My name is Will Spencer, and you're listening to the renaissance of Men podcast.

My guest this week is the author of the Boniface Option.

Please welcome Andrew Whisker.

You are the Renaissance.

During that time, from the other side of the equator and then the other side of the Pacific Ocean, I got to watch America go through all the convulsions of the Trump presidency from a distance.

Now, by that time, I already understood who Trump was and who he wasnt.

He might not have had the best taste in associates and probably had a little issue with his ego, but he certainly wasnt literally Hitler, nor was he even all that orange.

But I did know that he and the millions of Americans who supported him had a sense that the country that they loved and treasured was either being eaten away or was already gone.

And that for all of Trump's obvious flaws, he was courageous enough to lead people to do something about it to the unending scorn of the media.

Hence the term the deplorables.

So I got to watch this process unfold in my home country while traveling through other nations like Peru, Colombia, New Zealand, Mongolia, China, India, and many others.

And while watching this, I noticed something strange.

It seemed that in many of the countries that I visited, their own cultures were being eaten away as well.

The town was inundated with piles of plastic trash just everywhere.

The trash hadnt been imported from America and dumped there either.

This was their plastic trash because the wrappers and packaging had spanish words on them.

Roadside stands, basically just wooden shacks, had latin versions of the same kind of bright colored candy wrappers youd find at a local circle k or 711.

I was literally hours outside of any major city on a local bus in the middle of nowhere.

And yet it seemed that modernity had arrived long before I did.

This same pattern seemed to repeat itself wherever I went.

Japan is flooded with american chain restaurants and their own china has fewer chains, but certainly its own massive consumerism in the major cities.

Get on Google Maps right now and look up the Altai mountain range in Mongolia.

Thats Altai.

It is literally in the center of the asian continent.

You cannot get more into the middle of nowhere than that.

And I saw similar consumerism, though on a much smaller scale in that region as well.

And as anyone who's visited Thailand or Bali can tell you, parsing out authentic thai or balinese culture from the intensely consumerist materialist conditions can be difficult, if not impossible.

So I wondered, what's going on?

Something nameless and faceless was eating these nations from the inside out like a rot.

It presents itself as novel, convenient, comfortable, and even friendly, but it's actually insatiable.

Most in the world look at these trends and apply them to America.

They call them westernization, or sometimes american cultural imperialism.

But I was from America, and what I was watching in my home country had nothing to do with all of that.

In fact, Trump and MAGA were the antithesis of that phenomenon.

And the word that they used to describe it was globalism.

So as Trump and MAGA were pushing back against globalism, I was actually traveling around the globe and could see the same phenomenon they hated firsthand in my face, in places where it shouldn't be.

That's when I realized that these trends have nothing to do with America or the west.

They are not our traditions.

They only appear that way because whatever is eating the world ate America first.

Which brings me to my guest this week.

His name is Andrew Isker, and he's the pastor of the fourth Street Evangelical Church in Waseca, Minnesota, the co author, with Andrew Torba, of Christian Nationalism, a biblical guide for taking dominion and discipling nations.

And finally, he's the author of the outstanding book the Boniface Option.

More than any other christian author I've read, Andrew has identified the phenomenon I saw with my own eyes.

Andrew calls it trash world.

And while he didnt coin the term, if you ask me, hes the one who made it stick.

In the preface of the Boniface option, Andrew writes, quote, we are already in the midst of decades of social engineering.

The society we have is already an anti human one.

It is already designed to remove from you all that made life meaningful and fulfilling.

It has torn you from people and place.

It is designed to make you isolated, lonely, and above all else, totally docile.

Throughout the pages of this book, I use the term trash world to describe this dystopian society.

End quote.

Now, not everyone is a big fan of Andrew Isker, but I have to tell you, he's right.

We've been living in american trash world for years.

Because affluence is seductive.

And once you see that for yourself, as I have the productive, formerly self sustaining local cultures of the world being literally devoured by plastic, high fructose corn syrup, and consumerism, there's only one possible response.

It's a word that christians don't like very much.

It makes them feel uncomfortable because it involves them getting down into their bodies and feeling themselves as material beings on a physical planet with all kinds of icky attachments to things and people that it's far easier to spiritualize than take responsibility for.

But the word is hate, which Merriam Webster defines as to express or feel extreme enmity or active hostility.

And yes to that.

But here's iskur again.

To love a thing is to inherently hate its opposite.

Indifference is the absence of love, not hatred.

Where love is present, you will axiomatically have hatred of the object of that love's opposite.

If the Christian has a passionate love for the truth of God's word, the goodness of God's justice, and the beauty of holiness, he will necessarily have an intense hatred of the lies, injustice, and sin.

And that captures it.

Because as uncomfortable as it is to acknowledge there is something hate worthy out there, I came to Christ in part because I saw that evil was real, and I couldnt get anyone out there in the religions of the world to talk to me about it.

Christianity is the only world religion that does in any sort of credible way.

So if evil exists, can we not hate it?

If you've seen evil devouring the nations and souls of the world like I have, can I not hate that?

And if I see it devouring my country, my culture, and the souls of my countrymen as well, can I not then hate it?

How about if it almost devoured me?

Because it did, and God delivered me from that.

So this is personal.

And that's what Andrew Isker touches on, the feeling that this institutionalized, industrialized evil isn't just eating me, but you too, and your sons and daughters.

Heck, even our parents and grandparents.

Are we just going to sit idly by and play nice nice because a schoolmarm preaching hippie Jesus and his fortune cookie platitudes told us to?

Or are we going to be men and speak directly into this wickedness and rip it out?

Or really cut it down from the trunk on up and try for something better?

You're about to get a marathon four and a half hour ren of men classic podcast with the answer.

In our conversation, Andrew and I covered a ton of ground, including the origins of the boniface option, the third rail of evangelicalism.

What Paul's writing assumes church as the caboose of culture, the enemy of every christian parent, God's blessing of the barbell, the point of the entire Bible.

And finally, while you're not angry because you're fat, if you enjoy the renaissance of men podcast, thank you.

Please leave us a five star rating on Spotify, plus a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts and share this episode or another one of your favorites with a friend.

And if you're new to the show, welcome.

I release new episodes related to Christian Virtue, the culture wars, and the family every Friday.

And now for another marathon renaissance of men classic.

Four and a half hours with the co author of Christian Nationalism and the author of the Boniface option, please welcome Andrew Isker.

Andrew, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast.

The powers that be are trying to shut us down, but it's not going to happen.

That's right.

Yes.

Thank you for having me.

You're welcome.

So we just ran it for a minute and found that we got cut off midstream.

So we're going to pick up where we were.

But hey, we keep fighting on the.

So what I had said in the original stream was that how much I enjoyed your book, how much I was really looking forward to reading it.

It was actually a gift from my friend Matt Sider.

Thank you, Matt.

And he's like, you have to read this.

And I was looking forward to it.

I thought it was going to be good, but it massively exceeded my expectations because I'm reading it, I'm like, wow, this is really good.

This is really good.

And so I really enjoyed it.

So thank you for this.

Yes, thank you.

I'm glad you liked it.

Thank you.

So I wonder if you wouldn't mind talking about the inspiration of the book, where it came from, and sort of how it started maybe in seed form, and then grew into the work that it is.

Yeah.

So I read this book, his book, and that was at the time, there was a ton of discussion on that book.

A lot of people, a lot of people liked it.

A lot of people hated it.

And it kind of took over the majority of not just christian discourse, but a lot of discourse online on the right.

And reading it, there were things that I liked.

The thesis of the book is, okay, we're in this very anti christian world now.

It's in the wake of Obergefell and all of the rapid cultural change that took place in the years following that decision.

And it's like, okay, the response to it, we should retreat to intentional community, intentional christian community.

And reading that, I'm like, that's great, that's awesome.

But then what do we do, right?

There was no, okay, now we're in our community and we're safe and secure altogether.

Now what do we do?

Because, like, they're not going to allow that.

They're not going to allow you to have these little christian enclaves, these little christian ghettos or whatever.

They're going to.

They're going to come for you and destroy that.

And even if they don't, like, send in SWAT teams like Waco or something, they're coming for you in all sorts of different ways.

Like, you're still going to have Internet in those places.

Your children are still going to be exposed to all of the destructive cultural things that are carried via Internet, television and everything else.

And so in some ways, you can retreat physically to these places, but you still are not insulated from those things unless you became totally amish and completely cut yourselves out from society, which I don't think people are going to do.

And that really wasn't the argument in his book either.

And so I was left wanting.

I'm like, well, no, there's got to be more that we can do.

And I started thinking about the story of Saint Boniface.

I remember in college, many years ago, reading an issue of table talk magazine from Ligonier ministries, where they had a story about Saint Boniface in the 8th century and his mission to Germania across the Rhine, which at that time was all pagan.

And I was fascinated by it.

I mean, I am mostly german.

And so that had a, struck a chord with me, of course, along those lines.

And these are stories growing up, I'd never heard.

I'd never heard, yeah.

How did all of my people become Christian anyway?

No one ever told me.

And so here, St.

Boniface, who was this monk, and coincidentally was a benedictine monk from England, is commissioned to go be a missionary.

He goes across the Rhine and goes to the main shrine of Thor, and there's this massive oak tree that they believed if anybody touched it, they would be struck by a bolt of lightning from Thor and be killed.

And he tells them, I'm going to come back the same time tomorrow.

And not only am I going to touch this tree, but I will chop it down and comes back the next day, takes one swing of an axe and a wind, or at least according to the legend, a wind comes out of the heavens.

And knocks the tree over.

And all of the people who, tons of people had come from all the surrounding villages to go watch this guy get fried.

And they witnessed this, and they're all converted that day and are all baptized.

And from this tree, he had it milled and built the first church in Germany.

And from there, the conversion of the Germans began.

And I thought about that.

I just thought about what this guy would be like.

What would it be like to have someone go and say, here's your idol, here's this thing that you venerate and adore, and I'm going to destroy it.

Just the character of a man like that, the ethos of a man that would do that and thinking about what christian men are like, even in the most ideal form in our minds today.

And the contrast between those two is stark, right?

There's a major, major difference, especially the last 20 or 30 years.

The major ethos of evangelical Christianity is whatever you do, whatever you do, you must never offend anyone.

You have to be nice and winsome.

And that's how we, that's how we are going to evangelize and convert people, is they'll see how nice we are, they'll see what wonderful people we are, and they'll say, I want to be like that guy.

And in this post christian world that we now exist in, at least in America, that doesn't work anymore at all.

They, they are going to hate you no matter how nice you are, no matter how winsome you are.

And so the time clearly had come where, no, you need to be much bolder.

You need to be much more aggressive.

You need to have that same type of ethos of, I'm going to fight.

I'm going to say what's true and right and not care who it upsets, not care who it offends, because it's true and it's right.

And so thinking of those two things together, I'm like, okay, yes, there are tactical, strategic things we can do and sort of retreat to community and build up christian institutions that will be able to stand against the anti christian forces within the culture.

That stuff's important, of course, but if you don't have that ethos of we are going to fight for what's right, and we're, we don't care if you're angry at us, if you hate us, we are.

We're going to stand against you.

If you don't have both those things together, then it's going to fail.

Right?

Then it's going to fail.

And the benedict option is all defensive.

How do we retreat and survive?

How do we get through this?

And you need offense, too, right?

You need to be able to go and take background.

Um, and.

And so that's really where the book came out of.

And you continued thinking about these things for.

For several years, for, you know, four or five more years, then you go through the whole, you know, Trump era, and everything just got intensified even more.

And the, the people in power hate us.

They hate us the most.

And so we got to change our attitude.

We have to change the way we go about things.

And it starts internally.

It starts with rejecting a lot of the implicit ideas of just being nice and sweet and a little choir boy that no one will hate, to rejecting all of those things and saying, no, I'm gonna fight.

I'm going to stand up for what I believe in and do these things take up this kind of character, this much more, much more, dare I say it, masculine approach.

Oh, no.

Yeah, I know.

It's terrifying.

Anything but that.

Because you see, throughout christian history, you see men as men living as christians, and they live that way in a much different way than we do now.

We think being a good christian man is being a servant leader, and a heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy emphasis on servant.

Very little bit, tiny little bit of leading involved in that.

A tiny little bit of authority, if any.

Mostly just serving and being a doormat and never being disagreeable in any way.

And I'm like, no, that's got to stop.

If we're going to have any kind of christian culture, any kind of christian future for christian people, it has to be led by men who will stand up for their families, for their churches, for their people, and say, enough.

No more of this.

We are going to do what's right.

And you wrote the book in a particular way.

The metacommunication of the language and the imagery, it speaks to that.

Like, you didn't just write the book with this kind of perspective that you had just kind of articulated.

You wrote it in it using language like Bugman and world, right?

But that's the language of this energetic, masculine approach to culture.

But in most of the cases, it's divorced from Christ.

But it is a specific way of communicating about social problems.

How did you land on writing it that way?

