Eric Conn critiques the American church's shift to functional egalitarianism, citing Dr. Russell Moore's 2000 and 2023 statements as evidence of betrayal by "woke sociologists." He outlines nine principles for biblical patriarchy, defining it as creation-ordered father rule where men provide and protect while women focus on motherhood, explicitly rejecting female pastoral ministry and full-contact sports. Conn urges men to reject "father mommy" dynamics, embrace multi-generational covenants, and fight this cultural battle with contagious joy to defend Christendom against secular compromise. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Recovering Patriarchy in the Church00:14:56
Well, thank you, Pastor Joel.
I appreciate the height of this podium.
We have some pastors at our church who are about six foot five, and normally I'm reaching and leaning in so that I can get to the microphone, but they made this one short.
Joel actually has to lean down, which is also quite interesting.
As we look at everything that's going on in our culture, it's an encouragement to me.
You know, we've heard Dusty speak, we've heard Joel, we've heard Pastor Brian.
What an encouragement that God has not left his church in the dark.
Without teachers or alone.
Amen?
At this point, let's pray.
I want to pray for us and then we'll get started on today's talk, which will be Recovering a Vision for Biblical Patriarchy.
Let's pray.
Father, we thank you so much for the souls gathered here.
We thank you that you are faithful to your bride, to the church.
God, we ask that you would continue to build her up in faithfulness.
Lord, we thank you, especially for the men gathered here.
That you have made them bold.
We thank you for Dusty Devers, for his faith that he's willing to put into action.
We pray for his family as well.
God, would you give them courage as they are fighting literally demonic powers?
Would you put your arms and your angels around them?
Would you protect them?
Father, would you also inspire other men to be raised up that they too may be courageous, that they may fight the good fight of the faith?
Lord, and help us to see that our generations are brought to you.
God, we ask all these things in the high name of Jesus Christ, our King.
Amen.
Amen.
Well, I want to begin this talk again on biblical patriarchy, everybody's favorite doctrine.
Particularly if you're a feminist on Twitter, you probably hate me.
You might know who I am.
Maybe you blocked me.
That's okay.
But I want to start this talk with actually a talk that comes from the year 2000, or rather in the 2000s.
This talk is what I think is fantastically good.
One theologian stood at the Evangelical Theological Society to deliver a scathing indictment of the American church.
And a feminist followed him, so you know how brave he was actually being in this situation.
And he specifically addressed the failure of complementarianism to make much of a dent in the orthodoxy or the orthopraxy of the church, right?
The complementarian doctrines, which had been around since the early 90s, 1989 and following, had made little impact, both on the teaching of the church, but worse, On the practice of the church.
Complementarianism had become, he said, a weak compromise with feminist teachings.
As such, it had resulted in a church that was softly patriarchal, he said, on paper, but fundamentally egalitarian in practice.
Isn't that what we find in the church so much today?
We use words like headship, but they mean nothing.
For all intents and purposes, he said, the conservative and the complementarian wing of the church was pragmatically egalitarian.
Now, among other signs of demise, the speaker noted how many wives are encouraged to work outside the home and how childcare is relegated to daycares and public schools.
You know how excited people get when you talk about women working outside the home, particularly in our secular spaces on Twitter.
Now, this brave speaker told the story of one complimentary wife who sent her husband to Promise Keepers.
She sent him to Promise Keepers.
Thank you for laughing because that is ridiculous.
She said she did it.
She told this to a sociologist so that her husband could, quote, reconnect with other men his age.
Of this incident, the speaker said this, and I find this fitting.
He said, This complementarian woman does not seem to recognize that she is sending her husband off to be with one his own age as though she were a mother sending her grade school son off to summer youth camp.
How often does this sort of thing happen in the church today?
Well, quite frequently.
Likewise, our speaker said, Because the church had blindly adopted psychotherapeutic practices, which he said, and he's right, they're inherently Marxist and anti hierarchical.
Think of Freud.
Because of this, evangelicals had neutered headship of any meaningful authority.
Instead, the church had foolishly adopted a servant leader model.
This comes largely out of the Promise Keepers movement.
Servant leadership is what we got.
And what it did was empty the concept of virtually all its authoritative character of actual biblical headship.
So the speaker, also being brave, he said, What should we do about this?
And this is actually when I think it gets really good.
We had a simple and clear solution for the church moving forward.
It was not appeasement, as you see from so many people today.
No, but he said that the church needed to recover biblical patriarchy.
And I want to quote from him.
He said, Unless evangelical churches are willing to be countercultural against not just the secular culture, and here's the thing I want to underline not just against the secular culture, but also against the evangelical establishment itself.
That's what we're facing.
He said, unless we do that, the future of complementarian Christianity is, in fact, bleak.
He went on to say, a more patriarchal complementarianism will resonate among a generation seeking stability in a family fractured Western culture in ways that soft bellied big tent complementarianism never can.
