In the wake of last week’s University of California, Santa Barbara shooting, a professor at a California college has sought to tie the roots of the suspect’s misogyny with Christianity.
Devin Kuhn-Choi, an assistant professor in the religious studies program at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, attempted to link suspected shooter Elliot Rodger’s views on women with the perspective of “conservative Christianity” in an article written for ReligionDispatches.org, an online publication hosted by the University of Southern California. While Kuhn-Choi makes a point of writing that Rodger “was not directly influenced by conservative Christianity,” she spends much of the essay trying to make a comparison between Christian views on gender roles and the “pick-up artist” culture to which Rodger has been tied.
“Many commentators have discussed the ‘pick up artist’ (PUA) culture in which Rodger’s ideology is based, but broader cultural forces shape the exaggerated ideas of gender roles that are the foundation of Rodger’s misguided notions of masculinity and entitlement — including most conservative Christian constructions of strict gender roles,” writes Kuhn-Choi. “Though they approach beliefs about masculinity from different perspectives, both PUA and contemporary portrayals of conservative Christian masculinity share some similar points.”
One such point, for instance, is the relationship between male power and female ‘submissiveness.’
“In both conservative Christianity and PUA movements, the man is in charge: the leader, the head of the household, the provider. In this interpretation of Christianity, this is the natural, God-ordained role and how the world operates,” Kuhn-Choi writes. “The counterpart to the male leader is the submissive woman.”
Kuhn-Choi grants that any form of Christianity espousing “essentialist notions of gender” presumably doesn’t mean to take it to Rodger’s lengths of “extreme misogyny.”
“Yet the insistence on strictly differentiated gender roles in both conservative Christian and PUA cultures can lead to inequality, a devaluing of women and, in an already patriarchal society, a definition of masculinity that isn’t just a nightmare for men, but a tragedy for all,” she concludes.
The full essay is here.
(h/t The College Fix)
