Sallie‘s Rebuilding America
Commentary On Faith, Truth, News & Culture
Post may contain affiliate links. Read my disclosure statement.
Why I Walked – Sometimes loving a denomination requires you to fight by J. I. Packer is a look at his decision to walk out of the 2002 Synod of the Anglican Diocese of New Westminster over the issue of “blessing same-sex unions.”
The link will take you to a an article where you can download the PDF and read it. It’s a good refresher of why this is wrong.
If you aren’t familiar with Packer, here’s a brief overview of his life.
Post may contain affiliate links. Read my disclosure statement.
I saw this conversation on Twitter and I had to screenshot it to share here. I know many of my readers aren’t on Twitter and I want you to see it. I also didn’t want it to disappear. (I’ll put the actual Twitter link in the first comment.)
So here’s what was written and I’ll write my thoughts after the screenshots.
I have a lot of thoughts about this I’m still trying to sort out but let’s look at a few off the top of my head.
(To make it clear, I’m not talking about the abusive, arrogant hyper-patriarchy types, but the Christians who sincerely believe that the Bible teaches patriarchy as normal. I’m also not out to defend or refute the finer points of that view in this post. I’m making big picture observations.)
These men who enthusiastically push biblical patriarchy have a few blind spots.
One, they fail to understand what happened before regarding these topics which I’ve already mentioned in a recent post. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it and I can already see it playing out. See this post and the comment thread. I added quite a bit this morning in the comments by way of follow-up.
Two, they view their sisters in Christ as their adversaries. They don’t fully realize it, but they do. They would say they don’t, but they do. They don’t realize how their dislike of feminists and the damage they have done to our culture seeps over a bit into how they view women even within the body of Christ. Also see my post about adversarial marriage counseling for an example.
Three, they fail to realize that it isn’t as simple as telling women to be content and happy while they stay home and raise a family because the Bible says this is what you should do. To make a major cultural shift like this requires a significant work of the Holy Spirit.
But it also requires a scaffolding of sorts to help women make this change. It’s an entire paradigm shift. Younger women are not getting the support they need to make this shift on top of all of the other once-in-a-millennium upheaval going on in our culture at the same time. What younger women are being force to grapple with as mothers and wives is truly overwhelming. To sort it out in the context of being a Christian adds even more to the situation.
The burnout and overwhelm are REAL. It’s not being addressed and it is a real problem. No wonder these women flock to the sick “Christian women” who tell them they can blow up their lives and have it so much better. No more need to make life-defining decisions for you and your children on a weekly basis. Look at all of the major “Christian” women “influencers” who live completely shipwrecked lives but are out there confidently telling Christian women how to live. Women will look for understanding from other women. If there aren’t biblical examples out there, they will find the flashy trainwrecks who will give them answers in order to make the pain go away.
It’s not as simple as telling women they need to sit in the pew next to their husband and listen to expository sermons in order to fix everything in their lives. Women are much more complex than that and it’s insulting to think that women can simply be reprogrammed to be successful Christian wives and mothers simply because someone tells them this is what the Bible says and therefore if you would just do it all of your struggles would go away. Even women with their hearts totally committed to Christ and following Scripture are going to struggle and it’s cruel to expect otherwise.
These men speak often about the fact that the Bible says the older women are to teach the younger women (but only if it is a very limited list of approved topics and a man is overseeing it). At the same time, the men are suspect of almost all the women they don’t directly control. In the end, I honestly think they don’t trust women. It’s not simply that they believe the Bible forbids certain things. They really don’t trust women. So they don’t trust the older women to help the younger women. And so the destructive cycle continues.
For all of you old-timers out there, doesn’t this sound so terribly familiar?
Post may contain affiliate links. Read my disclosure statement.
This sums up this destructive evil. People will destroy everything they touch in order to live with themselves and their decisions.
Post may contain affiliate links. Read my disclosure statement.
In case you missed this one going viral, here we have a hint of the First Turning in the air that includes the return to strong male and female roles.
This liberal woman wants to be her Best Liberal Woman Self, but wants a traditional manly man who does traditional manly things. But he can’t be a conservative. And he has to allow her to still be her Best Liberal Woman Self. While doing all the conservative and traditional manly man things for her. Without expecting her to do any of the conservative and traditional womanly things for him.
If someone can find a way to break the white liberal woman matrix, our country could advance in leaps and bounds rather quickly.
Post may contain affiliate links. Read my disclosure statement.
This was originally posted on Gab at the link I’ll share at the end. It is no longer there, but I kept a copy I will save here.
August 24, 2021 6:55 pm
The dominant belief in the Western world is that men and women are interchangable. That women are the equals of men. This belief is the result of decades of Feminist indoctrination through schools and the Media.
Feminism was forced onto Western culture by politicians. The same politicians who forced onto the world a fraudulent pandemic. The same politicians who stole the presidential election from Donald Trump and the American people.
It was those same politicians that forced the Armed Forces, and police and fire departments, to hire females in the place of males. Standards were lowered to accommodate the females. Lowering the effectiveness of these groups, putting the lives of men and the people they serve at greater risk.
To believe that men and women are interchangable you have to reject:
Thousands of years of history.
Tradition.
Literature.
Sociology.
Psychology.
Physiology.
Genetics.
Biology.
Common sense.
The laws of Nature
and the laws of God.