So he's advocating we need to be bold, we need to oppose all the sexual craziness that's going on in our culture and specifically in our churches.
Well, he rightly pointed out that patriarchy is not a secondary issue within Christian theology.
It's a matter of vital importance.
Many of you, rightly so, would ask the question as you come to a conference like this okay, covenant succession, I get that one, that's important.
Post millennialism, I get that, that's important.
But really, patriarchy.
Why is that in this series of talks for building Christendom 2.0?
Well, C.S. Lewis was wise to this, and our speaker pointed it out.
In fact, C.S. Lewis included male headship as part of his book, Mere Christianity.
Well, why did he do that?
The speaker says this Male headship has been asserted and assumed by the Christian church with virtual unanimity from the first century until the rise of contemporary feminism.
That's a bold statement in the church today.
Patriarchy has been the baseline for 2,000 years, and only recently have we abandoned it.
He went on to say this if we are to reclaim the debate, we must not fear making a claim that is disturbingly countercultural.
And yet, he said, strikingly biblical patriarchy.
Patriarchy is a claim that the less than evangelical feminists understand increasingly.
Indeed, he said Christianity is undergirded by a vision of patriarchy.
Now, finally, our speaker concluded by saying this patriarchy for the Christian is essential.
Egalitarians are winning the evangelical gender debate not because their arguments are stronger, but because, in some sense, we are all egalitarian now.
That's the reality we have to face in the church.
Practically speaking, most people are egalitarian or feminist.
He went on to say this our response must be more than simply a reaction.
It must instead present an alternative vision, a vision that sums up the burden of male headship under the cosmic rubric of the gospel of Christ and the restoration of all things in Him.
It must produce churches that are not embarrassed.
We cannot be embarrassed that when we say our Father, we mean that we are patriarchs.
Of the oldest kind.
Amen indeed.
What a great speech, right?
It's phenomenally accurate.
The majority of Christians today really are functionally egalitarian.
Headship has been robbed of its authority.
Why?
Because we have ignored scripture for too long.
We have ignored the faith of our fathers on this issue of biblical sexuality, and we've let the woke sociologists do our theologizing for us.
Now, despite having greater power and influence than ever, think about this.
How many churches are on every street corner in the South?
How much money does the Gospel Coalition have in these major conference circuits?
How much money is represented?
And yet, for all that, the church is being more shaped by the world than it is shaping the world.
Why is this?
Why is it that evangelical leadership has, in mass, betrayed us on the issue of biblical sexuality?
Well, this failure of church leadership is, I think, typified most by the speaker himself.
Well, who was this brave speaker?
It was none other than Dr. Russell Moore.
Russell Moore, the now leftist editor in chief at Christianity Yesterday.
His speech, if you try to find this, has been scrubbed from almost every major publication in which it was linked.
Denny Burke, CBMW, ETS, it's all gone.
You can't find it.
And in 2023, Russell Moore said this in an article for Christianity Today.
He said, I put more trust in Beth Moore today.
That is the Anglican lady priestrix, right?
I put more trust in Beth Moore today than Russell Moore when I delivered that speech.
This is where we are as evangelical leadership has left us, right?
The patriarchy he once defended was, he said in the article, more John Wayne than Jesus, right?
An obvious nod to the evangelical left and Kristen Cobaz Dumas.
Now, why do I bring this up in this talk?
I want to illustrate by this example just how far the church has fallen in just 20 years.
I mean, think about this today.
If you talk about patriarchy at all, who gets mad on Twitter?
It's the conservative Christians.
A dark cloud, so it seems, looms over the church, which seems to have all but abandoned these historic doctrines of patriarchy.
And so I think we are in a desperate lurch.
Again, I think as you look at leaders like Russell Moore, what you see is something like in The Lord of Rings, Saruman.
You exchange the truth for a lie, and what do you get in return?
Money, power, power among the leftist elites, especially.
But I think, as Moore said 20 years ago, our task remains the same.
It's not simply to fight a feminist culture, but to oppose the evangelical establishment itself.
Now, this is a daunting task, no doubt.
It's encouraging to see everybody here, but I wonder if you've ever thought about the fact that maybe there are 800 of us here.
How many Christians are in America?
We really seem to be up against it.
It's a desperate situation.
And a lot of times people will ask me, Eric, do you actually think, do you actually believe that patriarchy could be recovered?
Absolutely.
That's my answer as well.
Yes, absolutely it can be recovered.
But the more important question is, what is true?
As we look at the scriptures, are we convicted about the clarity of God's word on this issue?
So many people have not even looked at the historic commentaries, the confessions, or the church fathers on these issues.
We listen more to sociologists and psychologists.
But there's encouragement for us as well, and I want to give that to you today.
This is not the first time the church has been badly on the ropes.
I love this quote from G.K. Chesterton.
Someone asked him about the church.
