Ideology U

It is becoming clearer that universities, for the most part, have been hijacked by Leftism. They have been hijacked intellectually, and increasingly hijacked physically.
There is not going to be one silver bullet solution to this issue, but it will take several approaches. Encouraging alternative paths than college is certainly one of the solutions. Universities also need to be transformed from within and without.
Anything other than a hard science like chemistry and math is going to be prone to be heavily affected by the ideology by those who publish and who teach. This does not mean that there is not academic value in examining social phenomena or in trying to apply scientific discipline to social studies. But it does mean that an ideology-free social science is a myth. It is un-achievable even if it is noble to strive for it. A “soft” science is soft precisely because it is prone to be affected by the ideology of the person conducting the study.
The problem is when a university only favors only one ideology while being in denial that it is favoring it. This is what happens when the university operates in the falsehood that the unattainable ideal of non-ideological social science is their academic reality. The result of this myopia is that a university allows itself to be hijacked by a dominant ideology.
When it comes to gender studies departments that are strongholds of feminist leftism on university campuses that poison college-going young people, a university should lose its federal funding and its donor support unless it either dumps these departments or creates ideological balance between left and non-left positions.

Feminism vs Biblical Justice

As secular feminism has pressed the church, much of the church has caved into the moral framework of secular feminism resulting the distortion of true Christianity into Feminist Christianity.  The church must work to confront the distortions that have occurred within the church as it works to understand how the forces causing that distortion are at work in the world at large.   Those who correctly identify and meet the challenge that the church is facing will be those who clarify the truth of Scripture against the distortions of feminism so that the church will be able to remain firm in the truth.

Rabid 4^th wave Feminist Social Justice Warrior culture is a weed with very deep roots in our wider culture.  While there may be examples of patently ridiculous SJW behavior that has been the subject of “SJW Fails” videos online, the breadth and depth of the 4^th wave feminist SJW mentality should not be underestimated.  The vitroilic 4th wave feminism of today is a direct heir of feminism past and of a host of related secular philosophies.  If you are pastor it has likely permeated your church to one degree or another.

By attributing the misery of women to the “patriarchy”, feminists have not been honest with the moral agency of women and the complicity of women in the world in all of its warts and flaws past and present.   So feminists have been promoting gynocracy and the moral infantilizing of women in the name of promoting their “rights”, holding women as less responsible than they actually are relative to men.

When Jesus met the Samaritan women at the well, he was engaged in an act of social justice that is consistent with Scripture.  Jesus broke down a social barrier between Jews and Samaritans that needed to be broken in order to advance the gospel, to advance the worship of God in Spirit and in Truth.

SJW’s frame the past as that of their victimization at the hands of the group they hold responsible, and believe that this is only righted by victimizing the victimizers.  They have granted themselves the presumed moral superiority to dispense vengeance in the name of “justice”.  So while the fruit of Biblical social justice is the advancement of the Gospel and the Kingdom of God, the fruit of godless SJW social justice is further injustice.

SJW’s have an ends justify the means mentality to advance their ungodly and unholy concept of justice, which ends up sacrificing the very core of justice in its purest and simplest sense; that of judicial impartiality.  As surely as Scripture condemns dishonest weights and measures in the marketplace, so too does it condemn dishonest weights and measures in regard to jurisprudence.  It is a very basic and very ancient concept of morality and law. This is why the church needs to stand with those who speak out against the feminism that has permeated the judiciary that is more and more treating men and women with different weights and measures in court.

Feminism and the Shame Scepter

Shame is a reality of every culture.  It expresses the norms and values of a culture.  It can be expressed overtly or covertly and with varying degrees of harshness, but it is always there.

When someone publically calls out others for “body shaming” them, they are not truly against the use of shame.  Rather they want to counter-shame those are trying to shame them for having an unattractive/non-normal body.  It is an attempt to re-direct the values of the culture away from the value of maintaining attractive appearance, athleticism and health and toward the value of being sensitive toward the feelings of others for their non-conforming bodies.

When a group of people has the power to shame others, they have what I will call the “shame scepter”.   When a woman dresses immodestly in public, she is holding the shame scepter that feminism has given her.  Her power to shame those who would call her out on being immodest is more powerful than those who would try to shame her for being immodest.  It happens in a society where the value for her freedom of choice and sexual freedom is more important than considering the sexual power that her body has on others.   The shame scepter goes where the values of the culture go and shifts where the values of the culture shift.

