When Dennis Rainey wants men to watch his man up videos, he turns to the complementarian head of the household, the wife. It is true that unlike their rivals (egalitarians), complementarians practice headship and submission; they have merely reversed the biblical roles.
As none other than Dr. Russell D. Moore explains in After Patriarchy, What? Why Egalitarians Are Winning the Evangelical Gender Debate (emphasis mine):
…Gallagher shows specifically how this dynamic plays itself out in millions of homes, often by citing interviews that almost read like self-parodies. One 35-year-old home-schooling evangelical mother in Minnesota says of the Promise Keepers movement: “I had Mike go this year. I kind of sent him…. I said, ‘I’m not sending you to get fixed in any area. I just want you to be encouraged because there are other Christian men out there who are your age, who want to be good dads and good husbands.”7 This “complementarian” woman doesn’t seem to recognize that she is “sending” her husband off to be with those his own age, as though she were a mother “sending” her grade-school son off to summer youth camp. Not surprisingly, this evangelical woman says she doesn’t remember when—or whether—her pastor has ever preached on the subject of male headship.
They reverse the biblical roles on authority, but not on accountability. She leads by obstruction and manipulation, but he’s still held accountable for where they end up.
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“They reverse the biblical roles on authority, but not on accountability. She leads by obstruction and manipulation, but he’s still held accountable for where they end up.”
Responsibility with no authority. A recipe for failure. Hardly surprising that Evangs have above average divorce rates, if this is the “truth” they preach in their “Bible Believing Churches”:
http://www.alternet.org/culture/what-war-marriage-divorce-rates-are-highest-among-evangelicals
“Denomination (in order of decreasing divorce rate)
Non-denominational** 34%
Baptists 29%
Mainline Protestants 25%
Mormons 24%
Catholics 21%
Lutherans 21%”
It’s true that most Christian men passively or passive-aggressively go along with the counterfeit exegesis out of ignorance and deception; however, a material number know that their relationship with their wife is out of alignment with God’s model but go along anyway out of fear knowing she can simply go on line and initiate a $99.99 no-fault divorce wrecking his life (but not hers) for many many years.
Way way way off topic, but –
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/05/15/feminist-icon-gloria-steinem-says-lack-of-abortions-caused-climate-change/
We are truly on the precipice.
Christian women still want the rollercoaster ride, they want the thrill of real danger, but only with the safety net of having any accountability for that thrill, and consequence incurred for the danger to be absorbed by the men they marry and control. That’s the frustration these women experience now, they want to build better Betas (via the Biblical Manhood “retreats”), they want a dangerous guy to come back home from the weekend, but they can’t shake the fact that she is still his ultimate authority. She has a man who just doesn’t ‘Get It’, so she has to tell him how to be dominant by ‘allowing’ him to go off to the mens’ weekend (to become a man according to Rainey), but in the act of so doing she negates any genuineness of his transformation. Thus, he comes back and it’s even more frustrating because he begs permission to be dominant in his marriage and supply the dangerous thrills, but she still sees him as the pathetic Beta who now pretends at being dominant.
“they want to build better Betas”
Complementarianism is just a bandage on the deep wound that feminism has caused. Dig down in any complementarian writings and you usually find a conservative feminist, eager to insist “Me no feminist! No!” because of opposition to abortion and lesbian weddings – although the latter is fading for various reasons. Millennials tend to be more opposed to abortion and more accepting of homosexuality for example.
The hilarious irony is that complementarians take a lot of attacks from more radical feminists accusing them of teh Patriarchy. This does enable comps to preen as “defending the family”, though, and sometimes complementarian men are the Only Real Men In The Room. Which they generally aren’t.
That pdf is pretty interesting reading, it has a few references mostly to recent lightweight popular books. Not only is it worth reading it is worth hanging onto a copy of in case of memory-hole.
DeNihilist, don’t fret over an aging 2nd stage feminist desperately scrabbling for a headline. Attention whores like Glorial gonna whore. Think of her delivering that screed from a bar stool with 3 or 4 empty Mimosa glasses at her elbow, that should clarify your vision.
Sad to say, I don’t think we’ve reached peak feminism yet. The precipice is still ahead of us.
Rollo sums the dilemma up very well, using some of the concepts from his site and this one.
