The Lord Is My MMA Coach

After badly bloodying his opponent inside the octagon cage erected on the White House lawn as part of Donald Trump’s 80th-birthday celebration, Mixed Martial Arts fighter Josh Hokit strutted over to the president and draped a gold chain with a fighting card pendant around his neck. Returning to the ring to be interviewed by Joe Rogan, the fighter said, “Shout out to Trump for havin’ the balls to put some shit like this on.” He continued, invoking his nickname, “There’s only one person more incredible than the incredible Hok, and that’s my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” Since he had the mic, he had another important point to make, shouting, “Michelle Obama is a man!”

But Hokit was not alone in invoking the Almighty. Earlier that evening, after decisively pummelling fellow born-again UFC lightweight fighter Michael Chandler, Brazilian contender Mauricio Ruffy breathlessly announced, “Jesus saved my life, and He wanna to save your life, too. Give your life to Jesus!” It may be unclear if the White House fighters are officially members, but several MMA celebrities have joined the informal “Jesus Christ Warrior” network. They preach in church pulpits, pray at denominational conventions, and evangelize at Christian sporting events. And naturally, most are avid supporters of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.

These are the kind of evangelicals tailor-made for Trump’s strongman persona: Cutthroat combatants with ripped physiques, ready to respond to any challenge with menace, bolstered by the conviction that only might makes right. A prerequisite of their piety appears to involve jettisoning the core principles of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, with its instruction to love not only one’s neighbor but one’s enemy, too. Jesus blessed the “peacemakers,” whom he said were the true “children of God,” and far more likely to feed and clothe opponents than break their jaws and knock out their teeth.

As norm-busting as this president has been, this version of macho religiosity is not a sudden departure from established standards. It’s the culmination of a fifty-year project by American evangelical leaders to bolster “men’s ministries,” while keeping women in their proper place as wives and mothers.

I know because I was part of these efforts. As a former national leader on the religious right, I spent 35 years helping to shape the social and political ethos that has metastasized into such a brutal phenomenon. I deeply regret my role, and over the last ten years have worked hard to try to repair the catastrophic damage it has inflicted on our church and our country.

I watched it all unfold. And here’s how it happened.

UFC fighter Josh Hokit shakes hands with President Donald Trump during the Ultimate Fighting Championship Freedom 250 at the White House, June 14, 2026.Daniel Torok/White House/Planet Pix/ZUMA

The radical departure from Jesus as the humble, gentle, and kind personification of God, whose very nature is love, has a long and tortured history, going back to the origins of Christianity. During the arrest of Jesus, Peter, one of Christ’s first and central disciples, severed the ear of the High Priest’s servant. Jesus severely rebuked Peter and ordered him to put away his weapon, warning, “For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” Centuries later, the Roman emperor Constantine decided to turn the cross, the symbol of Christ’s crucifixion, into a military icon of conquest, which the crusaders deployed to justify beheading those they considered to be heathen. After that, centuries of wars followed, many of them ostensibly directed by God. Today, conservative groups like WallBuilders and the National Black Robe Regiment are the present-day versions of Constantine and his sword as they aggressively militarize the Gospel from the pulpit and declare Christian nationalism as America’s only legitimate religion.

I entered the evangelical scene in 1974, at the end of the Jesus People Movement, when young people who had rejected their parents’ Sunday-best version of Christianity wore their hair long, bell-bottom jeans, and sat cross-legged on sanctuary floors. Church leaders of that time, who supported the Vietnam War, Monday Night Football, and the occasional boxing match, were aghast at our “femme Christianity.” We believed deeply in a peaceful Jesus, supported conscientious objectors, and saw men and women as completely equal in the eyes of God. We could prove this by referencing Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Even then, leading evangelical voices insisted that gender equality was neither true nor virtuous. They fretted that more women were attending Bible studies and services than men, and set about trying to reverse that trend. Bill Gothard, a popular Bible teacher whose Institute in Basic Youth Conflict (IBYC) drew tens of thousands of attendees to its multi-day seminars, promoted what he called the “Chain of Command,” which stipulated that God holds authority over men; husbands over their wives; parents over their children; civil authorities over citizens; pastors over congregants; and employers over workers. To reject or question this “umbrella of protection,” as he described it, meant being susceptible to the wiles of Satan.