Cause you could have written it lots of different ways.

Yeah, yeah.

I think some of it is, like many of us, you go through the cauldron of online, and you learn to communicate ideas in that rhetorical frame, which is very powerful.

Right.

You see this, and you see how these arguments are made online.

And I.

And so, yeah, it's a lot of, you know, a lot of Internet terminology, you know?

And it's funny because, like, I'll have older people that are not online at all, you know, read it, and they're like, yeah, I didn't get some of the terms, but they all made sense, right?

None of that, like, yeah, when you talk about a bug man, and even.

And now it's kind of even somewhat of a dated, you know, term, like, things move pretty fast on the Internet, but it makes sense, right?

The social problems that we have where men are demasculinized purposefully and made to be these consumers, that your only existence is just to watch Marvel movies and NFL football and play video games and.

And consume.

Just have fun.

I mean, all of these things are things like Doug Wilson talks about this, where all the freedoms that they say, these are our freedoms that we will die for, all of them are freedoms that you can have in a prison cell.

Right?

And so the language of the online.

Right, is like living in the pod.

It's the same thing where you look at these extremely bleak.

Like, there's that one guy who does, like, tiktoks or whatever, and it's like he lives in this tiny little apartment, and it's.

He goes to his job, and he has no human contact of any kind at all.

It's like life like that, right?

It's so depressing.

And there's.

There's.

It's like, this is.

This is all that life is, is I wake up, I go to my office job, I come home and, you know, watch.

Watch movies or football or porn.

I, whatever, order Uber eats, and then start the day all over again.

And that's just my life until I die, right?

That.

That's a horrible life.

And.

But people love it, right?

They think, this is great.

This is great.

I have freedom.

I could do whatever I want as long as it's available on Netflix, you know?

And it's.

So many choices.

Yeah, it's awful, actually.

Like, you are so constrained in this mode of life, and I.

And you see it in the social dynamics as well.

You're not allowed to be a man, you're not allowed to speak frankly.

You always have to walk on eggshells with every single thing you say, and you can't ever have any conflict directly with other people.

It's awful.

It's so terrible.

And that's not the way God made us to be and to live at all.

And you see this.

You see, especially young Mendez see this world, and they hate it.

They know that something is wrong, and they maybe can't quite put their finger on exactly what it is.

Especially because we're so divorced from history, we don't know how people historically lived in any sense.

You're born into the situation you're born into, and you just assume life has always been this way, and it always will be this way, and you don't have any other perspective to say, well, maybe it hasn't been that way before.

Maybe.

Maybe life was actually a lot better for a lot of people, right?

Even without all of the modern innovation that we have, even without antibiotics and dentists and air conditioning and everything else, like an iPhones, like, they actually had real life with real human community, where 100 years ago, you didn't have.

You didn't have people that are, like, designed to be antisocial and alone.

You actually have friends, lots of friends, people that you've known your entire life, many, many relatives that live around you, that we all believe the same things and love and hate the same things.

And instead, this world that we have, everyone is alone.

And you have all of these modern copes, you know, that.

Some of which we've mentioned that allow you that sort of desensitize you and anesthetize you to the conditions that you are in, and you take those away, and then life becomes really rough.

I can stay in my apartment forever, and I can just have food delivered to me.

I can watch as much streaming stuff as I want, and I can take up a couple new hobbies.

Won't that be fun?

And maybe I'll get, you know, I'll take the extended unemployment and not have to work for, like, nine months.

This will be great, right?

It's almost like an early retirement when you're, you know, 25 years old.

There are people that loved it.

And for me, I'm sitting there and I'm like, I'm going insane.

I'm going nuts.

And I would just get up and leave.

I would just go.

Go to empty parks and go meet friends illegally.

I couldn't do it.

I couldn't do it, man.

And it was a horrible life.

But you see these lockdowns.

People have been socially engineered to almost love that way of life where it doesn't affect them at all.

It's like, well, I never leave my apartment anyway, so this is great.

This is wonderful.

And so, yeah, I mean, you see these social problems, and, I mean, most people don't even see them as social problems.

They think this is just the way life is.

And it's good because look at all the stuff that we get to have and things we get to do, and it's like, no, it's actually really, really, really bad.

And so, yeah, that's that.

And so you have to use kind of shocking rhetorical devices and strategies to kind of shake people out of those things where it's like, actually, no, this life isn't very good.

You should not like it.

This is.

You weren't created to live this way.

You're created to be a man and to yearn for the unknown, to take risks, to do difficult, hard things and not seek comfort, always not seek the easy way.

And, yeah, I think a lot of people.

Yeah, a lot of people liked it.

I mean, I tried not to be, like, too funny in it, but some of it, because it's almost like morbid gallows humor in some ways, but you have to be somewhat shocking order to get people to, like, say, to see, like, no, look at the reality of things.

Things are way worse than you think they are.

And, like, even from the start of the book, you know, I kind of.

I kind of made fun of, you know, like, the boomer QAnon kind of thinking where it's like, oh, you know, Klaus Schwab is going to create this dystopia where we all have, you know, barcodes and we're living in pods and eating bugs and.

And there's going to be a one world government that, that dominates everything, and it's going to be so bad.

And it's like, just step back and think for a minute and compare the way we live now to the way people lived 100 years ago.

And you already have that dystopia.

You're already living in it.

All the World Economic Forum stuff and everything else, that's just theme, right?

Trying to advance what they already have.

Right?

It's not, they already have the dystopia that they.

That they want.

They've created it.

And you're living in it.

And so instead of, like, focusing your energies on this horrifying future that could be, you should actually learn to hate the world that you already have.

There's a powerful idea lurking in all of these.

It's called the Red Pill.

And I don't mean it in some sort of masculinity dialogue kind of way, which is kind of co opt.

And this idea that there's a moment of awakening where you look around and you see that you are in the dystopia.

And I think the language of the online right is really effective at painting a picture of where things already are as opposed to this conspiracy narrative about where they might go.

This is what already is.

And this sense of revulsion that comes up, the sickness.

Right.

Like, this is terrible.

And there's something particularly appealing about that, I think, to young men who, as you said, they feel that something's wrong.

They have the energy within themselves to truly despise it, but they can't articulate it.

And once you paint that picture, it's like, yes, I see that now everywhere, and I hate it, and I want to tear it down.

And I think that's really effective and very confronting to the american evangelical mind of the past 30 or so years, if not more.

Yeah.

Especially because you look at the last 20 or 30 years within evangelicalism, and a lot of it is they just assume that the dystopia that we currently live in is totally fine and okay, and.

And here's how we can kind of baptize it and make it, you know, give it some godly aspects.

Like you look at, like the gospel coalition, for instance.

I mean, it's really declined, and no one pays that much attention to it anymore.

But in its heyday, right, they were constantly writing these articles about the idolatry of the family and caring about singleness, right?

The gift of singleness.

And the subtext of that is you would have young women who, the way our culture has been engineered is for young women, which all of human history young women, they reach maturity, and now they go get married and have families.

There's a very short window that God has designed for them to bear children.

And what our culture has done is say, no, we don't want to do that.

We want them to go have careers and work, because look at all the lost productivity that we will have if these women go be moms and raise children.

And so they get diverted into the workforce, and then the cultural machine makes, you know, basically propagandizes them and indoctrinates them into this idea very subtly, that being a mom is bad, having children is bad.

That's a life or a death sentence to all the good things that you can do.

Look at all the travel you can do.

Look at all the brunch you can go have with your friends and post pictures of your avocado toast and mimosas on instagram.

And you won't get to do that if you have to take care of a crying baby all the time.

And so that's, that's buried into their, into the mindset.

And then they go, and they don't have children, they don't get married.

They think, well, I can, I can put that off.

I can go do that anytime.

And then they get to their mid to late thirties and, like, the biological clock has already mostly passed them by, and they're stuck.

They're stuck.

And it's really awful and tragic and, and you see, like, that dynamic.

And then the flip side of that is that if all of those young women are not getting married and finding husbands, that means there's an awful lot of men who are not finding spouses within that age cohort.

And so then you have the whole incel phenomenon, and it's just devastating to the entire society.

It's really bad.

And the whole evangelical world totally oblivious to it.

Or if they aren't oblivious to it, they want to attack what they'll do.

They'll attack the red pill men, they'll be like, oh, see, this is Andrew Tate, and this is guys like that that are pushing these ideas for making men hate women.

And it's like, well, no, I don't necessarily blame the women here either.

It's the people that govern our culture and rule it and decide, it's not like culture is organic.

It's not like we organically decided, yeah, we're going to pursue this course instead of what human beings have done for time immemorial.

No, people decided this.

They decided this.

And multiple parties are involved.

A lot of the discussion of the book, people are like, you talk about them and they, and who is that?

And I'm like, it's really this decentralized conspiracy, right?

So it's not, it's not like there's, it's not like George Soros is sitting up there, right, pulling the strings saying, all right, now we're going to send all the women into the workforce and trick them with mimosas, right?

No, it's multiple parties, all sorts of different nos to this thing.

It's not like there's one central guy where it's like, if we just get rid of this guy, then we'll be okay.

It's the entire managerial regime that has decided these things.

It's major corporations seeing, hey, you know what?

Yeah, that really will be bad, I guess, if the birth rates fall massively, but we'll just import people from all over the world to make up for it.

And so, but right now we can double our productivity if we bring all of these moms into the workforce.

And, yeah, instead of having four or five children like before, well, maybe have one or two.

And, yeah, we'll save on maternity leave and childcare and all these things because they just want to have kids and we'll make so much more money.

And when you're in your twenties and you make a good amount of money and you don't have a family, you have all this discretionary income to spend and so demand of all the products we sell will go up.

So, like, there's, there's clear, like, ego motive behind these things.

And so it isn't like any one guy that decided, we're going to do this.

A lot of people saw, hey, this is really good.

I mean, some of it you could go back to like World War Two and women entering the workforce there because all the men are off fighting and we need people to build tanks and bombs and everything else.

And so you see the rosie the riveter, you know, we could do it thing.

And, and the people with a lot of money saw that, too, and thought, hey, this isn't so bad.

We can make a lot of money this way.

And so it inserted this sort of very high time preference into a society that didn't otherwise have it, right.

You had american society, which was very low time preference, and people would save money, right.

They wouldn't want to just go out and buy stuff.

I mean, you see this kind of, with like, like the tv show Mad Men, right?

The subtext of that show is, right, this massive cultural change that's occurring during that era, and, and what are they doing on the show, right.

They're trying to promote high time preference in society, right?

That's the whole, wait, what's Don Draper doing the whole time?

It's like, how do I get people to buy more stuff?

Right?

That's, that's what they're trying to.

And so like that, you know, there's, there's, there's good and bad things.

Of course, about that show.

Of course, they, they try to glamorize it, but you look at it, it's like, no, they're the villain.

They're the bad guys the entire time.

And, and so, yeah, I mean, just that major cultural shift.

Like, there are economic motives to it.

There are culturally subversive motives to it.

People that wanted to remake american society in a particular image.

And so it's not like one guy or even one small group of people just up and decided, we're going to do this.

And so that's why it's like, oh, this is kind of conspiratorial language.

And it's like, well, I don't know, man.

Like, that's literally what happened.

Like, people wanted it to be this way.

I don't.

I don't think that's up for debate.

That's what happened.

That's what happened.

Yeah.

And so how do you overcome that is the big question.

I mean, there's basically two ways of thinking.

And I don't get into this too much in the book, because a lot of the book is for the general public.

Right.

It's for regular people.

And so for regular people, it's.

Right.

You see the way the culture is, and here's what you can personally do to protect your family, protect yourself, live in a much more human way, rather than a socially engineered, managerial society way.

That's a lot of the, the theme of the book, but I think on the larger meta political side of it is this society can't continue to function the way it's been designed to in perpetuity.

Right.

It's just like, I mean, one is like just a simple math problem, right?

If you don't have babies, you don't have a society.

I mean, this is like Elon Musk's thing, right?

That's why he's trying to repopulate the world single handedly.

And it's like, it's a busy guy, and Marsden.

That's right.

People go to bars, so he's making them himself.

But it's.

I mean, that's just the nuts and bolts of it.

It's like, if you don't have people, and you could try to import people from the third world and wherever else, but they're not the same people.

They're not able to function in the same way.

And so it will decline and fall apart in some way.

All sorts of people want to prophesy, oh, there's going to be a collapse within 20 years, and the whole system is going to fall apart.

Maybe things are complex.

Anybody who tries to do that, I think, is selling snake oil to a certain degree.

But the reason they're able to do it is because everybody can see this can't keep going on forever.

I think the background is knowing that, knowing that these things can't keep going on forever.

How do you build things and devote your life to the appropriate ends, to the right ends for 100 or 200 years down the road for your children and your grandchildren and so forth?

How do you set yourself up, if you're a single guy, to even have children, grandchildren?

What things do you need to do?

