Jared Matthews > Recent Status Updates

Framing the second issue as Alfred asking about Dick’s tough day was really powerful. There has always been something touching about their relationship. Maybe it’s because Dick has always been less guarded than Bruce.

Regardless, you can really feel Dick’s dread and relate to the shitty day that he’s had, you really understand how big Damian’s actions, and the day, impacted him.

Quitely’s art goes perfect with chillingly designed antagonists. The strange circus, and Pyg specifically, look so much more chilling with the jagged lines that he draws with. It also succeeds in making Batman and Robin look that much more rugged and fierce as well.

The dynamic between Dick and Damian, is a somewhat inverted dynamic from the classic Batman and Robin that we are familiar with.

Classically, Batman is the brooding fighter with Robin as the comic relief, youthful energy and fun counterbalance to Batman’s seriousness.

With Robin upgraded to Batman, and Bruce’s son as Robin, the roles are reversed. Dick takes things lightly while Damian is all business.

It’s a tall task to replace Batman.

Morrison does a solid job with Dick as Batman. He isn’t the same brooding deceptive that Bruce is, but he’s compelling in his own way.

Dick, along with the reader, is nervous about stepping into Batman’s impossible-to-fill shoes.

He is also a familiar and beloved character, which takes some pressure off the expectations the reader has going in. We know he is not Bruce.

For a community opposed to the changing socio-political landscape in general (war, race relations, gender roles), it is no surprise that the sexual revolution would have it’s own counterpart in conservative evangelicalism.

They seemed primed and waiting for a message that would preach against gender equality and propose an alternative, regardless of its lack of roots in a Christian worldview.

Maribel Morgan’s solution to the problem of chauvinism and inequality was to acceptance. Accepting the role you have been forced to play. Acting more like an object and seducing her husband would yield the materialistic desires of the wife, a new refrigerator, a trip to the Bahamas, etc.

This is not a loving marriage of mutuality, but a baptized sexual servitude, in the pursuit of manipulating their husbands.

The evangelical political posture was in line with most Americans during the Cold War, but the Vietnam war would create a divide between the views of many Americans and the uncritical militarism of evangelicals.

Atrocities committed during the Vietnam war created a sense of horror for many young Americans and demolished myths of American goodness.

Without much consideration, Evangelicals clung to their militarism.

Communism’s portrayal as fundamentally anti-Christian caused politics to become primary to evangelicals. No longer open to disagreement, your political affiliation became a moral imperative.

Being anti-communist, this particular “christian” political affiliation was pro-America; militaristic (against the communist threat) and hesitant towards civil rights (as a critique of America’s fundamental identity).

Similar to the wedding of 20th century masculinity with Christianity, 20th century gender roles and patriarchy were also wed and baptized with Christianity, embraced as something Christianity explicitly teaches.

This is the origin of various distinctive evangelical teachings. 20th century Americans decided that 20th century life was distinctively Christian and they convinced others that this was God’s desire.

Through the demonization of communism America could easily be seen as having God on its side. This may be the root of much of Christian nationalism in America.

While evangelists used this to inspire Americans to embrace Christianity in their life, it was a type of Christianity characterized by 20th century masculinity, uninterested in having Jesus define their ideas of what it means to be a man or a woman.

Opposition to this pagan masculine ideal, regardless of how christian its reasons, is slandered as weak, effeminate, and defeatist.

Combined with political compromise (or idolatry), this is characterized as mutinous and that will only lead to the superiority of Russia, china and the communists that are unamerican and unchristian.

Through fearmongering, Christians become willing to give up their ideas for safety

It seems a pagan (or American) definition of masculinity is driving the shape of the Christianity perpetuated by these evangelicals.

This masculinity is characterized by raw physical strength, high competitiveness, the willingness to engage in warfare, and the desire to usurp authority, demand submission and command others.

This masculinity is read back on to the Bible and Jesus and taught as an ideal.

Differing people are tracked, making it complex to understand the linear through-line between them.

One commonality is the view that Christianity has become effeminate and the desire to remasculate it

Unfortunately, what they see as effeminate are core components of the Christian worldview. What they see as masculine is similar to the Roman worldview that Jesus opposed.

