When you think of the “Christian men’s movement,” you probably think of the Promise Keepers — those huggy guys who meet in football stadiums because, as some of their leaders like to say, the church has been “feminized”. (I devote a chapter to PK in Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy). The matter of gender and gender politics has been all the rage in conservative Christian communities for some time, and for those focusing on these things, writer Jeff Sharlet has a report on recent trends in the Christian men’s movement, on Nerve, an internet magazine about sexuality. Here is a excerpt about James Dobson, who was recently in the news as a featured speaker at the Christian Right rally, “Justice Sunday.”

“… Dr. James Dobson, one of a handful of the evangelical kingmakers to whom George W. Bush paid court before announcing his bid for the presidency in 2000. Dobson is most-recently known in the secular world for his charge that Spongebob Squarepants had been recruited as an agent of the ‘homosexual agenda,’ but for the millions who tune into his radio shows or read his books or subscribe to one of the publications produced by his organization, Focus on the Family, Dobson has long served as a source for wisdom that embodies the feminist adage that the personal is political.”

“Not that Dobson acknowledges a debt to feminism; indeed, he sees it as a threat to Christianity. The problem, as he outlines it in Straight Talk to Men, a Dobson ‘classic’ originally published as Straight Talk to Men and Their Wives, is that men, in a righteous attempt to resolve the problems of sexism, have ceded too much power to women. As a result, he insists, women are engaging in a parody of male headship and most men lack the guts — and the sensitivity — to stand up to them. ‘Everything we do is influenced by our gender assignment,’ he writes. ‘Any confusion… in the relationship between the sexes… must be seen as threatening to the stability of society itself.’ Dobson, unlike other Christian manliness gurus, gets specific about the consequences, illustrated in this new edition of Straight Talk through an imaginary dialogue between a group of ‘yesterday’s husbands and fathers’ (from 1870) who’ve been transported into the present to talk to a representative of ‘the culture.’

“The culture’s spokesman paints a lurid portrait of today’s world, in which boys typically look at pornography depicting women ‘hanging from trees, and being murdered with knives, guns, ropes, etc.’; in which ‘it its legal for a father… to have a homosexual experience with his son’; in which women are called to combat in a time of war, because men are not up to the job. ‘I miss John Wayne,’ laments Dobson.”