As a young minister, I attended several of Gothard’s seminars, where he trained thousands of clergy to use these concepts in preaching, religious education, and deploying them in families through organized home meetings. Gothard asserted that men needed to be affirmed in their rightful God-given roles, or they wouldn’t find the gospel appealing enough to follow. No one knew back then what several former interns and employees would reveal in 2014: Gothard had been sexually harassing teen girls and young women in his organization for years. He was later forced to resign as lawsuits piled up, litigation that continues to this date. (Now 91 years old, he suffered a massive heart attack at the end of June.)

I fully subscribed to Gothard’s teachings, tried to implement them in my family, preached about them, and sold his books when I gave talks to youth groups, family conferences, and summer Bible camps. By the mid-1980s, I’d left the Jesus People movement for what I call “Ronald Reagan Republican Religion.” In 1983, after taking my seat at the table of national leadership and listening to Reagan be the first sitting president to address the National Association of Evangelicals, I started to dress the part. My new evangelical vestment became pin-striped power suits, banker shirts, wide silk ties, and leather-cap Oxford shoes.

But my efforts to get men back into the church were decidedly less conventional. I served as a board member of the Power Team, a group of traveling, muscle-bound evangelists who performed feats of strength, like breaking bricks with their foreheads and bending steel bars with their bare hands, during services. John Jacobs, a young Pentecostal minister, and his collection of eight or ten bodybuilders would turn sanctuary altars into something resembling pro-wrestling rings. Sweating and shouting into spit-drenched microphone pop-filters, Jacobs urged audiences to come to Jesus while he ripped thick phone books apart with his teeth, or straddled an associate lying on a bed of nails. To combat perceptions of religious men as weak and effeminate, Jacobs preached that Jesus was no “skinny little man” but a “man’s man.” Men and women in the congregation tended to be uninhibited in their responses, shouting “Amen, brother!” and “You tell ‘em!”

“To be like Jesus, Christlike, requires a certain ruthlessness; manhood does also.”

Enormously popular books of that era challenged Christian men to step up as the primary spiritual protectors and providers for their wives and children. In Straight Talk to Men and Their Wives, James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, a national evangelical organization devoted to promoting conservative Christian parenting advice, argued that modern society, feminism, and the sexual revolution were erasing biblical masculinity and leaving boys and men adrift, without a moral anchor. “There should be a clear delineation between maleness and femaleness, exemplified by clothing, customs, and function,” he wrote. “Men should be encouraged to provide for and protect their families.”

After a perceived slight by then-President Jimmy Carter, a fellow evangelical, who did not initially invite Dobson to a 1979 White House conference on the family, Dobson marshalled his popularity among evangelicals to help Ronald Reagan successfully unseat Carter a year later. He would go on to help shape the GOP’s family policies, particularly those supporting the traditional family structures he promoted in his book.

Preaching nationwide as an itinerant evangelist, I encountered many congregations using Edwin Louis Cole’s Maximizing Manhood in their Sunday school classes for men. Cole became famous for his maxim, “To be like Jesus, Christlike, requires a certain ruthlessness; manhood does also.” Eventually, the villains became a certain kind of “ruthless” woman. Borrowing a derisive term invented by radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who by the early 1990s was fast outpacing any Christian radio personality when it came to audience numbers, many men blamed “feminazis” for turning boys gay and undermining fatherly authority in homes.

By the time House Republicans recaptured their majority after more than 40 years in 1994, nobody was more influential in the expanding Christian men’s movement than University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney and his Promise Keepers movement. The organization staged large-scale rallies for men, often in sports stadiums, and, in 1997, one also attended by tens of thousands on the National Mall in Washington, DC. A retinue of male speakers, curated by McCartney, exhorted attendees to assume their rightful leadership roles in their homes, churches, and communities.

In his final call to action, McCartney, speaking of pastors and other religious authorities, shouted to those in the audience, “Obey your leaders and submit to their authority,” He then directed them to return home and work towards a January 1, 2000, nationwide witness when pastors would bring men from their congregations to their state capitol buildings to demonstrate the complete integration and involvement of “real men” in the lives of their churches. He also conveyed a special message to the clergy present. “You’ve been working with mostly women,’ he scolded, “but that’s going to change; you have to be ready now. These guys are coming back.”

I was at that Washington event with a group of antiabortion activists who were lobbying McCartney to take a stronger stand on the issue, something he would do some years later. I also attended many smaller events around the country and spoke at several of them. While our messaging was tempered with requisite entreaties to love, be faithful, and serve God and one’s fellow man, particularly across racial lines, the events underscored the exclusive and dominant role of men in biblical culture and American society. That meant opposing LGBTQ+ rights and same-sex marriage. Nonetheless, compared to what was also unfolding elsewhere in the evangelical men’s movement, PK’s tone on social and political issues could almost be seen as moderate. Soon, that would change.

