Aggressive And Loving Men

Abstract

This research uses Christian Hardcore punk to show how evangelical Christian men respond to changes in gender relations that threaten hegemonic masculinity through a music subculture. Drawing on interviews and participant observations of live music shows, I find that Christian Hardcore ministry involves a hybrid mix of aggressive and loving performances of manhood. Christian Hardcore punk men fortify the idea that men and women are essentially opposites through discourse and the segregation of music spaces, even as they deviate from dominant ideas of what makes a man in their strategy of openly expressing the “loving” of secular men. The mechanism for this is the interactions in concert spaces. These findings offer a conceptual move away from studying “godly” masculinity as intrinsically distinct from secular masculinity and illustrate how religious masculinities can be both hegemonic and “soft.”

Keywords

hybrid masculinities hegemonic masculinity homosocial bonds evangelicalism music

Scholars complicate the idea that religious conservatives behave in ways that legitimate the hegemonic authority of men. Indeed, this scholarship, typically focused on Protestant evangelical Christians, shows that “godly” men express a “soft” or more feminine side of manhood that is compassionate, emotive, and faithful (Bartkowski 2004; Brenneman 2011; Gallagher and Wood 2005; Gerber 2014; Wolkomir 2001). This softer side of manhood deviates from hegemonic masculinity, which Connell (2005) defines as a context-specific strategy and a practice of masculinity that normalizes and legitimates the subordinate position of women in society. In this scholarship, hegemonic masculinity is much “harder” than religious masculinity; it is presented as tough, violent, emotionally distant, and fixated on heterosexual conquest (Bird 1996; Grazian 2007; Kimmel 2008; Stroud 2012). But this analytic dichotomy between religious (i.e., soft) and secular (i.e., hegemonic) masculinity is problematic for two reasons. First, it downplays how soft—or in this case devotional—forms of masculinity can be a component of hegemonic masculinity (Bridges and Pascoe 2014; Diefendorf 2015; Heath 2003; Wilkins 2009) and assumes that Christian men do not combine aspects of religious and secular performances of identity to promote gender hegemony. Second, it suggests that godly masculinity is confined to religious institutions or practices and has no bearing on gender hegemony in the wider culture. But what if we examine Christian men in secular spaces?

This research uses Christian Hardcore punk music to examine how young white evangelical Christian men reinforce their hegemony in secular spaces through a hybrid performance of masculinity. Christian Hardcore is part of a larger, long-standing Protestant evangelical belief that Christians should use rock and roll music for religious ends (Howard and Streck 1999; Luhr 2009; Stowe 2011). But unlike mainstream Christian rock, which is mainly restricted to Christian radio stations and youth groups, Christian Hardcore bands tour with secular groups and headline secular show bills, allowing for contact with secular men who are fans. This secular hardcore setting illustrates how religious men draw from dominant cultural scripts to facilitate gender hegemony in secular spaces at the same time that they violate aspects of hegemonic masculinity.

Christian Hardcore punks seek to masculinize Christianity by reaching out to men in a music subculture that is already dominated by white men (Duncombe and Tremblay 2011; Haenfler 2006; Khan-Harris 2007; Mullaney 2007). A Theology21 blog titled “Screaming Praise: The Passionate Heart of Christian Hardcore” makes this mission clear:

In a nation where the men seem to be slipping away from the Church, and the church too often seems to be emasculating those who remain, this is the kind of movement that we need. We need strong men of God to carry Church into the next generation. (McClellan 2011)

Hardcore Christians “carry Church into the next generation” as they create a common space where Christian men can come together as men and come in contact with secular men. To build this space, hardcore Christian men present themselves as both aggressive and loving. Their aggressive style of masculinity resembles the “muscled” Christianity that other sociologists and historians have studied (Borer and Schafer 2011; Greve 2014; Kimmel 2012; Putney 2001). This involves physical violence in the mosh pit and warrior imagery in the music (McDowell 2014). On the other hand, these men vocalize their love for other hardcore men, both religious and secular. This tender side fits a sensitive evangelical ethos that encourages its men to care for other men in heartfelt ways (Gerber 2014; Heath 2003; Wolkomir 2001).

Centered on a doctrine of masculine God imagery, conservative religions present the social and spiritual authority of men over women as natural, normal, and inescapable (Pevey, Williams, and Ellison 1996; Rao 2015; Sumerau 2012). But the patriarchal gender relations that conservative religions advance are not stable and are prone “towards crisis” (Connell 2005, 84), meaning that religious institutions must continuously promote and justify the political, economic, and spiritually dominant position of men in society. One way white evangelical Christians manage “crisis tendencies” in gender relations is by seeking to recruit more white men into the Christian fold (Bederman 1989; Heath 2003; Kimmel 2008; Putney 2001).

