the way that men use their power as an excuse to abuse children and to make them feel less than.
And a lot of times, I think patriarchy, which is kind of it can be a dirty word in Christian circles,
but I think it is responsible for such a loss of just a loss of collective faith in the power of religion.
No, I totally agree.
It's a central reason people leave. It's why I left.
I talked to a lot of people who have left the church and still believe in God.
There's a lot of people like that out there.
And one of the main central reasons is this, like, not just inability,
but like refusal of the church at this point to face the power dynamics that they have not only like allowed to be there,
but have supported and created and groomed into place.
So just to summarize again, the bias held by Calvinist, Complementarian Christians,
that's fun, that rolls off the tongue, is the foundation on which they build their therapy.
Instead of examining the needs of their patients case by case, I'm going to say that one more time.
They start with the conclusion that their one size fits all.
And then that is the basis of their therapy.
They do not look at patients as individuals that are in need of specific treatment.
They try to apply, they try to nail them to their Procrustian bed.
The article that I got that study from was actually from Christianity Today.
It's called When Restoration Hurts, and we'll include it in our notes because it is worth a read.
We have people, I know, listening to this podcast, who are on the fence.
And I think it's really important for you, I think Christianity Today is a good middle ground
to kind of look at the criticism of now theistic, now called biblical counseling.
One huge issue with the ACBC is how it often emphasizes reconciliation over safety,
encouraging abuse victims to reconcile instead of getting the authorities involved.
You remember Josh Harris, how he stepped down as pastor of Covenant Life Church?
The author of I Kiss Dating Goodbye, if you listen to our episode on that.
He admitted in an interview with Christianity Today on the Mars Hill podcast
that he waited too long to turn to the authorities when problems were brought to his attention.
Even criticism of the psychology of religion and spirituality study itself,
because Christianity Today is kind of beholden to these Christian investors.
They kind of have to give two sides where I think sometimes there aren't sides.
But they do, even in showing the rebuttal,
it still shows how Reformed theology is biased against scientific methodology to a pathological degree.
If you're not basing your practice on any sense of evidence,
what foundation can you build your own credibility on?
We saw this issue with Dave Ramsey.
Right.
So what does this have to do with Wild at Heart?
Remember how I drew attention to the circular nature of Eldridge's claims and lack of psychological study cited?
That's by design.
Eldridge already has a conclusion based on his very specific understanding of scripture and Jesus.
And the book is simply a 200 page explanation of that conclusion.
It makes the writing come across very confidently, but this is the nature of a confidence man.
Some might call a poser.
Eldridge at day's end is, I wrote a hippie, but I'm going to upgrade that to a little bit of a cult leader.
I think he thinks he's doing good.
I do think this is a challenge for people like us who grew up in the church.
Some of the tenants that the American church culturally has adopted as essential
doesn't bear out in science and doesn't bear out as cultural changes are happening
or more people of different types of humans actually start to have a voice.
And so in order to hold on to a belief like this, you do have to compartmentalize.
There's a big difference between my view, which is like science hasn't caught up to God yet,
versus like science is wrong because it doesn't fit into this narrative.
Well, let me put it this way.
I think ignorance is not faith.
And most Christian views on science are deeply ignorant to what science is.
I think Christians are so afraid that science is this religion that's competing with Christianity when it is a method.
And that means it's fully compatible.
The whole thing about science is the understanding that we don't know everything.
So if your religion is threatened by that, your religion is A, making God very small,
and B, is just not going to be able to adapt.
Well, and yeah, I think, like you said, making God small.
I have encountered people who say like, who I feel like almost have this point of view where they're like,
I have to protect God from the world.
I say that in quotes in like this metaphorical outside of Christianity.
And it's like, well, no, God is bigger than like even Christianity.
Like God is out there doing his thing.
And then us humans have, I believe, inspired by God, but have created a system to understand who God is.
And I think it is very easy because humans are very like us centric to flip those on its head and say,
well, no, the religion tells me who God is instead of God tells me how to practice religion.
This is such an issue that I have with every fake outrage that the church has,
whether it's over evolution or more recently, the freaking multiverse.
None of those things, none of those things threaten an infinite God.
And if they threaten your God, your God is weak and not the God.
So this leads me to the last section and maybe the juiciest one aptly labeled the fruit.
I like how you have little chapter titles to all your sections.