They turned the upside-down kingdom back up

While Billy Graham’s characterization of Jesus as a “star athlete who could become your life’s hero” and “our great commander” isn’t entirely wrong, it’s emphasis is entirely in the wrong place.

This message appeals to those who want faith in Jesus, but don’t understand the biblical picture well enough to understand that the primary emphasis is a suffering servant and advocate of sinners.

The evangelical rebrand of fundamentalism placed a high priority on spreading its specific brand of Christianity through magazines, radios, and popular sermons. Its path forward was through establishing a network to support itself, composed of evangelical colleges and conferences.

Growing up, I was under the guise that Evangelicalism was something altogether different, even opposed to fundamentalism.

Amazingly, in 1942, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) was formed by fundamentalist leaders. Evangelicals were not opposed to fundamentalism, but were a sect within it, with a conscious effort to rebrand itself.

Forming political and religious alliances, they went on the offensive.

The first two chapters are somewhat difficult to follow, so that I am reading them a second time to make sure I understand correctly.

These chapters cover the early to mid 20th century history of American evangelicalism and Christian masculinity.

There are multiple strands and idea for these movements that are developing alongside one another, vying for power. There is no simple throughline for tracking it.

Parallel to the development of a new masculine identity, an evangelical identity was also being formed.

Du Mez identifies a component of the evangelical identity not solely in theology, but it consumerism.

Celebrity preachers and religious merchandising replaced traditional denominational authorities with the authority of the market and the consumer.

Du Mez locates the origin of the evangelical style of masculinity at the end of the 1800s.

As the economy became increasingly corporate and consumeristic, men’s jobs adapted to this change. However, “for men whose strength had become superfluous, who no longer identified as producers, their very manhood seemed in question”.

This elicited a response, an assertion of a “rougher, tougher masculinity.”

American Christian masculinity was not always characterized by a raw, unfiltered assertion of power, demanding submission.

In the 19th century, many men worked as farmers, or at least with their hands. Masculinity did not need to be asserted, or otherwise argued for, it seemed for of a given.

At this time, Christian manhood was characterized by hard work, shrewdness, and self-restraint or self-disciple.

The subsections addressing so-called myths of slavery are lazily written with logical jumps.

Wilson gives anecdotal reasons why these injustices may have been difficult for slaveowners to perpetuate. He sees as sufficient to disprove their occurrence, which does not logically follow.

He advances a lazy argumentation that abolitionists are themselves racist for assuming that black people would allow this to happen.

Wilson relies on RL Danny extensively in this book. It is incredible that to support his argumentation, he cites a confederate during the war.

It is obvious that this nonsense is confederate propaganda. Dabney is not a historian, but a civil war-era racist. I can’t think of a worst person to cite.

However, he was indeed a Presbyterian, which makes him the perfect one for Wilson to cite.

Wilson, in an attempt to paint southerners as morally superior, parrots his claim that Virginia and Georgia apparently made the slave trade a penal offense in the 1700s, 30 years prior to the US as a whole.

When the north begins antislavery efforts, they are driven by a “zealous hatred for the word of God”, but the south is praised for it.

This isn’t about the Bible, it’s about racism and ethnocentrism.

You might ask me why I’m reading this book. I’m starting to ask myself the same question.

Inexplicably Wilson argues that southerners bought slaves in the slave trade out of a desire to care for them. This is racist revisionism at its worst.

He argues that if white southerners did not buy slaves, they were already owned “by other blacks” who would sell them to Haiti where the treatment of slaves was “horrendous” apparently differing from the south, where the treatment for slaves was “godly”.

Wilson pays lip service to the idea that racism is evil. Indeed, when he speaks about his views on slavery in public, he always makes a statement distancing himself from racism.

But this is merely opening the door for his subtler, pseudo-intellectual racism. It’s clear that he thinks America, especially the south, was better (even for black people) and more Christian when slavery was legal.

That is racism.

This is less than surprising at this point, but Wilson continually characterizes the abolitionist movement as fundamentally anti-Christian and evil.

Providing no evidence, he states that the abolitionists, “were driven by a zealous hatred of the Word of God.”

This is just ahistorical racist garbage at this point. The lack of footnotes is telling, in a work that speaks with such confident ignorance and racism.