“This is the capital sin of our generation. Taking their starting point from the modern man’s mentality they have revised the gospel to meet the dilemma in which the church has found itself in the face of wholesale indifference and hostility. But the question for us is: how are we, holding to the sufficiency and finality of Scripture, going to meet the secularism, or whatever else the attitude may be, of this modern man?
Here, I believe, we have too often made the mistake of not taking seriously the doctrine we profess. If Scripture is the inscripturated revelation of the gospel and of God’s mind and will, if it is the only revelation of this character that we possess, then it is this revelation in all its fulness, richness, wisdom, and power that must be applied to man in whatever religious, moral, mental situation he is to be found. It is because we have not esteemed and prized the perfection of Scripture and its finality, that we have resorted to other techniques, expedients, and methods of dealing with the dilemma that confronts us all if we are alive to the needs of this hour. Some of us may have relied upon our heritage, our tradition, and may have been content with the reiteration of certain traditional formulae prescribed for us by our forefathers in a noble tradition, and with the reproduction of patterns eminently appropriate and fruitful in past generations.”
— John Murray, on the sufficiency of Scripture
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“The latest social science tells us that children raised in single-mother homes are about five times more likely to be poor than kids raised in stably married homes.That young men raised apart from a stably married home are, according to recent research, more likely to land in jail or prison than to graduate from college.That the biggest driver of recent declines in happiness is the nation’s retreat from marriage. And that, at the community level, the strongest predictor of economic mobility for poor children is family structure: Poor kids hailing from communities with more two-parent families have a markedly better shot at moving up into the middle class than poor kids from neighborhoods dominated by single parents.”
— Brad Wilcox
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This sums up the colossal failure of psychiatry/therapy:
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“By participation: for it is our persons that are sanctified and made holy (“Sanctify them throughout”); and although our souls are the first proper subject of the infused habit or principle of holiness, yet our bodies, as essential parts of our natures, are partakers thereof.”
— John Owen
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The argument to repeal the 19th amendment has to do with holding women accountable and their fitness/agency for public life.
https://youtube.com/shorts/vh3m8_0lB0w?is=kjtmjuZxva0OJh05
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“The “free” in “free market” doesn’t mean “free from restriction”. It means “free from coercion”.
In order to get “free from coercion”, you need quite a lot of restriction. Whether that restriction is applied by laws, by religious indoctrination, by cultural mores, by a technology stack, or by tribal loyalty, doesn’t really matter.
In other words, the free market is not a natural state of affairs. It is a garden protected by walls, pruning shears, and vigorous weeding.
In an environment without restriction, those who are able will apply coercion constantly, at the slightest hint of advantage, and almost no one except the very fortunate and well-placed will be free.
If the grocer or the restaurateur is “free” to add addictive things to the food you buy, and “free” not to tell you about it, then you are not free to choose what you buy and consume. Instead, you are coerced by the chemical hijacking of the basal mechanisms your brain depends on.
If your nation engages in “free” trade with other nations where slavery is legal, then the price of your labor is set not by its value to you and others, but by the price of guns, whips, cattle prods and overseers in the slave camps. You may sell your labor or not as you choose, but that choice is meaningless when you must compete with the owners of those who do not have it.
And if you must compete with imported labor who can be sent back to a terrible place if they quit, strike, or even complain, then the difference is only one of degree.
A market free from coercion is not only compatible with the thriving of the family and the community, it is necessary for both.
Sadly, this concept has been so driven from both our public consciousness and our legal practice that the very words “free market” have been stolen by slaver and used to endorse slavery.
Slavery is the worst of all possible evils, because unlike evils like murder, robbery, or rape, it harms not only the direct victim, but everyone who must share an economy with the slaver, who reaps the benefits alone.
Ultimately, the word “free” in “free market” means freedom from slavery…. and not merely the direct and obvious kind, but all forms of coercion and slavery by degrees.
Unfortunately, modern libertarians are mostly uninterested in this, and prefer to focus on sex and drugs.”
— Devon Eriksen, on free markets
https://x.com/devon_eriksen_/status/2099663327462850562?s=46&t=au-C34qTtl4rGPFr5igkAw
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Measure a man by the opposition it takes to discourage him.
—
“In 1960, nearly 100 years after slavery ended, the majority of black children were still raised in two-parent homes. One generation of the welfare state later, that became a minority. Centuries of slavery and Jim Crow didn’t destroy the black family. The welfare state did. And it happened while black incomes were rising and racial barriers were falling.”
— Thomas Sowell (paraphrase)
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“To always be relevant, you have to say things which are eternal.”
— Simone Weil
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“Men have broad and large chests, and small narrow hips, and more understanding than women, who have but small and narrow breasts, and broad hips, to the end they should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children.”
— Martin Luther
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“The manner in which this future righteousness is here defined, namely, as the content of the hope awakened by the Spirit which is obtained by faith, makes it clear, however, that this future righteousness is not another than that which has already been revealed. It is the same thing, but one can speak of it both in a present and in a future sense. Just as the adoption of sons, righteousness can be represented as a benefit already obtained as well as still to be expected. But nothing is hereby detracted from its character of fulfillment and from the assurance of salvation given in it. What is true of all that has been given in Christ thus applies to justification, that we are not dealing here with a matter that has been concluded, which has been settled, and which we should thus be able to leave “behind us.” The revelation of the righteousness of God in the gospel is precisely a power of God unto salvation (Rom. 1:17), which accompanies the believer as a constantly fresh and relevant thing. It binds him to Christ and his communion and so makes him by the Spirit to wait for the hope righteousness. With regard to the present as well as the future the situation is thus different in principle for the believer from what it is for the man who lives out of legalistic religiousness. And here is the connection, to be discussed still further, between this certainty of salvation and the knowledge of the coming judgment, in which it is not the hearers but the doers of the law who are to be justified before God.”
—Herman Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology, pg 166, on future justification
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“God commands wives to submit to imperfect husbands, children to submit to imperfect parents, slaves to submit to imperfect masters, Christians to submit to imperfect pastors and elders, and citizens to submit to imperfect magistrates.”
— Rick Davis
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“Unlike some Reformed churches, the CREC isn’t divided up into national churches.
At the Council meeting this week, I chatted with Brazilian and Polish and Canadian and Ukrainian and Hungarian friends, caught up briefly with a pastor from Toyko, had breakfast with a Kenya church planter. For the past three years, our Presiding Minister has been a Brazilian-American, Uri Brito.
The internationals aren’t pastors of mission churches. They have their own Presbytery and they have equal standing with other pastors in the denomination.
The CREC isn’t an exclusively white church, and if it’s “nationalist,” it’s got too many nationalities to be an American nationalist church.”
— Peter Leithart
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It’s fine to follow the crowd so long as the crowd you’re following is dead.
Tradition is the peer pressure of the dead.
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Bill Smith and I recorded a Collars and Calluses podcast on headcoverings:
The fact that Paul grounds the woman’s headcovering in nature means it cannot be an artificial covering because “from the beginning, it was not so.” Eve did not any headcovering other than her long hair and was unashamed.
A whole back, I did a podcast with Steven Jeffrey on the same topic:
Steven Jeffrey podcast on headcoverings:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSm0ZH_wNxI
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Pastors must pray hard, preach hard, and counsel hard. The responsibilities are weighty. It takes strength and diligence to pastor well. You must fear God more than you fear man. Pastoring done right is hard work.
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“Toothless, impotent Christianity is a gold mine for statism: It keeps men’s attention focused on the clouds while the State picks their pockets and steals their children.”
— David Chilton
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“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
— Plato
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From 8/21/25:
Classical liberalism grew out of the Christian faith and requires Christian virtue to sustain it. Apart from that faith and virtue, classical liberalism morphs into the monstrosity of modern liberalism. Classical liberalism is too fragile to endure when severed from its Christian roots.
To put it another way, if you want classical liberalism, you have to embrace some kind of Christian nationalist position. Classical liberalism cannot be sustained by pluralism.
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One way of looking at the problem with socialism is that it calls on civil government to do what God assigned to the individual/ family and the church. The state encroaches on the other spheres. At the same time, the state ends up rejecting the mission God actually has assigned to it, administering God’s justice against the wicked.
In short, in socialism, the state does everything except what it’s supposed to do.
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Socialized medicine is about government controlling its people in their most vulnerable moments.
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People think euthanasia is a compassionate because it relieves suffering. But why does anyone think the suffering ends when you die?
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“When I talk about a new Right-wing fusionism for the 21st century, I mean actual Classical Liberals…, not those who wear the skinsuit of Anglo-American Liberalism while seeking to only conserve 60s-era Progressivism.
Liberalism is the acid of civilization when divorced from its origins and turned into an ideology for abstract universal man. As an organic way of life produced by a particular people who seek out virtue and the common good, it simply becomes second nature to us.
Which is why we find ourselves in the position we’re in. We have so universalized our own particular way of life so much that we’ve turned it into an ideology that now seeks to overcome its own origins. The reason Liberalism is so hostile to White Men today is that White Men were the world’s first Liberals. It cannot escape its creator until it has destroyed him.
Now, what we do about that is up for debate, but understanding how we got here is essential to figuring out what to do next in order to save the only civilization we’ve ever called home.”
— Christian Heiens
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Communist societies have to build walls to keep people in. Free societies have to build walls to keep people out.
The strongest argument against socialism is its failed historical track record. Socialism has been tried many times in many parts of the world and it has never worked to increase prosperity. Not once.
—
Dad Saves America on socialized education (public education) and socialized health care:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgE0j10tHW4
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Men, the church you join really does matter. If your pastor denies or dilutes what the Bible teaches about headship, find a new church. You don’t want to find out too late (e.g., when your marriage us in trouble) that you have a white knight pastor and session.
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Therapy culture is far too pervasive.
We have to stop using categories like “mental illness” to describe things like transgenderism
It’s not an illness
It wicked, high-handed rebellion against God and God’s created order
It’s not an “illness,” it’s sin
We need to stop using therapeutic categories like “mental illness” to describe this kind of thing
It’s a willful darkening of one’s mind, a a willful blindness to reality, for which the person is accountable
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Good discussion of what a nation is, what nationalism is, etc.:
This is also good on the founding fathers, and why “all men created equal” is not an egalitarian slogan:
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“Never tell me the odds.”
— Han Solo
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Don’t treat machines like humans or humans like machines.
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Treat AI, chatbots, etc., the way Han Solo treated droids.
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Feminism, the fertility crisis, and civilizational suicide are just three names for the same reality.
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“The whole duty of the wife is referred to two heads. The first is to acknowledge her inferiority; the next, to carry herself as inferior.
First, then, the wife’s judgment must be convinced that she is not her husband’s equal—yes, that her husband is her better by far; otherwise there can be no contentment either in her heart or in her house. If she stands upon terms of equality, much more of being better than he is, the very root of good carriage is withered, and its fountain dried up. Out of place, out of peace. And woe to these miserable aspiring shoulders that do not content themselves to take their room next below the head.
If ever you purpose to be a good wife and to live comfortably, settle this with yourself: My husband is my superior, my better; he has authority and rule over me. Nature has given it to him, having framed our bodies to tenderness, men’s to more hardness. God has given it to him, saying to our first mother Eve, “Your desire shall be subject to him, and he shall rule over you.” His will is the tie and tether even of my desires and wishes. I will not strive against God and nature. Though my sin has made my place tedious, yet I will confess the truth: My husband is my superior, my better.
If the wife does not learn this lesson perfectly, if she does not have it by heart, even at her fingers’ ends, as we say, if her very heart does not condescend to it, there will be wrangling, repining, striving, vying to be equal with him or above him; and thus their life will be nothing but a battle and a trial for mastery: a woeful living.”
— William Whately, A Bride-Bush (1619)
Background on Whately:
William Whately (1583–1639), Puritan vicar of Banbury, Oxfordshire, wrote A Bride-Bush as a practical treatise on marriage duties. The title alludes to the bush traditionally hung outside an alehouse to announce a wedding. 
Full title of the authorized expanded edition: A Bride-Bush: or, A Direction for Married Persons. Plainely describing the duties common to both, and peculiar to each of them. By performing of which, marriage shall prooue a great helpe to such, as now for want of performing them, doe find it a little hell.
Editions
- 1617: Unauthorized short version (A Bride-Bush, or A Wedding Sermon), published from notes without Whately’s consent. He denounced it.
- 1619: Authorized, greatly expanded edition (the standard text; ~220 pages).
- 1623: Reprint of the 1619 text, with Whately’s added retraction of his divorce views.
John Wesley later abridged it as Directions for Married Persons in his Christian Library. Facsimile reprints exist (e.g., Walter J. Johnson / English Experience series). A modern critical edition appears in Robert Matz, Two Early Modern Marriage Sermons (Routledge, 2016), pairing it with Henry Smith’s A Preparative to Marriage.
The 1617 text is available via EEBO-TCP / Oxford Text Archive and Internet Archive.
Content and tone
Whately treats marriage as a covenant and a picture of Christ and the church (Eph. 5). He stresses mutual love, fidelity, cohabitation, and household piety, while insisting on a strong patriarchal order: the husband as God’s “immediate officer” and “king in the family,” the wife as his subordinate deputy who must acknowledge inferiority and obey in all lawful things.
He also discusses correction of a wife (including, in the 1619 text, corporal discipline after other means fail—an opinion most English clergy rejected) and household government.
Controversy
Whately argued that adultery or willful desertion dissolves the marriage bond and permits the innocent party to remarry (closer to continental Reformed practice than to English canon law, which allowed separation but not remarriage). The Court of High Commission convened him; he retracted on 4 May 1621. The 1623 edition reprints the original argument but appends his acknowledgment that he had erred. He restated the retraction in A Care-Cloth (1624).
The work remains a standard source for Puritan household theology alongside Gouge’s Of Domestical Duties and similar treatises.
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Young women are in crisis and bear much of the blame for collapsing marriage rates:
“There are now roughly 30.4 million unmarried American men between the ages of 20 and 39, nearly twice the number of married men in the same cohort. The predictable explanation is that men are to blame. Pornography, gaming, delayed adulthood, declining ambition, fear of commitment, social awkwardness, the manosphere, and economic stagnation all make the list of reasons. But after years of dissecting so-called “toxic masculinity,” perhaps it is time to ask what has toxic femininity done to the modern woman? Have women today become poor prospects for marriage?
That honest question may sound inflammatory because our culture has spent decades teaching women to evaluate men while treating reciprocal scrutiny as sexism. Women are encouraged to identify red flags, examine a man’s income, ambition, temperament, sexual habits, emotional intelligence, politics, attachment style, relationship with his mother, willingness to provide, and potential as a father. This is considered discernment, rightly so. Men, however, are increasingly discovering that asking similarly consequential questions about women’s character invites accusations of insecurity, misogyny, or an inability to “handle” independent women…
A culture built around protecting the self from imposition will eventually produce people who regard the obligation of duty itself with suspicion. Marriage, however, is almost entirely made of obligations. A husband will interfere with your preferences. Children will obliterate your schedule. Family will demand money, time, patience, forgiveness, dependence, and sacrifice precisely when self-actualization would be easier.
This is one reason so many young men look at today’s dating culture and see women who are prepared to choose husbands but less prepared to become wives.
The Lindsay Clancy trial let the cat out of the bag. What disturbed many young men was the intensity of identification with the woman who killed three children. They watched social media turn the case into another story about systems failing women; they watched TikTok conspiracy theoriesbaselessly implicate Patrick Clancy in the children’s deaths; and some users went so far as to invoke zodiac signs while attempting to redirect suspicion toward Patrick. Some men began looking at their own girlfriends and asking an uncomfortable question: Can this woman become the mother of my future children?
The Clancy response exposed what years of discussion about “toxic masculinity” have conspicuously avoided: femininity can become toxic too. We have no difficulty admitting that masculine virtues require discipline. Yet feminine instincts are routinely treated differently. Empathy can become indulgence. Vulnerability can become a mechanism for escaping accountability. Emotional sensitivity can become manipulation. Social intelligence can become reputational warfare and exclusion. Female solidarity can become the instinct to identify with another woman before asking whether she is right. Compassion can become so detached from judgment that the person presenting the greatest emotional suffering becomes the presumed victim even when actual victims are lying dead…
For decades, women have been trained to interpret their lives through systems of so-called oppression: patriarchy, unequal emotional labor, reproductive burdens, workplace discrimination, male violence, and expectations surrounding motherhood. The woman is increasingly understood first as someone acted upon rather than someone who acts, which means her failures are explained environmentally while male failures remain evidence of character.
This appears everywhere in contemporary culture. Male failure is moralized: grow up, work harder, stop watching porn, control your anger, earn more, become useful. Female failure is often therapeuticized: understand your trauma, honor your emotions, enforce your boundaries, protect your peace, consider how the system failed you. One sex is routinely told that maturity means mastering itself; the other is increasingly encouraged to understand and love itself as is.
Today’s young men are experiencing this in real time. They notice that many women still want the very masculine virtues the culture has spent decades problematizing. Women want men who are confident enough to initiate, ambitious enough to provide, strong enough to protect, decisive enough to lead, and emotionally steady enough to absorb difficulty without collapsing. Yet confidence can be redescribed as arrogance, provision as patriarchy, leadership as control, protectiveness as possessiveness, and stoicism as emotional unavailability. We have made masculinity culturally suspect while continuing to demand its benefits in private.
Meanwhile, young women’s own orientation toward marriage has changed dramatically. In 1993, 83 percent of female high-school seniors expected to marry someday, compared with 76 percent of boys. By 2023, the share of boys was virtually unchanged at 74 percent, while girls had fallen to 61 percent. The familiar story that men simply abandoned marriage while women patiently waited for them to mature is no longer intellectually adequate.
Women have agency too, which means they are capable of being badly formed by a culture rather than merely victimized by it. Too many young women have been formed to excel at independence without being formed for interdependence, to identify mistreatment without recognizing ordinary sacrifice, to demand emotional intelligence without cultivating emotional self-government, and to desire strong men while viewing traditional masculinity with suspicion. Social media has amplified those contradictions until they look like virtues.
For years, men have been told that wanting a good wife does not make them deserving of one. They must become husbands worth marrying. That remains true. But the inverse is equally true, no matter how uncomfortable our culture finds it. Wanting a good man does not make a woman marriage material. She has to become the kind of woman a good man can trust with his name, his home, his children, and the life he is trying to build.”
— Bethany Miller
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Far too many boys (especially in public schools) are being medicated for simply being boys. This is a manifestation of therapy culture.