Feminists are particularly skilled at wielding shame and have held the shame scepter for many decades. Feminists deny male and female nature, and at the same time never call out women for being too sensitive toward their real and felt needs, only men.  Feminists will shame men for being insensitive to women when men stand in the way of women’s felt needs.  At the same time feminists will shame men for being too sensitive when men stand up for their felt needs.    So feminists use the shame scepter to simultaneously deny masculinity and exploit masculinity into supporting feminism.

The latest incident with theWonder Woman movie was the theater provoking a reaction from certain men, and the feminist left using the shame scepter that they wield back on those men.

Feminism and the Quest for Superman

During the height of 3^rd wave feminism in the ‘90’s there was a song by Paula Cole, Where have All the Cowboys Gone whose lyrics said “…where is my John Wayne, where is my prairie sun, where have all the cowboys gone?”.   In this song “Cowboy” and “John Wayne” are codes for men, real men of a bygone age.  The song is asking “where have all the men gone?”  The answer is that feminists, including Paula Cole, drove the real men away, and left a landscape where only simps, strivers and supermen can occupy.

Underneath rosy sounding ideas of equality, Feminism is premised on the inevitable failure of men toward women, and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.    Feminism encourages women to be masculine, physically tough, able to provide for themselves, and verbally aggressive.  Underneath the red-herring idea of “equality” is the underlying idea that women need to be all these things because they can’t rely on men.  

It is part of God’s design that men desire to provide, protect and lead in a marriage.  God has designed women to desire those things in men, and admire men who are able to do those things and have contempt for men who don’t.  Part of the lie of feminism is that women can be reliant on themselves and at the same time have emotional space left over for a man to occupy that will be truly satisfying to both her and the man.  It is part of the lie that a woman can have a hard-charging career, while delegating childcare duties to a nanny and/or house-husband and still fully satisfy all that is involved in being mom.

There are many things in life that will help you survive but will inhibit you from thriving.  If you were to save every penny and never go out on the town, it would inhibit your ability to relate to people which is part of what is necessary to make real money.  If you were to stay off the snow slopes in fear of hurting your knee, you would never enjoy snowboarding.   The same principle applies to feminism – the actions that feminist women take to survive men failing them keep them from enjoying the best of who men are designed to be for them.

After a feminist woman has tried to make herself tough as nails, there is no real room in her life for a man to occupy.  And so you have feminist women in conflict with themselves – the feminist in a feminist woman and the woman in a feminist woman seek diametrically opposed things, and the things that will satisfy the woman in the woman won’t satisfy the feminist and vice versa.  And only a superman can save her by sweeping her off her feet –by being so emotionally and financially dominant that she backs down from her feminism and allows the man to provide, protect and lead like a traditional husband.

Any other type of man who tries to occupy the paltry emotional space over to him will be a man who she does not truly admire.  The latter man is either a simp who has been brainwashed by feminism into thinking that he should occupy a smaller space than was intended for a man to occupy, OR he is a striver who has taken on the misguided challenge of thinking that he can be a superman to her when he cannot.   As for the simp, she will never admire him and will engage in emotional affairs or worse with more with men who enter her life who appear more manly. As for the striver who believes he eventually can over-come the feminism in the woman to occupy the place of the traditional man – he is destined to resent and be in conflict with the woman when it is clear that he is not superman.

I remember when Cheryl Crow was with Lance Armstrong years ago back before it was known that he was doping.  Cheryl Crow said at the time that she was now going to allow herself to submit to a man.  I thought to myself at the time that for the many modern, feminist women out there like Cheryl Crow, you would have be a Lance Armstrong – a superman -- to be worthy of being treated as a traditional husband.  Of course, the story of Lance Armstrong is of a man who burned his relationships, reputation, fortune and quite possibly his health trying to turn himself from man into superman.

It is also telling that when 2^nd wave feminism entered the mainstream of our culture in the ‘70’s the G.I Joe dolls for boys went from being normally proportioned men to being super-muscular men.   Men’s desire to be superman in fantasy when they cannot be in reality is proportional to the feminism in society at large.