Some of it is just a pastoral question because I've, you know, especially when I was younger, a lot of my pastoral ministry was to younger men.

And so I started, I mean, this is probably, you know, I was online and seeing all of the, I mean, the nice thing about online for those that aren't online is you kind of see things that are going to enter the mainstream, like, five or ten years beforehand.

And so you get, you know, sort of an idea of where things are going.

And so we had, in the church that I was at, there were maybe 20 or 25 young men that were like 18 to 30, and most of them are unmarried, wanted to be married.

And I saw this problem, like, none of them were getting married.

And all the dads are like, well, they just need to stop being lazy.

They need to go get jobs and stop playing video games.

And initially, of course, I just assumed that's what was going on.

And I'd see these guys and it's like, no, I'm working like 60 hours a week.

I don't have time for video games.

I want to get married.

And I've asked all these girls out and none of them are interested.

And I'd look at these guys and I'm like, well, you're not, you know, you're good shape.

You're not big fat slob or anything.

You're a good looking guy.

That's weird that none of these gals right are giving you the time of day.

That's strange to.

And it was like every guy, it wasn't just like one.

Like, maybe he's just being weird and antisocial, doesn't know how to talk to girls, but it's like, it was all of them.

And I'm like, what is going on here?

This is, this is strange.

And, and I started to see some of the stuff I was seeing on the Internet.

You know, you're reading.

You're reading.

You know, guys like Michael Foster was, was starting to talk about this stuff.

And you'd read a, you know, this, this guy Dalrock would appear all over the place and I'm like, whoa, some of this stuff really makes sense, right?

Even within, like, conservative christian homeschool communities, we'd have these, you know, 20 something girls that just would say no to every single guy.

And it's like, well, why are they doing that?

Why don't they want to get married?

And it's like, oh.

Even within that very insular, kind of Benedict option kind of community, you still have the same problems that exist in the outside world.

Now, these girls were not on, like, Tinder and like hooking up with guys like girls out in the world, but the same kind of thinking was there, right?

Even though, even though they weren't living in an overtly sinful lifestyle, the same ethos of, well, I'm just going to find myself in my twenties and have fun and be with my friends.

And if the right guy comes along, that'll be good.

And then they get closer to their thirties and they're like, well, I just can't find a husband.

This is terrible.

And it'd be like, well, I know for a fact like half a dozen guys have asked you out and you've told them all no.

And to me, it was like, it was like selling a house.

In a lot of ways, it's like selling a house and you put your house on the market and you want half a million dollars for this house.

And all the offers you're getting are like, for 300, 350,000.

You keep saying, no, no, no, no.

Well, what's the value of the house then, if all the offers are way lower than you think it should be?

Well, it's the problem with your own valuation.

And of course, I'm a guy analyzing these things in this cold, brutal, rational way.

So it's not easy to, to talk to young women and explain that to them because, you know, women don't think that way, right?

It's hard.

It's like, honey, you're not as good as you think you are.

Like, you can't say that and you can't communicate that in a way that will be effective.

Like, only a father can do that.

So a lot of it.

Right, right.

Was like talking to the dads, like, hey, maybe it's maybe just too highly of herself, but I, that is the, that ended up being a lot of you.

You end up seeing these things.

You see the cultural, social problems that exist all throughout the world.

Or even in, even in very strong christian communities as well.

And the evangelical world was just totally oblivious to all of these dynamics and any of the resources that you had.

I mean, some of it is, you'd have know boomer pastors, that they grew up in the seventies and eighties and the sixties and the world was not this way at all for them.

And so they understandably, they have no way of understanding these things and coming up with any kind of solution, right.

Because these guys are just being lazy and playing video games, right.

Seemed like a very simple, easy explanation.

They can just harp on the guys being, being lazy and bums.

And that wasn't the answer.

And then you have the whole, all the leadership in the evangelical world really, really, really reinforcing all those ideas and at the same time telling the young women, no, you just have the gift of singleness.

And the gift of singleness means going and having fun with your friends and you don't want these people pressuring you to get married and have babies.

Right?

That's idolatry of the family.

Right.

You, that's bad.

And so, right.

Really, it was primed for this cope of the entire social order collapsing and assigning blame in all the wrong places and not giving good actionable counsel to young people living in light of these drastic social changes.

And thankfully, there has been sort of a sea change, at least among conservative evangelicals, to begin to address these things in different ways.

The prime example of the old way is you had very popular conservative evangelical pastor Matt Chandler.

When he gives this, I'm sure you've seen it, Will.

He gives this sermon and he's talking about, he's criticizing this older pastor who's talking about promiscuity, who is got this rose.

I mean, it's kind of a corny example.

He's got this rose and he's having all the young women pass this rose around.

And by the end of it, when it gets to the last person, the rose is all crumpled up and damaged and destroyed.

And he's saying, that's what, what you are, right?

This older pastor that he's critiquing, that's what you are.

If you go live a promiscuous life, you're going to be this damaged rose.

You need to keep it pristine.

You need to remain chaste and so forth.

And Chandler's like, no, Jesus wants the rose.

Jesus wants that damaged, destroyed Rose.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's like, I mean, in terms of like the salvific sense, right?

Can women who have been promiscuous and so forth.

Can they be redeemed?

Can God save the Onlyfans girl?

Right?

Yes, of course.

No one disputes that, right?

They, they can be right.

Grace extends to them.

Of course it does.

But when you're talking about ideal ways of life, right, a way of life that you would want for your own daughter, the crusty old pastor that he's critiquing was right.

He was correct.

You don't want your daughter to live that way.

That was their mode.

And you see this even today, constantly.

What happens is the OnlyFans girl, her career starts to end, she gets older and the grift ends.

And what do they do?

Well, I'm a Christian now, and so now I'm going to be a christian influencer.

And so send me money, right?

And anyone who criticizes them, it's like, well, you must be some kind of incel hater.

You must hate women and you must say that women can't get saved.

Who you're withholding God's grace from them.

It's like, no, if you're actually repentant of these things, like you would just go and not live in the public eye anymore.

Yes, that would, that's probably the best counsel you can give them.

And so you don't even give the pretense that you're just doing this as a grift.

And like, nobody can understand, we can understand that they want to, they just want to hate you.

But it's the same thing, right?

It's the same thing of winsomeness.

And whatever you do, right, one of the third rails of evangelicalism, you know, modern evangelicalism, is that women can't sin, right?

And you can't ever address women's sins, right?

You see this all the time with, you go to a megachurch on Mother's Day and it's how women are so great and so wonderful and we love our moms, don't we, folks?

And, and then you get to Father's day and it's like, men, you got a man up, you got to take responsibility.

You got to be a servant leader.

And I know some of you are just absolute losers.

You got to figure it out.

It'll just be, they'll hit you.

The only time they'll ever confront sin and be really bold and really hit you between the eyes is like when you're attacking men specifically, right?

You have permission to do that.

Everything else, which kind of shows you the feminization of Christianity and modern american evangelicalism, is, right.

You can't, you can't address sin by women.

Right?

You can't say that like, ah, promiscuity is bad.

Like, I mean, you see people like this, they'll, they'll, they'll lose their minds.

If you, like, use the word whore.

Like, you can't do that.

It's like, I don't know.

It's used a lot in the Bible.

Can I say it there?

Well, you're, you're not Paul.

You're not Jesus.

And it's like, okay, all right.

So, you know, yeah, it's just nuts.

And so a lot of these things, it's like, well, that stuff's changing, and it has to change.

Well, largely because Christianity and the christian religion in the Bible, it conforms to reality.

It conforms to, and it fits within reality.

They're not.

Conform isn't the right word, but they're seamless, right?

It's the same God who created all of creation and designed it the way that it is designed men to live like men and women to live like women, and for them to interact the way that they do, that God that built that whole world is the same God that gave us the Bible.

And the two things fit together.

And so what you see with a lot of modern evangelicalism that has conformed itself to the way of the world and to our currently socially engineered dystopia, is the Bible.

The way that they will preach it and teach it and so forth, will conflict with reality over here.

And so you see it like this, where, I mean, one of the realities that we badly, badly want to suppress in our current social order is that there is a finite amount of time where a young woman can get married, have a family, start having babies.

There's a very narrow window there, and it also corresponds with the time period when women are the most attractive to the opposite sex.

Right?

And you can't even say those things out loud without being accused of being a misogynist.

You hate women or you just think women are objects constantly.

You'll be told this, but it's like, it's just reality, right?

It's the way it is.

Sorry you don't like it, but that's how God made it, right?

He could have made women to be beautiful when they are 70 years old and just glowing with beauty, but he didn't.

He had those two things correspond for some reason, really, it's hard to figure out why that would be.

You have that reality that's built into the world, but then you have the world that we have in evangelicalism trying to cope with that.

And trying to justify it.

And so you will have the church telling young women these lies and repeating these lies to young women rather than just saying, hey, you should go get married, you should go be a mom if that's what you want.

And for the overwhelming majority of women, deep down, it is what they want.

It is what God has made them to want it.

There's very few that actually have this gift of celibacy that want to be devoted to a particular mission, that don't have any desire to be a mom.

And the reality is, no, most people do because that's how God built the world for human beings to want to have a future generation.

And so we're so out of whack with these things.

For, for faithful Bible believing Christianity to exist in the future, we have to react to the errors of this previous age.

And it's painful, it's hard.

People will call you a lot of names.

They will hate you, they'll attack you, they'll call you an incel, they'll, you know, whatever, you know, I mean, I get called it and I have weird, you know, we are on our 7th baby here, my wife and I.

It's like, I guess I'm the only, not the only, but one, one of the few incels with seven children.

But you get attacked this way and it's, and it's nuts, but, oh, well, right.

Who cares?

Like the world that you let the dead bury their dead, like this world that you are married to, that you love, is destructive and horrible and it's not going to survive.

We're after the future and what we can build and the future of christian civilization, and I don't care what people are going to call me.

That's like the ethos that you have to have.

It's like, I don't care.

St.

Boniface doesn't care if the german pagans are going to hate it.

He was martyred.

That's the end of the story.

They killed him.

They killed him.

And that has to be the ethos that we have to have.

I don't care if you kill me.

What I believe is true and that's what matters.

And so that's, you know, I mean, all of these things and there's so many other ones, but I mean, that's the obvious big one that's right before us is how feminized everything is, how it's geared to support this idea that women should not be mothers and to divert them from motherhood and family life at any cost.

And that's a major, major idol that exists within our society that has to be cut down.

And it's going to take men of boldness and courage to actually do that.

On a personal level, I really appreciate you saying all that because I've seen many of the same things.

Even though I'm very new to evangelicalism, I've seen all the same things.

And these are the inescapable conclusions that I've drawn.

And it's very easy for me to feel like, well, I'm the new guy in the room.

Maybe I'm crazy.

And I hear you say these things and it's like, okay, no, praise God, I am not crazy.

So thank you for that.

And I'll just.

I have a tweet kind of going viral right now, literally, about this.

Like, look, women, a single, unmarried, childless woman over 30, have to repent for the rebellion that they've been living in.

Yeah, that's just true.

You know what I mean?

Like, men, you can't say that.

No, you can't say that.

There's nothing in the Bible that says women should be married.

Like, well, show me the you go single girl scripture verse.

I haven't been able to find one yet.

And it's.

It's, it's.

It's so sad.

It's really.

It's tragic for so many.

For so many different reasons.

And I've just had it.

Like, I, you know, this, this idea, like, guys, does everyone see that fire over there in the corner?

Like, what fire?

That's keeping us warm as it's burning the house?

You know what I mean?

And the fact that there are so many pastors that will get up and berate men for hours and like, excuse me, do women sin ever?

We can't talk about that because they'll lose their church.

And I think that's cowardice.

And as civilizations burning down and birth rates are crashing, you have all these men, like, I bravely preach the gospel really well, let's hear it.

Are we going to get some equal weights and measures?

Are we going to.

No, we're not going to do that.

You say these things like, okay, these things are real.

I'm not making it up.

And so I very much appreciate that because your line that I took away from the book, one of the many things is you said harlotry versus the household.

I think that really just crystallizes it.

I don't know if you want to unpack that really quickly.

Yeah, I mean, that really is the.

That really is the issue.

Right?

Those are the two ways you can go because the gift of singleness thing is extremely narrow.

Like, oh, I'm going to devote myself to missions and to serving the church.

Well, that's not a huge chunk of people.

Throughout the history of the christian church, most people were just normal people that went and got married and had kids and raised them to be christians and so that their children would go do the same.

And that's how, that's how God has built us to, most normatively built people to live.

And so you divert people away from that.

Well, then what are they, what else are they going to do, right?

What else are they going to do?

They're going to.

And this is, and it's, I mean, you see some of the modern innovations as well, right?

You have, you know, antibiotics and modern surgery coupled with, you know, chemical, hormonal birth control that comes into, into being.

And it, it allows women to become just as promiscuous as men.

In the past, right?

