Many ask, but few seem to really want to know the answers to, the same basic questions: Why is our culture going to hell on a rocket? How did things get so bad so fast? Why do they only seem to be getting worse at a faster pace with each passing week, month, and year? And how can all of this be happening in a land where there are churches all over the place and the vast majority of people claim some form of Christianity?
It’s almost as though maybe – just maybe – the Christianity embraced by most of the professing Christian subculture in America, which then percolates and flows into the culture at large, isn’t really Christianity at all. That’s a heretical thought in many Americanized Christian circles these days, but one we ought to at least consider if we want truthful answers to those questions that everybody keeps asking about how and why the culture seems to be doing its final, fast laps around the drain.
One of the more obvious signs of the counterfeit nature of Americanized Christianity in recent generations has been its growing softness and effeminacy. Long before pop culture railed against “toxic masculinity” and championed such insane notions as “transgenderism”, the Christian subculture in America paved the way by pursuing a long, drawn out process of self-castration. For generations now Americanized Christianity has, with increasing aggressiveness (an ironically masculine attribute in this context), sought to promote feminine attributes as inherently more spiritual and holy. Thanks to decades of church-sponsored drift followed by a recent church-led sprint right off the cliff and down into the depths of cultural chaos, even most “conservative, Bible-believing Christians” in America now have a thoroughly feminized view of holiness and the pursuit of holiness.
This is why so many weak, soft males – who perceive their weakness and softness as a surefire sign of deep and growing holiness – are at this very moment happily escorting things like Critical Theory and egalitarianism into their homes, families, and churches.
This is why it’s near impossible to imagine a young man like the David who killed Goliath ever emerging as the product of an Americanized church. Think about that: a 14 or 15 year old (maybe younger) “boy” who so knows and loves the Lord as Lord that he articulates detailed judgment upon the openly sworn enemy of God and then follows through in the execution of that judgment by cutting the giant’s head off before using it to frighten other God-haters to the point that they run for the hills in terror.
Think about that.
Then think about what passes for spirituality and holiness in Americanized church these days. Think about how the Americanized church perceives and promotes masculinity, femininity, patriarchy, spirituality, and holiness.
Wanna know why even many highly regarded “Christian leaders” in America dare not stand clearly on the Word of the God they claim with their lips when it comes to subjects like religious pluralism, homosexuality, children’s education, or the duty of all men and nations to submit to Christ as King in detail right here and now?
‘Cause they’re afraid.
Like little girls. (Worse than most little girls, actually, since little girls have easy and understandable claim to cover and excuses that are not available to biologically full grown males.)
They’re scared.
They’re “deeply spiritual” too, of course. They can emote and talk/ramble/shout/sing about how much they love Jesus with the best of ’em. But when it comes to faithfully proclaiming the everything-defining Gospel command to repent and submit to Christ as Lord in every detail and area of life with the confidence and tone of a man unashamed of his manhood…well…not so much. They don’t have that kind of spirituality to offer and, frankly, wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near it.
You just can’t build a megachurch or a mega-ministry with that stuff, am I right?
And mega-religion is what Americanized Christianity wants most these days, which is why American culture is on the aforementioned rocket ride to hell while permeated by “Christian leaders” and drenched in weak, soft, effeminate approaches to spirituality and holiness.
Our culture doesn’t need another massive, centralized Christian ministry led by males and women who do everything but pursue the challenging details of the everything-touching Gospel command to repent and submit to Christ as Lord.
Our culture doesn’t need another wave of man- (and woman-) fearing pantywaist “leaders” (and wannabe leaders) who can’t run fast enough from currently unpopular biblical pronouncements on patriarchy, education, family and sexuality.
We don’t need another generation of “super-spiritual” males pursuing “holiness” by avoiding necessary battles for niceness’ sake while simultaneously virtue-signaling their implicit approval of various pop culture assaults on the core biblical truths that they hate deep down inside but don’t have the guts to clearly hate publicly (yet, anyway).
Our culture doesn’t need any more of these feminized male “leaders” and their soft, wispy, effeminate spirituality.