As early as the Progressive Era, a period of extensive social activism and political reform that rose and fell between 1870 and 1920 (McGerr 2003), white Christian men have touted that “feminization” poses a threat to U.S. society. Feminization is a term they used to condemn a perceived predominance of women in social institutions such as the church and the paid labor force. In their effort to quash the feminization of the public sphere, Protestant religious revivals such as the Men and Religion Forward Movement set out to get “as many men as possible active” in church (Bederman 1989, 432). Other men’s movements sought to make U.S. society, not only the church, the domain of white Christian men. Muscular Christians did this by replacing the image of a peacekeeping Jesus with the image of an almighty God that is physically fit and ready to fight (Putney 2001). With a beefy Jesus at their side, muscular Christians took the gospel to settings where men were already gathering: fitness gyms and sports.

Contemporary white evangelicals also fear that U.S. society is moving away from a godly ordained gender order (Greve 2014). They cite and exaggerate recent studies that show that people are growing disenchanted with organized religion and that young white men are the most disillusioned (Chaves 2011; Pew Research Center 2012; Putnam and Cambell 2010). For evangelicals, the absence of men at church is not merely a matter of statistics: some “feel that the gender distribution in their congregations is indicative of the feminization of their religion and a broader feminization of culture” (Greve 2014, 155).

Concerned that the gender order is under attack, evangelicals are hard pressed to find new ways to reach men. The Promise Keepers is one of the most visible efforts to make Christian patriarchs out of men. In its massive campaign for a godly manhood characterized by racial reconciliation, family headship and service, the Promise Keepers organization preaches that men have a moral obligation to lead their wives spiritually, socially, and politically (Bartkowski 2004; Heath 2003). They call these family men “tender warriors”—men who balance strength with compassion, and care with determination (Bartkowski 2004). Other, younger evangelical men are not so tender. Deploying an explicitly muscled approach to Christianity (Kimmel 2012), these men lift weights for Christ and compete in Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), a violent form of fighting that links the power of God to bodily strength and stamina (Borer and Schafer 2011; Greve 2014). In contrast to the notion that Jesus was a peacekeeping pacifist, Christian MMA fighters argue that violent matches are a religious activity because these “help them spread their faith” to men in a secular world (Borer and Schafer 2011, 177). Whether practitioners of “tender” or “muscled” evangelical manhood, Christian men are coming up with new ways to maintain a patriarchal gender order.

Hybrid Masculinities

Christian Hardcore men address the current crisis in gender relations by reaching out to young men in secular spaces. Yet their strategy for outreach looks different from what scholars of Christian manhood typically describe (Bartkowski 2004; Borer and Schafer 2011; Heath 2003; Greve 2014). Rather than stress a “tender” or “muscled” approach to manhood, hardcore Christians express a hybrid construction of manhood that is both aggressive and loving. Exhibited by white heterosexual men in periods of crisis, hybrid masculinities incorporate “elements of identity typically associated with various marginalized and subordinated masculinities and—at times—femininities” into masculine identities (Bridges and Pascoe 2014, 246). These elastic (Bridges and Pascoe, forthcoming) masculinities find expression through emotive sharing at college bars (Arxer 2011, 404), self-identifying with gay aesthetics (Bridges 2014, 65), openly expressing affection for other men on stag tours (Thurnell-Read 2012), or pledging sexual abstinence in Christian organizations (Diefendorf 2015; Wilkins 2009). Some scholars argue that hybrid constructions of manhood threaten the existing gender order (Anderson 2009; McCormack 2012). But as Bridges and Pascoe (forthcoming) point out, hybridity does not equate to gender equality: hybrid masculinities reinforce gender hegemony by obscuring how privileged men strengthen gender binaries that are oppressive to women and subordinate masculinities (Bridges and Pascoe 2014; Messerschmidt 2010; Messner 1993, 2007).

Drawing on the idea that young Christian men bond with other men by amalgamating soft and hard expressions of manhood, this article extends the sociology of gender. It offers a conceptual move from studying religious masculinity as distinct from hegemonic styles of masculinity. I illustrate how, through the construction of a hybrid masculinity of aggression and focused loving, Christian Hardcore men create masculine domains in secular spaces that promote the continuation of gender hegemony.

