Trumpism as Religion

I was thinking about the tenacity of many of Trump’s followers to not let go of Trump. As a result of my cogitations, I have concluded that Trumpism is not Falsifiable. Trumpism is a religious faith system that cannot be falsified. Any fact that would disprove and so falsify Trumpism is thrown over the Trumptard’s shoulder into the sea of impossibility. Here is are some examples of random Trumptard reasoning,

“In an omnibus Trump has the discretion on how money is spent if not mistaken. He can build the wall using defense money with Army corps of engineers. If he couldn’t win it politically maybe he won it with wording in the bill.”

Trump wanted money for the military and felt he had no choice. He was betrayed by his own party pukes and the horribly flawed process they used to create the bill. I wish he’d have vetoed it, but maybe he can steal money from the military crap to build the wall. If that happens, I’ll feel better & will be waiting to see what he’ll do on the next spending bill.

So, here we find Trump signing a massive omnibus budget bill that has Democrat leaders Pelosi and Schumer as excited as two toddlers on a sugar high on Christmas morning and we are being asked to believe that Trump has “whooped em again Josey. ”

If Hillary Clinton had been elected with a Republican House and Senate such a bill likely would have never gone to Hillary to sign. It is unlikely that Hillary Clinton could have never gotten such an omnibus bill past a Republican House and Senate if only because a Republican House and Senate would not have wanted to give a Democrat that kind of victory. However, the Republican President has accomplished what a Democrat would have found almost impossible to accomplish.

Even if it were possibly true,  that Trump hoodwinked the Establishment those asserting that possibility have no real evidence upon which to believe that. Believing that such a thing is true amounts to a faith in faith. How can we ever trust someone who is always running a cloak and dagger game on his own base? How could we possibly know that there wasn’t some kind of double agent matrix occurring?  I’d rather stick with the “Trust but verify” mindset. I’d rather say that without verification I refuse to embrace a politician’s wink and a nod.

Now having said all that, I would be delighted to be wrong and have it found out that Trump really did “whoop em again Josey.”  I’d be delighted to see Trump take the money allocated to Defense and put in place to fund a policy to return all illegal immigrants to their homeland of origination and then station the military to guard our border, but asking me to believe that or something similar to that is what Trump is going to do is like asking me to believe that the New World Order has been defeated and fooled by a Johnny-Come-Lately to the political pool party.  It’s like asking me to believe in the big rock candy mountain.

 

Now, some might counter that I am guilty of the crime of not allowing any falsification of my conviction of Trump is possible. However, that just is not true. To the contrary, my doubt in Trump is falsifiable. If Trump were to cut the budget, kick sodomites out of the military, bar women entry into the military, turn off all loans to Israel, kick out the United Nations, turn off funds to states and cities who claim sanctuary status, implement their own version of Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback,” or any number of other sundry things I would say … “I was wrong about Trump. He really is anti-NWO.”

As it is, it is becoming clearer and clearer that Trump is a Judas Goat, assigned the task by his masters of leading whatever little remains of any possible resistance to the Internationalist Globalist dream down a path of irrelevancy.  One simply does not fight one’s enemy by giving one’s enemy everything they could possibly hope for in terms of budgetary desires. One does not defeat the enemy by funding the enemy. Trump has funded the enemy by signing the omnibus bill.

Trump is not a Cyrus. Trump is Julius Rosenberg.
 

A Short Consideration on Conspiracy Theory and History

John 11:53 — “So from that day on they plotted to kill Him.”

Again, we are forced to consider from this text the reality of two very popular notions that are increasingly coming to the fore in our times; the deep state and the reality of conspiracy.

Those who plotted against Jesus would be what we call the deep state. The Pharisees, Scribes, and Sadducees were the power brokers of that time. They were moving behind the scenes in order to, in many respects, create the reality which Jesus had to face. They were the ones that worked on the arrest. They were the ones who bribed Judas for their plotting purposes. They were the ones that manipulated Pilate- i.e. — “If you release this man you are no friend of Caesar”.  They were the ones who ginned up the crowds to cry out “crucify Him… crucify him.” The idea of a deep state manipulating the perception of reality has been with us forever. And of course, all this speaks of conspiracy. There was a conspiracy to put Jesus Christ on the Cross. The recognition of that conspiracy or the pointing out of conspiracies, in general, does not necessarily mean that we think conspiracies are sovereign over God. We can point out conspiracies realizing that God is conspiring to overturn the conspiracy of wicked men. The fact that conspiracies exist doesn’t mean that those who understand those conspiracies do not believe God is not sovereign. It merely means that they recognize that God often governs the affairs of men through the conspiring of men. To recognize conspiracy does not mean that we think those who conspire are sovereign. Even in their conspiring, they act according to God’s predestined purposes, which is exactly what God points out in the book of Acts,

26 The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against His Christ.’ 27 For truly against Thy holy child Jesus, whom Thou hast anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, had gathered together 28 to do whatsoever Thy hand and Thy counsel determined before to be done.