In the past, right, men could be man whores and, and, and go, go to prostitutes or go to just loose women in general that were kind of on the margins of society, and rightfully so, and they could do that seemingly without consequence.

Right?

And so what feminism brought and the sexual revolution brought is, right, we want women to be able to do the same thing.

And to do that, well, you have to kill a lot of babies to do that.

And yes, there was abortion in the ancient world and the medieval world and the pre modern world, but it's very dangerous, right?

You very likely would die if you did.

There's a good chance you would, because you're basically taking poison to kill the baby or doing more primitive surgical techniques.

But with antibiotics and modern surgery now, it's relatively safe for the mother.

And on top of that, like your hormones prevent a baby from implanting in the womb.

So this conceived egg, which is a human being, gets implanted in the womb ordinarily.

Well, if your hormones block that, what are you doing?

You're killing a human being, the very smallest, tiniest human being, but it's still a unique human being with its own DNA, a person created in the image of God, and you're killing that.

So you have in the middle of the 20th century, this technological ability that unlocks this way of life that is unnatural, and you see the corresponding social changes that come out of that.

And women are incentivized to live that way, to live a promiscuous lifestyle.

It seems like fun.

It seems like this is a good life that you can have all the things you want.

You have a life like the tv show Sex and the City that's glamorized for women, and that's the ideal life.

That's what you want to do.

And if you do those things, obviously you can't have a household.

You can't be a mother raising children.

And those things, of course, are demonized and treated like slavery, treated like a waste of your gifts and abilities.

Like, that's something.

I mean, even recently online, some of the discourse has been, well, all the red pill guys and things like that.

What do you do about the really talented, bright women who you're like, well, go be a mom.

Go have kids.

What do you do about them?

And who have all these abilities, right?

What do you do about them?

Right?

What, what have, what do you have to offer them?

And it's like, it kind of goes back to the meme, right?

This.

It's, it's an older meme, but it checks out of.

Right.

The woman who's like, ah, I was a scientist, and I did all of these things and cured these diseases, discovered these things.

What did you do?

And this woman's like, well, I raised five scientists.

It's like, which is better?

Which contributed board of science, right?

And it's that kind of thing.

Like, it's better to have children and have many children and raise them up, train them, devote your life to them, devote all your talent and ability to that than to go have a single, solitary career of 40 or 50 years and leave nothing behind after that.

Right?

That's what you have to offer.

Right?

And people used to think this way and understand this intuitively, that God has made men and women different.

Yeah.

That he's made.

He's made men and women different.

That women have this extraordinary ability to create new life inside their own bodies.

Right.

And bring forth the next generation of humanity.

Right?

Only they have this.

Men don't have this ability.

Right?

This is controversial statement today, but men don't have this ability.

Women only women do.

And God has endowed them with this ability and even, like, psychologically and physiologically giving them different ways of understanding the world than men do.

Right?

We talk, you know, you talk about, like, men are, men are kind of autistic and rational and.

And cold and heartless, right?

They just think about things like this.

Boom, boom, boom, ABCD.

And women are much more emotional.

Right?

They make decisions more emotionally.

That's also a controversial thing.

What do you mean?

Yes, they do.

And you just proved it.

Thank you.

Yes, you do.

And, I mean, you see this also just in group dynamics, women seek consensus and they seek.

They avoid conflict, right.

They want everybody to get along.

And men are like, I'm right, you're wrong, and this is the way we're going to do it and let's have it out, right.

And if you win, then you win.

And I'll submit, right.

That you have rigid hierarchies form among men, women.

It's like nice democracy, right?

They all get along.

Isn't this nice?

And.

And so like that.

There's a reason for that, because within the household, when you got a bunch of little people, you raise them to get along.

You have matronly instincts where you have a much greater degree of empathy and care and love just built it in.

The hormones that are all throughout your body exist.

This way, women are unique compared to men.

They're different.

That's the skill and ability and everything else.

Yes.

If they're high iq, well, guess what, you're going to raise high IQ children that have lots of abilities or if they're very athletic, well, guess what, you're going to have athletic children or whatever it is.

Like you're going to replicate yourself in these people.

And people understood that not just 100 years ago, but throughout all of time, they understood that's what women are, that's what God made them to be, that there's a telos behind men and women.

There's an end for which God created them, a purpose of, for men and for women.

And God created women to be mothers.

And that is insanely controversial today, to say that.

What do you mean?

That means you don't think they're as good as men.

It's like, no, I think they're different.

I think they're different than men.

And it would be like saying men aren't as good as women because they can't produce babies inside of them.

No, they're just different.

They're different.

They're different beings.

And so just recovering that, recovering this natural order of what men and women are, you see this really the full bloom of it is within transgenderism, where it's like, all right, we take away all the social conventions between men and women, where we have to think of men and women as identical things in every possible way.

You own a corporation and you can't say, well, we're only going to hire men because we want.

You run an oil rig and you say, we're only going to hire men because this is a dangerous job and everything else.

No, you have to interview women for that job, too.

Those are the laws we make in our society, you take away all the social conventions around differences between the sexes, and then what happens?

Well, the next step of that, of course, is men can become women and vice versa.

It makes.

In this sick, twisted way, it makes sense, right?

That one would flow from the other, and it takes.

I mean, it took, I think, because most people.

Most people are okay with all the weirdness of feminism and all of that stuff.

They're even okay with perverted sexuality, like homosexuality and lesbianism and everything else.

They'll maybe be okay with those things.

But then when they see the transgender issue appear, especially when it starts to affect children, like, whoa, hold up here.

We're gonna put the brakes on right at this point, and you have to show them.

It's like, no, these are all, like, this is a clear line from one to the other.

That was good.

We'll stay right?

We just want to put all that.

That's what a lot of the anti wokeness stuff ultimately is.

A guy like James Lindsay, the anti woke guy, what does he want to create?

It's baked into the cake.

There's no way around it.

You either have a normal, natural order or you do not.

It's one or the other.

A lot of the thing seems like I harp in the book the transgender issue a lot, and I do that deliberately because that's the thing that people can grasp hold of, where it's like, yeah, this is wrong.

You're right.

This is wrong.

And it's like, yes, there's a direct line from this line I use in the book, a direct line from Rosie the riveter to the genderqueer goblin with pink hair that's actually a dude that's 400 pounds in a wig.

Right.

There's a straight line between those two things.

It doesn't just stop somewhere.

Now we have this nice, liberal, secular society, Star Trek style right now.

No, we have this horrible dystopia, and it's this progression from one to the other, and there's no way to stop it reaching these ends.

And people have to understand, and the church doesn't really want to understand that because we've made our.

We have made our peace with feminism we've made our peace.

Many evangelicals even have made their peace with homosexuality.

And I'm sure the same people will make their peace with transgenderism and whatever is next.

And you have to say, no, not only are we going to stop here, but we have to go back to a normal order.

And that's really painful because everyone has built their lives around, even, even normal.

Like, you go to a large mega church in a metropolitan area, in a suburb, and a church of ten or 15,000 people, and 90% of the family's there.

Mom and dad both work and they have 1.3 children.

And that's what's normal.

That's like normal family life in our dystopia.

And to get them to not do that is, I mean, they built their entire lives around it, right?

You can't just say, okay, mom's gonna stay home from work now.

Like, that's hard.

That's hard for, that's a very hard pill to swallow for people because, right, all of their lives, decades of their lives, have been, have they've worked toward having things the way they are, and you can't just rip them out of that.

And so it's much easier to just not go down that road in the first place and to disciple young people to avoid those things at all costs.

And that too, is very, very hard.

You look at housing prices today, and average cost of a house is nearly $400,000 throughout the country, and you would have to devote more than half your salary, the average, the median income, to paying just for the house, much less all the other expenses which continue to go up.

It's extremely difficult for people.

You can carve out a path on the margins.

You can live out in the sticks like I do, where the housing prices aren't quite as much, or you can be on the other end of the margin and make a lot of money, and then your wife can stay home and raise your kids and homeschool you.

But the median, the people in the middle of the bell curve, um, economically, right, they're stuck.

There's nowhere for them to go, and, and there's really no desire for any kind of change like that.

And, and the church is not going to, because they, it's not like, it's not like, um, like if you were, if you had a big, huge megachurch of 10,000 people, you start saying this stuff immediately.

People would be like, well, show me in the Bible where it says to do this.

Show me in the Bible.

And it's like, first thing, show me in the Bible where it's a sin to cut off your arm, right.

Well, there isn't actually, like, jesus says, cut off your hand, but, like, show me the Bible where this is.

This is not.

This is not right.

It's like, well, no, this is extremely foolish way of life that's destructive to every.

To your own family and to the entire society.

And it takes a lot of work to.

I mean, I had to write an entire book, like, outlining these things, and I don't have, like, little proof text to be able to say, here's where it's wrong.

It's like, no, you could see it if you have the sense to see how God built the natural order.

And so it's a tough hill to climb for people because they want just a quick, easy Bible verse that says, live this way.

And even the Bible verses that describe the household and describe how life is to be, even those ones.

Everyone wants to carve out these exceptions and make them say things other than they say.

Like, you look at ephesians five where wives are to submit to their husbands.

You'll have evangelicals who will say, well, that's conditioned on the husband loving the wife as Christ loved the church.

Then you make it conditional, and the wife can say, well, I don't have to submit to you for this, that and the other thing, because you're not loving me the way I think you should be loving me.

And so it's.

It's entirely subjective at that point.

There is no, like, objective command.

No, just listen to what your husband says.

And.

And all of this, all of what Paul says is predicated on an understanding of the natural order and how God made households.

Right?

He he just assumes it.

Right.

He assumes that the, um, ancient greek and first century jewish people that he's preaching to just implicitly understand, yes, we have households with husbands and wives, and men and women are different.

And we can't make that assumption anymore as easily because we've revolted against the natural order.

And so much of this stuff, I make this analogy in the book, too.

So much of this stuff is, it's like, I live in Minnesota, and we've got the Mississippi river here, this big, massive river, and our society is like, as if we manufactured a way to make the Mississippi run north, right, instead of south.

And we build all of these dams and we divert the whole river and everything else, but gravity is still working the way that it's working, and it doesn't actually work very well, but we've built all these things, and it seems like it's working okay.

And it's like going up to people and saying, actually, I think the Mississippi is supposed to run south, man.

What do you mean?

No, no.

We've devoted everything to this, right?

We've rebelled against the natural order, and we've advanced in technologically and sociologically to make it seem like it will work right.

Forever.

But it's not going to.

It's not going to.

And it'd be like, well, tell me in the Bible where it says that the Mississippi should run south.

You know, it's like, this is insane.

This is nuts.

And you almost feel in some ways like a cassandra, right?

If you know that, you know the ancient greek myth where this woman is cursed with prophecy, where everything that she says will come to pass, but nobody's gonna believe her, right?

You feel this way constantly, and I'm sure you do in the circles you run in as well, where it's like I'm just describing reality and nobody wants to listen at all.

Nobody wants to hear it.

But the white pill there is that there actually are people that want to listen.

There are people that seed reality all around them, and they hate the way things are.

And you have this duty and responsibility to help them to say, okay, you see the way things are, and we're not going to persuade the masses to give up their 401 ks and their life in the suburbs.

That's probably not going to happen.

I'm not going to have 20 million people read my book and say, yeah, we need to go back to an older way of living.

And so it will end up being the people on the margins on either end that are going to be able to rebuild a functional society and live in the way that God is intended for human beings to live and await the river, to start all the dams, to start bursting the river, start running south again, and to have things in place, to have institutions in place, to have communities in place where people live in a normal human way, and for that to finally grow when God brings it all down.

So I really appreciate so much of what you had to say there because there's a lot of context that I find myself also missing the fact of just how much of evangelicalism has bought in to feminism.

I can see the rainbow flags going up.

I can see the diversity equity and inclusion.

I can see that stuff happening.

But I haven't been able to see quite so clearly just how much feminism has gotten its claws deep into the evangelical church.

But I experience the pushback when I try to talk about these things, including well, where is that in the Bible?

Where does it say that women should get married?

I'm like, well, let's see.

The book starts with a married couple, Adam and Eve, and then it finishes with a married couple, Christ and his bride.

And there's marriages all throughout the thing.

So where isn't it in the Bible?

Show me the, you go single girl scripture verses as the thing.

I said, but people don't want to be challenged on that.

But when you say, and I love the image that you put into the book, all the engineering that's been trying to make the Mississippi river go north.

Right.

And you can feel that in culture, like, the gears are grinding.

But what I don't understand, and I guess I get the part that they don't want to have their ways of life upended.

But when you show people the truth, when you show them, like, this is God's design for the family, and I know that they've been engineered through complementarianism and egalitarianism.

Like, I understand that dialogue.

But when you show them and you show people inflation, you show people immigration and you show people crashing birth rates and you show people transgenderism and you see weak and aimless men and brassy women, and you say, like, you know, there's a book about all this and it says that we're supposed to do things this other way.

That worked pretty well.

Their response is like, is violent.

