Christian Men at War

Reject the Vice of Tolerance and the Lie of Egalitarianism

Editor’s note: The following is a lightly edited version of a speech delivered at the Burn the Ships Conference in Boulder, Colorado on July 27, 2024.

“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” -C.S. Lewis

Because modern Christians have been taught and believed lies about reality, they have completely misunderstood the nature of reality. One of those lies involves the nature of our heavenly pilgrimage, or our spiritual life. We have been taught that our heavenly pilgrimage is solely immaterial or “spiritual.” Meaning that the things that concern our pursuit of Christ are only immaterial concerns or soul level questions. I believe two tools have been used to reduce our heavenly pilgrimage to such a state. First, the induction of egalitarianism and, second, its subsequent demonic sister, the vice of tolerance. 

Egalitarianism

Here, we are not merely talking about the theological concept of egalitarianism. We are talking about that, but it is much bigger than that. In our day, there is a wildly held falsity propagated about the nature of reality and mankind. This is the notion that we are all equal, all people and all cultures are equal. We are told that all people are equal in any and every way. 

In more conservative contexts, this is sometimes laundered under biblical teachings about the imago Dei. In more liberal streams, it is glossed over with verses about there being neither male nor female, no Greek or Jew in Christ. We are taught to believe that men and women are equal in any and every respect. The worst stage of this cancer has been revealed in transgenderism, thinking that men can become women or women can become men. No longer, we are told, is there any biological reality to maleness or femaleness. It is all a social construct. 

More broadly, this falsity flies under the radar, using verses such as “judge not” when referring to various cultures. We are told that we cannot judge the morality or immorality of any culture or people other than our own. Why? Because they are only doing what they have been taught how to do. We are told that if given the same opportunities and privileges, they could be successful; in fact, they might even be better than us. All cultures are equal.

Closer to home, we are taught to feel an inherent shame about our very biological makeup as men. Your testosterone is not given by God, but instead a cancer you must rid yourself of. Your assertiveness and aggression are not Christlike. Your confidence and desire to win is anti-biblical. Your willingness to fight is not reflective of the meekness of Christ. On and on, they drone. 

This is the lie of egalitarianism that even among men, there is no one better or worse, no one stronger or weaker; we are all one and the same. And Christians have bought this lie hook, line, and sinker. But nature abhors a vacuum, and all men know this is a lie. When you play a game of pickup basketball or throw the football, you remember the old ways. And the old ways are designed by God. Like a dog who instinctually chases a cat, even the most effeminate man will somehow discover a prior to undisclosed masculine drive when he enters the area. Because God designed men to be this way. Christ did not come to obliterate your masculinity, and he did not come to lower your T-level. Grace does not destroy nature. Christ came to restore your manhood. 

Egalitarianism reduces Christianity to a consumer good. By twisting the Bible into an egalitarian framework, we have deceived ourselves into thinking that Christianity is just one option among others, which are all equal. The Christian religion is just believed to be another option among many. We adopt the anti-Christian ideal of principled pluralism and subjugate our religion to market demands. Our churches become branded such that we compete with others, not in terms of holiness or excellence but in programs and marketing. Christians themselves conceive of the church in market terms, determining the goodness of the church only in terms of success in reaching the lost. 

Tolerance

The second lie is what I call the vice of tolerance—we have represented Christianity in terms of its emotional effect on other people, namely pleasure. Therefore, if people have a negative emotional experience or feel pain from our witness and our journey to the heavenly city, then we assume we must be doing something wrong. Why? Because Jesus is not mean. 

We have remade Jesus in our own image regarding what it means to be a good person. There is a version of Christian tolerance that is virtuous, but today, that is not what is lauded. Instead, we see hypocrisy from those who claim tolerance and yet display nothing but contempt for Christians, particularly Christian men. It is good to overlook an offense. It is good to live in peace and harmony. This is a blessing from the Lord. But the enemies of God do not intend to live in peace and harmony with you.

G K Chesterton wrote, “Tolerance is the virtue of those who believe in nothing.”

Excessive tolerance or the vice of tolerance is more tempting than intolerance. Why? Because the coward risks no pain. It is a vice of pleasure. The person guilty of the vice of tolerance risks nothing and, therefore, can gain nothing. But they can at least preserve some sense of pleasure in knowing that they don’t have to endure pain, whether the pain of social ostracization or the pain inflicted on someone else by openly disagreeing with them. In a culture of pleasure and decadence, the idea of ever causing any pain to someone else, like what they call emotional distress, is seen as wicked.

