Month: September 2024

The Great Conflation: Romantic vs Christian Love

/ gynocentrism

By Paul Elam

“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her.” Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians, 5:25 (NASB 1995)

In my experience, this is one of the more commonly quoted bits of scripture. I’ve had it recited to me, sometimes more like thrown at me, by other Christian men when discussing marriage and relationships. It’s most often used when the conversation turns to contentious wives and how to handle them within scriptural canons.

To be frank, most of the time I’ve heard Ephesians 5 invoked, it came across as a copout; a convenience for men without boundaries or leadership qualities to explain their failure to stand up to their wives, or, and even worse, as a way to soften the spines of other men who might consider rebuking their wives for their contentious ways. In other words, it’s “go to” scripture for emasculating and emasculated men. I’ve seen no shortage of clergy who also fall into this category.

This unfortunate tendency to conflate love with weakness is pervasive and part and parcel to the feminized facsimile of Jesus now being peddled by mainstream churches. To tell the truth, I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the negative impact that this misinterpretation of scripture has visited on the church, on the expectations that Christian men and women have of each other, and on the institution of marriage itself.

But I’ll try.

And I’ll start with a shout-out to Javier, whose suggestion in the recent chat I started piqued my interest right away. I offer this with a linguistic caveat. I pledged when I started this series of lectures that I would avoid all of the foul language that accentuated my work prior to my Christian life. Out of respect to Javier, I’ll read the suggestion as written, and I quote:

“Consider a series where you take a typical thing a woman says, which is usually a shit test, and dissect the various ways to respond to it. Almost like a school for how to deal with women in a long-term relationship when they start to gradually introduce disrespect.”

Fantastic suggestion, but one that requires some rebranding. I will henceforth refer to the well known test, as a leadership test. I think this works out pretty well since that is actually what it is. Language problem resolved.

Also, I want to approach this from a slightly different angle than you’d normally expect from someone in the red pill space. Rather than tag this and future similar talks as how to overcome leadership tests, I’m calling this, “How to love your wife as Christ loved the church.”  Like the term, “leadership test,” I think “How to love your wife as Christ loved the church,” drills down much more succinctly on the designated topic.

But herein is the problem. The mind of the Western man and woman, Christian or not, is saturated and thoroughly corrupted with the romantic love narrative. When the conversation turns toward women and love, the Western mind automatically and reflexively conjures up images of romance, of giddy, undying infatuation, gallantry, chivalry, and worshipful praise, particularly of the woman. And I submit to you, dear listener, that this model of a man loving a woman doesn’t just evaporate when reading Ephesians 5:25. It continues to wield its influence, unabated, shaping our perceptions and our beliefs. It clouds our minds to what is actually meant by loving your wife as Christ loved the church. So, the task here is to first and foremost, long before we ever contemplate how to respond to disrespectful behavior, to clear out the romantic clutter from our worldview: to actively and purposefully reject the notion of romantic love when considering the love we have for a woman. We must, I tell you now, be unburdened by what has been… Sorry, I just couldn’t resist.

I should note here this confusion, this conflation of Christian love with romantic love, which I now call the “great conflation,” is a matter of historical record. After all, marriage based on romantic love is a recent development in anthropological terms. That kind of marriage, resting entirely on the insanity of infatuation, has only been happening for about 150 years. For countless thousands of years before that, marriages were arranged for the benefit of the families that were united by the institution. This involved, depending on circumstances, either dowries or bride price as the compensatory payoff for the union. It’s a topic I’ll be digging into an upcoming interview I’m doing with “This is Shah,” a man who has done significant investigation and research on the subject.

Suffice it to say for now that the Great Conflation did not go unnoticed. It’s been referenced in works by CS Lewis, but it was perhaps most succinctly nailed down by the great moral and religious thinker, Leo Tolstoy, who in 1888 wrote, and I quote, “I wish to open the eyes of all to the real nature and the tragic consequences of this substitution of romantic for Christian love.” End quote.

