Welcome Rev. Angela Denker!

I am honored to host an excerpt from her new book and tell you that we will have an unscripted convo at 2:30 today on Angela's substack. Join us!

I am so honored to host an excerpt from Angela Denker’s new book, Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood. It is powerfully argued and beautifully written. it is also a perfect complement to my new book, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife which released last week. You will definitely want to read it. And today is the last day to preorder as it releases tomorrow!

Also, I will be joining Angela for a conversation at 2:30 this afternoon on her substack

I'm Listening

. Join us there if you can, and we will. repost too. Here is the zoom link for 2:30 p.m. CT.

Join Zoom Meeting

https://baylor.zoom.us/j/86507026148?pwd=cwbkSgUd34aKz6wRgsWq1ZbXCjb2If.1

Meeting ID: 865 0702 6148

Passcode: 328643

I know you enjoy this excerpt from Disciples of White Jesus!

By

Rev. Angela Denker

Many white American Christians are pretty sure they know what God looks like. Most of us won’t really say it explicitly, of course: that would invite critique and the possibility that one of our most closely held but unexamined truths could be exposed as false. But most of us heard growing up that we were created in God’s image. On first read, maybe you’d think that means we’re taught that we look like God. But “no one has ever seen God,”1 so when you learn that you’re created in God’s image—as most young, white Christian boys and men have learned— then it makes sense that you think, “God must look like me.”

The Genesis verse above is taken from the first chapter of the first creation story in the book of Genesis, where God takes six days to create the world, and on the seventh day, God rests. Did you know there were two separate creation stories in the Bible? Written by two different faith groups, at two different times?

Genesis 2 is the second creation story, likely chronologically written and told orally prior to the Genesis 1 creation story. Genesis 2 is the more fabulistic, involving Adam and Eve as the first created humans, a serpent, and a tree of life. While most Sunday school kids (and adults in general) can tell you that the Bible teaches that the world was created in six days and God rested on the seventh, it is the Genesis 2 creation story that seems to carry more moralistic weight when it comes to our conceptions of who God is.

That’s important for our understanding of what’s happening among young, white Christian boys and men—because the Genesis 2 creation story is at the heart of many of the gendered identifications of God, and, further, most of the understanding of God’s masculinity as a model for boys and young men to follow. It starts with Adam.

The late twentieth century was rife with white, male Christian leaders who wanted to capitalize (and make money) off of the idea that men, in the image of a manly God, were created to be angry, violent, and in control. Pastors and writers like Mark Driscoll and John Piper wrote lengthy chapters and books devoted to the Apostle Paul’s supposed affirmation of male headship (which we’ll cover in the next chapter), and to the entire movement of complementarianism, or the idea that men and women are prescribed different and distinct roles, with men always in positions of headship and women in positions of support. Complementarians, therefore, do not allow women to preach or serve as lead pastors, to teach men, or to serve on elders boards or church councils.

Piper is one of the foremost proponents of complementarianism and of a specifically masculine view of God. In his 1986 book, Desiring God, he begins his chapter on marriage by citing “The Old Testament Context,” writing that “[a]ccording to Genesis 2, God created Adam first and put him in the garden alone. Then the Lord said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”3 Here Piper cites verse 18 of Genesis 2 as though it is definitively speaking of male and female roles. But as I mentioned above, the word ָדָם אָָ (‘āḏām) is used interchangeably to refer to human beings in the creation story. Genesis 2:18 is about the human’s need for connection and partnership, not for a subordinate woman, for neither is the word helper ֶזֶר עֵ֖֖  (ay’-zer) here referring to Eve directly. Instead, God initially creates animals to be partners to the first human, and it’s not until verse 22 that God takes a rib from the first human to create the second, opposite human—or .)ishshah) (woman( ִאָ ָ ֑שָּׁ֑ה

As I read through these passages again in the original biblical Hebrew, I am struck by their desire for beauty and symmetry. Isn’t it tragic that we have taken a story about love, connection, reciprocity, and perfectly created goodness in the image of God—and used that same story to support subjugation, abuse, hierarchy, and even violent war?

Piper concludes about women: “In other words, in the beginning God took woman out of man as bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, and then God presented her back to the man to discover in living fellowship what it means to be one flesh.”5

As a woman and a mother reading these words, I can’t help but feel the paltriness of the complementarian version of my own creation story. And thinking back to the birth of my own sons, and the visceral experience I had of carrying them within my own womb, my own gift as a vessel of God’s very creation, I find it ironic that Piper is so determined to make women secondary in creation’s story—when it is women (as mothers) who are in fact essential to the ongoing work of God’s creation, much more so than men, and that is the way God designed it to be.

White male pastors of Piper’s ilk love to emphasize that Eve, the woman, sinned first. They will make this claim alongside claims that women are fundamentally sneaky and constantly trying to dupe unthinking, doltish men into sin. This line of thinking is a key element of purity culture, which requires women to carefully monitor their appearance, clothing, and actions in order not to “lead men into sexual sin.” Thus, you begin to see the double-bind women face in this reading of the Bible: both immensely powerful and, at the same time, denied any authority or mutuality in relationships with men.