The beginning of putting Jesus to death was the conspiring against Him.

History in its large moments doesn’t typically happen by random chance. It happens often at its significant points (like the crucifixion of Christ) in the context of wicked men conspiring. But behind those who conspire is the God who conspires against the wicked and their conspiracies by His predestinating word. So we have wheels within wheels. Men conspire, but the conspiracies of men are the result of God conspiring against the very same men so that even the conspiracies of men both reveal and serve the purposes of God for those with eyes to see.

Consequently, we would be foolish to not take into consideration the reality of conspiracy theory as a penultimate and secondary means for how God moves history forward to His destination. The idea that the first history we get in journalist accounts, or the history we read by the official court historians or the history we learn in our History 101 course in college is anything but some kind of humanist historicism to be accepted on face value is not wise.

Having said all this it is well recognized that conspiracies are not easily sniffed out and identified. Understanding historical events is often a matter of conjecture and probability and then seeing how matters conveniently fit together in a pattern that is other than what the court historians offer. One particularly well known American believed much the same,

 But when we see a lot of framed timbers (sub-events of the same historical event), different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen — Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance — and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few — not omitting even scaffolding — or, if a single piece be lacking, we can see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared to yet bring such piece in — in such a case, we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.

In this paragraph, Abraham Lincoln is representing the Dredd Scott decision as the consequence of a long series of conspiring by prominent men to arrive at a long predetermined decision. The point here isn’t that Lincoln was right on this point. The point is that Lincoln saw history here as a conspiracy.  We agree and we agree that we likewise must look at the timbers (the individual historical exigencies)  to see if they were framed by plotters to exactly fit.

People who believe that large historical events happen randomly or by chance or “they just happened” are beyond incredulous. People who believe that the court historians give the unvarnished truth are likewise beyond incredulous. As men as power broker did so with the crucifixion of Jesus, men as power brokers continue to do so today to plot and conspire and then to cover up the truth. Here those who believe in the conspiracy theory of history invoke, “It is the glory of those who think they are Gods to conceal a thing: but the honor of God’s people is to search out a matter.”

Men are seldom going to be unified on any one account of a historical happening or the kind of conspiracy that might or might not have driven the event.  At the very least though, men might begin to agree that wicked men do plot and conspire and that at the very least God’s people should closely examine all official accounts that come to us by wicked men who have a vested interest to bend reality in their direction.

Understanding Social Orders By Their Guiding Mythos

This essay was kicked over in my head by a 4: 44-second video I viewed. What is below is not that video though there are structural commonalities between the two.
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In order to try and understand the thinking of a people in a set geographic location one has several tools at their disposal. One can examine peoples in worldview categories. How do they answer the cosmological, anthropological, ontological, teleological, axiological, and epistemological questions? Those answers are then compared and contrasted to the answers that the Holy Scriptures reveal. Another way of trying to understand the thinking of a people group is to consider what might be called their guiding mythos. This can be a bit more difficult because the guiding mythos for any people group is seldom explicitly articulated by the people in the people group that one is considering. The guiding mythos is a narrative that they are living and as living it they all assume it as valid, often without bringing it explicitly before their eyes. The guiding mythos becomes the environment that people live in and as the Chinese proverb has it, “if you want to know what the water is like, don’t ask a fish.”

One interesting aspect of a guiding mythos is that the people who are being guided by the mythos generally take the mythos, not as myth but as real reality. Correspondingly, people from the outside see the myth as a social construct not anchored in real reality. This is seen for example in Christianity. I as a Christian believe what others call my “guiding mythos” to be real reality while I consider their guiding mythos which analyzes my Christianity as a social construct, as a social construct.

When we offer that mythos of non-Christians is a social construct we do not suggest that there are not elements in the mythos that may be true. What we are saying instead when we talk about guiding mythos as a social construct is that which may or may not be true of it is providing a plausibility structure that as a whole does not correspond to real reality. There may be elements that correspond to real reality but the guiding mythos as a whole remains a myth. That is to say, it remains something that people take as true to give meaning to their lives, though as a whole, as it deviates from Biblical Christianity it remains a chimera.

All people groups, cultures, and social orders are organized around Worldviews, guiding mythos, macro-narratives, and plausibility structures and the way of life of said people groups are determined by these reality shaping molds.

Elsewhere on Iron Ink, we have offered how to analyze the Worldview of any particular people group. In this entry, we want to begin to toy with how to identify and recognize a guiding mythos or a foundation myth of people groups.

A guiding mythos must fulfill three functions for the people who embrace it.

First, the guiding mythos must explain the origin and structure of the world and the society around it. If we were to put this in Worldview language we would say that the guiding mythos must provide a cosmology and an ontology.

Second, the guiding mythos must define ultimate good and evil and from those definitions derive the values that are used to justify the holding of power. If we were to put this in Worldview language we would say that the guiding mythos must answer the question of axiology.

Here, it should be noted that the foundation myth will provide not only what is the ultimate good and evil but as a consequence it will also provide guilt for not aligning with the good as well as a means of atonement for one’s participation in ultimate evil or the participation of one’s ancestors in ultimate evil.

