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The image of Jesus Christ crucified has been replicated, illustrated, and infused with varied symbolic meanings over its history. That is, over the centuries, many interpretations of the crucifixion have developed, obscuring its original context and meaning. Thus, the many “Christianities” around the world today make competing claims as to the meaning and symbolism of the crucifixion. Cultural imagery surrounding the crucifixion ranges from traditional crucifixes to film portrayals, and from theologies to cross-shaped Easter chocolates.1 One key example of “crucifixion horror” in film is Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ (2004),1 which will be the sociological starting-point from which I explore the role of the violated, divine body of Christ in political theology, particularly within the historical and present-day context of imperial masculinity and the patriarchal household.
Crucifixion—Heroic or Shameful?
Neal King’s study, Heroes in Hard Times: Cop Action Movies in the U.S., notes the ritual portrayal of torture enacted upon bare-chested male bodies.2 Such torture is not emasculating. Instead, it often serves as a “proof of sacrifice and suffering in a world gone wrong.”3 Torture, in these contexts, serves as a vehicle toward greater masculinity for men who endure it. King notes in a sociological study of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ that the visceral depiction of Jesus’s crucifixion provoked affective reactions among Christian audiences. The cinematic experience became a religious one, where they revered “the sacrificial hero” and realized “the extent of his love.”4 Indeed, according to historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, evangelical authors felt that the film presented an “antidote to the image of the wimpy Christ,” one far more in line with the All-American, “John Wayne” and “Teddy Roosevelt” masculine ideal.5 Du Mez notes,
Evangelicals were already fans of Gibson’s work. Gibson was Catholic, but evangelicals recognized that they shared the common creed of militant Christianity and heroic masculinity. For many evangelical writers, references to Braveheart rivaled biblical references when it came to discerning God’s will for men. The Patriot, too, offered a heroic vision that was sorely lacking in modern America. But nothing matched evangelicals’ fervor for The Passion.6
Mel Gibson’s films, especially Braveheart (1995),7 took center stage as a presentation of ideal evangelical masculinity. Prefiguring The Passion of the Christ, Braveheart’s protagonist endures bare-chested torture and yet retains his dignity, strength, and the audience’s sympathy. The hero’s violence is justified and legitimized by the suffering of his damsel in distress. The Passion of the Christ, on the other hand, goes a step further—it presents the viewer, ultimately, as a damsel in distress whom Jesus Christ undergoes torture to rescue and then subordinate as part of his household. The film serves as a vehicle through which Jesus’s role as their Lord (Master) and Savior (Hero) is reinforced. This Jesus is an All-American (pictured below).8
Widely read conservative evangelical author John Piper outlined the distinction between “biblical masculinity” and “biblical femininity” in a landmark volume in 1991 that rearticulated and publicly rehabilitated Christian patriarchy against the rising influence of evangelical feminism. He idealized a “breadwinning,” “initiative-taking,” “benevolent,” and “responsible” husband, modelled after the heroic masculine Jesus, to whom wives should offer submission.9 Emulating Jesus’s salvific sacrifice, such a husband must “lay down” his life to protect his wife from threatening assailants,10 suffering “for her safety” and considering himself responsible for her protection. This interpretation of the death of Jesus in the biblical text (e.g., Eph 5:23–25, 33) is consistent with the Braveheart ideal.
On the flip side, the heroic rescue of the “damsel in distress” culminates in patriarchal marriage. Having proven his sexual dominion, strength, and command by overcoming sacrificial trials, the “biblically masculine” husband earns a position of authority over his wife. Piper describes femininity as “vulnerable,” “sweet,” “trusting,” “obedient,” and “sensually receptive” and calls on his readers to emphasize and manifest these gendered tropes in their everyday lives and gendered interactions.11 Piper effectively sacralizes cultural gendered ideals, which are a polarized distinction between sexual aggression and sexual passivity/subordination. This is predicated on the evangelical narrative of the heroic and masculine crucifixion, a narrative that can be problematized by the context in which the Roman Empire practiced crucifixion.
David Tomb’s The Crucifixion of Jesus: Torture, Sexual Abuse, and the Scandal of the Cross is premised on an assertion, one drawn from Roman history, that does something interesting when posited against constructions of heroic, tortured masculinity.12 Tomb argues that the essence of Roman crucifixion was not pain, but shame. Once, upon hearing a presentation of this concept in relation to the husband’s marital role in Ephesians 5, a conservative Christian male complained to me in an informal conversation that this was, effectively “castration.” He recognized that masculinity modelled after Jesus’s crucifixion implied some kind of phallic death. He thus could not accept any constraint upon what he viewed as his God-given right—a submissive wife whose role was to serve him and, in his words, “make him feel like a God.”