Once a culture can be conditioned to reject those realities, it will accept anything. No matter how absurd, illogical or unreasonable.
The goal of feminism was to destroy Western marriage, family and community. The foundations of the Western world. Any culture, having lost its cultural foundations, will inevitably collapse. Once that happens, all manner of evil will have it’s way. This is what we see happening in the entire Western world today. Without it’s cultural foundation of marriage, family and community, the Western world will perish.
The Western world is in a war for it’s very existence. Without the Western world, the world in it’s entirety will fall into a horror not yet seen in human history. The scariest part is, that most Americans are willfully oblivious to this fact.
May God have mercy on our unworthy souls.
Post may contain affiliate links. Read my disclosure statement.
This short article is one of the most accurate summaries I’ve ever read about what the author termed The Arrogant Patriarch. I encourage you to read it, bookmark it, and maybe even keep a copy of it for future reference in case it disappears.
This kind of thinking is on the rise again. I mentioned recently in Are We Heading Toward Vision Forum 2.0 and Patriocentricity Again? that I can see the same thing happening that we observed around us in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While it is not an exact match, it is eerily similar.
Here is how the author defines the arrogant patriarch:
Do these sound familiar? I would guess for many of us they do. If they don’t sound familiar, now you at least know what you are seeing if/when it makes its way into your circle of influence.
Read the full article: The Arrogant Patriarch
Post may contain affiliate links. Read my disclosure statement.
I’ve been watching this situation develop over the past 6-12 months, but was waiting for the right time and the right example to write a post like this. Yesterday this video popped up in my YouTube feed and I knew this was the right one. It’s short and it so clearly illustrates what is showing up all over YouTube, social media, websites, etc.
There are a lot of facets to what I’ve been observing and this video only gets at one of them. It will take me a few posts to tackle the different issues so know that this is just a first post in what will need to be a few. I mentioned in some recent podcasts and posts that I could see this problem coming and I have an obligation to speak up because it is shaping up to be a trainwreck just like Vision Forum and the patriocentricity movement of the early 2000s. Lots of younger people today weren’t around to see it. They might not even know about it. I was. I saw how many families and lives it destroyed. That’s not hyperbole. It was a disaster on an epic scale.
I took down a lot of the posts I had written about these kinds of topics when I moved my other website in a different direction. But I’ve started pulling them out of my unpublished archives and putting them on this website under a Christian Issues – Controversies category. I specifically put three older posts about Vision Forum back up, but there are many more still unpublished that I need to find again. We need to keep a public record of the history of these issues because those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Most of the people who tackled these issues have either deleted their websites or removed the content when they moved in another direction. I can still find them in the WayBack Machine, but that’s only because I know which websites to look for or I have old bookmarks still saved. Most of it has been lost which is tragic.
There is a movement of younger and young-ish middle-aged men and pastors who were not around for the disaster that overtook conservative homeschooling circles and the family-integrated church movement. But they are displaying the same attitudes, mouthing the same ideas, and showing the same posture today. It actually makes my stomach hurt to listen to them at times because I do not wish to watch Vision Forum 2.0 play out again. I know there is nothing new under the sun, but I will not hesitate to speak out this time and call it out. I was cautious the first time which you can tell in my posts from 2006 and so on. I’m not hesitating this time.
The problem with Vision Forum, in particular, is that they got quite a bit right and addressed with firmness issues no one else in the church was really discussing with any kind of clarity and conviction. This drew people in for the good that they offered. They were a couple of decades ahead of their time in some of the errors they pointed out. They were all over the Marxism-Feminism connection, for example, which most Christians did not understand at the time. But there was just enough wrong with their teachings that when it was combined with the unhealthy tendencies of some in their leadership it created a total and complete disaster that shipwrecked many families.
Some of the leaders in those circles at that time did learn from the experience and are more careful now. I would put Doug Wilson in that group. He said some questionable things, but his ministry never imploded like others did. There were no moral failings that tanked his life’s work. His ministry is now vibrant and flourishing as best as I can tell.
Here’s a short video clip by Joel Webbon at Right Response Ministries. In sharing this, I’m not saying that he is Doug Phillips 2.0. Not at all. I want to make that very clear. And I’m not trying to make him the face of the problem. His video was simply the first video that encapsulated what I have been observing and so it’s what motivated me to finally write this post. But listen to this clip and tell me if this does not sound disturbingly familiar to what was preached and pushed leading up to those dark days.
For the record, I do agree with some of what he says. I agree that Beth Moore and Jen Wilkin should be avoided. I do agree that women’s Bible studies create many problems in many churches. But he goes too far in terms of what he says about men leading their wives, in my opinion.
Look at the comments underneath the YouTube video as well. This kind of teaching is severe and confusing. It will breed all kinds of problem. Overbearing men will take this as permission to crush their wives even further. This is not conjecture on my part. We know it happens because we’ve seen this play out already.
(And, no, I did not go to him privately about my concerns because this is a public video which he put out there himself as part of his video ministry. I’m going to cut that tired objection out of the conversation before anyone even makes it. If a pastor or teacher publishes their own content in a public forum, it is open to public critique. Period.)
I’ll make some other observations in my own comment section below. What stands out to you, especially if you lived through the entire Patriocentricity, Vision Forum, etc. debacle that destroyed homes and churches?
