Stewart M. Hoover and Curtis D. Coats, Does God Make the Man? Media, Religion, and the Crisis of Masculinity

Abstract

This book follows in the footsteps of Hoover's path-breaking work in the study of media and religion via critical cultural studies. The research analyzed by Hoover and Coats comes from a series of media audience studies conducted by the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture at the University of Colorado. The authors ask the following question: what exactly is the role of religion and media in U.S. Christian men's understandings of their identities and social roles? The authors investigate self-identified Christian, white, middle-class, heterosexual, married men's ideas about masculinity, using interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observation. Explanations for the current so-called "crisis of masculinity" come in a variety of forms and from a range of political positions, from those who fear that the social and economic gains of women translate to equivalent losses for men, to those who blame media for its representations of "toxic" masculinities (p. 10), from television's "dumb dads" (p. 94) to its casual philanderers. For "neo-traditional" Christian leader Don Eberly, the solution to this so-called "crisis" is for America to reinvest in traditional patriarchal masculinity, turning men into strong fathers (p. 9).These strong fathers will in turn create strong families who will go on to act in the public sphere, investing in civic service and establishing a moral society, or so the story goes. Given the relatively coherent discourses of masculinity in American Evangelical Christianity, exemplified by Eberly, the authors initially sought to measure just how well Evangelical men understood and lived a religiously-directed masculine ideal. The assumption 386