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Therapy culture is now dictating legal verdicts that outlaw teaching basic Christian doctrine:
https://x.com/frcdc/status/2103911575996211675?s=46&t=au-C34qTtl4rGPFr5igkAw
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https://theopolisinstitute.com/head-coverings-what-are-we-missing/
This article from Meyers is a valiant attempt to address the headcovering issue in 1 Corinthians 11. Meyers has a lot of good insights. I would push back in a couple keys ways:
First, I’m not at all convinced verses 4-9 give the Corinthian position. It simple does not have the marks of other places where we can deduce Paul is quoting the Corinthians. It’s too long to be a quotation, it does not match other instances of quotations in the letter, and the verses actually form part of the structure of Paul’s own argument. Paul does not respond to the content in verses 4-9; rather, he builds off therse verses as the premises in the position he is developing. The Corinthians were confused about sex and the sexes; this part of the letter is one of the ways Paul gets them back on track.
Second, I’m not convinced by Meyer’s take on “nature.” In this context, “nature” means “custom” rather than something like “creational design.” The context of Paul’s argument is the creation narrative, not contemporary customs. In fact, I cannot think of a single place where Scripture commands Christians to follow pagan customs for the sake of not causing offense. As the end of the section shows, Paul’s concern is with uniform practice in all the churches, not conformity to the wider culture.
But I agree with Meyer’s conclusion, of course.
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We can learn a great deal about masculinity and femininity by looking at little boys and little girls.
What do boys want? They want to fight the bad guys, save people, build something, and be the hero.
What do girls want? They want to look pretty, play house, and care for dolls.
Boys fight and build. Girls beautify and nurture.
This translates into marriage in obvious ways. Husbands and wives are to love one another in the way the other needs to be loved. Husbands and wives are to appreciate what the other brings into the marriage and the complementary nature of the sexes.
Wives should cheer their husbands on, thank them for their accomplishments, and respect their work as providers. A wife should see her husband as her hero – and let him play the part of the hero. Wives, your husband still has the same instincts he had as a boy, so praise him for all the ways he fights and builds for you.
Husbands should love their wives, honor them as the more nurturing sex, and praise their domesticity. A husband should give his wife attention in a way that makes her feel like she is the most glorious creature he’s ever laid eyes on. Husbands, your wife still has the same cravings she had a little girl – so make space for to cultivate her nurturing nature and openly cherish her feminine beauty.
—
From 1/28/25:
“A woman shall marry the man whom she can call her lord—and no one else.”
— Sigrid Unset on hypergamy
ADDENDUM: As I understand it, she wrote these words when Norwegian feminists were demanding that the words of Ephesians 5, “wives, submit to your husbands,” be dropped from the marriage liturgy. She defended them, arguing that if women will choose their husbands well (a man who can satisfy their hypergamous desires) then the offense of Paul’s words dissipate.
—
“The war and the years afterwards confirmed the doubts I always had had about the ideas I was brought up on….[I judged] that liberalism, feminism, nationalism, socialism, pacifism, would not work, because they refused to consider human nature as it really is. Instead, they presupposed that mankind was to “progress” into something else—towards their own ideas of what people ought to be.”
— Sigrid Unset in the 1930s
—
From 8/7/25:
A key principle in marriage: “Headship and respect are romantic necessities.” This can be stated in a variety of ways but the basic point is this: Masculinity and femininity are necessary to maintain marital eros. Sexual polarity drives attraction and creates the erotic bond that help hold a husband and wife together and make marriage a joy. Surely when Scripture commands a man to rejoice in the wife of his youth, it includes sexual pleasure, which means couples should aim to stoke the fires of erotic love throughout the course of their marriage.
Obviously, there is more to a strong marital bind that the sexual tie, but it is certainly essential. Some listeners may have noted that I was actually riffing off of C. S. Lewis. In his absolutely brilliant essay “Equality,” Lewis says,
“This last point needs a little plain speaking. Men have so horribly abused their power over women in the past that to wives, of all people, equality is in danger of appearing as an ideal. But Mrs. Naomi Mitchison has laid her finger on the real point. Have as much equality as you please – the more the better – in our marriage laws, but at some level consent to inequality, nay, delight in inequality, is an erotic necessity. Mrs. Mitchison speaks of women so fostered on a defiant idea of equality that the mere sensation of the male embrace rouses an undercurrent of resentment. Marriages are thus shipwrecked. This is the tragi-comedy of the modem woman — taught by Freud to consider the act of love the most important thing in life, and then inhibited by feminism from that internal surrender which alone can make it a complete emotional success. Merely for the sake of her own erotic pleasure, to go no further, some degree of obedience and humility seems to be (normally) necessary on the woman’s part.
The error here has been to assimilate all forms of affection to that special form we call friendship. It indeed does imply equality. But it is quite different from the various loves within the same household. Friends are not primarily absorbed in each other. It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up – painting, sailing ships, praying, philosophizing, fighting shoulder to shoulder. Friends look in the same direction. Lovers look at each other — that is, in opposite directions. To transfer bodily all that belongs to one relationship into the other is blundering.”
Lewis is right that the modern woman is deceived by Freud and the sexual revolution. She has been told the key to sexual fulfillment is to liberate herself from traditional rules and roles, and from nature. She should be sexually autonomous and adventurous. She should enter into causal hookups with men as equals. Seeking liberation from the constraints of traditional morality and sex roles will be the key to the woman’s fulfillment since it will mean she can finally relate to men on equal footing. But the Apostle Paul was wiser than the feminists are. Paul was wiser than Freud. When Paul commands the woman to respect and obey her husband, he is not only giving the recipe for a successful, strife-free marriage, he is giving the formula for a supercharged sex life in marriage as well. Lewis argues legal equality is an important outer shell in the marriage relationship (a point I might want to nuance a good bit — but let it go) for now); however, equality is the enemy of romance. As Lewis says, inequality is an erotic necessity. A woman cannot be wooed by a man she will not obey — at least not for long.
Why is this? Legal equality in our marriage laws cannot erase male and female nature, and the reality is that women remain as hypergamous as ever; that is to say, they are erotically drawn to men they view as their superiors, so much that they want to surrender to them, sexually and otherwise. While marital bliss cannot be reduced to what happens in the bedroom, what happens in the bedroom is a very good indicator (over the long haul) of the overall health of the marriage (we can bracket out special situations, e.g., when there are health problems, etc.). A woman who gives her husband the cold shoulder in the bedroom has not ceased to be a sexual creature; she just no longer wants to have sex with him. The way for him to attract her to himself once again is to become an admirable and desirable man in her eyes. In most marriages, submission and sexual chemistry will go together (and, no “submission” in this context has nothing to do with BDSM garbage, but with Paul’s teaching in Ephesians, based on the Christ/church relationship).
Lewis makes the same point in narrative form in his book That Hideous Strength. The Director wisely explains to Jane that her marriage to Mark can only work if she learns that obedience to her husband is an erotic necessity:
“I don’t think I look on marriage quite as you do. It seems to me extraordinary that everything should hang on what Mark says…about something he doesn’t understand.
“Child,” said the Director, “it is not a question of how you or I look on marriage but how my Masters look on it.”
“Someone said they were very old fashioned. But-“
“That was a joke. They are not old fashioned; but they are very, very old.”
“They would never think of finding out first whether Mark and I believed in their ideas of marriage?”
“Well – no,” said the Director with a curious smile. “No. Quite definitely they wouldn’t think of doing that.”
“And would it make a difference to them what a marriage was actually like – whether it was a success? Whether the woman loved her husband?”
Jane had not exactly intended to say this: much less to say it in the cheaply pathetic tone which, it now seemed to her, she had used. Hating herself, and fearing the Director’s silence, she added, “But I suppose you will say I oughtn’t to have told you that.”
“My dear child,” said the Director, “you have been telling me that ever since your husband was mentioned”
“Does it make no difference?”
“I suppose,” said the Director, “it would depend on how he lost your love.”
Jane was silent. Though she could not tell the Director the truth, and indeed did not know it herself, yet when she tried to explore her inarticulate grievance against Mark, a novel sense of her own injustice and even pity for her husband, arose in her mind. And her heart sank, for now it seemed to her that this conversation, to which she had vaguely looked for some sort of deliverance from all problems was in fact involving her in new ones.
“It was not his fault,” she said at last. “I suppose our marriage was just a mistake.”
The Director said nothing.
“What would you – what the people you are talking of – say about a case like that?”
“I will tell you if you really want to know,” said the Director.
“Please,” said Jane reluctantly.
“They would say,” he answered, “that you do not fall in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”
Something in Jane that would normally have reacted to such a remark with anger or laughter was banished to a remote distance (where she could still, but only just, hear its voice) by the fact that the word Obedience-but certainly not obedience to Mark – came over her, in that room and in that presence, like a strange oriental perfume, perilous, seductive, ambiguous..
“Stop it!” said the Director, sharply.
Jane stared at him, open mouthed. There were a few moments of silence during which the exotic fragrance faded away.
“You were saying, my dear?” resumed the Director.
“I thought love meant equality,” she said, “and free companionship.”
“Ah, equality!” said the Director. “We must talk some other time. Yes, we must all be guarded by equal right’s from one another’s greed, because we are fallen. Just as we must all wear clothes for the same reason. But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes, ripening for the day when we shall need them no longer. Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.”
“I always thought that was just what it was. I thought that it was in their souls that people were equal.”
“You were mistaken,” he said gravely. “That is the last place where they are equal. Equality before law, equality of incomes–that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food. You might as well try to warm yourself with a blue-book.”
“But surely in marriage…?”
“Worse and worse,” said the Director. “Courtship knows nothing of it; nor does fruition. What has free companionship to do with that? Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends – comrades – do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed…”
“I thought,” said Jane and stopped.
“I see,” said the Director. “It is not your fault. They never warned you. No one has ever told you that obedience – humility – is an erotic necessity. You are putting equality where it ought not to be.”
Jane is not attracted to Mark because women are never attracted to men that they pity. (The fastest way for a single man to get friend-zoned is to make himself the object of a woman’s pity rather than respect/admiration. Women are not attracted to effeminate weakness but to masculine strength. Men who whine and grumble are not likely to get anywhere because they appear to women as incompetent and fragile.) But the real reason Jane thinks their marriage is a mistake is because they have not lived in marriage according to its design. They have been concerned with equality rather than reality — namely the reality that men and women are different and need something different from each other. Until Jane learns to surrender herself to Mark and obey him, she will not be able to fully love (and make love) to him. Deep down we all know this. A real romantic love story premised on equality would be impossible. One of them, after all, will have to ask the other out. One of them, after all, will have to propose marriage. One of them, after all, will have to lead the dance, while the other follows. Marital love is about many things but it is certainly not about equality, at least not in the modern sense of the term. Indeed, equality is the enemy of romance. Equality kills romance. It is only polarity — sexual differentiation — that can revive it. Dating and romance are nearly dead in our day for precisely this reason. One of the main killers of marriage and the marriage bed in our day is androgyny.
It goes without saying here that not only are men and women not romantic equals, but their roles are not reversible or interchangeable. The man must lead. The woman must respond. Otherwise, the relationship will go nowhere.
The quoted section from That Hideous Strength provides an excellent reason for keeping the bride’s vow to “obey” in the marriage ceremony. There is nothing more essential to the erotic one flesh relationship that is at the core of marriage than her obedience to her husband. He must be admirable, assertive, and confident; passivity, cowardice, and indecisiveness in men are unattractive. And she must be submissive, respectful and obedient; nagging, controlling, and manipulative behavior will drive him away.
—
I wanted to give a little bit of follow up on the first part of last Sunday’s sermon (9/20) when I talked about “therapy culture.” A few links and reading recommendations:
* Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier and The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt – these books are not by Christian authors but they are very good (especially for parents) in unpacking the harm the growth of therapy culture has done (especially to children).
* Resisting Therapy Culture by Matthew Loftus and Lies My Therapist Told Me by Greg Gifford – these are Christian books, with Loftus focusing of ways in which therapy culture creeping into the church has brought compromise and Gifford questioning the whole category of “mental health” as currently understood.
* “The Culture Keeps the Score” by John Ehrett argues against displacing the biblical concept of sin with the therapeutic category of trauma.
* Jeff Minick on how adult children going “no contact” with their parents is a huge problem. Minick is drawing from Noelle Mering’s work on the topic.
* A short but excellent clip on the problem with therapy culture.Therapy is a form of discipleship; the therapist is a quasi-pastor. Rumination on our problems tends to make them worse.
—
On headship and sumission:
A man who refuses to obey God but expects his wife to obey him is a hypocrite. A wife who expects her children to obey her but refuses to obey her husband is a hypocrite.
—
“On the difference between public vs. private education: ‘Try talking French with someone who studied it in public school. Then with a Berlitz graduate.’”
— Milton Friedman
—
Pro-family welfare is better than anti-family welfare, but it would be foolish to pretend like it will not have any downsides. When it comes to politics, there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. Pro-family welfare might encourage more family formation and more stay-at-home moms, but it will also further emasculate men who will miss out on the satisfaction and respect that come from being the provider for their families. Welfare always, always, always emasculates men. If the money is going to be spent no matter what, sure, I’d rather it be given to married couples instead of subsidizing fatherlessness (since we will always get more of what we subsidize), but let’s not pretend like “socialism for families” is some magic cure to the brokenness of our culture.
—
Interesting article on the culture war and catholicity in Ireland:
—
Feminism in 2026 is a bundle of contradictions. Feminists want all the privileges men have but none of the accountability. They want to take credit for anything good they do as “strong, independent women,” but then use their female hormones as an excuse when things don’t go well and they act crazy.
https://youtube.com/shorts/lNMEfBC1KUA?is=i476yR3LEHejqZGK
—
“When I talk to well meaning normiecons they all understand that a growing Muslim population is a threat to the country but they all have this strange plan where we will ban Sharia law and declare Islam “not a religion” because its political or something
I talked to about 20 very nice people with the exact same rube goldberg machine solution this weekend, so it must be getting traction somewhere in the commentariat
I then explained that the simple solution, and the only one that will work, is to ban all Muslim immigration
This generates a bewildered look and the assertion that doing this would somehow be more difficult due to the 1st amendment than reclassifying an entire major world religion as not one
To reiterate, I am fine with banning Sharia law but it really does nothing, it’s performative
Sharia law is what Muslims do, it is how they are naturally governed, it is their way of being
You can write whatever words you like on a piece of paper but once you have enough Muslims YOU WILL GET SHARIA LAW
Stopping the physical presence of Muslims in your country is the only way to avoid this
Why do you think we have English common law? Because we did a detailed survey of all legal systems and objectively found it to be best? No
We have English common law because we are an Anglo-descended nation, it is our way of being, our Sharia law
When you lose the majority Anglo population that kind of law will give way to another, we are already seeing this now with jury trials”
— Auron McIntyre
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“On no account must a woman be permitted to show a man any portion of her body naked, for fear lest both fall: the one by gazing eagerly, the other by delighting to attract those eager glances.”
— Clement of Alexandria
—
“The “civil rights” revolutionary groups are a case in point. Their goal is not equality but power. The background of Negro culture is African and magic, and the purposes of magic are control and power over God, man, nature, and society. Voodoo, or magic, was the religion and life of American Negroes. Voodoo songs underlie jazz, and old voodoo, with its power goal, has been merely replaced with revolutionary voodoo, a modernized power drive. The student revolution attacks the inequality between students and faculty, between students and the ruling powers, but it has consistently rejected favorable concessions in favor of broader claims to power. The goal from the beginning is power. The list could be extended indefinitely. The goal of the equalitarians has always been power, and equality has been an argument to tickle the sick conscience of a faithless and shaky ruling element. The law will always require inequality. The question is simply this: will it be an inequality in terms of fundamental justice, i.e., the rewarding of good and the punishing of evil, or will it be the inequalities of injustice and evil triumphant?”
— Rushdoony
—
Man of the West: You are free men. Do not live like slaves. You are heirs of the greatest civilization in history. Your ancestors built the greatest civilization the world has ever known. Their blood runs in your veins. Live a life worthy of your ancestors. Build a Christian civilization. Pass on something worthwhile to your descendants. Leave a legacy. Work for the restoration of Christendom.
—
“If they (the North) prevail, the whole character of the Government will be changed, and instead of a federal republic, the common agent of sovereign and independent States, we shall have a central despotism, with the notion of States forever abolished, deriving its powers from the will, and shaping its policy according to the wishes, of a numerical majority of the people; we shall have, in other words, a supreme, irresponsible democracy. The Government does not now recognize itself as an ordinance of God, and when all the checks and balances of the Constitution are gone, we may easily figure to ourselves the career and the destiny of this godless monster of democratic absolutism. The progress of regulated liberty on this continent will be arrested, anarchy will soon succeed, and the end will be a military despotism, which preserves order by the sacrifice of the last vestige of liberty.
They are now fighting the battle of despotism. They have put their Constitution under their feet; they have annulled its most sacred provisions; The future fortunes of our children, and of this continent, would then be determined by a tyranny which has no parallel in history.”
— James Henly Thornwell, 1862
(From Scott Morgan)
—
“They’ll cancel me for saying the truth because it goes against their feminist propaganda, but I’m gonna say it anyways:
Patriarchy was invented to protect women from themselves.
Not because men hated women.
Because if female nature is left unchecked, it creates chaos.
A woke society that doesn’t even know what a woman is anymore.
Impulse. Emotion. Hypergamy. Poor long-term decisions.
That’s why older societies put structure around marriage, family and male leadership.
These rules were not random.
It’s what allowed societies to thrive for millennia under the patriarchy. Instead of being destroyed by feminism and soyboys.”
— Tania Shaw, on feminism vs patriarchy
—
“Too many Christians treat defeat as a measure of sanctification. That you must lose and you must be weak and you must be trampled underfoot to prove your worthiness.
The podcast pastors desperate for fame of course never take their own counsel in this regard—losing is for the sheep, not them. Plus, it would be mean to call a wolf a wolf. Better to let it devour some sheep than to be called anti-wolf by the local townsfolk.
They point to Christ on the cross and state that if he submitted himself unto death, then you must also submit and accept defeat. They forget, or fail to contemplate, that Christ only subjected himself to death for the purpose of destroying it. He crushed Satan under his heel and freed us from the chains of sin and death. The victory is already won, so charge forth and act like it!