Methods

I primarily use participant observation and semistructured interview data, but I also reference online sources about the bands I observed during field research. Participant observation data of 285 hours comes from 10 live music shows (from 2009 to 2012), two multi-day annual Cornerstone Christian rock festivals in Bushnell, Illinois (2008 and 2010), and two weekend-long Unified Underground (UU) subcultural ministry conferences in Annapolis, Maryland (2008 and 2010). The hardcore music shows I attended took place in secular bars within a 50-mile radius of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and consisted of nationally known touring acts. The bands I selected to observe at secular venues also played the UU conference and/or Cornerstone festival. I selected live music shows in this way because I wanted to see how performers who participate in Cornerstone, a legendary alternative Christian rock festival (Beaujon 2006), and UU, a subcultural ministries network, convey Christianity in secular settings.

I conducted 23 intensive one-on-one interviews and five group interviews of two to six people. Interviewees included Christian and secular hardcore band members, subcultural ministers (Christian youth who organize music shows and/or Bible studies in their hometowns), and preachers and youth pastors of nondenominational and Baptist churches that support this music ideologically and/or materially. The total number of interviewees was 40. A handful of my interviewees self-identified as straight edge, which signified their allegiance to a hardcore music scene that emphasizes the politics of self-control by vowing to never use drugs or alcohol and avoiding sex outside of long-term relationships (Haenfler 2006; Lahicky 1997).

Interviews lasted one to two hours. Twenty-two interviews occurred in person at a music show, in a coffee shop, at Cornerstone, or at the UU conference; six were performed over Skype and by telephone with individuals I learned about through snowball sampling but could not meet in person. Thirty-eight of 40 interviewees were white and 33 of 40 of these individuals were men. Interviewees were between 21 and 35 years of age (most in their early 20s) but a few were in their early 40s and 50s (these were the pastors I interviewed). Most had not attended college. Some planned to go back to school once completing their “ministry” in underground music or after finishing a missionary trip abroad.

In a project that was designed to explore how Christian youth express religion in secular music, issues regarding gender and masculinity emerged without any specific prompting on how Christian Hardcore men think of themselves as men. I asked interviewees to describe the obstacles they face in this music, who shows up to their shows, and what they think about the involvement of women. Christian and secular hardcore interviewees were also asked how they perceive the growth of Christianity in this music. The interviews were active (Holstein and Gubrium 1995), meaning that I gave respondents room to bring up issues on their own terms. Interviewees raised the notion of a “loving” ministry without my prompting. When this was mentioned, I followed the methodological advice of Crang and Cook (2007) and asked respondents to provide examples of this love and how they practice it.

For my first round of interviews, I purposively selected a handful of band members and subcultural ministers that attend the UU conferences. I started with UU because I wanted to gain “selective access to appropriate groups of people” (Crang and Cook 2007, 14) who were directly involved in Christian Hardcore ministries. At the close of these interviews, I initiated a snowball sample. Sometimes an interview or observation morphed into opportunities to record group conversations. At UU, I scheduled an interview with Greg, the guitarist for a chart-topping Christian Hardcore band. When we sat down for the interview, two of his friends arrived, asked what we were doing, and requested to join the interview (n = 3). At that same conference, a group of six invited me to record their conversation while they smoked cigars outside (n = 6). As they talked about music and ministry, several others dropped by to join the conversation. I also interviewed all four members of a band in their tour van (n = 4) and two different married couples who refer to themselves as a subcultural ministries team (n = 4).

Public reviews of music shows (n = 23) were another source of data. These data were analyzed in light of the codes created from participant observation and interview data. Field notes and interviews were transcribed and coded according to a grounded theoretical method, allowing patterns and themes to emerge from the data (Glaser and Strauss 1999). To create open codes, I read participant observation notes and interview transcripts line-by-line (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995) and wrote analytic memos about the themes that emerged from this careful reading. Through this method I created the codes “masculinity,” “ministry,” “aggression,” and “love.” To investigate the relationship between these codes, I developed “masculine evangelicalism” as a sensitizing concept. This sensitizing concept laid the foundation for the analysis of inductive codes (Blumer 1954; Bowen 2006) and helped me organize these data on the practice of Christian Hardcore ministry.