And again, in his time, there's been lots of times where the church seems to be doing poorly.
He said this.
On five occasions in church history, the church has gone to the dogs.
But on every occasion, it was the dog that died.
This is the church of the Lord Jesus Christ.
He conquered the grave, He is the risen Lord.
And so, for us, as we seek out His word, and we want to do that today and ask the question what is biblical patriarchy?
We do so fundamentally from a position of hope.
So, if we look at this question, how is patriarchy to be recovered?
Where do we begin with this project?
Well, I love what Dr. Joe Boot, who's here with Ezra Institute, says in his book, The Mission of God.
Every revival, every reformation is fundamentally looking back to the law of God and to our fathers and doing the deep work of repentance.
I also love what Dr. Martin Lloyd Jones said about this when preaching a sermon on Genesis 26.
You'll remember in that passage, Isaac had departed to Gerar, and the land was without water.
Why was the land without water?
I wonder.
Well, the Philistines had stopped the wells of Abraham, Isaac's father.
And so he realized, Isaac did his desperate situation.
He realized that his people's survival depended upon him.
And so Isaac redugged the wells of his father.
Isaac redugged these ancient wells.
He didn't send for the diviners, he didn't send for the technocratic experts of his day.
He didn't take a straw poll.
No, he went back to his father's wisdom and he said, If I know anything about my father, it's that he knows where the water is.
Right?
Abraham knew where to find the living water.
This is what Lloyd Jones says about that passage in his sermon.
He says, The man who experiments in the midst of a crisis is a fool.
Theology Born of Cowardice00:08:05
There is great value in the readings of church history and the study of the past, and nothing surely is more important for us at this present time than to read the history of the past.
And to discover its message afresh.
The issue today, he said, is that we think that our problems are new and that we think that they are unique.
And the church and the world have never been confronted by such problems before.
But, Lloyd Jones said, and I find this quite helpful every time you get one of these great and glorious and mighty periods of true revival, you will find that in every instance it seems to be a returning to something that had been obtained before.
Every time the church is thus revived, She seems to be doing what Isaac did.
She is going back to something that had happened before, rediscovering it and finding that ancient supply.
And so there is nothing that I know of, Lloyd Jones writes, that is more striking in the history of the church than just this principle.
So, as we discuss patriarchy, we'll lay out some points, general principles and points for what is biblical patriarchy.
We have to face the fact that our need is not something novel or new or faddish.
How many times do we have to read a new sociological study or read from a professor at the University of Oklahoma or wherever else?
Sorry, Oklahoma.
We have to read from these professors that we now know that the word effeminacy doesn't mean effeminacy.
Because somebody in 2024 found out that the church fathers and everybody else for 2,000 years was quite simply wrong.
That is, of course, nonsense.
We don't need a new definition from Rachel Hollis about motherhood or womanhood.
We don't need a new defense of lady pastors from an up and coming lady pastor in training at a reformed denomination.
And we're all going to pretend, by the way, along the way, that she won't ever become a preacher, even though that's what keeps happening.
Right?
Our starting point, most of all, cannot be appeasement of our culture.
I appreciate so much what Dusty Devers had to say because I think that is the heart of the issue.
When you look at biblical sexuality in the church today, I think what you should notice is that our theology is developed more from cowardice than from the Word of God.
We are simply embarrassed about what Scripture teaches.
It was interesting to me that when Russell Moore in 2023 completely flip flopped on his position, it wasn't because he came up with a new interpretation of the text.
And so, what do we need to do in this moment and in this time is to go back to our fathers, to Genesis and Abraham, to the patriarchs, to the Puritans, to the reformers.
These are the men who built the first Christendom.
And what we need to do is redig their wells and go back and study what our fathers said.
I think it's fitting that as we go back and we study them, we should truly learn what it means to rule well as a king and as a father.
Fundamentally, what we have to do is we have to put the ancient landmark back where it was moved.
And this means that we have to go back and we have to read the old dead guys.
Because the one thing about it is they had problems, but they're not our problems.
They weren't enmeshed in 1960s liberation sexual theology.
They had problems, but not those.
All right, so what I want to do now is give just a brief defense of biblical patriarchy.
And as we jump into this, I want to make a couple baseline recommendations.
A talk like this is bound to bring many questions.
And so, as you have questions, it's good to talk to your husbands, it's good to talk to pastors, but it's also good to read.
So, I want to recommend to you a book that has been most helpful to me on this issue, which is Masculine Christianity by Mr. Zach Garrus.
He's actually a PCA pastor.
And he's done a phenomenal job outlining the biblical historical doctrine of patriarchy.
This book, by the way, you can get in hard copy, also Canon, the Canon app.
They have this in audiobook.
If you already have the app, you can listen to it there.
But this is a phenomenal book.
The other book I want to recommend is also by Zach Garrus, and this is titled Honor Thy Fathers Recovering the Anti Feminist Theology of the Reformers.
