Published with the generous permission of Andra Watkins. Read all of her outstanding work at How Project 2025 Will Ruin Your Life.
By Andra Watkins
I never understood what real masculine strength was until I married my husband. We’ve been together for 22 years. It has taken me much of that time to parse the difference between true male strength and the Christian Nationalist version I was indoctrinated to accept.
Christian Nationalists believe the man is superior to the woman because Eve ate the fruit first. She was the weaker of the two sexes. They teach that God cursed her to be ruled by her husband in Genesis 3:16, but Christian Nationalists extend this rule to all white Christian men. We women are supposed to bow the knee to the Mike Johnsons, the Tom Cottons, the Josh Hawleys, and the Sam Alitos, too.
…Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
Genesis 3:16b KJV
As early as kindergarten, I was indoctrinated to accept men and boys as my superiors. The Bible ordained their masculine supremacy; that alone deserved my awe. They were entitled to my respect, whether or not they earned it. I was schooled to let them win arguments, to cede to their opinions as “ladylike” and “godly feminine behavior,” to never ever ever emasculate them or make them feel humiliation or shame.
In Christian Nationalism, sons are almost always the family messiahs. Daughters are afterthoughts, or in my case, the family punching bag, the outhouse, the toilet. These family dynamics further ingrain the Christian Nationalist sense of masculine entitlement: I am the man; God meant for me to lead, and he meant for you to bow to my will.
In many of these churches and families, boys learn to expect deference. They are told they are special; they are coddled; they don’t have to prove themselves to be given their “rightful” place. Real men are respected, regardless of how they misbehave. After all, they reason, isn’t a little misbehavior just boys being boys?
While they talk about Jesus’ servant leadership sometimes, Christian Nationalists praise characters like Paul, a former badass Roman soldier turned Christian. They spend a lot of time highlighting David’s killing of Goliath and Samson’s massacres of entire Philistine armies with his brute strength and bare hands. In recent years, they’ve come to champion Cyrus, a Persian king who wasn’t even a believer, simply because he freed the Israelites from captivity in an epic show of strength.
Turning the other cheek? Letting someone wrong us seventy-times-seven without retaliating? Hanging out with publicans and sinners? Treating others the way we want to be treated? That’s for pussies, which is why they abandoned Jesus in favor of a masculinity that commands respect, even while much of what they label strength is weak and shameful.
Many of these men don’t know what to do with our disrespect, because they’ve been taught they deserve our adoration and our awe. In their weakness, they lash out; they order people around; they find joy and fulfillment in forcing others to do their will. They believe it is their right to rule over us, even if they have to grab their places illegally or unethically.
Thankfully, my husband is the strongest man I’ve ever met. He taught me what true masculine strength is by loving me and cheering me through every step I’ve taken to go from who I was when we met to who I am today.
I respect his strength because he earns it. Every day. In the way he serves others through his public job. In his patience with his mom and her need of more help. In his long-suffering stoicism with the fucked-up family dynamics he married into. In the joy he gets from teaching new generations to appreciate architecture. In the way he fights for the less fortunate in our community, even when he is maligned and misrepresented. In the way he supports me and cheers me on.
