A lot of people, including fellow contestants, have been in an almost-constant state of disbelief at Luke P’s run on the most recent season of The Bachelorette, where this year’s designated Born Again Christian somehow managed to hang on for so very long despite being the constant center of a swirling black hole of conflict in the house. Luke P’s almost creepy level of self-confidence, emotional immaturity and dead cold certainty that Hannah is already his is surely baffling to much of the audience — but to me, and probably a lot of people like me, Luke P. seems pretty familiar.
Being thrust from a private Christian K-12 school (with exactly the kind and amount of world perspective you’d imagine from that) into college- a secular environment- left me scared and grasping for familiarity, safety and community. I found this in an on-campus Christian fellowship. Weekly meetups for worship and a speaker, small group every weekend for bible study, and most importantly a group of people who looked like me provided safety in a place I was convinced fundamentally hated me. But we’ll get to that.
In this community I found so many things I’ll always grateful for: some friends for life, genuine, kind, thoughtful people with a great capacity for love, humility and honesty — traits you’d kind of assume would be a given as those are the J-man’s entire thing. But what I also found in this group was a specific characteristic I’ve seen reflected a few times in my postgrad life, though never as sharply as I’ve seen it coming out of my screen every Monday night at 8/7 Central. We’ve seen toxic masculinity, and we’ve seen toxic Christianity, but toxic Christian masculinity is a bag all its own. Toxic Christian masculinity has read that one passage about the husband being the spiritual leader of the household and has decided to go ahead and assume that level of authority over everyone all the time. Why not be the world’s husband? Seems like a good gig. TCM has read the Bible and feels that this has instilled it with absolute righteousness, righteousness here meaning a free pass to never have to second guess one’s own motives or wonder if one’s judgement is anything other than objective, God-bestowed truth. I saw men (actually, 19 year old boys, which is a very different thing) time and time again equate their own emotional reasoning and subjective opinions to fact so strongly you could almost hear the parenthetical I memorized a Bible verse about this trailing off the end. More times than I can count I saw these boys pull the same expression Luke has almost perpetually — the eyebrows drawn together in an expression I call “solemn thoughtfulness face.”
I’ve seen solemn thoughtfulness face brought out for a few reasons, all of which Luke P. is kind enough to showcase for us. The main one is recounting past “mistakes,” which almost always means alcohol and sex because you are always objectively either having sex and drinking or not having sex and not drinking and therefore are better and that’s the kind of black and white situation toxic Christianity loooooves. Solemn Thoughtfulness Face is doled out from an elevated position that indicates that every single bad behavior is far in the rear view mirror. “Glad that’s behind me, and now I’m perfect forever,” Luke says with his eyebrows as he gives his testimony to Hannah and a room full of also solemnly and appropriately thoughtful church bros on his hometown date.
Nothing is ever Luke’s fault! Sure, he’ll own up to drinking and “chasing sex” in college (always phrased in a way that would make a cynical person think maybe he was still framing his past self like he was rad even in his darkest hour), but everything he does in his entire run on the Bachelorette can’t be wrong, because he’s on a mission from God. Not slipping off his shirt in a quick massage-fest with Hannah during one of their first cocktail parties, even though he’ll go absolute short-king Donkey Kong if anyone else implies they’ve gotten physical with her. Not constantly crying to Hannah about other contestants being mean and unfair to him, which isn’t something you’d think a man who’s convinced he’s already won would bother with. Certainly not literally screaming right at Garrett’s face in one of the funniest exhibits of poorly-applied intimidation I’d ever seen. I mean, I’m sure you can flip through the Bible and find half a dozen examples of Jesus Christ screaming in Judas’ face for… [checks notes] eating pepperoni smugly in front of him. “I wouldn’t change a thing,” were the exact words Luke chose on Men Tell All after a stunning 25 seconds of dead air the producers were kind enough to leave in. These were words he would, of course, immediately walk back after the next commercial break as Luke once again calls upon his superhuman ability to claim that people have misheard or misunderstood phrases that he literally just said moments before.
Luke P. seems genuinely shocked to find himself repeatedly thrown into the villain slot in the mansion despite, you know, every single thing he’s ever said and done for the entire run of the show. “Everyone has always liked me,” Luke tells Hannah exasperatedly, like that’s something normal people have to go around disclaiming. I’m not surprised. Luke isn’t used to opposition, and he definitely isn’t used having anything other than complete control of his environment, and it shows in his erratic attempts to get literally anyone on the show to do what he wants. He starts with the bad-faith “I’m the reasonable one here” tone he takes towards a room full of men who all really love using the phrase “stay in your lane” for some reason. When that inevitably fails he repeatedly turns to much less subtle attempts at threatening behavior and intimidation: a telling shot of his fist tightening one of the camera operators was astute enough to capture, or the aforementioned pepperoni scream. Tragically for Luke, even this child-like attempt at domination is thwarted because, as Tyler C. put it so beautifully I wanted to cry, “We have a 5’8” villain.” The confrontations play out like deleted scenes from Stepbrothers rather than the Righteous Conflicts Luke P. is seeing in his mind’s eye, including a very real insistence from Luke P. to the other boys that he is, in fact, a big dog.