Much of our conception of our Christian witness and sharing the gospel cannot fathom this reality today. The idea that we should cause another pain in what we tell them is seen as anti-gospel. We live in a world obsessed with pleasure. Avoid pain at all costs. Comfort by any means. 

And yet, the comfort we truly need only comes from God, who comforts us with his salvation and presence. And we can only receive that comfort by facing the pain of our condemnation and the reality of our human condition apart from God. We rightly conceive of the gospel as good news. But there is no good news to speak of if people have no concept of there being bad news. The good news of the gospel is not perceived to be good if people have no familiarity with what is bad, to begin with. 

There is no gospel without pain. Without pain, the news we share is simply one option in the marketplace of ideas at best. But to preach the gospel, people must hear the law to understand their standing before God. There must be condemnation in order for there to be reconciliation. This is not legalism. This is just faithful gospel preaching. 

It is not cruel to speak the truth about sin plainly. In fact, to avoid speaking about sin plainly leads people to hell. Yes, this will create enemies. That is part of the deal when you come to Christ. You will have enemies. There will be people who hate hearing the good news. The aim is not necessarily to make enemies for the sake of making enemies. The aim is to proclaim the truth of God, knowing that enemies will be made. And we should pray for our enemies, especially by praying the imprecatory Psalms. 

Christ says that we will have enemies, but because of these lies of reality, egalitarianism, and the vice of tolerance, which create what we might refer to as an unreality or anti-reality version of Christianity, we cannot even conceive of other people as enemies. After all, who are we to judge? 

What a pox on this house of ours. We have twisted ourselves in knots to butcher the Bible to justify pacified men, a pacified church, and, therefore, a pacified society that is easy to control. We submit to the yoke of tyranny, so long as we can just conveniently order something to our doorstep. Christ did not die for his church to be pacified. He died for his church to march to the beat of his drum as we go forth into the world, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them, and teaching them to obey what He has commanded. But we have traded this vision of the church at war for a utopian vision of a pacified church filled with pacified men, just hoping if we are winsome enough, they won’t take our children from us and put them on puberty blockers. 

This was one of the critiques Nietzsche made against Christianity, or his conception of it at least. For many, Christianity has become a pacifier, like you would give a baby. Churches gather in the name of self-soothing. Sermons cater to people’s felt needs. Worship services are created to fill one with good emotions that soothe one from the pain of life. 

Nietzsche saw this. He conceived of a concept called ressentiment. This is the concept that if one is filled with such jealousy because of an inferiority complex, one becomes hostile to others. Furthermore, projecting their own insecurity, they will conclude that those who are superior to them are morally repugnant and inferior themselves. To understand Ressentiment, you must understand master and slave morality in Nietzsche. He’s telling a story about the origins of humanity that challenges Christianity.

It goes like this. There were people, and the bigger, stronger people took from the little weak people. Think like Conan the Barbarian. These bigger strong people Nietzsche conceived of as masters and the weaker people he conceived of as slaves. The master conceives of the good and not good in different terms than the slave. What’s good is getting food, being stronger, getting women. What’s not good: not eating, being smol, not getting women. This is the mindset of the master for Nietzsche.

When the master sees the slave, he doesn’t even think of the slave. “I don’t even think about you.” When the master encounters another master, they admire them, even if they end up fighting each other. The master, this big, strong brute, might give things to other masters to show his power.

How do the slaves feel? The slaves are naturally conflicted. Why? The slaves also think that getting food, house, and women are good, BUT they look at the master and think he is bad because he wants what they want, but the slave cannot prevent it. The master takes what they have, and they can do nothing to stop it. They are filled with resentment. The slaves can’t see the desires in their hearts as naturally good because the master has the same desire. The slave can’t look at another slave and respect them.

This resentment leads to slave morality. Master mentality honors who you are and your natural goods. Because it is good to get food, be strong, and get a wife. Slave morality looks at good things and is suspicious of them. They can’t imagine life as a master because they resent the master. They hate that the master is strong, gets food, and gets the woman. They resent him and create an entire moral framework to justify it. They end up filled with jealousy and contempt for anyone with money, power, and sex. 

