New Frontiers: Wild at Heart and Post-Promise Keeper Evangelical Manhood

John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul is one of the most popular works of contemporary evangelical non-fiction. Attending to the historical context of the book’s release and to Eldredge’s rhetoric, this essay argues that Wild at Heart represents and commends a distinctly “post–Promise Keeper” masculinity operant in twenty-first-century evangelicalism. Eldredge substitutes the Promise Keepers’ prescriptive gender rhetoric for a descriptive language of male self-discovery. Eldredge overturns Promise Keeper mistrust of secular men’s media and their view of boyhood as in need of supersession—using the popularity of Hollywood “guy” movies and the material culture of boyhood as prooftexts for his essentially “wild” masculinity.