Christ is a victorious warrior-king who chose you and forgave you because he wants you confidently marching with him towards victory. That calls for boldness and confidence in the fight, not submission to the enemy. He told you that the world will hate you—he never said to just give in and give up and just sit around and wait. You are made in the image of that same warrior-king, not in the image of flotsam hopelessly bobbing along with the tide.
What kind of spiritual cuckery tells the faithful, for whom total victory is already assured, to just give in now because there’s just nothing to be done until He returns?
Yet this is exactly what far too many weak churches and weak men demand of the faithful: to just give in, accept defeat, to turn the other cheek, and just helplessly wait until it’s all over. Turning the other cheek has been turned into a symbol of submission, rather than confident defiance backed by the assurance of victory.
Stop being spiritual eunuchs. Stop being spiritual cucks terrified of what the enemy might say about you if you stand up for yourself. Sack up, grab the sword, don the armor, and fight with the confidence of a warrior who knows the battle has all already been won. Defeat is for losers, and Christ the King is no loser.”
— Sean Davis, on X
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It’s a stretch to call Taylor Swift the “model wife,” but this post still makes a good point about wifely respect:
—
From 10/23/24:
There’s no question that David Platt’s book Radical is one of the most misleading and destructive books put out by an evangelical leader in the last 20 years. There’s a lot of competition in that space, sadly, but Platt rises towards the top because his book was so widely read and even applied by people who didn’t know better. People didn’t just read Radical; they restructured their lives according to its message. He ministered in the same city as me when the book was at its zenith (he has since moved away from Birmingham) so I got to see firsthand how it impacted people. I saw the false guilt. I saw the spread of the poverty gospel. I saw the demonizing of ambition and success. I saw the what a false view of spirituality and lack of a doctrine of vocation could do to people when they centered their lives around it. I saw what happens when people prioritize saving the world over serving the best interests of their own families. I saw what happens when the Great Commission is pursued at the expense of the Creation Mandate instead of in conjunction with it. I saw what happens when family structure is ignored in order to pursue virtue-signaling “mercy” projects. I saw happens when people with more money than practical experience and wisdom try to do ministry in complex urban and global settings. I saw what happens when people try to solve economic problems when they are economically illiterate.
My conclusion: it’s better to be normal than radical. Normal = living according to God’s design. Radical (at least in this case) = trying to make suburban evangelicalism more exciting by imposing extra-biblical obligations. The normal Christian life is “radical” enough in an insane society like ours.
The book Radical was radical alright – radically bad. Since the book came out, Platt’s gone even more woke to the point that he seems quite unhinged to me.
—
From 10/24/24:
The poverty gospel has actually made pretty significant inroads in evangelical and Reformed circles over the last generation.
Ron Sider was a well known proponent of the poverty gospel. His most famous work was entitled Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger and, frankly, proposed many of the worst conceivable attempts to address global poverty. Later in life Sider did come to appreciate the way market economics helped to raise the global standard of living far more than statist/socialist programs; he was willing to give capitalism some credit. But he never got over the supposed link between wealth and guilt. Along with other left leaning evangelicals, he advocated a form “simple living” or “minimalist living” based largely on a misunderstanding of key money texts in the gospels. David Chilton responded to Sider and completely decimated his arguments in his fabulous book Productive Christians in a An Age of Guilt Manipulators. The title says it all. I highly recommend reading Chilton.
It’s important to understand that Sider’s “poverty gospel” and socialist politics go together. Sider has no concept of Christians taking dominion, building a godly civilization, restoring Christendom (which would take heavy financing on the part of God’s people), etc. Christians don’t need wealth because we have no cultural mission (except to encourage socialism). He has no problem with Christians basically functioning as serfs of a secular state. In his view, we can voluntarily reduce ourselves to poverty (or minimalist living) because they state will take care of our basic needs. But he is wrong; there is nothing pious about this. This is not trusting the Heavenly Father to care for us, as Jesus taught in Matthew 6. This is statism. This idolatry of the state. And trusting in Caesar to take care of us is just as wicked as trusting in Mammon. Sider does not renounce idolatry; he exchanges one idol for another.
—
“Loser Theology uses grace as an excuse, but rugged Christianity uses grace as fuel.”
— Michael Clary
—
The standard narrative claims that after the Industrial Revolution, most men became wife-beating drunks, so we had to have prohibition and women’s suffrage. It’s the origin of the “women are angels, men are devils” trope. But the narrative doesn’t check out. It was men – a majority of these supposedly alcoholic misogynists – who banned alcohol and then granted women the vote. In passing these amendments, men went counter to their own desires/interests, and they did so because a small handful of bossy, nagging women badgered them into it. A very small percentage of women were actually part of temperance unions. Even fewer women wanted the right to vote. The 18th and 19th amendments do more to prove men of the early 20th century were already simps living in the longhouse than anything else. This is not to deny many American men of that era had a drinking problem or were violent with their wives. But these problems get blown out of proportion.
—
Loser theology, doormat Christianity, and the poverty gospel are all manifestations of the same outlook – namely, Christians prove their faithfulness by their failures. Power, wealth, success, ambition, and so on, are all too dangerous for Christians to handle. It’s better, safer, and godlier to get trampled underfoot for Jesus. We may be losers but at least we are good losers! The problem, of course, is that Jesus said his people getting trampled underfoot could be a sign of judgment – a sign that the salt has lost its saltiness.
—
Therapy culture, wokeness, and feminism are all different manifestations of the same thing – a war on reality and a subversion of God’s order. They each prioritize feelings over truth, women over men, and victimhood over responsibility.
—
Over the last 10+ years, I’ve seen therapy/counseling destroy far more marriages than it has saved. Far too many husbands have paid a therapist to destroy his marriage. My advice to men in troubled marriages in most situations: Do not outsource headship to a third party. Become your own marriage counselor.
—
On immigration:
A passport without allegiance is just paperwork.
—
Christians still sin but Christians can never be at peace with their sin.
—
The vast majority of “smash the patriarchy” feminists are hating on something they have never experienced and know nothing about. Most feminist have never lived under true Christian patriarchy, in which men lead/rule with wisdom and love. Most of the early feminists had “daddy issues” and did not know any version of masculinity except for toxic masculinity. There are exceptions here and there, but this is the norm for feminists.
Women who embrace feminism are to blame for their own rebellion against God’s order and design. But men are to blame for feminism as well – both toxically masculine men, who mistreated the women in their lives, and soft, effeminate men, who failed to lead the women under their care as they should have.
—
“Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.”
— Chesterton, on the war on reality
—
If the sole purpose of marriage is happiness, then unhappiness becomes grounds for divorce.
—
“Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased. The difference was established long ago, when ‘I believe’ lost precedence to ‘I feel,’ the caveat of the therapeutic. And if the therapeutic is to win out, then surely the psychotherapist will be his secular spiritual guide.”
— Philip Rieff
—
“Modern Christianity has replaced the Gospel of repentance and faith with a gospel of relief and feelings.
We don’t want to be born again; we just want to feel better.
This is not Christianity.
It’s spiritual anesthesia.
The therapeutic gospel tells you:
“You’re not dead in sin, just deformed.”
“You’re not a sinner, just misunderstood.”
“You don’t need to repent, just rest.”
But without the conviction of sin, there is no need for a Savior.
The real Gospel doesn’t pamper you. It pierces you.
It tells you the hard truth about yourself, then offers you mercy in Christ.
It doesn’t affirm your feelings.
It calls them to submit to God’s Word.”
— Virgil Walker
—
Monarchy does have some advantages over more republican and democratic forms of government, most especially the fact that when things go really wrong, there’s just one neck to strangle, as opposed to many.
—
“Some people who are very dissatisfied with their lives nevertheless have no intention of changing their own behavior.
They want to keep on doing what they have always done, but just have it turn out differently.”
— Thomas Sowell
—
“The Centipede’s Dilemma: Ask a centipede which one of its hundred legs moves the fastest and it forgets how to move.
Reflecting on what we normally do without thought ironically worsens performance. A culture of endless self-reflection, therapy, and navel gazing is eroding important life skills.”
— Abigail Shrier (one of the best ways to improve mental health is to stop thinking and talking about it so much)
—
Really good overview of ancient technology and mysteries of the ancient world:
https://youtu.be/0fktJpXjhUk?is=tsvumlMb-Q7OWsW1
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“Perhaps the greatest qualifications, the best instruction, the most useful learning, that any Christian minister can attain, without any disparagement of other kinds of learning, is that which is attained in the school of affliction; it is by this he becomes able to feel, to sympathize, and to speak a word in season to them that are weary.”
— Andrew Fuller
—
“To assign man’s discoveries to the category of general revelation is to imbue them with an aura of validity and consequent authority which they do not, indeed, they cannot merit.”
— Doug Bookman, “The Word of God and Counseling,” in Sufficiency: Historic Essays on the Sufficiency of Scripture in Counseling, edited by Heath Lambert and T. Dale Johnson Jr.
—
“Theology is the science of living blessedly forever. Blessed life consists in the knowledge of God. Joh 17.3, This is eternal life, that they know You to be the only true God, and the one you have sent, Christ Jesus. Isa 53.11, by his knowledge shall my righteous servant (namely, Christ) justify many. And therefore it consists likewise in the knowledge of ourselves, because we know God by looking into ourselves.”
–William Perkins
—
“A smooth sea never made a good sailor.”
— FDR
—
“Can we fight sin and Satan with a better weapon than the one Christ Himself used to defeat the tempter? Surely Christ did this to show us how we are to enter the battle against them. If He had chosen, He could have struck the devil down with a single ray of His divine power. He could have laid that bold enemy at His feet just as easily as He later overwhelmed those who came to arrest Him. But instead, Christ chose to veil the majesty of His deity and allow Satan to come near, so that He might defeat him with the Word. In doing so, He demonstrated the power of the sword He would leave to His saints—the Word of God—as their defense against the same enemy.”
— William Gurnall,
—
“All parents became amateur shrinks, and every shrink—even a childless one—was a parenting expert. Parents began to sound less like parents—in the traditional, American vein—and more like therapists. “Sammy, I see that you’re feeling frustrated. Is there a way you could express your frustration without biting your sister?””
— Abigail Shrier on gentle parenting
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“On your exceedingly great mercy rests all my hope. Give what you command, and then command whatever you will.”
— Augustine, Confessions X, 29
—
The therapeutic turn has led to a dead end.
—
People will spend years in therapy rather than just admit they are sinners in need of God’s forgiveness.
—
“Insofar as you’re thinking about yourself, you’re depressed and anxious…There’s no difference between thinking about yourself and being depressed and anxious. They are the same thing,”
— Jordan Peterson, on why therapy often makes things worse
I don’t think this quote covers every case of melancholy/depression. But it is certainly true of many such cases.
—
The closer we get to God, the more sensitive to and aware of our remaining sin we become.
The classic observation is that Paul’s self-assessment of his own sinfulness grows sharper across his letters, even as his apostolic fruit and assurance of grace grow.
The three texts usually lined up are these:
- Least of the apostles 1 Corinthians 15:9 (written ~AD 55 from Ephesus): “For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” Here the comparison is still within the apostolic circle. He ranks himself last among the Twelve-plus-himself because of his pre-conversion violence against the church. Grace is already the explanation (“by the grace of God I am what I am”), but the circle of comparison is still relatively small.
- Less than the least of all the saints Ephesians 3:8 (written ~AD 60–62 from Roman imprisonment): “To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given…” The Greek is striking: ἐλαχιστοτέρῳ πάντων ἁγίων — a comparative built on a superlative, “leaster than the least.” The comparison has widened from apostles to all the saints. Five or six years later, after more suffering, more revelation, and more years of walking with Christ, Paul no longer measures himself only against other apostles. He places himself beneath the entire company of the redeemed.
- Foremost of sinners 1 Timothy 1:15 (written ~AD 62–64, after release from the first Roman imprisonment): “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.” The present tense is deliberate: “I am” (εἰμί), not “I was.” The circle is now the whole human race of sinners whom Christ came to save. Paul does not treat his persecuting past as a closed chapter that no longer defines him; he treats it as the clearest window he has into the depths of remaining sin and the heights of mercy. What is not happening is a collapse of assurance or a denial of justification. In the same stretch of 1 Timothy he thanks Christ for judging him faithful and appointing him to service (1:12). In Philippians he can say “to live is Christ.” The growing sense of sin and the growing sense of grace rise together. Light increases; therefore more of the remaining darkness is seen. This is the ordinary pattern of sanctification, not an apostolic peculiarity. The holier a man becomes, the more he sees how unholy he still is. The tax collector in Luke 18, not the Pharisee, is the one who goes home justified. Paul’s three statements simply trace that same movement over roughly a decade of apostolic life. The pastoral payoff is straightforward: a deepening awareness of sin is not a sign that grace is failing. It is often a sign that grace is doing its proper work — making a man simultaneously more useful and more dependent.
—
What makes women happiest is marrying a strong man, having children, and staying home to raise them.
—
Tyler Todt on headship/patriarchy, the problem with “happy wife, happy life,” etc:
“The fastest way to end up in a sexless miserable marriage is to DO EVERYTHING YOUR WIFE WANTS, have zero backbone, & have zero self respect so she’ll lose all respect for you.
Fellas, don’t ask your wife’s permission,
ask for her perspective. She’s your wife not your mommy.
“I vote for whoever my wife tells me to…..”
“Men” like this that NEVER SAY NO to their wives, stand for nothing, lose her respect & then wonder why even after he gives her everything she wants they have sex 3x a year………
She doesn’t want a CHILD to tell what to do.
She craves a MAN grounded in his principles, able to THINK & reason on his own, & a strong leader. She wants him to stand up to her even if she won’t admit it.
She wants him to be strong & respected.
Not giddy that she allowed him to do something…….
If you want to make a woman miserable, give her everything she thinks she wants
*I think this is also true for men in marriages. I wouldn’t respect my wife at all either if she wasn’t intelligent, well thought out, & ambitious herself. Who wants a weak doormat??…
Happy wife happy life is the biggest SCAM & 100% propaganda.”
See the video that goes with the post: https://x.com/tyromper/status/2100080580637733355?s=46&t=au-C34qTtl4rGPFr5igkAw
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Auron McIntyre on why democracy leads to endless debt because politicians compete to buy voters with public money:
https://youtu.be/uQgUA-o15lI?is=UkHb5YClfNszIVXB
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On attraction:
As Rollo Tomassi tells married men, you cannot negotiate genuine desire. But you can cultivate desire. You can become desirable.
—
A man has to learn to be his own marriage counselor. Husbands, instead of outsourcing counseling (and therefore headship) to a third party, take ownership and do the counseling work yourself.
First, this means you have to counsel yourself. Give yourself good advice. Encourage yourself. Discipline and correct yourself. Remind yourself of what God requires of you as a husband. Treat yourself as someone you are obligated to help. You cannot change your wife, but you can change yourself so become the best husband you can be, independent of what she might or might not do. Do your own duty, and do it cheerfully.
Second, learn to counsel your wife in an effective way. Speak gently but firmly to her. Encourage her. “Honey, I want us to have an amazing marriage. I want us to be incredibly close and wildly happy together for however many years God gives us. Let me tell you what it’s going to take to make that happen…” Lead your wife from a position of strength and wisdom. Be energetic, optimistic, and joyful. Lead by example. Trust that she will match your energy and happiness in her own feminine way. Do not ask her, “What do you want me to do? Just tell me and I’ll do it.” That puts her in the leadership role and puts pressure on her she wasn’t made to bear. You cannot read her mind but you can evaluate her actions. You can understand female nature and notice what she responds to.
To be your own marriage counselor means more than just words. Action is required too. It means being a joyful head. It means taking responsibility – for yourself, for your wife, for your marriage, for the state of your household, for your sexual relationship. Take ownership and seek what is best for your family.
Think about the role a third party counselor plays: he listens to both husband and wife, then he tells each what to do. So to be your own counselor means listening to yourself to know what you want and exhorting yourself. Be honest with yourself. It also means listening to your wife and telling her what she needs to hear. Hold her accountable. Do not let her pushback or rebellion deter you from carrying out your mission with purpose and joy.
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The more a man submits to God, the more courageous and dominant he can be in the world.
—
Courage is born of fear – fearing God.
A man who kneels before God can stand up to anything and anyone.
—
“Lindsay Clancy has suffered enough. She lost her children.”
https://twitter.com/langmanvince/status/2100609359080271896?s=46&t=au-C34qTtl4rGPFr5igkAw
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This guy makes an uncomfortable point about the women who support Lindsay Clancy:
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Husbands, never say to your wife, “Just tell me what to do,” because she cannot respect a man she has to lead into manhood herself. Figure it out and do it. Do it without needing to ask and without being asked.
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Feeling sorry for oneself has never fixed anything.
Insofar as therapy dirves people inward to self-pity, it makes problems worse rather than better.
—
“If you’ve thought the patriarchy was bad, it seems the matriarchy will literally let you murder your children and cheer you on from outside the courthouse.”
— Kristin Landers
—
Many abortions are justified on the basis of the “mental health of the mother,” same Lindsay Clancy’s plea. The child in the womb is killed not because he poses a physical threat to the mother but a mental/emotional threat.
—
Only the free market brings prosperity:
https://twitter.com/WealthLens_/status/2099071876014240194/video/1?s=46
https://twitter.com/sfliberty/status/2100982493524443534/video/1?s=46
—
“What happens to a society when it begins to collectively disregard family values?
There’s something worth preserving in the simple idea that family matters. Marriage, commitment, responsibility, respect for parents, raising children with purpose, helping your neighbors, keeping your word, and taking care of the people who depend on you may not sound revolutionary, but these values have a tremendous influence on everyday life.
A strong family gives people a place where they belong and people they are responsible for. It teaches children that life isn’t always about getting what you want. Sometimes you sacrifice for someone else. Sometimes you put your own interests aside. Sometimes you do the right thing even when nobody is going to reward you for it.
Those lessons don’t stay inside the home either. They can shape how people treat friends, neighbors, coworkers, and strangers. When people learn to value responsibility and commitment, they are better prepared to contribute to the communities around them instead of expecting someone else to solve every problem.
Embracing traditional and godly values doesn’t mean pretending every family is perfect or that every tradition should remain unchanged. Families struggle, people make mistakes, and circumstances are different. But there is still tremendous value in encouraging stable families, involved parents, personal responsibility, loyalty, and a willingness to put something bigger than yourself ahead of immediate gratification.
A healthy society isn’t built only through laws or institutions. It’s built through millions of ordinary decisions made inside homes every day.
How different would our society look if people valued living godly lives?”