Scholars note that sociologists are suited to study their own subcultural communities because they can access valuable insider perspectives on the meaning of subcultural styles, ideas, and rituals (Hodkinson 2005; Muggleton 2000). However, this insider/outsider dichotomy does not capture the dynamic quality of a researcher’s identity or position in the field (Davies 1999). When it comes to Christian Hardcore, I was somewhere in between insider and outsider (mostly on the outside). Prior to this study, I was unfamiliar with Christian Hardcore but knowledgeable of secular punk. My prior involvement in punk helped me appreciate the perspective of insiders and made it easier to establish rapport with research subjects. Another aspect of my identity that complicates the insider/outsider dichotomy is my relationship to evangelical Christianity. While it has been more than 20 years since I participated in an evangelical church, my firsthand experiences with the religion prepared me for the Christian Hardcore worldview. At the same time, my detachment from evangelical Christianity kept me from becoming what Bennett (2003) calls a “subcultural spokesperson.”

My gender identity proved to be more of an obstacle in the field than did my religious identity. As a woman studying a music subculture wherein men make up most of the bands, organize the shows, and run the record labels, I was always on the “outside” to some degree. Yet this gendered dynamic was methodologically advantageous (Pini 2005; Pini and Pease 2013). As a gendered outsider, I was able to see that the Christian Hardcore talk of love is directed to men and that their mosh pits (areas for aggressive dancing and bodily contact that happens near the stage at live hardcore shows) are for men, not women. This helped me realize that Christian youth make space for religion in secular music as they promote gender hegemony. Before I discuss my findings, I provide some background on the merging of Christianity and hardcore punk music.

Christianity In Hardcore Punk

The fusion of Christianity and hardcore punk music is extraordinary. U.S. hardcore punk got its start in the wake of the Reagan era, when social conservatives were championing limited government, accelerating national defense, and promoting traditional family values (Blush 2010; Rettman 2014). Outraged by this political shift to the Right, hardcore punks created a music culture that “normal people” would find offensive (Rachman 2006). Fast, furious, and loud, this music was hypercritical of conservative Christianity and the neoliberal policies that defined the 1980s. Since then, the hardcore scene has undergone several sonic, symbolic, and political changes (Blush 2010; Duncombe and Tremblay 2011; Haenfler 2006; Rettman 2014). One of the most recent changes is the growing presence of Christian bands that are unapologetic about their faith in a music culture that has a reputation for loathing social conservatism.

As hardcore Christians see it, secular hardcore is intrinsically evil because it does not endorse the tenets of evangelical Christianity, such as Born Again salvation, a belief in the resurrection of Christ, and spiritual redemption (Balmer 1989; Smith 1998). Given the ungodly nature of this music, hardcore Christians argue that their participation in this music makes them more genuine in their evangelicalism than are “Sunday Christians,” which they broadly define as Christians who, as several interviewees put it, “just get dressed up and go to church on Sundays.” Hardcore Christians feel that “Sunday” Christians are wrong to believe that church alone makes someone a good Christian and insist that they are true followers of Christ because they take the gospel to secular spaces.

Christian Hardcore punks critique institutional religion like their secular counterparts, yet diverge from the broader punk movement in their evangelist mission to make America a Christian nation. They reason that God calls them to be punk, as one Christian Hardcore interviewee put it, because “He” wants them “to save the nation from the underground up.” In the underground, Christian Hardcore men try to “reach the rejected,” who they talk about in subcultural rather than socio-economic terms. From their point of view, the rejected are young white men who feel excluded by the church and/or society at large for being social misfits in some subcultural form or fashion (McDowell 2014). This notion of the rejected is regularly expressed at the UU conference, a subcultural ministry branch of Youth for Christ that hardcore Christians launched in their effort to unite the Christian subcultures in ministry. They often describe their mission as an urgent response to the fact that the mainstream church (i.e., conventional Christian denominations) is losing members and that most dropouts are young men (Chaves 2011; Pew Research Center 2012, 2015; Putnam and Campbell 2010). From their perspective, the mainstream church is to blame for this loss because it judges and mistreats people who do not fit the mold of a stereotypical Sunday Christian.