It helps me it helps sell to me the illusion of structure, which is important for a man's heart.
Oh, is it? Yeah, it's important for the heart of a man.
Women don't benefit from structure in their writing, Mary.
This is specifically important for the heart of a man.
Yes, thank you for telling me that, explaining to me that to me, Samuel.
Explaining things to women is very important to the heart of a man.
So if Eldridge is not intending harm, what is the harm exactly?
Let's play the game of the ACBC for a moment and use the Bible to illustrate our points.
Mary, would you do the honors?
Matthew 7, 15 through 20.
Watch out for false prophets.
They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.
By their fruit, you will recognize them.
Do people pick grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles?
Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.
A good tree cannot bear bad fruit and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.
Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into their fire.
Thus, by their fruit, you will recognize them.
So what is the fruit of wild at heart?
It depends on who you ask. Oh dude, I'm about to go into full reporter mode here.
Yay! Join the dark side.
The first and most obvious fruit is profit.
The book, according to Religion News Services, sold over 4 million copies.
I cited that specifically because accounts varied.
4 million seemed to be the general agreement.
It became the urtext for Eldridge's program by the same name, the Wild at Heart Bootcamp.
In his 2016 interview with RNS, Eldridge says,
The book is still number one for men in spirituality on Amazon.
We fill every conference we hold.
He points to letters he's received about how the book has changed men's lives for the better.
A Christian Cobbs Dumas and her book, Jesus and John Wayne,
How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, nice title,
has a less charitable assessment of the fruit,
asserting the book set the tone for a new evangelical militancy in the new millennium.
The book was one of many books written in the late 90s and early 2000s
that looked to disorient Christianity from tenderness
and reorient Christian men as warriors and competitors.
Other notable Christians who took this tact ranged from James Dobson in his book,
Bringing Up Boys, which Dumas notes uses the term masculine will to power.
Mary, does will to power bring a certain...
...right-kiness?
A certain what?
Third right-kiness.
Oh, third right-kiness, yeah.
Well, in it, I mean, I'm getting very Ayn Rand vibes as well.
Oh, yeah.
Which her whole thing is, you are supposed to selfishly do whatever you want to do.
If it is like your dream or you're going, it's like what you were purposeful to do.
Which like in the church, I'm just making this connection,
but like you kind of get that messaging in the church too, especially men,
this idea of like God has placed something in your heart
and you should go out after it no matter what.
John Eldredge says that in the book.
He says, you know that what I'm saying is true because you want it.
Yeah, in the best circumstances that could be fine.
It could be the message of like, yeah, like go after your dreams
or like if you feel like God is calling you to something, go for it or whatever.
But it easily, especially where there's like a power imbalance,
can become like an excuse that the worst parts of yourself are in line with God's will.
Yeah.
And that, my friends, is pride.
Yeah. Yeah.
So Dumas notes a handful of other books in parallel,
but all of these books, including Wild at Heart, have something very critical in common.
They were published in the month leading to a traumatic and pivotal cultural event.
Well, cultural is understating it. 9-11.
Mary, do you remember the atmosphere in the US when 9-11 happened?
I can't remember if you were in the US when it happened.
I was in the US.
I mean, there was a ton of fear, almost like the sense that nothing was safe anymore,
which became this kind of two things.
One was obviously a ton of Islamophobia.
And so there was that piece.
And then at the same time, there was this like overconfidence in the government
and its ability to act in a crisis, which I think actually, ironically,
we saw a lot in the early days of COVID.
Because when people have a collective traumatic experience,
I think there is a sense that at the same time that you're having this fear,
that maybe those institutions aren't enough to protect you,
which I think resulted in people forming a worldview based on emotions.
Yeah. You summed up that atmosphere very well.
I just remember the fear and the fear became addictive and the hate became addictive.
Dumas sums it up thus, and my memory of the event reinforces this.
The moral certainties of the war on terror,
framed as they were by an evangelical president,
put an end to any post-Cold War uncertainty among evangelicals.
Affairs were clearly connected to domestic concerns.
But how does that look on a civilian level?
Well, for starters, the Wild at Heart retreats are called boot camps.
Eldridge himself, in the book, declares we must see ourselves at war with the enemy.
Convenient, of course, that the enemy is invisible, so it kind of gets to be whoever you want.
