A Preface to the Discussion on Whores

The Bible tells us that our conduct will speak for us and for Christ as we make our way through this time of exile in the world before our Lord returns. We can either honor Christ and ourselves with our conduct, or bring both into disrepute.

Last week I saw a retweet from someone in California of a guy who looked like someone from around where I live. So I followed the original tweet to its owner to see if in fact he did live in Texas. I didn’t find out, but I did see his tweet was also retweeted by some young woman not only in Texas, but in the town where I live. Small world and so forth. That young woman had in her Twitter feed an exhortation to herself that Jesus was looking out for her. So far so good, you may think.

As you know, newest tweets are at the top and you have to scroll down to go back in time, as it were. Long story short, about four hours before she tweeted about Jesus, she had tweeted, “I miss being choked at night.” My hope is that there is no connection intended.

I can hear your wheels spin from here. “Oh, she’s not a real Christian.”, your mind ejects. Whew! That was a close one. Now you can go back to pretending girls like that don’t know really know Christ is the son of God, born of the virgin Mary, and was crucified for our sins and raised on the third day. Right? Therefore she’s not a girl from your church who went off to college to learn a career and “find herself”. Shhh… Be at ease, sleeper…

The next day I went into work and heard this conversation between three college-aged coworkers:

Senior Cody: …and just say to her, Look, you swiped right, I swiped right. We both know what this is about. Let’s get it on!

Underclassmen: Hahahaha! Right! Exactly! What else could she be thinking?

Cody: And, hey, listen…listen…if she’s got a Bible quote on her profile then definitely go for it because you know she’s a ho!

Maybe your daughter isn’t one of these two women. Maybe she’s just one of her hundreds of co-eds, roommates, coworkers, social media followers, church group buddies, and BFFs.

For the Love of the Game

Within the Christians Men’s Sphere (and even in the larger Men’s Sphere) a theory holds sways when it should not. It is the idea that if a man will be virtuous enough, then it will overflow, and his virtue will overrun onto his wife and daughters. Those who believe in this theory are suffering under one or more errors. One of which is that every aspect of life can be explained with modern economic theories.

But the main error is this: They will not confront the truth that women sin because they want to sin. This is why the same man who says that he should be a better man so that his wife will be “attracted” to follow him (Hahahaha!) will–with his next breath–boast that he will teach his son to be virtuous. They do not believe that their virtue will trickle down to other men such as their son. No, no: Men must be taught virtue!

Do you smell the Traditionalist Feminism I’m stepping in?

It’s actually even worse than I have so far stated because the virtues of a man are not the same as those of women. Some expect that the man’s virtue of speaking a word in church will magically be transmuted into a woman’s virtue of silence in church. Others expect worse: That his women will take up manly virtue and raise their voices.

Every Christian men’s outlet I know runs away from this truth: The New Testament, especially The Epistles, explains to us clearly and forthrightly that:

1. Men are the heads of women. Men are in charge and are to act like it; corporately and individually as the relationship defines. The Author of the Bible does not even say, “Christian men”, or, “Godly men”. It is so ordered through all Creation.
2. Women individually are to be submissive and therefore obedient to their heads of households.
3. Women are to be silent in church.
4. Women are to pray with their heads covered as a sign of submission. There is to be no question about it. Everyone who sees a praying women should see a woman who accepts that her God-given role and glory is to be submissive to God, and her husband or father.

The impulse of men like Tim Bayly, Michael Foster, and Aaron Renn (Hey man, I been there.) is that men must be somehow able to fix themselves. They think this because they want to address our current distress, and because they rightly know that no one can control another person; we aren’t even good at controlling ourselves.

The truth is that American Christians have raised at least four generations of brassy whores[1] and all we can do is talk about how to be the kind of men brassy whores prefer to marry. Throughout these generations Christian leaders and men have been exhorting one another to virtue and godliness with the same terrible results. There are enough books and sermons telling men to be better to fill a hundred libraries. If we want more virtuous men and women, then order must be restored. This means church leaders (bishops, pastors, elders, husbands, fathers, older women [2]) must charge women to be submissive, and to display the signs of submission: covered heads and their silence in church.

The prudential nature of pastoral care demands that we consider the currents of popular culture swirling around us. Because of that I suggest for any leader who wishes to be taken seriously that no less than half of his engendered instructions should be directed at women to be quiet and have some respect.

