ENDORSEMENTS RARELY CATCH my eye, but some names that grace Zachary Wagner’s Non-Toxic Masculinity: Recovering Healthy Male Sexuality made my jaw drop. Amy Peeler and Kristin Kobes Du Mez — scholars renowned for tackling purity culture and male-centric theology — aren’t names you’d expect on a book like this. Most traditional Christian men’s thoughts on “biblical manhood” are not only flimsily dressed in culturally secular activities like playin’ sports and shootin’ guns, but also fatally based in unbiblical standards of hypersexual and violent behavior. Thankfully, Wagner swings over such pitfalls, laying out an expansive vision of masculinity rooted in the Jesus ideal: love for God and neighbor.
Wagner articulates how purity culture failed both women and men. “Many of the theological and cultural foundations of the movement were sub-Christian, even worldly,” he writes. “Dehumanizing theology leads to dehumanizing behavior” — behavior that includes fetishized virginity, body hatred, tolerated abuse, and sexual segregation. Purity culture, Wagner explains, calls men “animals” and “perverts,” confounding rhetoric I heard growing up in the church. This type of gendered, sexual denigration — especially when attributed, in part, to God’s design — only serves to further dishonor the imago dei of men and excuse sexual sin.
There’s a “pathetically low and impossibly high bar for masculine sexuality [that] trains men to resist, flee, and medicate (through marital sex) their untamable boyish immaturity rather than grow beyond it,” Wagner writes. The divinization of high libidos and heterosexual marriage can be doubly damaging for queer Christian men, who face additional stigmatization and erasure in the church.
Wagner holds to traditional sexual ethics on pornography, extramarital sex, and LGBTQ+ issues. He has sufficient reasoning for the first two and little to say on the third; however, his approach to the latter is characterized by some theological humility, saying there’s room for faithful disagreement over sexuality, which he sees as a “secondary issue” to the gospel. Wagner cites queer theologians like Matthias Roberts and Bridget Eileen Rivera in good faith.
Wagner defines toxic masculinity as “entitlement — to power, space, freedom, preference, and pleasure” toward the “self and others.” Throughout the book, he casts a more positive, aspirational vision of masculinity, one where men use their “embodied male advantage” (i.e., men typically being larger and stronger than women) and paternal potential (fatherhood) “to take responsibility for, cultivate, nurture, repair, renew, or redeem” all of creation. He lauds virtues such as care and leadership in vocations from carpentry to teaching. While Wagner implies that people can embody fatherhood “no matter your sexual orientation [or] gender identity,” Non-Toxic Masculinity holds to some artificial barriers around sex and gender identity. By Wagner’s own playbook, aren’t women capable of embodying masculinity, too? Can’t men live out femininity?
Still, Wagner’s vision of masculinity helps break binaries. He believes Christian men are manly whenever they “bring life out of death” in self-sacrificial service. If that’s what makes a real man, then Wagner’s book represents a promising turning point for a vision of biblical manhood where Christian character comes first and cultural notions of gender expression second.
Joey Thurmond is a writer specializing in Christian sexual ethics, pop culture, and faith.
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