Reverse Chestlessness

In C.S. Lewis’ highly quotable “The Abolition of Man,” he describes what he calls “men without chests,” a phrase that has, over time, been reduced almost entirely to a soundbite. People reach for it any time they want to decry a society full of feckless individuals who lack the courage or conviction to take a stand for anything.

I’ve come to think of the current moment as two extremes locked in a feedback loop, each one’s excess justifying the other’s overcorrection. On one side, a strain of white liberal feminism that has made performative kindness into an identity, the kind of “be nice” politics that, in practice, asks women to go quiet, marvel at men who don’t deserve it, and treat the women willing to hold an unpopular line as the real threat.

On the Christian right, this diagnosis has spawned a predictable prescription: performative manliness to the rescue. From Owen Strachan’s “The Warrior Savior” to Richard Phillips’ “The Masculine Mandate,” the cure du jour is the belief that a feminized culture will only be reclaimed by chest-thumping warrior men who ride into town and take things back by force, with or without the consent of the women they must bulldoze in the process.

Albert Mohler does not exactly fit the mold of the typical theobro prescribing this solution. He doesn’t show up for photo shoots in flannel shirts, swinging an axe around to broadcast his manliness, or saying bombastic things about how happy his wife is now that he’s curated a list of her approved reading materials a la Joel Webbon. He’s not the stereotype.

He is a seminary president in a sport coat, not a man trying to sell you a beard oil subscription on a podcast he’s hosting in lieu of a real job. But maybe that’s what makes him a better case study. It’s a mistake to believe that chestlessness only shows up on the left as insanity or on the right with pomp and antagonistic arrogance. Sometimes it shows up in a calm, well-modulated voice explaining why biblical obedience required this or permitted that, with no apparent awareness of the inevitable harm that follows the prescribed cure.

Last week, under Mohler’s leadership, the Southern Baptist Convention passed the Truth and Unity Amendment, formalizing what was already practice into doctrine: no women in the pastorate, in title or in function. The justification offered was simple and repeated like a mantra: “We are committing to biblical faithfulness. We want to be obedient to Scripture. We will not deviate from it. If the Bible says no women pastors, we will obey.”

Fine. Take that at face value for a moment. How can you argue with obedience? Martin Luther himself once stated that “It is neither right nor safe to act against conscience,” and I don’t think he’s wrong about that. So even if I ultimately disagree with Mohler’s conclusions about the Bible’s roles for women, I can’t really begrudge him for trying to act in obedience, can I? God is known for rewarding obedience, even if we don’t get it entirely right. I want to hold space for the possibility that it really is a commitment to faithfulness that’s driving this ship.

But that’s becoming increasingly hard to do because it’s a faithfulness that’s incredibly lopsided in its application.

As previously expressed, the amendment, however well-intended, inadvertently functions as something of a gag order with far reaching implications for females. And just days later, while women across the American evangelical divide were still licking their wounds, Mohler did something either completely tone deaf or overtly diabolical. He appeared on a podcast with Doug Wilson, the Moscow, Idaho pastor whose record includes defending American slavery as “mutually beneficial” to both slave owners and the enslaved, opposing the 19th Amendment, shielding known abusers within his own church and school system, and referring to women in terms like “harpie” and “cunt” and “small-breasted biddies” and “lumberjack dykes.”

If you know that women under your care are struggling to believe you value them, you don’t team up with a man who disparages women every other sentence. This is not rocket surgery.

They were there to promote a forthcoming Canon Press volume on Christian nationalism to which they are both contributors. The conversation was friendly. Collegial. The kind of conversation you have with someone you consider a peer in good standing.

I’ve spent no shortage of energy documenting Doug Wilson’s litany of disqualifying offenses. At this point, the evidence is so extensive that the debate is no longer whether the record exists but whether people are willing to acknowledge it.

For those unfamiliar with Wilson, here is the abbreviated version: He is the self-appointed leader of a denomination he effectively built around himself. He has promoted Federal Vision theology, defended American slavery as beneficial in some respects, repeatedly used degrading and misogynistic language toward women, and spent decades entangled in scandals involving the protection of abusers and the mistreatment of victims.

Most notoriously, Wilson wrote to the court on behalf of convicted child abuser Steven Sitler, supported Sitler’s marriage despite expert warnings, officiated the wedding himself, and has since maintained that he would make the same decisions again. In another case, when a young woman reported that her father had been watching her shower, church leadership minimized the behavior and failed to provide meaningful protection.

The concerns are not merely theological or pastoral. They span doctrine, leadership, treatment of women, abuse response, financial ethics, and professional integrity. Former church members have brought extensive ecclesiastical charges against him alleging patterns of abuse, manipulation, dishonesty, and pastoral tyranny. Questions have also followed him into the financial and professional spheres. According to reports, Canon Press lost its tax-exempt status after the Idaho State Tax Commission determined royalties had been improperly routed to Wilson personally, and multiple instances of plagiarism were later documented in curriculum materials published under his editorial oversight.

