Monthly Archives: January 2025

Tate v. Evangellyfish

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Andrew Tate is back at the top of the Conservative hate list after Benny Johnson dared to platform him with Trump Lawyer Alina Habba. No, not the Jewish folk song. Then the reason for hating him came a couple days later when Tate mocked a man for not being able to take care of his sick kid. You know it’s the David French, Mike Pence argument against Trump. It’s like when your wife thinks she is mad at you for the thing that happened after she got mad. Summary of the kerfuffle here.

Anyway, aside from the hypocrisy of supporting Trump and not Tate for the same reasons the Left hates Trump, this reveals some real problems in the American Church. Namely feminism. I have defined the problem of feminism here but I want to update with some examples.

First of all this method of attacking Tate is ridiculous. Men mocking other men is what makes the world work. You mock the new guy on the job for doing dumb stuff and he and all the other guys learn not to do dumb stuff. Everyone is made better. Mockery works because it is based in truth. The truth is that men should be fighting to be the best. The lack of this is why nothing works anymore. Tate is not fake as many Christian simpletons have whined. He holds MMA titles and is ranked in chess. And his followers are not fake. He won chess matches and debates he probably should not have because of his aggression. This is the way the world works. This is what women want which is why Habba has her boobs out and looks as giddy as a school girl. Tate is proving the church wrong in it’s effeminate view of the world. Women don’t want the weak nice guy with a steady job, they want the aggressive winner. Young men are figuring this out as they are constantly lectured by the church ladies to be nice, and they are choosing Tate.

You see the weakness with this approach in the COVID overreaction. All the Christian leaders have been feminized. They never had a rigorous debate, so they caved in to the ridiculous requests to close their churches. Megan Basham wrote a whole book on this, even while she misunderstands the root crisis and bashes Tate. Academic men used to have all but violent debates. This is how the best ideas surface. But then women wanted to come in and be one of the boys. But they can’t, so they cut out the rigorous debate part. And now we have institutions run by the women of both sexes as C. S. Lewis said. He also warned about the sins of women in That Hideous Strength and The Great Divorce, despite people oddly claiming he was a feminist.

“Most men, if free, retire frequently into the society of their own sex: women, if free, do this less often. In modern social life the sexes are more continuously mixed than they were in earlier periods. This probably has many good results: but it has one bad result. Among young people, obviously, it reduces the amount of serious argument about ideas.” C. S. Lewis, Modern Man and his Categories of Thought

Second there are the attacks on Tate for making his money as a pimp. This is somewhat true, but just as disingenuous. He helped women make money by posting naked pictures of themselves. He made many of them rich. What goes on today, on Onlyfans is much worse and I don’t see any legitimate movements to stop this. Can you name the owner of Onlyfans? And the women are signing up in droves to do it, currently 4.1 million. The reality is, that he was exploiting young men for profit. And today he does the opposite. Encouraging young men to man up and take responsibility for themselves and earn as much as they can. This is more repentance than I have ever seen from a modern woman. The guy who was good at manipulating men and women is of course the best to tell men how to be men and women how to be women practically. Just like the Catch Me If You Can check forger is the best at finding–check forgers.

But now Tate supposedly became a Muslim, so throw that on the after-the-fact-hate list. But he became a Muslim because he has only seen a feminized church. This is because Christianity is in a similar position as it was before the Crusades. They were almost pacifist, as they sat and watched Mohammed wipe out half of the civilized world. They realized that they had to man up and fight off this evil heretical horde. And so they did and saved Christendom.

Anyone who looks at the history of Christendom sees this armed debate with Islam as the fundamental and determining thing. We beat off the Pagan of the North and of the East Mongol, Scandinavian and the rest—in the Dark Ages. We assured ourselves on that side, and we had raised the siege against those barbaric besiegers before the year 1000. We had beaten them to their knees in battle; tamed them and baptized them; brought them to heel and to school. But Islam was another matter. It was not pagan; it was a perversion of our own creed. It was not barbaric; it had more learning and better arts than we. It enjoyed our scholarship through its Greek subjects, and lived by a Strange, warped adaptation of out own culture. Its fierce appeal to human equality and to justice, the simplicity of its doctrine, had captured great masses of our own people who continued to work for it and to support it.