When a whole society is organized around feminism, our institutions weaken men while encouraging women to be independent and tough to protect themselves from weak men, while teaching men that something is defective with them unless they are supermen who can sweep feminist women off their feet.  

Radical Honesty and Wisdom: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Fundamentalism re Biblical Sexuality

There is a difference between truth and wisdom. It is the difference between being right and doing what is right in the right way. It is the difference between knowing the truth and knowing how to communicate it in a powerful, relevant way.
You can gain knowledge of the truth reading Scripture, but you will not have the wisdom to know how convey it properly if you are not a student of your environment and your audience. You must be able to recognize when you have a poverty of wisdom and bring it to the feet of God, which requires being "radically honest" with all of your doubts, questions and concerns in the presence of God. It is in the cauldron of this struggle that one is able find wisdom in Spirit and in Truth.
Both Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul, guided by the Holy Spirit, demonstrated mastery of both the truth and wisdom in all their interactions. In addition to being students of Scripture and following the Holy Spirit, Jesus and Paul were also careful students of the culture around them and were both radically honest before God.
I see Fundamentalism as a movement that has been ever shrinking within Church and the wider culture because it has found a false security in merely being able to say that this or that truth is "in the Bible". Fundamentalism has often held up Scripture as something that should be above wresting and questioning, when wresting and questioning before God is necessary to gain wisdom.
Having an environment that values the truth in wisdom means encouraging "radical honesty" before God and humility toward Scripture but not demanding blind obedience to Scripture at the expense of wrestling with it. Particularly as it relates to Biblical sexuality, I want to be part of a movement that takes up the banner of Biblical truth on sexuality that Fundamentalism sought to protect and advance while avoiding where Fundamentalism failed at wisdom. I want to be "radically honest" before God, and be a student the culture to know how to communicate the truth of Biblical sexuality in a powerful and relevant way.

Immodesty and the Feminist Code of Chivalry

It has been 10 years since I wrote A Crisis of Modesty in the Evangelical Church, to confront the sexually immodesty clothing that had become prevalent in women in places of work and at church.  In this writing I addressed the issue of chivalry and its relationship to the visual sex/lust-positive culture. 

I believe that feminism has not so much killed chivalry in our modern age, but rather it has driven it underground for it to emerge in a mutated form that expresses its deep pagan roots. There is a actually a feminist form of chivalry that has been further advanced by fourth wave feminism.

In Western Europe, there have been both pagan and Christian strains within chivalry, encoding deeper, underlying ideas of men's protective responsibilities toward woman within symbolic cultural gestures and codes of behavior.   Chivalry was forged from two different strains of Western European paganism: the Vikings who raped and pillaged and the Celts who saw women as beings with special access to the spirit world. 

Chivalry was conceived by the Catholic Church during the crusades as a way to channel the warrior energy of Viking men to operate under the banner of Christendom to combat the incursion of the forces Islam into Jerusalem and into Europe.   The code of the "holy warrior" involved the protection of women and children.  

As chivalry extended culturally to Christians who had Celtic roots, chivalry also absorbed and redirected ancient Celtic paganism, where women, along with bodies of water, were considered to have a special connection with the spirit world.  This is reflected in the Lady of the Lake in the Arthurian legend. 

Chivalry has also had the characteristic of conferring nobility on those who bestow chivalry and those who receive chivalry.  Chivalry in the time of Louis the XIV among the nobles was expressed with an elaborate set of mannerisms way to distinguish the noble from the non-noble (the idea of a noble class of people from royal/noble blood lines is pagan, even though there are have been Christians who have attempted to give it a Christian gloss). 

The early and mid-20th Century era chivalry of paying the bill on a date and holding open the door for a woman, among other things, were social conventions that symbolized the Christian worldview of man was the head of woman as Christ was the head of the church.  

When modern feminism arose to reject 20th century expressions of chivalry, it only rejected the Christian side of chivalry, but not the deep, ancient pagan side of it. The Celtic idea that women had special access to the spirit world had mutated into the modern feminist idea that women are imbued with special access to the enlightened, civilizing wisdom of the universe.  

