This book was an ambitious attempt to confront the intersection of white evangelical Christianity, race, and politics in America, but it's reliance on the author’s own whiteness and perspective often limits its effectiveness. While it offers an insider’s view of evangelicalism, it struggles to provide a nuanced understanding of race, making its critique feel at times more self-reflective of Denker’s own experience as a white person than a truly critical analysis of the broader issues at hand.

At its core, Denker’s book takes issue with the way that white evangelical Christianity has become intertwined with political conservatism and white supremacy, suggesting that the image of a "White Jesus" has been weaponized to uphold these ideologies. There is certainly merit in this critique, especially in light of the increasing prominence of Christian nationalism and its damaging effects on racial and social justice movements. However, Denker’s writing at times leans too heavily on her own personal journey of disillusionment, making it more about her experience as a white evangelical woman than about exploring the systemic racial issues that the book attempts to critique.
Denker occasionally frames her own journey as central to understanding evangelicalism’s racial entanglements, which can come across as a bit self-centered and even inadvertently minimize the voices and experiences of people of color who have long been fighting against the very systems she critiques. Moreover, the author's critique tends to focus on evangelicalism from the standpoint of a white person who is coming to terms with her own complicity, rather than offering a truly intersectional approach to understanding the lived realities of marginalized communities within or outside of evangelical spaces.

While Denker rightly critiques the political entanglement of evangelicalism, the book’s treatment of the issue sometimes feels too generalized. Denker draws broad strokes about evangelicalism’s relationship with political conservatism, yet her analysis could have benefitted from a more critical examination of the nuances within the movement, especially considering that many evangelical communities are diverse and there are efforts within these communities to actively challenge racism and nationalism. Instead, the book too often resorts to a binary of “us versus them,” where the “us” is progressive Christians like Denker and “them” are the evangelical conservatives she criticizes.

Ultimately, the book can be seen as a call for white Christians to take responsibility for the ways their faith has been co-opted by harmful ideologies. However, its over-reliance on the author’s personal narrative and the lens of whiteness detracts from the broader structural critique that is needed to fully engage with the complexities of race, politics, and religion in America. While the book will likely resonate with those who share Denker’s perspective, it falls short of offering a comprehensive or transformative critique that addresses the deeper, more systemic issues at play. It’s a book that feels too rooted in one person’s journey and not fully attuned to the complexities of the racial justice struggle within and beyond evangelicalism.

This book would have been more effective as an article. Relying heavily on vibes and anecdotes, the author makes plenty of observations and assessments that are not backed by research or scholarship, but instead on her experiences as a mom and an evangelical Lutheran pastor. While I enjoyed her storytelling and writing style, I did not find that her conclusions held the weight of data or even trustworthiness past her own life experiences and biases. I need citations and source material when reading a book of this magnitude. Unfortunately for me, there are other books on this subject that hold more credibility.

Thank you to Net Galley for providing me with this Advance Reader Copy.

I really enjoyed this read and to be honest in a USA/Canada context I think it is important to read, but I have a feeling that the people who need to read this book won't pick it up.

Too much elegy; not enough hillbilly.

The author is worried. As a Lutheran pastor she looks out on the situation of men these days and finds cause. Men are in trouble, looking at suicide rates and loneliness. But men are the trouble, looking at terrorism and abuses of power. As a mother of two sons entering their teenage years, she is concerned with the inflection point, the way in which the shift to terrorism is a slight turn from an ordinary, or even healthy, life for men, particularly young men.

This book investigates the question. It primarily consists of the author doing interviews and longer form character sketches on people, primarily men, and primarily younger men or those who work closely with them.

A thesis shows up about unity of the problem. Looking at the worries, predominately originating in Right-leaning media, and the fears, predominately originating in Left-leaning media, both are functionally the same set of problems with different sets of framing. I particularly liked these sections of the book. They are where the author's journalistic background shines the most in breaking apart the understanding of the problem. It is a thesis that seems obvious on stating, but the author picks apart is obvious but with less obvious implications and questions upon study.

As the title suggests this is about Christian boys and men and the role of Christianity in radicalization. This makes sense owing to the religious nature of much of the terrorism and the centrality of 'tradition' to the revanchists, which is usually Christianity. This is the "White Jesus" of the title, the small-l illiberal emphasis on the glory rather than the Cross and the marketing of God, which leads to excesses and unchristian-like actions in the social and political sphere.

When the polemic kicks in, it is good. A lot of the charlatans have made masculinity an issue, preying on the (valid) insecticides of men for personal advantage. The author has no tolerance for this, and shows why it is wrong. I am certain that the people she attacks would justify their behavior by calling the author's belief in tolerance and Left political views as foreclosed by their particular reading of the Bible, but when the author has it out with the abusers, the book is on point. However, some of the more outright political sections are weak. All the book is political, but there are sections of the book, particularly at the end and beginning, where it feels more like filler, or even shibboleth, in establishing the author's views.

The weakest section is the interviews, which is unfortunate as how many there are. On one hand, the interviews are deep and the author shows journalistic flair in knowing how to get people to talk. But the same fire that is applied to the public pastors is missing with the people she interviews. A section with a youth pastor is egregious. They make some awful comments, but the author does not challenge them. She even goes so far as to try and rationalize their bigotry. I can understand why avoiding some possible interviews is a reasonable choice - I would pause before platforming a Nazi - but most of what shows up is bland.

The interviews are an example of how the book's problem is the Nihilist's paradox. Men are in trouble, more than they are trouble, I contend, and fixing it through a resumption of patriarchy is morally repugnant and wholly ineffective at solving the problems men face. It is the spherical cow of psychological well-being, getting to a solution by removing enough parts of the equation.

But what, exactly, is the author arguing for? This is calculated in the sense that the author does not want to provide a list of solutions. The author is cognizant that she is not a man, but also of how this sort of itemization is what the grifters promote. Yet while toxic masculinity is denoted, a positive definition of masculinity is missing. Except that it seems to involve crying. (I would argue here that traditional masculinity is less about that men cry and where men cry, but we get far afield here.) In a worst-case scenario, this is the Texas Sharpshooter on the part of the author in finding men that have behaviors she agrees with, then writing the masculinity around that. But other interviews do not follow that course. A particularly odd one is with a Citadel cadet, complete with Political Officer at the side to oversee his comments. The author does good work by approaching the topic with wonder, but gets stuck.

The book feels outdated already. The least charitable reading of the text is that it is an audition for the New York Times opinion page, reactionary centrism complete with a cultural moral panic, here about...heavy metal? Whoo, that is old school. But I liked it more than that. I like the topic and the author was looking in the right places, even if the sense is that she was stymied in her investigations there. But the discourse has moved on. History started up again, and Enlightenment values as a shared aspiration is no given. The more argumentative parts of the book still function in this paradigm, but a lot of the gauzy introspection does not.

My thanks to the author, Angela Denker, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Broadleaf Books, for making the ARC available to me.