Keep in mind that that was written at the same time that romantically based marriage was coming into full swing as the latest social fad in the western world. Tolstoy wrote about what he was seeing play out in society, including the church, in real time. This may come as a surprise to those who have erroneously believed that marriage had always been a matter of romantic love. I would not hold that against them too harshly. Everyone operating in the romantic model is subject to such conditioned ignorance.

So, where does this leave us? Once we’ve cleared our view of romantic clutter, we need to answer the question, just how did Christ love the church?

Of course, the moment we actually do that, and attempt to answer the question honestly, it becomes abundantly clear that Christ’s love for the church wasn’t romantic. Christ didn’t send the church flowers. He didn’t take it on lavish vacations, or whisper sweet nothings in the church’s ear. He didn’t kneel before the church offering jewels. Indeed, he never tried to impress the church in any way. He never responded to a problem in the church with the pathetic surrender of, “yes, dear.” It was often quite the opposite.

Mind you, Christ loved the church, just as he loved all mankind. He gave his life for the church, just as he gave his life for you and me. In that light, the biblical lesson of that kind of love is clear where it concerns wives. We are to love them completely. We are willing to die for their protection. And, at least in my mind, this is where any similarity to the chivalrous model of romantic love begins and ends. The rest, every example of Christ’s love witnessed and recorded in scripture, takes a very different path.

The first thing we must acknowledge is that Christ’s love of the church was corrective.

In Revelations 2:14-16 Christ says to the Church of Pegamum;

“Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: There are some among you who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin so that they ate food sacrificed to idols and committed sexual immorality. Likewise, you also have those who hold to the teaching of the Nicolaitans. Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.”

Call me crazy, but that doesn’t sound like date night.

To the Church of Thyatira, Christ, while commending their love and service, nonetheless rebukes them for allowing Jezebel to lead believers into sexual immorality and idolatry. He urges them to repent. That is from Revelation 2:20-23.

Indeed, as we study the scripture in Revelations, we see churches lined up like ducks in a carnival shooting game as Christ draws a bead on them, one after another. For reference, see Revelations 2:4-5, Revelations 2:10, Revelations 3:1-3 and Revelations 3:15-19

Furthermore, in Matthew 21:12-13 and John 2:13-17 Jesus corrects the misuse of the temple when He drives out the money changers and merchants in a violent outburst of righteous indignation. He condemns the commercialization of worship and the way the temple, a house of prayer, had been turned into what He called a “den of robbers.”

In Matthew 23, Jesus delivers a series of “woes” to the Pharisees and teachers of the law, who represented the religious establishment. He corrects them for hypocrisy, legalism, and their focus on outward righteousness while neglecting justice, mercy, and faithfulness. Though not addressing the Christian church directly, this correction speaks to the same religious hypocrisy that now infects the modern Christian church.

Finally, we see in Matthew 16:23 the Rebuke of Peter, Christ’s personally designated rock on which the Christian church was built. For after Peter tries to prevent Jesus from going to the cross, Jesus sternly rebukes him by saying, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

There are countless other examples in scripture that fall along these lines. The Pauline Epistles amount to a collection of church spankings, with the Apostle Paul wielding the paddle through divine inspiration. I invite you now to find more examples in scripture that clearly demonstrate Christ’s love for the church and post them to the comments below.

And what are we to conclude from this about Christ’s love for the church? Well, it was obviously a corrective love. Christ held the church accountable for straying from its duties and sacred obligations. He insisted that the church adhere to its holy purpose, and was quick to rebuke the church when it didn’t.

That’s obviously not romantic love, as romantic love, by its very nature, elevates women above being rebuked. I think it’s fair to say that it elevates women above the church, and you can now witness the results of Tolstoy’s warning about that throughout Churches in the Western world.

Now, with this as the foundational understanding, we can begin to consider how to love our wives as Christ loved the church. We can now have meaningful dialogue about how to deal with the inescapable leadership tests that all women employ in their relationships with men. That is, we can do all that if we have examined, broken down and rejected the notion of romance, a tool of Satan designed to undermine both family and church.

That can be an ongoing challenge. Romance entered the family the same way that crack entered the inner city, and with largely the same deleterious effect. Like crack, romance is addictive. It’s pretty on the outside, it’s seductive and feels incredibly good for a while, but ultimately ends in ruin for most who take the bait and run with it.