Our culture needs a Christianity that has a pair.
Which is another way of saying that our culture needs actual Christianity.
Along these lines, I’d like to share some insights posted recently by Doug Wilson in an article entitled The Effeminacy of Silence. I highly recommend reading the whole thing if you get the chance. Here’s how it opens:
“Let me say at the outset that this is not a post about overt effeminacy—effeminacy of the lisping mincing kind. If that kind of thing were a virus, then the men who had it would be the carriers. What I want to talk about here is a far less visible form of effeminacy—by which I mean the effeminacy that refuses to respond appropriately to the overt kind. I am talking about the doctors who are afraid to address the virus. Doctors who are afraid to address the virus simply have a different form of the virus, and that is our great problem.
Not only is this second kind of effeminacy far less visible, it is also far more widespread. And it is the actual cause of all our troubles. It is the premier hazard in all of this.
We have had multiple stories we could use to illustrate how this works, three a day on average, but let me just pick one of the gaudier ones—drag queens in the kids’ section of our libraries. There are three basic kinds of characters in these stories. First, we have the drag queens grooming the little kids, and the lesbian librarians who set it all up. Second, we have a goodly number of Joe Six-packs, watching the news about this latest travesty as it comes on the 48 television sets at their favorite sports bar, with all of them saying, “What the hell?!” or the rough equivalent. And then third, we have the effeminacy of silence everywhere else.
You don’t need to be light in your loafers to be effeminate. You don’t need to teach a queer treasure workshop at Revoice. You don’t need to put on your face paint and wig, and go leer over the top of the book you are reading to prepubescent boys at the library. You don’t need to trail around clouds of epicene rainbow ambiguity.
All you really need is the effeminacy of silence. Head down, mouth shut. Every eye closed—no, wait. That’s a different drill, but not unrelated. Back to the point.
Our real problem, therefore, is not all the effeminacy we can see—and we are seeing quite a bit more of it, are we not? The problem is the vast multitude of effeminates who could stop it but who are letting this happen.
Suppose a man is walking downtown with his wife, and they are accosted by some thugs. The thugs take the wife’s purse, rifle through it, make rude comments to her, mess with her hair, and generally act like they are thinking of doing a whole lot worse than that. Suppose also that her husband is standing off to the side, saying things like, “Gentlemen, this is genuinely distressing. There is no need for this. I must register a protest in the strongest possible terms.” What we should do, confronted with a spectacle like that, is to say—in the strongest possible terms—that such a man doesn’t love his wife, no matter how emotionally distressed he might be over her unhappy circumstances.
And we can say this because love fights to defend what it loves.”
You can tell a lot about what men actually love by simply noting the things they’ll fight for…and these days there are a lot of “conservative Christian” males out there fighting, often vigorously, for things like egalitarianism, Critical Theory, and the pop-culture promoters of such constructs, all while often railing against (or at least taking cheap shots toward) things like biblical patriarchy.
Wilson continues:
“So, the sexual revolution has now worked its way into absolutely everything. Is that a trifle?
There is a line (between shouldn’t fight/should fight) that can be crossed, and real love instinctively understands where that line is. When that line is crossed, love stands up, love speaks up, and love does whatever is necessary. A studious and academic chin stroke of concern does not know very much about that line at all, except for the basic operational axiom that we “are not across it yet.” And that is because, for those trapped by the effeminacy of silence, we are never across it, by definition.
In the meantime, do not confound spiritual apathy with pastoral wisdom and concern.
Being across that line might require action, and action entails risk.”
Ah yes, risk…this is a biggie.
What will it cost to stand for clear biblical teaching on patriarchy, sexuality, education…what price will I pay?
These are reasonable questions to ask. We should ask them of ourselves regularly.
The way that we process these questions and their associated answers will reveal who we actually fear and who we actually love.
Do we really love Jesus? (Not to be confused with “really feeling like we love Jesus” – the two are completely different things.)
Do we properly fear Him? (We will if we truly love Him.)