Nietzsche thinks the world is filled with slave morality and hatred of anyone who is rich, powerful, and competent. And he says that the point at which the slaves began running society began with Christianity. He suggests that Christianity creates this slave morality because in his day the liberal churches were doing this. They were creating entire theological frameworks based on sentimentality, not reality. Of course we as Christians not believe this, but his critique based on the evaluation of many churches and Christian men seems to have some truth to it. 

This slave mentality leads people to build the world around them in such a way to accommodate their slave morality. They build a cage to cope and seethe with their conception of reality. They will construct a reality in which they can cope and seethe in their resentment. Slave morality resents those with money, power and success. In fact, from many pulpits and articles you would get the idea that Jesus does not want you to have money, power, success, or find a wife. We are told that being like Jesus means the only good thing to do with power is to give it away. The only good use of our natural God-given ambitions is to avoid them because they might become an idol. And that you should just settle for singleness.

Boiling under the surface of all of this, many Christian men live with a disquieting resentment. They are taught to hate themselves and deny how God made them all in the name of following Jesus. Is it any wonder that men oftentimes want nothing to do with a church that, by all accounts, hates them? Rather than encouraging men towards excellence, churches often just teach men that they are defunct women. Men are taught that they are spiritually deficient if they didn’t cry during church or talk about Jesus as they would a boyfriend. 

This all creates a pacified church obsessed with soothing our pitiful state. In the name of egalitarianism and the vice of tolerance, Christian men are deceived into thinking something is wrong with them in their creational design.

Because of this anti-reality teaching, egalitarianism, and the vice of tolerance, Christians live in the undesirable state of having no principles on which to fight, no enemies who they are to fight, and therefore can not even fathom praying the imprecatory Psalms, much less being animated by Christian virtue and honor in manly warfare in our pilgrimage to the heavenly city. 

Instead, our heavenly pilgrimage is conceived exclusively in quietist and anabaptist terms. This is not a call to arms or a call to revolt. It is simply to say that everyone who came before us had no qualms conceiving of reality according to God’s design. I often wonder about the fortitude of the men who came before us, who took up arms against a British Empire that was far less tyrannical than the American empire. It bothers me when I look around; we seem to lack the moral conviction and clarity that the men who came before us possessed. 

It was common in the old days to understand that Christians, churches, and Christian societies would have enemies that must be defeated. The Puritans often provided a type of chaplain service to their town or colony before they went to battle. Even today, Christian chaplains pray for their men’s success on the field of battle. In sports, chaplains pray for the success and victory of their football team. 

We must recover and appreciate these simple acts as reflections of what we should be doing in all of life, whether in business or politics. We must recover a martial spirit of victory or death. We must embrace the conflict of a world that wars against the Creator. And to that, we must reject egalitarianism, which flies under the guise of feminism most prominently, and reject the vice of tolerance. We must embrace God’s design for the world. God’s world is built hierarchically. And it is built to flourish where wickedness is not tolerated, and righteousness abounds. 

In a world of hierarchy, there will be conflict. There are tribes and factions, some stronger and some weaker. God’s Word maps onto reality and describes how to navigate these waters. However, the utopian egalitarian vision of the world in which everyone is equal in any and every respect also produces conflict. But because it is not reality-based but a fantasy, Christians are often at a loss as to how to navigate the conflict because the Bible assumes hierarchy, not egalitarianism. It would be like trying to look at the rule book for golf when you are playing football. You won’t succeed. Many Christians struggle and fail in their heavenly pilgrimage and all that it entails because rather than conceiving of the world according to God’s word, they have assumed the lies and tried to apply the Bible to the lie. They try to apply God’s reality to anti-reality and wonder why they fail. They assume they are playing a sport the Bible was not created for. We accept the rules of the enemy and wonder why we fail. In the worst cases, the Bible becomes a manipulative cudgel to suppress the actual conflicts we need to have. Now, instead of making war against Satan and his demons, we are called to monger peace, avoid conflict at all costs, play nice, and never offend anyone. What man would be drawn to such a religion? 

My main contention is this: Christian men have become emasculated by conceiving of their responsibility as Christian men in solely immaterial terms. Further, when we conceive of immaterial or spiritual matters, we typically denigrate the material matters of men. The worship of reason subjugates spiritual experiences to lower realms of viability. We have reduced humanity to simply meat sacks that have a brain possessing a supposed consciousness that we cannot explain from a materialist worldview. Supernatural events and realities are unwelcome in this paradigm. 