Do NOT get distracted by the fact that many men within those generations were vicious rather than virtuous. This has always been the case. We’re Christians, we know this. There was not a sudden decline in male virtue which heralded in the generations of whores. Generation-wide whoring began after men signaled the sharing of headship when women were given the vote alongside us, and it accelerated when women stopped covering their heads at church. When American Christian women gave up submission and the sign of submission, their next step was to become whores..and not even for the economics. They are whores for the romance and excitement. They whore for the love of the Game.

If you need an economics tie-in to hear me: It’s the brassy whores, stupid.

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[1] If she wasn’t a virgin at marriage, and she wasn’t raped, she whored around at some point. We used to discreetly acknowledge this with the phrase “make an honest woman of her”, but we’re way past the point now where discretion can be understood.

[2] As in, something like a grandmother. Paul wasn’t referring to a five years older bestie.

Thar Be Monsters in our Sea of Chivalry

Game/MTGOW and Feminism aren’t Christians’ problems except as they appeal to Christians because modern Christian practice is both anti-Christian AND a losing proposition. Our problem is that Christians don’t actually believe in the word of God. They don’t believe that–as whole beings–women are weaker than men…even though we all observe it every day. They don’t believe that it is good that God gave women fathers and husbands to rule them… even though we live in a society of liberated whores. They don’t believe that women are more easily deceived…even though marketing and scams are overwhelmingly aimed at susceptible women.

What Christians actually practice is chivalry because they believe that chivalry is “real” Christianity”. Chivalry is the water in which Feminism and Game/MTGOW swim; what is necessary for their existence. If we want Feminism and Game/MTGOW to go away, we have to destroy the cultural environment created by chivalry.

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Repurposed from this comment at Dalrock’s.

Between Fear and Worship

is reverence.

Related.

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Edited to point to the correct post. 

The Movements are Subject to the Spirits

Transcribed (as best I could) from the audiobook  “Resolute Determination: Napoleon and the French Empire”, by Prof. Donald M.G. Sutherland and from Recorded Books.

The (ed: French) Church was reconstructed as a largely royalist church. The church had split in the early years of the (ed: French) Revolution, and in the schism there is a pro-revolutionary and an anti-revolutionary faction. Because of vicissitudes of revolutionary politics, the pro-revolutionary church was purged and largely destroyed in what’s called the Dechristianization Campaign.

When the church was reordered in 1802 the personnel they had to draw on were clergy who had gone underground, or who had been expelled; indeed as far away as Baltimore or Quebec. They came back, but they came back often bitter, highly politicized, and royalist. Napoleon was well-aware of how potentially dangerous this could be and thus the necessity of subjecting the church to political tutelage.

The Church was a church in crisis almost from the beginning. There had been no creation of clerics for an entire decade; perhaps close to a generation. It was very hard to get seminaries up and running again. The clergy was aging, and the clergy of the restoration church–the Concordat Church–was much smaller than the old regime church had been.

The result was Catholicism itself changed. That kind of Catholicism was a traditionalist Catholicism with a spectacular (what historians of the Church call) “Feminization of Catholicism”[1] in the 19th Century that survived Napoleon’s fall in 1815. There’s a spectacular growth of female religious orders; hospitals, teaching orders, even some contemplative orders. There were probably more female nuns in the 19th Century than there had been in the golden age of the church in the 13th Century. There was also the revival of poor-relief and a Christianization of poor-relief institutions, medical care, and education for small children.

Priests themselves began to change their recruitment patterns. In the old regime priests had been highly educated, middle class, endowed by their fathers to study in the seminary, largely urban. In the course of the 19th Century, and under Napoleon, a ruralization of the Catholic clergy began. Thus, the clergy acquired a lot of peasant attitudes; dislike of towns, superstition, emotionalism. There’s a huge cult of saints and a very emotional kind of Catholicism emerges in the course of the 19th Century; what historians call a “Feminized Piety”.

Popular piety was very difficult to control because the church was so small and the clergy was aging. Popular piety was always a suspicious matter to the clergy, but in the early part of the empire and beyond there’s nothing they could do about ordinary people reviving suppressed feast days, for taking initiatives in the liturgy, for the laity insisting that the clergy authenticate relics which the clergy resisted, or miracle cures that curates were expected to authenticate and things of that sort; where the clergy simply felt overwhelmed by the revival of piety among the laity.