— Declaration of Memes
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“Politics should not be reduced to the art of the possible. It also contains the art of attaining the impossible, of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.”
— Henry of Fearn on X
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The defenders of “propositional nationhood” are not actually serious about defending the propositions that have defined our nation. It’s a worthless position that subverts itself.
Historically, Americans understood that America was a mix of peoplehood and propositional commitments. Most Americans today understand neither the peoplehood nor the propositional aspects of American identity – and so we are losing both.
An illegal immigrant living on American soil is not an American because he is not part of the American people. But Joe Biden isn’t an American either, because he denies the basic propositions that define us as a people.
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““America isn’t a people, it’s an idea.”
“Well, can we at least deport the people who openly reject the idea?”
“No, that would be against the ideas!”
This is the game we’ve been playing for over 60 years now.
Civic nationalism inevitably destroys itself because it’s utterly incapable of making literally any value judgements between those who openly reject the civics and those who adhere to it.
Why bother adhering or even learning the civics in the first place if there’s absolutely zero price to pay for betraying them?”
— Christian Heiens, on propositional nationhood’s failure to defend the propositions
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1819 News continues to make a difference in our state:
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A bunch of beautiful mainline church buildings are about to become available. Apparently no one wants to get out of bed on a Sunday morning to go hear the Jezebel lady-preachers at these synagogues of Satan:
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Revisions of some old X posts, from January 11, 2025:
Grace restores and perfects nature.
Nature says all humans descended from one man. Nations arose providentially in history, but they are not permanent/immutable features of nature or the creation (such as sex/gender). Nations and national identities come and go through history (e.g., the Canaanites no longer exist; Americans have only existed for a few centuries). Ephesians 2:11ff has to bear upon how we understand grace’s restoration of nature. Yes, nations were always part of the divine design for history, but they also have a kind of historical contingency.
Nations and national identity will continue to exist into the resurrection (e.g., Jesus is still Jewish). But in the resurrection, the nations will all be one in Christ, with no enmity, no division, no ethnic arrogance producing strife and division between different people groups. The enmity between different people groups is not “natural.” It is the result of sin, and will be removed in the end. “All nations whom Thou hast made shall come and worship before Thee, O Lord, and shall glorify Thy name.”
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Posts on nations, nationalism, and national identity from April 10, 2025:
It is not possible to take 16th century Reformational political theory and drop it into an American context unaltered anymore than it is possible to take the law of Moses and drop it into an American context unaltered. We cannot do with the Reformers what theonomists want to do with Moses because when it comes to politics, context matters and prudence is always necessary. We must adapt old principles to new situations.
Of course, biblical law should be an authoritative source of political wisdom and principles in every society. And we can certainly learn from and implement certain features from Reformational political theology — their political work is not irrelevant. But the American context is different — it’s different from ancient Israel and its different from 16th century Geneva. American problems call for uniquely American solutions. We have to deal with America as she actually exists in 2025. We have to reckon with American history, both the good and bad. We have to play the hand we’re dealt.
To give a couple examples: The American founders developed a system of limited government, checks and balances, federalism, individual rights grounded in nature and nature’s God, etc. We cannot simultaneously say, “the constitution is dead” AND honor our political forefathers. This is one reason why I have questioned the notion of a “Christian prince” in an American context — a “Christian prince” seems fitting in a European context, but not America. A Christian President, a Christian Commander-in-Chief — those would be fully American. But not a Christian prince. There’s no need for Americans to hanker after European titles that we left behind a long time ago. We should work within the system our founding fathers gave us (and of course that system has provisions for change and adaptation). And yes, I’ve read Caldwell — I know we have gone through several constitutional revolutions, and the civil rights regime has created a new de facto order. But even rolling back what needs to be rolled back from the civil rights era has to be done in a way that works with and within our existing institutions. To kill the institutions is to kill the nation. You cannot say the constitution is dead while simultaneously trying to make America great again. Making America great again has to mean respect for what America has been; it has to mean building in some sort of continuity with what has gone before us.
Another example: White Christian Nationalists will complain that no one accuses Japan of racism for wanting to be Japanese, so why is it wrong for whites to want to have a country of their own? Why is ethnonationalism ok in some countries but not others? But this misses the point, and the problem. American and Japanese history are entirely different. Racial identity politics will always function differently in America than anywhere else. America was multiracial from the days of the earliest settlers. We had black slaves here. We had Amerindians. We purchased and conquered territories that included Hispanics. America has to deal with the race issue differently from other nations because we have a different history. Advocating ethnonationalism here is a very different thing because our national story is very different. And before jumping to conclusions about what I am saying and not saying, I fully believe that we need to enforce our borders and deport illegals, we need to stop anti-white racialism, we need to continue dismantling DEI, we need to bring critical manufacturing back home, etc. But none of those things require us to frame the issues in terms of race. And none of those things will make America monoracial. They are all common sense proposals that serve the good of the nation. Period. Racializing everything is not the way forward. Trump won twice (or thrice), and did so without racialization. In fact, he sought to build a coalition that included blacks and Hispanics, and had more success than any other recent politician — and that’s becausen he knows coalitions are required in any movement if it’s going to be successful. The left wanted him to do racial identity politics, because it would have played into their own electoral strategy, but he refused. Trump’s genius is that he’s shown a way forward, a way the right can win. I don’t see why some people want to mess it up by making it all about race. “White Christian Nationalism” is to “Christian Nationalism” what “Make White America Great Again” is to MAGA. Conservative blacks often point out that the best way to deal with race in America is to just stop talking about it. And I tend to agree: if we focus on building a Christian nation here (as opposed to, say, a white nation), the race issue will take care of itself.
ADDENDUM: Given than Japan is 1% Christian, I’d like to see more missionaries going there. Otherwise, sure, they can remain ethnonationalist. But they better start having more babies or there won’t be any Japanese left before long.
ADDENDUM: Is there a Japanese equivalent of the 1790 Naturalization Act?
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Grok’s summary of Charles Haywood’s post-liberal manifesto:
Charles Haywood’s manifesto is The Foundationalist Manifesto: The Politics of Future Past (June 17, 2021), published on his site The Worthy House. It is the main statement of the post-liberal program he calls Foundationalism. 
Haywood is an Indianapolis businessman who built and sold the hair-care manufacturer Mansfield-King (2020), then wrote hundreds of long book reviews and essays. He also founded the invitation-only, men-only Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR). He frames Foundationalism as “a politics of future past”: not nostalgia or restoration, but a new order built from pre-Enlightenment Western principles after liberalism is broken. 
Core claim
The source of civilizational failure is “autonomic liberalism”—Enlightenment emancipation from unchosen bonds (family, sex roles, nation, virtue, hierarchy). Foundationalism’s first act is to smash and discredit that philosophy. Incremental conservatism is rejected; he says the current system must be shattered so something new can grow. The goal is “ordinary happiness of human life” and flourishing grounded in what he treats as reality, not ideology. 
The twelve pillars (summarized)
Haywood presents twelve interlocking “pillars.” The first five are the most fully spelled out in the manifesto itself:
- Space — Heroic outward achievement (space exploration, asteroid mining, great works) as a civilizational engine, fertility spur, and alternative to decadence. Transhumanism and most social science are to be suppressed.
- Mixed government of limited ends and unlimited means — Not democratic at scale. Could begin as an Augustan limited dictatorship or an aristocracy. Light footprint on daily life, sharply reduced bureaucracy, but a state with “unlimited means” because, in his view, the state is not externally constrained. Virtue is encouraged; vice is stigmatized and sometimes punished.
- Virtue politics — Teleological (Christian-filtered) morality, stigma and taboo, honors for the virtuous. Rawlsian/emotivist ethics discarded. Ruling-class virtue is treated as essential.
- Sex-role realism — Explicitly anti-feminist. Men and women as complementary partners with different competencies and spheres. Women “will not be permitted to choose career over family” without heavy penalties; men “will not be permitted to choose not to have a family.” No-fault divorce banned; adultery socially and legally penalized; Tinder/porn suppressed.
- Economics subordinated to politics — Private property and most free exchange honored, but markets lose whenever they conflict with virtue or the political good. Consumerism, rent-seeking, and “fake work” curbed; some fortunes confiscated; tariffs used against consumerism. Secondary summaries of the later pillars typically group them as: intermediary institutions and subsidiarity; an orderly hierarchy with merit mobility; a public role for Christianity; high culture over mass culture; cautious technology (anti-transhumanist); and a nationalist, anti-globalist foreign policy (including seizure of assets of those who treat themselves as “global citizens”). How he says it happens Haywood writes that Foundationalism will not arrive cleanly. It requires first “smashing and irretrievably discrediting” Left cultural-political dominance, and “will inevitably occur, in part, by first passing through chaos and violence.” Success then depends on “bold men informed by Foundationalism.” He has separately written about post-collapse “armed patronage networks” and a possible warlord role for himself; those ideas sit alongside the manifesto rather than being identical to it. Reception The piece is the document critics quote when they call Haywood authoritarian or “far-right”: non-democratic government, unlimited state means, compelled family formation, asset seizure for cosmopolitans. He appeared with Tucker Carlson in 2022 to discuss it. Supporters treat it as a coherent post-liberal alternative to both liberalism and mere nostalgia. Detractors (from National Review/Erickson to The Guardian) treat it as a blueprint for illiberal rule. Primary text: theworthyhouse.com/2021/06/17/the-foundationalist-manifesto-the-politics-of-future-past
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Grok, answering, “Were America’s founding fathers classical liberals?”
“In important respects, yes — but the label is incomplete and a bit anachronistic.
The American Founders were not a single school of thought. They drew on several overlapping traditions: Lockean natural-rights theory, classical republicanism from Greece and Rome (filtered through English writers), English common law and the Glorious Revolution settlement, and Protestant moral and covenantal ideas. What later generations called “classical liberalism” — natural rights to life, liberty, and property; government by consent; limited and enumerated powers; rule of law; and a commercial society — was a central part of that mix. It was not the whole of it.
What they clearly shared with classical liberalism
The Declaration of Independence is the clearest statement. Jefferson’s language of unalienable rights, government instituted to secure those rights, and the right of the people to alter or abolish a government that becomes destructive of those ends tracks Locke’s Second Treatise closely. Many leading figures — Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin, Wilson, and others — treated Locke as a major authority. They rejected divine-right monarchy and hereditary privilege as the basis of political authority. They designed a constitution that divided and limited power, protected property and contracts, and treated individuals (at least free white male property owners) as rights-bearers rather than subjects.
They also favored commercial society and private property as engines of prosperity and independence. That is closer to Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment than to a purely agrarian or martial republic. Later 19th-century classical liberals reasonably saw the American founding as a practical embodiment of those principles.
What the “classical republican” side adds
The Founders were also steeped in Cicero, Polybius, Livy, Cato, Harrington, Sidney, and Montesquieu. They talked constantly about virtue, corruption, mixed government, the dangers of standing armies and concentrated power, and the need for citizens capable of self-government. They did not treat government as a mere night-watchman or individuals as isolated atoms. Many believed a republic required a certain moral character in the people and that law and custom should support that character. Washington’s favorite play was Addison’s Cato. Adams repeatedly invoked Aristotle, Plato, Livy, and Cicero alongside Locke.
Scholarship has gone back and forth on which tradition dominated. Mid-20th-century writers such as Louis Hartz emphasized a Lockean liberal consensus. Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and J.G.A. Pocock stressed the republican language of virtue and corruption. More recent work treats the Founders as synthesizers who used both languages without seeing a contradiction. Natural rights and civic virtue were not, for them, opposites.
Important limits and differences from later “liberalism”
They were not modern liberals. They accepted property qualifications for voting, did not treat democracy as an end in itself, and many supported slavery or delayed its abolition. Several states retained established churches after independence.
They were not consistent 20th-century libertarians. Hamilton and others wanted a more energetic national government for credit, commerce, and defense. They used tariffs, land policy, and moral legislation in ways later classical liberals often rejected.
“Liberal” in their own usage usually meant generous, broad-minded, or opposed to arbitrary power — not a party label. The systematic ideology later called classical liberalism developed after them.
So: the Founders were classical liberals in the sense that they made individual natural rights, limited government, consent, and commercial liberty foundational. They were also classical republicans who believed those liberties required virtue, mixed institutions, and a people capable of self-rule. Reducing them to one modern category flattens a richer, more practical 18th-century synthesis.”
This answer is not too bad. It leaves out the deep influence of biblical law on the founding fathers as they developed the classical liberal synthesis. But it rightly distinguishes classical liberalism from its degeneration into modern liberalism.
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“Who keeps a society running when most people never stop to think about all the work happening behind the scenes?
Men continue to fill many roles that are essential to everyday life. They build homes, repair roads, operate heavy machinery, maintain power systems, work in construction, agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, utilities, and countless other fields that people depend on every single day. When something breaks, needs to be built, moved, repaired, protected, or maintained, there are often men doing the work.
That doesn’t mean women aren’t essential or that every man belongs in the same role. It simply means men bring particular strengths, interests, and abilities that have tremendous value to families and communities.
Men also take on important responsibilities as fathers, husbands, mentors, first responders, soldiers, police officers, tradesmen, business owners, coaches, and community leaders. Some of the most important contributions never receive much attention because they happen quietly. A father working long hours to provide for his family, a mechanic keeping vehicles on the road, or a man teaching a young boy how to become responsible can have an enormous impact without ever making the news.
A healthy society needs people willing to accept responsibility, do difficult work, protect others, build things, and keep going when the job isn’t easy. Men have historically played a major role in all of those areas, and their contributions shouldn’t be dismissed or taken for granted.
How different would society look if we stopped taking the contributions of good men for granted and started appreciating just how much depends on them?”
— Declaration of Memes, on how men are the infrastructure of civilization
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“The American family should not have to compete with foreigners for housing
The American student should not have to compete with foreigners for an American education
The American people should not have to learn a foreign langue to navigate an American grocery store”
— Auron MacIntyre
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From August 7, 2024:
I fully believe that globalist multiculturalism (like what is running rampant in the UK today) needs to be stopped
But I don’t believe that Aristotle is the best weapon to do so
The reality is that in America today, descendants of the very people Aristotle said could not get along are getting along quite well
America is a nation full of descendants from Europe – but in Aristotle’s day Europe was filled with warring tribes that despised and dehumanized one another
What happened? In a word, the gospel
The Apostle Paul went through the same region that Aristotle was familiar with and created communities called churches in which those different ethnic groups came together
The fact that this is invisible to us today is largely proof of the gospel’s astounding success
The problem with relying on Aristotle is that it commits you to an ontology of strife and violence. For Aristotle, interethnic strife is not the result of the fall. It’s just the way things are. Strife and violence are natural, built into the very fabric of reality. That’s a denial of Christian teaching about creation and eschatology. While Christians believe that there would have been many ethnicities in an unfallen world, we believe they would have been at peace. Of course, we also believe countless ethnic groups will live at peace with one another in the resurrection.
So how do we destroy the multiculturalism we see in our day?
1 We use the gospel. The gospel still transforms and unites people. The gospel is the solution to the world’s problems.
2 We show that nations have no obligation to commit civilizational suicide by allowing unrestricted immigration by people who have no interest in assimilating.
3 We demonstrate that we actually have an obligation to preserve our all that is good about our people, our culture, and our heritage as an application of the 5th commandment.
4 We end the welfare state, which draws immigrants like moths to a flame. Stop giving free stuff away and people will not be as eager to come here.
5 We must state the obvious: the main immigration problem in the West comes from Muslims invading once Christian nations. Islam is a demonic religion and the sworn enemy of Western civilization. There is no way to integrate serious Muslims into the West. It has never worked. Immigration needs to be limited to people who are relatively like-minded (coming from a Christian heritage) and who intend to assimilate.
6 We must remind all Western nations that their civilization was created by the gospel. If we don’t want to sink to the levels of the third world, we must reclaim our Christian heritage.
ADDENDUM: Empires often forced ethnic mixing as a way to weaken loyalties
Deportations to a new place also weakened loyalties
But even within the Roman Empire, many people groups maintained a strong ethnic identity
This was true of Jews, obviously, but many other peoples as well
ADDENDUM: The same strategy used by ancient pagan emperors is being used today by globalist “elites”
There are a few differences of course, but it’s the same basic play
ADDENDUM: Sure — there have been problems — I’m not denying that
But those same people groups have gotten along well enough to form a cohesive civilization that lasted upwards of 1500 years
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I think this is right.
It’s not just Aristotle
The need for ethnic homogeneity, the view that a great many men were part of a permanent slave class, etc. were taken for granted as natural “common sense” realities for most people in the ancient world
War was a way of life
Just look at how often Israel is at war during the era of the judges and the monarchy – its constant
Every spring, kings went to battle – 2 Sam 11:1
The only respite from war came when your people got conquered and absorbed into a mighty empire that used force to keep a semblance of peace
Add to that the fact that most pagan creation myths start with violence, and the pagan view of an ontology of violence becomes even clearer
For the ancient pagan, violence just is – there is no escaping it
It’s why pagan societies are unlivable and destructive – they are based on the “might makes right” principle
Christians should not say things like “ethnic homogeneity is necessary for peace,” at least not without a lot of explanation
First of all, many homogenous societies have still had violence, going back to Cain and Abel
Second, there is too much counter-evidence
Paul’s churches were all interethnic and, to the degree they followed his directives, they had peace
Europe and America have been places where the gospel produced interethnic peace (eg, the Anglo-Saxons)
And so on
None of that is to say that having a multiethnic society is a good in itself or one we should pursue
That’s a prudential matter
There is no obligation to make a society multiethnic – a nation can seek its own good and develop its immigration policies according to that vision
Progressive global multiculturalism is not some kind of “gospel value” (even if some Big Eva goons want us to think so)
It is the intentional destruction of Western civilization
And Western civ is hated precisely because it is the most christianized civilization to ever exist
That’s why it get singles out for destruction while other monoethnic societies like those in Japan and places in Africa are left alone
I have a lot of sympathy with what @Eric_Conn
and @PerfInjust
are trying to do – but I want to make sure we use the best possible arguments
Arguments that rely on an ontology of violence are not going to get us where we want to go
Arguments that lead others to want to protect what is good, true, and beautiful about our own people, place, and heritage will
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Can Muslims and Christians coexist?
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If most Americans think Sharia is protected under the first amendment, it’s game over.
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“If somehow the British elements could be eliminated from the cultural patterns of the United States—why, Americans would be left with no coherent culture in public or in private life.”