Third, the guiding mythos determines what is held sacred in that society. The guiding mythos delineates the taboos and provides the mysterium tremendum of a people.  Find that which cannot be blasphemed, mocked or satirized in a culture and you will have discovered what is sacred in that social order per their guiding mythos.

One can easily argue that for modern Westerners, WW II and the social implications arising out of that conflict has become the foundation myth of the West as we shall see as we examine who WW II as guiding mythos fills all three requirements noted above.

First, our understanding of the world and of our institutions all stem from the world that WW II created. This is true of our policies. One example is that it is taken as axiomatic that the US must have a globalist foreign and economic policy. This was not the nearly universal policy engagement of America until after WW II. Before WW II there was a strong isolationist impulse in America. Another example is our nearly universal push towards a New World Order where there is a unified Internationalist governmental structure. This was all propelled into motion by the child of WW II, the United Nations, as well as the Bretton Woods Economic gathering.

Secondly, our current guiding mythos, which arises out of WW II, our definition of ultimate evil is Nazism whereas ultimate good is an opposition to Nazism. That this obtains for our guiding ethos is seen by the countless movies that are produced by Hollywood where if a real villain is to be created he must be a Nazi. The values that then arise out of opposition to Nazism which our guiding mythos provides are anti-racism (whatever that is), egalitarianism, diversity, and anti-nationalism. Each of these values can be traced back to America’s victory over ultimate evil.

These values are then projected back upon the American founding and are taken as values that good Americans have always embraced since 1776. As such, as one example, the language in our Declaration of Independence which speaks of “all men being created equal,” is reinterpreted through this guiding mythos grid to mean something Jacobin that the founders never intended it to mean.  Obviously, our founders never intended the kind of egalitarianism that our current guiding mythos requires as seen in their reference in the same Declaration of Independence to American Indians as “merciless savages.”

Third, out of this modern guiding mythos,  that which is taken as sacred and cannot be mocked or satirized are those things that violate the myth. Jesus Christ can be defamed in our current guiding mythos (see the 2015 film “Krampus” where one of the characters blurts out as an exclamation “Christ on a stick.”) Biblical Christianity in our social order can be lampooned,  but what cannot be mocked or satirized is the holocaust, minorities, or sexual perverts. And, yes, there are certain elements of these that desperately need to be satirized and mocked.  Here are just a few examples of where the values of the current guiding mythos needs to be picked as a target, frozen as a target, personalized as a target, and finally made a point of polarization.

1.) The alleged fact that victims of the holocaust were turned into soap or human lamp shades or bone china needs to be mocked.

2.) The thinking of Black lives Matter needs to be mocked as well as the false narrative of “hands up don’t shoot.” The thinking of La Raza needs to be mocked. The thinking behind sanctuary cities and states needs to be satirized.

3.) Current diversity models that sanction the perverseness of transgenderism, sodomy and incest need to be mocked and satirized.

4.) Feminism needs to be mocked and satirized.

However, as these values are now the values of modern Western man these values are sacred and to touch them is to touch the ark of the covenant. To touch these is to violate the guiding mythos of the West.

Problems lie at several points in our current guiding mythos.

First, this 20th century guiding mythos gives us a worldview platform that is dark, negative and destructive. Instead of a mythos, such as the Christian one which gives us the idea of redemption and a conquering faith the current mythos gives us the ongoing total genocide of  White Christians who refuse to submit to the current guiding mythos. Consider the plight of South Africa today.

Secondly, whereas in Christianity ultimate good is seen in the Redemptive work of Jesus Christ and ultimate evil is seen as those who put Christ to death, what we have in this WW II mythos in the center place is the ultimate good is seen as egalitarianism and the ultimate evil generally assigned to Adolph Hitler and the Nazis.

Thirdly, as we have seen, that which is sacred in our current mythos is the Holocaust and its survivors as opposed to the Christian narrative where the Cross, Resurrection, and Ascension are that which are sacred.

All conceptual thinking is downstream from any guiding mythos. As long as this WW II guiding myth remains our guiding myth the trajectory of the current thought control and ultimately the genocide of the Biblical Christian is inevitable since this mythos teaches that Christendom and modern Western man is responsible for the violation of this now entrenched holocaust anti-egalitarian myth. If Christianity survives it can only survive as being reinterpreted according to this guiding myth. If it is reinterpreted according to this guiding myth it is no longer Christianity.  Modern Western man can only atone for this false guilt that this false mythos engenders by ceasing to be White and Christian. White Christians are responsible for the holocaust and only the elimination of White Christians can answer for it.

Modern Westerners have lost their original mythos identity that was anchored in the reality of Creation-Fall-Redemption-Dominion and have taken on a new mythos identity that is anchored in the false reality of Nazism-Anti-Semitism-False Guilt-Genocide. There is no escaping the trajectory of this current mythos. This guiding mythos is so entrenched now that for a White Christian to deny this current mythos is valid is to prove that the current mythos is valid according to the current mythos.