These meltdowns are almost unbelievable, but they do a lot to illustrate that Luke P. isn’t used to not getting his way and I can wager a guess as to why. A fair amount of Christian spaces are set up to afford the Luke P.s of the world the ability to never, ever be confronted on bullshit. The word “echo chamber” is definitely appropriate. I can remember at least one occasion in my organization where a speaker wasn’t invited back after even hinting at a perspective that was challenging to the main dogma — like we were too fragile to hear it — and that’s out of the people who agreed to literally come inside and talk to us in our space. “What’s the problem with everyone else” is Luke P.’s warcry and that echo gets louder with numbers. I remember a lot of furrow-browed talk about the “fallen” and “broken” — words that are meant to sound sympathetic (or, less graciously, pitying) but only ever seemed to be directed outward at the people we might theoretically interact with at some point, after we were done meeting amongst ourselves. “Anyone who drinks,” they meant. “The sexually active.” Never did “broken” mean prideful, detached, blind, condescending, and so brokenness was never found inside the group. “We are shepherds,” the furrowed brows said. “And everyone out there, who we run almost no risk of interacting with, they’re the sheep.” Luke, being thrust out of his safe space into a mansion full of them is shocked to find out that the sheep are actually just as charming, romantic, friendly and popular as him, and much less impressed with his charismatic Joel Osteen routine than he was led to expect. This is when Luke pivots to another favorite in the toxic Christian playbook to deploy when someone rightly calls you out for being a condescending asshat: persecution.
Speaking as a kid who benefitted from 12+ years of Christian education including courses with names like “Apologetics,” I can verify that young Christians spend a lot of time preparing for rejection. “Be in the world and not of it” is definitely canonical to the Bible, as is “the world will hate and try to kill you all the time,” even though that second one isn’t a direct quote. But the thing is that Christianity, in America at least, has come a pretty far way since John and Paul were hiding away in basements, holding secret services under the ever-present threat of execution. I remember being terrified of telling people about my faith in a way that makes my skeleton want to jump out of me due to embarrassment today because the only response I ever got, obviously, was vague nods and smiles because truly nobody cares, at least not in that way. All that built-up persecution preparation has to go somewhere, and usually (if you can’t afford to shoot another installment of God’s Not Dead, at least) I think it can go towards cushioning ourselves against actual valid critiques, such as “Luke, we are mad at you because you kneed our friend in the head at the big performative rugby game.” What Luke hears is that he’s a martyr, sent like Jesus before him to suffer for the sole crime of being objectively right — that things are going the way they’re supposed to, because these sinners are supposed to be hating him anyway.
There’s no point arguing with a Christian martyr boy, something Hannah starts to pick up on the first time Luke literally resurrected himself back onto the show after being kicked off. Martyr boys are absolutely right because God says they are and because they’re able to do a very good authoritative solemn voice, and who could argue with that. I’ve seen the voice used to explain that women aren’t meant to lead because scientifically they can’t drive, used to explain exactly what kind of person would be allowed a leadership position (hint: not a gay one), one time I saw it deployed to break up with me! Toxic Christian males love the authority granted to them in religious circles because authority is just another word for power. Luke craves that authority over Hannah, over the house, and probably over the audience too. We see how it goes when he isn’t granted power the way he would have been if he’d stayed back at his home church, talking about how messed up he “used to be” where there’s conveniently no one to disagree with him.
In Luke’s appearance on After The Final Rose, I saw exactly what I had expected: 50% solemn insistence that the Luke on the show isn’t “The Real Luke” (meaning Luke is in no way responsible for that specific set of well-documented actions) and 50% Daniel in the lion’s den, bravely facing unfair persecution from people who hate him for his faith and definitely not for being a colossal dickhead. If you took a shot every time Luke used the passive voice (I was misunderstood, misconstrued, mischaracterized, isolated, bullied) you would not have lived through the first commercial break. He’s actively filing every action he took on the show under “past mistakes,” just like his collegiate past: memories that, while regrettable, don’t require any further action or introspection on his part. The eyebrows really tell the whole story, turning the human beings in front of him in real time to a one-sided story of fully fictitious adversity, from which the Pepperoni Struggle will undoubtedly be omitted. Hannah will be turned into a misleading woman who claimed to be a real Christian like Luke and then mocked him for his beliefs on live TV while Luke’s lying and demands that Hannah give him what he’s owed are left behind. The stronger Luke’s opposition gets the more credit he gives himself for strength in the face of religious persecution, the more proud of his faith in a God whose only plan is to give him everything he wants all the time he becomes. He insists that his feelings are a literal mandate from God and are a thousand times more powerful than Hannah’s literal explicit statement that their relationship is over. A true crusader.
I know it’s just an overproduced, perpetually problematic reality show that doesn’t show an ounce of remorse for wringing Hannah’s mental state dry for the sake of Drama, but this was also potentially the first time I’ve ever seen a woman both own her status as a Christian and tell a domineering Christian crusader bro to his face that his solemn voice and thoughtful posturing don’t make him automatically right. I couldn’t be prouder of the way Hannah refuses to let Luke write the narrative, and I’m honestly thankful too for every one of the sound bites she delivers. “You call me out for my sin but pride is a sin, too, Luke, and you’re full of it.” Seeing Hannah resolutely refuse to allow a man to define her Christianness based on his own subjective qualifiers felt bigger than reality drama. It felt like a long overdue stand, on behalf of the women I know who have been either unofficially or overtly cast out from Christian communities, against the men who only know religion in terms of their own dominion.
I would hope being finally, objectively rejected by the woman Luke was sure God had signed over to him before they even met will make him reevaluate that his feelings aren’t Gospel. Maybe he’ll realize that following Jesus doesn’t give you literal Jesus-like infallibility and righteousness. Probably not, you know, but there’s always hope.
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