The civil code which we referred to earlier, also had some interesting developments; especially with regard to the status of women. As we have seen, it authorized divorce, and introduced a double-standard in divorce which made it easier for a man to divorce his wife than vice-versa. On the other hand, divorce was extremely rare under this period and becoming more rare as time went on. The overwhelming number of plaintiffs in divorce cases were not men, in fact, but women who were suing for divorce in order to complain about their husbands who deserted them and the purpose was to reclaim the property that they had brought to the marriage in the marriage contract.

That last paragraph is somewhat confusing out of context. What Sutherland said is that even though women did not have the right to divorce, they were still suing for divorce (asking a judge to make the divorce); and women did this more often than men who actually had the right to divorce.

He goes on to say that the response of society under the “liberty” provided by the Revolution and Napoleon was for marriage to be delayed, and also that France was one of the first countries in Europe to adopt the use of birth control despite the fact that birth control was banned by the Catholic Church; including the Concordat Church.

What Enlightenment and revolution promised was relief from harsh rulers and injustice. What it delivered was a dictator and disorder in families and churches. If Sutherland’s account is correct: The fascinating part is that Traditionalists were not even a speedbump to Liberalism. In fact women from the now disordered families and churches remade Traditionalism in their own image. It is still with us.

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[1] Emphasis not in original.

 

Her Submission is Her Glory

In the previous post on wives and women to be in submission I noted that there is much more instruction in the Bible about the order of Christian households than there is about the administration of baptism or the Lord’s Supper. Six passages were listed within the post, but I left out one in particular; a bit of “meat on the bone” that I hoped a commenter might gnaw off.

1 Corinthians 11:2-16 [1]

² Now I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I delivered them to you. ³ But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. ⁴ Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head, ⁵ but every wife who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, since it is the same as if her head were shaven.⁶ For if a wife will not cover her head, then she should cut her hair short. But since it is disgraceful for a wife to cut off her hair or shave her head, let her cover her head. ⁷ For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. ⁸ For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. ⁹ Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.¹⁰ That is why a wife ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels. ¹¹ Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; ¹² for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God. ¹³ Judge for yourselves: is it proper for a wife to pray to God with her head uncovered? ¹⁴ Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair it is a disgrace for him, ¹⁵ but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her for a covering. ¹⁶ If anyone is inclined to be contentious, we have no such practice, nor do the churches of God.

With this passage St. Paul blows out of the water the nonsense idea of “mutual submission” that so many pretend to glean from Ephesians 5:21.

My next post will probably be about my own error in applying 1 Cor. 11:15, but what is important in this post is:

1. Understand that there is no excuse for the supposed “confusion” about who is supposed to submit to whom, and how.[2]
2. Understand that a wife’s submission to God through Christ and through her husband (“³ But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.”) is supposed to be conspicuous–utterly obvious; not just a so-called “matter of the heart”. The sign and evidence of her submission is her glory! Without it, she has no glory.
3. If your church teaches Biblical Inerrancy, but it does not teach overt wifely submission and head coverings, why–in light of 1 Cor. 11:16–would you believe it is a church of God?

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[1] The ESV translators footnote that the words wife and husband used in the passage could be translated as woman and man, depending on the context, and that that word for angels could be translated as messengers or observers. 

[2] The linked post of Sheila Gregoire’s blog would be hilarious if she represented only a fringe element of Christian culture. She actually writes of those who quote 1 Peter 3 on the submission of women that they are ignoring the entire rest of the Bible, and that Peter’s instruction that wives act like Sarah is only in reference to Sarah when she followed Abraham out of Ur!

My drive-by commenters believe this verse clearly says that women should always obey their husbands no matter what. However, the readers of Peter’s letter would never have thought that. First, they would have known that Peter didn’t think this; but second, even if Peter had wanted to tell his readers to do so, he would not have used Sarah as the example. Sarah’s life was hardly the picture of a wife obeying her husband in everything!

Instead, when contemporary Jewish readers encountered Peter’s command that women emulate Sarah, who obeyed Abraham “rather than giving way to fear”, that last part would have given them the context of what Peter meant. They would have known that it was not a command to obey in all circumstances. Instead, they would take that bit of the verse–“rather than giving way to fear”–and hearken back to to the time that Sarah DID obey, even when it was scary.