They get angry and they get mad and they make it about you.

And that's the part that I don't understand.

For people who in the next breath will call themselves Bible believing, faithful christians, that's the part that I don't get.

I also get the making it on the margins.

But what has, and again, in many ways, I'm the new guy in the room, right?

You're articulating things that I also see what I'm trying to figure out.

I had a great conversation with Jeff Wright about this.

Understand the context of what is the, from the evangelical perspective, where is the rejection of these things coming from?

Where is the energy to reject these things coming from?

Is it pride?

Is it an unwillingness to be duped?

Do they really believe it?

Yeah, I think a lot of it is that.

And this is other things that I've mentioned in the book just on worship, is that pragmatism is the thing that drives evangelicalism and evangelical culture?

That, and this hearkens back to the second great awakening.

That second great awakening is this event in american christian history where you had traditional, mostly Protestant America and you would have Presbyterian and congregationalist and Baptist and Methodist churches.

And what the second great awakening brought about were things that were parallel to the church.

I mean, many of them, like Charles Finney, was an ordained minister, one of the leading lights of the second great awakening.

But you'd have these revivals that would take place where people would make decisions for Christ, and everything became about securing decisions for Christ.

And whatever pragmatic means you had to use, whatever emotional manipulation you would use to bring these things about was all on the table.

And that became really the driving force since within the evangelical world, and you see, especially in the 20th century, when you started to have a collapse of mainline denominations and people fled those places because they just stopped believing the bible wholesale.

They started going to evangelicalism.

And evangelicalism grew to be this large force within the american religious landscape in the sixties and seventies.

It was all the same methodology as the second great awakening is what drove it.

And it was pragmatic.

It was whatever we have to do to get them in the church, whatever marketing methods we have to use.

So by the eighties and nineties, you begin having the seeker sensitive movement where guys like Rick Warren, people like that bill Hybels, where whatever we got to say or do to get them in the church, thats what well do, right?

And you see the result of that is what we'll just soften on some of these things that conflict with the more mainstream culture, because that will be a roadblock to getting them into the church.

Once we get them in them, maybe we'll straighten things out, but we got to get them in the church.

Like you even see this with the Super bowl ads of he gets us.

I'm sure you've seen those ads.

That's the same dynamic at play there where they're trying to appeal to this kind of middle of the road current american sensibility of racism is bad guys and right wing stuff is bad.

Being against immigrants is bad.

And there's all this imagery countering kind of maga impulses among evangelicals.

And that's purposeful, right?

There's a goal there.

They want to appeal to the culture.

And so I think a lot from the leadership perspective of the church, that drives a lot of it.

I think we have this idea.

And so guys like Doug and others who in one sense they're totally right, that the church should be the engine that's driving the culture, that the church, just the idea of culture and what it is is the famous quote, like, what is culture but religion externalized?

And that's where you get like cult, cultus is at the core, it's a religious thing.

And so our culture is not driven by the church at all.

It's driven by.

By other religious impulses.

And so what the church ends up being is the caboose, right?

The culture takes it along and they're at the back end and they adopt whatever cultural things are extant, like ten years later.

And you even see this with worship music.

So, like, whatever music is popular, whatever pop music there is today, right.

You'll see within five or ten years, like the mirror or a parallel to that within christian music, right.

It just, it's the caboose following the train of culture.

And so that's the situation that we're in.

And so thinking along those lines, why do people react so violently to that?

It's because what is at, what is the, what is the cultist that's at the center of all of their cultural beliefs and practices?

It's not this christian idea of how we live life.

It's the world's.

And so if you conflict with how the world says you're supposed to live, then you're a bad person, right.

You're an evil person.

And they'll.

Or what you're doing, it's like, will, you're saying I'm an evil person because I live in this way and not in this way that you say I should.

You're saying I'm a bad person, right.

That's why they react violently to it, because you're really actually striking at the center of their actual religious belief.

That's the thing within christian churches today.

You can go to your pastor and say, you know, I'm having a lot of doubts about the resurrection and the virgin birth and all these things.

I've been on Reddit and I've been reading atheists, and they've been making some good arguments, and I think they're persuading me.

Right.

Well, your pastor or your friends at church or your friends at Bible Study or whatever, they won't freak out if you begin expressing doubts about these things.

But if you begin expressing doubts about certain cultural things or certain narratives that our culture believes, you will be cast out of the church immediately.

Get out of here.

We don't want you.

You're a bad person.

You're saying that women shouldn't work.

If you said, hey, sort of have some doubts about the 19th amendment, I think maybe that was a bad idea.

It's like, get out of here.

We do not want you at all.

You're divisive.

You're a bad person.

It's like, no, I've just been reading.

I'm not sold on.

I'm not persuaded.

I'm just.

I'm starting to have some doubt, like, no, we don't want you.

Because what is at the core of their religion is.

Right.

The post war consensus, right.

The actual religion that we have in America, which is we live in this secular liberal democracy, we buy into at least some strain of feminism, whether it's first wave or second wave or third wave.

We're somewhere on that spectrum that we think is we've made our peace with.

And if you confront those things, if you challenge those things, you'll be put out of.

Out of churches, because their actual belief, their actual religious belief that they would burn at the stake for is not Christianity, not the claims of the Bible, but the current civil religion of the United States.

That's right.

I think that's an excellent way you put it.

The church is the caboose of culture.

Because I want to talk a little bit about christian nationalism, because christian nationalism viewed that way would seem to be.

There are some of us who are in the caboose, like, no, I think we're going to go up to the front of the engine.

I think we're going to start making our way forward on the train, and maybe we're gonna, you know, see if we can get an engineer put in to drive us, you know, where we want to go, instead of being comfortable in the back.

But it seems that there are christians at the door that can woosh.

Like, no, you can't do that.

You're not allowed to do that.

It's like, well, we're probably going to.

So maybe we can talk.

Maybe we can talk about that.

At the risk of.

There are some more things in the book I want to cover, but I want to just kick this idea around for a little bit, if we can.

Yeah, we'll spend the rest of our time talking about this.

Yeah, no, I think you're right.

I think a lot of it is just that, like, the people that are strongly reacting to any talk of.

No, the christian religion should be the foundational cultural expression or the center of our culture.

Right.

That's bad.

You can't have.

Jesus doesn't want us to have power.

What are you talking about?

My kingdom is out of this world.

Yeah.

No, no.

Right.

And it's weird because it will be guys who.

It doesn't matter what tradition they come out of.

I mean, it can be people who are reformed and believe in the Westminster confession and catechisms, you know, 100% without exception.

And then they'll be like, no, we can't have Christianity at the center of cultural identity in the United States.

We're a secular democracy.

Or they could be, I mean, they can be Baptist, they can be mainstream, evangelical, they can be anything.

And they all end up in the same place because they've bought into this idea that secular liberal democracy is the end of history, and this is the good and best and most virtuous society that we could possibly have.

And if you say that no Christianity should be at the center, the christian religion should be at the center, then you're a bad, very, very bad person because you're threatening that.

And the irony, of course, is before the 20th century, and certainly at the time of the founding of the country, there wasn't any other option other than Christianity being at the center of the culture.

It was at the center of every culture in the western world.

And it would be inconceivable to those people for Christianity not to be at the center of your culture.

It's going to be human reason.

And so what they're doing is saying, we want, that we want to have this permanently revolutionary society where God isn't at the center, where Jesus isn't at the center, right?

He can be.

Often we'll carve out some space where we have a little safe space for us to exist, right?

And that's what they cling to because they think if you have Christianity at the center of a culture, well, then what are you going to have?

It's going to be like the 15 hundreds and the 16 hundreds, where you're going to be persecuting other christians and it's going to be so horrible.

We're going to have religious wars and all these things.

It's like, man, you are in a religious war right now and you are being persecuted for being a Christian.

If you, if you say there are only two genders, male and female, and I believe that because that's what Jesus said, that's what the Bible says, well, guess what?

You're a bad person, you're going to lose your job, you're going to lose economic opportunity, you're going to be shut out of normal society for believing that simple truth.

What is that?

But being persecuted for your beliefs like it is.

It is.

And so, no, we are in a religious conflict, religious war.

It's just not among various christian traditions and sects.

It's between an anti christian society and christians.

And so it's, what is, I mean, fundamentally, I guess what is happening is that just from a political and cultural and sociological perspective, the secular liberal democracy order that came into being after the second world war in America is collapsing.

This kind of neutral space where no one religion is going to have dominance, we're just going to have a neutral society.

Well, that's a transitionary period, right?

You can't.

It's a vacuum.

And something is going to fill that.

And what is filling it?

It's like this anti christian, anti God, anti Bible, religious view.

And it's becoming more and more obvious by the day that that's what we have.

And so now you have christians that are saying, no, I actually don't like that.

I think that's bad.

I think it's bad to kill a million babies a year.

I think it's bad for.

For children to be put in dresses and put on hormone blockers and have their genitals removed surgically.

I think those are bad things that are just deleterious to any society, and in particular to a society that has millions and millions of christians.

And so as these things fall apart, it's just a natural expression of it.

Some of it, too, is, where does this term come from?

A lot of it came from the tail end of the Trump years, where you have very widespread support, despite evangelical leadership that hate Donald Trump.

You had widespread support of him by evangelicals, like, 80% vote for him.

And I mean, that's just like, vote yes or no.

But among evangelicals, not only did they say, yeah, I guess I'll take him as president, if that's my only option, it's like, no, this is the guy we want positively, right?

There's very intense support among Trump, or for Trump among evangelicals, and it's a reaction to that where it's like, we have to eradicate this among the population, because the base of his, of this guy's support is among christians who think that we should have a Christian America.

And that's very bad, very scary.

So they wanted to attack this.

I mean, this goes back to Stephen Wolf's lone bulwark tweet.

Where he just looks at demographic data and that's who's being described.

And they do it negatively all the time where it's like white christian evangelicals.

They are the strongest supporters of Trump, and they're very bad people.

This is why Russell Moore and David French and people like that attack Trump, supporting evangelicals all the time.

It's because they want to chip away at those things.

They want to get rid of it.

They want christians to buy into their project.

And so what is christian nationalism?

It's just telling those people that you're not crazy, you're not insane, extremist people for wanting the morality of our laws to be shaped by the Bible.

That's not a bad thing.

That's not horrible.

It's a good impulse.

It's the right impulse for christian people to have, actually.

And then Woolf is able to take it a few levels deeper and just place it within traditional protestant political theory that, yeah, when you have a majority of christians in a place, civil power is going to be exercised by christians.

And that's good.

Right?

That's what we want.

That's not a bad thing.

And so that's where a lot of this conflict arises out of is.

And I don't think, like, even when I wrote the first book, Torba, my, I mean, there were a few goals that we had here.

I mean, some people interpreted it as, we're gonna create this, like, new political party and have this voting bloc and take over America and winter and instill this positively christian state in America through the ballot box.

And I'm like, I don't see that happening at all.

I think there's maybe 20 or 30 million american evangelicals that would generally be described as having these christian nationalist sensibilities.

That's not a majority.

You're not going to win an election that way at all.

It's more.

So my goal was to just, one, to defend christians that had the right ideas and maybe don't have the words to articulate why they have these feelings and thoughts and everything else.

So to defend them, and then secondly, to move the conversation forward that the church's understanding of politics is really messed up and that it's okay to vote for things that are good for christian people and good for christian society, that it's okay to want that.

Not that we're going to somehow turn the United States around by voting our way out of it.

Right.

I mean, you can take it back to the garden if you want, but like you can go back to the french revolution.

Like, it's arbitrary ultimately, but the foundations need to be of where we are need to be ripped out.

And I think everyone wants to continue having their little bit of modernity.

Like, I just want this little bit of thing.

I just like this.

I just like this.

No, its all got to go because I had to go through this myself.

Im not sure if you know, but I spent 20 years in the new age, right?

And so I absorbed all kinds of really terrible ideas about men and women and religion and spirituality and Christianity.

And so as I started going into my own sanctification process, I had to go digging within myself.

Plus I grew up liberal, atheist, jewish, feminist, you know what I mean?

So I had to dig in.

It's like the core of my being and find beliefs that were rooted in there from the start, maybe even in my bloodstream in some sense, and just rip them all out.

It's like I don't want to hold on to any of this stuff because I recognize that it's all lies.

It's all caused me pain.

It's all been deception.

And I want to start moving towards something more in line with scripture and God's truth because that's freedom.

Yes.

What I encounter is people.

You start pulling these things out, it's like.

But no, I like that.

It's like, why do you like that?

It's poison.

Stop.

And I don't get it.

I mean, on some level I do.

I understand the fear of change.

I understand all of that.

But it just seems like people want to hold on to things that are bad for them and that I don't understand.

Maybe some of it is just like naturally what men in their sin are.

I've already mentioned Doug a few times.

I think this is his analogy where he's like, sin is often like a little baby who has a dirty diaper.

It's warm and it's mine.

I don't want to get rid of it.

