Researchers, authors, journalists, parents, teachers, faith leaders, scientists, doctors—so many are writing right now and trying to understand what’s going on with boys and men. Even while American women continue to face an onslaught of government control and loss of bodily autonomy when it comes to reproductive health care, and Christian groups continue to target the rights of LGBTQ Americans, it’s clear that we all, on all spectrums of the political divide, feel that something unsavory is happening among men and boys in America. For our purposes, I’m focusing Disciples of White Jesus in particular on white Christian men and boys. This is for a couple of reasons, one of which is professional: leadership positions in American government and industry are still overwhelmingly occupied by white Christian men, and also my education and expertise in writing about rightwing Christianity and politics mean I’m well placed to research and examine this particular population. The second reason is more personal. The majority of my immediate family is made up of white Christian men and boys. I’m an older sister to a white Christian brother. My dad is a white Christian man. I serve in a Christian denomination that is the whitest in America, in a pastorate still made up of a majority of white men. And I happened to start my journalism career as a pro hockey beat writer, which is as good an introduction as any to the world of white masculinity, though with a Canadian flair.

Of course, I couldn’t write about boyhood without thinking about my own sons. While I wrote about and researched boys and young men, I was living through that golden moment in time with my sons, while they were looking and acting more like young men, on the cusp of becoming teenagers. But when they looked deep into my eyes and smiled those wide, grateful grins, I could still see them as toddlers, wide-eyed, outstretched arms, taking those first wobbly steps, knowing that I would catch them when they fell, all sharp elbows and knees.

The dream of motherhood, or parenthood, or the dream of anyone who loves and cares for young kids, is that you’ll always be there—right? To catch them, when they fall. You soon learn that you won’t be, like the time last summer when my youngest son came home crying in the neighbor’s bike carrier, with a swollen and throbbing ankle. Or when my oldest son got elbowed in the cheek during a basketball game, just below the eye, and immediately it swelled out a few inches, and they rushed around frantically to find ice at the concession stand while I stood there next to him, helplessly. He held back his tears, but the eye was black and blue and greenish for weeks.

I remember sitting around a brown, wooden table in a nondescript hotel lobby in Iowa with a bunch of fellow moms from my son’s basketball team. I had watched their sons play basketball with skill well beyond their years, had watched them be tough and dedicated and launch into the air, their elbows aloft with perfect form on yet another three-pointer. Many of these parents were athletes themselves, sculpted and fit, and some had played professionally. These were the boys for whom it seemed the world was at their fingertips. But as we moms talked, I noticed that what we all had in common was the terrible sense of fragility wrapped up in our young boys’ futures, and the gentleness and kindness and vulnerability that lived just beneath the surface of their vaunted athletic prowess.

We talked about nightlights, and nighttime meditations, and reading books or watching family TV shows together, strategies we’d all employed around that time to help our tween boys calm down when they were feeling anxious or restless, unable to fall asleep at night. We talked about our hopes and our fears for our lovable and sensitive boys. I sensed that all of us—alike—wanted most for our boys to love and to be loved. We wanted them to be strong but kind. To somehow wear a suit of armor but also easily take it off. I noticed, too, that we were all grasping for any kind of guide, as parents and caregivers who loved these kids, to help them make it through somewhat unscathed. The process of becoming men was no longer a clear and straightforward one, if it ever really was. We didn’t want to break them of their sensitivity and vulnerability, even if the world still sometimes did. I had this feeling, as I watched my boys grow up, like I did when I first went to the lake and saw the minnows swimming around my pale legs in the murky water. It seemed like it would be so easy to cup my hands and grab one of them, hold it aloft in the shimmering sunlight close to my chest. But every time I tried, the water and the tiny fish just slipped right through, out of my hands, and I couldn’t hold on.

Boys will not be little boys forever. This desire to hold them close, to keep them safe and kind and vulnerable and sensitive is ultimately as futile as the hope of grabbing minnows out of slimy lake water with bare, tiny, unskilled hands. I understand the desire, though: oh, how I understand the desire. At its root is not only love but also fear and recognition. I would be lying if I said that in my research and personal experiences I did not see within the American boys I know and love at the same time a terrible capacity for hatred, fear, and violence. Mass shooters and neo-Nazis and white supremacists have mothers and fathers and teachers and coaches too. Many of them ran around on the soccer field as little boys, coming together en masse at halftime to snack on cut-up juicy oranges and pour red Gatorade down their throats, eyes dancing and mouths chattering, in the golden years of American boyhood.

I think of the Church, of little boys with high voices wearing white choir robes and singing, “Away in a Manger.” I think of my own boys holding shepherds’ crooks, wearing ancient green and maroon costumes, at the Christmas pageant; I see holy water pouring over their heads in baptism like a fountain, and I imagine them in just a few years as teenagers, professing their faith in front of the church. If only all these things were solid inoculations against that terrible threat of hatred, violence, and despair—directed both outward and inward for so many American boys and men.

I think, too, of Jesus. Of how when I told people I was writing about boys and men and religion and radicalization, invariably, from New York City to the rural Midwest to Phoenix to South Carolina, they’d look at me with a little twinkle in their eye, and they’d ask: “Are you going to talk about White Jesus?”

As an ordained pastor with a master’s degree in divinity from a Christian seminary, talking about Jesus is kind of one of my specialties. But these folks weren’t asking me for a sermon, or for an explanation of a Bible verse, or even for a prayer. They wanted me to distinguish between the theological and the historical, brown-skinned, Middle Eastern, and Jewish Jesus, and the Jesus who is a creation of white American Christianity, a progenitor of the Christian industrial complex that brought us megachurches and celebrity preachers and New York Times bestsellers and the prosperity gospel and Donald Trump. White Jesus is to Jesus Christ as Instagram momfluencers and babies are to actual mothers and children. One is a brand meant to sell and control and influence and manipulate and create division and hierarchy. The other is complicated, humble, incarnate, vulnerable, persecuted, redeemed.

There is a movement afoot in America that says in order to protect and “save” young boys and men, they must become disciples of the movement of White Jesus. Unlike Jesus Christ, White Jesus is on a violent quest for naked power and influence and wealth. White Jesus deals in absolutes, and those who are among the “chosen” are absolutely convinced of their own sanctification and worthiness, and the damnation of all those who disagree. White Jesus is boorish and controlling, positioning himself at the head of the family and the government, at the top of the hierarchy, ignoring the truth that the Trinity of God taught by orthodox Christianity is necessarily reciprocal and relational, requiring three coequal parts of God, traditionally known as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

You can make the argument that much of what is wrong in America and in the world has come at the hands of wealthy and powerful white men. You can start to see them as the walking dead, marching forward incessantly to trample upon the rights and freedom of the vulnerable, especially women, people of color, and poor people. But I don’t know—that straightforward future story of zombified, irredeemable, angry, violent white men and boys doesn’t quite work for me. There has to be another possible future on the horizon for white men and boys. I see my baby boys in my arms. I see mothers and fathers, grandparents, coaches and teachers, and instructors and religious leaders—so many of us striving to hold on to the idea that, at root, boys and men can and will love and be loved. Like baby Jesus.

White Jesus comes upon boys and men in their living rooms, on their iPads, and in blaring font and catchy music, and he says: “Follow me.” He leads them toward empty self-aggrandizement, toward anger and violence and grievance. But that was never really where they wanted to go, or who they wanted to be; it led only to destruction: their own and of those around them. So much tragedy and death and despair. There has to be another way.

This is an excerpt from the introduction of Disciples of White Jesus.