Christian Hardcore Ministry

Christian Hardcore men mix anger and love to carry out their evangelist mission in underground music scenes, which sociologists define as dynamic social settings of collective meaning-making focused around music and live music shows (Bennett 2004; Futrell, Simi, and Gottschalk 2006). My participant observations confirmed this. At a Christian subcultural ministries conference, around 100 people gathered in a dimly lit room for the band Sleeping Giant. To get ready, a crowd of young white men and a handful of women wearing a mix of flannels, dark T-shirts, and tight jeans, formed a semi-circle in the middle of the floor, up front near the stage. The rest of the audience gathered at the back of the room, where chairs had been moved. When Sleeping Giant took the stage, the lyrics to “Sons of Thunder” were projected on a large screen at the front of the room, a gesture that invited everyone to sing aloud. As the crowd sang the chorus—“Overcome this world with love! Overcome my heart with love!”—the lead singer swayed side-to-side and lifted his hands in praise. Following his direction, several audience members raised their hands and mouthed prayers—movements that made this performance look more like a Sunday morning worship service than a hardcore show. Then suddenly the beat shifted from a soft melody about love to a loud thunderous growl of electric guitar riffs, deep bass, and roars. In sync with this change, several young men turned praising hands into balled fists and slung their limbs around viciously. These movements shaped a mosh pit, and, as the men moved more aggressively, the pit stretched wider. Before long, a group of about 15 men were the only ones left thrashing their bodies around in the center of the room; everyone else stood at the edges of the circle or moved to the back. Later that night, a Christian band member wept on stage as he testified about a time he had premarital sex with a woman before giving his heart to Christ. As he spoke, the men who had moshed all night paused in silence to hear his emotional testimony.

This Sleeping Giant show illustrates how Christian Hardcore men uphold hegemonic gender relations in hardcore music as they perform a two-sided masculinity that is both physically aggressive and emotionally loving. By participating in mosh pits, Christian Hardcore youth construct male controlled spaces for the physical expression of masculinity; and by collectively singing that they will “overcome this world with love,” they make emotional commitments to the Christian men in these spaces and to the secular men that they hope to reach. I find Christian Hardcore men bond with other hardcore men through an aggressive performance of masculinity that excludes women, but, at the same time, they do a loving performance of masculinity that explicitly focuses on secular men and implicitly devalues women.

Aggressive Men

The Sleeping Giant concert illustrates how Christian Hardcore youth carry out subcultural ministries by linking their faith in God to the antagonistic attitudes that characterize hardcore. Like the other underground Christian music scenes (Moberg 2015; Rademacher 2015), Christian Hardcore youth use warrior imagery in their albums and stage performances to present Christianity as a fearless, macho faith (McDowell 2014). But warrior imagery is not enough to establish membership in hardcore. Hardcore Christians must also earn the respect of nonbelievers at live music shows, spaces where hardcore youth, secular and religious, come together. Affectionately termed a “brotherhood,” hardcore music holds homosocial unity in high esteem and normalizes the idea that men need to express solidarity with other men. The pit is a “tough place to be” (Khan-Harris 2007, 44), but it is also a place where men express unity. In the pit, men dance violently, push and knock each other around, and help up those who have fallen down (Haenfler 2006; Khan-Harris 2007; Leblanc 1999; Mullaney 2007; Tsitsos 1999). For Christian Hardcore men then, moshing is not merely a destructive release; moshing helps them achieve membership in the hardcore brotherhood. This explains why Christian Hardcore bands use “breakdowns” to, as a few put it, “get the pit going.” Breakdowns are the sonic climax of hardcore songs. Composed of a few single chords chugged slowly and rhythmically in a monotonous fashion, breakdowns are central to live hardcore shows because these inspire physical thrashing and moshing in the pit (Haenfler 2006). Christian Hardcore bands also shout their most ominous messages during breakdowns. The song “Immanuel (The Reedemer)” by the billboard-topping Christian Hardcore band For Today is a case in point. About mid-way through the track, the music drops to a deep rhythmic choppy bass just as the singer roars: “Repent or Perish!”

In hardcore, good music is brutal. This is why active pits can be used to measure a band’s credibility; if the pit is “going,” a band is making a good impression. Samuel, the lead singer of a longstanding Christian band, measures the success of his music by how rowdy the pit gets:

I love it when they just go nuts! I like dancers doing their dancing thing! I like push-moshers doing their push-moshing thing! I like circle pits! I like it all! I like to see kids having fun!

To Samuel, physical endorsements from the pit confirm that he and his band are accepted as hardcore, which is significant as Christian bands are sometimes stereotyped as mediocre. Heather, who organizes Christian Hardcore shows in partnership with her husband, explains that secular people expect Christian music to be bad. But, she continues, Christian Hardcore music is changing that; secular youth are “starting to realize that Christians can have the same quality in music and talent as all these non-Christian bands.” Active pits at Christian hardcore shows are the evidence she and other hardcore Christians use to drive this point home.