The fact that this is our current mythos is testified to by the countless number of “Holocaust Museums” that dot the landscape of America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Holocaust_memorials_and_museums_in_the_United_States#Michigan

Even in 1981, in the small Wesleyan College, I attended I took a “Holocaust” course. All this despite the fact that Americans had zero role or responsibility in whatever did or did not happen in Europe during the time frame in question.

Also, the power of this current guiding mythos is seen in our ignorance of any other genocide that occurred in history. We are only aware of the Jewish holocaust. Our guiding mythos does not allow us to ask why we are seldom told of the genocide of the Ukrainian Christians in the 1920’s – 1930’s by the Bolsheviks or the genocide of the Armenian Christians in the 1910’s by the Turks, or the genocide of Christians by Muslims as they crossed the North African littoral during their rampage of conquest. Our guiding mythos being what it is cannot see these genocides for to see these other genocides diminishes the holocaust industry.

The ability to place guilt on a people is one of the powerful consequences of a guiding mythos. False guilt gives one the ability to manipulate people in almost any direction. Guilt and the ability to wield it successfully and the ability to offer ways wherein guilt can be assuaged is where power is leveraged. We saw this most clearly recently in the election of Barack Obama. We remained a guilty people for our primal national sin of slavery and one way to atone for our guilt was to vote for the black Democrat.

We might offer here that the mythos of the WW II holocaust and the mythos of American slavery coalesce and reinforce each other well. In both the 19th century American mythos (slavery) and the 20th-century WW II mythos, the white man is the guilty party. In both cases the White man was the oppressor of an innocent victim. In both cases, atonement can only be made by the giving up of the formerly embraced Christian mythos that stands as contrary to both the 19th and 20th-century mythos.  In both cases liberation theology is the core of each mythos. In both cases, egalitarianism, diversity, and a reinterpretation of Christianity and its mythos is required.
All of this is reinforced by our literature, our flims, our Universities, and nearly every cultural outlet that one cares to name.

Patriarchy as God’s Social Order

Ephesians 5:22 – 23 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body.

I Corinthians 11:9 Nor was man created for the woman, but woman for the man. 

I Timothy 2:11 Let a woman learn in silence with all submission. 12 And I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14 And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression. 
Titus 2:5  3 the older women likewise, that they be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things— 4 that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, 5 to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed.


These texts, and others like them, provided a foundation for social order for Christian civilization in the West for 2000 years. These texts can be summarized by the word “patriarchy” which simply means “Rule of the Father.”

Patriarchy as a social order — a way to organize a society — grew up out of the text of Scripture and because of that has been roundly hated by those who hate the Scriptures. Indeed, so hated as patriarchy been that we have spent the last 100 years or so seeking to strip ourselves of this idea that God intended for men and women to each have their respective domains of hegemony. The Man as he who fights to provide and the Woman as she who is head of hearth and home under the protection and guidance of her husband. So hated has been this idea of biblical patriarchy that the whole biblical notions of roles for men and women have been so eclipsed that now we are living in a culture where not only roles for men and women have been denied but so have the idea of sexual distinctions between men and women legally disappeared.

That the idea of Biblical patriarchy is to be overcome for an egalitarian social order has been seen repeatedly in our culture. This desire to reverse God’s intended order for society goes way back. Indeed, one might say that in the Garden, with the serpents bypassing of the male covenant Head for Eve what was seen for the first time was this attempt to be rid of God’s assigned patriarchy. 

The desire to rid social orders of patriarchy has been characteristic of every Revolutionary Movement. In the 18th century French Revolution, it was Mary Wollstonecraft writing her  “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” This was, comparative to today, a rather mild statement, wherein Women’s rights in the new Revolutionary order was championed. At one point Wollstonecraft, whose own life and marriage was shipwrecked on her Revolutionary views wrote,

“It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.” 

― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 


Mrs. Cady Stanton’s “Women’s Rights” championed for Woman to be freed from her subordination to man! This freedom was to be seized from men who were seen as dictatorial if they did not agree with Stanton. Freedom was to be grasped by women as she makes herself independent of man.

That Stanton was at war with Christianity is seen by just a couple quotes,

“We found nothing grand in the history of the Jews nor in the morals inculcated in the Pentateuch. I know of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of woman. “

“The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to women is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading. “

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

And yet it is only in Western Civilization, formed and shaped by Christianity wherein women escaped the degradation found in the harem of the Muslim. It was only in Christianity where women were esteemed and protected and so delivered from being merely objects as you find in much of paganism. It was not Christianity that put widowed women on the funeral pyre with their deceased husbands (sutee). And as sure as night follows day, as Christianity and Biblical patriarchy is eclipsed, women will return to slave status.