The recovery of provinces lost to so powerful an enemy occupied the energies of Christian men for thirty generations; nor is their task yet accomplished. -Hilaire Belloc, Islam and Christendom

The sad reality is that we treat our women worse than the Mohammedans do. When was the last time a Mohammedan country let their women be raped by foreigners on a mass scale like what is currently happening in Sweden, Norway, England and God knows where else? Which religion encourages their women to put off marriage and go out and sleep with more guys that my grandmother had even met? Which religion encourages the women to leave their husbands and children and go chase some Hollywood fantasy instead of being a good mother? Which country makes their men so effeminate (an abomination in Scripture) that the women don’t want them? Which religion has women who are the least happy of all time, over half of whom are on anti-depressants? We need some repentance here people.

Finally this idea of men competing to be strong, rich, powerful instead of competing to be weak and ineffectual victims, brings me back to the idea of sports. From Classical times to the prewar Universities like Oxford and Cambridge, the idea of the well rounded man drove civilization forward. Mental acuity must be developed but with it, physical strength. Men must be able to think but also to fight with their physical bodies. The civilized replacement for war was sport. And the reality is that these Oxford sportsmen, were the best equipped for war the world has ever seen, which is why they prevailed in both world wars. The sports made them better men. But then the feminists wanted to destroy this too. They shut down all the clubs and boys only schools where men sharpened their minds and then they demanded women’s sports. I have pointed out the silliness of this before.

But no one seems to listen. We keep fighting to get men out of women’s sports, instead of seeing that this Title IX nonsense is the start of our problems.  Women now describe themselves in mostly masculine terms. Where is the proof that making competitive women makes them better mothers and wives? The simple urging of the gospel that we just ignore(Titus 2:4). The reality is that women can’t fight and they can’t do sports which is why our culture is rejecting the physical world and becoming gnostics as NT Wright is always pointing out. “I’m spiritual but not religious.” These are the people who caved to COVID and are now caving to their wives on Andrew Tate, even as their wives wish their husbands were more like him. This is why the church is a joke and why young men are turning to Tate.

It’s a lot like the catholic church before the Reformation. If you don’t want the reformers to happen then clean up your mess. If you don’t like Andrew Tate then get rid of all the feminism yourself.

Further Reading:

The Church Impotent, Leon Podles

C. S. Lewis Letter to Mary Neylan, April 18th, 1940

Evangellyfish

 

C. S. Lewis to Mary Neylan, April 18th, 1940, On Marriage

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[Magdalen College]
April 18th 1940

Dear Mrs Neylan
(1) On the marriage service. The three ‘reasons’ for marrying. in modern English are (a) To have children. (b) Because you are very unlikely to succeed in leading a life of total sexual abstinence, and marriage is the only innocent outlet, (c) To be in a partnership.1 What is there to object to in the order in which they are put? The modern tradition is that the proper reason for marrying is is the state described as ‘being. in love’. Now I have nothing to say against being in love: but the Idea that this is or ought to be the exclusive reason or that it can ever be by itself an adequate basis seems to me simply moonshine.

In the first place, many ages, many cultures, and many individuals don’t experience it – and Christianity is for all men, not simply for modern Western Europeans. Secondly, it often unites most unsuitable people. Thirdly, is it not usually transitory? Doesn’t the modern emphasis on ‘love’ lead people either into divorce or into misery, because when that emotion dies down they conclude that their marriage is a ‘failure’, tho’ in fact they have just reached the point at who real marriage begins. Fourthly, it wd. be undesirable, even if it were possible, for people to be ‘in love’ all their lives. What a world it wd. be if most of the people we met were perpetually in this trance!