First-century Romans did indeed idealize heroic battle wounds and the endurance of “pain and death,”13 but this was not the point of crucifixion. Romans sentenced political dissidents to crucifixion precisely to prevent the very possibility of their continued heroization. Crucifixion ensured that their memory would be forever disgraced. This served as a demonstration of Roman might toward “enslaved people, rebels, bandits.”14 This form of damnatio memoriae (“condemnation of memory”) was a violation of both the body and honor of victims. Such shame was never considered part of a heroic path toward authority and heroism. James Cone, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, thus draws connections between crucifixion and lynching, identifying in the declarative rituals of White supremacist mobs the intent to enforce violent social power by desecrating the body of Black victims, condemning them with the ignominy of shame, and threatening those who would similarly challenge the established racial order.15
The worship of “Jesus of Nazareth,” pretender “King of the Jews,” lived on after his crucifixion. In fact, the crucifixion became central to early Christian sacrament and ritual. Early Christians would not only profess but continually ritualize his deeply shameful and offensive death. They would proclaim “Christ crucified,” this Christ who “endured the cross, scorning its shame” (Heb 12:2 NIV). In doing so, they reconceived the very notion of Roman honor—dignitas. James Cone cites Friedrich Nietzsche in identifying in this narrative a “transvaluation,” that is, an upside-down rendering, of social hierarchies and values.16 What early Christians should normatively have understood was that crucifixion was an intimate, ritualized, violent exchange between the greatest power—Caesar—and those with the least power in Roman society, slaves and symbolic slaves.17 Caesar represented authority, honor, victory, and sexual impenetrability. Every ritual of the crucifixion declared Caesar’s victory—flogging, stripping, and impalement. These inflicted the “marks of slavery”18 and, in Tomb’s view, constituted sexual violations.
Bodies enslaved under the Roman Empire were not fully human—if they were male, they were not considered men.19 Whether male, female, or children, enslaved people were legally subject to sexual violation.20 When early Christians referred to Jesus as equal with God yet bearing the likeness of a slave, such as in one Pauline doxology (Phil 2:6–11), this was literal.
Thus, the early Christian insistence on Jesus’s death as a full manifestation of divine “wisdom” and “power” (e.g., 1 Cor 1:18–25) can be described and examined as an intriguing, unexpected state of communal delusion. This delusion would have been the basis for a transvaluative (upside down) social and political ideology that calls into question social orders of both imperial might and White supremacy. R. Alan Streett, for one, makes the argument that the early Christian eucharistic meal and various enactments and rituals during the meal would have signaled an opposition to, and subversion of, hierarchical Roman social norms.21
This leads us to the question, “What kind of response does the crucifixion potentially represent in the face of imperial discipline?” The imperium assumes its authority over bodies that it chooses to discipline. These bodies are subjects of the larger imperial household under its benevolent father, the emperor.22 Thus, the way we choose to narrate and imagine the crucifixion within the imperial household has far-reaching implications for political theology—especially in relation to global empire—today. The imperial household may, indeed, be an interesting framework for examining empire and its constitutive social norms.
Patriarchy and the Christian Imperium
It would be inaccurate to assert that early Christians did not identify and define masculinity based on imperial norms. The postbiblical writings that remain are largely masculine because they were curated, censored, and doctored by fourth and fifth century imperial religious authorities.23 Second- and third-century Christian leader Clement of Alexandria, for example, prescribed Roman masculine norms for Christian men. In Paedagogus, he decries the removal of male body hair, among other practices, as effeminate and transgressive. Dominic Montserrat notes that Roman descriptions of slaves presented them as “infantile,” “ugly,” and “beardless.” They were feminine and “potentially penetrable,” “since, in the ancient world, the visible growth of facial hair marked a man as truly masculine, distinct from slaves, and unavailable for penetration.”24 Clement’s assertions show early Christian acceptance of Roman masculine norms.
