ULTIMATE FIGHTING JESUS V. BETT Y JO “B. J.” BLOWERS
Haggard’s mega-church provided him with a constantly expanding platform, but it was the Promise Keepers that fulfilled his original dream. At its height in the late 1990s, just as he had envisioned, the Promise Keepers drew hundreds of thousands of men to raucous rallies where they pledged themselves to the “Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper.” Chief among the group’s strictures was sexual purity, compelling its members to have hotel room movies turned off to avoid the temptation of the adult porn pay-for-view. Promise Keepers were also furnished with advice on finessing domestic disasters, such as a son returning from college with an earring. The “feminization of men,” said Promise Keeper founding member Tony Evans, was leading to the decline of civilization. Explaining his own attraction to the group, Haggard offered a motive that directly contradicted Evans and his coterie of manly men. To Haggard, the Promise Keepers gave men a private space where they could reveal their essential, unmanly selves. “When there are no women and children present the men feel uninhibited and free to worship because they’re not concerned about having to be masculine,” Haggard said.
The Promise Keepers was founded in 1990 by former Colorado University football coach Bill McCartney, an outspoken Christian firebrand, who turned his historically abysmal team into a championship team, even as twenty-four of his players were arrested within a three-year period for crimes including serial rape, and the team’s star quarterback, Sal Aunese (arrested for assault) impregnated McCartney’s twenty-year-old daughter Kristyn. They never married. Aunese died six months after the birth of their son, Timothy. Five years later, Kristyn had another son with another Colorado football player.
McCartney called Aunese’s diagnosis of terminal stomach cancer in 1989 the “will of God.” He also expressed his relief that the diagnosis was revealed on an off day. When the alternative weekly Westwords exposed Kristyn McCartney’s affair with Aunese the following year, McCartney concocted a plan to assassinate the piece’s author, Bryan Abas. He said he changed his mind only at the last moment when an elderly stranger handed him a stack of Bible verses inscribed on index cards and urging forgiveness.
“I wish I hadn’t been so focused on winning football games that I didn’t spend more time with my daughter,” McCartney told the New York Times. “But now I see an opportunity to build a godly content into those two boys that can make a difference in their lives. So on the one hand, maybe I could have prevented some promiscuity. But on the other hand, wow, I love those two little guys.”
McCartney preached that homosexuality was “an abomination before God” and warned Jews that they are “toast” unless they convert to Christianity. “A man’s man, a real man, is a godly man,” he said.
He launched Promise Keepers with the benediction of James Dobson, who featured him on his radio program. By 1997, the group had revenues of $85 million a year, charged $60 for attendance at its stadium rallies, and had drawn 2.5 million participants.
As the men’s movement that McCartney and Haggard helped to popularize evolved, it spawned a new generation of leaders who cloaked the Christian right’s kulturkampf behind an aesthetic of secular cool. One of these gen-next manliness marketers, Mark Driscoll, leveraged his ownership of one of Seattle’s most popular indie music venues, Club Paradox, to style himself as the “hipster pastor.” With a carefully calibrated edginess—the Disciples were “punch-you-in-the-nose dudes,” he once proclaimed—Driscoll claimed to make church fun again for disaffected young men. His constituents were a “lost generation” that preferred all-night sessions of Grand Theft Auto to Galatians, and responded better to heavy metal and heavy-handed sarcasm than to soft moralizing. Driscoll assured his mostly single guy parishioners that the Jesus they worshipped was not some “Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ” or “a long-haired . . . effeminate-looking dude.” He was “Ultimate Fighting Jesus,” a Terminator of machismo with “callused hands and big biceps.”
Brad Stine, a shaggy-haired Christian comedian promoted as “the Messiah of stand-up,” took his unique act to the Christian men’s industry, a whole new market, founding his own group, GodMen, a no-girls-allowed road show where, he said, “men can be men; raw and uninhibited; completely free to express themselves in the uniquely male way that only men understand.” Inside his frat-boy-style revivals (think Girls Gone Wild! without the girls), Stine treated his chest-thumping crowd to vulgar comedic rants against casual sex and serenaded them with an anthem he composed called Grow a Pair!