I’ll tag onto this with one observation: listen to churchgoing middle aged men with The Glasses on. Get them to talk about family life. Most likely in time you’ll hear that their churchgoing wives who are reasonably polite and even deferential in public are a lot meaner in private. They are all ready to “build up their man” in front of witnesses, and just as ready to cut his legs off at home.
None of these “men’s studies” do anything about that, because of the “servant leader” model that is pushed, and apparently pushed pretty hard, in the materials and presentations.
It is difficult to lead by example when you don’t have any real authority.
This surprises some women, but shouldn’t.
Frank K, what’s your point? Could you clarify?
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Responsibility with no authority. A recipe for failure. Hardly surprising that Evangs have above average divorce rates, if this is the “truth” they preach in their “Bible Believing Churches”:
It’s okay, we know you have no isea what the Scriptures say judging by you replies in yesterday’s thread. You just can’t help yourself in being a bigot.
@Rollo Tomassi
Christian wives want husbands who “get it,” but the sad reality is, they do “get it” – it’s just not what their wives are thinking of.
They “get” that their wives can completely and thoroughly destroy their lives on a whim for reasons that are utterly arbitrary and capricious, and yet somehow the church, society, and culture will treat their wife as the victim and him as the evil misogynist. They “get it” that if she leaves, she will probably ostracize him from his entire social circle and everyone will assume he did something horrible to cause the marriage to break up. They “get” that an attempt to exert themselves and show leadership can just as likely result in accusations of emotional abuse as it might in a wife who finds him more attractive. They “get” that refusing to do exactly what their wives tell them to do is equated by the modern church with not loving her.
As long as no-fault divorce is the law of the land, Western wives have no right to expect their husband to “get it” when there is no margin for error and a sincere, but flawed effort to do so can cost him everything. It is no different than expecting an Army NCO to lead a platoon in combat when he knows that an unpopular, but strategically solid order might result in his soldiers fragging him.
Sorry, forgot to mention Frank K as the target of my last post.
Like it or not…. responsibility without authority IS fundamentally unjust.
It is forcing someone to do a job, but not giving him the tools to do it.
How would any of us like to be punished for something when we have no ability to influence it?
“You just can’t help yourself in being a bigot.”
You’re talking like woman or a snowflake.
Or are you saying that I’m wrong about the state of Evangelicalism?
It is forcing someone to do a job, but not giving him the tools to do it.
AKA “figureheadship”.
In the days of the Patriarchy, women were forced to do manual labor. Even up to the 1800s, this was a widespread condition. Starting in the 1940s, Texas rural homes begged Lyndon Johnson to link up their pads to extended power grids.
By the 1970s, with the pill and the ever-growing metropolises, more and more women worked in the offices. By this time Patriarchy was dead and women moved into the vacuum.
It is in woman’s nature to whittle away at any bare-barked tree with “men’s space” chiseled in it. To a pick-up artist, it’s a s**t test. To a presidential candidate, it’s *sob* seeing a woman rise to the highest position in the land in my lifetime. They always have a cause — always involving themselves. (Notice any men on Bridal magazines? No? What a surprise!).
The selfishness of women would be staggering if it weren’t so transparently obvious. They only give to get, and get all they can wrap their hands around, currently consisting of a toy-doll church in their grubby hands.
The first centuries of Christianity applied a variety of soft techniques to bolster patriarchy.
They were able to rely on the surrounding environment to draw away men to the military, to execution, to the gallows, to be made eunuchs, to die in war … and in addition to this they popularized monastaries and drew many, many more men from the pool of eligibles. Furthermore – prohibitions on inter-marriage effected keeping this effect concentrated inside the sectarian pools who practiced it. The strength given to these sects by patriarchy in turn selected for their success. On top of it all – monastics served many purposes in creating spiritually centered communities through their song, prayer, presence, motion, acts, art, architecture, etc. All of this served to increase the social capital of Christian communities, making them more appealing to people. Monastics weren’t locked away … they were visible – visible praying, singing, building, … but visible – however: mysterious and unavailable.
Fewer available men also meant more value placed on masculine virtues, which meant men worked harder to embody those virtues, and it meant women could not compete on a level field with men, at being men.
