‘Muscular Christianity’ Got Us Nowhere. We Need ‘Calloused-Hands Christianity.

Training with my sons, Max and Jacob.

After decades of work in Christian political and cultural movements, I’m at a good vantage point to gauge the value and effectiveness of certain trends that come and go – or ought to go.

One idea that has overstayed its welcome in the public square is “muscular Christianity.” It’s everywhere. A vague idea of masculinity, often pushed by online “influencers” who do their best to look the part of the dashing hero by putting in hours at their local gym. It’s supposed to be the answer to all the secularist attacks on Christian principles. Christians have become impotent, they say, and it’s time for a show of strength.

Believe me, I get the appeal. I’m a soldier in a long family line of soldiers. I’m a jock in a family of jocks. I lift weights and train in martial arts– as a young man I even had the privilege to represent my country fighting in the Tokyo Dome. I travel the world and still drop in to train at boxing, Muay Thai and MMA gyms wherever I go. I even grew up thuggish and still have struggles with the habits (quick to fight, talking too loud in public) that many of these influencers would call “manly.” In other words, I am a “muscular Christian.”

But here’s my conundrum – and it’s one I think we Christians all must grapple with: I know deep down that “muscular Christianity” is far from the heart of the Gospel we profess.

I think of my grandfather, James Jones. As a boy, I knew the old man for the last chapter of his life, long after he’d seen action in World War II and even worse horrors in Korea. A quiet, stoic man, he had served his duty unflinchingly in both wars, but just as bravely left war behind to bear the ordinary lifelong weight of family and citizenship. If he were alive today, you’d find him in a factory (he was a tool-and-die maker at a Ford plant), or maybe at a bar – never at Planet Fitness.

He built a home–literally he built his home from the ground up– and a life for his family with a quiet, unassuming heroism. It’s a heroism that every one of us would recognize in an instant. And every one of us would also recognize instinctively that today’s influencers, who pump iron and bark Christian rhetoric on social media, fall short of the stature of men like Grandpa Jones – no matter how well they succeed in “looking the part.”

We could call men like my grandfather “calloused-hands Christians.” Their “show of strength” calls no attention to itself, and the only ones sure to see it are those it humbly serves – the weak and vulnerable under its care. The expectant mother. The child. The grandchild.

Calloused-hands Christianity concerns itself with progeny, not propaganda. It upholds the common good with strong shoulders and feet planted firmly in the dirt.

Calloused-hands Christianity creates a law of the land that’s more lasting and binding than any of the fragile, fine-tuned public policies we fight over.

Calloused-hands Christianity keeps in check the social evils – abortion, promiscuity, human trafficking – that muscular Christianity implicitly admits to being powerless against with every online rant.

And calloused-hands Christianity doesn’t “rant” at all. Instead? It acts. And it acts with deliberate, plodding, self-sacrificing confidence in its own power. The power to make upstart social experiments shrink away and out of sight rather than to make them a public punching bag for muscular Christians to perform with – a cottage industry of “Christian witness.”

In the home studio of the muscular Christian influencer, evil is a foil carefully placed at just the right angle to frame him in the most heroic light.

The calloused-hands Christian has no use at all for evil in his home.

In Washington, DC, “transgender bathrooms” (let’s be honest) is a fun game to play on social media and TV – and we’re on the “winning team.”

In small-town America … are you kidding me? Such a thing isn’t even thinkable.

I remain a “muscular Christian,” I suppose. And I will by no means abandon the post I find myself in as the head of the Vulnerable People Project, a very public advocate for the vulnerable – and by extension a visible agitator against laws and policies that threaten them.

But I also hope you’ll join me in admitting that the muscular Christianity trend has been a yearslong exercise in kidding ourselves. And that it can even serve as an excuse to put off indefinitely the kind of heroic virtue we all know we lack – the kind that built our country, and without with our nation can never hope to be great again.

I also hope and pray that I can one day be remembered as a Grandpa Jones like my own Grandpa Jones. A man who helped create a virtuous public by the natural means God ordained for men: the sweat of our brow, the fruit of our honest labor, the callouses of our own hands.

I pray God will raise up many such men, and that my sons will be among them.

Because the public starts in private.

And callouses are harder than muscle.