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Dallas, Spence Publishing Company, 1999. 288 pp. $14.00.
Christianity is often derided as the ultimate patriarchal religion: its Godhead a masculine Trinity, its clergy (at least until recently) entirely male, its theologians often misogynistic, its traditional proscriptions against divorce, abortion, gay lifestyles, and extramarital canoodling a supposed infringement of women's healthy sexuality. So, why is it that Christian women overwhelmingly fill the pews on Sunday, while their menfolk play golf or lie abed on a weekly St. Crispin's Day of snoozing and remote-punching?
This is distinctly the case among the mainline-to-liberal Protestant denominations, where women fill the leadership roles in many churches, forming a critical female mass that might make the Sunday service too much of a girls' morning out for many otherwise worship-inclined men. But it is also the case among Catholics, whose priesthood is closed to women and where those oppressive traditional restrictions on marital and reproductive behavior still prevail, if often in the breach. And it is even the case among evangelicals, they of the Promise Keepers, the football-field prayer circles, and the manly preachers who wear suits at the altar, not foppish robes.
"Men do not go to church," observes this book's author, Leon J. Podles, a freelance conservative intellectual who was raised Catholic but now seems to be one of his own statistics of male Christian disaffection. To explain the falling off, Podles doesn't just blame the usual suspects, the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s who agitated for women clergy and gender-oh-so-sensitive "inclusive" language, but constructs a grand narrative that stretches back to biblical times.
In the good Old Testament days, says Podles, the God of the Hebrews personified a properly masculinity-reinforcing faith: He laid down the law (literally), acted with sovereign freedom to choose Israel as his people, and radiated holiness, "a masculine quality"...