The immateriality of man and his inherent spiritual nature becomes not just a question in people’s minds late at night, wondering if there is a God. It becomes cast as unserious and childish. [insert atheist Reddit meme about sky god]. Reason and science become the gods to whom we must bow (and be sure to wear a mask when you do so). 

The counter-reaction to this plays out in Christian circles in this way. People develop an over-interest and overcorrection on matters of spirituality or the immaterial, becoming the antithesis of the supposed materialist perspective. Instead of the materialist, they downplay the importance of any material realities. They answer the materialist approach by simply denying that the material world matters. This simply subjugates the Christian religion to immaterial realities, never touching material realities. Strength, fitness, and warfare can only be discussed in the spiritual and unseen realms. Talking about such matters as strength, fitness, and warfare in material terms is perceived as worldly.

But the nature of man is body and soul according to God’s Word. We are not just spiritual or immaterial beings with a body. We are body and soul. For Christians, upon death, our soul goes to be with the Lord while our body awaits the resurrection when our soul will be reunited with our body. The design of man was not that we are meat sacks that either worship intellect or reduce the body to a problem to be free from. We have a body and soul. This is how God created us, and it is what we are destined for – embodied worship before the Lord for eternity. 

What must we do to escape this mind trap? How can we get back to the Bible and advance in the toughest battles of our day? I have several suggestions.

1. First, we must become active. Christian men must be well versed and competent at one of their chief roles – protector. We should have a posture that assesses threats and knows how to eliminate them. Yes, this is true spiritually, but it is not merely “spiritual.” After all, we must reject the lie that our bodies are useless for godliness. Christian men must be guardians of the faith. We are responsible for passing down the faith. We are also to be guardians in general. Christian men must have the maturity and discernment to assess threats. You don’t need to become Jason Borne, but you need to discern what is a threat. And that is why egalitarianism and tolerance is so dangerous. It teaches you to diminish these God-given roles in favor of acceptance as if there are no threats.

We also must know how to eliminate threats. And not just in spiritual terms. You may be able to identify that this person or this group wants to end me and my way of life, but many men are at a loss as to how to vanquish their foes. They are often taught that they should not want to vanquish their foes. They are taught that doing so would be unchristian. Christian men should organize together to advocate for their interests. They should form and get involved in clubs, organizations, politics, and other activities where men can unite to fight for Christian interests. 

Nothing rids oneself of the modern notions of egalitarianism and tolerance more than physical fitness, competition, and combat. Whether it is a pickup game of basketball, running against others, or jujitsu, you must become active instead of sedentary. Christian men must be physically active; otherwise, their souls will wither. Your quiet times will not produce good fruit if you are simply inactive and lazy in your life. 

Second, we must embrace hierarchy. You have to reject egalitarianism, including feminism, branch and root. What does this look like? 

2. A. First, it starts with you and your life. We are called to honor our fathers and mothers. We are to show honor and respect to them. You will not resist the slow descent into egalitarianism if you dishonor your father and mother, tear them down, and disrespect them, even if they believe differently than you and even if they were not that good at fulfilling their duties as fathers and mothers. Often, the first sin we commit is that of egalitarianism, thinking ourselves equal to our parents. And we attempt to tear them down to bring them to our level. 

Of course, we should not worship them as if they are God; that is not the call. It is simply to be grateful to God that your very existence is due to them existing first and conceiving you. If you cannot even muster gratitude for the dependency of your existence on the grace of God in your conception from your earthly father and mother, then you can expect to be filled with bitterness and contempt. God designed the world to flourish when we obey Him. And we cannot flourish personally in our heavenly pilgrimage if we are filled with ingratitude and bitterness against our earthly mothers and fathers. 

2.B. We also must embrace hierarchy in our home. This is one of the most difficult challenges for men in our day. Many men find themselves in marriages where they are just now coming to terms with reality as God made it regarding the roles for husbands and wives. And we don’t know how to discuss this with our wives. We hold many beliefs and convictions that we dare not share with our wives. While understandable, this is not ideal. We must lead and teach our wives, washing them with the Word. How to do this? Because it can be very challenging. Most people, women especially, have been indoctrinated into a way of thinking about patriarchy and hierarchy that runs contrary to God’s Word, whether it is related to matters of home, church, or state. 