As I continue this series of talks, I’ll do so assuming you’ve broken the code; that you’ve taken the red pill and have wiped away fairy tale mirage. You’re now free, sans romanticism’s unhealthy sentiments and ridiculous expectations.

Now that we have the foundation corrected, we can begin our work in earnest.

And with that, I will see you again with the next installment of the 425.

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The above video was first published at Paul Elam’s 425 Podcast, and is posted as text version by permission. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Q & A’ with Peter Wright – by Jana Xiolier

/ gynocentrism

Jana Xiolier posed the following questions to Peter Wright on July 4, 2024 .

Q. What do you think of our current culture and how it treats men?

A. In today’s culture, men are no longer appreciated for their presence or contributions and are routinely despised, especially when they fail to be of service to women and the State. This is because Western culture has lost its sense of family love – called storge by the Greeks – and in its place we now have atomised individuals driven by a narcissistic preoccupation with themselves; it’s a mindset that reduces men to mechanistic, utilitarian functionaries for the benefit of others, or to failures in that mandate.

Q. Do you feel fairly treated as a man?

A. If the benchmark for fairness is being treated with equal value, I think its reasonable to conclude that men are not – which I would say is demonstrated by the higher suicide rate of Western males. By way of comparison, Chinese women suicide in higher numbers than Chinese men, which also demonstrates the question of human value but with genders reversed.

Q. Do you think men have more power than women on a societal level?

A. Men more often hold the power of office, but what they do with that power deserves further consideration. To give an example, a local council where I live has eleven elected councillors (8 men and 3 women) who recently voted on whether to apportion money for celebrations of International Men’s Day in the city. The 8 men voted yes to funding, and the 3 women voted no! In a similar resolution voting to issue funds for International Women’s Day, the same 11 councillors voted yes, unanimously. My observation is that gendered use of power is generalizable to these examples; ie. men extend chivalry and consideration to women, but it is not reciprocated by women.

On a more general note I agree with Nancy Armstrong’s observation that there exists ‘two spheres’ of influence – one male sphere, and one female. She states that the interpersonal contract of romantic love and family relationships, which are directed largely by women, can often overrule the social contract controlled largely by male office holders.  The result is that love can be the most powerful regulating convention between two parties – a possibility that is little considered by feminist writers in their rantings about males holding all the power in all domains.

Q. Do you think feminism is interested in equality?

A. Not at all. “Equality” on the feminist tongue serves as a euphemism for securing unearned and often unequal power for themselves, and for women more generally. This motive points to a definition of feminism that most people would agree with: i.e., feminism is the project for increasing the power of women.

Q. Does feminism help men?

A. Feminism sets out to actively harm men in many instances. Strangely enough, feminism may accidentally help men in some ways, especially when they get legislation passed for the purpose of empowering women, but men end up exploiting the same legislation to their own benefit. For example, legal redress for victims of sexual harassment or physical abuse, or even the ‘abuse excuse’ designed for women who murder a spouse are things men have used to their advantage, which elicited outrage by the feminist architects of these systems. In fact there has also been a trend of men claiming (but only on paper) that they are trans-women in order to secure multiple female-only privileges: for example, in Switzerland a man legally classified himself a woman on government documents and was able to retire younger and receive a pension at the same age as women. A man in Ecuador also changed his status to female, on paper, in order to gain custody of his children after divorce, as his country typically awards child custody to women. In Germany and also Norway, men have identified as women, on paper, in order to gain access to female-only university courses (eg. STEM quotas), or to gain access to female-only scholarships. These men did not “transition” in any material way, and were simply exploiting the gender privileges that have accumulated exclusively around the female sex.

Q. What do you think are the major issues facing men today?

A. First issues that come to mind are a lack of social valorization, which leads them to feeling worthless and paves the way for suicidal outcomes. A second major issue is the weight of imposed guilt that men carry around for being supposed members of a violent oppressor class. I could go on to list more men’s issues, but these two items are among the most crushing for men and boys, working in the background of their psyches, which means that rectifying these messages would lead to a number of improvements for men – and by extension for Western society as well.

