Manhood, Satirized
How Jerry Falwell and Where the Crawdads Sing Show Dueling Visions of Masculinity
First things first: sorry for missing last week. Between ripping out termite-eaten drywall in my office and an extra influx of work in my day job, it’s been quite a hectic several days.
Now back to your regular scheduled programming.
Photo source: Gage Skidmore (Wikimedia Commons)
I had originally hoped to stay away from most current news cycle events, but like a frost troll to the arrow-kneed warriors of Tamriel, it chased after me. And after days of turning it around in my head, I just can’t avoid talking about Jerry Falwell.
The Masculinity of Jerry Falwell, Jr.
The now-former President of Liberty University has been caught in a sex scandal so salacious it wouldn’t have passed the smell test for a Saturday Night Live sketch. The Onion itself might have called it too outlandish. But what started as Falwell posting a sketchy photo with his wife’s assistant, both with their pants unfastened and midriff showing, unraveled into a much larger set of issues. Among those is the issue of Giancarlo Granda, a former pool boy of the Falwell family, who says he was involved in a three-way affair with Falwell and his wife. You can read more details here, but the allegations against Falwell are rising by the day, including voyeurism, forwarding sexual photos to at least one student, and bragging about his sex life to other Liberty University administrators.
But that’s only half the story. The other half is his reaction to Granda’s allegations of the three-way affair. In part:
Shortly thereafter, Becki had an inappropriate personal relationship with this person, something in which I was not involved — it was nonetheless very upsetting to learn about. After I learned this, I lost 80 pounds and people who saw me regularly thought that I was physically unwell, when in reality I was just balancing how to be most supportive of Becki, who I love, while also reflecting and praying about whether there were ways I could have been more supportive of her and given her proper attention.
It should be noted that Granda’s side of the story has been verified by screenshots (not made public, but provided to Reuters), as well as text messages and emails that were also supplied to Reuters.
Falwell’s cowardice here is deafening, especially considering his performative masculinity, which has essentially defined his public career. For example, he once tweeted :
“Sorry to be crude but pastors like @plattdavid need to grow a pair. Just saying.”
The tweet was deleted afterward. You can read the context of why Platt attracted Falwell’s ire, but to be frank, it doesn’t reflect any better on him. And while the original tweet has been deleted, this response to the backlash against him was not:
David Platt is the author of the book Radical. If you’ve not read it, I recommend it. Fittingly (although this was not the focus of Falwell’s tweet), among its many criticisms of the American church is that we spend too much money on fancy church campuses, and not enough on gospel missions. That we have painted over the gospel with The American Dream. Who lived the American Dream if not Jerry Falwell Jr.?
The Masculinity of Tate Walker
My perspective on current events is frequently influenced by whatever I happen to be reading at the time. It is, perhaps, a happy accident that I just recently finished reading Delia Owens’s novel Where the Crawdads Sing. The novel itself is not distinctly about manhood (not primarily, anyway), but the life of Kya, an ostracized and lonely girl who lives in North Carolina swampland. But the story does provide a rather vivid contrast between two male characters, Tate and Chase. For one of these two young men, people in the world are things to be manipulated, and people around him overlook it. As the book once notes,
“these hurried groping hands were only a taking, not a sharing or giving.”
Because while he’s “known as a ladies man,” he’s also the town’s star quarterback, and his family is known and respected in the community.
In other words, he flaunts his public image and that allows him to do what he wants, so long as he keeps the more salacious scandal secret. Sound familiar yet?
But then there’s Tate. He’s not perfect – he makes some serious mistakes in the book. But Tate’s father gives him this vision of manhood:
“a real man is one who cries without shame, reads poetry with his heart, feels opera in his soul, and does what’s necessary to defend a woman.”
And yet, that is by no means a coddling. For later, Kya notes:
“Once again Tate was nudging her to care for herself, not just offering to care for her.”
Discussions of toxic masculinity are tricky, because sometimes what folks hear is “masculinity is toxic.” True biblical masculinity is not, but too often the church has not endorsed true biblical masculinity. That Falwell was able to live so large, and so successfully attach himself to a prominent Christian university, in part because of this (as well as his family name). As is sometimes noted by social conservatives critical of the toxic masculinity label, we need a positive vision to replace it with. And, I would argue, that positive vision needs to tear down any vestige of the performative machismo that significant segments of American culture have championed.
To bring us full circle, and in returning to Where the Crawdads Sing, I think of the complementarian view of gender which so much of conservative Christianity adheres to. It strikes me that we have spent so much energy fighting over that view that we haven’t stopped to consider the second-order definitions of it. If a man is to lead his family, what exactly does it look like to lead? Consider, for example, this text:
“Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church, and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing of water through the word.” – Ephesians 5:25-26
How about we try this: biblical Christianity is loving, giving, and other-focused, dedicated to the holiness of all that surround him.
That doesn’t look much like telling a Christian pastor to “grow a pair.”
But it looks a lot like Jesus washing his disciples’ feet.