And that was the time that Sarah followed Abraham out of Ur, because God called him. That was a pivotal time in Jewish history (really the beginning of Jewish history). It would make sense that Peter would remind his readers of it. And the message they would take? When God is speaking, you follow by faith. It’s that simple.

They would never think that it meant that women should not confront their husbands’ sin, or that women should forget God’s will and only follow their husband’s will, because that would go against everything they knew of Sarah, and everything they knew of Peter. [Emphasis in original text]

 

Though, the Best Retort is to Live It

Doc H. asks:

“How could I respond to someones claims that the sanctifying work in Eph 5:26-27 is exclusively the work of Christ towards the church AND towards the wife and that the only action of the husband is to love? Wouldn’t the So (“houtos”) in 28 imply that 26-27 show what type of love the husband is supposed to show?”

I’ve never heard this “interpretation” of Ephesians 5:26-27 before, but it does not surprise me that some hold it. People will twist the Scriptures in all sorts of ways to destroy men’s headship when they can, and obfuscate it when they can’t. The good news is we are blessed with all of Scripture.

Colossians 3:18-19

¹⁸ Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. ¹⁹ Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them.

1 Peter 3:1-7

3 Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives,² when they see your respectful and pure conduct. ³ Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear— ⁴ but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious. ⁵ For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves, by submitting to their own husbands, ⁶ as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord. And you are her children, if you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening.

⁷ Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.

Titus 2:3-5

³ Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, ⁴ and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, ⁵ to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.

1 Timothy 2:8-15

⁸ I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling; ⁹ likewise also that women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, ¹⁰ but with what is proper for women who profess godliness—with good works. ¹¹ Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness.¹² I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. ¹³ For Adam was formed first, then Eve; ¹⁴ and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. ¹⁵ Yet she will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.

1 Corinthians 14:33-35

³³ For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.

As in all the churches of the saints, ³⁴ the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. ³⁵ If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.

There are, in Scripture, few points of so much agreement compared to the order of Christian households. Not to put too fine a point on it, but: There is significantly less instruction on baptism, or administration of the Lord’s Supper, than there is for wives to be in submission to their husbands, and for husbands to love and manage (not quite the same thing as “lead”) their wives.

The last thing I would point out is: So what? So what does that mean to say the husband is called “only to love” while Christ performs the sanctifying work on the husband’s wife? Ephesians 5:22-24 is explicit:

²² Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. ²³ For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. ²⁴ Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

This goes back to the very post which prompted Doc H.’s question: Husbands are not called to ALWAYS lead, but wives are called to ALWAYS obey. Sometimes the head may give a subordinate the lead because that is the prudent thing to do. He does not give up the rule. He may take back the lead at his pleasure, and the subordinate is only right if she gives it up in submission. A wife is to submit and obey her husband.

Says Everybody, Means Women

everybody wants and nobody’s ashamed

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I’m a sucker for a good synth-pop song.

The History of Cheerleaders, the Future of America

Originally, cheerleaders were men.

That’s Jimmy Stewart and his cheer squad, third from the right. Notice the terms: “leader”, and, “team”, and “squad”. These are manly terms. Notice the dress: pants, shirts, sweaters, ties.  Manly dress.

In 1923, at the University of Minnesota, women were admitted into cheerleading. I’m sure they asked themselves, “What could be the harm? Technically, women can cheer… I’m sure it will be fine.”

Then, in the 1940s, women came to dominate cheerleading because the men were away being toxic. When they came back, efforts were made to restore order to cheerleading, but women protested.

By 1960, cheerleading was seen as predominantly a girl thing, and for effeminate men. At the same time, the uniforms began to become less formal…and to shrink. Today, the “far-right moral position” on cheerleading is that it should be reserved for girls (who  only pretend to be sluts) as nature intended. In the future, conservative won’t even notice this.

Symptoms of the Clout-ture

Over on the Fabius Maximus website[1], editor Larry Kummer has the tagline “Reigniting the spirit of a nation grown cold.” It has a nice ring to it, but it’s just wrongheaded. The spirit of the nation was embodied in an electorate of men, but our electorate is embodied by the hermaphroditic, and woofully cuckoo.

[1] Worth reading on occasion.