Wild at Consumerism

When Wild at Heart was first published in 2001, it read like a retrosexual call to arms. It tapped into the growing backlash in society against feminized men and responded in a strikingly evangelical way with a single basic message: Men are different than Women. Men are supposed to be wild and strong, and there's nothing wrong with that, and trying to make a man into anything different is wrong and will kill him rather than change him.

Not quite a call to live in caves and eat raw meat, the book challenged cultural conceptions of men, specifically in the church, and called on church leaders to stop trying to make men into something they weren't intended to be. Specifically, it helped men understand why they felt so out of place in what seemed like an endless series of smiley Sunday sermons, bible studies, and pedantic Christian living work-books. The reason was that these things didn't satisfy a man's basic need to be free and strong. It left a person with the impression that activities like sports and hiking and smoking pipes and watching good movies was more important than the bible studies.

Suburban evangelical men, struggling beneath the malaise of their too structured, too simple, too easy, too boring lives ate it up. Sales soared. The books author, John Eldridge, founded a ministry and started doing seminars. He was interviewed for magazines, and wrote several sequels that said pretty much the exact same thing, though no one seemed to realize this.

Now, in 2006, the Wild at Heart frenzy is waning. Specious theology and growing irrelevance have landed the book close to the Promise Keepers movement in the evangelical world. Suburban men are, for the moment, either over or ignorant of the malaise, and a growing number of less testosterone driven metrosexuals are making their consumer needs felt and pushing the book more towards obscurity.

The solution? Join the malaise.

I opened my email this morning to find an amazon.com email advertising "The Way of the Wild Heart Manual: A Personal Map for Your Masculine Journey." This is the second "Wild at Heart" work book Eldridge has published, and it looks more desperate and even further from his thesis. If the thing men don't need is more programs, more work books, and more systems, why does he keep publishing them?

Because someone behind this whole thing, whether it's Eldridge or his publishing company or his editor or his wife or whoever, someone wants to keep the cash coming. Someone's more interested in the money than the message, and is selling out to the "WWJD"/"Prayer of Jabez"/"Tickle Me Elmo" movement of mass consumer Christian marketing.

It saddens me because, for better or worse, I read this book first at a tough time in my life when I needed to hear exactly what it said. Crappy theology aside, at 19 I was having a hard time feeling like I was up to being a man. This is kind of awkward to write about, but the transition out of being an irreverent kid interested in fantasy novels and comic books and video games into a mature adult interested in fantasy novels, comic books and video games was hard for me. I need someone to tell me that it was ok, that I could do it, and that was I supposed to do it, and made for it. I needed a little inspiration. Wild at Heart gave that to me, for whatever reason, and its a little disappointing to see it diminish into one of the things it spoke so strongly against, at least to me.

Will there be an October tally? I don't know! Do you want one?