“Ambrosiaster,” as Eusebius dubbed him, was the anonymous fourth century author of widely read biblical commentaries. Notably, Ambrosiaster formulated a theology of women’s subordination using the biblical texts that would be cited throughout the Middle Ages. According to Ambrosiaster, women were not truly made in the “image of God” as men were. As David G. Hunter describes, Ambrosiaster believed that female Christians owed their male leaders “special submission and silence”—their subordination was “both social and ecclesial.” Patriarchy, as Ambrosiaster conceived, was inescapable in this life and the next.25 Where did this come from? Hunter writes of Ambrosiaster’s political entanglements, noting,
It is significant that Ambrosiaster has chosen Roman legal practice to illustrate his biblical teaching. By appealing to the subordinate place of women in Roman law to validate his exegesis, Ambrosiaster expresses the concern of a late Roman aristocrat to preserve the established structures of society. By drawing a correlation between the order of creation and Roman civil law, Ambrosiaster reveals a desire both to politicize the Genesis story and to sacralize the political order. On the one hand, the subordination of women which he reads into Genesis is validated by the tutor-guardian relationship which enshrined women’s subordinate place in Roman society. On the other hand, the patriarchal structure of the Roman world is given sacral legitimation by his hierarchical reading of Genesis.26
Early Christian sources reflect a fear of emasculation and penetrability associated with a loss of status, as Alexander Perkin notes,27 as well as an investment in perpetuating the Roman patriarchal order of male imperium. Thomas Laqueur traces this fundamental conception of gender and fear of emasculating gender slippage from Roman antiquity across European history until the 18th century.28 Thus, masculinity continued to be defined by the Roman patriarchal standard, namely, the enactment of sexual dominance and possession.29
Medieval Spanish, for example, drew from Roman language to describe masculinity, vir, as freedom from emasculation, synonymous with sexual impenetrability, rationality, virtue, and moral superiority.30 Men who were penetrated or in danger of penetration were not vir,31 but mancebo.32 This became the language that justified colonial violences from the very moment of Columbus’s encounter with Arawak people in the so-called New World. According to historian Margarita Zamora, Columbus’s journals record him labelling them “beasts” and “monsters” lacking in “intellectual inaptitude”33 and his naming of them as mancebo,34 a word used to describe the effeminacy and penetrability of medieval Spanish slaves. The conquistadors justified the sexual violence that followed, including “genital mutilation of the men and the rape of the women” with these existing cultural definitions of masculinity and penetrability.35
Scholars identify a relationship between patriarchal authority over slaves and sexual penetrability in medieval Christendom36 such as among Spaniards, Scandinavians, and Anglo-Saxons.37 Debra Blumenthal, asserts that “sexual exploitation often was a distinguishing feature of the enslaved woman’s experience” in 15th century and late medieval Spain.38 This was uniquely situated in a context where the pretense of “Christian” morality dictated public sensibility. Masters, attributing virtue to their ruling position, would assert that they were “Christian” and did not take advantage of their right to sexual access, but documentation of enslaved women’s pregnancies indicated otherwise.39
For wives, exclusive “sexual possession”40 as representative of a “gendered polity” defining the relationship between males and females continued from the Middle Ages into modernity, where Toby Ditz argues that settlers of colonial America also exercised sexual access over the enslaved and indentured members of their households.41 Scholar of early American history Thomas Foster, similarly notes that “bodily self-mastery and emotional moderation”42 as well as possession and mastery over women and household subjects characterized early American masculinity. Indeed, Finkelhor and Yllo note that the uphill struggle in the 20th century toward recognizing marital rape not as the assertion of male rights over his wife condoned and enabled by social norms, but as an act of violence.43 Rape culture in contemporary American society continues to be undergirded by definitions of masculinity as characterized not only by aggression, virility, control, and dominance, but also “benevolent” paternalism toward women.44
Imperial masculine political theology is thus one of patriarchal authority and discipline across all spheres of life—church, city, household. Theologians cited spiritualized injunctions in the NT haustafeln—the household codes—emphasizing the obedience of slaves and submission of wives “as to Christ” (Eph 5:22; 6:5). A practiced spirituality of submission to the established patriarchal order served to reinforce the absence of bodily dignity and autonomy in a slave or wife.