With the AIDS epidemic and the assertion of gay rights, the ’90s became a period of escalating anxiety over sexuality and gender for the evangelical community. With this as the backdrop, Pastor Mark Driscoll co-founded the Seattle-based megachurch, Mars Hill, in 1996. One of the first young evangelical leaders to buff up his body and trade a suit for a tight t-shirt and skinny jeans, Driscoll was known for his wild rants about “pussified men.” His church empire began as a Bible study group and eventually expanded to 15 churches in 4 states. Driscoll’s influence quickly spread; pastors around the country attended his leadership seminars, listened to his recorded sermons, and purchased his numerous books, including the short-lived number one bestseller, Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, & Life Together, on his rigid theological views regarding gender roles, sex, and family. It fell off the charts after World Magazine exposed how Driscoll paid a marketing company to fabricate individual sales figures by orchestrating bulk sales internally. Nevertheless, his popularity as a provocateur kept rising.

Driscoll instructed the married women in his congregation that they owed their husbands sex upon demand. And if their husbands were reluctant to go to church, oral sex was a good way to change their men’s minds. His brand of Christian manliness was a step beyond anything previously promulgated. He mocked the Promise Keepers as frequented by men dressed in pastel colors who cried and hugged each other too much. In the aftermath of 9/11, he told his congregation that an “intense femininity has crept into Christianity. Islam is a masculine religion. That’s why they ran an airplane into the World Trade Center. And we meet in Central Park, and we get men like Elton John to play the piano and cry.” In 2007, he told Relevant Magazine, a publication for twenty-something evangelicals, “In Revelation, Jesus is a pride [sic] fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand, and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.”

Thousands of born-again Christians join a “Promise Keepers” rally to pray, renounce their sins, and commit to a life based on the Bible on October 4, 1997, on the mall in Washington, DC.Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty

“In Revelation, Jesus is a prize fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand, and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.”

Christian masculinity had moved into the mainstream of American evangelical culture when John Eldredge, a licensed counselor trained at Colorado Christian University and a former spokesperson for Dobson’s Focus on the Family, published his 2001 blockbuster bestseller, Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul. His book was a sort of Christianized version of Robert Bly’s Iron John, but unlike Bly’s secular juggernaut, Eldredge relied on a biblical narrative. He argued that because Adam was created outside the domesticated Garden of Eden, his very nature was to be wild and dangerous. Eve, on the other hand, was shaped out of Adam’s rib, the one near his heart, inside Eden’s verdant sanctuary, so she was predisposed to relational intimacy, beauty, and nesting. Thus, men seek battles, odysseys, and maidens to rescue, but women seek bonding, stability, and children. Eldredge acknowledges the emotional wounds men carry in their psyches. But he nevertheless further elevated the ideal Christian man as a primal, weaponized warrior rather than a gentle, long-suffering saint. Where once Christianity focused on a man’s character as a counterweight to his raw capacity for aggression, in the new paradigm, the primary spiritual duty of a Christian man is to stop apologizing, identify an enemy, and fight it.

Where once Christianity focused on a man’s character as a counterweight to his raw capacity for aggression, in the new paradigm, the primary spiritual duty of a Christian man is to stop apologizing, identify an enemy, and fight it.

Meanwhile, another regressive, reactionary groundswell was underway. In 2009, CNBC on-air editor Rick Santelli fiercely criticized the Obama bank bailouts and called for a new American Tea Party. Within ten days, coordinated protests occurred in over 40 cities. Evangelicals, suspicious of government, wed to the Republican Party, and tired of losing the culture wars, eagerly joined in. At the time, I was chaplain to the very conservative Capitol Hill Executive Service Club, the only private association allowed to meet regularly inside the Capitol Building’s prestigious Mansfield Room. Tea Partiers joined our club and brought a loud, bellicose, insulting, and even menacing communication style I had never seen in that type of setting. In one discussion, several Tea Party members bragged that they were ready to take up arms to get their way.

One prominent Tea Party figure was then-Alaska governor Sarah Palin, whose membership in independent Bible and Assemblies of God churches made her a card-carrying evangelical. I was present in Dayton, Ohio, when John McCain announced her as his GOP running mate. When I was invited on the platform afterward, I told McCain he had just won over my evangelical universe with his pick. It took my peers some months to share my enthusiasm. But as November approached, we were all on board. While out on the road with McCain, a colleague said to me, “At first I couldn’t believe he chose a woman for VP, but it turns out she has bigger balls than he does.”