One way to do this is to simply talk with your wife about your thoughts. “Hey, I read this interesting article; here’s what it says, here’s what I think about that, what do you think? Ok, yes, I understand that’s what you think; here’s where I think I’m going and what I will do about it.”

Another way is to live with your wife in an understanding way, knowing that she is the weaker vessel. Peter talks about this in 1 Peter 3:7, where he says, “Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.”

Notice that Peter here connects your prayers being answered with how you live with your wife. Your spiritual maturity is connected to an embodied relationship. Peter is not just talking about living under the same roof as your wife. He is talking about actively loving your wife. Now, we have to do some work here because we have been so infected with egalitarian notions of marriage. The egalitarian reads this and concludes that this just means we should make sure our wife is happy and empowered in all she does. This is not what Peter means. He connects it to the ontological reality that women are the weaker vessel. What means? 

Women are not the weaker vessel just in terms of some wooden headship model of marriage. It has to do with literal biological realities about men and women. He grounds the argument of living with our wives in an understanding way and giving her honor on two fronts. First, he connects it to the ontological reality that women are the weaker vessel. Second, he connects it to the reality that our wives are our heirs with us of grace. Regarding the former, there is the implied reality that men are stronger. 

This should not be surprising to us, but nowadays, this is considered hate speech. Men are stronger than women. Women are weaker than men. Both sexes have different biological and mental make-ups designed by God. Our emotional make-up and way of reasoning are different. We are to show her honor in the way we honor a cherished possession that belongs to us. Think of an heirloom or fine china or some cherished memorabilia that you have in your home. We honor it by protecting it and respecting its worth. 

This does not mean we demean it, but we protect it. We are called to protect our wives from a variety of matters. We are to protect them physically. This looks like opening the door for your wife or walking on the street side of the sidewalk with her. If someone were to attack our wife, we do not hesitate to eliminate the threat with all the violence we can muster. But it also looks like attending to spiritual protection for your wife. You ensure she is not being exposed to dangerous ideologies and worldly lies prevalent today—namely egalitarianism and the vice of tolerance.

We also provide for our wives because that is what it looks like to honor her. She is called to the home and the husband must ensure she can fulfill her created ends. This doesn’t necessarily mean you must be rich, but you should be laboring to provide for your wife. It doesn’t mean your wife is not productive. Quite the contrary. She is fruitful in the very activities that she was made for. This isn’t to say a wife cannot work. But that the husband’s job is to provide so that the wife can do what she was made to do. 

And we are to live with her in an understanding way such that we, in a way, condescend to her reality as the weaker vessel, as we would someone we are in charge of. I don’t mean speaking to her condescendingly, but to relate to her by assuming your headship and strength. Assume your role. Husbands must assume their role. And then, as a good Lord who takes care of those under his care and understands his role and responsibility, you live that way with your wife. You don’t expect her to be your peer on matters pertaining to your role. 

If you expect your wife to be just like your best friend, like the boys, you are setting yourself up for trouble because that is a role that she cannot fill because she will not be able to match you and other men on matters that are fitting for men. If you live this way with your wife, she will inevitably assume more for her than she can meet. You will inevitably become more womanly in your outlook and manners as you seek to adapt your way of being to her ways, to be her best friend. Be your wife’s co-heir of grace and husband by assuming your office and role in the home. 

2.C. A third is to raise our children in God’s ways. We must raise our boys and girls according to God’s Word and God’s design. Children are a pressure test on your marriage because once you begin to raise them with your wife, expectations regarding men and women come right to the surface in how you parent them. Boys should be trained to be men that protect and provide. Girls should be trained to be women who respect their future husbands. They should be taught to live into God’s design for the home and child-rearing. Hierarchy must be taught. 

Ensure you protect your home, wife, and kids from egalitarian notions about reality. You teach them. Why do we show respect to the police officer? Why do we obey our rulers? Why does dad obey the law? And so on. Your family’s world must be hierarchical because God’s world is hierarchical. It is ordered and designed to flourish under that reality. It will decay and be destroyed under egalitarianism. 