This isn't associated explicitly with Wild at Heart boot camps,
but I was reading in Jesus and John Wayne that it became this idea of
we need to make Muslims scared the way they made us scared,
which is not at all biblical, although the Crusades certainly took a similar route.
There's even more that can be said with the rise of the already popular Mel Gibson as a director amongst evangelicals.
From movies with Christian appeal such as Braveheart and The Patriot,
to explicitly Christian movies like The Passion of the Christ.
Now, I will make a note. What's funny to me is Mel Gibson's Catholic,
which is Christian, but some evangelicals don't see that that way,
but with him they totally make an exception.
Mel Gibson's definitely for another episode because his impact on Christianity is undeniable,
and I truly think it's for the worst. I mean, he's a bad man.
The point is, the Christian culture ran amok with the fear that 9-11 caused
and used it to fill a militant masculine aesthetic.
I can personally attest to this, as we had a youth leader at my home church
at one point who was a military veteran.
He wore fatigues during youth group and barked orders at us, reorienting our focus to being at war.
What was funny was, I should note that he would usually look to me, a sixth grader,
to validate any biblical claims he was making,
as he would openly say I knew more about the Bible than anyone else there, including him.
Which, Mary, is that a humble brag? Maybe my heart is just wild.
That's just such a bonkers story.
And it's true.
But I do think there was this era, and maybe 9-11 was probably not the start,
but I think at least in our lifetime was a speeding up of this conflation of conservative politics,
especially ones that take more of a militant edge with what it means to be a Christian.
Totally. 100%.
I think you see that with Roger Ailes' messaging during the Reagan administration as well.
Playing soldier doesn't necessarily mean you're actually shooting people.
Well, statistically in the US it kind of does.
I could cite Pew Research on gun violence in the US, but Wild at Heart is not ultimately advocating for the Second Amendment.
I'm sure he also loves the Second Amendment, but to its credit it's not really about that.
I don't think it was as hot-button of an issue at that point.
In fact, Eldridge regularly tries to skirt the image of the macho man with one side of his mouth,
as he reaffirms warriors and soldiers with the other.
Still, is there any direct correlation between Wild at Heart and violent crime?
And before I answer that, I want to acknowledge that correlation is not causation.
Still, I think this is the great story with which to end this account of Wild at Heart.
Mary, have you ever heard of the La Familia drug cartel in Michoacanacan, Mexico?
I have. It's been a while. I don't know that I remember all the details, but I have heard of it.
They started out as a group of vigilantes meant to bring order to Michoacanacan in the 80s,
and then seize control of the drug trade in the 90s.
The leader was arrested in 2011, but the group continues to operate.
All that being said, they're a drug cartel.
The twist is, they're not just a drug cartel, but a quasi-religious cult.
They believe their assassinations and beheadings are an act of divine justice,
and one of their bosses, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, known as the Crazy One,
even published his own Bible, mixing ideology with insurgent slogans.
So Mary, guess what book Gonzalez used to instruct and motivate recruits?
Oh, I'm guessing Wild at Heart.
Yup. This is according to Focus on the Family, an article in the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
The whole battle to be fought, adventure to be had, beauty to be rescued, they really gelled with that.
Eldridge responded to this news in an interview with Christianity Today in 2010, where he said,
If they'd actually read the book, they would know that submission to Jesus is central to the entire message.
They seem to have missed the central point, which gives context to everything else.
The thing is, they believe they are submitting to John Eldridge as Jesus.
They claim that their organization doesn't kill for money, doesn't kill women, doesn't kill innocent people.
It only kills those who deserve to die.
It claims to administer divine justice to rapists, robbers, corruptors of youth, and the like.
You know who that sounds like to me, Mary?
Braveheart.
William Wallace.
Yeah. I was like, what's his name?
And that is Wild at Heart. I can think of no better way to end.
Wow. That is a wild story that took my brain in many places.
So thanks for your in-depth research.
That was so interesting. And I feel like I had so many connections made.
Man, I'm going to be thinking on this one for a while.
It's crazy because very rarely when you find a cultural cancer is there such a pulsating heart at the center of it.
No pun intended.
Well, in the verse that you brought up, the bear, good fruit versus bad fruit, I just keep thinking about that.
And, you know, I think that is that should be just such a measure of what like how we're doing,
whether you're in the church or not or a Christian or not.
Like that should be the measure of how you evaluate your actions.