And this will be released this summer, Lord willing, from New Christendom Press.
He essentially goes through Calvin, Vermigli, Luther, and says, What did they have to say about women, biblical sexuality, pertaining to what is now feminism?
The final recommendation I want to give to you, particularly if you're a pastor, but anyone studying God's word, is that you rely on the older guys, right?
So when you're going through commentaries, it was very common, at least for me, in seminary that we're reading new commentaries.
You read R.T. France on the Gospels, and guess what?
He has a very egalitarian view.
When you get to sexuality.
And an older and a wiser pastor told me, he said, Really, what you ought to do is your bedrock for sermon preparation should be John Calvin.
It should be Matthew Henry.
It should be John Gill.
It should be William Gooch.
And as I started making that transition in pulpit ministry, what I started to notice was how backwards we actually are today.
I said, Wait a minute, these guys would get canceled on Twitter if they put these things on there.
So then I thought to myself, What if I did it for them?
And that's actually one of the most interesting things.
I often get charged with this, but people say, You're just trying to be a shock jock, Eric.
And I say, Actually, I was reading William Googe on the Fifth Commandment, and he's got some burners.
And so here they are for everybody's enjoyment.
So now, as we turn to this question of biblical patriarchy, I want to lay this out in nine basic points.
And again, I want to just emphasize this the question, so often you'll see this among reformed pastors, even.
But people will say things like, well, yeah, that's a cool principle from Deuteronomy, and I think it's true, but I just don't think today that's practical, right?
I just, in my experience, I don't know if that could actually happen.
The fundamental question that you ought to be asking, again, particularly for pastors, but fathers and husbands, the question is not, is this popular?
The question is not, is this going to be practical?
Are the feminists going to like it?
Is Taylor Swift going to like it?
That's not what we're asking, right?
Again, we're saying, is this true?
And so we begin with clarity about what the scripture teaches.
And from clarity, we move to courage.
And then courage means that somewhere along the lines, we're actually going to have to assert these principles.
We're actually going to have to live them.
We're actually going to have to say to a transgender family member, I'm not going to that wedding.
And the reason I'm not going is because this is a public statement.
And I know that because I've read William Gooch.
So in this talk, we're tying together confessionalism, post millennial vision.
And all the rest, hopefully, as we go about it.
The final thing I'll say as we jump in now, and I promise we're going to jump in.
Right?
These are general principles.
And I don't know if you've ever noticed this.
Pastors probably have definitely.
When you give general principles in today's culture, people's minds like short circuit.
Right?
Well, what about the exceptions?
I'm going to give you a general rule that is good for women to be mothers.
This is the glory of women, right?
Is to be mothers.
And people will say, What about my triple amputee?
Yeah, that's an exception.
Creation and Biblical Order00:15:09
But we don't make the rules based off the exceptions.
So it's a good practice that as you hear these, again, if you have questions, by all means, talk to your husbands, talk to your pastors, talk to your friends.
Point number one what is biblical patriarchy?
First of all, patriarchy simply means father rule, right?
Patriarchy means father rule.
In our culture, patriarchy is obviously a dirty word.
It's supposedly responsible for every evil that has ever happened.
Right?
The patriarchy has actually been smashed, so they tell us, and yet the women who are in charge are killing more babies than ever, if that's in fact what's happening.
Feminists run the day, and yet they tell us it's still the patriarchy's fault.
It's thought that before 1960, pretty much all women were treated like dirt.
But again, patriarchy means father rule.
It comes from the Greek word patriarches, and is a combination of the words potter for father and arco for rule.
As Zach Garrus says in his book, it describes the practice of men providing for and protecting women and children, as well as men leading in church and in society.
In its simplest form, patriarchy means that fathers rule in home, church, and in society.
Now, it's also interesting that Peter and Paul both use this word, patriarches, and it's always positive.
So, Acts 2 29, for example, Peter refers to David the patriarch.
They don't seem to be embarrassed about this language.
And so, if you ask the question, well, why are we going to use that word?
Number one, because it's a lot easier to say than complementarianism.
But number two, I think it is the biblical word that's used to describe the interplay between the sexes and, particularly, men leading in these three spheres.
It's a biblical word.
We should use the biblical word.
I don't really care what the feminists think about it.
So, that's number one.
Number two, patriarchy is about a multi generational.
Covenantal vision, right?
This is what separates Andrew Tate masculinity from what we're talking about here.
Yes, men should be strong, but for what?
Right?
They have to have what Brian just talked about with a vision for generations and legacy.
I don't have strength so that I can spend it on myself doing the sort of buy a Bugatti and have 30 women in your harem thing that Andrew Tate does.
Right?
This is a man who has no vision.
That's the fundamental problem, among many other problems.
So, patriarchy has to be about this multi generational and covenantal vision that husbands and fathers have for their families.
The Lord is known, by the way, in the Old Testament as the God of your fathers.