Unlike McCain, Palin broke with decorum. In an outrageous approach then, but has become mainstream today, she attacked Barack Obama and Joe Biden with sophomoric name-calling, cheap insults, and flat-out lies, at one point asserting that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” Not to be left behind, evangelical luminaries, who did not want to be outdone by a woman, would mimic her style. Greg Locke of Global Vision Bible Church in Lebanon, Tennessee, began to rely on screaming and hyper-aggressive, combative rhetoric to shock listeners. Targeting Planned Parenthood, public education, and Democrats, he called liberals “demonic,” “perverts,” and “godless.” Steven Anderson, the founder of Phoenix’s Faithful Word Baptist Church, started using graphic taunts he described as “hard preaching.” After same-sex marriage was legalized in 2015, he trafficked in homophobic slurs and openly prayed for the deaths of political leaders and activists. His language was so abusive that he was eventually banned from several foreign countries, including the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Netherlands.

Driscoll, Locke, Anderson, and others provided theological justification to reimagine evangelical masculinity that would, in turn, fundamentally reshape the American political landscape. As historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez observes in her definitive study, Jesus and John Wayne, this “warrior theology” effectively served as the psychological runway for white evangelicals to embrace Donald Trump. For a demographic convinced that their culture was under siege and that traditional masculinity was being systematically eradicated, a polished, “nice guy” politician was no longer sufficient. They did not want a pastor; they wanted a strongman.

My experience with this played out vividly at a luncheon with top evangelical leaders during the 2016 Republican National Convention. I was there to support Senator Ted Cruz, but virtually everyone I knew or worked alongside over the previous three decades supported Trump. They saw him as a contemporary Cyrus, the megalomaniacal Persian emperor who defeated the Babylonians and repatriated the Jews to Jerusalem. Many evangelicals considered Cyrus to be an amoral ruler, but believed he was God’s instrument since he liberated the Jews.

“Now, we’re going to go into that hall and back him. Then, we’ll all go into the bathroom and puke our guts out. Then we’ll go on the road and make him president.”

When I expressed my discomfort with Trump to the head of a large religious right think tank, he had a ready response. “Look, Rob, he alone can do what we need done,” he said, referring to eliminating abortion, dialing back the expansion of gay rights, and officially designating America to be a Christian nation. “Now, we’re going to go into that hall and back him. Then, we’ll all go into the bathroom and puke our guts out. Then we’ll go on the road and make him president.” His craven cynicism killed my appetite. I pushed my plate away. Immediately following Trump’s acceptance speech, I left the convention, and the Conservative movement.

By training an entire generation of men to believe that God made them dangerous, adventurous, and inherently combative, the men’s ministries of the last five decades have left the church uniquely vulnerable to a populist political movement built on grievance, power dynamics, and a rejection of institutional restraint. When MAGA Christianity arrived, it simply traded Eldredge’s metaphorical wilderness for a literal political battlefield, weaponizing the “wild man” archetype into a partisan militant.

“In 2016, many observers were shocked by the enthusiastic support white evangelicals offered Donald Trump,” Du Mez notes. “But a longer look at the history of evangelical masculinity suggests that Trump was not a rupture with evangelical values, but rather the culmination of them.” Evangelicals have been conditioned for centuries to view men as superior to women, embracing St. Paul’s admonition, “I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man.” They took John Knox’s 1558 treatise The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women literally, as well as a collection of modern publications from the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

Women clergy are rare among evangelicals, typically treated as either amusing aberrations or regrettable manifestations of rebellion or failure in the church. The Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest evangelical denomination, just advanced a resolution banning churches with female pastors.

For over 300 years, American evangelicalism has transformed dramatically, from refined Presbyterianism to animated Methodism (earning it the label “holy rollers”) to Pentecostalism, Jesus People hippieism, and everything between: abolitionists, suffragists, fundamentalists, and more. Now it’s experiencing its most radical shift yet: MAGAism, a surging, testosterone-saturated, phallocentric religious species promoted as a nationalized religion by Trump cabinet members like Pete Hegseth and Markwayne Mullin, who flaunt ripped abs, imitate Hulk Hogan, and pledge devotion to a sword-brandishing Book-of-Revelation Jesus.