Alexandra Kollentai 

Kollentai was one of the noteworthy Bolshevist Revolutionaries of the Russian Revolution. Early on she was known for her role in attacking what was then called the “bourgeiose family,” which was in point of fact the family based on Christian principles. She advocated the simplification of divorce, and for access to birth control and abortion, 

‘In my opinion, as a Feminist and a Communist, the fundamental importance and value of birth control lies in its widening of the scope of human freedom and choice, its self-determining significance for women. Birth control means freedom for women, social and sexual freedom, and that is why it is so feared and disliked in many influential corners today … [it] is the beginning of the end of a social system and a moral code.’

Kollontai following previous Revolutionary Feminists argued, 

“To be truly free woman must throw off her contemporary, obsolete, coercive form of family that is burdening her way.”

And again,

“In sight of the whole the home fire is going out in all classes and strata of the population, and of course no artificial measures will fan its fading flame.”

Modern Feminist

“Patriarchy perpetuates oppressive and limiting gender roles, the gender binary, trans phobia and cissexism, sexual assault, the political and economic subordination of women, and so much more. And it is of the utmost importance that we prioritize dismantling the patriarchy in our intimate lives, as well as in a larger systemic sphere.”

It has been argued by some Christian Feminists (Virginia Mollencott) that patriarchy is not biblical because patriarchy was merely the cultural soil out of which God’s revelation was given to us. Never mind that we find patriarchy in the garden of Eden before the fall. In this argument patriarchy is merely the culture wherein Scripture originated. Virginia Mollencott for example as argued that “We cannot assume that because the Bible was written against the backdrop of the patriarchal social structure patriarchy it is the will of God for all people in all times and in all places.” And from there she calls for the necessity to de-absolutize the culture of the Bible.

The problem there, of course, is that in calling for the end of patriarchy by de-absolutizing the culture of the Bible what Mollencott has done instead is to absolutize the culture of modern feminism as the grid through which Scripture should be read. So, for Mollencott and people like her what the State must do is pass laws that strip patriarchy from our social order and boy howdy have they done that. From women’s suffrage at the beginning of the century which had the effect of a wife potentially negating her husband’s vote as head of the family, to the encouraging of women en mass to leave the home and enter the work force as Rosie the Riveter, to our embrace of easy divorce laws and abortion in the 70’s to redefining marriage in the summer of 2015 to the embrace of all things Transgender we have been at war with all forms of patriarchy for decades. Indeed when viewed objectively the 20th century has given us an arc that clearly communicates the desire to be done with father rule. Indeed, the State and too often the Church are working diligently to overcome the crowning outrage and inconsistency of patriarchy by correcting God’s mistake of not letting woman become a man because He made her a woman.

In our current culture what R. L. Dabney said over a century ago has come to pass. With the absence of patriarchy

“Women have the natural right to do all the particular things that a man does if she can … to shave her beard, to serve in the army and ride astraddle, to preach sermons and to sing bass.”

This is not the way of Scripture,

Clearly, the Scriptures that have been elucidated teaches a Biblical patriarchy where the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is head of the Church. Clearly, Scripture teaches the central importance of a Trustee family inasmuch as Scripture teaches that children are a blessing from the Lord. Clearly, Scripture teaches explicitly that God hates divorce. Clearly, Scripture teaches that parents are uniquely responsible for the rearing and teaching of their children. All of these patriarchal truths are now increasingly denied in and by our patriarchy-hating culture.

This also has not always been the way our Christian Fathers and Mothers have thought. Susan Fenimore Cooper, writing to resist the women’s suffrage movement could write,

“No system of philosophy (as Christianity) has ever yet worked out in behalf of woman the practical results for good which Christianity has conferred on her. Christianity has raised woman from slavery and made her the thoughtful companion of man; finds her the mere toy, or the victim of his passions, and it places her by his side, his truest friend, his most faithful counselor, his helpmeet in every worthy and honorable task. It protects her far more effectually than any other system. It cultivates, strengthens, elevates, purifies all her highest endowments, and holds out to her aspirations the most sublime for that future state of existence, where precious rewards are promised to every faithful discharge of duty, even the most humble. But, while conferring on her these priceless blessings, it also enjoins the submission of the wife to the husband, and allots a subordinate position to the whole sex while here on earth. No woman calling herself a Christian, acknowledging her duties as such, can, therefore, consistently deny the obligation of a limited subordination laid upon her by her Lord and His Church.
From these three chief considerations–the great inferiority of physical strength, a very much less and undefined degree of inferiority in intellect, and the salutary teachings of the Christian faith–it follows that, to a limited degree, varying with circumstances, and always to be marked out by sound reason and good feeling, the subordination of woman, as a sex, is inevitable.”

That language in today’s culture is almost grating on our ears and yet this was the mindset of our Christian Fathers and Mothers. And what have we made of ourselves since we have overthrown this kind of Patriarchy? 

We send young ladies to college apart from the oversight of their Fathers and,

Among undergraduate students, 23.1% of females experience rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence, or incapacitation.

Relationships between young men and women have devolved into what we now call “the hook up culture.”