But if this kind of teaching about creational gender roles disempowers, confuses, and even abuses women—what does it do to young men and boys? Told again and again that they are the dominant sex, created to rule over and have dominion over not just women but the earth, the land, its animals, and all things on earth—it’s often a rude awakening for young, white Christian men when they enter the world and find that most created things are not interested in being ruled over by them. At the same time, these young men and boys have not been given the tools (which can be found in the creation story, too!) for building mutual relationships that are bound together not by control, authority or obligation but instead by love and respect.

Absent those tools, young, white Christian men and boys instead often cast about for role models who fit the image of God they’ve been taught about: a strong and violent masculine man who rules over everything in his presence. Many young, white Christian men and boys saw that image in Donald Trump, who spared no words talking about his own proclivity to grab women “by the pussy” and take whatever he wanted from them. Trump’s boorish comments may not have been what Piper, the proper theologian, had in mind, but they follow naturally from a theological model that privileges a gender hierarchy above all else and creates an image of God as power-hungry and dominating, particularly when it comes to women.

It’s instructive to look back at some of the initial writing, ideas, and books aimed at young men from the ‘90s and early aughts. When I was in high school and college, all the girls my age were encouraged to give our brothers and boyfriends one book, John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, published in 2001. According to Religion News Service, as of 2016, the book had sold more than four million copies.12 Wild at Heart depicts men as one-dimensional warriors whose highest desires are a “battle to fight,” “an adventure to live,” and “a beauty to rescue.”13 Women are thereby reduced to damsels in distress, valued primarily for their physical beauty and with little agency of their own. Interestingly, Eldredge had served as a Christian counselor at Focus on the Family, not exactly the kind of ninja-warrior, manly background now prioritized by many right-wing leaders who would speak to young, white Christian men and boys. And to present-day readers, Eldredge’s language sounds relatively tame. Early in the book, he even warns: “Now, let me make one thing clear: I am not advocating a sort of ‘macho man’ image.”14 Shortly after that, he writes: “Now, none of this is to diminish the fact that a woman bears God’s image as well . . . there is also something wild in the heart of a woman . . .”15. But this softer language belies a traditionalist view on gender as fundamental, and masculinity and femininity as diametrically opposed to one another. Even as Eldredge writes of God’s desire to be loved, of God’s humility and vulnerability, the book ends up serving as a lynchpin of the kind of literature that will continue to target young, white Christian men and boys—assuming that to reach or target them, rhetoric must appeal to traditional masculinity as an element of the image of God.

In Mark Driscoll’s Who Do You Think You Are? he grounds the question of identity again in Genesis 1:27, in our understanding of the image of God: “The world’s fundamental problem is that we don’t understand who we truly are—children of God made in [God’s] image—and instead define ourselves by any number of things other than Jesus. Only by knowing our false identity apart from Christ in relation to our true identity in him can we rightly deal with and overcome the issues in our lives.”16

The problem for Driscoll is that he, and other Christian leaders of the present day, go on to ground and depict the image of God incorrectly, reflecting instead a self-adulating and false idea of glorified, violent, and militant masculinity. The God of the Bible is quite different.

Theologians and sexual abuse survivors Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Susan M. Shaw write about this God in their 2024 book Surviving God. While they lament the use of rape throughout the Bible to subjugate women and justify the hierarchical authority of heterosexual men, Kim and Shaw also explain how “neither story of creation in Genesis 1 or 2 assumes or mandates women’s subordination.”17

“In fact, these stories depict a rather egalitarian relationship in the Garden of Eden,” Kim and Shaw write. “Only through the Fall does patriarchal dominance become a feature of human relationships; God does not issue male dominance as a punishment. Rather, dominance begins because the actions of the story rupture trust and rupture the egalitarian relationship between the woman and man that God had intended.”18

Young, white Christian boys and men have been sold an image of God, the Creator, that is wholly false and rooted not in heaven but on earth, at the hands of desperate and insecure Christian male leaders who are grasping at power, influence, and wealth. Our boys need to understand who they were created to be, and in whose image they were created. They need permission to live fully into that image, imperfectly and humbly and in concert with all other human beings, who also reflect the masculine and feminine and ultimately gender-neutral image of God.

Content taken from Disciples of White Jesus by Angela Denker ©2025. Used by permission of Broadleaf Books.

• 1  John 1:18.

• 3  John Piper, “Marriage: A Matrix for Christian Hedonism,” Desiring God: Med- itations of a Christian Hedonist (Colorado Springs, CO: Multnomah Books, 1986), 210.

• 5  Piper, “Marriage: A Matrix,” 212.

• 11  Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, a Division of W.W. Norton & Company, 2020), 65.

• 12  Jonathan Merritt, “The Book That Revolutionized ‘Christian Manhood’: 15 Years after ‘Wild at Heart,’” Religion News Service, April 22, 2016, https:// religionnews.com/2016/04/22/the-book-that-revolutionized-christian- manhood-15-years-after-wild-at-heart/.

• 13  John Eldredge, Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul (Nash- ville: Nelson Books, an imprint of Thomas Nelson, 2001), 9–10.

• 14  Eldredge, Wild at Heart, 28.

• 15  Eldredge, Wild at Heart, 36.

• 16  Mark Driscoll, Who Do You Think You Are? Finding Your True Identity inChrist (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2016), 2.

• 17  Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Susan M. Shaw, Surviving God: A New Vision of Godthrough the Eyes of Sexual Abuse Survivors (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf,2024), 133.

• 18  Kim and Shaw, Surviving God, 133.