We’ve been beaten down
Feminized by the culture crowd
No more nice guy, timid and ashamed . . .
Grab a sword, don’t be scared
Be a man, grow a pair!
While Driscoll and Stine amped up evangelical liturgy to appeal to twenty-something sensibilities, Haggard’s friend John Eldredge introduced a compelling new archetype for movement followers to emulate. A reformed druggie who discovered Francis Schaeffer in his twenties and later went to work as a counselor for Focus on the Family, Eldredge wrote the men’s movement’s seminal tract, Wild at Heart. This book, which has sold over 2 million copies since it was published in 2002, called for men to model themselves after a hybrid of “Ultimate Fighting Jesus” and William Wallace, the virile Scottish separatist leader romanticized in Mel Gibson’s movie Braveheart. Eldredge’s superman was the very antithesis of the prince of peace. “He works with wood, commands the loyalty of dockworkers,” Eldredge wrote. “He is the Lord of hosts, the captain of angel armies. And when Christ returns, he will be 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.” (This warrior Jesus resembled no other religious figure so much as Mohammed.)
White supremacists across the globe shared Eldredge’s reverence for Wallace. William Pierce, the deceased, Idaho-based neo-Nazi leader known as the “Farm Belt Fuhrer,” upheld Wallace as a model of personal sacrifice. “That, I think, is one of the strongest things in our people and is something we need to call on and recognize,” Pierce said, “and for more people to be willing to do whatever is necessary, as William Wallace was.” The Italian neo-fascist Umberto Bossi, who, while serving as reform minister to Silvio Berlusconi, proposed torpedoing boatloads of African migrant workers before they reached Italian shores, proudly adorned a wall of his office with a poster of Wallace. Meanwhile, back in Wallace’s homeland, the Scottish Sunday Mail reported, “Hate-filled Nazis are using Braveheart fever to recruit Scots. They urge people who want to do something about the ‘browning of our country’ to watch Mel Gibson’s movie about Scots patriot Sir William Wallace.”
But the William Wallace who captivated members of Christian cell groups and would-be klansmen was nothing like the real-life knight; he was a fictitious action figure fabricated by actor/director Mel Gibson. Gibson, a pre-Vatican II Catholic traditionalist raised by a vociferous Holocaust denier who, like his son, had a penchant for anti-Semitic rants, channeled the sensibility of his far-right fan base. (“Fucking Jews!” Gibson growled during an arrest for drunk driving in 2006. “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”) Gibson’s films incited angry feelings of revenge through depiction of vivid atrocities, whether the scene took place in thirteenth-century Scotland, the American colonies during the Revolution, ancient Jerusalem, or even Mayan Mesoamerica—Braveheart, The Patriot, The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto. Gibson’s work appealed to sadistic yearnings, glorifying hideous acts of violence through graphic close-ups. By presenting scenes of hearts exploded by arrows, skulls split by maces, and entire torsos bisected by broadswords, along with innocents burned, slashed, and crucified, Gibson redefined the aesthetic of authoritarian right-wing movements across the globe.
The storyline of Gibson’s Braveheart was custom-tailored to modern right-wing sensibilities. A
ccording to Gibson, Wallace’s archenemy, the hapless English prince Edward II, was a girly homosexual who spent his days modeling ornate outfits and carousing with his lute-strumming male lover, while his soldiers fell before Wallace’s swift sword. The film suggests that only after receiving a stern beating from his father did Edward take the Scottish rebellion seriously, dramatizing through sado-masochism that gays are unfit for leadership.
The rugged Wallace, meanwhile, stole away with Edward’s sex-starved wife, Isabella (who in real life was an infant when Wallace led the Scots) to a verdant hillside where he brought her to an earth-shattering sexual climax. Gibson’s contrasting of Wallace, the virile manly man, with Edward II, the effete girly man, was a deliberate appeal to the mentality of the Christian men’s movement follower. Thus Wallace’s triumphs over Edward’s lavender legions were more than military victories. Through Gibson’s lens, they represented the defeat of the liberal “culture crowd.” It turns out that the culture war has been going on for seven hundred years!
