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.

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.

Read More