Secular hardcore youth also use the events of the pit to affirm the quality of Christian Hardcore music. Seth, a columnist for a newspaper in Spokane, Washington, describes the pit at The Chariot shows as energetic and dangerous. After describing the injury he suffered from the pit at one of these shows, Seth asserts, “The pain and the doctor’s bill was worth it.” Seth encourages other hardcore kids to look past the religion of The Chariot and join their mosh pit. He claims,

The Chariot has always been forthcoming about the band members’ Christian faith, and they have addressed it lyrically. At his core Scogin [the lead singer] is a nice, affable Southern Christian boy who just happens to make killer music to slam to. But a lack of belief in a higher calling shouldn’t dissuade listeners—Scogin welcomes everyone.

Seth’s appreciation for violent mosh pits at The Chariot show resonates with what Sam, a hardcore blogger for the Pittsburgh Music Report, wrote about the rush he experienced at their show in Pittsburgh:

It was the kind of show where you just let everything go, you hit whoever you need to, you scream at the top of your lungs, you dance like it’s your last day. . . . I was in the middle of a crowd of people, being thrown around and throwing people around (Ritzer 2010).

Sam does not talk about Christianity in his review of The Chariot show, nor does he make a statement about his own religious identity. Instead, he focuses on how the pit made him feel free to dance violently, a primary mechanism of hardcore solidarity and largely exclusive to men. Sam continued,

Typing with a broken left thumb is not an easy task, especially when you could have a potential concussion, judging from the size of the bruise and lump on your forehead. (The dry blood under your nose may be a clue as well.) I am not really able to tell you exactly when any of these injuries occurred to my body, besides a general blanket statement that any hardcore music fan would understand, “I saw the Chariot last night.”

Sam typifies how young men use their wounds from the pit to gain credibility in this brotherhood. His broken thumb, potential concussion, bruises, and lumps establish that he is brave enough to join a notoriously daring mosh pit. Also, his wounds from other hardcore kids communicate his commitment to the scene that The Chariot helped create.

Given the violent measures young Christian men take to be hardcore, it is no surprise that women get pushed to the margins of this music. The gender imbalance at Christian Hardcore shows is striking, so much so that one secular musician remarked, “If you [a woman] go to a show like that you have to feel awkward because there are so many guys there.” Joseph, the pastor of a nondenominational church, claims that hardcore is dominated by young men because of the “whole energy level.” “Hardcore is supposed to be angry and violent on some level,” he says, “I guess that’s why they call it hardcore.” Pastor Joseph is not alone in his gendered assessment of hardcore anger. Greg, who plays guitar for a Christian Hardcore group, believes women do not show up for hardcore shows because they are “passive” and not as angry as men.

Women do go to hardcore shows, but they are seldom respected in the pit (Leblanc 1999; Mullaney 2007). This was made apparent at a Christian Hardcore show in Pittsburgh. Before starting the set, the band announced that the singer had an emergency and could not be there for the show. Without pause the band opened with a fast, thunderous roar. The bass player then leaped down from the stage and started slinging his guitar around his body. But rather than move away from the bassist, the audience moved towards him to form a semi-circle around him. By the end of the first song, the rest of the band relocated to the floor in the middle of a furious mosh pit. During the set, seven different young men passed the microphone to take turns screaming the lyrics to the songs. There were a few women in the pit, moshing alongside the men. One young woman jumped up and down as she screamed the lyrics (without the microphone) and another women climbed on stage and slammed to the music. But these women were never passed the microphone or given the opportunity to scream into it, even as they struggled to reach for it. They were physically excluded from the center of the scene. I next examine how, in addition to marginalizing women in these physical ways, Christian Hardcore men focus on loving men, not women, in this scene.

Loving Men

Christian Hardcore men are vocal about their godly love for other men in hardcore music. It is not unusual to see hand-drawn “Free Hugs” cardboard signs at the merchandise tables of bands or hear Christian men use the phrase “love on” from stage either as part of a prayer, a song, or a brief sermon. In the Christian Hardcore lexicon, “love on” refers to the idea that Christian ministry is a process of homosocial bonding in a music subculture that stereotypically abhors Christianity. As these youth see it, a loving ministry does not necessarily involve talk about Jesus or salvation. Loving someone is “being there” on stage, at the T-shirt booth, or after the show. As several interviewees put it, “being there plants the seed” for a Christian foundation in the hardcore brotherhood.