No Gibson film is complete without a grotesque scene of extended torture. In Braveheart’s final scene, the defeated Wallace was martyred through an old-fashioned English quartering. With his legs and arms separating from his torso, Wallace bellowed his last rebel yell before a crowd of startled onlookers: “Freeee-dom!” In Gibson’s telling, Wallace’s greatest contribution to history was not the way he lived his life but the way he died: by sacrificing his body for the greater nationalist cause—for freedom. In this way Gibson balanced Wallace’s sadistic side with deeply pronounced masochistic tendencies, completing his carefully executed makeover of the medieval historical person into a thoroughly modern right-wing authoritarian dominator.
In 2004, Gibson repackaged the brutal conclusion of Braveheart into an entire film about Jesus’s crucifixion, The Passion of the Christ. Basing his script on the anti-Semitic passion play performed for centuries in Bavaria, Gibson presented a cabal of venal Jewish priests as engineers of Christ’s death. For over two hours, Gibson bombarded viewers with excruciatingly graphic images of the nearly nude Jesus (played by burly actor Jim Caveziel) flayed by bullwhips, gored with myriad instruments of torture, and ultimately ground into chunks of bloody sinew during one of the most grisly scenes in modern film history.
The Jews, themselves controlled by a female Satan character, thirst after the blood of Jesus with a fervor that far exceeds that of the Romans. With the torture of Jesus approaching a pornographic crescendo of violence, and the Jews clamoring for more, Gibson’s Christ whispers, “I make all things new.” Here, Gibson asserted the theme that unified his films and most influenced his fans among the Christian masculinity movement: masochistic suffering as the ultimate form of redemption, pain as godliness.
“I can honestly say, without hyperbole, that The Passion ranks with the most moving artistic experiences I have ever had,” Haggard remarked after Gibson personally previewed the film for him at his New Life Church. “It is a brilliant film—a compelling vision of Jesus’s ministry, a challenging depiction of the violence of Roman crucifixion, and most important, a heart-rending portrayal of sacrificial love.”
Although Haggard’s quirkiness often set him apart, his assessment of The Passion reflected the masochistic mentality of the Christian right with perfect clarity. To Haggard, the suffering that Gibson’s protagonists endured at the exquisite moment of death was not suffering at all, but “sacrificial love” for a higher cause. Both Wallace and Jesus were keenly aware of the horrible fate that awaited them, yet they soldiered ahead, convinced that they would make more powerful symbols for their movement as martyrs than as living leaders. To these true believers, Wallace’s quartering and Jesus’s crucifixion symbolized more than selflessness—they represented the triumph each man hoped to achieve over his own body. Only through a metaphorical torture did movement members believe they could achieve their liberation from sin.
Denial of the body is a universal theme in the movement’s literature. According to Every Man’s Battle, a best-selling manifesto on sexual purity, even the most fleeting glance at a woman’s uncovered thigh or a moment’s glimpse at a pair of bouncing breasts will inevitably lead to porn addiction, chronic masturbation, and serial adultery. A trip straight to the lower rings of hell is next. It is therefore best to avoid admiring the beauty of unmarried women, especially lascivious femme fatales such as the fictional Betty Jo “B. J.” Blowers, an estrogen-infused evildoer who darkens the pages of the sequel, Every Young Man’s Battle. If a Christian man has the terrible luck to set his eyes upon the body of any woman other than that of his wife, he should immediately “bounce” toward something decidedly unsexy, such as an episode of Monday Night Football. Naughty thoughts about women must be “taken captive” in order for a man to “fully function as a Christian,” the book insists.