While the Christian idea of chilvalry saw masculinity as a source of leadership and protection, Feminism sees it as a source of danger to be protected from, and as something that is only redeemed when it is submitted to the cause of feminism.  Men, being naturally more brutish, gain their enlightenment and access to civilized society by operating in a posture that is simultaneously protective and deferential toward women.

So the new code of feminist chivalry is for men to be protective of women within the parameters of what feminism has ideologically defined as safe and comfortable. For men this means approving of feminism, opposing those who challenge feminism, and being a a facilitator of the wishes of women, giving them latitude to do and say whatever they wish. If you are a man who adheres to the feminist code of chivalry, you are rewarded with access to women. 

Men who do not adhere to the feminist code of chivalry are targets of feminist shaming tactics. Feminists will try to emasculate a man who speaks out against feminism by declaring him to be "insecure" in his masculinity. Fourth wave feminism has developed a new set of man-shaming terms that are justified as being counter-patriarchical, counter-chauvenistic, counter-shaming: terms that include "man-splaining", "micro-aggressions", and other ultra-subjective ideas of sexual harassment. If you are a man who calls out the modern women regarding sexually immodest clothing, you are guilty of “body shaming“, "slut shaming”, not having a uterus, and/or simply being a creep.  

Feminist chivalry places women as the new nobility, and brazen displays of visual sexually immodesty is one of the privileges of being a member of this nobility.  Anyone who is attempting to address the issue of modesty, even in the church, will likely encounter the resistance of the feminist code of chivalry that promotes and enforces the nobility status of women. 

The Kingdom of God vs the Post-Genderists

We were designed to comprehend God and our relationship to God as his children in the context of us being mind, body, and soul as we relate to God in Spirit. Our sexuality, as an integrally woven part of our being, was designed to intersect with all of these aspects of our being.
That is why Scripture has strict guidelines so that the sexual aspect of our being accomplishes its purpose of playing a role in uniting us with God himself, even as it unites us across male and female and brings flavor to our human existence.
God is not merely interested in saving the soul, but in redeeming our whole being. And so the redemption of our sexual identity is part of that salvation now and forever. Even in the new heaven and new earth we will have bodies that will be recognizable as men and women, even as the resurrected Jesus was recognizable as a man to those who he met before his ascension.
Even while there will not be the act of sex in the new heaven and the new earth leading to pro-creation, our identities as men and women will operate into eternity and have meaning into eternity. As Revelations teaches that every tribe and nation will be represented in heaven, so human distinctives ordained by God will be represented in our redeemed bodies including the first human distinctive created and ordained by God – the God created sexes of male and female operating in the God-ordained genders of man and woman.
And so in the Kingdom of God, we are designed to find joy in how we were made in God’s image in the sexes of male and female operating in the genders of man and woman. So it is essential that we appreciate the sexual identity that God has endowed us and submit to the understanding of our sexuality that God has endowed us with in his Word.

The heterosexual man operating in sexual sin seeks validation for his manhood, not in God and in the joy of being made in God's image, but in sexual conquests.  This "player/womanizer" man and another man who feels he is something other than heterosexual both share a crisis in their sexual identity, the latter being in a more advanced state of identity crisis than the former.

The neo-gnostic post-genderists in the church like Paris Jennel Williams would bow in moral deference to the secular, cultural marxist, and sexual leftist culture allowing its “wisdom” to over-ride Scripture. They would attempt to put a Christian gloss over the leftist agenda to remove gender by also somehow claiming to care about sexual holiness without caring about gender holiness. In the name of protecting sexual identity as something "too important" to define, they have actually anointed themselves as being important enough to try to redefine sexuality away from how Scripture has defined it.

What Paris and her ilk don’t understand that sexual unholiness and gender unholiness are fruit from the same tree, both related to each other, both feeding into each other. Sexual unholiness expresses a crisis of sexual identity in its more nascent stage that becomes gender unholiness in a more advanced stage of a seared conscience. It is only by being humble to what Scripture teaches about sex and gender holiness that our sexual identities are redeemed as God intended them to be. 

What does it mean for the church to have the confidence and clarity to reject the neo-gnostic post-genderists, to speak into to the confusion of sexual identity in all of the ways that it manifests itself? I want see the church find its way out of its current confusion to enthusiastically and passionately present the truth of Scripture as the answer to the crisis of sexual identity of our time.