We can now refine Yeats’ observation. Godhead is commonly perceived as masculine in a social and cultural context where power and authority are understood as masculine. But not any kind of masculine. Familiar images of God draw specifically on hegemonic constructions of masculinity – and not just in the benevolent bourgeois grandfather pictured on Sunday School cards. Consider, for instance, the forbidding images of royal power in Byzantine mosaics of Christ Pantokrator; or the hypermasculine figure of wrath that Michelangelo painted at the centre of the altar wall in the Sistine Chapel.

Since hegemonic masculinities are based on the subordination of other masculinities, it’s not surprising that patriarchal religions police expressions of masculinity. Right now, both Catholic and Protestant fundamentalists are engaged in campaigns against ‘gender ideology’ or ‘gender theory’, by which they mean any suggestion that masculinities and femininities are plural, or alterable, or that the relationship between them is negotiable. Particular targets are gay and trans groups. In the background, the campaign is directed against feminist women and their demands for equality.^[15]

Michelangelo’s contemporary Martin Luther never challenged the legitimacy of earthly power; famously, he opposed the peasants’ rebellion of 1524–25. But he certainly didn’t think the rich and powerful were themselves admirable. His Preface to the Magnificat was written at a crucial moment in the Reformation and addressed to a powerful duke, one of the German aristocrats then lining up to support the reformer. In this text he wrote of the experience of a God

‘who sees into the depths, and gives help only to the poor, the despised, the pitiable, the sorrowing, the forsaken, and those of no account’^[16]

– a God who frequently chastises kings, and chooses Mary because she is poor, unknown, of no account. Luther’s whole doctrine of justification has this flavour; it subverts the earthly hierarchies from which Martin himself could never break.

That’s part of a long tradition of radical thought within religion, from St Francis, through the Anabaptists and the Quakers, to liberation theology, Ambedkar’s Buddhism and Shariati’s Islamic thought. That tradition should be borne in mind as well as the tradition of misogyny I mentioned at the start. The construction of missionary masculinities was part of the building of global empires, undermining pre-conquest gender orders and indigenous religions – the burning of the Maya books in Yucatan by the missionary bishop Diego de Landa in 1562 is a famous episode. But no campaign to impose gender order or cultural uniformity has succeeded in the long run, as the multiplicity of masculinities in the world today bears witness.  The following papers in this issue of Concilium will go much deeper into these questions; I can only hope this brief introduction to the field of research suggests some useful directions. It is not a topic that everyone finds comfortable. When I was awarded my first grant for research on masculinities, it was denounced by a right-wing parliamentary committee in Australia as a waste of public funds. I think they were wrong, and not just because this research has clear applications in education, health and welfare. We need to understand masculinities and pay attention to the dynamics of men’s lives if we are, in the long run, to achieve gender justice.