Nothing says “Love thy neighbor” like a punch to the face. Christian cage fighting is a trendy new phenomenon among some evangelical churches, which are organizing teams and forming leagues. At the website jesusdidnttap.com, one can find upcoming fights, buy logo apparel and check out a gallery of fighters in action, beating their opponents into submission.
In a UFC-style cage fight, men exchange brutal punches and kicks to the legs, torso or head until one or the other “taps out,” that is, begs for mercy. There is no head-butting, eye-gouging or biting, and no grabbing the other guy’s shorts. What appeals to the men who watch these fights is the total domination achieved at the end, often with the loser on his back, legs spread and clasped around the torso of the winner, shielding himself from the blows. To describe the scene as pornographic would be more than a little obvious. It looks like rape.
Ancients knew all about male-on-male domination, and often it took on this same sexualized aspect. It is said that every Roman emperor, save Claudius, was thought to have had anal intercourse with other men.1 They weren’t all gay. Male penetration of another man was the quintessential act of domination—think imperial “prison sex,” not gay sex. The image of an erect male penis was recognized everywhere for its apotropaic powers. If you have ever strolled through the ruins of an ancient Mediterranean city, you will have seen it sculpted on city gates, graphitized on walls and scratched on door lintels. The message of these talismans is clear: If you mess with us, we’ll mess with you.
That was the lesson the men of Sodom thought to teach the strangers lodging in Lot’s home (in Genesis 19). They aren’t randy homosexuals out looking for a good time. They simply intend to put the outsiders in their proper place.
In her book The Reign of the Phallus, Eva Keuls shows that this ubiquitous image of the male penis in fifth-century B.C.E. Athens was part of a culture of “phallicism,” that is, “a combination of male supremacy and the cult of power and violence.”2 She goes on to argue that in 415 B.C.E. the women of Athens became fed up with this “phallocracy” and went about the city knocking the testicles off all the Herms—those small square columns bearing the bust of a man atop and nothing else, save a complete set of genitalia at about groin-height. The Athenians accused Alcibiades of perpetrating this act of impiety, but Keuls blames, or, rather, credits the women of Athens with the “castration of the Herms,” still one of the great unsolved mysteries of antiquity.
In the Gospel of Matthew we hear of a strange, early Christian practice that indicates perhaps that the followers of Jesus contemplated this world of phallo-dominance with a critical eye. Matthew 19:11–12 reads as follows: “And he said to them, ‘Not everyone can receive this saying, but those to whom it has been given: For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and eunuchs who have been castrated by people, and there are eunuchs who have castrated themselves for the sake of the kingdom of Heaven. Let anyone who can receive this, receive it.’”
Scholars squeamish at the thought of Christian castrati have sometimes insisted that this passage must be referring metaphorically to celibacy. But that is nonsense. If Matthew’s author had meant to speak of celibates (parthenoi), he knew perfectly well how to do that. In a religious context, eunuch had to mean eunuch, else he would simply have confused his audience. In the Book of Matthew, Jesus advises men (who can) to emasculate themselves!
Who were these Matthean eunuchs for the 066 kingdom? They were men who believed that following Jesus had nothing to do with masculine dominance and power. Eunuchs in a religious context were the opposite of manly men.
Most people would have known about eunuchs in the various cults of the Roman east. Mostly they served the Mother Goddess as feminized male priests, no longer male, but more female, like the deity they served.3
Matthew’s eunuchs were not the only early Christians who gave thought to breaking down the patterns of male dominance in antiquity. One of the earliest Christian creedal statements declares that in Christ “there is no longer male and female” (Galatians 3:28), and in Corinth the apostle Paul felt compelled to oppose a practice whereby male prophets were beginning to wear their hair long and flowing, so that one could not easily distinguish between male and female cult leaders (1 Corinthians 11:2–16). Paul liked his men and women to look like men and women, but his Corinthian protégés had taken “no longer male and female” to heart.
Matthew’s eunuchs were clearly the most extreme form of this conviction. Here were men who, in the eyes of their peers, “became women” in the most graphic and demonstrative way imaginable. They emasculated themselves, removing the thing that ancients most associated with male power and dominance. This is how they chose to embody the kingdom of heaven on earth.
Every generation or so Christian men complain that the church has become too “feminized” to appeal to the man’s man. The cure for this used to be a men’s breakfast on Saturday morning or an annual camping trip. In today’s hypermasculinized culture, the old ways apparently don’t quite scratch that itch. So modern manly men have taken it up a notch—cage fighting for Christ.
But back when gladiators still did battle and emperors banged senators just to show them who was boss, some Christians actually took it down a notch. Real men, they said, don’t “grow a pair.” They cut them off.
Nothing says “Love thy neighbor” like a punch to the face. Christian cage fighting is a trendy new phenomenon among some evangelical churches, which are organizing teams and forming leagues. At the website jesusdidnttap.com, one can find upcoming fights, buy logo apparel and check out a gallery of fighters in action, beating their opponents into submission. In a UFC-style cage fight, men exchange brutal punches and kicks to the legs, torso or head until one or the other “taps out,” that is, begs for mercy. There is no head-butting, eye-gouging or biting, and no grabbing the other guy’s shorts. […]
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