Looksmaxxing, Ben Sasse, and the Theology of the Cross

In the most recent interview on Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast, former United States senator Ben Sasse joined to talk about his surprising diagnosis of stage four pancreatic cancer. Douthat apparently told his friend Rod Dreher that “Sasse’s face looks like Jim Caviezel’s at the end of The Passion Of The Christ,” and he isn’t wrong. Crusty scabs and bloodied blotches cover Sasse from head to toe due to the medicine he’s currently taking to shrink the size of his tumors.

In this interview and others, Sasse has stated unequivocally that his doctors say he’s not going to beat this cancer. But he’s taking on an aggressive treatment plan to gain more time with his family, most notably his fourteen-year-old son. As his Interesting Times interview began, Sasse sat so comfortably resigned to death that he could announce he “has received a calling to die,” while Douthat made a joke about Clavicular canceling so that Sasse could be the guest. If you’ve never heard that name, don’t stop reading: all will (unfortunately) be explained. Clavicular is the internet nickname of twenty-year-old influencer and streamer, Braden Eric Peters, leader of the “looksmaxxing” movement. While looksmaxxing is Gen Z’s online term for self-optimizing one’s attractiveness through both lifestyle and physical changes, there are all sorts of “maxxing” options these days: healthmaxxing, personalitymaxxing, financemaxxing, etc. Basically, throw any self-improvement plan on steroids (sometimes literally), mix it together with social media, and you have a maxxing moment waiting to happen.

Douthat’s offhanded quip about Clavicular offered a stark contrast to the man who sat across from him, ready to meet his death. It’s a comparison I haven’t been able to get out of my mind since listening. Here was Sasse, unabashedly facing a camera while his face was covered in blood he couldn’t stop from flowing. Clavicular, on the other hand, provides a different view of the world. He is a young man willing to do anything and everything — including breaking the bones in his symmetrically perfect face — to “ascend” (internet lingo for gaining a new level of success or status).

A comparison between Ben Sasse and Clavicular doesn’t take rocket science to understand, and yet it’s one worth exploring. I’m not so interested in a comparison in terms of “whose morality is better?” (that should be somewhat obvious), but instead one that reveals the difference between a theology of glory, of which we are all guilty, and a theology of the cross, which is only possible through the work God does on us.

A month or so ago, I randomly listened to an entire podcast episode with Clavicular. I don’t know, I guess I was curious about “what the kids are up to these days.” Like Ben Sasse, Clavicular was a completely confident podcast guest. Yet this time, the confidence was purely in himself. He talked at length about the right amounts of testosterone and anabolic steroids to inject, about microdosing Ozempic and crystal meth, and about the most attractive facial structure for both women and men. I’m not an expert on the manosphere (nor do I really want to be), but from the viewpoint of at least this particular interview, I can confidently say that Clavicular believes life is rigged against ordinary people who follow the rules. Modern society is so broken and so depraved, your only option (if you want to find health, wealth, and happiness) is to join in. Sure, you might personally believe in something greater than yourself or not like the way people are acting around you, but to actually hold to any conviction is a social death sentence.

Within this worldview, goodness is equated with status climbing: the more you climb, the better you are. It’s a theology of glory cranked up to the nth degree. Clavicular and others like him don’t care about pretense. They don’t care about hiding behind even a veil of altruism. For the looksmaxxer, what you see is what you get, and so you might as well make it look as good as you can.

This past fall, I was in my brother-in-law’s wedding, and I felt this insane pressure (completely self-imposed), to achieve and then maintain a certain beauty standard for the day: I cut my hair, I tinted my eyebrows (which makes you look sort of insane for well over two days), I dyed my hair (which takes hours and hours of time!), and I got my nails done. I also watched hours of YouTube tutorials on makeup, and received not one but two! spray tans, the list continues.

All of these appointments were wearing me out, not only due to the commitment they required, but because every time I checked one thing off the list, I noticed something else that needed fixing. In the middle of all of this, I realized something: beauty, when treated as something you must achieve and maintain, especially in order to bring you any sort of lasting fulfillment, starts to feel pretty ugly.

That is how worldly status works. Whether it’s status based on your physical attractiveness or some other form of self-glory, God’s own glory is elsewhere. This is how Martin Luther can say in his 1518 Heidelberg Disputation:

Even though the works of man always seem to be beautiful and good, they are nevertheless demonstrably deadly sins. The works of God, thus always seem ugly and wicked, nevertheless they are truly eternal gain.^[1]

Luther did not necessarily mean these two theses in terms of physical attractiveness, and yet in the case of Ben Sasse and Clavicular, they are. There’s a bit (ok a lot) of Clavicular in all of us. We all want to ascend to whatever form of glory we set our eyes on. Yet the truth is our reliance on ourselves ensures that the closer we get to our goal, the further away we’ll find ourselves from God.