The Prayer Book therefore begins with something universal and solid – the biological aspect. No one is going to deny that the biological end of the sexual functions is offspring. And this is, on any sane view, of more importance than the feelings of the parents. Your descendants may be alive a million years hence and may number tens of thousands. In this regard marriages are the fountains of History. Surely to put the mere emotional aspects first would be sheer sentimentalism. Then the second reason. Forgive me: but it is simply no good trying to explain this to a woman. The emotional temptations may be worse for women than for men: but the pressure of mere appetite on the male, they simply don’t understand. In this second reason, the Prayer Book is saying ‘If you can’t be chaste (and most of you can’t) the alternative is marriage.’ This may be brutal sense, but, to a man, it is sense, and that’s that. The third reason gives the thing that matters far more than ‘being in love’ and will last and increase, between good people, long after ‘love’ in the popular sense is only as a memory of childhood – the partnership, the loyalty to ‘ the firm ‘, the composite creature. (Remember it is not a cynic but a devoted husband and inconsolable widower, Dr Johnson, who said that a man who has been happy with one woman cd. have been equally happy with anyone of ‘tens of thousands’ of other women.2 i.e. the original attraction will turn out in the end to have been almost accidental: it is what is built up on that, or any other, basis who may have brought the people together that matters.)

Now the second reason involves the whole Christian view of sex. It is all contained in Christ’s saying that two shall be ‘one flesh’.3 He says nothing about two ‘who married for love’: the mere fact of marriage at all – however it came about – sets up the ‘one flesh’. There is a terrible comment on this in I Cor VI 16 ‘he that is joined to a harlot is one flesh’.4 You see? Apparently, if Christianity is true, the mere fact of sexual intercourse sets up between human beings a relation who has, so to speak, transcendental repercussions – some eternal relation is established whether they like it or not.

This sounds very odd. But is it? After all, if there is an eternal world and if our world is its manifestation, then you would expect bits of it to ‘stick through’ into ours. We are like children pulling the levers of a vast machine of which most is concealed. We see a few little wheels that buzz round on this side when we start it up – but what glorious or frightful processes we are initiating in there, we don’t know. That’s why it is so important to do what we’re told (cf. – what does the Holy Communion imply about the real significance of eating?)

From this all the rest flows. (I) The seriousness of sexual sin and the importance of marriage as ‘a remedy against sin ‘ (I don’t mean, of course, that sins of that sort will not, like others, be forgiven if they are repented, nor that the ‘eternal relations’ who they have set up will not be redeemed . We believe that God will use all repented evil as fuel for fresh good in the end.) (2) The permanence of marriage wh. means that the intention of fidelity matters more than ‘being in love’, (3) The Headship of the Man.

I’m sorry about this – and I feel that my defense of it wd. be more convincing if I were a woman. You see, of course, that if marriage is a permanent relation, intended to produce a kind of new organism (‘the one flesh ‘) there must be a Head. It ‘s only so long as you make It a temporary arrangement dependent on ‘being in love’ and changeable by frequent divorce, that it can be strictly democratic – for, on that view, when they really differ, they part. But if they are not to part, if the thing is like a nation not a club, like an organism not a heap of stones, then, in the long run , one party or other must have the casting vote.

That being so, do you really want the Head to be the woman? In a particular instance, no doubt you may. But do you really want a matriarchal world? Do you really like women in authority? When you seek authority yourself, do you naturally seek it in a woman?

Your phrase about the ‘slave-wife’ is mere rhetoric, because it assumes servile subordination to be the only kind of subordination. Aristotle cd. have taught you better. ‘The householder governs his slaves despotically. He governs his wife and children as being both free – but he governs the children as a constitutional monarch, and the wife politically5 (i.e. as a democratic magistrate governs a democratic citizen). My own feeling is that the Headship of the husband is necessary to protect the outer world against the family. The female has a strong instinct to fight for its cubs. What do nine women out of ten care about justice to the outer world when the health, or career, or happiness of their own children is at stake? That is why I want a ‘foreign policy’ of the family, so to speak , to be determined by the man: I expect more mercy from him!