Protestant Christians should really reconsider their rejection of monasticism. Monasticism is a commitment to spirituality. It is a belief that the spiritual world – is a real world. So odd that Protestants have such a hard time coming to terms with that. Meanwhile – with so many of the earlier externalities (war, gallows, etc) now working to reduce the number of eligible men, it would take quite a large monastic movement to dent this. The other nail-in-the-coffin that undermines the positive effect of monasticism on patriarchy is inter-marriage. If the ladies can go outside the fold, it doesn’t help much to drive up the value of men inside it – you end up paying for another sect’s lunch.
Another thing though: when successful – the kind of patriarchy this created was somewhere inbetween the hard patriarchy of Islamic lands and the matriarchy we’re making here, and all other things being equal, that middle-ground patriarchy seemed to be a more optimal balance for everyone. Seems it even made women happiest. Think about it: if you had a peaceful, culturally and socially strong patriarchal community – then the women who could choose, would they choose matriarchy, hard patriarchy, or that?
Consider all of that while reading Russell Moore’s paper.
May 15, 2017 at 1:55 pm, Rollo Tomassi mentioned in passing:
I have to comment here, that one of the early critical events in my red-pill-ification, long ago, was seeing a news report on EyeWitless News (or whatever it was), likely in the very late 1990s, where they had a report on “The Men’s Movement” that showed a clip of a football stadium full of men at a Promise Keepers’ event, a — shall we say — collective of them, all weeping and wailing. And then they cut to a “feminist critic” who said to the camera, more or less, that this was the sort of Toxic Patriarchal Rugged Individualism that was so destructive of society, blah, blah, blah. (And, no, she wasn’t being sarcastic or ironic.)
And the room kind of spun around for a few minutes while I tried to reconcile the collective nature of the effeminate emoting I saw, with her use of the word “individualism”, and all the weeping and wailing, with her use of the word “rugged”. And so on.
And of course, the News Anchor just took her criticism as given. No rejoinder. No hard questions.
And then a light-bulb went on over my head, and I realized that Promise Keeper’s was totally fake, and she needed it to be totally fake, and that she was full of bullsh!t, and the news station was letting her spread it far and wide, so that it was in the bullsh!t business, too.
I asked myself: what sort of society has to have a fake men’s movement? And so on.
It took me a lot longer to fit that incident into the broader context of everything discussed in blogs like this one, but it was a start. I sometimes wish I had that clip as an mpeg. It opened my eyes; it might help a few other men open theirs, too.
And, I am quite absolutely sure that no man participating in that Promise Keepers’ event “came back home from the weekend dangerous”, as Rollo puts it.
Pax Christi Vobiscum
It is forcing someone to do a job, but not giving him the tools to do it.
How would any of us like to be punished for something when we have no ability to influence it?
Describes my day job (and my former marriage) to a T. I refuse to believe that I’m a unique example, either.
Response – ability
The ability to respond, which absolutely must have authority attached to it.
It’s a woman’s world. Men have no authority. We might think we do, but we don’t. We can’t do our job, because we don’t have the authority. Not in today’s world. Sorry, Rollo.
Yac-Yac says
red-pillification
Gotta love it!
@Yac-Yac,
As an alum of the Promise Keepers rally at the Coliseum in LA in 1995 (“Raise the Standard”), I saw much the same thing from the ground. At the time I chalked up the breathless news coverage to the fact that any time men gather together without women, they will perceive it as a threat. There was certainly no threat to women on stage – only instruction to keep our wedding vows and (yes, I saw it at the time, too) submit to our wives. That was one and done for me.
The music was pretty good, though. Twenty thousand men singing can stir the heart.
Perhaps a bit off topic, but I saw Rollo’s comment about Evangelical MMA on the previous post and it got me thinking. I lived in Colorado Springs for a while, home of the mega church that puts on that “Thorn” Easter pageant every year. It’s like Cirque du Soleil with Jesus in it for about ten minutes. Great production values but bad Biblical interpretation.
As part of that program, at the time they had a subset of the cast for the “angels and demons” performances. There’s a big battle scene that happens between Lucifer and Michael while Jesus is in the garden. I worked with a guy who was on that cast, and from the way he talked about it, it sounded like a cult within the church. Cast members had special restrictions on them, had to pledge to keep themselves “pure”, would often convince themselves they were possessed and needed exorcisms, and so on.
