While I share Andrew’s concern, I suspect this latest evangelical trend isn’t all that trendy. As Slate‘s Jack Shafer points out, “The Times accepts estimates from pastors who figure that 700 of the nation’s 115,000 white evangelical churches have taken up mixed martial arts. But the story names only three palooka ministries: Xtreme Ministries, Canyon Creek Church, and Victory Baptist Church.”
Still, while the “Jesus Didn’t Tap” crowd may be numerically insignificant, it’s a prime example of the disturbing resurgence of macho Christianity. At the 9 Marks blog, Mark Mckinley lists four problems with this unbiblical fad:
- It’s derivative and unoriginal. It was lame when Billy Sunday was doing it 100 years ago.
- It makes the gospel man-centered. Coming to Jesus isn’t a way for you to deal with your daddy issues. I get it, your dad didn’t hug you when you were little and you want to be a different kind of man. How about you go hug your kid then? Jesus didn’t come to help you get in touch with your inner MMA fighter.
- Like it or not, the gospel is at least in part about weakness. It’s about the almighty becoming weak to save us. It’s about us being helpless and unable in our sins. There’s no way to Christ that doesn’t start with brokenness and an admission of impotence. Yes, Jesus is the strong man who binds the adversary, but he bound him by suffering, humiliation, and weakness.
- It discourages and mocks godly men who aren’t macho. There is an undercurrent of disdain in all of this. Proponents of this testosterone Christianity can’t help but take shots at guys who wear pastels and drink cappuccino. You might not like guys with manicures, but there’s absolutely nothing morally wrong with it. A reserved, quiet, well-groomed man can be a good Christian. Believe it or not.
February 8th, 2010 | 10:47 am
“Palooka Ministries”. I am gonna run and trademark that one. And, oh, the spinoff potential . . .
February 8th, 2010 | 12:34 pm
With the exception of #3, these strike me as very weak objections:
1. Why is it necessarily bad to be unoriginal?
2. I can just as easily say that a Christian knitting-group, for example, makes the Gospel “woman-centered.” The Gospel can be legitimately man- or woman-centered, depending on who is being evangelized.
4. It is easy to turn this on its head. That is, proponents of cappuccino-drinking, pastel-wearing Christianity can’t help but take shots at guys who are cagefighters. You might not like guys who spar, but there’s absolutely nothing morally wrong with it. An aggressive, tough-talking, ill-groomed man can be a good Christian. Believe it or not.
Then again, maybe there _is_ something morally wrong with fighting for sport. In that case, you should have argued that point. But if you merely find this stuff distasteful, that says nothing one way or another about its objective compatability with the Gospel.
February 8th, 2010 | 1:13 pm
This seems to be another manifestation of the “personal Jesus”, where Christ is converted into a teddy bear who matches your particular needs and quirks. It’s fine for Gnostics or Docetists, where it’s all an illusion anyway, but it gets pretty silly if you accept that Jesus was one particular man in one particular time. He wasn’t a suburban soccer dad or whatever and you’re missing the point if you’re trying too hard to cast Him into a particular mold like htat.
I find it liberating to look at an icon of the Pantokrator or the transfigured Christ: He’s our king and we should be worried about conforming ourselves to Him and not conforming Him to some contemporary role.
I sometimes think that some converts to Islam might be reacting to this overly personalized Christianity. Do you see Muslims trying to gussy up the Qur’an to make it more “relevant”? Heck no! They have a sense of reverence.
February 8th, 2010 | 2:47 pm
Jerry,
Are you saying that the fully customizable “my personal Jesus” app I am developing for the i-phone may be heretical?
Chat with Jesus, order flowers and reserve a seat at a restaurant, all with the same handy device.
Oh, but seriously, in your view, at what point does depicting Christ in our own image cross the line to a form of self-idolotry (for lack of a better term? It has been common throughout history, for instance, for people to depict Christ, Mary and the saints as if they resembled them, albeit usually in a stylized fashion. Even the images to which you refer have some of that. I understand that your point regards the depiction of Jesus as we understand Him through the gospel, rather than conform Him to our own idea of how he “should” be.
Is the problem more with the type of mass produced images that became popular in the late 19th Century onward? I am thinking in particular of what I refer to as the “hippie from Amsterdam trying to score some hash” Jesus with the white skin, light hair and light colored (often, but not always, blue) eyes with the far off, spacey look. For a long time that type of image kept me away from church and from Christianity. I couldn’t take it seriously.