If so, we will strive to obey Him in every detail. That’s what He plainly tells us again and again in His Word (Luke 6:46; John 14:15; 1 John 1:6; 1 John 2:3; Matthew 7:21-23; Matthew 28:20).
So do we fear Jesus? Do we love Him?
Or do we fear man and love ourselves instead?
How we assess risk tells a watching world much about the core of what we actually believe, who we actually fear, and who we actually love.
Wilson closes by exploring some reasons for the plague of effeminate silence infecting so many males in Americanized Christianity (and its sister dead religions around the world):
“Are there reasons for such silence? There are always reasons for such silence. The one thing we can say about such reasons is that they at least are plainly heterosexual, because they multiply like crazy.
Let me speak in the person of those who will be enticed to offer such reasons.
I don’t want to be associated with nutcases . . .
The people we are up against are not slow with assigning epithets. Racist, bigot, misogynist, chauvinist, sexist, extremist, and more, and because there are genuine exemplars out there who do in fact answer to all those epithets, we in our sweet reasonableness want to make sure to telegraph to the bad guys our deathly fear of being lumped in with those right wing wastrels. “Please, sir! Whatever you do, don’t lump us in with the alt-right!” To which they reply (and this honestly comes as a big surprise to our Captains of Strategy), “Ha, ha! Look at these new alt-righters!”
I don’t want to be associated with those who have been successfully slandered as extremist . . .
There are others out there who are not extremists at all, and we know (down in the recesses of our hearts we know) that they are nothing of the kind. We know that they are innocent of the charge. They only have the reputation of extremism because they are merely living in faithful accordance with what was taught in every evangelical Sunday School in the country just three decades ago. The country has moved triumphantly toward the Abyss, and these troublers of Israel have refused to move with the times. “But if people as innocent as that can have their reputations ruined, then I too could have my reputation ruined if it ever came about that I—heaven forfend!—were to be seen on the same platform with any one of those faithful persons.”
Before it would be possible to share a platform with that Antipas character, he would have to demonstrate a little more flexibility.
Someday, when all this is over, and we are telling our war stories (around the oil stoves at our Free Speech Reeducation Sensitivity Camp), I might tell you the stories about how many people had been pressured by Big Eva (or in consideration of likely pressure from same) to drop their associations with us. It is quite a tacky business. Speakers for our conferences canceling because of pressure, speakers canceling on a conference because I was going to be there, someone backing out of writing a foreword, someone pressured into apologizing for quoting me, and the like. Couple this with the stories we have heard from people who associate with us anyway, with their tales about how they got “the treatment.”
Let’s just say that we are at the point where some up and comer is likely to catch far more grief for agreeing to speak at our Grace Agenda than he would if he spoke at Revoice. It is not the case that Big Eva doesn’t discipline. Of course they discipline. Not whether but which. It is just that they instinctively discipline men who are moving in a biblical direction, and they instinctively shelter men who are moving in an egalihomo direction. This is because—as should be obvious by now—it is far more desirable to them to have men in the ministry who sexually yearn to be in the sack with other men than it is to have men in the ministry who use hurtful neologisms like egalihomo.
If I were to take a stand now it would vindicate those people out there who have been urging me to take this stand for the last ten years . . .
Imagine a fellow who has been a senior statesman in the evangelical movement. He has fought many battles, and has won more than a few of them. But like many a decorated general before him, he has thought too much about the battles of the last war, and didn’t think fittingly about the battles of the next war. But he was warned about all of this, he was warned for years about it. To take a stand now would be to acknowledge that he should have listened to all those warnings from the nickel seats.
I would like to take a stand, but I have to say that outside observers don’t know the first thing about all the internal politics involved . . .
Granted, we don’t know the details. But some of us have an approximate idea, having been through some situations of our own. You have the adversaries who somehow got in, you have the compromised friends, you have the clueless friends, you have the compromised trustees, and you have the clueless trustees. And let’s not forget the donors who have to be led to believe that you are fighting more courageously than anybody actually is.
I know they fight dirty . . .
And there are some aspects of the old private life that could be taken wrong if placed in an unflattering light. Imagine if Peter were afraid that if he stood up to Annas and Caiaphas, they might tell how he denied the Lord. But Peter told everybody instead.