With the help of James Dobson, an enthusiastic promoter of the book’s “battle” methods, its authors, Steve Arterburn and Fred Stoeker, have become leading Christian-right self-help gurus. Their expertise stems not from any academic training but from their ability to describe their own redemption from sexual addiction in accessible, evangelical language. Arterburn’s come-to-Jesus moment arrived in college, when an extramarital affair he had led to an unwanted pregnancy, then an abortion—an act that weighed so heavily on his conscience that he believed he was guilty of murder. Stoeker’s problems began with his discovery of an eight-inch ceramic dildo among his father’s girly mags when he was in first grade. The find prompted a twenty-year porn obsession that ended only when, as Stoeker wrote, “Daily Bible study allowed the word of God to wash him clean and to begin to transform his mind.” Born again, Arterburn and Stoeker counseled other prisoners of sexual sin, charging them well over $1,000 for three-day seminars that promised to free them from their shackles.
But Arterburn and Stoeker’s disturbing impulses still roiled beneath the surface. The opening scene of Every Man’s Battle finds Arterburn driving along a California byway in his 1973 Mercedes 450SL, enjoying the view from “the car of [his] dreams,” on his way to a place that could have been named by any mischief-making adolescent: Oxnard. Suddenly he catches sight of a “goddesslike blonde,” with “rivulets of sweat cascading down her tanned body” and dressed in “a skimpy bikini.” Just “two tiny triangles of tie-dyed fabric struggled to contain her ample bosom.” While ogling the “banquet of flesh” he had “feasted” his eyes on, “craning [his] neck to capture every image for [his] mental video camera,” the distracted Arterburn crashes his luxurious ride into the back of a muscle car, badly crumpling his bumper. (Arterburn’s tawdry opening scene unwittingly echoed the theme of Crash, a dystopian 1973 sci-fi novel by J. G. Ballard about a “TV scientist” whose erotic obsession with violent car accidents drives him to commit insane atrocities. While Ballard’s novel is widely recognized as one of the most penetrating literary commentaries on modern man’s alienation from himself, Arterburn and Stoker’s revealing psychosexual journals also deserve consideration for this honor.)
In an online video that Arterburn produced to promote his purity seminars, he illuminated the Christian manhood movement’s fixation on high-tech incarnations of eroticism. A cast of middle-aged, middle-class, middle-of-the-road men struggle to resist mammoth sexual temptations, without it ever occurring to them to seek the company of actual women. One character, seated in his sterile office, crinkles his face, expressing inner turmoil as he alternates his gaze between a laptop computer screen and the portrait on his desk of his smiling family. Should he go home to his wife and children, or stay late and pleasure himself with online surfing?
Viewers of Arterburn’s video are insidiously warned that the anonymous cyber-sirens catering to any fetish from behind the member’s-only walls of Internet porn sites represent an even more irresistible temptation than living, breathing women. The wife in every man’s desktop picture frame is dowdy, dull, and frozen. She is the Christian man’s only permissible outlet for his sexual frustration—and theref
ore no outlet at all. If she does sleep with her husband, it is only to prevent his descent into total depravity, not to fulfill her own sexual needs. And if she fails to realize the fantasies brewing in what Arterburn and Stoeker call man’s “mustang mind,” her husband will inevitably stray outside his corral, riding into the dark wilderness of cyberspace, or beyond.
Every Man’s Battle is not so much a struggle against temptation as it is a war against the temptress. As images of comely lasses flash by, Arterburn intones, “Those who won hated their impurity, they hated their sickness. They were going to war and they were going to win, or they were gonna die trying. And every resource was leveled upon the foe.” Who were these enemies of purity promoting “sickness” everywhere they went? Against whom should Christian men declare spiritual warfare? Through a series of unsubtle cues, Arterburn left little doubt that single, sexually independent women—young ladies like the infamous Betty “B. J.” Blowers—were the Enemy.
But then who was God? Who should Bible-believing Christian men love, and what does he look like? Men’s movement literature made no secret about this. God is a man’s man with “callused hands and big biceps,” clad in a revealing loincloth, rippling with muscle, and invariably armed with a glistening broadsword. He is Fabio of Nazareth. With a sensibility shot through with homoeroticism, it should not have been any wonder that some of the movement’s most ardent adherents turned out to live their fantasies.
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