Reasonable people can disagree about many things. They can disagree about church polity, eschatology, worship styles, denominational structures, and even the role of women in ministry. What should not be controversial is that a pastor’s repeated pattern of protecting predators, minimizing abuse, maintaining crooked business and financial practices, and degrading women raises serious questions about whether he meets the biblical qualification of being “above reproach.”

Any one of those categories would be enough to warrant scrutiny. Taken together, they reveal a pattern. Doug Wilson is not a difficult case. He is the easiest case in existence, which is precisely why Mohler's willingness to treat him as a respected colleague is so revealing.

If you are willing to platform a man like that, a man whose theology has produced documented, repeated harm to actual women and actual children, but you are not willing to platform a righteous woman because she is a woman, I have to ask: is it really biblical faithfulness you’re after? Or is it something else entirely? Something that smells more like political or religious power?

Here is what I keep coming back to. Lewis borrowed an old way of understanding human beings, one that divided a person into three parts: the head (reason), the belly (appetite), and the chest (sentiment). The chest sits in the middle, connecting the other two. Without it, the head and the belly have no mediator. The head can rationalize anything you point it at, and the belly just wants what it wants, so the chest is the thing that's supposed to keep them honest with each other.

Lewis’ chest was never about bravado. It was about trained sentiment, the part of us that registers things at their actual moral weight rather than the weight we’d prefer them to have. The chest is what lets you feel the right amount of alarm at the right things. It’s the mechanism that should make wildly different moral situations feel like wildly different moral situations.

A rightly ordered chest does not produce a man who can hold “No woman may teach a man Scripture. Full stop, no exceptions. This is a hill to die on” and “Let's go laugh it up with a guy whose idea of a sexy woman is one who looks like she's just been hit in the mouth with a brick” in the same week without one of those positions buckling under the weight of the other. Something in the middle should short-circuit. Something should say, “Hold the phone. Something in this equation is awry.”

That nothing did is the tell.

It’s not that Mohler is loud or aggressive or chest-thumping. He is none of those things. It’s that his head, which can produce a doctrinal justification for nearly anything, is running uncontested errands for something else entirely, something that has nothing to do with Scripture and everything to do with where the gravity in his world currently sits. The belly is still driving. The chest, if it ever weighed in, neglected to do so here.

This is the same failure Lewis diagnosed. It just doesn’t look like the caricature we’ve grown to expect. We assume chestlessness mostly wears Birkenstocks, man buns, and pronoun buttons, and that, in the rare event it should escape its leftist captors to drift over into our own camp, that it will look like some roided-out fraud on the interwebs hawking a carnivore diet and creatine supplements while warning about the new world order and chemtrails. It’s easier to recognize when it resides on the fringes. It’s easier to digest when it lives there, too. We can convince ourselves we’re safely secluded from its influence. It won’t rub up against our own lives or actions.

But sometimes it’s a lot more subversive than that. Sometimes it wears a Mr. Rogers sweater, comes with a doctorate, and tells you, with total sincerity, that obedience required exactly this and nothing more, while making room at the table for a man obedience should have disqualified outright.

I say all this as someone who understands the courage deficit personally and on a visceral level. If you’ve followed my page for any length of time, you know that I got fired from a job I’d held for seventeen years for opposing men in women’s locker rooms at the YMCA. I watched the Christian men around me, men who would have described themselves as exactly the kind of conviction-driven, truth-telling believers these institutions claim to be forming, go quiet when it cost them something. Not one of them stood with me. I learned what it feels like to hold a line alone, and it is not an experience I would recommend.

So I am not dismissing the impulse to sound the alarm about a courage deficit. I lived it. We need people of actual conviction who will stand for truth when it costs them something real, and we need to stop treating that as somebody else’s job.

I can even hear my male friends when they tell me men need role models, that in a culture increasingly hostile to stereotypical masculinity, sometimes men need someone to say out loud that it’s okay. I can hold that. I appreciate men who are genuinely, uncomplicatedly masculine. I married one. Excellent decision on my part.

The problem isn’t the call to manliness. It’s the overcorrection. It’s the reverse chestlessness. The same failure Lewis diagnosed, just running in the opposite direction. Instead of men too passive to feel anything, you get men too certain of their own righteousness to examine what they’ve actually allied themselves with. They want the feeling of fidelity without the discomfort fidelity should sometimes produce. The belly is still running the show. It has just learned to masquerade as sound theology and principle and to convince itself that any opposition to it is the shrieking of Marxist feminist Jezebels rather than righteous lament at its spiritual blindness.

What would Lewis say? Probably not much that hasn’t already been said by the question itself. If we’re too busy hyperfocusing on answering the question, “Are these men strong and courageous enough?” we can run the risk of neglecting the more important question: “Have their loves been rightly ordered?”

If you can sit comfortably on a stage with a man like Doug Wilson while simultaneously treating faithful, orthodox women as the greater threat to the church, then a courage deficit is not the only or even the primary problem in front of you. It may be men who believe they possess courage in abundance while lacking the moral imagination to feel outrage where outrage is due. Men whose convictions are strong enough to exclude the righteous but strangely insufficient to confront the wicked when it presents itself in your own camp.

When you fail to love the right things in the right order, even the language of faithfulness can be leveraged as a weapon of unfaithfulness.

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