I haven't heard that one.

And it's like, it's like that's true.

Like we don't.

It brings us comfort, even though we know the end of it is pain.

But we would rather have this thing that gives us comfort in the moment and makes us feel good and getting rid of it can be painful, and people don't want that.

They'd much rather have.

I mean, that's the thing, too.

Why can't we just have that?

And it's like, no, things weren't bad then.

It's just, it wasn't as readily apparent.

All the toothpaste hadn't come out of the tube yet, and so it seemed like things were fine.

But we're already on this trajectory of where we were going to get to the place where we are now.

At that time, it wasn't like it could stop there at any point.

And people, yeah, most people, because, I mean, I've had some reaction to the book.

There are people that hear about it or hear it described were like, you got to read this book.

This is a really good book.

And be like, I refuse to believe that the world is as bad as you say it is.

And usually the people that say those things, right, they have, they have pretty comfortable lives, right?

So they, you know, it's usually like, like a middle class couple, right?

Things are, things are a little tougher than they used to be.

But, you know, mom and dad both are making a pretty good income, and life is good.

You get to, you get to enjoy all the hobbies that you like.

You know, you get to, you get to watch barstool sports and, you know, watch football.

Football and go have fun with your friends.

And things are pretty nice, right?

You don't have to deal with these things.

You're kind of, you're insulated from a lot of the pain.

Think about it.

Think about it.

I've got a pretty nice life, right?

I make plenty of money.

I like my life.

And if they did consider these things or if they did accept that, wait, actually, this maybe isn't good, it would radically disrupt their lives.

Their nice, comfortable life that they have would suddenly be way less comfortable then it would be otherwise.

And so, yeah, and if there isn't, like, show me in the body.

And this is the thing, I mean, this is, this is like, this goes back to like, the gospels where it's like, show me, show me a sign, Jesus, that you're actually the messiah.

And he's like, no.

Another one.

No.

You want some more?

What?

No, I'm not gonna show you any more signs.

Or it's like.

Or it's.

It's the parable that he tells of the rich man in Lazarus where he's like, please let me go back to my brothers so that I could tell them not to do the things that I did.

And he's like, well, they have Moses and the prophets.

If they wouldn't listen to them, they're not going to believe someone that came back from the dead.

And it's a similar kind of thing where if they can't extrapolate from.

From the Bible and from the natural order of the world that God has made, that's apparent to all.

They're not going to listen to some guy on a podcast who wrote a book or whatever.

They're not going to do that.

And so I think things will inevitably become more painful for more people, and more people will begin to see these things.

Like the guy who's living a comfortable life right now when his kids get trans or when he has to deal with his, you know, whatever other social problems come down the road.

Then you start to feel the pain.

It's because these people are starting to actually feel the pain.

It's like, oh, maybe gay porn in the public school library is not a thing that I want my children exposed to.

All the other stuff until that point, whatever.

All the sex ed and everything, they're getting near pornographic stuff anyway.

All of the pro homosexual stuff that had been in schools for years, whatever, all the feminism, everything else, okay?

But when it came to that, it's like finally they're feeling some pain and they are pushing back.

And I think it's the same kind of thing where it isn't until people start to feel pain from it and start to feel their own families personally affected by it.

I mean, it's.

You know, it's the meme, right?

How does this personally affect you?

And it's like Rome is burning behind them, right?

It's.

It's the same kind of thing wherever people don't get it until it does personally affect them.

And I wish it were some other way.

I wish people could see, like, no, here's what's going to happen if we continue to do the things we've been doing.

But until then, you're only going to have the small group of people on the vanguard who are, for whatever reason, willing to think through these things and come to the same realizations that a lot of us have that will continue to push ideas that are true and, like, self evidently true to everyone, for them to eventually gain more mainstream credibility.

That actually brings me some peace, is to remember just how many people doubted Jesus.

Like, didn't.

Wasn't in the resurrection.

Like, he's there.

He's like.

And some doubted, like, he's right there.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm not so sure about that.

Like, bro, right?

Yeah, you are.

Yeah, here I am.

Look at my hands.

Like, I'm not so sure.

I appreciate knowing that because it's a very heartening reminder that some people just will not see the truth right in front of their face.

Because for me, it's like, give me truth.

People, maybe they're incapable.

I always think it's people's high ability to tolerate cognitive dissonance, but it's actually deeper than that.

It's beyond psych.

I mean, it's manifested in psychology, for sure, and tolerance of cognitive dissonance.

But at a certain point, it's the human heart, where we would rather believe lies all day long than one uncomfortable truth.

That's just the reality of the way we are.

I would rather someone live in a fantasy world.

Right?

I mean, it does often go back to the Matrix.

Like, I'd rather just live in it.

And I don't care if this.

I know it's not a real steak, but it sure tastes good.

And I want to go back to that.

I want to go back to that.

I don't want to confront the reality that things are way worse than anyone recognizes.

And so, yeah, it's a.

It can be blackpilling for people.

It could be really depressing, and you could feel like I'm the only person that gets these things.

None of everybody around me thinks I'm nuts.

And you have to understand that this is the way we are, that human beings, in our sin, we will happily accept lies.

It will provide us comfort.

I mean, most people.

People don't naturally don't want to be weird, right?

They don't want to stand out.

They don't want to have everyone around them think they're nuts.

And so it will take.

It takes massive, like, black swan events for people to, like scales to fall off their eyes and see things.

People would think I'm nuts.

They'll think you're crazy.

And I got really good at just.

Only talking small talk with people because it's like, you're gonna think I'm nuts if we talk about anything real.

Oh, maybe this guy gets some things I don't.

And so I think it takes events like that where you're just forced to confront realities that you would way rather leave alone.

And that's the thing that God does, right?

He makes things happen.

It's the current meme on the Internet that nothing ever happens.

And I have some fun with that, too, because everyone's like, oh, is this it?

Is there gonna.

Is this world war three happening?

Is this.

It's like, hold your horses.

Right?

Nothing ever happens.

That's red heifer, bro.

That's right.

That's right.

And they did it this week.

And, like, what happened?

Nothing and no one.

Yeah, we're all still here, Vin, and so it's like.

But sometimes things do happen, right?

2020 was a happening, a big happening, and there are going to be things happening this year as well that we have to be prepared for.

And really, the preparation is people might start listening to ideas that they wouldn't have otherwise, given the time of day when.

When stuff, you know, starts to hit the fan.

And so it's.

It's just to be.

To be steady.

I mean, some of the stuff I talk about in the book, too, is there is.

And it's really hard because there's this propensity that we have if you're, like me, where, like, if you get things that nobody else gets and you see the world so clearly and nobody else is getting it, or it's easy, very easy, to become extremely antisocial, right.

Just to be, like, a gadfly and just happily upset everyone all the time, to be, you know, to be the guy at the party that ruins it all the time and.

Right.

It's important not to be that way at all, to.

Not.

To not be the person that's not fun at parties and pick your spots and just wait for the moment when people are willing and ready to listen to you.

That takes a lot of wisdom that we don't always have, that people are not just knowing, all right, this is not the time for me to start explaining this because they're not going to listen to me.

But sometimes they are.

And when things happen, then you are able to give an answer that is sufficient for the things that are taking place.

And it can be a lonely thing.

One of the things with this book is it puts people in a position to be a prophet.

Not a prophet in the sense that you are predicting the future and saying this thing is going to happen and come to pass, but rather prophetic in the sense that all these things that you love so much and think are awesome are actually really bad and we need to stop doing them and.

Right.

You know, you don't have to be a huge Bible scholar to understand how prophets get treated when they speak prophetically.

It's people don't like them, they think they're bad people and they beat them up and kill them.

And if you're taking this call upon yourself to be a prophet, and really the call is, do you see reality that nobody else is willing to see, well, then there it is.

That's your calling.

And learning to speak prophetically in a wise and effective way where you can win people and have your message heard and help people out.

It's a lonely place.

You're not going to get a lot of accolades.

You're not going to have a big gin Normo, 20,000 person church.

If you want to be a pastor like this.

That's part of it, too.

Going back to evangelicalism and just the structure of it is like, it would be very easy in some senses.

I mean, it's not easy.

Not everybody rises to the top of the heap in the evangelical world like, it does take some talent and ability, of course, but in another sense, it would be easy for me to, like, climb that ladder and say the things that I had to say to preach the Father's day sermon, chewing the men out and the mother's Day sermon saying how great women are.

I could do all that stuff.

I could be a good little boy and make my way all the way as high as I can.

And it's like, I can't.

I could never do that.

I cannot.

I could not bring myself to do that and sell out in that way.

I can't be shameless like that.

And it's like that for anyone who sees these things, wherever they're at in life, where you could have a lot more success in life, if you just lie to people all the time, don't tell them the truth about how life is.

You'll have a lot more friends, you'll be invited to a lot more parties.

But can you live with yourself being that way.

No, it would be impossible.

And so the upside, and I.

The white pill in all of it is those things really ultimately don't matter at all.

What matters is the truth.

And what matters is whether you're able to help people or not.

A lot of people came to them, and that is really good.

And I saw courage being rewarded in those years.

And so it doesn't always have to be this gloomy, sad thing where it's like, ah, you're like the prophet Elijah on Mount Sinai.

It's bemoaning.

Everyone has abandoned you.

Lord, I alone am left.

And what does God say to him?

There are way more people out there that are willing to face reality and hear things that are true, that are unpopular, to say way more of those people than you even realize.

There are a lot of people that get, and maybe in ways that they can't articulate or understand, but they know things are not right here.

There are problems, and I don't quite get it.

And they're looking for someone to say, this is it.

These are the problems.

This is what has gone wrong.

And you can build people up, and those are the people you can build things with.

Those are the people that you can rebuild a christian society out of.

Great.

You went right to where I wanted to go.

Because there is a phenomenon where men, especially young men, become aware of these trends, these realities.

Let me give you my definition of anger.

Anger is a legitimate emotional response to a crossed boundary.

So when someone crosses a boundary, we have.

We feel anger.

Anger is our body letting us know that someone has crossed a boundary.

It's instinctive, right?

So that's how we know someone has crossed a boundary.

We've been living in this trash world where all of men's boundaries, particularly men's boundaries, have been crossed multi generationally for 50, 60, 80 years.

That's just how it's been.

The sexual revolution, feminism, women's liberation, has entirely been about crossing men's boundaries.

And you can even go back to the betrayal of world War one and world War two, especially world War one and Vietnam, etcetera.

And so.

And so men have inherited this upside down world that demands them to be smaller and smaller.

Smaller.

You know, don't, don't even sit in a train with your knees apart.

Right.

Don't speak in a loud voice.

Don't.

Right.

It's to that degree.

And so men's boundaries have been crossed.

And so someone points out to them this is going on, and they feel this overwhelming relief and then a release.

Now our society doesn't really know what to do with men's anger.

This is something I can talk a lot about, and I think it's a real phenomenon.

So what do we do with it so it doesn't become corrosive?

Because I think that's everyone's worry.

This is a real thing.

We can't shame it out of existence.

It's really there.

We want to channel it productively and we don't want it to melt down on itself.

What do we do?

And this can be as practical as what do you and I do having platforms.

What do we do in our individual lives?

What can we do for men to help them work with that channel that productively, use that anger so it doesn't feed back in on itself?

Yeah, I think that's like the million dollar question because, and even like, it's funny, Rod Dreher reviewed my book pretty early when it came out, and in one sense, I'm very grateful that he took the time to read my book and took it seriously.

That's commendable.

But he hated it.

And his major critique of it is that Andrew Isker is this angry, angry young man.

He is angry and he's young.

And he apparently found the podcast with CJ and me, maybe watch some of it.

And I don't think I come across as very angry on the podcast.

You don't, you don't come across as angry in the book either.

No, I think it was his own, he was imputing his own feelings, probably onto it.

And it's funny because he looks like he's in his early thirties.

And so I'm like, wow, I'm almost 40, man.

So thanks.

I look younger than I am.

But no, I think like you're saying anytime you express that things are wrong, there are problems here.

Well, you're just angry, young man.

You're just angry.

Really angry.

And there is that fear, especially among the older generation, especially among the people that kind of are in power and in control, that the angry young men are going to take over and they're going to mess everything up.

And yeah, this stuff happens.

There are, Elliot Rodgers was a real thing.

There are angry incel people.

It's not a totally made up fear.

And I could see it going a lot of different directions.

I think on one hand, there is, if things continue to decline, and you have these episodes where things decline precipitously, because I don't think there's going to be this full on collapse like the Soviet Union, but there will be regular, continual decline in the state of things into the future.

And at some point there will either be like a total left wing maoist revolution, so all the people doing the Hamas protests on Ivy League campuses will come to power and just destroy everything, or there will be a right wing reaction to these people and to the state of things, which some people discount.

They think that's not going to happen.

The right is disorganized.

There's nothing.

It doesn't really exist.

But things change when economic circumstances change.

Inflation is bad right now, but imagine much worse inflation.