According to “projections based on census data, when today’s young adults reach their mid-40s to mid-50s, a record high share (25%) is likely to have never been married,” Pew Research noted in a 2014 study documenting the decline of marriage in the U.S.
  • Percent of all births to unmarried women: 40.2%

    We have sown the wind of anti-patriarchy and have reaped the whirlwind of broken homes, fatherless children, and a shattered social order.

    And all this because we abandoned God’s Word for the Family.

    Many will blame all this on Feminism but I believe in the end, this is the fault of men who desired the irresponsibility that comes with not having to rule. If God has designed men to be rulers then when ruling fails it can only be because men abdicated their place of ruling well as God’s representatives in the family.

Has Biblical patriarchy been perfect? No, precisely because it is implemented and lived out by creatures who are fallen. I myself in up close and personal ways have seen the failure of patriarchy. I’ve seen husbands out of control damaging their wives and children in the name of “being in charge.” But, this is once again the case where we dare not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Unbiblical Patriarchy should not determine our attitude towards Biblical patriarchy. Just as we would not conclude that terrible marriages, therefore means we should get rid of marriage completely we should not reason that all because we have witnessed bad patriarchy therefore, we should get rid of biblical patriarchy.

In this message, I have challenged many assumptions of the post-Christian West. In doing so, I realize that a sermon like this might be deemed “controversial.” But if any of it is controversial it is only controversial in the light of the Enlightenment project called modernity where egalitarianism has been the ruling motif. Overall, the point here is that in God’s social order men and women are not interchangeable cogs in a machine culture. They have each been gifted differently for the glory of God and for the good of one another. 

The healing of all this begins with men and women being regenerated by the spirit of the living Christ. Regenerated men and women have their minds awakened to God’s revelation and begin incrementally to challenge the assumptions of an age that have been at war with God since the fall of the Bastille. Only by the Cross can the family be restored. Apart from the finished work of Christ we can only expect more of this conflict of interest between men and women. We can not legislate our way out of this mess unless we are first turned to trust Christ. We can not muscle our way out of this unless we are first turned to trust Christ. Our only hope in restoring both individual lives and from that our larger social order is by once again being tutored by Christ.

The Hatred of Patriarchy

One of the most important roles/metaphors in scripture is that of Father. In Scripture, everything is founded on the idea of Father. God is our Father who art in heaven. Ephesians teaches there is,

6one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

St. Paul can say in the book of Corinthians,

yet for us, there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we exist.

The idea of God as Father is an architectonic idea without which the Scripture cannot hold together. Clearly, if we get the idea of Father wrong, there is nothing else right that we will understand.

One aspect of God’s Fatherhood is that He rules over all. It is why we can confess Sunday after Sunday, “I believe in God the Father almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth.”

Jesus revealed God as His Father, told Israel that only God was their Father, not Abraham nor Moses nor David. Further, Jesus never said His Father was the chief apostle, Senior Pastor, President or any other title/function such as most Reverend Doctor, but Father. Worse yet, for the anti-patriarchalists, it is the role of the Son to declare and reveal the Father and to come and do the will of the Father.

So important is Fatherhood that the last verse of the Old Testament promises of the Messiah that with His coming  ‘He shall turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse’ Mal. 4:6

One role of the Messiah was to heal the family and He would do so by turning the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers.

Well, if all this is so, then what can we call any movement that seeks to eliminate the biblical idea of fatherhood and the biblical idea of patriarchy…”Father rule?”

And yet this is where we are at in our social order in the West.

White people … (are for) “blood and soil, patriarchy, and racial hierarchy.”

Paul Krugman 
N.Y. Slimes Article 
Complaining about 16 Election results

Notice the venom against patriarchy in that statement. That venom is working itself out in a host of ways. Consider with me just a few moments the current attack on men. The facts I have collated here came from a recent news report,

Average American male dies 5 years earlier than the average American female.

One reason for this is addictions. Men are twice as likely to be alcoholics as women as well as twice as likely to die of a drug overdose.  In the state of New Hampshire, 73% of the opioid drug overdose deaths were men.

Nationwide 77% of the suicides recorded are by men. This represents a 43% increase in male suicides as between the years 1997-2014.  This suicide rate is falling disproportionately higher upon white men when compared to the rest of the US population. Now add to this that 90% of those incarcerated are men.

This trend is starting with our youth. In relation to females, fewer men graduate high school than women.  Fewer men attend and graduate from college than women. When in school boys far outpace girls as discipline problems. There may well be a correlation between that fact and the fact that 1 in 5 boys are diagnosed with a hyperactivity problem in comparison to 1 in 11 girls diagnosed the same. Many of those diagnosed are medicated with drugs that have no longitudinal studies that bear witness to the effects of these drugs when consumed over the course of a number of years, though there is increasing evidence that suggests that these drugs cause depression in later life.

Beyond college women decisively outnumber men in graduate programs as well as doctoral programs. Women are now in the majority of new enrollees in both law schools and in medical schools.

This bottoming out for men in the educational realm has translated into the economic realm. Between 1979-2010 working-age men with only high school degrees witnessed their adjusted for inflation hourly wage income drop 20%.  This stands in contrast to high school educated women’s income which over the same period spiked.