Roman panegyrics celebrated the humiliation and defeat of the Emperor Constantine’s rival Maxentius by naming Maxentius as a slave girl. His body was also physically mutilated, decapitated, and paraded with this label—slave girl.45 Thus, lauding the Emperor’s undefeated and masculine body means, at the same time, celebrating the denigration of the enslaved body.46 The Christianization of Rome under Constantine thus began with the reinforcement of the Roman household order under which the “slave girl” remained humiliated, violated, and marked as lacking imperial masculine virtue.47 This correlates with the Byzantine artistic reimagination of the crucifixion after Constantine’s ascendancy.48 These portraits reconfigured Christ as a regal king, the master of an imperium unmarred by socially shameful sacrifice, having undertaken statuesque, painful sacrifice.
Heteropatriarchy and Transgression
Imperial masculinity is a patriarchal order, one that requires individuals to embrace their assigned roles as penetrator or penetrated, masculine or feminized. This is also a heteropatriarchal order, one where heterosexual marriage is the ideal and where it is defined by masculine authority, virtue, virility, and sexual conquest. In American conservative evangelical sexuality, deviant behaviors include celibacy or singleness (particularly among women), egalitarian marriages, biblical equality for women, egalitarian sex where neither party is an aggressive “conqueror” of the other, and the failure to practice the corporal punishment of children.49 All of these threaten the boundaries between masculine and feminine established by masculine displays of strength and domination of the body. Conservative evangelicals like Piper thus believe that gender equality and feminism threaten distinctions between men and women, distinctions that are solely based on penetrative authority and described in phallocentric terms.
The heteropatriarchal household authority is also fragile and has to be protected and enforced,50 such as by the punitive shaming and attribution of transgression to those who refuse to enact subordination. This begins in childhood and can be found in authoritarian rhetoric emphasizing parental discipline.51 As seen in the writings of Augustine and Chrysostom discussed above, patriarchy involves the right and responsibility to exercise corporal punishment over children and slaves. This is based on a theological and political worldview in which discipline and control in each domain—household, church, and government—is the central manifestation of God’s divine authority and governance.52 Individual autonomy, even bodily autonomy, is seen as dangerous.53
Some, like John Piper, laud nineteenth-century theologian Robert Lewis Dabney, who described the power of corporal punishment of “slaves,” “children,” “apprentices,” and “wives” in English law as normative and benevolent.54 Dabney was an antebellum enslaver himself. Indeed, Dabney’s interpretation of the crucifixion narrative was one in which the Divine Son is subject to the chastisement of the Divine Father.55 Torture of the Divine Son is necessary to salvation, and it is the Divine Father who enacts this violence. Such theologies maintain an image of the Christian God not as the one who suffers humiliation. Rather he, on one hand, metes out punishment lovingly, and on the other hand, endures such punishment lovingly and submissively. In both cases, patriarchal rationale keeps divine masculinity intact. God is, in the crucifixion, typologized as both Caesar and Christ, master and slave.
Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and Dabney’s theology of “penal substitutionary atonement” are both largely central in contemporary conservative American evangelicalism. They serve to narrativize the crucifixion in ways very much the opposite of Cone and Tomb’s readings. Positing God as the punisher also posits God as the lynch mob and the lynch mob as God, on God’s side, and responsibly reinforcing God’s imperial household order. The divine sovereign and the patriarch, slaveholder, and segregationist all hold the right to punish and to kill with impunity.
Conclusion
The struggle between Caesar (the symbol of imperial masculinity) and “slave girl” (symbolic of humiliation, violation, and the lack of virtue) plays out in the ongoing struggle between corpus Christi and corpus Christianum. Corpus Christi represents the crucified body and those that shaped its memory and ritualization in previous centuries. Corpus Christianum represents imperial Christendom and the process by which the Corpus Christi was reimagined in the imperial masculine sense to become a product of Western Empire. Representations of Christ’s body and crucifixion remain marred by the ideals of Corpus Christianum, embodied, for example, by a Mel Gibson-type, swaggering Saviour. Piper similarly idealizes the church as rightly dominated by a “masculine feel.”56
Corpus Christianum has literally made a mission for itself of penetrating the world by crucifying, torturing, and erasing the bodies that stood in its way. For example, Christopher Columbus planted a cross on the land he named “San Salvador” after the “Savior” as he and his men began a program of sexualized conquest, a conquest that manifested itself in horrific violences against indigenous bodies including genital evisceration and mutilation.57
One failure of pacifist theology has been to imagine suffering under patriarchal and imperial violence as an act of subordination that becomes revolutionary in its own right. Christian anarchist Justin Barringer articulates this idea, claiming that “oppressive power structures are subverted and the oppressed are freed when those with little power, counterintuitive as it may seem, subordinate themselves to the powers that be.” This often leaves penetrators, abusers, and aggressors with the upper hand, able to enact their violence without resistance. Such theology has served as a source of secondary harm for victims of gendered and sexual violences in pacifist communities.