Even Promise Keepers has become Trumpified. A New CEO, Shane Winnings, is a full-bearded, strapping, former Army lieutenant and police officer, and diehard Trump supporter. He emphatically rejected the group’s quasi-apolitical stance, instead platforming MAGA-friendly personalities, including the late Charlie Kirk, and joining public prayer circles for Trump in the Oval Office. Winning’s latest initiative is a college speaking tour under the moniker, “America Needs Godly Men.”

Shane Winnings speaks onstage during Mike Signorelli and V1 Worship-Breakers 2024 at Now Arena on October 26, 2024, in Hoffman Estates, Illinois.Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images for V1 Church

For two days in June, an even newer, millennial-driven expression of reborn masculinity was on full display at “The Gorge,” a world-famous amphitheater on the Columbia River in, yes, George, Washington. “Freedom Con” was billed as “An American Congress of Christian Men,” and was sponsored by Stronger Man Nation, an organization that promotes “biblical manhood, marriage, and leadership.” What set this event apart from so many of its predecessors was the boldness of its messaging around political engagement. Its website promised the convening would “call men to a plan of action for preserving the vision of America’s Founding Fathers,” and that speakers would “unpack the historical precedent, biblical foundation, and moral necessity of Christian statesmanship.”

With a large-screen backdrop video showing fiery explosions and men in tactical gear running in battlefield maneuvers while shooting at targets, one of the keynote speakers, John Lovell, a former Army Ranger, was introduced as “a best-selling author, firearms trainer, and media leader whose content has garnered over 100 million views.” At the end of his 38-minute talk, Lovell warned the 4,500 attendees of a “lie that Satan uses to keep us from putting our foot in the ring, and it’s this: that politics is an off-limits place.” Becoming louder and increasingly animated, and to his audience’s escalating cheers and applause, Lovell concluded by asserting, “The politician should report to the pastors. Politicians are under the station of those in the pulpit who have the mouth and counsel of the Lord.”

Before Trump’s White House cage brawl, one of my old right-wing interlocutors, with whom I maintain a tenuous line of communication, dismissed my alarm “There may be a lot of blood and bruising, but no one dies in the Octagon,” he said condescendingly. But my concern went way beyond the sport’s potential lethality to the message it telegraphed, especially to the religious community that has been my spiritual home for over 50 years. Presidential endorsement carries monumental weight for evangelicals. Trump’s sanction of a form of amusement once forbidden to evangelicals because it violates historic holiness behavioral codes will no doubt contribute to the continued erosion of Christian decency, as a recent incident bears out.

On June 23, right-wing election-denying, anti-vax, wildly Trump-supporting pastor Tony Spell of Central, Louisiana, outside Baton Rouge, decided to reinterpret a New Testament passage calling for hands to be laid on the sick in prayer, so that they may supernaturally recover from their illness. Instead, the 48-year-old Spell used the mandate to justify severely beating a 20-year-old neighbor whom he claims threatened to rape his wife, children, and grandchildren, although he’s offered no proof. Spell dashed across four lanes of traffic and took down the younger man with moves reminiscent of MMA ground-and-pound, delivering furious punches to the head and face. He was arrested for second-degree battery, but bonded out of jail in time to preach at a regularly scheduled Tuesday night service, during which he told his congregants, “I fulfilled the scripture, and laid hands on the sick.” Then, he added, “I don’t know how much of a recovery they’re going to have, but I laid hands on the sick.” His sarcasm was met with laughs, applause, and whistling.

In the days that followed, a video of the preacher mounting his subject, whom he later referred to as a “little f**gg*tt boy,” raising his arm, and landing his closed fist with tremendous force more than 30 times, went viral on Facebook and Instagram. Scrolling through hundreds of comments, I was struck by how many supported Spell. “When a man gets married, he promises to ‘love and protect’ his bride,” one of the typical ones wrote. “That is what Pastor Tony Spell did . . . protect his bride and family from threats being made.”

In Trump, many of my fellow evangelicals got the manly president they wanted, the one who would pummel their enemies and demonize those who disagreed with him. He was the culmination of some of the most troubling forces that had been part of this movement for the last fifty years. Too many have traded the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount and his woke teachings on love for a warrior deity who bears a striking resemblance to the Vikings’ bloodthirsty Odin, whose mythical wolves devour his enemies. In unintentional irony, the very sermon whose message they abandoned ends with a warning they forgot to heed. It’s from Matthew 7:15: “Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.”

Unfortunately, this flock did not flee the wolf; they made him president.