Soft Patriarchs; New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands, by W. Bradford Wilcox

Soft Patriarchs; New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands. W. Bradford Wilcox. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2004. 337 pp. ISBN 0-2268-9709-5. $20.00 (paper); 0-2268-9708-7. $62.00 (hardback). A couple of years ago, two books appeared that made the case that marriage was good for men. Nock (1998) and Palkovitz (2002) argued that marriage provides entry into adulthood for men via engagement in networks of association, greater commitment to wage earning, and often, it turns out, religious participation. Brad Wilcox's Soft Patriarchs; New Men, picks up on this story by assessing the ways in which religion, specifically conservative Christianity, is also good for men, and by extension, he intimates, their wives and children as well. At the center of the book are two questions: Has modernity weakened the ability of religious communities to influence family? Is religion increasingly marginal in shaping family culture and practice? In seeking to answer these, Wilcox locates the sources of parenting strategies in religious institutional and subcultural strength and in the varying social locations of Protestants vis-a-vis modernity. The book begins with a reading of trends in the production and content of conservative and mainline Protestant culture-assessing the ways in which popular family advice literature, sermons, and relevant denominational statements variously situate these communities vis-a-vis modernity. He makes that case that mainline Protestants are positioned both theologically and socioeconomically in ways that would lead us to expect them to adopt an accommodationist stance on issues around marriage, divorce, gender identity, and the division of family labor. Conservative Protestants, he argues, are likely to resist "modern" family diversity, openness to multiple sexualities, and to be much more traditional and conservative when it comes to ideas about gender and family. The findings in this section bear out these hypotheses. The remainder of the book goes on to compare attitudes and behavior reported by conservative Protestant, mainline Protestant, and unaffiliated men (a discussion of Roman Catholics appears in an appendix), based on a range of publically available national survey data (including the General Social Survey; National Survey of Families and Households 1 and 2, and the Survey of Adults and Youth). He finds that although mainline rhetoric emphasizes tolerance and diversity, most mainline church-going men are conventional, middle-income husbands who are involved fathers and increasingly likely to help out at home. More surprisingly, he finds that conservative Protestants, particularly those who are actively involved in their churches, are even more likely to be involved expressive fathers and emotionally connected husbands. Not so surprisingly, these men also are more likely to be authoritative in their parenting style, hold more hierarchical ideas about gender, and help out less with housework. Overall, the book makes several substantial contributions to the literature on family, religion, and manhood. First, in answer to its central question, it appears that "modernity" has not weakened the relevance of religion to family culture and practice. Second, Wilcox's analysis illustrates the importance of attending to both the rhetoric of cultural producers and ordinary believers in assessing the effects of religion on family life. Across his analysis, he finds that mainliners are more traditional than what the inclusivist rhetoric of denominational leaders suggests, and conservative Protestants are generally less conservative than what cultural producers, such as Dobson, or Moral Majority, would suggest. …