3. Third, we must humble ourselves. We must read our Bibles and not squirm. One of the sad realities about the lies we have been taught is how badly it has affected our understanding of the Bible. We cannot even understand things like the sermon on the mount or God’s law or Paul’s writings, or the Psalms because we have been shaped by gay race communists who have perverted our faith. But when you read old dead guys it helps from the before times, and by before times I mean pre-20th century. If we read a passage from the Bible, and it makes you uncomfortable, then good. That means you are still savable. But if you have created a fake and gay hermeneutic that leads you to always interpret the Bible through egalitarianism and the vice of tolerance, then be warned, your soul is in danger. The Bible should shape us not just spiritually in the metaphysical sense but entirely. It is for all of life including your family, the state, your health, your work. All of it. 

These three things, become active, assume hierarchy, and remain humble, are ways that Christian men combat the anti-reality teachings of our day. 

We must fix our eyes on the heavenly city and no longer tolerate sin, whether in ourselves or in the world. Many Christians claim to have their eyes fixed on Jesus, but they are constantly hawking for the world’s approval in case their looking at Jesus were to upset their neighbor. Jesus Christ was crucified, not in the closet where you conduct your quiet times. He was crucified in the public square. Christianity is not a privatized religion. It is an inevitable world-conquering reality of God’s plan of redemption. 

We must recover a Christian martial spirit in all of life. We must embrace the reality that we have enemies. Yes, our enemies are principalities and powers, but also these manifest themselves through real people. There are enemies of Christ who actively work to destroy all that is good, true, and beautiful. They often come in innocent as sheep, saying, “Just read this book on race so you can be more compassionate.” “Read this book on misogyny; it is just meant to help you not be a bigot.” Read this book on how Christians should engage in the public square, you don’t want your neighbors to think you’re a fundamentalist, do you?” These people must be resisted and denounced in the strongest terms possible. We must shut this down in our churches. The devil is always looking for a foothold in our lives and our churches, and a fundamental way he has done this is by cloaking demonic ideologies in Christian language regarding loving your neighbor and being kind. 

We can spare no arrows for these false teachers and false teachings. Too often, in our very egalitarian and tolerant age, we are taught to hear out our enemies, read them charitably, and give them the benefit of the doubt. Rubbish. They want to end our religion and our way of life. How do we fight our enemies? We fight them at the level of ideas. This doesn’t mean you need a PhD in philosophy to discern the truth. If you are immersed in the Bible and live a godly life, you will have good instincts to determine when something is nonsense. But we also physically resist them. We don’t buy their books. We don’t put them in our churches. We undermine them publicly and privately. We do everything we can to make sure that their wicked ideologies do not get a foothold in our lives, our family, our children, and our churches. 

I want to conclude with a question. Why must men be fit for war? Why does this matter?

We have been lulled into complacency. Through mass consumer goods and the market’s invisible hand, we have become sleepwalkers, fat on resources, and lazy with our conveniences. The Christian church has simply given itself over to this in many ways. Christians are not held in respect because Christians don’t respect themselves, body and soul. We behave contemptibly because somehow we have forgotten reality, which is hierarchical. We have forgotten basic duties and doctrines. A strong Christian church, with strong men, body and soul may not be liked by the world, but it will be respected for its power. 

We have become men who think slavery is human flourishing. We have adopted slave morality. And we have built nice comfortable slave mindset churches where we can continue to see the ghettoization of the Christian religion in our once-Christian nation. We have crafted a reality to reflect our deep contempt and antipathy of others and our assumption that power, wealth, and winning a wife is somehow bad only because we are not good at it. And the church just caters to this by trying to simply soothe us, rather than excise the cancer and call us to excellence. 

There are many today who speculate that we are in a cold civil war. We should not pine for a civil war. It is horrible for a people. But I don’t think a cold civil war is exactly right. Instead, I believe Christian men and western civilization at large is facing a civilizational crisis. And what saddens me is that we seem to have no interest in defending ourselves and our way of life. We face an enemy who is hell-bent on crushing the church and Christians. And we should not give them an inch. 

This looks like banding together with like-minded brothers to come up with creative ways to fulfill our duties to God. It looks like getting involved locally. It looks like getting involved in school board meetings. It looks like taking an interest in politics and not politics like just a political party but the actual practice of politics in real terms by way of gaining power and influence. It looks like starting Christian schools and churches. And it looks like taking personal responsibility to guard one another and our families against our enemies in defending ourselves. Yes, buy the gun and learn how to use it. Go train with others. Go LARP, It’s fun. It’s what you always wanted to do as a young boy, if you remember.