God meant to impart this vision upon his people and in their hearts.
And when he visited Abraham in Genesis 15, what did he do?
Well, he told him to look at the stars and envision his sons, both numerous and ruling the cosmos.
This is what Dusty was talking about.
What we want to fill our men with is this hope.
Look at your life.
Someone did this with Jonathan Edwards, by the way, and they looked at like 200 years after his life.
And it's like dozens and dozens of his sons are lawyers and senators, probably back when senators were a better thing.
They impacted their society.
All these people came from him.
This is actually a similar thing to what we find in Virgil's Aeneid.
Aeneas descends into the grave, and what does he do?
He meets his father, and before him is paraded all the future generations of his sons.
That's the sort of vision that gives you hope.
And God told Abraham, This is what is going to happen, ultimately, to bring Christ from your loins.
This God given and patriarchal vision calls each of us to look down through the generations and by faith start building because we believe God's promises.
Number three, the scriptures themselves are patriarchal.
And somewhere a feminist brain just like short circuited again.
She had a meltdown.
Right?
But all of us, I mean, even when I first started looking into this, I said, I don't know, are the scriptures really patriarchal?
This is like 10 years ago.
Well, let's look at it.
Even Elizabeth Caddy Stanton, you remember her, she was the first wave feminist.
She is the one that said that Christianity, I'm quoting, Christianity is inherently patriarchal, and that's why I hate it.
When the feminists say it's patriarchal, and then you read the scripture and you say, she's right, not that she hated it, obviously.
So, what did she do?
She published her woman's Bible, which deleted all references to patriarchal rule.
Right, this is what the scripture teaches biblical patriarchy.
Scripture is actually quite clear on this issue in the scriptures, for example.
We learn things like this Adam was created before Eve, and she was made to be his helper on his mission.
Genesis 2 15.
God named mankind after the man, not the woman.
Genesis 5 1 through 2.
Adam was the one who, as ruler, named his wife Eve, mother of all living.
Even though Eve sinned first, what did God do?
He called Adam to first and foremost to be accountable.
And this makes sense when you consider that Adam ruled and had authority over his wife.
And thus he was responsible, he was the responsible agent for Eve's sin.
In fact, Adam was responsible covenantally for all humanity.
This is what patriarchy means.
Later, we learn that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would be referred to as the patriarchs.
Why?
Because they ruled their families.
Abraham was promised land and offspring and given the covenant of circumcision, which applied to male offspring.
These promises were inherited by his descendants, but specifically by his sons.
And the Apostle Paul includes Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as patriarchs in Romans 15 8 when he says, Christ became a servant to Jews.
Why?
To confirm the promises given to the patriarchs.
So the New Testament doesn't seem to have a problem with patriarchy.
In the Old Testament, we think about the civil structures.
Well, elders, prophets, judges, priests, kings, all men.
We do have the one case of Athaliah being the queen, but she is a usurper.
Judgment falls upon her head.
The heads of families, men, were chosen for civil government.
Exodus 4 29.
Of the Old Covenant structure, Herman Boving says this The entire organization of the nation was along patriarchal lines.
You see what's important to read the old guys?
It's along patriarchal lines in clans, families, and households.
Each group had a head or representative or prince, a man.
All these heads or princes together formed the members of the assembly.
When they gathered, the congregation of Israel was thus gathered.
End quote.
Well, what about Jesus?
This is one that I get a lot on Twitter, social media, but also in email.
Wasn't Jesus like a modern day hippie?
Didn't he have like really long hair and flip flops?
He hung out at coffee shops in Boulder, Colorado.
Well, that's not actually what we find from the biblical record.
Jesus not only had shorter hair like the Jewish men of his day, but he exercised manly authority.
What did he do?
He applauded John the Baptist because he wasn't soft.
And this is from Matthew 11.
The Greek word that's used there is malikos, which means effeminacy.
He's applauding John for not being effeminate.
God sent Christ in the flesh as a man.
That seems obvious, but again, as previous speakers have said, we are not even sure what men are anymore.
Christ came as a man.
He was resurrected with a male body.
He taught with authority and he overturned the tables in the temple.
God's people, in fact, expected a male Messiah because the prophecies were about a man and God's leaders had always been men.
Point number four gender rules are rooted in creation.
Gender rules are rooted in creation.
Now, modern feminists like to claim that gender rules are just cultural, right?
These are things that we made up because of John Wayne, not Genesis 1 through 3, which is, in fact, where they come from, right?
The New Testament authors, including Jesus, Root these teachings continually in creation.
So, for example, when Jesus is asked about marriage in Matthew 19, what does he do?
He makes a beeline for Genesis and for the creation account.
When Paul says in 1 Timothy 2 that he does not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, he ties it specifically to the creation account.
Adam was created first, therefore, Adam is to rule.
Creation order matters, in other words.
While Eve was created second, it is Adam's helper.