–Russell Kirk
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The solution to the immigration crisis is simple. The way we talk about it makes it overly complex.
The solution:
- Deport all illegals. Enforce the laws we already have on the books. This is not racist; it’s simply honoring the democratic processes of the American system. Sure, many Americans cannopt stomach the messiness and occasional violence involved in deportations. But we can also make it much more difficult for illegals to remain here by penalizing them (e.g., tax remittances) and refusing to subsidize them (e.g., no welfare, no public education).
- Move towards a moratorium on virtually all immigration going forward. We cannot afford more immigration right now, with our culture and economy in crisis. We cannot assimilate more immigrants. Out welfare system, our educational institutions, and our healthcare system cannot accommodate any further immigration at this time.
All of that is simple – simple to explain, simple to articulate.
But the way many who would agree with these two points have chosen to talk about immigration makes it way more complicated than it needs to be. They focus on race/racial identity politics, and say nasty things about darker skin. They use derogatory labels for other ethnicities. Those things are unproductive, unrighteous, and will ultimately backfire. These men are, or at least sound like, real racists, which scares off the very people we have to persuade in order for #1 and 2 above to happen. Case in point:
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“Democrats historically wanted to import foreigners and put them on welfare because they believed this would lead to the immigrants voting for Democrats.
Republicans historically wanted to import foreigners because their
big business donors wanted a class of indentured laborers who cost less than actual Americans.
Democrats kept this state of affairs alive by calling anyone who opposed it racist. Republicans kept this state of affairs alive by calling anyone who opposed it communist and anti-market.
Our country is now overrun with foreigners, welfare seems to be entirely fraudulent, we’re $40 trillion in debt, our cities are ground zero for millennia-old ethnic and tribal conflicts, and our own countrymen can’t find work or afford a home in a nation built for them by their ancestors.
And if you have a problem with this, Democrats will call you a racist and Republican politicians will call you communist and also call you racist.”
— Sean Davis
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“The Left spent decades arguing that we needed to demographically transform the United States. Now that they have succeeded, “conservatives” are pushing to maintain the achievements of the Left and attacking the Right for standing up for the world before the migration revolution.”
— CJ Engel
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“I’ve been saying this for a very long time: the quickest way to corrupt any group of human beings is to give them to understand that they will not be held accountable for the bad or stupid things they do. Shake well, and wait ten minutes. If you encourage them to blame OTHER people for their bad or stupid deeds, you need only wait five minutes, and you can just let the brew sit without having to shake it.
It doesn’t matter what sex you are, what race, what creed you profess, what your political leanings are, what you do for a living, how old you are, what you have done in the past that was good and virtuous. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter also, for the Five Minute Arsenic, whether OTHER people HAVE been bad and ARE blameable. We can let God assign the punishment due to someone whose wickedness or folly has been prepared for by the wickedness and folly of other people. The wickedness and folly remain.
So I say to young American men: I KNOW that your schools have been dreadful, and I know also that contempt against you is considered a downright virtue. Well, and? No one compels you to consume porn: no one but your own passions, and I do understand that they are often mingled with loneliness and hopelessness — but also with timorousness, ennui, and spiritual sloth. Get yourselves dried out. No one prevents you from reading good books. Read them. No one prevents you from learning all kinds of manual skills that you can put to good use in your work or in your daily life. Go for them. Don’t let anybody discourage you. Will you encounter resistance at the start? Sure, a lot, from within yourself and from without. Shrug it off. You will soon find that these things are fun, and the manual work will build up the body — a great counter against depression, such work.
And nobody is keeping you from returning to church.
In the end, God judges us not by comparing us with other people, but absolutely. We can be assured that he is a merciful judge, and THEREFORE will he scour out of us all that is impure, all that offends, all that is incompatible with bliss — if we repent, and say, “Do with me what needs to be done.”
So don’t blame anybody else for your failings. Oh, they may BE TO BLAME, but that is not your business. (It is the business of everybody to protect boys and girls from the peculiar evils to which this world exposes them all, or exposes one sex or the other, but that is another matter entirely.) Don’t be servile — don’t start “repenting” of things that are not sinful, or things you have not actually done. But be honest, get to work, and turn to God.”
— Tony Esolen
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“Society is a partnership of the dead, the living, and the unborn.”
— Edmund Burke
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A post from 6/5/25:
I have called myself “ecclesiocentric” but I think the meaning of the label often gets confused with other things.
If ecclesiocentrism means cultural and political retreat (eg, pietism), I want no part of it. An ecclesiocentric church will assume the center. An ecclesiocentric church will operate out of and build upon the reality that Jesus is the King of the universe and the church is his bride, the Queen of the universe.
Ecclesiocentrism is not retreat; rather, it’s a way of fighting that uses weapons for which the world has no counter-measures. What ecclesiocentrism should mean is that worship is warfare – the first form of warfare we are called to fight, but not the only form of warfare we are called to engage in as Christians. Ecclesiocentrism recognizes we have to contend with principalities and powers – not merely human enemies of the gospel, but dark and demonic powers that seek to corrupt and destroy. Ecclesiocentrism refuses to demythologize the culture war.
Liturgy (at least a fully biblical liturgy) is political but it is not a substitute for other forms of political action. Churches should apply the Word of God to the wider culture, even speaking directly to magistrates.
An ecclesiocentric church is prophetic. Fulfilling the prophetic role of the church means speaking to the King in heaven in prayer but also speaking to kings on earth in preaching. We are ambassadors of the King of kings to lesser kings. We are an embassy of a heavenly kingdom to earthly kingdoms. A Christian nation is (at least in part) a nation that recognizes the church as the body and bride of Christ. There can never be a Christian nation without the church in some way at the center.
This does NOT mean pastors need to be experts in public policy or political philosophy. If pastors simply point out the “big E” on the eye chart to magistrates, that should be sufficient. And any pastor who preaches his way through God’s Word will have plenty of opportunities to do this. Pastors do not need to address every political issue, just the major ones that are clearly defined by God’s Word.
Ecclesiocentrism does not mean retreating to the four walls of the church to hold on tight. It is not the Benedict Option by another name. It is not pietism in disguise. Ecclesiocentrism converted the Roman Empire. Ecclesiocentrism built Western Christendom in the medieval period, and then reformed it in the 16th and 17th centuries. Medieval Christians built churches in the center of the town square for a reason – this sacred geography was symbolic, revealing they believed the church to be the hub of the whole Christian community. During the Reformation, the church’s proclamation of the whole counsel of God not only transformed individual lives, it transformed families, cities, and nations. The church can bring about this kind of transformation again if she will only act as salt and light.
This is my ecclesiocentrism. Here I stand.
ADDENDUM: Ecclesiocentrism is basically a theology of the place of the church in history and society. It’s about unpacking Ephesians 1:22: Christ is “head over all things for [the sake of] the church.” If Christ is king, his bride is queen. Modern liberalism presents an alternative ecclesiology in which the church is essentially a privatized institution, a kind of “Jesus fan club” that does not intersect with politics or take up any public space. It’s interesting to me that so many rightwing men today decry liberalism but do not challenge one of its most fundamental tenets, namely the privatizing of the church. One of the most fundamental ways liberalism atomized society and deracinated us has been through the maginalization of the church. The history of America’s decline is basically the story of downgrading the church. It’s the story of moving from a thick Reformed ecclesiology to a thin evangelical ecclesiology.
It’s impossible to recover history Reformed political theology without also recovering historic Reformed ecclesiology. They are a pair. Any Christian nationalist movement not working to also strengthen and reform the church is not going to make much progress. There will never be a strong, healthy nation without strong, healthy churches at the core.
What you are describing would be closer to an ecclesiocracy. Perhaps some popes and theologians advocated eccleisocracy in the medieval era, but that’s not part of the Reformed tradition. We are in no danger of churches taking over other institutions. My point is not that the church should absorb other spheres, much less control them, but the church does have a central role in discipling the other spheres by teaching them all that Jesus commanded (Matthew 28).
A good illustration is Presbyterian Pastor John Witherspoon. Without Witherspoon there would be no American founding and no American founding fathers. Good Christian statesmen don’t grow on trees. They are are formed and shaped in many ways, but historically pastors and liturgy have played a key role in their formation. The faithful clergyman is a prophet to the Christian statesman.
Another good illustration is Calvin’s Geneva. Ronald Wallace’s book Calvin, Geneva, and the Reformation is one of many that gives a solid synopsis. Calvin believed in comprehensive social and cultural and political reformation, all flowing through the ministry of the church. Calvin saw the pastorate as a quasi-political office, with a calling not only to his congregation but the wider community. In Calvin’s case that meant part of his role as a pastor was sometimes tangling with the city council. The pastor spoke not just to private believers but to public officials and magistrates.
Biblically, we see ecclesiocentrism all over the place. The book of Judges is structured to show us that at the root of Israel’s struggles in that era were unfaithful Levites who did not teach the people YHWH is their king. As the priests, so the people. In Israel’s monarchial period, the test of every king was whether or not he would listen to YHWH’s prophets. Haggai explains to the people that all their efforts and culture-building and dominion-taking are in vain so long as God’s house (= the church) lies in ruins. Ecclesiastical reformation paves the way for cultural and political transformation. Jesus commanded his community of disciples ( = the church) to be the model city, to be preserving salt, and to be transforming light in the world. The Great Commission not only requires the church to baptize and disciple individuals but also nations as nations. Etc. Again, if the goal is Christian nations, there’s no getting there without the church in a certain sense leading the way. The only large scale Christian civilization that has ever existed (Western Christendom) was ecclesiocentric. There’s no other recipe or formula for getting what we want. Christian nationalists who despise the church will spin their wheels but never get much traction. The church seems weak compared to the state — but isn’t hiding strength in weakness often God’s way? Doesn’t the sword of the Spirit have a power the sword of the state lacks? When the church is faithful at being the church God has called her to be, she exerts great power and influence in the world over time.
ADDENDUM: A few notes in reponse:
- I like Sandlin in general, but that quote sounds like an Anabaptist reading of history. The early church was ecclesiocentric by default. They had no access to political power. But they still conquered and transformed the Roman Empire. The medieval period had faults, but it was a glorious and beautiful manifestation of Christian culture. There were times in the medieval period when the church (mainly through popes) overstepped her bounds, but, of course, there were times when kings did the same. Remember, the gist of the Magna Carta was to carve out freedom for for the church to be and act as the church. It was about freeing the church from state control. It was not about freedom for individuals per se (the way modern liberals think of religious liberty), but freedom for the church to fulfill her calling and commission as a public and visible body in the world. The text of the Magna Carta reads:
“FIRST, THAT WE HAVE GRANTED TO GOD, and by this present charter have confirmed for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties
unimpaired . . .”
At its conclusion, the charter reads:
“(63) IT IS ACCORDINGLY OUR WISH AND COMMAND that the English Church shall be free, and that men in our kingdom shall have and keep all these liberties, rights, and concessions, well and peaceably in their fulness and entirety for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs, in all things and all places for ever.”
Of course, in the medieval period at its best, we see a Christian church and a Christian magistrate working together, promoting true freedom and righteousness. - The point is not that the church tries to remake all of society into her image or swallow up all of society into herself; different spheres have different roles and responsibilities, and that must be respected. The point is that the church disciples other institutions through her teaching ministry. Where are fathers going to be taught how the Word of God applies to their role as fathers? Where are magistrates going to learn what the Word of God says to them as rulers? The Bible addresses these matters over and over, but the Bible is also clear that the Word is to be taught by duly ordained and appointed teachers in the church. What I am arguing for is exactly what de Tocqueville observed:
“I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers, and it was not there. I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her fertile fields and boundless forests, and it was not there. I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her rich mines and her vast world commerce, and it was not there. I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her public school system and her institutions of learning, and it was not there. I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her democratic Congress and her matchless Constitution, and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”
That’s my ecclesiocentrism. Great churches made America great. There’s obviously more to national greatness than that, but never less. - Yes, liberals (especially of the woke variety) have cherry-picked a handful of Bible verses they think they can twist to suit their political purposes. Wokeness uses Bible verses to undermine the Bible, just as it uses appeals to compassion to undermine truth. But that’s an entirely different issue than what I am addressing. A faithful church would inoculate its people against such Scripture twisting. A faithful church knows the liberty of Galatians 5:1 is an ordered liberty. A faithful church lives by Galatians 3:28 but still knows what a woman is because the verse is not about androgyny but our judicial status is Christ. I do not think liberalism is trying to turn society into the body of Christ, but replace the body of Christ. That’s why I say liberalism is best thought of as a heretical ecclesiology. If liberalism had its way, there would be no church at all because the faithful church is a rival to liberalism. The rise of liberalism as a political force absolutely corresponds to the decline of the church’s public role — nothing is more obvious from Western and American history than this fact. This is why O’Donnovan said the first amendment was the symbolic death of Christendom. The privatization of the church means the privatizing of the truth she proclaims, the privatization of the gospel, the privatization of biblical law and ethics. Privatization leaves elites to secularize all of public life and fill it with whatever content they choose. Privatization has been used as a stick to drive Christians out of the public square, to tell Christians “you cannot bring your faith to bear on politics.” Privatization results in “every man doing what is right in his own eyes.” Privatization removes the church as a buffer against statist tyranny and deracination. Again, go back to the Magna Carta: religious freedom in the West originally meant freedom for the church to be the church — it was an ecclesial, even ecclesiocentric, doctrine of liberty. Liberalism turned into religious freedom into freedom for the individual. Ecclesiocentrism is the best and last bulwark against liberalism. Without ecclesiocentrism, all you will ever have is the state and the individual — and who do you think is going to win that contest? In order to reign in the state and push the state in the direction we want it to go, we simply must have other institutions that exert influence in the public square and speak/act with real authority.
Here’s a test case for ecclesiocentrism vs liberalism: How do liberal view church discipline? There is absolutely nothing that threatens liberalism more than the reality of excommunication. The way we know liberalism has the upper hand is that church’s do not discipline according to the Matthew 18 pattern. When churches once again begin to practice discipline on a wide scale, we will know we gaining ground against liberalism. - Church can become synagogues of Satan. Churches can become rivals to Christ instead of servants of Christ. Churches can become deeply corrupt. We see this with the mainline Protestant denominations, for example. Churches can imbibe worldly philosophies, they can compromise themselves by cowardly leadership, and so on. Jesus told us what would happen when the salt loses its saltiness — and it’s exactly what’s played out in America.
- The most important thing for any nation is not who it elects or what laws it passes, but whether or not it has God’s favor. And God has told us the criteria he uses to evaluate nations. Do the rulers and people of the nation kiss the Son (Psalm 2)? And do they bless the people of God, the true family of Abraham (Genesis 12)? A nation that marginalizes or even mocks the church, much less one that persecutes the faithful, is inviting judgment. If America wants to be blessed, we will have to recognize the church for what she is — the body and bride of Christ. And we will have to give her proper space to carry out her mission — baptizing the nations and teaching them all that Christ the king has commanded. Any social analysis that leaves the church out of the picture is functionally atheistic. Any plan for social and political transformation that ignores the role of the church is functionally atheistic. This includes movements that go by the label “Christian nationalism.”
Original post: https://x.com/vicar1973/status/1930746640102527396?s=46&t=au-C34qTtl4rGPFr5igkAw
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On 1 Timothy 2 and women pastors:
In the past, I’ve pointed out the “case of the missing controversy” – controversies that should be present, if the apostolic church had embraced certain practices contrary to established old covenant precedent. This includes infant baptism – if the church suddenly stopped including children in the covenant community, that would have generated a controversy that would have left a mark on the NT. Likewise with icons – if the early Christians had started bowing before and kissing images and statues, that would have undoubtedly created huge controversy (as it eventually did centuries later). That change could have been made without explicit instruction. This is one of the ways we know the early church baptized (and communed) babies and did not venerate icons.
The same is true of women in ecclesial leadership. If the church had begun ordaining women priestesses, when Israel had never had female officers, that would have also created controversy, a controversy that would have left its mark. But of course, the apostolic church had a male-only pastorate. There was no controversy because there was were no women pastors. There are no elaborate arguments or justifications given for women pastors in the NT because there were not any.
What did cause controversy, this gets addressed at length, is the full and equal inclusion of the Gentiles in the people of God. It was so controversial, it required extensive argument in several letters (Romans, Galatians, Ephesians) and a church council (Acts 15) to settle the matter.
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Other than the fact that she strangled her three children, she was a great mother.
Yeah, right. This kind of moral blindness is hard to fathom. It’s a madness in itself. It’s demonic. It’s a divine judgment.
“The LORD will strike you with madness and blindness and confusion of mind.”
— Deuteronomy 28:28
https://x.com/theblaze/status/2099614261332856950?s=46&t=au-C34qTtl4rGPFr5igkAw
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“Uncontrolled immigration threatens to deconstruct the nation we grew up in and convert America into a conglomeration of peoples with almost nothing in common—not history, heroes, language, culture, faith, or ancestors. Balkanization beckons.”
— Pat Buchanan
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“Putting on a hat is assimilation in the same way putting on a dress makes you a woman.
It’s interesting that neocons seem to view Americanism only through the lens of materials. Oh, they bought things! That’s the essence of American identity!
Now, the people in the photo might be totally assimilated—there’s no now way to know from a photo, although I have real questions about bringing a gallon of milk to spray around as part of a celebratory amount—but you simply cannot argue that assimilation has occurred when entire foreign populations erect their own enclaves in city after city for the express purpose of recreating their homeland’s entire social structure, culture, and pagan religious practices in their new land.
Entire school districts have been taken over in Texas. Entire neighborhoods are single ethnic enclaves. Entire staffing companies are dedicated to only recruiting and hiring fellow foreign caste members. This is not assimilation.”
— Sean Davis
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Conservatism is not merely about conserving an ideology or a set of principles (eg, small government, free markets, etc.). Those principles do matter, of course. But conservatism is about conserving a people and their culture. It is about conserving their way of life, their families, and their institutions. It about conserving a way of life in accord with God’s design, the creational ordinances that God established to order and structure human life. It’s about preserving those things worth preserving. No other kind of conservatism matters.
ADDENDUM: Christians are conservatives, but not only conservatives – we are also futurists. We conserve what was good and God-given in our heritage while also maturing and growing up into whatever God’s providence holds next.
