Biblical Manhood and Womanhood According to AI
Why Christian patriarchalists and right-wing influencers tout computer-generated images instead of images of real, embodied people.
Welcome back to the Beaty Beat! Today I’m honored to share a guest essay by writer and Reformation history buff Amy Mantravadi. Amy came on my radar last year due to her brilliant Twitter/X threads, and we had the chance to connect in person at Fraunces Tavern in NYC in late 2023. Both of us are interested in women’s flourishing in the church — which is perhaps why we both recently noted the unsettling trend of patriarchalist/right-wing influencers (think Douglas Wilson) sharing images created by AI to tout idealized manhood and womanhood.
In the following guest essay, Amy digs into what’s going on with these images and describes how often, teachings on biblical manhood and womanhood amount to Law — a set of rules to follow to be considered right before God. Like a good Lutheran, Amy points us all toward the Grace that frees us from having to perform idealized manhood and womanhood. —KB
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You’re scrolling through your social media feed and come across one of those family portraits: multiple generations clumped together just so, all wearing white tops and denim bottoms, with a suitably natural backdrop. Blonde hair and blue eyes abound. The accompanying caption proclaims we need more traditional family values in this country.
Then you notice something odd. The matriarch of the family, a woman of forty or so years with a perfect coiffure, seems to have an identical twin standing on the other side of her husband. Is this the children’s aunt, or did you stumble upon a fundamentalist Mormon group by accident?
You think back to other images you have recently seen: A pair of men lifting a weight together in support of biblical masculinity, only their arms are conjoined. A band of knights guarding the sexual integrity of a young woman in her bed, only they were wearing the insignia of the Knights Templar of the Crusades. A woman standing before a wall covered half in diplomas and half in family photos, representing the stark choice that awaits young females — only the diplomas were from non-existent colleges and some of the photos were duplicates (see above).
I have encountered all these images on Twitter/X over the past few months, each supporting what I call the patriarchy movement: a group of Christians who believe all women should submit to all men, females should be barred from church and secular leadership, and the main purpose of a woman’s life is to be a self-sacrificing wife and mother. Of course, these beliefs are nothing new, but have gained fresh traction on the Internet, overlapping with far-right “manosphere” content creators who lament women’s societal gains and long for a return to a society where (white) men rule.
But that is not the only thing the images had in common: they were all created using artificial intelligence. In other words, the photos lacked the key ingredient of reality. They have an eerie surreality to them, which is what we’d expect from images of robots and not of real people.
The rate at which the seemingly backward-thinking patriarchy movement has adopted forward-thinking technology may seem odd, but in fact, it is entirely predictable, for its leaders have long embraced digitization to spread their message, and this is hardly the first time they have presented something other than reality to the public.
I remember a video by a young woman who insisted on making homemade Cinnamon Toast Crunch for her toddler rather than subjecting him to the harmful stuff one buys at the store. In her immaculate white kitchen, she glided around in a flowing nightgown, her hair perfectly braided, her face skillfully painted, clutching her cooing toddler all the while. Step by step, she made the dough and sliced it with the skill of Errol Flynn, her angelic child applying the cinnamon sugar as if it were the dust of heaven. Throughout, her face is as serene as a Botticelli woman.
Nothing in that video resembled the typical American kitchen. The woman belonged to the tradwife movement: a fantasy world of old-time beauty, but without all the old-time sweat and disease. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, the movement’s promise of domestic bliss has been joined with the patriarchy movement to create something as lacking in reality as anything generated by AI.
While many traditional scholars in the Reformed-ish evangelical world prefer to stay off social media, believing the medium can only rot brains, the leading voices of the patriarchy movement have shown no such compunction, moving into territory others have ceded. They have used Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to connect with swaths of millennial men—and yes, some women—who are longing for something to center their lives as they struggle to raise children, make ends meet, and navigate a rapidly changing world.
Figures like Douglas Wilson have embraced new media as tools rather than shunning them as vices. Wilson’s videos are slickly produced, as are the books released by Canon Press and the content you can now stream on Canon+. Ads for Canon Press publications appear on Amazon pages for more mainstream Reformed books, making good use of the algorithm, reaching millions of people. Social media is their happiest playground, where they can cross paths with the Christian nationalist and Tradwife movements, making it nearly impossible to tell one from the other.
There is something unreal about this all. The exteriors of those Canon Press books look great, but the quality of the interior content is another matter. For example, some readers have noted that the best-selling book The Case for Christian Nationalism (published by Canon) seems to oppose interracial mixing. Some patriarchalists believe that the U.S. Constitution may no longer be fit to address society’s degeneracy, and others dream of the end of women’s suffrage, but neither of these is a practical measure likely to succeed. It costs little to promote them, however, especially when getting ratioed on social media is a cheap form of advertisement.