Yet this fierce maternal instinct must be preserved , otherwise the enormous sacrifices involved in motherhood wd. never be borne. The Christian scheme, therefore, does not suppress it but protects us defenseless bachelors from its worst ravages! This, however, is only my own idea.

The Headship doctrine is that of Christianity. I take it to be chiefly about man as man and woman as woman, and therefore about husbands and wives, since it is only in marriage that they meet as epitomes of their sex. Notice that in 1 Cor XI just after the bit about the man being the Head, St Paul goes on to add the baffling reservation (v. 11) that the sexes ‘ in the Lord’ don’t have any separate existence. I have no idea what this means: but I take it it must imply that the existence of a man or woman is not exhausted by the fact of being male or female, but that they exist in many other modes. I mean, you may be a citizen, a musician, a teacher etc as well as a woman, and you needn’t transfer to all these personalities everything that is said about you as wife qua wife.

I think that is the answer to your view that the Headship doctrine wd. prevent women going in for education. St Paul is not a system maker, you know. As a Jew, he must, for instance, have believed that a man ought to honour and obey his Mother: but he doesn’t stop and put that in when talking about the man being Head in marriage.

As for Martha & Mary, either Christ and St Paul are inconsistent here, or they are not. I f they’ re not, then, whether you can see how or not, St Paul ‘s doctrine can’t have the sense you give it. If they are inconsistent, then the authority of Christ of course completely overrides that of St Paul. In either event, you needn’t bother.

I very strongly agree that it’s no use trying to create a ‘feeling’. But’ what fee ling do you want to have? Isn ‘t your problem one of thought, not feeling? The question is ‘ Is Christianity true – or even, is there some truth mixed up in it?’ The thing in reading Macdonald is not to try to have the feelings he has, but to notice whether the whole thing does or does not agree with such perceptions (I mean, about good & evil etc) as you’ll already have – and, where it doesn’t, whether it or you are right.

Term begins on Saturday next. If you and the gudeman cd. come and lunch with me on the following Saturday (27th) it wd. suit admirably. Let me know (address to College).

Thank you for taking my mind off the war for an hour or so!

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

P.S. I do n’t think the Marriage Service is ascetic, and I think your real objection to it may be that it’s not prudish enough! The service is not a place for celebrating the flesh, but for making a solemn agreement in the presence of God and of society – an agreement which involves a good many other things besides the flesh.

Distinguish the Church from the bedroom and don’t be silly! Wd. you really think it suitable for erotic excitement to be expressed by the young couple while visiting the family solicitor, while asking their parents’ blessing, while bidding good-bye to the old home? If not, then why when asking God’s blessing? Do you think a grace before meals should be so written as actually to make the mouth water? If we began holidays with a religious service, wd. you take your bathing suit to Church, and practice a few golf strokes in the choir?

‘Sober and godly matrons’6 may be a stickler, if you haven’t read the English School: but you ought to know that all the associations you are putting into it are modern and accidental. It means ‘Married women (matrons) who are religious (godly) and have something better and happier to think about than jazz and lipstick (sober).’ But you must know that as well as I do

 

  1. Lewis is citing the service fo the ‘Solemnization of Matrimony’ in the Book of Common Prayer: ‘First, it was ordained for the procreation of children…Secondly, It was ordained for the remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication…Thirdly, It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other.’ [↩]
  2. Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, vol. II , 22 March 1776, p. 46 1: ‘ Boswell. ” Pray, Sir, do you not suppose that there are fifty women in the world, with any one of whom a man may be as happy, as with anyone woman in particular.” Johnson. “Ay, Sir, fifty thousand.'” [↩]
  3. Matthew 19:5 [↩]
  4. I Corinthians 6:16 [↩]
  5. Aristotle, Politics, 1252a. [↩]
  6. In one of the prayers of the Marriage Service the minister prays ‘ that this woman may be loving and amiable, faithful and obedient to her husband; and in all quietness, sobriety, and peace, be a follower of holy and godly matrons.’ [↩]