In this war, we are not looking to be beautiful losers. As George Patton put it, “The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.”

We are looking to win and win bigly. And in Christ, this victory has been assured. Christ is our victor, our champion. Our future is secure in Christ, but this doesn’t demur us into not caring about my neighbor or children and their material well-being. Our spiritual war is against the domain of darkness, but Christ has defeated the realm of darkness. Yet, Satan roams around like a lion looking to devour. He is hungry, salivating over another soul to damn. It is only the power of Christ that can defeat this foe. For our spiritual war, we must draw near to God. He has promised to draw near to us. We must put on the spiritual armor of God for battle and take the fight to the enemy. 

What does this Christian man look like? The ideal Christian man is not an androgynous meat sack wearing a scarf and sipping a latte at [insert local coffee shop flying trans flag] reading the latest communist book that NPR recommended to you so that you can have more empathy for transvestites. The ideal Christian man is fit, able to work hard, and capable of defending his family, church, and nation. He is godly and righteous, filled with godly ambition. He is killing sin. Ready to take risks and able to take a punch. He is willing to be hated for the truth of God’s Word, and the hatred does not bother him. He laughs when crazy people mock him. 

The gift of how crazy the world is today is that why would you want to win the approval of people who are so depraved that they think it is good to chemically castrate children. Why would I care what they think of me? Why would I care if pedophiles hate me and my religion and my way of life? A godly man knows that his audience is the Lord God. The godly man aims to please God in every area of his life, including his physical life. We cannot be duped into thinking that the good Christian man is a diplomat between the domain of darkness and the domain of light. We cannot make peace with darkness. 

“No truce, no league, no treaty, are you to make with the enemies of Christ.” —Charles Spurgeon

Some words of prudence are in order. We are not called to be bloodthirsty. “No one desires to be at war for the sake of being at war, nor deliberately takes steps to cause a war: a man would be thought an utterly bloodthirsty character if he declared war on a friendly state for the sake of causing battles and massacres,” said Aristotle 

We are called to work for justice, yes. But we cannot grow too fond of fighting. Fighting is exhilarating. There is a euphoria when you know your cause is true and right, and you are taking the fight to the enemy. But war is terrible. To quote Robert E. Lee, “It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.” But many today believe we must have peace at all costs. We have prophets who call peace, peace, while there is no peace. And to celebrate peace while war is upon us is sinful. “If war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful,” cautioned C.S. Lewis. 

Of course, we want to live peaceful and quiet lives, but that must be fought for. You cannot expect to have a peaceful and quiet life while entertaining enemies. The enemies of God do not accept even the most normal terms of compromise. They do not compromise. The left never compromises. They want to take our children and disciple them. They will not rest until churches are stamped out for hate speech. We must be shrewd and prudent, but we also must be able and willing to fight them at every turn. And we do all of this not because we love war, but because we want peace.

One of the great victories of egalitarianism and the vice of tolerance is that we have forgotten how to fight or why we should or who we should fight. Everyone is supposed to be friends. Everyone is a potential convert. We should not offend people; after all if we offend them, then how will we share the gospel with them? This is exactly what ails the church today. We are more concerned with what the most rabid atheist thinks of the church’s witness than the Lord God. We have become drunk on pacifist fantasies that we can have peace without securing it. 

Christian men are men at war.

Consider the plight of the truly masculine Christian at war:

• The assertive man is perceived as rude.
• The confident man is called prideful.
• The man who will fight is denounced as pugnacious.
• The courageous man is thought foolish.

All the qualities necessary for warfare, a fighting spirit, courage, confidence, and assertion, are denigrated. What are we to do?

We must reject egalitarianism and the vice of tolerance. We must become active, assume hierarchy, and remain humble. 

On our heavenly pilgrimage, we don’t settle for the ghettoization of Christian communities. We don’t settle for a fake and gay Christianity which merely deals with immaterial matters and is sequestered to a faith in our homes and churches but nowhere else. We stand ready to defend our own with all the biblical masculine virtue we have to throw ourselves into the battle wherever it rages. We march forth, taking ground; we live with strength and courage because the Lord is with us. We don’t aim to lose. We aim to win because our victory is secure in Christ. 

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