Not only are these measures unlikely to be enacted, they do not match the experiences of most Americans. Because patriarchalists want America to return to where it was culturally in the 1950s, they seem to think it is possible for a man to simply get a job out of high school, get married and buy a house in his early twenties, and fill it full of children with the matriarch ruling as a domestic goddess. In fact, this represents a phenomenon that only existed for a small window of time for most Americans. The price of goods and housing have long increased faster than Americans’ incomes. Portraying 1950s suburbia as the height of righteousness means that the poor need not apply.
The Unreality Is a Feature, Not a Bug
The longer I have observed the patriarchy movement, the more I have come to see that this unreality is a feature, not a bug. I see smiling faces in profile pics paired with words of anger and bitterness, and I sense something at odds with the good, the true, and the beautiful: a doubled existence driven by an ever-demanding divine law. Yes, that oldest of curses, the law of our condemnation, hides behind the outward perfection, like a rotting corpse in a whitewashed tomb.
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This is where I tend to lose people. Don’t these Christians proclaim the gospel? Don’t they promote the historic Christian confessions? If so, how can I say they are preaching the law?
Ah, but what seems to be driving them? What are they always talking about? The dangers of feminism, public education, beta males, and the Democratic Party! They pay lip service to the gospel, but their social media posts tell the real tale. I asked myself once why I felt so awful after reading these posts, and realized it was because I was getting hit over the head with the law that condemns.
Are you single? Get married. Have two kids? You should have ten more. Send your kids to public school? You ought to be homeschooling them or sending them to classical school. On and on the message plays with an urgency that suggests these are not things that could be beneficial for certain people, but rather an unflinching standard for all people. One learns that God will only favor us if we follow all these rules, which is a complete misunderstanding of the nature of God’s grace.
The preaching of commands without the preaching of forgiven sins is what Martin Luther called the law. And in the case of the patriarchy movement, it is often not God’s eternal law, but extrabiblical laws imposed by man. None of us follow the law perfectly, and the idea that we can by our own actions ensure our righteousness and that of our children is a denial of the gospel. As Luther wrote in his theses for the 1518 Heidelberg Disputation, “The law says, ‘Do this,’ and it is never done. Grace says, ‘Believe in this,’ and everything is already done.” The gospel is nothing less than the fulfillment of God’s law: the promise that our sins are forgiven and we are righteous in Christ. That is the reality now. It is finished.
More to the point, while our public life is certainly under pressure from left-wing forces equally detached from reality, the reaction of the patriarchy movement seems driven by fear: fear of change, of the wrong people gaining power, of having comforts removed. Fear does not allow for forgiveness, love of neighbor, or trust in God’s plan. The louder these teachers declare themselves brave, the more they stink of cowardice.
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At a certain point we must ask, do we really believe in the resurrection of the dead, the sovereignty of God over history, and the forgiveness of sins? Are those our deepest realities? If they are, it ought to change the way we view the world, the things that concern us, and the tasks we set for ourselves. We can live confidently in reality rather than trying to create a fantasy world. We can see our gendered differences as wonderful gifts of God meant to bless one another. We can know a love that only comes through mutual self-giving. It is scary to step out of the fantasy world and make one’s self vulnerable, but that is what is required to experience the love of which Scripture speaks.
The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ introduced a new reality in which the law is fulfilled and its curse broken. His second coming will bring the ultimate perfection we crave. Perhaps we believe this in theory, but has it seeped into our warp and weft? Does it define our reality, transforming our hopes and dreams, granting us merciful relief from our strivings? I hope so, for to rest in him is to be no longer restless: that is the gospel.
Read more of Amy’s work at her Substack, Sub-Creations.
Excellent article! The litmus test for me is that if something is based in fear/power/status/money it is not the Kingdom of God, no matter how much Christianese and bible verses they use.
Also - that family is singing songs from "BOBY DECOLY" and the children have a million fingers!
The image of the AI knights reminds me of the still popular paintings - which are admittedly beautiful to look at - of the Victorian era Pre-Raphaelites that depict a medieval world that never actually existed. Similarly, the AI generated image of the 50s era family singing is faintly reminiscent of Norman Rockwell's popular magazine covers, but even Rockwell was aware of the grimmer reality of that era: https://kentingley.substack.com/p/the-legend-of-norman-rockwell-we. The Preacher's warning that it is foolish to think former eras were better than our own (Ecclesiastes 7:10) is always relevant in refuting such manufactured nostalgia.