And people are just not able to provide for themselves and their families, and now all sorts of right wing ideas, people are much more willing to hear them.

Right.

And so I can easily see in the next 20 years this reactionary movement taking off, and it won't be a christian one, it will be a pagan one.

And for this entire time, the church has been on the side of the regime and will provide no moderating influence whatsoever on any of this stuff.

So I think on the meta political level, the church has to become a lot more right wing politically and just culturally and sociologically.

So much so that it's able to influence the young men that are going this direction and to be able to moderate them, to be able to say, okay, yes, you're angry about the things, and rightfully so.

There is a lot to be angry about.

And how do you direct this anger?

What do you direct it toward?

Do you direct it toward productively building things that are good, that'll be good for you personally and for your family and for the people around you?

Or do you direct it into fruitless things that will be destructive?

That's one of the things.

One of the main things that the church can and should be doing is if you're, if, I mean, some of it is just to be able to say these things out loud and tell people, these are the things going on.

These are the things you should be angry about.

Here's what you can do to, to fix it for yourself personally and for others.

Right.

That, that alone provides a lot of moderation to the anger, because what, what other outlet is there other than to people, people to, to go online and, and call women whores?

I mean, what else is there?

I mean, you see a lot of that.

It has to be directed into productive ends.

The feelings and the emotions that people have in their circumstances.

They're just going to remain black pilled and have no hope for anything.

And that's a horrible situation to be in.

Right?

It's almost worse than.

Than just being a normie that wants to watch sports and play Xbox.

That's a worse state of things than being aware of reality and having nothing you could do remotely whatsoever to affect your situation.

So that is the huge one is all right, you're angry.

I get it.

I get why.

Here's what you can do.

The church today will stop right there.

It'll say you're angry.

Well, you need to repent.

It's bad to be angry and provide nothing for young men to do in any positive way to make things better for themselves.

Some of it is just to have someone say to you, an older man, say, I get it.

I get why you're angry.

I would be angry if I were in your shoes, too.

And if I were in your shoes, here's what I would do.

Like, we don't do any of that kind of stuff.

And it is like that alone.

And I'm working myself.

I'm getting angry about it, too.

Let's go.

But it upsets me that I see millions of young men who have some semblance of understanding of the problems that existed around them.

And the people that should have the answers don't provide any answers for them at all.

The answer is, you're a bad person.

You just need to be a better servant, leader.

And then, right, if you just show all the women what a great and godly doormat you are, they'll come flocking to you and you'll find a wife and all of these.

And it's like, no, that's the opposite.

They all go to the jerks.

That's just reality, you know?

And so, no, that's not the direction you should tell young men to go down.

You need to tell them things are really messed up.

Here's what you personally can do.

And there are major problems, and I hear them and I see them all around, just like you do.

And you need to direct that into things that you.

Because there are.

It shouldn't be black peeling because it's nothing.

Not all hope is lost.

Not everything is totally ruined.

You still can have a good life.

It's just much, much harder.

The good life that our fathers and our grandfathers just were born into.

They didn't have to do anything out of the ordinary to achieve.

You just reach 18 years of age.

Boom, here's a job.

Work hard and things will be good.

Single income families, you can support your family on a job here.

Here are all the women that want to get married, and you have a job with money, and they're all really pretty, and you pick one and boom, you got a family.

That world doesn't exist anymore.

It doesn't exist anymore, but you can still make it happen.

You have to work a lot harder than your father and your grandfather did.

You have to, you have to search a lot harder for a good woman to marry that wants to have a family.

Yes, you do.

But it's not impossible.

It's not impossible.

The path is just much narrower than it was for everyone else.

And so directing young men down this much narrower, harder path and encouraging them, in spite of the difficulty and problems that they face is, is what we have to do rather than, rather than what we've done, which is just.

No, the problem is you.

You're a bad person, right?

Oh, you can't afford a home.

Well, that must mean you're lazy, right?

It's like, I'm working as hard as I can.

I'm working two jobs.

What do you, what do you, what do you mean I'm lazy?

All right.

You play too much video games.

I don't even own any video games.

What are you talking about?

I mean, I see that stuff all the time, even from pastors that are really good, conservative men that oppose a lot of the things in trash world.

They'll just be oblivious to what a 22 year old guy has to the world that he has to live in today.

And so then their anger gets directed at the church.

Their anger gets directed at the pastors and the men that don't understand and refuse to understand the things that they are experiencing.

And so then where do you go?

Well, you go find, I mean, this is the thing.

It's like, why are all these young guys listening to Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate?

Right?

Why are they listening?

And it's like, man, I don't want young guys listening to Andrew Tate.

I mean, one, he's an idiot, and two, he's not a good guy, but he is saying things, some of which are true, that you don't say.

And he sees all of these young men and all the problems that they face and is providing answers that you won't even address the question of.

And so that's a huge thing that we have to change.

A huge thing is just listen to these young men.

Don't assume that they're bad people because they're upset about their circumstances.

Don't assume that they're just these bitter young guys that are losers.

They are, they're young men that are trying to have a good life.

And all of the routes that traditionally were open to them to have a good life are all closed off.

I mean, even just like economically, like the, with, I mean, these are guys who are like totally against Dei and things like that, and they should be able to see that.

I mean, there was that story, I think it was in Bloomberg about, right in the wake of George Floyd, corporate America now hires 90% non white male people.

Like out of all the thousands of jobs that went to the top 500 corporations, 90% of them went to non white males or non whites or non males.

And it's like, well, the majority of the workforce is white and male.

So that means you're actively restricting this group of people and saying, nope, white men need not apply.

And so, like, if that's the dynamic of the corporate world and you're saying, you young guys are just lazy, like those two things don't work together.

Like they're saying, no, we don't want you.

We're not going to give you economic opportunities.

And so that's shut off to you.

You can't just call these guys lazy, right?

They're doing the things they can and they're not allowed to have nice c suite corporate jobs anymore.

So what do you do with that?

You have to be able to say, oh, the deck is stacked against you.

This is bad.

I understand the problems that you're facing, and you're going to have to work harder and we will encourage you in this hard work that you have to do.

We get that.

You have to work way harder than we ever had to work.

You have to pay way more for a home than I ever had to pay for.

And that is really horrible and rough.

And I will encourage you in whatever way I can.

I'll try to help you out in whatever way I can.

We don't say those things ever.

We don't do that stuff.

And that's the thing that I find the most distressing in the church, broadly speaking today, is we have these and it's like they are fields, white for the harvest.

All of these people that would be open to everything that we say, everything that we teach how to be a Christian, what it means, what the faith is, what the Bible says about every single thing, these guys would listen to us and hear us if we would just say, yeah, you are getting a rough deal.

That is bad.

Right.

But we don't.

We don't.

And for all the reasons we've talked about, right.

You're not allowed to say those things.

Right.

You're not allowed to have any sympathy for young men because that would mean you're going to have to reject some of the things in our prevailing civilization, religion.

Yeah.

Nailed it.

Because that's the thing.

This is why I've tweeted before that the reason why we don't tell young men who they are is because you have to tell young women who they are.

Right.

If you want to tell a young man what he's, what he's for, you gotta.

That involves women.

We can't tell women what they're for, so we can't tell anybody what anyone's for because we don't want to offend the young girls.

And I've been saying, like, okay, so the gospel dies at the 20.

At the foot of a 22 year old girl.

Great.

Okay, cool.

Right?

And that's, and that's really what it comes down to.

Plus the grandfather also, by the way, was able to support his wife on one income.

And now men are, they're having to compete with women.

And like, this might be a really unpopular truth, but let me tell you, in an office environment, a 22 year old girl at the peak of her attractiveness is going to have a lot more success, especially with older male executives.

Then will a young 22 year old man who isn't at the peak of his abilities just yet, but who's a threat?

So now you're having this thing like, oh, young women are buying more homes than young men.

Well, yeah.

You want to know why that is?

Because they're getting the promotions thrown at them.

Because young guys are a threat to the guys in power, but young girls aren't.

No one can address these.

No one can address these things.

And so, yeah, young men are angry.

And I really appreciate that you said that there's this rising pagan right wing movement because I do battle with some of these guys.

The hellenist is a good example.

There's a bunch of them out there.

They're all talking about these pre christian civilizations, and they all hate on Jesus as some rabbi and all this different stuff.

And they're like, they're welcoming these men in.

And the reason why men are going to them is because, as you say, pastors aren't offering them anything.

They won't offer them anything.

Like, sorry, kid, you're the price to pay for my big church.

Sorry, young man, I'm going to sacrifice you for my big church.

I'm paying more than that.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, you're losing your entire society and.

Yeah, and, yeah, I mean, that's so much of it.

Like, yeah, why is a pagan rite coming to.

I don't think it's going to dominate or anything like that, or could, but why are men attracted to it?

Because.

Exactly.

You're going to find answers to these questions that no one is even willing to ask.

And these guys provide answers, and they provide a lot of not good answers to them, a lot of very bad answers.

And it's hilarious in a sad sense that these church leaders will refuse to get this stuff and their denominations and their churches will die as a result of it.

So much of it is the same high time preference thing where it's like, the getting's good right now.

We can let these young guys die on the vine and flee the church.

But it's also interesting, too.

I think Aaron Redd had something about this recently about young women leaving the church that they're leaving in droves.

And that too is interesting because that's the whole kitten caboodle for the modern evangelical world, is we got to have the women.

We got to have the young women.

We got.

The young women will be okay.

If they're even leaving, then you got nothing.

And so, yeah, I think the altar of pragmatism within the church is collapsing in on itself anyway.

It's not going to sustain itself for very long.

If you don't have marriages and families and children, you've got nothing for the future.

And so I think in the, in the near term future, the churches that actively combat trash world and teach people, hey, this is the historic way of living that your ancestors lived in for millennia.

And it's good.

It's hard.

It's really hard in the world that we have right now, but it's good.

It's very good.

And creating communities that can flourish even in the midst of trash world where people can, people can have families, where you have young people, children being raised to have families consciously.

I mean, this is the thing.

My daughters are.

My oldest daughter is still only nine years old, but we're constantly telling them and just like, subtly reinforcing is right.

We want you to grow up to be a mom.

We want you to grow up to be a mom.

I mean, some of the things that reinforce it is we just keep having babies and they're around babies all the time, and they don't.

I mean, some of it is the boomer generation.

They had like, two, maybe three children on average, and nobody grew up with little babies around them.

You weren't a teenager.

The older kids weren't teenagers.

And there's a little baby that's having his diaper change.

I had one sister that was two years younger than me, and the first time I held a newborn baby in my entire life was one week before my own son was born.

And I'm like, I don't even know what to do here.

Is his head gonna flop over if I hold him the wrong way?

I was terrified.

I was, like, shaking, like, I don't know.

I'd never held a baby before in my entire life.

And so, I mean, an entire generation that grows up not being around in their youth, around babies, that has massive sociological implications, because the young women, it's the same thing.

They're terrified of them, too.

What do I do now?

I have this person to take care of, and now I can't go out and have fun.

I have to be changing diapers all day and nursing and all, and that my life is revolving around this baby.

But if you, your entire life, you're just around other children, little babies, constantly, it's not terrifying.

It's like, oh, this is normal.

People have babies and they take care of them.

And when you're older, you're helping mom out, you maybe change your younger sibling's diaper.

And that's not a weird thing at all.

When you grow up in that, then it's an easy transition to, okay, now I'm 20 years old, and I want to get married and have a family and have my own children.

And so, I mean, some of it is just enculturating, things like that.

And being in communities where you have lots of babies, like going to a church where you hear the sound of five month old baby crying.

There's some churches where you don't ever hear that.

I mean, big ones with thousands of people, they'll have a nursery.

You go have the little babies off here, and they'll have children's services.

And some of it is just that, where you have the children cut out of the life of the body entirely, which is a huge problem, but it reflects how our society thinks.

Adult time is what matters.

The freedom of adults getting to do their thing and listen to a lecture and go to a concerte on Sunday morning.

That's what really matters.

But the reality is, no, if you have little children, sometimes they make noise and babies, and they're all together and you're just used to it.

And you realize this is normal life for all of humanity throughout all of time, is to be around really old people, brand new babies and everything in between.

Then it's not so terrifying then it's not so scary to.

To have a family and raise children.

And so, yeah, we've been trying to teach our daughters, especially our sons, we want to raise them to be men, to have jobs, and to fight for things that are good and right and, of course, for our daughters, too.

But to understand the uniqueness of what God has given them, that he has given you this precious ability to bring new life into the world, and you get to use that.

You get to go be married and have a family that's wonderful and a beautiful thing.

I don't think that's a thing that even some people may be hearing this.

Maybe people that hate you and me hearing this is like, whoa, this guy is indoctrinating his children to be breeders.

Uh, and it's like, mind.

You literally read my mind.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like, I heard that objection.

Yeah, I am.

Okay.

You're indoctrinating your children to be whores and homosexuals.

