12. Masculinity and Religion (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Promise Keepers Canada and Christian Relational Masculinities
Religious Studies and Theology, 2014
This article addresses two questions regarding the Christian men's organization Promise Keepers Canada (PKC). First, why is it that despite Canada's geographical and cultural proximity to the United States, the PKC has not followed the same historical trajectory and elicited similarly negative responses as its American counterpart? Second, is there something particular about Canadian experiences of masculinities that accounts for the differences? The article uses the concept of "culture wars" as one of the keys to explaining the differences in public reception. The article also demonstrates that PKC participates within a largely intersubjective tradition of masculine identity formation that is particular to Canada. While acknowledging that the discourse of relationality has resulted in a more interdependent or intersubjective notion of religious hegemonic masculinities in the Canadian context, the article also notes the limits of this discourse.
“It’s Not Macho, Is It?”: Contemporary British Christian Men’s Constructions of Masculinity
The Journal of Men’s Studies
Religion is a key site for constructions of masculinity, and visions of a gender equal society must include religious men. This study examines how a group of British white, heterosexual, middle-class, lay Anglican men construct masculinities via discourses on church-going, worship styles, and godly submission. The interviewed men express a hybrid form of masculinity, informed by religious faith, that embraces typically “feminine” characteristics such as love, humility, and vulnerability. At the same time, they articulate ideals of heteronormativity and essentialized gender differences that support hegemonic masculinity. The participants engage simultaneously in a selective, “discursive distancing” from, and a discursive alignment with, hegemonic masculinity norms, thus revealing tensions between competing masculinity norms.
Introduction: Religion and Masculinities – Continuities and Change
Religion and Gender, 2012
(USA) and Endowed Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies. His field of expertise is religion and gender, (post)-Holocaust studies, and reconciliation studies. He is the recipient of the Norton Dodge Award for Scholarly and Creative Achievements. Publications include Male Confessions: Intimate Revelations and the Religious Imagination (Stanford), Men and Masculinities in Christianity and Judaism (London), and Remembrance and Reconciliation (Yale).
What Would Jesus Do? Negotiating Hegemonic Masculinity in Religious Organizations
2015
Author(s): Molina, Carolina | Advisor(s): Valdez, Zulema | Abstract: This study investigates how men’s only church programs rearticulate notions of hegemonic masculinity. Specifically, this study examines two male-only programs, one English-speaking and one Spanish-speaking, within a non-denominational Christian organization in California’s Central Valley. Using qualitative methods, including semi-structured interviews and participant observation, this study shows that masculinities are constructed by aligning notions of hegemonic masculinity with religious beliefs to produce religious masculinity. Religious masculinity emerges as a form of masculinity that rejects traditional expectations of manhood that contradict religious doctrine. Yet, findings show that male-only programs tend to reinforce hegemonic masculinity in the process of constructing religious masculinity; for example, by exhibiting masculine displays through the use of physical strength, competition and familial leade...
At the turn of the 20th century, the question arose of whether Christianity could be compatible with modernity, progress and reason. In liberal, middle-class circles, where belief in science and social progress gradually replaced Christianity as a normative guideline, Christian faith was considered depreciated. If religion should have any place in modern society, then it was in the private sphere of the family, not in public life. Yet, since the home was considered to be the woman’s domain, religion came to be associated with femininity and ‘soft’ values. The modern man had to be rational, determined, and bent on profit, characteristics that seemed to be in glaring contrast to the Christian ideals of gentleness, lovingness, and humility. The idea of religion as soft and ‘feminine’ thus went hand in hand with the division into private and public and the idea of the separate spheres that marked the bourgeois society. To differentiate such an over-simplified narrative the aim of my article is to present some reflections, based on the development within historical research since the 1980s, on Christian concepts of manliness and the question of the (re-)masculinization of religion in (Western) European discourses from the mid-19th to the first part of the 20th century
In the Image of God: The Case for Re-Asserting Masculinity in the Church
2006
A recent book has captured the attention of many pastors who are struggling with the issue of growing their churches. That book, written by David Murrow, is entitled "Why Men Hate Going to Church." Why do men hate going to church? It is such an accepted reality that I doubt anyone would offer many objections to this assertion. This situation has profound effects on the broader society and history itself. Robert Bly writes of this loss of masculinity in his best-selling book, Iron John: In our time, when the father shows up as an object of ridicule (as he does, as we've noted, on television), or a fit field for suspicion (as he does in Star Wars), or a bad-tempered fool (when he comes home from the office with no teaching), or a weak puddle of indecision (as he stops inheriting kingly radiance), the son has a problem. How does he imagine his own life as a man? 1 Modern attempts by Christians to recapture some sense of the masculine can at times spin off into the infantile and the absurd. The Promise Keepers for example, have the feel of earlier fraternal organizations with their boyish activities as is demonstrated by this incident from a Promise Keepers event: "Later in the evening, Gary Smalley, another well-known author and speaker, hilariously made his entrance on a kiddiesized Big Wheel bike, again to the boisterous crowing of the crowd." 2 But this is not the masculinity that has fueled the church through its most precarious hours. This paper