Ultimately, political theologians need to wrestle with a long history of violence in the name of authoritarian order. This includes the legacy of Ambrosiaster and Augustine who viewed subordination in the imperial household as necessary to God’s imperial order on one hand and the views of those who see suffering as unjust, yet noble, necessary, and prescriptive on the other.
In conclusion, the battle over the meaning of the crucified Christ is deeply emblematic of imperial realities and imperial meaning-making in Christian history. Reclaiming and reimagining the memory and narrative of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion may be one way to challenge existing imperial power-knowledge frameworks. In any case, identifying the imperial masculine household as a violent, crucifying, penetrating force may be helpful in structuring exactly what empire is and how we may go about pursuing freedom for those whose bodies are subjected to violating, hierarchical, imperial regimes. This calls for a deeper definition of Christian egalitarianism in the full historical context of imperial gendered violence.
Notes
1. Mel Gibson, The Passion of the Christ (Icon Productions, 2004).
2. Neal King, Heroes in Hard Times: Cop Action Movies in the U.S. (Temple University, 1999) 153.
3. King, Heroes in Hard Times, 153.
4. Neal King, The Passion of the Christ (Bloomsbury, 2017) 41.
5. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Liveright, 2020) 175.
6. Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 202.
7. Mel Gibson, Braveheart (Icon Productions, 1995).
8. Tyler Merbler, “MAGA Jesus”.
9. John Piper, “A Vision of Biblical Complementarity,” in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism, ed. John Piper and Wayne Grudem (Crossway, 1991) 34.
10. Piper, A Vision, 35.
11. Piper, A Vision, 38.
12. David Tombs, The Crucifixion of Jesus: Torture, Sexual Abuse, and the Scandal of the Cross (Taylor & Francis, 2023).
13. Tombs, The Crucifixion of Jesus, 1.
14. Tombs, The Crucifixion of Jesus, 1.
15. James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Orbis, 2011).
16. Cone, The Cross, 35.
17. Richard P. Saller, “Pater Familias, Mater Familias, and the Gendered Semantics of the Roman Household,” CP 94/2 (1999) 182–97.
18. Deborah Kamen, “A Corpus of Inscriptions: Representing Slave Marks in Antiquity,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 55 (2010) 95–110.
19. Jonathan Walters, “Invading the Roman Body: Manliness and Impenetrability in Roman Thought,” in Roman Sexualities, ed. Judith P. Halett and Marilyn B. Skinner (Princeton, 1997) 29–43.
20. Inhee Cho Berg, “Female Gender Marginality in the Imperial Roman World: Affinity Between Women and Slaves in their Shared Stereotypes and Penetrability,” Gender Studies 18/1 (2022) 1–26.
21. R. Alan Streett, Subversive Meals: An Analysis of the Lord’s Supper under Roman Domination during the First Century (Wipf and Stock, 2013).
22. Jason J. Ripley, “‘Behold the Man’?: Subverting Imperial Masculinity in the Gospel of John,” JBRec 2/2 (2015) 219–39.
23. Andrew S. Jacobs, “Christians, Jews, and Judaism in the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East, c. 150–400 CE,” in The Cambridge Companion to Antisemitism, ed. Steven Katz (Cambridge University Press, 2022) 83–99; Ally Kateusz, Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership (Springer Nature, 2019).
24. Dominic Montserrat, “Essay Six: Reading Gender in the Roman World,” in Experiencing Rome: Culture, Identity and Power in the Roman Empire, ed. Janet Huskinson (Routledge, 2000) 153–63.
25. David G. Hunter, “The Paradise of Patriarchy: Ambrosiaster on Women as (Not) God’s Image,” JTS 43/2 (Oct 1992) 455.
26. Hunter, “Paradise of Patriarchy,” 451–52.
27. Alexander David Perkins, “Claiming Masculinity: Roman Ideologies of the Body and the Image of the Christian Man in Second and Third Century Christian Apologists” (PhD diss., Fordham University, 2021).
28. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
29. Inhee C. z, “Female Gender Marginality in the Imperial Roman World: Affinity Between Women and Slaves in their Shared Stereotypes and Penetrability,” Gender Studies 18, no. 1 (2020) 1-26.
