Home should be the one place where you can be yourself. It’s the place where you are protected from anyone else’s impertinent judgments about you. It’s the one place where following your convictions is always right. It’s supposed to be the domain God as feudal Sovereign has granted you, so that you can carry out His will unhindered by outside forces.
And church should be the place where your domain merges with others of like faith who will reinforce your mission and calling. The phrase “of like faith” needs to be reinterpreted here: It means you stand with others who hold the same total commitment to Christ as Lord. It’s the place where Jesus rules unhindered as the Ancient Near Eastern feudal Master, and we His adopted family. That’s where all covenants in the Bible point.
If there is a distinctly Christian Red Pill lore, then it’s really not so much a matter of having ideal marriages, but of being more perfect men. We should view marriages as a result, something God grants for His own purposes. We should strive, as part of the gospel mission, to have better relations with everyone who wants them, and romance is just a special category within the matrix of how we live the Word with others.
Building a godly community is not restricted to breeding one from scratch. The Covenant of Christ is not one of human birth, but of spiritual adoption. We are all imported, and the issue is spiritual birth, spiritual DNA. Our children still have to have this, and it’s not automatic. We should raise them as best we can, but the primary mission is finding hearts open to the gospel, whether inside or outside the home.
Nor is it merely a matter of claiming spiritual birth. The biggest single element is holding a sense of calling together. We haven’t done good work establishing a proper understanding of boundaries. Church History is a very ugly tale of including and excluding people on all the wrong grounds. On Judgment Day, we should all stand ashamed that we failed to understand how one person’s logical analysis of what it means to obey the Lord is for them alone, not a rule of faith by which to judge others. That was never part of any biblical covenant.
The whole thing is rather soft, and should arise from mere practical matters. Can you tolerate each other? How hard, and how soft, can the individual boundaries of divine calling be, and at what points do we harden or soften them for the sake of the gospel? We don’t have a Church History of seeking the truth without making it a cerebral task, and the very nature of the Fall itself is trusting human capabilities to establish right and wrong. We mistake our human boundaries as coming from God. We very much need to work on that.
But that’s a huge task, and I mention it only to make it obvious just how much work we have ahead of us. One of the first and most obvious ways we can tell the world about our Savior is how we defend each other. One particular place where this has failed is how Christian Red Pill men don’t pull together in a tribal manner, as the Bible teaches.
Jack notes how most church guys attack each other in support of feminist idolatry. If we do not band together to uphold a biblical standard of manhood, then we cannot expect anyone else to respect our boundaries, either. The strength of the Body of Christ is our moral unity, not our theological unity. It’s not merely a matter of how we do or don’t impress the church ladies, or anyone else. It’s a matter of how we uphold each other as men, because God said in His Word that we are the foundation of His reign on this earth.
Jack particularly points out how the primary problem of the Christian Red Pill online community is a kind of elitism. Those who are blessed with the social and physical charisma and have their pick of women seem wholly incapable of understanding or caring what it’s like to have no such advantages. Further, they see no purpose in fostering fellowship with these “lesser” men. There is virtually no redemptive effort at all, and certainly no clear plan for building a community that includes such men, men as God made them. Without an army of common men, there is no one for the leaders to lead into battle against sin. And as long as the elites keep bashing common men for being common, there can be no true church on the earth. We have failed to define what is good Red Pill living for men without those elite advantages.
The goal is not great marriages, but great men. Yes, there are clear tendencies in how God works among us. There are precious few men who are supposed to endure a Gomer as Hosea did. There aren’t that many men who are supposed to remain celibate in the church body, and it has nothing to do with leadership, per se. But if the majority are supposed to be married and building strong moral families for a strong covenant community, then we need the proper foundation. And that foundation is the biblical definition of manhood. It’s a definition that is partly informed by the Red Pill lore, but does not rest on what what seems to be the common over-emphasis on romantic relationships.
If we cannot change the meaning of the term “Christian Red Pill,” then we need to call this something else. Either way, we can’t keep doing what has already been done, which has been mostly failure. That is, it’s mostly failure in the sense that, so far, few men have those good relationships with the world. And that’s not the biblical standard. It should not rest on whether those men are born with the talents and charisma of the romantic upper class. It should rest on a communion of saints who build each other up to serve the Lord.
One of the most disappointing things has been just how the Red Pill movement has failed to lift up the men who are fallen. Let’s stop eating our own. We cannot redeem our women from the idolatry of feminism if we don’t first climb out of our own idolatries. It won’t matter what you consider the apex of Red Pill manhood if it doesn’t include actual leadership that guides lesser men to a higher standard. Not everyone needs to be like the apex, but we sure could use a lot more thoughtful guidance for those we need in abundance who walk the wider paths of common manhood. We need to change the definition of “common manhood” for the covenant community.