On the other hand I am drawn to the icons and to images such as that of La Virgen de Guadalupe. These are all examples of syncretism, but they capture at a deep level the essence of what they represent. I have an easier time believing that they are divinely inspired, regardless of how they may or may not have been created.
On yet another hand (I seem to have more than two), given the idea of faith as a spiritual battle, often depicted in concrete images (armor of chastity . . .) is a muscle bound Christ that far off base, so long as people realize that, at some level, the muscles are allegories for Christian attributes?
Gotta go work on the Palooka Ministries web site, merchandise coming soon to an outlet mall near you.
February 8th, 2010 | 3:30 pm
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February 8th, 2010 | 4:39 pm
Dang, I should have thought of that app idea!
Peter, good questions. I have no problem with inculturation, and in fact find it a necessary aspect of the universality (dare I say catholicity?) of the faith. I think that perhaps the underlying attitude is important: are we approaching the Ancient of Days with awe and love, or creating a cultural Rorschach blot? The line can be a bit blurry, no doubt, and perhaps I’m more conservative than some (though I hopefully didn’t come off as too crotchety), but I think it is important to examine our attitudes with sacred and popular art. Like you pointed out with your own struggles, these images can be a stumbling block if we aren’t careful (and in fact the first criticism of pop art Jesuses I encounted was in Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X”, when the title character was protesting the blue-eyed Jesuses that surrounded him).
February 8th, 2010 | 6:51 pm
Efforts to make church into a male-bonding exercise are doomed to fail, not because male bonding and church don’t mix but because they do and no amount of self-consciously male-friendly add-ons to liturgy is going to be an adequate substitute for the Y chromosome, which has been squeezed out of a lot of denominations. The literature on this subject is vast and goes back more than a century. That literature, like the various prescriptions for reconciling church and masculinity, may be largely “derivative” and “lame,” but at least it’s some kind of response to the question of “why men hate going to church,” the title of a surprisingly good, unpretentious book on this issue by David Murrow (2005). For some time now men and boys have been picking up the message that, if they’re not prepared to make themselves eunuchs for sake of the kingdom of heaven, the Church has no use for them. Consequently, most of them have no use for the Church.
Males (think of some of the martyrs) have been willing to endure emasculation—or emasculation as the world sees it—for the sake of God’s kingdom because their faith has invested them with a store of masculine identity so rich that it exceeds anything that the world can offer them through sexual or military conquest, athletic victory, or whatever. Christ on the Cross is the model for this dynamic. (See Colleen M. Conway, Behold the Man: Jesus and Greco-Roman Masculinity [2008].) “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased” is what the Father says of every believer, who is his adopted child. For women and girls the application of this truth will have a different psychological force. The psychological force it has for men and boys is powerful to the point of being soul-transforming. Alas, most of us don’t spend enough time thinking about it for it to sink in.
The agape, or divine love, between Jesus and anyone who believes on him is bigger than the human affection each has for the other—which is to say that agape includes or encompasses that affection. That’s the nature of the relation between those two forms of love as the believer experiences them. They’re not mutually exclusive. The mystery of the Incarnation entails that we relate to Jesus not only as creature to God but as brother to brother or, in the case of women and girls, as sister to brother. Jesus has a certain relationship with Mary, who massages his feet with oil and wipes them with her hair. His relationship with Peter is no less intense, but it’s different. The relationship between brothers, whether brothers by blood or brothers in the sense of fraternity brothers or teammates, happens to satisfy a basic human need that males have to be validated and accepted by their peers. See Lionel Tiger, Men in Groups (1969). Just as Christians recognize in romantic love a unique refraction of divine love, so in fraternal affection we recognize, or should, a different refraction of it.
As for the worry that a Christian celebration of masculinity “discourages and mocks” men who aren’t very masculine and that “there is an undercurrent of disdain in all of this”: Substitute “intellect” for “masculinity” in that formulation and what you get is anti-intellectualism. Masculinity, like intelligence, is a faculty, which is hard to define but also hard to deny or ignore. In itself, it is good, although it can be used for either good or evil. And just as in our admiration of Thomas Aquinas there is no undercurrent of disdain for John Vianney, so in our admiration of Tim Tebow there is no undercurrent of disdain for Fred Rogers. “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit.”
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