Christian Hardcore men open up space for men to love on one another as they sexualize and banish women from the scene. Paul, a straight edge Christian musician, believes that women get in the way of his ministry because women represent sex. Like other straight edgers, he frowns upon casual sex (Haenfler 2006) and implies that his ministry is best when women are not around. With only men present he “avoids certain temptations like, umm . . . girls trying to ‘get with’ the guys in our band.” Straight edge Christians are not the only ones who see women as sexual objects who get in the way of their ministries. Brad, a Christian Hardcore musician who is not straight edge, feels the music he plays is a good form of ministry because women do not show up for “darker, grungier” bands and the “chicks that dig it are not our type anyway.” Brad later clarifies that the kind of “chicks” who “dig” his music are unattractive because they will “get with anybody.” Brad’s sexual degradation of hardcore women resonates with Pastor Frisk’s statements to Christian men at the UU conference. During his spiritual speaker session, Frisk cautioned attendees against womanizing and whore mongering at live music shows. Through his discourse about men lusting after women, Frisk emphasized “compulsive heterosexuality” (Pascoe 2007) when he suggested that men have a natural urge to want women all the time. This comment not only objectified and marginalized women in the scene, but also it created a safe space where Christian men could vocalize their love for one another without losing their status as heterosexuals.

One of the primary ways that Christian Hardcore men say they “love on” nonbelieving men is by befriending them at live music shows. Samuel, the lead singer of a Christian band, claims hardcore music is “overrun by kids who are screwing up and trying to find themselves” and thinks “many of them are depressed but do not know it yet.” Accordingly, he believes in counseling non-Christians by letting them know that they are broken and deserve love. To make a personal connection with someone, Samuel asks questions like: “What are you doing? Where are you going to school?” He continues, “We become friends and then you can tell me about your home life…and then I’ll tell you a little about my home life.” Samuel claims it is easier for him to love on other men than it is for secular men. This is because fans and audience members generally know which groups are Christian and have come to expect that Christians feel dialogue between men is an evangelical practice, not an expression of sexual interest.

Christian Hardcore men have reason to believe that their love for other men is working. Both Christian and secular interviewees argue that Christian Hardcore bands are accepted more now in hardcore music than ever before. Some even claim that Christian bands are the leaders, not the followers, of contemporary hardcore music. Sean, who identifies as agnostic and straight edge, admires the Christian Hardcore bands that “stand up for what they believe” but do not “shove religion down your throat.” After this remark, Sean lists hardcore Christians that are nice guys—the ones who take time to get to know their audience members after a show. Other secular interviewees express a similar affinity for Christian bands. Liam, the lead singer of a secular hardcore band, respects and appreciates the Christian Hardcore musicians he meets on tour. He said he thinks Christian Hardcore has “gotten so big” because “it’s just so honest.” For him this means that Christian bands are brave enough to profess their faith in secular spheres but they “don’t go around telling you that you’re a bad person if you don’t believe in Jesus.” Instead, they get to know you; as several people put it, “they practice what they preach.” Some secular men even suggest that Christian Hardcore music helps them stay out of trouble. During talk about the growth of Christianity in this music, the bouncer of an all-ages music venue in Nashville, Tennessee, claimed that hardcore shows saved him from “being one of those stereotypical kids who has nothing to do and is cooking meth or whatever.” Greg, whom I met at a subcultural ministries conference, shared a similar story about how hardcore saved him from self-destruction. He spent his early 20s drunk. When he found hardcore music, that changed. Instead of spending his time at bars, he began going to live shows. Through the hardcore scene, Greg discovered Christian Hardcore. He says the people he met through this music rekindled his lost faith in Christ, inspiring him to “dedicate [his] life to God and hardcore music.” Now Greg uses his music to love on other rejected men who he believes are looking for a change.

Christian Hardcore men insist that they are accepted in hardcore music because they put their differences aside and look out for hardcore men. Paul, a straight edge Christian Hardcore musician, has faced backlash over the years: audience members have thrown beer bottles at him and told him to “Go drown in Holy Water!” Despite these attacks, Paul insists that most non-believers respect him because he is genuine about love:

Some of our best friends in the hardcore scene are completely opposite of what we believe. But we loved on them the way that Christ would love on them and we built a friendship. To this day they might not believe what we believe but we still love them like Christ. We’re still close friends with them. We’ll still talk with them on the regular and they respect where we stand. They saw that we lived out what we meant. You know, what we said we believed on stage, we practiced off stage.

When Paul shares that his secular hardcore friends “saw that we lived out what we meant,” he implies that he proved to other hardcore men that he cares about them, even if they do not share his faith in Christ. Likewise Jacob insists that his Christian Hardcore band has received national acclaim because of the rapport he and his band mates build on the road with other hardcore musicians. He says the tours give him a unique “opportunity to love on people, to serve them, to share Christ with them through actions.”