My sergeant was a big MMA guy, as was most of the Angels and Demons cast. He also used to tell our airmen that we were knights of Christ and things like that, fighting a holy war against the forces of evil in the world. Curiously this never involved any actual condemnation of Islam, or something that would have made sense.
At the time, I just thought it was a rather cynical way of engaging that segment of the congregation. Now I’m wondering if this doesn’t feed back into that idea of LARPing masculinity, another way of channeling male impulses into a form acceptable to that church.
(My sergeant later got in trouble for sleeping with an underage girl at the church. I have to wonder what his marriage with his wife was like, as she was just as zealous and overbearing as the woman described here)
@Stroller,
“Protestant Christians should really reconsider their rejection of monasticism. Monasticism is a commitment to spirituality.”
Monasticism was a way to handle unwanted men. Ancient society was very stupid in not valuing such a precious resource and the material success of monasteries was proof of that. Prots didn’t do monasteries because we valued our men from the start. None of that “get married, get ordained or get killed” insanity.
Now that society is producing massive numbers of unwanted men once again, I’m totally in favor of a Prot monasticism… but not for any supposedly holy, spiritual, feel-good experience. I want my brothers to have a home where they’re welcome, straight up and that simple.
“Think about it: if you had a peaceful, culturally and socially strong patriarchal community – then the women who could choose, would they choose matriarchy, hard patriarchy, or that?”
Matriarchy. Genesis 3. You haven’t yet accepted that feminism is a flaw of the human soul, not a failure of government policy.
Go to blue pill convention as Walter White. Return as Heisenberg. Ha!
Young, single, travel & career obsessed women need to step up. Here is a single, mid-30’s Christian woman who encourages other Christian women to focus on travel and to be way too picky. She wasted years dating a guy that would not commit to her. Was he a bad boy? Was she a plate he was spinning? Was she over estimating her SMV compared to his? Was she too busy to settle down, just yet?
Unfortunately she gets invited to speak at churches.
http://thesinglewoman.net/
http://www1.cbn.com/700club/mandy-hale-finding-satisfaction-single-woman
Bee:
Re Mandy Hale, “the Single Woman”:
From this link:
http://www1.cbn.com/content/mandy-hale-finding-satisfaction-%E2%80%9C-single-woman%E2%80%9D
Mandy Hale is affectionately known as The Single Woman, who “Tweets dating advice to over 500,000 Twitter followers from around the world.”
The Single Woman
Tweets dating advice
Wait a minute….
Also from the link: Mandy’s stellar advice.
“The best way to attract a quality person is to BECOME a quality person.”
Yeah. About that, Mandy….
If you are single, and haven’t been married and have no children, and you apparently aren’t attracting quality people (because if you were you’d no longer be The Single Woman), what does this tell us about you?
And yet a third thing:
Mandy Hale says she was in a seven year relationship with a man who “broke her heart”. After that she didn’t date for two years. She claims to be a Christian.
Are we really to believe she was in a celibate unmarried relationship with one man for seven years?
@thedeti,
Wow, she has more Twitter followers than Dennis Rainey and Matt Chandler combined!
Mandy Hale sounds like the female counterpart to Joshua Harris – someone who wants to impose their own ineptitude and shortcomings on others and reap profits from doing so.
On an unrelated note, Dalrock, you should dedicate a post to this travesty: http://people.com/sports/abby-wambach-married/
“Mandy Hale says she was in a seven year relationship with a man who “broke her heart”.”
Young women, if a guy won’t propose marriage after one year, break it off cleanly and start looking for someone else.
Go to blue pill convention as Walter White. Return as Heisenberg. Ha!
Say my name……..SAY MY NAME!
Mandy Hale is affectionately known as The Single Woman,
…and will soon be unironically known as The Cat Woman.
I’m beginning to think what St. Paul had to say about marriage today is as useful as what St. Paul had to say about slavery.
A musician friend told me the easiest way to make money as a musician was to form a Christian band. The expectations are low, and the money is good (and steady).
I suspect this woman has done the same thing. Turned her singleness into a Christian career. And because the church has endorsed her by having her in to speak, people feel obligated to buy her book and provide a love donation.