Q. What do you think a true path towards equality between men and women would look like?

A. Socially that would look like an equal valuing of men and women, and would rest legislatively on ‘equality of opportunity’ in place of the current feminist push for ‘equality of outcomes’ (equity).

Q. Can you tell me of an experience of someone you know or yourself that was unfair and related to our culture’s treatment of men?

A. For me the heart breaker scenario is men in horrifically abusive relationships who can’t leave for good reasons, men who sometimes suffer the double horror of being falsely painted an abuser by the actual female abuser – then having the world come down on that same man and multiplying his pain. I’ve seen many men in this situation, and feeling alone is an understatement for what they are going through. If readers know any man in this position, I encourage you to consider helping them – whether materially, or even simply with some kind words and a listening ear which may prove the difference between him living versus suiciding.

Q. Do you know of any experiences of people who have experienced issues with women in their lives or with the court system etc etc.?

A. Too many to count, and I wager most readers here will feel the same – the system is rigged against men from beginning to end. Again, if you know any man going through a break-up and family courts, consider if you can offer them some kind of support.

Q. What do you think of traditional gender roles?

A. Another tricky question because there’s a variety of “traditional roles,” each one differing somewhat in its customs and conventions. For example in the West we have two primary traditionalisms: the first one is highly gynocentric (prioritising wife/woman somewhat over husband and children) and the second model is a non-gynocentric tradition which values gender roles on the basis that they exist as service roles within the wider family nexus; this is a model I can get behind. I wrote two detailed articles on traditional gender roles titled, The Tradwife Revisited and Anti-Gynocentrism Is The Only Anti-Feminism That Matters – which I’d encourage readers to read if they want more detail. To summarise those two articles, I praise traditional gender roles that are non-gynocentric and family oriented, with the caveat that we now live in a society that doesn’t support that model – in fact it actively tries to undermine it and rip it down.

Q. What do you think of intersectionality?

A. Advocates of the intersectional model claim its a way of seeing, and of being more inclusive toward marginalised people. In practice however, I’m seeing the opposite; the theory gets used for the sake of excluding people deemed too high on their ‘privilege wheel,’ and such exclusion is often based on wide categories like ‘whiteness’ or simply ‘maleness.’ On that basis I completely reject its interpretation & application.

Q. One last question. What would you say to the argument that the world is more child-centered than it is gynocentric? In that women are only centered, as much as they are, because they are useful to nature and that it is an attempt to center children, meaning that gynocentrism is an inaccurate way of describing society’s focus on the issues women face?

A. One popular hypothesis holds that women have always been more ‘centered’ than other family members who remained on the periphery, this being due to women’s usefulness in reproduction and in the raising of children.  I reject this argument as another attempt to smuggle gynocentrism into families. The gynocentrism displayed today towards women who don’t have any children, and who plan to remain childless, is evidence that something other than child-centrism is at play in our centering of women.  I think that something else amounts to a gendered narcissism that aims to place women ‘on a pedestal.’ Far from being an evolutionary adaptation for production of children, this practice results in the maladaptive outcome of less pairbonding between men and women, acrimonious relationships, higher divorce rates, and plummeting birth rates.

In traditional societies all members of the family are considered central to the functioning of the family unit, providing an environment of support for the raising of children. And if any member of the family suffered injury or needed extra support, it was based wholly on need and not on being female. For example, I recently conducted a poll on X that fleshes out people’s reactions to this question: “In a traditional society, which family member do you think men would have assisted out of a burning house first?” The answers to that question & the results are as follows:

In summary, all family members throughout our evolutionary history needed protection, or ‘centering’ to use your word, in order to be part of a strong, viable family team. But that isn’t called gynocentrism; it’s called storge as mentioned above. All family members were protected – as indicated in the poll. If women were vulnerable and needed protection occasionally, they would be. Men, too, were protected if they were injured, old, sick, or in need. Protection & provision has always been based on the shifting needs of various family members – whoever had the most immediate need was catered to, cared for and centered.

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Jana Xiolier’s YouTube Channel:  Women Against Feminism