She was made for the man.
Paul tells us this in Corinthians.
This was one that I had the most enjoyment over on Twitter because I quoted Paul without telling people where it was from, and they said, You're twisting the word of God.
I said, No, this is literally word for word what the text says.
You just don't like it.
Here's the point in talking about our natures being rooted in creation and in God's design.
If God made a woman a certain way, everywhere she goes, every sphere, she takes the same nature with her.
It's not just that she's easily deceived when we're talking about the church, but not the family.
And then the sphere that nobody likes to talk about because it's so controversial is society, the public sphere.
Right?
God did not arbitrarily assign tasks to men and women apart from the sexual nature that he gave them.
Zach Garrus writes this contrary to modern thought, these physical and biological differences affect a person's entire being.
Men and women have different bodies, different minds, different personalities, and different dispositions.
Men and women have different natures.
I read an article recently in a newspaper, and this is how you know it's a good newspaper.
They said there's a new sociological study, and it proves a fundamental reality.
They said men and women are different.
Like, I did not need this article to know that that was true.
Right?
That's how crazy our society is, and that's how far even the church has fallen.
So, this means that when we talk of roles that men and women occupy, they're not arbitrary.
This is why God gave women certain physical components.
They have breasts and a womb.
Men have more muscle mass on average than women.
There's a reason for this, and it's related to their purpose.
This is also why, if you understand nature rooted in creation, this is why it's a problem when a woman says, I could preach a better sermon than most men.
No, in fact, you could not.
That's as equally absurd as if I said I could give birth better than most women.
You cannot do the thing.
It is not rooted in your nature.
No matter how many crazy articles that we read about men lactating, they don't.
But this is where we are.
This is literally where we are.
We talk about it all the time as pastors.
We're in a position now in our culture where we say, You're a man, you're a woman, and people get angry, but this is what you have to do.
You have to be courageous.
Number five, women are made for motherhood.
One of the primary aims of the feminist movement, they're outspoken about this, is to push women into the workforce.
Frederick Engels wrote about this before and after the Communist Manifesto.
They said, What we want to do is destroy the middle class of working people.
If we do that, then we can push our communist aims.
The only way we can do that is by destroying patriarchy.
There's a reason that Betty Friedan was a Marxist.
She fabricated her study about how miserable women were in the 1950s.
It was completely not true.
We moderns have a hard time fathoming that it's been atypical across history to have women so prominent in the workforce as today.
But you look at 1950 and before, it simply wasn't happening.
Not in American history, but in world history.
For thousands of years, women were seen as naturally caretakers in the home.
That's in fact what scripture tells us.
Creation tells us that women are made to help the man.
She does this, get this, she makes immortal souls in her womb.
And you're trying to tell me that spreadsheets are better.
She makes immortal souls in her womb, and the home is her proper sphere.
The church fathers said this for thousands of years.
A woman can put on pantsuits, she can occupy a corner office, she can sterilize her body for decades via the pill, but all the while her biology screams out, she is made to be a mother.
Her menstrual cycle, her breasts, her womb, they sing the song of her creation.
Her glory is motherhood.
It was Chesterton, I think, who so aptly put it this way.
He said, Feminism is the muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers, but slaves when they help their husbands.
You have to understand that's what our women are being inundated with.
All the feminists and the crypto feminists on Twitter, you know who they attack the most?
Moms who stay home.
And as men, we have to be the protectors to say, no, my wife is not going to take that because I'm going to stand in the gap.
Point number six men are made to be courageous warriors and workers.
If you ask me why patriarchy is so important for this project of rebuilding Christendom, it's for this reason Christendom simply cannot be recovered without recovering biblical masculinity.
Men as Warriors for Their People00:06:20
When you look at the first Christendom, men like Charlemagne and Alfred the Great and Jan Sobieski, well, newsflash, they were not pietistic, effeminate versions of men that we have today.
They saddled up their horses and they defeated an enemy that outnumbered them 200 to 1.
This is what we need if we're going to defend the perimeter.
Genesis 2 15 says that man was put in the garden to work and to keep.
Why?
Because man was designed for vocational work.
Our culture doesn't even know this.
There's a term for this.
It's called a fommy.
It's called a father mommy.
A dad who stays at home while his wife works.
This ought not to be.
Why?
Genesis 2 15.
It's very clear.
It's always been clear.
The man who doesn't provide for his family is worse than an unbeliever.
Men are made to be warriors for the sake of their people.
Leon Podols was correct.
He said this a man who has not bled, a man who has not suffered, a man without scars.
Is no man at all.
Women will bleed in childbirth and menstruation.
Men will bleed on the battlefield.
They were made for this.
Among other things, this means that a man must have a capacity for violence, for the good of his people.
He has to be meek in the sense that he knows how to restrain it, but he has a capacity for danger.
So when Paul says in 1 Corinthians 16, act like men, it's clear he means that men must be physically courageous.
