Elspeth is on fire this morning.

There is a subtle but unspoken line of thinking that permeates modern culture, and it persists even though there is ample evidence to the contrary. I call it the myth of feminine innocence. A quick reading of Proverbs 5 supports my assertion that this is a modern, feminist concept. To be the women we claim to be, to raise godly daughters and strong, free thinking sons, we have to face the truth which has gone largely ignored, particularly in the church, where truth is supposed reign.

A wife has an affair, and the husband is asked what he did (or failed to do) to make her so unhappy that she looked for “emotional” fulfillment outside the relationship. Women dissolve marriages that their husband want to save and are allowed to take the children and move so far that their father can never hope to maintain a meaningful relationship.

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I’ve also developed an aversion to our society’s penchant for undermining men everywhere we turn: from the media, to the counselor’s office, even from the pulpits. If we want to stem the tide, we need to be more vigilant about the words we speak and the things we tolerate.

It isn’t enough to silently sit by and watch, wondering what will become of the young men of the next generation. However small my contribution to the good and godly men under assault, I want to make it. Not just in terms of speaking out against liberal ideology, but also so-called conservative ideology if it serves to undercut the role of a man as the leader of his family.

I Well yeah. I commented elsewhere on what the church should do.

The Church however has two duties.
1. To exegetically preach, including the currently unpopular parts of the gospel. Not to sugar coat Hosea (Gomer is NOT approved of) and to teach Paul’s advice about family structure and the honour of being single.
2. To get older women to show younger women how to care for their children and love their husbands. In short, what Elspeth does at breathing grace, and a lot of the women in the Catholic Tradosphere like Sunshine Mary do, and Traditional Christianity did.

Chaz corrected me…

I agree that that’s what needs to happen. The problem is that pretty much any church that actually did that, plainly strongly and clearly would be empty inside of 6 months.

Look, folks there is a way that leads to life and a way that leads to death. Conservative feminism is still feminism. And that churchian version is a cargo cult.

“Churchianity” isn’t Christianity – it is a Cargo Cult. These women aren’t real Christians; their salvation is meaningless – they only attend church and claim to be Christians in order to achieve a goal i.e. find a spouse/erase the consequences of promiscuity. Their prayers are merely an elaborate summoning ritual – the same way South Pacific islanders would construct airplane effigies using sticks of bamboo. There’s a Richard Feyman quote about how avoid Cargo Cult-logic: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool”. Hopefully these women will realize – just because you call yourself a Christian, it doesn’t mean you are one.

We fool ourselves. If we find ourselves denigrating people because of who they are — by their class, their sex, their race, we are using a marxist based analysis (which is heresy) and we are breaking one of the rules of logic (Do not agree or disagree on the quality of the person: in Latin nihil ad hominem). Conservatives can fall into the habit of using class based analysis because it is being used by the other side — to canvass people, for instance.

We can easily appear blind to our faults. And for that we need our brothers, who out of mercy will tell us when we are going wrong… with ourselves, and with our families. We can then say the same thing with more gentleness within the families we belong to.

UPDATE

Corrected Link. And I should add that Butterfly (who apparently is riding out a frankenstorm right now) is making a lot of sense at present.