I have a hard time believing that my beloved institution could go hard left within the space of a few years . . .
So look around. What would you call it then?
My wife has reminded me of our mortgage, our connections, and my reputation, in that order . . .
It is better not to say this one out loud because it sounds too much like what it is.
In short, whatever the reason, we have millions of Christian men who have become like the men of Babylon that Jeremiah once described.
“The warriors of Babylon have ceased fighting; they remain in their strongholds; their strength has failed; they have become women; her dwellings are on fire; her bars are broken” (Jeremiah 51:30, ESV).
It is all there. Ceased fighting. Holded up. Failed strength. Become like women. Dwellings on fire. Bars broken down.
. . . my point is not that our ostensible conservatives are fighting like a girl. The point is that our enemies are avowedly fighting like girls, with makeup and everything, and are doing so in a way that is kicking our butt.
In those memorable words of Burke, words that ring down through the centuries, “all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to be wusses.”
It’s time to stop coddling, emulating, promoting, and following the wusses. It’s time to stop holding them up as paragons of properly feminized spirituality and holiness…and then expressing “shock” at the painfully predictable results.
If we want to actually slay the god-hating giants that are pillaging our culture as opposed to cowering before them and bending over on command, it’s time to bring back a Christianity that has a pair.
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Stupid Elephant Tricks – The Other Progressive Party’s War on Christianity takes a painful but much needed look at how Christ-less “conservatism” has captivated Christians and co-opted them into helping march the culture ever deeper into darkness:
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And especially this one: Never forget that apart from God’s grace you and I are complete morons.
The most requested prayer in the book of Acts was for holy boldness. I am thankful that God never associates holy boldness with testosterone. This presentation is best understood by the explanation in Romans 7 where the spiritual conflict is described as the flesh lusting against the spirit, and the spirit lusts against the flesh. This article demonstrates the analytical approach where the flesh has triumphed over the spirit. God forbid!
This is, by far, one of your best articles. The feminization of the Church may explain the results of the Barna survey of evangelical pastors in 2014 that said 90% believed that the Bible addresses all areas of life, but only 10% of that 90% said they were preaching along those lines. It also explains why most pastors won't touch imprecatory prayer with a ten foot pole.
I’m curious, does anyone here attend a church that teaches about and conducts imprecatory prayers? Seems too many ignore this, unfortunately. Here’s one I pray at home for those in authority.
“Lord, we pray you would raise up bold men of your Word, whose only fear is You, who will teach, preach, and implement the full council of your Word for every area of life. Remove all the hirelings, we pray, and revive the Black Regiment, not just in the pulpits, but in all spheres, including lesser magistrates, who will resist tyranny wherever it appears. For those you have raised up, give wisdom, strength, courage, and protection from on high. Wherever they are sincerely in error, send wise counsel to redirect and establish them as the legitimate authority You have raised up.
For those who do not follow Your Law, who support the slaughter of the unborn, sexual and moral rebellion, dishonest scales, theft by majority vote, false religion, Occultism, Secular Humanism, Statism, undeclared, unconstitutional, endless warfare without a clearly defined objective for victory, and all manner of tyranny and corruption and whose private lives don’t match their public persona, convict them of sin, righteousness, and judgement. Bring them to repentance, but if they refuse to repent and their hearts are hardened, then remove them as You see fit from their positions of authority and raise up Your people in their place who will obey You, even to the point of completely removing and replacing the institutions with a more Biblical alternative.
We lift up to You those around the world suffering for Your Name in China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and all other Muslim and Communist territory and anywhere else that’s hostile to the Gospel, give them strength and courage to advance the Gospel in spite of the severe persecution. In Thy sovereign mercy Lord, we pray You would smite all vile, oppressive rulers who hate You and refuse to kiss the Son. Smite them unto repentance, or smite them unto removal as You see fit, and raise up Your Church in their place that the world would know without any doubt that You are King of all kings and Lord of all lords. We ask this for Your honor and glory, in Jesus’ Name, Amen!”