7 million working-age men are unemployed. Approximately half of those same unemployed working-aged men take pain medication daily. This is the highest rate in the world. No other nation is even close. Far fewer men get married than just a few decades ago and far fewer stay married.  About 1 in 5 children in America live with their single mothers. This is double the rate of 1970. This, of course, means that there are millions of more boys, and girls, growing up without fathers.

The stats show that young married age males are now more likely to live with their parents than they are their wives or a girlfriend. This stands in contrast to women of the same age who buy their own homes at almost twice the rate as their single male counterparts. More women than men have drivers licenses.

In terms of the mythical wage gap between men and women it is recognized that when you compare apples to apples — when you compare men and women in the same fields, with the same experience, working the same jobs, for the same period of time, — the putative wage gap not only often disappears but also often is inverted so that there is a slight wage gap in favor of women. One study, using US census data, found that single women in their 20’s living in metropolitan areas now earn 8% on average more than there single male counterparts. Now add that the majority of managers in the workforce are women and suddenly the long talked about unfairness to women in the workforce begins to dissipate like the fog before the morning sun.

Further, women are scoring higher on IQ tests than men are. Not only are men falling behind women in IQ tests but men are physically wasting. One recent study found that almost 50% of the young men trying to join the Army failed their entry fitness exam. Fully 7 in 10 American males are overweight or obese. This is in comparison to 59% of American females who likewise are overweight or obese.

We might say that on all counts men are becoming less male. Male sperm count is down 60% as compared to the 1970’s. Further, there has been a significant dropping in male testosterone. One study has shown that there has been a 1% decrease in male testosterone every year since 1987. This means that the average 40-year-old male in 1987 would have 30% more testosterone than his 40-year-old male counterpart in 2017. Keep in mind here that there is a correlation in men between low testosterone levels and an increase in depression, lethargy, and weight gain while seeing a decrease in cognitive abilities.

Yet the narrative continues that women are victims while men are oppressors. Universities continue to offer “Women’s studies,” with the emphasis being an attack on male power in such studies. In Churches, male patriarchy is attacked and assailed with a vicious vehemence seldom ever seen in the past by pastors who could serve as the poster child for the cucked effeminate male. Politicians craft legislation to help women in STEM fields and continue to support the false narrative of male privilege.

Clearly, men… and by extension patriarchy is under attack.

Now men and the rule of men called Patriarchy have fallen on some hard times, what with the advent of Feminism and egalitarianism. Indeed the Church in the West, in many quarters, is all in a tizzy to find some other paradigm that is more “fair” and is more “wise” than what God has provided in His Word. The consequence of this search to replace the God of the Bible’s authority for structuring marriage with a different god’s authority for structuring marriage has resulted in the wreckage of the Christian family with the residual flotsam and jetsam of broken marriages, single-parent families, and confused children. Consider About 1 in 5 children in America live with their single mothers. This is double the rate of 1970. This, of course, means that there are millions of more boys, and girls, growing up without fathers.

The cure for all this breakage is found in a return to patriarchy. In Patriarchy we find that the Christian faith gives us structure that is characterized by Love, Hierarchy, and Relatedness.

Consider the assumption concerning Fathers behind just a couple verses

Psalm 103:13

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him.

Hebrews 12:7 Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? 8 If you are not disciplined—and everyone undergoes discipline—then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all.

Clearly, the assumption in these two verses is that Father rule means security, love, and discipline.

So, if that is true, why the attack on Patriarchy?

By attacking Patriarchy God is attacked. God, throughout Scripture, is known as “Father.” This doesn’t mean that God is a physical Male but it means that the way in which God makes Himself known and represented to the World is via a healthy male relationship…. as the Patriarch.

As such one way to eliminate God then is to eliminate Fathers … to destroy all notions of patriarchy. If patriarchy is destroyed completely then even positive patriarchy will be destroyed.

1 Corinthians 8:6
Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.
 
Ephesians 4:6
One God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
 
Matthew 23:9
And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven.
 
Psalm 68:5
 
Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation.
 
Malachi 2:10
Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers?
 
Ephesians 1:3
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,
 
Isaiah 64:8
But now, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.
 
John 14:9-11
Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else believe on account of the works themselves.

Psalm 103:13

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him.

The attack on biblical patriarchy is an attack on God. By wiping out patriarchy the thought is that the God of the Bible can be wiped out from our thinking. The attack on patriarchy is an Orwellian attempt to drop the God of the Bible down the memory hole.

So, one way to argue the attack on patriarchy is that it is an attack on God in the attempt to eliminate Him from our thinking. The other way to argue the reason for the attack on patriarchy is that  God having already been deleted from our thinking it is only natural then to attack those institutions that have their origination in a God we have deleted from our thinking.   Either way, the attack on patriarchy is an attempt to scrub biblical Christianity from man’s thinking.