Men must be bold, even heroic.
They must defend the perimeter.
But what does the church do today?
The church tends to over spiritualize this element of masculinity as though Paul were merely calling for spiritual strength.
They think when Paul says act like men, they mean have a really good quiet time.
That's not what builds Christendom.
Quiet times are important, but you have to do far more than that if you're going to be competent and capable as a man.
The reality here is clear God gave men chests and muscles and deep voices.
So, that they would learn how to command respect and act with gravitas and auctoritas or manly authority.
So, we must reject the false, effeminate version of manhood that is so often pushed on us by the church today.
One of the things that draws the most ire, perhaps, in the realm of fathers and sons protecting is the issue of modesty.
This is, if you talk about yoga pants, people get really mad.
I don't know if you know this.
There's a coveted thing among feminists that has been.
Just embedded in the culture, that women think they're free when they take all their clothes off in public.
And brothers and fathers and husbands ought not to allow this.
Why?
Because they love their daughters.
And when daughters are intoxicated and drinking during a Mardi Gras parade and doing all sorts of lewd gyrations, the question we ought to ask is where are the men?
Where are these young women's fathers?
Men are to protect their women and particularly their sexual purity.
Number seven, women are not made for military or combat.
This is incredibly unpopular, and I would say law enforcement is included.
Deuteronomy 22 5 tells us, it's actually very clear.
A woman shall not wear a man's garment, nor shall a man put on a woman's cloak.
For whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.
Read that again.
Whoever does these things is what?
An abomination to the Lord your God.
That's some pretty weighty language.
Not only does this prohibit cross dressing, but the text refers specifically to a woman who puts on military garb.
Women are not to serve in the military or combat roles because it is a violation of their nature.
Women are not designed to give or to take punches, they're not made to enter the arena or the agon.
That's what men do.
But what do we do?
We continue to push them into these areas.
Women in the UFC, I think it's against a woman's nature.
It's disgusting to see women cave each other's faces in.
This is against nature.
Paul makes very similar arguments.
But other sports, women in full contact sports.
You see this with the NFL.
They're continually trying to push women into playing.
Australia does this with rugby.
Women have leagues, and you know what they found out?
Cutting sports are notoriously destructive of a woman's ACL, her knee joint.
Catastrophic rates of knee failure in women that doctors have said we need to stop putting women in full contact sports.
Again, to which we could say, yet, no kidding.
Right?
The other area where we've connected it in Ogden is women and cultural pugilism.
Part of the problem is we have women in politics as well.
We have women all over the place doing things that normally men should be doing.
And while we admit that the world is messed up and there's going to be some imperfect situations, we also have to stand by the principle that women do not need to be out front, even in the culture war, fighting for us.
The thing we should ask ourselves if there are no men to do it, why is that?
Then maybe we should raise some up.
Maybe we should train them.
But again, the woman's role is primarily the home.
I think I'm crazy on this.
John Gill, who served 100 years, I believe, before Spurgeon in the same church, he applies this principle on Deuteronomy 22 5.
And he says this It is very unseemly and impudent and contrary to the modesty of her, that is, the woman's sex.
Or there shall not be upon her any instrument of a man, any utensil of which he makes use of in his trade or in his business.
So he's not just saying military, he's also saying trade tools.
Authority with Responsibility00:04:22
John Gill says, as if she was employed in it, that is the trade, her business was not to do the work of men, but to take care of her house and her family.
And the Apostle Paul says the exact same thing.
We just don't like it.
Number eight, men are made to rule in family, in church, and in society.
Fathers are called to rule in the family.
This much is clear.
Of all the controversial things to say, this is probably the least, but yet it still doesn't happen.
Paul is clear in Ephesians 5 25, for example, that the husband is head of the wife.
They are not joint heads of the household.
As my friend Pastor Rich Lusk often says, anything with two heads is called a monster.
There is one head, which is the husband.
He has both authority and responsibility to rule his household well.
This is the failure of servant leader model.
Well, he has the responsibility to serve his wife's every need, but he has no real authority.
But that's never leadership.
You have to have both authority and responsibility.
And the man is to love his wife as Christ loves the church.
She, in turn, is to submit, and here's the part that you all love she is to submit as one inferior in rank.
Let me say that again, as one inferior in rank.
They're both equally valuable before God, but they have a different hierarchical ranking.
Our society hates this.
I think this is one reason, this is the language, by the way, of the Westminster Confession, but this is one reason why the complementarians in 1989, when they formulated their statements, this is why they said, we're anti hierarchicalist.
Well, then you're anti scripture.
This is how God built the system.
Googe, William Googe, says this the necessary subjection of the wife is to that degree of subordination where God has placed all subordinates and how he has subjected them to their superiors and set them in a lower rank.
A wife is a lower rank.
All that means in hierarchy is very, very simple.
She reports to him.
