Drawing on key aspects of Muscular Christianity identified through this movement’s literature, this article ventures that the major contemporary Evangelical Christian men’s movement in South Africa, the Mighty Men Conference (MMC), draws on and harkens back to the concerns of the Victorian era of Muscular Christianity. Moreover, the article argues that this reversion should be of concern in the context of a post-apartheid and postcolonial South Africa where both women’s rights and human rights (especially encompassing racial equality) now form the core of the country’s identity. In other words, the MMC’s call to men to reclaim their top position is problematic even while it comes from a place of concern regarding the changing role of men in a transitional South African landscape.

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This article takes cue from Sarojini Nadar’s article analysing the Mighty Men Conference (MMC) in South Africa as a case study of masculinism, where the author makes some passing comparison between Promise Keepers in America (PKA) and the MMC in South Africa. This article investigates the specific ways in which PKA and MMC are ideologically similar, while also evaluating how their differences accrue dissimilar results with respect to their missions on race reconciliation. The article argues that despite their shared religious similarities as evangelical Christian men’s organisations and perceptions regarding the ‘crisis in/of masculinity’, race discourse plays different roles in the ministries of PKA and MMC. The key observation arising from addressing this discourse is that in the context of PKA, the organisation’s institutional focus on race translates itself into discussions and debates about race reconciliation amongst the various racialised men of the movement as part of the organisation’s work of self-transformation. However, such talk, although present at the individual level to some extent in the MMC, is absent at the institutional level. The absence of such discourse is especially problematic given the visibility of race in public discourse in South Africa, in general, and also points to a masked refusal to give up white male privilege in the post-apartheid public sphere.

This article addresses two questions regarding the Christian men’s organization Promise Keepers Canada (PKC). First, why is it that despite Canada’s geographical and cultural proximity to the United States, the PKC has not followed the same historical trajectory and elicited similarly negative responses as its American counterpart? Second, is there something particular about Canadian experiences of masculinities that accounts for the differences? The article uses the concept of “culture wars” as one of the keys to explaining the differences in public reception. The article also demonstrates that PKC participates within a largely intersubjective tradition of masculine identity formation that is particular to Canada. While acknowledging that the discourse of relationality has resulted in a more interdependent or inter-subjective notion of religious hegemonic masculinities in the Canadian context, the article also notes the limits of this discourse.

Acta Academica • 2016 48(1): 72-90 © UV/UFSSiphiwe Ignatius Dube / Race silence 73 South Africa and urges for more complex analyses of such masculinities. Such analyses should take into account the nuanced ways in which both "hegemonic masculinities" and "black masculinities" are constituted and contested.