You know, it is challenging to reckon with being a part of a church body or being, you know, a follower of a certain author and saying there's a lot of bad fruit here.
That doesn't necessarily like take away what good fruit existed.
I'm sure some man read this and it gave him confidence and he was better for it.
But, I mean, there's just so there's a fallacy at the center of his argument that I think has just led to incredibly toxic places.
And we didn't even get into like the line that keeps making me grimace every time I hear it is like capture a beauty or whatever he says.
I was like, yeah, I almost feels like a whole other episode.
Well, yeah, and I think I'm going to get into that in the future.
So, Mary, would you say this is a bad Christian book?
I don't even know if I have to ask that question.
It's like a drug cartel is using this to justify murder in mass.
Yeah. I mean, to be fair, people do that with the Bible, too.
So, I mean, let's let's let's let's give a little bit of fairness, I guess.
But yeah, I mean, it's I guess I would say his arguments obviously don't hold up.
But I think, you know, what makes this go from just like poorly supported self-help book to a bad book is this pervasive narrative that directly leads to abuse.
This was this was an amazing conversation.
And I'm I'm glad to be able to I'm glad that this proved to be more than some cost fallacy with this book, because this this thing would just mess with me.
I mean, I I'm somebody who I put a lot of work into my mental health.
But even so, it's just like we're living in this time and place.
And it would just get to me some days.
And I'm somebody who has been very lucky in realms of having good models of how vibrant gender expression can be and how they don't have to adhere to norms.
I mean, yeah, if you don't, and maybe that's a question I have for you, Samuel, kind of as we wrap this up, like, was there pieces of this book that you felt like were things that you had absorbed as a child or teenager whenever that you kind of saw the roots of in this in this book?
I I am in terms of Christian upbringing, I am very, very lucky because my dad is able to skirt that line of like, like, it wouldn't matter if he was a traditional idea of a man, but he's like, there, nobody's going to say he's not.
But at the same time, he never had any mold he needed me to fit into.
Like, he, he didn't want me to do the job that he did. He didn't want to put that burden on me. He didn't want me to be the same as him.
He just took an interest in my life.
And I, I think honestly, I feel a lot of sorrow for John Eldridge because it sounds like his dad didn't.
And, golly, I mean, I might be writing Wild at Heart if I had a different dad, and a lot of people do have a different dad and I don't know, I don't know how you do it because life is still being a human is still hard, but I had a great guy.
But, but digging a little bit more into that, I think a lot of, I was actually talking to Megan about this. I was never self conscious about my gender until Christians made it a problem.
Because I didn't realize until getting more into like high school and college that being a man with this be all end all thing for so many men and I think you really saw this around.
I mean, clearly it was happening as early as the 2000s, but it got just to an insufferable fever pitch as these ideal logs like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson started showing up.
And just all this noise. I mean, let's take the Barbie movie for instance. Ben Shapiro has made two movies that are the length of this movie to like, to do what? To say don't see it if you're a real man. I don't know. I don't care.
I don't have to deal with that noise. A lot of guys do. And I think John Eldridge preys upon that kind of guy.
As you were talking about your dad, I also wanted to add, since I said at the beginning, and like my memory is that he liked this book. I think while my dad, just like as a natural state probably does fit more into like a traditionally masculine style of human.
I also am very thankful because he never told me that I, as a woman, did not have like the same capacity as men.
And I think that protected me from a lot of stuff. Not, I mean, I think that's a challenge. It's like, you know, the, you can be a Christian household, but there will still be whatever culture you're surrounded by is still going to have an impact on your kids and man, I guess the
conclusion of that is, thank God for good dads.
And we need more books about like what that looks like. If anyone knows of what books of great dad parenting books that are healthy masculinity. I'd love for recommendations.
Yeah, that's a good point. You can email us at badchristianbooks at gmail.com. The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
I actually do like that book.
Well, do you have anything to plug Mary.
You know, I, I guess by the time this comes out, I will have something to plug.
I am a story editor and producer on an upcoming season of a new podcast called. Well, the podcast isn't new but the season is new, called change agents, and it is the season we're looking at solutions for people leaving incarceration, and so we have different
journalists looking at, like restorative justice stuff housing job education.
It'll just be called change agents anywhere you get podcasts.
I'll look forward to checking it out.
I guess this has been bad Christian books. Thank you for dumpster diving with us.
Yes.
And until then, above all else, guard your heart.
Thank you.