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The same arguments used to get Lindsey Clancy off the hook were used for thousands of years to keep women out of politics and public life. Today, feminism wants it both ways — feminists want all the rights and privileges that come with being equal to men, but they do not want any of the responsibility or accountability that men have. As I have said many times before, feminists are hypocrites, wanting equal treatment when it suits them and special treatment when it suits them, swinging back-and-forth between equality and fragility as they please. This is enough to bring about the ruin a society and the end of civilization.
To put it another way, feminism operates with a gender-based double standard: women get to take full credit for their accomplishments, achievements, and anything good that they do, while men are to blame for everything bad, including the bad actions of women. Feminism has set up a system where women only have agency if something good happens but otherwise cannot be held accountable.
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What Lindsay Clancy did follows the logic of abortion perfectly. Abortion is justified in terms of a woman’s autonomy. She decides whether or not the child is worthy of life or death. Her choice and her feelings are sovereign. It’s paterfamilias/patria potestas, but for moms. There is no obvious reason why the logic of abortion, if granted, should not continue to apply to children outside the womb. The woman chooses, based on her feelings, whether or not her born children are worthy of continued life.
I can remember decades ago when those on the pro-life side of the abortion debate argued that abortion would eventually lead to all-out infanticide, the killing of children outside of the womb. The idea was mocked. “Don’t be ridiculous! That will never happen!” Well, here we are. A woman who killed her three children cannot be convicted of a crime. Society has decided her feelings override the lives of her children.
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In the abstract, I’m not a fan of Vance’s pro family scheme. But it is a practical pragmatic matter I would be in favor of. For too long, our welfare system has been geared towards single mothers society at large bears the cost of their bad decisions we incentivize promiscuous behavior and so we get more of it. The welfare state called caused legitimacy rates to explode.
The welfare state is not going away. Republicans have no will or ability to end it. So as much as I hate the welfare state, we have to deal with it as it is. Why not take some of the money that’s going to be spent anyway, and directed away from instant advising the bad choices of single mothers and put it towards instant advising good choices made by married couples? There will be all kinds of unintended consequences and certain aspects of answers plan Will no doubt backfire. But it cannot be worse than what we have now I would rather money go towards people who are cultural friends rather than cultural enemies, who are trying to bring children into the world, the right way rather than the wrong way.
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Studies have shown that when women are financially independent they do not marry or have children. At the same time it’s obvious that things like longer paternity leave will not solve the problem either, because most women want to raise their own babies. The collapsing, marriage and fertility rates or problems of our own, making the result of perverse social engineering. We are at war with reality and God’s design.
God created men and women to work together to be mutually dependent. The man would be the breadwinner. The woman would raise the children. We have created a system that promotes female employment education about that of men. And we created a system in which motherhood is considered a low status form of slavery. We need to re-create a more traditional system that conforms to God’s created order in which women are dependent upon men for provision and women find great prestige in staying home to raise their young children.
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Women are social creatures much more so than men. This is why women are much more susceptible to things like shaming and social contagion. Traditionally women were kept in line largely by policing one another the promiscuous woman would be slut shamed by other women. The woman who abandoned her children for the workforce would be harshly criticize by other women.
Women are still policing one another but now they’re doing so in diametrically opposite ways. The version is shamed to stay at home. Mom is shamed. The only fans star is praised and celebrated. The boss babe is champion for breaking through the glass ceiling. For a long time, women has made it very clear that in general they do not want to be approached by and men fear fearing social media embarrassment were a visit from HR have been forced to oblige.
All of our incentive structures for women are wrong today. We can cannot get our civilization back on track without raining in women, calling them back to femininity raising the status of motherhood and teaching them the submission to a man is the pathway to freedom not bondage.
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Stolen paraphrase: “If men want women to turn on Lindsay Clancy, they need to start talking about how attractive she is.”
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The problem with progressivism is that all its fundamental premises are lies so all the conclusions it draws from those premises are contrary to reality. Progressivism is at with God and creation. It is contrary to human nature.
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Republicans are now the party of masculine men and married women.
Democrats are the party of immigrants, welfare recipients, sexual perverts, effeminate men, and unmarried women.
Those are the political fault lines.
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“Teddy Roosevelt explicitly warned against importing foreigners with their foreign beliefs and justifying doing so by pointing to supposed labor needs. He said:
“We should never admit any ‘merely because there is need of labor;’ better run short of labor than foul or dilute the body of citizenship into which our children are to enter. In practice it is not easy to apply exactly the proper tests; but fundamentally our aim should be to admit only immigrants whose grandchildren will be fit to intermarry with our grandchildren, with the grandchildren of the Americans of to-day.””
— Will Tanner
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One of the lessons from Hebrews 11 is that faith does not equate with passivity. We do not prove our faith in God by suppressing human action. Rather we act by faith and in faith. We must never use faith as an excuse for cowardice or inaction when action is called for.
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“All America had to do to prevent another 9/11 was close its borders.
Instead, our government claimed the ideology of the hijackers and their supports was peaceful, created a brand new bureaucracy to molest your grandmother and police the toothpaste in your luggage, started two wars which accomplished nothing, erected a massive new spy program targeted at American citizens, and then invited everyone displaced by the wars they started to come live in the U.S.
All we had to do was just close the border, and yet that’s the one thing our government refused to do.”
— Seth Davis
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I hear the classes on how to bake communion bread are top notch!
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Christian Heiens captures the idiocy of the anti-MAGA GOP:
“Ethno-religious minority with no historical connection to Western civilization and a routine pattern of open hostility towards it settles in a Western nation
They immediately begin voting for Left-wing race communists who promise to continue importing more of them
Establishment GOP sees this and concludes that we need to pander to them too
Both parties begin chasing a bloc that consistently votes 80-20 for the Left, engages in blatant racial nepotism, and seeks to import more of their own
People eventually catch on and demand we stop importing them
Establishment GOP: “No, you can’t do that, we need their votes!””
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“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
— 1 John 1:9
God forgives sins. He does not forgive excuses. To experience God’s forgiveness, you have to confess your sin, not rationalize why you acted the way you did. You cannot blameshift or play the victim. To get God’s cleansing, you have to come clean about the ways you have broken his law.
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“Being an American is more than paperwork.”
— Charlie Kirk
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Sons should be raised for dominion. They should be trained in wide-ranging competence. Masculinity is useful, it’s practical, it gets things done, it makes a dint on the world and in doing so makes the world a better place.
A son who is trained in a wide array of skills can better serve his future family. He will save time and money. He will be a blessing to others. He will be able to protect and provide. He will be self-disciplined and confident.
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Raise sons for dominion. Raise daughters for domesticity.
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Based on what I’m seeing lately, “if you’re gonna play in Texas, you’re gonna need a sitar in the band.”
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Men tend to get a great sense of satisfaction from providing for their families, even if they must work long hours at a mundane job.
When a wife is the main breadwinner for her family, she tends to resent it (unless it’s a temporary situation, such as when her husband is preparing for his career so she can stay at home with kids in the future).
Family structure matters. The roles God has assigned us as men and women are not arbitrary but rooted in our respective natures.
A society that supports God’s design for the family will be much healthier and happier than those that use social engineering and perverse incentive structures to subvert it. Refusing to align with reality has consequences. Policies that skew job creation towards women will always have an adverse impact on marriage and birth rates, and likely marital happiness as well.
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“My politics is to do whatever it takes to be able to leave a bike visibly unlocked anywhere in the country and it doesn’t get stolen.”
— Dan from X
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With one exception, Lindsay Clancy was most certainly judged by a jury of her peers – her peers being crazy, unprincipled leftists, of course.
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Doug Wilson practical postmillennialism – why believing we will win down here matters:
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“Today, 30+% of graduate students at UT Austin are international. That jumps to more than 60% for engineering students. At an elite, public, AMERICAN university your AMERICAN tax dollars fund… taking spaces from hardworking American engineering students.
Across the 8 campuses of the Ivy League, 25+% of all students (undergrad & grad) are international. At Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, more than 50% of students are not American citizens. Columbia’s entire student population is made up of 40% foreigners, and in 5 of their professional and graduate schools, more than 50% of students are foreign nationals.
It is not racist to believe that hardworking American students should be prioritized for positions at American universities and workplaces over foreigners–especially as your tax dollars and government grants you already paid for fund these institutions.
& the failure of FAR too many people in politics to realize this or just run to assume it’s somehow a “white supremacist” talking point will prove to be a MASSIVE problem in upcoming elections.
& no… wearing a cowboy hat & cheering at an American football game doesn’t mean you’ve fully assimilated into life as an American citizen.”
— Isabel Brown
https://twitter.com/theisabelb/status/2099596857403924689/video/1?s=46
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John Doyle had good thoughts on what a Texan (and American) is in this podcast:
https://youtu.be/AgGFBAiB1mU?is=jZemyyfvF8r-Xw8F
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A tweet from July 2, 2026:
The Bible nowhere condemns or prohibits interracial or interethnic marriages. It does prohibit interfaith marriages; Christians are to marry only “in the Lord.”
ADDENDUM: “But the Bible does not prohibit the marriage of a Christian 16 year old woman and a 60 year old man.”
Sure, but we have no biblical examples of godly 60 year olds marrying godly 16 year olds. We do have biblical examples of godly interracial marriages, eg, Ruth and Boaz. We should not confuse a principle with its wise application – and wisdom is always needed to make a good match when it comes to marriage. The principle is important but not enough on its own – it can tell who you can lawfully marry, but cannot tell you who you should wisely marry. Principles only accomplish their aim when exercised in prudence.
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With the Lindsay Clancy case, we have moved from activist judges to activist jurors.
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Multiculturalism and liberalism cannot co-exist. Race-based identity politics and hate crimes are a violation of justice.
https://twitter.com/liam_out_loud/status/2099868498700746753/video/1?s=46
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Lindsay Clancy was most certainly judged by a jury of her peers – insane liberal white women.
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I asked Grok my most viral tweets
This is what came up:
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Grok’s assessment of my theological themes (seems to be limited to my X posts, not sermons or other writings):
Lusk’s theology is a covenantal, ecclesial, civilizational Calvinism. The center is not TULIP as a standalone soteriology, but the claim that God rules a real people in history—by Word, sacrament, household, and public order—and that this people is the church as the matured form of Israel. Everything else (baptism, family, masculinity, Christendom, 70 AD, courage) hangs off that.
- Covenant as the operating system The controlling distinction is decretal election vs. covenantal history. Election is fixed and hidden; the covenant is public and administered. Scripture usually addresses people as they stand in the covenant, which is why members can be called elect, holy, and in Christ, even though some later apostatize and prove they were never elect unto glory. That yields several signature moves: • Belonging precedes articulation. Children of believers are addressed as God’s children because they are baptized into the Triune name, not because they have produced a conversion narrative. Paedofaith and I Belong to God exist to form covenantal identity: “God has saved you; now be loyal to him.” • Baptism is God’s instrument, faith is ours. He has repeatedly refused both Baptist memorialism and a crude ex opere operato. The formulation is roughly: God offers and applies Christ through baptism; faith receives what God gives. • Apostasy is real at the covenantal level. Warnings in Hebrews, 1 Corinthians 10, and Romans 11 are not theatrical. Some in the tree are cut out. Perseverance is still of the saints; the point is that pastors must treat the visible church as the field in which election comes to fruit. This is the Federal Vision residue he still owns as “treasures old and new”: high ecclesiology and sacramental realism retrieved from Calvin, Westminster 25.2 (“outside of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation”), and older Reformed baptismal language—without becoming Lutheran or Roman.
- Jesus as Israel, the church as Israel raised Lusk will not accept “replacement” if that means two peoples of God. He also will not accept dispensational two-track eschatology. The grammar is organic continuity: • Jesus is both Israel and Israel’s God. His life recapitulates Israel’s story, except he succeeds where Israel failed. • The church is Israel dead and resurrected—one olive tree, pruned and grafted (Romans 11), not a new planting. • Gentile believers are “Israelized”; unbelieving Jews who reject the Messiah are cut out. The dividing line is now Christian / non-Christian, not Jew / Gentile. • 70 AD is covenantally decisive: the old temple, land, priesthood, and holy-land typology expire. The church is the temple (Eph. 2; 1 Pet. 2). “The third temple is already here.” • A future mass conversion of Jews is compatible with this (Romans 11 read futuristically). The modern secular state of Israel is not. It has no unique prophetic claim on Christian politics. This is why the “holy land” and Christian Zionism draw such sharp fire from him: they relocate holiness and hope away from Word, table, and the nations under Christ.
- Church as polis, not a religious club Ecclesiology is thick. The church is household, temple, and kingdom—the beachhead of the new creation. Liturgy is “the gospel in action.” The means of grace are not illustrations of an already-decided private salvation; they are how God ordinarily creates and keeps a people. Two pastoral consequences: • Covenant succession. Baptize the children, feed them at the table (paedocommunion is a stated exception to Westminster practice he has defended for decades), catechize them as already belonging, and aim at multi-generational faithfulness rather than revivalism. • Session authority over marriage and discipline. Grounds for divorce are not self-granted or therapist-granted. The church court investigates. That is of a piece with his larger claim that the church is a real government, not a vendor of spiritual goods. He calls the project Reformed catholic: creeds plus Reformed confessions, high worship, biblical theology in the Jordan–Leithart–Theopolis stream, and mission. Calvinism is “not just a pretty tulip.” TULIP is a soteriological summary; Calvin’s program also included church, sacrament, discipline, and a public order under Christ’s kingship.
- Justification inside a larger story On paper he affirms imputation of Christ’s active obedience. His distinctive is placement: resurrection as the public verdict that justifies Jesus and, in him, his people (Rom. 4:25). The perfect record is not denied; it is folded into the eschatological act of vindication rather than treated as a standalone ledger transfer. He has also written on “future justification” and “justification by works” in the Norman Shepherd sense—works as the fruit and evidence that belong to a living faith, not as a second ground of acceptance. Critics heard Rome. His reply is that the difference from standard Reformed statements is slight, historically precedented, and still antithetical to merit theology. The live issue for him is not “faith vs. works” as rival instruments, but whether justification is only a past courtroom moment or also the beginning of a justified life that will be openly vindicated.
- Household as the first polity Family is not an illustration of the gospel; it is a created hierarchy that images God and carries the covenant. Recurring theses: • Submission is directional. Eph. 5:21 is not egalitarian “everyone submits to everyone.” It is respect for God-given orders, then specified: wives to husbands, children to parents. “Mutual submission” as reciprocity of rule he calls a novel, agenda-driven reading. • The original masculine failure is passivity (Adam “heeded the voice of his wife”). Wife-fearing is not servant leadership; it is abdication. Psalm 128 blesses the God-fearing man, not the wife-fearing man. • Masculinity must include the risen, reigning, judging Christ—not only the crucified servant. Revelation 19, the imprecatory psalms as Christ’s prayers, and the 70 AD “coming” belong in the picture. Soft evangelical Jesus-as-therapist produces soft men. • Proverbs is “red-pilled”: there are wise women and foolish women. Therapy culture (“blame your father and mother”) inverts the fifth commandment. • The sexual revolution failed. The constructive program is early marriage, fertility, distinct sexes, and household provision. This is why his public voice sounds harsher on sex roles than on the ordo salutis. He thinks the household is where covenant theology either becomes flesh or dies.
- Christendom as the shape of the Great Commission Postmillennial hope is practical, not date-setting. The mission is not only to convert individuals but to disciple nations—laws, symbols, education, marriage, speech. There is no neutral public square. Every society has a god. “Religious liberty” in the absolute sense is a myth; the real choice is which faith norms the order. Toleration is not the same as privileging. Hence: • MAGA without MACA/MABA (Make America Christian / Biblical Again) is incomplete. • Islam is treated as a historic scourge and a present civilizational rival that exposes Western church softness. • Dispensational support for the Israeli state is diagnosed as a substitute Christendom: people who do not believe Christians may build a Christian order will pour that creational hunger into a Jewish one. • He sees family resemblance among theonomy, reconstruction, and current Christian nationalism, even while granting differences (natural law, race, markets). The common enemy is soteriology-only Calvinism plus liberal neutrality. Courage is the ethical hinge. Winsomeness and “third-wayism” are, in his account, the fear of man baptized as a ministry philosophy. Kirk-style offense for the sake of truth is closer to Jesus and the apostles than Keller-legacy progressivism. Immature theology that fights beats mature theology that stays in the hangar.
- How the themes lock together One sentence: God elects a people, marks them in baptism, feeds them at the table, orders them in households, and sends them to bring the nations under the rule of the true Israel, Jesus. Cut any piece and the others sag. Low baptism produces revivalist uncertainty about children. Dispensational Israel theology steals the church’s political future. Servant-only masculinity produces pastors who will not say what Ephesians 5 says. Neutral-public-square piety produces churches that cannot imagine Christendom and therefore cannot resist Islam or the sexual revolution except as private sentiment. The intellectual sources are visible: Calvin and the Westminster Standards as base; Shepherd, Jordan, Leithart, Wilson, and the older Reformed political tradition as retrieval partners; biblical-theological typology as method; CREC as the ecclesial home after the PCA conflict over Federal Vision and covenant children.
- The public accent vs. the pastoral accent On X the sharp edges dominate: Islam, MLK’s character, Tesla on feminism, “most pastors are cowards,” church-as-temple, Kirk vs. Keller. In books and catechesis the tone is formational—belonging, liturgy, covenant nurture, commentaries on Ruth and Jonah, Measures of the Mission. That is not two theologies. It is one theology in two registers. The polemical register assumes the catechetical one: only a people who already know they belong, who eat at one table, who honor fathers and husbands, can afford to talk about nations and enemies without becoming a mere culture war account. The recurring risk of this package—one he himself flags when he warns Reformed people against sneering at “normie evangelicals in the arena”—is that retrieval plus courage can harden into contempt. The constructive core remains older than the controversy labels: a thick church, a real covenant, a public Christ, and households that look like they expect the future.
—
“Before I came to Christ, I loved science.
Before I came to Christ, I believed in justice.
Before I came to Christ, I wanted to uplift all people.
And now as a Christian,
I still love science, but now I know why.
I still believe in justice, but now I know it’s source.
I still want to see people uplifted, but now I know how.”