Of course not all secular hardcore youth welcome Christians with open arms. Some told me that they were “sick and tired” of all the preaching bands. This explains why Hardcore Christians often talk about loving nonbelievers as grueling work. The song “Sons of Thunder” by Sleeping Giant illustrates how Christians see their ministry in this music. At first the song mirrors a typical evangelical sermon about Christian grace and forgiveness. It tells listeners to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” As the song develops, it is made clear that the enemies who persecute Christians are the secular youth who Sleeping Giant hope to befriend at their shows. The song continues: “The stinging words of the crowd; they speak of me like I’ve lost my mind; like I’m some kind of joke,” and these “sickening” voices, the song warns, are of the devil. For the next stanza, the singer proclaims that he is “no longer afraid” because this fight is for the souls of nonbelievers and the only way to win this fight is to “overcome this world with love!”

Overall, these findings show that Christian Hardcore men marginalize women through a hybrid mix of aggressive and loving masculinity. Their violent mosh pits at live shows physically push women to the edges of the scene; their explicit focus on loving and befriending men implicitly devalues women and, in some instances, explicitly reduces women to sexual objects.

Conclusion

Christian Hardcore men promote hegemonic gender relations as they seek to make contact with and minister to secular men in hardcore music. Their practice of ministry involves a hybrid masculinity that emphasizes aggression while at the same time embraces love as a strategy to connect to secular men. Through this two-sided expression of manhood, hardcore Christian men uphold the idea that men and women “are bearers of polarized character types” (Connell 2005, 68; Sumerau, Cragun, and Mathers 2015; West and Zimmerman 1987), even as they express qualities typically associated with femininity (being loving) alongside more conventional expressions of masculinity (being aggressive) (Bridges and Pascoe 2014). At the same time, it is important to attend to the context in which Christian Hardcore men express this loving side of manhood. Like other social contexts where the dominant position of heteromasculine men is safe (Barber 2016; Dellinger 2004), hardcore music is a setting that opens up space for Christian Hardcore men to deviate from hegemonic constructions of manhood. In hardcore music, Christian men can compensate (Schrock and Schwalbe 2009) for a loving facade that departs from hegemonic masculinity when they mosh madly to hardcore music or talk about women in sexualized terms. These actions push women to the peripheries of this music scene and nurture the idea that women do not belong in hardcore because women come between them and other men, as well as between them and God.

This study also shows that hardcore Christians combine “soft” or religious performances of masculinity with aggressive expressions of masculinity to manage gender crises outside of religious institutions. These findings underscore that Christianity is a powerful institution and identity, and scholars need to pay closer attention to how men use it to legitimate and reinforce the social domination of men in secular contexts. Studies that focus on how Christian men live and embody religion outside of religious institutions will be able to see how “doing gender” and “doing religion” are co-constitutive (Avishai 2008; Rao 2015), and to what extent gendered practices of religion reinforce, subvert, or strengthen gender binaries that are oppressive to women (Diefendorf 2015; Heath 2003; Messner 1993; Wilkins 2009) beyond the confines of religious congregations and organizations.

Future studies concerned with gender hegemony should consider how white evangelical Christian men forge alliances with other white men who feel emasculated and angry about changing gender relations in U.S. society. It is worth noting that white evangelical Christians are investing secular objects and symbols from popular culture with religious meaning more now than ever before (Burke 2016; Burke and McDowell 2012; Hendershot 2004; Lynch 2005; McDowell 2014; Rademacher 2015), a trend that requires scholars interested in gender hegemony to examine what aspects of popular culture—music, movies, sports, video games—Christian and secular men hold in common and how they leverage these cultural forms to uphold their position in society. This same line of research could extend our understanding of the ways in which class factors into evangelist projects that create space for the alignment of religious and secular men against women. Doing so will help us understand if and how white Christian and secular men protect and foster gender inequality in similar ways. It can also help us identify how Christian and secular men perpetuate gender inequality together.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank the editor, Jo Reger, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their instructive feedback on this article. I also thank Kirsten Dellinger, Kathleen Blee, and Kelsy Burke for their support and suggestions on various stages of this project.

Amy McDowell is an assistant professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Mississippi. Her research and teaching focuses on gender and sexuality, religion, race/ethnicity, culture and cultural performance. She has published articles in the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Qualitative Sociology, Sociological Forum, and the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture.

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