So, we see that the attack on patriarchy is not primarily an attack on men and their rule as it is an attack on Christianity. Attacking the proper rule of men is just one means of attacking Biblical Christianity. In this respect, it is much the same as the current attack on white people. It is not so much white people who are being attacked. It is rather Christianity which is being attacked through the attempt to genocide white men and women since white men and women, by God’s grace alone, have been the chief civilizational carriers of Biblical Christianity.  In the same way Biblical rule by men is attacked because it is Biblical rule by men as God’s representatives that accounts for civilizational Christianity over the centuries.

This attack on men and patriarchy is so widespread that is going after our language and hymns now,

Dr. Jordan Peterson — Came to the fore when he refused to use gender inclusive pronouns on a Canada University campus.

Peterson zeroed in on Canadian human rights legislation that prohibits discrimination based on gender identity or expression.

Dr Peterson was especially frustrated with being asked to use alternative pronouns as requested by trans students or staff, like the singular ‘they’ or ‘ze’ and ‘zir’, used by some as alternatives to ‘she’ or ‘he’.

In his opposition, he set off a political and cultural firestorm that shows no signs of abating.

Indeed Peterson touched the sacred cow of cultural Marxsim, the avowed enemy of Christianity.

Gender Neutral Hymns

“God of our fathers” becomes “God of the ages.”
“Rise Up, O Men of God” becomes “Rise Up, O Church of God.”

In one of the Anglican  hymnbooks “Be Thou My Vision,” #339 in the
1990 hymnal was altered. The third verse in the new construction of that  hymn became a combination of the second and fourth verses of the original. This combination was made in order to omit the second half of the second verse and the first half of the fourth verse, both of which contain masculine language referring to God.

These are the lines that were omitted:

Thou my great Father, I thy true son;

Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one.

and

High King of Heaven, my victory won,

May I reach heaven’s joys, O bright heaven’s Son!

You certainly can understand why all that maleness had to be eliminated.

Recently, I was in a meeting where the gathered group sang such gender-neutral hymns and then was taught by a female Rev.

This attempt to overthrow patriarchy is why Biblically minded people are so adamantly opposed to women in the office of Elder and Pastor. It’s not as if women aren’t just as smart as men. It’s not as if women aren’t as capable or more capable than men to create and deliver a fine sermon. There is nothing about femaleness that obstructs a person’s ability at exegesis, logic, and rhetoric. It is not as if women couldn’t shepherd. In the end, the reason that Biblical Christians are opposed to female Elders and Pastors is that God’s Church being patriarchal in its social order is something that arises out of God’s determination. God determined that women should not be Pastors or Elders. And when the visible Church ignores that then as one of the leading social order institutions in the culture the Church gives God’s imprimatur … His stamp of approval on the feminization of the rest of the social order. The visible Church enters in league with those who would attempt to destroy the invisible Church.

This ignoring of God’s order that occurs with the attack on patriarchy is not original to us. Indeed, many scholars offer that when the serpent went to Eve in the garden in the Temptation narrative that the serpent did so in order to upset God’s covenantal patriarchal ordering. Other scholars have offered that it was Adam as the garden patriarch who failed to keep and tend the garden and that the result of that patriarchal failure was the entrance of the serpent into the Garden culture. If this is accurate than a lack of proper patriarchy is the sin behind the original sin of the Fall.

As we move through Scripture we see the failure of biblical patriarchy to be the failure of God’s people. Usually, that failure is found in men becoming tyrants and so turning patriarchy into something rightly to be despised. Think of the wicked Kings of Israel. Occasionally, the failure of patriarchy is found in male leadership being overthrown in favor of the ugly feminization of the social order. Think of examples like Jezebel and Athaliah.

A great host of matters and people are conspiring in our culture to overthrow men and patriarchy. Consider a couple quotes in closing,

I call this god, the god of white supremacy and patriarchy…This God isn’t the God that I serve…He might be ‘biblical’ but he’s also an asshole.”

~Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper

this quote from Dr. Peter Jones who is paraphrasing Dr. Virginia Mollenkott,

“Compulsory heterosexuality is the very backbone that hold Patriarchy together.” Homosexuality will break that backbone. If society is to turn from patriarchy to partnership we must learn that lesbian, bisexual, and gay issues are not just private bedroom matters of doing whatever turns you on. They are wedges driven into the superstructure of the hetero-patriarchy system.”

Dr. Peter Jones 
Paraphrasing Lesbian Virginia Mollenkott
Spirit Wars — pg. 179

If Mollenkott is correct here then we learn that the whole LGBQT movement and all its ancillary perverseness, is, at its heart,  amount scrubbing patriarchy from our thinking.

As Christians we must resist this. We must be dissidents in our thinking should we desire to stay loyal to Christ. If the anti-patriarchalists are successful here they will destroy Christianity not by digging Christianity up by its roots but by stripping it of all its leaves.

Illustrations — Two ways to kill a plant.

Conclusion;

What the defense of Justification by Faith alone was to the Reformation the defense of Hierarchy, Patriarchy, and Distinctions are to 2017 and the Reformed Church.

Failure here is failure everywhere.