30. Carvajal, Butterflies Will Burn: Prosecuting Sodomites in Early Modern Spain and Mexico, 4.
31. Conway, Behold the Man, 17.
32. Warren Johansson and William Percy, “Homosexuality,” in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, eds. Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage (New York: Routledge, 2013) 155-190.
33. Zamora, “Abreast of Columbus”, 138-139.
34. Zamora, “Abreast of Columbus”, 137.
35. Michael Hardin, “Altering Masculinities: The Spanish Conquest and the Evolution of the Latin American Machismo,” International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 7 (2002) 6.
36. Clark, Between Medieval Men, 14; Carvajal, Butterflies Will Burn, 101-102.
37. David Clark, Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
38. Debra Blumenthal, ““As If She Were His Wife”: Slavery and Sexual Ethics in Late Medieval Spain,” in Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies, ed. Bernadette J. Brooten (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2010) 180.
39. Blumenthal, ““As If She Were”, 182.
40. Toby L. Ditz, “The New Men’s History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power: Some Remedies from Early American Gender History,” Gender & History 16, no. 1 (2004) 14.
41. Ditz, “The New Men’s History”, 16.
42. Thomas A. Foster, “Introduction,” in New Men: Manliness in Early America, ed. Thomas A. Foster (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2011) 19.
43. David Finkelhor and Kersti Yllö, License to Rape: Sexual Abuse of Wives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).
44. Diana T. Sanchez, Amy K. Kiefer, and Oscar Ybarra, “Sexual Submissiveness in Women: Costs for Sexual Autonomy and Arousal,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 32, no. 4 (2006) 512–524; Kristine M. Chapleau, Debra L. Oswald, and Brenda L. Russell, “How Ambivalent Sexism Toward Women and Men Support Rape Myth Acceptance,” Sex Roles 57 (2007) 131–136; Nicole L. Johnson and Dawn M. Johnson, “An Empirical Exploration into the Measurement of Rape Culture,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 36, no. 1–2 (2021) NP70–NP95.
45. Susanna Elm, “Neglegentissimus Vernula,” in Soul, Body, and Gender in Late Antiquity, ed. Andra Jugănaru, Stanimir Panayotov, István Perczel, and Anastasia Theologou (Routledge, 2023) 350–51.
46. Michael Edward Stewart, “The Soldier’s Life: Early Byzantine Masculinity and the Manliness of War,” Byzantina Symmeikta (2016) 11–44.
47. Elm, “Neglegentissimus Vernula,” 350–51.
48. American Historical Association, “Christ as the Good Shepherd“.
49. Rebekah Mui Pei Ern, “The Crisis of Lust in American Conservative Evangelical Sexuality,” (paper presented at the Florida State University Department of Religion Graduate Student Symposium, Tallahassee, Florida, February 9–10, 2024).
50. Julie J. Ingersoll, Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2015).
51. Suely Ferreira Deslandes, Bárbara Morais Santiago Freitas, and Taiza Ramos de Souza Costa Ferreira, “‘The Rod of Discipline’: Religious Discourses that Defend Physical Punishment in the Education of Children and Adolescents,” Interface – Comunicação, Saúde, Educação 27 (2023) e220587.
52. Ingersoll, Building God’s Kingdom, 42.
53. Ingersoll, Building God’s Kingdom, 42.
54. Robert Lewis Dabney, Discussions, vols. 1–5, ed. C. R. Vaughan (Sprinkle, 1982) 221.
55. Robert Lewis Dabney, Christ Our Penal Substitute (Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1898).
56. John Piper, “The Frank and Manly Mr. Ryle: The Value of a Masculine Ministry,” Desiring God, Jan 31, 2012.
57. Margarita Zamora, “Abreast of Columbus: Gender and Discovery,” Cultural Critique 17 (1990) 127–49; Michael Hardin, “Altering Masculinities: The Spanish Conquest and the Evolution of the Latin American Machismo,” International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 7 (2002) 1–22.
58. Justin Bronson Barringer, “Subordination and Freedom: Tracing Anarchist Themes in First Peter,” in Anarchism and Religion: Essays, ed. Alexandre Christoyannopoulos and Matthew S. Adams (Stockholm University, 2018) 135.
59. Elizabeth S. Albrecht and Darryl W. Stephens, Liberating the Politics of Jesus: Renewing Peace Theology through the Wisdom of Women (T&T Clark, 2021).