I hate being a cynic, but I have to wonder what percentage of the book sales and love donation get kicked back to the church.
“I hate being a cynic, but I have to wonder what percentage of the book sales and love donation get kicked back to the church.”
It always put me in mind of a money changers in the temple scenario.
I understand asking for donations. I understand the churches wanting a certain amount for use of their facilities. When these outside speakers culminate with direct selling to the congregation, it looks like the church is really selling access to their pool of sales prospects. I’ve been out of church for a long time. Is this practice still common in evangelical circles?
Ive given up. Never wil marry. They have become Jezebels with the encouragement of the church.
The King is dead. Long live the queen.
Re Mandy Hale, “the Single Woman”:
These women wind up telling you everything without seeming to know they’re doing it.
“Maybe I haven’t met my Prince Charming,” she says. “But I have met dozens of toads that have taught me how to rescue myself…”
One of the subheadings on her blog is “A Dash of Sass”.
One of the subheadings on her blog is “A Dash of Sass”.
They don’t even try to hide it. But why should they? The whole “strong, independent woman” trope is pushed everywhere. Including in too many churches.
I found this Mother’s Day Tweet from Mandy Hale: celebrate yourselves every day for the heroes that you are, single moms
So, Mandy Hale celebrates single moms as heroes.
One of the subheadings on her blog is “A Dash of Sass”.
Because there’s nothing more attractive than a sarcastic, back-talking, pushy broad.
…. who is also a single mom..
Regarding the Abby Wambach link, what Melton, the “Christian Mommy Blogger” lesbian, says on her blog is most telling: “I know my Jesus, I love Him, and I think if he needed me to believe that homosexuality was a sin, He would have mentioned it.”
So, now it’s “my Jesus.”
I see this a lot. Many people see Jesus, and God, as personal extensions of themselves and their choices. “I don’t believe in your Jesus. Your Jesus is a bigot. But my Jesus says that gay marriage is beautiful.”
I hate being a cynic, but I have to wonder what percentage of the book sales and love donation get kicked back to the church.
I’ve been following the publishing industry since the 1970s, when as a kid I read the New York Times Sunday Book Review. My father always let me take that section of his paper.
Mandy says she’s a “bestselling” author, but that term has lost all meaning. Ever notice that today every author is described as a “bestselling” author? Nobody calls them on it. Nobody verifies.
In the 1970s, “bestselling author” meant your books sold at least 50,000 hardback copies, or 250,000 paperbacks. Or that you made the Bestseller List of either The New York Times or Publisher’s Weekly.
That was it. If you didn’t meet any of those qualifications, you weren’t a bestselling author.
Over time, Time, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times issued their own Bestseller Lists, but they were regarded as lesser lists. If you made those lists, you had to qualify, “Los Angeles Times bestselling author.”
Then came Amazon, then all its subcategories.
Today it’s easy to claim bestseller status, because it’s easy to score decently on some Amazon subcategory or other. You needn’t sell many copies to make those lists.
In the early aughts, I had a self-published book on Amazon’s main bestseller list. It was ranked in the 40s, for a few hours. It only sold a few dozen copies within those hours, but because of the sudden sales within a small time frame, the book spiked into a few hours of glory.
I’ve one Kindle book that has been high ranked on a subcategory for years now — and it only sells two or three copies a month.
So when Mandy says she’s a “bestselling author,” I wonder what that means. Ever see an author who’s not described as “bestselling” on their promo material?
Iowa Slim @ May 16, 2017 at 12:36 pm:
“When these outside speakers culminate with direct selling to the congregation, it looks like the church is really selling access to their pool of sales prospects. I’ve been out of church for a long time. Is this practice still common in evangelical circles?”
It’s part of the megachurch phenomenon. Not fraud because many people attend a megachurch specifically to be in the megapastor’s presence anyway (hello, John MacArthur). Also, I’ve known smaller pastors who buy into the stuff out of pure laziness… I’m taking about pastors who’ll put a taped sermon on for their Bible study like parents keeping the kids quiet with a Disney movie.
I wish the California Church was unique in its no-brain, cargo cult consumer approach to Christianity but it doesn’t seem so from other reports.
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