"At the time I perceived most religious men, particularly the pastors with all their talk about love, faith and relationship, as effeminate"
About this Quote
The line lands like a confession and an accusation at once: a younger Luke Ford looking at American Christianity and seeing not transcendence, but gender performance. “At the time I perceived” is the tell. It softens the blow just enough to signal retrospection, a hedge that both admits bias and preserves the memory’s sting. He isn’t only describing pastors; he’s describing what their vocabulary did to him. “Love, faith and relationship” reads like the church’s greatest hits, but Ford frames that language as suspect because it doesn’t map onto the masculinity he’s been taught to respect.
The word “effeminate” does the real work. It’s not a neutral observation; it’s a policing term, a way to downgrade men by associating them with traits coded as feminine and therefore, in his worldview then, lesser. The subtext is a cultural clash between evangelical therapeutic talk (emotion, intimacy, vulnerability) and a masculine ideal built around hardness, status, and suspicion of feeling. Pastors become targets not because they lack conviction, but because they traffic in a kind of emotional fluency Ford interprets as weakness or manipulation.
Context matters: late-20th-century American religion increasingly marketed itself through “relationship with God” language, importing the tone of counseling and self-help. Ford’s sentence captures how that shift could read, to some men, as feminized or domesticated Christianity. It also hints at a personal origin story: the moment before conversion, backlash, or reinvention, when ridicule functions as armor against a world asking for softness.
The word “effeminate” does the real work. It’s not a neutral observation; it’s a policing term, a way to downgrade men by associating them with traits coded as feminine and therefore, in his worldview then, lesser. The subtext is a cultural clash between evangelical therapeutic talk (emotion, intimacy, vulnerability) and a masculine ideal built around hardness, status, and suspicion of feeling. Pastors become targets not because they lack conviction, but because they traffic in a kind of emotional fluency Ford interprets as weakness or manipulation.
Context matters: late-20th-century American religion increasingly marketed itself through “relationship with God” language, importing the tone of counseling and self-help. Ford’s sentence captures how that shift could read, to some men, as feminized or domesticated Christianity. It also hints at a personal origin story: the moment before conversion, backlash, or reinvention, when ridicule functions as armor against a world asking for softness.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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