That's actually just crystal clear, and the church fathers taught it for millennia.
In the church, men are to rule.
Only men can be pastors.
No lady pastors.
Sorry, not sorry.
Christ has appointed men to lead in his church.
And again, 1 Timothy 2 and elsewhere, Paul affirms this.
We need to recognize that preaching and pastoral ministry is a form of spiritual combat and spiritual warfare.
And this is one reason why a woman's nature is not fitted for that task.
Finally, we'll conclude with this as we wrap things up.
What about society?
Thomas Watson and other Westminster divines taught frequently on the fifth commandment.
To Joel's point, it's really hard to do better than these guys, especially in our day.
Go back to the confessions and read them.
Thomas Watson on the fifth commandment taught that the civil sphere, just as the church, is an extension of the family.
It starts with the family, flows outward.
As such, it's clear in this structure and in Westminster that only men may rule.
We see this principle in Exodus 3, where the fathers are appointed to rule in the civil sphere.
Again, this is controversial today, but actually biblically quite clear.
If a woman cannot lawfully rule in her home, Which scripture says she cannot, and in the church, how then is she going to rule other households and churches?
This makes no sense.
She is not fitted in her nature for this task.
And again, if you think I'm crazy, here's R.L. Dabney.
He says this Does not the apostle here assign the home as the proper sphere of the Christian woman?
That is her kingdom, and neither the secular nor the ecclesiastical commonwealth.
Her duties in her home are to detain her away from the public functions.
A wise God, and here's the point this is in God's wisdom and His goodness and His mercy to us.
Dying Spent in the Fight00:04:34
These structures are good.
A wise God designs no clashing between His domestic, His political, and His ecclesiastical arrangements.
We have to see it's not just patriarchy, but it's patriarchy in this order that God has set, and it is good.
We have to rejoice that God made it this way because it is a good thing for us and for our families upon which Christendom will be built.
Finally, I'll close with this.
Number nine, patriarchy must be marked by contagious joy.
Right?
Everybody thinks, especially on the feminist side, that like we're in Ogden and we're just like really angry.
Right?
We're actually a bunch of friends in a really old church basement that probably has mold.
And the week before we got here, all Brian did was sing the same songs.
I'm so tired of hearing them all day.
We rib each other, we have fun, we love our culture.
As Pastor Doug has led the way on so many of these issues for so many years, and we're grateful for him, he said it best you can't fight a culture war without a culture.
Our main task is not drinking liberal tears.
We are establishing hardy cultures that are worth defending.
We are building cultures that are filled with psalm singing and feasting and robust worship and the study of God's word and Christian education and, yes, maybe even a little sourdough.
I'm glad you got that.
That was good.
Put that in there.
Only when we have this great culture are we prepared to fight.
And joy should mark us.
So, as we embark on the battle to defend God's design for human sexuality, we must remember what Chesterton said The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
It is not a hatred for feminism or a sexual perversion, a hatred for that, that marks us.
But it is our love for our people.
It's our love for the purity of Christ's church.
I love what Joe Rigney has said about this, talking about King Loon from C.S. Lewis and the horse and his boy.
It's this principle that we talk about often in Ogden first in, last out, laughing loudest.
Quoting from C.S. Lewis, I'll share this with you.
He says this This is what it means to be a king, to be first in every desperate attack, to be last in every desperate retreat.
And when there's hunger in the land, as must be now and then in bad years, To wear finer clothes and to laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land.
This is a vision, a joyful vision for patriarchy.
I want to charge you finally as we close, particularly the men.
Dusty spoke at length about this.
I love what he said.
I want you to think about your grandsons, especially, again, especially men.
Think about your grandsons.
What will disappoint them is not that you died in the fight and you gave it your all.
What will disappoint them in you is that you were a coward and that you didn't fight this fight.
Evangelicals have said this for the last many years.
This is not a hill to die on.
Brothers and sisters, biblical sexuality and patriarchy is a hill to die on.
We have to be willing to plant our flag here.
And we do so because we know what our fathers taught.
We have the confession behind us.
It may be depressing as you look about.
We are badly outnumbered by the feminist hordes and the culture, and yes, even our church institutions.
To which I say to you, what a time to win glory.
We have been chosen to stand in the gap, as did the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.
And we fight not for ourselves, but for our progeny.
Not because it is easy, but because we look with faith to the future generations of our sons.
And we come full circle with patriarchy.
When we die, let us die spent in the fight for Christendom.
Then we may say, as Theoden did on the Pelinor fields as he lay dying I go now to my fathers, in whose mighty company I shall not now be so ashamed.
What a Time to Win Glory00:00:21
Amen?
Let's pray.
Father, we thank you so much for your grace.
We thank you for your word.
We ask that you would revive and reform and build up your church in such a manner that we crush, The gates of hell.
Father, build up your kingdom for the sake of your son Jesus, in whose name we pray.