[BRIEF NOTE] Religion, masculinity, crime

[rfmcdonald]

Guest-posting at Towleroad, Matthew Rettenmund linked to B.E. Wilson's analysis of evangelical Christian writer John Eldridge's 2001 Wild at Heart,, a fairly controversial book (even among Christians) about masculinity that has been literally taken up as gospel by Mexico's ultraviolent drug gang, La Familia Michoacana.

What if your million copy-plus bestselling inspirational book calling on men to act more manly, aggressive, even violent became a key source of inspiration for a ruthless cultic Christian paramilitary fundamentalist crime syndicate that controls most of the Crystal Meth traffic in the US and is fond of tossing severed heads into Mexican discos ? You’d probably feel awful. Or at least a bit embarrassed.

Wilson links to an interview with the author in which Eldridge says that the Familia managed to miss entirely the fact that his writings on masculinity were thoroughly embedded in Christianity. Wilson's skeptical.

So why might the leader of La Familia have gotten the idea that Eldredge’s book justifies violence ? Flipping through available pages of Wild At Heart, on page 9 I find a chapter sub-section titled “A BATTLE TO FIGHT” with the following,

“Capes and swords, camouflage, bandannas and six shooters–these are the uniforms of boyhood. Little boys yearn to know that they are powerful, they are dangerous, they are something to be reckoned with. How many parents have tried to prevent little Timmy from playing with guns ? Give it up. If you do not supply a boy with weapons, he will make them from whatever materials are at hand. My boys chew their graham crackers into the shape of handguns at the breakfast table.”

His boys chew graham crackers into handguns. OK. Moving along, Eldredge’s passage concludes with,

Aggression is part of the masculine design, we are hardwired for it. If we believe that man is made in the image of God, we would do well to remember that “the LORD is a warrior, the LORD is his name.” (Ex. 15:3)”

The next paragraph delves further into the allegedly bloodthirsty, primal nature of little boys with, “Little girls do not invent games where large numbers of people die, where bloodshed is a prerequisite for having fun. Hockey, for example, was a feminine creation.”

On the next page, the cute little boy-architects of mass-death morph seamlessly into brave soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima. It’s in our blood, says Eldredge, we yearn for violence – “Women didn’t make Braveheart one of the best selling films of the decade. Flying Tigers, The Bridge Over The River Kwai, The Magnificent Seven, Shane, High Noon, Saving Private Ryan, Top Gun, The Die Hard films, Gladiator–the movies a man loves reveal what his heart yearns for, what is set inside him from the day of his birth.”

It’s all very dramatic. Eldredge wraps up with, “Like it or not, there is something fierce in the heart of every man.” But as detailed at Lt. Colonel David Grossman’s Killology Research Institute website, abundant research shows that humans (both sexes) have an instinctive aversion to killing members of our own species. Most soldiers, except for an estimated two percent who are sociopaths, have to go through specific conditioning before they’re willing to fire weapons at other humans in combat. For example in World War Two (prior to the development of such conditioning) according to one study only 15-20% of U.S. riflemen fired their rifles in combat.

And here I thought that religion was all about civilizing people.