So why don't.

We're all indoctrinating children, right?

I mean, really, that's.

That's it, though.

I mean, that's the thing is, right?

You are.

I mean, even if it isn't, it.

Isn't that so extreme?

Right?

You.

You're indoctrinating your daughter to.

Even if you think that promiscuity is bad and sex outside of marriage is bad, you're telling her to do all the same things that the 20 something year old woman that's on Tinder and bumble and cycling through the Rolodex of men, you're saying, go live the exact same way as that girl, but just don't have sex.

That's what you're instilling in her.

And we don't want to do that.

We consciously are saying, no, we don't want that for our daughters.

We're going to prevent whatever is within our power to hold the forces of trash world at bay for them.

Because I want to have grandchildren.

I want my daughters to have a good life.

I don't want them to go through that pain and sorrow.

I see the 30 something year old women who are despairing because the biological clock ran out.

I don't.

That's.

That's.

They are a warning to young girls.

Don't do this.

Don't do this.

Oh, all the.

All the eggs that you stored away that are frozen.

None of them are.

You can't, you can't get pregnant now at, at 39.

Oh.

Science lied to you and said you'd be able to have this like that.

That's horrible.

That's awful.

I don't want that for them.

Right.

And that's, that's part of, that's part of what it means to be a father is you have young children, teenage children, even young 20 something year old children that.

I mean, I remember what it was like to be a 20 something year old.

And I was an idiot.

I was really stupid.

And because I hadn't learned, I hadn't matured and discovered the world and learned hard lessons that I've learned over the last 20 years.

And the role of a parent, the role of a father is to have gone through all of those things, reached this maturity, have the wisdom that comes with age, and to be able to tell your children, no, actually, this thing you think might be good, it's actually really bad, and don't pursue that.

That's good.

That's actually good and wise.

The 18 year old girl just getting whatever she wants, or the 22 year old girl just getting whatever she wants, because she's been, she's been engineered.

Her mind, her soul, everything has been engineered to pursue this kind of life.

You have to prevent that from happening.

That's why it is.

And it's not even through their own fault.

It's not like they were born just to live this way.

Someone made them that way.

Somebody wanted them to think, this is the good life.

And so you have to.

You have to protect them from these things.

That's what it means to be a father.

And so, yeah, I think that just along those lines, you have these duties that a father has in our age that have always existed for fathers to protect their children.

But it's taken on a completely different aspect, where if you're living in a culture that more or less is in line with the natural order of the world that God made, you don't have to protect them from insane stuff because nobody else believes insane stuff.

There are things you have to protect them from, but now you have to protect them from a culture that is encroaching on their minds and their souls and every part of them to want to live in this destructive way.

And it seems good.

It seems like it's healthy and it'll be pain free and that it's beneficial and it's not.

And you have to be able to see down the road things that your children won't I mean, I look at it like, when I was 17 years old, a bunch of my buddies on the football team were starting to get tattoos, right?

Like, one of them, he got this really dumb incredible Hulk tattoo.

I mean, now it looks dumb, but when I was 17, like, that looks cool.

I want something like that.

And I go to my parents, right?

And, you know, you got to get permission from your parents to when you're 17.

And I'm like, I want to get a tattoo.

You know, can I.

Can I get one, please, please, please?

And they're like, no, that's stupid.

You don't want to do that.

You know, you're gonna mark up your body, and it's gonna look hideous.

You're a 17 year old.

You're an idiot.

You don't.

I mean, they didn't say that, but that's more or less the vibe of what they're saying.

And, like, they protected me from that.

Cause, like, now I'm sure whatever I would have gotten would look really stupid, and I have to live with that the rest of my life.

And this isn't, you know, I'm not like, attack.

I know you got tattoos, will, so I'm not attacking.

That's not an attack.

It's not an attack.

But it's like, that's the job of parents, to protect their children from really stupid decisions that they would make that will last them the rest of their lives.

And now I was really mad at them when I was 17, but now I look back on it, and I think, boy, I'm really happy that the same thing happened when I was 17.

I tried to join the army, and the recruiter comes.

I had a really good Asvab score.

And so he kept calling and calling because most of the people that would take the AsVab couldn't pass it.

He's calling me every day and taking me out to dinner and all these things.

Comes to finally sign the paperwork.

My dad was in the army, so he's like, yes, my son's going to follow in my footsteps.

This is great.

And I'm about to sign my name on the dotted line.

I'm like, my mom just breaks down weeping.

And I was like, because the recruiter, they just lie to you about everything, right?

But the recruiter is like, you got a 99 in the AsVab.

You can have any job you want.

And I'm like, I want to be infantry.

I want to be a ranger.

I want to try to be special forces.

And they're like, yeah, you can do it.

You can do it, man.

And so, like, it wasn't, like, so my mom knew, like, andrew's not gonna.

He's not gonna be like, the supply guy, you know, fixing a truck somewhere way back in the rear, right?

He's gonna be wanting to go to combat, right?

And he's gonna die or have his arm blown off or whatever.

And she just breaks down weeping, weeping and weeping, like, please, just go to college.

Just go to college and wait to join the army until after college or go to ROTC.

Just don't do this.

Don't do it.

And I pushed the paper back and I said, all right, I can't do it today.

Maybe some other time.

So I never joined, never enlisted, never joined the army.

And then I go through college and my views on foreign policy and the Iraq war, and things began to change, so I never joined afterward.

But nevertheless, I look at that and it's like, yeah, she probably saved my life.

She probably saved my.

I mean, sometimes I look back and think, man, it probably would have been fun, though.

It probably would have been a lot of fun.

Yeah.

I mean, I would have some cool stories, but no, she made, I think, a good decision in that moment for me.

And that's what parents are supposed to do.

And I think about it along those lines just as far as the duty of fathers today, living in trash world is, there are way more things like that to protect your children from.

And it starts when they're really, really young that this stuff just creeps in and attacks, and the kids, they won't understand.

My friends watch this show on Netflix.

Why can't I watch it?

It's like, we don't.

We don't watch that stuff.

No, we're not going to watch those things.

And, of course, you're never going to be able to have your children live in a bubble.

They're always going to feel like FOMo.

They're always going to feel fear of missing out.

These other people get to do this thing.

And so the enemy that you're constantly combating as a parent today is FOMo.

It's like, why don't I get to do these things?

Why don't I get the stuff the other kids get?

Why don't they get to do this?

Why not me?

And it's hard.

It's hard.

And the battle is mostly within yourself to stick to your guns, just to be like, no, we're not doing that.

No, no, and so some of these fights, some of the chopping down of idols and things like that are totally within yourself to have the will and the resolve to stand even within your own household for what is good and right.

Because, like, little kids, or even, and certainly like teenagers, they don't understand this stuff.

They don't understand why these things are bad.

But you're an adult, you do.

And so you have to draw hard lines.

And a lot of people don't want to do that because it's way easier just to be like, ah, let them have.

Let them watch it.

You know, I'm busy.

I got stuff to do.

Just let them watch.

Let them watch Mister beast on YouTube.

Who cares?

You know?

And it's like he's got the tranny, you know, right there on camera with it.

You really want your kids watching that?

Like, no, no, man.

Like, don't do that.

Just delete the app from.

From your phone or your tv.

Like, don't even let him near it.

Yeah, have them.

Have them go outside.

You know, give them.

Give your.

Give your little boy some knives to, like, to carve sticks with or whatever.

Give them something dangerous to do.

Like, you'd be better off.

Let him just throw knives out of the woods, then play around with that stuff.

That is the great irony.

We're happy to insulate our children from any kind of danger that they might face.

Like, physical danger.

We'll wrap them in bubble wrap and prevent them from ever facing any kind of, especially boys physical danger of any kind, but spiritual danger.

We're like, eh, whatever, you know, they're kids.

Let's let kids be kids.

It's like, no, I'd rather give my, my eight year old a chainsaw to play with than mess around with that stuff.

I think an eight year old will have a better sense of the danger of a chainsaw than they will the danger of a Netflix series.

Right?

Yes, they won't.

It's colorful and it's bright and everyone's smiling.

Versus a chainsaw, it's like, this is very sharp.

I can demonstrate how it will cut you, but kids can't see how these being indoctrinated with these ideas will cut them in other ways.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

And I think this also speaks to the importance of a father, because a father, a strong, confident father who's leading his household is the one who says, no, it's not mom's job to hold the final no, it's dad's job.

Right?

And so if mom has to always be holding the final no, I don't think women are meant to be that way because as we talked about, they tend to be more like, get along, more agreeable is the Jordan Peterson word, whereas men tend to be more hierarchical.

The buck stops here.

I am taking responsibility of this household.

My children are not going to watch this.

And I have spoken.

Right.

And when you weaken fathers, there's no one to say that, yeah, I see.

This in my own, I mean, my own household.

I don't even ever think about it.

But all the time, the kids will ask my wife, can we do this?

Can we do that?

And my wife will say, no.

Your dad said, no, you can't do that.

She'll just put it all on me, and I'm happy to be the bad guy all the time.

I don't even think about it.

It's like, yeah, no, I'll be the bad guy.

I'll be the one that they're angry at.

Then they'll come to me, dad, dad, dad.

No, no.

Get out of here.

Leave me alone.

You're not going to get to do that.

No, no, we're not doing that.

And that's the end of it.

It's hard, especially because if you have this environment that is very egalitarian and the role of the father is not to be the head of the household, and parenting is a partnership and all of that kind of stuff.

Well, then you don't have a dad.

That's just, I'm in charge when we're gonna do what I say, and we're not gonna do that.

Well, if that.

If that's not the role that you have, if you're kind of, you know, the co parent of your children, you can't do those things.

You can't say, no.

I've said, no, we're not doing that.

And I mean that.

And that starts, like, well, before you have kids.

I mean, that starts when you, when you're, when you're dating and engaged and everything, it's like, no, I'm going to be in charge of things.

And, I mean, some of it is like the manosphere language of the s test and passing those where you're just like, no, not doing that.

Oh, you're going to break up with me?

Okay, whatever, fine.

And there has to be, men have to have this confidence and this purpose and this mission where they're following it, and your wife has to be the partner in that mission that you have.

It can't be.

We have maybe separate missions and we're going to try to work together.

It's like, no, it's your mission.

You're the one leading.

She's coming with you, alongside you and supporting you, encouraging you.

And then if you have a family like that, well, then it's not hard.

I can't imagine what it would be like in my own household if every single decision I make, I have to persuade my wife and have a fight with her about everything.

If the kids want to watch some show that I think is bad, I have to then argue with her about that.

It's not good for her either.

She doesn't want to spent time thinking through those things and fighting those battles.

That's a huge waste of time.

It's much easier for her to just say, yeah, dad says, no, that's it.

And you can hear.

You can think about the people just hearing that they're thinking, that's patriarchal.

It's patriarchal, and it's toxic masculinity.

And his wife is a slave.

Can you believe that?

And it's like, I don't know how you live your life, but that would be horrible.

That would be agony to have to not be able to lead.

A friend of mine, he just got married, and I did the wedding, and it was a lot of fun doing their wedding, did marriage counseling for them and on all of the pastoral stuff.

And normally, normally when I do weddings, I just pick out the passage that I'm going to preach at the wedding, and I do it.

But I knew them.

I knew how they tick.

And I'm like, why don't you guys pick out the passage?

What do you want me to preach on at your wedding?

Let me know right before and I'll start working on it.

They pick ephesians 522 33, and then they're like, go as hard hitting as you want with this, right?

Say whatever you want.

Be as offensive as you want to be.

And I'm like, are you sure?

And they're like, yep.

And I'm like, all right, I understand the assignment.

And so I just preached on it.

And, I mean, one of the things I pointed out is that, like, even the, even the people who are totally bought into our completely messed up society and reject distinctions between men and women and their roles and everything else, even they, if you have a married couple and you hear a window break in your house and your house is getting broken into, even the people that are hyper feminists and pro gay and everything else, if the dude told his wife, honey, go check that out, even they would be filled with revulsion at this man sending his wife to go deal with the burglar.

We understand that at this deep level, even despite all of the social engineering, that men have responsibility.

Men have.

They have a responsibility to go die for their wives if need be.

We get that, and we'll put that responsibility on men.

But we refuse to have that responsibility correspond to the same degree of authority.

Right?

So if your job is to go die, your job is to go provide your job.

You have all these duties, all these responsibilities that are on the Mendez.

Then we turn around and say, look, you don't have any authority here at all.

I'm in charge, not you.

You just have a duty and a responsibility.

Well, we have a term for a person that has all the responsibility and no authority.

There's a term for that.

It's called a slave.

That's a slave.

A person that only has responsibility and no authority is a slave.

And that's what we've made men into.

And so if you want.

You know, if you want him to go get the burglar, right.

Then you need to go listen to what he says at the same time.

Right?

You need to say, all right, honey, we're not going to buy 15 more pairs of shoes.

That's enough.

And you need to say, okay, right?

He has authority.

Right.