A small start-up Web zine, The Art of Manliness wanted readers to know that they were not looking for girly men.
Sponsored by Old Spice, the venerable line of men’s shaving and hygiene products, the zine solicited nominations from readers for its first annual Man of the Year, to honor men who “epitomize the manliness that used to exist before the arrival of metrosexual pretty boys.”
They were looking for “men like Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Men like your grandpa,” who “understood things like hard work, responsibility, and looking out for others. They lived by a code of honor and respect for others.”
Winner Matthew Chancey, a marketing and communications consultant from Ashville, Alabama—an up-and-coming Republican politician—topped a field of ten finalists with thirty percent of the vote (3038 votes). He is now honored as one who knows “what it means to be a man,” which includes a $2,000 prize “and a manly stash of Old Spice products.”
“It was not possible,” according to the contest rules, “or even desirable to quiz each candidate about their political, religious, and social views.”
But as it happens, it was precisely those views that led to his win.
The Manly Theocrat
Matthew Chancey is an aspiring religious right politician who hails from some of the most unusual and archaic precincts of modern American religious, political, and social life. These precincts apparently turned out for him during a “get out the vote” campaign in the 48 hours before the contest deadline.
Key to Chancey’s victory were the efforts of both his wife, who nominated him, and an entrepreneur named Doug Phillips, an important figure in the homeschooling movement, and his large family and network of supporters.
Phillips is an old pal of Chancey’s and a religious and political co-belligerent from their days on the staff of the Home School Legal Defense Association; he heads a Texas-based organization called Vision Forum, which produces and markets books and other materials for conservative Christian homeschoolers.
But to describe Vision Forum as ‘conservative’ does not tell the half of it. Phillips is a follower of Christian Reconstructionism, a movement whose seminal figure is Calvinist theologian R.J. Rushdoony, who died in 2001. Rushdoony’s voluminous, and explicitly theocratic work, (such as the Institutes of Biblical Law) was a pivotal influence in the development of the religious right, and more particularly, the countercultural homeschooling and Christian school movements.
Vision Forum’s product line includes the Beautiful Girlhood Collection, which, “aspires, by the grace of God, to 
encourage the rebuilding of a culture of virtuous womanhood. In a world that frowns on femininity, that minimizes motherhood, and that belittles the beauty of being a true woman of God, we dare to believe that the biblical vision for girlhood is a glorious vision.”
Phillips is also the publisher of Matthew Chancey’s wife Jennie’s latest title, Passionate Housewives Desperate for God, a book that asks the question: “Do you wrestle with cultural messages that demean the homemaker’s calling and exalt instead the emotionally androgynous power-woman?” Mrs. Chancey is a popular speaker on matters of wifely submission and “faithful” daughterhood (namely, eschewing college to stay under a father’s protection until marriage).
And then there is Vision Forum’s “All-American Boy’s Adventure Catalog.”
“I knew my husband was a real man from the start,” Jennifer Chancey wrote in the her nominating essay, noting that he wore “impeccable three-piece suits and natty ties at age 19.” Her essay, which mentions his humanitarian work in Sudan (Christian missionary and relief work, carried out in consort with Phillips’ brother, Brad), is illustrated with a photo of Matthew dressed like a Texas gentleman rancher, holding a long unlit cigar, and inexplicably accompanied by two armed Sudanese “freedom fighters” in military garb. “The photo was taken,” Jennifer writes, “in the upper Nile. My husband, cool as a cucumber in the 120-degree heat, demonstrates that it is possible to be well-dressed even in the far reaches of Africa.”
RD contributor Kathryn Joyce, author of the forthcoming Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement (Beacon Press, March 2009), calls it “pretty savvy marketing” in our e-mail interview:
Tags: art of manliness, frederick clarkson, identity, matthew chancey, metrosexual, reconstructionist, stereotypes
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