— Sy Garte
—
“Once upon a time a dire and strange trouble took possession of the young women in Miletus for some unknown cause. The most popular conjecture was that the air had acquired a distracting and infectious constitution, and that this operated to produce in them an alteration and derangement of mind. At any rate, a yearning for death and an insane impulse toward hanging suddenly fell upon all of them, and many managed to steal away and hang themselves. Arguments and tears of parents and comforting words of friends availed nothing, but they circumvented every device and cunning effort of their watchers in making away with themselves. The malady seemed to be of divine origin and beyond human help, until, on the advice of a man of sense, an ordinance was proposed that the women who hanged themselves should be carried naked through the marketplace to their burial. And when this ordinance was passed it not only checked, but stopped completely, the young women from killing themselves. Plainly a high testimony to natural goodness and to virtue is the desire to guard against ill repute, and the fact that the women who had no deterrent sense of shame when facing the most terrible of all things in the world, death and pain, yet could not abide nor bear the thought of disgrace which would come alter death.”
— Plutarch, on how to deal with women’s attention seeking and incentive structures
—
One of my most viral tweets, from 8/8/24:
The biggest trouble makers in the church are not alpha males but females married to beta males.
These women are insecure about their own husband’s leadership which makes them anxious. They project that insecurity on all males in positions of leadership. They become anxious about male rule in general.
How women in the church react to preaching on “wives submit to your husbands in everything” generally tells you a lot more about how that woman feels about her particular husband than it does how she views, say, the authority of Scripture. Women who know they married men of high competence and high character virtually never complain about teaching on wifely submission. These women are married to masculine men and so they naturally settle into their feminine.
Sadly, churches today are mostly beta male factories.
ADDENDUM: A recent tweet of mine used the categories alpha and beta to describe different types of men
To be honest, I really don’t like those categories, though I still sometimes use them as shorthand
In the sense I was using them, alpha = confident, competent man, and beta = insecure, people pleasing man
In the post, both men are obviously church members and can be assumed to be men of high character but one man leads his wife well and the other doesn’t – the variable is not character per se but competency in leading
I’ve been in pastoral ministry for 30 years, and the dynamic I described is one I have observed repeatedly
It’s obvious from the responses, a lot of other people have observed this as well
The tweet does not blame the women for problems in the church (though women are accountable for their actions) but serves as a reminder to the men that they are responsible and their failure to lead in the home has implications elsewhere
—
Rushdoony’s influence on Alabama religious/homeschooling law, according to Grok:
R. J. Rushdoony did not draft Alabama’s homeschool or church-school statutes, but he supplied much of the theology, legal theory, and courtroom strategy that made the state’s distinctive “church school” pathway possible and durable.
The Alabama legal framework
Alabama never enacted a standalone homeschool statute. Instead it created three pathways that satisfy compulsory attendance (Ala. Code §§ 16-28-1, 16-28-3, 16-28-7):
- Church school (the route used by roughly 90 percent of homeschool families).
- Private school (explicitly including home programs after 2014).
- Certified private tutor.
The pivotal 1982 church-school exemption (Act 82-218, signed by Gov. Fob James) defined a church school as a nonprofit ministry of a church or association of churches that receives no public funds. Such schools were exempted from teacher-certification, curriculum-approval, and most attendance-reporting requirements that applied to other private schools. Homeschool parents immediately formed or enrolled in “cover” or “umbrella” church schools so they could teach at home while remaining legally compliant. Senate Bill 38 (2014) later wrote “on-site or home programs” into the statutory definitions and further deregulated private schools.
Rushdoony’s actual contributions
Rushdoony’s influence was national and intellectual rather than legislative: - He argued that education is inescapably religious, that the family and church—not the state—hold God-given authority over children (sphere sovereignty), and that government schools function as churches of “secular humanism.” Those claims appear throughout The Messianic Character of American Education (1963), Intellectual Schizophrenia, The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum, and The Institutes of Biblical Law.
- He repeatedly urged pastors to start church schools as ministries rather than state-licensed institutions.
- He served as an expert witness in dozens of Christian-school and homeschool prosecutions across the country. His most famous testimony was in the 1987 Texas Leeper case, which helped halt criminal prosecutions nationwide; the same historical and theological arguments were used in other states.
Direct Alabama connection
On 15 November 1982 Rushdoony testified in Mobile in Jaffree v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County—the same year the church-school exemption became law. He told the court that Mobile public-school textbooks and practices amounted to systematic indoctrination in secular humanism. The case later expanded into a textbook battle and reached the U.S. Supreme Court on the school-prayer statutes that Gov. James had also championed that year. Rushdoony’s appearance placed his reconstructionist critique of state education inside an Alabama federal courtroom at the exact moment the legislature was carving out an unregulated church-school category.
What he did not do
No legislative history, sponsor statements, or contemporary news accounts credit Rushdoony with writing or lobbying the 1982 bill. The exemption grew out of the broader Christian-school resistance to state licensing that was already underway in Alabama and many other states. Later organizations such as Homeschool Alabama (founded 1988 as CHEF) and the Home School Legal Defense Association built on the 1982 foundation; they do not trace their statutes to Rushdoony personally.
In short, Rushdoony’s role in Alabama was that of a foundational ideologue and occasional courtroom expert whose ideas about parental and ecclesiastical sovereignty over education supplied the rationale for the church-school exemption that still structures most homeschooling in the state.
Jaffree v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County
Jaffree is the 1982–85 Alabama school-prayer and secular-humanism litigation in which Rushdoony testified. I’ll pull the case posture, holdings, and how his testimony fit.
Jaffree v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County, 554 F. Supp. 1104 (S.D. Ala. 1983), is the district-court opinion in the Alabama school-prayer litigation that later produced Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38 (1985). It is also the Mobile trial in which R. J. Rushdoony testified on November 15, 1982. 
The dispute
Ishmael Jaffree, a Mobile attorney who described himself as agnostic, sued in May 1982 on behalf of three children in Mobile County public schools. Teachers were leading classroom prayers and religious songs. The suit expanded to three Alabama statutes:
- § 16-1-20 (1978): one minute of silence “for meditation”
- § 16-1-20.1 (1981): silence “for meditation or voluntary prayer”
- § 16-1-20.2 (1982, special session under Gov. Fob James): teachers may lead “willing students” in a prescribed prayer written by James’s son
Christian parents and teachers intervened, arguing that an injunction against prayer would violate their free exercise and that the real establishment problem was the public schools’ promotion of secular humanism.
Rushdoony’s testimony
Rushdoony was the first expert called by the intervenors. He argued that education is never religiously neutral; that Mobile textbooks taught moral autonomy (“morals are rules made by people”), culturally constructed sex roles, and evolution without a corresponding Christian account; and that this package amounted to establishment of secular humanism as a competing faith. The same reconstructionist critique of “statist” education that he used in Christian-school and homeschool cases nationwide was thus placed on the record in an Alabama federal courtroom the same year the legislature enacted the church-school exemption.
Judge Hand’s ruling (January 14, 1983)
Chief Judge W. Brevard Hand conceded that teacher-led prayer violated existing Supreme Court precedent (Engel, Schempp). He then held that the Supreme Court had misread the Establishment Clause: the First Amendment, in his view, bound only Congress and did not forbid a state from favoring religion. He dismissed Jaffree’s complaint and dissolved the preliminary injunction. Justice Powell immediately stayed that order.
Appeals
The Eleventh Circuit reversed (705 F.2d 1526, 1983): classroom prayer and the 1981 and 1982 statutes violated the Establishment Clause; the 1978 meditation-only statute survived. The Supreme Court, 6–3, struck down § 16-1-20.1 in Wallace v. Jaffree (June 4, 1985). Justice Stevens applied Lemon: the 1981 statute’s purpose, as its sponsor admitted on the record, was to “return voluntary prayer” to public schools, not a secular purpose. The 1978 silent-meditation law was left standing. Rehnquist dissented, attacking incorporation and Lemon.
Aftermath
The prayer statutes were dead. Judge Hand then tried the related textbook case (Smith v. Board of School Commissioners), again treating secular humanism as a religion and enjoining 44 textbooks. The Eleventh Circuit reversed that too (827 F.2d 684, 1987): even assuming secular humanism is a religion, the books did not establish it.
The Jaffree line is therefore two things at once: the Supreme Court case that killed Alabama’s 1981 “meditation or voluntary prayer” statute, and the Mobile trial in which Rushdoony put his theory of education-as-religion into the federal record while the state was simultaneously deregulating church schools.
Further notes:
There is no book whose subject is “Rushdoony and Alabama’s church-school statute.” The connection is real but thin in print: he lectured Alabama Christian-school conventions, praised Gov. Fob James on family policy, and testified in Mobile in Jaffree. He does not appear to have written an essay that names Act 82-218 or walks through Alabama’s code.
What Rushdoony actually said or did in Alabama
Lectures. The foreword to The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum (1981) lists the venues where those chapters were first delivered. One of them is “the Alabama Christian Schools conventions,” along with the Southern Association of Christian Schools and Christian Educators Association of the Southeast. That book is the closest thing to “Rushdoony talking to Alabama church-school people.” The content is the usual argument: no neutrality, church schools must not be baptized state schools, parents and church—not the state—own the educational task. 
A later education lecture (CR101 Radio / “Educational Christian Faith”) has him saying, “Now in Alabama last week, Mrs. Louden was a bit disappointed that I didn’t go into the contrast between humanistic and a Christian education.” So he was on the ground in Alabama again after the book, talking curriculum with Christian-school leaders. That is not a commentary on the 1982 statute. 
Position paper on Alabama before the statute. Chalcedon Position Paper No. 8 (December 1979), later reprinted as “The Family” in Roots of Reconstruction, singles Alabama out:
“The one exception is Alabama, where a superior governor, who believes that Christian faith means profession with action, has turned to Christians for the state’s guidelines with respect to the child.”
That is Fob James’s first term, two to three years before Act 82-218. It is the only place I found Rushdoony naming Alabama as a model on child policy. It is about International Year of the Child / family authority, not the church-school exemption. 
Court, not legislation. Mark Rushdoony’s published list of his father’s expert-witness dates includes 11-15-82: Mobile, AL—the Jaffree trial. The scholarly reconstruction of that trial (the Texas A&M Church History article on the Jaffree intervenors) quotes Rushdoony on textbooks and secular humanism. He is arguing the same thesis as Messianic Character and Intellectual Schizophrenia, applied to Mobile County’s curriculum. He is not discussing the new church-school definition. 
Chalcedon Report. I did not find a 1982–83 Chalcedon Report or Position Paper that analyzes Alabama’s church-school act. Later Chalcedon writers mention Alabama homeschool conflict (Sharon and Ed Pangelinan, Morgan County, 132 days in jail in 1985) as an example of parents who did not use the cover-school path and were prosecuted anyway. That is after-the-fact narrative, not Rushdoony on the statute. A 2019 Chalcedon Report piece (“Alabama Conference Represents a Stake in the Ground”) is Martin Selbrede on abuse, not education law. 
Best things to read instead
Primary (Rushdoony on the ideas that Alabama’s church-school path embodies):
- The Messianic Character of American Education (1963)
- Intellectual Schizophrenia (1961)
- The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum (1981) — the Alabama-convention lectures
- Roots of Reconstruction — collect the Position Papers, including the 1979 Alabama/Fob James paragraph and the anti-voucher / church-school freedom essays
- Court-date list in Mark Rushdoony’s Faith for All of Life Jan–Feb 2017 biographical installment
Secondary (context, not Alabama-specific): - Michael J. McVicar, Christian Reconstruction: R. J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism
- Julie Ingersoll, Building God’s Kingdom
- Milton Gaither, Homeschool: An American History
- The Jaffree trial article that quotes Rushdoony’s Mobile testimony (the piece in Church History / Texas A&M journal cited earlier)
- Lee Duigon, “Homeschooling’s Greatest Courtroom Victory” (Chalcedon) — Leeper, not Alabama, but the same witness strategy
Audio to hunt: pocketcollege.com / CR101 / RushdoonyRadio education series; Chalcedon Easy Chair around Dec 1982 (EC033 is dated nine days after Mobile). Those tapes often name the last city he was in; they rarely name a bill number.
Bottom line. He shaped the mindset Alabama church-school operators used—church as ministry, no state licensure of doctrine or teachers, education as religious. He spoke to Alabama Christian-school conventions and testified in Mobile the year the exemption passed. He did not, so far as the published record shows, write “here is why Act 82-218 is theonomic” or devote a Chalcedon Report to it. If a dedicated treatment exists, it is still in unpublished journals or an untranscribed Easy Chair tape, not in the books. Chalcedon’s office (Mark Rushdoony) is the place to ask whether the 1982 journals mention Mobile beyond the date line.
—
Rushdoony in 1979, praising Alabama governor Fob James:
“Various groups in the U.S. and Europe have been producing manifesto after manifesto, setting forth “Children’s Rights,” “Youth Rights,” “A Child’s Bill of Rights,” and like pretentious documents. These are presented as the last word in liberalism and radicalism. They are, in fact, reactionary, going back to the worst in paganism and in decaying cultures and civilizations. These set forth the supposed right of the child or children to sexual freedom, which often means the “right” to be exploited by others; the right to political power, i.e., voting, office-holding, etc.; the right to divorce themselves from their parents, and so on.
These plans must be taken seriously. With the International Year of the Child, every state save one is issuing pronouncements which strike at the heart of the Biblical doctrine of the family. The one exception is Alabama, where a superior governor, who believes that Christian faith means profession with action, has turned to Christians for the state’s guidelines with respect to the child. What these revolutionary plans on the part of the enemies of the family call for is really the end of Biblical laws governing the family, the abolition of the family, and a “new man” created by humanism and in terms of humanism’s goals.
The sexual revolution was in large measure a revolt against God’s laws concerning sexuality and the family. Its goal was far less love and more obviously hatred, hatred of God and man alike. It called for the depersonalization of sex in order to depersonalize man, i.e., to dehumanize man in the name of humanism. Very early in the sexual freedom movement, one prominent advocate called for the same freedom demanded by the Cynics of ancient Greece, to copulate openly in public like dogs.
When the state claims totally the public realm and denies any of it to the family and the church, it destroys man in the process. By obliterating all other claims, it reduces man to a creature of the state, under the public law of the state. Man becomes then public man, even in his copulation!
But man is created in God’s image (Gen. 1:26-28), and neither man nor the state can alter that fact. Efforts to do so destroy those who attempt it. History is littered with civilizations which undermined the family. The family is God’s ordained life for man, and it endures.”
https://chalcedon.edu/resources/articles/the-family
—
This is a paper I wrote 20+ years ago to serve as introduction to the church and church membership. While I’m not explicit about it, the basic underlying framework of the paper comes from a simplification of Eugen Rosentstock-Huessy’s brilliant “cross of reality.” The “cross of reality” integrates human experience across time and space: one axis of the cross is the tension between past and future, the other axis is the tension between in-group and out-group. This “cross of reality” has defined my philosophy of ministry for nearly 30 years now and it provides my template for this essay. In the paper, the past/future axis becomes tradition/eschatology and the in-group/out-group axis becomes community+discipleship/mission+mercy. At the heart of the cross is the Divine Service — the Lord’s Day covenant renewal liturgy. I hope this is helpful to pastors and church members seeking to think through what it means to be churchman, because every Christian must be a churchman.
A Primer for Church Members on the Nature and Functions of the Body of Christ
Introductory Note: I intend this paper to serve as something of a “user’s guide” for church members, though church leaders may also find it valuable in developing vision statements for their local bodies. I have not “proven” all my assertions with Scriptural exegesis because it would have caused the essay to grow to unwieldy proportions. For further development and defense of several of the key themes in this short paper, see the reading list at the end. This paper is not really a “manifesto” of any sort; but I do hope it will get us thinking about the church and being the church in more historic, catholic ways. I believe God has situated the church’s liturgical gathering – the Divine Service — at the center of the world. Flowing out of this, the body of Christ takes three basic shapes in the world, all deeply interrelated and inseparable: community, discipleship, and mission. Under girding and guiding us in these three areas is a backward looking appreciation for the Spirit’s work in the church through the ages (tradition) and a forward looking anticipation of what the Spirit will continue to do until every enemy has been put under Christ’s feet and he is all in all (eschatology).
Who are we?
We are the church,
a local expression of the catholic body of Christ.
What is the church?
We are the church:
the people who believe the gospel of Jesus Christ,
who are baptized,
and who share in the Lord’s Supper.
Through these means of grace,
the Spirit renews us and forms us into his people
so that we may glorify God and serve the world in love.
God has placed his church at the center and summit of the world. The church is the body and bride of Christ, the people of God called out of the world into union with the crucified and risen Lord. As God’s new humanity, an outpost of heaven on earth, we are marked out by baptism in the Triune name, our gathering around his table to feast upon the Eucharist, and our common faith in Jesus Christ, who is now seated at the Father’s right hand in heaven as King of kings and Lord of lords. The Lord Jesus Christ rules over all things for the sake of the church (Eph. 1:22-23), which in turn exists for the sake of the world. But how does God serve the church? And how does the church serve the world?
God’s service to the church centers on his gracious action each Lord’s Day, when he draws his people into his presence to renew covenant with them. This gathering is called the Divine Service. Why do we meet on the first day of the week? Because it is the day God raised our Lord Jesus from the dead, giving the world a new beginning. When we gather weekly on that day for the Divine Service, God renews his covenant with us through word and sacrament. This covenant renewal liturgy is nothing less than the gospel reenacted and reapplied to us.
What, then, happens in this Lord’s Day gathering? The Triune God serves the congregation in calling, confession, cleansing, consecration, communion, and commissioning. This is the biblical pattern of worship, the pathway on which we drawn into God’s heavenly sanctuary. First, the Lord calls us together, that we might be assembled as his people, set apart from the world. He summons us to confess our sin and cleanses us through the pastor’s declaration of forgiveness. Then the Lord lifts us up into his heavenly presence to worship with angels and archangels, and with all the company of heaven. The Lord consecrates us to his service as he proclaims the life-giving gospel to us and instructs in us paths of righteousness through his minister. He graciously feeds us at his communion table, giving us the body and blood of his Son in the form of bread and wine, thereby manifesting our oneness as his chosen people through this corporate meal. Finally, the Lord commissions us, sending us out into the world with his blessing so that we might be a blessing to others. Throughout the service, we respond in union with Christ, our great High Priest, and in the power of the Holy Spirit. Our response includes prayer, praise, thanksgiving, and joyous singing. Because God gives what he requires, we are able to believe his word, join in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, give tithes and offerings to him for the work of the church, receive the feast of the kingdom, and commit ourselves to serve him and our neighbors in all of life.
