The Return of Strong Christian Men

Offensive Christianity:
Restoring the Strength of Men in a Feminized Age
by j. chase davis
founders press, 184 pages, $19.98

Feminism forces us to confront the nature of nature. Susan Moller Okin famously warned against respecting natural sex differences. “Our laws,” she wrote, “do not allow kleptomaniacs to shoplift.” She counseled laws that reshape male aggression and female modesty toward a single image of virtue. She was partly right—biology is not destiny. But biology is also not nothing. The real task, which she rejected, is channeling distinct male and female natures toward worthy ends.

Chase Davis’s Offensive Christianity: Restoring the Strength of Men in a Feminized Age argues that many churches have absorbed feminist assumptions, treating ordinary male inclinations as something akin to kleptomania. Worship tilts toward therapeutic sentiment rather than clear doctrine and virtue. Niceness and passivity are elevated over strength, dominion, and public engagement. The result is a Christianity that fails to form men for their creational vocations.

A new birth of manliness is a prerequisite for a new birth of offensive Christianity. By “offensive Christianity,” Davis means both a Christianity unworried about offending the world’s dark powers and a Christianity that conquers territory in a dark world.

Offensive Christianity is a narrow path between two ditches. On one side is defensive Christianity, which compromises with the world to retain the mustard seed of faithful presence. Davis references liberal theologians, trimming doctrine where they think it necessary to maintain a seat at the table. The feminized church downplays or apologizes for Christianity’s patriarchal features. It condones women pastors. Husbands and wives are to be best friends rather than joined in a godly hierarchy. 

Churches hardly understand what a Christian man should be and misunderstand their missions as a result. Much of this stems from pietism. Emphasizing personal devotion and holiness, pietists retreated from public theology and rejected embodied concerns like work, household, legacy, and politics as worldly distractions from spiritual experience. Emphasizing the inner world, pietists tend to stigmatize traditionally manly traits necessary for offensive action for Christ.

The other ditch, represented by Friedrich Nietzsche and his epigones, is going on offense without a grounding in Christian aspiration. Davis wrestles thoughtfully with Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity throughout his book. He agrees with the German philosopher’s diagnosis of sentimental, emasculated religion and shares his contempt for defensive Christianity’s endless compromises. Yet Davis unambiguously rejects Nietzsche’s solution. Christ alone is “the only true Overman,” the model of—and the only means of attaining—real glory. Where Nietzsche urged raw will to power, Davis calls men to a Christ-shaped strength: meek but not weak, ambitious for God’s kingdom rather than self-glory. Alfred the Great, Constantine, and Ambrose exemplify bold conquerors and culture-builders who subordinated their manliness to divine authority.

Like Nietzsche, Davis worries that modernity drains men of grand ambitions or even the desire to make something of themselves. The Industrial Revolution has, he worries, removed the “thorns and thistles” from man’s labor, making it much less “satisfying existentially and physically.” Most men never comprehend the satisfactions of confronting nature and overcoming their own weakness.

Davis transcends critique to outline the duties of the man practicing offensive Christianity. The offensive Christian man embraces the calling to strength, provision, protection, and even dominion. He gets in shape to present an image of rightly ordered ambition in a weak age. He dresses and carries himself with seriousness. He confronts evildoers and leads his household with both authority and servanthood. He is a pillar of his community.

Nietzsche cannot celebrate what he regards as meek and weak manliness because it accepts too much of the world as given. What most offends him about Christianity are efforts to imbue the humdrum everyday with eternal meaning. But our everyday bodies point toward vocations and destinies. Most “glorious” dutiful vocations are outwardly humdrum. The most banal bread and wine are suffused with supernatural qualities through sacraments. The aesthetics of worship either point man up to God or confine him to the mundane.

Davis’s Offensive Christianity imputes supernatural importance to both humdrum and spectacular manliness. It is thus paramount that men exercise the manliness muscle, lest it atrophy and die. Inoffensive Christianity equates such a death with piety. But a doctrinally healthy church understands that men must be allowed to flourish in their manliness for the corporate body to truly imitate Christ.

The way of men is the way of the gang (as pagan disciples of Nietzsche say), or, as Davis says, men must join a phalanx where iron sharpens iron and manly honor forms character. Male fraternity is an X factor in today’s political and spiritual climate. Honest speech, household leadership, and joyous discharge of responsibility are offensive to our dying, feminized culture. Davis’s roadmap for discipling young men may just issue in renewal—of both church and civilization.