IMAGES OF MEN AND MASCULINITIES WITHIN CULTURAL CONTEXTS: A PASTORAL ASSESSMENT
Doctoral Dissertation - Stellenbosch University, Faculty of Theology, 2007
This study is an endeavour on the cutting edge of the field of practical theology. It engages in a pastoral assessment of contemporary men and masculinities in their manifold representations and embodiments. An in-depth assessment of current schemata of interpretation (on the issue of masculinity), is done within different cultural contexts, aiming to hermeneutically put this into dialogue with a pastoral-anthropological view on masculinity. This dialogue is initiated in order to gain deeper insight into diverse masculinities and the challenges they face in their search for meaning, intimacy and vitality. The point of the dialogue here is rather to describe than to prescribe. The dissertation analyses ‘masculinities as experienced and enacted’ in life and ‘masculinities as represented’ in the mass media as well as in other forms of pop culture, through a multidisciplinary perspective. It is further aimed at the contextual, theological deconstruction of these cultural representations and the establishment and furthering of meaningful connections between male identity, human dignity and Christian spirituality. The focus in contemporary (sociological and psychological) research on masculinity is on enactment of masculinities or ‘doing’ masculinities rather than ‘being’ masculine. The dominant cultural images of masculinity within a globalising life-order suggest and promote materialistic values such as efficiency, performance, mechanisation and functionality. These images are assessed and the interplay between it (the cultural images) and conceptualisations of God (God-images) are explored. This study asserts that men’s identity, self-understanding and spirituality is shaped in many ways by these images, but that the image of the crucified and risen Christ can indeed serve as a meaningful and normative-critical counter-image to the macho-images portrayed by most postmodern masculinities (which many men presently experience as confusing). This counter-image of Christ can transcend the abuse of power, the focus on performance and the commodification of male embodiment, in men’s lives, as they engage in a spirituality of vulnerable courage. A pastoral-anthropological perspective is employed in order to shift the emphasis on male identity in terms of gender and sexuality, towards a spiritual understanding of male identity in terms of human dignity and human destiny (i.e. the quest for meaning). The important question of the relationship between power, masculinity and male embodiment is addressed. Essentialist ideas about masculinity are deconstructed, and a re-interpretation thereof is introduced within a view of reality that affirms and embraces an earth-centred and embodied spirituality. Masculinity and male identity is in that sense “saved” from a commercial reduction by means of an eschatological and pneumatological perspective. This theological re-interpretation of masculinity presents a critical factor on the cultural notion that manhood is something that must be validated by means of performance (especially on the terrain of sexuality). Masculinity, viewed from an eschatological perspective, is thus more than virility that has to be manifested by doing functions. The culturally-determined understanding of masculinity - in terms of brutal power and control – is in this sense ‘emasculated’ in this study. In the light of Christ’s resurrection, there is new hope for the re-interpretation of masculinity. The postmodern man’s resurrection is therefore not guaranteed by the “Viagra-magic blue pill”, but in actual fact by the resurrection of Christ who daily unleashes and affirms new meaningful dimensions of hope in the globalised life-matrix. The power of masculinity thus lies in embodying vulnerability and mutual relationality, contesting unilateral and hierarchical relations. Within this context manhood is not equal to the size of achievement or success, nor performances or powerful penetration, but it rather denotes the capacity for lovingly hospitable relationships and the measure of the soul’s depth of character, i.e. its capacity to embody and affirm the courage to be.
Performing Masculinity through Christian Devotion
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2015
Although the academic research on religion in Fiji and the South Pacific is substantial, there are few examples of studies that connect religion with the larger discourses of Fijian tradition and social life. Even fewer are the ones linking culturally specific notions of gender performances to Christian devotion. By utilizing the theoretical framework of colonial mimicry, I argue that the Christianization of Fiji, particularly its continued impact on the social organization of modern Fijian society, has been reliant upon its collusion with premodern Fijian notions of gender, power and consanguinity. Based on historical enquiries and ethnographic material, I develop the argument that while conversion may be understood as the conscious adoption and mimicking of the western notion of religion as presented by Wesleyan missionaries in the 1800s, the Fijian understanding of their Christianity, the merging between Christian belief and Fijian social protocol and the consequent development of culturally specific articulations of Christian devotion have produced substantial differences from western theological practice and teaching. A central distinction is the close link between performances of masculinity and Christian devotion found among Fijian Methodists.