This is the heart of what it means to be the church: God calls us out of the world to renew covenant with him and worship him in the heavenly sanctuary. Through the means of grace, he gives us the gifts of the kingdom: life, wisdom, and glory. Then he commissions us to go back into the world to disciple the nations, to do unto others as he has done unto us. The Bible’s liturgical pattern of calling, confession, cleansing, consecration, communion, and commissioning impresses the gospel story upon us each Lord’s Day, crafting us into a humble, obedient, service-oriented community. The church fathers had a slogan to encapsulate the transforming power of such worship: “Lex orandi, lex credendi,” meaning, “As a man worships, so he believes.” While we usually think it is our theology that will shape our worship, the reverse is also true. A gospel-shaped liturgy shapes us into a gospel-shaped people. The rest of the Christian life flows out of the Divine Service: Because God has called us together, we find that we want to continue experiencing rich, loving fellowship with one another throughout the rest of the week. Because God has forgiven us, we forgive others, even seventy times seven. Because God has taught us, we are driven to teach others, that they may share in the wisdom God has gifted to us. Because God has mercifully served us, we mercifully serve others. Because God has fed us His Son and clothed us in His righteousness, we are compelled to feed and clothe others. Because God has called on us to give generously, a tithe and above, we learn to be disciplined and generous stewards of our possessions in all of life. Because God has preached the gospel to us, we are led to preach it to others, that they may be brought into Christ’s new humanity as well.
Why do we speak of the Divine Service as covenant renewal? The covenant is an everlasting bond of union, communion, and self-giving love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Triune God is covenantal. Each of the three divine persons eternally relates to the other two in peace and humility. God has graciously and sovereignly chosen a people to be included in his divine family. Believers and their children are made members of the covenant through Jesus Christ, the eternal Son incarnated in human flesh. We enter into this covenant via baptism. In and through the waters of baptism we receive, as John Calvin said, “regeneration and cleansing from sin.” Baptism unites us to Christ; this union gives way to communion, celebrated in our weekly partaking of the Lord’s Supper. At the table of the Lord, we receive the true body and blood of Christ, the glorified life of our crucified and risen Savior. This feast is the climax of covenant renewal each Lord’s Day, when our fellowship with the Triune God and one another is freshly experienced and manifested. The Divine Service, then, is covenant renewal because God renews and reapplies his pledge of redemption to us and we renew and recommit ourselves to loyal service in his kingdom.
Note also the special role given to the pastor, as the officiant of the liturgy. This is not sacerdotalism since the minister is no “nearer” to God than the rest of the congregation. In the New Covenant, we are all priests before God (1 Pt. 2:4-9). All the baptized now have equal access to God’s throne room in the heavenly sanctuary (Heb. 4:16; 10:19ff). The minister’s role, therefore, is symbolic, but not merely symbolic. We are not just “playing church” each Lord’s Day; God really is powerfully at work through the actions of the minister. As officiant, he represents Christ in the liturgy and is authorized to act and speak his name, so that what the pastor does for us in the service (e.g., baptizing, absolving us of sin, preaching, giving us the Lord’s Supper, blessing us) is really done by Christ. As the one entrusted by the community with the exercise of the keys in his ordination (Mt. 16:19), the minister has the role of authoritatively acting in Christ’s stead, of representing the husband to the bride. (One can see from this why Scripture only authorizes men to serve the flock as shepherds.) The pastor’s function as Christ’s special representative is critical for us to grasp if we are to understand God’s dynamic work in the Divine Service. The pastor’s liturgical role is at the heart what it means for him to “equip the saints” and do “the work of the ministry for the edifying of the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:12).
Thus, the gracious action of God in the weekly liturgy, when received by faith, generates the rest of our life together as the covenant people. As Augustine pointed out, men could not be bound together in a religious body apart from common sacraments and communal practices, distinguishing them from the world: “Our Lord Jesus Christ has knit together the company of new people with sacraments, few in number, easy of observance, explicit in meaning, such as baptism in the name of the Trinity, the sharing of his body and blood [in the Eucharist], and whatever other practice is commanded in the canonical Scriptures.” Through God’s ordained rites and rituals, we are congealed together into Christ’s new society. Therefore, as an outflow of the weekly liturgical, sacramental gathering, we begin to experience real community with our fellow Christians. Scripture calls us to share with one another, pray for one another, confess sin to one another, bear one another’s burdens, teach and admonish one another, and of course, tying it all together, love one another. This is the kind of common life we envision enjoying together, by the grace of God. Practically, this means we live in submission to those God has appointed to rule over us in the church, we invite one another into our homes for fellowship, we participate in various Bible studies and prayer meetings as opportunity allows, and we learn how to carry on deep, loving friendships with people who may be very different than ourselves. This is the day-to-day life of the church, the pattern of living we are called to exhibit from one Lord’s Day to the next.
1/2
We emphasize community formation because we realize salvation is ecclesial, not individualistic. To be saved is to experience the salvific presence of Christ in his church, through the means of grace, by the work of the Holy Spirit. Salvation is not just a matter of individuals “getting right with God.” It also is about the restoration, healing, and transfiguration of human life, especially human relationships. Indeed, the whole creation will, in some sense, be included in the scope of God’s redemptive plan (cf. Rom. 8:17ff; Eph. 1:9ff; Col. 1:15ff). God’s salvation is thoroughly communal, aiming at the church’s “life together with God,” as Augustine explains. We must repent of the ways we have interiorized and privatized God’s work of salvation, of ways we have traded in the rich, corporate view of salvation taught in the Scriptures for the mess of pottage that is American individualism. We must repent of the ways we have downgraded the church to a mere “voluntary organization,” having no organic connection with redemption. The church is not merely an adjunct to the gospel, tacked on as an afterthought or an unnecessary appendage. Rather, as Calvin says, “the one effect resulting from [Christ’s death] is, that there is a church.” The very goal of the gospel is the existence of a people living in restored fellowship with God and in harmony with one another. The church is not merely an agent or means to salvation; it is salvation (albeit only partially realized, for now). The church is to be the Garden of Eden restored — and on the way to its glorious consummation as the City of God (cf. Rev. 21-22).
In the liturgy we learn that we are ignorant and need God to instruct us and make us wise. Thus, discipleship is a vital dimension of the church’s vision, emerging out of the liturgical/sacramental matrix of the Divine Service. The church’s motherly, nurturing role as discipler is indispensable. Consider Calvin’s wise words:
[B]ecause it is now our intention to discuss the visible church, let us learn from the simple title ‘mother’ how useful, indeed how necessary, it is that we should know her. For there is no other way to enter into life unless this mother conceive us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us at her breast, and lastly, unless she keep us under her care and guidance until, putting off mortal flesh, we become like the angels. Our weakness does not allow us to be dismissed from her school until we have been pupils all our lives. Furthermore away from her bosom one cannot hope for any forgiveness of sins or any salvation.
The church’s educational ministry is varied. After all, Jesus called upon his first ministers to teach disciples everything he had commanded them (Mt. 28:19-20). This holistic discipleship begins with the proclamation of God’s great work of salvation in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And though we never stop learning the glories of what Christ has done for us, we have other things to learn as well. The Bible addresses all of life, and thus the church’s teaching ministry must be wide ranging. Discipleship includes learning God’s will for family, business, and society, as well as the practical skills needed to live the Christian life (e.g., how to pray; how to be a peacemaker; how to share and defend the faith; how to apply biblical principles to one’s calling; how to use and enjoy the things of the world without becoming “worldly”; etc.). Through preaching, teaching, and catechesis we hope to be educated in God’s glorious truth. We envision being a people that is saturated in the whole counsel of God’s Word.
But we must also remember that discipleship can never be reduced to a matter of ‘ethics’ or ‘values,’ in the way these are commonly understood. To paraphrase Stanley Hauerwas, “the church does not have a social ethic; she is a social ethic.” But this social ethic cannot be grasped on the world’s terms. As C. S. Lewis wrote, “The whole purpose of the gospel is to deliver us from morality.” Discipleship is not mere morality; it is a matter of what the apostle Paul calls the “obedience of faith” (or “faith’s obedience”; Rom. 1:5, 16:26). Faith and obedience are not two separate ways of relating to God, as though we had faith for justification and works for sanctification. Rather, faith-filled obedience is the holistic, full-orbed response to God’s grace that the gospel calls for and calls forth, by God’s Spirit. The obedience of faith is nothing less than eschatological life – the life of the new age, the life of the world to come, already experienced in some measure by virtue of our union with the resurrected and glorified Christ. The church, as a community of disciples, living under the sign of the cross and in the power of Christ’s Spirit, is a signpost pointing ahead and above to the world to come. The church, in short, is a colony of heaven on earth, living the life of the future in the present (Phil. 3:20-21). Most of our talk about the Christian life (and the church!) is far too mundane; we must envision grasping once again Paul’s eschatological consciousness that declares to the church body, “The new age has come! You are a new creation! Live accordingly!”
The Lord’s Day liturgy ends with a benediction: we receive the blessing of God as we are sent back out in the dark, rotten world so that we can serve as salt and light. Thus the liturgy trains us in mission. As one theologian stated it, the church is the only institution in the world that exists for the sake of her non-members. The church does not merely have a mission; she is a mission. We have been called out of the world into the body Christ not merely for the sake of our own salvation; rather, we are to become the embodiment of God’s love to the world. Through our loving service to the lost world around us, the world comes to see that she has not been abandoned by her Creator. As we humbly incarnate God’s love to a dying, sin-enslaved culture, the kingdom of God grows more and more into its glorious destiny. It is our mission to bring the word of the prophets to fruition: to see to it that our city, our nation, and then the entire earth is as “full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Isa. 11:9).
How do we go about this practically? How can we act as a missional church? How do we show that we exist as the covenant people, set apart from the world, for the sake of the world? We must remember that our God is a missionary sending God: He sent Christ and the Spirit to redeem us, to take on our suffering and bring us new life. We must remember that our mission is Christ-shaped through and through: “As You sent me into the world, I have also sent them into the world” (Jn. 17:18). In other words, what Jesus did for the people of God, the church is now to replicate (albeit in a qualitatively different way) for the world. We are not merely to be in the world, but for the world. We are to be the efficacious incarnation of God’s redeeming love and renewing presence to the fallen world order. God’s ministry to us through Christ involves both word and deed, and so our ministry to the world must do the same. Our mission includes evangelism, the triumphant gospel proclamation that the crucified and risen Christ is now King of kings and Lord of lords. In the gospel, God promises believers forgiveness of sin, victory over the world, the flesh, and the devil, and eternal life in the kingdom of God, which is nothing less than the redeemed and consummated new creation. But announcing the gospel is not the full extent of our mission. A faithful church will also envision extending God’s work in the world by showing hospitality to those in her surrounding community, especially by welcoming strangers into homes; by performing mercy ministry, especially through her diaconate, giving people spiritual and material assistance; by engaging in parish church planting that ministers to specified geographic communities; by supporting missionaries in domestic and international fields; and by working for social justice (in the best sense of that term), primarily through prayer and service, but also through political involvement when need and opportunity arise. Our mission means we do not shy away from joining in the world’s suffering, but embrace it and make it our own, knowing that because Christ dwells in us, his healing presence can flow out from us into a hurting world. This often means taking on great pain and even persecution, but to seek to escape this would be to (in a Jonah-like way) forsake our divine calling. Indeed, God himself suffered for us in human flesh, so we must be willing to endure suffering for and with others as well. As we carry out our mission to be the servant-leader of our culture, to live as the body of Christ – indeed, the broken body of Christ – for the world, we will find God using us to transform the culture and make the kingdom more and more manifest. The faithful church suffers and serves her way to victory.
A visionary, biblical ecclesiology is anchored in God’s weekly service to us through the liturgy; it extends to community, discipleship, and mission. What strategies will a faithful church implement in order to achieve this full-orbed vision? Reformed Christians should seek to learn from their forerunners in the faith, not because Reformed theology is a finished product, but because it is, to this point in church history, the purest expression of catholic, orthodox Christianity. Thus, a strong awareness of tradition, a robust historical consciousness, is needed to inform our theology, liturgy, and praxis. The Spirit has been working in and through the church now for nearly 2000 years and we would insult his ministry to the covenant people if we ignored the creedal and confessional documents, the songs and festivals, the liturgies and stories, he has bequeathed to the church. Dialogue with church history informs our vision at every point; we are not starting from scratch but seeking to take our part in the great conversation of our ecclesiastical heritage, a heritage that did not begin in 1973 (with the founding of the Presbyterian Church in America denomination), or in the 1640s (when the Westminster Standards were drafted), or 1517 (when Luther spearheaded the Reformation), but stretches all the way back through the medieval and patristic church to Pentecost. As G. K. Chesterton put it, tradition is the “democracy of the dead”; it serves as a guide and control on our doctrinal, liturgical, and practical growth. Church tradition, of course, is always subject to the authority of Scripture, so it cannot be blindly embraced. It must be understood as a home, not a prison. An irreformable tradition is an idol. This means we are not simply interested in looking backwards; we are also always looking ahead to God’s work in the future. We are not slaves of the past; we trust God to continue the kingdom work he has begun until all things have been put under Christ’s feet and death is swallowed up in victory (1 Cor. 15:20-28, 54).
In other words, our vision is eschatological. Thus, we have a strong interest in maintaining covenant succession and developing a future orientation. The Reformed church is to be ever reforming. We believe that God is continuing to mature his church “till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). We plan and build not just for the next year, five years, or fifty years, but for centuries to come because we know “the Lord [our] God [is] the faithful God, who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations” (Dt. 7:9). Throughout Scripture, God’s redeeming work includes the children of his people. This means we baptize our children and fully include them in the life of our body; but it also means we do everything with a view to the generations to come. Thus, our vision must be long-term. It ultimately concerns not just worship and ministry in the present, but building for the future, for the reestablishment of a Christian civilization, for the rebirth of Christendom in all its glory, when Christ’s lordship over every square inch of creation and every split second of time is acknowledged.
This, then, is our vision: as members of a local expression of Christ’s church, we are called to live human life as God really intended. As contemporary liturgical theologians like to say, in church we “do the world right,” we practice life the way it really ought to be lived. We embody a new way of being human. The church is the center of the world, the nursery of Christ’s kingdom. It is the most important institution on earth. With the church and through the church, societies live and die, rise and fall. What London is to England, Tokyo to Japan, and Paris to France, the church is to the world – only more so. The church is the polis and basilea of God, the heavenly Jerusalem, the capital city and temple-palace of Christ’s kingdom. We who are in Christ are the new humanity, the first fruits of the new age. The church is God’s eschatological beachhead in the cosmic war against evil, for only here, through her ordained means of grace in the liturgy, is the Spirit at work to turn back the forces of sin and death that otherwise hold men, women, and children captive. In the church, the life of the world to come is to be a present, if imperfect, reality. In our day, the church has generally failed to be an authentically Scripture shaped community. She has failed to carry out her calling as the servant-leader of culture. She has failed to be the body of Christ, giving herself for the life of the world, as her Lord did. As the prow of culture, she has misdirected the world by her own unfaithfulness. She has failed to authoritatively and prophetically herald God’s truth to the society around her. We understand that if the church is to recover her mission and sense of identity in our day, if she is to begin to reshape the wider culture in more biblical patterns of life, she must repent and learn to function once again as the early church did in similar cultural conditions: as a counter culture, an island of Christian culture in the midst of a raging sea of apostate, anti-Christian culture. This is the vision we embrace as members of Christ’s church. May God give us the grace to fulfill it!
But God still wishes in these days to build his spiritual temple amidst the anxieties of the times. The faithful must still hold the trowel in one hand and the sword in the other, because the building of the church must still be combined with many struggles.
–John Calvin
Therefore, he who would find Christ must first of all find the church. How would one know where Christ and his faith were, if one did not know where his believers are? And he who would know something of Christ, must not trust himself, or build his own bridges into heaven through his own reason, but he must go to the church, visit, and ask of the same…for outside of the church is no truth, no Christ, no salvation. The Holy Christian Church is the principal work of God, for the sake of which all things were made. In the Church, great wonders daily occur, such as the forgiveness of sins, triumph over death,…the gift of righteousness and eternal life.
–Martin Luther
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Jordan on the homeborn slave of Exodus 21:
James B. Jordan treats the “homeborn slave” law as Exodus 21:2–6, and he reads it as an adoption ordinance, not merely as a property rule.
The statute
A Hebrew man sold for debt serves until the sabbath year and then goes free (Exod 21:2; cf. Deut 15:12–15).
- If he entered already married, his wife goes out with him (v. 3).
- If the master supplies the wife and she bears children, “the wife and her children belong to her master, and he may go out by himself” (v. 4).
- If the man then declares, “I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free,” he is taken to “God” (the judges), his ear is bored at the master’s doorpost, and he serves for life (vv. 5–6).
Jordan’s comment on v. 4 is practical: the wife and children remain under the master’s household protection because the man has just proven financially irresponsible. The husband may later redeem them; he also retains conjugal rights. The arrangement trains the man rather than turning the wife loose with someone who may immediately fall back into debt.
What “homeborn” means for Jordan
The distinctive claim is that a homeborn slave is not primarily an infant born in the house. He is a man reborn into the household by the piercing of the ear.
Jordan calls the rite “the circumcision of the ear” (Jer 6:10; Acts 7:51; Ps 40:6). Circumcision itself is death-and-resurrection, the cutting away of flesh so that a man may hear and obey. Performed at the doorpost—the place associated with birth (Gen 18:10; 1 Sam 1:9)—the boring of the ear adopts the man as a son of the house. That is why Genesis 17 and Leviticus 22 distinguish the homeborn from the merely purchased slave, and why Eliezer of Damascus could stand as Abram’s heir (Gen 15:2–3). The open ear means the man now lives by the master’s word.
Jordan therefore lists “voluntary or homeborn slavery” as one of the legitimate forms of household servitude in his earlier Th.M. thesis Slavery in Biblical Perspective (1980).
Typology
He reads Psalm 40:6 (“mine ears you have opened”) and Hebrews 10:5 (“a body you have prepared for me”) together: the Messiah takes the form of the homeborn slave (Phil 2:7) and does the Father’s will unto death. Christians are then “slave-sons”—adopted hearers, not chattel.
Jordan’s full treatment is chapter 5 of The Law of the Covenant: An Exposition of Exodus 21–23 (ICE, 1984), especially the sections “Male Slaves” and “The Circumcision of the Ear.” That is the source for the reading that the ear-piercing creates the homeborn status rather than merely marking a man already born in the house.
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It’s interesting how our gender tribalism now matches our racial tribalism. This is very much the fruit of cultural Marxism/critical theory, which acts as a wedge to divide people so they can be easily conquered.
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