John Eldredge, the author of a million plus bestseller, “Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul,” has been cited as spiritual inspiration for a ruthless fundamentalist Mexican drug gang called La Familia.
The leader of the gang, which controls most of the Crystal Meth traffic in the US is Nazario Morena who has just written a 104 page booklet called “Thoughts” that gives Christian inspirational advice. Morena also expects his gang members to study the Bible and pray the Rosary even as they gun down police, dismember opponents and manufacture drugs. La Familia hit the headlines in 2006 when they threw severed heads into a Mexican disco, and they have become infamous for brutality mixed with pseudo-spirituality.
Morena has made John Eldredge’s book required reading for his gang members because he so appreciates Eldredge’s tendency to encourage Christian men to rediscover their masculinity in toughness and violence.
So what exactly is it about "Wild at Heart" that Morena loves? Well, for a start, Eldredge writes approvingly of men’s innate love of weapons, combat and hunting.
“Aggression is part of the masculine design; we are hardwired for it. If we believe that man is made in the image of God, then we would do well to remember that “the Lord is a warrior (Exodus 15:3).”
When the macho passages in Wild at Heart are read in context, it’s apparent that Eldredge’s animosity is toward what he sees as society’s emasculation of the male. His remedy is physical adventures in nature and an embracing of the Bible. He writes elsewhere that:
“Capes and swords, camouflage, bandannas and six shooters–these are the uniforms of boyhood. Little boys yearn to know that they are powerful, they are dangerous, they are something to be reckoned with. How many parents have tried to prevent little Timmy from playing with guns? Give it up. If you do not supply a boy with weapons, he will make them from whatever materials are at hand. My boys chew their graham crackers into the shape of handguns at the breakfast table.”
Over the course of his book, Eldredge tries to convince his readers that it is natural, or “in the blood” of men to yearn for violence. He says that, “Women didn’t make Braveheart one of the best selling films of the decade. Flying Tigers, The Bridge Over The River Kwai, The Magnificent Seven, Shane, High Noon, Saving Private Ryan, Top Gun, The Die Hard films, Gladiator–the movies a man loves reveal what his heart yearns for, what is set inside him from the day of his birth. Like it or not, there is something fierce in the heart of every man.”
However, abundant psychological research has proven that humans (both sexes) have an instinctive aversion to killing others. Most soldiers, other than the estimated two percent who are sociopaths, have to go through specific conditioning before they are able to fire weapons at others. For example in World War Two (prior to the development of such conditioning) according to one study only 15-20% of U.S. riflemen fired their rifles in combat.
Eldredge has distanced himself from La Familia claiming that they have fundamentally misunderstood his message.
(To read the full article, please go to http://blogs.alternet.org).