And yet God, who is truly beautiful and good, continues to work under the guise of that which is ugly to draw us out of ourselves and toward him. As Paul says, “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18).

And so God comes down to us in the repulsion of the cross. He comes to us in the embarrassment of a Savior who died in the most humiliating way possible. Down, down, down into the grave he went for the sake of our maxxing-intent hearts and souls. Down into sin and death itself, God went for the sake of Braden Eric Peters, Ben Sasse, and for you, too. And through his resurrection, we can say with Luther, “He is not justified who does many works, but he who, without work, believes much in Christ.”^[2] And therefore we can await the resurrection of our bodies, the restoration of our physicality, where neither tumor-killing poison nor bone-smashing hammers are needed.

One of the most notable moments of the Interesting Times interview is when Douthat asks Sasse if he’s ever mad at God. He responds quickly with, “No.” Then proceeds with the following:

I wouldn’t want a sovereign God to defer to all of my prayers with a yes. I’m not omniscient. I don’t know what the weaving together of the tapestry of full redemption should look like, but I know going through the period of suffering that I’m going through is a benefit because it is a winnowing …

I now, in the midst of this disease, know much more the truth of my finitude than I ever let myself believe in the past. The hubristic nonsense — I believe in God, and I’m grateful and blessed, but I can build a storehouse that can be pretty deistically persuasive.

My storehouse can have enough resources that I can operate without a need, but that’s not true. I can’t keep the planets in orbit. I can’t even grow skin on my face.

I was listening to this final part of the interview while weeding my yard (which I guess you could say is an attempt at beautification in an entirely different sort of category). My husband and I are in the midst of trying to get our house ready to sell while simultaneously keeping three small children alive and preparing to meet our fourth, who is due in June. So let’s be honest, there was plenty for me to be doing this past Saturday afternoon other than weeding, and yet it seemed like the essential thing to do. And as I bent over, back aching, picking at tiny tufts of weeds after tiny tufts of weeds, Sasse’s words brought me to tears. What a blessing it is to have full storehouses right now. Unless, of course, I think I’m the one maintaining them. While I currently can grow skin on my face, the truth is that I can’t get close to keeping my yard free from weeds or pretend that doing so will make much difference in who buys my house and when. Just like Sasse and perhaps like you, it’s often easy to hide how truly in need we are, until all of a sudden, it’s not.

We each have our hundred-plus plates to keep spinning, our burdens and worries, our goals and our dreams. We each have our own storehouses built by our own labors and efforts and talents and achievements — storehouses we would do almost anything to protect and keep safe. But when these are our anchor, we are left to continually fluctuate from pride to despair, from idolization to nihilism: one minute, everything rests on our ability to rid the yard of dandelions, the next all we can think is, as Sasse himself said, “We’ll all be pushing up daisies someday.” And if that’s all you have, I can see how life can feel like it’s rigged against you. It can feel like your only hope is found within your ability to climb the ladder of success, to achieve more than your neighbor, and to confirm that something about yourself is attractive based on your own merits.

Ben Sasse shows us a theology of the cross, but only because he can first confess he’s a theologian of glory. Faced with his impending death, he’s had to face the deepest needs of his soul, and thanks be to God, he’s willing to share that those needs are the same for all of us.

“My soul thinks Ben should be God, and I want that to die. Cancer sucks. But I’m pretty grateful that cancer is a stake against my delusional self-idolatry,” he said at the end of his interview.

Our lack of ability isn’t God’s final word. The exposure of our idolatries isn’t where God wants to leave us. Instead, he has promised that in Christ, we are intentionally brought to the end of ourselves so that he can make us alive once again. We are made alive through his promises, made new by the work of the cross, and someday very soon, we will be raised in glory with all his saints. I can’t wait to see Ben Sasse there, and I hope and pray Clavicular joins the party, too.

^[1] Theses 3 and 4 in “Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation 28 Theses and Proofs” (1518) translated by Caleb Keith in Theology of the Cross, edited by Caleb Keith and Kelsi Klembara (1517 Publishing, 2018).

^[2] Thesis 25 in “Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation 28 Theses and Proofs” (1518) translated by Caleb Keith in Theology of the Cross, edited by Caleb Keith and Kelsi Klembara (1517 Publishing, 2018).