At “Might & Mirth” gatherings, Glenn Jones said, men encourage one another while embodying God’s masculine designs: Strong and forceful, but jolly all the same.
He’s a leader at Trinity Reformed Chattanooga, a new congregation linked to a small — but, according to one attendee Thursday, punchy and ascendant — conservative evangelical group, which has been in the news recently on account of its ties to the Tennessee-based former Army National Guard officer, Fox News weekend host and “anti-woke” Christian crusader Pete Hegseth, put forth by President-elect Donald Trump to run the U.S. military.
Hegseth is just one expression of the sway the group and its ideas might have in Trump’s America.
The possibilities and limits of this influence were more or less the questions that Jones and six other men gathered at a cigar bar one evening this week to discuss.
There was a time, according to a prominent theory, when to announce oneself as a Christian in American was to, on net-balance, boost one’s social capital. Yet times have changed, said Jones, summarizing the theory through cigar smoke and over the loud music in the room. In the past decade or so, the theory asserts, society has by and large come to a negative view of Christians, who are now not infrequently dismissed as bigots and weirdos.